Welcome
President of the University of Maastricht, Dr. Jo Ritzen

Introduction to the Conference
Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, Chairperson of the UNU Council

Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, the current UNU Council chairperson was handpicked by outgoing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to take on the challenging job of Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs. As former ambassador of Sri Lanka, he was mandated to re-establish the Department of Disarmament after the UN reforms of 1997, and headed it from 1998 to 2003. In addition to the numerous international offices he has held, Dr. Dhanapala also served as Sri Lanka’s Secretary-General for Coordinating the Peace Process, until November 2005.

Development and Security
Dr. Jan Pronk, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands
Special UN envoy to Darfur (2004-2006)

Dr. Jan Pronk has a long standing career in Dutch politics, as Minister for Development Cooperation and later Minister of Environment, as an international civil servant with the UN, first with UNCTAD and more recently from mid 2004 until the end of 2006 as the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the UN in Sudan, leading the UN peace keeping operation (UNMIS) and last but not least as an academic as a research assistant of Jan Tinbergen at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and today Professor at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Dr. Charles Sampford, Director of the Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, (a joint initiative of the UNU, Griffith University and QUT in association with the ANU) Australia;

Dr. Charles Sampford became the Foundation Dean and Professor of Law at Griffith University in 1991. He was the first Director of the Key Centre which was the first of three centres to form the Institute which is a UNU associated institution. Foreign fellowships include the Visiting Senior Research Fellow at St John's College Oxford (1997) and a Fulbright Senior Fellowship to Harvard University (2000). From 2002-4, he was a member of a task force on responding to threats to democracy chaired by Madeleine Albright. In 2006, he convened the first World Ethics Forum in Oxford.

Dr. Luk Van Langenhove, Director UNU-CRIS, Bruges, Belgium

Dr. Luk Van Langenhove is Director of the Comparative Regional Integration Studies Programme of the United Nations University (UNU-CRIS) in Bruges and teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the College of Europe.  He was Deputy Secretary-General of the Belgian Federal Services for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs, post he occupied from May 1995 till September 2001. From 1992 till 1995, he was Deputy Chief of Cabinet of the Belgian Federal Minister of Science Policy. Before that he worked as a researcher and a lecturer at the VUB. Since 2004 he is Vice-President of the Executive Committee of the International Social Sciences Council.

The United Nations and the Elusive Quest for Peace
Dr. Ramesh Thakur, Vice Rector of the United Nations University

Dr. Ramesh Thakur was appointed by UNU Rector Hans van Ginkel to the position of Vice-Rector on 1 April 1998, and promoted to Senior Vice-Rector at the Assistant Secretary-General level in October 2003. As Vice-Rector of the UNU, Dr. Thakur was in charge of the University's Peace and Governance Programme. During his long standing academic career in New Zealand and Australia as professor of political sciences and international relations, Professor Thakur published many books and articles on peace and governance. Dr. Thakur’s term at the UNU comes to an end on April 30th 2007 after which he will take up the position of Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation
(CIGI) and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Dr. Gillian Robinson, is Director of INCORE, an affiliated UNU centre and ARK (The Northern Ireland Social and Political Archive www.ark.ac.uk ). She is the 2003 Eisenhower Fellow from Northern Ireland. She has been involved in the monitoring of social attitudes in Northern Ireland since 1989 and co-directs the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey series. Her research interests include social attitudes, gender roles, policy development in transition and research methodology including issues around researching violent societies and comparative methods.

Dr. Gundapuneni Koteswara Prasad, Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, University of Madras, India

Dr G. Koteswara Prasad is Professor of  Political Science and the Director of Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, University of Madras, an affiliated UNU Institution  In 2006 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Shenandoah University, USA. He wrote two dissertations relating to Gandhi—Sources of Gandhism and Gandhism Since Gandhi: A Study of Philosophy and Movement.  His scholarly interests include Gandhism, Election Studies, State Politics and Implementation studies. His publications and teaching are primarily in these areas during the last 26 years He has been involved with various  empirical studies being conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi for the last 10 years.

Conclusions
Dr. Hans van Ginkel, Rector of the United Nations University

Dr. Hans van Ginkel is since September 1997, the Rector of the United Nations University with its headquarters in Tokyo. He was elected President of the International Association of Universities (IAU, Paris) in August 2000 and served until July 2004. He is the former Rector of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He serves as a member and officer in several professional associations and organizations. Dr. van Ginkel holds a Ph.D. cum laude from Utrecht University (1979) and honorary doctorates from Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Cluj, Romania (1997), State University of California (Sacramento) (2003), and University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana (2005). His fields of interest are urban and regional development, population, housing studies, science policy, internationalization and university management.