Dr Harmonie Toros, Reader in International Conflict Analysis

>> Hello, and welcome. My name is Harmonie Toros, I'm a senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations here at the University of Kent and today I want to talk to you about negotiating with terrorists.

>> Is it possible? Is it feasible? Does it offer an alternative path to security? States have chosen primarily to have a violent counterterrorism response to terrorist violence. 

>> I'm a peace scholar: if I can find a way for a non-violent response to reduce the levels of violence, that is something that I have to look for. Why is this important?

>> I'm going to do this briefly because I think it's quite obvious. France at the moment is under a state of emergency after the Paris and the Nice attacks. 

>> In the UK we are under a severe terrorist threat, which means that an attack is highly likely. The US is worried about an unpredictable homegrown attack and Australia says an attack is probable on its soil. 

>> In some countries, this is a daily or near daily occurrence. In Iraq, 10,000 civilians have been killed in the first six months of 2016. Not all of them by terrorism, but a lot of them by terrorism. 

>> In Afghanistan, 600 people died between January and March 2016, at least 60% of them killed in terrorist attacks. This is a very, very serious problem. But before I go on I have to define the term terrorism because everybody says 'oh, you're using that term' and 'we don't know how to define it' and 'what do you mean by terrorism'. 

>> And there is a very large debate in the field on how we should define terrorism. Now, although I believe that this debate has some value I also believe that most of us in this room agree on an understanding of what terrorism is. Terrorism is violent. It is violence and the threat of violence.

>> It is political, so that's what makes the distinction between a terrorist group and organised crime. They're not doing this for money, they're doing this for a political goal. 

>> And finally, terrorism is aimed at affecting a larger audience than its immediate target. 

>> Now what do I mean by that? I mean that terrorism is not focused on whether it's going to attack bus number 30 or bus number 32. Terrorism is worried and interested in the impact the attack will have on the broader community. On the broader community within a city, within a state and internationally. 

>> Unlike a political assassination where the specific person has to be killed, in terrorism it is the effect of that killing that they are most interested in. How have states tried to stop terrorism until now? 

>> Well, mainly it's a police and intelligence response. That's how it starts off, so you have arrests, you have investigations, you have the intelligence agencies that carry out investigations. This, quite soon, is often followed by new counterterrorism legislation. 

>> So greater powers for the police, greater powers for the intelligence agencies, sometimes or even often curbing civil liberties. In some cases, you have military force. This is usually used either at home or abroad when groups control territory. 

>> So if you think of the FARC in Colombia, if you think of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, they would control territory and there would be military fighting them on and around that territory. 

>> And finally, the more enlightened states start asking themselves the question well, why are these people using violence? and why do they have people supporting them? What are the root causes of this violence?

>> Is there an ethnic group that is being discriminated against? Is there a disparity and economic disparity between regions? Why is this happening? And they will try to address these root causes.

>> What, until recently, they would never ever ever do is negotiate. 'We will never negotiate with terrorists, this is impossible.'

>> And you can go and look up a whole slew of state leaders that have said this. A few of them were actually negotiating while they were saying this. But publicly, the mantra was there: we don't negotiate with terrorists.

>> Now, why don't we negotiate with terrorists? We don't negotiate with terrorists: these are the three arguments put forward. One, because it inspires more violence. If I carry out a bomb attack and then, next week, I am being hosted at the presidential palace for talks, what is to stop anyone else in this room from doing the same to get their grievances heard? 

>> Two, it legitimises these terrorist actors and it delegitimises the state. State leaders should be elected in free and fair elections, they represent the state. 

>> If they're willing to talk to and they are seen talking with someone whose only claim to fame is to have carried out horrible violence, then what does that say about the state? What does that say about the state leader? It is legitimising these violent actors and it is delegitimising the state actor.

>> Finally, the question of complexity.

>> Now, this is particularly true with the al Qaeda Network or the affiliates of the so-called Islamic State today. Who controls whom? How are those links, how clear are they? It's an incredibly opaque, murky situation.

>> Who do you talk to? How do you access these people? So the complexity is used as an argument against negotiation. Now I have spent a good amount of the last ten years of my life studying this.

>> And I have interviewed violent actors, I have interviewed non-state armed actors, state armed actors, military officials, international officials of international organisations, to try and understand and go a little more in depth in these questions. 

>> I was lucky that the first question was dealt with by someone else. So Carolin Goerzig did an analysis empirically. There is no basis to the argument that negotiating with terrorists inspires more terrorism. There is actually no empirical validity to that point so I don't have to deal with that, thank you very much. 

>> But problem number two: legitimacy. Problem number three: complexity. 

>> Those are the ones that I really focused on and what I found was that legitimacy doesn't actually work that way. It's not the state that is granting legitimacy to the terrorist groups or the terrorist leaders. Because these groups take their legitimacy from their supporters. 

>> So, let's think of the IRA and Sinn Féin. The IRA and Sinn Féin were legitimate because the Republican community considered them their legitimate leaders. And whether Tony Blair or John Major accepted to talk to them or not, did not change the equation of that support and that legitimacy that was granted to them by their supporters.

>> So this idea that we can't negotiate with terrorists because we're granting them legitimacy really doesn't hold up when you look and study what is actually happening on the ground and the relationships between groups and their supporters or theirconstituencies. 

>> The second question of complexity. Very often, they would say well we can speak to the IRA because they're clear we know how they work but Al-Qaeda is messy and we can't talk to them right.

>> That really that's too much, that's too far, because they are so complex.

>> There's a wonderful peace scholar called John Paul Lederach and he says make complexity a friend not a foe. And the point is, if you have a simple problem they're often very few solutions to that problem. There may be one or two solutions to it and if those solutions are blocked for some reason you cannot carry out those actions to solve the problem then you're stuck. 

>> With a complex problem, you have so many more ways in.

>> There's so many more ways to address a complex problem. And this is the argument that I have made with respect to, I made it with respect to Al-Qaeda but I also make it with respect to sort of the affiliates of the so-called Islamic State, is that the murkier the relationships, the more complex, the more likely it is that we have some people we can speak to in the various affiliated groups. 

>> People that are sort of linked but not really. Who really have a local agenda which is far more important to them than their links with Rakka or their links with Osama bin Laden when he was alive. So why does this matter? This matters because if you look a research, you find that most terrorism ends through political solutions.

>> Most groups stop using terrorist violence because they turn to nonviolent politics and they engage in the political process: 43 percent, that big yellow bit in the middle. 

>> Military force, seven percent.

>> So policing, forty percent. So quite important. But still, the largest proportion is solved by a political solution. How do we facilitate this?

>> And these are the kinds of discussions that I'm lucky enough to have with state officials, with officials of international organisations, with military officials, saying we need to find a way to facilitate this move to nonviolent politics into the political process. 

>> And there's three points that I think have to be made. The first is we have to maintain negotiations as a policy option. We must not rule this out at any point in the battle.

>> If we do that, then we have to keep potential interlocutors, people that we may want to talk to in the future, we have to keep them around, a) alive b) not completely discredited or having lost any kind of credibility within their own circles or broader circles and c) we have to ensure that we are allowed legally to speak to them. 

>> Because if that's illegal, and a lot of the terrorist lists make it illegal for anybody, for me or you and anyone else, to speak to people who are designated as terrorists.

>> If it's illegal to talk to them then we can't negotiate with them. 

>> Point number three, we have to keep potential mediators around as well. So those political parties, those civil society groups that we know have links with the violent groups. 

>> Don't ban them, don't arrest everybody because you're going to need these people at some point to make the connections when those negotiations start.

>> So we have to facilitate a political solution, because it is the most effective way of bringing an end to terrorist violence. Thank you very much.