Assessing Paths to Peace

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine. The ensuing war has yielded many surprises, including Russia’s botched invasion, division and instability in Russian military leadership, and strength of the Ukrainian defense. Nonetheless, many questions remain about the conflict and prospects for peace. What would be needed to achieve real peace in Ukraine? Can we identify a viable path to peace that does not further injustices against the Ukrainian people, and that does not embolden similar invasions by Russia or other expansionist states? What role has sanctions played in shaping the conflict and alliances around the world, and what role can they play in the future? How are ethnic politics evolving within Russia? Panelists will speak to these and related questions, with ample time allocated for discussion with the audience.

Panelists

Nicholas Mulder, Assistant Professor and Milstein Faculty Fellow, Department of History, Cornell UniversityCristina Florea, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Cornell UniversityLeila Wilmers, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Sociology, Cornell UniversityModerator

Matthew Evangelista, President White Professor of History and Political Science, Department of Government

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Cosponsor

Institute for European Studies

Sharif Hozoori, IIE-SRF fellow and visiting scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' South Asia Program will discuss his research about the failure of liberal democracy in Afghanistan due to the ruling elite's overt ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism has been present throughout Afghanistan's political history, but it peaked during President Ashraf Ghani's tenure after the establishment of a democratic regime in 2001. Ghani enacted policies that concentrated power around three individuals: himself, the national security advisor, and the Director General of the administrative office of the President, essentially creating a "Republic of Three Persons" or a "sinister triangle" in Afghanistan. These actions had a profoundly catastrophic effect on the evolution of democratic governance in the country.

About the Speaker

Sharif Hozoori holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Center for International Politics, Organization, and Disarmament in the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was a professor of International Relations and taught both undergraduate and graduate students in Afghanistan before leaving the country after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Currently, he is an IIE-SRF fellow and visiting scholar at the Einaudi Center's South Asia Program at Cornell University. His research areas are Afghanistan politics and foreign policy, identity politics, South Asia and Middle East politics, cultural studies, and conflict resolution and peace.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Cosponsor

South Asia Program

What lessons have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping drawn from the Soviet collapse, and what lessons are they failing to draw? Renowned historian Stephen Kotkin, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at Princeton University, will talk about how we might see the Soviet collapse, looking back more than three decades. Was the collapse predictable? Did a new world order emerge, and is one emerging now? Could such a collapse be repeated? How can we use history to illuminate the present, and potential futures, and when does history fail us?

Professor Kotkin's talk is the Institute for European Studies' inaugural Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture.

This event will also be livestreamed. No pre-registration is required.

Rethinking the Origins and Significance of Corporate Climate Action

Charlotte Hulme, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the United States Military Academy, will examine the origins and significance of the corporate climate action phenomenon. Based on her recently published book, she will discuss how and why, throughout the 2010s, a growing cohort of some of the world’s largest corporations adopted certain climate practices and converged around the idea that the private sector has a vital role in addressing climate change and advancing a low-carbon future.

She will address how policy developments that states widely understood as watersheds, particularly the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, confirmed what the private sector had long believed: that states lacked answers about how to achieve concerted, ambitious, and effective climate action. Dr. Hulme will discuss the potential implications of powerful corporations seeking to fill a perceived leadership vacuum in an area poised to shape future global trends and impact the international security landscape.

About the Speaker

Dr. Charlotte Hulme is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the United States Military Academy, where she also serves as the Deputy-Director of the Johnson Grand Strategy Program. Her recently published book, Corporate Climate Action, Transnational Politics, and World Order, examines how and why multinational corporations came to play a more prominent role in the climate change issue area during the 2010s. Charlotte received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and M.Phil. in Politics and International Studies from Cambridge University, where she studied humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect in the African Union context.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Talk by Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard (English Language and Literature, University of Chicago)

“Is the ‘Coolie Woman’ A Banker?” revisits the figure of the “coolie woman” during Indian indenture in the British West Indies. Histories of indentured Indian women have focused on the experience of recruitment, labor exploitation, and especially violence at the hands of planters or would-be husbands. Instead, this talk looks instead to the bangles, necklaces, and anklets they carry in plain sight. Following brief but revealing references to jewelry through craft and financial histories, travel writing, poetry, photography, and painting, the “coolie woman” becomes an agent of global finance. Jewelry is a little-seen source of value, her collateral against the violence of the plantation and of companionate marriage.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she writes about the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and in the broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Parsard is working on her first book project, “An Illicit Wage,” an aesthetic history of hustling, sex work, and hoarding as practices of freedom. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies and can be found in American Quarterly, Small Axe, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and Representations.

To be a good woman? Caste, respectability and violence in South India and postwar Sri Lanka

This talk will focus on gendered lives in the midst of profound transformation. "It is hard to be a good woman", one of the older women I worked with in Kerala told me. She was an agricultural laborer from a Dalit community, and had latterly managed to achieve some form of stability from what had been an unhappy marriage. Like many of the older Dalit women i worked with, for her questions of caste, gender and negotiating with inheriting manual labor were fundamentally entangled with the ongoing realities of deep caste discrimination and also the context of working with one's relatives in the midst of neighborhoods for whom transforming the future were seen as major individual and collective duties. There is a long standing feminist discussion of the burdens and models of respectability that I draw from and challenge in discussing the specificities of how what women inherit and hope to transmit shapes their struggles. This was a question laid in earlier work in Sri Lanka around the challenges of moving beyond scholarly romanticisation of armed women to understand the struggles of ordinary minority Sri Lankan Tamil women when communities are focused on transformation that impose profound gendered costs and losses. I will thus briefly reflect upon the ongoing scholarly fascination with the armed militant which has signally overshadowed more critical analysis of women's lives in wartime and postwar Sri Lanka. This talk will span ethnographic work on Sri Lanka and India over two decades, and hopes to contribute to a larger feminist discussion of how we can sharpen our analysis of local struggles for transformation through centering gender, race and caste.

Sharika Thiranagama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Sharika Thiranagama’s research has examined how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her work on Sri Lanka explores changing forms of ethnicisation, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. Most recently, she has written on the effects of deep militarization in post-war Sri Lanka, the deification of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran among other works. She has also conducted research in Kerala, South India based in the Palakkad district, primarily on caste and with Dalit communities. She examines how communist-led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. Her work focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude, as well as the possibility of inheritance, dignity, and social mobility.

The Bernd Lambert Memorial Lecture Series, inaugurated in 2017, was established by the Cornell University Department of Anthropology in honor of one of its distinguished emeriti, Bernd Lambert. A transnational refugee from the Holocaust and an ethnographer of the Pacific Islands, Lambert joined the Cornell faculty in 1964 and is remembered for his kind and generous presence. For over 50 years, his research and teaching ranged widely from issues of kinship, adoption, and social organization to myth and symbol. The Lambert lectures honor Prof. Lambert’s legacy by bringing similarly broad-minded scholars to the Cornell campus.

Co-sponsored by South Asia Program; History; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies; and the Society for the Humanities. Thank you.

Find out more about this study abroad opportunity in Ecuador. Politics of Sustainable Development in Latin America is a multi-term, four-credit course that will bring students onsite in Ecuador during the January term. Students will travel to Quito, Ecuador to begin their field study at Cornell's Global Hub partner institution, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Following their in-country orientation, students will then relocate to the indigenous community of Sacha Waysa in the Amazon region of Ecuador to work with local partners and the Yakum Foundation on projects related to biodiversity, agroforestry, reforestation, food sovereignty, and community planning.

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Seminar Series, Co-sponsored by: Romance Studies & Department of Performance & Media Studies

Through a long-term personal project called What Remains, Lexi Parra has been documenting the effects of violence, repression by the State, and power of community in the targeted barrios of Caracas, by following the lives of those most affected. In this presentation, Parra will share her ongoing work paired with testimonies from local collaborators to offer an analysis of the militarization of Venezuelan police forces and the false narratives of an improving country as the crisis continues. She will also offer insight into the importance of nuanced, ethical storytelling.

Lexi Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based between Caracas and New York. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. Parra has worked with The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and others. Her degree is in Photography and Human Rights, from Bard College. Parra is the founder of Project MiRA, an arts education initiative that fosters visual literacy and critical analysis with youth in the barrios of Caracas. Project MiRA has been supported by Canon USA and the Davis Peace Prize.

Talk by Amrita Kurian (Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

This paper uses a historical and ethnographic approach to analyze how the ideal of the “progressive farmer” percolates into the literature and processes that help establish the latest standards in Indian Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) or cigarette tobacco markets. A legacy of colonial and postcolonial agricultural improvement projects, tobacco companies use the term as an accolade, indicating their preference for collaborating with some farmers over others - usually affluent farmers with the resources necessary to invest in improving farming practices. In a cash crop economy dominated by a few large buyers, these preferences also strongly influence the direction of state regulation and infrastructure projects. The paper argues that “progressive farming” practices geared toward producing standardized commodities reinforce the rural hegemony of affluent farmers while masking the infrastructural changes that have, over the years, shifted the financial burden of producing a quality crop from producers onto farmers. On the other hand, farmers, particularly affluent farmers, negotiate evolving metrics used to evaluate farming practices to variously align with the state and corporations and further their own goals of accumulating wealth and prestige.

Amrita Kurian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Her ethnographic research is based in the Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, where she studies experts’ scientific and affective mediation of markets and agrarian relations of production. Her articles titled “Flowers of Deception,” “Expert Disenchantment,” and “Progressive Farmers” are at various stages of review in Cultural Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Human Values, and Geoforum. Her essay “Accusations of Corruption: A Cautionary Tale from Indian Tobacco Auctions” was published in India in Transition and Scroll.in.