This project critically examines the advancement, projection, and negotiation of "values" by Western aid donor officials in Africa. Defined here as ethical and normative principles that influence and inform political beliefs, interactions, and policies, "values" have always undergirded Western aid relationships with Africa. They have, however, recently received renewed emphasis in the policies of many Western states. Prominent among these is the UK - the focus of this study - where ministers have presented the promotion of values - "British" or otherwise - as a key plank of ensuring that post-Brexit "Global Britain" retains international influence. For "frontline" UK officials in Africa - in the case of "national" staff, African citizens themselves - this presents fundamental challenges. Donor officials are expected to uphold international aid effectiveness norms on partnership and recipient "ownership" of aid. The same officials are also, however, under domestic (UK) pressure to champion (notional) UK values abroad. In some cases, these values may be shared by African interlocutors. In others, however, UK - and other Western - officials and African stakeholders may take directly oppositional stances, departing sharply from a partnership approach. Moreover, some non-Western powers have sought to undercut Western influence through presenting their own engagement as respectful of African sovereignty. This has intersected with criticisms by African leaders of Western value promotion as "neo-colonial meddling", inconsistent, and hypocritical, which resonate with many African peoples. A recent example of how these pressures play out can be found in the international response to Uganda's draconian 2023 "Anti-Homosexuality Bill". Western officials' public condemnations were rejected by Ugandan policymakers as "arrogant" and "imperialist", while rumours of Western aid cuts were met with assurances from Beijing that Chinese aid would remain without "political strings". This project will interrogate how UK officials in Africa experience and seek to balance such challenges, constraints, and countervailing forces in their everyday work and interactions. Drawing on research in Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa, the research will combine interviews, oral history, focus-group discussions, (non-/)participant observation and archival research to answer the following questions: How are "values" understood by UK officials in Africa - and by African host governments, NGOs and civil society groups, and other aid donors? How do both UK officials and their in-country interlocutors assess the effectiveness, or even desirability, of value promotion? Moreover, how does the meaning, significance, and prioritization of different values evolve for UK officials themselves, and with what implications? The research will significantly advance our knowledge of the critical role of frontline diplomatic and development staff in the negotiation of deeply sensitive and consequential areas of policy (dis)agreement and exchange. In doing so, it will refocus scholarly attention on the normative and relational dimensions of UK-Africa policy, including the wider question of what kind of "partner" post-Brexit Britain wishes to present itself as in Africa - a continent which receives over half of UK bilateral aid. Informed by an on-going engagement with practitioners from Africa, the UK, and elsewhere from inception, the research will illuminate the circumstances under which UK - and, by extension, wider Western - donor engagement can effectively amplify the work of African activists. Equally, the research will underline how and when UK and Western value promotion can not only be problematic, but actually backfire, undermining the interests of both the UK and African partners.

The international challenges facing British society today underline the crucial importance of understanding the nature and dynamics of world politics. International historians must play a role in furthering this understanding. The Practice of International History in the Twenty-First Century will create an international research network comprised of historians, international relations specialists and officials from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The core objective is to establish an inter-disciplinary forum for collective reflection on the nature and practice of international history and its role in contributing to wider British society. The research network will include leading scholars from the UK, the European continent, North America and Australia. It will be made up of established researchers, PhD students, post-docs and early career scholars. This will provide a framework to allow UK-based international historians to make an important contribution to wider debates on the current and future state of our field. The past two decades have seen the emergence of fundamental challenges to the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of international history. Advocates of a 'cultural turn' have argued for greater attention to race, gender, religion and collective memory as a means of deepening our understanding of international politics. The emergence of 'transnational' history has presented a different kind of challenge that rejects the nation-state as the focus of analysis to concentrate on the flow of people, ideas and technologies across what are in many ways arbitrary national frontiers. This 'transnational turn' complements a turn away from 'Eurocentric' historical approaches that is a central feature of the new 'global history'. Debates among international relations [IR] theorists over the relative importance of ideas, institutions and material power have the potential to further enrich the work of international historians. A final challenge to practices in our field is the need to engage more fruitfully and systematically with the UK policy community in general, and with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO] in particular. International historians in North America and Europe have recently been active in addressing the implications of the issues raised above for the practice of international history. Scholars in the UK have been far less active. This project will provide a framework for redressing this silence while at the same time creating structures for ongoing engagement with the policy community as well as teachers of international history at all levels from schools to postgraduate university courses. A number of core questions have been identified to provide a conceptual framework for four one-day workshops. Historians and IR specialists from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia and FCO officials will participate in these workshops. The chief 'outputs' produced by the project will be a 'state of the field' collection of essays, an inter-active web-based resource for teaching and research in the history of international relations and durable structures for engagement with policy stakeholders. Achieving these aims will leave the present and future generations of international historians better-equipped to teach, research and to contribute more effectively to meeting the ever-changing international challenges of our time.

Historical themes have long been prominent in the rhetoric and reality of Franco-British relations. Britain and France have been at peace for more than two centuries. Yet official and public discourse in both countries is saturated with backward-looking references to past national glory and 'natural' rivalry. The recent EU referendum in the UK is a case in point. Surprisingly, there is no systematic study of the role of representations of the past in Franco-British relations. To what extent have such representations shaped the conceptual horizons of policy-makers? What role have preoccupations with the present and the future played in the way the past has been used in policy debates? Has a preoccupation with history undermined co-operation between these two key European states? The proposed research addresses these questions in the first detailed archival investigation of the 'weight of the past' in Franco-British relations. We will engage systematically with current and former policy practitioners and civil society (third sector) stakeholders to draw on their expertise and disseminate our research findings widely in government and public spheres. The investigators will deploy an innovative research strategy based on new approaches in international history, historical culture and memory studies. The research will draw on richly varied archival and published sources in France and the UK. To maximise the breadth and depth of the research, we will work with leading international scholars who will attend project events and contribute their research to our final Project Conference. Proceedings will be published as a special issue of Diplomacy & Statecraft. The Investigators will co-author a research monograph ('The Weight of the Past in Franco-British Relations since 1815'), publish seven articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and give multiple conference papers. The result will be a substantial body of published work providing new perspectives on Franco-British relations and offering a new methodological template for studying the history of international relations. The Project's Research and Impact Strategies are mutually reinforcing. They will maximise impact by linking it closely to research, while ensuring that research is informed at every stage by practitioner expertise. This will be achieved in cooperation with Project Partners including the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK Embassy, Paris, the UK Ministry of Defence and the Franco-British Council. Other Collaborators include the French Defence Ministry, the French Embassy, London, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and The National Archives (TNA). A suite of Project Events will bring together the researchers, current and former policy-makers and members of key civil society associations to discuss our research and refine strategies for impact. These are a Witness Seminar (RUSI), a Policy Engagement Colloquium (UK Embassy, Paris), a Research Workshop (Glasgow), a plenary panel at the Franco-British Council's Annual Conference on Defence and Security Cooperation, a Public Exhibition (TNA) and the Project Conference (Maison Française, Oxford). The Investigators are uniquely placed to deliver the project aims. PI Jackson has published widely in the field of European international relations, including two widely-cited essays on theory and method in international history, and has worked extensively with policy practitioners and the media in France and the UK. Co-I Pastor-Castro specialises in Franco-British relations and has worked with the FCO to deliver a range of academic and impact goals. Co-I Utley has written extensively on French defence policy and has worked with the UK MoD, the French Embassy in London, NC3A (NATO) and the EU. Expert guidance on the project's management will be provided by an Advisory Group comprising vastly-experienced current and former policy-makers, members of civil society and academic researchers.

Effective mitigation of the coronavirus health crisis partly depends on trust that the measures which are being imposed are worthwhile, and that the people who have decided them are trustworthy. Such basic trust has come under pressure over time, partly as society has become more questioning, and more recently through the spread of conspiracism online. There is some evidence of online actors exploiting the current emergency to generate distrust and undermine vaccine confidence. Widespread sense of insecurity - whether health-related, or due to economic hardship - may also sharpen distrust of authority. Undermining of public trust may inhibit return to stronger lockdown measures, the management of exit from lockdown, rollout of testing and contact tracing, and introduction of vaccination programmes. Governments and public health bodies accordingly need high-quality evidence on the sources of distrust and noncompliance, and on the health and public security threats posed by the dissemination of conspiracism. We will analyse whether endorsement of conspiratorial accounts of the pandemic undermines trust and compliance, or whether the relationship works the other way around. This will be delivered through robust analysis of new, high-quality survey data tracking both those who endorse conspiratorial views and those who do not over the coming months. Subject to their agreement, we will also sample respondents' posts from a popular microblogging service, to track their online information sharing against their reported attitudes, identities and behaviours.

Development, and in particular, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are indelibly linked to questions of gender with gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls underpinning Goal 5. Despite the UN Charter clearly laying the basis for gender equality it is absent from the Organisation. This is a major issue for the UN as it depends upon its own legitimacy to lead across many global issues including on gender and development. Without gender equality too many of the UN's activities and too much of its work remains predominantly - if not entirely- informed and spearheaded by the male perspective. Centring on the Secretariat and SDG implementation, the Network is an innovative intervention in understanding how gender impacts on the UN's activities particularly its leadership of the SDGs and development. Through the SDGs the UN encourages states to uphold women's rights, eliminate gender discrimination, and to achieve gender equality. Yet, the UN fails to give effect to those principles within the Organisation. This has to change. In 2016 the UN admitted that 83% of its entities have failed to hit gender targets with no progress since 2012 and only 33% possessed a gender unit or equivalent to aid in achieving gender mainstreaming and equality. The UN Gender Network brings academics, civil society, member states and the UN Secretariat itself together in a spirit of conversation and collaboration. It will achieve a deep understanding of the causes and impact of gender inequality within the UN and the impact this has on its leadership of the SDGs and broader development policy. The collaboration of academics led by the PI and Co-I, its Network Partners AIDsFreeWorld, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and civil society as well as Network participants will lead to the development of an agenda for UN policy reform that will directly impact upon the implementation of the SDGs in the Global South. An emerging discourse within academia suggests that collaborative work around specific themes has much to offer in advancing understanding of gender inequality within the UN. State delegation support is a necessity if change is to occur and thus the role of the FCO is key to bringing a wider array of states, particularly those in the Global South, on board to push for UN reform. Collaboration enables all parties to offer cross-sectoral feedback to decision-makers; a process of joint advocacy that increases the likelihood of policy and organisational change. The impact of such collaborative activities can be seen with the steps already taken in the creation of UN Women and the Focal Point for Women by project partners. The UN Gender network aims to: 1. establish a transnational UN Gender network that includes academics, civil society, the UN and state delegations through a series of workshops and an online community; 2. Explore how long-term collaborative activities can be fostered that can bring about effective policy change within the Organisation; 3. Harness expertise from the academic and civil society, state delegations and the UN itself in the co-production of a research project agenda to understand the cause and impact of gender inequality within the UN and its impact upon the UN's leadership and legitimacy in the operationalisation of the SDGs; 4. Use the network's activities as a platform from which to develop targeted policy proposals alongside specific research collaborations that make effective policy recommendations to the UN to ensure long term change and to underpin the implementation of the SDGs, particularly Goal 5 and; 5. Ensure the network's sustainability through the active participation of postgraduate and early career researchers alongside establishing effective collaboration amongst the transnational participants. Stakeholders will be able to utilise the Network's reform proposals and research to ensure the SDGs are better placed to achieve gender equality and other development goals.