‘New wars’ at sea: A critical transformative approach to the political economy of Somali piracy

Abstract

Relying on the literature on the political economy of new wars, this article aims to challenge the policy articulation of Somali piracy through the security–development nexus in recent resolutions of the UN Security Council. The article’s central argument is that the UN Security Council’s assumption that the political economy of piracy can be transformed by external top-down intervention based on a formulaic security–development nexus seems to be bound to fail for two main reasons: First, the ‘nexus’ is based on a virtual liberal state-building project in Somalia that is disconnected from the local context involving piracy; second, the ‘nexus’ works as a securitized dispositif, hence prioritizing security goals over social changes. Therefore, instead of the liberal peace recipe proposed by the Security Council as remedy for everything, including piracy, the article suggests a critical transformative approach, centred in actually existing forms of local politics and governance in areas affected by piracy, where the articulation between security and development can be made in a more balanced and nuanced way, taking into account the concrete needs of protection and development of people dependent on piracy.

Keywords

conflict transformation security–development nexus Somali piracy war economies liberal peace

Introduction

In 2008, the United Nations Security Council issued a series of resolutions declaring that the rising wave of pirate attacks along the Somali coast was aggravating the critical situation in Somalia and posing a threat to international peace and security in the region. Hence, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council called on states and regional organizations with military capacity (warships and military aircraft) to intervene in the waters off the Horn of Africa, including within Somali territorial waters, to combat piracy in the region. Although some sparse indications of a comprehensive approach could be found in these early Security Council resolutions, the use of force and the call for international military mobilization in order to ‘fight’ Somali piracy remained their central focus. From 2010, however, there has been a shift in the UN agenda on Somali piracy towards a more transformative approach. UN Security Council Resolution 1918/2010, the first resolution on piracy issued without reference to Chapter VII, clearly reflected this move, declaring in its preamble that the conditions for lasting eradication of piracy depend on ‘peace and stability within Somalia, strengthening of State institutions, economic and social development’ (United Nations, 2010a). This transformative move was more evident in Resolution 1976/2011, whose preamble stressed ‘the importance of finding a comprehensive solution’, and pointed out

the need to build Somalia’s potential for sustainable economic growth as a means to tackle the underlying causes of piracy, including poverty, thus contributing to a durable eradication of piracy and armed robbery at sea off the coast of Somalia and illegal activities connected therewith. (United Nations, 2011a)

The crucial point to note here, which is the basis upon which this article’s argument will be constructed, is the apparently ambiguous framework created by the UN Security Council in order to articulate Somali piracy within a more comprehensive approach. A close look at Resolution 1976/2011 clearly shows this. The last paragraph of the preamble reproduces resolutions issued since 2008 under Chapter VII,¹ declaring that piracy and armed robbery at sea ‘exacerbate the situation in Somalia, which continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security in the region’. From this perspective, therefore, piracy is seen as one of the causes of the instability in the country. But, the resolution’s second item then inverts the argument, defining piracy as an effect of Somali instability: ‘the ongoing instability in Somalia is one of the underlying causes of the problem of piracy’. From this second perspective, it is Somali instability that produces the piracy. In short, the argument constructed in the resolution is that piracy aggravates the instability in Somalia, which in turn aggravates the situation of piracy, in a type of vicious circle whereby piracy is at once a cause and an effect of instability in the country. This sort of tautology, far from indicating confusion in the text, reflects the merging between security and development that is deeply entrenched in the language games of the developmental discourse that underpins the current UN transformative vision. In other words, seen as one of the causes of the instability in Somalia, piracy constitutes a threat to international peace and security; as a consequence, following the predominant tone of the resolutions passed since 2008 under Chapter VII, the UN Security Council justifies the military intervention in Somali waters as a necessary measure to combat piracy. On the other hand, seen as a consequence of Somali instability, piracy is defined as an effect of state failure, poverty and underdevelopment; therefore, the Security Council justifies the strengthening of the central government institutions and economic and social development as necessary measures to transform the underlying conditions that cause the problem. The result of this complex formulation is hence that Somali piracy becomes a question of security and at the same time inseparably a question of development. In other words, this means that the UN Security Council policy on piracy is rearticulated along the lines of the so-called security–development nexus.

Relying on the literature on the political economy of new wars, this article aims to challenge this policy articulation of Somali piracy through the security–development nexus by showing that the ‘nexus’ is more a recycling of the strategic vision of the UN and the African Union (AU) to strengthen the central government in Somalia rather than actually a transformative approach committed to changing the political economy of piracy in its local context. Consequently, there is a gap between the generic transformative recipe offered by the Security Council and the particular context involving the functional benefits yielded by piracy, such as wealth accumulation by business and political elites, survival mechanisms for local poor populations, and, to a lesser extent, resource extraction by factions in conflict. These three types of benefits – which could be classified as shadow, coping and combat economies according to the functional descriptors proposed by Pugh and Cooper (2004: 8–9) − constitute a kind of economic adaptation that Duffield calls ‘actually existing development’ – that is, those adaptive forms of radical economies that often flourish in contexts of war, enabling the emergence of new forms of rights to wealth and modes of accumulation and redistribution outside the formal structures of the global economy (Duffield, 2001: 139–40, 2010: 68). Somali piracy clearly represents the emergence of this kind of radical economy, producing ‘real development’ in its local context, but at the same time threatening the liberal order by ‘taxing’ (via hijacking and ransom) one of the most strategic world maritime trade routes. Hence, the UN Security Council policy formulation and the huge international mobilization to ‘correct’ this kind of deviant economic adaptation on the outskirts of the liberal world reveal a struggle between acceptable and unacceptable forms of development that assumes the dimensions of a war, strongly based on the securitization of the ‘nexus’ and exploitation of the window of opportunity opened by piracy for militarization of the Horn of Africa’s waters, imposition of Western legal systems in Somalia, resource extraction by private maritime security companies, etc. The extent to which this securitized ‘nexus’ is able to achieve its alleged transformative goals is a crucial question that is worth investigating.

On the basis of this argument, the article seeks to provide two main theoretical contributions. First, it adds to the Somali piracy literature a critical approach that challenges two dominant views in piracy studies: the classic perspective of piracy as merely a question of order at sea and the conception of piracy as an abstract ‘enemy of humanity’, universally characterized as barbarous and irrational. Even though this orthodox perspective is perfectly suited to justifying the use of force – and somehow the UN Security Council resolutions reflect this vision by addressing Somali piracy as an exceptional threat against which ‘all necessary means’ are justified – the idea of piracy as an ‘aberration’ or ‘dysfunction’ within the established maritime order neglects the political economy of piracy in its full extension and complexity. From this critical viewpoint, the article proposes to empty piracy of its traditional normative content and, on the basis of its functional benefits, reinterpret it as part of an alternative economic system, rationally integrated with the historic conditions and socio-political-economic environment of Somalia as well as the global economy, which paves the way for a more broad and complex approach to the Somali piracy problem. Second, the article joins the body of research that criticizes the liberal peace project, which has become an intrusive and exogenous standard recipe for conflict transformation that disregards local agency and deeper contexts from which violence emerges. Thus, against the generic liberal peace policy prescription for Somali piracy, the article highlights the importance of a critical transformative approach − here understood as an ‘anti-formula’ that emphasizes context, local perceptions of security and development, and indigenous forms of authority and governance − as a way to give local legitimacy and ownership to the transformative work. The UN Security Council’s assumption that pirates’ political economy can be transformed by external top-down intervention through a securitized liberal peace framework seems to be bound to fail precisely because of the gap between such an approach and the local context in which Somali piracy is immersed.

The current situation in Somalia is extremely discouraging for foreign researchers seeking to conduct fieldwork in that country. Therefore, the limited availability of primary sources of empirical information is a methodological reality faced by this attempt to understand the political economy of Somali piracy. Despite this, a set of complementary sources – academic studies, governmental and nongovernmental reports, and journalists’ articles and books, some of them resulting from rare cases of fieldwork carried out in Somalia − allow us to draw a picture of the political economy of piracy in Somalia consistent with the purposes of this article. Regarding the analysis of the Security Council’s policies and their consequences in terms of intervention, the article is anchored in the resolutions against piracy issued since 2008, along with reports and press releases delivered by various organizations involved in the international effort against Somali piracy.

The article is organized in terms of four further sections. The first is a brief empirical inquiry on the political economy of Somali piracy, focused on its functional benefits and on the system of protection created around piracy. The second section turns to the UN Security Council policies and international responses to manage the Somali piracy problem. Noting that the international mobilization does not go beyond trying to strengthen Somalia and neighbouring states’ capacity for enforcement, the third section shows that the articulation of Somali piracy through the security–development nexus leans frankly to the security side and, therefore, has strong limitations in terms of promoting the social changes envisaged in recent UN Security Council resolutions. A concluding section suggests a critical transformative approach that can be politically, culturally and economically rooted in the local context of Somali piracy.

The political economy of new wars: The case of Somali piracy

The complex economic dimension of contemporary civil conflicts has attracted the attention of scholars and policymakers since the mid-1990s. Starting with the widely cited ‘new wars’ and ‘greed and grievance’ debates (see Kaldor, 1999; Berdal and Malone, 2000; Ballentine and Sherman, 2003), the literature on the political economy of conflicts has greatly expanded, going beyond the original focus on the impact of resource exploitation on the duration of conflicts. One of the most vibrant segments of this debate is concerned with the challenges posed by war economies to conflict transformation. Authors committed to this research agenda tend to criticize international interventionist recipes for neglecting relevant aspects related to the political economy of conflicts, in particular the functions performed by shadow economies. According to these authors, the weak regulatory presence of the state in the context of most of these conflicts has allowed shadow economies and ‘local-global’ networks to operate as alternative sources of financing for multiple actors involved in conflicts. Although this process nearly always assumes violent and disruptive expressions and tends to be socially exclusive (i.e. it favours certain social groups according to criteria of kinship, ethnicity, religion, politics, etc.), at the same time it works as a form of ‘actual development’, generating creative and independent ways of integrating peripheral markets and populations in the global economy (Duffield, 2001: 153, 2010: 68). In other words, people living on the margins of the liberal economic world have discovered that state institutions and state-centred economic policies no longer can protect them, and for this reason they have been prompted (or forced) to seek alternative and independent forms of development (Reno, 2003: 42). From this point of view, instead of reflecting rupture and chaos or representing a peripheral aberration, shadow economies can be seen as a struggle for integration of ‘marginal’ market and population layers within the global economy – or, as Duffield (2001: 14) puts it, ‘the emergence of new forms of protection, legitimacy and rights to wealth’. Hence, if on the one hand shadow economies open room for self-interested economic elites to extract personal financial benefits, on the other they exercise an important social function by creating an alternative socio-economic system of generating jobs and movement of goods, as well as providing mechanisms for poor and marginalized people to satisfy their basic subsistence needs (Pugh and Cooper, 2004: 225).

From this perspective, and considering the legal vacuum that generally prevails in situations of war, words like ‘criminal’ and ‘illegal’ used to designate ‘deviant’ economic behaviours − in opposition to terms like ‘authorized’ and ‘legal’ that are used to designate ‘correct’ types of behaviour – have limited meaning when it comes to characterizing the actions of economic agents involved in armed conflicts (Pugh and Cooper, 2004: 8; Cockayne and Lupel, 2011: 191–2). For this reason, Pugh and Cooper advocate the use of the expression ‘war economies’ to designate all types of economic behaviour during conflicts, irrespective of its normative connotations, and suggest three functional descriptors to designate war economies: combat, shadow and coping economies. The combat economy aims at financing the war and encompasses not only control of the production and extraction of economic resources to sustain combat operations, but also predatory economic strategies to destroy the resources opposing groups need to continue fighting. The shadow economy refers to the extraction of personal gain and includes activities conducted outside the regulation of the state. Economic agents – ranging from business elites in search of profit to impoverished populations struggling to survive − are driven by non-military motives, taking advantage of the economic activities and opportunities brought by the erosion of state authority to obtain personal gains. Finally, the coping economy encompasses economic activities intended to provide mechanisms to face the hardships imposed by the conflict, thus enabling satisfaction of the basic subsistence needs of poor and marginalized populations. Although a coping economy is often confused with a shadow economy, its distinguishing feature is the extraction of resources for subsistence within the minimum standards of life rather than profit and accumulation of wealth. Even though shadow, coping and combat economies do not in practice fit within such strict limits and can often overlap, these functional descriptors are conceptually useful as analytical tools and bring to the main stage economic behaviours that have been ignored by the liberal recipes of intervention (Pugh and Cooper, 2004: 8–9).

Somali piracy as shadow, coping and combat economies

Analysis of the political economy of Somali piracy in terms of shadow, coping and combat economies enables the identification of different actors, motivations and connections involved in pirate activities. Since empirically these functional descriptors overlap, the narrative carried out here is not fragmented according to each descriptor, although it is not difficult to recognize, throughout the narrative, when piracy works as source of personal profits (shadow economy), as provider of minimum resources for the subsistence of poor people and assistance to communities (coping economy), and as financier of fighting factions (combat economy). At the end of this section, then, the political economy of Somali piracy will be summarized according to these three types of economy.

The professionalized stage of Somali piracy that attracted international attention began in 2004–5, from bases established along the central coast in hard-to-access areas removed from the country’s main conflict zones – around the cities of Harardheere and Hobyo − and resulted from the action of a single group, calling itself the ‘Somali Marines’ (Hansen, 2009: 23–5). Among the most notorious actions of this group were a series of attacks on ships chartered by the World Food Programme starting in the second half of 2005 (see Nincic, 2009: 12). In 2006, with the downfall of the embryonic central government in Somalia − the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) − and the taking of power in Mogadishu by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), piracy was eliminated on the Somali coast. With a programme of establishing order based on Sharia law, the UIC banished piracy and dismantled the bases in Harardheere and Hobyo (Hansen, 2009: 27; Murphy, 2011: 91–2). However, with the invasion of Ethiopian troops in the spring of 2007 in support of the TFG, with the approval of the AU and the UN and backed by the USA, the UIC militias withdrew from the region and piracy in the Harardheere/Hobyo area re-emerged. This rebirth, however, had new features. The so-called Somali Marines were fragmented into various independent groups and pirates from Puntland had returned to their original region, owing to the success that piracy began to have in the Gulf of Aden in 2007 (Hansen, 2009: 27).

According to Hansen (2009: 34), who travelled to Somalia in 2008 and carried out one of the few field studies on Somali piracy,² the heterogeneity and fragmentation of the pirate groups became extremely high in 2007–8, varying ‘from the small subsistence group that consists of a father, a son and a single skiff, to larger groups of up to 200 individuals’. The costs involved in the operations are also variable, ranging from a mere $300 in the case of a small fishing family trying to venture into piracy to $30,000 in the case of a large operation involving various skiffs and a great number of pirates (Hansen, 2009: 35). In any situation, the costs can be considered very low compared to the financial return, which in 2011 averaged around $5 million per ship ransomed (Bowden and Basnet, 2011: 2). Owing to these high profits, piracy tends to be self-financing and has created a new class of entrepreneurs in Somalia dedicated full-time to piracy. However, there are entrepreneurs from other activities who also invest in piracy. In his study, Hansen identifies 51 mid-level businessmen engaged in financing piracy in Puntland alone. The economic organization of piracy also includes the necessary logistical support for the post-capture phase: provision of water and food for crews taken hostage, bribes to local authorities and police, communication with ship-owners and insurers, negotiators and translators, etc. Regarding translators, Hansen (2009: 34–8) observes that members of the Somali diaspora, mainly located in Kenya, Ethiopia and the Gulf states, have played an important role in negotiating ransoms. Based on interviews with Boyah, a legendary pirate leader in Eyl (Puntland’s coast), Bahadur’s (2011) journalistic fieldwork paints a similar picture, adding that the ransom money, normally withdrawn from banks in London and Dubai, is dropped by parachute on the deck of the hijacked ship and is then divided among the men involved in the attack, the investors, those guarding the hostages, food and water suppliers, translators, and even the poor and disabled in the local community. Another business segment that has benefited from piracy is the distribution of the local mild narcotic known as khat, which is widely consumed by pirates. The symbiotic relationship between piracy and the khat trade has clearly offered some pirate leaders a way both to invest their resources and to generate additional gains, as in the case of Afweyne, one of the main pirate leaders in the Harardheere/Hobyo area, who has retired from piracy to dedicate himself to the khat business (United Nations, 2011b: 229).

Regarding labour, Somali pirates are generally recruited from among poor unemployed youths without schooling in coastal communities (former fishermen), in nearby villages, and, to a lesser extent, from interior regions of the country (International Expert Group, 2008: 17). Besides the income obtained directly from piracy, the coastal communities also benefit from the ransom money. This not only includes families and friends of pirates, but also people engaged in the entire support chain, who supply food, water and other basic items to the pirates and captured crews (International Expert Group, 2008: 17). Some analysts have also pointed out cases of investment in charity, health and education in coastal communities, which facilitates social acceptance of piracy (Hansen, 2009: 34; Murphy, 2011: 111, 120). This acceptance, however, is a highly local phenomenon and tends to prevail in more isolated and remote coastal communities, where piracy is an important alternative (sometimes the only one) for development. Even in these locales, the dynamics of acceptance and rejection of piracy are not uniform and vary over time. Some communities that depended on piracy in the past now condemn the problems and ‘bad habits’ introduced by the pirates (inflation, alcoholism, prostitution, etc.). Eyl is one of those cities that thrived on the proceeds of each successful hijacking (Howden and Guled, 2008) and is now considered free of piracy owing to the hostile reaction of the local authorities and townspeople against pirates, along with actions of the Puntland Maritime Police Force in the area (Pelton, 2012). In Bandar Beyla, another popular pirate hub in Puntland, the community now rejects the use of its district as a base for piracy. The coastal village is a peaceful place and in 2011 established an anti-piracy committee formed by elders, youths and women, as well as officials from the local municipal government. That committee created an anti-piracy policy for the local community, composed basically of young fishermen, which has discouraged pirates from establishing themselves in the region (Somalia Report, 2012). In the case of the self-proclaimed independent Somaliland State, a stable enclave in northwest Somalia, it is curious to note that the problem of piracy practically does not exist in the region. Although Somaliland has a small coast guard, the main reason behind this success is not the suppression efforts at sea, but rather the domain and control exercised by the local popular institutions (clan militias and Islamic courts), which react quickly to rumours of piracy and have managed to prevent groups from even organizing (Hansen, 2009: 30).

Irrespective of the degree of support for piracy by local communities, in general the perception of the piracy problem within Somalia does not coincide with the international view. Although piracy is an urgent matter on the international security agenda, it is not given the same priority by the local Somali elites and the population at large, where the fight between militias, droughts, illegal fishing and toxic dumping by foreign vessels, and other issues attract more concern (Hansen, 2009: 43). Samatar et al. (2010: 1387) argue that the social tolerance of piracy in Somalia is not only a consequence of the material economic benefits extracted by some communities. It also reflects a cultural climate developed since the 1990s, where ‘piracy symbolises the population’s feeble effort to protect the moral economy of their livelihoods’. According to the authors, this ‘moral economy’³ causes the pirates and local people to reject the view that their activities represent a disturbance to peace and order, because they believe they are merely taking back what is rightfully theirs (Samatar et al., 2010: 1388). In other words, within Somalia it is not possible to separate the actions of the pirates from those of foreign ships, which especially since the 1990s have intensively exploited fish stocks and discharged toxic wastes in Somali territorial waters. This moral economy intensifies the grievances of the coastal communities against foreign ships, since the international community condemns Somali pirates but does not condemn the agents that Somalis consider to be the true ‘predators’: foreign fishing vessels (Samatar et al., 2010: 1389). Although this argument refers to a particular historical context and the actions of Somali pirates today have no concrete relations with this type of defence of the Somali environment and natural resources (Hansen: 2009: 9–12), the discourse of the groups involved with piracy still follows this line of argumentation with the obvious objective of justifying their actions to the local communities (Gettleman, 2008). Even though one cannot say that all coastal communities accept this kind of justification, at least some are sufficiently receptive to offer, if not direct collaboration, at least a ‘passive’ support in the sense of ‘actively turning a blind eye’ to piracy (Lehr and Lehmann, 2007: 17).

Some commentators have suggested a growing link between piracy and the fundamentalist Islamic insurgent movement called Al-Shabaab, which today is the main armed faction opposing the TFG (see Middleton, 2008: 9; Eichstaedt, 2010: 5, 136, 145). The International Expert Group on Piracy off the Somali Coast (2008: 21), however, points out that the operational synergy between piracy and political factions in conflict is restricted to a few pirates among the groups based in Harardheere, who come from the same clans as the members of Al-Shabaab. Therefore, this phenomenon reflects highly localized small-scale personal arrangements that cannot be generalized as a wider pattern. The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia takes the same position in its report of March 2010 (United Nations, 2010b: 37), but admits in its most recent report that there has been an increase in the tolerance for piracy within Al-Shabaab-controlled areas, especially in Harardheere/Hobyo, where pirates have been sharing ransom money with the Islamic militia as a tax to operate freely in the area (United Nations, 2011b: 38–9).

Framing the above empirical narrative according to the functional descriptors defined by Pugh and Cooper, one notes that Somali piracy has developed a highly profitable shadow economy, involving connections with local businessmen, corrupt government and police authorities, khat traders, etc. Besides this, Somali piracy has worked as a coping economy, by providing job opportunities for unemployed youths, financial assistance to family and friends, and development of the logistical support they need (construction of boats, fuel supply, water and food for hijacked crews). This economy has trickle-down effects, boosting local construction and commerce (home building, sale of cars and mobile phones, etc.) and generating, in some cases, community social benefits. Although it is not fair to say that all coastal villages are involved in piracy, at least some of them offer the land-based connections, protection and logistical support that pirates need to develop their operations and keep hijacked ships. To a lesser extent, Somali piracy works as a combat economy, particularly in the violation of the arms embargo and payment of fees to the militia leaders in Al-Shabaab-controlled areas, which ultimately results in additional funds for combat operations. This set of functional benefits, which keeps some coastal communities economically dependent on piracy revenues, plus a cultural environment of tolerance motivated by piracy’s moral economy, constitute a fluid and fragile, but very efficient, structure of protection and acceptance of piracy within Somalia.

A radical economy on the outskirts of the globalized world and the liberal peace response

If one considers, as suggested by Castells (2010: 132–47, 508), that globalization is highly excluding and functions as a selective network that ignores non-essential social functions, marginalized social groups and devalued territories – which does not mean that these people, spaces and activities disappear, but that their structural meaning does – the Somali piracy case seems to demonstrate that this dominant form of global economic reorganization is not immune to penetration by those excluded in the process. As Reno (2003: 43) highlighted a decade ago in his study on the shadow economies in Somaliland and Puntland − and as the empirical inquiry on the political economy of piracy carried out here clearly reinforces − Somalia’s structural irrelevance does not necessarily result in complete exclusion of its population from the global economy. Piracy is an empirical demonstration that a portion of this population reintegrates itself into the global economy on a new basis that favours it. Thus, far from representing a simple ‘aberration’ or a regression to a pre-modern stage of civilization, Somali piracy has a rationale fully integrated into the current logic of globalization, materializing unequivocally a radical claim to the ‘right to wealth’ and sharing the features of what Duffield (2001: 139–40, 2007: 230, 2010: 68) calls ‘actually existing development’ − that is, those forms of adaptation, legitimacy and survival that exist beyond and outside the state and acceptable forms of development.

The way Somali piracy has inserted itself in the global economy reveals two sides of the same coin. On one side, piracy produces real development through a varied combination of shadow, coping and combat economies. From this perspective, piracy represents a form of adaptive self-reliance or a kind of ‘radical autonomy’ – that is, an alternative way of economic survival completely outside the state and official structures of development (Duffield, 2010: 68). From the liberal perspective, on the other side, communities are expected to become self-reliant under ‘acceptable’ forms of development (Duffield, 2007: 219). Hence, Somali piracy becomes a threat to the liberal order because it imposes a radical form of ‘taxation’ – through hijacking and ransom – along one of the most strategic maritime trade routes in the world. The crucial point here, therefore, is the absolute impossibility of acceptance, from the liberal point of view, of such a radical autonomy and ‘right to wealth’ claimed by Somali piracy.

Given the incompatibility between these two faces of the coin, the liberal discourse construes Somali piracy as an existential threat to a set of referent objects – international peace and security, humanitarian aid, international maritime trade, crew and passengers’ lives – moving the issue to emergency and exceptionality and, consequently, urging the international community to ‘combat’ such threatening deviant behaviour that menaces the liberal order (Oliveira, 2012: 57). At the same time, the liberal discourse rediscovers poverty, this time as a root cause of piracy, urging the development community to ‘reconstitute a better mode of self-reliance’ (Duffield, 2007: 219) that can ‘transform’ the social conditions that feed the radical economy articulated by piracy. If one examines this reinterpretation of Somali piracy through a merged framework between security and development in terms of policy formulation, whose articulation within the UN Security Council resolutions has already been introduced in this article’s opening paragraphs, it can be noted that the UN Security Council, in reality, merely recycles the UN and AU strategic peacebuilding vision for Africa, prescribing it for the specific case of Somali piracy. The African Post-Conflict Reconstruction Policy Framework, issued in 2005 by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), is a significant example of this strategic vision, whereby the resolution of conflicts in Africa is clearly articulated within the liberal peace model and the security–development nexus. In this document, NEPAD (2005: v) recognizes that ‘the nexus between development, peace and security have become a central focus of post-conflict reconstruction thinking and practice over the last decade’, and for this reason identifies five axes around which reconstruction policies should be organized: (1) security; (2) political transition, governance and participation; (3) socio-economic development; (4) human rights, justice and reconciliation; and (5) coordination, management and resource mobilization (NEPAD, 2005: 11–12). The appropriation of this strategic vision and its prescription as a remedy for Somali piracy is evident in Resolution 1918/2010, in which the UN Security Council, reproducing the above five axes,

[encourages] States and other potential donors to contribute [to the international fund against piracy administered by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime] and [emphasizes] that peace and stability within Somalia, the strengthening of State institutions, economic and social development and respect for human rights and the rule of law are necessary to create the conditions for a durable eradication of piracy and armed robbery at sea off the coast of Somalia. (United Nations, 2010a: 2)

This articulation of Somali piracy through the security–development nexus paves the way for the mobilization of the security and development fields – which include international militaries, governments, regional organizations, donors, the UN and its own agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private contractors − to work with the TFG to help implement a set of measures aimed at strengthening the country’s central governance system, establishing law and order (at sea and on land), and promoting economic and social development in a comprehensive effort to combat piracy. According to the UN Security Council resolutions, in addition to the current naval operations against piracy, this strategy must involve various initiatives, including good governance practices, criminalization of piracy, construction of a police force and prison system, measures against corruption and money laundering, construction of a national coast guard, development of fishing and port infrastructure, and investigation of illegal fishing and discharge of toxic wastes in Somali waters, with help from donors to implement all these initiatives (United Nations, 2011a). This package of measures has the ambitious aim of transforming the political economy of Somali piracy through international governmental, economic and legal supervision, all with the ‘good intention’ of empowering Somalia’s central government – the TFG – to retake the monopoly on the use of force and create incentives to develop the maritime sector to enable it to attract the elites and the people who benefit from piracy to ‘benign’ and ‘legal’ activities.

The ‘nexus’ works, therefore, as a dispositif – here understood in the Foucaultian/Bourdieusian sense employed by Duffield (2010: 56) and Salter (2008: 248), as a set of beliefs, practices and institutions that create conditions of possibility within a particular field. From this point of view, the dispositif is more than merely a mechanistic apparatus: it is ‘a capability for governance, or the disposition of a field towards a mode of governance’ (Salter, 2008: 248). Thus, the articulation of piracy through the security–development nexus has a far more ambitious goal than simply activating a network in order to transform the social conditions contextually related to the piracy problem. Given its dispositif rationale, the ‘nexus’ is a biopolitical tool of global governance; it embodies a ‘liberal will to govern’ (Duffield, 2007: 227) those ‘maladapted populations’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 151) that threaten not only themselves but the liberal order as well. And it tries to do this, as the aforementioned UN Security Council resolutions on piracy clearly show, through a liberal state-building project based on the strengthening of the central state and its democratic institutions, along with economic and social development and respect for human rights and the rule of law. The logic behind the ‘nexus’, therefore, is an abstract one in which all Somali problems, regardless of their particularities and contexts, derive from the failure of the Somali central state. Within this framework, pirates are merely ‘rogue actors’ − like terrorists (read Al-Shabaab) or any other ‘spoilers’ who threaten not only Somalia but also the world liberal order – and once the failure of the central state is rectified, piracy along with other ‘rogue behaviours’ will be solved as a natural consequence. The extent to which this liberal peace transformative recipe is able to change the political economy of Somali piracy, as assumed by the UN Security Council, is highly contestable.

The gap between the liberal peace response and the political economy of Somali piracy

One of the main problems with the standardized UN Security Council policy prescription for Somali piracy is its focus on the TFG. This embryonic central state created by the international community can barely control the capital Mogadishu with the help of the AU peacekeeping forces (AMISOM), having practically no influence in the rest of the country, particularly in the areas affected by piracy. Nonetheless, it is on this embryo that the UN efforts and hopes are concentrated to conduct the social transformations able to achieve the ambitious objective defined by the UN Security Council: the ‘full’ (United Nations, 2008) and ‘durable’ (United Nations, 2009) eradication of Somali piracy. But, contrary to the virtual power of the TFG and the high levels of violence in the south, Somalia has relatively stable zones achieved through local arrangements of governance, such as Somaliland (the country’s northwestern region) and Puntland (northeastern region). But, the crucial point to note, beyond these regional arrangements of governance, is the capacity Somalis have to govern themselves at the municipal and community level. As Menkhaus (2004: 18, 31–3) emphasizes, formal state structures have been largely ineffective in Somalia’s history in the sense of providing essential public services and social welfare to the country as a whole. These structures have served more as a pole to attract external aid, distribute public functions and extract resources from corruption, than as a source of welfare and services to the entire population. The same applies to the judiciary – Somalis generally have preferred to resolve their disputes and most crimes via customary law. Therefore, in terms of building institutions, Menkhaus (2011: 11) says, ‘Somalia is not so much a site of state “revival” as it is a country where creation of effective state institutions would constitute an entirely new phenomenon’. Even in Somaliland, ‘public expectations of the central government are not high’ and levels of public security and law and order are mainly ‘a reflection of a strong social compact to keep the peace, in which an active civil society, customary law, and clan elders are the main pillars’ (Menkhaus, 2011: 5, 11, 14). Considering this situation, it is important to observe that in many parts of Somalia, including the coastal regions where piracy is present, relative stability prevails, achieved by an informal politics that provides most of the everyday governance and basic services to the communities. According to Menkhaus, the biggest challenge is getting the international community to see and understand this ‘ubiquitous informal political sector’ that does not fit Western standards of governance, and therefore is ‘largely invisible to external eyes’:

To the extent that Somalia’s future success in managing conflict and providing local public order to communities is in the hands of these informal systems of governance, the international community is poorly positioned to understand and measure them, and has demonstrated only scattered interest in liaising with them. (Menkhaus, 2011: 12)

Within this context, it is noteworthy that some of the most effective responses in controlling piracy in Somalia have been produced within these customary local instances, as illustrated before in cases such as the Union of Islamic Courts that dismantled the most important pirate bases in 2006; Somaliland and preventive measures adopted by its coastal communities to avoid the rising of pirate groups; Bandar Beyla and the mobilization of civil society through educational work to prevent the entry of young people into piracy and the establishment of an anti-piracy communitarian police; and Eyl, which is becoming free of piracy owing to the reaction of local authorities and civil society and the help of the Puntland’s maritime police. Some of these cases show that even communities highly dependent on piracy are able to become free of pirates – meaning, first, that the ties binding coastal communities to piracy are malleable, and, second, that civil society, clan and religious leaders, customary legal mechanisms and local forms of policing are fundamental elements for any attempt to achieve peace and stability in Somalia, and have been working effectively in some cases to control piracy at the local level. Therefore, potentials for transforming the political economy of Somali piracy seem to be more promising within these actually existing structures of governance at the local level than within the virtual structures of the central state in Somalia.

As if this gap were not enough to show the fragility of the UN Security Council’s transformative recipe, the articulation of Somali piracy through the security–development nexus has paved the way for a range of actors to integrate the international efforts to manage piracy, many of them acting opportunistically, which increases the gap between the international mobilization and its practical impact on the transformation of social conditions underlying the political economy of Somali piracy. Given the dispositif characteristic of the ‘nexus’ − and its expansive rationale towards an almost endless ability to create self-justified security goals (Salter, 2008: 262) − militaries, governments, international organizations, specialized agencies and private companies have seized the opportunity to engage in the efforts against Somali piracy to achieve their own security interests. Since the first UN Security Council resolutions issued in 2008, Somali piracy has served as an opportunity to define new roles for navies and redefine strategic concepts. Seen as a new strategic threat, Somali piracy has become a justification to engage naval forces in operations of presence and projection of power in the Horn of Africa (NATO, the EU, the USA, China, India and Iran are just some examples of states and regional organizations driven by strategic interests in those waters); to seek international prestige in the case of countries with smaller navies; to train crews in real situations; and to develop interoperability, particularly in the cases of countries like China and Russia, which have had the opportunity to get closer to NATO, EU and US naval forces, in order to exchange information and operational procedures to combat a ‘common enemy’. For NATO, anti-piracy efforts have been an opportunity to expand its reach and redefine its strategic concept beyond its transatlantic frontiers; for the EU, piracy has justified putting into practice its multinational naval structure under the Common Security and Defence Policy; for the USA, Somali piracy has been an opportunity to reinforce the militarization of the Horn of Africa’s waters, in addition to naval efforts already under way in the area since 2001 in the context of the ‘war on terror’. Apart from these opportunities in the military field, piracy has served to justify the strengthening of the embryonic Somali central government backed by the Western powers − the TFG − and the implementation of a Westernized legal/judicial apparatus in Somalia under UN supervision – the so-called specialized Somali anti-piracy courts − that is able to free the international community of responsibility for the trial and imprisonment of pirates arrested in naval operations. The opportunities exploited by private contractors are also significant, producing a real boom in the business of private maritime security companies in recent years. These companies have been contracted not only to perform security functions onboard merchant ships, but also to act in the formation and composition of coast guards and maritime polices within the TFG, Somaliland and Puntland governments (for a broad view of these international responses, see Haywood and Spivak, 2012: 39–55; Homan and Kamerling, 2011; Murphy, 2011: 123–37; Geiss and Petrig, 2011: 17–35; United Nations, 2011c).

This opportunistic ethos is largely a consequence of the dispositif characteristic of the security–development nexus. As Salter (2008: 249) emphasizes, a security dispositif creates its own security objects, which means ‘it defines what might be governed in the name of security’. However, it does this by focusing on the norm rather than on individual cases, so that ‘the object of the dispositif is obscured’ (Salter, 2008: 251) and the normalization of security in itself is expanded, increasingly allowing ‘for a wide assemblage of actors to engage in this type of politics and continually to increase the spaces in which security operates’ (Salter, 2008: 262). From this perspective, the particular context of Somali piracy – involving its functional benefits, moral economy, system of authority and protection, communitarian needs and concerns, capacities to control piracy locally, etc. – is not central to the ‘nexus’. Rather, these particular aspects are obscured in the eyes of governments, militaries, international organizations, companies, experts and the constellation of actors who engage in the piracy problem, not to meet it face-to-face and manage its objective conditions, but to act in the name of establishing security in a broad sense. Therefore, the comprehensive approach advocated in the UN Security Council resolutions becomes more encompassing the more it enables the various actors and institutions involved in anti-piracy efforts to reach their own security objectives, not because it enables an effective ‘transformation’ of the particular social conditions underlying the political economy of piracy. In reality, the transformation of this context becomes irrelevant for assessing their success. After all, what counts as success is compliance with the security goals these actors define in their own missions. As Duffield (2011: xviii) properly highlights, ‘from seeing disaster as an opportunity, the distance of travel necessary to experience failure as success is minimal’. This is why the liberal interventionism continues to celebrate its mission accomplishment, even if in practice it has successively failed to solve the problems used to justify it. The intervention against Somali piracy seems to suffer the same malady: despite the huge international mobilization to manage the problem, making increasing use of transformative discourses under the generic ‘comprehensive approach’ label, the social conditions underlying the political economy of Somali piracy remain practically unchanged and pirates continue to readapt their modus operandi to bypass the international containment efforts.

Nevertheless, actors involved in anti-piracy operations point to several successes to celebrate. Official reports and statements from the UN Secretary-General and the International Maritime Organization have recognized that international naval patrols and self-protection measures taken by the shipping industry have made considerable progress in curbing piracy, contributing to reduce the number of successful hijackings (United Nations, 2010c: 4, 2011c: 38–40, 2011d: 4; International Maritime Organization, 2011). Reports from the International Maritime Bureau (2012: 24) add to these successful initiatives the role of private armed security personnel aboard merchant ships, which has been commemorated by the shipping industry under the mantra of ‘to date, not a single ship with Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel aboard has been pirated’ (Shapiro, 2012). The multinational naval coalitions have also highlighted their positive results, interrupting pirate attacks, successfully escorting ships chartered by the World Food Programme and AMISOM, arresting and transferring pirates for trial, and, especially, protecting the Internationally Recognized Transit Corridor (IRTC) established in the Gulf of Aden (NATO, 2012; European Union, 2012: 5, 10). These positive results, however, cannot mask two crucial aspects: the fact that the number of attempted attacks from pirates nearly doubled from 2010 to 2011, and that the main collateral effect of the naval patrols was to shift the action of pirates from the Gulf of Aden (where attacks predominated initially) to more distant regions in the Indian Ocean (United Nations, 2010b: 36). These figures indicate that despite the huge international military presence in the region and the juridical/penitentiary apparatus established in Somalia and regional counties under UN supervision, the functional benefits and the structure of protection around Somali piracy continue to outweigh the risks posed to pirates by the containment strategy conducted under the UN Security Council’s policies. Instead of being weakened, the Somali pirates have become increasingly persistent and bold.

Conclusion: Toward a critical transformative approach to Somali piracy

This study has shown that the UN Security Council policy articulation of Somali piracy through the security–development nexus leans heavily toward the security side and, in practice, basically results in creating protected spaces and corridors guarded by foreign militaries and private security personnel, as well as a punishment infrastructure in Somalia that meets Western standards of trial and imprisonment, so that the transformation of social conditions at the base of the political economy of Somali piracy is placed on a secondary level, overshadowed by short-term security goals. The key point to stress here is that the dispositif characteristics of the security–development nexus make it work as a securitized tool of global governance that gives greater importance to urgency and coercion, privileging the achievement of security objectives rather than social transformations. At the same time, the articulation of the ‘nexus’ through a liberal state-building project as a transformative recipe for Somali piracy seems to be a virtual solution, a kind of utopian and ideological project of social engineering with no political roots or concrete link to the particular context involving the political economy of Somali piracy. These are the main reasons why the UN Security Council policies and the ‘comprehensive approach’ increasingly used as a generic label within the international discourse on Somali piracy cannot be taken very seriously regarding their transformative purposes.

As an alternative, I suggest a critical transformative approach to Somali piracy that goes beyond securitized responses and generic liberal peace policies. This does not mean denying that piracy inevitably involves law enforcement measures or claiming that ‘actually existing forms of development’ created by piracy are desirable or more justifiable than the liberal peace promises. What is at stake here is not this kind of normative evaluation, but rather the fact that the international mobilization, while ignoring the functional benefits of piracy and marginalizing de facto local arrangements of authority and governance in Somalia, offers a utopian state-building policy and a disproportional military response that does not match the specific needs of development and security identified within the local context in which piracy emerges. Despite its global effects, piracy is a highly localized phenomenon in Somalia and depends on the protection and logistical support provided by small poor coastal communities without which its activities become unviable. It is therefore within this closest context that the greatest potential for transformation can be found. As exemplified in the case study developed here, indigenous mechanisms of authority and governance plus the involvement of civil society have produced some effective responses in communities previously dependent on piracy. These initiatives involve not only formal policing provided by local proto-governments (Puntland and Somaliland), but also community mobilization of customary and religious values in order to transform mentalities and attitudes towards piracy, and reorient unemployed youth to fishing activities or informal anti-piracy policing. From this picture, one may conclude, first, that concrete needs of development and security in communities dependent on piracy are micro-scale, and, second, that potentials can be found within local instances not only to enforce law and order, but also to transform material and cultural conditions sustaining Somali piracy. Recognizing that ‘local mini-alternatives’⁴ of engagement are effective ways to transform the political economy of Somali piracy, one can envision a more balanced and context-sensitive articulation of the security–development nexus, which is rooted in the concrete needs of people living in coastal communities and legitimated by local instances of authority and governance.

The critical approach suggested here cannot be fully explored within the limits of this article. A crucial question that remains open, for example, is to what extent local alternatives and liberal peace responses are mutually excluding or can be reconciled within a critical transformative agenda on Somali piracy. Placing this question at the core, the critical approach defended here could benefit from the vigorous debate that, in recent years, has explored the roles and capacities of local agencies in peacemaking and peacebuilding (Mac Ginty, 2008, 2010; Richmond, 2011; Richmond and Mitchell, 2012). Avoiding the ‘romanticization’ of the local and the ‘demonization’ of the international/liberal, this debate has confronted both sides, trying to find within their contradictions hybrid forms of action that can reflect their relations in more complex and positive ways. Considering that a critical transformative agenda on Somali piracy should not be focused exclusively on the polarization between local agency and international interventionism, the ‘hybrid peace’ debate seems to be a valuable source of theoretical and methodological insights for further developments of the critical approach suggested here.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Claudia Aradau and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments and suggestions.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundacão para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Foundation for Science and Technology, FCT), Portugal (SFRH/BD/72879/2010).

Notes

Gilberto Carvalho Oliveira is a PhD Candidate in International Politics and Conflict Resolution at the School of Economics/Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra.

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