Mass Data Surveillance and Predictive Policing critically assesses legal frameworks involving the bulk processing of personal data, initially collected by the private sector, to predict and prevent crime through advanced profiling technologies. In the EU, mass data surveillance currently engages three sectors: electronic communications (under the e-Privacy Directive), air travelling (under the Passenger Name Records Directive) and finance (under the Anti-Money Laundering Directive), and increasingly intersects with the deployment of predictive policing techniques. The book questions the legitimacy and impact of these frameworks in light of the EU’s powers to provide security while safeguarding fundamental rights, particularly privacy, data protection, effective remedy, fair trial and presumption of innocence.

3

3/28/2025

Energy transitions are expected to redistribute economic benefits to new actors, from local communities to countries with renewable resources. My research explores the classic political economy question of who benefits, looking at the role of communities, states, and firms. At the community level, I look at attitudes towards energy transitions in Jordan, a lower-middle income country rapidly transitioning to renewables with attractive jobs in this industry. Despite the top-down nature of energy policymaking in the authoritarian political context, household surveys reveal that people are highly supportive of energy transitions, especially if they perceive renewables as benefitting their communities. However, there are tensions between countries and firms that make it difficult for countries to see the kinds of local benefits present in Jordan in many other contexts. I argue that the transfer of green technologies promised in the Paris Agreement is not materializing at a large scale, des

2

1/23/2025

The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the 21st century, state-owned enterprises, sovereign funds, and policy banks have vastly expanded their control over assets and markets. Concurrently, governments have experimented with increasingly assertive modalities of statism, from techno-industrial policies and spatial development strategies to economic nationalism and trade and investment restrictions. This book argues that we are currently witnessing a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention, characterized by a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. It offers a comprehensive analysis of this “new state capitalism”, as commentators increasingly refer to it, and maps out its key empirical manifestations across a range of geographies, cases, and issue areas.

18

11/18/2024

Short video about the Department. Wendy Carlin speaker

475

7/18/2024

This discussion was held on Tuesday 14th May from 17:30-19:00 BST in person at UCL IIPP or online via Zoom. Building on the previous lecture exploring the roots of the 2008 financial crisis, this talk will look at the long term consequences of the crisis and both the political and economic policy response. It will focus on the combination of bailout, austerity and quantitative easing, as well as the price of those policies in terms of economic performance and political stability. To conclude this discussion on the 2008 financial crash and the crisis in neoliberal economics, the lecture will explore the intellectual opening the crisis created and the ideas that have stemmed from it. The lecture is presented by Professor Damon Silvers, Visiting Professor of Practice at UCL IIPP and Former Deputy Chair of the US Congressional Oversight Panel for Troubled Asset Relief Program.

1

5/15/2024

The first of two lectures, this discussion will look at the 2008 financial crisis and will seek to dispel a number of myths that have spread about the crisis since. It will examine the deep roots of the crisis in the neoliberal economic model, the nature of how the crisis emerged and unfolded, and the core character of the policy response of the countries at its centre. The lecture is presented by Professor Damon Silvers, Visiting Professor of Practice at UCL IIPP and Former Deputy Chair of the US Congressional Oversight Panel for Troubled Asset Relief Program.

4

5/10/2024

As digital platforms have become more integral to not just how we live, but also to how we do politics, the rules governing online expression, behaviour, and interaction created by large multinational technology firms --- popularly termed ‘content moderation,’ ‘platform governance,’ or ‘trust and safety’ --- have increasingly become the target of government regulatory efforts seeking to shape them. This book provides a conceptual and empirical analysis of this important and emerging tech policy terrain of ‘platform regulation.’ How, why, and where exactly is it happening? Why now? And how do we best understand the vast array of strategies being deployed across jurisdictions to tackle this issue? Speaker: Dr Robert Gorwa Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Discussant: Marisol Manfredi PhD Candidate of Sustainable Development & Climate Change (IUSS Pavia + University of Pisa), Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap Head of Research & Associate Prof in Economics, IIPP

5

5/8/2024

The second lecture in the Labour and Climate Change series will look at four case studies over the last two years—President Biden’s massive climate-related public investment agenda and the response from US trade unions, the effort to decarbonise the British steel industry, the attempt to phase out the South African coal mining industry, and the effort by President Lula to decarbonise Brazil’s economy after years of climate denial under his predecessor. In each case, the interactions of government, labour parties, and labour unions provides lessons about what to do and not to do to fight climate change effectively, both in the developed and the developing world. The lecture will be presented by Professor Damon Silvers

4

5/2/2024