UC San Diego

The construction of third-party jurisdictional piracy courts to address the problem of Somali piracy injected a sudden and unprecedented doctrine into---while simultaneously dismissing a canon of---international law. These courts dismissed the nexus requirement---or connection---between the seizing State and the legal apparatus used to prosecute those accused of piracy jure gentium, the original cognizable crime of universal jurisdiction. While the legal community does not appear to recognize this particular nexus requirement, its existence during over four hundred years of juridical practice and over two thousand years of social and juristic theory stands as a testament to its salience under international law. Given its history as a cornerstone of international law, the ability of powerful western States, and international organs working on behalf of those powerful western States, to delegate the prescriptive and adjudicative functions of the juridical apparatus to less- developed nations, while retaining the power of enforcement, is both remarkable and disturbing. This dissertation therefore poses two questions: First, what explains the emergence of third-party jurisdictional piracy courts in Kenya, Seychelles and Mauritius to address Somali piracy? Second, why did powerful States limit the jurisdiction of these courts to only cases of Somali piracy, when maritime piracy has been equally disruptive, and perhaps more costly, in other parts of the world? The central contention of this dissertation is that third-party jurisdictional piracy courts are a product of an international State system based on asymmetrical power relations that reflect the ability of hegemonic States to preserve their interests by selectively targeting subaltern actors. In this vein, this dissertation notes that alternatives to third-party jurisdictional piracy courts currently exist under both the law of nations and municipal law. However, extant juridical routes have the potential to expose and damage the dominance of hegemonic actors by, for example, opening them up to violations of international human-rights laws. In this light, the emergence of third-party jurisdictional piracy courts can be understood as both an affront to modern conceptions of sovereignty and the law of nations, and the normative juridical outcome of the interactions between hegemonic States and subaltern social actors