Pirate Hotspots, Then and Now: How Maritime Piracy Moved around the World, 1993 to 2026

Maritime piracy is often pictured through one episode, the Somali hijackings of the late 2000s, but its geography has shifted repeatedly. Using the Crime at Sea database of 7,511 geolocated attacks and attempted attacks from 1993 to 2020, compiled from International Maritime Bureau (IMB) and US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency reports, I map piracy year by year and trace how its hotspots moved. In the 1990s the South China Sea and East Asian waters led (26% of attacks in 1993 to 1999), followed by Indonesia, which peaked at 105 attacks in 2003. The Strait of Malacca peaked at 104 attacks in 2000 and averaged 14.3 a year from 2006. Attacks in Somali waters and the Gulf of Aden rose from 53 in 2007 to 231 in 2011, making up 48% of all attacks and 83% of hijackings in 2008 to 2011, with a median distance from shore of 131 km against 9.1 km elsewhere in those years, and then fell by 92% in two years. The Gulf of Guinea became the leading region, with 43% of attacks in 2020. IMB headline counts carry the story to 2026: the Singapore Strait recorded 80 incidents in 2025, 58% of the world total, and all 8 hijackings reported in January to September 2026 were by Somali pirates. Most attacks are thefts from ships at anchor close to shore, in busy shipping lanes and in poorer countries; the hotspots move with enforcement, opportunity and the routes of trade. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/piracy-hotspots/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/piracy-hotspots. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/piracy-hotspots/. Data: Benden, Feng, Howell and Dalla Riva (2021), Crime at Sea: A Global Database of Maritime Pirate Attacks (1993 to 2020), Journal of Open Humanities Data, CC BY 4.0; ICC International Maritime Bureau headline counts, 2021 to 2026; World Bank and IMF Global Shipping Traffic Density, CC BY 4.0; Natural Earth.