A fellow of the Canadian Royal Society and member of the Order of Canada, Stephen Clarkson taught political economy at the University of Toronto. We were expecting Stephen to be with the KFG again this spring as recipient of the prestigious Konrad Adenauer Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation.

We first met him at the European University Institute in Florence in the mid-1990s. At the time, he was one of the few scholars who were already working on comparative regionalism pioneering comparisons of the EU with other regional organizations, particularly the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). When the KFG started in 2008, Stephen got in touch with us and we invited him to join as a senior fellow. He regularly spent a few months at the KFG in 2012, 2014, and 2015 where he focused on the extremely timely subject of diffusion of foreign-investment-protection norms and investor-state dispute settlement institutions between Europe, North America and Latin America as well as the impact of globalization on the Canadian state with particular interest in NAFTA and the WTO. We just published Stephen’s KFG Working Paper on the role of regionalism in Brazil’s foreign policy.

No words can express how shocked we were to hear the news about Stephen Clarkson’s sudden death. We will miss him dearly at the KFG where he always was an extremely engaging colleague and friend. Our thoughts are with his wife Nora and his family.

Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse