91¸£Àû

The European Union is experiencing considerable turbulence, both in the domestic politics of its member states and in its international environment. A key characteristic of this turbulence are the close linkages between what is seen as ‘domestic’, ‘European’ and ‘international’, with many tensions and disputes rooted in at least two of these domains. This round table event is designed to explore these linkages and their political consequences with a focus on one area of concern: borders and their maintenance or modification. The event takes place on Thursday 18th May, at 6pm, in OC0.04, The Oculus.

Despite ideas of a ‘borderless world’ that have gained currency as part of globalization, there is no doubt that borders retain substantial symbolic and practical importance, and that if anything this has increased in recent years. The tension between borders as barriers and as crossing-places can be seen in a range of European and international processes:

• Peace-building and conflict transformation
• Integration and disintegration
• Migration and its management
• Movement of goods and capital

In this round table, we focus especially on issues relating to peace-building and conflict transformation, and migration and its management. Speakers will present a range of views focusing on the politics of North/South relations in Ireland, of Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom, of Cyprus and of migration into the EU and its member states, with the aim of uncovering the conceptual and political dimensions of border management in a turbulent EU.

Dr George Christou, PAIS
Dr Dallal Stevens, 91¸£Àû Law School
Francie Molloy, MP (Mid-Ulster, Sinn Fein)
Don Flynn, Founder and Former Director of Migrants' Rights Network
Chair: Professor Michael Smith, PAIS

Register for the free event here:

PAIS GEM Fellow has published the most recent peacekeeping profile of Italy in Providing for Peacekeeping. Providing for Peacekeeping is an independent research project of the International Peace Institute, the Elliott School at George Washington University, and the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland.

Italy’s profile is available here:

'The Epistemology of Counterterrorism' Event - 12th May - Scarman House

Colleagues and PhD students are welcome to attend this free event on the epistemologies and suspect assumptions which underwrite the War on Terror, run by Prof Quassim Cassam (Philosophy) and Dr Charlotte Heath-Kelly (PAIS). The event is funded by Professor Cassam's AHRC leadership award on intellectual vices.

The program can be found here:  

Places are free, but limited. Please register your interest by emailing Professor Cassam: q.cassam@warwick.ac.uk

Speakers include Professor Ruth Blakeley, Professor Richard Jackson, Dr Andrew Neal, Dr Lee Jarvis, and many more!

The 91¸£Àû speakers include Prof Jon Coaffee (PAIS), Prof Andrew Williams (Law), Prof Quassim Cassam (Philosophy) & Dr Charlotte Heath-Kelly (PAIS).

Dr. 's article "Sustained vs. Episodic Mobilization among Conflict-generated Diasporas" International Political Science Review 37(44): 500-516, has been selected by the editors of the IPSR journal for their Choice Collection on the topic of "Borders and Margins" in view of the forthcoming World Congress of the International Political Science Association in July 2018 in Brisbane, Australia.

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Speakers: (University of Amsterdam), (University of Sussex), (91¸£Àû)

Chair: (91¸£Àû)

For 2017 the 91¸£Àû IPE debate took up the topic of economic accounting. Specifically speakers were asked to discuss the politics of current, widespread practices of measuring and quantifying what matters in the world, but from three differing IPE perspectives: economic, feminist, and environmental.

The degree to which we tend to quantify our economic, political and social lives is now quite staggering. Quantification and measurement are highly important tools used to inform decision making within inter-governmental organisations (IGOs), national and sub-national governance bodies, and parts of civil society. The most common example is gross domestic product (GDP), which is used as the primary indicator of national politico-economic success. Although numbers may seem, on the surface, to be objective simplifications, measuring life in this way is deeply political and has a dark underbelly.

This was a lively debate, attended by students and scholars from the 91¸£Àû, as well as some scholars visiting from other universities. All three speakers pointed to the inability of statistics, assembled as they currently are, to ‘see’ a wide variety of aspects of life thereby rendering these aspects ‘invisible’ in governance terms. This, in turn, has various political implications not least in terms of: the de facto downgrading of that which is not visible, distributive effects, and the obfuscation and reification of the power relations that sit behind decisions about what to measure and how. Another observation made was that a great many attempts to quantify are inaccurate, or change depending upon ‘who’ is doing the counting. Despite these critical observations, there was some suggestion of using numbers to challenge the status quo, as well as some questions about how to move towards different mechanisms of measuring what does and does not work.

You can watch the 2017 Annual 91¸£Àû Debate on the Future of IPE below: