ABSTRACT
Conflict resolution as a meaningful process has taken the best part of fifty years to emerge as something in which the parties to conflict can effectively engage. This is not to ignore Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy of the 1970s or the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of the same era, nor the numerous plans and proposals outlined by successive US administrations since their increasing involvement in the region following the decline of Britain and France after the Second World War. Rather, it is to put such efforts into historical context, a context that actually militated against any serious attempt to address the real issues at the heart of so many conflicts in the region. Indeed, we believe that in many respects it was only with the ending of the Cold War and superpower competition in the Middle East that progress could be made in the major arena of conflict in the region, the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. We would caution, however, that without a more comprehensive approach to conflict resolution and appropriate linkages to other political and economic issues in the region, there is still a serious likelihood that conflicts such as those in Iraq could undermine the wider goals of peacemakers. Such an approach, however, also requires a major adjustment of the Western mindset towards the region’s majority Muslim population, which is currently perceived as part of a suppurating mass of Islamic violence, repression and primitivism that threatens Western interests in the region.
