ABSTRACT
Piracy has been the principal manifestation of maritime criminality since the earliest days of using platforms to transport people and goods at sea. The revival of piracy in Southeast Asia during the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a contextually unique, albeit innately connected, wave of maritime criminality that evolved into a more sophisticated threat during the 1990s and 2000s. Given the inherent attributes of the marine environment combined with the interconnectedness of the global economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, crimes like piracy could not be effectively suppressed by the unilateral efforts of any one nation or navy. In both Southeast Asia and Northeast Africa multilateral engagement at both the strategic and operational level resulted in a decline in successful incidents of piracy and maritime armed robbery. Suppressing piracy therefore, and maritime criminality more generally, benefited not only littoral states but also regional and international user states.
