Our Esteemed Faculty
Alan Alexandroff
Teaches: GLA2090H - Topics in Global Affairs I: Governing With and Without the State: Achieving Global Governance Progress in Agenda 2030 , GLA2001H - Global Capital Markets
Currently the Director of the Global Summitry Project and Senior Editor of Oxford’s Global Summitry: Politics, Economics and Law in International Governance, and a Principal of LECG, Inc., an economic, finance and strategic management consulting firm. Dr. Alexandroff has written and spoken on a variety of trade and global economic subjects. In 1994, Dr. Alexandroff was the project consultant on the international economy for the Canada 21 Project. In September, 1994, Dr. Alexandroff and Dr. Sylvia Ostry completed “The Challenge of Global Trade, Investment and Finance for Canada,” one of the four position papers prepared for the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons reviewing Canadian Foreign Policy. He has written recent articles on Canada’s trade policy and China-Mexico trade in NAFTA, and is preparing a piece on the implications of Jackson-Vanik for China’s accession to the WTO. – See more at: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/mga/faculty/mga-faculty.htm#sthash.VAKmhrwi.dpuf
Scott Aquanno
Teaches: GLA2888H - MGA Research Paper
Scott Aquanno teaches at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He has published widely on monetary policy innovation, inflation and the political economy of finance and globalization. His current research focuses on the governance of modern capital markets in relation to innovative investment and looks comparatively at the recent evolution of US and German financial policy.
Sarah Beamish
Teaches: GLA1006H - International Legal Challenges
Sarah Beamish is a practising lawyer with a focus on using the law to serve groups that face systemic discrimination, particularly Indigenous people(s) and women. She specializes in civil litigation, human rights law, and non-profit law.
Sarah has extensive experience in the human rights field as an activist, researcher, advocate, and governor, including over 15 years working at the international level. She is currently the elected Chair of the International Board of Amnesty International. As a member of the International Board, she has helped lead the organization’s work on global strategy, contentious human rights policy development, governance reform, and gender and diversity initiatives. Her human rights work has focused particularly on discrimination, Indigenous rights, and corporate accountability.
Sarah holds a Juris Doctor, Master of Global Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. She was born and raised on Treaty 6 territory, her ancestors come from western Europe and Aotearoa-New Zealand, and she is a member of the Ngaruahinerangi (Māori) people. She is a sessional lecturer at the Munk School.
Dan Breznitz
Teaches: GLA1011H - Global Innovation Policy
Dan Breznitz, is a Professor and Munk Chair of Innovation Studies, with a cross-appointment to the Department of Political Science. In addition, he is also Co-Director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School and the Director of Academic Research. Professor Breznitz is known worldwide as an expert on rapid-innovation-based industries and their globalization, as well as for his pioneering research on the distributional impact of innovation policies. He has been an advisor on science, technology, and innovation policies to multinational corporations, governments, and international organizations such as the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, TEKES, IFC, Fundación Chile, the United Nations, and the US-Israel Science and Technology Foundation. In 2001, he was awarded the GTRC 75th Anniversary Innovation Award for Public Service, Leadership, and Policy for this work. In 2008 Breznitz was selected as a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow. Breznitz spent eight years in Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) as a professor in the Scheller College of Business, the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Public Policy before moving to Toronto in 2013. In an earlier life he founded and served as a CEO of a small software company.
Professor Breznitz’s first book, Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland, won the 2008 Don K. Price for best book on science and technology. His second book (co-authored with Michael Murphree) The Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China, was chosen as the 2012 Susan Strange Best Book in International Studies by the BSIA, and was featured in The Economist and the New York Times. Dan Breznitz’s new book, Third Globalization: Can Wealthy Nations Stay Rich? (co-edited with John Zysman), looks at the challenges and opportunities faced by Western economies in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the rapid changes in the global production system.
Breznitz’s work has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, USCC, Sloan Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, EI2, Connect Innovation Institute, the Samuel Neaman Institute for Advance Studies, the Bi-National Science Foundation, the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Shiri Breznitz
Teaches: GLA2014H - Innovation and Economic Development , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
Shiri M. Breznitz (Director, MGA), an economic geographer, specializes in innovation, technology commercialization, and regional economic development. Her research is at the critical intersection of theory and policy to fit the new realities of globalization. Dr. Breznitz’s work has informed policymaking at the local, national, and international levels. She has advised on the role of universities in the larger story of innovation, on the economic impact of biotechnology, Intellectual Property, and on the role of clusters in driving innovation. Current projects include a study on the economic impact of entrepreneurship education, the impact of gender and work experience on entrepreneurship, the geography of crowdfunding, and a study on the Greater Toronto ecosystems of innovation.
Jack Cunningham
Jack Cunningham has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto and is Program Coordinator at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, in Trinity College and the Munk School. He teaches courses on Canadian defence policy; nuclear weapons in international politics; and war and its theorists.
Ronald Deibert
Teaches: GLA2010H - Geopolitics of Cyberspace
Ron Ron Deibert, (OOnt, PhD, University of British Columbia) is Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research and development hothouse working at the intersection of the Internet, global security, and human rights. He is a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor (2003-2012) projects.
Deibert was one of the founders and (former) VP of global policy and outreach forPsiphon Inc.
Deibert has published numerous articles, chapters, and books on issues related technology, media, and world politics. He was one of the authors of the Tracking Ghostnet report that documented an alleged cyber-espionage network affecting over 1200 computers in 103 countries, and the Shadows in the Cloud report, which analyzed a cloud-based espionage network. He is a co-editor of three major volumes with MIT Press: Access Denied: The practice and policy of Internet Filtering (2008), Access Controlled: The shaping of power, rights, and rule in cyberspace (2010), and Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace (2011). He is the author of Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communications in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), and the recently published Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (McClelland & Stewart/Random House, 2013).
He has been a consultant and advisor to governments, international organizations, and civil society/NGOs on issues relating to cyber security, cyber crime, online free expression, and access to information. He presently serves on the editorial board of academic journals such as International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue, Explorations in Media Ecology, Review of Policy Research, and Astropolitics.
Deibert is on the advisory board of Access Now and Privacy International. He is a member of the board of directors of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and is on the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy.
Deibert was awarded the University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award (2002), the Northrop Frye Distinguished Teaching and Research Award (2002), and the Carolyn Tuohy Award for Public Policy (2010). He was a Ford Foundation research scholar of Information and communication technologies (2002-2004). He was named among Esquire Magazine’s “Best and Brightest List of 2007, and in 2010, he was listed among SC Magazine’s top “IT Security Luminaries.” In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal, for being “among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide.”
Megan Dersnah
Teaches: GLA2062H - Topics in Development III: Gender, Conflict and Crisis
Megan Dersnah currently works on education policy for Global Affairs Canada, based in Ottawa. She previously served as the Director of Policy at Right To Play International and as a longtime consultant for the United Nations, including at UN Women and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She is interested in issues related to gender equality in humanitarian, conflict-affected and fragile contexts. She completed her PhD in 2016 in Political Science at the University of Toronto, focused on how women’s human rights issues have been incorporated into mainstream global peace and security, and development discourses and practices.
Marc Dupont
Teaches: GLA2093H - Topics in Global Affairs IV: Government Relations
Marc Dupont is Managing Director, Government and Public Affairs at the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Prior to this role, he led Government and Public Affairs functions at Methanex Corporation and DuPont Canada and was a Policy Advisor to the Canadian Minister for International Trade. Marc is a sessional instructor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
Marc is a lawyer and holds a B.A. in History/East-Asian Studies and a LL.B. from the Université de Montréal. He was a Fulbright Scholar and also holds an M.A. in International Relations and Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. A recipient of the Canada-China Scholarship, he also studied at the People’s University in Beijing. He is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Mandarin.
Todd Foglesong
Teaches: GLA2066H - Topics in Justice I: Justice Reforms , GLA2068H - Topics in Justice III: Police Violence in Global Affairs , GLA2066H - Topics in Justice I: Crime and Justice in Global Affairs: Solutionology 101 , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
Todd Foglesong joined the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto as a Professor of Global Practice in 2014. He teaches courses on the governance of criminal justice and the response to crime and violence in global context. In cooperation with the Open Society Foundations, he is developing a peer-based system of support for government officials that seek to solve persistent problems in criminal justice. Recent papers, speeches, and publications on measuring the rule of law, pretrial detention, the response to violence against women, and the role of surveys in development can be found here.
Between 2007 and 2014, Todd was a senior research fellow and adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). Between 2000 and 2005 Todd worked at the Vera Institute of Justice, creating a center for the reform of criminal justice in Moscow and founding Risk Monitor, a non-governmental research center in Sofia, Bulgaria that supports better public policies on organized crime and institutional corruption. Before that, Todd taught political science at the Universities of Kansas and Utah.
Benoît Gomis
Teaches: GLA2063H - Topics in Security I: Pathways into Global Security , GLA2067H - Topics in Justice II: Illicit Trade in Drugs , GLA2064H - Topics in Security II: Researching Terrorism , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
Benoît Gomis is a Sessional Lecturer at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy where he teaches MGA courses on ‘Researching terrorism’, ‘Illicit trade in drugs’, ‘Pathways into Global Security’, and a Capstone seminar on global security. Benoît’s research focuses on illicit trade and terrorism. In an independent capacity, he works with a number of organizations including governments, think tanks, NGOs, companies, and universities. He is a Research Consultant at the University of Bath, where he focuses on the illicit tobacco trade and the tobacco industry, and the Managing Editor of Stability, an international journal on security and development. Benoît is also an Associate Fellow at Chatham House, and a frequent contributor to Jane’s Intelligence Review and World Politics Review. He has authored over 100 papers, reports, and briefings, and one book (Counterterrorism: Reassessing the Policy Response, CRC Press 2015). He previously worked at Simon Fraser University, Chatham House, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and the French Ministry of Defence. He was educated at Sciences Po in Aix-en-Provence, Loyola University Chicago, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Stephan Heblich
Stephan Heblich is an Associate Professor and Munk Chair of Economics at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment to the Department of Economics. In his research, he looks at spatial disparities in the distribution of consumptive or productive amenities that attract individuals or firms. In turn, this helps me explain spatial variation in house prices, the share of high-skilled workers, innovative activities and entrepreneurship, or economic development. Another stream of research focuses on the causes and consequences of regional disparities in voting behavior. To establish causality, he often studies historic developments that explain present-day economic outcomes. This explains his interest in economic history. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and the Journal of Economic Geography and his research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association and the leading field journals in Urban Economics.
Gustavo Indart
Teaches: GLA1001H - Macroeconomics: Markets, Institutions, and Growth
Gustavo Indart is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Economics and an associate member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Political Science. He has worked as consultant to the Inter‑American Development Bank on poverty and income distribution in Paraguay and Nicaragua and has participated in numerous research and capacity-building projects throughout Latin America. He is the editor of Economic Reforms, Growth and Inequality in Latin America (Ashgate, 2004) and the co-editor of Critical Issues in International Financial Reform (Transaction Publishers, 2003). Professor Indart received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
Rajshri Jayaraman
Teaches: GLA2062H - Topics in Development III: Health and Education , GLA1010H - Microeconomics for Global Affairs , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
Rajshri Jayaraman is an Associate Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her research
in development and labor economics examines the role of incentives and social preferences on the decisions and performance of students, workers, and consumers. Her recent empirical work has examined the effect of incentive pay on worker productivity; school feeding programs on student outcomes; defaults on charitable donations; and immigration on employment. In collaboration with theorists, she has also worked on the identification of peer effects in social interaction models. Her research has been published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics.
Andres Kasekamp
Teaches: GLA2092H - Topics in Global Affairs III: The Populist Radical Right in Europe
Andres Kasekamp is Chair of Estonian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs, affiliated faculty at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Before returning to U of T, Andres Kasekamp was Professor of Baltic Politics at the University of Tartu in Estonia and Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Humboldt University Berlin and a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His first book was The Radical Right in Interwar Estonia (Palgrave 2000). His second book, A History of the Baltic States (Palgrave 2010), has been translated into nine languages. His research interests include populist radical right parties, memory politics, European foreign and security policy, and cooperation and conflict in the Baltic Sea region. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies, and is currently the President-Elect of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. Prof. Kasekamp has appeared as an expert in the foreign affairs committee of the parliaments of Canada, Estonia, Finland and the European Union, as well as the Baltic Assembly.
Rie Kijima
Teaches: GLA2060H - Topics in Development I: Global Development Education Policy Workshop , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
Rie Kijima is an assistant professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her research addresses topics such as international assessments, education reforms, gender and STEAM learning. Previously, she was a Lecturer and Interim Director in the International Comparative Education/International Education Policy Analysis Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in International Comparative Education from Stanford University and her B.A. from International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. She has previously worked at the World Bank as an education consultant specializing in monitoring and evaluation and traveled frequently to Morocco, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Laos. She has been affiliated with the Stanford Program in International and Cross-Cultural Education, Keio Graduate School of Media Design, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Silicon Valley Japan Platform, and the United States Japan Council. She is the Scott M. Johnson Fellow of the United States Japan Leadership Program. In 2016, she co-founded SKY Labo, an education non-profit organization to promote inquiry-based approaches to STEAM learning. She co-authored a book on Design Thinking and STEAM Education which was published by Asahi Shinbun Press in January 2019. She was featured as one of 100 women entrepreneurs around the world by Forbes Japan in March 2019.
Vincent Kuuire
Vincent Kuuire is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He studies immigrant integration dynamics in Canada. Particularly he is interested in the connections between various forms of immigrant transnational activities and integration. Dr. Kuuire also studies migration as a livelihood diversification strategy in the context of rapidly changing agro-ecological conditions in North-western Ghana. In addition to migration, Dr. Kuuire’s research in health geography examines healthcare access disparities and the growing prominence of non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.
Ron Levi
Teaches: GLA2068H - Topics in Justice III: Police Violence in Global Affairs
Ron Levi is Director of Global Strategies, Munk School of Global Affairs. He has previously served as Director of the Master of Global Affairs program and the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, and as Graduate Coordinator at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. Levi was a Fellow and Scholar in the Successful Societies program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for seven years, and recently completed his mandate as Canada’s Priority Leader for Justice, Policing & Security with the Metropolis Project.
Ron is also the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, where he is Associate Professor of Global Affairs and Sociology and is cross-appointed to the Departments of Political Science and Criminology and Sociolegal Studies.
Jon R. Lindsay
Teaches: GLA2024H - Intelligence and Covert Action , GLA2030H - Grand Strategy and Global Threats , GLA1003H - Global Security
Jon R. Lindsay is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs. His research examines the impact of technology on international security, with emphasis on cybersecurity, military power, and grand strategy. Recent publications include China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-edited with Tai Ming Cheung and Derek Reveron, and articles in International Security, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Technology and Culture. His current book project on information technology and military power, Technology at War: The Politics of Control Systems, explains how strategic and organizational factors shape the performance of battlefield data networks, cyber warfare, and unmanned drones. He is also a principal investigator for a major multi-institutional project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Initiative analyzing the effects of increasing sociotechnical complexity on the theory and practice of deterrence. Dr. Lindsay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. He has served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy with assignments in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, including a combat tour in Iraq.
Phillip Lipscy
Teaches: GLA2097H - Topics in Global Affairs VI: Bilateral Diplomacy: Canada-Japan and US-Japan Relations
Phillip Y. Lipscy is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He is also Chair in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research addresses substantive topics such as international cooperation, international organizations, the politics of energy and climate change, international relations of East Asia, and the politics of financial crises. He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy. Lipscy’s book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations.
Before arriving at the U of T, Lipscy was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Lipscy obtained his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University. He received his M.A. in international policy studies and B.A. in economics and political science at Stanford University. He has been affiliated with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University, the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for International Policy Studies.
Peter Loewen
Peter Loewen is a Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Political Science. He was previously the Director of the School of Public Policy & Governance from 2016-18 and the Centre for the Study of the United States. He is a Senior Fellow at Massey College and a Fellow with the Public Policy Forum.
Professor Loewen is interested in how politicians can make better decisions, in how citizens can make better choices, and how governments can develop better policy. He has published in leading journals of political science, economics, psychology, biology, and general science, as well as popular press work in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Globe and Mail, National Post, and Ottawa Citizen. His research has been funded by SSHRC, the European Research Council, the Government of Ontario, and other organizations. He regularly engages in public debate and acts as a consultant to several public and private organizations. He received his PhD from the Université de Montréal and his BA from Mount Allison University. He spent the 2018-2019 academic year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He has previously held visiting positions at Princeton University and the University of Melbourne.
Mark Manger
Teaches: GLA2025H - Global Economic Policy Lab , GLA2006H - The Political Economy of Money and Finance , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
Mark S. Manger (PhD UBC) is an Associate Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs specializing in Political Economy. His prior appointments were Lecturer for International Political Economy at the London School of Economics, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill, and Advanced Research Fellow in the Program on US-Japan Relations at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Professor Manger is the author of Investing in Protection: The Politics of Preferential Trade Agreements between North and South (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and of articles published or forthcoming in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Political Economy, and World Development. His research focuses on North-South economic relations and the Asia Pacific region.
Daniel Munro
Teaches: GLA2080H - Topics in Innovation I: The Ethics of Innovation: Ideas, Interests, Institutions , GLA2021H - Innovation Scorecards: The Art and Science of Measuring Innovation and Influencing Public Debate
Dr. Daniel Munro is Director of Policy Projects at the Innovation Policy Lab in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is on sabbatical from The Conference Board of Canada where he is Associate Director of Public Policy. His research interests include innovation policy, skills and education policy, distributive justice, and applied ethics, including the ethics of innovation, and new and emerging technologies.
Dr. Munro joined the Conference Board in 2008 and has played key roles in the Board’s Science, Technology and Innovation Policy group, Centre for Business Innovation, and Centre for Skills and Post-Secondary Education. Previously, he was Senior Analyst at the Council of Canadian Academies—the Government of Canada’s arms-length science assessment organization—where he provided research support for expert panels examining the health and environmental effects of nanomaterials, influenza transmission and protective devices, and business education. In 2006-07, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the Democracy and Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Forum for Philosophy and Public Policy at Queen’s University. Dr. Munro has taught politics and philosophy at the University of Ottawa, Queen’s University, the University of Toronto at Mississauga, and Huron University College (Western University) where he won the Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2006. His academic research has been published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Contemporary Political Theory, Ethics and Politics Review, and the Journal of International Migration and Integration.
Dr. Munro often writes and speaks publicly about ethics, technology, innovation and education. He co-hosts The Ethics Lab—a weekly radio segment on Ottawa Today with Mark Sutcliffe on 1310News—and he writes a weekly Ethics Lab column for MacLean’s Magazine. He has published commentaries in The Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, The Toronto Star, The Vancouver Sun and other print media, and has appeared on many radio and television programs, including CBC Radio’s The 180, Ottawa Morning, CTV Morning Live and many local radio programs across the country.
Dan holds degrees in political science from the University of Toronto (B.A.), Western University (M.A.), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D.).
Recently from Daniel Munro
June 20, 2019. America’s Antitrust Movement, Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Lynette Ong
Teaches: GLA2061H - Topics in Development II: Politics of China and Democracy in Asia
Lynette H. Ong is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, jointly appointed at the Asian Institute and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her research interests are authoritarian politics, contentious politics and the political economy of development. She is an expert of China and Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore and Malaysia.
Her current research addresses China’s state repression, social control, and citizens’ resistance. She writes about Chinese state’s outsourcing of repression using “thugs-for-hire” and engaging with brokers to bargain with disgruntled citizens. Using survey data, she explores the question why citizens in authoritarian countries, such as China, participate in protests. She also writes how regime types affect land politics in China and India. Her publication on state control and resistance has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies, Foreign Affairs, China Journal, Journal of Contemporary Asia and Journal of Contemporary China.
Her earlier work examines the political economy of development in China, particularly local government’s use of bank resources to finance government expenditures and the implications for developmental state model. Her work published in the mid-2000s highlighted the perils of mounting local government debts in China. She is the author of Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her work in this area has appeared in Comparative Politics, International Political Science Review, China Quarterly, Journal of East Asian Studies, among others.
She contributes her opinions regularly to popular audience. Her opinion pieces have appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, South China Morning Post, Ottawa Citizen, East Asia Forum, New Mandala, among others. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Economist. She has been invited to give testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on “China’s Banking System and Access to Credit”.
She was awarded An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship by Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies in 2008-09. Her research has been funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Connaught, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and the Association of Asian Studies.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Authoritarian Politics
Contentious Politics
Political Economy of Development
China and Southeast Asia
Darius Ornston
Teaches: GLA2012H - The Political Economy of Trade , GLA2018H - Innovation and the City , GLA2015H - Economic Competitiveness and Social Protection
Darius Ornston (on sabbatical 2020-2021) is an Assistant Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, where he specializes in the political economy of Western Europe.
Dr. Ornston’s first book, When Small States Make Big Leaps (Cornell University Press), examines how Denmark, Finland and Ireland leveraged private-public, industry-labour and inter-firm cooperation to assume surprisingly competitive positions in emerging, high-technology markets. His research on Nordic Europe and the politics of high-technology competition has also been published by Comparative Political Studies, Governance, Review of Policy Research, West European Politics, the World Bank and the OECD.
Dr. Ornston is currently drafting a second book manuscript, Good Governance Gone Bad, which explains how the same cohesive social networks that underpin successful economic adjustment in Nordic Europe can also lead to policy overshooting and economic crises. His current research interests also include the design of “Schumpeterian” developmental agencies, the politics of radical institutional change, the evolution of the state in advanced, industrialized economies, and the political economy of cities.
Before joining the Munk School of Global Affairs, Dr. Ornston worked as an assistant professor at the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009.
Vince Pranjivan
Teaches: GLA1009H - Financial Management for Global Organizations
Vince Pranjivan is an Assistant Commissioner with the Canada Revenue Agency, holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration and is a Chartered Professional Accountant. Vince is a seasoned professor with many years of experience in teaching at the University of Toronto and other institutions, using both in-class and on-line environments. Vince has a significant track record of innovative leadership in both operational and strategic domains, and leads the largest regional organization, with over 14,000 people, within the Government of Canada.
Wilson Prichard
Teaches: GLA2002H - Issues in Development Policy and Practice: Tax and Development , GLA1014H - Global Development
Wilson Prichard is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Political Science and the School of Global Affairs and holds a PhD and MPhil from the Institute of Development Studies, and a BA from Harvard University. His broad research focus is in international development, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and he has an interdisciplinary background in comparative politics, international political economy and economics. His current research explores the political foundations of developmental states, with a focus on the differential implications of taxation, resource wealth, and foreign aid for development outcomes, particularly in post-conflict settings. He is currently completing a book on taxation and state building in sub-Saharan Africa; other publications have appeared as several working papers and chapters in edited volumes. He works closely with international civil society organizations, regional organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, and international agencies and institutions, including the OECD, the UN, and various aid agencies. – See more at: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/mga/faculty/mga-faculty.htm#sthash.EpVwMKh4.dpuf
John Robinson
Teaches: JSE1708H - Sustainability and the Western Mind , GLA2000H - Capstone Seminar
John Robinson joined the Munk School on Jan 1, 2016, as a Full Professor, with a cross-appointment in the School of the Environment. Professor Robinson has a global reputation in the areas of urban sustainability, building sustainability, community engagement processes, and university sustainability programming. From 1992-2015 he was Professor with the Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability, and the Department of Geography at The University of British Columbia (UBC). From 2012-15, he was Associate Provost, Sustainability, at UBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor with the Copenhagen Business School, where he is leading the sustainability component of their campus redevelopment process.
Prof. Robinson’s own research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainability; the use of visualization, modeling, and citizen engagement to explore sustainable futures; sustainable buildings and urban design; creating partnerships for sustainability with non-academic partners; and, generally, the intersection of sustainability, social and technological change, behaviour change, and community engagement processes.
In 2012 Dr. Robinson received the Metro Vancouver Architecture Canada Architecture Advocacy Award and was named Environmental Scientist of the Year by Canadian Geographic magazine. In 2011, he received the Canada Green Building Council Education Leadership Award, and in 2010 he was given BC Hydro’s Larry Bell Award for advancing energy conservation in British Columbia. He was a Fellow of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation from 2008-11, and, as a Lead Author, he contributed to the 1995, 2001 and 2007 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with Al Gore.
At the Munk School, Prof. Robinson is a member of the Environmental Governance Lab and teaches in the MGA program.
Paola Salardi
Teaches: GLA1012H - Statistics for Global Affairs
Paola Salardi is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy where she works on the long-term development legacy of violent conflict. She completed a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex in January 2013, focusing on the analysis of labor market discrimination by gender and race in Brazil. She is also a Research Consultant at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and she has previously worked at the Inter-American Development Bank. Paola has published work in the World Bank Economic Review and the Review of Income and Wealth, while she has been involved in several projects for the World Bank and the UN. She is currently working on a number of additional research projects focused on the changing role of women in post-conflict countries, the short and long-term consequences of conflict on human capital accumulation, the role of institutions in shaping the presence of violence, and the impact of natural resource wealth on governance outcomes.
Janice Stein
Janice Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs. She is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars of political psychology and international politics. Professor Stein has also looked beyond international behaviour to examine concepts that govern policy-making locally and globally. Her most recent publications include The Cult of Efficiency (2001), the best-selling book that examined the concepts of efficiency underpinning the design and evaluation of public goods and services, and The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (2007), which won the prestigious 2008 Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing, and examines and critiques Canada’s decisions to commit its forces in Afghanistan.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario, Professor Stein was also the 2001 Massey Lecturer and a Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates of Laws by the University of Alberta, the University of Cape Breton, and McMaster University.
Joseph Wong
Teaches: JCR1000Y - Global Challenges
Joseph Wong is the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs, Professor of Political Science, and Canada Research Chair in Health, Democracy and Development. He was the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School from 2005 to 2014. Wong is the author of many academic articles and several books, including Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics In Taiwan and South Korea and Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State, both published by Cornell University Press. He is the co-editor, with Edward Friedman, of Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose, published by Routledge. Wong recently co-edited with Dilip Soman and Janice Stein Innovating for the Global South with the University of Toronto Press. Professor Wong has been a visiting scholar at major institutions in the US (Harvard), Taiwan, Korea, and the UK (Oxford); has worked extensively with the World Bank and the UN; and has advised governments on matters of public policy in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Wong’s current research focuses on poverty and social policy innovation. He is also working with Professor Dan Slater (Chicago) on a book about Asia’s development and democracy. Wong was educated at McGill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
David Zarnett
Teaches: GLA2068H - Topics in Justice III: Activist Campaigns in Global Politics
David Zarnett is the Undergraduate Advisor and a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he has taught courses on global security, human rights, international cooperation, and war and peace. His research interests include the transnational dimensions of intra-state conflict, human rights activists, and international relations theory. His published works examine international institutions, human rights NGOs, transnational activism on the Israeli-Palestinian and Turkish-Kurdish conflicts, and realist theory. He has also written on a number of public policy issues for national outlets, including the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, Maclean’s, and Policy Options. He has worked in advocacy in support of children with disabilities, serving as Executive Director of Every Kid Counts. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2017 from the University of Toronto.
