‘No poor person can afford a 200HP engine’: An Infrastructural Reading of Poverty-Piracy Link

For decades, piracy in the Gulf of Guinea (GoG) has been a major concern. Albeit at historically low levels since 2022, many worry that piracy may return, as witnessed previously. Given the threat that piracy poses, it has attracted multifaceted attention. Scholars and policymakers have explored various offshore and onshore dimensions to explain the threat and persistence of GoG piracy, including references to poverty as a ‘root cause’ of piracy. While acknowledging that the hardship endured by coastal populations is important, critical nuances must be added. Regarding the relationship between poverty and piracy, it is useful to conceptualise poverty as a ‘condition’ that underpins the mobilisation of people into piracy rather than as a feature that causes piracy. Engaging insights from scholarship on infrastructure, we develop a ‘piracy infrastructure literacy’ which adds critical nuances to poverty explanations, inviting attention to how various ‘flows’ (like weapons, information or spirituality) enable piracy. Flows that receive little attention when poverty is seen as a cause, rather than a condition.