Date: Thursday 24th August
Time: 12:30 - 14:00
Venue: FAB2.48, Faculty of Arts Building

Professor Hatakeyama is in the UK to connect with UK-based academics and experts to gain insights about the UK's Indo-Pacific policy in the context of 'China's rise', i.e., its assertive irredentist claims in the Indo-Pacific region supported by increased military spending and activity. This is in relation to her current research project that examines the Indo-Pacific policies of the UK, Australia and Japan. Fortunately, she has agreed to give a talk for the EASG on her research in this area which will act as a launching-off point for a broader discussion about the UK's Indo-Pacific policy and the security situation in the region more generally. The paper she is presenting is entitled 'Japan's and Australia's approaches to China: The nature of threat perception and proximity'.

Kyoko Hatakeyama earned her PhD in Politics at Macquarie University in 2008. She has worked at several prestigious universities in Japan and has been a professor at the Department and Graduate School of International Studies and Regional Development at the University of Niigata Prefecture since 2020. She has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Leiden University and is a Japan Fellow at the Asia Society Australia. Her research covers Japan's security policy, peacekeeping, security in Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. Her previous book, Japan's Evolving Security Policy: Militarisation with a Pacifist Tradition, examined Japan's post-Cold War security policy shift.

PAIS PhD student and incoming LSE Fellow, Victor Agboga has recently published an open access article in Democratization: "How do voters respond to party switching in Africa?" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2023.2232305

Abstract

Are there electoral consequences for elected politicians who switch from one party to another? Existing research on this question discovered that switchers often perform worse in elections than non-switchers because voters are suspicious of their intentions, especially in older democracies. Nonetheless, few robust studies have been conducted on this in Africa amidst concerns of weak party institutionalization and voters’ passivism, despite the prevalence of switching on the continent and copious existing research on the issue on other continents. I conducted a nationwide representative survey gauging voters’ response to party switching and analysed an original dataset on party switching among African MPs, using Nigeria with over 200 cases of party defection within eight years as a case study. I discovered party switchers in Nigeria, Africa's biggest democracy, performed worse in elections compared to non-switchers, with significant implications for our understanding of voting behaviour in Africa.

Victor Agboga, a PAIS PhD student, has been appointed an LSE Fellow. He will be joining the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science in September as a full-time teaching fellow. He is one of the 3 candidates selected for the prestigious fellowship among over 150 applicants. Also, Victor is currently writing up a full draft of his PhD thesis and hopes to defend before the end of the year.

Our MA Dissertation Conference is taking place on 30-31 May.

Student-led, with student panels and invited speakers. Closes with barbecue. Please join us!

Tom Long joined Mark Leon Goldberg on the podcast Global Dispatches to discuss small states in world politics. Goldberg is an experienced foreign affairs journalist and the editor of the UN Dispatch. They discussed Tom's recent book, A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics, and the lessons for small states facing growing competition among great powers. As Goldberg summarized, "If you overlook small states, you are missing a complete picture of world politics today."

You can listen to the podcast on their website: https://www.globaldispatchespodcast.com/how-small-states-can-influence-world-politics/