Marshall Palmer

Fellow

• PhD (International Conflict Management and Resolution Stream)

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 was also the managing editor of the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, where they published 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.”