Monday, May 12, 2025 at 1:00 PM
We often refer to the war between Ukraine and Russia as one primarily fought between these two countries. We understand alliances between each of these countries and their allies as alliances guided by a defensive strategy in support of their ally. However, when we step back and analyse the unfolding of the events since the fall of the Soviet Union, we are compelled to pay much more attention to the geopolitics of this conflict and the underlying proxy wars. Could this war have been a proxy war waged by the United States to weaken Russia and increase the wedge between it and the rest of Europe? Could success in this war with NATO flexing its military might lead to further ambitions against China? Could what we are seeing be an effort to continue the unipolar system led by the United States and block the rise of any other powers? Is Russia, with the support of China, trying to reconfigure the current world order? What does a lack of clear gains or victory by Ukraine and its allies, especially the United States (at least before Trump), imply for the geopolitics that formulate our current world order? Are we on the cusp of a transformation, perhaps a radical one, in our current unipolar world order?
Join us as our speaker, Manfred Bienefeld delves into these questions and offers some insight into what this means for us now.
Speaker: Manfred Bienefeld has a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics and is now Professor Emeritus at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration where he headed their International Development program for many years after moving to Carleton from the well-known Institute of Development Studies located at England’s Sussex University. Having published widely on many aspects of international development and worked with many government, international and civil society organizations around the world, in his retirement, he is currently lecturing and writing about the increasingly problematic evolution of the Bretton Woods institutions. In recent years he has been focusing more widely on the seriously dysfunctional state of the international financial system as a whole and the enormous economic, social and political costs and risks that this is imposing on the global system.
Moderator: Edward (Ted) Jackson is a professor, consultant, and editor with current research interests in sustainable finance, gender lens investing, jobs in the transition economy, and community-university partnerships. He is a retired tenured public-policy professor, former associate dean (research) and co-founder of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation, at Carleton University, where he continues to serve as an adjunct faculty member. He is also an honorary associate at the Institute of Development Studies. As president of the consultancy E. T. Jackson and Associates, he has advised bilateral and multilateral development agencies and banks, investment funds, foundations, non-profits, and universities in 60 countries, including Bangladesh, Belize, Ghana, Kenya, Singapore, South Africa, and Vietnam. An active volunteer, he co-founded the McLeod Group and advises the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an American farmworkers’ rights non-profit.
The objective of this webinar is to better understand the geopolitics thathave underpinned and that continue to underpin the support and contribution to this war and the impact of recent events on our current world order.
Links to background information for the webinar:
Jeffrey Sachs’s address to EU parliamentarians:
A discussion on Neutrality Studies: