Authors: Eli Baltzersen, Francesca Jensenius, and Øyvind Søraas Skorge

The accuracy of voters' perceptions of party issue positions is critical for the functioning of representative democracy, and as a result, it has received heightened scholarly attention in recent years, thanks mainly to the availability of survey data asking respondents about their perceptions of party left-right positions.

Citizens from minoritized groups, including women and people of colour, tend to feel better represented by politicians who share their identity, often translating into electoral support. Is this also the case for disabled people, one of the largest yet often ignored minority groups in our societies? In-group affinity in representation can be driven by assumptions about shared preferences or by affective orientations and group consciousness.

Last year, 2023, went down as the hottest ever recorded as also one with an alarming increase in the frequency and severity of a wide range of climate change induced extreme weather events. This gives us a stark warning of climate change impacts we can expect in the future. Scientists have urged world governments to urgently make use of one last window of opportunity to shift course. However, considering the scale of this challenge, the responsibility extends to all key stakeholders, including the news media.

The two most powerful people in India today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, both embody a notion of ascetic sovereignty or rājayoga. In this talk I shall look at historical precedents of the ascetic sovereign, primarily in the period which is the main focus of my research, the 11th to 15th centuries, when several monastic institutions became independently powerful and their rulers functioned like kings.

From birth to death, from late-term abortion on the basis of the disability of the foetus, to choices about puberty blockers to the demand to legalise assistance with dying, our bodies have become legal battle-grounds. How far are we entitled to assert that it is simply a matter of our choice – and who gets to decide when and how we have the right to make that choice?

The evolving US–China competition promises to become the defining feature of international politics in the foreseeable future. US objectives in the competition consist of preserving its global hegemony in diverse dimensions in concert with allies and friends, whereas China’s objectives consist of weakening the US security system in the Indo-Pacific en route to becoming a peer competitor of the United States globally.

25 years ago, Gudni Jóhannesson was writing his doctoral dissertation in modern history at St Antony’s. He then worked in academia but in 2016, he became president of Iceland. That drastic shift provided unique opportunities but also unique challenges.