Hope During Conflict

The most deeply rooted international conflicts are termed intractable conflicts. Intractable conflicts are violent disputes that demand extensive investment from the rival parties and persist for a long time. These conflicts also share a more subjective quality: those embroiled in such severe disputes perceive them as innately irresolvable. Unsurprisingly, after decades of intergroup violence and hostility, citizens’ hope for peace is almost absent. Yet hope is an essential component in the pursuit of any political change, including the pursuit of peace. To promote the resolution of intractable conflicts, it is vital to accurately assess the levels of hope for peace in these severe disputes and explore hope’s origins and broader political consequences. This chapter addresses some of these issues by presenting the findings of a large-scale survey on hope for peace administered in one of the most longstanding intractable disputes today, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The survey is part of a larger global attitudes project that aims to map the hopes for peace of citizens living in conflict zones. Examining hope for peace among Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and Jews from Israel, this chapter reaveals some of the demographic and sociopolitical antecedes of hope for peace and demonstrate hope’s effect on braoder political attitudes. Overall, findings suggest that hope is not only an obvious outcome of a successful peace process; it is also one of its sources.