Aitana Guia (RSCAS 2015-2017)

Too many political leaders are banking on politicizing migration today. Culture has become a fertile battlefield. Food represents familiarity and safety. Eating is a daily activity that connects parents to their children, to their schools, and to their extended families. Social life in Southern Europe revolves around food and food rituals.

Donna Gabbacia, a historian of the American immigrant experience, explains that the “choices people make about eating are rarely trivial or accidental. Food is a central concern of human beings in all times and in all places.”[1]

Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN) knows it.

Ioannis Galariotis (SPS 2015-2016)

One of the fundamental aims of political scientists is to develop robust methodological frameworks in order to explain, understand and critically assess political phenomena. The discipline of establishing causality among dependent and control variables has been deemed for years the key theme of dispute but also of theoretical/methodological elaboration in the political science literature. Recent developments in the field of computational social science (CSS) approaches come to substantially enlarge the existing methodological techniques for the establishment of causality and, consequently, for the better understanding of political phenomena.

Jordi Teixidó-Figueras (RSCAS 2015-2016) and Martina Bozzola (RSCAS 2015-2016)

Paris wrote a new page in the progress of human society, on this occasion by dealing with the widest climate change agreement ever produced. Last December, leaders from around the globe met in Paris for the 21st Convention of Parties (COP21) to the UN Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. COP21 is a long waited step towards tackling climate change. However, many voices raised the idea that such an agreement will pass into history as a new show for the gallery; it is full of (nationally determined) good intentions and empty of real binding commitments.

Max Weber Lecture by Daniel Cohen (Paris School of Economics), 20 January 2016

Summary brief by MW Fellow Jack Seddon (SPS 2015-2017)

Professor Daniel Cohen of the Paris School for Economics delivered a Max Weber Lecture titled ‘The Future of Growth’ to a packed lecture theatre at the EUI on 20 January 2016.

Professor Cohen introduced the topic of growth with some historical background, summarizing economists’ perspectives on the agricultural (Neolithic) revolution and the industrial revolution. Cohen drew on Malthus’ classical observation that societies can be subject to laws of growth that are not fully understood but nevertheless condition their development.