Dartmouth Conferences (peace)
| Dartmouth Conference | |
|---|---|
A meeting of a Dartmouth Task Force in Moscow, 2008
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| Status | Active |
| Genre | Conferences |
| Frequency | Irregularly |
| Country | United States – Soviet Union / Russia |
| Years active | 54 years, 149 days |
| Inaugurated | October 28, 1960 |
| Founder | Norman Cousins |
| Most recent | 30 October 2015 |
The Dartmouth Conference is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between American and Soviet (now Russian) representatives. The first Dartmouth Conference took place at Dartmouth College in 1961. Subsequent conferences were held through 1990. They were revived in 2014 and continue today. Task forces begun under the auspices of the main conference continued to work after the main conference stopped. The Regional Conflicts Task Force extended the sustained dialogue model, based on the Dartmouth experience, to conflicts in Tajikistan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Dartmouth inspired a number of other dialogues in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, many of them under the auspices of the Sustained Dialogue Institute and the Kettering Foundation.
The Dartmouth Conference was begun by Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and a founding member of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Speaking to the presidium of the Soviet Peace Committee in June 1959, he proposed that citizens of the United States and the Soviet Union meet to have informal discussions to widen contacts and to explore areas of contention between them. After discussing the idea with President Eisenhower later that year, Cousins began to organize a meeting between prominent citizens of the two countries.
Together with Philip Mosely, a professor at Columbia, he organized the American side of the conference. The Soviet Peace Committee organized the Soviet side of the first conference and several that followed. The Ford Foundation provided financial support for the American side.
That first conference took place in October 1960 on the campus of Dartmouth College. It began to set the model for the conferences that followed. The discussions covered most issues then important in U.S.-Soviet relations. As later, they were kept off the record.
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