Contributor(s): Professor Fiona Devine, Dr Sam Friedman, Professor Tim Newburn | We are delighted to confirm that the Impact of Social Sciences blog will continue to receive financial support from both HEFCE and the LSE for another year. To celebrate, we are hosting an event that will look at the opportunities and challenges of undertaking large-scale public social science projects. The session will look at the ways in ways in which academics are seeking to make their research and disciplines more public, and for their research to be part of public debate on key societal issues. We will also look at how these projects fit within the impact agenda and their challenges to traditional academic dissemination. Professor Tim Newburn will discuss the Reading the Riots project. This project was run jointly with the Guardian and its aim was to produce evidence-based social research that would help explain why the rioting spread across England in the summer of 2011. Professor Fiona Devine and Dr Sam Friedman will discuss the Great British Class Survey. Run jointly with BBC Labs, this project sought to understand whether class was still relevant today and, if so, what Britain's class system really looks like. Fiona Devine is professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Social Sciences (2009-12). Sam Friedman is lecturer in Sociology at City University. Tim Newburn is professor of Criminology and Social Policy and Head of the Social Policy Department, London School of Economics.

Contributor(s): Professor Ray Monk, Professor Stephen Mulhall | Is the biography of a philosopher relevant to an understanding of his philosophy? And is philosophy itself always somewhat autobiographical? Ray Monk is professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton. Stephen Mulhall is professor and fellow in philosophy at New College, University of Oxford.

Contributor(s): Massood Ahmed | Moderate growth is anticipated in the Middle East and North Africa region for this year, with oil exporters’ healthy growth rates moderating and mild recovery in the oil importers. However, complex political and social conditions, a challenging external environment, and low policy buffers burden the region’s oil importers. Difficult and unpopular policy choices coupled with a bold structural reform agenda will be necessary to maintain macroeconomic stability, create jobs, and promote inclusive growth. Masood Ahmed has been Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since November 2008. Between 2003 and 2006 he served as Director General for Policy and International Development at the U.K. government’s Department for International Development. He previously held positions in the IMF and the World Bank, working on areas that included international economic policy relating to debt, aid effectiveness, trade, and global economic prospects. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics.

Contributor(s): Professor Amartya Sen | When India became independent in 1947 after two centuries of colonial subjugation, it immediately adopted a firmly democratic political system, with multiple parties, freedom of speech and extensive political rights. The famines that had been so common in the colonial era disappeared, and steady economic growth replaced the almost complete stagnation characteristic of the long rule of the Raj. The growth of the Indian economy, which has quickened over the last three decades, became the second fastest in the world. Despite a recent dip, it is still one of the highest among nations. Maintaining rapid as well as environmentally sustainable growth remains an important and achievable goal for India. In this lecture, based on his new book written with Professor Jean Drèze, An Uncertain Glory, Sen will argue that the country's main problems lie elsewhere, particularly in the lack of attention that is paid to the essential needs of the people, especially the poor. One of the biggest failures has been the very inadequate use of the public resources generated by economic growth to expand India's lagging physical and social infrastructure (in sharp contrast, for example, to what China has done): there is a continued inadequacy both of social services such as schooling, medical care and immunization, and of physical services such as the provision of safe water, electricity, drainage and sanitation. Even as India has overtaken other countries in its rate of growth, because of these inadequacies it has, the book shows, fallen behind many of the same countries - often very poor ones - in quality of life. Because of the importance of democracy in India, addressing these failures will require not only significant policy rethinking by the government, but also a better public understanding of the abysmal extent of social and economic deprivations. The deep inequalities in Indian society tend to constrict public discussion in India's vibrant media to the lives and concerns of the relatively affluent. Dreze and Sen argue that if there is to be more effective democratic practice, there has to be a clearer understanding of the severity of human deprivations in India. Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor, professor of Philosophy and professor of Economics, at Harvard University. He is an honorary fellow of LSE. Amartya won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and was master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1998-2004. His many books include Development as Freedom, Rationality and Freedom, The Argumentative Indian, Identity and Violence and The Idea of Justice.

Contributor(s): Dr Derya Bayir, Dr Ayça Çubukçu, Dr Zeynep Gambetti, Dr Özlem Köksal | How should we understand what is happening in Turkey? Is this as an anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian rebellion, a struggle to redefine politics and to practice direct democracy? Why should we expect it to inspire people into action beyond Turkey? Should the popular insurgency in Turkey be understood as part of a global uprising that spans the Middle East and Africa, Europe and Latin America? More specifically, what are some of the strategies that the uprising citizens of Turkey have employed to negotiate their differences and to construct their common ground? How do they self-mobilize, arrive at decisions, and represent themselves through art, music and other media? How are political minorities shaping the extraordinary developments in Turkey with their presence or absence in the uprising? With this open forum we aim to address these questions, as we entertain the possibility that the uprising in Turkey may constitute something new that requires us to rethink our understandings of democracy, politics and law. Dr Derya Bayir is author of the forthcoming book Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law. Her interests include international human rights and minority rights, law and religion, the Turkish legal system, and Ottoman pluralism. She obtained her doctorate from the Law Department at Queen Mary, and her thesis was recently awarded a prize by the Contemporary Turkish Studies Chair at LSE. Derya has litigated many cases before the European Court of Human Rights, including the prominent case of Güveç v. Turkey. Dr Ayça Çubukçu is lecturer in human rights in the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and Department of Sociology at LSE. She writes on humanitarianism, liberalism and violence, transnational politics of solidarity, international law and colonialism, human rights and radical theory. Dr Zeynep Gambetti is associate professor of political theory at Bogazici University, Istanbul. She is particularly interested in theories of the public sphere, critical theory, ideology and discourse theories and in questions such as collective agency and ethics in the era of neoliberal globalization. She is currently exploring a theoretical framework through which to reflect upon recent radical movements, especially those that can create alternative spaces of existence. Dr Özlem Köksal is a Lecturer in the Film and Televison Department in Bilgi University in Istanbul. She received her doctorate from University of London, Birkbeck College with a dissertation examining the relation between collective memory, history, and cinema in Turkey. She is the editor of World Film Locations: Istanbul (Intellect 2012).

Contributor(s): Ambassador Akbar Ahmed | The United States declared war on terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. More than ten years later, the results are decidedly mixed. In The Thistle and the Drone, world-renowned author, diplomat, and scholar Akbar Ahmed, reveals a tremendously important yet largely unrecognized adverse effect of these campaigns: they actually have exacerbated the already-broken relationship between central governments and the tribal societies on their periphery. In the third volume of his trilogy that includes Journey into Islam (2007) and Journey into America (2010), Ambassador Ahmed draws on forty case studies of tribal societies across the Muslim world to analyze how the war on terror is being fuelled by the conflict between central governments and tribal peripheries. Beginning with Waziristan in Pakistan and expanding to similar tribal societies in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, this groundbreaking study offers an alternative and unprecedented paradigm for winning the war on terror. Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a Visiting Professor and was First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and has been called “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC.

Contributor(s): Dr Gordon Finlayson, Dr Simon Glendinning, Professor Laurence Goldstein, Professor MM McCabe, Dr Kristina Musholt, Dr Lea Ypi | Six philosophers have ten minutes each to pitch their arguments to a live audience. No deviation, hesitation or repetition! Gordon Finlayson is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sussex. Simon Glendinning is reader in European philosophy at the European Institute, LSE, and director of the Forum for European Philosophy. Laurence Goldstein is professor of philosophy at the University of Kent. MM McCabe is professor of ancient philosophy at King’s College London. Kristina Musholt is LSE fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method and deputy director of the Forum for European Philosophy. Lea Ypi is lecturer in political theory in the Government Department, LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor Justin Lin | This event marks the publication of Professor Lin's new book Against the Consensus: Reflections on the Great Recession. In June 2008, Justin Lin was appointed chief economist of the World Bank, right before the eruption of the worst global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. Drawing on experience from his privileged position, Lin offers unique reflections on the cause of the crisis, why it was so serious and widespread, and its likely evolution. Arguing that conventional theories provide inadequate solutions, he proposes new initiatives for achieving global stability and avoiding the recurrence of similar crises in the future. He suggests that the crisis and the global imbalances both originated with the excess liquidity created by US financial deregulation and loose monetary policy, and recommends the creation of a global Marshall Plan and a new supranational global reserve currency. Justin Lin is professor and honorary dean at the National School of Development at Peking University. He was the senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank from 2008-2012. Prior to joining the Bank, Professor Lin served for 15 years as founding director and professor of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University and is the author of 24 books including The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off, New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development and Policy, Demystifying the Chinese Economy, Benti and Changwu: Dialogues on Methodology in Economics, and Economic Development and Transition: Thought, Strategy, and Viability. He is a member of the Standing Committee and vice chairman of the Economic Council, Chinese People’s Political Consultation Conference. He was vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He served on several national and international committees, leading groups, and councils on development policy, technology, and environment including: Eminent Persons Council of the World Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Steering Committee, the UN Millennium Task Force on Hunger; the Eminent Persons Group of the Asian Development Bank; the National Committee on United States-China Relations; the Global Agenda Council on the International Monetary System; Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee; and the Hong Kong-U.S. Business Council. He received honorary doctoral degrees from Universite D’Auvergne, Fordham University, Nottingham University, City University of Hong Kong, London School of Economics, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for Developing World.

Contributor(s): Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Asanga Welikala, Uvindu Kurukulasuriya | Sri Lanka's civil war, which spanned more than a quarter of a century, ended in 2009. With more than 100,000 war casualties and one million refugees, it represented one of Asia's most violent, destructive and intractable conflicts. Four years since active military hostilities ended, there has been no progress towards constitutional and political reforms addressing the problems of pluralism and democracy that lay at the heart of the conflict, nor a legitimate process of truth and accountability for war-time abuses. Instead, Sri Lanka is steadily moving in the direction of becoming an authoritarian state, with the rule of law and governance under attack, the ascendance of majoritarian ethno-religious intolerance, and an overall decline in democratic and human rights standards. This event will explore the pervasive culture of impunity in Sri Lanka, both with regard to past abuses as well as post-war governance. The broader challenge of transition from a post-war to a post-conflict situation will be discussed in relation to ongoing efforts regarding peace and good governance. Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu has been the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) since its exception in 1996. He is a Convenor of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) and is a founder Board member of the Sri Lanka Chapter of Transparency International. Currently he is on the Board of the Berghof Foundation for Peace Support and a Member of the Transparency Advisory Group on The Right to Information in South Asia. In June 2003 he made the Civil Society Presentation at the Tokyo Donor Conference on Sri Lanka at the invitation of the Government of Japan and in March 2009, he served as a Member of the External Review Panel of the World Bank’s Post-Conflict Performance Indicators. In 2010, he was awarded the inaugural Citizens Peace Award by the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka. He has been quoted widely in the international and local print and electronic media and presented papers at a number of international conferences on the situation in Sri Lanka, on governance and security issues. Asanga Welikala is a doctoral candidate and ESRC Teaching Fellow in Public Law in the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. He is also a Senior Researcher in the Legal & Constitutional Unit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Sri Lanka. His most recent publication is the edited collection, A. Welikala (Ed.) (2012) The Sri Lankan Republic at 40: Reflections on Constitutional History, Theory and Practice (Colombo: CPA). Uvindu Kurukulasuriya is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. He has been a journalist for more than two decades and also the co-editor of Media Monitor. He is a freedom of expression activist, researcher and artist. At the time he was forced to leave the country he was the Convenor of the Free Media Movement and a Director of the Sri Lanka Press Institute and Press Complaints Commission of Sri Lanka. He was a Council member and executive committee member of International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) and Co-Convener of the Centre for Monitoring Elections Violence. He is co-author of Reporting on Human Rights in Sri Lanka: A Handbook for Media Professionals (Colombo: Centre for Policy Alternatives and International Federation of Journalists, 2008).

Contributor(s): Stephen King | The Western world has experienced extraordinary economic progress throughout the last six decades, a prosperous period so extended that continuous economic growth has come to seem normal. But such an era of continuously rising living standards is an historical anomaly, economist Stephen D. King warns, and the current stagnation of Western economies threatens to reach crisis proportions in the not-so-distant future. Praised for the 'dose of realism' he provided in his book Losing Control, King follows up in this volume with a plain-spoken assessment of where the West stands today. It's not just the end of an age of affluence, he shows. We have made promises to ourselves that are only achievable through ongoing economic expansion. The future benefits we expect - pensions, healthcare, and social security, for example - may be larger than tomorrow's resources. And if we reach that point, which promises will be broken and who will lose out? The lessons of history offer compelling evidence that political and social upheaval are often born of economic stagnation. King addresses these lessons with a multifaceted plan that involves painful - but necessary - steps toward a stable and just economic future. Stephen King is HSBC’s Group Chief Economist and the Bank’s Global Head of Economics and Asset Allocation research. He is directly responsible for HSBC’s global economic coverage and co-ordinates the research of HSBC economists all over the world. He is currently the top-rated global economist in the annual Extel survey. His new book is When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence.