ÌÇÐÄTV

PAIS has made significant gains moving up four places to 3rd in the rankings in Politics in .

We are also placed at No 1 for the student experience in the entire Russell Group of elite departments.

Head of Department, Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams is delighted with the rankings.

Professor Vaughan-Williams said: “This latest ranking in The Times/Sunday Times is yet further evidence of PAIS’ position as one of the UK’s leading Politics Departments. Research and teaching excellence are at the heart of who we are and what we stand for.

Staff and students should feel deservedly proud of this result. With a newly refurbished building and an ambitious agenda for the future, we look
forward to building on this success in 2015/16 and beyond.”

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

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is an open access collection from Punctum books.

Edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, it includes a piece by PAIS Professor entitled 'Writing by Accumulation'.

The aim of the book is not to offer advice on how to write, but for academics to share stories of how they actually write, with techniques, rituals, frustrations and horror stories.

"The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very active online presence, including blogs and websites; all are committed to strengthening the bonds of community, both in person and online, which helps to explain the effervescent sense of collegiality that pervades the volume, creating linkages across essays and extending outward into the wide world of writers and readers."

The book is free to download, but physical copies are available to buy. is a small, independent publisher that only produces open access material, and relies on sales and donations to enable projects such as this one.

(PAIS, ÌÇÐÄTV), with Co-Is Dr Dallal Stevens (Law, ÌÇÐÄTV), Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams (PAIS, ÌÇÐÄTV), Dr Angeliki Dimitriadi (ELIAMEP, Athens), and Dr Maria Pisani (Malta), have been awarded over 150K for an project entitled 'Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat: Mapping and documenting migratory journeys and experiences.’

While migrant deaths en route to the European Union are by no means new, the level and intensity of recent tragedies is unprecedented. More than 1850 deaths were recorded January-May 2015, demanding swift action on the part of EU Member States. This project produces a timely and robust evidence base as grounds for informing policy interventions developed under emergency conditions across the Mediterranean. It does so by assessing the impact of such interventions on those that they affect most directly: migrants or refugees themselves. This project undertakes such an assessment by engaging the journeys and experiences of people migrating, asking:

• What are the impacts of policy interventions on migratory journeys and experiences across the Mediterranean?
• How do refugees or migrants negotiate complex and entwined migratory and regulatory dynamics?
• In what ways can policy be re-shaped to address migrant deaths at sea?

The project focuses on three EU island arrival points in Greece, Italy and Malta. Qualitative interview data, both textual and visual, is produced through an interdisciplinary participatory research approach. The project contributes: an interdisciplinary perspective on the legal and social implications of policy interventions in the region; a comparative perspective on migratory routes and methods of travel across the Mediterranean; a qualitative analysis of the journeys and experiences of refugees and migrants; and methodological insights into participatory research under emergency conditions.

A virtual special issue of the prestigious international journal Political Geography has been published on the topic of 'the Politics of Migration' featuring PAIS academics.

Of the selected ten articles written between 1989 and 2015 are two by researchers in the cluster in PAIS:

• '"Desert trash"': Posthumanism, border struggles, and humanitarian politics', by
• '"We are not animals!" Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope', by

The virtual special issue reflects the internationally-renowned expertise in borders and migration research within the Department.

Available for free until 16 October 2015, the virtual special issue can be accessed here:

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: