Other News

PAIS has performed brilliantly in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

PAIS is now one of the top 5 ranking departments in the UK for research excellence in the discipline of Politics and International Studies.

PAIS has risen across all the three major methodologies of ranking departmental quality—research intensity (4^th), research power (4^th), and overall or ‘raw’ GPA (6^th), as shown by the tables below.

As the UK Political Studies Association analysis of the results posits:

“In general, the ‘big five’ departments at Essex, the LSE, Oxford, UCL and Warwick come out top from REF2014, whatever ranking system is used.”

Please click here for more in-depth analysis including league tables.

Dr Madeleine Fagan’s lead article in Contemporary Political Theory is second ‘most cited paper’ in the history of the journal. ‘The Inseparability of Ethics and Politics: Rethinking the Third in Emmanuel Levinas’ offers a rejection of traditional Levinasian ethics and of any politics based on this, arguing instead that Levinas asks us to think in terms of the ethico-political. This is part of Dr Fagan’s broader research project on the repoliticisation of poststructuralist ethics.

Find the full article, and the reply from Amanda Loumansky, here: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v8/n1/index.html

Dr. Chris Moran recently sat down with Dr. Trevor McCrisken for a podcast for the International Spy Museum to discuss the role of drones in modern surveillance, warfighting, and counterterrorism. McCrisken discusses the weaponization of drones, the targeted killing program of the Bush and Obama administrations, the perception in the West that the drone war is “costless”, and the possibility of what he calls the “perpetual war” against global terrorism.

The podcast can be downloaded here.

Adam Swift, Matthew Clayton and Andrew Mason from Politics and International Studies have been awarded a $460k grant by the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation to study faith schools.

These schools raise a number of challenging philosophical and practical questions. Do parents have a right to raise their children as members of their preferred religion, of a sort that can be translated into a right to send them to a school that instructs them in it? Do children have a right to autonomy that precludes instilling in them religious beliefs and throws into question the legitimacy of faith schooling? Do these schools foster intolerance or instead provide pupils with an invaluable moral grounding? Should they receive public funding or merely be tolerated as part of the private sector? To what extent, and in what ways, should they be regulated, for example with respect to admissions and curriculum? Swift, Clayton and Mason will address these issues in a way that combines both rigorous philosophical analysis and empirical studies in order to bridge the gap between policy and principle.

In Britain, recent policy developments around academies and free schools, together with worries about multiculturalism and social cohesion, have brought issues around government involvement in faith schooling to the centre of public debate. That debate has typically generated more heat than light. The aim is to contribute to, and improve, that debate by offering a philosophically serious and empirically informed perspective on the key regulatory questions, with implications for societies beyond the UK.

On December 6th a group of scholars from around the world met in Paris for the foundation meeting of the International Public Policy Association. Its President is B. Guy Peters from Pittsburgh University, and one of the four Vice Presidents is Professor Diane Stone from PAIS.

The Association promotes scientific research in the field of Public Policy and organises various activities that contribute to its international development. One of its most successful activities is an international conference. IPPAs next conference is in Milan in July 2015 and will convene 174 panels with anticipated participation of 1,500 individuals.

Details can be found at: http://www.icpublicpolicy.org/