AUTHOR
Srdjan Vucetic
Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Last fall, CIPS held a conference on AUKUS, the defence agreement among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The conference proceedings have now been published as a themed issue of International Journal, Canada’s pre-eminent outlet for …
READ MOREThe Canadian government recently announced its decision to enter negotiations with American aerospace giant Lockheed Martin to buy 88 F-35 fighter jets. The $19-billion contract is separate from $8 billion in additional funding for defence that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland …
READ MORE“Get CANZUK Done,” Conservative leader Erin O’Toole tweeted last fall. The six-letter word is a call for a new four-country partnership or, as he calls it, a pact: “The world needs Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to …
READ MOREThe term Five Eyes typically refers to a unique signals intelligence pooling club of three or four-letter acronymed agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. But FVEY, as it is also known, is now …
READ MOREBy Thomas Juneau and Srdjan Vucetic
With the federal election days away, Canada faces five major defence challenges: the fragmentation of the rules-based international order, over-reliance on the United States, the challenges posed by emerging technologies, how Canada procures weapons …
READ MOREBy Jonathan D. Caverley, Ethan B. Kapstein and Srdjan Vucetic
By Duncan Bell and Srdjan Vucetic
It was coined in the 1950s, but the term CANZUK — a union (or alliance or pact) of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — has been repurposed in the wake of …
READ MOREBy Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Srdjan Vucetic
“Ethnic conflict” elicits no shortage of strong scholarly opinion and debate. But what exactly is the causal relationship between ethnicity and violence? And what does “causal” mean in this context anyway? Since ethnic conflict …
READ MORESrdjan Vucetic, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa
Bentley B. Allan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Ted Hopf, Provost Chair Professor of Political Science, National University of Singapore…
READ MOREIn recent years, we’ve seen a number of depressing political shifts in the Euro-Atlantic area — but the rise of feminist foreign policies is not among them.
The trend was set in 2014 when Margot Wallström was named foreign minister …
READ MOREAccording to The Washington Post, US President Donald Trump has asked the Department of Defense to plan for a military parade later this year. The date is yet to be set, but it is likely to be either July …
READ MOREThe origins of CIPS’s International Theory Network (ITN) go back to an inspiring talk in 2010 by McGill’s Vincent Pouliot. A treatment of the evolution of NATO–Russia relations from a Bourdieusian perspective, Pouliot’s seminar led some folks in the …
READ MOREAt the end of December, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) closes its doors after 24 years in business.
The United Nations court, situated in The Hague, was established in 1993 with the goal of providing accountability …
READ MOREIn November 1964, the venerable American magazine The Atlantic published a special supplement on Canadian politics and society. It featured excellent, almost exclusively Canadian-authored articles: by John W. Holmes, the wordy Canadian diplomat, on “The Diplomacy of a Middle Power”; …
READ MOREGeneral Ratko Mladić has been sentenced to life in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The court found the former Bosnian Serb military chief guilty of one count of genocide and ten crimes against humanity, plus …
READ MOREToday’s world is sometimes described as “post-truth, post-West, post-order.” This week Canada received three maps for navigating it: first the House of Commons foreign policy speech by Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, then the Defence Policy Review, and finally …
READ MORECanada’s defence policy review statement is slated to be released in May 2017, a week or two before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travels to Brussels on May 25 for a meeting with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) heads of …
READ MOREThe government of Canada is about to accede to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the first and only legally binding treaty designed to regulate the multibillion-dollar global arms trade. On April 13, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the introduction …
READ MORE“As Prime Minister, I will actively pursue a Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand trade and security pact, including freedom to live, work, and invest in these countries.”
So says Conservative leadership candidate Erin O’Toole on his website — a bold …
READ MOREIn his inauguration speech, US President Donald J. Trump made it clear that a central focus of his tenure will be America’s national interest. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America first,” he said, adding that the US …
READ MOREThe day following President Donald Trump’s inauguration was marked by the Women’s March on Washington and hundreds of “sister marches” in cities around the world — a global display of disapproval for the new US leader and his retrograde understanding …
READ MOREMontenegro’s accession to full membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) took a major step forward this week as the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Balkan country’s membership bid. President-elect Donald Trump has yet to tweet …
READ MOREIn 2009, George Monbiot wrote a much-trafficked op-ed in The Guardian on the Canadian tar sands political-industrial complex, blaming it for the “astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state.” The author blamed the government …
READ MOREThe Trudeau government’s maiden budget pledged important new commitments, but defence spending was not one of them. One could argue that this is only logical: money should not be spent before the defence review is completed and Canada’s priorities in …
READ MORERadovan Karadžić, the former president of the Bosnian Serb Republic and supreme commander of its armed forces during the 1992–95 war, was convicted on March 24th of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal …
READ MOREby Jennifer Erickson, Srdjan Vucetic, and Amanda Alcamo
In his campaign, Justin Trudeau promised to sign the Arms Trade Treaty if elected. Now is the time for the new prime minister to follow through on his election promise.
The treaty …
READ MOREBy Srdjan Vucetic
The Trudeau government is giving itself twelve months to come up with a new defence document—most likely a Strategy, but quite possibly a White Paper combined with a Statement. Apart from setting out Department of National Defence …
READ MOREPhoto by Megan McCormick
Election campaigns are comedy fodder. This week’s top supplier is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the man running for the Republican presidential nomination in the United States. When queried on Sunday by Chuck Todd of NBC News’ …
READ MOREAs part of the Canada 2020 conference, Hillary Clinton will be giving a lunch-time talk at the Ottawa Convention Center on October 6. The subject of her speech is yet to be announced, but I imagine due attention to “Canada-U.S. …
READ MORERobert Farley, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).
The future of the U.S. military may be in Canada’s past, contends Robert Farley. The book’s main argument is that …
READ MOREPublished in the Ottawa Citizen, March 31, 2014
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914 set off a chain of events that a few weeks later led to an all-out war involving virtually …
READ MOREOnce again, transitional justice-watchers are enthralled with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). After dishing out one controversial acquittal after another for months, the tribunal is now embroiled in a bona fide scandal. It involves a major …
READ MOREBy Kim Richard Nossal (Queen’s University) and Srdjan Vucetic
In the Maclean’s annual list of “99 stupid things the government did with your money”, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter appears as exhibit 46:
…READ MOREJet lagged: After dissing reports from
The European Union has never not been in crisis. Whether “this time is different”—and “this time” refers to ongoing iterations of the eurozone crisis—is a question that lends itself to all sorts of speculation along the lines of an …
READ MORE“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore” is one of my favourite episodes of The Simpsons. First aired in 2006, it is an important contribution to North American and global popular culture’s celebration of post-liberalization India that began in the 1990s. In …
READ MOREExtreme events have the ability to radically change political, moral, technical and other debates that shape what governments say and do. The effect of the 2011 Fukushima disaster on national energy strategies was so far-reaching that it led many to …
READ MOREMy Ohioans did it again. In every election since 1964 (and almost every time since 1904), the winner of this state ended up taking the presidency – hence the clichés “America’s bellwether” and “as Ohio goes, so goes America”. Having …
READ MOREWeekly tracking polls by ImpreMedia & Latino Decisions are showing U.S. President Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney, his GOP challenger, by about 45 points among Hispanic voters. The result is in line with dozens of similar polls taken during the …
READ MOREHow many people do International Relations (IR) for a living in Canada’s Capital Region? To come up with an estimate, we counted full-time faculty who work in this semi-autonomous field of study at four universities in Ottawa and the neighbouring …
READ MOREAll eyes are turning to the London Olympics—but for people in the aerospace industry, Britain’s biggest event this summer is the Farnborough International Airshow. At this event (the 48th iteration of the biannual show run by Britain’s defense and aerospace …
READ MORELike its sister networks sponsored by the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS), the International Theory Network (ITN) aims to create opportunities for students share to their ideas and develop a research community. To that end, a group of students …
READ MOREIn 2001, the United States government selected Lockheed Martin (over Boeing) to lead in the development of the F-35, a fifth-generation fighter aircraft for use by the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Along with several other U.S. allies, Canada …
READ MOREBy Philippe Lagassé and Srdjan Vucetic
The F-35 program has received mostly bad press for months—until the government of Japan made a formal announcement on December 19 that it had selected Lockheed Martin’s stealth design as the winner of a …
READ MOREThis week, Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat currently acting as High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia), came to the University of Ottawa to speak about the Dayton Agreement, a 1995 peace deal ending a war that had left …
READ MORE