Discussion of Maritime Domain Awareness in Southeast Asia

One of the core areas work of the SafeSeas’ project TOCAS is Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA). Asking how MDA can become a fruitful tool for better law enforcement at sea, the disruption of transnational organised crime as well as increased cooperation, the SafeSeas team is developing a guide.

On the 24th of January, SafeSeas Director Prof. Bueger had the opportunity to discuss the draft guide with colleagues from Southeast Asia during an event organised by the Maritime Security Programme of RSIS.

MDA is often considered to be one of the keys for addressing maritime insecurity as it provides the knowledge and understanding for policy, institutional reforms as well as operational responses. The one day event had the objective to review the state of MDA in Southeast Asia on a national and regional level. Participants agreed about the value of MDA, but identified quite significant hurdles to achieve better knowledge of the sea.

In his talk Prof. Bueger introduced the work on key guidelines for MDA, summarized some of the promises and argued that many of the known hurdles can be overcome through institutional procedures. The slides of the talk are available here.

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