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Conference I
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Conference I: Developing Durable Peace Processes & Partners
The first conference aimed to look at the key elements that make a peace process durable
(that is which lead to a lasting peace, not just a lasting process). Participants
examined the recent developments in the Northern Ireland, Israeli-Palestine and
India-Pakistan peace processes, to see what lessons could be learned on how to
make a peace process “irreversible,” to use Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s term.
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Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and Delhi Policy Group Chairperson K. Shankar Bajpai
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The Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland examples showed that it
is not easy to ensure that a peace process is irreversible.
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After ten years, the Oslo agreement lies in shreds, and
Israelis and Palestinians have once again been forced to
debate whether and how the occupation can be ended, instead
of moving to the next stage of ending it. Even in Northern
Ireland, where the Good Friday Agreement seemed to have set
an irreversible peace process in motion, one of its chief
architects, Senator Martin Mansergh, describes its labors
as Sisyphean.
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One of the most interesting debates at the conference
revolved around the following questions:
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Can there be an effective step-by-step process when a specific end goal is not agreed?
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Do the two sides need to commit to such a goal first and then work out the steps towards it?
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Should the process be predicated on “constructive ambiguity”
where all parties consent to a broad end goal, but negotiations
on specific details and final status are staggered so that the
more contentious issues can be addressed only when their
capacity to derail the peace process have been hugely diminished?
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The conference concluded on the following points:
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The Irish peace process is irreversible but the same cannot be said for
the Israel-Palestine or India-Pakistan peace processes.
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Nevertheless, on a scale of three, the India-Pakistan peace process
shows great potential for rapid advances, in which the mistakes of
the Irish and the Israel-Palestine peace processes can be avoided.
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While comparisons are invidious, a successful peace process, that is,
one that lends to durable peace, is one that depends on step-by-step
and incremental trust building between the key actors.
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