Bargaining with terrorists: Organizational considerations

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article is based on the premise that terrorist organizations are a special class of political interest groups. What separates terrorist organizations from most interest groups is that terrorists use violence instead of lobbying to try to achieve their goals. Terrorist organizations will face the same kinds of organizational problems as other interest groups, i.e., recruitment of members, competing groups, political cohesion, leadership contests, etc. This paper focuses on how these organizational processes inside the terrorist organizations affect the outcome of bargaining between authorities and terrorist organizations. The effects of the internal organizational situation of the terrorist group will be manifest most clearly in the likelihood of achieving a peaceful resolution of a terrorist event and in the amount of the risk premium required to achieve the peaceful resolution.