Citizen diplomacy complements the formal diplomacy of government officials. It builds trust and mutual understanding based on face-to-face relationships among citizens of different cultures, regions, and religions. Humanity gets a chance to speak when ideology is put on hold by creative human contact.

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Esalen’s Soviet-American Exchange Program — Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy’s earlier incarnation—played an important role in bringing an end to the Cold War. By nurturing a network of deep human relationships, by holding annual conferences and other meetings that built upon those relationships, by creating and maintaining The Luchkov Library of Psychological Literature at Moscow State University, and by hosting Boris Yeltsin’s first visit to the United States, we created a crucial communications backchannel that served the needs of the 1980s and 1990s.

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Supplementing official summitry, groups of different professionals, from psychologists to astronauts, have been meeting for years. By letting the commonality of their professional—and human—interests speak louder than the differences between their nations and cultures, the members of the Track Two network have spanned the globe with bonds of growing friendship and mutual understanding. Track Two Diplomacy flies beneath the radar of official treaties, age-old enmities, hardened ideologies, and partisan politics. When people with similar interests can talk face-to-face about the things that interest them, “Faces of the Enemy”—the title of a book and video born of Track Two Diplomacy—are replaced by human faces and real communication.

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There is impressive evidence that Esalen’s Track Two work contributed significantly to the transformation of the Soviet Union and Russia’s relationship with the U.S. Now, relations between Islam and the West are strained. Indeed, we in the US may be more in need of building friendship and understanding through citizen diplomacy than at any time in the past century.  It is clear that Track Two diplomacy has a place and a very important contribution to make between Israelis and Palestinians and among the Abrahamic traditions in the US and beyond.

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The so-called “wars” we are asked to fight may be un-winnable without new thinking and new practices like citizen diplomacy. We are not fighting along established geo-political battle lines. We are struggling for hearts and minds, commitment, understanding, and intelligence. There are plenty of opportunities for inter-cultural maneuvers—highly focused, citizen-led efforts that fly below the radar of official, high level diplomacy.

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Rooted in the context of Esalen’s explorations of human potential, Track Two will continue to give voice to the growing constituency of individuals who feel disheartened and powerless vis-à-vis governments that don’t get it. Citizen diplomacy involves non-governmental individuals and groups that aim to fill the moral and intellectual voids of official peacemaking leadership. Track Two's major goal is to re-humanize relations that are dysfunctional. It works to make relationships better.

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In April 2006, Esalen and Track Two sponsored a 25th reunion of the many pioneers who then chronicled the principles they have distilled from their work with Russia and the former Soviet Union. These principles, they believe, can be applied to other problematic relationships around the world, over the long term. More than thirty Russians and Americans contributed to the conversation during the reunion week at Esalen, the meetings facilitator, Jay Ogilvy—took notes and wrote up the results as follows: