Krzysztof Pelc

Formerly of McGill University, Krzysztof Pelc is now the University of Oxford’s Lester B. Pearson Professor in International Relations. On November 12, 2025, he delivered the Lester B. Pearson Inaugural Lecture, “Passions, Preferences, and the Politics of Self-Binding,” from which the following is adapted. Here’s a question I often bat around with graduate students in my International Political Economy seminar: In book 12 of the Odyssey…

To establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are …

I would write much of the manuscript during solitary marathon sessions in a cabin in the Alberta woods. That, at least, had been the plan. I had been offered a stay in a magical land of exception, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. I had never gone to a residency, nor did I know anyone who…

Aren’t all the best myths really about the price of information? We have Adam and Eve ousted from Eden for wanting “the eyes of them both [to be] opened.” There’s poor Prometheus, who gets his liver pecked in perpetuity for disclosing the secret of fire and “all manner of arts” to humans. And there’s Odysseus, beckoned by the Sirens’ perilous revelation of “everything that happens on the fruitful earth.” In each…

It’s a pleasing question to consider, in a way: How has Canada been spared? Is it something we’ve been eating? Does our cold climate breed some resistance against would‑be strongmen? Over the past two years, looking at the club of Western democracies, commentators have remarked on how everyone but us seems to have come down with the same…

At the height of NAFTA renegotiations last summer, I found myself facing a recurring question: What could Canada do? The Trump administration had raised tariffs on steel and aluminum in May 2018, with renegotiations well under way, and it had refused to exempt Canada, its biggest supplier of both. Trump called our genteel prime minister…

People rarely change their minds. They stick to their positions and invariably interpret new evidence in ways that confirm their prior inklings. Not only does the gut usually win out over the mind, it enlists the mind in its victories: lab experiments suggest that the more knowledgeable people are about an issue, the less likely they are to update their beliefs when faced with conflicting…