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Summary Toros (2008): 'We Don't Negotiate With Terrorists!': Legitimacy and Complexity in Terrorist Conflicts
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Summary of Toros (2008) for the course Terrorism and Counterterrorism from Security Studies.
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Toros (2008) ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists!’: Legitimacy and Complexity inTerrorist Conflicts
Introduction
Main argument to reject negotiations with terrorists = it would legitimize the terrorists and terrorism
more broadly, weaken the democratic quality of states and likely only serve to incite more violence.
With the advent of Al-Qaeda, complexity has been added as another major hurdle to applying conflict
resolution methods to terrorism. 🡪 question of “who to talk to”
However, this paper argues that the factors of legitimacy and complexity may also be conducive to
a peaceful resolution of conflicts involving terrorist violence.
The study of terrorism
Field of research has been highlighted by the quest for a definition of ‘terrorism’. No single definition
but broad understanding within academia of what it constitutes: (1) a violent means (2) aimed at
triggering political change (3) by affecting a larger audience than its immediate target.
This act of naming, however, excludes certain qualities of the phenomenon. Furthermore, once acts
have been named as ‘terrorism’, future acts will automatically be categorized as such even though it
may be different or not correspond with ‘terrorist’ acts.
Nonetheless, the term can be used critically by adopting a minimal foundationalist perspective
drawn from critical theory from work of Frankfurt school and Robert Cox:
Terrorism can be understood as a violent means aimed at triggering political change by affecting a
larger audience than its immediate target that is to be examined using both problem-solving and
critical theory and focusing on its socio-historical context in an analysis embedded in broader social
and political theory that acknowledges a normative role to theory
With this approach, terrorism becomes a term used to describe actions and means, but ‘terrorist’ is
rejected as a label for a group or individual on the basis that it would reduce human beings to their
actions and thus ignore other key elements constituting the individual or social group.
Legitimacy
Main argument against engaging with terrorists: it would legitimize their actions, goals, and their
means. 🡪 which could lead to increased attacks.
Distinguish between
- Ad hoc negotiations (aimed at releasing hostages for example) 🡪 seen as problematic but at
times unavoidable
- Political negotiations (often conflated with concessions) 🡪 seen as counterproductive and
dangerous
How negotiations lead to legitimization is rarely elaborated on.
The very act of naming a group or action as terrorist is partly aimed at delegitimizing the group
(naming-isolating-radicalizing process). This is not a desirable side-effect that accompanies the legal
and financial penalties of such a designation, but rather one of the stated goals of governments in
naming terrorist groups.
However, consequences of delegitimizing a group the terrorist label:
- curtails attempts to resolve the conflict nonviolently (limits on range of responses)
- can polarize such movements, forcing moderate voices to choose between accepting the
‘terrorist’ label and thus engage in illegal actions or abandon their activism altogether
Terrorism appears to leave states with the difficult choice of
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