This paper introduces the term 'terraqueous territoriality' to analyse a particular relationship between capitalism as a social formation, and the sea as a natural force. It focuses on three spaces -exclusive economic zones (EEZs), the system of 'flags of convenience' (FOC), and multilateral counter-piracy initiatives -as instances of capitalist states and firms seeking to transcend the geo-physical difference between firm land and fluid sea. Capital accumulation, it is argued here, seeks to territorialise the sea through forms of sovereignty and modes of appropriation drawn from experiences on land, but in doing so encounters particular tensions thereby generating distinctive spatial effects. By exploring the articulation between sovereignty, territory and appropriation in the organisation of spaces where land meets sea, the article seeks to demonstrate the value of an analytical framework that underlines the terraqueous nature of contemporary capitalism.Keywords: oceans; capitalism; piracy; fisheries; territoriality From its inception as an historically distinctive social form in the long sixteenthcentury, capitalism has developed an ambiguous relationship with the seven tenths of the planet we call the sea. Present at capitalism's foundation, principally as a trade route, the sea has nonetheless regularly posed geo-physical challenges to the expanded reproduction of capital. It has presented specific risks, created unique logistical difficulties and set singular geographical obstacles in the way of capitalist

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Like many other parts of the erstwhile Third World, the Maghreb region of northwest Africa has lived under a general socioeconomic and political crisis

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The notion of democracy has been invoked in the past decade by both opponents and proponents of global governance. Many in the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement have underlined the inherently unaccountable, opaque and unrepresentative nature of global governance, whilst those more sympathetic to the pluralising dynamics of the phenomenon have emphasised the potentially democratic aspects of this new form of rule, especially with reference to the incorporation of a putative ‘global civil society’ into the structures of global governance and the accompanying diversification of sources of international political authority. Yet both critics and advocates also tend to agree that there are two basic challenges to (on some accounts, causes of) global governance: the global capitalist market and the concomitant system of sovereign states. The disjunctures generated by the operation of these two structures of power, so both liberal defenders of global governance and their radical, anti-capitalist contenders argue, have created the conditions for decentralised, multilateral mechanisms of socioeconomic and political management of world affairs, that is, ‘global governance’. It therefore seems that the question on both sides of this divide, is not so much whether to do away with transnational, multilateral forms of political authority altogether (although that is certainly one aim in some quarters of the anti-globalisation movement) but rather, how to render these democratic, that is, how to democratise global governance.