Past Events

Description

After the end of the Cold War espionage seemed to be something belonging to the pages of spy novels and the arrest of a former Estonian defence official in 2008 came as a shock. Since then, 20 people have been convicted for spying for Russia (more than in any other NATO country) and two for China. Based on material available on these 22 cases, the lecture aims to provide some answers to the following questions: What kind of information are the intelligence services of autocratic countries interested in? What is their modus operandi and what type of individuals are recruited? How long have the spies been active before being caught? Why have there been so many convictions in Estonia and so few in other NATO countries?

Ivo Juurvee is Head of Security & Resilience Programme at the International Centre for Defense and Security, Tallinn, Estonia.Prior joining ICDS in 2017, Dr. Ivo Juurvee had been a practitioner in the field of security for more than 13 years. Amongst other positions in Estonian public service, he has been an adviser at the National Security and Defense Coordination Unit of the Estonian Government Office and the head of the Internal Security Institute of the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences. He has also taught security related topics at the University of Tartu, Estonian Military Academy, Estonian School of Diplomacy, Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine, NATO School (Oberammergau) and on the FRONTEX master’s program on border management.

Ivo’s professional and academic areas of interest are information warfare, intelligence services and other forms of hybrid conflict. He has worked as an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies and given a guest lecture in several universities, including Stanford and Georgetown. He holds a PhD degree in history from the University of Tartu (2013) and an MA from the Central European University, Budapest (2003).

Description

The Prime Ministership of Jean Chretien was a tumultuous period in Canadian foreign policy, encompassing the Kosovo war, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the conflict in Afghanistan, and numerous other turning points in international affairs. The Graham Centre is proud to present a two-day conference at which leading scholars meet with policymakers to assess the key events of this important period.

Description

This event was a book launch for Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2022) co-authored by Jacques Bertrand, Alexandre Pelletier, and Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung.

Winning by Process asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities.

Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state’s ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.

Description

On September 13, the Munk School’s inaugural journalist fellow-in-residence, Paul Wells, will be joined in conversation with Ian Shugart, former Clerk of the Privy Council of Canada and incoming professor in the Master of Global Affairs and Master of Public Policy programs.

About the Speakers:

Ian Shugart is a Professor, Teaching Stream, at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He teaches in the Master of Global Affairs and Master of Public Policy programs.

Shugart’s time at the Munk School follows 30 years in the public service, most recently as Canada’s top civil servant, the 24th clerk of the Privy Council of Canada and secretary to the cabinet. He was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2019 as the successor to Michael Wernick.

Prior to that, Shugart was Chrystia Freeland’s deputy minister of foreign affairs at Global Affairs Canada, where he developed a reputation for his deep knowledge and devotion to Canada’s interests.

Shugart’s career has included deputy minister positions at Environment Canada and Employment and Social Development. At Health Canada, where he served as visiting assistant deputy minister and senior assistant deputy minister from 1997-2006, Shugart was chair of the Global Health Security Action Group and the Health Task force of APEC as well as a director on the World Health Organization’s executive board.

Shugart is an alum of the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, where he earned a degree in political economy. Following graduation, he worked as a constitutional policy advisor to then leader of the Opposition, the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, who is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School. Later, under the Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney, Shugart took on the role of policy director for the Office of the Leader of the Opposition before shifting to the public service in 1991.

Paul Wells is the inaugural journalist fellow-in-residence for the 2022-23 academic year at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Wells has been a well-respected political journalist for nearly 30 years. He wrote for Maclean’s magazine for 19 years and has written for the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the National Post and numerous other publications. His latest project, paulwells​.substack​.com, is a subscription-based newsletter that covers “politics and culture as though they mattered.”

A frequent commentator on French- and English-language television and radio, Wells moderated the national political leaders’ debates in 2015 and 2019. He has won four Gold National Magazine Awards and a National Newspaper Award, and filed stories from 17 countries around the world. His book on Stephen Harper, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, won three major non-fiction book awards: The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, the John W. Dafoe Book Prize, and the Ottawa Book Award.

Wells studied at the University of Western Ontario and the Institut d’Etudes politiques de Paris.

Description

Political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality and cannot be reduced to the factors that routinely go into thinking about economic inequalities or inequalities of power, although both have effects. Its currency is performative, not distributive, and is fundamentally about the nature and quality of social relations; politics is intrinsically process-oriented, comprising various ‘political transactions’ across citizens, representatives and interest groups, among others. Thus, to understand political equality, we need to appreciate how individuals relate to one another through the democratic process.In this lecture, Professor Margaret Levi presented the conceptual framework, that she, along with Professors Tim Besley and Pablo Beramendi developed since the publication of their paper, Political Equality: What is it and why does it matter? which forms the basis for their book-in-progress. A discussion and question and answer session followed the presentation.

The Cadario Visiting Lecture in Public Policy is possible because of the generous support of Paul Cadario, Distinguished Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  

About the Speaker: Margaret Levi is professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, a faculty fellow and former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. She is also co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub.  She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough.  She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Political Science Association. The most recent of her many books are In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, and A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021), co-authored with Federica Carugati.  She writes about what makes for trustworthy governance in states and organizations and what evokes citizen compliance, consent, and dissent.

Description

BOOK TALK

Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Press, 2022)  

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages.

In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position. From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.  

Order your copy of the book at: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674267978    

HAN SANG KIM is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Sociology at Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea. His teaching interests include visual sociology, qualitative methods, and sociology of film and media. He has conducted research and written on the themes of film archives, ethics of photographic representation, post/colonial visual culture, and mobilities. His most recent book is Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022) that traces the association between cinematic visuality and modern transportation mobility in forming a modern subjectivity in twentieth century Korea. He has been concurrently working on his second book project based on his doctoral dissertation on U.S. film propaganda activities towards South Korea from 1945 through 1972, putting on a self-reflexive critique of information-oriented archival approaches to film materials and expanding the project onto a methodological exploration. He has published essays in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and several other journals in Korean. He was the inaugural programmer of the Cinematheque KOFA at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul and taught at UC San Diego, Boston University, and Rice University during his postdoctoral years.  

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Description

Ten years ago in 2012, China claimed that it was forced to “regularize” its Coast Guard’s patrol surrounding the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands because the Japanese government purchased three of the features from a private owner. This year in 2022, China again announced to “regularize” its military activities beyond the median line of the Taiwan Strait as its sovereignty was allegedly challenged by the island visit paid by Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Speaker of the House. By making whatever excuses, Chinese aggressive behaviors over the East Asian waters have been transforming the security environment of the Indo-Pacific at a rapid speed. Then, what does China want to achieve in the end? How far is it going?

This talk will first analyze a historical trend of China’s domestic administration system regarding the sea. Secondly, it will focus on the new developments led by Xi Jinping, topped by the construction of the Spatial Infrastructure that utilizes its satellite network and extends also to the undersea. At the end, it will call for attention to the new application technologies China has been inventing, partially to win the hearts of the Global South with economic benefits, but more importantly to improve its own Maritime Domain Awareness worldwide.

Following the presentation by Dr. Masuo, the panelists will discuss ways in which Japan’s security policy should be aligned with the drastic changes in maritime security in Asia, based on the fact that Prime Minister KISHIDA announced in his first policy speech in December 2021 that he would draw up a new national security strategy in a year.

— Speaker Bios —
Chisako T. MASUO (益尾知佐子) is a Professor at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University and an Adjunct Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA). She has won the Nakasone Yasuhiro Award of Excellence in 2021 by her contribution to China studies and to the policy discussions regarding China’s Coast Guard Law. She received Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2008. Her research topics include Chinese domestic politics, foreign and maritime policies, and international relations with regards to China. Professor Masuo was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China Foreign Affairs University in 2019, and a coordinate research scholar working with late Professor Ezra F. Vogel at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 2014-2015. She is the author of China’s Behavioural Principles: International Relations Determined by the Domestic Currents (Tokyo: Chuko Publishing, 2019), as well as China Looks Back: Mao’s Legacy in the Open-Door Era (University of Tokyo Press, 2010), and a co-author of A Diplomatic History of China (University of Tokyo Press, 2017) all in Japanese. She also writes articles and book chapters in English and Chinese.

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Jonathan Berkshire Miller is currently a senior fellow with the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA). Miller is also Director and Senior fellow of the Indo-Pacific program at the Ottawa-based Macdonald Laurier Institute, Senior Fellow on East Asia for the Tokyo-based Asian Forum Japan and the Director and co-founder of the Council on International Policy. He also holds appointments as Canada’s ASEAN Regional Forum Expert and Eminent Person (EEP). Previously, he was an international affairs fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, based in Tokyo. Other former appointments and roles include terms as a Distinguished Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, and Senior Fellow on East Asia for the New York-based EastWest Institute. In addition, Miller previously spent nearly a decade working on economic and security issues related to Asia with the Canadian federal government and worked both with the foreign ministry and the security community.

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Eric Heginbotham is a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies and a specialist in Asian security issues. Before joining MIT, he was a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he led research projects on China, Japan, and regional security issues and regularly briefed senior military, intelligence, and political leaders. Prior to that he was a Senior Fellow of Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. After graduating from Swarthmore College, Heginbotham earned his PhD in political science from MIT. He is fluent in Chinese and Japanese, and was a captain in the US Army Reserve.

Heginbotham was the lead author of the recently released RAND US-China Military Scorecard, and a forthcoming RAND study on China’s Evolving Nuclear Deterrent. He is the coauthor (with George Gilboy) of Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior: Growing Power and Alarm, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, and is an editor of China in the Developing World, published by M.E. Sharpe. Heginbotham has published numerous articles in Foreign Affairs, International Security, Washington Quarterly, Current History, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a study of Japanese military options for the 21st century.

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Phillip Y. Lipscy is professor of political science at the University of Toronto, where he is also Chair in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. In addition, he is cross-appointed as professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo.

His research addresses substantive topics such as international cooperation, international organizations, the politics of energy and climate change, international relations of East Asia, and the politics of financial crises. He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy. Lipscy’s book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations.

Description

John Paul Kleiner, Senior Manager, University Relations at DAAD German Academic Exchange Service, will speak on Funding and Research Opportunities in Germany.

Christian Strowa, Head of Division Knowledge Exchange and Network, DAAD, will provide an overview of German Foreign Cultural and Education Policy after February 24, 2022.

The DAAD is the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers. Based in Bonn, Germany, the DAAD is part of Germany’s foreign cultural and educational policy (AKBP), which is often described as the “third pillar” of German foreign policy. Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, it has become necessary to question pre-conceived notions of what this third pillar can – and should – achieve.

Characterised as a “paradigm shift” or “fundamental turning point” (Zeitenwende) by German Chancellor Scholz, the Russian attack on Ukraine marked a rupture not only in German Foreign, Security and Defense Policy, but also in the field of AKBP. After looking at some concrete funding opportunities offered by the DAAD, this talk will focus on how the events of February 24th, 2022 affected academic exchange and scientific co-operation from a German (and European) point of view, taking a closer look at the German notion of science diplomacy and how it is being rethought in terms of a foreign cultural and education “Realpolitik”.

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

Description

The Munk School will be hosting a hybrid event with Peter Mansbridge, Distinguished Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Urban Ahlin, Ambassador of Sweden to Canada on Wednesday, September 21.

Join us as they discuss the future of NATO, arctic cooperation and Swedish-Canadian relations.

Speaker Bios:

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).

Peter Mansbridge is one of Canada’s most celebrated broadcasters. He was the longtime host of CBC’s The National. He is the host of the current affairs podcast, The Bridge by Peter Mansbridge and a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Description

The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Canada’s eighteenth Prime Minister, 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 the first in the 2022-23 David Peterson Public Leadership Program Signature Lecture  Series. The David Peterson Public Leadership Program Signature Lecture Series is made possible by the generosity of the Honourable David Peterson and Mrs. Shelley Peterson.  

About our Speakers  

The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, PC, CC, GOQ, LLD  In September 1984, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservative party to the largest victory in Canadian history, becoming Canada’s eighteenth Prime Minister. He was re-elected with a majority government four years later thereby becoming the first Canadian Prime Minister in 35 years to win successive majority governments and the first Conservative Prime Minister to do so in 100 years. He resigned in June 1993, having served almost nine years as Prime Minister.  His government introduced bold new initiatives such as the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Canada-U.S. Acid Rain Treaty and the Canada-U.S. Arctic Cooperation Agreement. Prime Minister Mulroney’s government also introduced a wave of privatizations, a low inflation policy, historic tax reform, extensive deregulation and expenditure reduction policies that continue to be the basis of Canada’s impressive economic performance today.  In an important attempt to include Quebec in Canada’s amended constitution, Prime Minister Mulroney was the architect of the Meech Lake Accord. His government also created the new federal territory of Nunavut, stretching across vast spaces of the Canadian Artic. Mr. Mulroney also served as Co-Chairman of the United Nations World Summit for Children and his government played leading roles in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, the creation of Le Sommet de la Francophonie, the Reunification of Germany and the first Gulf War.  Mr. Mulroney also served as Co-Chairman of the United Nations World Summit for Children and his government played leading roles in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, the creation of Le Sommet de la Francophonie, the Reunification of Germany and the first Gulf War.  Mr. Mulroney was born in Baie Comeau, Quebec in 1939, to Benedict Mulroney and Irene O’Shea, one of six children. His father was an electrician with the Quebec North Shore Paper Company. Mr. Mulroney graduated from St. Thomas College high school, Chatham, N.B., received his honours undergraduate degree from St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, N.S., and a law degree from Université Laval in Quebec City. He practised law in Montreal and served as President of the Iron Ore Company of Canada before entering politics by becoming Party Leader in 1983 and Leader of the Official Opposition in the House of Commons, to which he was first elected in 1983 and re-elected in 1984 and 1988. Upon resigning, Mr. Mulroney rejoined the Montreal law firm of Norton Rose Fulbright as Senior Partner. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Quebecor inc. (Montreal), and serves as a director of The Blackstone Group L.P. (New York) and Acreage Holdings Inc. (New York). He also serves as Chairman of the International Advisory Board of Barrick Gold Corporation (Toronto). He is a Strategic Advisor to Teneo Holdings (New York) and to ECN Capital (West Palm Beach). Mr. Mulroney is also a Trustee of the Montreal Heart Institute Foundation and the International Advisory Board of Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) Montréal.    

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

Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, with the occupation of the Chornobyl nuclear site. Together with the attack a few days later on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe located near Zaporizhia, the war produced a nuclear crisis that the world has not experienced before: the nuclear facilities ended up in the middle of the armed conflict. In this lecture I will discuss the origins of the war in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, triggered among other things by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, and the security vacuum produced by 1994 Budapest Memorandum. I will provide an assessment of the current stage of the hostilities and the impact that the Russian continuing control over the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant can have on the outcome of the war and the prospects of the nuclear industry worldwide–the theme explored in my recent book Atoms and Ashes.

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A leading authority on Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe, he has published extensively on the international history of World War II and the Cold War. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations and the Ballie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (UK). His latest book, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters was released by W.W. Norton in May 2022.

Description

Dr. Peter Singer is a Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a bioethicist. In this live podcast taping for the Paul Wells Show, host Paul Wells will ask Dr. Singer about the state of global health in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is the end of the pandemic in sight? And where does it leave us? Vaccines and other public health measures have become politically polarizing, international cooperation to fight the pandemic took a heavy blow, and the WHO itself has become a target of conspiracy theories. In this climate, Dr. Singer will share his ideas for getting the world back on track to meet its health goals.

The Paul Wells Show is produced by ANTICA, in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It is published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. The show’s founding sponsor is TELUS and the title sponsor is Compass Rose

Light refreshments to follow the conversation from 1-2pm.

Description

The Red Army Faction’s attack on the West-German state in the 1970s and 1980s still poses one of the most controversial issues in post-war German history. Its historical narratives have repeatedly been referred to and re-interpreted in political discourse and popular culture alike. However, this established, indeed canonized, story of German terrorism still looms large over the debates on terrorism in the 21st century. Thus, it will be argued in this talk, that recent terrorist threats from the radical right have been misinterpreted, and there are still common assumptions within German terrorism discourse that keep on evoking the ghosts of the pasts.

Hanno Balz is a historian of Modern German and European History at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

He received PhD at Bremen University and has taught at the Universities of Bremen and Lüneburg and had been an Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University (2013-2018).

He has been publishing extensively on the history of the “Red Army Faction” West-German militant group and the legal, intellectual, and political reverberations in West German society that came along with challenging the state. More broadly he works on European social movements from the 1960s to the 1980s as well as on the history of Nazi rule and the Shoah.

His current research concerns the origins of anti-Communism in Germany and history of the Colour Red and symbolism of the Red Flag.

Description

In her talk, Anu Realo will discuss her research on social trust within and across nations. Why certain societies are more trusting than others, how does trust influence behaviour, how have levels of social trust changed in Estonia and neighbouring countries over the past three decades.

Anu Realo (PhD) is a personality and cross-cultural psychologist. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tartu (Estonia). She is also the Past President of the European Association for Personality Psychology and a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea.

Anu’s research focuses on cultural and individual variation in personality traits, subjective well-being, values, and social capital; she has collaborated widely with researchers from across a range of disciplines and cultures. She is the principal investigator for the World Values Survey (WVS) in Estonia and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the WVS. Anu is active in public engagement work on topics relating to her research, her work has been extensively covered and cited by national and international news media

Description

On September 22nd, 2022, Munk celebrated the book launch of Outsourcing Repression, authored by the Asian Institute’s faculty, Professor Lynette Ong!

About this event:  How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash?  In Outsourcing Repression (Oxford University Press, 2022), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019–the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China’s urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts.  

Author: Lynette Ong (Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Asian Institute, Munk School, University of Toronto)  Discussants:  Andrew Mertha (Director of the SAIS China Global Research Center, and George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies)  Minxin Pei (Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow, Claremont McKenna College)  Dan Slater (Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies and Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Director; Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)  Sponsors: Asian Institute and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy Co-Sponsor: Department of Political Science, University of Toronto  

Author’s Bio:  Lynette H. Ong is Professor of political science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Toronto. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her publications have also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. Twitter: @onglynette.

Description

Speaker Bio:

Dr. R. Cheran is Tamil Canadian academic, poet, and playwright. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Windsor. An author of several books and poetry collections in Tamil, his work has been translated into many languages, including English. His best known work in English translation include The Second Sunrise (translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom, 2010), In a Time of Burning (translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling, 2013) and You Cannot Turn Away (translated by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2011) and in anthologies including Many Roads Through Paradise: Sri Lankan Literature (edited by Shyam Selvadurai, 2014), and In Our Translated World: Global Tamil Poetry (edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2014).

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK:  Tastes Like War   

A Korean American daughter’s exploration of food and family history, in order to understand her mother’s schizophrenia. Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.   

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.   

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, the Department of Sociology, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, the Department of English, and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School, University of Toronto

Description

In April 2021, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and U.S. President Joe Biden made global headlines when they jointly “underscored the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”—the first such reference in a summit-level statement since both governments switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in the 1970s. Amidst a rapidly changing regional balance of power and with the Biden administration asserting that U.S. allies would “take action” if Beijing seeks “to use force to disrupt the status quo,” this talk examined the historical evolution of Japanese perspectives on the U.S.-Japan security alliance’s and the JSDF’s potential roles in a “Taiwan contingency.” Though Tokyo’s nuanced positions and policies are often neglected in the U.S.-centric academic literature and policy discourse, Japan is a critical front-line player. Its choices are today—and will inevitably remain—crucial variables affecting cross-strait deterrence, U.S. options, and how things may play out if deterrence fails.

  — Speaker Bio —

Adam P. LIFF is associate professor of East Asian international relations at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he also serves as founding director of its 21st Century Japan Politics & Society Initiative (21JPSI). His research focuses on international security affairs and the Asia-Pacific—especially Japanese security policy; U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy; the U.S.-Japan alliance; Taiwan; and the rise of China. Beyond IU, Dr. Liff is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Associate-in-Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, and a B.A. from Stanford University.  More information: https://adampliff.com/

Description

Cécile Vidal is professor (directrice d’études) of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), Paris, France. She is a social historian of colonial empires, the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic worlds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In addition to the prize-winning Histoire de l’Amérique française (History of French America, 2003; 5th ed. 2019), co-authored with Gilles Havard, she is the author of the prize-winning Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (2019) and the editor or coeditor of ten collective volumes, including, most recently, Une histoire sociale du Nouveau Monde (A Social History of the New Word, 2021), and Les mondes de l’esclavage. Une histoire comparée (The Worlds of Slavery. A Comparatve History, 2021), co-edited with Paulin Ismard and Benedetta Rossi. She is currently working on a new research project on suicide, the slave trade, and slavery in the French and British Atlantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Description

On October 3, Christine Hogan, Deputy Minister of Environment and Climate Change, will join Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School, to discuss leadership in public service. This event is the first in the Women Leaders in Public Service series, sponsored by the David Peterson Program in Public Sector Leadership.   

Speaker Bios:  

Christine Hogan was appointed Deputy Minister of Environment and Climate Change, on September 30, 2019. Prior to her appointment, Ms. Hogan served as Executive Director for Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean, at the World Bank Group (in Washington), from November 2016 to September 2019. From January 2015 to October 2016, Ms. Hogan was Deputy Minister of International Trade. Between 2010 and 2015, Ms. Hogan served in the Privy Council Office, where she was initially the Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet and then Foreign and Defence Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister.  Throughout her career of more than 30 years, Ms. Hogan has contributed to a diverse set of public-policy issues ranging from international relations and development to trade policy, science and technology, and environment and energy. She has held a variety of positions within the Government of Canada, including Vice President of Strategic Policy and Performance at the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada) and Director of International Affairs at Environment Canada.  Ms. Hogan has also been a visiting executive with Encana and an Advisor to the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, in Nairobi, Kenya. She holds a Bachelor of Public Administration (Honours) from Carleton University and is a Yale University World Fellow.  Janice Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and was the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto (serving from 1998 to the end of 2014). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. Her most recent publications include Networks of Knowledge: Innovation in International Learning (2000); The Cult of Efficiency (2001); and Street Protests and Fantasy Parks (2001). She is a contributor to Canada by Picasso (2006) and the co-author of The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (2007). She was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and a Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Alberta, the University of Cape Breton, McMaster University, and Hebrew University.

Description

The Russian invasion in Ukraine (in 2014 and 2022), and the ongoing hybrid warfare against the West made it blatantly clear that authoritarian foreign policy in general – and Russian foreign policy in particular – cannot be grasped with the concept of “soft power”. Russia used “authoritarian inflation”, skillfully puffing itself up to look more economically, politically, and militarily powerful than it actually is, exaggerating its role in other countries’ politics and public as well as in global affairs. But this is just one element of a broader toolkit that is, in contrast to classic soft power, aimed more at being feared than about being loved. This phenomenon fits a general trend among authoritarian superpowers who are increasingly using new instruments, including the most modern technology (through cyberattacks and sophisticated automated ways of disinformation), to undermine the trust and feeling of security of the citizens of other countries – and the behavior of their leaders. “Sharp power” typically involves efforts at censorship, coercion, disinformation, and the use of manipulation to sap the integrity of independent institutions. Throughout the course, we aim to reveal and analyze patterns, channels, and functions of economic, political, and informational sharp power influence using the works of leading scholars and experts in this field, as well as through case studies done in the group. The course will put a special emphasis on the Central Eastern European region, (post-socialist states that compose the “Eastern Flank” of Western Alliances, members of both EU and NATO) when analyzing patterns of sharp power. But at the same time, these techniques will be discussed in the broader context of economic and diplomatic relations on the bilateral and multilateral (EU, OSCE, NATO) levels. The course also aims to retrospectively analyze and critically evaluate the decisions of Western leaders towards Russia at crucial points to identify the obvious mistakes of foresight with the aim of drawing lessons from them

Description

Susan Shirk, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, discussed her new book, Overreach, and its implications for China’s 20th Party, cross-strait relations, and China’s relations with the West. Lynette Ong provided commentaries and moderated the discussion.  

ABOUT THE BOOK:  

For decades, China’s rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed.  For three decades after Mao’s death in 1976, China’s leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, came not from abroad but from within—a conclusion cemented by the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. To facilitate the country’s inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China’s peaceful intentions.  Then, as Susan Shirk shows in this illuminating, disturbing, and utterly persuasive new book, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, threatening Taiwan as well as its neighbors in the South China Sea, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world’s most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.  

BIOS:  

SUSAN SHIRK is Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. She is one of the most influential experts working on U.S.-China relations and Chinese politics. She is also director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and the author of Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford University Press, 2022).  Dr. Shirk first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. From 1997-2000, Dr. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.    

LYNETTE H. ONG is Professor of Political Science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Toronto. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her publications have also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. Twitter: @onglynette.

Description

A panel of experts will examine President Zelenskyy’s leadership style and how it has shaped Ukraine’s trajectory during the conflict.

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine is forthcoming, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020. She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016-2019.

Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University, Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She has published five books, including Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Broadcasting through Information Wars with Hromadske Radio (2016) Ukraine Twenty Years After Independence: Assessments, Perspectives, Challenges (co-edited with Giovanna Brogi, 2015), Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience (co-edited with Oxana Gaman-Golutvina, 2009), articles in various journals including The Russian Journal of Communication (2014), Demokratizatsiya (2014), and regularly provides media commentary. Her doctorate is from Oxford University and she researches mass media, memory, migration, and history.

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, University of Alberta and other Western scholarly institutions. Since 2013, he serves as Ukraine’s representative in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity in contemporary Ukraine, media and discourse studies, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Dr. Kulyk is the author of three books, the latest being Dyskurs ukraїnskykh medii: identychnosti, ideolohiї, vladni stosunky (The Ukrainian Media Discourse: Identities, Ideologies, Power Relations; Kyiv: Krytyka, 2010). He has also edited two collected volumes published in Ukraine and two special issues of Western academic journals.

Dr. Olga Onuch (DPhil Oxford 2010) is a Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Politics. She joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding posts at the University of Toronto (2010-2011), University of Oxford (2011-2014) and Harvard University (2013-2014). She is an Associate of Nuffield College (Oxford) and The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Onuch was also a Research Fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard) in 2017. Onuch’s comparative study of protest (elections, migration & identity) in Eastern Europe and Latin America has made her a leading expert in Ukrainian and Argentine politics specifically, but also in inter-regional comparative analysis. Her book “Mapping Mass Mobilizations” (2014, reviewed in Europe-Asia Studies), explores the processes leading up to mass protest engagement in Ukraine (2004) and Argentina (2001). She is the author of several scholarly articles (in Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, GeoPolitics among other journals), book chapters, and policy briefs. Her research regularly appears in leading media outlets (The Washington Post, The Times, The Guardian, BBC, ITV, Al Jazeera, AFP, among others). Onuch’s research on protest politics in Ukraine has resulted in her consulting policymakers in Canada, Ukraine, the UK and US. Her research received praise and awards placing her on the map as one of the foremost experts on protests and activism in Ukraine.

Jessica Pisano is an Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She writes and teaches about contemporary and twentieth century politics in Eastern Europe. Her work focuses on the enclosure of public resources, the constitution of material and social power, and political and social processes of dispossession. She asks how shifts in political economy affect people’s lives, and how those effects translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on archival sources as well as a variety of immersion-based methods, including participant-observation research. Professor Pisano is the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2022) and The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which received the Harvard University Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies in 2009. She is writing a history of property under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy on a single street in Eastern Europe between 1938 and 2014. Her series of articles on American impeachment and Ukrainian and Russian politics appeared in the online Washington Post.

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Speaker: Tassos Anastassiadis, Associate Professor of History & Phrixos B. Papachristidis Chair in Modern Greek Studies, McGill
University

Tassos Anastassiadis (Phd Sciences-Po Paris, agrégation of history) is an Associate Professor of History and the Phrixos Papachristidis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at McGill University since 2011. He teaches and researches Modern European and Greek history, with a focus on inter-confessional relations and the emergence of differentiated modernities in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 18th-20th c.as well as the role of antiquity in the European imaginary. His most recent book, La réforme orthodoxe: Église, État et société en Grèce à l’époque de la confessionnalisation post-ottomane (1833-1940) (Peeters-EFA, 2020) , won the FRQSC’s Prix Louise-Dandurand in 2022.

Facing the increasing penetration of western catholic and protestant missionaries in the Ottoman world after the Crimean war, but also challenged by a growing Russian presence in their plurisecular role of leader of the Rum, i.e. the Eastern christian orthodox, within the Ottoman empire, certain Greek-Orthodox clergymen decided to react during the last quarter of the 19th c. Their projet was three-fold. Envision a new, imperial, but post-ottoman, configuration for the Eastern Orthodox churches that would preserve the primacy of the Greek-orthodox despite the emergence of national churches and growing Russian influence; adapt their project to the new geopolitical developments of the Age of Empires; guarantee the survival of these churches by adopting « modern » ways of practising religion that would help them maintain the allegiance of their flock tempted by the voices of outside sirens. The network of these reformers rotating around an Athens-Constantinople (Istanbul) axis and active from Alexandria to Tbilissi, and from Jerusalem to Bitola, but also in the USA, will have a narrow window of opportunity on the aftermath of the Russian revolution and the end of WWI. Though it was finally not fully realized, it has left its indelible mark on the way religion is practised and politicized in Europe’s orthodox borderlands.

Sponsors: CERES, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek History at York University, and Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario.

Description

Canadian observers of the Quebec political scene are confronted with an apparent paradox. On the one hand, sovereignty has fallen off the political agenda, with the Parti Québécois anticipated to be all but shut out of the Assembly after the October provincial election. On the other hand, the CAQ government is spearheading an activist agenda based on identity politics, through legislation such as Bills 21 and 96. The culmination of the court challenges to these bills (through eventual rulings from the Supreme Court) risk triggering a renewed debate about the legitimacy of the Canadian constitution and of federal political institutions in the eyes of francophone Quebecers. In the face of these developments, should Quebec’s federal partners be celebrating the end of the threat posed by the sovereigntist movement, or gearing up for a new national unity crisis?

Reception to follow 6:00 – 7:00pm.

Featured Speakers:

Emilie Nicolas, Columnist with Le Devoir and the Montreal Gazette

Emilie Nicolas is a columnist with Le Devoir and The Montreal Gazette, the host of the Détours podcast on Canadaland, as well as a consultant and public speaker. She is a regular analyst and commentator for several large media networks, and has been published in several journals, magazines and newspapers, both in French and English. Most recently, she won the Quebec’s cultural magazine (SODEP) 2020 Excellence Award for Best Essay, for a piece in the Liberté magazine.

Emilie has contributed to various organizations in Canada and internationally. She currently sits on the board of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a crown corporation dedicated to the elimination of racism, and Informed Opinions, a non-profit organization working towards more gender equality in Canadian media. An active bridge-builder, Emilie is a co-founder of Québec inclusif (2013), a movement that united citizens against racism and social exclusion. She also initiated a coalition campaigning for equality and against systemic racism in Quebec (2016).

As a Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Emilie focused her research on the role of a shared language in the connections between Quebec and Haiti. Emilie holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the same university.

Emilie is the recipient of a Harry Jerome Award for leadership along with a Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case. She completed the Action Canada Fellowship (2015) as well as the Jeanne Sauvé Public Leadership Fellowship (2019).

Andrew Parkin, Executive Director, Environics Institute

Andrew Parkin is the Executive Director of the Environics Institute for Survey Research, a not-for-profit agency created in 2006 to conduct in-depth public opinion and social research on the issues shaping Canada’s future.

Prior to joining the Institute, Andrew served as the Director of the Mowat Centre and Associate Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (2017-19), Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) (2010-14), Associate Executive Director and Director of Research and Program Development at the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (2004-10), and Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Information on Canada (2000-04). He has also worked as an independent public policy analyst and consultant, providing strategic advice, issue analysis, and policy research to a variety of national and international clients in the areas of education and skills development, social and economic policy, and public opinion research.

Charles Breton, Executive Director, Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation

Charles Breton has been the Executive Director of the IRPP’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation since 2019. He was the research director at Vox Pop Labs, where he led the design of innovative public opinion research tools such as Vote Compass. His research interests include Canadian politics, comparative public policy and public opinion research. Before pursuing an academic career, he was a researcher and journalist for current affairs programs on Radio-Canada, and he is a frequent analyst and expert commentator on Canadian politics and public policy. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia, did post-doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University, and has an MA in political science from the Université de Montréal.

Co-presented by Enivronics Institute for Survey Research adn Munk School for Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Description

Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies presents

Dr. Virginia Aksan is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on military history and trans-imperial intellectual encounters and the circulation of knowledge in the pre-modern Mediterrannean and Eurasia. Her publications include the books: The Ottomans, 1700-1923: an Empire Besieged (2022); Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870 (2007); An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783 (1995).

Description

Join us on Monday, October 17 as the Innovation Policy Lab Speaker Series is joined by two colleagues from the University of Manchester who will discuss the current challenges in innovation in the UK and the EU.

Topics include:

Towards a place and challenge-based innovation policy – Professor Elvira Uyarra, The University of Manchester

Innovation policy debates increasingly recognise societal challenges as drivers for innovation policy. This has motivated a ‘normative turn’ that advocates greater challenge orientation in innovation policy and targeted policies to articulate societal needs in order to deliver better, not just more, innovations. In parallel, regional innovation policy agendas such as the EU smart specialisation focus on selectively building on unique place-specific characteristics and assets, but it is somewhat agnostic about the direction of innovation. While mission oriented and transformative innovation policy agendas have been criticised for their lack of attention to context and the ‘messy realities’ of policy implementation, smart specialisation has been seen as too incremental, narrowing down the options and approaches for less developed regions, and neglecting more transformative means of value capture. This talk will bring together these agendas, their key challenges and shortcomings, and the need for an integrated place-based innovation policy.

What’s the problem with UK science and innovation policy? – Professor Kieron Flanagan, The University of Manchester

The UK was an industrial and scientific pioneer. Yet for nearly as long, the country has fretted about falling behind industrial and technological competitors. For decades the UK’s not terribly impressive R&D/GDP ratio of around 1.7% has resisted all attempts to improve it. For historical reasons, UK government R&D spending is unusually biased towards the ‘basic’ end of the spectrum by international standards, and the geographical distribution of that spending is highly concentrated on a small number of institutions in a few places – the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Now the UK is once again aiming to transform its technological fortunes, with increases in public spending in the pipeline and a target of 2.4% of GDP to be spent on R&D by 2027. The hope is that this additional R&D effort will help ‘rebalance’ regional growth prospects and drive improvements in productivity. This talk will examine why the UK seems to be stuck, what progress has been made in unsticking it, and will draw out some broader questions about why we should fund scientific and technological research and what we should hope to gain from it.

Description

Abstract:

Cross-border marriages have grown across East Asia in the last few decades. Children from these transnational unions are reaching adulthood, but their identity formation is yet subject to academic scrutiny. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 50 young adult children of cross-border marriages in Taiwan, this talk examines how differences in ethnic backgrounds (Mainland Chinese or Southeast Asian immigrant mothers) shape their identity management strategies. I emphasize that the macro context of geopolitics enables and constrains their identity negotiation at the micro level. Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy, implemented in 2016, reframed the ethnic difference of Southeast Asian immigrants as a multicultural asset instead of a social liability, allowing “the new second generation” (a new official label) to enjoy some institutional opportunities and ethnic dividends. By contrast, as political confrontation has intensified across Taiwan’s Strait, Chinese spouses are easily suspected of lacking political loyalty; their language and cultural intimacy also make it difficult to claim a multicultural niche. Their children have developed different strategies, including replacement, rescaling, and differentiation, to manage the conflicting and ambiguous identities.  

Speaker Bio:  

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University. She was a Yenching-Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University, a Fulbright scholar at New York University, a visiting professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University, and Tubingen University, and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, winner of Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).

Description

Refusing to obey the law in order to show its injustice: this is the principle of civil disobedience as defined by Henry David Thoreau. The paradigm has regained strength over the past decade – even if it is sometimes seen as an outdated and inadequate form of political action and even a menace to democracy. Civil disobedience is based on a moral principle, self-reliance, which encourages the individual to refuse the accepted law by basing herself on her own conviction. Advocates of the civil disobedience paradigm see it as a way of renewing democracy by making feelings of injustice, inexpression, and dispossession public and visible. They express a need to democratize democracy itself.  

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-La Sorbonne, Senior Member of the Academic Institute of France, and Deputy Director of Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences (ISJPS, UMR 8103 CNRS Paris 1). She is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour (2014), a member of the Academia Europea, and a laureate of the French Academy’s annual prize awarding an author promoting new ethics (2022).   

Sandra Laugier is the author and editor of numerous books including: Le souci des autres (with P. Papermann, EHESS), Pourquoi désobéir en démocratie and Le Principe Démocratie (with A. Ogien, La Découverte), Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (The University of Chicago Press, 2013), Nos vies en séries (Climats, Flammarion, 2019), Le pouvoir des liens faibles (dir. with A. Gefen, CNRS Editions, 2020), Politics of the Ordinary: care, ethics, and forms of life (Peeters, Leuven, 2020), and Series-Philosophy (Exeter University Press, 2023). She also writes for a wider audience, notably as columnist for Libération since 2013.

Description

On October 20, Marta Morgan, former Deputy Minister of Global Affairs Canada, joined Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School, to discuss leadership in public service.

This is the second event in the Women Leaders in Public Service series, sponsored by the David Peterson Program in Public Sector Leadership.

Description

Russian invasion in 2014 caused an outburst of Ukrainian so-called war literature – novels, sketches, short stories, essays, diaries, and memoirs. Soldiers, veterans, volunteers, and witnesses wrote many of these books. In 2019 more than 200 books on the Ukrainian-Russian war were published, and now that number is much bigger. As translating took time, numerous works haven’t been translated into English yet. But the following books are available for English-speaking audiences: The Airport by Serhii Loiko (2015), Apricots of Donbas by Liuba Yakymchyk (2015), Ukrainian Diaries: Dispatches from the Kyiv by Andrii Kurkov (2015), Words from War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchyk and Max Rosochinsky (2017), The Orphanage by Serhii Zhadan (2017), Absolute Zero by Artem Chekh (2017), Grey Beez by Andrii Kurkov (2018), In Isolation by Stanislav Aseev (2018), Daughter by Tamara Horikha-Zernia (2019), etc.  In Russia, books about contemporary Ukrainian-Russian started appearing in 2009: Maksim Kalashnikov’s "Independent Ukraine. Collapse of the project" (2009), Fedor Berezin’s "War 2010. Ukrainian Front" (2009), Georgiy Savitskiy’s "The battlefield is Ukraine. Broken Trident" (2009), Fedor Berezin "War 2011" (Moscow, 2010).   These books described the full-scale military invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine that was supposed to happen in 2010-2011.

Mentioned novels are affordable and easily assessable, and they consist of numerous narratives that the Russian propaganda machine is using now. These books were presented and got awards in "Star Bridge," a war fantasy language festival held in Kharkiv from 1991 to 2014. The festival is supposed to connect two countries, but only books that are written in Russian can be nominated. And the jury is quite specific, for example, Kharkiv Academy of Internal Affairs. Nevertheless, due to the poor aesthetic quality, these books have never been translated into different languages and are fully oriented on internal use (for Russian speakers).   After the invasion in 2014, Russian media started spreading the word that great Russian writers predicted war in Ukraine. Mentioned novels have poor artistic qualities. Nevertheless, Russian media highlight that such literature expresses high truth contrary to more sophisticated works.   Analyzing these works, we might observe several narratives used by Russian media and authorities to justify war, war crimes, and acts ao terrorism. We may see how contemporary Russian writers continue the tradition of using literature for propaganda. Studies on the soviet novel as a tool for propaganda have already been conducted, for example, by Katerine Clark. But it is the first time we may discuss Russian propaganda during full-scale military invasions and get particular examples of how narratives impact people. And how literature and stories art can share the war experience and resist disinformation on practice.  

Maria Shuvalova is a literary critic and lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Fulbright Scholar (Harriman Institute, Columbia University in the city of New York, 2019–2020). Acquisition Editor at Academic Studies Press and co-founder and head of the non-governmental organization New Ukrainian Academic Community, whose latest projects were the publication of a book by Volodymyr Dibrova Taras Shevchenko: New Perspectives, an international conference The Female Artist as an Icon of National Modernization: The Phenomenon of Lesia Ukrainka in a Comparative Perspective (in Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of the Writer). Projects were implemented in cooperation with such organizations as the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, the Association of Hispanics of Ukraine, Shevchenko Scientific Society in America, and publishing house Bilka. The latest publication is “Nothing New in Mariia’s Story — It’s Just That Centuries-Old Ukrainian Resistance Got Its Voice”, The Ukrainian Quarterly 2, 2022, p. 37-41. When the war started, I and my family felt Kyiv. Since February 25 I was residing in Khmelnytsky district, Ukraine. In a month we returned to Kyiv.

Description

Race and Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific event series

Abstract:

What does life in the university cost, and what debts do our disciplines impose as we seek success? How have racism and colonialism shaped our analytical relation to East Asia and how might Black feminist methodologies help us diagnose and dismantle supremacist habits of thought?

Reginald Jackson considered the concepts of debt and reparation in relation to the university, with an historical awareness of postwar and post-civil rights developments between Asian Studies and Ethnic Studies. Reading texts by Moten and Harney, Wynter, Ahmed, against memoirs by Japanologists Keene and Seidensticker, he mapped critical limits and potentials for rethinking the historical stakes of academic expertise and survival. Specifically, by theorizing how whiteness is institutionalized within the university and inhabits disciplinary norms, he discussed methods of reparation through which to redress deadening legacies of racial and gender-based discrimination that continue to deplete our capacity to thrive as creative human beings.  

Speaker bio:

Reginald Jackson is Director of the Center for Japanese Studies and Associate Professor of premodern Japanese literature and performance at the University of Michigan. He founded the Japanese Antiracist Pedagogy Project and has published monographs and articles spanning medieval calligraphy to contemporary choreography. A devotion to illustration and guitar complement his scholarship.

Description

With the demise of Roe v. Wade, the survival of abortion access in America will depend on new legal paths. In the same moment that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has constrained access to abortion in the United States, other constitutional democracies have moved in the opposite direction, expanding access to safe, legal, and free abortions. They have done so without reasoning from Roe’s vision of the private zone of unwanted pregnancy. The development of abortion law outside the United States provides critical insights that can inform future efforts to vindicate the constitutional rights of women facing unwanted pregnancies.

This lecture maps out the constitutional paths of reproductive justice in a world without Roe.  Constitutional democracies around the world that have progressed from banning most abortions to legalizing many of them have embraced the public dimensions of childbearing and childrearing. Laws protecting abortion access have recently emerged from strong pro-life constitutional baselines in several jurisdictions, including the notable example of Ireland. Rather than constitutionalizing the individual’s privacy interest in unwanted pregnancy, many constitutional orders recognize the social and public value of reproducing the community, and the disproportionate role played by people who stay pregnant and raise children in the production of these public goods. Banning abortion effectively coerces people to contribute disproportionate sacrifices to the state, without properly valuing these contributions. This insight from global abortion law norms can be pursued in U.S. constitutional law. The formulation of takings- and 13th Amendment-based challenges to abortion bans could focus on just compensation for the risks, burdens, and sacrifices of compelled motherhood, beyond the enjoining of abortion restrictions. Global experience also points to the importance of incrementally establishing reasonable, expanded definitions of medical necessity exceptions to abortion bans. Such avenues for reestablishing abortion access, as well as public support for pregnancy and parenting, imagine a broader world of reproductive justice than the one defined by Roe.  —

Speaker Bio:

Julie Chi-hye Suk is a Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City. She is the author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, the first book to chronicle and assess the twenty-first-century revival of the Equal Rights Amendment, culminating in Virginia’s ratification in 2020. She has published dozens of scholarly articles on equality and antidiscirmination law, women and gender, and comparative constitutional law. Her next book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It, will be published in April 2023. Her commentary has appeared in many media outlets including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Review, and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.   Professor Suk joined the Fordham faculty after three years at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she served as dean for Master’s Programs and professor of sociology, political science, and liberal studies. Before that, Suk was a Professor of Law for 13 years at Cardozo Law School in New York. She has also taught as a visiting professor at the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago, and UCLA. She has also been a fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and LUISS-Guido Carli in Rome. Suk received her doctorate in politics from Oxford University (where she held a Marshall Scholarship) and her J.D. from Yale Law School (where she studied on a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans). Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Description

This was a hybrid event.

Who matters in society? Why are some people viewed as more legitimate or given greater status than others? How can we broaden the circle of who is considered worthy of recognition?  On October 27, 2022, Harvard University sociologist Michèle Lamont delivered the Munk School’s Cadario Visiting Lecture in Public Policy.

Her talk, "Who matters? How to redefine worth in our divided societies?" explored how new cultural narratives are shifting the boundaries of who is considered worthy of inclusion and belonging.   

About the Event:

Growing inequality and the decline of the American dream have coincided with a mental health crisis across all social classes in the United States. In this context it is imperative to consider alternative sources of hope. Broadening recognition is gaining in appeal for significant segments of the population. To understand this phenomenon, Professor Lamont drew on her interviews with Gen Zs and change agents who are producing new narratives in entertainment, comedy, advocacy, art, impact investing, and other fields of activity. They are offering alternatives to neoliberal scripts of self. They feed recognition chains in response to political polarization and backlashes. These transformations point to a broadening of cultural citizenship, not only in the United States but also globally.

Description

Three experts on Ukrainian identity will discuss the evolution of Ukrainian identity before and after the 2022 invasion.

Paul Robert Magocsi is professor of history and political science at the University of Toronto, where since 1980 he also holds the John Yaremko Chair of Ukrainian Studies. He completed his education at Rutgers University (B.A. 1966; M.A. 1967), Princeton University (M.A. 1969; Ph.D. 1972), and Harvard University (Society of Fellows 1976). He is a member of the Harvard University Society of Fellows (1976).

Dominique Arel is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He received his BA from the University of Montreal, his MA from McGill University and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Arel’s interests range from nationalism and language politics to politics of identity and the censuses. Arel co-edited Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (John Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Petro Kuzyk is an Assistant Professor (Dotsent) of the International Relations and Diplomatic Service Department at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He graduated from the Faculty of International Relations of the same University in 1999. During 1998-2001 he worked for the Verkhovna Rada Intern Program run by the U.S. Association of the Former Members of Congress and also was an Assistant to MP and an adviser to the Verkhovna Rada Inter-Parliamentary Relations Department in Kyiv. In 2002-2003 Petro Kuzyk completed MA course in Political Philosophy at the University of York (UK). Shortly afterwards he defended his Kandydat Nauk dissertation on nationalism in Eastern Europe in Lviv.

Description

This paper addresses a long-standing narrative of the origins of the Haitian Revolution, which locates one of the principal motivating factors of the breakdown of French colonial rule in a hardening of racial lines particularly after 1763 and in particular, a declining status of free people of colour.  In particular, historians have pointed to the growing propensity of colonial authorities to restrict manumission of slaves.  The recent discovery by the authors of the accounts of the disgraced colonial receiver-general, however, prompts a reevaluation of the conventional narrative, suggesting greater ambiguity of both colonial whites and French administrators towards free people of colour.  This paper affords the opportunity to reflect on the disjunctures between government policies and their practice.   

Nancy Christie is Visiting Research Professor at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, and Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Western Ontario.  She is the author of four major monographs, including most recently, THE FORMAL AND INFORMAL POLITICS OF BRITISH RULE IN POST-CONQUEST QUEBEC, 1760-1837:  A NORTHERN BASTILLE (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2020), and nine edited volumes, most recently, VOICES IN THE LEGAL ARCHIVES IN THE FRENCH COLONIAL WORLD:  ‘THE KING IS LISTENING’ (London & New York:  Routledge, 2021), which emerged from a conference which she organized.  Her work has received the highest scholarly distinctions, including the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association and the Harold Adams Innis Prize of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.  Michael Gauvreau is Professor of History at McMaster University.  He is an expert in the history of Canada and Québec, and his interests more recently have turned to the history of the pre-1789 French colonial world.  He is author of five major scholarly monographs and several collaborative editorial projects.  HIs books have received scholarly recognition, including the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historial Association and the Harold Adams Innis Prize of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.

Description

This was a community screening of Coming To You 너에게 가는 길  followed by post-screening conversations.

Synopsis:

We are ready to step into your world.  Nabi, a veteran firefighter, prided herself for living a successful life, until one day her child, Hankyeol, comes out to her by saying: “Mom, I want to get a mastectomy.” Meanwhile, Vivian, a flight attendant of 28 years, sheds tears after reading her son, Yejoon’s, letter: “I’m gay.” Nabi and Vivian’d never even heard of the term “LGBTQIA+” during their entire lives when Hankyeol and Yejoon started opening up their various problems. Facing the reality that their children are struggling, what would two mothers do?   

The post-screening conversations featured Sujin Choi (WIND), Minwoo Jung (Loyola), Hyun-Chul Kim & Samuel Yoon (U of Toronto).  

Hosted by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for the Sexual Diversity Studies, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, the Academy of Korean Studies, York University’s Korean Office for Research and Education, and WIND, Toronto Korean Feminist Collective.   

Information about the documentary: Coming To You 너에게 가는 길   

Director and Writer: BYUN Gyuri  Cast: Nabi, Vivian

Executive Producer: PINKS

Producers Sona JO, LEE Hyuk-sang

Production: South Korea 2021

Running time: 93 min (post-screening conversations will follow screening)

Audio: Korean (English subtitles)

Post-screening panelists:

Sujin Choi is a member of WIND (Toronto Korean Feminist Collective), and a founding member of Jogakbo (transgender rights organization) and Rainbow Foundation in South Korea. She also performed as a singer on the 2016 Seoul Pride stage.  

Minwoo Jung is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. His research investigates the impacts of global and regional geopolitics on political, economic, and social life of marginalized groups and individuals. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted across East and Southeast Asia, he is working on a book project that presents a comparative ethnography of the intimate entanglements of queer lives and geopolitics.   

Hyun-Chul Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. She earned her MA degree in Geography from Seoul National University with the analysis of spatial occupation and contestation of the publicness between LGBTQI+ allies and anti-queer coalitions in the 2014 Seoul and Daegu Queer Parade in South Korea. Her doctoral project centers on rural villages as the intermediate locus of leprosy control in South Korea after the Korean War to engage in a deeper analysis of “the carceral” in the broader Asian context from the ruins of war, the discontinuity and continuity of the colonial past, as well as dreams of reconstructing nations via small community and rural reforms.   

Samuel Yoon (He/Him) is a PhD student in Women and Gender studies at the University of Toronto. His research is on queer performance, violence, and Asian racialization. In his spare time, he is an active participant and performer in queer of colour spaces in Toronto. Prior to his graduate studies he worked at an HIV/AIDS service organization as a project lead on LGBTQ+ inclusion.

Description

This was an in-person event.

After a year’s hiatus, Canada’s premiere social policy conference – the International Institute on Social Policy – is back, in a new partnership!   For over two years, the COVID-19 pandemic highjacked the policy agenda and necessarily focused attention on responses to the emergency. Meanwhile, new and enduring social, political, and economic challenges have been gathering force. To different degrees and in different ways across nations, societal fault lines have become more evident.   

Queen’s University and Munk School at the University of Toronto joined forces to host the 26th annual International Institute to explore these challenges. The 2022 Munk School-Queen’s International Institute on Social Policy – Next Wave: Challenges and Opportunities for Social Policy in the Coming Decade – explored whether and how we need to reform, or even transform, Canadian social policy for a more resilient and successful future.  As has been the case for over 25 years, the Institute focused on emerging public policy challenges, international and comparative perspectives, and the melding of research and policy.   

The 2022 International Institute on Social Policy launched on October 31st with a day-long conference at the Munk School on the meta challenges and policy choices facing Canada and other OECD countries – socio-economic, generational and political.  The full conference program can  be found here: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/the-next-wave-challenges-and-opportunities-for-social-policy/

Description

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

Speaker bio:

Dessy Gavrilova is a Vienna-based Bulgarian cultural entrepreneur, curator, cultural consultant and playwright.  In Sofia, Gavrilova co-founded and directed The Red House Center for Culture and Debate. For decades, it was Bulgaria’s principal socio-cultural centre. Its innovative programming spanning socially engaged art, debates, public talks and lectures transformed Bulgaria’s public space. In Vienna, she founded the European Network of Houses for Debate “Time to Talk”, a network of cultural centers and initiatives that promote public debate and develop a culture of civic argumentation, aiming to inspire dialogue and understanding. In 2016, Gavrilova initiated and co-founded the Vienna Humanities Festival, an annual event that has already become emblematic for Austria’s capital. During the last week of September, the festival features more than 40 debates with leading international thinkers, as well as selected artistic work that raises socially relevant issues.Most recently Gavrilova has founded a Bulgarian literacy start-up that supports kids’ reading with comprehension and develops their functional literacy, media literacy, and civil and global competences.In her capacity as a consultant, Gavrilova has advised numerous international and national institutions, like the European Commission, The Council of Europe, The Open Society Foundations.Her play "Innocent Murders" was nominated Best Play of the Year (2015) by both Askeer and Ikar theatre prizes.  In 2011, she was listed as one of the 100 most influential women in Bulgaria.