Contributor(s): Dr Benedetta Berti, Professor Christopher Coker, Andy Salmon | After NATO published its new Strategic Concept in June 2022, in the midst of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and 12 years on from its last Strategic Concept, this event takes a look at how the strategy was formed and what it is for.

Contributor(s): Professor Leslie McCall | Questioning widespread notions of US exceptionalism, the lecture critically examines common assumptions about how Americans think about issues of economic inequality (in outcomes and opportunities and across dimensions of race and class) and related policies that reduce economic inequality.

Using a wide range of existing and original data sources, as well as multiple methodological approaches, Professor McCall analyses public views in the United States over time and in a comparative context. She proposes a multi-dimensional framework for understanding public views of inequality rooted in desires for substantive economic and educational opportunities through a broad set of social rights, employment protection and support, and redistribution of pay. The in-depth study of the American case in comparative perspective and supplementary cross-national analyses suggests that this novel analytical framework can shed light on the politics of inequality throughout advanced political economies.

Contributor(s): Professor Shakuntala Banaji, Dr Ram Bhat | Social Media and Hate argues that these phenomena, and the extreme violence and discrimination they initiate against targeted groups, are connected to the socio-political contexts, values and behaviours of users of social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, ShareChat, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The argument moves from a theoretical discussion of the practices and consequences of sectarian hatred, through a methodological evaluation of quantitative and qualitative studies on this topic, to four qualitative case studies of social media hate, and its effects on groups, individuals and wider politics in India, Brazil, Myanmar and the UK. The technical, ideological and networked similarities and connections between social media hate against people of African and Asian descent, indigenous communities, Muslims, Dalits, dissenters, feminists, LGBTQIA communities, Rohingya and immigrants across the four

Contributor(s): Geoff Tily | Without taxation there is no government. Taxation is essential, but who is to pay, and for what? For centuries people have fought over these questions, and these fights have been at the heart of the development and crises of democracy, from Magna Carta through the French Revolution to the Global Financial Crisis and the Pandemic. Bringing together internationally renowned academic experts and policymakers, this documentary retraces this fascination history across France, Britain and Germany from as far as the Middle Ages up to the present day.

Contributor(s): Professor Hazel V Carby, Ruby Hembrom | Indigenous, black and Latinx communities suffer the health consequences of living in the most polluted and toxic environments. Indigenous peoples across the Americas are also at the forefront of opposition to the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels. In this event, Hazel Carby will be discussing and showing the work of indigenous artists who are responding to environmental and ecological crises and degradation.

Contributor(s): Dr Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, Maarya Rabbani | Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, LSE. She is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS), South Africa. 

Maarya Rabbani is the 2022-23 Education Officer at LSE Students’ Union. She is a British-Afghan scholar and holds two MSc degrees in Education, and Comparative Politics from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science, respectively. 

Eric Neumayer is Professor of Environment and Development at LSE, having joined the Department of Geography and Environment in 1998.

Contributor(s): Professor Abraham L Newman, Dr Jamie Martin, Professor Stephanie J. Rickard | The war in Ukraine raises questions about whether states must be ‘strategic’ about their national economic policies due to geopolitical risks. The scramble for supplies to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, long-term trends of growing competition between the United States and China and the rise of populism had already fuelled geopolitical tensions, along with fears that globalisation is eroding. As a result, some of the global economy’s most prominent players prioritise economic resilience and reshoring global supply chains with ‘friendly’ allied states. The potential outcome is a fracturing of a globalised economy based on these alliances or outright deglobalisation. All of this is culminating in escalating economic disruptions for lower-income countries, with countries in sub-Saharan Africa facing possible default on their sovereign debt. Added to this, the war in Ukraine has caused the most significant commodity shock since the 1970s. International institutions, like the World Trade Organization, continue to defend global trade and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank continue to champion international cooperation to address economic and social welfare.

What are the political, social, and economic implications of these challenges for the global economy? How should international laws and institutions address these challenges to economic integration? How do precedents for twentieth-century international economic institution building help us contextualise today’s challenges?

Contributor(s): Professor June Barrow-Green | In 1916 the physician Ronald Ross published the first of three papers on the mathematical study of epidemiology or, as he called it, ‘pathometry’. The second and third of these papers appeared the following year co-authored with the mathematician Hilda Hudson. At the time Hudson, who had ranked equivalent to the 7th wrangler in the 1903 Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, was well known for her work on Cremona Transformations. So how and why did Hudson, a geometer, end up collaborating with Ross, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria? And what role did she play? In her talk June Barrow-Green shall discuss the nature and extent of their collaboration, as well as the content and significance of their work.

Contributor(s): Professor Neil Cummins, Professor Sam Friedman, Sabrina Daniel | It examines how we wear and reveal our social class in English society today. Do accents really matter? Is it enough to imitate one supposed ‘social betters’ to achieve social mobility? What cost is there to the individual who changes their social status?

Sue Windebank talks to an LSE Law student who reveals how she has overcome the challenges of being an asylum seeker and a care leaver to study law at the School. Professor Sam Friedman, a sociologist of class and inequality, discusses the arbitrariness of what is considered ‘high culture’. And economic historian Professor Neil Cummins reveals how class will probably determine who you marry.

Contributor(s): Professor Gary Gerstle | As a new progressivism gains steam on the left, and Donald Trump gears up for a second run on the right, we are joined by Gary Gerstle to discuss his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order America and the World in the Free Market Era.