Rights of Nature represents a groundbreaking shift in environmental protection — a legal framework that recognizes rivers, forests, and other natural entities as having inherent rights to exist, flourish, and remain clean. This transformative model emerged in the Global South, led by Ecuador, the first country to enshrine Rights of Nature in its constitution. It has since inspired movements and legal debates worldwide, redefining the relationship between people and the planet.

Join us for a special Keynote in which lawyers, civil society activists, and academics discuss how Rights of Nature is being interpreted and applied in the courts of Ecuador and Colombia. They will also explore the challenges this paradigm faces and highlight the opportunities it creates for strengthening environmental protection and advancing sustainability. The conversation offers a rare, frontline look at the evolving global dialogue on environmental justice.

This work is part of a collaboration between the Ashley School of Global Development and Environment at Cornell and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. It is supported by a Cornell Global Hubs seed grant and the Polson Institute for Global Development.

Open access background reading: Special Issue: Integrating Ecology, Law, and Society to Protect the Environment. Journal of Integrated Global STEM: People, Technology and Policy. 3(1). Warner and Martínez-Moscoso (2026).

Register and see the full list of panelists.

Join us for a screening of the documentary Bombshell (2026) on Wednesday, September 26, at 6:00 p.m.

In the acclaimed 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, an American president calls a drunken Soviet Premier with bad news: “…Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...” The “something” is a deranged commander who has launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which leads to nuclear apocalypse. While a global apocalypse has yet to materialize, the history of nuclear weapons is full of other things going wrong. Indigenous lands have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have died of cancer, and trillions of dollars have been spent on weapons that one U.S. Defense Secretary ultimately concluded were “useless.”

Today the majority of the world’s nations have joined the Treaty for the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and surveys suggest strong public support for the TPNW, even in nations that possess nuclear weapons. However, the nine nations in the world that have nuclear weapons are continuing a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race which endangers all life on earth. In this full-day symposium, distinguished experts from diverse disciplines—including physics, political science, history, feminist studies, and peace and conflict studies—will discuss contemporary dangers of nuclear weapons, how we got here, and how we can work for a more secure and peaceful future.

This symposium is cosponsored by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Department of Government at Cornell University, on the occasion of Professor Matthew Evangelista’s retirement from Cornell. Professor Evangelista’s scholarship makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the nuclear arms race and means of ending it, and we are pleased to honor his distinguished career in peace and conflict studies.

Panels:

10:00 AM to 11:30 AM: Nuclear Arms Races and How to Stop Them
Ray Acheson (Princeton), David Cortright (Cornell), Lisbeth Gronlund (MIT)

11:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Break

12:15 PM to 1:15 PM: Keynote: "Nuclear Weapons: An International History"
David Holloway, Stanford University

1:15 PM to 1:30 PM: Coffee Break

1:30 PM to 3:00 PM: New Perspectives on Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control
Ruoyu Li (Colgate), Leyatt Betre (Princeton), Benjamin Wilson (Harvard)

3:00 PM to 3:45 PM: Coffee Break
Guest appearance by Frank von Hippel via Zoom (Princeton)

3:45 PM to 5:15 PM: Panel: Nuclear War and Climate Catastrophe
Neta Crawford (St. Andrews), Zia Mian (Princeton), and Benoît Pelopidas (Sciences Po)

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor
Department of Government

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She earned her BA from Harvard University and PhD from Princeton University. In 2012, she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor; she has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; UC Davis; Cornell University; and Williams College. Apter was president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2017-18. She is editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, Comparative Literature, October, Diacritics, Sites, and Signs. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Apter was awarded a two-year Mellon Grant (with Jacques Lezra) in 2011-12, for a seminar on “The Problem of Translation.” In fall 2014, she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.

Apter’s books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013), and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, 2006). She has also published extensively in Third Text, e-flux, October, boundary 2, New Literary History, Littérature, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Translation Studies, Cabinet, The Global South, Grey Room, Boston Review, differences, and Public Culture, among others.