Central to nearly every story about piracy lays an intrinsic tension – between pirates and their ancient enemy, the sovereign. Western political theory has traditionally defined both piracy and sovereignty as legal and political concepts that were constituted through distinction and definition2. But what if that was not always the case? Using indigenous accounts of piracy and stories of men at sea in the Arab Gulf region, this paper calls into question the figuring of the pirate as the anti-sovereign, showcasing how their actions at sea constituted an indigenous form of competing sovereignty that unsettled the fixed concept of Westphalian sovereignty the British Empire sought to achieve in the wake of its domination. It seeks to pull apart the exercise of sovereign power by unmooring it from the state, focusing instead on how Gulf pirates were rational actors who underwent self-organization by forming political agreements, through indigenous protection systems, as a form of resistance to Westphalian sovereignty and the sanctity of property within colonized spaces. Such a perspective helps center the experiences of Indigenous people, rather than the modern nation-state, in relation to the concept of political community, the “people”, and by reshaping meanings of Gulf Indigenous self-determination once it is uncoupled from the Westphalian notion of ‘sovereignty’ and territoriality’.