Security – NAOC

NATO Mission Iraq Must Do More for Women’s Security

NATO Mission Iraq seeks to include WPS in its longstanding operations. However, the recent killing of Iraqi-Canadian women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed highlights that insecurity for women remains prominent in Iraq, as women’s rights lag in the face of continued instability. As it supports Iraq’s reconstruction, NATO Mission Iraq must undertake a renewed commitment to implement WPS across its operations, support a safe environment for women’s rights defenders and civil society, and foster sustainable peacebuilding and societal resilience.

Cyber Security and Emerging Threats

Indigenous Leadership: The Missing Pillar of Canadian and NATO’s Arctic Security Strategy

As geopolitical competition intensifies across the Arctic, Canada and NATO’s Arctic security strategy must extend beyond defence capabilities. This article explores how meaningful partnerships with Inuit and Indigenous communities strengthen Arctic sovereignty through Indigenous leadership, environmental stewardship, and generations of lived experience and permanent presence.

Cyber Security and Emerging Threats

Weaponized Migration: When Mobility Becomes a Weapon of War

Through the manipulation of human mobility, states are transforming human desperation into a weapon. As migrants and refugees are increasingly being employed as weapons of war, NATO must be prepared to respond to this hybrid challenge, which carries significant security and humanitarian implications.

Previous Events

2026 Virtual Policy Hackathon Report: Calibrating Canada’s Defence Posture With Comparable NATO Allies

Although Canada achieved its 2% NATO target, it still struggles to turn that spending into modern, ready, and deployable military capability. With the new 5% pledge, Canada must rethink how it budgets and delivers defence investments to generate usable and efficient military power.

Cyber Security and Emerging Threats

The Battle for the Brain: Cognitive Warfare is Already Here

As some of history’s greatest military strategists have contended, human will is central to conflict. Yet, as emerging technologies capable of altering emotions, reasoning, and ultimately, human will, are progressively used to cause divide and modify conduct, NATO must place increasing importance on the cognitive domain of conflict.

NATO and Canada

Pay to Play: What the PJBD Suspension Reveals About U.S. Alliance Reliability and Canada’s Strained Defence Integration with Washington

Rachel Potter analyzes the Trump administration’s suspension of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, arguing that it marks a qualitative shift in U.S. alliance behaviour in which shared defence institutions are weaponized as instruments of coercion, revealing a strategic logic that goes beyond burden sharing disputes and instead reflects an effort to reshape the institutional architecture of continental defence on American terms.

Morgan Singer Women in Security

Critical Minerals, Critical Equality: Integrating Gender into NATO’s Critical Minerals Framework

Critical minerals are growing crucial to NATO’s defence-industrial capacity, but the governance of their extraction has largely omitted gender sensitive considerations. This article argues that as NATO intensifies efforts to secure defence-critical mineral supply chains, leveraging its Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda can help develop a gender-responsive governing framework. Drawing on Canada’s emerging critical minerals framework, this article discusses the legal safeguards and inclusive governance that can strengthen supply chain resilience while embedding gender considerations. This way, NATO members can enhance both strategic mineral security and its commitments to sustainable peace and security in tandem with gender equality.

Tessa McDermid Women in Security

Resilient to the Manosphere: How NATO Can Counter Algorithm-Driven Threats to Women’s Security

The manosphere is a network of communities united by opposition to feminism that has expanded from fringe corners of the internet into mainstream public discourse. In this article, Tessa McDermid presents how social media algorithms are mainstreaming manosphere ideology among Gen Z men, and how this poses threats to the safety and participation of women in NATO’s armed forces and to the Alliance’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) commitments. Addressing these risks requires NATO to update its WPS policy to explicitly incorporate manosphere produced threats, expand counter-radicalization programmes to recognize online misogyny as an extremist pathway, and to invest in digital and gender literacy training for military personnel.

Security, Trade and the Economy

Dealing with Defence: Canada’s Use of Economic Agreements as Instruments for Security

A tariff regime isn’t an act of war, and a supply-chain cut-off isn’t an invasion — even if they are coercive. In this article, Tyler Stevenson examines how Canada is responding to these threats through a new wave of comprehensive partnerships that treat trade as an extension of defence policy.

Security, Trade and the Economy

Reaching the 2% Goal: Canada’s Increased Defence Spending and Its Implications

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Canada has achieved NATO’s 2% defence expenditure target under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney. While the increase in spending does strengthen Canada’s credibility within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and supports domestic defence-related industries and employment, the 2% target does not measure actual military effectiveness. Can Canada convert higher defence expenditures into deployable capabilities, procurement reform, personnel increases, and reduced dependence on the United States?