Some conversations deserve to travel further

Some conversations deserve to travel further than the room in which they first take place.

With DIAS in Dialogue, the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) launches a new video conversation series featuring the researchers and thinkers who visit DIAS for lectures, events, and exchanges with the community.

Hosted by DIAS Director Sten Rynning, the series invites guest speakers to continue the conversations sparked at DIAS: to unfold their ideas, connect them to wider questions, and explore where different disciplines might meet.

The format is rooted in a simple ambition. DIAS regularly brings leading scholars to SDU to discuss questions that matter across research fields and beyond academia. Until now, many of those conversations have remained with the people in the room. DIAS in Dialogue creates a space for them to reach further - inviting guest speakers to develop their ideas in a more open conversation and giving new audiences a way into the questions they raise.

First episode: When great powers fear decline

The first episode features Professor T.V. Paul, Distinguished James McGill Professor of International Relations at McGill University.

Following his DIAS lecture on world order, disorder, and change, T.V. Paul joined Sten Rynning for a conversation on great-power rivalry, institutional decay, spheres of influence, and the pressures shaping international politics today.

At the heart of the episode is the idea that world order is not shaped by military and economic power alone. It is also shaped by status, by how great powers understand their own position in the world, and how they respond when that position appears to be under threat.

The conversation also turns to the role of academia. How can researchers make sense of a changing international order? And what becomes possible when historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and others look beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines?

A continuing conversation

DIAS in Dialogue will feature new episodes throughout the year, each building on a lecture, event, or visit at DIAS.

The series is part of DIAS’s broader ambition to create space for curiosity-driven exchange, bringing excellent research into dialogue with new perspectives, new audiences, and new questions.

Watch the first episode of DIAS in Dialogue on our YouTube channel