For centuries, freedom of the seas was both a legal principle and a material condition: oceans were extraordinarily difficult to observe, police and control continuously.
But maritime freedom was never politically neutral. Powers with superior blue-water mobility could use open seas for global military reach, trade, resource access and strategic pressure. The same principle that protected navigation could therefore also magnify hegemonic mobility.
Mare Dominium asks what happens when states challenged by that asymmetry seek greater control over adjacent maritime space — and when technology finally gives them increasingly practical means to do so.
An Exclusive Economic Zone is not territorial sea. Coastal states do not possess full sovereignty there, and navigation freedoms remain. Yet in practice EEZs are increasingly treated as strategically sensitive spaces for resources, security, military activity and strategic depth.
The book describes this tendency as the strategic territorialization of maritime space.
This territorialising tendency should not be reduced to a simple appetite for maritime expansion. It can also be understood as a defensive response to the asymmetry embedded in hegemonic use of the open sea.
A naval hegemon benefits disproportionately from a maritime order in which its forces can move globally, conduct surveillance, approach foreign coasts and project power while invoking freedom of navigation. Coastal states that cannot compete symmetrically on the high seas have a structural incentive to push effective defence outward: to monitor, contest and, where possible, control the maritime approaches around them.
Seen from this perspective, disputes over military activity in EEZs and freedom-of-navigation operations are not only technical disagreements about legal interpretation. They are also manifestations of a deeper struggle over whose freedom the open sea materially serves, and where legitimate coastal defence ends and excessive restriction of common freedoms begins.
The transition can be expressed in three stages: legal jurisdiction → strategic territorialisation → effective control.
The first belongs to positive law. The second describes political and security behaviour: the tendency to imagine an adjacent maritime zone as part of national strategic space. The third depends on material capability. Satellites, unmanned systems, coastal missiles, seabed sensors, data fusion and persistent surveillance can turn a political claim to strategic depth into an increasingly enforceable reality.
Mare Dominium begins at this intersection. It does not claim that an EEZ legally becomes territorial sea. It asks whether the practical distinction between an open maritime space and a controlled maritime space can narrow even while the formal legal distinction remains intact.
Why technology changes the equation
The political desire to control maritime approaches is old. What is changing is the cost and feasibility of enforcing it. Persistent surveillance, autonomous systems, networked sensors and long-range precision weapons compress the distance between detection, identification and action.
This is why Mare Dominium is not merely another name for maritime jurisdiction. It describes the point at which a centuries-long tendency toward maritime territorialisation acquires a new technological foundation.
Read more about it here.
