In praise of modern pirates?

An article in today's Middle East Online describes the code of conduct and justice system followed by the contemporary Somali pirates which, in some ways, resembles historical forms of piratical organization and challenges contemporary ideas of pirates as unorganized thugs:

"I have never seen gangs that have rules like these. They avoid many of the things that are all too common with other militias," said Mohamed Sheikh Issa, an elder in the Eyl region. "They don’t rape, and they don’t rob the hostages and they don’t kill them. They just wait for the ransom and always try to do it peacefully," he said.

Somalia's complex system of clan justice is often rendered obsolete by the armed chaos that has prevailed in the country for two decades, but the pirates have adapted it effectively. Abdi Garad, an Eyl-based commander who was involved in recent attacks on US ships, explained that the pirates have a mountain hide-out where leaders can confer and where internal differences can be solved. "We have an impregnable stronghold and when there is a disagreement among us, all the pirate bosses gather there," he said.The secretive pirate retreat is a place called Bedey, a few miles from Eyl. "We have a kind of mobile court that is based in Bedey. Any pirate who commits a crime is charged and punished quickly because we have no jails to detain them," Garad said.

Some groups representing different clans farther south in the villages of Hobyo and Haradhere would disagree with Garad's claim that Somalia's pirates all answer to a single authority. But while differences remain among various groups, the pirates' first set of rules is precisely aimed at neutralising rivalries, Mohamed Hidig Dhegey, a pirate from Puntland, explained. "If any one of us shoots and kills another, he will automatically be executed and his body thrown to the sharks," he said from the town of Garowe. "If a pirate injures another, he is immediately discharged and the network is instructed to isolate him. If one aims a gun at another, he loses five percent of his share of the ransom," Dhegey said.

Perhaps the most striking disciplinary feature of Somali "piratehood" is the alleged code of conduct pertaining to the treatment of captured crews. "Anybody who is caught engaging in robbery on the ship will be punished and banished for weeks. Anyone shooting a hostage will immediately be shot," said Ahmed Ilkacase. "I was once caught taking a wallet from a hostage. I had to give it back and then 25,000 dollars were removed from my share of the ransom," he said.

Following the release of the French yacht Le Ponant in April 2008, investigators found a copy of a "good conduct guide" on the deck which forbade sexual assault on women hostages. As Ilkacase found out for himself, pirates breaking internal rules are punished. Conversely, those displaying the most bravery are rewarded with a bigger share of the ransom, called "saami sare" in Somali. "The first pirate to board a hijacked ship is entitled to a luxurious car, or a house or a wife. He can also decide to take his bonus share in cash," he explained.

Foreign military commanders leading the growing fleet of anti-piracy naval missions plying the region in a bid to protect one of the world's busiest trade routes acknowledge that pirates are very organised. "They are very well organised, have good communication systems and rules of engagement," said Vice Admiral Gerard Valin, commander of the French joint forces in the Indian Ocean.

The booty distribution mechanisms, punishments for robbery aboard the ship, and informal justice procedures described by the Somali pirates have some very close parallels to the codes of conduct of 17th and 18th century pirates praised by Peter Leeson and debated a few weeks ago in the Roguish Commonwealth here. There's little evidence of democratic norms, but the economic incentives for better organization and systems of rules is strongly in evidence in the modern example.

We would like to take this opportunity to observe that Leeson's NPR op-ed originally entitled "In Praise of Pirates" has since been changed to "In Defense of Pirates (The Old Time Ones)." The troubling line about pirates being "harbingers" of democracy has been changed to "experimenters" and Leeson's original concluding paragraph:

Modern pirates can't lay claim to helping pioneer liberty, democracy and equality. But early 18th-century pirates can. In this way, historical sea scoundrels contributed something to the world worth as much as, and possibly even more than, what they took out. So go ahead, say "arrgh!," "avast!" and "shiver me timbers" without guilt. It's OK to impersonate, and even praise, pirates.

has been replaced by this considerably more watered down version:

Like modern Somali pirates, historical Caribbean pirates were also violent thugs and deserve our condemnation. But historical pirates, at least, gave us something more than violent thuggishness, and perhaps even something to praise—an at least partial embrace of liberty, democracy, and equality in time when it was hard come by.

Needless to say, we heartily approve of the modifications. It's hard to imagine praising the Somali pirates, even while being impressed by their alleged codes of conduct, which just goes to show how you can admire a system without admiring its enactors -- the point we made about historical pirates as well.

Swine flu and pirates: why language matters

The recent debate over what to call the H1N1 virus (also discussed here in the Financial Times) is good reminder of the importance of language in international relations as emphasized by constructivism. (See Karen Fierke's chapter "Breaking the Silence: Language and Method in International Relations," the beginning of which is available here on GoogleBooks for an actual reasoned, theoretical explanation of why we should take language and rhetoric seriously). Although Matthew Cordell at the UN Dispatch says "who cares" to the question of what to call the disease, it's clear that, in fact, a lot is in a name ...

The name "swine flu" led Russia to ban pork imports from affected countries, despite a complete lack of evidence that the virus can be transmitted by eating pork or that pigs can even contract the mutated form of the virus. In response to complaints from the pork industry and in an effort to set the record straight, the last few days have seen several alternative names proposed. President Obama used "H1N1 flu virus" earlier this morning and the World Health Organization has referred to the virus as "Mexican flu" or "2009 H1N1 flu," though assistant director-general for health security Dr. Keiji Fukuda says there are no official plans to change the name. The World Organization for Animal Health has proposed "North American flu," which, like "Mexican flu" emphasizes the geographic origin of the flu and is reminescent of the geographically-named 1918 "Spanish flu." The Financial Times downplays concerns that such geographic labels would stigamatize the countries and regions referred to, noting that "There is no evidence that the reputation of Spain or Hong Kong suffered in the past." Mexico is clearly suffering economically from association with the flu, though it is hard to judge how much this is a result of linguisic deployments. The EU Health Commission has suggested "novel flu," in an attempt to avoid all reference to genetic, historic, and geographic origin.

The name "swine flu" has also produced a unique response from several Middle Eastern countries, where some leaders have exploited the (initial and linguistic) connection between the virus and pigs to seek to ban pork consumption which is prohibited in Islam:

The Egyptian parliament wants all pigs in the country – where they cater largely to the non-Muslim minority – to be slaughtered. Egypt already is on edge because of a surge in cases of unrelated bird flu, which last week claimed a 26th fatality.

Lawmakers in Bahrain are hoping to use the scare to strengthen their bid to have all pork and pork products outlawed. Bahraini lawmakers are pressing for a measure that would make the import, sale or possession of pork a criminal offense.

“The outbreak of this flu, which has killed dozens, will make our case stronger to outlaw pork from the kingdom,” lawmaker Sheikh Adel Al-Moawada, who heads the parliamentary foreign affairs and security committee, was quoted by local media as saying.

In Kuwait, a top health figure also cited the Islamic prohibition in saying that the country’s “pig-free” status would probably afford it some protection.

“We are unlikely to have an outbreak since we don’t have pig farms here. We don’t have pig products and [the region where the strain emerged] is miles away from Kuwait,” said Dr. Khalid Al-Hasawi, deputy director-general of Kuwait’s Infectious Disease Hospital.

A similar view came from the government, with Undersecretary of Health Ibrahim Abdul Hadi saying that as Kuwait did not import pork in any form, it was safe.

Still, international airports in the Gulf, including the major hub at Dubai, are taking precautions, and Gulf States’ health ministers are to meet next week to discuss the issue.

In Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, city authorities ordered the removal of all pork products from store shelves and restaurant menus, local media reported.

Aside from the implications for economics and trade, this trend is worrisome from a public health perspective:

According to al-Bawaba, a pan-Arabic news organization, the question of pork consumption and the flu outbreak has stoked debate on Internet forums across the Arab world, with many Middle East Muslims “certain they are safe and immune from the new strain.”

Jeffrey Yoskowitz at the Atlantic raises related concerns regarding Israel's unwillingness to call a pig a pig:

[I]n Israel--where pigs are raised on Arab lands and pork shops are firebombed out of certain neighborhoods--pork is highly politicized. Even the word for "pork" in Hebrew, chazir, is so reviled that it goes by many euphemisms: "white meat," "other meat," and "white steak" ... Completely unrelated to eating pork though the flu might be, a swine pandemic by any other name is still porcine in origin. By refusing to recognize the source of the problem and regulate irresponsible farm practices in Israel, future swine viruses could emerge from Israel, and could wind up bearing an Israeli moniker--a much more humiliating prospect.

Israeli officials have retracted comments made earlier suggesting they were "offended" by the reference to an un-Kosher animal and will continue to use "swine flu."

At this point, it would likely be futile to attempt to change the way the virus is referred to by most people, given that even news articles that use a different name first have to establish that they are talking about "swine flu" before proceeding with an alternate designation. We are more interested in how the debate swirling around the "swine flu" label mirrors that surrounding the word "pirate," discussed earlier here and here.

(As a sidenote, the idea that I would abandon the pirate blog in favor of completing statistics review packets and writing econ papers is, of course, empirically denied and probably absurd from the get-go.)

South Park does pirates ... and does them well

It's finals week here at American University, so in order for make up for the studying I didn't do while posting on the pirate blog for the past month, I'll attempt to take a brief break from collecting and commenting on news stories such as Russia's detainment of 29 pirates today, the arrest of 9 pirates in the Seychelles following their attack on an Italian cruise ship, and Bloomberg's analysis of the history of anti-piracy law. (Fortunately, Galrhan at Information Dissemination is keeping track of unfolding developments, as is Eagle1 at EagleSpeak.)

Instead -- and in keeping with our overriding interest in cultural representations of piracy -- here's South Park's recent episode on pirates. They've done an excellent job negotiating the nexus of popular/historical conceptions of piracy and Somali piracy, with a welcome nod to how the Somali pirates perceive their piracy in the context of living in an impoverished and lawless state. This time, we really will say enjoy!





Thanks to both Phil Zakahi and David Taylor for bringing this to our attention.

Pirates, vampires, and the question of reality

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on how pirate re-enactors are responding to the Somali pirate attacks. Mark Summers, co-founder of Talk Like a Pirate Day, echoes the appeal made elsewhere for calling the Somali pirates something else:

"There ought to be a different word for pirates in their current incarnation," says Mr. Summers. ... In an aggrieved posting on his MySpace page just after Navy Seals rescued an American captain held hostage by pirates, Mr. Summers suggested some alternative nomenclature: sea-thugs, boat-muggers, kelp-festooned kidnappers. "I got a huge response," he said, "from people saying 'amen.' Or 'aaaar-men.' "

These are confusing times for pirate enthusiasts, grown men and women who like nothing better than dressing up in swashbuckler regalia and staging mock mutinies, kidnappings, pistol duels and pillages for street fairs and birthday parties. They often present -- and glamorize -- such famed rogues as Capt. Kidd and Blackbeard.

Somali teenagers in speedboats, brandishing AK-47s, don't have the same mystique. "Most of us don't consider what's going on there true piracy. They sound more like terrorists. Or thugs," complained Christine Markel Lampe, who edits No Quarter Given, a pirate re-enactor newsletter.

Well, the pirates so fondly romanticized by these re-enactors sound a lot like thugs (we'll leave terrorists out of it) too:

That Golden Age began with the flourishing of buccaneers, who were often authorized by rival European governments to attack Spanish vessels carting treasure to and from the New World. Around 1710, a new breed of cutthroats appeared who had no allegiances except to their own greed. Flying the skull-and-crossbones flag, they plundered thousands of ships, throwing trans-Atlantic trade into crisis. They also practiced torture. "They could come up with some pretty gruesome things to do with people they didn't like," says Marcus Rediker, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh.

The article suggests that while pirate enthusiasts are uncomfortable with recent events, the romanticization of piracy is likely to continue largely unchecked. Writing for North by Northwestern, Matthew Lieb suggests otherwise:

The honeymoon is over. Pirates are no longer cool. In the past few years, swashbucklers have done a complete 180, going from Hollywood heroes who provide Disney with box-office booty to global economic menaces who interrupt trade off the coast of Djibouti ... Piracy, it seems, has finally stormed out of the 18th century, donned an assault rifle and wrested its image from Johnny Depp. The question is no longer “Do we make a fourth movie starring Russell Brandas Jack Sparrow’s brother?” Now, rather, it is a matter of how the world plans to address piracy’s threat to shipping costs and to global economic stability at large.

Actually, the "Do we make a fourth movie?" question is still very much around and widely reported (the answer, in case you haven't heard, appears to be "yes, but without Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, and director Gore Verbinski") lending some credence to the WSJ's claim that "the alarm has proved unfounded." There's no doubt that plenty of questions have been added to the subject of piracy, but that does not mean the pop culture ones have gone away.

I have considerable difficulty understanding the project of "trying to take something bad [from history] and make it halfway decent," as pirate enthusiast Charles Waldron puts it. This seems to take Peter Leeson's attempt at balanced inquiry into piratical organization to new and troubling level. All judgment aside, however, the WSJ's investigation into this nexus of pirates and popular culture is much appreciated.

Also of note in the article is Rob Ossian's vampire comparison:

"People think of pirates the way they think of vampires" -- they're fun because they're fictional, he says.

"If there really were vampires around, I don't think people would be lining up to buy 'Twilight,' " the best-selling book about a young vampire, Mr. Ossian says. By that reasoning, he expected the hostage crisis to sour the public on piratical fun.

Back in December, we noted this vampire-pirate parallel after reading "How vampires got all touchy-feely" from the BBC News Magazine,an intriguing study into the process by which archetypes that started out as violent, scary, "outsiders" are sanitized and (sorry) defanged.

Replace "vampire" with "pirate" and "1970s" with "mid-19th century" in this passage, for example, and you have one of our central research questions:

So how did the vampire go from being the stuff of nightmares to the object of young girls' dreams - from a figure of evil to a desirable outsider? ...

For Milly Williamson, author of The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the changing cultural depictions of vampires reveals much about human society itself.

There has been a "general shift", she says, from the vampire as exotic foreigner - as depicted in Romantic poetry in the 19th Century and most famously in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula - to the vampire as edgy "outsider".

"From the 1970s, the vampire has achieved a cool, bad boy, exotic and sexy image", she says.

"And he has become a sympathetic creature, someone we feel for."

Of course, pirates are are were real and RPG's and AK-47's would probably beat out bloodlust and fangs, but the pirates (Captain Kidd, Blackbeard) romanticized by the re-enactors on the WSJ article are arguably just as much fictional characters as Dracula or Edward Cullen. The larger question for our project is how a frightening reality, not a blood-curdling fiction, came to be desanitized. The relationship of these glorified representations to a contemporary reality (Somali piracy) take these discursive shifts out of the cloudy realm of literary analysis and into (we hope) relevant IR research. The parallels between vampires and pirates should not be overstated, but we do think they are worth pointing out.

Thank God for Google News Alerts

... how else would I have known the Kansas City Star ran this story on pirates and popular culture?

Pirates really are “just your basic thugs,” said Mike Carraway, exhibit designer at the North Carolina Maritime Museum, where workers are excavating what is supposedly the 18th-century wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge. “We’ve for some reason romanticized them.”

The proof: Any museum can be assured of visitors with a pirate exhibit. “It’s like dinosaurs, or the Titanic,” Carraway said. “They’re our aces in the hole.”

Historian Marcus Rediker, author of several books on pirates, said they were folk heroes long before they became staples of children’s literature.

“They’re outlaws, like Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde,” Rediker said. “And being an outlaw is a very popular thing in American popular culture.”

Later, pirates became an object of popular fantasy, from “Treasure Island” to Captain Blood to Captain Hook to Captain Jack Sparrow, portrayed by Johnny Depp in the three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films.

“They’re always kind of roguish in these depictions, not bad so much as saucy, mischievous rather than sinister,” said Jay Wolpert, one of three screenwriters on the first film in the trilogy. “They use rapiers. That’s a lot more romantic than an AK-47.

“Of course, they’re not like any of today’s real pirates,” he added, except for one thing: “They’re interested in money.”

This story falls under the category of project validation rather than new information, but in case anyone was curious, we already have a visit to the North Carolina Maritime Museum planned!

The article also mentions the role of the media in popularity of pirates. The results of a recent poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press show how closely the Captain Phillips rescue story was followed:

"Great, kid, don't get cocky."

Two recent proposals for dealing with piracy highlight the US military's challenges in effectively dealing with piracy, despite the dramatic rescue of Captain Phillips. Given my recent (and yes, initial) encounter with Star Wars, I was pleased to see Donald Sensing at Sense of Events characterize the situation as such:



Although it is not clear that strikes on land would be much more effective than action at sea (and that goes for targeting Al Shabab as well), Sensing's points on this subject are generally well-taken, however, and it's good to hear an advocate for a non-reactionary response to piracy:

We need to refrain from getting caught up in action-reaction cycles in order to maintain the freedom to plan and act mostly analytically rather than reflexively. We must not become enamored with a "quick fix" under the illusion that the whole piracy problem can be solved as easily or quickly as Capt. Phillips' kidnapping was.

One plan that does not rely on a quick fix by the US Navy is that of a "Sons of Somalia" (think Sons of Iraq) Coast Guard. The Information Dissemination blog presents this as an opportunity for multilateral maritime nation-building, resulting in a Somali Coast Guard of 30 vessels and 2000 Coasties. The author of the blog estimates the cost of such an undertaking at around $130 million, considerably below the cost of ransom payments and maritime insurance premiums. As Nathan Hodge points out, the European Union is more interested in concentrating on land forces, though they did note Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed's call for the establishment of a coast guard.

A second, non-US Navy pirate plan hearkens back to the 18th century. As Elizabeth Dickinson at Foreign Policy reports, Ron Paul is advocating that Congress issue letters of marque and reprisal to essentially commission privateers in the style of the late 1700s:



The Constitutional authority is there (Article 1, Section 8), though it hasn't been used since the War of 1812 -- with good reason. There are numerous problems with this plan, not the least of which is, as Politico notes, its resemblance to the use of private military contractors:

“It may work in the sense that if you give people incentives to fight piracy, you’ll see more action taken against it,” said Andrew Grotto, a senior national security analyst with the Center for American Progress. “The ocean is huge and, practically speaking, there’s no way the Navy can prevent piracy; it’s too big. But just given the experience in Iraq with private contractors, that effort showcases the difficulties dealing with folks who aren’t answerable to anyone but shareholders.”

There are also legal issues with this proposal pertaining to the prosecution of pirates and even to identifying them as such (which is, of course, of no small interest to us):

If bounty hunters chase pirates into territorial coastal waters or on to the shore of another country, the problem would fall under the jurisdiction of that country. And any plundering activity that takes place in coastal waters is no longer considered piracy, according to College of William and Mary national security law professor Linda Malone. Not to mention that there’s also no clear indication where and how the captured pirates should be prosecuted ... And how to determine exactly who is a pirate — and what constitutes pirate activity — could get fuzzy. “What happens when a ship flying under Congress accidentally takes out an aid ship bound for Somalia?” Grotto said. “At what time does an act seem pirate-like enough to cross the line? Do we really want these snap judgments being made on the fly in waters thousands of miles away from Washington? This is not Johnny Depp we’re dealing with.”

The wide range of anti-piracy proposals (and the flaws and challenges in all of them) demonstrate quite clearly contemporary difficulties in conceptualizing and responding to piracy, but it is reassuring to see a movement away from the heated calls for all-out invasion and death from a few weeks ago.

Caterpillars, Torture, Terrorists (and Pirates)

This has very little to do with pirates, but I've decided to briefly hijack (and, we've got our link!) the pirate blog to share this op-ed my father wrote about the CIA's use of insects in psychological torture, briefly reported here. Read the op-ed for its own merits, but if you're looking for a better piracy link, keep in mind that the possibility that terrorists might deploy (or threaten to deploy) insect-vectored disease against the US points to one of the distinctions between terrorists and pirates. While both are scary, terrorists intend to strategically deploy frightening tactics to promote ideological motives, whereas pirates have a vested interest in not being too scary. As David Axe explains, as soon as pirates get a reputation for killing hostages, all incentive for shipping companies to pay ransom is destroyed:

But for all their aggression, the body count is low. One ship’s captain died of natural causes while being held hostage, and a few militia men have died in shoot-outs as they tried to rescue prisoners, but in general, little blood has been spilled. Pirates also prefer to keep their prisoners in good health. Not only are civilians worth hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece in ransom, but the pirates’ reputation for not harming their hostages has made governments reluctant to strike back on behalf of shipping companies.

The fear that pirates inspire is necessarily incidental to their tactics; the fear that terrorists inspire is their tactic.

The Pirate Game

Because we're committed to connecting pirates to every possible aspect of international relations, including liberal game theory ...

A recent Wikipedia exploration of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem just led me to discover that there is a mathematical game called the pirate game. Here's the set-up:

There are five rational pirates, A, B, C, D and E. They find 100 gold coins. They must decide how to distribute them. The Pirates have a strict order of seniority: A is superior to B, who is superior to C, who is superior to D, who is superior to E.

The Pirate world's rules of distribution are thus: that the most senior pirate should propose a distribution of coins. The pirates should then vote on whether to accept this distribution; the proposer is able to vote, and has the casting vote in the event of a tie. If the proposed allocation is approved by vote, it happens. If not, the proposer is thrown overboard from the pirate ship and dies, and the next most senior pirate makes a new proposal to begin the system again.

Pirates base their decisions on three factors. First of all, each pirate wants to survive. Secondly, each pirate wants to maximize the amount of gold coins he receives. Thirdly, each pirate would prefer to throw another overboard, if all other results would otherwise be equal.

And here's the perhaps counter-intuitive result:

It might be expected intuitively that Pirate A will have to allocate little if any to himself for fear of being voted off so that there are fewer pirates to share between. However, this is as far from the theoretical result as is possible.

This is apparent if we work backwards: if all except D and E have been thrown overboard, D proposes 100 for himself and 0 for E. He has the casting vote, and so this is the allocation.

If there are three left (C, D and E) C knows that D will offer E 0 in the next round; therefore, C has to offer E 1 coin in this round to make E vote with him, and get his allocation through. Therefore, when only three are left the allocation is C:99, D:0, E:1.

If B, C, D and E remain, B knows this when he makes his decision. To avoid being thrown overboard, he can simply offer 1 to D. Because he has the casting vote, the support only by D is sufficient. Thus he proposes B:99, C:0, D:1, E:0. One might consider proposing B:99, C:0, D:0, E:1, as E knows he won't get more, if any, if he throws B overboard. But, as each pirate is eager to throw each other overboard, E would prefer to kill B, to get the same amount of gold from C.

Assuming A knows all these things, he can count on C and E's support for the following allocation, which is the final solution:

• A: 98 coins
• B: 0 coins
• C: 1 coin
• D: 0 coins
• E: 1 coin

Also, A:98, B:0, C:0, D:1, E:1 or other variants are not good enough, as D would rather throw A overboard to get the same amount of gold from B.

A more in-depth explanation of the game (and an n=200+ pirates version) is available in Scientific American here. We've talked a lot about pirates' rationality (here and here) in the last few weeks; if nothing else, this game would indicate that avarice and violence are part of contemporary understandings of what it is to be a pirate.

Morocco Sets the Record Straight

This interesting letter to the editor from Aziz Mekouar, Morocco's Ambassador the the United States, was published in the New York Times as a response to their recent op-ed piece, Lessons from the Barbary Pirate Wars...

To the Editor:

“What Tho. Jefferson Knew About Pirates” (Week in Review, April 12) overlooks a historical link between Morocco and the United States by leaving a possible impression that Morocco supported the pirates.

In 1786, Morocco and the United States signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship — a joint commitment to combating acts of piracy targeting American ships sailing the Atlantic. It is the first such recorded treaty in United States history and is the longest unbroken American agreement with any nation.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently noted that cooperation with the United States’ oldest ally has been under way for generations. “We worked together to end piracy off of the coast of Morocco all those years ago,” Secretary Clinton said. “And we’re going to work together to end this kind of criminal activity anywhere on the high seas.” This relationship, borne from mutual respect, is as important today as ever before for Morocco and the United States.

Aziz Mekouar
Ambassador of Morocco
to the United States
Washington, April 13, 2009

This is certainly a fascinating hearkening back to the shared history between the US and Morocco with regards to fighting piracy; a history that I will be certain to explore further as I spend next year in Rabat!

Nine Things We Hope You Knew About Pirates

David Axe, a military correspondent currently located in Mombasa, Kenya presents a list of "10 Things You Didn't Know About Somali Pirates." We hope that, as a reader of our blog, you did in fact know the first nine (all well-taken); it's the last one "It May be Time for Desperate Measures" which caught our attention. Axe is not too specific on this point, but appears to advocate Karim Kudrati's proposal for a multinational invasion of Somalia. Writing for Foreign Policy's The Call, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer outlines why targeting pirates on-shore would be ineffective and why the Obama administration is unlikely to opt for this course:

First, a direct, onshore U.S. strike on pirates would have only a limited impact on the broader piracy problem. Second, it could undermine efforts to contain Islamist militants by inviting them to tap into wounded Somali national pride, one of a very few forces that can unite divided clans. (Somali nationalism provided the Islamist movement with early legitimacy in the struggle to expel U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops from the country.) Third, it would weaken transitional President (and moderate Islamist) Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, a potential force for stability in a country that badly needs it.

African and Gulf governments and U.S. counter-terrorism officials are well aware that strikes could drive extremism in the region and help militants recruit local youth. But there's another risk: Pirates in Puntland, a region in Somalia's northeast where most of the pirates are based, have already threatened to kill some of the 270 hostages they now hold-hostages from countries all over the world, some of them key U.S. allies.

As part of the ongoing debate over the appropriateness and efficacy of military responses to piracy, Wayne Long, a former Army colonel and the UN chief security officer in Somalia from 1993 to 2003, suggests a soft power approach to one of the problems of piracy. Drawing upon his personal experience with Somali pirate hostage situations, Long proposes withholding humanitarian aid from clans and regions where hostages are being held. Rather than futilely targeting what Long calls a "stateless state," this approach relies upon the state-like functions clans have assumed in Somalia and drives a wedge between the pirates and the clans (and their families) back on shore. Long admits that this his approach will do little to suppress piracy, but presents it as a third option to the traditional blood vs. treasure dilemma (that is, whether to stage a potentially deadly rescue as in the case of Captain Phillips last week or to pay a large ransom as was done with the Sirius Star).

The other problem with Long's proposal -- as illustrated by Axe's fourth point ("The Law Can't Touch Them") -- is that it contains no provision for detaining or punishing pirates. This issue has been in the news lately, with the US decision to prosecute Abduhl Wal-i-Musi, one of the pirates who attacked the Maersk Alabama, in a federal court in New York and with Dutch NATO forces' inability to detain pirates:

Dutch commandos freed 20 Yemeni hostages on Saturday and briefly detained seven pirates who had forced the Yemenis to join them in attacking vessels in the Gulf of Aden, NATO officials said.

The Dutch forces, operating under a NATO antipiracy mission, then released the pirates, a NATO commander said, because NATO has no “detainment policy.” [...]

Commander Fernandes said the hostages had been for more than a week. The commandos briefly detained and questioned the seven gunmen, he said, but had no legal power to arrest them.

“NATO does not have a detainment policy,” he said. “The warship must follow its national law. They can only arrest them if the pirates are from the Netherlands, the victims are from the Netherlands, or if they are in Netherlands waters.”

Charli Carpenter outlines some of these legal questions, drawing upon a recent seminar by Harvard University's Humanitarian Law and Policy Forum devoted to the legal challenges of off-shore piracy (which you can listen to here).

The Invisible Hook

Peter T. Leeson recently discussed his new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. (We're having some problems putting the video on our blog, but it is available here.)

The title's witty, and pirates may have acted in accordance with economic intentions that resulted in self governance, but this self governance simply enabled more efficient violent economic predation. It's also interesting to note how pirates spent their profits. In Empire of Blue Water, Stephen Talty describes how pirates spent liberal sums on alcohol and whores: "L'Ollonais' men were reported to have blown through 260,000 pieces of eight or $13.5 million in three short weeks after one of their expeditions 'having spent it all in things of little value, or at play either cards or dice" (138). Pirates may have had their social contracts on the ship, but Talty goes on to describe how, when they got back to shore, they lived in a virtual state of anarchy, blowing all of their hard earned profit on alcohol and women of questionable repute, until they were too broke to survive and needed to go back out to sea to earn more money: "He dealt only in immediate gratifications. It was almost as if the pirate code had short-circuited his ability to think of a regular life outside it" (139).

None of this is intended to directly refute Leeson's work (which we find very interesting); we merely question the implication that pirates are deserving of praise for their self-regulated maritime crimes.

The Buccaneer Stops Here

Lest this blog get too serious for its own good, we'd like to add a little humor:



And in the interest of maintaining our academic legitimacy, please note the use of the American power as the basis of Jon Stewart's jokes, as opposed to the romanticized pirate image from back in November 2008:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Buccaneer Stops Here
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Pirates were funnier back then, but these videos illustrate the shift in the pirate discourse noted earlier.

Talking Pirates

Robert Farley at the University of Kentucky and Daniel Drezner at Tufts discuss piracy:


The part most relevant to our project is at around 23:00 when they confront whether the "giggle factor" of piracy undermines our response to it. Farley posits that recent events may strip away the romanticization of pirates, and Drezner considers whether "one Hollywood trope might be replaced with another." Given the upcoming Spike TV show, this seems likely, and Farley and Drezner are not the first to make the Hollywood connection.

"Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber ...

... whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

Johann Hari, writing for The Independent, is referring to this passage from Augustine's City of God:

Justice taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

Augustine provides what must be one of the earliest constructivist accounts of piracy, and, as Hari points out, context -- governmental collapse, nuclear and heavy metal waste disposal in the Gulf, and overfishing -- still matters in contemporary piracy. He is careful to state these factors do not excuse hostage-taking, but notes:

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem –but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

Hari also alludes pirates' egalitarian political organization (discussed in some depth here), suggesting that this and their rebellion against authoritarianism contributed to their romanticization:

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century". They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

Hari's op-ed is juxtaposed with Daniel Henninger's in today's Wall Street Journal, which manages, in one fell swoop, to compare pirates to North Korea, Iran, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hugo Chavez. Henninger concludes:

We need to understand that these are not just security threats but a systemic threat. Each weakly answered pirate affront erodes the public's confidence in the West's promise of an ordered world. The erosion is persistent and cumulative. A crack sometimes falls apart. The world's foreign ministries and foreign policy intellectuals, secure in the calm sun that rises each morning where they live, try to make all this seem complex and very difficult. What we saw in the floodtide of jubilation over the rescue of Capt. Phillips is that eventually it's not complicated.

Desipte Hari and Henninger's wildly divergent perspectives, both of them, like Augustine, have identified the threat piracy poses to extant international orders (for good or ill). The negotiation of this shifting border between state and non-state, legitimate and illegitimate that, has shaped both the identity of pirate, and as Janice E. Thomson argues in Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, the identity of the modern state. We happen to find this idea very, very cool.

The Roguish Commonwealth thanks Fletcher for sending the Independent op-ed our way; I'd been waiting for a good opening to work City of God into the pirate blog!

Anti-piracy dolphins

According to Xinhua and China Radio International, thousands of dolphins intercepted Somali pirates as they tried to attack Chinese merchant ships in the Gulf of Aden on Monday.

The Chinese merchant ships escorted by a China's fleet sailed on the Gulf of Aden when they met some suspected pirate ships. Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants when the pirate ships headed for the China's. The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.

The Lede's Robert Mackey points out that none of the photos actually show the dolphins intercepting pirate ships, but reminds us that several armed, US military-trained dolphins are unaccounted for ...

Vesseljackers?

The author of Yourself in Five Years identifies some of the pop culture baggage that the term "pirate" carries aboard with it and suggests (tongue a bit in cheek) using "vesseljacker" instead. Language is flexible, though, and we're intent on taking apart the idea of an empirical pirate identity, so why not call them something else and avoid the troubling romanticizations and misleading historical parallels entirely? Well for one thing, it would rather moot our research project. And for another, the term "pirate" carries significant weight in domestic and international law. What the vesseljackers are doing is piracy, as it's legally defined, and calling it such both shapes and enables our legal and military response.

(Thanks to Anna Chapin, classy and loyal partisan of the Roguish Commonwealth, for sending this link our way.)

Pirates undeterred

Update 4/15/09: Pirates fired rocket propelled grenades at the Liberty Sun, a US cargo ship, off the coast of Somalia, but were not able to board the ship.

Somali pirates have hijacked four more ships and taken 60 more hostages since yesterday, according to the Washington Post, answering one of Elizabeth Dickinson's "now what?" questions on Foreign Policy's Passport blog. The Wall Street Journal echoes popular calls for a heightened military response and a harsh penalty for the captured pirate, including this troubling recommendation:

Better still if he's transferred to Guantanamo and held as an "enemy combatant," or whatever the Obama Administration prefers to call terrorists.

Not only would this further blur the distinction between pirates and terrorists, but it is completely unnecessary. The US already has jurisdiction over crimes committed against US citizens and US ships; both piracy and hostage-taking carry a life sentence; and, as the Washington Post says,

The U.S. is treating the matter as a criminal case because officials have found no direct ties between East African pirates and terror groups. Because the U.S. is not at war with Somalia, piracy cases are governed by U.S. and international law.

Writing for Foreign Policy, J. Peter Pham analyzes the organizational network of the Somali pirates, calling it a "highly structured enterprise built around a number of syndicates," and details why the US Navy's use of force is insufficient to stop piracy. Although supportive of a heightened military response as a means of "[driving] up, rapidly and decisively, the cost of engaging in piracy," Tom Mahnken also recognizes its limitations. These would appear to be considerable given the current profitability of piracy.

A Hijacker's Home Video

Wired Magazine recently posted a rather intriguing video on their Danger Room blog. The video is a clip of a home movie made by a Somali pirate aboard the Yasa Neslihan, vessel manned by a crew of 20 Turks captured by Somali pirates on October 29, 2008 and released unharmed on Jan. 6, 2009, after a ransom was paid. According to the blog post, the Somali pirates typically make videos like this one when they capture a ship to prove to the owners that the ship is still intact before they pay the ransom.

This video is a slightly surreal trip around a hijacked ship with shots of the pirates, their guns, and some Turkish crew members, all set to a soundtrack of a surprisingly catchy tune playing over the ship's loudspeaker.

I won't say enjoy, because that seems a little inappropriate, but this video, and the Danger Room blog are well worth a look!



The full 10 minute 42 second video can be found here.

"Pirate Hunters: USN"

Spike TV has announced the forthcoming pilot of a new series called "Pirate Hunters: USN," calling the timing "serendipitous," while others wonder when this week's drama will hit the silver screen. According to E! Online:

Pirate Hunters promises an "up-close and behind-the-scenes" look at the buccaneer-combating Navy operations on two warships, the USS San Antonio and USS Boxer-the same assault ship Phillips was taken to immediately after his rescue. The show will be set in the Gulf of Aden in the open waters off the coast of Djibouti, bordering Somalia and Ethiopia.

Apparently the public can't get enough of pirates, even in their scary modern guise.

Now what? The struggle to re-define "pirate" through policy responses

President Obama has vowed to "halt the rise of piracy" a day after he authorized the use of deadly force by Navy SEALS against the pirates who were holding Captain Richard Phillips hostage. Obama's rhetoric focused on the attacks themselves and bringing pirates to justice:

"And to achieve that goal, we’re going to have to continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks. We have to continue to be prepared to confront them when they arise. And we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes.”

Congressman Donald Payne, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa (and whose plane was shot at as he left Mogadishu earlier today), and Senator Russ Feingold, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, emphasized development-oriented solutions:

“For years, Somalia’s growing instability was neglected by the Bush administration and the international community,” Mr. Feingold said in a statement. “The new administration must not make the same mistake.”

This past week's pirate attack has renewed the debate about whether to arm crews of commercial vessels (the New York Times has a good balanced summary of that debate) and has inspired some, like Fred Ikle of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to call for much harsher responses to piracy. This sense of outrage and desire for a more forceful and violent response is echoed in New York Times readers' proposed anti-piracy solutions, the tone of which can be sensed in post titles such as the following:

Attack Pirate Coves
Send In the Subs
Hang the Ones You Capture
Detonate a Dolphin, and Save Somalia
How About Ray Guns?
Please, No Jimmy Carter Solutions

[A notable exception to this theme is the following proposal which suggests that cultural representations of piracy are never that far away:

Keira, We Need You
Who isn’t enjoying this spectacle of the world’s mightiest military (you know, the one purchased with trillions of borrowed non-existent bankrupt U.S. dollars) having to call up and ask, “Uh, hello? I was sort of hoping that you might consider maybe letting our boy from Vermont swim ashore, and we’ll throw in Keira Knightley and a yo ho ho bottle or rum.”]

Numerous other commentators, including Greg Scoblete, Alexander Benard, and (questionably) Jennifer Rubin have spoken up in favor of a stronger military response. Elizabeth Dickinson at Foreign Policy outlines why military escalation would be an ill-informed, ineffective, and dangerous response to piracy. John Boostra at the UN Dispatch agrees and says that:

treating pirates as "criminals" -- and in fact taking seriously the grievances of at least the original fishermen-cum-vigilante-pirates (namely, the illegal fishing and toxic dumping that engendered the whole viable life-as-pirate thing) -- is in fact the appropriate thing to do.

Boostra also calls for a multilateral response, noting that:

This is something that affects every country that sends a ship through or around the Gulf of Aden. It only makes sense to pool these countries' collective resources and wisdom and address the problem together. Going solo on this one will just endanger the lives of real and potential hostages, undermine the efficacy of the whole project, and unduly antagonize the strange bedfellows of allies (read: NATO, EU, Russia, China, etc.) that piracy has brought together.

Also in the vein of (a completely different branch of) IR liberalism, Peter Leeson's solution is to privatize the Gulf of Aden by selling its waters to private companies, though it's unclear how these corporations would be any better equipped to counter piracy than governments, even if they did have a greater incentive to do so. Certainly this solution, like most of those put forth, would do nothing to address the root causes of piracy, to the extent that the companies who would have the resources to buy these waters are the ones the pirates claim are exploiting the waters.

There has also been a noticeable upswing in the number of headlines and op-eds linking pirates and Islamic terrorists. Al Shabab, a Somali militant group with alleged ties to al Qaeda, praised the pirates for "protecting the Somali coast" and this had led to much speculation about more substantive ties. This can be seen in articles such as "Will pirates join forces with Islamist militias in Somalia?" in the Christian Science Monitor; "Somali pirates are natural allies of radical Islam" by Claude Salhani, editor of the Middle East Times; and in Fred Ikle's assertion in the Washington Post that "Terrorists are far more brutal than pirates and can easily force pirates -- petty thieves in comparison -- to share their ransom money. " This rhetorical tendency is significant, as piracy (as a form of organized crime) and terrorism trigger very different policy responses concerning the use of force.

More News on the Captain's Rescue

Update (4/13/09): The Washington Post describes how, after one pirate gave himself up, the USS Bainbridge had begun towing the lifeboat further out to sea, and the remaining three threatened to kill Capt. Phillips, Navy SEAL snipers shot the pirates on the lifeboat, clearing the way for a rescue.

The New York Times just released the following story with a more detailed account of Captain Richard Phillips's rescue:

Richard Phillips, the captain of an American cargo ship held hostage by four armed Somali pirates, was freed on Sunday after more than 100 hours held at sea, according to a statement released by his shipping company.

Andrea Phillips holds a photo of her husband, Richard Phillips, captain of the U.S.-flagged cargo ship Maersk Alabama.

“Maersk Line, Limited was informed by the U.S. government at 1330 EDT today that Captain Richard Phillips has been rescued,” the statement read. “John Reinhart, President and Chief Executive Officer of Maersk Line, Limited, called Captain Phillips’ wife, Andrea, to tell her the good news. The crew of the Maersk Alabama was jubilant when they received word.”

Mr. Phillips was rescued and placed aboard the U.S.S. Bainbridge, CNN reported. He was then flown by helicopter to the U.S.S. Boxer. He has contacted his family and has received a routine medical examination.

“We are all absolutely thrilled to learn that Richard is safe and will be re-united with his family,” Mr. Reinhart added in the statement. “Maersk Line, Limited is deeply grateful to the Navy, the F.B.I. and so many others for their tireless efforts to secure Richard’s freedom..”

Only three pirates were in the boat because one had surrendered early this morning, according to a maritime official who had been monitoring the situation and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The United States fired warning shots Saturday night, followed by a brief exchange of fire. One pirate was either injured or scared, jumped off the boat and surrendered to the United States to the Bainbridge. The justice department will be reviewing evidence to decide whether the surviving pirate, a Justice Department official told CNN.

Just after dark in Somalia, three pirates shot and killed, according to the maritime official. More than 250 hostages being held by various Somalian pirate groups.

Initial reports from CNN said that Mr. Phillips jumped overboard just before the shootout between his captors and Navy Seals ensued near northeastern Somalia. Three of the pirates were killed, according to reports, and one is currently being held in custody. CNN reported that the surviving pirate had been negotiating with American officials.

Citing an anonymous source, the Associated Press said that Mr. Phillips was not injured in the gun battle and that he has been moved to a nearby Navy vessel.

According to CNN, Mr. Phillips’s family said that he had been free for several hours, long before the media learned of his release early Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Reinhart will hold a media briefing in Norfolk, Va., later on Sunday.

The pirates — demanding $2 million in ransom — seized Mr. Phillips on Wednesday and escaped the cargo ship in a motorized lifeboat.

A standoff between the pirates and the United States Navy then ensued until Saturday when negotiations between American officials and the pirates broke down, according to Somali officials, after the Americans insisted that the pirates be arrested and a group of elders representing the pirates refused.

The negotiations broke down hours after the pirates fired on a small United States Navy vessel that had tried to approach the lifeboat not long after sunrise Saturday in the Indian Ocean.

The cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton cargo vessel, pulled into port at 8:30 Saturday evening in Mombasa, Kenya, with its 19 remaining American crew members.

When the crew members heard that their captain had been freed, they placed an American flag over the rail of the top of the ship. They whistled and pumped their fists in the air, The Associated Press reported.

On Saturday, a group of Somali elders from Gara’ad, mediating on behalf of the pirates, spoke by satellite phone to American officials, according to Abdul Aziz Aw Mahamoud, a district commissioner in the semiautonomous region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia. The elders proposed a deal in which the pirates would release Captain Phillips, with no ransom paid, and that the pirates would then be allowed to escape.But Mr. Abdul Aziz said that the Americans insisted that the pirates be handed over to Puntland authorities, and the elders refused. By noon local time, the Americans cut off communications with the elders, he said.

Puntland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Faroole, said that he was working closely with American officials to free the captain and “we’re really concerned about the recent attacks.”

“We’re committed to reorganizing our security forces,” he said. "We want to do more to crack down on piracy.”

The interesting debate will now be where and how the captured pirate will be tried. This type of decision has been an ongoing issue for countries who do manage to capture Somali pirates, as can be evidenced by Germany's decision to hand over the seven pirates they captured to Kenya for trial. Stay tuned for more news on the situation!

Blood wins out over Treasure in pirate stand-off

After talks with Somali leaders in Puntland broke down earlier today over the issue of arresting the pirates, the AP is reporting that:

An American ship captain was freed unharmed Sunday in a swift firefight that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, the ship's owner said. A senior U.S. intelligence official said a pirate who had been involved in negotiations to free Capt. Richard Phillips but who was not on the lifeboat was in custody.

A good explanation of why pirates are not terrorists

Commander John Patch, US Navy (ret.), clearly articulates why pirates are not terrorists in a recent article for Proceedings. He points out that:

The distinction between piracy and terrorism is neither semantic nor academic. If piracy, the responsibility lies with local law enforcement officials, not the military. But maritime terrorism means scrambling the Navy.

And concludes that:

In this context, more U.S. anti-piracy options emerge—including no military response at all. America has long championed freedom of the seas, but it is perchance time that the many flag states and private companies enjoying the benefits of the global maritime commons contribute to the costs of keeping it secure. Because the U.S. Navy lacks the resources to effectively accomplish even a fraction of its assigned missions, treating piracy for what it is—criminal activity—should lessen the demands on an already overtaxed American Fleet.

Refuting Peter Leeson's Apology, or, Why it's not ok to praise pirates

In a recent NPR segment, Peter Leeson, author of "An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization," states that "we shouldn't let our condemnation of modern pirates spill over, unchecked, onto their more colorful, and socially contributory, early 18th-century forefathers." He goes on to detail how Caribbean pirates had written constitutions that "established democratic governance for their roguish commonwealths," provided a rudimentary social welfare system, and "embraced racial tolerance." Leeson concludes with a defense of contemporary pirate fetishization:

Modern pirates can't lay claim to helping pioneer liberty, democracy and equality. But early 18th-century pirates can. In this way, historical sea scoundrels contributed something to the world worth as much as, and possibly even more than, what they took out. So go ahead, say "arrgh!," "avast!" and "shiver me timbers" without guilt. It's OK to impersonate, and even praise, pirates.

Leeson's pirate apology is factually inaccurate, absurd, and troubling. Here's my rebuttal:

1. The evidence for Leeson's claims about piratical constitutional democracy is Daniel Defoe's A General History of the Pyrates. While it is true that Defoe describes a written constitution with many of the principles Leeson says, this was a constitution for one group of pirates (those under Captain Roberts), and most significantly, Defoe himself follows up his ennumeration of the articles with this statement that scarcely suggests liberal democratic governance:

These, we are assured, were some of Roberts's Articles, but as they had taken Care to throw over-board the Original they had sign'd and sworn to, there is a great deal of Room to suspect, the remainder contained something too horrid to be disclosed to any, except such as were willing to be Sharers in the Iniquity of them ... (233)

2. Leeson's hand-picking of evidence to suit his case continues unabated with his claim about racial equality. There are numerous accounts of pirates being involved with the slave trade which suggest that pirates pursued the policies they did solely out of economic motivations -- not out of an overriding concern for equality. In The African slave trade and its remedy (1840), Thomas Fowell Buxton describes the Fama de Cadiz, a pirate ship whose plunder consisted of "about 980 slaves" (pg. 130-131). Defoe himself writes that while Robert's pirates did not engage in the slave trade, this was only because they were not brave enough, not out of concerns for equality and justice:

From these casual Observations on the Country, the Towns, Coast, and Seas of Brasil, it would be an Omission to leave the Subject, without some Essay on an inter loping Slave Trade here, which none of our Countrymen are adventrous enough to pursue, though it very probably, under a prudent Manager, would be attended with Safety and very great Profit (218)

3. Leeson's narrative completely ignores the externalities of piratical democracy. Even if we grant that some pirates may have had limited forms of democratic governance, this did not make them the peaceful, freedom-loving bands of hooligans Leeson suggests. In Empire of the Blue Water, Stephen Talty desribes how Captain Henry Morgan had to emulate the savage cruelty of Francis L'Ollonais in order to command respect. The French pirates deserted Morgan for L'Ollonais after Morgan failed to torture four captives from Puerto del Principe (which would have allowed more time to raise their ransom). Talty writes:

Morgan's reputation, his future as the admiral of the Brethern, was at stake ... Morgan would say that the Gallic pirates 'wholly refused to join in an action so full of danger,' but danger was never the point; it was leadership. L'Ollonais represented the pirate code at its most extreme, but Morgan could not afford to ignore his methods. The privateers would sail with whoever found them the most gold, and L'Ollonais was a rising star who was making his boys rich. Morgan would have to meld his ideas with those of a ruthless killer if he were to avoid another embarrassment. (90-91)

Talty goes on to cite Alexander Exquemelin's description of L'Ollonais' cruelty (cutting out tongues, using torture racks) and concludes that "The picture that emerges from many accounts is of new recruits lured by tales of riches and freedom, slowly being molded by peer pressure and constant alcohol intake until they succumbed to what might be called the culture of piracy and grew as savage as their mentors" (95). The point here is even if pirate leaders were utterly enlightened and benovolent towards their own men,* that fact becomes stunningly irrelevant when we consider how they behaved towards non-pirates.

*And in "An-arrgh-chy," Leeson himself concedes that this was not the case: In this sense, pirates exercised greater cruelty in maintaining discipline among themselves than in their treatment of prisoners" (1075).

4. Leeson presents absolutely no evidence for a causal link between pirates' constitutional democracies and American constitutional democracy. In "An-arrgh-chy," Leeson takes great pains to prove that checks and balances on pirate ships predated "legitimate" forms of balanced government (1066-1067), but nothing in the article says that states consciously or unconsciously drew upon this legacy in writing their own constitution. Indeed, to suggest this is true is a preposterous case for Leeson to make, given the hatred with which early modern states viewed piracy. In particular, as the media has been fond of reporting over this week, one of the first (and formative) military actions of the newly-created United States of America was to wage war on the Barbary pirates.

5. To suggest that 18th century pirates were "harbingers of some of contemporary civilization's most cherished values, such as liberty, democracy and social safety" is untrue and absurd. It ignores historical accounts, assumes causal links, and ultimately condones illegal non-state violence. When he says that "historical sea scoundrels contributed something to the world worth as much as, and possibly even more than, what they took out," Leeson is saying that rape, murder, and robbery (all documented piratical acts) are acceptable if done under the auspices of a quasi-democratic leadership. The implications of Leeson's apology are immensely troubling, particularly to a nation that prides itself on the promotion of democratic values. It is, quite simply, not ok to praise pirates.