Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding

5. Capitalism at Sea: Piracy and “State Failure” in the Gulf of Aden

134 5 Capitalism at Sea Piracy and “State Failure” in the Gulf of Aden1 Isaac Kamola During 2008 and 2009 reports of Somali pirates captured the imagination of many in the United States and around the world. This made-forTV spectacle reached a crowning height in April 2009 when US Navy snipers shot and killed three pirates holding captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama hostage. Journalists, academics, and policy researchers , however, have been quick to point out that piracy is not simply an oddly anachronistic spectacle, but rather a serious economic and security threat. According to the International Maritime Bureau, in 2008 pirates attacked more than one hundred ships off the coast of Somalia, making it “the greatest surge in piracy in modern times” (Montgomery 2008). Since then the number of pirate attacks and the range of these operations have 1. I would like to thank Jackie Smith, Ernesto Verdeja, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame for inviting me to participate in the Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding project. In addition, thanks to the participants of the Notre Dame workshop, as well as those at Dartmouth’s International Relations/Foreign Policy workshop, for providing supportive feedback on this project. This paper owes considerable gratitude to Garnet Kindervater for his intellectual friendship, as well as to Stephen Brooks and Nelson Kasfir for their extensive comments. Also, a sincere thanks to the Department of Government at Dartmouth College for hosting me while I wrote this paper, and the generous funding of the ACLS New Faculty Fellows Program, which funded me while I completed the paper. Capitalism at Sea  135 increased substantially (McDonald 2009). Some have expressed concern about a possible “piracy-terrorism nexus” in which pirated ships could be transformed into floating bombs, sunk in strategic shipping channels, used to “precipitate” an environmental disaster, or turned into a floating terrorist command center (Chalk 2008, 32; see also Luft and Korin 2004). In addition, piracy in the Gulf of Aden represents serious economic costs estimated at between $1 and $16 billion dollars annually (Chalk 2009), putting “the most important maritime route in the world into crisis” (Archibugi, quoted in Wander 2010). The current academic and policy debates on piracy in the Gulf of Aden focuses almost exclusively on finding ways to solve the problem of piracy. Some commentators advocate decreasing the incentives for piracy by deploying military assets to combat and arrest suspected pirates. Many realize, however, that policing the Gulf of Aden represents a short-term fix and that a lasting solution to piracy requires addressing Somalia’s failed state. However, both prominent policy suggestions— policing the oceans and statebuilding—fail to address the structural and economic conditions that make piracy a viable occupation. For example, while Kraska and Wilson recognize that the “threat of maritime piracy” results from “the desperate situation in Somalia and the devastated political economy along the coastline,” their solutions focus not on addressing these economic conditions but instead on developing “legal and policy solutions” to curtail piracy through the deployment of international law and a coordinated military presence in the region (Kraska and Wilson 2009, 57, 66). Similarly, the US National Security Council argues that while “economic development”—along with establishing governance, law, and security—are “necessary to repress piracy fully,” the only proposal that provides for addressing piracy is “reducing the vulnerability” of ships, using international law to disrupt piracy, and establishing a formal legal arena to prosecute pirates (National Security Council 2008, 6). Those analysts who do recognize economic factors as a driving cause of piracy commonly offer the ahistorical argument that poverty stems from state failure. For example, Chalk and Smallman contend that because piracy is “a reflection of underlying socioeconomic conditions on land . . . the international community must confront the failed 136  Global Models and Local Conflicts government in Somalia” (Chalk and Smallman 2009). As such, piracy is treated as a local problem—opportunistic individuals taking advantage of a failed state—to be solved through state building. In these accounts, piracy is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a symptom of larger, structural relations.2 In adopting this problem-solving approach to piracy, most academics, journalists, and policy researchers have missed opportunities to use piracy in the Gulf of Aden as a moment for critical theory.3 This chapter therefore examines piracy in the Gulf of Aden as an entry point to critically...