The Cyril Foster Lecture is the University's principal annual guest lecture in the field of International Relations. It has attracted a most distinguished group of lecturers.

Professor Barbara F. Walter (UC San Diego) will deliver the 2018 Cyril Foster Lecture: The New New Civil Wars.

I leverage exogenous variation in the historical origins of chieftaincy to study the effects of traditional leaders on voters' ability to extract state resources. Using original data on the history of traditional institutions in Northern Ghana combined with fine-grained census data, survey data, and polling station-level election results, I show that communities with chiefs from ethnic groups assigned to the colonial invention of chieftaincy in the late-19th century have less leverage to benefit from patronage exchanges with politicians today.

The main objective of this paper is to provide localized evidence about the mechanisms that may link oil wealth with the use of armed force against civilians by non-state armed groups in Colombia. Violence is studied in all three of the standard dimensions: onset, duration and intensity. This paper reports evidence on a subnational variant of a mechanism termed by the literature state-as-target.

Reuters Institute seminars “The business and practice of journalism”
The following seminars will be given at 2pm on Wednesdays, normally in the E.P. Abraham Lecture Theatre, Green Templeton College.
Convenor: Meera Selva

The 2015 National Cyber Security Strategy describes the UK Government’s ambition to foster a cyberspace which is free, open, peaceful and secure. However, the pace, scale, and complexity of the cyber-threat poses a constant challenge for states' understanding and response. HM Government faces the key challenge of how respond to state and non-state actors who do not adhere to the same values, doing so in concert with allies, and in a manner that guarantees a cyberspace that supports UK prosperity and security.

One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government’s sealed informational borders. Baek will describe how information has been illicitly flowing into North Korea, and what kinds of impact this unprecedented access to foreign information is having on North Korean citizens’ social and political attitudes towards the regime and each other.