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Trouble at Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Mel Gurtov
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Trouble is again brewing in the South China Sea (SCS), where six nations compete for control over tiny atolls—the Paracel and Spratly Islands—that probably sit atop important gas and oil reserves. On the surface the dispute over sovereignty would appear to be about two kinds of claims, one based on history, the other on international law—200nm exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and territorial waters that a country may legally claim under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In reality, however, the dispute has more to do with politics and economics—motives based on nationalism, power, and energy needs. Without such motives, the territorial dispute would stand a good chance of being quietly resolved through diplomacy or adjudication; with them, the dispute stands a good chance of leading to serious conflict.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 54 , December 2012 , e174
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

Footnotes

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.