This event launches Jonathan White's and Gerard Delanty's new books.

Ideas of the future were central to the making of the modern world and are reshaping today’s societies in an age of emergencies and existential concern.  Two new books look at the enduring significance of the imagined world to come: Jonathan White’s "In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea" (Profile), and Gerard Delanty’s "Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today" (de Gruyter).  This symposium brings together social and political theorists to explore what the future means today, how we got here, and what’s at stake. 

Meet out speakers and chair

Richard Bellamy (@rpbellamy1) is Professor of Political Science at University College London (UCL), University of London, and a Senior Fellow at the Hertie School.

Gerard Delanty is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought at Sussex University.

Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and IR at Queen Mary, University of London.

Anne Phillips is Professor Emerita at LSE, where she was previously Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science.

Jonathan White (@JonathanPJWhite) is Professor of Politics at the LSE’s European Institute.

Marta Lorimer (@_mlorimer) is Fellow in European Politics at the LSE’s European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

The Politics of the Future

Join us for this panel event, discussing some of the key policy issues pertaining women and work: from sexual harassment in the workplace, to the “motherhood penalty”, to the way women in employment (and women “who quit”) are represented in the media and policy discourse. 

The event launches the publication of the new LSE Public Policy Review issue “Multidisciplinary approaches and policy innovation in Gender Research”, edited by Almudena Sevilla.  Find out more about the issue that explores more emerging challenges and the evolving landscape of gender research, including perspectives from law, communications, health and social policy, gender studies and economics.

You can read the new publication here: https://ppr.lse.ac.uk/14/volume/3/issue/4

More about out speakers and chair

Gabriel Leite-Mariante (@LeiteMariante) is a PhD candidate in Economics at LSE. His work focuses on social protection, labour markets and gender inequality in low- and middle-income countries.

Shani Orgad is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. 

Margaux Suteau (@MargauxSuteau) is LSE Fellow in the Department of Social Policy.

Dame Maria Miller (@MariaMillerUK) was secretary of state for culture, media and sport and minister for women and equalities (2012–14). Previously, she was also a junior minister in the Department for Work and Pensions (2010–12). She chaired the Women and Equalities Committee from 2015 to 2019. 

Almudena Sevilla (@Sevilla_Almu) is a Professor of Economic and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy at LSE and is currently the Founding Chair of the Royal Economic Society UK Women in Economics Network and the LSE Women in Social and Public Policy Research Hub.

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The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.

Women and work

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has brought the spectre of potential nuclear conflict back into the public consciousness for the first time in decades. But what’s behind the potential for nuclear conflict and what issues are at stake for nuclear powers other than the US and Russia, like China?

To discuss these and other questions on the current state of global nuclear tensions and development, in March 2025 the Phelan US Centre spoke to Dr Nicola Leveringhaus of King's College London. 

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Luke Digweed.  
Further reading and resources
•	Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security by Fiona S. Cunningham (Princeton University Press, 2025) - https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691261027/under-the-nuclear-shadow 
•	The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon by Ankit Panda (Wiley, 2025) - https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+New+Nuclear+Age%3A+At+the+Precipice+of+Armageddon-p-9781509557462 


LSE: The Ballpark | US-China strategic stability with Dr Nicola Leveringhaus

Join us for this public event with Robert Holzmann, Governor of the Austrian National Bank.

Governor Holzmann will discuss selected issues of unconventional monetary policy instruments (UMP): Assuming inflation is tamed, can we go back to conventional monetary policy before 2008, when short-term policy interest rates (and reserve requirements) dominated the monetary policy tool box? Or do we have to apply again UMP – with learnings from recent past and perhaps new unconventional instruments? This talk offers selected considerations about the intentions, effectiveness, and options of UMP in the Euro area and beyond.

Meet our speaker and chair 

Robert Holzmann is the Governor of the Austrian National Bank, and member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (since 2019), and elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (since 2014). He holds honorary positions at the South-Western University in Economics and Finance, Chengdu, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur and University of New South Wales, Sydney. Before his return to academia in 2011, he held various positions at the World Bank including for 12 years Sector Director and acting Senior Vice President. Before joining the World Bank in 1997 he was an academic in Austria and Germany, and senior economist at the IMF and OECD.

Daniela Gabor is Professor of Economics at SOAS. 

Donato Di Carlo is an assistant professor in political economy at the LSE European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

OMFIF (@OMFIF), the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, is an independent forum for central banking, economic policy and public investment.

Unconventional monetary policy – quo vadis?

Should the world fear China?

Join us for this public event with Benjamin Haddad, Minister Delegate for European Affairs attached to the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, as he discusses how Europe can position itself in the face of today’s challenges.

“Our Europe is mortal”, French President Emmanuel Macron warned last spring, stressing the difficult and urgent choices that the continent is confronted with. Presenting his Report on the future of European competitiveness, former Italian prime Minister Mario Draghi argued that failing to cope with mounting challenges would entail the ‘slow agony’ of Europe. Following the return to power of President Trump, the transatlantic partnership faces potential disruption. The US has engaged in negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, sidelining Europeans and raising new questions on America’s commitment to European security. The threat of tariffs looms large over the future of the transatlantic economy and top US officials are meddling in Europe’s politics, such as at the recent Munich Security Conference. At the same time, a world of growing competition, rising authoritarianism and declining multilateralism tests Europe’s capacity to stand its ground and advance its interests and values.

Meet our speaker and chair 

Benjamin Haddad is Minister Delegate for Europe, attached to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of the French Republic. Graduated from Sciences Po Paris and HEC and a researcher in international relations, he taught international relations at Sciences Po and worked for seven years in think tanks in Washington, D.C., notably as Director of the Atlantic Council's Europe Center from 2019 to 2022. He is the author of “Paradis Perdu: l'Amérique de Trump et la fin des illusions européennes”, (Grasset, 2019), a plea for European sovereignty and strategic autonomy in the face of new geopolitical threats and American withdrawal. Elected Member of Parliament for Paris (14th constituency) in June 2022, he was member of the Foreign Affairs Commission and the European Affairs Commission and also spokesman coordinator for the National Assembly's Renaissance group. On July 7th 2024, after the snap legislative elections, he was re-elected MP for the 14th Paris constituency. On September 21st of the same year, he was appointed Minister Delegate for Europe.

Dr Spyros Economides is Associate Professor in International Relations and European Politics at the LSE European Institute and Deputy Director of the Hellenic Observatory.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

The Department of International Relations (@LSEIRDept) at LSE is now in its 97th year, and is one of the oldest as well as largest IR departments in the world, with a truly international reputation. The Department is ranked 2nd in the UK and 5th in the world in the QS World University Ranking by Subject 2024 tables for Politics and International Studies.

Europe's strategic crossroads

In February 2025 the Phelan US Centre spoke to spoke to Mukulika Banerjee, Professor in LSE’s Department of Anthropology. They spoke about using anthropology to better study politics, how the US might be turning into what she terms a “checklist democracy” and how seeing the US from an outside point of view might help Americans to understand their own politics better.

Professor Mukulika Banerjee was inaugural director of the LSE South Asia Centre. Her books include Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India, Why India Votes?, The Pathan Unarmed and The Sari (with Daniel Miller); and the series Exploring the Political in South Asia.

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Luke Digweed.  

Further reading and resources

•	Donald Trump’s election victory shows how the US is becoming a ‘checklist’ democracy – LSE USAPP blog – 6 November 2024 - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2024/11/06/donald-trumps-election-victory-shows-how-the-us-is-becoming-a-checklist-democracy/ 
•	Listen to and watch recordings of Professor Banerjee’s 5 March 2025 inaugural lecture, Citizens as cultivars: democratic values in paddy fields and universities - https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2025/03/202503051830/Citizens-as-cultivars 
•	Professor Banerjee spoke at the Phelan US Centre event, ‘The 2024 US election: turning point for America?’ on 6 November 2024. Watch the event video and listen to the event podcast - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/about-usapp/email-subscription/ 
•	Listen to The India Briefing podcast with Mukulika Banerjee and Pragya Tiwari [Spotify] - https://open.spotify.com/show/4C3i0GTt101v9DnIqQf6Od 

LSE: The Ballpark | Cultivating Democracy with Professor Mukulika Banerjee

The global outlook in 2025 is bleak. Ploughshares are being turned into swords as development spending is cut and defence budgets increase. Are we now living in a world of crisis, competition and conflict?  A context in which collective international action on global challenges is further away than ever? What lessons are there from the past about the world we have tilted into - and can we escape our present generational bleakness? 

Join Robert Kaplan, one of the leading international authors on global affairs, for a wide-ranging and timely discussion. This event will be chaired by Alexander Evans, Associate Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy.

More about our speaker and chair

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign affairs and travel. His books include The Loom of Time; The Tragic Mind; The Coming Anarchy and, most recently, Waste Land. The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics, formerly a Pentagon and U.S. Navy advisor, and for three decades an Atlantic foreign affairs reporter, he twice made Foreign Policy’s ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’. 

Alexander Evans (@aiaevans) is Professor in Practice of Public Policy and Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy at the LSE. He is a former adviser to the Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street and Director Cyber at the Foreign Office where he was the U.K.’s chief international cyber policy negotiator. He served as a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of State during the first Obama Administration and led the U.N. Security Council expert group on Daesh, Al Qaida and the Taliban.

More about this event

The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.

Waste land: a world in permanent crisis

In the early 21st century, democratic societies are at the height of their affluence, scientific brilliance, and institutional sophistication. Yet, their capacity to navigate the future has dramatically eroded since the turn of the century. While it has been the hallmark of democratic politics to sacrifice long-term and global policy commitments to short-term and local concerns, the postwar era witnessed an unprecedented rise in future-oriented institutions meant to lengthen the shadow of the future, both domestically and internationally, from the welfare state to international organisations.

Albena Azmanova and Kalypso Nicolaidis argue that times are changing in contradictory ways. Collective time is shrinking again under the diktat of emergency politics while at the very same time the need to act long term has never been so urgent, so pressing. Thus, democracies now seem to be in the grip of a paradox. On the one hand, they are afflicted by myopic tunnel vision: barely coping with one crisis after another, bereft of the capacity to think beyond their immediate concerns, people are increasingly focused on the here-and-now. On the other hand, the awareness is growing of the need for urgent action that is future-focused and planetary in scope – in order to safeguard nature, harness the digital revolution, fight poverty and disease, and prevent wars whose impact defies local borders. Indeed, democracies’ political ambitions for radical, transformative action are commendably bold.  

Azmanova and Nicolaidis set out to tackle this ‘paradox of democratic time’, as they call it: the fact that democracies are uniquely capable of harnessing collective intelligence in pursuit of grand political ambitions and thus anchor their present into a better future, yet keep chaining their future to an anxious present. The speakers consider three strategies for solving this paradox.

Meet our speakers and chair 

Albena Azmanova is Professor of Political and Social Science at City, University of London and Senior Fellow at OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, Bard College. She is co-director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle and founder and co-editor of the journal Emancipations. Her analyses of contemporary capitalism have received numerous awards, among which the Michael Harrington Award of the American Political Science Association given for work that “demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world”. She has worked as policy advisor for a number of international organisations, most recently, as a member of the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality to the European Parliament and as consultant to the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

Kalypso Nicolaidis is Chair in Global Affairs at the School of Transnational Governance (EUI), where inter alia she convenes the EUI Democracy Forum. She is currently on leave from the University of Oxford and was professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at Ecole Nationale d’Admistration, Paris. She has worked with numerous EU institutions, including as a member of the European Council’s reflection group on the future of Europe chaired by Felipe González (2008-10), and is a Council member of ECFR. She also served as advisor on European affairs to George Papandreou in the 90s and early 2000s, the Dutch and UK governments, the European Parliament, the European Commission, OECD and UNCTAD.

Abby Innes (@innes_abby) is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at LSE. She has published widely on the political economy of Central Europe and drew on this background for the comparison of Soviet and neoliberal economic regimes in Late Soviet Britain. In more recent years Abby has focused her research and teaching on the political economy of the green transition in Europe.

Regaining our futures: how to build democracies with foresight

What type of person falls for an online scam?  Who are the fraudsters and how does colonialism motivate them? And what’s the connection between criminality and pop music? 

This episode of LSE iQ looks at how we can avoid falling for online scams. We think it couldn’t happen to us, but incidents of online fraud are escalating at an alarming rate, affecting all areas of our day-to-day lives, from social media and dating apps to banking and business. 

As AI deepfakes and impersonation tactics become more advanced, scammers are finding new ways to exploit us, leaving victims emotionally and financially devastated. 

In this episode Oliver Johnson talks to a victim of a devastating romance scam, he hears about what motivates some of the fraudsters and what legal protections we have in the battle against the scammers.

Contributors: Dr Suleman Lazarus, Professor Andrew Murray, Lisa Mills, Nikki MacLeod

Research:
Fraud as Legitimate Retribution for Colonial Injustice, Dr Suleman Lazarus et al

Examining fifty cases of convicted online romance fraud offenders Dr Suleman Lazarus et al
Information Technology Law Professor Andrew Murray

Rethinking the Jurisprudence of Cyberspace Professor Andrew Murray et al

LSE iQ is a university podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. We’re keen to find out more about our audience so we can better tailor our content to suit your interests. With this in mind, we would be grateful if you could please take the time to fill out this short survey and share your feedback.

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=_epnVXfnpUKRu5RA_UO4k9i3ygPzxbNDuStfrFFNRBNUMzYxS1BITDlHTkdYMVhaVE9LRDhNQkxaVC4u

How do we avoid falling for online scams?

In March 2025 the Phelan US Centre spoke to John Minnich, Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at LSE about why semiconductors are so important in the global economy, and why the US is willing to go to what Dr Minnich terms, economic war, over them. They also discussed how the semiconductor trade is framed as a national security issue in the US and China, and how President Trump may approach the ‘chip-war’ in coming months. 

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Luke Digweed.   

Further reading and resources 

Ling S. Chen and Miles M. Evers, "'Wars without Gun Smoke': Global Supply Chains, Power Transitions, and Economic Statecraft," International Security 48, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 164–204. 

Cornell University Press. (2024). Disaggregating China, Inc. by Yeling Tan | Hardcover | Cornell University Press. [online] Available at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759635/disaggregating-china-inc/ [Accessed 14 Apr. 2025]. 

Cornell University Press. (2024). Disaggregating China, Inc. by Yeling Tan | Hardcover | Cornell University Press. [online] Available at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759635/disaggregating-china-inc/ [Accessed 14 Apr. 2025]. 

Paragraph locked by Gilson,CH
11 November 2024 - China’s evolving approach to economic security with Professor Yeling Tan | The Ballpark podcast - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2024/11/11/chinas-evolving-approach-to-economic-security-with-professor-yeling-tan-the-ballpark-podcast/  

13 February 2023 - China’s Belt and Road with Professor Taylor Fravel | The Ballpark podcast - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2023/02/13/the-ballpark-podcast-extra-innings-chinas-belt-and-road-with-professor-taylor-fravel/  

 

 

LSE: The Ballpark | The Origins of the US-China Chip War with Dr John Minnich

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The Politics of the Future

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