Nolan Martin :
Hello and welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. I am your co-host and co-founder, Nolan Martin, and with me as always, good friend, mentor, coach, life coach, I don’t know, Aram. Plenty of titles there for Aram Donigian, my co-host and co-founder.
Aram Donigian:
Thanks, Nolan.
NM:
Yeah. I’ll let you take it away.
AD:
I will. I just want to comment on your beautiful shirt. That shirt’s a lovely purple.
NM:
Thank you. Northwestern for our guest today.
AD:
Northwestern Kellogg. So folks, if you’re only listening to the podcast, and if you haven’t checked out the YouTube channel, you need to go on to see just this beautiful purple shirt that Nolan’s got on today. It’s looking good, looking good. And it is an honor of our guest, Danielle, Danny Gilbert is an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. Her widely published research explores the causes and consequences of hostage taking in international security, including projects on rebel kidnapping, hostage recovery policy, and hostage diplomacy.
Her current book project based on her award winning PhD dissertation examines why and how armed groups kidnap during the civil war. In 2023, Danny was selected to serve on the bipartisan commission on hostage taking and wrongful detention at the center for strategic international studies. She frequently writes public compensatory and outlets like foreign affairs, the Washington Post and USA Today, and has been interviewed by numerous media outlets.
She has advised the British, Canadian and US governments on hostage recovery policy and talked about her research at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Before joining the faculty at Northwestern, Professor Gilbert spent time at Dartmouth College, the United States Air Force Academy, and the United States Institute of Peace.
She was also a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Before beginning her doctoral work, she served four years on Capitol Hill, including as a senior legislative assistant and appropriations associate. She also worked as a policy advisor on presidential and congressional campaigns.
Danny received her PhD in political science from George Washington University, a master’s from the London School of Economics, and her bachelor’s from Yale. Danny, thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
Danielle Gilbert:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here.
AD:
And time doesn’t seem like something you have a whole lot of, as busy as you are, and if I understand right, you just got back from a trip In the last 24 hours.
DG:
Yes. So I just got back from a workshop in Berlin with a bunch of other academics who were thinking about political captivity. So it was a really fascinating couple of days of conversation. And then I got to explore a city I hadn’t been to before. So it was a great trip.
AD:
Thanks for jumping on with us as soon as you got back.
DG:
Thanks for having me.
NM:
So Danny, how did you get interested in the topics that you study, teach and advise on today? Were there any a-ha moments that really impacted your thinking and motivation?
How Global Events Shaped Danielle’s Academic Journey [03:47]
DG:
So when people ask me this question, one of the first things that I always have to caveat is that I don’t have any personal experience with kidnapping. I didn’t start studying this because of a terrible thing that happened to someone I know. I went to get a PhD in political science about a decade ago because I was really interested in learning the literature, learning the toolkit of the scholarly approach to studying politics. But I had a very different set of topics in mind when I first went to get my degree.
And I was taking my coursework, I was taking a class on political violence, studying kind of the causes and consequences of war and different tactics that violent actors use. And this was the fall of 2014, and in the fall of 2014, there was something that happened in the news that not only really captured my attention, but to seem to really capture the attention of anyone who was watching world affairs and watching politics, which is that there was this emergence of this really horrific group called the Islamic State that was kidnapping thousands of Yazidis and also taking hostage western journalists and aid workers and in some cases of the American and British hostages, beheading them quite gruesomely and posting these videos online.
And overnight, the US policy toward Syria and the Middle East went through this really rapid transformation about what the Obama administration was willing to do in Syria, the way that people were talking about the Middle East. And I, like everyone else watching the news, was just captivated by this really gruesome type of violence and, and wondering why.
Why do they do it? Does it work? Why do some groups do it and not others? What explains why there’s so much media coverage of it? How it changes policy? And there were lots of other kidnappings in the news right around the same time. It was 2014 when Boko Haram kidnapped those hundreds of schoolgirls from Chibok, Nigeria. And so kidnapping was just, you know, it was in the media.
And so I’m taking this class on political violence. I looked at the literature on political violence and there was almost nothing that explained this form of violence. And so my curiosity really started from there. I decided that this was the thing that I wanted to spend at least the start of my academic career, I really focused on and so it went from there.
AD:
Danny, maybe we can dig into a little more on the specifics of your work, just so our listeners who are not familiar with some of the language and terms that you use, kind of have a base.
So how would you define, or what are some examples you’ve given a couple with the Boko Haram and Islamic State, of rebel kidnapping, hostage recovery policy, hostage diplomacy. And then just as you kind of explain that, how does your work specifically contribute to improving success or successful outcomes around these things?
Navigating The Intricacies Of Hostage Situations In Policy & Politics [07:02]
DG:
Sure. So when I say rebel kidnapping, what I mean is when armed groups that are fighting in a civil war against a state government, so rebels are also known as insurgents. They’re the armed groups that we think about in conflicts around the world, some of which use terrorists, terrorism and some of which don’t. And when groups like that abduct people and take them to a new location, usually to coerce some sort of behavior change from a third party.
So that might be kidnapping for ransom. It might be kidnapping to coerce prisoner swaps or things like that. And a lot of my work on rebel kidnapping focuses on Columbia, which is the country with the oldest, longest running insurgency in the western hemisphere. There was left wing armed groups that fought against the Colombian state for decades, during which time they kidnapped tens of thousands of local Colombian citizens in some of the largest numbers of kidnappings of any conflict around the world.
So I study, I speak to former kidnappers from that conflict, former hostages, security personnel to really understand why the armed groups are doing it and how they carry out their kidnapping. When I think about hostage recovery policy, what I mean is how governments work to bring captives home when their citizens are taken hostage by non-state actors like rebels or by states. How that government is going to work to bring those captives home.
And in some of my work including a set of projects co authored with Lauren Prather, who’s a professor at UCSD, we look at what the public thinks about hostage recovery options. So using surveys and interviews, we look at what the American public thinks about government efforts to pay ransom, to engage in prisoner swaps, or launch hostage recovery missions. Those are kind of typically the big three ways that governments try to bring captives home. And then finally, when I say hostage diplomacy, what I mean is when state governments, countries usually autocratic or authoritarian states use their criminal justice system to take foreigners hostage.
Effectively, they arrest foreigners under the color and guise of law, and use those prisoners for leverage from the captive’s home state. So examples of that are well known right now in the United States, or in 2022 when Putin’s Russia took Britney Griner hostage. More recently, Evan Grishkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who’s being held in Russia. To me, those are examples of hostage diplomacy, and there’s other countries around the world that frequently engage in hostage diplomacy in this type of practice, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and China, and it’s not just the United States that is targeted by this form of violence, it’s also a lot of our other Western allies.
So this happens to the Brits, to the Canadians, to the Australians, Japanese, quite a bit. And so my work on hostage diplomacy is trying to kind of define this phenomenon. What does it look like? How does it relate to other things that we might know about, like kidnapping or like the legitimate arrest of prisoners? And it kind of operates in this murky space in between. And thinking about how governments should deal with these cases when their citizens are taken captive in this way.
AD:
I want to ask more about both the Brittney Griner and Evan Gershkovich situations. We’ll get to that, but I just kind of wanted to make note as you went through those three. Thank you for that. It really highlighted to me the complexity of what you’re talking about when you are talking about whether they are formal or informal actors, governments, the bureaucracy, just the politics that’s gotta be complex.
You mentioned the role of media, I think around the rebel kidnapping and maybe sometimes, you know, to get more attention or broadcast what they’re doing. That’s got to be complex. How do you manage the media? And then you also talk about public opinion and what they’re thinking and trying to manage that. I mean, this sounds like, I mean, I don’t know how you make any work progress in this field. There’s just so much there.
DG:
Yeah, I think that there’s, you know, among the reasons that I’m so interested in studying this and dedicating my academic research to this topic is that there are so many real world policy and political problems that governments and targets face when they’re thinking about hostage taking. And there’s very little research on any of it.
So it’s almost kind of an unending supply of possible research questions to explore that might not be mainstream political science, and sometimes my colleagues are sort of curious what it is that I’m up to but at the end of the day, I’m interested in these topics because I want to help in the real world. I want to help people figure out how to deal with these cases and with these problems.
NM:
Are there any common traps hostage negotiators tend to fall into? And how do you advise them to avoid or get out of these challenging situations?
Rethinking The ‘No Concessions’ Approach To Hostage Situations [12:48]
DG:
So one of the traps that I think is really common when we talk about hostage taking is this kind of widespread notion of a no concessions policy. I think a lot of people assume that the United States has a “no concessions policy” when dealing with hostage takers or kidnappers, which is actually not the case and has never actually been the case and but is so common in public conversation about hostage taking that it can sometimes mislead the public, the media, decision makers, when they’re trying to figure out how to bring captives home.
There are lots of reasons to have a policy that verges on a no concessions policy. It is quite distasteful to reward your adversaries for just arbitrarily, unlawfully, violently, quite traumatically taking someone and holding them against their will to use them as a bargaining chip. Every part of that is abhorrent and objectionable. And so the idea of rewarding them is, is, can be grotesque, but making those concessions frankly works to bring captives homes.
You know, I think seasoned negotiators who work on things that aren’t hostage taking well know that, you know, you have to give up some things that you might not want to give up if you want your broader interest to be satisfied. And so if the broader interest is getting the captive back, sometimes that’s what you have to do. There’s also this idea that the reason not to make concessions is that it might incentivize future hostage taking. The idea is that if hostage takers learn that taking hostages is not profitable for them, they won’t get their ransom payment, they won’t get their prisoner swap, they might stop doing it in the future.
And there’s a few big problems with those assumptions. One is that it’s never really worked. Countries and governments that have tried to have a no concessions policy have never been able to stop the practice of hostage taking. It’s as old as the written word itself and there’s always going to be somebody who’s willing to pay when it’s their loved one or their citizen whose life is on the line.
And so thinking about preventing benefits to the hostage takers has not ever really worked. And so the big trap that everyone is falling into and that we really have to, you know, work our way through that governments are thinking about a lot right now is what is the way to bring hostages home to help, you know, the hostages of today without endangering the potential future hostages of tomorrow, right?
Is there a way to simultaneously solve today’s hostage crisis without incentivizing future hostage crises? And so there’s a newfound effort to kind of separate those two problems, right? Can we make concessions today? Can we make the hard decisions? Have these very difficult negotiations with unsavory partners and adversaries and find a way to prevent it going forward? And so that’s a track that I think policymakers and negotiators are starting to work their way out of. But we have a long road ahead.
NM:
And then how does the practice and concept of backchannel negotiations assist in these negotiations?
The Role Of Mediators In International Hostage Negotiations [16:19]
DG:
So there are lots of different ways that folks can work to negotiate, to bring hostages home. I know you’ve had a former Scotland Yard negotiator on your podcast and talked about kind of what that looks like directly. Sometimes hostage negotiations are done quite directly between a target, maybe that’s a family of a hostage who’s negotiating directly with the armed group or the employer of a hostage.
And sometimes the government can deal directly with the hostage taker. But sometimes the target of the hostage taking and the perpetrator of the hostage taking aren’t able to talk whether that is because these are governments that don’t recognize each other. The situation is too volatile. So we might think, for example, of the current ongoing negotiations that are trying to resolve the Hamas, Israel, Gaza hostage crisis.
You don’t have the leadership of Hamas negotiating directly with the government of Israel, what you have are a series of other countries that have stepped in, that have workable relationships with both sides, that work essentially as mediators who try to work with one side, bring a proposal to the other.
And the benefit of having this kind of back channel to and fro negotiations between third parties is that it allows them to brainstorm more creatively about what might be possible without tying one side or the other to an outcome that they might not be willing to agree to. And it kind of allows that flexibility. And it allows, effectively, a conversation between two sides that otherwise wouldn’t step into the same room. So sometimes you have those kinds of negotiations, even when the two sides are willing to talk to each other that allows for more creative options to be generated.
AD:
And Danny, add in another player to this. And again, we kind of, we mentioned the media before. I’m curious if the media is an asset or a liability in these negotiations. Do they ever play a party to it? Did they exacerbate the problem? What’s your view on the role that today’s kind of 24/7 media plays in these negotiations?
The Dual Role Of Media In Hostage Situations: Asset Or Liability? [18:35]
DG:
Yeah. When you ask if they’re, you know, if they’re an asset or liability, I mean, the answer is yes, that they can be both. One of the things that’s really complicated when we think about hostage taking is the range of different audiences who are at play. Sometimes hostage takings are intentionally kept secret. The perpetrator doesn’t want attention. They want something to stay underneath the radar. And in that case, the media plays very little role.
But other times, the perpetrator wants as much media attention as possible, perhaps because they are using the hostage taking to their own advantage to helps spread a message, to send a threat, to signal to their own domestic audience or to a potential international audience of recruits that they want that attention.
And in fact, you know, in the 1970s and 1980s, when armed groups were conducting a lot of their hostage takings in the form of hijackings or embassy sieges, they requested media attention almost as their first demand, right? They wanted the media to cover what it was that they were doing.
AD:
Right.
DG:
Right now, that’s not the case. Hostage takers don’t have to request or demand media attention. They can generate it themselves quite easily. So, one of the things that a lot of families of hostages in the United States and in other democratic countries around the world think about is that they want to bring more media attention to their case. They want to, kind of, put the pressure on democratically elected leaders to illustrate the story and the plight of their loved one. To put pressure on their government to make difficult decisions and do what they have to do to bring the hostages home at the same time, that the media might indeed pressure the government to take action.
It might make it costly or impossible for them to ignore the plight of these hostages, but the perpetrator also sees that media coverage, right? And so that is broadcast to multiple audiences. And if the perpetrator sees that a democratically elected leader, like the president of the United States, is facing a lot of public pressure to bring the hostages home, they might raise the price. They might make it more difficult for, you know, for the democratic government to bring their captives home. They might demand more money. They might demand a larger prisoner swap.
And so while it’s difficult to know precisely what the cause or the effect might be, we might say that the increased media coverage might make it more likely that a government has to act, but will make it harder for them to succeed in bringing a hostage home.
NM:
What role do private companies play in this? Because I know there’s private negotiators, there’s private assault or tactical teams that will, I’m assuming, intervene in regards to rebel kidnapping. But what role do they play in all this?
How Ransom Payments & Insurance Policies Facilitate Hostage Releases [21:52]
DG:
So actually the vast majority of hostages around the world survive captivity. They are released following the payment of a ransom. And a lot of them never really rise to the level of the hostages government. So it’s very difficult to know. There’s terrible data on this because kidnapping is underreported for lots of different reasons, including the fact that the targets and the perpetrators might want to keep a kidnapping secret.
But as best as we can tell, the vast majority of hostages survive, usually after a ransom is paid. And those ransoms are often paid by individual families, by kidnap and ransom insurance policies and by companies and employers. So they play a huge role in the way that a lot of these cases are handled. So kidnap and ransom insurance are these policies that often companies will take out to support their employees who are traveling and working in dangerous areas all around the world.
And the individual employees often don’t know that they have a policy in their name or how much that policy is worth. That’s to prevent them if they’re captured, immediately saying to the captor, my policy is worth $200,000 and, you know, it’s with John at Lloyd’s of London, you know, to make it a little bit more difficult. But those people who study kidnap and ransom insurance, and Anya Shortland who’s a British academic, this is her area of expertise, will basically say that the existence of this wide private industry that deals with kidnap and specifically ransom kidnapping stabilizes the market.
It kind of sets a price, it sets expectations, it brings in consultants who are experts on how to deal with these cases and makes things a little bit more reliable. So that plays a huge role.
AD:
So Danny, this is such a complex situation, at least to me in my mind, you know, different, many different parties, unknown consequences that could go in any number of directions. It sounds highly complex.
So the question I’m about to ask just feels foolish because I feel like I want to know, I want to know about the most challenging negotiation that you’ve either ever advised on or perhaps researched. And that seems insane to ask because they all sound so incredibly difficult. But if I was to ask you which one was the most challenging, how would you respond to that?
Insights & Challenges In International Hostage Negotiations [24:24]
DG:
That’s a great question. So, you know, I will caveat this by saying that I, you know, as an academic who’s interested in policy, I have not been personally involved in negotiating any particular hostage crisis. I’ve spoken to many people who have and hope that the insights of those conversations can help inform things.
And recently in the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to representatives from several different governments, including my own government in the United States about what they might do in certain hostage crises and how to bring captives home. And as you mentioned in the intro, I’m currently serving on a bipartisan commission that’s working on trying to answer some big questions in hostage policy.
And so hopefully by early next year, we will be publishing a report with our recommendations about hostage recovery policy. And so that’s my caveat. But one of the ways that I have been able to advise some of these hostage takings is, first of all, thinking about what’s gone wrong in past crises and how to avoid those challenges.
And speaking to members of the British Parliament after they dealt with a series of negotiating the return of British citizens who are held captive in Iran and during an ongoing hostage crisis, Brittney Griner that we talked about a little bit earlier, I participated in a meeting at the White House that was serving to brainstorm how they can get her back, thinking about different creative options. And one of the challenges that emerges in these situations time and time again that I mentioned earlier is that there is very little appetite to reward adversaries and a real desire to shame them, to punish them for this egregious violation of dignity and freedom that they have committed.
But at the same time, as negotiators know, you have to give something if you want something in return. And so those situations are often extremely complicated. I will say that you know, the hostage crisis that is most prominent in the news right now. The Hamas kidnapping of a couple 100 Israelis and other citizens back in October. I think that those are the most complicated negotiations that are ongoing, and it’s been extremely difficult to watch how all of this has unfolded.
AD:
And why is that? Why do you say that those are the most challenging or difficult?
DG:
I think it’s really challenging because there are so many issues that have come up as part of this hostage crisis. You know, as I think I’ve alluded to, and we’ll say, pretty explicitly now the best way to bring hostages back is through making concessions. It’s distasteful, but it works. And so, watching the way that the Israeli government has proceeded since October with its invasion of Gaza, with the tens of thousands of people who have been killed, displaced, injured, under the guise of hostage recovery, is really it’s not successful.
It’s also, you know, violation of international law, it’s just atrocious to watch. And so, you know, thinking about the way that the hostage taking has been used in a way, kind of taking advantage of how awful a hostage taking is, right? Hostage taking is also a violation of international law under no circumstances. Is it legal? You know, and what has unfolded since then to my mind has been the most difficult hostage crisis that comes to mind for me.
AD:
Yeah, no, I think that I appreciate the complexity of what you’re describing and the desire to respond in kind or with greater force.
NM:
Hey everyone! Nolan here, I have to jump in and end today’s podcast for part A of this show. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast if you haven’t already. And also join us next week for part B of this awesome interview.
