Congratulations to Pedro Martín-Cadenas, Maxime Borg, and Emdjed Kurdnidjad from the Department of Political and Social Sciences, for receiving their doctorates in January 2025, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
Pedro Martín-Cadenas successfully defended his dissertation, Political Responses to Inequality: The Role of Grievances and Resources, on 24 January 2025. Comprising three substantive chapters, the dissertation identifies contextual factors that condition whether economic inequalities lead to political change. These factors are studied in the context of bank closures in Spain, economic shocks in the UK, and protests over economic inequality across Western Europe.
Read Martín-Cadenas’ thesis in Cadmus.
Maxime Borg has defended his thesis entitled, The Welfare Politics of the Flexibilisation of High-Skilled Workers in Europe, on 27 January 2025. The dissertation is theoretically innovative, making a strong and much overlooked arguement about how a surplus of high-skill workers in recent decades has invoked a tendency to casualization of high skill work across the EU. The three papers that make up the bulk of the dissertation are methodologically sophisticated and highly informative about the diffusion of temporary and solo self-employment in knowledge-based post-industrial economies.
Read Borg’s thesis in Cadmus.
Emdjed Kurdnidjad's innovative thesis, The Discourse of Death in the PKK’s Ideology. A Journey to Fathom Political Violence and the Fascination for Death, defended on 27 January 2025, looks at the “fascination for death” in the Kurdish nationalist movement PKK’s ideology and practices. It seems paradoxical that a Marxist nationalist liberation movement could make such a use of the “fascination for death” in its ideology. Kurdnidjad shows convincingly that this notion is deeply embedded in traditional Kurdish culture (kurdayeti) and plays a role in the ideologization of this culture by the PKK.
Read Kurdnidjad’s thesis in Cadmus.