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Invisible University for Ukraine: Essays on Democracy at War
(Cornell University Press, 2024-11-15)
Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) is an initiative of Central European University that began in Spring 2022, only months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since that time, nearly 1,000 Ukrainian students have taken online and on-site courses taught by hundreds of faculty from across Europe and beyond. The program's objective is to help sustain intellectual growth in the midst of incredible hardships, with coursework designed to mitigate the effects of the war on students' academic development and provide a framework to push back against autocracy. This volume recognizes the initiative of IUFU's organizers and its students, describes their work to sustain democracy, and outlines their innovative educational model developed in the face of ongoing war. For this important work, they are the recipients of the 2024 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe
(Cornell University Press, 2025-02-15)
Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe maps the generation and growth of novel forms of belonging in the years after World War II, crisscrossing the continent from Madrid to Warsaw and from Athens to London. Even as Europe struggled to rebuild, new forms of identity, statehood, and citizenship were beginning to take shape. Rachel Chin and Samuel Clowes Huneke bring together a diverse group of scholars to illustrate how citizenship was reimagined in the postwar decades in unusual settings and unexpected ways, while highlighting how ordinary citizens, living in democratic and authoritarian regimes alike, struggled to forge new kinds of belonging through which to assert their human rights and dignity. Ultimately, Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe contends that if we are to grapple with fraying citizenship in the twenty-first century, we must first look to when, how, and why citizenship originated in the calamitous years after World War II.
Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order: RT as Populist Pariah
Hutchings, Stephen; Tolz, Vera; Chatterje-Doody, Precious; Crilley, Rhys; Gillespie, Marie (Cornell University Press, 2024-09-15)
Through the prism of the first comprehensive account of RT, the Kremlin's primary tool of foreign propaganda, Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order sheds new light on the provenance and nature of disinformation's threat to democracy. Interrogating the communications strategies pursued by authoritarian states and grassroots populist movements, the book reveals the interlinked nature of today's global media-politics pathologies. Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Precious Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley, and Marie Gillespie provide a systematic investigation into RT's history, institutional culture, and journalistic ethos; its activities across multiple languages and media platforms; its audience-targeting strategies and audiences' engagements with it; and its response to the war in Ukraine and associated bans on the network. The authors' analysis challenges commonplace notions of disinformation as something that Russia brings to the West, where passive publics are duped by the Kremlin's communications machine, and reveals the reciprocal processes through which Russia and disinformation infiltrate and challenge the liberal order. Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order provides provocative insights into the nature and extent of the challenge that Russia's propaganda operation poses to the West. The authors contend that the challenge will be met only if liberals reflect on liberalism's own internal tensions and blind spots and defend the values of open-minded impartiality.
Thinking Otherwise: How Walter LaFeber Explained the History of US Foreign Relations
(Cornell University Press, 2024-09-15)
Thinking Otherwise addresses the question of what makes a great historian by exploring the teaching and scholarship of Walter LaFeber, widely acclaimed as the most distinguished historian of US foreign relations. This volume of essays, edited by Susan A. Brewer, Richard H. Immerman, and Douglas Little, is a testament to a scholar who published more than a dozen books during his time at Cornell University, where he delivered legendary lectures for half a century. The chapters trace LaFeber's journey as a scholar and demonstrate his enduring influence on the history of US foreign relations by linking six of his monographs to his abiding concern about the fate of the American experiment from the 18th century to the present. Thinking Otherwise explains and assesses the scholarship of a historian whose work became canonical in his lifetime and continues to resonate throughout public policy debates.
Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria
Seeley, Joseph A. (Cornell University Press, 2024-09-15)
Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu's seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Joseph A. Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors also spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan's wider political and economic power. Drawing on archival sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Seeley tells the story of the river and the imperial border haphazardly imposed on its surface from 1905 to 1945 to show how rivers and other nonhuman actors play an active role in border creation and maintenance. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons.