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.

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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.

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.

Recent assessments of climate change impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa indicate that the continent is already experiencing impacts from rising temperatures, including water shortages, reduced food production, loss of lives and biodiversity loss. There are an increased number of extreme events, from drought, floods and tropical storms, and these events will worsen if global greenhouse gases are not significantly reduced. At the same time, Africa is one of the lowest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and many countries struggle to manage with the cost of climate change adaptation, while also paying high levels of debt. Alongside these climate challenges are ongoing extractive industries looking to Africa as a new or ongoing source of resources – including mining precious minerals to support renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. Despite this bleak picture, alternative models that are transformative and reparative are emerging as ways to imagine just climate futures in Africa. These alternatives include attention to multiple types of social inequities and building development strategies through dialogue and careful attention to power dynamics. Adaptation approaches that support decent livelihoods alongside biodiversity, ecosystems and indigenous knowledge are being tested and expanded. Recognition of power inequities at multiple scales and reparation of these inequities is part of such approaches.

After an impulsive travel decision to visit friends, Freddie, 25, returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France. Freddie suddenly finds herself embarking on an unexpected journey in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions.

Filmmaker Davy Chou will join in-person for a post-screening conversation.

Supported by Albertine Cinematheque, a program of FACE Foundation and Villa Albertine, with support from the CNC / Centre National du Cinema, and SACEM / Fonds Culturel Franco-AmŽricain

Film screening with Sahraa Karimi (Director), followed by Q&A and conversation moderated by Iftikhar Dadi, John H. Burris Professor of History of Art

The desire for freedom is basic to human nature all over the world. Obtaining a driver's license is becoming a key factor towards attaining personal freedom for Afghan women. However, is the Afghan society prepared for women behind the wheel? In Afghan Women Behind the Wheel, director Sahraa Karimi, born and raised in Kabul, follows several Afghan women trying to obtain a driving license. Through personal interviews, Karimi discovers the motivations and desires of these women, which are often shaped by their age, social status, and family backgrounds. She taps into their lives and dreams and discusses religion and family traditions with them to better understand their journey toward their personal freedom.

Sahraa Karimi is an independent film director and screenwriter from Afghanistan. On August 15, 2021, she was forced to leave Afghanistan due to the sudden and unexpected fall of Kabul and the return of the Taliban to power. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia (Rome National Film School) in Rome, Italy.

She belongs to the second generation of Afghan migrants in Iran. When she was 17 years old, she immigrated to the Slovak Republic. In August 2012, she returned to Kabul and established her own Film Production Company, Kapila Multimedia House, to support Afghan independent filmmakers and artists. Karimi received her PhD In Cinema (Fiction Film Directing & Screenwriting) from the Academy of Music and Performing Arts, Film and TV Faculty in Bratislava, Slovakia (FTF-VSMU).

Presented in collaboration with the Ithaca City of Asylum. Cosponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Department of Performing & Media Arts, and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Financial support is provided by a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Tickets are free, and can be reserved beforehand through Cornell Cinema.

What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? In her new book, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi.

Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.

Register in advance to attend!

About the Speaker

Ida Danewid is a social and political theorist based in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex.

About the Moderator

Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His primary areas of research focus on law, violence, race, humanity, and world order(s) in global politics.

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Migrations initiative, part of Global Cornell.

Are you interested in the intersection of mental health and culture, global health, and community engagement? Do you want to gain field research skills and learn about indigenous communities in South India’s beautiful and fragile Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve? If so, the Cornell-Keystone Nilgiris Field Learning Program might be for you!