In 2024, two billion people went to vote – and populism won big. Donald Trump returned to the White House. Marine Le Pen surged in France. Reform UK became Britain’s most successful far-right party in modern history. Across the West, authoritarian populists now govern one-quarter of the world’s democracies. But is this peak populism – or the populists’ tipping point?

This talk will examine housing and work, sleep and sociality, as key aspects of everyday life where strategies to create more equitable and sustainable access to cooling must focus.

The Trump Administration has closed the world’s largest bilateral aid programme, USAID and poured scorn on its past effectiveness. Other donors are also cutting their aid programmes at the same time as there is a growing chorus of concern around aid effectiveness. It has created ‘’ a perfect storm” in the world of development finance. Can there be a happy ending or is development another casualty of Trump’s new global disorder?

Commentators around the world draw some startling analogies when they seek to assess President Donald Trump, some even likening him to a Roman emperor or an inter-war dictator. In this lecture, Niall Ferguson puts Trump's foreign policy in an Anglo-American historical perspective.

As Black Lives Matter has exposed the legacies of transatlantic slavery and empire, Britain has launched a new moral crusade at home: the fight against “modern slavery.” This panel discussion marks the launch of Drugs, Race and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law by Insa Lee Koch and asks what this crusade is really doing.

The US capture of President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 and the US–Israeli military campaign against Iran have thrust foreign intervention back to the centre of global debate.

This public lecture is for the book launch of Greek Prime Ministers in the Eye of the Storm: Crisis Management and Institutional Change, featuring authors Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou.

Leaders of the world’s premier economic institutions and a Nobel Prize winning economist discuss how ideas have evolved to shape our world and what is needed for the future.

Why should governments back “Big Science” when discoveries are uncertain and the benefits may seem distant from taxpayers’ daily lives? In this public lecture, France A Córdova—astrophysicist and former Director of the US National Science Foundation, NASA Chief Scientist, and President of the Science Philanthropy Alliance—explores how curiosity-driven research and the large infrastructures that enable it deliver value well beyond the lab.

At a time of intensifying geopolitical rivalry, economic nationalism, and ideological extremism, this roundtable brings together a group of leading political scientists and historians to take stock of the choices and pathways that have brought America and the world to this unsettled moment.