Abstract
African security concerns tend to reflect a dominant landward focus; regime security, militaries dominated by armies and irregular forces fighting incumbent regimes frame much of the African security landscape, and as a consequence, African maritime matters often come second to a fixation with security matters on land. Since 2006, events off the African coast became more precarious and threatening to the maritime community at large, as piracy became endemic off the Horn of Africa and intermixed with rebel and criminal agendas in the Gulf of Guinea. Although piracy tends to be the current face of African maritime threats, it represents only one strand of a much wider maritime threat landscape. By 2010 international concerns about security in African waters coincided with more explicit African stances to deal with threats to good order at sea. In the meantime international concerns resulted in several United Nations resolutions that set in motion an international response to securitise piracy and deploy naval contingents off the Horn of Africa. It appears that Africa’s seas are drawing an ever-increasing range of actors that brings both security, as well as insecurity to the African offshore domain. Good order at sea has now become an imperative for African decision makers.
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