Peace and Conflict Studies Institute Reading Group for October 22. Muhammet Bas, Associate Professor of Political Science, New York University Abu Dhabi and Andrew Coe, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, will join us for a discussion of “Give Peace a (Second) Chance: A Theory of Nonproliferation Deals,” International Studies Quarterly (2018) 62, 606–617. Note that only Andrew Cole will join us. Please note that the author will not give a formal presentation of their work, so it is best to read in advance.

Please pre-register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEode2qqz4oHNTEw3FCWJlH1fPV2U…, and a link to the reading will be sent to you with the registration confirmation. Please contact pacs@cornell.edu with any questions.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Megan Sinnott, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Georgia State University

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

In contemporary Thailand, new and transformed spiritual and religious practices are thriving within a capitalist market structure. The human body plays a central role within these spiritual practices, as both an object of devotion (such as the sacralization of human remains) and as the site of communication with the spirit world through mediumship and possession. This talk focuses on the possibilities provided by the market for shifting sensibilities around the body, and material objects as body-substitutes, such as the popularity of “angel-dolls” in the practice of child-spirit beliefs. Capitalism is often perceived as an obliterating, colonizing force; when its traces are found in religious and spiritual practices it is easy to come to the conclusion that these practices are somehow lessened, or cheapened, by their commodification. I want to resist this temptation, and ask instead, what are the cultural meanings associated with transformed spiritual practices and the material objects integral to these practices? If these commodified objects, such as amulets and other material objects of devotion, are also objects of desire – compelling forms that inspire delight and interest – how can we understand them as both “authentic” sacred objects and products of the capitalist marketplace?

Peace and Conflict Studies Institute Reading Group for October 15. William Spaniel, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh and Iris Malone, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, will join us for a discussion of “The Uncertainty Trade-off: Reexamining Opportunity Costs and War,” International Studies Quarterly 63(4) December 2019, 1025–34. Please note that the authors will not give a formal presentation of their work, so it is best to read in advance.

Please pre-register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwvfu2srzIpG9Ko1_cTBKHDGCo97I…, and a link to the reading will be sent to you with the registration confirmation. Please contact pacs@cornell.edu with any questions.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Patrick Jory, Senior Lecturer in Southeast Asian History, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland

Apart from some brief references to China and East Asia, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process focussed on the history of manners in Western Europe, in particular the cases of France, Germany, and England. While manners and civility tend to be held in high regard in Southeast Asia (Reid 2015, 422) there have been few scholarly attempts to understand how such rules of behaviour have evolved over time. The ahistorical treatment of manners has led to a tendency to essentialise them as one aspect of ‘cultural identity’. It rarely considers how the history of manners in Southeast Asia bears similarities with that in other countries around the world. In this paper, based on a forthcoming book, I will attempt to show how Elias’s influential civilizing process paradigm can throw light on the history of manners in Thailand, an old and once powerful kingdom, with a warrior tradition, a highly-developed courtly society, and a long history as a commercially dynamic state. The paper draws on research into a corpus of Thai literature on conduct and behaviour produced over the last two centuries. It will present a periodization schema that accounts for the historical development of manners and civility in Thailand.  

Peace and Conflict Studies Institute Reading Group for October 8. Fiona B. Adamson, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London, will join us for a discussion of “Pushing the Boundaries: Can We “Decolonize” Security Studies?” Journal of Global Security Studies, 5(1), 2020, 129–135. Please note that the author will not give a formal presentation of their work, so it is best to read in advance.

Please pre-register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0lceusrDMtG9ZinOvZjCqsyhnwqt…, and a link to the reading will be sent to you with the registration confirmation. Please contact pacs@cornell.edu with any questions.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Darin Sanders Self, PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Cornell University

From taking direct control of politics, to setting conditions on democratization, or to yielding entirely to civilians, there is substantial variation in how militaries behave during regime transitions. I argue that the extent to which a military sets parameters on electoral and political institutions during a regime transition, what I call bounded democratization, is a function of a military’s confidence that parties will protect the military’s corporate interests following a regime transition. A military’s confidence in political parties is influenced by the degree of trust between parties and the military, the institutionalization of the incumbent party, as well as the electoral and political strength of the incumbent party. When these factors are high, the military’s confidence increases and it becomes more willing to yield to civilian parties. I show that these are causal mechanisms using a comparative historical analysis of Indonesia and Paraguay and, with quantitative analysis using an original dataset, that they are generalizable.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Sopheak Chann, Lecturer, Department of Natural Resource Management and Development, Royal University of Phnom Penh

This paper explores place-making in post-conflict resource landscapes by elaborating on the concept of frontier-construction. Much of resource frontier literature examines conflicts over access to land and resources, but few studies look at how places emerge through the process of frontier making. This article provides an in-depth analysis of place-making in Northwest Cardamom region, a former battlefield and ex-Khmer Rouge stronghold, where the current socio-spatial relationships are formed by competing access to land and resources. I argue that the formation of place in post-war resource landscapes is the creation of frontiers where the relationship between local people and landscapes is formed through the reinforcing imagination of resource landscapes as wastelands. Everyday socio-spatial relationships in resource frontiers are established through three tensions: (1) socio-ecological intensity, (2) social confrontation, and (3) local vs state contestation over territoriality.

Peace and Conflict Studies Institute Reading Group for September 24. Emily Ritter, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, and Director of Graduate Studies, Vanderbilt University will join us for a discussion of "Oil Discoveries, Civil War, and Preventive State Repression," Journal of Peace Research, forthcoming (written with Peter Carey, PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Merced; Curtis Bell, One Earth Future Foundation & University of Colorado at Boulder; and Scott Wolford, Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin) “Oil Discoveries, Civil War, and Preventive State Repression.” Note that only Emily Ritter will join us. Please note that the author will not give a formal presentation of their work, so it is best to read in advance.

Please pre-register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIsdO6pqzspE9PBNn816zzjo0LxYG…, and a link to the reading will be sent to you with the registration confirmation. Please contact pacs@cornell.edu with any questions.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Tom Pepinsky, Tisch University Professor, Department of Government, Cornell University

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the most significant challenge facing Southeast Asia since the 1997-98 economic crisis. As in the case of the economic crisis, politics determines how countries have responded. Adopting a broadly comparative perspective on the region, I outline some broad lessons from the first six months of the pandemic about how the region’s political systems, focusing on narratives of “good governance,” political accountability, and state-society relations. These lessons from this comparative approach travel beyond Southeast Asia, and I will draw comparisons between the experiences of Southeast Asia and countries such as Germany, Taiwan, Rwanda, and the United States.

While the colonial and contemporary agrarian economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this paper traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights colonial agricultural extension’s racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term biopolitical project that merged material (i.e. food) provision with social reproduction (i.e. childrearing, kin-making).

Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms in Kalimpong that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt:” a socio-ecological opposite and a definitive outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. Despite this sense of deep contrast, this article describes how extension work aimed at the productive and reproductive labor of Nepali, Bhutia, and Lepcha small farmers in Kalimpong was essential to the architecture of the plantation economy. Through a combination of missionary agricultural education, state cadastral surveying, forest conservation, and seed distribution, extension work in outsides like Kalimpong absorbed the plantation’s biological and moral excesses while replenishing its deficits.

Sarah Besky is Associate Professor in the Departments of International & Comparative Labor & Labor Relations, Law, & History in the ILR School at Cornell. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020), as well as the co-editor of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019). Her new research explores the intersections of agronomy, Tibetology, colonial governance, and small-scale farming in the Himalayan region of Kalimpong, West Bengal.