Gabrielle Rifkind is a British mediator who has specialised in international conflict resolution working through non-governmental organisations, (NGOs) in the Middle East and United Kingdom. She is the Director of Oxford Process. She is known as a commentator on international peacemaking and related themes and author of several titles. Her work considers the role of human relationships in managing parties with "radical disagreements" with the goal of establishing areas of potential mutual self-interest.

Early life

Rifkind is a graduate of the University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh. After working for the Probation Service, she trained at the Institute of Group Analysis and became a group analyst and a psychotherapist.

Later career

Rifkind joined the Oxford Research Group in the late 1990s to explore peacemaking in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. She became head of the Israel/Palestine programme. She next turned her attention to Iran and the wider Middle East. In 2016 she founded Oxford Process, which works in conflict situations to build relationships with conflicted parties to identify opportunities to reduce tensions or prevent further escalation of violence. Rifkind's theory of conflict resolution focuses on the non-violent management of radical differences between groups, rather than searching for an elusive common ground. Her work is currently focused on the Middle East and the war between Russia and Ukraine. Rifkind has frequently appeared on broadcast media in the UK has given public lectures on peacemaking and contributed to a colloquium at Princeton University and has twice debated at the Oxford Union. She has been one of the conflict mediators for four series of BBC Radio 4's "Across the Red Line" presented by British political journalist, Anne McElvoy. Rifkind is a featured speaker at the upcoming TED2024 conference in Vancouver. She is the co-author, with peace activist Scilla Elworthy of Making Terrorism History (2005) and, with former senior UN diplomat Giandomenico Picco, of The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Conflict Resolution, and author of The Psychology of Political Extremism: What would Sigmund Freud have thought about Islamic State.

Publications

Books

Articles

Her contributions to journals include:

Broadcast Media