Centre for International Policy Studies – Canada's leading centre for analysis and debate of international affairs.

Policy Brief: Amidst the Ruins of Agreements: Can Arms Control Be Revived?
With New START expired, warhead numbers rising and nuclear threats normalized, the arms control architecture built over five decades has collapsed. It cannot be restored to what it was. The diplomatic machinery has stalled, but the technical infrastructure beneath it—IAEA safeguards and the CTBTO’s monitoring network—still functions. That gap is where progress is possible.

Read the Policy Brief by Tariq Rauf
On the Other Hand: Gender, Race, and the Costs of Ambivalence
Research on decision-making in foreign policy demonstrates that open-mindedness, cognitive complexity, willingness to solicit advice, and careful deliberation generally produce better decision-making and better outcomes. At the same time, recent scholarship in psychology has suggested that perceptions of competence and trustworthiness can be negatively impacted by expressions of ambivalence—holding two opposing views at the same time— in different social contexts, including evaluations of politicians and business leaders.

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Blog - There Is No Outside: A Painter’s Geometry for an Age of Disconnection
For fifty years I have painted a single shape: the lemniscate — the figure-eight, the sign of infinity. Two loops meeting at one point, crossing. I came to the University of Ottawa this month to make an argument I did not expect to be making to a room of policy scholars: that this shape is not decoration but diagnosis. Much of what divides us, at every scale from a marriage to a multilateral order, is not a difference of content but a mistake of form. We keep trying to resolve closed figures as though they were lines.

Read the blog by Patricia Karen Gagic
Policy Report: Terrorist Threats to Canada Originating in Central Asia, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan
CIPS Research Associate, Dr. Faramarz Tamanna, has written a new policy report. He argues that Canada should move from a reactive and listing-centred counter-terrorism posture to a network-centred, interests-centred and resilience-centred one, making the Canadian Threat-to-National Interest Transmission Matrix, updated every 90 days by an interdepartmental mechanism, the basis for decisions on listing, sanctions, intelligence resources and prevention programming. He then lists seven pillars.

Read the Policy Report by Faramarz Tamanna here

Latest From the Blog

There Is No Outside: A Painter’s Geometry for an Age of Disconnection 0
- Events, External
- November 11, 2026
For fifty years I have painted a single shape: the lemniscate — the figure-eight, the sign of infinity. Two loops meeting at one point, crossing. I came to the University of Ottawa this month to make an argument I did not expect to be making to a room of policy scholars: that this shape is

By Patricia Karen Gagic
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