Jinelle Piereder

Jinelle Piereder is a PhD candidate at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, specializing in conflict and security. Supervised by Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Jinelle works within the Ideological Conflict Project based at the Balsillie School, and focuses on ideological conflict within global governance and public policy-making. Using approaches and tools from complexity science, including Cognitive-Affective Mapping (CAM) and social network theory, she aims to understand the ways that ideologies are constructed, contested and perpetuated in the context of specific global (and conflict-prone) issues.

Some key questions that will shape her research are: how do we address ideological conflict at different scales, from the individual to the global? What are the key drivers behind dominant or powerful ideologies and – going beyond “norm entrepreneurship” – (how) can we influence, challenge or support them? How do we depolarize issues that are intimately connected with core belief sets in order to build constructive policy and successful movements? By examining ideological conflict using a network-based framework, Jinelle hopes to add to what is known about the determinants of ideological attachment and change at the individual level, as well as the social contexts and forces that operate on those determinants.

Jinelle previously completed an MA in Global Governance at BSIA, where her research examined the relationships between ideational, socio-political and material networks in contemporary arms trade and control. She also pursued research on food security and food sovereignty discourses, resilience-based approaches to security, and nuclear disarmament. As part of her degree, she completed an internship with CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation in Johannesburg, South Africa.

As a CIGI Graduate Fellow during her Masters, Jinelle worked with Dr. David Welch in the field of Asia-Pacific security, researching air defence identification zones (ADIZs). She and her research team presented their findings and recommendations in Washington, D.C. at the National Security Council, U.S. State Department and American University. Their policy brief has been published by CIGI, the Centre for Strategic International Studies’ PacNet, and the International Security Relations Network in Zurich.

She currently serves on the Board of the Peace and Conflict Studies Association of Canada (PACS-Can) and is a Student Member of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI). She is also a doctoral researcher with the newly founded Cascade Institute.