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Tea, coffee and biscuits from 11.50

How do state agents who guard the Greek and the European border experience the collapse of the border? Why are people committed to performing bureaucratic procedures they consider irregular and futile? When does the UNHCR “become” the state? What does it mean to “work for Europe?” This paper is concerned with how the lived experiences of people governing irregular migration help us understand broader processes regarding sovereign power and the state.

Today’s digital privacy concerns stem from how computers and networks are built. Security was an afterthought in the development of both, sacrificed to speed up the dissemination of the technology. As a result, copying is easy and sharing data gives no control to their owners. But we have caught up. Today, we can already build data sharing and linking systems that don’t see the data they are processing and give some control back to the data owners. Dan Bogdanov will be sharing stories about building and running such systems for evidence-based policymaking and fraud detection.

Greek to Me: A Memoir of Academic Life is an engrossing tale of academic and political intrigue. An extensive personal archive enables the author to throw light on the secretive ways of academic institutions against the background of the study of the modern history of Greece.

Turning back to Republic I in dialogue with the Statesman, this lecture explores rule as a phenomenon that includes but is broader than political office alone (which is one role through which rule can be exercised). It shows Plato to have wrestled with both the promise and the danger of a perfect identification between a person and the role of ruler.