It’s time to vote for the winner of the CIPS Best Blog Award! The CIPS Best Blog Award is designed to recognize the very best blog written by the CIPS community for the previous academic year. This is the fourth year that we will be giving out the award.

The previous winners of the award are:

• 2020: MBS admits “full responsibility” for the Khashoggi murder: What this means for the Kingdom’s allies by John Packer
• 2021: Bidenomics Signals the End of the Third Way in Economic Policy by Jacqueline Best
• 2022: The Politics of Travel Bans by Rita Abrahamsen

The 2023 award will go to a blog that was written between July 2022 and May 2023. During that period, we published 39 blogs on a wide variety of topics, including the war in Ukraine, the future of the Canadian Foreign Service, COP27, Canada’s partnership with Japan, and more. We hope that you have enjoyed and appreciated reading them as much as we have. Voting is now closed.

CIPS will donate $300 to an organisation of the winner’s choosing.

First, some background on the competition so far. The full list of 39 blogs was narrowed down to a top six by our judge, Madelaine Drohan. Madelaine, an award-winning author, editor and journalist, kindly read through each of the blogs and evaluated them based on the following criteria:

• The importance of the policy issue discussed
• The originality of the academic insight it provides
• The quality of the argument and the quality of the writing

We’re thankful for the time and energy that she put into this task, and for the short list that she has provided us. Read more about Madelaine below.

The shortlist is as follows:

1. Unpacking the Endgame: Examining the Possibility of Nuclear Escalation and Regime Change in the Russia-Ukraine War by Claude Denis
2. The Irony of La Francophonie by Rita Abrahamsen and Arsène Brice Bado
3. We Need to Rethink Aid to Fragile Contexts by Christoph Zuercher
4. Nuclear Threats and Canada’s Disarmament Diplomacy: A Way Forward by Paul Meyer
5. It is Time for Environmentalists to Stop Blaming ‘Overpopulation’ by Ryan Katz-Rosene and Devon Cantwell-Chavez
6. Iran’s Revolution: Will the Islamic Regime Endure? by Farhad Rezaei

Please cast your vote here

Our judge

Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning author, editor and journalist who has covered business and politics in Canada, Europe and Africa during her 40-year career. She was the Canada correspondent for The Economist magazine from 2006 to 2019. Her book, Making a Killing: How and why corporations use armed force to do business, won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Business Book of the Year Award in 2004.