Alarmism persists over a growing Chinese Navy, yet Chinese naval strategy suggests defence rather than offence. The root of the problem is inferring too much from Beijing’s naval building programme. Simple capability analysis is too scientific – there is no room for analysis of Chinese maritime intent amidst counting new hulls and long-range missiles. If the West overreacts to a growing Chinese Navy, the risk of a damaging arms race in the Western Pacific increases.

Belarus was once Europe’s forgotten country, although that is no longer the case. President Lukashenko has been in power now for 31 years, the last dictatorship in Europe, remaining Russia’s closest ally. The country has suffered an extremely turbulent period, with mass protests in 2020, a brutal ongoing human rights clampdown taking place ever since, the forced diversion of Ryanair Flight 4978 to arrest a civil society activist and the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which was launched from Belarusian territory.

Dr Edward Howell is the Strategic Net Assessment Research Fellow with SST:CCW. His research concerns the politics, international relations, and security of the Korean Peninsula and East Asia, with particular interests in inter-Korean and DPRK-US relations, and the UK's relations with the Northeast Asia. His latest monograph, North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order: When Bad Behaviour Pays, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023, and his forthcoming monograph, A New Axis of Upheaval: North Korea, Russia, and China—and Why We Should Care is expected for publication in 2026.

The disagreements over Venezuela and Greenland have called into question the rules-based international order. Dr Johnson nevertheless asks whether strategically, this is a structural shift underway. He examines the consequences and the longer term implications.

This week brings together members of WGQ (perhaps the MSt cohort in particular) and participants in the Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes Collective, reflecting on what we have learned methodologically, conceptually and theoretically across the series.

*Contributors/Respondents:* Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes
Sara Johnson (UC San Diego, and AFEM) will be here in person.

Historian of Victorian childhood *Catherine Sloan* investigates what she does with boredom: how as the reader of a mass of Victorian magazines she has sat with the problem of repetitive sources, and developed new techniques of interpretation.

*Anthea Butler* is a historian of twentieth-century race, power and religion. She asks what we can learn from when there is a glut of archival material about women’s activities around reproduction, but historians focus unduly on white women and the right to the exclusion of work on the left. How do we weigh where to place our attention?