Other News

The Opening Roundtable of the New Directions in International Political Economy will be held at 4.00pm on Wednesday 13th May 2015.

This is free to attend as a public event and all are welcome, but please register at: www.warwick.ac.uk/ipeconference/roundtable.

The Roundtable will be chaired by Dr Juanita Elias, and the lineup of prestigious speakers include:

Prof Matthew Watson (Warwick)
Dr Niheer Dasandi (University College London)
Dr David Hudson (University College London)
Dr Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester)
Prof Kees Van Der Pijl (University of Sussex)

Inquiries about the Roundtable should be sent to: ipeconference@warwick.ac.uk

Organized by James Brassett, André Broome, Juanita Elias, Lena Rethel, and Ben Richardson, the Warwick 50th Anniversary Conference on New Directions in International Political Economy runs from 13th to 15th May 2015 and brings together over 150 scholars from 20 countries around the world to reflect on contemporary and future developments in the study of the global political economy.

Further information is available from the conference website: www.warwick.ac.uk/ipeconference

The Global Slavery Index is profoundly flawed methodologically, yet it remains widely and often uncritically cited. What underlies the production and use of highly suspect statistics?

In a recent commentary piece published by the openDemocracy blog, André Broome from PAIS and Joel Quirk from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, criticize the flawed methodology and weak data used to produce rankings such as the Global Slavery Index.

The article draws upon material from a research project on global benchmarking (www.warwick.ac.uk/globalbenchmarking) based in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at Warwick. A series of papers from this project will soon be published as a special issue of Review of International Studies on ‘The Politics of Numbers: Normative Agendas and Global Benchmarking’.

The full commentary is available to view at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/joel-quirk-andr%C3%A9-broome/politics-of-numbers-global-slavery-index-and-marketplace-of-ac

Congratulations to our 2 ‪‎NSS‬ winners - Aya and Samara!

They both received gold iPad Minis after being picked at random in our NSS prize draw.

Our response rate needs to hit 90% to activate the iPad Air 2 prize draw, at last count we were already on 87%!

Rune Møller Stahl is a Visiting PhD student in PAIS who is studying for his doctorate at Copenhagen University. He is with us for the current term so as to study with Matthew Watson and the IPE Research Cluster. He has just been awarded a very prestigious 'EliteForsk' grant from the Danish Research Council to enable him to prolong his stay in the UK. Success in this funding scheme is very hard to come by, because as the name suggests grants are only awarded to people who it is believed have a special claim on them.

The full news story, albeit in Danish, is to be found here: http://ufm.dk/forskning-og-innovation/forskningsformidling/eliteforsk/prismodtagere/prismodtagere-2015/rune-moller-stahl.

Many congratulations to Rune.

On 20 February, Greece agreed to a four month extension of its current bailout programme, subject to the approval of reform measures proposed by the Greek government. In a recent commentary piece published by the London School of Economics European Politics and Policy blog, André Broome writes that while the election of the Syriza-led coalition in Greece was initially hailed as a game-changing event that could bring an end to austerity in Europe, the negotiations between Greece and the ‘Troika’ demonstrate why a sharp turn away from austerity policies in Eurozone bailouts remains highly unlikely.

The full commentary is available to view at: http://bit.ly/1EG31rX