The Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) is thrilled to announce that, for the third year in a row, we are placed 1^st for “overall student satisfaction” among Russell Group Politics Departments in the 2022 National Student Survey (NSS). This is a position that we are proud to have held for 5 out of the past 7 years.

In the NSS 2022, PAIS came top in every category among Russell Group Politics Departments for the second year in a row.

• 1^st for Teaching
• 1^st for Learning Opportunities
• 1^st for Assessment and Feedback
• 1^st for Organisation and Management
• 1^st for Learning Resources
• 1^st for Learning Community
• 1^st for Student Voice
• 1^st for Academic Support

The 2022 results show that we are 1^st in the Russell Group on 20 of the 27 NSS questions and in 2^nd place on a further 5 questions.

For seven years in a row, PAIS has ranked either 1^st or 2^nd on overall student satisfaction amongst the Russell Group. The 2022 outcomes reflect our best ever performance across all categories in our peer group; they demonstrate our close and effective partnership with the student body and our sustained commitment to the student experience.

Across all programmes with which we are involved - both single and joint honours - we achieved 87% overall satisfaction (an increase of 3% on last year). The Russell Group average for Politics was 73%.

These impressive outcomes are due to an outstanding team effort among our fantastic students, academics, and professional services colleagues, and demonstrate a partnership which we are extremely proud of. Thank you to everyone for all your hard work and support for our teaching and student experience during a very challenging few years for all concerned. We are pleased that our approach to blended delivery during restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, along with our move back to in person teaching, was appreciated by our students and we will continue to learn from student feedback to further enhance the student experience in 2022/23.

We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with our amazing students and dedicated staff to sustain and build on these strong results, which reflect our deep commitment to research-led teaching excellence. At the start of the new academic year, we will feed back in greater detail to all students and we will discuss and take forward ideas for further enhancement of the PAIS student experience via our Student Staff Liaison Committees (SSLCs).

In particular, we will intensify our work on liberating and decolonising the curriculum, employability and skills, and building a sense of community and belonging. We will work with partner Departments to ensure continued excellence across all programmes, in particular joint degrees.

*See the Office for Students websiteLink opens in a new window for more details and the full data. The results are based on the official Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH) subject breakdowns and the 21 Russell Group institutions which met the publications threshold for Politics.

The PAIS Research Conference on 29 June, 2022 offers a rich and diverse programme, reflecting the research power of our Politics and International Studies department! The conference is taking place in person with 58 participants listed on the programme. Faculty, early career researchers and Ph.D. students are presenting together on thematic panels. Panel topics include Brexit discourses and their afterlives, international politics of migration, the future of democratic design, counter-terrorism, endogenous challenges to European convergence, race, gender and politics in the Middle East, and two round-tables on Russia’s invasion and the war in Ukraine, and on Global South-North partnerships. We are also celebrating published field-defining books and seeking to develop new ones in the spirit of the Warwick manuscript development initiative. A speed mentoring session continues our tradition to support early career researchers. At the end of the day, a tribute panel for our late colleague, Tim Sinclair, is organised as a hybrid event to give all staff and students the opportunity to join if they wish.

Logistically, for the first time this year the conference is co-organised with volunteers from our early career researchers and Ph.D. student community. 12 panel sessions are running in three tracks in parallel throughout the day. This year we have also invited interested MA and UG students to join, besides Ph.D. students and early career researchers, to get insights into our vibrant research culture! We are reconnecting in person to celebrate achievements, support colleagues in their ongoing work, and embark on new research journeys!

Please click here to see the full PAIS conference programme.

It is with huge sadness that we announce the passing of Timothy J. Sinclair. Tim was a leading scholar of the global political economy of money and finance. His work on credit rating agencies pioneered research into how power operates in financial markets, leading to two highly acclaimed books: To the Brink of Destruction: America’s Bond Rating Agencies and Financial Crisis (Cornell University Press, 2021), and The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of Creditworthiness (Cornell University Press, 2005). In these and in his writings more generally, Tim’s work challenged the idea that financial markets are the domain of technocrats and economists, highlighting the social foundations of finance. For Tim, this meant not just pointing to the power that financial actors exert over states, but to the sources of political power and influence at work within financial markets themselves demonstrating the significance of private power and authority within structures of global governance. 

Following a career at the New Zealand Treasury, Tim began his academic journey as a PhD student at York University, Toronto. Tim worked closely with Robert W. Cox and Stephen Gill and his work bears some of the traces of their neo-Gramscian approach to IPE, although Tim himself always sought to develop a more ‘eclectic’ research approach grounded in fine-grained empirical analysis – an approach that was as much inspired by the work of his former PAIS colleague Susan Strange as it was by Cox and Gill. Tim collaborated closely with Cox on the publication of his collected works Approaches to World Order (Cambridge University Press 1996), a book that remains to this day a classic contribution to the IPE canon.

Tim was one of the longest serving members of PAIS, joining the department in 1995. At the time, IPE was not a subject that was widely taught in the UK and Tim formed part of a group of scholars that would cement PAIS’s place as one of the main centres of IPE scholarship. Tim taught generations of students at all levels of the undergraduate and postgraduate programme and served in numerous administrative roles. Tim’s intellectual imprint and legacy on the department is significant. Many current and former members of the IPE cluster in PAIS, including Fumihito Gotoh, Lena Rethel and Johannes Petry—and the International Studies community more broadly—have benefitted from being taught or supervised by Tim, and have been inspired by his work.

Beyond his intellectual legacy, we will miss Tim immensely. We will always remember his enormous collection of model aircraft kits, which he carefully curated in his office for many years. We will miss his good humour, his no-nonsense attitude (unless he was talking about cars) and jovial chats in the corridor. As a department our hearts go out to his wife Nicole and his young son Henry as we are still struggling to believe that Tim is gone.

Many people have shared memories of Tim and messages of condolence. To view a selection of them please visit our memories page.

Support

We know that this will be upsetting news for so many. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to colleagues and tutors within the Department if you need to, or have any concerns about a friend or peer. You can also access support through our Wellbeing Support Services – students can contact our wellbeing team via our wellbeing portal or on 024 765 75570. They will listen, help you and provide the support you need. Staff can access support through the Staff Wellbeing Hub and the Employee Assistance Programme. There is also bereavement support available from the Chaplaincy.

A new article entitled "What Drives Counter-Extremism? The Extent of P/CVE Policies in the West and Their Structural Correlates" by Sadi Shanaah and Charlotte Heath-Kelly has been accepted for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence.

In the paper, the authors construct an index of the intensity of P/CVE policies deployment in 38 Western countries and investigate the correlation between the index and the threat of terrorism (measured as the number of past attacks/victims), the size of Muslim minorities (Muslim communities have been ‘securitised’ as potential threats in the post 9/11 period), and the neoliberal governance (drawing on Criminological literature that connects neoliberalism to anticipatory crime control).

The study finds a positive and significant correlation in the first two factors (terrorism threat and size of Muslim minority population), while a negative and significant correlation for the last factor (neoliberal governance). Among other things, the findings provide some empirical evidence for the claim that Muslim minorities in the West have been racialised and securitized, since their population size positively correlates with the deployment of P/CVE policies (but not to the number of terrorist attacks and victims).

The paper is a part of the research project "Neoliberal Terror: The Radicalisation of Social Policy in Europe" funded by the European Research Council and headed by Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly. It can be accessed here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/projects/internationalrelationssecurity/neoliberalterror/neoliberal-terror/publications/

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.