Other News

The Teaching Political Economy workshop provided a unique forum to discuss pedagogy in the discipline. It featured presentations from Kees van der Pijl (Sussex), Matthew Watson (Warwick), Richard Woodward (Hull) and Earl Gammon (UEA) on the content and delivery of political economy courses. The University of Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning also led a session on teaching innovations. In total, 37 academics attended from twenty higher education institutions. The audio recordings of these presentations will be uploaded to the website of the International Political Economy Group (IPEG) of BISA, along with course outlines that the participants brought along with them to share. The workshop was supported with generous funding from the politics departments at Warwick, Manchester and Sheffield, as well as IPEG itself.

The Current Students website and and Staff Resources pages have been amalgamated into a PAIS Intranet. When the new website design goes live in the end of September, it will be obvious where to click to access all current student and staff information. In the meantime, you can get into the relevant areas of the intranet by clicking the PAIS Intranet tab on the left side of the page.

On Monday 15 August, Mike Thomson investigates the collapse of the US UK special relationship in 1973 in a Radio 4 'Document'. The programme is based on a document about Henry Kissinger brought to light by Prof Aldrich and used in his book GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency.

A full press release describing the programme and Prof Aldrich's contribution has been released by Warwick's Communications Office.

You can listen to the 'Document' programme on BBC iPlayer.

August sees the publication of the third of four new books from PAIS’s Peter Burnell in 2011, in the shape of Promoting Party Politics in Emerging Democracies, edited jointly with Prof. André Gerrits of Leiden University. This Routledge book was previously a special issue of the journal Democratization. Previous months saw Burnell’s monograph Promoting Democracy Abroad: Policy and Performance (Transaction Publishers at Rutgers, New Jersey) and, co-edited with Professors Vicky Randall (Essex) and Lise Rakner (Bergen) the third revised and updated edition of their Oxford University Press textbook Politics in the Developing World. His International Politics and National Political Regimes: Promoting Democracy-Promoting Autocracy, edited jointly with Prof. Oliver Schlumberger (Tübingen) is a book version of their special issue of the journal Contemporary Politics, contains additional material by the editors on the ‘Arab spring’, and will be published by Routledge in November.

On 2 June, Dr Chris Moran discussed the relationship between the fictional James Bond and the real-life CIA in a lecture delivered in the Library of Congress. His discussion is further detailed in a forthcoming book Classified: Secrecy and the State in Post-War Britain.

Chris' lecture was broadcasted on American TV; you can watch it here on C-SPAN's website.