• Strategy21
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• s.46
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• pp.123-157
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• 2020

This research focuses on one important type of non-traditional threat, maritime piracy, and tries to supplement previous research from the perspective of military power, especially naval power. When considering the elements of military power, naval power is a core independent variable to explain piracy incidents. Indeed, naval power can play a key role in solving piracy problems, since naval power is the only legitimate force to respond to piracy in the sea. It is natural that well equipped and trained naval power in the sea increases the probability of capturing pirates, which leads to increasing the costs of piracy and decreasing its occurrences. In addition, since naval combatant ships have more impressive weapons than those of pirate boats, just the presence of naval combatant ships could serve to deter piracy incidents in the sea. The main purpose of this research is finding the effectiveness of large multinational naval efforts to deter piracy incidents in Africa. With this research purpose, I analyze 771 piracy incidents that occurred in African states from 2009 to 2014. Furthermore, I include all 33 coastal states in Africa regardless of the experiences of piracy incidents in order to avoid selection bias, which is very common in quantitative-based piracy incidents research. The dependent variable of this research is frequency of maritime piracy incidents for a country-year and the independent variable is the number of multi-national naval warships that operate near Somalia. With this analysis, I find the large number of multi-state naval combatant ships are negatively related to piracy incidents. In other words, as a main means to counteract piracy incidents, multi-state naval combatant ships are conducive to reduce piracy incidents near Somalia, since it increases costs (being captured) of conducting piracy.