JOSEPH MONTVILLE

On June 1, 2022 our dear friend and colleague Joseph Montville passed away. In his honor and in collaboration with his family we have established the Joseph V. Montville Fund for Citizen Diplomacy. 

Joseph Montville was director of the Program on Healing Historical Memory, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. He was also director of the Abrahamic Family Reunion, the Esalen Institute project to promote Muslim-Christian-Jewish reconciliation.  And he also chaired the board of Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy. He was also Senior Adviser on Interfaith Relations at Washington National Cathedral, and was a Distinguished Diplomat in Residence at American University. Montville founded the preventive diplomacy program at Washington, DC’s Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1994 and directed it until 2003. Before that he spent 23 years as a diplomat with posts in the Middle East and North Africa. He also worked in the State Department’s Bureaus of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and Intelligence and Research, where he was chief of the Near East Division and director of the Office of Global Issues. Montville has held non-resident faculty appointments at the Harvard and University of Virginia Medical Schools. 

He defined the concept of “Track Two,” nonofficial diplomacy. 

Educated at Lehigh, Harvard, and Columbia Universities, Montville is the editor of Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington Books, 1990) and editor (with Vamik Volkan and Demetrios Julius) of The Psychodynamics of International Relationships (Lexington Books, 1990 [vol. I], 1991 [vol. II]). His most recent book is History as Prelude: Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean, (Lexington Books,  2011). In 2008, the International Society of Political Psychology gave Montville its Nevitt Sanford Award for “distinguished professional contribution to political psychology,” at its 31st annual scientific meeting in Paris.