ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ethnography as a methodological approach to studying maritime security governance. In maritime security studies, interdisciplinary work has been burgeoning in recent years and is also informing policy. Studies emanate in particular from law and IR – and, to a lesser extent, sociology and anthropology. Thus, while legal and policy analyses are abundant, and some variants of qualitative methodology have been utilised, ethnography remains largely underexplored. This chapter suggests a research agenda to establish ethnography more firmly as a track within maritime security studies and fleshes out its analytical purchase. The chapter introduces “global political ethnography”, an approach in the social sciences that unpacks the dynamics of international policy processes in practice. This provides a means to study the maritime domain from a bottom-up perspective that allows a critical assessment of the laws and policies – which maritime security studies currently examines – as they are implemented and negotiated in practice.
