Hostage taking or hostage making? The case for prioritising outcomes in identifying and modelling hostage diplomacy

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.