Dangerous diplomacy: bureaucracy, power politics, and the role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
An extremely important and valuable work, Dangerous diplomacy contributes substantially and impressively to understanding the pathologies of politics and power at the United Nations, specifically with regard to the organization's actions before and during the Rwandan genocide. The UN failed to prevent and stop the genocide in 1994 and ultimately contributed to its scale and scope. Herman T. Salton's book is a work of great ethical and intellectual depth, as well as of interpersonal and organizational insight, which is genuinely exceptional, original and of superlative quality—it is a major contribution to literature on the UN. Salton honestly, analytically and rigorously exposes the inner workings of UN agencies responsible for envisioning and implementing UN policies vis-à-vis Rwanda, specifically in relation to peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and the purported prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity and other egregious human rights violations. At each of these tasks the UN failed, catastrophically, and with a staggering combination of incompetence, pettiness and cowardice—while showing a profound lack of moral urgency and chronic ethical blindness. The book reveals intra-agency, inter-agency and interpersonal dysfunction within the UN, including extensive information not previously available due to its private and confidential nature. Much of this dysfunction stemmed from a lack of communication and coordination, as well as from turf wars between the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) within the UN Secretariat. Conflicts between their leadership, staff and closely related—often overlapping, but somewhat artificially and arbitrarily separated—missions are a central analytical concern of the book; the DPKO was ostensibly responsible for operational and technical aspects of peacekeeping and the DPA for political aspects of peacebuilding and larger questions of policy. Salton argues that much of the UN's failure in Rwanda stems from the conceptual confusion about the scope and mission of these two UN agencies—acting more in a spirit of conflict and competition than coordination and cooperation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it