| Summary/Abstract |
“Violent collision between Japan, China and Taiwan! The bloody battlefields of fishermen’s ‘Senkaku tuna war.’”1 So read the headlines of a Japanese magazine in 2013, while fisheries diplomacy was ongoing and fishery treaties were being negotiated among the three parties. These negotiations came after a series of violent encounters between fishermen in the waters around a group of uninhabited islets in the south of Okinawa and to the north of Taiwan, called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese. This was just one among many headlines in the news about conflicts over marine resources below the surface of the sea, migrating fish being one of them, after the creation of Exclusive Economic Zones, enacted by the third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1982. This international resolution established that zones of 200 nautical miles could be subsumed under national jurisdiction by coastal states, with those states having the sole right to exploit the zones’ marine resources.
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