Summer 2008 | Public lectures and events | Audio and pdf

Contributor(s): Dr Martin Rupiya, Patrick Smith, Knox Chitiyo, Gugulethu Moyo | As talks between Mr Mugabe and both factions of the Movement for Democratic Change open in South Africa, the crisis in Zimbabwe continues. Western countries are pushing for more sanctions against Zimbabwe's rulers, while President Mbeki and the African Union oppose them. Meanwhile, the shrinking economy provides Mr Mugabe with less and less to pay the army, police and administrators. The June 27 presidential run-off was dubbed the endgame. It proved just another stage in Zimbabwe's unfolding catastrophe. What might happen next?

Contributor(s): Fareed Zakaria | Global power is shifting, and wealth and power are bubbling up in unexpected places. Fareed Zakaria considers not so much the decline of America, but the impact of the rise of "the rest". This transition of power will redefine America's role as the arbiter of the world's political, economic, and cultural issues and force it to accommodate new heavyweights. Zakaria offers an illuminating view of our increasingly complicated future, the growing influence of rapidly developing nations, and how these forces of great change will continue to play out on the world stage. This event marks the launch of Fareed Zakaria's new book The Post American World (Allen Lane, July 2008).

Contributor(s): Professor Kenneth Pomeranz | This lecture traces evolving relationships among skills, bargaining power, and East Asian economic development. Kenneth Pomeranz is UCI Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California-Irvine.

Contributor(s): Cécile Laborde | The global revival of religion has raised fundamental questions about its role in politics and its claim that it serves as a principle of identity, indispensable to the continuing survival of communities. This series brings together leading thinkers and scholars to encourage discussion and debate on this crucial contemporary theme.

Contributor(s): Gabor Steingart | Globalization is the defining force of our lifetime, but most politicians have not understood the complexity of the process. Thus argues Gabor Steingart, in his controversial and thought-provoking new book The War for Wealth: The True Story of Globalization (McGraw-Hill, June 2008) which he will present for the first time in the UK.

Contributor(s): Professor Axel A Weber | In light of the current tensions in financial markets Professor Axel Weber will look at financial market stability from a central bank's perspective. Axel Weber is president of Deutsche Bundesbank and a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank.

Contributor(s): Professor Richard Norman | The global revival of religion has raised fundamental questions about its role in politics and its claim that it serves as a principle of identity, indispensable to the continuing survival of communities. This series brings together leading thinkers and scholars to encourage discussion and debate on this crucial contemporary theme.

Contributor(s): Professor Philip Bobbitt | The threat of terrorism is now part of the landscape of daily lives all over the world, yet we have hardly begun to think properly about it. In his new book Terror and Consent and in this lecture Professor Bobbitt argues that we are fighting these wars with weapons and concepts which though useful to us in previous conflicts have now been superseded. He aims to provide a fundamental rethinking of most generally accepted ideas about terror in the modern world 7 what it is, how it operates and above all how it can be frustrated. Philip Bobbitt argues that we need to reforge the links between law and strategy; to realize how the evolution of modern states, which have always produced terrorists in their own image, has now produced a globally networked terrorism; to combine humanitarian interests with strategies of intervention; and above all to rethink what 7victory7 in such a war, if it is a war, might look like 7 no occupied capitals, no treaties, no victory parades, but the preservation, protection and defence of human rights and of states of consent. It is central to his argument that we are fighting terror and not just terrorists.

Contributor(s): Professor Veit Bader | The lecture presents a contextualised criticism of first and second order myths of secularisms and of the conflation of liberal-democratic institutions with secular ones, and argues for the priority of liberal democracy. Veit Bader holds chairs in sociology, and social and political philosophy, both at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Contributor(s): Professor Mona Siddiqui | The global revival of religion has raised fundamental questions about its role in politics and its claim that it serves as a principle of identity, indispensable to the continuing survival of communities. This series brings together leading thinkers and scholars to encourage discussion and debate on this crucial contemporary theme.