Applications are now open for Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods 2026! Apply now: https://cvent.me/0EaK99 This renowned social science methods course will take place from Monday 23 March to Friday 27 March 2026, in both in-person and online formats. Our week-long programme offers graduate students and researchers a unique opportunity to learn cutting-edge methods in social science. Oxford Spring School 2026 consists of eight courses, which will be taught over five days.

Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Callum Harvey (callum.harvey@oii.ox.ac.uk) in advance to participate or with any questions. Attendance is online only. You do not currently have to be affiliated with the University of Oxford to attend and participate in discussions.

As Hungary approaches another pivotal national election, the stakes extend far beyond the country itself. Viktor Orbán’s long tenure has reshaped Hungary’s political system, strained relations with the European Union, and positioned the country at the centre of debates about rule of law, sovereignty, and democratic backsliding.

Join us for an expert talk on Highly Autonomous Cyber-Capable Agents (HACCAs), examining how offensive cyber capabilities in frontier AI models are advancing at speed. In a matter of months, systems have moved from near-zero to meaningful success on expert-level security challenges, with leading developers already triggering internal cybersecurity risk thresholds.

Is nuclear conflict manageable, or does any use of nuclear weapons inexorably push states toward escalation? And how do these dynamics differ between nuclear- and conventional-armed attacks? Many theorists have considered these questions, but empirically answering them is difficult given the absence of historical data. We address this challenge by fielding a pre-registered experimental survey of American adults designed around a series of hypothetical vignettes featuring attacks on the United States.

Law is not just a set of rules to comply with (or not), but a terrain of political struggle. As the war in Gaza began 2023, leading politicians, international lawyers, and ordinary people engaged on that terrain, to advance strategy and honor principle. This lecture considers how the demand for war to be fought within humane limits has shaped how activists, observers, and politicians argue in the present and imagine the future.

This paper introduces and reports the first results of a research project on the emerging billionaire-entrepreneurs of the Visegrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The increasing visibility of V4 billionaire-entrepreneurs has largely happened under the radar of recent scholarship, and their economic activities — including increasingly significant outward FDI towards the West — seem to defy the dominant thesis of the Visegrád countries' economic dependence on foreign capital.

TBC

The Oxford Computational Political Science Group (OCPSG) is pleased to announce its speaker event w/ Prof Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, FBA and Amara Otero-Salgado. They will be presenting their paper 'Measuring Empirically the Legal Conflicts over U.S. Public Lands from 1960 to 2024'. It seeks to better understand how conflicting views over public lands have evolved over time, namely by examining empirically a newly developed dataset to assess competing narratives that have driven legal battles in the U.S. in the modern era of environmental policy.