Other News
PAIS Departmental Seminar Series Launches
The PAIS Seminar Series launches this Wednesday, October 14th, with a talk from
Kristin M. Bakke is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at University College London and Senior Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. She has previously taught at Leiden University and been a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research, focusing on self-determination struggles and post-war states, has appeared in journals such as Annals of American Association of Geographers, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics. Her first book, Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec, was recently published with Cambridge University Press. She has received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, the National Science Foundation (US), and the Norwegian Research Council. She is an associate editor at Journal of Peace Research and serves on the advisory board of Nations and Nationalism, editorial board of Journal of Global Security Studies, management committee of the European Network of Conflict Research, and council of the British Conflict Research Society.
Dr Bakke will be speaking to the title: 'War and Peace (and Institutions)'
One of the hotly debated policy prescriptions for states facing self-determination demands, from Iraq and Spain to Ukraine, is some form of decentralized governance—including regional autonomy arrangements and federalism—which grants minority groups a degree of self-rule. Yet the track record of existing decentralized states suggests that these have widely divergent capacity to contain conflicts within their borders. Through in-depth case studies, as well as a statistical cross-country analysis, Kristin M. Bakke shows in her recent book Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québecthat while policy, fiscal approach, and political decentralization can, indeed, be peace-preserving at times, the effects of these institutions are conditioned by traits of the societies they (are meant to) govern. There is no one-size-fits-all decentralized fix to deeply divided and conflict-ridden states. Decentralization may help preserve peace in one country or in one region, but it may have just the opposite effect in a country or region with different ethnic and economic characteristics.
The seminar takes place at 4pm, in and is welcome to all.
The PAIS Departmental Seminar Series is the focal point of the Department's research culture and activity. The objective is to engage critically and constructively with current research from staff members, their external collaborators, invited speakers, and visiting researchers. To see a full schedule, please see the page.
Dr. M. Koinova Wins International Studies Association Workshop Grant
Dr. , Reader in International Relations at PAIS and Principal Investigator of the together with Gerasimos Tsourapas (SOAS) won a highly competitive International Studies Association venture research workshop grant (10,310 USD).
The workshop is titled “Unpacking the Sending States: Regimes, Institutions, and Non-state Actors in Emigration and Diaspora Politics.” It will gather fifteen scholars from prestigious universities in Europe and the US to discuss how regimes, institutions and non-state actors shape sending states’ extraterritorial engagement with migrant populations abroad. The workshop will take place at the ISA convention in Atlanta in March 2016, and a small follow-up workshop will be conducted at 桃色视频 University in the fall of 2016. Edited special journal issues are envisaged as a result of this workshop.
New Academic Staff
We are delighted to introduce you to our new academic staff who have joined the department this week.
Dr Mathew Coakley (Teaching Fellow, Political Theory)
Dr Coakley studied Social and Political Sciences at King's College Cambridge before doing an MA in War Studies at King's College, London and then a PhD in Political Theory at New York University. Prior to coming to PAIS he taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science. His primary areas of research are political theory and ethics, with interests in epistemology and the philosophy of economics.
Mathew has published on the value of political legitimacy, the ethics of sweatshops and the problem of how to add up interests / make welfare comparisons, with his first book - "On the Structure of Moral Theories" (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2015) - looking at the options for how to simultaneously morally evaluate both agents and the actions they undertake, and the impact institutions might have on such evaluations.
Dr Georg Loefflmann (Teaching Fellow, US Foreign Policy and American Politics)
Between 2011 and 2014 Dr Georg Loefflmann undertook his PhD studies at PAIS. His PhD thesis is titled: "The Fractured Consensus - How competing visions of grand strategy challenge the geopolitical identity of American leadership under the Obama presidency," and was supervised by and .
Previously, Dr Loefflmann has studied International Relations in Germany at the FU Berlin, the Humboldt-University, and the University of Potsdam, with a focus on German and European foreign and security policy and constructivist research perspectives.
His research focuses on the geopolitical contextualization and representation of national identity and how this informs the formulation of grand strategy and foreign and security policy.
Dr Briony Jones (Assistant Professor, International Development)
Briony Jones is joining PAIS from swisspeace, an Associate Research Institute of the University of Basel, Switzerland where she has worked since 2011. She in fact studied at PAIS as an undergraduate and has since then completed a MA and PhD in International Development at the University of Manchester. Developing her research and teaching focus on International Development Briony first worked as a Lecturer in International Development at Manchester and then moved to Switzerland where she has been based in Political Science.
Briony will be teaching on the core MA in International Development module 'Theories and Issues in International Development'. She will be continuing her research work focused on the intersection between development, peacebuilding and transitional justice with a special interest on the politics of intervention, knowledge production, citizenship and political identities at times of transition. She has worked on the case studies of Uganda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cote d'Ivoire, specialising in qualitative research methodologies.
Dr Chris Rossdale (Teaching Fellow, International Relations)
Dr Chris Rossdale previously lectured at Royal Holloway and City University London. He has a PhD from PAIS, and in 2014 was awarded the BISA Michael Nicholson Prize for best thesis in International Studies.
His research sits at the intersection between international relations theory and the study of resistance, looking at the ways in which our understandings of international politics shift when we begin from the perspective of radical social movements. His PhD thesis looked at the ways in which anti-militarist social movements can help us rethink (and better resist) the concepts and politics of security and militarism. Dr Rossdale is currently in the process of developing a new research project which seeks to interrogate the role of political solidarity in the international system.
Dr Reiko Shindo (Teaching Fellow, International Security)
Before joining PAIS, Dr Shindo was based at the University of Tokyo (Japan) as an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program on Human Security. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University (UK).
Reiko’s research is situated at the intersection between politics and geography. Most of her work derives from a general interest in citizenship and community. In particular, she examines how the ambiguous boundaries of citizenship are transforming conventional meanings of politics and the space of political community. Reiko has been committed to interdisciplinary research by drawing on works mainly from citizenship studies, migration studies, border studies, and critical International Relations.
PAIS Academics to run a UK Political Studies Association Commission
PAIS academics Professor and Dr have been selected as members of the Political Studies Association’s research commission on The Crisis of Care in Austerity Britain which was launched last week. Other members of the Commission include The Fawcett Society, The Women’s Budget Group and Sheffield University.
The Commission will examine the governance and regulation of care in the UK, with a particular focus on the care of older people. Prof Rai commented:
‘The crisis of care in the UK. is intensifying. While there has been considerable attention paid to this crisis in terms of the rising costs of this care to the state, less attention has been paid to the social consequences of this for older populations and those who care for them - who are overwhelmingly women. The Commission will address this gap.’
Dr. Elias noted:
‘Because the British welfare state has been important in organising, resourcing and delivering care work in the county, the restructuring of state provision of care is producing specific gendered effects which need to be more fully understood’
Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams, head of PAIS said:
‘We are delighted to have two of our colleagues working on the critically important issue of care of older people in the UK in collaboration with leading experts and organisations working in this area. This underlines PAIS’s commitment to high quality research that has the ability to address urgent social issues and shape policy agendas’
PAIS Honorary Professor addresses UN Summit
PAIS Honorary Professor, Her Excellency Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, President of Malta, has recently met with the UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, and has also addressed the UN Assembley in New York.

On 24 September, UNESCO Director-General met H.E. Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, President of the Republic of Malta, in New York, in the context of the UN Summit on Sustainable Development and the 70th session of the UN General Assembly.
President Coleiro Preca spoke of the importance of bridging exclusion, living together and dialogue in all societies today. She underlined the activities of the newly launched Foundation for Well-Being in Society, in Malta, with a focus on providing spaces for children of all backgrounds to exchange and share.
Whilst addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals summit, attended by more than 150 world leaders, President Marie Louise Coleiro Preca said "Global solidarity and a renewed commitment to safeguard human dignity and rights were needed now more than ever before."
“As leaders, we cannot look away. As leaders, we must be steadfast champions of social, economic, and political inclusion. As leaders we must always give voice to the shared truths of our global community. As leaders, we must become advocates for peace and the wellbeing of all,” the President said.
Although, at times, this might not be the most popular position “we must be bold, and defend the rights of vulnerable people wherever they are found”. She added “human dignity, integrity and freedom should be at the heart of our concerns”.
Her Excellency also attended the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York for the speech of Pope Francis the First.