Feature stories

A Note from the Director 

Welcome to the final Newsletter of 2020. Centre members continue to make an outstanding contribution in research and engagement across an extraordinarily diverse ranges of topics, from great power politics, to anti-corruption, authoritarianism and ‘pecarity’. We are also delighted to congratulate our newest ‘Drs.’, Diego Leiva and Elise Stephenson. Finally, we wish fond farewell to Dr. Paula Cowan, who has been Centre Manager for 13 years and with Griffith for over 30 years. As Centre Manager Paula has been a generous and thoughtful colleague and we wish her all the very best for the next chapter of her life.

This is my last Newsletter as Director of the Centre. It is my pleasure to publicly acknowledge colleagues for their generosity, and the Griffith Business School and Griffith University more generally for their unstinting support and commitment to research excellence. It’s been a fun and rewarding seven years.

Re-election to Transparency International (Global) Board of Directors and Launch of the Blueprint for Action

Congratulations to Professor AJ Brown on re-election to the global Board of Transparency International. This position will be for a further 3 years. Professor Brown also led the worldwide development of the coalition’s next 10 year strategy ‘Holding Power to Account: A Global Strategy Against Corruption 2021-2030’.

Australia's National Integrity System: A Blueprint for Action was launched by an online event at Canberra's Parliament House on Monday 30th November 2020. Griffith University and Transparency International Australia have been lead partners in this Australian Research Council-funded assessment. 

The full report of the National Integrity System: A Blueprint for Action Report is available on the website.

(Photo: Professor AJ Brown; J C Weliamuna PC, Transparency International Council; Dr Natasha Molt, Law Council of Australia; Alan Macsporran QC, Chair, Queensland Crime & Corruption Commission).

ARC Success for Professor Kai He and Dr Huiyun Feng  

Congratulations to Professor Kai He and Dr Huiyun Feng on their successful ARC Discovery Grant. Their project is titled Decoding Revisionist Challenges to the International Institutional Order.

This project aims to systematically examine the policy strategies that great powers can employ to challenge international institutions during a period of international order transition. This project expects to develop a new theoretical framework to shed light on how the United States and China compete and cooperate in the different issue areas of global governance. The outcomes of this project will be an in-depth understanding of revisionism in world politics and practical policy recommendations to cope with the dynamics of international order transition. This knowledge should provide significant benefits to Australia’s policy community for making sensible policies against the background of US-China competition in the 21st century.

Coping with Precariousness: Factory Workers' early withdrawal of Pension in Vietnam

Dr Tu Nguyen presented her paper ‘Coping with precariousness: factory workers' early withdrawal of pension in Vietnam’ to the Vietnam Studies Research Snapshots (VSRS) Webinars in late October.

VSRS is an informal platform launched in April 2020 by students and scholars of politics, culture and society in Vietnam to present their research, and holds a webinar once every month. In her paper, which was recently published in Law & Society Review, Tu shows how precarious work and life circumstances influence low-income workers' inclination to withdraw their pension money early and revisits some conventional claims about the legitimacy of law in the lives of disadvantaged citizens.

This paper is a part of her broader book project that explores the mutual relationship between law and precariousness in daily life, focusing on Vietnamese citizens. 

Election Turnout in Authoritarian Regimes 

Drs Ferran Martinez I Coma and Lee Morgenbesser have recently authored an article for Electoral Studies. Election Turnout in Authoritarian Regimes is a very topical issue in our current climate.

Their article hypothesizes that election turnout is explained by contestation, coercion and clientelism. The authors have tested the theory using data from over 500 elections in 108 countries between 1960 and 2011.