The audio track from a very timely lecture organised by the Stevenson Trust for Citizenship and co-hosted by the Scottish Council on Global Affairs.

It took place at the University of Glasgow in April 2025.

The speakers were Professors Rita Abrahamsen & Michael C. Williams, both at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and both Leverhulme Visiting Professors in the United Kingdom.

Professors Abrahamsen and Williams argue that while the radical Right is far from a unified political movement, its calls for sovereignty, civilizational orders, and multipolarity enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The potential consequences for the future of the liberal world order remain wide-ranging.

See also on YouTube.

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A live recording of First Minister John Swinney MSP and former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar with Principal Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, at an event held in the Booth Lecture Theatre to mark the transition of SCGA from the University of Glasgow to St Andrews for the next two years.

“The fact that three institutions – the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh – came together to found the Council is very good practice and not something I have seen in any other jurisdictions ” (Leo Varadkar)

https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/first-minister-and-former-taoiseach-mark-st-andrews-leadership-of-scga/

John Swinney from 9m50s

Leo Varadkar from 27m30s

Questions and vote of thanks edited out for length, recording c/o University of St Andrews.

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In this episode we look at the work undertaken by Prof. Andrew Neal and his colleagues on National Security globally. Breaking new ground a corpus and dataset of national security documents has been produced, with SCGA support, offering unprecedented insights into the landscape of international security.

This collection encompasses 575 documents from 113 countries, spanning the years 1987 to 2024. It represents the first-ever comprehensive corpus of public national security and defence documents on a global scale, providing a unique window into how countries across the world conceptualise and prioritise their security challenges.

The complete dataset has a DOI and is available through Edinburgh DataShare, the University of Edinburgh’s digital repository. It is released under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 licence, meaning it can be freely shared and adapted with attribution.

See scga.scot for more details, the work of Prof. Ole Wæver on Threat is also referenced.

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We are joined by Dr Ilia Xypolia, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen; and Dr Zana Gul, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Stirling.

They discuss their SCGA-funded project on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the first negotiated peace settlement post-World War One, its aftermath and its lessons for the greater Middle East.

Considered by some as the introduction of partition as a policy, and as the “birth certificate” of modern Turkey, the Treaty created a legacy that persists today.

While the Treaty also marked the beginning of the end of British foreign policy predominance, this episode discusses the UK’s persistent and discrete role in the greater Middle East today, the place of Turkey at the hinge of regional affairs, and touches upon aspects of gender. It also looks at how the Treaty prefigures the reconfiguration of power and influence that continues in global affairs today - with lessons and opportunities for Scotland’s role too.

Also mentioned: United States Institute of Peace and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

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Recorded live at the Glasgow Human Rights Network’s Early Career Researcher event, Dr David Scott talks with Dr Elaine Webster (Strathclyde University), Prof Bruce Adamson (University of Glasgow), and Mhairi Snowden (Human Rights Consortium Scotland) on how to bring academia and practice together to work on human rights in Scotland.

 On 13 June 2024, the Glasgow Human Rights Network hosted its first Early Career Work-in-Progress Workshop at Strathclyde University, bringing together PhD students from the Universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde, Glasgow Caledonian University, and the University of the West of Scotland to present their work and make new connections with other early career academics.

On this episode of the SCGA podcast, the Network presents the workshop’s keynote panel on Human Rights Work in Practice, with Dr David Scott (Postdoctoral Research Associate in International Law and Governance at the Glasgow Centre for International Law and Security, University of Glasgow, and the Scottish Council on Global Affairs) joined by Dr Elaine Webster (Reader in Law at Strathclyde University), Prof Bruce Adamson (former Professor of Legal Practice at University of Glasgow and former Children and Young People’s Commissioner for Scotland), and Mhairi Snowden (Director at the Human Rights Consortium Scotland) to discuss their careers in human rights, the successful collaborations they have seen between academics and civil society, and the challenges and obstacles that can be encountered when trying to work together.

Supported by a SCGA Connections Award, this Early Career Workshop was the third and final relaunch event for the Glasgow Human Rights Network, which aims to foster new connections between academics, civil society organisations, and community and activist groups working on human rights issues across Scotland. You can learn more about the Glasgow Human Rights Network at https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/glasgowhumanrightsnetwork/ and on Twitter/X at @GlasgowHumRts. You can also join the Network’s mailing list by contacting [email protected].

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On 16 January 2024, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 entered into law, ending a multi-year push by civil society to see international children’s rights written into Scots law.

On this episode of the SCGA podcast, Dr David Scott (Postdoctoral Research Associate in International Law and Governance at the Glasgow Centre for International Law and Security, University of Glasgow, and the Scottish Council on Global Affairs) is joined by Professor Bruce Adamson (Professor in Practice at the School of Law, University of Glasgow and former Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland) and Josh Kennedy (former Chair of the Scottish Youth Parliament) to discuss the long road leading up to the Act’s passage, the obstacles the Act faced – including a successful challenge to a previous draft of the Act before the UK Supreme Court - and the hopes they have for the future of children’s rights in Scotland.

For more on Scotland’s human rights plans, you can find a previous episode of the SCGA podcast on the Scottish Human Rights Bill at https://scga.scot/2023/10/24/human-rights-scots-law/. 

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In this podcast, John Edward speaks to Prof. Tom Scotto and Dr Claire Duncanson of the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively, on their work on public attitudes in Scotland.

In the first detailed study of its kind, they have looked at attitudes across nationalist and unionist persuasions to key international issues of today – wellbeing, global justice, colonial legacies, military force and development spending. In particular they have looked at attitudes to the feminist approach to foreign policy supported by the Scottish Government, among others. A full report “Good Global Citizens”, and open-source data set and code book are available at scga.scot.

Further reading:

The structure of foreign policy attitudes in transatlantic perspective: Comparing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany

Scotland the Brave? An authentic, ambitious and accountable Feminist Foreign Policy

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Four years on since the pandemic broke across the world SCGA looks at the prospects for a new Pandemic Treaty. John Edward speaks to Dr Stephanie Switzer of the University of Strathclyde and Dr Mark Eccleston-Turner of King’s College London.

Equity has been sorely lacking in pandemic preparedness and response, and COVID-19 is the latest example. The World Health Assembly of the WHO is due to finalise a Pandemic Treaty negotiated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body in May/June 2024. We look at how far apart countries of the Global North and South still are, and what this intergovernmental response tells us about preparedness and the search for equity ahead of whatever pandemic may come next.

An SCGA Insight paper on this project is also available, with the contribution of Abbie Rose-Hampton and Michelle Rourke.

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In the last edition of 2023 Dr. Tyler White, Associate Professor of Practice and the Director of the National Security Program at the University of Nebraska talks to John Edward about deterrence and assurance. Since warfare entered the atomic and nuclear age, deterrence and assurance have highlighted the perils and sought success in keeping the world safe.

• Where did the 1980's fear of nuclear weapon go?
• Has success in deterrence been undone by new forms of peril?
• How do you engage the right people to study these issues?
• Should we all now consider ourselves our own intelligence analysts?

Tyler is one of the members of the US Strategic Command's Academic Alliance. The most recent DAAA conference, organised in Edinburgh by the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory was in partnership with the SCoGA.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in Paris 75 years ago.

Professor Helen Duffy, Professor of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Grotius Centre of Leiden University and Director of Human Rights in Practice, joins Professor Christian Tams.

They discuss the Declaration's origins and progress, its universality and efficacy, and its application as the bedrock for binding human rights - not solely in situations of armed conflict.

• Human Rights Day 2023
• Drafting and Relevance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Hadijatou Mani Koraou v The Republic of Niger, Judgement of 27 October 2008
• University of Glasgow, LLM in Human Rights
• Glasgow Human Rights Network - a hub for human rights academics and practitioners

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