Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | A Conversation with Harold Saunders

Harold "Hal" Saunders is a veteran high-ranking U.S. diplomat who participated in the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords involving U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and later co-chaired the Dartmouth Conference Regional Conflicts Task Force. Presently, he is president of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, which conducts dialogues designed to make constructive social change possible in international and domestic conflicts, ranging from the "Inter-Tajik Dialogue" addressing the Tajikistan civil war to racial conflicts on U.S. college campuses. "Sustained Dialogue" differs from Track II in a variety of ways, but their likenesses are greater than the differences; both are based on building peace through the use of non-official dialogue in workshops reliant on private donors. Following is a conversation with Saunders on the difficulty of demonstrating the value of his work to private foundations.

How do you demonstrate success to sources of funding?

Any one of us who engages in this work lies awake at night saying, "Well, so what? What does this add up to?" Over the last 15 years ... a number of people in foundations wanted a numerical, objective, hard-results statement, a bottom-line kind of answer, and I have to say at the outset that I don't know of a single social change process that lends itself to that kind of evaluation.

Aren't there successful outcomes you can point to?

Let me tell you what my first proposal was to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 1993 for the Tajik Dialogue. Other organizations may have said, "We are going to pull together people from the different factions in the Tajik Civil War and mediate a peace agreement among them." We didn't say that. We didn't figure we were smart enough to do that. The proposition to the Hewlett Foundation was: we want to see whether a group can form in the middle of a civil war to achieve the capacity to design a peace process for their own country. Now, by that measure, there was success at a number of different levels, because this group did that, they did it in the dialogue group, they did it in the peace negotiations, they did it later in the National Reconciliation Commission, they did it over a seven-year period. And they formed their own NGO in 2000 to promote democratic processes in Tajikistan. So they are still attempting to develop the capacity to design a peace process for their own country and they were participants in a number of successful achievements along that track, in what is now a twelve-year period.

So, can't you take credit for those outcomes?

This brings us to the second level of evaluation: how much credit can we really accept? In the first year of the dialogue, which met six times over twelve months, people from the government and a fragmented opposition met. These people played a role in formation of a united Tajik opposition which then made it possible for them to accept a UN invitation to UN-mediated peace talks and I can honestly say that that dialogue played a role in precipitating those negotiations; they came together at a time when others were not ready for the formal processes of mediation and negotiation. They played a role in paving the way for that process. So, I can state that as a narrative fact. Can I claim responsibility for the Dialogue Group in precipitating the negotiations? No, I can't do that because in any complicated political situation there are countless inputs. I was at Camp David with Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978 and I don't know that any one of us there could give you a definitive statement as to who deserves the credit for X, Y and Z in that.

But surely, that is a certified success?

The point is that one has to remain focused on the large picture of what one is trying to accomplish...My experience in the Arab-Israeli peace process in the 1970s was that we created an open-ended political process. It was open-ended because we knew what we wanted to do in the next six-to-eight months, but we didn't know what doors that would open. So if we had said in 1974, in a period of a five-year grant we will have an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, people would have laughed us out of town; they would have thought we were crazy, and yet that is what happened. Creating the process was the achievement; the outcome was not predictable. Yet "creating a process" would be seen as too vague an objective.

So, you are saying you can aim for a goal but don't promise success?

One needs to allow time and space for an open-ended process that produce results that go beyond anything you can imagine when you start the process. You can tell from the way I'm talking that I think evaluation has to be geared to fairly broad, substantive questions: what are we trying to do here; and after a year we can ask, how are we doing? What has happened that is totally unexpected? What did not happen that was expected? Did we tackle the problem in an intelligent way? Was the process right? All kinds of questions are valid to examine and to examine every time we turn around. But we can't always produce measurable results.

So what does all that add up to?

I can say, we're creating spaces where people can try to relate to each other differently and you'll say "Hogwash, that's a bunch of pap!" and funders would say it's a bunch of pap. On the other hand, how do you change relationships between societies, between civilizations? Anybody got a pill people can swallow? No. Will people be able to negotiate away their fears? No. So we're engaged in a process of change the likes of which are not too familiar to people who use conventional social science paradigms for understanding and judging things.

Do you consider your work more political art than political science?

Oh, sure. There's no science to this. I have conceptualized Sustained Dialogue as a five-stage process [establishing the] progression of experiences you have to go through to transform relationships. But you will never find one dialogue that is the same as another; you will never do any one of them in the exact same, slavish implementation of the five stages. So it certainly is not political science. I have a difficult time with the word "science" as in social science; it just isn't. If you are going to deal with human beings, sure you can deal scientifically with certain parts of it but other parts, no; it just isn't limited to science.