Special issue call for papers: Straits, Canals and Choke Points

Maritime choke points—narrow waterways that serve as critical nodes for global trade and national security—currently deserve renewed scholarly attention. To be sure, international law’s relationship to maritime choke points has long revealed the discipline’s deep entanglement with projects of empire, capital, and technological transformation. From the Portuguese-Dutch conflicts in Southeast Asian straits that gave birth to modern international law, to Donald Trump’s contemporary threats on, e.g., Panama, these geographical features have served as crucial sites where sovereignty, mobility, and international legal order converge and conflict. The special issue examines how these geographical features—both natural and artificial—have shaped and have been shaped by international law’s development in historical and contemporary iterations. We also seek to examine how these features currently face acute tensions, as oceans grow warmer, and as geopolitical conflicts increasingly threaten the flow of commerce.

We particularly welcome papers addressing:

• The historical evolution of legal regimes governing maritime choke points, from classical doctrines to contemporary frameworks like UNCLOS, with attention to how these changes reflect broader transformations in international legal order.
• The intersection of security and sovereignty in critical maritime spaces, particularly the governance of international sea lanes, submarine infrastructure and data flows.
• Labour regimes and mobility governance in and around critical maritime infrastructure, examining both historical patterns of labour recruitment and contemporary challenges of maritime work.
• Environmental transformation and legal adaptation, including how climate change affects the material and legal infrastructure of maritime mobility.
• The interaction between artificial and natural choke points in international legal imagination and practice.

The classical law of the sea emerged through encounters at critical maritime junctures. Grotius’s articulation of mare liberum following the seizure of a Portuguese vessel in the Strait of Malacca marked the emergence of a new legal-economic order predicated on Dutch naval power. The subsequent tension between mare liberum and mare clausum played out dramatically in straits, where the free seas met territorial claims. This dialectic continues to structure contemporary legal debates, from disputes over transit passage rights, infringements on the freedom of navigation to questions of environmental protection.

The construction of artificial canals in the 19th and early 20th centuries marked a new phase in the relationship between international law and maritime geography. The Suez and Panama Canals embodied the marriage of imperial ambition with technological capability, while generating novel legal forms to govern these new spaces of mobility. The Panama Canal’s construction relied on complex extraterritorial labour arrangements that brought workers from the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe into a stratified legal regime that prefigured later developments in the law of global labour mobility. Today, these artificial waterways face unprecedented challenges from climate change, with rising sea levels and extreme weather threatening their operation. Often, their surrounding regions have become focal points for security concerns—from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea to attacks on submarine critical infrastructure in the Taiwan Strait and Baltic Sea.

The special issue seeks papers examining how historical developments inform our understanding of contemporary law in the transnational environment. How does the classical law of the sea adapt to new technologies of surveillance and control? What are the implications of submarine data cables, often following historical maritime choke points, for our understanding of maritime space and security? How do environmental changes affect legal regimes premised on static geographical features? And how do these vital waterways figure in broader contests over global order and power?

We invite contributions from scholars in fields such as law, history, geography and anthropology. Papers should engage theoretical frameworks and/or concrete cases.

Participants will be invited to contribute to a special issue in a major peer-reviewed legal journal. Initial drafts of 4,000-8,000 words will serve as the basis for discussion at the conference, with the expectation that papers will be developed into full-length articles through collaborative dialogue among participants.