In February 2007, we were in Muscat, Oman, for the Fourth Meeting of the Indian Ocean Research Group (IORG), focusing on issues of marine biodiversity and fisheries security. Fish is the most earth’s most traded commodity, and in many ways the successful management of global fish stocks will determine human survival in the long term. Muscat was a very appropriate place to host such a conference. It is from here that stories of Sinbad the Sailor first emerged, telling epic tales of a man sailing the seven seas, with the Indian Ocean as the fulcrum of such adventures. It is...

The main purpose of this chapter is to identify some of the central issues raised in this book within the three broadly defined themes of changing geopolitical orientations, regional cooperation, and security concerns. However, before doing this, a brief discussion is undertaken of the question of Indian Ocean regional definition.

From an academic geographical perspective, one of the broadest definitions of the region is that it includes 47 littoral and land-locked states bordering on the Indian Ocean (IFIOR 1995). However, if all Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states are included, then this raises the total number of regional states...

On December 26, 2004, an earthquake-induced tsunami disaster struck the coastal regions and communities on the Indian Ocean rim, killing more than 300,000 people and displacing 5 million. The coastal zones accounted for nearly 96 percent of the total human loss and sufferings and about 12 percent of the total economic damage recorded in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Bangladesh. The fatalities were also reported in the Seychelles, and on the other side of the Indian Ocean in Somalia’s Puntland region, Tanzania, and Kenya. While the then U.S. secretary of state, Colin Powell, compared the impact...

The tsunami of December 26, 2004, that struck coastal areas of Indian Ocean littoral states with such devastation and loss of life provided a graphic example of the forces of nature, and the effects of such forces on coastal communities. The tsunami and its aftermath were felt around the Indian Ocean Region, with coastal communities and environments destroyed in the area near the epicenter of the undersea earthquake off Aceh in Indonesia, in the southern parts of Thailand, the Maldives, and the Andaman Islands (Kay 2005). The tsunami also affected the east African coastline and was recorded at Australian stations...

Driving out from the center of Johannesburg through its suburbs, we were confronted—as every traveler there inevitably is—by the stark reality that the post-colonial world of Africa is clearly divided between the haves and have-nots. It is impossible to over articulate this split between worlds. It is as if travelers from the wealthier parts of the city enter through portals into separate states of existence. It is almost impossible to fathom that these two states of being exist alongside each other, that they are part of the same planet, let alone the same city. But no matter how...

Pressured by global population growth, which currently stands at 6.5 billion, the Indian Ocean Region, dominated by Africa, is a key site of global hunger. Of the estimated 850 million people worldwide classified as malnourished, some 200 million live in sub-Saharan Africa (Berthelot 2005). Many others of the global hungry also live in the Indian Ocean Region, especially in Asian countries, such as India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.

Despite many measures to purportedly address hunger and malnutrition, especially since the mid-1940s, with the creation of the high-yielding crop varieties of the so-called Green Revolution, and their transfer as...

The demise of Somalia as a functioning state and the ongoing, seemingly endless conflict there is well documented. What is less well acknowledged and understood is the impact the failure of the Somali state has had offshore, particularly in environmental and marine resource terms.

Most discussion of Somalia’s waters has tended to focus on the deterioration in the maritime security environment and particularly the threat to shipping posed by piracy. However, Somalia’s enormous, resource-rich maritime domain is also threatened by rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing on the part of foreign fishing vessels keen to exploit the absence of...

In this era of environmental insecurity, with increasing natural disasters—possibly caused by global warming—we have been made to realize that we are no longer “in the times of procrastination, of half measures, of soothings and bafflings, expedients of delays” (Sir Winston Churchill, 1936). In fact, we are entering a period of consequences.¹ The inconvenient truth of increasing environmental insecurity has shifted the discourses of sustainable development. In the Indian Ocean, the December 26, 2004, Boxing Day Tsunami questioned the readiness of communities to cope with such disasters, their abilities to recover, and their resilience in an event of...

We are sitting at the mouth of the Murray River, the largest river in Australia. We are waiting patiently for the arrival of a famous Australian long distance swimmer—Susie Moroney—who, in an act of symbolic protest at the ill-health of the river system, has vowed to swim its length, from source to mouth. This enormous river system begins in Queensland, thousands of miles away to the North, and winds itself through New South Wales, Victoria, and then finally flows through to the sea in South Australia, where the warmer waters of the Indian Ocean meet the Antarctic. Or,...

Rivers are the arteries of the earth, sustaining life in all forms. In the past, many great civilizations flourished along the banks of the Mekong River. The glorious Angkor civilization is a vivid example indicating the crucial role of this great river in its birth and progress. The Mekong River has been the epitome of socio-cultural synergies, representing a mosaic of harmonious confluence between sustainability, culture, nature, and humankind and thus unifying and binding the Mekong region into an open and “adaptive” place despite socio-cultural heterogeneity and diversity. But the birth of the territorially defined sovereign nation-state—an important facet...

The political relations between India and Pakistan remain consistently adversarial in the Indian Ocean Region. Yet the Indus Treaty signed in 1960 between India and Pakistan has endured despite the unabashedly hostile nature of the political relationship between the two states. There are other paradoxes. The World Bank and the United States played a strong mediatory role in the treaty negotiations and mobilized bilateral and multilateral organizations, and a consortium of Western governments to back its mediation with large infusions of aid to “stabilize” the conflicts over the waters of the Indus.

If the Indus Treaty mediation is a success...

Many political networks involved in environmental movements in India and Australia pursue concepts of sustainable development, environmental justice, and environmental security.¹ It is important to understand that while some of these struggles for environmental emancipation (see last chapter of book) appear similar at first glance, they are culturally very distinct, both in their overall goals and in the strategies used for achieving them. This chapter investigates two environmental campaigns that, in part, champion more sustainable forms of environmental security. Both these struggles formed around the impetus to stop the building of mega dams: the Narmada and Franklin dam campaigns. One...

As “Westerners” traveling in Iran in what George W. Bush has called part of the “Axis of Evil,” what quickly became apparent to us was that Iranians, like all who dwell in the IOR, wrestle with the daily grind of securing access to the vital ingredients for survival. Most environmental issues in Iran are reminiscent of those experienced in many parts of the majority world. They are issues of human survival: shelter, energy, water, and food security, all of which are threatened by rapid and uncontrolled industrialization. This industrialization is centered on the petrochemical industry, with few of the environmental...

Energy is likely to be at the heart of a major transformation of the global political scenario in the next few years. The post–Cold War world order that saw the fundamental changes in the mid-1980s is again on the threshold of a major change. Whereas the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the intertwined association of globalization and capitalism shaped the contours of international relations in the mid-1990s, the outset of the 21st century will see oil as the most likely catalyst of change.

The energy security issue assumes paramount importance in the oceanic regions of the...

This chapter examines security issues relating to electricity-generating cross-border natural gas pipeline projects, but it does not, unlike much of the energy security literature, focus specifically on the energy requirements of the nation-states involved. Rather, a critical security approach is undertaken, which questions the development paradigm used to justify the projects and analyzes the human and environmental security of communities in the vicinity of the pipelines.¹

Gas pipeline projects undertaken in majority world countries of the global South, such as those discussed here, are rarely vetted through a process of environmental or social impact assessment. If these processes do occur,...

It is an interesting irony that, on the one hand, apart from Southwest and South Asia, the Indian Ocean is surrounded by nuclear weapons–free zones (per the Antarctic Treaty, Treaty of Bangkok, Treaty of Pelindaha, and Treaty of Rarotonga) while, on the other hand, it is fast becoming a nuclear ocean (Doyle 2005). Apart from the increasing number of regional nuclear weapons on land, as well as the indeterminate number on and under the ocean itself at any one time, the increasing global and regional demand for nuclear energy is having a significant impact on the structure of the...

In 2000, we were in New Delhi taking part in initial meetings leading to the formation of the Indian Ocean Research Group. Moving about Delhi can be a hazardous process. The air was thick with pollution. Many buses and auto-rickshaws ran on diesel, or a heady mixture of petrol and kerosene. To make matters worse, the sheer number of these vehicles admitted into the heart of Delhi acted as a multiplier to the massive amounts of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and lead being emitted into the atmosphere.

Apart from vehicle emissions, coal, animal dung, and vegetable-based fuels are still commonly used...

Small island states and territories (SISTs) are of limited size, possess small populations and vulnerable economies, rely on limited local resource bases, and are environmentally fragile. Cumulating smallness (small land mass, small population, and small economy) and insularity (which implies geographical isolation and even spatial fragmentation in the case of archipelagos), SISTs are widely recognized as singular cases both in terms of environment and development.¹ However, even if all these islands share many common development constraints deriving from their small size and insularity, they all possess their own identities in regard to human and physical environments. In the Indian Ocean,...

Wind, as one of the four elements, is an apt metaphor to discuss the concept of security in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). While security often refers to military or economic concerns, climate security is, and will be, a matter of growing concern in the IOR in coming years. Regionally, “wind,” in its various forms as part of the phenomena of weather, is playing ever greater havoc with the lives of people through extreme weather events, and, with the phenomena of global warming, it is anticipated that this will continue. “Weather” is the “general name for processes in the atmosphere—...

Among the four elements of survival, air is the most mobile and difficult to physically constrain. The security of airsheds is thus acutely dependent on regional cooperation. This chapter will explore the emergence of a regional cooperation regime around air quality by comparing it to a more familiar water management agreement. Through this comparison, the relative challenges and merits of managing air quality at a regional level will be accentuated.

The Indian Ocean basin has a highly complex meteorology due to seasonal monsoonal conditions that prevail in the summer, which are inextricably linked to the water availability in much of...

This book’s strength has been to bring together disparate voices across this vast region defined by its proximity to the Indian Ocean: the Ocean of the South. Obviously, there have been many different emphases which have emerged in the telling of the stories that litter the previous pages. In this final conclusion, however, let us revisit certain common themes, flagged in Part One, which provide the strands tying this oceanic tapestry together. First, let us again make mention of recent trends toward market-driven models of governance across the region. By focusing on models of management for the ocean itself, we...