JUDGING ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITS

Judging a process of dialogue to transform relationship must start with a framework for analyzing how change takes place. For this author, that framework is the multilevel peace process, recognizing the continuous interaction among four levels of a polity - government, business, a collection of boundary-spanning civil society groups, and the grass roots.

For a sustained dialogue group assembled as a microcosm of parties to a larger conflict, three questions apply: (1) Have participants in the dialogue group transformed their own relationships and learned together how that experience might be built on to influence the larger arena of conflict? (2) Have they been able to influence official peacemaking?

(3) Have they contributed to preparing the larger body of citizens outside government to accept possibly painful compromises and to participate in actions that can contribute to postconflict reconciliation and peace­building?

In evaluating a process of sustained dialogue, one must start by recognizing its par­ticular character. As Harold Saunders writes:

Sustained Dialogue itself - like the peace process of which it is a part - is an open-ended political process. One cannot know at the beginning exactly what the dialogue will produce; the agenda, goals and specific steps must come out of the interaction of the participants. Each time the group takes a concrete step forward, new goals will emerge; achievements may become possible that were not possible before. The progression of goals and achievements can be judged only as the dialogue unfolds. So evaluation becomes part of the process (Saunders, 1999: 221).

As it happened, the initial statement of an objective for the Inter-Tajik Dialogue - to see whether a dialogue group can form from within a civil war that can learn to design a peace process for their conflict - was sufficiently specific yet also open-ended to leave it to participants to set their own goals as they went along.

In their third three-day meeting in August 1993, participants agreed (1) to work on starting a negotiation between government and opposition. Over the next seven months, they played a significant role in the decisions by government and opposition to join UN­mediated peace talks. When negotiations began in April 1994, they decided (2) not to interfere in the negotiations but to concentrate on designing a political process of national reconciliation for the people of Tajikistan. When a peace treaty was signed in June 1997, they committed themselves (3) to help make democracy work. In 2000, they registered their own nongovernmental organization, the Public Committee for Democratic Processes which (4) defined four tracks in the public arena on which they would work.

During the negotiation, three dialogue participants were members of the negotiating teams while remaining in the dialogue. Five participated in the National Reconciliation Commission - an institution created by the peace treaty to implement the treaty. At the end of many meetings, they produced a joint memorandum on an issue of current impor­tance. Options in one of these memos provided the design for the National Reconciliation Committee.

In short, participants moved from inter­personal hostility to working constructively together. From the dialogue base, they worked in both the policy and the public arenas. One became vice foreign minister. A national dialogue reconstituted in 2006 includes offi­cials from the president’s office and leaders in business, banking, journalism, and non­governmental organizations.

In another experience with conflict in the former Soviet Union, the Dartmouth Conference Regional Conflicts Task Force in 2001 began a dialogue among participants from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno Karabakh. The parties to their conflict had signed a ceasefire ending a war in 1994, but post-war negotiations had stalemated. In their eleventh meeting, participants agreed on a paper called “Framework for a Peace Process.” They invited American and Russian cochairs to visit their three capitals for public meetings on the “Framework,” to give it visibility, but they have been unable to influence the course of official negotiations which are exclusively in the hands of the two presidents who feel constrained by strong public feelings and have done little to lead their publics toward a peace agreement and reconciliation. In short, participants in the dia­logue changed, but they are confronted with a harshly unreceptive political environment.

An Arab-American-European dialogue met nine times in 2004-2007. These meet­ings were organized to address the conflict between the Muslim Arab countries, Western Europe, and the United States. Constructive - though sometimes bitter - dialogue deepened understanding within the group of the roots of behavior and fear on both sides of the relation­ship, but participants found themselves asking whether they could continue in the absence of concrete “products” or change. They faced the seeming impossibility of any one group's affecting such a complex of relationships and oppressive governments in any finite period as well as uncertainty of funding for the same reasons.

In a very different venue, students on high school and university campuses in the United States are drawn to sustained dialogue because they are deeply disturbed by self-segregation, “racialization” of student climate, or marginalization of minority groups on their campuses. In dialogue, students clearly deepen their understanding of differ­ence and transform personal relationships, but they are frustrated in the short term by their inability to see change in their “student racial climate” or in the social structures on their campuses.

Do these experiences demonstrate limita­tions of dialogue as a process, or could one say that they simply reveal a need to allow time for development and to be realistic in defining objectives precisely, recognizing what can and cannot be accomplished in a short-term time frame? This question captures the challenges in this field for the next decade.