Track Two Overloaded? Using Track Two Dialogues as a Vehicle for Inclusion in Peacemaking Discourse and Practice

Track Two diplomacy is commonly understood as a form of informal and private dialogues between warring parties facilitated by scholar-practitioners. While Track Two developed in the 1960s as an alternative mode of conflict resolution to official Track One processes, the practice has proliferated and is now seen as an established form of peacemaking. In the context of the normative turn of mediation and conflict resolution, in which peace processes are expected to meaningfully include the voices and needs of non-armed actors civil society actors such as women, youth and religious leaders, the default mechanism for including these actors has become Track Two dialogues. Policy discourses among the United Nations, regional organizations, states and mediation communities of practice increasingly conceptualize Track Two as the primary vehicle for widespread inclusion of civil society that provides both a physical space for civil society actors and a way to transfer their perspectives into formal processes. There is a dearth of research that investigates this evolving nature of Track Two and questions the assumption that Track Two dialogues actually lead to more “inclusive” outcomes in contemporary peace processes. This gap in the literature is underpinned by larger conceptual issues. First, many different types Track Two initiatives are labelled as inclusive dialogues without coherence as to what inclusivity means and how it manifests in a particular context. Second, the label of Track Two itself has evolved from discreet problem solving workshops to large civil society peace processes running parallel to official peace talks. Combining theories on inclusion found in mediation literature and empirical analyses of Track Two dialogues in conflict resolution scholarship, this paper address these issues through a comprehensive analysis of Track Two and mediation scholarship over the last 30 years. It assesses (1) what kind of peacemaking initiatives connecting informal and formal peace processes are labelled as “Track Two” initiatives and (2) what mechanisms and modalities of inclusion are at play in these instances. Through this analysis, this paper contributes a working conceptual taxonomy of what “inclusive” Track Two dialogues mean in practice.