14 January 2020 | Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo, Japan – 14 January 2020
“Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding, and the Tragedy of the United Nations Secretariat in Rwanda”
This seminar reassesses the role of the UN Secretariat in the Rwandan genocide. With the help of new sources, it will situate the Rwanda operation within the context of bureaucratic and power-political friction existing at UN Headquarters in the 1990s. It will show how this confrontation led to a lack of coordination between key UN departments on issues as diverse as reconnaissance, intelligence, and crisis management.
Yet the seminar will go beyond these institutional pathologies and will identify the conceptual origins of the Rwanda failure in the gray area that separates peacebuilding and peacekeeping. The difficulty of separating these two UN functions partly explains why, almost seven decades after the birth of the UN, it has still not been possible to demarcate the precise roles of key UN departments.
Date: 14 January 2020, 16:30-17:40
Place: Alumni House, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
Host: Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), ICU, Tokyo, Japan