Contributor(s): Professor Linda Colley | The onset and proliferation of new written constitutions after 1787 presented successive governments in the UK with both opportunities and challenges. Through its empire and international heft, the UK came to draft and influence more constitutions in more parts of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries than any other power. Yet governments have always resisted the introduction of a written constitution in the UK itself. Other states need their political systems, identity and liberties confirmed in writing but the British do not. Their historic uncodified constitution is thus itself a demonstration and proof of their distinct identity. In this lecture, Linda Colley examines these trends and tensions over time, and discusses how far writing a constitution might work to reinforce rights in these islands and reconfigure connections. Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C Davies 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, and an expert on Britain since 1700. She was the first female fellow of Christ College, Cambridge, was a professor of history at Yale and was awarded a Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship in History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 won the Wolfson Prize for History. She is a fellow of the British Academy and in 2009 was awarded a CBE.

Contributor(s): George Soros, Anatole Kaletsky | This event marks the publication of George Soros' new book, Tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival?: How Europe Must Now Choose Between Economic and Political Revival or Disintegration in which he reveals the roots of Europe's current financial crisis and comprehensively assesses the consequences of that crisis for the global economy and on the political ideals embodied by the European Union. In this concise and illuminating volume, renowned financier George Soros examines both the political and economic fault-lines of the European Union to reveal the roots Europe's current financial crisis. Interwoven with aspects from George Soros' personal life, The Fate of the Union narrates the history of the European Union in order to assess the current crisis and its effects on Europe's role in the global economy. Will the Euro survive? George Soros identifies the true culprits of the Eurozone crisis - among them a misbegotten German austerity programme - and diagnoses what we must do to rescue the ideals of the European project. George Soros (@georgesoros) is the chairman of Soros Fund Management and the founder of Open Society Foundations, a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. He is the author of several best-selling books including The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Crash of 2008 and What It Means, The Bubble of American Supremacy and The Age of Fallibility. He was born in Budapest in 1930 and lives in New York City. He survived the Nazi occupation and fled communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Mr Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Capetown University in apartheid South Africa. He has established a network of philanthropic organisations active in more than 50 countries around the world. These organisations are dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and an open society. Anatole Kaletsky is an award-winning journalist and financial economist who has written since 1976 for The Economist, the Financial Times and The Times of London before joining Reuters. His recent book, Capitalism 4.0, about the reinvention of global capitalism after the 2008 crisis, was nominated for the BBC’s Samuel Johnson Prize, and has been translated into Chinese, Korean, German and Portuguese. Anatole is also chief economist of GaveKal Dragonomics, a Hong Kong-based group that provides investment analysis to 800 investment institutions around the world.

Contributor(s): Theodore Pelagidis | The emergence of the current crisis, and its handling by successive Greek governments once the crisis led to the loss of the confidence markets had in the Greek government, has led many opinion leaders and academics to express doubts with respect to the wisdom of the decision of Greece to participate in the final stage of the EMU, and correspondingly of the European Union bodies to accept Greece in the final stage of the EMU. This paper/presentation focuses on the crisis period 2010-2013 where severe austerity policies are dictated by the MoU and the conditionality programs. It also deals with reforms been made on employment, wages, earnings and labour cost developments during the above period so as the economy to increase competitiveness and viability within the Eurozone area. The presentation will finally offer policy guidelines for the future. This research will also be published as a book (co-authored with M. Mitsopoulos) in January 2014, by the Brookings Institution Press and it is the outcome of research undertaken by the author on behalf of the Brookings Institution, entitled: The Greek Growth Project.

Contributor(s): Professor Timothy Snyder | The opening of borders and archives has permitted a much fuller acquaintance with the victims of the Holocaust as well as with the motivation and behaviours of the German perpetrators and the East Europeans who aided them in the murder. Must the national history of Eastern Europe now collapse into nothing more than a prehistory of catastrophe? Timothy Snyder is Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for 2013-14.

Contributor(s): Alison Nimmo | In the past 10 years London has seen the resurgence of Regent Street to one of the globe’s most iconic streets and the regeneration of London’s East End catalysed by London 2012. Hear from Alison Nimmo who helped to win and deliver the Olympic Park and is now chief executive of the Crown Estate, a business that is using its expertise and extraordinary assets to transform the heart of London’s West End. Alison Nimmo joined The Crown Estate as chief executive in January 2012. The Estate’s assets range from prime real estate in London’s West End, to around 50% of the UK’s foreshore and almost the entire seabed around the UK, to farmland and forestry. With a capital value of over £8billion the business pays its surplus revenue (profit) to the Treasury for the benefit of the nation every year: in 2012/13 this was £252.6 million. Alison spent five years with the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) where, as director of design and regeneration, she was responsible for delivering the overall design and early delivery of many of the venues for the London 2012 games. Alison specialises in urban regeneration and was awarded a CBE in 2004. Her previous roles have included chief executive of Sheffield One and project director of Manchester Millennium Ltd. Alison is also a non-executive director at Berkeley Group and a visiting professor for Sheffield Hallam University. In January 2014 Alison was awarded the prestigious Royal Town Planning Institute Gold Medal for services to planning throughout her career.

Contributor(s): Dr Yvan Guichaoua, Imad Mesdoua | The South of Algeria belongs to the widely integrated Saharan political economy also composed of large chunks of the Malian and Nigerian territories. As such, Algeria plays a key role in the livelihoods (through licit or illicit means), and geographical social and political mobility of Sahelian communities, using borders as resources and connected to each other through transnational networks. But Algeria is also a powerful hegemon trying to protect its domestic and regional interests in an environment where political tensions and rivalries abound: protracted Western Sahara conflict, French military deployment at Algeria’s doorstep, highly mobile Jihadist units - remnants of the Algerian civil war. As a result, Sahelian narratives on Algeria are alternatively framed through the limited experiences of participants of the Saharan political economy or through discourses produced by biased, sometimes conspirationist, decision-makers and diplomats with varying allegiances. A kaleidoscopic and intellectually frustrating image of Algeria results, whose verifiability is highly problematic. Dr Yvan Guichaoua will examine the role of Algeria in recent (Tuareg then Jihadist) insurgencies in Mali and Niger as portrayed by various actors of the political crises in the Sahel. Imad Mesdoua will be examining the rationales guiding Algerian foreign policy in light of growing instability throughout the Sahel and Maghreb regions. Prior to French intervention in Mali, there was a general sense in the West that Algeria would, as a regional power, ultimately contribute or even spearhead a potential military intervention. In the end, Algeria did not participate in the French operation, and Imad seeks to explain why this was the case. He will also examine whether Algeria's regional security policy, partly focused on countering al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) growing influence in neighbouring states, has been a success. Yvan Guichaoua is a lecturer in International Politics at the University of East Anglia. He is a former teaching fellow at Yale University and research officer at the University of Oxford. He has been studying the dynamics of irregular armed groups in Sub-Saharan African since 2004. Since 2007, Yvan Guichaoua has been studying insurgencies in Niger and Mali and the rise of Jihadism in the Sahel. His work explores the complex interactions between violent entrepreneurs, low level combatants and the state and forms of governance they produce. Yvan Guichaoua is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and the editor of Understanding Collective Political Violence and co-editor of The Developmental Challenges of Mining and Oil (Palgrave-Macmillan). Imad Mesdoua is an Algerian political analyst specialising in the Middle East and North Africa. He has previously worked as a freelance journalist and as a political consultant, advising political officials and international organisations. He regularly provides on-air analysis as a guest commentator for the BBC, Al Jazeera and France 24.

Contributor(s): Professor Rajeev Bhargava | It is widely recognized that political secularism virtually everywhere in the world is in crisis. It is also acknowledged that to overcome this crisis, secularism needs to be reimagined and reconceptualised. In this lecture Rajeev Bhargava takes the first steps towards this. He argues that we need to move away from the standard church-state models of secularism and begin to focus instead on secularism as a response to deep religious diversity. He claims that diversity must be understood as enmeshed in power relations and therefore the hidden potential of religion related domination must be explicitly acknowledged. These two moves enable us to view secularism as a response to two forms of institutionalised religious domination; inter-religious and intra-religious. This way of conceiving secularism rebukes the charge that secularism is intrinsically anti-religious. Secularism is not against religion; it opposes institutionalised religious domination. Finally, Professor Bhargava argues that this conception entails that a secular state shows critical respect to all religious and philosophical worldviews, possible only when it adopts a policy of principled distance towards all of them. Rajeev Bhargava (@Rajeev_Bhargava) is the director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Previously, he was a professor at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and was the head of the department of political science at the University of Delhi. In 2006 he held the Asia Chair at Sciences Po. His publications include Individualism in Social Science, What is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy.

Contributor(s): Anne Applebaum, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, Ben Judah, Olexiy Solohubenko | It was meant to be a moment of glory for Vladimir Putin, basking in the glow from a successful winter Olympics. Instead the world's attention was drawn away from the ski slopes of Sochi and towards the barricades of central Kyiv. The violence on the streets was the latest chapter in the long and unpredictable aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the Kremlin, the Ukrainian revolution was a takeover by fascist elements of a nation which lies at the core of Russian history, with Kyiv the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox Church. For pro-European elements in Ukraine, the events exposed the hollow bluster of Putin's rhetoric. Meanwhile a nervous world watches and waits to see whether the angry words explode into open conflict across national borders. The BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Bridget Kendall, draws on her deep knowledge of the region to discuss these events with a distinguished panel. She will try to put the dramatic events of recent days into the longer historical context and ask what they mean for our relationship with Russia. This public discussion will be recorded and will be broadcast at 8.00pm on Saturday 8 March, on BBC Radio 4 (@BBCRadio4). Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) is the author of, among other books, Putinism: The Ideology; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956; Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe; and Gulag: A History. She is currently writing a history of Ukraine. Anne was the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for the 2012-13 academic year. Sir Rodric Braithwaite is a former British Ambassador to Russia, former foreign policy adviser to the prime minister (John Major) and former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Among his books are: Russia in Europe, Across the Moscow River and, most recently, Afgantsy: the Russians in Afghanistan. Ben Judah (@b_judah) is a Russianist and published last year, Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. Ben is a fellow at the European Stability Initiative. Olexiy Solohubenko is executive editor, Americas and Europe Region of BBC Global News. He was previously executive editor for Eurasia, which includes BBC services for Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Prior to that he was head of the BBC's Ukrainian Service. Bridget Kendall is the BBC's diplomatic correspondent and former Moscow correspondent.

Contributor(s): Sabrina Mahfouz plus special guests | Join award-winning poet and playwright Sabrina Mahfouz and special guests for an evening of live literature, performance and debate, as she explores climate change in the UK through storytelling and lively poetry performances. Special guests include performers and artists Deanna Rodger, Raymond Antrobus, Zia Ahmed and David Buckland, alongside climate change experts from the LSE. This free event, which reflects upon the risks of, and responses to climate change, is aimed at 18-30s. Sabrina Mahfouz is a poet, playwright, performer and writer. She has won a number of awards including the 2013 Sky Arts Futures Fund Award for her poetry work and is Associate Artist at the Bush Theatre and a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum. She is currently writing theatre pieces for the Bush Theatre and the National Theatre and her first collection of poetry and plays will be published in May 2014 by Bloomsbury imprint, Methuen. Sabrina is currently a poet in residence for Cape Farewell, an international not-for-profit, working internationally to bring together artists, scientists and communicators to stimulate the production of art founded in scientific research.

Contributor(s): Dr Sara Hageman, Fergal O'Regan, Anthony Teasdale | LSE European Institute and the European Parliament Information Office ‘European Parliament Elections 2014: issues and stakes’ series. Fergal O’Regan is Head of Unit at the European Ombudsman. Anthony Teasdale is Director General of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) and Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE European Institute.