Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

The United States helped create the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of independent countries. Now the Trump administration is setting the tone for superpowers with imperial ambitions by waging economic war against democratic allies, violating long-standing treaties, and holding out the possibility of using military force.

What do these unprecedented actions mean for the rest of the world? How are states and peoples in different regions responding? And what may happen if tensions continue to escalate?

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Featured Faculty

Agnieszka Nimark (PACS) | Affiliated ScholarMagnus Fiskesjö (EAP, PACS, SEAP) | AnthropologyAlexandra Blackman (SWANA) | GovernmentSeema Golestaneh (SWANA) | Near Eastern StudiesIrina Troconis (LACS) | Romance StudiesKenneth Roberts (LACS) | GovernmentPeter Katzenstein (IES, PACS) | Government

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

This talk examines the history of the environmental clauses in Chile’s constitution. That constitution was imposed at gunpoint by the Pinochet dictatorship and has been widely assailed for preserving the “guardrails” of Chile’s neoliberal economic model. Surprisingly, the 1980 constitution, designed in a secretive and anti-democratic process by conservative legal scholars and politicians, included surprisingly innovative language on environmental rights. And, as this paper demonstrates, this language was not toothless. It established the basis for two landmark legal cases in the Supreme Court over water and water rights while Chile was still ruled by Pinochet during the 1980s. These cases signified major victories for Chile’s robust environmentalist and indigenous rights movements.

Thomas Klubock is John C. Coleman Professor of History, University of Virginia. He is the author of three books on Chile, Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951, and a co-editor of The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

TBD

More Auspicious Shores chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and promoting a pan-Africanist agenda while simultaneously fulfilling their 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' duties. Through a close examination of the Afro-Barbadians, Caree A. Banton provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa. Banton reveals how, as former British subjects, Afro-Barbadians navigated an inherent tension between ideas of pan-Africanism and colonial superiority. Upon their arrival in Liberia, an English imperial identity distinguished the Barbadians from African Americans and secured them privileges in the Republic's hierarchy above the other group. By fracturing assumptions of a homogeneous black identity, Banton ultimately demonstrates how Afro-Barbadian settlement in Liberia influenced ideas of blackness in the Atlantic World.

Caree Banton is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora History and the Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. Banton earned a BPA in Public Administration and BA in History from Grambling State University in 2005. She received a MA in Development Studies from the University of Ghana in July 2012 and completed her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in June 2013. Her research focuses on movements towards freedom, particularly around abolition, emancipation, and colonization.
Much of her work also explores ideas of citizenship, nationhood, and race in the 19th century. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships, including the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center, and the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Fellowship.

High rates of micronutrient deficiency persist in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and disproportionately impact populations with limited access to nutrient-rich foods. In response, national agricultural research programs and international organizations are prioritizing biofortification as a strategy to improve the nutritional value of staple crops. This presentation will examine efforts to scale these crops throughout the region and summarize specific research and applied interventions that address the broader food system, exploring the intersections of policy, processing, market access, the food environment, and human behavior.

Dr. Victor Taleon is a Research Fellow at IFPRI, specializing in the nexus of crop biofortification and food processing. With a Ph.D. in Food Science and Technology from Texas A&M University, he investigates the stability and bioavailability of micronutrients in staple crops like maize, beans, and rice. His research focuses on the post-harvest value chain to identify strategies that preserve the nutritional benefits of biofortified foods from farm to plate. Dr. Taleon collaborates with partners across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America to scale these solutions and combat hidden hunger.

In this talk, I analyze the relationship between criminal governance and citizen claim-making for public goods. Millions of people across Latin America live in urban peripheries marked by uneven state presence but where criminal organizations are often present and govern everyday life. What impact does this overlapping reality have on the strategies citizens use to make claims on the state for public goods? A comparative analysis across three peripheral Mexico City neighborhoods shows that claim-making strategies vary in both level – individual or collective – and mode – brokered or direct. I argue that criminal governance influences claim-making through two channels: social capital and political brokerage. I use this argument to structure a comparative analysis of claim-making for a basic but fundamental public good: water. The study contributes to broader debates on distributive politics, citizenship, and democracy.

Eduardo Moncada is the Claire Tow Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College of Columbia University, and he is also the Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. His research examines the origins, dynamics and consequences of crime and violence in Latin America, with a focus on how criminal governance shapes political life. He is the author of Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press) and Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press). He is also co-editor of Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics (Cambridge University Press). In his current research, Moncada is examining how variation in the ways that criminal organizations govern territories shapes how citizens make claims on the state for public goods and services. Moncada’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Faced with a past that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, through the dynamics of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism, we ask ourselves about the past, present, and future of Latin America and Caribbean. The slogan “Otro futuro es posible” –another future is possible– has been appropriated in a wide array of spaces, movements, and temporalities to trigger the imagination of many, from political movements to environmental causes. This symposium is an invitation to explore this expression not as an enthusiastic affirmation but rather a question awaiting an answer: is another future possible in Latin America and the Caribbean? Thinking about and with categories such as encounters, crossings, (dis)continuities, fractures and unions in space and time, and the search for autonomy, we ask: how can we think about the future of the region?

With this in mind, we invite the Cornell community to participate in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program’s annual research symposium entitled “Futures in (Re)Construction”, to take place on February 20th and 21st, 2026. VENUE In the midst of the current political sphere that especially affects Latin American and Caribbean communities and has sought to silence not only their traditions, heritage, and languages but also the academic study of the land and the impacts of climate change in various communities, we especially welcome abstracts for projects related to categories, concepts, and keywords that, in the current political climate, have been erased and discarded, such as gender, race, climate and environmental justice, and cuir/queer.

Faced with a past that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, through the dynamics of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism, we ask ourselves about the past, present, and future of Latin America and Caribbean. The slogan “Otro futuro es posible” –another future is possible– has been appropriated in a wide array of spaces, movements, and temporalities to trigger the imagination of many, from political movements to environmental causes. This symposium is an invitation to explore this expression not as an enthusiastic affirmation but rather a question awaiting an answer: is another future possible in Latin America and the Caribbean? Thinking about and with categories such as encounters, crossings, (dis)continuities, fractures and unions in space and time, and the search for autonomy, we ask: how can we think about the future of the region?

With this in mind, we invite the Cornell community to participate in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program’s annual research symposium entitled “Futures in (Re)Construction”, to take place on February 20th and 21st, 2026. VENUE In the midst of the current political sphere that especially affects Latin American and Caribbean communities and has sought to silence not only their traditions, heritage, and languages but also the academic study of the land and the impacts of climate change in various communities, we especially welcome abstracts for projects related to categories, concepts, and keywords that, in the current political climate, have been erased and discarded, such as gender, race, climate and environmental justice, and cuir/queer.

“We’re not going to be afraid of Immigration.” Juana spoke those words to her undocumented niece Sonia while they agonized over Sonia’s upcoming court hearing. Sonia had missed a previous hearing and might have a deportation order awaiting her. It was February 2025. But Juana advised against fear. She told her niece, We’ll go to court together.

This paper reaches for a theory of the state in order to think through the dilemmas faced by Central American immigrants in the rural and small-town Hudson Valley. To start, I focus on people who are at high risk of deportation and decide to go to court anyway. As Juana says, they are deciding not to be afraid. Why refuse to fear?

To search for an answer, I turn to 2021, when New York State created the Excluded Worker Fund, a COVID unemployment benefit designed specifically for undocumented New Yorkers. The shift from 2021 to 2025 – from state benevolence to mass deportation – can seem like a dramatic transformation in regimes. Immigrants, however, may be detecting an underlying continuity. In both periods, state intervention is managing the rural labor market by rewarding workers who have strong links to their employers. First trust and then loyalty (rather than enterprise) emerge as key dispositions. Through their refusal to fear, immigrants may demonstrate loyalty in the midst of danger. This paper turns an ethnographic eye to the practices and attitudes that rural New Yorkers develop in the current moment. By charting five tumultuous years in a single valley, we aim to understand what, during a time of change, ends up remaining the same.

Gregory Duff Morton is an economic anthropologist and social worker. He wants to know how people send value across borders in the Americas. He has engaged with welfare programs in Latin America, with Brazilian migrants who move back to the countryside, with Dominican seniors undergoing surgery in New York City, and, most recently, with Central Americans and the activists they meet in upstate New York. Morton has a special interest in the MST, Brazil’s landless movement, which brings small farmers together to occupy plantations. By thinking internationally about human services, he hopes, we can equip ourselves to confront the inequalities so characteristic of public life in the Americas.