Cyril Foster Lecture 2025: 'How to End Wars: Pragmatic Approaches to Peacebuilding'

Over the past 50 years, the Cyril Foster Lecture series has delivered engaging lectures from some of the world's most influential policymakers and academics. This year's lecture will be given by Christine Ahn and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force, bringing together two leading, internationally renowned speakers on peace activism and peacekeeping. The lecture will be introduced by Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Lord Tarassenko, and chaired by Cyril Foster Lecture Chair, Professor Neta Crawford.

The Cyril Foster Lecture 2025:

Reflections on Italy - Roundtable and Panel Discussion hosted by Lord Patten

“Authoritarianism, nationalism, centralization, demagogy: surely these are evils from which we may expect to be cured” - Alessandro Passerin D’Entrèves, 1947.

In 1947, Alessandro Passerin D’Entrèves gave his inaugural lecture as Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Oxford. A scholar and Italian resistance fighter, he delivered the lecture less than two years after the end of the second World War. Passerin D’Entrèves saw his appointment as a chance to “cement the bonds of friendship and mutual understanding between England and Italy”.

Prof. Neta Crawford's Inaugural Lecture as the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations: The 'Fierce Urgency of Now': war, climate, and change in the deep time of world politics

Join us for the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations Inaugural Lecture, which will mark the appointment of Professor Neta Crawford to this highly prestigious position.

Professor Crawford will deliver the Lecture: The ‘Fierce Urgency of Now': war, climate, and change in the deep time of world politics. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception

Nuclear Terrorism: What is the Threat? (Oxford Cyril Foster Lecture 2023)

Nuclear terrorism remains a low probability, high consequence threat. Lack of access and capability will likely continue to inhibit most non-state-sponsored terrorism scenarios; and nuclear forensics, and the risk that a state-sponsor’s identity would be discovered, will likely inhibit proxy attacks. But several developments appear to be changing the nature of the threat. One of these is that non-state groups likely to be motivated to try to use radiological or improvised nuclear devices are changing and growing in number.

Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods

Our hybrid Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods offers graduate students and researchers from universities across the UK and abroad a unique opportunity to learn cutting-edge methods in Social Science.

The week-long Spring School is now in its 20th year and consists of five core courses in quantitative and qualitative methods. Participants who choose to attend one of these courses will also be invited to attend additional research methodology classes along with the full Spring School cohort in the mornings.

The course options are:

Democracy, Votes, and Participation

In recent decades, liberal democracies have considerably expanded the scope for citizen participation, calling their citizens to vote in a growing number of popular votes. This research investigates the effects of the rising election frequency on electoral participation. It theorizes which, when, and how past votes affect current voter turnout. We argue that all election types contribute to a common factor of election frequency, whose high values depress voter turnout and reduce the effectiveness of party mobilization even in the most important elections.

The Mathematics of Card Shuffling: A Journey Towards Randomness

How many shuffles does it take to mix a deck of 52 playing cards? Behind this simple question lies a surprisingly deep mathematical theory. In this lecture, we explore what it means for a deck of cards to be ‘well mixed’, examine several classical shuffling methods, and see why certain methods require far more iterations to produce a random deck than others. We will view card shuffling through the lens of random walks, a mathematical framework used to model phenomena across physics, evolutionary biology and beyond.

Housing, childcare, and employment: How cumulative discrimination compounds inequality

Ethnic, racial and religious minorities experience discriminatory behaviour and prejudicial attitudes across multiple areas of their lives, with these experiences accumulating over the life course.

In this seminar, Valentina Di Stasio, Professor of Sociology, and Stefanie Sprong, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, will present the EqualStrength project. This Horizon Europe-funded project aims to investigate cumulative and structural forms of discrimination through cross-national field experiments conducted in nine European countries.

Facts against femonationalism: how to stop radical right normalisation

How can liberal democratic actors counter the normalisation of the radical right? While much research documents how radical right ideology and anti-immigration positions have moved into the political mainstream across many Western democracies, far less is known about the counter-strategies that can be used to combat the normalisation of exclusionary policy agendas.

Racism without racists: Colour-blind ideology in post-Brexit Britain

Those who are ‘ideologically colour-blind’ do not express explicitly negative views of racial minorities but instead reject the argument that racial discrimination is a significant social problem (Bonilla-Silva 2003). In the UK, it has been shown that this ideology is as widespread among white voters as it is in the US, with previous research indicating that few racial minorities will subscribe to colour blindness.
Subscribe to

QS WORLD RANKINGS FOR POLITICS & INT’L STUDIES: 2

BEST UK UNIVERSITIES FOR POLITICS – THE GUARDIAN: 1

THE WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKINGS FOR POLITICS AND INT’L STUDIES: 1 IN THE UK