The Technology and Management Centre for Development at the Oxford Department of International Development invites you to our upcoming research seminars.
These research seminars are intended to connect active researchers and students on the topics of innovation, technology and management for development. This is a chance to exchange ideas, learn and connect not just with TMCD staff, researchers and fellows but also the innovation research community at large at Oxford. These afternoons are a great opportunity to seek feedback and learn new viewpoints on our research interests.
Sandwiches and refreshments will be provided.
Open to students, lecturers, practitioners and researchers.

Dr Barghouti will talk about the situation in Palestine, concentrating on the Palestinian strategy of non-violent resistance, and the exposure of the grave violations of human rights in occupied Palestine.

Speaker:
Dr Mustafa Barghouti, General Secretary, Palestine National Initiative (Mubadara), Ramallah, Palestine

Chair:
Dr Avi Shlaim, Senior Research Fellow, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Speaker: Dr Rita Giacaman, Founding Director, Institute of Community and Public Health, Birzeit University, Palestine

Rita Giacaman will present research findings on the impact of the 2009 and 2014 assaults on the health of the population of Gaza.

Speaker: Miri Weingarten, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel

Miri Weingarten will link the attempts made by Israeli and Palestinian groups to seek accountability for Palestinians in international fora and the punitive responses of the Israeli government.

Introductory Speaker and Chair:

▪Karl Sabbagh, British-Palestinian writer, documentary maker, and publisher

Panel members:

▪ Mustafa Barghouti, Palestine National Initiative (Mubadara), Ramallah, Palestine

▪ Rita Giacaman, Birzeit University, Palestine

▪ Jeremy Moodey, Embrace the Middle East

▪ Karma Nabulsi, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

▪ Naomi Wayne, Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Short film and panel discussion with:

▪ Sir Stephen Sedley – one of the authors of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office report ‘Children in Military Custody’ (2012) which was discussed this January in Parliament

▪ William Parry – journalist/documentary film maker ‘Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Jails’

▪ Oxford Ramallah Friendship Association visitors who attended a juvenile court in the West Bank

(Event run by Oxford Ramallah Friendship Association – ORFA)

In the fourth and final lecture of the Trinity Term Annual Lecture Series on ‘Global Education’, Prof Stefan Dercon will discuss ‘Education and jobs as a response to the Syrian refugee crisis’.
Speaker
Prof Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economics and Chief Economist at the UK Department of International Development. His research at Oxford University relates to the application of microeconomics and statistics to problems of development.

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson discusses his first-hand experiences of world-wide events, from the 2011 Libyan civil war to the current-day migrant crisis.

Colette Morgan works for SAFE! as the Child on Parent Violence Project Development Manager. Sadly, Child-on-Parent violence is on the rise and this fascinating talk will show us how SAFE! tackles this problem and works with families to cultivate respectful family relationships, for the benefit of all society.

We will even provide you with a free sandwich and a cuppa.

Our present laws attacking conflict of interest and corruption came into existence during years of blistering financial and political corruption scandals in early Hanoverian England, notably the 1720 South Sea Bubble. But there was also a lot corruption surrounding war finance and the buying of offices and elections. Were the anti-corruption laws made in the 1720s a clean-up effort in the wake of breakdown and crisis? If political-legal change worked like that today, we would by now have a highly regulated financial industry in the United Kingdom and highly honest and ethical politicians and political media. In the early 18th century, and perhaps in all times in British legal history, crisis might be a trigger for legal reform, but the reform process was always played out on a wider canvas of domestic politics, religious conflict, international affairs, and personal rivalries within an elite. In this lecture I tell the story of conflicts in the realm of politics, finance and family life in the early reign of the Hanoverians, looking at a colourful caste of characters including many miscreants from Oxford.

Professor Joshua Getzler is Professor of Law and Legal History at St Hugh’s College. His book A History of Water Rights at Common Law (Oxford, 2004) won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005. He is interested in modern property and commercial law, and the interconnections of legal, financial, political, religious and economic history.

The Confession details the first-hand experiences of Moazzam Begg, British Muslim and former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, as he chronicles the rise of modern jihad, its descent into terror and the reaction of the West.

This one off screening will be followed by a Q&A with Moazzam himself, director Ashish Ghadiali and chaired by Dr Tina Managhan, Senior Lecturer of International Relations, Oxford Brookes.

The Tim Hetherington Society and the Oxford PPE Society present: 7 Days in Syria, an evening with Janine di Giovanni.

Join us for free in the Simpkins Lee Theatre at Lady Margaret Hall for a talk by Janine di Giovanni and a film screening of Robert Rippberger’s feature length documentary ‘7 Days in Syria’. After the screening, there will be a free drinks reception in the adjoining Monson Room.

Please join us at 7pm on Thursday of 7th Week (November 24th) for a presentation by Daniel Castro Garcia and Thomas Saxby on their recent publication ‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’.

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“The photographs are a protest against those who so
readily attack refugees and migrants entering Europe
without taking into consideration the dangers faced
during the journey.” (Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–16 by John Radcliffe Studio www.johnradcliffestudio.com)

For more information please read the press release below:

‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’, is a photography book that documents the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on migration to Italy from North Africa, migration to Greece and through the Balkans from the middle east, and the migrant camp in Calais known as ‘The Jungle’. Alongside the photography, written texts serve both as a context, and a means to share the stories of the people we met during the project.
The book was created in response to the imagery used in
the media to discuss the issue of migration, which we felt was
sensationalist, alarmist and was not giving people the time and
consideration they deserved. We wanted to approach the subject from a calmer perspective, using medium format portrait photography as a means of meeting the people at the centre of the crisis face to face – and of learning something about their lives.

John Radcliffe Studio is the creative partnership of Thomas Saxby and Daniel Castro Garcia. We specialise in photography, film and graphic design and have spent the last year documenting the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe.

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The Moser Theatre is fully accessible, with access to gender netural toilets, and the event will be **FREE** to attend. Oxford for Dunkirk will be collecting donations before and after the event in aid of La Liniere Refugee Camp, Dunkirk, France: please see our page for more details! (www.facebook.com/oxfordfordunkirk)

Drawing on his expertise as former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School, will present the latest trends and explore the varied challenges of a global transition towards an inclusive green economy.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception, to which all are welcome.

This lecture is a joint event between the Oxford Martin School and The Institute of New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School

Dishonest practices brought to light by the 2008 crisis have raised questions about the incentives faced by bankers, and about their training. Unfortunately, the remedy of using market discipline through competition policy to make bankers ‘behave’ is problematic.

So there have been many calls for more ethical bankers, but what might this actually look like in practice? Our answer is given by the idea of ‘principled agents’ who at times exhibit a high degree of concern for others in standard economic calculations and at other times operate from moral principle. But how compatible is the use of moral principles with standard economic cost benefit analysis?

Member of the House of Commons from 1979-97 and Independent Crossbench Peer since 1997. Chair and a founder of the All Party Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief who has authored reports on North Korea, Sudan, Tibet and Pakistan; a founder of the Jubilee Campaign; author of twelve books including “Building Bridges: Is there Hope for North Korea?” with Rob Chidley (2013)

The fifth annual Ockenden International Prize for excellence in self-reliance projects among refugees and displaced people will be presented by Lord Alfred Dubs, Labour peer, on Tuesday 7th March 2017. Projects in Uganda, Egypt and Nepal will compete for the $100,000 prize. The two runners-up will each receive $25,000.

Saïd Business School is thrilled to announce Lawrence H. Summers, American economist and former Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama, will be in conversation with Dean Peter Tufano at the School on Thursday 16 March. Registration is essential to confirm your attendance.

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past two decades, he has served in a series of senior policy positions in Washington, D.C., including the 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama and Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987, Mr. Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and in 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline with their six children.

The twin political earthquakes of 2016 – Brexit and Trump’s election as President – have left the UK and USA in a condition of divisiveness, uncertainty and rancour. Both events symbolized a rejection not only of an existing domestic order, but also of certain international organizations, and indeed globalization more generally.

Sir Adam Roberts – Emeritus Professor in International Relations at Oxford University, and Past President of the British Academy – will explore key questions about these events. What caused them? What are their consequences for the EU and the rest of the world? Are they part of a wider resurgence of nationalism? Are we now in a ‘post-truth’ world? Is there now a need to re-think liberal ideas about politics?

Entry free. Donations to the fund-raising work of the Friends of Summertown Library are welcome at the door.

St Catherine’s College is delighted to welcome Ambassador Peter Galbraithback this April to give a lecture on the current situation in the Middle East. Drawing on his first-hand expertise of the region he will consider the question: How does it all end? Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan.

Peter was appointed as the first United States Ambassador to Croatia by President Bill Clinton in 1993, where he was actively involved in the peace processes in Croatia and Bosnia. He has a wealth of professional experience in international relations, with particular expertise on Iraq and its Kurdish region. Peter travelled to Iraq during the Kurdish uprising, exposing Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and contributing to the decision to create a safe haven in the north of the country. From 2003 to 2005, he was an advisor to the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. He is the author of two books: The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (2006) and Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies (2008).

Join the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, in partnership with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), for the launch of the 2017 edition of:

“Attacks on the Press: The New Face of Censorship”

Among the threats that journalists and the media face are the erosion of what have long been seen as establishes protections, the targeting of journalists by terrorists to limit news coverage, the imprisonment of reporters and photographers who refuse to toe the official line, withholding access to officials and public documents online harassment, and the wielding of financial leverage such as advertising and credit scores. Efforts to suppress the free press are becoming more complex – and arguably, more pervasive – than ever before.

Attacks on the Press is a comprehensive guide to the state of press freedom around the globe, and within its pages, journalists and media observers examine these new abuses, expose nations that violate press freedom with impunity, and provide potential solutions – including guidance on possible work-around, on how to ensure the safety of journalists and their sources, and how to fight against the powers that seek to silence criticism and call into question the media’s credibility.

The report will be introduced by Joel Simon, Executive Director of CPJ, followed by a panel discussion, Q&A, then a drinks reception.

The panellists include –
Joel Simon, Executive Director of CPJ
Alan Rusbridger, Former editor in Chief of The Guardian, author of “Fiscal Blackmail” chapter in this report
Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News’ International Editor and the author of ‘Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution’
Chair: Razia Iqbal, Special Correspondent, BBC

Saïd Business School is pleased to welcome Lubomira Rochet, Global Chief Digital Officer of the L’Oréal Group, to speak at the School on Wednesday 26 April.

Leading digital transformation at L’Oréal

L’Oréal is the world’s number one beauty company with leading brands such as Maybelline New York, L’Oréal Paris, Garnier, Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Kerastase. The group was also named by Adweek as 2017’s hottest digital marketer. How did one of the world’s oldest consumer goods companies get to this position? Lubomira Rochet, the Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal globally and member of the group’s executive committee, will talk about the digital transformation of L’Oréal’s businesses that she and her team have enacted since she joined the company in 2014.

The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School on Wednesday 26 April followed by a short networking drinks reception until around 7.30pm. Please remember that registration is required to attend this event.

“Diamonds are a rebel’s best friend” is one striking way to sum up the belief that valuable minerals spur violent conflict. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme and the US Dodd Frank Act Section 1502, now on the chopping block under the Trump administration, are meant to counteract this: they aim to prevent trade in minerals unless it can be proven that revenues from these do not support armed groups.

Research however, suggests that the relationship between minerals and violent conflict may be more complex than this quote presumes. Valuable minerals may indeed fund or motivate rebel movements. But they may also provide a livelihood to millions of people, making them better off and less vulnerable to be recruited into armed groups. And revenue from minerals can also flows to countries’ governments and their armies.

In this lecture Dr Anouk S. Rigterink, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Department of Economics’ Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, will address the contradictory faces of ‘conflict minerals’ and their implications for how effective we think current policies to tackle them can be.

Will the US and global economy thrive, or barely survive, under Trumponomics? Will erratic policymaking and populist pandering lead to economic catastrophe? Or will business-friendly reforms and expansionary fiscal and monetary policies bring unprecedented prosperity? A distinguished panel of economists – Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, and John Muellbauer of Oxford Univesity – will debate the early economic consequences of Trumpism and how policies are likely to take shape in key areas such as trade, tax, infrastructure, finance, and monetary policy.

Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. The co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, his new book, The Curse of Cash, was released in August 2016. He is the Visiting Sanjaya Lall Professor at the University of Oxford.

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 “for services to financial journalism”.

Professor John Muellbauer is a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Professor of Economics and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford University.

Recent research purports that climate change is creating conflict, and leads to unchecked migration. But three distinct flaws characterise such research efforts; they often ask the wrong questions, present poor evidence, and remove references to other, more likely factors that cause conflict. It often gets translated into a perception that poor people act violently for ‘natural’ reasons, or are spurred by physical hazards. We all know that high climate vulnerability and conflict co-occur in the same general regions, but we know far less about what does shape the power and competition dynamics at the local level. Basically, who are the winners and losers of environmental change?

The reality from local research is that far more cooperation is occurring at the local level to mitigate and adapt to environmental challenges; and that a tremendous amount of development money is being directed towards adaptation and risk management. This changes the local calculus for violence. As a result, conflict, when and where it does occur, is often between the ‘winners’ from climate change, development and transitions to democracy.

A number of developments such as the Arab Spring and on-going famines in Somalia and South Sudan have led to renewed interest among both scholars and policymakers in the role of food insecurity and food-price related grievances as catalysts of conflict. In this lecture Prof Gunnar Sørbø, Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), will address such linkages, using case material mainly from Sudan and Somalia, with a particular focus on food insecurity as a risk multiplier and the implications for choice of interventions.

While the links between natural resources, conflict and peace are well understood within the academic community, the UN system has been slow to respond to the risks and opportunities in a comprehensive way. A combination of geo-political interests, sovereignty concerns, and other diplomatic barriers have largely undermined reforms across the UN and prevented a coherent response at the field level. However, with the appointment of the new Secretary General and his emphasis on conflict prevention, the UN is changing its perspectives on the environment, conflict and peacebuilding.

David Jensen, Head of the Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding (ECP) Initiative at UN Environment, has been working on this topic within the UN system for the last decade and will share lessons learned and personal insights on progress, disappointments and the challenges that lie ahead.

Competition over resources and territory is not just a feature of modern or historical times, but a recurrent theme in the natural world, and a phenomenon that reaches far back in human evolutionary history. While modern conflict has many unique qualities, common patterns across species and time suggest important fundamental insights about human nature and social organisation that may help to address modern problems, especially those which are hard to resolve.

This event is in partnership with the Resolution Foundation

The accumulation and distribution of wealth across Britain has been a contentious issue since the dawn of economics. But while wealth inequality is traditionally viewed as being between rich and poor, a new divide is also emerging – the wealth gap between generations.

The failure of younger generations to accumulate wealth – through pensions, property and savings – will reduce their lifetime living standards, particularly once they reach retirement. This would have profound implications for both families and the state, so what can be done?

As part of its Intergenerational Commission, chaired by Lord Willetts, the Resolution Foundation will soon be publishing a series of papers analysing Britain’s wealth across generations. Ahead of this launch, the Oxford Martin School is hosting an event to explore these issues and the role of public policy in tackling Britain’s new wealth divides.

Experts from the Foundation will present some of the emerging findings from its work on intergenerational wealth inequality, while Professors John Muellbauer and Brian Nolan will discuss possible policy responses, before taking part in an audience Q&A.

N.B. This event is not yet confirmed; however we expect it to be very popular. Please register your interest and, once confirmed, your registration will be converted into an order.

In 2013, the Bank of Japan adopted quantitative and qualitative monetary easing; a policy of unprecedented large-scale monetary easing. Since then, the economic and price situation in Japan has greatly improved.

In this talk, Governor Kuroda will recount how he was strongly inspired about the importance of expectations in monetary policy by a lecture by Professor Hicks when he studied here at the University of Oxford. He will discuss the latest monetary policy measures in today’s banking as well as topics to help central banks to appropriately manage people’s inflation expectations and raise the effectiveness of monetary policy in a global low-growth, low-inflation environment.

The seminar will take place at Saïd Business School followed by a short networking drinks reception and is open for anyone to attend. Please remember that registration is required.