TRN409H1

Is international cooperation coming to an end? As geopolitical rivalry intensifies, international organizations face growing challenges, from funding cuts and declining legitimacy to great-power competition and institutional paralysis. Yet many organizations survive crises that once seemed existential, while others adapt, stagnate, or disappear altogether. Why? This course explores the ebb and flow of global governance through the life cycles of international organizations. Rather than treating organizations as fixed institutions, we examine how and why they evolve and sometimes fail. Through historical and contemporary case studies—including the League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—students will investigate how leadership, institutional design, bureaucracies, and political change shape the vitality of international cooperation.

Course Instructor:

Julia Gray

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Course Description

International relations scholars have long considered the challenges of decision making under uncertainty, particularly in response to acute crises. Infectious diseases pose one such set of challenges whether it be managing endemic disease or the prevention and management of epidemics and pandemics. To some, infectious diseases pose a risk to national security through the erosion of state capacity and stability, biosecurity and decisions around the procurement of bioweapons. To others, infectious diseases evoke matters of human rights and social justice when considering the distribution of disease and access to care. At the centre lay approaches rooted in human security that bring together the stability and protection of our national borders with the responsibility of all governments to protect the most vulnerable in our midst. Such complex and interconnected crises place high demands on intelligence, defense, public health and development agencies at the national and international level.

While such crises reveal vulnerabilities in our governing institutions, they also reveal the possibilities for positive policy change. This course unpacks why—identifying what we know about crisis prevention and management and the relationship between security, intelligence, human rights and health. It does so by drawing upon the rich literature of conflict management and crisis decision making, public health, medical anthropology, security and intelligence analysis, situating the responses to recent infectious disease outbreaks. In particular, we will focus on how policy standards are negotiated and how health and security are defined and evaluated, drawing out lessons for future crises.

Joy Fitzgibbon
Joy Fitzgibbon is an Associate Professor at Trinity College where she also serves as Associate Director of the Trinity One Program. She is a political scientist whose research explores solutions to governance dilemmas in pandemic control and in international security. As a scholar of international relations, she assesses the efficacy of policies shaped by global health networks, international institutions and national public health and security agencies. Her PhD research explored the Harvard NGO Partners in Health’s successful policy advocacy at the World Health Organization around multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. She is co-author of Networks of Knowledge and more recently articles including WHO, Surveillance and COVID-19 and a review of The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure, Why Warning Was Not Enough. She has three ongoing research projects: a critical assessment of global pandemic responses to COVID-19, TB and HIV-AIDs; an analysis of contested worldviews on pandemic control; and an examination of the failure to address norms of sexual and gender based violence in conflict zones. She has lectured as faculty in the International Paediatric Emergency Medicine Elective at U of T, in the Canadian Disaster and Humanitarian Response Training Program and was a member of the Expert Working Group, Re-imagining Canadian National Security Strategy for the 21st Century—Working Group 7 After COVID: Global Pandemics and Biosecurity Strategy with the Centre for International Governance Innovation at the University of Waterloo. In addition to her faculty position at Trinity College, she is also a Fellow there, a Senior Fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History and a member of the Institute for Pandemics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

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Course Description:

This seminar investigates Canada’s evolving relationship with Asia from 1945 to the present, focusing on shifting attitudes and policies towards revolution in the broader context of the Cold War, decolonization, and globalization. In Canada’s national lore, the country has served as a metaphorical “bridge” between the Global North and Global South in world affairs, but this role has not necessarily extended to revolutionary movements, where it has often reacted with reserve, if not alarm, interpreting it as a potential threat to global order. Together, we will unpack Canada’s varied responses to anticolonial, communist, economic, and democratic revolutions in Asia, while assessing how Canada’s (and Canadian) actions were perceived and in turn shaped by them. In so doing, we will examine revolutions in India, Indonesia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, the Philippines, South Korea, and East Timor.

Course Instructor:

Daniel Manulak

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Course Description:

The world is facing increasing challenges related to migration and mobility, with states and international organizations engaging in diplomacy and exerting power over the movement of people. This course examines how migration policy and diplomacy shape international relations, with a particular focus on forced migration and the governance of refugees and displaced populations. Through close readings and case studies, students will explore and debate how states and international actors construct, respond to and negotiate migration. Students will develop the ability to critically analyze migration policies and diplomatic strategies, and to assess their implications for inequality and human mobility within the international system.

Course Instructor:

Emily Le Roux-Rutledge (see bio & picture below)

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Course Description:

The twenty-first century has brought remarkable shifts in how states and other actors define themselves in world politics. This course examines how identities, including national, political and cultural, are constructed, contested, and mobilized in international relations, and how they shape conflict and cooperation in the international system. Drawing on constructivist, feminist, and critical approaches, the course examines how identities are formed, whose identities are considered, and how identities influence state behaviour and global politics. Through theoretical readings and empirical case studies, students will learn to critically analyze the role that identities play in shaping both continuity and change in international relations.

Course Instructor:

Emily Le Roux-Rutledge

Emily LeRoux-Rutledge is an Assistant Professor at Trinity College and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She received her BA in International Relations and English from the University of Toronto, and both her MSc in Social and Public Communication, and her PhD in Social Psychology, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a migration and international development scholar whose research examines the identities and wellbeing of marginalized groups in global contexts, using quantitative, qualitative and narrative methodologies. She publishes in leading interdisciplinary journals, including The Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and World Development. Alongside her academic work, she has had a 20 year international research career in media and communication for development, working across more than 25 countries on issues including gender equality, health, education, governance, elections, peacebuilding and climate change.

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Course Description:

After centuries of struggle and thirty years of conflict, lasting peace in Northern hung in the balance over eleven dramatic days of negotiation in April 1998. This course examines the events, individuals, and issues that gave rise to the Troubles, shaped the course of the conflict, and converged for resolution in the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement. The course combines an in-depth examination of the historical narrative and a study of the key diplomatic interventions on the road to peace.

Course Instructor:

Eamonn McKee

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