Piracy and maritime governance in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

During the late 1990s and the early 2000s, this author conducted a comparative study on regime building in the world's three maritime ‘mega regions’, i.e., the Atlantic, the (Asia-) Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The aim was to explain why regime building is so difficult in the latter as compared to the former two, and why newly formed regimes tend to end up as ‘sandbanks of shattered hope’ soon after their inauguration. Many reasons were offered both by the author's numerous respondents and by the author himself, but amongst the findings was the widely shared opinion of specialists from various Indian Ocean Rim countries that attempts at regime building tended to fail because their aims and objectives were too lofty. Rather, it was argued that regime-building attempts should start on the relatively modest level of confidence building measures which all potential participants could agree on, such as disaster relief, search and rescue (SAR), sustainable development of marine resources, fisheries protection, and the fight against piracy. All those measures can be subsumed under the label ‘maritime governance’, which will be define below.

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