SFU School for International Studies

05/20/2026

"Northern cable security is becoming a test of Canada’s Arctic readiness." Nicole Jackson, a professor of international studies, calls for a clear response plan to undersea cable disruptions in an op-ed for Policy Options. Read full:

Canada needs a response plan for northern undersea cable failures before uncertainty, delay and misinformation deepen the damage.

05/12/2026

"This Mother’s Day is a chance for the B.C. Labour Ministry to ensure immigrant farm-worker women are protected by the same rights as all working people."
An op-ed co-written by senior lecturer Anushay Malik shares the hard reality of many women toiling in B.C.'s agriculture industry:

Opinion: South Asian women farm workers experience double precarity: economic and workplace vulnerabilities compounded by social isolation.

05/06/2026

On May 13, join us for an urgent conversation with Professor Arang Keshavarzian of New York University, exposing the drivers beneath the conflicts in the Persian Gulf region since the mid-19th century.

Please note that the event venue has changed! The event has been moved to Harbour Centre Room 1900 Fletcher Challenge Theatre.

RSVP: https://buff.ly/Z9JGQDR

05/06/2026

**Please note that the venue has changed too Harbour Centre room 1900**

On May 13, join us for an urgent conversation with Professor Arang Keshavarzian of New York University, exposing the drivers beneath the conflicts in the Persian Gulf region since the mid-19th century.

Why have so many U.S. administrations engaged in military confrontations in and over the Persian Gulf in the past five decades? Since the Iran-Iraq War and through to the current Operation Epic Fury, presidents — Republicans and Democrats, neoconservatives, liberal internationalists, and American Firsters —have turned to militarization and war-making in the Gulf to project American power locally and globally. To answer this question, we must contend with the contradictions in the way the waterway is imagined and the material constitution of it as a geographic region.

Building on analysis marshalled in Making Space for the Persian Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East, Arang Keshavarzian, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, will draw on the long history of geopolitical thought and infrastructures of capitalism that have made the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran possible. Notably, these same forces have been exposed as the Achilles heel of U.S. power and undermined the possibilities of regional integration that would make regional order sustainable and efficacious.

RSVP at the

04/27/2026

Ahead of the NATO July summit in Ankara, associate professor and former NATO Defence College Fellow Nicole Jackson says, "Canada should arrive in Ankara ready to push NATO toward a more practical Arctic posture"—a more proactive role in security and protecting Canadian interests in the High North.
Read the article at Open Canada: https://buff.ly/rsyOVpx

04/23/2026

These nondescript cables on the sea floor are a lot more important than you could imagine. "Undersea communication cables have become strategic infrastructure because they sit at the intersection of economic connectivity, military resilience, and information stability," writes associate professor Nicole Jackson. Jackson is a foreign and security policy scholar researching cable security and the risks associated with poor management.

Read the full article in the Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare:
https://buff.ly/dJjjGxh

04/22/2026

On May 13, join us for an urgent conversation with Professor Arang Keshavarzian of New York University, exposing the drivers beneath the conflicts in the Persian Gulf region since the mid-19th century.

Building on analysis marshalled in Making Space for the Persian Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East, Arang Keshavarzian, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, will draw on the long history of geopolitical thought and infrastructures of capitalism that have made the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran possible. Notably, these same forces have been exposed as the Achilles heel of U.S. power and undermined the possibilities of regional integration that would make regional order sustainable and efficacious.

RSVP: https://buff.ly/I7uB7LA

04/22/2026

Join us next week! On April 27, don't miss this special iteration of Consular Conversations featuring Ricardo Arredondo, IS Adjunct Professor and Consul General of Argentina.

The expulsion of diplomats —a technically neutral mechanism codified in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations— has evolved into a powerful instrument of political communication between states. While the Convention grants the receiving state absolute discretionary authority to expel a diplomatic agent without providing justification, this very legal silence creates space for intense political signaling. Drawing on recent cases from Latin America and the Ibero-American space, this talk explores how a legally uniform norm produces divergent political effects depending on context, and why, in contemporary diplomacy, it is politics that fills the silence the law leaves behind.

RSVP: https://buff.ly/mCg07ln

04/07/2026

On May 13, join us for an urgent conversation with Professor Arang Keshavarzian of New York University, exposing the drivers beneath the conflicts in the Persian Gulf region since the mid-19th century.

Why have so many U.S. administrations engaged in military confrontations in and over the Persian Gulf in the past five decades? Since the Iran-Iraq War and through to the current Operation Epic Fury, presidents — Republicans and Democrats, neoconservatives, liberal internationalists, and American Firsters —have turned to militarization and war-making in the Gulf to project American power locally and globally. To answer this question, we must contend with the contradictions in the way the waterway is imagined and the material constitution of it as a geographic region.

Building on analysis marshalled in Making Space for the Persian Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East, Arang Keshavarzian, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, will draw on the long history of geopolitical thought and infrastructures of capitalism that have made the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran possible. Notably, these same forces have been exposed as the Achilles heel of U.S. power and undermined the possibilities of regional integration that would make regional order sustainable and efficacious.

RSVP: https://buff.ly/I7uB7LA

04/01/2026

On April 13, join us for a lively evening of discussion as we delve into the shift of India's foreign policy from a reactive, inward-looking posture of non-alignment to a proactive policy of multi-alignment in the 20th century. RSVP at https://buff.ly/AXSuAx6