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Office of the Provost Massachusetts Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138July 15, 2006
Mr. Ahmed Sayyad
UNESCO Assistant Director General for External Relations and Cooperation
c/o Mr. Serguei Lazarev
Chief, Section for Action against Racism ad Discrimination
Secretary of the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the promotion of Tolerance and Non-ViolenceAs Harvard University's Vice Provost for International Affairs, I am delighted and honored to second the nomination of Professor Herbert Kelman for the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh award for the promotion of tolerance and non-violence. As someone who has known Professor Kelman at Harvard and learned from him over some three decades, I am especially happy to do so.
Herb Kelman is one of the leading social psychologists of our time. His scholarly work on the processes of social influence__compliance, identification, and internalization__has had extraordinary impact on professional life. His work on the social psychology of obedience is a major social psychological contribution to the study of genocide and sanctioned massacres. His research on the social psychological foundations and dimensions of international behavior is a cornerstone for the social scientific study of international relations. On these three subjects, his impact on scholarly work is both distinguished and vast. He has contributed, moreover, to interdisciplinary research that bears on social and political psychology, social and political science, social anthropology, and the scholarly study of human rights, international relation and social ethics.
Any of these justifies considering him a leading intellectual of the closing third of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. Each of them bears directly on the likelihood of success in the promotion of tolerance, the dissuasion of violence, and the affirmation of non-violence as a method and as an ethic of life.
Kelman's commitment to scholarly study has long been wed, however, to another equally important commitment to the practical advancement of peace. In the world of international action, he is a senior practitioner of two-track diplomacy. He links personal responsibility to global action. The connection between these two noble human endeavors has been the guiding light of his professional life and a key qualification for this UNESCO award.
Since the mid-1970s, Kelman focused his colossal scholarly and personal energies on the promotion of the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Through his work at and through Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, he pioneered in fostering dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. I was the director of this research center from 1995 to 2006 and have been a member of the center since 1969. I have known Kelman through the center as professor and director and would like to describe that work as I observed it first-hand.
I should start by noting that I first became aware of Kelman's towering influence in the late 1970s when he served simultaneously as president of the International Studies Association, chairman of the American Sociological Association's section on social psychology, and president of the Inter-American Society of Psychology. At about that same time, he had been a visiting professor at the American University in Beirut, engaged in research in Jerusalem, and lectured at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, a combination that is an achievement in its own terms.
In the mid-1970s, Kelman launched the activities at Harvard of what would become the Center's Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution (PICAR). PICAR sprung from the brain, heart, and lived experiences of Herb Kelman and his research on social psychology as applied to international topics. PICAR advanced our understanding of international and intergroup conflicts and developed interactive problem-solving processes to address such conflicts effectively. PICAR's work was based on the premise that international conflict is intersocietal as well as intergovernmental and that diplomacy at its best seeks to integrate official and unofficial efforts.
PICAR integrated research, practice, and education. Much of its work was carried out through problem-solving workshops. Members of communities in conflict met for intensive three to four day periods to engage in “joint thinking” about solutions to the problems that divide them. Choosing the participants carefully, developing clear ground rules, and bringing the basic human needs of identity and security to the fore of the political discussion promoted such joint thinking. These workshops brought together influential personalities from both sides of the conflict where participants could emerge as human beings, still committed to their respective views but enabled to listen directly to the concerns of the other. Participants in Kelman's workshops, often for the first time in their lives, were able to present their own views and observe instantly how “the other” heard them.
More generally, PICAR promoted a multidisciplinary orientation to the analysis and resolution of international and ethnic conflict, explored the relationship between unofficial and official processes in diplomacy and negotiation, and strengthened the link between theory and practice.
PICAR's focus remained the Arab-Israeli conflict but its members engaged as well on problems in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Armenia, indigenous communities in Canada, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and U.S.-Cuban relations.
Kelman developed through PICAR a network of scholars and practitioners trained in conflict analysis and third-party intervention capable of addressing regional and intercommunal conflicts and distilling from these experiences relevant contributions to the policy-making process. Through that network, Kelman trained and empowered scholars and practitioners who became dedicated, as he had hoped, to the promotion of conflict resolution, non-violence, and tolerance in their own countries. Thus he planted the seeds for the thoughtful, focused, well-informed, and practical search for peace in lands afflicted by violence.
Kelman has always and above all been a teacher. Therefore, under his leadership, PICAR stimulated, supported, and helped to train many postdoctoral researchers as well as graduate and undergraduate students. It drew vigorously and effectively from the Center's Fellows Program, which brings distinguished practitioners to Harvard every year, from different parts of the world and various ethnic, cultural, and religious origins, who have excelled in their respective professions - ambassadors, high-ranking military officers, business executives, etc. They educate each other and the university. PICAR engaged the Fellows as well as members of other programs at the Center to advance Kelman's twin objectives of research and practice and to foster open, creative, and multidisciplinary thinking.
Herbert Kelman is a scholar of great distinction, unassuming in his personal style, passionately devoted to the process of making peace an actual possibility, and thoroughly dedicated to these endeavors in the Middle East. Born in Vienna, a citizen of the United States, a man respectful of the world's varieties and particularities, Herb has also enriched our life and work as citizens of every country. He belongs to the legions of colleagues, students, and friends he has made all over the world.
Harvard is grateful for his leadership, talents, and accomplishments in the past, now, and in the years to come, and, as its Vice Provost, I second Dr. Roseli Fischmann's nomination of Dr. Kelman for this distinguished UNESCO award.
Sincerely,
Jorge I. Domínguez
Antonio Madero Professor of Government
Vice Provost of Harvard University for International Affairs