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Dinner Speaker: Janice Stein |
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Brief Biography Janice Stein is an acknowledged expert on conflict resolution and international relations, with an emphasis on the Middle East. She received her undergraduate degree from McGill University, her master’s from Yale University and returned to McGill for doctoral studies. Professor Stein is the co-author of We All Lost the Cold War (1994) and Power Keg in the Middle East: The Struggle for Gulf Security (1995). She has served on many international advisory panels, including membership in the Working Group on Middle East Negotiations at the United States Institute of Peace. She is currently chair of the research advisory board to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. |
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Full Biography As a Middle East specialist, Professor Stein has provided compelling explanations of the patterns of conflict and cooperation, and of war and peace, between Egypt and Israel from the 1960s to the present. She has used her knowledge of the Middle East to address a broad range of important theoretical problems in political science and psychology. Her first book Rational Decision Making: Israel's Security Choices, 1967 (1980) used Israel's decision to go to war in 1967 as a case study to test three contrasting models of decision-making. It won the prestigious Edgar Furniss Award of the Mershon Centre for making an outstanding contribution to the study of national security and civilian military education. Professor Stein was the first scholar to establish the pivotal importance of prenegotiation to bargaining. In Getting to the Table (1989), she articulated the connection between the negotiation of the terms of negotiation itself, and its ultimate success or failure. In the field of foreign-policy decision-making, Professor Stein has critically reevaluated the assumptions and theories that lie at the core of the prevention and management of international conflict. Specifically, she has demonstrated that beliefs about rationality and the efficacy of deterrence can have the paradoxical and unintentional effect of leading states into conflict, precisely in cases where they are intended to help states avoid it. Some of Professor Stein's many publications include Choosing to Cooperate: How States Avoid Loss (1991); as co-author, We All Lost the Cold War (1994); Powder Keg in the Middle East: The Struggle for Gulf Security (1995) and Knowledge Networks: Collaborative Innovations in International Learning. Professor Stein's most recent book, The Cult of Efficiency, was nominated by the Writer's Trust of Canada for the Shaughnessy-Cohen Prize in Political Writing, by the Canadian Political Science Association for the Donald Smilie Prize, and for the Pearson Readers' Choice Book Award. With David Cameron, Dr. Stein is also the editor of a new collection of essays, Street Protests and Fantasy Parks. In 2001, Professor Stein was the University of Toronto's Massey Lecturer. Professor Stein is well-known and in demand in Canadian, American and Middle Eastern policy circles. She has advised the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the United States Institute for Peace. In Canada, Professor Stein has been Chair of the Research Advisory Board to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chair of the Advisory Board to the Canadian Centre for Foreign Policy Development. Professor Stein is on the editorial board of several scholarly journals, including International Journal, Political Psychology, Foreign Policy and American Political Science Review. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In addition to being an outstanding University teacher, Professor Stein is frequently on Canadian television commenting on Middle East and other international issues. She has been extraordinarily successful in extending the reach of the academy to the broader policy community. Excerpts taken from:
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