LESZEK KOŁAKOWSKI LECTURE
Chair: Timothy Garton Ash (St Antony’s College, Oxford)

This talk will give an overview of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study, a partnership between Meta researchers and independent external academics to understand the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the US 2020 elections. Following the principles of independence, transparency, and consent, this project has implemented innovative features for this type of collaboration, such as pre-registration of analysis plans, no pre-publication approval by Meta, IRB review, and the release of data required to enable replication.

Theory and causal mechanism figures appear relatively often in theory chapters. The goal is almost always to provide an overview of a, perhaps somewhat complicated, causal mechanism that the author is proposing. Yet there is virtually nothing methodological literature about how one is supposed to do these mechanism figures: people just do it. The talk then surveys a variety of issues and provide suggestions about how to construct mechanism figures and what they should contain. This must then be at the same time guidelines on theorizing causal mechanisms.

Manifestations of minority religions in the public space – such as religious structures, attire, and insignia – are amongst the most contentious issues in the current immigration debate. Despite the vast political importance of this issue, and the empirical evidence that exposure to religious cues influences attitudes, research on the impact of manifestations of religion in the public space is scarce and focused on host society members. Furthermore, theories propose conflicting predictions about the potential effects of exposure to religion in the public space.

Based on a synthesis of decades of scholarship in numerous languages, The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism, is the first truly global and longue durée history of Sunni-Shii relations. The dispute over who should guide Muslims, the Caliph or the Imam, marks the origin of the Sunni-Shii split in Islam. Toby Matthiesen explores this hugely significant division from its origins to the present day.

Dr Haytham Alhamwi is the Chairman of the Syrian British Consortium, a London-based advocacy body for British Syrians. He is also a co-founder and the manager of Rethink Rebuild Society, a charity established in Manchester in 2013 to support Syrian refugees and asylum seekers in the UK.

Dr Husam Haj Omar, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Oxford will chair the event (introducing Dr Haytham Alhamwi and and moderating the audience Q&A.)

The origins of modern US-UK-led coalition warfare trace back to the Mediterranean theater of World War II. It was there on the treacherous battlefields of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy where Anglo-American forces learned to harmonize their fighting efforts under a modular and largely experimental integrated headquarters for the first time.