With friends like these, who needs enemies? Saudi Arabia is out of control. After the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, most likely on direct orders from the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed Bin Salman, it’s time for the West to sever ties with this regime of criminal des...

Is Vladimir Putin the most powerful – and dangerous – man in the world? With Putin in the Kremlin, we have returned to an era where former Russian spies are mysteriously poisoned on British soil and where Russia feels emboldened to roll its tanks into an eastern European state. The Kremlin uses d...

Yanis Varoufakis and Gilian Tett came to the Intelligence Squared stage in a conversation chaired by Anne McElvoy, to debate whether capitalism is broken and if it needs to be fixed. Tett and Varoufakis both agree that the current model of capitalism needs to change but they differ radically in ...

Forget the old battles between the left and the right. Welcome to the era of ‘identity politics,’ where loyalties are owed not to class or political party, but to groups defined by gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

To some people, this is a dangerous trend. True, many minorities have suff...

Despite Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, traditional conflict — fought with guns, bombs, and drones—has become less common around the world. For many nations it's almost too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In this conversation, transnational crime and Ru...

Fiona Hill is the foreign affairs expert who started life as a former coal miner’s daughter in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, and became an adviser to Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She came to public attention in 2019 when she testified against President Trump during ...

A monumental turning point of more hot air? How will COP change the world?

This debate is a part of Intelligence Squared Energised, a series of debates within climate and clean energy in partnership with Iberdrola.

Join ScottishPower CEO Keith Anderson and Professor of Energy Policy and Offici...

Pain, pleasure, suffering what makes a good life? In November 2021, Yale Professor Paul Bloom came to Intelligence Squared to talk about his new book The Sweet Spot, and explained how a life without chosen suffering would be empty – and perhaps worse than that, boring.

In conversation with Linda...

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Taken from our event "Niall Ferguson on History's Hidden Networks", recorded at the Emmanuel Centre on 4th October 201...

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many hallowed institutions – Harvard and Oxford Universities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Louvre. But the source of the family’s wealth has become an international scandal. They are the main owners of Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical com...

‘A global star … given his track record as a zeitgeist thermometer, we should all pay attention’ – Financial Times

The world in 2019 is looking increasingly chaotic and unpredictable. Trump has declared a ‘national emergency’ over immigration at America’s southern border. A humanitarian catastro...

There's not a lot to like about Vladimir Putin: he's autocratic, vain and runs a corrupt government. And he doesn't give a fig for human rights. The repression in Chechnya, the jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot protestors, the murders of journalist Anna Politkovsk...

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has sparked outrage around the world. The Palestinian ambassador to London claims Trump’s move amounts to ‘declaring war on 1.5 billion Muslims’, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has warned that the US could ‘plunge the region an...

Imagine if swathes of the British countryside were allowed to be wild once again, if trees and rare plants could flourish and beavers, boars and white-tailed eagles could retake their place in the ecosystem. That’s the goal of the growing numbers of nature-lovers who support the idea of rewilding...

When Tony Blair became prime minister in May 1997, he had a landslide majority, an approval rating of 93 per cent, and he went on to become Labour’s longest-serving premier. At his last PMQs he got a standing ovation in the chamber of the House of Commons. How things have changed. Nowadays all we...

25 years ago, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the future looked rosy. Liberal democracy, freedom and individual rights were on the march, triumphing over tyranny and repression. The end of the Cold War had brought an end to history, declared Francis Fukuyama. A quarter of a century on, that sun...

When the EU's transitional immigration rules expire on 1st January 2014, numerous Bulgarians and Romanians will be heading for Britain. And we should put out the welcome mat. Yes, it's true that there has been a huge fuss about this in the press, but then xenophobia sells newspapers. The truth is...

He’s one of the most powerful people in the world – yet in the West we know little about him. Who is Xi Jinping? And what are his ambitions for China and the world?

In May 2022 writer and academic Kerry Brown came to Intelligence Squared to shed light on China’s enigmatic leader. Drawing from r...

They are coming to an office near you: job-gobbling robots that can do your work better and more cheaply than you can. One in three jobs could be taken over by a computer or a robot in the next 20 years. Most at risk are less skilled workers such as machine operators, postmen, care workers and pr...

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now Turkey’s longest-serving president. Since coming to power as Prime Minister in 2002 he has overseen a radical and brutal transformation of this pivotal country. Once a secular democracy with aspirations to join the European Union, Turkey has become a deeply nationalist...

Why do they do it? Again and again, after every attack, our media react by giving the terrorists exactly what they want – maximum publicity. Of course, the public should be told that an atrocity has taken place. But each attack dominates the news for days at a stretch. The TV networks go into ove...

In February 2022 Russian shells rained down on Kyiv as tanks crossed the border into Ukraine. At the time American forces prepared to evacuate President Volodymyr Zelensky for fear of his life. But Zelensky refused to abandon his country, saying ‘I need ammunition, not a ride’ and quickly became ...