John Marks’ Journey from Provocateur to Peacemaker

It seems that almost everywhere in the world, there is conflict, distrust, and unrest – Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, and even here in the US. Oftentimes, any kind of diplomacy, cooperation, agreement, detente or finding a common ground seems impossible. But what if there was a different way? What if there was an organization that holds as its mission, “to transform the way the world deals with conflict, away from adversarial approaches and toward cooperative solutions?” What if those tactics included dialogue training, joint development projects, public art projects, sports leagues, and social impact entertainment via radio, TV, film, and print?

Well, these are all accomplishments that John Marks has achieved in his work as President of Search for Common Ground, a peacebuilding NGO he founded in 1982 and built with his wife Susan Collin Marks, predicated on social entrepreneurship. 

He is the coauthor of the controversial New York Times best-seller The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, the award-winning Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,”  and we’ll be doing a deep dive into his latest book, From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship, just recently published by Columbia University Press. 

John is also a Skoll Awardee in Social Entrepreneurship and an Ashoka Senior Fellow. The UN’s University of Peace awarded him an honorary doctorate for is work, and in 2018, Search for Common Ground was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I found From Vision to Action to be both a memoir and somewhat of a practitioner’s guide to the underlying principles of social entrepreneurship. It offers a master class in effective negotiation and conflict r