The changing Commonwealth and its geopolitical context

St Antony's College, University of Oxford

The Rt. Hon Lord Howell of Guildford in conversation with Baroness Arminka Helic and Lord Jonny Oates. Talk followed by Q &amp; A.

Nissan Lecture Theatre

St Antony's College Visiting Parliamentary Events

Trinity Term 2023 Visiting Parliamentary Seminars at St Antony's College, Oxford

This event is part of the Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship Series at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. Booking is recommended.The Rt. Hon Lord Howell of Guildford will be discussing 'The changing Commonwealth and its geopolitical context'. Professor Faisal Devji will be the academic interlocutor and our two Visiting Parliamentary Fellows, Baroness Arminka Helić and Lord Jonathan Oates will make the introductions.

The Rt. Hon Lord Howell of Guildford

The only Minister to have served in Heath, Thatcher and Cameron administrations, Lord Howell of Guildford has maintained a close engagement with government foreign policy, with energy policies and with the Commonwealth throughout. He served under Margaret Thatcher as her first Energy and Transport Secretary and has held numerous Government and public posts since – including Foreign and Commonwealth Minister of State in the 2010 Coalition Government. He was the President of the UK Energy Industries Council 2012- 15, President of the British Council of Energy Economics 2006- 15, has been chair of the Windsor Energy Group since 2005 and is co-Chair of Access for Women in Energy.

He is a former treasury economist, and was the Chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the chief architects of UK-Japan relations. He was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan in 2002. Lord Howell was Chair of the House of the newly formed Lords International Relations Committee 2017-2019, and currently sits on the Lords Constitutional Committee. He is also President of the Royal Commonwealth Society and actively engaged with the Commonwealth network’s 53 country membership on energy and trade issues. He is the UK member of the Commonwealth Governance Reform High Level Group. He advises Mitsubishi Electric, the Kuwait Investment Office and Japan Central Railway Ltd. – among other companies, and is a former adviser to UBS, Wood Mackenzie, Dow Chemical, Trafalgar House, Jardine Thompson and Merck, Sharp and Dohme. Lord Howell is the author of several books and he is a regular contributor to The Japan Times and other publications.Lord Howell’s latest books are ‘Look Where We’re Going ‘(2019) ‘The Japan Affair Vol I’ (2020) The Japan Affair Vol II (2021). He is also the author of the earlier best-selling ‘The Edge of Now’ (2000) and ‘Old Links and New Ties’ (2013).

Professor Faisal Devji

A Fellow of St Antony’s College, Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Professor Faisal Devji completed his PhD in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago in 1994. He was then elected Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he went on to run the graduate program at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, which included schools in Tajikistan and Iran. Returning to regular academic life in 2003, he taught for two years at Yale as a visiting lecturer and another four at The New School for Social Research in New York as Associate Professor,arriving in Oxford as Reader in Modern South Asian History in 2009. 

Professor Devji’s research interests are in the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. He has focussed on the cultural and philosophical meanings of violence as much as the emergence of non-violence as a political project and is interested in the different ways in which the idea of humanity achieves political reality, particularly as the simultaneous subject and object of globalisation. His recent work deals with efforts to think beyond the nation-state and the inheritance of anarchism in the post-colonial world.

Baroness Arminka Helić is a member of the House of Lords for the Conservative Party. She served as Special Advisor to the former Foreign Secretary William Hague. 

Lord Jonathan Oates is a member of House of Lords and is Chief Executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger, an advocacy group which seeks to raise the profile of global malnutrition and hunger and drive UK action to tackle it. 
Images - Official portrait photographs from the UK Parliament website, released for sharing under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence, and adapted for our use.Find out more about St Antony's<a href="https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/visiting-parliamentary-fellowship-seminar-series" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"> Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship</a>

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