Piracy and Crime Embeddedness: State Decay and Social Transformation in Somalia

This study is an investigation of the deeper context of Somali piracy as a peculiar regional phenomenon. It demonstrates a causal mechanism of Somali piracy that is optimized for a holistic understanding of complex contextual conditions. The comprehensive analysis reveals that Somali piracy has evolved along with the complex dynamics of multiple factors in various dimensions. Among the various factors, the embeddedness of crime in local governance crises is a core mechanism that has facilitated the rapid evolution of Somali piracy since 2005. The results call for a new understanding of Somali piracy as it resembles the embeddedness of crime in early modern European state formation (Thomson 1996). The article argues that Somali piracy is essentially an ill manifestation of the complicated dynamics of state decay and social transformation in Somalia.