Other News

On 28th June the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group is hosting a workshop to discuss 'The Limits of States - Ethics, War, and Migration'.

From the refugee crisis to the newly shifting plates of the world order, the limits of states have never been more critical. This workshop brings together a series of thinkers whose research examines the frontiers of war and security. How can we treat people ethically at borders? What special obligations towards refugees arise out of military intervention? How far can an existing state-based international order be hospitable to the protection of individual and global security in a nuclear world? What counts as a military victory and what rights do victors acquire? Each raises important further questions about the way that we understand the relations between states, and this workshop will provide an opportunity both to examine those issues independently and to identify their interdependencies.

Speakers include Prof. Tom Sorell (Warwick); Prof. Jason Ralph (Leeds); Prof. Nicholas Wheeler (Birmingham); Dr. Cian O'Driscoll (Glasgow); and Dr. Tom Walker (Belfast). To sign up please contact F.Melhuish.1@warwick.ac.uk.

You can view the workshop schedule here.

PAIS Research Fellow, Dr Charikleia Tzanakou was invited as a private expert from the European Commission (DG Research and Innovation) on March 18th 2016 to contribute to a declaration of young researchers initiated by the upcoming Slovak Presidency. Collaborating with a diverse team of researchers, this had led to the development of the Bratislava Declaration for Young Researchers which presents the aspirations of young researchers in Europe.

The declaration will be presented at a mini-Conference in June 2016 in Brussels and to the Ministers of Science and Research in Slovakia in July 2016.

Dr Georg Lofflmann, Teaching Fellow for US Foreign Policy and American Politics did 11 BBC radio interviews on 4 May this month reaching a potential 500,000 people in many parts of the UK.

Dr Lofflmann’s schedule included Ulster, Humberside Live, Cornwall Live, Derby Live, Solent Live, 3cr Live, Stoke Live, Scotland Live, Cumbria Live, Surrey Live and Kent Live.

After a decisive victory in Indiana, Donald Trump is now in all likelihood the presidential candidate of the Republican Party. The alliance of John Kasich and Ted Cruz has failed spectacularly. Indiana was the last chance for Cruz and the #nevertrump movement to deny Trump the votes for an outright majority of delegates.

The end of Cruz's campaign means that the GOP leadership will now have to find a way to support Trump despite their misgivings about him.

Trump's success is the result of a surge in populism among Republican voters. A rift has opened between the party base and the party establishment, which Republican voters see as part of a dysfunctional political system that has failed them.

Trump's foreign and economic policies directly challenge Republican orthodoxy, for example, on free trade and military interventions. The question now is, if Trump will be able to unite the GOP against Clinton.

Every year the leading International Relations journal Review of International Studies, in collaboration with the British International Studies Association (BISA), awards a Best Article Prize for an article selected from the previous volume of the Review.

The members of the selection panel for this year’s BISA Best Article Prize were Professor Jennifer Clapp (University of Waterloo), Professor Tim Dunne (University of Queensland), and Professor Mervyn Frost (King’s College London), who awarded the prize to André Broome (University of Warwick) and Joel Quirk (University of the Witwatersrand) for their article:

Governing the World at a Distance: The Practice of Global Benchmarking

The publication is the lead article in the 2015 Special Issue of Review of International Studies on ‘The Politics of Numbers: The Normative Agendas of Global Benchmarking’, edited by Broome and Quirk, which is part of the Global Benchmarking Project within the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation.

The prestigious award will be presented at a prize ceremony at 5.30pm on Wednesday 15^th June 2016 at the BISA annual conference in Edinburgh.

Further information:

www.warwick.ac.uk/globalbenchmarking
www.warwick.ac.uk/csgr
www.journals.cambridge.org/ris

Theory, Culture and Society have recently published a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon which took place in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and was transcribed by PAIS PhD student Katie Dingley on the basis of a tape recording made at the time.

Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expertise in prosecution cases, crime, responsibility and rights in the US and French legal systems.

The transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction by PAIS Professor Stuart Elden and a retrospective comment by Jonathan Simon, now a Professor at Berkeley.

Simon was one of a group of students who met with Foucault in a working seminar, many of whom can be seen in this archive picture. The wider context is further discussed in Elden's recent book, Foucault's Last Decade

The discussion can be downloaded here.