Hear from four Latin American and Caribbean political cartoonists on the challenges of their craft and creativity across the region. The session will be moderated by Nicaraguan political cartoonist Pedro X. Molina, IIE Artist Protection Fund Fellow and Visiting Critic at the Einaudi Center's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS). A hybrid event.

Panelists
Angel Boligan (Boligán – Cartooning for Peace), Cuba/Mexico
Rayma Suprani (RAYMA – Cartooning for Peace), Venezuela
Xavier Bonilla (BONIL – Cartooning for Peace), Ecuador

Moderator
Pedro X Molina (PxMolinA), Nicaragua/USA, winner of the 2021 Gabo Award for Excellence

Join us in person in G-01 Stimson Hall (to the right of Day Hall) at 5:00 pm. Portions will be in Spanish with simultaneous translation available on Zoom.

Join us online by registering at: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F90ezDImTkiMkxFJ7jhA8w

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.

Launched on January 1, 2021, the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement will create the largest free trade area in the world measured by the number of countries participating. The pact connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) valued at US$3.4 trillion. It has the potential to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty, but achieving its full potential will depend on putting in place significant policy reforms and trade facilitation measures (African Union).

Moderator: Muna Ndulo, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International & Comparative Law; Elizabeth and Arthur Reich Director, Leo and Arvilla Berger International Legal Studies Program

Panelists: Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa – Lead, Zziyika and Associates, LLC, former Acting Chief Economist and Vice President, former Director of Research, African Development Bank

Landry Signé - Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development Program and the Africa Growth Initiative, Brookings Institution

10:00am-12:00pm EST / 2:00pm-4:00pm GMT

English to French Translation

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.

You are invited to join us for a lunchtime discussion on Tuesday, November 2, 2021 from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. in Room 184 – Landis Auditorium – Myron Taylor Hall with Dr. Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor in the Global Policy Area at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Dr. Mukhopadhyay will present her talk, “The Palace Politics of ‘Precarious’ Sovereignty: Afghan State-building in the Shadow of Counterterrorism.” Professor Avani Mehta Sood, Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell University, will moderate the event.

Sandwich coupons for Copper Horse Coffee in the Law School Commons will be distributed to attendees.

Please RSVP to the event here: https://cornell.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9vN0nhOvrQwYPuC

About the Seminar:

The Palace Politics of "Precarious" Sovereignty: Afghan State-building in the Shadow of Counterterrorism

Since September 11, 2001, the United States and its allies have involved themselves in matters of governance abroad, not out of an altruistic commitment to the spread of liberal democracy, but, rather, as a function of concerns about the presumed nexus between weak statehood and globalized violent extremism. Those campaigns – of which Afghanistan is the paradigmatic case – have proved profoundly challenging, their failings often ascribed to the weakness and corruption of new regimes meant to usher in stability, democratic politics, and liberal governance. I employ the case of the post-2001 Afghan government, the first object of intervention in the so-called war on terror, to challenge this near-axiomatic characterization. I argue that state-building in the shadow of counterterrorism is an unprecedentedly constricting form of intervention in which a regime’s venality is not a bug but, rather, a feature that stems from the exceptional limits interveners place on the very regime they claim to embolden. The recent calamitous withdrawal of the last of U.S. forces from Afghanistan - and its aftermath - can be understood as a function of this neo-imperial form of intervention as well.

About our Speaker:

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is Associate Professor in the global policy area at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the relationships between political violence, state building, and governance during and after war. She is currently serving as senior expert on Afghanistan for the U.S. Institute of Peace and is an affiliated scholar with Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. She is also the Vice President of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies. Mukhopadhyay is the author of Good Rebel Governance: Revolutionary Politics and Western Intervention in Syria (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) with Kimberly Howe, and Warlords, Strongman Governors and State Building in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Join us for an informative information session on Africa summer internships on October 22, 2021 from 4:00-6:00 p.m. in G-08 Uris Hall. Summer 2021 interns will also be presenting on their summer research projects, so it will be a great opportunity to learn about what our Africa summer internships entail!

Register here: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtd-6opj8pGtWmcjCUTsXHcne-3p…

This project investigates changing patterns of knowledge resource management at the British East India Company. It covers the years between the Company’s takeover of Bengal in 1757 and the loss of its monopoly rights in 1833. At the beginning of the period, the Company generally depended upon individuals for the historical, linguistic, navigational, botanical, medical and other sciences upon which their operations depended. By the end of the period, the Company had taken over the direct management and production of many domains of colonial science. Along the way, the Company would become a key institution of science in London, establishing around 1800 a library, museum and two colleges in Britain. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the changing structure and geography of science under the Company. Out of this overview, the role that the East India Company played in shaping British science becomes clear, as does the debt that the organization of both modern states and modern sciences owe to the corporation as a form of governance. I will then consider the importance of this case for our understanding of the relationship between “state science” (or public science) and “corporate science” (or private science), and the fuzzy historical boundaries between these two orders of access.

Jessica Ratcliff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. She specializes in social and material approaches to the history of knowledge, with a focus on Britain and its former empire from the 17th through the 19th centuries. She has published or is working on research about Britain, colonial India (especially southern India), and Southeast Asia (especially Java and Singapore), on topics ranging from inventions and patents to positional astronomy to natural history. Professor Ratcliff is especially interested in studying how states and corporations have shaped the history of knowledge, and in the political economy of information. Her first book, The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain explores large-scale astronomical expeditions in the nineteenth century. It reconstructs Britain's attempt to measure the distance to the sun in 1874, and uses this case to show how the Admiralty and its colonial resources were central to the culture and practice of Victorian astronomy. Her current book project, Natural Monopoly: Science and Colonial Capitalism at the East India Company, is about the Honorable East India Company and its role in the growth of science in nineteenth-century Britain. The book traces out in detail the changing intellectual (or cultural-intellectual) property relations at the Company between 1757-1858. Focusing on the history of the Company’s library, museum and colleges in Britain, the project aims to provide an important historical context for broader questions about the relationship between “public” (i.e. state) science and “private” (i.e. corporate) science.