Gabrielle Rifkind is the Director of Oxford Process, a conflict resolution organisation that works quietly behind the scenes to ripen the conditions for peacemaking. She is a specialist in conflict resolution, a mediator, and a group analyst and has worked in international conflict resolution for the past 20 years where she is committed to the integration of geo-politics with psychology.
In 2003 she established the Middle East department for Oxford Research Group. The focus of work over two decades was the Iran nuclear issue, the proxy wars in Syria and the Palestine-Israel conflict. Committed to trying to understand the mindset of the region, she facilitated meetings and spent time talking to the leadership in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and ‘Western’ states. More recently she worked on Hong Kong, Myanmar and now on the Ukraine/Russia conflict. In 2016 she founded Oxford Process, which works in conflict situations quietly behind the scenes to build relationships with conflict parties and identify opportunities to reduce tensions and support a peaceful settlement to the conflict.
A dynamic woman and a political entrepreneur, she appears frequently in the broadcast media, has given many public lectures on peacemaking and has debated at the Oxford Union on two occasions. She is an author and frequent contributor to the media, with over 50 publications which advocate looking at an issue from multiple perspectives and speaking to all sides of the conflict. In these efforts, she regularly co-facilitates the BBC Radio programme Across the Red Line, where she invites two parties of opposing sides of various issues to listen to each other and have a constructive discussion.
She has written for various British newspapers, online publications, and academic journals, including The Guardian, The Times, Prospect, The Independent, Open Democracy and the New England Journal of Public Policy. She is knnown worldwide as a commentator on international peacemaking and related themes, and as the author of several books on the subject Making Terrorism History, The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of conflict resolution and the author of The Psychology of Political Extremism. Her work combines the role of human relationships, geopolitics and the management of radical disagreement.
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RELATED LINKS
● The Guardian: I’m a conflict mediator. This is a way out of the Ukraine crisis
● Open Democracy: The deal of the century: any chance of an honest broker?
● Preparing the Psychological Space for Peacemaking