PEDAGOGY: The Rising Politics of the Sea
Graduate course taught by Dr. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos in the PPIA program at the American University of Beirut
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Salt water covers 71 percent of the planet’s surface and releases an equal amount of O2 in the atmosphere. Always central to humanity – for travel, trade, food, and imagination – the oceans rose to global significance for the first time with the advent of colonialism, mercantilism and industrialization in Europe. Navigators, merchants, slavers and pirates roamed the seas for centuries leaving behind cartographies, economies and trajectories of extraction, exchange and excessive violence, but also important legal and political templates for the nascent capitalism. Today the global oceans rise again, albeit not only metaphorically. The seas account for 90 percent of goods and energy transportation (containers and tankers), facilitate the massive exodus for migrants and refugees from the Global South towards the Global North (dingies and smugglers), hold the material infrastructure of global digital communications (oceanbed cables), support the structures of global industries (tourism, fishing, offshore oil), but also generate global anxiety for the planet’s environmental future (rising sea levels and trash islands). The ocean has always been an extremely political space, but through the recent rise of truly ‘planetary’ issues of hope and concern some centuries-old questions on how to govern the ocean have resurfaced in novel contexts. The conundrum at the core of ocean governance is the relationship between terra-centric states and fluid oceans.
In the absence of a sea sovereign, an oceanic Leviathan, the rising politics of the sea, including questions of governance, law, conflict resolution, military and scientific research, and environmental conservation, offer new and surprising debates, institutions and prospects. This course will follow - to the extent possible – the main roots and routes of the contemporary politics of the sea, both from above (international governance, law, science) and “from below” (solidarity, slavery, labor). We will arrive at questions on ocean governance today through a historical overview of the ocean’s role in trajectories of science, economy and nation-building (with a special focus on modern Lebanon and Greece). In our journey, we will also visit the work of political thinkers of the sea from Grotius to Schmitt, and their struggles with the statelessness and ungovernability of the global oceans.