Past Events
War, Work & Want asks why global migration, which should have fallen after 1970, tripled over the next fifty years.
Hansen argues that the OPEC oil crisis unleashed economic and geopolitical changes that led to over 100 million unexpected migrants. The quadrupling of oil prices permanently halved economic growth in the West, leading to a five-decade stagnation in wages.
The middle classes responded by rebuilding their inflation-shattered standards of living on the back of cheap migrant labour, leading to millions of low-skilled migrants – documented and undocumented.
About the Event
George S. Takach will discuss some of the key themes of his new book, including: what it means for the democracies and the autocracies to be in a cold war, especially one that is technologically driven; why the democracies do technology and innovation better than the autocracies; and what the democracies have to do to leverage their edge in technology and innovation in order to prevail in Cold War 2.0.
Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999-2008, and has also been Administrator of the United Nations Development Program and Chair of the United Nations Development Group. She is Chair of the Global Leadership Foundation, and a member of The Elders, a group of former political leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007. She has extensive experience in issues of development, sustainability, and the promotion of democracy.
Helen Clark will be introduced by the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, former Canadian Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Constitutional Affairs.
On December 6, 2023, the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade released a report, "More than a Vocation: Canada's Need for a 21st Century Foreign Service", the first substantive examination of the Canadian foreign service since 1981. Join Committee chair Sen. Peter M. Boehm for a discussion of the report, and the challenges confronting Canada's foreign service as it deals with an increasingly troubled world.
Political Scientist Andrew F. Cooper discusses his forthcoming book, The Contestation Impulse in World Politics.
This book unravels the centrality of contestation over international institutions under the shadow of crisis. Breaking with the widely accepted image in the mainstream, US-centric literature of an advance of global governance supported by pillars of institutionalized formality, Andrew F. Cooper points to the retention of a habitual impulse towards concertation related to informal institutionalism.
The International Legal Order's Colour Line (Oxford UP, 2023) narrates this divide and charts the development of regulation on racism and racial discrimination at the international level, principally within the United Nations. Most notably, it outlines how these themes gained traction once the Global South gained more participation in international law-making after the First World War. It challenges the narrative that human rights are a creation of the Global North by focussing on the decisive contributions that countries of the Global South and people of colour made to anchor anti-racism in international law. The International Legal Order's Colour Line provides a comprehensive history and compelling new approach to the history of human rights law.
What does it mean to live beside an eroding democracy? As this powerful and timely book argues, that question will define the next generation of Canadian politics.
As a congressional staffer in the United States, Rob Goodman watched firsthand as a rising authoritarian movement disenfranchised voters, sabotaged institutions, and brought America to the brink of a coup. Now, as a political theorist who makes his home in Canada, he has an urgent warning for his adopted country: The same forces that have upended democracy in America and around the world are on the move in Canada, too. But we can protect our democracy by drawing on a set of political, cultural, and historical resources that are distinctly of this place.
Can history help us to understand the disastrous state of Russia’s relations with the West in 2023? Leigh Sarty suggests that it can, drawing on his experience as a student, a scholar, and a diplomat over more than four decades to describe some of the key turning points and deeper structural forces that make contemporary Putinism more intelligible.
In this symposium, a distinguished group of speakers will offer their insights about global challenges and potential solutions in the domains of international security, economic relations, and societal transformation. The symposium will consider the role that Japan, Canada, and the United States can play along with other G7 partners in confronting global challenges, building on the progress of the Hiroshima G7 meeting in May 2023.
The Graham Centre brings together leading experts on NORAD to discuss the past, present, and future of this unique institution.
A discussion of potential solutions to the challenges of accessing historic records via Canada’s current Access to Information system.
This event is presented by the Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project (https://www.csids.ca/canadian-foreign-intelligence-policy-project).
Natural Allies looks at the history of US-Canada relations through an environmental lens. From fisheries in the late nineteenth century to oil pipelines in the twenty-first century, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the scores of transborder environmental and energy arrangements made between the two nations. Many became global precedents that influenced international environmental law, governance, and politics, including the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Trail Smelter case, hydroelectric megaprojects, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements. In addition to water, fish, wood, minerals, and myriad other resources, Natural Allies details the history of the continental energy relationship - from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels -showing how Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state.
Canada must prepare for an isolationist and unpredictable neighbour to the South should a MAGA leader gain the White House in 2025.
The American-led global order has been increasingly challenged by Chinese assertiveness and Russian revanchism. As we enter this new era of great-power competition, Canadians tend to assume that the United States will continue to provide global leadership for the West.
Dr. Winthrop Bell, University of Toronto philosophy professor and British secret agent A12, may be best known for sounding the first intelligence warning against the Nazi plot for World War II in 1919, and the earliest public warning against Hitler’s plan for the Holocaust in 1939. Yet, defeating Nazi evil was, for Bell, simply a precursor to establishing a just post-war peace, one that would allow friendship and mutual profit for both victor and vanquished.
What was the historical importance of his intelligence work? What is its relevance today? With his papers finally declassified, we can reflect on its relevance for today’s scholars and policymakers who are interested in international relations and Canada’s role in the defense of Europe.
Who makes foreign policy in Canada? The bureaucracy? Civil society? The Business Community? Parliament? In this session, four scholars will share a discussion on the central role of the Canadian prime minister in crafting and executing this country's foreign policy. The discussion will stretch back to Sir John A. Macdonald's creation of the "Atlantic Triangle" but will focus on the roles played by Robert Borden, R.B. Bennett, Pierre Trudeau and Paul Martin.
The 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of labour history, and not only for historians of Germany. There was a marked turning-away from both labour history and workers' history after 1980, due in part to new interest in the German and European bourgeoisies, in part to the "cultural turn" and other scholarly trends. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1991 and the decline of Marxist historiographies. In 2010, a forum of scholars acknowledged that "class," as an analytical category, had largely lost its appeal. But now we are more than ten years further on, and scholars have recently been telling us that histories of work, of labour movements, and of capitalism are all back "in." Are they really?
One year ago, Vladimir Putin launched what was supposed to be a romp to victory in Kiev. Despite unrelenting Russian bombings and war crimes against civilians, the people of Ukraine have responded with incredible valour and resolve. Putin seems only to have succeeded in strengthening NATO, the EU and Western alliances. To help answer questions like ‘what next?’ , the CIC Ottawa Branch is welcoming back Stephen Kotkin.
It is twenty years since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and it is now possible to look at that crucial event in international history with a degree of perspective. The Graham Centre, in partnership with the University of Toronto Department of History, is pleased to present a conversation with distinguished historian Melvyn P. Leffler (University of Virginia) on his new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Decision to Invade Iraq.
Please join us for discussion and refreshments in the Upper Library on February 9th for a Conversation about Populism and Populist Leaders with Ed Greenspon, President and CEO of the Public Policy Forum and Kathleen Wynne, the 25th Premier of Ontario, moderated by Massey College Senior Fellow, Haroon Siddiqui, Editorial Page Editor Emeritus, the Star.
The peaceful end of the Cold War and the rise of economic neoliberalism are two of the most consequential developments in contemporary history. Yet the connections between the two have largely been ignored until now. In this pathbreaking book, historian (and U of T alumnus) Fritz Bartel explores the links, showing how the economic difficulties of the 1970s and '80s transformed the economic and geopolitical landscape.
The Vatican Archives in Rome house tens of thousands of Indigenous items, many from Canada. In light of the Church’s role in Canada’s residential schools and the larger global conversation about cultural loss and the return of colonial-era cultural property, pointed questions are being asked about the return of Indigenous cultural items to their communities. In this instalment of the Restitution Dialogues, we seek to further the discussion of these important questions by exploring the history of the Vatican collection and locating that history in the larger context of debates and practices concerning cultural loss, transfer, and return.
Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life.