Pirates are back on the agenda of world politics. How is the international community responding to piracy and what makes it so difficult to address the problem? This project analyses the international response to contemporary maritime piracy. Notably in response to Somali piracy a wide variety of actors has become engaged in counter-piracy since 2008. Actors include the UN Security Council, the NATO, the EU, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), but also various national and regional security and development actors. Together a complex set of new institutions and fora has been put in place, leading to unique web of relations that this project describes as a "global security governance arrangement under construction". In the project I want to understand how this arrangement works, why and when it succeeds and fails. To do so I conduct the first major systematic analysis of this arrangement from a political science perspective. To understand the arrangement illuminates and hopefully improves policy making in the domain of counter-piracy and maritime security. Yet, the type of analysis developed in the study has also implications that go beyond the immediate case of counter-piracy. I draw on and further develop theoretically and methodologically a perspective that is relatively recent to political science and international relations. It has been introduced as a "practice turn" or as "international practice theory". This perspective focuses on practice as the core unit of analysis. In the project I draw on practice theory and use praxiographic methodology centered on a strategy of zooming in and zooming out. In three research phases I investigate four counter-piracy governance processes in depth (zooming in) as well as the relations between actors and sites (zooming out). I conduct in-depth studies of counter-piracy governance on an international level by studying the UN Contact Group, and on a regional level by investigating initiatives in East Asia, Eastern and Western Africa. The analysis then is a major contribution to the research agendas of International Relations in at least three ways. 1) The project develops an innovative eclectic analytical framework to interrogate security governance arrangements. It is an eclectic framework since it aims "to demonstrate the practical relevance of, and substantive connections among theories and narratives constructed within seemingly discrete and irreconcilable approaches" (Sil and Katzenstein 2010:3). I combine different approaches to security often understood as mutually exclusive. I do so in relying on a practice-theoretical approach that has the capacity to combine these. The project develops an innovative framework and advances the debates about what can be achieved with practice theory. 2) The analysis is important for the debates in security studies on how contemporary threats are governed. A vibrant agenda around the framework of securitisation theory has approached the construction processes of threats, such as transnational organized crime or HIV/Aids. On the one side the project adds the securitisation of piracy to the discussion. But it also extends the discussions in two major ways. It fills a blind spot of a current agenda that concentrates on representations and constructions. A focus on practice helps to also pay attention to the practical consequences for actions such as the use of force. The focus on practice also widens the understanding of problem construction in situating securitisation among a range of other problematisations (such as an economic or a humanitarian one). 3) The project is of immediate relevance for the emerging inter-disciplinary field of piracy studies. Much of piracy studies are exclusively policy-oriented. Others focus on the behavior of pirates or on the "root causes" of piracy. The project intervenes in piracy studies in demonstrating that is important to also pay attention to the broader implications of piracy.