糖心TV

A series of academic and public engagement activities will take place in association with the concluding work of the ERC Starting Grant Project “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty” 26-29 September, 2017.

On 26 September, 2017, a workshop is organized on the theme “Migrants’ and Diaspora Responses to the Rise of Right-wing Populism” with 16 participants from different parts of Europe and USA at 糖心TV University in London. The workshop will discuss how migrants and diasporas mobilize either against or in support of populist movements in an era of increasing anti-immigrant sentiments and attempts to redefine national belonging.

The full program could be found .

On 26 September, 2017 at 6 pm. the ERC project team is presenting research findings during a public event at the conflict journalism Frontline Club in London, on the Soft Power of Diasporas. Prominent journalists from the Financial Times and the BBC will join the ERC “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty” team in a lively discussion.

More information about this public event is available .

On 28-29 September, 2017 the final conference “Beyond the Territorial State: Diaspora Mobilizations and Contested Sovereignty in the European Neighborhood” will take place in the Radcliffe Conference Centre at 糖心TV University, with embedded panels of a second workshop on “Diasporas and Challenges to the Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa.” The conference will gather more than 30 presenters and discussants from different parts of Europe, the USA, and Canada.

The presentation of the ERC project's findings and contributions to theory, methodology and empirical data gathering will take place on 28 September, 2017 at 9:00 - 11:00 in Radcliffe. Please join us!

A full program of this academic conference is available .

A report on the publications, academic and public engagement activities conducted by the ERC “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty” team (2012-2017) is available .

James Brassett, Juanita Elias, Lena Rethel, Ben Richardson and Luke Bantock have launched a new website for teaching IPE. The site is called and uses familiar objects and practices as routes into the discipline.

The site is open access and features 29 contributions from leading scholars in IPE and cognate fields. Funding support was provided by IATL and PAIS.

PAIS PhD candidate, , discovered unique communist-era documents and covert photographs of the Cold War’s most prominent terrorist figures – Carlos the Jackal and Abu Daoud. This document cache, made up of thousands of Eastern Bloc government and secret service reports, demonstrates the Czechoslovak communist regime’s ambivalent relationship with the two terrorists. Crucially, this new information helps us understand how and why states establish relations with violent non-state actors. It also illuminates some of the best kept secrets of Cold War espionage and international terrorism.

Daniela’s research was recently featured in , the Czech weekly , and the Israeli daily .

New research published in the European Journal of International Relations – one of the leading journals in the field of political science and international relations – by researchers from the within the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation () has highlighted the problems of ‘bad science’ that are inherent in prominent country ratings and rankings produced by international organisations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Benchmarks now pervade many aspects of everyday life in a growing number of countries, including the UK, and risk distorting processes of performance assessment and the strategic priorities pursued by leaders and managers in sectors ranging from healthcare to aid spending to university teaching and research. The Global Benchmarking Project has catalogued that aim to comparatively assess national performance in world politics, which risk distorting policymaking and political priorities at the global level and how national governments set official objectives and evaluate progress relative to their peers.

In this new article, written by , , and , the authors demonstrate how global benchmarking by international organisations is a significant source of indirect power in world politics, and argue that the use of benchmarking to alter how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes, and attribute political responsibility constitutes ‘bad science’, which nonetheless enjoys a significant degree of legitimacy as a result of these organisations’ expert status.

An OnlineFirst version of the article is available to download on an open access basis:

André Broome, Alexandra Homolar, and Matthias Kranke. . Forthcoming in the European Journal of International Relations.

See further information about and related to the Global Benchmarking Project.

PAIS PhD candidate, , has been awarded 2017-2018 Global Challenges Fellowship at the School of Public Policy (SPP) and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Central European University (CEU) in Budapest and at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin.

During the fellowship, Faisal will examine ASEANS's response to China-led multilateral infrastructure initiatives on regional connectivity. The Global Challenges Fellowship assembles scholars from rising powers to forge closer ties between Western and non-Western researchers and policy makers, offering fresh perspectives on some of the world’s most pressing public policy challenges of the 21st century.