Somali piracy, once an unsolvable security threat, has almost completely stopped. Here's why
Armed pirates hijacked ships as far away as 1,000 nautical miles from the Somali coast.
- Armed pirates hijacked ships as far away as 1,000 nautical miles from the Somali coast.
- The World Bank estimates that Somali pirates received more than US$400 million in ransom payments between 2005 and 2012.
- It was, therefore, generally held that the solution lay ashore: major state-building in Somalia to remove the root causes of piracy.
- What makes the Somali case special is the international community’s ability to agree to them and pay for their implementation.
- Further, Somali pirates were stopped even though the conditions onshore in Somalia didn’t improve in any major way.
Collective action
- Theoretically, the international community’s collective effort shouldn’t have happened because safety from piracy is a costly public good.
- The result is a collective action problem that’s rarely overcome in international politics.
- Our study sought to understand how and why the collective action problem was overcome.
What worked
- This induced France to take the lead in military action against the pirates.
- The US subsequently led with respect to formulating a comprehensive strategy to implement the four factors presented earlier.
- China and Russia supported the American-led strategy and launched their own naval operations because their ships were attacked as well.
- Second, the US established an institution, the Contact Group on Somali Piracy, tailor-made to formulate and implement a broad anti-piracy strategy.
Shared interests
- Somali piracy aligned great power, as well as private sector, regional and local state interests to an unusual degree.
- It was the high degree of shared interests among the many actors involved that made the Somali anti-piracy campaign so effective.