Through an empirical focus on hostage taking, my research explores the causes and consequences of political violence. From rebel guerrillas to authoritarian states, hostage takers use human captivity to coerce monetary, diplomatic, and political concessions from state and non-state targets. Hostages suffer significant and symbolic violence with implications for policy, governance, and peace.
This page includes abstracts of my current projects and links to my published scholarship. Links to my policy writing can be found here.
Book Project:
The Logic of Kidnapping in Civil War Based on my PhD dissertation, "The Logic of Coercive Kidnapping," winner of the American Political Science Association's 2021 Merze Tate Award for the Best Dissertation in International Relations, Law, and Politics.
Global kidnapping has spiked dramatically over the last several decades, as armed groups abduct civilians in war. While the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and the FARC ravage communities and confound policymakers, there has been limited scholarly examination of this tool of coercion. By examining when and why armed groups kidnap, my research fills this gap. I ask two related questions: First, why do some armed groups kidnap, whereas others do not? And, does kidnapping "work" for perpetrators? Leveraging evidence from extensive interviews with former combatants from Colombia's civil war, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), as well as military and security personnel, I show that ransom kidnapping is used to enforce groups' protection rackets. It is both the most lucrative way to punish tax evasion, as well as a strategic means of compelling future cooperation. However, kidnapping presents a temporal trade-off for armed groups: While it increases tax compliance in the short term, it presents long-term legitimacy costs to perpetrators. I explore this trade-off through an examination of the ongoing truth and reconciliation process resulting from the 2016 peace agreement between Colombia's government and the FARC. This project provides a novel explanation for a persistent and perplexing type of violence against civilians worldwide.
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
"Instruction over Incentives: Assessing Reading Strategies for International Security Studies" (with Paul Bezerra and Karin Becker)International Studies Perspectives, forthcoming.
"Terror by Any Other Name," Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2019): 417-420. Online here. "Organized Violence Between War and Peace," Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2017): 377-383. Online here.
Book Reviews:
Review of Nichols, Angela. Impact, Legitimacy, and Limitations of Truth Commissions. Democracy and Security. Vol. 15, No. 4: 408-410 (2019). Online here. Review of Kidd, Dustin. Social Media Freaks: Digital Identity in the Network Society. Terrorism and Political Violence. Vol. 31, No. 6: 1347-1349 (2019). Online here. Review of Scott, Erik R. "The Hijacking of Aeroflot Flight 244: States and Statelessness in the Late Cold War," H-Diplo. June 2019. Online here. Review of de la Calle, Luis, Nationalist Violence in Postwar Europe. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. November 2017. Online here. Working Papers and Work in Progress:
Kidnappings of soldiers, journalists, aid workers, and other civilians by armed groups happen every day. Yet, the politics of hostage recovery remains relatively understudied by international relations scholars. Whether and how governments choose to recover their citizens varies widely, as does public sentiment about bringing hostages home. To explain this variation, we develop a theory of hostage deservingness. We argue that deservingness is determined by the circumstance of capture—particularly whether hostages are perceived to be to blame for their capture—and that more deserving hostages receive more public support for risky rescue operations. Our multimethod approach to hypothesis testing includes the use of survey experiments embedded in two different nationally representative surveys of Americans, a behavioral experiment fielded on Facebook using Meta’s a/b testing platform, and 20 elite interviews with current and former senior hostage recovery personnel. Across our experiments, we find that when hostages are described as not to blame for their capture, support for recovery is at its highest. However, when capture occurs under circumstances that suggest the hostage bears responsibility, support for recovery decreases. Despite official U.S. government policy that the circumstances of capture are irrelevant to recovery decisions, our interviews show that notions of deservingness (and the public’s approval of hostages) matter a great deal in the hostage recovery process. We demonstrate that policymakers are similarly susceptible to notions of deservingness, yielding substantial internal debate about recovery options. Moreover, policymakers adapt their messaging to avoid backlash from recovering less sympathetic hostages or failing to recover those seen as more deserving.
"Partners in Crime: Comparative Advantage and Kidnapping Cooperation"
What explains cooperation between armed groups? Existing scholarship highlights groups' similarities -- such as shared ideology or goals -- to underwrite cooperation. But armed groups frequently cooperate without such shared values or traits. In this paper, I show that it is precisely groups' differences, not their similarities, that open up avenues to cooperation. To do so, I focus on kidnapping, an underexplored but common form of non-state actor violence against civilians, to explain cooperation across different types of armed actors. I apply the economics concepts of comparative advantage and vertical and horizontal integration to demonstrate that rebels and criminal gangs -- organizations that typically eschew collaboration -- cooperate in producing violence. Specifically, rebels outsource part of the kidnapping process to criminal gangs as part of their drive to expand their market territory, much as a firm might. Drawing on extensive interviews with armed groups and security personnel from Colombia, I theorize the conditions under which rebels are likely to "outsource" violence to criminal gangs or produce kidnapping violence "in house." This paper explains the organizational dynamics of armed group cooperation, as both sides exercise their specialization to achieve mutual benefits -- and commit systematic violence against civilians.
"Trust a Few: The Political Consequences of Wartime Violence" (with Elsa Voytas)
How does wartime violence affect trust? Existing research on the political consequences of violence is remarkably split: while some scholars argue that political violence generates prosocial behaviors and beliefs (like increased political participation and sentiments of reconciliation), others argue that violence generates antisocial behaviors (like decreased political participation and feelings of revenge). In particular, while most studies on the consequences of war demonstrate an increase in prosocial behavior, studies that focus on social trust show contradictory or null results. We argue that these mixed findings derive from a conflation in much of the literature of in-group trust, out-group trust, generalized trust, and trust in the government -- types of trust that we expect to diverge during conflict. Moreover, we expect that the effects of war on trust will differ by the relationship of research subjects to violence -- whether subjects experienced violence personally and directly, or whether their experience of violence was indirect, experienced by their family, community, or society. In this paper, we conduct a meta-analysis of existing studies on the effects of violence on trust. Understanding the variation in the political consequences of wartime violence has important implications for broader societal phenomena, including durable peace, reconciliation, and democratic consolidation.
"Prisoner Dilemmas: Conceptualizing Captivity in Conflict"
Hostage taking, detention, and abduction are pervasive in armed conflict. How are these forms of captivity related, and what do they achieve? This paper brings together disparate literatures on forms of detention and abduction to explore the interconnections between forms of captivity often classified as "kidnapping'' and consider the role of captivity in international security. To do so, I introduce a conceptual typology of captivity to show how variation in abduction and coercion in captivity -- where, and why captives are held -- condition dynamics of violence and the possibility of release. Then, I identify promising new avenues for a research agenda on captivity in conflict, examining the causes, consequences, and responses to captivity. In doing so, this paper uncovers relevant similarities and differences across forms of captivity, crucial for scholarly exploration and policymakers' response.
"Release, Kill, Rule, Recruit: The Role of Reputation in Hostage-Taking Violence"
During armed conflict, many armed groups including rebels, terrorists, and paramilitaries take hostages. While some hostages are released relatively unscathed in exchange for ransom or other concessions, others suffer terrible -- often fatal -- violence at the hands of their captors. What explains this variation? In this paper, I argue that armed group kidnapping behavior is central to the group’s reputation, and is a function of their territory of recruitment. If the kidnapping group operates in a territory with local support, then it will operate as a "stationary bandit,” prioritizing a reputation for reliability through repeat interactions. Such groups will use kidnapping as a method of exchange, and will be likely to release hostages alive. Conversely, armed groups that do not count on local recruits will use kidnapping as a means to signal their resolve and intentions more broadly, to attract recruits and support from outside their territory. These groups will be more likely to privilege spectacular violence over exchange. Using evidence from an original, cross-national dataset of the kidnapping behavior of 230 armed groups, I demonstrate that geography of recruitment is a crucial factor in explaining hostage outcomes.
Fieldwork:
Colombia (2017, 2018, 2019, 2023) Israel and the West Bank (2006) Washington, DC (2023)