TEL Programme

TEL Speaker Series on Conflict and Violence

The international system is undergoing profound transformation as global power dynamics shift. In this changing world order, traditional frameworks for addressing regional conflicts are being challenged. Despite the rapid and shifting changes in the global order, conflict in the Middle East has remained largely unchanged for decades, the factors fueling this conflict remain deeply entrenched and continue to worsen day by day, due to an international system that is unable to address the underlying causes.

Join us for an academic talk by Professor Alexandre Debs which discusses his ongoing academic research. In this talk, Professor Debs presents arguments from his working paper which asks: how could power imbalance lead to war? Some argue that power preponderance causes war by undermining the credibility of assurances. Others contend instead that non-credible assurances are inconsequential, fueling future negotiations without affecting the conditions for war.

Arms control is traditionally conceptualized as a cooperative undertaking, reducing risk and obviating the need for wasteful expenditure. But arms control can also be employed for competitive ends, shaping competition in ways that asymmetrically advantage certain parties. While previous literature has identified individual examples of competitive arms control within certain cases, the full range of competitive arms control practices has not been assessed comprehensively.

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.

Please note the earlier start time. Sarah Chapman Trim is the Royal Air Force Slessor Fellow at SST-CCW. She is a Military Psychologist focused on the readiness to fight.

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.

TBC