Oceans, Objects, Infrastructures: Making Modern Piracy

Abstract

The agenda of objectual International Relations has shown why object matters, how they arise and with what effects. Far less attention has been paid to how objects are maintained and stabilized over time and how their coherence is achieved. To add this dimension to the debate, we suggest turning to the infrastructures of object maintenance. Infrastructures are social material arrangements that maintain objects and enable their use. We introduce a framework for the study of object infrastructures and illustrate it by drawing on the case of “maritime piracy”. Providing a historical reconstruction of the infrastructures that produce piracy as an international object, we show that the growing proliferation of these infrastructures does not lead to an internal coherence of the object over time, but rather objectual fracturing and instability. We reveal how objects are often multiple rather than unitary. The article adds an important new dimension to the study of objects in International Relations.