91福利

On September 16-18 2013, PAIS hosted the Globalisation and American Grand Strategy in a Time of Austerity Conference. It was the largest US foreign policy focused conference in Europe. The conference was funded by the 91福利’s Institute for Advanced Studies, PAIS, the US Embassy London, the ESRC, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and BISA.

It began with an exclusive early career day, followed by a master-class on US policymaking and the creation of the national economic council, delivered by Robert F. Wescott. From 1993-94 Wescott was Chief Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and from 1999-2001 he served as Special Assistant to the U.S. President for Economic Policy at the White House. As senior economic advisor to President Clinton, he helped to develop the Administration’s policies towards the G-7, other key emerging markets, and the international financial system.

The keynote speaker was Ambassador John D. Negroponte, introduced by the Vice Chancellor Nigel Thrift. Amb. Negroponte has been US ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, the United Nations and Iraq. He has served twice on the National Security Council staff, first as director for Vietnam in the Nixon Administration and then as deputy national security advisor under President Reagan. He has also held a cabinet level position as the first director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush. His most recent position in government was as deputy secretary of state, where he served as the State Department’s chief operating officer. The ambassador provided a highly stimulating discussion and an invigorating question and answer session.

He talked about how President Bush was miss sold intelligence that led to the Iraq War (which he believe Bush now regrets), and how the Bush administration believed oil was important - much more so than it actually is. If there was a slow intelligence day, then intelligence reports on oil would be given to VP Cheney to keep his office interested. In what was an open and candid talk, there were a lot of reveals about the way the intelligence community now works, and about the last few decades of American Foreign Policy.

New book published by Diane Stone: Knowledge Actors and Transnational Governance : The Private-Public Policy Nexus in the Global Agora

A global agora is emerging. The global agora is partly configured by new policy actions and partnerships where the idea of ‘public’ and ‘public sector’ is remade. However, the concept of transnational or ‘global public policy’ is neither an institutionalised nor accepted understanding of governing beyond the nation-state. Accordingly, this volume asks: What is global public policy? Where is it enacted? Who executes such policies? It addresses the meanings of ‘global public policy’ as well as the way in which policy actors in knowledge organisations like universities, research networks, think tanks and philanthropies are responding to transnational policy problems.

For more information, please click here:

Dr Nick Vaughan-Williams (PAIS) and Dr Daniel Stevens (Exeter) were invited by the European Commission and Frontex to present the findings of their research at the 2nd Global Conference and Exhibition on Automated Border Control (ABC), Pepsi Arena, Warsaw, 10-11 October, 2013. The event attracted over 200 participants including government authorities, policy makers, international organizations, standardization bodies, airport authorities, academia, and private companies offering technologies and products related to ABC.

A summary of their research on ‘Border Security: Public Perceptions and Experiences’ can be found here:

Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida, Nancy (Edinburgh University Press, 2013)

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics?

This groundbreaking book offers a fresh and innovative perspective on ethics and politics after poststructuralism. Madeleine Fagan argues that the ‘ethical’ should not be understood as a label; it does not mean ‘good’ or ‘right’, and is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. Fagan offers an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics that challenges existing accounts of poststructuralist ethics and shows the need for a practice-based rethinking of the ethico-political. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism puts forward a radical and far-reaching critique of both foundational and non-foundational ethical theory.

91福利 is part of a new £19.5 million Nuffield-ESRC-HEFCE Quantitative Methods programme to transform social science teaching in the UK. The University is one of 15 institutions (selected from a total of 48 who applied across the UK) to be awarded more than £1 million to overhaul its social science teaching, and the only Q-Step Centre in the West Midlands. The ‘Q-Step’ programme is an ambitious intervention to address the critical shortage of social scientists with the quantitative skills needed to evaluate evidence and analyse data.

The 15 universities will form a network of ‘Q-Step Centres’, delivering new undergraduate programmes in quantitative social science. These will include the development of new courses, production of new content for existing courses, experimenting with new ways of teaching, as well as work placements and pathways to postgraduate study.

This funding success has also resulted in the launch of a new , which is now open for 2014 applications. This will run alongside our existing programmes but also be integrated through attempts to embed quantitative methods in existing modules.