Institute for African Development
Film Viewing: lo Capitano
October 29 6:00pm Cornell Cinema Free admission! This event is supported by Institute for African Development, the Institute for European Studies, the Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.
NoViolet Bulawayo Wins the Best of Caine Award
NoViolet Bulawayo, IAD
NoViolet Bulawayo, an award-winning author who currently teaches at Cornell University, was recognized for her literary achievements with the Best of Caine award.
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Spring Break African Popular Music Lab in Rwanda Info Session
October 7, 2025
4:30 pm
Lincoln Hall, 107
Learn more about this spring break opportunity that includes travel to Kigali, Rwanda, where students will deepen their knowledge of studio production techniques while engaging in vibrant cross-cultural musical collaboration. Open to songwriters, performers, producers, and audio engineers, the course centers around collaborative creation with Rwandan peers, allowing participants to produce original compositions that reflect the diverse influences and techniques of African popular music.
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Program
Institute for African Development
Warming Climate is Biggest Threat to Rangelands
Lund Debater Chris Barrett in World in Focus
Chris Barrett (Dyson/Brooks) analyzes climate impacts on Mongolian rangeland this month in Science. He joins Muna Ndulo (Law) on October 22 to debate the future of international aid.
Is (Cutting) International Aid Good?
This year's Lund Critical Debate explores the impact of aid on global communities, what makes aid effective—and how to move forward.
“It’s always struck me as puzzling, why people in suits and ties in capital cities seem to think that the pastoralists don’t understand very well how to manage these lands. And yet, there’s this common belief that you have to get them to reduce their herd sizes. That just hurts the herders.”
Overgrazing is commonly blamed as a key cause of rangeland degradation—yet policy measures designed to limit grazing damage, like herd-size restrictions and livestock taxes, can have devastating consequences on herders' livelihoods.
In Mongolia—where 70 percent of the land area is rangeland—the government revived a national livestock head tax in 2021 in response to perceived overgrazing impacts.
New research from Chris Barrett (IAD/SEAP) identifies a more significant factor: climate change.
Barrett's team analyzed longitudinal data on vegetation conditions and livestock population, collected annually by the Mongolian government across 40 years. They found that larger herds can slightly reduce rangeland productivity over the short term, but climate and weather have a much larger effect. The team published the findings on September 18 in Science.
“When we look really carefully at the equivalent of county scale over the whole country, over 41 years, we find that the longer-run changes in rangeland conditions are entirely attributable to changes in the climate,” said Barrett.
“Mongolian rangelands are affected more by the collective greenhouse gas–emitting behaviors around the globe than by local herders,” he wrote in the Science article. “Policymakers might therefore usefully focus attention on global mitigation and on international compensation for climate damages and less on taxing herders who … appear responsible for little if any of the change in Mongolia’s rangeland primary productivity over the past 40 years.”
The project began among Barrett's graduate students, including one who grew up on the Mongolian rangelands. Coauthors include two alumni from Mongolia—Tumenkhusel Avirmed ’21, MS ’23, now a research data analyst at Stanford University, and Avralt-Od Purevjav, PhD ’20, a consultant at the World Bank.
Chris Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and a professor in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy. He is a frequent commentator and policy advisor on food security and agricultural economics.
Featured in World in Focus Briefs
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IAD Fall Colloquium Series: Addressing Xenophobia in the Southern African Region
Wednesday, October 8, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm Venue: 401 Warren Hall virtual attendees registration Register
Recent decades have seen a surge in extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric in many countries and regions, including the Southern African Region, despite the African Union's emphasis on continental mobility as a key aspect of sustainable development. Xenophobia, a form of hatred directed at foreigners, immigrants, and people who are perceived as foreigners, has been flooding social media. The COVID-19 pandemic further amplified xenophobic sentiment in politics, the media, and online, especially toward Chinese people and people of East Asian descent (Shen et al. 2022). Documented harms to groups and individuals range from fear and dignitary insults to increased face-to-face encounters and hate-motivated violence. At the policy level, anti-immigrant sentiment leads to enforcement policies that shock the conscience. Political candidates and government leaders have “bully pulpit” options such as modulating speech about immigrants and emphasizing positive rather than punitive immigration policy, but the malleability of public sentiment encourages them to take the low road. Inter-governmental bodies and civil society, including academia, are responding to this devastating trend.
South Africa was one of the first - if not the first - country to develop a national action plan to address xenophobia. The plan was soon criticized for falling short of the “radically transformative agenda” needed to address escalating violence against immigrants effectively (Dratwa 2024). Though traditionally a country of origin, Zambia is also a country of transit and a host to migrant communities. Zambia “awoke to [the] scourge” of xenophobia in a 2016 incident of mass violence against Rwandan refugees in Lusaka (Akinola 2018). As the tenth anniversary of this attack approaches, our speakers will discuss deeper meanings behind xenophobia and how the Southern African Region is addressing this scourge.
Information Session: Fulbright U.S. Student Program
November 17, 2025
4:45 pm
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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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 Mario 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 for the virtual session.
Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
East Asia Program
Southeast Asia Program
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Institute for European Studies
South Asia Program
Migrations Program
Institute for African Development
Southwest Asia and North Africa Program
Is (Cutting) International Aid Good?
October 22, 2025
5:00 pm
Goldwin Smith Hall, G76, Lewis Auditorium
Lund Critical Debate
Since January 2025, the United States has slashed billions in international aid—and effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), responsible for administering U.S. development and humanitarian aid around the world. In what has become the largest restructuring of aid in the nation’s history, thousands of UN-administered programs have also lost funding, disrupting critical programs and services, breaking supply chains, and leading to widespread closures and layoffs.
These sweeping cuts affect food security, global health, democratic governance, and more—and the stakes have never been higher. As the landscape of international aid evolves, the world faces new questions about the impact of aid on communities, what makes international aid effective—and how to move forward.
This year's Lund debate from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies brings together policy and practice experts for an unfiltered look at the future of international aid. Join Einaudi Center faculty Chris Barrett (Dyson/Brooks) and Muna Ndulo (Law) as they tackle these questions: Who benefits from aid? Do some types of aid work better than others? Should we pursue new approaches to international development? What are the best ways to take strategic action in the world while investing in America’s security, economy, and global position?
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Interested in attending? Complete this RSVP.
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Panelists
Chris Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and a professor in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy. He is coeditor-in-chief of the journal Food Policy and a frequent commentator and policy advisor on food security and agricultural economics. Barrett won the USAID Science and Technology Pioneers Prize (2013), among many other awards for research, teaching, and public outreach. Read recent Chronicle coverage of Barrett's research.
Muna Ndulo is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International and Comparative Law at Cornell Law School and an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of constitution making, governance and institution building, international criminal law, African legal systems, and human rights. Ndulo has served as consultant to the African Development Bank, World Bank, Economic Commission for Africa, United Nations Development Program, and other international organizations. He led the Einaudi Center's Institute for African Development from 2001 to 2020.
Moderator
Paul Kaiser is the Einaudi Center's practitioner in residence in fall 2025. Kaiser has extensive experience in international development, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. His career spans roles at USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and World Bank. Previously, Kaiser taught political science and African studies at Mississippi State University and the University of Pennsylvania.
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About the Debate
The Lund Critical Debate is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Established in 2008, Einaudi's Lund Debate series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs '57.
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
East Asia Program
Southeast Asia Program
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Institute for African Development
Institute for European Studies
South Asia Program
Migrations Program
Southwest Asia and North Africa Program
Research at Risk: Cultural and Language Fluency
SEAP and SAP lose funding, seek solutions
The federal government has announced the end of National Resource Center and FLAS funding, which have supported area studies training for decades.
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Faculty Research Seed Grants: Global Hubs Info Session
October 1, 2025
12:00 pm
Join this info session to learn about 2026 Global Hubs Faculty Research Seed Grants offered by Global Cornell as part of our Global Hubs initiative. Info session attendees will learn about the grant opportunity and application tips through a short presentation and Q&A.
Through these seed grants, Cornell faculty from across the university are invited to apply for research funds to work with collaborators at Hubs partner institutions. Funded projects should lead to tangible outcomes, including the submission of at least one co-authored peer-reviewed publication and at least one application for external grant funding.
Up to 20 applications for research with a Global Hubs collaborator will be funded.
Successful proposals will receive up to $5,000 from Cornell, with the potential for matching funds from some Global Hubs partner universities.
Application deadline: October 15, 2025, 4:00 p.m. ET
Project duration: January 1–December 31, 2026
Virtual information sessions:
September 18, 2025, 12:00–1:00 p.m. ET (register)
October 1, 2025, 12:00–1:00 p.m. ET (register)
Learn more and apply for a Global Hubs joint seed grant.
Additional Information
Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
East Asia Program
Southeast Asia Program
Institute for African Development
Institute for European Studies
South Asia Program
Migrations Program
Southwest Asia and North Africa Program
Faculty Research Seed Grants: Global Hubs Info Session
September 18, 2025
12:00 pm
Join this info session to learn about 2026 Global Hubs Faculty Research Seed Grants offered by Global Cornell as part of our Global Hubs initiative. Info session attendees will learn about the grant opportunity and application tips through a short presentation and Q&A.
Through these seed grants, Cornell faculty from across the university are invited to apply for research funds to work with collaborators at Hubs partner institutions. Funded projects should lead to tangible outcomes, including the submission of at least one co-authored peer-reviewed publication and at least one application for external grant funding.
Up to 20 applications for research with a Global Hubs collaborator will be funded.
Successful proposals will receive up to $5,000 from Cornell, with the potential for matching funds from some Global Hubs partner universities.
Application deadline: October 15, 2025, 4:00 p.m. ET
Project duration: January 1–December 31, 2026
Virtual information sessions:
September 18, 2025, 12:00–1:00 p.m. ET (register)
October 1, 2025, 12:00–1:00 p.m. ET (register)
Learn more and apply for a Global Hubs joint seed grant.
Additional Information
Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
East Asia Program
Southeast Asia Program
Institute for African Development
Institute for European Studies
South Asia Program
Migrations Program
Southwest Asia and North Africa Program