Dangerous Diplomacy

Herman T. Salton is Associate Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at the Asian University for Women, a liberal arts college in Chittagong, Bangladesh, with a support foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts that promotes gender equality and draws students from Asia and the Middle-East. He teaches and publishes in the areas of international politics, international law, human rights, and the United Nations.

Dangerous Diplomacy reassesses the role of the UN Secretariat during the Rwandan genocide. With the help of new sources, including the personal diaries and private papers of the late Sir Marrack Goulding--an Under-Secretary-General from 1988 to 1997 and the second highest-ranking UN official during the genocide--the book situates the Rwanda operation within the context of bureaucratic and power-political friction existing at UN Headquarters in the early 1990s. The book shows how this confrontation led to a lack of coordination between key UN departments on issues as diverse as reconnaissance, intelligence, and crisis management. Yet Dangerous Diplomacy goes beyond these institutional pathologies and identifies the conceptual origins of the Rwanda failure in the gray area that separates peacebuilding and peacekeeping. The difficulty of separating these two UN functions explains why six decades after the birth of the UN, it has still not been possible to demarcate the precise roles of some key UN departments.

Winner of the 2018 ISA Chadwick Alger Prize and Friends of ACUNS 2018 Book Award

This book carries out an in-depth reassessment of the role of the UN Secretariat during the Rwandan genocide, focusing in particular on decision-making processes in New York.

Winner of the 2018 ISA Chadwick Alger Prize and Friends of ACUNS 2018 Book Award