Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The bestselling author of Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World joins us for a personal journey down the conspiracy rabbit hole to explore why our political sphere has become dangerously warped.

When author and social activist Naomi Klein discovered a writer with the same first name but radically different political views was chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously—until suddenly it wasn’t. As the pandemic took hold, she absorbed a barrage of insults from her doppelganger’s followers.

Klein’s 2023 book Doppelganger follows Other Naomi into a digital underworld of conspiracies, anti-vaxxers, and right-wing paranoia. Klein’s journey reveals mirrored concerns and unlikely connections between well-meaning liberals and the right-wing voices that relish “owning” them.

After a talk sharing her insights, Klein joins distinguished global democracy experts from Cornell to lift the lid on this surreal election moment and examine how our politics have become so twisted and polarized. What can we do to escape our collective vertigo and get back to fighting for what really matters?

***

Panelists

Read election remarks from the panelists in Chronicle coverage of global democracy activities on campus.

Thomas Garrett, Einaudi Center Lund Practitioner in Residence, Distinguished Global Democracy Lecturer (Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy)Suzanne Mettler, John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, Department of Government (College of Arts and Sciences)Kenneth Roberts (moderator), Einaudi Center Democratic Threats and Resilience faculty fellow, Richard J. Schwartz Professor, Department of Government (A&S)

***

This event is sold out.

All free tickets are reserved. If you don’t have a ticket but would like to attend, please arrive 15 minutes early to be put on our wait list.

A reception with refreshments will follow the lecture and panel.

Lecture and Panel: 5:00 | G10 Biotechology BuildingReception: 6:30-7:30 | Biotechnology Building Atrium

***

About Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and international bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages, including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and her most recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023). A columnist for The Guardian, her writing has appeared in leading media around the world. She is a tenured professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, founding codirector of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice, and honorary professor of media and climate at Rutgers University.

About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. This 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.

North American Practices of Forced Displacement, Detention, and Humanitarian Oversight in the 1940s

Nation states abide by international humanitarian law unevenly. They misrepresent their internal operations and deceive monitoring agencies. Yet, they often feel bound to give international agents the opportunity to observe and report, thus facilitating the endeavors they evade. During the Second World War, states notoriously evaded international law to perpetrate atrocities. Even the United States and Canada, whose mistreatment of civilians never generated international alarm, obscured their domestic undertakings from an international gaze. Nevertheless, humanitarian actors gained remarkable access to sites of mass internment and displaced people across the globe. In the decades since, their reports have served as fraught documentation for survivor communities, reflecting the biases of their creators yet capturing rare moments of traumatic pasts.

This presentation investigates the engagement of the United States and Canada with international humanitarian oversight of detention during the 1940s and its legacy within survivor communities, drawing from international, national, and community archives.

Delving into one case study, this presentation examines the creation and subsequent recontextualization of humanitarian photography in survivor communities. In doing so, it reveals the making of what Cathy Schlund-Vials calls, in a different case of twentieth-century displacement, a “transnational set of amnesiac politics.” In tracking the journey of these images, this paper situates North American wartime detention within the politics of liberal internationalism and considers what their remembering and forgetting can tell us more broadly about the commemoration and representation of histories of forced displacement.

About the Speaker
Kaitlin Findlay is a doctoral student in the Cornell History Department. Her research examines forced displacement, humanitarianism, liberal internationalism, and memory in the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Kaitlin completed her BA in History (Honours) at McGill University and her MA Thesis at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has over seven years of experience in community-engaged and public history, including with the award-winning Landscapes of Injustice project. She has published with McGill-Queen’s University Press and The Canadian Historical Review.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Hosted by the Gender and the Security Sector Lab, the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies, and the Reppy Peace and Conflict Studies Program, The Transition Home: Key Challenges for African UN Peacekeepers Upon Return is a unique collaborative effort, bringing together qualitative and quantitative evidence from surveys and interviews in Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Zambia.

In recent years, global shifts in peacekeeping contributions have led to African countries being some of the largest contributors of peacekeeping. Yet, many of the countries lack resources and have limited funding for their state security forces. On one hand, deployment to peacekeeping missions helps provide the country’s security forces with training, new experience, and funds. On the other hand, there is less information about the challenges that these peacekeepers face upon return.

This event is based on a policy brief that explores four potential challenges for African peacekeepers after they return from operations: relationship, psycho-social, economic, and career challenges. The report finds that the main challenges for returned peacekeepers upon their return appear to be relationship and financial. Women were more likely to experience financial challenges and social stigma whereas men had more physical and mental health problems. Psychosocial, mental health, and physical problems were more prevalent in the military than the police. The report ends with a series of policy recommendations. The policy brief will be available here after the event.

Register to attend this virtual event.

About the Panelists

Dr. Sabrina Karim is an Associate Professor in the department of Government. Her research focuses on conflict and peace processes, particularly state building in the aftermath of civil war. Specifically, she studies international involvement in security assistance to post-conflict states, gender reforms in peacekeeping and domestic security sectors, and the relationship between gender and violence. She directs the Gender and the Security Sector Lab.
Dr Maggie Dwyer is a Senior Lecturer in African Studies and International Development in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Security Research within the University of Edinburgh and is also a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
T. Debey Sayndee is Professor / Director, Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation (KAICT), University of Liberia. He has worked for many years on the complex nexuses of conflicts in West Africa, particularly Liberia and Sierra Leone. He has also served as a consultant for the UN, the University of Wyoming, and Women’s Campaign International on peace, security, and development issues. He is a Public Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer, Radio Broadcaster, and Mediator. He has contributed to several publications, most recently, Incomplete DDRR: A Prescription for Prolonged Fragility in Liberia; Post-War SSR in Liberia; and co-published: African Truth Commissions; and Social Mobilization and the Ebola Virus Disease in Liberia.
Addison Barton is a third-year PhD student and two-time Reppy Fellow whose research focuses on practices of humanitarian restraint in armed conflict. Host
Cornell University’s Gender and the Security Sector Lab
University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies
Reppy Peace and Conflict Studies Program

Photo credit: Clair MacDougall.

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 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.

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 for the virtual session.

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

In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called "green border" between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa are lured by government propaganda promising easy passage to the European Union. Unable to cross into Europe and unable to turn back, they find themselves trapped in a rapidly escalating geopolitical stand-off. An unflinching depiction of the migrant crisis captured in stark black-and-white, this riveting film explores the intractable issue from multiple perspectives: a Syrian family fleeing ISIS caught between cruel border guards in both countries; young guards instructed to brutalize and reject the migrants; and activists who aid the refugees at great personal risk.

Thirty years after Europa Europa, three-time Oscar¨ nominee Agnieszka Holland brings a masterful eye for realism and deep compassion to this blistering critique of a humanitarian calamity that continues to unfold. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Green Border is a poignant and essential work of cinema that opens our eyes and speaks to the heart, challenging viewers to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day.

Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland will join for a Zoom Q&A with Professor Ewa Bachminska, Senior Lecturer of Polish Language in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell, following the screening on Sunday, September 15, 2024 at noon.

Green Border screens as part of our "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

There is an oft-told story about the concept of strategic stability and the function of arms control. The conventional story says that stability was a condition inherent to the logic of nuclear deterrence, and that arms control was a project to restrain the superpower strategic competition and promote stability. This lecture revises that story in two ways. First, it shows that stability was a metaphor introduced to security studies from distant fields having nothing to do with the study of strategy.

Second, it shows that stability was used to rationalize policies that had little to do with restraint. It turns out that key early arms control thinkers held close relationships with ballistic missile contractors. Top science advisors to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations served as corporate board members and paid consultants to these companies. The scientists’ dual roles as employees of weapons contractors and as policy advisors were vulnerable to a strong conflict of interest.

The talk analyzes the impact of that conflict on US arms control policy and explores the techniques of concealment scientists and policymakers used to guard privileged financial arrangements.

About the Speaker
Benjamin Wilson is an Associate Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. In 2025, he will publish a book with Harvard University Press about US strategists and science advisors during the Cold War.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-host
Department of Science & Technology Studies

Insights from the Research of the Citizen Lab

In this presentation, Ronald J. Deibert, University of Toronto, will provide an overview of the Citizen Lab’s research with a special focus on case studies around mercenary surveillance and digital transnational repression. In particular, he will discuss the real-world impacts and unique ethical issues involving the type of mixed methods digital accountability research they have developed.

About the Speaker
Ronald J. Deibert is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab undertakes mixed-methods research on global security, digital technologies, and human rights. The Citizen Lab’s reports routinely make world news, including front-page coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Financial Times, and other major outlets. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (Random House: 2013) and RESET: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi, 2020). In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario. He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal for being “among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide.” In 2022, he was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada.

Host:
Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute

Co-Host:
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies