Lessons learned from an imperfect negotiation process

Abstract

In 2021, when he was living in France, Josu Urrutikoetxea gave an interview to Michel Wieviorka, in which he spoke about the long, chaotic, and imperfect process that led to the self-dissolution of ETA, the Basque separatist organization that had relied heavily on armed violence since the 1960s. The resulting transcript is an extraordinary piece of documentation, in which an ETA fighter who took part in several of its operations during the 1970s—including the assassination of Spanish Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco on December 20, 1973, in Madrid—discusses the journey that led to him becoming the main figure of ETA’s abandonment of political violence. The discourse Urrutikoetxea uses reflects his key role in the movement. In a short article that serves as an introduction to the interview, Wieviorka makes some comments from which the reader can draw several lessons of a sociological nature, particularly about the conditions required for a historical experience of political violence to move toward a process of negotiation.