Africa has an extensive and strategically located maritime space. This domain is vital for various reasons, including its abundance of economic resources and as a conduit for trade. Unfortunately, the potential of the African maritime space is being undermined by persistent, multifaceted and fluid domestic, regional and international threats and vulnerabilities. To tackle this, littoral African states have entered into various collaborative engagements at international and inter-agency level. The success of these arrangements is in turn greatly hampered by various practical challenges, including mistrust, diversity, ‘silo approach’ and lack of identified common Afro-centric security priorities and protocols. An urgent need for a functional collaborative engagement emerges as vital for a sustainable blue economy in Africa.
Sarabjeet Singh Parmar replies:If by the term ‘integrated maritime policy’ the question implies a single document that covers all aspects of security, safety, energy, economics, etc. pertaining to the maritime domain then the answer is no. However, different policy/strategy documents and initiatives that cover these aspects do exist and are very much available in public domain. One such strategy document and two such initiatives undertaken are as follows:
The revival of the centuries-old ‘Silk Road at Sea’ into a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) is an integral part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Chinese White Paper on its vision for enhancing maritime cooperation broadly confirms this perception, since it considers maritime security assurance as the lynchpin of MSR initiatives. As its trade and overseas economic interests have been constantly growing, Beijing’s strategic concern about protection of these interests has magnified.
The article argues that India and the United States are poised to strengthen their bilateral strategic convergences, not only in the Indian Ocean but also in Pacific-Asia that lies eastwards of the Malacca Straits, and wherein India’s geo-strategic stakes as well as its military-strategic footprint are likely to increase in the coming years. This would progressively enhance the complementarities between their navies in the western Pacific and its contiguous seas, thereby enabling substantive naval cooperation towards ensuring security and stability in the broader Indo-Pacific region.
The current trajectory of India–US relations is encouraging, but needs to be sustained by optimising their maritime-strategic convergence. In the maritime-configured Indo-Pacific region, the two countries could undertake substantive ‘transactions’ in the domain of geopolitics and military-strategic cooperation.
Since taking over in 2009, the Obama Administration considered Asia to be significant for power cooperation and for establishing an international order based on accepted rules and norms. This started the journey of a much-debated concept that was first called the ‘Back to Asia’ strategy and later re-termed as a ‘Rebalance’ or ‘Pivot to Asia’. In November 2011, then American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in an article titled ‘America’s Pacific Century’, reiterated the importance of Asia-Pacific for the United States (US).
Abhay Kumar Singh replies: The concept of ‘Oceans Economy’ or ‘Blue Economy’ is recent and originates from the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. At the heart of the concept is a separation of socio-economic development from environmental degradation, which is how it has traditionally been seen as a global status quo.
The vision document considers maritime security cooperation as a lynchpin in the MSR and attempts to redesign the existing maritime security architecture in the oceanic arena of MSR.
The Malabar Exercises: An Appraisal
India should take the lead in forming an overarching security quad along with Australia, Japan and the US in the Indo-Pacific region.