The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations and the Fight to End Empire | Kal Raustiala

Co-sponsored with The World House Project at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

About the Event: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the 1951 Oscars. In this talk, Kal Raustiala, author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire explores Bunche’s extraordinary life and career, from professor of political science at Howard to the OSS, State Department, and eventually the UN, his professional home for 25 years. Bunche was a world class mediator and arguably the father of modern peacekeeping. But he was also a Black man in the very white world of diplomacy, who during the Cold War stood at the center of the one of the world’s great historical revolutions: the postwar decolonization of much of Africa and Asia.

About the Speaker: Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School, Professor at the UCLA International Institute, and Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. From 2012-2015 he served as UCLA’s Associate Vice Provost for International Studies and Faculty Director of the International Education Office.

Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international law, international relations, and intellectual property. His recent publications include “The Fight Against China’s Bribe Machine,” Foreign Affairs, October 2021 (with Nicolas Barile); “Faster Fashion: The Piracy Paradox and its Perils,” 39 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, (Spring 2021)(with Christopher Sprigman); “NGOs in International Treatymaking,” in Duncan Hollis, ed, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2020); “ Hollywood is Running Out of Villains,” Foreign Affairs, August 2020; “Innovation in the Information Age: The United States, China, and the Struggle Over Intellectual Property in the 21st Century,” 58 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (June 2020); and “The Second Digital Disruption: Streaming and the Dawn of Data-Driven Creativity,” NYU Law Review (2019, (with Christopher Sprigman). His books include Global Governance in a World of Change (Michael Barnett, Jon Pevehouse, and Kal Raustiala, eds, Cambridge University Press, 2021); Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford, 2009); and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford, 2012) (with Christopher Sprigman), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His biography of the late UN diplomat, civil rights advocate, and UCLA alum Ralph Bunche, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, will be published in late 2022 by Oxford University Press.

In 2016 Professor Raustiala was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, Melbourne University in Australia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2016, he was the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. A graduate of Duke University, Professor Raustiala holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Raustiala was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Raustiala has served on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law and is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. Along with Catherine Amirfar of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is co-host of the American Society of International Law’s International Law Behind the Headlines podcast.

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