The state of international relations studies in Canada

Konstantin von Hammerstein spent the last few months reporting on Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany and a steadfast ally of Donald Trump. The result is this investigation in DER SPIEGEL, which paints a grim picture of Grenell’s diplomatic status in Berlin: increasingly isolated by everyone except for the far-right. 

In this piece for VICE, Ben Makuch sits down with Canadian ISIS fighter Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi, who made headlines last year when it was revealed on a New York Times podcast that he had managed to make it back to Ontario from Syria undetected. Huzaifa’s story provides a glimpse into what he says are RCMP efforts to de-radicalize foreign fighters who have returned from abroad.

In India, millions of women decided to kick 2019 off with an unprecedented display of solidarity, building a “gender wall” in support of women’s right that stretched out over 600 kilometres. And they weren’t alone — as Kamala Thiagarajan reports for NPR, “even as women of all ages lined up on one side of the highway, many of their menfolk — husbands, friends and relatives — lined up on the other side to show their support.”

Almost 25 years ago, at least 800,000 Rwandans were killed in a planned campaign of extermination. In this excerpt in The Walrus, survivors of the genocide who settled in Canada share their powerful, heartbreaking recollections with Christine Magill, who says their stories taught her “about the resiliency of the human spirit, and...demonstrate why we must counter divisiveness in all its guises.”