Why is Bukele-style punitivism gaining traction in Latin America’s least likely democracies? This talk examines Chile and Uruguay, two countries long treated as regional exceptions because of their stable party systems, stronger states, and comparatively low levels of violence. Both now face a post-pandemic transformation of organized crime, but they processed the shock differently: Chile’s decomposed party system turned insecurity into punitive competition, while Uruguay’s more legitimate parties initially channeled it through deliberation and cross-partisan coordination. Yet both cases are converging toward the same demand for authoritarian shortcuts. I argue that this convergence reflects state erosion from below: the declining centrality of the state and formal economy in organizing citizens’ life chances, reinforced by party-society detachment, expanding informal and illegal markets, and the time compression of democratic governance. Bukelismo is less a leader-driven export than the political name for a structural demand democracies increasingly struggle to contain, manage, and fulfill.

Juan Pablo Luna is the Inaugural Diamond Brown Chair in Democratic Studies at McGill. While mainly focused on comparative Latin American politics, his research analyzes how socio-structural conditions such as social inequality and state capacity shape democratic institutions and development trajectories. In recent years, he has researched how organized crime dynamics is contributing to reshape politics, states, and markets in Latin America.

Speaker: Greg Sattler, New York University

Title: Poems from Visitors to Japan in 858: A Foray into the World of Merchants and Monks beyond Tang High Society

Abstract: In 858, a group of travelers from throughout East Asia journeyed on a merchant ship from China to Japan. After having traveled together in China and across the high seas for several months, the group gathered in a lodge to bid farewell to the man responsible for bringing them together. At the emotional banquet, poems were composed on behalf of the monk Enchin 円珍 (814–891), who later became head of the Tiantai/Tendai 天台 school of Buddhism in Japan. Enchin’s high status and importance in the history of Japanese Buddhism allowed for the preservation of eighteen of these poems in a document titled Tōjin sōbetsushi narabini sekitoku 唐人送別詩幷尺牘. The poems, mostly written by merchants from southern China, provide some distinctive insights into Tang society through their engagement with the themes of Buddhism, friendship, scenic beauty, and even politics. They also constitute some of the earliest extant writings by merchants in East Asia. In examining these compositions, we will see that although many follow contemporary Chinese trends and conventions, they also offer rare glimpses into the mediocre and imperfect Tang works that are otherwise lost to posterity. This colloquium will welcome a range of perspectives on the poems, focusing not only on how they align with the poetry of the period, but also on the ways in which they might be perceived as subpar, flawed, or below the high standards set by the tiny fraction of esteemed Tang poems preserved in the present day. Of equal importance will be consideration of what these poems can tell us about their writers, local Chinese society, religious exchange, and, broadly speaking, the world in which they were produced.

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium
The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.
o At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

Speaker: Sean Cronan, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia

Abstract: In 1382, armies of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644/62) completed their conquest of Yunnan, the last stronghold of the Mongol-Yuan Empire (1260–1368/88) south of the Eurasian Steppe. Over the previous century, Chinggisid princes and Yuan administrators had governed Yunnan together with the former ruling strata of the Dali Kingdom (937–1253), a hybrid Sinitic state in Southeast Asia that had surrendered to the Mongols in 1253. Local collaboration had formed a key tenet of Mongol imperial strategy in Yunnan: re-cast as “native officials” (tuguan), the Dali ruling strata continued to govern local society as before, staffing imperial administration and styling themselves as loyal servants of the Yuan. This colloquium will examine a series of letters exchanged between the Ming general Fu Youde 傅友德 (1327–1394) and the final patriarch of the Dali imperial house, Duan Shi 段世 (fl. late 14th c.), as Ming soldiers prepared to besiege Dali city. Preserved only in the personal collection of the late Ming scholar Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1526–1590), these letters provide a rare glimpse into how the Dali elite understood their place within the East Asian interstate order during the twilight of the Mongol-Yuan Empire.

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium
The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.
o At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

Speaker: Jaeyoon Song, Professor of History, McMaster University

Title: Names can Kill: Enslavement through Semiotic Stigma in a Neo-Confucian Korea, ca. 1400-1900

Abstract: In this colloquium, we will examine several important documents on premodern Korean slavery. By reading through these documents, we will examine slave-naming practices in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1897), where an estimated 30~40% of the total population lived in bondage. By analyzing two representative documents, a 1570 will distributing sixty-one slaves among five heirs and a 1702 household register listing 116 slaves, we will encounter many enslaved individuals who were customarily assigned contemptuous birth names invoking animals, excrement, poverty, bodily defects, and sexual organs. In contrast to many slave societies which marked slave bodies through tattooing, branding, and collars, Chosŏn society developed a systematic psychological method of dehumanization through derogatory naming practices. Jaeyoon Song argues that the unusual longevity of Chosŏn slavery without a single recorded case of large-scale slave uprising was in part due to an elaborate method of semiotic stigma and onomastic segregation that fostered servility among the enslaved and confined them to the condition often described as “social death.”

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium
The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.
o At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

Talk by Rishad Choudhury (History, Oberlin College)

This talk surveys Islam’s emergence as an “imperial religion” in the Indian Ocean empire of the British Raj. Scholarship on colonial Islam has largely told a story of resistance: European empire as a provocation, and Pan-Islam as the insurgent reaction. By contrast, this talk shows how the Raj’s formal and informal empire in Asia and Africa, together with its material surrogate of free market capitalism, created skeins of connectivity and unity among transcolonial Muslims. Colonial Sharia, first codified in Bengal and then exported around the ocean’s rim, juridically bound and defined Muslim identity from South Asia to the Straits Settlements, the Swahili Coast, and Arabia. Meanwhile, the growth of colonial-era market relations drew far-flung coreligionists into shared, if unequal, circuits of exchange, triggering mass labor migrations in and among Muslim societies, propelling steamship journeys to Mecca, and weaving liens of debt and obligation throughout the Islamic world. The talk argues that the Raj’s oceanic empire crucially shaped modern Muslim projects of worldmaking until the First World War, whether by enabling connections of sociability among Cairine religious reformers and Bombay merchant-financiers, or by inciting discourses of economic self-sufficiency among Indian and Turkish Pan-Islamists. However, the racialized orders of colonial governance, coupled with the immanent inequities of capitalism, ultimately also foreclosed the constitutional and anticolonial possibilities that many Muslims across the Indian Ocean strove to imagine.

Rishad Choudhury is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean, from ca. 1750 to decolonization. His work centers on how power is exercised in and on Muslim societies, and how political genealogies are shaped by regional and global histories of empire and colonialism. Choudhury’s first book, Hajj across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge, 2024), examined how South Asian Muslims navigated the revolutionary age between Mughal imperial decline and British colonial consolidation by forging transregional ties through pilgrimage to Arabia and the Ottoman world. For a preview of the book’s themes, you can read a short piece I wrote for the Cambridge University Press blog. Rishad was formerly an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. Rishad is now working on two new books. The first, Mughal Enlightenment: The Command of Subjects in Colonial Thought, reconsiders how Persian – a classical lingua franca of India and the Indian Ocean – transformed under colonial rule. It reveals how Mughal munshis (scribal workers) engaged with European sources and actors to coproduce novel vernacular epistemologies of science, art, narratology, medicine, ethnography, and political economy. The second is a history of the Nawabs of Dacca, a merchant clan turned landed dynasty that used a colonial peerage to reinvent themselves as neo-Mughal nobles loyal to the Victorian Raj. The book reconstructs the family’s pivotal role in broader currents of Muslim communal mobilization in modern South Asia.

Filmed over ten years, One in a Million follows Israa from childhood to adulthood on an extraordinary journey from war-torn Syria to Germany — and back again. We first meet her at age 11 as she and her family prepare to cross the Aegean Sea, risking everything in search of safety and a better life in Europe.

What unfolds is a deeply personal chronicle of war, exile, and heartbreak, as Israa grows up navigating adolescence, identity, and belonging far from the home she was forced to leave. As she settles into life in Germany, new freedoms collide with the stabilizing pull of Syrian traditions, testing family bonds and reshaping her sense of self.

Co-directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, the film bears witness to the remarkable trust between filmmakers and family, following Israa and her loved ones across borders, cultures, and shifting circumstances. An intimate and nuanced coming-of-age story, One in a Million illuminates the complexities of the refugee experience while asking a universal question: what does it truly mean to call a place home?

Free admission! Sponsored by the Migrations Program and Southwest Asia and North Africa Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Most people dream of a better future. Pedro, an aspiring social worker, is no different. But as a blind, undocumented immigrant, Pedro faces political restrictions to obtain his college degree, secure a job in his field, and support his family. As he finally graduates, uncertainty looms over Pedro. What starts as a journey to provide mental health care for his community ultimately transforms into Pedro’s path towards his own healing.

Directed by queer, undocumented filmmaker, writer, and community organizer Set Hernandez, Unseen is a visually innovative, audio-centric documentary that reimagines the accessibility of cinema, while exploring the intersections of immigration, disability, and mental health. The film is also groundbreaking as one of the first media projects ever to be led by an intersectional team of queer, undocumented immigrant and disabled/blind artists

Filmmaker Set Hernandez will join for a post-screening conversation with Ezra Brown, Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Immigration Law & Advocacy Clinic.

Free admission! Sponsored by Cornell Law School Immigration Law & Advocacy Clinic.

For some, India’s single screen cinemas are a legacy to be celebrated and preserved. For others, they remain a place to see movies. Still others remember that it was within those crumbling edifices that they first discovered the magic of the movies, and made deep, lasting connections.

Cinema Pe Cinema, a remarkable documentary by Vani Subramanian and Cornell professor emeritus Mary Norman Woods, meanders through theatres in small towns and big cities across India, creating a memoryscape of women and men whose lives have been touched by single screen cinemas. As subjects reminisce about the cinema-going experience and its connections to their lives, the film becomes an act of resistance against forgetting, helping to keep alive both memories of these iconic theatres and the films they showed through traces of their audio, visual, and physical ephemera. With more and more single screen cinema theatres shuttering across India, Cinema Pe Cinema testifies to the importance of the single screen theatre-going experiences during in polarized times and the age of multiplex cinemas.

Filmmaker Vani Subramanian and producer Mary N. Woods, Professor Emerita in the College of Art, Architecture, and Planning, will join for a post-screening conversation.

Free admission! Sponsored by the South Asia Program and the Migrations Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Despite an ongoing policy debate within the United States about the value of alliances, research suggests that the complex network of security relationships that the United States and other major patrons have established since the end of World War II have important and understudied implications for a wide range of bargaining and cooperation dynamics. To tackle this pressing policy problem, this project delves into the strategic behavior of states in alliances with nuclear security guarantors or patrons. It asks two main questions. First, how do nuclear umbrellas produce risky security outcomes – namely, moral hazard – that can potentially entrap nuclear patrons into military engagement with adversaries? And second, how can alliances be designed to prevent these risky outcomes and yield positive dividends for the international system? To explore these questions, we pursue three lines of inquiry. First, we develop a new theoretical framework that explores the duality of nuclear umbrellas – their benefits and burdens. Second, we employ a series of large-n statistical tests exploring the United States as patron and its relationship with various treaty allies and their adversaries over time. Third, we examine this logic and mechanisms through a series of in-depth case studies, including Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and NATO. The manuscript concludes with valuable insights and recommendations for policymakers focused on grand strategy and the broad network of U.S. alliances.

About the speaker

Rupal N. Mehta is Chair of Research and Postdoctoral Fellows Program, and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is an Associate Professor (on leave) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Previously, she was a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the Belfer Center's International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her research interests lie in international security and conflict, with a specialization in nuclear proliferation/counterproliferation, extended deterrence, emerging technologies, and elite decision-making. Her first book, Delaying Doomsday: The Politics of Nuclear Reversal (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores the conditions under which nuclear aspirants stop their pursuit. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly and her commentary has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), BBC News, War on the Rocks, International Studies Quarterly, and the Washington Post's Monkey Cage. She received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, and B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Host

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