LSE Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events

LSE Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events is an interdisciplinary research programme. It has been established to promote new approaches to and improved methods for research on that class of geopolitical issues - long wave events - which pose some of the greatest challenges to the 21st century. These include socio-physical phenomena, such as the HIV/AIDS endemic or global climate change, socio-cultural phenomena such as technological "lock-in" or cultural encapsulation in the face of modernity - of which unconditional terrorism is a product and socio-historical phenomena such as cultural lag in institutions like the UN or EU. The renovation of strategic thinking is also a topic of continuing work.

The common feature of long wave events is that they share troubling characteristics of obscure causes and dynamics and are consequently corrosive of much received theory and practice. Grappling with these is our mission.

The Programme is named for the second Director of LSE, Sir Halford Mackinder the founder of modern geo-politics. This is to signal an awareness that a century after he responded with fresh and stimulating new public scholarship to dramatically changed circumstances at the start of the twentieth century , so today's LSE is similarly challenged to respond with similar imagination.

The Programme mounts research programmes and offers research opportunities detailed elsewhere in the website.

July 2008

Contents

Professor Gwyn Prins, Programme Director

Halford Mackinder (PDF)

Research

New: How to get climate policy back on course Professor Gwyn Prins et al.

Earthquakes Happen; Recent Developments in Climate Policy. Professor Gwyn Prins.

Another Europe? After the Third No, LSE Mackinder Programme/Lilliput Press, Dublin.

Since the Irish delivered a resounding 'Third No' on 12 June 2008, their verdict has caused a political earthquake in Brussels and in the capitals of Europe.

Risk, Threat and Security. The case of the United Kingdom. (PDF)

HIV/AIDS and Security: Fact, Fiction and Evidence. A report to UNAIDS. (PDF)

The Royal Navy at the Brink. (PDF) "The RN risks losing irretrievably the capacity which it has had since before Nelson but especially from the time of Trafalgar to the present, to be a decisive force across the globe".

Storm Warning for the Royal Navy. (PDF) "A decade of over-use and neglect has placed the world's oldest navy, and the U.S. Navy's presumed closest partner, at a critical decision point. What can the Royal Navy do to stay afloat?"

Time to ditch Kyoto (PDF). Climate policy after 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires, needs a radical rethink. More of the same won't do argue Gywn Prins and Steve Rayner.

The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy (PDF). A joint discussion paper of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, University of Oxford and the Mackinder Programme.

Lifting the taboo on adaptation (PDF). Renewed attention to policies for adapting to climate change cannot come too soon for Roger Pielke, Jr, Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner and Daniel Sarewitz.