Where next for conflict research? What issues should scholars of conflict and peace be focusing on, and how should they go about researching them? Two Oxford scholars will discuss the state of the field of peace and conflict studies and new research currently taking place at Oxford. John Gledhill will discuss his forthcoming research that maps the field of peace and conflict studies and identifies ways in which it can be reformed and taken forward.

How can academic research influence the policy-making process? Should academics be concerned about making their research relevant to contemporary problems of terrorism, political violence and war? The purpose of this round-table discussion is to engage in these ongoing debates about the appropriate relationship between the academic and policy-making worlds. Discussants will speak about their own experiences at the intersections of academia and policy and to identify the main opportunities and obstacles for productive dialogue between scholars and practitioners.

In the past two decades, there has been much talk in political theory about the role of religion in the public sphere. The resulting discussions of public reason and its limits, secularism and disestablishment, the nature of toleration, and the scope of religious exemptions have been invaluable. For many theorists, however, the fundamental worry remains: can the tensions between the demands of liberalism and the obligations of faith be negotiated?

This is a joint event between the Changing Character of War Programme and the Society for Army Historical Research.
Speakers include: Dr John Peaty, Dr Neil Faulkner, Gp Capt John Alexander, Maj Dr Paul Knight and CCW Director, Dr Rob Johnson.

Debates about the gig economy are cropping up everywhere: from Uber’s latest scandal and the convenience of Deliveroo to the global reach of Amazon’s MTurk. Is this the future of work? What are the benefits and challenges of crowd work for consumers, taxpayers, and regulators? And is the gig economy really fundamentally different from existing work arrangements and should it therefore fall outside the scope of employment law and other existing regulation, as many providers claim?

Booking note:Oxford Q-Step Summer Institute is open to social science undergraduates from other universities across the UK who would like to enhance their quantitative methods skills. Details on how to apply will be posted here in April 2017.

During this two-day workshop, our aim is to bring together scholars that approach the processes and institutions of representative democracy and mass politics from a variety of perspectives. In the first part of the workshop, we will discuss the main themes and arguments of The Meaning of Partisanship with the authors. The second part will be dedicated to independent research papers. We will engage with theoretical papers as well as more empirically-minded work that is in direct dialogue with recent theoretical literature on representative democracy.

Following the global financial crisis, economic growth and international trade growth have been sluggish. Current projections indicate that growth may continue to be sluggish in the medium term. These continuing trends will limit income raising productivity growth needed to maintain and improve living standards with population ageing across many economies. It will also limit capacities needed to raise living standards amongst lower income regions.

Matthew Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence, to be published by Oxford University Press in early 2017, promises to be a significant intervention into the debate between liberal neutralists and perfectionists concerning the justification of the exercise of political power. While neutralists hold that the state must be neutral in some sense between competing conceptions of the good, perfectionists hold that claims about the good can or ought to play an important role in justifying the state’s actions.

The social sciences have long been heavily influenced by modernization theory, focusing on issues of economic growth, political development and social change, in order to develop a predictive model of linear progress for developing countries following a Western prototype. Under this hegemonic paradigm of development, the world tends to get divided into simplistic binary oppositions between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘self’ and ‘other’.