2 EXPERTS IN AN ADVENTURE WITH PIRATES A story of Somali piracy expertise1 Christian Bueger Introduction I am a piracy expert. I probably know more about piracy than you; but, I often know less than others do. To be honest, I am not so much a piracy expert, but rather a counter-piracy expert. I am interested in how responses to piracy attacks are developed, why these responses fail or succeed, how a global field of counterpiracy is emerging, and how it is structured. In counter-piracy, like other areas of global politics, knowledge is constitutive of the field, and the demand of knowledge is changing. Becoming a counter-piracy expert was a methodological choice for me. As an expert, you gain access to ongoing activities and to documents not available in the public domain. You also have the opportunity to meet the people who construct and sustain the field of interest. Some academics call these people ‘the practitioners’ (as if, by implication, pursuing knowledge and being an expert wasn’t a very practical task too). Expert status allows for proximity and gathering insights directly, which in turn increases one’s expert status until one decides to leave the field and devote time to something else. This methodological choice isn’t quite unique. Many of my colleagues know more than others, and are known as expert for this and that. They have spent a long time in a certain conflict-ridden country, know the law in a particular domain very well, or know about particular political processes, technologies or historical episodes. Being an expert is hard work. It takes effort. Answering emails, responding to often bizarre-sounding requests, giving presentations, making arguments, trying to translate, and arguing that things could be different, in short, meeting a whole range of demands, all of which take up considerable personal resources. It’s not merely that most people I deal with belong to large organisations with substantial resources. Policy discussions develop at a fast pace, new issues and themes arise, as Experts in an adventure with pirates 41 do new projects. The demand of knowledge of today is often not that of tomorrow. It is difficult to stay on top of developments. So, though I am not always au fait with the latest news, the capital of the academic expert is the ability to offer unusual insights and interpretation. The academic expert can contrast and compare, and, indeed, has the liberty to ignore. This, however, might imply to disregard very different things to those whose work takes place in the field. As an academic, I also have a sanctuary. My job security, my career and my family are not dependent on how I perform in the field. I can sneak in and out as I see fit. I can provoke and leave. And return after a while. I have come to appreciate why academics should be able to retreat to the ivory tower and indulge in their theoretical debates. By having this space, and indeed having a mental retreat, we are able to offer different insights to policy debates. Isn’t it our responsibility to contribute to societal problem solving, or at least point out the fallacies that often arise from current policies? How can good theory be built purely in the abstract; doesn’t it always require a solid understanding of practice? Am I a good piracy expert? That is for others to judge. Nevertheless, I know I could be a better one, or perhaps a different one, if I would stop spending so much of my time trying to understand practice theory, expertise and governance as well. On the other hand, devoting my time to these issues allows me to be a different type of expert, which provides some unusual perspectives. As you might have grasped from these opening paragraphs, the idea of this essay is to reflect on an academic journey, which is at once personal and a study of how expertise comes to be assembled and shape a distinct field of world politics. I don’t want to indulge too much in auto-ethnography, since I think this approach has limitations.2 That said, I think that too many discussions about expertise and how to bridge academia and policy are presented in the abstract. Often, it is much more about practical issues, such as about whether to respond to an email or not. To advance our understanding of how expertise works in distinct policy fields, my objective in this essay is to blend my practical experience as an expert with observations of how expertise works more generally in my chosen field of study. The story I like to tell is about how counter-piracy actors mobilise different forms of knowledge, and how the epistemic hierarchies, that is, what counts as the more valuable or useful knowledge in a distinct issue domain, change according to the problematic situation. My title is inspired by a 2012 animated comedy, one of my favourite piracy movies. ‘The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists’ tells the story of an encounter between a pirate crew and a scientist, none other than Charles Darwin. The meeting leads to an unusual alliance that results in Darwin winning the ‘Scientist of the Year’ award and the pirate captain winning the ‘Pirate of the Year’ competition. This chapter tells the story of an encounter between experts with Somali pirates set roughly at the same time as when the movie hit the cinemas. I recount how experts and Somali pirates came to know each other, how different types of Somali piracy expertise have been assembled, and the role I have played in the field. 42 Christian Bueger A note on theory and concepts is in order before we proceed. The sociology of expertise is often seen as a debate between two camps.3 The first camp argues for an ‘internalist’ perspective. The argument is that someone holds expert status because of their knowledge. To be an expert is, then, to possess a distinct type of knowledge. The second, externalist, position argues that expertise is not an individual’s property, but the effect of a process of attribution. Someone is an expert not because of the knowledge he or she possesses, but because they are recognised by other actors as an expert. Several attempts have been made to reconcile these two positions; some scholars have pointed out that the internalist notion still depends on a collective process, given that expert knowledge implies knowing more than others, and is hence dependent on relations to others. Others have developed the notion of epistemic markets, in which those holding certain knowledge must meet the demands of those ‘using’ (or buying) the expertise. Here I follow, in keeping with this book, another route. Rather than studying individual experts, my position implies expertise to be a form of epistemic constellation, or ‘assemblage’ as the editors of the volume term it. The task is then to study the processes of how these constellations are formed. The study of expertise, therefore, is the analysis of the processes through which knowledge comes to be authoritative and relevant in certain action contexts. In consequence, expertise is not the property of individuals, but the effect of a process. It is, moreover, contingent. It evolves over time. It changes with the problems for which expertise is required transforming, or the overall relations that produce expertise shifting. Now, I do not want to spend my limited space arguing why I think this perspective is more useful in studying expertise empirically than others.4 Some consequences follow from this, however. Firstly, my opening claim that I am a ‘piracy expert’ is actually somewhat problematic. Whether I am capable as an individual to contribute to piracy expertise is a contingent and multifaceted process, and not something I could simply claim. Secondly, if we are interested in expertise, we must investigate how problematic situations produce or assemble forms of expertise in order to respond to that situation. We should follow the issue domain as it moves, and investigate how distinct constellations of expertise come to be at different points in time. In the following pages, I provide a narrative of how the field of counter-piracy has changed, and with it the problematic situations requiring expertise. I study five situations and show how different constellations of expertise were assembled to respond to them. Through this selection of situations, I intend to follow the movement of counter-piracy from 2008 to the end of 2015. The counter-piracy field, like any other international field of activity, is complex and heterogeneous and I could, therefore, have included other situations. My intention, however, is to focus on those in which I was directly involved, as well as to discuss those which give a general sense of how the field has evolved. I briefly describe each of those situations, my involvement with them, and the epistemic constellation they entail. I shall come back to the question of the implications for how we can understand and practice expertise in the final section. Experts in an adventure with pirates 43 Who are the pirates, and how do they operate? The heyday of counter-piracy kicked off in 2008. The number of high-profile attacks off the Somali coast rose, major container ships and oil tankers were hijacked, and hundreds of vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden – the major transit route connecting Asia and Europe – became targets. It became clear that international action was required. The UN Security Council issued its first-ever resolution on piracy. The US, NATO and the EU launched naval missions, as did countries such as China, Russia and Japan. An impressive set of activities aimed at stopping the pirates got underway, and a new global institution attempting to organise the field, the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS), was born in 2009.5 My involvement with piracy started that year, and by early 2010 I had written up my first ideas. Back then, I was far removed from the field, and began to leave my desk and started to venture closer. In autumn of that year, I got my initial sense of the expertise of the field. I arrived in a Bavarian cloister. It was my first job as an expert. Set against a beautiful landscape, one of the major German political foundations has a hilltop conference centre. The foundation had identified piracy as a topic, and was holding a workshop on the theme. They brought together an interesting group: the assembled piracy experts consisted of people working for shipping companies and insurance brokers, defence lobbyists, naval staff as well as a handful of academics. The workshop programme had a clear focus: it was about who the pirates were, what intentions they had, and how they could be stopped. The discussions therefore focussed on how pirates could be deterred and how ship operators could protect themselves. The main talk of the day was who had encountered a pirate, and who knew what they were up to. This implied that the true experts were those who had actually met a pirate either face-to-face or on the phone in a hostage situation. It was therefore ship owners who had been through a hostage situation, navy personnel who had met pirates at sea, area specialists who had been to Somalia recently and spoken to locals involved in piracy operations, or journalists who had visited pirate dens who were considered to have the most valuable knowledge. Other forms of knowledge such as legal expertise, or more theoretical knowledge, were less in fashion. I left the cloister with some frustration. While it was exciting to be welcomed to the club of piracy experts, I got the sense that I had not made a particularly strong impression. What I had to offer, arguments that we should focus on the land and not the sea, and that we should appreciate the larger political context (later published as Bueger, Stockbruegger and Werthes 2011), was of limited interest to the participants. A tasty Bavarian wheat beer helped to ease the pain. It was, however, not the first time I had encountered this epistemic constellation. During my first piracy-related research trip in Nairobi a couple of months earlier, I had met a journalist and made similar observations. During our discussion, I quickly learned that what was most important for him was to interview an actual pirate. He had checked out several candidates, but was not convinced by any of 44 Christian Bueger them. Again, I was of little help to the journalist, since meeting pirates was not my priority. How representative my journalist was of this period only became clear to me later. Some years afterwards, it was revealed that some clever businessmen in Nairobi were running a small ‘meet a pirate’ operation. In 2013, a Danish investigative reporter was found to have drawn on material sourced from interviews with fake pirates. Investigations into the case revealed that a service industry had developed offering journalists the opportunity to interview supposedly genuine pirates. As investigated by Jamal Osman, the scam was coordinated by a ‘fixer’, who drives westerners around, sometimes for days in search of the elusive pirates, telling journalists it’s too dangerous yet to approach them. […]. The scheme culminates in sit-down interviews with the so-called ‘pirates’ – interviews that have made it into the venerable pages of Time magazine and been broadcast in documentaries, one of which was reportedly shown in some 18 countries across the world. (Osman, 2013) One of these supposed pirates was interviewed by Osman. He had allegedly given a series of interviews since 2010, but had never been to Somalia and suggested that he made a good living from acting as a pirate. What luck that I had ignored the ‘meet a pirate’ hype – as otherwise, I would surely have become a victim of this scam! In hindsight, it was a wise choice not to follow the craze and attempt to develop my knowledge by meeting (fake) pirates. How should we understand this focus on the pirate himself? The episodes above are both representations of an epistemic constellation that is centred on understanding pirates, how they think and operate. To understand this constellation, we have to zoom out and investigate the broader problematic situation.6 A major response to the escalation of piracy from 2008 was to develop self-protective measures for the shipping industry. Shipping associations and international navies were exploring how pirates acted and how shipping could be protected (Hansen, 2012a). Knowledge about the motivation for piracy and practical behaviours was vital in that debate. The outcome of these discussions was a set of guidelines that became an essential part of the fight against piracy. Four versions of the so-called Best Management Practices (BMP) were developed by 2011 in response to the increasing number of piracy incidents in the Western Indian Ocean. The BMPs are guidance documents developed for the shipping industry, and prescribe a range of precautionary and self-protective measures to limit the risk of a piracy attack. Following Bryant and colleagues the BMP can be understood as a form of ‘situational crime prevention’, that is, ‘a strategy that aims to reduce crime by making opportunities for crime less appealing and more risky through the manipulation of the immediate environment’ (Bryant, Townsley and Leclerc, 2014: 72). At the core of the BMP are vessel-hardening measures and close coordination between the shipping industry and security actors. As shown by Hansen (2012a), the basis for the first version of Experts in an adventure with pirates 45 the BMP was lessons in thwarting piracy attacks from other regions, especially West Africa and Southeast Asia. During the evolution of the BMP, practical experience of piracy in the Gulf of Aden as collated and provided by industry associations and naval missions was integrated and linked to the operating procedure of naval liaison offices. A report by the International Chamber of Shipping (2013) refers to the BMP as ‘developed by industry with advice from the military’. Official records are inconclusive as to who the main authors of the BMP were; it is perhaps best to consider the BMP as a co-production process that brings together the expertise of industry, international naval missions, and existing guidance documents previously developed in the IMO. The scholars that mattered in this problematic situation were those who had experience with pirates. A primary example is Stig Jarle Hansen, a Norwegian academic with extensive field experience and connections in Somalia. He produced a range of reports on the organisational structures of Somali pirates (e.g. Hansen, 2012b), and advised on the BMP (Hansen, 2012a). The discussion of how ships can best be protected from pirates was largely settled by the publication of the fourth version of the BMP in 2011. The debate became less prolific and shifted to a discourse of engineers and naval architects. It now revolved around technical issues, such as the advantages and disadvantages of different self-protective systems (e.g. how to design a panic room, the so-called citadel). BMP4 became the standard reference document, and additional expertise was hardly required to address the problem.7 What we see at work, then, is how a distinct problematic situation – how to develop guidelines for the shipping industry and their interaction with navies – produced the need for a distinct type of expertise – knowledge of how pirates behave and act. Someone like me, with a PhD in political science, was of little use. I had never met a pirate, let alone faced the dangers of piracy by sailing on a merchant or navy vessel transiting the area. I had had a sneak preview of the field of counter-piracy expertise, but little to contribute to it. What to do with pirates once you catch them? With the BMP in place as a regulatory standard, and an increasing number of naval vessels operating in the Gulf of Aden, a new problem arose that required a very different type of knowledge: legal expertise. Since 2008, international lawyers had been the most prolific writers on Somali piracy. As a legal scholar put it in a conversation, piracy presented a fascinating set of new legal problems that required fixing. National legislations had to be revised and an international system needed to be put in place that could handle the situation. Given that I do not have legal training, I followed this discussion from a distance. Indeed, I was not in a position to contribute to this form of expertise. Monitoring the legal debate, however, allowed for some interesting observations on how the expertise was assembled to clarify the legal situation and develop practical solutions. 46 Christian Bueger The piracy provisions of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the UN Security Council resolutions on piracy provide the legal basis for the global counter-piracy field. UNCLOS gives all states the right to act in situations of piracy on the high seas, to interdict vessels, to interrupt attacks, as well as to arrest and prosecute suspects. It does, however, not entail any obligation to act, nor does it make specific provisions on how to do so. The UN Security Council resolutions broadly confirmed the basic provisions of UNCLOS and encouraged states to act and to cooperate against piracy. Following UN Security Council (2008) Resolution 1851, states are encouraged to ‘take all appropriate measures’, including ‘but […] not limited to boarding, searching and seizing vessels engaged in or suspected of engaging in acts of piracy’. What the formulation of ‘all appropriate measures’ entailed and what use of force it legitimised remained controversial. The practical implications of these counter-piracy provisions were therefore unclear and contested. It took an incremental process to come to a sort of international consensus regarding how piracy should be dealt with legally. Legal uncertainty concerned firstly the question of how Somali piracy relates to international counter-terrorism law and the laws of war, and, therefore, what level of force would be ‘appropriate’. The second issue was the more practical question of where pirates should be prosecuted, and whether an international court provides a feasible answer. The third question was how counter-piracy law enforcement can be harmonised with national laws, and which national laws should form the basis under which pirates can be prosecuted. The international consensus that emerged on these questions was that piracy should be dealt with as a form of international crime. In consequence, the response was interpreted as policing and law enforcement activities with the primary objective of arresting piracy suspects and putting them on trial. Rejecting the idea of an international court, the consensus on prosecution was that of a division of labour between arresting states and prosecuting states: regional African states would take the main responsibility for prosecution until prosecution could be transferred to the Somali judiciary sector. Considerable legal work was required to reach this consensus, mainly carried out in a working group of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) – the main global governance mechanism of the counter-piracy field. To learn about the working group, I sent an email to the chair, the government of Denmark, in March 2010. Here is part of the response I received: Up to 100 legal experts from approximately 45 countries and organisations participate in each meeting. The legal experts primarily represent Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ministries of Defence, and Ministries of Justice, Attorney Generals Chambers, Prosecutors Offices, and Coast Guards. I can also inform you that Dr Douglas Guilfoyle, University College London, has prepared a report for the Working Group on Treaty Jurisdiction over Pirates.8 As the email suggests, forum participants mainly consisted of legal experts from governmental bodies. The fact that they mentioned Douglas Guilfoyle, a Experts in an adventure with pirates 47 university-based scholar, is noteworthy: governmental legal expertise was being combined with the knowledge of university-based legal scholars.9 These scholars gave presentations to the group and offered background research on the relevant legal documents. The working group assembled what Guilfoyle (2013a), reflecting on his experience, called a transnational network of legal experts. The email from Denmark continued by outlining what the group had discussed and produced by 2010: WG2 has developed a set of practical legal tools, which has been gathered in a legal toolbox consisting of a number of documents (checklist, list of impediment, reports, generic templates etc). The documents have been circulated to the countries directly affected by or involved with the fight against piracy off the Coast of Somalia.10 As per this description, the legal work centred around collation of documents in order to create new ones addressing the response to piracy, such as those described above. Expertise in this problematic situation was clearly linked to those who drew on experience with law enforcement, the arrest and transfer of piracy suspects, or who had gone through formal legal education. The working group developed a framework for the arrest, transfer and prosecution of piracy suspects (Liisberg, 2014: 35). The legal system put in place is widely considered to be a great success, and an innovative attempt to harmonise a diffuse group of laws to respond to a practical problem. Guilfoyle provides a description of how the working group helped to develop and install the system: It has helped educate a number of foreign ministries in the applicable law. It has facilitated finding consensus on practical legal mechanisms, and had a strong agenda setting influence. It has facilitated much greater horizontal contact between government officials involved in the issue, allowing the sharing of practical experience and legal expertise. (Guilfoyle, 2013a: 77) Although I was not really in a position to contribute to this form of expertise in 2011 I was invited to a workshop of legal experts working on piracy (whose results are published as Guilfoyle, 2013b). As the only non-lawyer in the room, this gave me a great opportunity to better understand what was at stake. Following the discussions, it quickly became obvious that the production of legal expertise is hard work and quite a contentious process. The art of legal expertise consists in linking a considerable body of legal texts (conventions, laws, procedures, court cases, etc.) to concrete practical situations. Building such references is difficult, not least because there are conflicting interpretations over the meaning of texts, as well as which texts should be considered as relevant for the practical situation. In the case of piracy, the complexity was multiplied by the fact that numerous jurisdictions had to be harmonised. 48 Christian Bueger With the system working well and an international consensus established, the legal questions of piracy were soon seen to have been comprehensively addressed. As a result, the working group devoted to the issue was formally shut down in 2013 and replaced by a virtual network. The chair of the group declared the work to have been completed.11 In this case, we can see how the need for legal expertise arose to address a distinct problem (arresting and prosecuting pirates), and a unique constellation was produced in which legal expertise was combined with practical experience and political decision-making. Although I largely followed the development of this situation from a distance, what was particularly revealing was how expertise was directly linked to a form of education and knowledge and mastery of a distinct body of texts. This differentiates legal expertise from other forms of expertise, particularly if we contrast this situation with what follows. How can we prevent piracy from happening? From 2012, the demand for legal expertise was in steady decline. Although legal experts continued to identify problems that policy-makers hadn’t considered,12 another issue started climbing the agenda, namely how to sustain the increasing success and enable coastal states to take over the work from the international community. ‘Capacity building’ became a core topic of discussion. Building capacity, in areas such as the rule of law, governance structures, or operational coastguard and maritime police services in coastal states was seen as the path to address the so-called ‘root causes’ of piracy. The assumption was that if the maritime security sectors in the region were adequately reformed and capable of providing stronger law enforcement, this would prevent piracy from occurring in future. In 2012, I attended a meeting in London organised by the advocacy organisation Oceans Beyond Piracy. The theme of the one-day event was how to improve the coordination of capacity-building work in the area. The workshop was intended to supplement the discussion in the CGPCS on improving coordination of capacity building. What became clear to me at the meeting was that, in contrast to the legal situation, capacity building was not seen as an activity that would require any form of external or distinct expertise. The assumption was that the relevant knowledge was provided by those implementing capacity building on the ground. Part of the narrative was that maritime capacity building was understood as an entirely new task, one that no one had ever undertaken before. I remember a conversation with an implementer in 2014; he asked me whether I knew of any research on capacity building. My answer was that there is plenty; entire disciplines (development studies) and sub-disciplines (peacebuilding research) investigate capacity building, and there is a rich body of empirical evidence. My interlocutor, however, didn’t quite make the connection. The next time I met him, he told me how grateful he was for my advice to look into previous capacity building work. I was delighted that somebody had listened, but he then told me that despite having searched diligently, he had only found one case in which Experts in an adventure with pirates 49 capacity building had been undertaken; a maritime operation in the South Pacific. ‘Really?’, I thought, ‘capacity building has only ever happened once before?’ The conversation taught me a lesson in the extent to which many participants in the field start out with the assumption that what they deal with is entirely novel. They often do not ask whether their practical issue is an instance of a wider problem, or whether there is a track record to draw on. It also became clear to me that policy-makers had little clue as to whom to turn to outside the implementers’ bubble. Legal experts were readily available, but who could they ask for advice on capacity building? Development experts who had dealt with capacity building or state building projects were not on these actors’ radar. Explanations for this ignorance can be found in the ubiquitous tensions of the security-development nexus: security and development are separate professional spheres. Those dealing with piracy primarily had a naval background, moreover, with few links to professionals concerned with onshore issues. The situation slowly started to change with a set of publications on land-based counter-piracy activities going to print and catching the eye of policy-makers. Interest in capacity building expertise, however, remains low. In this problematic situation, we therefore face a constellation in which expertise is equated to those with hands-on, practical experience in capacity building. In contrast to the BMP and legal discussions, there was little attention paid to the scholar as a potential source of knowledge. The capacity building organisations, including the International Maritime Organisation and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and capacity building missions organised by the EU claimed to be able to provide the knowledge. Scholars with experience on capacity building, peacebuilding or development assistance did not offer expertise speaking to the situation, however. There is some indication that, over time, this situation is changing. By 2014 I had authored or collaborated on a range of studies that addressed the onshore aspects of piracy and questions of capacity building. Both NATO and EUNAVFOR started to develop capacity building strategies from 2014. Both of these actors got in touch. They had a question, however, for which I didn’t have a straightforward answer. Their query was how to measure the efficacy of capacity building measures. The only answers I could provide were outlined in the two papers on capacity building we published in 2014 (Bueger, 2014b; Edmunds, 2014), namely, that there was a rich body of literature on security sector reform and land-based capacity building from which we might learn much about what works and what does not. On this basis at least, we could tell with some certainty what would not work; for example, sending in trainers for crash courses. EUNAVFOR, in particular, started to pay attention to this lesson. In September 2015, I received a draft of their new capacity building strategy. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much they had relied on our two working papers. Capacity building remains an ongoing issue in the field. The knowledge required was initially provided by capacity-building organisations and international administrations, and there was little attention to scholarly expertise during the launch of capacity-building missions. There is some indication that the epistemic 50 Christian Bueger constellation is shifting in response to increasing concerns over the limited effect that capacity building has shown since 2015, however. A research project we launched in 2016 has already attracted some interest in, or at least curiosity about, the proposals scholars might make in organising capacity building differently.13 Capacity building should therefore be considered as an area in which we will witness a changing epistemic constellation, with new forms of expertise being assembled in the future. What lessons can be learned from this success? From 2012 on, the counter-piracy system put in place started to work. Incident rates went down, and the last successful piracy attack was recorded that year. Recognising this success, actors became increasingly concerned about documenting how and why it worked and whether any more general lessons could be outlined. In 2013, the CGPCS commissioned a Lessons Learned Project with the goal of recording how the group works and to identify practices that might be replicated in other piracy-affected regions, and potentially be used to address other international problems, such as people trafficking across the Mediterranean. For this, a very different form of expertise was assembled, that of policy analysts and governance specialists. My time as a core contributor to expertise in the field had come. The CGPCS chairmanship reached out to think tanks they had institutional connections to: the International Peace Institute, the European Institute for Security Studies, and Oceans Beyond Piracy. Surprisingly, they also got in touch with me. The background was that the research blog on piracy (piracy-studies.org) I had edited from 2010 was recognised as an independent source of knowledge by CGPCS participants, and I had recently published a blog on lessons to be drawn from Somali piracy. This led to a collaboration and research project, the story of which I tell in detail elsewhere (Bueger, 2015a). In this chapter, it forms another example of how a specific practical challenge leads to the assembling of a distinct type of expertise. The problem was how to learn lessons, and more generic political and epistemic expertise was required. Working with the main counter-piracy institution changed my position within the field drastically. I had a new status, that of official ‘lesson learner’ for the CGPCS. I was invited to attend all meetings, and tasked to record and outline lessons from counter-piracy work. When I attended the first meeting on the Lessons Learned Project, it became clear why core CGPCS actors had called in outside experts. Everyone agreed that recording the experience of counter-piracy was important and that lessons need to be identified as well as learned. However, no one had any idea on how to do this in practice, or what kind of methodology could be used. There was a clear recognition of the fact that learning lessons is not an apolitical exercise, however, and that different participants would come to varying conclusions regarding what the lessons might be. Having a university-based scholar with no obvious political affiliation to run the project was seen to be a way of circumventing this problem. Experts in an adventure with pirates 51 Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Department of State provided me with funding for a website that would provide the platform for collating lessons and would become a public repository of the experience of counter-piracy actors. The funding also allowed me to assemble a team of ‘lesson learners’, who analysed counter-piracy from different perspectives. Capturing experience, convincing the counter-piracy agencies to share their knowledge, and, finally, demonstrating that the lessons identified were useful, proved to be quite a challenge. The political character of this exercise and my own status became apparent when I attended a meeting in Brussels to discuss the progress of the Lessons Learned Project, and met with the CGPCS chairperson’s staff from the European External Action Service. By summer 2014, the European Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) had completed the first draft of an edited working paper in which a range of CGPCS participants described how different components of the counter-piracy system worked, and what the roles of the CGPCS bodies were (Tardy, 2014). In the meantime, in Cardiff, we had launched the website and published a range of lessons learned papers online. At the Brussels meeting, the difference between these endeavours became apparent. The EUISS was seen as an extended arm of the EU and not considered to be independent. Several states had concerns with what kind of lessons the EUISS report would outline, whether some actors would be presented in a less than favourable light, or whether the lessons would imply commitments. They therefore requested to review the report before it could go to print. In contrast, no one had any concerns with the lessons we might come up with in Cardiff. In the end, the EUISS report did not spark any further controversies, nor did any of my work. Throughout 2014 and 2015, I gave a range of presentations on the lessons learned to various policy audiences, including the CGPCS plenary and the Operations Policy Committee of NATO. There was notable interest in how to use some of these insights in other contexts. Indeed, some of the principles developed and tested in counter-piracy now inform the work of actors in addressing illicit trafficking in the Mediterranean. By 2016, the lessons learned project was still ongoing, although interest in learning lessons had declined. It is revealing how actors are driven by the concern to move on, and tackle new issues, independently from whether the job is done or not. The expertise that the Lessons Learned Project developed could be termed as a form of reflexive expertise. It concerns a description and consolidation of counter-piracy practices, and the actions of various actors to address the situation. Is the fight against piracy over? By 2014, the field began to shift significantly, as it became obvious that the counter-piracy system worked. It had been two years since the last successful Somali piracy attack was reported. Faced with sustained success, the discussion 52 Christian Bueger turned to the question of how to roll back the system put in place and how to disengage. At the heart of this debate was a distinct controversy which occupied more and more space in the CGPCS meetings I attended. A number of countries requested that the High-Risk Area (HRA) defined by the BMP be reduced in size and that their territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones be excluded from this area. The HRA is a vital element of the BMP, and marks the space in which they should be applied. The question whether the boundaries of this space should be revised became controversial. The shipping industry, in particular, argued that it was too early to reverse any measures. A debate arose on whether the risk of being a victim of piracy remained high and how this question should be decided (Bueger, 2015b). The issue was addressed through a lengthy political process, mainly undertaken within the framework of the CGPCS. The experts called to evaluate the risk in the area consisted of three big naval missions, organised through a forum called ‘Shared Awareness and Deconfliction’, known as SHADE. Presentations by SHADE had frequently featured in CGPCS meetings, and were considered to be authoritative analyses of recent developments in piracy activity. It therefore seemed logical to ask the ‘big three’ to address the question of whether the piracy risk remained high. The naval missions, however, resisted the request to produce a ‘risk assessment’, arguing that they could only provide a ‘threat assessment’. They argued that the naval missions could only provide an assessment of whether there is still a threat of piracy, while the evaluation of ‘risks’ was for others to undertake. In 2015, SHADE gave presentations to the CGPCS relying on a fairly simple methodology. The main claim of the assessment was that it relied on data gathered through intelligence, but did not make its sources transparent, claiming that the relevant information was classified. The analysis relied on an assessment methodology based on three factors – intent, opportunity and capability. This triad constitutes a ‘threat’ from an intelligence perspective, as distinct from an assessment of ‘risk’, which would have to include a number of other factors influencing probability. The assessment not only excluded factors which have proven to matter, such as the role of coastal populations, legitimacy and corruption, but it also failed to address the issue at the heart of the debate: spatiality, that is, where attacks and activity take place. In consequence, the audience of the presentation was left disappointed, and what SHADE was actually arguing remained ambiguous. The CGPCS proceeded in the face of this ambiguity, and a series of further discussions led to the decision to reduce the HRA from December 2015. The issue of how the threat or risk could be assessed, however, remained open. This now concerned, in particular, the question of how the counter-piracy system could be re-activated if required. By 2016, this issue remained unaddressed. What we see here is a process of a reluctant expert. Over time, naval organisations had become the premier source in evaluating the piracy situation at sea. When requested to contribute to a defined political controversy, however, they declined, leaving the question of ‘risk’ to the political process. Nonetheless, in offering a threat assessment and in claiming to have superior classified information, Experts in an adventure with pirates 53 the navies maintained the status of being the only authority able to provide reliable knowledge on the contemporary situation at sea. Although a range of private security companies also claimed to have this kind of knowledge, they were not considered or heard in the debate. Since scholars cannot claim to have resources comparable to these actors, their role has been limited, although they could have informed the debate on assessment methodologies on the basis of piracy literature. Conclusion: ignorance and the assembling of piracy expertise Piracy expertise is a fascinating inter-disciplinary set of knowledge (Bueger, 2013a). It is a combination of insight drawn from international law, maritime security studies, development studies, logistics, and peace research, to name just a few of the scientific disciplines that contribute to it. Military and legal knowledge were, however, the most prevalent and authoritative sources of expertise in the field from the outset. As I have attempted to show, other forms of expertise were assembled during the evolution of the counter-piracy field. The core drivers of this assembling process were the changing problematic situations for which knowledge was required. Initially, it was a hands-on problem of protecting ships; then, a legal problem of how to arrest and prosecute piracy suspects; subsequently, it became an issue of development and capacity building; next, a meta-, reflexive expertise for learning lessons was required; and finally, in the current phase, what is at stake is predictive knowledge (risk assessments), largely being provided by military intelligence. I consider there to be at least three wider lessons to be drawn from my narrative for the discussion of expertise. The first concerns plurality, the second ignorance, and the third how we practice expertise. Firstly, if we are interested in how expertise is assembled, we should not proceed by relying on static assumptions. Rather than assuming that, in a given crisis, we can observe a stable epistemic constellation, we should instead investigate process and change. A crisis is not static; it moves. Problematic situations become resolved with the aid of expertise, but new ones emerge. Experts are called upon, but also leave the stage. Therefore, we need to follow the movement of the field that responds to a particular crisis and pay attention to how each new problematic situation leads to the assembling of distinct types of expertise. Secondly, selective ignorance is one of the drivers of coping with problems. Seeing is ignoring. Acting is ignoring. Turning a complex situation into a problem that can be mastered implies exclusion of that which does not appear to be relevant. All of the episodes discussed above entailed inclusions, but also exclusions. Seen from a distance, in some of the situations, we may be puzzled by what has been excluded and why. Up close, at the practical level, however, these exclusions are often a consequence of a pragmatic need to act. Often, what is not immediately in sight and not present in the situation is excluded. The oversights made in one situation thereby inform what is addressed in the next. In this sense, the movement of a field of practice can be read through what is ignored and what made apparent in the assembling of expertise. 54 Christian Bueger Thirdly, if one is interested in being an expert, that is, in contributing to expertise, one needs to engage with the tensions between expertise and selective ignorance. To be an expert is to ignore. One can hardly build up the knowledge that is required for all problematic situations, not least given the fast pace at which problematic situations are changing. While one can participate in the field, it is important to be aware and self-reflexive as regards which matters one may or may not contribute to. Why interview fake pirates or claim legal expertise if one has none? Resisting to follow every twist and turn a field is taking and accepting the slow pace of academia is also a source of strength. It allows one to gain a broader picture that hardly anyone who is embroiled in the everyday activities possesses. This, in turn, also gives one the authority to point out the ignorance of the actors. While one should appreciate the action context in which one is embedded, one can nonetheless raise awareness for what actors overlook. Over the years, my participation in the field has increased. I spend considerable time giving advice to, and sharing thoughts with, other actors, writing papers, and giving presentations. I am occasionally asked by my colleagues how I gained access to the field and made it into the so-called ‘inner circle’. In practice, there is no inside or outside, since the counter-piracy field does not have one centre, but many: a multipolar rhizomatic assemblage would be a better characterisation. Moreover, it moves, and given the overall speed, one rather swims alongside. While it is tempting and comfortable to swim with the current and move with the field from one problem to another, it is important to pause, take a break on the academic island, and then continue the journey. This implies a measure of selective ignorance, and a focus on those issues where one may participate meaningfully. There is no prescribed route for becoming an expert. Contributing to expertise is a process of tinkering, and requires effort. Too many discussions on expertise and how to bridge academia and policy are presented in the abstract, when the challenges at issue are practical. Contributing expertise, for me, is both a methodology as well as a responsibility. If our aim is to understand practice, and if we accept the claim that research is performative and informs the object it aims to understand, then there is little alternative to seeking our treasure by becoming experts. Notes 1 Acknowledgements: For comments and suggestions that considerably improved earlier drafts of this chapter, I am grateful to Anna Leander, Trine Villumsen Berling, Jan Stockbruegger and the other contributors to this volume. Without the help of a range of interlocutors from the counter-piracy field, who shall not be named here, I would not have been able to tell this story. I am grateful for their support. Research for this chapter has benefited from a grant by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/ K008358/1]. 2 See Delamont (2009) for a telling critique and discussion of the idea of autoethnography. 3 See the contributions in Berling and Bueger (2015). 4 For a discussion of how such a take on expertise relates to other accounts see Bueger, 2014a; introductory chapter, this volume. Experts in an adventure with pirates 55 5 The story of the rise of counter-piracy practice and the making of the global field is thoroughly summarised in Kraska (2011) and Bueger (2013b). 6 Another driver behind the focus on pirates was naturally the general preference of the media for what is concrete, dangerous and personalised. However, as discussed in the following pages, it was also based on the problematic situations of that phase. 7 The debate later evolved into a discussion on how to handle the employment of private security contractors, a problematic situation I do not discuss any further here. 8 Email received from Government of Denmark, 16 March 2010. 9 Besides Douglas Guilfoyle, I am aware of a range of other legal scholars who have given presentations to the Working Group. 10 Email received from Government of Denmark, 16 March 2010. 11 This is reflected in the communique of the CGPCS: ‘Denmark marked the dissolution of WG2 in its existing form with the message that its main mission had been completed successfully. A comprehensive legal toolbox has been provided, models for trial and transfer have been developed, international law has been clarified and legal networks have been established.’ Communique of the 16th plenary of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, New York, 14 May 2014, available at http://www.lessons frompiracy.net/files/2015/03/Communique_16th_-Plenary.pdf. 12 This ranged from the regulation of armed guards to issues such as child pirates. A good indicator for the decline of legal expertise is the observation that legal experts stopped attending the CGPCS meetings, roughly at the same time as when I started to attend them in 2014. 13 See www.safeseas.net. References Berling, Trine Villumsen, and Christian Bueger, eds. (2015) Security Expertise: Practices, Power and Responsibility. London: Routledge PRIO New Security Studies Series. 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