BOOKS

Just About Everyone Wanted Benazir Bhutto Dead

• January 12, 2014

Why write a whodunit when you can’t say who done it? This is the challenging task undertaken by Heraldo Muñoz, a veteran Chilean diplomat and United Nations official, in his new book, “Getting Away With Murder: Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination and the Politics of Pakistan.” In 2009, the UN asked Muñoz to head an investigation …

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Defending Women’s Rights Against Muslim Fundamentalism

Irwin Arieff

• November 17, 2013

Karima Bennoune grew up in Algeria in the 1990s, a dark period when the country was riven by Muslim fundamentalist violence and a repressive military dictatorship that responded to the fundamentalist threat with its own campaign of terror. Her father, Mahfoud Bennoune, an intellectual and outspoken critic of both the authorities and the fundamentalists …

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Why the UN Was Built in New York and Not in South Dakota

Lucia Mouat

• July 18, 2013

Who knew there was once such hot competition to host the United Nations? Not even the author of a book on the topic, when she first started out. One day in her home city of Philadelphia, Charlene Mires, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, was going through some old newspaper clippings. One …

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Shocking! Uncle Sam Is Not an Honest Broker

Irwin Arieff

• July 3, 2013

You shouldn’t need a book to tell you that the Palestinians have gotten pretty much zilch out of the Middle East peace process. So readers of “Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East” are unlikely to be astonished by what they find there. The core argument of …

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Regional Organizations Remain Vital to the UN

Helmut Volger

• April 30, 2013

Formed as a “club” of nation states, the United Nations took some time to find out that cooperation with regional organizations might be of some use in improving social and economic living conditions as well as maintaining international peace and security and safeguarding the enjoyment of human rights. It was not before the economic …

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Diplomacy: An Insider’s Guide

Irwin Arieff

• March 21, 2013

International crises are not always resolved on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. Sometimes breakthroughs come around a table at a restaurant that is continents away. Or they fall in place because of a thoughtful gesture made by an important player at a cemetery years before. This is one of the lessons of …

BOOKS, UN Diplomats

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BOOKS

Kofi Annan: The Back Story

Irwin Arieff

• January 28, 2013

Frederic Eckhard, the United Nations spokesman for eight and a half of Kofi Annans 10 years as secretary-general, was certainly well placed to write a tell-all account of that action-packed era. But readers of Eckhard’s new book, “Kofi Annan: A Spokesperson’s Memoir,” get that and something more. Along with the insider accounts, there’s the …

Africa, BOOKS, Secretary-General

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More Foodless Days Ahead, Unless ‘We’ Act Now

Joseph Chamie

• January 7, 2013

Is the planet full? And how many plates are empty? These are the first two questions that came to my mind from the title of Lester R. Brown‘s new book, “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.” With world population now standing at 7.1 billion and projected to exceed 9.3 billion …

Africa, BOOKS, Climate and Environment

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Iran’s ‘Grand Bargain’ With the West

Irwin Arieff

• January 1, 2013

Iran’s nuclear crisis has been dragging on for a decade, so it sure would be great if someone in the know finally laid out the definitive plan for resolving the dispute and ending Tehran’s international isolation. In “The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir,” a veteran Iranian diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, modestly puts himself forward …

BOOKS, Disarmament, Middle East

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BOOKS

From Wole Soyinka: A Manifesto for Africa

Barbara Crossette

• November 12, 2012

The Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, winner of Africa’s first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, has published a new book calling for urgent action by Africans to save themselves from the threat of Islamic extremism, against which corrupt regimes seem unable protect the tolerance and spiritual strength of traditional cultures. “If Africa falls to …

Africa, BOOKS

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BOOKS

Reasons to Love and Criticize the UN

A. Edward Elmendorf

• November 4, 2012

In his new book, “Living With the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order,” Kenneth Anderson forces readers who lean sympathetically toward the United Nations to consider why they support it despite its faults. On the other hand, the acerbic views of Anderson, a law professor at American University, about the UN are deeply colored by …

BOOKS, US-UN Relations

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The Quiet Korean: Ban Ki-moon Opens Up

Barbara Crossette

• October 26, 2012

Over the last few years, an American journalist and academic, Tom Plate, has been writing a series of books called “Giants of Asia.” Lee Kuan Yew, the brilliant if steely founder of modern Singapore, was first. Then came Mahathir Mohamad, the former long-serving but short-tempered prime minister of Malaysia, and Thaksin Shinawatra, a deposed …

Asia, BOOKS, Secretary-General

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Kofi Annan: Lessons in Futility

Irwin Arieff

• October 24, 2012

Kofi Annan‘s existential crisis during his decade as United Nations secretary-general was without question related to the US-led invasion of Iraq. But the most fascinating part of his new memoir, “Interventions: A Life in War and Peace,” is the account of his numerous attempts to nudge the world toward a Middle East peace …

BOOKS, Secretary-General, US-UN Relations

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The Human Rights Council Gets More Respect

A. Edward Elmendorf

• September 14, 2012

The visibility of human-rights violations by the Syrian government amid the current turmoil owes much to the United Nations, particularly to its Independent International Commission of Inquiry, led by Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, a Brazilian lawyer, public official and professor. Such commissions are part of a growing number of tools used by the UN to …

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The Ethics of Chocolate

Irwin Arieff

• August 1, 2012

Given longstanding reports of slavery, economic exploitation and corruption in the West African cocoa trade, how guilty should you feel about eating a chocolate bar? How about one made with cocoa marketed under the fair-trade umbrella – a loose international system aimed at providing growers with fair prices while also imposing fair labor standards …