The distinction matters because two bodies of international law apply to coercive activity at sea. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides the framework for law enforcement within maritime jurisdictions, including restrained measures that may become necessary for boarding, inspection, detention, hot pursuit and suppression of offenses such as illegal fishing. By contrast, Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations against the territorial integrity or political independence of a state or in other ways inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. The Convention concerns the exercise of regulatory jurisdiction, while the Charter regulates coercion between states. Both regimes contain their own tests, and the same encounter may trigger arguments under both.

Maritime law enforcement is not inherently bloodless. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has described a sequence in which a pursuing vessel first signals an order to stop and may then take measures such as firing across a ship’s bow, with physical force reserved as a last resort. The governing principles of necessity and proportionality require the least harmful effective means, appropriate warnings, attention to human life and a response proportionate to the alleged violation. Domestic coast-guard laws can also authorize force. China’s Coast Guard Law permits necessary measures, including weapons, to stop unlawful infringements or imminent violations at sea, while legislation in the United States, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia grants various powers involving boarding, inspection, detention, weapons or use of force.

The South China Sea makes this familiar legal structure unusually difficult to apply. Coast guards in the region combine civilian regulatory duties in peacetime with possible integration into military command during war or emergencies. Vietnam’s Coast Guard is a specialized component of the armed forces; the United States and Philippine coast guards can operate under defense command in declared war, while Malaysia’s maritime enforcement agency may come under armed-forces control in emergencies, crises or war. This dual institutional role weakens the old assumption that an enforcing agency’s legal character can be inferred from its organizational label. The article also uses the United States as a comparative case because its coast guard has rotated cutters through the region since 2019 alongside naval vessels and exercises with regional partners.

A second source of ambiguity is the convergence of equipment. Law-enforcement vessels may now carry medium- and large-caliber guns, reconnaissance systems, electronic-warfare capabilities and other technologies once associated mainly with warships. A weapon that was once treated as distinctly military may therefore be used by a coast guard during an enforcement operation, and some platforms can perform both roles. Nor can intensity alone provide a clean dividing line. The article notes that the International Court of Justice recognized a spectrum of force, distinguishing armed attacks from less grave forms without excluding lesser coercion from the UN Charter’s framework. Lawful enforcement in cases involving armed smuggling, piracy or resistance can overlap in severity with low-intensity military action, making a simple “light weapons versus heavy weapons” or “low intensity versus high intensity” test unreliable.

Adjudicatory practice adds further uncertainty. In the M/V Saiga (No. 2) case, Guinean customs craft fired solid shots and automatic guns into an unarmed tanker, seriously injuring crew members and damaging the vessel. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea treated the incident exclusively as a breach of the rules governing maritime law enforcement, analyzing necessity, reasonableness and the duty to preserve human life without addressing Article 2(4). In the Guyana–Suriname maritime boundary arbitration, by contrast, a naval order that specified unspecified consequences if a rig did not leave was treated as an explicit threat of force even though no force was used. The two outcomes demonstrate that courts have not formulated a unified, articulated threshold distinguishing excessive police coercion from a prohibited threat of military force.

The proposed alternative treats each coercive act as a function performed within a legal relationship. The first dimension is its target. Coercion directed at a private vessel accused of violating fisheries, customs or environmental rules presumptively serves a regulatory function. An official vessel is more complicated: if it is conducting activities subject to regulation, such as unauthorized marine research or suspected smuggling, enforcement may remain regulatory. If it is exercising sovereign rights or asserting jurisdiction, however, force used to compel its withdrawal or retreat is directed at a sovereign actor and has a military function. The second dimension asks whether the invoked legal basis is domestic regulatory authority, such as fisheries legislation, or a claim to sovereignty, national security or historical rights. The third examines whether the implementation is graduated, proportionate and directed toward compliance rather than punishment, deterrence or physical obstruction of sovereign activity.

The fourth dimension considers the systemic effect if the measure succeeds. If a private vessel complies and the regional balance of sovereignty and factual control remains unchanged, the effect is remedial and order-sustaining. If success means that another state abandons claims, withdraws from disputed waters or acquiesces in a new allocation of control, the effect is transformative and the act is military in substance. The four elements form an integrated lens rather than a mechanical checklist, and no single factor is conclusive. Audio-visual recordings of an operation are proposed as particularly important evidence because they can reconstruct vessel movements, warnings, procedural steps and the intensity of measures used. Such recordings may narrow factual disagreement, although failure to show due regard does not by itself prove that an encounter was military force.

To translate the framework into practice, the article proposes cooperation in fisheries enforcement and marine environmental protection, areas where shared interests do not require settlement of sovereignty claims. A notification system could allow parties to disclose the time, location and scope of fisheries operations before they begin, reducing the risk that routine patrols will be misread as military provocations. The article also suggests joint conservation arrangements, patrols and action against illegal fishing by third-state vessels. For environmental protection, it proposes a regional emergency-response network for oil spills and hazardous chemical leaks, followed by shared monitoring and joint protection of vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs. These measures are proposals rather than established regional programs, and their practical success would depend on participation and agreement among the states involved.

A second proposal is a four-tier incident-response mechanism intended to make each response commensurate with the incident. Ordinary enforcement against private vessels under domestic regulations, with boarding, inspection or fines and no change in regional control, would receive diplomatic attention but no coercive maritime countermeasure. A dispute involving a government vessel engaged in regulated activity, warnings or expulsion with limited systemic effect would lead to diplomatic protest and continued surveillance. A forced confrontation involving a government vessel, a sovereignty claim and forcible expulsion or armed interdiction would prompt strong protests, reciprocal maritime measures and crisis consultations. A military threat directed at military facilities, justified by self-defense and changing actual control would call for high-level negotiations, deterrence and dispute-resolution procedures. The article cautions that technical criteria may themselves be applied selectively, especially during political maneuvering, and that its framework would require further adjustment for extra-regional military activities such as freedom-of-navigation operations. It presents the framework as a possible shared analytical language for moving disputed encounters from competing assertions toward verifiable facts and graduated restraint, not as a demonstrated guarantee of reduced tensions.

Subject of Research: A functional framework for classifying coercive maritime conduct in disputed South China Sea waters

Article Title: “Police force” or “military force”? A functionalist framework for the South China Sea

Article References: Li, X. (2026). “Police force” or “military force”? A functionalist framework for the South China Sea. Frontiers in Marine Science, 13, Article 1967148. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2026.1967148

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2026.1967148

Keywords: South China Sea, international law, maritime enforcement, use of force, coast guards, UNCLOS, UN Charter, functionalism, regional governance, Police, force, military

Verbal harassment was the most frequently reported experience. A total of 69.67% of surveyed operators said enforcement personnel had made them feel less than human, while most reported being shouted at, sworn at or insulted. Physical assault was reported by 24.6% of respondents, and sexual harassment by 4.1%. Demands for bribes were also widespread, with 78.69% reporting such demands. These figures describe the experiences recorded in the operator survey; the abstract does not provide details about survey dates, recruitment, question wording or statistical uncertainty around the percentages.

The authors interpret the survey alongside the officers’ accounts as showing that roadside enforcement cannot be characterized simply as interactions between powerful officers and powerless drivers. The focus-group material indicated that harassment could run in both directions, while bribery could range from a coerced toll to a transaction chosen by the operator. The researchers also report repeated bending of enforcement through elite interference. Drawing on theories of state-produced informality, street-level discretion and political economy, they propose a “discretion in exception” model to explain how unaccountable discretion within a weakly regulated environment may contribute to these outcomes.

The study offers an empirical account of what enforcement encounters can look like for informal transport workers in one Nigerian city, while also presenting a framework for examining relationships between police authority, discretion and informality. Its stated contribution includes documenting the bidirectional and elite-influenced character of Nigerian roadside enforcement and demonstrating how complementary data can be used to study a population that the authors describe as previously unmapped. However, this report is based only on the accessible abstract rather than the full article. The limited information available prevents assessment of the instruments, analytical procedures, subgroup patterns and broader generalizability, and the reported associations do not by themselves establish the causes of harassment, bribery or assault.

Subject of Research: Mixed-methods analysis of law-enforcement encounters experienced by informal transport operators in Ibadan, Nigeria

Article Title: The dynamics of power and vulnerability: an analysis of law enforcement interactions with informal transport operators in Ibadan, Nigeria

Article References: Akogun, O., & Popoola, A. (2026). The dynamics of power and vulnerability: an analysis of law enforcement interactions with informal transport operators in Ibadan, Nigeria. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 381. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01673-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01673-5

Keywords: informal transport, road enforcement, harassment, bribery, police, Nigeria, Ibadan, mixed methods, street-level discretion, dynamics, power, vulnerability

The research, led by Sarah Parry of Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Manchester, together with colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Oxford, and Lancaster University, took the form of a realist review. Unlike a conventional systematic review, which asks whether an intervention works on average, a realist synthesis asks a more granular question: what mechanisms fire in what contexts to produce which outcomes? The team followed the RAMESES reporting standards, searching six academic databases alongside grey literature, and screened 6,174 records down to 45 articles that met their inclusion criteria. Crucially, the evidence base was not left to speak for itself. The researchers refined their initial findings through 32 semi-structured interviews with professionals and people with lived experience of youth mental health crises, testing whether the theoretical account matched reality on the ground.

The scope of the review was deliberately broad. It covered emergency responses for individuals aged 0 to 25, drawing on diverse study designs and stakeholder perspectives, and encompassed the bewildering alphabet soup of models that have emerged internationally: mobile crisis teams, crisis intervention teams, police and clinical early response schemes such as PACER and its multi-agency variant A-PACER, psychiatric emergency response teams, co-response teams, and juvenile mobile crisis programmes. What unites these models is a shared premise: mental health crises are complex, multifaceted events that demand fast responses and multidisciplinary expertise, and no single service, however well intentioned, can meet that demand alone.

The analytical engine of the study was the context–mechanism–outcome configuration, or CMOC. This realist technique breaks down an intervention into the situational contexts that trigger particular reasoning in participants, which in turn produces observable outcomes. Fourteen such configurations were developed and grouped into three thematic domains: the experiences and outcomes of young people and their caregivers, the experiences of the workforce and the quality of cross-agency collaboration, and the organisational impacts and implementation factors that determine whether a model survives beyond its pilot phase. This structure allows the review to move beyond blunt verdicts and explain the causal texture of crisis response.

The findings on what works are strikingly consistent. Effective co-response models were characterised by calm, participatory communication, in which young people were engaged as partners in decisions about their care rather than treated as problems to be managed. Cross-agency collaboration was the second pillar: when police officers and clinicians genuinely worked together, drawing on each other’s expertise in real time, the response was better calibrated to the developmental and clinical needs of the child. The third pillar sat at the system level, in the form of stable funding and interoperable information systems that allowed different agencies to share the information needed for safe, informed decisions. Where these enablers were present, the synthesis found reduced trauma, fewer emergency department presentations, and improved decision-making for patient care.

The contrast with police-only responses was stark. Without clinical support, the review found, police-led interventions heightened distress among young people and increased the use of restrictive practices, including physical restraint and detention. For a child in crisis, the arrival of uniformed officers can itself be traumatising, particularly for young people from communities with strained relationships with law enforcement. The presence of a clinician changes the calculus: it signals that the crisis is being treated as a health event rather than a public order problem, and it brings de-escalation skills and clinical judgement into the moment when they matter most.

Yet the review is candid about the fragility of these gains. Effectiveness varied across contexts, and persistent concerns surround equity, sustainability, and the quality of the underlying research. Overarching factors, including stigma around mental illness, ethical concerns about coercion and consent, and the legal frameworks governing police powers, shaped both implementation and outcomes. In England, for example, Section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 gives police the power to remove a person from a public place to a place of safety for assessment, and recent policy shifts such as the Right Care Right Person approach have sought to redefine the boundary between policing and health care. The review suggests that such boundary-drawing succeeds or fails depending on whether health services have the capacity to absorb the demand that shifts their way.

The workforce domain of the synthesis carries important lessons for service designers. Co-response models ask police officers and clinicians to work across professional cultures with different training, different legal powers, and often different instincts about risk. The review indicates that collaboration is not achieved simply by placing two professionals in the same vehicle; it depends on shared understanding, mutual respect, and organisational structures that support joint decision-making. Where those conditions are absent, joint response can degenerate into parallel response, with each professional defaulting to their own playbook and the young person receiving the worst of both worlds.

The organisational findings are equally sobering for policymakers tempted to launch a co-response scheme as a quick fix. The synthesis found that these models can offer safer, trauma-responsive and equitable crisis care for young people only when embedded within well-resourced, clearly governed systems. Stable funding emerged as a make-or-break enabler, reflecting a familiar pattern in which pilot projects demonstrate promise and then collapse when short-term grants expire. Interoperable data systems were similarly essential, allowing clinicians to arrive informed rather than dependent on fragmentary accounts relayed over the radio. Without robust governance and data infrastructure, the review warns, even well-designed models struggle to sustain long-term impact.

The authors conclude with a clear set of priorities: sustained investment and coordinated strategies to strengthen co- and joint-response crisis systems for young people, integrating mental health expertise at every level, fostering genuine police–clinician collaboration, adopting trauma-responsive and culturally responsive practices, and ensuring the governance and data systems that allow services to learn and improve. Funded by the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research under the Care Responders Study, and approved by the Greater Manchester Research Ethics Committee, the review arrives at a moment when health systems internationally are rethinking who should answer a mental health crisis call. Its central message is both hopeful and demanding: the alternative to police-led crisis response exists, it works, and it is neither cheap nor simple, but for young people in their worst moments, the evidence suggests it is worth every pound and every hour of cross-agency negotiation it requires.

Subject of Research: Police–clinician joint and co-response models for youth mental health crisis care

Article Title: The care responders study: a realist synthesis of police–clinician joint and co-response models for youth mental health crises

Article References: Parry, S., Eve, Z., Oakes, L., Wong, G., Galvan, P., Akhtar, A., Edwards, S., & Lobban, F. (2026). The care responders study: a realist synthesis of police–clinician joint and co-response models for youth mental health crises. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08572-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08572-2

Keywords: youth mental health, co-response models, police, crisis intervention, realist review, mental health practitioners, trauma-responsive care, emergency services, cross-agency collaboration, restrictive interventions, health services research, BMC Psychiatry

The European approach to AI is frequently marketed as a third way, an alternative to both an AI-powered surveillance capitalism and an AI-powered surveillance state. Landmark instruments such as the AI Act, the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act are held up as proof that Europe can foster trustworthy AI while safeguarding democratic values. The word while does heavy lifting here, signaling a compromise between value systems that are supposedly reconciled rather than traded off. Knopp argues that this compromise is not merely a policy stance but a mode of justification, one that selectively absorbs some criticisms while excluding others in order to establish the moral conditions under which data extraction becomes possible at all.

The case at the heart of the study is the Hamburg police’s trial of automated behavioral recognition on Hansaplatz, a square in a predominantly migrant neighborhood undergoing gentrification. The system relies on algorithmic pose estimation: digital video frames are converted into vector graphs, producing what proponents call digital skeletonization, a normalized, decontextualized and depersonalized representation of human bodies. Unlike facial recognition, the software strips away body size, skin color, hair, clothing and body shape, then classifies movements against a predefined set of police-relevant activities such as beating, kicking or defensive posture. A three-month proof-of-concept ran in 2023, and by February 2025 the city parliament had passed the first German law explicitly permitting police to transfer both anonymized and non-anonymized surveillance data to external partners for machine learning.

Getting to that point required enormous sociotechnical investment, what the study, drawing on the pragmatist sociology of Laurent Thévenot, calls form investments. The square itself had to be engineered into something like a laboratory, with AI-ready cameras, an interoperable CCTV system, high-security data infrastructure and an unobstructed sightline across the surveilled space. CCTV operators had to learn to label the system’s outputs, maintain performance logs and interpret the different ways it produces false alarms. Because public spaces rarely yield sufficient footage of atypical behavior, police in Mannheim, where the system was first implemented, even staged show fights in front of cameras, with riot police enacting scripted violence to generate training data. These theatrical performances, the study notes, risk inscribing selective police assumptions about what violence looks like directly into datasets and classification algorithms.

Knopp’s central analytical move is to name these costs data sacrifices. Datafication, he argues, is never a neutral capture of reality but a costly operation of appropriation, exclusion and reductive generalization, one that abstracts traces of events from the complex situations in which they occur. The concept does double duty: it highlights the material and social expenses of formatting the world into data, and it foregrounds the critical agency of social actors who point out what has been disregarded. Where the influential notion of the boundary object emphasized dynamic compromises between local knowledges, the data sacrifice directs attention to the moral work that presents these efforts and exclusions as worthwhile contributions to a higher common good.

Using Critical Discourse Analysis of 57 parliamentary documents spanning from the conservative opposition’s first request in May 2019 to the passage of the new law in February 2025, the study reconstructs five suborders of worth through which the system was justified and attacked: security, individual freedom, social justice, automation and experimentalism. The conservative CDU opened the debate with a catastrophic picture of declining safety, describing citizens who hardly dare to walk alone in the dark and squares that had become crime hotspots plagued by fights and knife attacks. Such narratives perform a dual function, establishing the legal grounds for CCTV while constructing moral urgency around the high discursive value of security.

What made the AI project politically viable, however, was not the old zero-sum logic in which freedom is traded for security. Instead, proponents framed automation itself as the compromise. Conventional CCTV was criticized as inefficient, with one Social Democrat noting that officers have to watch twenty screens all day long, while AI promised to automate attentiveness, cut costs and enable real-time preemption. More remarkably, the technology was sold as a civil-liberties upgrade: because pose estimation supposedly erases personal traits, the innocent bystander remains out of sight, is not stored in any records, and, in the words of one conservative parliamentarian, has nothing to fear. This framing allowed the Green Party, historically rooted in surveillance-skeptic social movements, to reposition itself as a supportive but watchful partner, declaring itself open to the outcomes of the trial while endorsing its potential.

The same logic was extended to social justice. Because the stick figures produced by skeletonization carry no age, gender or ethnicity, proponents claimed the system could not discriminate, positioning it as superior both to human operators and to facial recognition, which had once made the identical promise. Critics from the Left Party saw a discriminatory trap instead, arguing that people with physical disabilities whose movements differ from those classified as normal, or homeless people who sleep rough, would be flagged as atypical, and that discrimination begins the moment someone is captured and unjustly observed, not when police intervene. Rather than finding common ground, these critics were excluded from legitimate debate, dismissed as ideological, ignorant or dishonest by parties that otherwise shared the same civic vocabulary.

When present-day failures could not be justified by the system’s actual capabilities, proponents turned to experimentalism, the solutionist order of worth that frames innovation as an end in itself and an external compulsion. Hamburg was portrayed as lagging behind other federal states; AI was declared to be everywhere, making it quite unrealistic not to exploit it; and German-developed software was celebrated as a matter of competing with American and Chinese surveillance markets. Trial and error became the sole pathway to progress, justifying security risks, costly infrastructure and intrusions into civil rights as temporary sacrifices on the road to an imagined future in which all contradictions would finally be resolved. The study argues that this radical temporalizing of moral paradoxes turns the object of criticism into a moving target and undermines public accountability, since evaluations of present failure are always deflected toward a not-yet-existing entity designed to withstand critique.

The paradoxes culminated in the new Hamburg law, which authorizes the transfer of citizen surveillance data to external developers for machine learning and has since been adopted in other German states. Knopp’s conclusion is pointed: the third way does not simply balance innovation and rights, it equips social control and data extraction with moral underpinnings, internalizing select civic values and critics while excluding others, until the industrialization of surveillance itself becomes a civic value. As local AI trials proliferate across Europe, the study suggests that the decisive battles over what algorithms may see, what data they may consume and who pays the price will be fought not in Brussels policy papers but in precisely such local disputes, where the sacrifices are made concrete and the justifications, for those willing to look, become visible.

Subject of Research: Parliamentary justification and critique of data extraction in an AI-based CCTV surveillance trial in Hamburg, Germany

Article Title: Data sacrifices and the ‘third way’ toward AI: justification and critique in local conflicts over automated surveillance

Article References: Knopp, P. (2026). Data sacrifices and the ‘third way’ toward AI: justification and critique in local conflicts over automated surveillance. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03075-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03075-w

Keywords: artificial intelligence, surveillance, datafication, CCTV, police, Hamburg, third way, critical data studies, pose estimation, machine learning, parliamentary discourse, civil liberties