| Synopsis: |
Gestures of Conciliation examines the ideas, assumptions and theories that underpin how leaders of parties in intractable conflicts begin and sustain a process of peacemaking by offering their adversaries 'olive branches' - in more modern terms symbolic gestures, concessions, tension-reducing moves or confidence-building measures. Using President Anwar Sadat's efforts to start a peace process between Egypt and Israel between 1970 and 1978 as a framework, the book moves from an assessment of factors that helped to make conciliatory initiatives credible and successful in a number of historical cases to more abstract concepts and theories that illuminate what conditions might, in general, make for success in launching a peace process. The author discusses means of overcoming barriers to accurate communication, problems posed by entrapment, the difficult dynamics of mistrust reduction, the need for intra-party consensus formation, and the nature of 'ripe' structural conditions, ending with tentative hypotheses about the overall process of conciliation. |