Kate O'Regan, founding director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, discusses media freedom and free speech in South Africa, where she served as a judge of the Constitutional Court from 1994-2009.
Siniša Malešević, Full Professor in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin, speaks at the second Ideas and Political Violence seminar.
Dr Corinna Jentzsch from Leiden University discusses the concept of auxiliary armed forces and how it applies to both government militias and insurgent police forces, with a focus on the African context in general and the case of Mozambique's civil war in particular.
Seth Flaxman, from the Oxford's Department of Statistics, explains how he has used data to enable predictive analysis of US elections.
By using ecological inference and census data, Seth has estimated not only “exit poll” style results (such as Trump’s level of support among white women), but entirely novel categories. The data analysis has also allowed researchers to explore which characteristics listed in the census predict voting behaviour, and non-voting.
The cyber revolution is the revolution of our time. The rapid expansion of cyberspace brings both promise and peril. It promotes new modes of political interaction, but it also disrupts interstate dealings and empowers non-state actors who may instigate diplomatic and military crises. Despite significant experience with cyber phenomena, the conceptual apparatus to analyze, understand, and address their effects on international order remains primitive. Here, Lucas Kello adapts and applies international relations theory to create new ways of thinking about cyber strategy.
Over the course of Hilary Term (January to March) and Trinity Term 2017 (April to June), the Department of Politics and International Relations is convening a new seminar series on Ideas and Political Violence.
This series has been recorded and is now available in its entirety, along with an introduction from convenors Elizabeth Frazer and Jonathan Leader Maynard, explaining why they chose this topic, which parts of the series they found particularly interesting, and where they hope it will go in future.
What kind of challenge did a rising Japan in the 1970s and 1980s pose to the United States, and how does that differ from the challenge that China has posed to US primacy in East Asia since the early 2000s? This article compares and contrasts US responses to these two shifts in relative power, in the process aiming to elucidate how changes that portend a power transition are understood and dealt with and how great powers manage the security order at times of disruption.
