Making Peace in the Middle East: Lessons and legacies from international diplomacy
Petter Bauck, Ambassador Martin Indyk, Uzi Rabi, Matt Matravers and Sue Mendus (Chair)

• Saturday 9 June 2018, 11.15AM to 12.45pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
  Book tickets
• Ron Cooke Hub, University of York (map|getting to campus)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

More than 20 years on from the Oslo Accords, our Focus Day examines how peace can be achieved in the Middle East.

Our keynote speakers are Ambassador Martin Indyk, former U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations at the U.S. Department of State; Petter Bauck, Editor of The Oslo Accords: A Critical Assessment; and Uzi Rabi, Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University.  

Martin’s talk will be based on his extensive experience in Middle Eastern diplomacy, while Petter will discuss whether the Oslo Accords had a reasonable chance of success. What went wrong? What is the way forward? Uzi Rabi will draw on his in-depth research into the modern history and evolution of states and societies in the Middle East, Iranian-Arab relations, oil and politics in the Middle East, and Sunni-Shi’i dynamics.

The session is introduced by Matt Matravers, Director of The Morrell Centre for Toleration at the University of York, and chaired by Sue Mendus, Morrell Professor Emerita, University of York.

Presented in collaboration with The Morrell Centre for Toleration which is generously supported by the C and JB Morrell Trust.

About the speakers

Petter Bauck is Co-Editor of The Oslo Accords. A Critical Assessment (American University Press in Cairo in 2016/2017) together with Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer. The book was nominated for the Palestinian Book Awards 2017. Petter has a Masters degree in Violence, Conflict and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has been engaged in development work for more than 30 years - from 1989 to 2016 he has had different positions in the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

Petter served as Deputy Head of the Norwegian Representative Office to the Palestinian Authority from 2000 till 2003 with responsibility for the Norwegian development engagement in Palestine and a particular focus on the political developments in Gaza. In Norad in Oslo the main focus has been on development work in countries in conflict and fragile situations, with a main focus on Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. In addition, since 2009 he has worked with the Norwegian Ministry for Justice and Public Security on their Rule of Law engagements in Georgia, Moldova and since 2015 in Ukraine. He is at present working as Development Counsellor at the Norwegian Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Ambassador Martin S. Indyk is the John C. Whitehead Distinguished Fellow in International Diplomacy in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From July 2013 to June 2014, he served as the U.S. special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001.

Martin served as special assistant to President Clinton and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council (1993-1995) and as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State (1997-2000). Before entering the U.S. government, Martin was founding Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for eight years. He currently serves as Chairman of the International Council, as well as on the boards of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia and the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel. He also serves as a member of the advisory boards of the Israel Democracy Institute and America Abroad Media. He is the author of Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (Simon and Schuster, 2009). Most recently, he co-authored Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy with Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Lieberthal (Brookings Institution Press, 2012).  He is currently working on a forthcoming book, entitled Henry Kissinger and the Art of the Middle East Deal (Knopf, 2019).

Matt Matravers is Director of the Morrell Centre for Toleration. Matt joined York Law School in 2015 as Professor of Law having been at the University of York since 1995 serving as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Professor in the Department of Politics. He is on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is also Head of York’s Goodricke College.

Matt works on contemporary legal and political philosophy. He is the author of two books, Justice and Punishment, and Responsibility and Justice, and is working on a third on the general part of the criminal law. In addition, he is the editor of six edited collections and the author of numerous papers in legal and political philosophy.

Sue Mendus is Morrell Professor Emerita, University of York, and the former Director of the Morrell Centre for Toleration.  She has published widely on topics in modern and historical political philosophy, with a special emphasis on the concept of toleration. In 2004, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and from 2008 to 2012 she was Vice President (Social Sciences) of the Academy. She is a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and in 2012 she was made a CBE for services to Political Science.

Sue’s current research falls into two areas: first, the relationship between terrorism and religion and, second, the problem of political integrity. Her most recent publications include Politics and Morality, (Polity Press, 2009), ‘Life’s Ethical Symphony’ in the British Journal of Philosophy of Education (2008) and 'Contingency in Political Philosophy' (2017).

Professor Uzi Rabi is the Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Iranian Studies, both at Tel Aviv University. Formerly, he was the Head of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. From 2004-2005, he held a Visiting Professorship at the Lipinski Institute of San Diego State University. He is the Director of the TAU Workshop, an annual ten-day seminar for international scholars that focuses on the geopolitical situation of Israel and its neighbours, and the Co-editor of Bustan: The Middle East Book Review.  His research focuses on the modern history and evolution of states and societies in the Middle East, Iranian-Arab relations, oil and politics in the Middle East, and Sunni-Shi’i dynamics.

Uzi has written a number of books in both English and Hebrew. In 2015, he published Yemen: Revolution, Civil War, and Unification (I.B Taurus), which covers the modern history of Yemen. He published a related book in Hebrew, Yemen: the Anatomy of a Failed State (Kibbutz HaMeuchad) in 2014. His other books include Saudi Arabia: An Oil Kingdom in the Labyrinth of Religion and Politics (The Open University, in Hebrew) and The Emergence of States in a Tribal Society: Oman Under Sa’id bin Taymur.  

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