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Professor Alasdair Roberts is the 2026 J.A. Corry Lecturer and will speak on his forthcoming book, Why Great States Fail. 

This is a book about great states and why they fail. It matters for people who live in great states—almost half the world's population—since their quality of life will clearly suffer if the political order is collapsing around them. The other half of the planet lives in smaller states like Canada that neighbour and trade with great states. These people also need to understand why great states fail, because life in small states is so heavily influenced by the caprices of their giant neighbours. When great states stumble, small states suffer too.

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public policy at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He writes extensively on problems of governance and public policy. His most recent book, The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century, was published by McGill-»ÆÉ«ÊÓƵ Press in 2024. It was a finalist for the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. His preceding book, Superstates: Empires of the Twenty-First Century, was published by Polity in 2023. Eight earlier books have received five book awards.