Jatin Dua

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on global regulatory regimes and economies of circulation with an emphasis on maritime mobility and its perils and possibilities in the Indian Ocean world. My book, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, published with the University of California Press (2019), is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with maritime piracy and contestations over legitimate and illegitimate commerce in coastal East Africa. Focusing on the ransom economy of Somali piracy, my book places this threat of violence (its management and perpetuation) as central to global mobility to see how a variety of actors from pirates and diya kinship groups in Somalia, to naval ships and Indian dhow captains at sea as well as insurance agents and security consultants in London create and regulate order and disorder within economies of piracy and counter-piracy.

My current research projects continue this emphasis on maritime worlds and their entanglements with law, sovereignty, economy, and sociality in the Indian Ocean and beyond. 1) Navigating the Bab-el-Mandeb, focuses on the materiality of navigation, including technologies of risk calculation, credit extension, and the daily forms of circulation and governance that occur across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, a key maritime chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. 2) Seasickness: Captivity and Care in the global shipping economy, examines multiple regimes of labor, law, and care at the heart of global shipping and maritime capitalism.  I'm conducting research for these project in a number of port cities across the globe including Antwerp (Belgium), Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Djibouti, Bosasso (Somalia) and Dubai (UAE) as well as onboard container ships and other vessels that transit along these shipping routes. 

I teach courses on the anthropology of law and regulation; oceanic studies; global capitalism; state and non-state violence and a course on the various historical and contemporary practices that have been labeled “piracy” from maritime raiding to the moral economy of hacking.

I direct the Oceans Lab at the University of Michigan, a research and teaching initiative dedicated to collaborative and multimodal ways of engaging oceans. I am the current Editor of Comparative Studies in Society and History. 

Research Areas(s)

• Anthropology of Law and Regulation
• Political Economy
• Piracy 
• Infrastructure/Logistics
• Maritime and Oceanic Anthropology
• Indian Ocean
• Horn of Africa/East Africa

Affiliation(s)

• African Studies Center
• Center for South Asian Studies
• Anthropology and History Program
• Science, Technology and Society Program

Honors and Award(s)

• Social Science Research Council Transregional Collaborative Research Grant
• Elliot P. Skinner Book Award for Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean
• International Institute for Asian Studies Fellowship
• Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship
• National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Proposal on Global Trade Chokepoints (Co-Principal Investigator Indian Ocean: Bab-el-Mandeb Strait)
• Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
• Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Fellowship
• Wenner-Gren Doctoral Dissertation Fieldwork Award