Abstract
Interactions between long-term hostages and hostage takers remain undertheorized in criminology, and the present study attempts to fill this gap by utilizing testimonials from long-term hostages held aboard ships. We argue that seafarer hostages’ testimonials depict hijacked vessels as carceral sites that reflect and reproduce the global economic inequalities and racialized patterns of violence undergirding the broader geopolitics of piracy. Utilizing a threefold theoretical framework that unites and builds upon narrative inquiry, narrative criminology and victimology, and thanatopolitics, our analytical energies focus on the centrality of ontologies of death in hostages’ accounts of being held for ransom aboard ships. Our findings emphasize how ontologies of death evident in ransom piracy hostages’ accounts represent the hostage experience as encompassing different states of death, with hostages describing death as a real and ever-present threat that variously encompasses a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic.
Introduction
Maritime piracy is one of the oldest transnational crimes and has a truly global scope, with all coastal regions impacted by piracy at some point in history (Hassan and Hasan, 2017). The most well-known contemporary example of maritime piracy to garner international attention occurred off the coast of Somalia in the early 21st century, when young Somali men held more than 3,000 seafarers of 125 different nationalities hostage aboard ships anchored in one of the largest shipping routes in the world (World Bank, 2013). Hostages came from diverse national origins and international responses to ransom piracy reflected tremendous geopolitical disparities, with sailors who were either from the Global North or working aboard well-insured ships quickly rescued through expedient ransom payments (Shortland, 2019). Conversely, sailors from the Global South, who were much more likely to be working aboard uninsured ships and from countries with limited political will to rescue them, comprised the vast majority of long-term ransom piracy hostages.
Ransom piracy is just one form of maritime piracy that occurred off the coast of Somalia since the late 1980s in response to Somalia’s complex history of internal conflict and international intervention. Geographer Abdi Ismail Samatar et al. (2010) accordingly contextualize piracy within a moral economy of ‘rich versus poor’ in which young Somali men also commandeered ships as a form of political protest against international political intervention and resource predation (p. 1377). Despite the complexity of issues that informed and co-constituted maritime piracy in Somali waters, extensive media coverage in the Global North focused exclusively on ransom piracy due to its economic impact on corporations’ ability to transport petroleum, crude oil, and gas safely and affordably (Collins, 2014).
Systemic racism and global economic inequality undergirded the Global North’s media coverage of ransom piracy off the coast of Somalia by ignoring the fact that most long-term hostages came from African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries that lacked the resources or political will to negotiate ransom payments or conduct rescue operations that would free them from their shipboard captors (Hurlburt, 2011). Some of these hostages accordingly languished for years aboard ships hijacked by young Somali men whose lives were shaped by decades of civil war and intergenerational poverty and for whom ransom piracy offered the promise of enough money to marry, purchase a home, and even become wealthy (Gilmer, 2017). These young men indebted themselves to older and more economically stable Somali men willing to provide financing to cover the costs of holding hostages for ransom aboard a ship, including firearms, a skiff to reach the ship, food, fresh water, and khat, in exchange for repayment of the debt along with a percentage of the ransom payment.
The debt financing aspect undergirding ransom piracy in Somali waters immensely raised the stakes for both hostages and hostage takers, making death a central concern for both. For hostages from countries unable or unwilling to assist in their rescue, each new day brought a growing sense of despair as their hostage takers tried, and failed, to solicit ransom payments from the hostages’ ship owners, home countries, families, and loved ones. For hostage takers, each passing moment brought growing debt incurred by the costs of keeping the ship afloat and its sailors alive, along with the hostage takers’ increased fear of their financier making good on threats of violent repercussions or even murder for failure to secure a ransom payment.
A small body of literature has begun to explore the psychological impacts of being victimized by pirates. Findings show that most seafarers do not receive mental health evaluations, systematic treatment, or any type of continued support after a hostage incident (Abila and Tang, 2014). Hostages often experience severe trauma and display symptoms of anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder due to enduring regular death threats, being used as human shields, and constantly being held at gunpoint, tortured, and humiliated (Abila and Tang, 2014; Seyle et al., 2018; Simon and Fernandez, 2016; Ziello et al., 2013). Research further indicates that a lack of proper psychological support post-release and recovery potentially increases seafarers’ risks for further victimization, drug misuse, and increased individual, social, and environmental maladjustment (Anele, 2017; Ziello et al., 2013).
Despite the important inroads made by these studies, criminologists are yet to engage with and theorize interactions between long-term hostages and hostage-takers. The present study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by utilizing testimonials from long-term hostages held aboard ships. We argue that seafarer hostages’ testimonials depict hijacked vessels as carceral sites that reflect and reproduce the global economic inequalities and racialized patterns of violence undergirding the broader geopolitics of piracy. To substantiate this argument, our analytical energies focus on the centrality of ontologies of death in hostages’ accounts of being held for ransom aboard ships. Our findings emphasize how ontologies of death evident in ransom piracy hostages’ accounts represent the hostage experience as encompassing different states of death, with hostages describing death as a real and ever-present threat that variously encompasses a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic.
Theoretical framework
The present study utilizes a threefold theoretical framework that unites and builds upon narrative inquiry, narrative criminology and narrative victimology, and thanatopolitics. Taken together, these unique bodies of scholarship allow us to empirically engage with the ontologies of death apparent in ransom piracy hostages’ accounts while simultaneously examining hijacked ships as carceral sites that reflect and reproduce deeply rooted global economic inequalities through relationships between hostages and hostage takers.
Narrative inquiry
Narrative accounts, generally defined as personal stories that individuals use to inform others about their experiences, are central to the global human experience in the way that they provide both the storyteller and the listener with insights on how to navigate life’s complexities (Gottschall, 2012). Narrative inquiry, which has been widely used since the 1970s as part of the narrative turn in social sciences, is an interdisciplinary method that analyzes how individuals construct particular versions of their lives within the cultural context that surrounds them (Andrews et al., 2004). While narrative constructions and associated ways of storytelling may take different forms depending on cultural context, cultural definitions of normalcy are central elements of how individuals cope with disruptions and chaos, and these cultural definitions are essential to organizing expectations for the future (Becker, 1997).
Constructing a coherent narrative storyline that will render the chaotic nature of life intelligible to a listener presents significant challenges to the storyteller, who must construct a narrative that will generate empathy in listeners by appealing to ‘norms about what is good and what is not’ (McAdams, 2006: 121). Narrative analysis accordingly offers significant insight into how individuals experience violent or otherwise grief-generating events that fundamentally disrupt their sense of identity, belonging, and place (Crossley, 2000). Narrative inquiry underscores the powerful role that storytelling plays in human experience by providing individuals with a means to make moral sense of experiences that otherwise may defy explanation. The universal human need to interpret and understand such experiences is at the heart of why people share accounts of themselves with one another. After all, as philosopher Judith Butler explains, ‘we start to give an account of ourselves because we are interpellated as beings who are rendered accountable to a system of justice and punishment’ (Butler, 2005: 10). Narrative inquiry provides a unique vantage point to comprehend the global inequalities informing the ontologies of death that feature so prominently in hostages’ accounts of their experiences aboard hijacked ships.
Narrative criminology and narrative victimology
Criminology and victimology are disciplines uniquely well-suited to narrative inquiry because of the complex subject matter criminologists and victimologists routinely address, and these fields have accordingly incorporated aspects of narrative inquiry since their inception (Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016). Individuals who commit crimes have often been victims of crimes themselves at some point in their lives, and, as a result, their narrative accounts may emphasize the tremendous impact that victimization had on their future decision making. Narrative criminologists have identified how ‘narrative hot spots’ (O’Connor, 2015) and ‘storylines’ (Carbone-Lopez et al., 2012) help people who have committed crimes to understand their own decision making through a series of pivotal events or moments that combined with individual choices and socio-structural forces to shape their lives (Guo, 2012). Narratives offered by people who have committed crimes often draw upon cultural codes and formula stories related to lawbreaking to recount their actions in a way that situates them within the purview of normal behavior within a given context (Brookman et al., 2011). Yet contexts in which lawbreaking occurs also reflect dominant cultural norms that especially condemn violence, which leads individuals who have committed violent crimes to distance themselves from violence by describing their actions as situationally appropriate reactions, rather than a reflection of their core selves (Hochstetler et al., 2010).
Narrative victimology, while closely connected to narrative criminology, has roots in midcentury criminology and truly emerged as a subfield in the 1970s, when victims’ rights movements gained traction with the voting public in Europe and the United States (Tapley and Davies, 2020). Victims’ narratives, due to their personal and emotional nature, have significantly impacted public policy, particularly with respect to domestic violence legal reform (Walklate et al., 2019). By focusing on how people experience wrongdoing, narrative victimologists analyze how victimization impacts individuals’ subsequent decision making and worldviews as they cope with the aftermath of victimization, including their engagement with the justice process and social reactions to victimization (Pemberton et al., 2018). Narrative victimologists note that accounts of victimization may inform the radicalization that leads to political violence and terrorism because of narrative’s central role in constructing identity, emotion, and connections between individual lives and the wider world (Pemberton and Aarten, 2018). Insights from narrative criminology and narrative victimology contribute tremendously to understanding how relationships between hostages and hostage takers aboard hijacked ships both reflect and reinforce global inequalities.
Thanatopolitics
Scholars of thanatopolitics are grounded in philosopher Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, which, in focusing on the politics of sovereignty over life and death, inverted Foucauldian conceptualizations of biopower as a technique for managing populations under capitalism following the advent of modernity (Mbembe, 2019). Mbembe argues that ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe, 2003: 11). For Mbembe, ‘to kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power’ (Mbembe, 2019: 66). Mbembe extends this critique to emphasize the liminal qualities of necropolitics by using the example of Western European exhibitions of persons of Black African heritage in human zoos throughout history, referring to their condition as ‘humanity suspended’ somewhere between the world of humans, animals, and objects as part of the zero world, where life is withering away, and the end continues to be deferred (Mbembe, 2019: 167).
Thanatopolitics helps scholars to theorize and understand death as a powerful force uniquely laden with meaning, as is evident in the types of political mobilization that occur around death in examples as diverse as suicide bombers, anti-abortion rhetoric, eugenics programs, and genocide (Murray, 2006). Political prisoners engaged in a hunger strike until death, for example, seize control of their bodies as human weapons in a way that ultimately defies state ability to contain them as captive subjects (Bargu, 2014). Soldiers in combat zones must likewise engage in complex moral and ethical reasoning when rationalizing civilian casualties as collateral wartime damage, which they may do by rendering civilians responsible for their own deaths and, in turn, representing themselves as doing ‘the minimum evil necessary’ (Joronen, 2016). Death is a powerful governing force for scholars of thanatopolitics, and their insights directly inform the present study’s identification of three ontologies of death among ransom piracy hostages: death as a real and ever-present threat that variously encompasses a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic.
Method
Criminological attention to long-term seafarer hostages’ experiences in captivity remains limited. The present study accordingly recenters these long-term hostages from African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries by analyzing the centrality of ontologies of death in ransom piracy. Case studies utilized here derive from a documentary series, Seafarers’ Voices, created and published online in 2012 by the seafarers’ advocacy group Seamen’s Church Institute (SCI). The series featured 17 video interview-based testimonials of crewmembers from six different ships hijacked in 2010 and 2011 off the coast of Somalia. The series is part of a broader empirical study by SCI aimed at improving hostage recovery efforts and access resources for former hostages.
The present study takes a grounded theory approach (Glaser, 1978, 1992; Glaser and Strauss, 1967); to the video testimonials by viewing them as a unique dataset that illuminates how hostages interpreted and characterized their experiences in captivity. The authors did not want to approach the dataset with a predetermined coding schema and, instead, preferred to see where the hostages’ stories would lead. Doing so allowed for a more meaningful engagement with the data that allowed what the hostages’ deemed was most important to come to the forefront of the analysis. During the initial phase of coding, the authors were guided by the questions: (1) what do the hostages want viewers to know? and (2) who do they want to hear it? It became apparent quite quickly that they were frustrated with the international community’s seeming indifference to their plight. Their prolonged existence of suffering-but-not-dead was a burden that simultaneously prevented their rescue and prolonged a ransom payment. The descriptions of incidents onboard the hijacked vessels illuminated how the slow violence of their bare life existence (Agamben, 1995) was marked by signposts of nearly dead, emotionally dead, yearning for death, and dead. These signposts became the themes employed during the second phase of coding.
The second phase consisted of conducting a focused incident-to-incident coding strategy that illuminated the circumstances and events in which hostages described experiences of death and dying. The authors used the refined themes generated during the initial phase to individually reengage with the data, compare notes, and move the analytical story forward in an agreed upon theoretical direction. The ontologies of death framework (e.g. death as a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic) was adapted from the second author’s previous work and generated the bones of the analysis that helped tie together the various ways hostages described experiencing death while existing within the hostage situation. Analysis was further informed by the first author’s experiences working at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Counter Piracy Programme and conducting ethnographic fieldwork on piracy in Somalia and the second author’s experiences conducting ethnographic research with people involved in illicit drug and sexual economies and incarcerated populations.
Findings
Former ransom piracy hostages self-identified throughout their testimonials by nationality, religion, and occupation. For example, they describe themselves as Pakistani, Tanzanian, Ghanaian, Muslim, Christian, and as ‘seafarers’ and ‘born seaman’. These identities shaped their lived experiences and interpersonal relations both aboard and external to the ship in terms of how hostage takers treated them, if (and with whom) hostage takers allowed them to communicate, and whether or not they were eventually rescued. Beyond these geopolitical and labor-related self-representations, the hostages came to further understand their existence and identities through the traumatic and torturous interactions of their immediate circumstances. We use the term ontology to refer to the meanings ransom piracy hostages ascribe to the experiences and circumstances they recount in their narratives, which are themselves products of the very same experiences and circumstances.
Ontologies of death are central to the ransom piracy hostages’ captivity narratives because of the unique dynamics that informed ransom piracy off the coast of Somalia. Hostage takers’ fears for their own safety escalated as their debts to financiers increased and the likelihood of securing a ransom payment decreased, just as hostages’ desperation and fear increased as their likelihood of rescue diminished. Hostage takers threaten their hostages with death as the consequence for non-payment of ransom and/or non-cooperation, while hostages have little to do in their captivity besides reflect on the likelihood of their death. The first author’s analysis of testimonial interviews with former ransom piracy hostages revealed that if a death had occurred on the ship, the interviewee usually mentioned the nature of the death at the start of the interview. Traumatic experiences with death or the threat of death remained central throughout these interviews and at the forefront of the former hostages’ memories of their time in captivity.
Locked into a liminal and high-stakes carceral dynamic somewhere between death and life, hostages and hostage takers alike remain highly concerned with the ever-present threat of death. Yet how do long-term ransom piracy hostages characterize the ways in which this ever-present threat of death reflects and reproduces global economic inequalities and racialized patterns of intentional violence that undergird the geopolitics of piracy? To answer this question, the present study identified three primary ontologies of death that variously centered the threat of death in ransom piracy as a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic.
Death as a psychological state of survival
The grueling experience of being held hostage for months or even years while enduring ongoing physical and psychological violence contributed to the production of what we term a necro-captive identity in which hostages regarded themselves as physically alive but existentially dead. This ontology of death as a psychological state of survival regarded death as an ambiguous, liminal state in which they were neither wholly biologically dead nor wholly spiritually alive. The torturous sense that death aboard the hijacked ship may be inevitable, whether through murder, illness, or starvation, proved to be so unbearable that some hostages considered committing suicide to end their suffering.
One former hostage from Ghana, engineer Jewel Ahiable, articulates several examples of death as a psychological state of survival in his retelling of the trauma he endured. He first recalls an instance when an interpreter suggested to the hostage takers that they remove the hostages’ hearts and kidneys and sell them to organ traffickers for 10 million dollars. He says,
and it was [at] that time in which we were traumatized because [for] a living being [to hear that their] heart and kidneys [are] going to be removed, it’s not an easy thing [to hear and] even the mere fact of hearing that . . . your heart and kidneys are going to be removed has already killed you. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Ahiable)
This is one example where the threat of maiming and killings led hostages to believe that it was only a matter of time before they were dead, leaving them feeling that they were ‘already killed’. This former hostage further explained how threats of organ removal left one of his fellow seafarers so psychologically distressed and mentally incapacitated that they found his corpse in the water clinging to the ship’s anchor.
Several of the hostages described contemplating suicide multiple times through their captivity due to the almost unbearable trauma of existing with the ever-present threat of death. These hostages regarded suicide as a way to end the suffering they associated with their liminal state between life and death while aboard the hijacked ship, with death by suicide bringing a conclusive end to an otherwise unknowable future ending. Former hostage Jewel Ahiable explained the pain associated with this unknowable future as increasing in direct proportion to stalled ransom negotiations:
I wanted to hang myself cause I was suffering so much . . . we almost gave we almost gave up in[on] life because there was nothing happening, absolutely nothing, no news coming, you don’t hear from our families, there is no news this [release from the hostage takers] is going to happen. There’s no sign that there was going to be light at the end of the tunnel. Not at all. So, we were dead. Let us die quickly so that the suffering ends. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Ahiable)
Ahiable describes himself and his crew as ‘already dead’ due to the trauma they experienced after being threatened at gunpoint multiple times for minor reasons such as turning on a light. He became increasingly hopeless as an illness he acquired aboard the ship worsened and no medical treatment was available. In tremendous physical pain and hopelessness, he seriously considered committing suicide again, this time with a knife, until his religious beliefs prevented him from doing so:
There are seasons in life which its [life experiences] cause us trouble, [these troubles make us feel we are on] a very long journey. You call upon him [God], you do all. But he [God] kept silent. We [the ship’s crew] have prayed, we have done all we can. But God was still waiting, which we [were] not knowing. We almost lost hope. For me, [I was] at the point where I wanted to kill myself because when I fell sick it was so painful there was nothing I can do. I took a knife once to stab myself, [but then] I just thought of [my relationship with] Christ one day and [so] I said, ‘no’. I was not going to do it, and the following day I gave that knife to my friends that [and they] took that knife away from me. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Ahiable)
The prolonged physical suffering, the anguish of not knowing if they would ever be free again, the isolation from their families, and the continuous threat of biophysical death left the hostages straddling the boundaries of life and death while occupying an ambiguous space of near-death. Within this ambiguous space of near-death the hostages were not biologically dead but robbed of their humanity and made to understand that they were nothing more than human property waiting to be sold to the highest bidder who would either pay the ransom necessary to keep them alive or quickly kill them in order to sell their organs.
Death as a dehumanizing force
The ever-present threat of death aboard the hijacked ships featured in our case study had a dehumanizing impact on hostage takers and hostages alike. Former hostages self-identified, and identified hostage takers, as existing in a depraved and dehumanized state. This ontology of death had three primary manifestations, with hostage takers behaving in ways that dehumanized their hostages, former hostages describing their captors as essentially dehumanized beings due to their actions aboard the ship, and former hostages experiencing difficulties transitioning back into society following their release.
Dehumanization had material consequences in the form of long-term physical changes as a result of poor living conditions aboard the hijacked ships. One former hostage lost all his hair due to the lack of water to maintain a minimum level of hygiene. Another former hostage held aboard a different ship described similar dehumanizing treatment, noting that his crew ‘went through a whole lot of torture and suffering at different stages and different times. Depending on what happened, we suffered for it’ (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Ahiable).
Some hostages regarding the dehumanizing treatment they received from hostage takers as the consequence of their hostage takers’ own lack of humanity. ‘We’re treated really badly’, former hostage Ahiable explained,
We’re treated below humans. Wickedness at its highest class. In fact, I don’t know which words to use because the pirates, they, uh [are] almost inhuman. They don’t have hearts. They behave like they were not created by God. Really. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Ahiable)
The ontology of death as a dehumanizing force is especially apparent in this former hostage’s description of both his own treatment and the hostage takers’ central lack of humanity. He attributes the hostage takers’ actions to inherent deficiencies within them that enabled them to treat the hostages with such cruelty. Prince John Agbo, another Ghanaian former hostage, recalling the torture aboard his ship, described the pirates as animals, saying ‘These people, they are animals. I won’t, excuse me, I won’t call them [the hostage takers] a real man, but they are animals’ (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Agbo).
Another former hostage made the analogy to animalistic behavior in attributing the hostage takers forcing the hijacked crew to live ‘like animals’ to the hostage takers’ poor hygienic practices. Second Officer Bokhari, a Kenyan, noted of the hostage takers that, ‘the[ir] living conditions are not good, so they treat us the same . . . [Our crew would tell them] “we want to take [a] shower”’ [and] they say, ‘why?’ [laughs] ‘there is no need to take shower’ (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Bokhari). Likewise, Third Engineer Francis Koomson, a Ghanaian seafarer who was held hostage regarded the hostage takers who hijacked his ship as uniquely depraved:
[In] Nigeria, they have pirates, but they don’t hijack vessels like this. They come on board, [steal] money, [and demand] ‘captain, what do you have?’ This, this, they take all your belongings and leave but the Somalian pirates are different pirates altogether. They are cannibals, they don’t care about human life, they don’t have impulsive [compassionate] feelings. When you are dying, they will assist you to die [kill you]. When something [bad] is happening to you, they will assist you for that [bad] thing to happen to you. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Koomson)
This former hostage’s assessment of the hostage takers who hijacked his ship as ‘different pirates altogether’ who are ‘cannibals’ lacking compassion and other human emotions underscores how the ever-present threat of death aboard the hijacked ships created an atmosphere suffused with the dehumanizing force of death.
Experiencing such traumatic events aboard the hijacked ship created difficulties for former hostages in adapting to quotidian social interaction with strangers following their release. Former hostage, Ahiable, described the day of his and the other seafarers’ rescue:
So, for almost three years [we were held hostage and] it was on the 23rd of December around 1pm that we step[ped] our foot on land. And when we go[t] there we just knelt down and thank[ed] God for his mercy upon our life. We wept; we were given water to drink that we would not even drink [because we were so traumatized]. We [were] given dates [to eat] and they [people on shore] tried to socialize with us, tried to bring us back as human beings because before [when we were hostages] we were not [living] as human beings. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Ahiable)
As the people on shore attempted to restore the former hostages ‘back as human beings’, former hostages found themselves grappling with the ontology of death as a dehumanizing force. The isolation of captivity, ever-present threat of death, and extensive physical and psychological violence they suffered all contributed to their difficulties in accepting necessities like water and food.
Widespread knowledge of the dehumanizing risks associated with seafaring in Somali waters directly impacted the number of sailors willing to venture aboard vessels on this busy shipping route (Hurlburt, 2013; Murphy, 2011; Simons, 2020; Wetangula, 2013). Potential seafarers weighed their decisions in light of their knowledge regarding the global geopolitical inequalities that frame the working conditions and experiences of most sailors from the African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries from which most of the long-term hostages came. Francis Koomson, a former hostage from Ghana, noted that ‘anyone who [might] want to go on the ocean to work should be very careful of pirates’. As another former hostage, Captain Abner Torres from the Philippines, explained:
It is, uh, uh, difficult because of a lot of things happening, and the recent incidents where they’re not only, uh, hijacking ships but killing the ship’s crew. So, with those things [occurring at sea], uh, you could also see a drop of a [in the] number of seafarers now because of that, uh, risk. Because, as you know, there’s no protection for us. There is no insurance. If ever we’re hijacked, held for ransom, there’s no, uh, insurances for seafarers. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Torres)
Captain Torres’ acknowledgment that ‘there’s no protection for us’ speaks volumes to the risk of dehumanizing treatment that African, Asian, and Middle Eastern sailors face from both hostage takers and a corporate-controlled shipping industry with few labor protections for them. It is in this context that hostages experienced perhaps the most disturbing ontology of death aboard their hijacked ship: death as a disciplinary tactic.
Death as disciplinary tactic
Former hostages described the atmosphere aboard hijacked ships as fraught with tension fueled by their hostage takers’ lack of seafaring knowledge, indiscriminate use of firearms, torture and murder of the hijacked crew. Everyone’s lives were at risk in the former hostages’ accounts of their captivity as a result, with hostages experiencing these realities as disciplinary tactics, intentional or otherwise, that the hostage takers used to control them and force submission to their will. The resulting ontology of death as a disciplinary tactic forced hostages to take risks and engage in actions that they otherwise never would have undertaken.
For example, former hostage Captain Sellathurai Mahalingam, who is from Sri Lanka, recounted the harrowing experience of hostage takers forcing him to anchor his ship in difficult and unsafe conditions, which revealed their lack of seafaring knowledge. He explained,
The place [shoreline] is not surveyed even properly. And they [the hostage takers] were asking me to go more and more inside [closer to shore]. So I was afraid of, if the ship take [runs a]ground, you know. Then what’s gonna happen to us, you know? And who’s gonna help us? . . . I could see other ships also . . . [in] the vicinity, so I thought, ‘okay, let me go somewhere [to drop anchor] in between those ships’. So, I tried to [drop] anchor. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Mahalingam)
In most cases, the crew engaged in such activities against their better judgment and only from the very real fear of death that informed all their interactions with the hostage takers. Some crew members, including those in a leadership role, initially refused to comply with hostage takers’ demands for fuel or other necessities, only to face dire consequences.
Captain Jawed Khan, who is from Pakistan, likewise described how his ship’s Chief Engineer initially adhered to his professional principles in his interactions with the hostage takers due to his belief that he had a moral obligation to protect other seafarers from the hostage takers, who were demanding more fuel. The Chief Engineer believed that if he provided the fuel, the hostage takers would only use it to hijack another ship and would ultimately refuse to honor their promise of better treatment in exchange for fuel. Captain Khan explained that the hostage takers responded by punishing the entire crew, which
was taking [taken] to [the] swimming pool . . . aboard. [They were] kept under the sun for a few days. No food, for example. No water, et cetera . . . the pirate said that, ‘we are gonna kill. Tell your [ship] owner we’re gonna start killing’. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Khan)
In another example of death as a disciplinary tactic, the hostage takers grew so frustrated by their inability to garner the ransom money they hoped to from their hostages that they threatened to sell them to the Somali militant Islamist group Al-Shabaab. Former hostage, Dipdendra Rathore, who is from India, explains the dynamics of this scenario, in which the hostage takers claimed that Al-Shabaab would ‘pay the pirates [the ransom money] and kill us eventually. As a religious favor [to the hostage takers], that’s what they were saying’ (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Rathore). Rathore, who is Hindu, describes how the hostage takers, who are nominally Muslim, threatened not only to sell the hostages to a militant group with a reputation for violence but also did so in a way that positioned the hostages as non-Muslim Others who would receive harsher treatment than they did aboard the ship.
Hostage takers also followed through on their threats of murder in order to discipline other crew members held hostage. While some former hostages described hostage takers who were so unskilled with firearms, intoxicated, or anxious about the hostage situation itself that they fired their weapons indiscriminately, others described murders they felt were deliberate in their attempts to terrify the crew into submission. Former hostage Francis Koomson recounted one such example:
Look at how they [the hostage takers] killed our, our, our secondary officer, Wagdi Akram. They just killed him . . . we were punished, tortured so much that he wanted to hid[e] himself somewhere by the anchor chain [on the side of the ship]. They caught him . . . and just killed him and then brought him on board, and put him in the freezer and they put our foodstuffs on top. We eat from [the same freezer] . . . uh, it’s not easy, it’s not easy [to be held in such conditions]. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Koomson)
While the hostage takers may have been preserving the body in the hopes of receiving a ransom for it or, in some minimal way, honoring the sanctity of corpses upheld by the Abrahamic faiths, hostages such as Francis Koomson experienced their decision to store the body in the freezer as yet another means by which to maintain power and control over the crew.
A final use of death as a disciplinary tactic occurred when hostage takers threatened their hostages with death if they refused to assist with hijacking other ships. The pressure that hostage takers face to repay debts to mainland financiers, coupled with the limited likelihood of obtaining a ransom with the passage of time, led some hostage takers to coopt their hostages’ labor in the hopes of hijacking another ship with a crew more likely to generate a ransom payment. While hostage takers sometimes promised freedom in exchange for a successful hijacking, hostages unsurprisingly doubted the veracity of their claims and refused to participate. Former hostage, Prince John Agbo, who is from Ghana, explains the consequences of doing so in his account of being held captive, when pirates told his crew that:
You choose [from] two thing[s]. One thing [choice is] we kill these all people on this ship . . . because no money [ransom payment has been received]. Or we [will] use this ship to catch [hijack] another big ship. When you catch two big ship[s], tanker ship[s], we [will] release you, you [will be let] go. [Our ship’s] captain, he choose [that] we’re going to work with them [the hostage takers]. (Seamen’s Church Institute, 2014: Agbo)
The Captain chose to have the ship’s crew assist in hijacking the two tanker ships, but the hostage takers forced them to hijack a further seven ships prior to their release, thereby completing the cycle of destruction and fear wrought by both hostages and hostage takers.
Concluding thoughts
Analyzing former ransom piracy hostages’ narratives revealed three primary ontologies of death that variously depicted death as a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic. Our narrative analysis offers unique contributions to narrative criminology, narrative victimology, and thanatopolitics in its examination of how former hostages described the role of death in their relationships with hostage takers. Their descriptions revealed a complex continuum from death as a liminal psychological state to a threat used to force hostages into complying with hostage takers’ demands. Yet, perhaps most saliently, death also emerged as the most powerful aspect of the hostages’ experience. Death, and the looming threat of death, animated every aspect of the hostages’ shipboard experiences.
Studying ontologies of death through the lens of narrative criminology and narrative victimology emphasizes how hostages, who are predominantly from the Global South, experience hijacked ships as carceral sites that reflect and reproduce the global inequalities and racialized patterns of violence that create and sustain maritime piracy. Complex cycles of violence, indebtedness, harm, and vulnerability entrap hostages and hostage takers alike aboard hijacked ships in ways that are compounded by a lifetime of privation for both parties. As an example of the geopolitically weak preying on the geopolitically weaker, the ontologies of death apparent in ransom piracy off the coast of Somalia underscore the complex means by which global socioeconomic inequalities and racialized forms of violence manifest at sea. Although our study is limited by the small dataset and the narrow geographical scope of piracy off the coast of Somalia, the hostages’ experience provide an important snapshot of a broader failure to ensure the safety and security of an already disenfranchised workforce.
Seafarers from the Global South are migrants whose families rely on their remittances to economically sustain themselves. They sail aboard uninsured ships with labor conditions that offer little in the way of security while transporting goods, including oil and gas, to supply the wealthy countries of the Global North. The threat of piracy only compounds their already highly dangerous work, which they must engage in because of limited economic options in their home countries. The young Somali men who hijack ships for ransom have experienced even worse circumstances following decades of civil unrest and international intervention in Somalia, and for these young men piracy is the only foreseeable means to earn the money necessary to marry, purchase a home, and obtain other markers of adulthood. The cycle of violence and harm flows from hostage taker to hostage, yet it also extends to the global communities of which both are a part. At a fundamental practical level, understanding how former ransom piracy hostages interpret and understand these cycles of violence and harm is critical to developing meaningful ways to address the long-term needs of former hostages, who have experienced an extremely traumatic form of workplace violence while held captive aboard their ship.
Given that death so frequently animates life among people who experience marginalization, the nuances of narrative inquiry are particularly well-suited to understanding the meaningful role that death plays in individuals’ accounts of pivotal events in their lives. Analyzing how cycles of violence and harm—and indeed, death itself—emerge in former hostages’ narratives can also offer tremendous insights to scholars engaged with people who are incarcerated, struggling with substance use disorder, or otherwise existing in a liminal state between the physical site of prison and/or the psychological prison of substance use disorder. Death features prominently in narratives of both everyday prison life and recovery narratives, with some ex-prisoners and former illicit drug users speaking of having been given a ‘second life’ following their release from prison or abstention from drugs and alcohol.
Examining ontologies of death in narrative accounts of interactions between hostages and hostage takers illuminates new aspects of thanatopolitics, particularly by examining the work of death in times of chaos and crisis. Former hostages in our case study variously regarded death as a psychological state of survival, a dehumanizing force, and a disciplinary tactic, all of which emphasized death as a looming force that governed much of everyday existence among the hijacked ship’s living crew, including both hostages and hostage takers. While scholars of thanatopolitics have thus far explored biological death as a governing force, the present study emphasizes how existential death plays an equally powerful role in the everyday experiences of those aboard a hijacked ship. This fixation on death as a biological phenomenon reflects deeply rooted conceptualizations that regard death as an event rather than a process that can have multiple meanings, especially for individuals whose situations force them to routinely reflect on death.
The mind and the body come into existence through various practices, and bodies become knowable through various knowledges and experiences. As geographer James Tyner argues, ‘we may agree that a “body” exists—this concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure’ (Grosz, 1998: 43)—‘but the meanings of the body are discursive, and by extension, political contests’ (Tyner, 2015: 362). Just as bodies cannot be confined to a ‘biological phenomenon’, neither can the social constructs of ‘life’ and ‘death’. The boundary between life and death is blurred in many narrative accounts and not necessarily associated with the destruction of life. Thus, in addition to signaling an end to physical existence, ‘death’ can also refer to both a process and a state of being.
The present study demonstrates the criminological utility of centering death in narratives compiled by the living. Individual attempts to compile coherent narrative storylines that render the chaotic, and sometimes horrific, nature of life intelligible to a listener offer valuable insights into how people construct meaning in almost incomprehensibly difficult circumstances. Accounts offered by former ransom piracy hostages emphasize the inhumanity of their situation and, in some instances, the inhumanity of the people who held them hostage. Some of these examples include cruelty that is difficult to comprehend, such as hostage takers who forced their hostages to eat food stored next to a former shipmate’s frozen corpse. Yet there is also a deeper violence at work here in terms of the geopolitics that enabled ransom piracy hostages to remain aboard hijacked ships for years at a time. Uninsured, without resources, and generally from poor families in the Global South, the seafarers whose narrative accounts form the scope of the present study did not receive the media attention, concern, or international intervention that characterized responses to their peers aboard well-insured ships from the Global North, most of whom were rescued quickly through expedient ransom payments.
Combining narrative inquiry with the thanatopolitical focus on the contexts and conditions in which particular lives matter (and, by extension, others matter less) offers great potential for criminologists and victimologists, who are uniquely positioned to examine the ways in which death emerges in narratives as a force uniquely laden with rich contextual meaning. The study of long-term hostages and kidnapping situations provides a unique extended-temporal context through which to explore and complicate understandings of how death is experienced, engaged with, and folded back on itself. The growth of victimology in the aftermath of the Holocaust demonstrates how relationships with death and genocide can become powerful agents of change. Reengaging with the nuances of death and dying in contemporary criminal incidents challenges criminologists to rethink how Western-dominated clinical bio-logics of life/death may impede crime prevention and criminal justice strategies while also unknowingly aiding offenders in prolonging their criminal acts. What if death was viewed along a continuum of embodied experiences of life/death (Tyner, 2015)? Criminologists could venture into new lines of investigation as to what constitutes a crime and challenge whether the cessation of vital signs is required to be charged with ‘death’. Victimologists can also explore the threshold space between ‘death’ and ‘life’ to interrogate the temporal biases underlying when and where victims are identified as such and provided with support services. Thus, it is imperative for criminologists and victimologists to lead the charge for critically engaging with the ‘bio-logics’ of life and death that pervade our disciplines and criminal justice systems.
