| The United Nations Intellectual History Project, based at the Graduate Center’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, has over the last decade scrutinized the UN’s sixty-five-year history to identify ideas that have proven crucial to improving the quality of life on the planet. As Washington resumes a leadership role in the world organization, successful ideas point the way to the future. They are recorded in UN Ideas That Changed the World (Indiana University Press, 2009), the project’s capstone volume in a series of seventeen books, which has a foreword by former UN secretary-general and Nobel laureate Kofi Annan. The book will be launched at the United Nations on September 14, 2009. Participants will include the three co-authors and project co-directors, Sir Richard Jolly, Dr. Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss (Presidential Professor of Political Science at the GC and director of the Bunche Institute); UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; UNDP Administrator Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand; and Columbia University Professor José Antonio Ocampo, former UN under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs. |
