Dr Wesley Widmaier - Constructing Friendships, Constructing Crises
Seminar
Australian Foreign Policy Pragmatism across Imperial, Hegemonic and Reformist Orders Over the past century, Australian foreign policy has been marked by the search for “great and powerful friends,” to provide security and economic guarantees. Yet, even where such friendships have provided initial…
Dr. Charles Miller - Does Warfare Spur Economic Development?
Seminar
The past few decades have seen a rapid growth in research examining the long run determinants of modern day wealth disparities among nations. This strand of research has established that initially favourable biogeographic endowments such as moderate temperatures, land suitable for agriculture and…
Nationhood Reframed: Second Thoughts
Seminar
Wresting the concept of nationhood from the clutches of nation-state groupies was always fraught with complications. Yet states are today defined less by the nation(s) in them and more, I argue, by nationhood - a term that subsumes diverse multiplex societies characteristic of an age of global…
Behavioural Patterns of Costly Signalling
Seminar
How to credibly communicate information when there is a conflict of interest is a question of practical importance in many domains. Although social science scholarship suggests costly signaling can improve credibility in theory, there is limited empirical evidence on how people actually behave…
Lisa Young – Professor, University of Calgary (title to be confirmed)
Seminar
TBC About the presenter: Lisa is an accomplished scholar in the area of Canadian politics, with a particular research focus on political parties, election finances and women’s participation in political life. She is the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, conference papers…
Brexit, Referendums and Deliberative Democracy
Seminar
"We want another referendum but one based on facts”, wrote the philosopher A.C. Greyling recently. In an ideal world, referendums (like all other democratic exercises) should be grounded in discussion. But the impression is that referendums, rather than being exercises in deliberation, are…
Endogenous Institutions and Constitutional Manipulation in Dictatorships
Seminar
Much of the existing comparative dictatorships literature is concerned with the effects of authoritarian institutions on survival. Given the existing difficulties of the identification of the possible effects of institutions, this paper instead turns to understand the…