The Political Economy of Piracy in the South China Sea.

Abstract

Piracy is an ancient, persistent, and elusive phenomenon in the South China Sea. In the past two decades it has increased substantially, leading to a renewed interest in piracy and its possible nexus with maritime terrorism, especially after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. Although it has been widely reported and investigated, piracy remains difficult to understand and to control. The oceans are “a domain increasingly beyond governmental control,” says William Langewiesche. They are “vast and wild, where laws of nations mean little and where the resilient pathogens of piracy and terrorism flourish.”1 In the Asia-Pacific region, “maritime disorder prevails,” observes Sam Bateman. “This includes unregulated pollution of the marine environment, over-fishing, marine environmental degradation and widespread illegal activities at sea.”2 This article attempts to analyze piracy through the perspective of political economy, with an emphasis on state and market stakeholders and on the economic, technological, and institutional factors affecting ocean governance of piracy. The major area of concern here is the South China Sea, where approximately half of the world’s reported incidents of piracy have taken place since the 1990s. Following the usage of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), this estimate includes instances of both piracy as defined under international law—theft on the David Rosenberg is professor of political science, Middlebury College, Vermont, and visiting fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. He is also regional editor for the South China Sea in the WWW Virtual Library of Asian Studies. He is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and chapters of edited volumes.

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