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Map of the contested area showing the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the North Korea-declared military demarcation line, Yeonpyeong Islands and the Yeonpyeong fishing ground. 

Map of the contested area showing the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the North Korea-declared military demarcation line, Yeonpyeong Islands and the Yeonpyeong fishing ground. 

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Extractive activities such as oil drilling, mining and fishing often appear implicated in international maritime boundary disputes. While natural resources' crucial role as a catalyst for conflict has been well-noted in the literature, such an approach has typically assumed a contextual and passive position of natural resources with little politica...

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Context 1
... delve into fishers' active participation by examining an ongoing maritime boundary controversy between the two Koreas. 1 The study focuses on an area surrounding Yeonpyeong Islands, which are under the jurisdiction of South Korea and situated less than 4 km from the disputed boundary called the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the Yellow Sea (see Fig. 1). The islands have thus formed a strategic base for South Korean military forces in securing sea border defense and control of the adjacent waters. Also, operating under the strict guidelines of the state and local government, the islands are home to a fleet of fishing boats targeting lucrative swimming crab in surrounding waters. ...
Context 2
... openly repudiate the NLL and insist that its territorial waters should extend further south, at least twelve nautical miles from the coastline, in keeping with the international standards defined by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In 1999, North Korea formally declared its own version of maritime military delimitation line (see Fig. 1) based on a different interpretation of the equidistance principle, which excluded the frontier islands of South Korea from the calculations of the baselines (Kim, 2009). Somewhat in line with the North's claim, international legal scholars have noted the ambiguity of treating the NLL as a permanent, lawful boundary on the basis of the ...
Context 3
... from North Korea, the governance of the swimming crab fishery around Yeonpyeong Islands has been sha- ped in a unique way to enable government-at-a-distance. Since 1968, the fishery has been under distinct spatial regulation, which confines its activities to an exclusive 776 km 2 fishing zone that surrounds the island group on three sides (see Fig. 1). The bound- aries of this fishing zone prohibit fishing boats from converging on the NLL, and are zealously guarded by the state through continual at-sea, as well as military radar, monitoring. Government supervi- sory vessels are deployed to hover in the vicinity of fishing boats until all boats return safely back to harbor each ...

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