Iran at a Crossroad

Join Professor Payam Akhavan and Professor Janice Stein for a discussion on Iran at a crossroad, examining the ongoing war, the domestic politics of Iran, and international effects.

 

The session will be chaired by Professor Ron Levi of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

 

Payam Akhavan, LLB (Osgoode) LLM SJD (Harvard), LLD Honoris Causa (Law Society of Ontario) OOnt FRSC, is the inaugural holder of the Massey Chair in Human Rights. Professor Akhavan is also Senior Fellow at Massey College, former Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, Associate Member of the Institut de droit international, and the former Special Advisor on Genocide to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

 

He has published extensively on human rights and international criminal law in leading academic journals and is on the Editorial Review Board of Human Rights Quarterly. In 2017 he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey. The companion book became the top non-fiction bestseller in Canada and the subject of a CBC documentary film.

 

Professor Akhavan was the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1994-2000) at The Hague. He has also served with the UN investigating atrocities in conflict zones – including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Timor Leste – and defended genocide survivors throughout the world – including the Bahá’ís of Iran, the Yazidi of Iraq, and Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.  

 

Renowned as one of Canada’s most respected national and international experts on world politics, Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and the founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. She is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

She was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and an inaugural Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorate of Laws by five universities around the world. In 1996, Stein became a University Professor, the highest honour the university accords its faculty.

 

Her research sits at the intersection of cognitive science, psychology, and international politics as she focuses on decision making and strategy. The author of eight books and more than a hundred articles, her most recent work is on the management of escalation and the psychological, institutional, and political factors that explain surprise.  Her latest research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and technology.

 

Ron Levi is a Professor and Senior Advisor, Undergraduate Programs at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Sociology, and is Distinguished Professor of Global Justice. He holds a courtesy cross-appointment to the Faculty of Law, and is a Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen.

 

Ron works at the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of law. He studies two related questions: (1) responses to crime, violence, repression, and atrocities, through legal institutions, in collective memory, and across professional groups; and (2) how legal ideas are institutionally promoted across eras and political contexts, and how individuals and groups grapple with them. He directs the Global Justice Lab in the Munk School, which works with justice systems under stress.