Deadlocks · defusion

Plan for the spoilers

Expect violence timed to wreck an agreement, and build the process so that an atrocity isolates its authors instead of halting the talks.

Every peace process has groups on both sides who lose by it, and an attack at the right moment can make a deal look impossible to the public on the other side. The defusion is to agree in advance that violence by opponents of the deal will not stop it: joint condemnation, including by the side the attackers claim to act for; security cooperation against them; and timetables that don't hand them a veto.

The deadlocks it addresses

Where it has been tried

  • The Omagh bombing, Northern Ireland (15 August 1998) — worked. Four months after the Good Friday Agreement, a bomb by the 'real' IRA killed 29 people — the worst single incident of the conflict. Condemnation came 'by all sections of the community and all shades of political opinion'; Sinn Féin's president 'condemned it without equivocation', which CAIN notes was 'the first time any member of SF has used the word "condemnation" in connection with any act of Republican violence'; the group suspended operations (and later returned to violence). The agreement held.
  • The Oslo years (1994–96) — failed. The Hebron mosque massacre by a Kahanist settler (25 February 1994) was met with an attempt to contain it: the Security Council, 'Determined to overcome the adverse impact of the massacre on the peace process', condemned it and 'its aftermath which took the lives of more than fifty Palestinian civilians', called on Israel to disarm violent settlers, and called for a temporary international presence (Resolution 904, 18 March 1994). The Hamas suicide bombings that began that spring and the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a Jewish opponent of the process (November 1995) followed; the bombings of early 1996 preceded the election of a government opposed to Oslo. Violence from both directions achieved what its authors wanted ⚠ (the 1994–96 sequence after Hebron as on the site's timeline; primary sources still to read).

What you have to believe for it to work

  • The leaders on both sides actually want the deal to survive the attack
  • The side the attackers claim to act for is willing to condemn them in its own words
  • The public reads the attack as the work of a fringe rather than of the other side as a whole

These are the assumptions the future solution builder will let you set yourself.

What has to happen first

  • Leaders with enough standing to condemn their own side's extremists
  • Security cooperation that continues through a crisis

How it can fail

  • Condemnation without action reads as cover
  • A government that needs the extremists' votes cannot move against them
  • Each attack raises the price of the next concession

Sources