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Comparative Muslim Societies Program

Getting to Climate Justice: A Global Approach

April 11, 2024

5:00 pm

Rockefeller Hall, Schwartz Auditorium, Room 201

Lund Critical Debate

Climate change has a disproportionate impact on the world’s most vulnerable populations, yet climate crises also impact people across the full spectrum of wealth and power. How do we understand these varied impacts and design climate policy to maximize human well-being and justice on a global level?

As climate change accelerates, we see the rise of violent conflict and humanitarian emergencies in some places but not others. In some places but not others, we see disruptions in food security and forced migration. And around the world, debates rage about access to energy, the need to profit from valuable natural resources, and pressures to reduce extraction and consumption.

This year’s Lund debate from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies explores how citizens and policymakers worldwide can act to increase justice in our shared climate crisis. The panel will discuss key issues surrounding societies, governments, business, and labor and ways to share responsibilities globally to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change.

How can we imagine new strategies for reshaping global trade and finance, national and transnational security policies, and environmental protections that go beyond political borders? Join climate journalist Kate Aronoff and climate security expert Joshua Busby (LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas) for a conversation on our climate’s state of emergency and how governments can help.

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Livestream for National and International Viewers

Can't join in person? Register to attend virtually at eCornell.

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Panelists

Kate Aronoff is a Brooklyn-based staff writer at The New Republic, covering climate and energy politics, and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She is the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back (2021) and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (2019). Aronoff serves on Dissent magazine's editorial board and the advisory board of Jewish Currents.

Joshua Busby is professor of public affairs in the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. His research focuses on climate change, global health, transnational advocacy movements, and U.S. foreign policy. Busby was principal investigator on two multimillion-dollar climate and security grants from the U.S. Department of Defense. He served as senior advisor for climate at the U.S. Department of Defense from 2021 to 2023. His newest book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (2022).

Moderator

Rachel Bezner Kerr is director of Einaudi’s Institute for African Development and professor of global development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She served as coordinating lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sixth assessment report chapter on climate change impacts and adaptation of food systems.

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About the Debate

The Lund Critical Debate is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Established in 2008, Einaudi's Lund debate series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs '57.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

East Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

"Racializing Religion: Islamophobia, Antisemitism and Palestine"

March 28, 2024

5:00 pm

Biotechnology Building, G10

Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law, Middle East Legal Studies Scholar and Chancellor’s Social justice Scholar at Rutgers University Law School shares her views on Islamophobia, antisemitism and Palestine.

Aziz is also the founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights. Her book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom” examines how national security laws and policies impact the civil rights of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities in the U.S.

The talk is scheduled for 5 p.m. in Room G10, Biotech Building. The event will also be livestreamed on eCornell. Register here for the livestream.

Sponsored by: Office of the Provost; College of Arts & Sciences; Department of Near Eastern Studies; Jewish Studies Program; Religious Studies Program; Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures; Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East at the Cornell Law School; Comparative Muslim Societies; Critical Ottoman + Post-Ottoman Studies; Einhorn Center for Community Engagement; Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; Society for the Humanities.

For more information, visit https://as.cornell.edu/public-engagement/antisemitism-and-islamophobia-…(link is external).

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To request an accommodation or for inquiries about accessibility, please email Lori Sonken at ljs269@cornell.edu(link sends email).

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

Information Session: Global PhD Research Awards

February 28, 2024

4:45 pm

The Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Awards fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this funding opportunity annually supports at least six PhD students who have passed the A exam. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars. All disciplines and research topics are welcome. The award provides $10,000 to be used by the end of the sixth PhD year for international travel, living expenses, and research expenses.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu(link sends email).

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

East Asia Program

Southeast Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

Annual Armenian Genocide Commemoration Lecture by Ümit Kurt

April 24, 2024

4:30 pm

White Hall, 106

The Ottoman Eichmann: Mustafa Reşat (Mimaroğlu) and The Technocracy of Genocide

Notorious SS officer Adolf Eichmann took the order he was given to send millions of Jews to death camps and applied it to the letter. Eichmann made sure that every single Jew reached the respective concentration and death camps. In his stunning biography of Eichmann, historian David Cesarani describes him as a critical cog in the Nazi mass murder machine, along with Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich. The personal, social, political, and ideological dynamics that shaped the character and mindset of genocide technocrats such as Eichmann, their formation, and acquisitions, play a key role here. Concurrently, these dynamics provide us with important clues and data on how they made decisions and choices at certain stages and episodes of their careers, and how these choices determined the direction of their lives. The historical actor who must be addressed in the context of the Armenian genocide is Mustafa Reşat (Mimaroğlu). As a young bureaucrat, he was the head of the Second Department of General Security (also known as the Department of Political Affairs or Kısmı Siyasi), a section of the Ministry of the Interior. Along with other officers in the same unit, Mustafa Reşat played an active role in the planning, organization, and implementation of the 24 April 1915 mass arrests in Istanbul that sparked the Armenian Genocide. As such, he facilitated the work of political decision-makers. Building on his memoirs published in two volumes titled Gördüklerim ve Geçirdiklerimden, in this talk, I focus on the course of Mustafa Reşat’s life, his actions and ‘jobs’ and explain how he turned into a genocide technocrat. My main goal is to trace the career of the major protagonist and his decisions at critical junctions and to explore him as an outstanding representative of a category of perpetrators who prepare the propitious infrastructure, ground, and climate for such large-scale violence.

About the Speaker- Ümit Kurt is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He is currently Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industry, and Social Sciences (History) and an affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of award-winning book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021) and the co-author of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn, 2017). He is now working on his third book manuscript project on the global patterns of mass violence in the Ottoman borderlands in 1860s-1920s.

This event is hosted by Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies with support from the Comparative Muslim Societies Program.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

“Out of Time: On the Rise and Resilience of Anti-Muslim Bigotry Today"

March 18, 2024

5:00 pm

Warren Hall, 401

Moustafa Bayoumi, journalist and professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York shares his views on the rise of Islamophobia.

The talk is scheduled for 5 p.m. in 401 Warren Hall. Register here to watch the event on eCornell.

Bayoumi is the author of “How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America” and “This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror.” He is a columnist for The Guardian as well as a regular contributor to The Nation, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, CNN, The London Review of Books, The National, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Progressive.

Sponsored by: Office of the Provost; College of Arts & Sciences; Department of Near Eastern Studies; Jewish Studies Program; Religious Studies Program; Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures; Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East at the Cornell Law School; Comparative Muslim Societies; Critical Ottoman + Post-Ottoman Studies; Einhorn Center for Community Engagement; Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; Society for the Humanities.

For more information, visit https://as.cornell.edu/public-engagement/antisemitism-and-islamophobia-…(link is external).

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To request an accommodation or for inquiries about accessibility, please email Lori Sonken at ljs269@cornell.edu(link sends email).

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

“Antisemitism, the Israel-Hamas War, and Distorting the Law of Genocide: A Perfect Storm"

February 12, 2024

5:00 pm

Warren Hall, 401

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and General Counsel Emeritus, World Jewish Congress shares his views on antisemitism, the Israel-Hamas War and the law of genocide.

Born in 1948 in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany, the son of two survivors of the Nazi death and concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Rosensaft is also general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, and a past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. He has taught about the law of genocide at Cornell Law School since 2008 and at Columbia Law School since 2011; beginning this semester, he is teaching separate courses on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence to Cornell law students and to undergraduates. He is the author of "Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen" (Kelsay Books, 2021) and editor of "God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors" (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015).

This talk will take place at 5 p.m. in 401 Warren Hall.

All the talks are open to the public and will be livestreamed on eCornell. To view this first talk, register at this eCornell site: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/overview/K021224/(link is external)

Sponsored by: Office of the Provost; College of Arts & Sciences; Department of Near Eastern Studies; Jewish Studies Program; Religious Studies Program; Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures; Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East at the Cornell Law School; Comparative Muslim Societies; Critical Ottoman + Post-Ottoman Studies; Einhorn Center for Community Engagement; Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; Society for the Humanities.

For more information, visit https://as.cornell.edu/public-engagement/antisemitism-and-islamophobia-…(link is external).

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To request an accommodation or for inquiries about accessibility, please email Lori Sonken at ljs269@cornell.edu(link sends email).

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

Information Session: Southeast Asia Program Undergraduate Opportunities

March 11, 2024

12:30 pm

Uris Hall, 153

The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) gives students multiple ways to engage with Southeast Asia. Affiliate with our program to be informed of all SEAP events and activities. Undergraduates who minor in Southeast Asian Studies are advised by SEAP Program Faculty advisors who collaborate with them to construct a course of study based upon their area of interest. SEAP also runs the CU in Cambodia program for students interested in international travel.

Can’t attend? Contact seap@cornell.edu(link sends email).

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

East Asia Program

Southeast Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

Conference: Research Frontiers in Democratic Threats and Resilience

March 23, 2024

9:00 am

Africana Studies and Research Center

This conference brings together scholars undertaking new research on questions of democratic resistance and sources of resilience in response to global evidence of democratic backsliding.

We will work together to analyze domestic and international factors, including institutions, civil society, political parties, voters, media, and foreign policy. In an era marked by threats to democracy from within nominally democratic institutions, by elected officials, and with varying degrees of support from the voting public, we seek to understand the interactive nature of democratic threats and resistance strategies.

As democracy can be conceived of as a continued contestation over rights, responsibilities, and rules, we aim to use this critical historical moment of contestation to expand our comparative conceptions of democratic practice, strategies of endurance and deepening or weakening of democratic regimes, and the social, economic, technological, and institutional factors that contribute to varied outcomes worldwide.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the conference is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience.

Register to attend the conference

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March 22 Panels

Panel 1: Concepts and Measurement: Democracy 2.0
This panel will push beyond the measurement debates to address conceptual and ontological questions about how to measure democracy, and definitional questions at the heart of democracy’s weaknesses and promise in contemporary practice. Does the practice of a minimal definition of democracy contribute to public disenchantment, and is such practice durable?

Panel 2: Resilience Factors, Resistance Strategies, and Opposition Tactics
This panel will examine the social and economic bases of democratic resiliency, as well as various strategies, actors, and institutions that can fortify and even enhance democratic practice.

Panel 3: Stabilizing Forces? Historical Patterns and Contemporary Challenges
This panel will dissect the factors that have historically stabilized advanced industrial democracies—including party systems, modes of political representation, and patterns of capitalist development-- and their potential applicability to contemporary patterns of democratic backsliding and resistance.

March 23 Panel

Panel 4: International Actors and Regional Organizations
This panel will explore the ways in which authoritarian or democratic leaders and regimes exert influence on the regime types of other countries and the influence of regional organizations on participating countries’ regime trajectories.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Comparative Muslim Societies Program

East Asia Program

Southeast Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

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