I wonder, there is a correlation between pirates and anarchy (Somalia), but is there any evidence to suggest a causitation?
I ask this because my dad brought this up.
Could you rephrase the question or post what your dad said?
He said that the anarchy in somalia is causing a rise in piracy.
Is somalia a free society where individual rights are unconditionally upheld ?
I would say that a degree of anarchy has allowed personal defense to flourish.
Ask him if he knows for sure that there was no rise in piracy in the Colonies via possible protest of British rule, & if there was (you’ll need to dig google for this), would it be justified? Is there a difference between protesting intellectual property laws that are unjust & terrorism / piracy? If he were to side with The British over The Colonies because some of the Colonists were pirating, would that make him a traitor? (Okay that’s a little ridiculous, but it would be fun to ask regardless)
What if he was the only one affected by intellectual property, & he was simply imprisoned by majority rule, despite there being no victim of the “intelletual property” breach, other than the loss of coerced-via-legislative means profit by the companies and/or individuals who make a living off of suing others over patents?
Piracy means little if your going to get all your money stolen by patent trolls suing you into poverty; it means even less if you leverage piracy to re-gain funds to get back into buisness, rather than going on welfare, or becoming a leech elsewhere. The black market is just ahead of the curve, honestly 
Or, ask if wants to gamble against the well known phrase: correlation does not equal causation. If you win the bet, forgive your father with an mp3 player full of “illegally downloaded” mp3’s of his favorite music as a gift 
As for piracy, it really depends; aren’t most of these pirates proclaiming that they are defending their territory against foreign powers? I would look around the forum for the few “anarchy in somalia” threads to get some better background info on it, however.
The “anarchy” of Somalia I think accounts for the effectiveness of piracy in the region, but the religious tribalism and savagry of the place have more to do with the levels of violence in general and little to do with the lack of a strong central state. Weren’t the attempts to establish a UN/US backed state the periods of the most intense violence?
Ask your dad if he seriously believes that if the central government disappeared from the state of Washington that Puget Sound would suddenly become a deadly pirate redoubt.
Somalia is Somalia because it is populated by Somalians. No other reason.
Most of Somalia is plagued by several governments fighting each other to become the “official” government of Somalia. Only a small portion of Somalia experiences anything remotely similar to anarchism.
That is irrelevant to the issue of Somalian piracy in the high seas.
Everything I’ve heard about the pirates indicates they went into the piracy business after their fishing territories were depleted by foreign trawlers who could no longer be stopped due to the fishers’ defenselessness.
So the response is yes, piracy is connected to anarchy.