Professor Sakwa will use his faculty grant of £2,800 to support fieldwork and establish a network of partners in Russia to further his research on ‘State, Regime and Democracy in Contemporary Russia’. His research aims to provide a broader theoretical and comparative analysis of the evolution of Russian democracy since the fall of communism.
Dr Adrian Pabst will use his faculty grant of £3,500 to organise a number of events on ‘Blue Labour’ that will feed into a forthcoming essay collection of which he is lead editor. According to Dr Pabst, ‘Blue Labour’ is the most significant attempt to renew the wider Labour movement and to shift British politics away from the neo-liberal consensus that has dominated the last 40 years. This is part of Adrian’s ongoing research on post-liberal politics, and he will bring prominent speakers to Kent for a series of debates in the run-up to the 2015 General Election.
Dr Luca Mavelli will use his faculty grant of £1,988 to travel to New York in order to carry out archival research. This is part of Luca’s new joint project with Dr Harmonie Toros which aims to explore how key IR theorists have been marked by some of the most important conflicts of the 20th century and how this experiential dimension of war may have contributed to their understanding of International Relations.