Master Canada's place in a volatile world order if the 21C!

If you have spent time watching Canadian foreign policy coverage and felt that something essential is missing — that the analysis rarely gets beneath the press release, rarely names the structural constraint, rarely explains why Canada ends up in the position it does — then I suspect you already know what this seminar is designed to do.

Canada is a genuinely fascinating strategic case in the 21C world. A mid-power with vast geography, enormous and very diverse resources, and a deeply integrated relationship with the world's pre-eminent state — and yet Canadian grand strategy is rarely analysed with the rigour it deserves. Most commentary treats Canada's foreign policy as a series of discrete decisions rather than what it actually is: the ongoing management of structural constraints, competing institutional loyalties, and a strategic culture that is itself contested. A political refugee in Canada, I built this seminar to change that, and to give serious students the analytical terminology to change it too.

What you will find here is a seminar organized around the logic of a working strategist rather than a textbook survey. We move through theory not as an academic exercise but as a practical toolkit: realism helps you name the power asymmetries; liberalism helps you account for the institutional architecture; constructivism helps you interrogate the national identity narratives that shape what Canadian decision-makers even believe is possible. All three lenses are in play throughout — on the 70-percent economic dependency problem with the sunsetting United States, on the Northwest Passage huge opportunity but also some legal dispute, on the NATO burden-sharing debate, on the Indo-Pacific pivot, on the EU pivot. The goal is structured analytical pluralism, not ideological commitment to any single theoretical framework or model.

I also want to be direct about what this seminar asks of you. The material is dense indeed. The sessions are designed to challenge you to think structurally, to resist the comfort of easy narratives, and to hold complexity without trying to resolve it prematurely. The policy brief practicum at the end is not a formality — it is the test of whether you can take everything the seminar has built and produce an argument that would survive scrutiny at a real policy table. That is a high bar; and I set it deliberately.

If you are a graduate student, a policy analyst, a diplomat, a journalist, or simply a serious citizen who believes that understanding Canada's place in the 21C world order matters — and that understanding it well requires more than good intentions — then this seminar was built for you. Come prepared to argue, to be challenged, and to leave with sharper analytical tools than you arrived with. The world is not getting less volatile. Canada needs people who can think clearly about its position in it. I hope you will be one of them.