糖心TV

We are thrilled to announce to all students and staff that PAIS is ranked 3rd out of 79 Politics Departments in .

We are ranked 1st for both the student experience and teaching quality in the entire Russell Group of elite Politics Departments.

Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams, Head of PAIS, commented: “Congratulations to all students and staff on this outstanding performance. This latest ranking in The Times/Sunday Times is yet further evidence of PAIS’ position as one of the UK’s leading all-round Politics and International Studies Departments. Our deep commitment as a community of scholars to tackling some of the biggest global challenges today — inequality, education, migration, climate change, conflict, to name only a few — means that our cutting-edge research feeds directly into our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The strengths and benefits of this symbiotic approach to research and teaching is reflected time and time again in our consistent appearance at the very top of all major league tables in the UK and beyond".

Thank you to all our students and staff for PAIS' continued success.

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The research workshop bringing together PAIS colleagues with scholars from the Balsillie School of International Affairs took place in Waterloo in September 22^nd-24^th, 2016.

This was a tremendously successful and fruitful set of substantive research discussions between a variety of established scholars and early career researchers from Waterloo, Wilfried Laurier, and eight 糖心TV academics.

Keynote lectures were given by Lena Rethel on ‘The Politics of Financial Ideas: Grafting Islamic Finance’ and Nick Vaughan-Williams on ‘European Border Security and the “2015 Mediterranean migration crisis”’.

Centred on two broad thematic areas – migration, borders and security on the one hand, and the global political economy of trade and finance on the other – the workshop has led to no fewer than five well-developed research project ideas.

These ideas are being actively pursued, with follow up meetings planned amongst the project groups to coincide with various international conferences - and bids for external funding in prospect within the next eighteen months.

Thanks in particular go to John Ravenill, Suzan Ilcan and Andrew Thompson of the Balsillie School who made us feel so welcome, and organised a wonderful programme of events, both academic and social. On the 糖心TV side Ben Clift, Jill Pavey, and Jade Perkins were key to making the visit such a success.

With our double MA degree already established we look forward to further deepening the relationship with BSIA over the coming years across research and teaching activities.

The PAIS Film Club gets underway on Tuesday 11th October at 7pm in MS.01.

We are screening 'Eye in the Sky', and there will be a discussion of the film with Dr Erzsébet Strausz, Dr Trevor McCrisken, Dr Rhys Crilley & Jules Gaspard.

There will also be free pizza for all audience members, and of course all students and staff are welcome.

PAIS PhD 's paper was acceepted at IDRC Davos 2016 (Davos, Switzerland), the world's leading conference on risk management, which was organised under the patronage of the European Commission Joint Research Centre, OECD, Science Council of Japan, UNCCD, UNESCO, UNEP and UNITAR.

Her interview "How to secure reputation by designing behavioral risk strategies?" can be viewed below:

Professor Barry Buzan – London School of Economics

Title: Twentieth Century Benchmark Dates in International Relations: The Three World Wars in Perspective

This paper builds on earlier work by Buzan and Lawson on how to think about benchmark dates in International Relations (IR). The Introduction summarises the analytical scheme from the earlier work and explains how this paper extends the analysis from suggestions made, but not developed, in the article. The second section uses the analytical scheme to look in more depth at the 20th century benchmarks centred around the three world wars (First, Second and Cold). It argues that by these criteria, the changes clustered around the Second World War look to be both deeper and more extensive than those clustered around either the First World War or the Cold War. The third section moves towards opening up a macro-historical perspective on the 20th century. It paves the way by considering how other IR benchmarks represent cluster of events occurring over decades or centuries. And it raises questions about how choices in relation to time and scale affect the construction of macro-historical perspectives. The fourth section chooses a two-century perspective centred on the revolutions of modernity as a way of evaluating the 20th century events. It first sketches out the main lines of this grand narrative, and then assesses the 20th century events within that framing. The Conclusions argue that a 20th century stretching from 1905 to 1989, or possibly 2008, can be seen not just as three world wars, but as an integrated process of working out first order solutions to the problems set up by the revolutions of modernity in the 19th century.

5 October, 2016

3-4.30pm

MS.04 (Zeeman Building) 

The talk will be followed by a wine reception.