CBC Ideas Week: War and Peace

What does it take to create peace? What ideas and values can knit a society back together – or at least make it possible for enemies to lay down their arms and live side by side? Past peace deals offer badly-needed models for our own time, but the process of making peace is often imperfect. And at worst, peace agreements can cement injustice and make future conflict all but inevitable.

This series, moderated by Ideas host Nahlah Ayed, explores four pivotal attempts to make peace over the last three decades, and asks what we can learn from the best - and worst - thinking of the past. The series culminates in an exploration of what it takes to make peace in the fraught context of the 21st century.

The Oslo Accords

When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat met in Washington, D.C. in 1993 to sign the first Oslo Accords, it was supposed to usher in a new era of peace and lay the groundwork for a Palestinian state. But three decades later, the Oslo Accords are primarily remembered as a failure, and the dream of peace is farther away than ever. Nahlah Ayed and guests discuss what went wrong, and what lessons the Oslo Accords hold for the future.