Keele Research Repository

In this chapter I propose a time and place of birth for maritime security. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, I locate the original context from which maritime security arose in a foundational violent event that bore witness to the presence of different visions of order at sea. I document how the sudden irruption of activist non-state actors into the maritime assemblage challenged the traditional statist construction of the sea. I locate that event in the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship, “Rainbow Warrior”, by French secret service agents on 10 July 1985, in Auckland harbour, at 23h45. At that moment maritime security was born as a complex, evolving field of relationships housing inter alia, state and non-state actors, forces of stasis and change, and practices of military technocracy and radical democracy.