糖心TV

On August 26-28, Prof Franklyn Lisk participated in the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI) and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) Conference on Rebuilding Viable State and Effective Institutions in Somalia. This three-day consultative meeting held in Addis Ababa brought together representatives across Somali leadership and civil society, as well as academics, professionals, and experts on post-conflict reconstruction. The main objectives were to contribute to the current assessment of the country's priority needs; provide support to the new government of the Federal Republic of Somalia in its endeavours to plan, formulate, and implement a coherent programme for the rebuilding of a viable and effective state; and to foster dialogue that promotes the exchange of ideas and new thinking among policy makers and the country's developed partners.

Prof Lisk presented on post-conflict reconstruction and the challenges of sustainable development in Africa. The conference report will be prepared by HESPI to communicate the key findings and messages from the conference papers and keynote speeches to assist the federal Government of Somalia in planning and formulating its near and medium term strategy for reconstruction and institution building.

Proceedings will become available on the HESPI website, where the is already available.

Miriam Grinberg, PhD candidate in PAIS, has been awarded a from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for 2013-14. This programme provides the opportunity for short-term visits for young pre- and post-doctoral UK researchers and researchers from Europe and North America based in the UK to conduct cooperative research with leading research groups at Japanese Universities and Institutions.

The award goes towards funding Miriam's fieldwork next year in Japan, where she will be conducting interviews and archival studies as part of her dissertation research entitled 'The US-Japan alliance and the relocation of Futenma: Sites of discursive exchange in the reproduction of security alliances'. As part of the award, she will be working with from the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo.

, Professor in PAIS and an Associate Fellow with , was recently quoted in a 21 August article on the Bo Xilai murder trial featured on NBCNews.com entitled ''.

Below is an excerpt from the piece:

“There is this feeling that elites are running the country for themselves and their kids are running around in Lamborghinis and Ferraris. It is a key cause of resentment among the general population,” Breslin said.

‘Security and the Everyday’
31 October - 1 November 2013
Keynote: Professor Jutta Weldes (University of Bristol); Professor François Debrix (Virginia Tech)

More and more research in critical security studies pays attention to the realm of everyday experience, popular culture and fictional narratives, and how they produce and reproduce discourses of security and representations of identity. At the same time, distinctions between politics and entertainment seem increasingly tenuous in a world of globalized spaces of hyper-reality. From the real-time images of remote controlled drone strikes to the imagined realities of video game franchises, and from the realpolitik of TV shows and comic books to the narratives of IR textbooks, virtual and actual realities blend into each other. This conference explores the interconnections and implications of this inter-textuality of security and image, narrative and identity, and power and fiction.

If you are interested in participating please send details of your affiliation, an indicative title, and an abstract of no more than 250 words to Georg Löfflmann (g.lofflmann@warwick.ac.uk).

Deadline for abstracts: 9 September 2013

The ESRC has recently announced that it has appointed Matthew Watson of PAIS to one of its from September 2013. These are made available on a biennial basis, and Professor Watson's is the first award of this nature ever to come to the department. The scheme is designed to identify potential ESRC 'champions', people whose work showcases UK social science as a whole to the wider world. PAIS Head of Department, Professor Christopher Hughes, says: "We are delighted to have the opportunity to house an award of such stature, and it is an indication of Matthew's standing within the profession that he was chosen to hold it in the face of such fierce competition".

Professor Watson's fellowship programme of work focuses on how it might be possible to rethink the concept of 'the market'. There is a purely intellectual element to his project, as it asks about the important shifts in the history of economic thought that have allowed the market to be conceived as a mechanism of efficient allocation, as well as how these shifts have been embedded in orthodox economics pedagogy. As befits the demands of the scheme, though, the project also has a practical element. The abstract questions on which the research design is based also have a real-world counterpart in asking why the response to the global financial crisis has been an increasingly unquestioning attachment to austerity. Professor Watson will be working alongside groups seeking to promote new ways of thinking about the market to challenge such an attachment, as well as with community education providers seeking to empower people to think critically about the obstacles currently being placed in the way of their life chances.