Research

Over the next three years, Dr. Kristin Good will continue to co-lead the Local Democracy Project / Projet sur la democratie locale.  This project conducts a far-reaching investigation of campaign finance regulation and local election campaigning. This project is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant following pilot work funded by Western Faculty of Social Science research seed grants.  With Dr. Good (Co-Investigator), the project is led by Professors Zack Taylor (Principal Investigator) and Martin Horak (Co-Investigator) at Western and Sandra Breux (Co-investigator) at l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Montréal. This mixed-methods project will entail the largest survey of election candidates ever conducted in Canada – over 4,000 candidates in 183 municipalities in all 10 provinces, which are home to four out of five Canadians – as well as analysis of candidates’ campaign finance disclosures over three election cycles and in-depth interviews with candidates and campaign managers. The project will contribute new insights, both nationally and internationally, into whether differently configured campaign finance regimes create more competitive elections, how local candidates campaign, and enduring questions regarding the influence of money in politics.

Much of Dr. Pruysers’ research attention is currently being devoted to three major research projects. The first is a SSHRC funded project (with Julie Blais) that explores political parties’ ability to engage in psychological microtargeting. After the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, fears that campaign operatives could tailor advertisements to psychologically manipulate individual voters have been widespread. This project evaluates these concerns through a series of expert surveys and experiments designed to test the efficacy of personality-tailored campaign messages. The second is a book tentatively titled From Ambition to Nomination: The Political Pipeline in Canada. The book establishes a profile of those who are the most likely to express nascent political ambition, explores the barriers to cultivating this interest in a political career, and reports the results of a number of experiments designed to foster ambition among historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. The final project is a series of SSHRC funded studies (with Mel Thomas) that examine the effects of violence against women in politics. Drawing on real-life examples of gender-based violence in Canadian politics, this work considers whether 1) the targets of political violence face an electoral penalty and 2) whether being exposed to political violence through media coverage dampens political attitudes such as interest and efficacy, particularly among women.

In recent years, the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand have all announced proposals to regulate online hate speech. In each country, debates about the limits of rights, especially free expression, in relation to hate speech law have played a central role in policy discourse. In this research project, Prof. Johnstone and Dr. Emmett Macfarlane (University of Waterloo) will explore the implications of different rights cultures for the development of policy responses to online hate speech in these three countries, which comprise the Commonwealth model of judicial review, said to be a middle ground between judicial supremacy and parliamentary sovereignty that produces rights-based scrutiny of legislation. This five-year project is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant. 

Prof. Tasker’s research explores gendered violence in conflict-affected contexts through the lenses of transitional justice, human rights, and feminist legal studies. In collaboration with community-based partners, she has examined women’s ‘law-making’ in forced marriages, access to justice following peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual abuse, and the development of transitional justice mechanisms in response to conflict-related sexual violence. Ongoing projects explore how access to healthcare impacts legal decision-making following sexual violence in the DRC, and tracks the inclusion of CRSV survivors in justice mechanisms in Liberia and North East Nigeria.

Dr. Eugene’s research takes up the historical struggles for reparations by conceptualizing it as a liberation praxis for conquest, enslavement, colonialism, and neocolonialism in new worldmaking in the Caribbean context. His current project argues for a decolonial and holistic undertaking of reparations in Canada by connecting the contemporary manifestations of anti-Black systemic racism to transatlantic slavery. He has also undertaken various consultancy projects, most notably with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), to assist states and other key partners to deliver reparations for people of African descent through a human rights and intersectional approach.

Prof. Denike’s teaching, research and writing cover topics such as theories of human rights; feminist and queer philosophies; the political activism of sexual and racial minorities; constitutional equality jurisprudence; state-sanctioned discrimination and persecution; biopolitics and genealogical inquiry; and the politics of terror and security.

Ruben Zaiotti, Director of the Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence, has continued to pursue his research interests on migration and border control in Europe. Not surprisingly, given what has been going on across the Atlantic in the last few months, he has been very busy responding to media requests and writing posts for his blog on European borders (schengenalia.com). He has also published an edited volume on the topic: Externalizing Migration Management: Europe, North America and the Spread of ‘Remote Control’ Practices, Routledge, 2016. The book examines the practice of extending border controls beyond a country’s territory from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, focusing on ‘remote control’ initiatives in Europe and North America. It highlights how in recent times these practices have become more visible, complex and widespread than ever before, raising various ethical, political and legal issues for the governments promoting them.

Dr. Banerjee’s research addresses global migration governance with a focus on the normative role of international institutions and domestic political actors in responding to forced displacement. As Canada Research Chair in Forced Migration and Refugee Policy, Banerjee's research focuses on developing effective policy responses to displacement at the domestic, regional, and international level. His current projects include examining the development of contemporary asylum coordination policies, studying Canadian refugee resettlement, and analyzing the responsiveness of the refugee regime to new forms of displacement.

Prof. Finbow’s focus recently has been on the Canada-European Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), especially the implications for social policy. He received an Erasmus+ grant from the European Commission for research on the CETA Implementation and Implications Project. https://ciipdal.wpcomstaging.com/ He is currently completing the project which analyzes the programmatic and legislative changes required to bring CETA to fruition in Canada, the EU and Member States. The project covers a number of elements of CETA, including investment, intellectual property, agriculture, and the environmental and labour impacts. The CIPP conference on CETA Implementation occurred in late September 2019. Professor Finbow is currently working on a book for McGill-Queen’s University Press based on this conference.

He is also working on theoretical piece on populism in contemporary democracy with applications to the right populist political rhetoric in the “five eyes” states. The case studies examine similarities and variations in populist rhetoric and policy on trade and immigration. This builds upon the work conducted with an undergraduate researcher award held by recent graduate, Noel Guscott. Another project examines the constitutional and domestic governance implications of trade agreements for a collection exploring the legacy of the late Stephen Clarkson.

Prof. Arthur continues to explore a variety of policy challenges facing African states, with special attention to West Africa. In addition to recent articles on democratic backsliding, economic dislocations caused by COVID-19, and digitalization of finance, he is working (with co-authors Vanessa Tang, Korbla Puplampu, and Kobena Hanson) on a new book titled “Green Development and Finance in a Globalized Africa.”

Prof. Bow is turning to a new research project on the “post-globalization” shift toward selective protectionism and industrial policy among the leading economies, with particular attention to the US and Canada. Early work in this area—“Whatever Happened to the Post-COVID Developmental State?”—was presented at the 2024 International Studies Association conference. He’s also working on a paper on the evolution of American policy-makers’ views of China during the 1990s, tentatively title “Don’t Believe the Hype: Liberal Ideas, Domestic Politics, and American Hegemony in the 1990s.”

In November 2024, Oxford University Press will publish Dr. Laurence’s book, Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations. Further details can be found on the OUP site: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intrusive-impartiality-9780197747575?cc=us&lang=en&. In addition, Dr. Laurence recently published a piece in International Peacekeeping entitled, “Interpretive Agency, Change, and the Role of Individuals in UN Peace Operations.” The article is part of a special section that she guest edited with Emily Paddon Rhoads (Swarthmore College) and Sarah von Billerbeck (University of Reading). The special section examines agency and the role of individuals in peace operations, and it includes contributions from a leading group of international scholars with expertise on international organizations and global security governance. The special section builds on a closed-door workshop that Dr. Laurence co-convened with her co-authors as part of the International Studies Association’s 2022 annual meeting.

Leah Sarson is wrapping up several projects with a focus on Indigenous global politics, including a monograph on the contested relationship between Indigenous nations and Canada in the context of resource extraction and a SSHRC-funded project on critical minerals and Indigenous governance in the Arctic. She's also working on an edited volume on gendered perspectives of Canadian foreign policy with three fantastic colleagues and is the editor-in-chief of International Journal. Her future research plans include expanding her focus on unconventional diplomacies.

Prof. Black has longstanding research interests in Canadian engagements with Sub-Saharan Africa, Canadian development cooperation policies more broadly, disability and global development, and sport in international politics and development. In connection with the first two interests, he is co-editor (with Liam Midzain-Gobin, David Hornsby, and Heather Smith) of a forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Critical Understandings of Canada in the World. On disability and global development, he is currently the research hub co-lead and South African country team co-lead of the Engendering Disability-Inclusive Development (EDID) project, funded by a seven-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSRHC) Partnership grant. On sport, he continues to work on the political economy of sport mega-events, and has a recent article in International Journal on “Sports Mega-Events and Changing World Order”, as well as a forthcoming chapter on “Canadian Elite Sport Policy” in an edited collection on Comparative Elite Sport Development.