“The future of international relations is right here,” Cox said in his final lecture
On April 2, the Department of Political Studies hosted an open lecture honouring Professor Wayne Cox’s final lecture at Queen’s before his retirement at the end of the 2026 winter semester. Held in the Humphrey Hall Auditorium, the lecture ran from 12:30 p.m. to 1:20 p.m. and drew more than 120 attendees. Cox has taught at Queen’s since 2001, with courses spanning international relations (IR), economics, and critical theory.
READ MORE: Professor Wayne Cox reflects on his career and looks to his goals for retirement
As students, alumni, and Queen’s staff filed into the auditorium, a slideshow featuring comments from past Cox students played in the front of the class.
Once settled, Jonathan Rose, head of Political Studies, introduced Cox, noting alumni had travelled from Ottawa and Toronto for Cox’s final lecture. He also said the comments displayed at the front of the class came from political staffers, entrepreneurs, communication specialists, professors, and lawyers, asserting Cox’s far-reaching impact.
Cox then took the stage, and he opened by laying out his central argument: despite underfunding, artificial intelligence, and the growing distance technology can create between students and professors, he believes IR remains strong in Canada.
“The conclusion that I will come to is that the study of international relations today in Canada is actually in a very good place,” he said.
From there, Cox traced the development of IR from what he described as its earlier dominance by American institutions and positivist approaches toward a more plural field. He argued that while the discipline has become more divided, Canada has emerged as a major site of new knowledge production, particularly for critical approaches to IR.
Partway through the lecture, Cox tied that broader history back to his own teaching career at Queen’s, recalling that he began teaching at the University on Sept. 11, 2001.
“It was at that moment that I started teaching in POLS 260 at Queen’s University.”
The attack on the World Trade Centres, he suggested, shaped both his own teaching and student interest in the field of IR in the years that followed, citing that the next year his IR class went from 98 students to 400.
While discussing the United States, he turned to the discipline’s current state, criticizing what he described as the silence of many American IR scholars in response to the current “Trump era.” He suggested the field’s emphasis on neutrality has limited its willingness to speak out.
“The silence of American IR scholars to what is going on in the United States is deafening,” Cox continued, “and I would argue it’s this idea that knowledge is value-free. The claim towards value freedom, towards neutrality, becomes at a certain point a gag order.”
Contrasting that silence with what he described as stronger and more diverse work outside the American academy; Cox pointed to Canada as one of the field’s emerging centres of knowledge production.
This led to Cox’s final message of the lecture: the future of IR lies not in the static disciplinary hierarchies, but in students and new scholars, and in how they are trained and taught at the University.
“[Queen’s is] a center for knowledge production […] The future of international relations is right here. It’s you folks, and it’s how we train you.”
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Open lecture, political studies, retirement, Wayne Cox
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