By Jon. M. Shane and Shannon Magnuson, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York City The shipping industry cannot rely on the navies and traditional law enforcement to protect them from pirate attacks and to hold pirates accountable. Patrolling the open waters is different from patrolling on land, crime is easier to perpetrate, harder … Read more

Don Liddick, Penn State-Fayette Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is a significant transnational crime problem that costs developing nations up to $15 billion in economic losses annually (Liddick 2011). Perpetrators include established organized crime groups as well as commercial fishing operations; moreover the incidence of IUU fishing is often shaped and facilitated by corrupt … Read more

By Brendan Flynn, National University of Ireland Operation Atalanta (EU NAVFOR) has unquestionably grabbed the limelight as the EU’s most important contribution to combating piracy. However, that mission’s mandate ends in 2014, and while it may be extended it appears to be scaling down as the piracy epidemic off the coast of Somalia has much … Read more

by Brandon Prins, University of Tennessee Southeast Asia once dominated the landscape of maritime piracy. From 1999 to 2004 Indonesia experienced nearly 100 pirate attacks per year. But just as piracy was receding in and around the Malacca Straits, attacks in the Gulfs of Guinea and Aden were on the rise. Indeed, piracy and especially … Read more

By Marianne Riddervold, ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo When the European Union (EU) launched EU NAVFOR Somalia (Atalanta) in 2008, it became the third multilateral anti-piracy operation established in the waters outside Somalia – all with military contributions from many of the same European states. The United States of America (the US) … Read more

William A. Donohue (Michigan State University), Franziska Pugh (Michigan State University), Sharmaake Sabrie (Georgetown University) Somali pirates take a very business-like approach to their craft. “We attack big ships that can pay us. However, after capturing several ships we have learned about what type of ships to target and which ship owner is able or … Read more

By Hassan M. Eltaher Threats to the maritime industry include threats to ships/vessels, ports, port facilities, passenger terminals, national and international waterways including their locks and approaches; international straits and multinational rivers; navigation facilities; waterside and landside moorings; human and multi-modal vehicular traffic; seaplane operations, and finally threats to Mobile Offshore Drilling Units (MODUs). To … Read more

By Victor Asal and Justin V. Hastings Maritime terrorism is not a prominent research topic. Terrorist attacks against maritime targets are very rare. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) only notes 199 out of 98,000 attacks in 40 years, which is less than 0.2% of the total. Even rarer are attacks on water where the terrorists … Read more

By Simon J. Smith and Carmen Gebhard Counter-piracy operations and maritime engagement in the Gulf of Aden is a puzzling case for anyone interested in the political and institutional problems underlying the attempts by both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to cooperate in security matters. Since late 2008, both … Read more

Brian Benjamin Crisher and Mark Souva, Florida State University Naval power is a crucial element of state power, yet existing naval datasets are limited to a small number of states and ship types. Here we present 147 years of naval data on all the world’s navies from 1865 to 2011. This country-year dataset, which we … Read more