What explains the fact that the humanitarian response in some crises is well funded, while other emergencies are largely neglected? How do recent funding cuts affect the work of humanitarian organizations and the lives of affected people?

This lecture will give an overview of the literature on funding allocations of humanitarian aid, focusing on three groups of factors: humanitarian needs, donor countries’ interests, and media coverage. A recent study will be presented of why donors fund some humanitarian emergencies but neglect others. The study uses a novel statistical approach, relying on an underused dataset and considering funding requirements per emergency. While humanitarian needs and donor interests play a role, the most consistent factor influencing how donors allocate their funding is media coverage.

The lecture will provide an overview of practical ways of overcoming imbalances in funding allocations and delivering aid in more effective ways. Pooled funds like the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) can provide funding more quickly and more strictly based on needs. CERF relies heavily on tools to make funding decisions in a systematic, evidence-based way, and is the biggest financier of anticipatory action globally.

As funding for humanitarian action is being cut, it is more important than ever to ensure the most urgent humanitarian needs of affected people are identified and addressed.

About the speaker

Nicolas Rost is head of programme for the UN’s global humanitarian fund, CERF. At the Central Emergency Response Fund, Nico works on providing humanitarian financing as quickly as possible for new emergencies, for anticipatory and early action, and for neglected and underfunded crises. Previously, he worked on evaluations of humanitarian programmes, on coordinating development programmes in Palestine, humanitarian funds in Somalia, the Central African Republic and Yemen, for the UN’s refugee agency in the Central African Republic and Geneva, and for a German NGO in Madagascar. Nico is also a visiting scientist at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative where his research focuses on early warning signs of humanitarian crises. He holds a Master’s degree in political science from the University of North Texas, and a Master’s and PhD in politics and public administration from the University of Konstanz. He has published a book and, together with his co-authors, articles on anticipating displacement, genocide and civil war, mediation and peacekeeping, in the International Journal of Forecasting, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and other journals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three sons.

Host

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

Co-host

Africana Studies and Research Center

Co-sponsor

Institute for African Development

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program provides fully funded immersive summer programs for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to learn languages of strategic importance to the United States’ national security, economic prosperity, and engagement with the world. Each summer, over 500 American students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States spend approximately eight weeks studying one of a dozen languages either overseas or virtually. Participants gain the equivalent of one year of language study, as the CLS Program maximizes language and cultural instruction in an intensive environment.

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

National security discourses have profoundly permeated the film industry in the United States for decades. Through direct and indirect intervention in major film productions, US security institutions (including the Pentagon, DEA, CIA, and FBI) have pushed for what Matthew Alford and Tom Secker call “national security cinema,” with hundreds of films complacent with a transnational militarist agenda promoting state violence in the global south. For this presentation I will analyze the films Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) and Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024) as symptomatic not only of securitarian propaganda criminalizing racialized populations but also erasing the devasting effects of the US-backed militarized antidrug policy in Mexico. I will ultimately consider the normalization of the militarization and its technopolitical surveillance culture (following the work of scholars Camilla Fojas, Huub Dijstelbloem, and Iván Chaar López) through the “drug wars” narrative at the US-Mexico border region.

Oswaldo Zavala is Professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of La modernidad insufrible. Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (2015), Volver a la modernidad. Genealogías de la literatura mexicana de fin de siglo (2017), Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture (2018), and La guerra en las palabras. Una historia intelectual del “narco” (1975-2020) (2022). He co-edited, with Viviane Mahieux, Tierras de nadie: el norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea (2012); with José Ramón Ruisánchez, Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (2011); and with Magdalena Perkowska, Tiranas ficciones. Poética y política de la escritura en la obra de Horacio Castellanos Moya (2018). He has published more than fifty articles on contemporary Latin American narrative, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the link between violence, culture and late capitalism.

Nuclear issues are forever. Whether dealing with the Cold War nuclear arms race, or the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific, nuclear challenges persist for decades. This presentation looks at two case studies in nuclear history. First, exploring the intense nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia that began in the 1990s, only to founder on the rocks of new international realities. In all, 50,000 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, the equivalent of 20,000 nuclear weapons, were taken out of Russian stockpiles before the program ended.

The Cold War also ushered in an age of nuclear testing, including the “Bravo Test,” the most powerful hydrogen bomb tested by the United States. The presentation focuses on “Bravo” and the 66 other tests in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the consequences that continue to reverberate.

The presentation highlights some of the Pacific environmental champions who see climate change as existential a threat as the nuclear legacy. Reppy Fellows will recognize the cross currents in diplomacy, conflict, and environment that make today’s global environmental problems so vexing.

Tom Armbruster served as Nuclear Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and Ambassador to the Marshall Islands. Insights into these assignments will give anyone considering a career in diplomacy an inside look at the realities, complexities, and opportunities in a Foreign Service career.

About the speaker

As a Foreign Service Officer, Tom served in Helsinki, Finland; Havana, Cuba; Moscow, Russia; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Vladivostok, Russia; and Majuro, Republic of the Marshall Islands. After retiring as Ambassador to the Marshall Islands (2012-2016) Tom served in senior advisor roles at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and U.S. Embassy Nuku`alofa, Tonga. He led Inspector General missions to Colombia, Denmark, Chad, Mauritania, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Foreign Service highlights include leading a counternarcotics delegation to Kabul, serving as lead negotiator for a treaty in force with Russia on emergency response, and attending “Cool School,” an arctic survival course while “Polar Affairs Officer.” He is the only American diplomat to travel to the Soviet Union by kayak, paddling with a group of Finns from Helsinki to Tallinn.

Mr. Armbruster holds Masters’ degrees from the Naval War College and St. Mary’s University. He speaks Russian and Spanish. Publications include articles in State Magazine, the Foreign Service Journal, Above and Beyond, Chesapeake Bay and the book How to Become an Ambassador. He lives in Ithaca with his wife Kathy, Marshallese dog “Skipjack” and Russian cat “Vika."

Host

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

Peasant History and the Accumulation of Difference in Colonial Panjab

Talk by Navyug Gill, History, William Paterson University

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that the peasantry simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from the present to antiquity. Within the British empire, Panjab has been regarded as the quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a diligent, prosperous and “martial race” of peasants. Against such essentialist depictions, I explore the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel political subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Colonial officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new kind of rural hierarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry, and family budgets – I challenge the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed the equation of power in the countryside, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Weaving together economic logic with cultural difference, this presentation offers a way to rethink the itinerary of comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Navyug Gill is a historian of modern South Asia and global history. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor politics, caste hierarchy, postcolonial critique, and histories of capitalism. His first book, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. A South Asa edition was released by Navayana in 2025. The book won the “Henry A. Wallace Award” for the best book on agricultural history outside the US from the Agricultural History Society. Gill’s scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, the Law and Political Economy Project, and Trolley Times.

Talk by Llerena Guiu Searle (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

In order to build a more just world order, philosopher Olúfémi Táíwo argues that we must contend with the fact that our current social order builds on relations of colonialism that did not end with colonial independence in the 1940s-1960s. Slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism have created what he calls the “Global Racial Empire” which accumulates advantages and disadvantages, harms and capabilities unevenly (2022). How might we understand “design” as a set of practices that operates within such a world system? Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with furniture and interior designers in India, this talk examines the ways in which designers navigate capitalist markets that continue to be haunted by colonialism. On the one hand, creative experts shaping elite Indian homes describe design as an anti-colonial project, poised to free India from tastes, fashions, and products from abroad. On the other, designers navigate hierarchies of values set by global markets, including demand for exotic, uniquely “Indian” products. Furniture and interior production also relies on production methods still defined through neocolonial discourses of “crafts difference” (McGowan 2009) and on caste and class dynamics that legitimize labor exploitation. By investigating how these unseen forces – histories, values, and ideologies – structure design practice in India, this paper contributes to our understanding of the politics of the creative industries and their imbrication in “Global Racial Empire.”

Llerena Guiu Searle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she also co-edits the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series. She is the author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her research examines capitalism and the production of the built environment in urban India.

This presentation is supported by the Central New York Humanities Corridor

Armed militant organizations and affiliated peaceful activist groups often co-exist within dissident movements. Although states tend to identify and repress activists within these movements as fronts for their militant counterparts, there is little research on how activist actions or the repression they face affect support for militant organizations. In this paper, I argue that state repression of peaceful activism boosts support for militant organizations, whilst activist mobilizing propaganda promoting peaceful means diminishes support for them. To test these expectations, I conducted a list experiment in Southeast Turkey, where the militant organization PKK and the activist political party HDP garner significant support. My research design presents sympathizer individuals with treatment videos that vary in the degrees of state repression of activists, and activist mobilizing propaganda. Results demonstrate that the state repression of peaceful activists leads to an immediate increase in support for the militant organization. Conversely, when activists advocate for peaceful mobilization, support for the militant organization diminishes. These findings demonstrate that the immediate attitudinal influence of powerful activist rhetoric is the opposite of what the state justification for its repression rests upon: if activists can convey their calls for peaceful mobilization without state repression, they can diminish support for their militant counterparts.

About the speaker

Ipek Sener studies international relations, conflict and security, great power politics, and quantitative political methodology. Her projects explore the relationship between illegal militant organizations and legal activist organizations within dissident movements, investigating how activist actions influence support for militancy and how militant propaganda can radicalize activists. Another set of projects analyzes how international actors, institutions, and great power competition influence the likelihood and microdynamics of civil war. She uses experimental, quasi-experimental, and observational designs, as well as text-as-data methods in her work. Ipek is a College Fellow at Harvard University, and she earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis.

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