Harold H. (Hal) Saunders (1930-2016)

"Governments cannot do the whole job themselves. Increasingly, change comes from the bottom up and not from the top down. Increasingly governments find themselves paralyzed to do what they ought to do. And the Arab-Israeli peace process is a very good example of a conflict in which political authorities seem paralyzed and unable to do what they need to do. Small wonder then that groups (of citizens increasingly) gather. . .to attempt to change that relationship from the inside out."

Hal Saunders died peacefully at home, on the morning of March 6, 2016. Since the 1980s, in what was then ICAR, Hal was a devoted friend and supporter. He taught for us, mentored students, graced our conferences, and in general lent to us his considerable reputation and gravitas.

Hal worked under six U.S. presidents. He joined the National Security Council staff in 1961, serving through the Johnson and Nixon administrations as the Council’s Mideast expert. During the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars he accompanied Henry Kissinger on the famous shuttles. He was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs in 1974, and in 1978, under President Carter, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. He was the principle architect of the Egyptian-Israel Peace Treaty and, with Carter at Camp David, of the Camp David Accords. According to the obituary released by the Kettering Foundation (where he had recently retired as Director of International Affairs), “In the early morning hours of November 4, 1979, a call was patched through to his home from Tehran, and over the next two hours he listened to the overrun of the American Embassy. For the next 444 days, Saunders worked tirelessly to free the American hostages, culminating in their release on January 20, 1981.”

Hal left government service soon thereafter and worked for a number of institutes and foundations, including Kettering. But Hal saw his work there as beyond analysis and consultancy.  
Like John Burton and John McDonald, also important figures in our School’s history, Hal was among a number of high government officials who followed a distinguished career in Track One diplomacy with an equally vital one in Track Two.

In Hal’s case, this involved “citizen diplomacy.” Since 1981, for example, he served as co-chair of the Dartmouth Conference, the longest continuing dialogue between American and Soviet, now Russian, citizens. Early work – literally “in the field”-- took him to Tajikistan in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, where his continuing mediated dialogues were credited with averting the level of violence that bedeviled other former republics. He returned to his work in the Middle East when he participated in several of Herb Kelman’s and Nadim Rouhana’s Israeli-Palestinian workshops in the early 1990s, in parallel with the formal Madrid and informal Oslo processes. He also worked domestically, on race relations in Baton Rouge. Like all true “scholar-practitioners,” he used his experience of practice to write, theorize, and publish, to contribute to the intellectual and conceptual growth of our field. In time, he came to theorize his sort of mediation and third party work as sustained dialogue, and building on this, he founded the Sustained Dialogue Institute, which is active around the world and on many college campuses. Meanwhile, the books testify to his evolving interests. The Other Walls: The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective (1985) reflects his work, mostly Track One, in the 1970s and 1980s.  A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflict (1999), draws on case studies to begin developing a paradigm of conflict resolution that might address the sorts of wicked problems that were beyond the grasp (if not also the ken) of Track One approaches: racial, religious, ethnic ones – so called identity conflicts. These seemed to elude both simple interest-based (cost-benefit) and coercive solutions. Further developing his ideas of what dialogue can deliver, he wrote Politics is About Relationships: A Blueprint for Citizen Diplomacy (2005). We teach this book to remind our students that “politics” is about more than power and leverages that, in effect, “national security” is also very much about “human security.” His final book, Sustained Dialogue in Conflicts: Transformation and Change (2011) is a mature statement of the theory and practice of sustained dialogue. “Resolution” is deepened to become “transformation,” and peace is understood to necessitate change.

According to the New York Times (March 8, 2016, p. A19), Hal is credited by many with coining the phrase “peace process.” The phrase has entered the vernacular of diplomacy, in both Track One and Two varieties. It has also entered the academic study of peace and conflict; for many years, Prof. Chris Mitchell researched and taught a popular course called “Comparative Peace Processes,” which built on Hal’s work as well as others'. What became clear to Hal, as the epigraph to this article indicates, is that whatever the process of attaining peace entails, it does not begin and end with top-down and government-only efforts.

I want to end on a note of personal pride, speaking as S-CAR’s dean. Hal was a distinguished graduate of two preeminent American institutions of higher education, Princeton and Yale. He served on the Board of Trustees at Princeton. When he decided to donate his personal papers, including notebooks and diaries from the first Camp David, he chose Mason’s library and School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution as the repository. Hal told me he felt a special connection to S-CAR and the work we do. We certainly felt a special connection to him. In the future, we will strive to find ways to honor this connection and Hal’s legacy. Meanwhile, I am using this gift as the cornerstone for a dedicated Special Collection in Peace and Conflict, archiving and highlighting the lifework of scholar-practitioners particularly.

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This article and others are featured on S-CAR's memorial page for Hal Saunders.