UN names Osaghae member of disarmament advisory board

United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has named Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Prof. Eghosa Osaghae, as member of the UN Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

The board was established in 1978 to advise the UN scribe on matters involving arms limitation and disarmament, including studies and research under the auspices of the global organisation or institutions within the UN system.

Other duties for the body are to serve as the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and counsel the Secretary-General on implementation of the United Nations Disarmament Information Programme.

Osaghae is a professor of Comparative Politics and former Vice Chancellor of Igbinedion University, Okada, Edo State.

He was leader of the Ford Foundation-funded Programme on Ethnic and Federal Studies, Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Ibadan, and chair of the university’s Senate Curriculum Committee.

Between 1994 and 1998, the ex-VC was Professor and Head of the Department of Political Studies at the University of Transkei, South Africa.

He has also been a Visiting Professor/Fellow/Distinguished Senior Scholar at the Carter Centre of Emory University, United States (1989), University of Liberia (1989/90), Salzburg Seminar, Austria (1993), University of Cape Town South Africa (1994), the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala Sweden (1994), University of Ulster, Northern Ireland (1999, 2000), Northwestern University, United States of America (2002, 2004), University of Cambridge United Kingdom (2003), a number of universities and research institutes in India (2005, 2009), Dartmouth College, USA (2005) and Yale University, USA (2009).

Osaghae was also a Rockefeller ‘Reflections on Development’ Fellow (1989/90), and recently, a MacArthur Fellow.

In 1996, he won the ‘Best Paper Award’ at the eighth yearly conference of the International Association for Conflict Management in Helsignor, Denmark.

Prof. Osaghae also won the ‘Best Article Award for 2004’ of the African Politics Conference Group – a coordinate group of the American Political Science Association, African Studies Association and International Studies Association.

He has published extensively on ethnicity, federalism and governance.