Negotiating with Terrorists

Strategy, Tactics, and Politics

Guy Olivier Faure, I. William Zartman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415566292
• eBook ISBN: 9781136998652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume addresses the important issue of negotiating with terrorists, and offers recommendations for best practice and processes.

Hostage negotiation is the process of trying to align two often completely polarised parties. Authorities view hostage taking as unacceptable demands made by unacceptable means. However terrorists view their actions as completely justified, even on moral and religious grounds. If they are to try and reconcile these two sides, it is essential for hostage negotiators to understand terrorist culture, the hostage takers' profiles, their personality, their view of the world and also the authorities, their values and their framing of the problem raised by the taking of hostages.

Although not advocating negotiating with terrorists, the volume seeks to analyse when, why, and how it is done. Part I deals with the theory and quantifiable data produced from analysis of hostage situations, while Part II explores several high profile case studies and the lessons that can be learnt from them.

This volume will be of great interest to students of terrorism studies, conflict management, negotiation, security studies and IR in general.

I William Zartman is the Jacob Blaustein Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Organization and Conflict Resolution and former Director of the Conflict Management and African Studies Programs, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Processes of International Negotiation (PIN) Program at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. He is author/editor of over 20 books on negotiation, conflict and mediation.

Guy Olivier Faure is Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne University, Paris I, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Processes of International Negotiation (PIN) Program at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. He has served as an advisor to French government on hostage negotiations.

Part I
How to negotiate

Kidnapping the kidnappers

Terrorism has multiple faces and if its central figure remains often opaque; its various expressions come to light in action. Kidnappings, hostage-takings, blackmail, suicide bombers are concrete means for terrorist groups to get media attraction and to generate enough fear to consider that they can seriously impact a much wider situation such as the political-strategic domain.

Confronted with terrorists, negotiators share some common attributes with firefighters, for they both have to contain the incident and limit its consequences, and may be burned in the process. What are the immediate measures to take in the case of hostage taking? Which strategy to choose contingent to the counterpart and to the surrounding circumstances? Should negotiation or assault be considered as the most effective option? There are a large number of cases for which there is a priori no ZOPA (Zone of Potential Agreement). The point thus is to build one, then to reach an optimal within it. How far can one go in terms of persuasion, which means in modifying the subjective utilities of the terrorists, their goals, at least, those of the present time?

Negotiation is an activity that can be unfolded through three different resolution rationales: concession, compensation, and conversion (or construction). At which of these levels should one operate when facing hostage-takers? Is there any preferable sequential order? What should be the fundamentals of an effective intervention?

The tactical goals of an operation can be understood as elements of a more global strategy, following the example of Clausewitz, distinguishing the engagement from the battle itself or the battle from the war. If negotiation starts, one enters the universe of Machiavelli, made up of many tactics aiming to move toward a predefined goal. Taking into account the counterpart, the carrot and stick system must be especially well thought out and borrow from a much wider register than the usual range of negotiation tactics.

Hostage-takings are situations in which terrorists have selected the context and organized some of its modalities. Regarding this advantage for the abductors, negotiators must intervene in an emergency and face risks of various natures and of some importance. In addition, to save lives is in most cases a priority, but not the only one. To correctly assess the related stakes and risks, the stress management linked to that type of intervention, the behaviors that may have to be devised on the spot, the apparent irrationality of the arguments displayed, implies the implementation of a method borrowing from experience learnt through years of practice of this type of negotiation. This is what Laurent Combalbert, former negotiator from the French RAID, offers.

Kidnapping and hostage-taking logically invite negotiation but imply such a variety of situations that it is quite essential at first to establish distinct categories of hostage-takers, the sequence of steps to be taken by the authorities, the various tasks to be performed by the negotiation team, the ideal profile (if any) of the negotiator and the different phases encountered in hostage situations. Best practice drawn from the experience of law enforcement agencies is displayed regarding verbal tactics. Finally, predictors for anticipating the outcome based on verbal cues from terrorists are reviewed in the chapter by Alex Schmid, St Andrews University, and Peter Flemming, of the ITERATE project at St Andrews.

Knowing the “enemy” is an essential requirement to put as many chances as possible on the side of the negotiator. David Pinter, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, offers a further and quite functional distinction between terrorist and insurgent, for both types of counterparts have different long-term perspectives, different representations of the situation and different strategic choices to carry out their action. As a consequence, different negotiation approaches have to be used for dealing with them. Both categories still have in common something that they also share with the governments, their extreme reluctance to be seen as “supping with the devil,” whichever side of the negotiation table is considered. Caught in a trap both strategic and tactical, state and terrorist are each other’s hostage, seeking collaboration yet refusing the other’s price and even the occasion to discuss price. These three chapters lead us inside the process of how it is done.

1
Guidelines for negotiating with terrorists

Laurent Combalbert

From interpersonal conflict to the management of high risk situations, from daily behavior in personal relations to the resolution of serious social and commercial crisis, each manager spends a good deal of his time in negotiating. However, many do it in the style of M.Jourdain, who spoke prose without knowing it, without any real method to grasp and tame the risks involved. Finding agreements on sensitive subjects, stabilizing a difficult or demanding client, settling a dispute between collaborators, leading a commercial negotiation with high stakes—these are some of the situations that a manager must resolve by constantly balancing firmness and flexibility. Firmness because each problem must find a solution as rapidly as possible for the proper functioning of the enterprise. Flexibility because the resolution of conflict in an authoritarian manner settles nothing about the underlying problem and instead leads to the resurgence of the phenomenon. Few negotiators today are prepared to conduct negotiations in which power relations are unbalanced to the extreme, time becomes an insurmountable constraint, and physical and psychological threats are an unacceptable means of pressure.

Today many are the internal and external conflicts and undertakings where the notion of risk is unavoidable. Here is the risk associated with business, the risk that can come from threats to capital that puts in danger the survival of an activity or a service, or a physical or psychological risk (in any case perceived as such) or violence in interpersonal relations or threats weighing such relations. Risk is an element that can no longer be avoided in the analytical phase of the context, the preparation of the strategy and the constitution of a negotiating team. This is true in the general business of negotiations; it is above all true in the matter of negotiating over hostages or over wild political demands.

Crisis negotiation

Crisis negotiation developed out of a need of police forces and intervention groups to deal with situations of terrorism and hostage-taking; and it has developed over time to extend to the business world and even official or private diplomacy. The methods and techniques that came out of hostage and terrorist negotiations can be adapted for business enterprises or political undertakings as modified by the perception of managers or negotiators in situations of urgency and risk, of high stakes, of power struggles, of team functioning, of the management of stress and the communication of influence. By enabling the creation of reasoned and durable solutions to complex situations, crisis negotiation adds another tool in the kit of diplomats and businessmen.

It is possible to adapt to the business world the typology of situations where police negotiators intervene. Even if the actions involved are different and only loosely comparable, they often develop according to the same logic. The following categorization of typical terrorist situations is used in police action: the psychotic (individual acting alone), the hostage-takers (one or more individuals holding one or more captives), and the “Tehran embassy” (a collective action).

The situation of the psychotic involves an action of self-isolation. This isolation can be physical (for example, the case of a person who closes himself up in his silence, in a refusal to communicate with others) or psychological (the person who hides behind his ideological certainty or his vision of a problem and refuses to enter into discussions with others). The origins of these situations are multiple: a difficult personality who is misunderstood or badly handled, an emotional crisis due to successive losses, or personal and/or professional difficulties, a millenarian belief, are antisocial reactions of desperation and millennialism.

The hostage situation involves an action of capturing others. In police situations, the objective is to impose a power relationship at a particular moment in

Table 1.1 Terrorist types

order to get a deal or even just to be listened to. This is particularly the case in certain social situations where the threat to hold up production, to disrupt normal activities, or to occupy buildings is brandished or sometimes put into effect.

The “Tehran embassy” situation involves a collective occupation. In this case a group of people occupy the buildings or a particular site and refuse to leave before having obtained publicity for their cause, public attention about their action, or a response to their demands. The number of these types of actions is continually increasing in recent years.

It would be difficult to draw up an exhaustive list of situations for which crisis negotiation is necessary, since negotiation can be useful in business and politics whenever it opens the way to peaceful solutions in potentially risky situations. In the end negotiation is a communications technique placed within the frame of technical and psychological preparation and teamwork.

The consideration of risk in negotiation

To the question whether negotiation is risky, the answer is clearly yes. It is one of the principal means of putting an end to particularly dangerous situations, whether within the context of international conflict resolution, of degenerating social crisis, or of interpersonal differences. But it carries with it great risk and so it is important to examine the way negotiators regard the inherent risks involved (Avenhaus and Sjöstedt, 2009). Some are filled with confidence, often to excess, in dangerous situations, while others are deep into stress and pressure in situations that are relatively simple and clear, at least at first sight. It is important to examine the perception and apprehension of each party, particularly in the context of team negotiations. It would be best to choose a negotiator who is able to identify risk to its proper extent and who can therefore show a behavior appropriately adapted to the situation.

In the framework of crisis negotiation, there are four principal factors of risk perception on the part of negotiators: urgency, stakes, constraints, and instability.

Urgency. Marshal Lyautey used to say, “You can do it or not do it, but if you do it, do it well.” It would be important to add “particularly under the pressure of time.” In fact it is surprising to see the extent to which many negotiators impose devastating time pressure on themselves, often setting ultimatums for themselves where there are none. As a result, the situation is perceived as risky because it seems necessary to make urgent decisions, and the distance which separates urgency from precipitation is not very great.

Stakes. The police negotiator has a clear stake in his work: save lives. From that moment on, all other stakes can appear less constraining, but it is not so: the notion of stakes is highly dependent on the perception of each party and it is often not rare to see negotiators in commercial discussions with high interests involved perceiving their stakes as so exorbitant that they are troubled, in fact inhibited, in their pursuit of their negotiations.

Constraints. Again it is surprising to see that many diplomats, businessmen or managers are not prepared to carry out negotiations within the constraints of the situation. Constraints can result from physical pressures; conducting discussions with terrorists or hostage-takers under the threat of sequestration or recourse to violence adds an extra dimension to the negotiation. The pressure can also be psychological; a narrow margin of error can indeed often rapidly destabilize even an experienced negotiator.

Instability. There are many factors of instability, but five stand out:

1 The unpredictability of behaviors, which can be the result of the emotional state of the parties, their psychological profiles, or group dynamics.

2 The irrationality of arguments or of tactics, over which control is difficult because of the absence of a rational basis.

3 The bad faith of parties who refuse to recognize eventual errors and thus by their reactions reinforce their feelings of injustice at the hands of the others.

4 The context that gives a volatile character to the negotiations, for example a conflict over salaries before a group of clients, or a social demonstration in a sensitive location.

5 The issues in the conflict: a negotiation over a political goal is always more unstable than the discussion about the use of the Christmas tree.

When two or more of these factors come together, the situation takes on a character which should lead the mediator trying to bring a solution to step back a bit and make sure s/he has taken into account the potentially unstable character of the event. The perception of risk in a negotiation and more particularly in a complex crisis situation is equally linked to the state of stress and emotion of the conflicting parties. To deny that risk factors are conducive to a particular state of emotion, capable of modifying the perception of each party, would be counterproductive and disqualifying. Learning to recognize and overcome one’s own stress is a much more professional and effective an attitude and shows a willingness to prepare properly for a successful negotiation.

The management of risk: the PACIFICA method

The PACIFICA method has been developed out of years of practice in crisis negotiation by the police and developed to be applied as well to situations of private diplomacy in businesses. Its object is to furnish negotiators, whatever their type of activity, with a clear and pragmatic process of preparation and behavior for conflict situations. Its steps are: Possession, Analysis, Characterization, Identification, Formation, Influence, Closure, Assessment. Each step of the method is a precondition for the next, none of which should be neglected even if all do not require the same amount of time of preparation and application.

1 Possession

The first step in the process of crisis negotiation, capital but often neglected despite its importance, is to take possession of the situation. When a crisis negotiat...

Table of contents

• Cass series on political violence
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• The PIN Program at the IIASA
• Introduction
• Part I How to negotiate
• Part II Practical/tactical
• References
• Index