Transnational Organised Crime at Sea, 2019-2022

Transnational organised crime at sea has emerged as a significant area of international concern, whether that be piracy and armed robbery against ships, the use of the sea for trafficking of humans, drugs, or arms and as a conduit for extremist violence, or pervasive illegal fishing other environmental crimes in the maritime domain. Responding to these challenges requires complex and interconnected measures at sea and on land, and in ways that combine security, law enforcement and development themes. This project set out to improve our understanding of the causes and manifestations of crime at sea, and to provide recommendations to strengthen international and regional responses to it. It focused on the Indo-Pacific, a maritime region which is particularly prone to maritime insecurities on the one hand, but in which significant efforts have been made to tackle these on the other. The project first established a systematic conceptualisation and categorisation of transnational organised crime at sea (Bueger and Edmunds 2020, 2024). Second, we conducted a systematic evidence review of the existing knowledge base on blue crime and published this as three data papers and an online evidence base. Third, drawing on analysis of responses to maritime crime in our case study regions, we developed a theoretical model of how and when cooperation develops between actors in the face of shared problems of security and law enforcement in the maritime domain. Finally, we identified a series of promising practices and solutions in the fight against transnational organised crime at sea, focusing on informal governance mechanisms, operations at sea, maritime security strategies, maritime domain awareness and information sharing, and capacity building. The collection consists of data files from evidence base and regional guide workstreams.