Conceptualising the Ocean as Political Space: An Overview and Research Agenda

It is, by now, a commonplace diagnosis to speak of the enclosure and territorialisation of the oceans. Mostly understood as an extension of sovereign rights of states to the sea, some authors also speak of a functional territorialisation beyond national jurisdiction and beyond state sovereignty (e.g. Lambach 2021). However, a systematic account of what kind of political spaces or places seas and ocean(s) are or are imagined to be is still missing. What is more, it is unclear how different notions of the ocean(s) as spaces or places are linked to patterns of ordering the ocean(s). Taking exemplary discourses on ocean politics from International Relations research as well as from Political Theory as points of departure, this paper offers an overview of possible readings of the ocean(s) and seas as container spaces, social spaces and/ or places. Thereby, it aims, first, to show how the ocean is conceptualised in these accounts and, second, to assess in how far specific conceptions of the ocean as space or place are related to distinct policy areas and/or underlying institutional guiding-principles. This account will also allow us to address the question in how far these patterns are similar to or (necessarily) differ from those we can observe regarding land-based territories. Regarding terranean territories, we can observe a systematic variation as well as interrelation of container-space and social space-conceptions of territory, sometimes supported by place conceptions of specific territories (Meine 2021). One hypothesis to be examined in this paper is that the ocean(s) and ocean politics might serve as a prism for different conceptions of space and place which are used interrelatedly when land-based territories are conceptualised, but which become separated when politics in and for oceanic spaces are conceptualised, imagined and realised. Thus, by systematising and negotiating different readings of the ocean(s) as political space(s), this paper contributes to our understanding of the ocean as a particular political space and its consequences for oceanic orders and outlines a research agenda for the future.