Abstract
How much does Canadian foreign policy revolve around calculations of economic advantage? Our current issue opens with a penetrating assessment of the Harper government’s economic diplomacy, by two promising young scholars, Asa McKercher and Leah Sarson. Continuing our focus on recent events, Aaron Ettinger and Jeffrey Rice assess Canada’s limited-term military deployments from 2001 through 2015. Paul Meyer then takes us back to the years of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, with an exploration of his thinking about the “suffocation” of the nuclear arms race. Stepping still further back, Kirk Niergath and J.L. Black illuminate a neglected episode in interwar diplomacy, unearthing the Soviet view of the proposed Canada–Soviet barter agreement.
Events in Syria continue to claim our attention, and Tom Najem, Walter C. Soderlund, E. Donald Briggs, and Sarah Cipkar bring us a groundbreaking study of the debate over invocation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the Syrian case, as reflected in the pages of the Globe and Mail and National Post. Then, Bill Park turns his eye to the knotty situation posed by the rise of Islamic State and Turkey’s problematic relations with the Kurds. Cynthia Banham examines Canadian responses to the torture of citizens abroad and finds these more complex and perhaps less commendable than we might link to think. And in our Lessons of History feature, Stephanie Bangarth evokes an early episode in Canadian anti-apartheid activism, pertaining to Air Canada package tours to Rhodesia and South Africa.
Finally, we close the issue out with the usual passel of reviews of recent books in international relations and related fields. This September, Mathilde Von Bülow steps down as Book Review Editor to concentrate on other responsibilities. We thank her for her hard work and for expanding the book review section’s coverage into new areas during her tenure. Of course, we wish her well in her future endeavours.
It is not a particularly auspicious way for a new editorial team to begin, but we need to acknowledge an error in the production of issue 71/2. The wrong versions of two articles were sent to the production team at SAGE, and the mistake was not discovered until production was too far along for the necessary changes to be made. The most significant problems were with Srdjan Vucetic's excellent article on the F-35, as the originally-submitted version of the article was sent to the printer and posted under the article-of-record DOI. This original version was drafted before the 2015 election, and does not include Dr. Vucetic's acknowledgement of feedback from Philippe Lagassé. Also affected was Stephen Saideman's penetrating assessment of the state of Canadian scholarship on International Relations; an early version of the article appeared rather than the final revision. IJ readers are strongly encouraged to seek out the correct, updated versions of the articles, which can be accessed on the SAGE web page for IJ at http://ijx.sagepub.com/content/71/2.toc. We sincerely apologize to Dr. Vucetic, Dr. Saideman, and to IJ readers for these errors, and any consequent confusion or inconvenience. We are also implementing new safeguards to prevent a recurrence, and working with SAGE to improve our production process. If you have any questions about this, or about the steps we are taking to prevent production errors like this in the future, please feel free to email us directly at