Piracy At Sea

​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.​

How is it possible for six men to take a Liberian-flagged oil tanker hostage and negotiate a huge pay out for the return of its crew and 2.2 million barrels of crude oil? In his gripping new book, Jatin Dua answers this question by exploring the unprecedented upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia in the twenty-first century. Taking the reader inside pirate communities in Somalia, onboard multinational container ships, and within insurance offices in London, Dua connects modern day pirates to longer histories of trade and disputes over protection. In our increasingly technological world, maritime piracy represents not only an interruption, but an attempt to insert oneself within the world of oceanic trade. Captured at Sea moves beyond the binaries of legal and illegal to illustrate how the seas continue to be key sites of global regulation, connectivity, and commerce today.

Violence at Sea is an overview of maritime piracy, examining threats that piracy poses to global security and commerce, as well as measures and policies to mitigate the threat. The essays analyze piracy activities in key shipping lanes (including the African coast, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the Straits of Malacca-South China Sea); piratical groups and their capabilities; case studies on overlaps between piracy, terrorism, and organized crime; legal and policy hurdles to combating piracy; tactical recommendations for combating piracy; and new trends and developments in the area. The counter response to maritime terrorism has been slow in coming, hampered by issues rooted in sovereignty, the laws of the sea, and the inherent challenges of international coordination. Yet given the likelihood that threats posed by piracy will not recede, but rather increase, all actors affected by maritime security will, sooner or later, need to address these challenges.

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.

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.

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.

Eric Frécon's study starkly reveals the fragility of the internal societies and the inadequate regulation of the Asian region by boldly plunging into a reality- that of piracy- that during the Cold War had been habitually restricted to notes of secret agents or for the reports of some original journalists. The study is an interesting approach. The development of terrorism has in fact confirmed it: a major part of the current scenario which matters now is that of the underground, economic, mafia-like or terrorist forces, forces that are beyond control and of which sometimes the nations are fully aware. Piracy is therefore an important phenomenon today; its analysis allows us to measure the power of the nations and the regulation of international zones. But the investigation is difficult and calls for intelligence, passion, the audacity to search in the dark and the courage to not be taken in: these are the very qualities that this work embodies. This book constitutes an excellent photograph of the weaknesses but also of the recovery of the Asians. It explains how piracy reappeared massively after the Cold War, firstly on account of the general deficiencies of the region and the weaknesses (or tactics) of some nations. But it also shows that the region has evolved. When I brought it up in 1998 in “L'Asie en danger”, piracy was partially imputable to the internal situation and to the foreign policy of China. Since then, the collapse of Indonesia and the recovery of the Chinese regime have pushed it back towards the Straits of Southeast Asia. Eric Frécon's book also describes how the efforts of regional coordination and the policies of certain big nations like Japan and India acted upon piracy, in order to contain it, on the whole. The problem seems to have, since then, been identified and to a large extent handled; one may hope that it will be resolved in the years to come, even though the Indonesian crisis may seriously impede regulation efforts.

Examines the truth behind the mythical portrayals of pirates and piracy, including discussion on the purposes of "countercultural social bandits," women pirates, and democracy and racial equality practiced on pirate ships.