Track Two Diplomacy in Theory and Practice
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Track Two Diplomacy in Theory and Practice

Peter Jones

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Track Two Diplomacy in Theory and Practice

Peter Jones

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About This Book

Track Two diplomacy consists of informal dialogues among actors such as academics, religious leaders, retired senior officials, and NGO officials that can bring new ideas and new relationships to the official process of diplomacy.

Sadly, those involved in official diplomacy often have little understanding of and appreciation for the complex and nuanced role that Track Two can play, or for its limitations. And many Track Two practitioners are often unaware of the realities and pressures of the policy and diplomatic worlds, and not particularly adept at framing their efforts to make them accessible to hard-pressed officials. At the same time, those interested in the academic study of Track Two sometimes fail to understand the realities faced by either set of practitioners.

A need therefore exists for a work to bridge the divides between these constituencies and between the different types of Track Two practice—and this book crosses disciplines and traditions in order to do just that. It explores the various dimensions and guises of Track Two, the theory and practice of how they work, and how both practitioners and academics could more profitably assess Track Two. Overall, it provides a comprehensive picture of the range of activities pursued under this title, to provoke new thinking about how these activities relate to each other, to official diplomacy, and to academe.

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SECTION I
IN THEORY
1
What Is Track Two Diplomacy?
FOR A TERM WHICH IS WIDELY AND OFTEN USED IN THE field of international relations, “Track Two diplomacy” defies easy definition. This is, in some ways, a source of strength. A loosely defined concept is one which can be applicable in many situations and can evolve quickly to meet the needs of different parties in different circumstances. Those who look at Track Two through a primarily operational lens would urge us not to seek specificity at the expense of flexibility. One is after all dealing with a process which is profoundly about the interactions between people, and firm definitions which attempt to cover all aspects of such situations are likely to be constraining and therefore not useful in the real world.1 Others argue that the lack of a firm understanding of what Track Two is can be a potential source of weakness; absent a widely accepted definition and, more importantly, absent the rigorous empirical and intellectual standards which often accompany efforts to develop such a definition, one can struggle to understand and communicate the boundaries of accepted practice. This means that the field can be open to unrestricted experimentation and even amateurish and destructive practices. Critics and skeptics can lambaste Track Two, critiquing certain cases which may not be representative of the field in the eyes of its proponents. And it becomes difficult to further establish the credibility of the field through research and analysis when different people are studying different things.2
Over the years many attempts have been made to define Track Two; the main ones will be explored in this chapter. Some attempts have focused on the specifics of the activity itself, developing from various case studies an outline of what happens in a “typical” Track Two event as a means of defining the field more generally. The problem is that no two Track Two processes are the same, and some are wildly different. Such definitions therefore may capture a specific case or two but rarely capture the array of activities which go on under this name.
Others have focused on defining who the actors in a Track Two process are as the key to defining what is happening in a larger sense. They have tried to define the roles of those who are in conflict and the roles of those who take on the task of the so-called third party which brings the protagonists together. They also study the types of people who do this. Once again, however, this approach does not yield a satisfactory, much less an all-encompassing definition of Track Two. Different Track Two processes can have very different kinds of actors. These can range from those who are entirely removed from official life, to those who are not officials but are very close to their governments, to officials themselves who are “acting in their private capacity.” Moreover, the backgrounds of these individuals can vary widely in their approaches to international affairs and to world politics.
Still others have sought to define Track Two by reference to its place within the larger negotiation process, most often seeing Track Two as a form of “prenegotiation”—a set of informal talks which help the two sides get to the formal negotiating table. While useful in some ways, this definition can limit views as to when and how Track Two is useful in that it conceives of Track Two as necessarily a tool to help parties get to an official negotiating table. Often Track Two is precisely this, but sometimes it is not; sometimes Track Two projects can be underway in parallel with official negotiations. But they can also be undertaken not to complement official talks, or the prospect of them, but rather to develop alternatives to official negotiation, often at the so-called grassroots level. Finally, some have tried to define Track Two by breaking it into a variety of categories, depending on what is going on, and then speaking about each in specific terms. While satisfying to some, no typology can ever really capture the large multiplicity of cases.
With so many, often conflicting, dimensions in play, it is probably impossible to come up with a concrete explanation or definition of Track Two which will adequately cover all cases. Attempts to do so quickly degenerate into largely frustrating theoretical debates over the application of certain terms and concepts to circumstances they were never meant to cover. Moreover, the question of defining Track Two is, for some, part of broader debates over the evolution of the field of conflict resolution. What this chapter will attempt to do, therefore, is to give the reader a sense of the array of activities which go on under the rubric of “Track Two diplomacy,” and also a sense of the attempts which have been made in the past to explain and define it. Such a baseline is critical for the chapters that follow, which delve into specific issues confronting the field.
The First Use of the Term
Many are surprised to learn that the term “Track Two diplomacy” was not coined until relatively recently. It is generally agreed that the term was first used by Joseph Montville, an American foreign service officer.3 In 1981 Montville used the term to denote unofficial conflict resolution dialogues. He defined Track Two as
unofficial, informal interaction between members of adversarial groups or nations with the goals of developing strategies, influencing public opinion, and organizing human and material resources in ways that might help resolve the conflict.4
Montville was keen to persuade his diplomatic colleagues that such dialogues should be better understood by diplomatic “professionals.” In looking at the growing field of conflict resolution, and the growing number of such initiatives that were going on outside the realm of official diplomacy, Montville was concerned that his fellow diplomats were in danger of missing an important development in the field of international relations. He was particularly concerned that a long-standing professional bias against nonofficial involvement in international affairs was leading his colleagues to dismiss something which was subtly changing the landscape of their profession, whether they liked it or not.
Indeed, official suspicion of individuals trying to insert themselves into “diplomacy” has a long history. One of the earliest attempts by a government to formally prevent individuals from inserting themselves into foreign relations was the Logan Act of 1799, passed by the US Congress after a private citizen, Dr. Logan, had traveled to Paris on his own to discuss US-French relations with the French government. The Logan Act reads, in part,
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.5
Almost two hundred years later, many of Montville’s diplomatic colleagues still viewed unofficial dialogues as, at best, an irrelevance, while others actively viewed them as a nuisance and believed that such processes should stay out of the way of officials. This view had still not changed significantly almost twenty years after Montville’s early work when Cynthia Chataway undertook a study of the attitudes of US officials towards Track Two.6 Montville wanted diplomats to recognize that government has no monopoly on creativity in the face of difficult international problems and that a relationship between officials and Track Two could generate positive outcomes if properly structured and utilized. But that message has been slow to find widespread acceptance.
Initially there was no magic about the term “Track Two diplomacy.” Montville merely noted that if official diplomacy might be called “Track One,” then unofficial attempts to resolve differences might be called “Track Two.” There is an undeniably elegant simplicity to this term. But it also unfortunately implies that such discussions could be construed as a form of “diplomacy.” With very rare exceptions they are not: practitioners of Track Two diplomacy are not diplomats. That title belongs only to those who officially represent their countries.7 While some Track Two processes may be closely related to, and even sponsored by, official diplomacy and while officials may take part in various Track Two processes in their “private capacities,” such processes cannot substitute for official interactions between states and should not try to do so.
It is thus probably unfortunate that the word “diplomacy” found its way into the lexicon surrounding unofficial dialogue and peacemaking, as it has created the potential for misunderstandings as to what is going on here. As we shall see, many of those who have subsequently tried to refine the definition have deliberately dropped the word “diplomacy” from their formulations. While their efforts have found favor with specialists in the field, the broader term “Track Two diplomacy” has caught on in the popular mind and in official circles, and is most often used in the vernacular to describe these efforts. We are thus stuck with it; but we should try to better understand it.
The Conflict Resolution Field
While the bulk of this chapter is dedicated to an exploration of the evolution of the idea and practice of Track Two, it is necessary to situate the discussion within the development of the broader field of conflict resolution. Indeed, for some people, Track Two is best understood as a subfield of the broader area of conflict resolution. This is true for much of Track Two, but not all; there are variants of Track Two that are not dedicated to the resolution of conflict. These include Track Two processes aimed at promoting regional security in various parts of the world, and these need to be understood in their own terms. They will be discussed later in this chapter. Within the conflict resolution stream of Track Two, which is the bulk of the field, there are differing understandings as to what “conflict resolution” actually means in practice, as we shall see when we explore this question in greater detail in Chapter 3.
The field of conflict resolution, as we presently know it in terms of international conflicts, emerged in the middle of the twentieth century when a small group of social scientists, influenced by both interwar theorists of international affairs and the development of new theories of labor relations and other means of settling domestic disputes,8 began to wonder if these ideas might not be applicable to international relations as well. At the time, the emerging field of international relations theory was heavily influenced by “realist” ideas, and the pioneers of what would become conflict resolution were not generally well received by the mainstream in either academe or official circles.9
Nevertheless, these pioneers carried on and began to develop sets of theories as to how conflicts originated, developed, and might be resolved. Over the years, the field has witnessed a significant evolution in its understandings and debates. The earliest days of the field, at its international level of analysis, tended to focus on state-to-state conflicts and the problem of peace between nations. Through the 1960s and the 1970s and onwards, and particularly after the end of the Cold War, new thinking emerged on the question of “intractable” disputes between ethnic and other groups which went on beyond the state-to-state level of analysis, although such conflicts were often exacerbated by events at the state level. Concepts such as social justice, gender and conflict, and the impact of good governance on conflict resolution became much more widely understood and debated. One of the key documents which launched new thinking about conflict resolution in the post–Cold War world was the Agenda for Peace released by UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Gali in 1992.10 At the same time, new approaches to negotiations, such as Harvard Law School’s “principled negotiation” method, emerged.11 Much more work was done to understand the complexity and the impact of culture and history on conflicts, beyond Cold War models of international affairs. As will be discussed later in this chapter, much of what would become Track Two as we presently understand it emerged and was refined at this time and was influenced by these wider developments and understandings of what conflict is, how it arises, and how it can be resolved peacefully.
The end of the Cold War saw significant advances in the field through the late 1980s and into the 1990s. As many conflicts which had been (apparently) suppressed by the superpower rivalry burst forth, a host of “scholar-practitioners” and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the conflict resolution field emerged to tackle them at many levels.12 This brought with it calls for a more professional approach, including techniques to evaluate the impact of interventions. There were also criticisms that the field was too dominated by Western concepts and traditions,13 and a growing awareness that the wide array of issues that attend what came to be known as “fragile” states need to be understood and addressed. Also during this time, and since, debates have arisen in the field as to the proper relationship between conflict resolution efforts at the level of political and military elites, which seek to manage disputes, and efforts which focus on grassroots peacebuilding as the path to genuine reconciliation (this difference in objectives will be further discussed in Chapter 3).14
It would be far too time consuming to detail the evolution of the field of conflict resolution, and several studies already exist for those interested (see notes 9 and 12). Moreover, we shall be exploring various aspects of the field as they relate to Track Two as the book goes along. What matters here is that Track Two has not developed in an intellectual vacuum; it is part of a larger field and has been influenced by (and has influenced) that field over many years.
Track Two B...

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