Politics & International Relations - Research

SPIRe staff and research centres are pursuing and publishing cutting-edge scholarly research on a wide variety of topics, many of which are directly relevant to the analytical needs of government and voluntary organisations at the national, European and international levels. The School's substantive and methodological strengths reflect the multi-disciplinary character of its staff.



Much of SPIRe's research activity is associated with the initiatives of the School's four research centres, all of which have strong national and international networks:



UCD Centre for Asia-Pacific Research

UCD Centre for Democracy Research

UCD Centre for Peace and Conflict Research (CPCR) - formerly Institute for British-Irish Studies

UCD Centre for Sustainable Development

UCD Connected_Politics Lab

UCD Dublin European Institute

UCD Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence



All members of SPIRe's academic staff are involved in individual and collaborative research projects in a variety of fields. For details on projects and publications, consult the staff's personal pages.



SPIRe also hosts an interdisciplinary seminar series during the academic year.



In geographic terms, SPIRe has a long-standing reputation for excellence in the study of Irish politics (including the Republic, Northern Ireland, and cross-border issues) and European politics (including the national and EU levels). Other staff members contribute expertise on the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This geographic expertise cuts across the various thematic topics listed below.



In thematic terms, SPIRe has an international reputation for cutting-edge scholarship in the following areas, each of which has multiple academic staff including at least one at professorial level.



Justice, Human Rights and Citizenship. The normative foundations of justice and the conditions for maintaining a liberal state in circumstances of pluralism; citizenship and the constitution of membership over time; the significance of cosmopolitan values for national sovereignty and global distributive justice.



Nationalism, Ethnicity and Conflict. National and group identity formation; micro-macro linkages between individual identities, group behavior and institutional structures; institutional strategies for preventing or resolving identity-based conflict.



Representation and Public Policy: Irish and Comparative Perspectives. State structures, political reform, and democratization; public opinion, voting and lobbying; the design and implementation of public policy.



European and International Integration. The role of state, non-state and supranational actors in integration; the evolution of supranational institutions and identities; the dynamics of intergovernmental negotiation and multi-level governance.



Political Economy and International Development. The determinants of economic development in industrialized and developing countries; the impact of globalization on economic development, social and ecological sustainability; the politics of international trade and finance.



Politics and Data Science: The Connected_Politics Lab is an interdisciplinary hub for researchers using computational methods to study politics and society. Our research interests include computational social science; big data; machine learning; quantitative text analysis; network analysis; agent-based modelling; Bayesian statistics; data mining and visualisation.

Politics & International Relations W143 Graduate Research PhD On Campus FT 4 Years