Response to Discussions negotiation and conflicts management

People are considered as hostages if they are snatched for requirement or demand in a certain situation. Negotiating with the people who take these hostages is very sensitive and needs some amount of training. So, the job of negotiators is to create a kind of reciprocal interest in between the authorities and the people who take the hostages. There are many deadliest attacks happened in the recent past, however, I would like to mention the cruelest attack happened in September 2004 in the Beslan school. The majority of the people killed in this incident are students, out of the 331 people who were killed, 186 of them are children. It is considered as the third deadliest terrorist attack (Dolnik, A., & Fitzgerald, K. M. 2011). To reduce the amount of these attacks many countries have begun to come up with negotiation techniques.

These negotiation techniques are learned to be widely adopted after the attack that happened in Munich Olympics(1972) to deal with the situations between the hostage-takers and authorities (Dolnik, A., & Fitzgerald, K. M. 2011). After adopting the negotiation techniques for nearly over the span of 40 years results are pretty impressive with the astonishing 95 % of success rated however this is mostly aimed at the people who are without no arms. Indeed, the people who take the hostages have no real intention initially to do such thing, however, has to opt this option to escape from the cops (Soskis & Van Zandt, 1986). Negotiation techniques are not widely successful when they are dealing with the terrorists who have the beliefs of religion because of the fact the motivation of religion is making them kill or get killed. Most of the hostage situation is conducted by the people who are considered to be mentally unstable (Soskis & Van Zandt, 1986). So considering all these situations and with the amount of success fetched with the negotiation, I would think, it would be wise for the government in agreeing on the granted immunity, even if they have other motivations in capturing and prosecuting these terrorists because innocent people are getting harmed if these negotiation techniques are gone improperly.

 

Reference

Dolnik, A., & Fitzgerald, K. M. (2011). Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists. Studies In Conflict & Terrorism, 34(4), 267-294. doi:10.1080/1057610X.2011.551718.

Soskis, D. A., & Van Zandt, C. R. (1986). Hostage Negotiation: Law Enforcement's Most Effective Nonlethal Weapon. Behavioral Sciences & The Law, 4(4), 423-435.\