Gulf of Guinea Piracy: Analysis of Threats, Dynamics and Responses

West African security threats have become more frequent in recent years, most notably in the Gulf of Guinea. As increasing quantities of the world’s trade pass through the maritime domain, ship hijackings and other maritime criminal activities have garnered widespread attention from the international community. The International Maritime Bureau reports 785 piracy incidents have occurred in the region since 2000 and current models forecasting worldwide piracy trends have failed to accurately predict maritime crime in all of the West African states. The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of piracy developments in the Gulf of Guinea. The authors argue that increased military capacity and anocratic regimes lead to increases in piracy while failed states are associated with a decline in such maritime crimes. Data from 2000 to 2016 is used to empirically test this claim. The analysis shows that a state’s military capacity has no impact on the prevalence of piracy events while institutional frameworks and regime type influence the degree and number of maritime attacks off the coast of West Africa. The results imply that institutionally strong and democratic regimes are less likely to experience piracy in the Gulf of Guinea than weak states or anocracies.

With the proliferation of post-Cold War globalisation, the international community began to appreciate the immense importance of maritime security. In recent decades, numerous national, regional, and global information sharing centres have been established with an aim to provide relevant stakeholders with an assessment of the risks and threats within the maritime domain. Unfortunately, international organisations failed to simultaneously emphasise the importance of standardised terminology and definitions for use in the global maritime security context. Instead of using other standardised areas of the maritime industry such as maritime safety as a guide, dozens of government agencies, regional reporting centres, private maritime security companies, and information sharing/fusion centres have now been established. Each of these uses its own unique categories, terminology, and definitions to measure and catalogue regional and global incidents of violent maritime crime. In this article, that includes acts of piracy and armed robbery against ships. In some cases, political and economic bias has played a significant role in how maritime security incident data is officially recorded and presented to the public. This lack of data cohesion has resulted in significant confusion and distrust amongst the shipping industry and policymakers. It has also created an uncertain environment for seafarers, who largely depend on their employers and regulators to keep them safe and secure at sea. The research includes an analysis of several sets of qualitative and quantitative data from prominent agencies and reporting centres. Case studies are also presented to illustrate why harmonised terminology, definitions, and incident reporting protocols are integral to achieving global maritime domain awareness. The numerous challenges to achieving this goal are then explored and proposed solutions are presented. The paper concludes by proposing a lexicon for incidents of violent maritime crime, as a first step in creating a common lexicon for global maritime security. As stated in earlier issues, this journal does not seek to promote a common definition of maritime security, but a common lexicon is of more practical use. This article is based on a dissertation completed as part of the master’s degree in Maritime Security at Coventry University in 2022.

EU’s Energy security and trade depend, to a large extent, on sea-based transport relying on open sea lines of communication and Maritime Security. The Gulf of Guinea (GoG) region has supplied 13 per cent of oil and six per cent of total EU28 consumption. Between 2003 and January 2015, piracy in the GoG accounted for 31 per cent of attacks (616 of 1,965) in African waters. With that proportion on the rise and a growing threat related to Piracy, illegal over-fishing and crude oil theft; maritime (in)security in the region is attracting attention from regional and international governments and bodies. In this context, and considering politicization as a more extreme version or a step to securitization, this paper analyses how an issue is brought up to the level of security by a speech act, namely, explaining how issues are politicized and securitized within the maritime domain and what strategies are involved. A number of institutions are currently acting to secure the Gulf of Guinea with growing co-operation between the region and extra-regional actors. However, the lack of capabilities, weak governance within the region and the willingness to take action from extra-regional actors have undermined the securitization, and thus, the Gulf of Guinea has remained politicized.

ABSTRACTOver the past two decades, the significance of the Gulf of Guinea and the wider South Atlantic Ocean has become incontrovertible in view of the spectrum of geo-strategic interests – commercial, energy, military, security and political – converging within the zone. Due to its vastness and lack of capacity to exercise adequate writby littoral states, the maritime landscape have become some of the most dangerous in the world: with frequent incidences of piracy, oil bunkering, trafficking in persons, weapons, illicit drugs and fake pharmaceutics, and criminal activities that are undermining maritime safety and security. A major debate is now brewing- in scholarship as well as in public policy circles- on the implications of developments in the maritime domain for security and development in Africa; including those around the challenges and opportunities facing Gulf of Guinea countries. Drawing on the insights as well as outcomes of a major conference on ‘African Approaches to Maritime Security: The West and Central African Perspectives, this article reviewed the challenges and opportunities that West and Central African countries face in view of the threats posed from, and by, their maritime domains; and their implications for governance, security and development. It further examined the prospects for the emergence of a putative maritime security community in the Gulf of Guinea, and across the South Atlantic.

Technology and maritime security in Africa: Opportunities and challenges in Gulf of Guinea

This article explores the strategic thinking of Admiral James Stavridis, former Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy, on global maritime security. With extensive experience on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, Stavridis offers a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing the maritime world. The article analyzes how his deckhand experiences shaped his views on global maritime dynamics, and how he translated this understanding into a comprehensive maritime security strategy. The article uses qualitative methods with a textual analysis approach to examine James Stavridis’ thinking on global maritime security. Data are analyzed through data interpretation and matching techniques to identify key themes and connect Stavridis’ views to his operational and strategic experiences. The article explores how he views the interplay between maritime security, international politics, the global economy, and climate change. It also discusses how Stavridis proposes solutions to maritime security challenges, including the threats of terrorism, piracy, and geopolitical competition. The article concludes by assessing the relevance of Stavridis’ strategic thinking for policymakers and maritime experts around the world.

Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and the complexities of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for countries in the Gulf of Guinea

Global maritime security has been a subject of analysis and debate in the West since the onset of the European expansion. This article distinguishes four main periods with regard to the doctrines and practices of global maritime security since c. 1450, during which the role of the state in relation to private actors has shifted. As a concept of global policy making, however, maritime security only emerged with the increasing importance of non-traditional security issues in the maritime sphere from around 1990. Maritime security studies has emerged in close connection with these developments, but in order to achieve intellectual excellence as a field of study, maritime security studies needs to distance itself from policy makers and industrial interests and develop an interdisciplinary research agenda based on in-depth studies of a broad range of traditional and non-traditional maritime security issues.

In a seemingly virtual era, maritime commerce and shipping retain a central role in contemporary global capitalism. Approximately 90% of global imports and exports currently travel by sea on around 93,000 merchant vessels, carrying almost 6 billion tons of cargo. Oceanic mobility and long-distance networks of trade are made possible and sustained by the life and labor of over 1.25 million seafarers currently working at sea as well as regimes of global security and governance. Yet, this oceanic world and its role in shaping politics, sociality, and regulation remains, for the most part, obscured and hidden out of sight in everyday life. As one of the oldest perils at sea, maritime piracy is not only a daily threat to seafaring and global shipping but makes visible this oceanic world and the larger networks of security and regulation that govern maritime commerce. In recent years, coastal Africa, specifically the waters off the coast of Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea, has seen an unprecedented rise in incidents of maritime piracy. The geopolitical and global trade importance of these areas has led to numerous national, regional, and international military and legal responses to combat this problem. While often seen as a seaborne symptom of failed states or criminality, maritime piracy has a more complex relationship with land- and sea-based governance. Occurring primarily in spaces that are politically fragmented but reasonably stable maritime piracy is better understood as a practice of extraction and claim making on mobility that emerges from deeper historical contexts and is linked to land-based economies and politics. Emphasizing maritime piracy in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea within these wider historical and geographic contexts highlights the imbrication of the political and economic in shaping the emergence and transformations of this practice. This is not to deny the violence that constitutes maritime piracy, but to locate piracy within larger processes of mobility, governance, and political economy on the African continent and beyond. In addition to impacting local communities, seafarers, and global shipping, maritime piracy is key to apprehending challenges to global governance from the vantage point of the world’s oceans.

Defence R&D Canada is developing a Collaborative Knowledge Exploitation Framework (CKEF) to support the analysts in efficiently managing and exploiting relevant knowledge assets to achieve maritime domain awareness in joint operations centres of the Canadian Forces. While developing the CKEF, anomaly detection has been clearly recognized as an important aspect requiring R&D. An activity has thus been undertaken to implement, within the CKEF, a proof-of-concept prototype of a rule-based expert system to support the analysts regarding this aspect. This expert system has to perform automated reasoning and output recommendations (or alerts) about maritime anomalies, thereby supporting the identification of vessels of interest and threat analysis. The system must contribute to a lower false alarm rate and a better probability of detection in drawing operator's attention to vessels worthy of their attention. It must provide explanations as to why the vessels may be of interest, with links to resources that help the operators dig deeper. Mechanisms are necessary for the analysts to fine tune the system, and for the knowledge engineer to maintain the knowledge base as the expertise of the operators evolves. This paper portrays the anomaly detection prototype, and describes the knowledge acquisition and elicitation session conducted to capture the know-how of the experts, the formal knowledge representation enablers and the ontology required for aspects of the maritime domain that are relevant to anomaly detection, vessels of interest, and threat analysis, the prototype high-level design and implementation on the service-oriented architecture of the CKEF, and other findings and results of this ongoing activity.

This article will briefly examine the maritime security situation in 2013 in the Gulf of Guinea and the coast of West Africa, where a number of internationally integrative approaches for improving counter-piracy efforts are being developed. As the maritime domain is both vast and complex, the article focuses on two of the major problems causing the present situation of maritime insecurity – firstly, piracy and armed robbery at sea, and secondly, Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. The progress in the provision of maritime security in regards to both problems is assessed. Finally, a number of concise recommendations for improving maritime security are highlighted.

As technology expands and spreads worldwide, the maritime industry and maritime crime are rapidly evolving While the heightened adoption of digital technologies has positively impacted the efficient and prompt execution of tasks like maritime surveillance, policing, monitoring, and early warning systems, it has also brought about significant challenges that impact the interconnected network of maritime actors. This dilemma can be attributed to geographical location, surveillance, and navigation systems of ports, vessels, and other state intuitions. With the emergence of cyber threats, West Africa is poised to face a dual-pronged threat at its ports and shores, affecting the broader security environment of coastal states as actors in the maritime domain are increasingly using digital technologies. Moreover, these threats demonstrate a path for maritime criminals to evolve into maritime cybercriminals. The central theme of this article is the connection between cybercrime and maritime crimes, and the cybercrimes that have found a lucrative avenue in the maritime industry. It also discusses cybercrime in maritime criminal activities occurring in West Africa, and the implications for the maritime and cyber landscape of the region. Finally, the article concludes with approaches for dealing with the risks posed by maritime cyber risks.

Increasing cases of piracy, sea robbery, illegal bunkering and unauthorized mid-stream discharge, among several other criminalities, constitute a major source of concern to maritime administrations in the Gulf of Guinea, including that of Nigeria. 
 Youth restiveness especially on the waterways of the Nigerian waters is of great concern to the government of Nigeria and the international communities. Youths grudges hinge on the gross negligence by the multinational oil exploration and production companies operating in the domains on areas of youth employment and empowerment, environmental devastation, education, negligence on environmental impacts restorations etc.
 While Nigerian current maritime security regulatory framework is not robust enough, enhancement must be made over time in order to continuously improve and deliver a secured maritime transportation system in Nigeria.
 The youths on the other hand inadvertently believe that by robbing in the water ways, kidnapping of individuals in the water ways for money, sabotaging oil pipelines, hijacking ships and vessels in the water ways and emptying their contents and then re-selling same to other buyers is a quick source of financial empowerment of the youths.

In the late 21st century, the growth of sea ships widened the horizons for trade on a global level. However, despite slow and cumulatively significant developments in transportation technology, during the era of sail, high sea maritime instability or the threats of piracy remained a significant obstacle to trade over long distances. In addition, with limited solidarity among all essential players in the region, several Gulf of Guinea (GoG) states can diversify their national attention to handle the pandemic instead of combating illegal activities at sea. Therefore, this article talks about the different factors of maritime piracy in the GoG, Comparing the trend across the region's different states (Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Ghana), the current maritime insecurity mitigation strategies proposed, and their gaps. Besides, a discussion around a knowledge gap in terms of accurate cooperation via the various policies implemented by those institutions brings us to propose coevolution governance in the shadow of the hierarchy and to create a maritime protect area (MPA) in the GoG country who do not have it yet, especially in Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria, and surround MPA with sustainably managed fishing areas where local small-scale fishers enjoy exclusive rights. The result shows that regionally it can help Centralize and diffuse the best practices, develop greater synergy among public policies and institutions, and nationally create greater sustainability of conservation with the integration of socio-economic concern and harmonization of strategic planning, practices, and policies.

: Maritime commerce is an essential component of the current globalized economy and defense of the maritime domain is critical for ensuring continued economic prosperity and national security for the world's maritime nations. As many states reduce their resource allocation for maritime security capabilities, a multi-lateral approach to maritime security must be adopted. The United States maritime forces Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower proposes a global maritime security cooperative to do just that. United States Joint Doctrine requires Geographic Combatant Commanders to develop a regional security cooperation plan but provides little guidance regarding the principles and procedures that comprise an effective security cooperation strategy. Developing the underlying principles that govern cooperative international security partnerships and creating the organizational structure and functional relationships required to manage a regional security partnership are essential elements in establishing an effective global maritime security environment.