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

The research distinguishes carefully between individual prejudice and structural racism, drawing on work by psychologists and sociologists who have mapped how discrimination becomes embedded in institutions. Individual prejudice typically occurs face to face, through microaggressions, hate speech or overt hostility. Structural racism, by contrast, is a web of interconnected elements embedded in legislation, policies and institutional practices that perpetually disadvantage racial minorities, even when individuals working within those systems hold no personal racist beliefs. The study cites evidence that structural racism manifests notoriously in housing, employment and the justice system, and it argues that supremacist attitudes also hide behind distancing strategies such as claims of color-blindness, whereby many white people detach themselves from responsibility and avoid discussing racism altogether. Philosopher Charles Mills describes this as a self-shielding tactic, in which pretending not to know functions as a channel that dismisses the oppressive realities of white supremacism.

Recent survey data underscore the scale of the gap between perception and reality. A 2025 Pew Research Centre survey of more than 5,000 respondents in the United States found that optimism about racial reform, which stood at 52 percent of US adults after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, had dwindled to 27 percent by 2025. Among Black respondents, 67 percent believed that meaningful reform remained a pipe dream. Ironically, 58 percent of white Americans believed racial equality had been restored. The study also points to a Gallup finding that 64 percent of US citizens consider racism against Black people to be widespread, and to research by the German Centre for Integration and Migration, which found in 2022 that 90 percent of respondents in Germany believed racism existed there. United Nations expert reports on the United Kingdom have concluded that discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic, while the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has reported that four out of ten Black people in Europe are stopped by police allegedly because of their skin color.

Central to the study is a genealogy of how racial ideology has adapted across economic eras, from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, imperialism and contemporary neoliberal globalization. Race, the author emphasizes, has no biological cogency: humans share roughly 99 percent of their DNA, and modern scholarship treats racial categories as political inventions created to grant power to white people and legitimize the subjugation of people of color. Racial hierarchies emerged historically around the fifteenth century and gained momentum alongside the transatlantic slave trade, colonial expansion and capitalist accumulation. The study documents how religion, culture, pseudo-science and economics were each mobilized to justify racial classification, from cherry-picked Christian doctrines that framed Black people as a cursed race, to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to distortions of Darwinian evolution that recast imperial domination as ‘survival of the fittest.’ Legal instruments such as the Jim Crow laws and South Africa’s apartheid pass laws then entrenched segregation long after slavery’s formal abolition.

One of the study’s most detailed case studies concerns education and academic publishing, arenas the author describes as supposed champions of open inquiry that have themselves been captured by supremacist gatekeeping. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration proclaims that education shall strengthen respect for human rights and promote tolerance and friendship among racial groups, yet the study argues that Western curricula continue to elevate whiteness at the expense of other races, teaching slavery and colonialism in sanitized versions while concealing colonial atrocities such as German genocide in Namibia and British torture of Kenyan freedom fighters. In publishing, the author describes subtle gatekeeping coded in routine rejection reasons, including demands to tone down criticism of imperialism, reduce word counts that would otherwise cut off criticism, or conform to Western-prescribed methodology. Empirical studies corroborate the pattern: research on geoscience found that only about 30 percent of papers on African topics were written by African authors, while studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global oncology documented persistent under-representation of sub-Saharan African authorship.

The study links these knowledge hierarchies to global capitalism, arguing that supremacism sustains a Western hegemonic system in which might is treated as right. Through trade ploys described as colonial-based commodity racism, including control of plants and seeds, and through raced markets, capitalism is said to manufacture poverty in the Global South while marginalizing it in economic relations. The author invokes Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, in which radical disparities in wealth distribution are purposely reproduced as small doses of death in the daily lives of subaltern populations. Trade frameworks such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act are criticized for tying market access to US-defined benchmarks of liberal governance, and the funding dependence of African institutions, with the African Union receiving nearly 70 percent of its operational funding from Europe, is presented as a mechanism of quiet capture that erodes institutional independence.

International human rights law offers little shelter from these dynamics, the study finds, because laws enacted in good faith are subverted by institutional practice. The United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010 and the Treaty of Lisbon, which made the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union legally binding, are cited as milestone legislation that nonetheless coexists with pervasive, well-documented racism. The now-defunct Rwanda Asylum Plan, struck down by four separate courts as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations, is presented as an example of how governments persist with policies widely denounced as racist even after legal defeat. The paradox, the author argues, is devastating for the credibility of universal rights: it seems implausible that universal rights can be attained in environments that condone supremacism, prejudice and racial stereotyping, and many in the Global South consequently view the human rights agenda as an extension of disguised colonialism.

The study also engages critically with psychological theories of racism’s origins, including Frances Welsing’s Cress theory of color-confrontation, which posits that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation in a world where most people are non-white. The author reviews objections from scholars such as Bernard De Montellano, who found the albinism claim scientifically baseless, and from critics who argue the theory distracts from the political economy of racism, exemplified by historian Barbara Fields’s warning that slavery’s chief business was the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco rather than white supremacy. The study concludes that the real drivers of supremacism are historical capitalist economic factors, profit accumulation through cheap labor and the fear of losing unearned imperial and neocolonial privileges, rather than genetics.

Resistance, the study insists, must come from both sides of the racial divide, because complicity sustains the system. Philosopher Iris Marion Young’s social connection model holds that people are responsible for structural discrimination by virtue of participating in the institutions they condemn, through employment, volunteering or funding. The author cites Steve Biko’s call for Black people to reclaim agency and Nelson Mandela’s reminder that no one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, since racism is a taught behavior. At the same time, the study argues that white complicity persists through color-blindness, white fragility and tokenism, the perfunctory hiring of minority members to create a false impression of inclusiveness while denying them real influence over policy. Emerging counter-currents, including South-South cooperation through BRICS and the decolonial drive toward delinking from the colonial matrix, are flagged as signs that the cycle of coloniality may be nearing its end.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: universal human rights and global justice cannot be attained when certain groups believe themselves above the structures of international governance, and the greatest threat to international peace and security may not be armed conflict but white supremacism itself, which fuels conflict through capitalism’s profit-maximizing contempt for African lives. Unless there is a proactive policy shift, the author warns, polarization between the West and Africa will deepen, making sustainable global security harder to achieve. Invoking an African proverb that when you shoot a zebra in the black stripe, the white stripe dies too, the study frames racism as a self-defeating scheme in a world where all human beings are enmeshed in the same social fabric, sharing 99 percent of their DNA and, by the terms of every major human rights covenant, the same equal and inalienable rights.

Subject of Research: How white supremacism undermines the universal human rights agenda through structural racism and global capitalism

Article Title: How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda

Article References: Simuziya, N. J. (2026). How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Keywords: white supremacy, human rights, UN Charter, structural racism, capitalism, Global South, colonialism, academic publishing, racial discrimination, institutional racism, necropolitics, decoloniality