Director's Message

Helping Find the Answers

Long-time Massachusetts member and Speaker of the House Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill once famously said: "All politics is local." Were he alive today, he might just as readily say: "All politics is global." The ease with which people can communicate, travel, and trade over vast distances today, and the fact that previously geographically isolated communities are spread across the world in vast diasporas, means that events on one side of the planet can almost instantaneously affect people on the other. They can affect people positively-as, for example, when medical discoveries in one place lead to more effective public health in another — or negatively — as happens when conflict in one part of the world spills over into another.

"Globalization"— the term we use to denote the deepening, thickening, acceleration, and intensification of interactions on a world-wide scale-presents both challenges and opportunities. Among the most important challenges is, quite simply, managing the conflicts that get in the way of realizing the opportunities. This would be difficult enough if issues could be kept in isolation, but increasingly issues interact in complicated, sometimes unpredictable ways. China's undervalued currency, for example, is a key reason why China's economy has been enjoying spectacular export-led growth, which in turn has led to an improved quality of life for hundreds of millions of Chinese; but at the same time it has distorted global trade and finance, poisoning relations with key trading partners. China's booming urban economy has exacerbated regional inequalities and ethnic tensions, and has emboldened China's rising middle class to press the regime for genuine political power. China's surging demand for power and raw materials is accelerating climate change, straining food supplies and water resources, and leading to a scramble for natural resources around the world, often in politically unstable areas where the sale of drilling, mining, and logging rights fuels corruption and threatens indigenous ways of life. In a genuinely globalized world, everything is literally connected to virtually everything else.

How will we manage the challenges and opportunities? What institutions and practices are best suited to the task? How can we help future generations prepare for them?

The Balsillie School of International Affairs was established precisely to help find answers. Its world-class faculty bring to bear on these questions insights from a wide variety of disciplines.  Its three graduate programs — the Ph.D. and M.A. in Global Governance, and the Master of International Public Policy — draw superb students from around the world who are attracted by the opportunity to pursue genuinely interdisciplinary research in Canada's most exciting intellectual community.

Come explore what we have to offer. I believe you will like what you find.

David A. Welch
CIGI Chair of Global Security, Director of the Balsillie School