Piracy in Southeast Asia ─ Trends, Hot Spots and Responses

This book combines multi-disciplinary ethnographic and theoretical approaches to examine the re-emergence of piracy in Southeast Asia and the regional and international responses to this resurgent threat.

Since 2013, Southeast Asia is once again the region with the highest number of reported pirate attacks in the world. In 2014, 75 percent of global attacks occurred in Southeast Asian waters, including 12 successful hijackings. Data from the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) shows that concerns over piracy now extend beyond the Malacca and Singapore Straits, and areas of risk now reach deep into the South China Sea, around Borneo and into the waters of the Southern Philippines.

The primary aim of this volume is to examine how piracy has evolved in Southeast Asia over the past ten years, to evaluate efforts of maintaining security in regional waters, and to offer an analysis of what might be expected in the next decade. The piracy boom in this region in the early- to mid-2000s received substantial academic attention, but in recent years, the focus shifted to Somali piracy, and the resurgence of piracy in Southeast Asia was neglected. This volume seeks to remedy this gap in the literature; it will make a contribution to current academic discourses about piracy and maritime security governance and inform national, regional and international policy discussions concerning anti-piracy efforts. The contributors include academics, policy makers and military officers from Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe, and their contributions focus on three inter-related issues reflected in the structure of the volume: (1) the nature of piracy in geographical hot-spots; (2) phenomenological aspects of piracy, such as economic and legal concerns; and (3) regional and extra-regional (state) responses to piracy in Southeast Asia.

This book will be of much interest to students of maritime security, Asian politics, security studies and IR in general. 

Carolin Liss is a Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany and?is the author of Oceans of Crime: Maritime Piracy and Transnational Security in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh (2010). Capt. Ted Biggs is?a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds a US Coast Guard Master Mariner license.