Security of Global Port Cities Conference
April 30-May 2, 2008

Forces of Order and Disorder in the New Geographies of the Maritime Frontier

(Carolyn Nordstrom, Susan M. Roberts, Mark Hamm, Nazery Khalid, and Brenda Chalfin)

Carolyn Nordstrom
Professor—Dept. of Anthropology
University of Notre Dame, IN
623 Flanner Hall
631-5072
cnordstr@nd.edu

A port from 4 perspectives: smuggler, security, industry, wild card…

Four people stand at the portal, surveying the opportunities and dangers of ports; each calculating risk, profit, and security in ways that reconfigure notions of intercontinental relations in the 21st century.  Trillions of dollars flow though ports extra-legally a year, and tens of trillions more legally.  Millions are employed to oversee, or thwart, these flows.  The health of nation’s depends on the outcome of these calculations.  The data for this analysis is firsthand – gathered ethnographically over three years at ports and along trade routes in Southern Africa, Singapore, The South Seas, The Netherlands, UK, and the USA.  Interviews bring the perspectives of smugglers, security and customs agents, port authorities, businesspeople, and the wild card (the potential terrorist, the harbingers of war, the dangerous rogue trader, etc…) to light, and to life.  The compendium of these realities challenges us to rethink our very notions of trade, security, and sovereignty.

Susan M. Roberts
Dept. of Geography
University of Kentucky
(859) 257-2399
mailto:GEG207@UKY.EDU

US Port Security, Global Container Trade, and New Border Geographies

Port cities are the sites of massive investments in infrastructure to facilitate global trade. With heightened concerns over the possible contents of shipping containers in particular, they are also now adding layers of security infrastructure. This paper examines the “technological fix” approach to securing US ports and considers how it contributes to the assertion of contradictory new border geographies – signaled by such terms as “smart borders”, “flexible borders”, and talk of “reinventing the border”.

Mark Hamm
Dept. of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Indiana State University
(812) 237-2197
mhamm@indstate.edu
mhamm@bluemarble.net
 
Maritime Terrorism: Vulnerabilities of the State and the Terrorist

This paper has four objectives. First it will review the small body of research literature on maritime terrorism—a literature based almost entirely on anecdotal evidence and government briefings. Second, the paper will examine the information on maritime terrorism contained in several global databases on terrorism. Relative to other targets, the analysis shows that maritime terrorism is rare. Third, the paper will examine several case studies of maritime terrorism, including both successful and thwarted attacks. Importantly, these cases are not easily searchable in the global databases. The cases include the Order’s 1984 attempt to sabotage shipping lanes in Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington; al-Qaeda’s 2000 plot to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans in the port of Aden, Yemen; al-Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Yemen; al-Qaeda’s attack on the French supertanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen in 2002; and al-Qaeda in Iraq’s attacks on the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the U.S.S. Ashland in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, Jordan in 2005. Finally, using the widely-known criminological theory known as the routine activities perspective, the study will identify some simple common denominators at work in these acts of maritime terrorism that may be used to expose both the vulnerabilities of port security and the terrorist organizations that exploit them.

Nazery Khalid
Research Fellow
Maritime Institute of Malaysia—Center for Economic Studies & Ocean Industries
nazery@mima.gov.my

To Serve and Be Protected:  A Comprehensive Perspective on Security in the Strait of Malacca

As one of the world’s busiest and most strategic sea lines of communication, the importance of the Strait of Malacca to global trade and geo-strategic balance is well documented.  However, post 9-11, the Strait has suffered from an ‘image problem’ in being unfairly viewed by the international community as a vulnerable waterway prone to terrorist attacks, despite the very low probability of their occurrence.  The jaundiced assessment, coming from a narrow perspective blinkered by post 9-11 paranoia which the international media has helped to fan, needs to be corrected as there is a wider dimension to the question of security in this strategic passageway.  This paper offers a fresh perspective on the subject by seeking to define ‘security’ in the Strait in a more holistic manner by shifting the focus away from ‘traditional’ maritime security concerns such as piracy and smuggling that the littoral states of the Strait face.  It advocates a comprehensive approach in securing the sealane by broadening the discussion of its security by looking at aspects such as environmental protection, economic security, navigation safety and territorial integrity, among others.  It argues that by identifying all the security risks faced by the Strait, proper attention and necessary resources can be allocated and practical actions can be taken to secure the waterway instead of just obsessing over the warning of a few pundits of the ‘potential threat of terror’ that the sealane faces.  The paper concludes by stressing that enlarging the scope of discourse on security in the Strait will help prioritize efforts and lead to optimal utilization of resources on sustainable solutions to tackle risks according to their probability quotient and potential impact.

Brenda Chalfin
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Florida
441 Grinter 
PO Box 117305 
University of Florida 
Gainesville, FL  32611-7305
352-392-2427 x306
bchalfin@anthro.ufl.edu

Technologies of Risk and Emerging Modalities of Global Governance on Europe’s Maritime Frontier

This paper draws from research conducted among Customs and Police officials at the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge in Belgium--among Europe’s largest and busiest international shipping harbors. At the center of my analysis are two technologies of governance involving the projection and detection of radiation. Globally pervasive and geared to the oversight of an ever-expansive field of global commercial flows, they are the x-ray cargo scan and the radiation detection portal. Increasingly common and necessary components of port operations world wide, these technologies contribute to the crafting of a global security apparatus around ‘risk,’ embodied as well as disembodied, in both predictable and unexpected ways.

I argue that the proliferation of such technologies signals a reconfiguration of the Cold War security mandates such that both the source of nuclear threat and means of nuclear deterrence are recast, shifting in character from extraordinary to banal, contained to dispersed, dangerous to putatively safe. This dynamic coincides with the emergence of maritime frontiers as sites of governmental innovation and coordination as state authorities struggle to contend with the growing scale and pace of cross-border circulation of things in addition to people. With risk and radiation at the fore, the maritime frontier specifically provides a space for government by private and mechanical proxy to facilitate the replication and standardization of the mandates and mechanics of rule across the world’s polities.

Lessie Jo Frazier
Assistant Professor: Gender Studies
Indiana University
Memorial Hall East, 130
Bloomington, IN
(812) 856-0402
frazierl@indiana.edu

New geographies in historical and ethnographic perspective

The main focus of my research has been the nothern Chilean port city Iquique on the ways in which its status as a frontier territory has intensified and made more evident human rights problems evident for the country and region more broadly. For examples, issues of military occupation and strategic investment, drug interdiction/trafficking dynamic since at least the 1960s, and the place of the free-trade zone in transnational arms and monetary transactions (including 'al Quaida). I bring this close-to-the-shore historical and ethnographic perspective to thinking about what is new in current geographic mappings of transnational economic and political flows and what kinds of methodologies can elucidate particular geographic and political registers.