The brainchild of a handful of academics, free-thinking State Department bureaucrats, and public intellectuals in the 1970s, "Track II" diplomacy grew out of the observation that private individuals, meeting unofficially, can find their way to common ground that official negotiators can't. Put bluntly, "citizens could take some action rather than simply being bystanders while the grown-up governments acted like jerks," says Joseph V. Montville, the former Foreign Service officer who first put the term down on paper in the pages of Foreign Policy 30 years ago. Governments once viewed Track II as a kind of feel-good exercise at best, and at worst as a genuine threat -- freelance diplomacy, after all, can damage the real kind. But three decades later, most of them have come to understand that an era of unconventional conflicts requires unconventional solutions.

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May 1, 1960
An American U-2 spy plane in Soviet airspace is shot down, leading to a full-blown Cold War diplomatic crisis. President Dwight Eisenhower's friend Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, convenes a gathering of unofficial American and Soviet delegations at Dartmouth College. The meeting establishes the blueprint for Track II diplomacy, from the cast of characters (a mix of academics and ex-officials) to its agenda: a frank conversation about their countries' differences.

1970s
Shrinks discover geopolitics. With backing from groups like the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the Institute for Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs (IPFA), the new field of political psychology begins convening meetings of Arab and Israeli scholars and retired officials. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is a believer, telling Israel's Knesset in his historic 1977 visit that "a psychological barrier between us, a barrier of suspicion, a barrier of rejection, a barrier of fear, of deception" divides Arabs and Israelis, and is "70 percent of the whole problem."

December 24, 1979
Soviet tanks roll into Afghanistan, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter cuts off contact with the Kremlin. The following year, California New Agers Michael and Dulce Murphy convene a conference at the Esalen Institute to promote unofficial citizen exchanges with the Soviets. Joseph V. Montville, a Foreign Service officer and participant in the APA's Arab-Israeli meetings, tells attendees, "I suppose you could say what I do is Track I diplomacy, and what you do is Track II diplomacy."

CHOO YOUN-KONG/AFP/Getty Images

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