The latest research news from around the School of Government and Society.
- Description
- The University of Birmingham's China Institute celebrates its official opening today in the presence of His Excellency Mr Liu Xiaoming, Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the UK.
- Date:
- Friday 14th December 2012
- Description
- Is there an ideal electorate system? As a recent Birmingham Brief demonstrated, we are often faced with a simple binary choice: do we want 'strong government' which can claim an empowering mandate, or do we want a government that represents, however messily, 'the will of the people'? If we want the former, in the UK at least, we have persisted with a first-past-the-post system. From time-to-time, though, we have had a dark night of the soul, wondered at the fairness of governments' claiming a mandate from a minority of voters actually supporting them, and flirted with alternatives.
- Date:
- Tuesday 11th December 2012
- Description
- Illustrating the high quality research in CREES a co-authored article of Dr Tim Haughton has been singled out for praise by the Slovenian Research Agency.
- Date:
- Monday 10th December 2012
- Description
- On 14 November, 2012, an Israeli drone strike killed Ahmed Jabari, the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza. The sharply escalating violence in the aftermath of this so-called targeted killing, while particularly costly in human life, is part of a seemingly unending violent confrontation in the region: according to a timeline of the conflict, over the past almost four years (since the conclusion of Israel's ground offensive in Gaza) more than 300 Palestinians and 20 Israelis have been killed, while in the past two years, some 800 missiles have been launched from Gaza into southern Israel.
- Date:
- Wednesday 5th December 2012
- Description
- On 01 October 2012 Georgia, a small post-Soviet state on the Black Sea coast with a population of 4.6 million people, conducted its 8th Parliamentary elections since 1990. The pre-election campaign was closely watched by the West and the number of international observers monitoring the elections was allegedly the country's largest-ever.
- Date:
- Wednesday 5th December 2012
- Description
- "There is no doubt that the Parliamentary elections held in Georgia this autumn yielded to a new era in the country's politics. Despite the fact that it was the 8th Parliamentary elections conducted in the small post-Soviet state since 1990, they have been dubbed as 'landmark' and 'historic' since it is the first time that the transfer of power in Georgia has occurred through free and fair elections." Written by Nino kemoklidze, CREES PhD researcher.
- Date:
- Thursday 29th November 2012
- Description
- This event coincides with the passage through Parliament of the Energy Bill implementing Electricity Market Reform (EMR) which is concerned with giving priority to a low-carbon electricity strategy. This event will focus on policies needed to underpin a feed-in tariff system for funding renewable energy and also the sort of policy environment that is needed to ensure maximised expansion of renewable energy.
- Date:
- Thursday 22nd November 2012
- Description
- According to Sir Humphrey Appleby in the 1980s BBC sitcom "Yes Prime Minister", the Trident missile system was "the Rolls Royce of nuclear weapons, the sort of deterrent that one would buy from Harrods." As the decision point looms for the replacement of this capability, questions are being asked whether Britain can afford a new Rolls, whether it should instead go for a more modest system, perhaps more of a Ford Mondeo deterrent, or whether indeed it should go green and eschew the need for such a costly and controversial system altogether.
- Date:
- Monday 5th November 2012
- Description
- "The question that must be answered is this: on what basis did Andrew Mitchell make the decision to restore UK aid to Rwanda?" by Dr Danielle Beswick, lecturer in International Development
- Date:
- Wednesday 17th October 2012
- Description
- This podcast was part of the workshop on Somalia: Negotiating the balance between 'African Solutions' and international responses. This presentation by Professor David Anderson (Oxford University) explored the reasons for Kenya's decision to intervene militarily in Somalia in January 2012 and subsequently to join AMISOM.
- Date:
- Tuesday 4th September 2012