Grant for workshop series on Ocean Governance
Dr. Vanessa Newby (ISGA) and Dr. Catherine Jones from St Andrews won a grant worth over €23.000 from the RSE Saltire Facilitation Network Award entitled: ‘Worse Things Happen at Sea’: The Governance & Security of the Ocean. The grant will comprise three workshops in 2022: one in Leiden, one in Edinburgh and one in London.
The workshop series Ocean Governance should bring together academics, policy makers, and practitioners to address the following inter-related questions: What type of political space are the oceans? How can we create an international framework to enable the oceans to be governed? To what extent should the freedom of the seas be maintained?
New pathbreaking approaches to research
The open ocean is easy to access but hard to control. This presents major obstacles for national governments to be able to pursue their global ambitions (both in terms of climate change, non-traditional security challenges and insecurity), but also tremendous opportunities in terms of freedom of navigation, trade and traditional security objectives.
This series of workshops will explore the proposition that, it is not a problem of having too little international law, but rather a challenge of too little governance. By its nature developing research in this area is inherently interdisciplinary and demands new path-breaking approaches to research.
Range of challenges
Newby and Jones state in their concept note that responding to this question is not simply an endeavour for international lawyers or international security scholars. Instead, it requires a deep understanding of the range of challenges that need to be considered alongside an understanding of the international politics and existing global governance architecture. Hence, there is a need to invest time in bringing a range of scholars from multiple disciplines to collaborate on this project.
For the initial workshop in St Andrews you will be required to provide an outline of an argument or piece of research related to the topic of Ocean governance. Contributions at this stage should be a maximum of 5000 words and should be in the form of a working paper. Please submit an abstract (maximum of 200 words) to Cath Jones, on CMJ20@st-andrews.ac.uk, before 5pm (GMT) January 10th 2022. In your submission please indicate if you would like to contribute in person or online. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact Vanessa Newyby via v.f.newby@fgga.leidenuniv.nl