Suchergebnisse

In recent decades, new public-private policing assemblages everywhere have constituted new forms of authority and political order in the contemporary world. Part of a broader project exploring the politics of multilateral policing in maritime space, this article examines the complex of regulatory practices governing maritime security companies in the Western Indian Ocean. While literature on private maritime security has largely focused on the regulatory mechanisms of a select few individual flag states, this article investigates how flags of convenience, international organisations and the commercial maritime community have interacted to produce a regulatory system that entrenches distinct forms of private power in multilateral policing governance on the high seas. While overwhelmingly, the regulation of private security on land has served to anchor multilateral policing in particular structures of sovereign authority and/or public good, this article argues that the assemblage of regulatory practices in the High Risk Area (HRA) is mutually constitutive of distinct forms of public-private relations and social ordering at sea.

There is wide agreement among scholars that the shift from government to governance in security has seen unprecedented levels of cooperation (and competition) between private security actors (PSAs) and law enforcement agencies in the policing of public spaces, and the formation of fluid, diverse policing assemblages. With the overriding goal of investigating how the politics of security governance vary across time and space, this article seeks to explore security assemblage structures in counter-piracy operations on the high seas. Specifically, it studies the assembly of coercive force between public and private actors there, and compares this to the experience of multilateral security governance in other policing environments. On the back of this, it suggests that the formation of security assemblages in maritime space involves a configuration of public and private in which private actors have great prominence in (and authority over) the distribution of legitimate coercive force in 'public good' or 'civilised' security provision. Consequently, it argues that in this space, private interests (rather than those of the nation) may be central in the assembly of 'civilised' security interests.