Existing studies of piracy focus attention on the institutional determinants of maritime piracy, but neglect variation in governments’ reach over territory. We argue and find that the effect of state capacity on piracy is partly a function of states’ ability to extend authority over the country’s entire territory. Weak governments allow for the planning and implementation of attacks and reduce the risk of capture, but particularly so if sufficient distance separates pirates from political authority. Our empirical analysis of country-year data on maritime piracy collected by the International Maritime Bureau for the 1995-2013 period show that capital-coastline distance mediates the effect of institutional fragility on piracy as we hypothesized. Operationalizing reach by measuring the average capital-coastline distance, we show that institutional variables have little effect when distances are short, but increase piracy substantially for states with long or very long distances. Our findings also show that these conditional relationships are not limited to specific operationalizations of independent and dependent variables. In addition, the models perform well in terms of predictive power, forecasting piracy quite accurately for 2013. The figure below shows the basic interactive relationship between state strength and distance while the map illustrates our forecasting successes and failures for 2013.
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Brandon Prins & Ursula DaxeckerSocial scientists researching drivers and consequences of modern maritime piracy. Archives
May 2020
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