Benjamin Zyla

Benjamin Zyla is Professor of International Politics at the University of Ottawa in Canada, and served as the MINDS Senior Research Fellow at the NATO Defence College in the spring 2021.

He has held Fellowships at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS), the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, and the University of Bielefeld.

Benjamin’s research on international (security) institutions, peacebuilding, and foreign policy has been published in leading journals and presses. In particular, he focuses on collective action problems in international organizations (e.g. UN, NATO, EU), as well as the politics and effectiveness of international peace-and statebuilding operations, and foreign policy issues.

He is the author of “Sharing the Burden? NATO and its second-tier powers”, which was listed among the top-100 political books published in Canada in 2015/2016, and The End of European Security Institutions? The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy and NATO After Brexit.

His talk at NDC is based on his latest monograph (with Laura Grant) on Canada as Statebuilder? Development and Reconstruction Efforts in Afghanistan, which was published earlier this summer.