ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Governing the Seas: Ocean Science, International Law, and the Contested Politics of the Post-War Ocean (1 of 2)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Contemporary ocean governance depends on scientific authority, yet the forms of knowledge that make the oceans governable were neither inevitable nor uncontested. In the decades after 1957 — when the International Geophysical Year intersected with the first UN Conference on the Law of the Sea — states, corporations, scientists, and international organisations struggled to define what the ocean was as a legal, spatial, and material domain.

In line with the conference theme, this session foregrounds the ocean as a site where scientific practices and legal concepts were co-produced, negotiated, and resisted. The papers examine how seabed mining consortia, Soviet fisheries experts, Pacific Island governments, petroleum geologists, hydrographers, and legal codifiers mobilised oceanographic, geological, cartographic, and engineering knowledge to advance divergent claims over ocean spaces. Together, they show how the ocean’s depths became sites of extractive speculation, geopolitical anxiety, and epistemic innovation, even as competing visions of the ocean’s waters, its deep seabed, and its territoriality were crystallising, and at times destabilising, the emerging regimes of UNCLOS and the International Seabed Authority.

By bringing legal history into direct conversation with histories of science, technology, environmental knowledge, and Cold War/decolonisation geopolitics, this session offers a new, integrative account of how scientific knowledge shaped global ocean governance. It highlights the plural worlds and contested sciences that structured oceanic authority in the late twentieth century, worlds whose infrastructures, imaginaries, and contradictions continue to define the politics of the sea today.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Sam Robinson, York

Individual Presentations

• The Deep Pacific, Viewed through the Prism of Nationalism, Regionalism, and Internationalism - Sonya Schoenberger, Stanford

• Bending the Bottom: The Perdido Fold Belt, Submarine Canyons, and the Role of Private Interest in Shaping and Governing Ocean Grounds - Samm Newton, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Contentious Cartography – Drawing the UK-Norway Border in the Northern North Sea 1975-1978 - Douglas Fleming, University of Aberdeen

• Artificial Islands and Sovereignty in the Law of the Sea - Kamil Ahsan, Yale University

Session Organizers

• Sam Robinson, York

• Jonathan Galka, National University of Singapore

• Samm Newton, University of Wisconsin–Madison