BOOK REVIEW
The Social Construction of Kidnapping: A Critical Perspective, by Camilo Tamayo Gomez, Routledge, 15 August 2025, 248 Pages, £155.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781032633237
A man in a jungle camp learns to read time by footsteps, not clocks, and to read danger by the way a guard clears his throat before speaking. In the account Tamayo Gomez builds from such scenes, captivity becomes a whole social world, a place where watching is constant, where kindness can feel like strategy, and where the smallest routine, a bowl of rice, a radio crackling at night, can hold a person together for one more day. The tension is not only whether the hostage will live, but what kind of self will be left when freedom returns, and what kind of country keeps moving while so many lives are paused.
Camilo Tamayo Gomez is the author of The Social Construction of Kidnapping, and he writes with the steady authority of someone who has had to answer to both scholarship and survivors. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield and a Senior Adviser in Transitional Justice for the United Nations Development Programme, roles that sit close to the institutions and arguments this book must reckon with. He is also President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change (RC48) and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Transitional Justice, credentials that matter here because the book refuses to treat kidnapping as mere “crime news” and insists on the longer political life of harm.
The guiding claim is simple and hard to argue against: kidnapping has been widely represented and widely feared, yet it remains under-theorized and too often handled through sensational stories or blunt statistics that explain little. Tamayo Gomez is clear that the familiar scripts, ransom, villains, victims, rescue, can hide the fact that kidnapping is also a social action that creates relationships, routines, and forms of control that spread far beyond the captive body. He insists that kidnapping is a human rights violation, but also a social, historical, cultural, and political phenomenon whose meanings are made and remade by states, armed groups, media, families, and courts. That insistence shapes the book’s tone, which is not cold, even when it is analytical, because the argument never lets you forget that people lived inside these categories.
The introduction begins from lived urgency and then widens into method, offering an interdisciplinary lens that treats kidnapping as more than an event and more than a number. It names the problem of spectacle directly, noting how mass media often foregrounds cruelty while leaving the sociological, emotional, political, and cultural dimensions unexamined. It also frames kidnapping as a “crime of immobility”, a deprivation of movement that reorganizes power and space, not only for the hostage but for whole communities that learn new habits of fear and caution. From there, the focus shifts in a deliberate sequence across the chapters, moving from definitions, to Colombian patterns over five decades, to armed conflict strategy, to the strange micro-politics of captivity, and then to civil society and transitional justice as forms of response.
The book has 7 chapters, counting the conclusion chapter as the seventh, and its structure matters because it is part of the argument that meaning is built step by step, not announced all at once. Chapter 1, “Unpacking kidnapping: a critical approach,” builds the conceptual base and argues for kidnapping as a socio-cultural phenomenon and a particular kind of interaction, marked by power, consent, control, intimacy, and surveillance. It surveys mainstream definitions, offers a typology, and then moves through sociological, philosophical, and political economy frameworks, including Wittgenstein and Levinas, and the discussion of gore capitalism, necropolitics, and human commodification. It also sets out the idea of kidnapping as immobility, linking bodily confinement to broader regimes of movement, inequality, and control.
Chapter 2, “Dynamics and characterization of kidnapping in Colombia 1970–2024,” is the cartography chapter, anchored in quantitative and historical documentation that tracks long arcs and abrupt spikes. It describes the evolution from rare cases in the 1970s to national crisis levels later, detailing changing motivations such as ransom-driven versus politically motivated abductions and identifying shifting regional concentrations. It also situates actors across time, including guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and criminal networks, showing kidnapping as both tactic and economy. Read alongside the rest, it becomes more than a trend report, because the numbers are repeatedly treated as traces of social life under pressure.
Chapter 3, on political kidnapping and the armed conflict, explains kidnapping as strategy, not side effect, and shows why it became such a defining feature of the Colombian war. Tamayo Gomez lays out motivations attributed to armed groups: financing, territorial control, intimidation, retaliation, and bargaining for prisoner exchanges, and he connects these motivations to the erosion of trust in institutions and the narrowing of democratic life. He also addresses state responses that ranged from negotiations to hardline policies and spectacular rescues, and he treats these as political theatre as well as security practice. The chapter’s best moments do not moralize in easy ways, but they do clarify responsibility and consequence, which is a different kind of moral work.
Chapter 4 examines long-term captivity in jungle camps through surveillance studies, and it is the chapter that most unsettles any reader who thinks they already know what “hostage” and “guard” mean. The argument is that these camps become regimes of mutual surveillance: captors chain, monitor, rotate watch, and use psychological control, while hostages learn to observe guards’ patterns, moods, and vulnerabilities in order to survive. Over time, the enforced proximity can produce a coerced intimacy and a troubling reciprocity, not as romance or redemption, but as the social chemistry of a closed world where people must manage each other to stay alive. This is also where the book’s early claim, that kidnapping is a form of social interaction, stops sounding like theory and starts sounding like a plain description.
Chapter 5 moves outward again, to civil society responses that range from support networks to public protest to practices of remembrance. Tamayo Gomez describes families and victims organizing, sharing information, sustaining one another, and building formal advocacy structures, including the NGO Fundación País Libre, and he frames these actions as part of a longer struggle over whose stories count. He also discusses mass demonstrations and media practices such as the radio programme Las Voces del Secuestro, where families sent messages that hostages might hear, and he treats these as both emotional lifelines and political acts. The chapter’s second half is especially strong on collective memory, arguing that commemorations, exhibits, and narrative labour are not add-ons to justice but conditions for it.
Chapter 6, “Transitional justice and kidnapping in Colombia,” focuses on the long road to acknowledgement and recognition, and it takes institutions seriously without treating them as the main characters. It analyses the JEP and its Macro-Case No. 001 on FARC kidnappings, including the effort to place victims’ participation and recognition at the centre rather than treating victims as passive objects of procedure. Tamayo Gomez also stages an internal critique of legalism, warning against what he calls “magical legalism,” the belief that formal processes alone can transform social wounds without sustained engagement with victims’ expectations and social realities.
The conclusion chapter, as the seventh, closes the arc by returning to what his framework has been pushing toward all along: kidnapping’s legacy persists in memory, governance, and the moral imagination, and so the work of naming and accounting cannot be brief.
What makes the book valuable is not just that it assembles methods, but that it shows why each method is ethically and intellectually necessary. The interdisciplinary blend is not a fashionable gesture here, because kidnapping itself operates across domains: crime markets, war strategy, state legitimacy, intimate relations, media narratives, and long afterlives of trauma. By bringing criminology, sociology, surveillance studies, collective memory, and transitional justice into one argument, Tamayo Gomez offers a language for harms that otherwise remain either unspeakable or overspoken in clichés. He also argues that kidnapping research has epistemological challenges that require stronger empirical foundations and more robust approaches than spectacle provides, which is a pointed rebuke to lazy certainty on this topic.
The book’s most important contribution to social constructionism is its insistence that “construction” is not a way of denying suffering, but a way of tracing how suffering is organized, narrated, classified, and governed. When Tamayo Gomez treats kidnapping as a “crime of immobility,” he is not polishing a metaphor, he is naming how freedom of movement, autonomy, and social relations are re-ordered through captivity and threat. When he tracks the struggle between official narratives and grassroots memory, he shows collective memory as a field of power: who gets to speak, who is believed, what is commemorated, what is forgotten. In a human rights register, this matters because recognition is not only emotional relief; it is also a precondition for policy, reparations, and non-repetition.
There are points where readers may want to push back, and that is a strength because the book invites argument rather than reverence. One controversial edge is the way his mutual surveillance framing can feel, at first glance, like it risks symmetry between captor and captive, even though the chapter’s details keep coercion and asymmetry in view. Another is the breadth of the conceptual apparatus in Chapter 1, including philosophical discussions and political economy concepts like gore capitalism and necropolitics, which some empiricist readers may find too ambitious for a book that also wants policy traction. Yet the ambition is also the point: he is arguing that kidnapping has been mis-seen because it has been flattened into a single register at a time, and that flattening has costs.
This is also where the book creates healthy debate within transitional justice scholarship and practice. Tamayo Gomez’s emphasis on “from below” approaches and recognition challenges court-centered approaches that treat procedure as the highest form of respect, while victims quietly adjust themselves to the limits of what a tribunal can hear. He insists that victims’ narratives are central not only as evidence but as part of the social process of truth and reparation, and that insistence can clash with institutional habits of efficiency and containment. He is also frank about scale, about how tens of thousands of cases test any justice system’s capacity, and he frames this as a moral design problem rather than a mere logistical headache.
Placed beside Rolando Ochoa’s Intimate Crimes (2019), Tamayo Gomez’s book clarifies what changes when kidnapping is embedded primarily in armed conflict rather than urban criminal governance, while still showing how both contexts generate intimate orders of fear and negotiation. Ochoa’s focus on trust, signaling, and everyday governance in Mexico City becomes a useful counterpoint to Tamayo Gomez’s emphasis on kidnapping as war strategy and as mass victimization tied to the Colombian conflict’s political economy. Read together, they encourage a comparative sociology of kidnapping that can ask how “interaction” looks under different forms of state presence, different criminal ecologies, and different public narratives. Tamayo Gomez also gives you conceptual tools, like immobility and mutual surveillance, that can travel into Ochoa’s terrain and illuminate it from a different angle.
Scott A. Bonn’s edited volume Kidnapping and Violence (2019) complements Tamayo Gomez by widening the lens beyond a single national case and by making room for clinical and policy viewpoints that a Colombia-focused monograph cannot fully carry. Tamayo Gomez, however, offers something many handbooks struggle to supply: an integrated narrative where theory, history, lived experience, civil society action, and transitional justice are placed in a single line of sight. The handbook-like approach can map variety, while Tamayo Gomez maps a deep social history of one phenomenon as it becomes endemic and then becomes memory, which is a different kind of knowledge. For a reader trying to understand how a society metabolizes mass abduction over decades, the monograph has the advantage.
Paula S. Fass’s Kidnapped (1997) is an especially sharp comparative counterpoint because it shows kidnapping as a social problem constructed through public anxiety, media attention, and shifting ideas of childhood and family in a liberal democratic context. Tamayo Gomez’s Colombia makes visible a different set of institutions and pressures: armed actors, territorial control, and transitional justice mechanisms built after civil conflict, yet both cases show that kidnapping is never only the act itself, it is also the story a society tells about vulnerability and blame. Fass can help a reader see how “kidnapping” becomes a moral panic or a policy object, while Tamayo Gomez shows how it becomes a weapon, a market, and later a demand for recognition. The pairing reminds management and policy readers that governance is shaped by narratives as much as by rules.
Management scholars will find this book more relevant than its title might suggest, because it is a study of how organizations, armed and civic, construct control, legitimacy, and compliance under extreme conditions (Christensen et al., 2016). The chapters on civil society and transitional justice show how collective action, advocacy organizations, and public campaigns coordinate resources, emotions, and media to shape national agendas (Pond & Lewis, 2019), which is recognizable territory for scholars of institutions and organisational fields. For scholars working on organisational nostalgia, the collective memory lens offers a disciplined way to ask how painful pasts are curated, narrated, and mobilised, and how those narratives affect identity and legitimacy in the present (Golant & Sillince, 2017). Policymakers and governance practitioners can also draw from the book’s emphasis on recognition, victim participation, and the limits of purely legalistic fixes, because those themes translate into institutional design questions about trust, accountability, and the conditions of non-repetition.
As an academic book, The Social Construction of Kidnapping is both a synthesis and a wager: the synthesis is the careful joining of theory, data, testimony, and institutional analysis; the wager is that we can talk about kidnapping without feeding the appetite for spectacle. It succeeds best when it stays close to the human consequences while refusing to surrender analysis, and when it treats memory work and recognition as serious forms of public life rather than as therapeutic footnotes. If there is a limitation, it is that the very richness of the framework can ask a lot of a reader who wants quick policy prescriptions, but perhaps that impatience is one of the habits the book is trying to correct. In the end, you come away with a sharper sense of how kidnapping rearranges a society’s movement, language, trust, and memory, and why any serious human rights response has to start by taking those rearrangements seriously.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Christensen, T., Lægreid, P., & Rykkja, L. H. (2016). Organizing for crisis management: Building governance capacity and legitimacy. Public administration review, 76(6), 887-897.
Fass, P. S. (1997). Kidnapped: child abduction in America. Scholars Press.
Golant, B. D., & Sillince, J. A. (2007). The constitution of organizational legitimacy: A narrative perspective. Organization studies, 28(8), 1149-1167.
Morewitz, S. (2019). Kidnapping and violence: new research and clinical perspectives. Springer.
Ochoa, R. (2019). Intimate crimes: Kidnapping, gangs, and trust in Mexico City. Oxford University Press.
Pond, P., & Lewis, J. (2019). Riots and Twitter: connective politics, social media and framing discourses in the digital public sphere. Information, Communication & Society, 22(2), 213-231.
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Reviewed by:
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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