 Welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us this evening for this public seminar. My name's Dr. Michael Clark, I'm the graduate convener here at the National Security College. My role this evening is to introduce our speaker, the social professor Sarah Percy, and I think she's going to give you a very interesting and very rich presentation on something that I think fits very well with the multidisciplinary focus and approach of the National Security College to national security challenges. And in particular I think Sarah's work addresses the nexus of the theory and practice of national security policy, and in particular changing nature of national security challenges in the current landscape, and in particular intersection and convergence of traditional and non-traditional security challenges and threats. Sarah is currently a social professor of international relations at the University of Queensland and the Deputy Director of UQ's Graduate Center for Governance and International Affairs. She's also a non-resident fellow of the Australian Sea Power Centre and a senior research associate at the Oxford Program on the changing character of war. Before going to the University of Queensland, she was an associate professor in international relations at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on unconventional combatants, particularly private military and security companies and mercenaries and unconventional security threats, particularly on the maritime sphere. And she's presented on these topics at a range of academic venues, as well as the United Nations and the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy. Finally, her research on piracy was also featured in the production notes of the film Captain Phillips, which starred Tom Hanks. So without further ado, I'd like you to welcome Dr. Percy to present her talk this evening. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. I always have to mention that, because it's the closest I think I'll ever get to Tom Hanks. Thank you very much for having me here this evening. I very much appreciate the invitation and I'm always very happy to talk to audiences about some of the more policy-oriented research that I do. I've had the sort of day where technology has conspired against me, so do not be surprised if something blows up during the course of the presentation. And I have my lovely and talented assistant over here who will be changing my slides for me. So that might slow things down a little bit. So can I have the first slide, please, please? So most of my research has always started with puzzles, something that surprises us that we should find unexpected about the study of international relations. And can I have the next one? In this particular case, one of the things we know is that states engage in extensive multilateral military cooperation. In fact, most states these days, most of the time, if they're operating in a military fashion, they're doing it with other states. They're doing it multilaterally. Unilateral military engagement is relatively rare, particularly among Anglo-Western states, like Australia, the UK, Canada, the US. And one of the things which is really interesting about it, I think I need the next one, is that the reason why they do this is pretty, seems to be pretty obvious, is that you need to do it for legitimacy. Very often it's very hard to undertake interventions in a sort of imprimatur that legitimacy gives you. And I think the US intervention in Iraq demonstrates that people really want to develop a coalition, not necessarily because it's going to give you any specific military benefit, but because that coalition gives you greater legitimacy. And also there are some force multiplier effects, particularly for some smaller states, that it would be hard to engage in military interventions if you didn't have some kind of coalition or cooperative venture. The problem with this, though, is that the coalition is notoriously problematic. And when you talk to people about it and you say, well, I know you felt that you had to develop this coalition, how was it working through with the coalition? Most often they'll say it was terrible. We had people who were operating under different rules, we had people who interpreted the rules differently, it caused an enormous amount of stress. So given that military cooperation is notoriously problematic, and given that it's not necessarily the optimum choice in many ways, I'll have the next one, we've got lots of quotes like this. Dealing with the enemy is a simple and straightforward matter, and also like the next one. So this is sort of where my puzzle started, is we expect that when people create multinational military cooperation, if that force multiplier stuff that I mentioned is true, what you should have is you should have something which is greater than the sum of its parts. But Nora Bentzell at those US-based academic points said that this is often the reverse is true, that what you end up with is maybe less effective than operating on your own. And the reasons for this is multiple different types of military groupings operating together creates lots of points of friction. There are lots of points where things don't work together as well as they should. There are issues always with command and control, so who's in overall charge of the mission? How do you respond to the person in charge? How do people participate in the mission? And there's a general loss of efficiency, which goes along with multinational military operations. One of the specific areas we've seen this, and there's been some very interesting new research done on this, is in the idea of caveats, which is to say, yes, I'll come participate in your military force, but I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this, and I'm not going to do this. And there's a very interesting paper that I can tell you more about in questions about particularly the impact on Germany of the use of these caveats in the ISAF context in Afghanistan, where there's been a lot of discussion about the damage that's done to Germany's reputation as an international military partner, because their caveats were so strict. So how do we solve these problems with multinational military cooperation? Well, the traditional solution has been to assume that what you want to get, ideally, is something like World War II, where really there is somebody in charge. You have a very top-down military command. You have as few different multinational commands as possible. You streamline all of your multinational commands, and you have extremely hierarchical commands. So there's no doubt as to who's giving the orders and when they're giving them. And that should therefore reduce the problems that we've talked about, of friction and efficiency and things like that. But given what we know about multinational cooperation and all of the things that make it work, my puzzle was this. How do we explain counterpiracy? Counterpiracy has been a very effective form of multinational military cooperation, so pirate attack, which was very, very high in 2008, 2009. There hasn't been a successful attack since 2014. So how do we explain, if multinational military cooperation is so hard, how can we explain counterpiracy, which has a number of very unique characteristics? How can you go back to that one? Which has a number of very unique characteristics, and I'll come back to this idea in a minute. One of the things that makes counterpiracy so interesting is that it includes people who don't like each other in other contexts. So in counterpiracy we have the Chinese cooperating with the Indians cooperating with the Pakistanis cooperating with the Americans with the Australians. And in a way, which is not at all hierarchical. So the question is, not only do we have a form of multinational military cooperation which seems to be effective, there's no resemblance to that ideal type. What we really want is one person who's calling the shots from the top right down to the bottom. And we see this partly, it's always interesting talking to an audience like this because some of you I think will know exactly what I'm talking about, and some of you this will be new. This is shade which is a shared awareness and deconfliction place which exists in Bahrain and they meet to solve the problems of coordinating counterpiracy. And there you have the command structure of the multinational mission which is running counterpiracy. And I'll come back to about how this works in a minute. But this facilitates multiple commands. It doesn't try to diminish them. And it's deliberately non hierarchical. The idea is to get the most number of people you possibly can into this mechanism and the only way you're going to do that is by not placing people under a hierarchy. And as I said this includes both allies and foes and non friends. This is a Russian counterpiracy grouping and Russia also helps participate in the broader counterpiracy missions in the Gulf of Aden. China is involved in this as I've mentioned and can we have a quick one? And so then I came up with my more precise puzzle. So this is a subject of some research I've been doing for a while. And that is how is counterpiracy different from other forms of military cooperation? So what is it that's making it work? And can we apply what has made counterpiracy work to other forms of military cooperation? Is there anything useful that we can draw from this? Or is counterpiracy just a completely unique beast from which we can't really draw any lessons? So that's what I'm going to talk to you guys about tonight. And I'm going to talk I think hopefully at multiple different levels because I know some of the people in the room have already said we'll really have a great deal of familiarity with what I'm talking about. And I would talk a little bit about for those of you who are interested in the study of international relations, there are some interesting international relations theoretical implications of what I'm talking about as well. But I'll do that with a very light touch. So we'll start out by thinking what makes counterpiracy so different? The first thing is counterpiracy is a network. So this isn't a picture of the counterpiracy network. This is a picture of networks formed by human rights organizations. And the different... You can see how the lines connect things and the different sizes and shapes of the organizations indicate certain things about their importance within the network and how they're connected to other people. Network theory is a very, very trendy subject in international relations. At the moment we use network theory to describe all sorts of different things from networks of NGOs to networks of terrorists to networks of organized criminals. And it occurred to me that I was invited to join this project on network theory, which I knew nothing about before I started, because it occurred to me that actually counterpiracy constitutes exactly this type of network. So what is networked cooperation? How do we define it? This is the textiest slide I will have for you. But it's basically actors who are working together who are bound together by common values, common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services. And the other way of looking at it is a representation characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange. So basically, people participate in these on a voluntary basis. They work because they're reciprocal, because everybody's participating, and they work because they're horizontal. In other words, they're non-hierarchical. This is a very good depiction of counterpiracy, and it's a bizarre depiction of military cooperation. So if you read that and said I'm going to describe military cooperation it makes absolutely no sense, except it works very well for counterpiracy. So it doesn't resemble this traditional form of military cooperation. And as we'll find out one of the things which is interesting about counterpiracy is that it doesn't even really resemble some of these other networks that I've mentioned. There are some unique things about it. So what's going on here and what does it tell us about the prospects for cooperation in other areas? As I've said before, we can see the non-hierarchy working very well through this shared awareness and deconfliction exercise. Not every military grouping that's involved in counterpiracy participates in shade, but most do, and even when they don't they tend to have very close connections. What shade does is every time people have a problem, they bring it to these regularly organized meetings and they try and work out exactly how they're going to move going forward. And it's been very instrumentally organized in the administration of something called the internationally recognized transit corridor. And that's the modified convoy system that allows shipping to transit the Gulf of Aden region safely and not get attacked by pirates. How it works is you are given a time where you transit and you wait for a vessel to come in. Let me start again. You are given your time to transit and you go through and as you leave at your appointed time there will be a vessel within about 20 minutes of you at all points along the way and that's enough time for you to resist a pirate attack and then be rescued. And the implementation of that transit corridor has been absolutely crucial to the success of counterpiracy. And this is one of the mechanisms which helps administer that transit corridor. As I've said before, it's very deeply non-hierarchal and in fact early on when people were trying to get China to participate in this they actually said, no, we're not going to and then it was sold to them as a basis. Once it had been running for a while, look, we're not going to impose any particular rules of engagement on you. We're not going to tell you what to do. You can come and participate. The reason why it's very important to have as many players in the room as possible is because the amount of maritime space which is in play in Somali piracy is absolutely enormous. So the more ships you have the better because then you can cover a wider range of ocean. Now remember we talked about networks having exchanges, dense exchanges of information. So how counter piracy works is ships have to be able to tell each other when there is a hostile or potential pirate ship on the horizon. And that might be at a great distance and you might need people to respond quite quickly. Now, how do you do that when you have the Chinese cooperating with the Russians who were cooperating with the Indians and the Pakistanis and none of them necessarily like each other? What they came up with was they repurposed something called Mercury Chat because they've got a little screenshot. It's like Instant Messenger. And it was a really useful, clever solution because it's something more secure than radio communications which pirates might just be able to listen into. But not as secure as it would be if you were trying to give the Chinese, say, secure communications. So it's a very good halfway and it's been integral to making this system work. Is it allows these dense exchanges of information to happen in a way which doesn't create any hierarchy in a way which doesn't create specific rules? It's a very innovative solution. So how have we seen this happen in counter piracy? What makes counter piracy different? The issue that I have, I think, when I explain this to people often is that counter piracy is very unique. Piracy constitutes a very unique problem and I think some of the reasons why we've been able to achieve a very unique form of cooperation is because of these very unique features of piracy and I'll go through them in turn. So the first thing I've mentioned this before is the size of the area in question and this is an old map but it's a really good one because it shows you the limits. The largest of the circles is the furthest extent of pirate attack and the smallest of the circles is where it started at the beginning. So you can see how the pirates began to extend their operations out and why you need so many ships to participate in counter piracy. This is a really, really vast area. So this is always going to be a situation of the more the merrier, the more vessels you have conducting counter piracy, the better the outcome that you're going to get. So that encourages people to be reasonably inclusive in developing how they're going to sort the problem out. And in a facility, so remember we talked about dense exchanges of information. Dense exchanges of information to cover that whole area we've seen a vessel this particular juncture, we need someone to move and it requires the confliction because you need to know what the other vessels are doing and how they're doing it in order to coordinate the whole picture. Also, the thing that's interesting about counter piracy is it's almost a deliberate blurring of hierarchies because in addition to all of those individual navies that I've mentioned, we have several different multinational groupings that are also involved in counter piracy. So we have NATO Sensor Contingent, EU Nav Force Sensor Contingent, and we have from Combined Maritime Force in Bahrain we have Combined Task Force 151 also sent into contingent. That last one involves I think it's about 26 different nations including Pakistan, including Australia, including in the United States, and they work together on counter piracy. So if you have three multinational groupings and a bunch of states, quite deliberately it's going to be very hard to have hierarchy. And so again there's a conscious decision to avoid it. Piracy is also very unusual as an international security problem in that it has a very explicitly clear legal framework. So one of the other things that I'm looking at at the moment is illegal, unregulated and unauthorized fishing, IOU fishing. That has a very complex legal framework and the consequence of that it's much harder to deal with as a problem. Whereas when Somali piracy first became an international problem of some significance, it was really really easy to deal with it because it was a clear violation of international law, it was a clear violation of a very well accepted international law and that facilitated UN Security Council support for counter piracy almost immediately. There was no quibbling around the margins about what was going on. So that's extremely helpful and it's reasonably unusual I think in terms of a security problem. There's also no doubt that Somalia has quite significant strategic importance and there are a lot of navies who would like to have an excuse to be sailing around the Gulf of Aden for a whole variety of different reasons. And most navies would probably be there anyway so Australia for example would like to have a presence in the Gulf of Aden regardless of whether or not counter piracy is ongoing. And the Chinese would like to have a presence partly to demonstrate how far their navy has come and how far it can go. So there's all sorts of navies have a reason to be there anyway. Somalia also has specific strategic importance because of its location. So the reason why Somali piracy becomes such an issue is obviously when you're transiting the Suez Canal it has a big impact on shipping and trying to avoid pirates. One of the things that tends to surprise people don't know a lot about it even at the height of Somali piracy we're still talking about less than 1% substantially less than 1% of the total shipping that was transiting the Suez Canal was being attacked by pirates but the counter measures that were being required for ships to avoid attack really slowed shipping down and a significant chunk of the world's oil transits this region. So this was a strategically important incidence of piracy and that partly explains why so many states were interested in it. Piracy is a classic problem of the commons most high seas things are states are unable to sort it out individually and we've seen that historically so the Barbary Pirates are the great 19th century example of piracy and that was actually my picture with the legal framework and that was at the coast of what is now Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria and that was also solved by an international coalition partly I think because of the number of ships that it takes often to sort out a pirate problem. Yup, my next one. And there's also something one of the other things which is unique about counter piracy probably has a little bit to do with the nature of navies and the nature of the maritime space. So navies have obviously historically been used to operating at a significant remove from national capitals and often without very speedy communication so there's a historic tradition of navies cooperating with other navies making decisions about how to solve problems on the high seas often because of technological constraints without the consultation of national capitals. There's a very strong, in a lot of the interview work I did, nearly everyone mentioned was the maritime code there's an idea that navies assist other navies when they experience problems. Navies are very like each other so they're very easy to operate across services because they all operate in the same kind of domain and naval vessels are relatively feel relatively familiar across different types of navies so there's a really strong impetus here something that also came out in my interviews was a lot of people said and not just people from navies said that it would be very hard to imagine this sort of cooperation with armies partly because also the numbers of people involved so you're talking about a few vessels rather than 20,000 troops so there are lots of things that may be specific to navies which are facilitating this type of cooperation. And finally I like to call this a classic Goldilocks problem it's just right for international cooperation. It's not such a big international security problem that national capitals are going to get really excited about how it has to be solved nor is it so insignificant that you're never going to get a multinational response in the first place. So it hits a sweet spot in terms of being just serious enough for control but not so serious that people are going to try to seize that control. So what does all of this mean? We have counter piracy as a special case and we have the specific form of cooperation that ensues. So we really reduce the need for repeated costly negotiations about what a contingent can and can't contribute. Shade is there to do that and also because there are multiple chains of command and there are allowed to be multiple chains of command people are allowed to work independently and you can make as big of a contribution as you want and that's going to be enough to be useful. And in this situation caveats which cause all of the problems in Afghanistan are relatively unnecessary. And it solves some, it overcomes some of the problems of multinational military operations by being egalitarian, informal and non-hierarchical in other ways in other words the exact reverse of what I said most people's conventional solution to the problems of military cooperation is. It also differs substantially from network theory expectations. So here's another, this is another human rights oriented map of network theory. One of the things that network theorists will tell you is the hubs, these are the organizing parts of the network will often try and manipulate their power in the network to get more of what they want and they might do that by blocking an exchange of information or by facilitating it for a preferred partner. What we find in counter piracy is none of that happens if the whole network wouldn't work. So this is something where states are actually very deliberately trying to be much more than the sum of their parts and they're not manipulating the people who are the network hubs so shade is run out of CMF and Bahrain. They could try and manipulate that to become more powerful but because it would damage the network as a whole they largely don't. So this is an area where it differs quite sharply from what network theory tells us should happen. Here's my big challenge though when I started working on this is this just a completely unique problem that all of those factors that I just told you about what makes piracy a special problem and explains why we have this very unusual form of cooperation to deal with it. And if that's true that's no good for me because then I can't be telling people we'll hear some policy lessons that we might draw from it. The good news is I don't think it is a sui generis problem. We see this sort of very unusual cooperation in lots of other places, most specifically in instances of crime control and particularly ones which involve the maritime. I'm going to come back to this idea a little bit later. This is the very blurry logo for something called the Joint Interagency Task Force South which is based in Key West in the U.S. It's a big counter-narcotics organization. It's multi-agency and multinational so they have anywhere between 15 and 20 different national contingents there at any one time. They have police forces coast guards and navies all working together and have very similar sorts of ideas. It's more hierarchical and permanent than counter-piracy but it still allows very independent contributions and facilitates relatively unusual forms of cooperation. After the Asian tsunami, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, we saw a very similar innovative solution that was drawn up on the fly by navies themselves coming up with cunning solutions to problems to deliver aid. And again it was also involved multiple navies who weren't necessarily obvious partners who were working together to solve the specific and concrete problems. During the First Gulf War there's something called the C3IC which is, I can't remember what the algorithm stands for, but it was a command and control, coordination command and control site that was meant to facilitate the cooperation between so many partners in the coalition of the First Gulf War. This is a less good example. It was a bit of a fig leaf to make certain national contingents feel better about participating in a multinational action under US command but it nonetheless shows that sometimes we do improvise unusual non-specifically hierarchical forms of military command. So what does this tell us about where we might see this type of cooperation? Well I think we'll see it with our Goldilocks problems. So we'll see it where problems are just serious enough where they require our attention. We'll see it where we need an extremely broad coalition and as soon as you have an extremely broad coalition that's probably not so likely to tolerate a unified command. And I think it's really important to say what I'm not saying here is I don't think this is a model for how you would actually fight a war on the ground. This would not work if you tried to use it as in any kind of war against a sophisticated adversary. It works against Somali pirates and it probably wouldn't work in other contexts. Interestingly in the narcotics context what you see is narcotics started out is exactly this sort of Goldilocks problem. This is something that we need to do but as the crime control developed there is a very interesting sort of co-evolution into more and more complex forms of counter-narcotics and more and more elaborate forms of control and that's something else I look at in other areas of my research and I'll come back to that a little bit. So I think that maybe we should see this kind of cooperation more and I think part of the reason why it's very important to study it and to think about how it works in other contexts where it does apply and maybe we should think about using it. So here's another picture. This is a change of command at Jayat of South. Can we have the next one? And part of the reason why I throw out this example of counter-narcotics is if you look at Australia's current naval operations what you find is the ones which are not in support of land operations the ones that are specific to navy I forgot to write down the name there too I can't remember Manabu Is that right? Manatou. That's the one. This is Manatou and this supports this basically supports combined maritime force and at the moment Australia has HMAS Darwin which is tasked to combine maritime force and Bahrain so that's part of what Australia does and the other one is Operation Resolute and this one is really interesting those are all the things that Operation Resolute is meant to do down the side there. All of those things are effectively crime or explicitly crime. They're all also things that it's hard to imagine that you could have an effective unilateral solution to any of those problems. These are all things that involve multiple nations a problem which happens at the high seas. They're also all inherently probably involving multiple types of agency because many of them are criminal. So when we are trying to control things like illegal maritime arrivals, maritime terrorism, illegal fishing, illegal exploitation of natural resources, maybe we should think about what was done in counter piracy is a really interesting model for how to control these problems. I think some of them like IUU fishing, I think IUU fishing should be a Goldilocks problem illegal fishing but it largely isn't because I think people underestimate its seriousness often it's hard to sell to people as a very important problem but maybe if we applied some of these very unusual non-hierarchical multi-agency multinational approaches to these problems we would see them also reduce and it would be a very innovative form of cooperation to begin to actually think about deliberately applying these rather than letting them spontaneously erupt in response to crisis which has typically been what's happened. I think this relates to my point about how do you counter crime in general without a network and this is a picture of one of the organization Sea Shepherd targeted these six naughty IUU fishing vessels called the Bandit Six and they were incorrigible they had been illegally fishing Patagonian tooth fish for upwards of 10 years and no one had managed to catch them and what Sea Shepherd did is they basically organized one of their very effective vigilante campaigns and said well we will just follow these vessels all six of them until they are either able to be apprehended by appropriate authorities or they give up and within 16 months all six of them had been brought to justice when previously had it taken 10 to 15 years how were they able to do that? Well they have a looser interpretation of the law than a legal organization would and that's part of it but it's also because they actually also have a networked form and they were able to create this very interesting national authorities were working with the Sea Shepherds to do this and people were keeping each other apprised of where the movements were in effect it created a little mini network to solve this problem and it stopped these six vessels from carrying on. Co-operating on crime is also easy for states. States like to cooperate on crime because most states agree that crime is bad and therefore it could be a really useful starting point for other things so there's very few states in the world that don't have some sort of counter-narcotics policy that don't have some sort of counter illegal migration policy that don't have some sort of policy that says we'd prefer it if people did not illegally fish our waters so if you have those common interests in the first place maybe what you could do is cooperate on them and use it to make connections between navies and the reason why I think that is quite important is because we have very few I think most people's dooms day scenario with the South China Sea which is here this is I found this this is on the internet this is how the US would fight a naval battle in the South China Sea where the fleets would come and most people you talk to their dooms day scenario in the South China Sea isn't an out full-on head-to-head confrontation it's a mistake that goes wrong so somebody misinterpret somebody else and what happens is that escalates and escalates and escalates and all of a sudden then you potentially have naval war in the South China Sea now I'm not trying to make too many claims for what the sort of cooperation that I've been talking about can do but I think it's not entirely far-fetched to say look if people have the familiarity operating with each other in countering piracy or encountering other sorts of crimes if they actually know each other which in many cases they will they might have met while they're doing some of these operations if they have an unusual communication system that they both know how to act there maybe that would actually be a very good starting point to reduce the potential of sort of catastrophic mistake from occurring in the South China Sea so it's not a perfect solution but I think in some ways it's as best as we're going to get given that we're dealing with states that are actually quite hostile to each other and a situation which has a great deal of security sensitivity so that takes me to the end of what I wanted to talk about I'm very happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you That's very much Sarah. Just a quick question about the involvement of the Chinese and how they were actually brought on I mean the subject I'm quite interested in could you expand a little bit on that? Well what happens what happened in the early stages of counter piracy is they developed something called the contact group on the contact group on piracy and it had lots of different components and it still exists there was a legal component there was a naval introduction component there was a civil society building component and most nations saw piracy as a problem they wanted to stop so they got involved piracy was authorized by like I said earlier a security council resolution and the Chinese were interested in participating in counter piracy but counter piracy can be a very complicated answer unfortunately piracy started out as a reasonably serious problem they got people's attention states tried to do something about it and the first attempts at state controlling counter piracy actually states controlling piracy actually backfired for a whole lot of different reasons and piracy was getting bigger and bigger and bigger at the same time you had this multinational response so it was clear that something more concrete and coherent needed to be done and that's when you start getting to the development of the contact group and shade begins to grow out of that again as a spontaneous response not as something particularly planned and the initial grouping of states that were involved in shade was quite small and then other states were operating the region began to participate more and more and the Chinese were invited as my understanding at early stages and said no that they did not want to be involved in multinational grouping and then eventually as they saw how well it was working were persuaded that it was a good idea Sarah I just wanted to test one of your underlying assumptions and that is that the coalition forces in the person against piracy actually achieved anything as you know many people would argue that in fact they achieved nothing and that the decline in piracy was all due to ships taking self defense measures and so if you look at it that way are these anti piracy operations more actually a political or strategic function have a political or strategic function rather than a practical function of being anti piracy I don't know what that would do to your theory well I don't buy it okay so I think part of what I said before is remember how I said we have this modified convoy system and how it works is that once you're transiting in the internationally recognized transit quarter you are about 20 minutes away from a vessel part of the reason why it works to be 20 minutes away is because states adopted a number of things which they call best management practices and some of them were very simple like putting barbed wire along a low lying ship to make it harder for the pirates to get on board or the use of water cannons some ships were using private security guards there are a number of things that made it actually harder for the pirates to get on board the ship there is no doubt that best management practices has had a significant impact but I think only in conjunction with with the IRTC and with the presence of navies as a deterrent because a lot of these measures are enough to resist pirate attack for about 20 minutes and no more than that the other thing is there's a huge number of ship owners that still haven't taken any best management practice measures because there's no incentive for them to do it when we talk about the fact that it's less than 1% of shipping which is transiting the region is getting caught and your insurance premiums were still not massively expensive if you didn't care whether or not your crew got taken hostage and a lot of ship owners don't care whether or not their crew members get taken hostage you know you're going to get the insurance payout in the first place and so they were unwilling to spend the money to get the more effective forms of management practice so people often ask me because it ties together my bits of research nicely what about private security on ships and the answer to that is rich companies who care about their cargo or care about their crew will be using private security guards but they are also the sort of ships who are going to be taking all the necessary precautions anyway because they are well off and because they care and it's not to explain the large numbers of ships who don't so those ones this is a classic it's the lighthouse it's a classic public good problem is that everybody is benefiting from the system but I think there's no doubt if the Navy's went away the pirates would just go back to business we know they're busily involved in smuggling all sorts of other things at the moment they've just transferred they haven't shut down operations they've just stopped pirating where I think you can be critical of counter piracy for not working is exactly that the pirates have not gone anywhere this is a solution which is being applied it would be like if Canberra suddenly had a very very devastating criminal problem occurring in the city centre and the solution to it was just to contain it in the city centre so the criminals never went in or out that solution will only last as long as the containment policy is there and as soon as it goes away everybody's just going to come out again and I think that's the case with counter piracy that the lasting solution is obviously going to be an on the ground in Somalia solution but that is obviously because we're talking about Somalia probably a generation away from being possible to implement so it's very very costly that's the other thing so I have a slide that I don't have in this deck that I have other ways about the total cost of counter piracy and it's immense so is it really worth spending so much money on this problem in perpetuity if we think that it would just re-surge if the Navy's went away I don't think it would be as severe as it was in 2008 and 2009 because of the best management practices but I think it would come back You're talking about illegal fishing 10 years ago the Somalis said that they're pirating because the illegal fishers they had to do something the fastest way of making a million dollars was to take a crew even two weeks ago they were writing another article written saying we would be doing the similar sort of thing we've now got the naval ship five years ago people said how can we stop it what they did is let's just stop all those boats coming off the shore which meant that not only did the illegals were being stopped coming off so were the legals so now they could not fish in their own water the article from two weeks ago was saying now we're actually we can't get off the shore unless we leave after dawn and are back before dark which fishing people don't want to do we can see the illegal fishing boats out there but if we actually go out we will get our boats will be run down by the local Navy's because they've got their light vessels running in shore yeah this is in Somalia yeah this is in Somalia wouldn't it just be cheaper to monitor the illegal fishing fleets monitor the illegal mother ships get rid of the mother ships the bases for these illegal fishes and then the guys would be actually be able to go out and fish again well it depends on whether or not you believe this Mully Pirates and a lot of people don't believe this Mully Pirates so there's been a lot of interesting work done on this and one of the big problems with it is the pirate hotspot in Putland was not traditionally a fishing community people were not actually fishing very much at all and if you look at where the ships they started attacking they weren't actually fishing vessels at all they sort of went straight away to oil tankers so it's a complex story and most people who know the region well there's at minimum a very high degree of skepticism as to whether or not that is actually what started Somalia Piracy there is a competing and I think a largely better theory which has been by some anthropologists who've actually done a lot of field work in the region for a very long time very dangerous I don't think my university would ensure me to go in the region but there is a in that part of Putland in particular which is the real pirate heartland there's a strong tradition of paying tribute to transit the area and that was true on land and at sea so what we actually see is nothing to do with illegal fishing it's just an increasingly sophisticated application of a tribute system which had existed for a long time and that tribute system is still in place for smaller fishing dows and still causes problems but it's not the same thing as saying illegal fishing caused Somali pirates to go off and become pirates which who stop the illegal fishing vessels well can't the Navy do that you mean the problem is that one of the many problem illegal fishing is a whole separate maybe you can have me back to come talk about illegal fishing it's a whole separate problem not least because it's very hard to distinguish between a vessel which may be fishing legally and a vessel which is fishing illegally and that's not what they're mandated to do and it wouldn't solve the pirate problem because the pirates are totally disconnected from illegal fishing so would it be better for us to have illegal fishing probably is this big multinational naval operation the way to stop illegal fishing probably not thank you for the good example of international cooperation something I'm interested in is applying the same sort of approach to international cooperation against things like anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism finance do you see the analogies across there and could that also be a similar Goldilocks problem yeah, I think if anything it's probably a more severe problem particularly when states are very exercised about terrorism questions definitely in terms of network solutions for cooperation because it's very similar not least because money laundering is one of these examples of where people have applied network theory to how it works as a classic network money laundering systems are classic examples of networks because they rely on communications of information and they're non-hierarchical and it all moves around so yes both in terms of its actual subject matter and in terms of the fact that you need multinational multi-agency responses to make it and what I think is interesting is that we don't seem to have seized on as much as we could all of these innovative solutions which respond to a specific problem and then said well you know if this specific problem can be solved in this way could we think more specifically and more specifically about how it might be applied Thank you I was just curious about sort of the scope of what's discussed on the mercury system that you were talking about between the navies particularly when you gave it roughly speaking as an example of something that could help in a catastrophic accident situation how free is the communication and what sort of how broad is the scope of what's discussed well in the context of counter piracy it was mainly about we've spotted this vessel it's moving at this speed it's at these coordinates keep an eye out for it which is obviously not something you want to broadcast on the radio because the pirates were low-tech but not stupid so you know if they'd heard it they would have just gone out it just relies on regular communications technology so it's not encrypted and you wouldn't pass very very secure things over it but it's a really important halfway house solution between radio and complete security which we're never going to get but because it's relatively easy and we know it's worked in that context we know it could work because all vessels have computers on them and they're equipped to do this so it could apply you would never use it for something very secure because it's secure from the pirates but it's not not secure from some sort of more sophisticated adversary you were talking about how countries can come together to tackle a problem especially in the comments that you know international waters but if we have piracy in territorial waters that is still very important to global trade and questions of sovereignty come up and getting the way how would we go about dealing with that like how do you see that as being a potential issue especially in regions like Southeast Asia where there is no sort of international waters it's very territorial base so how do you see that well the cheating answer is that it's not piracy if it happens within territorial waters it's the robbery that's the cheating answer and actually this was an issue in Somalia and the one thing that the Security Council was able to provide was to say actually we count this as piracy even though it's happening in Somalia territorial waters because we know Somalia has no capacity to police its own territorial waters so that counter piracy could pursue vessels within territorial waters actually though we've had a really good example which I didn't talk about tonight of an earlier multinational counter piracy cooperation which is between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia controlling piracy which was partly set up deliberately around this problem visited in ways you need more coordination if you're going to have to be constantly transiting each other's territorial waters then you do if the problem is primarily occurring on the high seas it's one of these fine legal distinctions which has important consequences because the other thing is some states Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia will tell you they have been very successful on counter piracy some people who are very skeptical say well no they're just not counting it as piracy anymore it's still happening this they've conveniently shelved it into the sea robbery category I don't think it's happening with the same depth and persistence it was when it was a more significant problem in the late 90s in the early 2000s though I'm just curious with your comment about it being a Goldilocks problem it seems sort of serious enough but not too serious to be solved but that point that you made that the underlying causes aren't being addressed and perhaps at the same time there are trends that could worsen it in the future of people backed off for example cutting off money transfers back to Somalia from the diaspora or people pushing from refugee camps back into Somalia from Kenya with a wave of anti-Somali feelings I'm just wondering how long do you think it will be a Goldilocks problem when they decide to sort of back off and it's not worth that investment when we see that spike from all those other factors yeah and I mean I remain very concerned that Somali piracy will become a problem again that's not just academic wishful thinking because I'm disappointed that they've gone to town and I write about them but I think actually it is a potentially very serious problem and it's partly because even the things they tried in the context of civil society building or figuring out how to build local capacity backfired so we were talking in another session this afternoon that various people tried to give the authorities inputland ships so they could enforce the pirate problem themselves and what happened was the pirates were suddenly seen sailing around in these much better vessels than the one that they had before so it's a classic that area is a classic state building problem generally it's phenomenally corrupt and that means that it's very difficult to give aid in such a way that it's going to develop into a more stable system there are all sorts of interesting things that we know also in Somali pirates and the fact that a lot of them had come in from the country and they sort of did your one big score and then you went back out and took your money with you and the simple fact of the matter for Somalis as well is this wasn't a problem that preyed on insiders, it's a problem that preyed on outsiders and we know from other crime control context that that's really hard to control one of the best ways to control a big criminal problem is to have the community get really annoyed about it and then stamp it out but if it's all outsiders and you're getting this big source of income that you're not getting any other way it's very desirable and I don't think that desire to keep doing it is going to go away I think some of the stuff we've talked about with making ships harder to attack will actually help quite a lot but one of the things that pirates are doing is smuggling charcoal so acacia you burn acacia to get charcoal in Somalia and Yemen and Yemen has had a reasonably significant deforestation problem because they're burning down the charcoal and they're smuggling it in and out and the pirates are using the same vessels and the same things that they were doing so they've just switched crime I think that it's not for a lack of will though I don't think people have said oh yeah we're just going to stick this maritime band-aid on the Somali pirate problem it's actually just really really hard to institute the correct sort of solutions that are going to get you a right outcome in somewhere like Somalia Yes I'd like to draw your attention to the notorious the water that's the Suluk Sea and that is the border between East Malaysia Sabah and the southern Philippines particularly the Suluk Archipelago now before I ask a question I'd like to draw your attention that according to the Indonesian Foreign Ministry Ministry more than 100,000 ships sailed through Suluk Sea last year and carrying about 60 million tonnes of cargo and more than 18 million passengers so it's quite significant to Indonesia Malaysia and the Philippines and the bad news is there was a series of kidnappings all the past months including 14 Indonesians and four Malaysian sailors in the eastern Sabah by gunmen linked to the Abu Soya group in the southern Philippines so that initially is an issue kidnapping of tourists kidnapping of the fish farming operators or even the seaweed operator from east Malaysia into the Suluk Archipelago such as Dawi Dawi a horror and the Basire and even part of the Mindanao Islands unfortunately that is a concentration of the Islamic area and they may have connection with the Middle East because the practice that the capitalization the seeking of ransom we're talking about ransom of million and million dollars that become a interesting issue and also a very a bit alarm bell being rang because Indonesia is right into that now my question is to my understanding the region the Suluk Archipelago has been a very underdeveloped region there is a lot of property and initially it's a problem within Philippines but the problem expand across the border my question is do you think multinational country to develop the underdeveloped region of Suluk Archipelago will be able to stop the kidnapping for ransom and the piracy in the Suluk area rather than resort to the multinational navies as you just point out it's very very expensive I think that area that when I was talking about that area has always been a pirate hot spot and I normally have a map in part of my slides where I show but it's a great place to be a pirate throughout the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea because people have to come really close to land and that means you don't have to be very sophisticated in your methods if you're going to be doing any kind of crime and so it's very desirable part of what you described is related to this problem that I've just mentioned of how people are classifying it so people are choosing not to report these instances of piracy because and damage their reputation is having successfully stamped out the pirate problem and as you point out this is also a political problem no doubt that piracy is partially a function of poverty and that if you can give people a better way of making a livelihood they could nap in ransom, most people will probably take that but that is an enormously complex so naval stuff is expensive solving world poverty has a ridiculously long time horizon and it's also very expensive so it's one of these not easy policy solutions that's your right, if we could eradicate world poverty we would see fewer instances of piracy and fewer instances of all sorts of crime actually Thanks Dr. Pursy, very interesting just two very brief questions piracy being a civil maritime security threat I'm just wondering how you felt about your thoughts on Coast Guard versus navies which is the best tool for that civil maritime security problem and just a very quick second one there's been a couple of reports on cyber attacks shipping companies lately in terms of pirates if you like targeting specific cargoes etc what are your views on that as an increasing problem yeah, so to take the shipping one first is this with the AIS system the vessel tracking system so for people who aren't necessarily familiar with shipping all ships travel with a transponder which basically gives their position at any time and when I first started working on this I would ask people from the International Maritime Bureau don't you find that worrying that people would actually know where your ship is at all times and there are other important safety reasons to have it but yes I think it's vulnerable I'm not aware of any particularly heightened form of attack which is happening now but I think it's a known vulnerability and knowing being able to know where a particular cargo is going is particularly important one of the things that differs about South China Sea piracy as compared to Somalia piracy South China Sea piracy was largely about stealing the cargo so having a valuable cargo or certain type of small portable cargo knowing that is really valuable Somalia just doesn't have the infrastructure to steal cargo and that's why they did kidnapping ransom because it would get into Somalia there were no roads there were no air but you couldn't move what you'd taken so that's why you got kidnapped for ransom so it doesn't surprise me that this is a tactic because that's your form of piracy it really helps to know that you've got a ship carrying a whole lot of iPads you can move them you can shift them you can make money more quickly