Why insurgents engage in kidnappings: A coercive strategy in quasi-state governance and control?

Despite the common perception viewing kidnappings as means to generate ransom income and to obtain political concessions, it remains unclear why kidnappings are disproportionately employed by some violent insurgent groups but not by the others. Combining data from the Global Terrorism Database and the Big Allied and Dangerous Insurgency Dataset, we empirically examined this question with a theoretical focus on the possible role of insurgents’ performance of state-like functions, which may necessitate the use of kidnappings as an illicit form of ‘policing’ and punishment for social control. Our analyses mainly focused on three aspects of quasi-state activities: extraction; provision of public services; and warring activities. A series of negative binomial regressions were conducted to examine the effects of insurgents’ quasi-state activities on their kidnapping activities over a base model with only group capacity and resource factors. We found that the initial effects of territory-control and membership size disappeared when variables measuring quasi-state activities were included into the model. This suggests that the influence of group capacity and resources on kidnappings may be an indirect one via insurgents’ strategic need for coercive control when contending for quasi-state status.