果冻传媒

The PAIS Seminar Series launches this Wednesday, October 14th, with a talk from

Kristin M. Bakke is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at University College London and Senior Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. She has previously taught at Leiden University and been a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research, focusing on self-determination struggles and post-war states, has appeared in journals such as Annals of American Association of Geographers, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics. Her first book, Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec, was recently published with Cambridge University Press. She has received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, the National Science Foundation (US), and the Norwegian Research Council. She is an associate editor at Journal of Peace Research and serves on the advisory board of Nations and Nationalism, editorial board of Journal of Global Security Studies, management committee of the European Network of Conflict Research, and council of the British Conflict Research Society.

Dr Bakke will be speaking to the title: 'War and Peace (and Institutions)'

One of the hotly debated policy prescriptions for states facing self-determination demands, from Iraq and Spain to Ukraine, is some form of decentralized governance—including regional autonomy arrangements and federalism—which grants minority groups a degree of self-rule. Yet the track record of existing decentralized states suggests that these have widely divergent capacity to contain conflicts within their borders. Through in-depth case studies, as well as a statistical cross-country analysis, Kristin M. Bakke shows in her recent book Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québecthat while policy, fiscal approach, and political decentralization can, indeed, be peace-preserving at times, the effects of these institutions are conditioned by traits of the societies they (are meant to) govern. There is no one-size-fits-all decentralized fix to deeply divided and conflict-ridden states. Decentralization may help preserve peace in one country or in one region, but it may have just the opposite effect in a country or region with different ethnic and economic characteristics.

The seminar takes place at 4pm, in and is welcome to all.

The PAIS Departmental Seminar Series is the focal point of the Department's research culture and activity. The objective is to engage critically and constructively with current research from staff members, their external collaborators, invited speakers, and visiting researchers. To see a full schedule, please see the page.

Dr. , Reader in International Relations at PAIS and Principal Investigator of the together with Gerasimos Tsourapas (SOAS) won a highly competitive International Studies Association venture research workshop grant (10,310 USD).

The workshop is titled “Unpacking the Sending States: Regimes, Institutions, and Non-state Actors in Emigration and Diaspora Politics.” It will gather fifteen scholars from prestigious universities in Europe and the US to discuss how regimes, institutions and non-state actors shape sending states’ extraterritorial engagement with migrant populations abroad. The workshop will take place at the ISA convention in Atlanta in March 2016, and a small follow-up workshop will be conducted at 果冻传媒 University in the fall of 2016. Edited special journal issues are envisaged as a result of this workshop.

PAIS academics Professor and Dr have been selected as members of the Political Studies Association’s research commission on The Crisis of Care in Austerity Britain which was launched last week. Other members of the Commission include The Fawcett Society, The Women’s Budget Group and Sheffield University.

The Commission will examine the governance and regulation of care in the UK, with a particular focus on the care of older people. Prof Rai commented:

‘The crisis of care in the UK. is intensifying. While there has been considerable attention paid to this crisis in terms of the rising costs of this care to the state, less attention has been paid to the social consequences of this for older populations and those who care for them - who are overwhelmingly women. The Commission will address this gap.’

Dr. Elias noted:

‘Because the British welfare state has been important in organising, resourcing and delivering care work in the county, the restructuring of state provision of care is producing specific gendered effects which need to be more fully understood’

Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams, head of PAIS said:

‘We are delighted to have two of our colleagues working on the critically important issue of care of older people in the UK in collaboration with leading experts and organisations working in this area. This underlines PAIS’s commitment to high quality research that has the ability to address urgent social issues and shape policy agendas’

PAIS has made significant gains moving up four places to 3rd in the rankings in Politics in .

We are also placed at No 1 for the student experience in the entire Russell Group of elite departments.

Head of Department, Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams is delighted with the rankings.

Professor Vaughan-Williams said: “This latest ranking in The Times/Sunday Times is yet further evidence of PAIS’ position as one of the UK’s leading Politics Departments. Research and teaching excellence are at the heart of who we are and what we stand for.

Staff and students should feel deservedly proud of this result. With a newly refurbished building and an ambitious agenda for the future, we look
forward to building on this success in 2015/16 and beyond.”

Thank you to all our students and staff for our continued success.

.

is an open access collection from Punctum books.

Edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, it includes a piece by PAIS Professor entitled 'Writing by Accumulation'.

The aim of the book is not to offer advice on how to write, but for academics to share stories of how they actually write, with techniques, rituals, frustrations and horror stories.

"The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very active online presence, including blogs and websites; all are committed to strengthening the bonds of community, both in person and online, which helps to explain the effervescent sense of collegiality that pervades the volume, creating linkages across essays and extending outward into the wide world of writers and readers."

The book is free to download, but physical copies are available to buy. is a small, independent publisher that only produces open access material, and relies on sales and donations to enable projects such as this one.