Counter-Piracy Law in Practice: An Ethnography of International Security Governance

ISBN-13: 9781032226767 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 152 str.

Jessica Larsen

Opis

This book is a socio-legal study of counter-piracy. It takes as its case the law enforcement efforts after 2008 to suppress piracy off the coast of Somalia.

Through ethnographic fieldwork, the book invites the reader onto a Danish warship patrolling the western Indian Ocean for piracy incidents and into the courtroom in Seychelles, where more than 150 suspects were prosecuted. The aim is to understand how counter-piracy worked in practice. The book uses assemblage theory to approach law as a social process and places emphasis on studying empirical enforcement practices over analysing legal provisions. This supplements existing scholarship on the legal aspects of counter-piracy. Scholarship has mainly examined applicable law governing counter-piracy. This book steps into the field to examine applied law. Its methodology renders visible areas of legal ambiguity and identifies practices that suggest impunity and question legal certainty. It thus contributes with new policy-relevant knowledge for international security governance. The relevance is one of urgency. Counter-piracy off Somalia has served as a governance paradigm, which is replicated in other maritime domains. Consideration of the implications for policy is therefore needed.

The book will be of interest to policy-makers, security practitioners and scholars who share a methodological commitment to practice.

Spis treści

About the author

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 Introduction

All things legal

On existing studies of counter-piracy

An ethnography of counter-piracy

The methodological approach

On related approaches

Organisation of the book

Literature

2 The law: legal debates on counter-piracy in the western Indian Ocean

Definitions of piracy: narrow or broad?

Locating jurisdiction, or the shall/may conundrum

UN Security Council bolstering legal authority

Piracy actors also have human rights

Seychelles’ codification of UNCLOS, and then some

Concluding remarks

Literature

3 The approach: ‘Following the law’ in practice

Law as process

The primacy of practice, counter-piracy’s emergence

The analytical building blocks

‘Following the law’ across key sites

Ethnographic methods and ethical pointers

Policies and laws as ethnographic data

Concluding remarks

Literature

4 The warship: maritime policing in the Indian Ocean

The political mandate

The ethnographic disappearance of law

Deciding upon the sources to intercept

Sources with a national ‘filter’

Regulation guiding constabulary tasks

A gap in military police jurisdiction

‘Urgent steps’, or narrowing the gap

Expanding ‘urgent steps’ in practice

Concluding remarks

Literature

5 The courtroom: piracy prosecution in Seychelles

Characteristics of Seychelles’ piracy trials

Identifying the accused in court . . . . . . or defining the ‘Pirate Action Group’

Establishing common intention

Using the ‘wrong’ section in the ‘right’ way

The curious tendency of successful appeals

Concluding remarks

Literature

6 The implications: socio-legal conclusions on counter-piracy

Policy implications of ethnographic findings

Proving the illegal act of piracy

Codifying UNCLOS articles in domestic law

The warship’s use of force

The constabulary function of navies

Human rights obligations

The limitations of law enforcement

Complementarity of the ‘socio-’ and the ‘legal’

Index

O autorze

Jessica Larsen is a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark.