Professor Padraig O’Malley speaks at Tufts prior to receiving the 2015 Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.
Professor O'Malley lectured on "Israel and Palestine: Is a Two-State Solution No Longer Feasible?"
Padraig O'Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has spent his career helping to resolve conflicts around the world and has written extensively on the subject, including the books Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes, and The Politics of Despair, one of the New York Times' best books of 1990. O'Malley is the founder of the Forum for Cities in Transition, an international network of divided cities that work together to promote reconciliation, civic participation, and economic development. His new book is The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine, A Tale of Two Narratives.
In September 2007, O’Malley, in collaboration with Nobel Prize winner Marti Ahtisaari’s Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) and the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) at Tufts University, assembled senior negotiators from Northern Ireland and South Africa to meet in Helsinki with their counterparts from Iraq. The partnership was known as “The Iraq Project”; the meeting became known as “Helsinki I.” O’Malley spent six months in Baghdad meeting with members of the Iraqi parliament to arrange meetings in Helsinki. There was a second round of talks in April 2008 (Helsinki II), and in July 2008, 36 leaders from all political parties in Iraq met with the same Northern Ireland and South African facilitators and negotiators. This last session resulted in the “Helsinki Agreement,” a series of principles that became the basis for exploring political reconciliation in Iraq in 2009.