Piracy off Somalia and its challenges to maritime security: problems and solutions

Abstract

The recent surge of piracy off the Horn of Africa has raised the alarms among the International Community. New methods and sophisticated weapons have enabled pirates to jeopardise the flow of merchandises through that region and have created a new security problem. Limits to the provisions of existing International Law and the incapacity of many states to put them into practice have brought the Security Council to issue a series of Resolutions to involve concerned countries in repression: the response has been an unprecedented deployment of foreign navies in different multilateral or unilateral initiatives in order to curb piracy and the row of hijackings that occurred so far. But the dismal state of Somalia, a paradigm of failed state, is the key to understand the chances of putting an as long as Somalia lacks a real government, any naval initiative against piracy will be but a mere patch to the real problem. Foreign intervention in Somalia needs understanding the real situation and having the tools to put into practice any long-term solution.