• Prof Brian Klaas, Professor of Global Politics at School of European Languages, Culture and Society-Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (SELCS-CMII), UCL 
• Dr Malu Gatto, Associate Professor of Latin American Politics at the Institute of the Americas, UCL. 
• Dr Michal Ovádek, Assistant Professor in European Institutions, Politics and Policy, at the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, UCL. 
• Prof Tarun Khaitan, Professor (Chair) of Public Law at LSE Law School 
• Dr Katharina Lawall, Lecturer in Comparative Politics at University of Reading. 

Chair: Prof Alan Renwick, Professor of Democratic Politics in the UCL Department of Political Science, and Deputy Director of the UCL Constitution Unit. Mentioned in the disucssion: 

• Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Executive Aggrandizement and Party-state Fusion in India, https://www.degruyterbrill.com/docume... 
• Care conscription as a progressive answer to the belonging question https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpo... 
• Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us https://share.google/7oRtyidNA1AOO7f6O 
•  Resistance to Gender Quotas in Latin America https://share.google/u3HkdbxmzEgCwPCoN 

Recorded 2 October 2025 

Prof. Habib Naqvi MBE is the Chief Executive of the NHS Race and Health Observatory. Previously he worked at the Department of Health and Social Care, where he acted as the Policy Lead on the development of the Equality Delivery System. He also has experience in academia, having been awarded the title of Honorary Visiting Professor of Health Equity at the Queen’s Institute for Medicine, University of Bolton. Recently, he co-chaired the Advisory Board for the UCL Institute of Health Equity’s report titled Structural Racism, Ethnicity and Health Inequalities in London. 

Dr. Ramya Sheni is a Local Growth Policy & Senior Analysis Adviser with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Prior to her current role, Dr. Sheni was a Research Manager with ClearView Research where, in partnership with the Black Equity Organisation, she co-authored two reports highlighting the Black experience with racism in Britain: Brick Wall After Brick Wall and Systemic Change Required. Her work focuses on marginalised communities, spotlighting Black voices and women’s voices. 

Ashitha Nagesh is an award-winning BBC News senior journalist and digital reporter, who has served as the BBC News Community Affairs Correspondent for the past two years. She also volunteers as a Senior Fellow with the John Schofield Trust, mentoring young journalists from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. Ashitha’s reporting has covered numerous issues faced by ethnic minority communities, expanding the reach of these communities’ stories. In particular, she reported on the ethnic minority experience during the Covid-19 pandemic and within the NHS workforce. 

Chair: Dr. Devina Maru is a GP in Islington and the Clinical Academic lead for MBBS Year 1&2 Primary Care. She is also the UCL Co-Deputy Director Medical Education (Primary Care), Department of Primary Care & Population Health.

Meet the speakers

Rose Mutiso is the Research Director for the Energy for Growth Hub. The Hub’s research and policy network focuses on issues such as improving how we define and measure energy poverty, pragmatic solutions for clean energy technology finance and deployment, and just energy transitions in energy-poor countries. Rose is also the Co-Founder and ex-CEO of the Mawazo Institute—a non-profit research institute based in Kenya which aims to support the next generation of female scholars and thought leaders in East Africa. She was previously a Senior Fellow in the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she co-led DOE’s engagement on technology and policy dimensions of energy access in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. 

Dr Amir Lebdioui is Associate Professor in the Political Economy of Development and the Director of the Technology and Industrialisation for Development (TIDE) Centre at the University of Oxford’s Department for International Development. His research has focused on the economic diversification of resource-dependent nations, green industrial policy and low-carbon innovation. He is the author of Survival of the Greenest: Economic Transformation in a Climate-conscious World, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. 

Alache Fisho is Policy Lead, Transition Pathways at the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) Secretariat. She has over 20 years’ experience in energy and extractives, advising governments across Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean and as in-house counsel in a large integrated state-owned enterprise. Alache leads BOGA’s engagement with producer countries, particularly in EMDEs geared towards supporting the design and implementation of an evidenced-backed vision of a ‘beyond oil and gas’ economy. She also supports dialogue and peer learning through BOGA’s thematic working groups and wider community of practice. 

Chair: Julia Tomei is the Deputy Director of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources and an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy & Resources.  

Co-organised with UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources 

They will explain the different roles of lobbyists, from communications and reputation management to strategy and policy work. They will also discuss the growing demands for lobbying in the UK to be more tightly regulated: on one estimate, the Lobbying Act 2014 captures only 4 per cent of lobbying activity. Lobbying necessarily informs policy; but by operating largely behind the scenes, does it also undermine democracy?

Meet the speakers

Charles Lewington OBE is the Chairman of Hanover Communications, which he founded in 1998 after a high-profile career in Downing Street and political journalism. It has grown to more than 200 consultants. He is also President elect of the Public Relations Consultancy Association, representing more than 1,000 agencies in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Yasmin Diamond CB, Executive Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs at IHG Hotels & Resorts. Yasmin is responsible for all external and internal communications; global government affairs work; and leading IHG’s corporate responsibility strategy. Before joining IHG in 2012, Yasmin was Director of Communications in the Home Office, and before that at DEFRA.

Tamasin Cave is the Head of Strategic Communications at Uplift UK. Prior to her current position, she worked with Spinwatch, a non-profit that investigates corporate PR and lobbying, and led the campaign for transparency regulations for lobbyists in the UK. She also co-authored A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain (2015).

Chair: Prof David Coen, UCL Pro Vice Provost Global Engagement and Professor of Public Policy

Sir Rob Behrens was the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman between 2017 and 2024. Prior to this, he held roles including Complaints Commissioner at the Bar Standards Board, Secretary to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (Office of the Independent Adjudicator) in England and Wales. 

Greg Clark is the Executive Chair of Warwick University’s Warwick Innovation District and a former politician. During his time as an MP, he held various ministerial portfolios, most notably having been the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy under Theresa May’s premiership. After returning to the backbenches, he served as the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee between 2020 and 2024. 

Kitty Donaldson is the Chief Political Commentator at the i newspaper. Prior to this, she covered politics and the House of Commons for Bloomberg nearly two decades, first as a Political Correspondent, then as UK Political Editor. 

Chair: Prof. Robert Hazell is Professor of Government and the Constitution in the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. 

Dr. James D. Boys is a Boston-based analyst focused on US political history. He was most recently a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. An expert on US politics and grand strategy, he frequently shares his insights as an on-air commentator on CNN, BBC News, Sky News, Al Jazeera, CNBC, etc. Dr. Boys has appeared before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and was quoted extensively in its 2013 report on US-UK relations. He has also authored several books, mainly centred around the Clinton administration. 

Alexandra Cirone is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy (SPP) at the London School of Economics, and has a joint appointment in the Department of Government. She also holds a research appointment at the BI Norwegian Business School, and she is a non-resident fellow in the Democratic Innovations Program at Yale University ISPS. She is one of the editors and co-founders of Broadstreet.blog, a blog on historical political economy. Her research interests center on political selection and institutional design in democracies, lottocratic governance and policy, and historical political economy. 

Dr. Julie Norman is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations and the Foreign Policy Lead of the Centre on US Politics (CUSP) at UCL. She has published widely on security, conflict, and foreign policy, including five books on nonviolent resistance and multiple articles on political violence, divided societies, and polarization. Norman also works as a policy consultant, providing research-based recommendations to the UN, US State Department, FCDO, US Institute of Peace (USIP), British Council, and other governmental bodies and NGOs. She is also a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI and a frequent political analyst on the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and other media outlets. 

Chair: Dr Thomas Gift is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre on US Politics (CUSP) in the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy.

- Meet the speakers- 

Emily Fry is a Senior Economist at the Resolution Foundation. Her research primarily covers productivity, trade, energy and how they intersect with living standards in the UK. Previously, she spent several years in finance and academia primarily focused on sustainability and net zero. 

Shanker Singham is an international trade expert and CEO of Competere Ltd, a company that provides law and policy advice to governments and companies, and that promotes international trade and competition policy throughout the world. He also serves as Co-Chairman of The Growth Commission and Co-Vice-Chairman of the Trade Facilitation Commission. He has advised parliamentarians and government ministers on the overall approach to UK trade policy, including the Brexit negotiations. 

Luke Raikes is a research director and Deputy General Secretary at the Fabian Society. His expertise covers a range of economic issues, including regional economies and inequalities, devolution, productivity, and industrial strategy. Prior to his current role, he led IPPR North’s research on regional economies and devolution. 

Chair: Prof. Lucy Barnes is Professor of Political Economy in the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/political-science

Meet the speakers

ex-Ambassador Simona Leskovar 
Simona Leskovar is Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia to the Court of St James's until August 2024. Prior to this appointment, she was State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia. 

Ambassador Leskovar is a career diplomat for 28 years of service in Slovenian diplomacy. She served as Slovenian Ambassador to Japan and Republic of Korea, was Deputy Permanent Representative of Slovenia at Permanent Mission of Slovenia to the United Nations in New York and member or head of several Slovenian delegations and missions to various conferences and events within the UN. Her first post as a diplomat was Washington DC. 
  
Ambassador Leskovar holds a position of the EU adviser to Slovenian Foreign Minister during the first Slovenian EU presidency in 2008. She was later Director of Young Bled Strategic Forum and the national Focal Point for Responsibility-to-Protect. 

Simona Leskovar studied international relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, and at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael in The Hague. Ambassador Leskovar initiated the MFA programme 'Young Ambassadors', a mentoring project that was organized together with foreign female Ambassadors in Slovenia, and aimed at encouraging young women to consider a career in diplomacy and international relations. 

Ambassador Leskovar was appointed Program Director of Bled Strategic Forum at the end of August 2024. 

Sir Mark Lyall Grant  GCMG 
Sir Mark Lyall Grant served as the United Kingdom’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN from 2009 to 2015. During this tenure, he served as President of the Security Council four times. He subsequently served as a National Security Adviser during David Cameron and Theresa May’s premierships. Following his retirement from the civil service, he is now a Visiting Professor at King's College London and a strategic advisor. 

Chair: Prof. Veronika Fikfakis Professor of Human Rights and International Law in the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. 

His new book "But What Can I Do?" went straight to the top of the Sunday Times best-seller lists. In it, Campbell argues that the next generation has to rescue politics from the populist, post-truth morass into which it has fallen in the era of Trump, Johnson, Brexit and Putin. This event explored the hopes and concerns of young people from across UCL and London about engaging in politics, and consider how our political system can become more open to their participation. 

Facilitated by the brilliant Julia Macfarlane of ABC News and joined on stage by students from UCL Political Science, Alastair will seek to address the challenge laid out in the sub-title of his book: Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How YOU Can Help Fix It. 

Watch the Julia Gillard speech: 

 • Julia Gillard misogyny speech voted m...  

Drawing on recent Constitution Unit research into public attitudes to democracy, as well as his own work on electoral systems, referendums, citizens’ assemblies and other democratic institutions, Alan Renwick explores answers to each of these questions. Alan argues that there are no quick fixes, but that a series of changes in institutions, practices, and behaviours may lead to valuable improvements.
 

With an introduction by Prof Meg Russell and an appreciation by Prof Anand Menon.

Introduction by Prof Meg Russell. Response by Rt Hon Jack Straw. 

Professor Sir Peter Riddell 

Peter Riddell was appointed an Honorary Professor at UCL in March 2022. He has taken a long interest in constitutional issues, parliament and standards in public life, both as a journalist and subsequently in various other roles. He joined the Financial Times in 1970 after graduating from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, with a degree in History and Economics. He served as Political Editor for seven years before becoming the paper’s Washington Bureau Chief. He joined The Times in 1991 serving as its chief political commentator until he retired from journalism after the 2010 election. He has written ten books on politics, parliament and political careers. Towards the end of his journalistic career, he became involved in other activities, initially as a trustee and then chair of the Hansard Society from 2007 until 2012, and then as Senior Fellow and then Director/Chief Executive of the Institute for Government from 2012 until 2016. He served for 18 months as a member of the Gibson inquiry into the involvement of UK intelligence agencies into the alleged mistreatment of detainees and rendition. In spring 2016 he was appointed to the independent office holder post of Commissioner for Public Appointments where he served an extended term of five and a half years until September 2021. His other public roles have included conducting a review for the Cabinet Office into the future of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and serving on the Parliamentary and Political Service Honours Committee. He has had close contacts with the academic world in various forms, notably with the Constitution Unit over more than two decades. He chaired the advisory panel of the ESRC’s Constitutional Change research programme from 2001 to 2006, is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a recipient of the President’s Medal of the British Academy.

Mentioned in this lecture: 

‘Merit, Tenure and Bureaucratic Behavior: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in the Dominican Republic’, Comparative Political Studies, 2018, Vol. 51(6), p. 759–792, 2018 (with Oliveros, V.) 

‘The Causal Effect of Public Service Motivation on Ethical Behaviour in the Public Sector: Evidence from a Large-Scale Survey Experiment‘, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2019, Vol. 29(3) (with Meyer-Sahling, J. and Mikkelsen, K.) 

‘Government Analytics: An Empirical Guide to Measuring Public Administration‘ Washington DC: World Bank, forthcoming (co-edited with Rogger, D.) 

‘Getting the basics right: How to manage civil servants in developing countries‘ (with Meyer-Sahling, J. and Mikkelsen, K.) World Bank, Governance for Development Blog, May 2018 

‘What the UK civil service can learn from developing countries on pay and acting on evidence‘ (with Meyer-Sahling, J. and Mikkelsen, K.) UK Civil Service World, May 2018 

Find more of Christian's publications via https://www.christianschuster.net/

Meet The Speakers 
Ilaria Di Gioia is Senior Lecturer in American Law and Associate Director of the Centre for American Legal Studies at Birmingham City School of Law. Her research focuses on questions of law and policy within the U.S. federalist structure. She is the editor of the British Journal of American Legal Studies, as well as the Inaugural Philip Davies Fellow of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. Finally, she also serves as Honorary Vice Consul for Italy in Birmingham, representing the Italian government as well as over 10,000 Italians in the British Midlands. 

James Tierney was the attorney general of Maine from 1980 to 1990. He currently is a lecturer at Harvard Law School where he teaches classes on state attorneys general and has directed the attorney general clinic. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Tierney was the Director of the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School. Since his time as Maine AG, Professor Tierney has also consulted with serving state attorneys general and the National Association of Attorneys General. In this role, he worked with then-AGs in negotiating the tobacco settlement of the 1990s. https://www.stateag.org   

Rachel Augustine Potter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. She has published extensively on bureaucratic politics and she published her award-winning book, Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy, in 2019. Professor Potter also contributes to the Brookings Institution Centre on Regulation and Markets and has served as a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States. Chaired by: Dr. Colin Provost, UCL Department of Political Science

Meet the speakers: Dr Sam Brazys (University College Dublin) Dr Huan Zou (SOAS) Chair: Dr Adam Harris Unfortunately Mr Solomzi Mhlana (1st Secretary Political, South African High Commission to the Great Britain and Northern Ireland) had to cancel and could not attend this seminar.

Dr Sarah Singer is Senior Lecturer in Refugee Law at the Refugee Law Initiative, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her research interests are refugee law and policy, human rights and migration. She is a recognised expert on criminality and asylum, and has broader research expertise on humanitarian accountability, detention and protection of LGBT+ asylum seekers.  

Dr Aydan Greatrick is a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Geography, University of Leeds and an expert in LGBTQ+ asylum support, protection and forced migration. He has over seven years experience researching the intersections between forced migration, humanitarianism, gender and sexuality, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ asylum and displacement in Europe and the Middle East.  

Chair: Prof Phillip Ayoub, Professor of International Relations, UCL

Combining history, economics, and political and legal philosophy, Tucker offers a new account of international relations. Rejecting intellectual traditions going back to Hobbes, Kant and Grotius, and deploying instead ideas from David Hume, Bernard Williams and modern mechanism-design economists, Tucker describes a new kind of political realism that emphasizes power and interests without sidelining morality. Incentives must be aligned with values if institutions are to endure. The connecting tissue for a system of international cooperation, he argues, should be legitimacy, creating a world of concentric circles in which we cooperate more with those with whom we share the most and whom we fear the least. Avoiding wishful thinking about the security of our way of life, and drawing on three decades as a domestic and international policy maker, Tucker applies the book’s principles to the international monetary order, including the role of the U.S. dollar, trade and investment regimes, and the global financial system. 

The event featured a discussion with the author, and a panel of three speakers: Richard Bellamy (Professor of Political Science at UCL), Jeff King (Professor of Law at UCL) and Juliet Samuel (Columnist at The Telegraph). 

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Ignacio Garcia Bercero participated in the Uruguay Round negotiations that led to the establishment of the World Trade Organizations. Between 2001 and 2005, he headed the unit in the European Commission responsible for WTO dispute settlement. Since 2005, he has been Director in DG trade where, among other responsibilities, he was chief negotiator for the EU-Korea Free Trade agreement, the EU-India Free Trade agreement and the negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Ignacio is currently director for multilateral trade policy and strategy and is Visiting Professor at UCL’s School of Public Policy. 

Stephen Adams is Senior Director in advisory firm Global Counsel. He has more than 15 years of experience in European and British public policy and regulation, chiefly in the field of international economic policy. He has also been an Executive Director of Goldman Sachs International, based in London. Stephen is Senior Research Associate at UCL’s School of Public Policy. 

Chair: Professor Lauge Poulsen, Professor in International Relations and Law, UCL Department of Political Science

Klaus Welle is the Secretary-General of the European Parliament, a position he has held since 2009.
Find out more.

Chaired by Robert Hazell.

About the speakers:

Sarah Isgur is a staff writer and host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions for The Dispatch, a professor at George Washington's School of Media and Public Affairs and George Mason Law School, a contributing editor at Politico, and an ABC News contributor. She most recently served in the Department of Justice as the Director of the Office of Public Affairs and Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General during the Russia investigation. She was backstage for more than a half dozen presidential debates as the Deputy Campaign Manager for Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign. Isgur clerked for the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Northwestern University.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and the author of "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success." Previously, she was a Bloomberg View columnist. McArdle wrote for the Daily Beast, Newsweek, the Atlantic and the Economist and founded the blog Asymmetrical Information.

Matthew Weil is director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project where he is responsible for all of the organization’s voting-related policy development efforts at the state and federal level, the Business Alliance for Effective Democracy, and collaborations with social media platforms to provide authoritative election information to voters. Prior to joining BPC in February 2013, he worked at the Department of the Treasury on domestic finance issues in the office of public affairs. He also previously served as a research and policy analyst at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and as a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. Weil holds a Master of Science in Government Analytics degree from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Chair: Dr Thomas Gift 

Brian Klaas grew up in Minnesota, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now an associate professor of global politics at University College London. He is also a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, and frequent guest on national television. Klaas has conducted field research across the globe, interviewing despots, CEOs, torture victims, dissidents, cult leaders, criminals, and everyday power abusers. He has also advised major politicians and organizations including NATO, the European Union, and Amnesty International. He is the author of four books, including the most recent: Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.

Moderator: Ian Dunt

FIND THE BOOK: CORRUPTIBLE: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

• Dina Ionesco is Manager in the Adaptation Division at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, focusing on human mobility and climate change. 
• Lena Dobrowolska and Teo Ormond-Skeaping are an artist collaboration from Poland and the UK whose work focuses on climate change. They won the 2019 Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development (COAL) Prize with their project ‘You never know, one day you too may become a refugee’.
• Chair: Dr Elisa Calliari, Senior Research Fellow, UCL Department of Political Science

Presentation slides:

• Richard
• Penny

Sir David Norgrove is a businessman and government official, who has been chair of the UK Statistics Authority since 2017. The UK Statistics Authority is an independent body which oversees the Office for National Statistics, the Office for Statistics Regulation, and the Government Statistical Service. He was previously the first chairman of The Pensions Regulator, and then chair of the Low Pay Commission.

ACCOMPANYING SLIDES

Speakers

• Jacob S. Hackeris Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. A regular media commentator and policy adviser, he is the author or co-author of five books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings onAmerican politics and public policy, including the highly influential Winner Take-All Politics (2010). 
• Professor Desmond Kingwho is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of Government at the University of Oxford. He specializes in the study of theAmericanstate in US executive politics, race and politics inAmericanpolitical development, and the financial bases of US politics.
• Edward Luce is the US national editor and columnist at the Financial Times, and co-author of the Swamp Notes newsletter, which covers the intersection of money, power, and politics in America. He is the author of three highly acclaimed books, including The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017) and Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (2012). 
• Dr. Lucy Barnes is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at UCL. She specialises in the comparative political economy of rich western democracies (including the USA), with particular focus on the interactions of political institutions and individuals’ ideas, attitudes, and behaviours, in the politics of economic policy-making.

Michael was climate adviser to Gordon Brown when he was Prime Minister and was heavily involved in the (unsuccessful) Copenhagen COP15 in 2009. He subsequently advised the French and UK governments and others in the run-up to COP21 in 2015, which resulted in the historic Paris Climate Agreement. He was a founder of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. He is now Professor of Political Economy and a fellow of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.

What have been the stresses and strains caused by the pandemic on the EU and the member-states? Has the EU managed to turn the pandemic into an argument for European cooperation, or will it go down  as having hindered the ability of the EU nations to respond? Will the EU emerge stronger or weaker from this crisis, and will the pandemic have pulled us together or apart?

Speakers

• Isabel de la Mata Barrancos, Principal Advisor for Health and Crisis management, European Commission, DG Health and Food Safety
• Dr Iveta Nagyova, President of the European Public Health Association, EUPHA & Head of Department (Social and Behavioural Medicine), Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, Slovakia
• Luuk van Middelaar, Professor of Foundations and Practice of the European Union and its Institutions, Leiden University & former adviser to Herman van Rompuy, first President of the European Council
• Chair: Dr Claudia Sternberg, Head of Academic Programming, UCL European Institute

• Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends
• Rory Stewart, former Cabinet Minister and 2019 candidate for the Conservative Party leadership, now Senior Fellow at Yale University
• Professor Nadia Urbinati, author of Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy
• Chair: Professor Meg Russell, Director of the Constitution Unit.

Further Reading

• Anne Applebaum - How my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit
• Anne Applebaum - How to beat populists when facts don't matter
• Rory Stewart - What is wrong with us?
• Nadia Urbinati  - Populism? It’s not fascism, and also democracies Are “Elastic”
• Nadia Urbinati  - The pandemic hasn’t killed populism

Lorriann Robinson is the founder and Director of The Advocacy Team, a consultancy practice providing policy, advocacy & campaigning services to international organisations. She is the co-founding partner of and advocacy lead for The Equity Index.

Alex Martins is an independent researcher, facilitator and advocate passionate about creating a more equitable international development sector. She is the co-founder and research lead for The Equity Index.

Chair: Professor Jennifer Hudson

Brian Klaas is a political scientist at UCL and a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. He has written three books: The Despot's Accomplice (Oxford University Press), The Despot's Apprentice (Hurst & Co), and How to Rig an Election (Yale University Press). His research focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, Trumpism, the nature of power, political violence, and US foreign policy. Before becoming an academic, he co-managed a winning campaign for Governor in his home state of Minnesota.

Anne Joseph O’Connell is the Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. She is a lawyer and political scientist whose research and teaching focuses on administrative law and the federal bureaucracy. Outside of the Stanford Law School, she is a contributor to the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution and an appointed senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency dedicated to improving regulatory procedures. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration, and an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Colin Provost is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Director of the MSc in Public Policy at UCL. His research focuses primarily on the design and enforcement of regulatory policy in the United States; much of his research has examined how the behaviour of elected prosecutors (state attorneys general) affects the enforcement of state and federal law and how this in turn affects business regulatory compliance. His research has been published in Governance, Journal of Public Policy, Law and Policy, Political Research Quarterly, Political Psychology, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, Regulation and Governance, State Politics and Policy Quarterly and Review of Policy Research.

Sherrill Stroschein is a Reader in the Department of Political Science at UCL. Her research examines the politics of ethnicity in democratic and democratising states, especially democratic processes in states with mixed ethnic or religious populations. She has published articles in Perspectives on Politics, Party Politics, Nations and Nationalism, Political Science Quarterly, Europe-Asia Studies, and Ethnopolitics, as well as other journals. Her current project is funded by the ISRF, on local politics in ethnic enclaves.

Moderator: Adam Smith, Director of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute (RAI)