Infrastructure as a Lens for Studying the Effects of Regime complexity. The Case of Maritime Security Governance in the Gulf of Guinea

This paper conceptualizes an analytical framework to study the effects that complex policy regimes have on the practices of security governance. Solutions to contemporary security threats often require a multiplicity of public and private actors across multiple states and sectors to collaborate. As such, they constitute complex policy regimes. To understand the effects of complex policy regimes on security governance, the paper builds on regime complexity theory and develops it further by introducing logics drawn from infrastructure theory. The paper establishes regime complexity theory as the basis of the analytical frame, but finds that it privileges visible phenomena that converge within complex regimes, such as official rules, agreements and institutions, but pays less attention to phenomena that are not readily observable. The paper therefore develops a complementary lens, fleshing out two logics deriving from infrastructure theory to drive the enquiry further, namely its methodological ability to render visible and render political certain processes that are hidden or unintended within the regime complex. The paper argues that the infrastructure lens may provide granularity to understanding governance effects in fields of regime complexity and proposes possible lines of enquiry by using the counter-piracy policy regime in the Gulf of Guinea as illustration.