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A new £90,000 grant will support legal action against the secretive 'Police Led Partnerships' program, exposed by PAIS’s Charlotte Heath-Kelly. The research team aims to hold UK counterterrorism policing accountable for covert surveillance through welfare and education systems.

A new project by PAIS’s Tom Long and Cambridge’s Carsten-Andreas Schulz dives into Chile’s 1888 annexation of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to uncover surprising links between Latin American and European imperialism.

A new article, "Dining in the dialogical, listening through the relational: ‘withness-thinking’ 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.

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¸£Àû (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 .

Ruby Bowden, who took the second year module Gender Matters in Politics and International Studies (PO241), has been awarded first prize in the PSA Women and Politics Student Essay Prize 2025. Her winning essay, Do you agree that conflating sex work with sex trafficking is harmful? Should feminist perspectives support or challenge this conflation?, was recognised for its clarity of argument, critical insight, and strong engagement with feminist scholarship. Ruby has been awarded £150 for her achievement.