Coast guards and maritime piracy: sailing past the impediments to cooperation in Asia

Despite the efforts of the past decade, maritime piracy remains of international concern today. Countries need to cooperate actively at both the regional and international levels to eradicate the problem effectively. In particular, the nature of the threat in the Asia-Pacific region suggests that coastal states – countries that possess sovereignty over the pirate-infested waters but lack the law-enforcement resources – have to turn to resource-rich extra-regional powers for assistance. Unfortunately, cooperation between such disparate countries has traditionally been impeded by sovereignty sensitivities, as best exemplified by Malaysia's and Indonesia's hostile responses to the United States' Regional Maritime Security Initiative in 2003. Faced with this apparent dilemma, a new phenomenon has emerged. National coast guard agencies, instead of their military naval counterparts, have become attractive alternatives for promoting international cooperation against non-traditional security threats, such as maritime piracy. Spearheaded by the Japanese Coast Guard (JCG), coast guards from various countries have imparted training expertise, conducted joint exercises, hosted low-publicity multilateral meetings, and even transferred security equipment across international borders. Together they have succeeded in promoting cooperation without arousing the sovereignty sensitivities often associated with such cooperation. This article analyzes the evolution of coast guard cooperation in Asia, highlighting in particular the Japanese Coast Guard's success in this endeavor. With the general alignment of regional and global power interests in Southeast Asia, coast guard agencies hold promise for extra-regional powers wishing to help eradicate maritime piracy in the region. Keywords: Coast guardinternational cooperationmaritime piracy Acknowledgements This article is a revised version of a chapter of the author's master's thesis (CitationHe 2008) completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The author would especially like to thank Richard Samuels and Taylor Fravel, his two thesis advisors, for their valuable advice and feedback during the course of the research. He would also like to thank MIT Libraries for their assistance in processing the primary data sources used in this article, as well as two anonymous reviewers for the valuable feedback to an initial version of this article. Finally, the author is grateful to the Singapore Armed Forces for funding his education at MIT. Ruijie He is a Lieutenant in the Singapore Armed Forces. He recently graduated with a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in the Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Notes 1 These IMO figures do not distinguish between attacks that occurred within territorial waters and those that occurred in the high seas, but instead classifies the attacks merely by geographical region. See IMO Annual Reports on acts of piracy and armed robbery against ships, 1998–2006; accessed at http://www.imo.org, 24 September 2009. 2 Significant variations in definitions exist between the two international organizations that deal with maritime piracy – the IMB and the IMO. The definitions differ on whether to include attacks that take place in territorial waters, as well as whether the victim ship needs to have been boarded by pirates from another ship (see CitationBeckman 2002; CitationJohnson and Valencia 2005) 3 Following the establishment of the Standard Operating Procedures for the Malacca Straits Sea Patrols (as MALSINDO is now known) in April 2006, patrol ships now have the right of hot pursuit up to a maximum of five nautical miles into the sovereign waters of another state (see 'TNI-AL Presentation' (paper presented at the Military Operations [MILOPS] Conference, Kuala Lumpur, 19 July 2006); and Storey (Citation2008: 119)). 4 In the case of Japan, only the English name of its coast guard changed from JMSA to JCG, whereas the Japanese version of the name remained unchanged.