Political dissidents must be resisted by legal or political means until they are persuaded to negotiate a political way forward.
People won't always agree with their government, or with other groups, or with the views of the majority of the population. And they represent a wider danger if they try to overturn agreements reached by others. Negotiation might be impossible with any such group until their support has dwindled and leaders have been imprisoned.
In many cases a refusal to negotiate has caused disruption and loss of life:
· Active anarchists or political dissidents, as in the BBC’s description of the Baader-Meinhof gang in 1970’s Germany, may try to overthrow governance which is acceptable to everybody else.
· Nationalists, whose leaders have convinced them that their identity is threatened (6.7.4.2), might feel justified in using violence in what they feel to be a battle for survival. ETA, in Spain’s Basque region, was a recent example – although The Economist has since published an article entitled Terrorism in Spain: The war is over.
A society can try to impose coercion if its stability is threatened by political dissidents. This is best carried out by using the law, which is designed for that purpose but which depends upon a degree of acceptability for it to be effective (5.4.3). Laws are more likely to be able to retain control if there are relatively few intransigent individuals. Continual adverse publicity thins their support, so that they start to look for other ways of achieving their aims.
Dissident leaders can be persuaded to negotiate when they see their support dwindling. They have to see a route to power by working within the existing framework of governance (6.8.4). That was how the problems in Northern Ireland were resolved, when the IRA was persuaded that it was more likely to achieve its objectives by political means: the Good Friday Agreement. US President Bill Clinton acted as a facilitator; the Northern Irish Protestants trusted UK Prime Minister Tony Blair; and the IRA trusted Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.
(This is an archive of a page intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. The latest versions are at book contents).