Abstract: “The most impossible job on this earth,” was how its first holder, Trygve Lie, described it when he received his successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, at New York's Idlewild Airport on 9 April 1953. A further five decades have not made the role of the Secretary-General of the United Nations any easier, though the seven men who have held the function have exercised it in widely differing global political environments. Hammarskjöld, who inherited the position from the only Secretary-General who has ever resigned, did most to shape and define the institution, both by his own intellectual appreciation of its possibilities and by his conduct in office. As the seventh Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the only other Nobel Peace laureate from that exclusive list, completes his tenure, it is instructive to examine how the role of the Secretary-General has evolved in the half-century since Dag Hammarskjöld made it his own.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-29
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 7
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