Old Theatre, Ground Floor, LSE Old Building, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
Free
Join us for a public lecture with Ambassador Lakshmi Puri, former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations and the founding Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. This event will take place on 3 February, 1730–1900, at the Old Theatre at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
This event will focus on Ambassador Puri’s personal journey in diplomacy, both within the Indian Foreign Service and at the UN, in particular her work championing gender equality and women’s empowerment (GEWE) on a global stage. We will discuss the significance of gender mainstreaming—why gender matters for development, human rights and peace and security, especially in view of the pursuit of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As diplomacy remains a male-dominated field, the event will also highlight Ambassador Puri’s personal reflections as an accomplished diplomat, including the role models she had in her career, and how the visibility of women trailblazers can inspire aspiring women leaders in diplomacy.
Ambassador Lakshmi Puri is former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations and the founding Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. She is an accomplished diplomat and author, having spent 15 years at the UN, and before that, 28 years in the Indian Foreign Service. She has received numerous international honours for her work, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights. The event will be chaired by Professor Karen E. Smith, Professor of International Relations at the LSE and Director of the LSE IDEAS Women in Diplomacy Project.
Our Speaker
Ambassador Lakshmi Puri is former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations and the founding Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. She is an accomplished diplomat and author, having spent 15 years at the UN and before that, 28 years in the Indian Foreign Service, where she served as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, as well as as Ambassador to Hungary and accredited to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Joining the leadership team of UN Women at its inception, she contributed significantly to building UN Women into an organisation for advocacy, knowledge and partnerships, as well as a norm setter for gender equality and women’s empowerment, most notably in the incorporation of SDG 5 into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. She was also instrumental in convening the 2015 Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Beijing, attended by over 70 world leaders.
Prior to joining UN Women, Ambassador Puri was the Director of the UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States in New York, and, separately, the Director of the UNCTAD Division of International Trade in Goods, Services and Commodities in Geneva.
Throughout her career, Ambassador Puri has promoted the gender equality and women’s empowerment agenda in various capacities in the context of peace and security, human rights and sustainable development. She has received numerous international honours for her work, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights.
Our Academic Chair
Professor Karen E. Smith is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interests lie in the fields of foreign policy analysis and the study of international organisations. She has recently published on feminist foreign policy, the role of women in diplomacy and foreign policy-making, the European Union’s diplomacy at the United Nations, and the role of groups in UN multilateralism.
She has also written on the formulation and implementation of common EU foreign policies, including the EU’s pursuit of ‘ethical’ foreign policy goals such as promoting human rights and democracy, and policy-making within European states regarding genocide. She has a strong interest in the role that emotions can play in EU foreign policy-making. She is currently investigating the role of women in foreign policy-making and has used Foreign Policy Analysis to try to explain feminist foreign policies. She is the Director of the Women in Diplomacy project at LSE IDEAS.