Name: CANCELLED - BISA 2020 conference
Start: 2020-06-17T04:00:00+01:00
End: 2020-06-19T22:30:00+01:00
Location: Civic Centre

CANCELLED - BISA 2020 conference

from Wednesday, 17 June 2020 (04:00) to Friday, 19 June 2020 (22:30)

Monday, 15 June 2020
Tuesday, 16 June 2020
Wednesday, 17 June 2020

10:30 Abolish/ Defend/ Repair – Action from the local to the international on a warming fascist planet.
Abolish/ Defend/ Repair – Action from the local to the international on a warming fascist planet. (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
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.

Author Meets Critics: Cloud Ethics
Author Meets Critics: Cloud Ethics (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Council Chamber In Cloud Ethics, Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms. Amoore offers a new view on the debate on fairness in algorithmic calculation, by paying attention to the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. She proposes what she calls “cloud ethics” as a way to hold algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate. The book will be published by Duke University Press in May 2020. This Roundtable facilities a discussion about Cloud Ethics and organizes a discussion between the author and her critical readers.

Dealing with Popular Discontent on Security and Migration
Dealing with Popular Discontent on Security and Migration (European Security Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Stephenson Room This panel explores how national and European actors understand and govern popular discontent. The panel focuses specifically on three areas of criminalisation - migration, urban protests and homelessness - and proposes an in-depth analysis of the actors' discoursive practices and operational responses.

Decolonising Politics Curricula: Pedagogies, Strategies and Reflections
Decolonising Politics Curricula: Pedagogies, Strategies and Reflections (Learning and Teaching Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Pandon Room Making sense of contemporary politics is not only a challenge for scholarly research, but equally for teaching and learning in International Studies. Both the composition of the classroom in UK universities, and the complexity of recent political developments provide key drivers for critical understandings that engages with wider social structures, recognises the global interconnectedness, and moves away from Eurocentric, masculine and heteronormative perspectives in knowledge and knowledge production. This roundtable features a range of university teachers who are engaging with the challenge to diversify and decolonise the curriculum by offering critical perspectives on power relations, inequalities, and marginalisation. This session aims to speak to a large constituency of conference participants by bringing together scholars from quantitative political scientists as well as critical political economists and political theorists. In doing so, all of the participants address the need to disrupt and reconceptualize key concepts and historical narratives. Sahra Taylor and John Morris argue that decolonization of social, political and economic theory and history requires more than the simplistic insertion of more brown, black and queer voices. These participants will open up a dialogue about how to go about disrupting narratives of world history through an attention to violence, a fracturing of the colonial world and western economic norms. As such, this requires a retheorizing of the history of thought through authors such as Madlingozi, Fanon, Bhabha and Modiri. This means that authors and topics cannot be merely injected into a traditional curriculum, nor can they be emphasized as ‘other’ through a positioning as the ‘exotic.’ Sahra Taylor argues that decolonization cannot be simply subsumed into the pre-existing neoliberal academy. She provides a critical reading of the traditional and most commonly used plan for teaching International political theories which places power-pragmatism before institution building and relegates (morality and emancipation to after-thoughts in the more poorly attended latter half of the term. Women and people of colour tend to be marginalised because people of colour feature in the week on post-colonialism (in response to white colonialism) and women appear in feminism (in response to patriarchal norms). John Morris focuses on his attempts to reshape IPE teaching by undergirding the story of the historical development of capitalism through the intimate relationship between liberalism, markets and Empire, the gendering of credit and gambling during the financial revolution and the role of reproductive labour though the gendered nature of primitive accumulation. He is keen to present initial findings from his Ongoing teaching innovation project ““Trans-gender Inclusive Curriculum Design in Politics and International Studies” which brings in transgender history and scholarship into this disruptive history of capitalism. Neema Begum, Nadine Zwiener-Collins, Rima Saini, Juvaria Jafri and Tabitha Poulter bring to bear their different expertise, experiences and perspectives on the potential for critical approaches to quantitative research to be incorporated into undergraduate teaching of statistics in the social sciences in the UK. The focus of this discussion is conceptual innovation. This requires a careful and sensitive re-centring of framing and operationalising research questions and concepts which are concerned with social and political inequality and transformation. These participants are keen to discuss the understanding and measurement of concepts such as democracy, gender inequality, and humanitarian aid as examples, and aim to supplement those theoretical suggestions with considerations of feasibility and practical aspects derived from 16 semi-structured interviews with academics. The panellists will also consider and discuss the need to encourage methodological pluralism which best fit the aims of the research question at hand and do justice to the population(s) in question.

Europeanisation, nationalism and democracy in South East Europe
Europeanisation, nationalism and democracy in South East Europe (South East Europe Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Katie Adie This panel contributes to our understanding of the ongoing political transformations, challenges to substantive democratisation, and the persistence of nationalist trends that characterise South East Europe today.

Explorations at the Intersection of the Official Record, the Rule of Law, National Security and Democracy
Explorations at the Intersection of the Official Record, the Rule of Law, National Security and Democracy (International Law and Politics Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Sandhill Room The intersection between the official record, the rule of law, national security and democracy is inherently contested. A full consideration of it incorporates an interconnected set of hardware that can be deployed far from the borders of a state (drones), policies deployed internally (counter radicalisation schemes such as Prevent), procedures that can lessen the geographical distance between states for individuals (extradition) and actions to interfere in the internal politics of other states that appear to contradict publicly-stated positions (as some of the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks appear to show). Intellectually, work that has attempted to develop generalisable insights at this intersection has been written from a variety of perspectives, ranging from relatively sympathetic to the reasoning and rhetoric put forward by states to overtly critical work written with an emancipationary goal in mind. This panel will explore the divisions and debates that define this intellectual terrain, whilst simultaneously engaging with empirical case studies. Material drawn from the official record (broadly conceived) will be privileged.

Hegel, Hegelianism and Ethics in International Relations:
Hegel, Hegelianism and Ethics in International Relations: (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Daniel Wood The aim of this panel is to reassert the significance of Hegel and the Hegelian tradition of political philosophy for the contemporary study of International Relations. Although recognised as one of the most significant philosophers of modernity and as an influential political theorist and ethicist of the first rank, G.W.F. Hegel has not exerted a comparable influence on the development of the discipline of International Relations. The central claim of this panel is that the relative neglect of Hegel’s complex meditations on politics and ethics at the international level ought to be redressed as his work offers a valuable critical resource for contemporary theorists of international society. If Kant was the political philosopher of a post-Cold War Cosmopolitan, liberal world order, Hegel promises to play a similar role in the contemporary era of crisis. The eclipse of Cosmopolitan principles of global governance invites reinvestigation into Hegel’s insights into the nature of ethics, politics and society. Hegel confronts theorists of the international with a series of challenges to prevailing orthodoxies and offers the means to rethink the bases of global politics by reference not only to moral requirements but political necessities. In contrast to Kant and contemporary cosmopolitans, Hegel and Hegelianism do not prioritise what ‘ought’ to be over how things ‘are.’ The Hegelian aim is to understand the ethical as a fluid, dynamic set of possibilities within a political context as opposed to a static set of legal commandments. The purpose of this panel is to probe these possibilities in a critically engaged fashion, drawing attention to both the promise and the problems inherent in the Hegelian theorisations of - inter alia – war, peace, and the role of law. In an era of growing pessimism and defeatism, IR can afford to ignore Hegel no longer. Hegel’s clear-sighted, balanced theory of IR is the ideal antidote to both the naivety of Cosmopolitanism and also the cynical opportunism of populism.

Inclusion and Exclusion in Global Health
Inclusion and Exclusion in Global Health (Global Health Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Carilol The papers in this panel explore different ways in which particular groups, individuals and ways of knowing can be included in or excluded from global health decision-making and analysis. Topics include narrow understandings of mental health within IR, property rights in new molecular antibodies and epistemologies of gender based water insecurity.

Masculinities and Queer Perspectives in Transitional Justice
Masculinities and Queer Perspectives in Transitional Justice (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Collingwood Room Although the field and study of transitional justice – referring to measures designed to deal with the legacies of human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts or authoritarian regimes – was traditionally silent on gender, the past decade witnessed the increasing utilization of feminist theories to elucidate the gendered workings of post-conflict transitions. Not at least since Bell and O’Rourke in 2007 have posed the critical questions of ‘where are women, where is gender and where is feminism in transitional justice’, considerations around gender have increasingly gained traction in the growing literature. However, while gender perspectives have become a burgeoning focus of analysis in the TJ field, the dominant conceptualization of 'gender' in scholarship and practice on dealing with the past effectively remains an exclusive one, predominantly equated with ‘women’. As a result of these dominant foci and conceptions, careful consideration for the roles of masculinities and for the experiences of sexual and gender minorities remains mostly absent. By bringing different critical approaches to gender in TJ – including masculinities and queer perspectives – into conversation, this panel begins to address these gaps. We thereby contribute towards a more inclusive and holistic understanding of gender in transitional spaces, which both challenges and contributes to current approaches and practices. The papers in this panel address incorporate masculinities and queer perspective across different post-conflict contexts, as well as from diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological backgrounds, to illustrate the diversity of contexts where such approaches offer new insights into understanding, disrupting and/or complexifying these processes.

Mobilities, Subjectivities, and Technologies
Mobilities, Subjectivities, and Technologies (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Martin Luther King This panel brings together papers engaging with the creation of infrastructures and regimes of governance, and with the experiences of those produced as the mobile or aesthetic subjects of these forms of power.

Narratives, struggles and violence in Africa: perception, ritual, practice and memorialisation
Narratives, struggles and violence in Africa: perception, ritual, practice and memorialisation (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Swan Room Papers on this panel examine questions violence and struggle in Africa with a particular focus on the discourses and narratives which give them meaning. The papers cover a broad range of actors – humanitarian, combatant, religious leaders, security professional - and sites of narrative - the mine, the museum, and memoirs. The papers all focus on the various ways in which narratives are used in relation to violence, including discourses of climate change, counter-narratives of reintegration, colonial nostalgia and testimony. These factors play out in Africa in the context of colonial histories and environmental degradation that shape practices, forms of violence, and the memory of them. Drawing on a range of case studies from across the continent, the papers contribute to discussions about the intersecting nature of narratives of violence, struggle and possibility in Africa.

Power and Order in International History
Power and Order in International History (British International History Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Bewick Room This panel brings together a range of individual papers submitted under the auspices of the BIHG dealing with aspects of international history.

War care: Infrastructures of bodily destruction and regenesis
War care: Infrastructures of bodily destruction and regenesis (War Studies Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: History Room War, health, medicine and care intersect in complex ways. Spurred in-part by the proliferation and dispersion of war and war-like violence in the 21st century, this panel will explore growing interest in science and social science in war injury and war care in recent years. In contrast to operational and logistical readings of the battlefield, in which attention to technical and tactical details often evades the how bodies are broken, made sick or killed, each of papers excavates the battlefield as a site and medium through which war can be read as series of decisions and designs in which casualties are not simply an effect – but central in the structure and infrastructures of warfare. Touching on the calibration of force, post conflict health services, sexual violence, and rehabilitation practices, the panel explores diverse practices though which through which bodies and lives are lost and regained, saved and severed, amended, extended and irreparably altered. Orientated around the materiality and metaphor of wounds, this panel considers war not from its causes but its signature consequences: injury, maiming and killing. In so doing, it articulates 'war care' as a framework for a conversation around new ways to think about the power of war and (para)military violence not only to destroy health infrastructures and subjectivities of care but also to be generative of them.

War, emotion and foreign policy
War, emotion and foreign policy (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Parsons Room This panel brings together a series of papers situated at the intersection of emotions and International Relations, foreign policy and war. Drawing on a range of theoretical influences and methodological approaches, the panel offers an interdisciplinary discussion as to the role of emotions in elite, individual and national perspectives. Consequently, the papers tackle the role that emotions have in the development of foreign policy and its implementation, in national and bilateral negotiations between countries, in diplomatic relations, as well as in conflict. In so doing the papers push the discourse of emotions and war within the discipline to imagine not only emotions such as anger and fear, but to consider the role of pride, recognition, anxiety, the therapeutic governance inspired by codifications of trauma, trust, and collective emotional mobilization in foreign policy and transnational movements.

Water Security Across Scales: Intersections of the International
Water Security Across Scales: Intersections of the International (Environment Working Group)
10:30 - 12:00
Room: Dobson Room Over the past two decades, water security studies have expanded rapidly. Global risks to water frequently rank among the most prevalent challenges in major surveys by the World Economic Forum. Worldwide, freshwater ecosystems are severely threatened, and urban water challenges make headlines from Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro to Flint, Michigan. The purpose of this panel is to examine water security across scales in order to consider how intersecting social, historical, environmental, political, and economic factors affect both empirical explanations and conceptual concerns. The panel has several aims: First, it examines how understandings of water security have evolved alongside new understandings of global risks—from economic and political crises to those arising from impacts on water systems in which the division of the ‘human’ from the ‘natural’ is increasingly blurred. Second, it juxtaposes papers that use different scales of analysis in order to identify aspects of water security challenges that may intersect in surprising ways with both larger-and smaller-scale dynamics. Third, it identifies future areas for water security studies through papers that examine understudied aspects of water insecurity. Together, the three aims offer an opportunity to rethink the boundaries and connections of water systems that connect the everyday to the ecological and to the international.

12:00 Lunch Break
Lunch Break
12:00 - 13:00

13:00 Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings - panel 1
Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings - panel 1 (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
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.

Challenging international legal norms and institutions
Challenging international legal norms and institutions (International Law and Politics Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Collingwood Room This panel engages with challenges to international institutions, laws and norms in the context of human rights.

Future Challenges for International Political Economy
Future Challenges for International Political Economy (International Political Economy Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Katie Adie This panel brings together a range of scholars working in the field of International Political Economy. The papel aims to (a) take stock of current scholarly trends within the field of IPE in the UK; and (b) refelect on 'future challenges' for the field. These include: 'blindspots' in IPE, Brexit, decolonising IPE, and re-thinking IPE from the perspective(s)of gender, work and religion.

Gender Approaches to International Politics: From the Micro to the Macro
Gender Approaches to International Politics: From the Micro to the Macro (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: History Room This panel explores a range of gendered approaches to international politics and covers topics from micro to macro levels in scale.

Gender(ed) Knowledge through Art
Gender(ed) Knowledge through Art (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Armstrong Room The panel explores different sites of gendered knowledge in global politics through art and popular culture.

Innovation in Learning and Teaching: Theory and Practice
Innovation in Learning and Teaching: Theory and Practice (Learning and Teaching Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Council Chamber This panel will explore innovation in learning and teaching related to students, skills development, technology, and professional development within the contemporary international studies classroom .

Interpretivist approaches to IR theory
Interpretivist approaches to IR theory (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Daniel Wood Interpretivist approaches to IR theory

Perspectives of Security Threats
Perspectives of Security Threats (European Security Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Dobson Room This panel explores EU and national perspectives of security challenges and institutional responses. The papers compare national approaches, examine the role of institutions (path dependency) and shed light on why when faced with similar challenges actors respond differently.

Refusing Redemption: failure, endurance and persistence
Refusing Redemption: failure, endurance and persistence (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Pandon Room This panel starts in the ruins: it acknowledges the current global forces of abandonment, exploitation and violence. However, instead of latching onto one of many crisis framings with ready-made normative resolutions, throwing up our hands in despair, or indulging in narcissistic self-loathing, we pursue a different trajectory. We aim to think and feel our way alongside current global catastrophes without an end goal of solution or redemption. In essence, we are f***ed, and we know we are f***ed: so what next? We look instead to communities that have long been surviving in conditions of ruin and abandonment, and find inspiration for how to live otherwise. This panel refuses the seductions of redemption and catharsis in favour of building global attachments (possibly solidarities?) that are characterised as much by contingency as they are by persistence and durability. Following recent arguments in Geography, Anthropology, Political Theory and Sociology, this panel confronts critical IR with new imaginaries of endurance, exhaustion, ongoingness and slow violence.

Reprising the Relationship between War and Technology
Reprising the Relationship between War and Technology (War Studies Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Martin Luther King Three decades have now passed since the canonical ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) debates of the early 1990s. Grounded in the historical idea of a “military revolution”, concepts like digital RMA and Network Centric Warfare promised a technologically-driven paradigm-shift in the conduct, character – and perhaps even nature – of war. With hindsight, however, many of these highest aspirations failed to materialise. Even so, in the intervening years, military-technical innovation has remained a central feature of soldierly activity and scholarly interest alike; prominent even during the supposedly people-centric wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the prospect of renewed inter-state competition, on the one hand, and the increasing potency of non-state actors, on the other, has brought questions of technological change and military effectiveness to the fore once again. This panel seeks to reprise traditional understandings of technology and security, by exploring the myriad interconnections between martial praxis and material artefacts. In so doing, it will examine the impact of emerging innovations on warfare, alongside the role of politics and society in generating technical change, to address the underlying conceptual relationships between technology and war.

Shaping IR according to our values: a disciplinary asymetrical fantasy?
Shaping IR according to our values: a disciplinary asymetrical fantasy? (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Bewick Room While many areas of IR have sought to address the wider world, these attempted conversations have often been asymmetrical, reflecting the context and social relations from which they emerge. However, the way that asymmetry is structured, whether in terms of policy relevance or cultural implications, has changed over time with clear consequences for the way that scholars understand what they do. This panel addresses these questions with a broad focus on how different disciplinary frontiers have come to interact with, and be shaped by, a range of factors including new technologies and sciences, the globalisation of the discipline and the social needs that IR has sought to respond to. It further asks how, and whether, the discipline can be said to have a core or unique set of social - scientific values, and how these are best actualised given the asymmetries addressed

Stability and power in interventions
Stability and power in interventions (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Carilol Stability and power in interventions

Technology in IR
Technology in IR (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Sandhill Room Technology in IR

The politics of comparison and relationality: colonial grammars, knowledge production & counter-politics - Part II
The politics of comparison and relationality: colonial grammars, knowledge production & counter-politics - Part II (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Stephenson Room This BISA roundtable is Part two of two that seek to extend a number of rolling conversations among IR scholars concerning the relations but also tensions within and between logics and forms of coloniality as well as the conditions under which anti-colonial activism and solidarity can take root. Inspired by the work of Stoler and McGranahan (2007), Lowe (2015) and Puar (2007), we seek to both examine how colonial linkages are shaped in and through (intimate) circuits of practice as well as how comparative/relational analytics can perform and produce additional modes of colonial governance, fractures and erasure. We will further these discussions through posing questions that consider the politics of comparison and relationality as inherently historical matters that can never be politically disinvested; and thus can contribute to but also efface the possibility of anti-colonial solidarities and movements. Taking this as guiding premise, the participants of this second panel will focus more explicitly on how dissenting to, revealing, practicing and/or producing new forms of relationality operate in modes of anti-colonial contestation, politics and critique. We will look at these themes from a variety of lenses, including indigenous epistemologies, anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements, academic knowledge production and the physical infrastructure that produces settler space. Again, the emphasis here is on contributing to new paradigms and practices for challenging colonial relations in the present.

Visuality and Emotions in International Politics
Visuality and Emotions in International Politics (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
13:00 - 14:30
Room: Swan Room The proposed panel takes up the recent “visual turn” in research on emotions in international politics. Building on the work by Rebecca Ander-Nissen, Katrine Emilie Andersen and Lene Hansen, especially their concept of “emotional bundling”, this panel suggests to explore the relationship between visuality and emotionality further. Empirically, it brings together research on different fields of world politics, including conflict, migration and everyday political performativity. At the same time, the panel combines research on different media of expression, including film, graffiti and fashion. Conceptually, we aim at disentangling the experience and expression of emotions from the social and political processes through which they are shared, shaped and transformed. The various contributions challenge discourses of “authenticity” of emotions by highlighting their performativity. They combine a focus on narrative techniques, materiality and gender in order to add nuance to the study of the relationship between images and emotions.

14:30 Coffee and Tea Break
Coffee and Tea Break
14:30 - 15:00

15:00 (Re)Production of Gendered Violence and Resistance
(Re)Production of Gendered Violence and Resistance (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Collingwood Room The panel unpacks multiple ways of production of gendered violence along with practices to resist it.

Art and Activism: Seeing, making, doing politics through art in peace and conflict
Art and Activism: Seeing, making, doing politics through art in peace and conflict (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Daniel Wood There is an increasing interest in aesthetics in international politics, with new research taking seriously the political affects and effects of different ways of ‘seeing politics’ (Harman, 2019). This roundtable is interested in these developments, but also in turning our attention to art as a political practice and exploring how politics is done in art, as well as how it is seen. In particular, the roundtable considers the role of art in conflict and post-conflict spaces, and the potential of such work as activism. As Danko notes, there is a tendency of studies of artistic activism to either focus on the art or the politics, rather than considering them as inseperable and intertwined. The roundtable considers applying “art suspicion”… to reflect upon both Artivism as artistic practice and Artivism as political practice’ (Danko, 2018: 238). This roundtable will explore artistic activist practices in conflict and post conflict and pose a number of questions. What is the role of artists as witnesses of atrocity? How does artistic engagement produce different kinds of politics? How do different forms of activist art by those who have experienced conflict shape politics? What are the tensions between activist, practitioner and donor claims about the value of artistic process? How does the political intent of art shape the form and reception of it? Does artistic activism necessarily broaden political participation, or can it be another form of exclusion? Has the value of an artistic approach been weakened through the integration of the arts in mainstream peacebuilding programmes?

BISA Professional Development Session I
BISA Professional Development Session I (BISA)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: History Room BISA Professional Development Session

Becoming Fugitives - Collaborating towards anti-colonial/decolonial praxis in academic spaces
Becoming Fugitives - Collaborating towards anti-colonial/decolonial praxis in academic spaces (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Dobson Room For colleagues invested in anti-colonial/decolonial movements – and to their disordering and disruption of coloniality, as global and transversal processes – there is a constant, unsettling set of questions that emerge, given the constrictive arena in which we produce our scholarship: How do we produce an ethics of practice that is politically invested in solidarity and allyship; that contributes to rather than extracts from movements and struggles; that challenges attempts to discipline who, what, where and how we teach and share our work? In other words, how do we produce scholarship that operates as and with anti-colonial/decolonial praxis? This roundtable attempts to contribute both conceptually and methodologically to these questions. On one hand, participants already engage these questions in their own work in International Studies: in the way they examine race and gender as imbricated in colonial relations, rethink policing and carcerality as foundational to global capitalist-colonial systems, work to reveal colonial relations in materials and materiality, and envision decolonial methods and practices in quotidian spaces and lives. On the other, this roundtable asks participants to read and reflect on the work of the other members, and thus present on how the challenges and political projects inherent to their colleagues’ work - in terms of methodologies, topics, and approaches - changes and helps to better develop their own. In this way, the roundtable sets out to expand the connections between different analyses of colonial and anti-colonial circuits, and at the same time disrupt the modes of accumulation and extraction that are central to academic knowledge production, and which we are consistently encouraged to pursue. Our aim is to contribute new thinking about collaboration and collective production that is both rigorous and generative; encouraging ally-ship, solidarity, support and political accountability to one another, and to the communities with which we work on the ground.

Chinese Hard and Soft Power in the 21st Century
Chinese Hard and Soft Power in the 21st Century (Foreign Policy Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Martin Luther King This panel examines the latest research on Chinese foreign and geopolitical policies.

Communicating the climate change: Narratives, images and affective imagination
Communicating the climate change: Narratives, images and affective imagination (Environment Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Swan Room National and international communities are facing more and more challenges, related with the environment. The impacts of man-made global warming are distributed and felt (though not equally) across the international system, transcending traditional boundaries of the states of the international political system. The inherent complexities of climate change make it wicked problem – a multidimensional puzzle that is difficult to resolve due to interrelation with other issues and differing views on the nature and potential solutions of the problem. This panel concentrates on the communication of climate change. Namely, we are interested in narratives, frames and images that various political actors use for forging the strategic meanings related with the environment. That kind of communication often blends the arguments of climate science with affectively loaded stories about the victims of global warming and the selfish motivations of the antagonists. Besides suggesting how to address climate change now, those messages frequently focus on envisioning potential future consequences and unprecedented threats. A noteworthy tendency is also the articulation of climate skeptic arguments and strategic spreading of misinformation.

Comprehensive Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development on the Korean Peninsula
Comprehensive Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development on the Korean Peninsula (Asian Political and International Studies Association)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Katie Adie East Asia is a region deeply affected by conflict, yet there is no collective security apparatus. Facing diverse challenges, successive governments in the region have adopted state-centric national security policies with an emphasis on national sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity. The most extreme manifestation of this state-centricity can be found on the Korean Peninsula where the two regimes, North and South, view each other as existential threats. Attempts to manage the conflict by coercing the “other” into acquiescence through threats and sanctions have proved ineffectual. Likewise, attempts to buy peace through incentivizing the other have failed to resolve the conflict. This panel, therefore, proposes a “comprehensive” approach to peacebuilding on the Korean Peninsula that simultaneously broadens the security discourse to encompass aspects of positive peace and sustainable development, while also looking to the long-term transformation of conflictual relations. The comprehensive construction of peace requires an understanding of the true interests and needs of all parties. This means that all parts of society must be included in the social construction and adoption of peaceful norms. Comprehensive perspectives on peacebuilding call for “positive, proactive programs that promote peace building, rather than negative, reactive programs intended to reduce violence” and a focus on promoting harmony, understanding, and effective problem solving.” In other words, comprehensive perspectives on peacebuilding concentrate on how to bring people constructively together to build a whole greater than the sum of the parts, rather than on how to keep them apart in order to mitigate against the worst manifestations of conflicts of interests. This panel will bring together scholars and students from the disciplines of international relations, development cooperation, and North Korean studies to assess the possibilities for building a comprehensive peace founded on the principles of sustainable and equitable development.

Forced Migration in Theory and Practice
Forced Migration in Theory and Practice (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Pandon Room This roundtable will bring together academics and practitioners in order to foster a critical exploration of key concepts relating to forced migration: welcome, membership and inclusion, protection, sanctuary, solidarity, hospitality and trauma. In the spirit of theorizing practice and practicing theory, the roundtable will provide for discussion of the politics, practice and pedagogy of these key concepts within institutions including the United Nations, states, local government authorities, communities and universities. Specific practices to be discussed include: • Global Migration Governance • State Securitisation Practices • City of Sanctuary • University of Sanctuary • Trauma Informed Pedagogy Drawing on a variety of cases and experiences at different levels of engagement, the roundtable will consider the limitations and potential these concepts provide and explore the relationship between global discourses on forced migration and local practices that often traverse them.

Health prioritisation in national and international institutions
Health prioritisation in national and international institutions (Global Health Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Carilol The papers in the panel discuss different cases of how health has been prioritised or otherwise in national, regional and international contexts. The first paper examines Brazi's foreign policy on global health, comparing the institutional cultures of the health and foreign ministries. The second paper critically analyses the European Commission's Health in All Policies concept. The third paper considers why needed health regulations sometimes fail to emerge in international organisations.

Making and Unmaking International Law
Making and Unmaking International Law (International Law and Politics Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Armstrong Room The panel engages with new approaches and interdisciplinary conversations in International Relations and International Law.

Militarism and emotion: feeling with and feeling for figures of war
Militarism and emotion: feeling with and feeling for figures of war (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Council Chamber Research on militarism has long identified gender, race and class as central to the cultural, emotional, political and technological processes which support, enable, legitimise, and contest practices of war-making. The papers in this panel seek to contribute to these debates by explicitly looking at ways in which experiences of compassion and empathy contribute to our understanding of war and violence in a range of different historical, global, cultural and technological sites. The papers explore what political and cultural work is being done through cultivating, announcing, or resisting feeling with and for figures of war and, in doing so, they investigate who may be part of these communities of feeling. They also consider the national and global histories, structures, ethics and identities at work which help to render (in)visible affective participation in war-related activities as part of everyday lives.

New Syngergies in IR
New Syngergies in IR (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Bewick Room New Syngergies in IR

Political mobilisation, hegemony and new democratic politics in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia: inequality and the crisis of liberalism
Political mobilisation, hegemony and new democratic politics in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia: inequality and the crisis of liberalism (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Parsons Room The panel will explore how recent movements and new social actors are responding to crises of democracy, liberalism and structural inequalities in countries across the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia. It will include papers that engage with different forms of mobilisation, social spaces and political legitimacy at the time that democratic politics is characterised by increasingly illiberal rhetoric, nationalism and change. Democratic politics is subject to conflicting developments; it comprises commitments to non-violent strategies and hope as well as rearticulation of new hegemonic frontiers that bolster populist and authoritarian movements. While exploring how democracy and hegemony require different global perspectives, the panellists will seek to draw on critical perspectives such as postcolonialism, poststructuralism, feminist and constructivist theories.

Security in an ice-free Arctic: interdisciplinary perspectives on Arctic geopolitics
Security in an ice-free Arctic: interdisciplinary perspectives on Arctic geopolitics (War Studies Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Sandhill Room The Arctic first emerged as a hotbed of military activity during the Cold War. Technological advances opened up the possibility of overflight by strategic bombers and under-ice passage by nuclear submarines. Defence planners learned to work around the permanent presence of ice. In recent decades though, it has become clear that the future of the Arctic is one that will be increasingly ice-free. As the international community comes to terms with the region's physical transformation, tensions are starting to build. A struggle is emerging over what constitutes legitimate interest and activity in the Arctic. Much of it centres on concerns about purportedly innocent scientific, commercial and military activity serving as a front for different kinds of strategic infiltration in different parts of the Arctic. As a result, the region is increasingly caught up with the global competition being played out by the West, Russia and China. This roundtable brings together perspectives from International Relations and Political Geography to consider what security means to different actors - local, regional and global - in an increasingly ice-free Arctic, and what that might portend for international relations as profound environmental change is encountered in others parts of the world in the coming decades.

Translation and narratives in international politics
Translation and narratives in international politics (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Stephenson Room Translation and narratives in international politics

16:30 Coffee and Tea Break
Coffee and Tea Break
16:30 - 17:00

17:00 American Miltarization and Intervention: Strategies and Tactics in the 21st Century
American Miltarization and Intervention: Strategies and Tactics in the 21st Century (US Foreign Policy Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Katie Adie This panel explores American miltarization and intervention policies in the 21st century.

Britain’s China-Factor: Sino-British Relations and the Economic-Security Interests Conundrum
Britain’s China-Factor: Sino-British Relations and the Economic-Security Interests Conundrum (International Political Economy Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Armstrong Room The consequences of China’s four-decade economic rise have finally spilt over into the international arena. This has led to shifts that extend across geopolitics, security, and political economy, opening new horizons while challenging long-standing dogmas. The United Kingdom, like many countries from the United States to Europe and South-East Asia, is struggling to create a coherent 'China strategy' that overcomes the problematic interlocking between economic and security interests. Indeed, London has to balance a crucial trade interaction with Beijing, the Anglo-American special relationship, ongoing developments in the South China Sea, and a unique historical bond to Hong Kong. Papers in this panel unpack this conundrum from two corresponding perspectives. On the one hand, two papers consider the shifting landscape through the lens of US-China geopolitical competition. Conversely, the other papers investigate Sino-Britain relations by looking at UK’s securitisation of Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) and by exploring the concealed networks behind recent significant events of this relationship. This way, the panel provides a comprehensive picture that accounts for both geopolitical and policy dimensions of Britain’s China dilemma. Considered together, the papers reveal a complex, multifaceted account where engagement with China may become one of Downing Street’s most sophisticated dilemmas.

Changing the dynamics of conflict in the Middle East
Changing the dynamics of conflict in the Middle East (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Sandhill Room This panel focuses on conflict dynamics on multiple scales in the Middle East and most specifically in Palestine-Israel. It explores how identity, sport and populist politics, resistance and perserverance underpin or influence struggles for justice. The panel will examine the role of international actors including how European policies in the region are increasingly challenged with the rise of populist identity politics in Europe.

Curating Conflict: Political violence in Museums, Memorials, and Exhibitions
Curating Conflict: Political violence in Museums, Memorials, and Exhibitions (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: History Room Museums, memorials, and exhibitions are sites through which societies represent, enact, and curate conflict. As privileged sites for diplomatic visits, official state ceremonies, and international tourism, these sites provide salient arenas for (trans)national communication and public debate on military intervention, warfare, and terrorism, amongst other manifestations of violence and conflict. This roundtable will investigate this ‘new frontier’ in International Relations by bringing together researchers who combine empirical analysis with theoretical discussions on the political significance of the curation of conflict in artistic, educational, and commemorative institutions. We invite contributors to address the use of art-inspired methods in research on world politics; the (transnational) politics and economics of curation; the place of museums, galleries and memorials in economies of affect and emotion; relics and materiality, and the international political significance of the cultural realm. We invite authors to draw on rich traditions of work on museums, memorials, in exhibitions in other disciplines such as history of art, anthropology, sociology, and heritage and museum studies, and bring using these to challenge and revisit current understandings of violent conflict as it is known in IR. Conversely, bringing an IR lens to bear on the curation of conflict will positively contribute to overcome naïve or depoliticised accounts of such practices in other disciplines (Sylvester 2015, 4; Lisle 2016, 192–99).

Emerging from conflict, building peace: exploring micro and macro approaches to peace in Africa
Emerging from conflict, building peace: exploring micro and macro approaches to peace in Africa (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Martin Luther King This panel contributes to contemporary and vibrant debates about the processes by which peace can emerge and be sustained in Africa. Exploring a range of peacebuilding approaches and initiatives at different scales, carried out by different actors, the panel enriches our understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of peacebuilding and security in the wake of conflict. These papers come at the challenges examining the processes that can lead to peace from the international level to the national level and also encompassing the experiences and interactions of combatants and civilians.

Feminism and Foreign Policy Thinking and Practice
Feminism and Foreign Policy Thinking and Practice (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Pandon Room The panel questions foreign policy practices and ideas critically from a feminist perspective.

Glory/Trauma: Affective Investments in the National Past
Glory/Trauma: Affective Investments in the National Past (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Council Chamber Recent years have been marked by the consolidation of conservative groups, which have mobilised ‘traditional’ values of autonomy and authenticity in service of addressing concerns about national identity. Central to this movement has been the appropriation and adaptation of national icons and institutions, imbued with historic affective associations. At international and micropolitical levels, this has led to the articulation of national Selfhood in terms that are deeply embedded in practices of commemoration and occlusion. Though dominant national narratives often rest on the subjective portrayal of past glories, competing narratives contest these efforts by revealing deep-rooted national traumas. Through contributions unified by their sustained attention to the affective resonance of vestiges of the past, this panel engages the politics of how we remember by exploring discourses of war and empire, and their connection to aesthetics and institutions. The papers unpack how emotional investments in the past act as interpretive vectors for navigating present anxieties relating to sovereignty, status, and self-esteem. In doing so, they demonstrate how narratives of the past constitute, reinforce and reimagine temporal, spatial, gendered and racialised political hierarchies. Engaging case studies from Britain and Japan, the contributions highlight the need for greater attention to be directed towards the affective draw of ‘the past’.

Grand Questions in Contemporary IR Theory: Legitimation, Order, and Recognition
Grand Questions in Contemporary IR Theory: Legitimation, Order, and Recognition (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Daniel Wood This panels explores grand questions of legitimation, order, and recognition in world politics.

How to rethink traditional topics? gathering methods and strategies
How to rethink traditional topics? gathering methods and strategies (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Swan Room ---

New Norms and Practices of Civilian Protection
New Norms and Practices of Civilian Protection (Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Collingwood Room This IR2PWG panel investigates various aspects of intervention, from zonation in conflict management to gendered vulnerability, to ethical considerations in mass atrocity situations, as well as to existence of a corporate responsibility to protect. Covering a wide range of issues, which are also complementary when thought as part of a whole, this panel provides a critical point of view that goes beyond the state-centric approaches to intervention and civilian protection.

Once More into the Breach: Reading, Writing, and Performing War
Once More into the Breach: Reading, Writing, and Performing War (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Bewick Room The last few years have witnessed a cultural turn in both IR and War Studies. Prompted by the work of Barkawi, Brighton, Sylvester, and Parashar, and inspired by the work of Fussell, Hynes, and Gray, there has been a move to explore the various ways (and sites) in which war has been imagined, experienced, and indeed enacted. This panel brings together a series of papers that consider the different modes, frames, and repertoires (literary, artistic, commemorative, and political) that people have engaged when seeking to make sense of war. The intention is to reflect upon the role that particular cultural resources and practices--from memoirs to theatre to honour flights--play in both delimiting and problematising everyday understandings of warfare.

Provincializing Social Sciences from SEE: Theories, approaches, and methods for the future
Provincializing Social Sciences from SEE: Theories, approaches, and methods for the future (South East Europe Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Dobson Room Studies of Southeast Europe (SEE) always developed in conversation with postcolonial theory, leading to a whole sub-field of interdisciplinary literature that critically examines the practices and effects of Balkanism. While this central position of postcolonial thought in SEE studies brought about many productive engagements, it also left blind spots—notably race (Baker 2018) and class (Zinaić 2017). In IR, we have been witnessing the calls to globalise, provincialize, and decolonise IR. These moves are seen as developments from and beyond postcolonial engagements with international politics. Yet, despite the noted proximity between SEE and postcolonial studies, SEE contributions to provincializing IR (and social science more generally) have been mostly absent (see Mälksoo, 2019 on this issue in wider Central and East Europe). This panel 1) examines the reasons for this absence of SEE in efforts to provincialize social sciences, and 2) looks for theories, approaches, and methods needed for this emerging project. The panel approaches these issues from different perspectives: history of knowledge, narrative accounts of positionality in fieldwork, and methodological debates on comparison and scale. All of the papers start from particular research situations in/on SEE and use those insights to change how and what we know in IR. The panel thus provides possible theories, approaches, and methods for the future of provincializing IR from SEE.

The Future of Human Rights: New Challenges in a Changing World
The Future of Human Rights: New Challenges in a Changing World (International Law and Politics Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Stephenson Room The past two decades have seen significant changes in the way human rights are conceived, implemented and studied. Conceptually, the human rights agenda has undergone a process of expansion, with the identification of new dimensions of rights and new rights holders. Economic, social and cultural rights have gained increasing importance alongside more traditional political and civil rights. These changes have emerged in response to new challenges faced by contemporary societies as well as a new geopolitical landscape. While a trend to establish new legal instruments and procedures to back implementation efforts can be observed in international fora, the attitude of different countries towards human rights is far from homogeneous and is reaching levels of polarisation and contention that were considered to have been overcome in the post-Cold War era, perhaps prematurely. This panel will explore new trends in global human rights, drawing from a range of empirically grounded cases addressing different challenges, including health and social inclusion, digital technologies and cyberviolence, indigenous rights and participatory governance and human rights diplomacy in the UK and beyond.

The Revenge of Tocqueville. The resurgence of individual local politics and membership organising at the expense of apolitical and professional INGOs
The Revenge of Tocqueville. The resurgence of individual local politics and membership organising at the expense of apolitical and professional INGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Carilol This panel explores the rising tension in the relations between professional and grassroots civil society organisations and the rise of individual as responsible agents of aid delivery. The first paper is an empirical research on the rise of grassroots NGOs in the US and what this effect may have on international norms. The findings show that despite expected differences in sophistication and financial accountability, small and large organizations alike converge in their narration of beneficiaries, with the “needs-based” approach prioritized over “rights.” The presenter will discuss the implications of these findings for beneficiary empowerment. The second paper explores the wider context of the Oxfam GB scandal for the aid sector. The research findings reported show that the problem of sexual misconduct is much more widely spread in NGOs than previous research has suggested, and highlights a dearth of research on this topic and that longstanding concerns suggest that there is an industry-wide problem, especially in aid abroad, as highlighted in the outcome of the statutory inquiry on Oxfam. The third paper explores individual agency and moral responsibility of aid workers vis-à-vis the systemic and structural environment of NGOs the author will present arguments that authenticity stands at the core of responsible behaviours in bureaucratic context as key underpinning of actors ability to make independent judgements and their ability challenge existing practices. The final paper discusses the limits of leading NGOs and philanthropists as global governors in the context of national politics and weak international regulatory oversight. Comparing the regulatory changes in Hungary and India the paper explores the boundaries of private non-democratic power of global governance actors.

The politics of comparison and relationality: colonial grammars, knowledge production & counter-politics - PART I
The politics of comparison and relationality: colonial grammars, knowledge production & counter-politics - PART I (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Parsons Room This BISA roundtable is Part one of two that seek to extend a number of rolling conversations among IR scholars concerning the relations but also tensions within and between logics and forms of coloniality as well as the conditions under which anti-colonial activism and solidarity can take root. Inspired by the work of Stoler and McGranahan (2007), Lowe (2015) and Puar (2007), we seek to both examine how colonial linkages are shaped in and through (intimate) circuits of practice as well as how comparative/relational analytics can perform and produce additional modes of colonial governance. We will further these discussions through posing questions that consider the politics of comparison and relationality as inherently historical matters that can never be politically disinvested; and thus can be part of but also efface the possibility of anti-colonial solidarities and movements. Taking this as our guiding premise, the participants of this first panel will consider the way colonial and imperial grammars operate across space and time, through exploring the tensions between claims to uniqueness (exception/singularity) and comparative teleologies and their mutual capacity to entrench colonial grammars. Participants will reflect on their work – which spans transversal nodes and apparatuses of policing, technology, child removal and knowledge production across multiple contexts, to help further decipher how colonialism continues to circulate, and thus produce new spaces and cause ‘the circulation of other things’ (Li 2018: 470).

19:00 Reception
Reception
19:00 - 21:00
Thursday, 18 June 2020

10:00 Ambitious Development and Development Ambitions: shifting goals and actors in African Development
Ambitious Development and Development Ambitions: shifting goals and actors in African Development (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
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.

BISA Professional Development II
BISA Professional Development II (BISA)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Armstrong Room BISA Professional Development II

Challenging Gendered Knowledge in IR’
Challenging Gendered Knowledge in IR’ (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Pandon Room The panel problematises the long-standing gendered areas and dynamics in knowledge production in the discipline of International Relations.

Conceptual revisioning from the Global South
Conceptual revisioning from the Global South (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Sandhill Room These papers offer alternative ways of seeing common practices in IR by drawing on perspectives from either 'the Global South' or 'the subaltern'. These papers uncover how actors in the Global South are revising and reimagining practices such as statehood, nationalism, humanitarianism, drone warfare and sovereignty.

Conflict management and security in Eurasia
Conflict management and security in Eurasia (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Daniel Wood This panel focuses on security and conflict management developments in Eurasia.

Critical Methods and Methodologies for IR
Critical Methods and Methodologies for IR (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Parsons Room Critical methodologies are becoming increasingly popular in the discipline of International Relations (IR). This is not only due to the vast array of new areas the discipline has moved into since the ‘Inter-Paradigm Debate’ but also because of the increasingly common awareness of the complex and interrelated nature of the phenomena we study. Yet moving beyond the dominance of mainstream and positivist approaches has taken considerable time and effort – and many new to the discipline lament access to a viable alternative. This panel is an attempt to overcome this problem. The panel outlines a number of alternative and critical methods to IR by bringing together an exciting and diverse array of critical methods and methodologies for the study of world politics, including feminist, post-colonial, dialectical and qualitative approaches, amongst others.

Critiquing IR
Critiquing IR (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Bewick Room Critiquing IR

Environmental Harm and Justice
Environmental Harm and Justice (Environment Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Dobson Room The contemporary world is experiencing myriad environmental harms and injustices. Perceptions of such harms as climate change, biodiversity loss and deforestation differ according to the communities experiencing them. This panel addresses the contested and contingent nature of environmental harm and injustice, through recourse to a range of cases and regions.

Foreign policy, politics and hegemony in a changing global order
Foreign policy, politics and hegemony in a changing global order (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Swan Room This panel examines foreign policy, changing power dynamics and regional security arrangements in Asia and the Middle East and with global partners. It explores identity construction and new challenges to global hegemonies and the resulting transformations in diplomacy, defence and security at play.

Global Political Economies of Trade and Development
Global Political Economies of Trade and Development (International Political Economy Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Stephenson Room This panel draws together new empirical and theoretical research concerned with the political economy of trade and development. The panel will raise important issues regarding the governence of global trade and aid regimes, the impact of these governance regimes, and the politics and practice of neoliberalism within contemporary international development.

Old Wars, New Technologies? – Challenging and Tracing the Changing Character of War
Old Wars, New Technologies? – Challenging and Tracing the Changing Character of War (War Studies Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Martin Luther King This interdisciplinary panel brings together scholars who focus on the history of technological innovation in war, with those who analyse contemporary and emerging military technologies. Each paper aims to highlight the impact of the technology they analyse on a given conflict and when combined the panel provides a timely reminder of how military innovations can, or cannot, alter the character of warfare.

Politics of Migration in the Global South and the Postcommunist Space
Politics of Migration in the Global South and the Postcommunist Space (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Collingwood Room This panel features papers from the perspective of migrants and their management in the Global South and the postcommunist space. Chernobrov discusses engagement of the Armenian diaspora with genocide recognition and Nagorno-Karabakh. Kneebone presents aspects of the politics of migrants' resistance. Moulin focuses on South-South relations in migration politics. Kabata delves deeper into aspects of considering migrants a security threat in Poland.

Processes of peace agreements and state building
Processes of peace agreements and state building (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: History Room Processes of peace agreements and state building

The Global Politics of Cyberspace: Mapping the Emergence of Communities of Practice
The Global Politics of Cyberspace: Mapping the Emergence of Communities of Practice (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Council Chambe From cyber-diplomats to technical experts, the governance of cyberspace encompasses a plethora of actors, practices and social, economic, and political dynamics. This panel is a mapping exercise of the emerging practices currently shaping the global politics of cyberspace, one of the most crucial areas of activity in contemporary international relations (IR). Such an approach provides an important starting point to (i) (re)thinking change in power dynamics, (ii) reassessing public-private/state-non state divides, (iv) analysing expert-based knowledge production dynamics. This panel has three aims. First, to take stock of those changes/divides by examining emerging dynamics of cyberspace governance. Second, to problematise how these practices affect the understandings of international relations, both as a macro-practice, and as a discipline. Finally, to contribute to situating the ‘practice turn’ in IR within a broader interdisciplinary exercise.

The colonial making of contemporary international discourse
The colonial making of contemporary international discourse (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Katie Adie These papers expose and unsettle the coloniality and racialisation behind common but underexplored Western discourses. How are binaries of colonial/ colonised articulated within and constitutive of ideas such as military victory, climate change in christian movements, international security, emerging powers respectively.

11:30 Coffee and Tea Break
Coffee and Tea Break
11:30 - 12:00

12:00 Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings - panel 2
Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings - panel 2 (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
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.

Bringing War Studies into the 21st Century
Bringing War Studies into the 21st Century (War Studies Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Swan Room This panel seeks to engage with the war studies tradition, which has traditionally formed around multidisciplinary research into the causes, effects, and ethics of organized violence. It does so by bringing together papers that focus on the technological, political, strategic, sociological, ethical, and legal debates surrounding the phenomenon of organized violence. In doing so, it seeks to illustrate not only the breadth of the war studies tradition in the 21st century, but the conceptual links between these different issue-areas that create the field.

Foreign Policy and Political Communication
Foreign Policy and Political Communication (Foreign Policy Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Dobson Room This panel offers a range of perspectives on the relationship between political communication and foreign policy, touching on strategic narratives, cultural diplomacy, digital diplomacy, broadcast media and the use of myth and metaphor.

Identity, Performativity and Representation
Identity, Performativity and Representation (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Carilol This panel brings together papers grappling with questions of identity and difference in international politics. This theme will be engaged across the panel in relation to cases of terrorism, foreign policy, populism and nationalism.

Internationalisation and the challenge to academic freedom: between authoritarian control and the logic of the market
Internationalisation and the challenge to academic freedom: between authoritarian control and the logic of the market (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: History Room As the ‘internationalisation’ of higher education generates increased partnerships in both education and research between Western institutions and those in autocracies, academic freedom is put at risk. High-profile attention has focused on researchers detained or killed in fieldwork. However, there are many more academics at risk of detention or worse who are ordinarily employed in universities under an authoritarian state. Foreign campuses in the Middle East and China are not immune from restrictions. Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Central Asian governments have cracked down in various ways on their academics and students, especially those from minority groups. Moreover, the response of universities and their representative bodies in the UK has been silence, obfuscation or denial of the problem, implying that market for students and income from autocracies makes them unwilling to defend academic freedom. University ethics committees are rarely prepared to step into these debates, other than in prohibiting fieldwork. In the roundtable six UK-based academics with experience of universities in China, Russia, Turkey and Central Asia will address these questions. What do we mean by ‘academic freedom’ and how is it maintained? What can IR academics do to show solidarity with colleagues who are at risk from and in autocracies (both on our campuses and overseas)? What may we do to mitigate the risks generated by internationalisation? How do we include scholars from autocracies without increasing surveillance of our work, heightening risks to them, and reducing academic freedom? What is the value of a sector-wide code of conduct (such as that proposed by Human Rights Watch with respect to China in 2019) or targeted academic boycotts (such as proposed by Turkish Academics for Peace in 2017)?

Localisation and narrowing of civil spaces: moral and practical implications
Localisation and narrowing of civil spaces: moral and practical implications (Non-Governmental Organisations Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Stephenson Room This panel is composed of five papers that discuss civil society in the context of localisation of experiences and narrowing of civil society spaces through for example raising of external barriers with long term consequences for how CSOs operate. The papers seek to explore what this means by showcasing a range of case studies that focus on individual experiences and global policy procedures – the papers ask not only whether INGOs, as global actors, are being excluded from valuable public dialogues, but also whether they themselves inadvertently act as those doing the excluding. The first paper on the securitization of civil society space in the aftermath of Kenya’s terrorist attack in 2013 looks at the potential implications of this policy in countering violent extremism. The second paper discusses a case study of how an authoritarian regime, Venezuela, can function as a constrain (or empower) transnational campaigns tracing how frames are transferred from advocacy networks to global governance networks and what effect this may have on campaign outcomes. The third paper shifts the focus inwards with a thick description of NGOs moral quality based on individual’s social experiences of ethical development. The fourth paper is a case study of Cameroon that explores marginalised voices in development and evaluates trusting relationships between Western and local actors. The fifth and final paper looks at the importance of democratic norms from external actors using Hungary and Czech as case studies to explore the role civil society organisations played during EU accession.

Materiality of Power and Gender
Materiality of Power and Gender (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Pandon Room The panel explores how power and gender interact through bodies and spaces.

Micro-level resolution in peace and conflict
Micro-level resolution in peace and conflict (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Collingwood Room Micro-level resolution in peace and conflict

Migration Management from a Regional Perspective
Migration Management from a Regional Perspective (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Parsons Room This panel features a variety of approaches to migration management. Koinova brings the perspective of polycentric governance of transit migration, providing comparisons from the Balkans and the Middle East. Dickson focuses on the dangerous ways migration is managed in the Mediterranean. Yesuane's paper discusses EU's engagement with the Horn of Africa. Hirotaka discusses migration diplomacy specifically in the Gulf states.

Policing’s contested relationalities
Policing’s contested relationalities (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Katie Adie Policing’s contested relationalities Policing’s geographic location and borders have long been taken for rather than being subjects of explicit analysis and theorization. Policing is most frequently associated with a small scale and the ‘domestic’ realm, assuming a mythic status as a quintessentially local state institution (Seigel 2018). Yet as policing’s colonial and imperial origins (Brogden 1987) have been excavated and recuperated in recent years, this mythic status is emerging as a vigorous and productive site of reevaluation across a range of social science fields (Schrader 2019; Seigel 2018) including IR (Honke and Muller 2016; Howell 2018; Neolcleous 2014). This relational focus, however, is not merely descriptive of police in its actually existing forms. It has shown how the routine transgressions of the political and geographic boundaries of police have been predicated on comparisons between different sites that have in turn enabled these circulations to take place and made possible the exchange of ideas, logics and tactics between different state authorities, enabling officials to make the case for new law and order interventions. Building on these conversations, this panel grapples with two key dimensions of the contested relationalities of policing. First, is how conceptual and material connections across time inform state violence against racialized communities. Second, is how attending to contested relationalities might inform anti-colonial, anti-racist and abolitionist organizing in specific locations but also transnationally. Bringing together case studies from Palestine, the US, India and the UK, the panel reflects on how these examples reflect common logics, patterns and techniques of pacification and order-making but also disjunctures between multiple ontologies of violence and order-making and possible frictions at play in the various border crossings at play in police work.

Reflections on collaborations between creative arts practice and social science in military research
Reflections on collaborations between creative arts practice and social science in military research (#FutureIR @NclPolitics)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Martin Luther King This roundtable includes creative arts practitioners, social scientists and curators. Its aim is to critically reflect on how collaborations between the creative arts and social science can offer insights in the field of military and conflict research.

Reviewing the NPT at 50: Actors, issues and next steps
Reviewing the NPT at 50: Actors, issues and next steps (Global Nuclear Order Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Council Chamber The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed into force in 1970, has long been considered the cornerstone of the global nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime. Spanning three pillars of activity, including nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the NPT is grounded on a Grand Bargain that sees its majority 185 non-nuclear-armed States Parties commit to not develop nuclear weapons, on the premise that the P-5 nuclear-armed states agree to steps towards eventual nuclear disarmament. 50 years since its entry into force the NPT approaches its 10th quinquennial review conference in 2020 under a storm of unusual magnitude. The issues facing the NPT at 50 capture a plethora of both long-standing and more recent political and security challenges. These include a rumbling discontent over the effectiveness of the NPT and other nuclear disarmament negotiating forums, discord centring on the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, deep concerns over the demise of the INF Treaty, fraught relations between the US and Russia over the START-II negotiations, the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, and ongoing nuclear proliferation concerns in Iran and North Korea. This roundtable brings together leading and early-career researchers specialising in global nuclear politics and diplomacy. Chaired by Spain’s former Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, this roundtable brings together speakers from across the UK and Europe specialising in the politics, issues, and actors currently shaping the NPT. Discussants will not only address the major challenges impacting the NPT as it turns 50, but reflect on the key actors involved, including both individual States Parties and group players. This roundtable will further shed fresh empirical insight into the NPT’s 10th Review Conference (held in April 2020), and crucially address the ‘what next’ for the NPT moving forward.

Screening Violence: a transnational approach to the local imaginaries of post-conflict transition
Screening Violence: a transnational approach to the local imaginaries of post-conflict transition (#FutureIR @NclPolitics)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Daniel Wood “Screening Violence: A Transnational Study of Post-Conflict Imaginaries”, an AHRC-sponsored research project currently in progress, aims to map the local imaginaries of conflict and post-conflict transition in five locations across the globe (Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia and Northern Ireland). Our decision to focus on the social imaginaries of conflict is based on the premise that it is within the imaginary that the meanings of these struggles is fixed. A key feature of the project is its interdisciplinary and participatory approach to knowledge production, which draws on popular culture and its reception as a way into the rich textures, ambiguities and inconsistencies of symbolic worlds. We work with the medium of film in a multi-faceted way: as a methodological tool designed to set up debates that allow us to chart social imaginaries; as an imaginary space itself, both reflective and constitutive of the popular imaginaries in question; and as creative expression, as we work with local filmmakers to co-create a cinematic cartography of the imaginaries that emerge in each site throughout the project. Focus groups and audience ethnography serve as a people-centred, participatory approach to the production of knowledge that goes beyond the screenings in our attempt to understand local imaginaries. Reflecting on this complex work in progress, this panel seeks to engage conference participants in relation to four key areas of discussion: • How do questions of scale affect the study of local social imaginaries? In other words, how do local understandings of conflict show the influence of the local, the national and the international? • The first relates to the value of using film as both a conceptual frame (film as a popular imaginary space in itself) and methodological tool (film spectatorship and reception as a window into the imaginary) for carrying out field research that aims to map the local imaginaries of post-conflict transition; • The second addresses the architecture of the project and the challenges of carrying out this study comparatively across five sites. • The third concerns how best to ‘translate’ and communicate the results from our multidisciplinary research, rooted in what popular cultural expressions can tell us about the imaginaries of conflict, in a way that speaks to both academics and practitioners within the area of International Relations. The roundtable will be structured and present findings as follows: 1. The role of the imaginary in understanding post-conflict societies. 2. Film reception and audience ethnography: From teaching to researching using film in IR (Diah Kusumaningrum & Simon Philpott) 3. Watching Indonesia and Colombia from Argentina (Philippa Page) 4. Watching Indonesia and Colombia from Algeria (Guy Austin) 5. Watching Indonesia and Colombia from Northern Ireland (Brandon Hamber) 6. The potential for Impact: Roddy Brett

Sustaining the Outer Space Environment: Now and in the Future
Sustaining the Outer Space Environment: Now and in the Future (Environment Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Bewick Room The outer space environment is dynamic and ever-changing thanks to technological and scientific advances, however, with the rise of varied space actors and the congestion of Low Earth Orbit, there are critical problems, such as space debris, security, and weapons aimed at space, that are calling for more discussion at the international level. With the recent addition of the Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines and the Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines, as well as the forthcoming Space2030 Agenda, there is a growing concern for sustaining the outer space environment which will guide future law and policy as well as political and security measures for space and future space actors. Therefore, this panel aims to address these problems the space sectors is facing now as they will incredibly impact the access and use of space in the future. Our panel calls upon experts from legal, political, and security backgrounds in order to address what the international space community is working on with regard to these high-level issues and the concept of space sustainability.

What role for the academy and independent 'experts' in the post-truth era?
What role for the academy and independent 'experts' in the post-truth era? (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Armstrong Room There is a sense that we are living through interesting – epoch making – times. The UK decision to leave the EU, Donald Trump’s election to the White House, and the rise of (often xenophobic) populism across the democratic world suggest that the liberal international order, and the institutions it rests on, are under threat. Added to this, we have seen the development of a “post-truth” era, where expert information and reliable evidence are undermined by mainstream political elites, often with support by the mass media. The purpose of this roundtable is to explore how as experts in Politics and International Relations, we should be responding to these challenges. These challenges pose questions about the role of ‘experts’ and the methodological and theoretical tools they use. These challenges also encourage us to reflect on the extent to which current events might be novel, and how history might be a guide to the present. Finally, there are questions about the role of the academy and its ability to respond to issues connected to truth, knowledge and narratives.

13:30 Lunch Break
Lunch Break
13:30 - 15:00

15:00 After Brexit: Navigating Britain’s Security, Defence, and Foreign Policy
After Brexit: Navigating Britain’s Security, Defence, and Foreign Policy (European Security Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
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.

Book roundtable: 'Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law' by Tarik Kochi
Book roundtable: 'Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law' by Tarik Kochi (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Stephenson Room The roundtable participants will engage critically with the recently published book *Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law* by Tarik Kochi (Routledge, 2019), followed by the author's responses and open discussion. In the book, Kochi argues that to think seriously about global justice we need to understand how both liberalism and neoliberalism have pushed aside rival ideas of social and economic justice in the name of private property, individualistic rights, state security and capitalist ‘free’ markets. Ranging from ancient concepts of natural law and republican constitutionalism, to early modern ideas of natural rights and political economy, and to contemporary discourses of human rights, humanitarian war and global constitutionalism, Kochi shows how the key foundational elements of a now globalised political, economic and juridical tradition are constituted and continually beset by struggles over what counts as justice and over how to realise it. Engaging with a wide range of thinkers and reaching provocatively across a breadth of subject areas, Kochi investigates the roots of many globalised struggles over justice, human rights, democracy and equality, and offers an alternative constitutional understanding of the future of emancipatory politics and international law.

Borders, Populism and nationalist politics in Asia
Borders, Populism and nationalist politics in Asia (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Carilol The panel explores how nationalist and populist trends impact upon communities, community relations, revolutionary or nationalist identities,across different Asian countries and borders. It takes new angles, including research into cyber-populism and everyday practices of combatants to understand conflict dynamics and potential for peace.

Evolving Protection Architectures at the United Nations
Evolving Protection Architectures at the United Nations (Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Katie Adie This IR2PWG Panel focuses on evolving protection architectures at the United Nations with a special focus on R2P and humanitarian intervention both as instruments and norms. It focuses on the futures of the Responsibility to Protect as well as practices under the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly. Moreover, it reflects on the role of progress, transparency and norm entrepreneurship.

Foreign Policy Theories in Practice
Foreign Policy Theories in Practice (Foreign Policy Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Bewick Room This panel brings together different theoretical perspectives on foreign policy and foreign policy analysis.

New directions in IR
New directions in IR (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Swan Room New directions in IR

Problematising migration and diaspora governance: From racialised migration control to 'minority' participation
Problematising migration and diaspora governance: From racialised migration control to 'minority' participation (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Dobson Room This panel interrogates the multiple ways in which migrants and diasporas have related to governance and economic practices. How have nations and regional organisations attempted to govern and control the movement of people, through securitising and racialising practices? And how have migrants and diaspora communities challenged such practicies by participating in and remaking existing governance practices?

Silence, Contestation and Denial in Post-Societies in Central, South, and South Eastern Europe
Silence, Contestation and Denial in Post-Societies in Central, South, and South Eastern Europe (South East Europe Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Daniel Wood Central, Eastern and South Eastern European societies are often characterised vis-à-vis their past; referred to as post-war, post-socialist, post-conflict, post-authoritarian, among other denominations. As such, and to paraphrase William Faulkner, the past and memory are never dead across the region. In this context, it is important to examine the role of silence, denial, and contestation in memory politics. Specifically, how have silence, denial and contestations manifested? How have actors including communities and organisations, victims of past repression, former soldiers, and other grassroots actors, actively shaped and influenced memory politics? How are memories contested by local actors and communities? How, when and why are local, community and collective memories in tension? And what are the politics of this contestation? Further, to what extent have these strategies led to emancipatory ways of reimagining the past for the present? The panel will explore these over-arching questions in the case of ‘post-’societies in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe which are defined in contrast to their previous oppressive and/or violent past.

Smugglers, Maps and Saviours: International relations, migration and the potential to ‘other’:
Smugglers, Maps and Saviours: International relations, migration and the potential to ‘other’: (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Sandhill Room This panel brings together five very different papers that intervene around the same theme, the role that international relations can play in othering refugees and migrants. It questions the role of scholars, governments, NGOs and activists in the presentation and hierarchisation of migration narratives, and the importance of consciously preventing unconscious harm. One paper explores the roles of maps and map making in establishing spaces where only a particular group of people are welcome and others are not. A second engages with questions of people smuggling and securitisation, a system of governance established to create those on the inside and those deemed to be other. The third paper engages with academia itself and the practise of presenting findings to non-academic audiences through the medium of exhibitions. Reflecting, as well, on the role of the academic in presenting findings and the unconscious effects of these presentations. The fourth paper draws on postcolonialism to engage with questions of border crossing in to and out of Europe. The final paper brings together scholarship and activism to reflect critically on the practice of the two authors and the effect they can have on the presentation and re-presentation of refugees and migrants. The panel explores these questions and advocates for caution in the methods and approaches used to engaging with questions of displacement and border crossing.

The Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd century
The Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd century (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Collingwood Room The 'Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd century' (HGP22) is an experimental collective project, written in a futur antérieur style. HGP22 explores a range of theoretical perspectives and approaches to ‘write the future’ of global politics, from the perspective of the year 2120. Panel participants are all part of the HGP22 project, including the editors. HGP22 mirrors the format and style of existing handbooks, but it does so through exploring the horizon of the possible: combining concise outlines and discussions of theories, structures, processes and core issues in international relations with a conjectural investigation of how these might play out over the course of the next century. The contributors offer plausible analytical accounts that extrapolate from the existing state of global politics, but also narratives of the ‘not yet’.

The Women, Peace and Security Resolutions and the politics of gender expertise and feminist knowledge in post-conflict settings
The Women, Peace and Security Resolutions and the politics of gender expertise and feminist knowledge in post-conflict settings (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Council Chamber This panel investigates the meaning and practice of gender expertise in post-conflict contexts, exploring how the Women, Peace and Security resolutions have shaped ideas about gender expertise at the international and local levels. The 20th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 presents a welcome opportunity to reflect on the development of gender experts and gender expertise in structures of international governance as an important but underexplored consequence of gender reaching the international agenda. This panel examines how the Women, Peace and Security agenda (WPS) has shaped different ways of knowing and doing gender in the international system and the packaging of this as gender expertise. It does so by exploring in a range of institutional contexts, for example the study of the experiences and strategies of gender experts in EU peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Georgia and the interaction of the local and the international in peacebuilding in Myanmar. Other contributions interrogate instruments that shape ideas about gender expertise, such as the WPS National Action Plans or the WPS indicators developed by the UN. Overall, the panel explores the challenges and questions that the development of gender expertise in post-conflict settings pose to international relations and feminist security studies.

The future of international studies in a digital world: which relations for which nations ?
The future of international studies in a digital world: which relations for which nations ? (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Martin Luther King This panel is a contribution to the debate on the future of international studies where international relations are no longer concerned only with Nation- States and their inter-actions. In fact, Nation-States have been facing a changing world for almost twenty years since the end of the Cold War. Therefore, we will base our study on some African cases to highlight key disruptions caused by old and new “threats” in the political and social landscape of African States. The issue of the future of International studies is increasingly emerging in the literature dealing with the future of international relations defined traditionally as relations of peace and conflicts among Nation-states. This literature, far from being recent, has brought to the surface the decline of Nation-States. In fact, today, many threats emerge and destabilise nation-states at both the infra-national level and the supra-national level and upset the basis of nation- states. African states are privileged grounds for the observation of these mutations. The most important of these transformations include the powerful digital tools of communication in a cyber world: internet, Facebook, Twitter, Whatssap, etc. These digital new tools of communication are considered as “threats” for African States. In fact, African States are the most vulnerable preys of these digitalization of the world that “internationalize” the national level. While once African people could not express their claims, today, internet, Facebook, twitter, Whatsapp, etc., allow them to openly challenge their governments and make allegiance to these modern tools of communication which escape the African governments and contribute to the further weakening of African States. Therefore, this panel aims to answer the following two research questions: (1) to what extent the term “international relations” is still relevant in such a changing world? ( 2) Which nations for which relations? Thus, papers of this panel will concentrate on, but no be limited, to the country-cases experiences of Cameroon, Tunisia, Sudan, South Africa, Mali, Sahelian African States, etc.) Each paper will propose a case study with an added value: an interdisciplinary approach (using both transnational and Realism theories of international relations) to assess the consequences of these threats on the future of African states. Specifically and in the light of specific case studies, the aim of our panel is to analyse new challenges of International Relations in a world where the national and global scales tend to converge under the information technologies transformation. Keywords: International studies, African State, digitalization of the world, conflict, terrorism, migrations.

The security of life in the Anthropocene
The security of life in the Anthropocene (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Parsons Room We are now living in what many describe as the Anthropocene, a new epoch that defines humans as a geological force (Cruzen & Stoermer, 2000). Unmonitored carbon emissions, non-sustainable business practices and a host of other human activities are contributing to permanent changes to the earth’s surface, biodiversity, climate and ecosystem. These and other changes to the planet has formed profound environmental risks including sea level rises, coastal erosion, severe weather systems and the extinction of species (Lewis & Maslin, 2018). Against this background, it is becoming increasingly clear that concepts of both ‘security’ and ‘life’ are undergoing radical transformations. In this panel we seek to address questions related to the task of grasping what these transformations involve and how they might contribute to a new understanding of what it means to speak of the security of life in the Anthropocene. We are especially interested in critically interrogating public as well as academic discourses on the Anthropocene, and how those discourses ‘perform’ certain ways of thinking about the security of life. The method is ‘performative’ in this sense, as it looks at how certain literatures produce conceptions of life that we need to question, problematize and articulate alternatives to.

Towards a critical security politics
Towards a critical security politics (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: Armstrong Room The UK’s approach to security and the ‘war on terror’ has been critiqued for privileging force, surveillance and militarism, but no substantive, alternative approach has emerged in academia, parliament or civil society which could challenge current policy. Some NGOs and parliamentarians have challenged this post-9/11 security orthodoxy. Yet these attempts lack academic rigour and are often developed in response to a specific government policy. The type of systematic thinking and empirical grounding that academic analysis can bring is often missing from the work of those at the coalface of policy development. If this is a failure of politics, then it is equally a failure of the academy. The project of critical security studies has succeeded in deconstructing and critiquing the security architectures of the liberal state. Yet, it has often failed to engage – conceptually, disciplinarily, and practically – with questions of security policy. With the aim of more practically engaging with policy-making, this roundtable will develop potential directions for bringing the insights of critical security studies to the political arena. What would a critical security studies approach to security policy look like? How can and should those critical of the current security orthodoxy respond to – and reshape – contemporary security debates?

‘Outside Voices, Informed Insight' – Intellectual Analysis on Military Relations’
‘Outside Voices, Informed Insight' – Intellectual Analysis on Military Relations’ (War Studies Working Group)
15:00 - 16:30
Room: History Room This panel is unique in that it focuses on the applied contribution of War Studies scholars within the military domain. The panel is divided into those who discuss the historical challenges of influential thinkers, such as Bernard Fall, and the modern challenges faced by think-tankers and academics who provide insight into the most important challenges faced by NATO, the British Military, Irish Military, and United Nations. The cross-over between the historical and contemporary analysis of academic study into military issues will generate discussion about each scholar's specific topic, but also the broader process of having meaningful 'policy impact'.

16:30 Coffee and Tea Break
Coffee and Tea Break
16:30 - 17:00

17:00 Civil Wars, Proxy Wars, and Insurgencies
Civil Wars, Proxy Wars, and Insurgencies (War Studies Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
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.

Debating the American Empire post-Bush
Debating the American Empire post-Bush (US Foreign Policy Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Katie Adie This panel addresses a significant gap in recent conceptual debates on American foreign policy: meaningful engagement with the concept of Empire. During George W. Bush’s presidency, International Relations scholars drew extensively from this frame to debate the character, hierarchical structure, and geographies of American power. Thereafter, as attention shifted toward the consequences of American decline and the erosion of the Liberal International Order, the concept has fallen out of mainstream use. With a few notable exceptions, it has been subsumed by debates on hegemony and unipolarity. This is a problematic omission given Empire’s continuing relevance to debates on American foreign policy. This panel draws from the concept to explain three discrete areas of contemporary American foreign policy. It examines: (1) how a focus on the particular post-war geographies of American imperialism provides an alternative explanation for the contemporary reliance on military assistance as a key tool of US military intervention; (2) how the particular characteristics of the American empire operating fragmented into many sovereign territorialities is undermined by its own open door strategy, requiring coercion to contain both economic and geopolitical rivals; and (3) how the increased “inclusion” of female American soldiers has been enabled by processes of domestic and international “exclusion” which reveal the American empire’s “faces of domination”. Taken as a whole, this panel makes a coherent contribution to this conference’s overreaching theme of the future of International Studies by reengaging with a core part of the discipline’s past. It also promotes a greater dialogue between scholars studying contemporary areas of the American imperialism and the wider discipline. We would be very receptive to the addition of extra papers to this panel. One of our other speakers has had to pull out due to being unable to make the conference.

Decentring Western Narratives of International Relations in Research and Teaching: Problems, Progress and Prospects
Decentring Western Narratives of International Relations in Research and Teaching: Problems, Progress and Prospects (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Martin Luther King Can International Relations (IR) be considered properly global if it remains dominated by Western-centric narratives and epistemologies? The Global IR agenda has sought to address this question in recent years by suggesting that a foregrounding of local, ‘non-Western’ perspectives and knowledges can diversify and decolonise the discipline. However, while this is an important and overdue endeavour in principle, practical challenges remain in its implementation in both research and teaching. The four papers in this panel interrogate some of these challenges and suggest new ways for taking Global IR forward both in and beyond the West. The papers variously present a framework for researching social context in the production of knowledge, track the divergence of conceptual meanings across different sites of IR knowledge production, explore the challenges involved in pursuing a Global IR agenda beyond the West, and consider the question of how to account for non-Western agency. Together, the papers provide an empirical and epistemological interrogation of some of the central problems involved in decentring the West in International Relations and, we hope, provide new perspectives and ways forward.

Defence Industries and Technology in Europe
Defence Industries and Technology in Europe (European Security Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Parsons Room This panel looks at defence technological and industrial challenges facing the EU, NATO and their member states and problematises their responses. It looks at the role of lobbying, the challenges of institutionalising responses and the issues caused by a lack of institutional expertise.

Discourses of Counter-Radicalisation and Counter-Terrorism: Critical Approaches
Discourses of Counter-Radicalisation and Counter-Terrorism: Critical Approaches (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Dobson Room This panel discusses the discourses around different counter-radicalisation and counter-terrorism approaches. Three papers cover the case of Prevent in the UK, which is one of four strands of the UK counterterrorism strategy - CONTEST. One paper focuses on the gendered nature of the discourses surrounding these issues and another paper compares US and EU approaches to far-right extremism. The different but related issues covered in this panel will shed light on contentious points around these types of approaches, which tend to rest on ill-defined and poorly evidenced assumptions about how people become involved in political violence, further embedding religious and ethnic discrimination through its overwhelming focus on individuals identified as being at risk of radicalisation into Al Qaeda- or ISIS-inspired violent extremism.

Dystopian Futures? Ontological Security in an Age of Anxiety
Dystopian Futures? Ontological Security in an Age of Anxiety (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Armstrong Room The emergence of a sense of generalised anxiety increasingly characterises much of Western – and possibly global – discourse and experience. Such anxieties are connected to an ever increasing set of transnational ‘crises’ in the face of which both people and states appear increasingly disoriented and are struggling to respond, and where such anxieties are frequently experienced in profoundly existential and ontological terms. Amongst others these include: a sense of crisis over the future of (democratic) governance, crises of consumerist capitalism, and crises of climate change and ecological breakdown. Generalised anxieties are also increasingly prevalent with regard to technology, where the often unanticipated effects of technological innovations designed to improve lives – such as social media and the ‘internet of things’ – are often a considerable source of angst and uncertainty. For some, technological innovation has also resulted in a crisis of war, as it has become increasingly post-human and therefore post-heroic. And not least, at a more general level, we are also in the midst of a crisis of knowledge and the associated decline of trust structures central to modernity. This latter is not just connected to the populist assault on experts and the emergence of a post-truth politics, but also to the fact that apparently robust scientific predictions (e.g. regarding climate change) increasingly appear to have been woefully inaccurate and optimistic. This sense of crisis is in turn reflected across popular culture, where dystopian themes increasingly predominate, but where we might also identify nostalgia for earlier times. To date, International Relations scholars interested in ontological security have primarily focused their analyses on issues of national identity. Papers on this panel will instead seek to expand discussion to a broader set of themes of global significance that cut through a narrower concern with the nation state to consider how such broader processes are a considerable source of anxiety at both transnational and everyday levels. In doing so, papers consider the ways in which individual and collective subjects have tried to respond to the emergence of such anxieties, with a particular eye on the political implications.

Foreign Policy Decision-Making
Foreign Policy Decision-Making (Foreign Policy Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Bewick Room This panel looks at different influences affecting foreign policy decision-making and implementation, touching on bureaucratic structures, information processing and diplomatic capacity.

Foreign Policy, the State and the Responsibility to Protect
Foreign Policy, the State and the Responsibility to Protect (Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Collingwood Room The implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is dependent on the will and the behaviour of states. On the one hand, norm entrepreneurs and antipreneurs of R2P highly impact its implementation under the framework of the United Nations (UN). On the other hand, how R2P considerations affect states' domestic and foreign policy decisions is also an important and complementary aspect in the implementation of R2P. In this vein, this IR2PWG panel investigates the foreign policy and state practices aspects of R2P.

International Political Economy, Rising Powers and Globalisation
International Political Economy, Rising Powers and Globalisation (International Political Economy Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Stephenson Room This panel draws together researchers concened with the role that rising powers (such as the BRICS) play in the global political economy. Papers in this panel draw together work on China, India and new forms of anti-globalisation nationalism in contemporary global politics.

New Avenues for Securitization of Migration Politics
New Avenues for Securitization of Migration Politics (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: History Room This panel features scholarship exploring new avenues for desecuritization of migration politics especially in the age of growing nationalism. Kalantzi offers a broad framework to demonstrate how the EU policies have used discussions about burden-sharing to aid securitization politics. Arrouche shows how securitization can take place through the use of radicalized discourses. Chakraborty shows how politics of securitization has been applied towards Afghans. Garcia demonstrates that desecuritization of migration discourses can be used in advancing migrant protection.

Populism in South East Europe
Populism in South East Europe (South East Europe Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Swan Room The rationale of the panel is to explore the socio-economic and political concerns/agendas of political groups (political parties, movements etc.) usually associated with populism in South East Europe. Populism manifests itself in different versions in this region. For instance, in the Western Balkan countries like Serbia under Vucic’s leadership, populist nationalist narratives are strongly present. The populist forces usually put the blame on an external ‘enemy’, for example, foreigners, ethnic minorities, refugees and others. However, populist movements can be nationalist and rightist, but can also be found among greens and leftist movements or a variety of political ideologies, and can appeal to many different things. This phenomenon has recently attracted attention from scholars focusing on the radical left and left-wing contexts of populism in South East Europe in particular Greece under SYRIZA’s leadership. Another type of populism in this region is also discussed in the case of Turkey. The Islamist populism led by the AKP government began to directly affect Turkish politics, especially after the coup attempt of 15 July 2016. This panel aims to explore the emergence of the various versions of populism in South East Europe through case studies.

Review of International Studies
Review of International Studies (Review of International Studies)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Council Chamber Review of International Studies

Security, Coloniality and the Policing of Mobility I: Migration, Citizenship and Race
Security, Coloniality and the Policing of Mobility I: Migration, Citizenship and Race (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Carilol This panel examines the intersections of colonialism, citizenship and the migration-security nexus. Contemporary migration scholarship explores the migration-security nexus through its instruments, practices, and impact on populations in a hypersecuritised context. Less discussed is the role of colonial practices, discourses and lived experiences that affect this relationship. With this objective, this panel interrogates how a postcolonial lens provides a critical framework through which the migration-security nexus can be understood and challenged. First, colonial rationalities govern practices of control, surveillance and policing with an increasing trend toward the blending of criminal and immigration institutions. Second, hierarchies of migrant and citizen populations continue to be ordered according to colonial notions of race, gender and class, drawing attention to those who are positioned as dangerous, disposable and deportable. Third, colonial renderings of the migration-security nexus trouble binaries of what is traditionally conceived as local/global, citizen/non-citizen and us/them, as well as challenging concepts of sovereignty and citizenship.

Security, Resistance and Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa
Security, Resistance and Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Daniel Wood This panel explores security challenges on multiple levels, from grassroots actors negotiating their survival through different strategies of cooptation or resistance, to the arms race between states in the Persian Gulf. It examines conflict econonmies from new angles, bringing different geographies and scales into play from borderlands to oilfields, and questions how local actors engage in resistance and ensure their representation across different political structures.

Teaching and Learning Post Conflict Afterlives
Teaching and Learning Post Conflict Afterlives (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
17:00 - 18:30
Room: Pandon Room Feminist and other critical IR scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the complex lived, emotional and embodied experiences intrinsic to the politics of conflict and violence. In doing so, this scholarship pays attention to war’s entanglement in the everyday, to the lived experiences of those touched by war and to the ways in which these experiences exceed and complicate any linear understanding of life “post-conflict”. The roundtable aims to situate these insights in relation to conflict, teaching and the everyday. With this roundtable we seek to reflect on the everyday-ness of those who live in post-conflict, and how this can/should inform the teaching of political violence. We are interested in thinking about how affective politics must also be a part of understanding the complexities of outliving conflict and political violence. Our participants foreground different orientations to teaching and (un)learning conflict such as the ethics of comedy, laughter and love in navigating conflict afterlives, resisting conclusive answers and embracing disorientation, and the using of creative tools and feminist teaching principles to encourage reflection.
Friday, 19 June 2020

10:00 20 Years on and 10 Resolutions in: Wither Women, Peace and Security?
20 Years on and 10 Resolutions in: Wither Women, Peace and Security? (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
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?

BISA Professional Development III
BISA Professional Development III (BISA)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: History Room BISA Professional Development III

Conceptual Progress in International Environmental Politics
Conceptual Progress in International Environmental Politics (Environment Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Armstrong Room Whilst significant theoretical progress has been achieved in International Environmental Politics, many of the key concepts are susceptible to being 'taken as given' and being considered unquestioningly as perennial 'truths' of the discipline. This panel intends to address that lacuna by deconstructing and revisioning salient concepts of International Environmental Politics, interrogating their theoretical and practical implications.

Contesting theoretical accounts: historiographies of emotions and IR
Contesting theoretical accounts: historiographies of emotions and IR (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Swan Room How might scholars within and beyond the discipline of International Relations investigate alternative methodologies with which to study the role of emotions? This panel provides a variety of innovative avenues to engage and provide thoughtful responses to this question. The papers on this panel focus on the use of film-making as research practice into emotions and ideological commitments, the role of aesthetics and emotions in re-thinking historiographical commitments of the discipline, re-reading canonical thinkers on war and order such as Hobbes and Thucydides through engaging with issues of rhetoric and emotions, the contribution of Buddhist feminist thought to world politics, and the affective and gendering function of political apologies. The papers offer a cross-cultural conversation that attends to concerns regarding the construction of emotional knowledge and lived experience in world politics.

Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq
Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Council Chamber This roundtable will be a discussion of Christine Sylvester's most recent book, Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq (2019, Oxford University Press). The monograph explores how war memorials and museums, military cemeteries, and war novels and memoirs institutionalize narratives of national identity, as well as international power. It asks whose vantage points on war are made available at these sites of memory, and whose war experiences are minimized or ignored in ways that advantage contemporary militarism. Following one reviewer (J. Auchter),the book pushes the boundaries of war studies and is 'a masterful example of how narrative work can generate knowledge'. This roundtable will bring together scholars of war, militarism, and resistance to both honour the author's contribution to the field and discuss how the book re-energizes reflections on the role of sites of memory in normalizing and destabilizing of liberal militarism.

Facing Human Interconnections 2020-2120
Facing Human Interconnections 2020-2120 (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Sandhill Room International Relations scholarship has been reflected on widely and deeply in the context of the (contested) 'centenary' of the field. Many shortcomings have been identified - from the lack of representation of many parts of the world to the lack of conceptual capacity in the field to grasp the complexity of the objects of study in this interdisciplinary field. This roundtable features contributors to a project on the future of IR developed as part of centenary activities at the Aberystwyth University. The group represented here, and others, were asked to develop during 2019 contributions that reflect on some key empirical global challenges today (e.g. migration, climate, technological change, IoT, inequality) but to do so considering how such cross-disciplinary and complexly bound 'issues' can be thought through in the future of IR scholarship. The aim then has been to develop conceptual, methodological and political tools for rethinking the field as well as its empirical objects. Key thematics that run through the contributions discussed within this group and to be discussed at this roundtable include reflections on: how to think on the future and multiple futurisms, the politics of the 'human' and the 'non-human', racism and decolonisation in the field, and future of governance in the field. The discussions at this proposed roundtable then contribute directly to the conference theme of the 2020 BISA conference. This proposal is not directly bound to any one working group but can be considered to be relevant to many.

Foreign Policy in a Populist Age
Foreign Policy in a Populist Age (Foreign Policy Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Stephenson Room This panel looks at the impact of the rise of populism on foreign policy.

Law, Security and the State of Perpetual Emergency
Law, Security and the State of Perpetual Emergency (International Law and Politics Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Parsons Room Fundamental shifts in the powers of the state and the rights of populations have accelerated since the globalized response to 9/11. These shifts have created effects that spread beyond borders and operate in new yet under-conceptualized space. Although these changed practices were said to be in response to exceptional circumstances — the response to terrorism — they have become increasingly settled into an altered baseline norm. The participants in this roundtable will explore the inter\national implications of exceptional legal efforts to protect states’ domestic space in the realm of security. With diverse experiences from the legal, academic, and practitioner sectors, this roundtable will illustrate how the distinctions between international and domestic law are falling away in the realm of security and in particular in the responses to terrorism and will explore the implications of this dramatic shift in the normative order.

Media, politics and influence of Russia and Eurasian states
Media, politics and influence of Russia and Eurasian states (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Martin Luther King This panel focuses on the influence of Russian and Eurasian media.

Poststructural Borders: Crossing the Line
Poststructural Borders: Crossing the Line (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Daniel Wood This panel acknowledges and emerges from critical border thinking and asks what knowledges are opened up by poststructural thinking that is situated in the big-ticket global border issues of today. The panel sets off on a number of trajectories which coalesce around the idea that resolving borders enacts a historical narrative that is resisted and rewritten by critical thought; we propose that this historical and deeply cyclical approach, in which the border failures of the past are used as the principal tool to resolve the struggles of present border issues, re/produces a failing sovereign order. We consider three big-ticket issues: the Irish border after Brexit, human trafficking in and beyond Nepal, and the relationality of climate change and human migration. We ask what happens when we stretch beyond the dominant IR accounts of border, risk and resolution? Who or what is excluded by the statist and anthropocentric focus of such accounts? What is rendered possible by the knowledges produced by poststructuralism in the context of today’s border issues? What do we learn about living from people in their border communities as well as non-human mobilities that resist and reform borders through daily practices? This panel argues that a restructuring of border thought opens new ways not only to rethink how policy is formulated, but also how humans might be partners in the post-Anthropocene world, by re-examining critical border studies through new and evolving lenses of poststructuralism.

Re-imagining Nuclear History & Politics
Re-imagining Nuclear History & Politics (Global Nuclear Order Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Dobson Room This panel revisits our understanding of key dynamics in nuclear history and politics through examining the political significance of the mythologised story of the US Manhattan Project, the role of popular culture in contributing to narratives of nuclear 'control', how memory of combat experience can impact nuclear choices and finally how domestic politics can reframe our understanding of India's nuclear policy.

Security, Coloniality and the Policing of Mobility II: Borders, Violences and Contestations
Security, Coloniality and the Policing of Mobility II: Borders, Violences and Contestations (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Carilol This panel examines the intersections of violence, subjectivities and the migration-citizenship nexus. The persistence of colonial rationalities and violences is evident through the instrumentalisation of law and surveillance strategies that enable the regulation and control of both citizens and non-citizens. The production of the ‘other’ operates through colonial rationalities that govern practices of control, surveillance and policing in formal and informal spaces. Where epistemic violence persists through the ordering of populations according to colonial notions of race, gender and class, physical violence co-exists with conflict and confinement. It is at the same time necessary to consider practices of contestation that disrupt otherwise singular relations of oppression. Interrogating the migration-citizenship nexus troubles binaries of what is traditionally conceived as local/global, citizen/non-citizen and us/them, as well as challenging concepts of sovereignty and citizenship.

State, gender, & materialism in international historical sociology
State, gender, & materialism in international historical sociology (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Collingwood Room This panel explores the interweaving of questions of state, sovereignty, material resources, and gender in international historical sociology. Geographical spaces considered include the Middle East and North Africa along with China and its region.

Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and State Terrorism in the Global South
Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and State Terrorism in the Global South (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Bewick Room This panel discusses approaches to terrorism and counter-terrorism in the global south, looking particularly at the cases of the coastal region of Kenya, Nigeria and Brazil. The latter case reflects particularly on how counter-terrorism legislation can feed into and legitimate state violence. It also looks at the portrayal of women who joined terrorist organisations (particularly ISIS), which perpetuates narratives drawn from Orientalist and Islamophobic practices. In this panel, we can find papers drawing on constructivist and poststructuralist scholarship and covering organisations such as the Mombasa Republican Council, Al-Shabaab, Al Muhajiroun, ISIS, Boko Haram.

Theoretical approaches to peace and conflict
Theoretical approaches to peace and conflict (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
10:00 - 11:30
Room: Katie Adie Understanding broader theoretical approaches to the study of peace and conflict, as well as the drivers of intervention

11:30 Coffee and Tea Room
Coffee and Tea Room
11:30 - 12:00

12:00 Agency, silence and voice in feminist international politics research
Agency, silence and voice in feminist international politics research (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
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.

Creating the State in South-East Europe: Sovereignty, Recognition, and (Il)legality?
Creating the State in South-East Europe: Sovereignty, Recognition, and (Il)legality? (South East Europe Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Katie Adie This panel attempts to bring together different voices of scholarship on the nature of state creation in Southern and Eastern Europe. Traditionally, state creation in international politics has been conceptualised through a dichotomy between constitutive and declarative theories – the state is either created in international law or outside of it. However, this dichotomy has become perceived to obscure the ‘practical aspects’ of state formation and governance – one by assuming that a state can legally exist without any political circumstances ‘on the ground’, the other by assuming that de jure recognition can happen in complete isolation of international political considerations. This panel, therefore, strives to explore perspectives of SE-European state creation and governance that move beyond this dichotomy. Is sovereignty, recognition, and/or state governance gained from ‘the bottom-up’, or awarded ‘top-down’? How important are (international) legal arrangements and principles for SE-European state creators? And how important is their capacity to act ‘beyond’ the law? Who is included/excluded in these processes? Generally, this panel aims to place questions of SE-European state formation in relation to broader fundamental questions of international relations.

Dealing with Far-Right Extremism
Dealing with Far-Right Extremism (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Swan Room This panel creates the space for a much-needed open, honest, critical, and ethical debate around dealing with far-right violence. It aims to contribute to the current debates and potential efforts to deal and counter the phenomena of far-right violence in a period when the rise of right-wing populism is being witnessed across the globe. Against this backdrop, the violent radicalisation and extremism of individuals and groups belonging to the extreme right threaten to undermine and destabilize societies and democratic orders, leaving a research gap that has only started to be filled in recent years, but that is still quite wide when it comes to counter-terrorism approaches to far-right violence.

Diplomacy & imperialism in international historical sociology
Diplomacy & imperialism in international historical sociology (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Bewick Room This panel draws on east Asian and Euro-Mediterranean country and region studies to develop insights into the practices and ideational contexts of diplomacy and imperialism.

Discussing Doing Fieldwork In Areas of International Intervention: A Guide to Research in Violent and Closed Contexts (Bristol: Bristol University Press, forthcoming 2020), edited by Morten Bøås and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara
Discussing Doing Fieldwork In Areas of International Intervention: A Guide to Research in Violent and Closed Contexts (Bristol: Bristol University Press, forthcoming 2020), edited by Morten Bøås and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Council Chamber Using detailed insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict, this handbook provides essential practical guidance for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent, repressive and closed contexts. Contributors detail their own experiences from areas including the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Myanmar, inviting readers into their reflections on mistakes and hard-learned lessons. Divided into sections on issues of control and confusion, security and risk, distance and closeness, and sex and sensitivity, they look at how to negotiate complex grey areas and raise important questions that intervention researchers need to consider before, during and after their time on the ground. The roundtable involves editors and authors as well as specialists external to the book project. It will take the form of a frank and wide-ranging conversation about the practicalities, politics and ethics of fieldwork

Ethics in Conflict
Ethics in Conflict (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Daniel Wood 1. #268 Resisting Unjust Aggression: The case for the targeting of security forces during occupations 2. #298 The Responsibility to Protect and Already Existing Intervention 3. #322 Just Limited Strikes? Revisiting the Ethics of Force Short of War 4. #586 The Dog That Didn't Bark: An Inquiry Into the Notion of Preventability 5. #608 The Ethics and Law of Surrender in Orthodox Just War Theory and Regular War Theory

Foreign Policy in and toward Asia
Foreign Policy in and toward Asia (Foreign Policy Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Stephenson Room This panel considers foreign policy developments in and towards South and East Asia

Militarisation in the Sahel: old security practices in a new war theatre
Militarisation in the Sahel: old security practices in a new war theatre (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Martin Luther King This roundtable brings together researchers carrying out work on security practices in the Sahel around two lines of discussion and enquiry. First, the researchers present some of their ongoing work into key trends in the Sahel: the growth of remote warfare, the militarisation of counter-terrorism, aggressive efforts to curb irregular migration towards Northern Africa and Europe, and the increasingly permanent footprint of international presence of foreign actors, devoid of an exit strategy. The participants then draw on these ongoing research observations to tackle the local political stakes of some of these trends, as well as the future prospects for the Sahel as a geopolitical entity and the paradoxical consequences that such transformative efforts may generate in the long term

Order, Agency & Complexity in Global Nuclear Politics
Order, Agency & Complexity in Global Nuclear Politics (Global Nuclear Order Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Armstrong Room This panel examines the state of global nuclear politics through engaging with questions of hegemony, norms, complexity and local agency and putting them in dialogue.

Permissive Violence: The Legality and Legitimacy of Armed Drone Use
Permissive Violence: The Legality and Legitimacy of Armed Drone Use (International Law and Politics Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Dobson Room In the age of the drone, the presentation of the use of force is of a sanitized, surgical, precision instrument which targets the malign tissue, without damaging the wider body politic. What is seen as a virtue by policy-makers is viewed elsewhere as a transgression of the legal boundaries surrounding when it is permissible for the state to kill. Instead, critics argue it is a form of execution that breaks existing international law despite attempts by governments to justify such uses of force in legal terms. Taking armed drone use as a site of enquiry, this roundtable proposes to interrogate the constitutive relationship between international law regulating the use of force and politics. Its discussion will be guided by an Open Society Foundation funded book project that we are working on at the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security, to be published in 2020. The book argues that the legal framework regulating all uses of force is sufficiently flexible in interpretation that decision-makers can justify military actions as lawful that previously would have been considered breaches of the law. In making this argument the book conceptualises an understanding of international law as a framework that is intensely political, and seeks to understand international law as both enabling and constraining of state actions. At a time when international law faces significant challenges, this roundtable reflects on how states seek to reinterpret it and set new precedents and how the law may be used to justify – or condemn – states’ use of force.

Perspectives on and challenges to regionalism
Perspectives on and challenges to regionalism (International Political Economy Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Collingwood Room A series of papers that explore regional scale developments in the global political economy and the key challenges to regional projects. The panel draws together state of the art research exploring European integration, Brexit and Europe's external relations, alongside work that looks to 'new' and comparative regionalisms.

Power, Populism and Popular Culture
Power, Populism and Popular Culture (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Carilol This panel brings together papers engaging with the international politics of populist movements, with a specific focus on the affective and discursive connotations of populism and popular culture.

Russian foreign/security policy and discourse
Russian foreign/security policy and discourse (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Sandhill Room This panel focuses on discursive approaches to Russian foreign policy.

Taking Ontological Insecurity (More) Seriously: The Future of Ontological Security Studies in International Relations
Taking Ontological Insecurity (More) Seriously: The Future of Ontological Security Studies in International Relations (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Pandon Room Where lies the future of ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations? Drawn primarily from the work of Anthony Giddens, ontological security has so far provided International Relations with valuable tools to better understand why identity commitments matter so greatly to international actors seeking security within and beyond their borders. However, by regarding chaos as the sole alternative to the maintenance of practices that support an established role-identity, OSS fails to adequately capture the variety of identity maintenance techniques at work in international politics. In particular, it explains the persistence of established identities, routines, and relations, but does a poor job of addressing modifications to established formations. This matters because international contexts are especially fluid, requiring actors to frequently adjust and recalibrate how they go on and, in some cases, how they see themselves and others. OSS’s unduly conservative bias in this respect risks reifying the identities, routines, and narratives that actors work very hard and continuously to produce. This roundtable proposes a different way forward for OSS by shifting focus to ontological insecurity. Participants will discuss the different ways that actors respond to the profound anxiety that ontological insecurity generates, and highlight the varied effects of such responses. They will also reflect on how to cultivate a more complex and dynamic approach to the politics of ontological in/security.

The ‘Brexit Moment’ in EU External Action
The ‘Brexit Moment’ in EU External Action (European Security Working Group)
12:00 - 13:30
Room: Parsons Room Scholars and pundits in the United Kingdom have been anxiously awaiting the outcome of the Brexit process to determine where the country will be heading. But on the EU side the ‘Brexit Moment’ has already happened, unleashing a flurry of activity and reforms in Brussels, many of which have been focused on bolstering the EU’s external actorness and making the Union a more effective actor abroad. Many of these reforms (such as PESCO) have received considerable attention, whereas others, like changes in relation to the neighbourhood, have been subtler. What is clear, however, is that the Brexit vote has resulted in significant shifts across all areas of external action in the EU. This panel proposal seeks to address the following questions: How has Brexit influenced the direction of travel in the EU’s external relations? To what extent have these developments varied depending on the issue area in question? How does the EU see itself in the world after Brexit? How successful or credible are the changes made in EU external action since the Brexit vote? The papers address a range of aspects of EU external action, including security and defence policy, development policy, UK-EU relations, and the externalisation of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). By linking theoretical debates to current empirical developments in EU foreign policy the panel contributes to our understanding of how Brexit is affecting world politics and where the EU is heading as an international actor.

13:30 Lunch Break
Lunch Break
13:30 - 14:30

14:30 Changing markets and social development in Africa: technology, norms and practices
Changing markets and social development in Africa: technology, norms and practices (Africa and International Studies Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
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.

Christendom in International Relations: imaginaries and afterlives
Christendom in International Relations: imaginaries and afterlives (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Martin Luther King How should we understand Christendom in world politics and as a referent of IR? Should we consider it a bygone era, a political-theological master-signifier, or a contested object of competing political imaginaries? Have we misunderstood it in the past? Have we understated its legacies and afterlives in contemporary law, politics and security? How do we compare and contrast its varying Western, Eastern and global forms? Research programmes on Post-Christendom and the (post)secular – as well as a variety of work in Theology, Philosophy, History and IR – gives rise to these questions.

Cultivating an Inclusive Discipline: Constructions, Challenges, and Conduct in Contemporary Academia’
Cultivating an Inclusive Discipline: Constructions, Challenges, and Conduct in Contemporary Academia’ (#FutureIR @NclPolitics)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Sandhill Room Using the short film 'Let Her Speak' as a conversation starter, this roundtable will explore ongoing practices of exclusion in academia alongside practical actions that can be undertaken by individuals, departments, universities, and disciplinary associations to change them.

European Journal of International Security
European Journal of International Security (European Journal of International Security)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Pandon Room European Journal of International Security

Everyday imaginaries of war and conflict
Everyday imaginaries of war and conflict (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Bewick Room This panel engages with debates on emotions and the everyday in world politics. The papers invoke discussions of affect, performativity, resistance, embodiment and subjectivity in a variety of cultural and politics sites such as Kashmir, Palestine, the Arab Spring, and Israeli military education. The papers engage with the positionality of the subject in relation to the collective, institutional and national structures that they navigate and contest in their everyday practices. In so doing the papers draw on a variety of theoretical frameworks including psychoanalysis, discourse analysis, narrative theory, and feminist institutionalism to push the discourse of emotions and International Relations beyond its current framings. Situated within scholarship on postcolonialism, gender, race, and psychoanalysis, the panel opens up space for critical reflection from both individual and institutional perspectives as to how emotions are cultivated and articulated in war and conflict.

In, against and beyond International Relations: Disciplinary investigations and interventions
In, against and beyond International Relations: Disciplinary investigations and interventions (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Armstrong Room These papers take the discipline of International Relations (IR) and its traditional concerns as their object of study. Examining issues such as coloniality, epistemic violence, Eurocentrism, diversity and essentialism, these papers offer disciplinary interventions both within and against the history. practice and theorisation of IR.

International Responsibility in Theory and Practice
International Responsibility in Theory and Practice (Ethics and World Politics Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Swan Room International Responsibility in Theory and Practice

Learning lessons from the agenda for civilian protection by peacekeeping missions
Learning lessons from the agenda for civilian protection by peacekeeping missions (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Daniel Wood It is now 20 years since the first mandate was issued to a UN peace support operation which included an obligation to protect civilians from physical violence. In the meantime, peacekeeping has continued to evolve, as each mission's mandate becomes more complex and deployments into hostile environments are now the norm. This panel looks at what lessons have been learned from the operationalisation of this civilian protection agenda and other developments in peacekeeping.

Let us open a Pandora’s box: Is India’s federalism exclusionary?
Let us open a Pandora’s box: Is India’s federalism exclusionary? (#FutureIR @NclPolitics)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Parsons Room Studies on federalism stumble upon the curious case of India: ostensibly federal in theory yet uniquely unitary in practice. Be it the rhetoric of a federal democracy or the nuanced academic interpretation harping on the ‘quasi-federal’ feature, the stark reality from the vantage point of the marginalised is gloomy. A spate of measures in quick succession – abrogation of Article 370, the introduction of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 in the parliament – raise normatively disturbing questions and seem to reveal fundamental flaws in India’s federal structure. At the heart of the problem is not merely the dominance of an ideologically driven political party with a clear-cut majority but the inherent possibility of ‘tyranny of the majority’, which is writ large in India’s political and electoral system. The conspicuous absence of proportional representation has relegated the numerically disadvantaged regions, religious communities, linguistic nationalities and the socially oppressed classes to the margins. Perhaps, there is a method in the madness; the rationale for a unitary bias within a federal arrangement has been to infuse ‘nationhood’ and retain territorial integrity. However, with exclusion becoming the central tendency that sanctified rationale appears to be faltering.

Making Sense of International Law and Politics in the 21st Century
Making Sense of International Law and Politics in the 21st Century (International Law and Politics Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Collingwood Room International law and associated norms and institutions have been central to understanding the post-Cold War rules-based international order within international studies. The multilateral arrangements on which this order has relied, however, are under growing stress across sectors, as state and non-state actors seek to challenge, reshape, and withdraw from global and regional institutions and legal regimes. Ongoing developments across economic, environmental, human rights/humanitarian, and security-related spheres have given scholars and policy makers cause for concern as to the resilience and future prospects of international law as an instrument of international governance. Do domestic, transnational and international challenges, such as growing nationalism, authoritarianism and illiberal democracy, alongside shifting global and regional power balances, call into question the stability and sustainability of international governance through a rules-based order? Or is it the case that international law’s “fundamental institutions” are sound and remain fit-for-purpose? Can we speak of international law as “under pressure” across the dimensions highlighted in scholarship, the media and policy discourse, or are we merely witnessing another passing phase in international law’s long history as a “discipline of crisis”? The proposed roundtable will address these and related questions, considering from multiple disciplinary perspectives – including IR, law, and history - the manifestations, drivers, and implications of international law’s current “crisis” across dimensions in an (apparently) unstable international political environment, and assessing the challenges and opportunities facing governments and other international political actors and institutions.

Teaching and (Un)learning Gender, War and Militarism
Teaching and (Un)learning Gender, War and Militarism (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Council Chamber This roundtable thinks critically about the practices, pedagogies and spaces of teaching and (un)learning the interrelated concepts of gender, war and militarism. While feminist research has long drawn connections between these concepts, as well as drawing attention to their embeddedness and (re)production in the ‘everyday’, insights from critical race, critical disability and Indigenous scholars have revealed the potential limitations of this (feminist) theorising. Starting from our role as ‘teachers’ (broadly configured), on this roundtable we grapple with what is at stake in the teaching of these concepts. Some of the questions this roundtable will consider are: What needs to be (un)learnt in teaching gender, war and militarism? What does it mean to locate ourselves as ‘teachers’ or ‘knowers’ of these concepts? How do we engage students with the possibility of change or resistance? What would it mean to engage ethically with both whom we teach and whom we teach about? What scope is there for genuinely critical pedagogies within the confines of contemporary university model? Drawing on experiences from both within HE and wider learning environments, the conversation is intended as a forum to share challenges, frustrations, rewards and possibilities of feminist teaching and learning.

The Politics of Governance and Policy
The Politics of Governance and Policy (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Katie Adie Governance and policy This panel brings together papers which seek to politicise debates on goverance and policy. With a range of issues areas under consideration, the panel will uncover some of the unintended or obscured consequences of public policy.

US Foreign Policy towards Asia
US Foreign Policy towards Asia (US Foreign Policy Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: History Room This panel looks at current issues in US foreign policy towards Asia. It explores the principal causes of Sino-American confrontation, the balance of power in the Asia Pacific and US public diplomacy in Vietnam.

Understanding Foreign Policy making within Area Studies
Understanding Foreign Policy making within Area Studies (Foreign Policy Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Dobson Room The proposed topic’s main objective is to bridge the gap between area studies and IR with a particular focus on its subfield of foreign policy. This can be achieved through a reflection on a series of different regional examples borrowed from European studies and the Middle East to South Africa, Asia and China. These examples can enable scholars to problematize (1) the agency in foreign policy analysis and whether it is possible to reach a consensus in ontological matters; (2) epistemological approaches that can satisfy emerging challenges; or other (3) methodological aspects that demonstrate the ways in which institutions contribute to foreign policy decision making. Here, means such as economic, cultural and public diplomacy are also of critical value.

Why do Wars Occur and How do They End?
Why do Wars Occur and How do They End? (War Studies Working Group)
14:30 - 16:00
Room: Carilol This perennial question helps frame the panel's cutting-edge scholarships on how to best predict, prevent, and end conflict. The papers are diverse, from theoretical approaches to the strategic motivations behind conflict, through to the historical study of Imperialism and the Global South. Indeed, the range of papers also includes those who conduct a contemporary analysis of the reasons behind the 2019 India-Pakistan hostilities, and the utility of quantitative analysis to understand the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. All, however, are united by the drive to understand the underpinning reasoning for conflict.

16:00 Coffee and Tea Break
Coffee and Tea Break
16:00 - 16:15

16:15 Between Inclusion and Exclusion: The Liberal Ordering of Movement and the Mobile Struggle for Rights
Between Inclusion and Exclusion: The Liberal Ordering of Movement and the Mobile Struggle for Rights (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
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.

Challenges to the Transatlantic Alliance
Challenges to the Transatlantic Alliance (European Security Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Stephenson Room This panel looks at challenges to the transatlantic security order. The papers look at challenges from both allies (the EU) and competitors (China & Russia), and propose new ways of conceptualising the European security architecture.

Conservatism and International Relations: Theories and Strategies of Japanese Foreign Relations
Conservatism and International Relations: Theories and Strategies of Japanese Foreign Relations (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Martin Luther King Conservatism has been a dominant force in Japanese politics for much of the country’s post-war history. However, many who study the political Right in Japan have argued that there has been a qualitative change in Japanese conservatism. Where the historically prevalent conservatism emphasized economic and financial growth, the new conservatism has centralized a culturally nationalistic politics both in its domestic and, crucially, foreign policies. Such a shift has been identified by critics as Japanese conservatism’s turn further to the Right. These critics argue that this has negatively influenced relations with its neighbours, particularly around issues around the memorialization of the Second World War especially given the revisionist history the new conservatism advocates. At the same time, others have argued that while Japanese conservatives and conservatism may have shifted in quality, the extent of its influence on foreign policy has been overstated. To clarify the state of affairs, this panel investigates the relationship between conservatism as an ideology and its relationship with foreign policy-making in contemporary Japan. It does so by bringing together various perspectives on conservatism – as both a theoretical and empirical phenomenon – at the sites of its formulation, articulation, and manifestation. In so doing, the panel brings clarity to, on one hand, the extent of ideological influence on foreign policy-making and, on the other, where and whether Japan may fit into the global rise of a new political Right.

Decolonising memory and history: countering coloniality in museums and the arts
Decolonising memory and history: countering coloniality in museums and the arts (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Swan Room This panel brings together papers that focus on the role of museums and the arts in shaping public history and memory. How is colonialism articulated through these cultural practices and institutions? And how have subaltern voices with anticolonial/ decolonising visions of resistance emerged within and against them?

Foreign Policy and Security
Foreign Policy and Security (Foreign Policy Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Dobson Room This panel considers the relationship between foreign policy and security.

Militarism, Terrorism and Security
Militarism, Terrorism and Security (Post-Structural Politics Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Daniel Wood This panel brings together papers engaging with various subjects of violence: from the pleasure of militarism to embodied memories of terrorism, and from the discursive constructions of radicalisation to the machine agency of surveillance.

Perspectives of UN peace operations
Perspectives of UN peace operations (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: History Room Perspectives of UN peace operations

Popular Culture and the Sociology of Knowledge in Politics and International Relations
Popular Culture and the Sociology of Knowledge in Politics and International Relations (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Parsons Room This panel has two aims, both explicitly addressing the conference theme, urging exploration of how we ‘do’ international studies, in dialogue with cognate disciplines and open to different ways of knowing, at formalised IR’s centenary. First, it interrogates and critiques the sociology of knowledge in Politics and IR, revealing the impacts of efforts at gatekeeping and their links to the disciplinary imaginary, whether performed through the re-telling of origin stories, enacted in higher education policy, or reproduced in the practices of everyday academic life. Second, it promotes a more open vision of the discipline(s) that does not exclude crucial analyses of the popular, the cultural, and the everyday, which are vital to understanding contemporary world politics, tackling global challenges, and resisting dangerous political discourses. To do so, the panel begins by tracing the marginalisation and exclusion of work capable of more fully making sense of recent political developments, such as the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the election of Donald Trump, and the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. From here, with the deck cleared, the panel moves to consider insights from approaches often deemed marginal or ‘heretical’ in Politics and IR, taking seriously the centrality of gender, popular culture, emotion, and everyday politics in making sense of broader patterns of international relations.

Rethinking Teaching and Learning about International Relations
Rethinking Teaching and Learning about International Relations (Learning and Teaching Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Armstrong Room This roundtable explores different ways of teaching International Relations that is methodologically aware and offers a coherent overview of IR without replicating a “march of the ‘isms.” International Relations syllabi and course design matter. When instructors teach students how to think about IR, we present powerful narratives about what the world looks like and what matters. Yet introductory international relations courses tend to adopt remarkably similar formats; most are structured around theoretical debates, known as “-isms” (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Hobson 2012; Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2015). The majority of textbooks mirror this structure. Diverse feminist, post-colonial, constructivist, critical, post-structural, post-positivist, indigenous, and Afro-centric approaches offer alternatives to the “House of IR” (Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Yet instructors often add these important critiques to existing IR syllabi in ways that replicate disciplinary theoretical silos. Thus, instead of providing a radical reframing of the field, our courses often present critical theoretical approaches as a “cacophony of different voices” (Hermann 1998). We propose a different way of teaching and learning IR. Introductory courses provide students with the foundation for their future studies, careers, and transferable skills. Our courses shape how students think. As such, we are not just teaching a subject, we are teaching skills, practices, and ways of knowing and relating to the world. We aim to develop approaches to teaching introductory IR courses that defy disciplinary silos, learn from the important efforts of decolonising the reading list, pay attention to the content of the reading list (including race, class, gender and colonial relations), and emphasise transferable thinking skills.

Saving Strangers in a Post-Liberal World Order? Twentieth Anniversary Roundtable
Saving Strangers in a Post-Liberal World Order? Twentieth Anniversary Roundtable (Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Katie Adie We spoke with Professor Kyle Grayson regarding the preferred date of June 19th and are hoping the organising committee can accommodate this request. Abstract Twenty years ago, Wheeler’s seminal text, *Saving Strangers*, set out to examine how far humanitarian intervention had become a legitimate practice in the society of states. In so doing, it argued a new consensus emerged in the 1990s on the legitimacy of UN authorised humanitarian intervention. Two decades on, the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect norm has seen advocates identify its consensual support as one of its key successes whilst highlighting the need to deepen and extend this further. This consensus-building, in part, has arisen because the RtoP has broadened the debate beyond humanitarian intervention to focus on prevention, assistance, and alternatives to war and also gone beyond the UN Security Council to incorporate the role of other actors such as Regional Organisations, the UN Human Rights Council, and RtoP networks including Focal Points and Group of Friends. Despite this, many of the fundamental questions, concerns, and challenges laid bare in the 1990s remain ever present in cases such as China, the Central African Republic, Syria, Myanmar, and South Sudan to name a few. In addition, the RtoP was born in a so-called liberal era, yet as we enter a period of shifting power balances new questions, concerns, and challenges arise over the future of the RtoP in a post-Liberal World Order. Against this backdrop, the roundtable reflects on the ever present issue of *Saving Strangers* amidst a crisis of liberalism.

THE RUSSIA-CHINA ENTENTE & STRATEGIC RIVALRY WITH THE WEST
THE RUSSIA-CHINA ENTENTE & STRATEGIC RIVALRY WITH THE WEST (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Council Chamber The emergence of a new 'containment-like' consensus in Washington has potential to stimulate further rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing. However, it has been Russia, rather than China that has attempted to capitalise on this situation. Moscow has pushed for closer cooperation with Beijing in the military sphere, while Vladimir Putin depicts the relationship as one of an alliance type (soyuznicheskiye otnosheniya). Yet in its 2019 White Paper, it states that China ‘advocates partnerships rather than alliances and does not join any military bloc.’ The case of Russia and China raises a number of questions about the strength of commitment and support: abandonment or entrapment are both equally possible. However, in today’s multipolar world, alliances are highly mutable and we need to see Sino-Russian relations in this context. Strong commitment means realignment at a later stage becomes more difficult, and makes an autonomous foreign policy harder. Given the declared aim for Russia and China to move towards greater multipolarity and resist hegemonism, the strategic rivalry between the US and China should be examined in this context.

The Political Economy of Digital Transactions
The Political Economy of Digital Transactions (International Political Economy Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Carilol The increasing digitisation of transactions is revealed in shifts towards a ‘cashless’ economy which is also described, alternatively, as a ‘digital enclosure’ (Scott, 2018). To what extent and how is this shift advanced and also resisted? How can scholars engage with the specific patterns of accumulation and extraction that emerge from the push to go cashless? These patterns, on the one hand, include the ‘data monetisation’ capacities of private organisations through which data is captured and — using digital analytical tools — turned into revenue streams. On the other hand, multiple forms of inequality are (re)produced from attempts to widen and deepen the digital enclosure. We are interested in paper proposals that address the complexities of a real and/or imagined ‘cashless economy’ and the overlapping social, political, and economic factors which give it its shape. Our session thus welcomes research examining all aspects of the political economy of digital transactions, to generate critical scholarship on various aspects of digital payments, including remittances, mobile money, electronic wallets, central bank digital currencies. We seek to address questions that include, but are not limited to, the following: - What broader political and economic factors have contributed to the rapid proliferation of digital transactions since the mainstreaming of the financial inclusion agenda, nearly two decades ago? - What role do digital transactions play in uneven financial access? - To what extent are ecologies of fintech reliant on global financial capital? Where and when does fintech create and contribute to new and continuing forms of racial and gender inequality and exploitation? Reference: Scott, B (2018). The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it. The Guardian, 19 July. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/19/cashless-society-con-big-finance-banks-closing-atms

The politics, legality and ethicality of non-state actors in war
The politics, legality and ethicality of non-state actors in war (War Studies Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Sandhill Room Although uneven across time and space, war is a constant in human history. War, however, is constantly changing. Not only are its ends and means in flux, war’s sites and its labourers are expanding and shifting. It is now commonly accepted that state hegemony in warfare is decreasing and that the role of non-state actors in violent inter- and intra-state conflicts are increasingly important in terms of the academic analysis of war. This panel seeks to explore two, although often neglected, non-state actors in war, namely volunteer fighters and mercenaries. Building on existing work in the field, the panel turns towards just war thinking as the most appropriate lens through which to explore the politics, legality and ethicality of non-state actors in violent conflict. In particular, presenters on the panel will address two principal themes. First, how do non-state actors complicate just war thinking. Second, and moreover, what are the political, legal and ethical implications of non-state actors in war. The proposed panel has four presenters and one discussant. Helene Olsen (King’s College London) looks at how mercenaries are constructed as illegitimate actors in war, and the underlying rationale for this political move. Fletch Williams (London School of Economics) problematises current legal frameworks surrounding private security and military companies by focusing on the question of accountability. Keith Smith (King’s College London) explores the historical memories and the underpinning political visions that transnational volunteer fighters employ to provide an ethical dimension to their volunteer fighting. Thomas Hooper (Queen Mary University London) employs the transnational fighting phenomenon as means to make ethical claims against revisionist just war theory.

Tracing Intersections of ‘Race’, Gender, and the Colonial Afterlives of Foreign Policy Organisations
Tracing Intersections of ‘Race’, Gender, and the Colonial Afterlives of Foreign Policy Organisations (Gendering International Relations Working Group)
16:15 - 17:45
Room: Pandon Room Feminist IR has illuminated the importance of gender to understanding how foreign policies and the organisations that make and implement them are produced. The discipline of international relations, however, continues to suffer from “racial aphasia”, and mainstream feminist IR has been criticised for failing to centre analyses of ‘race’ and coloniality. Nonetheless, there is a burgeoning academic literature on the topic of ‘race’ in/and IR, which demonstrates how the racial structures and hierarchies created by slavery, Empire, colonialism, and capitalism, remain central to international politics and foreign policymaking. This panel explores the intersections of gender and ‘race’, and colonial afterlives, in shaping the life of organisations in international politics, including governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations. It will trace these intersections across the foreign policies developed and implemented across these organisations. The panel asks: how does gender and ‘race’ shape the everyday practices of organisations that constructs or influences foreign policies? How do processes of gendering and racialisation in these organisations influence foreign policymaking, or make particular foreign policies possible or intelligible? How are spatiality and power dynamics shaped by the colonial afterlives of organisations/, and vice versa? In what ways does gender and ‘race’ reproduce colonial-racial logics in foreign policymaking, and how might these processes be subverted?