PAIS are delighted to announce that Victor Agboga, has been awarded a prestigious Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award for the academic year 2022-23. (The Round Table being the leading Commonwealth journal, founded in 1910, and Routledge being the journal's publishers.) Only two of these awards are made each year.

Victor has worked as a student missionary, a news writer in several media outlets in Nigeria, and a teaching assistant in PAIS. He also owns a YouTube channel with over forty thousand subscribers as of September 2022, where he shares international scholarship tips and opportunities.

Victor’s research revolves around African politics, African political economy, human security, and international development. He has won several international awards including the Standard Bank Africa Chairman Scholarship, the Helmut Schmidt Masters Scholarships for Public Policy and Good Governance, the Mo Ibrahim Governance for Development in Africa Initiative Scholarship, the British Institute in Eastern Africa Grant, and the Working Group in African Political Economy Grant. His research interrogates, both quantitatively and qualitatively, how voters respond when their elected politicians change political parties – whether they punish or reward them, in a non-Western context. He particularly examines this phenomenon in Africa, using Nigeria, the biggest democracy on the continent, as a case study. His research sits against the backdrop of ongoing debates on voters’ agency and party institutionalisation in Africa.

With the Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award, he aims to produce an academic paper for the Round Table, plan conference presentations within and outside Africa, film a podcast on his key findings on voters’ response to party switching in Africa, and disseminate them both in academic and policy spaces.

You can find more information on the Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship Awards on their website.

Balsam Mustafa has written an article for The Conversation, titled "Iran protest at enforced hijab sparks online debate and feminist calls for action across Arab world."

You can read Balsam's article here.

Saadia Gardezi, co-founder of Project Dastaan and PhD student in PAIS, is experiencing wonderful success with public engagement and impact. Her films for the 'Child of Empire' and 'Lost Migrations' projects are exhibiting throughout the UK in August, travelling between the V&A museum and the British Film Institute (London), Birmingham Museum, Bradford Museum, Derby Museum and the Wolfson Gallery at SOAS, before moving on to venues in India and Pakistan.

https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag/whats-on/project-dastaan-exploring-75-years-of-partition-and-migration-child-of-empire-vr-film-lost-migrations-animation-series 

This is the first UK tour of Project Dastaan's award-winning Virtual Reality film "Child of Empire" and the three part animated series "Lost Migrations". Explore our postcolonial identity, the aftermath of partition and forced migration and the effects of colonisation as told by those who experienced it. Child of Empire, an animated virtual reality (VR) docu-drama experience immerses viewers in one of the largest forced migrations in human history: the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Earlier this year, Child of Empire was awarded the very first Körber-Stiftung XR History Award. Lost Migrations is a three-part animated series that tells the stories of three communities of 1947 whose voice has been lost to history, even in the subcontinent. Please find attached a tour card for all the UK dates and venues.

Find out more about Project Dastaan's work here: https://projectdastaan.org/

On 26th May, the Community Policy Forum hosted a discussion of the Prevent Strategy on their podcast. Amnesty's Ilyas Nadgee and University of Warwick Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly explored the foundations of the Prevent Strategy, the dangers it poses to democracy and to communities, and recent leaks from the Shawcross review process.

The podcast can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-ZKeuhULuY

The Department received some exceptionally positive news regarding our research standing following the release of the REF2021 results in May 2022. REF is the Research Excellence Framework, the exercise through which the success of our research is scrutinised across the separate measures of outputs, impact and environment. We have never returned a stronger quality profile on any of these measures than we have done for REF2021, including a perfect score of 100% 4* for research environment.

We have therefore been able to retain our proud record of being one of only three politics departments in the UK to have been in the top ten of every REF league table since the current star grade and GPA system was introduced over twenty years ago. We are also the only department currently to be in the top ten of each of the REF GPA league table, the Complete University Guide subject league table and the High Fliers' Guide to the Graduate Market league table.

The REF results therefore provide further evidence of the all-round strength to which PAIS can lay claim. Please do feel free to take a look at further information that we have posted about them: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/ref2021.