Piracy in Somalia Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa

Piracy in Somalia sheds light on an often misunderstood world, oversimplified and demonized in the media and largely decontextualized in scholarly and policy works. It examines the root causes of piracy in Somalia, its impact on coastal communities, local views about it, and the measures taken against it. Drawing on six years' worth of extensive fieldwork, Awet Tewelde Weldemichael amplifies the voices of local communities who have suffered under the heavy weight of illegal fishing, piracy and counter-piracy and makes their struggles comprehensible on their own terms. He also exposes complex webs of crimes within crimes of double-dealing pirates, fraudulent negotiators, duplicitous intermediaries, and treacherous foreign illegal fishers and their local partners. In so doing, this book will help inform regional and global counter-piracy endeavors, avoid possible reversals in the gains so far made against piracy, and identify the gains that need to be made against its root causes.

Preface and acknowledgments; Introduction: locating Somali piracy in space and discourse; 1. Global root causes and local circumstances of early piracy in Somalia; 2. From cascading troubles of Somali fisheries to the onset of predatory piracy; 3. The epic spiraling of ransom piracy; 4. Local consequences of and responses to piracy; 5. International counter-piracy as a means and an end; Conclusion: IUU fishing is back! When will piracy?; Bibliography; Index.

Awet Tewelde Weldemichael is Associate Professor and Queen's National Scholar in the Department of History at Queen's University, Ontario. He is also an Associate of the Indian Ocean World Center at McGill University, Montreal. He has previously worked for international organizations, and held teaching and research positions at African, European and US universities. He holds Ph.D. in History and LL.M. in Public International Law, and is the author of Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation (Cambridge, 2013). He is a former refugee goatherd and currently a stateless person.