果冻传媒

A Pinpoint Politics article by Brendan Pastor

"Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we’ve got for that is the fact that we’ve got – budgetarily we can’t afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there’s no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out.” ()

The above quote by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was in response to a question posed by billionaire and Republican Party donor Diane Hendricks, who asked if Walker could make Wisconsin a “completely red [Republican] state, and work on these unions’, transforming his state into “a right-to-work” state. Accepting Walker’s poorly phrased and politically slanted answer, Hendricks would go on to contribute over $510,000 to the Walker re-election campaign, his single biggest individual donor.

A Pinpoint Politics article by Christopher Ogunmodede

In the wake of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s failed six-point Syria peace plan and the Assad’s regime not-so-subtle admission that it possesses chemical weapons, the stakes of a Western-led military intervention have increased significantly in less than a week. A report by the Royal United Services Institute noting the possibility of chemical weapons being used or stolen, not to mention the increased capability of the opposition forces as well as the geopolitical implications of the conflict spreading to and gripping other nations, concludes that a military intervention may take place to prevent the conflict from spilling beyond Syrian borders. As the ongoing crisis continues to manifest itself in the international realm, many pro-intervention voices in academia, the media, think-tanks and policymaking circles have decided that a military intervention will be the pill that cures all that currently ails the conflict-ridden country. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, has been making the rounds of Fox News and other right-wing press outlets decrying the administration’s response to the conflict.

Dr James Brassett and Dr Nick Vaughan-Williams have recently published a Special Issue of Alternatives, entitled: 'Governing Traumatic Events'. The volume draws together leading critical scholars on the politics of traumatic events, covering subjects like 9-11, Mumbai, and the Norway Massacre, as well as the ideologies of 'response' and 'resilience' that predominate. This publication is part of an ongoing research project on 'Resilience and the Politics of Security' that seeks to interrogate contemporary practices of civil contingency planning in the UK and abroad.

Effective from 1 September, , Professor of International Politics and Japanese Studies and Head of Department in PAIS, will serve as the new Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Prof Hughes will also continue in his current role as Head of Department.

, current Research Fellow and future Assistant Professor in PAIS, has recently been featured in an article by Mark Tran in The Guardian entitled 'EU sugar aid for Swaziland leaves a bitter taste'. Below is an excerpt from the piece:

"The attempts by the European commission to integrate the EU sugar regime deeper into the world market as part of its 2013 common agricultural policy (CAP) reform – not to mention prospective liberalisation under the Doha round or an EU-Mercosur (Latin America's trade bloc) – would effectively sacrifice its poverty reduction agenda on the altar of price competitiveness," says Richardson.