Sea Control - Sea Control 224 - Clashes at Sea with Dr. Sara Mitchell

Episode Date: January 24, 2021

1. Mitchell, Sara McLaughlin. 2020. “Clashes at Sea: Explaining the Onset, Militarization, and Resolutionof Diplomatic Maritime Claims.” Security Studies 29(4): 637-670.2. Security Studies Vol 29, Issue 4

Hey folks, Jared here. I'm joined this week by Dr. Sarah Mitchell to discuss her paper, Clashes at Sea, Explaining the Onset, Militarization, and Resolution of Diplomatic Maritime Claims, regarding how disputes at sea develop, evolve, become militarized, and are ultimately resolved. This paper was featured in a volume of Security Studies, Volume 29, Issue 4, Security Studies in a New Era of Increased Maritime Competition. It was put together by Peter Dombrowski and Jonathan Caverly, two professors at the Naval War College. I can't recommend the whole thing strongly enough to you. If you follow the second link in the show notes, it'll take you to the whole issue. Go ahead and read it. Aside from

that, I want to include a note on the website. You may have been having some difficulty accessing SIMSEC recently. We are aware in the very near future, we're going to be changing our host or our hosting agreement. I don't have every detail myself, but that change should resolve access issues. And that's the important piece for you. What that means is there will likely be a two to three-day period where the site is down, and we'll try to announce that as far ahead of time as we can on Twitter so that you understand what's going on. The reason we're able to make this change right now and upgrade our support agreements, though, is you. So our Right Fight Win holiday campaign was successful enough to allow us to make a few infrastructural improvements.

So thanks to those who donated, and if you haven't yet, you can still donate on the website or add us as your preferred non-profit on Amazon Smile so you can support us while you shop. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, my guest is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa, Dr. Sarah Mitchell,

and we're discussing her paper, Clashes at Sea, Explaining the Onset, Militarization, and Resolution of Diplomatic Maritime Claims. So Sarah, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Would you mind telling the listeners a little bit about your background? Hello, I'm a professor of political science, as you said, at the University of Iowa. I got my undergraduate degree at Iowa State, so I'm a native Iowan, and then I got my master's and PhD at Michigan State. I spent seven years at Florida State University before moving to Iowa in 2004, and I've been here ever since. Well, thank you again for coming on. And as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed our own and not representative of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. So let me start. What was the impetus

for your paper? What made you want to focus on this topic? So early in my career, I did a lot of work on the democratic peace. So the basic finding that no two fully democratic countries have fought a war with each other. And so I got interested in studying, you know, there were militarized disputes between democracies short of war. And so I was interested in why democracies were having some of those lower level militarized clashes. And so Brandon Prince, who was one of my colleagues in grad school, he and I coded all of the militarized disputes between democracies in the post-World War II era. And we found in that first study that over 40% of those clashes were involved maritime issues. So fishing disputes, oil, offshore oil. And so that got me really

interested in trying to understand why maritime conflicts were a potential point of contention between democratic countries. And I was at Florida State at the time, and my colleague Paul Hensel was collecting data on diplomatic conflicts between involving land disputes, basically. So land or island disputes. And he was involved in what's called the Issue Correlates of War Project or ICOW project. And so I joined the ICOW project back in the late 90s. And we added two additional issues to territorial disputes. The first one was maritime issues, trying to understand clashes at sea, but then also we studied river issues. So when countries share an international river and disagree over water quantity or water quality rates, things like that.

And then more recently, we started collecting data on identity issues. So say if Russia complained about the treatment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. So the basic idea is to why are we doing this? Because a lot of the studies of war tried to understand war by coding instances of wars or crises or militarized dispute. And what we were missing in that approach was starting with diplomatic disagreements and then studying how they escalated to those, you know, points where countries were employing their military to pursue some kind of diplomatic goal. So even though most wars in history have been fought over territorial disputes, for example, we find in our data that there are 843 territorial claims from 1816 to 2001, and 51% of those were settled purely with

peaceful means, so purely through diplomacy. And so what our project does is gives us a lot richer data about how issues arise and then how they are settled through either militarized or peaceful means. And so it helps us understand, I guess, the disputes that could have gone to war but didn't and what is it about those cases that that uh helped them to stay peaceful so let me ask one question that uh we didn't discuss previously but came up uh as you were talking there is that so are you all sort of anxiously watching uh what's unfolding between france the uk and norway over the fisheries disputes there as well as what's going on with the mekong river yeah definitely we we we have a page on the ico website where

we provide quarterly updates on what's happening and a lot of the ongoing cases. So yeah, we're trying to move to a more, you know, where we give more frequent updates to our users for the cases that are happening right now. No, that's great. I will get the website from you after we sign off here and we can link that in the show notes, give you a little bit more publicity there too. Could you describe the issue approach to politics that you mentioned in the paper? Yeah, so international relations scholars often assume that conflict begins for a reason, such as contestation of shared land borders, competition over important resources like oil, or maybe the removal of other countries' leaders. And, you know, Clausewitz's famous argument that

war is the pursuit of political goals by military means reflects this idea, suggesting that wars arise from countries' unsuccessful efforts to settle diplomatic issues peacefully. But a lot of the dominant theories of war, be they realist, liberal, rationalist, or other, they usually don't think about the issues at stake in how the contested issues and the nature of those issues affects the onset and escalation of violence. But a lot of the early work in the American foreign policy literature by Rosenau and others, they did think about how foreign policy issues, how they varied and how the nature of those issues was important. And so what we've done in the issue approach is build on that idea from the foreign policy literature. And it's pretty

simple. It's basically an argument that foreign policy is issue directed, that countries use both cooperative and conflictual foreign policy tools as substitutable means for pursuing their diplomatic goals. And then that the goals that they choose will be driven by the salience that they attach to those issues. So how important, if you're thinking about China and the South China Sea, how important is that contested area, say, for the Chinese government? And so what we're trying to do is capture that level of salience. I'll talk more about that in a second, but the basic idea is that countries attach for tangible salience, it would be something like resources that we could divide. We're dividing, we have 100 pennies, and we're going to decide

how to divide them. But intangible salience would be something that's more difficult to divide, Like, this is my, you know, sacred site for my religion. And so we can't really divide this area, or my ethnic kin lives in this territory, and we have historical ownership over this area. So, so those kind of intangible salience factors tend to make escalation to war more likely. Go ahead. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was just gonna ask the next question is how do you grade salience? Yeah, so what we do is we start with, the first thing we have to do is identify pairs of countries that could have diplomatic conflicts over a particular issue. So if you were thinking about who could have territorial disputes, well, we start with all pairs of countries that share a land border. So US and Mexico, right, could have had a land dispute, which they had and fought in

the Mexican-American War. They share multiple rivers that cross the border. They share maritime areas. And so we use those geographical opportunity sets basically to figure out what countries could have diplomatic conflict. And then we use newspaper sources, historical books, and other sources to construct a chronology of historical events. And then we look for cases where the official representatives of one country make some kind of claim to an area that is then contested by another state. So China, say, claiming area around the Spratly Islands, and then other governments like the Philippines, you know, disagreeing with those claims. And so for maritime conflicts, what we do is we use a source by James, which helps us identify

countries that could have potentially overlapping EEZ or exclusive economic zone areas. And then we use that as a sort of starting point. And so using that approach, we've identified 270 maritime conflicts between pairs of countries from 1900 to 2010. And so that versus about 600 in some, uh, territorial disputes in the same period. Uh, so, uh, and then, uh, rivers and identity claims are less, a little bit less frequent than that, but, uh, maritime conflicts are surprisingly, uh, uh, frequent and they are also militarized quite a bit. So land disputes are militarized about 41% of the time in our data and maritime issues are militarized about 29%. percent of the time. Compare that to something like a dispute over the Nile River. River conflicts

are only militarized about one in ten of the cases. So I think it's interesting that we were able to show what types of diplomatic issues have higher risks, right, for escalation, and also how, you know, if an issue involves both territory and maritime issues like we see in the Sea of Azov and Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine, then if you have multiple issues at stake, then the risks of escalation are even greater in those cases. Before I ask you about maritime salience, I want to go back to one thing you said there. How do you classify militarization of a maritime conflict? Does the Navy specifically of a country have to be involved? Or do you count the Coast Guard or just the involvement of weapons?

Yeah, so what we do is we use a data set that's collected by the Correlates of War Project, which is called the Militarized Interstate Dispute Data or MID data set. And so that project codes everything from threats to use military force, displays of force, say, having naval vessels show a force, naval show a force, uses of force where you could send soldiers across a border or seize another country's fishing vessel, say, or fire at a trawler. And then all the way up to interstate wars, which they consider cases where a thousand or more battle deaths have occurred over those, you know, in those clashes. Um, and so, uh, what we do is we, uh, if we have say a maritime claim, something like, uh, the U S and Canada, uh, disagree over the, the delimitation around the Juan de Fuca street. And that has to do with, um, how the, the AB line was drawn from the territorial dispute that was settled in the Alaska boundary tribunal.

And so they're still contesting the maritime boundary. And in that area, we've seen U.S. Coast Guard, for example, seize some Canadian fishing vessels in those contested areas. And so those would enter the data set as a use of force. and so what we do is we look for every instance of a dispute in that data set between say the U.S. and Canada and then we match the cases that the MID data codes to our data and and then we only keep the the disputes basically that are related to the diplomatic issue that we've identified so so yeah that's how we identify so so we we have this rich data that's already out there for militarized disputes. So we take advantage of that. We code our own data on peaceful settlements. So we've identified, for example, 935 peaceful attempts to settle maritime issues. And that would include things like bilateral negotiations, which are about 52%

of the cases, multilateral negotiations, which you see a lot in the Asian region, a mediation, which is used a lot in Middle East cases. And then also we code adjudication or arbitration where international courts or arbitration panels get involved. Those are less common, only about 3% of our cases. But when countries go to court to settle their issue claims, they have a 95% success rate. So unfortunately, the most successful tool is not used very often. As part of this, you create a maritime salience index. Can you explain the different indicators that comprise the index and then what those represent? Yeah, so the issue approach codes diplomatic issues based on two dimensions, tangible salience and intangible

salience. So tangible salience is based on values of things like security, survival, and wealth. Like I said, we would think of these as things that you could divide more easily in bargaining. And then intangible salience is based more on intangible values of, say, culture, identity, equality, or justice, status, prestige, influence, things like that. And so in this way, like if a country claims that they have historic rights over an area that makes that issue harder to, to settle. And so what we find is that issues high in intangible and tangible salience, like territorial disputes, typically those tend to be militarized a lot and escalate to war more often because those, like I said, they're harder to resolve in bargaining because if you're

negotiating over, you know, say the, you know, an area that contains sacred sites or ethnic kin, or this is a historic claim that you've had historical sovereignty over that area, then that makes those issues more difficult to resolve. Now, maritime and river issues tend to be more valued for tangible reasons rather than intangible so usually countries aren't making these kind of psychological or you know intangible claims about it's possible but it's just less frequent so maritime and river issues should be easier to resolve in peaceful negotiations because things that you're disagreeing about are typically things that you could divide like oil extraction rights or fishing rights. So for each of the issues in our data, we code six indicators for

each issue that would capture those intangible and tangible salience. So for territory, for example, I just gave you some examples of intangible salience could be coded for each side in the dispute if you have, say, ethnic kin in that area or sacred religious sites. And then for maritime issues, we have six indicators that go into the salience scale. That includes whether it's a homeland territory versus offshore. The second one is whether there's some kind of contested resources in the area. Three, whether it's a strategic location, so something like the Straits of malacca important shipping area or navigational area fishing stocks and especially we find the presence of migratory fishing stocks is important oil in the contested area and then also whether

the the maritime claim is part of a territorial claim too as i said in the the russia ukraine example so what we do is we code a challenger country who's the country that's challenging the the status quo over that boundary area and then we code a target state which is the country that's defending so in the Juan de Fuca Strait the United States was the challenger challenging trying to move the maritime boundary 12 nautical miles south of where it was from Alaska and then Canada would be coded as the target state in that particular case and then we code for each side there's you get basically one point for each of those six indicators so you can have a 0 to 12 scale basically so if it's a 12 it means that all six of those things are turned on right for each for

both the U.S. and Canada for that case so so it gives us a lot of variation right and because we're coding the salience for each state in the dispute. Do your research reveal anything about which of the indicators were at most important is probably incorrect, but more important? Yeah, I think that maybe the one that surprises everyone the most is that migratory fish stocks is the number one variable for increasing the risks of militarization. So more important than oil, it probably has similar risks to if there's a territorial claim present as well. So in that regard a lot of the a lot of the fishing disputes that are happening today you know we we've seen of course lots of militarization between china and vietnam and and lots of other areas in asia

in the asia pacific region and so i think the fact that our data shows that when you have fishing stocks that move across boundaries that that that creates a lot of risk i mean why is it risky because we often see countries using their coast guards or navies or even maritime militias now to right to defend fishing rights and so like Canada fired on a Spanish trawler in the mid 90s you know just outside their claimed EEZ area because the Spanish trawlers were were fishing heavily right you know on that boundary and then also the fish are moving across that boundary and so so I think that's pretty interesting that that we find that that fish fishing resources are a major reason why countries are having a lot of clashes at sea over these issues

and as I said if you have multiple issues at stake so if you think about you know like China And Japan, where they're contesting both who owns a territory and the maritime area around that, or the Falkland Islands, is like that's the contestation of both the territorial claim and the maritime resources around the island. Then, of course, those are areas where we would expect to see a greater risk for war in the future. So are the fish then the most frequent cause for diplomatic maritime disputes, or is it something else? i would say i identify sort of five reasons why we have uh maritime disagreements um so probably the number one is is just delimitation of the maritime boundary so it's a disagreement about where that uh say eez boundary exists between two states that's it can be difficult to draw depending on baselines maritime law you know at the time so the second thing yeah of course

is fishing so you often get countries making claims to fishing zones that are outside their easy areas so so the united states had diplomatic conflicts with uh u.s with ecuador peru and chile for example, because they were claiming 200 nautical mile territorial sea areas in the 1950s, which the U.S. did not recognize. And the reason that it was that issue arose was because the United States was trying to ensure access to tuna fishing waters for American fishermen. So, or the cod wars, of course, when British Navy was protecting the rights of British trawlers, you know, in the contested areas around Iceland. There are also disagreements about the basis for the claim in terms of is this a rock or an island. So quite a few cases arise over what countries

are trying to make maritime claims around. And then historical rights could arise. So China, for example arguing that its fishermen have been active in in the Spratly Islands area for centuries as a basis for the nine dash line or just navigational rights so um whether you know like states try to prevent the movement of other ships through a strategic point or something so so those are the main reasons that we see for um for why why we get these kind of maritime claims between countries. So has the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea affected the frequency and manner of resolution of these disputes? Yeah, so we find a very strong effect for the Law of the Sea Convention. So first of all, we find that countries that are members of UNCLOS are less likely to

start new diplomatic maritime claims. So once they've ratified the convention, then they make fewer new claims moving forward. They're also less likely to militarize any existing claims that they have when they join the treaty. And they're more willing to settle through international courts. And I just noted before that courts have one of the highest success rates for settling these issues. And so we've also done some work showing that, you know, there's a there's a clause within the treaty that is called article 287 and countries can designate you know if they go to court which court do they want to go to and so they could choose you know the international tribunal for the law of the sea they could choose the international court of justice

some other body so basically because countries can sort of forum shop by expressing their preference a priori, we find that if they make those declarations, they're better able to use bilateral negotiations to settle those cases because they're basically bargaining more effectively in the shadow of those courts. And so we find just even the presence of a sort of willingness to go to court makes countries more amenable to settling these issues peacefully. and so i think uh so yeah i think that's a it's a very positive i i was presenting this project at the naval war college and a lot of the people that that were there were very skeptical that that unclosed could have a significant effect which i thought was interesting but but our data

suggests that it that it is quite effective and of course the united states is is not ratified the treaty. And so that puts the U.S. at a disadvantage in terms of especially making claims in what the treaty calls the area or the parts of the sea that are outside countries, EEZ areas. And so President Bush tried to convince Congress to join UNCLOS unsuccessfully. But yeah, I think it would be a really good idea for the United States to join the treaty. So if you can do it without violating the Chatham House rule, what was the reaction at the War College there when you presented the data that sort of flew in the face of what the perception was? I don't know. It was just a skepticism that maybe about the mechanism, like how could belonging to an international institution affect, you know, whether you would be willing to defend an area with military force. And so, so yeah, I think, I don't know, I just call it like a realist kind of reaction. Several of the people in the room are realist scholars. So I think there are maybe they're just like skeptical of international institutions. But, but yeah, we have, we have very consistent findings on, on the effect of unclosed, both at the dyadic level.

So if a pair of countries are jointly ratified the treaty, then they're less likely to have diplomatic conflicts, less likely to militarize their conflicts. And then we also find at the global level that after the treaty came into force in 1994, we started to see a decline in the number of maritime claims globally. So, so yeah, I think, I think the evidence is, is on my side. But, but the, I don't know, it's fascinating too, because when I presented this work to a group of international law scholars, like they, you know, they completely buy the, the law of the sea convention effect, but they, they don't buy the, you know, that migratory fish stocks could, could prompt any kind of militarization. So it's kind of interesting, I guess, that different pieces of my project have, you know, different audiences react. They have varying reactions to pieces of the work. And I didn't mention, we also find that pairs of democracies have the highest risk for diplomatic conflicts over maritime issues. So higher than two authoritarian states or a democracy versus an authoritarian state. And so that was really interesting because it confirmed my work from two decades ago when we looked at just militarized disputes between democracies. But when you pull back and look at all diplomatic conflicts, we see a very similar pattern.

And so, so I think, I think that's kind of interesting, because it's a potential threat to the democratic peace in that this is an issue where democracies, you know, are pursuing their goals, you know, against other democracies. And there is some militarization, as we've seen between U.S., Canada, Canada, Spain, Iceland, and United Kingdom. Now, fortunately, only 6% of these cases where we have militarized disputes have any fatalities. So maritime issues, I guess I would say, are frequent. They're militarized a lot, but at a sort of less escalatory level than, say, disputes over land. Yeah, that leads directly to the next question. I was surprised to see the number of claims between democracies was so high. Were you able to conclude anything about the reason for that result?

Yeah, so I think one reason is that democracies tend to be highly developed, wealthy states. And so if you're going to have disagreements over maritime boundaries or fishing areas, you first have to be at a development level that would allow you to have large fishing fleets. So that's why a lot of countries in our data set, like Spain or Canada, United States, Great Britain, Japan, you know, a lot of different democracies that have really large fishing fleets have been involved in, of course, in a lot of these conflicts. But we also find that naval capabilities really matter a lot for, so in other words, countries that have greater naval capabilities are more likely to make maritime claims against other countries. Democracies historically have, especially the U.S., U.K., have had an edge, right, in terms of sea power. And so I think, you know, our data shows that countries that are investing in their naval capabilities, we would expect to see more of a clash, although we find that relative naval capabilities matters as well. So if you have a preponderance of naval power, so one side is much more powerful than the other, then those issues tend to get settled peacefully. If you have parity between the two states, so they have more even naval capabilities, then you tend to get more militarized conflicts over those issues.

And so, and then we, I think it's also interesting that I found that naval capabilities affected the settlement of maritime issues, but not territorial claims. So in other words, conventional power measures, things like, you know, like your economic size, your military personnel population, if you use those kind of measures of power, those help to predict conflicts, militarized conflicts over land disputes, but they don't predict whether maritime issues will become militarized. only naval analyses. So I thought that was really interesting that it wasn't, I wasn't really finding that power was completely fungible across different diplomatic issue areas. And, and also that democracy, right, regime type was having different differential effects. So, so it, if you have a land-based dispute, democracies are less likely to escalate those issues. But if you have a maritime dispute, then they're not less likely to escalate. In fact, they're willing to escalate in many of those cases. So I think, yeah, I'm really interested in doing more work exploring

how factors vary across diplomatic issues and why we see these kind of interesting patterns, right, where some variables that predict conflict matter for one diplomatic issue, but not another. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting questions, and I think ways that we could go with this, because you talked about the power dynamics, but then the results of the Cod Wars kind of fly in the face of that, where, you know, the power was all on one side, theoretically, conventionally with the British, with the Icelandic Coast Guard of four vessels or six vessels or something um and yet the iceland the iceland uh icelandic government had the uh the trump card if you will of being able to threaten to leave nato um i also wonder too if

if it's not a matter of uh those highly industrialized countries uh or we'll say more developed countries with professionalized navies and coast guards are reliant on the training of those navies and coast guards think that you know they can handle this with those without provoking a significant number of casualties or something i don't know i'm just yeah which i think you're musings well i that's why i think the the push by you know we've seen it with china and vietnam but also now with the philippines um trying to ramp up their maritime militia capability and i think one of the reasons they want to do that is because then they can engage is this they can sort of engage in in action that's you know less culpable in a way

for the leadership and so you know by just sort of disguising these vessels as as i talked to someone the naval war colleges said they're they're trying to track these the chinese vessels by looking for fishing trawlers that are not throwing any nets out. So this is how they're trying to identify these militias. But yeah, definitely, I think you've seen like in clashes in the Senkaku-Diao case, you know, a lot of the militarized clashes between China, Japan and Taiwan happened between Coast Guards. um and so so yeah so yeah i agree with you that that like the clashes are happening at that level but well going back to the cod wars like there were cases where the the british navy like would

uh you know call over to a vessel they were about to fire on and and tell tell the other side like what part of the ship they were going to fire on so so they they went out of their way to to prevent casualties in some of those clashes which i think is is so maybe that's the positive aspect of democracies fighting over these issues is that they're they're less willing to right to to accept casualties as part of that those kind of engagements what causes the claims to be militarized most often so consistent with the issue approach we find that if the issue is more salient to both sides then we get a higher risk of militarization so uh so yeah that's one nice thing about our data set is that we can we can sort of identify the hot spots um based on

if you were going to take uh you could take i do this in the paper i kind of talk about the the different cases that are ongoing for china and which ones are have a higher risk based on those salient scores. And then we find that a history of conflict over those issues matters, which is consistent with the literature on rivalry and crisis bargaining, but basically that if you have a history of fighting over an issue in the past, then you're more likely to militarize in the future. And then we find that, as I just said, the naval power affects. So if you have naval power, you are more likely to pursue diplomatic planes over maritime areas. But in terms of militarization, it's really the relative capabilities. So in the Asian region, we've seen

a shift, right, as China has invested more into their naval buildup. That's changed some of the relative capabilities um in the region but but i would say you know it's it is interesting that we are seeing quite a bit of um asymmetric uh clashes though like uh between china and vietnam um but but i would say the the cases that we should be very concerned about of course are the the cases where where we have two powers like china and japan that that both would have an incentive to escalate a particular situation and then what conclusions if any were you able to draw about future clashes at sea yeah so in the conclusion i talk about um you know some of the you know my prognoses for the future so what one of the interesting things is that i i looked at

the the top 10 growing uh naval states um in the world and most of them are consistent with my results are are involved as a challenger state so these are countries that are challenging the existing uh issue status quo over maritime resources or boundaries and so and and i think i've seen more generally right this is a little side note that we're starting to see a lot of countries make changes to existing territorial and maritime boundaries. And we've seen that with China and India territorial border. I think, you know, the, I think the fact that Russia took the Crimea created problems in terms of the territorial integrity norms. And I think that that we're going to see that play out on the maritime space as well. So, so it could be that maybe countries

will also start to challenge some of the existing maritime boundaries and especially given that a lot of the states who are these potential challengers are among the largest you know naval build-up countries in the world and then I also find that climate change is is going to be a factor for future maritime clashes so I have a another paper that that's coming out any day now In that paper, we find that if you have high volatility in temperatures or rainfall, that you get more of these diplomatic issues and that you get more militarization as well. So how does that upset future maritime boundaries? Well, first of all, EEZ claims are ambulatory, so they're based on, so if the sea level rises, then that means that your 200 nautical mile resource area, right, would shrink because your basis for making that claim would be moved inland. And so I think what's going to happen is that we'll have a lot more disagreements in the future, especially if we see significant rises in sea level. But I also think with global warming, we're starting to see a lot of fish stocks moving to northern waters.

And so that means I think that we'll see more clashes in the future, especially in the Arctic. Um, countries have, uh, 20 plus countries have signed a sort of moratorium on fishing in certain areas, but, but I, I don't expect that to last, um, as, you know, population continues to rise globally and, and fishing demand continues to rise. So, so I think, I think clashes at sea are, are likely to continue, but I do feel positive that, you know, that the law of the sea convention has a pretty good track record for, for helping to manage the cases that do arise. I'll say we're recording this on December 13th.

So by the time this goes to air, maybe we'll have seen some resolution between the French-UK-Norway dispute as well as what's going on with the Mekong River. But unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Sarah Mitchell. Sarah, where can we find you online

and what's your next project? So sarahmitchell.org, Sarah, no H. and you can find me there, and links to the ICAO data set, and the papers that I was talking about. I'm doing, I guess I'm doing a lot of work now on climate change and disasters, so interested in how both of those things are affecting not only conflict between countries, but also civil wars and internal conflict so yeah that's taking up a lot

of my time and it's important research given where we're headed as a planet yeah I'm definitely looking forward to reading those and maybe we'll have you on again once those get published but thank you again for joining us to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time

Sea Control is edited and produced by Keegan Ingersoll Ed Salo and William McQuiston Way, hey, bully in the alley. There I'm back with greasy alley. Bully on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm bully in the alley. Way, hey, bully in the alley. Help me, Bob, I'm bully in the alley.

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