Proscribing peace: How listing armed groups as terrorists hurts negotiations

By Sophie Haspeslagh

Proscribing peace offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. With rare access to actors during the Colombian negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army (FARC), Sophie Haspeslagh shows how proscription makes negotiations harder and more prolonged.

By introducing the concept of ‘linguistic ceasefire’, Haspeslagh adds to our understanding of the timing and sequencing of peace processes in the context of proscription. Linguistic ceasefire has three main components: first, recognise the conflict; second, discard the ‘terrorist’ label, and third, uncouple the act and the actor. These measures remove the symbolic impact of proscription, even where de-listing is not possible ahead of negotiations. With relevance for more than half of the conflicts around the world in which an armed group is listed as a terrorist organisation, ‘linguistic ceasefire’ helps to explain why certain conflicts remain stuck in the ‘terrorist’ framing, while others emerge from it.

International proscription regimes criminalise both the actor and the act of terrorism. Proscribing peace calls for an end to the amalgamation between acts and actors. By focussing on the acts instead, Haspeslagh argues, international policy would be better able to consider the violent actions both of armed groups and those of the state. By separating the act and the actor, change – and thus peace – become possible.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, justice and strong institutions

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526157584

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Proscribing peace

NEW APPROACHES TO CONFLICT ANALYSIS

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Until recently, the study of conflict and conflict resolution remained comparatively immune to broad developments in social and political theory. When the changing nature and locus of large-scale conflict in the post-Cold War era is also taken into account, the case for a reconsideration of the fundamentals of conflict analysis and

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New Approaches to Conflict Analysis promotes the development of new theoretical insights and their application to concrete cases of large-scale conflict, broadly defined. The series intends not to ignore established approaches to conflict analysis and conflict resolution, but to contribute to the reconstruction of the field through a dialogue between orthodoxy and its contemporary critics. Equally, the series reflects the contemporary porosity of intellectual borderlines rather than simply perpetuating rigid boundaries around the study of conflict and peace. New Approaches to Conflict Analysis seeks to uphold the normative commitment of the field’s founders, yet also recognises that the moral impulse to research is properly part of its subject matter. To these ends, the series comprises the highest quality work of scholars drawn from throughout the international academic community, and from a wide range of disciplines within the social sciences.

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Christine Agius Neutrality, sovereignty and identity: the social construction of Swedish neutrality

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Anna Geis, Maéva Clément and Hanna Pfeifer (eds) Armed non-state actors and the politics of recognition

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Ami Pedahzur The Israeli response to Jewish extremism and violence: defending democracy

Johanna Söderström Living politics after war: ex-combatants and veterans coming home

Maria Stern Naming insecurity – constructing identity: ‘Mayan-women’ in Guatemala on the eve of ‘peace’

Virginia Tilley The one state solution: a breakthrough for peace in the Israeli–Palestinian deadlock

Proscribing peace

How listing armed groups as terrorists hurts negotiations

Sophie Haspeslagh

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Sophie Haspeslagh 2021

The right of Sophie Haspeslagh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5759 1 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Front cover: Peace wall in Bogotá, CRISP @crispstreetart

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures and tables

Preface

Abbreviations and acronyms

Introduction

1Tying the act to the actor: a short history of international proscription

2International proscription regimes: material and symbolic effects

3Proscription and pre-negotiations: the importance of the ‘linguistic ceasefire’

4The ‘linguistic ceasefire’

5Proscription and power

6Revisiting ripeness

7The effect of proscription on peace in Colombia

Conclusion: proscribing peace

References

Index

List of figures and tables

Figures

3.1How to study the effects of proscription on pre-negotiations

3.2The effect of proscription on pre-negotiation processes

Tables

3.1Reciprocal vilification and de-vilification

3.2Proscription and extreme vilification

3.3Extreme (de-)vilification and the ‘linguistic ceasefire’

3.4Sources of power and (a)symmetry

3.5How perceived symmetry can be encouraged

4.1Proscription and extreme vilification

Preface

On 11 December 2007, my world was turned upside down by a terrorist attack. I was standing in the staircase of the United Nations Development Programme’s office building in Algiers, Algeria, discussing my leaving party with Redha, one of my colleagues and friends. All of a sudden, a terminally ill eighty-year-old man drove his van full of explosives into our office building. Talking to Redha and being in the staircase saved me, but that was not the case for my seventeen other colleagues and friends who died that day and during the gruelling few days it took to get them out of the rubble left by the explosion. This book is dedicated to them, and to their families and friends who survived them. It is also dedicated to all of us who carry the scars of violence in our souls and lives, and to those working every day to foster peace.

There is such a thing as a terrorist attack. I have lived it, I know how it feels – the shock, the horror, the injustice of it, but most importantly the sheer fear that it could happen again anywhere and at any time. I want to acknowledge this fear for driving me to write this book, for pushing me to understand the difference between the label and the act, the act and the actor. I remain convinced, now more than ever, that the only way out of violence, the only way out of terrorism, is dialogue and negotiations.

This book would not be here if it was not for the amazing, fascinating, troubling and energising country that is Colombia. When I arrived in Colombia for the first time in January 2004, the country had recently moved on from the failure of the Caguán negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army (FARC for its Spanish acronym) and all the talk was of terrorists. President Álvaro Uribe Vélez had come to power in 2002 and by 2004 nobody talked about peace. Fast-forward to September 2012. I was embarking on this project at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) when President Juan Manuel Santos announced the start of peace negotiations with the FARC. I could not square this announcement with the reality I had experienced under two terms of Uribe’s presidency. The leap was huge, and I set about trying to understand how it was possible – how we could start negotiating with armed groups that had been vilified as terrorists?

Colombia gave me much-needed inspiration and energy when the rest of the world seemed so bleak. To the brave civil society leaders, human rights defenders, thinkers, academics and priests, to the inspiring Colombian women and men who have courageously stuck their necks out for peace in difficult times, I am deeply grateful. Though I cannot name everyone who took the time to speak with me, I wanted to mention a few people at least. Thank you Lucho Celis, Padre Francisco de Roux, Hector Fabio Henao, Rosa Emilia Salamanca, Alvaro Sierra, Carlos Velandia, Geson Arias, Andrés Urcos and Mauricio Rodríguez. Particular thanks go to Mauricio García-Durán, Fernando Sarmiento Santander and the whole CINEP peace programme team for bearing with me for a full month in their office in Bogotá and for all their help and support. Also, to the Colombianistas who have been working and following Colombia for years from far and near, my particular thoughts go to the late Virginia (Ginny) Bouvier from USIP and to her family. Thank you to all my colleagues and friends from my ABColombia and International Crisis Group days, Louise Winstanley, Barbara Davies, Jonathan Glennie, Lorna Hayes, Claire Welling Herrera, David Huey, Fran Witt, Neil Jeffrey, Peter Drury, Francis McDonagh, Alexandra McDowall, Markus Schultz-Kraft and Andrew Stroehlein.

My friendships in Colombia have been an important part of this project. I have already mentioned many names, but I would like in particular to mention Claire and Luis for sharing their home and laughter with my family and me. I am grateful to Pascale and Juan for sharing their friendship and helping me make connections that would have not been possible without their journalistic flair.

Beyond Colombia, I owe the greatest depth of gratitude to Mark Hoffman at the LSE for his mentorship and support. I am also very thankful to all the people at the LSE who generously read and commented on my work over the years. Academics from the International Relations Department gave me insightful suggestions and feedback throughout the project. Thanks to Iver Neumann, Dave Rampton, Chris Alden, Karen Smith, George Lawson, Kirsten Ainley and Margot Light in particular. Many thanks go to my LSE friends, Andrew Delatolla, Joanne Yao, Julia Himmrich, Heidi Wang, Lukas Linsi, David Brenner and Mark Kersten, among others. I should also mention the financial support I received from the LSE through the School Scholarship and Global South fieldwork award, without which this book would not have been possible.

A number of scholars in different academic institutions have generously read, discussed and commented on my work. I am particularly grateful to Chris Mitchell at George Mason University in Virginia, Faye Donnelly, Roddy Brett and Roxani Krystalli at the University of Saint Andrews, Enzo Nussio at ETH in Zurich, Oliver Ramsbotham at the University of Bradford, Eduardo Bechara Gómez at the Universidad Externado in Bogotá, Jonathan Fisher at the University of Birmingham, Mareike Schomerus at ODI, Sara Hellmüller at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Harmonie Toros at the University of Kent in Canterbury, Christine Cheng at King’s College in London and Valérie Rosoux at the Université Catholique de Louvain. This section would not be complete if I did not highlight my singular debt of gratitude to I. W. Zartman from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. Ever since my Masters, the PeacekidZ adventure, ten years of work as a practitioner and my return to academia, he has been nothing but a constant source of inspiration and support.

To my practitioner colleagues and friends at Conciliation Resources and beyond, thank you for being a welcome reality check to my academic musings. I especially want to mention Andy Carl, Jonathan Cohen, Teresa Dumasy, Véronique Dudouet, Kristian Herbolzheimer, Alexander Ramsbotham, Zahbia Yousuf, Elizabeth Drew, Janet Adama Mohammed, Kennedy Tumutegyereize, Nicolas Tillon, Felix Colchester, Caesar Poblicks, Ciaran O’Toole, Rachel Clogg, Laurence Broers, Tahir Aziz, Mira Sovakar, Teresa Whitfield and Larry Attree. Working with all of you has been deeply rewarding and stimulating.

Thank you to Jonathan de Peyer, Robert Byron and Lucy Burns, the editors I was lucky enough to work with at Manchester University Press. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of two anonymous reviews. Portions of Chapters 3 and 4 were published in ‘The linguistic ceasefire: negotiating in an age of proscription’, Security Dialogue (2020):1–19. Portions of Chapter 1 were published in ‘The mediation dilemma of (not) talking to terrorists’, Swiss Political Science Review 26 (4) (2020):506–26.

Friendship is the bedrock of life, and I have been blessed with generous, loyal and funny friends that have kept me going. This project has spanned nine years and three continents, so I have many, many people to thank. I will mention just a few. Dank u Poep. Thank you Anna, Charlie, Katy, Zeynep, Zu and Laryssa and Bob. Merci Hélène, Chloé, Caroline, Pauline, Flora, Cryslen, Elsa, Giordano, Gabriela, Isa and Webber.

I end this note with the people closest to my heart – those who have carried me through this project: my family and family-in-law. To Rhona and Christopher, Andrea, Russell, Hugh and Lanny, David, Georgina, Tom and Nell, thank you for welcoming me into your fold, for your patience throughout this project and for showing me that British food – even the cheese – is not so bad. To my brother, Frederik, for keeping life entertaining always. To my parents, Philippe and Martine, this project would have been impossible without your enthusiasm and generosity, and I am forever in your debt. Finally, thank you Aidan for crossing my path one clear Bologna morning and putting up with me ever since. You and our children, Oscar and Clara, are the reason I want to learn, think, write and teach.

Abbreviations and acronyms

Introduction

During a speech given to the Colombian army on 8 September 2003, President Álvaro Uribe used the words ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, ‘terrorist’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘antiterrorist’ fifty-nine times to describe the threat of the armed groups in Colombia.¹ In the same speech, he proclaimed:

Here we have been dominated by terrorism for decades, a terrorism hidden in our big cities and in more than 300 thousand kilometers of jungle, terrorism financed by drug trafficking. I do not believe that in the history of my generation, a richer, more powerful terrorism has been faced in the world, a more aggressive terrorism, more dangerous than the one we have faced in Colombia.

Fast-forward twelve years to September 2015 and President Juan Manuel Santos was shaking hands with the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army (FARC for its Spanish acronym), Timoleón Jiménez (aka Timochenko), in Havana, Cuba, two years into a peace process.

The contrast illustrates the contradiction that lies at the heart of this book, namely that contrary to what they claim in public, politicians often do end up negotiating with ‘terrorists’. Following the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September 2001 (9/11) and the inception of the ‘war on terror’, a reduction in this trend could have been expected, but at the time of writing governments are exploring negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Communist People’s Party-National Democratic Front in the Philippines and the National Liberation Army in Colombia. All these armed groups are proscribed internationally or listed as designated terrorist organisations.

The listing of armed groups as terrorist organisations, and negotiation and peace processes have been happening concurrently. Both have different effects; each has a justification. Yet there is little understanding of how international proscription affects negotiations and peace processes, and in particular how it affects the process by which parties to conflict get to the negotiation table. These are the processes explored in this book. It sheds new light on the questions surrounding the effects of proscription on peace and asks the question: how has proscription affected the inception of peace negotiations?

International proscription

International proscription has become a widespread phenomenon, with an estimated 214 blacklists worldwide (de Goede 2011). More than 50 per cent of all internal armed conflicts involve armed groups proscribed in one of the lists of designated foreign terrorist organisations drawn up by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and other Western governments.² The events of 9/11 and the passing of UN Security Resolution 1373 were a turning point, which embedded proscription regimes deeply in the international system. Not only was it the first UN Resolution to invoke the right to self-defence (Article 51 of Chapter VII) against a non-state armed group, it also encouraged all member states to develop lists of terrorist organisations with no geographic boundaries or definition of what should be considered terrorism. The book argues that this global reframing of a whole range of protracted armed conflicts as wars against ‘terrorists’ has fundamentally affected local conflict dynamics and their possible resolution.

In June 2010, a US Supreme Court decision sent shivers down the spines of third party actors, mediators, diplomats, peace practitioners, and humanitarians – anyone in contact with listed armed groups for the purpose of their work. The ruling, known as the Holder v Humanitarian Law Project case, stated that certain activities directly relevant to the support of peace processes are considered as ‘material support’ to terrorists.³ While the ruling did not address all forms of peaceful speech and advocacy, the court’s rationale suggests that it would uphold criminalisation of most actions intended to engage armed groups in peace processes.⁴ It made clear that any type of contact with a proscribed armed group came with a possible fifteen-year prison sentence in the United States. As the US law is extra-territorial, it also applies to non-Americans.

At the time I was working for Conciliation Resources, a UK-based peacebuilding organisation. The ruling spurred those working in the peacebuilding field to start investigating the effects of proscription. This book builds on this work by human rights and humanitarian activists and researchers, lawyers and peace practitioners who have been the most prolific on the effects of proscription to date.⁵ Unsurprisingly, they have found that counter-terrorism provisions such as proscription can criminalise humanitarian action and undermine principles of neutrality and impartiality. This emerging body of work has presented a growing amount of evidence that proscription deeply influences the type of peacebuilding that is possible and has significant negative effects on the possible roles played by third party actors.

Mediators think one of the main problems with proscription is that it raises the entry cost of negotiations. In conversations and interviews with high-level mediators for this book, I heard time and again that ‘Listing makes starting negotiations harder’⁶ or that ‘proscription makes the barriers higher … it would be more strategic for the entry price to negotiations to be lower’.⁷

This book builds on these insights, but shifts the lens away from third party actors and peacebuilders to explore how proscription has affected the conflict parties themselves and their dynamic interaction. While third party actors play undeniable roles when it comes to supporting peacebuilding and peace processes – particularly in intensely polarised environments – just focusing on them risks over-emphasising the importance of external actors as opposed to conflict protagonists. To date, our comprehension of the effects of proscription on peace processes has been mainly centred on peacebuilding organisations, governmental or inter-governmental diplomats. We have little visibility of the effects on the actors themselves or on the broader processes at play that lead parties towards peace negotiations. This book offers an analytical framework for a systematic analysis of the effects of proscription on pre-negotiations. Proscription as a counter-terrorism measure has largely been neglected in academic literature (Jarvis and Legrand 2016; de Goede 2018), and this book hopes to start filling the gap.

Terrorism not terrorists

Scholars in the field of terrorism studies tend to see the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ as interchangeable. Actors will be regarded as ‘terrorist’ despite being involved in specifically non-violent actions. Groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, for example, can be political parties engaged in electoral politics and nevertheless are understood simply as terrorists.

It is this tying of the terrorism label to a specific actor that is being investigated. While there is a strand of the peace and conflict literature that uses the ‘terrorist’ label unhesitatingly, this book draws from insights of the critical terrorism literature instead. It is more useful to move away from a definition of terrorism towards attempts to describe the phenomenon (Jackson et al. 2011). The word ‘terrorism’ is indeed useful to describe types of actions in a broader repertoire of warfare. These would include actions such as hijacking, bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, hostage taking and suicide attacks against civilian targets. However, the use of the word ‘terrorist’ to describe an actor is more laden. Gearty (2008:559) highlights the evolution of ‘the term terrorist from the description of a kind of violence to a morally loaded condemnation of the actions of subversive groups regardless of the context of their actions’. It is important to differentiate between the word ‘terrorism’ used to describe a type of violent strategy, and the word ‘terrorist’ used to describe a type of armed actor.

Questioning this decontextualisation and then trying to recontextualise armed actors allows for the transformation of state and non-state actors engaged in terrorism:

Re-embedding acts of terrorism and those who perpetrate them in their temporal context discredits the absolutism and essentialism of the commonly used phrase ‘once a terrorist, always a terrorist’. Re-embedding them in their social context, moreover, discredits the use of the label ‘terrorist’ to describe groups or human beings altogether – leading us, the authors to reserve the term strictly for describing specific acts. (Toros and Gunning 2009:97)

Shifting the focus away from the actor towards the acts would condemn terrorist acts, but also place them in a broader arsenal of possible warfare tools, instead of turning the armed group itself into being simply terrorist.

The argument

International proscription has reshaped armed conflicts around the world. It affects the timing and sequencing of peace processes and has made getting to negotiations longer and harder.

While the labelling of opponents in conflict has been going on for centuries and reflects one conflict party’s opinion, the book argues that international proscription has solidified this judgement by creating a category, and that this has both symbolic and material ramifications. It has embedded a characterisation that one side, the non-state actor, is illegitimate and violent, and the other side, the state, is legitimate and should be unquestionably supported in its fight against ‘terrorists’. This symbolic shift has deep material implications, as it not only affects the type of war being fought but also the power relations between the parties, making the possibility of concessions towards the listed armed group appear impossible. This is particularly worthwhile in a context where much of the literature on ‘terrorists’ only looks at the armed group in isolation. This literature often fails not only to place the armed group in its wider context, but also to take into proper consideration the effects of counter-terrorism policies on state actors as well as on the dynamics of peace processes. This book shows that international proscription affects the state as much as it does the armed group.

Specifically, I will argue that international proscription affects three key dynamics essential in leading conflict parties to negotiations: (1) the move from a situation of asymmetry to establishing a perception of symmetry between the parties; (2) feeling a mutually hurting stalemate to envisioning a way out; and (3) going from a position of vilification to one of de-vilification.

(A)symmetry of power

A majority of conflicts today are intra-state as opposed to inter-state in nature. Most of those can be classified as asymmetric. The use of terrorism as a strategy is also emblematic of asymmetric warfare pitting non-state armed groups against government forces. We have learned from previous work that asymmetry is a major obstacle for the inception of peace negotiations (Kriesberg 2009:4). A central feature of the pre-negotiation phase is the need to establish a sense of symmetry between conflict parties.

International proscription of the armed group means the government has won a central battle in the process of having its legal status confirmed by the international community vis-à-vis its opponent. As a result, its power will predictably be bolstered. This engenders reticence to fostering a sense of symmetry between the parties, and proscription puts the burden of proof in terms of confidence-building measures squarely on the listed entity.

Revisiting ripeness

The most dominant concept in the peace and conflict literature on the question of timing or the when question of pre-negotiation is the process through which conflict parties become ready or ripe for negotiation. Zartman (1989) argues that two conditions are necessary but not sufficient for a conflict to be ripe: the mutually hurting stalemate and the perception of a way out (Zartman 2000). Parties perceive a mutually hurting stalemate when both sides think the costs of continuing the struggle exceed the benefits. Similarly, they also need to perceive a sense of a way out, meaning that both sides need to see a negotiated solution as possible. These two concepts are based on a cost-benefit analysis and a rationalist understanding of actors’ decision-making processes, but the element of perception is also central to these mechanisms.

One could imagine that international proscription would help ‘ripen’ a conflict by hurting listed armed groups and pushing them to the negotiation table, but the empirical research in this book shows that while the listed armed group undeniably suffered, international proscription actually postponed the two central elements of ripeness – the mutually hurting stalemate and the way out – from emerging. Proscription of the armed group bolstered the state to such an extent that it clouded its perception of a mutually hurting stalemate as well as blocking the way out, as it de-legitimised any possibility of dialogue with the listed entity. So international proscription distorted the classic conflict resolution paradigm of ripeness and deeply reduced the space for third party intervention.

Vilification and the ‘linguistic ceasefire’

Vilification is the process of demonising and dehumanising the enemy (Spector 1998, 2003). Proscription leads to ‘banishment’ and a type of modern-day exile (de Goede 2012). This needs to be reversed for official negotiations to take place. This book explains how proscription led to a form of extreme vilification that in effect blocked the possibility of negotiation. Toros’s (2008, 2012) work in particular has shown how the naming of a group as ‘terrorist’ can forestall non-violent responses to terrorism. But what has not been explored so far is how negotiations do still take place with groups listed as ‘terrorists’. How does the banishment end?

A central contribution of this study is the idea of a ‘linguistic ceasefire’, which helps to explain how extreme vilification is reversed in the context of proscription. The ‘linguistic ceasefire’ became a necessary condition not just for de-vilification but also for creating a sense of symmetry and the establishment of a way out.

The idea of the ‘linguistic ceasefire’ goes some way towards explaining why certain conflicts remain stuck in the terrorism framing while others emerge from it. The ‘linguistic ceasefire’ has three main components: (1) recognise the conflict; (2) drop the ‘terrorist’ label; and (3) uncouple the act and the actor. It removes the symbolic impact of proscription, even if de-listing is not possible ahead of negotiations. The case of Colombia and the FARC illustrates