Funded by the TK Foundation in 2011, the Dalhousie Marine Piracy Project (DMPP) is undertaking an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to examining the problem of global contemporary piracy and its impact on global shipping and coastal communities. The development of a piracy indicator model is part of this project. The purpose of the model is to determine what factors help distinguish between countries that are the origin of a piracy outbreak versus those that are not. By establishing factors that help determine this distinction, policy-makers and analysts can pay special attention to states where factors point to an outbreak of piracy. The right confluence of factors could signal that conditions are ripe for an outbreak. If an outbreak does not occur in such countries, the relation of outbreaks to the selected factors is presumably not strong enough and/or other factors which are not in the developed models are affecting the outcome.