FPA Book Talk: Cobalt Red with Siddharth Kara

Event offered by:
Foreign Policy Association

Event Details

Date:
Thursday, April 13, 2023
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM 
Location:
PricewaterhouseCoopers
300 Madison Avenue
New York , NY
Event type
Conference  
Email: 
[email protected] 
Telephone: 
212-481-8100 EXT. 250  
Admission Types
General Admission: 35.00
Student Admission: Free
FPA/OTR Admission : Free
 

Event Description

Please join the Foreign Policy Association on Thursday, April 13th for a talk with author Siddharth Kara on his new book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives, a New York Times Bestseller that covers the human rights crisis behind the cobalt mining opertations in the Congo. This event will take place at PricewaterhouseCoopers located at 300 Madison Avenue from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. There will be a reception following the lecture. Copies of Cobalt Red will be be made available after the event. 

You can register for this event on eventbrite or by contacting [email protected] 

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.

Event Speakers

    • Siddharth Kara - Speaker
      Author, Red Cobalt

      Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, screenwriter, and activist on modern slavery. He an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kara has authored three books on modern slavery: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009); Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012); and Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (2017), each with Columbia University Press. Kara adapted Sex Trafficking into a Hollywood film, Trafficked, which held its world premiere at the United Nations in New York. Sex Trafficking also won the prestigious Frederick Douglass book prize at Yale University for the best non-fiction book on slavery. Kara has also authored the reports: Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India's Hand-Made Carpet Sector (Harvard, 2014), and Tainted Garments: The Exploitation of Women and Girls in India's Home-Based Garment Sector (UC Berkeley, 2019). He is working on a fourth book about the horrors of cobalt mining in the Congo. Across twenty years of almost entirely self-funded research, Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves of all kinds. He has mapped global human trafficking networks, explored the perilous underground of trafficked sex slaves, and traced global supply chains of numerous commodities tainted by slavery and child labor. Kara advises several UN agencies and numerous governments on anti-slavery policy and law. He has also appeared extensively in the media as an expert on modern slavery, including on CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, CNBC, National Geographic, and numerous documentary films. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.

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