Suchergebnisse

The hostage situation precipitated by a group of Hanafi Muslims in Mar 1977, in Washington DC is examined. This episode provides a framework for discussion of a set of highly successful negotiation procedures & their implications for bargaining with political terrorists. Some hostage situations are, as was the Hanafi episode, attempts by politically weak groups to gain access to the public through the communications media. In such cases the granting of symbolic rewards & face-saving mechanisms to the terrorists through the ritual of negotiation can lead to their capitulation. These procedures, however, work neither in situations where terrorists escalate demands nor with suicide missions. The frequency of suicide missions, however, has largely been overrated. The implications from the police experience & the ritualistic & symbolic aspects of hostage taking may be discussed in terms of the United States department of State's policy of nonnegotiation. Findings & implications suggest that State department policy be reevaluated in terms of the symbolic & ritualistic motivations behind much of the hostage taking. Modified HA.

The findings of two presidential commissions have dominated the understanding of the Black urban riots of the 1960s & correspondingly the general understanding of the causes of political violence. The Kerner & Eisenhower commissions each explained the causes of the riots in terms of the social science orthodoxy of the time. The riots were seen as violent responses by a community that had experienced persistent & continual frustration as a result of economic deprivation wrought by white racism. The deprivation-frustration-aggression model of violence was superimposed as a causal explanation of the riots & social science, & the popular media extolled this as the definitive understanding of the riots. Yet over the past 30 years this model has not explained empirical findings & has fallen from grace, especially among political scientists. Our research shows that even within the context of the commission reports there was evidence of other, but less politically palatable, explanations. In addition, there was the overarching issue of the occurrence of violence in democracies. Riots, like terrorism, more commonly occur within democracies than in nondemocratic governmental systems. We suggest that viewed in this context, the Black urban riots are not a deviant occurrence but part of a common syndrome of violence in democracies. These riots, like others that preceded them, need to be viewed within the historical framework of the role of political violence in democracies & most specifically how democracies respond to political violence. Adapted from the source document.