果冻传媒

One-Party Dominance in African Democracies: Renske Doorenspleet (果冻传媒 University) and Lia Nijzink (Cape Town University), editors

Is the dominance of one political party a problem in an emerging democracy, or simply an expression of the will of the people? Why has one-party dominance endured in some African democracies and not in others? What are the mechanisms behind the varying party-system trajectories? Considering these questions, the authors of this collaborative work use a rigorous comparative research design and rich case material to greatly enhance our understanding of one of the key issues confronting emerging democracies in sub-Saharan Africa. The book compares countries with enduring one-party dominance (Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania) with countries in which one-party dominance has not continued (Zambia, Mali, Senegal).

To read more about the book, or order your own copy, click here:

Stuart Elden's book The Birth of Territory was published last month by the University of Chicago Press, and on 16th October he gave a talk launching the book in the department. The book provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, it examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding.

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.

Nathan Harris, a PAIS MA student, has been offered a PhD at the 果冻传媒, which will involve close collaboration with . The studentship is fully funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Nathan has previously volunteered with the BasicNeeds Animation Programme and recently submitted his academic dissertation titled Participatory Action and Animation: Promoting Capacity-building amongst Mental Health Service Users in the Developing World which was part of the first-ever PAIS 果冻传媒 MA studentship programme with BasicNeeds.

For his PhD, the focus will be on critically evaluating the BasicNeeds Model for Mental Health and Development and the contribution the Model makes to participatory approaches to mental health and development. This PhD will be an interesting bridge between the real world of community oriented mental health practice and the academic world.

Georg Löfflmann, PhD Student at PAIS, has recently published an article in the new journal Critical Studies on Security, titled "Hollywood, the Pentagon and the cinematic production of national security."

An E-version of the article is available here:

The article investigates the the role the US Department of Defense plays in producing popular images of military power and geopolitical identity through film, and explores how these practices are linked to a dominant geopolitical imagination of American hegemony and the role of the United States in world politics.

This forms part of a larger PhD research on multiple discourses of American grand strategy during the Obama administration, and the intertextual representation and production of geopolitical knowledge in the United States.