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59th Political Studies Association Annual Conference
Challenges for Democracy in a Global Era
7 - 9 April 2009
The University of Manchester, Renold Building |
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James Brassett is RCUK Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) and Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. He is Director of the new Masters level module 'The Politics of Global Ethics' and co-ordinator of the IPE Working Group at Warwick. His book entitled Cosmopolitanism and Global Financial Governance: A Pragmatic Approach to the Tobin Tax is forthcoming with RIPE/Routledge Studies in Global Political Economy. And his articles have been published in leading international journals including Ethics and International Affairs, European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and Review of International Studies. |
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Rt Hon David Blunkett MP was elected as the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Brightside in 1987. However, his outstanding political career began in local government as a member of Sheffield City Council where he worked for eighteen years, seven of those years as Leader of the Council.
In Parliament, David led Labour's assault on the poll tax as Opposition Local Government Spokesman. Promoted to the Shadow Cabinet in 1992, he took on, in turn, responsibility for Health, Education and then Education and Employment.
Following the 1997 Labour election victory, David became Secretary of State for Education and Employment. There he oversaw massive improvements in the basic standards of literacy and numeracy, substantial class size reductions and the introduction of university tuition fees. He led on the implementation of the New Deal, saw unemployment fall to below 1 million and was committed to increasing equality through responsibility for the Equal Opportunities Commission and the establishment of the Disability Rights Commission.
With Labour returned in 2001, David became Home Secretary, where he concentrated on fighting terrorism, crime and anti-social behaviour, and managing immigration and asylum. David resigned as Home Secretary in December 2004 and then took a leading role in fighting Labour’s 3rd term election campaign in spring 2005.
From May to November 2005, he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions where he set a clear vision for reform of the welfare state, and established a nationwide debate to find a long-term solution to pensions challenges.
Since then, he has been undertaking constituency and parliamentary duties and, in addition, to producing a book of his diaries, The Blunkett Tapes, has become involved with a number of local, national and international charities, and has further engaged with his long-standing commitment to the third sector in promoting voluntary and community activities, and social enterprise. He is currently leading work for the Prime Minister on the third sector for Labour’s next manifesto, as well as developing a project on welfare reform. He has recently completed significant work on the issue of social mobility and is deeply engaged in anti-poverty work. David is also a regular contributor to the British media through newspapers and journals, radio and television, including with a weekly column in The Sun, Britain’s biggest selling daily newspaper.
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Fred Halliday Born Dublin, Republic of Ireland in 1946, he was educated at the Marist School, Dundalk (1950-1953), Ampleforth College, Yorkshire ( 1953-1963), the University of Oxford (1964-1967), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (1969-1969). His doctorate at the London School of Economics, on the foreign relations of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, was awarded in 1985. From 1973 to 1985, he was a fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and Washington. From 1969 - 1983, he served as a member of editorial board of New Left Review. In 1983, he took up a teaching position at LSE and from 1985 to 2008 was Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. In 2005, he was made Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the LSE. Since April 2008, ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies, in Spain. In 2002, he was elected fellow of the British Academy. Columnist for openDemocracy and La Vanguardia.
A committed linguist, and advocate of the centrality of language to understanding contemporary globalization, Halliday can work in twelve languages, including Latin, Greek, Catalan, Persian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, and English. Beginning in 1965, he has traveled widely in the Middle East, visiting every country from Afghanistan to Morocco, and giving lectures in most.
He supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as well as the (first) Gulf War, the interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, as well as the American war against Afghanistan in 2001. Influenced by Bill Warren, he considers imperialism to play "a progressive role in transforming the world".
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David Held is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, London School of Economics. He was educated in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. He has held numerous Visiting Appointments in the US, Australia, Canada, France and Spain, among other places. In the last five years he has lectured regularly on questions of democracy, global governance and globalization to audiences in many countries. David Held's main research interests include rethinking democracy at transnational and international levels and the study of globalization and global governance. He has strong interests both in political theory and in the more empirical dimensions of political analysis. Among his recent books are: Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, co-author, Polity and Stanford University Press, 1999; Globalization/Anti-Globalization, co-author, Polity, 2002 and 2007; and Global Covenant, Polity, 2004. Forthcoming books include volumes on cosmopolitanism and aspects of global policy |
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Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include international ethics, international political theory, feminist philosophy and the work of Kant and Hegel. She is the author of Kant, Critique and Politics (Routledge, 1996); International Political Theory: re-thinking ethics in a global era (Sage, 1999); Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Polity, 2003); and, most recently, Time and World Politics: thinking the present (Manchester University Press, 2008). Her current work includes: the investigation of the conceptual links between politics and violence in the canon of western political theory (with Elizabeth Frazer); writing a book on global ethics; and developing further her arguments about the significance of assumptions about political time in contemporary theories of world politics. |
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Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of over 60 articles and book chapters and four books: The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), and (with Carole Pateman) Contract and Domination (2007). He is currently working on a collection of his Caribbean essays, tentatively titled Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class, and Social Domination. |
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