​Caught Between Giants: Hostage Negotiation Strategy for Middle Powers (with Gaëlle Rivard Piché)

Semi-finalist for the 2021 Janne Nolan Prize for the Best Article on National Security/ International Affairs. 

What is hostage diplomacy, and how can U.S. allies respond to China’s use of this coercive tool of foreign policy? We conceptualize “hostage diplomacy” — the taking of hostages under the guise of law for use as foreign policy leverage — to explain an underexamined form of international coercion. Exploring an international crisis over three prisoners — China’s Meng Wanzhou and Canada’s Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — we illustrate the turn toward hostage diplomacy by China and other authoritarian states. Drawing on the principles of negotiation, we analyze the creative negotiation strategies that middle powers might adopt to bring their captive citizens home. In doing so, we show how the fate of these three individuals had implications for policy concerns ranging from Iran’s nuclear program, to the adoption of 5G technology, to the future of the liberal international order.

Published in Texas National Security Review, Vol 5, Issue 1 (Winter 2021/2022). 
Paper available here | PDF available here | Coverage in The New York Times ​here. 

Full Court Press: The Negotiations to Bring Wrongfully Detained WNBA Star Brittney Griner Home (with Lucy Montgomery)

Full Court Press documents the negotiations and advocacy process to secure the release of women’s basketball star Brittney Griner from Russian prison in 2022. Griner was detained in Moscow in February 2022, convicted of drug smuggling, and sentenced to nine years in prison. After the US government determined that she was wrongfully detained in May 2022, actors inside and outside of government worked to secure her eventual release in December 2022, in a prisoner exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian who had been convicted of arms trafficking in 2011. The case provides a rich opportunity to discuss how negotiations involving the potential trading of humans are similar to “regular” negotiations, and how negotiation topics like interests, coalition-building, and BATNA manifest in hostage/wrongfully detained cases.

Published by Kellogg Case Publishers, 2025. 
Case study and teaching notes available here.

A Very Particular Set of Skills: The Role of Perspective-Taking in Hostage Diplomacy Negotiations (with Cynthia S. Wang, under review)

Hostage diplomacy—detaining foreign nationals for leverage under the pretext of national law—is a growing problem in international security. Beyond constituting a violation of international law and norms, hostage diplomacy is challenging to resolve. Target states must deal with aggressive, sovereign adversaries; handle a fraudulent but plausible legal process; account for numerous pertinent stakeholders; and protect their citizens from future harm. How do target governments negotiate the challenges of hostage diplomacy?
 
In this article, we offer a model for negotiators to adopt perspective-taking—the active cognitive process of imagining the world from another’s vantage point—as a tool for navigating hostage diplomacy. Specifically, our model introduces and distinguishes among variants of perspective-taking on two dimensions. First, negotiators can use multiple-perspective taking, which considers various stakeholders, including interests within their own government, the adversary’s government, and the hostage’s family. Second, across stakeholders, negotiators can use strategic, cultural, emotional, and moral perspective-taking to confront the complexity of hostage diplomacy. Drawing on insights from the U.S. hostage recovery enterprise, we offer a plausibility probe of our model. By employing these strategies, negotiators may better manage fluid power dynamics, navigate informal rules of engagement, alleviate uncertainty, and bolster global security.

Captivity and Coercion: Hostage Taking in International Security (in progress) 

Hostage taking is a global, costly, and underexplored problem for international and domestic politics. Across decades, regions, tactical innovations, and perpetrators from criminal gangs to autocratic states, hostage taking remains a devastating asymmetric tool, in which weaker actors use sustained human captivity to coerce leverage from their stronger opponents. Despite its colloquial use as the epitome of coercion, hostage taking itself is seldom explicitly studied. In this paper, I address that lacuna, arguing that research on hostage-taking violence offers insights on credibility, assurances, deterrence, and the conditions under which coercion succeeds and fails. To do so, I first define hostage taking as coercive detention and situate hostage taking in relation to other forms of coercion, abduction, and captivity. Then, I introduce a conceptual typology of hostage taking, illustrating how varying aspects of coercion and detention—where and why captives are held—condition the dynamics of violence and possibility of release. Finally, I conclude by proposing promising new avenues for a research agenda on captivity in conflict, examining the causes, consequences, and responses to hostage taking, crucial for scholarly exploration and policymakers’ response.