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

Please RSVP for the panel on Eventbrite.

Lunch will be served starting at 11:30 am.

U.S. foreign policies are changing dramatically, with profound implications for peace and security throughout the world. The administration of Donald J. Trump has broken with many decades of precedent by expressing sharp criticism of NATO and historical allies, while expressing admiration for historic adversaries such as Russia. U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion has wavered, with Trump even suggesting that Ukraine rather than Russia is to blame for the conflict. U.S. humanitarian aid to many of the world’s most needy people has ended or been sharply reduced. Changes in migration policy are also placing many groups at heightened risk of political violence. The administration has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, acting in violation of international law and suggesting a preference for military action over diplomacy. And changes in trade policy, particularly with China, have the potential to reshape military capabilities and alliances around the world.

These changes raise several questions. Is the re-arming of Europe a necessary bulwark against an expansionist Russia, or a new arms race that encourages nuclear proliferation and increases the risk of war? Will the cancellation of humanitarian aid encourage other nations to increase their capacity, or simply leave the world’s most vulnerable people without hope? What other nations might step in to fill the vacuum left by the loss of such aid, and will these nations be more or less exploitative than the United States? How will changing U.S. policies affect regional security alliances, for example between Russia and China? This panel will provide perspectives on how recent changes to foreign policy are likely to affect issues of peace and security in several regions around the world.

Panelists

Jok Madut Jok, Professor of Anthropology, Syracuse University

Jok’s areas of specialization include security, governance, democracy and development in South Sudan and Sudan. He has also written extensively about gender, sexuality and reproductive health, humanitarian aid, ethnography of political violence, gender-based violence, and war and slavery and the politics of identity in South Sudan and Sudan. He is the author of Breaking Sudan: The Search for Peace (Oneworld Publications, 2017), Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (One World Publication, 2007), War and Slavery in Sudan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Militarization, Gender and Reproductive Health in South Sudan (Edwin Mellen Press, 1998). He also co-edited The Sudan Handbook (with J. Willis, J. Ryle and S. Baldo, James Currey, 2011). Before joining Maxwell he was visiting professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Linacre College. He also served in the government of South Sudan as undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, 2010-13. He is the founding director of the Sudd Institute, a public policy research center.

Kaija E. Schilde, Associate Professor of International Studies, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

Professor Schilde’s research focuses on the political economy of security, with a particular emphasis on defense industry politics and the political development of the European Union. In July 2021 she was named Acting Director of BU’s Center for the Study of Europe and in January 2022 she received the Jean Monnet Chair in European Security and Defense. Her book, The Political Economy of European Security (Cambridge University Press, 2017) investigates the state-society relations between the EU and interest groups, with a particular focus on security and defense institutions, industries, and markets. Her research interests span multiple dimensions of the historical institutionalism of security organizations, including the causes and consequences of military spending; the relationship between spending, innovation, and capabilities; defense reform and force transformation; the politics of defense protectionism; and the international diffusion of internal and border security practices.

Zheng Wang, Professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University

Professor Wang’s research interests lie in three closely connected areas: (1) identity-based conflicts, nationalism, and the politics of historical memory; (2) peace and conflict management in East Asia, with a special focus on China’s rise and its impact on regional peace and security; (3) foreign-domestic linkages in Chinese politics and foreign relations. He is the author of Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (Columbia University Press, 2012), which received the International Studies Association’s Yale H. Ferguson Award in 2013. He is also author of Memory Politics, Identity and Conflict: Historical Memory as a Variable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and editor of COVID-19 and U.S.-China Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He is currently under contract with the Oxford University Press to write a book about the rise of nationalism and populism and the crises in the US-China relations. He is Director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS) at Seton Hall University.

Diego Chaves-González, Senior Manager for Latin America and Caribbean Initiative, Migration Policy Institute

Chaves-González’s research focuses on forced displacement, legal pathways, integration, migration and development, and regional cooperation in migration management. He previously worked for the World Bank and the United Nations. While at the World Bank, he helped expand the scope of the Global Concessional Financing Facility (GCFF). He also co-authored the 2019, 2020, and 2021 GCFF annual reports, and helped coordinate the Secretary of the Multilateral Development Bank platform. While working for the United Nations, Mr. Chaves-González initiated a platform in Colombia to coordinate the work of UN agencies, NGOs, and their partners in response to migrant and refugee situations. He also helped develop a strategy to involve victims of conflict and internally displaced persons in the peace deal negotiations that ended Colombia’s civil war. Chaves-González also played an essential role as a presidential advisor in the registration and regularization of 500,000 migrants in Colombia and helped provide advice on how to structure similar initiatives in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru. Since the start of the Venezuelan crisis, he has assisted Latin American governments in developing policies to integrate arriving migrants and refugees into receiving communities, accommodating both newcomer and local needs.

Host

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

Co-sponsors
Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies
Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative