East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Book Talk: Seeing China’s Belt and Road."

Speaker: Rachel Silvey, Professor, Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto

Description: Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China's Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different "downstream" contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China's Belt and Road shows the BRI's dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China's rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "The Rule of Law in Political Conflicts: How Taiwanese Courts Respond to Disobedience in Political Polarization."

In a severely polarized polity, political actors are sometimes driven to take extra-legal actions to secure their political goals. Such actions, often self-proclaimed as “civil disobedience”, pose serious challenge to the rule of law. How should the courts respond? What does the rule of law mean in such circumstances? Taiwan’s experience in the past two decades offer precious lessons.

Taiwan experienced a surge of social and civic movements since 2008, which culminated in the Sunflower Movement in 2014. It resulted in a series of judicial decisions showcasing the courts’ dynamic interactions with the civil society. Based upon comprehensive study of judicial decisions in Taiwan for over a decade, Hsu identifies evolving patterns of judicial response to disobedience. He argues that the rule of law plays an important role in maintaining fair political competition and facilitating political reconciliation.

Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu is Research Professor at the Institute of Law, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He received LL.B. from National Taiwan University, LL.M. and J.S.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. He was Harvard Yenching Scholar 2016-2017. His research includes legal philosophy, comparative constitutional law, civil disobedience, and transitional justice. He has published widely in international journals and books. He is the President of IVR (International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy) Taiwan Section. He recently published edited volumes such as Human Dignity in Asia: Dialogue between Law and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Ethics of Historical Memory: From Transitional Justice to Overcoming the Past (National Taiwan University Press, 2024, in Chinese). He is currently working on comparative judicial responses to civil disobedience, theories of human dignity in East Asian contexts, and post-transition justice and ethics of historical memory.

About the East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) is a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. Part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from across Cornell's colleges and schools.

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "The Political Thought of Xi Jinping."

Speaker: Steve Tsang, University of London

Description: This talk offers a comprehensive examination of the official dogma shaping today's China. Professor Steve Tsang, Director of SOAS China Institute at the University of London, will delve into Xi Jinping's personal words and writings, unraveling his ambitious plan to achieve the "China Dream of national rejuvenation". Discover how Xi Jinping's transformative leadership has profound global implications and learn about the evolution and significance of his ideology. This session provides an essential understanding of the ideological revolution under Xi Jinping and its impact on China's future trajectory.

Registration required: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_duULB4NUShunou6Nb3anZw#/reg…

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Book launch with a panel discussion
Sabrina Karim, Cornell University, will give a brief presentation of her book Positioning Women in Conflict Studies: How Women’s Status Affects Political Violence (Oxford University Press 2024), followed by a discussion with gender and conflict experts Summer Lindsey, Rutgers University, and Kanisha Bond, Binghamton University (SUNY).

About the Book
Authored by Dr. Sabrina Karim and Dr. Daniel Hill Jr., the book Positioning Women in Conflict Studies: How Women’s Status Affects Political Violence (Oxford University Press 2024), explores how the conflation of “gender equality” with “women” has inhibited progress on understanding how variation in women’s status in countries affects levels of political violence.

The second half of the book then delves into the pathways through which different aspects of women’s status—women’s inclusion, women’s rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women’s roles—affects levels of political violence globally.

About the Speaker
Dr. Sabrina Karim is an associate professor in the government department. Her research focuses on conflict and peace processes, particularly state building in the aftermath of civil war. Specifically, she studies international involvement in security assistance to post-conflict states, gender reforms in peacekeeping and domestic security sectors, and the relationship between gender and violence. She directs the Gender and the Security Sector Lab.

Panelists
Dr. Summer Lindsey is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the enduring implications of armed conflict for women’s security. Her work combines experimental approaches with quantitative and qualitative observational work to understand when and how social norms related to violence against women change.

Dr. Kanisha Bond is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. Her work orbits one central research question: How do organization and identity influence the dynamics of political challenges in polarized societies? She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine specifically mobilization and institution-building among radical socio-political groups around the world, particularly in North America, Latin America, and Africa.

Co-Hosts
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Gender and the Security Sector Lab

Co-Sponsors
Department of Government
Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Speaker: Kathlene Baldanza, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, Penn State University

Description: In China, Korea, and Vietnam, the genre of “biographies of exemplary women” (列女傳) served both to celebrate individual women for their virtue and to promote widow chastity more broadly. The dozen or so biographies of women collected in Đại Nam hành nghĩa liệt nữ truyện (大南行義列女傳) are quite similar on the surface to Chinese and Korean examples. A closer reading shows elements that are perhaps unique to Vietnam, and certainly reflect the political situation during the Minh Mạng reign period (1820-1839), when many of these biographies were collected.

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium

The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.Refreshments will be served.

Can a state exist without a military in an increasingly divided and heavily militarized world? The answer is “yes.”

Twenty-one sovereign countries – one-ninth of the United Nations’ roster – do not maintain standing armies. Many of them are small island states in the Caribbean and the South Pacific and the majority chose not to create armed forces upon attaining independence. Demilitarization, the act of abolishing an extant army, occurs much more infrequently, because it clashes with the interests of powerful organizations, especially the armed forces themselves. Some European mini states – Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco – scrapped their armies centuries ago. But two Central American countries, Costa Rica and Panama, and two small Caribbean Island nations, Dominica and Grenada, dispensed with their militaries after World War II.

Armyless states share some important commonalities: (1) the decision to demilitarize or not to have an army always follows a pivotal moment (military coup, foreign invasion, reaching independence) in history; (2) they have bilateral security arrangements and/or an alliance with a regional hegemon; (3) they have not been attacked or invaded; (4) they maintain public safety and border security organizations; (5) they are consolidated democracies; and (6) they are more prosperous and spend more on healthcare, education, and socioeconomic development than their neighbors with armed forces. While States without Armies engages all twenty-one demilitarized states, it focuses on the experiences of Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius, Panama, and the Solomon Islands.

About the Speaker
Zoltan Barany is the Frank C. Erwin Professor of Government at the University of Texas where he has been a faculty member since 1991. He is a student of military politics and sociology and the author of Armies of Arabia: Military Politics and Effectiveness in the Gulf (Oxford, 2021), How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why (Princeton, 2016), The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (Princeton, 2012), and other books. Barany held visiting and research appointments at CSIS, the Hoover Institution, the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh in the UK, and the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was elected to a Life Membership in the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies