Infrastructure is at the heart of China’s growing, controversial presence in global development. In addition to economic considerations, observers see infrastructure projects as important cogs in China’s pursuit of international influence. However, debates on Chinese global infrastructure are remarkably devoid of historical and comparative context, and China’s infrastructure-influence nexus remains conceptually and empirically unclear. Dr. Austin Strange provides a comprehensive account of Chinese global infrastructure since 1949, showing that high-profile infrastructure has been a tenacious feature of China’s development cooperation. It then discusses how high-profile infrastructure creates both intended and incidental sources of influence by serving as a unique form of political capital as well as a distinct source of political risk for China’s government and host country governments. Contemporary Chinese global infrastructure, both traditional and digital, has important historical and comparative contexts that help illuminate how China’s global infrastructure drive has injected major risk into its pursuit of international influence.

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About the speaker

Austin Strange is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines China’s contemporary and historical roles in the world economy and global development. He is co-author of Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Austin earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, M.A. from Zhejiang University, and a B.A. from William & Mary.

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

In this virtual panel discussion, Eugene Fishel and Yaropolk Kulchyckyj will provide an insider perspective into Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. They will bring together documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials for the first time.

Fishel will examine four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic administrations and ask whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decision-making regarding relations with Moscow.

Kulchyckyj will focus on the decision-making process of the Obama and Trump administrations regarding providing lethal aid to Ukraine between 2014-2017. Although the two presidents and their administrations were at opposite extremes on domestic and foreign policy matters, the only major difference in their policy towards Ukraine was the decision to arm Ukraine with lethal aid, particularly with the Javelin anti-tank missile.

Cornell government faculty Bryn Rosenfeld will respond to their findings.

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Panelists

Eugene M. Fishel, author of The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy Toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2022), is a distinguished fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University.

Yaropolk T. Kulchyckyj completed his doctoral research on “U.S. Foreign Policy Decision-Making: The Obama and Trump’s Administrations’ Decisions Regarding Lethal Aid to Ukraine, 2014-2017" from the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

Bryn Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Cornell University

Moderator

Matthew Evangelista, President White Professor of History and Political Science, Department of Government, Cornell University

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.

It is now widely accepted that the age of decolonization was also a turning point in the history of democracy, as the vast majority of the non-European world replaced imperial rule with democratic republics. Although this fact is taken for granted, scholarly attention so far has been focused on the nationalist aspiration of anticolonial movements and their contesting visions of self-determination. In the moment of its global conquest, democracy, it may seem, was an afterthought—or, at best, a logical corollary—for anticolonial thinkers preoccupied with overcoming empire.

Focusing on colonial India and departing from the standard narratives of anticolonialism, Nazmul Sultan argues that democracy was neither a given ideal waiting to be claimed nor reducible to the concerns of territorial sovereignty. Nazmul suggests that the problem of peoplehood sat at the heart of the monumental clash between the British Empire and the Indian anticolonial movement, inspiring in the process a rethinking of the meaning of democracy for the colonial world. He will also reflect on the place of the anticolonial moment in the global history of democratic thought.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Nazmul S. Sultan is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (forthcoming with the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). His research has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, and Review of Politics, among others.

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