The 2025 David J. BenDaniel Lecture in Ethics will feature a multilayered conversation with Sanda Ojiambo, Assistant Secretary-General, Executive Director, and CEO of the UN Global Compact, Andrew Karolyi, Charles Field Knight Dean, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and Colleen Barry, Inaugural Dean, Cornell Jeb E. Brooks, School of Public Policy. Their discussion will link ethics and sustainability to business and policy issues on a global scale.

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Japan’s 'New Pre-War': On the Repetition of a Capitalist Form"

Ken Kawashima (Associate Professor, University of Toronto) will give a talk and lead a seminar on his current research, which explores the complex interrelationships between repeated capitalist crisis and the repetition of what he calls the ‘pre-war form’ of capitalist development in modern Japan. This talk is based on his recent article, “Japan’s ’New Pre-War’: Five Dislocations of its historical development”, published in Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry.

To participate in the seminar, please read this article.

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.

Join experts Dr. Nancy Okail and Dr. Erin Snider for a conversation on the politics of democracy and development assistance, foreign aid, and U.S. foreign policy.

Nancy Okail is President and CEO of the Center for International Policy (CIP) based in Washington DC. Dr. Okail is a leading scholar, policy analyst, and advocate with 25 years of experience working on issues of human rights, democracy, and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. She previously served as a visiting scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, and as Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), which under her leadership became an internationally renowned policy research organization.

Erin Snider is a senior advisor and researcher for USG projects on democratic erosion and openings. She has served as a professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and a Carnegie Fellow with New America. Her research focuses on questions of power in the provision of aid and understanding the role of international actors in promoting reform in authoritarian states. Recent publications include Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Assistance in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2022), which asks why democracy aid efforts have failed in the Middle East despite billions allocated for its promotion and explains how democracy aid may work to reinforce, rather than challenge authoritarian regimes. It also explains why particular ideas about democracy prevail over others in democracy aid programs, to the detriment of civil society in recipient countries.

Vincent Foucher is a research fellow at Les Afriques dans le Monde, a research unit of the French National Centre for Science Research based at the Institut d’études politiques in Bordeaux. He holds a PhD in political science from the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was a senior analyst at the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group in Dakar from 2011 to 2017. He has done research on the separatist insurgency in Casamance, southern Senegal, on the politics of transition in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and on the Boko Haram insurgencies in the Lake Chad Basin.