International Efforts To Combat Maritime Piracy

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.

Maritime Piracy is now a pressing global issue, and this work seeks to provide a concise and informative introduction to the area. Never truly having receded into a romanticized past, seaborne banditry’s rapid growth was stimulated by low risks and increasingly high rewards. Currently, obsolete, incomplete and complicating structures and norms of governance, together with advances in technology, enable a lucrative business model for pirates, as they effectively operate with impunity and claim increasing ransoms. Beginning with an overview and historical development of piracy and the relevant maritime governance structures, this work progresses to examine how 20th century shifts in global governance norms and structures eventually left the high seas open for predatory attacks on one of the worlds fastest growing and essential industries. Moving through contemporary debates about how to best combat piracy, the work concludes that the solution to a chronic global problem requires a long-term, holistic, and inclusive approach. Examining militaristic, legalist and humanitarian strategies and offering a critical evaluation of the various problems they bring, this work will be of great interest to all students and scholars of international law, international organizations and maritime security.

International counter-piracy efforts have so far been focused on containing rather than solving the problem of piracy off the coast of East Africa. An effective strategy for resolving the threat of piracy in the long-term will require the international community to engage in extensive development efforts on land; to work with African partner nations to increase the capacity and capabilities of national and regional governments; and to provide viable economic alternatives to would-be pirates. Many of these strategies are already underway in West Africa, where the United States government in particular has undertaken a broadly holistic approach to maritime security. The security and political situation in Somalia has so been far less conducive to a land-based approach: but it is certainly within the US interest to explore development- and governance-based counter-piracy initiatives as circumstances allow. Unless the international community becomes willing to invest in a land-based solution to Somalia's dire political, economic, and humanitarian distress, the plague of Somali piracy will continue.

Global maritime piracy has remained a challenge for the community of states since antiquity. The scope, nature and context of this practice has spawned various responses and policies among nations to deal with it. In recent times, incidences of piracy off the coast of Somalia have increased, making the Gulf of Aden the epicenter of pirate activities today. This is a worrisome trend, considering the region's vital importance as a shipping hub. The aim of this work is to analyze the role of the international community in combating maritime piracy in Somalia. The book seeks to address the following pertinent questions: What is the historical development of maritime piracy in Somalia, what measures has the international community put in place to counter it and what mechanisms are effective at curbing maritime pirate attacks in the Horn of Africa. A wealth of knowledge and scholarly material already exists on the issue of Somalia and its free fall to chaos. However, this study limits its scope to maritime piracy and the responses to it, in an effort to foster an enhanced understanding of the vice, its upsurge within Somali coastal communities and how affected states can combat it.

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.

Beyond providing a solid foundation for the analysis of maritime piracy in Southeast Asia, the book also gives considerable attention to the challenges of regional co-operation.

​Over more than three decades starting in the 1990s, thousands of robberies, acts of piracy, and other violent attacks against merchant vessels have been reported in many of the world’s waters. The grave danger of piracy poses a direct threat not only to the security and efficiency of marine transportation, but more seriously, to the lives of the men and woman carrying out this important function. This book collates ideas brought up by seafarers, shipowners, industry practitioners, government officials, academics, and researchers exchanged views and insights on the complex web of underlying factors behind the phenomenon of piracy. Piracy at Sea brings together a wide spectrum of maritime stakeholders, who present different aspects of the problem in an open manner and share their thoughts on how to deal with a truly complex situation. It encapsulates this collective wisdom in a publication that can serve as an easy reference for practitioners as well as researchers, and hopefully contribute to more concrete action.​