States often fortify their borders against militant threats. How do these efforts shape civilian welfare and perceptions in borderland communities? Professor Christopher Blair conceptualizes border fortification as a legibility-building endeavor. By bolstering state reach in areas of weak historical penetration, fortification enhances the government's capacity for monitoring, administration, and control. Yet, expanding state authority also disrupts traditional cross-border markets. A trade-off between security and corruption emerges in consequence. He provides evidence for this theory in a difference-in-differences framework, combining administrative records on violence and representative data from a NATO-commissioned survey fielded across Afghanistan. Fortification facilitates government information-collection, improving security provision and fostering national identification. Enhanced state capacity is countervailed by negative economic impacts. By disturbing the informal borderland economy, fortification fuels criminalization and local opposition. Civilians rely on illicit economic entrepreneurs to sustain traditional market access. Higher smuggling rents fuel official corruption and bribe-taking. The findings point to a key dilemma inherent in border fortification strategies.

About the Speaker

Christopher Blair is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. His work spans across international relations and comparative politics, with a substantive focus on the political economy of conflict and migration. The main questions motivating his research are: (1) how counterinsurgency policies impact rebel and civilian behavior; and (2) how prospective hosts respond to forcibly displaced people.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

Shannon Philip explores the gendering of everyday urban spaces and the social production of gendered violence. Through ethnographic data collected by ‘hanging out’ with young Indian men in New Delhi, he discusses the ways masculinities are constructed and performed, and how these in turn produce hostility, fear, and violence for women and girls accessing the same urban spaces.

Through weaving together material from myriad urban sites like gyms, bars, trains, street corners, night clubs, gay cruising parks as well as shopping malls, Philip explores how there is an attempt to make the city a masculine space, with a hypersexualization of women in the same spaces. However, this process is not even or uniform, with several masculine anxieties and vulnerabilities also emerging in men’s claims on the city from queer and non-masculine bodies. In this way, the urban space becomes an interesting palimpsest to explore the politics of gender, class, sexualities, and violences on an everyday level.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr Shannon Philip is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of East Anglia, UK and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His first monograph has recently been published with Cambridge University Press (2022) titled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony. Shannon’s new research project comparatively explores youth, sexualities, urban transformations, and gender in South Africa and India.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

The exhibition 75 Years of Consequence: The Partition of India explores the legacy and tragedy of Partition, which created the independent states of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. At this panel discussion, two of the exhibition curators—Ellen Avril, the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, and Zain Abid ’24, a visitor services intern at the Museum and Outreach Coordinator for Cornell University’s South Asian Council—will be joined by Iftikhar Dadi, the John H. Burris Professor of History of Art and Binenkorb Director of the South Asia Program, and Durba Ghosh, Professor of History and director of the College of Arts and Science’s Humanities Scholars Program, to discuss the processes behind the exhibition and the social, cultural, and historical contexts of these works from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Cosponsored by the South Asia Program

Photo of Mohandas Gandhi on a morning stroll with his granddaughter Sita and grandniece Abbha, India, by Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904–1971), 1946-48 (negative); ca. 1965 (print), Gift of the artist, Class of 1927, and LIFE Magazine

Join us on Zoom to practice your Bengali skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public.

Join Bengali Conversation Hour on Zoom!

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Historical thinking is one of the most critical skills a college student can acquire. Teaching globally is a vital approach to understanding our contemporary world.

How do we combine the resources available to us from archives, libraries, and online collections to inform our understanding of the past and the present? In this workshop we collaborate across the expertise of librarians and historians to further conversations about teaching, history, and library materials.

Are you a post-secondary educator seeking to build connections across the State of New York? Are you faculty looking for more primary source materials? Are you interested in learning more about how to access materials from libraries at a distance? Are you a graduate student in need of resources and source materials as you construct current and future syllabi? If you have answered "yes" to any of these questions, then please do join us!

This online workshop is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, with funding support from the U.S. Department of Education Title VI NRC Program.

Speakers:

Emily Zinger, Southeast Asia Digital Librarian, Cornell University

Dr. Joshua Kueh, Reference Librarian, Asian Division, Library of Congress

Dr. Michitake Aso, Associate Professor, Department of History, SUNY-Albany

Moderator: Dr. William Noseworthy

Aunty Aesthetics, or More Ways to be an Aunty, a talk Dr. Kareem Khubchandani
Friday, October 21st, 3:00 p.m. - 4.30 p.m. , Film Forum and on Zoom

Description:
Aunties are known to be terrifying figures, domineering and difficult, overbearing to younger generations. They are especially known for managing and curtailing desire, whether shaming you for that extra piece of cake you are eyeing, or blabbing to your parents about your nighttime escapes. As such, they have become the butt of the joke, particularly in meme culture that critiques older generation's outmoded style and politics. This talk revisits the hegemonic figure of the South Asian aunty in performance, TV, literature, and visual culture to detail what paying attention to her aesthetics can teach us about the queer and trans futures she makes possible rather than forecloses.

Kareem Khubchandani is Associate Professor in theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and guest editor of the "Critical Aunty Studies" special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.