Peace accords — twelve treaties worth knowing
The list. Tolerance on the exam is ±2 years.
| # | Treaty | Year | What it did (one line) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peace of Westphalia | 1648 | Ended Thirty Years' War. Invented the modern sovereign state. |
| 2 | Treaty of Paris (US independence) | 1783 | Britain recognized US independence. |
| 3 | Congress of Vienna | 1815 | Reset Europe after Napoleon. Held ~100 years. |
| 4 | Treaty of Versailles | 1919 | Punished Germany after WWI. Conditions of WWII. |
| 5 | UN Charter | 1945 | Founded the UN. |
| 6 | Geneva Conventions | 1949 | Rules of war: prisoners, civilians, the wounded. |
| 7 | Camp David Accords | 1978 | Framework Egypt-Israel. |
| 8 | Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty | 1979 | First Arab country to recognize Israel. Has held. |
| 9 | Oslo I Accord | 1993 | Israel ↔ PLO recognition. Statehood promised; not delivered. |
| 10 | Dayton Accords | 1995 | Ended Bosnian War. Created an awkward shared-power state. |
| 11 | Good Friday Agreement | 1998 | Ended most of "The Troubles" in N. Ireland. |
| 12 | Abraham Accords | 2020 | Israel ↔ UAE / Bahrain. Sidelined the Palestinian question. |
The big stories worth understanding
Versailles: the textbook bad peace
1919, end of WWI. The Allies forced Germany to:
- Take sole blame ("war guilt" clause).
- Pay enormous reparations.
- Give up territory.
- Cap its military.
Result: German economy collapsed in the 1920s. Politics radicalized. By 1939, Nazi Germany was invading Poland and WWII was on. Most historians argue Versailles didn't cause WWII directly but absolutely set the conditions for it.
The lesson is structural: a peace deal that humiliates the losers without giving them a stake in the new order is not a peace deal, it's a delay.
Oslo: the peace that wasn't
- Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed Letters of Mutual Recognition. The plan: a phased process leading to a Palestinian state by 1999. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed on the White House lawn.
What happened instead:
- Settlement construction in the West Bank accelerated through the 1990s.
- Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli extremist opposed to the deal.
- The Second Intifada broke out in 2000.
- The promised final-status talks never produced a state.
- Today the West Bank is more fragmented, more occupied, and Gaza has been under blockade since 2007.
The framework signed in 1993 is still nominally in force. The peace it promised never arrived. We don't think the Palestinian side has been treated justly here — that's not a neutral description, it's our family's view.
Abraham Accords: arranging the room
- Israel normalized relations with the UAE and Bahrain (later Morocco and Sudan). The deals are real diplomatic agreements — embassies, flights, trade. But the Palestinians were not at the table; the deals deliberately decoupled "Israel-Arab relations" from "the Israel-Palestine question."
Defenders of the accords say the old logic — "no Israel-Arab peace until Israel-Palestine is solved" — was a veto that gave the Palestinian leadership too much leverage to block progress. Critics (including us) say sidelining the people whose lives are at stake has, historically, never produced a just outcome. See Versailles. See Oslo.
Good Friday: a peace deal that worked
- Northern Ireland. Three decades of sectarian violence (~3,500 killed). The agreement:
- Set up a power-sharing government with both communities at the table.
- Released paramilitary prisoners on a schedule.
- Created cross-border bodies tying Northern Ireland economically to both Britain and the Republic of Ireland.
- Got popular consent — voted on in referenda by both populations.
That last bullet is the difference. The people on both sides voted for it. They had a stake. Brexit has strained parts of it (border / customs questions) but the violence has not returned.
The through-line
Three patterns repeat across centuries:
- Peace deals that include everyone affected tend to hold (Westphalia, Camp David, Good Friday).
- Peace deals that humiliate the losers or leave out the people whose lives are at stake tend to fail (Versailles, Oslo, Abraham Accords' handling of Palestine).
- Signing paper is not the same as making peace. A peace process can run for decades and produce no peace at all.
That's the lesson. Names and dates are just the way to hang it.