When Fish Attract Pirates: Why High-Intensity Piracy Concentrates in High-Volume Fisheries Contexts
Abstract
The relationship between fisheries conditions and maritime piracy is commonly framed as an inverse association: higher fisheries production is expected to coincide with lower piracy intensity, whereas lower production is expected to coincide with higher piracy. To assess this, the study uses Mahalanobis distance matching to test whether fisheries-related conditions are systematically associated with piracy intensity after accounting for socioeconomic, political, deterrence, and opportunity covariates. Treatment effects are estimated under two piracy-exposure definitions (high and median exposure), each contrasted against a low-exposure control group. Design-based t-tests with Bonferroni adjustments assess differences across multiple fisheries outcomes. Results show meaningful differences primarily under high piracy exposure, while median exposure yields no statistically robust differences relative to low-exposure controls. Overall, fisheries-related conditions appear to matter primarily in high-exposure environments, highlighting the need to distinguish between marginal and extreme piracy contexts.
Keywords
maritime piracy, fisheries, Mahalanobis distance matching, piracy intensity, mobilisation capacity, quasi-experimental design, treatment effects
Supplementary File(s)
Appendix (PDF)Author Biography
Jevon Dixon
Jevon Dixon is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University where his main research focuses on narratives in international relations. He holds a PhD in International Relations from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea. His academic background is in international relations, political science, and computational social science, with a focus on security studies. His work uses computational social science methods to investigate complex political and security issues. His other research interests include maritime security, maritime piracy, cybersecurity, democratic governance, and Southeast Asian security. His recent projects apply spatial analysis, clustering, topic modelling, and machine learning to the study of maritime piracy, cyber threats, security governance, and policy prioritisation in Southeast Asia.