In today’s global environment, transnational security challenges—so-called grey-area phenomena—pose serious and dynamic challenges to national and international stability. These dangers, which cannot be readily defeated by the traditional defenses that states have erected to protect both their territories and populaces, reflect the remarkable fluidity that currently characterizes world politics—a setting in which it is no longer apparent exactly who can do what to whom with what means. The maritime realm is especially conducive to these types of threat contingencies given its vast, largely unregulated, and opaque nature. Two specific issues that have elicited particular attention are piracy and seaborne terrorism. This monograph assesses the nature, scope, and dimensions of these two manifestations of nonstate violence at sea, the extent to which they are or are not interrelated, and their overall relevance to U.S. national and international security interests.....
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