Go global in summer 2026! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

Applications will open in the fall.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Go global in summer 2026! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

Applications will open in the fall.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Join us to learn about opportunities for graduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including research and travel grants, guest lectures, fellowships, and more!

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

Join us to learn about opportunities for undergraduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including academic minors, guest lectures, summer research and travel experiences, and more!

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

Please join us for a screening of the Pulitzer Center-supported film Democracy in Debt: Sri Lanka Beyond the Headlines (2024, 25 min) and a discussion about fostering and engaging cross-border, Southasian publics with producer Beena Sarwar, SAPAN, and journalist Ronojoy Sen, National University of Singapore, moderated by Hadia Khan, Jamhoor.
Watch the trailer here.

Workshop Participants

Hana Shams Ahmed, Anthropology, York University, Toronto, CanadaMohsin Alam Bhat, Law, Queen Mary University London, London, UKMona Bhan, Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USANatasha Raheja, Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USARadhika Mongia, Sociology, York University, Toronto, CanadaSadia Mahmood, Religious Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan Salah Punathil, Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, IndiaSalman Hussain, Anthropology, York University, Toronto, CanadaSana Batool, Journalism, Falmouth University, Falmouth, UKSidharthan Maunaguru, Tamil Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, CanadaTashi Ghale, Anthropology, Washington University Saint Louis, Saint Louis, USA

The global decline in democracy has increasingly been shaped by ethnic and religious majoritarianism, which serves as a core mechanism for authoritarian politics. Across South Asia, governments are working to further entrench permanent majorities and minorities through exclusionary legal, political, and economic structures. At the same time, electoral shifts, protest movements, and new forms of collective action highlight the contested nature of these projects and the possibilities for resistance. This workshop aims to examine majoritarianism in South Asia through historical, legal, and anthropological perspectives and to explore strategies to counter these developments. In bringing together scholars working across the areas that comprise Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, we hope to foster cross-disciplinary and cross-border analyses that move beyond nation-specific accounts.

This session is part of the Cornell-QMUL Global Hubs workshop: Majority-Minority Politics and Democracy in South Asia, supported by Cornell-QMUL Global Hubs, Center on Global Democracy - Cornell Brooks Public Policy, Cornell South Asia Program, Religious Studies Program, and the Department of Government.

Drawing by Rohait Bhagwant

U.S. foreign policies are changing dramatically, with profound implications for peace and security throughout the world. The administration of Donald J. Trump has broken with many decades of precedent by expressing sharp criticism of NATO and historical allies, while expressing admiration for historic adversaries such as Russia. U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion has wavered, with Trump even suggesting that Ukraine rather than Russia is to blame for the conflict. U.S. humanitarian aid to many of the world’s most needy people has ended or been sharply reduced. Changes in migration policy are also placing many groups at heightened risk of political violence. The administration has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, acting in violation of international law and suggesting a preference for military action over diplomacy. And changes in trade policy, particularly with China, have the potential to reshape military capabilities and alliances around the world.

These changes raise several questions. Is the re-arming of Europe a necessary bulwark against an expansionist Russia, or a new arms race that encourages nuclear proliferation and increases the risk of war? Will the cancellation of humanitarian aid encourage other nations to increase their capacity, or simply leave the world’s most vulnerable people without hope? What other nations might step in to fill the vacuum left by the loss of such aid, and will these nations be more or less exploitative than the United States? How will changing U.S. policies affect regional security alliances, for example between Russia and China? This panel will provide perspectives on how recent changes to foreign policy are likely to affect issues of peace and security in several regions around the world.

Panelists

Jok Madut Jok, Professor of Anthropology, Syracuse University

Jok’s areas of specialization include security, governance, democracy and development in South Sudan and Sudan. He has also written extensively about gender, sexuality and reproductive health, humanitarian aid, ethnography of political violence, gender-based violence, and war and slavery and the politics of identity in South Sudan and Sudan. He is the author of Breaking Sudan: The Search for Peace (Oneworld Publications, 2017), Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (One World Publication, 2007), War and Slavery in Sudan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Militarization, Gender and Reproductive Health in South Sudan (Edwin Mellen Press, 1998). He also co-edited The Sudan Handbook (with J. Willis, J. Ryle and S. Baldo, James Currey, 2011). Before joining Maxwell he was visiting professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Linacre College. He also served in the government of South Sudan as undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, 2010-13. He is the founding director of the Sudd Institute, a public policy research center.

Kaija E. Schilde, Associate Professor of International Studies, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

Professor Schilde’s research focuses on the political economy of security, with a particular emphasis on defense industry politics and the political development of the European Union. In July 2021 she was named Acting Director of BU’s Center for the Study of Europe and in January 2022 she received the Jean Monnet Chair in European Security and Defense. Her book, The Political Economy of European Security (Cambridge University Press, 2017) investigates the state-society relations between the EU and interest groups, with a particular focus on security and defense institutions, industries, and markets. Her research interests span multiple dimensions of the historical institutionalism of security organizations, including the causes and consequences of military spending; the relationship between spending, innovation, and capabilities; defense reform and force transformation; the politics of defense protectionism; and the international diffusion of internal and border security practices.

Zheng Wang, Professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University

Professor Wang’s research interests lie in three closely connected areas: (1) identity-based conflicts, nationalism, and the politics of historical memory; (2) peace and conflict management in East Asia, with a special focus on China’s rise and its impact on regional peace and security; (3) foreign-domestic linkages in Chinese politics and foreign relations. He is the author of Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (Columbia University Press, 2012), which received the International Studies Association’s Yale H. Ferguson Award in 2013. He is also author of Memory Politics, Identity and Conflict: Historical Memory as a Variable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and editor of COVID-19 and U.S.-China Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He is currently under contract with the Oxford University Press to write a book about the rise of nationalism and populism and the crises in the US-China relations. He is Director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS) at Seton Hall University.

Diego Chaves-González, Senior Manager for Latin America and Caribbean Initiative, Migration Policy Institute

Chaves-González’s research focuses on forced displacement, legal pathways, integration, migration and development, and regional cooperation in migration management. He previously worked for the World Bank and the United Nations. While at the World Bank, he helped expand the scope of the Global Concessional Financing Facility (GCFF). He also co-authored the 2019, 2020, and 2021 GCFF annual reports, and helped coordinate the Secretary of the Multilateral Development Bank platform. While working for the United Nations, Mr. Chaves-González initiated a platform in Colombia to coordinate the work of UN agencies, NGOs, and their partners in response to migrant and refugee situations. He also helped develop a strategy to involve victims of conflict and internally displaced persons in the peace deal negotiations that ended Colombia’s civil war. Chaves-González also played an essential role as a presidential advisor in the registration and regularization of 500,000 migrants in Colombia and helped provide advice on how to structure similar initiatives in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru. Since the start of the Venezuelan crisis, he has assisted Latin American governments in developing policies to integrate arriving migrants and refugees into receiving communities, accommodating both newcomer and local needs.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Please RSVP for the panel on Eventbrite.

Talk by Daisy Rockwell (Artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator)

Translators love to use metaphors to capture the nature of their work, yet every metaphor seems to fall short, resulting in a great, unusable tangle of mixed metaphors. In this lecture, Daisy Rockwell will share some of her own handcrafted metaphors for translation and explore the many dimensions of the art.

Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. She has translated numerous classic and contemporary literary works from Hindi and Urdu into English. Her translations have been awarded the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work, the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, and the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award. Her translations have been honored with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and PEN Translates. Her novel Alice Sees Ghosts, and Mixed Metaphors, her collection of poems about translation, are both forthcoming from Bloomsbury India in 2025 and 2026. Her memoir Our Friend, Art is forthcoming from Pushkin Press in 2027.

Books will be available for sale and signing after the lecture, from Odyssey Bookstore.

The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.

Cosponsored by the Society for the Humanities