Political Reach, State Fragility, and the Incidence of Maritime Piracy: Explaining Piracy & Pirate Organization, 1993-2012

Programme Group Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV)

The project is financed through the Office of Naval Research under the Minerva Initiative, and proposes; new theoretical explanations of maritime piracy, collects data on the incidence of piracy and the characteristics of pirate organizations, and uses advanced quantitative methods to conduct empirical analyses.

Funded by: the Office of Naval Research under the Minerva Initiative

Period: Still needs to start (2013-2016) 

Research on maritime piracy consists mostly of case studies of countries or regions with particularly pressing piracy problems. We therefore lack systematic explanations and analyses of piracy. While several international organizations (such as the IMB) collect information on piracy incidents, no unified data source exists to date. In addition, data on incidents collected by these organizations provide almost no information on the pirates and their organizational structure. This project pursues four objectives to alleviate the above shortcomings.

1. To provide a comprehensive and novel theoretical explanation of piracy. 
2. To evaluate these expectations systematically, the authors propose the creation of a comprehensive database on piracy incidents that combines information from all four organizations currently engaged in data collection. Existing data sources suffer from diverging or incompatible formats, partly overlapping data, or a lack of public access. 
3. To address the lack of information on pirates and their organizational characteristics, the project involves expert surveys in several countries identified as particularly piracy prone. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to collect data on pirate organizations. 
4. To use geo-spatial and causal modeling methods to forecast piracy events into the future, which we believe will benefit policymakers interested in identifying at-risk states and other maritime areas. 

Research Methods 

The PIs intend to collect data on piracy incidents based on reporting by the four major organizations involved in collecting piracy data. Besides this, a survey will be conducted, which will include questions on pirate group location, size, ports used by the organizations, among others.

Data for the MPO (Mapping Pirate Organization) project will be obtained in two distinct phases. In this first phase (U.S. Phase), scholars in the U.S. with regional and or country-specific expertise in four to six countries with persistent maritime piracy problems will be contacted via email by the PIs. A Phase II (Foreign Country Phase) of the data-collection project will be proposed after host country permissions are obtained. At the subnational level, the MPO database will allow PIs and other researchers to analyze the micro-level determinants and evolution of piracy. 

Published by  AISSR

3 October 2013