The question of security in the South China Sea is not new, and has its modern origins in the 1990s when newly prosperous states in North and Southeast Asia were better able to engage in policies of military modernization to press their territorial claims in the region. Adding to this was the rise of China as regional power and its assertion that the entirety of the Sea was under their exclusive jurisdiction despite overlapping claims from other states including Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. Although Beijing has softened its stance on the idea of absolute sovereignty in the South China Sea somewhat, it has not backed away from its claim, and Chinese maps still feature the “broken line” border encompassing the entirety of the Sea. Yet, while the possibility of direct conflict in the region has abated a little, the role of the South China Sea in Asian security has if anything become more complex, and this work seeks to explain the growing number of potential threats in the waterway which encompass both state actors as well as non-state (pirates, terrorists and perpetrators of other international crimes). The prolific detail of the book not only examines these issues in a comprehensive manner but also details how the East China Sea fits into the growing body of study on maritime security.

As the authors note, the region is an important conduit for maritime trade throughout the East Asian region and therefore maintaining the waterway's ease of navigation has been both an economic and strategic concern for the littoral states. The issue of navigation and the maintenance of trade routes has also become a thorny area of international law, not only in terms of which countries can and should claim sovereignty over which parts of the Sea but also more specific issues such as policing, search and rescue, and environmental protection. As the introduction argues, these non-traditional maritime security issues are now dominating much of the overall debate about security in the waterway. “If such issues cannot be resolved in a timely manner,” it is asserted, “they will cause serious damages to regional economies and disrupt the global trade order” (pp. 10–11).

It is therefore not surprising that much of the book is given over to these security threats and attempts to create and strengthen international laws and codes of conduct for the Sea despite often-considerable political barriers. The chapter on the Sea's economic role underscores the potential losses, economic and strategic, which are threatened by piracy, smuggling and terrorism. Another chapter is specifically given over to detailing the problems of piracy in the Sea, especially the vital Malacca Straits region, and its tenuous ties to international terrorism. Although incidents of maritime piracy have been fewer in number in the Sea in recent years, and attention has shifted to the Gulf of Aden in current studies, the issues of piracy remain a concern among many states in East Asia despite attempts to bolster multilateral co-operation such as the ReCAAP regional anti-piracy initiative.

Although the book covers much ground in terms of actual and potential threats to the safety of the South China Sea region, the work would have been greatly enhanced with the inclusion of chapters on specific country policies, especially China, Japan and the major Southeast Asian states. Only the US is given a stand-alone chapter and its topic specifically centres on maritime terrorism rather than the entirety of the potential threats in the Sea. Two chapters are dedicated to Chinese policy but their topics are even narrower, namely the subject of Beijing's handling of regional oil spills and its potential role in submarine rescue scenarios. There is also a lack of a strong conclusion which would bind these myriad issues together and present possible future policy directions. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in arguing that in order to best understand the strategic importance of the Sea it is necessary to look beyond state policy and add the roles of local “spoilers” such as pirates as well as the growing number of official and unofficial international agreements which have facilitated communication and more effective policy-making in assuring the security of the waterway. The work does not gloss over the considerable economic and political problems which remain in the region, but it does present a very even-handed and comprehensive study of progress in the Sea as well as its pitfalls.