Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) in collaboration with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, the Gender and the Security Sector Lab, Department of Government, and the Brooks School of Public Policy will be hosting a two-day meeting at Cornell University on October 28th and 29th. Sabrina M. Karim, Hardis Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and member of the EGAP network, will head the organization of the event, which will focus on two thematic areas:

Crime Reduction & Police AccountabilityDemocracy, Conflict, & Polarization

This closed event will bring together invited scholars and practitioners from the EGAP network, along with other experts in these two thematic areas, to showcase findings, identify research questions and promising interventions, and provide opportunities for matchmaking between researchers and practitioners.

For more information, please contact Sabrina Karim at smk349@cornell.edu or Ayuko Picot, Administrative Assistant, EGAP at ayukopicot@berkeley.edu.

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.

***

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.