Beyond Intervention: Preventing Actions, Containing Bodies, and Making Profits

Abstract

This book situates the strategic shift in counter piracy strategies within a context of broader socio-historical forces shaping relations between security and development. Simultaneously, it situates this shift within a larger transition from a post-crime to a pre-crime, security society. It began with an overarching question: If the number of successful piracy attacks off the coast of Somalia has steadily decreased since 2008–2009, why were counter piracy actors insisting on increasing interventions and expanding the counter piracy framework to encompass a more “holistic” approach to combating piracy? In an effort to address this question, it became evident that combating piracy off the coast of Somalia was a far more complex issue than crime and punishment. Early research illustrated that (re)framing piracy as a security-development issue not only entailed drawing upon a set of existing understandings of security and development in Somalia, but also reproducing and promoting a discourse of casual linkage between the two. This drew a parallel between underdevelopment and insecurity in Somalia as both the cause of and solution to Somali piracy. The research thus involved locating and examining discourses and practices that normalized and promoted these assumptions, and how these assumptions shaped and were shaped by the gendered/racialized practices associated with the UNODC CPP messaging campaign.KeywordsCriminal JusticeTransnational Organize CrimeSomali WomanSecurity ResponsibilityMessaging CampaignThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.