IISD is rooted in three decades of experience in deep-rooted human conflict. The process of Sustained Dialogue (SD) conceptualizes that experience.

 

The Institute’s founder and president, Hal Saunders, played a central role as a senior U.S. diplomat in the Arab-Israeli peace process after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Working with a team headed by Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter that mediated five agreements, 1974-79, he learned three lessons: (1) the power of a continuous political process to change the political environment; (2) the importance of the human dimension of conflict; and (3) the importance of the relationship between whole bodies politic—citizens outside government as well as those inside government. “The peace process,” he wrote later, “was a series of cumulative agreements that gradually changed the political environment and gave citizens a sense that peace was possible. It was in that larger political process that relationships changed.

 

When he left government in 1981, he became U.S. co-chair of the Task Force on Regional Conflicts (RCTF) of the Dartmouth Conference—the longest continuous dialogue between American and Soviet citizens. His Soviet co-chair was Yevgeny Primakov, who after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 became foreign minister and then prime minister of the new Russia. They met every six months through the 1980s. From that experience, Hal observed that bringing the same group together time after time creates four opportunities: (1) they develop a cumulative agenda; (2) they learn to talk analytically rather than polemically; (3) they develop a common body of knowledge—not just about positions but why problems are important to each group; (4) they can learn to work together.

 

He also observed that participants’ relationships seemed to evolve through a recognizable pattern. In the early 1990s, he (1) developed a concept of relationship for analyzing relationships and for guiding efforts to change them and (2) conceptualized in five stages a process for leading participants through dialogue over time to create conditions in which relationships could change.

 

In 1993, Hal and his Russian colleague first published the five stages and started a dialogue among individuals from factions in the civil war that broke out in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. This was the first test of the five-stage process. The Inter-Tajik Dialogue within the Framework of the Dartmouth Conference met 35 times by their tenth anniversary in 2003.

 

In 2002, David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation where Hal was director of international affairs, proposed creating IISD to provide separate space for SD to develop and extend its reach. “Deliberative and collaborative processes are for people who are able to talk with each other,” he said; “Sustained Dialogue is for people who have been killing each other or whose relationships are so destructive that they can’t talk.” IISD was incorporated in October 2002.