Hosted by the Finsbury Institute, City International Policy Studies, and the Research Group on Global Disorder, this three-part panel series explores the critical implications of the 2024 US presidential election for both domestic politics and global affairs.
The 2024 US presidential election is yet another critical election in which the US electorate faces the choice between two largely competing continuity candidates – in Democrat Kamala Harris (with Biden) and Republican Donald Trump (with his first administration). Yet, if victorious, Harris will become the nation’s first ever woman president, the first Black woman to occupy the White House, and the first of South Asian heritage.
The election campaign has already seen twists and turns and nothing suggests that the pattern won’t continue now that we are just a few weeks from the November poll. President Biden’s withdrawal placed Harris in the hotseat, while increasing levels of political violence are symbolised by two attempts at assassinating Trump.
Death threats against election officials, judges, and prosecutors across the US, but especially in so-called ‘swing states’, are intensifying, security measures being ramped up. A question, almost unthinkable, is being asked by serious observers: will there be a peaceful transfer of power? The events of 6 January 2021 – the Trump-orchestrated insurrection- continue to hang over the country.
Globally, the US is continuing its policy of armed and diplomatic support for the Ukraine war, the illegal Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza, which has already spilled over into Lebanon and Syria, and threatens to engulf the region in another military conflagration.
While the numbers on the US economy are strong, Americans – especially younger and minority voters – report high levels of financial insecurity and a sense of doom about the future. The country is politically polarised – even factionalised – and most voters have already decided on their choice. And it’s going to be a very close election. Yet, pollsters report that something like 6% of voters in 6 swing states will determine the election outcome.
The election has been cast by many as a contest between democracy and dictatorship, multilateralism under Harris and unilateral America First-ism under Trump, between commitment to the liberal international order and greater levels of US retrenchment from international institutions, between strategies to mitigate climate change to climate change denial and full-throated backing for fossil fuel corporations.
Whichever way the election goes, the outcome will have highly significant effects on the peoples of the United States and the rest of the world. Despite claims of the eclipse of the West by the ‘Rest’, the United States remains the world’s pivotal power. 2024 is about to see the most consequential election of what has been a monumental 12 months of elections on a global scale.
In this context, the Finsbury Institute, City International Policy Studies, and the Research Group on Global Disorder are hosting three panel discussions to focus on some of the most significant issues raised by the US election.
The panels
The state of US democracy and what the world can expect of Trump 2.0
29th January 2025 17:00 – 18:30
Panel members: Inderjeet Parmar (Chair); Andrew Payne (City St George’s); Fernando Pizarro (Journalism); Daniela Vieira Secches (PUC Minas, Brazil); Lindsay Newman (Eurasia Group)
Panel members: Andrew Payne (Chair); Lea Hellmuller (City St George’s); Ahmed Waheed (NUST/Roads Institute, Pakistan); Bobby Banerjee (Bayes Business School); Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson (LSE); Inderjeet Parmar (City St George’s)
Global Dis(order) 
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