Revolutions and world order: still the 'Sixth Great Power'?

Department of International Relations Fred Halliday Memorial Lecture 2024/25

Tuesday 27 May 2025  90 minutes

This lecture, held in honour of the renowned scholar Fred Halliday, explores the relationship between revolutions and world order in contemporary geopolitics.

Fred Halliday argued that revolutions were the “sixth great power” of the modern world, a force that sat alongside the five great powers that sought to regulate 19th century world politics. Does Halliday’s assessment of the impact of revolutions remain true today?

This lecture analyses the three main forms that revolution takes today – ‘people power’ movements, ‘restoration revolutions’ and ‘decentralised vanguardism’ – and assesses their impact on contemporary world order. It argues that revolutions remain central to contemporary world politics, not as a “sixth great power”, but still as the primary means through which people around the world mobilise against injustice, inequality and domination.

Meet our speakers and chair

George Lawson is a professor in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. His work is oriented around the relationship between history and theory, with a particular interest in global historical sociology. He applied this interest to the study of revolutions in three books: Anatomies of Revolution, Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile, and On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World, co-authored with Colin Beck, Mlada Bukavansky, Erica Chenoweth, Sharon Nepstad and Daniel Ritter.

Jasmine Gani is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory at LSE. She specialises in anti-colonial theory and history, and the politics of empire, race and knowledge production. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, and Millennium, among others. She is writing a book on ‘Racial Militarism’, using a postcolonial framework to analyse the relationship between race, militarism, and the state in both imperial metropoles and post-colonies. 

Toby Dodge is a professor in the Department of International Relations at LSE. He is also Kuwait Professor and Director of the Kuwait Programme, Middle East Centre. Toby currently serves as Iraq Research Director for the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme (CRP). From 2013–18, Toby was Director of the Middle East Centre.

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The Perils of Saudi Nationalism

Department of International Relations Fred Halliday Memorial Lecture 2023/24

Monday 5 February 2024 (90 mins)

Listen to or watch the 2023/24 Fred Halliday Memorial Lecture with Madawi Al-Rasheed who discussed the history of Saudi nationalism and the new populist Saudi nationalism.

Since the rise of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in 2017, a new populist Saudi nationalism has been promoted. This lecture traces the shift in Saudi nation-building from the early days of religious nationalism to the current populist trend. The new Saudi national narrative inevitably involves selectively remembering and forgetting aspects of the past in order to consolidate a shift in national consciousness about who Saudis are. But while the new nationalism promises to invigorate the nation, the process is accompanied by serious violence against dissenting voices.     

Meet our speaker and chair

Madawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research focuses on history, society, religion and politics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Middle Eastern Christian minorities in Britain, Arab migration, Islamist movements, state and gender relations, and Islamic modernism. She has published several books on Saudi Arabia. Her most recent book is The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia (OUP 2020).  

Jeffrey Chwieroth is Professor in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Head of the Department. He is also co-investigator at the Systemic Risk Centre and Faculty Affiliate at the Phelan United States Centre at LSE.

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Hijacking Women's Health

Department of International Relations Fred Halliday Memorial Lecture 2022

Tuesday 4 October 2022 90 minutes

Speaker:

Sophie Harman, Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London, where she teaches and conducts research into Global Health Politics, Africa and International Relations, gender and feminism, and Visual Politics.

Discussant: Marsha Henry, Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies, LSE

Chair: William A Callahan, Professor of International Relations, LSE

Women’s health is and always has been hijacked for political ends. The US Supreme Court overturning of Roe vs Wade is but another example of elites using the needless death of women to further their own political advantage.

In the 2022 Fred Halliday lecture, Professor Sophie Harman sought to answer two fundamental questions: first, why do women die when they don’t have to? and second, what happens when we take the relationship between women’s health and global politics seriously?

To answer these two questions, Harman mapped key trends in how women’s health is used and abused for political advantage around the world; and offer a key provocation, that these trends are fundamental to understanding, and even predicting, the chaos and crisis the world finds itself in. Women and women’s health saw it coming.  

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From Subject to Citizen - And Back: crises of the republic

Department of International Relations Fred Halliday Memorial Event 2021

Monday 22 March 2021
Online public lecture (90 mins)

This lecture explores how and why the symbolic investment in republican discourse and the building of republican institutions can be so detrimental to the rights of the very public that they are meant to represent, even embody.

A lecture in the series which celebrates the life and achievements of one of the world's leading Middle East scholars, international relations theorists and analysts of global affairs, Professor Fred Halliday.

Speaker:

Charles Tripp is a Professor Emeritus of Politics with reference to the Middle East and North Africa, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests include the nature of autocracy, state and resistance in the Middle East, the politics of Islamic identity and the relationship between art and power. He is currently working on a study of the emergence of the public and the rethinking of republican ideals in Tunisia. Together with other colleagues he has been one of the founders of the Centre for Comparative Political Thought at SOAS.

Chair: Karen E. Smith is Professor of International Relations and Head of the Department of International Relations at LSE, and is Director of the European Foreign Policy Unit.

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The Arab Uprisings and the future of revolution

Department of International Relations Fred Halliday Memorial Event

Date: Monday 4 February 2019
Speakers: Professor Salwa Ismail, Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East at SOAS, Dr George Lawson, Associate Professor of International Relations, LSE
Chair: Dame Minouche Shafik, Director of LSE

Further information

Populism: A Global Perspective

International Relations Fred Halliday memorial roundtable

Date: Monday 5 February 2018
Speakers: Dr Mukulika Banerjee, Firdevs Robinson, Professor Robert Singh
Chair: Professor Toby Dodge

More information
Read our tribute to Fred Halliday

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International Norm Change: the outlawry of war in the interwar years

Date: Monday 14 November 2016
Speaker: Professor Hatsue Shinohara
Chair: Professor Christopher Hughes

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: the politics of the UN Security Council's approach to the protection of civilians

Date: Thursday 19 November 2015
Speaker: Professor Anne Marie Goetz
Chair: Professor Christopher Hughes

Human Suffering and Humanitarian Emergencies

Date: Tuesday 5 November 2013
Speaker: Professor Craig Calhoun
Chair: Professor Christopher Hughes

A Woman's War Doesn't End When the Guns go Silent

Date: Monday 5 November 2012
Speaker: Professor Cynthia Enloe

Framing the Arab Uprisings: a historical perspective

Date: Thursday 6 October 2011
Speaker: Professor Juan Cole
Chair: Professor Kimberly Hutchings