Adjunct professors/fellows

Leslie Armijo

Adjunct Professor

Leslie Elliott Armijo (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Adjunct Professor, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, and an expert on the international relations and financial development of large emerging powers, especially in Latin America and South Asia. Recent publications include “The Political Economy of Development Finance in Latin America” (Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2020); “The Monetary and Financial Powers of States: Theory, Dataset, and Observations on the Trajectory of American Dominance” (New Political Economy, 2019); The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford 2018); Unexpected Outcomes: How Emerging Economies Survived the Global Financial Crisis (Brookings 2015); and “Can International Relations and Comparative Politics be Policy Relevant? Theory and Methods for Incorporating Political Context” (Politics & Policy 2015). 

CV & Publications

Paul Meyer

Adjunct Professor

Harbour Centre 7276
778.782.8520
pmeyer@sfu.ca

Paul Meyer is a former Canadian diplomat who retired from the Foreign Service in September 2010 after a 35 year career. He joined the then Department of External Affairs in 1975 and served abroad in Oslo (1976–1978), Moscow (1982–1984) and Brussels (1988–1992) where he was Political Counsellor in Canada's delegation to NATO. From 1992–1997, he served at the Embassy in Washington D.C. as Minister-Counsellor (Political) and from 2001-2003 as Minister and Deputy Head of Mission at the Embassy in Tokyo. In Ottawa, Paul held a variety of positions at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, primarily in the field of international security policy. He was Director-General of the International Security Bureau (1998–2001) and Director-General of the Security and Intelligence Bureau (2007–2010). From 2003 to 2007, he served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations and the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. His responsibilities at this centre for multilateral action on global issues spanned a variety of fields including human rights, humanitarian affairs, global health, and arms control and disarmament.

In February 2011 he was appointed Fellow in International Security at the Centre for Dialogue and concurrently Adjunct Professor, School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He is also a Senior Advisor to ICT4Peace. His research interests include nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, outer space security, conflict prevention and cyber security.

Jennifer Allen Simons

Adjunct Professor

Jennifer Allen Simons, C.M., Ph.D., LL.D. received her B.A. from Antioch University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. Dr. Simons is Founder and President of The Simons Foundation Canada, an innovative private foundation based in Vancouver committed to advancing positive change through education in peace, disarmament, international law, and human security. Dr. Simons is an Adjunct Professor with Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies and Senior Visiting Fellow and Dialogue Associate at SFU’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.  Her other academic activities include membership in the Research Steering Committee of the Will to Intervene (W2I) Project , Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Concordia University; Visiting Professor, University of Queensland (2007); Academic Advisory Board Member and Visiting Research Fellow (philosophy ), Charles University and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Center for Theoretical Study, Institute of Advanced Studies (1994); Member of the Citizen’s Panel on Nuclear Weapons, Center on Violence and Human Survival, John Jay College for Criminal Justice, The City University of NY; and former Adjunct Professor and Executive Director, Simons Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Research at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia (2002-2006). Dr. Simons is also a Founding Partner of Global Zero; a Council Member of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs; a Patron of Initiatives pour le Désarmement Nucléaire – IDN (Nuclear Disarmament Initiative – NDI); a member of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; and has been instrumental in the establishment of a number of important non-governmental organizations.

Robert Springborg

Adjunct Professor

rdspring@sfu.ca

Professor Robert Springborg is Adjunct Professor, School of International Studies, Simon Fraser University; and Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs in Rome. In 2016 he was Visiting Scholar at the Belfer Center, Harvard University, and in 2014 was a Visiting Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, Paris. Until October 2013, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. From 2002 until 2008 he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt. From 1973 until 1999 he taught in Australia, where he was University Professor at Macquarie University. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, College of Europe (Warsaw), Canterbury University and Sydney University.

Ricardo Arredondo

Adjunct Professor

Ricardo_Arredondo@sfu.ca

Dr. Ricardo Arredondo is a Professor of International Organizations and Global Governance and Diplomatic Theory and Practice at the University of Belgrano and Public International Law at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Mendoza and has also served as an Argentine Foreign Service diplomat. He is the author or co-author of five books and more than 100 articles in well-known journals, newspapers and blogs, and regularly lectures on international law and diplomacy, particularly on diplomatic and consular law issues, WTO, legal aspects of the use of force, responsibility to protect, and international relations.   

Dr. Arredondo has received awards from different professional associations, including the Elena Holmberg and the Raúl Prebisch Medals from the Foreign Service Institute of Argentina and has taught at the Argentine Foreign Service Institute, University of Tucuman (UNT), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Universidad Austral, and Universidad de Palermo.

Dr. Arredondo received his LL.B. from the University of Tucuman Law School (1986), where he graduated in the top 1% of his class. He received his LL.M. (with Merits) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1996 and his Ph.D. summa cum laude at the University of Buenos Aires in 2011. 

As a member of the Argentine Foreign Service, Dr. Arredondo has served in the UK, Spain, and the USA. In the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was Head of the Settlement of Economic Disputes Office and served in the Legal Affairs Department, among other positions. As of 2021, he is the Consul General of the Argentine Republic in Vancouver (Canada).

Before joining the Foreign Service, Dr. Arredondo practiced law at the Tucuman Bar in Argentina (1986-1989) and received a Fellowship from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) of Argentina (1987-1989). He is also a Counselor at the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI) and a member of several other organizations, including the International Law Institute of the National Academy of Law of Argentina, the Argentine Association of International Law, and the Observatory of International Politics (University of Palermo).

Sumercan Bozkurt-Gungen

Adjunct Professor

sbozkurt@sfu.ca

Dr. Bozkurt-Gungen holds a PhD in political science from the Middle East Technical University. Before coming to SFU she was a visiting assistant professor at York University where she taught courses in Departments of Political Science and Social Science. Dr. Bozkurt-Gungen was hosted as a Jean Monnet scholar in the School of Politics and IR at the University of Nottingham in 2011. Her research lies at the intersection of labour studies and comparative political economy. She has worked extensively on the transformation of labour markets and forms of state involvement in labour relations in Turkey and Argentina. Her academic interest extends to social movements, political regime transformations as well as the perennial questions of social policy and political economy. Her current research addresses the links between authoritarian forms of governance; relations of production and social reproduction; and limits to and prospects for collective, democratic empowerment in the Global South. Dr. Bozkurt-Gungen has articles published in academic journals such as South European Society and Politics and Journal of International Relations & Development.

Fellows

David Thompson

Fellow

david_thompson_3@sfu.ca

David is the Fellow and was the 2021/22 Simons Foundation Canada Postdoctoral Fellow within the School for International Studies. An anthropologist by training, his research centers on prisons and incarceration in Brazil. David draws on ethnographic fieldwork to examine the forms of social and political life that emerge within the nation’s prison system, and to highlight the entanglements of punishment, reform, race and gender.


David is currently developing a book manuscript that analyzes the interventions made in the lives and futures of those incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro in the name of “resocialization.” He is also working on a new thread of research regarding the shifting politics of prison construction in Brazil. David’s work has been published in the International Review of Social Research, the Cultural Anthropology Editor’s Forum, and various online outlets. His research is supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Sally Sharif

The Simons Foundation Canada Postdoctoral Fellow

s_sharif@sfu.ca

 

Sally is the Simons Foundation Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the School for International Studies. She has a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before coming to SFU, Sally was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 
 
Sally's research focuses on civil war, peacebuilding, and state consolidation. Her doctoral dissertation and book project analyzes Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs on the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, examining how DDR is embedded in rebel cohesion and post-conflict political bargaining, and how these two processes shape prospects of post-conflict peace. The dissertation involved extensive field research with ex-combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and employed mixed methods in answering theoretical and empirical questions. 
 
Her research has been published by International Peacekeeping, Political Violence and Terrorism, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the London School of Economics. Her policy briefs have appeared in Political Violence at a Glance and the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) Policy Brief Series. You can find out more about her research and teaching at www.sallysharif.com.

 

 

Guldana Salimjan

SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow

salimjan_guldana@sfu.ca

Guldana Salimjan is a 2023-2025 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School for International Studies. Guldana holds a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia. She was a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) China Studies Fellowship in 2022.

Guldana’s scholarship is broadly concerned with settler colonial dispossession, displacement, racial capitalism, history, and memory. Her current book project titled State of Dispossession: Voices of Belonging & the Colonial Politics of Land in Pastoral Xinjiang is a feminist decolonial study of the post-1949 history of resource extraction, border securitization, and settler infrastructural development in China’s northwestern internal settler colony known as Xinjiang. The book intervenes in the study of socialist modernity by showing how revolutionary projects can become entangled with racialized forms of colonial domination, dispossession, and occupation. Some of the findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Central Asian Survey and Asian Ethnicity. 

Guldana’s future research agenda extends beyond her current book project to work that interrogates China’s contemporary participation in global green colonialism in the name of counterterrorism and environmental preservation. These research findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Human Ecology, Inner Asia, and an edited volume, Xinjiang Year Zero.

In her public-facing work, Guldana has co-developed the Xinjiang Documentation Project at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University since 2019, a project dedicated to archiving and analyzing the primary source documents pertinent to mass internment and political campaigns targeting Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. The Project was awarded a 2021-2022 SSHRC Connection grant and a 2022-2024 SSHRC Partnership Development Grant.