Foreign fleets plunder Somali waters while anti-piracy patrols criminalise artisanal fishers defending ancestral commons
Original framing: “Kinship and surveillance: The return of Somali piracy” — Al Jazeera
Xeer maritime customary law operates through clan-based councils (guurti) that designate seasonal closures (dulmar), gear restrictions, and species-specific taboos — e.g., prohibiting shark finning as violation of baraka (blessing) from ancestral spirits. These systems collapsed not from internal failure but from 1991 state dissolution followed by foreign trawlers using bottom trawls that destroy coral reefs xeer protects. The current crackdown criminalises fishers using handlines and gillnets compliant with xeer, while EU-flagged vessels with 'sustainable' certifications operate 12nm offshore.
The 'return of piracy' is a category error produced by a security epistemology that mistakes immune response for pathology.
For three decades, the international community has securitised the symptoms — armed fishers in skiffs — while subsidising the disease: industrial IUU fleets, toxic dumping, and port privatisation that enclosure the commons Somali xeer governed for centuries. The crackdown's surveillance architecture, built on counter-terrorism logic, now criminalises the very kinship-based stewardship (amana) that sustained these fisheries. Real solutions require not more drones but epistemic restitution: recognising clan maritime councils as legitimate authorities, redirecting patrol budgets to coastguard capacity, and making IUU extraction unprofitable through port state enforcement and insurance reform. The trickster — the insurance-market-security nexus — has been selling protection from a threat its own risk models created. The fishers know this; their buraanbur poems have always said: the sea remembers who feeds it and who only takes.