Over 30 years ago, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe how different dimensions of identity -- race, class, gender, for example –interact and overlap with one another. It has subsequently become one of the most commonly used concepts across the social sciences. But how can it be applied effectively within social science research to reveal different dimensions of power? This session brings together three colleagues who work on particular aspects of the relationship between identity and power. Prof.

The UK’s Integrated Review published earlier this year called for deepening trade and attracting more investment from China. And called China the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security. HM Trade Commissioner to China and Hong Kong, John Edwards, will set out why that is not a contradiction but a reflection of a complex relationship with the world’s second largest economy.

The duty to remember the Holocaust, the profession of responsibility for the atrocities committed, the admission of guilt and shame on the part of all Germans with the ensuing effort to atone for the past constitute the cornerstone of Germany’s national memory approach today. However, what started this official ‘atoner attitude’ in the first instance? More specifically, what was the initial push towards the long road of atonement, and why did German political leaders decide to take this approach in the first place?

In a milestone vote in late 2019, both the US House of Representatives and Senate overturned more than forty years of precedent to pass a bill declaring that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks was, in fact, a genocide. Subsequently, on 24 April 2021, also US President Joe Biden has officially recognized the Armenian genocide. These decisions reinforced the importance of the subject matter and which offers the opportunity to learn how the 1980s were a formative period for the campaign for international recognition of the Armenian genocide. In his talk, Dr.

After a century of prohibition, we are witnessing a dramatic shift in cannabis culture and policy around the world from a “killer weed” and a cause of racial degeneration to an accepted recreational drug and a “magic medicine.” In his lecture, Haggai Ram will examine this global shift of cannabis by focusing on the social history of the drug (i.e., hashish and marijuana) in Palestine-Israel from the late nineteenth century to the present.

In this talk, based on her book, The Colonizing Self, Kotef explores the cultural, political, and theoretical apparatuses that enable people and nations to construct a home on the ruins of other people’s homes or to feel that they belong to spaces of dispossession. Moving from analysis of contemporary Israeli TV shows to theorizations of settlers’ violence in the West Bank, Kotef examines the affectual conditions of settler colonialism. She tries to understand how, in conditions of systematic, prolonged violence, people develop attachment to the violence they inflict on others. 

This is the first study of Israeli foreign policy towards the Middle East and selected world powers including China, India, the European Union and the United States since the end of the Cold War. The book provides an integrated account of these foreign policy spheres and serves as an essential historical context for the domestic political scene during these pivotal decades. In my talk, I shall demonstrate how Israeli foreign policy is shaped by domestic factors, which are represented as three concentric circles of decision-makers, the security network and Israeli national identity.