Wednesday 15th March 2023, 5.00pm, S0.18.

Professor Conor Gearty (London School of Economics) will be speaking on “Homeland Insecurity: Why anti-terrorism laws are here to stay – and what to do about it”.

Professor Gearty’s seminar will be a joint PAIS/Law event.

Joseph Chan (Distinguished Research Fellow, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan), ‘What is wrong with social inequality (or hierarchy)?’

13 March 2023, 5-7pm, SO.11

All welcome.

EASG Talk with Dr. Gabrielle Cheung on Democracy, Free Trade, and Backlash Mitigation in Japan
Date: Wednesday, 8th March
Time: 16:15-17:30
Venue: FAB3.25, Faculty of Arts Building

This EASG talk is based on her book manuscript, Resilience in Global Economic Governance. The manuscript investigates the emerging approaches through which democratic governments mitigate domestic backlash against international economic regimes. Drawing upon the case of Japan, this talk examines how elected representatives use the legislative branch as an instrument of insulation to minimise the impact of backlash on policy-making processes. Through statistical analysis and case studies that address Japan’s negotiations over, and accession to, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its subsequent Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement (CPTPP), the talk shows that governing status significantly influences parties’ level of advocacy for protectionist interests in deliberations on the agreements. More broadly, the manuscript and talk aim to specify how domestic conflicts over global rule-making on issue areas of mutual interest to nation-states may be better managed.

Gabrielle Cheung is a Lecturer in Global Challenges at Brunel University London. Her research focuses on international and comparative political economy, with an emphasis on the politics of trade liberalisation, central banking, and inequality. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Southern California in May 2021. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Politics and Public Administration (2011-2016), and held a visiting position at the United Nations University’s Institute on Computing and Society (2016).

For more information, please see: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/currentstudents/postgraduatephd/academicsupport/eastasiastudygroup/events/dr_gabrielle_cheung/

Moch Faisal Karim is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at BINUS University, Indonesia. His primary research interest lies in the intersection of political economy and International Relations (IR) with an emphasis on the role of state institutions and state-society relations in explaining transnational issues faced by Southeast Asian countries. His research has been published, among others, in Territory, Politics, and Governance, International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Asian Studies Review, Pacific Review, and Contemporary Politics.

The transformation of forest governance in low- and middle-income countries has been accelerated due to increased international pressure for climate change adaptation. These endeavours, however, have been severely limited by inefficiencies within the forest-related state institutions tasked with addressing governance challenges, such as coordination, mediating political interests, and strategy-setting. His paper aims to contribute to the discussion of forest governance by providing an alternative view of such limitations. Using the case of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program in Indonesia, his paper examines the institutionalization process of the climate agenda in the forestry sector and how it influences forest governance transformation.

Date: 17/11/2022
Time: 16:15-17:30
Venue: FAB4.73, Faculty of Arts Building

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