Port Security

Port Security

Introduction

The paper aims to present a critical analysis of Maarten van de Voort and Kevin A. O'Brien's article “Seacurity” with Adnan Rahman and Lorenzo Valeri, published by RAND Europe in 2003. RAND is a European not-for-profit institution that aims to assist in improving decision-making and policy formulation through analysis and research. The article provides an insight into improving the security of the global sea-container shipping system. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the article through deeplyanalyzing various parts of the article.

Analysis: Maarten van de Voort & Kevin A. O'Brien, et. al., “Seacurity”, RAND Europe, 2003

The article “Seacurity” is a joint effort of Maarten van de Voort and Kevin A. O'Brien, along with the cooperation of Adnan Rahman and Lorenzo Valeri. RAND Europe, the publisher of this article, is a European nonprofit institution that aims to assist in improving decision-making and policy formulation through analysis and research. RAND Europe gave a presentation, with a focus on container security, in a workshop organized by the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs in cooperation with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). The presentation of RAND Europe activated awareness regarding the susceptibility of the global container shipping system. All these efforts resulted in the organization of “Seacurity”, which was held on28-30 October 2002 regarding improving the security of the global sea-container shipping system. This event comprised of two categories, the first one was regarding 'Threats' and the second one consisted of proposing 'Solutions.' The purpose of the workshop and the article revolves around presenting and creating awareness of the present status of maritime security and its susceptibility to terrorism. The interaction of the workshop participant's assisted the writers in formulating and identifying the main obstacles in achieving a less susceptible maritime security system. The main aim of the article is to present the issue and solution of maritime security to the policy makers and government officials dealing with the issue, as well as, private companies interested in the international maritime security system.

Research Questions

The article begins with a summary of the article stating the immense need of reviewing and systematically analyzing the security of the global sea-container shipment system. The summary suggests two steps in order to conduct a systematic review of the maritime security, which involves consultation with stakeholders as the first step. This consultation will help in identifying the major issues and the perspective of relevant stakeholders. The second step will be to use the results of this consultation to create awareness of the maritime security issues and to create a research outline and efforts for improving the maritime security. The article further describes the issue that containers carry approximately 90% of all the cargo, in which around 250 million containers are annually shipped. The article formulated its research question by analyzing the risk associated with the checking of contents in a container. According to the authors, less than 2% of the containers are thoroughly checked and verified for the contents they are carrying in ...