power and geopolitics in the world today, from one of the UK’s leading authorities on international relations
Brendan Simms, Professor of the History of European International Relations and Director of the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge will deliver four lectures on the Great Powers. Once a routine concept in world history, the idea of a Great Power system had become largely defunct by the millennium with the advance of globalisation. Instead, the exponential growth of the world economy, and its demand for energy, drove the rise of ‘new’ powers like China and India, and the ‘return’ of old ones like Russia. Today, as the Americans simulate the defence of Taiwan, and British forces prepare for confrontation with Russia, few doubt that the Great Powers are ‘back’. Against this background, Prof Simms will begin by defining Great Powerness, then trace the rise of a great power system, before looking at its eclipse in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries before concluding with an examination of the return o the Great Powers.
