Between power and powerlessness: Families and politicised captivity

Abstract The family is rarely a topic of international politics, but politicised captivity is one of the few domains where familial relations can play a prominent role. Crucially, the families involved generally lack the traditional power resources of wealth or official status that would normally be understood to influence outcomes within international politics. What they do possess, however, is a different set of emotional–political resources that both evoke emotion and invoke a diverse set of social rules concerning emotional experience. To explore our claims, we examine the case of the family of Yokota Megumi, a thirteen-year-old Japanese girl abducted by North Korea. This case both illustrates the potential of emotional–political resources to mobilise action and also highlights the risks that emotional narratives of families can be leveraged by political actors for their own purposes.