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Russia in Chechnya and Syria: Pursuit of Strategic Goals

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In recent months, as Russia has stepped up its involvement in the Syrian civil war, there has been a flurry of analysis by Western observers of Moscow's possible objectives. On a spectrum of interpretations concerning Russian actions are claims that the Kremlin's main concern is ensuring the survival of the Assad regime. Others assume broader strategic foreign-policy goals, including no less than a "grand bargain" with the West over the Ukraine crisis and Moscow's re-admission into the club of Western nations.

Session 3: Scaling and Dictionary Approaches

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Félix Krawatzek and Andy Eggers present a new podcast series in which they discuss Text in the Social Sciences.

[Please scroll down for podcast recordings.]

Language is essential to human interaction, and so is essential to understanding politics and society.

Researchers in many disciplines now employ a variety of methods to analyse large bodies of text in more systematic and reliable ways. These techniques are complementary to conventional reading techniques and may generate new insights for understanding texts or using text as data.

Twenty-five Years in the Search for Peace: Reflections on the Nobel Peace Prize

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Geir Lundestad was the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and from 1990 to 2014 was the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2015 Geir published a frank account of his 25 Nobel years. The lecture was based on Geir's book, which discussed what the Nobel Peace Prize can realistically achieve.

‘What does the failure of the Lords Bill 2012 tell us about the British Constitution?’

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Jesse Norman, MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, delivered a lecture entitled ‘What does the failure of the Lords Bill 2012 tell us about the British Constitution?’ Dr Norman graduated in classics from Merton College and twelve years later continued on to University College London, where he earned his MPhil and DPhil in philosophy. He is the author of numerous books in political theory, including a biography of Edmund Burke.

Measuring Government Policy with Text Analysis

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An index of assembly dissolution powers

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Assembly dissolution is a key dimension of constitutional variation in parlia- mentary democracies. It conditions the timing of elections, influences electoral accountability, and shapes how politicians bargain about government formation, termination, and policy. Yet, despite the importance of dissolution rules, no mea- sure exists that applies to the different actors involved in dissolutions and records the complexity of the rules sufficiently accurately to capture their substantive im- plications.

Session 2: Text as Discourse

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Félix Krawatzek and Andy Eggers present a new podcast series in which they discuss Text in the Social Sciences.

[Please scroll down for podcast recordings.]

Language is essential to human interaction, and so is essential to understanding politics and society.

Politics of the ‘Other’ in India and China: Western Concepts in Non-Western Contexts

Read more about Politics of the ‘Other’ in India and China: Western Concepts in Non-Western Contexts

The social sciences have been heavily influenced by modernization theory, focusing on issues of economic growth, political development and social change, in order to develop a predictive model of linear progress for developing countries following a Western prototype. Under this hegemonic paradigm of development the world tends to get divided into simplistic binary oppositions between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘self’ and ‘other’.

'Hurricanes and hashtags: the power dynamics of humanitarian reporting in a digital age'

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Glenda Cooper shared her insights on the power dynamics of reporting a humanitarian crisis in a digital age, and raised several pertinent questions, including: do social media really allow diverse points of view? Cooper has studied the news reportage during the earthquake in Japan (2011), the Hudson plane crash, Oklahoma tornado and Bangkok bomb blasts (2015) from an anthropological lens.

Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea Published by: Hurst and Oxford University Press (US)

Read more about Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea Published by: Hurst and Oxford University Press (US)

This study, based on extensive fieldwork, interviews and engagement with primary and secondary sources, is the first on the subject to take on the regional, as opposed to the country-specific, dimension. It has four key aims. The first is to bring out the extent to which oil has forged the interaction of the region with the world economy and how the ongoing expansion of the oil sector will deepen this pivotal role.

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