Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business

by Anja Shortland

Overview

Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap risks, yet kidnaps of foreign workers, local VIPs, and tourists are surprisingly rare and the vast majority of abductions are peacefully resolved - often for remarkably low ransoms. In fact, the market for hostages is so well ordered that the crime is insurable. This is a puzzle: ransoming a hostage is the world's most precarious trade. What would be the "right" price for your loved one - and can you avoid putting others at risk by paying it? What prevents criminals from maltreating hostages? How do you (safely) pay a ransom? And why would kidnappers release a potential future witness after receiving their money?

Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business uncovers how a group of insurers at Lloyd's of London have solved these thorny problems for their customers. Based on interviews with industry insiders (from both sides), as well as hostage stakeholders, it uncovers an intricate and powerful private governance system ordering transactions between the legal and the criminal economies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198815471
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/07/2019
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,093,255
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anja Shortland is a Reader in Political Economy at King's College London. She has worked as an academic economist at Leicester and Brunel Universities, rising to fame for her work on the economics of Somali piracy. She now studies private governance in the world's trickiest markets: hostages, fine art, and antiquities- and how people live, trade, and invest in complex and hostile territories.

Table of Contents

1. IntroductionPart I: Making kidnap for ransom insurable2. Kidnap for ransom insurance and the market for hostages3. Kidnap for ransom as a private governance system4. The price of a life5. The case of the CEC FuturePart II: Mafia governance of kidnap for ransom6. Extra-legal governance: protection vs kidnapping7. The protector's choice: when is kidnapping rational?Part III: Ordering transactions at the legal / extra-legal / criminal interface8. Contracting with bandits9. Trading with banditsPart IV: When kidnapping goes wrong10. The market for "terrorist" hostages11. Conclusions

Editorial Reviews

"The important issues raised by this book make in an indispensable guide for those interested in understanding the dark world of kidnapping for ransom." —Joshua Sinai, Washington Times

"This is the latest, and in many ways one of the very best, of a recent wave of "New Institutional Economics of Marginal Markets" books... After years of research and hundreds of interviews, Anja Shortland has delivered a truly excellent book, one worth studying for the insights it contains into the new political economy and the new institutionalism." — Michael C Munger, Independent Review

"... a fascinating insight into a world most people thankfully don't have to experience... This is a fascinating and provocative book, as compelling as any fictional thriller." — Matthew Partridge, Money Week Book of the Week

"Kidnap will open your eyes, and it could help you keep both feet square on the ground." — Terri Schlichenmeyer, Journal Record Online

"Using jargon-free prose and impeccable analytical clarity this book portrays the business logic of the protagonists of kidnap- the kidnappers, their protectors, the hostages, and the insurers-vividly illustrating it with many real-life cases replete with unexpected twists. Whether you are afraid of being kidnapped, eager to sell insurance, working hard to deter or catch kidnappers, or even just a social scientist eager to understand what makes kidnapping fail or thrive, this treatise, the first of its kind, will prove supremely enlightening." —Diego Gambetta European University Institute and Oxford University, author of Engineers of Jihad, Codes of the Underworld, and The Sicilian Mafia

"What do you get when you combine the intrigue of the international kidnap-for-ransom business and solid nuanced economic theory? A great read and deep insights into how extra-legal markets really work." —Gillian Hadfield, University of Toronto

"The business and economic dynamics of kidnap-for-ransom are highly complex, but in this new book-unique in this field-Shortland provides a masterful deconstruction and explanation of the trickiest trade. Shortland lifts the veil on a highly complex world, revealing the ecosystem of motivations and competing interests that allow an orderly market to operate in the most disorderly of environments." —Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Financial Crime & Security Studies, RUSI

"Negotiation with criminals; a fortune at stake; emotions on the redline; lives hanging in the balance. What couldn't go wrong with kidnap-for-ransom? In this gripping new book, Anja Shortland analyses the ransom business from the inside. Her discovery is startling and brilliant: a self-governing marketplace of cooperation and order. Outstanding and original, Kidnap is mandatory reading for students of (anti-)social order." —Peter T. Leeson, George Mason University. Author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates and WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird

"Rigorous analysis which is needed not just in this field but also in cyber, art crime and all those areas where the lack of international policing leaves the private sector to find its own solutions' Meticulous research, clear conclusions of great importance to policy makers and those engaged in the prevention and mitigation of ransom attacks." —Julian Radcliffe OBE, Founding Director of Control Risks and Chairman of the Art Loss Register

"This outstanding book enlightens readers on the modern workings of the ransom business with its stakeholders-the kidnappers, the insurers, the governments, and the victims and their families. The author applies economic reasoning in a clear, clever, and insightful manner. In doing so she puts a perplexing problem into sharp focus. This must-read book addresses a crucial political problem in an engaging way." —Todd Sandler, University of Texas at Dallas. Author of Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know

"Rigorous analysis which is needed not just in this field but also in cyber, art crime and all those areas where the lack of international policing leaves the private sector to find its own solutions' Meticulous research, clear conclusions of great importance to policy makers and those engaged in the prevention and mitigation of ransom attacks." —Julian Radcliffe OBE, Founding Director of Control Risks and Chairman of the Art Loss Register

From the Publisher