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
Blog: American Election – The Die is Cast, But the Dangers Are Still There
“The die is cast, and all bets are off.” This well-known idiom from casino games—a rule that should be familiar to Donald Trump, who has also brought it into politics and the United States’ relations with the rest of the world. After all, was it not he who, acting as the planet’s croupier, set the game of tariffs in motion with his “take it or leave it” ultimatum? Alas, it is now he, personally, and his party, who must submit to this very rule because “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (The Bible).

Read the blog by Jabeur Fathally

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American Election – The Die is Cast, But the Dangers Are Still There 0
- Analysis, CIPS, News
- November 12, 2026
“The die is cast, and all bets are off.” This well-known idiom from casino games—a rule that should be familiar to Donald Trump, who has also brought it into politics and the United States’ relations with the rest of the world. After all, was it not he who, acting as the planet’s croupier, set the

By Jabeur Fathally
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