Wikipedia Deep Dive

Track II diplomacy

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In September 1993, the world watched as two men who had spent decades trying to destroy each other stood on the White House lawn and shook hands. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat had just signed the Oslo Accords, a breakthrough that seemed to emerge from nowhere. But it hadn't come from nowhere. It had started in living rooms and academic conferences, with scholars and activists talking quietly while the official diplomats remained frozen in their formal positions.

This is the story of Track Two diplomacy—the art of solving international conflicts by going around the people officially charged with solving them.

The Invention of a Parallel Channel

Joseph Montville was a career diplomat at the United States State Department in 1981 when he published an essay with an unusual title: "Foreign Policy According to Freud." In it, he proposed something that his colleagues found almost heretical.

Official diplomacy—what Montville called Track One—wasn't working the way everyone assumed it should. Professional diplomats in expensive suits, speaking carefully calibrated language in formal settings, were supposed to be the gold standard for resolving international disputes. But Montville noticed something that psychologists had understood for decades: humans don't change their minds through formal argument. They change through relationship.

So he coined a new term. Track Two diplomacy would be everything that happened outside the official channels—the conversations between professors, the exchanges between cultural organizations, the workshops where ordinary citizens from opposing sides sat down and actually listened to each other.

The State Department was not pleased. When Montville and his colleague John McDonald tried to publish a book about Track Two diplomacy in 1986, the Department refused to print it for eighteen months. The bureaucracy had a deep investment in the idea that it alone possessed "the right, ability, and authority to conduct conflict resolution." Admitting that professors and activists might succeed where ambassadors had failed was professionally threatening.

The book was finally published in 1987. Its core argument was simple but revolutionary: governments needed to support and benefit from unofficial diplomacy, not compete with it.

Why Formal Diplomacy Fails

To understand why Track Two diplomacy matters, you have to understand why Track One diplomacy so often doesn't work.

Think about what happens when two nations are in conflict. Their leaders are watched constantly—by their citizens, by their political opponents, by the media. Every word they say is scrutinized for signs of weakness. Every concession is attacked as betrayal. The Israeli prime minister cannot admit that Palestinians have legitimate grievances without being accused of selling out his country. The Palestinian leader cannot acknowledge Israeli security concerns without being labeled a collaborator.

This creates what game theorists call a prisoners' dilemma. Both sides would benefit from cooperation, but neither can afford to be seen cooperating. The political cost of appearing weak is higher than the potential benefit of making progress.

Professional diplomats are trapped in this same cage. They represent their governments, which means they can never truly speak freely. They must posture. They must threaten. They must protect their nation's bargaining position. Even when they personally understand the other side's perspective, they cannot say so publicly.

Montville described Track One diplomacy as necessarily involving "official posturing and its underlying threat of the use of force." This isn't a flaw in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed. Nations need to project strength to protect their interests. The problem is that strength projection makes genuine understanding almost impossible.

The Living Room Solution

Track Two diplomacy solves this problem by removing the pressure.

When a professor from Tel Aviv University sits down with a professor from Birzeit University in the West Bank, neither of them is representing their government. Neither of them can make binding commitments. Neither of them will be blamed by their citizens for what they say in the conversation. This freedom is precisely what makes the conversation valuable.

In these unofficial settings, people can explore ideas that would be impossible to raise in formal negotiations. They can admit that their own side has made mistakes. They can acknowledge the humanity of people they've been taught to see as enemies. They can brainstorm solutions without worrying about whether those solutions are politically viable.

One of the most remarkable examples of this approach was the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group, which began meeting in 1992. For years, families from both communities gathered in actual living rooms—not conference centers, not government buildings, but homes—to talk about their experiences and their hopes. From 2003 to 2007, the group partnered with Camp Tawonga to bring hundreds of adults and children from fifty different towns across Israel and Palestine to live together at peace camps with a deliberately bilingual name: Oseh Shalom—Sanea al-Salam, meaning "peacemaker" in both Hebrew and Arabic.

Did these conversations solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Obviously not. The conflict continues to this day. But they accomplished something that decades of official diplomacy had failed to achieve: they created relationships between individual human beings who had been taught to fear and hate each other.

The Three Processes of Unofficial Peace

Montville identified three distinct processes that make Track Two diplomacy work.

The first is the facilitated workshop. You bring together members of conflicting groups—not leaders, but influential citizens, academics, business people, religious figures—and you create a structured environment for them to interact. The goal is not to negotiate a treaty. The goal is to develop personal relationships and to understand the conflict from perspectives other than your own.

These workshops often produce a strange alchemy. People who arrive viewing the other side as monsters leave viewing them as human beings with legitimate concerns. This doesn't mean they agree on solutions. It means they can no longer dismiss the other side's pain as propaganda or exaggeration. Once you've sat across a table from a mother who lost her child to violence, it becomes much harder to dehumanize everyone who shares her nationality.

The second process is what Montville called "shifting public opinion." Conflicts are sustained not just by leaders but by populations who support them. Citizens on both sides often feel like victims—and when you feel like a victim, it's nearly impossible to see the other side's suffering as equivalent to your own. Track Two practitioners work to reduce this sense of victimhood and to "rehumanize the image of the adversary" in the public imagination.

This is psychological work as much as political work. It involves education, media engagement, cultural exchange, and storytelling. It's slow and it's unglamorous, but it creates the conditions that make peace agreements possible. A leader cannot sign a treaty that their population will reject.

The third process, which Montville added later, is cooperative economic development. This might seem disconnected from conflict resolution, but it's actually central to it. When people on opposing sides are economically interdependent—when they trade with each other, employ each other, invest in each other's communities—they have concrete incentives to maintain peace beyond abstract moral arguments. Economics provides what Montville called "incentives, institutional support, and continuity" that psychological processes alone cannot sustain.

The Space Between Official and Unofficial

One of the trickiest aspects of Track Two diplomacy is its relationship with Track One.

Montville was always careful to emphasize that unofficial diplomacy is not a replacement for official diplomacy. The two need each other. Track Two creates possibilities; Track One converts them into binding agreements. Track Two explores options; Track One implements the viable ones. Track Two builds relationships; Track One leverages those relationships into treaties.

Some analysts have coined the term "Track 1.5 diplomacy" to describe situations where official and unofficial actors cooperate directly. The Oslo Accords are a perfect example. The process began as pure Track Two—a Norwegian scholar brought Israeli and Palestinian academics together for conversations that no government authorized or controlled. But as those conversations produced promising ideas, they gradually transitioned into official negotiations, eventually culminating in that famous handshake on the White House lawn.

This transition from unofficial to official is delicate. Move too fast, and you destroy the freedom that made the Track Two conversations productive. Move too slow, and the insights from those conversations never become policy. The Oslo process managed this transition skillfully enough to produce a historic agreement, even if subsequent events proved that agreement insufficient to achieve lasting peace.

The Resistance from Within

You might expect that professional diplomats would welcome any approach that helps resolve conflicts. In practice, they often resist Track Two efforts.

Part of this is institutional ego. The State Department, and its equivalents in other countries, believes it has the expertise and authority to manage foreign relations. Acknowledging that professors and activists might succeed where career diplomats have failed threatens that belief.

Part of it is also legitimate concern. Amateur peace efforts can complicate official negotiations. Untrained citizens might make promises they can't keep or reveal information that damages their country's bargaining position. The unofficial channel can be exploited by sophisticated adversaries who use it to gather intelligence or sow division.

But the resistance has weakened over time. In 2004, the State Department's Office of Iraq held a special briefing where officials essentially admitted they couldn't rebuild relationships in Iraq fast enough and needed help from non-governmental organizations. This was a remarkable concession—the same institution that had refused to publish McDonald's book seventeen years earlier was now actively seeking Track Two assistance.

War has a way of humbling institutions. When official approaches clearly aren't working, even bureaucracies become willing to try alternatives.

From Two Tracks to Nine

As the field matured, practitioners realized that the simple distinction between official and unofficial diplomacy was too crude. In 1996, Louise Diamond and John McDonald published "Multi-Track Diplomacy: A Systems Approach to Peace," which expanded the framework from two tracks to nine.

Track One remained government diplomacy. But the original Track Two was now subdivided into eight distinct approaches: professional conflict resolution, commerce and business engagement, personal citizen involvement, educational and training programs, activism and advocacy, religious dialogue, funding and philanthropy, and media and information.

Each of these tracks involves different actors, different methods, and different leverage points. A business executive who builds economic ties between conflicting communities is doing something fundamentally different from a religious leader who facilitates interfaith dialogue, even though both are working toward peace. The multi-track framework helps practitioners understand which approaches might be most effective in specific situations.

This expanded model also highlights how interconnected peace efforts really are. Funding organizations support conflict resolution professionals who train citizens who participate in dialogue groups that are covered by media that shapes public opinion that creates political space for official diplomats to negotiate. No single track succeeds in isolation. Peace is a systems problem that requires systems solutions.

The Limitations of Good Will

For all its value, Track Two diplomacy has real limitations that its advocates sometimes understate.

Montville himself acknowledged that "there is no evidence that conflict resolution workshops would work for the principal political leaders themselves—perhaps because they are too tough or even impervious to the humanizing process." The people who rise to the top of political systems are often precisely the people least susceptible to the kind of perspective-taking that makes Track Two effective.

John McDonald offered a more generous interpretation: leaders aren't necessarily harder or more cynical than ordinary citizens, but they're trapped in rigid roles that prevent them from showing flexibility. A foreign minister who admits doubt or uncertainty in a workshop might find that admission weaponized against them in the next election. The political incentives that make Track One diplomacy difficult also make it hard for leaders to participate authentically in Track Two processes.

There's also a risk of what critics call "peace process theater"—unofficial dialogues that make participants feel good without actually changing anything. People attend workshops, develop relationships, return home, and then find that nothing in their political reality has shifted. The warm feelings fade. The conflict continues. In the worst cases, these processes can actually reduce pressure for real change by creating the illusion of progress.

Montville described Track Two diplomacy as "strategically optimistic, based on best case analysis." Its underlying assumption is that conflict "can be resolved or eased by appealing to common human capabilities to respond to good will and reasonableness." This is a beautiful faith in human nature, and it's sometimes vindicated. But it's also sometimes wrong. Some conflicts are not based on misunderstanding but on genuine incompatibility of interests. Some adversaries are not reasonable. Good will alone cannot disarm people who have decided that your destruction is necessary for their survival.

The Permanent Necessity

Despite these limitations, Track Two diplomacy has become a permanent feature of international relations. Governments, universities, non-governmental organizations, and foundations around the world now support unofficial dialogue processes. The field has its own journals, its own training programs, its own professional associations.

This institutionalization creates its own tensions. As Track Two becomes professionalized, it risks losing the informality that made it effective in the first place. A "conflict resolution expert" working for a well-funded NGO may have more in common with a traditional diplomat than with the grassroots activists who pioneered the field. The original insight—that ordinary people talking to each other could accomplish what officials could not—gets diluted when the ordinary people are replaced by credentialed professionals.

But the core insight remains valid. Official diplomacy alone cannot create peace because official diplomats cannot take the risks that peace requires. Someone has to be free to admit fault, to acknowledge the other side's humanity, to explore ideas without worrying about how they'll play in the press. Someone has to build the relationships that make treaties more than paper.

That work can happen in living rooms or academic conferences, at peace camps or business forums, through cultural exchanges or religious dialogue. The specific setting matters less than the freedom it provides—freedom from the posturing and positioning that make official diplomacy so often sterile.

Track Two diplomacy is not a magic solution. The Oslo Accords it helped produce have largely collapsed. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict that inspired so much of the field's development remains unresolved. But the insight that Joseph Montville articulated in 1981—that peace requires both official channels and unofficial ones, that leaders need political cover that only citizen relationships can provide, that understanding must precede agreement—has become common wisdom in the world of international conflict resolution.

Sometimes the most important diplomacy happens not in marble halls but in living rooms, where people who are supposed to be enemies discover that they're both just human.