The bulk of the essays in this book were delivered as part of Liverpool University's Institute of Irish Studies Peace Lecture Series, 1996–2000, and they have been left largely unchanged as reflecting opinion at the time they were given. The earlier lectures received generous sponsorship from the Irish Independent Newspaper Group and Lord David Owen's charity Humanitas. They are dedicated to Torkel Opsahl, the international human rights lawyer, who headed up the 1993 Opsahl Commission in Northern Ireland and died tragically early shortly afterwards, just as he was taking up his new post as head of the Bosnian War Crimes Commission in Geneva. The collection concludes with an appendix bringing together the key recommendations of the major agreements, commissions, government papers and so forth on Northern Ireland since Sunningdale. It does not pretend to be comprehensive, attempting rather to trace the long gestation of some of the key recommendations of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Institute of Irish Studies was established in 1988. As well as delivering a full degree programme, it has continued the role set out by its first Director, Professor Patrick Buckland, as a bridge between the cultures of Ireland and Britain, in particular providing a neutral forum for political debate. The Peace Lecture Series has been part of this tradition. It was initiated in 1996 by Sir George Quigley's ‘Achieving Transformational Change’, which, at a time when the idea was belatedly being accepted in Northern Ireland, looked at the role of a ‘third party’ or external agency in areas of conflict. What if this had happened earlier, he asks, and Sinn Féin's 1993–94 claim to a new commitment to democratic politics been taken at face value and the third party had brought them into talks then? He looks at other areas of conflict to show the difficulties experienced by all movements turning from violence to exclusively democratic means, particularly that of urging implacable enemies towards compromise. The idea of peacemaking as a lengthy, evolutionary process, rather than something confined to the making of the initial agreement, is a theme which was to reappear in most of the other lectures.