ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on terrorist demands for a cash ransom in exchange for their detainees. It gives a review of the arguments on whether one should agree to the exchange and advice on how to understand and manipulate their motivations and obligations. The chapter reviews ideas for manipulating the ransom-seeking hostage-takers' motivations to official advantage. They includes for funds that the group will spend on further terrorist activities or associated bureaucratic activities and for symbolic concession where more desirable concessions cannot be achieved. Those motivations also includes for religious duty or allowance and for subsistence and consumption of luxuries. The chapter concludes that the official side's best response to a hostage-taker that is seeking or claiming to seek funds to support terrorism is to characterize the hostage-taking as religiously or internationally unlawful. Such acts involve selfish profit seeking, and to target the publicity toward the terrorists' local community.
