Next year the UN will hold a 'Summit of the Future' billed as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance cooperation on critical challenges and to address gaps in global governance". This talk seeks to explore the challenges and opportunities ahead for the UN:

* Can multilateralism be strengthened at a time of geopolitical tension and North-South mistrust?
* What are the implications of China's increased engagement in a range of international institutions?

Environmental politics often asks for our renunciation - for example by reducing waste or driving less. These contemporary forms of asceticism may seem remote from traditional Christian forms, and yet, even religious renunciation has often had political significance. This talk asks about the political significance of asceticism, especially in the work of Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton. It argues that Thoreau's nineteenth-century retreat described in Walden was playing on more ancient monastic practices, and that Thomas Merton was an inheritor of this vision of ecological justice.

Sandwiches will be served from 12.40

This is part of the Balliol College Oliver Smithies Visiting Lecturer Seminar Series.

Sandwiches will be served from 12.40. Please note that this seminar will finish earlier than usual, at 14.00, discussion will continue in the Kings Arms.

This presentation is an in-progress update of a research effort aimed at improving the US Defense Department’s concept of Integrated Deterrence. It discusses some of the concept’s difficulties as brought to light by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It offers some potential remedies as well.

Sandwiches served from 13.00. Please not the later start time.

This panel is the first event in the UK to take stock of the current state of the peace process(es) in Colombia, the “total peace” policy of President Gustavo Petro, and the challenges and opportunities of the current moment. Bringing together academics and practitioners, we will explore the peace talks between the government and the ELN guerrilla group, the legal framework created to negotiate with illegal armed groups, implementation of the 2016 peace accord with the FARC, and overall, the developments in peacebuilding since Petro took power last August and prospects for the future.

“An ambitious account of the corrosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike, arguing that antidemocratic sentiment reflects fear of material and cultural loss, not a critique of liberalism’s failure to deliver equality, and suggesting possible ways out”

Professor Bardhan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of California, Berkeley

Find out more about the book at https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674259843.

Join St Anne's College and the African Studies Centre for the launch of Dr Portia Roelofs new book, Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book draws on in-depth fieldwork in Nigeria to show how Nigerian political practice and thinking can inform alternative theorisations of accountability and transparency as part of a more socially-embedded understanding of good governance.