Event details

Dalhousie University and St. Mary’s University will jointly host a preview of the 2017 Halifax International Security Forum on Thursday, November 16. Hosted by Tom Clark, the panel will include:

• Tawakkol Karman, Nobel Peace Laureate; Founder, Women Journalists Without Chains
• Dr. Bessma Momani, Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs
• General Petr Pavel, Chairman of the Military Committee, NATO
• Jonathan Tepperman, Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy

The 9th annual Halifax International Security Forum will bring delegates from more than 90 countries to Halifax, Nova Scotia to engage in a constructive dialogue that strengthens strategic cooperation among democracies and defines the global security agenda for the coming calendar year.

Attend

Alumni and friends are invited to join us for this special panel – please register online to reserve your seat. This event is free and guests are welcome.

If you have any questions, please contact Sara Daniels at Sara.Daniels@Dal.Ca.

Moderator and panelist bios

Tom Clark
Chair, Public Affairs and Communications, Global Public Affairs
Tom Clark is the Chair of Public Affairs and Communications at Global Public Affairs. Mr. Clarkjoined Global after almost 45 years at the most senior levels of Canadian journalism. Tom left Global News on January 1, 2017, after serving as the network’s chief political correspondent and host of The West Block. He has interviewed every Canadian Prime Minister since Lester B. Pearson and has covered every federal election campaign since 1974. He has reported in eight active war zones and from over 33 countries. Tom was CTV’s China Bureau Chief and was also its Chief Washington Correspondent for five years.  He has a deep understanding of Canada’s position in an increasingly complicated international dynamic. Tom is the recipient of Radio Television Digital News Association lifetime achievement award and has been named one of the most influential journalists in Ottawa.

Tawakkol Karman
Nobel Peace Laureate; Founder, Women Journalists Without Chains
Tawakkol Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 in recognition of her work in non-violent struggle for the expression rights, safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work in Yemen. Upon being awarded the prize, Tawakkol became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the seconed youngest Nobel Peace Laureate at that date, at the age of 32. Karman, a mother of three, is a human rights activist, journalist, politician and president of the NGO “Women Journalists without Chains”. She is also the general coordinator of the Peaceful Youth Revolution Council, a member of the advisory board for the Transparency International and several other international human rights NGOs. Bold and outspoken, Karman has been imprisoned on a number of occasions for her pro-democracy, pro-human rights protests. Among Yemen’s youth movement, she is known as “mother of the revolution”, “the iron woman”, and as The lady of the Arab spring.

Dr. Bessma Momani
Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs
Bessma Momani is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is also Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI), and has been Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Mortara Center. She is a 2015 Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and a Fulbright Scholar. She has authored and co-edited over eight books and over 65 scholarly, peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters that have examined the IMF, the World Bank, petrodollars, the Middle East, and Arab youth.  She is a current recipient of a research grant funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to study IMF and World Bank cooperation.  She was also the past recipient of two previous SSHRC grants on the reform of the IMF executive board and on Middle East urbanization. Dr. Momani is a regular contributor to national and international media on the Arab Spring and on global economic governance issues. She has written editorials for the New York Times, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, and many other reputable international newspapers.

General Petr Pavel
Chairman of the Military Committee, NATO
General Petr Pavel is the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. From July 2012 to May 2015 General Petr Pavel served as Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Czech Republic, the highest ranking officer in the Czech Army and the principal military adviser to the Czech Government. In September 2014, General Pavel was elected Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. General Pavel graduated from the Army College in Vyškov, Czech Republic in 1983 and since then has spent a large part of his military career holding positions in Special Forces, Operations and Intelligence divisions. Throughout his career, General Pavel has held a range of positions from Deputy Military and Air Attaché of the Czech Republic in Belgium to Commander Special Forces to Deputy Director Operations Division at the Ministry of Defence,In addition, General Pavel has also held his share of positions in International and National joint staffs representing the Czech Armed Forces as the National Military Representative to the US Central Command, as well as National Military Representative of the Czech Republic to SHAPE in Mons, Belgium. Furthering his education in the United Kingdom, General Pavel has studied at the Staff College, Camberley, the Royal College of Defence Studies, London and obtained an M.A. in International Relations from King’s College, London.

Jonathan Tepperman
Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy
Mr. Jonathan Tepperman is the Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine and author of the book, The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Solve the World’s Worst Problems (Crown, September 2016). From 2011 until August 2017, he was the managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. Tepperman has spent twenty years working on international affairs as an editor, writer, and analyst. He started his career working as a speechwriter at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland. After stints as a foreign correspondent, he joined Foreign Affairs as a junior editor. He later moved to Newsweek International, where he was deputy editor, and then worked as a political risk consultant before returning to Foreign Affairs in January 2011. Tepperman has written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and others, on subjects ranging from international affairs to books to municipal politics to food. Tepperman has interviewed more than a dozen world leaders, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. He is the coeditor of the books The U.S. vs. al Qaeda(2011), Iran and the Bomb (2012), and The Clash of Ideas (2012).