The Guru Sri Lanka - Academic Blogs and Articles

Maritime Domain Awareness - Effective Sharing of Information in Maritime Domain   Information sharing is often seen as the key collective mechanism in maritime sector due considering the challenges facing at the movement. A secure maritime environment can only be achieved when information is shared among maritime stake holders in a comprehensive manner. These stake holders might be nations, military and civil authorities, international organizations, etc. Close cooperation and communication between government and the private sector is a critical means of enhancing maritime situational awareness through information sharing. From a legal standpoint, information sharing can actually be quite complicated. The line between information sharing and intelligence sharing is often quite thin. Once a piece of information becomes classified by a government, sharing it becomes much more legally challenging – even within that government. In the context of maritime information sharin...

Anti Smuggling Operations - Maritime Challenges and Security Concerns Maritime Domain can be interpreted as all areas and things of, on, under, relating to, adjacent to, or bordering on a sea, ocean, or other navigable waterway, including all maritime related activities, infrastructure, people, cargo, and vessels and other conveyances. Due to its complexity and vastness, Maritime Domain is particularly vulnerable to misuse and disruption by many entities such as individuals, organizations, and nation states. According to the statistics approx. 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the shoreline. Yet the vast majority of people are unaware on the importance of maritime domain and key role played by the shipping industry, which is largely hidden from view. Basically that because of lack of knowledge in that field and nations are not utilizing the available maritime resources effectively. It is observed that commonly there are no any effective mechani...

Mitigating Maritime Blindness The right of vessel to travel freely in international waters engage in innocent transit passage and have access to ports is an essential elements of international security while safeguarding interests of other nations. Despite many advances made in maritime surveillance and intelligence gathering, the oceans are still exploited for a plethora of illegal activities both by state and non state actors many gaps and ungoverned space remain in the global commons. Managing maritime security is a challenges endeavor. However cooperation and collaboration among global stakeholders could provide solutions to such challenges by sharing information and thereby creating real time picture. For that, it requires a region centric collaborative maritime security construct. Addressing these challenges, like piracy, smuggling, illegal fishing and transnational terrorism demands timely and accurate and actionable information along with forces available to resp...

Security Perspective of South Asia Security of a country and region is tightly related to a whole array of its sustainable development facets. Struggles, conflicts, threatening economies and civilizations and enforcement of different powers irritating the sovereignty of individual states has become a notable strategy of global politics. In this context, South Asia has become a notable crisis region in the world. It is characterized by an interlocking web of old and new and traditional and non-traditional security risks. There are unresolved territorial disputes, proliferation of nuclear technology, a broad range of ethnic, religious, and non-state actors that have links to individual, regional and global terrorist groups connected with organized crimes. Moreover, the unpredictable repercussions of climate change, which could turn one of the poorest regions in the world into a pit of worst. Further, unsecured information and cyber network, financial and environmental insec...