Conflict Management and the Oslo Experience: Assessing the Success of Israeli–Palestinian Peacemaking

The Oslo experience and the signing of an agreement between Israel and the PLO is used as an empirical case study to highlight the nature of successful mediation in international conflicts. To provide a structure for the analysis, the concept of intractable conflicts and their management is utilized. Factors affecting the mediation of intractable conflicts are grouped into two clusters: (a) contextual factors and (b) process factors. The paper focuses on the changing balance of contextual factors and how these created a ripe moment for mediation, and on the particular way the mediation process was carried out. Timing, ripeness and secrecy are identified as the crucial variables that produced the breakthrough in Oslo.