From petro-coercion to hostage economics: Wrongful detention as statecraft in the Venezuelan sanctions regime

This article introduces hostage economics as an analytic framework for examining how wrongful detention acquires structured bargaining relevance under conditions of sanctions pressure and declining hydrocarbon rents. The case of Venezuela is analysed within the broader literature on coercive statecraft and energy geopolitics. The paper argues that detention practices – frequently stemming from domestic repression, institutional fragmentation, or contingent security dynamics – become diplomatically consequential through their iterative intersection with sanctions enforcement, energy-sector negotiations, and externally coordinated advocacy. The analysis explicitly rejects monocausal accounts premised on strategic substitution or centralised design, putting forward instead the argument that external constraint does not generate detention practices ex nihilo, but conditions the environments in which such practices become legible, reusable, and politically consequential as bargaining instruments. These dynamics are illustrated through qualitative process tracing of a French–American detention case between January and July 2025. The article concludes by identifying a normative dilemma: that the iterative diplomatic engagement necessary to secure individual releases risks institutionalising detention as a recurrent and self-reinforcing feature of authoritarian statecraft under conditions of diminishing material leverage.