War on Piracy: The conflation of Somali piracy with terrorism in discourse,tactic,and law

Abstract

This article argues that since 2005, the global security discourse has confused maritime piracy off the Horn of Africa with terrorism. US and European policymakers and financiers have tapped a vulnerable public imaginary to exaggerate Somali pirates as ‘maritime terrorists’ linked to Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda, driving the militarization and legal obfuscation of counter-piracy operations. And while Somali piracy has all but disappeared since 2013, international naval coalitions remain deployed in the Indian Ocean, which is still declared a war risk area. The discursive conflation of piracy and terrorism has thereby launched a tactical War on Piracy that mirrors the War on Terror. While pirates were active, this approach pushed them to become more daring and dangerous in response. Drawing on interviews with piracy stakeholders in Kenya, the article concludes that the tactical extension from counter-terrorism to counter-piracy is unresponsive to the origins, motives, and realities of Somali pirates. The article proposes a shift from military to developmental responses to countering and preventing piracy, with an emphasis on respecting local institutions of law enforcement and governance in Somalia.

Keywords

Piracy Somalia Somali piracy terrorism War on Terror

Introduction

This article traces how US and European policymakers and financiers conflated Somali piracy with terrorism from 2005, framing it as an exigent threat in the contemporary security discourse. Leading up to the deployment of naval forces in 2008–2009, governments and analysts framed pirates as ‘maritime terrorists’ who cooperate with militant Islamists along the Horn of Africa. While over 30 nations deployed their navies to Somali waters after 2008, only the US, NATO, and EU coalitions were discursively situated within the global War on Terror. We hypothesize that they did this not to protect Indian Ocean shipping, but rather to achieve alternate military, political, and financial ends.

The arch of the argument is as follows. Despite piracy and terrorism being historically and legally distinct, US and European policymakers and financiers began to conflate them after 9/11 by exaggerating the global threat of ‘maritime terrorism’ in strategy papers, policy statements, and the public imaginary. When Somali piracy broke out in 2005, this generalized conflation carried over into the interpretation of that specific phenomenon. The media then appropriated and disseminated the idea. This set the stage for a War on Piracy that matched the War on Terror, and included naval operations that employed the same units and tactics.

Before delving into the argument, we start with a sketch of the problem. With the longest coastline in Africa and its status as a ‘failure among failed states’ (Menkhaus, 2003: 407), Somalia became a hotbed for maritime piracy from 2005 onward. Pirates pushed out over the years from the Gulf of Aden at the mouth of the Suez Canal deep into the Indian Ocean. During the peak period of the problem, from 2005 through 2011, the International Maritime Bureau attributed 905 attacks to Somali pirates, including 202 hijackings (IMB, 2006–2012). More than 3,000 seafarers were held hostage for ransom, and payments to pirates totaled US$385 million (IMB, 2006–2012; World Bank, 2013: 122). By the end of 2011, the average ransom payment for a vessel and her crew had increased to US$5 million (Compass Risk Management, 2012a). It is 80% more expensive for shipowners to avoid the Suez Canal and sail around the Cape of Good Hope than it is to risk it and pay ransom if necessary (Coggins, 2010: 87). To buffer the additional risk, they take out high-premium insurance, streaming profits to marine insurers. In 2013, the World Bank estimated that Somali piracy costs the international community up to US$18 billion a year.

The stage for this offshore drama is a complicated set of governance structures onshore. Civil war led to the collapse of the post-colonial regime of Siad Barre in 1991, paving the way for an expensive humanitarian operation, followed by 16 attempts to piece together a central government. Somalia currently tops every ranking of failed states, while clan-based substates like Somaliland and Puntland have declared autonomy and maintain relatively stable governments and economies. Somalia’s deadliest terrorist organization, Harakat Al-Shabaab Al-Mujahideen (Al-Shabaab), emerged in 2007 and now controls much of southern Somalia. In February 2012, Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda announced a merger. While engaged in an ongoing war with African Union forces, Al-Shabaab has carried out attacks abroad, like the World Cup bombing in Kampala, Uganda in 2010 and the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya in 2013. The concurrent rise of terrorist violence and maritime hijackings along the Horn of Africa from 2007 onward created an impression of rampant criminality vulnerable to the conflation of piracy with terrorism.

Somali piracy has dropped precipitously in the past three years, from 237 attacks and 28 hijackings in 2011 to just 15 attacks and two hijackings in 2013 (IMB, 2012–2014). In 2015, there were no hijackings reported to international agencies (IMB, 2016). The navies claim (and are often attributed) credit for this development; however, as this article documents, the naval missions had unintended and counterproductive consequences after their deployment in 2008–2009. For example, the incidence of attacks more than doubled thereafter, and pirates adopted more sophisticated technology in response, using more dangerous arms and motherships to sail further out to sea. It remains unclear, therefore, why pirates reversed course so suddenly when there was no sea change in counter-piracy tactics. However, questions about the navies’ success or why Somali piracy fell so rapidly are left for another article. Here, we show only that the discursive conflation of piracy and terrorism preconditioned aggressive military strategies, and that these strategies led to operational one-upmanship on the part of pirates.

The next section elaborates the article’s theoretical and methodological underpinnings. Section three reviews the construction of the threat of ‘maritime terrorism’ after 9/11 but before the Somali piracy surge in 2005. Section four traces the discursive conflation of Somali piracy with terrorism since the surge. Section five demonstrates the penetration of this discourse into contemporary counter-piracy practices. Finally, the conclusion proposes a few desecuritized, developmental solutions to Somali crime and governance.

Theoretical and methodological standpoint

This article’s central aim is to trace the conflation of Somali piracy and terrorism in the global security discourse from its origins to its contemporary manifestations in counter-piracy operations. It is couched in securitization theory, which focuses on the intersubjective processes of state and non-state actors presenting and justifying issues as existential threats requiring emergency measures outside the bounds of normal political procedure (Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde, 1998). Thus, security can be examined as ‘a discourse through which identities and threats are constituted rather than [purely] as an objective, material condition’ (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 243). Discourse here is taken as an extended stretch of conversation, orientations, and activities among policymakers, media, and the public (Stritzel, 2012: 551–552, 563). Our methods include an extensive literature review, a discourse analysis of policy documents and media reports, and observation of piracy trials at the Mombasa Law Courts, Kenya. Six semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in Kenya – including counter-piracy officials, lawyers, and a ransom negotiator – also inform the analysis.

While most of the literature on Somali piracy alludes to a potential relationship between pirates and terrorists, some authors have challenged this (Hansen, 2009; Hamilton, 2010). Furthermore, much of the literature focuses on piracy as piracy and not as terrorism (Pham, 2010; Dua and Menkhaus, 2012). Accordingly, we do not claim that the conflation of piracy with terrorism is the sole or dominant conception of Somali piracy. Rather, the conflation thesis demonstrates what was discursively necessary to mobilize extraordinary military resources in response to perceptions of the piracy phenomenon. The point of this piece, therefore, is to examine how this idea originated, who its agents were, and how it became manifest in security discourse and practice.

The conflation of piracy and terrorism has been previously elaborated in terms of post-9/11 rhetoric (Engels, 2007) and, regionally, in Southeast Asia (Young and Valencia, 2003). This article updates these arguments and extends them for the first time to the Somali case. Engels’ critique of neoliberal discursive formations inspires our analysis; however, our securitization framework helps us trace the causal chains that link securitizing actors to particular securitizing moves and practices in Somalia. Young and Valencia introduce the techno-legal conflation of piracy and terrorism in Southeast Asia; we elaborate and globalize the overlapping legal regimes of counter-piracy and counter-terrorism, and also broaden the analysis to describe the plurality of actors involved in the Somali case (especially non-state actors like marine insurers).

While empirical in bent, this article also engages with its theoretical underpinnings, illuminating how instruments of law and security have become hijacked by the ‘macro-securitization’ of the global War on Terror (Buzan, 2006: 1103). The causal mechanism herein involves political elites – including non-state actors like private companies – recalling historical threats to mobilize an exceptional, aggressive response to a situation in order to advance their interests. When we speak of elites, we mean politicians, academics, journalists, lobbyists, government and military officials, and other securitizing actors capable of making speech acts that set the policy agenda (Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde, 1998). In the case of Somali piracy and global jihad, this includes the White House (especially the Bush administration), the US National Security Council, the US Armed Forces, the UN Security Council, the marine insurance lobby (especially Lloyd’s of London), private military contractors, and NATO and EU policymakers, among others.

We argue that these actors’ conflation of piracy with terrorism depends on the perception that piracy and terrorism are ‘stateless’ crimes that thrive in ‘failed states’. Herein lies the article contribution to this theoretical discussion: it demonstrates how the War on Piracy relies on the trope of the nation-state and conventional ideas about state-building in Somalia, proscribing land-based solutions to the piracy problem that would respect local realities of governance. The article thus advances a hybrid developmental approach to Somali piracy. Following De Oliveira (2013: 15), this approach seeks to understand piracy in its full complexity and combat it with strategies that marry the ‘liberal state-building project’ with ‘indigenous mechanisms of authority and governance’ along the Horn of Africa. De Oliveira says that the ‘vicious circle whereby piracy is at once a cause and an effect of instability … reflects the merging between security and development that is deeply entrenched in the language games of the developmental discourse’ (2013: 4). This is most evident in Africa, where the security-development nexus crystallized after 9/11 to compensate for the externalities of ungoverned spaces. Effectively, the USA and EU fear that terrorists, pirates, and other criminals will flourish wherever the rule of law is weak. But as Biekart et al. (2005: 358) expound, the real danger is that ‘all social progress (i.e. ‘development’) may come to a halt if reactionary forces manage to convince us that new dangers are constantly on the horizon’.

On this note, one danger is that observing the securitization process without passing judgment may implicate the article in reproducing the conflation of piracy and terrorism (Eriksson, 1999). However, the normative position that underlies Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde’s work is the preference for desecuritization. So drawing from an activist-scholar position in line with Booth’s (2005) critical security theory, the article seeks to contribute to the desecuritization process and identify alternative approaches of making security. It thus elaborates the origins and consequences of the conflation claim, but also judges it on its merits.

Such an approach may seem to sit uneasily in a securitization framing, which does not judge whether or not a threat is objectively real, only that it comes to exist discursively. McInnes and Rushton (2013: 120) help clarify: ‘Security issues are socially constructed, but the securitization process is not divorced from empirical considerations.’ They argue that empirical evidence has an impact both on securitization (when empirical claims are authoritatively made) and desecuritization (when they turn out to be incorrect). Building on Balzacq (2010), they write that ‘claims about “empirical reality” form a crucial part of securitizing speech acts, but that where doubts subsequently arise over the evidence for this “reality”, securitization can be undermined’ (McInnes and Rushton, 2013: 115). Airing such doubts can thus help to unravel the securitization. Therefore, disentangling piracy from terrorism would help to desecuritize piracy, potentially mitigating the aggressive militarization off the Horn and the confounded application of international law. Following McInnes and Rushton’s approach, we examine the speech acts that constitute the securitizing moves for the conflation of piracy and terrorism, and investigate the validity of their truth claims. However, we do not attempt to provide irrefutable proof that piracy and terrorism are unlinked – indeed, the relationship is not binary, and an empirical truth about this relationship may not exist independently. Rather, we seek to cast sufficient doubt on the piracy-terrorism link to precipitate desecuritization.

The post-9/11 conflation of piracy and terrorism, 2001–2005: A review

This section reviews the post-9/11 global rhetoric that confused piracy with terrorism and challenges the credibility of this threat of ‘maritime terrorism’.

In international and customary law, piracy and terrorism are distinct crimes. Article 101 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (United Nations, 1982) defines piracy as ‘acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends … on the high seas … outside the jurisdiction of any State’. The International Maritime Organization (2009: 4) broadens this definition to include ‘armed robbery against ships … within a State’s internal waters, archipelagic waters and territorial sea’. These definitions typify piracy as a private, apolitical act. In contrast, terrorism is generally defined as the employment of violence against non-combatants for political or ideological ends.

The conflation of piracy and terrorism is rooted in the perceived threat of ‘maritime terrorism’, a label covering (a) politically motivated attacks at sea and (b) politically motivated attacks on land for which ships are used to transport arms or operatives. The largest perceived threat is that terrorists will use vessels as ‘floating bombs’ (Engels, 2007: 326), that is, use ‘merchant and cruise ships as kinetic weapons to ram another vessel, warship, port facility, or offshore platform’ and cause mass-casualty destruction (White House, 2005: 4). The root of this perception lies in 9/11. Buzan and Hansen (2009: 239–240) explain: ‘One of the curious twists of 9/11 was the way it put emphasis on the vulnerability of [civil infrastructure] to [attack using] readily available civil technologies as weapons.’ Others fear that terrorists may also leverage a vessel’s cargo – like petroleum or gas – as explosive material. Engels (2007: 331) writes that an oil tanker, if ‘exploded in a port such as Singapore, Boston, or Galveston, would wreak more havoc than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’.

After 9/11, while US policymakers and media launched their War on Terror, they also projected the union of pirates and terrorists. In the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, George W Bush declared that ‘terrorism will be viewed in the same light as slavery, piracy, or genocide: behavior that no respectable government can condone or support and all must oppose’ (White House, 2002: 6). This statement discursively grouped piracy with premeditated political violence. Southeast Asia, where maritime raiding had long been a legitimate practice, quickly became vulnerable to the conflation of piracy and terrorism, as militant secessionists in Muslim areas of the Philippines and Indonesia adopted maritime tactics. For example, an October 2003 article in The Economist and a subsequent report in Foreign Affairs (2004) dwelled on the terrorist motivations behind the hijacking of the Dewi Madrim tanker off Indonesia. The allegation was made initially by Aegis Defence Services, a London-based private military contractor, and later deemed as hogwash by the International Maritime Bureau and the ship’s owner (Murphy, 2007: 7–8). In July 2005, the Lloyd’s Joint War Committee (JWC), a London-based network of marine insurers, classified the Strait of Malacca as a war risk area because of the risk of piracy and maritime terrorism. The JWC based this rating on a controversial report it had commissioned from Aegis Defence Services, the same company that had instigated the Dewi Madrim allegation. Lobo-Guerrero (2008: 219) calls the rating ‘an active process of securitisation [through which] the narrative of the problem was heavily circumscribed within the rhetoric of the War on Terror [and] securitised as “maritime terrorism”’. Under pressure, the JWC withdrew its rating of the Strait of Malacca as a war risk area in August 2006. Murphy warns that

discussion of maritime terrorism in the media, the academy and intelligence agencies can suffer from circularity, whereby analysts and commentators discuss possible scenarios, terrorists listen, analysts then pick up chatter that reflects their speculations, and take it to be proof that their suspicions were correct. (Murphy, 2007: 71)

Thus, the discursive ‘chatter’ about pirates conducting terrorist attacks, though unwarranted, gathered speed after 9/11, crystallizing anxiety into policies like those employed in Southeast Asia.

Despite talk of maritime terrorism, most analysts concur it constitutes a less-than-credible threat. Chalk (2008: 19–20) calculates that only 2% of all terrorist attacks over the past 30 years have been against maritime targets. He explains that the ocean poses high costs for terrorists, who do not know how to rig or moor a vessel, maneuver or navigate, or operate equipment – let alone swim. Moreover, attacks at sea do not elicit as much publicity as attacks on land, making maritime terrorism less attractive for its perpetrators (Murphy, 2007: 69).

But if the threat were incredible, why would piracy be exaggerated as terrorism? Young and Valencia (2003) suggest that since 9/11, maritime powers have inflated the threat of maritime terrorism to exert pressure on weaker states to sign the 1988 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA Convention). Drafted in response to the Palestinian Liberation Front’s hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985, the SUA Convention extends state jurisdiction over international waters and mandates cooperation with maritime terrorism prosecutions of other States Parties. More recently, it has been promoted as a counter-piracy measure. Young and Valencia deduce that the USA and other maritime powers are hoping for the SUA to get them a foot in the door in terms of extraterritorial jurisdiction over acts of terrorism. The states of Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Indonesia, have largely declined accession to these conventions, since they threaten the sovereignty of states with disputed maritime boundaries. ‘However, if “piracy” and “terrorism” are fused into a general threat to maritime security, developing countries may find outside “help” easier to accept and to “sell” to their domestic polity’ (Young and Valencia, 2003: 277). ‘So’, the authors continue, ‘it may be in the United States’ interest to conflate piracy and terrorism to persuade reluctant developing countries to assist maritime powers pursue pirates and terrorists in their territorial and archipelagic waters’.

Importantly, while pirates were analogized to terrorists after 9/11, initially it was the other way around. According to Guzzini (2011: 336), processes of securitization ‘can only be understood against the background of … [the] embedded collective memory of past lessons, defining metaphors and the significant “circles of recognition” for the collective identities of a country’. Silverstein (2005: 180) demonstrates how in the immediate wake of 9/11, US pundits deemed the Barbary ‘pirates’ of Ottoman North Africa to be the ‘historical forebears of twenty-first-century Islamist militants, as “terrorists by another name”’. The First Barbary War – which saw the dispatch of US Marines to Tripoli in 1801 – even inspired Captain Glenn Voelz, a professor at West Point Military Academy, to wonder if ‘we are still fighting the same war’ 200 years later (Leiby, 2001). Silverstein writes: ‘The Barbary Analogy has been a potent arm in the ideological battle that has paralleled the … war on terror … The equation of piracy and terrorism has outlined a wider field of international engagement that has further reified the geographic and cultural poles of a putative “clash of civilization”’ (2005: 183). This ‘Barbary Analogy’ was made before Somali piracy ever grabbed the headlines, but its field of engagement has widened since 2005 to spin contemporary maritime crime off the Horn of Africa as a trend of global jihad.

The discursive conflation of piracy and terrorism in Somalia, 2005–2012

Given the discursive construction of the global threat of ‘maritime terrorism’ since 9/11, this section traces the extension of this rhetoric of ‘floating bombs’ to Somalia and dispels the claim that Somali piracy and terrorism are linked.

The case of Somalia

After Somali piracy surged early in 2005, the Bush administration issued the National Strategy for Maritime Security (NSMS) in September the same year. The NSMS declares that ‘the safety and economic security of the United States depends upon the secure use of the world’s oceans. Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Federal government has reviewed and strengthened all of its strategies to combat the evolving threat in the War on Terrorism’ (ii). Thus, in a single sweep, maritime security fell under the ambit of the War on Terror. The NSMS made a further conjecture to link piracy with terrorism: it feared that ‘the capabilities to board and commandeer large underway vessels – demonstrated in numerous piracy incidents – could also be employed to facilitate terrorist acts’ (2005: 5). The White House followed suit with the Policy for the Repression of Piracy and Other Criminal Acts of Violence at Sea in 2007, which interpreted piracy as a terrorist threat. This document outlined a single policy to address both piracy ‘for private ends’ and ‘criminal and terrorist activities not defined as piracy’. It justified this grouping by saying: ‘The combination of illicit activity and violence at sea might … be associated with … terrorism’. Lending credence to Young and Valencia’s (2003) analysis on Southeast Asia, the document proposed the SUA Convention and its 2005 Protocols as the relevant legal standard for both crimes – despite these documents mentioning ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ 23 times, but ‘pirate’ or ‘piracy’ none (International Maritime Organization, 1988, 2005). In fact, the SUA Convention was specifically drafted to distinguish maritime terrorism from armed robbery at sea, so the Bush administration’s equation of the two in its 2007 Policy confounded the whole aim.

Then, in December 2008, the US National Security Council published a counter-piracy action plan for the Horn of Africa. In addition to the SUA Convention, this document claimed that the 1979 Hostage Taking Convention and the 1999 Terrorist Financing Convention could apply to piracy cases. The former dangerously defines ‘all acts of taking of hostages as manifestations of international terrorism’, and the latter suggests that pirate money is used or allocated for terrorist offenses, which remains unproven. So the Bush administration’s proposal that these instruments be used to prosecute pirates conflated them with terrorists.

But why go through the trouble? The Bush administration probably seized advantage of the dramatic rise in piracy off the Horn of Africa to press its regional counter-terrorism ambitions, which were live from October 2002 with the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom – Horn of Africa, part of the US war in Afghanistan. By February 2006, the CIA was funneling US$100,000 a month to an alliance of Somali warlords to crush the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a locally popular network of sharia courts which many analysts have judged as moderate and peaceful (Mazzetti, 2006; Dagne, 2011: 18–21). Pushed to defend itself, the ICU militarized, defeated the warlords, and assumed control of Mogadishu in June 2006. Operation Enduring Freedom then aided an Ethiopian military intervention to eliminate ICU rule in December 2006 and January 2007. The USA did so because it was afraid of affiliations some members of the ICU might have had with Al-Qaeda, though such allegations were largely unsubstantiated (Dagne, 2011: 17–18). While there was proof that Somalia played a minor role in Al-Qaeda operations (as a transit point for arms and operatives), by itself this proof never sufficed to justify direct military intervention, which the Bush administration had considered as early as 2002 (Menkhaus, 2004: 68). Effectively, the Bush administration exploited the coincidence of militant Islamism and maritime crime in the Horn of Africa, exaggerating piracy as a trend of global jihad to advance its counter-terrorism agenda for the region.

Securitization of Somali piracy in this way would not have been possible without the consent of the ‘audience’, in this case the US public. For a securitizing speech to be successful, ‘the speaker has to tune his/her language to the audience’s experience’ (Balzacq, 2005: 184). The conflation stuck because in the Western social imaginary, reports, photographs, and YouTube videos of Somali pirates taking mariners hostage are difficult to differentiate from those of terrorists taking passengers, journalists, and aid workers hostage. Armed Muslim youth, in an environment of lawlessness, conflict, and poverty, are kidnapping international targets on the high seas with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. Incidents of kidnapping for ransom look like acts of terrorism, which are choreographed so that hostages are released after demands are met (Jenkins, 1974: 3). The assumed parallelism becomes dominant because ‘it is easier to act on old, concrete fears than on new, untested hopes’ (Mitzen, 2006: 362–363). For the public, terrorism even becomes a ‘term of comfort’, because in a world of ambiguous threats, people are convinced that terrorism can be defeated by the US military (Engels, 2007: 339). The public fascination with hostage situations, rooted in the imaginary of terrorism and nurtured by the media, further confuses the perception of the pirate problem, as it seems to have the right ingredients for militant Islamism.

Such confusion springs from the remote threat of Al-Qaeda and Somali pirates combining forces to wreak global havoc. Murphy (2010: 96) articulates the potential challenge facing the USA and its allies:

If al-Shabab [gained] access to the northern coast of Puntland, then [they could] attack international shipping using pirate tactics. The situation would become even worse if Yemen, already politically fragile, also fell under Islamist sway … [putting] both sides of the Gulf of Aden … in hostile hands … Ceding control of the Horn of Africa … would be a nightmare in waiting for Washington. (Murphy, 2010: 96)

Of course, while this ‘nightmare’ scenario is unlikely, it is invoked to generate fear. Short of the worst-case scenario, pirates are rumored to have operational and financial interactions with militant Islamists. Bahadur (2011: 48) writes: ‘In a world dominated by the discourse of the war on terror, various policy analysts, journalists, and politicians pushing particular agendas inevitably began to speculate about pirate cash ending up in the hands of terrorists’. Some of these claims are elaborate: Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor reported in 2008 that pirates were transporting arms and fighters for Al-Shabaab in return for training and weapons, and that the two forces had trained together in naval tactics (Plaut, 2008).

True or false, this discursive conflation is not limited to US policymakers and analysts. Among the most vocal proponents of the pirate-jihadi nexus are marine insurers. In fact, the market logic of marine insurance developed hand in hand with Barbary piracy. Effectively, insurance companies – like private military companies – have long used their ‘epistemic power’ to set security agendas and shape threat perceptions (Leander, 2005: 811–815). They ‘produce knowledge of risk by objectifying everything into degrees of chance of harm’, and can thereby rhetorically construct or exaggerate a danger – justifying a hike in insurance rates (Ericson, Doyle and Barry, 2003: 5). Practically speaking, if there is an expectation of war-like conditions, maritime terrorism, or capture at sea in certain waters, underwriters can categorize these as areas of enhanced risk and multiply insurance rates up to 300 fold for ships sailing those waters (MacAskill and Sundaram, 2011). Due to piracy, kidnap and ransom insurance has multiplied tenfold, cargo insurance premiums in war risk areas have risen between US$25 and US$100 per container, and hull insurance has doubled (Bowden, 2011: 10–11).

As early as 2004, Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest marine insurer, published articles in its newsletter Lloyd’s List with the following titles:

Maritime terrorism is a ticking timebomb: The global supply chain is in jeopardy. Pirates have evolved from clusters of commercial plunderers to a sinister and organised force that relishes the prospect of toying with the levers of the world economy. (Armstrong, 2004)

We ignore threats at our peril: We may think terrorist attacks are unlikely, but, if they happen, they will be devastating – and piracy is a real threat. (Osler, 2005)

With such language, Lloyd’s injected panic into the piracy discourse. In March 2006, Lloyd’s decreed that pirate attacks and terrorist attacks would be covered by a single scheme because of the ‘difficulty in distinguishing’ between the two (Insurance Journal, 2006). The Lloyd’s Joint War Committee then designated the Gulf of Aden a war risk area in May 2008. It later extended this designation across the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Oman, and Southern Red Sea – which is still in effect. In April 2009, Peter Levene, Lloyd’s chairman, announced that ‘nearly all of the ships pirated this year are insured within Lloyd’s either by hull underwriters, hull war underwriters, kidnap and ransom underwriters or through reinsurance. And the peril of piracy, traditionally covered by the hull policy, is currently being moved into the war policy’. Due to these shifts, marine insurers earned US$635 million in 2011 from piracy-related insurance premiums, dwarfing the US$160 million earned by Somali pirates that same year (Bowden and Basnet, 2012: 11–16).

The conflation of piracy and terrorism in Somalia – fueled by certain political and financial interests, the remote threat of Al-Qaeda commandeering pirate ships, and a vulnerable public imaginary – has fed a media storm. Consider a sampling of newspaper articles: ‘Warnings from Al Qaeda stir fear that terrorists may attack oil tankers’ (Bradsher, New York Times, 2002); ‘The next 9/11 could happen at sea’ (Burnett, New York Times, 2005); ‘Piracy is terrorism’ (Burgess, New York Times, 2008); ‘Somali pirates form unholy alliance with Islamists’ (Der Spiegel, 2009); ‘Somali pirate ransoms “could fund terrorists”’ (Syal and Townsend, The Guardian, 2009). Under conditions of uncertainty, reporters’ repeated invocation of pirates’ possible connections to terrorists, however unwitting, ‘backed up’ the securitizing speech acts of policymakers and lobbyists by facilitating public consent. A critical mass of press thus made the Somali pirate-jihadi nexus ‘real’; it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This process is similar to the production of the terrorist threat. Buzan and Hansen (2009: 249) explain: ‘The constitution of terrorist profiles is … always prophetic, seeking to identify the future threat, and thereby ultimately producing its own subject’.

Defusing the ‘floating bombs’ fallacy

Like the global threat of maritime terrorism, the discursive conflation of Somali pirates and terrorists is also less than credible. There are signs of rivalry, rather than cooperation, between pirates and militants in Somalia (Hansen, 2009). When the ICU came to power in Mogadishu in 2006, inheriting a surge in piracy, it publicly declared piracy haram (forbidden) and ended all maritime crime, taking special efforts to crack down on pirate bases and threatening to cut off pirates’ hands. On ICU watch in the last six months of 2006, there was only one vessel hijacked, and the ICU rescued it within a week.

More recently, since Hizbul Islam, a splinter group of the ICU, conquered the pirate ports of Xarardheere and Hobyo in April 2010, there have been conflicting reports about the relationship between pirates and militants in the surrounding region. Some report a deal whereby Al-Shabaab earned a 20–50% commission for vessels held and ransomed at Xarardheere, while others report that the deal soured when the parties could not agree (Bahadur, 2011: 49–50). Interviews with stakeholders in Kenya confirm and dispel some rumors about cooperation between Al-Shabaab and the pirates of Xarardheere. Andrew Mwangura, a negotiator between shipowners and pirates and founder of the Seafarers’ Assistance Program in Mombasa, Kenya, believes that ‘a pact was made [in 2010] between the Xarardheere [pirate] group and Al-Shabaab’ that involved a percentage cut, but that the pirates only agreed in order ‘to cool them [Al-Shabaab] down’ (Personal interview in Mombasa, 31 July 2011). Mwangura says the sustainability of this pact is ‘impossible’ and that it ‘won’t hold water’, primarily because pirates do not want to confront terrorist financing laws, which would proscribe ransom payments. Rather, Aden Maow Abdi, Somali Program Officer of the UK Department for International Development, suggests Al-Shabaab may have extracted ‘access fees’ from pirates in Xarardheere as it does from humanitarian agencies as a ‘cost of doing business’, especially since Al-Shabaab is ‘under financial pressure’ (Personal interview in Nairobi, 15 July 2011). According to Mwangura, there is proof that pirates have set sail from southern ports controlled by Al-Shabaab, but anchored hijacked vessels further north in Puntland while ransoms were negotiated, to avoid Al-Shabaab’s port commissions and sharia law. In sum, it appears that Al-Shabaab, under financial pressure, coerced pirates of Xarardheere into a financial arrangement that is not buoyant in the long term, and has probably already sunk.

For their part, Somali pirates have not presented ideological or political motivations for their crimes and have denied affiliation with Islamist groups. Bahadur (2011: 49), who interviewed dozens of Somali pirates, writes: ‘During my months in Puntland, I questioned every pirate I met about Islamist ties, and received the same vehement denials from every one’. Hamilton (2010: 28) records: ‘While conducting research in Kenya where over 100 Somalis accused of piracy are currently imprisoned and undergoing prosecution, I found general consensus that Somali piracy was unrelated to Islamic politics and was instead strictly an economic crime’. Chalk (2008: xiv) agrees, claiming that while the ‘objectives of the two actors remain entirely different’, the ‘presumed convergence’ between piracy and maritime terrorism ‘has informed the perceptions of governments, international organizations, and major shipping interests around the world’.

War on Piracy: The tactical conflation of piracy and terrorism in Somalia

Since the extension of the ‘floating bombs’ rhetoric to Somalia, the international community has based its counter-piracy strategies on the War on Terror, in effect launching a War on Piracy. This War on Piracy entails the militarization of the seas, mirroring existing counter-terrorism strategies and disregarding the actual nature of piracy.

In October 2008, NATO deployed warships to patrol Somali waters and escort humanitarian vessels. In December 2008, the EU launched a naval mission, the EU Naval Force Somalia or Operation Atalanta, to prevent piracy off the Somali coast. Around this time, the navies of China, Russia, India, Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, South Korea, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries launched independent counter-piracy missions. Pirates, it seemed, were an enemy against whom the whole world could unite.

The US National Security Council’s December 2008 counter-piracy action plan recommended the deployment of naval, air, and surface assets to strengthen patrols of the Gulf of Aden. It declared: ‘We will seize and destroy any implements of piracy and, in appropriate cases, seize and destroy vessels outfitted for piracy’ (2008: 11). On 8 January 2009, 12 days before President Bush left office, the US Navy established Combined Task Force (CTF) 151 to conduct search and destroy missions to combat piracy off the Horn. CTF 151 is a division of the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), a multinational naval partnership mandated to secure Middle Eastern waters as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. But the creation of CTF 151 was only a formality; CMF already operated CTF 150, which was protecting the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea from terrorism through the use of search and destroy missions, and which had used these tactics in encounters with pirates since 2006. In August 2008, CTF 150 had also created a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden to protect its shipping interests from ‘destabilizing activities’ (US Naval Forces Central Command, 2008). The reason for the creation of a separate task force was that a few allied navies in CTF 150 do not have the authority to conduct counter-piracy missions; but functionally, there is a great deal of crossover between the two forces. For example, the USS Boxer has served as the flagship of the counter-piracy task force, has acted as a ‘floating Gitmo’ (Ackerman, 2011) to seize and detain an alleged terrorist from a fishing boat in the Gulf of Aden, and maintains a squadron of aircraft to fly missions against targets in Yemen and Somalia (US Naval Forces Central Command, 2009).

With its roots in CTF 150, CTF 151 embodies the idea that identical tactics and units should be used to fight piracy and terrorism. Vice Admiral Mark Fox, who commanded both forces until May 2012, confirmed this when he said that ‘only counter-terrorism measures’ can defeat Somali piracy, saying he is ‘loathe to hope or to assume [a linkage between pirates and Al-Shabaab] hasn’t occurred’ (Agence France-Presse, 2011). With their tactical roots in the War on Terror, and their rhetorical justification found in the Bush administration’s conflation of piracy and terrorism, the US, NATO, and EU naval missions off the Horn of Africa amount to a War on Piracy. These naval coalitions operate under the sanction of UN Security Council resolutions, which have authorized states to enter the territorial waters of Somalia (Resolution 1816) and conduct land-based operations in Somalia (Resolution 1851).

Upon the launch of all naval operations in 2009, attacks within the Gulf of Aden dropped by 50% the next year, but pirates sailed further out to sea and total attacks amounted to a record high (Figure 1). Figure 2 shows that crew fatalities rose from two fatalities in 2007 to 32 in 2011. At the peak of piracy, Noor M Noor, President of the Puntland Non-State Actors’ Association, stated that ‘the violence of piracy is new’ (Personal interview in Nairobi, 15 July 2011). Shamus Mangan, Prosecutions Advisor for the Counter-Piracy Program of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, explained: ‘As militaries get more violent, it makes sense that pirates are retaliating.’ Mangan summed up the pirate attitude as ‘“Unless you release our guys, we won’t release yours”’ (Personal interview in Nairobi, 13 July 2011).

Figure 1.

Geographical expansion of Somali piracy, January 2005–March 2011 (Geopolicity, 2011).

Figure 2.

Somali piracy crew fatalities (Compass Risk Management, 2012b).

In an example of this cycle of violence, CTF 151 may have provoked the February 2011 killing of four US citizens aboard their yacht, the Quest, when authorities detained two pirate negotiators who had come aboard the USS Sterett (Schmitt, 2011). In April 2011, for the first time, pirates held Indian hostages from the MV Asphalt Venture, even after receiving a ransom for their release. They did this ‘to exert pressure on the Indian Navy … to release detained pirates’, according to Andrew Mwangura, the ransom negotiator. Mwangura says this indicates a ‘shift to political motivations’ for piracy. These events show that pirates – whose injury or murder of hostages is extremely rare and would, according to Aden Maow Abdi, be ‘akin to destroying elephant tusks’, or burning their money – responded to naval aggression in kind, politicizing in the process.

Pirates apprehended at sea are usually released, but are sometimes held in the brig of a naval vessel for several weeks, as it ‘takes a while to identify the country of prosecution and sail to port’, according to Keith Wileman, Legal Liaison Officer for Operation Atalanta (Personal interview in Mombasa, 27 July 2011). This detention at sea may be illegal, especially given the naval proclivity to apprehend fishermen and laws (as in Kenya) that require a detainee’s appearance before a magistrate within 24 hours of arrest. In one case in which 24 alleged pirates were arrested by the Danish warship HDMS Esbern Snare, the suspects were held for 38 days before they were transferred to Kenya. We attended a hearing with these 24 alleged pirates on 3 August 2011 at the Mombasa Law Courts, where the defense urged the court to investigate the ‘serious physical and mental torture’ of the accused at the hands of the Royal Danish Navy. Mombasa’s Directorate of Public Prosecutions has received requests for prosecution of pirates up to three weeks after the apprehension date. Alex Muteti, Principal State Counsel at Kenya’s Directorate of Public Prosecutions and a member of its counter-piracy task force, says: ‘Some packages come to our desk with insufficient evidence, or without evidence at all’ (Personal interview in Mombasa, 27 July 2011). In these cases, Kenya will refuse prosecution. Muteti says: ‘We do not want to be regarded as the Kenyan Guantánamo’.

Skeptics may acknowledge the false conflation of piracy with terrorism, but believe that similar tactics are nonetheless required to defeat each threat, or represent the only practical option against non-state actors. After all, how else to fight piracy on the high seas but with a navy? As RAND analyst Peter Chalk says: ‘I don’t think that the naval presence out there has anything to do with the protection of ships. It’s been politicized’ (Spiegel, 2009). The rub is that Somali piracy, for all its harm, was never quite existential enough of a threat to justify by itself a discrete and streamlined military response. By universal legal custom, pirates are hostis humani generis, so there was never a need to search for an ulterior justification to launch a mission specifically to fight them. And this is just what countries like China and Russia and Iran and India did. But the United States and its allies, in the lead up to the deployment of CTF 151, made elaborate public references to package piracy as a national security emergency related to terrorism. Why?

De Oliveira breaks down their motivations. For NATO, Operation Ocean Shield was a way to ‘redefine its strategic concept beyond its transatlantic frontiers’ (2013: 14). As for the EU, Operation Atalanta is the first deployment of the EU Naval Force under the Common Security and Defense Policy, and thus the first chance for it to prove its salt. And ‘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”’ (2013: 14). Pham (2010: 325) says that despite the fact that Al-Shabaab is clearly the more serious threat, ‘it is the pirates who galvanised the international community into the unprecedented deployment of more than two dozen warships to the waters off Somalia’. In the age of terror, the discursive conflation of piracy and terrorism was thus necessary to facilitate the USA-led militarization of the Indian Ocean.

To pinpoint the causal mechanism in action here, we see political elites – including politicians, military officers, and non-state actors like insurance companies – recalling historical threats ranging from Barbary piracy to 9/11 – to justify an exceptional, aggressive response to Somali piracy, not only to serve their private ends, but also to sell a belief structure (the macro-securitization of the War on Terror) that would keep them in power and in profit. In this reading, the conflation of piracy and terrorism matters precisely because, as the two phenomena co-evolved in Somalia, piracy became not only a justification for counter-terror operations, but also the other way around. Pirates and terrorists became linked circularly over time, as a complex spiral developed off the Horn, with increasing naval deployments, increasing piracy, increasing insurance premiums – and, incidentally, increasing terrorism.

Empirically, the conflation of piracy and terrorism not only created the conditions for the deployment of naval forces, but also led to a series of knock-on securitization practices, including the UN resolutions authorizing force against pirates. At the debates behind the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1851, which was strictly about enabling naval coalitions to operate on land against pirates, terrorism was nonetheless invoked, as seen in transcripts from the meeting (United Nations, 2008). The Commissioner for Peace and Security of the African Union called piracy and terrorism ‘twin problems’ and called for additional political support for AMISOM, the African Union force that fights Al-Shabaab. Sweden announced it would contribute a naval unit to the EU mission as a ‘first step’, using classic ‘failed states’ rhetoric to say that unless longer-term approaches were supported, Somalia would be ‘entrenched as a recruiting ground and safe haven for criminality and terrorism’. The debate about the piracy resolution turned into a debate about AMISOM, whose mandate is to fight Al-Shabaab. US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice provided an extended critique of AMISOM, calling it ‘unsustainable’ and demanding a new UN peacekeeping force in Somalia, potentially enlarging the conflict into a catch-all approach. Outside of policy debates, the conflation of piracy and terrorism was also useful to private security companies. Erik Prince (of Blackwater) helped to train a counter-piracy force of 500 soldiers in Puntland, who later languished without pay (Mazzetti and Schmitt, 2012). Naval officers from different coalitions turned, upon their retirement, to the maritime guard business, which is now a US$1 billion industry for ships transiting Lloyd’s war risk area in the Indian Ocean. There are even ‘floating armories’ that accommodate contract security forces and their weapons, which has drawn the ire of the UN as ‘uncontrolled and almost entirely unregulated’ (Kent and Werber, 2015). As the Wall Street Journal reports (Kent and Werber, 2015): ‘Critics say the armories themselves could be targets for attack by pirates or terrorists’. These types of securitizing moves, part of an ongoing spiral of aggression, have been built on the discursive conflation of piracy with terrorism.

Somali piracy has all but vanished now, and this may in part be due to the role of the naval coalitions. But could there be other explanations? Many have suggested that the use of private armed guards on ships and other defensive onboard practices have deterred Somali pirates. Another hypothesis is that the ongoing conflict between Al-Shabaab and African Union forces has disrupted pirates’ business conditions and patronage networks along the coast. Of course, only time and further research will tell. The point made here is not that the naval operations did or did not cause the reduction in Somali piracy in the past three years, but rather that these operations – predicated on the conflation of piracy with terror – provoked pirates into becoming more strategic, sophisticated, and violent, while enabling a series of knock-on securitizing moves.

In short, piracy is a legitimate threat, but has been hijacked by the terror discourse. Counter-piracy is now entangled with the War on Terror, which is crystallizing in Somalia on land and offshore. The discursive conflation of piracy and terrorism, it seems, has been operationalized, militarily and diplomatically. It could take further shape by providing legal cover for counter-insurgency forces to enter Somali waters and lands under the guise of counter-piracy operations. Given the already fuzzy distinction between counter-piracy and counter-terrorism operations, the counter-piracy measures of detention at sea and specialized trial could be adopted in counter-terrorism operations, providing the veil of legal sanction of what might otherwise amount to violations of international law.

Conclusion

This article has traced the conflation of piracy with terrorism back to 9/11 and the extension of this discourse to the Horn of Africa after 2005. The simultaneous emergence of Somali pirates and militant Islamists enabled securitizing actors in the USA and Europe to make this conflation, spawning a War on Piracy. This War on Piracy mirrors the War on Terror by adopting strategies that advance militarization and legal obfuscation, pushing pirates to become more daring and dangerous in response.

Despite the intricate discursive entanglements that tie pirates to militant Islamists, one must remember that they are not natural bedfellows. Tinniswood (2010: 300) claims it was the ‘fear of European conquest’ that motivated Barbary pirates and Barbary Islamists to join forces in the 16th century and ‘set out on their sea jihad’, presenting an unprecedented threat to the global order of the age. He continues: ‘Without that fear of conquest, Barbary’s socialised piracy would never have grown into the scourge of Christendom, its followers would not have become the shock troops on the front line of the defence of the Islamic world’. In the early 19th century, the USA sent frigates and Marines to the shores of Tripoli in the Barbary Wars, conflating maritime criminals with Islamist governors and driving the two actors ever closer together. History may be repeating itself in Somalia today, as foreign military intervention may drive pirates and militant Islamists to attempt cooperation under duress, further upsetting the prospects for stability in the Horn of Africa.

‘This begs the question’, says Engels (2007: 342): ‘Which discursive rules make it possible and necessary for the [United States] to compare pirates with terrorists?’ He hints that it has largely to do with space, specifically the trope of the nation-state. To settle public anxieties post-9/11, the US government framed militant Islamism as a threat hosted by enemy states that can be identified, targeted, and destroyed. Janz (2008: 192) writes that ‘the metaphor of war re-legitimized the place identity of the United States by putting the narrative of terror back on familiar ground, as the conflict of one country with another’. And so it was with piracy – which, like terrorism, is ‘stateless’. Somali piracy was thus ‘structurally incorporated’ into the ‘macro-securitization’ of the War on Terror and took on its discursive rules and signs (Hansen, 2011: 357). As Engels tells us, ‘pirates hail the dawn of a Hobbesian world in which violence is the ultimate arbiter of social relations. However, by linking pirates and terrorists, and hence nationalizing them, pirates become discursively manageable’ (2007: 343).

This rhetoric was especially useful because it resonated with the public belief that Somalia is a ‘failed state’. The ‘Republic of Somalia’ is most accurately a hodgepodge of nascent state institutions, criminal syndicates, autonomous statelets, clan-based governments, Islamist groups, local and foreign militaries, and ungoverned spaces. The coincident rise of piracy and terrorism, and the discursive conflation of these two phenomena, fed easily into the narrative of Somalia’s failure as a nation-state and the need for external intervention.

Of course, the discourse of state failure belies the reality of how Somalis actually function. As De Oliveira (2013: 16) puts it, international state-building in Somalia needs to be reconsidered alongside the richness and range of ‘micro-scale’ solutions to crime and governance along the Horn of Africa. He says this would avoid the ‘romanticization’ of the local and the ‘demonization’ of the international by ‘trying to find within their contradictions hybrid forms of action that can reflect their relations in more complex and positive ways’. The implication is that if the War on Piracy feeds into (and feeds off) a fiction about state failure, then a better approach to piracy would be to work with micro-scale realities of governance and promote a land-based solution that delinks piracy from the militarism of the War on Terror. De Oliveira (2012: 58) says that piracy has been ‘reduced to a logic of war’ and that desecuritized approaches to the issue would entail a shift from military to civilian counter-piracy strategies; threats should be disaggregated and dealt with in transformative ways, rather than relying on the exceptional urgency of securitization.

So what would this hybrid developmental solution look like? The first step to crafting such a solution is freeing up the funds to do so. Chalk (2010: 100) calculates that ‘the cost of deploying one frigate to the Gulf of Aden for six months … could theoretically cover the wages of 100,000 police officers over the same period’. Drawing down counter-piracy forces and building the capacities of locally owned and culturally acceptable law enforcement in Somaliland, Puntland, and South-Central Somalia would better tackle the root causes of piracy. If successful, such strategies may also contain and weaken terrorists onshore. Other steps may include adhering to the rules of engagement proscribing aggressive rescue operations that endanger the lives of captive crews, launching efforts to fight illegal fishing in order to earn the trust of Somali communities, and promoting alternative livelihoods.

While the incidence of piracy off the Horn has declined since 2012, maritime piracy has burgeoned off West Africa and remains a global threat. Recalling Guzzini’s (2011) ‘circles of recognition’ upon which nations collectively fall back, the conflation of piracy and terrorism continues to exploit vulnerable imaginaries in a changing world order. Al-Qaeda was once said to be linked to Somali pirate groups, and as time has seen these threats diminish, new ones have arisen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rise of the Islamic State and its expansion along the North African coast has spawned a new – or rather, recalled – fear of maritime piracy and terrorism in the Mediterranean (Stewart, 2015). The ‘Barbary Analogy’ is alive and well, as the conflation of piracy and terrorism reverberates in the contemporary security discourse.

In sum, the conflation of piracy with terrorism in media, academia, and policy is unmerited; counter-piracy initiatives should be detached from counter-terrorism commands and strategies. Tinniswood (2010: xvi) writes: ‘Pirates are history. The history of piracy, whether on the Barbary Coast or in the Horn of Africa, shows us – what? That we never learn? That we invent our heroes? That those we cast as demons play their parts too well? All of those things. Above all, it shows us that the demons are human, too’.

To break the cycle of history, then, it is time we start learning and stop inventing our heroes. Most importantly, if the demons are human, too, then it is time to stop casting them as demons.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Margarita Petrova for her insightful guidance and accompaniment through the drafting and revision of this essay. We also thank our interviewees in Kenya, as well as Peter Middlebrook of Geopolicity and Leslie Edwards of Compass Risk Management for permission to reproduce the above figures.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Currun Singh is an MA graduate of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. The research presented here is an outgrowth of his MA dissertation, which won the 2012 Prize for Excellence in Development Studies from the European Association of Development Institutes. Email: currun@gmail.com

Arjun Singh Bedi is a professor of Development Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2013–2014 he was visiting professor at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha. His research focuses on labor and human resource economics in developing countries. His work has been published in several international economics and development studies journals including Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Law and Economics, and World Development. Email: bedi@iss.nl

References

Ackerman

(2011) How this ship became a floating Gitmo. Wired, 19 July.

Agence France-Presse (Paris) (2011) Counter-terror tactics needed to fight pirates. Agence France-Presse, 27 January.

Armstrong

(2004) Maritime terrorism is a ticking timebomb. Lloyd’s List, 22 June.

Bahadur

(2011) Deadly Waters: Inside the Hidden World of Somalia’s Pirates. London: Profile Books.

Balzacq

(2005) The three faces of securitization: Political agency, audience and context. European Journal of International Relations 11(2): 171–201.

Balzacq

(ed.) (2010) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve. London and New York: Routledge.

Biekart

Mainguy

Mold

Murshed

(2005) Insecurity and development: Regional issues and policies for an interdependent world. European Journal of Development Research 17(3): 357–371.

Booth

(2005) Beyond critical security studies. In: Booth

(ed.) Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 259–278.

Bowden

(2011) The economic cost of maritime piracy: One Earth Future working paper, December 2010. Oceans Beyond Piracy, One Earth Future Foundation.

10.

Bowden

Basnet

(2012) The economic cost of Somali piracy 2011 report. Oceans Beyond Piracy, One Earth Future Foundation.

11.

Bradsher

(2002) Warnings from Al Qaeda stir fear that terrorists may attack oil tankers. New York Times, 12 December.

12.

Burgess

(2008) Piracy is terrorism. New York Times, 5 December.

13.

Burnett

(2005) The next 9/11 could happen at sea. New York Times, 22 February.

14.

Buzan

(2006) Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new Cold War? International Affairs 82(6): 1101–1118.

15.

Buzan

Hansen

(2009) The Evolution of International Security Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

16.

Buzan

Wæver

De Wilde

(1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

17.

Chalk

(2008) The Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States. RAND Project Air Force monograph. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.

18.

Chalk

(2010) Piracy off the Horn of Africa: Scope, dimensions, causes and responses. Brown Journal of World Affairs 16(2): 89–108.

19.

Coggins

(2010) The pirate den. Foreign Policy 180: 86–87.

20.

Compass Risk Management (2012a) Six ship moving average ransom reported paid to Somali pirates. Available at: http://www.compass-rm.com/piracystatistics/Ransoms-Six_Ship_Moving_Averages_31.07.12.pdf (accessed 10 July 2014).

21.

Compass Risk Management (2012b) Somali piracy crew fatalities. Available at: http://www.compass-rm.com/piracystatistics/Somali_Piracy_Fatalities_Graphic_as_at_31.07.12.pdf (accessed 10 July 2014).

22.

Dagne

(2011) Somalia: Current conditions and prospects for a lasting peace. CRS Report for Congress no. RL33911. US Congressional Research Service.

23.

De Oliveira

(2012) Naval peacekeeping and piracy: Time for a critical turn in the debate. International Peacekeeping 19(1): 48–61.

24.

De Oliveira

(2013) ‘New wars’ at sea: A critical transformative approach to the political economy of Somali piracy. Security Dialogue 44(1): 3–18.

25.

Der Spiegel (Hamburg) (2009) Terror on the high seas: Somali pirates form unholy alliance with Islamists. Der Spiegel, 20 April.

26.

Dua

Menkhaus

(2012) The context of contemporary piracy: The case of Somalia. Journal of International Criminal Justice 10(4): 749–766.

27.

The Economist (London) (2003) Peril on the sea. The Economist, 2 October.

28.

Engels

(2007) Floating bombs encircling our shores: Post-9/11 rhetorics of piracy and terrorism. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 7(3): 326–349.

29.

Ericson

Doyle

Barry

(2003) Insurance as Governance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

30.

Eriksson

(1999) Observers or advocates? On the political role of security analysts. Cooperation and Conflict 34(3): 311–30.

31.

Geopolicity (2011) The Economics of Piracy. Tracking Pirate Finance research program, Geopolicity. Available at: http://oceansbeyondpiracy.org/sites/default/files/geopolicity_-_the_economics_of_piracy_-_pirates__livelihoods_off_the_coast_of_somalia.pdf (accessed 28 July 2016).

32.

Guzzini

(2011) Securitization as a causal mechanism. Security Dialogue 42(4–5): 329–341.

33.

Hamilton

(2010) The piracy and terrorism nexus: Real or imagined? Proceedings of the 1st Australian Counter Terrorism Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth, 30 November. Available at: http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=act (accessed 28 July 2016).

34.

Hansen

(2011) The politics of securitization and the Muhammad cartoon crisis: A post-structuralist perspective. Security Dialogue 42(4–5): 357–369.

35.

Hansen

(2009) Piracy in the greater Gulf of Aden: Myths, misconceptions and remedies. Report no. 2009:29, Oslo: Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research.

36.

Insurance Journal (San Diego) (2006) New Lloyd’s policy wording covers terrorist ‘piracy’. Insurance Journal, 20 March.

37.

International Maritime Bureau (2006–2016) Annual piracy and armed robbery reports, 2005–2015. International Chamber of Commerce.

38.

International Maritime Organization (1988) Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts of Violence Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA Convention).

39.

International Maritime Organization (2005) Protocol of 2005 to the SUA Convention.

40.

International Maritime Organization (2009) Code of practice for the investigation of crimes of piracy and armed robbery against ships. Resolution A.1025(26).

41.

Janz

(2008) The terror of the place: Anxieties of place and the cultural narrative of terrorism. Ethics, Place & Environment 11(2): 191–203.

42.

Jenkins

(1974) Terrorism and kidnapping. RAND Paper Series No. P-5255. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.

43.

Kent

Werber

(2015) How floating armories help guard cargo ships from pirates on the high seas. Wall Street Journal, 3 February.

44.

Leander

(2005) The power to construct international security: On the significance of private military companies. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33(3): 811–815.

45.

Levene

(2009) Today’s piracy problem. Lloyd’s Press Centre, 27 April. Available at: http://www.lloyds.com/Lloyds/Press-Centre/Speeches/2009/04/Todays_piracy_problem (accessed 24 February 2013).

46.

Lobo-Guerrero

(2008) ‘Pirates’, stewards, and the securitization of global circulation. International Political Sociology 2(3): 219–235.

47.

Luft

Korin

(2004) Terrorism goes to sea. Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004.

48.

MacAskill

Sundaram

(2011) India fights Lloyd’s expanding piracy zone after 300-fold insurance jump. Bloomberg News, 3 June.

49.

McInnes

Rushton

(2013) HIV/AIDS and securitization theory. European Journal of International Relations 19(1): 115–138.

50.

Mazzetti

(2006) Efforts by CIA fail in Somalia, officials charge. The New York Times, 8 June.

51.

Mazzetti

Schmitt

(2012) Private army formed to fight Somali piracy leaves troubled legacy. The New York Times, 4 October.

52.

Menkhaus

(2003) State collapse in Somalia: Second thoughts. Review of African Political Economy 30(97): 405–422.

53.

Menkhaus

(2004) Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism. Adelphi series (Book 364). London: Routledge/International Institute of Strategic Studies.

54.

Mitzen

(2006) Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma. European Journal of International Relations 12(3): 341–370.

55.

Murphy

(2007) Contemporary Piracy and Maritime Terrorism. Adelphi series (Book 388). London: Routledge/International Institute of Strategic Studies.

56.

Murphy

(2010) Dire straits: Taking on Somali pirates. World Affairs 173(2): 90–97.

57.

Osler

(2005) We ignore threats at our peril. Lloyd’s List, 16 February.

58.

Pham

(2010) Putting Somali piracy in context. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 28(3): 325–341.

59.

Plaut

(2008) Pirates ‘working with Islamists’. BBC News, 19 November.

60.

Schmitt

(2011) Seizing of pirate commanders is questioned. The New York Times, 23 February.

61.

Silverstein

(2005) The new barbarians: Piracy and terrorism on the North African frontier. The New Centennial Review 5(1): 179–212.

62.

Spiegel

(2009) Bush administration had issued plan for pirates in December. The Wall Street Journal, 9 April.

63.

Stewart

(2015) The return of the Barbary pirates. Washington Times, 10 March.

64.

Stritzel

(2012) Securitization, power, intertextuality: Discourse theory and the translations of organized crime. Security Dialogue 43(6): 549–567.

65.

Syal

Townsend

(2009) Somali pirate ransoms ‘could fund terrorists’. The Guardian, 1 November.

66.

Tinniswood

(2010) Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean. London: Vintage Books.

67.

United Nations (1982) Convention on the Law of the Sea. Available at: http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/UNCLOS-TOC.htm (accessed 28 July 2016).

68.

United Nations (2008) Security Council authorizes states to use land-based operations in Somalia, as part of fight against piracy off coast, unanimously adopting 1851. Press release, 16 December. Available at: http://www.un.org/press/en/2008/sc9541.doc.htm (accessed 12 March 2016).

69.

US National Security Council (2008) Countering piracy off the Horn of Africa: Partnership and action plan (released in December).

70.

US Naval Forces Central Command (2008) Coalition warships set up Maritime Security Patrol area in the Gulf of Aden. Press release, 25 August. Available at: http://www.icc-ccs.org/news/473-coalition-warships-set-up-maritime-security-patrol-area-in-the-gulf-of-aden (accessed 10 July 2014).

71.

US Naval Forces Central Command (2009) USS Boxer becomes flagship for CTF 151. Press release, 10 March. Available at: http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=43303 (accessed 10 July 2014).

72.

White House (2002) National security strategy of the United States (released in September). Available at: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf (accessed 28 July 2016).

73.

White House (2005) National strategy for maritime security (released on 20 September). Available at: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/255380.pdf (accessed 28 July 2016).

74.

White House (2007) Policy for the repression of piracy and other criminal acts of violence at sea. Memorandum from the President, 14 June. Available at: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/06/20070614–3.html (accessed 28 July 2016).

75.

World Bank (2013) The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding a Nation. Regional Vice-Presidency for Africa, No. 76713. World Bank.

76.

Young

Valencia

(2003) Conflation of piracy and terrorism in Southeast Asia: Rectitude and utility. Contemporary Southeast Asia 25(2): 269–283.