Forging Lasting Peace: Movements for Justice in a Pluralist World (Bartels World Affairs Lecture)

In our ethnically, racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse world, how do we find common ground? Amid ongoing conflict and violence, how do we foster lasting peace? In our world full of inequalities, what practices of activism and solidarity lead to transformative change? Drawing on her experiences of mobilizing, demanding, and brokering peace, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee shares how action and activism can shape a just world.

A book signing and reception with refreshments will follow the lecture.

Lecture: 5:00–6:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumBook signing and reception: 6:30–7:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance: Reserve your ticket. Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell.

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Learn more about our distinguished speaker by reading her book, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. Pick up your copy from The Cornell Store and bring it to the book signing! Buffalo Street Books will also have copies for sale at the event.

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How did Leymah Gbowee's protests lead to lasting peace? Read a Bartels explainer by Naminata Diabate.

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About Leymah Gbowee

Nobel Peace laureate Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist, trained social worker, and women's rights advocate. She currently serves as executive director of the Women, Peace, and Security Program at Columbia University's Earth Institute and is the founder and current president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founding head of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, and cofounder and former executive director of the Women, Peace, and Security Network Africa. She is also a founding member and former Liberian coordinator of Women in Peacebuilding Network/West Africa Network for Peacebuilding.

Host and Sponsors

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Institute for African Development and Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, in cooperation with Peace is Loud. To learn more about Peace is Loud and discover other empowering women peacebuilders, visit www.peaceisloud.org.

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Einaudi Center’s flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

2008 > Ukraine > Directed by Naomi Uman In 2006, filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine (about 350 miles south of Kyiv), where she lived for four years. The result of her adventures was “a quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian TimeMachine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life…Uman created a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve.” (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) Tonight we’ll show three of the films. Unnamed Film (55 mins) is a beautiful documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ various strategies of labor and resourcefulness, their heartiness and warmth. It will be bookended by Kalendar (12 mins), a poetic collection of shots, one for each month of an entire year; and Coda, a black-and-white epilogue encapsulating the themes of the series as a whole. At a time when we are witnessing the senseless destruction of Ukraine and its people on a daily basis, we offer a glimpse of what life was like not so long ago, and a window into the soul of a nation that is fighting for its very existence. In Ukrainian. Paraphrased subtitles in English. Cosponsored with the Institute for European Studies.More at https://creative-capital.org/projects/the-ukrainian-time-machine/ 1 hr 11 min

Dmitry Bykov is one of Russia’s leading public intellectuals, and a Visiting Scholar hosted by Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, under the auspices of the Open Society University Network. Meet with Dmitry for an hour of public conversation with Mabel Berezin, Director of the Institute for European Studies. Prof Berezin will ask him about the role of dissent and intellectual life in Russia, what drove him to becoming a poet and satirist, and his views on the current situation in Ukraine and Russia.

Speaker bios:
Russian dissident Dmitry Bykov is an Open Society University Network fellow and visiting critic based in the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies (IES). One of Russia’s best-known public intellectuals, he is a novelist, poet, critic, satirist, and university professor. Bykov has authored more than 80 books, including novels, poetry, biographies, and literary criticism. He is a three-time winner of the Bolshaya Kniga (Big Book) award, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary prizes. A popular lecturer and public speaker, he has also served as the host of numerous television and radio programs.

Mabel Berezin is Professor of Sociology at Cornell University and the Director of the Institute for European Studies. Her expertise lies in the area of extreme and exclusionary forms of nationalism, such as fascism and right-wing populist politics, and the threats that these phenomena pose to democratic political culture and governance. Berezin has written books on Italian fascism; on territorial politics in Europe; and on contemporary French and Italian right-wing politics, including Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy, which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize by the American Political Science Association. In addition, Prof. Berezin has also published numerous articles and review essays, and has edited collaborative volumes on democratic culture, emotions and the economy, qualitative methods, and health and culture.

This event is a hybrid event. Those who are not from the Cornell community can attend via Zoom. Register here.