Research, Survey, Espionage: The Securitization of Marine Scientific Research in US Law?
The U.S. Coast Guard medevaced a man suffering a broken arm from the Chinese research vessel Xue Long (Snow Dragon), 15 nautical miles from Nome, Alaska, 2017. Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
On 8 June 2026, Senators Mike Lee and Jeanne Shaheen introduced the Arctic Security and Diplomacy Act (S.4708).1) Nine days later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ordered it reported favorably, with an amendment in the nature of a substitute.2) The reported text, printed on 27 July 2026, is the version discussed here, and it differs from the bill as introduced in several respects which will be addressed subsequently.3) Its central rule is administrative: no foreign vessel may conduct marine scientific research (MSR) in United States waters without the prior consent of the US government. The rule’s core, however, lies arguably elsewhere: no consent may be granted to vessels of, or “reasonably believe[d] to be associated with”, a foreign adversary (§3(5)(B)). The sponsors made the logic underpinning and motivating the Act very transparent: the Act is meant to stop “China’s increasing incursions into US waters under the guise of surveys and research”.4) Research is thus arguably reclassified, in advance and across the board, as a hostile activity and a cover for espionage. The Act performs what can be described as a double securitization: of the research actor, through the figure of the adversary; and of marine scientific research itself, framed in the Act inherently as a dual-use activity. This double operation seeks to entrench in legislation a transformation begun by the Presidential proclamation in September 2020, when the United States reversed its long-standing waiver of jurisdiction over foreign marine scientific research; a reversal that now culminates in the categorical exclusion of the enemy from the production of knowledge about the sea. This article traces this trajectory, and the legal form it has now assumed, before drawing out what is arguably at stake: not only the language of security, but the rule of the exception it enacts.
Legislative Findings as threat assessment
The Act opens (Section 2, Findings) by declaring the United States an Arctic nation by virtue of the State of Alaska (finding 1), and moves at once to the characterization of the Arctic as “a critical domain for the security and sovereignty of the United States” that “faces elevated risks related to the threats of territorial expansion and violation, influence operations, sabotage of critical undersea infrastructure, and espionage by foreign adversaries” (finding 2). It then lists eighteen findings that read more like a threat assessment than legislative recitals with each finding sourced to security and intelligence reporting. Fifteen name China, seven of them with China as the sole subject: its self-designation as a “Near-Arctic State” (finding 4), its research stations in Svalbard and Iceland and its co-optation of civilian science and research cooperation (finding 6), its surveillance buoys (finding 11), its dual-use survey fleet (findings 8, 14). Russia is also included in the findings, as territory – some 53 per cent of the Arctic coastline – and with reference to its expanded military presence (finding 3). The findings quote the 2026 Threat Assessment naming Russia “our primary challenge in the Arctic” (finding 13), even as the two adversaries appear jointly as builders of a “Polar Silk Road” (finding 5). If Russia is a territorial and military threat, China is rather a knowledge producer, a researcher State and, crucially, the key adversary in the conceptual economy of the Act. The committee adds a finding registering that the two States have “overlapping priority interests in the Arctic, though each have their own distinct interests with associated challenges” (finding 9). Yet this distinction is not carried over to the operative provisions, as the class of foreign adversary in §3(7) admits of no degrees. The findings thus perform the first of the Act’s two securitizing moves: they mark the adversary. Where they invoke dual-use, the suspicion remains attached to the actor: China’s surveying, “much of which has dual-use risk” (finding 8) and its “dual-use civilian and military infrastructure” (finding 4). The second securitizing move, the securitization of any act of ocean science, whoever performs it, is carried out in the definitions, to which we now turn.
The definitions’ “Covered activities” (§3(4)) is in effect a securitized taxonomy of the ordinary methods of contemporary ocean science: seabed mapping, hydrographic and oceanographic surveys, data collection relating to subsea infrastructure, and the operation of unmanned maritime systems. These are defined at large as “marine surveys that may pose dual-use risks for civilian and military applications”; which means, in practice, any survey carried out by any vessel. The taxonomy, however, opens up its own frontier via a final clause that allows the Secretary of State to add any other activity designated as posing a risk to national security (§3(4)(E)). Research becomes, definitionally, whatever the securitizing instrument already governs: marine scientific research is in fact any activity “regulated by the United States under the Presidential Proclamation […] of September 2020” (§3(10)(B)). The link between the activity and the adversary, again built on suspicion, is provided by the definition of the “covered vessel” (§3(5)): a vessel owned or operated by, or reasonably believed to be associated with, a foreign adversary.
Section 6 then assembles these elements into a consent regime whose central operation is disqualification. However, where the bill as introduced barred the foreign scientist from conducting research without consent, the reported text bars the foreign vessel (§6(a)), and the notification duty requires reporting the country affiliation of the vessel rather than of the scientist (§6(f)(1)). The correction aligns the prohibition with the definitions, pivoting around the vessel, and makes the criterion of exclusion a matter entirely contingent on a link to a State, whether government ownership, charter, corporate control or flag (§3(8)). The person returns later in the Act and does so in a different capacity as noted below. Applications from covered vessels, additionally, shall not be approved (§6(d)); a reasonable belief of association suffices to trigger the disqualification, suspicion in effect,5) since the Act provides no mechanism for testing the belief it requires. The doctrinal difficulty is arguably evident. Article 246 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) constructs coastal State consent around activities, and consent shall, in normal circumstances, be granted.6) The grounds on which it may be withheld, such as direct significance for resources, drilling, explosives, or installations, concern what a project does, not the nationality of the researcher. A categorical, identity-based disqualification finds no legal basis there, and a broad interpretation of “normal circumstances” cannot be used as an excuse to refuse consent.7) The United States, moreover, invokes Part XIII of UNCLOS as customary law binding on foreign researchers in its waters, even as the regime it now seeks to build departs from Article 246 in precisely the respect that matters by turning consent from an activity-based consideration into a status-based exclusion.
The reported text registers the difficulty without resolving it. A provision added in committee requires the Secretary of State to report within 180 days on how the requirements of section 6 “compare to the requirements of existing multilateral marine scientific research consent regimes”, and on the staffing needed to review applications in a manner that””continues to encourage marine scientific research and scientific diplomacy” (§6(g)). The regime, which is not named, is obviously Part XIII of UNCLOS. The United States has not ratified UNCLOS, and thus the Act invokes a comparison rather than an obligation, despite the customary international normativity Part XIII is likely to carry.
From Waiver to Restricted Consent
The Act’s own genealogy can be said to begin in 1983. When President Reagan proclaimed the US Exclusive Economic Zone, the accompanying Statement on United States Oceans Policy acknowledged that international law permitted coastal States to exercise jurisdiction over MSR in the maritime zone. However, the US declined to exercise such jurisdiction in order to encourage marine scientific research and avoid “any unnecessary burdens”,8) given the “importance attached by the United States to the avoidance of any system which would require the consent of the coastal state for marine scientific research”. It is helpful to recall, in this respect, that the United States had opposed the consent regime of Part XIII at UNCLOS III, but had lost on that point.9) The 1983 waiver thus continued, unilaterally, what could not be accepted during the negotiations, even as the same administration rejected the Convention’s deep seabed regime adopted under Part XI of UNCLOS. Interestingly, the Act invokes the 1983 Statement, stating that it is in the interest of the United States “to encourage marine scientific research, as President Ronald Reagan noted in his Statement on United States Oceans Policy on March 10, 1983” (finding 18).
The waiver, however, was never intended to construct a jurisdictional vacuum. Foreign research in US waters remained subject to consent whenever it touched domestic ocean administration in respect of marine mammals, endangered species, sanctuaries, fisheries or the continental shelf. Research was governed, in other words, obliquely: through the government of nature and environmental administration rather than the government of research by way of sovereign authorization. The register, however, had already begun to shift in 1995, with a Presidential Decision Directive which folded ocean monitoring into economic and national security interests.10) This shift then continued with a 2018 Executive Order reframing ocean policy around economy and security,11) and a 2019 memorandum on mapping the US Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).12)
The formal reversal came on 9 September 2020, coinciding with the final months of the first Trump administration. Proclamation 10071 revised the 1983 election directly, obliging the United States to henceforth “exercise its right to regulate, authorize, and conduct marine scientific research” (§1), requiring advance authorization of all foreign MSR in the EEZ and on the continental shelf regardless of subject-matter, and, as the implementing framework would specify, regardless of platform.13) This is a first, preliminary securitizing operation, one that targets the activity as such: no enemy is (yet) named, and the Intelligence Community is simply instructed, in a single sentence, to “support the implementation of this proclamation, as appropriate” (§3). Equally significant is what the new regime omitted. While the proclamation officially reaches “all instances of foreign marine scientific research” (§1), the State Department’s implementing definitions exclude hydrographic surveys, military activities and resource prospecting from MSR entirely.14) Consequently, identical acts of seabed mapping constitute regulated research when performed by a foreign civilian, yet remain an unconstrained freedom for the US Navy. The legal category, rather than the physical act itself, determines what qualifies as science. Foreign science was thus securitized, while the US retained (claimed) its freedom with respect to its own knowledge-gathering operations.
What is perhaps most significant, however, is that the proclamation survived the subsequent Biden administration untouched. S.4708 now expands and codifies this regime, and adds the second operation: the targeting of the actor. This process of securitization is thus at once abrupt in legal form (thirty-seven years of policy undone by a proclamation), incremental in rationality (prepared by a decade of reframing), and, throughout, uncontested politically.
Securitization and the Exception
The most immediate reading of the Act runs through the grammar of securitization: a securitizing actor, a speech act, an audience – all relevant materials are easy to identify in the Act.15) But it is useful to focus attention on one crucial aspect of securitization, already considered important by the Copenhagen School but that perhaps can be rendered more central in this context: the exception, as a central result of securitization. According to the Copenhagen School, securitization leads to the invocation of extraordinary powers on the part of the State to address an existential threat.16) And it is precisely as a catalogue of exceptions that the 2026 Act can be read. Substantively, status replaces the individualized assessment of applications that ordinary administrative law would require: the covered vessel is disqualified, as such. Procedurally, suspicion replaces demonstration as the operative epistemology (“reasonably believes”). Institutionally, the intelligence community is integrated operationally into what remains, formally, a civil licensing process (§6(b)-(c)), and the national-interest waiver reserves to the executive a discretionary power over its own exception (§6(e)). That all of this arrives through the most ordinary of procedures – findings, markup, a committee report – does not normalize it; it rather makes the exception permanent, entrenched against the next administration.
It is here, moreover, that the two securitizing operations reveal their intimate linkage. Once every act of ocean science is treated as potentially an act of intelligence, the nature of the proposed activity ceases to provide a usable criterion of decision. Examined on its own terms, every application looks identical: a mapping survey is a mapping survey, whether proposed by an ally or an adversary. Consequently, the grounds for withholding consent set out in Article 246(5), premised on the possibility of assessing specific acts, most of which would be cleared, become, in this respect, inoperative as an evaluative framework. Yet the regime must still distinguish, given that it does not intend to exclude foreign science altogether. The criterion of decision therefore migrates from the activity to the applicant, that is, from what is proposed to who proposes it. This makes the categorical exclusion of the adversary a necessary consequence of the dual-use premise.
This is also why the exception operates not only through the traditional mechanism of suspension,17) but crucially through classification. The regime does not suspend the legal order of ocean knowledge, but it rather produces one, sorting physically identical acts – lowering a sensor, mapping a stretch of seabed – into research, survey, and espionage according to the body that performs them: the allied vessel researches, the American vessel surveys, the covered vessel spies. The operative legal technology is not the emergency decree, but the application file, the interagency review, and the suspicion-trigger – the examination, in Foucault’s sense, carried out at the water’s edge.18)
Two changes made in committee are telling with respect to the underpinning logic. The bill as introduced listed among its diplomatic means “motions to remove an offending country from Arctic-related multilateral bodies and cooperatives” (introduced §4(4)(E)). The amended version however deletes that subparagraph and puts in its place a commitment to “maintaining robust participation of the United States in the Arctic Council to limit Chinese and Russian efforts to undermine the interests of the United States in the Arctic” (§4(4)(F)). The logic remains the same, but more realistically emphasizes containment from within rather than expulsion. Alongside this, the reporting requirements under section 7 need to include an assessment of the feasibility of a formal Arctic security information-sharing framework among the allied Arctic States – Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark including Greenland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland – with mechanisms for the “joint identification of dual-use maritime scientific activity” and for “the development of shared watchlists of high-risk vessels, entities, and individuals” (§7(b)(5)). This envisions a parallel security architecture encompassing all the Arctic Council members except Russia while committing to the Council itself, the latter representing in some respect good news, considering the erratic US discourse and policy orientation in the Arctic since January 2026.
The Researching Enemy
Seen from this vantage point, S.4708 is part of a broader family of instruments. The same foreign adversary who knows the sea too well organizes Proclamation 10071, the April 2025 executive order on seabed minerals (explicitly aimed at curbing “foreign adversary control”),19) and now the Arctic Act. Across these instruments, ocean knowledge is progressively recast as a strategic asset, and its foreign production as a security threat.
China, of course, operates under its own legal architecture. It has required consent for foreign MSR in its maritime zones since the 1990s through a framework that is stringent, universally applicable, and administrative in form, representing a fundamentally different link between research and security governance, where state control is the baseline grammar of the legal order rather than an exceptional derogation. To be sure, freedom of marine scientific research in the US EEZ was never absolute, and coastal state practice under UNCLOS remains anchored in consent, even if the grounds for withholding it are strictly delimited under Article 246. What has changed is that the governance of ocean knowledge now speaks in the first person of the sovereign; the entire practice of knowing the sea has been recast as a question of security; and the Act unequivocally signals the return of the enemy to the positive law of the sea.20)
Vito De Lucia is Professor of International Law at UiT the Arctic University of Norway and Director of the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea.
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