Love and Forgiveness in Governance: Exemplars: Harold (Hal) Saunders
by Amy Lazarus
Dr. Hal Saunders worked in the U.S. government as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, an analyst in the Central Intelligence Agency, and then a member of the National Security Council staff under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He moved to the State Department in 1974 and served last as Assistant Secretary for the Near East and South Asia. He was intensively involved in the Arab-Israeli peace process, 1974-1979. He was a key member in the small U.S. team that mediated five Arab-Israeli agreements in six years, including the Kissinger shuttle agreements, the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. From 1979-81, Hal helped negotiate the release of American hostages in Iran, working 444 days straight.
After leaving the government in 1981, he participated in a wide range of non-official dialogues between Soviet and American citizens; Israelis and Palestinians; Indians, Pakistanis, and Kashmiris; Americans and Chinese. From those experiences, he conceptualized the five-stage process of Sustained Dialogue and the concept of relationship. Dr. Saunders currently serves as the President of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, the Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation, and the US Chair of the Dartmouth Task Force on the Russian-US Relationship.
Love and forgiveness have been at the core of Dr. Saunders' work in and outside of government for the past five decades. These virtues are most directly evident in Dr. Saunders' conceptualization and practice of Sustained Dialogue. Sustained Dialogue is a systematic process for transforming destructive relationships that block effective collaboration in communities and organizations and cause ethnic and racial conflict within or between nations. It differs from most other change processes in two ways: (1) through rigorous dialogue, it focuses on the relationships that cause gridlock or conflict, not just on contested issues; (2) because relationships marked by deep-rooted differences change slowly, Sustained Dialogue brings the same people together repeatedly through a widely tested five-stage dialogue process.
The virtue of love is at the heart of dialogue. Despite deep differences and conflict, participants in dialogue are asked to recognize each other's common humanity. Dialogue, as defined by Dr. Saunders, is "a process of genuine interaction through which human beings listen to each other deeply enough to be changed by what they learn...No participant gives up her or his identity, but each recognizes enough of the other's valid human claims so that he or she will act differently toward the other." This recognition of common humanity is in essence an act of love. Although dialogue does not mandate that participants in deep conflict forgive each other, forgiveness is often a key element of Sustained Dialogue. This often results in a fundamental shift in the dynamics of their relationship.
Dr. Saunders' work in Tajikistan exemplifies these ideas. In 1993, after the USSR dissolved, three Russian and three U.S. members of a Dartmouth Conference task force launched a dialogue among factions from the vicious civil war in the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan. Through thirty-seven three-day meetings, Dr. Saunders led members of both sides of the civil war — whose families had killed one another's — to recognize their common humanity and eventually contribute to the peace treaty and National Reconciliation Commission. He was able to bring sworn enemies to a table, had them address pressing and complex national issues, and did so in a way that bread love and forgiveness, rather than further hatred and resentment. This process led to stronger, more informed governance, whereas if the government had simply created a constitution it would have been only a document. The process of relationship and trust-building that went into the actual document contributed to its meaning as a covenant of the people and by the people.
Growing from its roots in the Arab-Israeli peace process and the Kissinger shuttles, Sustained Dialogue is now practiced annually by 4,500 students, professionals, and citizens worldwide. On twenty campuses across the U.S., students gather in weekly sessions to move from dialogue to action around the issues most urgently facing their campuses, ranging from retention to race relations. Through this process, students emerge as active citizens, recognizing their roles in their communities and motivated to act as agents of change. After graduation, Sustained Dialogue alumni bring their inclusive leadership skills, such as the ability to relate constructively across lines of difference and effectively lead diverse teams, to their workplaces and communities. The work of Dr. Saunders is actively spreading love and forgiveness in classrooms, boardrooms, and community centers across the world.
In a world where many have lost the capacity to relate constructively across lines of difference, we need more leaders like Dr. Saunders who not only practice compassion in every facet of life, but who also engage in whole body politic. In his third of four books, Politics Is about Relationship, Dr. Saunders explains this much-needed paradigm shift that he actively practices and promotes: "In our complex and interdependent world we must think of whole bodies politics in which governments plus citizens as political actors along with nongovernmental political and economic institutions all engage simultaneously... politics is a cumulative, multi-level, and open-ended process of continuous interaction over time engaging significant clusters of citizens in and out of government and the relationships they form to solve public problems in whole bodies politics across permeable borders, either within or between communities or countries."[1]
The Carnegie Endowment launched the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative in 2009 for International Peace in Washington. It was headed by an international commission, and led by former foreign ministers of Russia and Germany and U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn. Its final report, by one working group in the most comprehensive study of East-West relations since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, has the following main point: "The... Working Group on Historical Reconciliation and Protracted Conflict offers an approach that goes beyond traditional diplomacy to get at the root causes of the problem and urges a broader strategy for engaging society at large, the level at which solutions must be found."[2] That thought reappears throughout the report in statements such as the following: "...the Working Group... examined both the existing hindrances to cooperation and the methods used during the past two decades to resolve crises and build a security community...We have concluded that these strategies have not worked..."
"Achieving these goals has been complicated by an unprecedented pace of change... These forces have transformed the relationships not only between and among the region's states, but between those who govern and those who are governed... the[se] changes have unleashed new energies and capacities of citizens outside government." This is where Sustained Dialogue, and the larger body of work of Dr. Saunders, comes in. Not only do Sustained Dialogue participants experience and learn a more productive way of relating; that way of relating is deeply rooted in a new paradigm for the study and practice of politics that we call the "relational paradigm." It reaches well beyond the traditional focus on the state and its institutions to see politics in terms of the relationships — the associations — that citizens outside government build to initiate and manage change. Experiences like this show that Dr. Saunders makes a unique contribution to the preparation of tomorrow's citizens of the world.
Dr. Saunders is the author of four books: The Other Walls: The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective (1985); A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts (1999); Politics Is about Relationship: A Blueprint for the Citizens' Century (2005); and Sustained Dialogue in Conflicts: Transformation and Change (2011). Dr. Saunders' recent accolades include: the Waging Peace Award 2011, the American Academy of Diplomacy's Annenberg Award for Excellence in Diplomacy 2010, and Search for Common Ground Leadership Award 2006. In 1980, Hal received President Carter's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.
[1] Saunders, Harold H. Politics Is about Relationship: A Blueprint for the Citizens' Century. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). <http://books.google.com/books?id=5_bFw8-6PR8C>.
[2] "Historical Reconciliations and Protracted Conflicts." EASI Working Group on Historical Reconciliation and Protracted Conflicts. February 3, 2012. <http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/02/03/historical-reconciliation-and-protracted-conflicts>.
