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.

Professor Charles RH Tripp delivers the 47th annual George Antonius Memorial Lecture. This event will be followed by a drinks reception in the Investcorp Gallery.

Comfort Ero brings her global perspective as President and CEO of the International Crisis Group to Europe’s mounting challenges, examining how changing power dynamics are transforming conflicts and security. Informed by her high-level conversations across continents, she asks whether the EU and key partners such as the UK can rethink their role, draw the right lessons from recent crises, and respond to a growing transatlantic divide.

In this lecture, Professor Stav Shufan-Biton examines how Israeli Jews living outside Israel experience holy time, focusing on Shabbat, Jewish holidays, and local religious and civil holidays such as Halloween and Christmas.

The Annual Oxford Taiwan Studies Conference 2026, hosted by the Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme, explores the theme “Taiwan and Its Neighbours: Indo-Pacific States in a Changing World Order.” As geopolitical competition intensifies and the regional balance of power continues to evolve, Taiwan’s position has become increasingly central to debates on economic security, technological transformation, and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. Bringing together leading scholars and policy experts, the conference situates Taiwan within its wider regional context by examining how neighbouring st

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.