Recent U.S. military actions in Venezuela—including strikes on civilian boats, the seizure of oil tankers, and the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro—have raised questions about U.S. ambitions in Latin America and their implications for peace and international order. This panel brings together five prominent experts on Venezuelan history and politics, with the aim of deepening understanding of Venezuelan perspectives on recent events and their broader implications.

How are Venezuela’s political parties responding to shifting U.S. foreign policies? What are the likely effects of recent military actions on prospects for peace and stability in Venezuela and Latin America? Can the U.S. play a meaningful and legitimate role in helping Venezuelans restore democratic governance, and if so what policies might contribute to that goal?

Panelists

Irina Troconis, Professor, Cornell University (moderator)David Smilde, Professor, Tulane UniversityVeronica Zubillaga, Professor, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas; Visiting Scholar, University of Illinois, ChicagoMargarita López Maya, Professor, Universidad Central de Venezuela
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Event Hosts

This virtual event is hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and cosponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Both are part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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.

Why do isolated latent proliferators insist on retaining some of their nuclear capabilities in nonproliferation settlements? Prominent scholarship on nuclear proliferation shows that weak states have used latent nuclear capabilities like uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing to draw Western states into negotiations and extract concessions. But when theories of nuclear latency are applied to isolated states like North Korea and Iran, scholars undertheorize those regimes’ political aspirations and black box their demands as generic “rewards” for nuclear restraint. This leads scholars to overlook the credibility deficits of the political commitments that superpowers make in nonproliferation agreements, and to misinterpret the nuclear-latency strategies of isolated regimes seeking to address those credibility challenges. This article analyzes the technopolitical strategies that North Korea and Iran used as they sought to keep Western states engaged and hold them to their commitments. Through a mixture of technical and political analysis, I identify a repertoire of nuclear latency strategies by which both states have sought to simultaneously signal nuclear capability and restraint while retaining nuclear latency in reserve to incentivize future engagement from the West.

About the speaker

Christopher Lawrence is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs in Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. He studies the histories of U.S. nonproliferation engagement with North Korea and Iran, as well as the epistemic communities in the West that create knowledge about those countries’ nuclear programs. His academic writing has been published in International Security, Social Studies of Science, Journal of Applied Physics, and IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. He has also written policy analysis for various online publications, including Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and War on the Rocks.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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 supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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.

Civilians have long developed strategies to protect themselves and others in the face of violence. Over the past two decades, research on civilian self-protection (CSP) has documented these practices across diverse conflict settings, challenging the assumption that protection is primarily delivered by states or international actors. Today, this insight has taken on renewed urgency. Civilian casualties, displacement, and violations of international humanitarian law have surged, while international assistance has become increasingly fragmented and unreliable. In this context, civilian self-protection is not peripheral but central to how civilians navigate insecurity and survive.

In this talk, I examine what the current moment reveals about CSP and its limits. Drawing on my recent work on civilian protective agency, the risks of international engagement, and the role of digital technologies, I synthesize key insights from the CSP literature and assess why international efforts to recognize or support these practices—often framed through the language of localization—have remained partial, contested, and fraught with risk. I then analyze how information and communication technologies are reshaping civilian agency by amplifying coordination and visibility while simultaneously producing new forms of exposure and vulnerability. Taken together, the talk asks how civilian self-protection reshapes conflict dynamics, redistributes risk, and complicates prevailing assumptions about responsibility, authority, and protection itself.

About the speaker

Emily Paddon Rhoads is Associate Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, where she teaches courses in international relations, comparative politics, and peace and conflict studies. Her research examines how protection, legitimacy, and trust are constructed when formal institutions are strained or contested, and how communities, local and global, organize safety and cooperation under conditions of violence, crisis, and political fragmentation.

Host

The Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor

The Gender and Security Sector Lab