Winchester Lecture 2021: Professor Michael N Barnett, ‘Suffering and International Progress’

This year’s lecture was held at 5pm on Thursday 21 October at the Examination Schools in Oxford’s High Street. Professor Barnett is from George Washington University and is a world-renowned scholar of international affairs, having written extensively on global governance, humanitarianism and the Middle East. In this year’s lecture, Michael will explore how a West that believes in progress copes with instances of evil; how it reconciles a belief in progress and the existence of suffering; and how it copes and restores hope. He will present an argument linking the relationship between suffering and the creation of international institutions with a cosmopolitan ethos, which are intended to represent the West's continued faith in progress. But for how long can the West continue to respond to suffering with hope? Has the West reached its end? *** The Bapsybanoo Marchionness of Winchester Lecture is one of the University of Oxford's flagship annual events. Generously endowed by the late Bapsybanoo Pavry, Dowager Marchionness of Winchester in 1995, the Lecture honours the intellectual legacy and interests of the Marchionness.