New Research Centre for Social Sciences (CSS) based at PIRThe Centre for Social Sciences (CSS) was established in 2012. The CSS is funded by Royal Holloway as part of its strategy to improve the standards of research methods across the social science community and to promote and disseminate social science research findings with the wider public.

The CSS provides an institutional focus for the development of research and teaching throughout the social sciences. The Centre brings together staff and students working across different social science disciplines from all three faculties, including Management, Economics, Politics and IR, Geography, Social Psychology, Criminology and Sociology, Drama and Theatre, Music, Media Arts, and Social Work.

The Centre is intended to develop and promote training in empirical research methods and analysis techniques in the social sciences, particularly in the area of quantitative methods. In doing so it actively supports the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) strategy to improve the standards of research methods training across the social science community.

The Centre provides a focal point at Royal Holloway for research, training and capacity building activities. These activities are aimed at promoting a step change in the quality and range of methodological skills and techniques used by the social science community, and providing support for, and dissemination of, social science research here.

Please contact Oliver Heath for more details, or visit the CSS website to find out more:

www.rhul.ac.uk/ centreforsocialsciences/home

Department of Politics and International Relations

Research Newsletter

Welcome Contents • New Research Centre for Social Sciences (CSS) based at PIR • Guest speaker invitations • New books • Book contracts • Policy papers and interviews • Book reviews • Articles and book chapters • News from the book series edited at PIR • Routledge Studies in Global and Transnational Politics • Research Fellowships and Grants • Organisation of workshops and conferences • Conference papers

October 2012

Oliver Heath gave a presentation entitled ‘Trends in the Uttar Pradesh elections 2012’ at the seminar series ‘Behind the Headlines: Indian Politics Today’ organised by King’s India Institute, King’s College London & Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, May 2012

Jonathan Seglow gave a guest lecture on ‘Compatriot Duties and Global Justice’ at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim in March, and was also invited to present this paper at the workshop on ‘Domination, Migration and Non-Citizens’ at University College Dublin in April.

John Mattausch was invited on 2 May to give a talk entitled ‘The Unwelcome Stranger: Chance and Post-war British Migration’ to the Social Policy and Health Research Seminar Series at The University of Greenwich.

Andrew Chadwick was invited to speak at the Holberg International Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, on June 5, and to participate in a three-day series of cultural and educational events surrounding the prize. Awarded this year to Manuel Castells for his work on the network society, the Holberg International Memorial Prize is given annually for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law, and theology. The prize, which is formally awarded by the Norwegian government and the Crown Prince of Norway, is $800,000. Link: bit.ly/K3tWDm

Luis Lobo-Guerrero delivered a public lecture on 8 May at the Helmut Schmidt Universität (University of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg) entitled ‘Historical Dimensions to the Insurance of War.

On 14 March he was also invited to the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy of Hamburg, IFSH, to speak about ‘Risks at Sea and the International Relations of Maritime Insurance’, 14 March 2012

Nathan Widder was invited to be plenary speaker at ‘Deleuze and Transdisciplinary’ conference, Goldsmiths College, 10-12 February; and at the fifth annual Deleuze Studies Conference, Tulane University (New Orleans), 25-27 June.

Guest speaker invitations

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Department of Politics and International Relations

Research Newsletter

New books

Nathan Widder published Political Theory after Deleuze (Continuum, 2012). It is the second book length study published on Deleuze’s relation to political theory, and situates Deleuze’s thought within what has become known as the ‘ontological turn’ in political theory. The aim of the book is to show how Deleuze offers a re-reading of this turn, and the political theory field as a whole, through its focus on the ‘micropolitical’ domain of individual, social and political life.

Michael Bacon published Pragmatism: An Introduction (Polity, 2012). The book provides an account of the arguments of the central figures of the most important philosophical tradition in the American history of ideas, pragmatism. This wide-ranging and accessible study explores the work of the classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, as well as more recent philosophers including Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, Cheryl Misak, and Robert B. Brandom.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero published Insuring War: Sovereignty, Security and Risk (Routledge, 2012). It is the second of a trilogy of books on a wider project on Insurance and Power. The book draws on the British experience of using maritime insurance as an instrument of war during the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, and the early twenty-first century. It asks, what happens, when, under conditions of war, the sovereign adopts insurantial imaginaries and practices into its rationalities of government?

Book contracts

Michelle Bentley signed a book contract for an edited book on continuity in Obama’s foreign policy, to be edited with Dr Jack Holland at the University of Surrey. The book – Obama’s Foreign Policy: Ending the War on Terror – will be published in 2013 with Routledge.

Michelle also signed a contract with Routledge for her book Contesting Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Strategic Use of a Concept.

Policy papers and interviews

On 5 July Ben O’Loughlin and Nick Anstead presented an LSE Policy Brief, ‘Semantic Polling: The Ethics of Online Public Opinion’, in Parliament at a launch event hosted by the Hansard Society.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero was interviewed on the topic of ‘The Biopolitics of Security’ for the podcast series ‘The Evolving Character of Power Today’ of the International Security Network at ETH Zurich. The podcast was part of the section: ‘Power and the Westphalian Sytem: Goodbye to All That? www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Podcasts/Detail/?lng=en&id=140032

Book reviews:

Niklas Rolf reviewed Chiara Bottici’s book ‘Men and States: Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age’ in Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Volume 40, Number 3)

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Articles and book chapters

Michelle Bentley: ‘The Long Goodbye: Beyond an Essentialist Construction of WMD’ – in Contemporary Security Policy.

James Sloan: ‘New Voice, Less Equal: The Civic and Political Engagement of Young People in the United States and Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, September 2012.

Ben O’Loughlin and Nick Anstead: ‘Trust, confidence, credibility: Citizen responses on Twitter to opinion polls during the 2010 UK General Election’, in Loader, B. & Mercea, D. (eds.), Social Media and Democracy: Innovations in Participatory Politics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge pp. 91-108.

Oliver Heath and S. Kumar: ‘Why did Dalits desert the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh?’ Economic and Political Weekly 47 (28): 41-49.

Curtice, J. and Heath, O. (2012). ‘Does Choice Deliver? Public Satisfaction with the Health Service’. Political Studies 60 (3)

Mina Al-Lami, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin: ‘Mobilisation and violence in the new media ecology: the Dua Khalil Aswad and Camilia Shehata cases’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, June 2012. Global Policy published a summary of the paper here.

Jonathan Seglow: ‘Recognition and Religious Diversity: the case of legal exemptions’, in Shane O’Neill and Nicholas Smith (eds) Recognition Theory as Social Research: Investigating the Dynamics of Social Conflict (August 2012, Basingstoke: Palgrave)

Andrew Chadwick: ‘Recent Shifts in the Relationship Between the Internet and Democratic Engagement in Britain and the United States: Granularity, Informational Exuberance, and Political Learning’, in Eva Anduiza, Mike Jensen, and Laia Jorba (eds.), Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Link to the book: amzn.to/QBn7um; for a blog, see: bit.ly/MGaS0k

Luis Lobo-Guerrero: ‘Lloyd’s and the moral economy of insuring against piracy: towards a politicisation of marine war risks insurance, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5:1 67-83; also,

Luis Lobo-Guerrero: ‘Uberrima Fides, Foucault and the security of uncertainty’, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law’, April 2012.

News from PIR-edited book series

Oxford Studies in Digital Politics book series, edited by Andrew Chadwick

Two new books have been published:

David Karpf’s The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy amzn.to/IY2bLr

Daniel Kreiss’s Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama amzn.to/QkUh14

For more information about the series, visit this link: www.oup.com/us/brochure/digitalpolitics

Routledge Studies in Global and Transnational Politics

A new series co-edited by Sandra Halperin, Chris Rumford and Luis Lobo-Guerrero will be launched in the autumn.

Routledge Studies in Global and Transnational Politics is concerned with the implications and outcomes of global and transnational processes in history and in the contemporary world. Its aim is to promote greater theoretical innovation and inter-disciplinarity in the academic study of global transformations. The understanding of globalization that it employs accords centrality to forms and processes of political, social, cultural and economic connectivity (and disconnectiviy) and relations between the global and the local. The series’ editors see the multidisciplinary exploration of global and transnational connectivities as contributing, not only to an understanding of the nature and direction of current global transformations, but also to recasting the intellectual agenda of the social sciences. The broader aim of the series, therefore, is to promote empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions from across disciplines that enrich and extend the scope and theorization of a broad range of traditionally defined areas of study throughout the social sciences.

Department of Politics and International Relations

Research Newsletter

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In July Tom Dyson co-organised (with Professor Sir Mike Aaronson of the University of Surrey) a two-day workshop ‘Hitting the Target: How New Capabilities are Shaping Contemporary International Intervention’ that took place at the University of Surrey’s Centre for International Intervention. Funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies, the workshop brought together over 50 academics and practitioners to discuss the strategic, ethical, legal and psychological implications of new precision-strike capabilities.

Sandra Halperin organised two workshops. The first, entitled ‘Legacies of Empire 1’, was funded by an International Studies Association Venture Research Workshop Grant, and held on 31 March at the ISA Convention in San Diego. The second, ‘Legacies of Empire 2’, was funded by the British Academy and was held on 18 June, 2012 at Royal Holloway’s Bedford Square facility.

Mark Pope, Niklas Rolf, Nora Siklodi and Robert Yates convened a one-day conference entitled ‘Olympics and the ‘Isms’’ at Bedford Square, on 25 July, under the leadership of Ben O’Loughlin. Over 25 international delegates attended the event to consider the relationship between the Olympics and ideologies. Speakers from Hong Kong, the USA, Germany, BBC World News, Hackney

Council and PIR (Mark Pope) presented on panels discussing cosmopolitanism, nationalism, commercialism and Olympism. Participants contributed to three recorded focus group sessions for use in a forthcoming discourse analysis paper by the conference convenors. The organisers and James Dennis acted as chairs, discussants and focus group facilitators.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero convened the ‘11th Aberystwyth Graduate Colloquium on critical political thought’, hosted by the Emerging Securities Research Unit, Keele University, 14-15 June 2012. – Professors Mark Duffield and Michael Shapiro were keynote speakers.

Giacomo Benedetti organised a Workshop on ‘The UK and the EU Budget, 2014-2020’, on 16 March 2012. The event was co-financed by the European Commission and held at 2 Gower Street. Speakers included Stefan Lehner from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Budgets and Brendan Donnelly from the Federal Trust think-tank. Papers were given on the EU budget and the Lisbon Treaty, the British negotiating position on the EU budget, and the futures of the British rebate and of agricultural and cohesion spending in the UK.

Organisation of workshops and conferences

Department of Politics and International Relations

Research Newsletter

Research Fellowships and Grants

HARC fellowship: James Sloam has been awarded a one-year fellowship with the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway, to hold two multidisciplinary workshops entitled ‘Crisis and Transition: Youth Participation in Democracy Britain’. The workshops will take place in March 2013 and will include top academics from across the country working in the field of youth and participation from the disciplines of political science, geography, sociology and drama, and policymakers from government and relevant NGOs. This will be complemented by a RSF/ Centre for European Politics funded workshop in February on youth, citizenship and politics, which will bring together experts from across Europe to present papers for forthcoming journal special issue and act as a springboard for joint funding bids.

Ben O’Loughlin is co-investigator of a project examining the extent to which the BBC was able to use the Olympics to create a ‘global conversation’ by widening user participation, creating dialogue that overcomes national, religious and ethnic divisions, and even cultivating a sense of global citizenship – the rather fuzzy criteria by which the BBC must now justify its funding. Doctoral students Billur Aslan and James Dennis are part of the team working with the BBC and the ESRC’s Centre for Research on Socio Cultural Change (CRESC) to analyse how Arabic, Russian, Persian and English-speaking audiences responded

to the Olympics and the BBC’s coverage of it. Findings will be available later this year.

Oliver Heath is co-investigator of a project entitled ‘From Identity to Interests? Quantitative and Qualitative Explanations of Electoral Change in Rural and Urban India’. The project, worth £132,170, is funded by the Indian-European Research Networking Programme in the Social Sciences (ANR-DFG ESRC-NWO with ICSSR) 2012.

Oliver was also awarded an ESRC Festival of Social Sciences grant worth £1900 for a public debate event entitled ‘Whose NHS? Citizens and Public Service Reform’.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero concluded in August a two-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (£73,000) entitled ‘Capitalising Security through Life Insurance in the UK’. As part of the end-of-award he launched a website disseminating findings of the wider project Insurance and Power: www.insuranceandpower.com

Luis was also awarded €7000 from the Faculty of Social Science of the University of Hamburg for a Visiting Professorship between March and July 2012 and to advance archival research on ‘State security and maritime insurance in seventeenth century Hamburg’.

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Next issueThe PIR Research Newsletter is a space to share the research activities of members of the department. The editorial deadline for the following issue is Friday 23 November 2012. Please send your entries by email to: Luis.Lobo-Guerrero@rhul.ac.uk. When possible, include pictures.

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Department of Politics and International Relations

Research Newsletter

Giacomo Benedetti: ‘The EU Budget: Institutional Change and Austerity’, paper presented at the Sixth Pan-European Conference on EU Politics, European Consortium for Political Research, Tampere, 13-15 September 2012.

Niklas Rolf : ‘The State of Nature Analogy in International Relations Theory’ at the ISA Annual Meeting in San Diego, April 1-4, 2012; and ‘Martin Wight and the Three Traditions of International Theory’ at the BISA-ISA Joint Conference in Edinburgh, 20-22 June, 2012.

Michelle Bentley: ‘A Comparison of the Foreign Policies of George W Bush and Barack Obama’, presented at a symposium at the University of Southampton, April 2012; ‘Prevent and Counter-Radicalisation in 2012: Challenges and Ways Forward’, BISA US Foreign Policy working group conference at the University of Birmingham.

Tom Dyson: presented findings of his forthcoming book ‘EU Defence Cooperation in Law and IR Theory’ at the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) Annual Conference in Passau, Germany.

Sandra Halperin: ‘Structural Determinants of Middle East Crises’, presented at a conference on ‘Accounting for Crisis: Challenging the Theory and Practice of Global Political Economy’, held on 14 September, 2012, at Sussex University; ‘”Modernity” and the Embedding of Economic Expansion’, delivered at the conference Economic modernity in the twenty-first century: markets, solidarity, democracy, University of Barcelona, 3-5 October.

Mark Pope: ‘The Olympic Games and cosmopolitanism: consequences for public diplomacy’at a SOAS symposium on Sport and Diplomacy on 18 June; ‘Cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool: UK news media coverage of human rights issues in counter terrorism” at the ISA conference in San Diego on April 3rd, at BISA in Edinburgh on 22 June and the GSA in Manchester on 5 July.

Mohammadreza Kalantari: ‘Shiite Marja’iyat: The Association of Shiite Quietism and Activism,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Annual Conference, March, London School of Economics; ‘The Familiar Stranger: Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq and Iran’, Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 5th Annual Conference, March 2012, Washington D.C.

Michael Bacon: ‘Peircean Deliberative Democracy Revisited’ at the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy annual conference in Belfast

Michael Bacon: ‘Peircean Deliberative Democracy Revisited’ at the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy annual conference in Belfast.

Ismail Erdem: ‘Understanding the changing institutional contexts and the endogenous dynamics of the nation-building process in Iraqi Kurdistan’, Second International Conference on Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter, 6-8 September 2012.

Jonathan Seglow: ‘Associative Duties, Voluntarism and Freedom’, Association of Legal and Social Philosophy annual conference, Queen’s University Belfast in June.

John Mattausch: ‘Unsettled Citizens?: British South Asians’, 22nd European Conference on South Asian Studies, 26 July, Lisbon University

Oliver Heath: ‘Does choice deliver? Public satisfaction with the Health service’, Workshop 5. Citizens and Public Service Performance: Demands, Responses and Changing Service Delivery Mechanisms, ECPR, Antwerp, April 2012

Luis Lobo-Guerrero: ‘Connectivity as the strategization of water space: the case of the Port of Hamburg’, Beyond the Sea – Reviewing the manifold dimensions of water as a barrier and bridge, University of Greifswald, Germany, 20-22 September 2012; ‘Maritime insurance, the security of credit and the British state at war during the Napoleonic period’, Security and Conspiracy Dispositifs in the Modern Period, Universiteit Leiden, 31 May-1 June 2012; ‘Using Foucault to Problematize the Uncertainties of the Insured World’, Foucault in and on the Post-political Global Present: Using and Reading Foucault in Europe, Asia and America, Deutscher akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, Berlin), 25-26 May 2012; ‘Transcending security studies –the challenge of addressing the political as the art of managing uncertainty’, Security Dispositifs: Technology – Space –Event, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 10-11 May 2012

Michael Bacon: ‘Peircean Deliberative Democracy Revisited’ at the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy annual conference in Belfast

Nathan Widder was invited to take part in a workshop on ‘Deleuze and Time’, Manchester Metropolitan University, on 25 March, and also presented a paper at the Society for European Philosophy – Forum for European Philosophy annual conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 5-7 September.

Conference papers