All Books
DANGEROUS DIPLOMACY
Bureaucracy, Power Politics, and
the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda
(2017)
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 of the United Nations 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 friction 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 book comes to a number of conclusions about the role of the UN bureaucracy during the tragic events of 1994. It argues that the difficulty of separating the peacekeeping and peacebuilding functions of the United Nations explains why, seventy years after the birth of the organization, it has still not been possible to clearly and unambiguously demarcate the roles and functions of some of the key UN departments–both at Headquarters and in the field.
More information on Dangerous Diplomacy and its contents can be found on the global website of Oxford University Press here. Reviews of the book can be found in the ‘External Reviews’ page of this site here.
Winner of the 2018 ISA Chadwick Alger Prize for Best Book on International Organization
Winner of the 2016-18 Biennial Book Award by the Academic Council on the UN System
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ARCTIC HOST, ICY VISIT
China and Falun Gong Face Off in Iceland
A Report on the 2002 Events
(2010)
In July 1999, when the Chinese government began to crackdown on a spiritual movement called Falun Gong, few expected a showdown to take place in one of the most remote countries in the world.
But when President Jiang Zemin paid an official visit to Iceland in June 2002, the struggle between these two antagonists moved to the Arctic. In contrast to the anti-Falun Gong campaign in China, most observers expected democratic Iceland to allow peaceful protests.
But the Icelandic government was in no mood to tolerate dissent. It banned practitioners from the country; used a secret blacklist to identify those already in Iceland; ordered the national airline Icelandair to deny them passage; and arrested those who managed to slip through the net.
Originally a report commissioned by the Icelandic Human Rights Center, Arctic Host, Icy Visit reviews these little-known events and situates them in the context of global politics and international human rights law. It also facilitated the Icelandic Parliament’s own investigation into the incident.
Although the events of 2002 were unprecedented for Iceland, they were hardy new for China. They are especially relevant from an international relations standpoint, given the arguable decline of US influence over global norms and the parallel rise of China on the global stage, including in Africa, South-East Asia, the United Nations, and beyond.
A summary and visual synopsis of ‘Arctic Host, Icy Visit‘ can be watched here (opens a new window).
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VEILED THREATS?
Islam, Headscarves, and Religious Freedom
in America and France
(2008)
For a variety of historical, cultural and political reasons, the Islamic veil has become an increasingly controversial matter in Europe. This is particularly the case in France, where in 2004 the country’s parliament 
passed a statute that prohibits students from wearing the Muslim veil (with any other ‘ostentatious’ religious sign) in the classroom.
‘Veiled Threats?’ compares the French and US attitudes towards religious symbolism and the Islamic veil. Against conventional wisdom, it argues that before the passage of the 2004 statute, the French and American legal systems adopted a similar approach that respected religious signs. This is hardly surprising, the book suggests, for the American conception of secularism is in many respects stricter than the French idea of laïcité.
The book also questions a number of assumptions that surrounded the so-called ‘affaire des foulards’ and the passage of the 2004 statute: that the French legal system is fiercely secular; that the US one is more positively inclined towards religion; and that France was, in 2004, confronted with a ‘veil emergency’ that made the passage of the new statute inevitable.
A work of comparative law and policy, Veiled Threats? touches on issues as diverse as religious freedom, French and US legal history and politics, freedom of expression, human rights law, and secularism. The doctoral thesis on which the book is based can be downloaded in PDF here (opens a new window).
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