In Delhi on February 3rd-5th the “US-India Track II Dialogue on Climate Change and Energy” will gather, as it has each year in India or America since 2010, supported by the Aspen Institute and other think-tanks. Peace-building is not the only area for Track 2. Nancy Lindborg, USIP’s boss, says that, after a post-cold-war lull, the resurgence of regional and great-power rivalry once again requires greater reliance on Track 2 and 1.5. In the middle are expert facilitators like Mr Jones’s Ottawa Dialogue or the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). At the other end are numerous think-tanks and NGOs. Mr Powell co-founded Inter Mediate after, as a British official, pushing for peace in Northern Ireland.įor size HD, with some 250 people, could rival the diplomatic service of many a country. Martti Ahtisaari, a president of Finland and like Mr Carter a Nobel peace laureate, set up Crisis Management Initiative (CMI). Some, like Jimmy Carter, a former American president, have brought skills honed in government. The need for more flexible ways to bring the parties together creates a gap for private peacemakers. In the trickiest cases, “Track 1 as a conflict-resolution tool has really lost its significance,” says Luxshi Vimalarajah, of the Berghof Foundation in Berlin, another leader in the field. These tend to be within countries, not between them. Meanwhile, two or three new wars start each year. Technology has enabled smaller groups to pile into conflicts, making them messier and harder for the UN’s state-centric system to handle, Mr Harland argues. But the next decade saw only seven or eight. The first two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall brought some 30 major peace agreements, according to David Harland of the Swiss-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), a leader in private diplomacy. With communism’s collapse the need for alternative tracks diminished. ![]() The Dartmouth Conferences fostered contacts between cultural figures, scholars and politicians from East and West the Pugwash Conferences brought together scientists. Track 2 initiatives proliferated during the cold war. (It defines conflict broadly, including anything from the bloodbath in Syria to tetchy exchanges between Scottish nationalists and the British government.) The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs reckons there were 402 “political conflicts” in 2016, up from 278 a decade earlier. One driver, perhaps, is an increase in discord. “When I first started in the early 1990s, you could probably count on two hands the number of organisations involved in this kind of work, but in the last ten years there’s been a proliferation,” says Hrair Balian of the Carter Centre in Atlanta. They all have one thing in common: they have been growing. To complicate matters, some variants merge into “Track 1.5” (run privately but with involvement of public officials), while “Track 3” connects communities. Even the author of a book on the subject, Peter Jones of the University of Ottawa, says Track 2 “defies easy definition”. The term, first used in 1981 by an American diplomat, Joseph Montville, covers everything from modest workshops to major initiatives. Such diplomacy, known as “Track 2”, fills the void left by the official sort in “Track 1”. ![]() Increasingly, they establish entire alternative avenues for dialogue. ![]() They may open a back channel (as South Africa’s ruling National Party did in order to negotiate an end to apartheid with the African National Congress-representatives of the two hostile sides secretly met in an English country house owned by a gold-mining firm). They can help as advisers (as in Colombia). “You need a referee,” says Jonathan Powell of Inter Mediate, “and that has to be someone who’s trusted by both sides.” The involvement of third parties can take many forms. When official efforts to resolve a conflict are lacking or bogged down, another way must be found. In 2015 a pioneering transitional-justice deal was reached. ![]() But with the help of Inter Mediate, a British charity, a way forward was found, involving the appointment of three independent lawyers on each side. The two sides could not agree on how to bring those responsible for crimes during the country’s 52-year civil war to account. TALKS BETWEEN the Colombian government and the FARC rebels were stuck.
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