preventive form of security that operates prior to the issue of the policy and throughout
its renovation process at the end of cover. Once the policy is written and under the event
of a kidnap both victim and company are subjected to a reparational form of security
through which the impact of the event is minimised by an expert handling of the
situation. Life in this case has been affected; it now needs to be repaired. The fact that
out of 15,000 reported kidnaps every year more than 70% are resolved through ransom
payments, as Kroll describes, would denote the reparational capacity of K&R insurance
policies, presuming of course that a big part of that 70% involved K&R policies (which
is difficult to ascertain due to the secrecy of the policies).
Emotions, however, are yet
to be repaired.
Risk embracing in context
K&R insurance is a sophisticated form of ‘embracing’ kidnap risk. It recognises
risk as a way of ordering kidnap as a phenomenon and rendering it in as calculable a
form as possible. This approach, as argued by Mitchell Dean, is ‘a way of representing
events in a certain form so they might be made governable in particular ways, with
particular technologies and for particular goals’.
In this sense, ‘notions of risk can be
made intelligible as specific representations that render reality in such a form as to make
it amenable to types of action and intervention’.
Kidnap, as this paper has shown, is
problematised in the form of risk in order to make it governable through K&R
insurance. Insurance is the technology through which kidnap is rendered manageable
through its problematisation as risk; risk enables a treatment of kidnap through
24
Kroll, Kidnap for Ransom Brochure.
25
Mitchell Dean, "Risk and Reflexive Government," in Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern
Society
(London: SAGE, 1999)., p. 177
26
Ibid., p. 178
15
Convention