The Lund Critical Debate (December 11, 2020) brought together the United Nations’ police commissioner and a noted expert on political conflict resolution to discuss strategies—both inside and outside the policing framework—for public safety, police accountability, and racially motivated violence.

Andrew Campana, assistant professor of Asian studies, talks about how blind and low-vision player communities continue playing video games.

Taomo Zhou’s Cornell University Press book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War, was recognized by Foreign Affairs as a Best Book of 2020!

“The Fed is doing the best it can, but its tool ultimately is a very blunt one,” says Eswar Prasad, professor of economics and trade policy. “Even though credit appears a lot cheaper, in difficult economic times access to that credit becomes even more severely limited to those parts of the population and businesses that need it the most.”

“His appointment would be consistent with what we’re seeing overall, which is a preference for experience, possibly at the expense of fresh ideas,” says Sarah Kreps, a professor of government. “That said, to be able to think out of the box, you need to know where the box is and there have been times in the past few years that people in the executive branch didn’t even know how to identify the framework.”

While many of the speakers during the event lamented a broken system, Chris Barrett, professor and co-editor-in-chief of Food Policy at Cornell University, said it is not all gloom and doom. He said the system has been phenomenally successful in 2020 such that the world is seeing a record high cereal harvesting despite the pandemic and climate change. He also said about 5 billion people will have access to affordable healthy diets this year.“How do we combat the challenges while acknowledging the successes?” he asked.

Kaushik Basu, professor of economics, writes this opinion piece about the language used in policies for coronavirus safety.

“It has never been more important to understand the domestic tensions and debates that seethe inside China, even as the worsening domestic and international climate have made traditional modes of face-to-face research more difficult,” says, Jessica Chen Weiss, associate professor of government.

In this op-ed, professor of government Allen Carlson writes that the Tibetan leader's recent visit to the White House may have made Tibet more vulnerable as a pawn in a game of power politics.

“There is a danger that (Chinese President) Xi Jinping will see this period as one of especially pronounced American weakness and look to take advantage of it to forcefully move to challenge the status quo in China's peripheral regions,” says Allen Carlson, associate professor of government.