We thank Okafor-Yarwood et al. for their response to our paper on “Rethinking maritime security from the bottom up”, for bringing African perspectives to the fore, and for highlighting the importance of inclusive authorship and citation practices. We also extend our gratitude to npj Ocean Sustainability for enabling an academic space where we can have a dialogue on epistemic justice in relation to maritime security—a rarity in our current moment.

One of the premises in our Perspective was to emphasise that research and practice on maritime security is dominated by approaches that foreground state and economic security, over and above human and ecological security. We referenced earlier reviews of the maritime security literature that have highlighted this dominance1 and discussed the multiple dimensions of maritime security2, and we agree with Okafor-Yarwood et al. that calls for more holistic approaches are not particularly new. Our Perspective reiterates the call because state and economic security approaches continue to dominate. Scans of Web of Science indicate that this imbalance remains broadly prevalent in scholarship, where “maritime security” brings up 1313 results, but produces far fewer results when combined with “human security” (15 references), “environmental security” (3 references), and “ecological security” (1 reference). Furthermore, global military spending in 2024 has registered its highest increase in decades to reach $2718 billion, and this militarisation is regionally concentrated in Asia and the Pacific, which is a major frontline of contemporary geopolitical tensions3. This clear material prioritisation of state and military security above human and ecological security persists despite a long history of resistance especially from the region3,4.

In our Perspective, we did not aim to conduct a systematic or global review, and made no claims to its definitiveness or conclusiveness, but built on this central premise regarding the ongoing need for holistic approaches to maritime security to develop four principles and highlight associated case studies that articulate alternative pathways for thinking about maritime security. In doing so, we completely agree with Okafor-Yarwood et al. that we missed salient examples of scholarship from the African context, including but not limited to the important works cited by Okafor-Yarwood et al [e.g., refs. 5,6,7]. We also acknowledge that there have been significant recent advancements in the way that maritime security policies in the African region have integrated ecological and human security considerations.

More broadly, we recognise and support the call by Okafor-Yarwood et al. to be cognisant of inclusive authorship, teams and citation practices, and for addressing the persistent structural barriers to this [e.g., ref. 8]. In addition to authors from Australia, Europe, and North America with regional expertise in the Asia-Pacific, our author group included researchers from Southeast Asia and East Asia. The immediate relevance of Asian and Pacific contexts and the examples that we included in our paper matters for us because of where our team is situated. However, our authorship team did not include researchers from or with expertise in the African continent—nor from Latin America or South Asia. As such, we recognise that we would have certainly missed important perspectives and empirical examples from other regions where our group has less research expertise and linguistic abilities.

Finally, we agree that the academic and practical discourse on maritime security might evolve with greater integration of empirical and theoretical insights, as well as policy and practical insights, from around the world. We conclude with an invitation for researchers globally to respond with additional examples that we may have missed and contribute to these important areas of research and practice around the human and ecological dimensions of maritime security.