This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.

This talk sheds light on what various actors engaged with the United Nations trusteeship system wanted decolonization to mean, what they thought, or hoped, it should mean, and their contests of power over normalizing its meaning. The speaker will explain the importance of the UN trusteeship system in establishing decolonizing norms, particularly the meaning of universal rights within those norms. In opting not to address land claims and abuse of power complaints that petitioners brought to its attention, the Trusteeship Council created a precedent for excluding substantive rights from decolonization’s meaning in international law. This talk will elucidate what decolonization could mean within the trusteeship system, by examining the making of Italian Somaliland’s trusteeship agreement within the Trusteeship Council.

About the speakers

Meredith Terretta, is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. She examines transregional legal and rights activism, both past and contemporary. Professor Terretta is now co-editing, with Dr. Samuel Moyn, The Cambridge World History of Rights, Volume 5: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Her work appearing this academic year includes a special issue on African Refuge for the Canadian Journal of African Studies, co-edited with Dr. Philip Janzen, as well as single-authored articles on rights, international law, and decolonization in The Law and History Review; the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; and the Humanity Journal: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.

This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

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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.

This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.

This academic year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first major interdisciplinary research project undertaken by the then newly established Peace Studies Program, now the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies -- The Air War in Indochina.

The report, subsequently published by Beacon Press, was based entirely on open-source materials and interviews, and presented an assessment of the war and especially its toll on civilians that remains unmatched to this day.

About the speakers

This seminar features Cornell Professor Emeritus Norman Uphoff, one of the project’s original principal investigators, discussing the history of the study; and Oxford Professor Neta Crawford, co-founder of the Costs of War Project, explaining how she and her colleagues have used similar methods to study the impact of contemporary warfare, including strategic bombing. Professor Matthew Evangelista will introduce and chair the session.

Register here

This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

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.

Just a little more than six months ago, the United States marked the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and the end of America’s longest war as the last U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. To mark the occasion, the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs organized a half-day conference of practitioners and academic thought leaders to reflect on the past, present, and future of US grand strategy and the complicated inter-relationships between domestic and foreign policy.

In just six months, existing challenges, such as China’s projection of power in the South China Sea, have intensified and altogether new challenges have emerged, most dramatically the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The NATO alliance, once derided as a Cold War Relic, is once again central, and defense spending is once again increasingly swiftly in most western democracies. This panel discussion will engage these and other developments since September 2021 and examine what they portend for the future of US foreign policy.

Panelists

Annie Pforzheimer is a Senior Non-Resident Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an Adjunct Professor at the City University of New York, and a public commentator on foreign policy. Her previous thirty-year diplomatic career included positions such as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kabul; director of the U.S. security assistance program in Mexico; lead human rights officer in Turkey and South Africa; and Director for Central America migration issues at the National Security Council. Ms. Pforzheimer is a graduate of Harvard University and the National Defense University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

James Rogers is DIAS Assistant Professor in War Studies, within the Centre for War Studies, at Southern Denmark University, and Associate Fellow within LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics. He is currently Special Advisor to the UK Parliament's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drones and a UK MoD Defence Opinion Leader. His research focuses on drone warfare, contemporary security policy, and the history of warfare, and it has been featured in the Washington Post, Economist, CNN, and, the Guardian, among other outlets.

Daniel Stoian is a Fellow with the Negotiation Task Force at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar at Cornell's Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Legislative Affairs Bureau at the U.S. Department of State. Previously he served as the Deputy Executive Director in the South Central Asia Bureau, overseeing the operations of 27 SCA missions and 17 domestic offices across NEA and SCA. He received his masters of public administration at Harvard University, and completed his undergraduate work in computer science engineering and international relations at the University of California at Davis.

Moderators

Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor of Government, Adjunct Professor of Law, and Director of the Tech Policy Lab at Cornell University. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Kreps has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations (where she is a life member), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. She has a BA from Harvard University, MSc from Oxford, and PhD from Georgetown. Between 1999-2003, she served on active duty in the United States Air Force.

Douglas L. Kriner is Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government and the faculty director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. He is the author of five books, including (with Dino Christenson) The Myth of the Imperial Presidency: How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive; After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War; and (with Francis Shen) The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities.