Cornell Center on Global Democracy presents: Democratic Resistance and International Policy

Jan 28 3 – 4:30
ILR conference room 423

Brief Welcome and Introduction: Rachel Beatty Riedl, Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Center on Global Democracy

Opening Remarks: Kenneth Wollack, Chairman of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy

Faculty Panelists:

Thomas Garrett, Einaudi Center Lund Practitioner in Residence and Distinguished Global Democracy Lecturer in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy Siba Grovogui, Professor of International Relations Theory and Law at Cornell UniversityThomas Pepinsky, Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University Bryn Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University

About Kenneth Wollack:
Kenneth Wollack has, for the past four years, served as chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. He is now a vice chair of the endowment and is a member of the George W. Bush Institute’s Advisory Council. Mr. Wollack served as co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates for the presidential and vice presidential debates during the lead up to the 2020 election.

Mr. Wollack has been actively involved in foreign affairs, journalism, and politics over the past five decades. For more than 25 years, he served as president of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to advancing democracy worldwide. He retired in September 2018, after 32 years at the Institute.

Mr. Wollack joined NDI in 1986 as executive vice president. The Institute’s board of directors, then chaired by former Vice President Walter Mondale, elected him president in March, 1993.

Mr. Wollack traveled to more than 100 countries, many on multiple occasions, in every region of the world on behalf of the Institute’s democratic development programs.

Chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright from 2001 until her death in 2022, NDI maintains offices in more than 50 countries and works to support democratic elections, political parties, parliaments, civic engagement and women’s political empowerment. NDI was established as the result of a 1983 Act by the US Congress.

Before joining NDI, Mr. Wollack co-edited the Middle East Policy Survey, a Washington- based newsletter. He also wrote regularly on foreign affairs for the Los Angeles Times. From 1973 to 1980, he served as legislative director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Mr. Wollack has been active in American politics, serving on the national staff of the McGovern presidential campaign in 1972. He graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and was a senior fellow at UCLA’s School for Public Affairs.

He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio, and spoken before world affairs councils across the country. He has served on task forces sponsored by the Brookings Institution, the United States Institute of Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for U.S. Global Engagement, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Atlantic Council. He was chairman of the U.S. Committee for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), served on the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, and was a member of the advisory committee for the U.S. Agency for International Development and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He also co-chaired the Ronald Reagan Institute’s bi-partisan Working Group on advancing freedom and promoting democracy in the 21st century.

For his efforts on behalf of democracy, Mr. Wollack was the recipient of NDI’s W. Averell Harriman Democracy Award, the Presidential Order of Excellence as well as Honorary Citizenship from the Republic of Georgia, the National Order “Faithful Service” from the government of Romania, and the Medal of Honor “Lithuanian Millennium Star” from the government of Lithuania.

Join us to learn about opportunities for undergraduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies! This session will discuss how to successfully apply for programs like Global Internships and Laidlaw Scholars, and how to discover or strengthen global interests, including academic minors, weekly seminars, and language study.

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

This session will describe opportunties for undergraduate and graduate students in the Institute for European Studies and the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

IES offers a minor in European Studies, Global Summer Internships, a Graduate Fellows Program, and research funding for both undergraduate and graduate students. PACS offers fellowships, funding, and research travel grants for undergraduate and graduate students.

Register for virtual attendance here. Can't attend? Contact ies@cornell.edu or pacs@cornell.edu.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register here. Can't attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research in any field or teaching in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only. The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months.

Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Register here. Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

This talk is part of a forthcoming book entitled, Medicines that Feed Us, in which Langwick examines the shifting, multiple relationships between toxicity and remedy in the face of the environmental and health crises shaping the 21stcentury. Broadly, she is interested in how that which counts as “therapeutic” is shifting with the growing acknowledgment that the extractive relations, which fuel contemporary economies and animate modern life, undermine possibilities for ongoing survival. In this seminar, Langwick thinks together with TRMEGA, a small vibrant NGO in northern Tanzania. TRMEGA’s plant(ing) remedies apprehend illness as an effect of long histories of dispossession, slow violence, and social-ecological abandonment. Herbal formulas intervene not only in depleted, suffering bodies but also in the affective and material relations that concretize people’s alienation from the forces of life. TRMEGA draws on traditional medicine, global herbalism, functional foods, agroecology, organic agriculture, and food sovereignty to cultivate forms of care that draw people closer to the soil and to each other. This work suggests a redefinition of the terms of health and healing. Lifestyle diseases are reimagined through what Langwick calls landstyles. Sharing seeds and cuttings, tending to compost, and building communities of multispecies support, are activities that together address the chronic injury and persistent vulnerability that shape the distribution of disease. Through the extension of their gardens, TRMEGA unsettles the boundaries between medicine and agriculture, redefines healing (as) land relations, and conceptualizes health as a quality of lushness in everyday life.

Public Registration

In rural areas on the peri-urban fringe of rapidly expanding African cities, urbanization can be interpreted and conceived as an unwelcome change threatening traditional ways of life and personal and community cultural identity of rural areas with customary land tenure arrangements and generally ethnically homogenous populations. We examine the relationship between place attachment and residents’ perceptions of various aspects of urban life, using Moshi, Tanzania, located in a region long identified with the Chagga people, as a case study. We utilize a survey of approximately 700 respondents, stratified by location, and use principal component analysis to construct variables for place attachment, perceptions of cities, and perceived risks associated with urbanization. Utilizing stepwise regression techniques, we find that there was a significant decrease in levels of place attachment between rural, per-urban, and urban locations. We also find that residents who associate the city with more negative characteristics report higher levels of place attachment. This suggests that urbanization is perceived as a threat to people’s sense of place. Finally, we find that place attachment is positively associated with age, while being Chagga, owning land, and being native to the area are associated with greater levels of place attachment.

Public Registration

In December of 2023, the United States Department of Defense released its detailed Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR DoD-I), as stipulated by Section 936 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. The CHMR DoD-I formalizes and institutionalizes the recommendations of the earlier 2022 DoD Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR DoD-AP).

In this exploratory discussion, Helen Kinsella, University of Minnesota, seeks to identify the stakes of the 2022 and 2023 DoD guidance by drawing out the implications for conceptualizing CHMR as a strategic and moral military imperative and assessing the preeminent role of the United States. She charts the introduction of the concept of CHMR, its recent formulation in policy and guidance documents from the Biden administration, and critically assesses its potential; namely, the work it does, in whose service, and to what ends.

If, as its proponents claim, it is a manifestation of the U.S. understanding of a rules-based order, it can and should be analyzed for the “set[s] of material, ideational, and normative interests congealed into institutions and practices,” some of which bear the racialized and gendered histories of its conceptualization thus far, and result in a still troubling understanding of democratic accountability for and engagement with civilian casualties and civilian harm

About the Speaker
Helen M. Kinsella is a Political Science and Law Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She holds affiliate faculty positions in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center at the Law School, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Cosponsors
Cornell Law School
Department of Government
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Are you interested in the intersection of mental health and culture, global health, and community engagement? Do you want to gain field research skills and learn about indigenous communities in South India’s beautiful and fragile Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve? If so, the Cornell-Keystone Nilgiris Field Learning Program might be for you!