On February 8, 2012, the International Security Program and the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center hosted a meeting of the Atlantic Council Maritime Piracy Task Force, chaired by Atlantic Council Board Director Franklin D. Miller. This is the third in a series of meetings looking into the challenge of piracy and possible strategic approaches.

For the better part of five years, much of Somalia's long-suffering population has been caught in a deadly stalemate between al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked militant group, and African Union peacekeepers, known as AMISOM.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, was interviewed by Jeffrey Brown on PBS’s NewsHour program about the rescue by US Navy SEALs of an American aid worker and her Danish colleague who had been held hostage since October in north central Somalia.

Bronwyn Bruton, deputy director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, was featured on WAMU Radio's Kojo Nnamdi Show on a segment entitled "Piracy in Somalia."

Michael S. Ansari Africa Center Deputy Director Bronwyn Bruton joined the New York Times East Africa Bureau Chief, Jeffrey Gettleman, on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation.

The biggest story out of Africa last year did not occupy the headlines the way dramatic revolutions in the Maghreb, civil strife in West Africa, the independence of South Sudan, famine in the Horn of Africa, piracy off the Somali coast, fraud-ridden elections in the ironically-named Democratic Republic of the Congo, and various other developments each did in turn.

While billions of people around the world join in Christmas celebrations this weekend, there will be few outward signs of holiday cheer, religious or otherwise, in the onetime Somali capital of Mogadishu.  

Martin Murphy, resident senior fellow in the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, is the author of an article on “Somali Piracy: Why Should We Care?” in the current issue of the RUSI Journal. In his essay, Murphy contends that Somali piracy is the single biggest maritime threat since World War II, with consequences resonating far beyond the shores of Somalia that have political, geostrategic, naval, economic and human security aspects.