Saori N. Katada is Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California, and she is currently a Banque de France/Fondation France-Japon Fellow at L’École de Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales (FFJ/EHESS) in Paris France. Her book Japan’s New Regional Reality: Geoeconomic Strategy in the Asia-Pacific was published from Columbia University Press in 2020, and its Japanese version in 2022. She has co-authored two recent books: The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Taming Japan’s Deflation: The Debate over Unconventional Monetary Policy (Cornell University Press, 2018). She was the vice president of International Studies Association (ISA) from 2021 to 2022. She has her Ph.D. is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Political Science), and her B.A. from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo). Before joining USC, she served as a researcher at the World Bank in Washington D.C., and as International Program officer at the UNDP in Mexico City.

This project examines the infrastructure investment ‘competition’ between Japan and China in the context of privatization of development finance in the post-global financial crisis world. As geoeconomic challenge to China’s infrastructure ‘big push’ through its Belt-and-Road Imitative, Japan and the Quad powers responded by establishing Blue Dot Network to certify bankable infrastructure projects with the hope that such certification will invite institutional investors to infrastructure financing in the Indo-Pacific region. By examining contrasting financing features and risk consideration of infrastructure financing between China and Japan, the project illustrates the foundation of quantity versus quality competition among the financial suppliers of infrastructure investment.

Date: Friday, 4th November

Time: 17:15-18:30

Venue: S0.13, Social Sciences

For additional information, please contact the EASG at easg@warwick.ac.uk

The Data and Displacement project (PI: Vicki Squire) launched its final project report at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on 12 September. The findings reveal that, as new ways to collect data continue to grow, humanitarian actors need to improve ethical and operational data practices for internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The AHRC and FCDO-funded team of researchers for the Data and Displacement project come from the Universities of Warwick, Ibadan, Juba and Glasgow, and from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Over two years, the team of experts conducted 174 in-depth interviews with a range of stakeholders, including international data experts, donors, and humanitarian practitioners, as well as regional humanitarian actors and IDPs living in camps in north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan.

You can read the report here.

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.

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/

Professional photographs from our Graduation Reception on July 25th are now available to view from this page: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/news/graduation2022/