Rebecca HansonAssistant Professor of Crime, Law, and Governance, University of FloridaKellogg Institute Visiting Fellow Discussants:Abby CórdovaAssociate Professor of Global AffairsKellogg Faculty FellowRachel SweetAssistant Professor of Politics and Global AffairsKellogg Faculty FellowErnesto VerdejaAssociate Professor of Political Science and Peace StudiesKellogg Faculty FellowSince the mid-2000s Venezuela has been ranked one of the most violent countries in the world as homicides and police violence skyrocketed. Much has been written about the country’s turn to Chavismo but scholarship has ignored what will perhaps be the revolution’s most important legacy: how Chavista policies transformed coercive power and the security landscape. This panel will discuss the Rebecca Hanson's book of the same name, which provides the first in-depth analysis of policing and security policies during the left turn in Latin America by focusing on the experiences of three groups: police officers, police reformers, and residents of neighborhoods most affected by violence. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and survey research collected over ten years, she analyzes how security policies within the context of the pink tide and later turn to authoritarianism contributed to the expansion of lateral violence and the pluralization of non-state violent actors. Far from the always-already authoritarian project proposed by many scholars and pundits, Hanson shows that the Bolivarian Revolution was defined by highly contested and contrasting visions of security that resulted in a fragmented and inconsistent ordering of state and society. Moreover, by pairing the vantage point of street-level police officers with that of ordinary barrio residents, she provides a unique analysis of how insecurity during revolution was experienced “from below.”Click here for more information   

A story of resilience and creativity, "Creative Force" captures the inspiring stories of everyday Ukrainians who transform their daily professions into acts of defiance against an invading force. This documentary explores the intersection of creativity and resistance in times of conflict. Film director Alex LeMay and film producer Maris Lidaka will join for a Q&A following the film screening. This event is cosponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” will speak at the University in an event hosted by the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. Drawing on his work as a journalist, Blitzer will discuss how immigration became a political crisis. “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis” is an epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported book about the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. Blitzer tells this history through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate. The book has received widespread praise and was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New York Times and several other publications. The event is free and open to the public. A reception with book sales and a book signing will follow the lecture. Blitzer’s lecture ties in with the Klau Institute’s Migration Initiative, which launched last year through collaboration with other experts from across the Keough School of Global Affairs and the University as a whole. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Latino Studies, the Institute for Social Concerns, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy. Originally published at klau.nd.edu.

In this talk, Cheryl Lawther, professor at Notre Dame’s School of Law and a fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, will draw on her recently published book, Constructing Victimhood: Beyond Innocence and Guilt in Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024), to expand the criminological, victimological, and transitional justice image of who we “see” as victims, what we “hear” as experiences of victimization, and who makes these determinations. In her talk, Lawther will argue that if transitional justice is to live up to its claims of being “victim-centered,” it is essential to widen its conceptual and practical boundaries to recognize the multiple and overlapping variables that construct and reproduce victimhood. Lawther will be joined by Josefina Echavarría Álvarez, professor of the practice and director of the Peace Accords Matrix, Joachim Ozonze (PhD candidate in Peace Studies and Theology) and Emma Murphy (Post-Doctoral researcher, Kroc Institute & Keough-Naughton Institute). Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

Ahmed Mushfiq MobarakJerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and EconomicsYale University Mobarak will present his most recent research paper, "1970 Bhola Cyclone and the Birth of Bangladesh." This work explores the political impacts of one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded, the Bhola Cyclone that struck East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and killed 300,000 to 500,000 people. He will provide empirical evidence that the cyclone's devastation and the Pakistani government's "callous response" to it were instrumental in galvanizing support for an independence movement. In addition to this exciting talk, Mobarak also will discuss his involvement in the new interim government of Bangladesh, where he serves as part of the Planning Ministry Task Force. He will discuss connections between the historical incident of the cyclone and current events, and how large-scale events like the cyclone enable political transitions today. This lecture is part of a larger series organized by faculty fellows Alejandro Estefan Davila and Heitor Pellegrina entitled "New Frontiers in Economic Development." First organized in 2013, the series focused on microeconomic poverty interventions. The series now focuses on larger-scale economic issues and their impact in developing countries by featuring distinguished economists who deliver a public lecture as well as participate in a master class with graduate-level economics students. The series is cosponsored by the Department of Economics. More information here

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Silvana Patriarca (Fordham University) titled:"Anticolonialism(s) as antiracism(s)?" Italian Radicals Facing 'Race' and the Colonial Question at the Turn of the Twentieth Century In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Italians fully participated in the racialization of the African populations that they and other Europeans colonized. At the same time, Italians themselves were often racialized by other Europeans (including Americans) and engaged in the racialization of southern Italians. In this context, some anthropologists and sociologists of leftist orientation such as Napoleone Colajanni questioned the idea of “pure races” and the racial hierarchies that placed Nordic peoples (including northern Italians) above southern Europeans. A number of leftist and radical thinkers and politicians — radical democrats, socialists, and anarchists — also rejected colonialism and especially the consequences that colonial wars had for the inhabitants of a country like Italy that was still poor and underdeveloped. Some anarchist geographers even claimed a right to so-called “barbarity.” To what extent did the critique of colonialism (including the internal variety) lead to an explicit rejection of anti-Black racism? Were anticolonial thinkers able to express sympathy and solidarity with the colonized people victimized by European aggressions? Analyzing the works of the thinkers and the leftist press of that period, this lecture will address these questions as part of a larger project on the history of antiracist beliefs and sensibilities in modern Italian culture. Silvana Patriarca received her laurea at the University of Turin and her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Florida, and is currently a professor in the Department of History of Fordham University. She specializes in the history of modern Italy and her research has ranged from the social history of industrialization to the intellectual and political history of statistics to the cultural history of nationalism and the construction of national identities in their intersection with gender and “race.” The author of the award-winning Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press) and of Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge University Press), she has co-edited (with Lucy Riall) The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (North Carolina) and at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in Paris. Her most recent book, Race in Post-Fascist Italy: "War Children" and the Color of the Nation (2022), focuses on the experiences and representations of the "brown babies" born at the end of World War Two from the encounters between Black Allied soldiers and Italian women, and explores the persistence of racial thinking and racism in post-fascist and postcolonial Italy. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.