Abstract
The journal's sponsors and editorial staff are very pleased to announce a new editorial leadership team for International Journal. Dr. Susan Colbourn, who has been serving as editor for the journal's Lessons of History section, has recently taken over the historian's position left empty by the untimely death of Greg Donaghy, and has been sharing the editorial work for this issue. Susan is a historian of alliance politics and nuclear statecraft and has published widely on the political and military uses of nuclear weapons, the past, present, and future of NATO, and Canadian foreign relations. She currently holds a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
In summer of 2021, Prof. W. Andy Knight will take over the other editor-in-chief position from Brian Bow. Andy is one of Canada's best-known scholars of International Relations, with expertise (and a lengthy publication record) in a wide variety of areas, including the UN, humanitarian intervention and peace-building, African security cooperation and Canada-Africa relations, and the Caribbean. He brings a wealth of experience, including many years' work as editor-in-chief of the journal African Security.
We begin the new year, as we always do, by celebrating our essay prize winners for the previous year. The SAGE Award for international scholarship goes to Eric M. Blanchard, for his article “Combing the same beach: Analytic eclecticism and the challenge of theoretical multilingualism” (September 2020). The Marcel Cadieux Award for the best article on Canadian foreign policy has been awarded to Meredith Lilly and Delaram Arabi, for their article “Symbolic act, real consequences: Passing Canada’s Magnitsky Law to combat human rights violations and corruption” (June 2020). And the Marvin Gelber Prize, awarded each year to the author of the best essay by a junior scholar, goes to Caroline Dunton, for “Willing to serve: Empire, status, and Canadian campaigns for the UN Security Council, 1946–1947” (December 2020). Congratulations to all of our award winners for their outstanding contributions.
This issue begins with a forum of relatively short, policy-focused essays on the international implications of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, brought together by Bruno Charbonneau. These five essays explore various efforts by international organizations and states to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic and its knock-on effects, and some of the short-term and medium-term consequences for international politics—and for Canada in particular. We lead off with Charbonneau’s assessment of the UN Security Council (UNSC)’s limited and ineffectual effort to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which—he argues—reveals the profound structural limitations of the UNSC as a vehicle for managing non-conventional security challenges. Next up is Chantal Lavallée’s review of the European Union (EU)’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. Lavallée argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has put the EU’s commitment to “two-fold multilateralism” to the test, but in the long run may end up strengthening that approach and furthering regional integration. Third, Shahar Hameiri notes the massive disruptions of international trade and investment and asks, “Is this the end of globalization?”; ultimately, he concludes that the era of globalization is not over, but it is under severe stress, with widening inequalities and intense rivalries. That is followed by Stephen Brown’s reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on international development assistance. Brown worries about declining aid amounts and further politicization of aid decisions, but welcomes wider recognition of aid flowing from new directions and through collaborative initiatives. Wrapping things up is Wesley Wark’s appraisal of the global health regime’s initial reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. He argues that the monitoring and alert systems built after the 2002–2004 SARS pandemic have clearly failed, but he offers some thoughts on what might be done to strengthen the WHO and the Canadian response to any future pandemics.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to undertake a different review process to get this bundle of essays out in a reasonably timely way, while still maintaining rigorous quality-control. We are grateful to three members of the journal’s editorial board—Jean-Christophe Boucher, Brian Job, and Roland Paris—for agreeing to serve as blind reviewers, on an expedited timeframe, for all five of these essays, and providing thoughtful editorial guidance to each of the authors.
The issue is filled out with three other excellent essays. In the first, Xiaojun Li and Adam Liu explore the drivers of consumer activism in international trade disputes, focusing on Canadian consumers’ responses to US steel and aluminum tariffs in 2018. Li and Liu use a survey experiment to determine the degree to which consumer activism is driven by retaliatory impulses, peer pressure, or elite cues, and find evidence of all three types of effects. Next is an impressive study of comparative trade policy, co-authored by Stéphane Paquin, Hubert Rioux, David Eiser, Graeme Roy, and Ian Wooton. Paquin et al. compare the roles played by Quebec and Scotland in the negotiation of new, post-Brexit trade agreements between Canada and the United Kingdom and find that, while the scope for these subnational governments to participate formally in trade negotiations is quite limited, there are nonetheless important avenues for them to have an impact on trade negotiation outcomes. And, third, we have an important essay on the global market for private military and security services, by Ulrich Petersohn. He uses extensive open-source research to show that there have been significant violations of the international norm against the use of mercenaries for offensive military operations, and then uses basic game theory to explain why even states committed to the norm have refrained from drawing attention to these violations.
This issue includes a fine Lessons of History essay by Daniel Macfarlane, digging into General A.G.L. McNaughton and his work on the International Joint Commission. Macfarlane explains McNaughton’s distinctive approach to environmental cooperation between Canada and the United States and draws out practical lessons for contemporary policy-makers. This issue features two Policy Brief essays: Yuen Pau Woo reflects on the Canada–China relationship and makes the case for a more pragmatic approach; and then Kevin Budning, Alex Wilner, and Guillaume Côté assess the Canadian military’s efforts to develop a “connected battlespace,” building on insights gathered from a workshop for technical experts and policy-makers.
As always, the issue concludes with reviews of recent books, including Ferry de Kerckhove’s review of David Webster’s Challenge the Strong Wind: Canada and East Timor, 1975–99; Wilfrid Greaves’ review of Danita Catherine Burke’s Diplomacy and the Arctic Council; and Victoria Tait’s review of H. Christian Breede, Stéphanie A.H. Bélanger, and Stéfanie von Hlatky’s (eds.) Transhumanizing War: Performance Enhancement and the Implications for Policy, Society, and the Soldier.