Al Shabab Fights the Pirates
Paul Greengrass’s “Captain Phillips,” an action movie starring Tom Hanks, dramatizes the hijacking of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama in 2009. The high-seas, high-stakes drama of Somali piracy has been a box-office hit.
But of the millions of people who will watch the movie, few will leave the cinema grasping the context of crime and terrorism in Somalia, even as this violence has had ripple effects like the recent terrorist attacks at a shopping mall in Nairobi, and accounts of religious radicalization of Somalis, from Minnesota to Norway.
Based on my fieldwork with Somali pirates, ransom negotiators, and naval officers in Kenya, as well as statistical analysis I conducted with Arjun S.… Seguir leyendo »