TREVOR FINDLAY

A white United Nations helicopter hovers overhead as it attempts to land in a crowd of eager voters, producing a swirl of dust, parasols, vividly garbed villagers and blue-helmeted peacekeepers. The arresting image, shot in 1994, seemed to capture the essence of the whirlwind UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia. As a framed photograph on the wall of the main corridor at SIPRI that year it also announced the arrival at the Institute of my new project, on peacekeeping and regional security.

Among the traditional SIPRI crowd-arms transfer monitors, nuclear arms controllers, chemical disarmers, military expenditure toters, observers of the arcania of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe-my project was a novelty. Not only had SIPRI previously paid only fleeting attention to peacekeeping, but for SIPRI regional security meant European, or at a stretch transatlantic, security.

The Research Staff Collegium was polite but bemused, certain that SIPRI needed to spread its wings but uncertain about the implications for the traditional agenda. The librarians wondered how their heaving shelves would cope with a new subject area that wandered into uncharted ISBNs. (They also perhaps pondered whether 'Liberian' was a misspelling of their profession rather than a citizen of Africa.) The editorial department hastened to check the spelling of Phnom Penh, unravel a whole new tangle of acronyms like MINURSO (derived from the Spanish title of the UN operation in Western Sahara) and adopt a rule on SOPs (Standard Operating Procedure or Standing Operating Procedure?).

Puzzlement grew when the project's first Yearbook chapter was entitled 'Confl ict prevention, management and resolution'. Quite apart from its preposterously ambitious title, its location in the Yearbook was unclear. Its logical place was, I argued, as the first chapter, since everything else on the SIPRI agenda, notably its longstanding concern with arms control and disarmament, flowed from such fundamentals. Furthermore, a veritable regional security invasion seemed to be engulfing the institute: Bates Gill arrived to work on East Asia, while Peter Jones launched a Middle East project. The Yearbook suddenly contained hitherto unknown topics like the use of force in peace operations and the debacle in Somalia. SIPRI seemed to be careering wildly away from its mandate.

But in fact, of course, in all these ventures SIPRI was simply returning to its roots. The original conception of SIPRI, notably that promoted by Alva Myrdal, had been of an institute devoted to peace and conflict research broadly understood, albeit with an early emphasis on arms control and disarmament.

SIPRI moved premises in 1995 from Bergshamra to Frösunda. Trevor Findlay settles into his new office in the Frösunda building

SIPRI moved premises in 1995 from Bergshamra to its new building (above) in Frösunda, Solna

Today, SIPRI's mandate makes explicit what was implied by the launching of my project: it is to 'conduct research on questions of conflict and cooperation of importance for international peace and security, with the aim of contributing to an understanding of the conditions for peaceful solutions of international conflicts and for a stable peace'.

Today my project is called the Armed Conflict and Conflict Management Programme, it has a staff of four and it is recognized as a core SIPRI activity. I hope the photo from Cambodia is still on the wall.

I left SIPRI at the end of 1997, after years of quiet research in suburban Stockholm, for the roiling, somewhat anarchic, non-governmental sector in the heart of the capital of the world- London. Leading the six-person, multi-project Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) could, in many respects, not have been more different from heading a single research project with a support staff ranging from zero to one (including the wonderful, late Olga Hardardóttir) at SIPRI. Nonetheless I took with me several well-learned lessons from my SIPRI experience that stood me in good stead at VERTIC. Many of these were gleaned from the thankless but highly educative task of chairing an internal committee on SIPRI reform that I inadvisedly volunteered for shortly before I left the institute.

The first lesson I learned was the paramountcy of leadership. A research institute, whether well established or new, cannot maximize its impact if it looks upon itself as an agglomeration of several distinct research projects, each permitted to go its own way. Competition for funding, media space and the attention of policy-makers is stiffer than ever. Success requires strategic planning, attentive management of people and resources and lean administration. Good institution-based research needs to be fostered, encouraged, marshaled and subjected to rigorous review.

A second lesson I learned at SIPRI was that editors are powerful people who can, without too much exaggeration, make or break you. SIPRI's reputation has been built up steadily over the years, not just through the activities of its leadership, researchers and support staff (although sometimes in spite of these), but through the unremitting dedication of its editorial worker bees, led throughout by the indomitable Connie Wall. Overworked, underpaid and underground (they are invariably located in the basement), the editorial department regularly turned sows ears into silk purses, burnished the reputation of many an author, including me, and repeatedly rescued the intellectual credibility of the SIPRI Yearbook, edited volumes and single author works.

In my time, besides Ms Wall, they comprised Jetta Gilligan Borg, Eve Johansson and the late, much loved, Billie Bielckus. To VERTIC I not only brought the eminently sensible SIPRI style guide (although I still cannot fathom why SIPRI quirkily uses 'USA' rather than US) and the services of Eve Johansson, but the subterranean SIPRI editorial mentality. It served me and VERTIC handsomely.

A final lesson that struck home at SIPRI, not just with me but with many (but not all) of my colleagues at the Institute, was the growing importance of the Internet in disseminating research products, projecting institutional identity and having an impact on international politics. There were visionaries in SIPRI who saw this coming before the rest of us, notably Gerd Hagmeyer-Gaverus. Today, of course, if Google doesn't throw up your institute in micro-seconds to the student, press hack or harried professor you might as well not exist. SIPRI now has this, too, well in hand.

Happy anniversary SIPRI.