Making One Ocean? The affective politics of ocean diplomacy – a collaborative ethnography

The ODIPE (Ocean Diplomacy Ethnography) project brings together interdisciplinary researchers in the marine social sciences to examine how ocean diplomacy is practiced across the multiple political, scientific, and civil society spaces surrounding major international ocean events. Drawing on ethnographic observations, we approach ocean diplomacy as an emerging set of situated practices through which diverse issues and communities are assembled around the ocean as a shared global political object. As such, it differs from the more normative language of “blue governance.” We develop an analytical perspective on affective politics, examining how affects are expressed, regulated and legitimized during the UNOC3 sequence (Nice 2025), across diplomatic, scientific and public settings. Rather than understanding affects as individual emotions, we approach them as collective and politically organized ways of making sense of and relating to the ocean. We examine how different affective registers contribute to constructing “One Ocean” as a shared political object, while privileging or marginalizing particular forms of knowledge, attachment, and engagement.