Reuters Institute / Nuffield College Media & Politics seminars
The following seminars will be given at 5pm on Fridays, normally in the Butler Room, Nuffield College.
Convenors: Meera Selva, David Levy, Andrew Dilnot

Join Professor Barbara F. Walter (UC San Diego) to discuss the themes of the 2018 Cyril Foster Lecture: 'The New New Civil Wars' in more detail.

Kimberley Johnson (New York University)

This paper explores the formation of black urban citizenship or “black urbanism” as a key part of the development of the 20th century American urban order. Rather than seeing black urbanism as reactive to American urban development, I argue that it both shapes and is shaped by urban political development. Such a reconceptualization shifts black urban politics from its “urban crisis" origins across time and space, affecting national, state and local political development.

Who do prime ministers prioritise during financial crises; voters or the market? The political economy literature finds that international financial actors closely watch and react to political developments such as elections, particularly during times of financial turmoil. Particularly during financial crises prime ministers are between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, voters demand social protection against economic uncertainty.

The Cyril Foster Lecture is the University's principal annual guest lecture in the field of International Relations. It has attracted a most distinguished group of lecturers.

Professor Barbara F. Walter (UC San Diego) will deliver the 2018 Cyril Foster Lecture: The New New Civil Wars.

I leverage exogenous variation in the historical origins of chieftaincy to study the effects of traditional leaders on voters' ability to extract state resources. Using original data on the history of traditional institutions in Northern Ghana combined with fine-grained census data, survey data, and polling station-level election results, I show that communities with chiefs from ethnic groups assigned to the colonial invention of chieftaincy in the late-19th century have less leverage to benefit from patronage exchanges with politicians today.

The main objective of this paper is to provide localized evidence about the mechanisms that may link oil wealth with the use of armed force against civilians by non-state armed groups in Colombia. Violence is studied in all three of the standard dimensions: onset, duration and intensity. This paper reports evidence on a subnational variant of a mechanism termed by the literature state-as-target.