Maritime Violence Research Articles

The Mauritian Piracy Act: A Comment on the Director of Public Prosecutions v Ali Abeoulkader Mohamed Decision

ABSTRACTIn 2011 Mauritius adopted the Piracy and Maritime Violence Act (the Act). The Act does not expressly state that Mauritian Courts have jurisdiction over offenses committed outside of Mauritius. In Director of Public Prosecutions v Ali Abeoulkader Mohamed & Ors, the Mauritian Supreme Court dealt with the issue of whether the Act applied to non-Mauritius citizens where the alleged piracy acts had been committed outside of Mauritius on the high seas. This article assesses the Supreme Court's decision and suggest ways that the Act can be strengthened.

Introduction

Introduction Terri Gordon-Zolov (bio) and Amy Sodaro (bio) At no time since the age of piracy in the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century has the open sea been a more tumultuous place. The high seas are the locus of dangerous migrant crossings, of maritime violence and lawlessness, and of massive environmental destruction. A slew of accidents, from the March 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean to the ferry accident in Bangladesh in February 2015, have led to international concern over safety standards. The ocean itself, with its rising sea levels and massive deposits of debris, embodies the hazards of environmental change. The state of the seas reveals the shortcomings of the project of modernity itself. As historian Maya Jasanoff writes in a 2015 New York Times piece, "The ocean … shows the failure of progress. It is where thousands of refugees drown trying to reach prosperity. It is where slavery and piracy flourish in the face of modern law. It is where industrial chemicals and plastics pollute and destroy ecosystems." This issue of WSQ mobilizes the motif of "at sea" to consider the many ways in which the sea as a locus and metaphor reflects and shapes our contemporary experience. As the articles, poetry, and prose in this issue demonstrate, the sea embodies dystopian despair, violence, and degradation, but also hope, coexistence, and possibility. The Current Crisis at Sea In its current form, the contemporary global migrant/refugee crisis is without precedent. Escaping violence, poverty, civil war, and religious persecution, thousands of families and individuals (often children) from Africa, [End Page 12] Asia, and the Middle East are making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea in fishing boats or overcrowded ships. The statistics are startling. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), over one million migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean in 2015, and over 3,500 perished or disappeared in the crossing (Holland 2015). The situation is only becoming direr. While fewer migrants have attempted the crossing to Europe this year, the death toll is greater. As of November 2016, there have been an estimated 4,233 deaths at sea in the Mediterranean alone (IOM 2016). Rising tides of xenophobia, and Islamophobia in particular, only make the issues of refugee status and asylum more acute. The physical vulnerability of a boat on the open seas renders it a striking symbol of the vulnerability of individuals seeking refuge or asylum. As the editors of the spring 2015 "Border Crossings" issue of Dissent write, "That migrant vessel embodies just what it means to be caught between borders" (Asoka and Chan 2015, 2). Artist Rob Bein's fiber artwork, "Boat Travelers," which is the cover image for this issue, encapsulates the "feeling of vulnerability, of precariousness, uncertainty [and] fear" that accompanies migration by boat (2016). Maritime violence is also on the rise. Our economic dependency on the sea has increased exponentially while our ability to control it remains unchanged. Within a global geopolitics structured around nation-states, the sea remains a space beyond national borders and outside of the reach of national laws and protections. The majority of goods in the global economy are transported across international waters in merchant ships and cargo boats. Because of inconsistencies in maritime law and the difficulty in enforcing national and international maritime codes, crimes, ranging from racketeering to summary executions, often go unreported or unprosecuted. Human cargo, in the form of stowaways and indentured servants, is the cost of this exploding and unregulated economy. Some of the worst abuses occur in the illegal fisheries sector, which feeds our bottomless appetite for fish, but also pet food and livestock feed. Fishers and migrant workers who find themselves "caught at sea" are subject to a range of abuses, including excessive work hours and hazardous work conditions, a lack of fresh food and water, low wages, exposure injuries, physical injuries, sexual assault, and even murder (ILO 2013, 29–30). Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable and may find themselves in a state of forced labor or debt bondage (16–18). In a special New York Times series entitled "The Outlaw Ocean" (2015), investigative reporter Ian Urbina outlines a range [End Page 13...

Asia. Piracy and surreptitious activities in the Malay Archipelago and adjacent seas, 1600–1840 Edited by Y.H. Teddy Sim Singapore: Springer, 2014. Pp. 189. Maps, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

Piracy and surreptitious activities in the Malay Archipelago and adjacent seas, 1600-1840 Edited by Y.H. TEDDY SIM Singapore: Springer, 2014. Pp. 189. Maps, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. This provocatively titled volume is timely given that piracy and associated maritime violence is an ongoing concern in Asian waters. This edited volume sets out two key aims: first, to explore the phenomenon of piracy and surreptitious activities (such as smuggling or raiding) and the linkages between these activities and war and the economy; the second aim is to examine piracy and surreptitious activities with direct reference to subregions of the Malay Archipelago and the adjacent seas. In the introductory chapter, editor Y.H. Teddy Sim provides a good overview of existing scholarship relating to piracy, and more broadly, to violence and lawlessness at sea in Asia, and this helps to situate this volume within existing scholarly discourse on maritime violence in Asian waters. The pre-nineteenth-century focus of this volume is valuable as each chapter makes the case that the local and regional forces at play are just as significant as the interplay with external forces (such as the Iberians and East India companies). What is particularly commendable is that multiple perspectives on piracy are presented, with European sources often interplayed against indigenous sources (such as the Hikayat Siak and letters from Sultan Bayan of Maguindanao to Dutch officials) to great effect, bringing new voices to the fore, hence developing our understanding of the history and context of piracy in the archipelago. Several chapters explore the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) and the Portuguese presence in Southeast Asia. In a chapter on early modern Malay warfare, Timothy Barnard includes the VOC as part of the Siak and Johor sultanates' statecraft and regional rivalries. Here is a tightly framed study of the power play between the rival Malay states, culminating in an attack on the Siak capital of Mempura (p. 19). In a chapter on Dutch privateering, Peter Borschberg explores why this practice quickly became essential to the VOC's survival. Borschberg describes the VOC as behaving 'like a drug addict' (p. 48) in its compulsion for privateering. His analogy aptly captures the intensity of the VOC's connection to revenues gained from privateering as well as its dependency on these revenues. This observation is provocative but also insightful as too often scholars tend to generalise that the lure of profits drove the East India companies without examining the juncture at which the decision to embark on privateering took place. …

Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical Perspective

Warfare and legitimate violence have long been seen as key elements in state formation. Persistent Piracy brings into the picture the long missing component of maritime violence – and shows it to be of vital importance to the formation and, on occasion, disintegration, of states. Spanning from the Caribbean to East Asia and covering almost 3,000 years of history, from Classical Antiquity to the eve of the twenty-first century, the book is an important contribution to the history of state formation as well as the history of violence at sea. The book has contributions by leading authorities in the field of piracy studies and history more generally: Philip de Souza, Neil Price, Wolfgang Kaiser, Guillame Calafat, James K. Chin, Robert J. Antony, David J. Starkey, Matthew McCarthy, James Francis Warren and Stig Jarle Hansen.

Virtue in Corruption: Privateers, Smugglers, and the Shape of Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

Violent encounters between Spanish American guarda costas and British vessels during the early decades of the eighteenth century sparked the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739, a war that started in the Caribbean over issues of inter-imperial contraband trade. Despite the causes of the war, Spanish American guarda costas out of port cities such as Cartagena de Indias outfitted their ships through illicit British supply chains. Moreover, the maritime violence leading up to the declaration of war helped the Spanish official José Patiño push for British acquiescence to Spain’s territorial designs on the Italian peninsula. Sent to the Caribbean to seek revenge for Spanish depredations against their shipping, the British Royal Navy also engaged in contraband trade so they could fully equip their vessels in the competitive environment of the eighteenth-century maritime world. Contraband trade in the circum-Caribbean served as a tool in Britain’s and Spain’s political economy while simultaneously producing the need for more smuggling and eventual conflict. For Spanish America, moreover, British contraband supplies in places such as Cartagena de Indias proved invaluable for its defense against invasion by British forces during the war itself.

Temporality, Isolation, and Violence in the Early Modern English Maritime World

Semiotic and institutional developments relating to the governance of the English oceanic empire during the second half of the seventeenth century significantly increased state agents’ power to control isolated, violent maritime encounters. The paper describes these developments in relation to piracy, privateering, and the control of seamen and argues that they have a common mechanism of social control: the manipulation of temporality. By creating capacities for the institutionalized reinterpretation of isolated acts of maritime violence, these developments reshaped the temporal horizons of such encounters by making future accountability to state agents, state categories of meaning, and state processes of adjudication more likely.

En

With increasing global economic development, maritime security constitutes more important role throughout the world. The efforts of the international community including shipmasters, shipowners, international specialized agencies, intergovernmental organizations and States concentrate on ensuring the safety and security of ships, repressing acts of maritime violence, imposing obligations upon States, and developing regional agreements between States. As the oceans are used by all and controlled by no one [1] , these efforts are very important for global trade and security. Taking into account the security concerns of littoral states, the shipping industry and passengers in general, these efforts continue to try to repress the serious crimes of terrorism, piracy and armed robbery at sea while staying in the lines of the freedoms of the seas that are being protected by state practice and customary international law. In this study, the consequent codification related to the acts of terrorism, piracy and armed robbery against ships and the problems related to the measures aiming to defeat these crimes were examined and recommendations to prevent these crimes were given. [1] Gabel, Jr., George D. (2007), Smoother Seas Ahead: The Draft Guidelines as an International Solution to Modern-Day Piracy, 21st Biennial Admiralty Law Institute Symposium, 81 Tul.L.Rev.1433, p.1.

Preparing for piracy trials in Mauritius

This paper purports to present a brief overview of the measures taken by Mauritius in preparing for prosecution and trial of suspected pirates. It outlines the law of Mauritius on piracy in 2010 and the main heads of assistance under the European Union–UN Office on Drugs and Crime Joint Programme. It sets out salient features of the transfer agreement entered into with the EU and of the Piracy and Maritime Violence Act 2011. It refers to the conclusion of instruments this year with the UK, Puntland and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Lastly, it focuses on the preparation at the level of prosecutors in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP).

The Contested Sea: Regimes of Maritime Violence in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean

Abstract Rulers on the Indian Ocean littoral are generally portrayed as having been uninterested in the pursuit of sea power until the coming of the Europeans. This article examines a series of case studies from this earlier period to argue that maritime violence had long been a part of expansionist political projects centered on the control of trade routes and coastal waters. In their sum, they show the Indian Ocean to have been an arena of active political competition and legal contestation, which were waged through private and semi-private agents commonly denoted as pirates.

From Self-Defense to an Instrument of War: Dutch Privateering Around the Malay Peninsula in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract This article examines the transition of the Dutch East Indian Company (VOC) from a policy of self-defense into its full espousal of large-scale privateering and plundering. I argue that this shift was driven by both economic and political factors, and can be traced to the very formation of the Company as a unified trading venture. The taking of prizes became a cornerstone not only of the economic fortunes of the company, but the establishment of the Dutch colonial empire in Asia. Of particular interest is not only the instructions emanating from the company directors and the Dutch government in the metropolis, but especially the implementation and adaptation of these directives on the ground. It is this local context that adds a crucial dimension to interpretations of the eager espousal of maritime violence by the VOC and its agents in Asian waters.

The abundant sea: prospects for maritime non-state violence in the Indian Ocean

Maritime violence perpetrated by non-state actors is a feature of the Indian Ocean. This includes the piracy, which has occurred most prominently off Somalia but also in the waters of Bangladesh, India and Indonesia, and terrorism perpetrated by al-Qaeda, the Tamil separatist movement in Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) against the Indian city of Mumbai. This paper aims to chart why opportunities for non-state actors to use violence to advance their interests may continue across the region.

Sebouh David Aslanian. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa.

As the title suggests, this book has an enormous geographic scope carefully anchored to early modern Armenian trade communities. Scholarship on both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, especially for late ancient and early modern periods, has in the past fifteen years or so been increasingly creative and evocative of world history themes, such as maritime violence (piracy and hostage taking) and long-distance travel literature produced by Asians. Sebouh David Aslanian takes a fresh look at a more the familiar theme of wide-ranging trade between Asia and Europe. He argues that relevant Armenian records from church, monastic, and family archives constitute important Eurasian primary sources. These sources, he contends, help to reduce the gaps in quantity and quality between overall Asian sources and those of European trading companies and travelers that constitute “proxy” sources of Asian history (p. 22). Aslanian generously acknowledges the scholarship on which he builds, especially the unpublished dissertation of Edmund Herzig, “The Armenian Merchants from New Julfa: A Study in Premodern Trade” (1991).

MARITIME VIOLENCE : IMPLICATIONS TO MALAYSIA

Abstract Maritime Piracy has been a serious threat to the international community especially in the SoutheastAsia region. This threat has caused tremendous implications towards the world economy, environment,political stability of the nations involved because 45% of the shipping company passes through theSoutheast Asia. The worrying fact is that these attacks were committed by terrorists as well as traditionalmaritime pirates. This paper examines on the implications of maritime crime in Malaysia and discusseswhether the definition of piracy under the International Law could be applied to these attacks. Thispaper concludes that cooperation between the region’s states and the enhancement of a good securitysystem of one state are needed to combat maritime violence. Thus it is imperative that the internationallaw need to be changed in order to enhance the meaning of piracy and also to include sea terrorism. Key words: piracy, maritime, terrorist

The Pirate and the Warlord

Abstract Starting in the second half of the sixteenth century, Japan, and especially Kyushu, experienced a surge in maritime exchange that was unprecedented in Japanese history. Alongside the boom in trade, there was a concurrent swell in maritime violence as pirates and privateers militarized East Asian waters. During this period, the port of Hirado on Kyushu emerged as one of the most important and consistently active pirate hubs, becoming a base for Chinese, Dutch, English, and Japanese mariners. This article explores Hirado’s long association with piracy and uses it to reflect on the changing nature of maritime violence in East Asia.

En amont des poursuites : à propos du régime juridique des opérations de police menées dans le cadre de la lutte contre la violence maritime somalienne

The policing operations against acts of maritime violence which have been conducted since 2008 by several actors off the coast of Somalia raise a number of interesting questions. Examination of the introduction of these operations, oscillating between Chapter VII and Somali consent, and of their exact incidence on international law of the sea shows that the legal regime surrounding them is far from unequivocal. The unsettled rules and regulations about these operations, mainly with respect to international law of the sea and human rights, explain that it is ultimately in the area of international responsibility that the very many uncertainties in this field will have to be dissipated, in particular by virtue of possible involvement of the European Court of Human Rights.

Piracy and Indian Ocean Africa

AbstractThe current maritime crisis being caused by Somali piracy may be of recent origin, but the phenomenon of piracy in the Indian Ocean has ancient roots. In this paper I seek to place the recent Somali experience in this wider and deeper context, arguing that what is piracy to some, may be legitimate maritime action to others. I suggest that if piracy is often in the eyes of the beholder, for others it is a response to political and economic marginalization. At the same time, in some cases piracy becomes divorced from such sources of legitimization and those who practice maritime violence become simple outlaws.

Discourses of Piracy in an Age of Revolutions

“The stigma of piracy,” writes Sugata Bose, “has provoked heated historical and political debate without always shedding much new light on its meaning and substance.” As a stigma, it has not only misrepresented the morality and motives of so-called pirates, but has also succeeded in ascribing an air of criminality to their activities, in an absence of any law that would actually have made it so. Moreover, recounting the spectacles of piracy in world history once nourished a faltering vision of imperial triumph, in which the maritime violence of empires, particularly the British Empire, was seen to be a wonderful thing. Since then, naval history has run aground, while other historians have begun to confront some of the questions head on: what is a “pirate,” and what made its violence illegitimate relative to the power of sovereign states? Most important to the present article is questioning how piracy developed into a central pillar of maritime-imperial expansion. Was it, as Bose suggests, part of a wider “extraterritorial and universalist anticolonialism” within the Indian Ocean arena, or was it merely an oppositional fantasy that legitimised sea power against a ubiquitous and ill-defined foe?

European Maritime Violence and Territorial States in Early Modern Asia, 1600-1650

The European overseas enterprises that began to push into Asian waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were maritime organisations geared towards commerce and seaborne warfare. As such, they looked very different from the powerful territorial states like Mughal India that traditionally dominated early modern Asia, and they were able to create a new kind of empire consisting of a network of fortified ports and trading centres connected by long sea routes. The construction of these empires was initially driven and subsequently sustained by maritime technology. To borrow Carlo Cipolla's words, guns, sails, and empire were always bound tightly together in this period. European vessels held a significant advantage over local shipping; neither the wealthiest groups of merchants nor the most formidable Asian states were in a position to field maritime forces that could challenge them on the open ocean. In virtually every encounter at sea, ships from Europe were able to inflict overwhelming defeats on the fleets assembled to oppose them. Since it represented their most significant advantage, Europeans made frequent use of maritime violence: against competing merchant groups (in order to disrupt commercial networks and to gain a dominant position), and against Asian states (to pry open port cities and improve trading conditions). This article explores the role played by maritime violence in the relationship between European overseas enterprises and two powerful territorial states, Mughal India (1526-1757) and Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Piracy, navies and the law of the Sea: the case of Somalia

This contribution concentrates on the legal aspects of piracy and tries to explain some of the practical problems which modern navies experience in their fight against piracy and maritime violence off Somalia. The UN Law of the Sea Convention of 1982 provides a traditional though largely deficient set of rules for control and counter measures. Modern legal instruments such as the SUA Convention of 1988 as amended, recent resolutions of the UN Security Council and regional treaties try to fill the loopholes. Against this background the paper discusses e. g. the law of boarding and investigation of suspicious vessels, the arrest and penal prosecution of criminals and the right of self-defence in case of an imminent attack. The international mandates and the national rules of engagement in which the navies operate reflect these ambiguities that result in a loss of momentum. After all piracy is not an act of war, but a crime. In conclusion apolitical solution on land is indispensable as the navies and coast guards can only fight the symptoms and not the causes of crime and unrest in a failed State.

The Evolving Dynamic of Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea in the Modern Era: Scope, Dimensions, Dangers and Policy Responses

The rash of pirate attacks off Somalia and the Gulf of Aden in 2008 has cast into sharp light an enduring problem that affects not only the waters around the Horn of Africa but many other areas of the world as well. This paper aims to inform and put into context the current debate on piracy by providing an overview of the scope and factors driving armed maritime violence in the contemporary era and the principal dangers that are associated with this particular manifestation of transnational crime. Given its publicity and unprecedented character, the paper also addresses the appropriateness of the measures that have been instituted to deal with armed maritime violence in the wider vicinity of East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.