Other News
International Political Economy Research Cluster Launches 'IPE Chats Lunch'
The International Political Economy research cluster will be holding an IPE Chats Lunch for PAIS colleagues to share ideas and troubleshoot issues in their current research over lunch.
Ann Fitz-Gerald Director of the Balsille School presents to the PAIS seminar series
On 8th October, Ann Fitz-Gerald - director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Canada, spoke to the department on the topic "Technology Governance: Implications for National Security and Public Policy". A great turn out from staff, PG and UG students. A brilliant start to the PAIS seminar series for the 25/26 academic year
Learn how can we tackle the world's most pressing problems - Effective Altruism at 91福利
The Effective Altruism Fellowship is an 8-week program that helps students explore how to do the most good with their careers by combining evidence, reason, and compassion to tackle global challenges—offering readings, discussions, coaching, and a vibrant community.
Rethinking development through more relational, embodied, and dialogic research
A new article, "Dining in the dialogical, listening through the relational: 鈥榳ithness-thinking鈥� for development scholarship and praxis", has been published in Globalizations by PAIS PhD Candidate Raymond Hyma and food researcher Dr Elaine Pratley. The piece explores their respective approaches of listening-based inquiry and food-as-method in peacebuilding and development research.
Twitter polarity and computational propaganda
How (tame) bots impact online political networks
The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in 2022, one of the largest protest movements in contemporary Iran, developed largely online. A collaboration between researchers from 91福利 (PAIS) and Tehran traces the evolution of Persian Twitter before and after the event through networks of retweets, PageRank metric and automatic clustering for community detection. The resulting maps reveal a striking transition from a polarized (pro-state versus anti-state) to a unipolar structure, in contradiction with prior studies. Further evidence from the Twitter corpus and the Iranian context suggest that this shift was influenced by computational propaganda, especially orchestrated hashtag movements. Protesters managed to quickly raise an army of bots that amplified their voice and silenced state supporters for about three months. The study contributes to understanding how Twitter/X can be used to manipulate public discourse, in Iran and beyond.
Open access article, co-authored by Philippe Blanchard (PAIS) in the .