About Us
Canadian Academics for a Just Foreign Policy
CAJFP is a network of lecturers, researchers, and students at universities and colleges across Canada. Our network arose in response to an increase in troubling instances of free speech and academic freedom suppression on our campuses.
In recent years, faculty and students who are critical of Canadian and Western involvement in international conflicts have experienced growing attacks. These attacks are associated with critical scholarship and activism on the Palestinian genocide, the Ukraine War, the conflict over Taiwan, and numerous other conflicts in South America, Africa, Europe, and West Asia. The targeting of faculty and students has had a chilling effect on scholarship.
The dearth of critical foreign policy scholarship in Canada is alarming given the generational shift in global geopolitics we are now witnessing. This moment sees the waning of Western hegemony and the emergence of a robust multipolarity. The potential benefits of this shift are tremendous, but so are the risks.
CAJFP seeks to build a network of faculty and students who will reaffirm the importance of academic freedom and free speech in relation to foreign policy. We also seek to support critical scholarship, pedagogy, and public educational events at institutions country-wide. Ultimately, we are advocating for a principled, evidence-based approach to the study and instruction of Canadian foreign policy, and a movement within academia to realign this policy in the interests of peace, justice, and international law.
Now, more than ever, we must make space to have debates and open dialogue, to question establishment narratives, to challenge sites of institutional power, and to generate new understandings and models of action that promote peace, international cooperation, sustainable development, and academic freedom for all the world’s peoples.