ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account of the current state of play in maritime risk and security governance, and provides a brief overview of the academic investigation into private security offshore. It argues that much of the contemporary literature has viewed private security proliferation in terms of the reconfiguration of a state-centred security landscape, and that such a perspective may be of little use in a space in which sovereignty is, and has always been, articulated differently. The chapter focuses on the question of spatiality in security governance literature. Specifically, it argues that the literature has generally relied on the spatial model of territoriality, and that people may require new spatial imagery to make sense of the different forms of security assemblage across different maritime spaces. The chapter investigates the applicability of two prominent ideas to maritime security governance; the concept of state disassembly and the traditional social-scientific model of state spatiality.
