Find out more about our winter program exploring the Tiputini Biological Station in the Yasuni National Park in the Amazon in Ecuador. Tropical forests have a stunning array of diversity, and adaptations to strong species interactions, while species in alpine ecosystems have highly-specialized adaptations to challenging environmental conditions. To study this gradient, students will embark on a field course spanning multiple biogeographic regions in Ecuador, a region that boasts some the highest degrees of species diversity and endemism. This program will involve travel in January to the Amazon followed by synthesizing those field observations fduring the first seven weeks of spring upon return.

Meet Cornell's Laidlaw scholars and Global Interns at our fall showcase. They'll present their undergraduate international summer experiences, including hands-on research and leadership-in-action.

The International Research Showcase is hosted by the Einaudi Center for International Studies and cosponsored by the Office of Global Learning. Both are part of Global Cornell.

***

Applications for Global Internships and the Laidlaw Leadership and Research Program will open in the fall semester.

Global Internships give undergraduate students valuable international experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more. They are managed by the Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning, both part of Global Cornell.

The Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Scholarship Program provides generous funding to first- and second-year undergraduates over two years as they pursue internationally focused research, engage in leadership training and a leadership-in-action experience, and join a global network of like-minded peers. The program is managed by the Einaudi Center.

Drop in to learn more and ask questions about the 2027 Global Hubs Faculty Research Seed Grants that Global Cornell and partner universities are offering through the Global Hubs initiative.

Join us on Zoom at any time during the session.

Through these seed grants, Cornell faculty from across the university are invited to apply for research funds to explore and jumpstart collaborations with colleagues at Global 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.

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 14, 2026, 4:00 p.m. ET

Project duration: January 1–December 31, 2027

Learn more and apply for a Global Hubs joint seed grant.

Since January 2026, Venezuela has become the model of the new “successful” imperialist intervention. Indeed, the Chavista authoritarian government has been reenforced by the support of the US intervention while transforming itself to accommodate this new situation. In this context, social mobilization has been visible in different forms: human rights, workers' unions, and divers leftwing organizations currently going through important transformations to build new forms of solidarity from below. The Venezuelan case allows us to put into perspective social sciences literature on authoritarian governance and democratic resilience, by taking a “mezzo” perspective on the relationship between policy and politics. This approach can help us to answer a new question: how to integrate the imperialistic/ neo-colonial concept tool to the study of policy and social movements' interactions and mutual transformations?

Yoletty Bracho has a PhD in Political Sociology from the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France). She’s now an Impact + postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal (Canada). She specializes on participatory public policy and leftwing activism in Venezuela. She is currently working on her manuscript Faire la Révolution dans l’État : participation et consolidation autoritaire au Venezuela, at the Éditions Terres de feu (Paris).

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 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.