Other News

After the US dropped one of the biggest explosives ever used in Afghanistan earlier this year, critics objected to the use of the name ‘mother of all bombs.’ In a blog post for LSE's Gender Institute, Jennifer Philippa Eggert analyses the gendered assumptions underlying the criticisms of the bomb’s name, before critically discussing the roles of mothers in violent political movements and counterextremism strategies.

The blog, titled "Mothers, bombs, and a whole lot of gender clichés," can be read here.

The new book, titled American Grand Strategy under Obama: Competing Discourses (EUP, 2017) examines the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. The book explores competing discourses of national security and foreign policy under the Obama presidency, and how the Obama Doctrine posed a practical challenge to the established elite consensus on American exceptionalism and liberal hegemony by emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind. It argues that under Obama, American grand strategy no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched up.

New research published in the European Journal of International Relations – one of the leading journals in the field of political science and international relations – by researchers from the Global Benchmarking Project within the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) has highlighted the problems of ‘bad science’ that are inherent in prominent country ratings and rankings produced by international organisations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Benchmarks now pervade many aspects of everyday life in a growing number of countries, including the UK, and risk distorting processes of performance assessment and the strategic priorities pursued by leaders and managers in sectors ranging from healthcare to aid spending to university teaching and research. The Global Benchmarking Project has catalogued 275 instances of global benchmarks that aim to comparatively assess national performance in world politics, which risk distorting policymaking and political priorities at the global level and how national governments set official objectives and evaluate progress relative to their peers.

In this new article, written by André Broome, Alexandra Homolar, and Matthias Kranke, the authors demonstrate how global benchmarking by international organisations is a significant source of indirect power in world politics, and argue that the use of benchmarking to alter how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes, and attribute political responsibility constitutes ‘bad science’, which nonetheless enjoys a significant degree of legitimacy as a result of these organisations’ expert status.

An OnlineFirst version of the article is available to download on an open access basis:

André Broome, Alexandra Homolar, and Matthias Kranke. Bad Science: International Organizations and the Indirect Power of Global Benchmarking. Forthcoming in the European Journal of International Relations.

See further information about publications and events related to the Global Benchmarking Project.

Congratulations to all who graduated recently! Photographs from the graduation reception, which took place in the Chancellor's Suite, are now available for viewing at the following link: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/news/graduation2017

The photos are also available on the PAIS Facebook page, please feel free to tag yourselves!

PAIS PhD candidate, Moch Faisal Karim, has been awarded 2017-2018 Global Challenges Fellowship at the School of Public Policy (SPP) and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Central European University (CEU) in Budapest and at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin.

During the fellowship, Faisal will examine ASEANS's response to China-led multilateral infrastructure initiatives on regional connectivity. The Global Challenges Fellowship assembles scholars from rising powers to forge closer ties between Western and non-Western researchers and policy makers, offering fresh perspectives on some of the world’s most pressing public policy challenges of the 21st century.