Omar Azfar Lecture - 'How much should we worry about inequality?'

On most measures income inequality in the UK has barely changed in 35 years. Indeed, it has fallen since the financial crisis. Yet public concern about inequality is higher than ever.

In this talk Paul Johnson will draw on the IFS Deaton review of inequalities to help understand this conundrum, and will also look at the sorts of areas - beyond tax and welfare - that policymakers ought to be exploring.

Jiyuan Sun

I am Dmitry (Jiyuan) Sun, a second-year MPhil student in political theory. I specialise in contemporary political philosophy, with focuses on political liberalism, public reason, autonomy, and state toleration.

Towards a Freer and more Open Indo-Pacific: The Takaichi Administration and its quest towards enhancing FOIP

Kotaro Katsuki is the Minister and Head of Political Section at the Embassy of Japan to the United Kingdom. He has held various managerial positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Headquarters and the Japanese Government including Free Trade Agreement negotiations, Sustainable Development Goals implementation and Sustaining Peace efforts among others.

How the global operating system is a sea-based phenomenon, ocean anarchy and why the sea matters to everyone

The oceans are the invisible infrastructure of modern civilisation—the global operating system upon which trade, energy, data, and climate stability depend. More than 80 percent of world commerce moves by sea, and over 95 percent of international internet traffic flows through undersea cables. Yet the maritime domain remains fundamentally anarchic: beyond the domestic seas, it is a space where states, corporations, and non-state actors contest resources, assert coercive power, or exploit regulatory gaps.

The End of Cybersecurity: An Optimist’s Guide to Fixing the Global Software Quality Problem

Many conversations today frame AI + cyber as a looming arms race—faster attackers, smarter malware, more breaches. But what if the real opportunity is to make the cybersecurity aftermarket obsolete by addressing its root cause: insecure, defect-ridden software? For nearly 40 years, the world has been patching the same types of software flaws that caused the first Internet crash in 1988. The truth is: We don’t have a cybersecurity problem. We have a software quality problem. That can finally change.

Military strategy and complex uncertainty

The preliminary lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war are not new; at their core these lessons have been described by military strategists throughout history. They are, however, an uncomfortable reminder that warfare is complicated and inherently complex, and combinations of, for example, human behaviour and fast innovation contribute to fast adaptive cycles and, arguably, increased unpredictability.

Allison K. Carpenter

I am a DPhil (PhD) student in Politics (Comparative Government) affiliated with the DPIR and Linacre College.

I hold a dual MA in Political Science (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Social Science (Humboldt University in Berlin). I also hold a BS in Business Administration and a BA in Contemporary European Studies, with a minor in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (Kenan Flagler Business School; UNC Chapel Hill).

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