Although the imperial ship has been a key location through which to theorize colonialism and the origins of racial capitalism, little research exists on the postcolonial ship as an analytical indicator for the persistence and distinctiveness of contemporary racial capitalism. This article explores a largely uncharted territory through a critical appraisal of postwar Greek‐owned shipping.

This article draws on fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the maritime campaign of the International Palestine Solidarity Movement to challenge the embargo on Gaza. I make three main arguments: first, in addressing the Mediterranean Sea as a platform for international solidarity, the Ships to Gaza inadvertently contrived a novel and largely understudied instance of popular politics at sea, which I coin ‘popular thalassopolitics’.

The Mediterranean does not settle easily in predestined critical or cultural location. In immediate terms, contemporary European politics and legislation, concentrated in the figure of the ‘illegal’ migrant, inadvertently expose deeper archives; these invite us to revaluate this body of water and associated histories.  Sea water is striated. It follows neither a single history nor a unique map. It is worked up and worked over not only by social, but also by physical, animal and chemical, processes. To insist on these overlapping configurations is to register what exceeds and enriches the picture. Unregistered histories invest, cross and construct unsuspected maritime archives.

Dr. Rami G. Khouri interviews Dr. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos on DemocraSea Politics. The sea matters in different ways to all the people who share it – in trade, migration, political protest, environmental conditions, labor, and other areas. But its prevailing rules and perceptions, set by modern European powers or centuries-old systems designed in imperial days for much larger oceans, need to be revised.

A discussion focused on maritime Hellas and cosmopolitics at sea.

“Anti-Periplus – Of Other ships” is a pilot anti-tour project by dëcoloиıze hellάş that aims to showcase the “unconventional” seas, focusing on ships on strike, ships in solidarity, ships with political role, ships that carry pirates or migrants. It also aims to creatively deconstruct the cartographic representation as a postcolonial technology that inscribes borders and controls the flows and lives at sea.

Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás’ recent book, Capitalism and the Sea, is an ambitious, systematic, and convincing account of the reciprocal impact of capital upon the salt-water world in the past 400 years. The book is at once an important addition to and a referential text for the rising interdisciplinary field of critical maritime studies – a formidable ocean of research spanning histories of maritime colonialism, including piracy, slavery and revolution, macro-economic approaches to capital circulation in the oceans, studies on borders and border crossers, securitisation and state control over maritime spaces, maritime legalities and materialist perspectives on ports, logistics, chokepoints and labour, as well as ethnographies of marine biologists and maritime activists.

Seaspiracy is a Netflix documentary which raises awareness towards the atrocities committed by the fishing industry towards marine life and laborers at sea. Many influential individuals praised its role in highlighting the effects of seafood consumption, and how the depletion of oceanic waters will make way for irreversible damages towards the earth’s atmosphere. The problem however lies in the lack of solutions provided towards the issues being raised, leaving individuals with one option to counteract the issues being raised, that being veganism, when in reality, such an option does little to counteract the reality of the situation. So, is Seaspiracy truly trying to call for change, or is it nothing more than a propaganda film made by vegan activists?

Changing seas, whether it be in the form of increased acidification, higher temperatures or its rising level, demand a sea change in human-to-human and interspecies interactions. Whatever measures and countermeasures are put in place to reverse, adapt to and/or mitigate effects of climate change, states will no doubt play an outsized role as the most prominent subjects of international law. Yet there has been an expansion of subjecthood to commercial enterprises (arbitration) and the individual human being (criminal law), and there exists a plethora of actors and networks, connections and flows that transcend borders.