Caroline is the Skelton-Clark Postdoctoral Fellow in Canadian Affairs at Queen’s University.
About Me
I am currently the Skelton-Clark Post-Doctoral Fellow in Canadian Affairs at Queen’s University. I completed my PhD in Political Science at the University of Ottawa, where I was also a research associate at the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS).
I study Canadian foreign policy and the United Nations Security Council. In particular, I am concerned with the history of imperialism as it relates to international organizations and the concepts of status, recognition, identity, and responsibility. I have also published on settler colonialism in Canada.
I hold an MA in Political Science from The George Washington University, an MA in Public and International Affairs from the University of Ottawa, and a Bachelor of Knowledge Integration from the University of Waterloo. I have worked at Global Affairs Canada, where I was the 2018-2019 Cadieux-Léger Fellow. I am the Book Reviews Editor at International Journal and was recently the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.
In Winter 2024, I taught two courses at Queen’s. The first is POLS 392: Canadian Foreign Policy. The second is POLS 496: Canada and the United Nations. In Fall 2021, I taught POL 4330: Honours Seminar in International Relations and Global Politics at the University of Ottawa. In May 2022, I taught a high school course at the University of Ottawa’s Enrichment Mini Courses Program titled Diplomacy, Statecraft, and Foreign Affairs.
Published Work
Journal Articles
Caroline Dunton, Marion Laurence, and Gino Vlavonou. “Pragmatic Peacekeeping in a Multipolar Era: Liberal Norms, Practices and the Future of UN Peace Operations”. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 17, no. 3 (May 2023): 215-234.
Michael Murphy, Andrew Heffernan, Caroline Dunton, and Amelia Arsenault. “The Disciplinary Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Political Science and International Relations: Methods, Topics, and Impact”. International Politics 60, no. 5 (January 2023): 1030-1048.
Caroline Dunton and Jack Hasler. “Opening the Black Box of International Aid: Understanding Delivery Actors and Democratization.” International Politics 58, no. 5 (October 2021): 792-815.
Liam Midzain-Gobin and Caroline Dunton. “Renewing Relationships? Solitudes, Decolonization, and Feminist International Policy.” Millennium Journal of International Studies 50, no. 1 (September 2021): 29-54.
Caroline Dunton. Willing to Serve: Empire, Status, and Canadian Campaigns to the United Nations Security Council (1946-1947)”. International Journal 75, no. 4 (December 2020): 529-547.
Caroline Dunton and Veronica Kitchen. "Paradiplomatic Policing and Relocating Canadian Foreign Policy" International Journal 69, no. 2 (June 2014): 183-197.
Other Articles
“Book Review: Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971”. International Journal 78, no. 4 (December 2023): 657-660.
Liam Midzain-Gobin, Caroline Dunton, and Robert Tay-Burroughs. “Provincial-Indigenous Relationships as Diplomatic Encounters?” IRPP Insight 47. Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation (July 2023): 1-24.
Anjali Dayal and Caroline Dunton. “The U.N. Security Council Was Designed for Deadlock — Can it Change?” United States Institute of Peace. March 1, 2023.
“Book Review: Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions” Small States & Territories Journal 5, no. 2 (November 2022): 337-339.
“UNSC Reform: A future possibility or a distant memory?” Centre for International Policy Studies Blog. October 17, 2022.
“This federal election, think about which party wants to build a stronger foreign service”. The Conversation (Canada), September 16, 2021. Also available via the CIPS blog.
Caroline Dunton, Marion Laurence, and Gino Vlavonou. “Action for Peacekeeping? Middle Powers, Liberal Internationalism, and the Future of UN Peace Operations.” Centre for International Policy Studies Blog, September 13, 2021.
Robert Tay-Burroughs, Liam Midzain-Gobin, and Caroline Dunton. ‘Shifting the Relationship between Provinces and First Nations to a Diplomatic Focus’. Policy Options, 17 August 2021.
“Can Canada Win a UN Security Council Seat?” Centre for International Policy Studies Blog, June 15, 2020
“Canada and the United Nations Security Council: A primer on the upcoming election” Canadian International Development Platform, June 14, 2020.
“Review Essay: Making Liberal Internationalism Great Again?” H-Diplo, March 27, 2020.
“Revisiting Responsibility in International Relations: Accountability, Practice, and Canadian Foreign Policy.” E-International Relations, September 18, 2017.
Commentary
You can find my analysis of Canada’s 2020 UNSC campaign on The Boys in Short Pants podcast and the Open to Debate podcast.
Book Project
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is a place where states can seek international status by campaigning for its ten elected seats. Beginning from this premise, in this project I ask: how do states seek status through their competitions for seats on the UNSC? Drawing on the concerns of IR theorists as well as historians, this is a process-driven question; I am interested in the process of status-seeking, not simply status itself, and I am concerned with the ways that status-seeking has evolved from 1945 to the present in the lifetime of the UN. I understand status as membership in a club embedded in larger hierarchies and examine both the nature of the hierarchies and the responsibilities associated with that membership. Similarly, I take a relational view of status that is predicated on recognition and social closure.
While the UN and the UNSC are embodiments of liberal internationalism, they are also embodiments of global and historical imperialism. This imperialism structures the hierarchy under which status-seeking occurs. Status, as membership, comes with shared expectations of behaviour, responsibility, practices, and resources. I argue that status-seeking thus requires relating to these expected behaviours, responsibilities, practices, and resources and so states conduct their campaigns in terms of articulating how they plan to use their status and contribute to the UNSC’s (liberal) mandate. By speaking to these liberal responsibilities and the use of status, states are also articulating their relationships to global imperialism at different points in time through the process of status-seeking. In supporting this argument, I examine Canada’s nine campaigns to the UNSC in 1946, 1947, 1957, 1966, 1976, 1988, 1998, 2010, and 2020. Using a combination of historical methods (interviews, archival work, policy document analysis), I use a genealogical lens to trace the process of status-seeking in the 20th and 21st centuries.
