Research projects and activity

©Xingyuan Wang

Current research projects

Prof John Heathershaw (PI), Identifying Enabler Networks and Their Vulnerabilities

The project undertakes the first-ever large-scale study of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) Aleph database to identify trends in how professional service providers enable cross-border corruption. Containing more than 3.8 billion entries and 50 terabytes of data – including the entirety of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)’s offshore leaks data dumps – Aleph is an investigative data platform that helps journalists follow the money. It is one of the world’s largest troves of documents on corruption including financial records, ownership documents, court filings, and correspondence. However, comparative study of this large dataset which allows us “to see the wood from the trees” has never before been attempted.

Dr Szinan Radi, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship

Socialist-Arab partnerships, Eastern European ideas, and practices of global economic integration

This project will offer the first in-depth analysis of how socialist-Arab partnerships impacted Eastern European ideas and practices of global economic integration. As such, the research will not only uncover an overlooked multidirectional history in contemporary Europe but also provide a new framework to understand today’s populist divergence, thereby likely contributing to an emerging literature that links economic and cultural aspects of post-1970s globalisation to the rise of ‘illiberalism’. The primary aim will be to contextualise Eastern Europe’s economic opening to the Middle East within the late-twentieth-century dynamics of decolonisation, financialisation, and neoliberalisation.

Dr Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, UKRI Network Plus Fellowship

'Russian Arctic Media: Contemporary Indigenous Media Advocacy in the Russophone Far North'

The project investigates how Russian Arctic Indigenous peoples advocate on behalf of their lands and peoples in the wake of the existential threats of Russian ethnonationalism, industrial pollution, and climate change. It focuses on the significance and use of media – broadly defined – in Russian Indigenous peoples’ fight to preserve their cultures and heritages. The Arctic is of key geopolitical and economic importance to Russia: melting ice caused by climate change has opened up new possibilities for hydrocarbon extraction and a Northern Sea route. Such policies are detrimental to the 250,000 Indigenous peoples that are the custodians of Russia’s Northern lands.