Dr Diego Salama is Head of Partnerships & Communications.
Dr Salama leads UNU-MERIT’s partnerships portfolio, supporting the Director in strategic partnership development, programme and project management, and engagement across the United Nations system, governments, international organisations, universities, and other external partners. He plays a central role in positioning the Institute within multilateral networks and developing partnerships that connect UNU-MERIT’s research and education to policy priorities.
His responsibilities also include institutional governance and strategic reporting. He supports the Institute’s engagement with the wider United Nations University system and contributes to formal reporting and submissions to the UNU Council, host-country authorities, and institutional partners. Alongside this, he oversees UNU-MERIT’s communications portfolio, including public information, external relations, and digital communications, with responsibility for strengthening the visibility and policy reach of the Institute’s research, education, and engagement.
Dr Salama is also a historian of the United Nations. He holds a PhD in the History of International Relations from Leiden University and is a Research Associate at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA). His research focuses on UN peacekeeping, multilateral diplomacy, institutional adaptation, and the history of the United Nations in the Middle East. More broadly, his work examines how the UN operates under political and institutional constraints, including the agency of the Secretary-General, coordination between peace operations, relations between different UN organs, and the ways in which the organisation adapts to diplomatic deadlock.
His first book, The UN’s Multidimensional Approach to the Israel–Arab Conflict, 1967–1982: An Architecture for Peace (Routledge, 2026), draws extensively on archival material from the United Nations Archives to reconstruct how different parts of the UN system interacted across the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has published in academic Journals including International Peacekeeping, Strategic Assessment and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Dr Salama is Managing Editor of Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, a peer-reviewed journal published by Brill in collaboration with the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS)
