ABSTRACT
Despite much analyses and rigorous scholarship, there is no definitive acceptance or authoritative conclusion in regard to what to make of the post-Cold War geopolitical scenario. Clearly, the promise of a New World Order and a peaceful ‘end to history’ has degenerated into global disorder – unipolar and statist in some ways, multi-polar and post-Westphalian in others. The international stage is peopled by a variety of state and non-state actors, including a fatigued superpower; a rising (with caveats) China and India; a declining Europe; a convulsed Islamic world; and of course terrorists, fundamentalists, ideologues, and peregrine groupings of many hues. What is, however, abundantly clear, is that the twenty-first century is seeing nations more interconnected and interdependent than ever before in human history. The globalised economy with exponentially increased trade, the internet and instant communications, quick and reliable intercontinental transportation, and space-based imagery and location, and even long-range precision-guided munitions, just to mention a few factors, have clearly served to shrink and link the planet. Taken together with the sharp escalation in maritime activity, one can now easily imagine humanity, 80 per cent of which lives within a hundred miles of the sea, 1 as almost a single community inhabiting the ‘Great Littoral’, if I can so term it, and conjoined through the Oceanic Commons, which cover 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and belong, as yet, to no political entity.
