Did the threat to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by President Trump and Congressional Republicans after the 2016 elections undermine the general public’s support for health reform and mobilize Republicans voters to favor the law’s termination? That was the Republican intent; the actual effects speak to a fundamental question in the study of policy feedback – namely, the influence of political developments and, specifically, policy threat on individuals.

The Oxford Review of Books is delighted to announce a panel discussion on the history, literature and politics of the Irish border at 5pm on Friday of week 5. The event will bring together the perspectives of Ireland's Ambassador to the UK, an award-winning novelist and two Irish Oxford academics on the border, the backstop, and Anglo-Irish relations past, present and future.

Samuel Moyn, Henry R Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, will give a lecture at the School in honour of Professor Henry Shue. He will survey Leo Tolstoy’s still-relevant criticism of attempts to make war more humane through international law. Tolstoy's criticism remained constant despite shifting reasons and the almost total change in his career, and he argued for the pursuit of alternatives to 'more humane' war. The lecture will conclude by assessing the relevance of Tolstoy’s attack on humane war to the 'forever wars' of today.

Treaties are categorical as to the limited competencies of the European Union when it comes to health policy. However, this statement is not true for complementary and supplementary health insurance, which accounts in several European countries for a significant share of health expenditures – and when it is even the main provider of care for some benefits. In this respect, private (usually voluntary) health insurance has been fundamentally transformed by a series of European directives and regulations over the last thirty years.

Dr Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Reader in International Relations at the University of Cardiff’s School of Law and Politics, will discuss the life and internationalist thought of Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973), who was a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean intellectual, poet, theoretician, revolutionary, political organiser, diplomat and nationalist. Having led one of the most successful wars of independence in modern African history, Cabral was an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and independence movements globally.