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This is the second of three chapters that set out the differing contexts through which the dilemma in the laws of war over the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants can be viewed: political and diplomatic (Chapter 1), social (this chapter) and intellectual (Chapter 3). It explores the social history of army occupation and resistance to it in nineteenth century Europe – from the Napoleonic period to the Franco-Prussian war– and places these diplomatic failures in their broader social and political context. In particular it examines the range of army practices under occupation, and the effect that they had on civilian life. The different sections of the chapter discuss: pillaging, looting, requisitions and billeting; reprisals; hostage-taking; types of civilian behaviour –obedience to the occupier, political and armed acts of resistance, organized acts of resistance –guerrillas and franc-tireurs; levee en masse and other assorted insurrections; ideologies of resistance; religion as a source of resistance; and the influence of nationalism and patriotism.

This chapter treats Polybius' sixteen-year detention in Rome following the Third Macedonian War and asks what it meant to be a detainee in Rome. Consequently, although the chapter focuses on Polybius, it also examines the situation of those deported with him, whether from Achaea or elsewhere in Greece. It explores the conditions in which he and others were detained, their attitude to detention, the kind of terminology that Polybius uses to describe himself and his fellow detainees, their status compared to those in Rome as hostages, their place of residence, and the degree to which they had freedom of movement. It concludes by reviewing the evidence for Polybius' eventual release.

Historical precedents and international agreements provided scant protect to the inhabitants of an occupied territory during World War II. Although noble in design, the Hague Convention used vague language to overcome fundamental disagreements between large and small powers and implicitly sanctioned collective reprisals by way of the Martens clause. American, British, French, and German manuals of military law sanctioned the execution of hostages and punished one man or groups of people for crimes committed by others. The first two men who served as the military commander in France, Generals Alfred Streccius and Otto von Stülpnagel, did not adopt abbreviated judicial procedures established by Hitler, viewed collective reprisals and hostage executions as a last resort, and exercised a degree of restraint. Supported by statistics that pointed toward a decrease in serious resistance activity, they endured petty attacks and avoided provocative reprisals that would undermine Franco‐German cooperation.

On the morning of 21 August 1941, French Communist Party activists launched a wave of symbolic assassinations by shooting Alfons Moser, a young German naval cadet. Although preoccupied by events on the eastern front during the Moser attack, Hitler learned about subsequent assaults, condemned Stülpnagel's response of gradually increasing reprisals as ‘much too mild’, and ordered the execution of 50 to 100 hostages after every assassination. Wilhelm Keitel, Walther von Brauchitsch, Eduard Wagner, and other senior officers in Berlin condemned Stülpnagel's restraint, joined senior Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, and pressed for severe countermeasures against Jews who allegedly organized all resistance activity. Demonstrating the ideological purity of the SS, Helmut Knochen ordered SS minions to bomb seven Parisian Synagogues, embarrassed Stüpnagel, and earned the enmity of the German military administration. This chapter examines security debates between the military administration, SS, and German diplomats in Paris and a second argument between generals in Paris and Nazis in Berlin.

Assassinations in Nantes and Bordeaux on 20 and 21 October 1941 placed General von Stülpnagel and the military administration in the center of a political firestorm. Using assassinations as a pretext for genocide, Hitler ordered the execution of hundreds of hostages, sanctioned mass deportations through the Night and Fog Decree, and ordered subordinates to carry out severe reprisals that focused on Jews and communists after every resistance attack. General Otto von Stülpnagel condemned ‘Polish Methods' that neither made political sense nor sat well with his conscience, but this stance poisoned his relationship with Hitler, Armed Forces High Command (OKW), Army High Command (OKH), and Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels. Assassinations and brutal German reprisals divided communist resistance groups like Main‐d’œvre immigrée from Charles de Gaulle's movement, upset Germany's relationship with Marshal Pétain and the French government, and exposed sharp disagreements between various German institutions in Paris.

As long as the Americans remained abducted in the mountains, Batista's forces and planes were down. “One American is worth an anti-aircraft battery,” a rebel lieutenant stated. The Batista administration once again appeared weak and powerless, not to mention helpless. It was again made manifest that the government of Cuba could not protect the foreigners working in their country. Nor could Havana help but allow the U.S. to negotiate with the government's enemies. The crisis drew attention to U.S. armaments deliveries, destroying U.S. claims to neutrality. The hostage crisis also forced Washington to stop delivery of the T-28 airplanes.

This chapter examines the processes and legislations in India that sought to clear up such confusions. Although the laws defining citizenship came to be established by the Citizenship Act of 1955, ambiguities about who was an Indian citizenship continued and were prone to contextual interpretation with regard to those groups who would become ‘minorities’ within India and Pakistan after 1947. While in practice officials often failed to accurately implement equal rights when it came to India’s Muslim minorities, concern for Hindu minorities across the border in East Pakistan continued to guide official policy and actions in the post-Partition period. It argues that it was the continuing migration in the East (rather than in the West) that prompted legislators to confront specifically the modalities of defining a citizen and to formulate the rules for refugees to acquire Indian citizenship.

The preface sets out the historical questions pursued through the rest of the book: what did it mean to talk about peace in the centuries following the end of the Roman Empire in the West? What role did it play in the wider conception of rulership? Beginning with a single case‐study — the coronation of Charles the Bald in Metz in 869, and the poetry written for the occasion by Sedulius Scottus, an Irish scholar — this opening sketches the modes by which early medieval kings and their theorists worked. Competing treatments of peace in the same year are explored, as are the means of making peace (oaths, hostages, treaties) to reveal the diversity of attitudes even within a single year. Peace in wider time and space is addressed. So, too, is earlier scholarship on the field. The chapter closes with an investigation of the place of peace in the early medieval imagination more broadly (Beowulf, the Waltharius).

Chronologically, Chapter Two focuses on the 1980s, but the main theme of the chapter is the development of mutual antipathy between Iran and the United States. This development is traced through an examination of their interactions from the 1953 coup to the Iran-Iraq War. The chapter emphasizes how the experiences of the 1953 coup in Iran, the Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War contributed to the development of a profound and widespread mutual hostility between the two countries that would subsequently come to act as a major constraint on policy-makers on both sides. The chapter also examines the origins of the IRI's nuclear programme and its connection to the emerging conflict with the USA.

This chapter highlights the culture of hostage-taking in Chechnya. The lucrative business of holding hostages for ransom developed among Chechens during the first war, and after the peace agreement, escalated into a full-fledged crisis by 1999. Submitting the subject of hostage-taking to social and cultural analysis has proved difficult, for a number of reasons. First, it was necessary to sweep aside certain popular myths that had been generated around this theme during the Chechen war. Second, the perpetrators of such deeds were not accessible for direct interviews. Third, their victims were often far from ideal sources of accurate information, owing to the intense physical and psychological traumas they had suffered. Finally, the people who liberated the hostages were so biased, both politically and personally, that they were also not very helpful in illuminating the character of the phenomenon.

This chapter analyzes postwar Chechen society. Certain aspects of this period are self-evident, including the devastated infrastructure, a thorough economic collapse, a mass exodus from the republic, and the disintegration of civil institutions, leading to the proliferation of high-level criminal activities such as hostage-taking. The difficulty of getting back to normal essentially consists of the fact that the war did not truly end for Chechnya in August 1996, but lived on in the minds and actions of armed veterans, politicians, and various intellectuals. It was revived daily in the propaganda about the great victory that had asserted Chechen superiority over the rest of the world. Chechens had cultivated the image of an enemy (Russia and the Russians), and the resumption of fighting was encouraged by outsiders who supported complete secession from the Russian Federation. The circles supporting Chechnya's continued fighting after 1996 were in fact wider and more influential than those that had been dominant during the war.

The essential role of love in our life and our profound personal involvement in love makes breakup of intimate relations and divorce very painful — particularly so when this separation involves rejection and the people involved believe in the romantic ideology, such as the men who kill their wives or partners. This chapter discusses the meaning of separation and love in the face of romantic rejection. The chapter argues that what is perceived to be the ultimate expression of romantic love — ‘I can't live, if living is without you’ — is in fact a state of mind that turns the partner, who is perceived to be the sole supplier of this meaning, into a hostage. The chapter further analyzes the behavioral patterns and the emotional state characteristic of the rejected partner and its manifestation among men who killed their wives.

This chapter addresses the question: how did the state come to believe that branding could help defeat the FARC? It goes back in history to trace mediatization of the Colombian conflict, that is the ways in which media played an increasingly central role in the war as it wore on. The chapter focuses on three inflection points. The first is the shift from agitprop, Soviet-style propaganda, to what the Colombian urban guerrilla group, the M19, called "armed propaganda." The second transformation was when Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellín Cartel, adapted "armed propaganda" in his bid to avoid extradition to the United States, putting it at the service of an urban war that terrorized city residents and kidnapped high profile hostages, especially journalists. The third inflection point is the FARC's usage of hostages in a cynical bid to break what it describes as a "media siege" that does not allow it to speak for itself, and the public backlash to its efforts. In tracing the semiotic sensibility of Colombia's armed actors and the way the learned from each other, the chapter traces a history of the emergence of brand warfare.

This chapter examines President Lincoln's attitude toward counter-guerrilla tactics, which could include the execution of civilian hostages in retaliation for unlawful enemy actions. Most of the house burning that bothered the president had been carried out, by both sides, as acts of “retaliation.” Two highly effective acts of retaliation by the Confederacy—one threatened, the other executed—illustrate how the practice was supposed to work. Retaliation remained a major weapon of Union generals against guerrillas and the civilians who supported them. The forced movement of hostile civilian populations was another common response to guerrilla warfare. Abraham Lincoln himself signed one order for retaliation against Confederate prisoners of war. The distaste he felt for actually ordering the innocent to suffer for offenses they had not committed is explained.

Despite being a fast, fluid, tactic police officer, Keith Ryan never expected he would be a cop until in 1986 he decided to take the test to become a New York police officer. It did not take long for him to gain a reputation as an active cop who excelled in certain roles. There were, however, occasions when Ryan did stupid things, particularly during the early months when he was learning the job, but during this phase he learnt that if he wanted to continue his job he has to put his own safety first. After initial bad experiences, Keith Ryan did not repeat his mistakes and felt proud in 1997 to lead a six-man team into a most dangerous job.

In this chapter, García Márquez's foray into investigative journalism through his writing of News of a Kidnapping is the main focus. News is considered to be the most “Colombian” of all of García Márquez's writing as it requires readers to be ultimately familiar with Colombia. A brief historical background is presented to establish context. News can be summarized simply as an account of the kidnapping of six men and four women of salaried thugs, their captivity, the government responses to the situation, the deaths of two female hostages, the anguish of the victims' kin, and finally the freeing of the remaining hostages. The narrative tells of different human interactions, mostly between guards and hostages.

The towns of Louth used the marches to gain concessions from the crown and tried to control trade with the Irish there. The Irish suffered discrimination in the towns and efforts were made in town and country to disinherit individuals on the grounds that they were Irish. March customs permeated the county as a whole, and Irish loan-words appeared even in the most solemn documents of the settlers. This in turn reflected a significant migration of Irish people from Ulster into the county, including many priests. The bilingualism of these people was not unusual among the inhabitants of the county, but the ability to speak Irish did not imply any disloyalty to the English crown or disengagement from English culture. Irish attacks in the marches targeted mills and involved hostage-taking, but the marches also offered opportunities for advancement to settlers from more peaceful parts of the county.

This chapter talks about the emergence of the risk of institutionalized and currently ritualized kidnapping. These involve the use hostage videos to exert political pressure and secure ransoms, and if things go awry, result in horrible executions. Journalist kidnappings are not a new phenomenon; up until the Daniel Pearl case, the standard response was to use the power of the media to pressure the perpetrators into releasing their hostage. Nowadays, many cases of journalists' kidnappings are not reported at all—a controversial practice known as a media blackout. This practice is quite disagreeable since media organizations already routinely publish sensitive information for various reasons, but especially because their primary mission is to inform the public. Moving forward, the best course of action would be for media organizations to report such kidnappings in a straightforward manner, omitting, for example, demands of the kidnappers and firmly indicating that they are withholding certain information at the request of the authorities.