Touko Piiparinen - The Transformation of UN Conflict Management: Producing images of genocide from Rwanda to Darfur and beyond

1 The Transformation of UN Conflict Management

Producing images of genocide from Rwanda to Darfur and beyond

Touko Piiparinen

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Rwanda of 1994 was the ground zero of a country and an organisation. It wrecked the lives of a million people. It also shattered the credibility of the UN conflict management system. It would not be an overstatement to argue that the UN has never been the same since its failure to prevent and manage the Rwandan genocide, neither in the imagination of people who had viewed the UN as a standard-bearer of humanity, nor institutionally, as the conflict management mechanisms of the UN have been drastically transformed since the disaster. The time has come to assess this structural development at the UN, which is the objective of the present book. For me, like many other researchers, the UNs failure in Rwanda is a place and time in history that manifests itself through indirect sources: through stories, archival records and interviews, as well as the unique opportunity I have had to observe the working methods of the UN and particularly that famous horseshoe-shaped table, a place in which the decision to withdraw the UN from Rwanda was made years earlier, and my visit to the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. The main driving force behind my decade-long journey has undoubtedly been a desire to understand humanitarianism and one of its greatest letdowns. This motivation made the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, a natural choice of the home institution for my PhD thesis, which I completed in autumn 2005 and is now transformed into a book.

During the ten years of writing this book I have become more and more convinced of a long-held wisdom of Critical Theory which has prevailed in the philosophy of science over centuries, that human beings are not only producers but also products of the social world to which they belong. Such an assertion could not be more apposite to this study, which is deeply indebted to the stimulating and warm social environment of the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Many individuals belonging to that environment deserve more gratitude than it is possible to express in this limited space. I feel similar gratitude to my colleagues at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, particularly for providing me with opportunity and intellectual space to complete this book, which I hope combines practical experience and academic research in a mutually reinforcing way.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Nick Wheeler, who has been not only the best supervisor imaginable but also a friend from the very beginning of my PhD research. His invaluable support, encouragement and engagement in my PhD project frequently amounted to self-sacrifice, especially in summer 2004, when I provided him with a draft chapter of a hundred pages, which he nevertheless managed to read and return with meticulous comments like he always did. Many of my ideas, contacts and research visits I owe to him, as well as some of the more engaging discussions and debates informing this book, including that concerning the ontological nature of the horseshoe-shaped table.