A talk by Hal Whitesman, Financial Times' Chicago and Midwest bureau chief.

Thanks to demand from big emerging economies, most South American governments have become increasingly "resource nationalistic" and have ramped up social spending to meet the needs of the poor and the indigenous, causing poverty levels to drop - at the same time as poverty has been on the increase in the United States.

Will the U.S. continue losing influence in Latin America? Will China soon dominate the area both commercially and strategically? Can the U.S. do business with countries from Mexico to Argentina without interfering in their internal affairs?

A talk by David Scheffer, Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University. As senior adviser to Madeleine Albright and then as President Clinton’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, David Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals is Scheffer’s gripping insider’s account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time.

Introduction by Susan Gzesh, Executive Director of the University of Chicago Human Rights Program and Senior Lecturer in the College.

Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established in 1994, efforts to secure international agreement on climate policy have gained increasing attention, but compromise on the issues has not been easy to achieve.

For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise. Venezuela Speaks! is the real, bottom-up account of the country's bloodless uprising and reorganization.

Co-editor Carlos Martinez will explain how the stories in Venezuela Speaks! offer a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez.

In this talk, Robert Pape presents findings from the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism demonstrating that, contrary to popular belief, religion alone motivates only a tiny minority of suicide attacks. Instead, the root cause is foreign military occupation, which triggers secular and religious people to carry out suicide attacks. From The World Beyond the Headlines series.

A talk by Whitney Cox, Lecturer in Sanskrit, School of Oriental and African Studies.

Imtiaz Gul is the Executive Director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. He is the author of three books on the ongoing security concerns in South Asia: The Unholy Nexus, The Al-Qaeda Connection, and The Most Dangerous Place. Gul addresses the longer term political and social consequences of the floods in Pakistan of July of this year.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Klimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

Raman Sukumar is the author of three books on the ecology and conservation of elephants, and the recipient of the International Cosmos Prize in 2006. He is presently completing a cultural history of the Asian elephant that will be published in late 2010. Using literary sources and artistic representation of elephants in painting and sculpture, Sukumar's talk traces the changing paradigms in the elephant-human relationship through history, and provides possible ecological explanations for the same.

Robert Glennon is a nationally-renowned water expert, and the author of Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It (2009). His previous books include the highly-acclaimed Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters (2002). Glennon is the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy in the Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. Glennon explores potential water futures for the U.S. — one driven by passivity, the other by foresight.