Insight Turkey
Insight Turkey
Challenging ideas
On Turkish politics and International affairs

Author

Nathan C. Funk

Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Waterloo, nfunk@uwaterloo.ca
Nathan C. Funk
Peacemaking between America and the Muslim World: A New Beginning?*
October 1, 2009
The arrival of the Obama administration has created opportunities for positive and enduring change in U.S. relations with the Muslim world. Although early attempts to replace confrontation and ideological inflexibility with a more circumspect approach rooted in conciliatory gestures and “enlightened” political realism are encouraging, more substantial shifts in U.S.-Islamic relations will require commitment to a strategy of active peacemaking that moves beyond the standard repertoire of concepts and practices associated with the Cold War’s dominant international relations paradigm. Such a strategy would seek to grasp the potential inherent in President Obama’s stated commitment to founding relations upon “mutual interest and mutual respect,” breaking the present impasse in U.S.-Islamic relations through principles and prescriptions derived from academic studies of peacemaking as well as from a critical re-evaluation of past U.S. policies.

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