| dc.description.abstractEN | This Thesis aims to identify trends and challenges underpinning maritime security and energy. To this end, it explores both the historical and established state of affairs, and how these change over time, as well as observe new developments, and to what extent these further influence the incumbent trends and challenges. This is done by a literature review, collecting and collating the underpinning facts and reporting of academia, industry knowledge, legislation/jurisprudence and journalistic reporting. These sources span the subjects of maritime security, energy transportation via the maritime vector, energy infrastructure, grid operation, and the digital factor of cybersecurity, and comparing and contrasting this information across those constituent links of the supply chain.
The aim is not only to identify developments, but also to apprehend the gravitas of them and the ramifications they can have across the supply chain, the extent and knock-on effects of those ramifications, and finally the impact they can have on the end consumer, observing as well what pressures are exerted by consumption and what that can constitute. This study also attempts to see how often these are identified within their own fields as well as across the linkages in the supply chain, how similar these understandings are, as well as what means of mitigation and redress there are- as well as how applicable these may also be across the supply chain.
Finally, this thesis presents the findings: a multidisciplinary approach that contextualizes market and state forces within the spectra of geopolitics, identifies the key incentives of actors and their ability to achieve their goals by leveraging the identified means, as well as the repercussions that are not intended but nonetheless stakeholders would be affected by. The findings indicate a high level of self-compounding impacts, which amplify across the supply chain, and increasingly present axes of action- and are increasingly utilized as such, by a host of state, proxy, and independent actors. Similarly the study connects similar issues across the supply chain in terms of violence and cybersecurity exploitation that already present spill-over effects across the supply chain, but also similar means for addressing them. The key finding is the importance of building interdependence through diplomacy preemptively, in order to stabilize affairs before incentives slide into seeing parts of the supply chain as exploitable for geostrategic gain, as well as cooperation, coordination and preparation for developing technologies which may lend to rogue actors and criminal elements to be able to effect similar results, without geopolitical constraints. Last of the key findings is that the constituent fields do not appear to have high levels of intercommunication, despite the convergence of issues and solutions. Whilst some of the trends have had irreversible impacts, whose costs already affect the market and energy policy/diplomacy in unparalleled manner, some of these can be stabilized and limited, and perhaps some of the impact curtailed. | el |