Introduction: Bringing together maritime crime & policing scholars and professionals

The seas and oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface and 80 percent of world trade by volume travels by sea. It is remarkable, especially given the abundant scrutiny of maritime security, that as a subject for professional and academic study, there is hardly any analytical interest in maritime crime and policing. All in all, the origins of one of the biggest criminological ideas (the panopticon) and that of policing principles (Peel’s) are maritime. From the oceans of interlinked maritime crimes, the people go to irregular maritime threats at the littoral sea, a specific maritime domain, which, according to Arabinda Acharya, has received barely any proper attention, whereas crime and chaos in the littoral could potentially undermine security and prosperity on a global scale. Perhaps one of the most neglected, yet interlinked, as well as irregular maritime crimes is that of illegal land reclamation.