International Peace Institute

The International Peace Institute (IPI) is an independent non-profit research and policy development institution based in New York. Its President is Terje Rød-Larsen, its Vice President Edward Luck, and its Board of Directors is chaired by Rita Hauser, Esq. IPI specializes in multilateral approaches to peace and security issues, working closely with the Secretariat and membership of the United Nations. IPI’s primary objective is to promote effective international responses to new and emerging issues and crises through research, analysis, and policy development.

History

The International Peace Institute (formerly the International Peace Academy) was created with support from UN Secretary-General U Thant in 1970, originally with the purpose of studying UN peacekeeping and developing peacekeeping doctrine, with strong financial backing from Ruth Forbes Young. Its first President was Maj. Gen. Indar Jit Rikhye, a distinguished Indian commanding officer of UN peacekeeping forces and a former military advisor to the UN Secretary-General. Under his tenure, IPA initiated an innovative program aimed at training civilians and military officers together for the challenges of preventing conflict and building peace.

In 1990, under Olara Otunnu, a Ugandan diplomat and politician, IPI branched out into the political dimensions of war and peace. During this time, IPI became known for its case studies of UN field operations and for its forward-looking analysis on new roles for the UN in the security sphere. Otunnu also initiated IPA's Africa Program, which is currently its longest-running program.

The next IPI President, in 1998, was David M. Malone, a Canadian scholar-diplomat. Malone took IPA more deeply into the realm both of scholarship and of policy advocacy, focused in part on the work of the UN Security Council. IPA broke new ground on the economics of war, on links between the causes of conflict and conflict prevention, the nexus of security and development and on new forms of international governance, such as transitional administration. It became a source of expertise for the media in which Malone and his IPA colleagues published frequent opinion and analytical pieces.

Since 2005, IPI has been led by Terje Rød-Larsen, a principal architect of the Oslo Peace Accords (between the PLO and the Government of Israel) and a Norwegian sociologist and diplomat who has served the UN as its senior envoy in the Middle East. IPA today focuses its work on crisis and the response capacity of international institutions, UN reform, statebuilding/peacebuilding, and has specific regional programs on the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Rød-Larsen serves simultaneously as the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559.

Alumni

Published alumni of IPI, today widely spread across the academic and policy worlds, include Michael Doyle (now of Columbia University), Robert Orr (Assistant Secretary-General of the UN), Thant Myint-U, Margaret Vogt, Simon Chesterman (now at the NYU School of Law), Ameen Jan, Karin Wermester, Necla Tschirgi, Karen Ballentine, John Hirsch, Adekeye Adebajo (now Director the Center on Conflict Resolution in Cape Town), W.P.S. Sidhu (now Director of the New Issues in Security Course at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy), Chandra Lekha Sriram (Director of the Centre on Human Rights in Conflict at the University of East London), Heiko Nitzschke, Sebastian von Einsiedel, Jake Sherman, Angela Muvumba, Aida Mengistu, Charles Cater, Ruth Iyob, Ian Martin (UN Special Envoy in Nepal), Agnes Hurwitz and Chetan Kumar.

The body of IPI's scholarship over the past fifteen years is considerable and much cited.Fact|date=March 2007

External links

* [http://www.ipacademy.org International Peace Academy website]