- What did the Kellogg-Briand Pact actually commit its signatory nations to do?
- Why did the pact fail to prevent Japan's invasion of Manchuria or Germany's remilitarization of the Rhineland?
- What structural weakness made the pact unenforceable despite its unambiguous language?
- What is the legal status of the Kellogg-Briand Pact today, decades after the wars it failed to prevent?
Conflict Mediation and Peace Accords
Negotiated settlements and mediation of armed conflicts.
- Why did Angell argue that war was irrational rather than immoral?
- How did Ralph Bunche negotiate the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreements on Rhodes?
- How much money did the Marshall Plan direct to European reconstruction, and how many nations received it?
- Why was rebuilding Western Europe's economy considered a strategic move against the spread of communism?
- Why did some recipients feel uneasy that a former military Chief of Staff had designed the recovery program?
- What long-term economic outcome followed the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe?
- What did the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 actually accomplish, and what did they leave unresolved?
- What concessions did Sadat and Begin each make at Camp David that their own constituencies largely rejected?
- How did the thirteen-day Camp David negotiations lead to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty?
- What role did Jimmy Carter play in brokering the Camp David Accords?
- Why was Anwar Sadat assassinated in 1981, and how was it connected to the peace treaty he signed?
- How did the history of Aracataca, including banana-company colonialism, influence the world of García Márquez's fiction?
- What made Central America's overlapping civil wars in the mid-1980s a proxy theatre for outside powers?
- Why did Costa Rica's lack of a military shape Oscar Arias Sánchez's approach to peacemaking?
- What did the Esquipulas II Accords of August 1987 actually commit the five governments to do?
- Why did the Nobel committee award the Peace Prize so soon after the accords were signed?
- What is the structural paradox at the heart of UN peacekeeping's mandate to be neutral, invited, and lightly armed?
- What happened to Maya civilians during Guatemala's internal armed conflict?
- What did the Oslo Accords actually establish between Israel and the PLO?
- Why were the Oslo negotiations conducted secretly in Norwegian country houses rather than publicly?
- What happened to Yitzhak Rabin less than a year after receiving the Peace Prize, and how did it affect the peace process?
- What did the Good Friday Agreement change about the constitutional status of Northern Ireland?
- What political risks did John Hume and David Trimble each take within their own communities to reach the agreement?
- Why did the Nobel committee award the Peace Prize before the power-sharing institutions had fully taken hold?
- What international conflicts did Jimmy Carter help mediate after leaving the presidency?
- What role did Martti Ahtisaari play in negotiating Namibia's independence in 1988?
- How did Ahtisaari's mediation end a three-decade separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia, within just two months of serious talks?
- What made Ahtisaari's approach to conflict resolution a repeatable 'craft' rather than one-off diplomacy?
- How did Obama address the tension between receiving a peace prize while commanding forces in two wars?
- How long had Colombia's conflict with the FARC lasted before the 2016 peace agreement?
- Why did Colombian voters reject the peace referendum, and by what margin?
- Why did the Nobel Committee award Santos the Peace Prize just days after the referendum failed?
- What work was the Center for Civil Liberties doing in Ukraine at the time of the award?