Canadians Need a Foreign Policy Guided by Justice and Peace

As academic workers and as graduate and undergraduate students at Canadian post-secondary institutions, we have become alarmed at the spread of a culture of intolerance, censorship, and intimidation within our colleges and universities. This culture particularly targets faculty and students who study and lecture on geopolitics, who are critical of historic and present-day Western colonialism and imperialism, and who challenge Canadian foreign and defence policies.

It is an undisputed fact that today’s world has been shaped by Western colonialism and imperialism.

Canada and the United States are settler-colonial states in which the Indigenous populations were subject to a genocide perpetrated by European settlers. The North American colonies, and others in South America, were founded in a competition between European empires that dominated global geopolitics during the 16th through 20th centuries. The continents of Asia and Africa were also shaped by European colonialism in this period, with much of their territory conquered and then exploited by Western powers.

The effects of imperialism and colonialism did not end when the world’s European colonies gained independence in the 20th century. Instead, patterns of political, economic, and military domination of the “developed” West over the “developing” Global South have continued in post-colonial frameworks. West Asia and North Africa, in particular, have been sites of constant intervention by imperial powers. This includes the colonization of Palestine by Europeans in the early 20th century, as part of the aftermath of WWI.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we have been living in a “hegemonic moment” in which the United States and their Euro-Atlantic allies have exerted unprecedented influence across the globe. This is evidenced by the violent interventions of the US-led military alliance, NATO. This Western bloc has been shaping world affairs through unilaterally projecting economic, political, cultural, and military power.

The hegemonic moment has seen international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization used as vehicles to promote Western economic dominance and to enforce exploitative trade relationships on Global South countries. Even the United Nations has been compromised as an impartial arbiter of international relations, and largely serves to protect Western hegemony.

The hegemonic moment has also seen an unprecedented level of intervention by the Western bloc into the affairs of sovereign states world-wide. This includes numerous instances of economic and political destabilizations including the 1995 and 1999 NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, the 2001 NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the 2002 and 2019 attempted coups in Venezuela, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the 2011 NATO regime-change war on Libya, the 2011 regime-change war on Syria, and the 2019 U.S. – backed Bolivian coup.

Finally, the hegemonic moment has been marked by the openly-stated intention of the United States, with support of its allies, to “contain” geopolitical rivals such as China, Russia, and Iran. This policy of containment has led to competitor states being surrounded by American military bases and Western military alliances such as NATO and AUKUS. It has also led to the instigation and intensification of proxy conflicts such as the Ukraine war, the Taiwan conflict, and the genocidal war in Israel-Palestine. These mounting tensions have brought us closer to a direct conflict between nuclear-armed powers than at any other time in human history.

In order to de-escalate geopolitical conflicts, we need to understand the role that the West, including Canada, plays in them, just as we need to understand the role played by other powerful states, such as China, Russia, India, and Iran. Silencing the voices of academics and graduate students doing this work undermines the very foundations of post-secondary education and erodes the core values on which academic inquiry rests. It also has dangerous effects on our democratic institutions, as foreign policy decisions become based on a fatally distorted version of reality.

By their own mandates, Canadian universities and colleges are intended to be places in which free speech, free inquiry and academic freedom are exercised in the pursuit of truth. Instead, these institutions are increasingly defined by attacks on academic freedom, targeted harassment against faculty and graduate students, the denial of space on campus to host critical events, deplatforming of critical speakers, suppression of student peace activism, and the uncritical embrace of Western imperialism. This dire state of affairs cannot continue.

If we are to understand our present geopolitical moment, we need critical scholarship that examines national and international political, economic, and military systems in an open and evidence-based manner. To this end, we are calling on Canadian post-secondary institutions to uphold the principles of academic freedom, free speech, and critical inquiry. 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.