Best Practices: Identifying Points of Contact

For donors and implementers of regional organisations it is often difficult to reach out to recipient countries. They struggle to identify the right individual or organisation to speak to or invite as a representative to a coordination meeting. The result can be that a government is weakly represented at international events, or that information about opportunities arising are not adequately transmitted within the government.

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Best Practices: Maritime Security Strategies

For many countries, maritime security strategies and plans are a useful coordination device. Such strategies provide overall direction and guidelines; they map agencies and accountability relations and describe maritime security governance structures and the roles and responsibilities of each agency. Often, as in the case of the EU Maritime Security Strategy or the Seychelles Maritime Plan (see box), they are accompanied by detailed plans of action and investment strategies.

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Best Practices: The ‘tool-box’ of capacity building

Capacity building can only be defined very broadly; the measures it should include are debated, if not contested. Different methods of delivery belong in the tool-box and it is important to note their different strengths and weaknesses. The SAFE SEAS Best Practice Toolkit explores the strengths of different methods of delivery.

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Best Practices: Maritime Domain Awareness

Effective knowledge production about activities at sea, also known as Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), is one of the backbones of successful maritime security governance on both national and regional levels. Establishing a centre that integrates data on maritime activity and analyses it is a priority. Such centres share information between agencies on both national and regional levels. In many countries, a national centre also integrates search and rescue, as well as the monitoring of fisheries.

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Mastering maritime security: SafeSeas forthcoming best practice tool kit

Maritime security is a global task. It requires effective governance on a national and regional level, but also external capacity building to assist countries in developing the required human, institutional and material capacities needed to manage maritime spaces and enforce regulation within those spaces. Mastering this complex arena requires reflexive capacity building. SafeSeas forthcoming Best … Read more

Performing piracy: a note on the multiplicity of agency

SAFE SEAS Principal Investigator Professor Christian Bueger has recently published an article in the Journal of International Relations and Development on ‘pirate agency’ as a primer for the study of the multiplicity of agency and its production with pirates representing a paradigmatic case of international agency. The article offers a renewed understanding of agency and … Read more

An enduring threat – suspected Somali pirates transferred to Seychelles

This week six suspected Somali pirates were transferred by EUNAVFOR officials to the Seychelles to stand trial – the first such transfer of piracy suspects to the country since 2014. The suspects were apprehended by an Italian navy frigate, ITS Virginio Fasan, after they attacked a Seychelles-flagged 52,000-tonne container ship and a fishing vessel in the … Read more

SAFESEAS workshop at University of Stellenbosch

This week the SAFESEAS team were joined by our international research assistants and partners for a workshop hosted by the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA) at the University of Stellenbosch’s Institute for Advanced Study. The primary objective of the workshop was to discuss the initial results of the research conducted over … Read more

A new agenda for maritime security studies

SafeSeas Principal Investigator Prof. Christian Bueger and Co-PI Prof. Tim Edmunds have published an article in International Affairs. The new article – entitled Beyond Seablindness: A New Agenda for Maritime Security Studies – argues that developments in the maritime arena have flown beneath the radar of much mainstream international relations and security studies scholarship, and that a … Read more

Maritime Security in Kenya

This working paper provides a primer to the SAFE SEAS case study of the maritime security sector in Kenya drawing on elements of the SPIP methodology. It examines the maritime spaces of Kenya, the problems, and challenges facing these spaces as well as the existing legal, policy and institutional frameworks for tackling these problems. Read … Read more