The Current Column

Greenland and the Strait of Hormuz

Global Ocean Cooperation? Frontiers and Chokepoints

Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Rapti / Dorothea Wehrmann
The Current Column (2026)

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), The Current Column of 1 June 2026

Bonn, 01 June 2026. In January, the High Seas Treaty entered into force, strengthening multilateral ocean cooperation. At the same time, geopolitics threaten the ambition of the United Nations Ocean Decade.

On World Oceans Day 2026, June 8, the ocean sits at the centre of a troubling paradox. After two decades of negotiations, the entry into force of the High Seas Treaty or the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) on 17 January, marked a rare achievement in multilateral cooperation. BBNJ gives new political weight to biodiversity protection and benefit-sharing beyond national jurisdiction. And yet, archaic narratives continue to dominate oceans: extraction, military security, and territorial control.

What does Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland have to do with the Strait of Hormuz? Very little, at first glance. One is often conjured as an Arctic “frontier” of melting ice, mineral wealth, Indigenous sovereignty, and great-power rivalry. The other has returned, singularly, as a maritime “chokepoint”, a narrow corridor where energy supplies, food security, shipping, and military threats converge. Yet, both are being drawn into the same grammar of resource and strategic access.

To frame these developments only as geopolitics misses the point. We are seeing a wider reordering of ocean space as infrastructure and political leverage. In Kalaallit Nunaat, talk of Arctic opportunity can push Indigenous self-determination and planetary environmental considerations to the margins. In Hormuz, disruption in a narrow strait exacerbates already precarious working conditions for seafarers and has global repercussions, hitting household economies within and far beyond the Gulf. Just as multilateral ocean cooperation gains traction, ocean politics is reverting to familiar habits of militarisation, route control, and hunger for resources, often cloaked in state strategic anxiety.

Ocean Cooperation: Torn between Corridor- and Planetary Thinking

Ocean governance has long imagined the high seas as open space, caught between free movement and enclosure. But this freedom was never universal. Across the Indian Ocean for example, passages linking the Gulf of Aden to the South China Sea were shaped by trade, diplomacy, unfree labour, pilgrimage, and monsoonal knowledge, but also by taxation and negotiated access. “Corridor thinking” has older maritime roots: movement has always rested on unequal relations of control.

Melting sea ice has spurred the imaginary of the Arctic as a "region of riches", providing access to rare earths, oil, gas, and shorter sea routes. This “resource optimism” and geostrategic thinking disregard national and international rules, laws, and voluntary agreements, keeping alive the view of the Arctic as an “empty white space” to be conquered. The Arctic is still treated as an environmental frontier, overlooking its four million inhabitants and its place within global social and environmental transformations. 

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is the legal framework for marine and maritime activities, and can be seen as an unusually expansive form of planetary thinking from the 1990s. It made the ocean governable as a shared space of rights and responsibilities. Yet, the same architecture also made certain divisions appear self-evident, separating surface from depth, seabed from water column, shipping lanes from fishing grounds, and cable routes from military zones. Today, those divisions are stretched by maritime identities, regional alliances, Indigenous claims, and older oceanic histories. Chile’s constitutional debate around maritorio sees the sea as living territory. Indigenous claims of the Arctic as “homeland” and renewed attention to Afro-Asian maritime histories remind us that ocean politics has never belonged only to conventional security and defence planners. Beyond the UN Ocean Decade, new regional ocean politics is being shaped by heritage, memory, and the asymmetric dependencies that bind seemingly diverse maritime spaces.

There is a double standard: The sea is kept open for capital, energy, minerals, data, and naval mobility, but closed or policed for others. Shipping lanes and energy corridors are secured, while migrant routes are criminalised and Indigenous waters and island ecologies are made disposable. Ocean cooperation must therefore ask not only who is enabled to move and who is not, but also at what cost existing systems are kept afloat. It calls for confronting the politics of passage – not only as movement across water, but as labour and the relations that sustain coastal and oceanic life.

Quo Vadis Global Ocean Cooperation?

Today, connected land-sea future-making faces a crisis of imagination and must confront geopolitics. There is an urgency to challenge corridor- and frontier-thinking and to advance planetary perspectives. As the potential location of the BBNJ secretariat in China reveals, BBNJ offers a chance to renew global cooperation by breaking new grounds. In addition to investments in critical ocean knowledge as envisioned by the UN Ocean Decade, we call for bolder political leadership recognising that maritime dynamics are not peripheral to energy security, food systems, climate action, or household survival. With the established multilateral order put into question, this moment invites us to re-imagine global ocean cooperation and re-design political structures by acknowledging interdependencies between people, marine life, infrastructures, markets, and living environments.