Piracy in Somalia

Copyright © 2017. HBP Education Case Study Collection. All rights reserved.
May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
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DECEMBER 12, 2017
SOPHUS A. REINERT
ALISSA DAVIES
Piracy in Somalia (A)
Other men live from hunting, and different people from different kinds of hunting, for instance some from
piracy, others from fishing—these are those that dwell on the banks of lakes, marshes or of a sea.
— Aristotle, Politics, 1256a, c. 350 BCE
As dawn broke over the Indian Ocean on 17 February, 2011, a young Somali fisherman stood on a
beach near his home in Garacad, a fishing village in the Mudug region of the North-Eastern semi-
autonomous state of Puntland, itself part of the shifting patchwork of overlapping administrations,
clans, and fiefdoms often referred to as Somalia, “the world’s most dangerous place.” 1 A periodic
drought had resulted in an ongoing famine that had cost hundreds of thousands of Somalis their lives,
and his stomach grumbled. Gazing out to sea, he faced an agonizing choice. To his right, his small
wooden fishing vessel, loaded with rudimentary nets and meager provisions, lay on the beach, ready
to set sail. On his left, great commotion surrounded two rusty speedboats that were being loaded with
food, petrol, AK-47s, and ammunition, equipment needed to hunt a different sort of prey. Two dozen
young men were busily transporting supplies from Land Rovers parked on the nearby dunes,
communicating by satellite phones with a larger “mother ship” moored within view off the coast. They
were local pirates, and their beach buzzed with news of several large sailing ships heading towards the
Gulf of Aden from the Indian Ocean.
The yachts were taking part in an around-the-world voyage organized by Blue Water Rallies, a
company that, since 1997, had helped “over 200 owners and hundreds of crew to realize their dream
of a circumnavigation.” 2 Slow, luxurious, and lightly armed if at all, the Western tourists would be
easy prey, and, if everything went well, offer lucrative ransoms that quickly could reach millions of US
dollars. Even a simple deckhand could earn tens of thousands of dollars on a successful mission. At
the same time, the young fisherman knew—as everyone on the beach did—that the world community
had established Combined Task Force 151 a mere month earlier, dedicating warships from more than
20 nations to counter-piracy measures in order to “develop security in the maritime environment” off
the Horn of Africa. 3 A run-in with such a warship, however improbable, could end in jail, almost
anywhere in the world, or even death. But day fishing, too, involved risks, as the seas off the Horn of
U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Africa had been overfished in recent decades. Though he could still get lucky and haul in $5 worth of
fish in a day, he was more often forced to return empty-handed.
Professor Sophus A. Reinert and Alissa Davies (MBA 2017) prepared this case. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion.
Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
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718-018 Piracy in Somalia (A)
Copyright © 2017. HBP Education Case Study Collection. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under
As the captain of one of the speedboats sought to wave him over to join them on their hunt, the
young fisherman considered his options. He knew his extended family depended on him for their
livelihoods, and his choice was, in the end, simple: fishing or piracy?
Ahead of him, the dark sea beckoned.
Country Background
Geography and Demographics
Though the degree to which it was a “country,” a “nation,” or a “state” at all remained an issue of
some contention, the area generally referred to as The Federal Republic of Somalia covered 637,000 km2
of the Horn of Africa. Strategically located between the Suez Canal and the Bab el Mandeb gateway to
the Red Sea, the territory bordered on Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti to the West, the Gulf of Aden
directly to the North, and the Indian Ocean to the East (Exhibit 5). With a seaboard stretching more
than 3,300km, it had the longest coastline on Africa’s mainland, and up to 30,000 ships—a quarter of
the world’s shipping—passed by it each year through the Gulf of Aden heading to and from the Suez
Canal, mostly through the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), carrying millions of
tons of petroleum and consumer products. 4
Somalia was semi-arid, with a very low ratio of arable land (c. 1.64%), consisting mostly of desert,
semi-desert plains, and highlands. It had a population of around 12.3 million people in 2017, of whom
40% were urban and 60% nomadic. The country was ethnically and religiously homogenous.
Ethnically, 85% were Somali while the remaining 15% were Bantu and other non-Somali peoples,
including 30,000 Arabs. Somali and Arabic were the official languages of the country, and the official
religion was Sunni Islam. 5 Many argued that, though the Somalis were a nation in the region, stretching
across parts of present-day Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, they were still searching for a state
to call their own. 6
Economics
Though estimates varied because of difficulties with measuring, the United Nations assessed
Somalia to have a gross domestic product (GDP) of about $1 billion in 2011, or $2.7 in constant 2005
prices, growing at slightly below 3% per annum. Other institutions believed that GDP could be as high
as $3.6 billion. 7 According to the Central Bank of Somalia, the country’s GDP per capita at the time was
$226, a small reduction in real terms from 1990 and, by far, the world’s lowest, while the UN presumed
the value to be no higher than $109 in 2011. By comparison, economic historians often assumed the
equivalent of $400 in 1990 US$ to be subsistence-level in pre-historical societies going back to the stone
age, though others assumed a much higher level of $800 1990 US$ to be necessary for real “subsistence”
across time and space. 8 Whatever the case, Somalia might well have been the world’s single poorest
region. Between 1991 and 2011, Somalia had received an estimated $55 billion in international aid, yet
3,500 Somalis were fleeing their country every day. 9 A quarter of all Somalis were either refugees or
internally displaced. 10
The population of Somalia was mostly composed of nomadic pastoralists, and the country housed
the world’s largest population of camels. 11 Agriculture broadly conceived contributed 65% of GDP and
employed 65% of the workforce. Livestock accounted for 40% of GDP and more than 50% of export
earnings. Other exports included fish, charcoal, bananas, sugar, sorghum and corn. 12 More than 70%
of the population was younger than 30, but only 40% of children were in school and the official
unemployment rate of 54% was one of the highest in the world. As a result of high infant and maternal
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Piracy in Somalia (A) 718-018
mortality rates, the prevalence of preventable diseases, poor sanitation, chronic malnutrition and
inadequate health services life expectancy was, at around 55 years, one of the world’s lowest 13 (Exhibit
6). Famine killed around 260,000 Somalis between 2010 and 2012. 14
Earlier History
Somalia had been an important crossroads of commerce in antiquity, and one of the most likely
locations for the fabled Land of Punt with which the ancient Egyptians had traded. 15 In the wake of the
Middle Ages, however, the region had come to be dominated by a series of small centralized states.
These included the Ajuran Empire and the Adal, Warsangali, and Geledi Sultanates, which were
powerful enough to briefly repel Portuguese invaders during the European Age of Discovery. During
the so-called “Scramble for Africa” of the nineteenth-century, however, the region was already among
the world’s poorest, and both the British Empire and the Italian Empire gained control of parts of the
Somali coast by force of arms and through chartered private companies. They subsequently established
the colonies of British Somaliland, in the Northwest, and Italian Somaliland from the Horn of Africa
down the coast towards present-day Kenya. Neither of these colonial powers invested a great deal in
the Horn of Africa, and the colonies were administered—to the degree that they were—for the benefit
of European interests. 16
British Somaliland was called a “poor excuse for a colony,” and Winston Churchill himself visited
in 1907 and argued it should be cut off from the Empire because it was “unfit” even “for a decent
English dog.” 17 Beginning in 1899, colonial authority there had been challenged by the so-called
“Dervish Uprising” led by the Somali religious leader Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, known to
the British as the “Mad Mullah.” The British originally sought to abandon the protectorate in 1910 in
light of the resistance, arming protected tribes and advising them on how to defend themselves, but,
once armed, the tribes turned on each other in an “orgy of blood feud,” forcing the British to again seek
to establish control of the Somalian hinterlands. 18 After 20 years of unsuccessful military expeditions
against the Dervishes, the British finally invited members of Hassan’s family for an official visit to the
Dervish capital of Taleh before proceeding to bombard the city for 23 days in a strategy of “shock and
awe.” The ensuing violence cost the lives of “thousands” of Somalis, including most of Hassan’s
followers, six sons, four daughters, and two sisters, as well as two British soldiers. The “Dervish War”
proved consequential for the nature of British imperialism, but also for the trajectory of Somali state-
formation, as his anti-imperial example proved influential and scholars still debated whether the “Mad
Mullah” in effect had been a tribalist or a nationalist. 19
Similarly, it was recently argued that Italy’s approach to its Empire in Somalia took the form of
“ragamuffin colonialism,” and that it never truly managed to control large parts of its colony. 20
Explicitly inspired by the example of the European and later American “extermination” of the
indigenous Indian Tribes of North America, Italian authorities in the Horn of Africa relied on a “politics
of terror” to divide and conquer the local population, “hunting” recalcitrant Somalis “like big game”
and establishing a widespread system of slavery-like forced labor that would remain in operation until
independence. In an exceedingly bloody campaign of internal colonization under Fascism, Italians
waged war “palm to palm,” utilizing largely local mercenaries, pitting clans and tribes against each
other in a “fratricide war,” to minimize the loss of European lives. As a consequence, far from
“pacifying” Somalia, Italy turned it into a “battleground,” making it, as the foremost scholar of Italian
colonialism summarized affairs, “hell.” At the same time, the colonial powers began to introduce
“modern” agriculture in the territories. 21
The Italian Empire in Africa was conquered by Allied forces during World War II and put under
British rule until 1949, when it became a United Nations Trust Territory of Somaliland under Italian
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administration. On 1 July 1960, former Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland united to form the
independent Somali Republic under a civilian government (nearby French Somaliland would become
the independent country of Djibouti in 1967). 22 The Somali Republic was a unitary parliamentary
democracy with an elected National Assembly comprised of 123 representatives from its two
constituent territories and a capital in Mogadishu, in the far south of the country. Women had begun
voting in local elections already in 1958, and universal suffrage supported a vibrant political culture
where electoral participation exceeded that of many Western countries at the time. 23 Nonetheless, the
earlier Italian and British administrations of its territories had essentially left behind two distinct
countries, with disparate administrative, legal, and educational traditions, not to mention diverse
customs, languages, and internal conflicts. Given the nature of European imperialism, the two regions
had few economic linkages between them either, most activity having been focused on their respective
metropoles. 24 As the propagandistic Italian Touring Club’s guide to Somalia for 1929 had put it,
“everywhere one notes a tenacious activity, which doubtlessly will make Somalia a rich source of raw
materials for the Motherland.” 25 Yet, during the time that Somalia was a colony, it most probably
represented an absolute cost to Italy, much like Somaliland had been so to Britain. 26
The first decade of independence was largely characterized by conflicts between dominant Somali
tribes, between the formerly British “North” and the formerly Italian “South”, as well as by the question
of Somali nationalism and whether or not a “Greater Somalia” including surrounding territories might
be geopolitically tenable. The largest party by far was the heterogeneous Somali Youth League (SYL),
but coalition-politics was rampant and there was no effective limit to the size of parties. A number of
tribal, village, even individual parties with only one supporter therefore flourished, forming a seething
cauldron of contrasting ambitions that undermined the integrity of the polity. At the same time, many
politicians decided to eventually side with winning parties, even when they disagreed over crucial
issues, and in the wake of the 1969 elections the SYL and its allies and recent converts came to claim
120 out of 123 seats in the Assembly, without this indicating any sort of national political consolidation
in practice. 27 As scholars put it, politics had become a “heated chase for spoils.” 28
Shortly afterwards, the Somali President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke was assassinated by one of his
bodyguards, apparently as an “an act of revenge linked to a clan dispute,” and, a mere week later,
Major General Mohamed Siad Barre executed a bloodless military coup, inaugurating a period of
authoritarian rule based on an ideological admixture of scientific socialism, the Qu’ran, and Somali
nationalism. 29 Barre and his group, named the Supreme Revolutionary Council, subsequently renamed
the country the Somali Democratic Republic, made widespread arrests, banned parties, dissolved
parliament and the Supreme Court, suspended the constitution, and placed Somalia squarely in
Moscow’s camp at the height of the Cold War. 30
Barre’s government immediately sought to transcend the sectarianism of the past by legally
undermining the importance of clan-based and tribal identities in Somali life. 31 He initiated the first
orthography of the Somali language and greatly encouraging literacy in the country. Ideologically,
Barre emphasized Somalia’s historical linkages to the Arab world across the Red Sea, and eventually
led the country to join the Arab League in 1974. Economically, Barre also doubled down on ostensibly
Marxist ideals, renaming his party the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1976. Nationalizing land
and industries alike, he also embarked on several large-scale public works programs. 32 Though initially
promising an eventual return to democracy, however, Barre over time began to instead foster a
veritable cult of personality, and pursued decidedly clan-based tactics in an effort to “divide and
conquer” his country. 33
In a gambit to consolidate power by fostering pan-Somali national sentiments in July of 1977, Barre
ordered the invasion of the heavily Somali-populated region of Ogaden, in neighboring Ethiopia.
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Ethiopia had been on the verge of collapse since the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie at the hands
of the military in September 1974, and separatist movements in the Eastern parts of the collapsing
Ethiopian Empire sought unification with Somalia. 34 Both countries were allies of the Soviet Union,
and fought each other with Soviet weapons and resources. Having made its opposition to the offensive
clear, the Soviet Union subsequently sided with Ethiopia in the conflict. Only Romania and, because of
the ongoing Sino-Soviet Split, China, continued to give token support to Somalia in the conflict, which
ingloriously retreated in March of 1978. 35 The defeat was politically costly for Barre, who ever more
came to depend on authoritarian techniques, outright state terror, particularly against peripheral and
minority populations, and clan-based machinations to maintain power. 36 At the same time, Somalia
struggled economically in the wake of its alienation from the Soviet sphere of influence. The country’s
economy remained predominantly pastoral, and its exports gradually became uncompetitive even in
the near region in the face of the internationalization of the livestock market in the 1970s and 80s. 37
As one analyst observed, “his regime became so brutal as to almost defy description,” butchering
refractory citizens and happily taking payments from the Italian mafia known as ‘Ndrangheta to dump
toxic waste off Somalia’s coast. 38 A UN report assessed that Barre’s Somalia had “one of the worst
human rights records in Africa,” and, in January of 1991, he was forced to flee Mogadishu to escape a
plot led by a rival clan. 39 Long-suppressed groups in the Northwestern part of the country took the
opportunity to declare independence as the Republic of Somaliland (covering almost exactly the
territories once occupied by the old colony of British Somaliland), though this remained largely
unrecognized by the international community. 40 Indeed, given the two former colonies had joined
voluntarily, while Somaliland’s declaration of independence from the rest of Somalia was unilateral
and unrecognized, it remained unclear what international law had to say about the issue. 41 Whatever
the case, the rest of the country rapidly descended into even more violent forms of civil war. 42
“The World’s Most Utterly Failed State”? 43

The Somali Civil War quickly led to a collapse of the central government and the subsequent
fragmentation of the country into semi-autonomous regions ruled by competing, clan-based warlords.
More than 300,000 Somalis died from violence and famine before the UN approved of interventions to
provide aid, but found that they had to do so unilaterally as representative of the world community,
with no acknowledged sovereignty on the ground. 44 In 1992, United States President George H. W.
Bush sent forces into Somalia to defend aid shipments that were being plundered by militiamen, but
they, like the UN, had to negotiate with warring factions in order to get the task done. In the process,
they unwittingly legitimized them and, in the eyes of some, aggravated conflicts on the ground. Indeed,
one salient critique argued that by focusing on humanitarian interventions to save hundreds of
thousands of lives, the UN “allowed” the Somali state to “fail completely.” 45
In October 1993, two US Black Hawk helicopters engaged in Operation Gothic Serpent, aimed at
capturing warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in retaliation for his faction’s murder of dozens of UN
troops, were shot down, and 18 US servicemen and an estimated 1,000–3,000 Somalis subsequently
died during what came to be known as the “First Battle of Mogadishu” (with eight more to date).
President Clinton, who had assumed office just nine months earlier, reacted by withdrawing U.S.
troops from the country. 46 In 1993, the UN and the African Union (AU) deployed 50,000 peacekeeping
troops, which were unable to restore order before they in turn withdrew in 1995, having suffered
significant casualties. 47 The Northeastern region of Puntland sought increased independence in 1998,
but like with Somaliland, the process remained challenged. 48
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Following the disintegration of the national army and navy, Somalia had naturally lost its ability to
defend both its land and maritime territories. This resulted in the almost complete collapse of law
enforcement (beyond hired militias and motley private security forces) and economic regulation,
leaving it vulnerable to smuggling, arms and narcotics trades, illegal fishing, and an intensification of
the toxic waste dumping inaugurated by Barre’s regime. Although the full consequences of this
dumping were difficult to map, actual radioactive waste was identified and rumor spread of massive
fish death and numerous human casualties. 49 The coastal population began to suffer from a number of
maladies, including radiation sickness, and hundreds were reported to have died from poisoning,
particularly after a 2005 tsunami washed a number of leaking barrels onshore. Furthermore, the UK’s
Department for International Development (DFID) found that between 2003 and 2004 alone, Somalia
lost an estimated $100 million in revenue from foreign trawlers illegally fishing tuna, shrimp and
lobster in the country’s exclusive economic zone. 50 Most commentators deplored the collapse of the
Somali state, and the UN’s Special Representative to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, expressed a
widespread sentiment when he argued, “What is ultimately needed is a functioning, effective
government that will get its act together and take control of its affairs.” 51 What exactly such effective
government would look like, however, remained an open question, as did the degree to which outside
forces, models, and institutions fruitfully could influence conditions on the ground. 52
Large parts of south-central Somalia were, for example, gradually pacified in the early 2000s by an
alliance of sharia courts known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which originally had emerged
from local attempts to provide security, education, and even health care in the tumultuous territory.
Adhering to strict sharia rules, the solidifying legal system practiced punishments such as amputations
and execution like stoning but was, on the ground, renowned for its “fairness.” Violence in the region
declined dramatically under the rule of the UIC, also off the coasts, though fear arose locally and
around the world that Somalia could develop into an international center for Islamist terrorism. 53 The
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped support the local Alliance for the Restoration of Peace
and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), comprised of local warlords and businessmen in opposition to the
UIC. The ARPCT was defeated during the Second Battle of Mogadishu in June of 2006, after which the
United States subsequently supported an Ethiopian invasion backed by troops from Puntland and the
largely virtual Somali Transitional Federal Government in an attempt to restore order to Somalia and
defend Ethiopia’s territorial sovereignty. The UIC was, in turn, supported by a number of Arab
countries through Eritrean interventions, though it largely was routed and its territories lost. Ethiopian
troops withdrew two years later, and a more radical branch of the UIC calling itself al-Shabaab (“the
Youngsters” or “the Guys”) arose from the ashes of the conflict to seek vengeance against the attackers.
A number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Somalia pulled their operations out
of the country after the group radicalized and was deemed a “terrorist organization” by the United
States in 2008, leaving local militias and warlord factions out of work in the security sector. 54 In 2010,
the jihadist fundamentalist al-Shabaab movement, which now controlled large parts of south-central
Somalia, officially declared its allegiance to the militant Sunni Islamist multinational organization al-
Qaeda. 55 By February 2011, the Somali “Civil War” was in its twentieth year. As Ould-Abdallah
despondently noted, “There can be no humanitarian ‘emergency’ that should continue for twenty
years—it’s a contradiction in terms.” 56
The German sociologist Max Weber had famously defined “the state” as “that human community
which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory,
this ‘territory’ being another of the defining characteristics of the state,” and this because only a “state”
could give the “right” to “violence.” And, similarly, Weber emphasized the necessity of individual
loyalties to the state trumping those to tribes, clans, and kinship however construed. 57 As the civil war
raged and international peacekeeping efforts continued to fail, traditional bonds of kinship and
patronage reigned, violence lost all central legitimacy, security collapsed completely, and Somalia
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simply ceased to have a state in the Weberian sense (to the extent that it ever really had enjoyed one).
In 2008 alone, 9,000 civilians lost their lives violently, and soon Somalia was the world’s third highest
source country for refugees after Syria and Afghanistan, with more than 1.1 million Somali refugees
hosted in other countries in the region. 58
Unsurprisingly, Somalia, now a geographical expression, won the dubious honor of topping
Foreign Policy magazine’s failed state index for five consecutive years 59 (Exhibit 9). Since 2007, Somalia
consistently beat even Afghanistan to the bottom spot on Transparency International’s annual
“Corruptions Perceptions index.” 60 According to Robert Rotberg, failed states were “consumed by
internal violence and cease delivering political goods to their inhabitants… The continuing nature of
the… nation state itself becomes… illegitimate in the hearts and minds of its citizens” 61 (Exhibit 8). In
the case of Somalia, Rotford argued that it had gone beyond a failed state to become a collapsed state:
“There is dark energy but the forces of entropy have overwhelmed the radiance that hitherto provided
some semblance of order.” 62 Or, as the Somali scholar Ahmed I. Samatar put it, Somalia was not even
a “Predatory State” any longer, it was “Cadaverous,” one in which “civic life is, simply put, no more.” 63
Even the moniker “Civil War” might, in short, project too much order and structure on the territory.
Pirate Utopia
Yet, not everyone eyed developments in Somalia with equal scepticism. Indeed, a number of
economists maintained that anarchy benefited the country. They argued that Somalia’s governments
had done more harm than good to their citizens, and that any state it might see emerge would threaten
rather than provide for public goods and the citizen’s property rights. According to outspoken
libertarian economist Peter T. Leeson, who proudly sported tattoos of “supply” and “demand” on his
right biceps, an analysis of 18 key indicators including GDP per capita, life expectancy, infant mortality
rate and adult literacy rate suggested that Somalia was doing significantly better under anarchy than
it was under government (Exhibit 19). “Although a properly constrained government may be superior
to statelessness,” he eventually contended more cautiously, “it doesn’t follow that any government is
superior to no government at all.” 64 The Von Mises Institute was more sanguine, arguing, under the
heading “Stateless in Somalia, and Loving it,” that “Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years
since its government was eliminated.” 65 Many began to describe the country as an “economy without
state,” highlighting in particular its telecommunications sector, which, benefitting from the fact that it
received more calls than it originated under the so-called “accounting rates system,”, thus receiving
“net payments” from abroad, was “among the cheapest and most efficient in the world.” 66
One area that had grown during the absence of a central government was “entrepreneurship.”
Mohamed M Sheikh, a Somali consultant with UNESCO, characterized Somalia as the “perfect model
of laissez-faire.” 67 He argued that the lack of state structures meant minimal bureaucratic interference,
leaving business free to flourish. For example, Somalia had no customs authorities and all goods were
therefore imported duty free. The entire country was, in effect, a free port or special economic zone. 68
“Somalis consider themselves born free,” he continued, “to them, the State equals registration,
regulation and restriction.” 69 In the late 2000s, the rebuilding of Somalia amidst civil war attracted the
attention of the international investing community, with some hailing it as “East Africa’s newest
business destination.” 70 Indeed, it was maintained that “due to the nomadic culture in Somalia, most
Somalis have a head start at conducting business in a globalized economy.” 71
It was, however, a particular kind of entrepreneurship—what some called “violent

entrepreneurship”—that brought Somalia and the lack of effective sovereign control over the Gulf of
Aden back into the international spotlight in the later 2000s. 72 The period namely saw a spate of pirate
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attacks off the coast of Somalia, with high human and economic costs. Though the first pirate attack
had occurred already in 1991, piracy only exploded around 2008, when the government of Puntland,
having channeled funds to Mogadishu as part of a state-building project to re-centralize the country
politically, became unable to keep its coast guards and security forces on a stable payroll. 73 Piracy
remained largely in check in the territories of semi-autonomous Somaliland, much as it had at the
height of the UIC’s influence. 74
At an individual level, the cost-benefit calculation of piracy was attractive in a context where there
were virtually no other economic alternatives. Abdullahi Omar Qawden, a former captain in Somalia’s
long-defunct navy, described the low barriers to entry and high pay-offs in attractive terms: “All you
need is three guys and a little boat, and the next day you’re millionaires.” 75 Other estimates suggested
that the cost of an operation ranged from $300 to $30,000, depending on personnel and equipment, and
that they usually were funded either by single investors, co-operations between shareholders, or by
what some called a “private equity model” where an individual raised capital from investors to then
launch an operation. 76 Through ransoms, even Somali deckhand pirates could earn up to $79,000 a
year, an almost incomprehensible amount of money in a region where nearly half of the population
lived on less than $1 a day. 77 This made piracy an attractive career option in spite of its risks, and the
story of Ismail Elixh was representative: “One day he decided to stop being a fisherman, went to his
local market in Bossasso, Puntland, and bought an AK-47, a bazooka and a speedboat” in order to
embark on a career in piracy. 78 In 2008, piracy brought in 50% more than the livestock exports which
were officially Somalia’s biggest earner of foreign exchange. 79
“Enemies of the Human Race”?

Piracy was, of course, one of the oldest crimes of civilization. 80 The Roman philosopher and
statesman Cicero defined pirates “hostes humani generis,” “enemies of the human race” and “the
common enemy of all.” This by virtue of their acting without “good faith” by threatening the channels
of commerce—understood to be both trade and communication—and thus of sociability itself,
purposefully operating outside of and against the “immense fellowship” of humanity and therefore
outside of the parameters of that most basic ”obligation” that all human beings, even warring
competitors, owed each other. Pirates were not simply foreigners to society, they were antibodies of
society and not owed anything, by anyone. 81 More recently in the context of the War on Terror,
American legal scholar John Yoo, the author of George W. Bush’s so-called torture memos, argued that
even the Christian just war tradition would consider “terrorists to be hostis humani generis, the enemy
of all mankind, who [merit] virtually no protections under the [law].” And, on another occasion, he
mused that the status of “illegal enemy combatant” was not new at all; “what,” he asked, after all,
“were pirates?” 82
In the early twenty-first century, piracy nonetheless continued to be identified with the “Golden
Age of Piracy” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in popular imaginations
worldwide. At the time, pirates—sometimes known as privateers, if they operated as self-financing
mercenaries under a government license, or freeboters, if they did not—had terrorized commercial
traffic on all seas, and particularly off Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Their daring exploits
against often tyrannical states and merchant companies gave rise to a durable cultural appreciation
celebrating both the defiant ideology of pirate crews and the personalities of iconic figures like the
Barbarossa brothers, Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, Captain Kid, Blackbeard, and Calico Jack. 83 Even
then, however, piracy was a multifacted phenomenon, and while some simply looted on the high seas,
others, and particularly in the Mediterranean, captured ships, cargo, and people to hold for ransom. 84
Though piracy eventually came to a violent end as states intensified their efforts to eradicate its
existential challenge to solidifying state structures and the extension of global commerce alike, the
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survival—however briefly—of so-called “pirate utopias” like Tortuga, in the Caribbean, and the
Barbary Coast of Northern Africa continued to inspire anarchists and libertarian economists centuries
later. 85 Indeed, stateless Somalia could again be hailed as a “pirate utopia” or a “Temporary
Autonomous Zone (TMZ),” a space that resisted what the anarchist writer Hakim Bey called “the
closure of the map,” a rare part of the globe that remained “open,” both “unpoliced [and] untaxed.” 86
Ironically though, as piracy again was becoming a real force in world affairs, its imagery was
increasingly eulogized in the early years of the twenty-first century, whether in the form of actor
Johnny Depp’s Disney franchise Pirates of the Caribbean or the aesthetics of celebrity chef Anthony
Bourdain, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, or the hacktivist collective Anonymous, not to mention more
generally through an ever-increasing volume of academic publications. 87 “Pirates,” some business
theorists argued, were uniquely qualified for “disruptive innovation.” 88 And, as Apple prophet Steve
Jobs famously had put it, “it’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” 89 At the same time, many
cheerleaders of the phenomenon balked at extending the parallels between Golden Age piracy and that
which took place off the Horn of Africa. “Sadly,” Leeson put it, “modern pirates simply aren’t as
interesting as their golden age predecessors.” 90 Some even argued that Somali pirates were not “real”
pirates; as two prominent piratical business theorists put it, simply “committing an illegal act at sea
does not make one a pirate.” 91
Indeed, one person’s utopia could quickly become another’s dystopia. In human terms, Somali
pirates had captured thousands of crewmembers of 125 different nationalities by 2011, and in January
of that year 32 boats and 736 hostages (the vast majority hailing from non-OECD countries) were being
held at the same time. Detention periods on the Somali coast lasted up to 1,178 days, and it was reported
that upwards of 100 seafarers had died either during the attacks, in detention after poor treatment, or
during rescue operations. 92
In economic terms, according to Oceans Beyond Piracy, by 2011 Somali pirates cost the global
shipping industry $3.3 billion annually, including an 8% increase in shipping costs as a result of pirate
attacks or efforts to deter or evade them, though the pirates themselves only netted about $120 million
a year. 93 Others estimated yearly costs of over $6 billion (Exhibit 18), including ransoms, armed
security on ships, and taxes paid to fund the international naval armada eventually sent to patrol the
Gulf of Aden. Between the Combined Task Force 150, Combined Task Force 151, the European Union’s
Operation Atalanta, and NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield, scores of military vessels from EU and
NATO countries, China, Russia, India, Japan, and many others patrolled 8.3 million km2 of ocean
within the Gulf of Aden, an area about a quarter the size of Africa. 94 As one retired Italian Rear Admiral
observed regarding the challenges of policing such a vast area, “it is as if a citizen living in Milan sees
a thief scaling the gate to his house and calls the police station in Paris, which tells him that they will
immediately send a car which will arrive in more than a day.” 95
In addition to increasing the costs of shipping, piracy severely affected the economic activities of
neighboring countries. Since 2006, East African countries had seen a marked decline in tourist arrivals
and fishing yields. Spending in East Africa since the surge in pirate activities had grown 25% slower
than in other sub-Saharan African countries, and some believed it was attributable to fewer visits from
citizens of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
who were now 8.6% less likely to choose East African countries as travel destinations (Exhibit 15). 96 In
addition, exports of fish products from piracy-affected countries compared to others in the region had
dropped by 23.8% since 2006 (Exhibit 13). In Somalia itself, piracy disrupted the emergency food
supplies on which some 2.6 million of the population relied, as the World Food Programme (WFP)
suspended food deliveries by sea in 2007. 97
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In addition, UN officials feared that the lawless environment perpetuated by piracy would foster
terrorism. John Steed, head of the UN’s counter-piracy unit, argued that links between armed pirate
gangs and Somalia’s al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels were strengthening. 98 In The Pirate State, American
journalist John Eichstadt warned that, “The pirates are at the edges of an underground network
determined to make Somalia not only a haven for madness but a platform for global jihad. Turning a
blind eye to piracy and Somalia is to invite disasters of horrific proportions.” 99 A former Somali
military officer echoed his verdict: “So now the Somalis have a weapon: we are a staging ground for
the fight against global terrorism… After so many years, with our piracy and our jihad, we are finally
able to project fear.” 100 But how did a group of fishermen with rusty AK-47s come to coerce hundreds
of millions of dollars in ransoms from some of the world’s most sophisticated countries and companies?
And what drove them? The most common explanation for piracy was that it was a consequence of the
long neglected crisis in Somalia, the maritime ripple-effect of anarchy on land, but other explanations
offered alternative narratives. 101
Social Bandits
Many, and particularly in Africa, had come to consider Somalia’s pirates “social bandits.” 102 As the
late historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in an influential work on the subject, “Social bandits are outlaws
whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who are considered by their people as heroes, as
champions, avengers, fighters for justice.” 103 Indeed, the Somali news-site WardherNews found that
70% of Somalis “strongly supported piracy as a form of national defense of the country's territorial
waters.” 104 By attacking illegal fishing vessels, it was argued, pirates were not criminals but fishermen
fulfilling the role of the legitimate state, which could no longer protect its maritime territory. In
Somalia, pirates referred to themselves as badaadinta badah, which translated as “saviours of the sea,”
and their organizations had names like the “National Volunteer Coast Guard.” The former Libyan
dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, too, had argued that Somalis were not involved in piracy, but rather
self-defense: “It is a response to greedy Western nations, who invade and exploit Somalia’s water
resources illegally.” 105
Some pirates even described hijackings as a legitimate form of taxation levied on behalf of a defunct
government that they represent in spirit, if not in law. The pirate Gedow Ali articulated it as such: “We
‘arrest’ ships that come into our waters. We charge them a ‘fee’ and ask them never to come back. We
use this money to replace our equipment that has been destroyed by the foreign aggressors.” 106
Similarly, the pirates who captured the Ukrainian vessel MV Faina declared that the $8 million ransom
was a means of “reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our
country for nearly 20 years… The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is
nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas” 107 (Exhibits 13, 14, 15). In January
2011, the Somali Parliament, one of many institutions claiming authority in the region, refused to pass
a bill making piracy illegal because many MPs maintained that the pirates were “heroes.” 108
Somali pirates often distributed the proceeds from ransoms amongst investors who provided
capital for ships, fuel and weapons, as well as the local communities which acted as everything from
guards for the hostage crew to translators, lawyers, and even bank-note checkers to detect fake
currency. 109 As a result, modern pirate hubs such as Harardhere reported economic gains from the
trickle down effects of piracy. Local shopkeeper Leyla Ahmed observed that pirates drove
consumption in the area: “Every time a seized ship tosses its anchor, it means a pirate shopping spree.
Sheep, goats, water, fuel, rice, spaghetti, milk and cigarettes—the pirates buy all of this, in large
quantities… They pay $20 for a $5 bottle of perfume.” Another shopkeeper, Sahra Sheikh Dahir,
described a symbiotic economic relationship in which “the pirates depend on us, and we benefit from
them.” And a third woman from Harardhere, Shamso Moalim, described her moral ambivalence
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towards piracy: “Regardless of how the money is coming in, legally or illegally, I can say it has started
a life in our town. Our children are not worrying about food now.” 110
Indeed, in addition to the financial rewards of piracy, its corresponding social benefits increased
enthusiasm for the cause. New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettlemen described “high rolling
pirate swagger” in the following terms: “Flush with cash, the pirates drive the biggest cars, run many
of the town’s businesses—like hotels—and throw the best parties. Fatuma Abdul Kadir said she went
to a pirate wedding in July that lasted two days, with nonstop dancing and goat meat, and a band
flown in from neighboring Djibouti. ‘It was wonderful,’ said Ms. Fatuma, 21. ‘I’m now dating a
pirate.’” 111
Justice?
Even abroad, there were those who believed that Somali piracy could be “just.” As the documentary
film-maker Thymaya Paine observed, “[Somali pirates] are unemployed, living on the brink of
starvation and every day they look out and see a third of the world’s wealth sailing by – few of us
would not try to break off a piece.” 112 “Piracy,” another observer concurred, was “really about human
beings trying to exist in a world where they have nothing.” 113 More theoretically, the political
philosopher James Pattison argued on the basis of natural law and just war theory that some acts of
Somali piracy had to be considered “morally permissible” because they were perpetrated in reaction
either to “starvation” or to the “theft” of the country’s resources. “71 per cent of Somalis did not meet
the minimum dietary energy consumption of 1,600 kca/day,” he observed, meaning that, without
piracy, “their survival would be under threat.” 114 In this, Pattison drew on a venerable tradition of
natural law. For the seventeenth century theorist Thomas Hobbes, for example, the law was invented
to protect people’s lives. The moment an individual had to steal food to survive, laws against theft
therefore ceased to apply:
When a man is destitute of food, or other things necessary for his life, and cannot
preserve himself any other way, but by some fact against the law; as if in a great famine
he takes the food by force, or stealth, which he cannot obtain for money nor charity . . . he
is totally excused. 115
A similar sentiment had informed the great Enlightenment criminologist Cesare Beccaria, whose
work, it had been argued, “changed Western civilization.” Theft, even banditry, he had maintained,
was “a crime born of poverty and desperation, a crime of that unhappy segment of men for whom the
right to property (a terrible and perhaps unnecessary right) has left them nothing but a bare existence.” 116
Indeed, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights listed “a standard of living
adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” but gave no indication as to how
this positive right (requiring a duty to provide) interacted with the negative right (requiring a duty to
not interfere) of “property,” particularly that of others. 117 How did such theories of individual natural
right translate onto entire countries, regions, and continents?
De facto, large parts of the world had followed the diverging vision of the Scottish political
economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, according to which property rights were so
foundational to society that theft remained a crime no matter the circumstances, though individual
judges might pursue clement verdicts in such cases. It was true that “commercial society” created
inequality, Smith observed, but at the same time everyone was better off because of absolute property
rights and the incentives they provided to better one’s conditions (Exhibit 20). As one of the most
frequently quoted passages in his Wealth of Nations put it,
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. . . the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an
industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many
an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked
savages. 118
Without property rights, Smith insisted, “the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric
which to raise and support seems in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling
care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms.” 119 Only “states,” Smith argued, had the rightful
power to ignore property rights, and then only in times of “the most urgent necessity.” 120 But where
did that leave stateless, starving Somalis?
Rational Acts
Adopting a different perspective, political scientist Ken Menkhaus argued that the motives of
Somali pirates had shifted “from grievance to greed.” 121 Similarly, author Jay Bahadur observed that
the Robin Hood narrative of poor Somalis stealing from the wealthy of the world often was a
justification rather than a cause of piracy, comparing the distinction between coastguards and pirates
to self-labeled “freedom fighters” straddling the “semantic fence” that separated them from
“terrorists.” 122 He and others had argued that, in fact, the core motivation for piracy was rampant
profit-seeking, and that Somali pirates represented “the very essence of rational profit maximizing
entrepreneurs.” 123 Bahadur described one pirate, Afweyne, as “a capitalist at heart… (he) went about
raising venture funds for his pirate operations as if he were launching a Wall Street IPO.” 124 Similarly,
Leeson posited that “a pirate ship more closely resembled a Fortune 500 company than the society of
savage schoolchildren depicted in Lord of the Flies,” and argued that it was necessary to consider
pirates as rational economic actors, and piracy as an occupational choice. 125 The problem, in short, was
one of diverting the pirate’s profit-motive towards less systemically destructive pursuits.
Broadly speaking, the international community concurred that the main challenge lay in
disincentivizing piracy off the Horn of Africa, but the question remained how. U. S. Defense Secretary
Robert Gates, for one, blamed international companies, rather than countries, for perpetuating piracy:
“Part of the problem is the number of companies—not countries, but companies—that are prepared to
pay the ransoms as part of the price of doing business and clearly if they did not pay the ransoms then
we would be in a stronger position… at least it would make it a lot more dangerous and a lot tougher
for these pirates and then we could address some of the longer-term problems. 126 Rather than raising
the costs of piracy for its perpetrators, however, the World Bank recommended increasing the benefits
of alternatives to piracy for the enablers. Somali piracy, after all, relied on a complex ecosystem that
included local clan leaders and governmental officials. Abdi Waheed Johar, the director general of the
fisheries and ports ministry of Puntland, had openly admitted that “there are government people
working with the pirates.” 127 Therefore, a solution could involve economic incentives for local
stakeholders conditional on verifiable progress towards ending piracy. A similar policy was being used
to target opium poppy production in Afghanistan and coca production in Colombia. Deterring
individual farmers from planting poppies or coca trees was unsustainably costly, but devolving
responsibility for drug eradication to local communities and incentivizing them accordingly had
proved more effective and might be replicable in Somalia. 128 Similarly, Puntland had originally
controlled piracy by keeping coast guards on their payrolls, much like Sharia courts had historically.
Could local institutions be strengthened over time to effectively provide security, welfare and law
enforcement? And what might the role of aid be in such a project? It remained a painful irony, for
example, that a number of the skiffs used by Somali pirates had originally been donated as part of a
Swedish aid project to rebuild the country’s fisheries in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. 129 Whatever the
role of the international community, the question remained open if, in a country where authority was
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already so fractured, an even greater decentralization of power would lead to more stability or to total
collapse.
Clearly, something had to be done in light of the piratical crescendo in the short run. Already in the
early years of the pirate crisis, the British businessman and politician Lord Michael Ashcroft argued
that “we should blow the pirates out of the water.” 130 In effect though, the ambiguity of international
law surrounding piracy meant pirates long were able to act with relative impunity. As noted by Vice-
Admiral Willian Gortney, Commander of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, currently “there is no
reason not to be a pirate. The vessel I’m trying to pirate, they won’t shoot at me, I am going to get my
money. They won’t arrest me because there is no place to try me.” 131 Rupert Herbert-Berns of Lloyds
Intelligence Unit highlights the legal uncertainties: “No one nation has a responsibility for policing
international waters. We are reliant upon countries which have an economic or strategic interest in
maintaining the security of sea lanes of communication.” 132 The 1988 Convention for the Suppression
of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation permitted only the arresting state party to
assume jurisdiction over the accused. Most naval operators patrolling the Gulf of Aden wanted to avoid
the complicated and expensive process of prosecuting pirates in their own courts. As a result, nearly
50% of pirates who had been caught were released. It was not until June 2008 that the United Nations
passed a resolution allowing foreign navies to enter Somali waters and use “all necessary means” to
combat piracy. In 2009, the US, EU and Canada reached an agreement with Kenya whereby pirate
suspects would be transferred to Mombasa for detention and trial, but already by April 2010 Kenyan
authorities said they would not accept any more piracy suspects as they lacked the necessary financial
resources to deal with them (Exhibits 19, 20). As such, though “Catch and Release” remained a favored
strategy for fighting piracy, the active and passive use of lethal force in the war on piracy gradually
intensified, evident already from the 2009 US Navy rescue of the MV Maersk Alabama, which resulted
in the death of three pirates. 133 Generally though, “Western” countries seemed to approach the
challenge differently than others. One industry insider lamented this state of affairs:
With pirates you have to shoot first and ask questions later. The Russians shoot, the
Koreans shoot, the Indians shoot, but we don’t because of considerations of human rights.
It is hence an opinion in the shipping industry that to sail under a European flag in waters
where pirates operate at will, is a risky business. Pirates are like terrorists, they do what
is right for them. 134
In early May 2010, for example, Russian special forces retook the Liberian-flagged Russian oil tanker
MV Moscow University after it was hijacked by 11 pirates. One of the Somalis died during the assault,
and the others, some wounded, were released because of what Russian authorities deemed
“imperfections” in international law. All perished before reaching shore, though accounts differed on
whether they perished from dehydration or because, as some suggested, Russian forces either blew
their skiff out of the water or “put a bullet in their stomachs so that, technically, they would still be
alive when released, but with the certainty that they would not live long.” 135 The trend towards harsher
engagements with pirates continued, and, on in January 2011, twenty-five South Korean special forces
stormed the hijacked Malta-registered Norwegian-owned and South Korean-operated chemical carrier
Samho Jewelry off Somalia with the support of the destroyer ROKS Choi Young and a Westland Super
Lynx helicopter that provided covering fire. The commandos killed eight Somali pirates, arrested five,
and released to the entire hostage crew of 21 South Korean, Indonesian, and Burmese sailors. 136
Somewhat surprisingly, Somalia, one of the poorest and most war-torn countries on the planet, and
its most failed state, had become a global “threat to trade and prosperity” and to “world peace” during
the first decade of the twenty-first century. 137 Some even saw it as a harbinger of the “decline” of the
“global economy.” 138 And, as one naval officer observed, given the “intermediary” nature of the
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campaign against piracy, occupying a gray area between “military intervention” and “police action”
in international waters, it “posed legal and operational problems” that were “objectively difficult to
resolve.” 139 On February 15th, 2011, the elderly Norwegian ship-owner Jacob Stolt-Nielsen wrote a
frequently “liked” op-ed piece arguing that the “international community is far too kind towards
pirates” and that they instead should be “executed on the spot.” The “way to solve the problem,” he
continued, “is to sink the pirates and their ship with men and mice. Businesses only grow as long as
they are profitable, and piracy has grown hugely.” 140 But were the pirates of Somalia “terrorists,” or
were they “victims of circumstance”? 141
Two days later, as the sun rose over the white dunes and azure beaches of Garacad, a young Somali
fisherman considered his options.
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Exhibit 1 Somali Piracy and Media Coverage (2004–2011)
Source: Quy-Toan Do et al., The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding a Nation (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank,
2013), p. 4.
15
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Exhibit 2 Piracy in Numbers (2000–2012)
2013), p. xxii.
16
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Exhibit 3 Reported Somali Pirate Incidents (2000–2012)
2013), p. xxiii.
17
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Exhibit 4 Costs of Counter-Piracy Measures
Source: Jonathan Bellish, The Economic Cost of Somali Piracy, 2012, Broomfield: Oceans Beyond Piracy and One Earth Future,
2013, p. 14.
18
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Exhibit 5 Map of Somalia
Source: Roger Middleton, “Piracy in Somalia: Threatening Global Trade, Feeding Local Wars”, Chatham House Briefing Paper,
October 2008, p. 2, http://www.offnews.info/downloads/12203_1008piracysomalia.pdf.
19
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Exhibit 6 Human Development Index
Source: United Nations Development Programme Somalia, Somalia Human Development Report 2012, Nairobi: United Nations,
2012, p. 27, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/242/somalia_report_2012.pdf
20
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Exhibit 7 Estimated Population in Acute Food and Livelihood Crisis
2012, p. 33, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/242/somalia_report_2012.pdf
Exhibit 8 Costs of State Failure

2012, p. 35, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/242/somalia_report_2012.pdf.
21
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Exhibit 9 Failed State Index
2012, p. 35, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/242/somalia_report_2012.pdf.
Exhibit 10 Ransom Amounts (2006–2012)

Source: Quy-Toan Do et al., The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding a Nation (Washington, D.C.:
The World Bank, 2013), p. 95.
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Exhibit 11 Total Ransoms Paid vs. Average Ransom Payment
Source: “Somali Piracy, more sophisticated than you thought,” The Economist, November 2 2013,
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21588942-new-study-reveals-how-somali-piracy-
financed-more-sophisticated-you.
Exhibit 12 Ransoms Paid in 2012 by Ship
2013, p. 12, http://oceansbeyondpiracy.org/sites/default/files/attachments/View%20Full%20Report_3.pdf.
23
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Exhibit 13 Exports of Fishing Products, Piracy-Affected and Non-Affected Countries
2013), p. 60.
Exhibit 14 Total Annual Tuna Catch Western and Eastern Indian Ocean (million tons)
2013), p. 61.
24
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Exhibit 15 Annual Visitors
2013), p. 36.
Exhibit 16 Prosecution Costs
25
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Exhibit 17 Total Cost of Trial and Imprisonment for Piracy Prosecutions in 2012
Exhibit 18 Total Cost of Somali Piracy

26
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Exhibit 19 Key Development Indicators before and after Statelessness
Source: Peter T. Leeson, “Better off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse,” in id., Anarchy Unbound
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 170-196, p. 180.
Exhibit 20 Adam Smith on Commercial Society
The rich . . . consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity,
though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the
labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable
desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible
hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had
the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it,
without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the
species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor
abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of
all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior
to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different
ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway,
possesses that security which kings are fighting for.
Source: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knuud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 184.
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Endnotes
1 James Fergusson, The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw-State of Somalia (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press,
2013).
2 www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/blue-water-rally-scuppered-5118.
3 Combined Maritime Forces Public Affairs, “New Counter-Piracy Task Force Established,” 8 January 2009,
http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=41687.
4 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, Somalia, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/geos/so.html; Tim Fernholz, “Definitive proof that taxes are more efficient than piracy,” Quartz, February 28 2013,
http://qz.com/57655/definitive-proof-that-taxes-are-more-efficient-than-piracy/ On the history of the Suez Canal, see
Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal, New York: Vintage, 2004.
factbook/geos/so.html.
6 A principal argument of Ioan M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali, revised ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).
7 https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/selbasicFast.asp.
8 Central Bank of Somalia Annual Report 2012; https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-

factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html ; https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/resQuery.asp; Angus Maddison, Contours of the
World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 382, and for the higher
$800 estimate see Gregory Clark’s review of Maddison’s book on H-Net, May 2010, http://www.h-
net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30336.
9 Thinkprogress, “What has $55 Billion in Aid done for Somalia?,” 14 September 2011, https://thinkprogress.org/report-what-
has-55-billion-in-aid-done-for-somalia-1a6c522dd61f/.
10 Thinkprogress, “What has $55 Billion in Aid done for Somalia?,” 14 September 2011, https://thinkprogress.org/report-
what-has-55-billion-in-aid-done-for-somalia-1a6c522dd61f/.
11 Central Bank of Somalia – Economy and Finance report , http://www.somalbanca.org/economy-and-finance.html.
12 The British Chambers of Commerce Guide to African Markets 2007.

factbook/geos/so.html.
14 Liz Ford, “Somalia Famine in 2010-12 “Worst in Past 25 Years,” The Guardian, 2 May 2013,
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/may/02/somalia-famine-worst-25-years.
15 Nathaniel J. Diminy et al., “Mummified Baboons Clarify Ancient Red Sea Trade Routes,” American Journal of Physical
Anthropology, vol. 156, 2015, pp. 122-123.
16 A classic statement regarding the negative consequences of imperialism in Africa remains Walter Rodney, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa (Dakar: Codesria, 2012 [1974]). For the case of Italian Africa in particular, see Angelo del Boca, Italiani,
brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), pp. 74-75.
17 Quoted by Bruce Stanley, “Berbera,” in Michael Dumper and Bruce E. Stanley (eds.), Cities of the Middle East and North Africa:
A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2007), p. 92.
18 Brock Millman, British Somaliland: An Administrative History, 1920-1960 (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 17. On more recent
episodes of de-facto genocide in Somalia, see Lidwien Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
19 Brock Raphael Chijioke Njoku, The History of Somalia (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2013), pp. 81-82.
20 Andrea Naletto, Italiani in Somalia: Storia di un colonialism straccione (Sommacampagna: Cierre Edizioni, 2011). This was
acknowledged already at the time, see, for example, Tomaso Solani, L’Affrica orientale italiana (Rome: La Rassegna Italiana,
1938-1939), p. 213. Se also Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione colonial italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), pp. 171,
275.
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21 del Boca, Italiani, brava gente?, pp. 156-158, 160, 165, 168. Naletto, Italiani in Somalia, p. 9.
22 On these events, see still Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, Djibouti and the Horn of Africa (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1968).
23 Helen Chapin Metz, Somalia: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1993), p.
26.
24 See, for a contemporary account, still Paolo Contini, The Somali Republic: An Experiment in Legal Integration (London: F. Cass
& Company, 1969).
25 L.V. Bertarelli, Guide d’Italia del Touring Club Italiano: Possedimenti e Colonie (Milan: Touring Club d’Italia, 1929), p. 687.
26 Labanca, Oltremare, p. 295.
27 Metz, Somalia, p. 35. For context, see Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats: Somalia’s Aden A. Osman and Abdirazak H.
Hussen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 201.
28 Terrence Lyons and Ahmed I. Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political
Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 13.
29 On the assassination, see Hussein Solomon, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Africa: Fighting Insurgency from Al Shabaab,
Ansar Dine and Boko Haram (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 44. For a striking portrait of Siad Barre see Andrew
Harding, The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), p.
118 and passim. On the role of the Soviet Union in the region, see Robert G. Patman, The Soviet Union in the Horn of Africa: The
Diplomacy of Intervention and Disengagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
30 Harding, Mayor of Mogadishu, p. 69.
31 Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, p. 14.
32 On Somali socialism, see among others Jamil Abdalla Mubarak, From Bad Policy to Chaos in Somalia (Westport: Praeger, 1996),
p. 50 and passim, and, for a very strong view of the period, Mohamed Haji Ingiriis, The Suicidal State in Somalia: The Rise and Fall
of the Siad Barre Regime, 1969-1991 (Lanham: The University Press of America, 2016).
33 Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, p. 14. A classic work on the tradition he helped inaugurate remains Robert H. Jackson and Carl
G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1982),
pp. 1934-198.
34 On Selassie, see Bereket Habte Selassie, Emperor Haile Selassie (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
35 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), p. 252, 271-276 and passim. On the Sino-Soviet split more broadly, see Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold
War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
36 Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, p. 15.
37 Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, pp. 15-16.
38 On the wider problem, including in the Mediterranean, see Riccardo Bocca, Le navi della vergogna (Milan: RCS Libri, 2008).
39 Andrew Palmer, The New Pirates: Modern Global Piracy from Somalia to the South China Sea (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014),
pp. 30-32.
40 On the emergence of Somaliland, see among others Mark Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008) and, for a recent comparative analysis of Somalia and Somaliland, Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of
Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), pp. 109-140.
41 Kidane Mengisteab, “The OAU Doctrine on Colonial Boundaries and Conflicts of Separation in the Horn of Africa,” in Redie
Bereketeab (ed.), Self-Determination and Secession in Africa: The Post-Colonial State (London: Routledge, 2015), 38-50, p. 47.
42 On such civil wars, see now David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017).
43 “The World’s Most Utterly Failed State,” The Economist, October 2 2008, http://www.economist.com/node/12342212.
44 Madeleine K. Albright, “Yes, There Is a Reason to Be in Somalia,” August 10 1993, The New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/10/opinion/yes-there-is-a-reason-to-be-in-somalia.html.
29
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45 A point made forcefully by Kate Seaman, “The United Nations, Peacekeeping, and the Globalization of the Conflict in
Somalia,” in Emma Leonard and Gilbert Ramsay (eds.), Globalizing Somalia: Multilateral, International and Transnational
Repercussions of Conflict (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 27-48, p. 45.
46 Jon Lee Anderson, “The Most Failed State,” December 14 2009, The New Yorker,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-most-failed-state. On these events, see Mark Bowden, Black Hawk
Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Grove Press, 2010).
47 Michael Train and Jeanne McNett, “Ransom on the High Seas: The Case of Piracy in Somalia,” Richard Ivey School of
Business case no. W11524 (Ivey Publishing, 2011).
48 For one of very few overviews of this region, see Markus Virgil Hoehne, Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization,
Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (London and Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute, 2015).
49 See among others Victoria E. Collins, “Somalis Fight Back: Environmental Degradation and the Somali Pirate,” in Avi
Brisman, Nigel South, and Rob White (eds.), Environmental Crime and Social Conflict: Contemporary and Emerging Issues (London:
Routledge, 2016), 153-174, p. 158 and passim.
50 Defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Article 57 as within 200 nautical miles of the
coastline.
51 Najad Abdullahi, ‘’Toxic Waste Behind Somali Piracy,” Al Jazeera, October 11 2008,
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2008/10/2008109174223218644.html.
52 Mary Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State (London: Zed Books, 2012), p. 201.
53 Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong?, pp. 164-165; Colin Freeman, “Islam has Tamed a Lawless Somalia, but is it Raising and
African Taliban?,” The Telegraph, 8 October 2006,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/somalia/1530919/Islam-has-tamed-a-lawless-
Somalia-but-is-it-raising-an-African-Taliban.html.
54 Matteo Guglielmo, Il Corno d’Africa: Eritrea, Etiopia, Somalia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013), p. 138.
55 Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong?, p. 5 and passim. On such movements, see generally Daniel Byman, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State,
and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and for the Somali
context pp. 145-146. On US interventions in relation to Islamist organizations in Somalia before the rise of al-Shabaab, see also
Matteo Guglielmo, Somalia: le ragioni storiche del conflitto (Torrazza Coste: Altravista, 2008), pp. 129-157.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-most-failed-state.
57 Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in id., Political Writings, eds. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 309-369, pp. 310-311. On the Weberian state and kinship in Somalia and the
Horn of Africa see many of the articles in Redie Bereketeab (ed.), State Building and National Identity Reconstruction in the Horn of
Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
58 United Nations Human Development Programme, Somalia Human Development Report 2012,
http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/hdr/Somalia-human-development-report-2012.html.
59 2007-2012.
60 James Fergusson, “Somalia: A failed state is back from the dead,” January 13 2013, The Independent,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/somalia-a-failed-state-is-back-from-the-dead-
8449310.html?printService=print.
61 Robert Rotberg, When States Fail – Causes and Consequences, (University Press Group Ltd. 2003).
62 Robert Rotberg, When States Fail – Causes and Consequences, (University Press Group Ltd. 2003).
63 Ahmed I. Samatar, “The Porcupine Dilemma: Governance and Transition in Somalia,” Bildhaan, vol. 7 (2007), 39-90. pp. 47,
51.
64 Peter T. Leeson, “Better off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse,” in id., Anarchy Unbound (Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 170-196. For his tattoos, see id., The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. xiii. Leeson developed his arguments further in Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-
30
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Governance Works Better than You Think (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 171. See, for similar arguments, also
Benjamin Powell, Ryan Ford, and Alex Nowrasteh, “Somalia After State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement?,” Journal of
Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 67 (2008), pp. 657-670.
65 Yumi Kim, “Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It,” 21 February 2006, https://mises.org/stateless-somalia-and-loving-it.
66 See, for example, Peter D. Little, Somalia: Economy Without State, Oxford: James Curry, 2003 and, similarly, Alex de Waal, The
Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power, Cambridge: Polity, 2015, pp. 115-117.
67 Spencer Heath MacCullum, “A Peaceful Ferment in Somalia,” Foundation for Economic Education, June 1 1998,
https://fee.org/articles/a-peaceful-ferment-in-somalia/.
68 On the origins of such spaces, see Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Meditarranean World,
1574-1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
69 Spencer Heath MacCullum, “A Peaceful Ferment in Somalia,” Foundation for Economic Education, June 1 1998,
https://fee.org/articles/a-peaceful-ferment-in-somalia/.
70 Dinfin Mulupi, “Mogadishu: East Africa’s newest business destination?,” June 21 2012, How We Made It in Africa.
71 Claire Metelits, Security in Africa: A Critical Approach to Western Indicators of Threat (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2016), p. 40.
72 Amadeo Policante, ‘The new pirate wars, the world market as imperial formation’, Taylor & Francis Online, June 21 2013,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23269995.2013.804760. On the nature of entrepreneurship as risk-taking
creative rent-extraction see Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Creative Response in Economic History,” in id., Essays on
Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism, eds. Richard V. Clemence and Richard Swedberg
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 221-231, p. 223, and, on the “violent” variety, Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian
Village, 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs, with a foreword by Charles Tilly (Prospect Heights: Waveland
Press, 1974). On creating and claiming value, see among others Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, “It’s Time to Make
Management a True Profession,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 86, no. 10 (October 2008), pp. 70-77.
73 Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World (New York: Vintage, 2011), pp. 69, 273; Stig Jarle Hansen,
“Piracy, Security and State-Formation in the Early Twenty-First Century,” in Stefan Eklöf Müller and Leos Müller (eds.),
Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,
175-188, p. 181.
74 Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong?, pp. 164-165.
75 Jeffrey Gettleman, “Somalia’s Pirates Flourish in a Lawless Nation,” New York Times, October 30 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/world/africa/31pirates.html.
76 Bahadur, Pirates of Somalia, pp. 264-265.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/world/africa/31pirates.html; https://www.unicef.org/somalia/children.html.
78 Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong?, p. 151.
79 J. Peter Pham, “Putting Somali Piracy in Context,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2010, 325-341, p. 333.
80 On the longevity of piracy, see the essays in Stefan Eklöf Müller and Leos Müller, “Introductoin: Persistent Piracy in World
History,” in id. (eds.), Persistent Piracy, pp. 1-23.
81 Cicero, De officiis, III.107, on which see among others Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations,
New York: Zone Books, 2009, pp. 13-18; Harry D. Gould, The Legacy of Punishment in International Law, Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010, pp. 84-89. On the history of “criminals” as “social enemies,” see also Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society:
Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015, pp. 33, 45-47, 253.
82 John Yoo, “Obama, Drones, and Thomas Aquinas,” The Wall Street Journal, 7 June 2012, also quoted in Jane Mayer, The Dark
Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 153. On the
“torture memos,” see David Cole (ed.), The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York: New Press, 2009).
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83 See, for a classic academic study of the phenomenon, focused on the Atlantic world, Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and
the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989) and, more broadly, Frank Sherry, Raiders and Rebels: A History of the Golden Age of Piracy (New York:
Harper Perennial, 2008). On privateers and tehir role in spearheading the British Empire, see Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and
the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
84 Attila Ambrus, Eric Chaney and Igor Salitskiy, “Pirates of the Mediterranean: An Empirical Investigation of Bargaining with
Asymmetric Information,” Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper No. 115, 19 November 2014,
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1954149.
85 On pirate utopias, see the anarchist writer Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes, 2nd
rev. ed., Williamsburg: Autonomedia, 2003, particularly pp. 188-204, building on Hakim Bey [Peter Lamborn Wilson], T.A.Z.
The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Seattle: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2011 [1991], pp. 83-84. For an economist’s take, see Peter T.
Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, (Princeton University Press, 2011). For historiographical context, the
essays in Peter Ludlow (ed.), Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. For a more
historical analysis exploring also the dysfunctionallity of such places, their role in early modern political economy, and the
concentrated state action to get rid of them, Niklas Frykman, “Pirates and Smugglers: Political Economy in the Red Atlantic,”
in Phil Stern and Carl Wennerlind, (eds.), Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 218-238.
86 Hakim Bey [Peter Lamborn Wilson], T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Seattle: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2011 [1991]),
p. 71; Russell McDougall, “Micronations of the Caribbean,” in Maria Cristina Fumagalli et al. (eds.), Surveying the American
Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 231-262, p. 249.
87 See, among many, many examples, the Hollywood franchise Pirates of the Caribbean (Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures, 2003-);
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), the cultural impact
of which influenced even the children’s movie Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird (Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures, 2007), though
its culinary advisor was the rather un-piraty Thomas Keller, whose Weberianly perfectionist approach to bureaucratic cooking
is evident from id., The French Laundry Cookbook (New York: Artisan Books, 1999) and Chef’s Story: Thomas Keller, directed by
Bruce Franchini (New York Soho Culinary Productions, 2007); Micah Sifry, Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2011); Parmy Olson, We are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global
Cyber Insurgency (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012); Rodolphe Durand and Jean Philippe Verone, The Pirate
Organization: Lessons from the Fringe of Capitalism (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). These were merely
particularly flamboyant expressions of a general piratical critique of the nature and ostensible benefits of governmentality
fielded across the political spectrum. The gamut is neatly represented by a conjoined reading of the more recent James C. Scott,
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 and Terry
L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier, Stanford: Stanford Economics and
Finance, 2004.
88 Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips, The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters, and Other
Informal Entrepreneurs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
89 Steve Jobs’ influential maxim has been quoted among other places in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2013), p. 144. On Jobs as an archetype also of early modern Mediterranean pirates, see Nicholas Walton, Genoa ‘La
Superba’: The Rise and Fall of a Merchant Pirate Superpower (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2015), p. 81.
90 Leeson, Invisible Hook, p. 205.
91 Durand and Vergne, The Pirate Organization, pp. 13-14, and again p. 56: “Somali bandits are not pirates”.
92 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-4375908/Somali-pirates-seize-Indian-ship-11-crew-members.html ; Quy-
Toan Do et al., The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding a Nation (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2013), p. 4.
93 Fernholz, “Definitive proof.”
94 See, among others, https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/.
95 Massimo Annati, All’arrembaggio: Venticnque secoli di combattimenti a bordo (Milan: Mursia, 2014), p. 449.
96 Pirates of Somalia, p. xxiii.
97 “The most dangerous seas in the world,” The Economist, July 17 2008, http://www.economist.com/node/11751360.
98 Richard Lough, “Piracy ransom cash ends up with Somali militants,” Reuters, July 6 2011, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-
somalia-piracy-idUKTRE7652AW20110706.
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99 Peter Eichstaedt, Pirate State – Inside Somalia’s Terrorism at Sea, (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010), p. 5.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-most-failed-state.
101 Robert Kaplan, “Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea,” The New York Times, April 11 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12kaplan.html.
102 See the literature discussed in Andy Rice, “Analysis: Robin Hood’s Legacy is Alive and Well in Somalia,” Daily Maverick, 3
February 2011, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-02-03-analisys-robin-hoods-legacy-is-alive-and-well-in-
somalia/#.WYSyJ62B3q0.
103 Eric Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1959).
104 Johann Hari, “You Are Being Lied to About Pirates,” Huffington Post, May 25 2011,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html.
105 Argaw Ashine, “Gaddafi defends Somali Pirates,” Daily Nation, February 5 2009, http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-
/1066/525348/-/13rtrgiz/-/index.html.
106 Jay Bahadur, “Somali pirate: ‘We’re not murderers…we just attack ships,” The Guardian, May 24 2011,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/24/a-pioneer-of-somali-piracy.
109 Jonathan Owen, “Out of control piracy set to cost world $9 billion by 2015,” The Independent, April 16 2011,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/out-of-control-piracy-set-to-cost-world-1639bn-by-2015-2269013.html.
112 Thymaya Payne, Stolen Seas: Tales of Somali Piracy (Long Angeles: Brainstorm Media, 2012).
113 Andrew Palmer, The New Pirates: Modern Global Piracy from Somalia to the South China Sea, London: I.B. Tauris, 2014, p.
316.
114 James Pattison, “Justa piratica: The Ethics of Piracy,” Review of International Studies (213), 1-26, pp. 5, 7.
115 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 208.
116 Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Thomas, trans. Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 43. Emphasis added. For a modern use of the phrase, see Stefano Rodotà, Il
terribile diritto: Studi sulla proprietà privata e i beni comuni, 3rd edition, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013. On Beccaria’s importance, see
among others John D. Bessler, “The Economist and the Enlightenment: How Cesare Beccaria Changed Western Civilization,”
European Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 42, no. 2 (2016), pp. 1-28.
117 www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
118 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), vol. I, p. 14, probably inspired by works like Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 2 vols., ed.
Frederick Benjamin Kaye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), vol. I, pp. 26 and 26f, 169-181 [remark P]; Henry Martyn,
Considerations upon the East-India Trade (London: Churchill, 1701), pp. 72-73; and ultimately John Locke, “An Essay Concerning
the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” in id., Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), 283-446, p. 314-315 [§41]. On this ‘idiom’ see István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International
Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 249 and 249f145,
389-443.
119 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knuud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.
101.
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120 Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. II, p. 42.
121 Ken Menkhaus, “Somalia: They Created a Desert and Called it Peace (building),” Review of African Political Economy, (2009) :
36.
123 Jonathan Owen, “Out of control piracy set to cost world $9 billion by 2015,” The Independent, April 16 2011,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/out-of-control-piracy-set-to-cost-world-1639bn-by-2015-2269013.html.
124 Bahadur, Pirates of Somalia, p. 33.
125 Leeson, The Invisible Hook, p. 195.
126 Michael Train and Jeanne McNett, “Ransom on the High Seas: The Case of Piracy in Somalia,” Richard Ivey School of
Business case no. W11524 (Ivey Publishing, 2011).
128 Do et al., Pirates of Somalia, p. 175.
129 Hansen, “Piracy, Security, and State-Formation,” p. 178.
130 Lord Michael Ashcroft, “We Should Blow the Pirates out of the Water,” The Telegraph, 26 November 2008,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3563776/We-should-blow-the-pirates-out-of-the-water.html.
132 Nick Rankin, “No vessel is safe from modern pirates,” 11 March 2008, BBC World Service,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7280042.stm.
133 Annati, All’arrembaggio, p. 462-465 and Richard Phillips, A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at
Sea (New York: Hyperion Books, 2009), lionized by the movie Captain Phillips, dir. Paul Greengrass (Culver City: Columbia
Pictures, 2013).
134 Casewriter interview with anonymous ship owner, 19 August, 2017.
135 Mansur Mirovalev, “Russia says freed pirates didn’t reach land,” Associated Press, 11 May 2010,
http://archive.boston.com/business/articles/2010/05/11/russia_says_freed_pirates_didnt_reach_land/; Annati,
All’arrembaggio, p. 478.
136 Mike Pflanz, “South Korean Commando Raid Kills Eight Somali Pirates,” The Telegraph, 21 January 2011,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/piracy/8274541/South-Korean-commando-raid-kills-eight-Somali-
pirates.html.
137 Tim Buther and Rahul Bedi, “Pirate Boat Sunk but Attacks Continue off Somalia,” The Telegraph, 19 November 2008; Robin
Gei and Anna Petrig, Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea: The Legal Framework for Counter-Piracy Operations in Somalia and the Gulf of
Aden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 221.
138 Palmer, The New Pirates, p. 316.
139 Annati, All’arrembaggio, p. 603.
140 Eyvind Elbsborg, “Vil skyte piratene på stedet,” Dagens Næringsliv, 15 February 2011,
http://www.dn.no/nyheter/naringsliv/2011/02/15/vil-skyte-piratene-pa-stedet.
141 Robert Farley, “Somali Piracy is Everyone’s Problem,” The Guardian, 20 November 2008,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/nov/20/piracy-somalia.
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Piracy in Somalia (A)

Ahead of him, the dark sea beckoned.

“The World’s Most Utterly Failed State”? 43

It was, however, a particular kind of entrepreneurship—what some called “violent

“Enemies of the Human Race”?

Exhibit 1 Somali Piracy and Media Coverage (2004–2011)

Exhibit 2 Piracy in Numbers (2000–2012)

Exhibit 3 Reported Somali Pirate Incidents (2000–2012)

Exhibit 4 Costs of Counter-Piracy Measures

Exhibit 5 Map of Somalia

Exhibit 6 Human Development Index

Exhibit 7 Estimated Population in Acute Food and Livelihood Crisis

Exhibit 8 Costs of State Failure

Exhibit 9 Failed State Index

Exhibit 10 Ransom Amounts (2006–2012)

Exhibit 11 Total Ransoms Paid vs. Average Ransom Payment

Exhibit 12 Ransoms Paid in 2012 by Ship

Exhibit 13 Exports of Fishing Products, Piracy-Affected and Non-Affected Countries

Exhibit 15 Annual Visitors

Exhibit 16 Prosecution Costs

Exhibit 18 Total Cost of Somali Piracy

Exhibit 19 Key Development Indicators before and after Statelessness

Exhibit 20 Adam Smith on Commercial Society

possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

8 Central Bank of Somalia Annual Report 2012; https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-

12 The British Chambers of Commerce Guide to African Markets 2007.

13 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, Somalia, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-

26 Labanca, Oltremare, p. 295.

31 Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, p. 14.

37 Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, pp. 15-16.

94 See, among others, https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/.

96 Pirates of Somalia, p. xxiii.

120 Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. II, p. 42.

125 Leeson, The Invisible Hook, p. 195.

129 Hansen, “Piracy, Security, and State-Formation,” p. 178.

139 Annati, All’arrembaggio, p. 603.

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