International Affairs
Vol.94, No.2, 2018, 459-461
Dangerous Diplomacy: Bureaucracy, Power Politics, and the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda. By Herman T. Salton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. 320pp.
- Reviewed by: Dr. Noam Schimmel, University of Oxford, UK, and McGill University, Canada
An extremely important and valuable work, Dangerous Diplomacy contributes substantially and impressively to understanding the pathologies of politics and power at the United Nations, specifically with regard to the organization’s actions before and during the Rwandan genocide. The UN failed to prevent and stop the genocide in 1994 and ultimately contributed to its scale and scope. Herman T. Salton’s book is a work of great ethical and intellectual depth, as well as of interpersonal and organizational insight, which is genuinely exceptional, original and of superlative quality—it is a major contribution to literature on the UN.
Salton honestly, analytically and rigorously exposes the inner workings of UN agencies responsible for envisioning and implementing UN policies vis-à-vis Rwanda, specifically in relation to peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and the purported prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity and other egregious human rights violations. At each of these tasks the UN failed, catastrophically, and with a staggering combination of incompetence, petti- ness and cowardice—while showing a profound lack of moral urgency and chronic ethical blindness. The book reveals intra-agency, inter-agency and interpersonal dysfunction within the UN, including extensive information not previously available due to its private and confidential nature. Much of this dysfunction stemmed from a lack of communication and coordination, as well as from turf wars between the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) within the UN Secretariat. Conflicts between their leadership, staff and closely related—often overlapping, but somewhat artificially and arbitrarily separated—missions are a central analytical concern of the book; the DPKO was ostensibly responsible for operational and technical aspects of peacekeeping and the DPA for political aspects of peacebuilding and larger questions of policy. Salton argues that much of the UN’s failure in Rwanda stems from the conceptual confusion about the scope and mission of these two UN agencies—acting more in a spirit of conflict and competition than coordination and cooperation.
Along with this rigorous organizational and bureaucratic critique, Salton also offers illuminating and astute analyses of the individuals responsible for the UN’s Rwanda policies and practices between 1993 and 1995, and for their failures of leadership, ethics and policy execution. Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was greatly compromised by his close ties to the Hutu supremacist regime ruling Rwanda prior to the genocide and as Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister—just prior to becoming UN Secre- tary-General—facilitated arms shipments to that regime, which were then used during the genocide. In addition to Boutros-Ghali, Salton also discusses Kofi Annan, the Under- Secretary-General for Peacekeeping and later UN Secretary-General; Iqbal Riza, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping; Romeo Dallaire, United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Force Commander; Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Special Repre- sentative of the Secretary-General in Rwanda; and Marrack Goulding, Under-Secretary- General for Peacekeeping and later Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs. Salton’s analysis reveals how Boutros-Ghali and Booh-Booh were particularly responsible for many of the UN’s greatest failures in Rwanda, but Annan, Riza and Goulding contributed to them significantly as well. Only Dallaire, though imperfect, appears to have been focused on saving lives and protecting human rights. He acted with a moral integrity that was utterly lacking across the UN and the overwhelming majority of its leadership.
Although Dangerous Diplomacy’s preface states that its purpose is not to allocate blame for the UN’s role in the genocide, Salton does an excellent job of doing so. Readers will be left wondering how justice could and should be served for those UN officials who failed to act decisively in 1994, when they had the possibility, power and resources to prevent the Rwandan genocide—or at the very least reduce the loss of life. Salton does not analyse their legal responsibilities and obligations or how they may have violated them. But the evidence overwhelmingly reveals a systemic and egregious moral and human culpability which may indeed be a legal one as well. None of them faced international human rights accountability at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but many were complicit in these crimes. Ironically, and conveniently, the UN evades international legal responsibility by granting itself immunity from the very international laws it is responsible for creating and enforcing.
The tone throughout the book is measured rather than emotive. This is a strength, as the book errs on the side of caution and in so doing renders its critique of the UN all the more searing and irreproachable. The writing is clear and compelling, but inevitably dense and detailed given the topic’s complexity. Both scholars and students of human rights and International Relations, however, have much to gain from reading this work. Dangerous Diplomacy ought to be studied and appreciated, as well as inform both politics and policy in national governments, at the United Nations, and among diplomats, civil servants and development and humanitarian aid practitioners. Salton’s relentlessly fair-minded writing makes this book’s indictment of the United Nations all the more devastating and complete.
International Studies Association, IO Section
Awarding the 2018 Chadwick Alger Prize for the Best Book
on International Organization and Multilateralism
- Committee Members:
Professor Antje Wiener University of Cambridge, UK
Professor Donald Puchala University of South Carolina, USA
Dr. Sherif A. Elgebeily University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- Rankings:
Winner: Herman T. Salton, Dangerous Diplomacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press
2nd Place: Ian Hurd, How to Do things with International Law, Princeton: Princeton University Press
3rd Place: Christopher R.W. Dietrich, Oil Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Laudatio Delivered at ISA San Francisco, 2018
Dangerous Diplomacy is the result of superior scholarship. It is an outstanding book and this year’s undisputed Chadwick Alger Prize winner.
Herman Salton focuses on the performance of the United Nations (UN) during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The overriding purpose of the book is to examine in penetrating detail the workings of the peacekeeping departments of the UN Secretariat. As Salton argues, to understand the operations of the UN, one needs to grasp that personalities are determinative, as also are bureaucratic structures and processes, and actors’ visions, conceptualizations, aspirations and limitations.
The book is both carefully structured and clearly written and the findings are original and important. Salton’s research drives convincingly to the conclusion that “the case of UNAMIR shows that problems in the field reflected structural issues at Headquarters, which were in turn the product of conceptual confusion an unclear delineation of roles . . .” (248). He also concludes that the problems that derailed UNAMIR persist within the UN even today.
Salton’s study is mainly based on the analysis of archival materials and memoirs, particularly (though far from exclusively) the papers of Marrack Goulding, Under-Secretary-General of the UN during the tenures of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan. He also appears to have had rather extraordinary access to Secretariat records and correspondence and off-the-record interactions among Security Council representatives. Beyond his archival studies, Salton exhibits command of a vast, multi-lingual bibliography spanning the UN literature, IR theory, Political Theory and International Law.
The references to both the private Goulding collection and other informal sources offer insights into the decision-making process of the United Nations that are rarely seen despite a focus on transparency (at least officially) through publicly available material – resolutions, verbatim records, etc. The subject matter – though over two decades old – does not feel at all dated; rather, this is the type of book that reads as a “de-classified” explanation, serving to finally answer questions about UN failures in reacting adequately to the genocide in Rwanda.
More than this, however, the structure and content of the narrative is excellent – there is reference but not reliance on these private documents, diaries, and personal accounts. At no point does the reader feel overwhelmed with statistics or other data, as was the case with other submissions. Moreover, the reader really appreciates a treasure trove of genuinely “secret” information here – this is as close as one might get to being inside the head of the decision-makers when they were facing the Rwanda crisis. The positions taken by Salton are both innovative and impactful on our understandings of how the UN responds to keeping the peace (and the peace kept), as well as charting the development of the role of the UNSG. This is a real page-turner and factual goldmine.
Against this backdrop, Salton argues that Rwanda did not happen in a vacuum, that contexts conditions mattered, and that circumstances require attention and finds that to this day, the meaning of the ‘political’ remains contested in the UN. It is a timely book that suggests that there is a lot to learn from the Rwanda crisis and the noted impact of the UN’s inner-institutional conflicts and how they play out when addressing the quite distinct policies of peace-keeping, peace-building and peace-making, respectively, and when to apply important reference to Goulding’s archives.
As many of us who have written professionally about this organization will agree, even though we believe that we understood the UN at a level of considerable sophistication, reading Salton, the reader will recognize how much more knowledge there is to take into account in order to understand the actual workings and political role of the UN.
The book is a fascinating read and offers genuinely novel insights. Salton offers a politically most relevant insight on collaboration and communication between the UN’s leading departments. The finding regarding the definition of what actually makes a ‘political’ situation and its impact on taking decisions about political situations such as in Rwanda offer important and novel insights for research in the field of international organisations.
In sum, this historical reconstruction of the Rwanda crisis by an author with a former UN practitioner’s background and a legal education offers encompassing references to historical approaches to IR, such as for example Carr’s distinction between academics and politicians as well as the distinctive role of the UN Security Council and the UN Secretary General in the actual policy-making decision-making processes. This book’s argument, approach and innovative reconstruction of long-hidden available data fit the Chadwick Alger Prize prize substance of international organisation perfectly well.
Download the full PDF document, with comments on all three finalists, here.
The Political Quarterly
Vol.90, No.2, 2019, 329-331
Dangerous Diplomacy: Bureaucracy, Power Politics, and the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda, by Herman T. Salton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 320 pp. £60
- Reviewed by: Dr. Michael Newman, London Metropolitan University, UK
In this deeply researched and beautifully written book, Herman Salton has provided new insights on both the international politics of the Rwanda genocide and UN bureaucracy and power structures. Making use of a variety of archives, and particularly the papers of the late Sir Marrack Goulding, Under-Secretary-General at the UN from 1986 to 1997, Salton has produced a sombre and reflective study. His attitude to the genocide itself is quite orthodox and he says little about the violence of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). But he questions conventional wisdoms in relation to the responsibility of states on the one hand and the UN on the other. It has normally been assumed that it was political leaders and policy makers in the major states who had blood on their hands: the French for seeking to uphold the Hutu-led regime in order to keep Rwanda in francophone Africa, and the Americans for promoting regime change at minimum cost and in callous disregard of the human sacrifice involved. Salton does not explicitly dissent from such charges, but his target is different, for he also demon- strates the culpability of the UN, both in terms of its dysfunctional bureaucracy and the behaviour of some of its leading person- nel. Yet his tone is one of regret, combined with the hope that lessons will be learned.
There are several themes in the book and I will highlight only a few here. The first is that the then Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, carries a heavy personal responsibility for the failures in Rwanda. He genuinely wanted to transform the role of the UN, aspiring to turn it into a force for good, motivated by morality and impartial- ity, with peacebuilding as one of its major objectives. Yet in relation to Rwanda, his own record undermined all these worthy goals. As Egypt’s Minister of State for For- eign Affairs and, briefly, Deputy Foreign Minister, he had developed strong links with President Juvenal Habyarimana’s Hutu-led regime in Rwanda, for which Egypt became an important arms supplier. Boutros-Ghali was also extremely close to the French, and particularly to President Mitterrand, seeking to incorporate Egypt into francophone Africa. Their attitudes to Rwanda were very similar and in 1990, Egyptian weapons played a crucial role in preventing the regime’s defeat by the Tutsi-led RPF, and Egypt continued to send arms until July 1994—after the genocide. While Boutros-Ghali himself was no longer involved in this, his attitude to the Rwandan civil war did not change when he moved to the UN in 1992, for he continued to analyse the situation in the same way as the government of Rwanda, focussing on the need for a cease- fire rather than any danger of state-orchestrated massacres. This record of proximity to the French and Rwandan governments meant that he, and therefore also the UN, would never be viewed as impartial by the RPF. But his responsibility for the failure in 1994 extends beyond this.
As Secretary-General, Boutros-Ghali inherited a climate of cuts at the UN to which he agreed. Yet he sought to carry out a major reform agenda while the organisation was taking on more operations than ever previ- ously. A key feature of the reform was the creation of the Department of Political Affairs (DPA), merging six political departments, while the Department of Peace-keeping Operations (DPKO), under the lead- ership of Kofi Annan, was entirely separate. Boutros-Ghali sought to ensure that the DPA was of pivotal importance in the bureau- cratic hierarchy, reporting to him directly and taking the political and strategic deci- sions. He viewed the DPKO as subordinate, responsible for administrative and day-to- day operations. But this was deeply prob- lematic, for there was no clear division of responsibility or co-ordination between the two departments, and no real attempt to dis- tinguish between political and administrative matters. All these difficulties were exacerbated by personal antagonisms between the two leading figures, for Boutros-Ghali, who was genuinely interested in peacebuilding, saw Annan as too close to the US and sought to confine him to a subordinate role, which he resented. Annan regarded Boutros-Ghali as impractical and over-ambitious in seeking to extend UN interventions when the US was hostile. There was some justifica- tion for both attitudes, but the inter-relation- ships between institutional incoherence and personal antipathy contributed to the UN’s culpability in relation to the genocide. This was illustrated in one of the most notorious cases—the response to the telegram sent by General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), on 11 January 1994—three months before the genocide.