Professor Helen Margetts OBE FBA
Opening Keynote: ‘AI for Democracy’
Monday 30 March, 17:15 – 18:15, South School, Examination Schools
Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford, and Senior Advisor and Visiting Professor at LSE’s Data Science Institute. She founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute, which gained national and international recognition for its pioneering work on AI and government.
This keynote will be chaired by Prof. Georgina Blakeley, University of Huddersfield and PSA Trustee
AI for Democracy
Democratic governments operate in a changing technological landscape, with generative AI models diffusing across society and the economy more rapidly than any previous digital technology. This talk considers what this shift means for democratic institutions, citizens and the relationship between them. Political science scholarship has tended to downplay the importance of earlier generations of technology, or to focus on the negative implications of social media. In contrast, scholars have paid extensive attention to AI, but as a novel phenomenon rather than placing AI in the wider context of technological change. The talk argues that there are important distinctions between the internet and social media era and the emerging AI era. The internet and social media were about collective behaviour and connecting citizens across networks, powered by social information and visibility. In contrast, AI fosters individualised, invisible information environments where people are far less aware of what others are doing, potentially undermining collective action. The talk argues that to understand and sustain democratic life in this changed landscape, we need to bring AI out of isolation and consider it in concert with other digital platforms. Lessons from the internet era—both positive and negative—can help to shape AI’s democratic role.
Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet in the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford. She is Senior Advisor and Visiting Professor at LSE’s Data Science Institute. From 2018 to 2025, she founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, which gained national and international recognition for its pioneering work on AI and government.
She has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy and government including over 150 articles and six books on the topic, including Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008), Data Science, AI and the Third Wave of Digital Governance (OUP, forthcoming) and Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press) which won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017.
Public service appointments include the Smart Data Council (from 2025), the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (HOSAC, from 2019) and the United Nation Committee of Experts on Public Administration (UN CEPA, from 2025).
Professor Richard English CBE FBA
Keynote: ‘Rethinking Counter-Terrorism‘
Tuesday 31 Tuesday, 17:15 – 18:15, South School, Examination Schools
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Between 2011 and 2016 he was Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations, and Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of St Andrews. Between 2021 and 2025 he was Director of the Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast.
This keynote will be chaired by Prof. Daniel Bulley, Oxford Brookes University and PSA Conference Committee
Rethinking Counter-Terrorism
There is an urgent need for political studies scholars to rethink counter-terrorism. The tragedy in Gaza, and before that the longer-term failures of the post-9/11 War on Terror, demonstrate how flawed much recent counter-terrorism has been. In this Lecture, Richard English will ask what states’ approaches to non-state terrorism should be, if human flourishing were to be their central goal. And what can political studies scholars do to contribute to this necessary and benign shift? State responses to terrorism transform the world far more decisively than does non-state terrorism itself. Rethinking counter-terrorism is therefore a hugely important task, for states, for citizens, and for scholarship.
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Between 2011 and 2016 he was Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations, and Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of St Andrews. Between 2021 and 2025 he was Director of the Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. His books include the award-winning studies Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (2003) and Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (2006). His most recent books are Does Counter-Terrorism Work? (2024), Does Terrorism Work? A History (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (co-edited, 2019), and The Cambridge History of Terrorism (edited, 2021). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Fellow of Keble College Oxford, and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews. He has held visiting or affiliate positions at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. In 2018 he was awarded a CBE for services to the understanding of modern-day terrorism and political history. In 2019 he was awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal in the Social Sciences.
Professor Catherine Boone FBA FAAAS
Keynote: ‘Political Rupture in a Post-Liberal World: Changing Regionalisms in Africa’
Wednesday 1 April, 11:30 – 12:30, South School, Examination Schools
Catherine Boone is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Department of Government and the Department of International Development. Her research focuses on questions of comparative political economy, and especially on questions of institutional change and economic development.
This keynote will be chaired by Dr Mwita Chacha, University of Birmingham
Political Rupture in a Post-Liberal World: Changing Regionalisms in Africa
This talk explores how the geopolitical and geoeconomic ruptures of the present are impacting domestic politics and inter-state relations on the African continent. Changing geoeconomics and intensifying great power rivalries are shifting power balances across subnational regions within African countries. The rise of new forms of geopolitical opportunism can work to reconfigure states themselves. These changes are driving innovation in the study of comparative politics in Africa and beyond.