This year's guest lecturer is Fania Oz Salzberger, Professor of History (University of Haifa), widely respected public intellectual and peace activist. All attendees are invited to join a drinks reception following the talk.

Join Nadia Murad, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Amal Clooney, Blavatnik School of Government Visiting Professor of Practice in International Law, for a discussion on their ongoing fight for justice for survivors of genocide and sexual violence around the world. In 2014, ISIS attacked Nadia Murad’s hometown in Sinjar and began a genocidal campaign against her community, the Yazidis, in Iraq. After escaping from captivity, Nadia devoted her life to fighting against the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Visiting Professor Clooney has been Nadia’s counsel for the past ten years.

In this talk, David Boyk draws from his new book, Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2025), to tell the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many—and is still seen today—as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, the introduction of colonial mode of education transformed the existing ways of knowing practices in Malabar and elsewhere in British India. Closely following this transformation, this presentation maps the emerging new form of power-knowledge entanglement and the struggles against this methodological domination from the marginalized communities. I argue that the dominant form should be marked as Colonial-Brahmanical as caste was central to the new form of knowledge production.

This MWI builds on national discussions as well as international frameworks like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness. The measure incorporates eight domains: psychological wellbeing, health, time use, education, community cohesion, governance, environment, and living standards. Join us on 26 May to learn more about the construction of the MWI, and what its initial results suggest about well-being in Indonesia.

With unprecedented access to Taiwan’s sitting head of state, director Vanessa Hope investigates the election and tenure of Tsai Ing-wen, the first female president of Taiwan. Thorough, incisive and bristling with tension, Invisible Nation is a living account of Tsai’s tightrope walk as she balances the hopes and dreams of her nation between the colossal geopolitical forces of the U.S. and China. Hope’s observational style captures Tsai at work in her country’s vibrant democracy at home, while seeking full international recognition of Taiwan’s right to exist.

The earliest variants of scepticism about the value of trying to extend human activity into space took the form of (mistaken) claims about physical impossibility, the classic variants involve an idea of threat. Lewis Mumford, Carl Schmidt and Hannah Arendt all raise concerns about space as a continuation of terrestrial trends including conflict and the domination of technology over the human.

Common wisdom has long accepted Arthur Vandenberg’s claim that US politics “stopped at the water’s edge” in the Cold War. But passing familiarity with partisan combat in middle decades of the twentieth century suggests otherwise, whether we’re talking about foreign aid, the UN, NATO, trade, or immigration—not to mention the global crusade against communism. Clearly, postwar American internationalism was far more brittle and contested than it seemed to be. Yet the fact that these extraordinary commitments only collapsed after nearly 80 years of sustained investment requires explanation.

Our seminar series with the Institute for International Economic Policy continues with a session on measuring well-being in the United States. This seminar explores the construction of a novel measure of multidimensional well-being in the USA, using the same methodology that underlies Bhutan’s well-known Gross National Happiness Index. The conversation around measuring well-being is especially relevant in the context of the recent recommendations from the UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP.

Join leading experts in international law and human rights Judge Theodor Meron, Professor Marko Milanovic and the Blavatnik School’s Professor Philippa Webb KC and Visiting Professor of Practice Amal Clooney for a discussion on the future of international legal institutions. As global conflicts reach levels not seen since World War II, international justice is in retreat.