Renata Dwan Director
Charts the strategic and tactical direction of UNIDIR, raises funds, and manages the Institute's staff.
http://unidir.org/about/staff/renata-dwan
Renata joined the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) after 13 years working on peace and security issues at the United Nations, most recently as Chief of Policy and Best Practices in the Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support. In 2015-16 she led the team to implement Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s reform initiative on peace operations, the High-level Panel on Peace Operations, and was a member of Secretary-General Guterres’ team reviewing the UN’s peace and security architecture in 2017. Renata has worked on peace operations and complex emergencies at UN Headquarters and in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Mali and Syria. She led major UN-wide policy and reform initiatives on peace and security issues including security sector reform, peacekeeping partnerships and crisis management capacities.
Before joining the United Nations, Renata was head of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Programme on Armed Conflict and Conflict Management (1999-2005) and Deputy Director of the EastWest Institute’s European Security Programme in Budapest (1997-1999). She was Special Adviser to the European Union Council Secretariat for the first European Union crisis management operation and a member of EU High Representative Javier Solana’s 2004 Task Force on a Human Security Doctrine for Europe.
Renata holds a M.Phil and D.Phil from the University of Oxford where she was the Hedley Bull Junior Research Fellow in International Relations. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Princeton University and a visiting researcher at the former Western European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris. She has published widely on international security matters.
Spotlight: Renata Dwan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-enSqoyvAck
SIPRI interviewed Renata Dwan at the 2018 Stockholm Security Conference, 19–20 September.
Renata Dwan is the Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). Here, she speaks about the risks posed by newly emerged technologies and how we can facilitate dialogue between international organizations, including the United Nations, to mitigate these risks.
About the Stockholm Security Conference:
The Stockholm Security Conference is an annual event that brings together key stakeholders to discuss global security challenges and how to respond to them. The theme of the 2018 Stockholm Security Conference (SSC 18) was ‘Emerging technologies: Unseen connections, missing players, absent solutions’. It was organized in partnership with the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) and the Munich Security Conference (MSC).
About Spotlight:
The Spotlight series is a collection of short, on the spot interviews, captured on occasions where individuals have visited SIPRI for various events, seminars and workshops. The aim of the series is to capture an array of angles and viewpoints that will stimulate further discussions. While these are designed to offer snapshots, the intention is to provide starting points to contribute to a continued dialogue to better understand the conditions for peaceful solutions of international conflicts and for a stable peace.
RENATA DWAN
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/renata-dwan/
The risk of nuclear weapons being used is at its highest since World War II, a senior U.N. security expert said on Tuesday, calling it an "urgent" issue that the world should take more seriously. Renata Dwan, director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research ...
Risk of nuclear war now highest since WWII, U.N. arms research chief says
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/22/world/politics-diplomacy-world/risk-nuclear-war-now-highest-since-wwii-u-n-arms-research-chief-says/#.XORstFfVKJA
GENEVA - The risk of nuclear weapons being used is at its highest since World War II, a senior U.N. security expert said on Tuesday, calling it an “urgent” issue that the world should take more seriously.
Renata Dwan, director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), said all states with nuclear weapons have nuclear modernization programs underway and the arms control landscape is changing, partly due to strategic competition between China and the United States. Traditional arms control arrangements are also being eroded by the emergence of new types of war, with increasing prevalence of armed groups and private-sector forces and new technologies that blurred the line between offense and defense, she told reporters in Geneva.
With disarmament talks stalemated for the past two decades, 122 countries have signed a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, partly out of frustration and partly out of a recognition of the risks, she said.
“I think that it’s genuinely a call to recognize — and this has been somewhat missing in the media coverage of the issues — that the risks of nuclear war are particularly high now, and the risks of the use of nuclear weapons, for some of the factors I pointed out, are higher now than at any time since World War II.”
The nuclear ban treaty, officially called the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was backed by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
The treaty has so far gathered 23 of the 50 ratifications that it needs to come into force, including South Africa, Austria, Thailand, Vietnam and Mexico. It is strongly opposed by the United States, Russia, and other states with nuclear arms.
Cuba also ratified the treaty in 2018, 56 years after the Cuban missile crisis, a 13-day Cold War face-off between Moscow and Washington that marked the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war.
Dwan said the world should not ignore the danger of nuclear weapons.
“How we think about that, and how we act on that risk and the management of that risk, seems to me a pretty significant and urgent question that isn’t reflected fully in the (U.N.) Security Council,” she said.