Other News

Stuart Elden, PAIS Professor of Political Theory and Geography, delivered one of the keynote papers to the conference "Identity, Sovereignty, and Global Politics in the Building of Baghdad," held at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Stuart's paper was entitled 'Crises of Territorial Integrity: Iraq and Nigeria' and set the overall themes of the conference in a wider geopolitical context.

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/events/conference-identity-sovereignty-and-global-politics-in-the.html

Demonstrating a strong PAIS research focus on emerging areas, Volume 35 (2014) of the high-profile international journal Third World Quarterly, which is well into its fourth decade of publishing scholarship and policy-related articles in international studies, showcases four very distinctive articles by PAIS members including:

Peter Ferdinand, ‘Rising powers at the UN: an analysis of the voting behaviour of BRICS in the General Assembly’, 35, Issue 3, pages 376-91.

Dominic Kelly and Charalampos Efstathopoulos (formerly a doctoral candidate supervised by Dominic and now Lecturer in the Dept. of International Politics, Aberystwyth University), ‘India, developmental multilateralism and the Doha ministerial conference’, 35, Issue 6, pages 1066-81.

Shaun Breslin, ‘Financial transitions in the PRC: banking on the state? 35, Issue 6, pages 996-1013.

Peter Burnell, ‘International support for action on climate change and democracy: exploring complementarities’, in 35, Issue 7, pp.1216-38.

Volume 35 of Third World Quarterly is available from Taylor & Francis Online

If you are new to PAIS this September, please head over to our Welcome 2014 web pages for essential information, including information on your induction meeting and your first week and a welcome message from the Head of Department, Christopher Hughes.

Welcome to PAIS!

Just published at Springer (June 2014): Philippe Blanchard, Felix Bühlmann & Jacques-Antoine Gauthier (eds). Advances in Sequence Analysis: Theory, Method, Applications.

This book gives a general view of sequence analysis, the statistical study of successions of states or events. It includes innovative contributions on political trajectories and processes, life course and contemporaneous and historical careers. The approach presented in this book is now central to the life-course perspective and the study of social processes more generally.

This volume promotes the dialogue between approaches to sequence analysis that developed separately, within traditions contrasted in space and disciplines. It includes the latest developments in sequential concepts, coding, atypical datasets and time patterns, optimal matching and alternative algorithms, survey optimization, and visualization.

Field studies include original sequential material related to parenting in 19th-century Belgium, higher education and work in Finland and Italy, family formation before and after German reunification, French Jews persecuted in occupied France, long-term trends in electoral participation, and regime democratization.

Overall the book reassesses the classical uses of sequences and it promotes new ways of collecting, formatting, representing and processing them. The introduction provides basic sequential concepts and tools, as well as a history of the method. Chapters are presented in a way that is both accessible to the beginner and informative to the expert.

http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/book/978-3-319-04968-7

Prof Hughes was quoted in an article appearing on 9 September 2014 in The Christian Science Monitor entitled 'Japan, Germany shake off WWII arms constraints. A cause for concern?'. Below is an excerpt from the piece:

“As these two powers emerge from the cold war, it is much harder for them to rely on the United States or other allies for their defense,” says Chris Hughes, professor of International Politics and Japanese Studies at Warwick University in Britain.