Victor Agboga, a third year PhD student at PAIS recently published an article "Selective forgiveness and the politics of amnesties in Nigeria", in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. Through the lens of political settlement, he argues that domestic peace processes could mimic existing power inequalities, thereby including some groups and excluding others from state forgiveness.

"Selective forgiveness and the politics of amnesties in Nigeria" can be read here.

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

Dr Patrick Meehan works in Global Sustainable Development in the School of Cross-Faculty Studies at the University of Warwick, and he is also a post-doctorate research fellow in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS. In this seminar, Dr Meehan provides insights into the political economy of the illegal drug trade in Myanmar based on extensive fieldwork conducted as Co-Investigator of a five-year research programme (2017-2022) led by SOAS University of London entitled 'Drugs and (dis)order: Building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war’. This seminar explores how Myanmar’s flourishing drug economy is not only rooted in the country’s longstanding armed conflict, but is also central to processes of rapid political, economic, and social change that have re-shaped Myanmar’s borderlands since the 1990s. Through exploring issues of cultivation, trafficking, and rising local drug use, Dr Meehan reveals how drugs have become embedded in the DNA of the Myanmar state and the development processes through which Myanmar’s resource-rich borderlands have been integrated into the global economy. 

Date: 27th October 2022 

Time: 16:15-17:30 

Venue: MS.05, Zeeman Building 

This seminar is part of the East Asia Study Group (EASG) Seminar Series. For further information please contact the EASG at easg@warwick.ac.uk.

My name is Holly Rodgers. I am currently a First Year PhD Student in the PAIS department at the University of Warwick. Between 10th and 20th September 2022 I visited the University of Montreal in Canada for a graduate exchange as part of the Jean Monnet Network “Between the EU and Russia” (BEAR) to work with Prof. Magdalena Dembinska. This visit built on my recently submitted MA thesis “The Puzzling Foreign Policy Behaviour of Poland towards Belarus” and was facilitated by my MA dissertation supervisor at PAIS, Prof. Maria Koinova, as an excellent fit with the thematic discussions within the BEAR network of which Warwick is part. In turn, my visit to Canada was aimed to enhance the development of my Ph.D thesis, focusing on memory, identity and nostalgic discourse in post-Soviet EU member states.

Located at the EU Jean Monnet Centre in Montreal, I had the opportunity to meet and network with other Ph.D. students also researching the EU, and other doctoral candidates at their Graduate Center, whose topics were thematically close to mine. I met also academic faculty whose willingness was incredible to discuss my research plan, theoretical focus, and operationalisation of difficult concepts such as identity. Their feedback during individual conversations was superb. In that short time span, I was given my own office to work in, and an opportunity to present my research plans to a larger academic audience. The seminar set was a perfect opportunity for me to practice presentation skills in a friendly environment and to get useful feedback on aspects of my early research – conceptual and methodological – that need finetuning. This was an excellent experience for me to justify my Ph.D. project in the ways it has been designed, and to build my skills for the forthcoming First Year Review at PAIS, and ultimately for the viva.

This visit to the University of Montreal will be invaluable for my further Ph.D. studies. Not only did it offer a new perspective, but the feedback and expertise academics shared with me have given me plenty of food for thought about my research plans. I feel that my Ph.D. project has evolved because of this visit. Short but clearly fruitful 10 days in Montreal, full of 1:1 meetings, a seminar, and informal conversations with colleagues seem like a condensed indicator of what is to come on my PhD journey – and for that I am incredibly grateful.

PAIS PhD candidate Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez and PAIS's Tom Long have co-authored a new article. The piece has been published by Revista Desafíos as part of a forthcoming special issue on new trends in the study of Colombian foreign policy. The Spanish-language article, "Política exterior colombiana y performatividad: ¿Un 'buen miembro' del Orden Internacional Liberal?" examines how Colombia's performances striving to be seen as a "good member" of liberal international order help co-constitute and legitimate that order. Palma-Gutiérrez and Long illustrate these performances in two cases: the treatment of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and the participation of Colombia in the prohibitionist "war on drugs."

The article can be read here.