Fitchburg State University Professor Eric N. Budd’s new volume on the struggle for peace in the Middle East – Conflicted are the Peacemakers: Israeli and Palestinian Moderates and the Death of Oslo – is being published this week by Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.
The 1993 Oslo Accords were a key attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, whose failure was largely attributed to extremists on both sides. Budd’s book challenges this conventional wisdom by examining the role of Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers themselves in derailing the peace process.
“The current conflict over the Gaza Strip shows how far apart the two sides remain,” said Budd, a faculty member in Fitchburg State’s department of economics, history and political science. “As the Oslo Peace Process has bogged down, the extremists have been empowered. With the moderates too conflicted to make peace, the extremists don't need to sabotage the peace process because the moderates have already done that for them, so the cycle of violence continues.”
Looking at the role of moderates before and after Oslo, the different agreements and peace proposals they negotiated, and their rhetoric, the book shows that these peacemakers retained an inherent ambivalence toward the peace process and one another. This prevented them and their constituents from committing to the process and achieving a lasting peace.
This unique survey shows how the people who drive the peace process can not only undermine it, but also prevent its successful conclusion. By dealing with such an important aspect of negotiation, the book will foster a better understanding of the role of moderates and why peace processes may falter.
Budd, one of the founders of Fitchburg State University’s Center for Conflict Studies, is the author of Democratization, Development and the Patrimonial State in the Age of Globalization (Lexington Books, 2003) as well as many articles and book reviews.
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