Lebanese hostages’ families, moral injury and the legacy of the Arsal kidnappings

Despite the ubiquity of kidnappings, how such events impact victims’ families remains largely overlooked. This paper draws on an original case study, utilizing 30 interviews with hostage families whose relatives were kidnapped by Islamist militants in Arsal, Lebanon in 2014. It provides new empirical evidence on the circumstances surrounding the ‘Arsal kidnappings’ while problematizing families as merely ‘secondary’ victims. Instead, it draws on the concept of ‘Moral Injury’ (MI) to explore how hostage families are affected by witnessing actions that violates their moral beliefs and often involves a sense of betrayal or loss of trust inauthorities. This extension of MI to hostage contexts offers a more holistic and interdisciplinary frame to observe the psychosocial legacy for families who are often personally implicated in negotiation processes with captors (and the State) and in which their own victimhood is often contested. Such an approach recognizes that hostage crises often result in ongoing familial suffering, guilt, trauma and resentment against the state. This case study offers a prescient remainder of Lebanon’s need to address historic injustices and more broadly the detrimental social legacy of hostage crises.