Go global in summer 2026! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

Applications are open now.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Go global in summer 2026! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

Applications are open now.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Go global in summer 2026! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

Applications will open in the fall.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Join us to learn about opportunities for graduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including research and travel grants, guest lectures, fellowships, and more!

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

Join us to learn about opportunities for undergraduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including academic minors, guest lectures, summer research and travel experiences, and more!

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

For close to a decade, the U.S. government has been preoccupied with the threat of China, fearing that the country will “eat our lunch,” in the words of President Joe Biden. The United States has crafted its foreign and domestic policy to help constrain China’s military power and economic growth. This talk will argue that great-power competition with China is misguided and vastly underestimates the costs and risks that geopolitical rivalry poses to economic prosperity, the quality of democracy, and, ultimately, global stability. Great-power competition exacerbates inequality, leads to xenophobia, and increases the likelihood of violence around the world. In addition, it distracts from the priority of addressing such issues as climate change while at the same time undercutting democratic pluralism and sacrificing liberty in the name of prevailing against an enemy “other.” A better, saner, more democratically accountable grand strategy of easing tension and achieving effective diplomacy is possible.

About the speaker

Michael Brenes is Co-Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Senior Lecturer in Global Affairs at Yale University. He is the author of For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), the co-author with Van Jackson of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025), and co-editor with Daniel Bessner of Rethinking US Power: Domestic Histories of US Foreign Relations (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) and Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (Cambridge University Press, 2026). He is currently writing a history of the War and Terror from the 1990s to the present, to be published by Grove Atlantic.

Host

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

Co-host

Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute

Please join us for a screening of the Pulitzer Center-supported film Democracy in Debt: Sri Lanka Beyond the Headlines (2024, 25 min) and a discussion about fostering and engaging cross-border, Southasian publics with producer Beena Sarwar, SAPAN, and Ronojoy Sen, National University of Singapore, moderated by Hadia Khan, Jamhoor.
Watch the trailer here.

Reception to follow the discussion

This session is part of the Cornell-QMUL Global Hubs workshop: Majority-Minority Politics and Democracy in South Asia, supported by Cornell-QMUL Global Hubs, Center on Global Democracy - Cornell Brooks Public Policy, Cornell South Asia Program, Religious Studies Program, Institute of Comparative Modernities, Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Government.

The global decline in democracy has increasingly been shaped by ethnic and religious majoritarianism, which serves as a core mechanism for authoritarian politics. Across South Asia, governments are working to further entrench permanent majorities and minorities through exclusionary legal, political, and economic structures. At the same time, electoral shifts, protest movements, and new forms of collective action highlight the contested nature of these projects and the possibilities for resistance. This workshop aims to examine majoritarianism in South Asia through historical, legal, and anthropological perspectives and to explore strategies to counter these developments. In bringing together scholars working across the areas that comprise Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, we hope to foster cross-disciplinary and cross-border analyses that move beyond nation-specific accounts.

Workshop Participants

Hana Shams Ahmed, Anthropology, York University, Toronto, CanadaMohsin Alam Bhat, Law, Queen Mary University London, London, UKMona Bhan, Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USANatasha Raheja, Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USARadhika Mongia, Sociology, York University, Toronto, CanadaSadia Mahmood, Religious Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan Salah Punathil, Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, IndiaSalman Hussain, Anthropology, York University, Toronto, CanadaSana Batool, Journalism, Falmouth University, Falmouth, UKTashi Ghale, Anthropology, Washington University Saint Louis, Saint Louis, USA

Drawing by Rohait Bhagwant

In this 80th year of the atomic age, the catastrophic risks posed by nuclear weapons are growing. The US and Russia are developing new nuclear bombs and missiles and upgrading weapons delivery systems. China is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities.

In the history of the atomic age, progress toward arms limitation has usually been the result of social protest and organized political advocacy. The initiative for halting the new arms race will have to come from the bottom up, through grass roots mobilization.

Drawing from his new book, Protest and Policy in the Iraq, Nuclear Freeze and Vietnam Peace Movements, Cortright will identify lessons for effective advocacy. He will share principles of strategies and tactics and will emphasize the importance of mass public support, compelling narratives and combining non-institutional and institutional politics.

Cortright will recount organizing experiences to identify how movements influenced nuclear policy in the 1980s and helped to end the cold war. He will suggest new strategies for today, describing the new Appeal to Halt and Reverse the Arms Race and suggesting coalitional alliances with religious communities and today’s movement to save democracy.

About the speaker

David Cortright is a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He is the author or editor of 23 books and has written widely on peace policy, nonviolent social change, soldier dissent, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking.

In 2002 Cortright was a co-founder of Win Without War, which opposed the US invasion of Iraq and remains an active voice today in promoting progressive foreign policy issues. He continues to serve on the group’s board of directors.

As director of policy studies for Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Cortright initiated policy advocacy campaigns to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons; refine the utilization of economic sanctions as instruments of diplomacy; reduce the adverse humanitarian impacts of sanctions; develop effective nonmilitary means of countering violent extremism; and support the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cortright helped to create and for four years directed the Kroc Institute’s Peace Accords Matrix Barometer project monitoring implementation of the Columbia Peace Agreement.

Host

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