In May 2024, the co-editors of this special issue convened a group of scholars and practitioners, with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Freie Universität Berlin, to discuss the implications for foreign policy and international security of the forced deprivation of individuals’ freedom by state or non-state actors for political advantage – in shorthand, ‘political captivity’. We soon agreed that while captivity is ubiquitous in time and space, and takes many forms – coercive, extractive, deterrent, predatory, discriminate, non-discriminate, inter alia – it matters for the study of international relations most when the captors’ motives and methods and the targets’ responses become contested and politicised. This insight prompted us to move away from ‘political captivity’ as a central concept, to ‘politicised captivity’.
Such politicised captivity seems a particularly common tactic in contemporary international security affairs. In the past decade it was manifest in: Russia’s abductions of Ukrainian children in 2022; Boko Haram’s seizure of nearly 2,000 school girls in Nigeria since 2014; ISIS videos of its executions of journalists Daniel Pearl in 2002 and James Foley in 2014; and Hamas’s taking of 250 hostages during its 7 October 2023 attack in Israel. It was also a central part of high profile prisoner exchanges such as the ones between Canada and China in 2021 involving ‘the two Michaels’ in exchange for a Chinese business executive; between Sweden and Iran in June 2024 involving the exchange of two Swedish citizens – one a diplomat – for an Iranian official serving a life sentence for the mass murder of political prisoners; and between the United States and Russia in August 2024 when American basketball star Brittney Griner was released in exchange for Russian arms trader Viktor Bout. Even more recently, a tightly coordinated military operation in January 2026, directed by the president of the United States, reverberated globally after US forces seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas and transferred them to a New York jail.
Despite its ubiquity, politicised captivity has attracted surprisingly little academic attention, particularly as a broader phenomenon. Although some scholarship – much of which is cited in the articles prepared for this special issue – explores cases of kidnappings by terrorists, the use of human shields, and hostage diplomacy, there is limited research that engages politicised captivity in its full complexity. This is particularly odd given the recent increase in scholarly interest in the role of emotions in international politics. After all, popular emotions permeate captivity, and what we call ‘captivity passions’ have at times influenced national security policies. This volume therefore aims to redress the lack of sustained theoretical and empirical attention to how captivity triggers national emotions and affects international security.
We begin this introduction by placing politicised captivity in historical context. We thereupon outline some of the key themes explored in this special issue, focusing first on the emotional zeal that often accompanies captivity politics. We then discuss briefly the construction of captivity, after which we introduce our authors’ individual contributions. In the concluding section, we draw broader – albeit still tentative – conclusions based on their findings.
Politicised captivity in brief historical context
Captivity has been used for political purposes for centuries. Contemporary ‘politicised captivity’, however, differs from the modal function of captivity in antiquity and during the Middle Ages, when it was typically a transactional instrument to preserve the stability of political and social order. Across the Roman Empire at its height, for example, hostages were presented to Roman victors by those they vanquished to secure the peace.Footnote 1 In medieval Europe, hostages were ubiquitous as elements of long-term social contracts aimed at strengthening social and political ties.Footnote 2 Family members were provided to third parties to collateralise debt, to guarantee agreements, to assure allies, and to secure treaties that accompanied kinship links thought to reduce prospects for – and increase the costs of – feuding.Footnote 3 Apparently this was ‘more honored in the breach than the observance’. Christian noblemen were abducted in such great numbers during the Crusades that St. Leonard was adopted as the patron saint of hostages.Footnote 4
Nor was this practice limited to western civilisation. Mongolian lore has it that in the late twelfth century, Börte, the future Grand Empress of Mongolia and wife of Temüjin, the future Genghis Khan, was kidnapped by hostile tribe members seeking to avenge the kidnapping of another woman who had become Temüjin’s mother. His rescue of Börte is reputed to be the event that influenced Genghis Khan to unify the nomadic tribes of Mongolia and build the greatest continental empire in history.Footnote 5 And we know, too, that in West Africa hostage-taking was an established practice for centuries used to rebalance power between and among rival groups.Footnote 6
There are no official data documenting the balance between captivities that are transactional and those that are politicised – perhaps because they are not mutually exclusive. And neither do we know empirically the balance between captivities that affect foreign affairs and those that do not. But we do know (and will document in this volume) that there are a great many examples of each, that ransoms are still paid without public notice, and that hostages often are traded both quietly and in the full glare of national spotlights. It is most puzzling to us that even those many captivities that clearly are politicised have been understudied and largely disconnected from the growing scholarship on the emotional forces that captivity can unleash upon world affairs.Footnote 7 Of course, there are exceptions, and there is a considerable literature on specific cases – many of which are connected to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century terrorism when ‘hostage taking and kidnapping [became] two of the most valued weapons in the modern terrorists’ arsenal’.Footnote 8
In this special issue, we and our colleagues explore how agency is woven within a complex structure that can render captivity’s resolution especially difficult by raising expectations and emotional costs. Our analyses frame captivity as a drama with three principal actors: the abductee, the target state/community, and the abductor. Their tangled three-party interactions highlight the fundamental difference between kidnapping and other coercive tactics such as the use of force, sanctions, blackmail, and the more indiscriminate use of violence in bombings and other mass terror events.
We will see also how this division of principal actors can be most useful heuristically when none of the three is assumed to be a unitary actor. The target state and the captive’s community, in particular, consist of diverse individuals and groups pursuing multiple interests. Government representatives may, for example, have personal and ideological ambitions that differ from actors belonging to the political opposition; likewise, relatives of individuals held captive may hold political preferences sharply at odds with one another. Thus, the incentives of state, abductee, and family do not always align during a captivity crisis – even within a single one of these groups. Competition within and among them – and asymmetries in the power they each can mobilise – have the potential to trigger different public emotions with varying intensity and to frustrate national policies.
Captivity passions
For these reasons, and others that will be introduced below, we and our colleagues agreed that ‘captivity passions’ – the particularly zealous responses that emerge (or are constructed) at the intersection of individual and national trauma – deserve closer scrutiny, especially when captivity fuels political activity that engenders or intensifies disputes on the global stage. In Berlin – and later in Chicago at Northwestern University – our collaborators discussed, and now have written about, how captivity can become politicised, by whom, and to what effect for diplomacy, war, and peace. As one contributor, Todd Hall, remarked during the Berlin workshop:
States need to make decisions that sacrifice lives all the time: about resource allocation for healthcare, speed limits, investments in certain types of food safety checks, etc. And yet, when it comes to politicized captivity, the value of the individual assumes extraordinary political significance.
Readers of this volume will see just how disruptive and diverse ‘captivity passions’ can be and, arguably, always have been – for example, terrorist kidnappings and hostage negotiations, as well as the unending downstream consequences of slavery, the manipulation of prisoners of war, the use of human shields in active conflict, and even ‘secret seizures’ used to extract (with plausible deniability and without fanfare) information and or skills from an adversary. They will explore with our authors how family trauma nurtures fear, anger, humiliation, contempt, joy, affection, and/or solidarity, which shift public emotions and shape national responses to crises engendered by captivity. And they will appreciate why these passions are, if anything, more traumatic today than they were in decades and centuries past when captivity was often politicised to deter, to compel, to enrich, and to punish long before democratic states emerged alongside autocratic ones – and well before the nation-state system became dominant. Crude ‘pirates’ and ‘bandits’ have become more decorous-sounding (but equally murderous) ‘non-state actors’.
As demonstrated in the studies prepared for this special issue, once politicised, captivity is a trigger for emotional upheaval and socio-political mobilisation because families can be seen as twice victimised: first by the captors who have seized their loved ones and, second, by their government, which failed to protect them in the first instance and also may fail to arrange their reunion. Captivity can supercharge identity politics by providing captors and captives alike with opportunities to assert moral superiority, to appeal for solidarity, to mobilise new supporters, and to establish their own virtue and rectitude by identifying an evil and feckless ‘other’. Its focus on negotiations for ransom or prisoner exchange may be conditional on an individual basis; institutionally, politicised captivity may be targeted narrowly at regime change, and systemically it has been part of an international political economy of forced extraction, for example, its association with slavery. It typically is deployed asymmetrically – usually to coerce and/or extract – by weak actors to enhance their ability to force systemic change or by greater powers to sustain their influence.Footnote 9
Our authors note too that the agency of each of the three principal actors involved in captivity dramas – the abductee, the target state/community, and the abductor – differs significantly from the other two. While the kidnapper is the most obvious actor in most captivity events – at least initially – the agency of the abductee is suppressed. If captivity is understood as not only an abuse of the captive but also a violation of the target state/community’s agency and dignity, the latter may choose to react forcefully, rather than negotiate passively, for the captive’s release.
Constructing captivity
Captivity can be understood as a narrated drama in which the nationality, ethnicity, or some other identity of the captive and/or the captors is centre stage. In this drama, there is a limited range of denouements in store for captives: release, rescue, escape, or death – all often freighted by the weight of politicisation and powered by emotion. The two most common modes of release, ransom and prisoner exchanges, are far more common – and less spectacular – than rescue. We and our colleagues surmise it is precisely the spectacle of a highly politicised captivity crisis that may explain why governments attempt rescue, despite its greater expense and lower probability of success.Footnote 10 Rescuers – be they special forces or commanders in chief – may generate significant political benefit by delivering captives to their families to prove that ‘we feel for our own’ while constructing an action hero aesthetic and punishing transgressors.
In addition to inducing a ‘twice victimised’ effect, the ideological construction of political captivity – and manipulation of public emotion involved in that process – is often bathed in hypocrisy that further complicates captivity politics. States in the grip of captivity passions ignore, or wilfully forget, their own complicity as victimisers in others’ captivity narratives. They remember ‘their’ captives and forget those of ‘others’. In Bristol and other English port cities, merchants and ship captains lured white children from their families and transported them to Virginia and the West Indies to be sold into slavery in the seventeenth century.Footnote 11 But unlike the trade of black Africans, who were anonymous to the English citizenry and largely ignored by the media of the day, the abduction of white children generated stiff public blowback. Responding to popular outcry, an ordinance was passed in 1654 to prohibit the kidnapping and enslavement of poor whites in England, and fines were levied on the perpetrators. Yet the black African slave trade was considered a legitimate business well into the nineteenth century.
More recently, in 2002–3, the Japanese public frothed into collective rage when Kim Jong Il acknowledged North Korea’s decades-long programme of abducting young Japanese, but decades later the Japanese government continued to resist fully engaging its wartime history of ‘requisitioned’ labour from colonial Korea. Similarly, in July 1947, the Zionist paramilitary organisation, Irgun, kidnapped two British soldiers in Palestine and ignored pleas from the UK government and from the hostages’ families for their release. After the British executed several Irgun operatives, the nationalist paramilitary group responded by hanging both captives.Footnote 12 The tables turned in the twenty-first century, when Israeli jails became filled with Palestinian ‘terrorists’, some of whom were children, while the jailers and the general public insisted that Israeli combatants held by Hamas or Hezbollah were merely ‘citizen soldiers’.
Notably, the pattern of captors portraying themselves as captives to advance political interests echoes throughout history and across cultures. For example, the construction of a captive identity has been described as integral to both American and Russian empire building. In the US case, popular captivity narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries condemned the evil assaults of ‘uncivilised savages’ to showcase the bravery of settlers who were seizing the land of indigenous people found living on it. Meanwhile, religious leaders invoked stories of abductions by native peoples to engender social solidarity – effectively the beginnings of an American nationality.Footnote 13 Once embraced, these narratives are difficult to dislodge. For example, a survey of Russian newspapers published during a spate of abductions between 1997 and 2006 found Pushkin’s 1822 ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’ in more than 5,000 headlines.Footnote 14 And Hollywood’s glorification of Native American abductions of white girls in epic Westerns, like John Ford’s The Searchers, echoed the colonial motif and reappeared in the staged, but widely accepted, capture of a female US soldier, Jessica Lynch, in Iraq in 2003.Footnote 15
Our contributions
Members of our multidisciplinary working group focused on a wide range of political and policy dynamics stimulated by captivity passions. Our goal was to improve the understanding of the strategic logics and consequences of politicised captivity. Writing about the political sociology of captivity, P. Ahn Nguyen and Todd H. Hall examine a ubiquitous but relatively modern ‘captivity paradox’ – the simultaneous power and powerlessness of family groups seeking to secure the release of their loved ones. They use the case of the North Korean abductions of young Japanese in the 1970s–80s to explore how captives’ families used ‘emotional-political resources’ to provoke reactions and invoke social rules for political advantage. Relatedly, Danielle Gilbert and Lauren Prather note that while hostage-taking presents a problem for foreign policy, hostage recovery presents a problem for domestic politics. Focusing on the latter, they explore two different individual-level determinants of support for hostage recovery among the American public: individuals’ general views about national security and foreign policy – that is, internationalist or isolationist – and their partisanship.
We learn too about the evolving political psychology of captivity, where the connection between emotions and abductions has deepened over time as technology has provided new capabilities for captors and defenders to manipulate emotions and frame the crisis. In this regard, Barak Kushner explores ‘the mind and body problem’ in which authoritarian states in twentieth-century East Asia sought to manipulate the former to even greater effect than the latter. He reports how some individual captives – both foreign soldiers and domestic opponents seen as security threats by a regime – became objects of psychological conversion to be ‘re-educated’ for propaganda, intelligence, and other purposes. Roger Petersen specifies two emotional drivers that connect captivity and mass psychology: anger and contempt. By exploring each of these emotions in the context of power dynamics – specifically in the case of Israel’s reaction to Hamas’s attack and hostage seizures in October 2023 – Petersen explains why responses to captivity dramas sometimes engender particularly fierce retaliation and significant collateral damage.
Others of our authors focus expressly on how state institutions and states themselves politicise domestic and international affairs. For example, Nina Krickel-Choi and Minseon Ku speak to how captivity is related to sovereignty. They show that extra-territorial kidnappings challenge state sovereignty and, by extension, are seen as an affront to state dignity. Abductions not only challenge state authority among co-nationals but also challenge the legitimacy of their state in the international community. Likewise, Simon Koschut invokes intergroup emotions theory to explore how states may weaponise emotions to generate a captivity passion. In his view, these emotions not merely are collateral to captivity but are also manipulated deliberately in international relations.
Nick Ackert and Richard Samuels introduce us to a ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice Effect’ whereby ambitious political leaders use the institutions of democratic states to manipulate captivity-related emotions to boost their careers, but often lose control over captivity passions they helped unleash and that may undermine their foreign policies. Karl Gustafsson applies deterrence theory beyond interstate strategic issues by focusing instead on how captivity is used in authoritarian states to secure control by deterring perceived potential threats to regime security posed by academics, publishers, and activists.
We are also treated to a riveting account of captivity by theoretically informed practitioners with considerable experience in the field. Jade McGlynn and Anastasiia Romaniuk of the Kyiv-based Civil Network OPORA report on the means, manipulations, and consequences of the abductions of Ukrainian children by Russian authorities after February 2022. Their contribution offers a grim account of how such abductions function as a biopolitical instrument of war – a transmission belt from the schoolyard to the battlefield designed by aggressors to create more favourable demographic and geopolitical balances in the succeeding peace.
Conclusion
The contributions to this special issue illuminate the complexity of politicised captivity in international security. Our cases not only examine how captivity is used by political actors but also provide insight into beliefs about captivity’s collateral effects. In several cases, captivity is used instrumentally to effect prisoner swaps or to extract other concessions from targeted states. In others, it is used by ambitious politicians who seek to influence public opinion in order to win elections by supporting affected families against foreign enemies. We see it also used to generate fear and anxiety to deter adversaries.
McGlynn and Romaniuk, writing on Ukraine, and Kushner on East Asia offer particularly ambitious understandings of how captivity can be politicised. Russia’s abductions of Ukrainian children reveal Moscow’s intent to erase their Ukrainian consciousness and replace it with a Russian one, as part of its broader war on Ukrainian identity. Similarly, in East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, the Chinese Communists, the Chinese Nationalists, and Imperial Japan each had grand ambitions to alter the ideological beliefs of captured soldiers and imprisoned domestic opponents alike.
Despite variation in how captivity is conceived, deployed, and politicised, common threads tie our analyses together. For example, virtually all touch on questions having to do with agency and power. Even though it is often used by the strong against weaker targets, as in the case of China’s imprisonment of journalists and scholars, captivity is also often a weapon of the weak, as Hamas’s hostage-taking suggests. And the weak often become the strong, as both Nguyen and Hall and Ackert and Samuels suggest, in their explorations of how family groups in Japan, West Germany, and the United States appeared on centre stage of their respective national captivity dramas.
Agency is implicated in complex ways as well. Gustafsson reminds us that captors always deny the agency of their captives and shows how, once released, former captives may wish to regain agency through retribution. Krickel-Choi and Ku take this further by directing us to how the denial of agency of the individual captive might be understood as a denial of the agency of the entire state to which that individual belongs. They argue that the abduction of individuals from within another state’s territory can be understood as an affront to the state’s sovereignty and dignity. In protest, the targeted state may appeal to international organisations to denounce the captor. Additionally, Petersen argues that when the targeted state is powerful relative to – and has contempt for – the captor, it is more likely to react with anger and retaliate disproportionately, even in the face of vigorous public demands for a cease fire and the return of hostages. Gilbert and Prather show that support for military intervention varies by partisanship in the United States: Republicans are more prone to support military rescue missions than are Democrats. In Koschut’s analysis of the EU’s and Sweden’s response to Iran, however, there is no evidence that suggests that military rescue was even considered. While there are contextual differences related to these cases – particularly power disparities – their contrast raises additional questions concerning why, for some states, exercising agency through military means is a conceivable response to captivity while, for others, it never becomes an option.
The through line across all the articles in this special issue was our authors’ shared interest in how captivity and emotion – what we have labelled ‘captivity passions’ – erupt in domestic politics to affect foreign policy as well as international security. Some authors focused on these connections in autocracies, others in democracies. Some wrote of history, others of the most pressing current events. And still others examined psychological or sociological features. By exploring captivity across time and space, we together observe how captivity has been politicised – indeed, weaponised – in the pursuit of security, profit, power, revenge, regime stability, incumbency, and revolutionary change. In democracies it has proven a useful tool to mobilise mass publics that had good reason to expect better protection from their elected officials. Yet, despite its frequent occurrence and variety of manifestations, politicised captivity and the passions that surround it remain understudied relative to other forms of coercive behaviour, such as the use of force and economic sanctions. Given the abundant evidence of its domestic and international impacts, we believe politicised captivity deserves more systematic attention.
Finally, we return to a point we made above – that captivity can end in only one of four ways: rescue, release, escape, or death. Recognising the possibility that a kidnapping can end well for the victim, Gabriel García Márquez observed that ‘news of a kidnapping, no matter how painful, is not as irremediable as news of a murder’.Footnote 16 This observation goes some way in explaining what makes captivity – and the life of one or a few individuals – so powerful. At least in part, captivity derives its power from hope, yet another emotion embedded in political captivity that may enable political entrepreneurs to seize opportunities to appeal for solidarity – and to define virtue and rectitude – on their terms. In an age in which the core institutions of the democratic state are under assault, this dynamic is filled with a special dose of precarity and is why we suggest further research of specific cases of politicised captivity – some where the enemy is them, and others where the enemy is us.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the MIT Center for International Studies and the Free University of Berlin’s Graduate School for East Asian Studies for supporting this project, and are grateful to Northwestern University for hosting the final workshop.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Karl Gustafsson is Professor of International Relations at Stockholm University and Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University. His co-authored article ‘The Insecurity of Doing Research and the “So What Question” in Political Science: How to Develop More Compelling Research Problems by Facing Anxiety’ won the Jacqui Briggs Prize for best article published in European Political Science in 2024. He has published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Security Policy, and European Journal of International Relations.
Richard J. Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been Director of the MIT Center for International Studies and Head of the MIT Political Science Department. His most recent book is Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community (Cornell University Press, 2019).
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