The 2024 European elections have reshaped the political landscape of the European Union, setting the stage for a new European Parliament and European Commission. This talk delves into the outcomes of the political power-play in Brussels, examining which parties and coalitions emerged victorious, the dynamics of their influence, and the implications for EU policy-making.

Book talk: The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes, by Frances Yaping Wang (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Relations between the United States and China are at their lowest point in many decades. What is the outlook for the bilateral relationship over the next four years? Will the new administration in Washington bring change? Will the absence of leadership change in Beijing produce continuity? Individual national leaders can exert considerable agency, but they do not operate in a vacuum. While Donald Trump and Xi Jinping each possess strong-willed personalities and driving ambitions, both will be constrained by domestic pressures, impacted by economic forces, and subjected to external shocks.

This talk will look at how Orwell's most influential book has been received in the People's Republic of China, focusing on that Communist Party-run country's capital city, as the title suggests, but with sideways glances at some other cities as well. Not surprisingly, it will deal with issues of censorship and surveillance, but there will be unexpected sides to the story, too. The PRC is the rare case of a Big Brother state in which for decades now there has been no problems with bookstores stocking the novel that features Big Brother.

Book talk: Tsang, Steve and Cheung, Olivia. The Political Thought of Xi Jinping. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2024).

This presentation draws on an eight-month ethnographic study in a rural community in Southeastern China to examine the socio-economic transformations brought about by the digital age. With limited entrepreneurial opportunities following the decline of the family workshop model of earlier industrialisation eras, younger generations face a stark dissonance between the opulent lifestyles portrayed on social media and their own constrained realities.

Sri Lanka’s conflict landscape was dominated by its three-decade long civil war, which absorbed scholarly and popular attention from the 1980s onwards. The island’s longer history of ethno-religious violence has received less attention, allowing historical narratives such as those on the ‘1915 Sinhala-Muslim Riots’ to be captured and distorted by nationalist and statist interpretations. How, then, do you write back into history an event in which the victims have been forgotten, the aggressors remembered as ‘victims’, and the state a key purveyor of a distorted narrative?