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Nanette Shaw
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty Turns to The CUNY Graduate Center To Orchestrate Research The newly formed International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) will rely upon The City University of New York Graduate Center to be the research hub for this independent initiative. The decision was announced at the first meeting of the Commission in Ottawa on November 5-6, 2000. The Research Directorate will be headed by Thomas Weiss, a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center and a distinguished analyst of international relations, and Stanlake Samkange, a former Rhodes Scholar and senior UN official who is coming to The Graduate Center for this analytical effort. In the wake of acute human rights abuses during such recent traumas as Kosovo, and East Timor along with earlier ones in Rwanda and northern Iraq, the need for outside intervention when state sovereignty remains the dominant organizing principle for international relations is clearly one the most urgent issues facing the international community today. The Commission’s mandate is to promote a comprehensive debate on the issues surrounding intervention and state sovereignty, ultimately seeking to foster a global political consensus on the most appropriate international responses. Topics to be dealt with by the Research Directorate encompass the host of moral, legal, operational, and political elements of the intervention-sovereignty debate; past interventions, including Cold War and post-Cold War periods; questions of legitimacy; domestic and international political will; lessons from the responses in the 1990s; and prevention strategies. A Canadian initiative, the ICISS was announced on September 7th by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien at the UN Millennium Summit in New York, and launched by then Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy the following week. The Commission is co-chaired by Gareth Evans, a former Foreign Minister of Australia and currently President of the International Crisis Group, and Mohamed Sahnoun, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for the Great Lakes Region Africa. Minister Axworthy will chair a Commission Advisory Board. An independent body intended to support the work of the UN, the ICISS is designed to build upon and complement efforts already undertaken on intervention issues in other contexts. It will complete its work during the UN’s Millennium Assembly year and present its findings to the UN General Assembly in late 2001. In addition to serving as Presidential Professor in The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Political Science, Weiss is editor of the journal Global Governance and co-director of the UN Intellectual History Project, a multi-year and multinational effort to produce an in-depth account of the UN’s economic and social contributions since 1945. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies and chairs the International Organization Section of the International Studies Association. Weiss came to The Graduate Center in 1998 from Brown University, where he was Research Professor at the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies (1990-98). While at Brown, he also served as Director of the Global Security Program, Executive Director of the Academic Council on the UN System, and co-director of the Humanitarianism and War Project. Previously, among other positions, he was the Executive Director of the International Peace Academy (1985-89) and conducted seminars for diplomats and military officials on regional conflicts and third-party roles in the peaceful resolution of international disputes. He has written extensively about international organization, conflict management, peacekeeping, humanitarian action, and North-South relations. His most recent books are Military-Civilian Interactions: Intervening in Humanitarian Crises (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), Humanitarian Challenges and Intervention, 2nd edition (Westview, 2000), and The United Nations and Changing World Politics, 3rd edition (Westview, 2001). A native of Zimbabwe, Samkange recently worked with the UN Panel of Experts set up to investigate breaches of the sanctions imposed by the Security Council against the UNITA rebel movement in Angola. He was previously a Political Affairs Officer for the UN Department of Political Affairs, analyzing developments and providing advice to the Secretary-General, senior officials, and UN field operations for Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea and other African territories. In 1998, he prepared the Secretary-General’s report to the Security Council and General Assembly on "The causes of conflict and the promotion of durable peace and sustainable development in Africa." From 1993 to 1996, he served as political officer and speech-writer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, with areas of responsibility in development, Africa, international law, and non-governmental organizations. Prior to his work with the UN, he was an associate with the Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling. In addition to his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a J.D. from Stanford University Law School. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York, the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, The Graduate Center draws its faculty of more than 1,600 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 32 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 28 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. |