Talk by Harshana Rambukwella

This talk explores what solidarity might mean in the current geo-political context through the specific example of postcolonial Sri Lanka, which is experiencing an existential threat unprecedented in the country's contemporary history. Mired in a deep and intractable economic and governance crisis, the country's future looks dark. But despite this despondent outlook, a youth-led protest movement transcends the many institutional, social, and economic fault lines that have characterized Sri Lanka's postcolonial history has emerged. I argue that this movement represents a form of 'deep solidarity' that stands in contrast to other iterations of solidarity, such as enchanted and disenchanted solidarities and vertical and hierarchical solidarities often marred by instrumentalist motives shaped by geo-political power and other forms of instrumental power structures. Exploring the actual protest movement and literary entanglements with the notion of solidarity, I offer a series of critical reflections on the limits and possibilities of solidarity in postcolonial societies. I argue that deep solidarity is a tenuous and, at times, idealistic but, nevertheless, morally and even pragmatically superior alternative to other ways in which solidarity has been imagined.

Harshana Rambukwella is a professor in English at the Postgraduate Institute of English, the Open University of Sri Lanka. Currently, he is a guest professor at the Geography Department at the University of Zurich and shortly before was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna. He was the Sri Lanka Chair at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg in 2019 and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (UCL Press 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2, the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Postcolonial Text, among others. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Harshana is active in promoting Anglophone literature as a Trustee of the Gratiaen Prize for English creative writing instituted by Michael Ondaatje and is also a member of the State Literary Panel of Sri Lanka. With a primary focus on postcolonial and comparative literature and theory, Harshana’s work is interdisciplinary in nature and spans fields such as sociolinguistics, nationalism, and history.

Professor Ryan Brutger explains that one of the central challenges in China-US relations is the risk of a security dilemma between China and the United States, as each side carries out actions for what it perceives to be defensively-motivated reasons, failing to realize how it is perceived by the other side. Yet how susceptible to the psychological biases that undergird the security dilemma are the Chinese and American publics? Can their deleterious effects be mitigated?

The speaker explores the microfoundations of the security dilemma, fielding parallel dyadic cross-national survey experiments in China and the United States. Micro-level evidence is found to be consistent with the logic of the security dilemma in publics in both countries. IR scholars have overstated the palliative effects of perspective taking, which can backfire in the face of perceived threats to actors' identities and goals. These findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in China-US relations, and perspective taking in IR.

About the Speaker

Ryan Brutger is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Prior to joining Berkeley, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Moderator

Paul Lushenko is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and a Ph.D. student in International Relations at Cornell University.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of Government, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell), and Cornell's Language Resource Center.

Professor Tyler Jost develops a theory of crisis miscalculation that emphasizes variation in institutional relationships between political leaders and foreign policy bureaucracies. He argues that two dimensions of these institutions – capacity for information search and oversight structure – help explain why some states are more prone to miscalculate than others.

To test his argument, he introduces a novel data set that measures these institutional differences across the globe from 1946 to 2015. Contrary to canonical theories that argue that bureaucratic advice undermines strategic judgment, the analysis finds that institutions that integrate bureaucrats into a leader's decision-making process tend to perform better in interstate crises than those that exclude them. The theory and findings improve our understanding of how bureaucracy shapes the crisis behavior of modern states.

About the speaker

Professor Tyler Jost is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University, and an Assistant Professor of China Studies at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His research focuses on national security decision-making, bureaucratic politics, and Chinese foreign policy.

Moderator

Paul Lushenko is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and a Ph.D. student in International Relations at Cornell University

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by Cornell Center for Social Sciences, the Department of Government, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

Dr. Levi West will articulate a framework for understanding the manner in which innovative forms of violence, narrative and communicative dynamics, and emergent information and communications technologies can be integrated by terrorists and other violent non-state actors to achieve strategic effect.

The framework will be applied to a contemporary case study, namely the Islamic State, while additionally making use of historical case studies including transatlantic anarchist terrorism in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and political violence undertaken in support of the liberation of Palestine in the aftermath of the 1967 War. The framework seeks to provide explanatory insight into the means by which asymmetrically weak actors are able to cause disproportionately consequential strategic effect on their adversaries. The framework can assist with understanding the non-kinetic purposes and impacts of terrorist violence, while also providing a degree of insight into the strategic utility of highly calibrated, choreographed, targeted violence. In identifying a consistent strategic calculus that underpins terrorist violence across temporal and ideological contexts, the framework also suggests that it is possible to understand the enduring nature and strategic logic to terrorist violence, despite its frequently changing character.

About the Speaker

Dr. Levi West is the Director of Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, and the Executive Director of Leviathan Analysis, a bespoke consulting firm that provides research, advisory, and professional development services to the law enforcement and national security sectors.

Moderator

Paul Lushenko is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and a PhD student in International Relations at Cornell University.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Department of Government and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

Emma Belcher, president of Ploughshares Fund, joins a national panel of experts for a vital look at the future of nuclear security policy at a time when the United States, Russia, and other nations continue to maintain enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on earth.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasizes the ever-present threat of nuclear war, raising urgent questions:

Did the U.S. possession of weapons utterly fail to deter Russian aggression? Did Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons embolden it to invade Ukraine, a nation that gave up nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War? What is the wisdom and what are the risks of continuing to maintain large numbers of nuclear weapons in a world marked by growing authoritarianism in Russia, China, and elsewhere? What are the implications of the crisis in Ukraine for the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons? Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register now!

Introduction

Peter Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies, Director, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Cornell University

Panelists
Fiona Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Mariana Budjeryn, Senior Research Associate, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Pavel Podvig, Senior Researcher, United Nations Institute For Disarmament Research

Moderator
Emma Belcher, President, Ploughshares Fund

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Hosted by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, with additional support from Einaudi's Institute for European Studies and the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs. The event is part of the Einaudi Center's Democratic Threats and Resilience research priority.