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https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/hypocrisy

Great powers preach principles they don’t always practice. Does it cost them? This lecture takes up one of the oldest questions in world politics and argues that it does.

Drawing on four waves of original experiments in the Global South, where the United States and China now compete for allegiance, it shows how hypocrisy by either power turns people away from cooperation, and why no appeal to national interest or the greater good wins them back. It also explores whether reactions to hypocrisy are driven by moral outrage or colder calculations about credibility, and when hypocrisy bites hardest. The answers suggest that the moral language through which the powerful claim the right to lead, and build the orders they preside over, can itself become a constraint on their power.

Matias Spektor is a prominent voice from the Global South on international relations, great-power politics and the changing world order. Dean and Professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Brazil, he brings a distinctive perspective to debates about who shapes international rules, how power is exercised and what makes global leadership legitimate. His latest research examines how citizens across the Global South make sense of  legitimacy, hierarchy and security in world politics. He has been a visiting scholar at Princeton, Georgetown, LSE, King’s College London and the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford and is currently a visiting  fellow of the Oxford Martin School's Programme on Security Futures.

'The costs of hypocrisy in world politics' with Prof Matias Spektor