Munk Centre for International Studies

Jury Named for Lionel Gelber Prize

For the second year the jury will be chaired by George Russell. Returning jury member Thomas J. Biersteker will be joined by new members David Halton, Tod Lindberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

“We’re honoured to have jurors of such distinction,” said Janice Gross Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, which administers the Prize.

Last year's winner was Steve Coll for Ghost Wars, a penetrating analysis of the politics of terrorism, detailing the rise of Osama bin Laden. After winning the Lionel Gelber Prize, Ghost Wars won the Pulitzer Prize.  The Lionel Gelber Prize is presented annually in association with the Munk Centre and Washington-based Foreign Policy Magazine. The Economist has called it the world’s most important award for non-fiction.

Lionel Gelber, a Canadian scholar renowned for his work in international relations, established the Prize in 1989. He wished to encourage writers around the world to write books on foreign affairs and international relations so as to stimulate discussion and debate on vital global issues.

Finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize will be announced on January 18, 2006. The winner will be announced on March 6, 2006. The winner will deliver the annual Lionel Gelber Lecture at the award ceremony in Toronto on March 29, 2006. The Lecture is open to the public.

DETAILS ABOUT THE JURY

George Russell, Jury Chair, is currently executive editor with Fox News Network in New York City. He is the former president and editor of TIME Magazine in Canada. Previously he held positions as editor of TIME Latin America as well as writer and editor at TIME U.S., covering numerous disciplines including international affairs and business. He is co-author of Eyewitness: 150 Years of Photojournalism.
Thomas J. Biersteker is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Transnational Organizations and, since 1994, director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He wrote The Emergence of Private Authority (2002) with Rodney Hall and co-edited Rebordering North America: Integration and Exclusion in a New Security Context (2003) with Peter Andreas. Biersteker is the founder and former director of the Center for International Studies and former director of the School of International Relations, both at the University of Southern California. Biersteker chaired the Global Security and Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Independent Task Force on Terrorist Financing. He received his doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

David Halton, distinguished broadcast journalist, joined the CBC in 1965. A year later he became the network's Paris-based correspondent, reporting on the de Gaulle government, the Six-Day War in Israel and the coup in Greece.

His career took him to Moscow, where he was correspondent from 1968 to 1969, to Canadian posts in Quebec and Ottawa, to London, and to his last major posting as senior news correspondent in Washington, D.C. He covered the Prague Spring in 1968, as well as the Vietnam War. In Washington, he reported on President Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, as well as the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the momentous global events that followed. He retired from the CBC earlier this year but will continue contributing special news features. Halton is regarded as one of Canada’s most acclaimed television journalists.

Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of Hoover Institution's Policy Review. Lindberg's areas of research interest are political theory, American politics, and national security policy. He is the editor of Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (2004) and a contributing editor to the Washington-based Weekly Standard. Since 1996 Lindberg has written a weekly column about politics for the Washington Times, where he served as editor of the editorial page from 1991 to 1998.

In 2005, Lindberg served as coordinator for the task group on Preventing and Responding to Genocide and Major Human Rights Abuses for the United States Institute of Peace's Task Force on the United Nations (the Gingrich-Mitchell task force). He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Princeton Project on National Security, for which he serves as co-chair of the working group on anti-Americanism.
Anne-Marie Slaughter has served as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University since September 2002 where she is also the Bert G. Kerstetter University Professor of Politics and International Affairs.

Slaughter writes and teaches global governance, international criminal law, and American foreign policy. She is the author of A New World Order, which was a finalist in last year's Lionel Gelber Prize. The book identifies transnational networks of government officials as an increasingly important component of global governance.

Slaughter is a former president of The American Society of International Law and serves on the boards of a number of organizations, including the McDonald’s Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

SPECIAL 15TH ANNIVERSARY GELBER PRIZE LECTURE - "Rethinking the Search: New Directions in Histories of Modern China"

On Thursday, November 3, 2005, Jonathan D. Spence, winner of the first Lionel Gelber Prize in 1990 for The Search for Modern China, will give a special lecture in honour of the 15th Anniversary of the Prize.  Professor Spence is recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Chinese civilization from the 16th century to the present. Among his many awards, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth in 2001 by being made a companion of the Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. Spence is the Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Graduate Studies Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University.

The lecture will be held at the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. and will be followed by a reception.
 
The public is welcome and can register online at www.utoronto.ca/mcis