Sea Spaces and Oceanic Orders. Capturing and Theorising the Blue Horizon of Politics and Political Science

Mann-Borgese's thoughts today echo in the goals of the UN Ocean Decade (2021-2030), calling for a change in human relationships with the ocean. Reforming ocean policies, ocean-related decision-making and institution-building, and the constitution of oceanic orders raise questions at the core of political science. Yet, political science does not seem sufficiently well equipped – conceptually, and regarding empirical and normative insights – to answer them. Rather, it seems to lag behind. The ‘blue turn’ and advances in, for instance, international law (eg Braverman/Johnson 2020), history (eg Bosco 2022), geography (e.g. Peters/Steinberg 2019), and humanities (eg Mentz 2023) have only selectively reached us. Despite recent efforts (eg Armstrong 2022, Carvalho/Leira 2022), we mostly still suffer from 'sea-blindness' (Bueger/Edmunds 2017). To remedy that, we want to bring together work across political science to pinpoint the specificity of the ocean as a political space and explore consequences for the conceptual and theoretical base as well as the analytical tools of our discipline. Synthesising insights on issues such as maritime conflict and security, the constitutional evolution of oceanic order, human rights at sea and democratic ocean politics, as well as policies and institutions for ocean sustainability and the use of ocean resources, we want to increase our ability to contribute to answering the challenges of ocean politics today. In short, moving the questions centre-stage in how far oceanic orders differ from land-based politics and institution-building, this workshop aims to broaden the blue horizon of politics and political science.

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1: What characterises the ocean as a political space, how is it different from terranean space?
2: How are oceanic orders emerging, created, or sustained, what are their structures of domination?
3: How are present oceanic orders and their politics and policies to be evaluated and judged?
4: Which principles should guide policies, politics, and institution-building for new oceanic orders?
5: How do oceanic specificities necessitate or enable new paradigmatic thinking in political science?

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