The Emergence of Maritime Governance in the Post-War World

Abstract

Shipping highlights some of the adverse effects of globalization as can be seen in examples such as oil spills resulting from maritime accidents, seafarers reduced to `modern slaves' and the risk of pandemics spread through seaborne trade and cruise trips. Against this background, this chapter aims to show that experiences from shipping can reveal some of the legal challenges presented by globalization. The development of the regulation of shipping reveals that globalized industries do not operate in a legal vacuum, but that they require a more subtle form of regulation than the traditional state-centred perspective implies. The chapter describes the regulation of shipping as `conglomeratic' because it is characterized by the involvement of a wide and growing range of different actors in creating and enforcing shipping standards, and attributes its conglomeratic structure to the fact that maritime shipping fully developed its global nature in the post-war era. On the basis of these observations, the chapter argues that an analysis of the shipping industry can serve as a means of better understanding the role of law in processes of globalization.