HomeThe Territorialisation of Maritime Spaces: Actors, Forms and Temporalities, from Antiquity to the Present Day

HomeThe Territorialisation of Maritime Spaces: Actors, Forms and Temporalities, from Antiquity to the Present Day

The Territorialisation of Maritime Spaces: Actors, Forms and Temporalities, from Antiquity to the Present Day

La territorialisation des espaces maritimes. Acteurs, modalités, temporalités de l’Antiquité à nos jours

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Published on Tuesday, December 05, 2023

Abstract

Maritime areas - seas and oceans - cover 70% of the Earth's surface, but remain relatively unknown and scarcely studied by social sciences, despite their importance today. This conference will aim at studying examine the role played by maritime areas in the exercise of political and military authority, the forms of legal control over the seas, the use and economic exploitation of the seas, as well as their territorialisation.

Announcement

Co-organized by Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Centre for Strategic Studies of the Navy (CESM), Paris, June 10-12 2024

Arguments

Maritime areas - seas and oceans - cover 70% of the Earth's surface, but remain relatively unknown and scarcely studied by social sciences, despite their importance today for many governments, economic actors and public opinion, and despite their prominence in the media, which is far from negligible. A few recent events that affected France, more or less directly, generated sometimes considerable media coverage: the establishment of the AUKUS strategic alliance in the Pacific Ocean (resulting in the cancellation of an arms contract with Australia); the international tensions linked to migrations across the Mediterranean Sea or the (English) Channel; the very high tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean between Turkey, Greece and Cyprus; tensions between the European Union (particularly France) and the United Kingdom over access to British fisheries; recurring tensions in the South and East China Seas, the creation of a French Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mediterranean and recent extensions of the continental shelf, etc. 

Maritime areas play a key role in international affairs, in relation to a wide range of issues and challenges: trade, international migrations, security and defence, piracy, pollution and environmental protection, rising sea levels and the effects of marine transgressions, the exploitation or over-exploitation of fisheries and other resources, energy production, the maritimisation of economies in the context of globalisation, etc. Recently, the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment in International Waters has raised the profile of these issues. In June 2023, UN member states adopted the BBNJ Treaty (Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdictions), which aims to "ensure the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in international waters", i.e. beyond the sovereign zones and exclusive economic zones of coastal states, on the high seas.

These concerns already existed to some extent in societies of the past. For centuries, maritime spaces have been an object of observation and reflection for political and military players. As they explored the seas and oceans, they implemented measures to control or even take over these environments on a long-term basis. Among the activities linked to the use and exploitation of these areas, trade is perhaps the domain that has contributed most, alongside the political and strategic dimensions, to the development of human control over the seas and oceans. 

The aim of this conference is to examine the role played by maritime areas in the exercise of political and military authority, at different scales of space and time. Examples abound from Antiquity onwards, including the domination of Athens in the Aegean during the Classical period, the thalassocracy that the Ptolemies maintained in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period, and the economic and in some respects military power that the island city of Rhodes wielded between the Classical and Hellenistic periods. For a time, the cities of Carthage and Rome shared control of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the western Mediterranean in general, before Rome acquired a monopoly through a series of wars and the development of a navy. Later, with the establishment of the Principate under Augustus, the administrative reorganisation of the Empire had consequences on the structuring and use of the coastlines at the interface between land and sea. In the modern era, the British were quick to realise that mastery of the ocean and coastlines could contribute to world domination (Walter Raleigh in the 17th century, and Halford Mackinder at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries). The United States seized on this historical precedent and drew inspiration from it at the end of the 19th century under the impetus of Alfred T. Mahan, with the concepts of sea power and maritime power.

The second objective is also to study the forms of legal control over the seas. Legal thinking on maritime spaces flourished in the modern era, stimulated by colonisation among other factors. In the 17th century, John Selden (drawing on the ideas of the Venetian Sarpi) promoted the principle of mare clausum to legitimize England's claims to what he called the "British Ocean". As for ancient times, although they did not produce theoretical treaties postulating a legal organisation of the sea, they did establish certain principles and standards applied to Mediterranean maritime areas. Drawn up essentially within the framework of bilateral or multilateral agreements, they defined the various forms of influence that a given authority was likely to exert over the seas or certain portions of seas. Taken as a whole, these principles and norms constituted a body of knowledge that reveals the way in which the sea has been considered from a legal perspective at different times, right up to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, known as the Montego Bay Convention, which - at least in appearance - regulates these issues right up to present day. 

Maritime spaces are apparently borderless places, but have been subject to a process of territorialisation. By territory, we mean a more or less extensive area invested by a state entity (city, kingdom, state, empire) that exerts authority over the territory and the human groups occupying it. Constructed and transformed over time by different practices, maritime territories become material and symbolic places where sovereign authority is displayed while also being objects of social representations.

It is therefore important to look at the players, the methods and the timescale of the territorialisation of maritime areas over the long term, from Antiquity to the present day. The status of players deserves particular attention. We have chosen to focus primarily on political actors who have a monopoly of force or claim it in a given maritime space, and who use military forces to ensure a more or less continuous and ubiquitous presence at sea. The ways in which political (and military) players act, which partly depend on their status, involve interaction with other players - institutional, economic, paramilitary - who are also present in maritime areas. As a result, we need to analyse the ways in which the respective fields and degrees of intervention of these players are defined, and the types of relationships they establish (cooperation, interference, opposition). More generally, we need to look for continuities and breaks in the centuries-old territorialisation of maritime areas. Does the question of territorialisation arise in the same terms at all scales, for a narrow sea, an inland sea, a large oceanic space, or even the global ocean? Has it been the same for every historical period? Have the issues varied, due to the specific nature of maritime areas and the evolution of their relationship with land?

The general theme of the territorialisation of maritime spaces can be broken down into five main areas:

Sovereignty and the construction of sovereignty in maritime areas, with a focus on several topics: freedom as a fundamental principle of use of the sea, the conditions under which it is exercised and the restrictions it is subject to when a sovereign authority, whether claimed or proven, imposes itself over a portion of sea or ocean.

Armed forces in maritime areas: navies are an instrument for preserving sovereignty over a given portion of maritime space that must be defended. They can also be a tool for challenging an established authority, as new sovereignties can emerge by mobilising naval forces.

Cartographic and discursive representations of the seas contribute to the construction of maritime spaces as territories. In this context, the points of view adopted by the authors or promoters of these representations, and their divergences, reveal the variety of forms of control over these spaces and any underlying political objectives.

The use and economic exploitation of the seas, particularly through trade, give rise to the creation of economic areas in which different forms of exchange and different definitions of legality and illegality confront each other. The diversity of economic cultures can give rise to conflicts, the resolution of which sheds light on the general and specific legal principles at work. By extension, challenges to the exploitation of maritime areas, for example in the name of heritage and environmental protection, are also worth considering.

Maritime areas and their territorialisation are both tools and levers for the development of new knowledge and expertise. Whether we are talking about knowledge (formalised or otherwise) derived from the exploration of the seas and oceans, information derived from the exploration of the seas for economic purposes, new military and civil naval engineering techniques, or practices and technologies developed to exploit resources, maritime areas can be seen as laboratories for the development of an autonomous field of knowledge.

Submission guidelines

All the social sciences can contribute to the study of the territorialisation of seas and oceans. Papers by two or more specialists from different disciplines will therefore be encouraged. Each proposal, focusing on one or more themes, should be between 6,000 and 7,000 characters long (including spaces). It should be preceded by a 100-word summary and five keywords. Proposals should be accompanied by a list of five bibliographical references.

We invite you to send your proposals simultaneously to the three members of the organising committee, before 31 December 2023, to the following e-mail addresses: 

  • Nicolas MAZZUCCHI, Centre d'Etudes Stratégiques de la Marine (CESM): mazzucchi@intradef.gouv.fr
  • Yann RICHARD, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UFR de géographie: Richard@univ-paris1.fr
  • Lucia ROSSI, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Ecole d'Histoire de la Sorbonne:lucia.rossi@univ-paris1.fr 

References

  • Braudel, F., 2002 [1977], La Méditerranée : l'espace et l'histoire, les hommes et l'héritage, Paris.  
  • Buraselis, K., Stephanu, M, Thompson, D. (éd.), 2013, The Ptolemies, the sea and the Nile, Cambridge.
  • Cabantous, A., Lespagnol, A., Péron, F. (ed.), 2005, Les Français, la terre et la mer XIIIeXXe siècles, Fayard, Paris.
  • Caron, F., 2008, « De la maîtrise de la mer », Stratégique, n° 89-90, pp. 101 à 147
  • Casson, L., 1971, Ships and seamanship in the ancient world, Princeton 
  • Coutau-Bégarie, H., 2007, L’Océan globalisé, Paris, Économica/ISC
  • De Souza, Ph., 1999, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman world, Cambridge
  • Drisch, J., 2015, « Territorialisation des mers et des océans : entre mythes et réalités », Inflexions, vol. 30, n° 3, 2015, pp. 129-139
  • Grataloup, C., 2015, L’invention des océans. Comment l’Europe a découpé et nommé le monde liquide, Géoconfluences.  En ligne : http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/informationsscientifiques/dossiers-thematiques/oceans-et-mondialisation/articles-scientifiques/l-inventiondes-oceans  
  • Horden, P., Purcell, N., 2000, The corrupting sea : a study of Mediterranean history, Oxford
  • Kowalski, J.-M., 2012, Navigation et géographie dans l'Antiquité gréco-romaine. La Terre vue de la mer, Paris
  • Lasserre, F. « Frontières maritimes dans l’Arctique : le droit de la mer est-il un cadre applicable ? », dans Frontières. Droit, territoire et individus, CERIscope Frontières, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, 2011
  • Louchet, A., 2014, La planète océane, Paris, Colin
  • Mahan, A. T., 1890, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783, New York, Little, Brown & Co.
  • Motte, M., 2015, « Stratégie navale et stratégie maritime », dans Stéphane Taillat (éd.), Guerre et stratégie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 287-310
  • Murray W. M., 2012, The age of titans : the rise and fall of the great Hellenistic navies, Oxford
  • Nicolet, Cl., 1988, L’inventaire du monde, Paris     
  • Reddé, M., 1986, Mare Nostrum : les infrastructures, le dispositif et l'histoire de la marine militaire sous l'Empire romain, Rome 
  • Stavridis, J., 2017,  Sea Power : The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans, Random House Large Print
  • Strootman, R., van den Eijnde, F., van Wijk, R. (éds), 2020, Empires of the sea : maritime power networks in world history, Leiden ; Boston
  • Vanney, J.-R., 2001, Géographie de l'Océan global, Paris, Éditions scientifiques Gordon & Breach

Subjects

Places

  • Paris 05 Panthéon, France (75)

Date(s)

  • Sunday, December 31, 2023

Contact(s)

  • Yann Richard
    courriel : Yann [dot] Richard [at] univ-paris1 [dot] fr

Information source

  • Lucia Rossi
    courriel : Lucia [dot] Rossi [at] univ-paris1 [dot] fr

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« The Territorialisation of Maritime Spaces: Actors, Forms and Temporalities, from Antiquity to the Present Day », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, December 05, 2023, https://doi.org/10.58079/1ccj

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