The study’s methodology is what sets it apart from much of the existing literature on the region. Rather than offering a country-by-country descriptive tour, the authors apply a narrative review of government and institutional documents, treaty texts and peer-reviewed publications, and then compare the strategic engagement of twelve major and middle powers alongside four small and island states on a consistent set of variables. This comparative table, the authors argue, allows claims about the regional order to rest on evidence rather than assertion. They also embed a human security and small-state agency perspective within the comparative analysis itself, rather than treating it as an afterthought, and they evaluate how economic exposure translates into chokepoint vulnerability and threats to human security.

The analytical stakes are enormous because of geography. The Indian Ocean links the world’s principal energy producers in the Persian Gulf to the largest consumers in East and South Asia, and it hosts several of the busiest maritime chokepoints on Earth, including the Strait of Hormuz and the sea lanes approaching the Strait of Malacca. According to data cited in the study from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and United Nations trade bodies, disruptions at these narrow passages ripple directly into global inflation and supply chains, as recent disturbances around Hormuz have demonstrated. Whoever secures, or threatens, these arteries holds leverage over the economic life of billions of people, which explains why navies from Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, Paris, London and beyond now patrol waters that were once considered distant from their core interests.

The historical sweep of the paper reminds readers that this attention is not new. From the rise of Islam through 1750, as the economic historian K.N. Chaudhuri documented, the Indian Ocean sustained a vast commercial civilisation of monsoon-driven trade long before European arrival. The age of empire then turned the ocean into a British lake, a dominance examined by scholars such as Ashley Jackson and John Darwin. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 dictum on the influence of sea power upon history, and K.M. Panikkar’s 1946 warning that Indian history had been shaped by neglect of the sea, framed the strategic anxieties that resurfaced after the Cold War, when superpower rivalry in the region, chronicled as early as the 1970s and 1980s, gave way to today’s multipolar contest.

What has changed is the number and variety of players. The study catalogues an extraordinary range of strategic engagements: the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy and the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom; China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its so-called string of pearls of ports and facilities, a concept first analysed by Gurpreet Khurana in 2008; India’s maritime security strategy and its expanding web of agreements, from a comprehensive strategic partnership with Australia to coast guard harbour development in the Maldives and a maritime rescue centre with Sri Lanka; France’s self-declared resident power role in the southwest Indian Ocean; Japan’s economic cooperation in the Middle East and Africa; and the growing naval ambitions of middle powers such as Türkiye, which is preparing its first aircraft carrier. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia have sought footholds, from a proposed Red Sea naval base deal to aid diplomacy across the region’s least developed countries.

Against this crowded field, the paper’s central mechanism comes into focus. Infrastructure loans, port construction, coast guard vessels, hydrographic surveys and security assistance all arrive with strategic strings attached, and the states that accept them, small island developing states such as the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Sri Lanka, gain real capabilities they could not otherwise afford. Yet the same dependence concentrates exposure. When external powers compete, the littoral states become arenas for base negotiations, debt leverage and diplomatic pressure, as the abandoned Chinese-linked project in the United Arab Emirates after American intervention illustrated. The authors’ testable proposition is that this competition does not distribute risk evenly: it accrues precisely where fiscal buffers, maritime domain awareness and regulatory control are thinnest.

The human security dimension sharpens the argument further. The study draws on research into coastal hazard vulnerability in India, post-disaster mobilities in small island developing states, and disaster risk reduction two decades after the Indian Ocean tsunami, to show that maritime insecurity is not only about warships. Non-traditional threats, including piracy, trafficking, illegal fishing, climate-driven displacement and the fragility of undersea communication cables, which Observer Research Foundation analyses have flagged as an underappreciated security domain, bear directly on livelihoods. For island states whose economies and very territories are exposed to rising seas, as adaptation studies from Mauritius demonstrate, the line between strategic competition and human survival is thin indeed.

The paper also engages with contested sovereignty questions that continue to shape the region’s legal geography. The International Court of Justice’s 2019 advisory opinion on the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, and subsequent negotiations over the archipelago’s future, show how decolonisation, base politics and great-power strategy remain entangled. Regional institutions such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association offer a forum for cooperation, but the authors suggest that minilateral groupings and middle-power diplomacy, examined in recent work on the region’s security architecture, are increasingly where the real bargaining happens.

Perhaps the study’s most policy-relevant conclusion is its reframing of stability itself. The authors argue that regional stability depends as much on maritime governance and economic cooperation as on the balance between great powers. In other words, more carrier groups and more basing agreements will not, by themselves, make the Indian Ocean safer. What is needed, on their account, is investment in the governance capacity of littoral states, so that the countries sitting on the world’s most valuable sea lanes are not also the ones least equipped to manage the risks that competition generates. That includes coordinated approaches to chokepoint security, debt transparency in port financing, and human-centred frameworks that treat fishermen, coastal communities and island populations as stakeholders rather than bystanders.

For a region that carries the bulk of intercontinental trade and the energy lifelines of Asia, the message of this analysis is a sobering one. The Indian Ocean’s geopolitical moment has arrived, celebrated in strategy documents from Delhi to Washington to Beijing, but the costs of that moment are being quietly externalised onto its smallest and most vulnerable members. Whether the coming decade produces a governed, cooperative ocean or a fragmented arena of competing spheres will depend, the study suggests, not on who wins the rivalry, but on whether the states that host it are finally given the tools to shape it.

Subject of Research: Geopolitical competition, maritime security and human security in the Indian Ocean region

Article Title: The Indian Ocean at the forefront of contemporary world geopolitics: a conceptual and policy analysis

Article References: Prabhu, S. S., & Mohapatra, N. (2026). The Indian Ocean at the forefront of contemporary world geopolitics: a conceptual and policy analysis. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01771-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01771-4

Keywords: Indian Ocean, geopolitics, maritime security, chokepoints, human security, small island states, Indo-Pacific, China-India rivalry, maritime governance, sea lines of communication, Belt and Road Initiative, strategic competition

Distant water fishing, by definition, describes fleets that harvest marine resources outside their own exclusive economic zones, often under access agreements, joint ventures, or flag arrangements with coastal states in Africa, the Pacific, and Latin America. For Southeast Asian nations, whose own waters are among the most productive and most heavily exploited on the planet, distant water operations have become both an economic outlet and an ecological escape valve. When domestic stocks are depleted or domestic licensing becomes restrictive, vessels and their investors look outward. The new research examines this outward push not as a static fact but as a dynamic system, one that shifts with fuel prices, bilateral agreements, enforcement regimes, and the health of the fish stocks themselves.

The study’s central contribution lies in treating fleet behavior as something that can be characterized quantitatively over time rather than described anecdotally. Rather than simply counting vessels, the analysis focuses on the patterns of activity that emerge when large numbers of fishing vessels operate in concert: where they concentrate, how long they remain in particular grounds, how their presence changes in response to regulatory signals, and how the composition of the fleet evolves as older vessels retire and newer, often larger and more technologically capable ships enter service. This kind of systems-level view is essential because distant water fishing is not merely a collection of independent boats. It is an industry organized around supply chains, processing capacity, ports of convenience, and market demand that spans continents.

Southeast Asia provides a particularly revealing setting for this kind of analysis. The region contains some of the world’s largest fishing nations, with enormous domestic fleets that have historically been supported by fuel subsidies, loan programs, and development policies aimed at expanding seafood production. Those same policy instruments, designed to strengthen food security at home, have inadvertently fueled the capacity that now seeks opportunity abroad. The research highlights this feedback loop: capacity built for domestic waters spills into international ones, and the resulting pressure on foreign stocks can replicate abroad the very overfishing problems the fleets were escaping. Understanding this dynamic is critical for any honest assessment of global fishing effort, because vessels that leave home waters do not simply disappear from the global ledger of exploitation.

The technical challenge of studying distant water fleets has always been data. Fishing vessels operating in remote waters, sometimes under flags of convenience and sometimes with limited transponder coverage, are notoriously difficult to track. The study engages with this problem by synthesizing available information on fleet composition, operational ranges, and the institutional arrangements that govern access to foreign waters. Such synthesis work matters because policy debates about distant water fishing frequently proceed from fragmented or outdated information. Without a coherent picture of how fleets are actually distributed and changing, attempts at regulation, whether by flag states, coastal states, or regional fisheries management organizations, risk targeting the wrong vessels in the wrong places at the wrong times.

One of the most striking themes the research surfaces is the role of governance asymmetry. Coastal states in the waters where Southeast Asian distant water fleets operate often possess limited monitoring, control, and surveillance capacity, while the vessels themselves may be registered in jurisdictions with minimal oversight obligations. This mismatch creates conditions in which illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing can flourish, and it places honest operators at a competitive disadvantage relative to those willing to cut corners. The study situates fleet dynamics within this institutional landscape, showing that the movement and behavior of vessels cannot be understood purely in terms of fish abundance or economics. Where the rules are weak, the fleets concentrate; where enforcement tightens, activity shifts to new grounds. The geography of fishing, in other words, mirrors the geography of regulation.

The implications of these dynamics extend well beyond the fishing industry itself. Distant water fishing touches on food security for coastal communities that depend on fish as a primary source of protein, on the livelihoods of small-scale fishers who compete with industrial vessels for shared stocks, and on the marine ecosystems that absorb the cumulative pressure of decades of industrial extraction. When highly migratory species such as tuna are harvested across vast ocean basins by fleets from many nations, the sustainability of the resource becomes a collective action problem. The research’s systematic account of how Southeast Asian distant water fleets fit into this equation helps clarify which actors bear which shares of the pressure, a necessary precondition for fair and effective international management.

The findings also speak to an ongoing transformation in how the global fishing industry is monitored. Satellite-based vessel tracking, automatic identification systems, and machine-learning analyses of vessel behavior have begun to peel back the opacity that once shielded distant water operations from scrutiny. Studies like this one demonstrate the value of bringing such analytical tools to bear on specific regions and fleet segments. As more nations adopt requirements for electronic monitoring and as regional fisheries management organizations expand their data collection, the possibility of genuine, evidence-based management of high-seas and foreign-access fisheries moves from aspiration toward practice. The Southeast Asian case examined here suggests both the promise of that trajectory and the distance still to be traveled.

For policymakers in the region, the research carries a pointed message: distant water fleets are not an externality of domestic fisheries policy but a direct product of it. Decisions about subsidies, licensing, fleet modernization, and labor standards at home reverberate through fishing grounds on the other side of the world. Conversely, international agreements on fisheries access, port state measures, and transshipment regulation shape the economic calculus of fleet owners in Southeast Asian ports. The study’s systemic framing underscores that meaningful reform requires coordination across this entire chain, from the shipyards and banks that finance vessels to the markets in Europe, North America, and East Asia that consume their catch. Sustainability, in this view, is not a property of individual fishing trips but of the whole interconnected system.

As global demand for seafood continues to rise and wild-capture fisheries approach or exceed their biological limits, the behavior of distant water fleets will only grow in importance. The analysis of Southeast Asian fleet dynamics published in npj Ocean Sustainability provides a rigorous foundation for understanding one of the major forces acting on the world’s ocean resources. It replaces a vague sense of concern about far-water fishing with a structured account of how these fleets operate, where they concentrate, and how they respond to the shifting landscape of regulation and opportunity. In doing so, it gives scientists, managers, and the public something increasingly rare in ocean governance: a clear view of an industry that has spent decades just beyond the horizon.

Subject of Research: The operational dynamics of distant water fishing fleets based in Southeast Asian countries

Article Title: Dynamics of distant water fishing fleets in Southeast Asian countries

Article References: Alam, L., Teh, L., Teh, L., Palomares, M. L., Skerritt, D. J., Issifu, I., Lam, V. W. Y., Villasante, S., Lazzari, N., Kinds, A., Carvalho, A. R., Majluf, P., Aheto, D., Mokhtar, M., & Sumaila, U. R. (2026). Dynamics of distant water fishing fleets in Southeast Asian countries. npj Ocean Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00242-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44183-026-00242-w

Keywords: distant water fishing, Southeast Asia, fisheries, ocean sustainability, overfishing, IUU fishing, fleet dynamics, fisheries management, maritime governance, satellite vessel tracking, tuna fisheries, flag states