This course would bring together AU students across a diverse set of disciplinary foci and from a diverse set of educational and cultural backgrounds in the study of a truly complex problem for all of humanity: piracy. “Piracy”, in this sense, refers to criminal activities conducted at a specific kind of intersection between a more-or-less recurring set of physical, social, and economic marginalities. Pirates have been with human society as long as there have been human societies with such margins (be they military, moral, social, or demographic): after doing this course, students will have not only a good sense of why that is but also a sense of major processes within human societies and how these latent processes manifest in observable phenomena.