Maritime Security in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Southeast Asia's maritime security today is grounded on colonial legacies of undefined sea boundaries and porous borders which traders, smugglers, pirates and migrants crossed with impunity and fishermen and nomadic communities moved. The post-colonial states emerging out of the decolonisation of Southeast Asia after the Second World War struggled to define these boundaries as integral to the sovereignty of the nation-states they were building. This chapter traces the efforts by Southeast Asia's littoral states to resolve, if not manage their contentious sea boundaries within the evolving framework of international law to regulate their relations with neighbours. UNCLOS III has complicated efforts by Southeast Asian littoral countries to demarcate their sea boundaries and claims to maritime domains. The old traditional maritime security problems of piracy and armed robbery against ships, smuggling, irregular human migration, as well as illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing persist. This chapter offers an overview of these maritime security challenges, and how Southeast Asian governments endeavour to address them through maritime forces development as well as the promotion of confidence- and security-building measures, and practical security cooperation. There are limitations to these measures, however, which thereby oblige governments in Southeast Asia to conceive of long-term, sustainable solutions to those extant challenges in the region's maritime domain.