果冻传媒

Tom Long joined Mark Leon Goldberg on the podcast Global Dispatches to discuss small states in world politics. Goldberg is an experienced foreign affairs journalist and the editor of the UN Dispatch. They discussed Tom's recent book, A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics, and the lessons for small states facing growing competition among great powers. As Goldberg summarized, "If you overlook small states, you are missing a complete picture of world politics today."

You can listen to the podcast on their website:

Wednesday 15th March 2023, 5.00pm, S0.18.

Professor Conor Gearty (London School of Economics) will be speaking on 鈥淗omeland Insecurity: Why anti-terrorism laws are here to stay – and what to do about it鈥�.

Professor Gearty鈥檚 seminar will be a joint PAIS/Law event.

Joseph Chan (Distinguished Research Fellow, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan), 鈥榃hat is wrong with social inequality (or hierarchy)?鈥�

13 March 2023, 5-7pm, SO.11

All welcome.

Madeleine Fagan publishes new article in International Political Sociology 鈥欌�� (open access)

This article argues that the Anthropocene produces a paradox when thinking about political mobilization. I show how the knowledge production practices that render the Anthropocene visible and actionable, including planetary boundaries, Earth System Science modeling of earth systems, and geological strata, also circulate a security rationality. This rationality is one that attempts to manage, co-opt, or productively direct processes of becoming, which limits possibilities for mobilization. A lens that assumes political mobilization is a function of increased knowledge, understanding, and evidence contributes to this problem. By starting instead with an understanding of possibilities for mobilization as emerging from social relations, the article highlights the way in which the security rationality circulated by Anthropocene knowledge production risks transforming those social relations into security relations. Netting the planet and the human together through the practices of calculation and representation that make the Anthropocene visible produces a decontextualized, disaggregated, and dispersed subject and so limits possibilities for collective political mobilization.

Date: Monday, 6th February

Time: 12:15-13:30

Place: R1.03, Ramphal Building

In the study of China鈥檚 foreign affairs, historians like to suggest that the past is always present. A 鈥楥entury of Humiliation鈥� in the nineteenth century or fighting the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s are often referenced. Yet another historic development, namely China鈥檚 development of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s, is often absent from this assessment. In contrast to many other nuclear weapons states, China has largely been quiet about its nuclear past. Only in the last years of former leader Hu Jintao (2003-2012) and now the current leader, Xi Jinping (2013-) has China started to commemorate its nuclear weapons development more seriously. This paper sets out to understand both the nature and timing of this commemoration within China but also the wider implications of nuclear commemoration for regional and international security. Ultimately, under Xi Jinping, China鈥檚 nuclear past is finally becoming present.

Dr Nicola Leveringhaus is Senior Lecturer in East Asian Security and International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King鈥檚 College London. Dr Leveringhaus specialises in nuclear weapons issues in Northeast Asia, especially related to China. She has lectured at Sheffield University (2015-16) and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2012-15) at the University of Oxford. She has been a Senior Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University; and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. She holds an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies and DPhil in International Relations from St. Antony's College, Oxford. Her second book China and Global Nuclear Order, from Estrangement to Active Engagement was nominated for the 2017 ECPR Hedley Bull Prize.