Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 1, February–March 2009, pp. 21–25
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The epidemic of piracy off the coast of Somalia since 2007 included the spectacular pirating in November 2008 of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star containing a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s daily oil production; the ship was released on 10 January 2009 in exchange for a $3 million ransom. The epidemic has led to extensive media commentary, a flurry of UN Security Council resolutions, and deployment of an unusual combination of some of the world’s most powerful navies to escort commercial ships through one of the world’s busiest, and now most dangerous, shipping lanes.
Predictably, policymakers, pundits and politicians have sought to harness the piracy story to advance their own agendas. Many have seized on it to plead for a durable political solution to the 19-year crisis of state collapse in Somalia. This is a waterborne variation on the ‘securitisation’ of state-building, the argument that failed states pose a host of spillover dangers, including piracy, if left unresolved. Humanitarians have contrasted the robust international anti-piracy response with the tepid global mobilisation to address Somalia’s horrific humanitarian crisis, in which three million Somalis are in need of emergency aid. Some apologists have cast Somali piracy in ‘Robin Hood’ terms, as a legitimate local response by poor coastal fishing communities against external predators engaged in illegal fishing and toxic-waste dumping in their waters. More than a few journalists have framed the Somali piracy story as another example of ‘Mad Max anarchy’ prevailing in the hopelessly ungovernable place called Somalia. Still others warn that it is only a matter of time before the pirates fire on a ship laden with chemicals or fuel, producing an environmental disaster on Somalia’s shoreline. And counter-terrorism experts have expressed concern over a ‘terrorism–piracy nexus’ in which some of the tens of millions of dollars of ransom money flowing into Somalia are being garnered by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia known as al-Shabaab. What all of these perspectives share is the claim that Somali piracy is only a symptom of a much bigger political problem on land.
This is emphatically true – the Somali piracy epidemic is unquestionably an on-shore crisis demanding an on-shore solution. Naval operations to interdict and apprehend pirates will help, but cannot possibly halt the daily quest of over a thousand gunmen in such vast waters when the risks are so low, rewards so high and alternatives so bleak in desolate Somalia. As for the other narratives, there is at least some truth to all them, but also much that is potentially misleading.
The coast of Somalia has been the world’s worst piracy area only since 2007. But piracy and other variations on extortion and kidnapping at sea have been at play in Somalia since the early 1990s, when the state first collapsed and warlords sought new ways to parley their firepower into profit. In 1991, foreign fishing trawlers aggressively moved into Somalia’s rich and unpatrolled waters, at the expense of coastal fishing villages. Angry Somali fishermen secured weapons and began firing on foreign trawlers...
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Ken Menkhaus is Professor of Political Science at Davidson College, and a specialist on the Horn of Africa. His recent publications include Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism (2004) and ‘Governance without Government in Somalia’ in International Security (2007).
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