Preventing Bad Order at Sea Redux: Evolution of Thailand's Maritime Security Practice

Abstract

The article traces five centuries of Thai maritime security practice to argue that recent reforms mark a partial return to preventing bad order at sea. It shows how Siamese polities initially conceived maritime security in negative terms, prioritising stability in riverine and coastal systems by merely managing or outright initiating rather than eliminating non-polity maritime violence. Only with the rise of a fiscal-state navy in the Interwar years did a positive good order at sea agenda begin to emerge in Thailand, later deepening through environmental stewardship and regionalisation efforts during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. Drawing on primary sources, the article argues that Thailand has renewed its preventive orientation in response to climate-related risks, a striated maritime domain, and proliferating transnational threats. It advances the concept of deep pluralist maritime security as a more appropriate framework than multipolarity for understanding the choices facing small navies in the contemporary strategic environment.

Introduction

The maritime security buzzword surged across policy and scholarship in only three decades (Kismartini et al., 2024). Some leading maritime security theorists even argue that an “ocean revolution” has finally taken place after so many years of calling for one (Bueger and Mallin, 2023). Maritime governance is now a top priority for most states around the globe (Morris, 2017).

Yet, this “apparent” revolution sits uneasily with facts on the high seas (Sowden-Carvalho and Valença, 2025). While policy documents and conference panels are saturated with the language of maritime security, the everyday business of maritime governance remains shot through with security issues driven by hard-edge geopolitical tensions (Kembara, 2024) and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (Huda and Lindley, 2023), as reflected in continued spikes in regional piracy and armed robbery at sea (English, 2025).

This article starts from this tension. Much of the literature treats maritime security as a positive conceptualisation, or “good order at sea,” an aspirational, teleological endpoint in which navies and civilian agencies cooperate to deliver safety, sustainability, and economic prosperity across the maritime global commons (Till, 2018a, 2018b). This perspective, though, overlooks both that the maritime security practice historically stems from negative conceptions (Ryan, 2022) and that international relations appear to be shifting back towards policies grounded in preventing bad order rather than producing good order at sea (Chan, 2023). Policymakers increasingly prioritise the prevention of bad order at sea over more ambitious good order at sea agendas (Bueger, 2025a, 2025b), even as the latter discourse endures because it rewards its discursive users with membership recognition in intergovernmental organisations (Dionisio da Silva and Oliveira, 2025), notably at the United Nations (United Nations Security Council, 2025).

Thailand offers a particularly revealing vantage point. This article argues that over five centuries, Thai maritime security practices have oscillated between a predominantly negative conception and a positive construction of good order at sea. Contemporary reforms, however, suggest a renewed tilt towards preventing bad order at sea even if official documents continue to invoke the discourse of good order. Its maritime security establishment increasingly prioritises measures designed to reduce acute operational and governance risks associated with climate-related security threats, sub-level vulnerabilities in a striated maritime domain, and proliferating transnational threats. In the contemporary setting, prevention of bad order at sea is frequently pursued through good order instruments, such as functional cooperation, information-sharing regimes, and bilateral or multilateral maritime diplomacy, deployed less as normative ends in themselves than as preventive risk management.

The article proceeds as follows. It begins by briefly revisiting the definitional debate on the maritime security concept, contrasting positive and negative conceptualisations. Next, it traces Thailand's efforts to prevent bad order at sea in its coastal waters during the pre-colonial era through the post-Cold War embrace of constructing good order at sea through the adoption of specific policy agendas that aligned with broader global norms. The article then reveals the transformation that the contemporary Thai maritime security establishment is undergoing in response to an evolving strategic environment by returning to preventing bad order at sea. The final section situates its response within the broader notion of deep pluralism rather than multipolarity, and offers policy recommendations for how small states and their maritime security establishments can retain autonomy in a highly contested maritime environment.

Maritime Security Definition

It is a “wicked problem,” as the late Sam Bateman had once called it (2011), to pinpoint what exactly state polities truly make of maritime security and when they institutionalise it (Bueger, 2022). There is still no mutually agreed definition of maritime security under international law, further complicated by the absence of a clear basic distinction between maritime security and maritime safety (Gustafsson, 2019).

Maritime security definitions vary substantially due to four factors (Percy, 2018). First, as Christian Le Miere wrote, the concept of maritime security holds in mind, simultaneously, different operational actors, ranging from navies, coast guards, maritime paramilitaries, and private transport companies (2014). The return of “hybridness at sea” (Famularo, 2025), or the nebulous deconstruction of the fiscal-state navy territorialisation of the high seas that started in the late sixteenth century and endured until today (Sumida and Rosenberg, 1995), makes it that much more challenging to determine which actor is responsible for providing maritime security (Cusumano and Ruzza, 2022; Flynn, 2022).

Second, as Kathleen Walsh at the United States Naval War College already stresses, the definition contains a diverse range of issues, interests and objects, and therefore activities (2025). These range from developing a naval strategy, to protecting international commercial shipping and port infrastructure (Avila-Zuniga-Nordfjeld et al., 2023), to conducting oceanographic research (Edwards and Bradford, 2023). The divergence augments as the difference between state capacity becomes more pronounced, as between great powers versus small states (Somchit, 2024). Great-power navies emphasise power competition and national maritime interests within their maritime security concepts, whilst broadly considering those non-traditional security threats working against their civilian and commercial assets (Bosco, 2022). Small states, in turn, tend to highlight much more the softer dimension of maritime security in their definitions, though they themselves cannot ever entirely escape the vortex of the harder dimension of naval warfare precisely due to their material limitations (Bueger, 2015a, 2015b).

Third, the definition of maritime security is challenged by the manner in which it changes across cultural contexts (Skov et al., 2025: 2). Put otherwise, one's safeguards at sea are another's negligence at sea. The attention to cultural context reveals that maritime security fundamentally evolves, implying that temporality is embedded in the definition of maritime security (Bateman, 2015). For the last decade, many have argued that the definition should include the marine environment and sustainability (Li, 2023), especially considering the consequences of climate change (Klein, 2011: 93). Though this suggestion is widely seen as appropriate today, it would have been viewed as an outlandish suggestion at the start of the previous century, excepting for the limited number of international maritime lawyers who had been influenced by the first generation of climate theorists during the informal meetings in the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) (est. 1902) (Tjossem, 2012).

Finally, the definitional exercise is complicated by the fact that there might be rational incentives to keep the definition ambiguous. Some, like John Bradford (2005), correctly highlight that certain strategic advantages can be derived both domestically and internationally from such ambiguity. Domestically, it enables better inter-agency coordination by avoiding turf battles, whereas internationally, the ambiguity allows diplomatic flexibility to foster cooperation without explicit confrontation. Such ambiguity allows different actors to participate in joint actions under the general abstract of the term while simultaneously disagreeing over local meanings (Cornwall, 2007).

Despite the lasting ambiguity, the efforts above are all attempts to define the maritime security concept through positive conceptualisations by projecting a certain ideal-typical end state (Bueger, 2015a, 2015b). While it held certain advantages for policy-making in the modern and post-modern eras (Sloggett, 2013), it too quickly dismisses the negative conceptualisations of maritime security adopted by international actors amid their political relations (Bellamy, 2011; Bellamy, 2020).

There remain specific use cases for the negative conceptualisation of maritime security on two grounds. First, the negative conceptualisation allows maritime security theorists to conduct long-durée historical analysis. Maritime security theorists need to commence their historical accounting of case studies by investigating policies of resistance during the so-called “first wave” of maritime security in the age of “naval hegemony” (Bueger and Edmunds, 2024). The study of maritime security practices should begin with political claims situated in historical practices of contestation and not in the abstractions of universalist political philosophy and its broader modern governance agenda (Subramaniam, 2009: 1–27). This means commencing with earlier treatments of maritime security threat management as prevention of bad order at sea, a proto-constabulary agenda centred on the thwarting and usage of piracy, smuggling, and other illicit acts, before the concept narrowed to the production of a good order at sea with its attention to cooperative maritime governance. Without this turn, there is no way of treating efforts by pre-modern Asian potentates deploying a range of maritime security policies against actual or imagined threats (Germond, 2015).

Second, the negative conceptualisation of maritime security provides a sense of the evolution that the contemporary international system might take over forthcoming decades. Some security theorists propose that the international system is transitioning towards a multipolar world system (Joshi, 2023; Kennedy and Wilson, 2021). Others propose a pluralised governance environment, increasingly dubbed “multiplex ordering” (Pardesi and Acharya, 2025) or “deep pluralism” (Zhang, 2023). In either case, the future international system has the potential to be contentious (Zhang and Buzan, 2022), especially if its strategic environment continues to grow exponentially more complex (Kurtz and Snowden, 2003). There is less opportunity for a widely sahred, positive conceptualisation of maritime security governance in a complex international system (Carr, 2024). Its effect would necessarily mean that the international system is now undergirded by a type of social relations grounded on a negative conceptualisation of maritime security.

Preventing Bad Order at Sea Across Classic and Pre-Modern Eras in Thai History

Taking negative conceptualisations seriously reveals that maritime security practices in Thai history are much older than initially presented. It is certainly far older than the standard late-twentieth-century narrative (Bradford and Herrmann, 2021). For centuries, Siamese rulers and later Thai central authority mobilised coercive and regulatory measures to prevent bad order in their sea, river, and coastal systems. The familiar positive conceptualisation of maritime security appears only gradually: a first iteration applied in the Interwar years, then institutionalisation in the late Cold War era, and finally an official discursive formalisation in the post-Cold War era.

In the ancient, classic, and pre-modern kingdoms, preventing bad order was primarily about manifesting sufficient stability in a designated maritime area so that international commerce could transpire (Office of Archaeology and National Museums, 2001). The contemporary Thai word for “maritime security” – kwahmmankhong thang ta-lay – is translated today as “security,” though its etymology is actually closer to “stability” in matters “related to the sea” (Kongrawd, 2021). Historically, the royal naval forces of Ayutthaya and Thonburi kingdoms, together with local leaders in peripheral port cities, understood maritime security principally as preserving stability in sea lanes (Hall, 1984: 62). Stability even sometimes came at the expense of security (Baldwin, 2016; Baldwin, 1997). The attention to stability over security came from the view that international trade only required a sufficient and not perfectly secure maritime environment (Smith, 1977: 8).

By the mid-fourteenth century, the rulers of Ayutthaya were already taking explicit steps to prevent bad order at sea, even if enforcement remained more challenging than on land. In the 1460s–1480s, under King Trailok (r. 1448–1488), Ayutthaya moved to secure access to the western coastal zone of Tenasserim and Tavoy (Harvey, 1967: 154–157), asserting nominal control of trans-peninsular portage for the next forty years (1460–1490s) (Potter, 2023: xi–xii; Vickery, 1973: 58–59). The monarch had sought to affirm greater control along the coast against Mon polity interference (Potter, 2019: 39–40), striving to keep trade with kingdoms across the Indian Ocean undisrupted (Ruangsilp and Wibulsilp, 2017: 99–100). Its attention to maritime security only accelerated during the subsequent decades as revenues from maritime trade rather than agricultural tribute formed the most vital component of state income (Kasetsiri, 1976). Over time, the maintenance of its coastal defence increasingly relied on foreign intermediaries into the 1530s, especially during the reign of King Ramathibodi II (Chetthahirat) (r. 1491–1529), since the Portuguese had captured Malacca in 1511 (McGovern, 2017). Even though Buddhist injunctions had underpinned anti-opium laws as early as the 1360s, with later legal traditions associated with the Law of the Three Seals of 1805 imposing severe sanctions on violators, opium entering Ayutthaya ports from Bengal and Arabia in the 1510s still proved arduous to control through maritime interdiction (Rimner, 2018: 17–20).

Covetous rival polities sought to co-opt Ayutthaya coastal ports, access routes, and commercial revenues that linked the eastern Bay of Bengal to wider international trade (Charney, 1998: 1). By the mid-1540s, after constituting the First Toungoo Kingdom, the young Burmese King Tabinshwehti (r. 1530–1550) attacked the city of Tavoy with 200 elephants, 100 horses, and 60,000 men. The Ayutthaya coastal defence force found it impossible to retain nominal control over the sea lines of communication in view of the limited personnel and vessels available (Surakiat, 2005: 79). The second son of King Ramathibodi II, Chairachat (r. 1533–1546), had transferred certain naval forces for riverine operations in the central plains to transport his army northward to retain control over the rebellious northern dependencies: Phitsanulok, Kamphaeng, and Phrae (Chutintaranon, 2023). “Prestigious upland centres” that had developed in intermontane valleys were at times able to marshal forces that could mount a considerable challenge to “lowland ambitions” (Andaya and Andaya, 2015: 36).

The transfer transpired not because Ayutthaya had lost a sense of its maritime culture by reorienting its outlook northwards (Baker, 2003), or that external defence of its coasts seemed to be a low priority (Baker, 2014). It was just that good order at river superseded even the prevention of bad order at sea. This decision turned out to be the right one. In the siege of Ayutthaya in 1568, only twenty years later, in a different approach to the siege of 1548, which had used the Three Pagodas Pass route, the Burmese King Bayinnaung utilised the river system of those same northern dependencies to conduct a one-year siege against the capital, in spite of the usurper King Maha Chakkraphat attempting to break the siege. From 1563 onwards, the Burmese monarch had forced local boat makers in the norther dependencies to produce over 200 warships in preparation of the capital siege (Surakiat, 2005: 81–83).

When good order at river was re-established, in 1593, the Siamese sought to regain nominal control of Tenasserim, Mergui, and Tavoy against the same earlier covetous rivals (Charney, 1994: 41, 47, 51). It did for some time through the period of relative peace during the seventeenth century (Chutintaranond, 2002). Issues with European colonial-capitalists though were becoming intermittently problematic, famously the Dutch naval blockade of Ayutthaya in 1663–1664, requiring an approach that blended maritime policing with diplomacy (na Pombejra, 2003). Subsequent Ayutthaya kings in the seventeenth century proactively rebuilt their commercial network in the Bay of Bengal (Wyatt, 2001: 109), partly facilitated through foreign Muslim communities in the port cities (Subrahmanyam, 1992). Some of this effort transpired even further south in what is today the province of Trang on the peninsular west coast, where special attention was placed on preventing bad order at sea against piratical attacks targeting trade ultimately heading into the wider eastern regional commercial network, including the Ming dynastic court (Nakseethong, 2024: 10–12).

Nothing changed over the following century. Establishing good order at sea was systematically undermined by a priority given to good order at river through special attention to the defence fortification of Bangkok and Louvo during the eighteenth century (Luengo, 2019). Yet, even when Ayutthaya was unable or unwilling to establish good order at sea, it did not mean that it left its periphery in an “international power vacuum” (Graefrath, 2025), succumbing to the might of powerful neighbouring states, like its Burmese rival (Shu, 2012: 241). Monarchical polities in river-basins systematically made use of colonial-capitalists originating from various localities around the globe from China, Japan, Persia, and the European continent, to create conditions in which rivals could do little but construct a negative conception of maritime security (na Pombejra, 2002). They demanded that peripheral autonomous centres tolerate pirates as a means of retaining relative standing in these peripheral areas (Liss, 2003). Asian pirates were a means of production in the active contestation and politicisation over the maritime domain, especially for land-minded polities (Prange, 2013). They were frequently hired not for private ends but for actual political design (Swettenham, 1955: 125).

This comportment of preventing others from constructing good order at sea aligned with the broader trend across the region (Lockhard, 2010). In the sixteenth century, the Orang Laut (Sea Peoples), for instance, operated as hired marauders raiding across the southern Malacca Strait on behalf of the king of Malacca in exchange for food and uncontested coexistence. They prospered until their decline in the eighteenth century with the rise of European colonial-capitalism, which weaponised their way of being and certain industrial technologies undermined their established patron–client relationship with local potentates (Barnard, 2007).

Analogously, in the late eighteenth century, the younger brother of King Phuttha Yotfa of the Rattanakosin (Rama I) (1782–1809), the Chakri Prince Khrom Maha Sura Singhanat (1782–1803), mobilised European colonial-capitalists, notably the English, to put a stop to pirate attacks that were creating too much instability for his international trade (Chularatana, 2001: 211). This approach had not been his preferred option. Initially, in 1793, the Chakri prince had the idea of merging permanently two maritime theatres of operations – the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea – by constructing a canal across the Kra Isthmus. The idea had taken real priority after the Burmese King Alaungpaya (r. 1752–1760) of the Konbaung Dynasty had once more gained control over the Tenasserim coast following the Burmese-Siamese War of 1759 (Mackay, 2013). Though the canal had been proposed by King Narai (1656–1688) a century earlier, it was this prince who first advocated for the canal to be used militarily so as to move ships and men to protect the towns on the Andaman coast from Burmese and Mon piratical attacks (Low and Yue-man, 1973), and ideally in time recover parts of the Tenasserim provinces lost in the 1760s (Ngui, 2012). It would not be their last foray in preventing bad order at sea. In 1785, King Rama I issued a decree by which he placed the influx of weapons being imported into the country under strict surveillance, stipulating that all Siamese commercial boats coming into Bangkok had to unload all arms and ammunition on board at the interpreters’ office of the Kalahom department (in charge of military affairs and southern Siam) (Junko, 2014: 176). This long-term policy played a role in orchestrating, in 1855, the ultimate exchange made between the kingdoms of Rattanakosin and Konbaung over Tenasserim (to Burma) and Lan Na (to Siam); reaffirming once more the logic of ensuring good order at river at the expense of constructing good order at sea (Andaya and Andaya, 2015: 214–332).

In the face of inter-empire colonial networking in Southeast Asia, the Siamese employed a similar approach by manipulating privateers into becoming pirates to resist colonisation. This time, they directed their efforts against European transcontinental maritime empires and not historical rivals, who were collectively attempting to forge good order at sea around their newly acquired colonies (Muller, 2024). In the decades before Sri Suriwongse (r. 1851–1868) began to formalise a fiscal-state navy (Moonsuwan, 2025), when the bulk of naval expeditions and patrols was still performed by royal commoners (phrai luang) to satisfy their corvée service obligations (Junko, 2014: 170), local Siamese authorities following the command of King Nangklo (Rama III) (1824–51) fomented civil unrest on the Malay peninsula by funding piracy to attack British colonial possessions (Connors, 2024). This calculated use of non-state maritime violence was astute in that administrators of the East India Company did not have the authority to commission construction of ships to combat pirates in the Straits Settlements until 1831, with the British Royal Navy only gaining Admiralty jurisdiction in 1837; that is, the legal mechanism for trying captured pirates (Tarling, 1993: 32, 71–73). Other rulers in the region emulated this strategy by likewise sponsoring non-state grey-zone operations against rival trade. For example, Ibrahim I, the Temenggong of Johor, notoriously took great pleasure in funding piracy against the British mercantile class (Trocki, 2007: 6).

Constructing Good Order at Sea Across Modern and Post-Modern Eras in Thai History

After nearly three centuries in which Siamese rulers prioritised good order at river, even at the expense of preventing bad order at sea, a more expansive social ordering of the seas finally entered Thai strategic thinking during the Interwar years.

As the nascent Siamese nation-state took shape, its leaders began a generational project to link sovereign territorial sea control to a positive notion of good order at sea by institutionalising a fiscal-state bureaucratic navy. This effort was driven above all by the efforts of Commander-in-Chief (CinC) Admiral Abhakara Kiartivongse (1922–1923) and Admiral Sindh Kamalanavin (1938–1951). Like other newly minted fiscal-state navies around the globe, the Siamese navy successfully channelled statehood formation processes through the elimination of violent seizures at sea by non-fiscal-state actors (Reid, 2010). Notably, following the First World War, after Siam became a signatory to the League of Nations (1920), Minister of Navy Vudjiaya Chalemlabha (1924–1932) agreed to monitor illicit drug trafficking at ports and in coastal provinces to limit the influx of human trafficking, especially women and children, through Sino-centric trade networks into Siam. The Siamese navy had already been conducting naval exercises in the relevant waters since 1914, and used the cover of follow-up exercises as maritime security efforts. It paid particular attention to good order at sea, in 1931, after Siam hosted its first-ever international conference in Bangkok called the Agreement on the Suppression of Opium-Smoking in the Far East (Collins, 2021). This should be read as one of the first forays into the positive conceptualisation of maritime security in the Thai context as known today, though still far from outright institutionalisation.

In the forthcoming decade, this positive conceptualisation of maritime security had to take a back seat. The Thai navy prioritised resistance to naval aggression from various great powers, initially from the Indochinese colonial navy that culminated in the Franco-Thai War of 1941 (Mahé, 2016), and later occupation by the navies of Japan, the United States and Great Britain following each of their naval mining efforts in its home waters throughout the Second World War (Lott, 1959).

Almost immediately after the Second World War, the Thai navy returned its attention to good order at sea (Jayanama, 2008: 299). The most vital foreign policy objective for the service was to help secure recognition of Thailand's admission to the United Nations (Hanklaeo, 2019; Stowe, 1991). It did so by sending Lieutenant Commander Thawee Imwittaya and the HTMS Sewang to tackle illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) in its self-declared territorial waters and beyond in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) (Charoenphon, 2010: 42). Environmental stewardship would thereafter remain a major diplomatic tool for the Thai navy to signal its role in constructing good order at sea alongside the wider international community.

Yet this early post-war focus on good order at sea proved difficult to sustain during the early Cold War era, as contentious disputes over maritime territorial boundaries once more began to dominate the agenda. In the early 1960s, frustrated by the great power reluctance to recognise their individual territorial claims, a growing bloc of post-colonial coastal states collectively pressed to increase territorial seas to 12 nautical miles (nm) from the baseline (O’Hara, 2016). Thailand followed this trend in concern that its domestic fishing fleets would be cut off from historic waters, expanding its own claim in response to unilateral extensions by the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam between 1969 and 1973 (Thao, 2003). The Petroleum Act (1971), promoted by Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn to enable exploration of the claimed continental shelf, and its subsequent enforcement policy by the navy under CinC Admiral Charoon Charlermtiarana (1966–1971), further pulled its attention towards the territorialisation of maritime boundaries (Tangsubkul, 1982: 87).

By the early 1970s, however, environmental stewardship re-emerged as a complementary strand in the Thai navy's positive conceptualisation of maritime security. In 1973, the navy under CinC Admiral Komon Sitakalin (1972–1973) sent Admiral Kawi Singha, who had extensive experience working with the United States and British navies in Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), to the International Conference on Marine Pollution (MARPOL). There the officer made it known that the Thai navy supported deeper integration of environmental concerns into international maritime law (Singha, 1988: 18). So much so that when he became Navy CinC in 1978, Admiral Kawi translated this stance into concrete operational capability by commissioning the first domestically built oceanographic survey vessel (Singha, 1988: 29). This marked a significant shift in naval strategic thinking, in that the seabed was no longer viewed solely in military terms, as early deliberations had been on the possibility of procuring submarines (1910) (Boonrasri, 2004: 26), but increasingly as an object of maritime security.

Even with these initiatives, the Thai navy was still not discursively framing them in maritime security terms. They were merely individual acts of maritime security. That changed with the Boat Refugee Crisis, which pushed the language of non-traditional security into the open inside the navy (Chong and Maisrikrod, 2017: 117). In 1980, a grossly over-militarised counter-piracy response produced disastrous results, thereby prompting a political recalibration (Lacey, 1987). In 1982, CinC Admiral Sombun Chuaphiboon (1981–1983) implemented a six-point plan devised by the Cabinet by striking a bilateral arrangement with the U.S. Navy through the Office of the United Nations Human Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (Muntarbhorn, 1982). The Thai navy received a US$2 million grant from Washington to subsidise a more expansive counter-piracy operation. Between 1984 and 1987, under CinC Admirals Niphon Sirithorn (1984–1986) and Thada Ditthabanchong (1986–1987), this programme was further broadened to include land-based initiatives with multiple foreign navies through the Rescue at Sea Resettlement Offers (RASRO) scheme supervised by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) (Prayong, 1999: 39). Drawing on this experience, the navy under CinC Admiral Prapat Krishnachan (1987–1991) designed, tested, and institutionalised a Coast Guard Squadron (CGS) between 1989 and 1992, and 1991 pushed parliament to codify Thailand's first comprehensive and dedicated anti-piracy statute (Herrmann, 2014: 218).

Starting in the post-Cold War era, between the late-1990s and early-2000s, the maritime security concept evolved inside the Thai navy less through the United Nations than through the extra-institutions of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It was through involvement in these meetings that the service began working on formulating the first generation of the Maritime Enforcement Coordination Centre (Thai-MECC) in 1997 (Rakkeo, 2017). The induction of maritime security in the Navy through regionalisation efforts occurred not long after former Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral Sopon Ratanakiri began his tenure in the Thai National Security Council (NSC). The officer would lead the main effort in the government to move the Navy away from a militarised version of maritime security, further accelerating after his promotion to Deputy Permanent Secretary for Defence in 1998. The admiral strove to align closely with other ASEAN navies (Kongrawd, 2021). Even more explicit attention to maritime security emerged once instruments in ASEAN surfaced during the late-2000s, when the ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC) Blueprint of 2009 cemented maritime security as a central political-security issue for its members (ASEAN Secretariat, 2009).

And yet, before 2015, the Thai navy still lacked an explicit definition for maritime security, even though Thailand had finally agreed to become a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) in 2011 and had already participated for six years in a remote, multilateral counter-piracy operation around the Horn of Africa (Prayounstang, 2017). It took additional external pressures in the form of a simultaneous downgrade by the United States' “Washington Consensus” on human trafficking and the European Union's (EU) “Brussels's Effect” on IUU fishing (Naiki and Rakpong, 2022). The downgrades provided the political space for the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Agriculture and Forestry (AMAF) to mobilise the Thai fishery department, and behind that the Thai navy, to quickly act on maritime security questions (Cogan, 2024). It was also the moment that international condemnation was widespread regarding its response to the Rohingya Crisis, which described the Thai maritime security establishment as having mismanaged the political issue (Al Imran, 2022).

Even though it did not entirely lead to rectifying all its shortcomings in implementing UNCLOS (Charusombat, 2016), the external pressure did push the Thai national security establishment to at least explicate its definition of maritime security in the National Maritime Security Plan (2015–2021) (Office of the National Security Council, 2015). The proposed definition had been tested by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) a year prior to its release through a comparative case study analysis on counter-piracy in the Malacca Strait and South China Sea (Sirirotborirak, 2015: 42–91). The external pressure also led to renewed discussions on whether the then twenty-year-old Thai-MECC should be reformed from a coordinator to a command centre (Manitkul, 2014), especially in view that other states in ASEAN were taking proactive steps themselves (Limpsira, 2016). The reform was followed through in the Maritime National Interests Protection Act (2019) (Office of the National Security Council, 2019). Subsequent administrations published an updated National Maritime Security Plan of 2023–2027, accompanied by the Thai navy's first-ever White Paper (2023), which together followed through on previously discussed infrastructure initiatives, research projects, and vessel developments, especially along the Andaman Coast, all in support of economic expansion and self-reliance (Sanglee, 2024).

Thailand and the Evolving Contemporary Maritime Security Environment

The contemporary maritime security environment has continued to evolve since many small states formalised their maritime security definitions (Bueger et al., 2024). Despite the Thai defence establishment updating its maritime security documents just three years ago, they are arguably already outdated (Thailand Maritime Enforcement Command Centre, 2022: 6–7). The Thai maritime security establishment appears to agree with this assessment. It is apparently already in the process of formalising a response to three identified threats, with the updated document to be released to the public in either a second Navy White Paper or consolidated in a sixth MoD White Paper, depending on what the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee decides (Thumwong, 2025).

Climate Change-Related Maritime Security Threats

The first threat identified is that maritime security portfolios expand as the effects of climate change worsen (Brennan and Germond, 2024). Thai-MECC will address the threat by carrying out four reforms. First, it has already given the Department of Labour Protection and Welfare (DLPW) expanded funds to increase the number and complexity of its Port-in Port-out (PIPO) investigations (Department of Labour Protection and Welfare, 2023). The process for its investigations is based on its new PIPO Manual (2023) which was introduced to explicitly address past criticism that it historically has had too light of a touch in its policing of human trafficking in the fishing industry (Environmental Justice Foundation, 2020). Its policing efforts to curb human trafficking trendlines in the fishing industry will need to take even greater attention following climate crises as traffickers often try to offset pressure on profitability by exploiting vulnerable individuals and communities (Haenlein, 2023).

The second reform is replacing the one- or two-year rotational assignments with permanent roles that have their own promotional pipeline and cycles. The decision was made to make this transition after it was established that officers performed inconsistently. The permanent posting allows naval officers who develop expertise on addressing climate change-related security issues to finally translate their knowledge into policymaking (Kliangsong and Maneethorn, 2023).

The third reform is systematically providing the CGS with vessels that are specifically designed for climate-related mission-sets, like the Marsun M36-class inshore patrol boat (Coyne, 2018: 25). Although the debate about whether the Squadron should be made independent from the Navy has yet to be resolved internally, with some in favour and others opposed (Saperstein, 2021a), it still needs, in either case, vessels able to operate in these difficult environments. In March 2025, Vice Admiral Suwat Donsadul, Director of Thai-MECC Region 3, deployed a M36 patrol boat called T-111 near Ko Racha Yai to rescue fishermen stranded on an island following a climate crisis event (Royal Thai Navy, 2025a). The flooding that Thailand experienced at the end of 2025 makes this point all the more prescient in their judgment (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025a).

The final reform is getting even more proactive on environmental stewardship. Similar to the Indian, South Korean, and Bangladeshi navies, Thailand pushed a Green Navy initiative in 2017 to last until 2037. The Navy took explicit steps to address oil spills and marine debris during its ASEAN Chairmanship in 2019 (Chinvanno and Anantasirikia, 2024: 3). Since then, Thai-MECC has been given orders to put greater priority on the issue, especially after a crude oil spill transpired only 9 km away from Koh Sichang in early June, 2025. After the incident, the Chief of Staff of Thai-MECC Region 1, Rear Admiral Pisit Rangsiphanurat (2024–2025), requested that the organisation respond more effectively to crude oil spills in domestic waters (Royal Thai Navy, 2025a). A month later, Vice Admiral Apa Chapanon, Commander of Thai-MECC Region 1 (2024–2025), in collaboration with the Marine Department (MD), organised Operation Rose 25, an oil spill prevention and mitigation exercise to ameliorate its response time (First Area Command, 2025b).

Striated Maritime Security Threats

The second threat identified is that maritime security is no longer pursued mostly at the surface level. Security risks are now distributed across the five sub-levels of the maritime domain: surface, airspace, subsurface, seabed, and AI-cyberspace-outerspace nexus (Callender, 2017).

To address the striated threat environment, the Navy is in the early days of assisting Thai-MECC in developing responses to the five sub-levels, especially by ensuring they prioritise protecting sea cables and cyberspace assets. It is perhaps the security issue that has been given the most attention in its internal academic journals over recent years. The Royal Thai Navy War College (RTNWC), in partnership with Thai-MECC, has debated this issue at great length, even making it the theme of the 13^th navy symposium: Integrated Thai Maritime Security (ความมั่นคง แบบองค์รวม แห่ง ท้องทะเลไทย) (Chaenglek, 2025).

On the undersea subdomain, the Thai navy has been working to secure it for two decades already. It has already built indigenous remote and autonomous unmanned prototypes to augment its situational awareness (Argüello et al., 2023), best exemplified by research projects on unmanned undersea vehicles: HMTS Kraithong, Wichuda, and Sutsakorn (National Legislative Assembly, 2017: 10-11). In support of this effort to secure its interests on the seabed, the Hydrographic Department in May of 2025 released its replacement vessel – HTMS Suriya – to maintain the capability to inspect and repair navigational aids on the seafloor within territorial waters (The Nation, 2025b). Around the same time, the Thai-MECC Region 1 began testing a Remote-Controlled Victim Assistance Device (RCVA) for tourists who develop issues during their tour of seabed maritime environments. These innovations are scheduled for transfer to the operations centre over the coming year now that the testing exercise has completed (The States Times, 2025).

For its part, per the Executive Committee Order No. 3/2024, Rear Admiral Jumpol Nakbua, Director of Thai-MECC, organised a study on possible threats to its critical underwater communication infrastructure and then communicated the findings to relevant private companies, like True Corporation Public Company Limited (TRUE) (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025b). The study led to an effort to establish specific guidelines for Thai-MECC to monitor the security of physical underwater communication infrastructure (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025c), and likely informed Thailand's support for the Enhanced ASEAN Guidelines for Strengthening Resilience and Repair of Submarine Cables at the 6th ASEAN Digital Ministers Meeting (Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, 2026).

There is also great awareness of the prevalence of maritime cyber-attacks on infrastructure (Harish et al., 2025; Fenton, 2024). According to Vice Admiral Saneh Soontonmongkol, a latent concern was already present back in 2004 when the Hydrographic Department digitised its classified nautical charts, as it could do little to prevent cyber hacks then (Royal Thai Navy Hydrographic Department, 2008). The Navy officially began its effort to secure the maritime cyber subdomain in the early 2010s, formalising the effort through the Network Centric Warfare Master Plan of 2015. The act required incoming CinC Admiral Na Arreenich to establish the Cyber Centre within the Naval Communication and Information Technology Department (NCIT). It took another three years, in 2018, for the Navy to establish the Cyber Security (CS) and Cyber Operation (CO) Divisions within the Cyber Centre (Saperstein, 2020). Though the cyber teams were only authorised to procure defensive capabilities, and therefore lacked any offensive cyber capabilities, it did not stop Cpt. Pattaphong Durongritthichai, Director of the NCIT Cyber Division, from declaring that year during an academic seminar on cybersecurity in military affairs at the Royal Thai Army Command and General Staff College, as organised by Air Chief Marshal (ACM) Chanarit Plikanon, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Royal Thai Armed Forces Headquarters (RTArFHQ), that in time the navy would be required to employ offensive capabilities due to developments in naval warfare (Isra News Agency, 2017).

To rapidly ameliorate its cybersecurity capabilities, following the path of other Thai bureaucratic organisations (Naripthaphan, 2023), the Navy openly pursued a cyber diplomatic approach. In 2019, in accordance with the Cobra Gold Exercise 6 Years Plan of 2019–2024, it participated in its first-ever multilateral cybersecurity exercise under the command of Major General Chartchai Chaikasen, then Director of Cyber Security Centre in the RTArFHQ. The broader maritime security establishment only held observer status then. This initial partnership seems to have had little effect. In 2021, the National Defence Studies Institute (NDSI) did a survey of the AI-cyber ecosystem across the government, including the navy, and found that it lacked the necessary features to evolve its capabilities. It recommended an (i) AI Action Plan and (ii) Joint AI Centre developed to create a culture of integration internally on AI-cyber-based operations and externally on a Joint Information Environment with relevant allies or partners, even potentially translating into a Joint Regional AI-Ecosystem (Nunpakdii and Sirirotborirak, 2020).

From that study, two developments transpired. First, the Thai Cabinet passed the National AI Strategy and Action Plan (2022–2027). The objective of this action plan was threefold: (i) building human capacity, economic growth, and social/environmental maturity. Second, given that the plan called for an increase in the number of public and private agencies that use AI technology to a minimum benchmark of 600 agencies in six years, the Thai navy under CinC Admiral Chatchai Srivorakhan (2020–2021) established the inaugural AI and Big Data Exhibition (Royal Thai Navy, 2021). These efforts led Thailand to jump from 60th place in 2020 to 31st in 2022 in the Government AI Readiness framework (Noor and Manantan, 2022).

The attention paid to AI-cyber led certain senior officers in the Thai naval defence establishment to worry that the outerspace subdomain had been largely neglected. In 2023, Cpt. Chalermchai Suankaew from the NCIT wrote the first analysis of threats to naval assets via the outerspace subdomain. The officer concluded that its dependence on outerspace systems is too vulnerable to interception of classified data and satellites themselves, reconnaissance against naval vessels, and electronic jamming of its GPS technology. There was also a general lack of outerspace coursework across the fleet, including in Thai-MECC (Suankaew, 2023). As a result of the study, CinC Admiral Cherngchai Chomcheingpaet (2022–2023) mandated that the 2023 Cobra Gold would be the first time that the Navy incorporated space training in its Joint/Combined Staff planning exercises with Thai civilian space agencies included (The Nation, 2023). It did not hurt that the United States was in the early days of pushing for its own regional intelligence dominance through space defence cooperation (Sasaki, 2025: 72).

Since then, the Navy has taken the necessary steps to augment its cybersecurity capabilities in outerspace through both inter-bureaucratic and inter-governmental initiatives. With regard to inter-bureaucratic initiatives, in 2024, it agreed to join the recently established Cyber Command unit under General Songwit Noonphakdi at the RTArFHQ to improve the skill set of its naval officers, with some actually coming from the newly established Electronic Warfare Division (Looi, 2024: 23). In terms of inter-governmental initiatives, in 2025, CinC Admiral Jirapol Wongwit made the first diplomatic visit to the U.S. Cyber (10^th) Fleet Command (Chief of Naval Operations Press Office, 2025), which broadened its participation in the 7th Cyber Exercise at the 2025 Cobra Gold with the U.S. 252nd Cyberspace Operations Group (Wilson, 2025).

There are also some indications that the Navy is perhaps finally recognising the need to incorporate offensive cyber capabilities into its modus operandi, much as other navies have already done so (Ferazza and Mersinas, 2025). At its 1st Navy Cyber Fair, organised by the Director of the Cyber Centre, Rear Admiral Karajack Yotsasarn, the main lecture was actually on the link between AI-Cyber and offensive naval operations(Royal Thai Navy, 2025b). Not long after the event, the Head of National Cyber Security Agency (NCSA), ACM Amorn Chomchoey (2023-), organised a seminar on national cybersecurity with offensive naval cyber capabilities discussed at length by none other than Captain Sermsak Boontha of the NCIT's Cyber Centre. The 2025 Procurement Operations Plan allocated two million baht to procure training simulation software, so its officers can develop offensive cybersecurity capabilities, though with a special addendum for “ethical hacking” (Chiangsin, 2025).

These efforts by the Navy prompted Thai-MECC to also consider securing the cyberspace subdomain. In 2023, it signed a multi-agency data integration agreement with Thailand's Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA) to gain access to the recently launched Marine Geo-Informatics Portal Platform. The platform enhances its efficiency in managing marine and coastal areas (Post Today, 2023). Its acquisition indicates that Thai-MECC is in the early days of ensuring that space-borne geo-data is structurally integrated into the knowledge management of its territorial waters. Since then, Thai-MECC launched a recruiting drive that called for applications from the public to hire nearly a dozen civilian cybersecurity specialists (Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Centre, 2025). With these new specialists finally integrated, in April 2025, the executive council agreed on a proposal to conduct a cybersecurity study on the best way to secure the increasing number of IT devices and software across the organisation (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025d). This wider push was reinforced by Thai-MECC co-organising, alongside the EU and Japan, a regional seminar in Bangkok on cyber resilience of supply chains in the maritime domain (Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Centre, 2026). While there is much left to do for Thai-MECC to secure its interests in this maritime subdomain, it is clear that the organisation has finally begun to take the issue seriously.

Transnational Maritime Security Threats

The third threat identified is that the rapid democratisation of technology expands the geographic reach of malign actors, effectively systematising maritime security policy at a transnational level. To address it, the Thai maritime security establishment is determined to expand its maritime diplomacy (Edwards, 2019), at the bilateral (Paul, 2020), trilateral (Song et al., 2020), and multilateral levels (Agastia, 2021). Put otherwise, after all these years, the Thai maritime security establishment is finally taking the necessary steps to go global to secure its domestic territorial waters. However, though the global expansion might give the impression that they are partaking in a broader consensus on international cooperation, as expressed at the conclusion of the May 2025 UN Security Council high-level debate on maritime security (United Nations, 2025), these authorities are using good order instruments primarily as a means of preventive risk management to insulate Thai autonomy against a more coercive and uncertain maritime strategic environment rather than as an end in itself (Joshi, 2023).

At the bilateral level, the Thai navy seeks to expand its joint and combined exercises on maritime security activities with other navies. In April, the Thai and Vietnamese navies expanded their attention to maritime security issues after Vice Admiral Arpa Chapanont of the Thai First Naval Area Command (NAC) signed an accord with the Vietnamese 5^th Naval Region (Peoples Army Newspaper, 2025a). The accord was closely followed by the personal visit of former CinC Jirapol Wongwit (2024–2025) to Vietnam, where further accords were signed (Peoples Army News Paper, 2025b). The Japanese navy has also expressed its eagerness to participate in more maritime security activities with the Thai navy to expand its footprint in Southeast Asia. In June 2025, the RTArFHQ under General Songwit Noonpackdeem (2023–2025), building on the Terms of Reference (TOR) agreement signed two years earlier by the Thai navy with the Japanese navy on questions related to maritime security and intelligence gathering (Nanuam, 2023), reaffirmed its intention to combat transnational crime with Japan (The Nation, 2025c). The current CinC Admiral Pairote Fuengchan (2026-) has only expanded upon this effort, as reflected in the April 2026 visit to Japan to deepen maritime security cooperation and further strengthen intelligence ties with the Japanese navy (Royal Thai Navy, 2026).

On South Asia relations, Thai-MECC Region 3, under Vice Admiral Suwat Donsakul (2024–2025), expressed a desire for Thailand to be a major point of contact for Indian Ocean Region (IOR) navies on their maritime security activities in Southeast Asia (Rodjanagoson, 2024: 252). While the Indian navy has captured attention in the media through the 36^th edition of Coordinated Patrol (CORPAT), 1st bilateral Ex-Ayutthaya naval exercise last year, and the recent 1st Training Squadron making a port visit (India News Network, 2025), the Pakistani navy is also worth a special mention as it has been a major partner of interest for the Thai navy since it helped determine whether the Chinese-built submarine engine and Turkish-made frigates were each worth procuring (The Nation, 2025a). The Thai navy just last year signed agreements with the Pakistani navy on maritime domain awareness (MDA), search and rescue, and hydrography at the 3^rd Navy-to-Navy Talks (Pakistani Navy, 2024). And, in a similar approach to the Burmese-Bangladesh maritime security agreement in 2023 (Narinjara News, 2023), the Thai navy also recently established bilateral initiatives with the Bangladeshi navy. The Thai navy will not only assist Bangladesh in its Blue Security transformation by helping it to better conserve its marine natural resources but will also help it secure its direct commercial shipping (Hasan, 2025). The latest announcement that Phang Nga Naval Station is not far from getting the necessary funds to expand its port facilities will only facilitate such efforts (The Nation, 2025d). All these initiatives position Thailand as a mediator between South and Southeast Asia, actively engaged in inter-regional maritime security governance.

At the multilateral level, the Thai maritime security establishment will look to deepen its standing within ASEAN through its CGS, as expressed at the most recent high-level meeting in Pattaya during the ASEAN Coast Guard Forum (ACF). It will also continue to aggressively pursue chairmanships of other multilateral frameworks between 2023 and 2025, such as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), and Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) (Cheeppensook, 2024). In all three organisations, the Navy has worked overtime to attain a leadership position to promote its understanding of the blue economy concept (Phuvanatnaranubala, 2024) . At the IONS Maritime Table Top Exercise (TTX) that it organised in Bangkok in the middle of 2025, it presented a maritime incident scenario on health and environmental (in)security in the Indian Ocean, whereby an oil tanker collided with a passenger ship (Royal Thai Navy, 2025c).

In the same vein, Thai-MECC has been equally proactive in pursuing diplomatic efforts. There is a clear record of a desire to move beyond its near-seas and take a global approach. In December 2024, Vice Admiral Danai Suwannahong, Director of Thai-MECC, signed the IORIS Partnership Agreement (IPA) with the EU to train some analysts on the Critical Maritime Routes Indo-Pacific Project II (CRIMARIO). Some of its analysts were recently certified on the latest Indo-Pacific Regional Information Sharing (IORIS) software package (Version IV), which brings Thai-MECC into the wider network fold of European maritime security agencies and their partners in the region, like the Philippines Coast Guard (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025e), even if the utility of such platforms still depends on how effectively they are incorporated into routine institutional practice and human-machine interaction (Schultheiss, 2026). In October 2025, in place of other government agencies, it was decided that Deputy Director Thanathip Chantharaphakdee would attend the US-ASEAN series on Undersea Cable Maintenance & Repair Best Practices Workshop in Jakarta (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025f). Not long after, Vice Admiral Songrit Chatngern, Assistant Secretary-General of Thai-MECC, met with a delegation from the EU's Enhancing Security Cooperation in and with Asia and the Indo-Pacific (ESIWA+) team, which seeks to build maritime cyber security capabilities in countries located in the Indo-Pacific (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025g). And most recently, Commander Chaisiri Khundam, Deputy Director of the Strategic and Operations Division, represented Thai-MECC at the 3rd IORIS Steering Committees Meeting in Manila to strengthen regional maritime security cooperation (Office of Policy and Planning, 2025h).

Maritime Security Under Deep Pluralism

Following the trend of certain renowned naval strategists (Kennedy and Wilson, 2021), the Thai defence establishment frames these three maritime security evolutions as arising due to the international system structurally transitioning from a unipolar to a bipolar to now a multipolar world order. This transition is noted, for example, by Air Vice Marshal Poomjai Leksuntarakorn during his tenure as Director of the SSC, a research centre that is part of the Mnistry of Defence (Leksuntarakorn, 2019). The transition is also frequently expressed in their public lectures. Only last year, the Deputy Chief of Staff in the navy's Operations Department, Vice Admiral Thadawut Thatpitakkul, stated that multipolarity characterises the contemporary international system (Royal Thai Navy Official Channel, 2025). If not explicitly, multipolarity is alluded to in internal documents through the acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), as revealed by Vice Admiral Wasan Sathakij in the preface to the most recently edited handbook for the junior naval officer training course (Department of Naval Education, 2023: 3).

However, a reversion to the realist ideal notion of multipolarity to capture changes in the maritime security environment may actually underplay the extent to which the international system is structurally transforming (Powlson, 2025). Multipolarity may not fully provide an explanation for the degree to which social orders and international norms are transforming in the maritime domain. It cannot, for instance, explain how the International Seabed Authority (ISA) can claim exclusive jurisdiction over seabed mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone at the expense of French and Mexican state-led maritime interests (Lodge et al., 2014). Nor can it explain the positive results that the intensifying relations between regional organisations have had on managing environmental security issues in the maritime domain, such as those between the EU and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (Bueger, 2025a, 2025b). The maritime security agenda of indigenous peoples through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is also grossly underestimated by utilising multipolarity, as they have increasingly found creative ways to expand their influence on maritime security governance policymaking (Chuffart, 2025; Chuffart et al., 2023). They play an important role in producing knowledge and MDA and have also worked towards tackling the causes of blue crime themselves (Benson, 2022). The same is true of non-governmental commercial insurers, whose decisions can constrain international commercial shipping in ways that state-centric accounts of multipolarity struggle to explain. Recent disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz illustrate how authority to secure maritime circulation may rest as much with financial risk actors as with state-led naval forces (Hailes, 2026).

A new social order is emerging in the international system that extends well beyond multipolarity (Bueger and Edmunds, 2021). This social order is increasingly dubbed “multiplex ordering” (Pardesi and Acharya, 2025) or “deep pluralism” (Buzan, 2023). The attention to multiplexity or deep pluralism emphasises the role of multiple layers of interactions beyond mere state-to-state relationships, thereby recognising non-state actors and transnational interactions as fundamental components of the international system, too (Zhang and Buzan, 2022). There is an open question currently as to whether this new social ordering augments, stabilises or further disorders international relations (Zhang, 2023). Most indicators are currently pointing towards contention, and not collaboration (Farrell and Newman, 2019; Kupchan, 2014). The intensification of regional cooperation might make neighbours work closer together, but perhaps at the expense of risking fragmentation of global governance (Kahler, 2017). In either case, small states around the globe are forced to pay greater attention not just to great-power naval threats (Till, 2022), but also to the diffusion of wealth, cultural, ideological, and technological power beyond the state-system itself in the maritime domain (Lupel et al., 2024).

A more deeply layered and complex generation of maritime security capability is now required. Rather than relying on traditional sea power (de Mattos and de Sexias Cavalho, 2022), international actors need to generate deep pluralist maritime security, or the capacity to not only secure maritime interests against non-state actors but also to gain recognition across multiple overlapping and normatively diverse maritime orders (global, regional, and functional), each with its own rules, institutions, and audiences. The result is a wholesale revision of the previous maritime security matrices that many small navies have been reliant on for the last few decades (Till, 2018a, 2018b: 308).

Certain policy proposals can help maritime security establishments of small states avoid being reduced to permanently implementing bad order at sea prevention policies, and instead retain enough autonomy to generate deep pluralist maritime security. First, they should be pragmatic about certain post-modern maritime security policies previously implemented and accept that a degree of remilitarisation will be required at the margins of their maritime governance (Fiskvik and Heier, 2024). Rather than blanketly criticising Thailand's maritime security approach as “over-militarised” (Sanglee, 2024), a stance common in the Security Sector Reform literature (Cogan, 2023; Chambers, 2020; Kocak and Kode, 2014), the more productive question is how the maritime security establishment can be used to help the defence establishment navigate a rapidly transforming international system (Bueger and Stockbruegger, 2022). Certain non-military sectors and domestic industries will need to remain or be integrated back into a traditional national security architecture (Berndtsson, 2024). Such integration – done well – moves Thailand closer to its own stated whole-of-government maritime security approach (Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Centre, 2023), while preserving the hard-edge capabilities required to prevent bad order at sea (Christensen and Lægreid, 2007).

The remilitarisation of certain maritime security policies does not necessarily mean that frugality and fairness abroad cannot be prioritised, let alone included (Deverell, 2025). Neither does it necessarily mean a reduction of liberalism in civil-military relations (Ellingsen, 2024). In fact, in certain instances, the opposite will have to transpire where the traditional naval defence establishment will need to keep giving way to civilian authorities when it undermines regional stability (Marggraff, 2025: 2). For example, it might reconsider the way it lends support to business diplomatic actors, as businesses increasingly need state support in certain highly-contested regions until such time that international maritime law establishes new guiding baselines (Parlov, 2023). This means in practice that the Thai naval defence establishment will need to lend more resources, not fewer, to diplomatic engagements through its naval attachés or maritime security development assistance programmes (Royal Thai Navy Hydrographic Department, 2021: 13).

Second, maritime security establishments of small states need to reform the internal structure of their domestic organisations. Turf wars and institutional rigidity conflict with the flexibility required to address challenges effectively (Arif et al., 2024). In addition to receiving greater funding, Thai-MECC needs to deepen previous efforts to revise its top-down command structure (Proamprenge, 2022: 56). Administrative and management personnel must transition into policy executors. Not only are the current policy executives already struggling to manage all organisational affairs, but their focus should be wholly dedicated to developing long-term policy planning and ensuring that others are following through accordingly. Locating policy executors at lower managerial levels will drastically reduce the delays in processing approval requests currently plaguing the organisation. Managers would finally be incentivised to improve their responsiveness to the needs of local communities. All of these reforms regrettably require a leadership with tremendous tenacity, as the twelve domestic laws that regulate maritime security are too highly restrictive at this time for these reforms to transpire solely within the organisation (Kliangsong and Maneethorn, 2023).

Third, maritime security establishments of small states will need to do more than “shelter” within legacy intergovernmental organisations (Chong, 2014: 211). They will need to truly “go global” (Crandall, 2020: 404). Contemporary small states have advantages over past ones due to the current number and depth of intergovernmental maritime organisations available for membership (Liebetrau and Bueger, 2024), especially regimes grounded on MDA information sharing practice (Bueger et al., 2025). More critically, though, once they become members, they will need to proactively reconstruct organisations so that they possess a flexible security architecture; one that allows for a joint adaptive patchwork governance approach, treating complexity and fragmentation as a given. This is only possible after establishing a consensus on the global-regional division of labour and on how informal versus formal organisational links between their respective institutions can offset risks and expand the benefits of the new regionalism (Telò, 2020).

While the maritime diplomacy of Thai-MECC has made tremendous strides in the last few years in going global, it needs to join an even greater number of intergovernmental organisations. With that, it has neither sufficiently leaned into efforts to organisationally restructure those it has previously joined, nor sufficiently put its ideational mark on them. There is limited time left to make use of the open ideational space currently available before it is filled by other more eager norm entrepreneurs. It is time for Thai-MECC to co-design norms by, for instance, integrating climate change-related environmental concerns into maritime security discussions (Saperstein, 2021b) and pushing for greater attention to land-sea integrated governance, including investment in coastal communities (Dayan and Rubin, 2026).

Until such time as these reforms are adopted by maritime establishments of small states to address the level of social complexity that has newly emerged in the international system, the demand for maritime security is likely to exceed the supply (Schmitt and Tumchewics, 2025). And despite ardent efforts undertaken by apt small states to reduce “voids of governance” in the maritime domain (Dabova, 2013), their maritime establishments are bound to be momentarily forced to move away from their preferred model of maintaining good order at sea towards periodically giving way to preventing and deploying bad order at sea once more.

A transition to merely preventing bad order at sea does not mean that maritime security establishments will stop utilising the discourse of positive conceptualisation of maritime security. The conceptualisation has become too closely tied to membership conditions of intergovernmental institutions to be relegated altogether. The positive conceptualisation as a discourse is here to stay. For many actors, its use will concern preventing bad order at sea as much as manifesting good order at sea.

Conclusion

This article traced how Thailand's maritime security practice has moved from a centuries-long preoccupation with preventing bad order at sea in service of riverine and coastal stability towards a more ambitious agenda of constructing good order at sea during the twentieth century, and back again to a renewed emphasis on negative conceptualisations in the present. In doing so, the article has shown that practices now labelled as maritime security are far older than the late-Cold War narrative suggests.

Historically, Ayutthaya, Siamese, and Thai rulers treated maritime violence as something to be managed rather than eradicated, tolerating and even instrumentalising pirates and privateers when this helped preserve good order at river and protect commercial networks. Only with the emergence of a fiscal-state navy in the Interwar years, and later through post-Second World War environmental stewardship and post-Cold War participation in regionalisation, did a positive good order at sea agenda become central to its maritime strategic thought. The post-Cold War period deepened this shift, as Thailand subscribed to UNCLOS, experimented with coast guard functions, and embedded itself in ASEAN-centred regimes.

Its recent reforms, though, reveal the limits of this trajectory. Under pressure from climate-related crises, maritime boundary disputes, and transnational threats, Thai government officials increasingly prioritised preventing bad order at sea rather than merely working towards a positive construction of good order at sea. They prioritised plugging gaps in maritime domain sub-levels and international maritime governance regimes.

Part of the explanation for Thailand's contemporary maritime security reforms is that they are being rolled out under a particular reading of an emerging international order, a reversion to a realist multipolarity. This framing captures some of the distributional shifts in naval power and economic prowess but underplays the extent to which authority in the maritime domain is now being renegotiated across multiple layers and by a wider cast of international actors. The proliferation of functional regimes, such as the growing role of regional organisations, the activism of coastal communities and indigenous groups, and the rise of new regulatory platforms around climate and seabed mining, all point to a more complex ordering of the maritime domain than multipolarity alone suggests.

To capture this emerging configuration, the article has advanced the notion of deep pluralist maritime security: a form of security that rests less on achieving traditional sea control with a number of near or distant state actors alone and more on the capacity to operate, secure interests and gain recognition across overlapping and normatively diverse maritime orders – global, regional, and functional – each with its own rules, institutions and audiences. For Thailand, and other small states, the challenge is not simply to keep up with great-power competition, but to navigate and shape this multiplex environment without being reduced to a permanently reactive posture of crisis-driven prevention.

For scholars of maritime security, the Thai case underscores the value of bringing negative conceptualisations back into the analysis and of situating good order at sea historically rather than treating it as an unproblematic endpoint. For practitioners, it suggests that the gap between the demand and supply of maritime security is likely to widen as climate change, technological diffusion, and transnational crime intensify. Until such time that the international system becomes less complex, maritime security establishments of small states will continue to oscillate between the aspiration to help build good order at sea and the recurrent necessity of preventing – and at times strategically deploying – bad order at sea.