Saadia Touval, noted scholar on mediation in global disputes
WASHINGTON - Saadia Touval, 76, a political scientist who made an influential argument that biased mediators in international disputes were often the most effective, died April 17 at his home in suburban Rockville, Md. He had gastric cancer.
Dr. Touval, a former Israeli university dean, taught in the conflict management program at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington from 1994 to 2007.
Starting in the 1970s, his work on "biased intermediaries" had an impact on prominent US negotiators such as Aaron David Miller and Dennis Ross, who borrowed his ideas.
Dr. Touval drew on concrete lessons from disputes in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans to assert that neutrality or impartiality were not as important as holding power.
Looking at the Middle East, he pointed out that Arabs viewed the United States as an ally of Israel. But this was not a problem, he wrote, because the Arabs knew that the Americans were in a better position to win concessions for them.
It was considered a fresh concept when he first explored the topic in foreign policy journals and books such as "The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1979" (1982).
Ross and Miller called Dr. Touval one of the more distinguished and helpful scholars in his field because of his vivid examples.
"He came up with a reasonable and compelling look at theory for practitioners," said Miller, now a public policy scholar. "For a political scientist in a field just littered with jargon and unusable formulations and concepts, he came up with a very practical approach that was of great benefit."
Dr. Touval received his doctorate in government from Harvard University. He spent almost 20 years at Tel Aviv University, where he became dean of the faculty of social sciences.
