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This article explores maritime protection zones (MPZ), which are being created in the territorial waters of a number of European states. Through the work of Gaston Bachelard and Peter Sloterdijk, the article analyses maritime zonation as a paradigmatic global security mechanism. It examines how maritime spatial planning seeks to reconfigure sea-space into multi-dimensional spheres of predictability and rationality. These processes, it proposes, seek to routinize the use of sea-space and reconcile tensions between the governance of land and sea, and between fixed infrastructure and mobile capital flows. The political and economic redistribution at stake in the construction of a global network of vast maritime zones, which act as hubs of wealth creation and environmental management, creates further tensions where commercial and military security imaginaries meet local and ecological interests. The article traces the ontology of multi-dimensional zonation and concludes that space which emerges from a pluralist and less anthropocentric understanding of the maritime would provide more effective security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines power relations along the African coast of the Indian Ocean in terms of space and time. Spatial strategies, it argues, are swiftly emerging through zoning mechanisms which territorialise the governance of ocean space. These strategies can supplement and disrupt more traditional temporal strategies, which facilitate speed and freedom of movement for commercial and military traffic. The article focusses on the US proposition to provide maritime security sector reform to African coastal states as a form of temporal strategy designed to shape new zoning practices in favour of freedom of movement. The paper concludes by arguing that the US strategy implies a policing approach that generates maritime surveillance capacities along land–sea lanes of communication. It contrasts this surface form of knowledge with the need for African coastal states to generate the sort of oceanographic data presently undergirding the emerging blue economies of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]