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This includes all plenary and panel sessions totalling 44 pages in length.

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Introduction

A high-level, bipartisan group of current and former U.S. foreign policy officials, scholars, and other experts joined nearly 1900 participants to make specific recommendations to the Obama administration on such important international topics as the Arab-Israeli peace process, the way forward in Afghanistan, and countering nuclear proliferation.

Passing the Baton’s presentations and panels were organized around major issues in the new national security and foreign policy agenda. This event was not a comprehensive survey, but rather one that drew on projects central to the work of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which celebrates 25 years of work on international conflict management and peacebuilding in 2009.  With its broad and flexible charter from Congress, the Institute focuses on issues of war and peace, on approaches to managing international conflict by non-violent means, and on ways of strengthening our national capacity to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts abroad.

This report serves as a brief overview of the day’s events and, importantly, the specific policy recommendations made by panelists.  On the following pages, readers will find a short synopsis of each panel and session from the day’s events.  A more comprehensive archive of the event is available at USIP’s website, www.usip.org, where users can access more than 14 hours of video and audio files from the conference, as well as links to supplementary documents, photo galleries, and other features.  The panel descriptions in this report are intended to serve as overviews only.  The video and audio files available online should be considered the official record of all speakers’ remarks.

It is the Institute’s hope that by providing these analyses of the American posture toward international conflict as the Obama administration begins its tenure, we will help policymakers and citizens alike understand the depth and complexity of the foreign policy challenges the country faces.  The Institute does so not in an effort to overwhelm its audience with the scale of the effort needed, but to demonstrate that conflict is both natural and manageable. It is the Institute’s purpose to find nonviolent solutions to managing or resolving international conflicts. Hopefully, conflicts can be prevented from reaching a violent stage, but if not, there are techniques of managing crises and promoting post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction. That is the fundamental purpose of the work of the United States Institute of Peace and the focus of Passing the Baton 2009.