On “pushy strategies,” enticing opportunities and bias: Third-party mediation in unripe conflict, a comparative analysis of pre-negotiation case studies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The study focuses on the effectiveness and limits of superpower third-party mediation during pre-negotiation in the complex environment of low-intensity intractable conflicts in which at least one of the adversaries perceive the mediator as biased. In these situations, third parties often operate in a context that is unripe for negotiation, which raises questions about how a powerful third party should act during the pre-negotiation stage, is there a limit to what even a powerful third party can achieve under the circumstances? What should a third party do to increase the effectiveness of its mediation and avoid pitfalls that may escalate tensions between the parties in asymmetric intractable conflicts? These issues will be explored in a comparative analysis of U.S. engagement in two pre-negotiation processes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Kerry peace initiative during the second Obama administration (2013), and the current Trump administration’s effort (2017-2018) to generate peace talks.