ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Sam Robinson, York

Individual Presentations

• Frozen Laws on a Burning Planet: What Corals Can Teach Us About Time and Scale - Irus Braverman, SUNY

• All aboard the Akademik Knipovich: Soviet Fisheries Research, International Organizations and the Cold War of the Sea - Elizabeth Banks, University of Edinburgh

• How Meta-Organizations Influence Their Social Environment. The Case of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea - Kurt Rachlitz, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Michael Grothe-Hammer, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Jennifer L. Bailey, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• “The Mines of Neptune”: Deep Seabed Mining, Ocean Territorialization, and the Undersea as Underground (1957-1982) - Jonathan Galka, National University of Singapore

Session Organizer

• Sam Robinson, York