Citizens' movements resisting an authoritarian, unjust and high-handed states have faced immense coercion and police violence across the globe. State narratives of these protests term them as 'dissenting', 'anti-national' and 'anti-people'. Most protests fizzle away due to policing, surveillance, and state-action or fall into than the trap of 'state-media constructed narratives' posing one community against the other. In such times how can scholars, citizen-activists, and people start a process of negation of such allegations through a process of initiation of re-building solidarity.

This year’s report Unstacking global poverty: Data for high-impact action, produced in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report Office (UNDP HDRO), presents a compact update on the state of the world’s multidimensional poverty. It compiles data across 110 developing countries covering 6.1 billion people and accounting for 92% of the population in developing countries.

Speaker: David Enoch
Respondent: Thomas Douglas

The European Green Deal has paved the way to a ground-breaking EU agenda for climate neutrality and just transition, while at the same time triggering an extensive debate about how feasible, solid and coherent the new policy strategy is, and which factors are crucial for the whole legislative dossier to pass through the decision-making process successfully. The presented research investigates the European Commission’s role and leadership style in this process by conducting an in-depth analysis of the Commission’s political narrative and the power dimension therein.

Lecture by Professor Brownlee
Respondant: Dr Giubilini

This will be a hybrid event. If you are unable to join in person, please contact Dr Binesh Hass (binesh.hass@philosophy.ox.ac.uk) to request the Zoom webinar registration link.

I am afraid this event has been cancelled due to speaker’s travel restrictions because of the war

Biography:

Prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, analysts predicted a quick and decisive victory for Russia over Ukraine due the Russian military benefiting from a long and sustained modernization program. It soon became clear that analysts' projections of a quick and decisive victory for Russia were shockingly incorrect. Why was the perception of the Russian military so divergent from its performance in the Ukraine war and why were assessments of the Russian military apparently so inaccurate?

Every few years a new concept captures the attention of a large part of the strategic studies community. These buzzwords – such as hybrid warfare, grey zone conflict, counterinsurgency or the revolution in military affairs – are both ambiguous and powerful, sparking a wave of publications only to eventually be superseded by the next buzzword. How can we explain this recurring cycle? This talk looks at the dynamics and underlying ideas about war driving this process. It argues that these buzzwords are the outcome of fallacies inherent in much current strategic thinking in the West.

Given the return of Great Power Competition, could democratic governments have been better at anticipatory policymaking? Have weapons of mass distraction diverted attention from the persistent challenge of war? To what extent has a self-referential fascination with ourselves, our universalism and challenges to it from within (like radicalisation) diminished our ability to read the prevailing winds of how most states read the world? Have the twin conceits of cultural narcissism and presentism diminished the ability of major democracies to navigate a volatile world?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent attritional war has upended pre-war assumptions about "future war." Futurologists within the broad security penumbra increasingly argued that conflict was becoming hybrid, ambiguous and shadowy, with some arguing that the tools and assumptions of major war were becoming obsolete. While all wars to some degree are "hybrid", the unambiguous, industrial-scale clash in Ukraine is emphatically not what they expected. Why did bright minds fall prey to such expectations? The failure had several causes.