This book has emerged out of the author's experience as Director of an innovative peacemaking, peacekeeping and humanitarian initiative, the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, between 1992 and 1996. What was striking about this conference was the experiment of two full-time Co-Chairmen, one from the United Nations and one from the European Union, who laboured tirelessly for peace in different parts of the former Yugoslavia for three and a half years. The strategies and organization of the conference had to be pieced together from the start by the Co-Chairmen and their colleagues; only in retrospect could the question whether there might have been experiences of international peace conferences that might have been useful at the beginning of this process be reviewed. This research is contained in Part One of this book, which offers a review of the role of international peace conferences in history. Part Two contains a case study of the strategies and experiences of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia.

Professor Dr. Bertrand G. Ramcharan (Guyana) Ll.B. (Hons.), LL.M., Ph.D (LSE), Barrister-at-Law of Lincoln's Inn, is President of UPR Info and has been Director of the Guyana Institute of Public Policy. He was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights ad interim in 2003-2004 with the rank of UN Under-Secretary-General, and Deputy High Commissioner from 1998-2003. He was Professor and First Swiss Chair of International
Human Rights Law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva from 2006-2008 and has been Chancellor of the University of Guyana. Previously he was Head of the Speechwriting Service of the UN Secretary-General, Director of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, and Director of the Africa I Division of the UN Department of Political Affairs for three years.
He has been UN Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and, before that, Fellow of the LSE. He was a member of the UN Panel of Eminent Persons on Human Rights in Darfur (2007), Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the peace process in Georgia (2008), and member of the ILO Commission of Inquiry into trade union and human rights in Zimbabwe (2009-2010).