Deterritorialized Threats and the “Territorial Trap”: The Geographical Imaginaries of Piracy in the Gulf of Aden

This paper investigates how modern theories of international security are being revised in relation to a perceived “deterritorialization” of the global security environment. Using the case of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, I examine how geographical imaginaries of security and insecurity are reproduced in relation to non-state, global threats. I show that while the objects to be secured from threats like piracy are interpreted in relation to networked and deterritorialized space, diagnoses of threats themselves, their origins, and their movement, rely on a territorial imaginary of political order. This attributes a one-way spatio-political directionality to global threats, as incubating in zones of local disorder before crossing into the complex, networked space of the global. Drawing on recent research into the territorialization of modern sovereignty and its relationship to European colonization and imperialism, I underscore continuities between contemporary geographical imaginaries of security and threat and those of the early 20th century. This analysis helps make explicit the spatial heuristics that are usually implicit in global security research and highlights the kinds of empirical and political questions that these heuristics sideline. The case of Gulf of Aden piracy foregrounds the material effects of these threat diagnoses, which shape particular geographies of bordering, surveillance, and state and non-state violence.