Peace and Reconciliation Processes

Abstract

The use of the term peace process may be recent, but the concept is as old as war. Sophisticated conventions on ceasefires and peace negotiations were already well established and accepted when theIliadwas composed. The negotiations preceding the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had some resemblance to contemporary peace processes: they lasted for four years; the principal negotiators never met; and they adopted approaches similar to the “proximity talks” and shuttle diplomacy used at Dayton for Bosnia and in Northern Ireland, with the main parties separately quartered in Münster and Osnabrück. More than three centuries later, these techniques and approaches were formalized and designated as peace processes. Harold Saunders recounts how the term “negotiating process” was used by those working with Henry Kissinger in the Middle East in 1974. Eventually, finding the phrase too narrow, “we coined the phrase peace process’ to capture the experience of this series of mediated agreements embedded in a larger political process” (Crocker et al. 2001).