Hello, my name is David Runsman and this is Talking Politics. Happy Christmas.

This week the panelists are going to give you some of their reflections on 2016 and I'll look ahead to 2017.

Some of the things that have freaked them out, excited them, made them laugh.

Some of you have said over the past few months that you'd like to know a little bit more about who we have on regularly,

who work in the politics department here in Cambridge and who come by my office once a week and chat about politics.

So this is a chance to hear a few of them in their own words without me butting in all the time, telling you what they've been thinking about and what they think might happen next.

Hi, I'm Mahara Raffia Tau. You've been hearing me on the podcast this fall and I am a doctoral candidate in the faculty here at Cambridge and what I study is corporations and their role in politics.

We're the focus on the developing world especially Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and I'm also involved in a number of media projects in the faculty besides this podcast because I'm a recovering journalist and come to the news from that perspective.

My name is Christopher Brook and I'm one of the lecturers in political theory here in the department of politics and international studies.

I've published on late 16th century Dutch political thought some of my current projects keep me engaged with political ideas going right through the 20th century.

I'm currently trying to finish a book about distributive political theory since about 1700.

Hi, my name is Fimma Alivacy and you've heard me on talking politics over the past year talking about American and British politics in the main.

My areas of interest are public policy generally on the director of the master's course in public policy here at Cambridge and my research work looks at the structure of the global economy.

So I've got a book coming out in 2017 which is looking at the end of globalization so we wish it was out this year because that seems to be current.

My name is Aaron Rapport. I'm a lecturer here in the department of politics international studies. I've been here some September of 2013. I moved from Atlanta, Georgia and the United States.

My interests largely lie in US foreign policy, international security. I'm also something of a wannabe psychologist and that I apply those theories to decision making situations in cases of international crisis.

Oddly enough, I spend most of my time on the podcast discussing domestic politics but I swear that I know something about that too.

My name is Helen Thompson and I teach in the department here with everybody else. I have spent a reasonable amount of this year writing a book on oil and the Western economic crisis.

My main teaching this year is on the introduction to politics course for the first year students where I've been or still am giving a course of lectures about democracy.

And finally me, I'm David Ronsman as I say at the top of this podcast every week. I'm the host. I also work in the Cambridge politics department. I teach history mainly, the history of ideas.

My work is about democracy. What I'm interested in, what I've been interested in for a long time, is how we know when democracy is failing. So 2016 has been an interesting year for me.

When I think about 2016, I think about what looks to be the beginning of the end of the world order that was established after World War II by the Liberal powers in the West that's fraying on us in different ways.

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