Somali Piracy: The Local Contexts of an International Obsession

International treatment of Somali piracy can appear as a double denial. On the one hand, although the United Nations Security Council involved itself and received support from many member states, the actual policy toward Somalia has been dictated for years by post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policy, which made sure that no actors could openly distance themselves from the key priorities of the U.S. administration. Here, multilateralism exists only as far as offshore Somalia is concerned. On the other hand, the fight against piracy near the Somali coast does not aim to tackle the very causes of the support that piracy enjoys among the Somali population at large, not least because the international community would then have to consider the violations of international law perpetrated by some of its major members. Hence, piracy is usually presented as a symptom of “state collapse” and a breeding ground for global jihad, while its moral economy is disqualified and the reconfiguration of a transnational Somali economy simply ignored. This essay focuses on this second set of issues.

From mid-2008 onward, the Security Council spent a considerable amount of time addressing the issue of piracy off the Somali coast, first in the Gulf of Aden but eventually farther to the south, on the East African coast and even near the Seychelles. Many resolutions expressed this international concern—though for other situations which may have cost many more lives, the Council showed greater caution if not a certain reluctance to act.¹ This activism provides a hint as to how piracy and armed robbery at sea should be understood as a global concern: the Somali case is only a pretext allowing some actors in the international community to legitimate their calls for new developments in the international law of the sea and the regulation of maritime space.²

The creation of a maritime force was indeed an important moment of international diplomacy. It was the first time the European Union launched such an intervention, Operation Atalanta, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was not shy about his personal role in bringing about this creative reinterpretation of the European Security and Defense Policy. But participation extended far beyond the EU and the task force included the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, and Iran, as well as a few others. This maritime force built around its two main components, Atalanta and Combined Task Force 151, is an event in itself and should be seen as a new element in international relations as much as a way of protecting strategic sea routes in the context of the globalization of trade.

Somalia also could be considered as a growing problem. After the close of an international intervention that ended in March 1995 without producing any result,

Figure 1.

Map of Somalia

the international community bet on a policy of containment that worked efficiently thanks to Somalia’s neighbors, especially Ethiopia. The bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam in August 1998 and the attack on a hotel near Mombasa in November 2002 prompted a counterterrorist approach led by the Bush administration, which could accommodate regional interests. This policy can be described as a covert war pitting mainly U.S. and Ethiopian security services against Somali and foreign Islamists allegedly connected to international networks of jihad. It was exacerbated by the victory of the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia in June 2006 and its control of most of southern-central Somalia during the next six months. The intervention of the Ethiopian army in December 2006 and the subsequent creation of the AMISOM (Mission of the African Union in Somalia, comprising Ugandan and Burundian soldiers) was seen as a way of consolidating a weak and fragile Transitional Federal Government (TFG) created in 2004. In fact, this foreign military presence only protracted the war in Mogadishu and South Central Somalia. In 2008 an attempt to revamp the TFG failed, and in July 2010 the Somali war spread to Uganda. In all these events, the U.S...