Entries by admin
CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO VERDICT OF INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE: AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE
On 25 February 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its verdict in favour of Mauritius, over the sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago and asked the United Kingdom (UK) to hand over the disputed islands to the former. It was a longstanding contention between the UK and Mauritius over the sovereignty of these islands. […]
NAVAL AIR STATIONS AS CATALYSTS FOR STATE ECONOMIES
In recent days, some newspapers in Goa have reported on issues of No Objection Certificates (NOC) that the Indian Navy provides for certain buildings, development and infrastructure at a specified radius around the Naval Air Station (NAS), Dabolim. As is widely known, NAS (Dabolim) is also the international airport at Goa. All airports in the […]
POLITICAL CRISIS IN SRI LANKA: CHINA AND THE MARITIME DIMENSION
In late October 2018, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena set off a constitutional crisis by sacking Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and replacing him by Sirisena’s predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa. i With Sirisena later dissolving Parliament, even members of the Sri Lankan Election Commission declared the President’s action illegaliibefore the country’s Supreme Court finally overturned the President’s […]
KENYA, ANOTHER CHINESE TAKEOVER IN THE INDIAN OCEAN REGION?
The spectre of the takeover of another strategically located port by China in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is looming large these days. In Kenya, a leaked report from the Auditor-General’s office states that the terms of a loan taken by Nairobi from China’s EXIM Bank make the port a collateral in case of a […]
CYBER- WARRIORS FOR CYBER SPACE: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE US NAVY?
On 04 Jun this year, the US Navy (USN) took a rather unusual step in reintroducing the Warrant Officer-I (W-I) rank and inviting applicants in this rank for cyber warfare. The USN has had a complex history of warrant ranks as opposed to commissioned and non-commissioned ranks. The details of this history are not of […]
FIVE YEARS OF CHINA’S BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE (BRI): REVISITING BRI IN TANDEM WITH THE MALACCA DILEMMA
Introduction Five years ago, in September and October of the year 2013, the ‘Chinese Marshall Plan’ or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was unveiled in Kazakhstan and Indonesia by Premier Xi Jinping. Done to ‘enhance regional connectivity’, the delayering of the ‘belts’ and ‘roads’ mechanism mapped expansively through Asia, Europe, and Africa will tell one […]
EMPLOYMENT OF UNMANNED MARITIME SYSTEMS IN THE INDO-PACIFIC: LEGAL IMPLICATIONS AND THE WAY AHEAD
On December 16 2016, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) seized an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) in the EEZ of the Philippines, approximately 50 nautical miles North-West of the Subic Bay. The UUV belonged to the United States (US) Navy. The US government condemned the Chinese action. It claimed that the People’s Republic of China […]