• What is the difference between engaging national political terrorist organizations and engaging individuals involved in terrorist behavior?
• What are the arguments against and obstacles to a state negotiating with a terrorist organization?
• What are benefits of engagement?
• How does timing affect engagement?
• As Stacie Pettyjohn states in her chapter, an enduring principle of the United States’ counterterrorism strategy has been to “make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals.” When will the United States break its stated policy of non-negotiation and engage a nationalist terrorist organization (NTO)?

What is the difference between engaging national political terrorist organizations and engaging individuals involved in terrorist behavior?

Negotiations with political terrorist organizations are much broader in scope than negotiations with individual terrorists, such as hostage takers. Negotiations with terrorist organizations involve national, not just personal, security, and the fate of friends as well as enemies. Unlike negotiations with hostage takers, they do not involve parties looking for a deal, who try to define a zone of possible agreement and find appropriate terms of trade. Negotiations with political terrorist organizations seek to change the means that terrorist use but also, to some degree, have to address the ends they pursue. If the terrorists’ ends were immediately acceptable, the extreme means (terrorism) would not be necessary.


What are the arguments against and obstacles to a state negotiating with a terrorist organization?

There are many arguments against negotiating with an extremist organization:

• The relative clarity of state-to-state negotiations is absent.
• The process of arriving at an agreement is complex, time-consuming, and frustrating.
• Even when parties get to an agreement, the result is often unstable, unreliable, unencompassing, and unenforceable.
• Engagement and negotiation imply the recognition of a terrorist organization by the state, and for the terrorists, recognition of the state. For the state, engagement gives the terrorist organization legitimacy that overshadows its illegitimate tactics.  There is an ethical and moral level to recognition: no government wants to recognize a terrorist group of extortionists, civilian killers, and trainers of suicide bombers as a legitimate counterpart. The compounding moral problem is that negotiation actually encourages terrorism. For the terrorists, recognition of the state weakens their own claims of exclusive legitimacy.
• An engagement could be rejected by either side, leaving the engaging side seemingly weakened by the attempt.
• An engagement is also a slap to one’s allies, particularly those in the conflict area.

What are benefits of engagement?

• One small but significant benefit of engagement is to gain information. Public statements by terrorists, usually for propaganda purposes, are an unreliable source about what they really want, think, believe, will accept, or seek to achieve. Even before any negotiations are on the horizon, contacts and talks with terrorist organizations’ representative can elicit useful inputs into intelligence, and eventually, policy, on both sides.
• A greater benefit is to gain influence. Negotiation is a mechanism for influencing other parties’ decisions, and given adverse or suboptimal circumstances, negotiation may be the best, if not the only, way of avoiding an undesirable outcome. Engagement may be a necessity, the only alternative to defeat or endless, costly conflict.
• The greatest benefit of engagement is to end the conflict or at least its terrorist form. If the terrorists can agree to stop violent acts, the state can reciprocate by softening its “no engagement” stance. This initial exchange can lead to further exchanges.
• The broadest benefit of engagement is a less-tense general tone in international relations. “Reach out and understand” replaces “combat and isolate.” Concrete results may be slow in appearing, but the approach puts the state on the high moral ground, gives it a positive image among the undecided populace, and ultimately sends the message than “he who is not against us is with us,” rather than the reverse.

How does timing affect engagement?

Different strategies are more effective at some moments than at others. By using the right tactics at the right time, negotiators can encourage extremists to choose political rather than violent ends, and this focus is more productive than trying to reorient goals and belief systems. Timing involves an understanding of the life cycles of terrorism, in which there are opportunities to break into the cycle and engage individuals and groups in a transformation of means and, eventually, ends. Timing is also defined by the conditions set by the mediator, whose services are almost always necessary to bring together the state and the terrorist organization. This volume presents two life cycles of terrorism: one focused on the individual within the group, the other on the mission within the organization. The book details key moments within each cycle that are ripe for engagement.

In the life cycle of the individual, the first opportunity to engage exists before prospective actors turn violent. Critical to this engagement is identifying warning signs and taking preventative action. Involving actors at this stage creates a deeper understanding of the problems that give rise to terrorism and of the actors’ perceptions of them. This understanding then serves as the basis for remedial measures and tactics for dealing with those perceptions and reactions. A third-level effort, at a later entry point, can provide individuals with exit options out of the extremist group.

In the life cycle of the group mission, the methods of engagement evolve along with the organization, from its incubation to strategic, political, and transformational stages. In the incubation stage, preventative action is the initial opportunity for engagement, as with individual intervention. The next two stages involve internal consolidation and external confrontation, respectively, with the extremist organizations using violence first to gather support and then to achieve goals. In the final stage, the organization begins to mainstream, trading its terrorist credentials for a role as an accepted political party. Negotiations become more and more likely as the organization progresses though these stages. Negotiations disrupt the organization’s purposes in the strategic phase, become part of the process in the political phase, and are the major activity in the transformational phase.


As Stacie Pettyjohn states in her chapter, an enduring principle of the United States’ counterterrorism strategy has been to “make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals.” When will the United States break its stated policy of non-negotiation and engage a nationalist terrorist organization (NTO)?

The United States’ default policy toward terrorist organizations is isolation and no negotiation. Although the United States has seldom chosen to engage an NTO, it has done so. In Iraq, the United States engaged Sunni insurgents in an effort to divide the insurgency and incorporate disaffected Sunnis into the government. In Afghanistan, the United States supported an initiative to disengage low-level Taliban fighters by offering them incentives to lay down their arms. Typically, however, the negotiation question does not involve a terrorist organization in direct conflict with the United States but one that is merely an interested third party. The third-party dimension is particularly crucial for studies of U.S. foreign policy because, with the exception of its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is not in direct conflict with any NTOs. Nevertheless, as the sole superpower, the United States is involved or expected to intervene in a number of ongoing conflicts in which NTOs are participating. The United States must begin with a no-negotiation policy, lest it simply invite other terrorist organizations to stand up and stand in line for negotiations.  But if the terrorists cannot be beaten through the state’s exercise of its monopoly of legitimate force, talking becomes necessary.

Pettyjohn argues that the United States will engage an NTO when there are no preferred moderate interlocutors and when it believes that the NTO is moderating. In addition to these two necessary conditions, a catalyst seems to be needed to alter the expected utility of engagement, pushing a reluctant U.S. administration to adopt this politically and strategically risky policy.