Newswise — Container ships and other maritime behemoths that carry oil and bulk cargo ponderously across the oceans are prominent visual evidence of global trade, said Stephanie C. Kane, associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University Bloomington. She said this is the case not only in the port cities that function as transport nodes, but also along the coasts of nations like Somalia whose people are excluded from the benefits of global trade.
"That economic exclusion of nations and peoples is lawful and legitimate according to international frameworks will certainly not deter the excluded from engaging in unlawful and illegitimate practices such as piracy, hostage-taking and armed robbery to enrich themselves or merely to survive," Kane said. "In this sense, we can expect that the networks of support and appreciation for pirate-kidnappers inside Somalia may be quite deep within the intimacies of families, villages, and governments. It is only by building a more just and equitable global economic system, by diversifying and enhancing legitimate modes of economic survival, that we will create disincentives to engage in these worrisome tactics."
Routes to and through strategic waterways like the Gulf of Aden may be altered but possibilities are not limitless, Kane said, and it should be assumed that pirates will not be long behind.
"As we have watched them move attacks outward from coastal waterways into the open Indian Ocean, the limits of police and military interventions have become clearer," she said. "All the latest weapon and information technologies and all the best trained crews can be deployed by the world's powerful shipping nations without achieving long-term results if the underlying conditions of poverty and tyranny are not addressed."
Some might find it ironic that a pirate attack this week targeted the Maersk Alabama, a vessel headed for the port of Mombasa laden with food and agricultural supplies from the United Nation's World Food Program. But even in the unlikely instance that those with the capability would forgo attack for the benefit of their Kenyan neighbors, the multicolored containers do not betray their contents to the unauthorized, which will probably reach their destination in any case.
"More to the point, the situation shows how we must all learn to change the way that we grow and distribute food and fresh water, and build equitable societies, thereby avoiding the starvation, drought and chaotic interruptions of sustainable survival modes in Africa and the violence that will inevitably result if we do not," Kane said.
Stephanie Kane is an Indiana Bloomington associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice in the College of Arts and Sciences. Trained in social and cultural anthropology, she is conducting research on port cities around the world.
The Department of Criminal Justice is in IU's College of Arts and Sciences.
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