Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes, foreign arms sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion: most cases of Chinese coercion are not military coercion, nor does China coerce all states that pose the same threats to its national security. My book manuscript, Calculating Bully – Explaining Chinese Coercion, examines when, why, and how China coerces states when faced with threats to its national security.

The following seminars will take place at 1pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome to join via Zoom, but registration required: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.

With much talk of a ‘splinternet’ and the emerging of technology ‘blocs’ of influence, the cyber domain is emerging more strongly as a domain of geopolitical competition. This competition features competing visions of the Internet: one, an American led Western model that is open, and another, a more state-controlled, authoritarian Chinese model. The competition between these and other models has had little structure so far and has seen a complex mix of economic, trade, security, technological and other strategic considerations.

Why did Britain withdraw from its major military bases in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia midway through the Cold War? Existing accounts tend to focus on Britain’s weak economic position, as well as the domestic political incentives of retrenchment for the ruling Labour Party. The speaker offers an alternative explanation: the strategic rationale for retaining a permanent presence ‘East of Suez’ dissolved during the 1960s, as policymakers realised that large military bases were consuming more security than they could generate.

We present results of a three-wave, six-country (Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) survey project that investigates how media coverage influences people’s preferences for financial regulation. We test a variety of frames built around actual financial scandals, using language that appeared in the media to describe these scandals. In wave 2, we find that political frames of the scandal influence regulatory attitudes more than either non-political scandals or scandals that focus on the wrongs done to individual victims.