Many norms develop in the absence of clear templates for how to implement them. I argue that, even under these conditions, individuals and organizations can still successfully push for new norms, along with attendant changes in state practices. They do so through a mode of action that I term communicative entrepreneurship. Unlike norm entrepreneurs, communicative entrepreneurs do not project normative or technocratic certainty. They use nudges and networking strategies to trigger debates that define the contours of emerging normative scripts.

Why study the Federal Reserve Bank? Political scientists analyzing US politics, with only a few notable exceptions, have largely ignored the question. The result is that we know precious little about the Fed even as it becomes an increasingly consequential feature of contemporary American politics amid rising economic inequality. This symposium is innovative in two respects. First, it treats the Fed as a political institution instead of adopting the common assumption among many of its observers that the central bank is a neutral technocracy.

The procurement of autonomous weapon systems is on the rise in Southeast Asia, where, as in other parts of the world, interest in the military applications of unmanned systems is outpacing fractured international regulation efforts.

This book explores the natures of recent stabilisation efforts and global upstream threats. As prevention is always cheaper than the crisis of state collapse or civil war, the future character of conflict will increasingly involve upstream stabilisation operations. However, the unpredictability and variability of state instability requires governments and militaries to adopt a diversity of approach, conceptualisation and vocabulary.

Are there long-term legacies of civil wars on the electoral geography of post-conflict democracies? We argue that parties derived from armed bands enjoy an organizational advantage in areas where they fought and won the war. Former combatants can create a strong local party organization that serves as a crucial mobilization tool for elections. Parties have strong incentives to institutionalize this organizational advantage and retain electoral strongholds over time. We test our theory on the case of Italy (1946-1968).

Turkey’s digital surveillance policy has been shaped by five events: the 2013 Gezi protests, the leakage of wiretapped government conversations (the “17-25 December incident”), the country’s growing involvement in the Syrian Civil War and the subsequent refugee influx, successive terrorist attacks through 2015-16, and the failed coup attempt in July 2016.

On June 21 and 22, 2018, Oxford University’s Centre for Technology and Global Affairs hosted the First “Robotic Skies” Workshop: The Role of the Private Sector and Public Policy in Shaping the Drones Industry in Rhodes House, Oxford.