Ocean Crime Narratives: A polyhedral assessment of hegemonic discourse on environmental crime and harm at sea (1982-present)

Introduction

With the latest international Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982), narratives on environmental crimes and harms at sea have changed their views of ocean governance, sustainability, and human rights, and are now shaping an international, hegemonic discourse. A growing, under-examined corpus of contemporary literary and filmic narratives discusses environmental criminality at sea as subject to contested international and state jurisdiction, harmful to oceanic sustainability and threatening human rights, and uncertainly poised between crime and harm.

Discourse Contributors

Literature and film are only part of the discourse around environmental criminality at sea, since policymakers, lawyers, and scientists are its main producers. How do discourses in the cultural and scientific realms co-create conceptions, arguments, and ideas that underpin the actual international regulations and policy negotiations around environmental crime and harm at sea?

Project Objectives

OCN responds to this new challenge with three objectives:

1. To analyze the narratives around environmental crime and harm at sea in a new, hitherto unexamined corpus of post-1982 literature and film.
2. To conduct a novel narrative analysis of environmental sea crime and harm discourses aiming for dissemination and governance from the perspective of oceanography, green criminology, and political ecology.
3. To produce a polyhedral assessment of hegemonic, international discourse on environmental crime and harm at sea today.

Areas of Focus

OCN examines a post-1982 corpus of literary, filmic, and expert narratives dealing with three areas of harm and crime:

a) Exploitation of biological and mineral marine resources.
b) Toxic waste and plastic dumping.
c) Harmful climate-change effects on oceanic ecosystems.

Methodology

The project tests an interdisciplinary analysis of discursive practices to provide a fresher, critical view of hegemonic, international environmental crime discourses at sea, which determine definitions of criminality and aim to safeguard the future sustainability of our oceans.