From dusk to dawn? Maritime domain awareness in Southeast Asia.

• Author: Bueger, Christian

Maritime security is not only a contested concept, it also involves very different activities. (1) One of the major clusters of activities is that of information sharing. This domain has become central to coordinating national and international maritime security responses and to developing regional maritime security regimes. As America's National Research Council's Committee of the 1,000 Ship Navy phrased it, information sharing should be understood as a "key enabler". (2) It is a foundational practice, and has the potential to strengthen trust and confidence among maritime security actors. This in turn allows for joint law enforcement operations or even improved security relations between states in more general terms.

In the past decade various networks and centres for information sharing have become operational. Many of these are US-led efforts, such as the maritime security reports by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Global Maritime Situational Awareness or initiatives under the Maritime Partnership Concept. (3) Increasingly, however, regional initiatives have been developed, especially in the piracy prone areas of Southeast Asia, the Western Indian Ocean and West Africa. They have become important tools not only to tackle piracy, but to address maritime insecurity more broadly. Southeast Asia has spearheaded the development of regional MDA systems. The region has developed centres for information sharing which are both regional--in that they focus on Southeast Asian maritime zones--as well as global, since they work closely with nonlittoral states and the global maritime players. The centres based in Singapore--the Information Sharing Centre (ISC) of the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) and the Information Fusion Centre (IFC) operated by the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN)--, and Malaysia--the Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB)--have become prototypes for how to organize regional information sharing. For the emerging architecture in other regions, such as the Western Indian Ocean as well as West Africa, these centres have become main reference points. Understanding how these centres work, and whether and how they can complement each other in a larger architecture, is hence a vital task in order to improve a core dimension of maritime security provision. Scrutinizing these centres is also fruitful in academic terms, given that the centres represent a form of everyday practical international security cooperation which has hardly been studied. The centres imply that security actors engage in joint projects and interact on an everyday basis, which in turn might provide the preconditions of more sustained security interaction in the form of maritime security communities. (4)

This article presents a detailed analysis of the three regional Southeast Asian centres, and is divided into three parts. Following this introduction, part one discusses the challenges that information sharing networks and centres face. It foregrounds the importance of social and political aspects and suggests investigating information sharing by asking three questions: Among whom is information shared? What type of information and data is shared? And how is the information interpreted to gain shared understandings of the situation at sea? In the following section, each of the three Southeast Asian centres is discussed in the light of these questions. I argue that the centres should be understood as performing a range of different functions in a broader system. In the conclusion, I review the Southeast Asian system by addressing its efficacy and demonstrate how the overall system, rather than an individual centre, can serve as an international role model for organizing regional information sharing.

Understanding Information Sharing

"Information sharing" is a rather generic term. It refers to the transmission of data, information or knowledge across space and between individuals and organizations. The notion of "information" is often contrasted with the concepts of "intelligence" or "evidence", with the latter terms referring to information which is classified or not available in the public domain due to security concerns or ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions. A further concept used in maritime security is that of "information fusion". This refers to attempts not only to distribute information, but to bring together and combine different sources in one stream. To organize information sharing for maritime security, two concepts have been developed: "Maritime Domain Awareness" (MDA) and "Maritime Situational Awareness" (MSA). Both refer to activities that lead to a shared picture and interpretation of what happens at sea. The US government defines MDA as "the effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States". (5) The maritime domain is defined as "all areas and things of, on, under, relating to, adjacent to, or bordering on a sea, ocean, or other navigable waterway, including all maritime-related activities, infrastructure, people, cargo, and vessels and other conveyances". (6) Steven Boraz sketches out the width of tasks, when he argues that MDA

means finding the ships and submarines of friends and foes, understanding the entire supply chain of cargoes, identifying people aboard vessels, understanding the infrastructures within or astride the maritime domain, and identifying anomalies and potential threats in all these areas. (7) MDA and MSA grasp very similar activities. Yet, they have slightly different connotations and hence agencies differ over which term they use and how. MDA is the broader term, and, as given in the definition of the maritime domain above, goes beyond analysing what happens at sea, but rather focuses on everything connected to the maritime. In contrast, MSA emphasizes space and time (situations) and is hence more oriented towards operations, incidents, real-time analysis and rapid reactions. The focus of MSA is hence more directly related to understanding what is going on at sea. In consequence, MDA is often understood as the broader notion which subsumes MSA. (8) For the rest of this article I draw on this understanding and take MDA to be the broader, more encompassing concept interested in larger interpretations of developments at sea. (9)

The Challenges of Information Sharing

MDA is a major technological challenge. Big data from different sources and in different formats--satellites, radar, reconnaissance planes or humans--have to be stored and fused. Data need to be securely stored in central databases. User portals are required to make data accessible. Algorithms are needed for visualization, reporting, incident statistics or trend analysis. As Boraz phrases it, "massive amounts of data on all aspects of maritime activity must be collected, then cross-referenced, 'fused' (generally speaking, correlated across sources), and analyzed, in order to detect anomalies that may indicate threat-related behavior". (10) Developing this dimension will be an ongoing task for science and technology, and computer scientists specifically. MDA is, however, not a question of algorithms, software and technology alone. It also raises

Which Actors are Involved in MDA?

MDA centres are confronted with the sheer number of agencies engaged in maritime security. Each of these maritime security agencies has a different organizational interest and culture, as well as different bureaucratic procedures. If this is already problematic on a national level, it is magnified on a regional or global level. The cross-sectorial nature of maritime security, moreover, implies a number of divides have to be bridged which have been identified as especially problematic. This concerns, firstly, the civil-military divide. Military actors are involved in maritime security and so are a broad range of civilian ones, ranging from police and border agencies to port authorities or environmental regulators. An impressive body of literature shows how difficult civil-military coordination is, given, for instance, misperceptions, or different cultures and routines. (11) Within a national as well as international context, e.g. in peacekeeping operations, it is often heavily contested whether civil or military agencies are in the lead. A second set of challenges relates to a public-private divide, that is, the coordination between state agencies and the shipping industry. Shipping is, by its very nature, a globalized industry. Because of the rise of open registries and the flag state principle of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), shipping is a heavily self-regulated industry that often escapes state control (12)--although counter-terrorism provisions, such as the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) code have started to reverse this relationship. (13) In the volatile and highly competitive shipping markets, state regulations are largely seen as a cost factor. As a consequence, the industry often views state initiatives with suspicion. It is important to keep in mind that the state-industry relation varies over different maritime security issues. In the case of piracy, the shipping industry is mainly a victim and hence more inclined to cooperate. With maritime security issues such as terrorism, illegal migration, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or other questions of trafficking, the industry is to a lesser degree the core victim and is even a potential perpetrator. On these kinds of issues companies will be less likely to seek cooperation with states. These dimensions make the industry-state relation intricate. The problem is exacerbated by the rise of private security companies. (14) Many shipping companies prefer to pay for services such as...