Throughout his ten-year term as United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan pursued reform of the organisation in an effort to strengthen its legitimacy, effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness. This article begins with a definition of UN reform and identifies four different types: Security Council reform, reform of administrative practices, incremental procedural reforms, and creation of new institutions to address contemporary challenges. It next examines Kofi Annan’s initiation of reforms over the course of his term in office, from the time of his selection in 1996 to the end of his term in 2006. In addition to his engagement with all four forms, he also pursued improvement of the organisation in each of the three pillars of the UN Charter: security, development, and human rights, arguing that they were fundamentally interrelated. Kofi Annan believed that reform was a process, and he pursued it not only throughout his term in office but also afterwards through his foundation and other activities. His legacy of reform has been continued by his successors in the Office of Secretary-General.

In this paper, we examine Kofi Annan’s two most consequential roles in the course of his long career at the United Nations: his role in the Rwanda genocide in 1994 as the head of UN peacekeeping and his tenure as Secretary-General. A realist analysis of the Rwanda genocide which continues to be the referent point for critics of both Annan and the UN is presented. We find that, more than any personal or institutional failings, it was the retreat into a post-Cold War posture of realist non-interventionism of global powers based purely on realist considerations of national interest that mostly accounted for the inevitability and irreversibility of the Rwanda genocide. The paper also explores Annan’s bold idealist global initiatives during his time as Secretary-General and his contributions to human rights, human security, justice, conflict resolution and commitment to sustainable development in Africa, the continent of his birth.