Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Michael von der Schulenburg will speak about his new book On Building Peace – Rescuing the Nation-State and Saving the United Nations, based on a lifetime working in countries with wars, conflict and social disintegration. He argues that preserving a global order for the future will need what many thought to be outmoded or even dead: strong nation-states and a stronger United Nations.

About the speaker

In this paper, Tamsin Barber interrogates the role of recent debates around Modern Slavery and trafficking in framing and understanding the experience of new Vietnamese migrants working in the cannabis trade and nail salons in the UK. By reflecting upon wider aspects of the lived experience and biographical processes of migration, the speaker will argue that these frameworks can unintentionally become complicit in rendering these migrants more vulnerable by disregarding their agency (more broadly conceived) and pre-migratory conditions.

Turning from the articulation of constitutional rule in terms of office, to the idea of rule itself as articulated in Aristotle and Xenophon, this lecture argues for the centrality of rule as hierarchical subordination requiring obedience not only to law but also to individual rulers as such. It then explores the psychosocial demands of willing obedience on the part of the ruled.

*Lecture Three: Ruling and Being Ruled*

Turning from the articulation of constitutional rule in terms of office, to the idea of rule itself as articulated in Aristotle and Xenophon, this lecture argues for the centrality of rule as hierarchical subordination requiring obedience not only to law but also to individual rulers as such. It then explores the psychosocial demands of willing obedience on the part of the ruled.

_The Carlyle Lectures are a lecture series co-sponsored by the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Faculty of History._

DPIR invites all students and staff to take part in an introduction to evidence-based mindfulness, in two steps:
1) 29 January, 10am-12:30pm: Everyone is invited to an introductory session which will begin with an introduction to mindfulness in politics by a senior member of the Mindfulness All Party Parliamentary Group in the UK Parliament. This will be followed by an interactive ‘how to’ workshop offering participants practical, effective mindfulness methods which can be incorporated into daily life to manage stress and promote resilience and wellbeing.

The 1997 publication of Zen at War sent shockwaves through Western adherents of Buddhism because it revealed allegedly enlightened Buddhist leaders had been fervent, even fanatical, supporters of Japanese militarism during WW II. Yet, Buddhists not affiliated with either the Zen sect, nor Japanese Buddhism, could take comfort in regarding this support as a “Zen thing” or “Japanese thing”, or even a “Mahāyāna thing”.

This lecture examines 21st-century social policies and what they tell us about Chinese politics. At the same time it makes the case for more rigorous qualitative policy research, and it argues that international influences show it is time to reconceptualise Chinese policy processes.