FPA Book Talk: Cobalt Red with Siddharth Kara

event_image 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  

Event Description

Please join the Foreign Policy Association 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 operations in the Congo.  There will be a reception following the lecture. Copies of Cobalt Red will be made available after the event. 

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.

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Event Speakers

    • Siddharth Kara - Speaker
      Author, Cobalt Red

      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 is the author of three other 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). He has taught courses on modern slavery at the Harvard Kennedy School, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.

      Across 23 years of research, Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves and child laborers. 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.

       

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