East African Piracy and the Defense of World Public Order

Abstract

We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute an essay on the law of the sea in a volume honoring our friend, Rüdiger Wolfrum. As scholar and judge, Rüdiger Wolfrum has instructed a generation on the law of the sea and, even more distinctively, has shaped the field in his roles as an innovative decision maker. Because so much of Professor Wolfrum’s work addresses contemporary problems, we have chosen to focus on a current, acute problem in the law of the sea: the challenges presented by the recrudescence of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. New forms of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean have brought piracy to the forefront and international lawyers and policy makers are struggling to install mechanisms that can control it. We hope to show, using some of the methods of the New Haven School, that (i) the developments there are best conceived of as a problem of the restoration and maintenance of public order rather than as a stricto sensu “legal problem”; and (ii) viewed in context from that perspective, only some of the techniques for the protection of public order are applicable.