By Leonardo Pesci - Africa Desk
Introduction
Surrounded by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the Red and Mediterranean Seas, the maritime domain represents an immense source of wealth for Africa. Yet, African waters remain connected to a series of issues impacting security and all its referent objects: humans, states, environment, society, and economy. In light of these concerns, this essay is the first in a two-part series investigating maritime security practices on the continent. More precisely, they will offer a vision of current strategies addressing maritime security issues through the lens of International Relations and Security theories.
The articles will highlight two, perhaps counterintuitive, tendencies. On the one hand, it will draw on constructivist approaches to International Relations (IR), particularly securitization and regional integration theories, to highlight the internal convergence and cooperation among African States and (sub)regional organizations into a thematic security community. The second publication will employ a specific case study to embed within IR theories, the posture of a single state toward external threats and third states operating in African Waters. The outcome of this two-fold endeavor will underscore how the internal dynamics of integrations are balanced with neorealist approaches towards external states on the continent.
General threats and geographical scopes of maritime security in Africa
For a long time, African understanding of security has intersected with traditional and state-centric issues, including inter- / intra-state conflict, peacebuilding, human trafficking, terrorism, and poverty. Only more recently, the maritime domain has become a compelling issue for the agendas of national governments and regional organizations.
The spectrum of threats is wide, spanning from the notorious cases of piracy off the Somali coasts and the Gulf of Guinea (GoG) to less-known yet relevant issues. These include energetic security, illegal, unreported and undocumented (IUU) fishing, oil theft, armed robbery, and human, weapons, and drug trafficking. Other illicit activities conducted at sea involve environmental degradation, dumping of toxic wastes, and spilling of polluting agents. The costs of these actions have high impacts on the continent, contributing to exacerbating structural vulnerabilities such as economic fragility, food (in)security, political instability, conflicts, and impacting states to control their territory and population.
To begin with, the West Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea are known for the intense activities linked to piracy. Although the phenomenon has recently decreased, renewed insecurity emerged from the latest Houthi attacks against commercial vessels (133, only in 2023), and the consequent disruption of submarine cables. These latest developments have made the region a new hotspot of insecurity, diverting commercial maritime traffic to the old route of the Cape of Good Hope.
Additionally, Islands and states in the East Indian Ocean are reportedly engaged in fights against the massive increase of criminal networks involved in heroin trafficking. Similarly, the African Mediterranean coasts, primary gateway to Europe, have long been under international attention for human trafficking and coastal fuel smuggling.
On the other side of the continent, the GoG - a 6.000 km coastline bordering 19 states - has become the center of new commercial routes as well as criminal activities. Similar to other regions, piracy reportedly decreased by 90% in 2024. However, serious challenges remain in a region extremely rich in terms of natural resources, maritime wildlife, and the center of new commercial routes.
For instance, fishing activities in the region account for 4% of the global fish supply. In turn, IUU fishing operated by private enterprises and foreign vessels (flagged in Europe and Asia) impacts local economies, food security, and maritime biodiversity. To illustrate the point, it is estimated that IUU fishing accounts for 40 - 65 % of the fish captured in the region. It has been observed that a more sustainable allocation and management of the fishing sector would be worth $2 billion annually for national and local economies.
Cooperation structures: Maritime Security Institutions and (sub-)Regional Cooperation
In the light of these issues, the past decade marked a period of intense development for African maritime architecture. Within the continent, a proliferation of multilateral and bilateral agreements has gradually concentrated and intersected maritime concerns under the attention of old and new institutions leaning towards the formation of an African security community for maritime affairs. The beginning of this momentum coincides with the rising threats linked to piracy in Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea in the late 2000s.
During the decade, new governance practices emerged. Encapsulated in securitization discourses, they encouraged continental integration in the maritime domain, envisioning common solutions to shared problems. The outcome of such efforts has been condensed in the creation of new institutions, renewed engagement in existing ones, new security tools, and joint enterprises reflected in new visions and strategies. Such governance and security practices can be found through charters, meetings, symposiums, conferences, and the constitution or renewal of regional and sub-regional bodies and committees. More practical tools should not be underestimated. These include communication and information sharing platforms, capacity building, joint rescue coordination centers, common juridical frameworks, and published documents and strategies. These developments are coupled with the creation of sub-regional bodies and treaties, declarations, and Memoranda of understanding dealing with maritime security issues.
For instance, North African states have cooperated with Europeans through bilateral agreements as well as in multilateral settings. Worth mentioning is the 5+5 Defense Initiative, whose first meeting took place in 2004 in Paris. Similarly, the Djibouti Code of Conduct of 2009, united states from the Horn of Africa and Western Indian Ocean, established practices under the common objective of fighting piracy and set a shared information and knowledge management system.
On the Atlantic Side, the Yaoundé Protocol, signed by 26 member states part of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), introduced a comprehensive maritime security framework. The architecture has divided maritime areas into “responsibility zones” and has broadened cooperation to all sorts of illicit activities conducted in the sea (e.g., money laundering, illegal arms and drug trafficking, human smuggling, maritime pollution, IUU fishing, toxic waste dumping, and the sabotage of offshore infrastructure).
During the same years at the sub-regional level, African organizations developed their maritime visions and strategies. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) reorganized the SADC Maritime Committee (SMC), adopting in 2007 its first maritime strategy, targeting piracy off the Somali coasts and the Indian Ocean. Simultaneously, the SMC created the Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) System, a joint intelligence platform for information sharing on maritime events and trafficking, and has set an embryonic legal framework to deal with piracy. On the other hand, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mentioned maritime security for the first time in 2005, integrating the topic as one of the four pillars in its Security Sector Program.
At the continental level, the African Union (AU) revisited the 1993 African Maritime Transport Charter, publishing in 2007 the first official document dealing with maritime security: the Abuja Declaration and Plan of Action on Maritime Security. Thereafter, the AU Secretariat for maritime issues has worked on a common and comprehensive strategy for the continent, finalized in 2014 as the 2050 African Integrated Maritime Strategy (AIMS).
The document represents a key moment for the African Union’s management of maritime spaces, setting the common goal of “developing a sustainable thriving blue economy in a secure and environmentally sustainable manner,” and offering a comprehensive map of security risks and mitigation strategies. AIMS identifies common objectives, stakeholders (including states, civil society, and business groups), main threats, and the measures to mitigate them. It emphasizes the need for cooperation at the national and regional levels to achieve a sustainable and safe maritime environment for states and people.
Furthermore, AIMS 2050 ambitiously sets the rules to harmonize states' legal frameworks on national maritime law to foster judicial cooperation, defining and combating maritime criminality under a unified legal framework.
Drawing on the AIMS 2050, the Lomé Charter (African Charter on Maritime Security, Safety and Development) was adopted in 2016, and the Djibouti framework was expanded in its scope through the 2017 Jeddah Amendment.
Maritime environment through the prism of International Relations and Security Theories
From the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to the western Gulf of Guinea, passing through all the African coastlines, conventional and unconventional challenges have compelled states to find collaborative solutions at the national, regional, and sub-regional levels. From this analysis, two major theoretical implications can be drawn. First, the African maritime sector has gradually converged towards a thematic security community. Secondly, over time, it has integrated traditional state-centric security approaches to include other referent objects, such as human, economic, and environmental security.
To begin with, a security community can be understood as a group whose members construct securitization with one another. Securitization, in turn, refers to the discursive act of framing an issue as a security threat to a specific referent. The securitization of a thematic area, hence, passes from the creation and reiteration of new practices and discourses. The process begins with the identification of a shared threat and a collective engagement against it. It continues with the creation of repertoires (e.g., common practices, tools, and technologies such as declarations, strategic documents, and information-sharing platforms), and it ends with a shared enterprise (e.g., common objectives and shared securitization vision). It finally culminates with the creation of a community grounded in mutual objectives and common visions of goals. In this sense, the emergence of crossing and overlapping institutions in the African maritime sector suggests a gradual process of formation of a maritime security community, composed of states, regional and sub-regional organizations, maritime professionals, as well as civil society, sharing a common objective, and establishing common practices under the umbrella of a single security issue.
Secondly, Christian Bueger has categorized security issues in the maritime domain on four different dimensions: marine and environmental security, economic security, human and state security. Given the interconnectedness of maritime and continental challenges, the literature suggests a substantial reconciliation between the four domains. These syntheses are often explicated – and visible - in the documents, declarations, and strategies through the nexus “maritime security – sustainability - development”. In other words, in the African continent, a gradual shift has occurred from an early understanding of maritime security as inextricably linked to the state and sovereignty, to a maritime domain which has become interconnected with the state, human security, wealth, food security, economic development, and political stability.
For instance, the early versions of the Yaoundé and Djibouti codes of conduct were based on negative measures aimed at limiting illicit activities, particularly piracy, to safeguard and prioritize state security. The more recent developments (e.g., AIMS 2050, Lomé Charter, Jeddah Amendment) reflect more positive notions on maritime security. These documents are more oriented towards developing a sustainable and thriving blue economy within a secure and environmentally sustainable framework in African coasts.
Integrating multiple aspects of security, these charters have implicitly attempted to structure an increasing number of institutions into a security community that reconciles human, state, economic, and environmental security under the umbrella of maritime security. They have thus expanded their scope for the development of wealth and a sustainable maritime sector, pushing against all illegal activities conducted at sea (i.e., IUU fishing, crimes against the environment, human trafficking, etc.).
- Conclusion
The African Maritime domain has been subjected to substantial transformation over the past decades. It is now embedded within a broader understanding of security, which integrates state, human, economic, food, and environmental concerns. This conceptual shift comes together with an intense proliferation of institutions, frameworks, and strategies that lean towards the creation of a thematic security community. In this context, however, the effectiveness of these efforts will be dependent on the degree of cooperation achieved and the level of implementation of the measures. As the continent continues to confront complex maritime challenges, the consolidation of this security community will be essential to ensuring not only safety and sovereignty but also sustainable development and a resilient blue economy for future generations.
