Events

Global oceans are in crisis. Oceanic places and processes are increasingly flashpoints in global political economy where ocean resources including fish, hydrocarbons, and minerals, and ocean infrastructures including ports, ships, cables, and pipelines are figured at the center of narratives around national security, migration, unfree and coerced labor, and conflict. These trends challenge the conception, implementation, and enforceability of ocean governance regimes, underscoring how persistent ambiguities around the ownership of ocean resources and the management of ocean spaces offer opportunities for creative rethinking.

Yet, while some scholars of maritime and ocean governance have increasingly found it useful to historicize, emplace, and otherwise situate law as one technology among many used to apprehend and order ocean space, ecologies, labor, and resources, it remains the case that ocean governance is often treated as a static frame in which science and technology operate, rather than being treated as contingent.

Consequently, there remains much work to be done in bringing critical approaches to ocean science and technology into denser dialogue with law and policymaking. In part, this entails the meaningful integration of customary, vernacular, and other locally situated approaches to ocean science and ocean management in wider schemes for ocean management that are historically rooted in approaches from Western technoscience and lawmaking. It also means attending to diverse cultural imaginaries of the ocean and the tensions between local and global knowledges of the sea, by remaining open to new methods of inquiry including embodied and multispecies approaches.

In the spirit of the Pacem in Maribus conferences, which after 1970 were organized by Elisabeth Mann Borgese and colleagues with the International Ocean Institute to address thematic and regional facets of evolving global ocean policy, this workshop aims to deepen the synthesis of critical accounts of ocean science and ocean law, broadly construed.

Singapore is an excellent place to undertake this work. The history of global ocean governance is deeply tied to local and regional histories, beginning with the Sultanate of Johor’s role in the maritime conflict that eventually shaped the Doctrine of the Freedom of the Seas, to the Singaporean Diplomat Tommy Koh’s shepherding of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas to its conclusion. The years after UNCLOS have seen Singapore play important roles in maritime arbitration and high seas treaty-making. Singapore is situated amid multiple, overlapping geographies, from the historic Nanyō and Nanyang, to the contemporary Indo-Pacific and South China Sea, which bind together shared histories spanning the Eastern Indian Ocean, archipelagic Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. And furthermore, Singapore’s modern history at the ocean-land interface distills anxieties around human mobility, logistics, trade patterns, environmental transformation, ecological degradation, and resource extraction, that together ramify outward with planetary effects.

Proposals might draw on a range of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives to address questions including the following:

• What forms of marine tenure and spatial planning, resource management, or trans-boundary mobility across marine ecologies, among other features, have characterized the history of living and working with the ocean in Singapore and Southeast Asia?
• How has the development of global ocean knowledges shaped local histories, and vice versa?
• How might contexts that structure ocean life in Southeast Asia generate models for ocean governance done differently, by attending to alternative ocean epistemologies at social, political, and legal scales?
• How might we draw on diverse oceanic imaginaries to interrogate tensions between local and global conceptions of the sea, particularly by engaging diverse methods including embodied, multispecies, and artistic approaches?
• What might it look like to conceive the ocean we want, given varied and proliferating interpretations of how the ocean should be and how we should be in relation to it? How can we accommodate these polyphonic, and potentially contrasting, desires and interpretations?

We need new methods and metrics for ocean governance. This workshop stages a provocation to think how to recontour wider ways of understanding, managing, sharing, and relating to oceans across scales, by beginning from the situated specifics of place.

CALL OF PAPERS HAS ENDED

Authors of selected proposals will be notified in mid November 2025. Presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (between 3,000-5,000 words) by 16 January 2026. These papers will be distributed to fellow speakers and chairpersons prior to the workshop and do not need to be fully polished.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Jonathan GALKA
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Canay ÖZDEN-SCHILLING
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Jiat Hwee CHANG
Asia Research Institute & Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore