Between November 10th-14th 2021, activists and human rights groups will hold a people’s tribunal to examine who was responsible for gross human rights violations that took place in Iran in…
Over the course of 2021 the Foreign Policy Centre’s Retreating Rights project has mapped the scale of the human rights challenges in three of the five Central Asian states through…
Examining the importance of open societies to the UK’s ‘force for good’ ambitions.
Part of the ‘Retreating Rights’ publication series.
Part of the ‘Retreating Rights’ publication series.
This report focuses on two unusual but strategically important British communities overseas.
Fostering inclusive growth in order to ‘level up’ prosperity across the UK and reduce regional inequality has become an important policy agenda for the UK Government. There remain many questions, however, regarding how exactly this can be achieved. This Aston Centre for Europe and Foreign Policy Centre event seeks to extract lessons from the Basque Country, a region in northern Spain renowned for its inclusive economic transformation, and to share ...
More infoDr Edurne Magro, Senior Researcher at Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness
Bill Murray OBE, Adviser, Global Counsel; Former Head of Economics and Public Policy at the British Embassy in Spain
Dr Igor Calzada, Senior Researcher, Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD), Cardiff University; Urban Transformations ESRC & Future of Cities Programme, University of Oxford; UN-Habitat – Digital Transformation in Urban Areas
Henriette Lyttle-Breukelaar, Director of Economic Strategy, Greater Birmingham & Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership
Chair: Dr Caroline Gray, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, College of Business and Social Sciences at Aston University
This event will be taking place on Zoom.
This virtual event will discuss the findings of an upcoming Foreign Policy Centre (FPC) and the Peaceful Change Initiative (PCi) publication. The event and publication seek to re-examine the UK’s presence in fragile and conflict affected countries (FCACs) around the world at a time of continuing global geopolitical competition and added fragilities generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of climate change. The publication will address the questions of ...
More infoRt Hon. Andrew Mitchell MP, former International Development Secretary
Fleur Auzimour Just, CEO of Peaceful Change Initiative
Phil Bloomer, Executive Director of Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
Dr Naho Mirumachi, Reader in Environmental Politics at Kings College London
Tim Molesworth, Senior Adviser, Conflict Sensitivity and Peace Technology at Peaceful Change Initiative
This event will be taking place online.
This webinar, held on International Anti-Corruption Day, will explore what can be done by the US, UK and other governments to push back against kleptocracy as well examine the ongoing challenges for journalists working to expose corruption facilitated through Western financial and legal systems. Background Successive global journalistic investigations, including the recent Pandora Papers, have increasingly uncovered the extent of global ‘kleptocracy’. Political and business elites from countries with limited democratic ...
More infoCatherine Belton, Journalist and author of ‘Putin’s People’
Casey Michel, Journalist and author of upcoming book ‘American Kleptocracy’
Maria Ordzhonikidze, Director of the Justice for Journalists Foundation
Dr Sue Hawley, Executive Director of Spotlight on Corruption
Chair: Dame Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of APPG on Anti-Corruption & Responsible Tax
This event will be taking place on Zoom.
Between November 10th-14th 2021, activists and human rights groups will hold a people’s tribunal to examine who was responsible for gross human rights violations that took place in Iran in…
Open societies around the world and the international system that supports them are under growing threat. This publication provides detailed analysis and practical ideas for how the UK can meet…
This publication comes at a moment of transition for UK foreign policy as Britain seeks to put into practice the Government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy…
If all politics is local, then it is also personal. I did not become a politician because of some abstract theory. I became a politician because I was free to…
‘Soft power’ is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as ‘the use of a country's cultural and economic influence to persuade other countries to do something, rather than the use…
What differentiates an ‘open society’ What are open societies? The famed camel comes to mind: open societies may be hard to define but they are easy to recognise. Given the…
Why does it matter It matters who we elect to lead our communities and our country. Their values and priorities shape our future. If all of those leaders have the…
The rationale for elevating open societies and human rights as a major British foreign and development policy priority is clear. There have been 15 consecutive years of declining civic space…
Since the Financial Crisis in 2007-8, democratisation has stalled and even gone into reverse. Authoritarianism is proliferating worldwide, including even at the heart of Europe. According to Freedom House, a…
It is not by accident that the most common metaphor in anti-corruption is the contention that ‘sunlight is the best of disinfectants’. It was popularised by soon-to-be US Supreme Court…
The rule of law and the Integrated Review The rule of law’s place in the Integrated Review is something of a walk on part.[1] Alongside a commitment to universal…
The UK Government’s stated commitment to open societies is unequivocal. In the wide-ranging Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy published in March this year, open societies are…
The challenge of defending and advancing democracy around the world is intertwined with economic challenges facing the UK and other societies: “Open and democratic societies like the UK must…
The autocrats playbook “The playbook of “wannabe” dictators seems to have been shared widely among leaders in (former) democracies. First, seek to restrict and control the media while curbing academia…
For digital democracy to succeed across the world, we need an open reformation in our democratic systems, practices and mindset. Far from radical, this is essential if we are to…