Global politics are undergoing a radical rupture. The post-WWII rules-based international order, which prohibits most uses of military force, provides collective security, and respects human rights, has always been imperfect. But today several prominent governments appear to be explicitly repudiating these norms. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East suggest that great powers like Russia and the United States are seeking power primarily through military force and economic coercion rather than through incentives or persuasion. Middle powers such as Canada have responded by calling for new coalitions and strategies to counter aggression. What will these changes mean for the future of war and peace? In this panel, four distinguished scholars with regional expertise in Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe will discuss different visions for the future of international order, with a focus on prospects for developing non-violent means of resolving conflict.

Panelists
Amitav Acharya, American University
Oumar Ba, Cornell University
Kyoko Imai, Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security
Alexander Lanoszka, University of Waterloo

Moderator
Rebecca Slayton, Cornell University

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

Co-sponsors
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Institute for European Studies
East Asia Program
Institute for African Development
Southeast Asia Program

Founded in the wake of war, the East Nimba Nature Reserve shelters some of West Africa’s most endangered species. With exclusive, on-the-ground access, OVERBURDEN follows rangers, scientists, and forest defenders, including ranger Moses Darpey, biologist Grace Kotee Zansi, chief park warden Catherine Kuku Dolo, and community leaders Saye Thompson and Dada Konkah, who tend the land, protecting endangered species and sustaining livelihoods as a billion-dollar company falls short of promised support. They are joined by Shadrach Kerwillain, a Liberian conservation biologist and Mnqobi Mamba, a bat scientist from Eswatini, who navigate the tangled frontier where mining meets conservation and where memory, science, and power collide.

The film captures their intimate encounters with the mountain’s extraordinary inhabitants, from the only true viviparous toad found nowhere else on Earth to resilient cave-dwelling bats and adaptive chimpanzees. Grace works to reconcile clashing farmers and chimpanzees through coexistence strategies. Moses searches for the rare Nimba toad on high peaks, while Mnqobi revisits a cave to see if the bats he helped relocate as part of the company’s biodiversity offset program are still there.

OVERBURDEN tells a powerful story of resilience and transformation in a landscape shaped by industry yet alive with possibility. Through vivid cinematography and deeply rooted storytelling, the film follows communities and nature enduring and adapting in the face of relentless global forces. OVERBURDEN celebrates the power of mutual aid, showing how people and ecosystems persist, rebuild, and thrive against overwhelming odds.

Tikcets are free! Reserve your ticket in advance.

Hosts

Hosted by the Institute for African Development, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.

Talk by Meghna Chaudhuri (History, Davidson College)

In this talk, I will present research that clues us into reframing the agrarian in colonial, and early post-colonial South Asia - as not merely a space where material production of grain and food occurs but as a key site of experiments with finance capital going back to the 1870s. If we all understand the agrarian as the object of “development”, whether from a post-World War II moment or earlier, in the 19th century as I argue – then we also must wonder why this “development” sits alongside an ever-increasing immiseration of rural populations across the global South. I argue that the 1870s marks a shift towards financial logic of governance in South Asia. The talk will zoom in on attempted experiments by the colonial state with Agricultural Banks in the late-nineteenth century and on South Asian vernacular political economy and its argument for swadeshi banks in the early-twentieth century. By focusing in on the languages of self-improvement that connected these disparate developments, this talk outlines my larger argument about the crucial interrelation between the agrarian and finance-led global development. In fact, the paradoxical coming together of a new financial logic of extractive accumulation with the language of developmentalism discloses the hidden logics tying impersonal, abstract structures of the global economy to ideological and intellectual trends.

Meghna Chaudhuri is James B. Duke Assistant Professor of History at Davidson College and is a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton University for 2026-27. She is currently working on her book Invisible Attachments: Finance, Development and Subjectify in South Asia, 1830-1950. She completed her PhD with Distinction at NYU in 2020. Her research interests lie at the intersection of histories of science, political economy and historical capitalism. She is particularly interested in fictitious capital, and the question of representation that materializes itself, as often seems to be the case with financial value. Coming out of her first project, her second book project will explore Bombay’s historically shaped form of urbanism and the consistent relationship between its spatial expanse and financial foundation through land reclamation schemes and financial bubbles over two centuries.

Cosponsored by the Cañizares Center for Emerging Markets, Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, and Department of Economics.