Summer 2007 | Public lectures and events | Audio and pdf

Contributor(s): Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Patrick Cockburn, Tim Finch, Baroness Margaret Jay, Professor Mary Kaldor | Following a series of hearings, Channel 4 aired the findings of the Channel 4/ Foreign Policy Centre Iraq Commission in a special programme presented by Jon Snow on Saturday 14 July 2007. The Commission, the equivalent of the US Iraq Study Group, is an independent, cross-party Commission which has produced recommendations on the future of Britain's role in Iraq.

Contributor(s): The Rt Hon Jack Straw MP, Shami Chakrabarti, Nick Clegg MP, Peter Facey Dominic Grieve QC MP, Professor Robert Hazell, Gus Hosein, Henry Porter, Justice Robert Sharpe, Roger Smith, Michael Willis MP | In what will be his first major speech since taking on leadership of constitutional reform, the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, will deliver a keynote address at the launch of the LSE's Future Britain project. The project is a two-year initiative to explore the best and most appropriate processes for constitutional reform in the UK. The Future Britain website, www.futurebritain.org, will go live on Monday 16 July 2007, with more about the project.

Contributor(s): Professor Mary Kaldor, Yahia Said, George Soros, Professor Sir Nicholas Stern | This event seeks to encourage a more holistic approach towards thinking about energy security, and will mark the launch of the publication Oil Wars, edited by Mary Kaldor, Terry Karl and Yahia Said.

Contributor(s): Mark Wilson, James Deane, Gerald Milward-Oliver | How can the media hold governments in developing countries to account? How can more effective media development improve development more widely? What is the impact of the digital revolution in Africa? Are there fragile states in which media development must be abandoned altogether? This report sets out the POLIS view of 'networked journalism' for fostering media development in Africa.

Contributor(s): Sir Nicholas Stern | Professor Stuart Corbridge is head of the Development Studies Institute, LSE. Mr Anwar Hasan, is managing director of Tata Ltd.UK. Professor S Parasuraman is Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Professor Sir Nicholas Stern is the IG Patel Professor of Economics & Government and director of the Asia Research Centre at LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor Axel Honneth | This lecture develops Freud's implicit idea of the freedom of the will. For Freud, the 'healthy' person is very often determined by the same kind of irrational powers to which the neurotic personality is subjected. On the basis of a 'normalised' concept of repression, Freud has to explain how a normal subject should be able to gain emancipation from these unconscious constraints of his or her will. What conception of the individual self-relationship will enable us to solve this problem? How might we clarify the link Freud established between individual autonomy and the reflexive appropriation of one's own past?

Contributor(s): Professor Jiang Wang | Liquidity is of critical importance to the stability and the efficiency of financial markets. Shortages of liquidity has often been blamed for exacerbating and sustaining financial market crises such as the 1987 stock market crash and the 1998 near collapse of the Long Term Capital Management. Yet there is little consensus about exactly what liquidity is, what determines it, how it affects asset prices and welfare. Views become even more divergent when it comes to appropriate regulations and policies with respect to market liquidity, such as lowering barriers of entry in securities trading, increasing margins and capital requirements of broker-dealers when dealing with hedge funds, coordinating market participants and injecting liquidity during crises. Professor Wang will attempt to present a simple model of market liquidity, which will help consider these issues. In particular, it will help understand what gives rise to the need for liquidity and determines its supply, how liquidity influences asset prices and welfare, and what, if any, policies may help to achieve efficient liquidity supply in the market.

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Krugman | Progressive free-traders - people who believe both in domestic equity and in the promise of globalisation - are feeling chastened these days. What's left of the case for globalisation? How can we make it work?

Contributor(s): Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt MP | In this lecture, Patricia Hewitt will reflect on the achievements and lessons learnt from the last ten years of investment and reform in the health service. She will set out how, over the coming decade, the NHS can rise to the challenge of delivering the best health and healthcare for patients, and the best value for money for taxpayers. Ms Hewitt will also tackle head on proposals for alternative ways of funding healthcare, such as co-payments, and demonstrate how a universal, tax-funded NHS can remain 'the best insurance policy in the world'.

Contributor(s): Professor Shai Feldman, Dr. Khalil Shikaki | Professor Shai Feldman is director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, Boston. From 1997-2005 he served as head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. In 2001-2003 he served as a member of the UN Secretary General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Dr. Khalil Shikaki is director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), Ramallah

Contributor(s): Imran Khan | [Please note that due to a sudden change of venue, the beginning of this lecture is missing] Imran Khan is a member of the Pakistan parliament and Chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) which he established in 1997. He is also the founder of the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre, Lahore. Khan is thought of by many in the cricketing world as being one of the finest all rounders to play the game and led the Pakistan cricket team to victory at the 1992 cricket world cup. He is a graduate of Keble College, Oxford.

Contributor(s): Professor Saskia Sassen | Global warming will fundamentally alter the political economy of cities. A large number of cities will be in the front line of the most massive onslaughts of these changes. What do engineers and architects already know about how we can adjust our built environments? And how can ecological economists help to take us beyond the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change? Saskia Sassen is Centennial Professor at LSE and Professor, Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Her latest book is Territory, Authority, Rights.

Contributor(s): Professor Gerald Frug | There is a widespread consensus that, everywhere in the world, urban development has to be based on the rule of law. But what is 'the rule of law'? Does any formal legal system qualify - or must it have specific requirements? If there are specific requirements, who says what they are? Does the rule of law inhibit - or does it encourage - the extent of privatisation of urban space? Does it require the abolition of informal settlements and businesses or allow them? This lecture will investigate whether the contested notion of the rule of law contributes to thinking about urban form. Gerald Frug is Louis D Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Visiting Professor at LSE.

Contributor(s): Hari Sankaran | Financing urban development and infrastructure requires consistent strategic planning. While urban planning adjusts to flexible, short-term and incremental implementation, cities rely on long-term visions. How can capital intense investments become socially and financially sustainable given this critical long-term perspective? Hari Sankaran is managing director of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd.

Contributor(s): Dr Michael Thomas | Most scholars explain America's nearly unconditional support of Israel either as a result of inordinate influence by a small pro-Israel lobby or as the product of strategic choices by presidents. Studies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations demonstrate a more useful way to understand American policy and to predict when it might change. That method involves analysing how policy advocates redefine, institutionally embed, and enforce versions of long-standing American beliefs favourable to their preferred policies, and under what conditions those efforts are less effective.

Contributor(s): Lord Paddy Ashdown | In this lecture Lord Paddy Ashdown discusses his new book - Swords and Ploughshares: Bringing Peace to the 21st Century. There have been 15 UN-led interventions since 1946, and there are at least 74 wars in progress today. From his perspective as a former Royal Marine officer in the 1960s to the High Representative in Bosnia from 2002-6, Lord Ashdown discusses the successes and failures of peace-keeping operations, questions what lessons have been learned - and what lessons keep being forgotten. The men and women of the British armed forces are currently engaged in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans in 'peacekeeping operations'. How do we avoid these missions turning into long-term entanglements, like the current disaster that is Iraq? How do we bring our soldiers home? And what do we do about 'failed states' that are havens for gangsters and terrorists? Paddy Ashdown fears we will soon see major wars between nation states. Many will begin as minor conflicts that will expand into full-scale wars unless the international community intervenes.

Contributor(s): Professor Michael Cole | From its founding as an academic discipline, psychology has been divided in its understanding of itself. The project to create a psychology that unifies experimental, 'physiological' psychology and ethnographic, cultural-historical psychology requires a reconfiguration of the disciplinary landscape of the late 19th century that, from our current perspective, appears inter-disciplinary, including, as it does, scholarship from anthropology, sociology, discourse analysis as well as the neurosciences and evolutionary biology.

Contributor(s): Professor Anthony Giddens, Lord Kinnock, Ed Miliband MP, Mandy Telford, Stephen Twigg | Many children approaching adulthood today will not remember anything other than a Labour government. So ten years on from the dawn of New Labour, what has been achieved and how has Britain changed? Was New Labour just a campaigning vehicle, or did it herald a new philosophical direction for the Labour Party? Is New Labour still relevant today, or does Labour need to find a different way of articulating its purpose?

Contributor(s): Jeremy Rifkin | This lecture critically examines the fossil fuel era and its consequences for industrial civilisation. It explores the nexus of politics, society and business and the massive potential for industry and capital investment. It also considers the future of renewable energy and the hydrogen economy, and how an integrated infrastructure and energy regime can be created in Europe.

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Krugman | Manufactured imports from developing countries have risen sharply since the mid-90s, when the effects of trade on inequality were a major political issue. Should we be reconsidering the link between globalisation and inequality?