Pirate Lands : Governance and Maritime Piracy

In Pirate Lands, Ursula Daxecker and Brandon Prins argue that pirates operate in locations where local governance is weak enough to incentivize collusion among pirates and local authorities, but strong enough to ensure that infrastructure and markets permit the organization of sustained piracy. Conducting cross-national and subnational analyses of Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia, they show how governance at the state and local levels explain maritime piracy. They further employ interviews with former pirates, community members, and maritime security experts to offer the first comprehensive, social-scientific account of maritime piracy.

Maritime piracy''s improbable re-emergence following the end of the Cold War was surprising as the image of pirates evokes masted galleons and cutlasses. Yet, the number of incidents and their intensity skyrocketed in the 1990s and 2000s off of the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Somalia.As Ursula Daxecker and Brandon Prins demonstrate in Pirate Lands, Maritime piracy-like civil war, terrorism, and organized crime-is a problem of weak states. Surprisingly, though, pirates do not operate in the least governed areas of weak states. Daxecker and Prins address this puzzle by explaining why some coastal communities experience more pirate attacks in their vicinity than others. They find that pirates do well in places where elites and law enforcement can be bribed, but they also need access to functioning roads, ports, and markets. Using statistical analyses of cross-national and sub-national data on pirate attacks in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia, Daxecker and Prins detail how governance at the state and local level explain the location of maritime piracy. Additionally, they employ geo-spatial tools to rigorously measure how local political capacity and infrastructure affect maritime piracy. Drawing upon interviews with former pirates, community members, and maritime security experts, Pirate Lands offers the first comprehensive, social-scientific account of a phenomenon whose re-appearance after centuries of remission took almost everyone by surprise.