SAFESEAS Principal Investigator, Prof. Christian Bueger, recently presented at a symposium of the Indian Navy hosted by the Indian Navy Naval War College in Goa. The two-day event focused on “Addressing Regional Maritime Challenges” and brought together over one hundred representatives from Indian and Indian Ocean navies.
The presentation explored Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and capacity building both from a historical and contemporary perspective. Zooming in on the Western Indian Ocean, it investigated the claim that MDA by virtue strengthens cooperation and argued that the competition between architectures points to a strong geo-political motive in building MDA, and to the rise of communities of practice.
It concluded that advancing shared MDA implies provision of some order to the current complexity of architectures, to re-politicize these projects, to work towards more trust and confidence to enable sharing of information, as well as to avoid living in technological fantasies and rely on pragmatic low tech work instead.