Short Abstract

This panel explores Africa’s seas as contested and terraqueous spaces, examining how diverse actors negotiate access, authority, livelihoods, mobility, knowledge, and resources, and how these struggles reshape Africa’s maritime governance, political economy, and global engagements.

Long Abstract

Africa's oceans have long been spaces of mobility, exchange, and socio-political encounter. Contemporary transformations in fisheries, ports, conservation, offshore extraction, and blue economy agendas are generating new—and reconfiguring older—forms of contestation over maritime spaces/resources. This panel examines how Africa’s seas are governed, used, imagined, and contested by diverse actors.

We understand contestation broadly, encompassing struggles over access to and ownership of marine resources, as well as competing claims to authority, livelihoods, mobility, knowledge, security, and legitimate uses of the sea. Who gets to fish, extract, conserve, navigate, work, and profit from maritime spaces? How are competing claims negotiated among states, coastal communities, workers, corporations, international organisations, and others? How do ownership structures, transnational value chains, and infrastructures redistribute control and benefits? And how do African actors negotiate, appropriate, or challenge competing projects of maritime development and governance?

Rather than assuming a clear boundary between land and sea, the panel invites attention to the terraqueous character of these processes (see Campling and Colas 2018 & 2021): maritime contestations unfold through relations connecting fishing grounds and coastal communities, vessels and ports, offshore resources and onshore infrastructures, and ocean spaces with markets, institutions, and networks extending far inland and across borders.

We welcome grounded contributions on fisheries, maritime labour, ports, coastal livelihoods, conservation, offshore extraction, security, and ocean knowledge. By bringing these diverse maritime worlds into conversation, the panel explores how contestations across and beyond the sea illuminate wider transformations in authority, political economy, social relations, and Africa’s connections with the world.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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