Captured at Sea

"This is an engaging and vivid narrative, based on extraordinary fieldwork and insightful observations. It is filled with compelling anecdotes, events, and characters, and it tells a story that is both intrinsically interesting and filled with intriguing insights about power, violence, and sovereignty."--James Ferguson, author of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution "This brilliant and absorbing book is like no other. It is first and foremost an astonishing ethnography of the politics of piracy and ransom in Somalia. But Dua also critically expands our imagined maps of piracy to show how deeply European insurance and shipping businesses and even NATO warships are implicated in the political economy of protection in the Western Indian Ocean." --Laleh Khalili, Professor of Politics at SOAS University of London "In this remarkable ethnography, we see Somali piracy as an economy of capture and redistribution intimately tied to a long history of Indian Ocean trade. Rather than an outmoded aberration, Dua argues for piracy as one among many infrastructures of protection that knit together a transregional geography of power, property, and profit. A truly impressive achievement."--Ajantha Subramanian, author of Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India