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02 August 2023

Piracy So Far This Year

From here.

Piracy is pretty rare, with the map above providing, while not a complete list of incidents, a very large share of them, worldwide - many of which aren't that serious.

Many of the familiar piracy hotspots remain. The waters off the coast of West Africa are the worst. Southeast Asia is next.

But piracy has pretty much ended in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the adjacent parts of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, all of which have been places where there has been piracy in modern times. Also, the incidents in India, Mozambique and Brazil on the map involved ships docketed in port, not at sea.

UPDATE August 4, 2023: The tranquility of the Persian Gulf with respect to piracy needs to come with a caveat, however. The Iranian military is a genuine threat to civilian shipping in the Persian Gulf and its immediate vicinity, and has been involved in numerous incidents of illegitimate hostile acts towards both military and civilian ships there, but this doesn't count as piracy because piracy, by definition, involves non-state actors.

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