Book Talk | Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World
The UN’s first non-Western secretary-general, a soft-spoken Buddhist from rural Burma, once stood between the superpowers and nuclear annihilation, yet his story is largely untold.
In Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World, historian Thant Myint‑U mines newly declassified archives to show how his grandfather U Thant steered the world through the Cuban Missile Crisis, mediated conflicts from the Congo to Kashmir, challenged Washington over Vietnam, and championed decolonization and environmental stewardship decades ahead of his time. Drawing vivid portraits of Cold War flashpoints, Myint‑U recasts U Thant’s legacy as a roadmap for principled multilateralism in an era of renewed great‑power rivalry.
In conversation with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, Myint-U will explore U Thant’s battles against white supremacy in southern Africa, the rise of newly independent Asian and African voices at the UN, and what U Thant’s diplomacy can teach today’s gridlocked Security Council.
The conversation will take place on Tuesday, September 30 from 12:00 – 1:00 PM Eastern Time.
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Thant Myint-U
Thant Myint-U is an award-winning writer, historian, conservationist, and international public servant. He is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge University and a Senior Fellow of the United Nations Foundation. He was born in New York City and was educated at Harvard, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Cambridge University, where he completed his PhD in History in 1996. He was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the "100 Leading Global Thinkers" of 2013 and by Prospect Magazine as one of 50 "World Thinkers" of 2014. Thant Myint-U has served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, in Cambodia (1992-3) and in the Balkans (1994-5 and 1996) and from 2000-2007 at the U.N. Secretariat in New York, including as the head of Policy Planning in the Department of Political Affairs and in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. He is the author of five books.
Trita Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. He is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He has authored four books on US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel. He has been named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC for five years in a row since 2021, and preeminent public intellectual Noam Chomsky calls Parsi “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran.” Parsi has worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the UN, where he served in the Security Council, handling the affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara, and in the General Assembly’s Third Committee, addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Iraq.