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ISSN : ISSN 2050-4306 (Online) ISSN 2050-4292 (Print)
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This special edition is dedicated to the rising African maritime security landscape that served to not only draw international attention to piracy, but to the wider ambit of maritime security off Africa and on the world’s oceans in general. While piracy became the primary focus of decision-makers and a defining threat to safety and security at sea off Africa’s eastern shorelines in particular, several other threats coexist with the salient piracy threat.
Events at sea off eastern Africa however, offer much ground to learn from and to draw upon when viewing the emerging threat landscape in the Gulf of Guinea. Eastern Africa thus became the focus of the conference that informs the subsequent sections of this special edition of the Journal of African Union Studies. The conference report and workshop outputs reflected in this special edition turn the attention more deliberately towards the wider expanse of threats off the African coast. The narratives exploit the piracy and anti-piracy features of the contemporary debate as a departure and adds to it in two ways: firstly, by using the piracy focus as a learning experience to draw upon and secondly to move beyond the piracy focus fixation to address three additional themes namely policing, development and leadership. By adding the latter three topics to an existing debate, an attempt is made to address a rapidly evolving debate with important, if not existential, security consequences for Africa. In addition to the well-known and much debated piracy contours of the African maritime security debate, this edition thus adds to the piracy focus by emphasising policing, and promoting development and leadership as neglected areas of concern without which it would be rather difficult to bring about better maritime security governance off Africa.