Forging Lasting Peace: Movements for Justice in a Pluralist World (Bartels World Affairs Lecture)

In our ethnically, racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse world, how do we find common ground? Amid ongoing conflict and violence, how do we foster lasting peace? In our world full of inequalities, what practices of activism and solidarity lead to transformative change? Drawing on her experiences of mobilizing, demanding, and brokering peace, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee shares how action and activism can shape a just world.

A book signing and reception with refreshments will follow the lecture.

Lecture: 5:00–6:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumBook signing and reception: 6:30–7:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance: Reserve your ticket. Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell.

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Learn more about our distinguished speaker by reading her book, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. Pick up your copy from The Cornell Store and bring it to the book signing! Buffalo Street Books will also have copies for sale at the event.

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How did Leymah Gbowee's protests lead to lasting peace? Read a Bartels explainer by Naminata Diabate.

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About Leymah Gbowee

Nobel Peace laureate Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist, trained social worker, and women's rights advocate. She currently serves as executive director of the Women, Peace, and Security Program at Columbia University's Earth Institute and is the founder and current president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founding head of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, and cofounder and former executive director of the Women, Peace, and Security Network Africa. She is also a founding member and former Liberian coordinator of Women in Peacebuilding Network/West Africa Network for Peacebuilding.

Host and Sponsors

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Institute for African Development and Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, in cooperation with Peace is Loud. To learn more about Peace is Loud and discover other empowering women peacebuilders, visit www.peaceisloud.org.

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Einaudi Center’s 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.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008) is the inspiring account of a group of ordinary women—Muslim and Christian, rich and poor, urban and rural—who came together to bring peace to their beloved but war-torn Liberia. The story of their protest's historic achievement is suspenseful and ultimately incredibly satisfying. According to Desmond Tutu, the film “eloquently captures the power each of us innately has within to make this world a far better, safer, more peaceful place.”

Join the Institute for African Development (IAD) at Cornell Cinema for a free screening of this documentary about the women's peace movement led by Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Peace laureate and speaker at this year's Bartel's World Affairs Lecture. Part of the Einaudi Center's work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice, this year's lecture and film screening are cosponsored by Einaudi's IAD and Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Find out about the Bartels lecture and reserve your ticket to see Leymah Gbowee in person on May 3.

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How did Leymah Gbowee's protests lead to lasting peace? Read a Bartels explainer by Naminata Diabate.

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Discussants:

N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, Director, Institute for African Development; Professor, Africana Studies and Research Center, College of Arts & Sciences

Muna B. Ndulo, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International and Comparative Law; Elizabeth and Arthur Reich Director, Leo and Arvilla Berger International Legal Studies Program, Cornell Law School

What worlds take root in war? This talk takes us to the southern border of Lebanon where resistant ecologies thrive amid gusts of perennial war. In frontline villages, armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered landmines have become the conditions within which everyday life is waged. Here, multi-species partnerships such as tobacco-farming and goat-herding carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these survival collectives make life possible within an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. War is a place where life must go on.

Sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Anthropology, Critical Ottoman and Post Ottoman Studies, and Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Please adhere to Cornell University’s COVID-19 guidelines. Stay informed at covid.cornell.edu.

Experts, Experiences, and Discussion

Hosted by Global Cornell, this virtual forum gives Cornell faculty, staff, and students a time to come together, learn more about the unprovoked invasion—and stand with the Ukrainian people.

Join scholars based in Ukraine, and Cornell faculty and students, as they speak about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens lives, the post–Cold War international order, and the stability of the global economy. Following a panel discussion, participants will connect in breakout rooms, share experiences, and receive further resources.

Faculty in Ukraine

Tymofii Brik (Professor and wartime Acting Vice President of International Affairs, Kyiv School of Economics)Yuliya Bidenko (Associate Professor, Political Science, Karazin Kharkiv University)Natalia Kudriavtseva (Professor, Translation and Slavic Studies, Kryvyi Rih State University)Cornell Faculty

Matthew Evangelista (Professor, Department of Government/A&S)Cristina Florea (Assistant Professor, Department of History/A&S)Steve Israel (Director, Institute of Politics and Global Affairs/BPP; Professor of Practice, Department of Government/A&S)Stephen Yale-Loehr (Migrations faculty fellow; Professor of Immigration Law Practice/Cornell Law)Eswar Prasad (Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy, Dyson/JCB/CALS)Bryn Rosenfeld (Assistant Professor, Department of Government/A&S)Cornell Community Members

Ivan Kosyuk (Operations Research and Information Engineering, MEng ’22)Olaf de Rohan Willner (Computer Science and Government/A&S ’24)Olga Zimina (Postdoctoral Associate, School of Integrative Plant Science/CALS)This event is open to the Cornell community only and intended as a protected space for learning and discussion. NetID authentication is required to register and attend. Please register with your Cornell NetID email address (not an alias email address).

Cities are changing sites of revolution and rebellion, contestations over forms of power and social relations. As historical and contemporary instances, revolutions present alternative views of world-making and contestations over the organization of society and relations of power. To better understand this phenomenon, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies has assembled a panel discussion of Professor Mark Beissinger’s book, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton University Press, 2022). Join us for an exploration of how and why cities have become primary sites of revolutionary disruptions in the contemporary world.

Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city—accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms.

Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change.

Author of The Revolutionary City:

Mark R. Beissinger, Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics, Princeton University

“Author Meets Critics” Expert Discussants:

Dina Bishara (Assistant Professor, School of Industrial and Labor Relations)Bryn Rosenfeld (Assistant Professor, Department of Government/A&S)Sidney Tarrow (Emeritus Maxwell Upson Professor, Department of Government/A&S; Adjunct Professor, Cornell Law School)
Moderator:

Rachel Beatty Riedl (Einaudi Center Director; Professor, Department of Government/A&S and Cornell Brooks School)

Co-Sponsors:

Institute for European Studies, Einaudi CenterSoutheast Asia Program, Einaudi CenterReppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Einaudi CenterInstitute of Politics and Global Affairs
About the Forum:

The “Author Meets Critics” forum stages scholarly conversations around the Einaudi Center’s research priority areas: Democratic Threats and Resilience, and Inequalities, Identities, and Justice.

Attendance Requirements:

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID and mask REQUIRED