Northeastern University London Working Paper Series
Below is a compilation of working papers that Northeastern University London Faculty are either currently developing or pre-proof manuscripts of already published research:
Northeastern University London WP 2020-01 Proposals for Restructuring the Taxes Applicable to UK Residential Property
Proposals for Restructuring the Taxes Applicable to UK Residential Property to be accompanied by various Reforms to Housing Policy and the Housing Market
Author: Dan Beiny
Northeastern University London WP2019-01 A compound index of renewables consumption
Authors: Andrea Gatto and Carlo Drago
Abstract: Renewables play a crucial role in sustainable development and energy security achievements. SGDs recommend a number of actions to enhance the implementation of renewables both in OECD and non- OECD countries. A prime policy consequence of renewables use is entrepreneurship enhancement. Microbusiness implementation can empower women, rural, youth, and vulnerable categories, especially when coupled with microfinance and policies. Those policies are nowadays detected as important strategies by the International Community for reaching increased resilience in energy, food and resource. The work exploits a statistical approach useful to measure energy policy effectiveness. A composite indicator on renewables policy is built, exploring different approaches. The determinants of energy policy effectiveness are analyzed, considering some other relevant variables which can be identified from the recent literature. A statistical comparison of the different results is particularly relevant to ensure the robustness of the factual implications. We confirm that green countries, e.g. Scandinavia, are keeping a green consumption attitude. We discover that countries endowed with rich resources, like Brazil, are managing to perform better in terms of renewable energy consumption. We also validate that countries that are oil exporters, like most Arab countries, are usually less prone to use renewable energy.
Northeastern University London WP2018-10 Anchored East, Integrating West: Bulgaria, the European Union, and the Russian Federation
Author: Diana Bozhilova
Abstract: Bilateral relations between the European Union and the Russian Federation are best described as one of asymmetric interdependence. This arises primarily out of the significant dependency of EU member states on Russian energy resources. The accession of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU has soundly increased these asymmetries. The nature of the existing infrastructure for energy resource transmission in Europe, as well as the prevalence of long-term energy contracts in Eastern Europe has led to the fact that these are states which are largely non-diversified. Consequently, the asymmetric dependence is reflected into the accumulation of significant negative trade balances between these states and the Russian Federation. Against this background, Bulgaria’s bilateral approach vis-à-vis Russia as a ‘friendly pragmatist’ has evolved only in the course of the past decade. The gradual shift away from the path-dependent discourse of the early 1990s has been the result of rational reflection on past events. Bulgaria has over 130 years of diplomatic relations with Russia. These have been invariably analysed through the dichotomy between on the one hand, the theory of Soviet occupation in Eastern Europe and, on the other hand, the International Relations realist theory of small states. Bulgaria’s accession into both of the EU and NATO in the new millennium has increasingly cast these aside, allowing for a 2 measured pragmatist-realist approach in the pursuit of a level-playing field in strategic energy and trade negotiations.
Northeastern University London WP2018-09 Memories of World War II in Britain, German and Russia
Author: Catherine Brown
Northeastern University London WP2018-08 Lawrence, Dostoevsky, and the Last Temptation by Christ
Author: Catherine Brown
Northeastern University London WP2018-07 The Evolution of Sectarianism and the Collapse of Human Reciprocity and Cooperation
Author: Sebastian Ille
Abstract: The tendency of humans to cooperate for reasons other than self-interest has long intrigued social scientists, leading to a substantial literature in recent years. However, this question has a complement which has only received closer attention in the political science literature. In sectarian societies, we frequently observe that individuals do not cooperate even in cases which are beneficial at the individual and group level. In this paper, I study the principal drivers for sectarianism and the dynamics that undermine cooperation by developing an evolutionary game theoretic and agent-based model. Much in the same way as in models of cooperation, the interrelation of actions, preferences and institutions can lead to a co-evolution of sectarian identities. Supporting the constructivist perspective, the model demonstrate in which way the history of interaction, external exertion of influence, and internal non-sectarian inequalities and conflicts are key to explaining the tendency for religious bigotry and hostility.
Northeastern University London WP2018-06 Financial crises and plurilateral discourses
Author: Diana Bozhilova
Abstract: This paper analyses impacts of the Eurozone crisis on the global standing of the European Union (EU) through the failure of the EU interregional approach in the EU-ASEAN plurilateral discourse. It appropriates theoretical models of socialisation, in order to explain the dearth of cooperation in the EU-ASEAN plurilateral partnership during the Eurozone crisis. The paper draws on comparative accounts of financial crises and exit strategies from the EU and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). It further utilises the systemic hypothesis from the work of Agarwal and Fogarty (2003) on interregionalism and the appropriateness hypothesis of Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2004), in order to advance two propositions: (i) democratization is an unlikely avenue of EU ‘externalization’ in the EU-ASEAN plurilateral partnership; and (ii) preventing financial crises is the likeliest avenue for lesson-drawing in the EU-ASEAN plurilateral partnership but only if lesson-drawing
can go beyond the scope of EU processes and policies, i.e. where the EU can itself be influenced by broader tendencies and patterns in the international system (Schimmelfenning 2012). Failure to see beyond the normative ontological quality of the EU, is likely to diminish the global appeal of the supranational integrative model of the EU and may re-enforce instead the preference for bilateralism over interregionalism in the EU-ASEAN partnership.
Northeastern University London WP2018-05 A long view of liberal peace and its crisis
Authors: David Rampton and Suthaharan Nadarajah
Abstract: The ‘crisis’ of liberal peace has generated considerable debate in International Relations. However, analysis is inhibited by a shared set of spatial, cultural and temporal assumptions that rest on and reproduce a problematic separation between self-evident ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ worlds, and locates the crisis in presentist terms of the latter’s resistance to the former’s expansion. By contrast, this article argues that efforts to advance liberal rule have always been interwoven with processes of alternative order-making, and in this way are actively integral, not external, to the generation of the subjectivities, contestations, violence and rival social orders that are then apprehended as self- evident obstacles and threats to liberal peace and as characteristic of its periphery. Making visible these intimate relations of co-constitution elided by representations of liberal peace and its crisis requires a long view and an analytical frame that encompasses both liberalism and its others in the world. The argument is developed using a Foucauldian governmentality framework and illustrated
with reference to Sri Lanka.
Northeastern University London WP2018-04 Towards Better Economic Models of Social Behaviour? Identity Economics
Author: Sebastian Ille
Abstract: In recent years, a growing literature emerged studying the role of identity in economics. Yet, mainstream economists and other social scientists still eye Identity Economics with suspicion. This paper illustrates the underlying assumptions of identity economics, gaps in the literature, as well as existing tools and research in other domains of economic theory that help to close these gaps, while demonstrating that identity economics is able to provide sophisticated approaches and additional findings that support transdisciplinary research on the topic.
In order to demonstrate how these tools can be used to study the complex social systems in which identity, preferences, and institutions co-evolve, I develop a number of simple analytical models and elaborate on their implications, while keeping technicalities to a minimum. In addition, I show how findings in Behavioural Economics apply to identity economics and prove insightful for our understanding of the complex interdependencies between identity and group formation.
Northeastern University London WP2018-03 The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace
Authors: Suthaharan Nadarajah and David Rampton
Abstract: Hybridity has emerged recently as a key response in IR and peace studies to the crisis of liberal peace. Attributing the failures of liberal peacebuilding to a lack of legitimacy deriving from uncompromising efforts to impose a rigid market democratic state model on diverse populations emerging from conflict, the hybrid peace approach locates the possibility of a ‘radical’, post-liberal and emancipatory peace in the agency of the local and the everyday and ‘hybrid’ formations of international/liberal and local/non-liberal institutions, practices and values. However, this article argues, hybrid peace, emerging as an attempt to resolve a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into globalising liberal order of cultural, political and social orders perceived as radically
different and obstructionist to its expansion. Deployed at the very point this expansion is beset by resistance and crisis, hybrid peace reproduces the liberal peace’s logics of inclusion and exclusion, and through a reconfiguration of the international interface with resistant ‘local’ orders, intensifies the governmental and biopolitical reach of liberal peace for their containment, transformation and assimilation.
Northeastern University London WP2018-02 Democratization and Inequality: Empirical Evidence for the OECD Member Countries
Authors: Sebastian Ille, Adrian Risso and Edgar J Sanchez Carrera
Abstract: The correlation between democracy and income inequality, as well as the direction of causation is still debated. In this paper, we conduct a dynamic panel data analysis for all 34 OECD member states over the period 1960-2012 and illustrate a non-monotonic relationship between inequality and democracy, as well as test the direction of causation by employing a non-causal homogeneity test in a panel Granger framework and the Dumitrescu and Hurlin non-causal heterogeneity test. We provide an explanation for the inverted U-shaped relation. In addition, we illustrate individual regression results for 12 exemplary OECD countries and provide a concise illustration of the economic and political changes to which countries have been subjected while elaborating the effect of the underlying policies on democracy and income equality.
Northeastern University London WP2018-01 State-building, Nation-building and Reconstruction
Authors: Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Denisa Kostovicova and David Rampton
Abstract: This chapter explores a new kind of interventionism in the post-Cold War era and challenges faced by global actors in the reconstruction of domestic political authority in the aftermath of conflict. The chapter reflects on the meanings and implications of different facets of comprehensive external involvement in state-building, nation-building and reconstruction, before addressing the theoretical framings of international intervention in terms of (post)liberal peace and its critique. What follows is a review and discussion of dilemmas and contradictions inherent in the outsiders’ project to pursue liberal peace-based interventions by focusing on: sovereignty, legitimacy, ownership and accountability. The chapter turns to hybridity as an alternative conceptualisation of international peacebuilding and concludes with the policy implications on rethinking wholesale reconstruction of state and society by external actors.