When asked a bit about himself, Marshall Palmer doesn’t shy away from any aspect of his upbringing: whether it’s sharing his “addiction to outdoor adventure” that
he inherited from his father’s side of the family or his sense of “vergangenheitsbewältigun”, German for “the struggle to overcome past” that he inherited from his mother’s side (where his maternal grandparents grew up under the Third Reich in Germany). He has used these aspects of his life, as well as “simply following my interests” during his pursuit of a PhD at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.
Five years of hard work are culminating as he defends his thesis on foreign election intervention this week.
After Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with Russian help, Marshall wanted to see if there was a broader pattern to such interventions. “If a foreign power helps a candidate/party into office, does that candidate/party then cooperate with that foreign power? Under what circumstance do they cooperate? When do they renege?” These initial questions then lead him to reassess some existing research on why these interventions happen in the first place, and how interveners decide on their methods of intervention. He knew he was on the right track when he serendipitously happened upon a statue of Jean Jaurès, a pre-WWI French politician. “I casually looked him up on Wikipedia wherein I discovered that the Russian Tsar intervened quite heavily in French elections ahead of World War I, to keep Jaurès and his party out of power. Given that Jaurès was stridently anti-war, Russia’s interventions count as one of many contingencies upon which history turned before 1914. It illustrated so well my argument that I used that anecdote from French history to open my dissertation.”
Marshall is also the managing editor of the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, where they are in the process of publishing two special issues on the conflict in Ukraine and on Canadian foreign policy in Southeast Asia. He has also converted one of his PhD chapters (on U.S. intervention in the Canadian elections of 1962 and 1963) into a standalone paper and is awaiting peer review. He continues to work on his French every chance he gets.
The best advice he can offer to students who are considering NPSIA or who are considering a PhD is to “Follow your interests. Don’t be shy: engage with the scholarly community that works on similar questions. Treat the PhD as a full-time job. Get outside: take full advantage of Gatineau Park and the Canal. Write, write, write.”
Congratulations Marshall on all your hard work, we are rooting for you!