Conferences and Workshops
Recent Workshops and Conferences
“Something Going Wrong with the Bomb”: Rethinking Nuclear Weapons and Global Security | September 17, 2026
In the acclaimed 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, an American president calls a drunken Soviet Premier with bad news: “…Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...” The “something” is a deranged commander who has launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which leads to nuclear apocalypse. While a global apocalypse has yet to materialize, the history of nuclear weapons is full of other things going wrong. Indigenous lands have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have died of cancer, and trillions of dollars have been spent on weapons that one U.S. Defense Secretary ultimately concluded were “useless.”
Today the majority of the world’s nations have joined the Treaty for the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and surveys suggest strong public support for the TPNW, even in nations that possess nuclear weapons. However, the nine nations in the world that have nuclear weapons are continuing a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race which endangers all life on earth. In this full-day symposium, distinguished experts from diverse disciplines—including physics, political science, history, feminist studies, and peace and conflict studies—will discuss contemporary dangers of nuclear weapons, how we got here, and how we can work for a more secure and peaceful future.
This symposium is cosponsored by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Department of Government at Cornell University, on the occasion of Professor Matthew Evangelista’s retirement from Cornell. Professor Evangelista’s scholarship makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the nuclear arms race and means of ending it, and we are pleased to honor his distinguished career in peace and conflict studies.
Panels:
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM: Nuclear Arms Races and How to Stop Them
Ray Acheson (Princeton), David Cortright (Cornell), Lisbeth Gronlund (MIT)
11:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Lunch Break
12:00 PM to 1:15 PM: Keynote: Benoît Pelopidas, Sciences Po, Paris
1:15 PM to 1:30 PM: Coffee Break
1:30 PM to 2:45 PM: New Perspectives on Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control
"Banning or Facilitating the Test? Reconsidering the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty"
Ruoyu Li (Colgate)
“Atmospheric Absorption: Nuclear Weapons and the Science of Climate Doomsday in the 1970s”
Benjamin Wilson (Harvard)
2:45 PM to 3:45 PM: Coffee Break
Guest appearance by Frank von Hippel and David Holloway via Zoom
3:45 PM to 5:15 PM: Panel: Nuclear War and Climate Catastrophe
Neta Crawford (St. Andrews), Zia Mian (Princeton), and Benoît Pelopidas (Sciences Po)
Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies
Co-sponsor
Department of Government
Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) Meeting
A two-day meeting to be held on October 28 and 29 will bring together invited scholars and practitioners from the EGAP network, along with other experts in two thematic areas, to showcase findings, identify research questions and promising interventions, and provide opportunities for matchmaking between researchers and practitioners.
The two thematic areas are:
- Crime Reduction & Police Accountability
- Democracy, Conflict, & Polarization
Cybersecurity Expertise: Practice, Performance, Power
A two-day workshop held on June 16 and 17, 2022, aimed to center analysis of the people, organizations, and work that ultimately make and break cybersecurity in a way that bridges the gap between two very different kinds of methods and theoretical perspectives: science and technology studies, which tend to adopt a grounded and “bottom-up” approach to analysis; and international relations, which tends to take more of a “top-down” approach that centers nation-states and the international system.
Peacebuilding, Climate Change, and Migration
Anthropogenic climate change currently threatens to exacerbate displacement and conflict around the world. Through this workshop held virtually on March 22 and 24, 2022, we sought alternative outcomes and approaches to these challenges. The symposium was co-sponsored by the Migrations initiative.
Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Workshop on Peace and Conflict
On April 13, 2019, Reppy Graduate Fellows organized a workshop on interdisciplinary approaches to peace and conflict, inviting graduate students from Cornell and other universities to gather to present papers and discuss the topics of Infrastructure of Security, Historical Approaches, Ways of Knowing, and Shifts in Militarization.
Practicing Peace for Climate Justice: Haudenosaunee Knowledge in Global Context
Cornell graduate students led by Reppy Fellow Bruno Seraphin, organized a special event that took place on March 14, 2019. This was an interdisciplinary conversation was designed to engage the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace as a multifaceted legal and philosophical system well suited to address the political and environmental crises of our times. The interdisciplinary conversation engaged multiple academic departments and regional communities and was geared toward a robust Indigenous-centered theorization of the practice of peace.