PIRACY: Piracy and Maritime Crime: Historical and Modern Case Studies
Beginning in the early 1980s, commercial shipping became a prime target of pirates, first off West Africa and then slowly spreading into Southeast Asia. Throughout the 1990s, and especially after the Soviet Union’s collapse, piracy increased dramatically. Reports of piracy tripled during 1991–2001: of 335 reported cases in 2001, ninety-one were in waters claimed by Indonesia, twenty-seven by India, twenty-five by Bangladesh, nineteen by Malaysia, eight by Vietnam, and eight by the Philippines; another seventeen reported attacks occurred in the Malacca Strait, bordering on Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. This monograph is intended as a contribution to both scholarship and professional naval thinking; it is an academic and comparative examination of twelve selected case studies from maritime history used to illuminate a range of concepts and uses of piracy suppression. The twelve case studies provide the basis for the conclusions, an approach that provides a more thorough understanding of the uses and limitations of naval antipiracy operations in the context of new maritime technologies and within a wider range of modern national policy goals than might otherwise be achievable. Above all, this collection provides a sound basis for comparative analysis of varying historical experiences that can stimulate new and original thinking about a basic but often overlooked naval duty. United States Naval War College // Newport Papers (31 January 2010)