Dr. Negi at Oxford conference on 'Effective Multilateralisms'

Dr Archna Negi from CIPOD attended an International Conference on “Effective Multilateralisms: Cross-Regional Perspectives” at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford from 17-19 December 2009. The conference was organized by the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.



Dr. Negi's brief comments:

The Conference focused on the management of global security relations in the 21st century in light of the growing gap between the ‘normative ambitions’ of the international society and the ‘lack of means to deliver them’. Discussions centered on possible forms of global governance that can effectively achieve desired global action outcomes and a ‘global order based on the principle of effective multilateralism’. Nuclear non-proliferation and climate change were the two themes identified for discussion, being areas of severe potential consequences in the event of a collective action failure. Principles, problems and prospects relating to these issue areas were discussed from a cross-regional perspective.

Dr Negi’s presentation was titled “Effective Multilateralism, Climate Change and Trade: Prospects for Conflict and Cooperation between the Trade and Environmental Governance Systems”. Although there is an established prima facie case for the need for ‘effective multilateralism’ in the realm of climate change as well as trade, no two regimes are more visibly blighted with the curse of ‘ineffective multilateralism’ than those relating to climate change and trade. The presentation dealt individually with each of these governance systems and attempted to identify possible explanations for the ‘deadlocked multilateralism’ that currently characterizes both regimes. It focused specifically on potential areas of conflict and cooperation between the trade and climate change regimes. Based on specific examples, some generalizations relating both to effective multilateralism as well as coherence across the two regimes were sought to be identified.


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T.V. Paul speaks at CIPOD on the Pakistani State

CIPOD was privilaged to host Prof. T.V. Paul on December 2 for the last of the CIPOD seminars for this semester. Paul is the James McGill Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal. He spoke about one of his current projects, a searching examination of the state of the Pakistani State . . .


Paul is the author/editor of a number of well-recieved books. He has far too many books to list here (click on his name above, or here, to go to his McGill University webpage which has a full list) but among the more notable are: Complex Deterrence: Strategy in the Global Age (co-editor and contributor); The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons; India-Pakistan Rivalry: An Enduring Conflict (editor/contributor); Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century (co-editor); Power versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons; and The Absolute Weapon Revisited: Nuclear Arms and the Emerging International Order (co-editor and contributor). And this is just a parial list.



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Social science prose

(cross-posted from The Real World)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice essay about academic prose, written by Gail Hornstein, professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, US.

Though she writes from her experience in a different discipline, much of what she writes should be familiar to students of political science and international relations. Clarity and simplicity should have greater value in the social sciences than it has today. I do feel that IR is (very) slightly better than most other social sciences, primarily because of its policy orientation. That forces IR folks (especially those on the policy end of the spectrum; the theorists, I think, are no better than the other social scientists) to both stay rooted in worldly concrens and write in a way that makes them somewhat more readable. Almost two decades back, the editors of International Security also pleaded for greater clarity in a guide to contributors, despite the fact that IS is among the more readable IR journals. Clearly, we are all still struggling.
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