ABSTRACT
As property is not universal, easily definable nor stable, spaces (and places) of piracy emerge. Piracy is both a consequence and a confrontation to property claims – both disrupting and reinforcing. It is this complex interplay that makes this area both fascinating and challenging. Legitimate and illegitimate mobility is also about the appropriation of place. This system of entitlements and exclusions can rely on both colonial and capitalist structures of power. In the twentieth and twenty-first century colonial expansionism has been succeeded by Cold War and geopolitical contestations, but yet the colonial structures of power prevail. The uses of assumingly 'uninhabited' Indigenous land as testing ground for nuclear weapons show how the colonial terra nullius doctrine interacts with Cold War militarisation. The vision of the piracy of the weak and the piracy of the strong is attractive if we want to maintain the potentials of piracy as a socially subversive force, but that distinction is not that easy to make.
