Author(s)

Nana Raymond Lawrence Ofosu-Boateng

College of Transport and Communications, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China.

The number of piracy attacks on the Gulf of Guinea is increasing even though armed robbery and piracy at the Gulf of Aden is on a gradual decline. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) specified in (2015) that the Piracy Reporting Centre updated their records to 58 attacks by pirates, comprising of ten hijackings. With 11 attacks reported for the first quarter of 2013, and 27 attacks in 2012 (almost three times more than in 2011) along the territorial waters of Nigeria thus making her the most affected country. However, it is believed that other coastline countries and areas most affected apart from Nigeria on the Gulf of Guinea comprise Ghana, Togo, Benin and Bakassi. This is evident as pirates have increased their operations mainly petro piracy on the Ghanaian waters, which negatively affects marine transportation and maritime security. The scenario has aggravated with the discovery of oil along these coastlines. This paper gives methodological responses to maritime piracy by way of three models namely, the Ordinal Logistic Regression, Series Hazard Modelling for Maritime Transport Analysis and the Bayesain Networks. The uniqueness of these models in relation to their ability to address some of the pertinent issues associated with modern day piracy is looked at. The study was conducted as a panel analysis based on a longitudinal quasi-experimental research design with focus on piracy attacks that occurred between 2006 and 2015 culminating finally in the various forecasts based on each of the different models.

Bayesian Network, Gulf of Guinea, Maritime Piracy, Ordinal Logistic Regression, Series Hazard Modeling

Ofosu-Boateng, N. (2017) Methodological Responses to Contemporary Maritime Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 5, 240-259. doi: 10.4236/jss.2017.54022.