Registration Link in person: https://cvent.me/dx9K9m

Registration Link online: https://cornell.zoom.us/s/93668620332

A fireside chat between Andrew Karolyi and Iván Duque about Duque's new book: "Our Future: A Green Manifesto for Latin America and the Caribbean", Planeta, 2024.

Andrew Karolyi, Charles Field Knight Dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of BusinessIván Duque, Former President of Colombia (2018-2022)
A reception will be held after the fireside chat at Sage Hall atrium.
Please register to attend and keep posted about this event.

Registration Link in person: https://cvent.me/dx9K9m

Registration Link online: https://cornell.zoom.us/s/93668620332

In a post-January 6th US, a reasonable concern of fascism is manifesting in one particular way: silencing dissent and pluralism. This talk is about identifying the ways that silencing contentious politics benefits far right extremism and harms far left pro-democratic work in this complex political environment.

Dr. Marcus Board argues that we must protect grassroots communities and advance the interests of democracy - even when they appear contradictory to the interests of the country. Using various data sources, including original surveys, in-depth interviews, and case studies, he makes the case for resistance politics as a pro-democratic staple and distinct from fascist violence.

About the Speaker
Dr. Marcus Board is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University. He is the author of Invisible Weapons: Infiltrating Resistance and Defeating Movements (Oxford 2022), winner of the W.E.B. DuBois Best Book Award (NCOBPS), Best Book on Race, Ethnicity and Justice (APSA), and the Most Outstanding Book Award (Association for Ethnic Studies). Dr. Board is the Black Politics Committee Chair, Faculty Advisor for the Political Science Society, and a Scholar Coach with the Faculty Summer Academy Program - all at Howard University.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Prospects for European Security after the War

Whatever the outcome of the Russian war against Ukraine, in its wake Ukraine will need to choose a security policy to defend its sovereignty from future threats. Its choice holds implications for broader European security. Some observers advocate Ukraine becoming a member in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), thereby gaining protection from the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.” Others doubt the effectiveness of “extended nuclear deterrence”—the threat of U.S. nuclear retaliation for attacks, including those carried out with conventional armed forces, on an ally's territory. But nuclear deterrence was never put to the test in Cold War Europe, and today extended nuclear deterrence is an unreliable and risky approach to Russian aggression.

An examination of the role of nuclear deterrence during the 1961 Berlin Crisis demonstrates that Soviet military strategy against U.S. nuclear weapons posed the risk of escalation. In vulnerable NATO territories, such as the Estonian city of Narva, such a risk still exists. A Cold War–era alternative to nuclear deterrence offers the possibility of a non-nuclear defense for Ukraine. Proposals such as the “spider in the web” strategy draw on concepts of the security dilemma and non-offensive, confidence-building defense to provide for Ukrainian security in a Europe threatened by Russian expansion, without relying on the threat of nuclear war.

About the Speaker
Matthew Evangelista is President White Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus in Cornell’s Department of Government. His most recent book, recently published in paperback and available to download for free through Open Access, is Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940-1945: Bombing among Friends (Routledge, 2023).

Host:
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-sponsor:
Institute for European Studies

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Daena Funahashi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, who will discuss constitutional change and political legitimacy in Thailand.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In 2017 Thailand launched yet another constitution – its twentieth in less than a century. Contra a common perspective among political scientists that the cycle of coups followed by constitution writing in Thailand points to a “failure” of democracy, I examine this cycle as one that successfully renders political legitimacy visible as the vanishing point of politics. As I see it, what the century of Thai political conflict teaches us is that the problem of legitimacy is one that cannot and should not be laid to rest. Based on ethnographic and archival work I began in 2011, I argue in this talk that legitimacy is a question most animated at moments when old notions are toppled, and the new codifications of legitimacy are yet to emerge. Here, I put forth an idea of legitimacy as that which emerges through being toppled, rather than on being constituted.

About the Speaker

Daena Funahashi is a political and economic anthropologist interested in examining the interstice between speech and speechlessness, between what is possible to make legible and what resists articulation. She has written on issues of scientific authority, political legitimacy, and democracy in Thailand. Beyond Southeast Asia, she is the author of Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland (Cornell University Press, 2023). In it, Funahashi brings classic anthropological scholarship on exchange and sacrifice to bear on contemporary concerns with labor, labor’s attritional force such as burnout, and the future of state welfare. She is a member of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS) and The Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.