Contemporary Maritime Piracy

This volume provides a concise introduction to the issues and debates regarding modern piracy, including naval operations, law, and diplomacy, and focuses on the recent surge of attacks off the coasts of Africa and Asia. In the past decade, the incidence of maritime piracy has exploded. The first three months of 2011 were the worst ever, with 18 ships hijacked, 344 crew taken hostage, and 7 crew members murdered. The four Americans on board the sailing vessel Quest were shot at point-blank range. The economic costs are also staggering, reaching $7 to $12 billion per year, as insurance costs skyrocket, ransoms double and then quadruple, and ships are forced to hire armed security for protection. Pirates operating off the Horn of Africa disrupt shipping traffic through the strategic Suez Canal, siphoning transit fees from an unstable Egypt, while the seizure of supertankers in the Indian Ocean underscores the vulnerability of the world's oil supply. Governments, private industry, and international organizations have mobilized to address the threat. This is the first volume to examine their work in developing naval strategy, international law and diplomacy, and industry guidelines to suppress contemporary maritime piracy. Contemporary Maritime Piracy: International Law, Strategy, and Diplomacy at Sea comprises three sections, the first of which contains chapters on historical and contemporary piracy, international law and diplomacy, and coalition strategies for combating future piracy. The second and third parts provide collections of historic profiles and relevant documents.

This book explores contemporary maritime piracy in Southeast Asia, demonstrating the utility of using historical context in developing policy approaches that will address the roots of this resurgent phenomenon. The depth and breadth of historical piracy help highlight causative factors of contemporary piracy, which are immersed in the socio-cultural matrix of maritime-oriented peoples to whom piracy is still a "thinkable" option. The threats to life and property posed by piracy are relatively low, but significant given the strategic nature of these waterways that link the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and because piracy is emblematic of broader issues of weak state control in the littoral states of the region. Maritime piracy will never be completely eliminated, but with a progressive economic and political agenda aimed at changing the environment from which piracy is emerging, it could once again become the exception rather than the rule.

This book examines the complex phenomena of modern maritime piracy. The work offers a cutting-edge analysis of modern maritime piracy in the two most pirate-prone regions – southeast Asia and northeast Africa – from the late twentieth century to the modern day. These case studies present a detailed exploration of how regional and international governments responded to upsurges of piracy and how responses have evolved over the course of the past 40 years. This analysis reveals the results of these efforts and what effect, if any, suppressing piracy at sea had on tensions and instability ashore. The book transcends a simple narrative, providing detailed and extensively researched case studies of contemporary manifestations and responses at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. New insights are offered, such as the role of external navies in the repression of piracy in northeast Africa before the well-documented escalation in 2005. In addition, this book constructs a comparative analytic framework to gauge the effectiveness and shortcomings of modern attempts to counteract piracy, which reveals lessons learned, future policy projections and wider implications. This analysis adds new classifications, innovative concepts and scholarly depth to the field of maritime security studies, naval history and theory and international relations. This book will be of much interest to students of naval history, maritime security, strategic studies and international relations.

Do piracy and maritime terrorism, individually or together, present a threat to international security, and what relationship if any exists between them? Piracy may be a marginal problem in itself, but the connections between organised piracy and wider criminal networks and corruption on land make it an element of a phenomenon that can have a weakening effect on states and a destabilising one on the regions in which it is found. Furthermore, it is also an aspect of a broader problem of disorder at sea that, exacerbated by the increasing pressure on littoral waters from growing numbers of people and organisations seeking to exploit maritime resources, encourages maritime criminality and gives insurgents and terrorists the freedom to operate. In this context, maritime terrorism, though currently only a low-level threat, has the potential to spread and become more effective in the event of political change on land. It is only by addressing the issue of generalised maritime disorder that the problems of piracy and maritime terrorism may be controlled in the long term.

This book combines multi-disciplinary ethnographic and theoretical approaches to examine piracy in Southeast Asia and the regional and international responses to this threat. During the piracy boom of the early to mid-2000s, the issue of piracy in Southeast Asia received substantial academic attention. Recent scholarship, however, has shifted the focus to Somali piracy and the resurgence of piracy in Southeast Asia has largely been neglected in the academic community. This volume seeks to remedy this gap in the current literature. The primary aim is to examine how piracy has evolved in Southeast Asia over the past ten years, to address why piracy has re-emerged as a security threat, to evaluate efforts at maintaining security in regional waters, and to offer an analysis of what might be expected in the next decade. The contributions are drawn from academics, policy makers, and military officers, covering a range of disciplines including international relations, socio-cultural anthropology, security studies, history, law, and Asian studies. Taken together, the contributions in this volume provide a better understanding of contemporary piracy in Southeast Asia and suggest avenues to successfully combat piracy in this region. This book will be of much interest to students of maritime security, Asian politics, security studies, and international relations in general.

Do piracy and maritime terrorism, individually or together, present a threat to international security, and what relationship if any exists between them? Piracy may be a marginal problem in itself, but the connections between organised piracy and wider criminal networks and corruption on land make it an element of a phenomenon that can have a weakening effect on states and a destabilising one on the regions in which it is found. Furthermore, it is also an aspect of a broader problem of disorder at sea that, exacerbated by the increasing pressure on littoral waters from growing numbers of people and organisations seeking to exploit maritime resources, encourages maritime criminality and gives insurgents and terrorists the freedom to operate. In this context, maritime terrorism, though currently only a low-level threat, has the potential to spread and become more effective in the event of political change on land. It is only by addressing the issue of generalised maritime disorder that the problems of piracy and maritime terrorism may be controlled in the long term.

Piratical attacks have become more frequent, violent, costly and increasingly threaten to undermine order in the international system. Much attention has focused on Somalia, but piracy is a problem worldwide. Recent coordination efforts among states in South East Asia appear to have helped in the area, but elsewhere piracy has expanded. Interestingly, international law has long recognized piracy as a crime and provided tools for universal suppression, yet piracy persists. In this book, a handpicked group of leading experts in the field of International Relations use maritime piracy as a means to expose the incongruities in our understanding of global governance. Using broadly constructivist approaches to understand international actors’ responses to the challenges created by maritime piracy, the contributors question a number of myths and misconceptions around piracy and analyze the various ways that international law and organizations channel actors’ understandings of maritime piracy and their efforts to respond to it. In doing so, they expose some shaky foundations for IR theorists: how do we conceive of governance and legitimacy when they are delinked from the territorial aspect of the modern nation-state? What happens to prospects for cooperation when we get to the nitty-gritty questions of practice related to paying for trials, imprisoning and maintaining captured pirates, bearing the burden of policing sea-lanes, or even determining what constitutes a pirate? Does anyone have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force at sea, and how is that legitimacy constructed? Maritime Piracy and the Construction of Global Governance offers an improved theoretical understanding of the response of the international community to maritime piracy and broadens our understanding of the complex and sometimes countervailing motivations of all the actors involved, from international organizations and states down to the pirates themselves.