Between empires and institutions: non-state actors and the sea since 1945

Summary

ABSTRACT.Piracy has revived since 1945 with the failure of new international legal regimes to replace the former imperial naval power. Crime at sea is technically harder than terrorism or smuggling, but similar forces and capabilities make it possible and profitable.

RÉSUMÉ.La piraterie a connu une recrudescence depuis 1945 de par l'échec des nouveaux régimes juridiques internationaux à remplacer les anciennes puissances maritimes impériales. La criminalité en mer est techniquement plus complexe que le terrorisme ou la contrebande mais des forces et capacités similaires la rendent possible et lucrative.

Piracy declined at the end of the 19th century, thanks to technology and empires, but it never went away. Steam power revolutionized the operation of both warships and merchant vessels but was too expensive for pirates to adopt. Like other colonial peoples, they had little access to modern arms. The British Empire in particular had the naval wherewithal, but also the political will and legal justification of hostes humani generis(“enemies of all mankind”), to hunt them down, including putting an end to the coastal raiding that had always been part, often the largest part, of pirate practice. Off the coast of China, a geographical expanse wracked by internal discord and foreign intervention where Western imperial power was applied with less certainty, maritime depredation continued to be troublesome.

BRIEF HISTORY

In Asia piracy almost certainly continued during and after World War II, albeit at a low level. Amongst the coastal peoples of Southeast Asia, around the Straits of Malacca and Singapore(“the Straits”), the Sulu Sea and southern Thailand, activity that is regarded by outsiders as piracy remained widely accepted.1 In addition, groups affiliated to the nationalist Kuomintang regime, after its defeat by the Communists in 1949 and its retreat to Taiwan, attacked shipping along the southern Chinese coast as far south as the South China Sea well into the 1950s.

Six categories of piracy have been observed around the globe since 1945(Table 1).

Records prior to 1992 are patchy and confused because at the time neither states nor international institutions saw piracy and its territorial sea equivalent, armed robbery at sea, as a problem, largely because international shipping was unaffected.