The Cornell Population Center brings Luca Maria Pesando, Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Pollicy at New York University Abu Dhabi. He will give his talk, "Dynamics of School Expansion and Sociocultural Changes in inter-Casate Marriage in India."

Talk by Sarah Thompson (Political Science, Stanford University)

In areas where traditional institutions rival the state, how does providing information regarding the quality of state services and whom they benefit induce individuals to use state fora, or continue with tradition? Findings from a combination of an experiment with 2,100 participants in Pakistan’s Newly Merged Districts who invest in state or nonstate legal aid funds and an original survey embedded within it indicate that social inequalities play a large role in determining compliance with the state’s laws. Men and women update favorably to state courts and away from a traditional method of dispute resolution after hearing about general improvements in courts’ efficiency. However, this effect for men goes away when explicitly making clear that women, who remain subjugated to men in the traditional system, will have equal rights in state proceedings. This study provides novel evidence on political behavior from 142 Pashtun villages in an underdeveloped and unstable area typically not accessible to researchers. My findings show that preexisting social inequalities can hinder state-building projects, and point to the distinct political preferences of men and women regarding traditional governance.

Sarah Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. She utilizes causal inference methods (particularly field experiments and quasi-experimental methods) to research the politics of women and indigenous groups in South Asia and Latin America. She also works closely with policymakers in the field. Her dissertation examines why individuals choose traditional forms of governance over the state, and the impacts this has on security and access to justice.

Talk by Sahana Ghosh (Anthropology, National University of Singapore)

This talk draws on my book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (2023). It explores how national security practices produce differentiated risks, fundamentally gendered, across a transnational and highly unequal terrain of mobilities across the India-Bangladesh borderlands. Bordering unfolds with a thousand tiny cuts: here the (re)production of masculinity, risk, and national value in agrarian economies occurs with the criminalization of the borderlands and its residents as deserving of violent policing and social reprobation. The talk centers the reflections, decisions, jokes, and critiques of young Bengali men as they come of age and contemplate such a horizon of gendered risks and inequalities.

Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in our contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge, and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor. Ghosh conducts research in India and Bangladesh. Her first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands, chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility. This book recasts a singular focus on border fences and migrants as border-crossers and shows, instead, that postcolonial bordering materializes through multiple forms of violence and devaluation in agrarian, borderland lives. It is under contract with Atelier: Ethnography in the 21st Century, a book series at the University of California Press. Ghosh’s academic writing and photo essays have been published in the American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Economic and Political Weekly, Gender, Place, and Culture, among others. She also contributes to podcasts, op-eds, and photo essays to engage in broader public debates on these topics. She received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Before joining NUS, Ghosh was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University, and the Watson Institute at Brown University. She also holds an MPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA and MA in English Literature from Delhi University and Jadavpur University, respectively.

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Featured Speakers:

Iván Duque Former President of Colombia (2018-2022) Colombia
Heather Henyon Founding Partner Mindshift Capital, UAE
Andrew Karolyi Charles Field Knight Dean and Harold Bierman Jr Distinguished Professor of Management Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, USA
Mark Mobius Founding Partner Mobius Capital Partners, UAE
Juan Pablo Ortega Co-founder and CEO Yuno, Puerto Rico
Shaanti Shamdasani CEO & Founder S. ASEAN International Advocacy & Consultancy - SAIAC, Indonesia
Vera Songwe Chair and Founder Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, Africa
Marcos Troyjo Transformational Leadership Fellow University of Oxford
Edward Tse Founder and Chairman Gao Feng Advisory Company, China

The Cornell Emerging Market Institute Conference is the United States’ leading annual forum for discussing the ongoing trends and phenomena in our world’s rapidly growing emerging markets. Bringing together heads of the world’s largest multilateral institutions and preeminent business, the conference fosters engaging discussions on economic development and this year, specifically, through the lens of global supply chains.

The Conference is hosted at Cornell’s landmark Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City and will feature a variety of key-note speakers, thought-provoking panel discussions, networking sessions, and two sponsored competitions: the Cornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch Competition and the Cornell EMI Corning Case Competition. The Conference also marks the launch of the Institute’s Annual Report, a collection of research and articles from the past year developed by researchers within Cornell as well as the Emerging Multinationals Research Network in collaboration with OECD Development Center, UNCTAD, IFC, and Inter-American Development Bank.

This year’s conference is centered around the compelling theme Risks and Realignments:

Emerging markets are in flux—no longer the future, already central to the present. And yet Capital is flowing as if there is doubt, with new partnerships dawning, old questions lingering. The EMI Conference straddles the crossroads, here to capture a seminal moment, when crises — even the specters of financial contagion — may not have to threaten us, so much as invite us to think anew. This Conference reaffirms our commitment to building bridges, as risks spill over, as potential realignments draw closer. The conference will hold 4 panels, the Cañizares Award ceremony, and the competition finals:

Central Bank Digital Currencies: Looking Back and Looking ForwardReorganizing investments in Emerging MarketsRealignments: Multilaterals and Sovereign Wealth FundsLaunch of the EMI Report 2023Cornell EMI Corning Case CompetitionCornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch CompetitionJoin us.

Cornell University’s Emerging Market Institute is holding its annual conference on November 3rd at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, NYC.

The Emerging Markets Institute holds an Annual Conference every first Friday of November, in which Emerging Markets are brought to the forefront of discussion. Within the conference, EMI also holds the finals of the and the . Stay connected to the EMI Conference website to find more about the speakers and agenda, and follow our newsletter.