Global Dynamics Lecture Series

Trevelyan College Senior Common Room and in partnership with the al-Sabah Programme' launched a major new Lecture Series called 'The Global Dynamics Lecture Series' in 2023/2024

Global Dynamics Lecture Series 2025-2026 | Between Life and Death: Warfare and the Environment

Since 1975 over 150,000 civilians have died in Vietnam from the leftovers of the Vietnam war. Almost on a daily basis echoes of the Second World War are heard across Europe as unexploded munitions and mines from that war emerge to disrupt lives and livelihoods.? Our seas and oceans are graveyards of military vessels harbouring dangerous cargo that remain beyond our reach. War makes a lot of mess and the images of war - the death, destruction, dislocation, carnage, helplessness - shown on our screens daily remind us of the toll. We watch in horror as we see lives destroyed and futures wrecked. But what happens to a country, a space, when the guns finally fall silent? What do we find when quiet returns? In this year's Global Dynamics Lecture Series we will look at a much-neglected part of the crisis of war, the environmental legacy and impact of war. How do militaries impact the environment and what do they leave behind following conflict? In five lectures this year we will be hearing from leading commentators, scholars and experts on how war machines and conflicts are degrading the very land survivors tread - not just in terms of unexploded munitions and landmines, but in the damage caused on a much bigger scale. 

Global Dynamics Lecture Series 2024-2025 | Democracy and the Tale of Five Elections

Over the last two years around half the world’s population has had the opportunity to participate in a series of national, local, provincial, presidential and parliamentary elections. While some, Russia for example, have been little more than show elections, and while in some others countries elections have not changed the political landscape of the country concerned, Türkiye and Iran for example, in many others national elections have proved to be decisive, indeed consequential. But the coverage of these important elections have been patchy and insufficient to provide interested parties with an in-depth understanding of the electoral process, an explanation of the outcome of these elections, and their meaning in domestic and foreign policy terms. The Trevelyan College’s new season of Global Dynamics Lecture Series, hosted by the College’s Senior Common Room and in partnership with the al-Sabah Programme, intends to address this apparent gap by focusing on elections in five important cases of the United States, the United Kingdom, EU elections, India, and Mexico in 2024, each ‘historic’ in its own right.