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1. Pirates, Ports, and Coasts in Asia
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
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1 Pirates, Ports, and Coasts in Asia John Kleinen and Manon Osseweijer INTRODUCTION War, trade, and piracy. Three in one, indivisible: Goethe’s Faust’s well known complaint about the English of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicates the contemporaneous, ambiguous use of the term “piracy” which parallels the way the term “terrorist” is employed nowadays. The limited distance between rulers and pirates is still hailed in the romantic invention of tradition story, now eternalized in musicals and Holywood representations, written by William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (1879): When I sally forth to seek my prey I help myself in a royal way. I sink a few more ships, it’s true, Than a well-bred monarch ought to do; But many a king on a first-class throne, If he wants to call his crown his own, Must manage somehow to get through More dirty work than ever I do. The French consequently stigmatized their nationalistically inspired adversaries in colonial Vietnam as “pirates”, with not the slightest reference to the sea. Piracy is often used in the same breath as “robbery” and “raiding”, but they are not necessarily the same. The terms “robbery” and “raiding” are not always confined to the high seas, but are also used where human security is threatened in terrestrial areas by the absence of the monopoly of violence in the hands of a single ruler. For a long time, piracy was the extreme instance of marginal coastal and maritime livelihoods and hence assumed a pivotal position in attempts 01 Pirates.indd 3 5/14/10 9:26:47 PM 4 John Kleinen and Manon Osseweijer to understand many of the complexities present in coastal and marine settings. Piracy, although it is the most dramatic of marginal(ized) maritime livelihoods available, is just one of the many illegal uses to which the sea can be put, the others being for example, drug smuggling and trafficking in human beings. Many maritime coastal zones and their hinterlands in Asia started out as frontier societies in which all kinds of illicit and semi-legal activities took place. The political economy of the South China coast, for example, was historically based on an intrinsic cohabitation of rulers, peasants, fisher people, and the “froth of the sea”, as pirates were known in those days. Coastal zones are boundary areas, places of contestation, and crossfertilization . They are naturally and socially marginal spaces in that they serve to demarcate the limit between sea and land, and the site of contact between cultures. Because of these factors, in contemporary times they have become highly desirable places and consequently areas subject to great social and ecological pressures. Ports where the loading and unloading of shipments of people and cargo, as well as business transactions, trading, and provisioning, are taking place, are located in these coastal zones. Therefore it is necessary to investigate how port authorities have been operating, combating, condoning, or perhaps even encouraging different forms of piracy and smuggling. Whereas, in certain situations in the past, ports or port towns may have acted as pirate headquarters, in many cases they have also served as places of refuge for the vessels attacked by pirates. The port authorities in East and Southeast Asian ports have been the organizations designated to manage the ports and deal with the suppression of piracy, in cooperation with such (para)-military organizations as the navy and coastguards. Sea ports are also nodes in an emergent world system, and, despite globalization and the liberalization of trade, they are also the markers through which people and goods are controlled. They serve a dual purpose as physical bottlenecks for legitimating a geographical territory, and as identification and interdiction of prohibited commodities and people (see also Heyman 2004). Social Science Perspective From a social science point of view, maritime piracy, unlike maritime terrorism, can be regarded as one of many so-called “grey-area” phenomena in Asia. This term borrowed from political scientist Peter Chalk (1997) indicates a “parallel underground economy”, comparable with other 01 Pirates.indd 4 5/14/10 9:26:47 PM [18.188.40.207] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:39 GMT) Pirates, Ports, and Coasts in Asia 5 “grey-area” activities in the socio-economic context of the coastal zone. Like smuggling, trafficking of goods and people, gambling, prostitution, and petty crimes on land, piracy is also pursued in a more or less organized form (Chalk 1997, pp...