Why We Fight

The Changing Character of War's Conflict Platform team is delighted to host Mike Martin for a seminar on ‘Why We Fight’, drawing on his recently published book of the same name.

When we go to war, morality, religion and ideology often take the blame. Mike argues that the opposite is true: rather than driving violence, these things help to reduce it. While we resort to ideas and values to justify or interpret warfare, something else is really propelling us towards conflict: our subconscious desires, shaped by millions of years of evolution.

Publishers, papers and peer review

Join us for a series of short talks and discussion around open access and changing pathways to publication. Speakers include representatives from academia, publishing, repositories and our support teams for open access, data and the REF. Topics include publication strategies, avoiding ‘predatory’ journals, the role of social science preprint platforms, managing data, the new culture of responsible research metrics in impact assessment, and OA policies.

Burma Studies amidst the Rohingya Crisis

The field of Burma Studies has expanded rapidly in the past decade. Part of this growth has been fuelled by changes in Myanmar’s political conditions, as research opportunities have opened up on topics and in regions where the military government previously restricted access. Additionally, the historical divide between scholars and activists is gradually fading, with much innovative academic work being informed by scholars’ experience with rights groups or civil society organisations.

International Organizations and the Expansion of the International System

The present version of the international system – organized around the sovereign state – emerged after waves of decolonization in the latter half of the twentieth century. But how did this transition from a world of empire to a global international system organized around the sovereign state play out? This talk traces this transition through an examination of membership debates in two prominent intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). IGOs are sites of contestation over what the international system is and should become.

Socialism, Socialists and the state in Western Europe from 1914 to the present: a complex and ambiguous relationship

Mathieu Fulla will present the outline of a forthcoming edited volume, dealing with the complex relationship between socialism and the state that took hold in a number of Western European countries. His book questions the widespread popular belief, still frequently conveyed by the medias, that socialism simply means “statism”. In fact, a scientific approach based on historical, sociological and political science methods could dispel this misunderstanding and display a more complex history.

The Mass Politics of International Disintegration

In the past few years, the world has witnessed an unprecedented popular backlash against international institutions. Popular demands to not only slow down, but to reverse international integration have proliferated, and have resulted in referendum and election outcomes that have reverberated across the world. Examples range from the Swiss 2014 mass immigration initiative over the British 2016 Brexit referendum to the 2016 election of a US President seemingly determined to withdraw US support from various international treaties.
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