What's going on there?

So there's a few factors kind of coalescing to drive this trend, and it's something that we've seen fairly consistently over the past five or six years.

The world is becoming more complicated.

Uh, a lot of civil conflicts have opened up in the past half decade, um, which themselves have created conditions for kidnap for ransom to escalate quite significantly.

Um, equally the, the proliferation of, of transnational organized crime, uh, has enabled smaller gangs to carry out kidnapping, both to generate in-revenue for themselves, but also to consolidate control over territory, drug trafficking routes, and in a lot of cases to enforce extortion demands.

So if a company doesn't pay when that extortion is issued, um, they will often use kidnapping of staff as a means of effectively intimidating the organization a- and from their perspective, trying to kind of get them to be compliant.

On, on top of that you have, uh, a number of technological changes.

Um, but what about geopolitics? What's the link between geopolitics and kidnap?