Across the world, religious and cultural identities are being weaponized for political gains. South Asia is no exception, with frequent conflicts between faith communities strengthening politico-religious organisations, and severely straining social cohesion. Yet this region also has a history of religious intermingling, exemplified by shared sacred sites such as saints’ tombs, temples, churches, and natural elements, serving as places of worship. Such ‘sites in common’ offer rich insights into the dynamics of religious interaction.

This event from the Business and Operations Managers (BOM) Network is intended as a focused thematic session responding to a rapidly developing operational need identified by network members, presenting practical experience and guidance for how meeting attendees could implement AI and automation solutions in their own roles. Our motivation is to help colleagues improve operational efficiency while maintaining appropriate consideration of wellbeing, change management, and the human impact of AI-enabled working.

Radu Marian is a Member of Parliament in Moldova, Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Economy, Budget and Finance, and Vice President of the governing PAS party. As Moldova faces intensifying Russian hybrid pressure alongside its ambitious push toward European integration, Marian offers a frontline perspective on democratic resilience, economic reform, and the geopolitical struggle shaping the country’s future.

Join us for an expert talk with Dr. Ashley Sweetman exploring how financial institutions have become a critical arena where cyber security, operational resilience, and national economic security intersect.

Helmut Brandstätter is a Member of the European Parliament and a prominent Austrian journalist and politician known for his work on democracy, European integration, media freedom, and foreign policy. Europe's democracies are under sustained external pressure: Russian interference in elections, online disinformation at industrial scale, an entrenched dictatorship on the Union's eastern border, and a full-scale war in Ukraine that has reopened the most basic question of how the continent defends itself. Brandstätter sits at the centre of Parliament's response.

The speakers will discuss why the weakening of state institutions may be as pernicious as democratic backsliding and examine the long-term implications for governance, democracy, and the rule of law. This is part of the two-day workshop at the University of Note Dame titled Hollowing Out the State: Understanding Executive-Led State Erosion, which includes DPIR colleagues Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos, David Doyle, and Tim Power. The workshop is co-hosted by Javier Perez Sandoval, Associate Member of DPIR, as part of his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The post-1945 diplomatic order was designed for a different world: two superpowers, clear frontlines, and a set of shared institutional rules that most states, however reluctantly, accepted. That order is fracturing. A rising China, a revisionist Russia, an increasingly transactional United States, and a growing bloc of middle powers unwilling to align with either camp have produced a world that is genuinely multipolar for the first time in decades.

The Production of Value: Metrology, Land Revenue, and the State in Colonial India, 1820-1900 Shankar Nair (Oxford) The mapping of India has long been viewed as an instrument of colonial governmentality and control. In this view, scientific survey and map-making legitimised British territorial possession and extraction, presenting an image of imperial rule at once enlightened and powerful.

Louis W. Pauly, University of Toronto Insurance as Global Governance: Entanglements and Aspirations at the Risk Frontier Of the sectors comprising global capital markets, insurance has received relatively little attention from scholars of international politics. New social conventions and financial instruments arising from the invention of probabilistic reasoning and the discovery of risk began to spread around the world only a few centuries ago.