Today: Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to speak on campus

Kofi Annan, seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, will take part in a Jackson Institute Town Hall Meeting on Thursday, Feb.7, at 4:30 p.m. in Levinson Auditorium of Yale Law School, 127 Wall St. The event is open to the public.

Annan served two terms as secretary-general from 1997 to 2006. One of his main priorities in that role was a comprehensive program of reform aimed at revitalizing the U.N. and making the international system more effective. Annan was an advocate for human rights, the rule of law, the Millennium Development Goals, and development in Africa. He sought to bring the U.N. closer to the global public by forging ties between civil society and the private sector, among other partners. In 2001 Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace; the citation praised his leadership for “bringing new life to the organization.”

Kofi Annan’s talk will be livestreamed on the Yale YouTube channel.

Since leaving the U.N., Annan has continued to press for better policies to meet the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable through his work with the Kofi Annan Foundation and other venues. He continues to use his experience to mediate and resolve conflict, most recently serving as the Joint United Nations-Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. He is the co-author of “Interventions: A Life in War and Peace,” a memoir of his 40 years of service at the U.N.

Annan is traveling to New Haven to mark the publication of a five-volume set of his official U.N. papers. The publication project is a collaboration between Yale and City College of New York (CUNY) and is headed by Jean Krasno, a faculty member at CUNY and a distinguished fellow in Yale’s International Security Studies program. A selected set of the Annan papers was published in book form in 2012. A loose-leaf set will be housed in the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Yale Library.

During the Town Hall Meeting Annan will be interviewed by John Negroponte, the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale and senior fellow at the Jackson Institute. Negroponte is a former U.S. deputy secretary of state, first director of the Office of National Intelligence, and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs is a centerpiece of Yale’s initiative to internationalize its teaching curriculum, to attract the most talented students and scholars to Yale from around the world, and to deepen the University’s engagement abroad.