GOVERNING PIRACY: MACROSECURITIZATION, GOVERNANCE AND MARITIME SPACE.

Within less than a decade piracy has been turned from a marginal economic problem into a global security problem. A surprising array of international actors addresses piracy and coordinates their activities. In this contribution we interrogates this astonishing story of international cooperation. We argue that what we can observe here is a global security governance arrangement under construction. We conduct a praxiographic analysis of the current counter-piracy governance arrangement. A praxiographic analysis takes as the main unit of analysis practice, that is, collective patterns of action which entail speech and doings. Based on this evidence we carry out what can be called an "informed speculation" about the future of the arrangement. Based on the notion of macrosecuritization we develop three different forms of expectations (or scenarios) of what characterizes the piracy governance arrangement: 1) an interest based "alliance" or "coalition of the willing"; 2) as a forming "security community" of cosmopolitan or regional scale; or as a 3) hybrid "global security assemblage". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]