Marginality and insecurity have long been loosely twined together in Colombia, especially within the context of conflict. The 2016 Havana Peace Accord was heralded for ending America’s longest internal armed conflict and creating an opportunity to confront high rates of marginality and insecurity through an ambitious comprehensive agreement that made explicit the need for peaceful political participation to build sustainable peace. Yet the initial accord was defeated in plebiscite, an anti-accord president was elected in 2018, and implementation of key points has been slow.

We evaluate the extent to which individual preferences for secession are affected by anticipated trade, fiscal, and employment shocks following independence. We draw from an original survey conducted in Catalonia before the 2017 regional election, which followed a suspended declaration of independence. We show that material interest informs preference for and against secession, complementing existing scholarship that emphasizes ethnic identity considerations.

This year’s China Centre Distinguished Lecture will be in the form of a conversation (followed by a general discussion) with Peter Wittig, German Ambassador to the UK.

In this term’s final session of the Global Thinkers of the International Discussion Series, Dr Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke, Research Associate of the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge and Professor Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge will speak on Brazilian internationalist Giberto Freyre.

As ‘Global International Relations’ seeks to overcome the Western-centric parochialism of mainstream International Relations, scholars are cautious about reproducing similarly parochial accounts of the international from differently-situated vantage points. They are suspicious, therefore, of discourses of foreign policy ‘exceptionalism’ among countries of the non-West.