Dangerous Diplomacy reassesses the role of the UN Secretariat during the Rwandan genocide. With the help of new sources, including the personal diaries and private papers of the late Sir Marrack Goulding-an Under-Secretary-General from 1988 to 1997 and the second highest-ranking UN official during the genocide-the book situates the Rwanda operation within the context of bureaucratic and power-political friction existing at UN Headquarters in the early 1990s. The book shows how this confrontation led to a lack of coordination between key UN departments on issues as diverse as reconnaissance, intelligence, and crisis management. Yet Dangerous Diplomacy goes beyond these institutional pathologies and identifies the conceptual origins of the Rwanda failure in the gray area that separates peacebuilding and peacekeeping. The difficulty of separating these two UN functions explains why six decades after the birth of the UN, it has still not been possible to demarcate the precise roles of some key UN departments.

Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1993 to 1994, covered Rwanda for much of the genocide. Based on his first-hand expeiences, archival work, and interviews with many key participants, he reconstructs the history of the UN's involvement in Rwanda. Barnett's new Afterword to this edition includes his reaction to documents released on the twentieth anniversary of the genocide. He reflects on what the passage of time has told us about what provoked the genocide, its course, and the implications of the ghastly events of 1994 and the grossly inadequate international reactions to them.

Australian civilians worked for decades supporting the survivors and orphans of the Armenian Genocide massacres. 24 April 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of the First World War. It was the day the allied invasion forces set out for Gallipoli; and it marked the beginning of what became the Genocide of the Ottoman Empire's Armenians. For the first time, this book tells the powerful, and until now neglected, story of how Australian humanitarians helped people they had barely heard of and never met, amid one of the twentieth century's most terrible human calamities. With 50 000 Armenian- Australians sharing direct family links with the Genocide, this has become truly an Australian story.