Established by a group of highly qualified and successful legal practitioners and policy advisors, SAI is a not-forprofit private international organization that provides legal and policy advice and guidance to parties negotiating in conflict and post-conflict situations.

The aim of SAI’s work is to promote the peaceful resolution of conflict, in accordance with internationally accepted legal principles.

SAI engages with combatants, former combatants, and the range of civil society elements and institutions that are critical to making conflict resolution successful and permanent.

SAI emphasizes assisting the parties most marginalized in negotiations.

The overriding methodology driving SAI’s work is that an approach addressing each conflict as a series of discrete elements that can be resolved individually will produce results. There is no single universal approach to conflict resolution that can be transferred from one process to another – though elements of different conflicts may have strong similarities.

In 2005, SAI is achieving its aims with three programs:

I. Stabilization
SAI’s Stabilization program represents a significant departure in the evolution of international intervention. With many features of a conventional intervention, and with a mandate from the international community, SAI operates as an independent third party engaged by stakeholders in a conflict, to provide assistance to all parties seeking a negotiated peace.

By addressing each conflict individually, SAI is able to look for and address the fault lines that prevent a negotiated peace from emerging. SAI provides assistance and designs resolutions appropriate to the specific circumstance of conflicts on a case-by-case basis.

The Stabilization program recognizes that minimum conditions often need to be created to promote the resolution of conflict. These do not substitute for the political will of combatants and/or the international community. Nevertheless, stabilizing conditions can help create the conditions necessary to influencing political will. SAI identifies these conditions and then, working directly with participants, works to implement the changes necessary.

As an independent third party assisting with the processes leading to a negotiated peace that conforms to the norms of international law, SAI is not unique. What has set it apart from the history of such organizations is that it is able to take on the whole range of peace activities, activities that would conventionally be undertaken by international or multilateral organizations, by virtue of the confidence that those organizations, and many other stakeholders in a conflict, have placed in SAI’s ability to direct processes and that promote negotiations that in turn would result in a successful and permanent peace.

II. Peace, Media, and Culture (Public Diplomacy)
Conflicts between groups are often exacerbated by the perceptions surrounding their conflict. Such conflictsustaining perceptions can be dismantled by the emergence of alternative conceptions that weave relevant nonviolent, humanizing, balanced, and peaceful engagement with the issues into the narratives of popular culture.

SAI’s Peace, Media, and Culture program develops and promotes such conceptions, and enlists leaders in different fields – political, cultural, spiritual, entertainment – to generate awareness and interest across societies.

In developing a strategy to maximize peace media and publicity, to most effectively leverage the support of these leaders, and to add value to relevant creative works, the program makes careful analysis of target markets, using demographics, polling, focus group and other PR research techniques.

III. Scenario Planning
The key to SAI’s provision of ‘boutique’ level support to the processes of negotiated peace is the research undertaken before SAI proposes a role for an independent, third party. The Scenario Planning program applies long term planning methodologies to create an holistic view of factors contributing to a conflict – economic, developmental, cultural, environmental or geographic – and generates projections of where the conflict is likely to lead in the mid (5-10 year) term. The program develops proposals for SAI’s other programs on the basis of where discrete interventions might address ‘fault lines’ and move a conflict closer to a negotiated peace.

SAI and the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
SAI has been able to leverage the significant contributions that two of its managing partners – Amjad Atallah and Jarat Chopra – have made to peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian people, including work with the Mitchell Commission, the General Zinni and Secretary of State Powell missions, the Negotiating Affairs Department of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Monitoring Group, and the Quartet “Roadmap to Peace”. Both partners have also made significant academic contributions on the subject over a period of twenty years.

Jarat Chopra is currently heading an SAI Stabilization program based in Jerusalem. The program has a mandate to prepare an assessment of planning considerations necessary to maximize the Palestinian exercise of freedom in the short and mid-term while not prejudicing Israel’s legitimate security concerns or prejudicing a permanent negotiated end of conflict. As part of this effort and resulting from the planning considerations already produced, SAI has assisted the preparations of Palestinian security organizations for their coordinated deployment into the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories to follow the unilateral disengagement of Israeli Occupying Forces planned for the second half of 2005.

In the absence of a conventional international intervention acceptable to the stakeholders in this process, SAI has adopted an independent third party role, as it recognizes a coordinated deployment would constitute a discrete accomplishment in the development of a mature security sector for Palestinians. Such a development is a prerequisite for the Palestinian people’s support of their representatives’ startup efforts to end the long-running and tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

In July 2005, SAI completed work on a Palestinian Security Assessment, the first comprehensive review of the Palestinian security sector. The work is a significant and essential step towards coordinated development of the sector. It has been widely and highly praised, in both the international and Palestinian communities.