Piracy

Piracy has plagued the oceans throughout human history. Increasing maritime trade flows have led to recurrent waves of piracy and armed robbery at sea. Piracy was always more than just a crime. It has been a constitutive problem for developing global order, for establishing the distinction between private violence and state violence, and for regulating global space from the Pax Britannica to the modern international law of the sea. Piracy is a problem not only of the past or of theory. Since the 1990s, the return of large-scale piracy in East Asia, the Horn of Africa, and other regions can be observed. In particular, piracy rooted in Somalia has received wide international attention. International security actors, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union (EU), or the UN Security Council, have become concerned about piracy. In consequence, since 2008 an international armada has patrolled the Horn of Africa. Contemporary piracy is increasingly recognized to be one of the major nontraditional security threats. It is a multidimensional issue, connected to concerns over state failure, arms trade, terrorism, transport, energy, and environmental security, as well as global maritime security. The goals of this article are, first, to familiarize the reader with works that examine the history of the concept and the practice of piracy in light of the development of global political order and international law. Second, the article encompasses literature on contemporary piracy and the international response to it, including contributions that theorize the causes of piracy as a conjecture of weak governance, opportunity, and cultural acceptability. Works that study the responses of global and regional security governance and that propose alternative policies of coping with piracy are also included. The main focus is on today’s two major hot spots of piracy, East Asia and the Horn of Africa