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On April 9, 2026, MIT political scientist Kathy Thelen visited BESI to discuss the origins and implications of the new cloud business model powering the AI boom and how it differs from the traditional platform out of which it grew.

In this talk, Harvard political scientist Stephanie Ternullo explores the political tensions of suburbs that support liberal policies at the national level but sustain exclusionary housing and education policies at the local level.

Organized by the Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at BESI, the Rhodes Center at Brown, the European Institute at LSE, and the Huth Initiative at LSE, the annual Finance and Democracy Summer School program aims to weave an emerging generation of researchers into an international network that bolsters the study of finance, political economy, and democracy.

In this talk, recorded at BESI on February 23, 2026, sociologist McCarthy shows how democracy and working-class power can be strengthened by creating new deliberative forms of financial governance, focusing on the inclusion of historically excluded groups. His inspiration: ancient Athens.

On May 1, 2026, BESI hosted historian Quinn Slobodian and journalist Ben Tarnoff for a talk on their new book "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed," which explores the machine that made the man — and the world he’s making next.

Sam Trachtman reflects on the BESI panel event he moderated back last month.

On April 27, 2026, California climate policy experts joined BESI's Samuel Trachtman for a candid discussion on California's climate track-record and potential paths forward.

In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, BESI's Brian Judge argues that the digital euro can change how the European public perceives integration — but only if leaders resist their technocratic impulse and show how it improves their daily lives.

On February 10, 2026, Stanford political scientist gave a talk on his book "Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency." He argues that Republican backlash to the progressive administrative state has motivated the party to seek a strongman presidency that governs unilaterally in defiance of democracy and the rule of law.

In this talk recorded at BESI on January 27, 2026, Boston University political scientist Erik Peinert explains the ever-narrowing group of companies that monopolizes American and international markets by dredging up the economic research, theories, and interests that motivated policy discussions at key moments during the 20th century.

Recorded at BESI on March 4, 2026, this talk with Princeton sociologist of science and technology Janet Vertesi summarizes her "Opt Out" experiments and the lessons for fighting back against surveillance capitalism.

Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy research director Brian Judge joined Garth Bray on The New Zealand Herald's "HNOW: Business" to discuss how diminishing investor confidence in private credit funds signals broader risks for the global financial market.