Description

The Middle East Study Group of the CIC National Capital Branch invites you to take part in this event that will explore the challenges facing the liberal international order.

It is commonplace to say that the liberal international order – an order characterized as an open, rules based system of shared values of democracy, rule of law and protection of human rights – is under threat on multiple fronts, domestic and international, with the list usually comprising populist forces, anti-EU movements, backlash against new trade agreements, the rise of great power revisionism and increasing questions about U.S. alliance commitments. In this battle, it is now increasingly being argued that the future of this rules based international order will likely be determined in the Indo-Pacific. From this perspective the challenge becomes how to promote positive, not negative, convergence around global norms, both entrenched and emerging, in that region.

But in order to properly frame this region-specific question, we need to zoom back out to the broader context of the overarching rules based international order and examine an insufficiently acknowledged but fundamental challenge from within that is, from its erstwhile strongest defenders led by the USA but too often now abetted, or insufficiently challenged, by other western allies.

Within this context, some of the relevant cases will be addressed giving the Canadian response or lack thereof in each case:

– US attack on the ICC (and lack of meaningful western pushback eg. Canada)
– US abrogation of Iran nuclear deal
– IHL, Saudi Arabia and Yemen
– Nuclear Weapons and the NPT, TPNW

Speaker’s Biography

Peggy Mason is President of Rideau Institute. Her career highlights diplomatic and specialist expertise in the field of international peace and security, with a particular emphasis on the United Nations, where she served as Canada’s Ambassador for Disarmament from 1989 through 1994. Since 1996 Mason has been involved in many aspects of UN peacekeeping training, including the development of groundbreaking principles on the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former fighters. As a regular trainer and exercise developer, she also brings the UN political/diplomatic perspective to a range of NATO and EU training exercises to help prepare military commanders for complex, multidisciplinary peace and crisis stabilization operations. Since 2002 Mason has been a Senior Fellow at The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University, where she also chairs the Advisory Board of the Canadian Centre for Treaty Compliance (CCTC). Since 2004 she has been Chair of the Board of Directors of Peacebuild, a network of Canadian NGOs engaged in all aspects of peace-building. A graduate and gold medallist of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Common Law, Peggy Mason was inducted into its Honour Society in September 2003.

Registration

RSVP: Hamid Jorjani, Ph.D. – hjorjani@bell.net
Chair, MESG-CIC/NCB