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Richard Wilcox
Richard Wilcox is a US and German diplomat. He has served as an Assistant Secretary-General in the United Nations as the Director General ad interim of the African Union’s Africa Risk Capacity, as Representative of the UN Secretary General, and with the United States Government as Director in the National Security Council in the Clinton Administration.

Biography
Wilcox was appointed as interim Director General of the Africa Risk Capacity Agency (ARC) by the First Conference of the Parties in February 2013. He continues from his previous role as Managing Director to lead the work of the Agency towards the establishment and capitalization of the first continental risk pool in 2013. The ARC is managed with the support of United Nations World Food Programme, which Wilcox joined in 2001 as Chief of Interagency Coordination. Later, as Director of the Business Planning Division, he created and managed a $250 million project to finance emergency aid in advance of donor contributions, and pioneered drought insurance in Ethiopia as an international risk transfer to protect poor populations vulnerable to natural disasters. As Representative of the Secretary-General in Belgrade in 2008, Wilcox was a principal architect of the UN Secretary-General’s strategy to facilitate independence for Kosovo within the framework of the United Nations. This strategy was designed to create the conditions for the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state, and then for the drawdown of the UN interim administration of Kosovo, to be approved by the UN Security Council. This was to be done without provoking a nationalist backlash in Serbia that could lead Belgrade to re-arm the Kosovo Serbs, and bring the region back into conflict. To achieve this, the Secretary-General announced a policy of “status neutrality” within the rubric of which countries could recognize Kosovo as they were ready to do so, until a critical mass had been reached, after which the UN interim administration could seek a mandate to down-size by 90%. The Secretary-General’s “Kosovo package” is viewed as an important achievement of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Prior to the Belgrade assignment, Wilcox served as Political Director for the UN in Iraq in 2007. Wilcox also served as Director for United Nations Affairs of the U.S. National Security Council under President Clinton and as Civil Affairs Officer with the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH), where he developed plans for the return of displaced persons to Drvar and other highly sensitive “minority return” areas. Richard Wilcox holds a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has studied political philosophy at Harvard, as well as Finance at INSEAD. He teaches graduate courses in the Development and Security Program at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Bologna Center in Italy and is Senior Advisor  to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.

Publications and articles

 * America should insist: Yes, a Security Council seat for India, New York Times, 10 February 2003
 * Four Stars for Africa, New York Times, 14 October 2004
 * Rethinking international disaster aid finance, with Joanna Syroka, Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2006, vol. 59, no. 2.
 * Uniting Africa to face climate change, by Richard Wilcox and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, This is Africa Online, 14 August 2013