Dartmouth Conference

The Dartmouth Conference is an important meeting where leaders from America and the Soviet Union talked about their differences and ways to work together peacefully. The first meeting happened at Dartmouth College in 1961, and many more meetings followed until 1990. These talks helped both countries understand each other better during a time when the world was tense.

Even though the big meetings stopped for a while, they started again in 2014 and continue today. The ideas from these meetings inspired other groups to talk and solve problems in places like Tajikistan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Many of these new talks are supported by groups like the Sustained Dialogue Institute and the Kettering Foundation, showing how the Dartmouth Conference helped people learn to communicate and find peaceful solutions.

Origin

Norman Cousins

The Dartmouth Conference started because Norman Cousins, who wrote for the Saturday Review of Literature, thought it would be good for people from the United States and the Soviet Union to talk together. He talked to leaders and then helped set up a meeting.

The first meeting happened in October 1960 at Dartmouth College. Important people from both countries talked about many issues, but what they said was kept private.

Cold War conferences

The Dartmouth Conferences were special meetings where people from the United States and the Soviet Union talked about many important topics. The first meeting in 1961 had people with different jobs, like a dancer, a lawyer, and a senator from Connecticut. The Soviet group also had people like a playwright and a chemist.

These talks covered many subjects, not just one. They spoke about things like trade, conflicts in other parts of the world, and even environmental issues. Over time, the meetings began to include government leaders and officials from both countries. Important reports from these talks were shared with leaders in both nations.

The last conference before the Soviet Union ended in 1991 was Dartmouth XVII. After that, the talks continued with new groups helping to organize them.

Revival

In 2014, after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, official meetings between the United States and Russia stopped. The U.S.–Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, which began in 2009, was paused. The United States and Europe put restrictions on Russia, and Russia responded with its own restrictions.

The Kettering Foundation suggested restarting the Dartmouth Conferences to Vitaly Naumkin and Harold Saunders, who were leaders of a group working on U.S.–Russia relations. They got support from their governments to restart these meetings. The new meetings included people from many different areas to better show what people in both countries were thinking.

Since 2014, the Russian group has been led by Vitaly Naumkin and Yuri Shafranik. The U.S. group has been led by former U.S. Ambassador to Russia James Franklin Collins.

The 18th Dartmouth Conference happened in November 2014 in Dayton, Ohio. After talking about each other's concerns, the group focused on ways to improve relations. They started working on joint projects in the medical field and other areas. After meeting with U.S. officials in Washington, D.C., they were encouraged to keep meeting because they were one of the few ongoing discussions between the two countries.

The 19th conference took place in March 2015 in Suzdal, Russia. Russian leaders were divided about whether Russia should join the Euro-Atlantic community or focus on its own regional ties. The participants suggested several ideas, including restarting the Bilateral Presidential Commissions, the NATO-Russia military council, and talks about arms control in Europe. They also talked about working together on issues in Syria and with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The 20th conference was held at Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia in late October 2015.

Task forces

During the 1970s, the Dartmouth Conference started including small meetings to talk about specific issues. In the early 1980s, they began forming special groups called task forces to discuss these issues between the bigger conferences. These task forces did some of the most important work linked to the Dartmouth Conference.

Regional Conflicts Task Force

The Regional Conflicts Task Force first met in 1982. It was led by Evgeny Primakov from the Soviet side and Harold Saunders from the American side. After Primakov left for a higher job under Gorbachev, Gennadi Chufrin took over. The task force met regularly until 2001, then focused on conflicts in Tajikistan and Nagorno-Karabakh.

These meetings happened more often than the main conferences—twice a year until the Soviet Union ended. The members stayed mostly the same, which helped them talk more deeply about solving problems. After a conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008, the task force started new meetings to discuss important issues between the U.S. and Russia, like Ukraine, Georgia, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Islamic State. They met about every six months, with the 12th meeting in July 2015 about Afghanistan, and the next one planned for January 2016 to talk about Syria.

Other task forces

Other important task forces also met during the 1980s and early 1990s. The Arms Control Task Force started in April 1983, led by Paul Doty and Georgy Arbatov. They met 15 times over ten years, ending in 1992. They talked about nuclear, chemical, and conventional arms control, as well as missile defense and security in Europe. After the Berlin Wall fell, they also discussed NATO expansion and nuclear weapons spreading among Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

A Political Relations Task Force met four times between 1986 and 1989 to look at how the two countries could improve their relationship. An Economic Relations Task Force met once in 1988, helping the Soviets work on laws about joint ventures. The Southern Africa Task Force met three times in the mid-1980s to discuss conflicts in that region.

Dialogues inspired by the Dartmouth Conference

Because of the work by Harold Saunders, the Regional Conflicts Task Force, and the Kettering Foundation, many groups used the Dartmouth Conference's idea of ongoing talks to help solve problems.

The Regional Conflicts Task Force started the Inter-Tajik Dialogue to see if talking could help end a fight. The task force stopped leading in 2005, but the talks went on for years. They even made a group called the Public Committee for Democratic Processes to talk about everyday issues.

The same task force also helped people from Armenia and Azerbaijan talk about Nagorno-Karabakh. They met many times from 2001 to 2007 and made ideas for peace, though the leaders of the countries did not use them.

In 2010, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace started the Transnistria Conflict Resolution Task Force with other groups. They met several times between 2010 and 2013, following the Dartmouth way of talking to solve problems.

Sustained Dialogue Institute

The International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (later called the Sustained Dialogue Institute) started in 2002 to keep working on peace talks that began with the Regional Conflicts Task Force. It continued talks between people in Tajikistan and about Nagorno-Karabakh. The institute also started new talks in the Middle East, Southern Africa, and Iraq. It brought these talks to American college campuses through the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network (SDCN).

The New Dartmouth

In the early 2000s, the Kettering Foundation started a new way to talk about relationships between Russia and America, called the New Dartmouth. They used a method called public deliberation, which they had used before in the National Issues Forums. First, three groups helped create questions about the relationship between the two countries. Then, 25 more groups all over the United States talked about these questions.

At the same time, two groups in Russia held 70 similar discussions. They talked about the relationship using a different set of questions. The ideas from all these talks became part of the plans for the New Dartmouth meetings. These meetings happened between 2003 and August 2008. After that, the work moved to libraries in Russia and the National Issues Forums network. Big policy questions were handled again by a special group looking at regional conflicts.

Locations and dates

The Dartmouth Conference was a series of meetings between American and Soviet representatives that began in 1961. These meetings took place in many different cities around the world. Some of the early meetings were held in places like Hanover, New Hampshire in the USA and Nizhnaya Oreanda in Crimea. Later meetings occurred in cities such as Moscow, Austin, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, continuing into the 2010s.

Partial list of notable participants

Many important people took part in the Dartmouth Conferences. These included leaders, writers, scientists, and thinkers from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Some well-known names are: