Understanding climate-related disruption of global financial governance

On June 4, 2025, the European Studies Centre at Oxford’s St Anthony’s College welcomed Professor Jeff D. Colgan of Brown University for a seminar entitled “Climate Politics and Global Financial Governance.” As a Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs—and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre—Colgan spoke to a full house of faculty, graduate students, and practitioners. The event was chaired by Dr Othon Anastasakis, Director of the European Studies Centre.

Colgan opened by reminding his audience that Europe exists not in isolation but at the intersection of three vast global systems: the environmental web that sustains all life, the industrial networks that generate the greenhouse emissions driving climate change, and the financial architectures that allocate the capital for both economic growth and decarbonization. Europe, he argued, views these systems through a unique lens. Its robust embrace of ESG and green finance stands in stark contrast to the more cautious attitude of other regions.

Building on this foundation, Colgan described the shocks reverberating through climate politics today. He observed that the Trump administration’s return has once again disrupted U.S. climate diplomacy and science funding, emboldening right-wing parties abroad. Meanwhile, rising interest rates are making capital-intensive clean-energy technologies more expensive relative to traditional fossil-fuel assets. Across Washington and Westminster, a new strain of “climate realism” has taken hold—one that doubts the feasibility of Paris targets and advocates a more pragmatic, if pessimistic, approach. Colgan cautioned that such realism risks abandoning decades of hard-won progress.

Bridging the gap between research and policy in international affairs: A practitioner's perspective

On 29 May 2025, the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, welcomed Giulio Venneri, Deputy Director in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, for a seminar chaired by Eli Gateva, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University. Venneri—who began his career in the Italian Foreign Ministry before joining successive EU institutions—has combined frontline policy work on Albania and North Macedonia with teaching posts in Rome, Trento and London. His new book, Learning Policy Advice, distils nearly two decades of experience into a practical guide for anyone seeking to navigate the leap from academic research to policy-making.

Venneri opened by recalling his own “cold shower” moment on joining Italy’s Foreign Service. Fresh from completing a PhD on Bosnia and sovereignty, he confidently drafted his first briefing on Canada’s embrace of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine—only to be told by his head of office that, however sophisticated his analysis, it was far too dense for a busy minister. Forced back to the drawing board, Venneri learned that policy writing must be both vertically accessible—so that your political masters can grasp key arguments at a glance—and horizontally calibrated, empowering them to advocate effectively in bilateral or multilateral settings. This anecdote underpins his conviction that academic rigour, rather than being jettisoned, must be re-engineered into concise, audience-tailored advice.

Learning Policy Advice is structured around three pillars. First, Venneri “front-loads” the trauma of that cold shower, inviting readers to test themselves with realistic simulations—drafting talking points or speeches under tight deadlines, armed only with minimal background material. Only after this exercise does he introduce the building blocks of policy writing: defining the scope of “policy advice” (distinct from advocacy or academic argument), mastering template-based briefings, crafting speeches, and preparing press statements. Each chapter concludes with further simulations, and Routledge has generously provided free online exercises to sharpen practical skills.

Spanish transition to democracy revisited

On 27 May 2025, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, hosted a seminar chaired by Ainhoa Campos Posada, Ramón Areces Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s. The event brought together Alba Nueda Lozano of the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha; Sophie Baby, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at Université Bourgogne Europe; and Magda Fytili, Ramón y Cajal Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Each speaker challenged conventional wisdom about Spain’s passage from dictatorship to democracy, illuminating overlooked dimensions of violence, gender, and regional disparity.

Sophie Baby began by dismantling the myth of a peaceful transition. She reminded attendees that between 1975 and 1982—often held up as Spain’s “exit from violence”—there were at least 714 deaths and over 3,200 recorded violent actions. Far from a simple departure from authoritarianism, Baby showed how Spain inherited and perpetuated interlocking cycles of violence: revolutionary groups such as FRAP and GRAPO clashed with far-right militants like Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey, while the state itself was responsible for nearly 180 deaths through police operations and extrajudicial “dirty war” tactics. The Basque conflict, she argued, cast the longest shadow: ETA’s campaign left over 800 dead, provoking counter-terrorism measures (Triple A, BVE, GAL) that blurred the line between law enforcement and political repression. Baby concluded that this sanguinary backdrop calls for a re-evaluation of human-rights legacies: unlike Latin America, Spain’s victim-rights movement emerged unevenly, propelled more by the long-running Basque struggle than by civil-war memory.