Public Voting Now Open – Centre for International Policy Studies

Last year we launched our first ‘Best Blog Award’ competition. While the principal motivations behind the competition were to (a) offer up an engaging experience for you, dear reader and (b) draw some more attention the expertise and hard work of our authors, we also found that by rereading some of the older blogs we (at CIPS HQ) got something out of the experience too. In particular, the opportunity to revisit issues and analysis from throughout the year gave us the chance to think again about the world we live in, and Canada’s place in it.

While last year (2019-20) was a bumper year both in terms of quality and quantity of blogs, this year (2020-21) has broken all records. We published 68 original blogs by 57 different authors. Like last year the blogs covered an array of diverse topics related to international affairs including several special series focusing on a particular topic. These special series included, for example: the excellent collection of blogs accompanying our first twitter conference on the Five Eyes intelligence network, a collection of blogs associated with the ‘The Global Right Research Project’ and of course several blogs around the US Presidential Election.

It gives us great pleasure, then, to announce that public voting for the second ever blog award is about to begin!

First, some background on the competition so far. Like last year the first round of the competition was judged by a panel of experts – to whom we are extremely grateful (see below for profiles) – who have narrowed down the full list down to a top six. This determination was based on the following criteria:

• The importance of the policy issue discussed
• The originality of the academic insight it provides
• The quality of the argument and the quality of the writing

The short list is as follows:

Our judges

Madelaine Drohan

Returning for the second year as a judge, Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning author, editor and journalist who has covered business and politics in Canada, Europe and Africa during her 40-year career. She was Canada correspondent for The Economist magazine from 2006 to 2019. Her book, Making a Killing: How and why corporations use armed force to do business, won the Ottawa Book Award and was short-listed for the National Business Book of the Year Award in 2004.

Randall Germain

Randall Germain is a professor at Carleton University and chair of the Department of Political Science. His current research focuses on the political economy of global finance, with emphasis on the regulatory apparatus of global financial governance. His recent publications include: “Welfare and World Money: the domestic foundations of currency internationalization” in the.Journal of International Relations and Development and “E.H. Carr and IPE: an essay in retrieval”, in International Studies Quarterly.

Junie Saint-Fleur

Junie Saint-Fleur is a program manager for international development organizations. She has more than 12 years experience as a practitioner in international development, working primarily on issues related to: gender and youth empowerment. She holds a LLB in Common Law and a B.A. in Sociology from Université de Moncton, and is in the process to obtain a Masters degree from Université Laval.