Chokepoint Politics
Global maritime shipping is riddled with obstacles that slow down logistics, some of which are intentionally implemented to increase profit.
DECEMBER 7, 2023
“Armed guards on board.” As soon as the pilots who had been on the ship from the Little Bitter Lake disembarked in Suez, we picked up another crew. Unlike the chain-smoking duo who had been bantering with the captain and first mate, this group was aloof but loud. Wearing quasi-military uniforms with the company name Risk Control embossed on the back, the foursome immediately went to work.
I was on a cargo ship, traveling from Fos-sur-Mer to Dubai. While sitting in the galley watching Lorenzo, the ship’s chef, season the captain’s pork chops with paprika, we heard over the ship’s public announcement system that armed guards had arrived on board. The ship’s kitchen was divided between paprika (a favorite of the Romanian captain and the Filipino crew) and curry powder (preferred by the Indian seafarers). Lorenzo had placed me in the curry powder category as soon as I boarded the ship and was fretting over the spice preferences of our newest crew members. “I think they’re English,” he remarked. “Those people like curry. I guess they stole it all from your country.” Lorenzo laughed and began to prepare a chicken curry for “our” side of the ship.
“Chop onion,” he instructed, and I began my least favorite task in the kitchen. I had spent the past week walking around the deck of the ship with some of the crew on chipping and painting duty, one of the most ubiquitous tasks on a container vessel — a never-ending battle against rust and salt damage at sea. When the second mate told me I could spend time in the kitchen for the rest of the week, I was excited for a break from paint and diesel fumes, the dominant smells of cargo ships.
“There will be a live-fire exercise at 22:00.” Bleary-eyed from my onion duty, I looked up to see one of the armed guards at the doorway of the galley. “Stay in your quarters during those hours,” he declared before walking down to the ship’s office. At 21:30 the ship loudspeaker crackled alive and Elvin, the third mate, reminded us it was time to go to our quarters, draw the curtains and stay inside. Over the next hour, I heard occasional pops amid the general din of the ship (container ships are loud places), and at midnight, once Elvin had come back on the loudspeaker to tell us the exercise was over, I sneaked back up to the bridge.
Chokepoints are a reminder that while our world may seem more and more connected, it is also in some ways more stuck. That stuckness, far from being an exception, is both the norm and, at times, the condition desired by many as a mode of profit and possibility.
At night, the bridge is mostly dark, illuminated only by the glow of navigation screens and occasionally the cellphones of the seafarers standing watch. As I peered at the navigation screens, I saw our ship and numerous others now broadcasting the notice “armed guards onboard” on the marine radar. Soon after, the captain made his way up to the bridge and went outside for his routine midnight cigarette. Eager to chat about the armed guards, I followed the captain outside. It was a beautiful, starry night, though the view was hindered by the exhaust fumes of the ship. “We’ll be going through the High Risk Area soon as we make our way first to Djibouti — that’s why we have guests on board,” the captain informed me, referring to the area in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean with greater risk of piracy. “What a funny world. We’re sailing with mercenaries on the lookout for pirates. … I feel like I’m in a history book, like we are in a different century.” Mercenaries and pirates were once understood as belonging to a different time, a time prior to the advent of enormous, professionalized national navies and container ships. However, an unprecedented upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia from 2007 to 2013 led to the return of mercenaries as a security solution for ships. Increasingly, armed guards are commonplace on cargo ships as they navigate the world’s oceans.
Ninety percent of global trade happens by sea. Almost everything we consume has spent time on the thousands of ships — which are operated by over two million seafarers from over 140 countries — that are currently at sea. In a seemingly virtual world, global shipping and the dense maritime highways traversed by cargo ships remain key to the making and sustaining of a deeply interconnected world. Yet this movement of ships, cargo and capital is far from seamless. Mobility at sea (and indeed elsewhere) requires constantly navigating chokepoints. Some of these chokepoints are tied to geography — narrow waterways such as the Suez Canal choke and slow down the seemingly frictionless flow of global shipping. Sometimes people, places, and events also become chokepoints: Pirates, ports, pandemics, and storms have the power to create delays, interruptions and backlogs that ripple across the world.
Policymakers have primarily understood chokepoints as sites of anxiety and logistical challenges that need to be overcome. But chokepoints are also dense spaces of circulation, amphibious locales where landed forms of territoriality abut the fluidity of the maritime realm. Chokepoints foreground slowness, stuckness and interruptions. They make palpable the tensions of moving across scale and temporality. Chokepoints are a reminder that while our world may seem more and more connected, it is also in some ways more stuck. That stuckness, far from being an exception, is both the norm and, at times, the condition desired by many as a mode of profit and possibility.
I.
In March 2021, the Ever Given — a Taiwanese-owned, Panamanian-flagged container ship traveling from Malaysia to the Netherlands — got stuck in the Suez Canal. For almost a week the 220,000-ton ship managed to completely block traffic in the canal, where roughly 12 percent of global trade transits on a regular basis. This created a traffic jam of over 400 vessels. Thousands of seafarers and billions of dollars’ worth of cargo ranging from sheep to oil were all stuck on either side of this vital chokepoint that connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. After several days of intensive dredging, nonstop work by a fleet of tugboats, a favorable swell, and unusually high tides caused by a full moon, the Ever Given finally came unstuck on March 29, 2021, though it was promptly impounded by Egyptian authorities as they negotiated damages from the owners of the ship and insurance companies.
Chokepoint politics reveal that who wins, who loses, who gets stuck and who gets left behind are not always known from the onset.
As the spectacle of the Ever Given played out in the media, I was reminded — like the captain I spoke with about mercenaries and pirates — of a different century. The idea of cutting a sea lane through the Sinai Peninsula, thereby connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and easing access to the riches of the Indian Ocean, had existed from at least the mid-16th century. The Ottoman grand vizier had planned to dig a canal between the Mediterranean and the port of Suez in 1568, but the idea was abandoned after surveyors deemed it infeasible. It was only in the mid-19th century, when the semi-private Suez Canal Company took on the task, that the idea came to fruition. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 marked a watershed moment in world economic history. Prior to the opening of the canal, majestic sailing ships called clippers commanded the maritime highways of the global ocean. The canal cut 7,350 nautical miles and a few weeks in transit time off the trip from Europe to Asia.
Steam transformed geographies of maritime connection. As historian Jeremy Prestholdt has noted, “Steamships loosed the societies of the Indian Ocean rim from the rhythms of the monsoons. Since steamship service integrated distant reaches such as Natal into older networks, coal effectively expanded the Indian Ocean region.” The age of the container is a continuation of this story. The container shrunk the world by moving seamlessly across road, sea and rail, engendering new economies through the “sinews of war and trade.” Within the world of ports and global shipping, this transition from sail to steam to container structures understandings of place and navigation. New technologies seemingly consolidate power and profits in certain places while leaving others behind.
Chokepoint politics add an important dimension to this sweeping story of technical progress and lag. All journeys require the navigation of chokepoints. Whether a ship is stuck outside port, waiting to load and unload cargo, or suffering the interruptions of pandemics and pirates, slowdowns, stuckness and drift affect all vessels at sea. These liminal conditions are marked by perils, possibilities and occasionally sudden reversals of fortune. Chokepoint politics reveal that who wins, who loses, who gets stuck and who gets left behind are not always known from the onset.
II. The Port of Djibouti
Soon after we entered the High Risk Area, the bridge became a noisier place. On a fairly regular basis, the radio would crackle alive, and one of the numerous naval vessels patrolling the area would hail a cargo ship asking for location, crew numbers and next port. This messaging was ostensibly undertaken to ensure that a ship was still under the control of its captain and crew and had not been hijacked. We were traveling in an informal convoy through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait , which lies between East Africa and Yemen. The ordinary seaman on watch that night was telling me that on his last transit, ships had to be escorted by navy vessels, but when a ship had private security, the requirements were loosened a bit. In the middle of our conversation, a voice boomed through the radio: “Coalition warship to CMA CGM Scorpio.”
Our ship was being hailed. Elvin, the third mate, who had been updating navigation maps in the back, ran to the front and answered: “This is CMA CGM Scorpio.”
After a brief pause, the voice came in again: “CMA CGM Scorpio, switch to Channel 7.”
Once on the private channel, a somewhat scripted back-and-forth ensued:
Coalition warship: “CMA CGM Leo, how many crew members on board?”
Elvin: “Thirty-five crew, plus one passenger and armed guard escorts.”
Coalition warship: “Nationalities on board?”
Elvin: “Eighteen Filipinos, seven Romanians, 10 Indians and one American and four British.”
Coalition warship: “Nationalities on board?”
Elvin looked toward me and said, “Maybe they’re confused why we have one American on board,” before repeating the numbers again.
Coalition warship: “Next port?”
Elvin: “Djibouti.”
Another pause, then: “Thank you, CMA CGM Leo. Safe transit.”
Arriving by ship to the Doraleh Container Terminal in Djibouti, the second-largest container port on Africa’s Indian Ocean coast after Durban, is at first glance no different from docking at any other node of global shipping. In contrast to non-containerized port cities — where ports give rise to bustling spaces of commerce and conviviality, and where cargo and crews are part of the aesthetic register of urban space — container ports are at first sight distant and distinct. Technological advancements such as containerization and the ever-increasing cargo capacity of ships mean that ports now require more space, and ships need deeper channels to load and unload cargo in accordance with the just-in-time requirements of global logistics. These specifications have meant that container ports are now located far outside city centers, in self-contained worlds linked to markets and other distribution centers via railways and highways.
As we berthed in Djibouti, amid the large cargo vessels of major shipping companies like Maersk, CMA CGM and COSCO Shipping were a number of naval destroyers belonging to NATO’s counter-piracy mission. This proximity of trade and security, of cargo ships and navy vessels, has led the Dijbouti port to take on an outsize importance among the port cities of the Red Sea.
Djibouti’s transformation into the chokepoint for this strait is surprising. Unlike neighboring ports in places such as Aden, Berbera, Massawa and Assab, Djibouti was not historically tied to the wider land-sea trade network of the Red Sea. In addition to transforming routes and itineraries on land, the building of Djibouti’s port in the 19th century redirected marine traffic from older Red Sea port cities like Zeila, Massawa and Berbera. This transfer was achieved through the coercive power of the French empire, which at the time had colonized what was known as French Somaliland. The French deployed blockades and a series of regulatory measures, such as the construction of lighthouses and the use of ship identification papers and decrees regularizing flows of ship traffic, including the establishment of quarantines.
Landlocked Ethiopia is reliant on Djibouti as its gateway to the world. The result is that Djibouti’s inordinate geopolitical and economic importance belies its size.
The Dijbouti port opened in 1888. The French administration’s decision to move its capital from Obock to Djibouti four years later increased the prominence of the port and helped establish the French as an imperial power in the Red Sea, sitting cheek to jowl with the Italians and the British farther down the coast and across the strait.
From the 1990s onward, Djibouti became a major chokepoint for the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. The collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and the subsequent closure of the port of Berbera led to an influx of shipping from Berbera to Djibouti. Even more importantly, the independence of Eritrea after a protracted civil war with Ethiopia in 1993 meant that Africa’s second-most populous state was suddenly landlocked. The bombing of the USS Cole by al-Qaida , as the ship was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000, and the ensuing militarization of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait during the global war on terror and the counter-piracy operations, contributed to Djibouti’s emergence as a security and trade chokepoint. In the absence of other competing ports in the region, and in light of the logistical needs of military bases, the Djibouti port has become the port for the Horn of Africa. Landlocked Ethiopia is reliant on Djibouti as its gateway to the world. The result is that Djibouti’s inordinate geopolitical and economic importance belies its size.
In the small, bustling office of the Djibouti Ports and Free Zones Authority, an energetic team of young marketing graduates was hard at work. “We’re branding the port as the crossroads of Asia and Africa,” explained Fatima, the chief of port marketing, who was responsible for producing the glossy brochures I had been given when I arrived at the office. Over the next few weeks, I observed Fatima and her team sell berthing space at the port to clients from around the world, in addition to arranging tours for a variety of visitors.
“The port is really our selling point,” Fatima remarked when we chatted in between her client meetings. “Our location is what makes Djibouti very different. We have the Ethiopia market since they are landlocked and in conflict with Eritrea. No one is really dealing with the port of Assab or Massawa [in Eritrea], and on the other hand you have Somalia.” Fatima emphasized “Somalia” with a big smile, as if just uttering the word made it obvious why the port of Djibouti was the winning choice. “Location is what makes Djibouti; we’re a small piece of land otherwise,” Fatima said, with some pride apparent in her voice. “It helps us that we’re surrounded by failed states on all sides.” Then, perhaps recognizing that she might be coming across as a bit callous, she clarified: “I mean strictly from a business sense. This is obviously not something to wish on one’s neighbors, but it’s good for business.”
By 2014, shipping and transportation accounted for one-third of Djibouti’s gross domestic product. The container port in Doraleh, an extension of Djibouti’s port, was scheduled to process over three million containers per year. But in the midst of this revenue boom, the government of Djibouti canceled its contract with the logistics company DP World. Shortly afterward, DP World began arbitration proceedings in the UK against the government of Djibouti for breach of contract. In 2016, DP World sought to negotiate a deal in Somaliland to develop a “new Djibouti” on the Red Sea. DP World’s investment plans were viewed by the government of Djibouti as a direct attack on the port of Djibouti. But Djibouti found an unlikely ally when the new president of Somalia sought Saudi intervention against DP World’s proposed port expansion and the United Arab Emirates’ plans to open a military and counter-piracy base in Somaliland.
In the midst of these diplomatic and legal entreaties, the government of Djibouti signed an agreement with a Chinese state-backed port management firm. Soon afterward, China announced plans to open a naval base in Djibouti. Today, a global naval armada stationed in Djibouti surveils the strait for threats from pirates and maritime spillovers of geopolitical contests.
III. The Port of Bosaso
Even in a narrow strait like the Bab-el-Mandeb, most days are spent staring out at blue expanses on either side. On our navigation map I watched as the names of Indian Ocean port cities I had encountered in archives and 14th-century navigation manuals — towns like Massawa, Assab and Mukalla — appeared and disappeared, bypassed by the itinerary of contemporary container routes. As we steamed through this region, other boats came into view. Turquoise blue sambuks, brown wooden baghalas and other dhows, traditional sailing vessels, were visible from the bridge as they darted between the container ships, crisscrossing the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and connecting ports seemingly left behind in the wake of the container.
The port of Bosaso lies in the narrow coastal strip that runs alongside the Red Sea, known in Somali as Guban (“burnt”). Bosaso is hot and humid for most of the year; temperatures are routinely over 40 degrees Celsius. To reach these ports requires stepping onto a different boat. No container ship calls at Bosaso. The channel is too shallow. Gantry cranes and other infrastructure common to container ports are absent here.
On my last trip to Bosaso, in the summer of 2019, the relative calm of the port was briefly interrupted during the Hajj pilgrimage. Every year, the weeks leading up to the Hajj are the busiest period for livestock exports because of a sharp spike in demand for goats and other animals in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region. Given the intense heat, cargo, including livestock, is loaded and unloaded after sundown during the summer. In the lead-up to the 2019 Hajj, which took place in August, the port transformed into a buzz of activity once the late afternoon sun lost some of its intensity. Every day, a slow procession of goats and camels from as far away as northern Kenya languidly made its way from the nearby quarantine through the main gate of the port. These animals were then loaded at night onto ships that slipped away before the port became bathed in ferocious morning sunlight.
When you’re standing at the Bosaso port watching wooden dhows glide in and out, it is tempting to imagine this trade as a vestige of an Indian Ocean past. However, a closer look reveals a more dynamic and recent mode of port-making (the ways that regulation, investment, geopolitics and contingency come together in establishing certain places as ports). Bosaso’s rise as a chokepoint is rooted in and remains dependent upon regional politics. The fall of the regime and the civil war in Somalia in 1991 led to the closure of nearby ports. Amid the Somali civil war, the Bosaso port provided an outlet and safe haven for traders who were “returning” to their clan homelands. While the port may seem quaint when compared with a large container port like Djibouti’s, it is just as implicated in the logistical ecosystem surrounding it.
I met Ahmed during fieldwork in the port. He had introduced me to a number of traders who used Bosaso as their port of call for exporting livestock. As Ahmed and other merchants recollected, their extended social and business networks kept the port, and thus Somalia, open during the civil war. “At that time, there was no way to go in and out of Somalia,” he said. “I had been in exile in Saudi Arabia and in those early years used my connections to get boats going and in and out of the port. When there was famine, we made sure the WFP [World Food Program] ship could come here and unload.”
Time at port is spent in an unusual mix of boredom and companionship. When not supervising the loading and unloading of cargo, crews exchange stories, watch movies, cook meals, drink tea and “time pass.”
A final aspect of Bosaso’s transformation into a chokepoint was the establishment of the licensing monopoly. Transporting goats, camels and cattle across the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait requires an export license that includes a medical clearance certificate issued by a recognized livestock quarantine and certification facility. In the 1990s, livestock would first travel to the port of Aden in Yemen, where it would be processed and re-exported to the more lucrative markets of Saudi Arabia and UAE. The establishment of quarantines by the local government, often backed and even run by Saudis and Emiratis, was key to regularizing the flow of livestock. These quarantine stations provide the necessary paperwork and test results for export, capturing and channeling the flow of livestock through the Bosaso port.
In 2019, everyone in Bosaso seemed to be talking container ships. Conversations with merchants or port authorities would inevitably lead to complaints that the port was losing out on bigger ships and higher revenues due to a lack of infrastructural capacity. Yet what was perceived as a lack by some has been a boon for others, namely the captains of small boats from South Asia whose businesses rely upon connecting places outside the major shipping routes.
During my fieldwork in Bosaso, I spent a significant amount of time with ship crews, primarily from South Asia, who circulate between small ports across the region. Non-containerized ports like Bosaso are a constant hub of human activity. In addition to the stevedores, brokers and others who wander through the docks, crew members are not restricted to their ships, as they are in container ports. Time at port is spent in an unusual mix of boredom and companionship. When not supervising the loading and unloading of cargo, crews exchange stories, watch movies, cook meals, drink tea and “time pass.” Occasionally, they may leave port for the market or the mosque, or go to meetings with brokers and traders. Sometimes they buy khat and attempt a group chewing session on board, though for the most part they prefer paan leaves or tobacco. Once cargoes and itineraries are arranged, the portside bustle begins anew. Holds are kitted out with two or three layers of temporary decking, each furnished with pens made from planks and lined with straw. Once livestock is loaded and the paperwork processed, the ship glides out of port, dodging the half-sunk Pakistani dhow just before the break line, and disappears into the shimmering azure of the Red Sea.
If the logic of the border is binary (open vs. closed, captive vs. free), the logic of the chokepoint is one of idling, waiting and drifting.
Primarily transporting bulk goods such as rice, cement, foodstuffs and charcoal on wooden dhows and other small bulk carriers, this shipping network extends to places where container ships cannot or will not go due to expenses, port capacity or security. Bosaso’s story of port-making is tied to its ability to facilitate the movement of goods and commodities within the shadows of geopolitical upheaval. Events near and far — from containerization to trade liberalization in India and the collapse of the central government in Somalia — all contribute to the rise and fall of ports. Chokepoint politics here involve deftly maneuvering the underbelly of this world system. As with Djibouti, slowdowns and blockages in one place create possibilities for mobility elsewhere. Managing, navigating and indeed profiting from these forms of delay and interruption are at the heart of chokepoint politics, whether seen from the vantage point of a port state like Djibouti or in the everyday arrivals and departures from Bosaso.
IV. Drift
“We lost our berth, so we’re going to be idling for a bit,” the second mate told me. From the bridge, I could see the bright lights of the Jebel Ali oil refinery and the hazy outline of Dubai in the distance as the sky shimmered orange in the fading light. The port of Dubai did not allow any armed private security guards, so the team from Risk Control had disembarked onto one of the many floating armories based in the Gulf of Oman that hold crews at the ready to escort ships in and out of the High Risk Area. I had gone up to the bridge to watch the negotiation between the captain and the pilot as they brought the ship into port. But there was no captain on the bridge, and the second mate was still wearing a T-shirt and shorts, having not yet changed into the full uniform that is the norm for coming into port. He explained that there was port congestion, and we might be delayed up to 48 hours. For the next two days, we sat anchored offshore, idling in the water until we drifted into a shipping lane. When that happened, the engine roared into action, and the ship came back to its original anchorage position. The straight line on the navigation map that was tracing our journey through the Red Sea and into the Strait of Hormuz all of a sudden turned into a zigzag.
Navigating chokepoints is seldom straightforward. Even big ships find themselves drifting outside ports, waiting for permission to enter. If the logic of the border is binary (open vs. closed, captive vs. free), the logic of the chokepoint is one of idling, waiting and drifting.
Two days of drifting turned into four, until I was awakened by the sounds of land. The alarms of cranes, the thuds of containers being loaded onto the ship, the groans of trucks backing up: These constitute the sensory soundscape of container ports. A berth had opened up in the middle of the night, and our ship was now portside in Jebel Ali. As I walked up to the deserted bridge (the small crew on the ship was busy with the myriad tasks required for loading and unloading), the familiar sight of cranes and containers stacked in neat rows greeted me for one last time on this journey. I made my way down to the ship’s office and said my goodbyes, posing for photos that were hastily sent to the crew’s WhatsApp chat, and then disembarked from the lumbering leviathan that had brought me from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. Two Indian welders had signed off from the ship, and the three of us ended up in an air-conditioned minivan tasked with transporting seafarers to the port’s immigration office. The officer at passport control looked a little surprised by my U.S. passport, somewhat out of place in a stack of Romanian, Filipino and Indian passports. As we drove out to the exit, a procession of trucks loaded with containers exited alongside us. Many of these trucks were heading from Jebel Ali to Sharjah, where the cargo would be unloaded and then loaded back on to dhows as they made their way to ports in Iran or across the sea to ports that dot the coasts of Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. This process of circulation and dispersal continues unabated, even as the reverberation of events near and far, onshore and offshore, threaten to always delay, interrupt and choke mobility.
On January 1, 2023, the designation of the Indian Ocean High Risk Area was rescinded by the maritime industry, noting a significant decline in piracy incidents. This meant that ships transiting through the region would not have to take out additional insurance cover or use armed guards for transit. In addition to recommending that ships continue to follow “Best Management Practices (BMP 5)”, the circular that informed companies of this change noted an increase in tensions around Yemen and the Bab-el-Mandeb. In late November and early December, these tensions transformed into a series of major incidents where commercial shipping, including Israeli-linked shipping, and a US naval destroyer have been targeted at sea. While some of these attacks have been blamed on the specter of Somali piracy, Houthi forces in Yemen have claimed responsibility for these events. In a statement, Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree described the attacks as an attempt to “prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops.” Here we see another instanton of chokepoint politics, where control over circulation — its slowdown, its blockage — emerges as central to understanding encounters at sea.