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Private Professionals for Peace
Track Two Diplomacy encompasses peace efforts embarked upon by unofficial, non-governmental organisations and individuals who specialise in conflict management. Private peacemakers try to generate non-governmental citizen interactions between parties in a conflict. Their aim is to help resolve conflicts by surpassing the logic of power politics and to encourage communication, understanding and collaboration between antagonistic communities © By Jos Havermans
The former US diplomat John McDonald, who was among the first to provide Track Two with an underlying theoretical and analytical structure, believes that the strength of unofficial diplomacy lies in its ability to address the root causes of conflicts. More than any other approach, Track Two is able to reveal the underlying human needs that can fuel antagonism, he says. ‘By allowing face-to-face communication, Track Two Diplomacy helps participants arrest the dehumanization process, overcome psychological barriers, focus on relationship building, and reframe the conflict as a shared problem that can be resolved collaboratively,’ he believes.
Track Two differs from Track One Diplomacy in that it perceives its role as being part of a process of developing mutual understanding between larger groups of people, whereas Track One Diplomacy tends to limit its focus to the narrower world of the politician. Track Two tries to make its impact felt on the entirety of what it describes as identity groups: namely, communities that share a certain ethnic, regional, national, socio-economic or other identity. Rather than just trying to inspire politicians to make certain favourable decisions based on rational evaluation of options and interests, which is the Track One approach, Track Two seeks to help all the people involved change their way of thinking. McDonald: ‘Track Two is transformational, positing a worldview in which power politics is superseded by mutual empowerment; identity groups at least join if not replace nation-states as the loci of power; basic human needs and not strategic interests set the agenda; collaboration and inclusivity replace competition and exclusivity; international relations are seen as ongoing relationships between all the people, not crisis or situational relationships between governments’.
Track Two Diplomacy is said to have become more relevant, because of a change in the nature of conflicts. Increasingly, conflicts are the outcome of internal strife in which the government is just one actor among several. In these circumstances, it makes less sense to make deals with governments because other actors, such as local leaders or rebel groups, may decide to continue fighting. In a context where other actors than the state play a crucial role in conflicts, proponents of Track Two Diplomacy envisage a larger role for their methods of alternative peace making. NGOs are perceived as being in a good position to act as Track Two peace workers. Since they are often rooted in, or deal with local communities, they are in a good position to fulfil a role in early warning and human rights monitoring. NGOs are also capable of helping to establish a well-knit local infrastructure across the levels of society that empowers the resources for reconciliation. NGO staff could even become engaged in negotiations on the local and sometimes national level.
Landrum Bolling, who is an advisor to the Conflict Management Group and an expert on Track Two Diplomacy, states one of the advantages of private peacemaking: ‘In dealing with troublesome problems it is often useful to find some mechanism by which new ideas can be tried out with minimum risk,’ he says. ‘Officialdom may be very inhibited about trying out ideas; even floating a balloon to an official of another country might seem to be sending more of a signal than is meant’, Bolling continues. ‘But if an idea is tried out with an unofficial person, then if it does not fly or if there are repercussions, the government can always disavow it. The person engaged in this informal communication naturally has to understand that he may be disavowed in this way and not have his ego invested in a particular message or point of view. He has to be totally vulnerable and willing to say, ‘Yes, I made a fool of myself. That was wrong.’ Just let it go.
‘One of the possibilities of the informal approach is that it may offer a way of beginning a process of revising official policy with minimal risk and without loss of faith’, Bolling concludes.
Bolling is well aware of the difficulties and challenges that actors in Track Two diplomacy face. ‘Amateurs can cause damage’, runs the one-liner that summarizes the number one concern of both adherents and opponents. People involved in informal citizen’s diplomacy may be limited in their knowledge and background of a conflict. In that case, they could cause damage; especially if they do not acknowledge their limitations. Realizing one’s flaws seems to be an essential first step to try to avoid the possible negative effects of interventions. Another weak spot of Track Two is that private peacemakers are more vulnerable to manipulation than their official counterparts. Some parties in a conflict feign a willingness to compromise and open talks with unofficial mediators in order to gain time to strengthen their military position. ‘Track Two can be a waste of time as some Track Two diplomacy efforts are probably stalling manoeuvres’, according to Bolling.
A major challenge for private peacemakers is to achieve and maintain balance and even-handedness and avoid acting as advocates for one of the parties in a conflict. Another, extremely difficult, aspect of Track Two work is dealing with the intense emotions of people directly engaged in a conflict. These emotions are connected to matters of life and death, which require insight on the part of peace workers. Private peacemakers should ideally be familiar with psychological issues such as victimhood, mourning, forgiveness and contrition.
Track Two diplomats must also deal with ethical issues. McDonald pointed out that intervening in conflicts carries innate moral concerns about power, ethnocentricity and the personal agendas of mediators.
Given these difficulties, it is no wonder that many projects in which Track Two Diplomacy was practised turned out to have only an indirect impact on a peace process. In many cases it is extremely difficult to determine to what extent, if any, Track Two Diplomacy has assisted a peace process. Most experts of the field, however, believe that as yet its potential has not been fully used. Compared to Track One Diplomacy, private peacemaking usually suffers from insufficient funding and limited human resources.
In general, Track Two Diplomacy can be most effective when linked to official peace processes at a governmental level. The proponents of Track Two also see opportunities to collaborate with adjacent non-governmental approaches. Since its inception in the 1980s, Track Two Diplomacy has seen the birth of a number of siblings, nephews and nieces who have been named Track Three, Four, Five, etc, diplomacy. These parallel tracks encompass peace efforts by actors such as the media, churches, schools and artists. The multiplicity and variety of actors involved in today’s conflicts requires a similar multiplicity of partners to solve them.
Track Two remains the leading edge of this Multi-Track Diplomacy system. It is itself engaged in a continuous process of change. Theoreticians and field workers constantly seek to enlarge its impact and adjust Track Two Diplomacy to new international developments. The environment in which Track Two Diplomacy is developing seems to be encouraging. The well-heeled world of Track One Diplomacy is showing signs of becoming more susceptible to alternative diplomatic approaches. Some governments are actually willing to invest in alternatives to Track One policies. This implies that the ideas behind Track Two Diplomacy are gaining wider acceptance. It also means that the Track Two approach can count on receiving more resources. Peace-making by professional non-governmental organisations, therefore, has potential for further growth and development.
Unlike Track One officials, who are part of a single, formal bureaucratic political system, Track Two actors come from many different realms. Each player has his or her own culture and values. In most cases though, Track Two ‘diplomats’ have an academic background and are employed by action-oriented organisations that see it as their main mission to deal with conflict. This endows these actors with a considerable degree of professional credibility. And a professional, scholarly background is a welcome asset in Track Two Diplomacy, since experience has shown that private peacemakers need to be fully familiar with the history of the conflict and the range of issues it entails and should also be sensitive to the potential risk and threats to those invited to participate. This makes high demands on peace workers’ competence.
The activities of Track Two peace workers vary from organizing problem-solving workshops, acting as messengers and go-betweens to help set up a dialogue between antagonistic communities, offering mediation courses to local leaders, organizing seminars and conferences and private one-on-one diplomacy behind the scenes.
As some of the cases presented below demonstrate, Track Two Diplomacy can make a difference. In Somaliland, for instance, the so-called Boroma process, which was supported by the Life & Peace Institute led to a landmark breakthrough. Starting locally among elders at the sub-clan level in 1992 and moving upwards through society to clan level and from there to a national level, the process, which was supported by the Life & Peace Institute, culminated in a meeting of elders of all clans of Somaliland who in a remarkable display of participatory democracy elected a government and a president.
In Colombia, to give another concrete example, the Dutch NGO, Pax Christi provides support to local village communities who have declared themselves neutral in the conflict between guerrilla and national army. Representatives of Pax Christi were stationed in the villages to support the peace initiative and provide the kind of protection that the presence of foreign neutrals brings with it in these circumstances. A similar example of Track Two activity can be found in the Philippines, where peace zones have been formed by the Coalition for Peace (CfP), an umbrella organisation for more than fifty organisations based in all the regions of the Philippines engaged in professional peace building.
In the Croatian town of Osijek, Track Two peace work took the form of educational and advisory programmes. There, local academics established the Center for Peace Nonviolence and Human Rights, which functions as a Track Two organisation. Members of the Center focus on long-term results in trying to help Croats and Serbs create mutual understanding and work toward reconciliation. ‘Reconciliation is the beginning of spiritual renewal and is a prerequisite for building relationships which will preclude violence’, the Center’s founders say in a mission statement. Other successful examples of Track Two Diplomacy are taking place in Sri Lanka and Cyprus, where processes have been unfolding that are depicted later in this section of this book.
Conflict Resolution - Track Two Diplomacy, John W. McDonald and Diane B. Bendahmane (Eds.). Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, Washington, D.C., 1995
Conflict Resolution Wisdom in Africa, Jannie Malan. African Centre for the Construction Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), 1998
Multi-Track Diplomacy - A Systems Approach to Peace, John W. McDonald and Louise Diamond. Kumarian Press, 1996
Participating Approaches to Peacemaking Strategies, Ed Garcia. UN University, Tokyo, 1993
Peace by Peaceful Means - Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization, Johan Galtung. PRIO, Oslo, 1996
Peaceworks - Private Peacemaking, David Smock (Ed.). USIP-Assisted Peacemaking Projects of Nonprofit Organizations, United States Institute of Peace, 1998
Preventing Deadly Conflict - Final Report of the Carnegy Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Carnegy Corporation of New York, New York, 1997
Preventing Violent Conflicts, Michael Lund Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC, 1996
Prevention and Management of Violent Conflict - An International Directory, European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1998
Feedback please to
j.verhoeven@euconflict.org