| Abstrakt: |
The European states penetrating these foreign waters therefore needed to distinguish between what they claimed to be legitimate and illegitimate acts of violence because of what Hans Hägerdal calls "the porous line between state-condoned warfare and sheer piracy" (119). It could be pointed out that the rhetoric of I hostis humani generis i at the time was culturally significant in gradually shaping a view of pirates, even if, as Benton makes clear, the state did not rely on it to prosecute pirates until later. Those mariners who the casual observer thinks of as pirates may not have set out to commit piracy; rather, they ended up angering Europeans attempting to assert sovereignty in a given region, who then used the threat of piracy to justify further legal, political or military interventions against them. [Extracted from the article] |
