Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua (review)

I Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, anthropologist Jatin Dua has woven an insightful and refreshing monograph about contemporary maritime piracy emanating from Somalia, with specific focus on what he refers to as “an anthropology of protection” (23). For Dua, this means empirically tracking practices of protection that are violent and/or coercive, whether they are meant to protect lifestyles, land, trade routes, financial assets or free trade (19). This move destabilizes the “empirical and analytical divides between piracy and counter-piracy,” (4) and Dua shows us how they are, in many ways, quite similar. The introduction to Captured at Sea is a fabulous piece of scholarship that offers important interventions to how we understand sovereignty, and specifically challenges the taken-for-given conceptual divide between the land and the sea. The first three chapters seek to anchor piracy practices to reciprocal kinship groups (diya) and counter-piracy to marine insurance companies (121). He begins with a thorough historical framing of protection practices in the region, and then shows how these practices continue to be relevant in everyday relations with those who practice Somali piracy. His chapter on the connections between counter-piracy and marine insurance is based on the framework of maritime regulations and law. Thereafter, Dua focuses on ransom-making practices (Chapter 4) and on being captive (Chapter 5). The book is based on research that stretched over approximately four years during which he developed a methodology that is “transregional” (24). In practice, this means that Dua not only links sites perceived as separate—such as places at sea and on land or diya groups and insurance