Know Your Enemy: The Changing Sophistication and Success of Maritime Piracy

Abstract

In this article we have introduced a new comprehensive Maritime Piracy Sophistication Index. The MPSI allows us to better understand the relationship between risks and rewards in maritime piracy, manifested through highly sophisticated attacks and their lower success rates. More highly sophisticated and difficult attacks present a greater risk of failure; simultaneously, they provide the financial incentive of greater monetary reward than their easier, less risky low sophistication counterparts. It also helps to identify time-based and regional trends in piracy sophistication, namely the evolution in recent years of more sophisticated pirate operations and the stratified development of piracy in East Africa. The MPSI shows that piracy is nuanced and regional: different geographic regions experience vastly different forms of piracy, in their sophistication as well as magnitude. Any further efforts to understand or combat piracy must keep these developments in mind, and must, critically, be geospatially rooted.