Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! Contemporary maritime piracy Since
the end of the Cold War, piracy has had a considerable comeback,
not only in popular culture. The raids of the real counterparts
of Captain Jack Sparrow, star of the movie ‘Pirates of the
Caribbean’, have reached a dimension that poses a serious
problem to security policy. By Jan Künzl Piracy occurred ever
since humans have been using waterways for transportation. It
reached its heyday between the 16th and the 19th century,
concentrating in the Caribbean, Mediterranean and East Asian
regions. However, in the course of the increasing importance of
modern statehood and international maritime trade the phenomenon
was nearly superseded. In the 20th century, until the end of the
Cold War, piracy had almost vanished. But since then a
resurrection of piracy, which has reached an enormous extent by
now, has taken place. In 2007 the Piracy Reporting Centre in
Kuala Lumpur reported some 263 attacks on a whole variety of
vessels. The number of unreported c