In 2016, the former President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, current Chair of the Elders, and featured speaker in this event, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as he led the peace process in Colombia. After 50 years of conflict, Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement did not come easily – it required strategy, diplomacy, fearless determination, and timing. This event at the University of Oxford will mark the tenth anniversary of one of the most significant peace processes of recent decades, and do so from a world roiled by complex conflicts.

Contrary to dominant narratives that portray cultural life in Greece under the Colonels’ dictatorship (1967–1974) as suppressed, this event features Stathis Kalyvas discussing his latest book, which reveals a surprising cultural “Big Bang.” Drawing on new evidence, he argues that, despite censorship and repression, artistic and intellectual activity flourished. The talk examines the conditions that made this possible, highlighting how cultural production can adapt under authoritarian rule.

Digital and artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly mediating our political and legal interactions. For example, in the ways in which judges and civil servants increasingly rely on algorithmic tools in their decision making, or in how political communications increasingly take place on, and are structured by, digital platforms, challenging legal scholarship to consider what we gain and lose from the penetration of digital and AI technologies into political and legal spheres.

This presentation introduces my book project, The Hotels’ Republic: Elite Internationalisation and State Territorialisation in Wartime Yemen. It analyses how the frontiers of the state are remapped in the midst of violence, by looking at how the ongoing war transforms Yemen’s ruling class. The book draws on a sociology of the political elite, many of whom are now based or in transit between Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat, Amman, and Istanbul.

Momentum is gathering on the implementation of commitments made by the international community to build a measurement framework that respects and accurately reflects the ambitions of sustainable development, going beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - “Beyond GDP”. In this seminar, Sabina Alkire and James Foster will propose eight criteria by which to assess some component indicators in the Beyond GDP framework.