[1] Waage has produced foundational contributions to Norwegian scholarship on Norway's role in the Oslo process of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the early to mid-1990s.
[2] She has also been critical of the doctoral thesis of former Norwegian State Secretary Jan Egeland, who was intimately involved with the Oslo negotiations, and has used the Oslo process to demonstrate what she calls "the limits of third-party mediation by a small state in highly asymmetrical conflicts," in contradiction to Egeland's thesis.
In 2001, Waage was commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to conduct a comprehensive study of this back channel.
Waage and others speculate that such documentation has been kept hidden for party-political reasons, to avoid upsetting Israeli and US sensitivities about Israel's stance during the Oslo process, and for the vested interests of the Norwegian officials involved: Waage describes Norway under the guidance of Terje Rød-Larsen, his wife Mona Juul, Jan Egeland and Johan Jørgen Holst as "Israel's helpful errand boy.
PLO leader Arafat's willingness to accept the Oslo Accord, with all its shortcomings and compromises, was clearly a result of his fear of being permanently marginalized.
She in the last paragraph of her paper "Postscript to Oslo" says that:Without the power to impose solutions, and above all dependent on the stronger party, the weak state mediator in unequal contests must rely heavily on “process symmetry,” where the two sides are treated with absolute equality, provided with exactly the same accommodations, allotted exactly the same amount of time to make their case, and so on.
The Norwegians went to great lengths to achieve this symmetry (as did the Americans in their mediating efforts between Palestinians and Israelis, albeit for different reasons).
Process symmetry and the entrie [sic] facilitative exercise can create a sense of equality between adversaries and the illusion of genuine communication, even trust.
The Norwegians believed that through dialogue and a gradual building of trust, an irreversible peace dynamic would be created that could push the process forward to solution.