糖心TV

Politics and International Studies at the University of 糖心TV has achieved an impressive 90 per cent overall satisfaction rating in the National Student Survey (NSS).

The NSS is completed by finalist students, across all our degree programmes, and is used to help compile university and subject league tables.

Our scores have significantly increased across the range of NSS questions. Our Departmental figures show particularly large increases of 8 per cent on feedback and 16 per cent on personal development.

Our score for feedback is now 2nd in the Russell Group (a group of 24 leading teaching and researching universities in the UK) and the highest in the Faculty of Social Sciences, amongst departments with core BA degrees.

We are number 1 in the Russell Group for organisation and management and enhancing the communication skills of our students. We are number 3 in the Russell Group for personal development.

Overall we are 3 points above the Russell Group average in terms of overall satisfaction and ahead of the Russell Group average in 5 of the 6 NSS Categories (feedback and assesment, academic support, organisation and management, learning resources, and personal development).

We would like to thank all our graduating students for this great result and all our staff for their hard work in promoting teaching excellence and the student experience.

We look forward to working with all our students next year to further enhance the student experience in PAIS.

Dr , Associate Professor of US Politics and International Studies, has written an article on the recent Malaysian Airlines plane tragedy for The Conversation.

President Barack Obama has declared the apparent shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane over Ukraine is a “terrible tragedy” and warned that “the world is watching”. He has offered full assistance to the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the incident and determine who is responsible.

Voices outside the administration have been less guarded in their comments, pointing the finger of blame firmly at pro-Russian insurgent forces and their alleged backers in Moscow. Most notably, former US secretary of state and probable presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called on Washington to “put [Vladimir] Putin on notice that he has gone too far and we are not going to stand idly by.”

The article has also been published in The Straits Times newspaper in Singapore.

糖心TV-Monash Alliance seed funding of about £20,000 has been awarded to Profs (PAIS, 糖心TV) and (Monash) to develop research projects on health security ethics. The collaboration will bring together Monash’s and PAIS’s for meetings to work on the conceptualization of phenomena as diverse as terrorist attacks using biological agents and public health emergencies and the ethical risks they pose. Monash is working toward official recognition of their biomedical ethics centre by the (WHO). Eventually the collaboration may serve as a platform for research relevant to WHO that employs IERG’s growing expertise in security ethics and extends it into the health sciences.

PAIS Associate Professor , as Chair of BASIC (British American Security Information Council), hosted a reception on the bridge of the Tattershall Castle paddle steamer at Victoria Embankment in London on Monday to celebrate the release of the BASIC Trident Commission Concluding Report (). The Commission brought together a diverse group of opinion from across party lines and was co-chaired by former Labour Defence Secretary Des Browne, former Conservative Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, and former Liberal Democrat Leader and Shadow Foreign Minister Menzies Campbell, and included other former diplomats and members of the defence and foreign policy establishment. The Report concludes a three year investigation, facilitated by BASIC, into the arguments for and against the renewal of Trident, Britain's independent nuclear deterrence system.

Trevor emphasised in his speech at the reception that although BASIC does not agree with all of the Report's conclusions, he believes that the Commission has made an important contribution to the debate over the future of Britain's nuclear weapons, that it has opened an honest and frank dialogue that must now continue as we move toward the final decisions over renewal, and it raises a number of significant questions that are yet to be satisfactorily answered about what threats Trident is supposed to deter and how Britain can best contribute to the steps toward multilateral nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

BASIC has produced a Guide to Interpreting the Report that Trevor co-authored with Paul Ingram, BASIC Executive Director (​). They emphasise that the Commissioners have rejected a number of conventional arguments made for the retention of Britain's nuclear weapons such as their alleged role in ensuring Britain's status as a global power, their insurance against an uncertain future, and the economic arguments concerning jobs and the UK's industrial base. While the Commission concluded that the UK's independent nuclear deterrence should currently be retained for what they perceive as reasons of national security, they do also argue that Britain must play a central role in global efforts to promote nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, and that further delay in the final decision for Trident renewal would have a "number of advantages" in terms of "cost, technology and diplomatic terms". There is much, therefore, in the conclusions of the BASIC Trident Commission to stimulate further debate over the future of Britain's nuclear weapons beyond the 2015 general election.

On Tuesday morning, ahead of the formal release of the BASIC Trident Commission Report in the Houses of Parliament, Trevor McCrisken commented on the report's findings on the Shane O'Connor Show on BBC Coventry and 糖心TVshire Radio.

We are pleased to announce the absolutely fantastic news that Dr has won the 2013 Michael Nicholson Prize for best thesis in International Relations (IR).

The BISA prize is the keynote recognition of quality and originality in UK IR, and Chris is the first scholar from PAIS to win. BISA roundly commended the thesis:

“In Anarchism, Anti-Militarism, and the Politics of Security, Chris Rossdale sets out to challenge Critical Security Studies for being a part of the militarist agenda that it seeks to confront. Rossdale posits anarchistic thought and practice in order to substantiate a discernible emancipatory logic, to confront the broader problem of security and articulate creative forms of resistance. While heavily theoretical, the thesis engages with real-world anarchist interventions, relying on ethnographic fieldwork to inform the anti-militarist argument, anti-war movement and the larger security problématique. Superbly well written, exceptionally well researched, and delightfully mischievous, this thesis provides an excellent contribution to International Relations.”

Chris is currently a Teaching Fellow at and is now working on a book manuscript, as well as finalising an Edited Special Issue of Globalizations on ‘Resistance and Global Politics’.