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Around the time Diane Stone and Richard Higgott left The University of Warwick to come to UWA, cuts in government funding for the humanities and social sciences in the UK were announced.

But as the Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Winthrop Professor Krishna Sen said: "Diane and Richard are not economic refugees from the UK system despite comments published in The Australian a few months ago.

"Their arrival, and that of Professor Mark Beeson from Birmingham last year and Professor Sarah Percy (Oxford) next year, is all about UWA 's growing research capacity in international relations.

"This is the part of the globe where the action is, both in real transformations in international relations and in academic studies of international relations and international public policy. It is from here that political scientists should expect to re-think the shape of world politics - in the neighbourhood of Singapore's internationally high-ranked National University of Singapore, in the same time zone as the top and fast rising universities of China, in the midst of a mining boom which is re-writing this state's relationship to the Indian Ocean region," she said.

Winthrop Professor Stone and Winthrop Professor Higgott have taken extended leave from Warwick and are following the increasingly popular trend of dividing their time between universities in different hemispheres.

It is an arrangement that benefits all parties with, in this case, UWA being included in a €10 million global research project of Professor Higgott's funded by the European Commission on Europe's power and moral purpose in a multipolar world. Both academics bring extensive international networks of collaborators with them to the School of Social and Cultural Studies.

Professor Stone is originally from WA and Professor Higgott taught here in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While still a Professor in politics and international studies at Warwick, Professor Stone is also a Professor of Public Policy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. She was the Marie Curie Chair at CEU for four years and was the founding director of their Master's program in public policy.

Professor Higgott said he was looking forward to getting back to research, after a gap of four years as Pro Vice- Chancellor at Warwick where he still retains the chair in international political economy.

His previous appointments include chairs at the University of Manchester and the Australian National University where he was also variously Director of Studies for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and National Director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, following early career appointments in the Kennedy School at Harvard, UWA and Murdoch. Visiting professorships have been held in Vienna, Singapore, Bangkok, Berlin, Budapest and Paris.

Professor Stone was, until this year, a member of the Council of the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank. While working in the World Bank in Washington DC, she was a member of the Secretariat that launched the Global Development Network in 1999.

Her current research focuses on global networks and governance, while her specific interests include the influence of ideas and expertise on policy.

"This is where changes are made - behind the scenes," Professor Stone said. "I'm interested in the long-term structural dynamics of policy, not the personalities of politics."

Professor Higgott will be commuting to Warwick every couple of months, in his role of Director of his EU project. "The funding is for four years and the Asia Pacific institutional partners other than UWA are Peking University, Waseda University in Tokyo and the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. We are trying to develop some comparative and cross-national initiatives in global public policy analysis," he said.

The professorial couple are delighted to be back in WA , even though it meant leaving their 17th century home at Stoneleigh Abbey where Jane Austen wrote large parts of Mansfield Park.

Published in UWA News , 2 May 2011