Centre for International Policy Research (CIPOL)
Understanding Our Changing World
CIPOL seeks to conduct research at the boundaries between Politics and International Studies. The centre was established to work on those issues that lie along the domestic-foreign frontier, such as governance, migration, security, political identities and regional integration. Its role is to pool academic strength and explore contemporary issues that highlight the interplay between domestic and international change.
The Centre’s work is organised around three research strands: governance, security and identity. Governance is our core area of strength. Current research on governance in the UK explores issues such as crisis and institutional responses, delegated governance, the changing role of the state, political disengagement and public service delivery. Another area of strength concerns European governance, including multi-level governance and Europeanisation. Finally, we have considerable research expertise on governance in developing countries beyond Europe, notably in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa.
Aims of the Centre
- Bringing together work on key departmental research themes such as global and multi-level governance, state transformation, regional integration and democratisation.
- Facilitating specialist engagement with issues that define the domestic/foreign frontier, such as international migration security, ethnicity and development.
- Promoting engagement across sub-fields of political science and international relations.
- Providing a base for postgraduate students to engage with core themes, through seminars, workshops and other events.
Related Research Groups and Workshops
CIPOL runs a joint seminar series on European governance with Sheffield´s Law School. It also holds thematic seminars and occasional lectures. It hosts externally-funded research projects, such as an ESRC project on multi-level governance in South-East Europe, and on UK human trafficking (with South Yorkshire Police). It was a partner in the European Commission-funded European Immigrant Integration Policy Index. Recent CIPOL seminar series titles include `Migration Policy and Mechanisms of Societal Steering´ and 'Identities in a South Asian Context'.
Forthcoming Workshop: ‘UK Institutions, Crisis and the Response’, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, 29 June 2012
In the last few years, UK politics has witnessed a number of what might be labelled ‘institutional crises’. Each has contributed in different ways to raising a series of fundamental questions, not only over the formal and informal rules and current working practices surrounding key institutions within the British state, but more particularly, over their claims to legitimacy, the ability of institutions to adapt to new forms of governance and the implications of new media.
The workshop brings together academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to contribute their own specialist insights and approaches to understanding and exploring this emergent debate on crisis. The workshop will survey a variety of institutions - Parties, Parliament, Whitehall, Media, Police, Local Government, Europe, the City, the Union etc. and in so doing address a series of inter-related themes – participation, accountability, power, transparency, regulation, adaptation, exceptionalism, risk, transformation etc.
Contact
To find out more about the work of this group or how to get involved, please contact Professor David Richards (d.richards@sheffield.ac.uk, 0114 222 1666).