Angela Ndinga-Muvumba, Senior Research Fellow at ACCORD and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Uppsala’s Department of Peace and Conflict Research (DPCR), took part in the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation’s 50th Anniversary Roundtable Event in Uppsala on 2 March 2012, alongside a high-profile panel including Martti Ahtisaari, Lakhdar Brahimi, Francis Deng and Jan Eliasson. Ndinga-Muvumba’s discussant remarks focused on African conflicts and peacekeeping and highlighted the issue of regional arrangements between the UN and the African Union (AU) under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter.
The four main speakers were Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland, winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize and Chairman of the Board of Crisis Management Initiative; Lakhdar Brahimi, former Ambassador and Foreign Minister of Algeria, Special Representative/Envoy and Special Adviser to the United Nations (UN) Secretary General, chair of the Panel on UN Peace Operations and member of “The Elders”; Francis Deng, former Ambassador and Foreign Minister of the Sudan, Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons and since 2007 Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide; and Jan Eliasson, formerly Sweden’s Permanent Representative to the UN and Foreign Minister and President of the 60th UN General Assembly. Mr Eliasson was appointed Deputy-Secretary General of the UN on 2 March 2012. Ahtisaari, Brahimi, Deng and Eliasson were all previous presenters of the annual Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture.
Discussants, in addition to Angela Ndinga-Muvumba, included Lena Ag, Secretary-General of the NGO Kvinna till Kvinna (Woman to Woman) and Marie Tuma, Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. The roundtable debate was held at the Uppsala University Main Hall.
The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation pays tribute to the memory of the second Secretary General of the United Nations by searching for and examining workable alternatives for a democratic, socially and economically just, ecologically sustainable, peaceful and secure world in which human rights are genuinely respected.
