Dr. Liisa L. North

Liisa L. North (Professor Emeritus, York University) is the author or co-author or editor of thirteen books and about sixty-five book chapters and journal articles on party politics, civil-military relations, political economic development processes, and mining conflicts in various South American countries, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador in particular; on the civil wars, United Nations peacekeeping missions, and human rights and refugee crises in El Salvador and Guatemala; and on Canadian-Latin American relations, with a particular focus on peace promotion and development assistance. She also has written numerous journalistic pieces published in various magazines and national newspapers in Canada and Ecuador.

At various moments, she was the Director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University, President of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS), and director of various institution-building projects financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in Ecuador and other Andean countries. In 2005, she received the Pio Jaramillo Alvarado Prize in the Social Sciences, awarded annually by FLACSO-Ecuador, with CONESUP and UNESCO, for lifetime contributions to knowledge concerning the Andean Region of South America. After retiring form York, she taught in the graduate programs of FLACSO-Ecuador and the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB), both in Quito.