ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Governance and Public Policy
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Biography
Sara E. Davies is an ARC Post-doctoral Fellow and Chief Investigator of an ARC Discovery grant titled 'Containing H5N1: the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) and East Asian states'. This project entails two objectives. The first is to identify how global surveillance networks enhance the capacity of the WHO to seek verification of disease outbreaks from states, and second, to identify how regional specific programmes aimed at enhancing event based surveillance have succeeded in the East Asian region. One significant outcome from the research project will be a comparative database detailing all disease outbreak alerts and reports within the Asian region from multiple disease surveillance networks from 1996 to present day. The database will test whether states are increasingly the timeliness of disease outbreak verification, which infectious diseases receive higher reportage and which surveillance networks are most accurate in their disease alert reportage. The long term intention is for the database to be updated each year with data comparing timely disease outbreak reports and verifications from various global disease surveillance networks.
Sara is also co-Chief Investigator for an ARC Discovery grant with Professor Alex J. Bellamy (Griffith University) titled 'An Early Warning Framework for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities'. This project identifies the preconditions that predict the likelihood of genocide and mass atrocities that can be developed into a early warning prediction list for each year, and maps the differences in preconditions and interventions regarding the 'event' cases and 'non-event' cases. The intended outcome of the project will be to develop a typology of interventions that will enhance the prevention tools available for halting genocide and mass atrocities. The project involves the development of a precondition watchlist from 1998-2008, with plans for this watchlist to become a ongoing yearly exercise with detailed case study reports.
Sara has published two sole authored books, Global Politics of Health (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010) and Legitimising Rejection: International Refugee Law in South East Asia (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers), and four edited books. She has published a number of articles in internationally recognised journals such as International Affairs, Security Dialogue, International Journal of Refugee Law, International Relations of Asia Pacific and Australian Journal of International Affairs. Sara is the founding co-editor of a quarterly issued journal, Global Responsibility to Protect, with Alex J. Bellamy and Luke Glanville