Conference on The Human Face of Marine Piracy: Consequences and Policy Options

(March 2012)

A three day Conference, 29.2.-.2.3.2012, Karachi, Pakistan.

The conference focuses on the seafarers, which are the main victims of piracy, against the backdrop of a growing number of hostage cases involving Pakistani seafarers.  The conference brings together a range of high level naval staff, representative of the shipping industry, seafarers as well international academics to discuss how the problem of piracy can be approached differently and managed better. The event is organized and hosted by the Fazaldad Human Rights Institute, Islamabad and National Centre, for Maritime Policy Research at Bahria University in Karachi  in partnership with the PIRACY project at Dalhousie University Halifax, Canada and sponsored by the Near East South Asia Centre for Strategic Studies, Washington, USA.

Further Information is available here. A report on the conference is available here.

Piracy Studies Research Workshop on “Contemporary Maritime Piracy and the International Response”

(September 2011)

A one day research workshop on Interdisciplinary Challenges in Piracy Studies, 30.09.2011, London, UK.

In September 2011 piracy-studies.org organized a one day research workshop on contemporary maritime piracy at the Greenwich Maritime Institute in London. The core theme of the workshop was the question which distinct contributions different academic disciplines can make to understand the phenomenon of contemporary maritime piracy and to assist in developing innovative policy solutions to the problem. So far piracy has often been approach as either a legal problem or as a military-tactical problem. Piracy is however a “wicked problem”. To be mastered wicked problems demand to utilize all available forms of knowledge. It is important to think through what different disciplinary knowledge, including but not limited to economics, computer sciences, history, anthropology, criminology, area studies, political science and legal studies, can contribute to understand and address piracy. Representatives from different disciplines and research paradigms working on contemporary piracy will present their research and discuss possibilities for trans-disciplinary collaboration. The workshop took place on the 30^th of September, during the “World Maritime Day 2011: Piracy: Orchestrating the Response” of the International Maritime Organization, equally taking place in London. The workshop benefited from the contributions of the following participants:

• Dr. Christian Bueger (Leverhulme Visiting Fellow, Greenwich Maritime Institute, Greenwich University, UK)
• Dr. Basil Germond (Lecturer in Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, Lancaster University, UK)
• Dr. Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Senior Lecturer, Keele University, UK)
• Dr. Douglas Guilfoyle (Lecturer, University College London, UK)
• Zoltan Gluck (Researcher, City University New York, USA)
• Dr. Hans-Joachim Heinze (Senior Researcher, Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict, Germany)
• Dr. Michal Jakob (Senior Researcher, Agent Technology Center, Czech Technical University in Prague)
• Candyce Kelshall (University of Buckingham, UK)
• Dr. Axel Klein (Lecturer, University of Kent, UK)
• Dr. Sam Menefee (Professor, University of Virginia, USA)
• Dr. Sarah Percy (Lecturer, University of Oxford, UK)
• Sascha Pristrom (International Maritime Organization, UK)
• Marie Walker (Hanson Wade, UK)
• Sarah Simons (Researcher, Seafarers International International Research Centre, UK)

A more detailed outline is available here. For further information and inquiries, please contact Christian Bueger at cbueger@gmx.de

International Conference on Piracy at Sea

(forthcoming event, October 2011)

The World Maritime University organizes the “International Conference on Piracy at Sea” (ICOPAS 2011) will be held in Malmö 17-19 October 2011. The Conference is addressed at the maritime industry, public officials and academics alike. The three day conference aims

to exchange views and ideas on the complex web of underlying factors behind the phenomenon of maritime piracy, to examine and review current responses and initiatives, as well as to discuss ways whereby industry stakeholders and the many disciplines engaged in maritime research might better work towards an integrated approach to control or eradicate piracy and other violent crimes at sea.

More information on the event is available here.  The conference program is available here . Attendance to the conference is however pricey, with a conference fee of €400.00 being charged. Hence the conference will be primarily a forum for industry and policymakers.

Maritime Piracy & Global Governance: New Perspectives on an Old Problem

(March 2011)

Workshop at the International Studies Association Conference, March 15, 2011, Montreal, Canada, organized by Jon Carlson, Michael Struett and Donna Nincic.

Workshop Summary:

While the pirate has been romanticized in modern pop culture (everyone likes pirates!), modern maritime piracy occupies a challenging intellectual space for scholars.  As such, maritime piracy is an exemplar of many of the challenges implicit in global governance.  Accordingly, this workshop brings together scholars operating in three overlapping intellectual spaces or areas of IR. First, many

scholars approach the topic from an international organization or international regime perspective, recognizing the many layers of obligations and authorities that arise from UNCLOS, the International Maritime Organization, international human rights law, fisheries agreements, shipboard security regimes, anti-terrorism treaties or freedom of the seas doctrine.  Subsidiary to this are legal questions more explicitly linked to the prosecution and punishment of pirates, historically drawing on the principal of universal jurisdiction, though it also opens up questions of local jurisdiction, territorial waters or national sovereignty.  A separate set of scholars tend to treat piracy through the lens of security studies, focusing on interdiction, use of force, possible deterrence, and the pursuit of pirates as little more than aquatic terrorists.  Finally, piracy exposes some shaky foundations for IR theorists: how do we conceive of sovereignty and legitimacy when they are delinked from the territorial aspect of the modern nation-state? What happens to prospects for cooperation when we get to the nitty-gritty questions of practice related to paying for trials, imprisoning and maintaining captured pirates, bearing the burden of policing sea-lanes, or even determining what constitutes a pirate?  Does anyone have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and how is this determined? These approaches have tended to compete with each other along sub-disciplinary conceptual-theoretical boundaries, and this workshop seeks to explore a more holistic, comprehensive conceptualization of the multiple challenges posed by maritime piracy.

Broader Impacts — This workshop brings together a number of junior scholars working within these traditions from around the world, with the opportunity to interact with senior, established scholars including experts in the field of maritime security, piracy and international law. Several junior scholars and advanced junior scholars focusing on regime studies, international organizational approaches, international law, security and international relations theory allow for a multi-perspective approach to the understanding of piracy.  We believe that meaningful international partnerships can arise from this workshop, including the possibility of co-authorships developing between junior and senior faculty from the US, Asia and Europe.  Furthermore, we include both academic participants and think-tank or research-center participants.  The proposers have undertaken the workshop as an ‘author’s workshop’ with the plan of publishing an edited volume on the topic of maritime piracy and IR.  The University of California Press has expressed initial interest in the volume for their new series on International Governance, and the edited volume would also be suitable for a press such as Routledge, which has a more international distribution.

This workshop offers a unique opportunity for the participants, many of whom are junior scholars or rising PhDs.  It brings together many different perspectives on maritime piracy and how piracy as a phenomenon “fits” in various sub-fields of IR. The workshop offers the opportunity to interact with prominent and rising scholars in the fields of maritime security, international law, and international relations.  The purpose of the workshop is to allow scholars who are contributing to the book project an opportunity to more fully explore their differences and build research relationships that bridge both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Workshop Participants (tentative):

• Eamon Aloyo, University of Colorado
• Christian Bueger, European University Institute
• Jon Carlson, University of California, Merced
• Harry Gould, Florida International University
• Eric Heinze, University of Oklahoma
• Ingrid Kvalvik, Nordland Research Institute
• Terence Lee, National University of Singapore
• Kevin McGahan, National University of Singapore
• Mark Nance, North Carolina State University
• Donna Nincic, California State University
• Brent Steele, University of Kansas
• Michael Struett, North Carolina State University