While the end of the Cold War opened up opportunities to resolve long-standing disputes in some parts of the world, the last years of this century are not turning out to be an era of peace, says Richard Solomon, president of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. Creative approaches are needed to deal with new sources of international conflict, he says, and the work of the Institute of Peace has been refocused to meet this challenge.

Solomon earlier served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, director of the State Department's policy planning staff, and U.S. ambassador to the Philippines. He was interviewed by Contributing Editor Dian McDonald.

QUESTION: What was the rationale for creating the United States Institute of Peace in 1984?

SOLOMON: For quite a few years there had been a national campaign to establish a "peace academy." The notion was to create a four-year degree-granting educational institution as a complement to the military training academies -- West Point and Annapolis. In support of this idea, there was a public organization, with more than 70,000 members, that lobbied Congress to establish this kind of an educational institution.

There also was a feeling during the Cold War that the Communist world had co-opted the notion of "peace." The Communists had created various front organizations -- peace committees and peace institutes -- that were, frankly, very political and part of their Cold-War activities. Many people in the United States believed that we should not let the Communist world dominate and corrupt the notion of peace. This was one motivation for creating the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was established by a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans who passed the legislation to establish the institute in 1984.

The legislation did not create a four-year degree-granting "university," but rather an institute whose primary purpose was educational and that had more flexibility -- and was, in effect, a little less grandiose -- than the concept of an academy on the order of the American military training academies.

Q: What are USIP's key objectives now?

SOLOMON: The original congressional charter of the institute is still our basic orienting document. It says that our purpose is to "strengthen our national capabilities for resolving international conflict without resort to war or violence." With the end of the Cold War, that directive from Congress has become in some ways more relevant than ever because the end of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation meant the end of the nuclear standoff that had dominated all aspects of international relations for a generation. In the early 1990s many long-standing disputes and conflicts suddenly seemed amenable to negotiated approaches to resolution. Consider, for example, the progress that has been made in recent years in the Middle East peace process, the U.N. settlement for Cambodia, and in peacemaking in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. In that sense, our charter today reflects the new opportunities for peacefully resolving long-standing international disputes.

That said, however, the end of the Cold War did not mark the beginning of an era of peace. There are some long-standing conflicts, like Kashmir or Cyprus, or more recent ones like Bosnia, that have proven to be very durable and resistant to resolution. We have also seen the outbreak of new ethnic and religious conflicts; and some long-standing confrontations -- including the one on the Korean Peninsula -- have become more tense as the discipline that the Cold War confrontation imposed in many parts of the world has eased.

Therefore the work of the institute has been refocused to try to (1) understand the new sources of international conflict, (2) develop approaches to dealing with ethnic and religious conflicts that were not on our Cold War agenda, and (3) develop educational and professional training programs to strengthen the skill base of foreign affairs practitioners -- both U.S. diplomats and representatives of nongovernmental organizations promoting humanitarian assistance programs -- to facilitate the negotiated resolution of these conflicts.

Q: How would you describe the primary milestones in USIP's evolution during the past decade?

SOLOMON: There has been an interesting systematic evolution in our work and programs. In the mid-1980s we focused on our grant program, which stimulated the academic community and the "think-tank" world to develop the intellectual base of understanding about processes of conflict management and resolution. In other words, our first effort was to build the intellectual capital, through research, that would help professionalize our understanding of what "peace studies" really meant. In 1989 we published a book called Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map, which laid out the intellectual framework for research on conflict management and resolution -- the components of peacebuilding.

Subsequently we developed a fellowship program that annually brings to the institute about 14 senior scholars and other outstanding professionals representing academic institutions, the media, and governments around the world. They pursue year-long studies here in Washington on topics relevant to our charter.

More recently, our education and training program has become the most active area of the institute's operational focus. The "education" part of the program develops specialized studies for high school and university students designed to cover a range of topics that will deepen understanding about the sources of and the means for resolving international conflict. These studies are the basis for summer enrichment seminars for high school, community college, and university faculty as well. The institute's fellowship program supports this work by awarding scholarships to graduate students to generate more new knowledge about what peacemaking and conflict resolution mean.

We have also expanded our professional training program to include workshops with the professional military to develop their skills for peacekeeping operations. In collaboration with the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute at Carlisle Barracks, in Pennsylvania, we work with people who are professionally trained as war fighters and teach them skills that are appropriate to running international peacekeeping operations. We also are developing a program to improve the skills of those who do international negotiating across cultural barriers.

Our work also has evolved in the area of policy support. Since I came here three years ago, we have tried -- with the encouragement of our board of directors -- to make our programs more policy-relevant, and to work with government officials in helping them think through political approaches to resolving international conflict -- so they have options between doing nothing and sending in troops.

And finally we have developed a capacity for what is generally referred to as "Track Two" diplomacy -- semiofficial dialogues -- to facilitate resolution of long-standing international conflicts. "Track Two" diplomacy is usually preparatory to formal government negotiations. In the case of the Middle East peace process, for example, the Norwegian Academy of Social Sciences brought the Israelis and the Palestinians together off site and quietly helped them assess the basis for further progress in the peace effort. We and other organizations have played a similar role in a number of conflicts -- in Africa, South Asia, and other parts of the world -- in helping to lay the basis for what one hopes will be formal -- government-mediated -- negotiations for resolving the conflicts.

Q: Do other governments sponsor organizations that parallel the structure and mission of USIP?

SOLOMON: There are, of course, many international affairs "think tanks" around the world that various governments have set up and support. But our congressional charter is fairly unique in its focus on strengthening capacities for non-military, nonviolent approaches to resolving or managing international conflict.

Developing cooperative programs with other institutions around the world is one of the areas for future growth of this institution. We have not been able to pursue this possibility very actively thus far, given the relative youth of our organization and its small staff. But that is something that we will certainly want to do over time.

Q: How would you assess the American public's understanding of and support for the efforts of USIP?

SOLOMON: Our work has received an enthusiastic response in a number of communities as it has acquired some visibility. One of our major outreach vehicles is our annual national peace essay contest in high schools in all 50 states. Each year upwards of 10,000 students compete for college scholarships awarded through the contest by writing essays that focus on some contemporary issue of war and peace. As a result, the institute and its work are increasingly well-known at the "grass-roots" level in communities around the country.

Our grant program, which takes up almost a third of our annual budget with an allocation of about $3 million, has received a very positive response. The program supports research and other conflict resolution activities in universities and in the private sector by nongovernmental organizations involved in humanitarian assistance work. Our grant program receives such a positive response in part because the major private sector foundations that for many years had supported this kind of activity are cutting back now on international programs. And both the Congress and the administration, as they see what we are able to do with a very modest annual appropriation of federal money, are asking us to do a lot more joint programming in support of their work.

We believe that the way we use our small annual budget is a good example of how a semi-independent federal agency can play an innovative role in helping the government adapt to the changing international environment. We are trying to make the institute a center of innovation and education that is helping our country adapt to the post-Cold War world.

The global "information revolution" really will enable us to take our modest congressional budget and give our programs an international voice and much broader impact, because, in effect, we now have global outreach through the Internet, teleconferencing, fax machines, radio programs, and even the humble telephone. After we move to permanent facilities, we are going to build in much more of this electronic outreach capacity, which will give us the ability to conduct "virtual" training programs in classrooms anywhere in the country, to run seminars with a "think tank" anywhere in the world, and to make our publications and our other activities visible on a global basis.

Q: Does USIP have a role in trying to ameliorate the current crisis in Central Africa?

SOLOMON: The current crisis in Central Africa is not a recent one; its immediate origins go back to the civil war in Rwanda and the genocide of 1994. We have numerous projects on the three states enmeshed in the conflict -- Rwanda, Zaire, and Burundi -- and some of the issues at play, such as peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention, repatriation of refugees, accountability for perpetrators of genocide, and ways to manage ethnic strife. In September 1996, the institute cosponsored with the State Department a symposium on Burundi designed to help the State Department generate a possible negotiating plan for the international mediators trying to bring peace to Burundi and avoid the kind of genocide that devastated neighboring Rwanda.

I think the most important issue on the immediate-term time horizon is the future of Zaire, which is teetering on the brink of collapse and potential dissolution. The institute is in the process of publishing a report on ways for the international community to engage and prevent this collapse from happening. It will offer recommendations on how international organizations like the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations can help stabilize Zaire.

Q: USIP has held an ongoing series of study group meetings on U.S. policy in the Korean Peninsula. What are key aspects of that effort and has it had an impact on U.S. policy in the region?

SOLOMON: The institute's North Korea Working Group, which we started in 1993, has analyzed the changing situation on the Korean Peninsula both in the context of North Korea's nuclear program and more recently as North Korea's economy has entered a period of decline and crisis. Today there is a need for contingency planning that is more political than military in its focus. The institute's study groups and reports have influenced the administration's thinking about how to deal with the serious situation on the Korean Peninsula; we have stimulated longer-range strategic thinking as the administration has reassessed Korea-related issues.

Q: What are the objectives of the "Virtual Diplomacy" conference that USIP is sponsoring in April of next year?

SOLOMON: The conference will focus on the global impact of the information revolution and the telecommunications transformation of our world, and how these new technologies are transforming international relations and creating new opportunities for conflict prevention, management, and resolution.

We believe the conference will be pathbreaking in helping people think through how the world is changing and how new technologies can be used for the peaceful resolution and management of international conflict. The use of the "virtual mapping" capacity that played an important role in the Dayton negotiations on Bosnia is an example of how it is possible to meld technology with diplomacy to advance negotiated solutions to various disputes.

Q: USIP recently published Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict, a book that examines the complex politics of the post-Cold War period. What is the significance of this publication, which has been described as a "unique" aid for teachers in the field of international conflict management?

SOLOMON: The book is a direct outgrowth of the faculty enrichment program that the institute runs for professors who teach at the undergraduate level. Through these seminars, the institute became aware of the need for a comprehensive undergraduate text that examines both the changing nature of international conflict and new approaches to conflict management and peacemaking.

The volume explores factors that may spark or exacerbate violent conflicts, and examines ways in which the international community can respond effectively to both inter- and intra-state wars. By considering the many options available to the policymaker and practitioner, the book seeks to change the perception that, in responding to international conflicts, our choices are limited to the extremes of either doing nothing or sending in troops.

Through the volume, the institute hopes to advance understanding of the many choices available to government, private sector organizations, and individuals in responding to conflict. This is what makes it unique. By emphasizing the steps that both government officials and private citizens can take to prevent, contain, manage, and resolve conflict, the book gives students hope in the future and a blueprint for their own professional contributions to peacemaking.

Q: What are the objectives and scope of USIP's "Religion, Ethics and Human Rights Initiative?"

SOLOMON: One of the objectives of the REHR initiative is to examine the relevance of human rights norms to resolving religious and ethnic conflict in places like Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Tibet, and to identify ways such norms might be implemented. A second objective is to foster mutual understanding and collaboration among religious communities. The institute has hosted two meetings involving representatives of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities to discuss their respective approaches to the use of force and the strategy of nonviolence. In addition, the institute is designing a program in Bosnia which would revive a 20-year-old interreligious symposium to address contemporary questions of reconciliation and reconstruction there.

Q: What is USIP's "Rule of Law Initiative" and how would you explain the relationship between the rule of law and a nation's ability to prevent or manage conflict?

SOLOMON: The Rule of Law Initiative seeks to build on the premise that a society governed by the rule of law is more likely to be peaceful than are centrally-controlled societies governed by a small group of people, or one paramount leader. This view has been affirmed not only by USIP-sponsored research, but also by such organizations as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has declared that "societies based on...the rule of law are prerequisites for...the lasting order of peace, security, justice and cooperation." The initiative conducts original research, conferences, consultation and writing that combine legal and political perspectives to explore the role of the rule of law in the prevention, management and resolution of international conflict, as well as in the post-conflict phase. The initiative currently focuses on several broad themes, including "transitional justice," which involves approaches to dealing with leaders accused of war crimes or gross violation of human rights; the role of international and regional organizations in the advancement of the rule of law; and constitutional approaches to post-conflict peacebuilding.

Q: What is the most difficult aspect of your work and what are the dividends?

SOLOMON: The most difficult challenge is coming up with effective ways of dealing with international conflict. Everyone had hoped that the end of the Cold War would mean a more peaceful world. But in fact the conflicts that have broken out, particularly those based on ethnic or religious differences, are proving to be very difficult to manage and resolve.

But that said, this is very satisfying work, precisely because it is not just deterring an adversary in a military sense, but it involves developing mechanisms, strategies, and approaches to try to resolve conflicts -- and to do it without having to employ military force.