Public Papers of the Secretaries General of the United Nations

Public Papers of the Secretaries General of the United Nations

This English edition of the German "Lexikon der Vereinten Nationen" provides concise and comprehensive information not only about the structure of the UN system, its goals and functions, but about recent developments and reform efforts in the face of global opportunities and challenges. The contributing authors are academic scholars of international law, economics and political sciences; active and former diplomats and UN officials; journalists and members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and offer a variety of interesting perspectives. The entries are provided with Internet addresses for further information and are supplemented in the annex with a trilingual list (English-French-German) of the most important institutions and items of the official terminology and a list of information facilities concerning the UN. Readership: scholars and students of international law, international economics and political sciences, teachers, journalists, diplomats and politicians in the parliaments of the UN member states. "This new encyclopedia on the United Nations is a welcome addition to the works of academic research and political analysis covering the organization, its complex goals in the post-cold war era, and its ever broader role in the new millennium. While taking stock of more than half a century's achievements and setbacks, the encyclopedia also reflects the many ways in which the United Nations touches the lives of people everywhere." from the Preface by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan

The United Nations Secretary-General and the United Nations Security Council spend significant amounts of time on their relationship with each other. They rely on each other for such important activities as peacekeeping, international mediation, and the formulation and application of normative standards in defense of international peace and security - in other words the executive aspects of the UN's work. The UN Secretary-General and the Security Council fills an important lacuna in the scholarship on the UN system. Although there exists today an impressive body of literature on the development and significance of the Secretariat and the Security Council as separate organs, an important gap remains in our understanding of the interactions between them. Bringing together some of the most prominent authorities on the subject, this volume is the first book-length treatment of this topic. It studies the UN from an innovative angle, creating new insights on the (autonomous) policy-making of international organizations, and adds to our understanding of the dynamics of intra-organizational relationships. Within the book, the contributors examine how each Secretary-General interacted with the Security Council, touching upon such issues as the role of personality, the formal and informal infrastructure of the relationship, the selection and appointment processes, as well as the Secretary-General's threefold role as a crisis manager, administrative manager, and manager of ideas.

How has the role of the United Nations and its Secretary-General changed with the end of the Cold War? With the beginning of a New World Order? These questions are increasingly significant as the threat of nuclear-bloc confrontation is replaced by ethnic tensions and civil conflicts. In this first study of the office of the UN Secretary-General in this new era, Rivlin and Gordenker bring together leading scholars and practitioners to analyze these issues. The fifteen essays in this volume discuss the new complexity and salience of the role of the UN Secretary-General and its current incumbent, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Not only is the role analyzed in relationship to a rapidly changing climate of world politics, but it is also examined in relationship to the backgrounds and experiences of the earlier Secretaries-General from Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjold, U Thant, and Kurt Waldheim, to Javier Perez de Cuellar. All those concerned with the UN, international organizations, and international administration will find this volume interesting reading.

In the twentieth century, great leaders played vital roles in making the world a fairer and more peaceful place. How did they do it? What lessons can be drawn for the twenty-first-century global agenda? Those questions are at the heart of The Peacemakers, a kind of global edition of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Writing at a time when peace seems elusive and conflict endemic, when tensions are running high among the major powers, when history has come roaring back, when democracy and human rights are yet again under siege, when climate change is moving from future to present tense, and when transformational statesmanship is so needed, Bruce W. Jentleson shows how twentieth-century leaders of a variety of types—national, international institutional, sociopolitical, nongovernmental—rewrote the zero-sum scripts they were handed and successfully made breakthroughs on issues long thought intractable. The stories are fascinating: Henry Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, and the U.S.-China opening; Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War; Dag Hammarskjöld’s exceptional effectiveness as United Nations secretary-general; Nelson Mandela and South African reconciliation; Yitzhak Rabin seeking Arab-Israeli peace; Mahatma Gandhi as exemplar of anticolonialism and an apostle of nonviolence; Lech Walesa and ending Soviet bloc communism; Gro Harlem Brundtland and fostering global sustainability; and a number of others. While also taking into account other actors and factors, Jentleson tells us who each leader was as an individual, why they made the choices they did, how they pursued their goals, and what they were (and weren’t) able to achieve. And not just fascinating, but also instructive. Jentleson draws out lessons across the twenty-first-century global agenda, making clear how difficult peacemaking is, while powerfully demonstrating that it has been possible—and urgently stressing how necessary it is today. An ambitious book for ambitious people, The Peacemakers seeks to contribute to motivating and shaping the breakthroughs on which our future so greatly depends.

Drawing from little explored archives and personal correspondence, chronicles the life of the second secretary general of the United Nations who was killed in 1961 while en route to ceasefire negotiations in the Congo.

Once described by Trygve Lie as the "most impossible job on earth," the position of UN Secretary-General is as frustratingly constrained as it is prestigious. The Secretary-General's ability to influence global affairs often depends on how the international community regards his moral authority. In relation to such moral authority, past office-holders have drawn on their own ethics and religious backgrounds—as diverse as Lutheranism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Coptic Christianity—to guide the role that they played in addressing the UN's goals in the international arena, such as the maintenance of international peace and security and the promotion of human rights. In The UN Secretary-General and Moral Authority, contributors provide case studies of all seven former secretaries-general, establishing a much-needed comparative survey of each office-holder's personal religious and moral values. From Trygve Lie's forbearance during the UN's turbulent formative years to the Nobel committee's awarding Kofi Annan and the United Nations the prize for peace in 2001, the case studies all follow the same format, first detailing the environmental and experiential factors that forged these men's ethical frameworks, then analyzing how their "inner code" engaged with the duties of office and the global events particular to their terms. Balanced and unbiased in its approach, this study provides valuable insight into how religious and moral leadership functions in the realm of international relations, and how the promotion of ethical values works to diffuse international tensions and improve the quality of human life around the world.

This book deals with the political and legal issues of the Korean question in the United Nations. This is the first in-depth analysis of the meaning and effects of the Korean problem in UN politics. The book discusses the UN's role in the management of the Korean problem, the effects of the Korean war, South-North Korea's rivalry over the issues of their legitimacy and international representation, the problems of the Korean armistice agreement, and prospects for the four-party peace talks. It also examines North Korea's nuclear program and structural famine as the new concerns of the international community in the post Cold-War era. This study is intended as one of the important readings for researchers, scholars and students in the fields of international law, international organizations and international relations.

This volume addresses the central theme of adjusting the United Nations system in light of, firstly, the broadening definition of security, secondly, a perceived shift from modernity to post-modernity; and finally, the contemporary debate about reform, adaptation and institutional learning in multilateral institutions during transnational periods. The UN has not been successful in learning appropriate lessons that could facilitate requisite changes to its structure and operations. Thus the authors in this study focus on the lessons learned from the organizations' recent performance in collective security, preventative diplomacy, preventative deployment, peacekeeping, peacemaking, peace maintenance, and international legal, environmental and trade regulation.