I Don’t Know the Names of the 17 Crew Members

When I read the headline about pirates appearing again off Somalia, I paused. A container vessel operating in the Gulf of Aden was seized by armed attackers, and 17 crew members are being held hostage. BBC reporting indicates the vessel is Panama-registered and that its crew includes Pakistani and Indonesian nationals. Behind that number — 17 crew members — there are 17 separate lives, 17 families. I don’t know their names or faces. But somewhere in a port town, someone is waiting for a father to come home. When I think about that, this story stops being a maritime security matter and becomes something more personal.

Somali piracy appeared to have been brought under control in the mid-2010s. The peak came between 2011 and 2012, when more than 400 attacks were recorded in a single year. What followed was a significant reduction, driven by multinational naval patrols involving NATO, the European Union, the United States, China, and Japan, combined with enhanced crew training and the widespread adoption of Best Management Practices for self-protection. By around 2016, the international security discussion was written in cautiously optimistic language. The problem could be “managed,” the reports said. Looking back at that optimism now, it seems to have been somewhat superficial. The problem was suppressed rather than solved. The conditions that created it remained in place.

The rise of the Houthi movement has redrawn the security map of the entire Red Sea region. Starting in late 2023, Yemen’s Houthi forces began attacking commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea, citing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. In apparent connection with this, maritime security organizations began reporting renewed activity by armed groups off the Somali coast. The Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the waters off Somalia form the gateway to the Indian Ocean and operate as a connected system. When one node destabilizes, the others tend to follow. Shipping companies that rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope added thousands of kilometers to each voyage, causing fuel costs and war-risk insurance premiums to rise sharply. The ripple effects are reaching consumer prices in ways that are difficult to trace directly but are real.

Japan’s relationship to these waters is deeper than most Japanese people recognize. Approximately 90 percent of Japan’s crude oil imports originate in the Middle East, and virtually all of it passes through the Strait of Hormuz, through the Gulf of Aden, and across the Indian Ocean to Japanese ports. Iron ore, coal, and liquefied natural gas travel the same route. Instability off Somalia is a direct threat to Japan’s energy supply. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintains a Level 4 advisory — evacuation recommended — for Somalia, and a Level 3 advisory — do not travel — for the Gulf of Aden. No Japanese person is traveling there voluntarily. But the goods that keep Japan’s economy running — the electricity, the gasoline, the raw materials that supply factories — pass through these waters every single day.

The international response to this situation is more fragmented now than it was a decade ago. Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force has maintained a base in Djibouti since 2009 and has conducted continuous escort operations in the Gulf of Aden under the Anti-Piracy Act passed that year. The expansion of MSDF overseas operations was contentious at the time, and that debate has not fully faded. But the practical security necessity that drove the original decision has not gone away. Today, however, naval resources across all major powers are stretched across simultaneous crises: Russia’s war in Ukraine, Taiwan Strait tensions, and the broader Middle East situation. The capacity available for dedicated Somali piracy patrol has measurably declined from its peak. In a world where instability operates in multiple places at once, no place receives adequate attention.

Unless Somalia’s land-based conditions improve, piracy will return as many times as it takes. This point was made repeatedly during the 2010s, and it remains true today. Somalia still lacks an effective unified government. The Federal Government’s authority extends to Mogadishu and its immediate surroundings; significant portions of the south remain under al-Shabaab’s effective control, while the north includes regions with their own political aspirations. The structural conditions that draw young men on the coast toward piracy remain intact: the destruction of legitimate fishing grounds by illegal foreign vessels, the absence of economic alternatives, and the financial capacity of armed groups to recruit. Naval patrols can suppress the symptoms. They cannot remove the cause.

I keep thinking about what those 17 crew members are experiencing right now. Metal bulkheads. A rocking hull. Shouted commands in an unfamiliar language. The isolation of being held at sea is different from the isolation of being confined on land. There is no street outside, no passing traffic, no nearby life — just water in every direction. If communication with their families has been cut, as is typical in these situations, then both the people on the vessel and the people waiting for them are living through something that is very difficult to describe from the outside. Ransom negotiations often stretch for months. Past cases include instances where release took more than a year. In the space between diplomacy and corporate decisions, individuals wait. I want to hold onto that fact rather than let it be absorbed into the statistics.

The cost of transiting these waters has already risen substantially. War-risk insurance premiums for vessels passing through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden rose dramatically from early 2024 levels, according to Lloyd’s of London data. Those insurance costs pass through into freight rates and from there into consumer prices. Pirates appearing off Somalia may sound like distant news, but the connection to grocery store prices and utility bills — while indirect — is real. Supply chain disruptions translate into the cost of living in ways that are hard to trace but accumulate in the background of economic life.

The Houthi campaign and Somali piracy are structurally reinforcing each other, even if there is no direct coordination. Houthi attacks on the Red Sea push shipping traffic southward to the Cape route, which increases the number of vessels transiting Somalia’s waters and therefore the number of targets available to pirates. At the same time, the attention directed at Houthi activity creates a relative blind spot for the Somali situation. If two destabilizing forces in the same regional system are feeding each other’s effectiveness, addressing each in isolation will be insufficient. What is needed is a regional security strategy that treats the Indian Ocean approach as a single system, but the multilateral architecture capable of executing such a strategy has weakened considerably.

Japan’s engagement with this issue is a question of both economic interest and ethical responsibility. Continuing the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s escort operations from Djibouti is justified on energy security grounds alone. But whether the current scope and resourcing of those operations is adequate to the changed situation — the Houthi campaign, the renewed piracy activity, the declining multilateral capacity — deserves examination. Separately, Japan’s development assistance and humanitarian engagement with Somalia’s land-based instability are also relevant to the long-term security picture. The past 15 years have shown the limits of protecting the sea without addressing what drives people to the sea in the first place.

I am resistant to the instinct to file this away under ‘there it is again.’ Recurring crises tend to normalize themselves. Piracy off Somalia, attacks in the Red Sea, instability across the Indian Ocean — these become known risks, priced into business decisions, managed at a systemic level without anyone seriously asking what would be required to fix them. But the 17 people currently on that vessel are not living inside a statistical category. They are experiencing a specific, immediate reality. Whether the world pays enough sustained attention to ensure they come home safely is worth asking out loud, and asking again, and not letting the question be absorbed by the next headline. Somewhere in a port town, someone is waiting for them tonight.

The distance between Somali piracy and daily life in Japan is shorter than most people assume. Coffee, sesame, cocoa — agricultural goods from East Africa move through these waters. Garments from textile factories in India and Bangladesh do too. The main sea lane connecting Asia and Europe runs through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean. An estimated 12 percent of global trade uses this route. Even partial disruption through rerouting or delay ripples into the cost of a wide range of goods. This is not a distant maritime story. It connects, through a chain of intermediate steps, to what ends up in a shopping cart.

The history of past hostage cases teaches that resolution requires time and complex negotiation. The 2009 Maersk Alabama incident — the basis of the film Captain Phillips — ended with a US Navy special operations rescue within days, but that outcome was the exception rather than the rule. In most cases, shipping companies hire professional negotiators and spend months working through demands for ransoms that have reached several million to tens of millions of dollars. Throughout that process, the crew remains confined on board. Many hostages report lasting psychological effects after release. Some are unable to return to careers as seafarers. The personal cost of what is managed at the policy level as a maritime security problem falls heaviest on the individuals caught in it.

The transformation of Somali fishermen into pirates has roots in illegal foreign fishing. When Somalia descended into civil war in the 1990s, the government functions that had regulated and protected its Exclusive Economic Zone collapsed. European and Asian fishing vessels moved in and conducted large-scale illegal operations in waters close to the Somali coast, destroying fish stocks that coastal communities depended on. Some of the first people to take up arms against vessels in those waters described themselves as a ‘coast guard’ defending their livelihood. That framing does not justify what piracy became — it evolved into organized crime with international networks. But understanding where the original anger came from is necessary for understanding the problem honestly.

The relationship between al-Shabaab and Somali piracy is complex and not monolithic. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist armed movement affiliated with al-Qaeda. Some analyses have suggested coordination with piracy networks; others describe a competitive or adversarial dynamic. There are credible reports of ransom proceeds reaching al-Shabaab through intermediary channels. This complexity illustrates why simple ‘piracy suppression’ cannot serve as a complete strategy. Somalia’s security situation is a multi-layered problem in which organized piracy, Islamist insurgency, and the absence of functioning governance interlock in ways that cannot be separated by any single intervention.

The legal processing of piracy cases under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea carries its own complications. Piracy on the high seas falls under universal jurisdiction in principle — any naval vessel can arrest and prosecute pirates regardless of the flag. In practice, the questions of who prosecutes, where trials are held, and where sentences are served create enormous operational complexity. Kenya, Seychelles, and Mauritius have established piracy prosecution centers with international support, but processing capacity is limited. When captured suspects cannot be prosecuted and must be released, naval crews face what amounts to a ‘catch-and-release’ problem that erodes both operational morale and deterrent effect.

The cumulative cost to the maritime industry of managing the Somali piracy problem has been enormous. Armed guard embarkation fees, additional fuel for rerouting, insurance premium surges — at the peak between 2010 and 2012, some estimates placed the total cost at 6 to 7 billion dollars annually. Even after the problem was declared ‘managed,’ armed guards on vessels remained standard practice, and those costs were absorbed into freight rates. If the current resurgence persists or deepens, those cost structures may again inflate significantly. The difference this time is that the Houthi Red Sea campaign has already driven baseline insurance and fuel costs upward, meaning the compounding effect starts from a higher floor.

Djibouti, a small nation of roughly one million people, occupies an extraordinary position in this regional security picture. The United States, France, China, and Japan all maintain military bases in Djibouti, a concentration of great-power presence that reflects the country’s strategic location at the intersection of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Every vessel bound for the Suez Canal passes within view. Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force presence there can be understood as a concrete geopolitical investment in protecting its energy import routes. The fact that so many major powers have chosen to place bases in a country of this size is itself a statement about how much this particular stretch of ocean is worth controlling.

Ultimately, this is not the kind of problem that can be solved by waiting for someone else to act. The United States and Europe each operate within their own interest calculations and resource constraints. The UN system moves slowly, and Somali state-building is measured in decades. Japan is among the world’s leading maritime nations and its third-largest economy. Engagement in securing the energy transport routes it depends on is simultaneously a national interest and a contribution to the international public good. How much engagement, and in what form, is a political judgment. But that judgment should be made with clear eyes about the costs of non-engagement, and with the 17 people currently on that vessel somewhere in the frame of reference.

The international community has tools for managing this situation, but using them requires political will. Combined naval forces can be reconstituted or reinforced; the precedent exists. Development assistance programs targeting Somalia’s coastal communities can be expanded. Legal frameworks for prosecution can be strengthened with additional resources and cooperation agreements. None of these tools is new, and none is cheap. The question is whether the current level of disruption — costly but not catastrophic — is sufficient to motivate the investment required. History suggests that crises of this kind tend to receive renewed attention only after they have worsened considerably. Whether the international community waits for that threshold or acts before reaching it is a test of the kind of foresight that multilateral institutions are designed for but often struggle to demonstrate.

For Japan specifically, this is a moment to reassess the scope of its maritime security engagement. The Anti-Piracy Act of 2009 was designed for the threat environment of that era. The situation has changed: the Houthi campaign represents a qualitatively different challenge, involving state-backed actors with longer-range weapons and more sophisticated targeting. The question of whether Japan’s legal and operational frameworks are adequate to the current threat environment is one that security policy professionals are already discussing. The answer will require both legal review and a frank conversation about what Japan’s interests in this region are worth defending, and at what cost. These are not comfortable conversations, but they are necessary ones.

The crew members being held off Somalia are citizens of countries that are Japan’s partners and neighbors. Pakistan and Indonesia are both significant partners for Japan in trade, development cooperation, and regional diplomacy. The welfare of their citizens working on vessels that pass through waters Japan depends on is a matter that connects strategic interest and human concern in the same direction. Keeping an eye on this situation — and pressing for its resolution through diplomatic channels as well as through operational naval presence — is something Japan can do that is consistent with both its values and its interests. The 17 names I do not know deserve that much attention, at minimum.

Maritime piracy is one of several areas where the concept of the ‘rules-based international order’ is tested in practice. The principle that commercial shipping should be able to transit international waters safely is foundational to the global trading system. When that principle is violated at sufficient scale, the costs fall on everyone who participates in global trade — which is to say, on virtually every economy. The willingness to enforce that principle, even in waters that are far from any major power’s home coastline, is a measure of whether the rules-based order is a real operating norm or a rhetorical position. Japan’s participation in anti-piracy operations over the past 17 years is one of the clearer examples of a non-military power contributing concretely to the maintenance of that norm. Sustaining that contribution as the threat environment evolves is both a security question and a statement about values.

The 17 crew members whose names I do not know will eventually come home, or they will not. Their fate depends on negotiations being conducted right now by professionals I will never meet, in a context shaped by decisions made by governments and companies operating in a logic of interest that only partially overlaps with the logic of the individuals involved. That gap — between the systemic level at which these problems are managed and the human level at which they are experienced — is something I find myself returning to every time a story like this appears. Keeping that gap visible feels important. Not as a critique of the people managing the systems, but as a reminder of what the systems are for. They exist to protect people. The people are the point. Somewhere off the coast of Somalia, 17 of them are waiting.

In the end, the story of piracy off Somalia is a story about what happens when governance collapses and does not recover. Somalia lost its central government in 1991. Thirty-five years later, the state-building project is still incomplete. The international community has invested money, peacekeepers, and diplomatic effort, but sustainable governance cannot be imported from outside — it has to be built from within. The piracy that periodically resurfaces in these waters is one symptom of that incomplete process. Other symptoms include terrorism, famine, displacement, and the loss of human potential at a scale that rarely makes the news. Addressing the symptom at sea without addressing the cause on land is the work of generations, not policy cycles. That reality is frustrating, but it is the reality we have, and the 17 crew members on that vessel are living inside it right now.