The seminar will cover two major issues relating to horizontal inequalities:

o The importance of perceptions of inequality as a source of action; and the relationship of perceptions of horizontal inequalities to ‘objective’ measures, including both socio-economic inequalities and political inequalities.

o The relationship of horizontal inequalities and democracy. This will include a discussion of why and when one would expect such a relationship, in terms of both political and socio-economic inequalities, and some empirical evidence on the relationship

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, budget deficits returned to the political agenda. This revived an old question as to whether the partisanship of governing parties affects fiscal policy, where the conventional view is that the left tends toward excessive deficits. Though the existing scholarly evidence provides little support for this view, political rhetoric on the British Labour government’s borrowing, or that of SYRIZA in Greece, or other left parties around Europe, attests to its ongoing power. In this paper we seek to address three questions related to this conventional view.

Professor Harold Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale University and former Legal Advisor at the US State Department, will speak on 13 May at 5.00pm at the Manor Road Lecture Theatre on the topic of “International Law under Challenge in the Age of Trump”.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now well established as a transformative technology across multiple industries as well as in government and in scientific research. The impact of AI comes from its effect on intelligent decision making and predictions as well as from its facilitation of greater automation. As a general purpose technology, AI's beneficial impact can be considered akin to the invention of electricity or the development of the Internet. Such capabilities, however, are tempered by concerns, such as privacy infringement and automation induced unemployment.

Abstract: Since the Ukraine crisis, the dominant perspective on Russian foreign policy has come to emphasize its increasingly confrontational, even revanchist, nature. Experts have focused on discontinuities in Russian foreign policy either between the ostensibly more pro-Western Yeltsin presidency and the anti-Western Putin presidency or between the more cooperatively inclined early Putin (2000-2007) and the more confrontational late Putin (2007-present). Dmitry Gorenburg argues that Russian foreign policy preferences have been largely continuous since the early 1990s.