About

Jatin Dua is 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. He authored the book 'Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean,' published with the University of California Press in 2019, which is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with maritime piracy and contestations over legitimate and illegitimate commerce in coastal East Africa. His work centers on the ransom economy of Somali piracy, examining how actors such as pirates, diya kinship groups, naval ships, Indian dhow captains, insurance agents, and security consultants create and regulate order and disorder within economies of piracy and counter-piracy, framing violence and its management as central to global mobility. His current research projects continue to explore maritime worlds and their entanglements with law, sovereignty, economy, and sociality in the Indian Ocean and beyond. These include studies on navigation across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, focusing on technologies of risk calculation, credit extension, and circulation, as well as research on regimes of labor, law, and care within the global shipping economy. He conducts fieldwork in port cities such as Antwerp, Rotterdam, Djibouti, Bosasso, and Dubai, as well as onboard vessels. Dua teaches courses on the anthropology of law and regulation, oceanic studies, global capitalism, and violence, including piracy and hacking. He directs the Oceans Lab at the University of Michigan and is the current editor of Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Geography
• History
• Aesthetics
• Economic geography
• Philosophy
• Anthropology
• Law
• Engineering
• Economy
• Business
• Mechanics
• Linguistics
• Economics
• Management
• Art

Selected publications

• TOXIC RELATIONS: Circuits of Evasion from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea

  2026-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the middle of the Cold War, various state officials, politicians, middlemen, and mafiosi operated in transporting toxic (chemical and radioactive) waste from Italian ports to Venezuela, Nigeria, Lebanon, Syria, and Somalia. Public protest in some receiving countries triggered, at least to some extent, repatriation. In some cases, ships carrying toxic material sunk at sea in mysterious circumstances. The circuit stood at the center of numerous international and Italian journalistic investigations, judicial enquiries in more than twenty Prosecutor Offices throughout Italy, and several Italian Parliamentary investigative commissions (with self-described inconclusive reports in 1995, in 2001, and in 2018). Aspects of the circuit interested UN and international environmental organizations as well. We focus on the maritime, transnational, and evasive characteristics of this circuit and its aftermath. Specifically, we emphasize how erstwhile and ongoing colonial and imperial relations mobilized to facilitate the transit and depositing of toxic waste, and how this everchanging circuit reshaped those relations. This is a circuit that is known through investigations, at multiple scales and exercising multiple jurisdictional authority. At the same time, these investigations— we argue—produce and reproduce the very evasive relations and a transnational politics of disavowal that sustained this circuit in the first place. Through a historical anthropology of this circuit and its enquiries, we discuss the co-production of evasion and investigation within the transnational histories and presents of maritime mobility. Toxic circuits thus straddle the geopolitical temporalization that hinges on the end of the Cold War. They also provide a corrosive twin to the historiography of the globalization of commercial shipping and the world, which the container and super-tanker made.

  PublisherDOI

• INTRODUCTION: Mobility and Inhabitation Amidst Racial Capital

  2026-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  The introduction proposes capture/connect/shift as a dynamic framework for understanding how infrastructures operate through spillover, opacity, and incompleteness. Capture operates not only as enclosure but as a modality that holds within itself possibilities for fugitivity, rupture, and relation. Connections—whether through marronage archives, transregional solidarities, or toxic circulations—are simultaneously generative and corrosive, material and affective. Shift attends to how terrains, relations, and power dynamics remain in constant flux, revealing spaces within and beyond capture’s logic. Across eight essays that traverse diverse geographies and draw from historical archives, ethnographic encounters, legal and urban fields, and sonic engagements within black (maritime) geographies, the collection aims toward new vocabularies for inhabiting worlds where “there are new suns.”

  PublisherDOI

• From neoliberalism to compliance capitalism? A view from global supply chains

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2025-12-19

  articleOpen access1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Anthropology of and from the Ocean

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2024-07-25 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The ocean has a key, though often unremarked, role in shaping everyday life, from impacting weather patterns and food supplies to facilitating, and contesting, systems of capitalism, including contemporary logistics, empires, mobility, and migration. Beginning with early debates on maritime anthropology, this review traces the shift from maritime anthropology to an anthropology of and from the ocean. It notes the ways that the ocean appears and disappears as metaphor or material space of encounter and engagement within the past, present, and possible futures of anthropology. It shows how absence and presence as well as metaphor and materiality are the modes through which oceans are imagined and inhabited. While there is no distinct oceanic turn in anthropology in contrast with a number of other disciplines, the anthropology of and from the ocean holds the possibility to reenergize anthropology's interdisciplinary encounters, including with history and geography, as well as modes of engaging scale and specificity.

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist Cyberlaw

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.

  DOI

• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography
  • History
  DOI

• Anthropology at sea

  American Ethnologist · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Sociology

  Abstract Ethnography remains central as a form and location of knowledge production in anthropology. Given this weaving together of ethnography and anthropology, to ask, what good is anthropology?, is also to ask, what good is ethnography? Taking apart two of the guiding metaphors for ethnography—fieldwork and immersion—allows us to explore a distinction that undergirds them: that between land and sea. While the field in fieldwork has been heavily theorized, immersion often appears as a metaphor to signal anthropological legitimacy. But for those who are at sea, immersion is not just metaphor but materiality. For objects to be immersed at sea requires an understanding of displacement and buoyancy. Beyond dislocation, displacement produces the buoyancy essential to navigation. Thinking through this principle allows for an ethnographic practice attuned not only to the frictions of contemporary life but also to how displacement moves forward, in unequal and haphazard ways, but forward, nonetheless.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Scales of subversion

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pirates and politics <b>Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia</b> <i>David Graeber</i> Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. 208 pp.

  Science · 2023-01-19

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An anthropologist argues that experimental communities in Madagascar influenced the European Enlightenment.

  PublisherDOI

• The broker

  History and Anthropology · 2022-03-15 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An emphasis on flow and endless accumulation has been central to the understandings of contemporary maritime capitalism. This form of accumulation has been enabled by structures of violence and exploitation wrought through desires of ever-bigger and ever-faster within the world of global shipping. But flow is only part of this story, mobility at sea is always interrupted, sticky and delayed. Maritime journeys are constituted by chokepoints, drift, and stuckness and are moments of anxiety and peril for a variety of actors from seafarers to policy makers whose projects seek to overcome these blockages in order to make possible more efficient and more profitable forms of circulation. For others, interruptions point to possibility. Here, I emphasize that for ‘maritime figures’ like insurance brokers, and seafarers, interruptions are part of everyday life at sea: a life constituted through an admixture of peril and possibility.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Vulnerabilities in Critical Global Trade Infrastructures

  NSF · $20k · 2016–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Naor Ben‐Yehoyada

  17 shared

• Ashley Carse

  Vanderbilt University

  17 shared

• Marion Tissier

  Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

  16 shared

• Jia Lee

  Universiti Sains Malaysia

  16 shared

• C. Elainf Field

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Bill Maurer

  University of California, Irvine

  16 shared

• Nanna Heidenreich

  16 shared

• Jacob Hamblin

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• Social Science Research Council Transregional Collaborative…
• Elliot P. Skinner Book Award for Captured at Sea: Piracy and…
• Honorable Mention, Monsoon Book Award for Captured at Sea: P…
• International Institute for Asian Studies Fellowship
• Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junio…