Academic Consultation Group
The W2I Project invited a distinguished group of policy makers and experts to provide strategic advice throughout its implementation. Research Steering Committee meetings took place in Montreal on 26 May 2008 and 29 September 2008. The names of the members of the Research Steering Committee are listed below and their biographies can be viewed by clicking on their names.
Elizabeth Bloodgood is an assistant professor of political science at Concordia University. She earned her PhD at Princeton University. Her research focuses on NGOs and their use of informational lobbying and protest tactics to influence national decision makers regarding foreign policy and international regimes. In her past work, she has examined the activities of Greenpeace, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Friends of the Earth, and Abolition 2000. In order to address questions about the influence of NGOs in foreign policy making, she has surveyed decision makers about their relations with ngos and interviewed NGO staffers about their tactics and goals in both London and Washington.
David Carment is a professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University and fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. He is a NATO Fellow and listed in Who’s Who in International Affairs. In addition, Carment serves as the principal investigator for the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project. He has served as director of the Centre for Security and Defence Studies at Carleton University and is the recipient of a Carleton Graduate Students’ teaching excellence award, fellowships and research awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Carleton University’s research achievement award, and a Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award. Carment has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Don Hubert led policy development on Canada’s human security agenda within the Department of Foreign Affairs for nearly a decade. He has been responsible for specific initiatives on small arms proliferation, diamonds and other resources linked to armed conflict, the responsibility to protect, and corporate social responsibility. Most recently, he was director of the Human Security Division, with previous positions in Policy Planning, as coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs, and as deputy to the chair of the Kimberley Process. He has held post-doctoral positions at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University and the Humanitarianism and War Project at Brown University, was a consultant for the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, and has taught at the School of International Affairs at Carleton University.
Michael Ignatieff was born and raised in Toronto and earned his PhD from Harvard University, where he taught from 2000–05. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts in democracy, human rights, security, and international affairs. He has advised governments and world leaders on these questions and has served on the International Commission on Kosovo and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. He has been a regular commentator, critic, and broadcaster on television and radio in Canada, England, and the United States. As a journalist, he covered the Balkan wars for the BBC, The Observer and The New Yorker, reporting from Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Angola, and Afghanistan. On television, he has hosted many programs for the bbc, pbs, and cbc, including the awardwinning 1993 series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the Academic Consultation Group New Nationalism. In January 2006, he was elected member of Parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore. He is the current leader of the Liberal Party and of the Official Opposition in the Parliament of Canada.
Bruce Jentleson is a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, where he served from 2000–05 as director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. He is a leading expert on a wide range of issues in American foreign policy, with a distinguished professorial record and extensive policy experience. In 2006–07, he was a visiting senior research fellow at Oxford University and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), and was a Fulbright senior research scholar in Spain. He has published numerous articles and seven books, including American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century (3rd edition, 2007) and Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World, a project of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1999). Forthcoming books – After Bush: Getting Global Leadership Right, First Principles: Force and Diplomacy in the Contemporary Era, and Profiles in Statesmanship, are in preparation.
Paul Koring is a staff correspondent in The Globe and Mail’s Washington Bureau and specializes in international security affairs and foreign policy. He has been a foreign correspondent for the Globe and other news organizations since 1980 and has spent significant time covering conflicts and international security and defense issues. His “on-the-ground” conflict coverage includes the Iran-Iraq war, the Palestinian intifada, Northern Ireland, the first Gulf War, and the Balkan wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He has made four trips to Afghanistan and has covered Canadian military overseas deployments in Haiti, Baghdad, Cyprus, and Kandahar.
Stephen Saideman is Canada Research Chair in International Security and Ethnic Conflict and associate professor of political science at McGill University. He has published articles on the international relations and comparative politics of ethnic conflict in a variety of journals and edited volumes. Saideman spent a year on the US Joint Staff working in the Strategic Planning and Policy Directorate on Balkans issues as part of a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship.
Abby Stoddard is a policy analyst in international humanitarian affairs, conducting independent and commissioned research in association with New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and the UK-based Overseas Development Institute. She is a founding member of Humanitarian Outcomes, an independent research team that provides evidencebased analysis to governments and international organizations on improving humanitarian response. Her prior work as an aid practitioner throughout the 1990s spanned such crises as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Stoddard is the author of Humanitarian Alert: NGO Information and its Impact on US Foreign Policy (2006).
Scott Straus is an associate professor of political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches classes on genocide, violence, human rights, and African politics. His book on the Rwandan Genocide, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (2006) won the 2006 Award for Excellence in Political Science and Government from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. He has published articles relating to genocide inForeign Affairs, World Politics, Politics & Society, and Genocide Studies and Prevention. Before entering academia, he was a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Amanda Sussman has an extensive background in advocacy work with organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Greenpeace. She has been a policy adviser on human rights and refugee issues to senior Cabinet ministers in the Canadian government. She holds an MA in international affairs and economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her published works include The Art of the Possible: A Handbook for Political Activism (2007).
Allan Thompson is an assistant professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. He joined the faculty in 2003 after seventeen years as a reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper. Thompson worked for ten years as a correspondent for the Star on Parliament Hill, reporting on foreign affairs, defense and immigration issues. He first reported from Rwanda for the Star in 1996 during the mass exodus of Rwandan refugees from eastern Zaire. He visited Rwanda again in 1998 to research a series of feature articles. Over the years he has also chronicled Roméo Dallaire’s career in a series of reports for the Star. In January 2004, Thompson travelled to Arusha, Tanzania, to report on Dallaire’s testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, where he is co-director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project. Weiss has served as the interim executive director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. He was awarded the Grand Prix Humanitaire de France in 2006 and is chair of the Academic Council on the UN System. He was a co-editor of Global Governance, research director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, research professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, executive director of the Academic Council on the UN System and of the International Peace Academy, a member of the UN Secretariat, and a consultant to several public and private agencies. He has written or edited some thirty-five books and numerous scholarly articles about multilateral approaches to international peace and security, humanitarian action, and sustainable development.