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.”
