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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in the Black Sea port city of Poti, this paper examines how contemporary maritime governance actively produces shifting boundaries between licit circulation and illegality through processes of infrastructural enclosure and privatisation.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research in the Black Sea port city of Poti, this paper examines how contemporary maritime governance actively produces shifting boundaries between licit circulation and illegality through processes of infrastructural enclosure and privatisation. Over the past decade, port expansion and foreign-led logistics development have reconfigured access to the shoreline, transforming formerly open maritime spaces into securitised and fenced zones of extraction and transit.

While these projects are promoted as legal modernisation and integration into global trade networks, they simultaneously displace long-standing coastal livelihoods and recast everyday practices as informal, tolerated, or criminal. The paper traces how locals engaged in small-scale fishing, fish-smoking, and scrap-metal collection tied to port infrastructures navigate ambiguous regulatory regimes in which legality is unevenly enforced and continuously reinterpreted.

Rather than treating informality as marginal or deviant, I show how it emerges from the encounter between transnational logistics regimes, national sovereignty claims, and local survival strategies. By foregrounding the shoreline as a key site where global circulation meets exclusionary governance, the paper conceptualises the port as a paradigmatic instance of the "(il)licit sea": a space where legality is not fixed but produced through infrastructural design, selective enforcement, and everyday negotiation.