THE PROCESS OF CONFRONTING TERRORIST-RELATED CONFLICT

Given these trends in understanding both the types of strategies that appear to work best in dealing with terrorists and their complex web of motives, how can they be confronted from a process perspective in direct talks as in a hostage or kidnapping negotiation? To address this issue, it might be best to take a step back and make a distinction between crisis and normative bargaining.

Beginning with these relational challenges, the terrorist-police exchange aimed at conflict resolution must first address the relational issues to relieve the crisis and allow the indi­viduals to focus on substantive issues. Once this transition occurs, and individuals have established some kind of working relationship with sufficient levels of trust and affiliation to continue, bargaining becomes more norma­tive and focused on substantive issues capable of resolving the situation. Rogan, Hammer and Van Zandt (1997) make a similar distinc­tion in their communication-based negotiation model between instrumental, relational and identity concerns in a negotiation. These issues are all intertwined, but when they become more balanced, individuals can concentrate on moving toward a negotiated settlement.

Achieving this transition to normative bar­gaining, particularly with terrorist groups, can be conceptualized as a challenge in removing a number of the paradoxes disputants face in the course of conflict resolution. This chapter will now detail these paradoxes and then use the 40-day siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem (Cristal, 2006) to illustrate how the negotiators managed these paradoxes to make the transition to normative bargaining to resolve the siege.

Paradox and crisis bargaining

The crisis context is organized around a set of interlinked paradoxes, each of which must be addressed for conflict resolution to be successful in a terrorist negotiation event. The first paradox that must be addressed and that underlies the entire conflict event is termed the competitive paradox. In a set of papers, Donohue and colleagues (Donohue, Kaufmann, Smith & Ramesh, 1991; Donohue, Ramesh & Borchgrevink, 1991; Donohue, 1998; Donohue & Hoobler, 2002) outlined a theory to account for the dynamic evolution of relationships in conflict. Based on Strauss's (1978) Negotiated Order Theory, Relational Order Theory contends that negotiators continuously create and tacitly negotiate relational limits that serve to constrain the substantive negotiation process. The two main relational parameters or limits that communicators negotiate while they interact are affiliation and interdependence based on the consensus of a variety of papers focusing on the core parameters defin­ing interpersonal relationships (Burgoon & Hale, 1984). The issue of interdependence focuses on the extent to which parties can influence or exert behavioral control over one another in the context of the relation­ship between them.

The competitive paradox is a product of high interdependence a low affiliation. Disputants send unaffiliative and disapprov­ing messages in the context of relational dependence. That is, to defeat their rival, parties must increase interdependence to pull their opponent closer by initiating communi­cation or aggression while also pushing the opponent away through a show of negative affiliation by being unfriendly and untrusting. When parties are in this condition, they communicate very directly while showing signs of negative affect (Donohue & Roberto, 1993). This paradox is disabling if it is not recognized and addressed, because the focus moves away from the obligation to mutually exchange information and proposals to create a better future and more toward asserting individual rights aimed at achieving one's own goals while the obligations to share proposals and ideas, which is the essence of conflict resolution.

Because the emphasis is on asserting rights and resisting obligations, the communication carries almost a moral imperative and author­ity with it. Parties must resist with all their resources because key, central and defining rights have been violated. This is the kind of communication that Winter (1991) observed during the first few exchanges between leaders dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The United States certainly asserted its right to enforce the Monroe Doctrine that seeks to prevent non-Western-Hemisphere powers from establishing military dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, as letters from Khrushchev became more conciliatory, the United States altered its focus away from rights and more toward specific substantive issues. The parties moved away from aggres­sion temporarily by agreeing to reduce their interdependence.

Managing the competitive paradox can be accomplished by either increasing affiliation or decreasing interdependence.

As the interaction evolves, parties commit­ted to forging an agreement look for ways to resolve the paradox by increasing expressions of affiliation or decreasing interdependence. In a recent paper, Taylor and Thomas (2005) examined the linguistic style of hostage takers and hostage negotiators along three dimensions: structural features of language (word count, articles, negations, tense, propo­sitions), social affect (negative and positive emotion, relational references) and cognitive contributions (causation, insight, discrepancy, certainty and exclusivity). The hostage takers in these transcripts ranged from criminals caught in the act to domestic disputes to men­tally impaired individuals. The authors found that the hostage negotiator and hostage taker in the successful (a negotiated outcome) con­dition were synchronous on all but four of the 18 categories across these language choices. In the unsuccessful condition (the situation was resolved tactically), the parties were synchronous on only two parameters.

Further, when the data were analyzed on a turn-by-turn basis, the hostage negotiator in the negotiation condition drove the frame choices whereas in the tactical condition, the hostage taker drove the frame choices. In other words, collaboratively resolved negotiations were characterized by more frame coordi­nation and the use of more collaborative frames with fewer transitions between frames (Donohue & Taylor, 2006). In comparison to unsuccessful negotiations, the dialogue of successful negotiations involved greater coordination of turn taking, reciprocation of positive affect, a focus on the present rather than the past, and a focus on alternatives rather than on competition.

Within the context of the competitive paradox, there are more specific kinds of relational paradoxes that hostage negotiators must also confront as they learn to deal with hostage takers. In a classic book on policing, Muir (1977) describes the kinds of coercive relationships that often emerge in the course of police work. Coercive relationships, or controlling others through threats to harm, precipitate extortionate transactions in which parties seek their ends through the use of threats which often take the form of hostages and ransoms. Muir argues that extortionate transactions are organized around a series of paradoxes, and that reconstructing these transactions requires managing the paradoxes. Muir’s first example is the Paradox of Dispossession, or the less one has, the less one has to lose. The idea in this paradox is that the hostage taker is simultaneously powerful and powerless. The hostage taker’s power derives from taking something of value from the hostage, but this is an act of a desperately powerless person who must take hostages as a last resort to gain power. If the hostage taker is dispossessed or has the sense that he or she is detached from those things which are valued (even life itself) or has nothing to lose, then the negotiator loses any leverage over the hostage taker. The goal of the negotiator is to find something that the hostage taker values that the negotiator can ultimately control to balance power. This balance is essential in moving from a crisis to a normative bargaining context. When both parties value something, they can bargain in good faith to claim it.

Secondly, the Paradox of Detachment holds that parties are both attached and detached simultaneously to one another and to the situation. They are attached in the sense that they must co-confront a difficult negotiation session, but they are detached in the sense that each party moves back and forth within a frame of indifference. By communicating indifference, the victim can become less valuable to the hostage taker.

Ultimately, the police must learn to main­tain sufficient levels of attachment among all parties to move from crisis to normative bargaining. When the hostage taker is attached and values something that the negotiator can control, and the negotiator is attached and focused on managing the hostage taker's problem and the victim and hostage taker are somewhat personally attached to one another, then the bargaining can proceed in good faith. During a prolonged negotiation, managing these values is difficult given the restricted lines of communication and the many sources of interference that may impact on the sense of detachment such as direct communication with family members, for example, or overt signs of threat from police that might cause the hostage taker to become less attached and more desperate.

The Paradox of Face focuses on the broad issue of identity, and often in a hostage situation, the narrower issue of threat. Parties vacillate between communicating both toughness and flexibility and often must do so simultaneously. The professional police identity is rooted in a desire to be both firm and tough, while being tempered with an ability to be understanding and fair. The hostage taker's identity is rooted in being perceived as a credible threat to secure a desired outcome, although not so much of a threat that the police are likely to take tactical action to preserve the lives of the hostages. The hostage taker must strike a balance between being tough, but reasonable so that negotiation appears more viable as a strategy than tactical action. The hostage's face can shift between being a helpless victim, to a hostage taker supporter or even an overt detractor.

Of particular interest in managing this paradox is interpreting threats. In a classic work on threats, Shelling (1956) indicates that for threats to be credible, they must be specific and perceived as within the willingness and capability of the threatener. This threat then binds it to the identity of the threatener and becomes part of their face. In an empirical test of coercive power and concession making in bilateral negotiation, de Dreu (1995) found that balanced power produced fewer threats and demands than unequal power. This result suggests that the role of the police is to manage this paradox by seeking to balance identity issues in such a way as to make threats less necessary so the parties can shift to more of a normative bargaining context and resolve the situation appropriately.

Finally, Muir (1977) identifies the Paradox of Irrationality which focuses on the issue of emotional involvement. In Muir's terms, the more delirious the threatener, the more serious is the threat, and the more delirious the victim, the less serious is the threat. If the hostage taker is too emotional, he or she may become irrational and incapable of managing the scene or bargaining in any kind of normative manner. Or, if the hostage taker exhibits no emotion or involvement, then it might be a warning sign of detachment which again removes the possibility of normative bargaining. In his chapter on emotion and emotional expression in crisis bargaining, Rogan et al. (1997) make the point that it is vital to both understand the kinds of emotional expressions hostage takers are communicating and be able to respond appropriately to them. Muir would argue that the real challenge is to manage the opposing forces of irrationality that intertwine between the hostage taker, hostage negotiator and the victim. Not only must the police be able to read the hostage taker's emotions, but they must also understand their own emotional conditions. Police can act irrationally when the hostage taker confronts their face or threat­ens a hostage in some manner. As situations wear on, police might become too emotionally invested in terminating the situation and less invested in concentrating on the welfare of the hostages. Thus, the issue focuses again on the problem of balance. Are the hostage negotiators able to balance the complex set of emotional issues presented by themselves, the hostage takers and the victims?

Clearly, any negotiation can devolve into an extortionate abyss in which parties simply try to overwhelm one another with coercive force. That's what war is all about. The declaration of war is an admission that the ability to balance these four paradoxes within the competitive paradox has failed. In a world where all- out war aimed at defeating an enemy into submission is quickly disappearing, the need to understand and manage the extortionate transaction becomes even more imperative. Toward this end, it might be useful to use the example of the Forty Day Siege of the Church of Nativity that occurred in April and May 2002 between the Palestinians and Israelis (Cristal, 2006). This chapter now turns to a description of that event and an examination of how the paradoxes were resolved in this crisis.

The Church ofNativity example

The wave of violence triggered by the failure of the Camp David accords in 2000 ultimately resulted in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) occupying Bethlehem in 2002, which was essentially a Palestinian-held city. This effort resulted in many Palestinians, wanted by the IDF for terrorist activities, taking refuge in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem built over the traditional birthplace of Christ. Rather than take the church by force which would have precipitated an international incident, the IDF decided to use negotiations to relieve the crisis. The standoff began on April 2 and ended with a series of political negotiations on May 10.

There were three main groups caught in the church at the beginning of the siege: members of the Tanzim which is the armed wing of Fateh, commanders of the Palestinian Security Forces who were wanted by Israel for conducting and supporting terrorist activities, and a group of Hamas fighters. The Israeli negotiators pursued three main strategies in working through the crisis. They first sought to undermine the Palestinian's safe zone or sense of security in their military training and orientation.Thegoal was to change their focus to being on their personal circumstances rather than on their military orientation. Second, they sought to restructure responsibility for all local players by creating a set of procedural rules for how the negotiations were going to occur. Third, the Israelis sought to create a legitimate resolution to the crisis through a negotiation process. They were first com­mitted to negotiation rather than to a tactical conclusion of the crisis.

The negotiations began with an initial exchange of positions which identified key gaps in positions, but more importantly, established a respectful relationship between the parties resulting in a sense that problem solving was possible and likely. The next set of sessions worked to make some procedural decisions such as dividing the people in the church into four different categories and a decision to treat each group differently. This agreement focused on a few of the Palestinians working toward the first goal of reshaping the safe zone for the core group that Israel wanted to focus on. This allowed the Israelis in subsequent negotiations to focus on the individual circumstances of each member of the targeted group regarding their individual status, essentially accomplishing their second negotiation goal. From that point, the negotiations proceeded successfully to resolve the crisis, despite some setbacks both inside the church and external to the immediate situation.

This negotiation is an excellent example of how resolving paradoxes was essential in moving the negotiations forward. The competitive paradox that develops from a lack of affiliation was managed by initial communications that established mutual respect among the parties. A sense of integrity developed that served the parties well as they moved along. As these relational parameters developed, the parties were able to move away from a crisis bargaining orientation and resolve the paradoxes associated with the extortionate transaction. Regarding the paradox of dispossession, the move to divide the Palestinians into different groups was important to insure that most of the individuals inside the church did not feel dispossessed. Clearly, each person, regardless of the group they were in, valued their freedom and the fact that groups were perceived differently kept the focus on the future and the resolution of the crisis.

The paradox of detachment was also addressed skillfully. The key in resolving this crisis is to get the parties involved in the bargaining process. The more they are involved, the less they are detached from the constructive resolution of the situation. The early bargaining to divide groups, and subse­quent negotiation sessions that kept everyone involved, were key in resolving this paradox. Similarly, the Israeli team remained active in the sessions by reviewing all details of the events regularly to insure that they remained committed to a negotiated settlement. All signs pointed toward negotiation despite the setbacks.

The third paradox focusing on face was very skillfully managed by the Israeli team. Recall that this paradox focuses on man­aging the identity issue as it relates to the individuals’ desire to appear both firm and flexible. This paradox was very skillfully addressed by shifting the identity of the Palestinians from their military roles to their personal situations. By dividing the church inhabitants into groups and treating each individual separately to discuss their specific future fate, it removed the need to maintain the group military identity and all the power and threat issues that attend this identity. In fact, the face of the Palestinians was foremost in the minds of the Israeli negotiators as they worked through each phase of the negotiations.

The fourth paradox deals with the potential for irrationality. Again, early on, the Israelis established a very business-like approach to the negotiations. An organization was established, rules were developed and fol­lowed, and the development of normative bargaining proceeded effectively, even in the face of various impediments that emerged in the course of the discussions. More importantly, the Israeli negotiators maintained their composure during the 28-day siege which further improved their ability to make the transition to normative bargaining.

In contrast to the Church of Nativity example are the negotiations between the Russian forces and the Chechen in the Moscow theater hostage crisis that took place on October 23,2002. Dolnik and Pilch (2006) provide an account of the incident based on a compilation of various sources. Since this incident was handled very differently than the Church of Nativity negotiations, it serves as a useful contrast in learning how the management of the extortionate paradoxes influenced the outcome of the event.

The Moscow theater hostage crisis example

While Dolnik and Pilch (2006) provide a thor­ough account of the Russian and Chechen standoff at the Moscow Theater in 2002, it will be useful to provide a brief description of the event to provide an effective contrast with the Nativity Church negotiations. The siege by the Chechens of the Dubrovka Theater in the heart of Moscow followed two other hostage incidents perpetrated by the Chechens in an attempt to draw attention to their goal of breaking away from the Russian state. The prior incidents resulted in some hostage deaths following the primary tactic of the Russians to storm the scenes rather than engage in negotiations. At the Dubrovka Theatre, the Chechens stormed the building in the middle of a crowded performance taking hundreds of hostages and planting several explosives throughout the building in anticipation of a Russian rescue attempt. The siege occurred after months of planning and meticulous preparation by the Chechens.

Once the negotiations began, the Chechens articulated a primary, but vague demand of Russian withdrawal from Chechen soil. Several Russian negotiators and intermedi­aries carried on these negotiations which lasted about two days. Many of the hostages were released in the course of these negotia­tions, which were often tense as the Chechens made two ultimatum threats to kill hostages if interim demands were not met. In the end, the Russians lost patience with the negotiations and stormed the buildings to release gas in an attempt to chemically subdue the Chechens and the hostages. Unfortunately, the dose of gas was lethal and killed all but two of the remaining hostages and a handful of Chechens.

Dolnik and Pilch (2006) provide an excel­lent review of some of the key mistakes made by the Russians in handling the incident. It seems best to review these errors in the context of the paradoxes to see how the process used by the Russians failed to gener­ally relieve the paradoxes constructively. For example, the competitive paradox remained problematic since the Russians failed to develop any kind of working relationship with the Chechen hostage takers. In contrast to the Israelis, the Russians did not appear to be focused heavily on resolving the situation pri­marily by negotiation. They probably focused more on resolving the situation tactically, consistent with past practice. As a result, they did not have a consistent negotiation orientation that allowed them to develop an open line of communication capable of rendering some kind of affiliative relationship.

Second, the paradox of detachment was a particularly difficult challenge in this negotiation. The professional nature of the takeover by the Chechens made it clear that they were both powerful and powerless at the same time. They maintained extensive control over the scene in a very careful manner. To balance power and resolve the conflict, the Russians needed to increase the Chechen dependence on negotiation. They needed to develop a rich and consistent dialogue that explored each avenue for a resolution that saved the lives of the hostages. The lack of interest in substantive negotiations is evidenced by the number of mediaries that intervened in the dispute for the Russians. A committed approach to negotiation would have made a much more consistent path to giving power to the dialogue, and there's ample evidence that the Chechens wanted to talk.

The paradox of dispossession focuses on creating value. Since the Chechens were willing to sacrifice themselves for attention to their cause, it is important to insure that they wanted to live and wanted the hostages to live, as well. Without extensive communication and building this sense of value by reframing their perspectives, it is difficult to successfully deal with this paradox. Indeed, the impatience of the Russians is in stark contrast to the Israelis who exhibited a great deal of patience in managing their siege. Perhaps it is even useful to view this paradox from the Russian perspective. An interesting question is whether they were detached from the safety of the hostages given their primary focus on tactical intervention. At any rate, the Russians clearly failed to deal with the detachment issue, keeping the interaction at a crisis level in an extortionate framework.

The paradox of face focuses on identity. Where the Israelis successfully transformed the identity from soldier to individual per­son considering personal preferences, the Russians never moved the dialogue toward that objective. The Chechens were treated as one with little focus on individuals further reinforcing the paradox. Perhaps the lack of time the Russians had to deal with the dispute intervened here, as well. They did not seem interested in taking the time needed to transform face and identify strategies that could be used to help both sides manage face costs.

The final paradox is most interesting in this case. Irrationality played a significant role in this negotiation. In particular, the lack of any consistent negotiation strategy, and several important negotiation blunders insured that both parties remained fairly irrational during the entire event. The Russian offer to allow the Chechens to leave the scene in exchange for the hostages angered the Chechens, and was duplicated a few hours later which further drove the negotiation into irrationality. The Russians were similarly challenged since they also became progressively irrational as the event evolved. In reaction to international pressure, and the general policy of quick resolution, the Russians viewed time as more important than successful resolution. Perhaps because the Russians were detached from the lives of the hostages, they were willing to act on their impulses to storm the theater.

It is clear that the Israeli game plan in dealing with the Palestinian siege focused on reliving the crisis bargaining framework to move more constructively toward normative bargaining. The Russians functioned without an apparent negotiation game plan which resulted in the unnecessary loss of life. Perhaps the next step in this process is to review the phases of hostage negotiation to further understand the process of dispute resolution with terrorists.

Managing the Paradox

The question is, how can police place themselves in a position to manage these various paradoxes and transform the conflict from a crisis bargaining (Donohue & Roberto, 1993) to a normative bargaining situation? The general idea is that in the initial stages of a crisis event, the focus of the communication is not on the exchange of proposals to resolve the substantive issues dividing parties, but on managing the peripheral issues associated with the paradoxes and managing the crisis itself. Once these issues have been addressed, then parties can settle into a more normative bargaining mode that allows for exchanging proposals and building agreements. While Faure (2006) provides a very useful analysis of the 1979 hostage case at the US Embassy in Teheran using Zartman’s three-phase model of pre-negotiation, formula and details, this chapter will offer a refinement of that model that addresses the key process issues identified above.

Containment The first step in managing a hostage scene is containing the hostage takers in a fixed location (Donohue, et al. 1991). This is a pre-negotiation activity. The hostage negotiation team must be satisfied that they have eliminated routes into and away from the scene while also minimizing the ability of the hostage takers to contact third parties. Containment is essential to eliminate escape options to insure that negotiation is the only way out of the situation for the hostage takers. It also ensures that the hostage takers are not playing the crowd or talking to audiences with a different point of view (Cambria et al., 2002). The disastrous consequences of not containing an incident are made transparent by incidents in which well- intentioned members of the public are harmed or killed (McMains & Mullins, 2001).

In an era of modern electronics, commu­nication containment is very difficult. The hostage takers can learn about police activities from TV news coverage or use a cell phone to communicate with an outsider. In many bargaining contexts, the availability of infor­mation from third parties can dramatically shift the balance of power and undermine even the most persuasively crafted position. Yet, negotiators and scholars outside of the hostage context continue to focus on events at the negotiation table, with only cursory recognition of the “negotiations” that occur away from the table. Thus, it is important for negotiators and scene commanders to think broadly about the scene to help them manage the perceived value of issues while trying to gain influence and power (see Donohue & Hoobler, 2002; Donohue & Taylor, 2004).

Containment also has a positive effect on individuals’ engagement and coopera­tion within an interaction. Negotiators typi­cally show more interdependence, are more likely to reciprocate cooperation, and ulti­mately achieve higher joint outcomes than negotiators who have alternative options (Donohue & Taylor, 2004; Giebels, et al. 2000). Police negotiators often refer to this as creating a “we-are-in-it-together” environ­ment, whose rationale centers on the fact that it is more difficult for an individual to withdraw from the negotiating process when they perceive themselves as having a role in the interaction and as having ownership (i.e. a stake) in the negotiation’s success. Such engagement with the hostage taker is critical to successfully managing a high- stress, protracted interaction.

Beyond helping to influence a hostage taker’s behavior, containment also plays an important role in police negotiator efforts to present information persuasively. Contain­ment not only allows negotiators to limit a hostage taker’s knowledge of what might be available, but it also allows them to distort the value of the alternatives. For example, police negotiators will often remonstrate at length about the difficulty of providing something to the hostage taker. This approach draws on the scarcity principle (Cialdini, 2001, p. 203), which is to view a resulting offer or concession as considerably more attractive when it is presented as a rare event. Similarly, police negotiators will always try to break down any substantive considerations into their constituent parts. For example, this is rather than talk about providing fixed sandwiches (and whether the police negotiator and hostage taker have common preferences in condiments), what the bread should be (and the problems with certain vegetables in the sandwich), what drink should be included, whether or not there should be any side orders and so on. This process also facilitates relationship building as both parties are problem solving and having a communication success.

In summary, police negotiators rely on containment to limit the influence of unpre­dictable outside factors and to allow for some control of how information is fed to the other party. The impact of not containing these factors is very apparent in the high-stakes, uncertain environment of hostage taking, where a mismatch between what negotiators say and what others do or say can critically reshape the conflict, as the end of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco unfortunately testifies (Wright, 2003). The lesson here, then, is to remember that negotiations are often shaped away from the table, and that individuals’ perceptions and beliefs while at the table may be crafted to be very different from the reality away from the table, but only if the negotiation is successfully contained.

Relational development After police have successfully contained the hostage takers, they are free to initiate negotiations. Estab­lishing communication can be difficult if the hostage taker does not have access to a phone or other modes of communication. However, the police must establish a channel that allows for the free exchange of information. Once a channel has been established, the negotiator must begin communicating with the hostage taker who is leading the hostage-taking effort. The hostage negotiators are usually part of a tactical team and must ultimately serve the interests of that team with all members working together to free the hostages. The negotiation team often consists of at least three roles: a speaker who cannot make decisions but establishes communication with the hostage taker, a strategist who interacts with the speaker to help guide the interac­tion and a psychologist who can comment on the mental capacities of the hostage taker.

Once communication has been established, the first task in managing the crisis is to simply establish a relationship with the hostage taker. Initially, the hostage negotiator allows the hostage taker to maintain control of the communication, playing a one-down role, as a means of reducing perceived resistance and avoiding a power struggle. The key transformation is moving from a highly distributive, competitive mode to a more collaborative orientation focusing on underlying psychological issues. When collaborating, the fundamental, underlying basis of the conflict becomes exposed, and personal needs (tied to self-concept) emerge, allowing mutually fulfilling outcomes to emerge in turn.

An example might serve to illustrate these points. In an airline hijacking in the early 1970s in the USA, a passenger hijacked an airplane bound for Atlanta by packing dynamite under his coat. When negotiations began, he shared demands for many items such as money, fuel to get to Cuba and so on. As the interactions unfolded, the police nego­tiator learned that the hostage taker hijacked the plane to demonstrate his manhood to his partner, with whom he had fought the night before. This personal opening became a turning point from cooperation (sharing demands and information) to collaboration, in which underlying issues were explored. The resolution called for the hijacker to release the passengers in exchange for a phone to call his partner. Thepassengers were released, and the phone call was made. (Unfortunately, in this instance, the hijacker committed suicide while on the phone).

Both cooperation and competition present paradoxical relational challenges to negotia­tors. A cooperative relationship is paradoxical because parties like and trust one another, but resist the kind of engagement that would expose them extensively. They are pushing the other away while also pulling them closer. Similarly, a competitive relationship is also paradoxical, since parties do not like and trust one another, but they are highly engaged. They are pulling the other closer in order to defeat or in other ways harm them.

In the opening movements of a hostage negotiation, very competitive relationships tend to dominate. The police negotiator tries to slowly but deliberately shift away from this approach into more of a time­out period characterized by exchanging pre­liminary information, and moving hostage takers away from demands and threats. Parties explore roles and engage in a great deal of small talk. The goal of the police negotiator is to build sufficient trust to move toward a more cooperative relationship. These preliminary discussions often center on such substantive issues as food, heat, light and logistics as a means of moving the hostage taker into a more cooperative orientation. Once a collaborative orientation starts to emerge, then more substantive issues and demands can be explored. If that trust can be established through relatively minor exchanges of food for hostages, for example, then more important demands can follow - but not too rapidly. Thus, police negotiators are keenly aware of how to manage the relational perspectives of hostage takers to build the foundation that allows certain issues and demands to emerge. Without this foundation, executing the substantive goals becomes quite difficult.

Issue development Substantively, hostage negotiation revolves around the interplay between demands and issues that both sides must manage. Hostage takers, often suffering from a psychological disorder or fanatical commitment, have little difficulty articulating their demands. They may want specific, concrete items like money or freedom for political prisoners, or they may make more nebulous demands for revenge. However, while clear on these substantive issues, hostage takers do often have difficulty articu­lating the underlying issues that brought them to this precipice. For hostage negotiators, their demands revolve around freeing the hostages, but the process of executing this goal is often driven by various issues that can be difficult to sort through, such as staff fatigue, overtime costs for maintaining the scene and police jurisdictional and publicity issues.

Most negotiation research recognizes the importance of “expanding the pie” and search­ing for optimal solutions. However, negotia­tors and negotiation theory have traditionally viewed this integrative strategy as relating to substantive issues. For police negotiators, however, issue exploration comes second to emotional exploration. Recent estimates suggest that nearly 80% of all hostage situations are emotion- or relationship-driven (Vecchi, et al. 2005). For this reason, police negotiators have learned to work quickly to understand and negotiate around expressive aspects of the situation. They seek to reduce the tensions and perceived threats of the context, and they focus early efforts on developing trust and identifying face-saving strategies (Donohue, et al. 1991; Taylor, 2002).

What is unique about this perspective is not the recognition that emotive factors play a role in negotiation, since this is now recognized across many disciplines (Barry, 1999). The unique aspect of this perspective is the way in which emotive concerns are viewed. In many traditional negotiation contexts, relational and identity dynamics continue to be viewed as mediating factors that help or hinder efforts to work towards a substantive agreement. The traditional view is to conceptualize emotion as something that needs to be dealt with before considering instrumental issues (McMains & Mullins, 2001), or as something that informs understanding of instrumental positions (Van Kleef, et al. 2004). In contrast, for the police negotiator, it is as important, if not more important, to search the emotional pie and address emotions as negotiation issues in their own right.

To illustrate this shift in perspective, consider a hypothetical organizational take­over and efforts by the potential buyer to identify what is likely to persuade the organization’s board. In all likelihood, a tra­ditional buyer would seek to determine the board’s perception of the organization’s value by gleaning information about costs and overheads, the value of subsidiary assets, whether money can be saved in staffing and so on. However, a police negotiator would ask whether members of the board are concerned for the well-being of their employees, are worried about their personal reputation after the take-over, have a desire to retain influence on the board and so on. By asking these kinds of emotive questions, a negotiator begins to uncover what might persuade the board members to accept less attractive offers than would rationally be the case when dealing with instrumental factors.

Expanding the emotional pie involves two main processes. The first is that police nego­tiators work proactively to manage a hostage taker’s anxieties (Miron & Goldstein, 1979; Noesner & Webster, 1997). Rather than rush to deal with instrumental aspects of the negotiation, police negotiators use techniques such as mirroring, self-disclosure, and paraphrasing (Hammer & Rogan, 1997; Noesner & Webster, 1997; Vecchi et al., 2005) to show their interest in the hostage taker’s emotive concerns. Coupled with supportive feedback and non-assumptive questions such as “I’ve not been in your position, but I guess you must be feeling very lonely,” their efforts to show interest allow the hostage taker to express their concerns while simultaneously venting their emotions. Police negotiators do not try to counter emotionality with rational debate, which is generally ineffective in high-pressure scenarios (Vecchi et al., 2005). Instead, they accept that emotion itself is an important issue of the negotiation, which must be continuously monitored, explored and addressed.

The second is that police negotiators work to identify the hostage taker’s main underlying problem or driver. At any one time, a hostage taker will communicate about one particular concern or issue, ranging from concerns about personal identity, to concerns about relational issues such as trust and power, through to concerns about substantive issues (Taylor, 2002; Taylor & Donald, 2004). Police negotiators listen carefully to the hostage taker’s dialogue, identify the underlying problem and then address it by matching the framing of their message to the hostage taker’s framing. For example, it is not useful to be making substantive offers when the hostage taker’s real concern is for his personal identity and the shame the incident will bring to his family. By focusing on an inappropriate frame, a negotiator is in danger of making the hostage taker feel misunderstood or unvalued, which may lead to further conflict and heightened emotions. By interpreting the focus of dialogue, negotiators may also act proactively to identify under-explored issues that will expand the emotional pie. For example, by tracking changes in dialogue, it is possible to gauge how much time has been spent discussing various identity, relational and substantive issues. If negotiations come to a standstill, they are able to review the motivational focus of previous dialogue and move to an issue that has yet to be covered. Much of police negotiators’ efforts to resolve hostage crises rely on their ability to explore and understand the emotional drivers of the hostage taker. Far from being hin­drances or mediating issues in the interaction, emotions are defining points of bargaining that often determine how the interaction unfolds.

Proposal development and scene resolution Once the issues have been developed, the hostage negotiator can begin to work toward proposal development and scene resolution. The hostage negotiator may propose solutions that allow the hostage taker to address their underlying issues which will then lead to the surrender sequence and scene resolution. The surrender sequence is very risky for several reasons. The hostage taker becomes very powerless in contrast to the bulk of the negotiations in which the perpetrator had significant bargaining power while holding the hostages. At the surrender, the person’s power comes only in being able to cause problems in the final surrender. In addition, the police are anxious that the sequence goes smoothly and no one behaves precipitously to create any sudden surprises that might disrupt the flow. These sequences must be slow, carefully negotiated, very specific, well organized and executed with disciplined officers who can make the process controlled and deliberate.

Factors impacting negotiation with terrorist groups

To be successful in bargaining with terrorists, the police negotiators must also understand the factors that impact how parties approach the negotiation process. First is the issue of power complementarity. Terrorists are inherently constrained in their ability to control the negotiation process and attain their desired outcomes by virtue of being contained by police. The response of many terrorists is to adopt a one-down position and threaten or actually use violence to generate fear, coercion or intimidation in an effort to realign the balance in power (Russell, et al. 1979). If the negotiations can be transformed so that the parties are able to bargain over substantive proposals, then the inherent dangers associated with the one-down power complementarity become less relevant. However, if the interaction remains in a crisis mode and parties have difficulty transforming the negotiations, then the one-up party often withdraws affiliation in favor of more aggression (Alexandroff, 1979). Thus, managing the one-down role is important in building toward more productive outcomes.

Second is the prominence of identity. As indicated above, central to the beliefs and attitudes that form the terrorists’ identity is an ideology (Crenshaw, 1988; Hoffman, 1999). Understanding the terrorist’s ideology provides clues concerning the kinds of paradoxes that might dominate the terrorist negotiation process. For example, a religious fundamentalist driven terrorist might be willing to sacrifice his life to achieve his objectives in the incident. This condition suggests that the paradox of detachment might be particularly problematic for negotiators to address. Also, the fanaticism could dig the negotiations deeper into the paradox of irrationality in which emotion begins to dominate the interaction.

The third issue is individual bias from situational, task and frame perspectives. The one-down role effect appears most likely to emerge when a number of individual biases start to develop. For example, when negotiators define the task as revolving around a single issue, they remove options for more collaborative tradeoffs and more nuanced views of the conflict. Also, more aggressive strategies emerge when individuals perceive that violent means of addressing the issues are socially sanctioned, and they enter the conflict with a fixed sum bias and a negative frame. As noted by Corsi (1981), the propensity for these dynamics to emerge will vary across the types of terrorist incidents, since each type differs in terms of its setting, the available possibilities, and the way in which the interaction is played out.

To examine the impact of these effects, Donohue and Taylor (2004) conducted an analysis of 186 descriptive accounts of terror­ist incidents collected from the chronologies compiled by Mickolus and his colleagues (Mickolus, 1980,1993; Mickolus, et al. 1989; Mickolus & Simmons, 1997). The accounts selected contained sufficient descriptive mate­rial to enable a coding of behaviors that occurred during the incidents as well as a coding of the way in which the incident ended. A hundred of these accounts were aerial hijackings in which the perpetrators took control of an airplane or helicopter for a sustained period of time. The remaining 86 accounts were barricade-siege incidents in which the perpetrators took control of a public building (e.g. embassy) or a private location (e.g. bank). The selected incidents took place between 1968 and 1991, and were located in over 50 different countries. The incidents were reportedly committed by both autonomous perpetrators and per­petrators affiliating themselves with known terrorist organizations including the Black Panther Party, Islamic Jihad, the Irish Repub­lican Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These affiliations allowed the incidents to be grouped according to whether they were associated with a nationalist-separatist, social revolutionary or religious fundamentalist ideology (Post et al., 2002).

A content analysis of the descriptive accounts revealed a number of variables that reflected overt power moves and affiliative acts within the terrorist incidents. These behaviors were identified through a grounded approach to categorizing descriptions in which the coding scheme was continually expanded and refined until it effectively reflected the behavior of both terrorists and authorities (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Holsti, 1969; Krippendorff, 1980).

The data generally provide support for the three-key dimensions of the one-down effect in the context of terrorist negotiation that include power complementarity, the prominence of identity that can magnify the role effect, and the impact of the situation on individual biases that affect the degree and type of behavior. Specifically, the data revealed that terrorists who responded to their one-down role by making excessive demands were more likely to achieve a negotiated outcome. Although this contrasted with our expectations that making excessive demands may have perpetuated a crisis bargaining frame, the demands served to escalate the level of dialogue which ultimately served to transform the interaction and overcome the power discrepancy.

Regarding the prominence of role identity, when compared to nationalist-separatists and social revolutionaries, the terrorists with a religious ideology typically used more aggressive strategies. This use was pervasive across the different kinds of aggressive strategies, which is consistent with the idea that these terrorists aim to maximize fear and threat rather than use these dynamics to achieve some other goal. Religious terrorists engaged in very little affiliative behavior compared to nationalist-separatists and social revolutionaries. This unwillingness to engage in normative interaction illustrates the reli­gious terrorist’s lack of interdependence with the system they are attacking and their determination to achieve a set of goals without giving consideration to alternatives (Silke, 2003). These findings suggest that identity plays a significant role in the evolution of terrorist negotiations and, consequently, that it is important to understand the cultural and social background of those terrorists authorities engage in negotiation.

However, it is important to note that there were some important variations across the hijacker and barricade-siege roles. Compared to barricade-siege incidents, hijackers typi­cally used more overt aggression as a means of shifting power, tended not to negotiate or use threats to the hostages as a way of gaining leverage in the incident or negotiation, and were less likely to make concessions, presumably because they were less prepared to engage in any form of bargaining to obtain a certain outcome. The focus of aerial hijacks was on overt aggression to maximize the threat of the situation and force the authorities into capitulating. In contrast, the barricade-siege incidents focused on more indirect attempts to change the power structure combined with normative bargaining for a resolution.

Perhaps the most significant implication of these findings is that in extreme circum­stances, the role effect takes some interesting twists. In less extreme conditions, such as buyer-seller negotiations, the one-down effect generally reveals more conciliatory behavior from the higher-power party. The higher-power party experiments with reach­ing out to propose more negotiated options while focusing on the substantive nature of the conflict. However, in the current findings, when the lower-power party (i.e. the terrorist) engaged in extreme aggression, the higher-powered authorities quickly recipro­cated with tactical attempts to resolve the dispute.

Thus, the profile of the more high-risk terrorist negotiation is one in which the perpetrators are religious extremists, they make references to their one-down, low- power role, they focus on a single issue and they repeat information about their identity. The question at this point is how to approach these individuals given the general framework proposed in this chapter. The final section now turns to the task of integrating the perspectives offered here to create a comprehensive strategy for conflict resolution with terrorists.