The Ocean as a peacebuilder

Abstract

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14 (the “Ocean SDG”) focuses on the ocean's role in the 2030 Agenda. The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021–2030 (the Ocean Decade), spearheads corresponding ocean research, identifying issues and proposing science-based solutions. While the seventeen SDGs recognize the importance of a peaceful society for this world, the SDG 14 is not explicit with regard to peace. By reviewing various ocean activities and policies, using examples from the post-World War II history and capitalizing on their own research, the authors of this paper highlight modalities of human relations with the ocean that would support peaceful coexistence of nations. This analysis refers to prominent theories of conflict resolution, peacemaking and peacebuilding. Our conclusion is that adding an explicit peacebuilding dimension to the current ocean research and management practices could not only help nations to make the ocean a critical ally of sustainability, but also support peace in the world. Since human interactions with the ocean are science-intensive, the ocean's peacebuilding potential is inseparable from the objective and cooperative nature of ocean science. One of the qualities of the “ocean we want” is a peaceful ocean. Systematic research on the ocean as a peacebuilder needs therefore to be initiated. However, it requires a dedicated transdisciplinary methodology, which does not yet exist. The Ocean Decade has the potential to bring together the currently disconnected peacebuilding- and ocean-research communities and co-design methodologies and practices to fully use the ocean's capacity as a peacebuilder.