Contributor(s): Peter Feith | A look at Kosovo's achievements and challenges over the past year, highlighting the current state of play and the priorities and vision of the Kosovo government and its international partners as the country prepares for European Union membership.
Contributor(s): Professor Michael Cox, Professor Danny Quah | How will the world economic crisis impact the United States? Are we now witnessing the end of the American era? Michael Cox is professor of international relations and co-director of IDEAS at LSE. Danny Quah is head of department and professor of economics at LSE.
Contributor(s): Sharron Lovell | China is a country in superlative transition. Media attention focuses primarily on the economic miracle and burgeoning political power, while the interwoven and critically important story of mass human migration remains a postscript. Driven from crumbling countryside economics, 200 million Chinese have moved to the cities, serving as cogs in an engine powering unprecedented growth. Though they are changing every facet of Chinese life, these internal migrants are,...
Contributor(s): Will Hutton, Martin Wolf | Journalists Will Hutton and Martin Wolf discuss the global financial crisis. What are its dimensions? Have governments done enough to avoid the worst economic outcomes? And is the global economy teetering on the edge of depression?
Contributor(s): Lord Professor Meghand Desai, Dr Sharmila Bose | The fifteenth General Election in India, the world's largest democracy, with currently 714 million registered voters, is happening in five phases between 16 April and 13 May. The panel will discuss the most exciting election in India since Independence.
Contributor(s): Jessica Dimmock | Jessica Dimmock outlines the issues and obstacles relating to documentary photography, and the value of the long term project. She explores the process of engaging with subjects and the stories resulting from such sustained focus. This talk also considers the development of story ideas for the freelance photographer.
Contributor(s): David Aaronovitch | Why are people attracted to conspiracy theories and why are those theories are so damaging? David Aaronovitch is an award-winning journalist, who has worked in radio, television and newspapers in the UK since the early 1980s. This event marks the launch of his new book 'Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History'.
Contributor(s): Professor Conor Gearty | Conor Gearty speculates about the ongoing search for truth in human rights and reflects on his seven years as director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at LSE.
Contributor(s): Dr Joshua Barker | Anthropologists often use key figures, such as the street tough, the child witch, and the flbneur, as a means to elucidate, personify, and critique underlying dynamics of social and cultural transformation. It is a method that is widely used, but seldom scrutinised. In this lecture Joshua Barker uses examples from his research in the slums of Bandung, Indonesia, to argue that this method can make a powerful contribution to a comparative anthropology of urban ma...
Contributor(s): Prince Turki Al-Faisal | The Saudi-U.S relationship has always faced challenges that constantly test its strength. However, recent events in the region, such as the Iraq war, the 2006 war in Lebanon and the war in Gaza, have strained this relationship further. Prince Turki Al-Faisal, with his long and extensive experience in this area, gives his personal insight into this important relationship, its historical development and future challenges and prospects.
Contributor(s): Linda Melvern | Linda Melvern is an investigative journalist and author. A world expert on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she was a consultant to the prosecution team at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the military one case. She is an Honorary Professor of the Department of International Politics (University of Wales - Aberystwyth).
Contributor(s): Professor David Campbell, Teresa Hanley, Dr Ruth Kattumuri, Dr Sally Stares | This diverse panel explores global civil society approaches to the social problem of poverty. The ways in which poverty are articulated, how poverty is represented, and how 'the poor' are designated are important political processes with implications for people's agency, our perceptions of impoverishment, and policies to alleviate it.
Contributor(s): Professor Geoffrey Heal | The Stern Review stirred up the controversy surrounding the economics of climate change. This lecture will review these issues and give an assessment of the debate - where it is leading and what issues remain open.
Contributor(s): Christopher Caldwell | After a half-century of mass immigration, has Europe overestimated the need for immigrant labour and underestimated the culture shaping potential of religion? Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, and a regular contributor to the Financial Times. His new book is entitled 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Islam, immigration and the west'.
Contributor(s): Professor Athar Hussain, Professor Chen Jian, Professor Danny Quah | Asia's rise has brought about profound changes to the international system and the current world crisis presents the continent with both opportunities and challenges. The initiatives and responses by Asian countries, China and India in particular, have the potential to define the world's path of development now and in the future.
Contributor(s): Gillian Tett | Gillian Tett takes us inside the shadowy world of complex finance and derivatives and explains how the business of slicing and dicing debt led us to the devastating global credit crunch. Gillian Tett has worked as a journalist for the Financial Times for fifteen years. In 2008 she won the British Press Award for the Financial Journalist of the Year. This event marks the publication of her latest book Fool's Gold :How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered ...
Contributor(s): Professor John Gray | The world has entered a period of crisis and upheaval in which the ideologies of the past give little guidance. How did it reach its present condition? Is there a pattern of thinking that has led governments to make systematic errors? In conversation with Richard Reeves, John Gray will ask what went wrong and what we can expect in future. John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European hought at the LSE and author of Gray's Anatomy. Richard Reeves is Director of...
Contributor(s): John Christensen, Felicity Lawrence, Nick Mathiason, Dr Attiya Waris | Defenders of tax havens argue they provide vital financial services for international trade, and that most comply with money-laundering regulations and have juridical co-operation treaties. This panel will explore the issues surrounding tax havens, in particular their impacts on poor people.
Contributor(s): Dr Tristram Hunt | With capitalism in crisis, the shadow of Karl Marx is looming large. But what about the co-author of The Communist Manifesto? In advance of a major new biography, The Frock-Coated Communist, Tristram Hunt explores the life and work, the personal contradictions and ideological breakthroughs, of Friedrich Engels. Cotton-lord and communist, Engels was the man who turned Marxism into a political force - and whose vision was then brutally betrayed in the 20th centur...
Contributor(s): Professor Paul Collier | Award-winning author Paul Collier investigates the violence and poverty in the countries at the bottom of the world economy that are home to a billion people and asks why the democratic process in these countries so often fails.
Contributor(s): Professor Wang Gungwu | At the end of the 19th century, the Qing court described all Chinese living overseas as sojourners. Under the Republic, overseas Chinese were enjoined to be patriotic. After 1949, migration policies changed several times. Why did three different Chinese states pay so much attention to this subject?
Contributor(s): Nick Cohen | In the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism has been in hibernation - yet Britain has lived through its longest period of left-wing government. What is the future of the Left?
Contributor(s): Group Captain Bill Boothby | A discussion on future directions in the law regulating weaponry in armed conflict to mark the release of Bill Boothby's new book Weapons and the Law of Armed Conflict. Bill Boothby has served for 27 years as an officer in the Royal Air Force legal branch. He developed and implemented the British system for the legal review of new weapons, and formed and led the team charged with conducting these reviews. Tom Porteus is London director of Human Rights...
Contributor(s): George Papandreou | George A. Papandreou is president of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and president of Socialist International. He was minister of foreign affairs from 1999 to 2004, a period that saw inter alia a new rapprochement with Turkey. He has served as minister for national education and religious affairs on two occasions (1988-89; 1994-96).He is the son and grandson of two Greek prime ministers. In 2006 he became president of the Socialist International. Th...
Contributor(s): Professor Alejandro Aravena, Professor Ricky Burdett | The challenge to provide affordable housing is a global issue. At a time when market forces are eclipsing architecture's social value, Elemental's pioneering housing is transforming urban communities in Latin America.
Contributor(s): Francois Bayrou | Frangois Bayrou will address the theme of humanism. He will outline how he believes that Europe needs a new set of values and specially humanism after the failures of capitalism. Frangois Bayrou is the leader of the French centre party called Mouvement Democrate (Democratic Mouvement) and former presidential candidate. Mr Bayrou entered politics in the early 1980s and joined the centre right party called UDF. He served as education minister in centre-right gover...
Contributor(s): Nandan Nilekani | Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who has been a key player in India's growth story, argues that the country's future rests on more than simply economic growth. Only a safety net of ideas - from genuinely inclusive democracy to social security, from public health to sustainable energy - will enable the country to continue to grow and support the young people who have become one of its greatest assets.
Contributor(s): Professor Lord Stern of Brentford | Nicholas Stern presents an outline of his new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, which describes how to manage climate change while creating a new era of growth and prosperity.
