Guest Lecturer: Professor Angela Stent

The United States, Europe, Russia, China and the New World Disorder.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ended the post-Cold War global order that had emerged three decades ago out of the ashes of a politically and economically bankrupt Soviet Union – combined with China’s integration with the world economy. Western attempts to create a rules-based international order into which a post-Soviet Russia would become integrated failed, in part because Russia’s understanding of and goals for a post-communist world were fundamentally different from those of the United States and Europe. Russia – at least Putin and his circle – refused to accept the post-Cold War settlement.

However this war ends, new configurations are already emerging, and Russia, China and many countries in the Global South seek to create a “post-West order.” What might the pillars of that new order be? How do China’s and Russia’s visions coincide or differ? And how can the West—with all the domestic challenges America and Europe face—navigate to preserve a world that is not disrupted by an axis of authoritarians? This lecture will explore how we arrived at the situation in which the world currently finds itself and the contours of a post post-Cold war order of Great Power competition and fragmented globalization

Dr Charlie Laderman will chair the event, with Dr Jade McGlynn serving as a discussant.

You can sign up for the event here

About the speakers:

Angela Stent is Director Emerita of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. She is a Senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Advisor to the U.S. Institute of Peace. From 2004-2006 she served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. Stent’s publications include: ; From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German-Soviet Relations, 1955-1980 (1981) Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, The Soviet Collapse and The New Europe (1999)); The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (2014), for which she won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon prize for the best book on the practice of American Diplomacy. Her latest book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (Twelve Books, 2019, updated paperback 2023) for which she won the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s prize for the best book on U.S-Russian Relations.

Charlie Laderman is Senior Lecturer in International History and the author of Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and the German March to Global War. He is part of the core team responsible for directing the Centre for Grand Strategy. Before joining KCL, he was a research fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, where he remains a senior research associate. In 2016–17, he was a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin and in 2021-22, he was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Jade McGlynn is a Leverhulme EC Researcher in the War Studies department and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s College London. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she previously worked as a Lecturer in Russian. She is a frequent contributor to international media, including BBC, CNN, DW, Foreign Policy, The Times, The Telegraph and The Spectator.