Diego Rubio is a historian and policy analyst based at the University of Oxford. He holds a Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen's College and memberships at the History Faculty and the Department of Politics and International Relations. He is also an associate researcher of the Oxford Center for Global History and the Higher Education Academy of the United Kingdom, and he has worked as advisor to the United Nations and the Ibero-American General Secretariat. His research falls within the fields of History of Political Thought and Applied History, with an special focus in improving policy and decision making through a better use and understanding of historical knowledge.
Diego holds a PhD in History of Political Thought from the University of Oxford, a MA from the École Normale Supérieure and a BA from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has been visiting scholar at a number of universities, including Paris IV Sorbonne and Columbia in NYC.
The past is never dead. In fact, most of the times it is not even past. The world of today is the result of a complex of historical processes and dynamics whose study can help us to better understand the current global turmoil and anticipate some of its possible outcomes. The goal of this lecture is to provide students with the basics to undertake such analysis. In the first part we will examine some of the large-scale structural, dynamic, or systemic theories of change formulated by men since the Antiquity, aimed at explaining and predicting the rise and fall of civilizations, the development of societal transformations and political disruptions. In the second part of the lecture we will see how these theories could be apply to the analysis of current global affairs and and shed some light on the rising uncertainty that lays ahead us.