Sustained Dialogue in Conflicts Transformation and Change

"Our country is more deeply and angrily divided than at any time in my life," says Harold H. Saunders. Believing that the energies and capacities of citizens outside government are the greatest untapped resources for meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century, Saunders argues that sustained dialogue is a critical instrument for citizens to use in marshaling those resources to develop the relationships essential to peace, efficient organizations, and democratic political and economic development. Beyond that, sustained dialogue offers a creative diplomacy appropriate to the twenty-first century.

HAROLD H. SAUNDERS is the President of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue and Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation. He served on the National Security Council Staff, 1961-1974, and was Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asia in the Carter Administration. He flew on the Kissinger shuttles, 1974-75, and was a principal drafter of the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, 1978-79. Since 1981, he has engaged in the nonofficial dialogues described in this book. He is author of The Other Walls: the Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective; A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts; and Politics Is about Relationship: a Blueprint for the Citizens' Century.

Prologue: Why Sustained Dialogue? * Part I: Historical Setting and Conceptual Framework * The First Half-Century: Setting and Timeline * Peace Process: Pre-1982 Roots of Sustained Dialogue * Framework for Analysis: Sustained Dialogue as Process * Part II: The First Laboratory * Beginning a Dialogue: Dialogue about Dialogue * How to Talk about Problems and Relationships: The Struggle for Dialogue * Talking, Listening, and Thinking Interactively: Dialogue Experienced * Thinking Together about Acting Together: Sustained Dialogue Takes Shape * Conceptualizing the Process * Part III: Testing the Five-Stage Process of Sustained Dialogue * The First Test: Tajikistan * Testing the Limits: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh--With Philip D. Stewart * Arab-American-European Dialogue: Working Together toward a New Relationship between the Arab Region and the West (2001-2007)--With Randa Slim * Part IV: Sustained Dialogue in Peacebuilding * Mini-dialogues and Hybrids in Tajikistan--With Parviz Mullojanov and Randa M. Slim * Process, Place, and People: The Three Ps of Sustained Dialogue in South Africa--With Theodore Nemeroff * Sustained Dialogue Campus Network--With Priya Narayan Parker * Part V: Reflections * Evaluation in an Open-ended Political Process: Civic Learning and the Citizen Evaluator * Epilogue: Transforming Relationships . . . Designing Change