Alexander will speak about the changing international politics of cyber; from the renewed UN negotiations on norms that begin in September 2019 to the growing work on deterrence, attribution and sanctions responding to the hostile use of cyber capabilities by states.

Dr Alexander Evans OBE is Cyber Director at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He was previously Britain’s Deputy High Commissioner to India (2015-2018) and Britain’s Acting High Commissioner to India (November 2015 to March 2016).

Paul D. Williams is Associate Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Between 2011 and 2019, he was also a Non-Resident Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute in New York where he managed the “Providing for Peacekeeping Project.” He has also been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. His research focuses on the politics of contemporary peace operations and conflict trends in Africa.

Mezna Qato is junior research fellow in history at King's College, Cambridge. She is completing a book on the history of education for Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Her work revolves around three themes: social histories of Palestinian and Arab exile, the politics and practice of archives, and comparative settler colonialism. Her next project is a history of Palestinians in Haiti.

Information-psychological warfare comes in many disguises. In my talk I will present an analysis of assumptions underlying the contemporary Russian debate on information warfare. The focus is on research literature and other writings that can be thought of contributing to the formation of Russian security strategy.

Katri Pynnöniemi, assistant professor, University of Helsinki and National Defence University.

A sandwich lunch will be served at 12.40

Access to information (ATI) policies are often praised for enhancing transparency, accountability, and trust in public institutions, yet evidence that they lead to better governance outcomes is strikingly mixed. We argue that ATI policies do not improve institutional performance unless accompanied by mechanisms for preventing officials from avoiding compliance with information requests that could reveal poor performance.

The eleventh annual OxPeace Conference aims to explore some of the challenges to peace, and responses to those challenges, that arise from the ascendancy of human beings on planet Earth and the consequent impact on our environment.

OxPeace suggests as a working definition of ‘peace’: ‘Human security and human flourishing, in a sustainable environment, with the constructive management of conflict.’

Conference Dinner on Friday 17 May. Drinks will be served from 19.00 and dinner at 19.30.

Dinner tickets are £40 for non-students, but £20 if you are a student and among the first 15 students to register, full price thereafter. To honour this year’s theme, the dinner will be vegetarian – but wine is included!

Dinner speaker: Brian Lander, Deputy Director, World Food Programme, formerly at UNHCR.

Payment for the dinner must be made in advance, payment instructions will be sent to you.

This talk will focus on patterns of protest in Hong Kong during the last three decades or so and the tightening of political controls in the city over the course of the last several years. The presenter, who has been visiting Hong Kong regularly since 1987, will draw on his work as a specialist in the history of social movements and also his observations during his many trips to Hong Kong, including one that took place while the drama of the 2014 Umbrella Movement was underway.

Does campaign contribution limits reduce the influence of donors over elected officials and kickbacks for donors? Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits institutional rules determining contribution limits based on registered voters thresholds, we find that looser campaign limits affects donors participation: it reduces the number of donors per candidate and increases the average donations received by the winner of the election.