Piracy In Southeast Asia

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.

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 comparative study of piracy and maritime violence provides a fresh understanding of European overseas expansion and colonisation in Asia. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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.

Maritime piracy continues to persist as a significant phenomenon manifesting a range of social, historical, geo-political, security and economic issues. Today, the waters of Southeast Asia serve as the dominant region for the occurrence of piracy and the challenges it poses to regional security and Malacca Straits security. As a second installment within the Series on Maritime Issues and Piracy in Asia by the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden University, and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, the authors of this volume add fresh perspectives to the ongoing debate about piracy, the threat of maritime terrorism, and the challenge of securing the Malacca Straits today.

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.

"The chapters in this volume were presented in 2005 at an international conference hosted and organised by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences"--Acknowledgements.