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Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business
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About Kidnap: Inside The Ransom Business
Product Description Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap risks, yet kidnaps of foreign workers, local VIPs, and tourists are surprisingly rare and the vast majority of abductions are peacefully resolved - often for remarkably low ransoms. In fact, the market for hostages is so well ordered that the crime is insurable. This is a puzzle: ransoming a hostage is the world's most precarious trade. What would be the "right" price for your loved one - and can you avoid putting others at risk by paying it? What prevents criminals from maltreating hostages? How do you (safely) pay a ransom? And why would kidnappers release a potential future witness after receiving their money? Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business uncovers how a group of insurers at Lloyd's of London have solved these thorny problems for their customers. Based on interviews with industry insiders (from both sides), as well as hostage stakeholders, it uncovers an intricate and powerful private governance system ordering transactions between the legal and the criminal economies. Review "The important issues raised by this book make in an indispensable guide for those interested in understanding the dark world of kidnapping for ransom." --Joshua Sinai, Washington Times "This is the latest, and in many ways one of the very best, of a recent wave of "New Institutional Economics of Marginal Markets" books... After years of research and hundreds of interviews, Anja Shortland has delivered a truly excellent book, one worth studying for the insights it contains into the new political economy and the new institutionalism." -- Michael C Munger, Independent Review "... a fascinating insight into a world most people thankfully don't have to experience... This is a fascinating and provocative book, as compelling as any fictional thriller." -- Matthew Partridge, Money Week Book of the Week "Kidnap will open your eyes, and it could help you keep both feet square on the ground." -- Terri Schlichenmeyer, Journal Record Online "Using jargon-free prose and impeccable analytical clarity this book portrays the business logic of the protagonists of kidnap- the kidnappers, their protectors, the hostages, and the insurers-vividly illustrating it with many real-life cases replete with unexpected twists. Whether you are afraid of being kidnapped, eager to sell insurance, working hard to deter or catch kidnappers, or even just a social scientist eager to understand what makes kidnapping fail or thrive, this treatise, the first of its kind, will prove supremely enlightening." --Diego Gambetta European University Institute and Oxford University, author of Engineers of Jihad, Codes of the Underworld, and The Sicilian Mafia "What do you get when you combine the intrigue of the international kidnap-for-ransom business and solid nuanced economic theory? A great read and deep insights into how extra-legal markets really work." --Gillian Hadfield, University of Toronto "The business and economic dynamics of kidnap-for-ransom are highly complex, but in this new book-unique in this field-Shortland provides a masterful deconstruction and explanation of the trickiest trade. Shortland lifts the veil on a highly complex world, revealing the ecosystem of motivations and competing interests that allow an orderly market to operate in the most disorderly of environments." --Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Financial Crime & Security Studies, RUSI "Negotiation with criminals; a fortune at stake; emotions on the redline; lives hanging in the balance. What couldn't go wrong with kidnap-for-ransom? In this gripping new book, Anja Shortland analyses the ransom business from the inside. Her discovery is startling and brilliant: a self-governing marketplace of cooperation and order. Outstanding and original, Kidnap is mandatory reading for students of (anti-)social order." --Peter T. Leeson, George Mason University. Au
