Negotiating with Hostage-Takers What Procurement Learns from Crisis Pros

Kidnappings and hostage-takings are strongly shaped by region — very different criminal economies exist. Acute situations arising from a family dispute or a botched bank robbery are usually resolved directly by the police. Advisers like Ruthe come into play where criminal acts follow a clear economic intent.

The focus is often on local business people, senior public officials and their relatives, occasionally also employees of international corporations and business travellers. As a rule of thumb: countries with less well-developed state structures are more vulnerable — wherever gang crime, drug crime and cartels are widespread. As risk regions Ruthe names Latin and Central America, the Middle East, East, North and West Africa, and the Philippines. In Europe, by contrast, the perpetrators are often lone offenders from the circles around prominent families.

What has changed above all is the digital risk: during the lockdowns, cybercrime rose sharply because less well-secured home-office workplaces offered a point of entry. At the same time, business travel is picking up again — and with it the risk of attacks.

In most cases, economic motives prevail. “Why else would anyone commit a ransom extortion?” says Ruthe. Where commercial interests are the driving force, a swift agreement is also in the perpetrators' interest — because the pressure on all sides rises the longer a kidnapping drags on. Only in politically motivated cases do negotiations stretch over long periods.

Behind this lies a cynical logic that, in the moment, actually works in the hostages' favour: in the criminal economy, the hostage is a piece of merchandise. “If I damage the goods, I get less money for them.” Purely commercially motivated groups therefore treat hostages reasonably well given the circumstances, including medically where needed. There are even regional “market prices” for hostages. Anyone who wants to bring a case to a good conclusion has to align with the perpetrators' modus operandi and expectations — and, in the negotiation, insists on regular proof of life.

Perhaps the most important principle for any negotiation is this: do not respond to the opening demand straight away. Doing so could whet the appetite, Ruthe warns — along the lines of: “If our demand can be met this easily, maybe we should raise it.” Anyone who gives in too quickly shifts the anchor to their own disadvantage.

Instead, the negotiator works with empirical benchmarks: from comparable cases it is known what a locally customary sum would be. Within this range, the real room for negotiation emerges. The same mechanism — anchor demand, credible response, patience — sits at the heart of every professional price negotiation. Our foundational article on game theory in procurement shows how to think through such dynamics systematically.

Unlike with ordinary trade goods, a hostage negotiation cannot simply be broken off. A moral obligation to see it through remains — and that raises the pressure on everyone involved, from authorities and psychologists to the relatives. All the more reason to define a clear ceiling.

It follows from two factors: the locally customary level of comparable cases and the feasibility of the demand — because not everyone has the sum demanded available promptly, or at all. In Eastern Europe and Russia, perpetrator groups often gained a very precise picture of their target's financial situation in advance and made correspondingly realistic demands. The negotiation was then only about handover arrangements, scarcely about the size of the ransom.

Reputation plays a role of its own: the fact that states such as the USA or the UK fundamentally do not pay ransom can act as a deterrent — but only if the perpetrators operate methodically within gang structures and know their victims' nationality. Where selection is made more ad hoc, by outward appearance, the deterrence comes to nothing. With purely commercially motivated perpetrators, a credible no-payment policy can discourage the act — with politically motivated ones, it can achieve the opposite.

A cyberattack shows clear parallels to a real hostage-taking — only it is not human lives that are at stake but a company's IT infrastructure. Sometimes data has been stolen and its publication is threatened; sometimes the entire IT system is encrypted. And when nothing works at all, there is logically little room left to negotiate. The decisive question is how high the damage actually is or could be — and whether a security gap can be closed after the fact in order to play for time in the negotiation.

Here too the rule holds: payments are avoided where possible, but cannot always be circumvented. Anyone who pays must check the legal framework — are payments even permitted? The caveat of financing terrorism remains, because you never know who is hiding behind the hacker. Unprotected production facilities are particularly precarious: a non-segmented network can sometimes be hijacked via an unscrewed surveillance camera and a tapped cable, or through outdated patches. Whoever takes control could, for instance in the food industry, alter recipes, render machines unusable or even poison products.

The lessons from high-risk negotiation are, at their core, the same ones that govern every negotiating table in procurement:

• Never agree to the first demand — giving in quickly whets the appetite and shifts the anchor.
• Define the ceiling in advance — from empirical benchmarks and from what is realistically feasible.
• Understand the other side's interests — whoever knows the modus operandi negotiates more purposefully.
• Reputation is a lever — a credible self-commitment changes the counterpart's behaviour.

These principles can be trained. In our negotiation training, procurement teams practise exactly these mechanics — soundly supported by the academic advisory board around Prof. Dr. Christian Rieck. With over EUR 35 billion in negotiated volume across 16 industries, we know what matters.

Want to sharpen your negotiation tactics? Talk to us — or test in the negotiation quiz how confidently you perform under pressure.