In an effort to understand the reasons why, Bertrand Monnet, a French academic and filmmaker, has been travelling to piracy hot spots around the coast of Africa. In an extraordinary and very tense series of encounters, he came to face to face with heavily armed pirate gangs operating in and around the Niger Delta, where Nigeria's huge offshore oil industry, which employs thousands of expatriates, offers rich ransom pickings.
It gradually became clear that piracy in West Africa has many of the same root causes as piracy in Somalia and elsewhere, not least of which is that those who don't share in the benefits and profits of global trade have ever fewer reasons these days to respect the security of those who do.
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