Other News

Dr. Mariarosaria Taddeo, a Research Fellow in Cyber Security and Ethics here in PAIS, has won the 2013 World Technology Network (WTN) award in the Ethics category.

The WTN is a curated membership community comprised of the world's most innovative individuals and organizations in science, technology, and related fields. The WTN and its members – those creating the 21st century – are focused on exploring what is imminent, possible, and important in and around emerging technologies.

The WTN brings key players together – from cutting-edge technologists to forward-thinking financiers, from conceptual futurists to grounded entrepreneurs, from insightful science writers to savvy marketers, from big-picture government officials to focused policy analysts, and from the world's leading corporations to the world's newest start-ups – helping to make things happen sooner and better than they might have.

The World Technology Awards are presented each year to the outstanding innovators from each sector within the technology arena, both as a way to honor those individuals and as a vetting mechanism to determine the newest WTN members. The Awards are announced each year in a gala ceremony at the close of the annual World Technology Summit. The World Technology Summit is a global gathering of the WTN membership as well as other delegates.

Throughout her career, Dr Taddeo has focused on problems and topics which have great bearing on contemporary societies, such as the ethical issues raised by the emergence of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICTs). Her approach to research rests on the firm idea that ICTs prompt a conceptual revolution that is changing the environment and the moral scenario in which human beings interact. In doing so, ICTs brings to the fore new moral issues, generating a vacuum that needs to be filled by conceptually-grounded policies; the latter cannot be properly addressed before the former issues are overcome. Dr Taddeo’s research has the twofold goal of contributing to the academic debate and of providing innovative analyses, which can then offer the conceptual ground for sound policies and regulations concerning the use of ICTs. This is the case for her work on peer-to-peer technologies, online trust, cyber warfare and cyber security.

Dr Taddeo is committed to establishing collaboration with scholars and experts from different fields, e.g. policy-makers, lawyers, military, and engineers, in order to develop interdisciplinary research and to ensure that the ethical issues related to ICTs are heard and taken into consideration beyond the boundaries of academia. In this respect, it is noteworthy that Dr Taddeo worked with Google Europe to organize a workshop on cyber security and civil rights and collaborates on regular basis with the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. In this case, her research was crucial to attracting and focusing the military’s and international lawyers’ attention on the ethical problems engendered by cyber warfare and on the policy vacuum that this phenomenon brought to the fore.

To read more about the WTN please visit their website

A full list of winners are located here

A new article by Nicola Pratt, who currently holds a British Academy mid-career fellowship to document women's activism in the Arab world, responds to a poll published this week by Thomson Reuters that ranks Arab countries according to women's rights: http://theconversation.com/ranking-violence-against-arab-women-feeds-tired-stereotypes-20173

The 3rd edition of Adam Swift's accessible and widely-used introduction to Political Philosophy has just been published by Polity Press. As well as updating the material on social justice, liberty, equality, community and democracy, the new edition adds discussion of gender justice, global justice and questions of method in political theory.

Previous editions have been translated into Chinese, Czech, Japanese, Korean and Polish. A Greek translation of the new edition is progress.

Prof Chris Hughes, Head of Department, was recently quoted in a 29 October New Statesman article entitled: 'Territorial disputes in the South China Sea will not hold back oil exploration'.

Below is his quote from the piece:

Christopher Hughes, Professor of International Politics and Japanese Studies at the University of Warwick called the situation “the most serious for Sino-Japanese relations in the post-war period in terms of the risk of militarised conflict”, with tensions reaching their peak when Japanese and Chinese coast guard vessels engaged and collided, plus the scrambling of fighter jets on both sides to monitor other ships in the area.

Read the full article

James Brassett, Stuart Croft and Nick Vaughan-Williams have published a Special Issue of Politics, a journal of the UK Political Studies Association.

In recent years the concept of resilience has come to frame security discourses, particularly, though not exclusively, – in the UK context. Taken as whole, the volume focuses on the politics of resilience in diverse empirical settings and addresses questions such as: How we should understand resilience? What is stake in the rise of resilience? Who benefits from resilience and what are the political effects of its societal cultivation? The collection features an agenda for resilience research in Politics and International Relations, eight specially commissioned articles on issues including cyber-security, international state-building and peace-keeping, and the 2011 UK riots,– together with an interview with leading resilience practitioner and PAIS Impact Advisory Board member Helen Braithwaite OBE. Other contributors from PAIS/Warwick include Richard J. Aldrich, Jon Coaffee, and Lewis Herrington.

The Special Issue can be accessed via this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ponl.2013.33.issue-4/issuetoc