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Mission
To stimulate, by means of relationship building with enemy parties, an effective process of peacemaking that includes profound cultural gestures which have practical effects on day to day relations and circumstances, and that are sponsored by significant political leadership.
Vision
An irreversible direction of reconciliation between and reconstruction of enemy societies that becomes embedded in cultural and religious interactions.
Methods
Quiet relationship building between significant actors from among both adversaries and third parties, across lines of class, religion, and political affiliation, and which leads to A. support for innovative programs that will affect large populations, B. subtle policy shifts, and C. the stimulation of peace process proposals which receive high level sponsorship from significant figures on all sides ·promotion of new ideas and strategies(significant writing, opeds, interviews on radio and television, email lists, advertising) that follow on back channel conversations, thus adding pressure from the public sphere on key leaders.
Gathering of wisdom that hones and strengthens the first two methods by creating a rapid-response “brain trust” of theoreticians and activists who would be consulted regularly in order to quickly adjust recommended strategies as the conflict changes and evolves.
Rationale: What has been missing and what is need
Diplomacy is at a crossroads at the present time due to unprecedented challenges. The Western, primarily American, war on terrorism, the war of Arab and Muslim extremist groups against the United States, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continue to threaten the stability and safety of millions of people, many beyond the Middle East as well. For millions more this Middle Eastern set of conflicts has spilled over into conflicts between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are global networks of Islamic groups, on the fringes of many societies, whose aim is to exacerbate these civilizational struggles and create a full-scale war. Furthermore, there are cultural and religious resurgent groups on every continent that capitalize on human misery and alienation to stimulate cultural warfare.
These developments come paradoxically in the context of very positive evolutions of religious civilizations in the past century, and unprecedented levels of contact and cooperation between cultures and religions. Many international agencies express this growing consensus on universal values. International documents of human rights have their various counterparts in multi-religious documents that embrace and deepen the commitment to human rights. Much of this work lacks strategic depth, however, when it comes to educating and moving whole civilizations towards the practices of tolerance and coexistence. But we cannot, in the midst of our fears of growing violence, lose sight of these positive developments. There is, in reality, a fierce competition at work for the hearts and minds of millions of people. How can we win this competition?
Diplomacy, both in theory and practice, has tended to foist peace and coexistence upon whole populations, expecting that the promises contained in abstract treaty documents will be enough to quell the rage and injury of centuries. There is little attention to how whole communities actually move from unbridled hatred to tolerance and eventually to reconciliation. Diplomacy has thus far demonstrated little understanding of how to actually inculcate the values of coexistence and human rights in the context of many unresolved grievances that run very deep. There is a good understanding of the importance of economic development as a major factor in relieving stresses that contribute to extremist violence. But this ignores the full panoply of human tendencies that contribute to either war or peace, and the tendency of war making to be seductive despite its highly destructive economic consequences in most cases.
There are other mistakes. Political leadership is currently viewed by traditional diplomacy in a rather simplistic fashion that boils down to one fundamental error. Diplomacy acts as if leaders truly lead and followers follow. But the mood of the majority in democracies, and even in many authoritarian regimes, heavily determines the choices of leaders. The mood of the majority, or even very significant minorities, will determine whether leaders truly devise workable compromises in negotiations, take major political and military risks, or whether they obfuscate and devise ways to blame the other side for the impasses.
Diplomacy: That competes for hearts and minds
Diplomacy must continue to evolve in such a way that its strategies of achieving social ends, and especially peace treaties, becomes inextricably coupled with methods of social change that reach the hearts as well as the minds of target populations. These methods must affect behavior at the highest levels of interaction between leaders as well as interactions on the street, and particularly the behavior of security forces, or more accurately, those who have the guns and the power of life and death over others. It is in understanding the central importance of these matters that we can begin to devise new and bold strategies of diplomacy.
Put simply, it has been proven both by recent cataclysmic historical events, as well as by new research [1] , that culture and religion matter a great deal in the formation of conflict, and, must, therefore, play critical and creative roles in conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation, and socio-economic reconstruction. Once millions of people are motivated to resist rational compromises in the name of religion, to fight and kill in the name of their culture, there is simply no way for them to be brought into peace processes without engaging those myths and values that matter to them most. These frames of reference and meaning must then be coupled together with negotiations concerning power, security, economics, and the sharing of scarce resources.
New methods of diplomacy must focus on the way in which leaders at the highest levels and the political leaderships of every civilization involved, including the political leadership of religion and culture, can be helped to see the wisdom of broader and deeper methods of building peace. In that way painful and dangerous compromises can be made in the context of communities that are steadily evolving new cultural ways to see each other. The political openings emerge as worldviews start to be reconstructed. In this way pre-negotiations and negotiations are not over against culture but in sync with it. At a human level, the heart and the mind become engaged simultaneously in conceiving a new paradigm of the future.
We now understand that human beings make complex and fateful decisions in life through a subtle combination of brain functions, not just abstract reasoning, and that, in fact, abstract reasoning is often colored by primal feelings of trust or distrust, fear, hate, forgiveness, friendship, and loyalty. Visions of the past and the future, relationships of loyalty to both the living as well as the dead have a profound influence on how we think through matters of war and peace.
One of the tragedies of the Arab-Israeli Oslo peace process, for example, is that just a few people got the chance to go through the profound changes that come with the re-humanization of enemies. The latter typifies the kind of relationship building that stimulates not only creative rational compromises but also has an impact on the more primal choices between trust and distrust, hatred or friendship, recovery from loss or the inability to do so. Most members of both populations never really got a chance to engage in this process. As much progress as was made between businessmen and security personnel, the deeper relationships and friendships were more rare, or confined to privileged classes. Political leaderships are always flawed, and sometimes they are abysmal. Nevertheless it takes more than bad leadership to create paroxysms of hate or endless cycles of revenge between two groups. It takes an absence of large scale, heavily funded efforts to reverse the emotional damage of the past. This has never been done in the Arab-Israeli conflict.