Annual Lectures
The POLIS Annual Lecture
The POLIS Annual Lecture was created in 2025 to welcome an esteemed speaker from within the broader disciplines of politics and international studies.
The 2025 POLIS Annual Lecture
The inaugural POLIS Lecture took place on Thursday 6 November 2025. We were honoured to welcome our distinguished speaker Desmond King who spoke on the subject of political violence and the American nation. Desmond King is Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government at Oxford.
Summary
Max Weber defined the modern state as having a monopoly on legitimate violence. Not in the United States. The American regime organized and defended popular violence right from the start. The American Constitution –driven by both historical necessity and political theory-- institutionalized an armed citizenry. The Constitution, interacting with slave codes in the south, institutionalized the violence that was already endemic in colonial America and projected it into the future. We argue that as the state slowly developed its own capacity for legitimate violence it operated in a unique dialectic with the citizen violence that the state itself had organized. The development of the American state’s capacity continues to the present day. The Trump administration vastly expands the federal government’s law enforcement apparatus and projects it onto the reluctant cities in the American homeland – unsettling established ideas (and legal boundaries) but following a logic that was present from the start. We offer a framework for understanding how the state interacts (and patterns) private violence across four broad categories: Delegation, exemption, enforcement, and repression; all are complicated and driven forward by American federalism.
The Alcuin Lecture
The next Alcuin Lecture will be scheduled for Michaelmas Term, 2026.
Named after Alcuin of York, a teacher, theologian, and poet who advised Emperor Charlemagne, this annual lecture, hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations, is given on a topic concerning the UK and Europe.
The series was established with a generous gift from Lord Brittan, former Vice-President of the European Commission, who himself gave the first lecture in 1999. Since then many UK European Commissioners have contributed to the series, which has also included Lord Hannay, the former UK Permanent Representative to the EU; Carl Bildt of Sweden; and Shirley Williams.
The 2023 Alcuin Lecture
We are honoured to have welcomed Perry Anderson as the speaker for our 2023 Alcuin Lecture. This year's lecture took place on 22 November 2023. The subject of the lecture was:
The European War in the East
'For the third time in just over a century, war is raging in the Ukraine, but for the first time in the series every major European state agrees which power is responsible for it, save one, held the perpetrator by a consensus of the continent. In this conflict, far from of being detached from Europe by its exit from the Union, Britain has taken the lead in a common dispatch of arms and assistance to the victim of what all those coming to its aid condemn as unprovoked aggression. How far is this view of the war likely to be upheld in the court of history?'