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Recent research on post-revolutionary struggles to consolidate a sovereign Mexican State and how these legacies laid the foundation for contemporary problems of state-cartel complicity, endemic violence, and the rising numbers of `disappeared' in Mexico. In empirical terms, the research focuses on the evolution of policing institutions and practices, particularly the ways that different factions within the revolutionary movement developed conflicting, competing, and overlapping coercive powers, leading to the fragmentation of security institutions. It then shows how this fragmented assemblage of security practices, which themselves began in Mexico City but moved to the regions and back, laid the foundations for the declining capacity of the Mexican state to monopolize the means of coercion, thus leading to a fragmentation of sovereignty more generally. In conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms, the research suggests that scholars must take into account historical, territorial, and institutional legacies of policing if they want to understand contemporary patterns of impunity and corruption, including state-cartel complicity. The larger argument is that beyond a focus on democratization and/or its absence, scholarship must take seriously longer-term processes of state formation and how they limit contemoorary efforts to minimize violence, reduce criminality, and strengthen the rule of law.

Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Development and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Trained as a sociologist (BA in Sociology & Geography, Northwestern University; Ph.D. in Sociology, UCLA). Davis’s research focuses on relations between cities and development, particularly as mediated by

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED !!

spatial structure, social composition, governance arrangements, and political conflict. She is author of Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011); Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA’s 2005 Best Book in Political Sociology); Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). In 2023 Davis was named a Fellow and Co-Director of the Humanity’s Urban Future program funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Her forthcoming book on the history of impunity and corruption in Mexico will be published by Oxford University Press in 2027.

Go global in summer 2027! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

Applications are open now.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Over the past several decades, hacking and journalism have increasingly intersected, changing how both fields work. This talk uses that relationship as a way into hacking itself: its different cultures, histories, and politics. Hacking has never been one thing—phreaks, free software developers, the underground, security researchers, artist- activists—each with their own ethics and histories. The media, however, has usually focused on just one group at a time, and which group got attention often depended on the political milieu. At first, journalists mostly treated hackers as threats or oddities. Later, as technology became more widespread and complex, journalists began to seek out hackers for their expertise. Sometimes reporters approached these experts, but hackers also made themselves visible and available to journalists. They had shared their knowledge for years in zines like 2600 and Phrack, and groups like the L0pht and the Chaos Computer Club staged public interventions to force media coverage. I will end by discussing what changed after 2010, when hackers began doing journalism themselves through leaking and hacking. Newsrooms had to re-work out the ethics of publishing stolen material and of depending on sources they were still uneasy about.

About the speaker

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is a full professor in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and is a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship covers the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. She is the author of two books on computer hackers and the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal into the cultures of hacking).

Host

Computer Science Colloquium Series

Co-host

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

Against the backdrop of post-independence nation-building, especially during the New Order regime, Indonesia has consistently assimilated the ocean to a land-based perspective, and one moreover that focuses -- under the rubric of ‘landscape’-- on its more solid, extractive, and materially driven formations. But this was not always the case. What happens if we regard the land from the point of view of the sea?

Nyegara-Gunung is a divine “marriage” of two powerful natural elements, inextricably tied to one another. Whatever occurs on the summit of a mountain, for example, has a direct effect on the sea and vice versa. It is through the liminal interaction of these primordial forces and elements that the universe and all life within it are created.

On Friday, a performance will be held drawing on Javanese and Balinese traditions of music and shadow puppetry.

On Saturday, there will be an artist dialogue and workshop.

There will be programming as well related to week-long residencies of three artists on West Campus. Building on the exhibit The Hum of Life: A Thousand and One Tales from Bali which just ended, a subset of the exhibit focused on the sea and the land (nyegara-gunung) will be on display in the 5th floor Southeast Asia gallery of the Johnson Museum, including the acquisition and installation of an ider-ider painting on the symposium theme by Citra Sasmita, one of the visiting artists.

Come meet other members of the Cornell community interested in studying Southwest Asia and North Africa, including fellow students, faculty, staff, postdocs, and Visiting Scholars. Tea, coffee & snacks, both sweet and savory, will be served.