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Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century
Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century)
How is it possible for six men to take a Liberian-flagged oil tanker hostage and negotiate a huge pay out for the return of its crew and 2.2 million barrels of crude oil? In his gripping new book, Jatin Dua answers this question by exploring the unprecedented upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia in the twenty-first century. Taking the reader inside pirate communities in Somalia, onboard multinational container ships, and within insurance offices in London, Dua connects modern day pirates to longer histories of trade and disputes over protection. In our increasingly technological world, maritime piracy represents not only an interruption, but an attempt to insert oneself within the world of oceanic trade. Captured at Sea moves beyond the binaries of legal and illegal to illustrate how the seas continue to be key sites of global regulation, connectivity, and commerce today.
259 pages, Paperback
Published December 10, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 14, 2021
6/14/21: 5 stars. HOLY CRAP THIS IS THE BEST NON-FICTION BOOK I'VE EVER READ FOR CLASS! I've never quite read an analysis of anything like this, and the author's such a badass for going to fucking Somalia to meet with pirates and pirate captains and pirate bosses and drug dealers and security companies and more to do his research. One of the most interesting books I've read in a while.
December 14, 2022
Spectacular multi-sited ethnography! This is how it's done. One of the best ethnographic research, theory-building, and accessible academic writing out there. This has to be required reading from the undergraduate to graduate levels in economic anthropology, political/legal anthropology, security studies, history, and finance. In an amazing feat of speaking multiple languages (Urdu, Hindi, Somalian, Arabic) and situating himself on the commercial, military, and merchant vessels to insurance, bureaucratic offices, and seedy marketplaces, Jatin Dua successfully covers the global and micro-economies of piracy akin to an investigative journalist but with an anthropological eye.
Using the concept of protection as his framework, he reverses how I thought about licit and illicit activities in social, financial, and entrepreneurial spaces. There's a lot to cover here.
As we grappled with the issue of fraud in our book club, Dua proposed in chapter one an anthropology of protection to best describe this phenomenon. Protection as he says, "occurs across multiple scales from those protecting their lives and goods as they travel through liquid domains, to those making claims over trade routes, and finally, to those claiming to protect free trade. In addition to being enacted at multiple scales, protection also ranges from promise to contract and from a willing form of engagement to a coercive force." Protection as a word means to ensure safety as in safe passage but also like the extractive version like the mafia's protection racket that demands financial exchange for protection from violence. This framework, in essence, describes the global economy built around a hijack and ransom economy in which Somalian piracy is what he describes as merely an "interruption, but also an attempt - framed through the threat of violence- to insert oneself within a global sea of trade." This is how a small seemingly insignificant country like Somalia becomes a fulcrum of a "broader filed and longer histories of protection" that spans history and across North-South and South-South nexus.
His historical and legal treatise on piracy is actually quite interesting and eye-opening. Piracy can be seen as an economic system of transfer and redistribution as practiced by the Greeks and twelve other Aegean sea communities. Similarly, northern Somalia has had a vibrant shipwreck economy historically. This was what Dua says is part of the attempt to legitimize the empire on land and sea or the territorialization of the ocean.
Dua debunks the typical cause of Somalian piracy as a direct result of the failed state. His concept of protection/redistribution/piracy throughout history helps explain why piracy is a specific result of the colonial, post-colonial, and cultural foundation present in Somalia. Ironically, it was the establishment of "licensing" or the cartaz system introduced by the Portuguese (with the arrival of Vasco de Gama in 1498) and later on followed by the Dutch and British that gave rise to the triple meaning of maritime protection (punitive costs or risk of seizure). Historian Charles Tilly links this to the rise of the nation-state through "war-making" by the larger powers. On the other hand, Somalian piracy is as Dua says, "an alternative form of connectivity and possibility." This has roots in Somalia's post-Cold War period, in which fishing licenses and access were selectively awarded through a system of extractive and violent ways by both state and non-state actors. Piracy simply became an extension of the state's licensing regime. It is unsurprising that mercenaries hired during this period became the early teachers of these early pirates and (spoiler alert!) eventually spelled the pirates' destruction. What we see here are multiple competing but parallel ways of governance and regulation in which protection and "reach" by competing nation-states exercise over a space that is not land or an ungovernable liquid ocean.
After a historical explanation, Dua proceeds to look into the specific Somalian conditions that enable men to go to sea. He describes how this mobility is linked to the North Somali relationship to land and nomadism more specifically. Animal herders or nomads view their animals and the commons differently from settlers. In chapter one, he contrasts the natural law of a nomad commons in which "the commons-as a space with no prior claim of ownership-that allows for the possibility of expropriation." Animals like camels and consequently like boats, "never only belong to one person." This link to family and clan wealth and rights to animals is part of the trading and raiding economies in pastoral societies with "systems of capture, redistribution, and incorporation." Rather than enclosure (as in settler or land properties), the capture of objects (such as boats) and routes are ways to create a property with a pastoral mindset (MINDBLOWING).
Dua continues that capture is not fully a recognizable property until it is "fully socialized." That is, embedded in systems of obligation, reciprocity, debt, and risk within the clan. In chapter two, Dua describes more fully how these attachments, "how piracy becomes anchored to land," through the financial and social insurance provided by the Diya (clan) and the entrepreneurs who supply goods, especially the required drug khat to keep pirates afloat for weeks at sea and months during ransom. Successful pirates may land wealth but a large proportion of failures rely on this system to de-risk piracy attempts.
In chapter three, Dua gives us other points of view on risk management. First, he takes us aboard a military vessel and gives us a bird's eye view of the politics of regulation. It's a fascinating account of how navies identify and choose how to manage potential pirates using radar. Second, he takes us into the world of maritime insurance in London on how protection and de-risking are translated into figures and incentives for state legitimacy to wield violence at sea. We can see parallels and similarities of de-risking strategies provided by different entities in chapters two and three.
Chapter four answers my personal puzzle of who are the negotiators and why aren't these pirates arrested outright. This chapter on negotiation describes intermediaries practicing different modalities of attachment and detachment to transform capture into ransom. Negotiating with insurance brokers requires transactional detachment over the price of life or cargo. Meanwhile negotiating with the captain requires them to propose emotional attachment to their crew and family as a way to control them and prevent them from contacting anybody else. For me, this chapter is the most suspenseful as Dua takes us into how pirates board a tanker and what happens during capture for the people on board. A kind of forced hospitality.
Similarly but seemingly out of place final chapter describes a different type of hospitality with the crew of the dhow, stronger and larger boats than the skiffs that pirates use to stay at sea longer. The goal of the captured is to translate potential violence into one practice of hospitality.
As a postscript, Dua tells us that with a change in international policy and consequently insurance mandates that now require ships to hire armed protection, piracy has declined or ceased for large international cargo by 2012.
===========
Using the framework of protection, we can begin to see how the activity of piracy is part of a longer historical continuity of governance of the sea from the colonial to the post-colonial period. This, of course, doesn't answer our question if piracy is ultimately a criminal action or simply just managing opportunities available. The grey and mostly obscured areas are a necessary space in a media-saturated world that only purports a black-and-white view of a spectacular event. The movie Captain Philipps is an enjoyable film that offers another POV and a good supplement to this book. For the general readers, this book might be a bit theoretically dense and full of citations at the start but you can safely just read the details, and won't hinder you from enjoying the information presented. Highly recommended and underrated.
Using the concept of protection as his framework, he reverses how I thought about licit and illicit activities in social, financial, and entrepreneurial spaces. There's a lot to cover here.
As we grappled with the issue of fraud in our book club, Dua proposed in chapter one an anthropology of protection to best describe this phenomenon. Protection as he says, "occurs across multiple scales from those protecting their lives and goods as they travel through liquid domains, to those making claims over trade routes, and finally, to those claiming to protect free trade. In addition to being enacted at multiple scales, protection also ranges from promise to contract and from a willing form of engagement to a coercive force." Protection as a word means to ensure safety as in safe passage but also like the extractive version like the mafia's protection racket that demands financial exchange for protection from violence. This framework, in essence, describes the global economy built around a hijack and ransom economy in which Somalian piracy is what he describes as merely an "interruption, but also an attempt - framed through the threat of violence- to insert oneself within a global sea of trade." This is how a small seemingly insignificant country like Somalia becomes a fulcrum of a "broader filed and longer histories of protection" that spans history and across North-South and South-South nexus.
His historical and legal treatise on piracy is actually quite interesting and eye-opening. Piracy can be seen as an economic system of transfer and redistribution as practiced by the Greeks and twelve other Aegean sea communities. Similarly, northern Somalia has had a vibrant shipwreck economy historically. This was what Dua says is part of the attempt to legitimize the empire on land and sea or the territorialization of the ocean.
Dua debunks the typical cause of Somalian piracy as a direct result of the failed state. His concept of protection/redistribution/piracy throughout history helps explain why piracy is a specific result of the colonial, post-colonial, and cultural foundation present in Somalia. Ironically, it was the establishment of "licensing" or the cartaz system introduced by the Portuguese (with the arrival of Vasco de Gama in 1498) and later on followed by the Dutch and British that gave rise to the triple meaning of maritime protection (punitive costs or risk of seizure). Historian Charles Tilly links this to the rise of the nation-state through "war-making" by the larger powers. On the other hand, Somalian piracy is as Dua says, "an alternative form of connectivity and possibility." This has roots in Somalia's post-Cold War period, in which fishing licenses and access were selectively awarded through a system of extractive and violent ways by both state and non-state actors. Piracy simply became an extension of the state's licensing regime. It is unsurprising that mercenaries hired during this period became the early teachers of these early pirates and (spoiler alert!) eventually spelled the pirates' destruction. What we see here are multiple competing but parallel ways of governance and regulation in which protection and "reach" by competing nation-states exercise over a space that is not land or an ungovernable liquid ocean.
After a historical explanation, Dua proceeds to look into the specific Somalian conditions that enable men to go to sea. He describes how this mobility is linked to the North Somali relationship to land and nomadism more specifically. Animal herders or nomads view their animals and the commons differently from settlers. In chapter one, he contrasts the natural law of a nomad commons in which "the commons-as a space with no prior claim of ownership-that allows for the possibility of expropriation." Animals like camels and consequently like boats, "never only belong to one person." This link to family and clan wealth and rights to animals is part of the trading and raiding economies in pastoral societies with "systems of capture, redistribution, and incorporation." Rather than enclosure (as in settler or land properties), the capture of objects (such as boats) and routes are ways to create a property with a pastoral mindset (MINDBLOWING).
Dua continues that capture is not fully a recognizable property until it is "fully socialized." That is, embedded in systems of obligation, reciprocity, debt, and risk within the clan. In chapter two, Dua describes more fully how these attachments, "how piracy becomes anchored to land," through the financial and social insurance provided by the Diya (clan) and the entrepreneurs who supply goods, especially the required drug khat to keep pirates afloat for weeks at sea and months during ransom. Successful pirates may land wealth but a large proportion of failures rely on this system to de-risk piracy attempts.
In chapter three, Dua gives us other points of view on risk management. First, he takes us aboard a military vessel and gives us a bird's eye view of the politics of regulation. It's a fascinating account of how navies identify and choose how to manage potential pirates using radar. Second, he takes us into the world of maritime insurance in London on how protection and de-risking are translated into figures and incentives for state legitimacy to wield violence at sea. We can see parallels and similarities of de-risking strategies provided by different entities in chapters two and three.
Chapter four answers my personal puzzle of who are the negotiators and why aren't these pirates arrested outright. This chapter on negotiation describes intermediaries practicing different modalities of attachment and detachment to transform capture into ransom. Negotiating with insurance brokers requires transactional detachment over the price of life or cargo. Meanwhile negotiating with the captain requires them to propose emotional attachment to their crew and family as a way to control them and prevent them from contacting anybody else. For me, this chapter is the most suspenseful as Dua takes us into how pirates board a tanker and what happens during capture for the people on board. A kind of forced hospitality.
Similarly but seemingly out of place final chapter describes a different type of hospitality with the crew of the dhow, stronger and larger boats than the skiffs that pirates use to stay at sea longer. The goal of the captured is to translate potential violence into one practice of hospitality.
As a postscript, Dua tells us that with a change in international policy and consequently insurance mandates that now require ships to hire armed protection, piracy has declined or ceased for large international cargo by 2012.
===========
Using the framework of protection, we can begin to see how the activity of piracy is part of a longer historical continuity of governance of the sea from the colonial to the post-colonial period. This, of course, doesn't answer our question if piracy is ultimately a criminal action or simply just managing opportunities available. The grey and mostly obscured areas are a necessary space in a media-saturated world that only purports a black-and-white view of a spectacular event. The movie Captain Philipps is an enjoyable film that offers another POV and a good supplement to this book. For the general readers, this book might be a bit theoretically dense and full of citations at the start but you can safely just read the details, and won't hinder you from enjoying the information presented. Highly recommended and underrated.
January 7, 2022
Surprised this doesn’t have more laudatory reviews so I’m adding mine. Dua has remarkable access to the interior lives not only of the pirates, but also to the systems of protection that ground the pirates to land - to a Somalia that has not been oriented to the sea - and to the international economy of insurance and trade. Describes Somali piracy at numerous levels - at the local level, but also the national and global - all in great detail. Places Somali piracy in a broader history of global piracy. Extremely well researched and is the product of nearly a decade of fieldwork. Read like a page turner.
March 21, 2020
High seas adventure and in-text citations galore!
The book may be a bit dense for someone (me) who just wanted to learn what the heck Captain Phillips was about. But instead of hyper-focusing on the facts of Somali hijackings, Dua tries to illustrate the complex system that supported (and later abandoned) the practice of piracy in its local and historical context.
Owing to the author's laudable commitment to scholastic rigor, some sections may nor exactly fly off the page. That said, any reader will come off better informed of some of the realities of modern piracy, instead of merely the imagery and fears (many justified!) that surround it.
The book may be a bit dense for someone (me) who just wanted to learn what the heck Captain Phillips was about. But instead of hyper-focusing on the facts of Somali hijackings, Dua tries to illustrate the complex system that supported (and later abandoned) the practice of piracy in its local and historical context.
Owing to the author's laudable commitment to scholastic rigor, some sections may nor exactly fly off the page. That said, any reader will come off better informed of some of the realities of modern piracy, instead of merely the imagery and fears (many justified!) that surround it.
April 10, 2020
Very well written ethnography! A little slow and dense to start, but once you dive into chapter 1 you gain an incredible analysis of piracy, where theories and anecdotes are interwoven.
November 13, 2023
who knew a book about pirates could be so boring
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews