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Issues in African Development Seminar Series examines critical concerns in contemporary Africa using a different theme each semester. The seminars provide a forum for participants to explore alternative perspectives and exchange ideas. They are also a focal activity for students and faculty interested in African development. In addition, prepares students for higher level courses on African economic, social and political development. The presentations are designed for students who are interested in development, Africa’s place in global studies, want to know about the peoples, cultures and societies that call Africa home, and explore development theories and alternate viewpoints on development.

This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.

This talk sheds light on what various actors engaged with the United Nations trusteeship system wanted decolonization to mean, what they thought, or hoped, it should mean, and their contests of power over normalizing its meaning. The speaker will explain the importance of the UN trusteeship system in establishing decolonizing norms, particularly the meaning of universal rights within those norms. In opting not to address land claims and abuse of power complaints that petitioners brought to its attention, the Trusteeship Council created a precedent for excluding substantive rights from decolonization’s meaning in international law. This talk will elucidate what decolonization could mean within the trusteeship system, by examining the making of Italian Somaliland’s trusteeship agreement within the Trusteeship Council.

About the speakers

Meredith Terretta, is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. She examines transregional legal and rights activism, both past and contemporary. Professor Terretta is now co-editing, with Dr. Samuel Moyn, The Cambridge World History of Rights, Volume 5: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Her work appearing this academic year includes a special issue on African Refuge for the Canadian Journal of African Studies, co-edited with Dr. Philip Janzen, as well as single-authored articles on rights, international law, and decolonization in The Law and History Review; the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; and the Humanity Journal: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.

This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

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In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.

This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.

This academic year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first major interdisciplinary research project undertaken by the then newly established Peace Studies Program, now the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies -- The Air War in Indochina.

The report, subsequently published by Beacon Press, was based entirely on open-source materials and interviews, and presented an assessment of the war and especially its toll on civilians that remains unmatched to this day.

About the speakers

This seminar features Cornell Professor Emeritus Norman Uphoff, one of the project’s original principal investigators, discussing the history of the study; and Oxford Professor Neta Crawford, co-founder of the Costs of War Project, explaining how she and her colleagues have used similar methods to study the impact of contemporary warfare, including strategic bombing. Professor Matthew Evangelista will introduce and chair the session.

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This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.

Please join us for the media studies colloquium on Friday, April 15, 1:30-3:00pm, in Uris Library 311. If you need remote access, please pre-register for the Zoom link here.

Iftikhar Dadi (History of Art and Visual Studies) will be discussing an exhibition and writing project on “Pop Art and South Asia: Aesthetics and Politics.” There is no pre-circulated material.

Please feel free to get in touch with the event organizer if you encounter any technical difficulties or have any questions about the event.

Join Wendy Wolford and Jason W. Moore for a critical conversation on our contemporary planetary predicament and how different ways of conceptualizing it might entail different strategies for transformative change.

A presentation of the Polson Institute for Global Development

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development and Vice Provost for International Affairs at Cornell University. Her research includes work on international development, agrarian social mobilization, and critical ethnography. A prolific author, her most article, “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2021), served to frame the international conference on the Plantationocene at Cornell in April 2021.Jason W. Moore is Professor of sociology at Binghamton University and author of Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) and co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017).Moderator: Fouad Makki, Associate Professor of Global Development and Director of the Polson Institute.

The human story in the Americas began nearly 33,000 years ago, its chapters filled with thousands of years of place-based knowledge possessed by its inhabitants, until colonialism brought with it dispossession and genocide. Now, an interdisciplinary research team at Cornell University is exploring the arts of the Americas to answer this question: How is today’s ecological crisis related to the colonialist violence that shaped — and continues to shape — these lands?

In this webcast, three generations of women-of-color scholars will discuss how they’re working to answer that question with their innovative project, “From Invasive Others toward Embracing Each Other.” The project, funded by Cornell’s Migrations initiative, invites students, community partners, and artists to co-create an immersive learning experience that explores the intersecting histories of Indigenous, Chicanx, and Latinx place-based knowledges through the lens of the visual, textual, and performative arts.

Co-principal investigators on the project include Ella Maria Diaz and Ananda Cohen-Aponte from Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences, and Jolene Rickard from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Los Angeles-based artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez is the project’s visual and conceptual artist.

What can be done to solve America’s crisis of democracy? Fifteen months after a literal assault on a central institution of U.S. democracy, one might imagine that Americans would welcome earnest efforts to strengthen the democratic foundations of the republic. Unnervingly, though, extreme polarization and partisanship are steering the nation away from democratic progress, and toward unequal representation and weaker institutions of government.

Please join us on Wednesday, April 20th for a panel discussion that will explore the practical steps that can be taken to guard against democratic backsliding in the United States and bolster the integrity of a functional national government. Topics of discussion will include election administration, political party reform, proportional representation, and civic organizing. Register now!

Panelists:
Judd Choate (Colorado Division of Elections)
Lee Drutman (New America)
Hahrie Han (Johns Hopkins University)
Larry Jacobs (University of Minnesota)

Moderator
Jelani Cobb (The New Yorker, Columbia Journalism School)

This event is the third and final panel in our webinar series, Democracy in the Balance: Vulnerability, Resilience, and Reform, sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Democracy Collaborative. The first panel debated current threats to American democracy; and the second was an examination of countries around the world that had been making progress toward strengthening democratic institutions, but have experienced backsliding toward autocracy.

When travel is restricted during the pandemic, join EAP-GSSC’s symposium on “Food and Fieldwork” for a fulfilling journey. Emerging Cornell scholars from anthropology, sociology, development, and Asian studies will share their methodologies of fieldwork and stories of food. After a food trip to borderland Yunnan with Zhuang Han (Global Development), get a taste of Hainanese "western" food in Malaysia with Joshua Kam (Asia Studies), then indulge in the realm of bread with Annie Sheng (Anthropology); explore how organic food has been brought from farm to table with Shumeng Li (Sociology), and head to Sichuan for rituals of food with Jinglin Piao (Anthropology). HYBRID event. The in-person location is Uris Hall G08. Light refreshments will be served but rsvp is required and limited only to Cornell community members. Please rsvp for in-person participation using https://cornell.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6hy6iNesrTXeZxk

For online participation, please see the Zoom registration link below.

Registeration link

Speaker's details

Just a little more than six months ago, the United States marked the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and the end of America’s longest war as the last U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. To mark the occasion, the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs organized a half-day conference of practitioners and academic thought leaders to reflect on the past, present, and future of US grand strategy and the complicated inter-relationships between domestic and foreign policy.

In just six months, existing challenges, such as China’s projection of power in the South China Sea, have intensified and altogether new challenges have emerged, most dramatically the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The NATO alliance, once derided as a Cold War Relic, is once again central, and defense spending is once again increasingly swiftly in most western democracies. This panel discussion will engage these and other developments since September 2021 and examine what they portend for the future of US foreign policy.

Panelists

Annie Pforzheimer is a Senior Non-Resident Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an Adjunct Professor at the City University of New York, and a public commentator on foreign policy. Her previous thirty-year diplomatic career included positions such as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kabul; director of the U.S. security assistance program in Mexico; lead human rights officer in Turkey and South Africa; and Director for Central America migration issues at the National Security Council. Ms. Pforzheimer is a graduate of Harvard University and the National Defense University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

James Rogers is DIAS Assistant Professor in War Studies, within the Centre for War Studies, at Southern Denmark University, and Associate Fellow within LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics. He is currently Special Advisor to the UK Parliament's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drones and a UK MoD Defence Opinion Leader. His research focuses on drone warfare, contemporary security policy, and the history of warfare, and it has been featured in the Washington Post, Economist, CNN, and, the Guardian, among other outlets.

Daniel Stoian is a Fellow with the Negotiation Task Force at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar at Cornell's Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Legislative Affairs Bureau at the U.S. Department of State. Previously he served as the Deputy Executive Director in the South Central Asia Bureau, overseeing the operations of 27 SCA missions and 17 domestic offices across NEA and SCA. He received his masters of public administration at Harvard University, and completed his undergraduate work in computer science engineering and international relations at the University of California at Davis.

Moderators

Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor of Government, Adjunct Professor of Law, and Director of the Tech Policy Lab at Cornell University. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Kreps has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations (where she is a life member), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. She has a BA from Harvard University, MSc from Oxford, and PhD from Georgetown. Between 1999-2003, she served on active duty in the United States Air Force.

Douglas L. Kriner is Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government and the faculty director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. He is the author of five books, including (with Dino Christenson) The Myth of the Imperial Presidency: How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive; After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War; and (with Francis Shen) The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities.