The 2025 Black History Month Lecture will be delivered by award-winning historian Professor Hakim Adi. The event is organised by the University of Oxford BME Staff Network and the Equality and Diversity Unit who are honoured to welcome Hakim as this year's speaker.

The lecture will explore themes of power and pride in the rich histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain, encompassing approximately 10,000 years of Britain's history.

In recent years, inequalities in residential environments have received much attention as an explanation for the appeal of anti-immigration parties across advanced democracies. This paper explores the long-term association between neighbourhood context in adolescence and attitudes towards immigration later in life, drawing on a UK-based cohort study matched with fine-grained census data on neighbourhood composition.

Large-scale disruptions to everyday infrastructure are becoming more frequent due to climate change, population growth, and increased user demand. While the political consequences of gradual changes in public service quality are relatively well understood, we know less about the electoral consequences of public service breakdowns where these services were once reliable and readily accessible. To address this critical question, I use the quasi-random allocation of electric outages in South Africa to examine how the breakdown of public services influences voting behavior.

This talk examines how illicit flows that cross borderlands shape security from the local to the global level. It introduces the concept of Global Illicit Supply Chain Networks to explain how trafficking hubs—places where several illicit flows intersect, often near borders—connect regions of conflict and instability with wider global systems. These hubs are not peripheral; they are crucial nodes where local arrangements, often between state and non-state actors, sustain both order and disorder.

Does public sector employment make graduates less likely to join anti-regime protests? Recent scholarship argues yes, with implications for bottom-up democratization in late-developing economies with expansive public and higher education sectors. This paper examines how that thesis travels to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region marked by segmented labor markets, developed tertiary education, and persistent authoritarianism.

Who pays for postwar demobilization? I argue that postwar governments use gender-based labor discrimination to facilitate veteran reintegration, pushing women out of jobs they gained during wartime. While veteran grievances are theorized to reduce class inequality through welfare expansion, I demonstrate an alternative mechanism: gender-based labor discrimination that undermines women’s labor market position. During war, women often benefit from the absence of male labor, gaining expertise in traditionally male sectors.

This paper advances a “relational geopolitics” account of the European Union’s foreign policy, arguing that the EU exercises power through standards, markets, conditional finance, citizen-centered and institutional ties – not through classic state coercion (Anghel, 2025). Empirically, it anchors the argument in evidence on rising global risks to EU security, first mapped through expert reviews and now tested with embedded expert-survey experiments (Global Risks to the EU Project, 2025). The risk landscape is concrete – from a potential U.S.

Democratic backsliding occurs incrementally, but the empirical study of how citizens respond to undemocratic politicians has been predominantly static. I formulate and test predictions about how different sequences of backsliding shape accountability.