School of Social and Political Science

Description

From 2007–2012, maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia captivated global attention. Over 300 merchant vessels and some 3,000 seafarers were held hostage with ransom amounts ranging from $200,000 to $10 million being paid to release these ships. Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean explores this unprecedented upsurge in piracy in the Western Indian Ocean. Pushing back at reductive explanations of pirates as enemies of all mankind, mere criminals, or even romantic figures, this book instead argues for understanding pirates and piracy within longer histories and wider contestations over protection. Somali piracy operated exclusively on a kidnap-and-ransom model with crew, cargo, and ship held captive until a ransom was secured. These moments of hijacking were not only localized encounters between small boats and big ships, but also encounters between parallel and competing systems of protection. Forged in the interruption of the hijacking, piracy makes visible the importance of protection from a transregional perspective. Through extensive ethnographic work at sea, onboard multinational container ships and sailing on Indian dhows, and on land, in pirate communities in Somalia and insurance headquarters in London, this book vividly makes visible the centrality of protection beyond the dichotomies of land-sea, global north-global south, state-non-state. 

Bio:

Jatin Dua is an associate professor of Anthropology and Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. His research explores processes and projects of governance, law, and economy along the East African coast and the wider Indian Ocean world. His book, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, published with the University of California Press (December 2019), winner of the 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Prize is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with maritime piracy and contestations over legitimate and illegitimate commerce in coastal East Africa. Focusing on the ransom economy of Somali piracy, the book places protection as central to global mobility to see how a variety of actors from pirates and diya kinship groups in Somalia, to naval ships and Indian dhow captains at sea as well as insurance agents and security consultants in London create and regulate order and disorder within economies of piracy and counter-piracy. In addition, he has published a number of articles on maritime anthropology, seafaring, insurance, ransom economies, and property at sea. 

His current research projects continue this emphasis on maritime worlds and their entanglements with law, sovereignty, economy, and sociality in the Indian Ocean and beyond. 1) Navigating the Bab-el-Mandeb, focuses on the materiality of navigation, including technologies of risk calculation, credit extension, and the daily forms of circulation and governance that occur across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, a key maritime chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. 2) Africa at Sea: Captivity and Care in the Global Shipping Economy, opens up a hitherto unexplored world of African mobility and its relationship to global shipping and maritime capitalism. In particular, this project explores the varied meanings of blackness and racial capitalism through a simultaneous focus on port-making and large-scale maritime infrastructure investment on land as well as following the regional and global itineraries of African seafarers onboard cargo ships at sea.