Dartmouth Conference
American-Soviet bilateral dialogue
The Dartmouth Conference is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between American and Soviet 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.
Origin
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dartmouth Conference” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.