With Just a Little Help From My Friends: Credibility Borrowing for Change

What happens when a leader of a violent non-state organisation starts questioning their organisation’s violent strategy and begins to see the potential benefits of cooperation? Such leaders face the problem of having to maintain what I call in this paper "dual-credibility". On the one hand, leaders of violent organizations lack "peaceful credibility" and are usually not trusted by the other parties to the conflict, or by interested third parties. On the other hand, when leading a violent organisation, the mere mentioning of a cease-fire or showing any willingness to cooperate may tarnish your in-house "violent credibility", which in turn can lead to one’s replacement, or worse, death. To overcome this problem of dual-credibility, leaders can borrow credibility from other leaders. To succeed, they must correctly balance the two types of credibility with both their actions and their words. To make my point about the importance of such credibility borrowing for stable peace-making, I examine two cases. First, the success of Gerry Adams, who led the Republican Movement in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and managed to pull the organisation towards the Good Friday Agreement by borrowing the peaceful credibility of John Hume and the violent one of Martin McGuinness. Then, the failure of Yasser Arafat, who led the Palestinian Liberation Organisation during the two Intifadas and the Oslo Accords but did not borrow enough violent credibility to ensure his own organisation’s support for the peace. I end with applying this notion of Dual-Credibility Borrowing to analyse the chances of peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. To do so, I discuss Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and former PLO leader Marwan Barghouti’s interest in and potential avenues to obtain and correctly balance the two types of credibility.