Ocean Rules: UNCLOS, EEZs, and the Real Map of Power

In the late twentieth century, states quietly redrew the world map without moving a single land border. Through UNCLOS and related agreements, they carved the oceans into belts of jurisdiction and rights, transforming open water into a layered legal landscape. Ocean Rules reveals how that settlement now underpins energy systems, food supplies, digital communication, and naval strategy, making the law of the sea one of the most consequential yet least understood pillars of world politics.

Moving from historical debates over free seas and closed seas to contemporary struggles over Arctic shelves, South Pacific fisheries, and fibre-optic routes, the book shows how legal lines decide who can drill, fish, patrol, and lay undersea cables. It explains exclusive economic zones, continental shelves, straits regimes, and high seas governance in clear, non-technical prose, while tracing how they are negotiated, contested, and enforced. Case studies of maritime boundary disputes, seabed claims, and fisheries crises illuminate when legal frameworks dampen conflict and when they harden rivalries. Institutional chapters unpack the roles of courts, tribunals, and commissions in international adjudication, without assuming legal training.

For students of international relations, history, and law, as well as policy practitioners and informed general readers, Ocean Rules offers a way to read the oceans as strategists, diplomats, and coastal communities do. It connects doctrinal rules to resource geopolitics, environmental change, and the everyday workings of global trade and security and trade infrastructure. Readers come away with a structural understanding of ocean governance: how UNCLOS and its offshoots allocate authority and risk, why commercial assets at sea have become security flashpoints, and what is at stake as climate change, deep-sea mining, and new technologies press against the limits of an ageing but still vital ocean order.

Saoirse Kelleghan writes about the ways law, geography, and power intersect in the governance of the oceans. Working at the boundary of legal analysis and political understanding, Saoirse is drawn to questions that sit awkwardly between disciplines: how a technical delimitation rule becomes a foreign policy crisis, or how a fibre-optic cable route reshapes strategic thinking. This book reflects a long-standing engagement with the law of the sea, international relations, and the history of empire and decolonisation.The perspective throughout is consciously global, attentive to both major maritime powers and smaller coastal and island states whose voices are often sidelined. Saoirse treats legal texts not as self-contained systems but as archives of bargains, fears, and hopes, always asking whose interests particular formulations serve. A sensitivity to cartography and the lived experience of coasts informs the writing, bringing to life worlds that can otherwise appear inhumanly abstract.Ocean Rules grows out of years of following maritime disputes, institutional developments, and emerging technologies, with an eye to their cumulative effect on the shape of global order. Saoirse aims to offer readers neither advocacy nor cynicism, but a clear view of how ocean law actually works when it meets politics, profit, and changing seas.