Describing Contemporary Maritime Piracy

This chapter begins by describing pirates and their organizations. It provides a sketch of “typical” pirate organizations in countries such as Indonesia, Somalia, and Nigeria. The chapter then proceeds to explore pirate activity. It describes the Maritime Piracy Event and Location Dataset (MPELD) and compares and contrasts these data with other databases on modern sea piracy. Next, the chapter uses the data to illustrate geographic and temporal patterns of maritime piracy. The last section of the chapter provides assessments of key determinants of piracy mentioned in the literature. These empirical patterns provide a basic picture of contemporary maritime piracy.

National State Capacity and Maritime Piracy

This chapter models and empirically tests the cross-national correlates of contemporary commerce raiding. The chapter theoretically examines how state capacity at the center influences the rate of pirate attacks in the territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones of states. But it also recognizes that several other conditions help drive ship attacks, including privation, target opportunity, armed conflict, and the labor supply. The empirical models control for these factors when assessing cross-national and over-time variation in maritime piracy. Using multiple measures of state capacity, the chapter shows that pirates gravitate toward states that are weak at the center. It also finds that countries with larger populations, longer coastlines, proximity to maritime choke points, and poor economic conditions witness more pirate attacks. The last section discusses how to move from national capacity in the analyses presented in this chapter to subnational capacity in the next two chapters.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews what has been learned from the extensive research conducted by the authors and how the findings speak to the current state of knowledge about maritime piracy operations. It then considers theoretical and empirical extensions of the study that go beyond piracy, exploring implications of the conceptual framework for other types of crime and political violence. The chapter proceeds to policy implications of the findings, explaining why naval patrols and state-level capacity enhancements remain insufficient to eradicating maritime piracy completely. The chapter ends by examining recent and future trends in maritime piracy.

Theoretical Framework

This chapter presents the theoretical argument. It argues that national capacity is important in establishing the equilibrium level of piracy acceptable to the state. In weak or failed states, national governments are either unable or unwilling to counter piracy effectively, while more capable states have sufficient capacity to counter pirates on land and in coastal waters. Yet despite the importance of overall capacity in creating permissive conditions for piracy, it is argued that local governance determines the incidence and organization of piracy. In particular, organized piracy needs access to infrastructure and markets, suggesting that areas with some economic governance will be most attractive to pirates. Furthermore, pirates look for weakly governed areas where opportunities for collusion are plentiful. These expectations should hold most strongly for more organized forms of maritime piracy, since spontaneous, short-term opportunistic attacks could still occur in weak or strong areas.

Governance and Piracy in Nigeria and Somalia

This chapter first describes geographic and temporal trends in the frequency of attacks in Nigeria and Somalia. It then reviews the development of piracy in both countries, paying particular attention to local governance capacity. Similarly to the analyses of Indonesia in Chapter 6, this chapter notes a clear curvilinear association between nighttime light emissions and sophisticated pirate attacks against steaming ships on the open water. The findings are stronger in Nigeria than in Somalia, but this is to be expected given low variance in local capacity across the Somali state. Significantly, the empirical evidence presented on Nigeria and Somalia supports the findings from Chapter 6. Pirates locate in spaces characterized by intermediate state capacity, places with some infrastructural development and elites who can be bribed to look the other way. The evidence presented in this chapter shows considerably less piracy in areas with very weak or very strong governance.

Governance and Piracy in Indonesia

This chapter uses quantitative and qualitative methods to assess whether and how local measures of institutional capacity affect piracy in Indonesia. It disaggregates the unit of analysis to subnational grid-cell units and consistently observes a curvilinear relationship between local governance and organized piracy: there appears to be a capacity “sweet spot” that attracts criminal-type organizations that engage in sophisticated maritime attacks. It also finds that opportunistic piracy is affected by local measures of institutional quality but that this relationship is weaker and does not follow the same inverted-U-shaped pattern. The chapter complements the quantitative findings with interviews conducted in Indonesia’s Riau Islands. Interviews with former pirates, local community members, journalists, and other local experts confirm that infrastructure, markets, and collusion opportunities are important considerations for piracy.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the main puzzle and argument motivating the book: piracy affects primarily weak states, but in those states, organized piracy is most common close to coastal areas with some governance and infrastructure. The chapter notes the limitations of existing research on maritime piracy, compares Pirate Lands with research on transnational crime, and argues that the authors’ comparative political economy focus is well-suited to capture the subnational conditions that drive armed robbery on ships and maritime piracy. The chapter sketches the research design and empirical approach. The chapter concludes with the organization of the book.

Maritime Piracy, Past and Present

This chapter offers comparisons of historical and contemporary maritime piracy. It examines the conditions that have driven commerce raiding in the past and the present, which include political violence, privation, geographic opportunity, and governance. The chapter notes that imperial competition, legitimacy gaps, and capacity limits drove privateering and piracy up through the nineteenth century. But while legitimacy gaps and capacity limits continue to incentivize piracy today, weak capacity and lack of legitimacy originate within states rather than states being unable to control and regulate the world’s oceans. Contemporary pirates collude with corruptible local elites rather than with far-off imperial powers. The chapter concludes that historical piracy was often an extension of regime capability, while modern pirates stand in opposition to central state power even as they partner with local governance actors to plunder transiting ships.