The Design of Peace: Re-imagining Directions for the UN at 80 OxPeace Annual Day-conference 2026

Cost: £5 students, £10 non-students. If possible pay online on registering, otherwise at the door by cash, bank transfer, or card. Walk-ins welcome, but registration and pre-payment are warmly encouraged. You are warmly invited to the eighteenth annual OxPeace Day-conference, which takes place in the 80th year since the inaugural meeting of the UN General Assembly, held in the Methodist Central Hall, London in January-February 1946. That first meeting designed how the UN would operate to fulfil its Charter. Now in 2026 the UN exists in a world context that has undergone deep changes.

How Wars End: Military Scenarios for Peace in Russia´s War Against Ukraine

As Russia’s war against Ukraine enters another critical phase, questions about how it might end are becoming increasingly urgent. Recent diplomatic initiatives, peace proposals, and shifting political dynamics in Europe and the United States have reignited debate over what a sustainable settlement could look like and on whose terms. This panel brings together military attachés from Austria, Germany, France, Ukraine and the United States (tbc) to reflect on the war’s trajectory, the realities on the ground, and the conditions under which negotiations could become viable.

The Quest for Imperial Peace: On the Politics of International Law

This talk explains the impunity gap for the crime of aggression in the current international legal order. It recasts the genealogy of the crimes against peace to the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals through their liberal imperial context. It argues that international criminal law in the postwar order has been premised on the pursuit of liberal imperial peace. Revisiting Judge Pal’s dissent at the Tokyo Tribunal, it brings this genealogy to bear with the current questions of Ukraine and Palestine.

The State, Bureaucracy, and Policy in Contemporary Pakistan

Scholarship on contemporary Pakistan remains fragmented across theoretical and methodological approaches structured by disciplinary traditions (Political Sociology, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, South Asian Studies), journals, and academic institutions in which scholars of Pakistan are dispersed. While this fragmentation has enabled prolific research embracing a plurality of approaches and objects, it has also deprived scholars of shared intellectual platforms in which to engage collectively in a reflection on contemporary Pakistan. This workshop seeks to provide such a space.
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