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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.

As the aftershocks of the Kwarteng mini-budget continue to reverberate, UK economic credibility and fiscal sustainability is in question. After initially declining the OBR’s independent technocratic oversight, Truss' government has struggled to assuage financial markets. Truss is taking a big economic risk, as the IMF pointed out.

Read Ben Clift's article for UK in a Changing Europe here: https://ukandeu.ac.uk/trussonomics-and-the-obr/

Balsam Mustafa has written an article for The Conversation, titled "Iran protest at enforced hijab sparks online debate and feminist calls for action across Arab world."

You can read Balsam's article here.

We are delighted to announce that the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick has moved up to joint 2^nd place out of 79 UK Politics Departments in The Times/The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023. This prestigious league table continues to place us 1st in the Russell Group for both ‘teaching quality’ and ‘student experience’.

Ben Clift has written a new piece for LSE blog (along with Sean McDaniel, formerly of PAIS) on the politics of productivity and the failings of Prime Minister Truss’s thinking about reviving Britain’s economic fortunes. This draws on their research published in BJPIR. This paper was recently selected by the editors as part of a virtual special issue on British Politics in times of crisis.

You can read Ben's piece here.