For centuries, the physical difficulty of controlling vast seas sustained the material basis of maritime freedom. But that freedom also disproportionately benefited powers capable of global naval mobility.
The Mare Dominium framework therefore examines two connected processes: the long political and legal movement toward stronger coastal-state rights, and the new technological capacity to convert strategic claims into effective control.
EEZs, territorialisation and hegemonic mobility
An exclusive economic zone is not territorial sea: the coastal state possesses defined sovereign rights and jurisdiction, not full sovereignty, and navigation freedoms remain. Yet in strategic practice, EEZs are increasingly treated by some coastal states as spaces of national security, resource protection and strategic depth.
This tendency can be read not only as maritime expansionism but also as a defensive response to an asymmetric order. A hegemonic navy can use the freedom of the seas for worldwide movement, surveillance and power projection. States unable to compete symmetrically on the high seas therefore have an incentive to push effective defence outward and contest military activity near their coasts.
The resulting disputes over military operations in EEZs and freedom-of-navigation practices reveal a deeper question: whose operational freedom is materially enlarged by the freedom of the seas?
Mare Dominium does not erase the legal distinction between an EEZ and territorial sea. It identifies the possibility that legal jurisdiction → strategic territorialisation → effective control becomes a historical pathway as technology makes persistent enforcement increasingly feasible.
MARE DOMINIUM
Not formal ownership of the sea, but effective control produced by armed power, persistent surveillance, technological reach and strategic geography. In this sense, Mare Dominium is the technological stage of a much longer movement toward the strategic territorialisation of maritime space.
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