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By Sheiknor Qassim - Vice President, Global Africa Bank
Recent security briefings from European institutions, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), point to a renewed rise in maritime insecurity across the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean. After more than a decade of relative calm, incidents of Somali piracy re-emerged between late 2023 and 2025, marked by high-profile hijackings such as MV Ruen and MV Abdullah. These developments coincided with escalating Houthi attacks on commercial shipping, intensifying anxiety among shipping companies and insurers alike.
While most of these threats were contained through naval patrols, armed guards, and risk-management protocols, the prevailing response has remained narrowly focused on deterrence at sea. This approach, however, treats the symptoms while ignoring the disease. Maritime insecurity in the Red Sea did not begin offshore—it began on land.
Before the collapse of Somalia’s central government in the early 1990s, the country maintained a functioning navy, coast guard, and maritime regulatory system. Somalia ranked second only to Egypt in regional maritime capacity, exercising authority over Africa’s longest coastline and safeguarding some of the world’s most strategic sea lanes. That system’s destruction created a vacuum that has never been adequately addressed.
In the absence of state authority, foreign fishing fleets—many from Europe and Asia—moved aggressively into Somali waters. Operating without licenses or oversight, they engaged in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. United Nations agencies and academic research estimate that over three decades, Somali fisheries lost resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. This extraction enriched foreign companies while devastating local livelihoods, undermining food security, and damaging fragile marine ecosystems.
The exploitation went beyond fishing. United Nations environmental assessments documented the dumping of hazardous waste off Somalia’s coast throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami exposed toxic containers buried offshore, after which coastal communities reported spikes in respiratory illnesses, skin diseases, and other health problems. No serious international accountability followed.
From Somalia’s perspective, piracy emerged as a reaction to this sustained abuse. Displaced fishermen—stripped of their livelihoods and abandoned by a collapsed state—armed themselves as self-styled “coast guards,” seeking to defend their waters. While piracy later evolved into a criminal, ransom-driven enterprise, its origins lay in unaddressed exploitation and profound injustice.
The contradiction is striking. Some of the same states that now deploy warships to combat piracy have, directly or indirectly, benefited from the resource extraction that helped create it. Today, as regional navies are overstretched and increasingly diverted by Red Sea tensions and Houthi attacks, the underlying conditions that fuel maritime insecurity are once again being ignored—allowing piracy to resurface.
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Sustainable maritime security cannot be achieved through patrols alone. Warships can suppress attacks, but they cannot build legitimacy, restore livelihoods, or enforce justice. Lasting stability in the Red Sea requires rebuilding Somali maritime institutions, enforcing sovereignty over territorial waters, regulating fisheries, investing in a viable blue economy, and ensuring genuine international accountability for past and ongoing exploitation.
Justice and security at sea begin on land. Until the root causes—state collapse, economic dispossession, and decades of impunity—are confronted, maritime insecurity will remain a recurring crisis rather than a resolved one.
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*Sheiknor Qassim is a Vice President, Global Africa Bank | Co-Founder & Vice President, Global Somali Council.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dawan Africa.
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