Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT the Arctic University of Norway scholar Jonathan Crossen visits Carleton University in June 2025
I am a historian of organized internationalism, particularly international cooperation between Indigenous peoples in the late twentieth century. My past researched has focused on both institutions like the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) and the individuals that contribute to their work. I am currently focused on efforts at Indigenous international diplomacy during the 1990s, including international Indigenous women’s activism; global Indigenous youth conferences; joint Indigenous responses to European seal skin restrictions; Indigenous cooperation surrounding the 1992 Kari-Oca Conference; as well as various examples of Indigenous-led economic development work.
I am based at the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT the Arctic University of Norway in Romsa, Sápmi / Tromsø, Norway. Dominque Marshall has kindly invited to come to Carleton as a Visiting Professor and I will complete a brief research stay in June 2025.
During my time in Ottawa and Algonquin territory, I hope to gain further insight into how the synergies between various inter-governmental undertakings helped advance Indigenous rights, both directly and indirectly. Gatherings like the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, or the Arctic Council’s Ministerial meetings not only not only draw international attention to Indigenous peoples’ rights but provide space for Indigenous delegates to practice their diplomatic skills in a high-level forum. I aim to analyze this growth period while also explaining the parallel demise of the WCIP, one the first global Indigenous organizations.
Similarly, the span of time between the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985) and the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People (1993) provided bi-directional attention which led to a leap in the organization and effectiveness of Indigenous women’s collaboration. Successive conferences during and after the end of the UN Women’s Decade attracted steadily increasing participation from Indigenous women. Making new connections, they saw opportunities for collaboration and began to organize their own international conferences, and eventually, their own international organizations. During the 1990s, Indigenous peoples completed a draft the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, organized protests and commemorations of the “Columbus Quincentenary.” This work, the added attention of Rigoberta Menchú’s 1992 Nobel Peace Price win, and the proclamation of the first International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (1995-2004) effectively forced UN bodies to facilitate increased Indigenous participation. By the time of the 1995 World Conference on Women, Indigenous women were well prepared and well situated to make their voices heard.
Letterhead from the Second International Indigenous Women’s Conference (August 1990) under the sponsorship of Sáráhkká, the Sámi Women’s Association.
As well as conducting research at Library and Archives Canada and Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada, I look forward to forging new links with scholars from various units at Carleton, including History, NPSIA, SPAA, FIST, and Indigenous Studies. I aim to investigate the possibility of building an expanded international research project related to Indigenous diplomacy or internationalism.
The CNHH will organize a hybrid event around Jonathan’s work toward the end of his stay. If you are interested, please contact us at dominique_marshall@carleton.ca
Image of a Student Working for the Instagram Account of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). United States of America National Archives. NAID: 236741847.
Shocked, but not surprised.
It’s an ambivalent set of emotions that I, and I’m guessing many others, have become well acquainted with since 2016, when Trump first took charge of the White House. And it’s something that I felt acutely when I heard the news about Elon Musk gutting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). After all, this is happening under the same President that once referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” so I could not be truly surprised. But it was still a shock when I read that as the unofficial head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a group that has no Congressional authority, Musk began to shutter USAID operations at the beginning of February. Musk bragged on his social media platform that he was putting USAID “into the wood chipper.” At that time, the USAID website went dark, and as I am writing this, it is still down.
President John F. Kennedy created USAID through an Executive Order in 1961. Though many historians have pointed to earlier origins of humanitarian aid, stemming from imperial, colonial and missionary roots, the government aid programs that developed in mid-century North America were geopolitical and economic expressions of the post-war period. USAID consolidated the growing but piecemeal technical assistance, food aid, education and healthcare-based development programs already underway in parts of the US government throughout the 1950s. A similar consolidation of the Canadian program occurred when the Liberal Lester B. Pearson government created the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in 1968.[1]As I’ve written about in this forum in the past, the government of Stephen Harper dismantled CIDA in 2013 to more explicitly align aid with the government’s foreign policy goals. While many observers disliked this change, no one could argue it was outside the norms of traditional democratic governance. Aid continued to be a feature of Canadian foreign policy. What is currently happening in the United States is quite different.
Clearly, self-interested economic and geopolitical considerations of the Cold War, such as the need to dispose of food surpluses and support American soft power influence against Communist powers, provided the political currency and motivation to spend aid dollars. Nonetheless, USAID and concomitant support for the Bretton Woods and other multilateral institutions reflected an ideal, emerging from the Second World War, that rejected the autarky of fascism and economic isolation of pre-war America, and sought to build international relationships. Of course, successive US administrations exploited the country’s economic and political power to support anti-democratic and autocratic regimes, including support for the military coup in Iran in 1953 and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Many critics argue that global trade arrangements have allowed those in wealthy countries to profit enormously from cheap and exploited labour within countries that receive aid.[2] But USAID and other contemporary nation-based development agencies did at least represent a vision of the global order that saw the prosperity and security of the rest of the world as relevant to the prosperity and security of those at home.
Aid has always been vulnerable to political winds of change and, indeed, fads. From the focus on family planning of the 1960s and 1970s, to the structural adjustment trends of the 1980s and 1990s, to the technocratic Sachsian approach of the 2000s (instead of more cowbell, think more bed nets), the desire to provide an ultimate “fix” to global poverty cheaply and easily is a cycle that has repeated itself over and over again.[3] That no such fix is possible has led to real donor and compassion fatigue, especially as international crises seem to multiply and intensify.
Adding to this fatigue, some small and big “c” conservatives have long been inclined to be skeptical of aid, asking why money that could be spent at home should be spent abroad (it often goes unnoticed that a lot of aid dollars have been spent at home, purchasing the items that are given abroad). Indeed, this was a question that Prime Minister John Diefenbaker himself once expressed privately in correspondence with one of his Ministers, Donald Fleming, during Canada’s early days of aid-giving.[4] But if anyone today has a relative connected to the “Proud” and Q-Anon adjacent social media universe, you will know that this point has escaped from an uncle’s passing reflection at the dinner table, and entered the online right-wing meme-a-verse. These memes paint government spending as a zero-sum proposition, where resources are spent either on foreign aid or, for example,homeless veterans, and usually contain false statistics. It does not help that such opinions are reinforced by the waste and scandals that have occasionally plagued aid-giving, such as the discovery that Oxfam employees were sexually exploiting women in Haiti. But more than that, they speak to the ideology that allowed USAID to be put into the metaphorical wood chipper.
I do not pretend to know what goes on in the mind of Elon Musk, but I do not think it was an accident that he targeted USAID first. Aid programs have never been an issue that motivated voters one way or another, and the issue has been rife with misconceptions about how much countries spend on aid, so they have always been vulnerable to election cycles. But in the present political context of the US, foreign aid programs stand in direct contradiction to the MAGA movement’s values. Tariffs promise national autarky, opposing the post-war order that encouraged international trade. Foreign aid closes off the mechanism that attempted to foster the growth of political and economic institutions worldwide, promoting more widespread participation in the international rules-based order.
Opposing aid also makes sense to the Christian Nationalist movement that supports Trump. As Vice President J.D. Vance argued in a Fox New interview, the cancellation of foreign aid could be justified by the theological concept developed by Thomas Aquinas of ordo amoris,which Vance stated meant that people “should love their family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” This was an interpretation so out of line with post-Vatican II Catholicism that Pope Francis himself felt the need to correct it. Regardless, it is a view of Christianity that justifies America’s current global retreat from aid-giving. These beliefs lay far from the mission of the mainstream Christian development organizations that grew up in the post-war period alongside government aid programs. One such example is the Catholic organization Caritas Internationalis (the Canadian branch of this organization used to be known as Development & Peace). Officially recognized by the Vatican in 1954, Caritas’ stated aim is to “promote integral human development” and advocate “on the causes of poverty and conflict.”
Critics of aid who do care about global poverty have had no shortage of material to speak about in the past number of decades. Indeed, the development fads I noted above have left their own history of problems, from forced sterilization policies to the rigidly neoliberal governance imposed on highly indebted countries through structural adjustment policies.[5] Many criticized the United States for its hypocrisy in global affairs.[6] However, since the Second World War, it has never been the case that a US administration has so fully refused to state a commitment to the global order it helped create, or refused to participate in a dialogue about compassion and care for the world’s poorest.
Indeed, I find myself in the strange position of missing the hypocrisy. For all its problems, after seventy-five years, aid is needed. It will never “solve” global poverty, and even if it could, it would not be done cheaply or easily. But following a natural disaster or man-made conflict, it can feed and house people, support the construction of needed infrastructure, and help enable a society’s return to a new normal. In an era of climate change, this is more important than ever before. Many non-governmental organizations have become more strategic, focusing support on areas that show the greatest benefits for communities, such as funding small-scale women’s entrepreneurship. Global health campaigns have successfully eradicated diseases or reduced incidence of preventable diseases (bed nets do have their place after all). America’s retreat from this global responsibility will cause suffering, and that suffering will, as always, disproportionately affect those who are most vulnerable in their own societies. Given the comparative size of the US aid budget, representing 40 percent of all humanitarian aid given globally in 2024, it is unlikely that other wealthy democracies, such as Canada, will be able to fill this void, especially as the pressure to increase military budgets rises.
The destruction of USAID is representative of much more than the aid itself. It is the clear rejection of a global norm that, however imperfectly, acknowledges the humanity of all. For those of us that continue to value those principles, we must support those organizations and leaders that will do what they can to make up for America’s absence.
Jill Campbell-Miller, PhD, is a Research Analyst in the Government of Nova Scotia, but this was written in her capacity as a private citizen and does not reflect the views or interests of her employer. Jill is the co-editor of the volume Jill Campbell-Miller, Greg Donaghy, and Stacey Barker, eds. Breaking Barriers: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021).
[1] The most complete history of CIDA remains David Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1998).
[2] From the middle of the 20th century, scholars such as Raùl Prebisch, Fernando Henrique, and Immanuel Wallerstein advanced different versions of the “core-periphery” model of development, arguing that global systems of trade and economics promoted the underdevelopment of the Global South through the development of the Global North. For a summary of their arguments, see David Simon, Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (New York: Routledge, 2005). Following accelerating globalization and the further advancement of free trade in the 1980s and 1990s, more recent scholars such as economist Paul Krugman have proposed updated versions of a similar argument. See Paul Krugman and Anthony J. Venables, “Globalization and the Inequality of Nations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 110, no. 4 (November 1995).
[3] Jeffrey Sachs is a Columbia economist who became prominent in the media in the 2000s following the publication of his book, The End of Poverty (New York: Penguin Press, 2005) which argued that extreme poverty could be eliminated by 2025. He became popularly known for his public promotion of the mass distribution of insecticidal bed nets to discourage the spread of malaria. See Awash Teklehaimanot, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Chris Curtis, “Malaria Control Needs Mass Distribution of Insecticidal Bednets,” The Lancet 369 (30 June 2007), 2143-2146. For an exploration of the real-world technical challenges associated with Sachs’ approach, see journalist Nina Munk’s book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (Toronto: Signal, 2013).
[4] University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections, DCC, Diefenbaker papers, John G. Diefenbaker to D.M. Fleming, 26 April 1961, Volume 532, File 802 Conf. World Relations – Economic Assistance Abroad. 1959-1961.
[5] One of the major critics of these structural adjustment policies (SAPs) is economist Joseph Stiglitz, whose book Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002) argues that countries that found themselves indebted to international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund were forced to open their economies to the free flow of international capital without sufficient regulations. Stiglitz argued that when these policies had the effect of further destabilizing the economy, the same conditions imposed by SAPs prevented governments from providing social safety nets to help their populations.
[6] There is such a huge literature on this topic it is impossible to summarize. Noam Chomsky has been one of the most long-standing critics and vocal critics of hypocrisy in US foreign affairs, most recently putting out a new book with Nathan J. Robison, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World (New York, Penguin Random House, 2024). Other examples include Ruth Blakely, State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: The North in the South (New York: Routledge, 2009) and Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development in US-Indonesian Relations, 1960-68 (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2008).
Brazilian emerging scholar Henrique Schlumberger Vitchmichen visits Carleton University from April to October 2025
My name is Henrique, and I am currently a PhD student at the Federal University of Paraná (Brazil), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marion Brepohl. I am developing a thesis titled Echoes of the Border: Refugee Letters and the Ukrainian Committee in World War II. Below is a brief summary of my ongoing research:
My work aims to investigate and analyze the creation and activities of the Ukrainian Committee for War Victims’ Relief in Europe after the end of World War II, a period in which the continent was overwhelmed by thousands of refugees, war victims, and displaced persons from various regions and nationalities—including Ukrainians who fled their homes or were taken as prisoners following the German invasion of their territory.
Housed in hastily constructed refugee camps across Europe, often lacking adequate resources, these individuals endured the pain of their losses, the humiliation and violence of their conditions, and, ultimately, hunger and material deprivation. In response, many countries, through aid committees, began receiving requests for assistance and providing support in every possible way. One such committee was founded in 1945 in Brazil, in the city of Curitiba, state of Paraná—a region that had received a significant number of Ukrainian immigrants since the late 19th century.
Letter from a Young refugee telling his story in Lviv on the early years of war, and asking for materials, like pencil, paper, ballons, and other thing to play. From the archives of the Ukrainian Society of Brazil.
Operating under the supervision of the Agricultural Instructional Union (now known as the Ukrainian Society of Brazil), the committee maintained correspondence with numerous other organizations, including the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, as well as others in England, France, Argentina, Italy, and the United States. Additionally, it was part of the Central Ukrainian Relief Bureau (CURB), whose member countries included Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, and Switzerland.
Through constant communication, these committees played a crucial role in sending supplies to refugee camps and facilitating immigration opportunities for displaced persons. Moreover, they regularly received letters from refugees seeking provisions or information. In the case of the Brazilian Committee, approximately three hundred letters remain preserved under the care of the Ukrainian Society of Brazil. These letters are currently being translated and analyzed as part of my research. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dominique Marshall, I am eager to be there as soon as possible, as a Visiting Scholar, and to contribute in any way I can to Carleton University and to the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History.
Correspondence between the leadership of the Brazilian and Canadian committees, where the Canadians are orienting the Brazilians about financial business related to the Central Ukrainian Relief Bureau (CURB). From the archives of the Ukrainian Society of Brazil.
Please join the History Department for a talk with Dr. Severyan Dyakonov, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, entitled “The Soviet Red Cross in 1950s-60s India.”
Abstract:
During 1950s-60s decolonization, the Soviet Red Cross aimed to establish hospitals in India as a model of socialist humanitarian aid. Soviet doctors—mostly women—integrated into Indian hospitals and medical schools to showcase the merits of socialism. The International Red Cross provided Moscow with a neutral humanitarian platform to engage non-aligned states while avoiding accusations of spreading Communist propaganda. Moscow instead used it to redefine humanitarianism itself—equating it with socialism.
The rise of generative AI has sparked both innovation and controversy in global health storytelling. Numerous global healthcare aid organizations are embracing AI-generated imagery to depict communities in crisis—but at what cost?
Artificial images in global health: Fakery before and in the era of AI is a thought-provoking exhibition that explores the evolving role of artificial imagery in global humanitarian healthcare aid. Displayed is a collection of AI-generated and historical visuals that challenge perceptions of authenticity, fakery, ethics, and the power of images in shaping global health narratives.
What happens when synthetic images replace real moments? Can AI help or harm efforts toward ethical representation? And in a time of decolonization and authentic partnerships, what does it mean to rely on ‘fake’ visuals?
Experience the exhibition and be part of the conversation.
L’objectif de ce cours est de fournir aux étudiant.es et aux professionnel.les les bases du droit international humanitaire et la possibilité d’appliquer ces connaissances à travers des études de cas réalistes et une journée complète d’exercices de simulation.
Les candidatures d’étudiants universitaires, de fonctionnaires, d’organisations non gouvernementales, de journalistes et de toute personne désireuse d’en savoir plus sur le DIH sont les bienvenues. La préférence sera donnée aux participants ayant une expérience dans l’application ou la théorie du DIH, du droit international des droits de la personne ou du travail humanitaire. Les cours d’été seront dispensés par des universitaires et des experts canadiens et internationaux reconnus du ministère de la Défense nationale et du ministère de la Justice du Canada.
Veuillez noter que les formulaires d’inscription pour la 17e édition du cours d’été en DIH seront disponibles le 1er mars 2025. Si vous avez des questions, n’hésitez surtout pas à communiquer avec nous à l’adresse dih-ihl@uOttawa.ca.
The aim of this course is to provide students and professionals with the fundamentals of international humanitarian law and the opportunity to apply this knowledge through realistic case studies and a full day of simulation exercise.
Applications are welcome from university students, government employees, non-governmental organizations, journalists, and anyone interested in learning more about IHL. Preference will be given to participants with a background in the application or the theory of IHL, international human rights law or humanitarian work. The summer school will be taught by leading Canadian and international scholars and experts from the Department of National Defence and the Department of Justice Canada.
Please note that the registration forms for the 17th edition of the Summer School on IHL will be available on March 1st, 2025. If you have any questions about the summer school, please do not hesitate to contact us at dih-ihl@uOttawa.ca.
The CNHH is pleased to announce that a peer-reviewed article relating some of its members’ experiences engaging with communities and organizations around issues of humanitarian archives is now available to read in Issue 256 of the Revue internationale des études du développement.
“Creating Development Archives Ethically from an Over-Developed Country” appears in a special issue dealing with development archives around the world. The article is available online and open access at: https://journals.openedition.org/ried/23482.
Co-written by David Webster, Dominique Marshall, Chris Trainor, Sarah Glassford, and Eve Dutil, the article grew out of a thought-provoking roundtable sponsored by the CNHH at the 2023 conference of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA).
The roundtable, which was chaired by Glassford (Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections, University of Windsor), featured a lively discussion between Marshall (Department of History, Carleton University), Webster (Department of History & Global Studies, Bishop’s University), Trainor (MacOdrum Library Archives & Special Collections, Carleton University), Melanie Oppenheimer (Emeritus professor, Flinders University), and Fabrice Weissman (Centre de réflexion sur l’action et les savoirs humanitaires, Médecins sans frontières), on a wide array of issues facing scholars and practitioners who engage with archives of development and humanitarianism.
The discussion raised many points the participants were keen to explore further, and a subsequent call for papers from the Revue offered the opportunity to do so. Marshall, Glassford, Trainor, and Webster were joined by Dutil (formerly Bishop’s University, now a graduate student at Carleton University) in co-writing the paper, while Oppenheimer and Weissman graciously granted permission for their roundtable insights to be used as needed.
The result is an article that grapples with where the primary sources documenting humanitarian action end up archived, how, and by whom. It also highlights the direct work of the CNHH and its individual members in helping to preserve and make those primary sources available for future generations – work of which this network can be justly proud. Additionally, the composition of both the original roundtable and the resulting article’s team of co-authors offers yet another example of the CNHH’s commitment to bringing together scholars and practitioners, and the positive results that can come from those encounters.
As an affiliated committee of the CHA, the CNHH has an annual opportunity to sponsor a traditional panel of research papers or a roundtable like the 2023 one, as part of the CHA conference. If you have a theme or idea in the area of humanitarian or development history, around which you would like to organize a panel or roundtable, consider reaching out to the CNHH at aidhistory.canada@gmail.com, or by individually contacting one of the Steering Committee members (*whose contact information is available in the Members section of the CNHH website). It’s a great chance to link your individual research to a broader conversation, and to tap into the network the CNHH has built.
Dr. Sarah Glassford is an archivist at the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections, with responsibility for community collections. She is also a social historian of modern Canada, the author of Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), and a founding member of the CNHH.
À propos de la bourse Cadieux-Léger – date limite de candidature : 13 janvier 2025
– Objectif : La bourse soutient les étudiants de doctorat qui mènent des recherches sur des sujets pertinents pour Affaires mondiales Canada.
– Rôle : Les boursiers travaillent en tant qu’analystes intégrés au Pôle ouvert d’analyse, contribuant à la recherche, aux notes d’orientation et aux efforts d’engagement.
– Durée de la bourse : La bourse s’étend sur une période maximale de douze mois, avec un engagement maximum de 25 heures par semaine.
– Bourse : Les candidats retenus reçoivent une bourse, plafonnée à 48 000 dollars en fonction de la durée de leur poste.
De plus amples informations sont disponibles sur l’offre d’emploi.
The French Association for Canadian Studies (AFEC) has issued a call for papers for its 48th Annual Conference, which will take place at Université Grenoble Alpes from June 18-20, 2025.
This event is aimed at all doctoral students, post-docs and other young researchers at the start of their careers (master’s students, temporary lecturers (ATERs), young PhDs without a contract) working on the Canadian cultural area – be it Anglophone Canada, Francophone Canada, Quebec, Indigenous People – or on themes related to Canada.
To echo the 2024-2025 edition of the Seasons of Canada (Saisons du Canada) organized by the Grenoble Centre for Canadian Studies, the general theme chosen for this next congress will be “Transition(s)”.
Under this broad and flexible theme, AFEC welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions, from all disciplines – civilization, history, linguistics, literature, geography, law, sociology, political science, anthropology, arts, philosophy – reflecting the diversity of research carried out by up-and-coming researchers in Canadian Studies. Contributions may explore contemporary or historical issues related to Canada, including but not limited to:
Environmental or climate issues (ecological transition, energy, health), including ecological and ecofeminist perspectives;
Social reforms and political struggles in Canada, particularly those relating to the rights and representation of minority groups (indigenous people, 2SLGBTQ+, etc.);
Migration and (cross-)border issues;
The development and socio-economic impacts of new technologies (artificial intelligence, cybersecurity);
Current issues in indigenous studies, with a particular focus on movements of cultural and political resurgence and reappropriation;
The circulation of decolonial, postcolonial and/or feminist theories and practices in Canadian research (through the notions of positionality, situated knowledge, intersectionality, care, etc.);
The evolution of literary and artistic forms;
Linguistic issues (e.g. the revitalization / reclamation of Indigenous languages, the evolution of Canadian and Quebec language policies, debates surrounding certain linguistic practices, issues of linguistic representation in the media, etc.)
They should include a title, a 300-word abstract in English or French, 4 to 5 bibliographical references (not included in the total word count), and a short bio-bibliographical note (name, current status, institutional affiliation, fields of research and recent publications if applicable).
Following the review by the scientific committee, a response will be sent by January 15 at the latest to those who submitted a proposal.
Global Affairs Canada – Open Insights Hub – POR Ottawa (Ontario) From September 2024 to August 2025 The Cadieux-Léger Fellowship will last up to 12 months. The Fellow will receive a total bursary not greater than $48,000 contingent on duration.
Closing date: 25 June 2024 – 23:59, Pacific TimeWho can apply: Persons residing in Canada, and Canadian citizens and Permanent residents abroad.
From GC Jobs:
The Open Insights Hub of Global Affairs Canada (GAC) is pleased to announce the selection process for the 2024-2025 Cadieux-Léger Fellowship.
The Cadieux-Léger Fellow is integrated within the Open Insights Hub at GAC as an analyst. The Hub engages with external experts and fosters relationships with the knowledge institutions as part of its research and analysis on foreign, economic and international assistance policy issues, as well as environmental scanning to identify emerging global trends and changes. The Cadieux-Léger Fellow’s activities will focus on themes of relevance to Canadian international interests.
While at GAC, the Fellow is expected to advance the Hub’s current thematic agenda, including understanding the evolving structure of international relations and its implications for Canada. Priority areas of focus include: Canada’s vulnerabilities and opportunities in the context of geopolitical risk; navigating great power competition; engaging the middle ground (or Global South); examining Canada’s international toolkit of policies and programs; the Canada-United States bilateral relationship and impact on Canada’s broader foreign policy; economic security and resilience; and the international dimensions of horizontal issues as emerging technologies, or climate change and the green transition.
We welcome proposals related to these themes and others that have clear relevance to Canadian foreign policy priorities, notably international advocacy and diplomacy. The relevance and quality of the research proposal is an important factor in the selection process, as are interpersonal skills and capacity for engagement and teamwork.
The Open Insights Hub aims to create an engaged, strategic, rigorous, collaborative and innovative environment through knowledge-sharing and interaction with internal and external experts, assumption testing, exchanging experience and facilitating innovative ideas, as well as soliciting and welcoming input in new ways from a variety of stakeholders. Accordingly, the Fellow would be expected to build networks within GAC, the Government of Canada and with external experts. A particular emphasis will be placed on identifying and engaging new sets of stakeholders whose good ideas can be leveraged.
Candidates are expected to work in presence at Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa.
Positions to be filled: 1 or 2, funding for a second Fellow to be confirmed
Positions to be filled: 1
For further information including eligibility and application requirements, please visit the GC Jobs posting for the 2024-2025 Cadieux-Léger Fellowship.
Global Affairs Canada (GAC), in collaboration with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), is pleased to announce the seventh edition of the International Policy Ideas Challenge. The objective of the program is to draw on the network of talented Canadian graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and early-career civil society researchers to identify concrete, innovative solutions to emerging international policy challenges faced by Canada.
The program offers applicants a chance to test their skills at translating academic expertise into policy language and insights. Applicants are invited to submit brief proposals. GAC will select between 5 and 10 winning proposals and provide coaching to researchers as part of further developing their proposals into full policy briefs. Winners will present their briefs to Government of Canada officials as part of the virtual Ideas Symposium, taking place in late 2024.
Call for proposals launch: June 14, 2024
Application deadline: July 15, 2024
Assessment of applications: July – August 2024
Selection of the 5 to 10 winning entries: August 2024
GAC and SSHRC announce winners: August 2024
Four coaching sessions (roughly 3 days in total; see “Coaching,” above): August-October 2024
Policy briefs due: Exact date TBD
Virtual Ideas Symposium to present final research products to Government of Canada officials at GAC: November or December 2024
