Piracy and Maritime Insecurity among Territorial Waters of Africa: Analysis of Comparative Implications to Sustainable Regional Development

This paper analysed piracy to understand the levels of maritime insecurity in the African coastal space and their implications to regional development. It combined the descriptive research design with comparative methodology to collect and analyse a body of available secondary and quantitative data. Guided by the collective security analytical framework, the paper found that maritime insecurity through piracy existed at different levels among national territorial waters in Africa, with variations in their common tolerable insecurity condition between 2014 and 2018. This is because, 80%of the national territorial waters in Africa had very low level of insecurity based on their percentage point interval of between 0.00-24.99%, and recorded below the mean of 8.0 of insecurity cases at sea between the period under study. Based on our established criteria or logic of comparison the paper holds that this insecurity level has positive implication to the sustainable development of the continents maritime environment. Since it is not a threat to the common tolerable insecurity condition in such African environment, and cannot hinder sustainable development of the environments of the national territorial waters. The study suddenly discovered that the Nigerian territorial water was the actual hotspot of the high level of insecurity that has stigmatized the African maritime industry between 2014 and 2018. This is because of the high level of insecurity around Nigerian water of between 50.00-74.99% varied far widely and consistently above the mean of insecurity cases in Africa within the period under study. The implication is that the Nigerian water with such high level of insecurity, posed great threat to the common tolerable insecurity condition and hindered sustainable development of its national and continental maritime environment. The research assumption of this paper is hereby confirmed that the increasing violence within and around the African waters is not a common characteristics of the African maritime environment but an indication of variation in the level of insecurity among territorial waters in the continent. And such variation can lead to variation in the stability of development therein which collective security can rescue and unify. Based on findings the paper recommended among others, for a Unified African Maritime Security Control System (UAMICS), as response to variation in the levels of maritime insecurity among territorial waters in Africa.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.