Nonlethal violence in armed conflict : the logic of mass kidnapping

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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

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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.

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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

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5 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

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6 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).

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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

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%

Selective kidnapping Mass kidnapping Kidnapping No kidnapping Unknown

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8 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

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9 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

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10 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

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11 (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

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12 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

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13 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

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14 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

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15 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

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16 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:

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17 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.

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18 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

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19 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

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20 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

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hostage-21 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.

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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

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23 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).

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24 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

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25 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

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26 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

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27 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

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28 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

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29 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

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30 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,

Nonlethal violence in armed conflict : the logic of mass kidnapping