Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College. After completing research at KCL, he taught at Bristol Polytechnic,(now the University of West of England), the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and also Director of the Laughton Naval Unit KCL. In 2020 he was made a Fellow of Kings College London (FKC).

The following seminars will take place at 1pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome to join via Zoom, but registration required: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.

Dominic Johnson received a DPhil from Oxford University in evolutionary biology, and a PhD from Geneva University in political science. Drawing on both disciplines, he is interested in how new research on evolution, biology and human nature is challenging theories of international relations, conflict, and cooperation.

A large conventional wisdom has maintained that economic downturns, which drastically reduce grain prices and the returns to agricultural labor, foment peasant resistance against landowners and state officials. Yet, recent waves of peasant resistance in the developing world have occurred in a prosperous time of extraordinarily high prices. We reconcile these findings by theorizing about the spatial dimensions of peasant unrest.

There is growing concern about the movement of individuals from private sectors to bureaucracies, yet little attention is paid to how this affects interest groups’ activities. Interest groups with connections to bureaucrats may exert less effort to provide information to policymakers (the “substitution effect”) or exert more effort (the “complement effect”). We address this question by constructing a novel dataset on career trajectories of bureaucrats in the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) and firms that served on USTR advisory committees during the period 1997-2017.