UN Under-Secretary-General Gambari Speaks at SU Wednesday, December 6

SALISBURY, MD---Since its formation in 1945, the United Nations has been one of the world’s most significant forces for world peace.

The Salisbury community gets an insider’s view of that organization and its peace efforts throughout the world as Ibrahim Agboola Gambari, the UN’s under-secretary-general for political affairs, speaks at 6 p.m. Wednesday, December 6, in Holloway Hall Auditorium at Salisbury University.  His talk is titled “Promoting Peace Amidst Demanding Conflicts.”

“Professor Gambari is arguably in an elite group of people who are world authorities on UN peace keeping missions and international conflict,” said Dr. Brian Polkinghorn, executive director of the SU Center for Conflict Resolution.  “He has earned his way into this group as a renowned scholar of international conflict and as a career diplomat with a reputation for getting things done in tough places.  If you want a reliable assessment of peace and conflict at the global level, he's one to listen to."

Born in Nigeria in 1944, Gambari is its former minister of external affairs as well as director-general for the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs.

Gambari served as Nigeria’s permanent representative to the UN, as well as chairman of the Nigerian delegation of the UN General Assembly. He chaired the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid, which successfully saw the demise of that practice and the establishment of democratic rule in South Africa. He also served as two-time president of the UN Security Council.

He joined the UN Secretariat in 1999. In the six years that followed, he served as under-secretary-general and special advisor on Africa, promoting international support for the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Gambari to his current post as under-secretary-general for political affairs in 2005.

Earning his Ph.D. in political science and international relations from Columbia University in 1974, Gambari has authored several books on international relations and foreign policy. The former chair of the University of Zaria’s Political Science Department, he founded Nigeria’s first undergraduate program in international studies. He also has served as a resident scholar with the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Italy and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The Nigerian government named him a Commander of the Federal Republic, one of the country’s highest national honors. He also was elected to the Society of Scholars at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was a visiting professor in the School of Advanced International Studies.

Gambari’s talk is free and the public is invited.  Part of the Center for Conflict Resolution’s “One Person Can Make a Difference” Lecture Series at SU, co-sponsors are the Office of the President, the Fulton School of Liberal Arts, the Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution Program, the Political Science Department, the International Studies Program and the History Department.

For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU Web site at www.salisbury.edu.