On the evening of April 26, the Egyptian merchant vessel Sward was hijacked by armed men a few miles off the Somali coast. It was steered towards an anchorage near the port of Garacad in Puntland, a semi-autonomous state in north-eastern Somalia.
Over the following days, further armed men joined the Sward as well as an interpreter tasked with negotiating a ransom with the shipowner. At the time of writing, the ship remains under pirate control.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event . Two oil tankers – the Palau-flagged Honour 25 and the Togo-flagged Eureka – were seized around the same time and redirected towards the Puntland coast.
Somali pirate groups have also hijacked several ocean-going dhows – traditional sailing vessels – as “motherships” in recent weeks, enabling them to remain at sea for weeks and launch attacks far from the coast. Together, these incidents have sparked concern over whether we’re seeing a resurgence of Somali piracy.
Map of Somalia.
Photo credit: Google
Between 2005 and 2012, Somali pirates carried out more than 1,000 attacks on foreign ships. They successfully hijacked 218 vessels and took over 3,700 sailors hostage. Shipowners paid around US$50 million (£37 million) in ransoms per year over this period, while the associated loss of trade and increased security measures cost the global economy up to US$18 billion.
Since then, Somali piracy has been kept in check by a combination of private security guards, naval patrols and land-based development initiatives. But very few pirate kingpins faced trial and their broader supply and support networks were never dismantled. The recent cases suggest they were merely dormant.
So, could the hijack-for-ransom business model now be resurrected? There are three reasons for concern. First, piracy has always had a political dimension. In our 2014 research on the local dynamics of Somali piracy, we found that peaks in local pirate activity coincided with periods of political turmoil and military contest.
And, unfortunately, Somalia is currently in constitutional crisis . In March, the federal government postponed the 2026 general election without due process. It also recently ordered the dissolution of the newly elected parliament in Somalia’s South West state and forcibly replaced its leadership.
Meanwhile, Israeli recognition of the self-declared republic of Somaliland in December 2025 has led to new regional alliances between Arab states and Mogadishu. Saudi Arabia, in particular, sees Somalia’s territorial integrity as essential to security in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
Distrust and skirmishes between Somalia’s various regions and its federal government led local elites in the states of Puntland and South Central Somalia to turn to piracy to fund military and political campaigns between 2005 and 2012. They may well be tempted to do so again.
The second driver of piracy is poverty. Rising food, fuel and fertiliser costs, coupled with the Trump administration’s abrupt dismantling of US-funded development programmes, are causing widespread misery in Somalia. US humanitarian assistance to Somalia dropped from US$467 million in 2024 to US$70 million a year later, with just US$3 million coming from the US government in the first three months of 2026.
Many people in Somalia are desperate for new income streams. In Puntland and South Central’s coastal areas, pirate groups are remembered as big and generous employers that shared their revenues broadly to create the necessary land-based support for their business.
Third, the opportunities for piracy are better than they have been for many years. With the Strait of Hormuz closed due to the Iran war and attacks by the Houthis making the Red Sea a high-risk area, many merchant ships heading towards Europe are rerouting around southern Africa. This route passes along the Somali coast.
Risks for pirates are also suddenly lower. Many of the naval vessels that previously patrolled the area have been redeployed towards the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. This means that pirates can station themselves on hijacked dhows for longer without being detected or challenged and wait for a target to present itself.
Faced with escalating costs, fewer shipowners are also currently investing in expensive counter-piracy measures or travel at sufficiently high speed to put off potential hijackers. For those who can afford them, armed private security teams have proved an effective deterrent . Yet those who cannot return fire when pirates approach struggle to evade capture.
Initially, what happens next will depend on how the current hijacks proceed. Pirates rely on ransoms for reinvestment and to attract young men into their no-win-no-fee contracts. Fast and generous payments – the pirates have demanded US$10 million for the Eureka – may free the captive ships. But they will lead to escalating risks for everyone else.
Marine insurers can drive shipping traffic away from Somalia’s coast by declaring the Somali Basin a “high-risk area” once again, as they did in 2008. This will further inflate costs for consumers. No state or alliance also currently has the will or capacity to run a naval mission on the scale seen in 2011 and 2012, when navies worldwide spent more than US$1 billion annually on counter-piracy operations off Somalia.
Although piracy manifests as a sea-based problem, it can only be solved on land. Building infrastructure that fosters regional trade and local development is a better approach than trying to control piracy at sea. The economic damages caused by higher trade and naval enforcement costs are orders of magnitude greater than what pirates have to offer to their communities.
Written by Anja Shortland, Professor of Political Economy at King's College London.
And Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
