Sala de Prensa

Francis Mading Deng has served, since 1992, as the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons. He is alos a distinguished Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the CUNY Graduate Center-Brookings Project on Internal Displacement at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies of The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was born in 1938 in the Sudan, where he attended schools in both the African-Christianized South and the Arab-Islamic North. He graduated with LL-B (Honours) from Khartoum University and pursued post-graduate studies in the United Kingdom and the United States, where he obtained LLM and JSD degrees from Yale Law School in 1965 and 1968 respectively.

In addition to academic appointments in Khartoum University and in several universities in the United States, Dr. Deng served as Human Rights Officer in the United Nations Secretariat, as his country's Ambassador to Canada, the Scandinavian countries and the United States of America, and as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. After leaving his country's foreign service in 1983, Ambassador Deng joined the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as a Guest Scholar and was subsequently invited by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to be the first RBF Distinguished Fellow, combining research with giving seminars and lectures to the staff and the trustees. He then returned to the Wilson Center as Senior Research Associate and was concurrently appointed one of the first Jennings Randolph Distinguished Fellows of the United States Institute of Peace. In 1989, he joined the Brookings Institution as Senior Fellow to establish the African Studies branch of the Foreign Policy Studies program.

Following his appointment as Special Representative by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Dr. Deng co-founded the Brookings Institution Project on Internal Displacement, which he co-directs with Roberta Cohen. For several years, he was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School where he gave seminars on Law and Nation Building. In 1996, Dr. Deng assumed the position of Acting Chairman of the African Leadership Forum following the imprisonment of General Olsegun Obasanjo, former and now again Head of State of Nigeria, the founder of the Forum. In February 2001, Dr. Deng took up his position at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York while continuing his affiliation as a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Dr. Deng has authored or edited over twenty books in the fields of law, conflict
resolution, forced migration, human rights, anthropology, folklore, history and politics as well as two novels. His latest Brookings publications include: Strategic Vision for Africa (2001 forthcoming) co-authored with I. William Zartman; Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement (1998) co-authored with Roberta Cohen; The Forsaken People: Case Studies of the Internally Displaced (1998) co-edited with Roberta Cohen; African Reckoning: A Quest for Good Governance (1998) co-edited with Terrence Lyons; Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (1996) co-authored with several scholars; War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (1995); Protecting the Dispossessed: A Challenge for the International Community (1993); The Challenges of Famine Relief: Emergency Operations in the Sudan (1992); Conflict Resolution in Africa (1991); Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1990). Among his earlier books is a biography of his father, The Man Called Majok: A Biography of Power, Polygamy and Change, published by Yale University Press in 1986. His first book, Tradition and Modernization: A Challenge for Law Among the Dinka of the Sudan (1971) also published by Yale University Press, won the 1972 Herskovits Award offered annually by the African Studies Association for the best book published the year before. Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, co-authored with Abdullahi An-Na'im, was the 1990 winner of the Excellence in Publishing award sponsored by the Association of American Publishers.

July 2001