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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in the Comoros, this paper examines how local actors navigate (il)licit maritime economies. It shows how legality, illegality, and oceanic materiality intersect, shaping translocal exchanges, subsistence strategies, and agency in peripheral maritime spaces.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Comoros, this paper examines the challenges, ambiguities, and materialities of (il)licit maritime circulations in the western Indian Ocean. Located at the margins of global maritime routes, the Comorian seascape is traversed by international trade flows, restrictive border regimes, and growing constraints on local maritime practices—from fishing to inter-island mobility—imposed in the name of environmental conservation and maritime security. Despite the dense regulation of maritime space, which often renders inter-island navigation legally dangerous and lethal, the ocean remains a vital medium for translocal exchanges that persist beyond, against, and through legality.

Informal and illegal maritime economies are not marginal anomalies but expressions of enduring global connections shaping peripheral maritime routes. Although frequently criminalised, these practices often constitute the only viable means of subsistence for communities marked by long-standing structural vulnerability.

Drawing on two ethnographic vignettes—marine turtle poaching and smuggling, and the “illegal yet licit” maritime route to the French island of Mayotte—the paper unsettles the legal/licit versus illegal/illicit dichotomy. It demonstrates how these categories are negotiated through oceanic materiality, embodied navigational knowledge, and situated moral economies rather than determined solely by international law. The sea itself, through its physical properties and uncertainties, enables circulations that evade regulation, opening interstices where illegality becomes licit and legality reveals its own illicit effects.

Adopting an oceanic perspective, the paper traces how local dynamics intersect with global regimes of border control, conservation, and capitalist extraction, foregrounding local agency in navigating—and contesting—the shifting boundaries of the (il)licit at sea.