This seminar will held in person as usual and will not be affected by the UCU strike.

Three decades of research have documented substantial cross-cultural variation in the ideal attributes and behaviors that followers expect from their leaders in the domain of politics, business, sports and religion. In the East, employees tend to describe their ideal managers as more paternalistic and authoritarian than in the West, for instance. Furthermore, whereas only 5% of respondents in Sweden believe that men make better political leaders than women, in Egypt this is more than 80% (World Values Survey, 2022).

Sandwiches will be available from 12.40

Though China has arguably the world’s most dynamic lunar exploration programme, it is only one of several countries with ambitious plans to visit the Moon. Over the next decade, numerous international missions are expected to land at just a handful of small sites on the lunar surface, a clustering of activity that portends crowding and interference problems. These challenges in view, several countries are leading efforts to develop international governance institutions and mechanisms to manage activities at these lunar sites. China’s role in these efforts may prove pivotal.

This talk examines how Taiwan’s security has been affected by great power competition between the United States and China. It argues that the geostrategic aspect of great power competition has been a destabilizing factor in the Taiwan Strait, while the geoeconomic aspect has been a stabilizing factor. Against the backdrop of the U.S.-China rivalry, the United States has cooperated more closely with Taiwan at the political and military levels, raising doubts about the unofficial character of U.S.-Taiwan relations and the United States’ non-support for Taiwan’s independence.

Sandwiches will be available from 12.40.

As China opened up its economy over the past four decades, conventional wisdom held that the country’s growing embrace of free markets would lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s unprecedented economic growth has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West. At the 20th Party Congress in Beijing in October 2022, Xi Jinping was appointed to a third five-year term as China’s supreme leader, and many have commented on his renewed embrace of Maoist principles.

Sandwiches will be available from 12.40

Dr Hertog will present the key arguments of his new short monograph “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism” published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues against the received wisdom that neo-liberal reforms are the main culprit explaining slow growth, corruption and inequality across low- to mid-income Arab countries. It instead proposes that it is the uneven presence of the state – over-protecting some while neglecting others – that accounts for the region’s lopsided development and creates deep insider-outsider divides in Arab economies.