After piracy: what theoretical insights have we made?

Since 2008, when piracy off the coast of Somalia gained international attention, academic and policy literature abounds on the problem of maritime piracy and the counter-piracy responses that piracy prompted. Reviewing the literature, the authors identify a widespread focus on the so-called ‘problem effects’ of piracy, in other words a policy-oriented analysis providing insights on the effects that counter-piracy efforts have in responding to the problem of piracy.

The authors find in these insights the potential to push piracy studies further by analyzing what the authors call the ‘constitutive effects’, meaning examining the productive capacity held in the counter-piracy responses themselves, for instance how certain actors have been able to establish themselves in the international community as maritime security governance actors, or consolidate their legacy in this regard. This focus moves from the analysis of how counter-piracy actors shape the maritime domain to how the maritime domain shapes counter-piracy actors.

As one inroad to studying such constitutive effects, the authors suggest ‘contingency’ as a fruitful concept with which to approach the analysis. Contingency, they argue, is a characteristic condition of contemporary security governance at sea, hereunder counter-piracy. They demonstrate this through three central cases related to piracy and its response showing how the regulatory (law), the structural (institutions) and the practical (actors) dimensions of security governance in the maritime domain is less established and less clearly defined compared to security governance on land.

Approaching counter-piracy from the analytical perspective of contingency, the authors argue, allows a view onto the processes with which counter-piracy actors are shaped in the maritime domain, in other words the constitutive effects.

A decade into the piracy studies literature, the authors urge further study of the theoretical implications of its analyses which can contribute with conceptual insights that have broader application in the study of international security governance.