April 15th, 2024
This new report from The Simons Foundation Canada identifies 69 continuously staffed Arctic military sites. It includes maps and satellite images and covers the Arctic territories of the five states with Arctic Ocean coastlines and discusses the challenges of reducing strategic tensions and recovering diplomacy. As Canada’s first northern indigenous Governor General, Mary Simon, has […]
Read MoreJanuary 31st, 2024
This was the theme of a one-day conference at Massey College, University of Toronto (November 30, 2023). Dr. Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon, Professor Emerita at Western University and Senior Fellow of Massey College, opened the conference with the question: “how can we engage Russia in the shared pursuit of pan-Arctic security, stability, and cooperation, while still holding […]
Read MoreJanuary 16th, 2024
Emerging security challenges in the Arctic require policies that squarely face changing conditions, strategic and environmental, but preserving the basic stability that still exists in the region must be a clear priority. Relying too heavily on military responses risks exacerbating rather than easing Arctic tensions, and it ignores the post-Cold War reality that vulnerability to […]
Read MoreNovember 10th, 2023
Of the world’s nine states with nuclear weapons, two – Russia and Israel – are now fighting high intensity wars. Another three of the nuclear nine – the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – are deeply invested in both wars, supplying weapons and expecting to influence outcomes. The other four nuclear powers – […]
Read MoreArmed Conflict, Defence and Human Security, Nuclear Disarmament
July 12th, 2023
Two Parliamentary Committees have recently recommended that Canada “reconsider” it’s 2005 decision against joining the US homeland Ballistic Missile Defence system. The Pentagon acknowledges the system has no capacity against Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles, and its operational design means it also has no capability against cruise and hypersonic missiles. With continental security concerns shifting […]
Read MoreArctic Security, Defence and Human Security, Nuclear Disarmament
June 30th, 2023
A discussion paper prepared for the Canadian Pugwash Group project on a Peace Table for Ukraine and Russia. Though their land is torn by horrific war, what many Ukrainians fear is an early ceasefire. As deep as the desire to silence the guns may run, it is hard to get past the understandable suspicion that […]
Read MoreJune 24th, 2023
The likelihood of either side in this war ever being in a position to dictate settlement terms to the other is remote, and that means talks are inevitable. Hill Times, Opinion, June 22, 2023
Read MoreMay 24th, 2023
While rising northern tensions clearly challenge notions of the Arctic as a durable zone of peace, current tensions are rooted in fears of a European conflict spilling northward, not in conflict endemic to the Arctic. Two decades of high north military expansion have certainly added to the region’s strategic uncertainty, but even more consequential are […]
Read MoreArctic Security, Defence and Human Security, Nuclear Disarmament
May 15th, 2023
The Department of National Defence (DND) is updating its 2017 defence policy statement, “Strong, Secure, Engaged” (SSE), pointing to a changed “geopolitical landscape” in which threats from that time “have intensified and accelerated…at an unprecedented rate.” Among those rising threats, the Defence Department includes “rapidly accelerating climate change, more sophisticated cyber threats, Russia and China’s […]
Read MoreJuly 29th, 2022
Nuanced changes to the nuclear weapons elements of NATO’s new Strategic Concept do not alter its substance. Once again, the alliance propagates the dangerous myth that nuclear weapons are the “supreme” source of security, doubles down on the threat of nuclear weapons use in response to conventional attack, continues to insist that alliance security depends […]
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