ÌÇÐÄTV

On 8th October, Ann Fitz-Gerald - director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Canada, spoke to the department on the topic "Technology Governance: Implications for National Security and Public Policy". A great turn out from staff, PG and UG students. A brilliant start to the PAIS seminar series for the 25/26 academic year

The Effective Altruism Fellowship is an 8-week program that helps students explore how to do the most good with their careers by combining evidence, reason, and compassion to tackle global challenges—offering readings, discussions, coaching, and a vibrant community.

A new article, "Dining in the dialogical, listening through the relational: ‘withness-thinking’ for development scholarship and praxis", has been published in Globalizations by PAIS PhD Candidate Raymond Hyma and food researcher Dr Elaine Pratley. The piece explores their respective approaches of listening-based inquiry and food-as-method in peacebuilding and development research.

How (tame) bots impact online political networks

The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in 2022, one of the largest protest movements in contemporary Iran, developed largely online. A collaboration between researchers from ÌÇÐÄTV (PAIS) and Tehran traces the evolution of Persian Twitter before and after the event through networks of retweets, PageRank metric and automatic clustering for community detection. The resulting maps reveal a striking transition from a polarized (pro-state versus anti-state) to a unipolar structure, in contradiction with prior studies. Further evidence from the Twitter corpus and the Iranian context suggest that this shift was influenced by computational propaganda, especially orchestrated hashtag movements. Protesters managed to quickly raise an army of bots that amplified their voice and silenced state supporters for about three months. The study contributes to understanding how Twitter/X can be used to manipulate public discourse, in Iran and beyond.

Open access article, co-authored by Philippe Blanchard (PAIS) in the .

Ruby Bowden, who took the second year module Gender Matters in Politics and International Studies (PO241), has been awarded first prize in the PSA Women and Politics Student Essay Prize 2025. Her winning essay, Do you agree that conflating sex work with sex trafficking is harmful? Should feminist perspectives support or challenge this conflation?, was recognised for its clarity of argument, critical insight, and strong engagement with feminist scholarship. Ruby has been awarded £150 for her achievement.