King Dodge is an angry man. The poet and owner of an art gallery in the dirt-poor village of Ngecha — 20 miles from Nairobi — he raves about injustice in his land. He is still incensed over tribalism and the horrors of last year’s riots and the indiscriminate killing of more than 3,000 people.
The current “war against piracy,” which is spilling into Kenyan and U.S. courthouses after months of simmering off the coast of Somalia, is only the latest in a long series of U.S. actions against non-state actors in the service of empire. The “Global War on Terror,” which the Obama administration recently replaced with the vaguer term “overseas contingency operations,” justified a large-scale increase in military spending, two major interventions, and explicit calls for the United States to maintain its unparalleled power. With the world’s maritime chokepoints at risk, pirates are emerging as the latest non-state threat: the terrorists of the seas.