The academic workshop, which aims to bring together graduate students whose work seeks to answer global peace and conflict questions, featured thirteen scholars from Cornell University and beyond to discuss research on the institute’s focal topics of climate change and conflict, nuclear security, governance of emerging technologies, and human rights, race, and gender. The guest presenters were joined by current and former Reppy Institute Graduate Fellows, as well as Cornell graduate students who contributed as discussants.

Emphasizing the conference’s commitment to multi-disciplinary perspectives, participants included political scientists, sociologists, historians, and professional students. Equally important was the event’s support for methodological pluralism, with presented research including econometric, ethnographic, survey-experimental, text analytic, and other methodological approaches.

The first panel (Jing Ge, Florida International University; Chi Fang, University of California, San Diego; Sanghyun Han, Georgia Institute of Technology; Ahmet Ergurum, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) featured papers analyzing the governance of artificial intelligence, international arms trade and development, contemporary industrial policy, and international institutions’ growing interest in emerging technology. The papers emphasized the opportunities and challenges that sensitive and rapidly evolving technologies’ pose for contemporary geopolitics.

Moving to the second panel (Danielle Obise-Orlu, Cornell University; Bohan Zhang, Rice University; Phoebe Wagner, Cornell University), participants examined the importance of historical memory in both past and present peacebuilding efforts, strategic interstate interactions, and the construction of just and equitable societies. Scholars explored various regional perspectives on memory, analyzing how states and cultures frame history and construct memory, both for themselves and foreign audiences.

The third panel (Vierelina Fernandez, Florida International University; Maisnam Arnapal, University of California, Santa Barbara; Khilola Iakubzhanova, Cornell University) explored gendered norms and social attitudes in a range of settings, including South America, the Middle East, and South Asia. In particular, scholars emphasized the agency of communities and organizations in actively shaping these views to influence and support their members.

Finally, the fourth panel (Cecilia Cavero Sánchez, Pennsylvania State University; Lois Matthew, Cornell University) focused on the role of civil society in post-conflict and regime change conditions. From communities and municipalities to entire countries, civil society plays a vital role in mediating the spread of norms and attitudes, as well as coordinating public responses to rapid and large-scale sociopolitical shifts.

The Reppy Institute thanks the participants and looks forward to continuing its mission of furthering peace and conflict studies in the 2025 conference.

"I refer to the bibliography in my Cornell course Genocide Today: The Erasure of Cultures, which I have taught four times so far."

Since 2017, the Chinese government has imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China's far-northwest region of Xinjiang and committed systematic human rights violations—including forced labor, religious restrictions, family separations, and sterilizations—against the region's mostly Muslim ethnic groups.

Fiskesjö launched the bibliography project to collect news reports, documents, and research on the abuses as they unfolded.

"I started the bibliography on a personal basis, just to keep track of important news on the issue," he said. "Then I was happy to have it hosted publicly so others can benefit."

The bibliography now runs to more than 2,300 pages. It is searchable by topics like eyewitness accounts, forced labor, heritage destruction, reproductive abuse, organ harvesting, and Chinese tourism as propaganda.

Magnus Fiskesjö is a Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies steering committee member and core faculty in the East Asia Program and Southeast Asia Program.

Browse the bibliography

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