Contemporary Maritime Piracy in Southeast Asia: History, Causes and Remedies - By Adam J. Young (original) (raw)

2009, Asian Politics & Policy

Despite its often glamorized and sentimental portrayals in popular media, exemplified in the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise, maritime piracy has always been an extremely violent and callous form of criminal activity. In extreme cases, pirates are known to kill everyone on board, as well as scuttling the vessels they pillage, thus ensuring that an already jurisdictionally problematic offence also becomes a juridically difficult one to collect evidence against. For these reasons, piracy has historically been readily accepted by international lawyers as an example par excellence of an offence or crime against the international ordre public, with pirates themselves being regarded as hostes humani generis, literally meaning the 'enemies of all mankind'. In the post-9/11 era, piracy has also become entangled in wider maritime security issues in the so-called 'war on terror'. The pair of complementary titles reviewed here examines the Southeast Asian aspect of the piracy phenomenon from multiple disciplinary perspectives, befitting the nature of their publishing houses, the Institute of South East Asian Studies (ISEAS) based at the National University of Singapore, and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at the University of Leiden, in The Netherlands. The legal perspectives on this issue are therefore tangentially, rather than directly, involved in the discussion. Nevertheless, these monographs combine well to give us an excellent picture of contemporary Southeast Asian maritime piracy issues. Both treatments of this subject agree that the definitions and meanings used to describe 'piracy', whether legal or otherwise, seldom do justice to the nature and complexity of this activity, as well as its participants. This is especially true of Southeast Asian piracy. Young notes that '(p)iracy includes everything from petty theft to the hijacking of entire vessels, and pirates can be anyone from opportunistic fishermen, to members of syndicates and even rogue military units.' (p.13) In terms of their respective approaches to the common theme of Southeast Asian piracy, Young emphasizes the need to tackle pirate and terrorist acts separately, from the conceptual, policy, legal and