News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
When citizens of the United States go to the polls next month, they will be engaged in an act of faith. They don’t know what will happen in the election or in the weeks, months and years after their election. Like believers lighting a votive candle in a church to […]
Although China and the US are strategic rivals, each depends on global markets, finance and innovation, and needs to co-opt other countries and regions in order to sustain its own power. For this reason, both will use multilateralism, formal and informal, to protect the system within which they have flourished […]
Most diplomats and policymakers who decide their nation’s security policy or shape UN resolutions in New York and Geneva on conflicts in Syria, Yemen or Mali have never lived through a war, or seen one close-up. Like most of us, they must imagine war. They must see it in their […]
The West’s idea of international aid and development as the rich world rightly meeting its ethical obligation to help poor countries to modernise and join the club of developed countries is looking increasingly out of touch with the times. For a start, most aid today is going to people in […]
COVID-19 attacks the human body, but it is largely the body politic that defends us against it. While we wait for vaccines and treatments, we depend on health systems, governments, and the actions of others to detect the virus, control its spread, and break the chain of infection. But our […]
The devastating toll of the coronavirus pandemic has ignited a debate about the intersection of public health and national security. Once recognised as global leaders in pandemic preparedness, the United States and the United Kingdom have struggled to integrate policy responses to COVID-19 into existing security frameworks and to allocate resources accordingly. Indeed, public health spending in both countries pales in comparison to spending on counter-terrorism, even though more America lives have […]
In announcing the merger of the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Boris Johnson has not created a centaur, with the hindquarters of a development agency and the head of a diplomatic service, but a puggle: an entirely new animal. Merging two departments does […]
In the past term, through the magic of video conferencing, students in the MPP module of Applied Behavioural Public Policy have explored a variety of ways in which behavioural science has been used in public policy to influence people – from getting them to pay their taxes on time, to […]