The Geographical Journal, 2010, doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2010.00383.x
Commentary
The Deepwater Horizon, the Mavi Marmara, and
the dynamic zonation of ocean space
geoj_383
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PHILIP E STEINBERG
Department of Geography, Florida State University, 113 Collegiate Loop, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2190,
USA
E-mail: psteinberg@fsu.edu
This paper was accepted for publication in August 2010
T
wo events dominated the world news during
the second quarter of 2010. First, on 20 April,
an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig
off the coast of Louisiana left 11 dead. In the weeks
following what was first depicted as a contained accident, it became apparent that the explosion had
triggered what may well be one of the major
environmental catastrophes of the past hundred years
with the release of millions of gallons of oil and
natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico. Then, on 31 May,
an Israel Defense Forces commando team raided a
seven-ship flotilla organised by a Turkish nongovernmental organisation that was attempting to
deliver humanitarian aid to residents of the Gaza
Strip. The boarding of the lead ship, the Mavi
Marmara, resulted in nine deaths and has had significant diplomatic repercussions, most prominently for
Israel’s relationship with Turkey but throughout the
Middle East as a whole.
At first glance these two events have little in
common. While the Deepwater Horizon incident was
the result of corporate negligence and the failure of
the US government to adequately regulate and police
economic activities undertaken by the politically
powerful petroleum industry, it was not a calculated
exercise of state power. Indeed, most commentators
wish, in retrospect, that the state had been more powerful in developing and enforcing regulations. By contrast, the Mavi Marmara interdiction was clearly a
willful act of state action, even if the actual shooting of
participants in the aid convoy was unplanned.
The two incidents, however, are linked by their
maritime location. Specifically, both occurred outside
the territorial waters of their coastal states (the USA
and Israel, respectively) but inside their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), the areas of ocean space between
12 and 200 nautical miles from shore in which states
The Geographical Journal, 2010
retain sovereign rights to mineral and living resources
but in which states do not have sovereignty. (The
Deepwater Horizon was located about 41 nautical
miles off the coast of Louisiana while the Israeli military action occurred about 68 nautical miles off the
coast of Israel.)
In the case of the Deepwater Horizon incident,
the rig, although operated by a Swiss company
(Transocean) on behalf of a British petrochemical
giant (BP), was working under a lease from the US
Minerals Management Service, an agency within the
US Department of the Interior, and it was following
(or perhaps not following) US government regulations for drilling in US waters. All parties agree that
because of the rig’s location within the US EEZ, the
USA had the sovereign authority to lease the site,
regulate the drilling process, and lead the long and
difficult process of stopping the flow and organising
the clean-up.
In the case of the Mavi Marmara interdiction, by
contrast, Israel claimed authority in spite of the EEZ
location. If the interdiction had occurred within territorial waters (fewer than 12 nautical miles from shore,
in which the coastal state is sovereign) Israel likely
would have referred to the zone of ocean space in
which the Turkish ships were located as part of its
justification for boarding. Likewise, Israel probably
would have made reference to ocean zonation if the
interdiction had occurred in its contiguous zone
(12–24 nautical miles from shore, where coastal states
have certain policing rights). However, for the governance of non-resource-extraction-related maritime
activities (most notably navigation), the waters of the
EEZ are exactly the same as the high seas beyond 200
nautical miles, and indeed Israel has made no reference to the fact that the intervention occurred within
its EEZ.
© 2010 The Author. The Geographical Journal © 2010 Royal Geographical Society
(with The Institute of British Geographers)
2
Commentary
However, I draw attention here to the EEZ location
of both incidents because the construction of the EEZ
and the ways in which the EEZ location was and was
not used to frame the two incidents points to the
broader ways in which the zonation of space, including ocean space, both reveals and obscures the
co-constitutive relationship between space and
society. The EEZ emerged as a spatial category from
the negotiations over the United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as states sought a
compromise between those that wanted to extend
territorial waters out to 200 nautical miles (or beyond)
and those that sought to preserve maritime freedoms.
The category brokers the tension between the ideal of
the ocean as a space that supports the division of the
world into sovereign states and the ideal of the ocean
as a ‘free’ space of flows that supports commerce
among them. In other words, the EEZ negotiates the
contradictions inherent in the very concept of the
‘international’, which, on the one hand, reaffirms
the fundamental division of the world into sovereign
states but, on the other hand, challenges the myth of
these states’ inviolability by recognising that their
identity is reproduced through the crossing of their
borders. As I have argued elsewhere, the ebbs and
flows between territorialisation and deterritorialisation in the history of ocean governance can be seen as
manifestations of this more general contradiction in
the organisation of the world system (Steinberg 2001).
Here, I assert that the EEZ regime serves as a particularly tangible illustration of the complex tendencies
embodied in the construction of the ocean, and that
this can be seen in the ways in which the two incidents of 2010, like the EEZ regime as a whole, mobilise specific relationships between law, politics, and
culture to construct the ocean as a (problematically)
‘international’ space made (il)legible through apparently static zones.
*
*
*
Although the location of the Israeli intervention in
its EEZ cannot be used to support its legality, consideration of the incident’s EEZ location brings up
broader questions of the overall relevance of
UNCLOS’ zonation of ocean space. If one simply
applies UNCLOS to an analysis of the intervention,
there is little question that Israel violated international
law. UNCLOS specifies five conditions that allow a
warship to board another state’s vessel in places
where high seas freedoms exist: if the boarded vessel
is suspected of participating in piracy, if it is suspected
of participating in the slave trade, if it is broadcasting
to the warship’s territory without authorisation, if it is
without nationality, or if the ship is suspected of being
of the warship’s nationality even though it is flying the
flag of another state (Article 110). Israel has not suggested that any of these conditions applied in the case
of the Mavi Marmara.
The Geographical Journal, 2010
Rather, the IDF bases its justification on the argument that it was enforcing a blockade that, in turn,
was legal because Israel is in a state of armed conflict
with Hamas (Israel Defense Forces 2010). Israel
implicitly argues that this state of war overrides the
high seas freedoms guaranteed under UNCLOS. In
other words, Israel asserts that the ocean in which the
intervention occurred was exceptional not because of
its geographical location (an EEZ) but because of its
social location (within an armed conflict, the space of
which effectively extends out to wherever Israel
announces its blockade line).
It should be noted that many (though not all) legal
scholars dispute one or several aspects of Israel’s
claim (Lynch 2010; Scott 2010; see also the extensively referenced entry for ‘legal assessments of the
Gaza flotilla raid’ at www.wikipedia.com). To accept
Israel’s argument, first, one must acknowledge that
Israel is in a state of armed conflict and that therefore
its blockade is legitimate. Some legal scholars have
asserted that a blockade could never be legal in this
situation because Hamas is not a state, although
others point to examples of blockades against insurgent movements that have been generally accepted
under customary international law, including the US
blockade of the Confederacy during the midnineteenth century Civil War. Nonetheless, it is ironic
that Israel’s claim to the blockade’s legality would be
strongest if it acknowledged Hamas as the legitimate
government of a sovereign Gaza state, something that
Israel is unlikely to do. Second, even some who recognise that Israel has the right to establish and enforce
a blockade against Hamas question whether this
blockade is legal because it has been found by a
number of international institutions, including the UN
Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Commission, to
be punitive in intent. Finally, there are those who
agree with Israel that both the blockade in principle
and this specific blockade are legal but that the intervention as it was carried out was illegal because Israel
used excessive violence in its enforcement.
Each of these points could be debated (and indeed
each has been the subject of numerous legal missives
since the incident), but the salient point here is that by
even engaging in any of these arguments about the
legitimacy of Israel’s blockade one is acknowledging
that the ocean is a space of dynamic social processes as
well as static, legally mandated zones. If one accepts
the possibility that social circumstances may override
UNCLOS’ geographic framework – even if, in this
particular case, one were to reject one or more of the
specific pillars of Israel’s argument – one is implicitly
acknowledging that the ocean is not simply a space
that is divided across a number of zones that lie along
a continuum from territory (internal waters) to nonterritory (high seas). Rather, one is acknowledging that
the ocean is continually reconstructed amidst competing and ever present tendencies toward territorialisation and deterritorialisation. Like the EEZ within which
© 2010 The Author. The Geographical Journal © 2010 Royal Geographical Society
(with The Institute of British Geographers)
Commentary
the interdiction occurred, the events of 30 May suggest
that the ocean is a dynamic space whose rules, norms,
and geographic divisions are continually reconstituted
amidst competing social forces, rather than a stable
space whose functional zones are designated by a
presumably transcendent international law.
*
*
*
The connection between the Deepwater Horizon
incident and the construction of the ocean as a space of
continual reterritorialisation is less obvious.The rig was
operating in the US EEZ on a lease from the US
Minerals Management Service, in accord with US
(non-)regulations. Clean-up is being organised by the
US Coast Guard, and newscasts in the USA routinely
show images of oil washing up on US beaches, alongside stories about the impact that the incident will have
on US coastal fishing communities. When news stories
examine the impact that the spill is having on the water
itself, this point typically is made to support a story
about the impact that ocean pollution will subsequently have on US coastal livelihoods, wildlife, and
beachscapes. The USA has been quick to internationalise the forces behind the incident: the Obama administration insists on calling BP ‘British Petroleum’ even
though it abandoned that name in 1998, and conservatives call for increased drilling in spite of the spill
because oil independence is deemed crucial for
national security. However, the space within which the
spill occurred is rarely, if ever, conceived of as anything
other than a portion of Louisiana’s coastal waters, and
the space that is being impacted is rarely conceived of
as anything other than a series of US coastal zones.
The spatial framework for understanding the Deepwater Horizon incident likely would have been much
different if the spill had occurred 100 years earlier. In
the first decades of the twentieth century, the Gulf of
Mexico was popularised as ‘America’s Mediterranean’
(Ober 1904). Key West, Florida was promoted as
‘America’s Gibraltar’ and the Gulf was understood as
a region that linked the USA with its southern neighbours and, via the newly constructed Panama Canal,
the world (Steinberg 2007). However, this image of
the Gulf as an inland sea that connected the USA with
other nations has long faded from the national imagination. Few Americans (or Mexicans, for that matter)
think of Tampa and Tampico in the same breath. As
Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes:
Political and physical maps of the region bifurcate neatly
at the border of Texas and Tamaulipas – with the significant exception of hurricane-tracking maps, which depict
the Gulf as a uniformly empty blue punctuated by an
ominous, iconic white swirl. The fact that meteorology is
virtually the only representational system in the popular
imaginary that apprehends the Gulf of Mexico as a whole
– and that it does so by extracting humans from the
picture – suggests how powerfully the spread of continen© 2010 The Author. The Geographical Journal © 2010 Royal Geographical Society
(with The Institute of British Geographers)
3
talism and territorial nationalism, and the subsequent
devaluation of ocean space, militates against our ability
to see it as a coherent space of social interaction.
Silva Gruesz (2006, 473)
In the US imagination, the Gulf of Mexico is less a
body of water that connects the nation with its neighbours than a US coastal region. Or, rather, it is several
coastal regions: a ‘pristine’ peninsular Florida Gulf of
sandy barrier islands and a ‘gritty’, swampy Louisiana/
East Texas Gulf of shrimpers and offshore oil rigs.
Between the two lies the forgotten buffer zone of
Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle,
where military bases and shipyards predominate. This
vision fragments further when Americans look southward. To the southeast are the islands of the Caribbean, not usually considered part of the Gulf or its
economy. To the southwest lie Mexico and Central
America, lands that, in the US imagination, are continuations of the arid western USA, not the coastline
that lies across the water from Mobile.
This spatial construction of the Gulf is a zonation of
ocean space very different than that found in
UNCLOS, with its division between territorial seas,
contiguous zones, EEZs, and high seas. Yet it is equally
powerful in determining how we interact with the
ocean, how we extract resources from it, how we
travel across it, and how we pollute it. Zones in the
ocean, whether the legal zones of UNCLOS or the
conceptual zones of people’s imaginations, appear to
be fixed in space and time, and thus they often are
applied to explain the scope (or define the legal
context) of an ocean incident. However, since the
zones themselves are dynamic, their value may lie
more in indicating the level of power of the individuals who are discursively framing an incident than in
identifying the ambit of a regulatory environment.
Indeed, zonation in the ocean is exceptionally volatile, as one would expect for a number of reasons.
First, there is a poor fit between the very idea of
zonation (which implies stability and permanence)
and the geophysical fluidity of the ocean’s materiality;
secondly, the ocean is a three-dimensional space,
which complicates any two-dimensional zonation
system; and thirdly, the ocean is ideologically constructed in modernity as a space beyond zonation and
regulation. For all these reasons, zones within the
ocean are particularly unstable, and contestation over
zonation goes beyond questions of where to draw
lines to include debates over what the zones mean.
For instance, right-wing pundits in the USA decry the
turn from shallow to deepwater drilling in the Gulf as
part of a Federal government initiative to move
resource extraction (and revenue collections) from
state to federal waters. In this example, the geophysical and legal division between ocean regions is
rescripted as a political division. Furthermore,
attempts to draw and define zones in the ocean occur
in the context of an even grander-scale zonation:
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Commentary
drawing the line between land and water. This is
another aspect of zonation in which the oil industry
has been an active player: the North Slope of Alaska
has several artificial islands for oil drilling, constructed by oil companies to exempt themselves from
offshore drilling regulations because these spaces are
effectively removed (or, reclaimed) from ocean space.
*
*
*
As both incidents demonstrate, the zonation of the
ocean is dynamic and arbitrary. The Mavi Marmara
incident demonstrates that the apparently evident
boundaries of UNCLOS can be modified by establishing a blockade, a new kind of zonation that Israel
asserts overrides the zonation codified in UNCLOS.
Meanwhile the Deepwater Horizon incident has
revealed that, notwithstanding the zonal divisions of
state boundaries and constructions of the Louisiana
coast as culturally, economically and geophysically
distant and different from the Florida tourism
economy, a complex maze of currents, fluid dynamic
forces, and food chains connects the fate of holiday
goers in the Sunshine State with the job prospects of
roughnecks and fishers in Louisiana and Texas.
Indeed, the alternate zonations that are possible
when one approaches the ocean from a perspective
informed by its dynamic fluidity are limitless (and this,
of course, puts the lie to the very concept of static
zones). For instance, for a while this Spring, it looked
like Cuba was about to be reincorporated into the
‘Gulf region’ because of the Loop Current, which
some predicted would soon be taking Louisiana oil
around the Florida Keys and into the Atlantic.
Although the international aspect of the Loop Current
received little attention in news coverage, before
rounding the Keys the Current passes just a few miles
off the coast of Havana, after which, in an example of
nature imitating politics, it visits Miami on its journey
northward. The Cuban press was as silent as its US
counterpart in pointing out the spill’s trans-border
aspects, and the Cuban government said little about
the spill’s potential impact on Cuban shores. A search
of the website of the official Cuban newspaper
Granma revealed seven articles through 16 June with
the words ‘deepwater horizon’ but none referred to
the threat to Cuba. Presumably Cuba had calculated
that the impact that coverage of potential dangers to
Cuba might have on tourism and on that country’s
own active offshore drilling program outweighed any
benefit that Cuba might gain from decrying this most
recent threat to Cuban territory from the excesses of
Anglo-American capitalism.
However, notwithstanding this reticence on the
parts of both Cuba and the USA to draw attention to
how the two countries are linked together in a single
Gulf petroleum economy zone, the incident led to
private ‘working-level’ talks between the two states
regarding cooperation on spill surveillance, mitigaThe Geographical Journal, 2010
tion, and clean-up activities (Haven 2010). In this
respect, the former designation of the Gulf as ‘America’s Mediterranean’ may have a second meaning. In
studies of international environmental regimes, the
‘real’ Mediterranean is often singled out as the great
success story. There, in the 1970s, countries around its
shoreline recognised that they were facing a common
pollution problem, and that a cooperative effort was
needed to study the Mediterranean’s geophysical processes and address its sources of pollution. The treaty
that resulted from this effort remains an exemplary
international environmental accord, in particular as it
builds bonds across nations with a wide range of
income levels and political cultures (Haas 1990). One
cannot help wondering if it could serve as a model for
environmental governance in an increasingly polluted
Gulf of Mexico. To do so, however, old zones would
have to be erased and new zones created.
* * *
Almost every introduction to ocean law begins with
a cross-sectional schematic image of the ocean, defining the concepts and relative locations of categories
such as territorial water, the contiguous zone, the EEZ,
the high seas, and the area as well as exceptional
zones like international straits, internal waters delimited by straight baselines, and the extended outer continental shelf. This drawing is as de rigueur in an
international ocean law text as a ‘political’ world map
is in an introduction to international relations or geopolitics. And yet the ocean schematic, like the world
map, can hide as much as it reveals. As numerous
cartographic theorists have noted, the problem with
studying lines on a map is that one’s focus is diverted
from the processes by which those lines are continually being redrawn by map makers, and from the
processes by which their meanings are continually
being reinscribed by map users (e.g. Pickles 2003).
It follows that incidents like those that occurred on
the Mavi Marmara and the Deepwater Horizon can
shed light not just on international law and US oil
drilling regulations but on the fallacies of thinking of
the ocean as a stable set of zones, ordered for specific
uses, and governed at pre-defined degrees of sovereignty. The ocean – like the rest of the world – is
continually being remade by actions that both draw
lines and erase them.
To conclude with a final example from the Gulf
of Mexico, the 1planet1ocean program (www.
1planet1ocean.org) seeks to foster cooperation among
US, Cuban, and Mexican oceanographers and marine
biologists to study the Gulf’s integrated ecosystem.
The project, although fundamentally devoted to international collaboration in ocean science, has an
implicitly political goal. To date, US collaboration in
the effort has been limited to non-governmental
organisations. However, it seems likely that as this
effort merges with technical US–Cuban collaboration
© 2010 The Author. The Geographical Journal © 2010 Royal Geographical Society
(with The Institute of British Geographers)
Commentary
to monitor and respond to the Deepwater Horizon
disaster, the potential for spillover from the ‘epistemic
community’ of scientists into the broader world of
policy-making is enhanced.
It would be striking if an accident aboard a Louisiana oil rig operated by a Swiss company for a British
petrochemical giant were to catalyse a new era of
cooperation between the USA and Cuba. But such are
the links that can occur when one goes beyond seeing
the ocean as a set of territories where zonal categories
are implemented and instead recognises the ocean as
a fluid space in which connections and divisions are
continually being remade.
Acknowledgement
This editorial is inspired by the research of my friend
and colleague, Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald. Ian’s stubborn refusal to accept
official reports of the Deepwater Horizon spill’s extent
has highlighted the impact that it may have throughout the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and serves as a
model of socially engaged, methodologically rigorous, independent scientific research. In addition, I am
grateful for input from the anonymous reviewer.
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© 2010 The Author. The Geographical Journal © 2010 Royal Geographical Society
(with The Institute of British Geographers)
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