Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

208 • GAME THEORYArmy (IRA) members against each other by inducing opportunisticIRA suspects to turn into informants or even just to spread suspicionamong other IRA members that arrested comrades had been “turned”to create distrust and infighting within the various IRA groups.More positively, game theory has been the inspiration for manyefforts to try to induce terrorist groups to give up the use of politicalviolence in favor of negotiated settlements by convincing the terroristgroup that while it would be certain to be the loser in a zero-sumstruggle with the targeted government, it would instead have somechance of making at least some limited political gains if it renouncedterrorism in favor of negotiation and peaceful political participation.The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which resolved most of the conflictin Northern Ireland, may be cited as an example of such a conflictresolution approach by which the main following of the IRA wasinduced to move away from political violence in favor of peacefulpolitical participation. Kenneth W. Stein’s study, Heroic Diplomacy:Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace(London: Routledge, 1999), analyzed incidences of success in theArab-Israeli peace process as being due to the ability of negotiatorsto create areas of plus-sum cooperation between Israel and Egypt, aswell as between Israel and other Arab opponents.Leonard Greenhalgh’s seminal 1986 work “Managing Conflict”(Sloan Management Review 27, no. 4, 45–52), used a game theorymodel to address how negotiators could seek to resolve conflicts byfinding plus-sum areas of cooperation. Although written primarilywith commercial litigation and the management of private businessfirms in mind, much of his conflict-resolution model can alsobe applied to the analysis and resolution of more purely politicalconflicts, including terrorism. For example, Greenhalgh emphasizesthe need for the parties in conflict to focus on short-term attainablegoals benefiting both parties rather than on inflexible “fundamentalissues,” the need for both sides to have strong and credible leadersto legitimize negotiated solutions, and the desirability for havinga mutually trusted third-party mediator who also has an interest inhaving the conflict resolved peacefully. In the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, during the period from the Oslo Accords of 1993 untilSeptember 2000, Israel and the Palestinian Authority appeared able tomake progress when they focused on practical issues, such as securitycooperation and facilitating daily cross-border traffic between Israel