Humphrey Battcock Lecture 2026 How to achieve resilient, secure, low-carbon economies: Lessons from China and the United States With global geopolitics - and oil prices - in near daily turmoil, the need for a just transition to green energy is ever more apparent. But how does this seismic change towards green industrialisation actually happen? What does it look like in sectors that most of us interact with daily, like the automotive industry? What are the public policies that can permanently shift major economies and the processes of technological innovation that help or hinder progress?

Join Zahid Hasnain, Lead of the Global Program on Public Administration Reform at World Bank Group, in conversation with Christian Schuster, Professor Management and Public Policy, as they discuss the World Bank’s evolving thinking on how to attain good government and public sector performance, and the World Bank’s new report on Public Workforce Performance and Prosperity. Speaker biographies: Zahid Hasnain is a Lead Governance Specialist at World Bank.

After the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian state became an ideological project promoted by national cultural and media institutions. Focusing particularly on the years under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970), Chihab El Khachab uses official written and visual sources produced by different governmental departments to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats represented and embodied the Egyptian state through a praxis of 'achievement' (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). This study demonstrates how a successful anti-colonial nationalist movement built its own state apparatus.

This panel discussion will assess how far the government’s good intentions on housing are being realised. But what are the prospects for tackling the UK’s dysfunctional property taxes? Is the speculative builder model for private sector housing supply fit for purpose? Do we need radical new ways of expanding access for Britain’s families to decent roofs over their heads? The UK faces a severe housing crisis. House prices remain far too high compared to incomes. Renters and the young bear the brunt of the affordability crisis. Many spend over a third of their earnings on housing alone.

This talk discusses the naturalisation of identitarian thinking across the political spectrum and in academic life. It considers the social institutional forces that have enabled its proliferation in many Western societies. Identity politics across much of the political left, alongside ethnonationalism, racism and civilisational discourse on much of the right, are expressions of a broader identitarian logic.

Join us for the launch of Critical Conditions, the debut memoir by Hadi Abdullah, newly translated into English by Alessandro Columbu. Written in the aftermath of revolution, war, and exile, Critical Conditions is both a personal account of survival and a profound meditation on witnessing, resistance, and the politics of memory. Blending the immediacy of frontline reporting with lyrical reflection, Abdullah’s memoir traces his transformation from a teaching assistant in Homs to one of the most recognisable media voices of the Syrian uprising.

Join Kevin Vallier, Professor of Philosophy at the Univeristy of Toledo, and Thomas Simpson, Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, for a seminar on agentic capital, intelligence inequalities, and alignment. AI will transform social order, yet we lack a general theory of how it impacts politics and the economy. In this event, Professor Vallier offers such a theory. AI's transformative potential arises from its status as agentic capital: capital that can act and spawn autonomously.

After rising during the early modern age European economic inequality greatly contracted from the 1910s to the 1970s, much as it did in other parts of the world. Even though European mechanisms of pre- and redistribution have held up comparatively well since then, the pressures they face operate on a global scale. While violent levellers have faded and benign influences from homeownership to pensions are losing steam, new technologies such as AI portend further income shifts from labour to capital.

Evans-Pritchard Lecture Series 2026 The Reinvention of Rule: Political Leadership and Legitimacy in the Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean, ca. 1200–600 BC Dr Marco Santini, The University of Edinburgh This series of five lectures proposes an overarching interpretation of key political developments that characterized Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant during the period called the Iron Age (ca. 1200–600 BC).