Sea Control - Sea Control 196 - Blue Crime with Prof Christian Bueger

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

Links:1. Safe Seas Network Homepage2. Professors Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds, "Blue crime: Conceptualising transnational organized crime at sea," Marine Policy, Vol. 119, September 2020.

Hey folks, Jared here. This week we are headed to Northern Europe, Copenhagen specifically, to talk blue crime with Professor Christian Buger. We're rapidly closing in on the submission deadline for the next phase of Project Trident. This is your opportunity to shape the future of maritime security. Our next theme is regional strategies and we've partnered with the Okuska Council for Asia-Pacific Studies, Dominican Naval Command and Staff College, and the Institute for Zickerheitspolitik in Kiel, Germany. Submissions are due August 31st. You can find more information on our website at simsec.org. We're also seeking volunteers to assist with back-end production of Sea Control.

Volunteers sit in on interviews, assist with sound editing and production, and help transcribe episodes. Contact seacontrol at simsec.org if you're interested. Finally, as always, we want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the SimSec Podcast Network and our second podcast feed, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex and friends over on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcasts.

It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain, and naval history by three historians. So check them out wherever you download. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, my guest is Professor Christian Buge, co-author of the paper Blue Crime, Conceptualizing Transnational Organized Crime at Sea. You can find a link to the paper in our show notes. Christian, thank you for joining me. And could you please tell the audience a little bit about your background?

Well, hello, everyone, and thank you again for the invitation to discuss the paper here today. I'm a professor at the University of Copenhagen since two years. And before that, I was at Cardiff University in the UK. My background is in international relations and security studies, but I'm also one of the directors of the Safe Seas Initiative, which is a network of maritime security researchers. And in this network, we are working at the moment on two exciting projects, and one of them is the Transnational Organized Crime at Sea, the TOCAS project. And the paper we are going to discuss today is the outcome of that project, and it's a project together with the University of Bristol. Well, thank you again for agreeing to come on. I'll add our usual caveats that our opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might otherwise be associated. So how long have you been studying maritime crime specifically? it has been no quite a number of years i must say it was back in the days it was the somali

piracy crisis that got me fascinated about the sea and about different forms of crime at sea and as we all know somali piracy was a fascinating case of international cooperation and this was really what got me motivated it was i was trying to understand how this cooperation worked and ever since I've been passionate about maritime security and ocean governance, in particular cooperation or operational responses at sea. But then I've also been looking a lot into information sharing and maritime domain awareness, capacity building, but also maritime security strategies. So I've been studying piracy since about 10 years.

And initially, I was particularly interested in the Western Indian Ocean. But increasingly, I've been looking into other maritime regions, the Gulf of Guinea, the larger Indo-Pacific area, and so on. Thank you. So why would you say your paper is important and what problems are you trying to help resolve with it? Yeah, so what we're trying to do in the paper is develop the concept of blue crime. And that is basically an attempt to put our discussion on maritime security into new categories and use a different concept to organize our thinking. Now, over the last decade, I would say, much efforts have been actually made to tackle different expressions of blue crime. Now, perhaps initially this was primarily piracy, but today we know that the ocean actually overall is in crisis. And that we also need to address other problems, and that is illegal fishing, various forms of smuggling, and so on.

But part of the point of proposing this idea of blue crimes is that we hardly ever think the oceans as a more integrated security space. Professionals dealing with the oceans continue to operate in silos. And then, for instance, the relation between IUU fishing and piracy or between illegal fishing and smuggling is hardly explored. But it also concerns the relationship to environment and the environmental policy. Think, for instance, about responses such as marine protected areas. Now, marine protected areas, that's one of the most important conservation tools. But then it's largely understood as an environmental tool. And we hardly think about how the rules created for these areas are actually policed, what kind of consequences they have for crime and for security at sea.

Now, as we know, the sea is a vast space and it provides ample opportunity to break the law. And what we need to get towards is thinking these relations much more together, how the environment, crime, but also other forms of security at sea are related, and also then break up these silos between professionals dealing with different kind of issues in their own right. So that's the crux about this paper and why we need the concept of blue crime to foster and facilitate this more holistic thinking about security at sea. So why do you think labels like piracy or IOU, which you mentioned, illegal, unauthorized, unregulated phishing, are insufficient? sorry insufficient insufficient well they are they are super important concepts to start with and they're also legal categories right so labels like piracy less so illegal fishing are important actually to to prosecute these kind of crimes why are they not sufficient in their own right well as i just said we do not think them together right and that of course implies that

We need to have something like an integrative concept that can link up the various professionals, but also analysts and allows us to explore the linkages between different forms of crime and then also develop joint responses to them. And for this, we need a broader, broader category. So is that what you mean when you say that you want to conceptualize blue crime? Is that this is a term that you'd like international organizations to take over and start to use to think about this more holistically? Yes, exactly. So that's one of the core points here.

And quite obviously, the concept of transnational organized crime at sea has been substantially used. The UN Security Council held two debates where the concept was actually in the title. and we think that there's more effort required to actually clarify what we mean by it. And why is that important? We should not forget that concepts not only describe a particular kind of reality or particular kind of events at sea, but they also organize and categorize the world we are living in. They are important thinking tools that alert us to certain things and not others.

and because of that having the right concepts is super important and yes the concept of blue crime is a sort of new concept and we hope that it can do exactly that to facilitate and integrate our thinking about threats at sea thanks your jumping off point was un talks definition of transnational organized crime can you first explain what un talk is for our listeners and then what their definition is? Yes. UNTAC is the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. It's also called the Palermo Convention. That's perhaps a little bit easier than the acronym. Now it's from 2000s and the United Nations sponsored a multilateral treaty for cooperation against different forms of transnational organized crime. It has been widely signed,

So almost all states in the world are members to the treaty, and it's perhaps the most important legal document actually to enable international cooperation in the area of crime. Now, part of what is problematic about the document is that it has a relatively vague definition of transnational organized crime. Now, transnational organized crime here implies that there's an organized group of more than three people that operates across at least two countries and that this form of operation is structured and organized. There's one limitation here in the sense that the definition only applies to serious offenses. And these serious offenses are here defined as those which are punishable with at least four years in prison. The convention does talk a little bit about the sea, but quite obviously it was not drafted with maritime crime in mind. It's, however, the most important international legal document, but it complements other international laws, such as the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. Now, in analytical terms, the Palermo definition is useful, but it's also overly restricted since we know that some of the crimes that we can observe, in particular if it concerns the environment, are not necessarily taken seriously enough in all countries that they would trigger four years imprisonment.

And that's, of course, also a restriction that we are trying to correct a little bit with our own definition of blue crime. But it is a good starting point to think through of what we mean by transnational organized crime at sea. And let's not forget this definition is also important because it is a great legal language. I'm going to quote from the paper for just a second. In the maritime domain, a common challenge for law enforcement is that many countries do not have appropriate legislation in place to effectively deal with criminality at sea. Why do you think that is? Well, here the challenge clearly lies in what has often been called sea blindness. Many countries, and that includes Western countries, have really only woken up to what goes on at the sea over the last 10 years or so.

So this is clearly changing and I think piracy, in particular Somali piracy, was a core trigger for this in many regions because if you think in Europe or so, there was not really a lot of motivation to prosecute different forms of maritime crime or they were not necessarily seen as maritime crimes. And also because of that, there has been so much need for capacity building work in the Western Indian Ocean, in Africa, but also Southeast Asia and other parts of the world, because fighting crimes without a proper legislation in place is tremendously difficult. And then coming back to the definition of the Palermo Convention, here the problem then, of course, is also that many of these crimes, fishing is a good example, are not necessarily criminalized in many countries at all. So this is something that is an ongoing process, I would say. And that's not only think about illegal fishing, but also many of the other actions that cause harm at sea and could be clustered around this notion of environmental crimes. So that's also an area that will require ongoing attention. Thank you. Now, your paper also highlighted the importance of centering definitions of crime around the sea rather than the state. Why did you think that that was important? And what was problematic about, for example, the definition of piracy? now to start we are all living in a terror-centric world so too much of our thinking is just bound to the to the land and not the sea and that really requires a little bit of opening up and rethinking issues and it is um it is i think quite a mental challenge to think from the sea and not

not the lands and also then think about what that might imply i i don't have good answers to to what might imply, but I see it as an interesting challenge to ask that. How does it look from the sea? What do we see differently if we start looking from the sea and not the land? So I think it's an intellectual challenge, but also a policy challenge because many of our bureaucratic categories are actually land-based. Think about how military forces around the world are often organized and so on. You know, we have categories such as Africa, but the Western Indian Ocean, for instance,

wouldn't be often a bureaucratic category. Now, if it comes to piracy, the main definition, of course, here is the legal one that we find in the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. And here, piracy is a term for criminal activities that take place in international waters. And this is the most important definition if it comes to counter-piracy operation and to prosecution.

Yet, we should not forget that in everyday language, there's quite a number of other definitions around, which also have different functions other than law enforcement. So think about the use of the concept of piracy for alerting the shipping industry of particular risk areas. Or think about using the concept as a tool to actually record incidents and compile statistics like the International Maritime Board is doing, for instance. And in these discussions, we have much wider definitions of what piracy is than it is given under UNCLOS. Now, what is important here is that concepts just have particular functions in relationship to us trying to do something. And because of that, it is often important to rethink our concepts when they are particularly useful in analytical terms, but then also in handling our everyday needs, such as compiling statistics, alerting the shipping industry, and so on. So we need to get our concepts right in that sense. We need to define it that they can do the work for us that we want them to do. So, the three categories that you settled on in the paper were crimes against mobility, criminal flows, and environmental crimes.

How would you describe each of those categories? So, the concept of blue crime is, so to say, the umbrella concept. But then when we started out looking at different expressions of crime, we quickly found out that there are actually different forms in terms of how these crimes relate to the sea and also what kind of harm they actually cause. So that's our main definition here for crime as well, that there's substantial harm being caused. So we are also in the process of developing a large-scale evidence base for blue crimes around the world. And writing this paper was partially about organizing our existing evidence. So what do these three categories entail? Let me very quickly talk you through it.

Our first category are crimes against mobility. sea and here the object of harm is what moves on the sea so that has been the target of of crime and piracy in its various expressions quite obviously is is here one of the one of the core crimes think about a hijacking of a ship and the the harm is here caused in terms of the crew the shape and and everything that is that is involved here the second category criminal flows operates differently because here the sea is actually used to to smuggle things and the harm is actually not caused or at sea but on land so criminal flows are include smuggling of various goods or

human trafficking human smuggling and so on so here we're talking about the flows what moves across the sea our third category is again different and that's environmental crimes and here the object of harm is the environment it is the sea and hence we have again a different relationship to the sea. And I think what is important here is also that when we're talking about the environment then we have to recognize that in the meantime we're living in the Anthropocene.

So it's actually not so easy to decide what belongs to the environment and what not. Let's say a shipwreck that is in the meantime the habitat for a lot of fish perhaps even turtles is that environment or not and we do think it is and because of that in our understanding of environmental crime we also include all forms of installations at sea which have sort of a permanence and form part of the environment So then environmental crime is not only illegal fishing or all sorts of illegal resource exploitation. Let's keep deep seabed mining in the future in mind.

But it would also be crimes committed at installations. And here we're thinking of not only oil platforms or wind platforms, but then also installations such as pipelines and submarine data cables. And of course, there has been quite a lot of interest in submarine data cable protection recently. And then if you ask how does that issue fit into this category, it is exactly here because the cables form part of the environment. So what this categorization allows us first to do is to see and recognize that there are different expressions of crime. It brings also into attention crimes that perhaps do not often get that much attention like our big crimes, the piracy, illegal fishing and smuggling. And it also allows us to actually see that they are part of one common problem space, although they are different. They are linked to the sea in different terms and, of course, bring different actors to the fore.

So this is what we can do and see with a conceptual apparatus like this. Thank you. I was going to ask, how did you settle on those categories specifically? I think you kind of addressed it at the end there. Why did you opt to exclude terrorism from any of your definitions? Yes, I think the case of terrorism is quite interesting, or perhaps it's better to talk about politically motivated violent actor groups here, because terrorism is also a very, very contested term. Part of the reason why we think that terrorism shouldn't be put in the same box

is that the logic that drives it is, first of all, very, very different. When we're talking about crime, we're always talking about some sort of profit-driven logic and that it's clearly different in the case of violent groups where it's more about symbolic gains and so on. But quite obviously, it is also linked to the fact that the responses and the legal situation is simply quite different. So the kind of actions you can take against violent groups or under the terrorism conventions is radically different.

than what you can do under the crime conventions. Now, what is however important is that maritime terrorism is part of the broader maritime security agenda. And there's quite obviously some evidence for terrorist groups or violent actor groups having links to blue crime in various ways. But we shouldn't conflate them with criminals. There's actually a long and old debate on piracy in Southeast Asia from the 1990s that discussed that quite heavily, whether piracy should be conflated with terrorism or not. I don't think it's good to do so. And in introducing the notion of blue crime, of course, then our understanding of maritime security looks a little bit different because, in essence, we can think about maritime security as having three domains, and one would be blue crime, one would be terrorism, that is non-state violent actor groups and their activities, and the third one then would be interstate disputes of various kinds.

So this is the definition of maritime security that then actually follow from it. I do, however, think that exploring this relationship between blue crime and terrorism, that's one of the fields that requires substantial analytical attention to know when and how what kind of blue crimes emerge and how they actually facilitate the threats of terrorism and when not. So I think we need quite some attention to that in the near future by revisiting the cases that we have, but also doing some more modeling work and so on. So terrorism is not crime, but it's an important part of the maritime security agenda. This question was on our list, but just popped into my head as you were giving your answer about terrorism as well as your previous answer about submarine cables. Do you see a similar tension with including submarine cables in one of these categories? Because my impression is that the primary actors who are going to attack, if you will, a submarine cable are state actors. Yeah, I sort of agree, but there are different scenarios, right?

So submarine cables, the main threat that we are discussing, at least in the security discourse, is, of course, state activities, in particular, you know, Russian naval activities. In practical terms, if you look into the actual threats of submarine cables being broken down, then it is mainly from private actors, right? And causing harm on submarine cables through phishing activities, that would be, for me, an environmental crime. Fortunately, we haven't seen any kind of discussion or evidence on terrorist groups targeting a submarine data cable. That is certainly a scenario in the future, but perhaps also in terms of transnational organized crime groups. And perhaps we are not necessarily here talking about what happens in the West, in Europe and North America and so on, because cutting us off from the internet is almost impossible. So Denmark has 26 data cables going into the country. Well, we are going to be fine in any case.

There's enough contingency. However, a country like Seychelles has one cable. So what happens there? You know, can you take this cable hostage? Perhaps you can. So it's up to our fantasy in the end to imagine what could be done there and so on. But it's certainly not necessarily state actors. We are going to be fine. Russia is not going to cut us off from the Internet. This I can promise. What difficulties do you see caused by UNCLAWS' emphasis on the primacy of flag states in the existence of open registries and flags of convenience? Well, this is an old and well-known problem. So to say that law enforcement at sea is tremendously difficult because of the emphasis on flag state legislation. Just entering and inspecting a vessel is not easy. And what do you do if there's no one that answers the phone if you want to board a vessel? I think there's little that can be done about this, at least in the foreseeable future, because UNCLOS is a package that will not be opened. But then we're already seeing that it has been complemented in various ways.

And I think more and more emphasis is now being put on port state legislation. If we think about the Cape Town Agreement against illegal fishing, that's a classical new approach to address illegal fishing in ports. And at the same time, what we're also seeing is more and more regional cooperation agreements, which would provide new opportunities to deal with the issue in the future. I think the biggest problem can actually be caused by those states, by those ships, which have unclear nationality, that change their nationality often with rapid speed or where it's not possible to verify it. Policing the sea will always be difficult, and weak law enforcement will continue to be a major problem in tackling blue crime. It's not something that we can deal with easily, but part of the point about the blue crime concept or proposal is, given that the sea is such a difficult space to police, We need to identify new synergies between those professionals that deal with the sea, hence working towards more integration if it comes to not only Navy's Coast Guards and fishing authorities, but then also the environmental policy, the conservation movement, and so on. If these can be drawn much stronger into this discussion, I think that would be a very, very important step.

Because how can we rescue the oceans if we don't think about security and think about how the rules that we are designing for the oceans are actually enforced? So that's to unpack that problematic area here a little bit. Thanks. Now, you had discussed the difficulties of sea blindness before. Or do you think open registries and flags of convenience contribute to sea blindness? It just seems that all those sort of contribute to difficulties in oversight for non-flag states. I mean, it's actually interesting to see how some of the larger shipping companies are increasingly looking for the good flag state authorities. And I think we are largely talking about the black sheep here.

If you look at it in a long-term perspective, it's actually quite ironic how the shipping industry has made so much effort to drive the state out of their business. And I think piracy really has changed something here because in particular with Somali piracy, the shipping industry all of a sudden recognized that it needs powerful states, that it needs naval protection, and that it cannot solve these problems on their own. So ironically, they have then been – when in crisis, they have been calling to have the state back into the game. And guess what? With the maritime security agenda, the state is not going to disappear. And quite obviously, the shipping industry, they don't like to talk about terrorism or they don't like to talk about smuggling because whatever states do on this front, it's going to cost them money. So I think gradually, there's more and more regulation of over-maritime actors. There will always be black sheep, and it's not easy to get rid of them, but the more pressure from different directions can be put on them, the better we will be off. Thank you, Christian. Any final thoughts before I close it out?

Well, the blue crime proposal in the end is also an invitation to conduct different forms of research, work more interdisciplinary, not only look at one particular kind of crime from one disciplinary perspective, But look at the sea as an integrated security space where what happens on one front has consequences for the other. I mean interstate disputes, for instance, create spaces of insecurity, which in turn also facilitates maritime crime. And quite obviously, we see this happening all over the world, and we need to get better at understanding that and then also feeding that kind of knowledge back to those who are fighting crime at sea on an everyday basis. learning about the the causes of crime how they hang together and then also be relatively realistic in terms of what can be done one of the things that i learned in in studying somali piracy for for that many years is there are these wild fantasy worlds out there in 2010 people were talking yeah we are going to tackle the root causes of somali piracy and then the problem

will stop but we're talking about a failed state you don't tackle you don't you don't fix this in 10 years it's not it's not possible so i think it's also important to avoid these these kind of fantasy fantasy worlds but rather look at the evidence and ask what what does it tell us so thinking about and thinking with the concept of blue crime is an invitation to engage in an intellectual but also very practical endeavor and i do hope that some some of the listeners here today take up this invitation and i'm definitely looking forward to continue the discussion on this well thank you for coming on i'm really looking forward to how the rest of this dialogue is going to unfold particularly once we publish this episode i'd like to thank my guest professor

christian buger christian what are you working on next and where can we find you online yes you can either find me on my personal website which is my last name dot net uh you can find us on our platform that is safe seas dot net and uh the stuff i'm working on is exactly now continue on the evidence base and the blue criminology agenda but i'm also working on a new research project which is on ghana and that project is called amaris addressing maritime insecurity in ghana and the motivation for this project is that much of our discussion actually so far is on a regional level we tend to study maritime insecurity regionally And here we want to basically dissect Ghana as one relatively resource-rich state and look at all of the maritime security problematics there related to security governance, the strategy, the cooperation between different actors, but also then the blue crime agenda, the intersections between actors.

And I hope once this study is done, we just started with it, I actually want to compare Ghana with other countries, including the UK, including Denmark, and perhaps also including the US with an eye on seeing what are actually the parallels which are paradigmatic for maritime security. So that's something that will keep me very busy over the next two and a half years. And it didn't get easier with doing this kind of research, sitting at my beautiful desk in Denmark without being able to travel there. But thank you so much again for the invitation and the great conversation here today. Well, Christian, thank you again for taking the time to come on. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Sea Control is edited by Keegan Ingersoll.

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