The 2025 Stanfield Conversation: Challenges to the rule of law and the future of liberal democracy

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:00:00 GMT

The 2025 Stanfield Conversation:
Challenges to the rule of law and the future of liberal democracy

Courts and the Dynamics of Democratic Decline
Even in some of the world’s sturdiest democracies, leaders are deliberately undermining courts to weaken, or even dismantle, checks on their power. In many cases, the justice system is not only being sidelined but “weaponized” against political opponents through political appointments, the strong-arming of judges and law firms, and lawsuits and prosecutions designed to intimidate critics. These tactics threaten the rule of law – a necessary component of democracy. How much damage has already been done? Where and how can courts reassert themselves in ways that bolster threatened democracies? And what, if anything, can judges, lawyers, and ordinary citizens do to shore up the legal foundations of democracy?

2025-2026 MacKay Lecture Series

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:00:00 GMT

The 2025-26 MacKay Lecture features Dilip Menon, Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Writing by the Sea: Connected History in the Age of Global Warming

Global warming has reminded us of the porosity of the boundaries between ocean and land, belying the hard distinctions that we have been prone to make at least since Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum in 1609. Ironically, Grotius’s argument for a free, open ocean simultaneously laid political claims on the freedom to trade and travel of nations. The fundamental question before us, as humans, in addition to being academics, is how we stop fragmenting the ocean along national claims and ideas of “territorial waters.” The divisions into oceans – Atlantic, Pacifc, Indian – and seas – Red, the Mediterranean – while heuristically satisfying, sometimes forget the underlying fact of one body of water with its tides and seasonal winds, within which human beings negotiate and make claims. Looking at the ocean as one body allows us to recognize the importation of the territorially incarcerative ideas of area studies into a space not amenable to such dictation. We are forced to think beyond the idea of the discrete spaces of Asia, Africa, and Europe to more connected as much as interstitial histories. We have to learn to think athwart and betwixt the geographies of recent origin generated by a worship of the golden calf of the nation state. Temporally, too, we need to think beyond the limited chronologies of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity towards a notion of time dictated by movements across the ocean, as Braudel foundationally did, and historians like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Engseng Ho have done more recently (Braudel, 1972; Ho, 2006; Subrahmanyam, 2012). We have been prone, as social scientists, to think about a terrestrial imagination, with the ocean on the margins of our thought. A maritime vision would require us to engage with the persistent movement of people, goods, and ideas across the ocean which has always exceeded the remit of states and empires.

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The 2025 Stanfield Conversation: Challenges to the rule of law and the future of liberal democracy