UNIDIR is 40 years old. HAPPY BIRTHDAY UNIDIR !

It is 40 years since President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing created UNIDIR.

Giscard created the Institute inside the Palais de Nations in Geneva, because he did not want all the disarmament work to be kept in New York where the Secretary General lives. The French president was standing up for French values: and quite right too!

I work for peace, and I worked for one of my favourite peace organisations: UNIDIR in Geneva, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.

“Disarmament does not just happen! It requires a great deal of hard work and patience as you persuade armed rebels or armed governments to give up their arms, to immobilize them or even destroy them.”

During the 1990s, while my wife Michelle ran the European office of ChildFund and chaired the NGO Committee for UNICEF, I became a Research Fellow (and later a Senior Fellow) of UNIDIR working for micro-disarmament in West Africa and publishing books about how it is done.

UNIDIR studies different types of disarmament and offers new solutions. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are well-known weapons of mass-destruction regulated by international conventions; micro-disarmament concerns the small arms and light weapons that kill thousands of people every year, and which need a different type of regulation in each country; recently UNIDIR has been focused on new emerging issues like the Arms Trade, Swarm Robotic weapons, Ammunition, Cyber-Space and Weapons in Outer Space.

The whole range of UNIDIR’s work makes fascinating reading, and in the 40th Anniversary Report you can discover the evolution of our research work over the decades. See it here:

If you would like to know more: https://www.unidir.org

If you would like to read more: https://www.unidir.org/publications

If you would like to meet the Director, Dr Renata Dwan (from Ireland): https://twitter.com/RenataDwan

This amazing short story is fun to read. Robin Poulton takes you into rural pagodas along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along tracks threaded between fields of landmines and rice paddies. Here you can read peace journalism at its best, and peace anthropology at its most creative: an uplifting and amusing story proving that even after a civil war, Peace is Possible.

One of my micro-disarmament successes in which UNIDIR was involved, was disarming the Khmer Rouge after thirty years of war in Cambodia. One day I might write the whole book, but meanwhile I wrote a short story:

Peace is Possible: Exchanging Weapons for Development and how we disarmed the Khmer Rouge with wit, bluff and balloons

The book is available in print and in kindle format on Amazon