Nonlethal Violence in Armed Conflict: the Logic of Mass Kidnapping

Nonlethal Violence in Armed Conflict: The Logic of Mass Kidnapping

Marketa Kachynova

Supervisor: Dr Lee J M Seymour Second reader: Dr Ursula Daxecker June 2015 Master thesis Political Science: International Relations

Abstract

Mass kidnapping occurred in 40 per cent of armed conflicts in the period of 1989- 2013, yet there have been only limited efforts to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of this phenomenon. This thesis aims to contribute to current debates on nonlethal violence against civilians in armed conflict. It elaborates a within-case longitudinal study of kidnappings carried out by the Nigerian rebel group Boko Haram. The study finds that mass kidnapping constitutes a revenge tool for insurgents, who kidnap civilians en masse in order to punish the state for targeting family members of rebel combatants. The theatricality of the act serves as a feasible means of exposing the inability of the state to protect its civilians. To assess the wider relevance of the central argument, the paper extends its analysis to a cross- case study of mass and selective kidnappings carried out by insurgent movements in Chechnya and the Philippines.

Table of contents

1 Introduction ...... 4 Kidnapping as an object of study in political science ...... 8 Definitions ...... 9 Functions of kidnapping ...... 10 2 Theorizing civilian victimization ...... 12 Theoretical framework ...... 14 Information and indiscriminate targeting ...... 14 Organizational control and opportunism ...... 16 Revenge and indirect retaliation ...... 18 Research design: within- and cross-case analysis ...... 20 Case selection ...... 21 3 Boko Haram ...... 21 Nigeria’s struggles: background to Boko Haram’s origins ...... 22 The rise of Boko Haram ...... 22 The group’s organization ...... 24 A longitudinal study of Boko Haram’s kidnappings ...... 26 May 2011 – July 2014: selective kidnappings ...... 26 May 2013 – March 2015: mass kidnappings ...... 27 Explaining Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings ...... 30 Information and indiscriminate targeting ...... 30 Organizational control and opportunism ...... 32 Revenge and indirect retaliation ...... 34 Scope conditions ...... 37 4 Comparative evidence ...... 38 The Chechen insurgency ...... 38 The Philippine insurgency: Abu Sayyaf ...... 40 5 Conclusion ...... 44 Bibliography ...... 47 Appendix I ...... 58

1 Introduction

Why do rebel groups kidnap civilians en masse? How different are the dynamics of mass kidnapping and selective kidnapping? Kidnapping civilians in armed conflict is a type of nonlethal violence widely used by insurgents. It is a tactic that can yield many benefits to rebel groups: it can demonstrate a state’s inability to protect its populations, attract significant media attention, enrich the rebels with ransom money, and assist in pressuring the government to release incarcerated members. Simultaneously, it is a double-edged sword: it may alienate civilians from the insurgents’ cause, motivate them to organize themselves in order to retrieve kidnapped individuals, make the government deploy extra resources to tackle the group and draw in foreign governments seeking the release of kidnapped foreign nationals or locals. These effects may become fatal for the rebel movement. Yet despite the risks, kidnapping frequently forms an important part of insurgent violent strategies.

Studying mass kidnapping has the potential of broadening the horizon of research on civil wars and political violence. One trend in recent research is looking beyond killing to understand different types of violence, including torture, repression, sexual violence and other forms of coercion in the repertoire of civil war violence (Balcells, 2015). Examining kidnapping as a distinct form of violence helps to broaden our understanding of who experiences conflict and how. Indeed, kidnapping affects a wide segment of the population in some conflicts, impacting not only those kidnapped, but also sowing fear of abduction, forcing people to struggle to free someone kidnapped, and traumatizing those affected by the abduction of friends or family. Those kidnapped, if freed, suffer emotional and behavioural difficulties, struggle with traumatic memories and may be stigmatized by their communities (O’Callaghan et al., 2014). As kidnappings expose the government’s inability to protect a population, they also form an important part of state reactions to insurgent violence. In sum, mass kidnapping has important effects on how states and societies experience violence.

This work explores the logic and dynamics of mass kidnapping in armed conflict. The aim of this thesis is to identify the mechanism that explains why insurgent groups kidnap civilians en masse. To do that, it compares the processes underpinning 4

selective kidnapping and mass kidnapping. It also seeks to explain the factors that account for the variance in the use of this tactic within the development of a single group and across different rebel organizations. In other words, what accounts for a group’s decision to begin abducting civilians or for the shift from small-scale selective kidnappings to mass indiscriminate kidnappings? Research on kidnapping in armed conflicts can make a great contribution to debates on civilian victimization and rebel recruitment within current research: it is part of the different types of violence against noncombatants and is a crucial element of rebel recruitment due to forcible conscription. Furthermore, research of this sort is necessary as it significantly enhances our understanding of why and how civilians are targeted by armed organizations. Political science has contributed to explaining that civilian victimization is not a random, irrational and inevitable corollary of armed conflict, but a tactic that fulfils rational goals (Valentino, 2014). Progress in the analysis of different forms of violence against civilians is crucial for policymakers to devise adequate security strategies in conflict; understanding why insurgents kidnap can help to prevent kidnappings and thus reduce the harm inflicted on civilians.

Current research has strikingly little to say about mass kidnapping in armed conflict considering the fact that it represents a wartime tactic documented since antiquity. Historical accounts describe particularly wartime mass abductions of women. The rape of the Sabine women, for instance, is an episode from the legends surrounding the founding of ancient Rome, in which the first generation of Roman men carry out a mass abduction of women from neighbouring Sabine families in order to form a stable population base for Rome. ―Rape‖ here derives from the Latin raptio, a term referring to large scale kidnapping of women either for marriage or enslavement, which underscores the close historical association of rape and kidnap (Ananda, 2015). References to kidnappings of women as spoils of war can be found in different parts of the Old Testament and are believed to have been widely practiced by the Vikings (Keil & Delitzsch, 2014; Jesch, 1991). Archived legal records suggest that abductions of females were a frequent issue in medieval England (Dunn, 2013).

More recently, large-scale and small-scale kidnappings by insurgent groups have been seriously affecting developments in domestic as well as international politics. Israel, for instance, swapped 4,700 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners for six

Israelis captured in Lebanon in 1983 (Tierney, 2010). The FARC used kidnappings to influence the course of elections: as part of its 1997 call for a boycott of municipal elections, the group killed 36 candidates and kidnapped 300. As a result, more than 1,000 candidates withdrew from the election (BBC News, 1998). By kidnapping a Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz in July 2004, Iraqi insurgents accomplished to pressure the Philippine president Gloria Arroyo to an early withdrawal of Philippine military forces from Iraq (The Economist, 2004). The 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok by Boko Haram provoked an international social media campaign pressing the Nigerian government to locate and free the abducted schoolgirls. The political crisis that ensued influenced the result of the presidential election the following year (Blanchard, 2015).

Mass kidnapping is a relatively widespread tactic across violent conflicts, which makes it a consequential phenomenon worthy of exploration. To assess the incidence of kidnapping in armed conflict, I have analysed 144 armed conflicts between 1989 and 2013 listed in the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. The analysis aims to find the proportion of conflicts during which kidnappings were carried out by one or both belligerents, i.e. state as well as non-state actors directly involved in the dispute (see Appendix I for details on the data collection procedure). Kidnappings occurred in more than three quarters of armed conflicts. Selective kidnappings were present in 74 per cent of armed conflicts since 1989, while mass kidnappings occurred in 40 per cent of the conflicts. These numbers are significant, particularly taken into consideration the obscurity with which kidnappings are often perpetrated and the difficult reporting conditions in these types of events; in 9 per cent of conflicts it was not possible to verify whether any type of kidnappings took place due to insufficient or unclear reporting (see Fig. 1).

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Selective kidnapping Mass kidnapping

Kidnapping No kidnapping Unknown

Fig. 1. Kidnapping in armed conflict, 1989-2013

In addition, the surge of international newspaper headlines informing about mass kidnappings in armed conflicts of 2014 and 2015 suggest that mass kidnapping has been gaining prominence as a tactic within insurgent organizations’ repertoire of violence. In May 2014, the same month when Boko Haram abducted 276 girls from a school in Chibok, Islamic state (ISIS) militants kidnapped 186 Kurdish children in Kobani in northern Iraq. Conversely to the Chibok kidnapping, the Kobani case received very little coverage in Western press (Di Giovanni, 2014). The group is believed to hold more than 1,000 women and girls from the Yazidi minority in Iraq, which has been targeted by ISIS in its mission to annihilate other religions in the predominantly Sunni Islamic ―caliphate‖ (Dearden, 2014). In February 2015, ISIS kidnapped 220 Assyrian Christians from villages in north-eastern Syria in the period of three days (Saul, 2015). Also in February 2015, gunmen in South Sudan abducted at least 89 boys preparing to sit school exams, together with six teachers. Human Rights Watch accused both the rebels and the government forces of recruiting child soldiers; their number is estimated to amount to at least 12,000 (D. Smith, 2015).

While acknowledging the validity of other explanatory factors, the thesis seeks to highlight the use of mass kidnapping as a revenge mechanism by insurgents. I argue that mass kidnapping constitutes a revenge tool for rebels, who kidnap civilians en masse in order to punish state authorities for past violence against rebels and/or 7

their families. Since it is difficult to punish a state by targeting state representatives selectively, rebels turn to mass kidnapping, using civilians as pawns in the conflict. The revenge mechanism applies in those conflicts where state forces target relatives of rebels – the family members may be detained without charges, tortured, or even killed. When a state targets relatives of rebel fighters, insurgent groups become incentivized to retaliate in an attention-drawing manner that puts many civilians’ lives at stake. Such events become a tool for publicly enacting revenge and humiliating the state forces.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, it defines the core concepts of the work, establishes abduction as a distinctive object of study, and offers a review of the functions of kidnapping. Second, it probes into current research and theory dealing with the dynamics of violence against noncombatants in armed conflict, and uses it to build a theoretical framework for the study. Third, it explains the choice of research design used in this work. Fourth, it elaborates a study of a Nigerian insurgent group, Boko Haram, to analyze mass and selective kidnappings perpetrated by the group and to examine the relevance of the variables from the theoretical framework in explaining the mechanisms that drive mass kidnapping. Fifth, it compares the findings with kidnappings carried out by rebel groups in two other conflicts to examine the wider relevance of the argument. The final section concludes.

Kidnapping as an object of study in political science

Current political science research dealing with dynamics of violence in armed conflict has made significant progress in analyzing the functionality of violence against civilians. However, as Dara Cohen points out, studies have predominantly focused on killing at the expense of examining the variegated forms of violence that do not necessarily end with death, such as sexual violence, kidnapping, hostage-taking, torture, mutilation, or forced displacement (Cohen, 2013). This work seeks to contribute to the studies of nonlethal violence by establishing kidnapping of civilians in armed conflict as a separate object of study.

There are a number of reasons justifying the choice to treat kidnapping as a distinct phenomenon. First, by studying nonlethal violence, political science can cover more

fully the actual extent of impacts of armed conflict on civilians. Non-fatal violence is difficult for researchers to reliably measure, yet that does not mean it is less important – tactically or otherwise – in civil wars. Mass kidnapping can extend not only over the victims and their immediate family and friendship circles, but over whole societies. Trauma, stigma, or living in an environment of permanent fear can have devastating effects on many aspects of life. Second, kidnappings, as part of the repertoire of violence insurgents may use to achieve their goals, constitute the small acts of violence that represent the elementary components driving violent conflict. Third, the scale of these acts in armed movements cannot be ignored. In addition to the examples of mass abduction from recent years mentioned above, there is a wealth of instances from older conflicts. The UNITA movement in Angola was responsible for the abduction of 312 hostages over the period from 1983 to 1985 (Elster, 2004). In Kashmir, about 2,000 individuals were kidnapped during the first half of the 1990s. The Philippines experienced a period in 1997 when kidnappings were occurring at the rate of one every two days (Auerbach, 1998). In Colombia, kidnappings reached a high in the year 2000, with around 3,500 kidnappings in that year alone. During the Iraq War, the rate of kidnappings rose from two kidnapped Iraqis in Baghdad per day in January 2004 to ten per day in December of the same year. By March 2006, the kidnapping rate went up to between thirty and forty people kidnapped per day in the country as a whole (Williams, 2009). In short, kidnapping of civilians is a widespread tactic that may influence the course of intrastate conflicts. The relevance of the study also extends to the area of terrorism, as kidnapping has been a useful tool of many terrorist groups. Studying and understanding kidnapping in armed conflict can therefore be a promising contribution to research in political science.

Definitions

Inspired by Valentino’s (2000) steps in formulating a definition of mass killing, I define mass kidnapping in armed conflict as the act of carrying off a significant number of noncombatants by force in order to force a third party to make concessions or to coerce the kidnapped individuals into involuntary confinement or activities. There are four aspects to this definition that need to be explained. First, mass kidnapping entails the abduction of a ―significant number‖ of persons. This

calls for a specification of the amount of victims that make kidnapping a ―mass‖ kidnapping. A ―mass‖ kidnapping can be any single kidnapping involving the abduction of a minimum of ten individuals. Second, the definition indicates that the abductees have to be ―noncombatants.‖ This term describes any unarmed person that does not belong to any military group, be it a government unit or a guerrilla organization. Noncombatants can, nonetheless, support one side of the conflict to varying degrees. Third, the definition specifies that mass kidnapping can be done in order to press a third party to make concessions. Such concessions may include the release of prisoners in exchange for the lives of abductees, demands for ransom money, or demands for policy change. The last aspect of the definition that requires explanation is the concept of ―involuntary confinement or activities.‖ Insurgents may kidnap civilians and keep them confined against their will, or coerce them into activities which may include becoming part of a fighting unit in combat, sexual slavery, or supportive roles in camps.

Functions of kidnapping

Kidnappings have a variety of functions. In the following paragraphs, I present an overview of the different functions of kidnapping in order to summarize the existing knowledge on kidnapping, lay out the focus of this thesis within kidnapping in general, and to provide a basis for the search of the causal mechanisms that may explain why rebels kidnap en masse.

In the existing typologies of kidnapping, scholars distinguish between political and criminal kidnapping. Political kidnapping is carried out by rebel groups or state authorities in pursuit of a proclaimed political goal, while criminal kidnapping is associated with personal pecuniary motives and generally attributed to criminal gangs (Elster, 2004). Given that this is a political science thesis, it will focus on political kidnapping. Political kidnapping may imply either a dyadic or a triadic structure. In the case of the former, kidnappers capture their victims in order to gain control over them, with no appeals to a third party. In insurgencies, abductees may be coerced to perform different tasks, including soldiering, use as porters, cooks, messengers, and other forms of labour or sexual slavery. The general label of this type of kidnapping is forcible recruitment. Perhaps the most notorious example of rebel groups engaging in this type of mass abduction is the Lord’s Resistance Army 10

(LRA) in Uganda, which is estimated to have abducted 60,000 to 80,000 children and adolescents since 1994 (Beber & Blattman, 2013). The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) has also widely used this tactic during the Sierra Leonean civil war (Humphreys & Weinstein, 2008).

In a kidnapping with a triadic structure, victims are used to pressure a third party to satisfy insurgents’ demands for concessions. Insurgents may threaten to keep the abductees until the third party agrees to meet their demands, or to kill the captives unless the third party manages to meet the demands (Elster, 2004). Based on the type of demand, kidnappings can be divided into two categories: resource-seeking and concession-seeking. Resource-seeking kidnapping is carried out in order for the victims’ lives to be exchanged for payment of ransom and serves as a funding mechanism for the insurgents. Among the most prominent cases in this category are kidnappings carried out by the ELN and the FARC in Colombia. Both groups exploited selective as well as mass kidnappings to fund their operations (Elster, 2004). Concession-seeking kidnapping is carried out with the aim of pressuring the government to meet rebels’ demands, such as policy change or the release of prisoners. The Iraqi insurgents, for instance, have used kidnapping not only as their main source of revenue, but also as a channel for voicing their political demands (Pfeiffer, 2005). Insurgents use kidnapping to generate bargaining power: the pressure from the public in light of the threat of killing the abductees obliges policy makers to meet demands that would not have been satisfied without this kind of pressure. Also, the pressure that accompanies kidnapping events may serve to elicit disproportionate state response: insurgents may carry out kidnapping when the desired outcome is military reaction or even ―overreaction‖ [emphasis in original] (Pfeiffer, 2005, p.37). Brutal military retaliation may fuel resentment among civilians and may as a result heighten support for the insurgency.

Concannon (2011) lists three more ―typical‖ motives of political kidnapping. Insurgents kidnap civilians to demonstrate the weakness of the government in not being able to protect its citizens; to obtain publicity for a certain cause; or to stir civil discontent. These motives imply a triadic structure in a less direct way than the resource and concession-seeking kidnappings described above, and may overlap to varying degrees with the motives of concession-seeking kidnapping. Due to their

prominent demonstrative nature, they may be labelled as demonstrative kidnappings. Demonstrative kidnappings may have an additional function: conveying an ideological message. Rebels often target specific groups precisely in order to make an ideological point, as has been for instance the case with Boko Haram targeting schoolgirls in their kidnapping campaign to underscore their stance against Western-style education. Events such as hostage-taking, kidnapping and abduction generally tend to receive a considerable amount of media coverage – a human drama attracts the attention of diverse audiences, which makes it a desirable publicity tool. Kidnapping incidents may even trump other lethal events perpetrated by terrorist or insurgent organizations. In 2004, for example, the Beslan school hostage crisis received more interest in US media than the terrorist attacks in Madrid (Pew Research Center, 2004).

It is worth noting that the lines demarcating the different types of kidnapping based on their functions are blurred, especially in the case of mass kidnapping. Since it is ―mass,‖ insurgents can decide to use individual abductees for different purposes. They may offer to exchange a number of individuals for ransom money, allocate a certain amount of people for work in their camps, and use the rest to exert pressure on the government with the threat of killing them. Rebels may also use abductees as camp attendants or sexual slaves while they are negotiating their exchange with a third party, so one kidnapped individual can in fact move from one category to another. My initial interest was to focus exclusively on mass kidnapping carried out for concession-seeking purposes, however, it became clear that it is impossible to identify cases of mass kidnapping that only fulfil a single function and can be labelled solely as resource-seeking, concession-seeking, forcible recruitment or demonstrative kidnapping. Still, mass kidnappings may have a common explanatory mechanism even if their functions differ or even if they fulfil a multitude of functions at the same time. The following parts of the thesis aim to identify that mechanism.

2 Theorizing civilian victimization

To place the study of kidnapping in current research, the paper offers an overview of the major contributions in the research on civilian victimization. Valentino notes that until the mid-1990s, research focused primarily on the causes of violent conflict, not

on its dynamics or its consequences. By seeking to theorize the origin of armed struggle, political scientists were overlooking the ―form and degree of violence within these phenomena‖ (Valentino, 2014, p. 90), leaving the investigation of concrete instances of violence to historians. This changed with the end of the Cold War and the subsequent surge in intrastate conflict. Political scientists have gradually taken up interest in the facets of violence in civil wars. Academic literature on violence against civilians progressed mainly in that it began to perceive acts previously considered as random, ―barbaric‖ violence as a strategy employed by insurgents and political figures to serve certain purposes. Primordialist explanations positing that violence is an inevitable side effect of war, which has roots in ancient hatreds, thereby gave way to instrumentalist rationales seeing violence as a tool exploited by powerful actors. This paper subscribes to the view that violence against civilians is instrumental and may be exploited strategically. Valentino’s work (2000) on mass killing highlights that due to the strategic nature of civilian victimization, the causes of violence against civilians lie at the level of high military and political leadership, not at broad socio-political structures. Humphreys and Weinstein (2006) analyse the significance of meso-level factors in civilian abuse. They argue that the internal structure of warring factions is the crucial determinant of civilian abuse. Factions with low levels of organization, unable to control the behaviour of their members due to a lack of mechanisms to punish indiscipline, are more likely to abuse civilians extensively. Kalyvas (2003; 2006), in turn, points to the on-the-ground micro-level dynamics of civil conflict. He contends that violence in armed conflict is driven by personal agendas at the local level, rather than by macro-level ideologies. Outbreak of war provides individuals with new opportunities to rectify personal grievances, which explains why so much violence happens among groups of the same ethnicity or among inhabitants of the same village. These works indicate that all levels of organization may be significant when identifying the origins of civilian victimization.

Current research has a fundamental weakness, however, which lies in that the works explore civilian victimization exclusively in terms of killing. Other nonlethal forms of violence have been neglected in the literature dealing with violence against noncombatants. This paper underscores that political science is relevant for studying nonlethal forms of violence in armed conflict, because all these types of violence can be political. Therefore, concrete violent acts in armed conflict should be as much a 13

concern of political scientists as it is of historians or of scholars of international development. In this respect, most progress has been made in the study of sexual violence in civil wars thanks to the work of Dara Kay Cohen and Elizabeth Wood. Cohen (2013) focuses on the motives of rape and offers an alternative explanation gleaned from criminology literature – rape, especially gang rape, occurs chiefly in contexts where men are forcibly conscripted into insurgent armies. In such conditions, leaders seek ways to form a sense of cohesion among the new recruits, who are often complete strangers. Rape becomes a tactic of organizational socialization due to the cohesive power of the act. Through the common experience of perpetrating rape, new recruits are able to create bonds of esteem and loyalty and overturn the initial anxiety and lack of trust related to their forced entry into the organization. Sexual violence thereby serves a rational purpose in increasing small unit cohesion and military effectiveness. Wood (2009) aims to explain the variation in the incidence of rape across conflicts. She attributes high occurrence of rape to two factors. One is the active promotion of rape by leadership structures as a way to terrorize or punish the population (called by the author the ―top-down implication‖). The other is the weakness of military or insurgent hierarchy to prevent rape perpetrated by individuals (the ―bottom-up implication‖). In circumstances where individuals are discouraged from perpetrating rape from the top down and where leadership hierarchy is strong to punish disobedient individuals, the occurrence of rape is much lower.

Theoretical framework

This paper sets out to elucidate why insurgents kidnap civilians en masse. The thesis looks specifically into three independent variables that influence the occurrence of mass kidnapping: information, organizational control, and revenge. For each of the variables I formulate a set of predictions that constitute a framework for the empirical section. These factors have emerged as the most prominent in the literature on civilian victimization, which is why I have chosen them as the basis for the theoretical framework.

Information and indiscriminate targeting Stathis Kalyvas (2006) explains the variation within violence against civilians by violent actors’ access to information. Kalyvas’ proposition underscores that violence 14

has a function of control. Control crucially has a spatial dimension – actors who have significant territorial control are able to protect civilians living in that territory, not only from rival groups, but also from the group which is in control. Civilians are incentivized to collaborate with the group controlling the territory they live in, regardless of their actual political preferences. In this sense, control largely shapes collaboration, and both selective and indiscriminate violence are employed by insurgents with the aim of generating civilians’ collaboration through deterrence. The distinction between selective and indiscriminate violence is contingent on the level where ―guilt‖ is located and subsequently targeted, highlighting the identification problem inherent in insurgency. Selective violence aims to establish ―individual guilt‖ and targets victims in a personalized manner, while indiscriminate violence targets guilt collectively – often in cases when ―guilty‖ individuals cannot be found. Kalyvas argues that indiscriminate violence occurs when insurgents lack information to establish concrete criteria to select specific targets. They can gain information from three main sources: material indices (photographs, documents), violent extraction, and consensual provision (which may be provided by paid informants or through denunciations). The most radical form of indiscriminate violence is that which targets its victims on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, or religion (Kalyvas, 2006). Therefore, information is a key determinant of the selectiveness of insurgent violence. In this sense, mass kidnapping may be a form of indiscriminate violence by insurgents unable to directly target collaborators with the state, or a tactic employed when insurgents intend to collectively punish civilians. These considerations yield the following hypotheses:

H1: Mass kidnapping is likely to occur when insurgents lack access to information that would allow them to specifically target selected individuals.

H2: Mass kidnapping is likely to occur if rebels seek to punish civilians on a collective level.

If hypothesis H1 is valid, we can expect to see the following implication: the rebel group should be involved mostly or only in mass kidnapping and should not be able to carry out more high-profile selective kidnappings or kidnappings of highly profitable targets, since such targets require the rebels to have a solid access to 15

information to carry out the kidnapping. If hypothesis H2 is true, it should be possible to identify the source of ―guilt‖ of the kidnapped groups – the abductees have to be part of a group that is collectively perceived as guilty by the rebels. The guilt can have a variety of origins, for instance religion, ideology, or collaboration with the adversary.

Organizational control and opportunism Alternatively, violence against noncombatants may be the result of discrepancies between group leaders and rank-and-file members. As noted above, Humphreys and Weinstein (2006) posit that high levels of civilian abuse are more likely to occur when factions are poorly organized and lack a functional punishment system. Elizabeth Wood (2009) makes a similar argument with reference to rape: higher levels of rape are perpetrated by rebel organizations with weak leadership, because in such conditions rapists are more likely to avoid punishment. Otherwise, rape frequently occurs when it is sanctioned as a wartime tactic by leaders who have strong control over their fighters. The crucial difference between mass kidnapping and rape or killing is that it cannot be carried out by a single rebel; in terms of mass kidnapping, it is necessary to think of processes between group leadership and different factions. Wood’s argument refers to the dynamics of the control relations between leaders and rank-and-file fighters. My assumption is that her argument can also be applied to the relations between group leaders and factional commanders: group leaders may not authorize kidnapping as a tactic, however, if they lack control over different factions, they may not be able to prevent it from happening. This notion informs the following prediction:

H3: Mass kidnapping is likely to occur when organizational control of group leaders over factions is low.

Conversely, group leaders may actively promote mass kidnapping as a tactic. Given the large-scale nature of some mass kidnappings, different factions may cooperate under the command of the group leader to carry out mass kidnapping operations. In that case, group leaders have to be able to exert control over factions in order to organize a large-scale kidnapping event. This predicts the following:

H4: Mass kidnapping is likely to occur when it is sanctioned by group leaders who have high levels of control over factions.

Furthermore, Woods’ findings about rape can elucidate the relation between mass kidnapping and sexual violence. The introduction of this thesis mentions the close historical connection between kidnap and sexual violence. Organizational control is a crucial determinant of variance in rape across conflicts (Wood, 2009). Opportunism too plays an important role in wartime sexual violence as conflict ushers in the elimination of social norms and legal prohibitions, which may leave combatants with a low degree of inhibitors that would prevent them from committing rape (Goldstein, 2003). As opposed to rape, mass kidnapping requires the action of a multitude of individuals, so the question of opportunism moves from the individual level to faction- or group-level. At these levels, mass kidnapping can become a channel for sexual opportunism: wartime circumstances may enable rebel combatants to gain access to women through mass abduction and thus offer them possibilities of sexual gratification and marriage. Regardless of whether it is a group strategy (H4), or an act of a single faction (H3), commanders may sanction mass kidnapping of women in order to facilitate opportunities for sexual gratification and marriage to fighters. Based on this logic, I formulate the next hypothesis:

H5: Mass kidnapping is likely to occur when commanders seek to provide combatants with opportunities for sexual gratification and marriage.

The validity of the organizational control and opportunism variables can be confirmed by the following observable implications: if mass kidnapping is a corollary of squabbles between group leadership and factions (H3), kidnappings should be left without the group leaders claiming responsibility for them. Conversely, if mass kidnapping is part of the repertoire of violence used by insurgents under the instructions of a group’s leader (H4), the group leadership will make sure to claim responsibility for the action. If mass kidnapping is an activity facilitating sexual gratification of combatants (H5), there should be a significantly higher proportion of female abductees than male ones.

Revenge and indirect retaliation The final causal mechanism to be discussed in the thesis is revenge. Kalyvas (1999, 2003, 2006) finds that revenge is endogenous to conflict. Civil wars and other forms of violent conflict usually remove working judicial systems, which, together with increased levels of violence, enhance the desire for revenge. The resulting effect is an escalating cycle of violence: violence exacerbates desire for revenge, and revenge in turn provokes more violence. Kalyvas (2006) focuses mainly on local- level dynamics of revenge, highlighting that it not only produces violence directly (when an individual enacts revenge on someone), but also indirectly by motivating individuals to join armed organizations. Simultaneously, revenge may operate at the collective level between an individual and a group – Kalyvas refers to an example of a Polish guerrilla member whose family members were killed in a Ukrainian raid during the Second World War. The Pole ―continued to exist only for the purpose of killing and torturing Ukrainians‖ (2006, p.60). At times, group and individual motivations amalgamate, which can be evidenced by instances when the general pool of targets is characterized by group ethnic identity, while the specific targets are selected on the basis of individual attributes, e.g. past actions. In this sense, violence, although generally driven by master narratives, is conducted by micro-level rationales. Different levels of action may therefore interact in the process of taking revenge. Laia Balcells (2010) shows that desire for revenge influences the levels of violence in a given area. Her study of violence during the Spanish civil war demonstrates that areas with high levels of violence perpetrated by one side in the conflict are likely to have greater levels of violence perpetrated by the adversary in a subsequent period. Roger Gould (2000) puts forth a notion that vendettas, albeit altruistic, are highly strategic acts following an unwritten but universally respected code of practice. Through an analysis of court records from nineteenth-century Corsica, Gould finds that vengeance was rare and usually happened when the original incident involved violence against nondisputants – revenge attacks were much less likely to be provoked by incidents in which the victims were the actual disputants. Gould’s logic may help clarify the dynamics of the situation when rebels seek to enact revenge on the state. Insurgents may wish to avenge the actions of the incumbent; in attempts to curb an insurgency, incumbent forces may carry out extrajudicial arrests and killings, for which they may not be held accountable. Rebel

movements often operate in contexts of high levels of state impunity, which may further exacerbate insurgents’ desire to retaliate, especially in cases when rebels have close relationships with those targeted by the state. This may be particularly important when family members of group leaders or senior combatants are affected by incumbent violence.

Violence in the form of mass kidnapping can fulfil the function of revenge in armed conflict, which may help to explain why insurgent groups carry out mass kidnapping. If insurgents want to retaliate against the state, they may use mass kidnapping, because it is a tactic that can punish the government in a variety of ways: it exposes state inability to protect civilians, stirs civil discontent, and the public pressure generated by the threat of killing a significant number of civilians may severely undermine the state. Following this rationale, I can formulate the next hypothesis:

H6: Rebels are likely to carry out mass kidnapping if they seek to enact revenge on the state.

Based on Gould’s findings, revenge is more likely when actors uninvolved in a dispute are affected by the violence between the disputants, i.e. revenge is more likely to occur when one of the disputants intentionally targets one or more outsiders related to the opponent. If mass kidnapping is a manifestation of revenge, as postulated in H6, the probability that insurgents will kidnap civilians en masse to avenge past state actions increases if the state targets individuals related to the rebels. This logic yields the final prediction:

H7: Rebels are more likely to carry out mass kidnapping when relatives of the insurgents uninvolved in the conflict are targeted by the state.

If the revenge hypotheses are true, we can expect to see three implications. The first observable implication is that, temporally, detention of leaders’ family members should be followed by mass kidnapping. Second, the rebels themselves should claim that kidnappings are a response to a past grievance they seek to avenge. Clearly, rebels cannot be taken for their word and their proclaimed justifications usually do not paint the full picture, but if the action is indeed intended to serve as revenge, it is highly probable that the rebels will wish to make it explicit to their opponent. The third observable implication is that the factions whose leaders’ families are targeted are 19

more likely to engage in mass kidnapping than the factions whose leaders’ relatives are not targeted.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that most of the hypotheses for mass kidnapping described above are based on theories explaining lethal violence. Mass kidnapping dynamics, however, may be different from killing dynamics. Killing is an irreversible act, while kidnapping, if not ending with death of the abductees, can in fact be ―undone.‖ Although victims are left with psychological and possibly physical scars and trauma, the control over their lives is given back to them. In this sense, kidnapping is a much more versatile tactic than killing, so theories gleaned from literature on lethal violence may or may not capture the processes related to nonlethal violence. The question therefore is whether the hypotheses are applicable to nonlethal violence, namely kidnapping. Kalyvas notes, for instance, that the trend in armed conflict is for indiscriminate violence to shift to selective targeting as actors gain access to more information to be able to identify the ―guilty‖ targets. Yet this is not necessarily the case with kidnapping. The empirical chapters will clarify which of the hypotheses find support in mass kidnapping.

Research design: within- and cross-case analysis

This thesis seeks to explain why rebels abduct civilian hostages en masse. The paper uses a qualitative research strategy and employs the method of case study analysis. The analysis focuses on the level of group and factional leadership. Mass kidnapping is a phenomenon that has not been covered by extensive research, so individual cases are adequate for making observations about mass kidnapping. Hence, case analysis results as the most suitable method for my research. The group under study is the Nigerian insurgent organization Boko Haram in the period between 2002 and early 2015. The paper first offers a longitudinal overview of the group’s kidnapping incidents and then goes on to inspect the explanatory leverage of the independent variables described above. The analysis is extended to two other violent settings in a comparative design to look into the variation in the scale of kidnapping across conflicts and to examine the wider relevance of the observations drawn from the within-case analysis. The two settings are Chechnya and the Philippines. In Chechnya, I look into the surge of kidnappings in the period between the First and the Second Chechen War (1996-1999) and into the mass hostage- 20

taking events carried out by the Chechen militant group Riyad-us Saliheen. In the case of the Philippines, I analyse the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and its extensive kidnapping campaign.

Case selection The main condition directing the selection of the cases for this study has been the occurrence of both mass and selective kidnappings in a conflict, as understanding the differences in the processes that accompany each type of kidnapping can yield valuable insights into the logic behind mass kidnapping specifically. The three conflicts are diverse geographically, but have similarities in terms of ideology and religion – all have a separatist element and are Islamic (Walker, 2012; Pokalova, 2015; O’Brien, 2012). The insurgencies also operate in contexts with high levels of state violence (Human Rights Watch, 2012; Hughes, 2013; Boumghar et al., 2008). The Chechen and Philippine rebel movements are therefore comparable to a certain degree to the Boko Haram movement and are suitable for testing the wider applicability of the inferences observable in the case of Boko Haram.

3 Boko Haram

―We attacked the securities base because they were arresting our members and torturing our wives and children. They should know they have families too, we can abduct them. We have what it takes to do anything we want.‖

Abubakar Shekau’s audio tape message, January 2012 (Oboh, 2012).

The following chapter explores the mass kidnappings carried out by Boko Haram. It provides an overview of the group’s history, looks into Boko Haram’s organization, and tracks the development of the group’s kidnapping techniques with a particular focus on the shift from selective to mass kidnappings. It then offers explanations for the shift, by which it illustrates the logic behind Boko Haram’s involvement in mass kidnapping.

Nigeria’s struggles: background to Boko Haram’s origins

As most post-colonial African states, Nigeria is a collection of tribes, ethnic groups and nations united under a common government. The British colonial administration initially maintained northern and southern Nigeria as two separate dependencies, but decided to merge them in 1914 for economic reasons (Tinti, 2014). The Nigerian state was thereby formed by an external order with little internal cohesion. After gaining its independence from British colonial rule in 1960, the country witnessed a series of secessionist struggles, the Biafran war of the late 1960s being the internationally best known one. A series of military juntas that exhausted the country were replaced by democracy only in 1999 (Tinti, 2014). The democratic governments, however, have been failing to lift Nigeria out of its problems. Most Nigerians are poorer today than they were at independence in 1960 (International Crisis Group, 2014). The country has been plagued by the resource curse due to inefficient handling of revenues from the export of petroleum drilled in Nigeria’s south. Corruption is rampant and ingrained in the structures of social, political and economic organization. The government has been unable to guarantee functioning public services – security, water, health, education, or good roads are not provided in many parts of the country. As a consequence, frustrated Nigerians have resorted to developing and joining ―self-help‖ civic groups, some of which are hostile to the state (International Crisis Group, 2014). The 2015 presidential elections were the first elections during which an incumbent was replaced by a newcomer – president Goodluck Jonathan, running for his second term, lost votes to Muhammadu Buhari. The election was postponed due to the critical situation in the North, where Boko Haram’s violence was raging. Many voices emphasize that the insurgency played a major role in undermining Jonathan’s support (Siollun, 2015).

The rise of Boko Haram

Initially created as a religious movement in the early 2000s aiming to release Nigeria from the influence of Western culture, Boko Haram evolved into a violent insurgency seeking to establish an independent Islamic state. Its official Arabic name is Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad). Boko Haram, its Hausa moniker, which translates to English as ―Western education is forbidden,‖ has been ascribed to the group from 22

the outside. To understand the group’s hostility towards Western education, one must look at what Western education represents for some in the Nigerian context. Under the British colonial rule, Western-style education was only accessible to the privileged, which subsequently led to the formation of a club of Western-educated elite. In northern Nigeria, this group was particularly marked out against those who received traditional Quranic education. Since political and leadership circles in Nigeria constitute Western-educated officials, they are seen by some to use their education to exploit the mass of traditionally educated people. Therefore, Boko Haram is fighting against the products of Western education, which is perceived as having a corrupting effect on the country (Osumah, 2013; Mohammed, 2014).

The group was born out of a faction that broke away from a radical Islamist youth group whose members worshipped at the Alhaji Muhammadu Ndimi Mosque in the city of Maiduguri in 2002. The offshoot moved to a village near the border with Niger called Kanamma with the intention of setting up a separatist community running on strict Islamist principles. Muhammad Ali, its leader, promoted an anti-state ideology and a return to a life under Islamic law, away from the corrupt authorities (Walker, 2012). In December 2003, the group entered a conflict with the police after a community argument. The members were overpowered by the police and most of them, including Muhammad Ali, were killed. The few survivors, led by Mohammed Yusuf, returned to Maiduguri, where they managed to establish their own mosque. Over time, the charismatic Yusuf enlarged their establishment by a cabinet, its own religious police, and a large farm. The group grew steadily, attracting refugees and jobless Nigerian youths by offering shelter, food, and welfare handouts (Walker, 2012). The source of its funding in this period is not clear, although Yusuf reportedly allied with Ali Modu Sheriff, a politician and businessman from Maiduguri (Pérouse de Montclos, 2014). In July 2009, the group got into conflict with the police, which led the Bauchi government to crack down on the group. During the bloody purge, more than seven hundred members were arrested, and dozens executed without a trial. Mohammed Yusuf was killed in police custody. After the crackdown, the group went underground for a year, possibly relocating to northern Cameroon (Pham, 2012; Walker, 2012). In this period, the group is said to have acquired training from other Islamist organizations in Africa and the Middle East, particularly the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) (Sergie & Johnson, 2015). 23

In mid-2010, Boko Haram resurfaced with a violent campaign targeted at police and military checkpoints, churches, markets and government objects. Their methods were progressively more sophisticated – predominantly shooting attacks shifted to blasts with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) around the beginning of 2011 and the movement later started using vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs). Its assaults also expanded geographically beyond the areas of Borno and Yobe states. In August 2011, the rebels used a VBIED to attack the UN headquarters in Abuja (International Crisis Group, 2014). Roughly from 2012, the group has widened the scope of its targets by setting schools aflame and striking in press offices (Walker, 2012). In 2013, Boko Haram managed to gain control over large strips of Borno state. It turned to forcible conscription and recruitment of boys from criminal gangs and used kidnapping for its funding. It secured unprecedented international attention in April 2014 when it kidnapped 276 girls from a boarding school in the Chibok region. The mass abduction triggered a large campaign on social media that pressed the government to find and free the kidnapped girls (Maiangwa & Agbiboa, 2014). At the beginning of 2015, Boko Haram carried out a deadly raid in the town of Baga and surrounding villages, during which they killed hundreds of civilians (Mark, 2015). The escalating violence and Nigeria’s presidential elections, scheduled for February 2015, drove Jonathan’s government to press harder against the group, this time cooperating with Chadian and Cameroonian military, and bolstered by more than seven thousand African Union troops (The Guardian, 2015). It is too early to judge whether the counter-offensive has been successful or not, however one thing is certain: Boko Haram is an ―amoebic‖ group that has demonstrated a remarkable ability of re-organizing and remodelling itself to the transforming local circumstances (Mohammed, 2014). It stems from issues entrenched in Nigeria’s social, political and economic realities, so for the group to be appeased, military victory is not enough.

The group’s organization

Although with time more information about Boko Haram is likely to become available, much is still unknown about the group. Essentially, the exact number of its combatants is unclear. Amnesty International (2015) estimates the number of Boko Haram fighters to be around 15,000, while the press releases of US officials state the estimate of between 4,000 and 6,000 fighters (Blanchard, 2015). The group became

prominent under the leadership of Mohammed Yusuf, who was not an especially effective leader and had trouble keeping other members under control. In the post- Yusuf phase of Boko Haram’s existence, the group has been officially led by the violent Abubakar Shekau, though the organization has never had firm centralized control (International Crisis Group, 2014). Boko Haram has more of an ―umbrella-like structure,‖ with cohesive organization only at the topmost leadership levels (M. Smith, 2014). Different units may carry out assaults for their own motives and recruit combatants according to their needs. This is one of the reasons why it has been so challenging to estimate the actual number of Boko Haram’s followers. Furthermore, its fragmented structure impedes efforts for dialogue, as it is hard for the group to form a representative front that could legitimately negotiate with the government on behalf of the whole Boko Haram umbrella (M. Smith, 2014).

International Crisis Group’s report (2014) describes six current factions of the insurgency. The largest and most significant one is headed by Shekau. It is based in the North East and has reportedly been responsible for most attacks in the past two years. Shekau is said to be technically in control of a group of soldiers commanded by Mamman Nur, although the fighters are allegedly more loyal to Nur than to Shekau. Another offshoot is led by Aminu Teshen-Ilimi, who keeps a low profile. A fourth group is directed by Abdullahi Damasak, also known as Mohammed Marwan. The most sophisticated splinter group is Ansaru. Until 2012, it was headed by Khalid Barnawi, who considered Shekau untactful and frowned on the group’s indiscriminate violence. In 2011, Ansaru started to kidnap Western targets, which led the group to enter a deal with Boko Haram and a subsequent reconciliation. The groups agreed that ―Shekau, who had the men, would provide security cover, while Barnawi, who had the skills, would kidnap Westerners.‖ A certain portion of the ransom would be used to finance Boko Haram operations (International Crisis Group, 2014, p.27). The sixth faction is concentrated in the state of Bauchi. Its commander is the engineer Abubakar Shehu, also called Abu Sumayya. Shekau and the leaders of Ansaru decided to get rid of him because of their suspicion that he was an informer. He survived an attack on his Bauchi safe house by Ansaru men in early 2012 and retaliated by leaking information about Khalid Barnawi’s hideout to Nigerian security forces. Barnawi was then killed in a raid in August 2012 (International Crisis Group, 2014). This episode demonstrates that Boko Haram has 25

developed into a ―many-headed monster‖ which is now beyond the control of a single leader (M. Smith, 2014).

A longitudinal study of Boko Haram’s kidnappings

This section presents a descriptive overview of the evolution of Boko Haram’s kidnappings. Boko Haram appears to have shifted from selective to mass kidnappings over time while experiencing a period of overlap in which the group engaged in both selective and mass kidnappings. The longitudinal section is followed by an examination of the relevance of the different hypotheses in this case study. The purpose of this section is to offer an insight into how Boko Haram’s kidnappings developed. It covers the kidnappings reported in different pieces of literature, however, it is important to note that there may be many more kidnappings which have not been reported or have not appeared in the available sources. The reported abductions may be those Boko Haram wanted to go public, while there may be kidnappings that were intended to go unreported. Thus, the inferences I draw in the sections that follow apply to the kidnappings that we know about, but there may be others that may follow different dynamics.

May 2011 – July 2014: selective kidnappings The first selective kidnapping was organized by Ansaru’s Barnawi in May 2011. The group kidnapped two construction engineers, Briton Chris MacManus and Italian Franco Lamolinara, in northern Kebbi state (Aghedo, 2014). The kidnapping received little media attention, most likely on the request of the negotiators in Europe. After ten months in captivity, Nigerian security forces, supposedly aided by UK Special Forces, raided a hideout in Sokoto city in a rescue attempt, which revealed that the abductees had been killed before the operation. It also came to light that the insurgents had received a down payment of £1 million from the kidnapped men’s families (Walker, 2012). This incident was followed by a kidnapping of a French engineer working on a wind energy project from his compound in Katsina, after which Ansaru stated the French intervention in Mali and the country’s ban on wearing Muslim veils in schools as motives (International Crisis Group, 2014). In February 2013, Ansaru soldiers stormed Jama’are town in Bauchi and kidnapped seven expatriates from a Lebanese-owned civil engineering company working on the Kano-Maiduguri highway. This event ended in the execution of the kidnapped 26

workers in response to what they perceived as signs of a rescue mission. Within three days of the Bauchi kidnapping, Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped four children and three adult members of the French Moulin-Fournier family in northern Cameroon, where they were touring the Waza National Park. The Moulin-Fournier family was released by their captors after two months of being held hostage for a $3 million ransom and the release of sixteen Boko Haram members imprisoned in Cameroon (Reinert & Garçon, 2014; Zenn, 2013). After a nearly year-long break in small-scale selective kidnapping, Boko Haram abducted the wife of Cameroonian vice prime minister and the religious leader of the town of Kolofata in northern Cameroon, as well as some members of their families (Musa, 2014). They were released after being held hostage for three months together with ten Chinese hostages who had been abducted two months earlier. The Cameroonian government did not disclose any information regarding the negotiations that facilitated the release of the hostages. Cameroon officially does not pay ransom to kidnappers, yet there were speculations that the Chinese workers were swapped for a number of low-level Boko Haram fighters and that the sect demanded a ransom of $400,000 to set the vice prime minister’s wife free (Daily Trust, 2014).

There are also a number of unclaimed kidnappings of locals. The majority of targets were mid-level officials or their family members. They included a local government chairman, a lecturer at the University of Maiduguri, the manager of the Maiduguri Flour Mills, a police officer, a customs officer and his six relatives, a criminal investigator, the manager of the Borno Water Board, a member of Borno’s Elders’ Forum, the father of the Borno commissioner for women affairs, the brother of the shehu of Bama, the parents of a member of the Borno House of Parliament, and the mother of a member of the Borno House of Assembly. The unclaimed kidnappings took place between February 2013 and June 2013 and all followed an identical pattern, which led Nigerian intelligence officials to believe that they were carried out by Boko Haram (Zenn, 2013).

May 2013 – March 2015: mass kidnappings Assessing Boko Haram’s involvement in mass kidnapping is complicated because the crisis in northern Nigeria prevents effective monitoring of the violence on the ground. Although the scale of Boko Haram’s massive kidnappings has reached

levels that drew international attention to the conflict, there are only sketchy data available on the extent of Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping. Amnesty International (2015) estimates that 2,000 women have been abducted since the start of 2014. Hundreds could have been kidnapped in the previous years. The number of abducted men and boys is difficult to approximate. Boko Haram rebels use lethal violence more frequently with male targets, while females are predominantly targets of nonlethal violence (Amnesty International, 2015). Despite the fact that there have been several reports of incidents of mass abductions of boys and young men, the majority of reports on Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings inform about female targets (Ola, 2014; Waxman, 2015). The disproportion between male and female abductees indicates that Boko Haram’s kidnapping has an observable gender dimension.

Human Rights Watch (2014) cites a May 2013 abduction of twelve women from a police station in Bama, Borno state, as the first occasion when more than one woman was kidnapped in a single attack. This incident marked the beginning of a violent campaign against women and girls. It was followed by a release of 23 women by Nigerian military authorities, a number of them recognized as wives of Boko Haram senior members. In another incident three months later, some twenty women were abducted from a checkpoint on the Damaturu-Maiduguri highway. In December 2013, wives and children of soldiers (altogether eighteen people) were abducted during an attack on Nuhu Muhammed army barracks in Bama. In an attack on Konduga in February 2014, twenty female students of the Government Girls Science College were abducted along with five female street traders (Human Rights Watch, 2014).

The Chibok kidnapping The event that granted Boko Haram unprecedented levels of international attention (and sparked the author’s interest in mass kidnapping in armed conflict) is the mass kidnapping of 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok in April 2014. Due to escalating violence in some areas of northern Nigeria, the school had been closed, but had reopened to allow final-year students to sit exams. The attack happened overnight. The school was reportedly guarded by fifteen soldiers, who received an alert call by a local government official stating that about two hundred armed militants in twenty pickup trucks and more than thirty motorcycles were headed in

Chibok’s direction (Faul, 2014). After overpowering the guards, the rebels looted the school and set it ablaze. They then seized all the schoolgirls who had been gathered outside, Christians and Muslims alike, and drove them away in their trucks. 57 girls managed to escape by jumping off the trucks, or hanging on tree branches and jumping down after the vehicles had driven off (Human Rights Watch, 2014). The dawdling government response to the kidnapping, accompanied by chaotic publications of unverified information and repeatedly retracted statements from Nigeria’s military, incited a wave of frustration in Nigerian society that resulted in numerous protests and a global uproar via an online campaign on social media, where the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls was used (Adewunmi et al., 2014). Shekau contributed to the tension by releasing a video a few days after the abduction, in which he threatened to sell the girls as slaves. A week later a new video emerged, showing a group of about 130 girls holding Korans and praying. Shekau announced in the recording that the girls had been converted to Islam and offered to swap them for Boko Haram fighters held by the government (Blanchard, 2014). Over a year has passed since the kidnapping, but the missing girls have not been found and little is known of their whereabouts. Some accounts suggest that they are still alive and travel with the group, while others fear they have been killed and buried in mass graves as the country’s army and coalition forces moved in to recover the northern territories (BBC News, 2015; Winsor, 2015).

The ―success‖ of the Chibok abduction emboldened Boko Haram to intensify their kidnapping campaign in other locations. In early June 2014, sixty women were kidnapped from Kummabza, Borno state, and other twenty women from the Fulani ethnic group were carried off from a number of villages near Chibok (Human Rights Watch, 2014). Four months later, forty women were abducted in the town of Wagga and another twenty in Gwarta (D. Smith, 2014). The last report of a mass abduction is from March – the rebels abducted nearly 400 women and children from Damasak, a northern Nigerian town that had been freed by troops earlier (Penney, 2015).

Similarly to the Chibok girls, the whereabouts of other kidnapped victims remain unknown, impeding observers’ efforts to find out about and report on what happens to Boko Haram’s abductees. Information provided by escapees or released individuals indicates that the victims of mass kidnapping undergo a process of

religious indoctrination, are put to cooking and cleaning in the camps, forced to marry Boko Haram fighters, and subjected to widespread sexual abuse (Human Rights Watch, 2014; Oduah, 2015; Nossiter, 2015; Amnesty International, 2015).

In sum, the longitudinal study shows that Boko Haram’s mass and selective kidnappings follow different dynamics and fulfil different functions. While selective kidnapping has a discernible resource-seeking element, mass kidnappings are more complex, as they serve for forcible recruitment, concession-seeking, and demonstrative purposes. What accounted for the shift from selective to mass kidnapping? The next section will use the theoretical framework to analyse Boko Haram’s internal transformations as well as impulses from the outside that brought about the shift to mass kidnappings.

Explaining Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings

In line with the theoretical framework, the following section will examine the relevance of three explanatory variables that may elucidate Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping: the group’s access to information, leaders’ organizational control, and their drive to enact revenge on the state.

Information and indiscriminate targeting The information hypotheses predict that mass kidnapping would occur if the group did not have access to information that would allow it to specifically target selected individuals (H1), or if it sought to punish civilians on a collective level (H2). The first hypothesis does not hold in the Boko Haram case. The observable implication that would confirm its validity is that if the group did not have information to be able to select specific targets, it would not engage in selective attacks. Boko Haram, however, has been involved in numerous high-profile selective kidnappings of foreign targets. This demonstrates that the group does have the capacity of gaining information in order to be able to select profitable targets. Kidnapping of foreign targets requires a degree of surveillance on the part of the rebels so that they can abduct the targets without clashing with the police or security apparatus. Rebels also must have an available safe house where they can keep the hostages in confinement and need to be able to identify whom to negotiate with about the ransom payment. In short, even though it may be easy to identify the foreign target,

the multitude of processes accompanying the actual kidnapping indicates that Boko Haram is capable of obtaining all the information it needs to secure that the kidnapping is carried out and successfully completed by exchanging the hostages for ransom. Moreover, Boko Haram has established a relatively solid degree of control in some areas of north-eastern Nigeria. The locals they have targeted for selective kidnapping have been mid-level officials who do not have robust security, but at the same time can afford a modest ransom (Zenn, 2013), which implies that the selection of local targets is not a very complex process for Boko Haram. It is therefore clear that hypothesis H1 is not valid – mass kidnappings are not the result of Boko Haram’s inability to gain access to information to carry out selective kidnappings.

Hypothesis H2 predicting that mass kidnappings serve as a tool for collective punishment of guilt has more explanatory leverage. The observable implication of this hypothesis is that there has to be an identifiable source of ―guilt‖ of the targets of mass kidnapping. The sources of ―guilt‖ may be for instance ideological, religious, or may have to do with civilians’ collaboration with the state. In ideological terms, many of Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings have targeted female students of Western-style teaching institutions. Another observable source of perceived guilt is religion – in numerous raids, the rebels have abducted Christian women while letting Muslim women go (Human Rights Watch, 2014). In Boko Haram camps, female abductees are forced to convert to Islam and obliged to solidify their faith by studying the Koran (Oduah, 2015; Human Rights Watch, 2014; Amnesty International, 2015). Some kidnapping raids, such as the December 2013 kidnapping of eighteen relatives from Nuhu Muhammed army barracks in Bama were likely a punishment for collaborating with the state (Human Rights Watch, 2014).

However, Boko Haram has not been entirely consistent in its selection of groups for mass kidnapping. Some women were reportedly taken at random, regardless of their education, religion or alleged collaboration with state forces (Human Rights Watch, 2014). In March 2015, for instance, Boko Haram kidnapped more than 400 women and children from the Muslim population of the town of Damasak in northern Nigeria (Penney, 2015). In such instances, the guilt of the targets of mass kidnappings

cannot be identified. Thus, the collective guilt hypothesis is applicable, but has certain limitations in explaining Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping.

Organizational control and opportunism The organizational control and opportunism variable contains a pair of contradictory hypotheses. Mass kidnappings may happen when group leaders have low organizational control over the actions of different factions, implying that mass kidnapping and other types of violence not approved by the group leader may occur because factions are likely to avoid punishment (H3). Conversely, it predicts mass kidnapping when the organizational control of group leaders over factions is high and it is a tactic sanctioned by the group leader (H4). In addition, the variable points to sexual opportunism: if commanders seek to facilitate opportunities for sexual gratification and marriage to their soldiers, mass kidnapping of female targets is likely to occur (H5). The validity of H3 and H4 can be determined by observing whether the group did or did not claim responsibility for the mass kidnappings – in case mass kidnapping was a product of squabbles between group and factional leadership, the kidnappings would go unclaimed by the group. In contrast, if mass kidnappings were a group tactic organized by the group leader, the rebel movement would claim responsibility for them. In Boko Haram’s case, hypothesis H4 has some leverage: mass kidnappings occurred when Shekau reconciled with the most sophisticated group, Ansaru, enforced control over it and directed its experience with kidnapping towards mass abductions.

Ansaru claimed responsibility for the earlier selective kidnappings – such as the May 2011 kidnapping of Chris MacManus and Franco Lamolinara, the December 2012 abduction of a French engineer in Katsina or the February 2013 kidnapping of seven Lebanese construction workers (Mohammed, 2014; Reinert & Garçon, 2014; International Crisis Group, 2014). Boko Haram did not make any claims regarding these kidnappings, which suggests that the selective kidnappings were an activity unauthorized by Shekau. At this point in time, Shekau indeed had low control over the offshoot – Ansaru split from Boko Haram due to an alleged disagreement over the sharing of funds from external sponsors (International Crisis Group, 2014). Nonetheless, the events claimed by Ansaru were selective, not mass kidnappings.

The first kidnapping claimed by Boko Haram was the seizure of the Moulin-Fournier family in February 2013 (Reinert & Garçon, 2014). From May 2013 onwards, Shekau has claimed responsibility for the mass abductions of women and girls through statements in video releases (Human Rights Watch, 2014). Boko Haram’s involvement in these kidnappings was likely the result of Ansaru’s reintegration into Boko Haram, which started in late 2012. Multiple pieces of evidence support this notion: first, Ansaru has transferred its know-how to Boko Haram, as Boko Haram established a ―special kidnapping squad‖ around the beginning of 2013 that aims at kidnapping government officials, foreigners and wealthy locals. Prior to the formation of the squad, Boko Haram did not carry out any kidnappings. Second, Boko Haram’s and Ansaru’s areas of operations have been concurring since late 2012 (Zenn, 2013). Third, Shekau appointed new leaders to replace Ansaru’s commanders in late 2012. Through the reshuffle he achieved eliminating Ansaru as a competitor and bolstered his control over the faction (Zenn, 2014). With more control over the splinter group, Shekau could use Ansaru’s experience with selective kidnapping to carry out large-scale kidnapping raids.

Nevertheless, hypothesis H4 is only applicable to a certain degree. In the Boko Haram case, its validity is evidenced by the reinsertion of Ansaru into Boko Haram, however, there is a lack of information on the relations between Shekau and other Boko Haram’s factions. Ansaru was particularly relevant with reference to kidnapping, but it is not possible to establish whether the hypothesis applies to other factions within the Boko Haram grouping.

If mass kidnapping was an activity facilitating sexual gratification of combatants, as postulated by hypothesis H5, we could expect to see a significantly higher proportion of female abductees than male ones – which is indeed the case of Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping. Abducted women have reportedly been used as sex slaves and have been forcibly married off to Boko Haram fighters (Oduah, 2015; Nossiter, 2015). In various series of kidnapping raids, insurgents were reportedly going door- to-door, searching for young women and girls. In some instances of such kidnappings, rebels left a sum of money and presents, such as kola nuts, in the homes where they carried off a woman, possibly as a bride price (D. Smith, 2014). Testimonies from abducted individuals who escaped or were released reveal that the

group has been systematically raping abducted females in what appears as a strategy to create a new generation of Islamist militants in Nigeria (Amnesty International, 2015; Human Rights Watch, 2014). A New York Times reporter has commented that Boko Haram’s forced ―marriages‖ denote a euphemism for a campaign of organized sexual violence (Nossiter, 2015). The sexual opportunism hypothesis therefore has considerable explanatory leverage in Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping. It also helps to explain why women have been the targets of Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping raids.

Revenge and indirect retaliation The revenge variable implies that mass kidnapping is employed as a revenge tool by Boko Haram. The predictions made for the revenge argument suggest that mass kidnapping occurs when rebels seek to enact revenge on the state (H6), and that the probability that rebels will carry out revenge – and use mass kidnapping as a means to enact it – increases when the state deliberately targets actors uninvolved in the conflict, who are related to the rebels (H7). Both of these predictions capture neatly the dynamics of the Nigerian conflict. For Nigeria’s federal police, it is a standard practice to arrest family members of those they want in order to compel them into turning themselves over to authorities (Gambrell & Alamba, 2012). Since relatives of many high-ranking Boko Haram members were deliberately targeted by the state despite the absence of any evidence suggesting that they took part in Boko Haram’s activities, the rebels were poised to avenge the imprisoned relatives. Mass kidnapping represents a feasible way of enacting revenge on the state: it is difficult to punish the state directly, so insurgents need to use an ostentatious violent act involving a high number of civilians, which can publicly expose the government’s incapacities, humiliate it, and thereby avenge a grievance caused by state security forces.

A series of observable implications determine the validity of the two hypotheses. The first observable implication of the revenge hypothesis looks at the temporal factor of detentions being followed by mass kidnappings. The authorities began arresting the relatives of Boko Haram’s members in December 2011. Between 2011 and 2012, more than a hundred Boko Haram family members, among them wives and children of Boko Haram high-ranking combatants, were arrested. None of the arrests were

backed with evidence indicating that the family members had a part in Boko Haram’s crimes (Zenn & Pearson, 2014). The first instance of a kidnapping aimed at the release of females related to Boko Haram members was the kidnapping of the Moulin-Fournier family in February 2013. Shortly after the abduction, Boko Haram posted a video in which the group requested the release of all women arrested during government raids on insurgents’ hideouts. This was arguably a crucial point when the group vocally protested the deliberate targeting of its member’s relatives and started planning a mass kidnapping to avenge grudges against the state. Boko Haram’s campaign of mass kidnappings of women started in May 2013. The first mass kidnapping of females was followed by a release of 23 women by Nigerian military authorities, some of whom were recognized as the wives of Boko Haram commanders (Human Rights Watch, 2014). The revenge rationale explains why the group ―switched‖ from selective to mass kidnappings. The Moulin-Fournier incident showed that small-scale kidnapping was not a big enough event to indeed pressure the Nigerian government to satisfy Boko Haram’s demands. The group therefore commenced to kidnap en masse to exert bigger pressure on the state; to avenge its unjustified targeting of its member’s relatives.

The second observable implication puts that rebels should publicly claim that kidnappings are a response. Following the May 2013 abduction, Shekau released a video statement where he made explicit that the kidnapping of women was a form of payback. The film depicts women and children apparently held hostage, while Shekau states: ―we kidnapped some women and children, including teenage girls. In a single house in Damaturu, eight of our women and fourteen children were arrested‖ (Human Rights Watch, 2014; Vanguard, 2013). He also threatens to make the female hostages his servants unless a set of conditions, which includes the release of incarcerated Boko Haram members and their wives, are met. This established a ―tit-for-tat cycle of detentions and kidnappings‖ (Pearson & Zenn, 2014), and set off a revenge game between the rebels and the government.

The third observable implication is that if mass kidnapping fulfils the function of revenge for a personal-level grievance, then the factions whose leaders’ families were targeted are more likely to engage in mass kidnapping than the factions whose leaders’ relatives were not targeted. Shekau’s own wives were among the arrested,

together with the wife and children of the commander for Kano, Suleiman Muhammed, and the pregnant wife of the commander for Sokoto, Kabiru Sokoto, who gave birth to her child in prison (Barkindo et al., 2013). Muhammed was killed in a raid in September 2012, while Sokoto was imprisoned in November 2012, so this implication is verifiable by the decisions Abubakar Shekau made after the detentions took place (International Crisis Group, 2014). The incarcerations have been a personal blow to Shekau’s dignity and a significant source of grievance: throughout 2012, Shekau repeatedly referred to the arrests in video messages. In one of the films, Shekau stated: ―since you are now holding our women, just wait and see what will happen to your own women... to your own wives according to Sharia law‖ (Zenn & Pearson, 2014). His determination to punish the state for targeting his wives through mass kidnappings of females gives plausibility to the revenge mechanism.

In sum, both of the revenge predictions (H6, H7) are true, together with the sexual opportunism hypothesis (H5). Hypothesis H4 is valid, as mass kidnapping occurred after Shekau consolidated his control over an important faction and directed it towards kidnapping, but its relevance is limited due to a lack of evidence of what happened with other Boko Haram factions. The collective guilt prediction (H2) holds with some mass kidnappings, but is refuted by incidents when Boko Haram’s targets were selected at random. Mass kidnapping was not the result of the inability to access information to select targets (H1) and did not occur when the group leader had low levels of control over different factions (H3).

Since the revenge variable appears to accurately illustrate the causal pathway for Boko Haram’s mass kidnapping, it forms the backbone of my argument. I argue that mass kidnappings are often carried out by rebels to avenge past state action against rebels or their family members. Thanks to the theatricality of mass kidnapping and the large-scale consequences it has on whole societies, it is a useful resource to punish the government and the authorities. I do not attempt to claim that the revenge mechanism is the only – or the most valid – explanation of all mass kidnappings. I seek to underscore that it has crucial explanatory leverage in the case of Boko Haram and may be relevant in other cases as well. It offers an alternative angle, which highlights how state action, perpetrated in an environment of impunity, fuels conflict. Importantly, Boko Haram has a clear inclination towards targeting females in

its mass abductions. An explanation for it could be that, based on the revenge logic, the targets of rebels’ mass kidnappings directly reflect who the state has targeted. Nigerian authorities detained women and children of Boko Haram members, so the rebels retaliated by seizing women and girls in its kidnapping raids. However, the revenge variable does not explain why Boko Haram subjected the abductees to such widespread sexual abuse. For this reason, the revenge argument needs to be complemented by the sexual opportunism hypothesis. Boko Haram rebels are using mass abductions to gain access to women, whom they subject to organized sexual violence. Mass kidnappings in the Nigerian case are therefore driven by a combination of revenge and sexual opportunism.

Scope conditions The revenge argument is likely to be applicable under a couple of scope conditions. First, the argument is only pertinent in settings where state authorities are willing to target family members of insurgents in order to gain leverage on them, though it would also predict mass abduction where rival rebel groups target one another’s family and kin in multiparty civil wars. This condition is not endemic to all regimes where violence is arbitrarily directed at civilians, as will be shown in the comparative section of the paper. Second, the validity of my argument is contingent on the capacity of the state on which rebels want to enact revenge. Weak states are more prone to experience mass kidnappings as a form of revenge, because rebels need to be able to exert a high degree of control over an area where they confine the abducted individuals. Repeated mass kidnappings are only possible in settings where the state does not have firm control and presence. Third, the plausibility of the argument is conditioned by the organizational capacity of rebel groups. This implies that a rebel organization needs to have sufficient resources and know-how to be capable of carrying out a mass kidnapping. Without this scope condition, the argument would predict a much higher frequency of mass kidnappings, as wars generate grievances in many individuals, who could subsequently desire to punish the opposing side for its past violence. To see whether the argument has wider applicability, the thesis will explore kidnappings in two other conflicts in the following section.

4 Comparative evidence

In order to assess my argument more broadly, it is necessary to examine if it applies in conflicts beyond the Nigerian one. This section offers an insight into selective and mass kidnappings carried out by insurgent movements in Chechnya and the Philippines. The extension section is not intended to test all of the hypotheses, but to focus particularly on the relevance of the revenge argument in other armed conflicts.

The Chechen insurgency

In the first case of the comparative analysis, I will compare the dynamics of the surge of selective kidnappings during the intermezzo between the First and the Second Chechen war with the mass hostage-takings carried out by the Riyad-us Saliheen rebel group. After the formal end of the first Chechen war in August 1996, a wave of kidnappings hit the Caucasus region. The Russian Ministry of the Interior monitored 1,843 cases of kidnapped individuals. Kidnapping became the most profitable business in Chechnya, generating estimated $200 million – more than the sale of oil or contributions from Russia’s federal budget (Tishkov, 2004). The expansion of this flourishing ―industry‖ earned the then Chechen system the name ―kidnapocracy,‖ operated by ―commercial insurgents‖ (Szászdi, 2008; Schaefer, 2010).

While the majority of kidnappings seemed to be pure money-making, the timing of some kidnapping events hinted at possible political motives as well. For instance, Chechen guerrillas abducted two British volunteers at a home for troubled children only a day after an oil agreement between Azerbaijan and British Petroleum (BP), proposing to ship Caspian oil through Chechnya, was signed. The kidnapping was therefore interpreted as an intention to ruin the BP-Azerbaijan deal and prevent Chechnya from integrating into the international oil market (Evangelista, 2004). Furthermore, some kidnappings included important political targets, such as president Yeltsin’s envoy, Valentin Vlasov, who was released for a ransom of $7 million, or Russia’s Interior Ministry’s general Gennady Shpigun (Tishkov, 2004). The hostage trade grew out of the treatment of prisoners and was favoured by the absence of a legal structure to guide the procedures for exchanging prisoners. The legal vacuum created space for an informal market of prisoner exchange, which evolved into a machinery of kidnapping (Akhmadov & Lanskoy, 2010). The

kidnappings were carried out by a multitude of smaller criminal groups, although there was an impression that they were carried out mostly by the ―barons‖ of the hostage trade – well-known commanders from the First Chechen war who established their names in the kidnapping business. These organizers appeared ubiquitous thanks to being put formally in charge of abductions committed far away from Chechnya. By ―lending their trademark,‖ they allowed lesser known groups to carry out kidnappings in the commanders’ name, which permitted them to demand a larger ransom and in return cede a percentage of the ransom to the ―trademark commander.‖ This produced clashes between groups over a trademark, feeding cycles of violence that facilitated the growth of the kidnapping industry (Tishkov, 2004). Interestingly, none of the kidnappings during the interwar period was a mass kidnapping.

The Chechen ―versions‖ of mass kidnappings were seizures of public spaces and taking civilians hostage in the anticipation that the insurgents and hostages might be killed in the process. There were three mass hostage takings perpetrated by the Chechen rebels: the Budyonnovsk hospital siege in 1995, the seizure of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow in 2002, and the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004. The Riyad-us Saliheen group, led then by Shamil Basayev, claimed responsibility for all of these events. Among the reasons for the hostage takings cited by the rebels was the deliberate targeting of rebels’ families by Russian forces. Russian squads targeted family members of all significant Chechen leaders, including Basayev, Dudayev, Umarov, Maskhadov, and others (Hughes, 2013). A senior official of the Russian Ministry of Justice made plain to Anna Politkovskaya that targeting family members has been a customary military practice: ―brother must answer for brother and if someone in the family has been fighting for Basayev, then all of his relatives are accomplices and deserve extermination‖ (Politkovskaya, 2009, p.73).

The hostage crises in Budyonnovsk and Beslan show features of the revenge rationale. The Budyonnovsk hostage-taking, led by Basayev himself, was launched on June 14, 1995, just weeks after a Russian bomb hit Basayev’s home in Vedeno and killed several members of his family, including his wife and children. The elimination of his clan has likely driven him to use violence against civilians, as Budyonnovsk was the first Chechen operation that deliberately targeted Russian

civilians (Dolnik & Fitzgerald, 2008). The Beslan school seizure was formally organized by Basayev, though he did not take part in the actual operation. The hostage-takers who carried out the seizure were most likely aware that their chances of surviving it were slim (Tuathail, 2009). Their motives for participation, nonetheless, included an important element: many of them were driven by the desire to avenge relatives who died at the hands of Russian military in the Caucasus. Rustam Atayev’s 12-year-old brother, for instance, was killed by the federal army (S. Smith, 2005), the husband of another hostage-taker, Khaula Nazirova, was reportedly tortured to death by Russian forces, while her children died when a Russian bomb hit a Chechen school. Basayev referred precisely to the targeting of children by Russian forces as a justification for the decision to seize a school and use violence against Ossetian children (Tuathail, 2009). Given that Basayev was far from alone in seeing his family targeted by the Russian forces, the argument would suggest a higher number of mass kidnapping acts in the Chechen conflict. I argue that only Riyad-us Saliheen had sufficient organizational capacity to carry out mass hostage-takings. As one of the scope conditions indicates, the argument is only relevant when rebel groups are organizationally capable of realizing a mass kidnapping.

In sum, it is evident that as in Nigeria, selective and mass kidnapping events in Chechnya fulfilled different goals. While selective kidnappings were predominantly money-making acts, mass hostage-takings aimed at publicizing the insurgents’ grievance. With Russian forces targeting family members of leading Chechen rebels, the conflict entered a personal dimension. This gave the rebels incentive to retaliate against the state through a noticeable attack where the lives of a significant number of citizens were threatened. The rebels’ aim was to attract a great amount of public attention and to embarrass the state by demonstrating its failure to protect civilians. Mass kidnapping – or mass hostage-taking in the case of Basayev’s rebel group – thus emerged as a suitable method to accomplish those goals.

The Philippine insurgency: Abu Sayyaf

The second case is Abu Sayyaf, a small separatist organization founded in 1991 whose proclaimed political goal is to establish an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippine islands of Mindanao. Abu Sayyaf has widely used kidnapping- for-ransom as a funding technique. Throughout its existence, there have been 40

periods in which kidnappings have completely crowded out other types of violence, leading scholars to question whether the group’s nature is insurgent, or rather criminal (O’Brien, 2012; Filler, 2002). Similarly to Boko Haram, the group’s organizational structure is loose and decentralized. The movement has a multitude of self-proclaimed leaders commanding smaller units (Santos & Santos, 2010), who struggle to cope with a considerable degree of organizational dysfunction among the groups (Ugarte & Turner, 2011). From 1991 through August 2011, Abu Sayyaf carried out 137 documentable kidnappings, and many more that went unreported, as only 10 per cent of kidnappings are estimated to be reported in the Philippines. The criminal nature of its kidnapping is supported by the fact that the ASG has been kidnapping mainly Filipino businessmen, and is believed to have raised over $35 million from kidnapping activities (O’Brien, 2012).

However, there are also political and ideological elements in Abu Sayyaf’s kidnappings: Christian clergy members and foreign missionaries, along with local businesspeople and journalists, have been among its primary abduction targets. Furthermore, kidnappings may have served as a channel for receiving support from political allies. For instance, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya mediated the release of one set of hostages abducted from a resort in Malaysia in 2000, paying the group $1 million for the release of each of the six hostages (BBC News, 2000).

Prominent mass kidnappings carried out by the ASG include the abduction of nearly sixty schoolchildren and teachers in Sumisip in March 2000, the seizure of ten Western journalists in June 2000, the kidnapping of 21 people – ten tourists and eleven staff members – from the Sipadan resort in Malaysia that same year, the abduction of twenty tourists, including the American missionary couple Martin and Gracia Burnham, from the Dos Palmas resort in Malaysia in May 2001, and a kidnapping of 32 settlers from a predominantly Christian village of Balobo in August 2001, in which eleven hostages were executed (Gerdes et al., 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2007). The problem of underreporting suggests that this is only a fragment of the total amount of mass kidnappings carried out by Abu Sayyaf, particularly those where locals are the victims. In the Sipadan and Dos Palmas kidnappings, ransom money played an important part of the process: in both cases most of the hostages were released after paying ransom or managed to escape, even though the Dos

Palmas abduction was followed by a large-scale military rescue operation, for which a number of American soldiers were deployed to provide knowledge and support to Filipino troops (La Vina & Balane, 2009; Gomez, 2007). Similarly, the ten Western journalists kidnapped in June 2000 were released only ten hours after their capture for a ransom of $25,000 (Ressa, 2004).

The Sumisip and Balobo kidnappings show a discernible element of terrorizing the population and targeting Christians as part of an ideological agenda (Gomez, 2001). Shortly after the Sumisip kidnapping, Abu Sayyaf made a demand to the United States – in exchange for the hostages, it required the release of three terrorists held in US prisons. The demand was ignored by the US as well as the Philippines. Most hostages (one as young as three years old) were held captive for nearly a year. Some were released following negotiations with families, while some were released on the basis of random decisions, such as that they were ―too young‖ (Ressa, 2004, p.110). In Balobo, the kidnapping was part of a terror attack, as the rebels beheaded eleven of the captives. Both men and women were taken, so the kidnappings did not have a gender dimension, though some female hostages were raped by the ASG (Ressa, 2004). Nevertheless, in contrast to Boko Haram, there has been no major shift from selective to mass kidnapping; although mass kidnappings peaked in 2000 and 2001, the ASG has been involved in small-scale kidnappings both before and after the period. The mass abductions that have been carried out for money-making purposes do not differ in their function from ASG’s small-scale selective kidnappings, while the other two, aimed at terrorizing the population, can be understood as a diversification of the group’s terror methods.

Why have ASG members not used mass kidnapping as a revenge tool? I argue that it is because the family members of Abu Sayyaf leaders have not been targeted by state forces. As Boko Haram in Nigeria, Abu Sayyaf operates in an environment with high levels of state violence and impunity. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) have been reported to use arbitrary violence, such as torture and sexual violence against civilians as part of its offensive against insurgents in the southern islands of the country. Arrests without charges and extrajudicial killings are relatively frequent in the area, yet state security employees are rarely held accountable for their actions (Boumghar et al., 2008). However, contrarily to Boko Haram, one scope

condition is different in the case of Abu Sayyaf: although the AFP uses its arbitrary violence against civilians, it has not specifically targeted family members of ASG’s leaders. The condition of the state willing to punish individuals for the crimes of their relatives is missing in the Philippines, in contrast to the Nigerian and Chechen settings. Thus, the ASG lacks the personal motive to punish the state, and does not need to use mass kidnappings as vengeful leverage against the government.

Nevertheless, this scope condition is present on the local level in the Philippine conflict. Applied to the interactions between rival rebel groups or rebel and paramilitary organizations, the scope condition predicts mass kidnappings as a form of revenge in situations where one of the sides targets family members uninvolved in the conflict. Abu Sayyaf operates in closely connected communities – locals know each other and know who supports or is a member of Abu Sayyaf. Abdul Midjal, a member of one of those communities in Basilan, formed a Muslim vigilante group after his daughter had been kidnapped from her elementary school together with a number of other schoolchildren. Too poor to pay ransom, but refusing to wait for the government to take action, Midjal and his men abducted ten relatives of Abu Sayyaf leader Abdurajak Janjalani, responsible for the kidnapping (Ressa, 2004; Tarroza et al., 2000). Hence, the revenge theory is relevant in the Philippine conflict: as a response to violence against a family member, the vigilante group founder organized a mass kidnapping of the relatives of the rebel leader. Given that this is a piece of evidence from the local level, the roles changed (the violent side that provided incentive for revenge was rebels, not state), however the incident follows the pattern described by the revenge theory. It is worth noting, though, that this is only one episode from the Abu Sayyaf insurgency – the revenge argument is present, but limited to this particular incident in its wider applicability.

In sum, this section broadened the scope of my analysis with two additional cases of the Chechen insurgency and the Abu Sayyaf insurgency. It found that, similarly to the case of Boko Haram, the members of the Chechen Riyad-us Saliheen were motivated to punish the state forces for detaining or killing their relatives. Abu Sayyaf rebels did not have this incentive, yet the revenge mechanism was observable in a local-level episode in which a local vigilante group carried out a mass kidnapping of the relatives of a rebel leader in order to avenge the kidnapping of the vigilante

leader’s daughter. The revenge variable therefore does find relevance in other cases, but it is not generalizable to all mass kidnappings.

5 Conclusion

In conclusion, why do rebel groups engage in mass kidnapping of civilians? To explain the logic of mass kidnapping in armed conflict, the thesis made use of a theoretical framework composed of three variables: access to information, organizational control and opportunism, and revenge. The last factor resulted as the most prominent one in the case study. I have argued that rebels carry out mass kidnapping in order to enact revenge on the state and punish it for its past violence against rebels and/or their family members. Mass kidnapping is a highly visible act that humiliates the state in a number of ways and is therefore a desirable punishment instrument for insurgents; it is a tactic in the asymmetric warfare of the weak against the strong. In the Boko Haram case, mass kidnapping served as a payback for the government’s deliberate targeting of the wives of senior Boko Haram combatants. However, the revenge logic could not explain the widespread sexual abuse of abductees, which is why it had to be complemented by the sexual opportunism variable. Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings targeted predominantly females not only because the rebels adopted an ―eye for an eye‖ approach and their own targets reflected the targets of the state authorities, but also because commanders sought to facilitate opportunities for sexual gratification to combatants.

It is worth noting that the revenge argument cannot explain the occurrence of mass kidnapping in general. Rather, it is one of the many theories that may altogether elucidate a very complex process of mass kidnapping. Nonetheless, the argument does find support in other conflicts. In Chechnya, the revenge theory illustrates the mechanism leading to mass hostage-takings perpetrated by Basayev’s Riyad-us Saliheen rebel group. In the Philippines, it explains local-level dynamics of a conflict between rebels and paramilitaries, but not the processes between the rebels and the state because the relatives of Abu Sayyaf’s fighters have not been deliberately targeted by the Philippine state forces.

The study has several limitations. First, there is the issue of reporting. Kidnappings frequently happen in obscure circumstances. Even in the cases of ostentatious mass 44

kidnappings that are intended to draw publicity to the rebel movement, the full picture explaining all the related dynamics may never come to light. There are also considerable gaps in reporting on local and foreign victims of kidnapping. The inferences I have made are based on the observations of the kidnappings that are known, but there may be many cases which go unreported and therefore cannot be part of any research. Second, even testimonies from victims are not a reliable source of information: the trauma related to kidnapping and different forms of violence that accompany it may leave an imprint on the abductees, who may not be willing to reveal all details and whose memories may be distorted. The final limitation is that the central argument is not generalizable to all mass kidnappings. Although the thesis has shown that it does find relevance in other cases besides Boko Haram, it is evident that the argument does not apply to all mass kidnappings. Still, if it did, a more extensive study would be required to examine the generalizability of the argument.

Research on mass and selective kidnapping greatly contributes to one of the trends in broader political science debates that focus on nonlethal violence in armed conflict. Studying different forms of violence beyond killing is a constructive endeavour as it helps students of armed conflict to better capture the actual extent of the impacts of armed conflict on civilians. Mass kidnapping can have a negative imprint into many aspects of life and the consequences of abduction reach far beyond those directly affected by it. The thesis has shown that mass kidnapping is a widespread wartime tactic and has highlighted the importance of the study of nonlethal violence against civilians. Given that there is still much unknown about the dynamics of mass kidnapping in armed conflict, it emerges as a promising area for future research, for which I propose several avenues. First, debates on civilian victimization would benefit from a quantitative analysis of mass kidnapping in armed conflict that would map out the trends related to this phenomenon and elucidate whether mass kidnappings are aligned with particular factors, such as ideology, geopolitical circumstances, or access to material resources. Second, the thesis has focused on the insurgent side of the matter. This research could be complemented by a study of mass abductions carried out by state actors and paramilitary groups. Third, the thesis encourages the broadening of civil wars research by including

different forms of nonlethal violence. Future research could aim to elucidate the rationales behind non-lethal violent strategies such as mutilation, maiming, or torture.

The study points to a number of implications. Regarding theory, the paper contributes to the debates on the dynamics of violent interactions between opposing sides in a conflict. In these, civilian victimization can play a crucial part. Theories of civilian abuse need to reflect the fact that violence against civilians cannot be isolated from the processes that connect the state and the rebels. In terms of policy, my finding that rebels are encouraged to kidnap en masse by the desire to avenge family members implies that much of the violence we see in armed conflict occurs due to a lack of accountability of violent actors for the crimes they perpetrate during wartime. The thesis therefore emphasizes the importance of the work of organizations that seek to bring war criminals from both sides of a conflict to justice. Prospects of being held accountable can work as an important deterrent for rebels and might help reduce the risk of mass kidnapping.

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Appendix I Data collection procedure for the large-N analysis of kidnapping in armed conflict

The aim of the data analysis is to find the proportion of conflicts during which kidnappings were carried out by one or both belligerents, i.e. state as well as non- state actors directly involved in the dispute. The conflict data used in this analysis are from the PRIO/UCDP Armed conflict dataset, which includes armed conflicts in the period from 1945 to 2013. To acquire data on armed conflict from 1989, I have extracted the conflicts that were either ongoing in 1989, or started after 1989. For each of the conflict I have searched for data using Google Search. Given the relatively extensive time periods of most conflicts in the dataset and taking into consideration the obscurity with which kidnappings are often perpetrated, Google Search results as the most suitable and time-efficient platform for this coding exercise (as opposed to e.g. Lexis-Nexis article search). The search includes the name of the conflict, the name of the insurgent group and the keyword ―kidnapping‖ or ―abduction‖ or ―hostage.‖ From the results, I select newspaper articles, NGO reports, or websites specifically dedicated to a particular conflict that provide the overview of violent events related to the conflict. When required, I add the name of an international news service (e.g. ―BBC‖). Alternatively, I add the name of a local newspaper publishing articles in English (e.g. ―This Day‖). Following the definition of mass kidnapping outlined in this paper, I code the seizure of ten or more persons as mass kidnapping. In the majority of cases, there are multiple reports of kidnapping per conflict, which serve as verification for coding the occurrence of kidnapping as positive. Cases where there are sufficient reports of one type of kidnapping, but no reports of the other type, are labelled as positive for the type of kidnapping that did occur and negative for the type of kidnapping that did not figure in the reports. In 13 conflicts, there are insufficient data to establish whether either type of kidnapping took place.