ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I propose a time and place of birth for maritime security. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory, I locate the original context from which maritime security arose in a foundational violent event that bore witness to the presence of different visions of order at sea. I document how the sudden irruption of activist non-state actors into the maritime assemblage challenged the traditional statist construction of the sea. I locate that event in the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, by French secret service agents on 10 July 1985, in Auckland harbour, at 23:45. At that moment maritime security was born as a complex, evolving field of relationships housing inter alia, state and non-state actors, forces of stasis and change, and practices of military technocracy and radical democracy.
