Canada and the Republic of Korea in 2024: Indo-Pacific Partners

 

In this talk, Ambassador Tamara Mawhinney will provide a foreign policy practitioners’ “on-the-ground” perspective on our bilateral relationship in 2024 in a complex region of critical importance to Canada.

 

About the Ambassador:

 

Ambassador Tamara Mawhinney joined Global Affairs Canada in 1993. She began her career as a Cabinet Liaison Officer and then as a Lawyer within the International Trade Law Division. Assignments overseas included Mission of Canada to the UN in New York (1995 to 1998), Embassy of Canada to France, Paris (2001 to 2006 and 2013 to 2014), and Mission of Canada to the European Union in Brussels where she served as Political section head from 2007 to 2012. After serving for 2 years as Advisor to Mme Michaëlle Jean, Secretary-General of La Francophonie in Paris, she returned to Ottawa in 2016 to lead the UN Security Council campaign team. Ambassador Tamara joined Canada`s Mission to the UN in Geneva in the summer of 2018 as Deputy Permanent Representative.

 

Prior to joining Global Affairs, Ambassador Mawhinney completed her Articles of Law with the firm of McCarthy Tétrault in Toronto and Ottawa and remains an Attorney and Member of the New York State Bar.

 

Ambassador Mawhinney has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in History and Literature from Trinity College, University of Toronto (1987) and a Bachelor of Laws degree from University of Toronto (1991). She also has a Certificate of Political Studies (Certificat d'Études Politiques) in European politics and Law from Paris Institute of Political Studies (Institut d'Études Politiques, France, 1998) and a Diploma in French and EU Public Administration, Management and Law from École Nationale d'Administration (France, 2000).

 

 

Yoonkyung Lee is a political sociologist specializing in labour politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and was associate professor in Sociology and Asian and Asian-American Studies at State University of New York-Binghamton (2006-2016) before joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto in 2016. She has also been the director of the Center for the Study of Korea (2019-2022).

 

She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2022). Her recent publications include “Cold War Undercurrents: The Extreme Right Variants in East Asian Democracies” (Politics and Society, 2021), “Seoul as a Site of Labor Resistance: The Spatial Representation of Inequality and injustice” (European Journal of Korean Studies, 2021), and “Neoliberal Methods of Labor Repression: Privatized Violence and Dispossessive Litigation in Korea” (Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2019).

 

Julia Bentley is a former career diplomat whose work has focused chiefly on Asia. She has served twice as a diplomat in China (cross-accredited to Mongolia), Taiwan and India, where she was cross-accredited to Nepal and Bhutan. She was appointed as High Commissioner of Canada in Malaysia from 2017 to 2020. Combined with other roles including as a teacher, development consultant and head of an international organization, she has spent 22 years in Asia.  

 

At Global Affairs Canada's headquarters in Ottawa, Bentley served as Director for Northeast Asia, Executive Director for South Asia and Director General for South Asia, encompassing foreign policy, development, trade and investment.  

She previously worked as Winrock International's Chief Representative in China and director of its NGO Capacity Building Program in China, funded by the Ford Foundation.  She was on secondment from Global Affairs Canada to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at University of Toronto from January through December 2022 and held a policy practitioner fellowship at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs for a semester in spring 2023. 

 

She holds degrees in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and University of Toronto, as well as a post-graduate diploma from Nanjing University in modern Chinese history.