Why Pirates Are Back

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the birth of a new pirate age both in international waters, where fights over oil and fish extraction echo colonial wars over silver and slaves, and in the “high seas” of a global information society. This article reviews these fast-growing phenomena and shows how they relate to one another and to a broader proliferation in types of sovereignty, as well as the rebels they engender. Piracy forces open the cracks of legal sovereignties, revealing an intensifying contradiction in what ought to be called neoliberal mercantilism.