Jean-Marie Guéhenno is Director of the Kent Global Leadership Program, and the Inaugural Kent Visiting Professor of International Conflict Resolution at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Practice in International and Public Affairs at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and Director of the International Conflict Resolution Specialization at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is Emeritus Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution.
He is a member of the High-level Advisory Board on mediation created by Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres. Guéhenno is also a senior advisor of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, a counsellor of the Australian consultancy Dragoman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Crisis Group from 2014 to 2017.
Guéhenno has held numerous senior-level positions during his distinguished career, spanning peacekeeping, international security and defense policy. Guéhenno was the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping operations from 2000 to 2008, becoming the longest-serving head of peacekeeping and leading an unprecedented expansion of peacekeeping. When Kofi Annan was appointed Joint Special Envoy for Syria in 2012, he selected Guéhenno to be his Deputy, a position he left to chair a review of France’s defense and national security at the request of the President of France. Before joining the United Nations, Mr. Guéhenno had a distinguished career in the French Government and the private sector. He was the director of policy planning in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1989 to 1993, when the Cold War ended. Subsequently, as the ambassador to the Western European Union, he helped lay the foundations of a renewed European defense effort. From 1998 to 2000, he was chairman of the French Institute of Higher Defense Studies.
Guéhenno has published articles in many newspapers and magazines, and is the author of three books: La Fin de la Démocratie (1993), a book acclaimed by The Economist, which has been translated in a dozen languages, and is considered as the first book to have identified the challenges of globalization; L’Avenir de la liberté, la Démocratie dans la mondialisation (1999) and The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of Peacekeeping in the 21st Century (2015). Guéhenno has also taught extensively, including as a professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris, and throughout his time at Columbia.
Guéhenno is a board member of the Carnegie Corporation, the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is the chair of the scientific committee of the Institute for Higher national defense studies (Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale) in Paris. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Guéhenno holds the highest decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany(commander of the Bundesverdienstkreuz), and is an officier de la Légion d’Honneur. Guéhenno is bilingual English-French. He is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure, the Institut d’Eudes Politiques, and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA).
Books
Principal Articles
Book Chapters
Politischen: Die Herausforderung der Demokratie am Beginn des 21 Jahrhunderts, (Julius Raab Foundation, November 1999).