This weekly digest is a collection of news, upcoming events and other opportunities from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University and the wider area, compiled by Graduate School students.
- X-courses
- CMES Seminar with Fulbright Professor Christie S. Warren: Reconstructing Syria
- Lecture: The Spectre of State Capitalism
- Lecture with Former President of Tunisia Dr. Mohamed Moncef Marzouki: “The Arab Democratic Revolutions Have Just Begun”
X-courses
Looking for something extra this autumn? Study one of the University’s new x-courses!
X-courses are short, credit-bearing, flexible and designed to suit those who are already studying. X-courses are independent courses that are not included in programmes. Take the opportunity to learn something new, network with other students and get more out of your studies.
Read more about x-courses at: www.lunduniversity.lu.se/x-courses
CMES Seminar with Fulbright Professor Christie S. Warren: Reconstructing Syria
Welcome to a CMES seminar with Fulbright professor Christie S. Warren (William & Mary Law School) on the reconstruction of Syria.
Speaker Bio
Christie S. Warren is the 2024 – 2025 Fulbright-Lund Distinguished Chair in Public International Law. She is Professor of the Practice of International and Comparative Law and founding Director of the Center for Comparative Legal Studies & Post-Conflict Peacebuilding at William & Mary Law School.
She has designed, implemented, monitored and assessed academic, constitutional, judicial and legal development and training projects in more than 58 countries throughout Africa, Central and East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Russia and the Newly Independent States, the Balkans and East Timor.
Warren served as the 1998 – 1999 Supreme Court Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States and the 2010 Senior Expert in Constitutional Issues on the Mediation Support Unit Standby Team within the United Nations Department of Political Affairs. She was named the 2016-2017 Fulbright-Schuman Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and served as a 2019 Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a 2021 Visiting Professor of International Law at Sapienza University in Rome.
Date and time: 16 April 2025, 13:15 to 2:30 PM
Location: CMES Seminar Room (Finngatan 16)
For more information, visit this page
Lecture: The Spectre of State Capitalism
Open lecture with Dr Ilias Alami, Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development, University of Cambridge
The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the 21st century, state-owned enterprises, sovereign funds, and policy banks have vastly expanded their control over assets and markets. Concurrently, governments have experimented with increasingly assertive modalities of statism, from techno-industrial policies and spatial development strategies to economic nationalism and trade and investment restrictions.
Based on a recently published book, the lecture will argue that we are currently witnessing a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention, characterized by a drastic reconfiguration of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. The lecture will offer a comprehensive analysis of this “new state capitalism”, as commentators increasingly refer to it, and maps out its key empirical manifestations across a range of geographies, cases, and issue areas. The lecture will show that the new state capitalism is rooted in deep geopolitical economic and financial processes pertaining to the secular development of global capitalism, as much as it is the product of the geoeconomic agency of states and the global corporate strategies of leading firms. It will demonstrate that the proliferation of muscular modalities of statist interventionism and the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of states indicate foundational shifts in global capitalism. This includes a growing fusion of private and state capital, and the development of flexible and liquid forms of property that collapse the distinction between state and private ownership, control, and management. This has fundamental implications for the nature and operations of global capitalism and world politics.
Date and time: 16 April 2025, 15:15 – 17:00
Location: Asia Library, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Sölvegatan 18 B, Lund
For more information, visit this page
Lecture with Former President of Tunisia Dr. Mohamed Moncef Marzouki: “The Arab Democratic Revolutions Have Just Begun”
In collaboration with the Association of Foreign Affairs in Lund, CMES is hosting an online lecture with the former President of Tunisia, Dr. Mohamed Moncef Marzouki.
In this lecture, Dr. Mohamed Moncef Marzouki, Tunisia’s first democratically elected president, will reflect on the hopes and setbacks of the Arab Spring. Drawing from his unique political journey, he explores the challenges facing democracy in the Arab world and questions whether it can remain a credible, viable alternative amid rising authoritarianism and global disillusionment.
Dr. Mohamed Moncef Marzouki is a human rights activist, medical doctor, and former President of Tunisia. Elected after the 2011 revolution, he championed transparency, civil liberties, and democratic dialogue. Now in exile, he continues to advocate for democracy in Tunisia and across the Arab world.
This is an online event. To attend, please register following this link. Following your registration, you will receive an email from the Association of Foreign Affairs with the link to the Zoom-lecture.
The lecture will be moderated by Said Haji.
Date and time: 17 April 2025, 17:30 to 18:30
Location: Online (Zoom)
For more information, visit this page