NEWOpen Lecture (1/15) Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding, and the Tragedy of the United Nations Secretariat in Rwanda

Time & Date: 16:30-17:40, January 15, 2020

Venue: Alumni House, Lounge 2F

This seminar reassesses the role of the UN Secretariat during 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 early 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.