Past Events

Description

Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become more democratic as they have grown richer, while others—most notably China—haven’t? In From Development to Democracy, Dan Slater and Joseph Wong offer a sweeping and original answer to this crucial question.

On November 1, Dan Slater and Joe Wong were joined by Edward Friedman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Janice Stein, Professor of Political Science and founding director of the Munk School to discuss From Development to Democracy.

This event is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, Asian Institute, and the Department of Political Science.

Description

This is an in-person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar room 108, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 created many crises, such as massive internal displacement, destroyed critical infrastructure, military occupation, to name only few. Ukrainian society proved surprising resilience in the asymmetric war and the local authorities are contributing to this resilience significantly. In this seminar, I’ll present the research findings, conducted with the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, and the Association of Ukrainian Cities, with focus on two questions: First, how local public authorities (LPA) contribute to the resilience in Ukraine under conditions of the war. We define resilience as the capacity of local authorities to adjust and provide public services during the war despite external shocks and threats. The underlying assumption is that anticipatory governance is a useful approach to reinforce and sustain resilience capacity of the local authorities in Ukraine. Thus, the second question is, what is the capacity of public authorities in Ukraine for anticipatory governance and what are opportunities and challenges to it. The analysis is based on three pillars of anticipatory governance – foresight, networks, and feedback loops, as well as considers the role digital technologies.  The study is based on the survey of communities in Ukraine in September 2022. The questionnaire has been informed by the previous interviews and a focus group with the representatives of local authorities (community and regional level) and representatives on the central level. The survey dataset consisted of 241 responses – it is 16% of all communities in Ukraine. Where possible, we compare the results with the findings of the 2021 baseline survey on open government.  The assessment of LPAs resilience in this survey confirms the widespread assumption that local self-government authorities in Ukraine are the backbone of the national resilience in crises arising from the war. The ongoing work of LPAs under high security threats ensured adequacy of public services to the current needs of citizens, as well as provided legitimate centers to manage crises and coordinate resources, in line with the local context. The findings indicate that networks – both with citizens, businesses, as well as with other communities in Ukraine and abroad, were crucial to withstand seven months of the war. In the same time, the survey indicated some weak spots in anticipatory governance practices that should be strengthened, especially with regards to vertical intragovernmental collaboration and feedback loops to increase flexibility of governance.  

Dr Oksana Huss is a researcher in the BIT-ACT research project at the University of Bologna, Italy and lecturer at the Anti-Corruption Research and Education Centre, Ukraine. Her areas of expertise cover (anti-)corruption and social movements, as well as open government and digital technologies. Oksana obtained her doctoral degree at the Institute for Development and Peace, Germany and held several research fellowships in Canada, France, Netherlands, and Sweden. She consulted international organizations, such as Council of Europe, EU, UNESCO and UNODC. Oksana is a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network and author of the book How Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policies Sustain Hybrid Regimes: Strategies of Political Domination under Ukraine’s Presidents in 1994-2014.

Description

This is an in-person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many psychiatrists in the US used the mind-altering drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to help patients explore their unconscious minds. A handful of these psychiatrists discovered that if LSD was taken in a comfortable, compassionate, and aesthetically pleasing environment, it could generate powerful, spiritually transformative experiences that had lasting mental health benefits. This specific approach to LSD therapy became known as "psychedelic" (mind-manifesting) therapy. In 1962, after becoming impressed with psychedelic therapy, the clinical psychologist Gary Fisher decided to see if LSD could help twelve “severely disturbed” children who he worked with at Fairview State Hospital in Costa Mesa, California. The environment at Fairview though was less than ideal. The children’s ward was “bleak and barren” and the atmosphere was “constant pandemonium.” Many children were “hyperactive, screaming, [and] assaultive.” Despite these difficult conditions, Fisher did his best to create a comfortable setting in the visitor’s room to help children have positive LSD experiences. Drawing on Fisher’s notes about these LSD sessions, I explore how children reacted to psychedelic therapy in such difficult circumstances. Surprisingly, Fisher found that some of the children were often able to enjoy the “psychedelic experience” in the same way that “normal adults” did: they took pleasure in sensory stimuli and in music, they became “more alive,” and they seemed to have profound, transcendental experiences. What this case ultimately highlights then is the resilience of these children. In the chaotic environment of a state institution, suffering from difficult mental conditions and subjected to unethical experimentation, these children were able to have positive experiences.  

Speaker Bio:

Andrew is a PhD Candidate in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Toronto, he did a BA and an MA in Philosophy and Science and Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation follows the stories of three American mental health experts who in the 1960s used LSD in radically different ways to treat children in state hospitals. His research is funded by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Description

This is an-person event in Seminar Room 108N, North House, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario.

Digital transformation increasingly drives economic growth in the rich capitalist democracies, but orienting production around digital technologies is associated with rising inequality and spreading precarity. In Recoding Power, Rothstein outlines three tactics that workers can use to build power in the current episode of economic transition, where they otherwise lack access to traditional power resources like unions and institutions for social protection. Drawing on four in-depth case studies of workers responding to mass layoffs at tech firms in the United States and Germany, Rothstein shows how workers can develop creative tactics to “recode” management’s discursive techniques for control, transforming them from obstacles into resources for collective action. By centering workers’ lived experiences in the workplace, Recoding Power develops an account of actually existing digital transformation, illustrating how the path of capitalist development is shaped not by economic necessity, but by political creativity.  

Sidney Rothstein is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College. His research focuses on the political economy of wealthy democracies in comparative perspective, especially in Europe and the United States. In particular, Rothstein examines the politics of digital transformation, seeking to explain how the transition to the knowledge economy reshapes relationships of power and patterns of inequality in different countries. He holds a BA from Reed College, a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held appointments at Haverford College, the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

This event is funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

This is an-inperson event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

What are the long-term socioeconomic consequences of wartime destruction? In this research project, Daniel M. Smith and colleagues use historical aerial photographs taken after the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II to measure micro-variation in neighborhood-level damages, and then investigate the relationship between the amount of damages sustained and the present-day strength of neighborhood associations, a key indicator of geographically-rooted social capital. Even after decades of population recovery, economic growth, and transformations of the urban space, the most heavily damaged neighborhoods continue to have less-organized neighborhood associations, and also exhibit lower socioeconomic well-being in terms of education, occupation, and residential stability. These findings are consistent with the idea that the social capital of survivors is a crucial ingredient for postwar recovery: when fewer survivors remain, communities can potentially be set on a path of persistent disadvantage.  

Speaker Bio:

Daniel M. Smith is the Gerald L. Curtis Visiting Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.  His interests cover a range of topics in Japanese politics, comparative politics, political economy, and political behavior. A core substantive focus of his research and teaching is political representation in democracies, especially how institutions such as electoral systems affect voting behavior and the demographic backgrounds and behavior of political elites.  He is the author of Dynasties and Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2018) and articles appearing in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis. He is also a co-editor of the Japan Decides election series.  Prior to coming to Columbia University, he was assistant and then associate professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. He received his MA (2009) and PhD (2012) in political science from the University of California, San Diego, and his BA (2005) in political science and Italian from the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2012 to 2013, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University.

Description

This event will be held in-person in the Boardroom at the Observatory, Munk School, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario

Skill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. In the lead up to the 2022 World Cup, Qatar has drawn on cutting-edge material, design, and information technology to rebuild itself as a global elite destination for sports and culture. An examination of the Qatar’s booming construction industry and the experiences of migrant workers it relies on reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used.

Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as “unproductive,” “poor quality,” or simply “bodies.” Iskander demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries.

About the Speaker: Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights.

This event is sponsored by the Innovation Policy Lab and the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Description

Abstract:

In the 1990s and 2000s, contemporary art in India changed radically in form, as an art world once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance. In response to the liberalization of India’s economy, art was cultivated by a booming market as well as by new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. The result was an unprecedented efflorescence of contemporary art and growth of a network of institutions radiating out from India. Speaking from her new book, Infrastructure and Form, Karin Zitzewitz articulated the connections among formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. By untangling the complex interactions of infrastructure and form, Zitzewitz offered a discussion of the barriers and conduits that continue to shape global contemporary art and its relationship to capital more broadly.   

Speaker Bio:

Karin Zitzewitz is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. An art historian, anthropologist, and curator, her latest research is collected in Infrastructure and Form: Globalization, Contemporary Art, India (University of California Press, 2022). Her earlier books are The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (Hurst/Oxford, 2014) and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (Chemould, 2003). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Fulbright program.  At Michigan State, Zitzewitz is core faculty in the Global Studies in Arts and Humanities Program and Muslim Studies Program, and is affiliated faculty with the Asian Studies Center and the Center for Interdisciplinarity (c4i).

Image caption: Vivan Sundaram, Barricade (with two drains), 2008, digital print.

Description

Prior to travelling to the Indo-Pacific region, Minister Joly will join the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy to discuss Canada’s work to expand partnerships and deepen ties within the region.

This online event is sponsored by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Description

ABSTRACT:  

When the Imperial Japanese Army swept across Southeast Asia in 1942, the region’s large and diverse South Asian diaspora was incorporated into Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In recent years, the story of the Indian National Army (INA) and its leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, have received much popular and scholarly attention. However, Bose’s relationship with his Japanese supporters is often framed around the issue over whether Bose was an Axis collaborator or a patriot who was willing to go to any length to achieve India’s independence. Yet this opportunist/collaborationist binary ignores a fundamental fact about the wartime Japanese empire. Japan’s purpose in articulating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was precisely to create an empire of client-states that could mount a serious challenge to the liberal internationalism of the League of Nations and the socialist internationalism of the Communist International. It was in the interest of both Bose and Japanese military administrations to present Indian nation-building exercises in the diaspora as “authentic” expressions of Indian nationalism. This talk explores the complicities between empire, nationalism, and internationalism through the language of authenticity as Japanese and Indian leaders in wartime Southeast Asia attempted to mobilize the South Asian diaspora behind a vision of a resurgent India that would play an active role in Japan’s community of nation-states to overthrow Euro-American colonialism in Asia. It highlights both the possibilities and limitations of a Pan-Asianist universalism that privileged the nation-state as the building block of transnational solidarity, as well as the violence and exploitation that Tamils and Muslims in particular experienced at the hands of both the Japanese military and Bose’s Provisional Government of Free India.    

BIO:

Aaron Peters recently completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto, Department of History on Japan-South Asia relations titled, “A Complicated Alliance: Indo-Japanese Relations, 1915-1952.” He is currently a lecturer at Ambrose University in Calgary.

Description

This was an in-person event at the Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario.

On November 10, Lionel Gelber Prize award-winning author Carter Malkasian sat down with Janice Stein, Prize Chair and University Professor, to discuss his book, The American War in Afghanistan: A History.

After two decades and four presidential administrations, America finally ended its war in Afghanistan. There is little doubt about the outcome: the United States spent twenty years pouring blood, sweat and treasure into a frustrating and complex war — one that it ultimately lost. In The American War in Afghanistan: A History, noted historian and former adviser to American military commanders in Afghanistan Carter Malkasian offers an extraordinary view into the dynamics of that led to America’s withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Malkasian’s account draws on primary sources and takes the reader through the complicated political, military and socio-cultural forces that shaped America’s longest war.

About our Speaker:

Dr. Carter Malkasian is the Defense Analysis Department Chair at the Naval Post Graduate School, U.S. Navy. He was the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford from 2015 to 2019. He has extensive experience working in conflict zones, especially Afghanistan and Iraq, and has published several books. The highlight of his work in conflict zones was nearly two years in Garmser district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, as a State Department political officer. He was also in al-Anbar in 2004–2005 and 2006; Kunar in 2007; Honduras in 2012; and was General Dunford’s senior advisor in Afghanistan in 2013–2014. His latest book, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (Oxford University Press), won the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize and was rated one of the top 100 books of 2021 by the New York Times. His 2013 book, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (Oxford University Press), won the 2014 silver medal for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Book Award. Other books include Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Islamic State, A History of Modern Wars of Attrition (2002), and The Korean War, 1950-1953. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and completed his doctorate in history at Oxford University. He speaks Pashto.

Description

OCAD University’s Faculty of Art in Partnership with Reel Asian Film Festival presented:

The Kym Pruesse Speakers Series:

ART CREATES CHANGE

Featuring: Deann Borshay Liem

The screening was a Canadian premiere of Liem’s film CROSSINGS, a documentary that follows a group of international women peacemakers who set out on a risky journey across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for an end to a 70-year war that has divided the Korean peninsula and its people.

Deann Borshay Liem, a Sundance Institute fellow, has worked in independent documentaries for over twenty years. Her films include the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (Sundance, 2000) and the award-winning films, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS, 2010) and Memory of Forgotten War (with Ramsay Liem; PBS, 2015). As former director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) she activated the work of racialized artists in public media.

The screening was followed by a conversation featuring Deann Borshay Liem and Christine Ahn of Women Cross DMZ.

Event co-sponsors:

Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies

Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University

Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto

Asian Canadian Women’s Alliance

Korean Professional Womens’ Association

Description

Canada, Sri Lanka, UK | 2021 | 67 minutes | Tamil, Urdu, English with English subtitles | Documentary, Experimental, LGBTQ+ Filmmakers

*FREE SCREENING*

If From Every Tongue It Drips is a documentary constructed between three locations that follows Ponni, who writes a form of 19th-century queer Urdu poetry called Rekhti, and her lover Sarala, a camera operator. As their personal lives unfold on camera, the lines between rehearsal and reality, location and distance, and self and other seem to dissipate. The couple’s conversations are interwoven with the director’s own reflections, connecting dots from each of their specific experiences and reference points.

By choosing to look at the personal and political through the framework of quantum physics, director Sharlene Bamboat draws connections between British colonialism and Indian nationalism, tracing the impact these distinct histories and realities have on queer art, politics, poetry, dance, and music. From landmark pieces of music and poetry composed by revolutionary figures to more contemporary works, the film shows us the politicization of South Asian pop culture and the possibilities of its reclamation. – Mariam Zaidi

Description

Synopsis:

In this oddly sweet and gentle story, Hong, a shy young man, opens his eyes to love when he coincidentally meets Lele, the mistress of a sex worker business. After a disastrous blind date set up by his mother, Hong is dragged to Lele’s hotel by his cousin. Not yet ready to lose his virginity to one of Lele’s girls, Hong finds himself strangely attracted to the older woman instead. This comes as a revelation for Hong, who has been under the thumb of his mother Meiling all of his life, and has never acted out of his own will. Little does Meiling know that the spark in Hong’s heart for this older, experienced, and unapproved woman will truly mark the beginning of Hong’s growth into adulthood.

Two multi-talented singer-actor heartthrobs from different generations, Kai Ko and Vivian Hsu, play the awkward yet warm couple who find comfort in each other. After a break of almost 10 years since Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, Mama Boy is a welcomed return for Arvin Chen that will bewilder you with its magical colour palettes and characters that grow in you as well as on the screen. -June Kim

Director’s Bio:

Arvin Chen is a Taiwanese American director and a familiar name to Reel Asian. He attended the festival with his debut feature, Au Revoir Taipei, which was invited as the closing film for the 14th festival in 2010. Chen has been recognized and awarded by many festivals, including the Berlinale, where he won the NETPAC Award for Au Revoir Taipei.

Description

This is an-in person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

Ukraine’s heroic defence has provoked various discussions about brave and strong resistance, much evidence of which have been demonstrated since late February 2022. Ukraine’s experience has proven that enduring resilience forms a solid basis for resistance, whereas successful resistance enables transformative effects of resilience. Both systems and functions are critical for a nation’s survival, development and recovery which anticipates and observes the post-victory progress in reconstruction, recuperation, and rehabilitation of the nation.  

The development cooperation programme “Resilient Ukraine” has been implemented by the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) since 2016 with the support of the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Currently, the ICDS team studies several resilience-related attitudes and perceptions of the war and recovery among vulnerable groups in Ukraine (i.e. refugees, IDPs, veterans, youth, traumatised families, people from de-occupied territories etc.). The analytical data will be used for promoting best practises in and civic engagement for crisis preparedness, civil protection and public safety on local and regional levels in Ukraine. Moreover, a more profound understanding of societal resilience will contribute to strengthening active citizenship and social cohesion and preventing polarization, radicalization and youth disillusionment through intergenerational and interregional dialogue.  

Dmitri Teperik will present the latest results of ICDS field research with the major findings and policy recommendations on Ukraine’s development needs in operational continuity, civil security, law enforcement, crisis preparedness and strategic communications. As the role of institutional resilience — especially that of state agencies and local municipalities — increases considerably during the crisis and also recovery phase, Ukraine’s international partners and donors should, therefore, support the wide spectrum of resilience stakeholders on all levels.  

Speaker bios:

Dmitri Teperik has been the Chief Executive of the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) since 2016. From 2007 to 2015, he worked at the Estonian Ministry of Defence, overseeing research and development (R&D), as well as the defence industry. In 2016, he co-founded the “Resilience League”, an international training and co-operation platform, to provide young professionals and experts with practical skills and tools necessary to develop cognitive resilience against hostile disinformation and societal polarisation. Since 2016, he has been leading “Resilient Ukraine”, a development and cooperation program that focuses on measuring and strengthening national resilience in vulnerable communities in Ukraine. Among his main academic interests are factors contributing to national resilience, situational awareness in the information environment and social media, as well as interdependencies between communication and behaviour. He holds an MSc degree from the University of Tartu (Estonia) and has completed various internships abroad, including at Vilnius University and NATO HQ. He has participated in various professional training courses on security in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, as well as NATO and the EU.

Description

This is an-person event in Seminar Room 108N, North House, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario.

The main focus of the talk is on internal regime dynamics in Russia ("regime personalization") before and during the war.  Fabian Burkhardt is a comparative political scientist. His research interests are political institutions, such as executives and constitutions, in authoritarian regimes, with a regional focus on post-Soviet countries, in particular Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. At IOS in Regensburg, he conducts research on how digital transformation shapes post-Soviet authoritarian regimes. Since July 2020, he has been the co-editor of Russland- and Ukraine-Analysen, and of the Russian Analytical Digest since 2022. Burkhardt received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen for the thesis “Presidential power and institutional change: A study on the presidency of the Russian Federation.” Before joining the IOS, he worked at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), the Higher School of Economics (HSE Moscow), and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP Berlin). His research has been published in journals such as Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, and Russian Politics.

Description

This event has been postponed. Please watch this space for a revised event date.  

Former Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada, the Honourable John Baird P.C. will join Professor Peter Loewen, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, to discuss Canada’s role in a changing world and the future of democratic societies.

This event is part of the David Peterson Public Leadership Program Signature Lecture Series. The David Peterson Public Leadership Program is made possible by the generosity of the Honourable David Peterson and Mrs. Shelley Peterson.

About our Speakers

The Honourable John Baird P.C. is a Senior Advisor at Bennett Jones LLP and a former Senior Cabinet Minister in the Government of Canada. An instrumental figure in bilateral trade and investment relationships, Mr. Baird has played a leading role in the Canada-China dialogue and worked to build ties with ASEAN countries. In addition, Mr. Baird has worked closely with international leaders to strengthen security and economic ties with the United States and Middle Eastern countries.

A native of Ottawa, Baird spent three terms as a Member of Parliament and four years as Foreign Minister. He also served as President of the Treasury Board, Minister of the Environment, Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons. In 2010, he was selected by Members of Parliament from all parties as Parliamentarian of the Year. Prior to entering federal politics, Mr. Baird spent ten years in the Ontario Legislature where he served as Minister of Community and Social Services, Minister of Energy, and Government House Leader.

In addition to his work with Bennett Jones, Mr. Baird sits on the advisory board of Barrick Gold Corp., the corporate boards of Canadian Pacific, Canfor Corporation (as Chair), Osisko Gold Royalties, the FWD Group and PineBridge Investments. He also serves as a Senior Advisor at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consultancy.

Mr. Baird also volunteers his time with Community Living Ontario, an organization that supports individuals with developmental disabilities, the Prince’s Trust Canada, the charitable office of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, and is a board member of the Friends of Israel Initiative. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Political Studies and an Honourary Doctorate of Law from Queen’s University at Kingston.

Peter Loewen is the Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Professor Loewen teaches in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is the Director of PEARL, Associate Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and a Fellow with the Public Policy Forum. For 2020-2022, he is a Distinguished Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Tel Aviv University. From 2016 to 2018, Professor Loewen was the Director of the School of Public Policy & Governance until it was amalgamated with the Munk School of Global Affairs to create the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Description

Speaker Bios:
Ron Levi is Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Sociology, and is Distinguished Professor of Global Justice. He holds a courtesy cross-appointment to the Faculty of Law, and is a Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen.Ron has served as Secretary of the Law and Society Association, and as an elected Council Member for the Sociology of Law section of the American Sociological Association. He was made Chevalier in l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Government, is a recipient of the Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize, and has served as Scholar-in-Residence for Holocaust Education Week. In 2022, he received the Global Educator Award from the University of Toronto.  

Gabriele Chlevickaite is an Assistant Professor in Empirical and Normative Studies at the VU Amsterdam (Faculty of Law, Criminology and Criminal Law Department), where she conducts research into fact-finding in international criminal investigations. She is a board member of the Center for International Criminal Justice (www.cicj.org), an interdisciplinary research centre at the VU Amsterdam and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Amsterdam, where she conducted my NWO Research Talent-funded PhD research in 2017-2021. In 2013-2017, she was an analysis assistant at the International Criminal Court, and in 2020-2021 she was a research assistant with the Independent Expert Review of the International Criminal Court.  

Monica Eppinger, Associate Professor; Co-Director, Center for International and Comparative Law, Center for International and Comparative Law. Eppinger has published ten articles or peer-reviewed essays in journals including the Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, the George Washington International Law Review, and Catholic University Law Review. She has been a featured expert on the law of war, Russia, and Ukraine on CNN, public radio, and in local print and broadcast news media.In 2011, the American Society of Comparative Law selected the working draft of her article on the institution of private property in Ukraine, "Unraveling the Illiberal Commons," as one of six papers discussed at its annual works-in-progress workshop held at Yale Law School. Her work on property was also selected for the 2011 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Her work in international law, on the law of war, was selected for the 2011 Childress Symposium, the 2013 Ewha Comfort Women Conference (Seoul, Korea), and the 2014 Cornell Law School Comfort Women Conference.Before entering academia, Eppinger served in the United States diplomatic corps as a tenured Foreign Service Officer for nine years, with tours of duty or policy-making experience in Nigeria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Caspian energy, and West African security. She was awarded an individual Superior Honor Award, the State Department’s highest civilian honor, in 1999.  

Ilona Khmeleva holds a PhD in Law specializing in International Law (Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv). Since 2021 she coordinates the project "Ukraine in Europe: Parliamentary Dimension" (implemented by LibMod in partnership with the East Europe Foundation) and is an expert in the field of international law and international relations. Ilona Khmeleva is a member of the Ukrainian Association of International Law, author of numerous scientific publications.  

Oleksandr Merezhko, Professor and Doctor of Law in International Law, namely in such areas as international public law, international diplomatic law, international treaties law, EU law, international environmental law, law of international organizations, etc. He is a specialist in international treaties and international economic law. Doctor of Legal Sciences, thesis: “Theory and Principles of Transnational Trade Law (Lex Mercatoria)” (Ukraine, 2002). Candidate of Legal Sciences (PhD), thesis: “Humanitarian Intervention and International Law” (Ukraine, 1996). People`s Deputy, Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Affairs and Interparliamentary Ties of Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Vice-President of Parliament Assembly of the Council of Europe.  

Afonso Seixas-Nunes obtained a PhD from the University of Essex in 2019, with a thesis entitled ‘The legitimacy and accountability for the development of autonomous weapon systems under international humanitarian law’. Between 2018-2020, Afonso worked as a visiting scholar at the Blavatnik School of Government under the supervision of Professor Dapo Akande.He taught various legal subjects at the Porto Law School and at Essex Law School and currently also lectures at the Universidad de Deusto in Spain. His areas of interests are international law and the use of force; international humanitarian law and the challenges of new technologies of warfare for international law; and state responsibility for violations of international humanitarian law caused by artificial devices.Afonso Seixas-Nunes is a Jesuit Priest, having been ordained in 2010. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford University.

Description

This event is taking place at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar room 108, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

Speaker Bios:

Ulf Brunnbauer is a social historian of Southeastern Europe. He serves as Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg (Germany) and holds the Chair of Southeast and East European History at the University of Regensburg. In his research, he deals mainly with the social history of the Balkans since the 19th century and with questions of nationalism and state-building. His most recent book, co-authored with Philipp Ther et al., is a history of transformation on the example of two shipyards since the 1970s (In den Stürmen der Transformation, Suhrkamp, 2022). He is also author of Globalizing Southeastern Europe. Emigrants, America, and the State since the 19th Century (Lexington, 2016).  

Katrin Boeckh is Research Associate at the Leibniz-Institute for Southeast and East European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg. She studied History of Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Slavic languages and Languages of the Balkans at the universities of Regensburg and Munich and earned a degree as M.A. in 1991. In 1995, she graduated at the University of Munich with her Ph.D. in History of Eastern and South Eastern Europe (Dr. phil.). Habilitation followed in 2004. During her professional career at the Osteuropa-Institut (first in Munich, since 2007 in Regensburg), Katrin Boeckh was technical editor of the journal „Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas" until 2008, since then she is senior researcher in the Department of History. Her areas of research are ethno-national conflicts and their consequences, state and churches in socialist countries, institutions in late Stalinism and the discourse of values during transformation, with a regional focus on the Ukraine and the countries of Yugoslavia.

Heike Karge is Assistant Professor at the Chair for the History of Southeastern and Eastern Europe, University of Regensburg. Her main research interests include the cultural and social history of Southeastern Europe in the 19th and 20th century, especially history of medicine and psychiatry, social policy, postwar politics; conceptual history, history and knowledge; remembrance cultures in Eastern and Southeastern Europe; interdisciplinary trauma research; dealing with war crimes / Transitional Justice; nationalism and conflict in the former Yugoslavia.  

Heike Karge studied history, East and Southeast European Studies, and sociology at the universities of Leipzig and Zagreb. She holds a phD from the European University Institute Florence (2006) and a habilitation awarded by the University of Regensburg (venia legendi for History and Modern History of East and Southeastern Europe) (2018). In 2017 she was Invited Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, in 2019/20 she was Interim Professor at Leipzig University, Chair for the History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.  Among her recent publications are: Der Charme der Schizophrenie. Psychiatrie, Krieg und Gesellschaft im serbokroatischen Raum. Berlin: De Gruyter 2021; (together with Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Sara Bernasconi, eds.), From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe. Budapest, New York: CEU Press 2017; Den Zweiten Weltkrieg erinnern: Der (post-)jugoslawische Raum, in: Südosteuropa Mitteilungen 8/2-3 (2021), 73-80; Psychiatrische Diagnostik und klinische Praxis im Ersten Weltkrieg, in: Timm Beichelt, Clara Maddalena Frysztacka, Claudia Weber, Susann Worschech, eds., Ambivalenzen der Europäisierung. Beiträge zur Neukonzeptualisierung der Geschichte und Gegenwart Europas. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2021, 239-251.  

Lilia Topouzova is an Assistant Professor of History and Creative Nonfiction at the University of Toronto. She is a scholar and a documentary filmmaker whose interdisciplinary work explores the relationship between remembering and forgetting. Her academic research appears in the American Historical Review, Gender & History, The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, Journal of Visual Literacy, and Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. She is the writer of the critically acclaimed documentary film The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and TIFF, and received more than twenty-five awards, including the Human Rights Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2007. Her other films include a feature-length documentary on immigration Saturnia (co-writer, co-director, co-producer, 2012), distributed by the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. She is currently in production of her third film, Anaanaga: My Mother.  Dr. Topouzova held fellowships at Brown University in the US, York University in Toronto, the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) at the University of Potsdam in Germany, and at the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in Concordia University in Montreal. In 2022, she was a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia.

Description

This is an-in person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

There’s something about Paul Beatty’s humour in The White Boy Shuffle (1996) that’s easier to intuit than it is to put into language. It is this characteristic of Shuffle’s comedy that invites readers to question what makes literature “literature.”   With this question in mind, “Meditations on the Self” explores how Beatty guides our reading of Shuffle as a collection of comedic psychological fables. In other words, this presentation reflects on how Beatty uses humour to prompt (or dupe) the reader into acting out the text through the very reading of it. The so-called “reading effect” produced by Beatty’s comedic novel is precisely what opens up a larger conversation about the relationship between “literature” and “psychoanalysis”—as well as the uneasy relationship between psychoanalysis and race. By attempting a close reading of Shuffle’s self-reflexive humour, Jasleen willingly allows herself to fall for Beatty’s running joke on the reader—with the hope of better understanding the significance of The White Boy Shuffle not only as a work of African American literary fiction, but as a work of literary and cultural theory.  

Speaker Bio:

Jasleen Singh (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in English. Jasleen’s dissertation seeks to identify the language and categories that will allow us to more fully understand the way humour functions in African American literature. Her research focuses primarily on the novels of Paul Beatty, which Jasleen reads as ideal instances of Black psychoanalysis. Prior to joining the Department of English, Jasleen graduated with Honours in Journalism and English from Carleton University, and completed an MSc in postcolonial literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has reported on racial and economic inequality for radio and print in Ottawa, and has been stationed in Kigali, Rwanda, where she covered breaking news for the TV10 network. In addition to receiving funding from SSHRC and OGS, Jasleen’s doctoral project is funded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Top Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

Description

This was an in-person event at the Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario.

“My concern is the inclusion of Muslims in Western Europe. These are dark times; all the more reason therefore to see if there is a way forward. What I aim to bring into the open is how far majorities are willing to go to be inclusive, where they draw the line, and why they draw it there and not elsewhere.”

Paul Sniderman, Fairleigh Dickinson Jr. Professor of Public Policy, Stanford University

Sniderman’s research focuses on multiculturalism and politics in Western Europe and spatial reasoning. He coauthored The Struggle for Inclusion: Muslims and Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2020) with Elisabeth Ivarsflaten. He has published many other books, including When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands (Princeton University Press, 2007) with Louk Hagendoorn, Reasoning and Choice, The Scar of Race, Reaching beyond Race, The Outsider, and Black Pride and Black Prejudice, in addition to a plethora of articles. He initiated the use of computer-assisted interviewing to combine randomized experiments and general population survey research. Sniderman received his B.A. degree (Philosophy) from the University of Toronto and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

Description

This is an-person event in Seminar Room 108N, North House, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario.

Intelligence communities are everywhere and always in motion. Japan’s has been no exception, often shifting in response to dramatic analytical and organizational failures, changes in the regional and global balance, and sudden technological developments. In the first half of the 20th century, Japan had a full spectrum intelligence apparatus. This came apart with defeat in WWII and subordination to the United States.  After the Cold War, shifts in the security environment and major intelligence failures stimulated rethinking by Tokyo. Following a period of half-hearted and incomplete reforms, the Japanese government began to enhance its collection and analysis capabilities, and to tackle in earnest the dysfunctional stovepipes and leak-prone practices hampering its intelligence system. Where do matters stand today? In this program, Richard J. Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies at MIT, discusses the evolution of Japan’s intelligence community and its future.   

Speaker Bio:

Richard J Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been head of the MIT Political Science Department, Vice-Chair of the Committee on Japan of the National Research Council, and chair of the Japan-US Friendship Commission. He has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was awarded an Imperial decoration, the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star by the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese Prime Minister. His study of the political and policy consequences of the 2011 Tohoku catastrophe, 3:11: Disaster and Change in Japan, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013. Samuels’ Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia, was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book in international affairs in 2007. Machiavelli’s Children won the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the Jervis-Schroeder Prize from the International History and Politics section of American Political Science Association. Earlier books were awarded prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, the Association of American University Press, and the Ohira Memorial Foundation. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, International Security, Political Science Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, The National Interest, Journal of Japanese Studies, and Daedalus. From 2014-2019, he was Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, and his latest book, Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community, was named one of the “Best of Books 2019” by the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal, Foreign Affairs.

Description

Graduate Programs will be showcasing their programs at this Online McGill fair. The MGA & MPP (Professional Masters degrees will be showcased here as well).  

Description

Book launch of the Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India (Cambridge University Press), authored by Shivaji Mukherjee (University of Toronto).

ABOUT THE BOOK:  

What explains the peculiar spatial variation of Maoist insurgency in India? Mukherjee develops a novel typology of colonial indirect rule and land tenure in India, showing how they can lead to land inequality, weak state and Maoist insurgency. Using a multi-method research design that combines qualitative analysis of archival data on Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh states, Mukherjee demonstrates path dependence of land/ethnic inequality leading to Maoist insurgency. This is nested within a quantitative analysis of a district level dataset which uses an instrumental variable analysis to address potential selection bias in colonial choice of princely states. The author also analyses various Maoist documents, and interviews with key human rights activists, police officers, and bureaucrats, providing rich contextual understanding of the motivations of agents. Furthermore, he demonstrates the generalizability of his theory to cases of colonial frontier indirect rule causing ​ethnic secessionist insurgency in Burma, and the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan.  

AUTHOR BIO:  

Shivaji Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in Political Science, at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and also part of the Graduate Faculty at the University of Toronto, St. George. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Center for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He works on political violence and conflict in India, and does research on insurgencies in South Asia, particularly focusing on colonial legacies of indirect rule and Maoist insurgency in India. He also has an interest in state formation, legacies of colonial institutions, and other types of political violence in South Asia like the Kashmir insurgency and Hindu-Muslim violence and vigilantism.

Description

This is an-person event in Seminar Room 108N, North House, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus is a Professor at the University of Manchester and associate researcher at the Centre of History, Sciences-Po Paris. He is a specialist of the economic and diplomatic aspects of the Holocaust and post-war reparations. His research considers other genocides, Jewish history in Europe and exhumations of corpses after mass violence. He also works and looted art in the Holocaust and the unfinished restitution process.  Jean-Marc Dreyfus’ current research is three folded. It considers the question of looted art in this Holocaust and its legacy; he is interested in the personal narrative and the microhistorical approaches of Holocaust victims; he considers the question of the ‘forensic turn’ in Holocaust studies, the ‘forensic turn’ being the studies of human remains’ treatment during and after the genocide, including their uses for commemorative purposes.

Sponsored by Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World (CEFMF) and co-sponosred by Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.

Description

This event took place in the Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON.

On November 21, Ana Palacio, former Foreign Minister of Spain and a member of the European Parliament,  joined Janice Stein, University Professor at the Munk School and Department of Political Science, to discuss the role of democracies in foreign policy within a changing world. H.E. Professor Alfredo Martínez Serrano, Ambassador of Spain, and Professor Peter Loewen, Director of the Munk School, provided introductory and welcome remarks.

About our Speaker

Ana Palacio is a Senior Strategic Counsel to ASG, where she draws on her experience as Foreign Minister of Spain and a member of the European Parliament to advise clients on business in Brussels and throughout the European Union. Ms. Palacio is also the Founding Partner of Palacio y Asociados, a Madrid-based consulting and law firm.

Ms. Palacio was the first woman to serve as Foreign Minister of Spain, from 2002-2004. Previously she was a member of the Spanish Parliament, where she chaired the Joint Committee of the two Houses for European Affairs. She also served as a member of the European Parliament, where she chaired the Legal Affairs and Internal Market Committee, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and the Conference of the Committee Chairs, the most senior decision-making body on legislative policy and programs.

As the Head of the Spanish Delegation to the European Union’s Intergovernmental Conference and a member of the Presidium of the Convention, Ms. Palacio was at the forefront of the debate on the future of the European Union and drafted and led legal discussions on the European Treaties reform.

Previously, she served as Senior Vice President for International Affairs of AREVA, the international nuclear and renewable energy company; Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the World Bank Group and Secretary General of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

She is currently an Arbiter at the Arbitration of Madrid’s Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the Panel of Arbitrators of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Pharmamar, a biopharmaceutical company; a member of the International Advisory Board of INVESTCORP, an alternative investment products provider, and of Anadarko, an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company.

She serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of the European Union, the Board of the Atlantic Council of the U.S., and the Supervisory Board of Hague Institute for Internationalization of Law. Ms. Palacio graduated with honors from the Lycée Français (Baccalauréat Mathèmatiques).

Description

This event took place in person at the Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON.

On November 22, His Excellency Alar Karis, President of the Republic of Estonia, delivered an address entitled "The Future of Euro-Atlantic Security: Is Ukraine our Moment of Truth?" at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Professor Peter Loewen, Director of the Munk School, delivered welcome remarks and Professor Andres Kasekampl moderated the discussion.

About the Speaker

His Excellency Alar Karis is the President of the Republic of Estonia. Until taking office on 11th October 2021, he was the director of the Estonian National Museum (from 2018). President Karis served as the Auditor-General of the Republic of Estonia from 2013-2018, and before that as the rector of the Estonian University of Life Sciences from 2003-2007 and of the University of Tartu from 2007-2012. Most of President Karis’ scientific career has focused on research and teaching in molecular genetics and developmental biology. He has worked at universities in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and joined the University of Tartu as a professor in 1999. His research has been among the most widely cited internationally of any Estonian scientist of his generation.

Description

At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Union started industrialization with no gold and currency reserves. The government feverishly sought gold to pay the tremendous foreign debts acquired to purchase equipment, materials, and technologies abroad. State-run stores called Torgsin (1930-36), which sold food and goods to the Soviet people at inflated prices in exchange for their heirlooms – foreign currency, gold, silver, and diamonds, became an important source of revenues to finance industrialization and the major strategy of survival for people during the mass famine of 1932-33.  

Elena A. Osokina is  Professor of Russian History at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at Moscow University, Russia (1987).  She has authored 5 books published in Russian, English, Italian and Chinese, and numerous articles published in the major journals in Russia, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Finland, and Italy. More specifically her research focuses on the impact that the Soviet industrialization of the 1930s had on everyday life, social hierarchy, transformation of the economy, and the nature of Stalinism.  The most recent book came out in 2021 by Cornell UP Stalin’s Quest for Gold. Also available in English: Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (2001). Elena Osokina received two book prizes: the Makariev book prize and the Prosvetitel’  book prize (both in 2019).  She is a recipient of the fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Kennan Institute-Woodrow Wilson Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Hoover Institution Archives, Davis Center for Russian Studies (Harvard University), La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris, France),  Aleksanteri Institute (Helsinki, Finland), and others.  Before coming to USC, Elena Osokina taught at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Oberlin College, and Missouri State University, and internationally at the Donaueschingen Academy (on the invitation of the Council of Europe) and Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (both in Germany).

Description

China’s 20th Party Congress has just sealed a third term for Xi Jinping.  What will the next five years hold for Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy?  How should Canada and the United States be dealing with a China that is economically weaker but continuing its wolf warrior diplomacy abroad? Three experts of Chinese elite politics convened to discuss these pressing issues.  

Dr. Alfred L Chan is Professor Emeritus at Huron University College, Western University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto, and is a long-term research affiliate with the Asian Institute at the Munk School. A political scientist and China expert, he has taught and researched about China for more than four decades. He is also the author of Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership, 1953-2018 (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Diana Fu is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, and Director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School. She is a non-resident fellow at Brookings and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. She is also a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Her research examines popular contention, state control, civil society, and authoritarian citizenship, with a focus on contemporary China. She is author of the award-winning book Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (2018, Cambridge University Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series).

Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Li focuses on the transformation of political leaders, generational change, the Chinese middle class, and technological development in China. He is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China (2017), and Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement (2021). He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title Xi Jinping’s Protégés: Rising Elite Groups in the Chinese Leadership.

Victor Shih is an Associate Professor of Political Economy and the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy & Strategy, UC San Diego. Professor Shih is an expert on the politics of Chinese banking policies, fiscal policies, and exchange rate, as well as the elite politics of China. He is the author of Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation and Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi, published by the Cambridge University Press. He is also editor of Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Institutions and Financial Conditions, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Description

CASSU Academic Seminar

This talk will invite us to historicize and contextualize the evolution of patriarchal violence in contemporary East Asia against Orientalist imaginations and official reinventions and appropriations of Confucianism, to better explain gender violence following the global #MeToo movement without regarding “Confucianism” as the ahistorical source of East Asia’s patriarchal violence.

Dr. Ting Guo is Assistant Professor of Language Studies, University of Toronto (Scarborough), focusing on religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. Her first book monograph, Politics of Love: Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Critical Research on Religion, Anthropology Today, and Journal of Religion and Film. She co-hosts a Mandarin podcast called "in-betweenness" (@shichapodcast).

Description

The secret US talks with the Taliban and the resulting “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” aka the Doha Deal set the stage for Afghanistan’s dramatic collapse on August 15th of 2021. This agreement and the strategy the United States used to end this war will continue to be scrutinized for decades to come. Not long after this collapse, the Ukraine war began and US and NATO, who left Afghanistan due to ‘war fatigue’ engaged this new theatre with a renewed energy and sense of purpose.  Shoaib Rahim was a member of the government peace delegation for Afghanistan and spent the last two years of the republic preparing for the peace negotiations only to realize that deals and agreements had already been made on the government’s behalf by the powers that be. He will share with us his first-hand observations of the final months of the Republic, how he has grown to distrust externally driven political roadmaps and to try and draw certain parallels between Afghanistan and the on-going war in Ukraine.  

Shoaib Rahim is the former Senior Advisor to Afghanistan State Ministry for Peace, closely involved in the peace negotiations between the government and the Taliban. He also served in many public sector roles such as the Acting Mayor of Kabul and Senior Advisor to the Minister of Defense. He is a Duke University Alumni, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Visiting Scholar at The New School in New York.  An Associate Professor of Practice at the American University of Afghanistan’s Business Department, he has recently resettled in Toronto and is co-authoring a book on the collapse of Afghanistan’s National Defense and Security Forces despite two decades of international investment and the sacrifices made in blood and treasure.

Description

Using mostly unexplored archives from Albania, China, Italy, France, and Germany, as well as conducting interviews, the research explores the educational networks of Albania during the Cold War. This project proposal contends that studying these educational and academic exchanges would provide a more complete understanding of the communist regime of Albania during the 1960s and most of the 1970s when hundreds of economic and industrial projects were under construction with Chinese assistance. To compensate for the lack of an adequate specialized workforce, hundreds of Albanians were sent to Eastern and Western Europe, and China to pursue university studies. By tracing Albania’s educational networks during its communist period, this study aims to inscribe part of the history of Albania’s communist past into the broader context of the exchanges that took place between East European countries, as well as between them and the rest of the world in the field of education and expertise circulation during the central decades of the Cold War. The study is also aimed, among others, at revealing the limits of ideology driven economic models, its legacy in the country’s model that followed the fall of the communist system in Albania (path dependency), and the shortcomings of the centralized planning of human resources at national level under the communist regime. Furthermore, the research will also focus on the personal experiences of the students, which were strictly intertwined with the dynamics of the Cold War divisions, and were continuously conflicted between political loyalties and spaces of personal affirmation. In this way, this investigation poses issues of, among others, agency, political control and oppression, self-development, and creativity under the last Stalinist regime of Europe. Ultimately, the research contributes to the emerging scholarship focused on the agency of smaller countries of Eastern Europe and the transnational networks they create at the margin of the competition between major powers. Considering the recent events in Eastern Europe, historical studies have the potential of providing a better understanding of the area and provide the European Union with better tools to adopt adequate policies towards Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Ylber Marku is Lecturer in History at Zhejiang University, China. He is a Cold War historian with research interests in Albania’s communist past, Tirana’s transnational networks during the communist period, the Global Cold War, Sino-Albanian Relations, East European History, and the Global South in the Sixties. Dr. Marku obtained his Ph.D. in History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, in November 2017. Before his doctoral studies, he studied Political Science and Politics of the European Union at the University of Padua, Italy, and has lived in different European countries such as Spain, the Netherlands, and Greece. Dr. Marku has published research articles in leading journals in his field such as, among others, Cold War History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and The International History Review. He is currently working on several research articles and the completion of his first monograph.

Description

This event is taking place at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar room 108, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

In 2015, the Sweden Democrats, a populist and anti-immigrant party, traveled to Lesbos to block the mobility of people fleeing war and seeking refuge further North. To explain these unconventional movements, we build on Du Boisian sociology to account for the structuring role of racialized violence at the border and to incorporate a more global perspective on far right scholarship. We argue that the far right’s repertoire of violence, including the hardviolence of white privilege, the soft violence of paternalism, and the extension of remote violence, infringe on the agency and self-determination of displaced people. Following Du Bois, we contend that this repertoire of violence is racially structured and racially motivated by factors rooted in domestic politics yet enacted in transnational space which enforces a global color line. We seek to extend sociological accounts of migration politics by taking seriously transnational social processes that cannot be contained within the nation-state and the effects of which are multi-scalar, individual, and collective.

Description

This paper explores the intersections between the study of comparative racialization of Asian and Indigenous peoples and the study of comparative empires between Imperial Japan and the US. By reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel, Ceremony, I propose how interracial alliances are imagined and desired in the novel and in its criticism by compounding experiences of imperial violence and misrecognizing racial and familial belonging at the intersection of empires, US’s and Japan’s. The novel’s protagonist, Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran, imagines kinship with Japanese soldiers in the Philippines during WWII, whom he fails to kill because he misrecognizes them for his Laguna family members. I argue that the novel cites the Bering Strait theory—which problematically proposed that Indigenous peoples originally migrated from Japan to the Americas through the Bering Strait—and remembers the atomic bomb as an intersection of imperial violence of resource extraction of Laguna Pueblo land to create the bomb and nuclear destruction of Japan to end the war to make sense of these misrecognitions as imagined solidarities. In these instances of making sense of solidarity, the novel elides Japanese imperial contexts and histories. This specific elision of Japan plays into Orientalist clichés of making the Orient supine in the Western imagination. In the US, this supine portrayal is specifically used for the subordination and liberation of the Orient. In this way, the novel inadvertently asserts US imperial/Orientalist intentions that mirror US-Japan geopolitical relations in the postwar to Cold War period. By building on Jodi Byrd’s “cacophony of colonialism” in its global and inter-imperial contexts, and by engaging with recent Asian-Indigenous scholarship by Iyko Day, Quynh Nhu Le, and Juliana Hu Pegues, this paper explores the following questions: Are interracial/global encounters with Japan often misread or desired as solidarities? And how do we reckon with interracial solidarity through the global framework of comparative empires?   

Speaker Bio:

Lilika Ioki Kukiela is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the intersections between Japanese and American empires through figurations of Japan in post-1945 ethnic American literary texts that complicate or make sense of one’s relation to empire.

Description

This event features a lecture by Luxembourg’s first female finance minister Ms. Yuriko Backes. As a member of the Eurogroup, which coordinates Euro area economic policies, and the influential Economic and Financial Council (ECOFIN), bringing together the economy and finance ministers of EU member states, Ms. Backes will provide first-hand insights into the European Union’s response to the key challenges of our time. These include a range of issues from the war in Ukraine and the related energy crisis to climate change and rising geopolitical tensions, all of which are fundamentally (re-)shaping the EU and its policies. As the finance minister of one of Europe’s largest financial centres, Ms. Backes will especially focus on the economic impact of today’s permacrisis and the role of the European Union in an emerging bipolar era.

About the Speaker

Yuriko Backes joined the coalition government between the Democratic Party (DP), the Luxembourg Socialist Workers Party (LSAP) and the Green Party (déi gréng) as Minister of Finance in January 2022. As a career diplomat, she held several high-level positions with Luxembourg’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including a post as the representative of the European Commission in Luxembourg.

Description

Abstract:

This presentation explored how a distinctive temporal consciousness – mainly a sense of belatedness, but of non-synchronousness or non-identity with the present regardless – characterizes Korean modernist poetry of the 1920s and ‘30s in such a way as to substantiate on the literary-cultural plane its latecomer advantage, what Leon Trotsky had called “the privilege of historical backwardness,” through the non-linear, non-sequential appearance of the various European avant-gardes “all at once, en masse,” as art historian Youngna Kim puts it. Dr. Smith suggested that the amalgamation of various forerunner movements constitutes the formal imprint of Korean modernist poetry’s belatedness, registered not merely as subjective feeling of falling behind by Korean poets themselves but as the literal coming after, in the wake of the European avant-garde’s heyday such that it became retroactively possible for the poem to magnetically attract and synthesize these cumulative exploits into a formal singularity otherwise unthinkable in Eurocentric literary-historical time. He, therefore, located in select works by poets such as O Chang-hwan, Kim Ki-rim, Yi Sang, and Im Hwa a multifaceted temporal metabolism distinguished by an oscillation between belatedness and a highly technical quality outpacing the present, too advanced for the mainstream reading public and, given the forward directionality and innovative ethos of modernist practice broadly, rendering the social acceleration of modernity’s “shuddering” 20th century in new poetic forms.

Dr. Kevin Michael Smith is Assistant Professor of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis in 2019. His research and teaching focuses on modern Korean literature and culture with emphasis on poetry and poetics, concerned broadly with aesthetics and politics in colonial Korea and its aftermath, pursuing questions of uneven development, literary form, and periodization comparatively across East Asia and Euro-America. His articles and translations have appeared in positions: east asia cultures critique; Modernism/modernity; Trans-Asia Photography Review; Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review; and Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, Shuddering Century: Modernist Poetry in Colonial Korea and the Poetics of Belatedness which examines the uneven and accelerated reception of the European and Japanese avant-gardes by Korean poets in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Description

Today, more than ever before, US politics is intertwined with media, from legacy print publications and broadcast networks through social media platforms. This has led to competing, poll-driven narratives–especially at election time. Despite the wealth of data, however, experts consistently get things wrong. The latest example is the 2022 midterm elections when the predicted "red wave" never materialized. The stakes will be even higher in the presidential election of 2024–with Donald Trump as an announced candidate. Why does US politics remain so hard to analyze and interpret–and what can be done to clarify the picture at this critical moment?  

Speaker Bio:

Sam Tanenhaus, visiting professor at St. Michael’s College and the Munk School, is a historian and journalist. The former editor in chief of the New York Times Book Review, he has also been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writing feature articles on politics and culture. His books include Whittaker Chambers (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, shortlisted for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize; and a national best seller) and The Death of Conservatism (New York Times Best Seller and one of The New Yorker’s “100 Favorite Books” of 2009). His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other publications in the United States and abroad. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and City University of New York and lectured at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and New York University as well as at the White House and at the Clinton, Kennedy, and Johnson Presidential libraries, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Sun Valley Writers Conference. He is currently completing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

Description

At the end of the 1920s and through the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin’s leadership sold art abroad by thousands of tons. Stalin’s art export became one of the extraordinary sources to finance Soviet industrialization. When the sale of ordinary antiques failed to satisfy the financial needs, the decision was made by Stalin’s Politburo to shift to the export of major museum masterpieces. The former Imperial Hermitage being the major Russian and world-famous depositary of the best examples of Western art had to suffer first and most. As a result of the unprecedented sale, the masterpieces from the Soviet Union found their way to private collections and world museums.   

Elena A. Osokina is Professor of Russian History at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at Moscow University, Russia (1987). She has authored 5 books published in Russian, English, Italian and Chinese, and numerous articles published in the major journals in Russia, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Finland, and Italy. More specifically her research focuses on the impact that the Soviet industrialization of the 1930s had on everyday life, social hierarchy, transformation of the economy, and the nature of Stalinism. The most recent book came out in 2021 by Cornell UP Stalin’s Quest for Gold. Also available in English: Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (2001). Elena Osokina received two book prizes: the Makariev book prize and the Prosvetitel’ book prize (both in 2019). She is a recipient of the fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Kennan Institute-Woodrow Wilson Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Hoover Institution Archives, Davis Center for Russian Studies (Harvard University), La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris, France), Aleksanteri Institute (Helsinki, Finland), and others. Before coming to USC, Elena Osokina taught at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Oberlin College, and Missouri State University, and internationally at the Donaueschingen Academy (on the invitation of the Council of Europe) and Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (both in Germany).

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Join us on Thursday, December 15 as Laura Raham discusses her work in progress "Shifting social norms: The role of knowledge transfer in global gender programmes from an actor-network perspective" at this Innovation Policy Lab Brown Bag Event.

About the Speaker

Laura Rahm, Ph.D., is a MSCA Research Fellow at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University and the lead investigator of H2020 GlobalKnoT project. Laura Rahm is also an Associate Researcher at the Paris-based Center for Population and Development, a Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute, the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and the Center for Global Social Policy at the University of Toronto. She specializes in global governance, population, and gender policies with a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights and knowledge mobilization to end harmful practices.

Description

Abstract:

Hedging is widely misunderstood as sitting-on-the-fence behavior. This talk corrected this misunderstanding by focusing on the Southeast Asian states’ policy responses to the U.S.-China rivalry. Far from being opportunistic, speculative behavior, hedging, in fact, seeks survival and avoids speculation. Professor Kuik defined hedging as instinctive, insurance-maximizing behavior under high-uncertainty and high-stakes conditions, where a rational actor seeks to mitigate and offset risks by pursuing active neutrality, inclusive diversification, and prudent contradictions, with the ultimate goal of cultivating a fall-back position. Each of these elements is evidenced in the Southeast Asian states’ responses to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy. Based on the Southeast Asian states’ alignment patterns over the past decades, Professor Kuik argued that weaker states opt to hedge under two structural conditions: when patron support is uncertain and when threat perception is diffuse and unpredictable. The greater the structural uncertainty, the greater the weaker states’ tendency to hedge, even and especially as space for maneuvering shrinks. Structural conditions, however, only explain when states hedge; it is domestic factors that explain how and why states hedge the ways they do.      

Cheng-Chwee Kuik is Professor in International Relations and Head of the Centre for Asian Studies, the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies at the National University of Malaysia (UKM), and a nonresident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, SAIS Johns Hopkins. He received the 2009 Michael Leifer Memorial Prize, presented by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, for his essay “The Essence of Hedging.”

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Are you applying to the Master of Global Affairs & Public Policy degree programs for fall 2023?  

Come join the Admissions officer to get your application questions answered on a one-on-one Q & A in this session! Register today!

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Event series: Race and Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

Abstract:

In the Philippines, the United States’ first overseas colony, direct occupation had supposedly come to an end with Filipinization: the appropriation of native leadership into colonial governance. But Filipinization also informed the everyday conduct and political imaginations of those outside of structures of power, namely, migrant workers across the Pacific. In this talk, I suggest that American counterinsurgency informed how people across the Pacific imagined how the future citizens of an independent Philippines might behave. This provisional subject—the Filipino subjunctive—emerges from these transnational imaginaries, and the creative labors of everyday life. Together, this fledgling community asked: What would it look like to become Filipino, and who would pay the price to make this nation yet-to-come?

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Along with Prof. De Leon’s talk, there will be a graduate student luncheon held at 12:00-1:45pm; location: TBD. For this graduate luncheon, students will have the opportunity to engage in informal conversation with Professor De Leon to discuss all things graduate school-related including writing, fellowship applications, publishing in journals, selecting post-docs, hitting the job market as a graduate of a Canadian institution, opportunities for PhDs beyond traditional academic presses, and other general advice. Those interested in registering for this lunch should email Melanie Ng at melanie.ng@mail.utoronto.ca. Attendance will be restricted to U of T graduate students.  

Adrian De Leon is an award-winning writer and public historian at the University of Southern California, where he is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. A graduate of the History Department at U of T, his dissertation was recognized with the Governor’s Gold Medal in 2020. He is also a host for PBS Digital Studios and the Center for Asian American Media. His first academic book, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press.

Description

Urban Ahlin is the Ambassador of Sweden to Canada, since February 2019. Prior to his appointment as Ambassador, Mr Ahlin was a member of Parliament, representing the Social Democratic Party. Following the 2014 parliamentary election Mr Ahlin was elected Speaker of the Swedish Parliament, Sveriges Riksdag.  

Urban Ahlin first became a member of Parliament in 1994. Mr Ahlin has since then worked in the field of foreign policy in various capacities including Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, member of the War Delegation and he is also a former member of the Swedish Defence Commission. Mr Ahlin also held the position of Foreign Policy Spokesperson for the Social Democratic Party and was a member of the party’s Executive Board. Furthermore, Mr Ahlin is one of the founding members of the first pan-European think-tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).  

Urban Ahlin is a teacher and graduated from the University of Karlstad with a Master of Science.

The four priorities of the Swedish Presidency of the EU:

Security- unity
Competitiveness
Green & energy transitions
Democratic values and the rule of law – our foundation

Security, competitiveness, green and energy transitions, democratic values and the rule of law. These are the priorities of the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2023.  

Sweden is assuming the Presidency of the Council of the European Union at a time of historic challenges for Member States and the Union as a whole. Russia’s illegal, unacceptable and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a threat to European security, with dire consequences for migration, as well as global food and energy supplies. Ukraine is fighting for its survival as a nation – and for the security and lives of its citizens. The EU and its Member States have rallied unprecedented support for Ukraine and will remain firmly by its side. Continued cooperation with trusted partners, including a strong transatlantic link, needs to be secured.  

European economies are severely affected by Russia’s war as well as the ongoing manipulation of energy supply. Rising inflation levels, interest rates and energy prices have left companies and citizens struggling. While decisive action has been taken, it is imperative that we stay firm in our transition to the green economy and safeguard the basis of our economic model for long-term growth.  

Our unity and readiness to act remain key to EU security, resilience and prosperity.

Description

BOOK TALK

Imperial Gateway explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan’s empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. It uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan’s imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order.

Author Bio:

Seiji Shirane is an Assistant Professor of Japanese History at The City College of New York (CUNY). He received degrees in history from Yale University (BA) and Princeton University (PhD), and his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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*This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances*

Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

The saint, prophet, liberated guru, or enlightened being occupies a powerful place not only in their respective religious spheres, but in the social lives of the cultures that create and maintain them. Yet how are these social categories “created” and through what means are their parameters delimited over the last century and a half as technologies of mass communication have transformed the epistemology of discourse?

To approach these questions, this paper focuses on the “living arahants” of early twentieth-century Burma, examining how the narratives surrounding this supposedly enlightened class are negotiated and contested in the public sphere through the mediums of photography and print. By exploring the figure of the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1955), a Burmese scholar-monk and pioneer of insight, or vipassanā meditation, it is argued that the application of these categories is not just a religious act, but profoundly political—determining who wields the power of definition itself.   

BIO:

Tony Scott is a PhD Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, working under Professor Christoph Emmrich. His research focuses on the relationship between Pali commentary, insight (vipassanā) meditation, and Buddhist statecraft in twentieth-century Burma/Myanmar. Tony’s dissertation centres on the Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā (Commentary on the Questions of King Milinda) of the Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw (1868-1954), a rare example of a modern Buddhist commentary (aṭṭhakathā) that caused controversy amongst the highest levels of the Burmese monastic community (saṅgha) and first independence government.

As a 2018-2019 Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Buddhist Studies, Tony spent the year working in Myanmar, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and as a 2019-2020 Bukkyō Dendō Kyokai Foreign Scholar Fellow, he will finish his dissertation at the University of Tokyo under Professors Norihisa Baba and Ryosuke Kuramoto.

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Description

When we talk about the future of the region, it should be remembered that on the one hand, the region consists of five different states that can have their own future based on internal and external factors. On the other hand, the war in Ukraine for Central Asia will have the same serious consequences as the collapse of the USSR, which led to the construction of a new system of international relations, a change in the geopolitical balance, the emergence of new risks and threats, as well as new opportunities.

And when we talk about the future of Central Asia, our region has six important tasks and challenges.  

1.     Building a new model of relations with Russia.  

2.     Building a new geopolitical balance.  

3.     The third important task, reducing the risk of secondary sanctions  

4.     The Fourth task, to not be drawn into any military conflict. Including within the region.  

5.     The Fifth task, the region should be "Too important to be threatened" and "Too important to be lost" for all major geopolitical players.  

6.     The Sixth task, make lemonade from lemon. Use the eight "windows of opportunity".

Dossym Satpayev, Director of Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, Board Member of Kazakhstan Council on International Relations, Board member of Kazakhstan Council on International Relations, political analyst at FORBES.KZ, and Co-Founder at the Alliance of Analytical organizations. Dr. Datpayev is a founder of Private Cultural and Educational Fund and Literary Project “Soyz”, and a co-founder of Kazakhstan literary award "Altyn Kalam." His monographs include “Deformation of the vertical in Kazakhstan. From anonymous empires to anti-lobbies”, Almaty, Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, 2019; "Rules of survival in conditions of urban terrorism", Almaty: Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, 2003; and "Political science in Kazakhstan. Prospects of discipline", Almaty: Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, 2002.

Sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.

Description

This presentation will discuss how print culture, or “polite propaganda” was utilized to deploy images of supposedly happy American women as feminine wives, mothers and homemakers living under a capitalistic consumer culture.  Through magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Amerika, the latter distributed in the Soviet Union, the U.S. government hoped to convince American women and Russian “babushkas” of the superiority of the American way of life and in the process, undermine a Soviet regime that promoted “gender equality” in place of the “special status” of American women.  More broadly, it sheds light on the significance of women, gender, and consumption to international politics during the Cold War. Analyzing the Cold War through this unique lens reveals a broader U.S. foreign policy approach which sought to gradually destabilize the Soviet government not just through political and military means, but also through cultural diplomacy.

Diana Cucuz specializes in American, women’s and cultural history and the intersections of foreign and domestic policy, and politics and culture.  Her research focuses on the post-World War II era, and in particular the ways in which the U.S. government and media politicized women, traditional gender roles and consumer culture during the early Cold War. Her first book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds (University of Toronto Press), will be released in February 2023.  She is currently working on a second book, on the American National Exhibition which took place in Moscow during the summer of 1959.  Dr. Cucuz holds a PhD from York University and teaches at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States and co-sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School.

Description

Ian Garner will discuss his new book, Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat & Survival (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), which combines historical research and literary translation to reveal the creation and afterlife of the Stalingrad story.

In the fall of 1942, with the fate of the USSR hanging in the balance, Soviet propaganda chiefs sent their finest writers—Vasily Grossman, Konstantin Simonov, and a host of others—to the Stalingrad front as newspaper correspondents. Exploring these authors’ experiences and work, and analyzing readers’ responses to their writing, Garner will explain why the idea of Stalingrad continues to play an integral role in Russian subjectivity and political culture today. As Vladimir Putin’s regime claims to wage war in Ukraine in defence of the memory of World War II, understanding the Stalingrad myth’s production and reception is crucial to our understanding of the present.  

Ian Garner’s research focuses on Soviet and Russian war propaganda. The author of Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat and Survival, he studied at the Universities of Bristol and Toronto, and at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory.

Description

This lecture will examine the ways that African peoples in North America imagined and pursued self-determination after World War II. It will illuminate how the U.S. and Canadian governments discredited Black people’s justice claims by using counterinsurgency and counter-revolutionary methods to undermine Black communities in North America (including the Caribbean).  

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantsè, Atrékor Wé) is William Dawson Chair, assistant professor, and specialist in post-Reconstruction U.S. history and the history of the African Diaspora in North America and the Atlantic World at McGill University. He is the author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press). Dr. Adjetey is working on two new book projects. One examines how revolutionary messianism in Black liberation movements in the United States and beyond inspired Western governments to pursue counter-revolutionary, counter-insurgent, and genocidal measures to thwart African-centered self-determination. His other project unearths just war theory, abolitionism, and humanitarianism in the context of nineteenth-century warfare along the Gulf of Guinea Coast.  

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

Description

The idea that China’s system of governance, which has achieved rapid economic growth through a one-party system, has an impact on other countries is gaining popularity. In this talk we call this hypothetical mechanism the China Effect. We examine whether the China Effect can be observed in the context of the global progress of digitalisation in the 2010s. To empirically tackle this issue, we focus on the policy transfer of digital protectionism via China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A possible pathway for China’s protectionist practices to spread to relevant countries is through the various channels of the initiative as well as bilateral agreements including memorandums of understanding. After briefly reviewing domestic digital protectionism in China, we conduct an event studies estimation. Results suggest that the countries involved in the initiative have strengthened their regulation of digital services, however, the effect of treatment is largely heterogeneous. To further examine underlying mechanisms, we also conduct case studies. Our findings suggest that discussion around the China Effect needs to focus more on the heterogeneous impacts and two-way influences of the countries involved. As the results suggest some emerging countries have stronger incentives to absorb the Chinese model, the findings have important implications for the foreign policymaking of countries like Canada, Japan, and the United States.

Asei ITO is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo. He obtained PhD in Economics from Graduate school of Economics, University of Keio, Japan. His research covers Chinese industrial development, outward FDI activities, and innovation. He is one of editors of China’s Outward Investment Data (Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo, 2014) and The Asian Economy: Contemporary Issues and Challenges (Routledge, 2020). Also, he is a recipient of academic prizes including Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Prize and Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. Currently he stays at Harvard Yenching-Institute as visiting scholar (2022-2023).