Cips Podcasts

This paper reflects on two funded research projects examining how science and ethics shape the development and deployment of border security technologies in the EU. It examines the different phases of research, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of border security technologies in order to see how different practitioners (e.g. computer engineers; border guards) engage with these material devices. Central to both these studies is the particular way in which the technologies used at border crossings expose broader tensions between mobility and security. I am interested in exploring what that tension reveals about the changing relationships, encounters and negotiations between human and non-human agents. Debbie Lisle is a Reader in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast. Her current research explores the intersections between travel, culture, security, mobility, visuality, materiality and technology.

Despite the signature of the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan in 2015, the humanitarian and economic situation on the ground remains dire. What is the state of peace implementation today? How is the economic crisis affecting the people? What are the prospects for justice and reconciliation in that context? Nicholas Coghlan has been Canada’s resident representative in South Sudan since 2012, first as Head of Office and then as our Ambassador. Prior to that he served in Khartoum, Bogota and Mexico City. He has published several books including Far in the Waste Sudan (2005) and Winter in Fireland (2011).

After almost 60 years of war, Colombia may be on the verge of peace. On November 2012, the Colombian Government and the guerrilla group FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) began formal peace talks. The parties have advanced in four of the five main points on the agenda and have set for themselves a deadline of 23 March 2016 to reach a final agreement. Talks with the smaller remaining guerrilla group ELN (National Liberation Army) have also advanced and negotiations may start soon. What is the content of the agreements being negotiated with FARC, particularly on transitional justice issues (e.g. compensating victims of human rights violations and addressing the impunity of violators)? What are the prospects for their implementation, given the history of Colombia past peace processes? How could Canada contribute to peace with justice in Colombia?

Charles Lister is a Fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he focuses on terrorism, insurgency and sub-state security threats across the Middle East. He is also a Senior Consultant to The Shaikh Group’s Syria Track II Initiative, within which he has managed over two years of face-to-face engagement with the leaderships of over 100 Syrian armed opposition groups. Charles was formerly a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and before that, the head of MENA at the London-based IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre. Lister will be discussing his new book, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency which was published in the UK in November 2015 (Hurst Publishers) and in the U.S. on 1 February 2016 (Oxford University Press). He is also the author of Profiling the Islamic State (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

The increasing reliance on private military and security companies in contemporary conflict and peacekeeping raises a host of new issues for feminist scholars and activists. In recent years, a new set of critical gender scholarship has emerged that examines gender as a central aspect of security privatization. In parallel, the private security industry has begun to pay more attention to gender and women in an attempt to improve its legitimacy. In this talk, I outline some of the sites where we can “see gender” in private security, from debates on accountability and regulation, to gendered divisions of labour, and the remaking of civil-military relations more broadly. Maya Eichler is Canada Research Chair in Social Innovation and Community Engagement and assistant professor in the Department of Political and Canadian Studies and the Department of Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax). Her research interests lie in feminist international relations theory, gender and the armed forces, the

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are one of the most important trends in contemporary social policy in countries in the South, having become the standard model for delivery of social services. CCTs have been praised by their promoters due to the low cost of delivery, their relatively high impact on reducing inequality, and their positive effects on women. Many feminist researchers, on the other hand, have suggested that CCTs—particularly those that specifically target women—are based on some contradictory assumptions about the nature of female empowerment. In particular, can women be empowered by entrenching an unequal division of labour? And what are the costs of these programs with respect to who women expend their labour? This presentation explores these debates in the context of Bolivia, Argentina, Egypt, Namibia and South Africa. Susan Spronk is associate professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies. Her research focuses on the experience of development in Latin America, more

Traditional theories about the origins of imperialism focus on political elites, either in the metropole or the periphery, asking whose interests drive imperial rule. Through an exploration of American Empire in the Pacific, this paper argues that imperialism may be reflective of the agents who navigate between societies rather than those with influence within metropole or colony. Specifically, this paper analyzes the origins of American imperialism in Samoa from 1872 through 1899. It shows that local concerns, about pigs and about papists, led unusual figures with little influence to play outsized roles in shaping international politics. In doing, it proposes a theory about the conditions under which imperialism is likely to occur in regions where there is no significant interest by the metropole or the colony in establishing imperial relationships. Eric Grynaviski is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. His book, Constructive Illusions (

Under what conditions do states shift inconsistently between acts of cooperation and conflict that is, engage in volatile foreign policy behavior? Even fierce rivals such as India and Pakistan often alternate inconsistently between military clashes and bilateral trade or security agreements. Yet IR studies often overlook volatility in foreign policy, focusing instead on what makes relations either more cooperative or more conflictual. This talk will present a theory of volatility in foreign policy behavior that hinges on the interaction between dynamics unfolding both at the domestic and the international level: the unbridled competition among domestic groups to rip off the benefits of certain foreign policy paths and a state’s relative power superiority. Eleonora Mattiacci is the Karl Loewenstein Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Amherst College. Her research focuses on the determinants of volatile foreign policy behavior, with a specific focus on climate change and nuclear prol

The Global War on Terror launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States has had a series of perverse effects. At its most egregious, it has licensed the return of torture and political assassination (now known as ‘targeted killing’), as well as the widespread degradation of personal privacy. Closely tied to these effects has been a growing militarisation of Western societies. In Canada this militarisation has been most noticeable in public acts, such as the designation of a stretch of Canada’s busiest highway as ‘the Highway of Heroes’, and the escalating presence of the military at sporting events. It is, however, a much more widespread phenomenon. This talk begins to explore the militarisation of Canadian society in and through its popular culture, jumping off from an analysis of two particular artefacts: an ‘award winning’ CBC Radio drama, Afghanada, and a children’s book, Road to Afghanistan, which is distributed by Scholastic Books to schools across the country. David Mutimer is Prof

Richard French is Professor and holder of the CN – Paul M. Tellier Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Realism is often misunderstood as encouraging a passive or fatalist attitude toward progress in human affairs: pessimism as resignation. An examination of the some of the most penetrating thinkers in the pessimistic tradition shows otherwise. A common tradition of pessimism and tragedy reveals a world-view which insists on the imperative of struggle in the face of the odds, and on the dignity and self-respect engendered by such efforts. Excellence and value are contingent, but their pursuit is not. Realism, pessimism and tragedy are not inherently corrosive of activism; they conceive themselves simply as a superior mapping of the territory to be traversed by the activist.

Thomas Juneau is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research focuses mostly on the Middle East, in particular on Iran, Yemen, Syria and US foreign policy in the region. He is also interested in Canadian foreign and defence policy and in analytical methods. He is the author of Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical realism and Iranian foreign policy (Stanford University Press, 2015), co-editor of a forthcoming book on strategic analysis in support of international policy-making, and co-editor of Iranian Foreign Policy since 2001: Alone in the world (Routledge, 2013). Discussant: Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail The Islamic Republic of Iran faced a favorable regional environment after 2001, especially in the wake of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran attempted to exploit this window of opportunity by assertively seeking to expand its interests throughout the Middle East. It fell short, however, of fulfilling its longstanding a

Bessma Momani is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a 2015 fellow at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. In the West, news about the Middle East is dominated by an endless stream of reports and commentary about civil war, sectarian violence, religious extremism, and economic stagnation. But do they tell the full story? For instance, who knew that university enrollment in the war-torn Palestinian territories exceeds that of Hong Kong, or that more than a third of Lebanese entrepreneurs are women? Change is on its way in the Middle East, argues Bessma Momani, and its cause is demographic. Today, one in five Arabs is between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Young, optimistic, and increasingly cosmopolitan, their generation will shape the region’s future. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and other research conducted with young

JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC MORIN, Université Laval. 9 novembre 2015 Présenté par le CÉPI et le Réseau en économie politique internationale (RÉPI). Les organisations-frontières dans les complexes de régimes : une analyse des réseaux de l’IPBES: Les complexes de régimes sont des ensembles d’institutions dont les mandats se chevauchent partiellement. Puisque les tensions sont fréquentes entre ces institutions, la recherche actuelle tente d’identifier des stratégies permettant de les atténuer. De récents développements en théorie des régimes, en études des sciences et des technologies et en analyse des réseaux sociaux indiquent que des « organisations frontières » – une forme d’organisation jusqu’à récemment ignorée par les Relations Internationales – peuvent éventuellement réduire les tensions au sein des complexes de régimes en générant des savoirs perçus comme crédibles, légitimes et pertinents. Dès lors, cette présentation évalue la capacité la nouvelle Plateforme intergouvernementale sur la biodiversité et les servic

The Initiative aims to find sustainable governance solutions for the Old City of Jerusalem, probably the most sensitive issues in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Our initial efforts identified the needs of stakeholders (symbolic, religious, security, economic, political and social) and posited a set of alternatives to meet them. We concluded that an effective and empowered third party presence was imperative in the Old city, along with the need to maintain its physical integrity. We developed the concept through a process of detailed consultations and research, working with a stellar group of experts, academics, former officials and policymakers.

Jean-Pierre Cabestan, ''China's New Foreign Policy Priorities'' Centre for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa, October 7, 2015. Since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, China’s foreign and security policy has become more assertive by the day. Aiming to turn China into a global leader and full-fledged naval power, the new Chinese leadership is clearly prepared to take more risks in order to challenge the U.S. domination of the Western Pacific and return “Asia to the Asians”. Simultaneously, the Xi administration has become more active on the world stage, trying to appear not only as a challenger to the status quo but also a builder of new international norms. As its economic growth slows and its reform plan faces fresh challenges, can China deliver as much as it has promised? Can it really reshape the world economic order, lead the reorganisation of Asia’s diplomatic and security order, and replace the U.S. as the hegemon of East Asia and the Western Pacific? Are the U.S. and its Asian all

PANELISTS: Nadia Abu-Zahra, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa Jamie Liew, Immigration Lawyer and Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa Michael Molloy, Part-time Professor, and former Senior Fellow, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa Agnieszka Weinar, Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence and Visiting Scholar at Metropolis international and Center for European Studies, Carleton University. MODERATOR: Patti Lenard, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. Many are calling the Syrian civil war the worst humanitarian disaster of our time. Millions of refugees have escaped Syria in search of refuge, and millions more are internally displaced, from a conflict that shows no sign of slowing. The global community is struggling to respond effectively to the urgent needs of these profoundly vulnerable people. The e

Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (University of Ottawa). His research enquires the politics of knowledge in and on the Middle-East. His current project investigates the translation of critical ideas in military organizations (Israeli Defense Forces, US Army and Canadian Forces). Philippe completed a Ph.D. in International Relations at the University of St-Andrews in the United Kingdom in December 2014. His thesis developed a methodology and method to analyse relationships between theory and political-practice in specific issues. Philippe relied on this methodology to reveal how IR knowledge production was involved in the Iranian nuclear crisis (1998-2014). Philippe recently published on reflexivity and actor-network theory in International Relations and, on smart power/soft war in US-Iran relations in the International Studies Journal. Post-positivist approaches became gradually popular in International Relations (IR) from t