How do foreign companies and NGOs safeguard their employees from kidnapping in countries where abductions are common and expatriate workers are attractive targets?
Many firms and NGOs operate in areas where state law enforcement is non-existent, weak, or corrupt. What are the best ways to provide security when state forces have limited power to protect?
Especially for targets like:
The answer is that usually there are local power-brokers who could provide protection. Examples are traditional chieftains, councils of elders, Islamist militias, warlords, rebel movements, terrorists, or mafias.
Anyone wishing to travel or operate in their territory will find it counterproductive, or prohibitively expensive, to challenge their power. If you know who poses the kidnapping risk, you are better off paying them not to kidnap your staff or their families in the first place.
Similarly, for informal protectors it is better to attract business into their territory and thereby maximise their tax base, rather than putting off all risk-averse people and companies and squeezing a ransom out of the occasional adventurer.
We know that in many countries locals unquestioningly pay the pizzo, tithe, la vacuna (the vaccine), lala salama (sleep peacefully) or whatever they call the local form of protection payment.
But how can a foreign firm, news corporation or aid organisation negotiate a protection contract with an armed group – especially one that may be in conflict with the host government?
What would be the damage in terms of a company’s reputation should such a deal come to light? Moreover, who will hold the protector accountable if they take your money and then kidnap your staff anyway?
We need what institutional economists call a “self-enforcing contract”. Here it is in the interest of both parties to keep their promises without third party enforcement.
This generally requires long time horizons. That way the protectors’ expected future income from protecting their customers is greater than the (one-off) pay-off from kidnapping.
You can see this working reasonably well for a long-term mining operation or oil well. The main issue is to ensure that rebels or other armed groups have clear incentives to provide effective protection. And that’s without appearing to be the direct beneficiaries of the arrangement.
I provide many examples of successful protection arrangements in my book. In some cases, security guards and other personnel are hired from and maintenance contracts allocated to companies owned by local power-brokers.
Other companies respond to security threats by providing local public services that raise the standing of local power-brokers in the community.
Many “Corporate Social Responsibility” programmes look like they were specifically designed to create a steady stream of income conditional on the continued co-operation of local elites.
Joint ventures are another way of incentivising local co-owners to maximise the profitability of local operations rather than undermine it. If these arrangements are well designed and closely monitored, they create strong incentives for the local suppliers of protection to stick to their side of the bargain.
But what stops the protectors from renegotiating the price and extorting most of the company’s profits? An interesting answer is that the companies’ bargaining position is vastly improved through kidnap and extortion insurance.
Lloyd’s of London dominates the market for this type of insurance. Around 20 syndicates compete for business in this special risk class.
When a protector turns rogue and starts kidnapping or extorting one customer, insurers co-operate. Their associated security consultants can raise security alerts to pull out all other insured companies from the protector’s territory, too.
If Lloyd’s comes to the view that commercial activity in a certain area is no longer “insurable”, then a company cannot fulfil its duty of care towards its employees.
It’s time to evacuate expatriate staff. This will be efficiently arranged through the security consultancy. The credible threat of co-ordinated punishment mostly keeps the protectors compliant. And if not, they usually come to their senses fairly swiftly as their tax base collapses.
Market concentration and the outstanding information exchange within the tight-knit group of kidnapping specialists also facilitates the protection of one-off business trips and short-term projects.
Security consultancies associated with kidnapping insurers create the necessary time horizons for self-enforcing contracts through facilitating repeat business – but with different customers over time.
Unless you are looking for an implicit protection contract, most of the security advice looks innocuous.
By directing a steady stream of customers to reliable protectors (and having a credible threat of redirecting everyone in case of a breach of contract) the incentive is to protect everyone.
Kidnapping insurance with its stringent “best practice” guidelines and security advice thus facilitates surprisingly safe foreign direct investment, trade, reporting, research, and aid delivery in many unpromising security contexts.
Anja Shortland is the author of “Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business”
Vision of Humanity originally published this article in September 2019.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Vision of Humanity.
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