This is the essential book today for understanding maritime security law as a key element in crafting responses to hybrid threats at sea. Since the Corfu Channel Case at the International Court of Justice in 1949, international law, the law of the sea, and law of naval warfare have struggled to provide clear guidance for deterring and addressing hybrid threats in the maritime domain. The 1986 Paramilitary Activities Case and the 2003 Oil Platforms Case similarly proved inadequate to the task of providing guidance and relief for States under hybrid maritime assault. There is a lack of clear guidance in international law for contending with maritime threats that combine elements of conventional and irregular military forces with peacetime coercive strategies and disruptive practices, operating with synergistic effects to disorient an adversary. And yet throughout the world, from the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Red Sea, to the South China Sea, States are now confronted with sophisticated, multi-dimensional and multi-domain attacks intended to erode their maritime security, and with it their political stability, economic prosperity, and national security.
“Maritime Security Law in Hybrid Warfare” systematically approaches the international law applicable to these pernicious and unconventional threats and risks, whether described as hybrid, grey zone, Fourth Generation Warfare. The task is not easy because hybrid maritime security involves cybersecurity and disinformation, crime and sabotage alongside anti-ship ballistic missile, and threats that extend from outer space to the deep seabed.
The study is authored by some of the most experienced and highly regarded experts in the field along with the rising stars. The authors form an elegant team that operates at the intersection of international law and maritime security to produce a compelling and thoughtfully coherent study that smoothly interacts with the seam between the law of the sea and the law of naval warfare. Part I explores the nature of hybrid warfare through the lens of maritime security law, considering the contours of hybrid attacks at sea and considerations for the use of force in self-defence and other responses, such as imposition of countermeasures. In the peacetime grey zone, the toolkit relies on the law of the sea and proposes guidelines for reducing the operating space of grey zone actors by “shedding a light” on their activities and demarcating firm positions on acceptable conduct and unacceptable threats that will produce consequences for adversaries.
This Part concludes with a detailed study on how we should draw the line between peacetime and war. Do the boundaries of classical international law still make sense in today multi-domain hybrid naval conflicts? Anna Petrig
Part II explores questions surrounding offshore underwater infrastructure – oil pipelines and submarine communications cables that have been attacked in Europe and East Asia. This is a roadmap for thinking about what types of disruptions on the seabed constitute an armed attack in international law, and how the right of self-defence is triggered. During armed conflict at sea, what may belligerents lawfully do to protect their own critical underwater infrastructure and hold at risk those of the adversary? This part of the book contains the most sophisticated analysis in print on the Nord Stream pipeline and the Balticconnector, providing a toolkit for the law of the sea and the law of naval warfare, and how these regimes are adjacent to prescriptive and enforcement jurisdiction, civil liability, and environmental law, as well as how we should think about asymmetric responses, such as economic sanctions.
Part III turns toward hybrid threats to international navigation, such as irregular maritime migration and shipping in the Black Sea amidst the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Russia’s “shadow fleet” has emerged to evade sanctions, circumventing the generally accepted international rules and standards developed by the member States of the International Maritime Organization. Dark shipping may carry as much as 20 percent of the world’s oil in ships that traverse the globe, often with their automatic identification system turned off to pass unnoticed. These ships stymie traditional oceans governance and shipping regulations to serve as an economic arm of the Russian war effort and operate outside the legal obligations of flag State duties, coastal State awareness and port State control. Denmark has attempted to get a handle on such vessels transiting through the Danish Straits by focusing on its own asymmetric levers – maritime safety regulations and rules for protection of the marine environment, and associated certificates for insurance. Lacking explicit enforcement measures against foreign-flagged ships in passage through the straits, the Kingdom of Denmark is experimenting with regulatory responses that may at least reduce dark shipping in the service of Russia. To the extent these efforts prove successful, Moscow loses foreign currency from oil buyers in Asia.
This study explores the relationship between threat formation and normative concepts of threats at sea against considerations of State sovereignty, the security of the European Union, and human rights law. From irregular maritime migration in the Mediterranean Sea, Part III shifts toward protection of international commerce through the Turkish Straits while Ukraine and Russia are at war. The theme of hybrid threats to international shipping implicates not just the belligerents but States relying on grain exports and the rights of neutral shipping. Against this backdrop, Turkey exercises control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits pursuant to the Montreux Convention. The parameters of Turkey’s governance of the straits during armed conflict at sea has effects that extend beyond the region.
Like Turkey, Japan also sits astride strategic straits, but these are subject to the conventional regime in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, limiting Japan’s ability to control transit. Five strategic Japanese straits provide access for Russian and Chinese warships and submarines access to the Pacific Ocean. In October 2021, for example, a combined task force of five Chinese warships and five Russian warships sailed through Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu into the mid-Pacific. For decades, Japan has limited its territorial sea claim to only three nautical miles along five “designated areas” including Tsugaru Strait to ensure foreign warships, submarines, and aircraft may not exercise transit passage through the straits, which would apply shoreline-to-shoreline. This modest but effective measure unilaterally limits foreign warships to surface navigation and innocent passage except for a narrow high seas corridor through the center line, allowing Japan to maintain greater domain awareness and security of its littoral zone.
The chapter contributions and parts form a coherent study. The volume reflects a legal realism that integrates the political concept of hybrid war but is crisp and careful in maintaining the linearity and integrity of the legal analysis. In this respect, the study is essential for officials and scholars to understand the application of the law of the sea, the law of naval warfare, and other aspects of international law, such as the law of state responsibility and marine environmental law, to contemporary conflicts. Russia, Iran, and China are especially poised to generate new hybrid challenges to destabilize competitors,
Responding with legal creativity is necessary but insufficient to deter or contain hybrid threats at sea, as normative factors also weigh heavily. States must better prepare the information battlespace while thinking out of the box about new legal tools in national law and international law. Some examples of such responses can be harvested from the past before the era of post-Cold War peace stripped democratic States of their resilience and confidence to develop and employ new legal concepts to advance their security. European States have begun this process, for example, with economic sanctions. The authors offer plenty of other food for thought, including better utilization of safety zones, areas to be avoided, traffic separation schemes and other devices that could be repurposed to get more out of them.
The hybrid nature of the maritime threats and challenges mean that scholars and leaders must become adept at integrating security dimensions into marine spatial planning, from internal waters to the high seas and the deep seabed. This book is an essential resource for thinking about creative development and employment of these methods.
James Kraska
Newport, Rhode Island