The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade by Deborah Cowen

Author:Deborah Cowen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: SOC016000 Social Science / Human Services
ISBN: 9780816680887
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-08-31T14:00:00+00:00

Supply Chains and the Somali Pirate

Despite the recent flurry of interest and interventions, the issue of piracy is not new to the Gulf of Aden. Episodes of maritime theft have long been a feature of the waters off the coast of Somalia as they are in any area with an active maritime history. The Gulf of Aden is a necessary gateway for all transits through the Suez Canal, linking Europe with the Middle East, East Africa, and South and East Asia. Along with the Panama Canal, the Suez is a key link in the chain of global trade—and so too a chokepoint in the circulation of stuff. The very existence of the canal is a reminder that individual acts of piracy have no monopoly on maritime violence in this region. The physical infrastructure is a material marker of the deeply entangled histories of imperial trade and violence and a testament to a past filled with violent contests for control over this critical shipping corridor (Harlow and Carter 2003; Wallach 2005). The first canal on this site was built under Egyptian authority in the second century BC, with the current architecture dating back to the era of European colonial power in the nineteenth century. The canal sculpts global flows of maritime commerce, currently drawing more than twenty thousand ships into the Gulf of Aden every year (Chalk 2010, 94). This amounts to an astonishing daily average of fifty-eight ships transiting through these waters and constitutes 95 percent of European member states’ trade by volume (MSCHOA n.d.). Charles Bumstead (2010, 148) asserts that the Gulf of Aden “is one of the most, if not the most, traveled sea routes in the world.” Even as maritime violence of both the singular and state-led varieties is an old story in the area, there has nevertheless been a dramatic increase in both piratical acts and naval interventions over the last decade that pivot around a new figure in global politics: the Somali pirate.

It is widely noted that piracy has been increasing globally since the 1980s. According to Bumstead (2010, 145), pirate attacks in the 1990s “increased threefold, while the increase in the 2000s has more than tripled again.” But amid this general increase in piracy around the world, there has been a particularly marked growth around the Horn of Africa and particularly in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) reported in 2009 that there had been a stunning 11 percent worldwide increase in incidents of piracy or armed robbery in the previous year, and well over a third took place off the coast of Somalia. The report notes that this entailed a 200 percent jump in incidents in the corridor linking the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean (IMB 2009, 1–2). In what was the busiest year in recent history, 322 actual or attempted pirate attacks were reported in the area between 2008 and 2009, making up almost half of all global incidents (Chalk 2010, 90). Recent debates at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.