Bartels World Affairs Lecture In this year's Bartels lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, former president of Costa Rica Carlos Alvarado Quesada shares how conservation and sustainability are crucial for preserving democracy around the world. Costa Rica is one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet, with more than one-quarter of the nation's land protected in parks and preserves. As Costa Rica's leader from 2018 to 2022, Alvarado proposed a challenge for his country and the world: to make Costa Rica a decarbonized nation by 2050. During his visit to Cornell, Alvarado explores some of the questions that guided his administration: What roles do democracy and governance play in shaping environmental policies at the local, national, and global levels? And how can we meet the basic needs of the world’s ever-growing human population—equitably and democratically—without sacrificing the health of the planet and its other inhabitants? A reception with refreshments will follow the lecture. Lecture: 6:00–7:30 p.m. | Alice Statler AuditoriumReception: 7:30–8:30 p.m. | Park AtriumFree ticket required for in-person attendance. Reserve your ticket for the lecture and/or reception today! Join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell. *** How did President Alvarado's policies protect Costa Rica's environment? Read a Bartels explainer by the Lab of O's Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez. *** About Carlos Alvarado Quesada Carlos Alvarado Quesada was Costa Rica's 48th president, serving from 2018 until 2022. He was Costa Rica's youngest president in a century, taking office at age 38. Representing the Citizens' Action Party (PAC), Alvarado previously served as minister of labor and social security. Alvarado received the 2022 Planetary Leadership Award from the National Geographic Society for his commitment and action to protect the ocean. He accepted on behalf of his country the 2019 Champion of the Earth Award, the United Nations' highest environmental honor. A writer and political scientist, Alvarado is currently Professor of Practice of Diplomacy at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Massachusetts. *** About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience, this year's lecture is cosponsored by Einaudi's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. The Einaudi Center’s flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

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.

Asian borders are often sites of division, surveillance, and militarization that usurp histories of indigenous sovereignty and fluid mobility, even as they are developed as zones of superficial connectivity. Against these spectacles, ordinary people escape and cross borders every day, often in illicit, unspectacular ways. For example, in the late 1980s, a network of transnational 'rebel' organizations facilitated the clandestine movement of Kachin children across Myanmar's borders into China and India for safekeeping. Undertaking dangerous journeys and dodging multiple security regimes, the children lived most of their lives as ‘illegal’ transnational subjects, only to return decades later to a distant war-torn 'homeland.' Building on a book project that assembles such oral histories and ethnographies of mobility across Myanmar’s borderlands, this talk explores what trans-Asia might mean when seen from the border-worlds of Asia. In doing so, it shows the production of Asian spaces and identities that do not sit comfortably within the boundaries of area studies.

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.

Reading by V. V. Ganeshananthan (Novelist)

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever. Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Books will be available for sale and signing from Buffalo Street Books after the reading.

Please join Cornell's Society for Buddhist Studies for a virtual talk by Prof. Richard F. Nance (Indiana University).

Attributed to the great Sarvāstivādin thinker Vasubandhu, the fifth-century Buddhist text The Logic of Explication (Vyākhyāyukti) is perhaps best known today for the elegant arguments it offers against dismissing Mahāyāna traditions as insufficiently Buddhist. But to narrowly focus on these arguments is to risk missing both the text’s broader agenda and its imbrication with two additional texts that make up what has sometimes been called “the Vyākhyāyukti literature.” The effort to read these three texts together generates intriguing philological puzzles. Prof. Nance will present a few of these puzzles, and will offer tentative suggestions as to how each might be (dis)solved. Such work carries implications for how we think about the authorship and function of these texts, their transmission down through the centuries, and how we might proceed today in our own attempts to understand and explicate them.

The talk is sponsored by the GPSA-FC and the Department of Asian Studies, and is open to all interested.

Given the intertwined history of industrial capitalism, extraction and colonialism, this symposium will explore the pending reparations to their victims from a multidisciplinary perspective. Acknowledging the accountability of the first industrializing countries of the Global North to the previously colonized countries of the Global South, the symposium will address the importance of material and moral reparations in bringing justice to the residual inequalities caused by slavery and racism, environmental extraction and pollution. The intention is to explore the intersections between colonialism and climate change, de-colonization and de-carbonization, transitional justice and energy transition.

This symposium will continue the discussion from the “Repair and Reparations” panel series organized by Esra Akcan as director of the Institute for European Studies, at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell. Information and links to the recordings of the panels are included below.

PROGRAM

10:00—10:15 A.M. Introduction: ESRA AKCAN, Cornell University

REPARATIONS: THE CONCEPT AND PENDING REPARATIONS FOR COLONIALISM

10:15—12:15 P.M.: Presentations by Panelists:

RUTI TEITEL, New York Law School

REBECCA BOEHLING, University of Maryland

LILIANE UMUBYEYI/AMAH EDOH, African Futures Lab

TIFFANY FLORVIL, The University of New Mexico; The American Academy in Berlin

12:15—12:45 P.M. Discussion: Moderated by NATALIE MELAS, Cornell University

REPARATIONS FOR CLIMATE REFUGEES

1:45—3:15 P.M.: Presentations by Panelists:

ANNE MCCLINTOCK, Princeton University

BRONWYN LEEBAW, University of California, Riverside

WILLIAM FLEMING, University of Pennsylvania

3:15—3:30 P.M. Coffee break

ASHLEY DAWSON, City University of New York

ANOORADHA IYER SIDDIQI, Barnard College, Columbia University

4:30—5:00 P.M. Discussion: Moderated by IFTIKHAR DADI, Cornell University

5:00—5:30 P.M. General Discussion and Future Plans

PANELIST BIOGRAPHIES

Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, the Director of the Institute for Global Law, Justice, and Policy, and a co-director of the Center for International Law at New York Law School. She is one of the world’s leading experts on international human rights and the foremost thought-leader of transitional justice. She is the author of a wide body of work, including three books: Globalizing Transitional Justice (2014), Humanity’s Law (2011), Transitional Justice (2000), all published by Oxford University Press. Prof. Teitel is the founding co-chair of the Interest Group on Transitional Justice and Rule of Law at the American Society of International Law. She is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Rebecca Boehling is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of the study, A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany, as well as numerous articles on Germany under U.S. occupation. She is also the co-author of a personal history told through letters, Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story . From 2013 to 2015 she directed the International Tracing Service in Germany, co-editing multiple volumes of its yearbook. In 2016, she was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin where she researched comparative histories of denazification.

Liilian Umubyehi is the Co-founder and Executive Director of African Futures Lab, an organization which aims at tackling the lack of accountability regarding historical and contemporary racial injustices in Europe and Africa, by investigating these injustices and by supporting the efforts of racial justice actors to hold States accountable. Prior to establishing AfaLab, Liliane worked in the field of international development (United Nations, Lawyers without Borders, and the American Bar Association, International Centre for Transitional Justice) on projects concerning access to justice for marginalized groups, transitional justice, and gender justice. This professional background and her lived experience in Africa (Rwanda, South Africa, Central African Republic) and in Europe (Belgium, France) inform her thinking about the decolonization of development policy and practice, the decolonization of international law and justice systems, and the possibilities for repairing historical and contemporary racial violence. Liliane holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France) and in Law from the Université Saint Louis Bruxelles (Belgium), and her dissertation focused on apartheid victims' mobilizations in South African and American courts.

Amah Edoh is the Homer A. Burnell Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-founder of the African Futures Lab. Her research takes as its focus the circulation of material and visual objects across West Africa and Europe to interrogate the production of Africa as a category of thought. Edoh has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Togo and the Netherlands. is an anthropologist interested in how “Africa” as a category of thought is produced through material practices across African and non-African sites.

Tiffany N. Florvil is Associate Professor, Department of History, at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African diaspora, Black internationalism, as well as gender and sexuality. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, APuZ, Signs, and The German Quarterly. Florvil has also co-edited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories (2018 hardback and 2022 paperback), as well as published chapters in Gendering Post-1945 German History (2019) and To Turn this Whole World Over (2019). Her manuscript, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press 2020), offers the first full-length institutional and intellectual history of the modern Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s. Her book won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies First Book Prize in 2021 among other honors. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Women’s History and Central European History and the founding editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press. Currently, Florvil is working on an intellectual biography of Black German activist and author May Ayim and is the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Anne McClintock is the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. McClintock’s interdisciplinary and transnational work—both scholarly and creative—explores the intersections between race, gender and sexualities; imperialism and globalization; visual culture and mass media; sexual and gender violence; and environmentalism and animal studies. Her work includes Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest; Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited), as well as creative non-fiction and photographic essays. She has won many awards, including two MacArthur-SSRC fellowships, Columbia Human Rights Distinguished Fellowship, Feminist Scholars Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and numerous artists residency fellowships. Her public writing and photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica Magazine of Arts and Politics, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, Women’s Review of Books, and Truth Out, among others. Her writing has been translated into 13 languages.

Bronwyn Leebaw is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses on human rights, transitional justice, political theory, international politics and ethics, and environmental justice. Leebaw has published articles on human rights, humanitarianism, and transitional justice. Her research critically examines how human rights and transitional justice practices have conceptualized, documented, judged, and avoided various forms of resistance to the abuses that they confront. Anotherproject, entitled, Scorched Earth: Environmental Justice and the Legacies of War, traces efforts to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate wartime environmental devastation from just war theory through the contemporary environmental justice movement.

Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, a senior fellow with Data for Progress, and co-director of the "climate + community project at Penn. Fleming is also co-author of “The Indivisible Guide”, co-editor of “Design With Nature Now” and “The Adaptation Blueprint”, author of Drowning America: The Nature and Politics of Adaptation”, and co-founder of Data Refuge. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, Jacobin, Dissent, CityLab, The Guardian, Landscape Journal, and LA+. Before joining Penn, Fleming worked on urban policy development in the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama Administration. Before joining the faculty at Penn, Fleming worked on urban policy development in the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama Administration.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and is co-editor of a soon-to-be-published volume of essays called Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions).

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), which conceptualizes architectures of migration and histories of settlement through spatial politics, visual rhetoric, and ecologies of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. She is completing the book A Modern Architecture of the Past, on heritage politics understood through the work and intellectual career of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier. Siddiqi’s scholarship aims to create collaborative practices of mutual support to foreground histories of those systematically marginalized or silenced. Among many written and edited publications, Siddiqi co-edited the online collection Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration (ABE: Architecture Beyond Europe, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Aggregate, 2019-2022). She is a director of the Columbia University working group Insurgent Domesticities and a co-chair of the University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa.

New Perspectives on Postwar and Postcolonial Reparations

Panelists: Ruti Teitel, Rebecca Boehling, Nicholas Mulder, Tiffany Florvil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlT5e6q4M1M

This panel brought together scholars who provided new perspectives on the material and moral reparations of the postcolonial, post-Nazi and post-communist eras in Germany, as well as the significance of these restitutions in serving as a model for transitional justice and international law. It explored both material and moral reparations, such as return and restitution of property that had been confiscated, monetary payments as compensation, and educational steps to take accountability for the past. The panel not only acknowledged these reparations to ex-citizens and refugees, but also questioned the limits of established formulas and the lack or inequality of restitutions throughout the history of today’s Germany.

Colonialism Reparation and Truth & Reconciliation Commissions

Panelists: Pablo de Greiff, Amah Edoh, Pedro Monaville, Liliane Umubyeyi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtGaN2A_tC4

This panel explored the theme of reparations and restitutions to bring justice to the residual inequalities caused by slavery and colonization. It focused on the recent developments to institute a sort of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Belgium, which was approved in Summer 2020 in the form of a parliamentary Special Commission to scrutinize the country’s colonial past. The multidisciplinary panel put into conversation scholars who commented on the history of Belgium’s colonization in Congo, on the recent movements in conjunction with Black Lives Matter including the toppling of the King Leopold II Monument that sparked the demand for accountability, and on the current debate around truth and reconciliation in Belgium, as well as its place in other transitional justice processes around the world.

Repatriation of Museum Objects

Panelists: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Jonathan Fine, Cécile Fromont

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7H4J30nig

This panel was organized to bring together museum curators and scholars to comment on the recent discussions on repatriation and restitution as a form of reparation to colonized and looted lands. While museums in Europe and North America have occasionally returned objects to their native communities or lands of arrival, the issue of repatriation gained an accelerated epistemological and ethical momentum at the end of 2018. What is the responsibility of museums to objects taken into their collections by violence or deceit during the colonial times or wars? What is the role of museum-object-repatriation in the recognition of colonial and military violence? What are the legal structures that prohibit or allow deaccession in the museums of different countries? Once the objects are parted from their communities and no longer serve their original sacred functions, where are they to be returned? What determines how far back museums consider repatriation claims legitimate and why? What is the future of “universal museums” around the world?

Repair and Reparations for Climate Refugees?

Panelists: Anne McClintock, Ashley Dawson, Bronwyn Leebaw, Anooradha Siddiqi, Billy Fleming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96KAQHK-ztc

The displacement of populations due to climate change forecasts an unprecedented phenomenon in human history. Neither international law nor nations are prepared to face up to this challenge in a way that would secure refugee’s human rights or their appropriate resettlement. This panel brought together different academic disciplines to bear on the question of rehabilitation and resettlement as a form of reparation to current and future climate refugees. How, if at all, is it possible to think of restitutions to climate refugees by acknowledging the accountability of the first industrializing countries of the Global North in imposing this displacement on the peoples of the Global South? Can we think of subsidized resettlement as one form of reparation to climate refugees? The intention was to start a conversation with scholars working in the areas of migration, transitional justice, architecture, activist art and environmental history on the possibility of a just response to the displacement of climate refugees.

A conversation about encounters, collaborations, and commitments that shape, motivate, and inspire anthropologists.

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities; Science and Technology Studies; and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Thank you.

Ashawari Chaudhuri is a visiting assistant professor in STS. Professor Chaudhuri's bio: I am an anthropologist of the environment, science, and medicine. My current book manuscript is a historically grounded ethnography of agricultural biotechnology in India. Along with asking what a good seed is for farmers and biotechnologists, I trace how knowledge about objects like genetically modified seeds is formed at intersections of practice, people, and time. My next project is an inquiry into the long relation between environmental heat and the body in South Asia. I find historically emerging meanings of words and concepts powerful. My teaching is often grounded in questions of ethics and creative negotiations with power around practices, technologies, and ideas that acquire palimpsests of meanings over time and across place.

Tanzeen Rashed Doha (PhD Anthropology, University of California, Davis; M.A. Philosophy, San Jose State University; M.A. Humanities, San Francisco State University) is a global racial justice postdoctoral fellow at the Einaudi Center. Doha is an anthropologist of Islam and secularism. His most recent research explores the relationship between race and religion as categories of modern secularity, specifically looking at questions concerning blackness and Islam. His current ethnographic work examines problems of betrayal, hypocrisy, false worship, disbelief, and other political and moral actions, and psycho-existential conditions, through an engagement with 20th century Islamist thought.

Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests are located in the overlap of experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology with a particular focus on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Currently, Khalvashi is finalizing two books Peripheral Shame: Affective City and Politics on the Margins of Georgia and A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics on the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen).