Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Nuclear Freeze Archive Digitized
Randall Forsberg Project Led by Reppy Institute
Judith Reppy, Matt Evangelista, and Agnes Nimark (PACS) led work to preserve papers of international Nuclear Freeze movement leader.
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Armed Drones: Limited War in Strategic and Global Contexts
March 14, 2022
1:00 pm
Since 9/11, the U.S. has used armed drones to combat terrorists. Bush initiated the use of strikes; Obama accelerated the practice, especially in Pakistan; and, Trump institutionalized it further. Biden’s “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism strategy suggests he will also continue to rely on strikes. At the same time, other states and stateless actors, including France and the Islamic State, have acquired drones indicating the emergence of a “second drone age.”
What are the implications of the evolving proliferation of drones for international security and global order? How do these consequences, in turn, shape policies to manage the emergence of automated and autonomous remote-warfare technologies? This panel discussion draws on the insights of three experts to answer these and related questions, including:
Mr. John Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency;Professor Amy Zegart from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University; and,U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Lushenko, a General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster Scholar at Cornell University.This discussion will be moderated by Professor Sarah E. Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor at the Department of Government, and hosted by Congressman Steve Israel, Director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at the Brooks School of Public Policy.
This event is a collaboration between the Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell Tech Policy Lab, the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.
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Program
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Einaudi Center for International Studies
The Crisis in Ukraine: A Conversation with Amb. Bill Taylor
February 23, 2022
7:00 pm
Ambassador William B. Taylor served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. In 2019, he served as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. Currently, he is the Vice President for Russia and Europe at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Taylor visits the Cornell community to discuss diplomacy and the latest developments in the Ukraine-Russia crisis.
Speaker
Amb. Bill Taylor, Vice President, Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace
Moderators
Prof. Nicholas Rostow, Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School
Steve Israel, Director, Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University and former U.S. Representative (D-NY)
Organizers
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Institute for European Studies
Greetings from Uncle Sam: Manpower Policy as Cipher in American History
March 10, 2022
11:25 am
Uris Hall, G08
This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.
Professor Amy Rutenberg will discuss the idea that debates over U.S. manpower policy -because they rest on questions of personal liberty, collective responsibility, and competing visions of national security – end up substituting for much larger debates over the meaning of “America.” In this way, policy proposals end up acting as a cipher. The same basic program idea symbolizes very different things depending on the lens through which individuals decode it. This seminar will use debates over universal military training and selective service in the twentieth century as case studies.
About the speaker
Amy J. Rutenberg is an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University. Her works focus on the intersection of war, gender, militarization, and American society in the second half of the twentieth century. Cornell University Press published her first book, Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance, in 2019, and she is working on a book tentatively titled In the Service of Peace: Peace Activism and Military Service in Post-Vietnam War America.
This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).
Cosponsored by the American Studies Program.
Register here
In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
China's Coronavirus Missteps Open Door for US, But It Fails to Capitalize: Report
Sarah Kreps, PACS
“What does the off-ramp of a zero-Covid strategy look like in a world where we’re going to have variants bouncing around for years?” asked Sarah Kreps, a Cornell University professor of government. “Can the government keep up with the lockdowns for three to five years?”
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Reppy Institute Welcomes New Program Manager
Priyanka Chakravarty, PACS
Priyanka Chakravarty is the new full-time Program Manager for the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. She joined the Einaudi Center and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs in September 2020, where she has managed a diverse portfolio of projects, including the Einaudi Center’s Global Racial Justice research priority and its work with threatened scholars, undergraduate internships, graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, and the Global Public Voices faculty fellowship.
In the past, she has worked with ASER Centre / Pratham, one of India’s largest NGOs working in the field of primary education, and she interned with UNAIDS as well as CNN-News18 (the sister channel of CNN in India) and Business Standard (a leading financial newspaper in India). Over the years, she has gained experience in areas of governance, policy analysis, policy advocacy, and communications. As part of her research, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in rural India, in addition to interacting with a broad spectrum of stakeholders, from policymakers to senior bureaucrats.
Priyanka grew up in India, where she received a multidisciplinary education. She has an MPhil (Master of Philosophy) in Law and Governance and a Masters in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi. She also has a Bachelor’s in Journalism from Delhi University. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oslo, Norway.
When not working, she loves traveling to new destinations and trying out new cuisines.
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Demilitarizing the Environment: Indigenous Knowledge, Colonialism, and Fire in Northern California
Bruno Seraphin, PACS Graduate Fellow
Bruno Seraphin conducted dissertation field research during fall 2021 with financial support from the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies through the Marion and Frank Long Fellowship. Seraphin is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology with a Graduate Minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
Seraphin’s research focuses on the ways that Indigenous Karuk prescribed fire practitioners are working to transform the paradigm of militarized fire suppression within California. He has been living and conducting fieldwork in Karuk country since August 2020. The dissertation’s working title is, “Fires Beyond Crisis: Karuk Sovereignty, Demilitarizing the Environment, and Unsettled Colonialism in Northern California.”
This fall, Bruno conducted more than a dozen long-form semi-structured interviews with Karuk fire practitioners, Karuk Tribal employees, fire professionals employed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), United States Forest Service (USFS) employees, and other local community members from the mid-Klamath region whose lives are affected by wildfires and prescribed burning. He learned about the opportunities and challenges that emerge within collaborative partnerships between land management agencies, and varying understandings of the nature of the wildfire crisis. He also studied historical and ongoing systems of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession in the region, and individuals’ diverse hopes and concerns with regards to the future of fire in Karuk country.
"Fall 2021 was a generative and exciting time in my PhD trajectory," reports Seraphin.
Seraphin also conducted participant observation, working directly with local experts to explore first-hand the different sides of fire. He helped out with prescribed burns; shadowed Karuk Tribal representatives as they advocated for Karuk sovereignty and cultural values within the wildland fire bureaucracy; worked with community members as they prepared their properties for incoming wildfire, and more.
Seraphin also worked on prescribed fire as a videographer, photographer, and media consultant. He helped colleagues at the Karuk Department of Natural Resources (DNR) document the seven-week-long Klamath Prescribed Fire Training Exchange Program (TREX). He co-produced educational videos on topics relating to Karuk fire knowledge, for example “Learning Fire: In the Klamath Mountains 2021,” a fun project made primarily with and for local youth. He also developed the video “Talking Roads: Transportation and Climate Adaptation in Karuk Country,” as part of a collaboration between the Karuk DNR and the California Department of Transportation (video will be available publicly in February 2022).
During fall 2021, Seraphin also made time to write. He revised and resubmitted an article manuscript to the journal American Ethnologist, drawing on research from his MA thesis as well as this current project.[1] Additionally, based on his research on the political far right’s environmental rhetoric, he worked on two public-facing collaborative projects: first, a forthcoming zine titled “Against the Eco-fascist Creep,” and second, a short piece titled, “De-Escalating Water Crisis” for a collection of water policy reports. This collection is now published online and can be read in its entirety. Working with several other early-career scholars of settler colonialism and fire in the U.S. west, Seraphin is coauthoring a review article for Environment and Society’s special issue on “Fire and Flood,” to be published in 2023. Finally, Seraphin submitted three fellowship applications to secure funding for the upcoming months of dissertation writing. One was awarded, and the other two are still under review.
Seraphin reports, “fall 2021 was a generative and exciting time in my PhD trajectory.” He expects to complete fieldwork in May 2022 and defend the completed dissertation in May 2024. “Throughout all,” says Seraphin, “I am grateful for the friendship, patience, and support of the Karuk colleagues and neighbors with whom I work and live.”
[1] Manuscript title: “Unsettling Ontology: Narrations of the Human in the Wildtending Movement”
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A Survivor's Voice: Update on the Atrocities Against the Uyghurs in China
March 7, 2022
4:45 pm
What are the prospects for halting China’s mass atrocities in the Uyghur region, which are now entering their fifth year since the start in 2017? An update and discussion. Our special guest is Tursunay Ziyawudun, a survivor of the Chinese concentration camps in the region known in Chinese as Xinjiang. Translation will be provided by Rizwangul NurMuhammad, MPA student at Cornell and also affected by the atrocities. Faculty hosts and facilitators Magnus Fiskesjö, Anthropology and Allen Carlson, Government.
Co-sponsored by the China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program (CAPS), Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies, Comparative Muslim Societies, Anthropology, and the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).
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Program
East Asia Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
The Most Serious Crimes of Concern to The International Community as a Whole?
March 3, 2022
11:25 am
Uris Hall, G08
This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.
Oumar Ba discusses the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its relationship with African states at this week's seminar with the Reppy Institute. RSVP to attend and learn more below.
About the speaker
Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His primary areas of research focus on law, violence, race, humanity, and world order(s) in global politics. He is the author of States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge, 2020). He is currently working on two major projects - Crimes, Against Humanity: Governing Global Justice, and (Re)Centering Decolonization as Ontology and Sifting through the Archives of Liberation.
About the talk
The scholarship on the relationship between African states and the International Criminal Court (ICC) tends to point to various contentions stemming from the quasi-exclusive focus of the Court on the continent and its citizens, and the disputes regarding head-of-state immunity. It is also often pointed out that African states were early and eager supporters of the international criminal justice regime. Yet, the current international legal order is starkly different from the one that African states had envisioned. By revisiting the archives of two pivotal moments in the establishment of the current international legal order – the work of the International Legal Commission (ILC) in drafting the Code of Crimes Against The Peace and Security of Mankind and negotiations that led to draft statute of the ICC, we find that Africa had proposed a different version of the international legal order. This article contends that for African states, their vision for an international legal order was linked to their history of colonial subjugation, colonial wars, wars of liberation, and conflicts after the independences. Therefore, the Draft Code and establishment of the ICC were meant to provide an avenue for redress, amidst a deep mistrust between Africa and “international law”.
This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).
Register here
In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Institute for African Development
War and Statehood at the Eastern Periphery of Europe: Bukovina in World War I
February 24, 2022
11:25 am
Uris Hall, G08
Cristina Florea is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. She is interested in the interactions between German and Russian power (their competition for territory and influence) across this space, as well as the consequences these interactions have had for the people living in between. Her research focuses on the importance of imperial legacies in modern European history, and the centrality of imperial competition to East European politics and societies.
This conversation is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).
Register here
In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.
Additional Information
Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Institute for European Studies