Acculturation and the acceptance of the Genocide Convention

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on why states ratify human rights treaties. It first analyses why Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States did not initially ratify or accede to the 1948 Genocide Convention, and then explores why the three countries eventually did accept it, 20–40 years after it was approved by the United Nations General Assembly. The extent to which material costs and benefits, the logic of appropriateness, and acculturation played a role in each of the three cases is assessed. Acculturation is particularly evident in the Irish case, but it also helps to explain the UK and US acceptance of the Convention

Security spheres: a phenomenology of maritime spatial practices

This article explores maritime protection zones (MPZ), which are being created in the territorial waters of a number of European states. Through the work of Gaston Bachelard and Peter Sloterdijk, the article analyses maritime zonation as a paradigmatic global security mechanism. It examines how maritime spatial planning seeks to reconfigure sea-space into multi-dimensional spheres of predictability and rationality. These processes, it proposes, seek to routinize the use of sea-space and reconcile tensions between the governance of land and sea, and between fixed infrastructure and mobile capital flows. The political and economic redistribution at stake in the construction of a global network of vast maritime zones, which act as hubs of wealth creation and environmental management, creates further tensions where commercial and military security imaginaries meet local and ecological interests. The article traces the ontology of multi-dimensional zonation and concludes that space which emerges from a pluralist and less anthropocentric understanding of the maritime would provide more effective security

Migration, Seafarers and the Humanitarian-Security-Economic Regimes Complex at Sea

Undocumented migration across the maritime space poses different challenges to the maritime industry. By focusing on a hitherto overlooked group, seafarers, the chapter attempts to set their experiences in the maritime security research agenda by using the Mediterranean scene as a demonstrative case study. The chapter highlights the normative dilemma and conceptual limitation of reading undocumented migration at sea through a security lens alone. Instead, by focusing on the experiences of seafarers in relation to migrants at sea, the chapter draws from the literature on international regime complexity to frame the socio-legal, political and economic environment seafarers inhabit and operate in vis-à-vis migrants as a ‘humanitarian-security-economic regimes complex’. Using examples from the Mediterranean Sea, the chapter argues that the humanitarian, security and economic regimes within the complex place contradicting expectations on seafarers which entail significant tensions and lead to trade-offs such as instances of non-rescue. The chapter, thus, calls for more research into the experiences of seafarers which takes into account the nuances of the humanitarian, security and economic challenges they face when encountering migrants at sea