Agents Of Chaos And Unlawful Combatants: Pirates In Philosophy And Law

157 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2011 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1 PP 157–160 CULTURAL POLITICS DOI: 10.2752/175174311X12861940861987 BOOK REVIEW AGENTS OF CHAOS AND UNLAWFUL COMBATANTS: PIRATES IN PHILOSOPHY AND LAW ANDREW OPITZ The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, £21.95, HB, ISBN 978-1890951948 It is now customary for popular histories of piracy to begin with a cursory study of pirates in the Ancient Mediterranean, sometimes mentioning Julius Caesar’s fight against Cilician pirates in the Aegean, before jumping forward to stories of notorious early-modern pirates like Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, “Calico Jack” Rackham, Captain Kidd, and others.1 There are a number of reasons why pirate books tend to pass over the ancient world and focus on the early-modern Atlantic. For one thing, ANDREW OPITZ IS A LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA > CULTURAL POLITICS 158 BOOK REVIEW it tends to be easier to research and write about Anglophone pirates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their colorful lives and crimes are generally well documented in Admiralty court records and in contemporary literary accounts such as Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (1724). However, it is also easier to write about early-modern maritime bandits because their status as “pirates” – as criminals and legal outcasts – is firmly established and recognizable to a modern audience. Piracy was not always so easy to identify. From Odysseus to Caesar’s Cilicians, the Ancient Mediterranean was filled with seaborne marauders who skirted the line between legitimate warfare and raiding activities we would now consider piracy. The definition and redefinition of pirates and piracy has been a perplexing problem for Western legal scholars for more than 2,000 years. It has drawn the attention of influential thinkers from Thucydides and Cicero to Hugo Grotius, Immanuel Kant, and Carl Schmitt. The identification and classification of piracy is more than just an academic debate about an exotic crime. The idea of the pirate as an unlawful actor is central to juridical theories of property rights, sovereign power, and the legitimate use of violence. Twenty-first century debates regarding the status of international terrorists as “unlawful combatants” have been shaped in important ways by legal traditions that cast the pirate as the opponent of all civilized peoples – the enemy who respects no laws and, as a consequence, is undeserving of established legal protections. In his new book The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, Daniel Heller-Roazen makes an important contribution to the study of the evolution of piracy in Western legal discourse. The chief strength of Heller-Roazen’s study is that it provides a detailed account of the development of piracy as a legal category from Ancient Greece to the twenty-first century writings of John Yoo – the Berkeley law professor who helped to draft the Bush administration’s policy that “enemy combatants” seized in “the war on terrorism” are not subject to the same Geneva Convention protocols as prisoners of war. Readers interested in the lives of actual pirates and the material conditions that shaped their activities will not find this information in The Enemy of All. Roazen is upfront in declaring that his book is “philosophical and genealogical in its aims” (9). It is not a traditional history of pirates and piracy, but rather a tightly focused study on the lineage of piracy as matter of law. The narrow focus of The Enemy of All may disappoint readers concerned with the economics and cultural politics of piracy. The book has little to say about the lived experience of past and contemporary pirate communities or the status of pirates as celebrated figures of rebellion in popular culture. It also does not engage with recent debates about media piracy and property law. These concerns are more or less left out of a book devoted to the thorough and admittedly rather dry study of the maritime bandit as the fundamental outsider figure of Western legal...