CONFLICT RESOLUTION/RECONCILIATION: DIALOGUE ACROSS DIVIDES

LAST UPDATED: 8/14/22

My negotiation and conflict mediation efforts are informed by Pugwash’s long-standing tradition of “dialogue across divides,” their valued informal diplomatic networking, and their efforts to foster open discourse about critical issues. Pugwash’s approach resonates the educational efforts I tried to hone over decades to stimulate dialogue, and to reify my Institute’s mantra of “thinking across boundaries and acting across borders,” and now, the Trebuchet’s “Breaking Down Barriers/Building Bridges.”

Elbe Day, April 25, 1945, is the day Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River, near Torgau in Germany, straddling a torn-up destroyed bridge, marking an important step toward the end of World War II in Europe. This contact between the Soviets, advancing from the east, and the Americans, advancing from the west, meant that the two powers had effectively cut Germany in two.

Elbe Day has never been an official holiday in any country, but in the years after 1945 the memory of this once friendly encounter gained new significance in the context of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This Davis Center remembrance updates that historic moment.

In 2016, during my last EPIIC year’s symposium, I was wonderfully surprised  by my friend, Brigadier General (ret.) Kevin Ryan, then director of the Defense and Intelligence Projects at Harvard’s Belfer Center.

Kevin, now a mentor, was a co-convener and participant in my last Pugwash workshops at Tufts in 2016 on the Security of Europe and “Technology in the Service of the European Refugee Crisis.”

Kevin interrupted his panel talk to present me with a retirement memento, the Elbe Award for “Thirty Years of Dedication and Leadership” and for “the courage to reach across dangerous divides.” The award is given by the Elbe Group, which Kevin convenes.  It is an independent gathering of very senior retired Russian and American military and security leaders, with a mandate to nurture dialogue and keep critical channels of communication open between their governments.

For thirty years at Tufts I intentionally chose complex and highly problematic complex themes embracing the complexity surrounding state sovereignty, international law, repressive regimes, human rights, and sought to explore the human impact of state policies and security doctrines.

My last years as Director of the Institute were from 2012 until 2016. Here you can find the last themes I chose and their activities.

Throughout, I understood the themes I chose as “conundrum” issues, challenging my Institute’s core EPIIC programs’ students to explore them in a demanding interdisciplinary manner. On the 25th anniversary of the Institute, my alumni and students honored me by endowing the program, both its colloquium and symposium, in my name.

My professional, educational, and Track II work over the decades has acknowledged the tension surrounding these issues embraced by Pugwash’s founders. I particularly understood the misgivings of Pugwash’s Nobel Laureate and physicist Joseph Rotblat’s about the vexed, quicksand potential of national sovereignty:

One of the greatest difficulties to overcome in the process of creating global citizens is dealing with conflicts between people who identify strongly with their respective countries. [….] Further, the major function of the nation state is said to be to protect its people from the threat of other nation states. This has been understood to mean that states have the right to maintain war-making potential. [….] Indeed, to eliminate the “institution of war,” we must overcome the thorny problem of national sovereignty

I juxtaposed the sanctity of state sovereignty, with for me, the more critical overriding intrinsic sovereignty of the individual. For I am the son of a father whose parents and his entire extended family were exterminated by the Nazis. Only he and his two sisters, Blima and Lonya, activist Labor Zionists, who fled to Palestine in 1937 after the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany, survived).

The world’s nations abstained from any direct intervention against the Nazi regime’s barbarous persecution of its Jewish citizens, homosexuals, and dissidents, terming the actions a domestic, internal matter. They argued that they were allegedly legally constrained, with any interference understood as as infringement on German sovereignty.

In 2003, I specifically directed the Institute’s EPIIC program to concentrate its entire year on sovereignty and intervention resulting in its ensuing international symposium, and its special programs,  including interviewing world leaders for their Sovereignty Exchange.

In 2011/12 our theme Conflict in the 21st Century, explicitly focused on global governance.

On the 10th anniversary of the Institute, in 1995 I had chosen the theme 20/20, Visions of the Future: Anticipating the Year 2020.

Its approach, asking students to confront complexity, to contend with nuance and ambiguity, was celebrated in a Boston Globe editorial. Refreshing thought.

Leaving the Institute in 2016, I had anticipated spending several years carefully preparing a major Boston city-wide series of events and symposia in actual 2020, to determine how wise our futurists had been, how our predictions and preconceptions had turned out, and how we might plan best for 2050; as a city, a society, a region, a nation, a universe. I knew I would not live to see that year, but wanted to imagine, to envision, what a more peaceful, sustainable, and livable era might look like, and how to aspire and plan for that.

Witnessing the unexpected emergence of Trump, I had grave misgivings about what might occur. The first time I identified myself as the creator of the Trebuchet was when I wrote this 2016 Globe editorial

As a very young boy, my Dad had me listen with him to the radio broadcasts of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and made certain I knew of his loathing of McCarthy’s chief counsel. malignant Roy Cohen.

He became Trump’s eventual mentor. Reptilian Stephen Miller reminds me of Cohen. His odious behavior provoked me to compose this blog.

To insist as many extremists have, surely Miller, and Steve Bannon on a false, stark Manichaean choice — between nationalism and universalism, between patriotism and cosmopolitanism is a thoroughly ugly, dangerous, and destructive approach. The current intolerance of extreme identity politics has made the essential quest for ambiguity and nuance both far more difficult, yet more necessary than ever.

In 1982, anticipating the anniversary of Orwell’s classic 1984, encouraged by Rod, I held a symposium, Secrecy and Democracy, as the culminating project of a graduate seminar I taught at Emerson College on freedom of information and technology. 

In a wonderful Beacon Hill pub, the Seven and Seven I befriended a wonderful maverick who became a fun and challenging mentor, Rod Whitaker, who I initially only knew as the Chair of the Communications Department at Emerson College.

Well not so - Rod had an important pseudonym, Trevanian, which really surprised me. He is the author of some extraordinary books that I really liked such as Shibumi and The Eiger Sanction.

Rod hired me to revise Emerson College’s communications curriculum, and with his blessing and a free hand, I created new seminars on international and investigative reporting, (and for fun sports reporting…for another entry…)

I understood both the early promise and peril of technology and the legislative debate, at that time on deregulation. I was informed by a friend John Wicklein, the head of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting and the author of the The Electronic Nightmare: The New Communications and Freedom, about the dilemmas of privacy and surveillance. Among my invited guests were the former head of the CIA William Colby, William Kunstler, and Robert Coover … I was already fearful of the demise of liberal democracy, and later in 2005, I dedicated the EPIIC year to The Politics of Fear, then later to the Future of Democracy.

One of the hallmarks of the Institute was immersive education, where in my thirty years of directorship we created opportunities for well over a thousand students to visit, research, and intern in well over a hundred nations and territories.

It was always controversial. One reason the Carnegie Corporation of New York supported the Institute, as detailed in Carnegie’s letter, “Tufts EPIIC — Taking Student Research Far Beyond the Classroom,” was this approach to understanding the world.

In one instance, two of my EPIIC students, one a citizen of Japan, the other of South Korea, were both quite initially suspicious of one another in our early class sessions. Ultimately they became good friends. Together they conducted common research in Japan and South Korea on “comfort women” and produced “The Legacy of War Crimes and the Potential for Reconciliation.” I invited the distinguished MIT Professor of Japanese History, John Dower, National Book Award recipient of War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, as one of their advisers. He was surprised by what we were able to do. I appreciated the opportunity to meet the students and learn about their ambitious joint research project. What they are undertaking is truly important to us, not just as scholars, but as world citizens. History and memory, racial and cultural identity, gender issues, ideology, and plain crass politics, and even current strategic and economic relations have all become entangled in the current debates over Japanese behavior World War II. They impressed me as precisely the type of committed young people we need, not merely help clarify these issues, but also to help move us toward a healing process. A family member was involved in the notorious 731 Japanese biological war crimes unit. The subsequent American involvement in this “research” speaks to the very ethical concerns and dilemmas that Pugwash was created to expose and confront.

I am dedicated to educating my students without blinders. Controversial opportunities occurred when I encouraged meeting with figures I hardly personally endorsed, included during NIMEP’s visit in Syria, where they met the exiled head of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, and in Lebanon where they met with Fadlallah, the cleric presumed to be the mastermind behind the bombing of the U.S. barracks in Beirut. I was accused of being an “intellectual bully with a pernicious desire to destroy Israel.”

Once challenged with whether I would actually send my students to an Iranian conference of loathsome Holocaust deniers, I indicated I would rigorously prepare them, and indeed support sending send them to Tehran. My intention was always to create a full spectrum of exposure. Here is one link to the research conducted by well over one thousand students to over 120 countries and territories under my direction.

I sent Sarah Dahglish, the a Tufts Neubauer Scholar, a merit scholarship program I oversaw, to Havana, Cuba examining and reevaluating the Cuban Missile Crisis in the light of then newly revealed Russian declassified documents; and others to the former Yugoslavia to aid in the reconstruction of the archives of the University of Sarajevo’s Library, razed by incendiary bombing by Serbian forces and to compile evidence for the trial of Slobadan Milosovich in the Hague for “cultural genocide” conducted by Cherif Bassiuouni.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, strongly supported this approach, with Carnegie’s President Vartan Gregorian terming us “the proving breeding ground for the next generation of international security and international relations leadership.”

The entire highly conflicted Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region remains of particular concern to me. I studied as a MA graduate student in Israel at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1965, concentrating on comparative politics, insurgencies and civil-military relations of developing nations, what I have now come to call the “majority world.” (Thanks, Shahidul Alam…)

Under an Israeli foreign ministry grant I did my own first immersive fieldwork research, traveling with the insurgent guerrillas, the Anyanya, in Southern Sudan in 1966. Little did I know then that it would be one of the world’s longest running civil wars. (I actually supported the independence day celebration of the ill-fated independence of South Sudan at Tufts in 2012.)

At the Institute I created several year-long efforts on the area, the first, early, in 1986/87, “The Future of the West Bank and Gaza,“ on the 20th anniversary of the Yom Kippur /Ramadan War, which personally embroiled me. Then decades later, in a far more intricate effort, the EPIIC colloquium/symposium in 2014/15 “The Future of the Middle East and North Africa.”

Throughout, we supported a number of MENA reconciliation efforts. At our 1987 forum on the West Bank and Gaza, with Galia Golan, Naomi Chazan, and Mona Rishmawi, the seeds of Women in Black were planted. In 2004, we hosted philosopher and PLA liaison to Jerusalem Dr. Sari Nusseibeh and former Shin Bet Director and Israeli Chief of Staff the Israeli Navy Admiral Ami Ayalon — two remarkably far-sighted and courageous people, once adversaries — who created the Israeli-Palestine People’s Voice. Ami and Sari were recipients of our Dr. Jean Mayer Award for Global Citizenship, and inspired me and my students to create the Institute’s New Initiative on Middle East Peace.  Its journals reveal its distinctive perspective and I have written prefaces to all volumes.

My NIMEP students’ first trip to the region, where they visited both Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, was under the auspices of the Faculty for Israeli Palestinian Peace (FFIPP). They helped an unincorporated Bedouin village receive electrification. Others of my students have helped create the NGO Daughters for Life, founded by the courageous Gazan physician, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, to whom I also awarded a Mayer Award. I sit on its board, as I do on the board for Combatants for Peace.

I am particularly interested by the ISYP’s Middle East efforts, most recently the 2017 conference in Cyprus, “Narratives of Change: Cooperation and Partnerships among Communities in the MENA Region.” Their mission is “to engage young people by providing an inclusive platform for diverse perspectives on regional issues through the framework of challenging beliefs.” I will be advising them on their upcoming conferences for young upcoming leaders, soon in August on South Asia and Kashmir.

At my Institute I persistently sought opportunities to engage our students in policy debates and efforts to understand Track II diplomatic initiatives. Landrum Bolling - a spectacular man - was a great personal influence - first working together in the Vietnam War era’s draft resistance with War Resisters International, later in his 1960’s Two-State Israel-Palestine effort - and then after Dayton in 1995, in the Former Yugoslavia.

I also hosted the architects of the Oslo Peace Plan, senior Israeli and Palestinian figures Yair Hirschfeld and Samih Al-Abed in a workshop explaining their vision of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab cooperation in the political, economic, and civil society realms to create a sustainable two-state solution.

I also hosted the Seeds of Peace campers, honoring my friend John Wallach with whom I helped develop their initial curriculum. As an OutWard Bound instructor I hosted Seed’s adult escorts at Thompson Island Outward Bound headquarters in Boston Harbor. Their young charges were the inaugural Seeds, young Israeli, Palestinian, Tunisians, and Jordanians who had come directly from the White House lawn where Arafat and Rabin has signed the once promising protocol .

Wonderful Convisero mentor Eva Armour is the Seeds director of alumni impact. We are working together to think of collaborative ways to increase the value of our communities.

I am the nominator for the Bronfman Award for Justin Hefter, one of the initiators of 30 Birds, and a GATHER Seed.

I have introduced Eva to South Africa’s Pumla Godibo Madikizela who has asked me to visit Stellenbosch University as a Fellow, once one the stronghold of the Apartheid government, to bring my Institute pedagogy. Here initial overture came decades over. but our means are evergreen.

Most notably, to illustrate dialogue across divides is our Iraq Project I developed with a wonderful friend, Padraig O’Malley, a frequent Institute collaborator beginning in 1986 (the very first EPIIC year on International Terrorism). The Iraq Project was an attempt to create a possible framework for the first secular election in post-Saddam Iraq. We sought to replicate Padraig’s own prior effort assembling the IRA and Northern Ireland government with the African National Congress to draw inspiration from South Africa’s efforts at reconciliation.

Padraig wrote this in-depth analysis for the Photo VII Foundation volume Imagine, which I helped edit.

The result of the Iraq Project was a series of conferences with senior Iraqi officials representing all diverse tribes, sects, and political parties in Iraq— with the exception of Al Qaeda. The two most important days-long sessions were held in Helsinki under the auspices of former Finnish president and Nobel Laureate Martti Ahtisaari, and resulted in the Helsinki Principles, signed by all parties and ratified in Baghdad in our culminating meeting. My students were involved in all of this, researching and creating preparatory materials, and a few actually traveled to both Helsinki and Baghdad, observing and recording the meetings. 

The Institute’s ongoing civil-military program, Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES), is another effort I initiated to create dialogue across divides. Cadets and midshipmen of the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, West Point, and Institute’s liberal arts students visit each other’s campuses for major symposia in an effort to understand each other’s perspectives and educational curriculum. They conducted joint research during summer projects, which have ranged from: the creation of the first human rights curriculum for the militarized carabinero under the direction of Judge Juan Guzman, who courageously prosecuted Pinochet; to understand Ukraine’s decision to release its fissionable nuclear material; to Jordan, to understand the impact of refugee flows from Iraq; to Japan, to understand the re-armament of post-WWII military; and to Rwanda, to understand their alleged role in reconciliation. Now, The Trebuchet is engaged with ALLIES in its efforts on environmental remediation with the U.S.-Pacific Command and strategic thinking in the Indian Ocean, working with Gregg Nakano and Admiral Rabinder “Robin” Dhowan, the former Chief of Staff of the Indian Navy in a SaiU initiative.

One of my MX organizers was Antonia “Toni” Chayes, then Undersecretary of Defense for the Air Force, who remains a friend. She now teaches at the Fletcher School, and frequently spoke for me at the Institute, particularly for ALLIES at our 25th anniversary on the theme of her most recent book on civil-military affairs, Borderless Wars: Civil Military Disorder and Legal Uncertainty.