Elisabeth Tamte

Elisabeth Tamte is a first-year MPhil International Relations student. Her research focuses on international organisations, especially the ways their rules, structure, and decision-making processes are influenced by social constructs such as norms, values, power relations, and identities.

Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy

Book talk: Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.

Wild Ride is a tour-de-force journey through the rise and fall of the Chinese economy since the 1980s from a writer who witnessed it all up close. From the early transition of stagnation of the 1980s to the euphoria of the 1990s when investors hankered after a market of a billion people to the closing of the economy in the past decade, Anne Stevenson-Yang reveals the challenges of doing business in China.

The estate origins of democracy in Russia: from imperial bourgeoisie to post-communist middle class

This talk is based on the author’s newly published book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class. The book argues that the Bolsheviks failed to obliterate the social structure of Tzarist Russia, and that these divisions continue to have implications for understanding popular support for autocracy in Putin’s Russia. The author makes this argument by analysing the transition of Tzarist Russia’s educated proto-bourgeoisie into modern high human capital status groups.

Samuel Ritholtz

I am a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the DPIR, in association with St Hilda's College. Previously, I was a Max Weber Fellow and Part-Time (Assistant) Professor of Qualitative Methods in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the European University Institute. I earned my DPhil and MSc at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre and my BSc at Cornell University.

Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values and Institutions in Hong Kong

A lot has been written about the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and the aggressive police crackdown offered in response. Much less has been written about the more severe assault on liberal values and institutions that followed. In his new book Professor Davis takes a forensic look at both the growing Beijing intervention in Hong Kong affairs from the handover forward and its culmination in the more severe crackdown that followed the 2019 protests, the 2020 passage of the National Security Law, and the 2021 Beijing imposition of a patriots-only electoral system.
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