In the fall of 1920, the Egyptian police found seventeen female corpses buried under the floor of five houses in the working-class district of Labban, Alexandria. Several men and women were charged with the mass killing, yet two sisters among them – Rayyā and Sakīna – came to be remembered as its main perpetrators. This paper interrogates the genealogy of such representation. It seeks to show how, months before the trial and with no police evidence, the Egyptian press presented Rayyā and Sakīna as the masterminds of the crimes and Rayyā, in particular, as the boss of the gang.

What explains patterns of state repression during civil wars? To address this question, this paper analyzes novel data on rebel attacks and security operations during Algeria’s War of Independence from France. The data were constructed from 15,000 pages of declassified intelligence documents collected from France’s national archives, providing a uniquely fine-grained picture of violence in Algeria over time and across this territory.

Drawing upon his new book, The Once and Future World Order, the speaker will reflect on China’s past, current and future world order-making, addressing the opportunities and challenges it faces in reshaping global governance, Asian security and great power relations. He argues that while the end of the US- or West-dominated world order has much to do with China’s rise, this does not mean a Chinese-dominated world order is emerging. Rather, China will be one of the key players in a multiplex world, rather than a conventional multipolar or G2 world.

As China’s flagship platform for cultural diplomacy, the global expansion of Confucius Institutes has been shadowed by mounting controversy ‒ particularly in the West. Allegations have cast them as vehicles of propaganda, geopolitical influence, espionage, and even as threats to academic freedom or instruments of surveillance over Chinese students abroad. Are these claims justified? How do Confucius Institutes actually operate?

Scholars argue that great powers must be technological leaders, and that autocracies, which suppress creativity and information flows, will stifle innovation. Many observers of China’s rise thus argued that it would be unable to compete technologically with the United States. Professor Lind's book, Autocracy 2.0: How China's Rise Reinvented Tyranny (Cornell University Press 2025), challenges this view by showing that China has become a global innovation leader.

In the early 1940s, Nationalist China was an important shaper of the post-World War II economic order founded at Bretton Woods; by the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had become a target of Cold War economic sanctions and absent from the order’s major institutions. Tracing Nationalist and Communist ideas about China’s place in the international economic order, Amy King examines how these ideas shaped, and were shaped by, the changing character of that order from World War II to the early Cold War.

Xi Jinping has preserved his position but can he revive reform? In this talk, Dr Willy Lam will examine supreme leader Xi Jinping’s relations with principal stakeholders in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) establishment, including the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) top brass, the spies and security-related cadres, fellow princelings, and party elders. Particular focus will be put on his ties with top generals and admirals, including speculation that his military proteges have been removed by his foes so as to isolate Xi.

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world ‒ and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang.