Here, a dynamic group of leading diplomats, academics, and journalists combines forces with UN policymakers and leaders including current Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to explore how the international community can improve its practice in negotiating and implementing peace.

The UN's record in peace operations is long, various, distinguished by both accomplishments and failures, and most importantly, innovative. Unfulfilled expectations and escalating violence in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia forced retrenchment upon UN peace operations_but at the same time, a new opportunity to enhance capacities, review strategies, redefine roles, and reaffirm responsibilities has opened up. Here, a dynamic group of leading diplomats, academics, and journalists combines forces with UN policymakers and leaders including current Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to explore how the international community can improve its practice in negotiating and implementing peace. They look at what works and what doesn't in UN peacemaking and peacekeeping, and then map out alternative futures for UN action in the 21st century.

This book, now available in paperback after selling out in record time in its initial hardback release, provides a range of unique insights into the issues surrounding peacebuilding, delivered by major international figures with direct experience in this area at the highest level, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Kofi Annan and Garret Fitzgerald. Based on a series of lectures on the theme of peacekeeping and peacebuilding in the contemporary world, each lecture is presented here with an introduction placing it in its proper context within the discourse on peacemaking. Edited and introduced by Nobel Laureate John Hume, this volume makes an invaluable contribution to the study of peace and conflict studies, international history, international relations and international politics.

Peacemaking includes a large array of activities from local to global attempts to attain peace. It includes consideration of international, interstate, and intertribal conflict resolution; communal, personal, and interpersonal social justice; deterrence of the use of nuclear weapons; design of international treaties that prevent war or other forms of international conflict; disarmament; international organizations that secure the order among nations; and even, from some points of view, war. As the 20th century drew to a close, we have witnessed peacemakers trying to end ethnic cleansing, reinstate justly elected political leaders, and reach compromises in the ideological differences that perpetuate age-old conflicts. We also see peacemaking in our schools, homes, and workplaces. Philosophers have long been interested in peacemaking in one form or another, and philosophical accounts of peacemaking reflect the variety of perspectives, methods, and activities developed in pursuing peacemaking. In some instances, philosophers expand upon the situations, activities, and methods of the peacemaker in the field. The essays in this volume propose some theoretical arguments for various aspects of peacemaking, offer nonmilitary alternatives to war, and discuss practical examples of peacemaking in daily life. The contributors analyze power relations, language, social groupings, and distribution of resources. At times, they draw insight from social and historical models of conflict and conflict-resolution. This collection of essays on peacemaking aims to enlighten contemporary social and political discussions and contribute to achieving the ever-challenging goal of peace.

No small number of books laud and record the heroic actions of those at war. But the peacekeepers? Who tells their stories? At the beginning of the 1990s, the world exited the cold war and entered an era of great promise for peace and security. Guided by an invigorated United Nations, the international community set out to end conflicts that had flared into vicious civil wars and to unconditionally champion human rights and hold abusers responsible. The stage seemed set for greatness. Today that optimism is shattered. The failure of international engagement in conflict areas ranging from Afghanistan to Congo and Lebanon to Kosovo has turned believers into skeptics. The Fog of Peace is a firsthand reckoning by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the man who led UN peacekeeping efforts for eight years and has been at the center of all the major crises since the beginning of the 21st century. Guéhenno grapples with the distance between the international community's promise to protect and the reality that our noble aspirations may be beyond our grasp. The author illustrates with personal, concrete examples—from the crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Sudan, Darfur, Kosovo, Ivory Coast, Georgia, Lebanon, Haiti, and Syria—the need to accept imperfect outcomes and compromises. He argues that nothing is more damaging than excessive ambition followed by precipitous retrenchment. We can indeed save many thousands of lives, but we need to calibrate our ambitions and stay the course.

This collective work brings together scholars, international civil servants and field practitioners who examine a wide range of theoretical and practical problems as well as challenges confronting the world and the United Nations at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The papers in this volume have been organized under themes which focus on problem areas and challenges that mankind must unavoidably deal with collectively in the years ahead, much as it has attempted to do during the past half-century. The contributors address the triangular relationship between peace, security and development and raise questions about the relevance of the UN system in the decades to come. The authors do so through reflection on past experiences and relevant philosophical inquiries. They examine specific cases and experiences that are representative of the relevance or irrelevance of past collective actions in the security and non-security fields and suggest new ideas and concepts that attempt to marry theory and practice. In this connection, aspects of peacemaking and peacekeeping, arms control, economic development, human rights and the critical role of education are amongst the topics analyzed and assessed. One of the underlying themes of the volume is that the challenges of the twenty-first century will be of unprecedented magnitude. Unless the UN system is reformed and revitalized it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant.