糖心TV

Congratulations to Christopher Hughes, Head of Department here in PAIS and Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences, who has been announced as a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an award which recognises leading social scientists who have made a substantial contribution to wider social science.

is one of Europe’s leading experts on international relations with Japan, particularly the US-Japan alliance, and is among only 33 leading social scientists to receive the honour.

The is the National Academy of Academics, Learned Societies and Practitioners in the Social Sciences. Its mission is to promote social science in the United Kingdom for the public benefit.

The department is delighted that we have been ranked 35th in the world in Politics and International Studies in the 2015 QS World University Rankings by Subject, with an overall score of 60.8.

For the fourth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject, 3,467 universities were evaluated and 971 institutions were ranked in total. Over 82 million citations attributions were analyzed and the provision of 13,132 programs were verified.

The Global Slavery Index is profoundly flawed methodologically, yet it remains widely and often uncritically cited. What underlies the production and use of highly suspect statistics?

In a recent commentary piece published by the openDemocracy blog, from PAIS and Joel Quirk from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, criticize the flawed methodology and weak data used to produce rankings such as the Global Slavery Index.

The article draws upon material from a research project on global benchmarking () based in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at 糖心TV. A series of papers from this project will soon be published as a special issue of Review of International Studies on ‘The Politics of Numbers: Normative Agendas and Global Benchmarking’.

The full commentary is available to view at:

On 20 February, Greece agreed to a four month extension of its current bailout programme, subject to the approval of reform measures proposed by the Greek government. In a recent commentary piece published by the London School of Economics European Politics and Policy blog, writes that while the election of the Syriza-led coalition in Greece was initially hailed as a game-changing event that could bring an end to austerity in Europe, the negotiations between Greece and the ‘Troika’ demonstrate why a sharp turn away from austerity policies in Eurozone bailouts remains highly unlikely.

The full commentary is available to view at:

The top ten ISI ranked journal Security Dialogue has recently published a Special Issue on ‘Resilience and (In)Security.’ This marks one of the key interventions on resilience from a critical perspective and is sure to become a standard reference point in the field. Impressively, the collection includes articles by no less than four members of the International Relations and Security Cluster in PAIS:

• James Brassett and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2015) Security and the performative politics of resilience: Critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency preparedness, 46(1): 32-50.
• Charlotte Heath-Kelly (2015) Securing through the failure to secure? The ambiguity of resilience at the bombsite, 46(1): 69-85.
• Jon Coaffee and Pete Fussey (2015) Constructing resilience through security and surveillance: The politics, practices and tensions of security-driven resilience, 46(1): 86-105.

Resilience is an important and burgeoning theme across the Social Sciences and PAIS has led the way in developing collaborative networks and notable events and projects. Indeed, this rich vein of research activity has already produced a number of books, articles, and an already well-cited Special Issue of Politics edited by James Brassett, Stuart Croft, and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2013), entitled: ‘Security and the Politics of Resilience’, 33(4). The latter features an interview with Helen Braithwaite OBE, one of the architects of the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, who sits on PAIS’ Impact Advisory Board.