This article analyses the social construction of climate change mitigation as a policy issue at the hands of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IPCC models and scenarios, play a key role in constructing and legitimising political visions of pathways towards Net Zero. IPCC scenarios have important and real socio-ecological consequences that are crucial for the politics of tackling climate change, profoundly shaping what are seen as viable futures and mitigation policy options. We problematise five key assumptions that are fed into modelling, showing why and how they matter politically. These contestable assumptions built into IPCC IAMs undermine their credibility and usefulness for planning mitigation strategies. We find that, ironically, although IPCC efforts stress just how urgent political action is, their models and scenarios undervalue today’s actionable mitigation policies, leaving us prisoners of our climate polluting past.

A team of political scientists from VUB and the University of Warwick has won the Frank Cass Prize for the best article of 2023. Kamil Bernaerts, affiliated both with the Department of Political Science of the VUB and of the University of Warwick wrote the article “Institutional design and polarization. Do consensus democracies fare better in fighting polarization than majoritarian democracies?” together with Benjamin Blanckaert (VUB) and Didier Caluwaerts (VUB). The article was published in the leading journal Democratization and has made an important contribution to understanding democratisation and political polarisation.

Feminist Geographies and the Afterlives of the Revolution
A conversation with Dr Dina Wahba and Yasmin El-Rifae

7 February 2024, 16:15- 18:00

Room S0.11, The University of Warwick, Coventry

How can we understand the unfolding politics of the Middle East from a feminist perspective, attentive to the body, home, city, nation and their entanglements? You are invited to join writer and cultural producer Yasmin El-Rifae (Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution, Verso, 2022) and activist-scholar Dr Dina Wahba (Counter-revolutionary Egypt: From the Midan to the Neighbourhood, Routledge 2024), to explore this question.

Event open to all. Please register through this link: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/news/events/feminist-geographiesLink opens in a new window

The event is funded by the Department of Politics and International Studies, and the Midlands Graduate School ESRC DTP. Artwork is by generous courtesy of Salam Yousry.

Maria Blancas holds a PhD in International Relations from Kings College London. Her research interests focus on the effects of China's economic statecraft in developing countries, although she has also written more generally on Chinese foreign policy, Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Outside of academia, she has worked in several posts for the Mexican Foreign Service (consular-diplomatic branch) and in the private sector as a trade consultant and through participation in research projects with the International Organisation of Migration. Currently she works as an economic and trade advisor in the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Mexico.

Her talk addresses the field of China-Latin American relations - an area that remains underexplored in academic literature, often constrained by narrow economic analyses or Spanish-language publications. Highlighting the tendency of this literature to downplay local agency and generalise diverse cultural, social and economic contexts, this talk will draw upon Mexico as a useful case study to offer insights into China's economic statecraft in developing nations. Additionally, this talk will explore the nuances of Mexico's unique conditions and how they have proved a challenge for Beijing to deepen its presence in the country.

Date: Wednesday, 06/3/24
Time: 16:15-17:30
Venue: Zoom

This EASG-CSGR-PAIS talk, delivered by Norbert Gaillard, Fumihito Gotoh and Rick Michalek is based on the recently published book, The Future of Multilateralism and Globalization in the Age of the U.S.–China Rivalry. It investigates how a new modus vivendi between China and the United States in the post-globalized world requires increased economic interdependence. This is because, despite the distrust between G20 economies, heightened international cooperation is required in order to avert a shift to nationalism and protectionism and to fight financial and climate crises. The seminar will discuss several topics: the respective characteristics of Chinese and U.S. capitalisms; the way China is reshaping the international financial architecture; and the initiatives to secure critical mineral supply chains and global value chains. A comparison of Chinese capitalism with American and Japanese models will be presented, along with a case study on China's vehicle electrification.

Norbert Gaillard is an economist and independent consultant. He has taught at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, the University of Geneva, and the Graduate Institute. He has served as a consultant to various international institutions and financial firms. His main areas of expertise are public debt and sovereign risk, local government debt and subnational risk, credit rating agencies, country risk, and moral hazard.

Fumihito (Fumi) Gotoh is a lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Previously, he was a teaching and research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. His research interests include comparative capitalisms (particularly between Anglo-American countries, Japan, and China) and the politics of finance.

Rick Michalek is an independent consultant and the senior partner of RJM Consulting, a legal and financial consulting group based in the New York area. A graduate of Columbia University with both a JD and an MBA, he worked as a former senior credit officer and legal analyst at Moody’s in the structured derivatives group. Rick has authored and co-authored and co-edited (with Norbert Gaillard) a number of academic articles and books as a part of their series, International Studies in Money and Banking.

Date: Tuesday, 16/01/24
Time: 16:15 -17:30
Venue: OC1.02, The Oculus