Geoff White

Apartheid was a system of rigid racial segregation practised in South Africa for most of the twentieth century. Black people could not live in the same neighbourhoods as white people (nor could “Coloureds” or “Indians”). They could work in white neighbourhoods in the day but had to return to their own townships at night. Black South Africans received a rudimentary “Bantu” education with almost no access to post-secondary…

The retired CBC journalist Brian Stewart is renowned for his coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine. His reports accompanied by shocking images of the starving victims brought the scope of the disaster to world attention. They mobilized an international relief operation to bring tonnes of food to millions of those afflicted. Only the CBC and the BBC were permitted by Ethiopia’s Marxist regime to enter the…

Even as it raged, some called it the “forgotten war.” But the legacy of the Korean War is not forgotten. It is a prosperous, innovative, and democratic state: the Republic of Korea. Think of Hyundai vehicles, Samsung laptops and smartphones, LG household appliances, the cultural effusion of K‑pop, or the penetrating big- and small-screen sensations of Parasite and Squid Game…

When Canada opened its first diplomatic mission in Brazil in 1941, one of its principal aims was to help secure support for the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. Despite some fascist tendencies of the dictator Getúlio Vargas, Brazil was one of the few South American countries to back the Allies and the only one to eventually commit…

Along with stakeholders from business, academia, and the public at large, employees of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (as it was then known) were invited to take part in a major policy review in 1994 and 1995. I volunteered. Over the course of several sessions, I heard many officers, especially younger ones, advocate for a stronger emphasis on Canadian…

It is a well-worn joke, but it still has some bite: Three students — one British, one French, and one Canadian — are assigned to compose an essay on the elephant. The British student drafts “The Elephant: A Product of Empire.” The French student writes “The Elephant: A Story of Love.” The Canadian comes up with “The Elephant: A Federal or Provincial Responsibility?” Obsessions with jurisdiction are even more pronounced during crises like the…

It was once typical of countercul­ture nonchalance to dream of a benign technological future full of easy rewards. “I like to think / (it has to be!) / of a cybernetic ecology / where we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature,” the American poet Richard Brautigan wrote, in 1967. “All watched over / by machines of loving grace.” While Brautigan’s glib vision is no longer just a fanciful…

Twenty years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization saw fit to violate the supposed sanctity of international borders, through a bombing campaign to protect the endangered Albanian-­speaking minority population in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Across the alliance, pundits claimed NATO had successfully applied the emerging “responsibility to protect” doctrine. Perhaps the earlier air bombardment of the Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloševic, which brought Serbia to the table to sign the Dayton Accord in…