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It's easy to forget now, but the shocking and horrific violence that set off the current hostilities in the Middle East, where Hamas militants slaughtered and kidnapped innocent Israeli civilians, was predicted. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump warned in October 2020 that terrorist violence was set to be imminently inflamed.
Trump's DHS didn't claim it was because, in President Joe Biden words, of "sheer evil" from those who exist only "to kill Jews." Rather, it pointed to the Abraham Accords: the U.S.-led effort to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which Trump claimed would shift the course of Middle Eastern history from "decades of division and conflict" and which the Biden administration claimed would make the region "safer and more prosperous."
So how did we end up with the exact opposite?
For decades, the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning the provision of an independent state for the Palestinian people and the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, was central to the task of engineering peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. This was a problem, since between successive Israeli governments steadily chipping away at the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict and dwindling U.S. interest in pressuring the Israeli state to follow through on the commitment, that resolution started to look increasingly impossible.
But over time, the priorities of the Arab states shifted away from the Palestinians, too. Their largely authoritarian leadership became more preoccupied with matters like maintaining political control in the wake of the Arab Spring protests — for which support from an advanced military power like Israel might prove useful — and an increasingly assertive Iran, which then-newly appointed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called a "much more urgent and more important" issue.
This shift dovetailed with the Trump administration's ultra-Israel-friendly stance and its own goal of further isolating Iran in the region. The resulting Abraham Accords were, at least in the neoconservative world, considered a stroke of "genius." Rather than finding a solution to the seemingly intractable question of Palestinian statehood, it simply sidelined it.
The signers dropped this long-standing precondition as they re-established diplomatic relations and deepened security and economic cooperation with Israel, while Trump lavished them with rewards, like an arms deal for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and U.S. recognition of the annexation of West Sahara for Morocco. It effectively supplanted the Saudi government's Arab Peace Initiative, which since its 2002 introduction had been the foundation of the Arab world's program for resolving the conflict, placing the Palestinians front and center.
The new normalization agreements' foundational and cynical assumption was that the plight of the Palestinians could and would be safely ignored and forgotten about by both the region's governments and the broader international community. Both the Trump administration and, reportedly, bin Salman, pressured Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to assent, while the states that signed continued paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, claiming this normalization push would halt Israel's annexation plans for its illegal West Bank settlements.
In reality, the text of the agreements barely mentioned Palestinians, outside of a few vague assurances to keep working toward a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Morocco maintained a "coherent, constant and unchanged position" on the matter. This was, to put it mildly, far short of what both Palestinians and their supporters in the U.S. Congress demanded.
As Arab states began gradually deepening ties with Israel, they increasingly backed away from their historic positions. Bin Salman declared (and subsequently walked back) that Israelis "have the right to have their own land," effectively sanctioning the loss of what the Muslim world viewed as Palestinians' historic land. When violence broke out in April 2021 at the Al-Aqsa mosque, with Israeli forces raiding one of Islam's holiest sites, the UAE response was notably muted. That the normalization process continued despite what would earlier have been viewed as an unacceptable provocation against both Palestinians and Islam itself was celebrated by the accords' supporters, as proof that ongoing repression of Palestinians could indeed be safely ignored.
But the Palestinian issue could not simply be wished away, and the signing of the pacts created a set of contradictions that fueled the tensions that erupted October 7. The vast majority of the populations of Israel's Arab neighbors opposed the accords, as did some leaders, like Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who charged that the signers had "lost their moral compass," and Jordan's King Abdullah, who declared that "no architecture for regional security and development can stand over the burning ashes of this conflict."
So did Palestinians themselves, across opinion surveys, with both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas calling it a "betrayal," a "treacherous stab," and "grave harm." Hamas also called for "an integrated plan to bring down normalization." Protests against the accords erupted in Morocco, one of the signers.
The signing of the Accords was particularly fraught in Saudi Arabia. The country's powerful clerics continued to oppose Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But beyond that, the Saudi leadership's internal legitimacy and its standing as the region's leader of the Islamic continued to rest in part on its commitment to the Palestinians. Regional rival Iran quickly stepped in to fill this vacuum left by Saudi support for the deals, sharply criticizing the normalization effort as a "betrayal of Palestinian aspirations for freedom."
Meanwhile, Israeli policy didn't change as promised, and in fact, only hardened. Since 2020, when the accords were signed, illegal settlements have expanded and even ramped up alongside settler violence. The Netanyahu government has now advanced a record number of settler housing units, and transferred administration of the occupied territories from military to civilian hands, widely interpreted as signaling plans for annexation, even as figures like former Abbas adviser Ghaith al-Omari claimed the accords had "already delivered to the Palestinians" by stopping this policy. This past September, the UAE's ambassador to the United States admitted annexation hadn't actually stopped.
The Biden administration could have reversed Trump's efforts, and placed pressure on Israel to halt these plans, as well as end its settlement expansion while making good on its promises and obligations under the peace process. Instead, the president continued Trump's normalization efforts while breaking from presidential precedent and not even attempting to advance the peace process, all while issuing little to no criticism of the Israeli government's violations. He has in fact escalated the issue, pushing for an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement, with the only concession to Palestinians the mere preservation of the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace — an agreement that would also entail further nuclear proliferation in the region and giving Saudi Arabia security assurances. Even so, Biden's secretary of state continues to claim that this could "be used to advance" such a peace.
So while Hamas had reportedly planned this operation for two years, and claimed it was motivated by years of violence at Al-Aqsa, its attack also can't be understood without the bipartisan push for Israeli-Arab normalization at the Palestinians' expense, and the outrage, anger, and despair it has inspired.What is clear — from Hamas's extraordinary violence, the wider regional war it threatens to spark, as well as the major pro-Palestinian protests across Arab countries in response to Israel's bombing campaign — is that almost every assumption that undergirded the Abraham Accords was disastrously wrong, not least the idea that dismissing the Palestinians would make for a more peaceful Middle East.

IntroductionBetween September 2012 and December 2015, a series of national and regional consultations, aimed at resolving a persistent dynamic of conflict between law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) working on issues of access to HIV services in high‐priority countries for people who use drugs have been organized by the HIV/AIDS Section of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, the Law Enforcement and HIV Network (LEAHN) and other international organizations. The aim of these consultations has been to understand, at a national and regional level, the key points of tension between police and CSOs and how to overcome these tensions to enhance access to and uptake of services by key populations, including people who inject drugs, sex workers, men who have sex with men and transgenders. This commentary briefly describes the methods, process, content and key outcomes of these consultations held across diverse number of countries and regions, including Africa, South East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.DiscussionWhile the context varies, this paper highlights that there are commonalities that drive a persistent dynamic of conflict and therefore also common methods for resolution of conflict and forging partnerships. Both policing and CSOs have key sectoral responsibilities and reform agendas to implement to ensure that as an individual agency they are able to meet their obligations as partners in the HIV response. Using the key outcomes of discussions and recommendations from these consultations and drawing on existing literature, the objective of this paper is to present a preliminary model that roadmaps the critical path from resolution of conflict to partnership between LEAs and CSOs.ConclusionsThis paper seeks to highlight that critical resources are required to support ongoing development and harnessing of partnerships between LEAs and CSOs and argues that these resources should not just come from global HIV funding mechanisms but should be part of a more mainstreamed security sector reform agenda that understands the mutual benefits that programming for human rights–based policing reform would have on HIV, development and security.

Purpose– A rapidly expanding body of literature on international mediation, as well as the central role international mediation plays in modern-day conflict resolution, make it necessary to review and analyze this vastly evolving field of study. This study seeks to review the most significant trends and debates in the literature on international mediation, with an emphasis on the literature of the past six years.Design/methodology/approach– Reflecting Wallet al.'s staged conceptualization of the mediation process; this review essay is divided in three sections that cover the antecedents of mediation, possible mediation approaches, and the outcomes these approaches yield – making it possible to review and analyze the diverse sets of theories within the field of mediation, as well the various methodological approaches employed to test these theories.Findings– Much research to date has focused on how international mediation in armed conflicts affects the likelihood of reaching a negotiated agreement, while other possible outcomes of mediation have been understudied. Accordingly, research needs to be done on the effects of mediation attempts that did not lead to a peace agreement, as well as the accumulative effect of peace agreements. Furthermore, the relation between negative peace and mediation has been studied extensively, but how mediation affects the degree of positive peace has received scant scholarly attention. Finally, the interlinkages between the different phases of the mediation process need to be examined more extensively.Originality/value– This review identifies the state of the art knowledge concerning the international mediation process, which allows peacemakers to make informed decisions in order to prevent and resolve armed conflict in the twenty-first century.

This thesis looks into how bilateral issues feed into ongoing EU accession negotiations and are, in fact, able to stall the process. Further, this piece of research analyses whether and how it is possible to resolve bilateral issues during accession negotiations. The salience of this single-case study of the border dispute between Croatia and Slovenia is the hitherto non-existent situation of two EU Member States facing an unresolved bilateral conflict over territory, here a so-called mixed dispute (maritime and land). The study reconstructs the conflict and both its bilateral and third-party management efforts between the end of Yugoslavia and the most recent stage, the lawsuit before the CJEU, with focus on the events 2008-2018 including the troublesome arbitration procedure from 2012-2017. The method employed in this qualitative within-case study is process tracing. The availability of both (i) actors for interviews and (ii) documents renders process tracing particularly apt. Interviews play a central role and are at the heart of this study. Actors are vital sources of information and can help reconstruct events and the causal mechanisms between them. Documents are the second pillar of the data collection approach this study is based on. Draft documents in particular are a first-hand primary source and an equally crucial instrument alongside interviews in the process tracer's toolbox. Prior to Croatia's EU accession on 01 July 2013, this very conflict had led to a blockade of the accession negotiations of one party to the conflict (Croatia) by the other party to the conflict that was already an EU member (Slovenia). The inherent feature of the present case is that an issue of national interest has been pursued by means of the Member State veto power. That leverage is indeed at hand not least when bilateral attempts have failed. As a result, the asymmetric power relationship between the two countries at the time produced some coercive momentum to 'solve' the conflict, or to initiate such solving, during Croatia's accession negotiations. These features are unique in the history of EU enlargement. In view of the implications for the post-Yugoslav space in relation to the EU, an analysis of how a bilateral conflict between an EU Member State and a Candidate Country was handled is urgently needed. That is what this study will want to provide. The recent so-called Western Balkans Strategies of the European Commission from 2012 and 2018 confirmed the merits-based approach meaning each Candidate Country is going to join the EU when it fully complies with EU conditionality individually and irrespective of the progress of other Candidate Countries. It follows from the current merits-based approach that it appears highly unlikely that the remaining SFRY successor States and Albania will be able to join at the same time. As a result, every time one Candidate Country has joined, it acquires the Member State veto power vis-à-vis another Candidate Country, so conflict over bilateral issues between Member States and Candidate Countries may become self-energising. This study presents concluding recommendations with regard to, first, a sustainable implementation of the common State border between Croatia and Slovenia; second, pressing bilateral issues in the ongoing and prospective accession negotiations with the Candidate Countries from the former Yugoslavia; third, means to strengthen dispute resolution both in terms of an EU framework and concerning reform of international arbitration; and fourth, ways to create some responsiveness between the rule-of-law record of and financial support for Candidate Countries.

This article seeks to understand the evolution of the processes of peacebuilding in the past years by analysing how international organisations have recently conceptualised alterity in a different manner. It is argued that throughout the post-war interventions of the 1990s and early years of 2000s, the inter-subjective processes of post-conflict societies were considered a problem to be corrected by the means of creating efficient institutions supervised by international experts. However, the optimism in relation to the promotion of democracy abroad withered away and there was the need to solve the errors of highly intrusive interventions. On these assumptions, alterity is increasingly seen as a resource that can be used to develop a peace project respectful of the context of each society. In order to analyse how alterity is understood more positively in the past years —which is crucial to explain how international organisations currently practice peace— the article will focus on the concepts of "local ownership" and "resilience". The conclusion is that the positive shift to embrace other cultures also hides two potential problems. The first is that we are losing the capacity to theorise about peace and the second is that the autonomy or national sovereignty of post-war societies still remains in limbo. ; Este artículo quiere entender la evolución de los procesos de consolidación de la paz en los últimos años, a través del análisis de cómo la conceptualización de la alteridad por parte de los organismos internacionales está cambiando. El argumento es que en las intervenciones posbélicas de la década de los noventa y de los primeros años del siglo XXI, los procesos intersubjetivos de las sociedades que salían del conflicto se consideraban un problema a corregir con la creación de instituciones eficientes supervisadas por expertos internacionales. Sin embargo, con la pérdida de confianza en la posibilidad de promover la democracia internacionalmente y con la voluntad de solventar los errores de unas intervenciones excesivamente intrusivas, la alteridad es cada vez más un recurso que puede utilizarse para desarrollar una paz respetuosa con el contexto de cada sociedad. Para analizar cómo la alteridad se ha entendido más positivamente en los últimos años, algo transcendental para explicar cómo organizaciones internacionales entienden la paz actualmente, el artículo se centra en los conceptos de "apropiación local" y "resiliencia". La conclusión es que este cambio positivo para respetar otras culturas también esconde dos potenciales problemas. El primero es que estamos perdiendo la capacidad para teorizar sobre la paz y el segundo es que la autonomía o soberanía nacional de las sociedades posbélicas continua en el limbo.

In How Informal Institutions Matter, Zeki Sarigil examines the role of informal institutions in sociopolitical life and addresses the following questions: Why and how do informal institutions emerge? To ask this differently, why do agents still create or resort to informal institutions despite the presence of formal institutional rules and regulations? How do informal institutions matter? What roles do they play in sociopolitical life? How can we classify informal institutions? What novel types of informal institutions can we identify and explain? How do informal institutions interact with formal institutions? How do they shape formal institutional rules, mechanisms, and outcomes? Finally, how do existing informal institutions change? What factors might trigger informal institutional change? In order to answer these questions, Sarigil examines several empirical cases of informal institution as derived from various issue areas in the Turkish sociopolitical context (i.e., civil law, conflict resolution, minority rights, and local governance) and from multiple levels (i.e., national and local).

The United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution on children in armed conflict in 1999, making it one of the oldest examples of Security Council engagement with a thematic mandate and leading to the creation of a dedicated working group in 2005. Existing theoretical accounts of the Security Council cannot account for the developing substance of the children and armed conflict agenda as they are macro-oriented and focus exclusively on states. I argue that Security Council decision-making on thematic mandates is a productive process whose outcomes are created by and through practices of actors across the three United Nations: member states (the first United Nations), United Nations officials (the second United Nations) and non-governmental organizations (the third United Nations). In presenting a practice-based, micro-oriented analysis of the children and armed conflict agenda, the article aims to deliver on the empirical promise of practice theories in International Relations. I make two contributions to practice-based understandings: first, I argue that actors across the three United Nations engage in reflective practices of a strategic or tactical nature to manage, arrange or create space in Security Council decision-making. Portraying practices as reflective rather than as only based on tacit knowledge highlights how actors may creatively adapt their practices to social situations. Second, I argue that particular individuals from the three United Nations are more likely to become recognized as competent performers of practices because of their personality, understood as plural socialization experiences. This adds varied individual agency to practice theories that, despite their micro-level interests, have focused on how agency is relationally constituted.

Este artículo presenta el resumen del trabajo fin del máster "Cultura de Paz, Conflictos, Educación y Derechos Humanos" que hice en el "Instituto de la Paz y los Conflictos" en Granada. El tema principal del trabajo son conflictos religiosos en la Guerra de Bosnia y Herzegovina (1992-1995) y el papel de la religión como tal en el conflicto. Los conflictos balcánicos son bien conocidos y por ahora bastante analizados, pero los autores españoles nunca han analizado el componente religioso del conflicto. El fin de este trabajo es dar a conocer el papel que jugó la religión en dicha guerra de un modo profundo, aprovechando la ventaja de la autora de conocer la literatura en las lenguas balcánicas, así como las circunstancias históricas y políticas de los países balcánicos. He llegado a la conclusión que la Guerra de Bosnia y Herzegovina tuvo un componente religioso importante, siendo la primera vez que se estudia el tema de los conflictos religiosos, pero desde la investigación para la paz, siendo este el aporte más valioso del trabajo. ; This article presents the summary of the master's thesis, which I undertook at the Institute for Peace and Conflicts in Granada for the course "Culture of Peace, Conflicts, Education and Human Rights". The focus of my master's thesis is religious conflicts in the War of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995) and the role of religion in the conflict. The Balkan conflicts are well-known and until now have been quite analysed, but Spanish authors have never analysed the religious component of the conflict. Taking advantage of having in-depth knowledge of Balkan languages, literature about the issue, historical and political circumstances of the Balkan countries, the goal of this research work is to introduce Spanish readers, in a much more in-depth way, to the role that religion played in the War of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I have concluded that the War of Bosnia and Herzegovina had an important religious component and bearing in mind that this kind of peace investigation has never been developed before, this can be considered as an important contribution of this research work.

International audience ; We live in unprecedented times characterised by social, economic, andecological crises in the global perspective. To respond to these challenges, the conceptof sustainability was developed as a global blueprint for just action. The problem withglobal sustainability is that we have conflicting visions of what is just and what issustainable. How to deal with conflicts in a fair way in situations in which consensusis out of reach, and global action that really makes a difference (as opposed to anyaction that people happen to agree on) is required? This article explores the elementsof an ethics of compromise as a solution to contemporary global challenges such assustainability. I argue that consensus is not a necessary condition for cooperativeaction. I propose a theoretical model of fair political compromise that does not requirecompromising one's own moral values, and discusses the methods and conditions ofapplication in international affairs. To this end, I draw on Martin Benjamin's notion ofintegrity-preserving compromise. Such compromise can be an ethically legitimatemode of peaceful conflict resolution in situations of rationally irreducible difference.

With the Indonesian invasion in late 1975, the self-determination conflict in East Timor gained international attention. Against all attempts on the part of Indonesia to silence international debate on its incorporation of East Timor, the Timorese resistance, with the support of selected states, continued to draw attention to its thwarted efforts at self-determination until the 1990s. Conflicts on self-determination are often analysed either as part of the larger picture of inter-national conflicts or as local territorial conflicts. Instead, we suggest a systems theoretical per-spective and understand conflict as a social system, which is based on repeated communication at various levels at the same time. Our analysis shows how the self-determination conflict in East Timor was successfully constructed as a matter of world politics by both the securitising and desecuritising speech acts of the conflict actors. These strategic speech acts from this early phase of the conflict in world politics, on the lack of self-determination of the Timorese people and the unlawful occupation, would prove to be important for the conflict system and renewed critical reaction to the Indonesian occupation in the early 1990s at the UN, ultimately leading to its resolution.

South America's predominant democratic regimes and its increasing interdependence on regional trade have not precluded the emergence of militarized crises between Colombia and Venezuela or the revival of boundary claims between Chile and Peru. This way, how can we characterize a zone that, in spite of its flourishing democracy and dense economic ties, remain involved in territorial disputes for whose resolution the use of force has not yet been discarded? This article contends that existing classifications of zones of peace are not adequate to explain this unusual coexistence. Thus, its main purpose is to develop a new analytical category of regional peace for assessing this phenomenon: the hybrid peace. It aims to research the evolution of security systems in South America during the previous century and build a new, threefold classification of peace zones: negative peace zones, hybrid peace zones, and positive peace zones.

This research report has beenreviewing the context of economic development-ecological communitiesPidie Jaya. Seeing the condition of natural resource management, the problem lies in the managementof natural resources related to the economic and ecological basis Aceh alleged birthplace of armedconflict in the 1970's. Political and economic tensions in the former conflict and tsunami destroyed theeconomy and ecology of the Acehnese people, usually heats up along with the emergence of rivalrybetween the various political and economic power. Momentum Momentum Aceh peace and electionshave become the domain of the end of conflict and bring peace and the effects can be expected toaccelerate the development process of Aceh in the future. The focus of the problem lies in thecharacteristics (Community Economic Development) around the area of operations of the company. Inthis survey, the Economy-Ecology parameter that will be seen are: Livelihood patterns, level ofdependence on resources related to their livelihoods, access to economic capital and distribution,economic value of fishing for communities, Local Economic Infrastructure, Local Labour Force Figures ,Gini Ratio and Rural Poverty Level (Village level). Primary and secondary sources of data will be analyzedwith descriptive methods, qualitative and quantitative, Shape Activities: The process of recognition ofthe general characteristics of the Acehnese people and the communities that surround the region ofAceh Pidie, Pijay District, District Bireun and Sabang can be done in several ways including throughobservation / observation, intensive discussions (FGD, wawawancara) and through the study ofdocuments. Purposes, among others: Identifying structure-sekonomi social and ecological coastalcommunities, coastal communities identify vulnerabilities in the survey in the context of localcommunity life and home economics, mapping key stakeholders and their roles in the socio-economicdynamics and ecology, and to prepare and establish recommendation program for local coastalcommunities in the context of social and environmental responsibility. Law of the sea in Pidie Jaya doesnot act as a medium of conflict resolution. The need for mentoring and training roles including chiefmerevitalisai laot and customary law of the sea. The role of commander laot not only regulates maritimeregulations for fishermen, but also as a medium of socialization and social conflict resolution. The role ofmaid agencies also quite a supervisor. In addition it is also important to community participation inpolitics so as to avoid themselves from desruktif political behavior, and the importance of cooperativerelationships by regents Pidie quite legitimated.