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Search for Common Ground (http://www.sfcg.org/) is an international non-profit organ-isation operating in 16 countries whose mission is to transform the way the world deals with conflict, away from adversarial approaches toward cooperative solutions.

Headquartered in Wash-ington, D.C., the majority of its employees are based in field offices around the world. To date, SFCG has created several independent radio stations, a newsletter which features articles on relations between the West and the Muslim world, and brought together numerous conflicting groups to find ways to peacefully resolve issues. John Marks, SFCG’s founder and current president, recently received an award from the Skoll Foundation for social entrepreneurship.

SFCG was founded in 1982 by John Marks. At the time of its founding, the organization focused on facilitating cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, the organization has expanded its work to 15 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe. Further, it now has more than 300 staff workers throughout the world.

SFCG’s mission of transforming the way the world deals with conflict is best captured by the phrase ‘understand the differences, act on the commonalities’. According to SFCG’s guiding philosophy, conflict is a natural part of life, and improving our ability to transform conflict into a source of growth and progress will have a profound impact on how well we are able to deal with every issue we are facing.

To achieve its mission, SFCG manages projects that use innovative tools and work at different levels of society to promote cooperation and non-adversarial solutions to problems. Its ‘toolbox’ includes media production, radio, TV, film and print as well as mediation and facilitation, training, community organizing, sports, drama, and music.

Next to the BBC, SFCG is the biggest producer of radio soap operas in the world, and in countries like Sierra Leone which recently emerged from a civil war, its programmes are listened to by over 90 per cent of the population that has access to a radio. Common Ground Productions, the television and radio production arm of SFCG, was responsible for creating Burundi’s first independent radio studio, Studio Ijambo, in 1995. Studio Ijambo has been credited with playing a key role in decentralizing the media in Burundi and building local capacity for news coverage.

A popular initiative of SFCG is Common Ground News Service.

(www. commongroundnews .org/). The Common Ground News Service (CGNews) seeks to promote mutual under-standing and offer hope, opportunities for dialogue and constructive suggestions that facilitate peaceful resolution of conflict. It publishes and promotes articles by local and international experts on current Middle East issues and the relationship between the West and Arab and Muslim communities.

Launched in 2000 on the recommendation of key local, regional, and international media experts, CGNews targets media outlets, policy makers, scholars, think tanks and interested readers worldwide. Today, it has 20,000 subscribers, an active network of contributing authors and major media partners who regularly reprint CGNews articles and special series.

The CGNews board of editors comprises individuals in Amman, Beirut, Geneva, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Toronto and Washington, with extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Muslim-Western issues and a “common ground” orientation.

Each week the editors select five articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict and five on relations between the West and the global Muslim community to distribute through CGNews. The former are published in three languages, Arabic, English and Hebrew; the latter are available in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, English, French and Urdu. As copyright permission is obtained for all articles, media outlets are free to republish them as desired.

In addition to its weekly distribution, CGNews commiss-ions, with Al-Hayat and United Press International as its most frequent partners, special series on important topics such as: non-violence, the Arab Peace Initiative, the Geneva Accords, the Greater Middle East Init-iative, the relationship between the Arab/Muslim world and the US/West, enlarging the window of opportunity in Israeli-Pal-estinian relations, the dynamics of public opinion, the role of women in US-Muslim relations, ijtihad: interpreting Islamic law, religious revivalism in US and Muslim-majority countries, economics and Muslim-Western relations and secularism. It also commissions articles from young writers for a “Youth Views” column.

According to Shamil Idriss, Acting Director of the Secretariat for the UN Alliance of Civilisations, CGNews is the most successful service he knows of when it comes to placing timely, important and thought-provoking opinion pieces that illuminate intra-Muslim and so-called ‘Muslim-Western’ debates in important print media outlets. The ability to do so consistently and over as broad an array of media outlets across geogr-aphical, linguistic, and ideological editorial barriers is what makes CGNews stand out.

For both scholars and policy-makers, the materials on the Middle East produced by Search For Common Ground are outstanding. If one is looking for balance and depth of analysis, this is the place to go to get a better under-standing of the complexities of the contemporary Middle East.