The World for Ransom: Piracy Is Terrorism, Terrorism Is Piracy.

• Author: Skelton, Chris
• Position: Book review

The World for Ransom: Piracy is Terrorism, Terrorism is Piracy, By D.R. Burgess, Prometheus Books, 2010. ($26.00).

Untangling the issues posed by international terrorism, D.R. Burgess offers a compelling strategy to combat this scourge of the modern world. His engaging study The World for Ransom proposes a fusion of terrorism with the older, equally distinctive crime of piracy. Burgess claims that his solution would facilitate prosecution of terrorists without compromising the rule of law, thus reconciling the opposing concerns of efficiency and legitimacy that loom in this arena. While his argument suffers somewhat from over-ambition, he offers many fresh insights into a topic of increasing significance.

In the first and much longer of the book's two parts, Burgess argues that piracy constitutes the same crime as terrorism, for the earlier crime shares mens rea, actus reus, and locus elements with its descendant. He examines the historical application of universal jurisdiction to pirates, considered "enemies of the human race" (hostis humani generi) whom any state could capture and prosecute. (1) The nebulous status of pirates defied two types of binary frameworks: classification as ordinary criminals or military combatants and classification of their actions as intra- state or interstate conflicts. Even in the premodern world, therefore, lawmakers categorized piracy as a unique crime defined by a war against the entire world. For two and half millennia, pirates have represented the inversion of the established order and a threat to society's basic structures.

Firmly rooted in historical context, The World for Ransom draws from ancient works, including Cicero and the first explicit formulation of universal jurisdiction in the Italian Renaissance. From this theory sprang the doctrine of aut dedere aut judicare, which held each state responsible for either prosecuting captured pirates or extraditing them to a competent authority for prosecution. Within a century, however, state sponsorship of figures such as Francis Drake complicated the status of piracy by introducing privateering, in which a state directly licensed pirates to perform their actions on its behalf. In those circumstances, laws exempted pirates from responsibility for their actions, labeled acts of war by states rather than acts of piracy by individuals. Seeking to refine the definition of this elusive crime, seventeenth-century British courts identified piracy simply as "sea robbery." (2) This designation secured convictions more efficiently in that era but left behind a legacy of rigid interpretation that hindered the crime's later expansion.

Recounting the evolution of both piracy and counter-piracy measures, The World for Ransom notes the parallels between the cohesive, tightly disciplined pirate organizations and terrorist networks...