Counter-Piracy Law in Practice: An Ethnography of International Security Governance

This book is a socio-legal study of counter-piracy. It takes as its case the law enforcement efforts after 2008 to suppress piracy off the coast of Somalia.

Through ethnographic fieldwork, the book invites the reader onto a Danish warship patrolling the western Indian Ocean for piracy incidents and into the courtroom in Seychelles, where more than 150 suspects were prosecuted. The aim is to understand how counter-piracy worked in practice. The book uses assemblage theory to approach law as a...