Digital technology plays a vital role in modern life. The firms of Silicon Valley have built vast revenue streams through offering services which are intangible, but which can, thanks to the internet, scale rapidly. Digital technology moves fast, and it sometimes feels like society cannot keep up. We worry that our elections have been influenced by bad actors, that the information we receive is filtered through systems that do more harm than good. Machine learning allows complex algorithms to be developed and deployed faster than ever.

This conference brings together graduate students and early-career researchers from a variety of disciplines concerned with questions of political violence to share their original research on violent conflict within and beyond states.

How can political violence be defined and contested? How are its different manifestations, such as riots, insurgencies, and terrorism, linked? What are the empirical and ethical implications?

Join us for a discussion about the nature of political violence with Dr Lisa Stampnitzky, University of Sheffield, and Dr Stathis Kalyvas, University of Oxford, chaired by Dr Faisal Devji, University of Oxford. Our speakers will address these questions in the following keynote speeches, followed by a discussion and Q&A.

The UK is going through perhaps the largest retrenchment in welfare programs ever seen in an advanced democracy. Public opinion has also turned against welfare to an unprecedented degree. Until recently, both major parties largely embraced the new settlement, using increasingly harsh rhetoric to describe welfare and its users. This book project asks why these transformations occurred. I argue that the ‘New Labour’ years were most crucial for the long-term trajectory of British welfare provision, and offer an explicitly political and top-down explanation for new Labour’s changes.

The modern international order is facing significant challenges. Power is shifting to non-Western states and diffusing to non-state actors, but this is more than a power transition, though: it is also about culture. Join one of the world’s leading IR theorists for a talk about his major three-year project and forthcoming CUP volume, On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference.

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Chairman of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies.

Reuters Institute / Nuffield College Media & Politics seminars
The following seminars will be given at 5pm on Fridays, normally in the Butler Room, Nuffield College.
Convenors: Meera Selva, David Levy, Andrew Dilnot

Numerous studies explain the behaviours of politicians and citizens which underlie natural resource curses. Curiously, however, this literature has not systematically considered the role of bureaucrats. This paper argues that this is a consequential omission. Bureaucrats are in charge of the day-to-day operation of states. As such, their actions may facilitate or constrain the use of resource rents for political advantage.