Event Details

The Centre for War and Diplomacy is delighted to welcome Dr Flavia Gasbarri of King's College London, to discuss the United States' policy on peacekeeping in Rwanda.

After the successful US–UN action in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, by the mid-1990s Washington’s enthusiasm for multilateral action had already faded away. This was evident after the ‘Black Hawk Down’ disaster of the US Mission in Somalia in October 1993 and the release of a much more restrictive peacekeeping policy in May 1994 (PDD-25). The US inaction during the following Rwandan genocide in spring 1994 was then seen as the obvious consequence of the American ‘trauma’ in Somalia, as well as the symbol of Washington’s withdrawal from peacekeeping commitments. However, in the light of new archival documents a different scenario emerges.

This talk will discuss how the consequential link between the Somali disaster, the release of PDD-25 and American inaction in Rwanda is much less straightforward. This suggests that the policy in Rwanda was not just a consequence of the Somali debacle and that the reasons for US inaction toward the genocide must be gauged within the broader patterns of post-Cold War American foreign policy.

Dr Flavia Gasbarri is Lecturer in War Studies in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. She is co-Chair of the KCL Africa Research Group and a member of the KCL Centre for Grand Strategy. Her research and main publications focus on the study of the Cold War in the Third World, the development of post-Cold War US foreign policy and US-Africa relations. Her first book entitled US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa was published in 2020 in Routledge’s ‘Cold War History’ series (edited by Arne Westad and Michael Cox). She has also researched and published on US policy in the Rwandan genocide and in the Great Lakes region.

Dr Gasbarri's recent article "Revisiting the Linkage: PDD 25, Genocide in Rwanda and the US Peacekeeping Experience of the 1990s", The International History Review, is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2017.1354311