1st Edition
Counter-Piracy Law in Practice An Ethnography of International Security Governance
This book is a socio-legal study of counter-piracy. It takes as its case the law enforcement efforts after 2008 to suppress piracy off the coast of Somalia.
Through ethnographic fieldwork, the book invites the reader onto a Danish warship patrolling the western Indian Ocean for piracy incidents and into the courtroom in Seychelles, where more than 150 suspects were prosecuted. The aim is to understand how counter-piracy worked in practice. The book uses assemblage theory to approach law as a social process and places emphasis on studying empirical enforcement practices over analysing legal provisions. This supplements existing scholarship on the legal aspects of counter-piracy. Scholarship has mainly examined applicable law governing counter-piracy. This book steps into the field to examine applied law. Its methodology renders visible areas of legal ambiguity and identifies practices that suggest impunity and question legal certainty. It thus contributes with new policy-relevant knowledge for international security governance. The relevance is one of urgency. Counter-piracy off Somalia has served as a governance paradigm, which is replicated in other maritime domains. Consideration of the implications for policy is therefore needed.
The book will be of interest to policy-makers, security practitioners and scholars who share a methodological commitment to practice.
About the author
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Introduction
All things legal
On existing studies of counter-piracy
An ethnography of counter-piracy
The methodological approach
On related approaches
Organisation of the book
Literature
2 The law: legal debates on counter-piracy in the western Indian Ocean
Definitions of piracy: narrow or broad?
Locating jurisdiction, or the shall/may conundrum
UN Security Council bolstering legal authority
Piracy actors also have human rights
Seychelles’ codification of UNCLOS, and then some
Concluding remarks
Literature
3 The approach: ‘Following the law’ in practice
Law as process
The primacy of practice, counter-piracy’s emergence
The analytical building blocks
‘Following the law’ across key sites
Ethnographic methods and ethical pointers
Policies and laws as ethnographic data
Concluding remarks
Literature
4 The warship: maritime policing in the Indian Ocean
The political mandate
The ethnographic disappearance of law
Deciding upon the sources to intercept
Sources with a national ‘filter’
Regulation guiding constabulary tasks
A gap in military police jurisdiction
‘Urgent steps’, or narrowing the gap
Expanding ‘urgent steps’ in practice
Concluding remarks
Literature
5 The courtroom: piracy prosecution in Seychelles
Characteristics of Seychelles’ piracy trials
Identifying the accused in court . . . . . . or defining the ‘Pirate Action Group’
Establishing common intention
Using the ‘wrong’ section in the ‘right’ way
The curious tendency of successful appeals
Concluding remarks
Literature
6 The implications: socio-legal conclusions on counter-piracy
Policy implications of ethnographic findings
Proving the illegal act of piracy
Codifying UNCLOS articles in domestic law
The warship’s use of force
The constabulary function of navies
Human rights obligations
The limitations of law enforcement
Complementarity of the ‘socio-’ and the ‘legal’
Index
Biography
Jessica Larsen is a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark.
