(Part III of this article appeared yesterday (04)

Maritime Security and the Blue Economy amid Winds and Waves

The post-war reconfiguration of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy inevitably drew the country’s gaze toward the sea. As the island sought to redefine its global relevance beyond the narratives of conflict and sovereignty, the Indian Ocean emerged as both opportunity and test. Strategic geography, once a source of vulnerability, began to be reframed as a foundation for growth, connectivity, and influence. The maritime domain offered a new framework through which Sri Lanka could integrate security, development, and diplomacy — a shift from land-locked anxieties to ocean-oriented aspiration. It is within this context that Colombo’s engagement with the Blue Economy and maritime security took shape, reflecting an effort to navigate the winds and waves of regional competition while reclaiming the sea as a space of national renewal and international partnership.

Across decades, Sri Lanka’s small-state strategy reveals a consistent pattern: the blending of prudence with principle, and the translation of anxiety into diplomacy. The island’s leaders—regardless of ideological orientation—have confronted the same structural dilemma: how to engage the world without being engulfed by it. Strategic ambiguity, embedded in a besieged mentality yet sustained by a peace drive, has been the enduring response.

The persistence of this strategy underscores a central paradox of Sri Lankan foreign policy: that autonomy must be defended not through isolation, but through participation on carefully negotiated terms. For Sri Lanka, the ocean is both lifeline and frontier—the defining feature of its geography and the principal determinant of its security and prosperity. The island’s position astride the main east–west maritime artery renders it uniquely exposed to shifts in global commerce, naval presence, and ecological change. Yet this same exposure also endows Sri Lanka with strategic visibility and economic potential. The sea, in Sri Lanka’s worldview, is not merely a boundary but a medium through which power, trade, and ideas flow.

For a small island state such as Sri Lanka, maritime security extends beyond the traditional concerns of safeguarding territorial waters, sea-lanes, and coastal infrastructure. It involves the broader task of reducing vulnerabilities and strengthening the capacity to respond to emerging maritime threats—ranging from piracy, illegal fishing, and environmental degradation to strategic competition among major powers. The modes of operation available to small states in meeting these challenges are inevitably shaped by the moral and material resources at their disposal, as well as by their geopolitical location. In recent years, the notion of maritime security has expanded to encompass the sustainable use of marine resources, the protection of ocean ecosystems, and the responsible exploration of seabed mineral resources that hold both promise and peril. Within this evolving framework, the Blue Economy has emerged as a key integrative concept, linking security, environmental stewardship, and economic diversification. It underscores the understanding that maritime stability and national prosperity are mutually reinforcing—and that enduring security for small states like Sri Lanka depends as much on prudent management and cooperation as on deterrence and defense.

From Vulnerability to Resource Governance

For small island states such as Sri Lanka, vulnerability is not merely an episodic condition but a structural reality shaped by geography, resource endowment, and external dependence. Two interrelated dimensions define this predicament: resource vulnerability and strategic vulnerability. Resource vulnerability arises from the inability to manage, monitor, and exploit oceanic assets effectively, leaving them susceptible to overuse, external extraction, or environmental degradation. Strategic vulnerability, in turn, stems from the asymmetries of power that shape maritime interactions in the Indian Ocean—where the interests of major powers, often couched in scientific or commercial terms, intersect with the sovereign space of smaller coastal states

For small island states such as Sri Lanka, vulnerability is not merely an episodic condition but a structural reality shaped by geography, resource endowment, and external dependence. Two interrelated dimensions define this predicament: resource vulnerability and strategic vulnerability. Resource vulnerability arises from the inability to manage, monitor, and exploit oceanic assets effectively, leaving them susceptible to overuse, external extraction, or environmental degradation. Strategic vulnerability, in turn, stems from the asymmetries of power that shape maritime interactions in the Indian Ocean—where the interests of major powers, often couched in scientific or commercial terms, intersect with the sovereign space of smaller coastal states.

The ocean’s promise is thus shadowed by vulnerability. Offshore and seabed mineral resources exemplify this duality. For Sri Lanka, the potential wealth of the seabed—ranging from hydrocarbons to cobalt-rich deposits—offers significant prospects for diversification and growth. Yet, this same promise can become a liability when exploration activities invite external involvement that outpaces national regulatory or scientific capacity. The entry of Chinese research vessels into Sri Lanka’s territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) has underscored how scientific exploration can blur into geopolitical maneuvering, generating domestic anxiety and diplomatic tension. Similarly, the competing claims by India and Sri Lanka over two tracts in the cobalt-rich Afanasy–Nikitin Seamount demonstrate how overlapping ambitions in resource exploration can translate into strategic contestation, testing the resilience of regional cooperation frameworks.

Sri Lanka’s maritime domain faces multiple pressures: illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing; competition over undersea resources; piracy and trafficking; and the long-term threat of climate change and sea-level rise. These challenges intersect with great-power competition in the Indian Ocean, where naval deployments, port access agreements, and infrastructure financing often blur the line between economic development and strategic dependency. In this environment, maritime security becomes inseparable from resource governance. Sri Lanka’s EEZ—almost eight times its land area—contains vast potential for fisheries, minerals, and renewable energy. However, the capacity to monitor, regulate, and exploit these resources responsibly remains limited. External assistance, while necessary, introduces new asymmetries of dependence.

The path from vulnerability to governance therefore requires institutional strengthening, regional cooperation, and a redefinition of Sri Lanka’s maritime constabulary role—not merely as a defensive function but as a mechanism of stewardship and sovereignty. Effective resource governance is thus both a developmental and a strategic imperative: it enables small states to transform exposure into agency, and to convert the ocean’s uncertainty into a managed space of opportunity.

Blue Economy as Strategic and Developmental Framework

The Blue Economy has emerged as both an economic paradigm and a strategic doctrine for oceanic and coastal states. Broadly defined, it refers to the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and ecosystem health. For small states such as Sri Lanka, the Blue Economy extends the logic of the Green Economy into the maritime sphere—combining environmental stewardship with developmental and geopolitical agency. It recognizes that the sea is not merely a frontier of extraction or defense, but a living system whose long-term health underpins national security and prosperity alike.

For Sri Lanka, located at the heart of the Indian Ocean, the Blue Economy offers a framework to transform vulnerability into opportunity. It links sustainability to sovereignty: by managing marine resources responsibly, the island can assert agency in a domain where traditional hard power is limited. This framework encourages diversification away from dependency on land-based and low-value exports toward ocean-based industries such as marine biotechnology, renewable ocean energy, sustainable fisheries, and coastal tourism. By integrating innovation and environmental ethics, Sri Lanka can build resilience against the twin shocks of climate change and external economic volatility.

The Blue Economy should therefore be viewed not only as a developmental agenda but as a key pillar of Sri Lanka’s maritime strategy. It provides a peaceful and cooperative means of leveraging geographic advantage—turning the Indian Ocean from a theatre of vulnerability into a space of managed opportunity. The island’s active participation in the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), particularly in working groups on fisheries, maritime safety, and blue carbon ecosystems, reflects its emerging role as a norm entrepreneur. By promoting sustainable resource management and equitable access, Sri Lanka projects moral authority within regional diplomacy, consistent with its historical commitment to peace and neutrality.

Nevertheless, the realization of a genuinely “blue” economy remains constrained by several factors. Limited technological capacity, inadequate maritime governance frameworks, and fragmented institutional coordination hinder progress. External financing—while essential for developing port and ocean energy infrastructure—can also reproduce patterns of strategic dependence. Meanwhile, overfishing, marine pollution, and the slow pace of adaptation to climate change threaten both livelihoods and ecosystems. Sri Lanka’s successes include early policy recognition of the Blue Economy’s potential, regional leadership within IORA, and emerging partnerships in ocean observation and renewable energy. Yet, its challenges lie in translating these commitments into enforceable regulations, scientific capacity, and integrated governance mechanisms.

The way forward requires Sri Lanka to consolidate its Blue Economy strategy around three priorities: first, investing in marine science and data infrastructure to enhance resource governance; second, fostering public–private partnerships that align innovation with sustainability; and third, deepening regional and multilateral cooperation to ensure that the Indian Ocean remains a space of shared prosperity rather than strategic rivalry. By doing so, Sri Lanka can make the Blue Economy not only a developmental framework but also a foundation for a new, peace-oriented maritime order.

Despite the cooperative rhetoric surrounding the Blue Economy as a strategic and developmental framework, its security dimension remains inescapable. The Indo-Pacific discourse has intensified naval activity and security partnerships across the Indian Ocean, at times reducing smaller coastal states to little more than strategic real estate. For Sri Lanka, the challenge lies in participating in these frameworks—through exercises, information-sharing, and maritime domain awareness—without being drawn into alliance politics.

In recent years, Colombo has pursued a delicate equilibrium: engaging with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) countries on maritime safety while sustaining defence cooperation with China and aligning with India’s Neighbourhood First policy. This calibrated engagement reflects the broader pattern of strategic ambiguity typical of small-state behaviour. It enables Sri Lanka to derive capacity-building benefits from multiple partners while avoiding deeper entanglements.

Here again, the island’s besieged mentality resurfaces—not as paralysis but as prudence. The lingering fear of encirclement translates into a strategy of controlled openness: welcoming maritime partnerships but resisting their militarization. By emphasizing the Blue Economy, Colombo shifts the discourse from confrontation to cooperation, repositioning itself not as a pawn in great-power rivalries but as a facilitator of inclusive ocean governance.

The Ocean as Moral and Strategic Space

The moral geography of the Indian Ocean is also reflected in the island’s collective psychology—a continuous oscillation between a besieged mentality and cosmopolitanism. The sea evokes both fear and freedom: the fear of encirclement and exploitation, and the freedom of connection and exchange. This dual consciousness, formed through centuries of colonial intrusion and maritime coexistence, continues to inform Sri Lanka’s strategic imagination. To perceive the ocean as moral space is, therefore, to reconcile these inner contradictions—to convert the anxiety of smallness into an ethic of responsible openness.

For Sri Lanka, the sea is not only an economic and security frontier but also a moral geography. The island’s historical experience has always been marked by duality: exposure and connection, vulnerability and possibility. As an island, Sri Lanka has lived with the perpetual tension between openness and insecurity—its shores have invited commerce, migration, and cultural fertilization, yet also conquest and exploitation. This tension gives moral depth to the maritime imagination: the ocean is not merely a space of movement or material extraction but a field where moral choices are enacted—between domination and reciprocity, extraction and stewardship, isolation and coexistence. The moral properties of this space arise from its capacity to bind peoples and histories across differences, to remind coastal societies of their interdependence, and to reveal the ethical consequences of maritime engagement. In this sense, Sri Lanka’s relationship with the Indian Ocean has never been simply strategic; it has been existential—a dialogue between geography and responsibility.

Beneath this duality lies a deeper social–psychological rhythm: the interplay between a besieged mentality and a cosmopolitan impulse. The sea has long evoked for Sri Lankans both fear and fascination—the fear of encirclement, invasion, and dependency, and the fascination with connection, exchange, and self-renewal.

The besieged mentality stems from the memory of colonial exploitation and from the perpetual sense of smallness in a world dominated by larger powers. Yet, alongside this anxiety runs a countercurrent of cosmopolitanism rooted in centuries of maritime coexistence—Arab, Malay, Indian, European, and African influences that made the island a microcosm of the Indian Ocean world. These two sensibilities—protective insularity and ethical openness—have coexisted, shaping Sri Lanka’s moral geography of the sea. To imagine the Indian Ocean as a moral space is thus to reconcile these inner contradictions: to transform the fear of exposure into a philosophy of connection, and to redefine security as the practice of responsible engagement.

Understanding the ocean as moral space also means acknowledging its place in the making of maritime moral geography. Across centuries, the Indian Ocean has been a medium of moral and cultural exchange: the spread of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity; the circulation of traders, monks, and ideas; the coexistence of diverse communities bound by the ethics of navigation and hospitality. These histories form a counter-narrative to imperial cartographies that reduced the sea to a zone of control. By reclaiming this moral geography, Sri Lanka situates itself within a long tradition of ethical connectivity—one that predates and transcends the modern nation-state. The island’s strategic choices, therefore, cannot be divorced from this inheritance: to act justly in the oceanic realm is to honor a legacy of coexistence and shared stewardship.

From this perspective, framing the Indian Ocean as a space of peace, sustainability, and shared heritage becomes both a moral and strategic act. It enables Sri Lanka to transform its geopolitical vulnerabilities into a diplomatic asset—an articulation of responsibility rather than merely of interest. This approach has situated the island within the Global South’s broader moral economy of international relations: an effort to humanize strategy through principles of equity, care, and cooperation. The Blue Economy, in this light, becomes not only policy but philosophy—a moral response to the ecological and political anxieties of smallness. It seeks to reimagine security as coexistence, and prosperity as stewardship, turning the Indian Ocean into a living archive of ethical possibility. By projecting a moral vision of the sea, Sri Lanka asserts that strategy itself can be a form of moral imagination—one that binds survival to responsibility and geography to conscience

The Indian Ocean: Moral Geography and the Global South Perspective

The moral geography of the Indian Ocean, as seen through Sri Lanka’s experience, offers a vital lens for understanding how the Global South imagines space, agency, and ethics. For Sri Lanka, the ocean has always been more than a route of trade or a theatre of strategy—it has been a living archive of connection and vulnerability, a mirror of its historical condition as both a crossroads and a frontier. This maritime consciousness has located Sri Lanka within a broader Global South tradition that seeks to reclaim moral agency from the margins of global politics. In this context, the Indian Ocean becomes a space through which postcolonial societies articulate a humane alternative to the dominant logic of power—an attempt to redefine the global order through the language of reciprocity, stewardship, and coexistence (Acharya 2014; Bose 2006).

The Indian Ocean has long functioned as an ethical commons of the Global South—a space that historically linked African, Arab, South Asian, and Southeast Asian societies in networks of exchange, pilgrimage, and pluralism. Before the colonial era imposed boundaries and hierarchies, the ocean connected communities through practices of trade and mutual care that reflected a shared moral economy (Chaudhuri 1985). Sri Lanka was integral to this oceanic world: its ports from Manthai to Galle were nodes of cosmopolitan encounter, where diverse peoples negotiated differences through hospitality and cultural translation. This deep history of connectivity offers an ethical counterpoint to the militarized and extractive geographies imposed during the colonial and Cold War periods. To retrieve this past is to affirm the Global South’s claim to historical agency and to challenge the reduction of the ocean to a mere space of rivalry or resource competition (Bose 2006).

From a Sri Lankan perspective, moral geography provides an idiom for transforming the anxieties of smallness into a vision of ethical leadership. The island’s postcolonial diplomacy—particularly its advocacy of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace in the 1970s and its later embrace of the Blue Economy—reflects this enduring aspiration to balance survival with moral responsibility (Gunasekara 2021). These initiatives exemplify the Global South’s wider effort to humanize international relations: to shift the vocabulary of strategy from control to coexistence, from competition to cooperation. For Sri Lanka, the moral geography of the sea thus becomes a method of asserting presence in global affairs without recourse to dominance—what could be termed strategic ethics, or the art of wielding moral imagination as a form of soft power.

This moral reorientation resonates with broader Global South perspectives that critique the moral asymmetries of the international system. As Amitav Acharya (2014) argues, Global South approaches to world order seek to pluralize international relations by foregrounding non-Western traditions of thought and coexistence. Similarly, Walter Mignolo (2011) and others have described this as border thinking—the effort to imagine global ethics from the margins, drawing from subaltern histories of encounter and exchange. In this sense, Sri Lanka’s oceanic worldview embodies a form of Southern cosmopolitanism: grounded in local experience but open to the universal, protective yet participatory. It extends the moral geography of the Indian Ocean into a planetary register, proposing that the future of maritime order must be built on the ethical lessons of its past.

In the end, to conceive the Indian Ocean as a moral space is to articulate a Global South vision of world order—one that binds geography to responsibility and history to justice. The sea becomes not merely a surface of strategy but a metaphor for relational being: fluid, interconnected, and morally consequential. Sri Lanka’s perspective, shaped by both exposure and resilience, exemplifies how small states can contribute to the moral imagination of the Global South. By invoking the Indian Ocean as a shared moral frontier, Sri Lanka gestures toward a post-hegemonic internationalism—an oceanic humanism that reclaims the sea as a site of ethical possibility and cooperative survival. The Global South does not merely navigate the world; it redefines what it means to inhabit it together.

(To be concluded tomorrow)

Prof. Gamini Keerawella