Neil Kritz previews the pending agreement to heal a decade of division between Hamas and Fatah, and explains what effects the reconciliation might have on the larger Middle East Peace Process.
On Peace is a weekly podcast sponsored by USIP and Sirius XM POTUS. Each week, USIP experts tackle the latest foreign policy issues from around the world.
A U.S.-led peace initiative to end Sudan’s brutal civil war took place in Geneva over the last two weeks. But despite invitations and extensive international pressure, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) declined to send a delegation to Switzerland altogether, while the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) sent a delegation.
Israeli soldiers’ discovery of six of their country’s hostages shot dead in a tunnel underneath Rafah, Gaza has placed the question of a cease-fire’s prospects in stark relief. Coming as the U.S. had already stepped up efforts to push for an Israel-Hamas agreement, the grim fate of the hostages can simultaneously be viewed as providing a catalyst for the urgent conclusion of a deal, or as a harbinger of diplomatic derailment for a process the U.S., Egypt and Qatar had been in the throes of pushing to resolution.
When negotiations between the Colombian government and the rebel FARC group kicked off in 2013, only one of the 20 negotiators was a woman. Two years later, 20 percent of government negotiators and 43 percent of FARC negotiators were women. Their participation broadened the agenda of the talks that led to the historic 2016 peace accord, which included important gender provisions. Women’s participation in the Colombia peace process was a clear peacebuilding success — and it was ultimately made possible by a diverse national women’s coalition, which mobilized to insist on gender-inclusive negotiations.
July marks the anniversary of the 1953 armistice agreement that ended the Korean War and the 1954 Geneva Conference, convened to resolve the issues that the war could not. In the seven decades since, efforts to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula have been limited and flawed. Today, the security situation in the region is arguably more precarious than ever, with a nuclear armed-North Korea and dysfunctional great power relations. Recent foreign policy shifts in North Korea do not augur well for peace in the near term. Thus, even moving the needle toward peace will likely require Washington to undertake bold initiatives.