The Theatre of International Law

• Zar, Mickey 1

Abstract

This article explores the connection between maritime and digital piracy, and pursues the thought that the common moniker is more than a rhetorical flourish. Golden Age maritime piracy (1650–1730) and today’s piracy in cyberspace are by no means identical; there is no one ideal form of piracy. And yet, pirates of the literal and virtual high seas share a crucial feature: their social role as others. Piracy itself is a social function; its content is otherness. Dominant accounts of piracy note its character as a mode of resistance, but frame that resistance as either economic or political. Neither of these explanations of piracy’s resistance is sufficient on its own. The comparison of Golden Age maritime piracy with current digital piracy is telling, because what these two modes of piracy have in common is the way they highlight the relationship between capital and the state system. In other words, piracy’s political attack is not simply an assault on the idea of sovereignty, but rather a more specific critique of the way the system of sovereign states advances the interests of capital. The legal treatment of piracy, making it the pillar of universal jurisdiction, highlights the particular threat that piracy presents to the world order: the crime is political because it is an affront to the economic-political alliance that is capitalism, old or new.

• 1Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. My deep gratitude goes to Michael Birnhack, Omer Ein-Habar and Roy Kreitner. I am also grateful to the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics in Tel Aviv University for a postdoctoral fellowship which enabled me to complete the research.