The book offers detailed historical accounts of three prominent enduring rivalries: between India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey, and Israel and Lebanon. In each case, Blum illuminates the ways in which governments open their countries to specific accommodations even as the overall conflict--and the suffering of citizens and soldiers--continues.
   --Foreign Affairs

A compelling case for scholars and practitioners alike to focus on narrowly bounded conflict management initiatives as a most promising way to mitigate certain patterns of conflict that recur within enduring rivalries.
   --Brian Mandell, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Provides important and useful lessons for both the theory and practice of international conflict management.
   --P. Terrence Hopmann, Brown University

Islands of Agreement genuinely offers a new paradigm for thinking about conflict. It argues that in prolonged, intractable conflicts, the best can be the enemy of the good. Efforts to resolve the conflict, to transform war into peace, and the determination to assess all proposals regarding the conflict by that measure, ignore the possibility that even violent conflict and cooperation can exist side by side. Finding and using these islands of agreement gives us an entire new arsenal of tools that we can use to improve the lives of people on both sides of the conflict. Gabriella Blum has built on her direct experiences in Israel and Lebanon and combed the literature of negotiation, conflict studies, and international relations to write a bold, original, and far-sighted book.
   --Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean,Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Gabriella Blum is Learned Hand Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.