Learning Lessons from Waco: When the Parties Bring Their Gods to the Negotiation Table

by Jayne Docherty, Jayne Seminare Docherty

Overview

Heated debates about "what really happened in Waco" are a recurring public drama. Yet, little or no attention has been given to the work of the negotiators who talked with the Branch Davidians. In this important book, Jayne Seminare Docherty utilizes largely unexplored sources of data to explain why fifty-one days of negotiations by federal officials failed to get all of the Branch Davidians to exit the compound.

Learning Lessons from Waco applies a theory of worldview conflicts to the more than 12,000 pages of the negotiation transcripts from Waco. Through perceptive analysis of the situation, Docherty offers a fresh perspective on the activities of law enforcement agents. She shows how the Waco conflict resulted from a collision of two distinct worldviews-the FBI's and the Davidians'-and their divergent notions of reality.

By exploring the failures of the negotiations, she also urges a better understanding of encounters between rising religious movements and dominant social institutions. Finally, the resulting model is applicable to other conflict resolution processes such as mediation and facilitated problem solving.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815627760
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2001
Series:	Religion and Politics Series
Edition description:	LST ED.
Pages:	372
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Jayne Seminare Docherty is the Academic Programs Director at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University.

Table of Contents

	Illustrations	ix
	Foreword	xi
	Acknowledgments	xv
	Abbreviations	xvii
	Introduction: The Never-Ending Drama of Waco	1
1.	What Really Happened in Waco in 1993?	18
2.	Understanding Worldview Conflicts	49
3.	When Worlds Collide	69
4.	Managing a Crisis Between "Citizens of Separate Worlds"	103
5.	Establishing Relationships Across a Worldview Divide	124
6.	"If You Release Some of Those Youngsters ... We Will Play the Tape"	154
7.	"We Don't Want Anything from Your Country"	189
8.	When the Parties Bring Their Gods to the Table	225
9.	Working with Worldview Conflicts	274
	Appendixes
Appendix A.	The Special Counsel's Summary of the Waco Negotiations	313
Appendix B.	Defining the Coding Categories	315
	References	319
	Index	339

Editorial Reviews

Docherty (conflict studies, Eastern Mennonite Univ.) presents a conceptual model of worldview conflict, using the example of Waco to extract principles for negotiating with communities motivated by unconventional beliefs. Having researched transcripts of the negotiation tapes, official reports of events surrounding the negotiation, and interviews, she argues that parties with fundamentally different worldviews must first deal with reality, or "worldnaming," before they can begin to confront the issues. Docherty suggests that because they used different "naming, framing, and blaming" language, the two sides in the Waco negotiation were destined to fail. While the Branch Davidians' reality was based on values and spirituality, that of the FBI was scientific and goal-centered, and it dismissed the Davidians' attempts to communicate as "Bible babble." Docherty concludes with 14 lessons for future crisis negotiators dealing with such groups, not the least of which is that they must know their own worldview and work to understand that of the parties with whom they are negotiating. This book is doctoral candidate Docherty's thesis, as reflected in the hundreds of citations, footnotes, and discussions of other theoretical approaches. While the thesis is important and timely, the language is sometimes so academic that it may not be every negotiator's next read. For academic libraries. Julie Denny, Resolutions, Inc., Armenia, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal