This panel discussion will bring together four speakers to discuss various aspects of the recent protests in China that are without recent precedent. We will aim to provide social and political context for the protests as well as historical analysis. Our panelists include both students and faculty who will present diverse viewpoints. The goal of the event is simply to bring people together to better understand what is happening, why it is happening, and to understand how things might develop from here.

Panelists: Eli Friedman, moderator
Allen Carlson and Xu Xin

Co-sponsored by Brittany and Adam J. Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program and the East Asia Program.

Come and learn about this exciting summer study abroad opportunity!

Funded by the Department of Education UISFL grant, Africa, AU Agenda 2063 & UN SDGs is a three-week summer course that focuses on African development that engages the interface between the UN 17 SDGs and AU Agenda 2063 and their respective priority areas. Held at one of Cornell's Global Hub partner institutions, the University of Ghana, students will link readings and discussions with visits to relevant historical and cultural sites, including Cape Coast castle, that will provide learning milieus to satisfy academic as well as cross-cultural objectives.

In this virtual panel discussion, Eugene Fishel and Yaropolk Kulchyckyj will provide an insider perspective into Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. They will bring together documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials for the first time.

Fishel will examine four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic administrations and ask whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decision-making regarding relations with Moscow.

Kulchyckyj will focus on the decision-making process of the Obama and Trump administrations regarding providing lethal aid to Ukraine between 2014-2017. Although the two presidents and their administrations were at opposite extremes on domestic and foreign policy matters, the only major difference in their policy towards Ukraine was the decision to arm Ukraine with lethal aid, particularly with the Javelin anti-tank missile.

Cornell government faculty Bryn Rosenfeld will respond to their findings.

Register here

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Panelists

Eugene M. Fishel, author of The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy Toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2022), is a distinguished fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University.

Yaropolk T. Kulchyckyj completed his doctoral research on “U.S. Foreign Policy Decision-Making: The Obama and Trump’s Administrations’ Decisions Regarding Lethal Aid to Ukraine, 2014-2017" from the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

Bryn Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Cornell University

Moderator

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

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.

In this talk, Amanda Kaminsky will present a paper that untangles the supply chain of Kenya's crayfish industry, to explore how multispecies landscapes come to manifest and shape our social and cultural norms. Amanda draws from one year of ethnographic fieldwork to analyze the historical political ecology of crayfish in Kenya and its contemporary meaning among Chinese consumers. As a nonnative species feeding a primarily Chinese market, crayfish highlight the ambiguity of foreign and native categories, as well as the ambiguous position occupied by China in the Kenyan imagination.

Amanda Kaminsky is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. Amanda earned an M.S. in Environmental Policy at the University of Michigan School of Environment and Sustainability, and a B.A. in Chinese from Middlebury College.

This event is hosted by the Migrations initiative, and co-sponsored by the East Asia Program and Institute for African Development.

RSVP to save your spot for a vegan/vegetarian Thai lunch.

Registration Link: https://cglink.me/2cm/r1928367

Join the Emerging Markets Institute to celebrate EMI fellows '23 graduation.

During their programs, the fellows contributed to the development of EMI's activities, such as the EMI Conference and webinars, and the EMI Report.

The graduating EMI fellows are the reflex of the success in engaging business leaders to become experts in emerging markets.

Dress code: Formal. The brochure will be available here in the next few days.

Following the recent Global Grand Challenges Symposium, we are continuing the conversation with this virtual faculty and staff town hall.

The symposium brought together the Cornell community and international partners to discuss the most urgent challenges around the world and how we can work together to address them. This informal session with time for participants' remarks will provide a brief overview of outcomes from Migrations, Cornell's first Global Grand Challenge; gather community feedback about new themes; and describe the process for selecting the next Global Grand Challenge.

Whether or not you attended the symposium, we invite you to join the December 8 town hall and complete this short survey with your thoughts on potential themes for universitywide international collaboration.

Register today!

Discourse around Muslims and Islam all too often lapses into a false dichotomy of Orientalist and fundamentalist tropes. A popular reimagining of Islam is urgently needed. Yet it is a perhaps unexpected political philosophical tradition that has the most to offer in this pursuit: anarchism. To better understand this topic, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies has assembled a panel discussion of Dr. Mohamed Abdou’s book, Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022).

Islam and Anarchism is a highly original and interdisciplinary work, which simultaneously disrupts two commonly held beliefs—that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; and that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Deeply rooted in key Islamic concepts and textual sources, and drawing on radical Indigenous, Islamic anarchistic and social movement discourses, Abdou proposes “Anarcha-Islam.”

Constructing a decolonial, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Islam and Anarchism philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.

Author of Islam and Anarchism:

Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center

“Author Meets Critics” Moderator and Discussants:

Edward E. Baptist (History) - ModeratorDurba Ghosh (History)Seema Golestaneh (Near Eastern Studies)Jolene Rickard (History of Art and Visual Studies)

About the Forum:

The “Author Meets Critics” forum stages scholarly conversations around the Einaudi Center’s research priority areas: Inequalities, Identities, and Justice and Democratic Threats and Resilience.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, as part of its research priority theme on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice.

What are the roles of science, math, music, art, hope, religion, and spirituality in Black life? What counts as Black liberation given BIPOC complicity with (neo)liberalism? What are some of the bridges that can be built to combat woke-online armchair allyships and the algorithmic logics of “digitized racism” and its production of Black death and suffering? What are some of the tools that can be deployed to enact genuine acts of solidarity practices in the wake of what Robin D. G. Kelley calls the “Black Spring” of 2020 and in light of what Saidiya Hartman calls the ongoing “afterlife to slavery projects”?

At this event, Katherine McKittrick and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein read the spectrum of demands by BLM groups in relation to the Black Power legacies of, for example, the Black Panthers who incepted alternatives as the free breakfast programs and argued for the right to self-defense. How crucial is an internationalized anti-imperial and anti-colonial Black abolitionist politics to anti-racism and for combatting anti-blackness locally and globally? How might we collectively devise an overarching strategy to do so?

In what ways do extant imperial and colonial forces operate differently toward Black people in terms of “necropolitics” in determining who is invited into the realm of economic, political, and scientific life and who, instead, is confined to social death? This question—who must die so others may live—is central to our discussion on the ongoing theme of “decolonizing anti-racism.”

Speakers

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (UMP, 2006) and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (DUP, 2015). Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories (DUP, 2021) is an exploration of black methodologies.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. She researches Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the science and technology category and was named a Best Book of 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and Kirkus.

Moderator

Mohamed Abdou is a global racial justice postdoctoral fellow and part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Inequalities, Identities, and Justice research team. He graduated from Queen’s University with a doctorate in cultural studies and holds a BAH/MA in sociology. graduated from Queen’s University with a doctorate in cultural studies and holds a BAH/MA in sociology. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, and decolonization. He is the author of the book Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). He wrote his transnational dissertation on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary.

Event Attendance Information:

Limited in-person seating; free ticket required: reserve your ticket today!

If you're not able to attend in-person we invite you to join our zoom webinar. Register here.