Former UN Under-Secretary-General with special responsibility for peacekeeping operations TFF associate August 20, 2003 YRINGHAM, Mass.- Ralph Bunche was born in Detroit 100 years ago today (August 7, 2003). His passionate determination to get results did not extend to seeking credit for them, so his work is better remembered than he is. Of all his many accomplishments – civil rights pioneer, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, chief drafter of two chapters of the United Nations charter, negotiator of the armistices that ended the first Arab-Israeli war – Bunche said he was proudest of developing what came to be known as peacekeeping. Setting up the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Palestine in 1948, Bunche formulated the principles that have governed peacekeeping operations ever since. In the 1956 Suez crisis, working with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and Lester Pearson of Canada, he organized the first peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force...

Background and CV Dr Pascal Lottaz joined TFF as an Associate in May 2025. Very short bio Dr. Pascal Lottaz is an Associate Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Law and Hakubi Center (Japan). He researches neutrality in international relations and directs the network neutralitystudies.com. Short bio Dr. Pascal Lottaz is an Associate Professor at Kyoto University, where he investigates neutrality in international relations and directs the research network neutralitystudies.com. He received his MA and PhD from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and previously researched and taught at Waseda University and Temple University (Japan Campus). His recent books include Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War (Routledge, 2022), Neutral Beyond the Cold: Neutral States and the Post-Cold War International System (Lexington Books, 2022), and Notions of Neutralities (Lexington Books, 2019). He also wrote articles on “Neutrality Studies” for Oxford Encyclopedia and “The Politics and Diplomacy of Neutrality”...

LONDON – So far so good, at least on the wider level. While internally Iraq seems on the edge of chaos, the much heralded clash of civilizations between the Muslim and Judaeo-Christian worlds has yet to become apparent. We have anger and despair aplenty in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But very little rushing to the standard and there was no great pilgrimage of warriors to join the fight, as happened when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan twenty years ago, and then, having driven the Red Army out, were left to ferment in that mountainous redoubt. With the armaments supplied by the CIA the mujahidin were transformed into Al Qaeda that became, for a relatively brief moment as these things go, ‘the greatest threat to the homeland that America has ever known.’ Nevertheless a ‘Cold War’ between much of the Muslim world and the West is certainly in full swing. Winston...