International studies and sustainability: moving beyond economic growth? (Review of International Studies (journal editors only))

• Jacob Hasselbalch (Copenhagen Business School)
• Rajeswari S Raina (Shiv Nadar University)
• Chukwumerije Okereke (Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike Nigeria)
• Matthias Kranke (University of Kassel)
• Dahlia Simangan (Hiroshima University)
• Lorenzo Fioramonti (University of Pretoria)
• Michael Albert (SOAS University of London)
• Bentley Allan (John Hopkins University)

Room: Room 2 This roundtable - part of a Review of International Studies editor's forum - examines the relationship between sustainability and economic growth.

Is ‘Women, Peace and Security’ shrinking? (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Room 3 This roundtable brings together early career researchers with diverse, critical and historical perspectives, including practitioner and policy-based research, to explore the following questions: - Is ‘Women, Peace and Security’ becoming a foreign policy tool at the exclusion of having a domestic remit? - Who are the ‘women’ in ‘Women, Peace and Security’ and which women are made invisible by this label - As we broaden our understanding of what security means (for example to include climate change, structural violence), is this being translated to the remit of ‘Women, Peace and Security’? - Is knowledge production about ‘Women, Peace and Security’ being manipulated and to what ends? The roundtable has been convened by the Defence Research Committee.

Pluriversal Relationality (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Room 4 Relationality is embedded in our daily lives. How we relate to one another conditions how we see ourselves and how we are seen. This roundtable, based on a forthcoming *Review of International Studies* Special Issue, addresses two challenges. First, what happens if we conceive relationality in a manner that ontologically begins by assuming interconnection as prior to the existence of entities. Second, it seeks to pluralize the sources of relational thinking in IR by showcasing how different cosmological traditions in the Americas, Asia and Australia view relationality. This epistemological plurality affords us an opportunity to expand, enrich and enlarge the debate on relationality in IR by making it "pluriversal". The term "pluriversal" refers to the entanglement of different cosmologies, each with their distinct understanding of the relationship between human beings and the cosmos. Pluriversal relationality examines how these different cosmologies are constructed, how they relate to one another and how they are transformed through interaction. This roundtable thereby seeks to make an important and distinctive intervention to: 1) non-western, post-western, and decolonial IR explorations of the pluriverse, 2) current IR debates on relationality and also the cosmological turn and 3) mainstream constructivist thought and practice of relational theorizing.

Politics, strategy and diplomacy in South East Asia (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 5 South east Asia

Securitisation of Refugees and Migrants in the EU (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 6 This panel assesses the process of securitising refugees and migrants in the EU

COVID 19 and Environmental Rule of Law: One Crisis! One World? (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Room 2 The pandemic caused by COVID 19 can hardly be divorced from the global environmental crisis. In fact, Covid 19 as climate change are both local and global crisis at the same time. Deploying emergency powers all around the world to face the current crisis brought to the fore no less fractured image of the rule of law at both national and international levels. Inability of many states to react in consistency with international obligations raised, ever debated questions over the legal institution of emergency at the international level. Crisis is bond to reveal aspects of chaos and inequality. This is particularly when addressing economy, lives and livelihood is to take place within the sense of sustainability and rights. The outbreak of the pandemic has its clear implications on inequalities all around the world. The global economy has been disrupted on a vast scale and loss of jobs and unemployment has seriously affected livelihoods around the world. Considering the decline in the role and structural weakness of international institutions it was not surprising that the World Health Organization (WHO),for example, has clearly struggled to effectively bring national states to adopt a coordinated response. Climate justice and environmental crises are forms of an international crisis that call again for consideration of legal responses and shed an illuminating light on conflicts as much as they do on progressive capital powers in times of globalization regionally and internationally. Using a comparative lens, this roundtable engages with states’ responses to the ongoing pandemic across the globe while raising questions over societal values post the pandemic . The discussion will seek to highlight the intersection between the current pandemic and environmental challenges by looking at what this pandemic revealed about the state in terms of shortcomings of international law. The discussion will question whether environmental rule of law is still fit for purpose and how the current pandemic has revealed shifting dynamics between the Global South and Global North.

Can the world survive? Can we listen to the marginalised? (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group) Room: Room 3 For far too long, International Relations has taken people for granted. The discipline is notoriously biased in favour of status quo and boringly state-centric. The preoccupation with a strategic rationale has resulted in the utter neglect of the people, especially the marginalised sections of society. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its continuing aftermath has set the alarm bells ringing. Theoretically, International Relations has been muted and indifferent to a number of catastrophes—be it Rwanda, Sri Lanka or Myanmar. Strategically, inaction has been normalised; foreign policy decisions privilege ‘national interest’ to the exclusion of the ‘other’. This is no longer the case. When the disaster strikes at the doorsteps of all of us in the form of a pandemic, we understand the limits of power, capabilities, security and other such perennial obsessions of International Relations.The world is far more fragile and precarious than we had imagined and theorised from the comfort zone of ivory towers. The marginalised are the most affected and teetering on the brink of penury. Can the world survive and return to normalcy? Can the marginalised be ever free and secure? Are we hearing the clarion call for privileging the standpoint of the marginalised?

Polish International Studies Association: The role of the main actors in the Indo – Pacific regional Order. Neoliberal perspective (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 4 The objective of the panel is to reconstruct the assumptions of strategies of the most important individual and collective actors for the Indo-Pacific region. The concept of the Indo-Pacific region emerged in political and scientific discourse as early as 2007, but it was only during the Donald Trump presidency that the United States for the first time presented the approach to this region, known as the Indo-Pacific strategy. Soon after, other powers did the same. All these strategies are more competitive than complementary. Therefore, it justifies the need to compare them in order to answer the question about the shape of the regional order. The actors' regional strategies will be framed using the terms and categories characteristic for neoliberal institutionalism.

Post-Liberal Statebuilding and Social Ordering in Central Asia and beyond (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Room 5 Recent political developments and scholarly advances have indicated the limitations of liberal-democratic politics, capitalist development and analytical approaches founded upon them. Thus, well established framings on ‘authoritarian’, ‘illiberal’ and otherwise non-democratic governance have faced critique and a call for alternative approaches that better capture the contradictions of liberalism and its capitalist foundation. The present roundtable engages this emerging debate in the Central Asian and wider Eurasian and global context. It is centred around Philipp Lottholz’s monograph Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia: Imaginaries, Discourses and Practices of Social Ordering (Bristol UP), which develops the concept of post-liberal statebuilding as a novel way to capture political and social change. Drawing on decolonial perspectives on peace, conflict and intervention and their iterations in the post-Socialist world, this work argues for a more dialogical approach to research and for inquiring the imaginaries, discourses and practices that foreground social order. With its practice-based and ethnographic inquiry into community security and peacebuilding in Southern Kyrgyzstan and a wide-ranging textual analysis, the study demonstrates the continuous co-existence of liberal-democratic discourse with exclusion, marginalisation and violence in the present order, and identifies alternative sources and potentials of substantive peace and security in practical and political, but also imaginary and cosmological domains. Participants will critically examine this analysis and, among other things, the author’s argument that Kyrgyzstan’s – and the wider Central Asian – socio-political order needs to be understood in terms of its post-liberal character alongside a reconsideration of prevalent assumptions about liberal democracy, modern statehood and capitalist development.

EU Agencies in Transnational Criminal Enforcement (European Security Working Group) Room: Room 2 The papers in this panel consider the institutional foundations of the European Union’s criminal policy – a highly topical and critical question for the future development of the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and the subsequent legal and political developments entailed an unprecedented reinforcement of the powers of the Union’s criminal justice agencies; Europol, Eurojust and, recently, the establishment of a novel EU criminal justice body – the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO). The transformation of the former third pillar to the AFSJ suggests that these agencies now partly operate inside the traditional ‘supranational‘ decision-making structure. The expansion of qualified majority voting in the Council and enhanced powers for the Commission, the European Parliament and the Court of Justice as well as the extension of direct effect to EU acts in this area substantiate this proposition. The most important reform in the Lisbon Treaty is that EU criminal justice agencies were conferred with a clear mandate to engage in the fight against transnational crime. The Lisbon Treaty opened up new possibilities for strengthening the role of Eurojust, conferred wider powers to Europol to reinforce their institutional capacity, and a legal basis for establishing a European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) with powers to directly prosecute crimes against the EU’s financial interests. On the basis of the novel Treaty mandate and a strong political will the EU legislator has thereto adopted important reforms such as the EPPO Regulation, a new Europol Regulation and a new Eurojust Regulation. In the light of these developments, this panel explores the question - via a multi-disciplinary investigation - to what extent the increased competences of the EU and the stronger internal and external presence of EU criminal justice agencies has transformed EU criminal law from an ‘intergovernmental’ and ‘cooperative’ regime to a ‘supranational’ and ‘integrated’ framework.

Italian Political Science Association: A renewed interest in the study of Italian foreign policy (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 3 Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in the study of Italian foreign policy. This panel aims to provide a systematic overview of all aspects of Italian foreign policy and to set the agenda for further research on the subject. Particular attention is given to how the topic of foreign policy is addressed in the political science literature with a focus on policy formulation and decision-making. The panel includes several contributions whose aim is to show new trends in the study of Italian foreign policy, from a comparative perspective or with a focus on international institutions, the role of civil society and political parties. The panel also aims at showing how there are nowadays different ways to study foreign policy following theoretical or empirically oriented approaches. Particular attention is given to the decision-making process and the evaluation of foreign policy effects. Equally important is the historical-theoretical analysis that highlights the distinctiveness of foreign policy among other policies, thus its link to international relations. Are there permanent factors that explain foreign policy directions? What have been the main historical junctures that have influenced policy fractures and positions?

Populism, Turkey and regional politics (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 4 Populism, Turkey and regional politics

Theory, technology and international relations (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 5 New perspectives on international relations

Translocal households in the context of Covid19 (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Room 6 This roundtable is concerned with how Covid19 has impacted translocal households - households in which members live in different locations, but are connected via resource flows (including remittances), social reproduction, consumption, or less tangible, affective, practices. Large scale migratory flows, often into highly precarious forms of work, serve to distribute householding practices spatially – be it across national borders or urban-rural divides (Brickell and Dutta 2011). However enforced mobilities and immobilities that were the direct result of the Covid19 pandemic have thrown translocal householding practices into flux: migrant workers unable to return home or send remittances; returned migrants placing additional pressures on unpaid household labour; government policy responses that served to both support and undermine households struggling with these pressures. The roundtable will draw together a range of feminist political economy scholars working on different parts of the world (both the Global North and the Global South) to provide initial reflections on the transformation of the translocal household in the context of the Covid19 pandemic. Participants are asked to reflect on how translocal households were impacted by the pandemic (both in the short and the longer term) and, more broadly, to consider how best to centre discussions of social reproduction within an understanding of the translocal household

Interrogating transnational anti-gender politics (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Room 2 In recent years, attacks on the ‘rise of gender ideology’ as a sociopolitical force, on gender studies as an academic field, and on individuals – whether they be scholars, activists or policy makers – seen to be their embodied representatives, have grown in scope and intensity as well as in their geographical reach and transnational connectivity. Prominent examples include the banning of gender studies in Hungary; gender panics deployed against the peace agreement in Colombia; and assaults on feminists campaigning against sexual violence in India and Pakistan. These attacks have deleterious effects on the bodily, psychic, and economic security of women and the non-conforming sexual and gender subjects who are denied basic rights and dignity and access to healthcare, and are made even more vulnerable to physical violation. They undermine fields of study that social justice movements have fought hard to establish. They cause, in other words, harm that is both symbolic and material; that is epistemic and bodily felt. This panel understands such anti-gender attacks as a formation in need of urgent analytical and political attention and interrogates them from a specifically transnational feminist perspective. The papers on this panel interrogate: How do anti-gender mobilisations work as political formations? What animates their claims? How can they be resisted?

Military Humanitarianism: The Nexus of Humanitarian Impulses and Military Means in the Twentieth Century (British International History Working Group) Room: Room 3 Histories of humanitarianism and the military frequently operate in parallel with one another, enrichening the other’s interpretations of conflict, power, and international hierarchies. However, these fields have yet to fully engage with the points of connection that complicate existing studies of humanitarian organisations and military actors. This panel seeks to address this lacuna and bring together papers which consider this nexus in detail, locating instances of military humanitarianism and transforming conceptions of international interventions. Rather than attempting to pin down a specific definition of ‘military humanitarianism’, this panel explores the liminality of humanitarian and military action in practice and the fluidity of identity in conflict environments. By engaging the histories of humanitarianism and counterinsurgency, these papers consider both how humanitarian impulses have influenced military strategy and to what extent military means and logic have shaped the evolution of humanitarian response in the twentieth century. Examining this nexus enables a more nuanced understanding of how humanitarians and military actors were far from distinct categories in conflict contexts and that blurring between these groups was common – if unacknowledged. Building on critical humanitarian histories – challenging humanitarians as impartial or neutral in conflict contexts – this panel seeks to emphasise the tension in defining ‘humanitarian action’ in war and thus provoking the questions: who is a ‘humanitarian’ and can a military actor act upon a ‘humanitarian impulse’? This panel considers these questions in the context of three case studies, tracing the evolution of ‘military humanitarianism’ in practice: the US military mission to Armenia in the 1920s; formative United Nations military pursuits in the 1940s; counterinsurgency responses to child soldiering in mid-century Kenya and Cyprus; and the humanitarian intervention into Bosnia during the 1990s.

Political Theologies and Socio-Political Practices (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Room 4 In order to challenge prevalent narratives downplaying the presence of religion on the international stage, IR discussions over the past twenty years have flagged the extent to which religious actors shape and reshape the international realm (Petito and Hatzopolous 2003; Fox and Sandler 2004; Thomas 2005; Hurd 2008). Recent explorations of the political theology of the international (Molloy 2017; JIRD 2019; Paipais 2020; Bain 2020) go a step further by deliberately shifting the focus away from religion as a socio-political object of study towards the manner in which secular international political thought is itself shot through with theological motifs. This panel extends the political theological conversation, and it does so in two important respects. First, the panel emphasizes embodiment and socio-political practices out of a recognition that the IR political theological conversation has thus far largely unfolded at the level of the history of ideas. This sole focus on ideas is problematic to the extent that it reinforces a reductive notion of religion and theology as pertaining to the level of belief. Second, the panel brings together political theological conversations within the western tradition with the burgeoning exploration in IR of the political theological import of non-western traditions.

Re-imagining International Relations: Proposals for building a decolonized discipline (Review of International Studies (journal editors only)) Room: Room 5 This Roundtable showcases a forthcoming Review of International Studies Forum. This forum asks, what should a decolonized field of International Relations (IR) look like? Scholarly works have studied the colonial makings of the “core-periphery dynamics” of IR (Tickner 2013) and the way this places the Global North in the disciplinary mainstream and relegates perspectives from the Global South to the periphery (Engel & Olsen 2005; Harman & Brown 2013; Johnston 2012; Odoom & Andrews 2017; Taylor 2012). Others have argued for a recognition of the multiplicity of ways in which politics and society is experienced (Ling 2014; Tickner & Blaney 2012). They go on to demonstrate that the colonial roots of IR have ensured that racialized epistemologies and codes of knowledge production continue to determine the disciplinary norms and priorities (Anievas, Manchanda & Shilliam 2015; Hendersen 2013; Lake 2016; Rutazibwa 2016; Vitalis 2015). But while it is important to persist with the effort to garner widespread recognition of the need to decolonize IR, this forum is motivated by the understanding that decolonization is not just a metaphor or a discursive struggle (Tuck & Yang 2012). Neither is the decolonization agenda fulfilled by the mere recognition of the colonial past and imperial present of the discipline. Instead, the articles in this forum contribute to the decolonization agenda as they propose ways of materially re-making IR as a decolonized discipline. Accordingly, they identify explicit and implicit mechanisms that constitute colonization and present pointed reparative strategies that aim to dismantle these mechanisms.

The Transformative Potential of Feminist Foreign Policy – Early-Career Scholars’ Perspectives (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Room 6 Recently, feminist foreign policy (FFP) has emerged as an innovative way to make and think about foreign policy. First adopted by Sweden in 2014, FFP quickly travelled across the globe, with various states adopting (Canada, Spain, Mexico) or pledging to adopt an FFP (France, Luxembourg, Libya). While FFP is often related to centring gender equality, ‘feminist’ foreign policy in fact remains a contested term, and a definition of FFP is still evolving. Nevertheless, FFP is seen as providing innovative ways to effectively address urgent global challenges that necessitate cooperation from different actors and organisations. For, FFP makes possible solidarity as it potentially transforms power hierarchies that underpin foreign policy (making) globally. However, emerging scholarship has also highlighted how FFP is co-opted and constrained by capitalist, neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal structures underpinning foreign policymaking (Parashar and D’Costa 2017; Vucetic 2017; Duriesmith 2018; Macdonald and Ibrahim 2019; Thomson 2020; Cadesky 2020; Morton et al. 2020; Parisi 2020), thereby casting doubt on its transformative potential. While research on FFP is still in its early stages, it has sought to centre new perspectives and non-hierarchical and collaborative approaches. In line with this, this roundtable provides an opportunity for a diverse range of early-career researchers and practitioners to openly discuss the future of FFP as a developing policy approach and growing field of study. Drawing on their own research on FFP in India, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and the UK, speakers will reflect on the following questions: What makes a foreign policy feminist? To what extent does FFP help us to address increasing global inequalities? How is feminism co-opted, constrained, contested in foreign policymaking? Which feminist knowledges are included/excluded in FFP? Is a feminist foreign policy indeed possible?

Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Internacionales: Pandemics: The Catastrophic Crisis. Transregional governance and the provision of public environmental goods in the Americas (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 2 Towards the end of 2019 everything of our abnormal life was in its normal course. Until the pandemic. No country knew what to do and how to react. We witnessed different responses and measures, and a horrific quantity of deaths. All this has to be enough to make us, as humanity, to get proactively involved in proposing different solutions and alternative ways of thinking and living, to overcome this and the crises to come. Staying within what we already know, won’t work. Prof. Modesto Seara Vázquez, president and founder of the Oaxaca (Mexico) System of Public Universities, coordinated an effort to explore different ways in which the authors would look into the unknown to find a better future for all.

Covid-19 and the politics of trauma (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Room 3 Covid-19 seems to have inaugurated a “new normal.” This is the fashionable talk we hear in the middle of a global pandemic that has so far victimized 1,000,000 people, has disproportionately affected racialized and working class communities, has been characterized by blatant policy failure, evidenced the senselessness of the neoliberal assault on the state, and risks triggering an unprecedented economic crisis. In this absolutely dystopian scenario, critical scholars are faced with two choices: First, to take the “new normal” as another buzzword, another unfortunate point in a long history of publicity tricks meant to numb global audiences to the violence, death and suffering caused by the forward march of racial, colonial capital. Or, second, to take the buzzword seriously, as evidence of the (re)emergence of symbolic and material processes whereby the modern/colonial/capitalist world reorganizes its basis, attributing or extracting different values and meanings to aspects of everyday life. As more time passes, and the normalization of acceptable deaths becomes more evident, the “new normal” also invites a much needed reconceptualization of the larger politics of trauma, a concept that has acquired a privileged position in critical security studies. Trauma refers to an external event (a shock) that interrupts normality of life with a magnitude and force defies the logics of representation, shattering our capacity to put into words the violence suffered or witnessed. But what happens to the traumatic once we enter Covid’s “new normal”? What happens to governance via the logic of exceptionality? The representation of Covid as an event that cannot be comprehended? The reality of death, its proximity, and routinization? The role of emotions in the political sphere (where are all the “rational men in suits” supposed to lead us through the storm)? The language of militarized masculinity (what does it mean to take a million deaths on the chin)? The constantly reinvented technologies of body-counting? Among others. We propose a panel that begins a conversation on the larger connections between death, trauma, memory, racialization, coloniality, dispossession and Covid-19. This workshop seeks to bring together scholars interested not only in the global pandemics as such, but also in the larger theoretical questions that Covid-19 has brought to light. The panel is not meant to produce a final word and overwhelming phenomenon, but to explore the opportunities for rethinking the usual frames through which we talk about violence, death, and strategies of mourning/commemoration.

ISA: COVID and the Future of International Studies (Conference/Management) Room: Room 4 COVID has transformed so many things and academic exchange and collaboration is not exempt from those impacts. Conferences have been cancelled, postponed, pivoted to hybrid and the pandemic has created financial uncertainties for many people and institutions in the field. It has also created pressures for new and different types of interaction that many associations have been ill-equipped to manage in the short-term, all the while many colleagues crave the return to in-person gatherings. This roundtable is populated by representatives from various international studies organizations who will speak to their experiences to date and looking ahead. It will also spur speculation about future trends in our field.

Surviving the post-imperial world: post- and decolonial perspectives to global challenges (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Room 5 d

UACES: How can European Studies survive? (Orphan Papers track) Room: Room 6 European Studies is facing challenging times particularly in the UK. Brexit, the steady decline in language learning, changes to the Law qualifying system and a hostile political environment are putting the teaching of the EU, and European Studies more broadly, at risk. Simultaneously, our research expertise is both needed more than ever by policy makers, but has also become politicised in unexpected ways. These challenges are not confined to the UK. The round table will reflect on this challenging environment and the steps we might take to remain relevant.