Congratulations to Professor Jatin Dua on receiving the 2020 Jack Goody Award for his essay, “Hijacked: Piracy and Economies of Protection in the Western Indian Ocean”

The panel of judges, composed of Andreas Glaeser, Michael Herzfeld, and Carole McGranahan, had the following praise for Dua’s article: 

"In an adventurous, innovative, and usefully provocative approach, he offers a comparison of two very different regimes intended to protect both lives and investments. These regimes, which became fatefully entangled with each other in the surge of piracy off the coast of Somalia between 2007 and 2012, are, respectively, the diya, an extended kinship network, and the formal maritime insurance agencies (such as Lloyd’s of London). The article is ethnographically rich on both fronts, and Dua’s theoretical contribution is especially to explode the standard categories of formal or controlled comparison and thereby to show us how historical conjunctures can be fruitfully exploited as an occasion for comparative analysis. This is comparativism at its transgressively most fruitful. In particular, the conjunction of legal and illegal worlds in a shared analytic frame is a productive way of focusing analysis on wide-ranging but reciprocally linked concepts and practices of protection. Indeed, Dua has offered us, in this single article, the groundwork for what might usefully be described as an anthropology of protection regimes."

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