Non LI Event - The Annual Hedley Bull Lecture: Power and Order in the Asian Century - Professor Hugh White

Power and Order in the Asian Century: What Hedley Bull teaches us about the chances for peace or war between America and China.

The Hedley Bull Lecture Series:

The annual Hedley Bull Memorial Lecture lies at the core of the Politics Society’s calendar of events. The Lecture is named after Professor Hedley Bull (1932-1985), who graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in 1953. Professor Bull is one of the most influential thinkers in the study of international relations, with his major work, The Anarchical Society (1977), becoming a canonical text in that field.

Forty years ago, Hedley Bull explored a looming transformation of Asia’s strategic order. China was rising, America was fading, Japan was restless and India was emerging. Sounds familiar today. Things didn’t work out as he [and almost everyone else] expected, but the ideas Bull developed about what might happen in a new Asia, and what should be done about it, remain remarkably important today. Not only did they seed many ideas in The Anarchical Society, and thus shape the study of International Relations was we know it today. They also provide the best guide we have to the immense and urgent challenges of practical policy that we face today as the transformation that Bull foresaw finally happens.

Professor Hugh White:

Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He studies and writes about Australian strategic and defence policy, and the regional and global security issues that most directly affect Australia. He has worked on these issues for 30 years as an intelligence analyst, journalist, ministerial adviser, senior official, think tank analyst and academic. He worked as an adviser to Kim Beazley as Defence Minister and Bob Hawke as Prime Minister, as Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence, and as the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. His recent publications include Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing published in Quarterly Essay 39 in September 2010. In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.

Registration is recommended, though not compulsory. Please sign up at our website: http://supoliticssociety.com/hedley-bull-memorial-series/