Just War, Human Augmentation and Doctors Designing Weapons

In contrast to the nature of war, its character - the conduct of warfare - is in constant flux. War became mechanised in the early part of the last century, and at some point in the 1950s, fighting machines outstripped the ability of humans to operate them. One approach to this problem has been to remove the human from the machine. Another is to try to augment the human in order to match that fighting capability. Human augmentation for the purpose of enhancing combat lethality is of course not new, the Blitzkrieg of May 1940 most famously fuelled by methamphetamine use by the Wehrmacht.

The Art of Coercion: Reid Pauly, Brown University

Summary of the Event: Reid Pauly is the author of The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell University Press, 2025). In his new book, Pauly presents a fresh explanation for the success—and failure—of coercive demands in international politics. Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey.

Book Talk: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War

Join us for a timely discussion of Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, in which Sean M. Wiswesser draws on decades of experience to examine the doctrine, methods, and strategic logic underpinning contemporary Russian espionage. The talk situates intelligence activity within broader frameworks of hybrid conflict and coercive statecraft, analyzing how Russian Services employ deception, active measures, and covert action under Putin.

Alayna Su Yi Yap

Alayna Yap is a MPhil International Relations candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Her research decodes Chinese and Russian political communications through combining computational social science methods and cybersecurity tools, with a focus on authoritarian informationalism, algorithmic manipulation, cyber warfare, and Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference tactics. Her thesis work examines the prevalence of coordination, automation, and disinformation in foreign communications towards African states.  

Nagi Koriki

I am a DPhil student in International Relations at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Edward Keene. My research lies at the intersection of international relations theory, international law, and socio-legal studies. It examines how the international legal principle of sovereign equality has been reconstructed by actors in semi-peripheral status positions within international society.

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