Abolish/ Defend/ Repair – Action from the local to the international on a warming fascist planet. (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Armstrong Room Against a backdrop of fascist resurgence and climate breakdown, this conversation brings together active projects for liberated global futures. From anti-racist action to extractivist abolition, from grounded community defence to global solidarity, and from recommoning to reparation – voices around this table work through old and new tactics for building local commons and reviving internationalism.

Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings - panel 1 (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Parsons Room This double-panel explores the way architecture helps us understand politics across Africa. Its aim is to establish cross-disciplinary discussions, using a variety of examples and perspectives, and to explain the complex relationships between international and domestic politics. Architecture is possibly the most political of all the arts. Because it usually requires large capital investment, it is predominantly determined by elites and in Africa, where such capital is often scarce, it is hugely influenced by foreign investors and international aid agencies, as well as international sources of technical expertise, materials and labour. And yet architecture also creates and shapes citizens’ lives, defining the landscapes of daily activities, giving a face to political institutions, and measuring out the quality of facilities, services and housing. Architecture, more than any other art, is thus linked to the material realm of politics, illustrating and shaping wealth distribution and access to power. But more than any other art, it also carries collective symbolic meaning, defining the public sphere, embodying history, international relationships and mediating and shaping collective experience. In one powerful example, most African countries have inherited buildings from the colonial era, and have since grappled with the challenge of how to reimagine and repurpose such buildings after independence. The panel explores questions around statehood, pan-Africanism, international investment and political influence; tradition and modernity; and decolonisation – all through the medium of public buildings.

(Re)Production of Gendered Violence and Resistance (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Collingwood Room The panel unpacks multiple ways of production of gendered violence along with practices to resist it.

American Miltarization and Intervention: Strategies and Tactics in the 21st Century (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Katie Adie This panel explores American miltarization and intervention policies in the 21st century.

Ambitious Development and Development Ambitions: shifting goals and actors in African Development (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Carilol This panel explores a variety of ways in which development is being envisaged and enacted across multiple African contexts. It highlights the importance of development ambitions, goals and targets in addressing questions of health, food security and poverty but situates these ambitions within the broader political economies of development. Considering how different actors and stakeholders understand and pursue their visions for development, the panel brings a critical lens to development actors and approaches, including public health actors, NGOs, African and Western states and development consultants. The papers bring questions of power, critical consciousness and knowledge economies to the foreground.

Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings - panel 2 (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Sandhill Room This double-panel explores the way architecture helps us understand politics across Africa. Its aim is to establish cross-disciplinary discussions, using a variety of examples and perspectives, and to explain the complex relationships between international and domestic politics. Architecture is possibly the most political of all the arts. Because it usually requires large capital investment, it is predominantly determined by elites and in Africa, where such capital is often scarce, it is hugely influenced by foreign investors and international aid agencies, as well as international sources of technical expertise, materials and labour. And yet architecture also creates and shapes citizens’ lives, defining the landscapes of daily activities, giving a face to political institutions, and measuring out the quality of facilities, services and housing. Architecture, more than any other art, is thus linked to the material realm of politics, illustrating and shaping wealth distribution and access to power. But more than any other art, it also carries collective symbolic meaning, defining the public sphere, embodying history, international relationships and mediating and shaping collective experience. In one powerful example, most African countries have inherited buildings from the colonial era, and have since grappled with the challenge of how to reimagine and repurpose such buildings after independence. The panel explores questions around statehood, pan-Africanism, international investment and political influence; tradition and modernity; and decolonisation – all through the medium of public buildings.

After Brexit: Navigating Britain’s Security, Defence, and Foreign Policy (European Security Working Group) Room: Pandon Room In the aftermath of leaving the European Union, Britain is at a crossroads. Since the end of the Second World War, the UK has straddled the Atlantic, maintaining close relationships with both the US and Europe. It has forged a ‘Special Relationship’ with the US while participating in the EU’s Single Market and the Common Security and Defence Policy. In effect, Britain’s strategy has been to move seamlessly between these two poles and to serve as a power broker and translator between them. After leaving the EU, what sort of relationship will Britain seek— should it seek— with its European neighbours and allies? How will Britain define its new place in the world? What will be the impact of Brexit on Europe’s security, defence, and intelligence strategies given the departure of one of the EU’s most important security actors? To what extent should the UK participate in initiatives such as the European Security Council or the French-led European Intervention Initiative? What kind of foreign and security policy do the British people want? There are no clear answers to these questions, but this roundtable aims to kickstart a set of ‘After Brexit’ conversations within the BISA academic community.

Civil Wars, Proxy Wars, and Insurgencies (War Studies Working Group) Room: Sandhill Room This panel analyses the latest developments in global civil wars, proxy wars, and insurgencies. The panel brings together a range of perspectives and expertise to tackle some of the most important issues in the field. The panellists build upon their diverse expertise - from the Middle East and South-East Asia, through to the analysis of influential military technologies - to provide an important, wide-ranging, and cross-disciplinary discussion.

20 Years on and 10 Resolutions in: Wither Women, Peace and Security? (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Pandon Room To date over 80 states have adopted National Action Plans (NAPs) on Women, Peace and Security since the Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 in 2000, in addition to regional organisations such as NATO, the AU, OSCE and the EU. The momentum at first glance seems unstoppable, yet this increased visibility leads to the question of whether the rhetoric lives up to the reality of action. There has also been significant pushback on gender equality and WPS at the national and international level, which makes progress made precarious and increasingly under threat. In addressing these issues, it is important to remember that UNSCR 1325 was a Resolution like no other, relying on advocacy from within civil society, the UN, states and from academics to realise its adoption. This roundtable reflects on where we are at and where WPS is going. We therefore bring together, scholars, practitioners, policy makers and civil society to interrogate the prospects for the next 20 years of WPS. The panel will consider: What should civil society’s role in relation to WPS be? What obligations do regional organisations have under WPS? What barriers remain to realising a gender just world and is WPS a solution? And finally, do we need more Resolutions?

Agency, silence and voice in feminist international politics research (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: History Room The examination of silence as a site of agency is an emerging practice in feminist international politics research. Parpart and Parashar (2019) contend that alongside negative articulations of silence, silence can be mobilised as an instrument to evade violence or exercise power. Hansen (2019) theorises silence as paradoxical and non-binary to move beyond the reductive dichotomy ‘speech’ versus ‘silence’. Responding to the conference theme ‘ways of knowing’ international relations, this panel takes a feminist and interdisciplinary approach to challenge dominant knowledge production within critical and qualitative studies examining relations between the international and the local that privilege voice and speech (Parpart and Parashar, 2019). We are particularly interested in papers that explore how silences are used as strategies of power and resistance; discuss theoretical and methodological approaches to researching silence in relation to gendered security and insecurities, international politics, conflict and post-conflict settings, and the creative tensions that emerge during the embodied research encounter.

Changing markets and social development in Africa: technology, norms and practices (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Stephenson Room This panel explores the changing nature of the responses to African developmental challenges. It highlight the roles that technology and changing political and economic norms are is playing in transforming markets and how this is impacting on strategies of development across the continent. The papers tackle these issues from a range of perspectives, from exploring the international community’s role, to analyses of specific economic sectors. The panel challenges conventional understandings of the role of foreign direct investment and international financial frameworks in shaping African development within the international political economy.

Between Inclusion and Exclusion: The Liberal Ordering of Movement and the Mobile Struggle for Rights (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Collingwood Room A large and increasingly diverse body of critical and interdisciplinary scholarship exists today at the intersection of mobility, migration, citizenship and border studies which explores the increasing securitization of movement and migration in so-called liberal contexts. Within this, focus has been placed in particular on the varied structures, mechanisms and processes which enable or maintain the exclusion, control, surveillance or differential inclusion of particular subject communities and groups be they minorities, refugees or asylum seekers. This work, cumulatively, has contributed much to our understanding of not only citizenship regimes and the ways in which they order movement, but of the shifting bases of contemporary mobility itself. This panel situates itself within this work, but also draws particular attention to the mobile struggle for rights waged by communities as they navigate routes and/or forge new and alternative pathways to rights as part of their everyday life and struggle for survival.