Somali Piracy: The Local Contexts of an International Obsession

Roland Marchal (1)

1 CERI - Centre de recherches internationales (Sciences Po, CNRS)

International treatment of Somali piracy can appear as a double denial. On the one hand, although the United Nations Security Council involved itself and received support from many member states, the actual policy toward Somalia has been dictated for years by post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policy, which made sure that no actors could openly distance themselves from the key priorities of the U.S. administration. Here, multilateralism exists only as far as offshore Somalia is concerned. On the other hand, the fight against piracy near the Somali coast does not aim to tackle the very causes of the support that piracy enjoys among the Somali population at large, not least because the international community would then have to consider the violations of international law perpetrated by some of its major members. Hence, piracy is usually presented as a symptom of ‘‘state collapse’’ and a breeding ground for global jihad, while its moral economy is disqualified and the reconfiguration of a transnational Somali economy simply ignored. This essay focuses on this second set of issues...

Domains: Political science; Sociology

Roland Marchal. Somali Piracy: The Local Contexts of an International Obsession. Humanity, 2011, 2 (1), pp.31 - 40. ⟨hal-03460451⟩