Félix Grenier

The global educational challenge: how Canada can contribute to global developmental solutions through innovation in higher education

Highly educated people are an essential asset in todays global governance architecture. Global governance is, from this perspective, dependent on a broad access to higher education. Indeed, it is only through a broad access to higher education that the respect of principles such as the rule of law, democratic rule, and public accountability can be developed and, accordingly, that the less developed countries can participate in global governance frameworks. This article asserts that combining internationalization strategies in higher education with a proper use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can provide a significantly wider array and easier access to higher education resources in the less developed countries. Additionally, the article suggests that Canadian policy-makers could draw significant political benefits from this initiative by collaborating with institutions in the poorest countries and using existing programs within international organizations like la Francophonie. While the article underlines several budgetary and organizational constraints, it provides a broad and insightful analysis of the policy and educational resources currently available to Canadian policy-makers interested in the implementation of such an innovative international development project.

The struggle over the identity of IR: What is at stake in the disciplinary debate within and beyond academia?

Since the inception of International Relations (IR) within university departments, its disciplinary status has been the subject of constant debate. Yet, the current literature on ‘the state of the discipline’ silences this debate either through IR’s assumed disciplinarity or conflation of debates about theory with the existence of IR. This Forum moves beyond this literature by explicitly engaging whether IR is a discipline or not and by enquiring how this status matters. Contributors rely on the sociology and philosophy of social science to call into question or affirm the disciplinarity of IR to argue whether IR is as a subfield of Political Science, a full-blown and autonomous discipline, or a hybrid field of interdisciplinary studies. Furthermore, contributors reveal the implications of the different disciplinary statuses regarding the academic institution, interdisciplinary possibilities and modes of organizing IR. Overall, these contributions aim to engage rather than close the disciplinary debate, creating further space for reflection.

An eclectic fox: IR from restrictive discipline to hybrid and pluralist field

31. Buzan and Little, ‘Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project’, p. 32. 32. Alan Ryan, ‘A Theory of Growing Concerns’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 27(11), 1998, p. 27. 33. Fred Halliday, ‘The Future of International Relations: Fears and Hopes’, in Ken Booth, Steve Smith and Marysia Zalewski (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 318–27. 34. Kal Hosti in Jones, ‘Interview with Kal Holsti’, p. 621. 35. Brecher, ‘International Studies in the Twentieth Century and Beyond’, pp. 213–64. 36. This is not to suggest that other disciplines have not entered into such a debate for they have, see, for example, John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993); John Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia State University, 2004). However, it is the degree, the persistence and intensity of the disciplinary debate that I argue is peculiar to IR.