UK – Taylor and Francis, Jan. 20, 2026
ABSTRACT
State hostage-taking, or ‘hostage diplomacy,’ is a specific form of arbitrary detention that has emerged as a particularly thorny international challenge. Difficulties in identifying cases of hostage diplomacy, considerable inter-case diversity and the preference of most governments to resolve cases behind the scenes has complicated efforts to analyse and quantify the nature, scope and significance of the phenomenon.
Introducing the concept of ‘hostage-making,’ we unsettle the view that hostage diplomacy is pre-meditated or discernible in the early stages of an arrest. Instead, we argue that the imperfect information available to researchers about the vast majority of alleged hostage diplomacy cases requires those interested in identifying and tracking the phenomenon to adopt an outcomes-focused approach. While some unresolved cases may appear self-evident, we assert that the only way to really know whether someone is a state hostage is to confirm that a case has been resolved through what we term a ‘hostage outcome.’ Expanding on this, we examine the varying outcomes of hostage diplomacy, putting forward an operationalisable model that can be used by future scholars and practitioners to begin the complex but essential role of quantifying the phenomenon.
The practice of hostage-taking by state actors has emerged as a key international challenge in the past decade, with some states increasingly and repeatedly violating diplomatic norms by leveraging foreign nationals held in their custody to extract concessions from that national’s country of citizenship. The practice has proven highly profitable for perpetrator states including Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China and North Korea. Recent cases have seen innocent travellers freed in exchange for convicted terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals, as well as the transfer of billions of dollars to hostage-taking states (Bancroft, Citation 2022; Luscombe & Roth, Citation 2022). The surge of prominent cases over the past two decades, including the ‘Two Michaels’ in China, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran and Britney Griner in Russia, has seen the term ‘hostage diplomacy’ rise to prominence across the policy and media landscape. However, it is currently impossible to gauge the extent of the phenomenon. For example, while some have estimated that over 90 percent of American citizens in unjust captivity abroad are now held not by terror groups or criminal gangs, but by nation states (Loertscher, Citation 2023, p. 12), we currently lack the classification tools required to establish how many of this cohort are diplomatic hostages.
Hostage-taking is not a new phenomenon, and as a result has received significant academic attention over the course of many decades. Scholars have examined how local conflict dynamics influence armed groups to take hostages (Gilbert, Citation 2020, Citation 2022; Welsh, Citation 2024), when ransoms are paid (Welsh, Citation 2025) and the impact of such payments on the future incidence of hostage-taking (Brandt & Sandler, Citation 2009; Brandt, George, & Sandler, Citation 2016), the dynamics that explain which hostage-takers are most successful in extracting concessions (Santifort & Sandler, Citation 2013) and the reasons for fluctuations in hostage-taking over time (Landes, Citation 1978). And while such works provide significant insight into hostage-taking by armed groups, the literature’s explanatory utility is limited by its focus on non-state actor kidnappers, and particularly the fog of civil war. Hostage diplomacy by contrast is a distinct phenomenon, in which states are the kidnappers. Unlike other forms of hostage-taking, hostage diplomacy is often shrouded in a veneer of heavily publicised legal and diplomatic process. It predominantly takes place during times of peace.
