International security & rough sleeping: history behind the headlines

Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. I'm Matt Elton. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month I'll be joined by our two regular panellists. I'm Hannah Skoda, I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.

I'm Rana Mitter. I'm ST Lee Chair in US-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history. Hanwen Rana, thank you so much for being with us. We are talking in the middle of June against a backdrop of headlines of an escalating situation in the Middle East. We're not going to comment today too much about the history of that specific situation, but it does give us the chance to have a wider think about escalation and about how

nations have historically tried to guarantee their security in a complex and conflict-ridden world. Rana, did you want to kick off thinking about this? Absolutely. And I would say that in some ways, governments have spent a huge amount of the modern era thinking about how the emergence of different types of nation states, different types of empires have been able to live with each other without essentially escalating into conflict.

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