I’m of a generation whose father would never tell them how to spell a word but directed them to a dictionary. I am also of a generation that grew up watching war films on a Sunday afternoon – which took me to Colditz a few years ago. There I stood dumbfounded by the ingenuity of […]
Read more
by John Turner Three concerns confront policy makers and the international community in general when engaging with the Islamic Republic of Iran: Nuclear proliferation, the exportation of terrorism and the stability of Iraq. It may be reasonable, as many have done, to simply label Iran as a rogue state that defies the will of the […]
Read more
One of the more notable aspects of the French Presidential elections – which have their first round of voting this weekend – has been the extent to which all the candidates have been willing to bash the EU and European integration more generally. As the very helpful manifesto comparison tool from Le Monde shows all […]
Read more
PSA 2012 is coming to an end and I’ve had some really interesting and useful discussions with colleagues on a number of subjects. One topic that came up was an old one, namely the continuing basic problems in researching euroscepticism. From the very word itself, through definitional and classificational inadequacies to a lack of systematic […]
Read more
It’s the first day of the Political Studies Association conference in Belfast. I’ve been presenting on my recent work on eurosceptic discourse, but here I’d like to focus on some of the other themes that have been emerging. The plenary with Matt Flinders on ‘Defending Politics’ was a genuine call to arms to political scientists. […]
Read more
PS’s piece on EU blogging last week made a very good argument about its core proposition that EU funding of blogging would be a terrible and counter-productive thing (thanks again to @ronpatz for taking sure I read it!). As an aside, PS noted that that EU’s budget goes very disproportionately to agriculture, the result (he […]
Read more
Comment