Forthcoming Events

Events at IDEAS

IDEAS hosts a wide and varied calendar of events, including public lectures, seminars, book launches and conferences. IDEAS events are focused on and coordinated by our research programmes, and IDEAS also hosts media briefings on contemporary strategic issues. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History sponsors the IDEAS Centre Gilder Lehrman Lectures, which attract the most prominent US historians to the School, and the The Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminar Series for Teachers, which is a worldwide programme of continuing education and training for current educational professionals.

IDEAS Middle East International Affairs Programme Seminar

What next for Yemen?
9 February 2010, 6.30pm, B212|
Speaker: Fawaz Gerges|
Chair: Nigel Ashton|

Prof. Fawaz Gerges considers recent events in Yemen, the domestic challenges it faces and its regional and international relations.

Fawaz Gerges is Professor of International Relations at LSE.

LSE IDEAS East Asia International Affairs Programme Seminar

The Triangular Relationship: China, the US and the EU

With the end of Cold War, international relations have changed profoundly following the acceleration of globalisation and polarisation. Relations between the major powers are constantly varying and adjusting. Among these, the triangular relationship between China, the US and the EU is one of the most prominent in the international arena. As an emerging power, China exerts an increasing influence in regional and global issues. What kind of role will the “China factor” comparatively play in US-EU relations? Are there any differences between the EU and the US in their approaches to China?

Currently a Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS, Ouyang Huifeng is a diplomat of the Information Department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry of China. As a diplomat, he has worked in various Chinese Missions abroad, such as the Xinhua News Agency (Hong Kong Branch), the Chinese Consulate General in Chicago, and the Chinese Embassy in South Africa. He finished his assignment as Congressional Liaison Officer at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC in August 2008. He is currently the Liaison Officer for the press affairs of the European Diplomatic Missions and correspondents in Beijing.

Southeast Asia International Affairs Programme Workshop

Democratisation and New Forms of Voter Mobilisation in Southeast Asia
12 February 2010, 10:00am
Speakers include: Joseph Chinyoung Liow, Eva-Lotta Hedman, Duncan McCargo, Andreas Ufen, Ibrahim Suffian, Pravit Rojanaphruk, Choel Mallarangeng and Emmanuel Yujuico
Chair: Dr Munir Majid

This workshop aims to explore how political parties and politicians seek to mobilise voters in ways that go beyond more commonly noted patterns of machine politics, patron-clientelism, cleavages, fraud and vote-buying. While not unrelated to broader trends and themes - e.g., reformism, populism - also observed in the region, this LSE IDEAS workshop will focus on mobilisational practices and electoral campaigns which have yet to attract more serious or systematic scrutiny. In as much as such practices and campaigning is part and parcel of the ‘travails of democratisation’ in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, this workshop will thus add an important and otherwise overlooked perspective to the existing literature and debates on democratisation in the region.

Registration for this event is now closed.

LSE IDEAS Africa International Affairs Programme Seminar

Nigeria and the Politics of Natural Resources 
11 March 2010, 6.30pm
Speaker: Dr. Charles Alao
Chair: Dr. Sue Onslow

Dr. Abiodun Alao is a Senior Research Fellow at the Conflict Security and Development Group King’s College London. His current research interest is on the Politics of Natural Resource Conflict in Africa and his latest book on the subject is The Tragedy of Endowment: Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa, published by the Rochester University Press. Dr Alao presentation will be on Oil, the Yar’Adua Administration in Nigeria and the Niger Delta. It will discuss issues like the circumstances leading to the “Amnesty” granted to the “Militants”, the creation of the new Ministry of Niger delta Affairs and the extent to which recent developments hold the key to addressing the complexities of the conflict in the region.

Southeast Asia International Affairs Book Launch

"If you leave us here, we will die"
How Genocide was stopped in East Timor
25 February 2010, 6.30pm, B212
|Speaker: Professor Geoffrey Robinson
Chair: Dr Eva-Lotta Hedman

Geoffrey Robinson, an expert in Southeast Asian history, was in East Timor with the United Nations in 1999 when the country was plunged into violence that left some 1500 people dead and 400,000 others displaced. In his new book "If you leave us here, we will die: How Genocide was stopped in East Timor", Robinson provides a gripping first-person account of that violence, as well as a rigorous assessment of the politics and history behind it. He debunks claims that the militias committing the violence in East Timor acted spontaneously. Robinson also focuses attention on the complicity of major powers - notably the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom - in the unleashing of violence in East Timor in 1975, and again in 1999. At the same time, he argues that armed intervention supported by those powers in late 1999 was vital in averting a second genocide.

Drawing on personal observations, documentary evidence, and eyewitness accounts, Robinson engages essential questions about political violence, international humanitarian intervention, genocide, and transitional justice.

Geoffrey Robinson is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali, and East Timor 1999: Crimes Against Humanity.

LSE IDEAS Africa International Affairs Programme Seminar 

From Nuclear Pariah to Non-Proliferation Hero: Legacies of South Africa's Nuclear Policy
2 March 2009, 6.30pm, B212 LSE IDEAS Conference Room|
Speaker: Dr. Anna-Mart van Wyk
|Chair: Dr. Sue Onslow

South Africa’s nuclear policy represent a unique case in the history of international arms control measures, non-proliferation and non-alignment. In late 1989, South Africa became the first country to have developed a nuclear weapons capability and voluntarily destroyed it before acceding to the NPT. This arsenal of 6.5 nuclear bombs was developed since the 1970s as a deterrent to what the Apartheid Government in Pretoria perceived to be a communist ideological and security threat to South Africa. The dismantlement of the arsenal would be the beginning of a new era in South Africa’s nuclear history – one where an original decision founded on Real Politic was transformed into a claim to moral authority and leadership in international relations, and of nuclear accountability in the contemporary world. After 1994 specifically, under the new ANC government, South Africa became a leader in promoting nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament among non-aligned nations.

Anna-Mart van Wyk is a Lecturer and current Head of International Studies at Monash South Africa, a campus of Monash University Australia. Her current research in multiple international archives investigates South Africa’s military and nuclear policies during and after the Cold War. She is the author of a chapter on U.S.-South African nuclear relations in Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Liberation (ed. Sue Onslow, London: Routledge, 2009) and papers in Cold War History, South African Historical Journal and Historia. She has held a prestigious post-doctoral research fellowship from the South African National Research Foundation and the University of Johannesburg before joining Monash South Africa in 2008, where she teaches courses in arms control and diplomacy and international relations.

LSE IDEAS Middle East International Affairs Programme Seminar

What next for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?
3 March 2010, 6.30pm, B212|
Speaker: Raffaella A. Del Sarto
|Commentator: Amnon Aran|
Chair: Nigel Ashton|

Raffaella A. Del Sarto discusses the latest moves towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians and their future prospects.

Raffaella A. Del Sarto is Fellow in Israel Studies, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies / Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford.

LSE IDEAS Cold War Studies Programme Seminar

Peace and the Human Person:
The “Foreign Policy” of the Polish Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs with France, Belgium, and West Germany, 1956-1978
9 March 2010, 6.30pm, B212 LSE IDEAS Conference Room|
Speaker: Piotr H. Kosicki
Chair: Professor Arne Westad

In December 1967, Poland’s Ministry of Confessional Affairs circulated to the leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party a memorandum in which it argued that the network of liberal Catholic journals and discussion groups had achieved such international prominence that the Catholic intellectuals were in fact conducting a “separate foreign policy” that “functioned in distinct contradiction with the warranted requirements of policies in this sphere mandated by the State.” The goal of this lecture is to define this “foreign policy” and to explain its intellectual, political, and social origins and consequences. Beginning in 1956, this movement – whose total membership never exceeded 500 – was able to send representatives abroad regularly. What began as an exchange of ideas with Western European counterparts turned into a transnational project to find the key to harmonizing Catholicism and socialism: through progressively more frequent, more numerous, and deeper contacts with French personalist circles, Belgian journals and trade unions, and West German peace activists . Within the world of Catholic intellectuals – this movement contributed to the intellectual and political foundations of both Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II), and the Solidarity movement, and they led efforts towards Polish-German reconciliation. In their quest to be both good Catholics and good socialists, they regularly parted the Iron Curtain and problematized Cold War bipolarity, laying the groundwork for Poland’s “return to Europe” in 1989.

Piotr H. Kosicki is a Centennial Fellow and ABD in the Department of History at Princeton University. For the 2009-10 academic year, he is also Chateaubriand Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Institut d’Études politiques de Paris. In the past, he has taught at the Cooper Union and at Warsaw University (the latter while on a Fulbright Fellowship). He has three principal research and teaching interests: the interaction between Catholicism and socialism, the events of 1989, and memory of mass violence in Poland. He is currently completing a Ph.D. dissertation on the ZNAK movement and its Western European contacts, and he is co-editing a volume on the global events of 1989.

LSE IDEAS Africa International Affairs Programme Seminar

The Geopolitics of the Western Sahara Conflict
29 April 2010, 6.30pm, B212 LSE IDEAS Conference Room|
Speaker: Professor Yahia Zoubir
Chair: Dr. Sue Onslow 

Professor Zoubir will explore the main reasons for the curernt impasse over Western Sahara and the negative roles played by outside powers.

Yahia H. Zoubir is Professor of International Relations and International Management, and Director of Research in Geopolitics at EUROMED Management, Marseille School of Management. He taught in the United States for many years before joining EUROMED in 2005. He has recently published (co-edited with Haizam Amirah-Fernández), North Africa: politics, region, and the limits of transformation (2008) and North Africa in transition: state, society and economic transformation in the 1990s (1999). He is co-editor (with Daniel Volman) of International dimensions of the Western Sahara conflict (1993). He has published many articles on US foreign policy, especially in North Africa. His articles have appeared in Middle East Policy, Mediterranean Politics, Journal of North African Studies, Canadian Journal of History, Democratization, among others. He also contributed numerous chapters to various edited scholarly books internationally. His latest publication is, Global security watch: the Maghreb (forthcoming).

LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme Book Launch

How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace
4th May 2010, 6.30pm
Professor Charles A. Kupchan

Is the world destined to suffer endless cycles of conflict and war? Can rival nations become partners and establish a lasting and stable peace? How Enemies Become Friends provides a bold and innovative account of how nations escape geopolitical competition and replace hostility with friendship. Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity--and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.

Charles A. Kupchan is a senior fellow for Europe studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, professor of international affairs at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a member of the IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme advisory board.

LSE IDEAS – IPRI Working Seminar, Lisbon, Portugal

Legacies of Conflict, Decolonisation and the Cold War |
28/29 May 2010, IPRI Lisbon, Portugal

The recent history of Southern Africa has enormous importance for the contemporary world, in terms of both inter and intra state relations, and the linkages/ruptures between African states and movements.  Building upon a successful conference in May 2009 which brought together both established and new scholars in the field of Southern African studies in the 1970s and 1980s, LSE IDEAS and the Portuguese Institute of International Affairs (IPRI) are organizing a second working seminar in Lisbon on 28/29th May 2010. This meeting will address the legacies of decolonization, conflict and the Cold War for contemporary Africa with an emphasis on the political, diplomatic, military, ideological and social legacies of the Cold War era on African states and societies, and new perspectives on the inheritance of the struggle between nationalist liberation and white minority rule, external actors and agencies.