20 Peace Lessons from Northern Ireland to Israel and Palestine - Paperback

by Colin Irwin (Author)

All conflicts are different, different peoples, places, cultures, languages, religions, histories etc. etc. So the solutions needed to resolve these conflicts are also necessarily very different. However, the road to peace, the steps that have to be taken to get to peace, the peace process itself is quite another matter and in this regard there is a very great deal that the world can learn from Northern Ireland. Of course the Northern Ireland experience is also littered with failure. Some things worked and some things didn't. But the purpose of this book is to review the things that did work in the hope that others can learn from that experience. Regrettably these lessons have not been learnt in Israel and Palestine, or if they have been learnt then they have been ignored. It may be possible to simply manage the conflict in the Middle East for some years to come but the world requires that this conflict is resolved. Best practice in Northern Ireland peace making can bring all the parties much closer to that objective.

Author Biography

Colin Irwin received his Doctoral degree in Social Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in the US in 1985 with a study of the Inuit and how they developed a society without war. Then, through a series of appointments at Dalhousie University in Canada, Queen's University of Belfast and the University of Liverpool developed 'peace polls' to bring the views of 'the people' into the negotiations of the Nunavut settlement in Canada in the 1980s and the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Since then he has extended his work around the world to include the Balkans, Middle East, Kashmir, Sri Lanka and relations between the West and the Muslim World all reviewed in his comparative work The People's Peace.