Grant Proposal

Here's what we are doing this summer! This is the abstract from our research grant proposal:

We seek to discover how parallel legal and cultural understandings of piracy have operated in concert to shape evolving popular perceptions of and governmental responses to maritime piracy. While tracing how actors in the international system are socially constructed certainly has value from an academic perspective, the policy implications of this process are equally significant. Ultimately we endeavor to understand how this social construction informs public reaction to modern-day Somali pirates. To discover how contemporary perceptions of pirates evolved, we will analyze popular and media representations of piracy, drawing upon historical, literary, and legal texts.

In 1724, Defoe described a pirate as “he who goes to the greatest length of wickedness.” Today, Defoe’s pirates have been rendered harmless and humorous in the image of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. This cultural conceptualization of pirates contrasts strongly with perceptions of other violent non-state actors, such as terrorists, which engender little of pirates’ popularity.

To evaluate how pirates are perceived differently from other non-state actors we will use the methods of literary discourse analysis and hermeneutics to study the vocabulary, tone, and imagery associated with pirates. The process of social construction informs – and is informed by – the broader historical and legal contexts in which pirates have operated. Our preliminary research has suggested a group of texts that were key to this process.

The acts of Somali piracy resemble historical piracy in several aspects, including the pirates’ position as outsiders in a broken, exploitable system. In both cases, motivations for piracy are economic, not ideological. These similarities facilitate links between historical acts of piracy, their subsequent romanticization, and contemporary instances of maritime violence.

We will draw upon historical and cultural representations of piracy to analyze contemporary news media coverage of the Somali pirate attacks. To ensure our project’s relevance, we will examine the discourse of governmental responses to piracy in the Gulf of Aden to determine if these representations effect state action taken to combat piracy.