Anja Shortland is a Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London. Anja studies private governance in the world’s trickiest markets: hostages, fine art, and antiquities—and how people live, trade, and invest in complex and hostile territories. Although often based on data analysis, her work usually cuts across disciplinary boundaries adopting techniques and insights from sociology, engineering, geography, politics, international relations and economics. Anja has published widely on the issue of kidnap and hijack for ransom and co-authored the 2013 World Bank Policy Report: "The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat; Rebuilding a Nation." Her book: Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business is published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Anja was an Engineering and Economics undergraduate at Oxford and then did her Masters and PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. Before joining King's she worked as a lecturer in Economics at Leicester, a Reader in Economics at Brunel University and as a consultant to the World Bank.