The Politics of Discourse: the United Nations Secretariat and Genocide in Rwanda

This thesis addresses how the United Nations Secretariat, and mainly the Secretary-General and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), framed and legitimized their actions when they were confronted with genocide in Rwanda in April 1994. It answers what discourse UN staff use to authorize inaction while working for an organization set up to save the people in the world from the harm that war brings. The purpose is to criticize the representation of the United Nations' identity by its own Secretariat in the face of powerful member states and other external constraints, to expose the discursive framing of the meanings and limits of peacekeeping and subsequently, to show the policies that derived from the discourse UN staff propounded. This is important because, as this thesis argues, the Secretariat’s discourse limits their understanding of peacekeeping and their own role in it, and in turn restricts their available policy options. A lack of independence and unwillingness to...Show moreThis thesis addresses how the United Nations Secretariat, and mainly the Secretary-General and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), framed and legitimized their actions when they were confronted with genocide in Rwanda in April 1994. It answers what discourse UN staff use to authorize inaction while working for an organization set up to save the people in the world from the harm that war brings. The purpose is to criticize the representation of the United Nations' identity by its own Secretariat in the face of powerful member states and other external constraints, to expose the discursive framing of the meanings and limits of peacekeeping and subsequently, to show the policies that derived from the discourse UN staff propounded. This is important because, as this thesis argues, the Secretariat’s discourse limits their understanding of peacekeeping and their own role in it, and in turn restricts their available policy options. A lack of independence and unwillingness to confront the status quo caused a discourse that created policy detrimental to the UN’s goals formulated in the Charter. An alternative conception of the role of the UN and its civil servants would have delegitimized their role as bystanders and provided different policy options than the ones set forth during the Rwandan genocide.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

The Politics of Discourse: the United Nations Secretariat and Genocide in Rwanda