Track II diplomacy explained at its most precise is the practice of unofficial, informal dialogue between influential individuals from opposing sides of a conflict, facilitated by a third party, designed to explore solutions and transform relationships in ways that official negotiations cannot. The term was coined by Joseph Montville in 1982 to describe the problem-solving workshops that John Burton and his colleagues had been convening since the 1960s under the label controlled communication . The defining feature is not the absence of government involvement but the absence of official authority: participants speak for themselves, not for their states, and the talks are non-binding by design. This non-binding character is not a weakness but the source of the technique's distinctive value. It allows participants to explore ideas, acknowledge constraints, and build trust without the political risk that accompanies formal negotiation.
The practice sits within a broader ecosystem of diplomatic tracks. Track I is official government-to-government diplomacy. Track II is the unofficial, non-governmental dialogue that runs parallel to it. Between them lies Track 1.5, where officials participate in their private capacity in dialogues facilitated by unofficial bodies . The distinctions matter because they determine what can be said and by whom. A Track I negotiator speaks with the authority of a state and is constrained by instructions. A Track II participant speaks only for themselves and is free to think aloud. The craft of Track II lies in exploiting that freedom without allowing it to become mere talk.
The Burton Legacy
Controlled Communication
The intellectual foundation of Track II diplomacy was laid by John Burton, an Australian diplomat-turned-academic who convened a series of unofficial workshops on conflicts in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and developed the concept of controlled communication to describe his method . Burton's insight was that conflicts often persist not because the parties cannot find a solution but because they cannot communicate effectively enough to discover one. The facilitator's role was to create a controlled environment in which the parties could step back from their public positions and examine the underlying dynamics of the dispute. This was not mediation in the traditional sense. The facilitator did not propose solutions or pressure the parties toward agreement. The facilitator controlled the process, not the substance.
The Burton workshops were the prototype for what would later be called problem-solving workshops, and their influence on the field has been profound. Herbert Kelman, a Harvard psychologist who ran Israeli-Palestinian workshops for decades, described the approach as a microprocess designed to insert into the macroprocess of conflict resolution the components that official negotiations often lack: identification and analysis of the problem, joint shaping of ideas for solution, and creating a supportive political environment . The workshops were not negotiating sessions and were not intended to substitute for them. They were designed to produce new ideas and insights that participants could carry back into their own societies' political debates.
The Dual Purpose
Kelman's formulation of the workshop's dual purpose captures the tension at the heart of Track II. The first purpose is to produce change in the individual participants: new understandings, new insights, new ideas for resolving the conflict. The second is to transfer those changes into the political debate and decision-making process in the two societies . These two purposes can pull in opposite directions. To maximize transfer, you want participants who are close to decision-makers, ideally officials. To maximize change, you want participants who are removed from the constraints of official position and free to explore . The facilitator must choose which purpose to prioritize in any given workshop, and that choice determines who is invited and what the workshop can realistically achieve.
The dual purpose also explains why Track II is so difficult to evaluate. A workshop that produces a genuine shift in a participant's understanding may never produce a visible political outcome. A workshop that produces a joint concept paper may be read by no one in a position to act on it. The chain of causation from a private conversation in a hotel conference room to a change in a government's policy is long, contingent, and almost impossible to trace. The practitioners know this, and the honest ones acknowledge it. They do not claim that their workshops caused the agreements that followed. They claim that they contributed to an environment in which agreements became possible.
The Oslo Back-Channel
The Norwegian Facilitation
The most famous success associated with Track II is the Oslo process, which produced the 1993 agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Oslo talks were a back-channel negotiation, conducted in secret through Norwegian facilitators, that bypassed the official negotiations that had been stalled. The Norwegian mediators acted as facilitators rather than mediators: they built relationships between the sides, leveraged the costs and benefits of working together, and accelerated the speed of the talks through multiple channels of communication . The back-channel was not a problem-solving workshop in the strict Kelman sense. It was closer to Track 1.5: unofficial facilitation of talks that directly involved individuals close to official decision-making.
Kelman himself acknowledged that his workshops, along with other unofficial efforts from the 1970s to the early 1990s, helped lay the groundwork for Oslo. They contributed by developing cadres prepared to carry out productive negotiations, by creating opportunities to share information and formulate new ideas, and by fostering a political atmosphere that made the parties open to a new relationship . This is a modest claim, and it is the right one. The workshops did not produce Oslo. They helped create the conditions in which Oslo became possible. The distinction is important because it reflects the actual mechanism of Track II influence: it works slowly, indirectly, and through the accumulation of small changes in how people understand the conflict and each other.
The Lessons of Failure
The Oslo process also illustrates the limits of Track II and back-channel methods. The agreement that emerged was ambiguous on the hardest issues, and its implementation stalled. The back-channel that produced it was secret, which meant that the constituencies who would have to support it were not prepared for the compromises it required. The speed that the Norwegian facilitators achieved came at the cost of depth. The process moved quickly because it was insulated from public debate, but that insulation also meant that the agreement lacked the broad political ownership that might have sustained it through the difficult years that followed.
The Oslo case is not an argument against Track II. It is an argument for understanding what Track II can and cannot do. It can create channels, build trust, and generate ideas. It cannot substitute for the political work of building domestic coalitions and preparing publics for compromise. The back-channel is a tool for a specific phase of a process, and the mistake is to treat it as a substitute for the whole process. The facilitators who ran Oslo understood this, but the political leaders who embraced the agreement did not. The result was an agreement that was celebrated in Washington and contested in Jerusalem and Ramallah.
The Workshop Method
What Happens in the Room
A problem-solving workshop is a carefully constructed space. Kelman described it as a workshop in the literal sense: a place where participants can engage in exploration, observation, and analysis, and fashion new products that can be exported into the political arena . The format varies depending on the phase of the conflict, the participants, and the purpose, but the core elements are consistent. A third-party facilitator, knowledgeable about the conflict and about group process, convenes members of the conflicting societies for direct, face-to-face interaction. The facilitator does not propose solutions or pressure the parties toward agreement. The facilitator creates a setting in which the parties can speak openly, listen to each other, and develop new understandings of the conflict and of each other's needs, fears, and constraints .
The facilitation is a distinct skill from mediation. A mediator engages in the substance of the dispute, proposes options, and tries to bring the parties closer to agreement. A facilitator focuses on the process, fostering a climate conducive to problem-solving, and rarely volunteers ideas . The facilitator's authority derives from the parties' consent, not from any external power. Any party can end the process. This makes the facilitator's position precarious, but it also ensures that the process remains voluntary and that the parties retain ownership of whatever emerges. The facilitator's craft lies in knowing when to intervene and when to stay silent, when to push the parties to go deeper and when to let them find their own way.
The Transfer Problem
The central practical challenge of the workshop method is transfer: how do the insights and relationships developed in a private room get back into the political process? Kelman identified several mechanisms. Participants can communicate their new insights through writing, lecturing, political activities, or the advice they give to decision-makers. In the Joint Working Group on Israeli-Palestinian Relations that Kelman co-facilitated with Nadim Rouhana, the participants shaped their insights into joint concept papers that were made available to decision-makers, political elites, and the wider public . This was an innovation: the group moved beyond dialogue to joint production, creating documents that could circulate in the political arena.
The transfer problem is not fully solvable. A workshop can produce a brilliant idea that no one in power ever hears about. It can build a relationship between two influential individuals who are then marginalized in their own societies. The Track II practitioner must accept that the work is, in a sense, a gamble on the future influence of the people in the room. The selection of participants is therefore the most consequential decision the facilitator makes. Choosing people who are close to power maximizes the chance of transfer but reduces the freedom to explore. Choosing people who are free to explore maximizes the chance of insight but reduces the chance that the insight will travel. There is no formula that resolves this tension. There is only judgment, case by case.
Track 1.5 and the Gray Zone
Officials in Private Capacity
The boundary between Track II and official diplomacy is often blurred by the participation of officials in their private capacity. Susan Nan introduced the concept of Track 1.5 in the 1990s to describe diplomatic initiatives facilitated by unofficial bodies that directly involve officials from the conflict in question . The officials participate as private individuals, not as representatives of their governments, and they often rely on unofficial third parties to facilitate the process in strict secrecy. Jones described Track 1.5 as the closest that unofficial dialogues get to official diplomacy . This proximity can be enormously beneficial, because it increases the chance that what is discussed in the room will influence actual policy. But it can also be harmful, because it can compromise the confidentiality that makes open exploration possible.
The gray zone of Track 1.5 raises a question about what Track II is for. If the goal is to influence policy, then bringing in officials makes sense. If the goal is to create a space where people can think freely without the constraints of official position, then the presence of officials may undermine the very freedom the process is meant to create. The practitioners who work in this zone must navigate the tension carefully. They must ensure that officials understand the rules: that they are speaking for themselves, that nothing is binding, and that the confidentiality of the process protects everyone involved. When those rules are respected, Track 1.5 can be a powerful bridge between the unofficial and the official. When they are not, it can become a venue for posturing and leaking.
The Multi-Track Critique
The concept of Track II has been criticized for being too narrow. Diamond and McDonald's concept of multi-track diplomacy, developed in the 1990s, distinguished nine tracks of peacemaking activity: government, professional conflict resolution, business, private citizens, research and training, peace activism, religion, funding, and public opinion . This framework argued that peace is not made between elites only, and that a broader level of interaction may be vital depending on the conflict. The multi-track approach does not reject Track II; it situates it within a larger system of activities that all contribute to peacebuilding in different ways. The implication is that Track II practitioners should not see their work as the only or even the most important track. They should see it as one component of a system that includes many other actors and methods.
This critique is useful because it tempers the tendency of Track II practitioners to overstate their importance. The workshops and dialogues are valuable, but they are not the whole story. The people who negotiate the agreements, the activists who build pressure for change, the journalists who shape public understanding, and the citizens who vote for or against peace are all part of the process. Track II works best when it is integrated into this larger system, not when it is treated as a substitute for it. The most effective practitioners understand this, and they build relationships with actors across the other tracks. The least effective treat their workshops as an end in themselves.
The Contemporary Practice
The OSCE Model
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe provides a contemporary institutional model for the kind of dialogue facilitation that Track II represents. The OSCE's Conflict Prevention Centre supports mediation and dialogue facilitation across the conflict cycle, from prevention to post-conflict rehabilitation. Its work includes high-level mediation and dialogue facilitation at the local level, and it explicitly connects informal and formal dialogue processes to ensure coherence and inclusivity . The OSCE describes its local-level engagement as often acting early and flexibly to stabilize situations before disputes escalate, using tools such as quiet diplomacy, shuttle diplomacy, and local prevention mechanisms . This is not Track II in the strict Montville sense, because the OSCE is an intergovernmental organization, not an unofficial body. But it shares the underlying logic: creating spaces for dialogue that are separate from formal negotiation and that can address the relational and psychological dimensions of conflict.
The OSCE model also illustrates how the boundary between official and unofficial has blurred in contemporary practice. An intergovernmental organization can convene dialogues that have many of the features of Track II: informality, confidentiality, a focus on process as well as substance, and the involvement of actors who are not official representatives. The distinction between Track I and Track II was useful for analytical purposes in the 1980s, when the field was being defined. It is less useful today, when the practice has diversified and the categories overlap. What matters is not the label but the function: is the dialogue creating a space that official negotiations cannot provide? If so, it is doing the work of Track II, whatever it is called.
The Evaluation Problem
The evaluation problem remains the most persistent challenge for Track II. How do you know if a workshop worked? The most rigorous attempts to answer this question rely on process tracing: tracing the path from the workshop to the political outcome, identifying the mechanisms through which the workshop's outputs entered the political process, and assessing whether those mechanisms were plausibly responsible for the changes observed. This is labor-intensive and inevitably interpretive. The practitioners who do it well are candid about the limits of their evidence. They do not claim that their workshops caused the agreements. They claim that they contributed to the conditions that made the agreements possible, and they trace the specific ways in which they contributed .
The honest evaluation of Track II requires accepting that its successes are often invisible and its failures are often ambiguous. A workshop that fails to change anything may still have built a relationship that will matter years later. A workshop that produces a brilliant joint paper may have no impact at all if the political moment is not right. The field has not solved this problem, and it may not be solvable in the way that the evaluation of more conventional diplomatic activities is solvable. What the field has done is develop a body of case studies and practitioner knowledge that allows for informed judgment. The judgment is not certain, but it is better than nothing. And in a field where the alternative is often no dialogue at all, better than nothing may be enough.
Track II diplomacy explained honestly is not a magic bullet. It is a patient, uncertain, often frustrating practice that works at the edges of official diplomacy, building relationships and generating ideas that may or may not influence the people who hold power. Its practitioners are not naive about this. They know that most workshops do not change the world. They know that the chain of causation is long and the evidence is thin. They do it anyway, because the alternative is to leave the space between the official and the unofficial empty, and because sometimes, in ways that cannot be predicted in advance, the conversations in that space matter. The Oslo back-channel is the exception that proves the rule. Most Track II work does not produce an Oslo. But without the accumulated work of many people in many rooms over many years, Oslo might not have happened at all.