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BIGGER IS BETTER: Stedman supports
expanding the Security Council to 24.
Photo: Bob Sacha |
As research director of
a report that could result in dramatic changes to the
United Nations, Stephen Stedman had a strenuous year.
The senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International
Security and Cooperation (CISAC) headed a group of 30
scholars who prepared working papers for the 16-member
High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,
briefed heads of state and traveled to meetings around
the world. He logged more than 200,000 air miles in
the first six months alone.
“It was an absolutely bizarre year—like
being back in graduate school,” says Stedman,
’79, MA ’85, PhD ’88, an expert on
civil wars, mediation, conflict prevention and peacekeeping.
“At times we’d be working under really strict
deadlines to get working papers to the panel, and at
other times there would be a lot of travel, like one
10-day trip from London to Cape Town to Warsaw to Rome
and back to New York. It was fairly crazy.”
The panel of former heads of state, foreign ministers
and security, military, diplomatic and development officials
issued its report, “A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility,” in December. It argues that a
new understanding of collective security can, in the
words of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, “tackle
both new and old threats, and address the security concerns
of all states—rich and poor, weak and strong.”
The report recommends a sweeping overhaul of the U.N.
and proposes new definitions in international law that
would help it adapt to the 21st century. It identifies
six major threats to global security: war between states;
violence within states; poverty, infectious disease
and environmental degradation; nuclear, radiological,
chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational
organized crime. The panel makes 101 recommendations
for how U.N. members can best respond to these threats.
Annan will draw on its recommendations for a report
that he is scheduled to issue in March, setting the
agenda for a summit of heads of state in September.
The panel’s report, he said in a statement, “offers
the United Nations a unique opportunity to refashion
and renew our institutions.”
“One of the biggest contributions of the report
is an overarching argument about what the concept of
collective security should look like for the 21st century,
in a world where the threats we face are much broader
and more diverse than international aggression by states,”
Stedman says. He also praises the panel’s recommendations
for an expanded U.N. Security Council, from 15 to 24
seats, a new peace-building commission and a new office
of deputy secretary general, who “would act as
the equivalent of a national security adviser.”
As research director, Stedman called on Stanford colleagues
for assistance. CISAC co-director Christopher Chyba,
an associate research professor of geological and environmental
sciences, former security adviser to the Clinton White
House and specialist in astrobiology, briefed the panel
on biological agents. “This really is a new world
for all of us, and one of my goals at the beginning
was to have more awareness of the issues of biological
security,” Stedman says. Chyba “was one
of the first people I had brief the panel, and by the
end [of the session] they sure did understand where
we are.” Former CISAC doctoral fellow Bruce Jones,
’63, served as Stedman’s deputy at the U.N.
and Tarun Chhabra, ’02, worked as a research officer.
After the report was issued, Stedman fielded numerous
calls from reporters who saw some of the panel’s
recommendations as a rebuke to the Bush administration’s
policies in Iraq. “What the report essentially
says is that when it comes to states defending themselves
against an imminent threat, they can legally use force
for pre-emptive purposes,” he says. “But
when a threat is not imminent, no state has a legal
right for the preventive use of force.
“Countless journalists were trying to trap me
into saying [that] on the basis of the report, the war
in Iraq is illegal,” Stedman says. “But
what I kept saying was that the panel did not consider
the war in Iraq. This is a forward-looking document.”
In January, Stedman assumed the title of special adviser
to the secretary general, with the rank of assistant
secretary general. He will spend the coming year following
up on the report’s recommendations and “strategizing”
about how the U.N. can encourage member states to act
upon the recommendations. “Part of the fun of
this job for a professor is that we all want to be policy-relevant.
Well, 191 governments have to respond to what we’ve
written. They have to!” Stedman says. “The
reactions of governments have been incredibly positive,
but we’re going to see [this] year whether they’re
serious or not.” |
