Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS) Podcasts

Stephanie Carvin is a Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and is the author of Prisoners of America’s Wars: From the Early Republic to Guantanamo (Columbia University Press, 2010). She researches in the area of international relations, international law and security.

Robert W. Cox, is professor emeritus of political science at York University. On graduating from McGill University in 1947, he joined the staff of the International Labour Office (ILO) which had been given refuge from war torn Europe at McGill and was about to return to its headquarters in Geneva. In a twenty five year career with the ILO he travelled extensively in Europe, Asia and Latin America meeting political leaders and observing social conditions and problems. In 1972, he resigned from the ILO and was appointed Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, New York. In 1977 he returned to Canada as professor of political science at York University, Toronto. He has written about multilateralism, international political economy, world order, civil society and civilizations. His publications include: Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory in Millennium. Journal of International Studies (summer 1981); Production, Power and World Order (Columbia University Press, 1987), andApproaches to World Order (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. He is also a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. He is currently researching the role of market-oriented development strategies in post-conflict environments. Previously, he was a senior intelligence analyst for the U.S. military and worked in Afghanistan.

Jonathan Paquin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Université Laval in Québec City. His research interests include Canadian foreign and security policy as well as U.S. foreign policy. Professor Paquin is the author of the book Stability First: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist States, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009 (forthcoming). He has also published articles in Foreign Policy Analysis and the Canadian Journal of Political Science on issues related to international politics and foreign policy decision-making.

This panel brings together three veteran observers of U.S. politics who will discuss the state of the presidential election campaign and consider its implications for Canada. Michael Kergin retired from the federal public service after a distinguished career as one of Canada’s leading diplomats and experts in international affairs. He was Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2000 to 2005 and, prior to that, he held several senior positions in the Canadian government and diplomatic service, including Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister and Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet for Foreign and Defence Policy. He is a Senior Fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Luiza Savage is the Washington bureau chief for Maclean’s magazine and the editor ofBilateralist.com, a website that tracks Canada-US relations. She is covering her third presidential election campaign, and appears regularly on CBC TV’s US Politics panel. Prior to joining Maclean’s, she was a Washington reporter for the New York Sun, a Supreme Court writer for the National Post, and a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen. She was a Knight Foundation Journalism fellow at the Yale Law School, where she earned a master’s degree, and also holds an economics degree from Harvard. Jeffrey Simpson, the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist, has won all three of Canada’s leading literary prizes — the Governor-General’s award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award for column writing (twice). He has also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism. He is a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

Glenn Carle served as an operations officer in the CIA for 23 years, retiring from the Agency in March 2007. In his last assignment he served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats on the National Intelligence Council. In this capacity he was responsible for the US intelligence community’s most senior strategic assessments of terrorist threats.

Jean-Christophe Graz is Professor of political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques et Internationales of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and co-founder of the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur l’international (Crii). He teaches and researches international relations and global political economy. Prior to taking up this position, he was Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) Professor and held teaching and research positions in Canada, the UK, France and other Universities in Switzerland. His publications include: Transnational Private Governance and its Limits (Routledge, 2008 – with A. Nölke, eds);La gouvernance de la mondialisation (“Repères”, La Découverte, 2008); Commerce international et développement soutenable (Economica, 2001 – with M. Damian, eds); Precursor of the WTO. The Stillborn Havana Charter, 1941-1950 (Droz, 1999).

Ido Oren is Associate Professor at the University of Florida. His intellectual and research interests range from IR theory, international security affairs, and U.S. foreign policy, through the history and politics of American political science, to interpretive methods of political research. Oren’s book, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Cornell University Press) was translated into Chinese and Japanese. Professor Oren is a former Vice President of the International Studies Association. In spring 2010 he was a Fulbright lecturer at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. His articles have appeared in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, International Security, the European Journal of International Relations, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Payam Akhavan is Professor of International Law at McGill University. He was the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague, served the UN in Cambodia, Guatemala, and East Timor, and appeared in leading cases before international courts. He is the author of numerous publications and his 2001 article “Beyond Impunity” in the American Journal of International Law has been recognized as one of “the most significant published journal essays in contemporary legal studies.” Professor Akhavan has been a prominent advocate of human rights for Iranian political prisoners, is Co-Founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, and has been at the forefront of efforts to bring Iranian leaders to justice for crimes against humanity. In 2005, he was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. His latest book, Reducing Genocide to Law: Definition, Meaning, and the Ultimate Crime(Cambridge, 2012) addresses the question of whether genocide is in fact the ‘ultimate crime’.

Steve Coll is president of New America Foundation and a contributor atThe New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper’s managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is the author of six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC’s battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Steve Coll is president of New America Foundation and a contributor atThe New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper’s managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is the author of six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC’s battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007), recipient of the Council on Foreign Relation’s 2008 Arthur Ross Silver Medallion and the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Dr. Parsi’s latest book is entitled A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (Yale University Press, 2012). Have the diplomatic efforts of the Obama administration toward Iran failed? Was the Bush administration’s emphasis on military intervention, refusal to negotiate, and pursuit of regime change a better approach? How can the United States best address the ongoing turmoil in Tehran? This book provides a definitive and comprehensive analysis of the Obama administration’s early diplomatic outreach to Iran and discusses the best way to move toward more positive relations between the two discordant states.

Azza Kamel Maghur is a Libyan lawyer and member of the newly-established Libyan Council for Human Rights. She has worked on several cases involving political prisoners. She is active in current debates in Libya on democracy, a new constitution and the protection of women’s rights. A graduate of the Faculty of Law at Benghazi University, and awarded a DEA in international law from the Sorbonne University, Ms Maghur also lectures at the School for Judges in Tripoli. She has published short stories and articles, including in the New York Times.

Susanne Soederberg is Professor and Canada Research Chair at Queen’s University. She is author of several single-authored books: The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture: Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South (2004); Global Governance in Question: Empire, Class, and the New Common Sense in Managing Globalization(2006); and Corporate Power and Ownership in Contemporary Capitalism: The Politics of Resistance and Domination(2010) (winner of the Rik Davidson/Studies in Political Economy book prize 2010 and short-listed for the International Political Economy Working Group of the British International Studies Association book prize 2010), and a co-edited volume, Internalizing Globalization: The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Erosion of National Models of Capitalism (with Philip G. Cerny and Georg Menz) (2005). Professor Soederberg’s current five-year research plan (2010-2015) involves two major research projects. The first project, Cannibalistic Capitalism: The Making of Predatory Credit, is a single-authored book that critically explores the capitalist nature of the credit system, and debt relations therein, within the contexts of the American political economy (e.g., credit cards, pension securitization, payday loans, etc.) and the global South (the securitization of global development finance and micro-credit). Her second project,Greening Corporations: The Politics of Environmental Shareholder Activism, seeks to build understanding of, and accountability in, environmental shareholder activism – a process the vast majority of people in North America and Europe are unaware they are involved in.

Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. He served as President of the American Political Science Association (2008-09). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1987 and the American Philosophical Society in 2009. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and comparative politics. Prof. Katzenstein’s work addresses issues of political economy, security and culture in world politics. His current research interests focus on the politics of civilizational states; on questions of public diplomacy, law, religion, and popular culture; the role of anti-imperial sentiments, including anti-Americanism; regionalism in world politics; and German politics.