Archived List of Speakers Invited

See the list of distinguished speakers that Grimshaw has invited for the past few years below.

Click on the links (if available) for more information about some of the speakers or speeches.

2009

• Christopher Greenwood, QC
  Professor of International Law at LSE, Barrister at Essex Court Chambers
• Coker, Christopher
  Professor of International Relations at LSE, Adjunct Prof Staff College, Oslo
• Galtung, Johan
  Founder and Director of TRANSCEND
• Haacke, Dr Juergen
  Member of LSE’s IR Department, Asia Research Center
• Kupchan, Charles
  Professor of International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University
• Langridge, Barry
  BBC World Service
• Light, Prof. Margot
  Professor Emeritus in the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, Guest Teacher at LSE
• McGrath, Rae
  Nobel co-Laureate
• Semelin, Jaques
  Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Paris (Center for International Research and Studies)

2008

• Halliday, Prof. Fred
  ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies
• Topygal, Tsering
  Editorial Production Manager at the European Journal of International Relations

2007

• Cox, Prof. Michael
  Chair of International Relations at LSE, Co-Director of the LSE IDEAS Centre for the Study of International Affairs

2006

• Economides, Dr. Spyros
  Senior Lecturer in International Relations and European Politics at LSE
• Mr Angel Gurria
  Secretary-General of OECD
• Lachezar Nikolov Matev
  Ambassador of the Republic of Bulgaria to the United Kingdom

2004

• Barrow, Gregory
  Senior Public Affairs Officer, World Food Programme
• Booth, Prof. Ken
  Head of Department of International Politics, University of Aberystwyth
• Fitz Gerald, Dr Ann
  Senior Lecturer, Cranfield University’s Department of Defence Management
• Hariri, Rafiq
  Former Lebanese Prime Minister
• Hawes, Crispin
  Director for Middle East & Africa Practice at Eurasia Group
• L’Estrange, Michael
  High Commissioner of Australia to the UK
• Mohaupt, Isabelle
  Novelist
• Murray, Craig
  Former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan
• Shambaugh, Prof. David
  Director, The China Policy Center, George Washington University
• Starr, Dr Jeffrey
  Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Eurasia
• Toro-Hardy, Alfredo
  Ambassador of Venezuala to the UK

2003

• Bulmer-Thomas, Prof. Victor
  Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
• Dalziel, Stephen
  BBC Russian Affairs Analyst
• Fernando, Tyronne
  Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sri Lanka
• Gomperty, Stephane
  Deputy French Ambassador
• Guthrie, General the Lord of Craigiebank GCB LVO OBE
  Former Chief of Defence Staff
• Mann, Steven
  U.S. Department of State
• Owen, Lord
  Former British Foreign Secretary
• Rousso, Alan
  European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
• Tong, Jacqui
  Medecins Sans Frontieres

2002

• Amorim, Celsio
  Brazilian Ambassador to the UK
• Berezovsky, Dr. Boris
  Financier
• Bulmer-Thomas, Prof. Victor
  Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
• Dowden, Richard
  The Economist, Former Africa Editor
• Hoffman, David
  Foreign Editor of Washington Post
• Lau, Emily
  Hong Kong Legislator
• Longworth, Peter
  Former British High Commissioner to Zimbabwe
• Mabuza, Lindiwe
  High Commissioner of South Africa to the UK
• Sen, Ranendra
  Indian High Commissioner to the UK
• Summers, Michael
  Councillor, Falkland Islands Government
• Tickell, Sir Crispin
  Former British Ambassador to the United Nations
• Yavlinsky, Dr. Grigory
  Leader of the Yabloko Party in Russia, Former Presidential Candidate

2001

• Byford, Mark
  Managing Director BBC World Service
• Caruana Q.C., Peter
  Chief Minister of Gibraltar
• Elliot, William
  Foreign & Commonwealth Office
• Griffin, Michael
  Expert on the Taliban
• Hofman, Dr. M. Wilfried
  Former German Ambassador
• Hurd, Lord
  Former British Foreign Secretary
• Kader Jaffer, HE Abdul
  Pakistan High Commissioner
• Kinsman, HE Jeremy
  Canadian High Commissioner
• Kramarenko, Alexander
  Deputy Russian Ambassador
• Ridley, Yvonne
  Sunday Express
• Rubin, James
  Former Spokesman of the US State Department
• Sung-Hong, HE Choi
  Ambassador of the Republic of Korea
• Suriyakumaran, Prof. Canaganayagan
  Chairman of the Centre for Regional Development Studies Sri Lanka, Former Visiting Professor at LSE

2000

• Bhutto, Benazir
  Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
• Coleen C. Higgins
  Legal Officer at the International Maritime Organization
• Gomperty, Stephane
  Deputy French Ambassador
• Kollantai, Prof. Vladimir
  Institute of World Economics and International Affairs
• Miklo, Ivan
  Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic
• Pang, HE Prof. Eng Fong
  High Commissioner of Singapore
• Setinc, HE Marjan
  Ambassador of Slovenia
• Zhengang, He Ma
  Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China

1999

• Pestaina, Judith
  Special Adviser in the Political Affairs Division Commonwealth Secretariat

(Archived) The Future of the Transatlantic Relationship After the US Presidential Election

A Coffee Morning with Professor Michael Cox

3 November 2007 1:15-2:15pm in Room S421 (St Clement’s)

Professor Michael Cox is a Chair in International Relations at the LSE and the Co-Director of the LSE IDEAS centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy, and grand strategy. He is well known for his focus on US Foreign Policy, the state of the Transatlantic Relationship, and the long-term issues affecting the European Union.

Coffee, tea and biscuits provided.

(Archived) The Future of International Organisations and the Influence of the US Administration

A Speaker Event with Dr. Spyros Economides

26 November 2006 10:00-11:00am in Room Z229

Dr. Spyros Economides is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations and European Politics, well known for his focus on International Organizations, US as well as EU Foreign Policy, and Southeast Europe and the Balkans.

(Archived) Sino-Tibetan Dialogue: Back to the Dead End?

A Speaker Event with Tsering Topygal

26 November 2008 6:00-7:30pm in Room E304

Tsering Topygal was born in Tibet and escaped to India at the age of 10 in 1983. From 1983 to 1994 he had his education in Tibetan schools in India. He graduated with a BA in political science from Berea College, USA in 2000, following which he took a Masters in International Relations and Chinese Studies in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IRPS), University of California-San Diego. From 2005 until now, he has been a PhD Candidate in the Department of International Relations, LSE. Mr. Topygal is married to a Tibetan-British with one son, and is the editorial Production Manager at the European Journal of International Relations.

(Archived) Social Science and the ‘Failures’ of Prediction – LSE 1968, Tehran 1979, Berlin 1989, Wall Street 2008

A Speaker Event with Professor Fred Halliday

2 December 2008 6:30-7:45am in Room NAB214

Fred Halliday is ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He was formerly professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and is now one of the the IR Department’s emeritus staff. He is a widely known and authoritative analyst of middle-eastern affairs who appears regularly on the BBC, ABC, al-Jazeera television, CBC and Irish radio. Among his many books are The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (2005) and 100 Myths about the Middle East (2005).

Please note that this talk will now be chaired by Dr George Lawson, lecturer in IR at the LSE.

(Archived) Britain and the US: The ‘Special Relationship’ in the Obama Era

A Coffee Morning with Professor Christopher Coker

13 January 2009 10:00-11:00am in Room D106

Christopher Coker is a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, and Adjunct Prof Staff College, Oslo. He is the author of The Future of War: the re-enchantment of war in the Twenty-First Century (Blackwell 2004), Waging War without Warriors (2002), Humane Warfare (2001); War and the Illiberal Conscience (1998); The Twilight of the West (1997); War and the Twentieth Century (1994); Britain’s Defence Policy in the 1990s: an intelligent person’s guide to the defence debate (1992); A Nation in Retreat (1991); Reflections on American Foreign Policy (1989) and in a previous incarnation many publications on South Africa and African security.

Globalisation and Insecurity in the Twenty-first Century was published in 2002 as an Adelphi Paper for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Empires in Conflict: the growing rift between Europe and the United States was published as a Whitehall Paper for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) the following year.

He was a NATO Fellow in 1981. He has served two terms on the Council of the Royal United Services Institute. He is a serving member of the Washington Strategy Seminar; the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (Cambridge, Mass); the Black Sea University Foundation; the Moscow School of Politics and the LSE Cold War Studies Centre. He is a member of Council on the 21st Century Trust. He was a Visiting Fellow of Goodenough College in 2003-4 and is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas (United States Programme). He is also President of the Centre for Media and Communications of a Democratic Romania.

He is a former editor of The Atlantic Quarterly and The European Security Analyst. He is on the Editorial Board of Millennium and The Journal of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions.

He has advised several Conservative Party think tanks including the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies and the Centre for Policy Studies and helped to draw up the Party’s defence platform in the 1996 European Parliamentary Elections.

He has written for The Wall Street Journal; The Wall St Journal (Europe); The Times; The Independent; The European, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review.

He is a regular lecturer at the Royal College of Defence Studies (London); the NATO Defence College (Rome), the Centre for International Security (Geneva) and the National Institute for Defence Studies (Tokyo) He has spoken at other military institutes in Western Europe, North America, Australia and South-east Asia.

(Archived) Civil Society and War – Challenging the Military

A Speaker Event with Rae McGrath

13 January 2009 6:45-8:15pm in Room NAB214

Given the current situation in Gaza, Mr. McGrath will be focusing his talk on the role of civil society in ensuring the integrity of International Humanitarian Law. He will be drawing on the experiences of the campaigns to ban landmines and cluster munitions, and in doing so, examine ways to ensure that those treaties remain meaningful, examine their inherent weaknesses and look to future areas for civil society action.

About the speaker:

A soldier in the British Army for nearly 18 years Rae McGrath has worked since 1985 responding to the humanitarian impact of conflict and natural disaster and as an energetic and unapologetic civil society campaigner against the proliferation of indiscriminate weapons.

He was a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and represented the campaign at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1997, where he gave the Nobel lecture and is a Nobel co-Laureate. Until recently he was a member of the steering committee of the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) and author of one of the key publications examining the humanitarian impact of those weapons a result of an comprehensive study conducted during 1999/2000. He was the founder of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and served as Director until 1996 and established the first community-based humanitarian landmine clearance programme in Afghanistan in 1988. McGrath designed and implemented the first ever wide-scale landmines survey in Afghanistan in 1990/91, and conducted a first assessments of landmines North Iraq. He was co-author of the influential Human Rights Watch reports on landmine impact in Cambodia, Cowards War (1991). He subsequently researched and wrote two further reports for HRW in North Iraq (1992) and Angola (1993). In 1998 McGrath undertook field impact assessments of landmine use in Upper Nile and the Sorbat Basin in Sudan leading to protracted cooperation with the European Union ‘Planning for Peace Initiative’, Landmine Action, Oxfam and civil society organisations on both sides of the conflict. This work culminated in the establishment of the first landmine training and clearance programme based in the Nuba Mountains immediately following the Nuba Mountains ceasefire and two substantial assessments of landmine impact in Sudan, one focused on nomadic pastoralists whose migrations through frontline areas made them especially vulnerable.

Although best known for his work related to explosive remnants of war (ERW) McGrath has also amassed considerable experience in rehabilitation and emergency aid programmes. He worked on emergency food aid response to famine in Darfur, Ethiopia and southern Zambia during the mid-1980′s, on flood response in Bangladesh and established an innovative agricultural and infrastructural rural rehabilitation programme in Paktia Province of Afghanistan in 1988. Following the Asian tsunami in December 2004 he was director of a multi-sector response programme among isolated coastal communities in Aceh and conducted an immediate air survey of the impact area of the May 2006 earthquake in Jogyakarta, Java and established medical and support services covering the worst affected communities in Bantul.

McGrath has lectured widely in many countries, on conflict, civil society, security and development issues and is a visiting lecturer and associate at the Post Conflict & Rehabilitation Unit (PRDU) of York University, and also lectures at Cornell University in New York State. He is currently working on a study of the impact of the proliferation and commercialisation of mercenaries and a project reviewing concepts of sustainability in community-based humanitarian projects.

(Archived) The West: Last Gasp or Making a Comeback?

An LSE IDEAS event with Professor Charles A. Kupchan

14 January 2009 6:30pm in Room B212

The election of Barack Obama has precipitated a surge of interest in the future of transatlantic relations following the disharmony of the Bush years. But is the warming of the atlantic alliance a sign that the West has common interests and can act in pursuit of them, or merely the dying breaths of an alliance that sees the world in fundamentally different ways?

About the speaker:

Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. He is also Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Kupchan was Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the first Clinton administration having previously worked on the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department. He is author of numerous books, including How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (forthcoming); The End of the America Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (2002); Atlantic Security: Contending Visions (1998) and The Vulnerability of Empire (1994).

(Archived) The Role of the ICJ in the Broader Context of International Relations

A Coffee Morning with Christopher Greenwood, QC

15 January 2009 9:45-10:45am in Room D311

Christopher Greenwood, QC, is a professor of international law at the London School of Economics and a barrister at Essex Court Chambers, one of the “magic circle” top commercial sets. Professor Christopher Greenwood has taught at LSE for 12 years and is also a practising barrister who has been a QC since 1999. At the end of this month, Professor Greenwood will be leaving LSE to take up his new position as a judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where he will serve a nine year term as one of the court’s 15 judges – hearing cases that range from territorial disputes and allegations of racial discrimination to issues of genocide and environmental protection. Greenwood, 52, studied law at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar in 1978. He has appeared in many prominent cases in Europe’s highest courts — the Lockerbie bombing, Pinochet, Kosovo, Rwanda — but he is arguably best known for providing in November 2002 the legal opinion for the invasion of Iraq; Lord Goldsmith, QC, then Attorney-General, consulted him before giving his own opinion on the legality of the conflict. The opinion concluded that the invasion by allied powers was sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Greenwood was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2002 for services to international law.

Professor Greenwood has also very recently been awarded a knighthood for services to public international law in the Queen’s New Year Honours list 2009.

(Archived) The BBC Around the World

A Speaker Event with Barry Langridge

19 January 2009 7:00-8:30pm in Room NAB206

A history of the BBC’s development – radio service, the BBC World Service, then TV and online. From being the only show in town to the present era of great competition.

About the speaker:

Barry Langridge has been BBC World Service Regional Head for Africa and the Middle East and the Head of Region for Asia and Pacific Region. He has also worked as Project Officer, India, for the British NGO Christian Aid.