Emmy Simmons is an independent consultant on international development issues with a focus on food, agriculture, and Africa. She is currently a member of the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, the Board of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and the Board of DevWorks International. She serves as a non-resident senior adviser for food security programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She has previously served on other Boards and advisory groups, including as a co-chair of AGree, an initiative that brought together a diverse group of interests to transform U.S. food and agriculture policy, and as a co-chair of the Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability at the National Academies of Science. She completed a career of nearly 30 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2005, having served since 2002 as the assistant administrator for economic growth, agriculture, and trade, a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed position. Prior to joining USAID, she worked in the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in Monrovia, Liberia, and taught and conducted research at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. She began her international career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines from 1962 to 1964. She holds an M.S. degree in agricultural economics from Cornell University and a B.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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This talk will provide an overview of the Intra-Afghan peace process from the comparative peace process point of view and the missed opportunities by key actors involved in the negotiation process. It offers challenges in protecting and promoting women's rights in Taliban's Afghanistan.


​Madhav Joshi is research professor and associate director of the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He oversees the data coding on the implementation of peace agreements worldwide for the PAM project and leads the research initiatives on peace agreement design, implementation, and post-implementation political and economic developments.

Dr. Joshi earned his PhD in comparative politics and research methodology from the University of North Texas in 2010. His research and teaching focus on civil wars, mediation, post-civil war democratization and democratic survival, peace duration and peacebuilding, quality peace, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. He has published on these topics in Social Science Research, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, Democratization, Global Governance, and many other journals. Dr. Joshi has authored and co-authored over 70 policy briefings to facilitate ongoing negotiations on issues related to peace accord contents and implementation challenges for the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (Philippines), Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nepal Transition to Peace, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (Colombia), the United Nations Development Programme, and many civil society organizations involved in peace processes around the world.

Journalist Sanam Maher spent several years investigating the murder of Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch. Questions arising from Maher’s investigation—What kind of woman is the country’s culture willing to tolerate? And how did Qandeel encourage a generation of Pakistani women to inhabit the same online spaces she was viciously trolled in—broaden into larger questions of how sex is being talked about, and, as importantly, how it isn’t. To censor those discussions is to refuse to have a conversation about one’s own culture and society. If instead we invited those conversations, what is the worst that could happen?
 
Sanam Maher covers stories on Pakistan’s art and culture, business, politics, religious minorities, and women. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Caravan, Roads & Kingdoms, and The Times Literary Supplement, amongst others. Her first book, A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch, appeared in 2018. She participates in the International Writing Program’s Fall Residency courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. 
 

By Meena Khandelwal on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020
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​A colleague in engineering took a group of students to visit a village in Rajasthan, India; they learned that women and girls were trekking long hours to find and haul firewood that was once available just outside their homes-simply to cook a meal. Availability of a solar cooker, they thought, would not only address the problem of deforestation but would also ease women’s workload and put more girls in school. The engineers’ consideration of perspectives from cultural anthropology and gender studies led to an awareness that the cook-stove problem is not only technological, but also environmental, cultural and political. The project now involves a multi-disciplinary group of colleagues conducting research on the complex nexus of forests, energy, gender relations, health, consumption and culture.Thus far, three publications have resulted from this collaboration. 

By Brenda Longfellow, Wednesday, October 30, 2019