Description:

The Buffett Institute's international diplomacy series will culminate in our spring quarter symposium on peace-making organized with Fundación Acordemos. This two-day event will bring together diplomats, negotiators and academics to discuss the high-profile peace processes of recent decades. Our aim is to draw lessons for future negotiations in a world confronting a crisis of multilateralism.

Although peace negotiations are often greeted with relief, they also represent a fork in the road. A badly-crafted agreement may be worse than no agreement at all. Rushed peace deals store up trouble for the future, fueling more intense and widening conflicts.

This symposium will examine the successes and failures of past processes, analyze key principles and strategies and discuss the roles of various actors in achieving lasting and implementable peace agreements.

The evening plenary session on Thursday, April 3 features prominent leaders and experts involved in negotiating peace in high-profile conflicts to foreground lessons learned from the successes and failures of peace processes of the past few decades. 

The substantive sessions on Friday, April 4 focus on the practical difficulties confronting peace negotiators, the principles and strategies that are key to an effective peace negotiation, and the potential impact of a peace negotiation on the ground. The comparative and thematic panels feature speakers with deep expertise in peace negotiations and third-party mediation to unpack the complexities and dilemmas of peace negotiations. We will discuss the conditions that are necessary for peace negotiations to occur and the role of different state and non-state actors in negotiating peace in a multipolar world. The sessions also analyze the structural and design elements that make for a successful peace negotiation and the factors that can enable or enforce their implementation.

Confirmed speakers include:

Barney Afako
Ravi Agrawal
Betty Bigombe
Kate Fearon
Claire Hajaj
Christopher R. Hill
Sergio Jaramillo
Pavlo Klimkin
Carlos Prieto
Shoaib Rahim
William Taylor
Tor Wennesland
Abiodun Williams

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.