Why Does the South Atlantic Ocean Matter?
The South Atlantic Ocean has historically presented itself as a puzzle of world politics. Although relatively absent of great power inter-states disputes, there took place the last war at sea in Falklands in 1982. Although it never held the metropolis of an empire or global power, it was essential for the rise of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British sea power projects and was the base-area for the US World War II campaigns in North Africa.
In contemporary international security paramount, the South Atlantic does not have the same gravity of the South China Sea or the Persian Gulf, and the mighty naval power of day barely considers it. 1 Nonetheless, the South Atlantic has three global-reach impacts. First, it holds one of the largest seabed mineral and energy reserves of the world: in 2010, South Atlantic already ranked worldly at first position with 109 oil and gas floating platforms (North Atlantic had 90, Pacific 76 and the Indian Ocean only 2). The most optimist previsions figure 174 floating platforms in 2030, still ahead of other maritime areas of the globe. 2
Second, it presents the most complex “web of maritime criminality”: on the one hand, due to the great possibilities of all kinds of smuggling and trafficking through the immense shipping opportunities derived from the region’s substantial participation in the global supply chain and on the other hand, due to the joint venturing among significant black markets, cocaine barons, insurgent movements, and high-performance pirates.
Third, much earlier than the popularization of the notion of blue economy by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in January 2014, new diplomatic dialogues and security arrangements flourished across the South Atlantic, also between Northern and Southern Atlantic countries, but especially among Global South countries themselves. The relative distance from the main areas of great power politics of the day allows that several regional initiatives and agendas emerge, in which USA, Europe, China, India, and Russia are more participants than dominant players. Furthermore, the geopolitics and geo-economics of the South Atlantic are not an extension of the patterns of North Atlantic, and if forcefully addressed all together, the wider Atlantic portrays as a fractured ocean. 3 More emphatically pointed out by others, the South Atlantic is, potentially, the ocean for the Global South . 4
The South Atlantic Regional Dimensions
To grasp the South Atlantic, one may consider at least four nexuses of political, security, and economic realities. First, West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea frame the more unstable one. Transnational and regional-networked syndicates operate in borderless areas and are entrenched in local society and production sectors. Although West African countries struggle to overcome infrastructural and institutional deficiencies, several of them are part of their colonial legacies, and the European—mainly French and Portuguese—influence and presence are still active. Accordingly, that is the South Atlantic sub-region most exposed to foreign intervention and inter-regional maritime security arrangements.
Second, on the other side of South Atlantic, its Northeast fringe comprising Brazil, Venezuela, and the three tiniest states of South America: (English) Guyana, French Guyana, and (Dutch) Suriname. That is already the wealthiest area of the region in hydrocarbon deposits. Besides Venezuela holding the largest proven reserves of oil in the world, pre-salts deposits exist in the rest of the other three countries’ offshore and other rare minerals in the Amazon River estuary. Moreover, there locate the departure or transit points of the largest and richest drug trafficking pipelines in the world. Converging the cocaine productions of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, which travels mainly on land through Brazil and Argentina, then crossing the ocean and, then, West, Central, and Southern Africa, supplying the national markets on the way to Europe and Asia. Therefore, that South Atlantic area links the Caribbean Sea, the Southern Atlantic, and Africa and their respective legal and illegal economies. The last trend to be remarked is the illicit weapons trafficking that spreads from Colombian civil war throughout South American drug trafficking pipelines. That leads to the top regional security topic of the day in reason it can exponentially expand in case of a Venezuela’s civil war or failure as a state, replicating the effects of Libyan civil war in West Africa .
Third, the Southern Atlantic has additional features and dynamics along with the several kinds of smuggling and trafficking above mentioned. Thanks to Brazil’s decades of investments, the region is becoming self-sufficient and potentially exporter of energy and mineral resources. Thus, although it is deficient in law enforcement on the sea, Brazil also supports a developed regional maritime traffic system. Further, the Falklands Isles is still a critical issue in the region, impacting beyond Argentinean and British chancelleries. The British drilling of oil and gas deposits and the overlaps of exclusive economic zones’ claims between the UK and Argentina (as well as Chile) anticipate the diplomatic movements regarding the Antarctic Treaty’s expiration in 2048.
Fourth and last, one may consider that Southern Africa as a bi-ocean sub-region, where the reconfiguration of Western powers’ presence on the continent with the creation of the United States Armed Forces’ African Command (AFRICOM) and the operation of European military joint forces in the Gulf of Aden impacted on Southern Africa. 5 That marked a new cycle of geographical location concentration of Somalia piracy in evasion of European naval forces. Instead of a single militarised response, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) presents an innovative approach of ocean governance.
The event that motivated SADC’s maritime approach was the hijacking of the fishing vessel Vega 5 by Somali pirates in the Mozambique Channel in December 2010, in the Gulf of Aden. After only eight months, SADC developed its Maritime Security Strategy. It has as its primary directive the eradication of Somali piracy from Southern Africa, Western (Atlantic) Coast of Southern Africa, and the region’s rivers and lakes. 6 Parallel those developments. However, the most influential international trend consists of the direct impacts of Chinese maritime power project, with berthing naval bases in construction in Angola and Namibia, and the consequent contest by other extra-regional power, particularly India.
Therefore, South Atlantic has been the cradle of very particular trends of regionalism , state-building strategies, and governance of common areas, going on beyond the study of law enforcement compliance and oversight over offshore waters. The South Atlantic comprises distinct security realities and matters that rest on old and new developments, which solutions depend on different kinds of sub-regional arrangements and national commitments. Moreover, they are all related to some level of underdevelopment as the leading causes for the void of governance.
All that would be sufficient for the South Atlantic to be the subject of continuous scholarship publication, which, in fact, it has been not. Few grasp one sub-region or topic without correlation to others, for instance Forest & Sousa’s Oil and Terrorism in the New Gulf: Framing U.S. Energy and Security Policies for the Gulf of Guinea (Lexington Books, 2006). In any case, the list of contemporary and comprehensive books dedicated to the South Atlantic is concise: so far, only two. With a more similar scope to this one, but entirely different in perspective and contribution, is Slauthgter and Bystrom’s The Global South Atlantic (Fordham University Press, 2017), which focus on “postcolonial, subaltern, and comparative ethnic and third-world cultural studies”, though it comprises almost only of European collaborators. Alternatively, with the similar approach, but without the same scope and depth is the German Marshall Fund’s report The Fractured Ocean Current Challenges to Maritime Policy in the Wider Atlantic (2012).
This book is part of a project to revert this shortcoming by setting a new agenda of scholarship on South Atlantic maritime security issues. In that sense, a second and forthcoming book, also by Palgrave Macmillan, complements this one. While Maritime Security Challenges in the South Atlantic approaches the South Atlantic regional security issues with maritime implications, Navies and Maritime Policies in the South Atlantic discusses the maritime agendas and interests of the main naval countries of the South Atlantic: Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, UK, and Brazil.
The overall project aims to be a first comprehensive and multi-level analysis of South Atlantic contemporary maritime security issues. That is undertaken in three ways. First, that is a multinational effort, that reflects the compromise in providing Global South perspectives of South American, Southern, Central and West Africa security issues of maritime effects, without neglecting Northern hemispheric counterpoint views. Second, those collaborations offer eclectic backgrounds as political scientists, historians, defence analysts, IR scholars, geographers, diplomats, and military officers. The reader will notice in each following chapter the density and complementarity of historical reconstructions, updated data, documentation analysis, reviews of literature, and, finally, policy recommendations on national, regional, and international scopes of South Atlantic. Third, the book aims to launch further agendas of research than conclude any of its several topics to predetermined discourses of the several academic “(tribal)isms” and groupings. The authors of this book recognise that in the Global South also manifests the trend of a new epistemic community with more practical concerns and useful implications, and they subscribe to Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds’s normative proposal:
We argue that in addition to the traditional concerns of studies of sea power and the legal structures governing the sea, maritime security studies need to pay greater attention to the interconnectivity of different threats and issues, to novel forms of governance and order at sea, and to the dissemination of the new maritime security agenda through capacity-building. 7
Therefore, to situate our contribution, it is necessary to address the recent scholarship developments regarding the ongoing changes in the nature of maritime threats, the correspondent review of maritime security sector as a whole-of-government articulation, and how academia may contribute in the overall efforts of national and regional capacity building .
The Twenty-First-Century Agenda on Maritime Security Studies
The scholarship on maritime security is very rec...