The ocean is given an ever-greater role in a 'planetary zoning plan'. Under concepts such as Blue Economy, industrial projects and investment are (or will be) carried out in the sea. They are based on the idea that man must put all that is pristine into 'culture' and subdue and colonize 'wilderness' (in this case, the sea and the deep sea). Yet, does the sea have its word to say? A spectacular new trend is deep-sea mining (in which Belgium plays a prominent role). This new industry is to take place deep in the ocean, 4 to 5 kilometers below sea level and de facto escapes our view. It continues unabated, but there is hardly any debate. Its excavators are shrouded in industrial secrecy, its impact justified by inadequate scientific research.

Greet Brauwers graduated as an audiovisual author at KASK. She’s a journalist, makes documentaries and films, and coordinates socio-artistic projects in which participation, meeting and exchange of knowledge are central.

Raf Custers is a writer, doc-maker, historian (KU. Leuven, interbellum/Latin America/semiotics), singer-performer and freelance journalist.

In this paper we argue that international legal imaginaries reproduce the ocean as an engine of racial capitalism. We examine the 1983 Saudi Independence case, where the Dutch Supreme Court examined the lawfulness of a strike of seafarers from the Philippines. In the process, the courts sought to determine which groups of logistical workers had legal recourse, and where and how they could use it. Taking place during the heyday of the logistics ‘revolution’ that sought to establish logistics, like law, as an apolitical science (Cowen 2013; Chua forthcoming), the Saudi Independence case makes it possible to explore how land-based international law itself is fully imbricated in the ocean, but nonetheless has long drawn on imaginaries of a divide between land and sea. Given that the Philippines is currently the global largest supplier of foreign labor aboard container ships, and the Netherlands has become a hub for maritime dispute settlement cases, we examine the deliberations for the Saudi Independence case to show how the pretense of neutrality itself came to act more broadly as an accumulation strategy, and in so doing reproduced the widespread devaluing of racialized workers’ more situated understandings and engagements with both ocean and land. International law criminalized resistance by drawing on conceptions of the ocean as an outside space supposedly separate from land, thereby carrying forward oceanic legacies of enslavement into the science of logistics. As such, international law operated as an agent of racial capitalism rather than an outside arbiter of its effects.

Arjîn Elgersma is a social theorist interested in the frictions as well as intersections between different Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions through exploring the seemingly fleeting moments in which the consolidation of a racial logistical capitalism takes place – as well as being resisted. He is a tutor in sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Jess Bier is an Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she studies the social and political geographies of science and technology. She is the author of Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge (MIT Press, 2017).