THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2024 53 From left: John Marks, Ambassador Robert Frowick, and Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov in 1993. COURTESY OF JOHN MARKS Begun as an effort to improve U.S.-Soviet relations, our first major project was to promote superpower cooperation against terrorism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we grew steadily, branching out to other regions and addressing other issues. In 1991 we began working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in 1995 we established our first full country program in Africa, in Burundi. When I stepped down as president of the organization in 2014, we had a staff of 600 full-time employees at work in 35 countries. In 2018 Search for Common Ground was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. We had become the world’s largest peacebuilding nonprofit, and our toolbox included everything from traditional negotiation and mediation to production of TV soap operas and retraining more than 100,000 Congolese soldiers and conducting training to prevent sexual assault by soldiers. The world would almost certainly be a better place if there were less need for our services. However, I was convinced, and still am, that peace is possible, and that even the most intractable conflicts can be resolved without violence. From early on, I found that retired career diplomats and former ambassadors could be very useful in carrying out this kind of work, and our relationship with the U.S. Foreign Service has been important. Certainly, the diplomats have had to be comfortable operating in a milieu where advancing U.S. foreign policy was not necessarily the goal but where resolving conflict was. And moving from a world of protocol and démarches to a free-flowing organization like Search usually required major leaps of faith. Our engagement with the Foreign Service and former ambassadors began in 1991, when I received a phone call, out of the blue, from retired Senior FSO Alfred “Roy” Atherton Jr., a former ambassador to Egypt and assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs. He had heard about Search’s work and wanted to become involved. We had never before had such a high-level volunteer, and Atherton became the chair of our Middle East Advisory Board. With the assistance of other retired FSOs and former ambassadors, Search’s Middle East projects developed. And when Atherton passed away in 2002, retired FSO and longtime ambassador to Israel Samuel “Sam” Lewis replaced him as head of Search’s Mideast board. Over the decades our engagement with career diplomats has continued; here are two examples of successful collaboration.
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