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's improbable re-emergence following the end of the Cold War was surprising as the image of pirates evokes masted galleons and cutlasses. Yet, the number of incidents and their intensity skyrocketed in the 1990s and 2000s off of the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Somalia. As Ursula Daxecker and Brandon Prins demonstrate in Pirate Lands, Maritime piracy-like civil war, terrorism, and organized crime-is a problem of weak states. Surprisingly, though, pirates do not operate in the least governed areas of weak states. Daxecker and Prins address this puzzle by explaining why some coastal communities experience more pirate attacks in their vicinity than others. They find that pirates do well in places where elites and law enforcement can be bribed, but they also need access to functioning roads, ports, and markets. Using statistical analyses of cross-national and sub-national data on pirate attacks in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia, Daxecker and Prins detail how governance at the state and local level explain the location of maritime piracy. Additionally, they employ geo-spatial tools to rigorously measure how local political capacity and infrastructure affect maritime piracy. Drawing upon interviews with former pirates, community members, and maritime security experts, Pirate Lands offers the first comprehensive, social-scientific account of a phenomenon whose re-appearance after centuries of remission took almost everyone by surprise.

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.

This two-volume work offers a comprehensive examination of the distressing topics of transnational crime and the implications for global security. National security is a key concern for individual nations, regions, and the global community, yet globalism has led to the perfusion of transnational crime such that it now poses a serious threat to the national security of governments around the world. Whether attention is concentrated on a particular type of transnational crime or on broader concerns of transnational crime generally, the security issues related to preventing and combatting transnational crime remain of top-priority concern for many governments. Transnational Crime and Global Security has been carefully curated to provide students, scholars, professionals, and consultants of criminal justice and security studies with comprehensive information about and in-depth analysis of contemporary issues in transnational crime and global security. The first volume covers such core topics as cybercrime, human trafficking, and money laundering and also contains infrequently covered but nevertheless important topics including environmental crime, the weaponization of infectious diseases, and outlaw motorcycle gangs. The second volume is unique in its coverage of security issues related to such topics as the return of foreign terrorist fighters, using big data to reinforce security, and how to focus efforts that encourage security cooperation.

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.

The Indian Ocean is of tremendous geo-political and strategic relevance. More than eighty per cent of global seaborne trade in oil passes through the Ocean. Access to resources is under-regulated (fishing) or has yet to be conceived (deep sea bed mining) and security concerns such as piracy and the stability of strategically located states, are propelling countries to rethink naval capabilities and priorities. This applies to littoral countries as well as to extra-regional powers such as China, Japan, European countries and the United States, each of which is keenly interested in maintaining and securing open sea-lanes of communication. The revival in maritime concern is prompting new dynamics of competition and cooperation in a region that has historically been characterised by dense cultural, economic and political networks. The Indian Ocean is an extensive and expansive space where no one power has been able to hold sway. Hence, multilateralism and open regionalism are key contributors to stability, both in terms of military as well as commercial coordination. In this issue, scholars from Asia, Europe and the US examine institutions and examples of maritime governance within the Indian Ocean including security arrangements, evolving forms of alliance building and counter-balancing, policy planning and forecasting. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region.

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.