This seminar Q&A between Professor Jane Green and The Rt Hon. Lord Andrew Tyrie, will give students, and all interested in the UK Parliament, an expert insider’s answer to questions covered in the PPE and MPhil British politics syllabi, with first-hand insight from a former MP and now member of the House of Lords, described in 2013 as “the most powerful backbencher in the House of Commons”. Audience members will have a wide-ranging opportunity to ask questions.

Those who seek to increase electoral participation appear to face a dilemma. Prior work finds that Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) interventions are more effective on individuals with ex-ante higher voting propensities and might hence deepen turnout inequality. In this paper, we formalise the link between differential mobilisation effects and turnout inequality, introduce a novel Gini-based turnout inequality measure, and comprehensively answer if and when GOTV interventions increase or decrease turnout inequality.

Lea Ypi reads from her new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined and reflects on the enduring legacies of migration, displacement, and forced removal. Beginning with the story of her grandmother in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, she explores how past experiences of exile and resettlement help us confront the moral and political challenges of migration in our own time.

This talk opens with a look at the background to the New Cold War. The conjunction between a big political change – the shift from the Western world order to deep pluralism – plus the deepening of the Anthropocene crisis, make for a complex, volatile, and unlucky background of world politics. The second part looks at the concept of cold war, and at the two cases of it, the first running from 1947-1989, and the second beginning in 2014. The third part looks at the impact of Trump 2.0 on the Second Cold War. While there are significant continuities, there are also some big changes.

Four authors will introduce core arguments and findings from their recently-published book, United Nations Peacekeeping and the Politics of Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2025). The book asks: Why do countries hosting United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations tend to consolidate authoritarian forms of governance, despite the UN’s own stated aim of promoting democratization?