Thursday, November 26th, 2009 Does the Elephant Dance? Dilemmas in Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy

Description

We tend to think we know more about India and Indian foreign policy than we often do. Until recently, this may not have mattered so much to Canadians. But as India’s economic success lends weight to its aspirations to emergence as a leading international actor, we might want to know more. The presentation will focus on the factors that shape India’s outlook, its principal partners, potential adversaries and its main foreign policy challenges. In the discussion that follows, we can expand the focus, if there is interest in doing so, to include Canada in India’s wider world view.

Speaker’s biography:
David Malone became President of Canada’s International Development Research Centre, one of the world’s leading institutions in the generation and application of new knowledge to meet the challenges facing developing countries, on 1 July 2008. IDRC funds applied research by researchers and innovators from developing countries on the problems they identify as crucial to their communities. It also provides technical support to those researchers. Previously, he served as Canada’s High Commissioner to India and non-resident Ambassador to Bhutan and Nepal from 2006 to mid-2008.

Prior to his nomination to India, from 2004 to 2006, he was Assistant Deputy Minister in Canada’s department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade responsible initially for Africa and the Middle East and subsequently for Global Issues, in which portfolio he oversaw Canada’s multilateral and economic diplomacy.

From 1998 to 2004, he was President of the International Peace Academy, an independent research and policy development institution in New York.
From 1994 to 1998 he served within Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade as Director General of its Policy, International Organizations and Global Issues Bureaus. During this period he also acquired a D.Phil. from Oxford University with a thesis on decision making in the UN Security Council.
From 1992 to 1994, he was Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Canada to the United Nations, where he chaired the negotiations of the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations (the Committee of 34) and the UN General Assembly consultations on peacekeeping issues. From 1990 to 1992, he represented Canada on the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and related bodies. Earlier foreign assignments took him to Egypt, Kuwait and Jordan.
He is a graduate of l’Université de Montréal, of the American University in Cairo, and of Harvard and Oxford Universities.
He was a Guest Scholar in the Economic Studies Program of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, and a Guest Scholar of the Economics Department of Columbia University, 1988-89.

He served as an Adjunct Professor of International Relations in Columbia University’s graduate School of International and Public Affairs, 1991 1994. Since 1991, he has been a Senior Fellow of Massey College in the University of Toronto. In 1998, he was appointed an Adjunct Research Professor in the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University (Ottawa). From 1999 to 2004 he was an Adjunct Professor at the New York University School of Law. From 2002 to 2004 he was also a Visiting Professor at l’Institut d’ Etudes Politiques in Paris.

He has published extensively on peace and security issues in a variety of journals. His books include Decision Making in the UN Security Council: The Case of Haiti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and, with Mats Berdal (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000). Two further volumes were published in 2002, Unilateralism and US Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, co edited with Yuen Foong Khong) and From Reaction to Conflict Prevention: Opportunities for the UN System (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, co edited with Fen Osler Hampson). In 2004, he published The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century (Lynne Rienner).

His widely reviewed book The International Struggle for Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980-2005, was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.

In 2007, he published, with Markus Bouillon and Ben Rowswell, Iraq: Preventing a New Generation of Conflict, (Lynne Rienner).

In early 2008, he published The Law and Practice of the United Nations with Simon Chesterman and Thomas M. Franck (Oxford University Press).

xAt present, he is at work on Can the Elephant Dance? A Survey of Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, due out in 2011 from Oxford University Press.

While at IPA, he wrote commentary frequently for the International Herald Tribune, the Globe & Mail and a number of other publications. He continues also to write in a lighter vein, often for the Literary Review of Canada.