Bhaso Ndzendze

3 January 2026

As only he can, second-term US President Donald Trump has got the world abuzz with his latest unpredictable manouvre: the reported abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. So has begun 2026 with a rocky start on the global landscape. The act was conducted amid explosions in the capital city of Caracas. It is as brazen as it is illegal under international law.

Yet it is not without historical precedent.

The last two decades have seen the gradual erosion of international norms, and the taboo against leader kidnapping is one of them. In the normal course of events, even the most powerful states have tended to push their target incumbent into fleeing their country and political position, rather than straight-up abducting them. To the best of my knowledge (based on my research for another book 11 years ago), the last time a leader was abducted was all the way in the nineteenth century — long before the establishment of the United Nations Charter, with all its guarantees of sovereignty. In 1809 Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had Pope Pius VII abducted from Rome over quarrels over authority, and kept him in France until 1814, when he lost his own throne (and was himself sent to exile in Elba and then St Helena in 1815). The years since the Afro-Arab Spring have seen numerous heads of state and/or government – i.e., presidents and/or prime ministers – flee from power in Africa and Asia, most recently Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Sheikh Hassina of Bangladesh (2024), to Russia and India respectively, and Andry Rajoelina of Madagascar (2025), to France. All of these were induced by popular protests or, in the case of Syria, a successful insurgency. Several other heads of state have fled their countries following coups in West and Central Africa since 2020.

Ivory Coast and Lebanese Precedents?

The most recent cases which meet the criteria of the abduction of an incumbent in modern international affairs have occured in Africa and the Middle East: President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast in 2010, and Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri (2017). The former was de facto abducted (along with his wife, like Mr Maduro) by being placed under conditions of arrest by the International Criminal Court, in an operation led by the French military, and taken to The Hague. He was eventually granted an acquittal in 2021 against accusations of inciting violence following his country’s 2010 elections which he lost.

The second incident was even more strange and may be the closest parallel to the current situation. At the height of the Iran-Saudi proxy conflict, in November 2017 the Lebanese prime minister was in Saudi Arabia when he was broadcast resigning from his position, in what were widely regarded as coercive circumstances. Prime ministers usually resign in their home countries, not during foreign trips. He eventually returned to his country, where he rescinded the resignation. The country also has a seperate head of state (President Michel Aoun at the time), which closed space and prevented the potential vacuum and chaos likely to emerge in Venezuela in coming weeks.

The Venezualian Precedent is Different

At a time when inter-state tensions and disputes are reemerging (a trend to which Maduro has himself contributed through his aggressive policy towards small, oil-rich neighbouring Guyana), and international institutions and norms are at their weakest, the abduction of Maduro could set a precedent far more significant than the Ivorian and Lebanese cases. Firstly, the two were carried out either under the guise (or pretext) of international law (the enforcement of electoral outcomes in Ivory Coast), or were impermanent (Hariri was eventually reinstated as prime minister of Lebanon). Secondly, they were conducted by less symbolically powerful states. While the US has been gradually losing its once-idealised image of being the world’s moral superpower, the country still holds considerable moral weight, even among those who abhor its current administration.

It is as true as it is ironic: the world’s opinion on what is acceptable or not still flows downstream from the US. With this recent operation, we can expect a more lawless world in which presidents are abducted in the dark of night in pursuit of geopolitical goals. States may soon come to the conclusion that – on the basis of the US example – it is better, and more cost-effective, to simply kidnap an opposing regime rather than spend time and resources defeating them through diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, and even battlefield outcomes.