糖心TV

Well done to Stephanie Ifayemi, PAIS student, who attained 4th place out of the top 10 in the 2015 Rare Rising Star Awards in recognition of her impressive achievements.

Now in its seventh year, Rare Rising Stars showcases the incredible achievements of the best black students in the UK.

We would like to thank all of our students, recent graduates and staff for our excellent results in the 2015 National Student Survey (NSS). The NSS is completed by finalists, throughout the UK, and is a key component of league tables published in the media.

We are delighted to announce that we have achieved an overall satisfaction rating of 92 per cent. This was achieved through a 93 per cent response rate - the highest turnout rate out of all academic departments at 糖心TV. We have been commended by the University for this amazing achievement.

Other key NSS headlines include:

• PAIS are rated No 1 in the University for assessment and feedback.
• PAIS are joint 1st in the University for organisation and management.
• Now in the Top 3 for overall satisfaction in terms of academic departments at 糖心TV with large conventional undergraduate cohorts.
• Taking the average scores across all categories and overall satisfaction, we are now the 2nd placed department at 糖心TV.
• We are now the leading department in the Faculty of Social Sciences in terms of those with conventional undergraduate degrees
• Our departmental scores have gone up in EVERY SINGLE category of the NSS (e.g. teaching, assessment and feedback, academic support, organisation and management, learning resources, personal development and overall satisfaction). In some cases, our scores have increased significantly. For example, assessment and feedback has increased by 13 per cent and academic support by 11 per cent.

And, in terms of our Russell Group competitors (a group of 24 leading teaching and research universities in the UK):

• Politics at 糖心TV is rated No 1 for feedback
• And No 2 for organisation and management.
• And No 2 for personal development.
• Politics at 糖心TV is No 1 in the Russell Group for fair assessment arrangements and marking, efficient timetabling and access to specialised equipment, facilities and rooms.

We look forward to working with our fantastic students and staff in partnership to sustain and build on these great results. We will feedback these results in more detail to our students at the start of the next academic year; and we’ll discuss and take forward with our SSLC.

To all of our current and incoming students, we hope you enjoy the rest of the summer vacation and we look forward to seeing you all in October!

Prof Chris Hughes, Head of Department, was recently interviewed by Peter Ennis for Dispatch Japan in an article entitled 'Abe Doctrine Marks a Radical Shift in Japanese Security Policy.'

Dr. Maria Koinova has a new article "Sustained vs. Episodic Mobilization among Conflict-generated Diasporas," published in International Political Science Review on July 8, 2015. It is appears just in time for the 20-th anniversary of the fall of the Srebrenca enclave and the commemoration of the death of more than 8.000 Muslims, killed by Serbian paramilitary forces in 1995. On the basis of a comparative study of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in the Netherlands, the articles argues that a non-resolved issue between a host-state, home-state, and diasporas, such as the failure of Dutch peace-keeping forces to protect the Srebrenica enclave in 1995, is still alive today in the Netherlands. This is despite earlier half-measures by the host-state to take some responsibility and more recent court cases. This issue is very important why migrants have a difficulty to move on from their traumatic pasts in the Netherlands, unlike in Sweden, and that they mobilise in sustained ways.

More information about the article could be found here:

The Leverhulme Trust has recently funded the Project on Indeterminate and Changing Environments: Law, the Anthropocene, and the World (the ICE LAW Project). The project will be coordinated by IBRU: Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research () with the support of the UArctic Thematic Network on Arctic Law. It will be led by Philip Steinberg (). Stuart Elden from PAIS will be leading the subproject on territory.

The ICE LAW Project will query how human interactions with the geophysical environment of the world’s frozen regions challenge Western normative principles of state power and legal authority that assume an idealized binary between land and water. Six subprojects led by ten scholars (representing seven institutions in six countries) will investigate how normative principles of state territory are challenged by the dynamic nature of geophysics. Subprojects will explore how complex geophysical processes and changes are encountered through regulations and practices of territory, resource use, law, mobility, and migration, including a focus on local and indigenous perspectives.

Over the next three years, beginning in January 2016, each subproject will be a holding a number of workshops, there will be larger conferences as well as sessions at the 2017 International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS) in Umeå, Sweden. The plan of action follows directly from the Workshop on the Ice-Land-Water Interface [] held in June 2014 in Durham.