Defining Piracy and Terrorism

For this blog, I’m going to draw some of the material I’ve gathered from the terrorism studies minor. Many of the aspects of Somali piracy share similar elements with some aspects of terrorism. A particularly important and interesting one is the difficulty in defining it.

The United States has several working definitions of terrorism, several from several agencies or acts, and they are all a little different. The Patriot Act, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Army Manual all have different definitions of terrorism and going beyond that, every scholar writing on the subject defines it differently. There are disagreements as to whether an act counts as terrorism if a state carries it out rather than a non-state actor (e.g. Assad in Syria and sarin gas). There are also debates among individuals about what the motives behind the act have to be and who the target was. The United Nations has made attempts at defining the term but it is impossible to come up with a definition that pleases everyone. There is this concept that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” We can apply this to piracy as well. To us, Somalian pirates are being just that- pirates, but to them, they are protecting their waters and attempting to make a profit.

We encounter the same problem with terrorism and piracy in that the individuals whose acts are are defining do not consider themselves terrorists or pirates. In class, we discussed several quotes where pirates were justifying their actions- declaring that they were defending their waters and acting as their own coast guard. In one quote in particular, a Somali pirate acknowledges that holding innocent hostages is a crime, but what they are doing is not a crime because they are stopping illegal fishing and waste dumping. Some of the reading offers a fair perspective of a pirate and even almost forces the reader to sympathize with their cause. There are similar instances in literature on terrorism, specifically religious extremism, where hearing about the conflict from the terrorist’s perspective offers a wider view. Members of Islamic extremist terrorist organizations will justify attacks on the United States because of the involvement of the United States in the Middle East and their Western influence on the world. A terrorist can justify their acts and beliefs the same way a pirate can. A terrorist will say that killing innocent civilians is wrong, but Jihadists don’t necessarily see anything having to do with Western influence as innocent at all.

Also, pulling from the “freedom fighter” quote above and in relation to the adversary’s perspective, there are historical examples where those who were labeled terrorists under the current regime that we do not consider terrorists now. In South Africa, when it was still operating under the apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela was a member of the militant wing of the African National Congress, an organization dedicated to increasing the rights of black South Africans. They carried out acts considered to be terrorism, but no one would consider the organization a terrorist organization or the people involved to be terrorists now. The context of the situation and conflict certainly shape our definitions of terrorism and piracy. Obviously, Somalia and the United States are run very differently; the United States has a functioning and present Coast Guard, unlike Somalia. But, if a foreign ship were to enter the United States water, fail to cooperate, dump waste or illegally fish, and we were forced to board a ship and take control of it, we certainly wouldn’t call ourselves pirates. We would say we were defending our waters- acting as a coast guard, which is exactly what a pirate would say, and we have read quotes such as that.

So, in conclusion, both can be difficult to define- perspective can mean everything. We also discussed that both are labels that no one wants to be associated with, so they are labels associated with enemies of sorts. If you don’t share the same viewpoint as your enemy, which you probably don’t, that makes defining each other’s acts even more difficult.