A research colloquium to mark the retirement of Professor Martin Ceadel, preeminent historian of the British peace movement and one of the world’s foremost experts on the politics of war prevention and its impact on international relations, and to celebrate his distinguished contribution as a teacher and scholar at the University of Oxford for over thirty five years.
Session 1: Thinking About Peace and War
A research colloquium to mark the retirement of Professor Martin Ceadel, preeminent historian of the British peace movement and one of the world’s foremost experts on the politics of war prevention and its impact on international relations, and to celebrate his distinguished contribution as a teacher and scholar at the University of Oxford for over thirty five years.
Session 1: Thinking About Peace and War
A research colloquium to mark the retirement of Professor Martin Ceadel, preeminent historian of the British peace movement and one of the world’s foremost experts on the politics of war prevention and its impact on international relations, and to celebrate his distinguished contribution as a teacher and scholar at the University of Oxford for over thirty five years.
Session 1: Thinking About Peace and War
A research colloquium to mark the retirement of Professor Martin Ceadel, preeminent historian of the British peace movement and one of the world’s foremost experts on the politics of war prevention and its impact on international relations, and to celebrate his distinguished contribution as a teacher and scholar at the University of Oxford for over thirty five years.
Session 1: Thinking About Peace and War
The theme of this seminar was the relationship between religion and politics, which inevitably comes to the fore in new ways as Egyptian political parties embark upon democratic competition for votes. Before the Arab spring, there was a long held view that democracy cannot really flourish in a predominantly Muslim society. The first three years of the post-Arab spring Egypt provide an excellent opportunity to unearth many of the arguments and counter-argument surrounding this – and other – views.
Magnificent and Beggar Landis a powerful account of fast-changing dynamics in Angola, an important African state that is a key exporter of oil and diamonds and a growing power on the continent. Based on three years of research and extensive first-hand knowledge of Angola, it documents the rise of a major economy and its insertion in the international system since it emerged in 2002 from one of Africa’s longest and deadliest civil wars.
China's behaviour as a nuclear weapons state is a major determinant of global and regional security. For the United States, there is no other nuclear actor — with the exception of Russia— that matters more to its long-term national security. However, China's behaviour and impact on global nuclear politics is a surprisingly under-researched topic. Existing literature tends to focus on narrow policy issues, such as misdemeanours in China's non-proliferation record, the uncertain direction of its military spending, and nuclear force modernization, or enduring opaqueness in its nuclear policy.
Vladimir Putin has said: "If you stand alone you cannot survive in the Arctic. Nature makes people and states to help each other." But are international relations in the Arctic really that different from those in other regions – such as Eastern Europe – and if so, why?
War was not inevitable in Europe in 1914, and it is not inevitable in Asia today. But war happened in Europe because the Europeans failed to conceive a new international order to reflect radical shifts in the distribution of wealth and power. And war will become more likely in Asia if regional powers fail in the same way to imagine a new regional order which fits the fast-changing realities of power there. How might such a new order look, and how could it be built?
Cyber actors are comparable to the actors of maritime warfare in the 16th and 17th centuries. The militarisation of cyberspace resembles the situation in this previous context, in which states transitioned from a reliance on privateers to dependence on professional navies. As with privateering, the use of non-state actors by states in cyberspace has produced unintended harmful consequences.
Florian Egloff is a DPhil student at DPIR.
