Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement

Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University).

Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement

Dr Sarah Wolff is the Director of the Centre for European Research and Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Since 2019, she is Principal Investigator for the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence NEXTEUK project on the future of EU-UK Relations. Senior Research Associate at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael), her research interests include EU politics and public policy, non-majoritarian agencies, Justice and Home Affairs policy (migration and border management policies), as well as EU external relations and EU development aid.

It is estimated that up to $900 billion is lost to corporate tax avoidance every year. This amounts to almost 40 percent of the global profits of multinationals. These profits are dominated by the big tech MAAFiA group - Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet. A small number of corporate tax centres in Europe are central to their profit-shifting and wealth-protecting strategies: Ireland, Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg. We know a lot about the economics of tax avoidance.

Recent global demographic trends suggest that agrarian ways of life are best thought as relics of the past. Urbanization has won the day and will claim our future. At the same time, however, many of the world’s land and water habitats, along with the communities of life they support, are under assault and are being systematically degraded.

Humanitarian diplomacy is making its mark today as a significant sub-field of diplomacy. The term has been widely taken up in recent years by governments, UN agencies and NGOs, all of whom are now running an increasing number of training courses on this niche area of diplomacy. This seminar looks back in history at the long practice of humanitarian diplomacy. It then examines how humanitarian diplomacy is being defined anew today and the challenges it faces in different types of organization.

About the speaker

Bayesian network methods have recently gained great popularity in machine learning literature and applications to model uncertainty in complex phenomena that include relationships between multiple random variables. However, these models are not commonly applied in economics and development studies. Here, we introduce the Bayesian network classifier models to estimate the probability of a person to be welfare deprived in one and multiple dimensions. These probabilities are then used for measuring vulnerability to multidimensional poverty (VMP) in four alternative measurement frameworks.

Despite the large number of working-class students having to work while attending schools, their work experience and the potential of class solidarity have been largely unaddressed. By bringing in a social psychological perspective, this article revives the sociological debates of working-class solidarity and challenges the defeatist view of solidarity since the neoliberal turn of the global economy. This article comprises two studies.

Ms Waad Alkhatib (Film Maker, For Sama)

Waad is a Syrian film maker and one the main characters in the documentary For Sama. The documentary, which captures life under siege in Aleppo, has won an EMMY, a BAFTA and more than 95 awards. Waad was named as one of the Time 100 and BBC 100 women. Having witnessed the Syrian uprising from its early days, Waad continues to be a strong international advocate on human rights in Syria, particularly on the issue of bombing of hospitals.

Mr Ibrahim Olabi (Guernica 37, Syrian British Council)

About the Event: The SDGs include a number of ‘universal’ targets for water, hunger and poverty, but what does that really mean and how are these measured in practice? There are many inequalities related to who can access and benefit from water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH services) and a major challenge is how these are measured, tracked and communicated. This is fundamental to accelerating progress in achieving SDG 6 if we really aim to leave no one behind.