Did you just walk out of The Pirates of Penzance?

Last night, my keen sense of duty overcame any general lack of enthusiasm for musical theater that I may occasionally express, and I went (with catlike tread) to see the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players perform The Pirates of Penzance at Wolf Trap. It was quite fun to see it performed live with great gusto, good humor, strong voices, and a few updated jokes for the DC crowd. According to my thoroughly unscientific survey of the crowd on the lawn, there was at least one large group of people in full pirate dress and several spectators sporting pirate hats and skull-and-crossbones head scarves, which, in addition to to full house, indicates pirates are as popular as they were in 1879.

David Cordingly, author of Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, notes that the operetta is a deliberate parody of Victorian-era melodramas featuring pirates as villains who terrorize the sea and discusses Penzance's influential role in shaping contemporary images of pirates:

The story is sheer nonsense and revolves around the mistake made by Ruth, "a pirate maid of all work," when she apprentices Frederick [sic], the hero, to a pirate instead of a pilot. The pirates themselves are as genial and ineffective as the policemen who are sent to catch them, but a complicated plot ends happily with Frederick marrying the Major-General's pretty daughter, Mabel, and the pirates revealed as patriotic noblemen who will no more go a-pirating. In spite of its lighthearted approach to the subject, The Pirates of Penzance has had a considerable influence on the way many people view pirates today. For more than a hundred years it has been performed by amateur and professional companies around the world, and its cast of hearty and good-natured fellows have contributed to the illusion that pirates were really misunderstood ruffians who never meant to harm anyone. (25)

Whether because of its piratical theme or the influential (and G-rated) wit of Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance has clearly endured better than the melodramas it set out to parody; The West Wing, for example, would not have had much luck working The Red Rover, or The Mutiny of the Dolphin (which was immensely popular in 1829, though described by one critic as "arrant trash") into its scripting, though it had no such trouble with Gilbert and Sullivan's works in "And it's surely to their credit."


And, given its longevity and silliness, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Pirates of Penzance has itself become the object of parody (and subject to the same confusion with H.M.S. Pinafore -- "they're all about duty") by none other than the Animaniacs in "H.M.S. Yakko."

Piracy hits the suburbs

From this week's New Yorker magazine:

Oh, the other kind of RPG

With contemporary piracy still very much in the news (though bad weather may change that) and insurgents in Mogadishu further tearing apart the minimal trappings of Somali state authority while threatening to turn the country into a proxy war for Ethiopia and Eritrea, the popularity of pirates continues unabated. Given stories like this one:



it is not surprising that my first thought upon reading a headline about pirates and RPG's went to weapons technology and not entertainment. However, it appears that Disney has announced the creation of a role-playing game (RPG) called Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned that they will release in 2010. The game seeks to capitalize on the popularity of the movies and (one assumes) on the recent upswing in piracy news, but according to Game Director Alex Peters, the idealization of individual liberty associated with pirate identity is also an important part of the game:

[W]e want to make sure our game creates a sense a freedom in how you decide to live your pirate life ... Since the player is cast in the role of a pirate, they may choose to involve themselves in situations that pique their interest or serve their own purposes.*

The game is not aiming for historical accuracy, but it does acknowledge the moral ambiguity of piracy, the prevailing economic conditions, the historic distribution of state power in the Caribbean (or lack thereof), and the importance of a pirate ship's crew.

In an even more explicit Hollywood connection, Columbia Pictures acquired the rights to the story of Captain Richard Phillip's capture by Somali pirates and subsequent rescue by US Navy SEALS (answering a question posed on the Duck of Minerva and discussed here a couple times in the past month). Here's a brief statment about how Columbia Pictures plans to narrate the story:

"We were drawn to this remarkable story of heroism and courage as events were unfolding off the coast of Africa," Doug Belgard, co-president of Columbia Pictures, said in a statement.

This suggests that the Somali pirates will be cast fairly unambiguously (and unsurprisingly) as the bad guys, in stark contrast with their role in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, highlighting the gap between perceptions of contemporary pirates and portrayals of historic ones.

Finally -- because pirates are still kid-friendly --LEGO has a new pirate ship set out, reviewed by John Baichtal at Wired. He thinks the set's pretty great (and with good reason -- this LEGO pirate ship actually lets you fire cannon balls!), but can't help noting how it fits into the greater construction of piratical identity:

Speaking of soldiers, like many LEGO sets, Brickbeard’s Bounty comes with a readymade conflict. The cartoon storyline depicted in the instructions shows a pair of hapless soldiers arriving in a rowboat with a chest full of gold and jewels, which they give to the pirates in exchange for the Admiral’s daughter. Any question who the real stars of the line are? (And does anyone else find it ironic that LEGO is selling a toy that shows authorities ransoming a hostage from a group of pirates?)

Yes. Yes, they do. Competing and dynamic narratives of piracy are the essence (eeps!) of this project, though, so more than ironic, I find it a fascinating puzzle.

*I'll have more on libertarianism and pirates in a future post.

Descending from the heights, Part the Third

(Are you really going to post about every academic source you can find that legitimates the use of pop culture in IR research? Yeah, probably. It's very exciting!) From Lene Hansen's Security as Practice: Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War:

Analysis investigates whether popular representations reproduce or contest those of official discourse and how representations travel between the spheres of entertainment and politics (Shapiro 1990, 1997). Studies of popular culture include film, fiction, television, computer games, photography, and comic books. It analyzes, for instance, how a particular region, country, or people is cinematically represented (Iordanova, 2001) or how espionage is treated within popular fiction (Der Derian 1992) ... Poststructuralist analysis has often focused on popular culture, but analyses of 'high culture' might be equally valid (and the definition of 'popular' should be extensive and historically situated) in showing, for example, how music, poetry, painting, architecture, and literature have been employed in constructing national and civilizational identities. Travel writing in particular has been an important genre for communicating the construction of 'foreign places and people' to the Western public since the eighteenth century and has been employed by a large variety of professions: by merchants or emissaries; pirates and buccaneers; missionaries; explorers; warriors and Spanish Conquistadores; ambassadors; scientists (botanists and geologists) and engineers; and not least, tourists ... (62-63)

Indeed. Having begun to expand our reading list into the realm of secondary source pirate-related material, Catherine and I have observed that Alexander Exquemelin's 1678 Buccaneers of America (check out this interactive version on the Library of Congress's website) fulfills precisely the role that Hansen talks about. Essentially a very early piece of first-hand travel writing, Exquemelin's book (along with Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates) has -- often explicitly -- informed many, many works on pirates that came after it, including contemporary sources like Benerson Little's The Buccaneer's Realm: Pirate Life on the Spanish Main 1674-1688 and Stephen Talty's Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign.
We're not prepared to assert the direct sort of links Hansen talks about here:

Adopting these guidelines calls forth a variety of genres: from direct links to popular culture, as in the influence of Tom Clancy's novels on Vice President Quayle and Secretary of Defense Weinberger (Der Derian 1992: 195), to secondary sources creating stories of influence, as when John F. Kennedy was said to have been heavily influenced during the Cuban Missile Crisis by Barbara Tuchman's account of the outbreak of World War I in Guns of August (Der Derian 1992: 174), or popular academic works such as Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, which was reported as being 'fashionable in America's foreign policy establishment' (Walker 1997c) (62).

Certainly, tracing the genealogy of modern conceptions of pirates requires a few more steps than the direct influence of Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts on Clinton's foreign policy in the Balkans, but we look forward to looking at how we got from Exquemelin's hair-raising eye-witness accounts of 17th century piracy to Vice Admiral William Gortney, Commander of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, naming his dog Captain Jack Sparrow. And with President Obama referencing Treasure Island in an (albeit light-hearted) discussion of Somali piracy, it's hard not to accept, on some level, Hansen's points about the mutually constitutive nature of identity and policy.

And who be Elmo? Pirates set sail on Sesame Street

Having just purchased Daniel Sekulich's Terror on the Seas: True Tales of Modern-Day Pirates, now at home on the "contemporary piracy" shelf next to John S. Burnett's Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas (I could mock the the formulaic tendencies of these titles too), it's easy to forget the comically romanticized image of pirates that sparked this project in the first place. However, as Tina Fey's portrayal of a pirate on Sesame Street demonstrates, the defanged image of pirates is alive, well, and teaching Elmo about books:



Nobody's accusing Sesame Street of being out of touch with scary realities (quite the opposite, in fact), but these cuddly Muppet pirates are, to mix nautical metaphors, 20,000 leagues away from the pirates in Sekulich's book. And yet, the possibility and success of both depictions depend, in a sense, on the same popular perception of pirates' "cool factor." This fairly incredible gap between puppets for the preschool crowd and terrorist references for browsers of the military history section of Borders Books points not only to the continued and broad-based popularity of pirates, but also to the sheer absurdity of treating "pirate" as an easily definable term that refers to a static empiric entity.

Romulan pirates?

I am absolutely unqualified to discuss anything Star Trek-related and am thus hesitant to even write about this, but I would like to briefly comment on the pirate-Romulan connection as described by Clifton Collins Jr. in an interview with E! Online:

Collins said his and Bana's Romulan look could have been somewhat inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean. “We’re space pirates,” Collins explained. “Think of Johnny Depp as a Romulan."

Having seen (and thoroughly enjoyed) the movie, I'm pretty sure the comparison with Captain Jack Sparrow only works at the most superficial (read, tattooed) level, since the film's depiction of the Romulans left little doubt that they were the bad guys. In contemporary narrative, pirates - especially the Johnny Depp kind - tend to be charming rule-breakers whose life on the margins of society is seen as bold repudiation of the oppressive cultural or governmental status quo. The film's Captain Kirk (at least back in Iowa) actually fulfilled that particular archetype better than Captain Nero did.

Nor is a comparison with the unromanticized version of "real" piracy particularly apt. It might be tempting to compare the destruction of the Romulans' planet with the overfishing and environmental degradation in the Gulf of Aden, but while the Somali pirates are narrated as having been driven to economic desperation, Nero's motive is purely revenge. Some Somali pirates, like Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, have demonstrated their willingness to surrender in exchange for foreign help and a group of 200 pirates renounced piracy in exchange for amnesty ; Nero fiddled while the Narada burned.

A quick Google search on the subject reveals that this is not the first comparison between Romulans and pirates in the Star Trek universe, however. In particular, the prohibition and smuggling of Romulan ale (I Wikipedia-ed this) provides a nice comparison with Carribbean pirates and their rum.

The horror!

We're wholeheartedly in favor of scholarly work on pirates and we're definitely intrigued by Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (discussed tangentially here), but this trailer for the book, produced by Princeton University Press, shows the dangers of carrying the pirate theme too far...



Basically this is what we're trying to avoid doing with our project.

A(nother) Disney movie in the making

First there was speculation over the Hollywood-esque rescue of Captain Phillips, then the announcement of the Spike TV series, then Samuel L. Jackson's Somali pirate movie. Now, from NPR's All Things Considered, comes this extraordinary and heartwarming story of an unlikely friendship between a Danish shipping executive and a Somali pirate negotiator, forged over phone and e-mail, and cemented with the gift of three baby camels. Humanizes pirates like never before! A fascinating glimpse inside the lives of those driven to desperation! Two thumbs up! (You can listen to the full version of what is actually an interesting and well-reported story here.)

They dropped the money for the pirates from a helicopter on a Friday morning. Shipping executive Per Gullestrup's crew was released and headed home. The pirates, in the Gulf of Aden, headed off.

But the next morning, Gullestrup was in his kitchen in Copenhagen when his cell phone rang. The caller was "Mr. Ali," the pirate negotiator who says he is known on dry land as Ali Mohammed. "When he got ashore and got back to his home in Somaliland and he called me, initially, funnily enough, it was almost a courtesy call," says Gullestrup, CEO of the Clipper Group. "He just wanted to say he'd gotten back home."

That surprising call marked another step in an unusual working relationship, between a bargainer for pirates demanding a $7 million ransom and the businessperson trying to save sailors' lives. "We started talking because I was curious about the inner working of the system ... and he was very forthcoming with that," Gullestrup says.

Over the course of their conversations, Gullestrup asked about the pirates' thinking when they lowered the ransom figure. Gullestrup won't say exactly how much the company paid, only that it was between $1 million and $2 million.

For his part, Mohammed says he was curious about the shipping company's bargaining strategy, and that the men have continued to e-mail back and forth — two or three times a day.

"We talk about the issues of piracy or this or that," Mohammed says.

Their experience speaks to business negotiations everywhere, which leave the parties not necessarily as adversaries. Gullestrup is operating in circumstances where he is essentially on his own. He can't expect military help when and where he needs it.

Pirates, meanwhile, are colluding, sharing intelligence in an unregulated environment. Economists would say the dynamic centers on market power. The situation makes it hard for a shipper like Gullestrup to figure out the market rate for ransom.

"The owners are escalating the ransom payments because they're not coordinating how to deal with pirates," Gullestrup says. "The pirates are extremely good at sharing information. We know for a fact from Ali the pirates have piracy workshops. Pirates of various clans, [their] elders are getting together and they will exchange information."

Mohammed says he gets something out of the relationship, too. He doesn't see himself as a pirate. He says he agreed to negotiate for pirates so he could learn enough about their business to start his own.

"If I become an expert on piracy and try to milk that, I think it is a legit business," he says. "The news media and global news media will need someone who is going to be an authority, to report from the inner feelings of a pirate, and to report whether pirates are going to stay around for a long time or not, and how to eliminate piracy."

Gullestrup sounds satisfied with that arrangement. "We tried to help him by giving him credentials as an expert in piracy locally, and he's trying to establish himself as a piracy consultant. It's a quid pro quo," he says. "It's not like we're bosom buddies. It's a business relationship."

The executive expresses a certain appreciation for Mohammed's character. "He's a very kind person, and he has a wife and a son," Gullestrup says. "He has a large herd of camels. He sent me an e-mail that said he allocated three camel babies to me, for which I'm honored."

Mohammed called the gift a good gesture. "It's those little things that count."

Obama's Naval Academy Commencement Address

Mostly because I really, really want President Obama to give the American University School of International Service commencement address in 2011 (and am therefore wholly in favor of linkages like this one), I've been paying close attention to Obama's commencement speeches this year, including today's address to the United States Naval Academy (full transcript available here). I actually liked the Notre Dame speech better because I thought its acknowledgment that, while some differences are irreconcilable, this recognition does not mean we should either eliminate differences in belief or default to absolute relativism but rather pursue our divergent beliefs "fair-mindedly" demonstrated an admirably sophisticated take on what Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney call the "problem of difference." Today's speech, however, was more relevant to the pirate project, ending as it did with the following narrative of the Navy snipers' rescue of Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is hardly the first time the president has publicly discussed piracy, however. I didn't write about it at the time, coming, as it did, in the flurry of final paper writing, but the White House Correspondents' Dinner included a pirate joke that made it clear that pirates are still a source of humor, even at the highest levels of government (go to 8:22):

Pirates sell crunchy snacks!

Today as I was Wikipedia-ing Pirate's Booty snack puffs*, I happened upon this extraordinary article from Fortune Small Business Magazine analyzing the marketing potential of the delicious snack's pirate mascot:

According to the pros at Character product mascots succeed when they embody a brand's inherent conflict. In the case of Robert's, founded in 1986 by ex-commodities trader Robert Ehrlich, with about $50 million a year in sales, the conflict is snack food that's fun to eat but is also good for you. (Its all-natural ingredients include spinach and kale.) Even the product names' Veggie Booty, Smart Puffs, and Nude Food combine these traits: healthy food that feels indulgent.

Robert's uses dozens of mascots, including a pilot, Sigmund Freud, and a mischievous-looking pirate on its signature product, Pirate's Booty. "These are characters who refused to accept the standard way of doing things, either by pioneering revolutionary approaches or by living outside the normal rules of society," explains Jim Hardison, creative director at Character.

The drawings are based on Ehrlich (except the Einstein-ish character on Smart Puffs, inspired by his father, Mel), but Hardison says the style of drawing is irreverent, fun is more important than the specific individuals shown. Here, Hardison's analysis of the pirate:

• The character's eye is drawn in a way that tracks when you look at it, creating a connection with buyers. A concerned eyebrow and smile makes him mischievous, not evil or dangerous.
• The cartooniness of the pirate supports that too, in that a realistic pirate is a dark, negative character who breaks laws. This is just transgressive enough to be fun without being threatening.
• As Ehrlich expands overseas, he may want to replace the mascot in certain locales (such as the Caribbean, which was repeatedly plundered by pirates).

* When I told this story to Catherine earlier she expressed a bit of confusion over why I was Wikipedia-ing my snack food. Basically, I Wikipedia everything. You can learn a lot by doing this. QED.

Ummm...Ok...?

A recent post on the US Naval Institute's blog left me feeling vaguely confused as to the significance of the following story:

Pirate training in USSR? - A RETIRED rear admiral of the Soviet navy reportedly admitted today that some Somali pirates had been trained at USSR naval academies.

Sergey Bliznyuk told the Ukrainian newspaper Gazeta Po-Kievskiy that he had personally come across some men he now believes are behind many hijackings.

“There are many former military men among the Somalis who have perfected the tactics of sea combat,” he said. “The majority of these 40-50-year-olds were trained in the former Soviet Union.

“I myself taught at one point at a school in Baku [Azerbaijan], where we had 70-80 Somalis a year studying.”

Bliznyuk told the newspaper that Soviet officers had trained naval personnel from the government of President Siad Barre, who ruled Somalia in 1969-91 after a military coup.

Further, Bliznyuk told the newspaper: “The USSR taught not only Somali natives but also those of Yemen, Ethiopia and others. Who would have assumed then that they would turn against us?”

The notion of professionally trained seafarers turning pirates is not an isolated concern: at least one security company trained Puntland coastguards before Somalia’s government collapsed some years ago.

I think by now most of us already know that Somalia was a client state of the USSR way back in the Cold War, and we also know that as a result the Soviets did in fact equip and train the Somali navy. OK, so yes, there are many Somalis who have received training on Soviet-era ships and weaponry.

But, there are some more things that we already know, such as the fact that those boats from the 1970s are so old and decrepit that they can't function anymore, and that when the Soviet Union went down, Somalia's own government followed shortly thereafter. With no functioning naval vessels, let alone a central government to command them, all of those Soviet trained Somali men who were formally members of Somalia's navy and coast guard were left unemployed and seeking new avenues to pursue income through. Throw in some illegal fishing in Somalia's exclusive economic zone, and one of the world's most heavily traveled shipping lanes right off the coast, and ta da...piracy! I feel a little like I've already heard this explanation for piracy in ways that articulated the issue less as a soviet conspiracy and more as a natural result of Somalia's lack of government.

Maybe we should be focusing less on the fact that some of the pirates may have received Soviet training, and turn our attention instead to the root causes of piracy, which are also partially grounded in the Cold War...just a thought...

Madlibs: IR Theory edition

I wanted to call this post "[Verb]ing [International/National/World] [Relations/Interests/Politics]: [Subtitle involving {not more than three of the following: identity, argument, idea, power, ethics, politics, change, discourse, crisis, community, rhetoric, practice} or {a specific historical event}]" but it was way too long for the little box where you type the title of your post. One day, I'll make a chart like this one for how to title your work of constructivist IR scholarship.

As vaguely promised earlier, here is our current reading list. Snarkiness about titles aside, these books and articles are generally very thought-provoking and do an excellent job questioning many received understandings of international relations, both empirically and theoretically. While not directly pirate-related, they are helping us figure out where we fit in what Catherine calls the incestuous little constructivist family. Without further ado and in no particular order:

• Ordering International Politics: Identity, crisis, and representational force (Janice Bially Mattern)
• Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Jutta Weldes)
• Making Sense of International Relations Theory (Jennifer Sterling-Folker)
• "Twisting tongues and twisting arms: the power of political rhetoric" (Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson)
• Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, decolonization and humanitarian intervention (Neta Crawford)
• Security as Practice: Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War (Lene Hansen)
• Identity, Interest and Action: A cultural explanation of Sweden's intervention in the Thirty Years War (Erik Ringmar)
• The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an anti-whaling discourse (Charlotte Epstein)
• The Empire of Civilization: The evolution of an imperial idea (Brett Bowden)
• Stories, Identities, and Political Change (Charles Tilly)
• The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Quentin Skinner)
• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Benedict Anderson)
• The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Reinhart Koselleck)
• Wired for War: The robotics revolution and conflict in the 21st century (P.W. Singer)
• Harry Potter and International Relations (Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann)
• "Anarchy is what states make of it" (Alexander Wendt)

We're definitely open to suggestions for further readings along these lines, if you have them, though time constraints being what they are, we of course cannot promise to read them.

Descending Even Further...

As Erin and I have begun wading into the pool of constructivist theory that we need to explore before starting on the pirate-y part of our pirate research, we've been rather surprised to see what an incestuous little family we've stumbled into. It's been fun, and vastly interesting to see who keeps citing whom and which scholars invariably end up in the acknowledgment section of everyone's books. One great example relates to Erin's last post about Jutta Weldes's fabulous quote on the importance of studying popular culture. This morning, I began reading the Harry Potter and International Relations book, edited by Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann. (On a brief side note, as someone who dearly loves Harry Potter, I am totally reading this one all the way through for fun as much as research!). Jutta Weldes herself is mentioned in the acknowledgments section, but the best part is that the introduction contains a slightly more accessible version of her quote on popular culture that Erin just brought to our attention:

International-relations theorists often neglect second-order representations. They also view first-order representations as relatively unproblematic expressions of the "facts" of international politics. The speeches and debates of political elites are often the "stuff" of our investigations, whereas we usually treat books, films, and television as afterthoughts or indirect commentary on political events. For many purposes, there is nothing wrong with this mode of analyzing the social world. At the same time, both speeches and television dramas are representations of social life, and they interact with one another in a variety of important ways. We need to keep in mind that, for many people, second-order representations are often more significant sources of knowledge about politics and society. Popular entertainment not only commands a larger audience than the news or political events, but it frequently has a more powerful impact on the way audiences come to their basic assumptions about the world. (pg. 7-8)

Descending from the heights

Conducting research on something as, well, popular as pirates makes you somewhat inclined to go on the defensive as to the seriousness of your research and its importance to the study of "actual" international relations. So this concluding passage from Jutta Weldes' fascinating Constructing National Interests:The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis provided some welcome theoretical validation for what we're up to this summer:

Recognizing the constitutive character of common sense, in turn, opens up a variety of other possible domains of inquiry that have often been overlooked in our attempts better to understand world politics. One such domain, I would argue, is popular culture. Students of international relations have rarely descended from the heights of interstate interaction to analyze the everyday cultural conditions that make particular state actions possible and that render them sensible to wider publics. But as I have suggested, these mundane cultural conditions are integral to rather than irrelevant for state action. It matters deeply that U.S. state actors are able to interpret and to define world politics in ways that at least significant portions of the U.S. population, and other audiences, find plausible and persuasive. The reproduction of common sense, and specifically of the grounds upon which particular representations are constructed and make sense, however, cannot be restricted to the representational practices of state actors. On the contrary, those representations are made sensible in no small part precisely because they fit with the constructions of the world and its workings into which diverse populations are hailed in their everyday lives. Representing world politics is not an unusual or extraordinary activity; rather, it is a relentlessly mundane and commonplace one. A key site at which that representation takes place, then, is in popular culture, in the everyday practices of meaning making that structure the quotidien. Perhaps it is time we devoted a little less attention to the doings of state actors and instead devoted a little more to the “silent” masses in whose name they claim to speak. (241-242)

In Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, P.W. Singer has a similar, though (necessarily?) somewhat less academic, justification for the importance of popular culture as a site of research:

[T]his is how people process information most efficiently. Humankind has long best understood and digested things that new by flavoring them with stories of personal experience ("There was this one time, in band camp, where we...") as well as by allusions to what is already culturally familiar, especially icons, symbols, and metaphors ("It's just like when..."). And, whether we like it or not, our twenty-first century folklore is that of the popular movies, TV shows, music, gadgets, and books that shaped us growing up. (15)

On the subject of language ...

Because at its heart, the pirate project is really about language. And because this is hilarious:



"So for you, language is more than just a means of communication ..."

Somali pirate called "Robin Hood"

From the AP, here's another way in which we try to fit contemporary pirates into our existing narratives:

A lawyer for one of five suspected Somali pirates being prosecuted in the Netherlands described his client Monday as a modern-day Robin Hood driven by poverty to hijack ships.

Danish Navy sailors captured the men after a Jan. 2 attack on the cargo ship Samanyulo in the Gulf of Aden. The ship's crew fended off the pirates with signal flares until the Danish naval ship came to the rescue and sank the pirates' boat ...

At a pretrial hearing in a heavily guarded court in Rotterdam, lawyer Willem Jan Ausma called his client, Ahmed Yusuf, a "Robin Hood."

Speaking to reporters outside court, he said pirates "attack ships of rich countries to give the ransom to poor families."

He later told judges there were different types of pirates operating off Somalia's coast — those who gave ransom money to organized crime gangs and others "who just go to sea in the hope of getting something more than the fish that are no longer there."

Also, because I don't know where else to put it, here's the link to Gwen Thompkins' NPR interview with a Somali pirate.

Swine flu's out and pirates are back in

If my Google News Alerts are any indication, since we've decided that swine flu is not going to develop into a lethal pandemic, some media focus has returned to pirates. The debate over arming crews has leapt to the forefront of the coverage. As Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister Abdirahman Aden Ibbi repeated his call for a Somali coast guard, delegates to this week's maritime security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia oppose both arming sailors and hiring private security guards:

"We are against the arming of seafarers in the fight against pirates. We are also against armed private security guards," said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the London-based International Maritime Bureau, or IMB. "We think it can be counter-productive," said Mukundan, whose organization monitors piracy worldwide and has urged greater international efforts to combat a spate of attacks off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden. "Pirates will upgrade their weapons. Only a few ships will have armed security," he told reporters ...

Tim Wilkins, Asia-Pacific manager for ship owners' association Intertanko, said that arming vessels would increase fatalities, which until now have been low despite the large number of attacks. "We would certainly not advocate arming of the crew. It is not the answer. Seafarers are not trained to use guns. They are trained to navigate ships," he said. "We believe it will escalate the problem. At the moment, the pirates are not killing the seafarers. They only hijack and kidnap the sailors. Arming the crew will put their lives in danger."

Mukundan said armed crews would also create legal problems as ships passed through different territories or entered ports. "A vessel may need to go into coastal waters. But they may not be allowed in if they have private armed guards on board," he said. "There is also the question of who is in charge of the armed guards. Is it the ship captain or the guard themselves?" he said, adding that rather than reacting to attacks, it was better to focus on shutting down pirate networks.

Richard Farrington, chief of staff of the European Union Naval Force, said armed guards would be of uncertain quality and would operate in a hazy legal environment. "It is an unregulated industry and you get what you pay for. I think there are significant legal difficulties - their rules of engagement, their training, their competence, their identification of their targets."

Top Israeli maritime security expert and owner of Defender Security Group Igal Hasson disagrees with this assessment, however, and notes that concerns about legal problems while in ports could perhaps be circumvented by locking up weapons:

"Your average cargo vessel has very high sides, and can only be accessed at the stern. That's a small area that can be protected by as few as two to four guards, provided they're trained and armed with scope-mounted assault rifles," he said.

On the high seas, Hasson said, the snipers would be legally entitled to shoot to kill as soon as the "means and motivation" of the pirates were established -- for example, if they were armed or bearing down on the ship in a threatening manner.

Like the conference delegates, Hasson also recommends non-lethal measures, including an electrified fence. Another non-lethal anti-piracy tool that has received some press coverage in the last few months is the LRAD, an acoustic cannon that fires 150 decibels of sound in the direction it is aimed. I've recently discovered the amazingness of Ted Talks and so was intrigued by this talk by the inventor of the LRAD. However, as the Danger Room blog notes, the LRAD has a mixed track record in warding off pirate attacks.

Like the Kuala Lumpur conference attendees, Galrhan at Information Dissemination opposes the use of private security forces on board ships, but rather than echoing their call for exclusively non-lethal means of maritime defense, he advocates using US Naval forces:

What is the US Navy's role in defending freedom of navigation anyway, and can anyone wearing a Navy uniform say with a straight face it is to protect the sea lines of communication or freedom of navigation when our governments own policy suggests they are willing to give up that freedom so easily?

Sound maritime strategy during a period of peaceful globalization must be built on a fundamental necessity to insure freedom of navigation for trade, particularly in the parts of the world that are disconnected, like Africa. Piracy is compounding the global economic slide for countries like Egypt, that rely heavily on income from the use of the Suez Canal. Kenya is also suffering, as ships instead take a longer route around Africa and many smaller ships are avoiding port in Kenya where normally they would take on fuel or provisions. These carry economic consequences in a part of the world where economy is the strategy to bring peace and stabilization to a very poor region of the world.

He goes on to advance the argument from commercial IR liberalism that economics is driving world peace, implying that the US government has a security interest (what would Jutta Weldes say?) in protecting maritime commerce. There's a couple problems with this post, however, most notably that the burden of proving that a US naval presence would be a functional deterrent to piracy. Furthermore, while ransom payments are costly, the chance of a given ship being successfully hijacked remains low. However, Galrhan's call for a comprehensive approach to the problems in Somalia is well taken, particularly as the governmental failings of that state are becoming worse and worse.

Blackbeard's secret American identity revealed!

International maritime experts, security officials, and diplomats are preparing for Monday's anti-piracy conference in Kuala Lumpur, where they will weigh in on the now-familiar debates over arming crews vs. hiring private guards; short-term security vs. long-term development solutions; and what to do with captured pirates. But while they are debating pirate policy, there's another, historical pirate debate brewing -- that of Blackbeard's nationality.

Kevin P. Duffus claims that Blackbeard and his crew were not rogue Englishmen, but rather the sons of landowners in Beaufort County, North Carolina (which is, incidentally, one of our planned research destinations this summer. More on that as the time approaches.).

Duffus' theory is that Blackbeard was the son of Capt. James Beard of the Goose Creek area near Charleston, S.C., who owned about 400 acres on the west bank of Bath Creek as early as 1707.

He says Beard's son Edward, born in South Carolina in 1690, came to Eastern North Carolina with his father but was also taken to Philadelphia, where he learned his sailing skills.

Duffus suggests that Edward Beard sported a black beard and used "Black" as a nickname, much like fellow pirate Black Sam Bellamy.

By his account, Thatch or Teach was an alias, and the pirate's moniker was actually Black Beard, later condensed to Blackbeard.

Duffus admittedly does not have a lot of evidence for his theory, but he points out that there is not much solid evidence for the version "that has been foisted upon us for nearly three centuries." The theory that Blackbeard came from Bristol, England is based upon Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates which may or may not have been written by Daniel Defoe (another hotly contested piratical debate that we will stay out of for now given its irrelevance to the project at hand). Duffus thus notes that "They [skeptics] can accept seven words written by an author whose true identity remains a mystery," he said - "or a preponderance of circumstantial evidence." Ultimately, the resolution of this debate -- and Blackbeard's "true identity" -- are of little importance to our pirate project. In fact, most of what we're concerned with is the mythicization of Blackbeard as an archetypical pirate. From this standpoint, what is most interesting is the continued interest in and fascination with the idea of Blackbeard. As David Moore, a nautical archaeologist at the North Carolina Martime Museum (and one of our most helpful expert contacts) notes, Duffus' claims, however tenuous, are like to create a resurgence in interest in historical piracy. "Pirates and piracy have held a fascination with the general public since piracy began," he says.

We've got rules -- and maps! -- and guns

We've already blogged a bit about rules and guns, and now Strange Maps has an interesting post about the possible origins of Robert Louis' Stevenson's Treasure Island, apparently sparked by a fanciful map similar to the one above (a more legible version is available here). They also make the now familiar contrast between Somali pirates and the Treasure Island variety, while tracing the origins of the "treasure map" symbolism associated with pirates:

Despite recent outbreaks off the Horn of Africa, piracy still conjures up other images than freebooting Somali fishermen.Your standard-issue pirate from Central Casting will have an eyepatch, an earring, a parrot on his shoulder or a wooden leg – or any combination of the above. He will almost inevitably have the accent of the English West Country (which explains all the Aarrrh-ing), and will surely be on a quest for treasure.

We owe this persistent stereotype to, and can blame its most recent incarnation in the increasingly awful Pirates of the Caribbean-franchise, on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), the classic adventure novel about pirates and buried treasure. Stevenson’s book also spawned, in later derivations and imitations, the trope of the treasure map as an essential part of the story.

Treasure Island introduced or popularized a lot of common piratical themes, including the peg legged sailor with a parrot on his shoulder, so we'll certainly be looking at it more closely in the future.

Less time doesn't mean no time ...

In addition to our current immersion in theory, we're still keeping up with the pirate news and blogs, and cordially invite you to view this video of the US Navy and Coast Guard's capture of a pirate mothership off the coast of Yemen.

The game's afoot!

Catherine and I have officially started in on the theory section of our research, which means we'll be spending less time blogging about pirate news stories like Kenya's agreement to help arrest pirates, how the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater will not be fighting pirates, and the capture of 17 suspected pirates by US and South Korean warships.

We've checked out, requested through Interlibrary Loan, and downloaded a small canon of constructivist IR literature and are currently buried in Charles Tilly's Stories, Identities, and Political Change (Catherine) and Jutte Weldes' Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (me). (I'll probably post a full reading list later.)

At this point, we're mainly interested in how other international relations scholars make rigorous use of explanatory discourse analysis and constructivist theory in their work, but I've also run across some potentially relevant pirate allusions. Weldes begins her book by presenting three narratives of what the US calls the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was particularly interested to note the deployment of the term "pirate" against the United States by both the Soviets and the Cubans. From the Soviet narrative we have: "More important, the United States launched a belligerent and illegal show of military strength through its naval blockade, an act of war and tantamount to piracy on the high seas" (31) . And from the Cuban narrative: "The United States pursued its hostile policies toward Cuba with a succession of 'insolent diplomatic notes' as well as 'piratical flights' over Cuban territory" (32). Indeed, Castro specifically called for the cessation of "pirate attacks carried out from bases in the United States and Puerto Rico" (36).

Cuba obviously has historical experience with pirates to draw upon, but the reference to piracy as the ultimate act of illegal aggression by the Soviets demonstrates just how illegitimate piracy is understood to be by state actors.

A *real* pirate movie

We interrupt the flurry of moving day to report that according to Variety, Samuel L. Jackson will produce and star in a movie based on the life of the pirate negotiator Andrew Mwangura, a journalist and ex-marine engineer who runs the Seafarers' Assistance Programme, a nonprofit group that offers humanitarian aid to all seafarers. Mwangura was largely responsible for brokering the $3.4 million ransom for the Ukrainian ship MV Faina which contained Russian tanks allegedly bound for South Sudan.

Update: Andrew Mwangura comments on Jackson's film here.

South Korean snipers defend North Korean freighter from pirates

As previously noted, finals have left little time for pirate blogging but this brief story seemed worth mentioning in light of an earlier post on the potential for international cooperation that piracy may bring about. From the New York Times:

South Korean snipers in a helicopter chased away pirates pursuing a North Korean freighter on Monday, in a rare instance of cooperation between the Koreas. The episode took place near the Yemeni port of Aden, according to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff. The pirate vessel gave up chasing the North Korean freighter after snipers aboard the helicopter prepared to fire warning shots, the South Korean military said in its statement. Relations between North and South Korea have frayed since a conservative government in the South took power last year with a vow to get tough on the North over its nuclear program.