(For a report from Convocation 2003, click here.)

Aaron David Miller, who advised six U.S. secretaries of state on the Middle East during the past two decades and who this year became president of the international organization Seeds of Peace, opens the 149th academic year at Bates College with the convocation address "Arab-Israeli Peace: Is It Still Possible?" at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 3, on the college’s main quadrangle. The rain site will be the Alumni Gymnasium.

Familiar to Mainers from its youth camp in rural Otisfield, Seeds of Peace is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preparing teenagers from areas of conflict with the leadership skills needed to promote coexistence and peace. Though campers come from a variety of conflict-riven regions, including South Asia, Cyprus and the Balkans, Seeds of Peace is best-known for its work in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The program, which tracks young people from the ages of 14 to 23, follows up year-round through its center in Jerusalem, seminars and conferences, youth publications and its confidential listserv SEEDSNET.

Miller became president of Seeds of Peace in January 2003, bringing to the post a wealth of experience in Middle East politics. He is the author of three books on the subject, and for the last two decades helped the State Department formulate U.S. policy on the region and the Arab-Israeli peace process -- most recently, as the senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations.

Miller earlier held the State Department positions of deputy special Middle East coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations and senior member of the policy planning staff. He also served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and in the Office of the Historian. He has received the department's Distinguished, Superior and Meritorious Honor awards.

His address follows a summer during which incoming first-year students, as well as the Bates faculty and advisers who work closely with them, have been asked to read a book exploring the circumstances around the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Longitudes and Attitudes (Anchor Books, 2003) is a collection of columns and a diary written in the wake of the tragedy by New York Times foreign affairs commentator Thomas L. Friedman.

Miller received his Ph.D. in American diplomatic and Middle East history from the University of Michigan in 1977 and joined the State Department the following year. In 1982 and 1983, he was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a resident scholar at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1984 he served a temporary tour at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Between 1998 and 2000, he served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Miller has lectured widely at universities and Middle East symposia across the country. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other publications. He is the author of The Arab States and the Palestine Question: Between Ideology and Self-Interest (The Washington Papers) (Praeger Publishers, 1986), PLO (Praeger, 1983) and Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy, 1939-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

Since becoming president of Seeds of Peace, Miller has spoken about the organization and the Arab-Israeli conflict on such media outlets as FOX News, CNN, The Washington Post, the Portland Press Herald and National Public Radio.

Miller lives in Chevy Chase, Md., with his wife Lindsay. They have two children: Jen, 23, currently in Jerusalem researching a book on young Israelis and Palestinians; and Daniel, 21, a junior at Princeton.

Seeds of Peace observes its 11th anniversary this year. It was founded by the late John Wallach, an award-winning author and journalist, after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. That summer, 46 Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian teenagers met for the first session of the Seeds of Peace International Camp in Otisfield, and in September witnessed the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accord on the White House lawn.

The program is designed to bring together future leaders, selected and designated as such by their governments, to reveal the human faces of those they were raised to hate. By dispelling fear, mistrust and prejudice -- the root causes of violence and conflict -- Seeds of Peace aims to ensure that the future of peace is in the hands of friends rather than enemies.