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Vice-Admiral Glenn Davidson was Ambassador of Canada to Syria from September 2008 until March 2012 , a period which included the beginning of the Arab Spring and Syria’s descent into civil war. He was also Ambassador of Canada to Afghanistan from May 2012 until July 2013.

Ambassador Davidson visited the University of Alberta campus on February 22, 2016, where he also gave a public talk called 'Personal insights on Syria'. For more information see https://uofa...

Posted by Adam Dombovari on February 25, 2016

The recent terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Tunisia, Turkey and France are some of the many attacks connected to ISIL and the ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis in Syria, which resulted in millions of displaced people and refugees fleeing to protect their families. Unfortunately, 4.5 years have passed by and a solution on how to decrease violations of human rights and enforce security and protect civilians has yet not been fully identified. This article is based on my research and the field work conducted in Iraq during the summer of 2015...

Posted by Yannis Bacalis on December 15, 2015

Writing about terrorism and refugees is difficult. From a personal and normative standpoint and, given my own liberal internationalist inclinations and commitment to multiculturalism, humanitarianism and multilateralism, it is a challenging subject. But in light of the level of controversy, fear and unabashed racism that surrounds the current debate over the admission of Syrian refugees to Canada and other western states it is crucial that academics engage with these fears from a scholarly perspective...

Posted by John McCoy on December 14, 2015

In the fall of 2015 Asad Makhani, a student at the University of Alberta working on cultural issues in medicine under the supervision of Professor and Kule Chair Natalie Kononenko, began interviewing refugees already settled in Canada. These were people from Sierra Leone, Bhutan, Cambodia, and other areas of turmoil who had found a new home and a new life in Canada. The goal of this project was to use the experiences of earlier waves of refugees to develop best practices for dealing with the imminent influx of new, Syrian refugees...

Posted by Asad Makhani on December 3, 2015

Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the North of France, I can catch a glimpse of the English Coast from my childhood-bedroom window, weather permitting. How many migrants have also cast their gaze in the same direction, upon the cliffs of Folkstone or Dover (England), an “El Dorado” seemingly within easy reach?

Currently, due to international politics, Syrian refugees are converging in the North of France, in Boulogne and even more so in Calais, which has long been a fulcrum point for migrant populations...

Posted by Eva Lemaire on November 30, 2015

Over the past few months I have been “glued” to any screen showing the thousands of refugees on the roads of Europe–some walking, some being pushed on wheelchairs, and many children being carried on their fathers' shoulders or in their mothers’ arms—and many crowded around fences, trying to push themselves through, to pass a child over the fence, or to try to convince the police officers that they must be let through. These images brought me back to 1989-90 when, along with thousands of other Bulgarians, we were allowed to “enter” the Western world after living behind the Iron Curtain since the Second World War...

Posted by Anna Kirova on November 29, 2015

The current refugee crisis indicates that Visegrád countries are only interested in such form of solidarity that is beneficial for them and refuse any shared responsibility for issues that are challenging for the rest of EU member states,

At least since 2009 Central European (CE) countries have been talking a lot about solidarity within the European Union. Caused by a dispute between Russia and Ukraine over the price, the gas crisis that left this part of Europe without the main source of natural gas for several days served as a trigger for solidarity calls at the EU level...

Posted by Matus Misik on November 26, 2015

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand here before you as testimony of what hope can achieve.

I was born a refugee with no place to call home. I was born stateless. For about a year, my family and I lived in a refugee camp, in a shanty tent with a dirt floor on which we slept. We had no money and no material belongings. All that was sustaining us was hope. Hope that there was a better life than the one we left behind in Vietnam.

Tonight, I'll be sharing a story about a Vietnamese refugee family — my family — and their heroic feats to find a new life, and of a church community from northern SK who reached out to my family and gave us hope for a better life here in Canada...

Posted by Mai-Linh Huynh on November 26, 2015

History tends to repeat itself, and this is certainly the case all over this planet when it comes to migration. I come from Austria, a small republic in the Alps and the old heartland of Central Europe. My home town is known for being the city with the highest proportion of foreigners, many of them Turkish and from the Western Balkans. I grew up with this piece of knowledge.

It was much later that I learned of another and much larger wave of immigration of foreigners that had taken place just a few decades earlier...

Posted by David Wineroither on November 24, 2015

My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
Vice President Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003.
The damage has been done; so welcome.
Welcome. Let us offer our welcome to the new and forgotten. Whatever appears, what we can touch, the presence we feel belonging as we belong. What faces us, the horizon, assumes a form that reflects me. I would not recognize myself were it not for this possibility: in passing in time, I cannot help but being elsewhere as here opens. Not only am I you – we exist only in passing – not one moment of existence is frozen in time...

Posted by William Anselmi on November 16, 2015