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'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).

March sees publication of the fifth revised and updated edition of the popular Oxford University Press textbook . The textbook is edited by Professor , Lise Rakner and Vicky Randall, together with publication of Peter’s chapter ‘From supporting democracy to supporting autocracy’ in the fourth revised and updated edition of Daniele Caramani’s highly successful Oxford University Press book (at chapter 25, pages 437-52).

Peter’s new research paper in the CSGR Working Paper series, International Party Assistance by ‘Bad Guys’ has also been published.

The Working Paper develops an agenda for researching international support for political parties and politicians in other countries by so called leading autocracies, and for comparing the findings with the political party support that is provided within the context of international democracy promotion. Although framed largely within the context of autocracy support to countries that are not consolidated liberal democracies, the Paper has relevance to the currently much publicised issue of Russian interest in political parties in some European countries and the United States too.

The paper can be read here:

Professor has published a new book on the Ukraine conflict, titled 'Europe's Eastern Crisis: The Geopolitics of Asymmetry.'

In recent years, a series of crises have erupted on the European Union’s eastern borders. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent conflict in eastern Ukraine presented the EU with a major foreign policy challenge, both in Ukraine and across the other countries of the Eastern Partnership. In response, the EU has begun to map its own form of “liberal-redux geopolitics” that combines various strategic logics. This book traces the effect of these crises on the foreign policy of the EU, examining the changes in policies toward the countries on its eastern borders, the EU’s review of the Eastern Partnership, as well as the EU’s relations with Russia overall. It goes on to uncover whether the EU has contained the crisis or if it has set up new conditions for more instability in the future.

Reviews for this publication

“Richard Youngs’s new account of the complex geopolitical context in the Eastern Partnership region provides a nuanced, sophisticated, and empirically rich study that is invaluable in taking into account the opinions of diplomats, policymakers, and civil society in the EaP states themselves.”
—Eka Tkeshelashvili, head of EU Anti-Corruption Initiative in Ukraine, former Georgian foreign minister, and president of the Georgian Institute for Strategic Studies

“Ukraine and other states between these two ‘empires’ feel the heat again, and Richard Youngs’s book expertly maps a complex mosaic of power, ambition, and brinkmanship. Youngs’s engaging and balanced analysis is indispensable reading for everyone trying to comprehend the ongoing geopolitical turn and the evolution of the EU’s foreign and security policy.”
—Jan Zielonka, professor of European Politics, University of Oxford

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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: