The world's oceans cover close to three quarters of the surface of the globe, representing 99 percent of the planet's living space by volume (Kundis Craig, 2012). With half of the world's population living within fifty miles of the ocean's edge these swathes of saltwater provide a theatre for interactions between local subsistence, international trade and the global climate. They provide economic arenas for diverse industries, such as offshore oil development, fisheries and tourism, and provide deep reservoirs of biodiversity, with 43 of the 70 recognized phyla of life found in the oceans-compared to the 28 found on land (Kundis Craig, 2010). Society has taken this materiality of these spaces and transformed it. The levels of these oceans are rising due to climatic change. Society's industrial and economic activity has resulted in increased levels of nitrogen, phosphorous and iron within the world's waterscapes.) Increasing ocean acidification is placing the life of the planet's coral reefs at risk. Anthropogenic change has also impacted on levels of marine diversity-through ecosystem stressors such as habitat destruction, over-fishing and marine pollution (Kundis Craig, 2012). Humans have extracted an extensive, ever-expanding amount of resources from the oceans of the world-from halibut to gravel, and kelp to crude oil-resulting in the oceans pollution, degradation and depletion. Yet, maritime characteristics have also influenced how humans have used the sea, and interacted with each other, for millennia. Questions of geography and oceanography have influenced the differential impacts of maritime security both between and within nations and regions. From the conflicts of pre-European Oceania (Keeley, 1996) to the series of Cod Wars between the United Kingdom and Iceland (Guðmundsson, 2006), the ocean space has both facilitated and forced international interaction over the resources (both physical and political) that it provides. United States Navy Admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan (1890) wrote that international power, and with it national prominence, can be found in the control of the sea. Although history is populated with exceptions, maritime transportation routes have provided an important canvas on which international relations are played out. From the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan shifting the trade routes away from land and towards the New World, sea lanes have reflected the globe's composition and concentration of wealth and power. The world's oceans have often provided a fulcrum for a state's military and commercial power-from the strong role of the Royal Navy providing an important factor in the emergence of the British Empire and the related Pax Britannica to the militarised shipping lanes, defence areas and strategic choke points of the Cold War,