The Warden's Dilemma: Self-Sacrifice and Compromise in Asymmetric Interactions

Abstract

Many of the violent conflicts of the post‐Cold War period have involved peoples who have historically been victims of interstate politics. Compromise is highly problematic in contexts of this kind, given that sovereign powers tend to attach the label ‘terrorism’ to acts of resistance and the resistance tends to claim an experience of injustice. Given a situation where compromise is seen by actors on both sides to be impossible, how would anything other than a ‘rotten compromise’ be possible? The article develops a framework called the Warden's Dilemma which is then put to use in the empirical exploration of two historical cases: the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in 1980–81 and the martyrdom of Polish Solidarity's priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, a few years later.

The Warden's Dilemma as Nested Game: Political Self-Sacrifice, Instrumental Rationality, and Third Parties

“…George Tsebelis (1990) describes a nested game as an interaction with consequences in multiple arenas, all of which influence the actors' eventual outcomes. Because Fierke's (2012a) discussion of the Warden's Dilemma highlights the fact that the interaction between the prisoner and the warden has implications beyond the prison walls for both actors, analysing her model as a nested game may make the Warden's Dilemma and its dynamics more accessible to those inclined to rationalist analysis.…”

“…A brief overview of the Warden's Dilemma will aid this discussion. In Fierke's telling (2012a), a prison in Northern Ireland is filled with prisoners whose sovereignty the warden has taken away; all prisoners are expected to abide by the rules established by the warden. The prison also contains IRA prisoners who would normally be granted special rights as political prisoners under international law but are instead labelled and treated as terrorists.…”

“…The warden's actual dilemma (Figure 1) occurs when a hunger striking prisoner approaches death but continues to resist the warden's authority non-violently. Enforcing the prisoner's conformity with the prison rules would require the warden to use a degree of force that ‘appears disproportionate to a larger audience’ given the hunger striker's unwillingness to respond violently to the warden's punishment (Fierke 2012a: 330). ‘The warden’, Fierke writes (2012a: 327), ‘must now decide whether his self-interest in appearing to run a humane prison is maximized by continuing the punishment’ or by instead changing his strategy.…”

“…Scholarship attempting to bridge divides ought to be celebrated and encouraged, and the best way to do so is to continue the dialogue such scholarship begins. One constructivist scholar's particularly bold engagements with game theory (Fierke 2012a, 2012b) and game theorists (Fierke and Nicholson 2001) exemplifies such attempts. By inverting the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma model, Karin Marie Fierke (2012a, 2012b) has constructed the Warden's Dilemma as an explanation for the role self-sacrifice plays in facilitating compromise between asymmetric powers.…”

“…One constructivist scholar's particularly bold engagements with game theory (Fierke 2012a, 2012b) and game theorists (Fierke and Nicholson 2001) exemplifies such attempts. By inverting the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma model, Karin Marie Fierke (2012a, 2012b) has constructed the Warden's Dilemma as an explanation for the role self-sacrifice plays in facilitating compromise between asymmetric powers. Fierke demonstrates these dynamics through a case study of Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger strikers in the early 1980s and also applies the prison analogy to Poland's Solidarity movement.…”