Sacrificing the sacred? Failure and success in negotiations with Islamists

Based on existing case studies of negotiation processes involving Islamist actors, this article discusses explanations for failure and the role religion plays in them, extracting and discussing three recurrent reasons: first, the transnationalisation and transnationality of Islamist conflicts; second, the polycentric characteristics of Islamist movements and organisational fragmentation linked to differences in religious interpretation, which may at times lead to transformation; and, third, exceptionalism in the way they are approached or dealt with by the government side or by international actors. The article illustratively draws upon existing research on various cases including the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Hamas in Palestine, Boko Haram in Nigeria and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. Bringing in the comparisons and the existing variations in Islamist approaches to political compromise from such different contexts constitutes a relevant contribution to existing academic debates about how religion matters when it comes to the failure of conflict resolution.