Prof. Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky is a Head of the BA Honors Track in Strategy and Decision Making at the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the IDC Herzliya, Israel. His research interests include international security, cultural approach to IR, modern military thought, and American, Russian and Israeli national security policy. He has published on these topics in Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Intelligence and National Security, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Journal of Cold War History.

How important is the de facto enforcement of political rights in new democracies? We use the enfranchisement of the emancipated slaves following the American Civil War to study this question. Critical to our strategy, black suffrage was externally enforced by the U.S. Army in ten Southern states during Reconstruction. We employ a triple-difference model to estimate the joint impact of enfranchisement and its enforcement on taxation. We find that occupied counties where black voters comprised larger shares of the electorate levied higher taxes compared to similar non-occupied counties.

Profs Stephen Whitefield and Florence Faucher will host an ‘OxPo Exchange Surgery’ on 8 February at 10am in Seminar Room C, Manor Road Building, for all those who might be interested to learn more about the OxPo exchanges (https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/oxpo/oxpo-call-for-applications.html), with tea, coffee, and biscuits.

Seth A. Johnston is Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is a Major in the United States Army, and most recently served as a task force commander with the NATO Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan. He was previously an assistant professor of international relations at West Point. Johnston earned his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2013, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

In this lecture, Sir John Adye will draw on his professional experience as the Director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and now as Chairman of Identity Assurance Systems Ltd. He will reflect on how GCHQ’s role has developed over the past 100 years, in carrying out its vital national tasks - Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security. Sir John will then discuss some international challenges which face the UK and our allies, in a rapidly developing digital environment.

There seems to be a growing consensus that previous assumptions about the long term consequences of China’s rise have turned out to be misplaced. Rather than China becoming ‘socialised’ into the liberal global order (and democratising at home), a China challenge to that order is instead being identified. This is seen not just as a challenge to the distribution of power within the current system, but to some of the fundamental norms and principles that underpin it, as well as to the theories and concepts that are used to try to understand it and predict future behaviour.