BISA 2022 Conference (virtual stream)

Name: BISA 2022 Conference (virtual stream)
Start: 2022-06-14T08:55:00+01:00
End: 2022-06-14T19:25:00+01:00
Location: No location set

Tuesday 14 Jun 2022, 08:55 → 19:25 Europe/London

Description

Welcome to the event management area for #BISA2022. Here you can view the programme and register for our virtual conference. We look forward to welcoming you at BISA 2022.

If you've already signed up to the face-to-face conference, you do not need to sign up to the virtual conference here. Please note that signing up to the virtual conference does not sign you up to the face-to-face conference in Newcastle.

Contact

conferences@bisa.ac.uk

- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  Roundtable / Climate Assemblies, Multi-Level Governance and the Global Climate Crisis Room 1
  
  Climate change is gaining increasing traction on the political agenda. Meaningful public engagement, at all levels of governance, is widely considered to be essential to help address the crisis. Traditional institutions of representative democracy, are seen as inadequate as they struggle to consider long-term goals due to electoral incentives and the need to respond to current public opinion and media. As a result, we are seeing a wave of citizens’ assemblies, at all levels of governance, from the global to the local, used to engage representative samples of the public in informed climate change deliberation. This roundtable assesses the extent that climate assemblies can help society address the global climate, considers their transferability across different levels of governance, and highlights the barriers they face. A range of speakers, who have researched climate assemblies from the city, local, regional, sub-national, national and global level will provide key lessons.
  
  Sponsor: Environment Working Group
  
  Chair: Stephen Elstub (Newcastle University)
  
  Participants: Naoyuki Mikami (Hokkaido University) , Nadine Andrews (University of Lancaster/ Scottish Government Social Research) , Alice Moseley (University of Exeter) , Oliver Escobar (Edinburgh University) , Jayne Carrick (Newcastle University) , Claire Mellier (OSCA) , Martin King (Northumbria University) , Dmitri Courant (University of Lausanne)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  Roundtable / International Studies and Sustainability: Moving Beyond Economic Growth? Room 2
  
  This roundtable - part of a Review of International Studies editor's forum - examines the relationship between sustainability and economic growth.
  
  Sponsor: Review of International Studies (journal editors only)
  
  Chair: Matthew Paterson (University of Manchester)
  
  Participants: Matthias Kranke (University of Kassel) , Dahlia Simangan (Hiroshima University) , Jacob Hasselbalch (Copenhagen Business School) , Bentley Allan (John Hopkins University) , Michael Albert (SOAS University of London) , Rajeswari S Raina (Shiv Nadar University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  Roundtable / Is ‘Women, Peace and Security’ Shrinking? 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.
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Columba Achilleos-Sarll (University of Birmingham)
  
  Participants: Dipti Tamang (Darjeeling Government College,) , Hannah West (Newcastle University) , Rachel Zhou (London School of Economics) , Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  Roundtable / Pluriversal Relationality 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.
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Giorgio Shani (International Christian University)
  
  Participants: Tamara Trownsell (Independent Scholar) , Giorgio Shani (International Christian University) , Navnita Chadha Behera (Delhi University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  Panel / Politics, Strategy and Diplomacy in South East Asia Room 5
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Convener: Yi Wang (Waseda University)
  
  Chair: Yi Wang (Waseda University)
  - Indian Grand Strategy Towards Himalayan States
    
    The paper is an attempt to understand the historical evolution of Indian grand strategy towards Himalayan states since 1947. We will use the archival sources and employ an amalgamation of historical and conceptual tools in order to decipher its grand strategy. In this process, we will decipher what are the means employed by India in the region historically in order to achieve its grand strategic ends. Among the Himalayan states, we will look at the cases of Nepal and Bhutan. Most of the studies use the foreign policy perspectives in order to understand the Indian policy towards the region. We will depart from this traditional approach and use the conceptual framework which is developed by employing the works and concepts on grand strategy. In the process, we portray the shortcomings of Indian posture and argue that with the changing regional security environment; with a more prosperous and assertive China, Indian state's strategic posture actually harms its core security interests in the region. We then argue why India will be better off by employing the strategy of 'defensive accommodation' towards the small states in the region which don't pose any direct military threats.
    
    Keywords:
    Grand Strategy
    India
    Nepal
    Himalayas
    South Asia
    China
    Regional Security
    Archival Sources
    
    Author: Jayant Chandel (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - The Politics of Diplomatic Assertiveness in China
    
    China’s assertive diplomacy has been an important topic in recent years. With the expanding economic and military power, Beijing has become more willing to take a hard approach to dispute with other states, especially the US. Why does China perform in an assertive way in its diplomacy? Isn’t a gentle diplomacy more constructive for Sino-foreign relations? This study intends to answer this puzzling question that has been discussed by many International Relations scholars and experts. It takes three perspectives to explain China’s diplomatic assertiveness. First, assertiveness toward enemies or rivaling states has a cultural tradition in China. It is based on the collective memory that blames the conciliatory and surrender-like policy as the reason for China’s humiliating defeats by foreign powers from mid-eighteenth century. Second, assertiveness was a routine practice during the Cold War, when the Communist Party openly confronted with the US and the USSR, which has become a source of nationalistic nostalgia. Third, the blaming-nostalgia complex in Chinese nationalism induces and compels the state to perform in an assertive way for political legitimation.
    
    Author: Yi Wang (Waseda University)
  - Global Crises, Regional Solutions: China, India and the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, 1947-1950
    
    Asia in the late 1940s has been examined in terms of several national conflicts, for example the Chinese Civil War, Partition and independence wars in Southeast Asia. Little is known about the intention of major emerging countries like China and India to shape the future of post-war Asia. This paper examines China’s and India’s participation in the early Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), a regional commission of the UN Economic and Social Council founded in 1947 and still functioning today (as the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific). Indian delegates demanded that ECAFE boldly launch developmental projects in areas like food supply and industrialisation. By contrast, China wanted to build ECAFE’s capacity gradually and expected it to help Asian countries rehabilitate and revive their economies. Yet both Chinese and Indian leaders ultimately believed that ECAFE should help Asia not only ‘reconstruct’ but construct to a level much higher than the pre-war period. Their efforts compelled international organisations to act beyond the Atlantic. Despite the Cold War and the emphasis on nation-building, these efforts inspired later attempts in promoting regional development such as the 1955 Bandung Conference and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
    
    Author: Yui Chim Lo (University of Oxford)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  Panel / Securitisation of Refugees and Migrants in the EU Room 6
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales)
  
  Chair: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
  
  Discussant: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
  - State-Civil Society Relationship in the Implementation of UNSCR 2242.
    
    Women-led civil society activism contributed to the creation of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, governed by a series of UN Security Council resolutions on this theme. Their involvement led the Security Council to acknowledge these organisations as key WPS actors, both domestically and transnationally. However, these organisations are often allocated tokenistic roles during the national implementation of WPS resolutions. Based on semi-structured interviews and surveys with civil society and state WPS actors in Spain, the UK and Nigeria, this study explores the opportunities and methods used by state governments within these states to engage civil society in processes to implement Counter-Terrorism and Countering Violent Extremism (CT/CVE) measures informed by WPS. It also explores whether the ambiguity-conflict model is applicable in explaining the process adopted by states to implement domestic policies that align with the resolution. As civil society engagement within the majority of these states is minimal and the model provides little insight into WPS policy implementation within the Spanish and UK contexts, these findings have implications for CT/CVE and WPS practice and raise questions about how WPS policies are being implemented in some national contexts.
    
    Author: Doris Asante (University of Sydney)
  - The Securitization of refugees and far-right terrorism in the EU
    
    Refugees have been increasingly securitised in Europe, i.e. they have been presented as a security threat – as a terrorist threat. With a wave of Daeash terror attacks in Europe after Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Manchester, this issue has become a hot topic. Indeed, it has become more and more accepted that refugees have been securitized, i.e. presented as a security threat, notably through their constructed link to Daesh terrorism. This paper takes the securitization prism as a starting point, building on the notion that the terrorism association served as an amplifier in the process of securitization, a theoretical school initially developed by the Copenhagen School. However, refugees have become more than a security threat assumed by an increasingly anxious population. In fact, refugees and Europe itself have become a grievance factor for radical far-right groups. Thus, two seemingly separate processes – the rise oft he far right and the securitization of refugees and migrants – are in fact intimately linked and feed into each other. How are they linked? This paper analyses hybrid security conflicts, including hate speech towards migrants and refuges and the far-right rise in Europe. The new cyber age has brought a number of old societal conflicts to the forefront again – new old societal conflicts that are derived in old geopolitical rivalries, most notably conducted by revanchists powers, such as Russia.
    
    Author: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales)
  - Migration management in the EU: The ramifications of borders’ technologisation
    
    There is an apparent increase in employing new techniques for migration management. The new migration management agenda defined by technological innovations, like for example usage of biometrics, big data predictions regarding population movements, and artificial intelligence lie detectors. In fact, biometrics has become one the main practices for the identification of migrants and refugees. In the EU, the first signs of border control biometricisation can be detected within the Eurodac system and the biometric passports.
    Within this context, the growing employment of biometrics and the increasing role of data in managing populations raise ethical, legal and efficacy considerations, which become more salient once combined the with the economic dimension of biometry and datafication, namely the rising profits in this market and the neoliberal logic underpinning border management.
    In the effort to map the constantly altering border regime defined by technological innovations, the paper seeks firstly, to explore the ramifications to human rights and the impact on human lives, and secondly, to investigate how the technologisation of borders reconfigures the actors’ positions, decisions and actions and how it changes their relations.
    
    Author: Foteini Kalantzi (UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD)
  - The Diplomacy of Forced Migration
    
    Organised population transfers, expulsions, and exchanges have been a surprisingly common feature of international politics, but little is known about the state-level diplomacy that has accompanied such processes. As a result, separate fields of inquiry within foreign policy, security, and migration studies have yet to be placed in conversation with one another in order to understand the relationship between forced migration and diplomacy. This paper starts this critical conversation by addressing two key questions: 1) What diplomatic interests, tools and processes have shaped instances of forced migration? 2) What have been the diplomatic causes and effects of state-organised forced migration, and how do they relate to other international political arenas? To answer these questions, we draw upon our original globally-focused dataset of incidents of organised forced migration driven by, or resulting in, bilateral or multilateral initiatives. We further highlight implications of the evolution of the interplay between migration and foreign policy, while paying particular attention to regional and geographic variation. Overall, the paper adds a missing component to existing work on forced migration and diplomacy and draws attention to our new dataset as an important resource to policymakers and scholars of migration, international relations, security, diplomatic history, and international law.
    
    Authors: Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London)* , Gerasimos Tsourapas (University of Glasgow) , Kelly Greemhill (Tufts University)*
- 10:45 → 12:15
  Panel / BRISMES Panel: International Relations of the Middle East Room 1
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Conveners: Marianna Charountaki (University of Lincoln) , Teodora Todorova (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Teodora Todorova (University of Warwick)
  
  Discussant: Matteo Lengrenzi (Ca' Foscari University)
  - Arabian Peninsula views of IR: A disconnect?
    
    This paper aims to explore views from the Arabian Peninsula about the study of IR theories. The Arabian Peninsula is a region where informal networks and non-state actors are often more influential in foreign policy than state institutions and concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy are understood in different terms and with different connotations than in Western cultures. Despite these cultural and institutional differences, governments in the Arabian Peninsula adopt Western frameworks for IR. Could there be a gap between Arabian views of IR and what IR theories assume to be the driving forces of IR in the Arabian Peninsula? The paper will explore Arabian views of IR and compare them with established IR views of the Middle East. The analysis of this paper will be based on experience of teaching IR theories in the Arabian Peninsula for over 10 years, as well as secondary source data in research on IR in the Middle East.
    
    Author: Sterling Jensen (UAE defense college)
  - Towards an International Relations of the Middle East: Derivative Discourses or Decolonial Departures?
    
    Recent work, at the intersection of area studies and international relations, and from those concerned with attempts to decolonise the discipline of international relations, have highlighted the importance and utility of regional perspectives on international theory-making. Thus, there is now a vibrant literature that explores the potentials and pitfalls of conceptualising, interrogating, and analysing transnational politics, processes, and spaces from African, East Asian and South American standpoints. Much critical work also points to the deeply entrenched Eurocentrism of disciplinary international relations and mounts strident calls for reform. Significantly, little of this work has yet explored Middle Eastern/West Asian perspectives. This paper explores how work from other regional viewpoints might contribute to a potential project of crafting an “international relation of the Middle East”. In doing so, it explores some of the reasons why such approaches have thus far not coalesced and examines what such a project might suggest to us about the politics of the relationship between disciplinary IR and non-Western accounts of transnational politics and exchange. Throughout, the paper seeks to identify how a focus on West Asian materials may help scholars craft better theoretical accounts of regional power relations and contribute to overcoming the coloniality of existing accounts of regional politics from within IR.
    
    Author: Simon Obendorf (University of Lincoln)
  - The Political Sociology of the International Relations of the Middle East
    
    This paper outlines the contributions political sociology can make to re-defining the field of international relations of the Middle East. As a field of study political sociology has become associated with the study of power in social relations. More recently scholars have begun to re-assess the field’s neglected history of theorizing the state as a constellation of institutions and actors which shape and are shaped by gendered, racial and classed power relations. This reappraisal of the centrality of the state formation within social life highlights the synergies between political sociology and political science. The paper wishes to argue that political sociology can make a critical contribution to the international relations of the Middle East by foregrounding the contemporary study of the role played by postcolonial social movement actors in the evolution of the state/society relation. As such, the paper argues that the study of the International relations of the Middle East requires an approach which combines the lenses of political economy, postcolonial and decolonial critical theories, and social movement studies as central to understanding socio-political relations in the region.
    
    Author: Teodora Todorova (University of Warwick)
  - The nexus between Foreign policy and IR in the Middle Eastern context : Indicators of continuity in transition
    
    The international relations system, which has been in a state of flux since 1991, has intensified the rise of elements on both the structural and agent levels which require consideration. This explains a period of intense transition, where transformational forces have emerged that challenge conventional approaches to understanding foreign policy and International Relations; by blurring the line that traditionally separates the two disciplines. This is particularly interesting in cases such as the Middle Eastern region. Thus, the paper identifies (and operationalizes) four critical elements as pillars and explains how they impact on the study of foreign policy and IR, at least in the context of the Middle East. The impact emerging elements – as significant materials for the theorisation of International Relations (IR) discipline – have on foreign policy explains the need for a novel epistemology and asserts that, although traditional patterns of foreign policy continue to exist, they do so in a state of transition. Therefore, the effect of such forces has been sufficient to necessitate and justify a re-evaluation of how we think about the relationship between foreign policy and IR and the distinction between the two. The paper uses examples drawn from the study of the Middle East to shed light on broader theoretical themes.
    
    Author: Marianna Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  - The challenges and opportunities of conceptualising International Relations in the contemporary Levant
    
    The challenge and opportunity of conceptualizing International Relations trends in the Levant is that it is a cocktail of dimensions: an interconnected mixture of international, regional, state, and group levels of analyses that are all simultaneously active and operational. The use of legitimate force as a monopoly prerogative of the state within its own recognized border often no longer applies to fragile social structures as multiple external states reinforce the trespassing of territorial borders of the contested polity. The motivation of this paper is the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework that fully captures and conceptualizes these international relations dynamics in the contemporary Levant, despite the strategic importance and empirical significance of this sub-region. How this new Levant emerging order is evolving along with the parameters of the international system and how it can fit the International Relations literature?
    
    Author: Joe Macaron (University of Bath)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  Roundtable / COVID 19 and Environmental Rule of Law: One Crisis! One World? 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.
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Dina Hadad (MESA Global Academy Scholar)
  
  Participants: Louna Farhat (Dhofar University) , Darina Mackova (University of Kent)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  Panel / Can The World Survive? Can We Listen to the Marginalised? Room 3
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Convener: Madhan Mohan Jaganathan (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  
  Chair: Amitabh Mattoo (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  
  Discussant: Marco Vieira (University of Birmingham)
  - Shifting the standpoint from the ivory tower to the marginalised
    
    For far too long, International Relations has shied away from the concerns of the marginalised. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has exposed the hollowness of this exclusionary practice, and demonstrated the precariousness of the global community. While theorisations from the ivory tower concentrated disproportionately on eliminating worst-case scenarios, especially in the context of inter-state relations, the stark reality is shocking. The suddenness of the pandemic, and the scale and intensity of death and suffering have sent shivers down the spines of sovereign states. Whereas the current situation is probably better than before owing to vaccination, and a slew of precautionary measures, it is uncertain whether the pre-pandemic normalcy will ever be restored. More importantly, the marginalised strata have taken the brunt of the devastation. Perhaps, theories of International Relations, if they are to stay relevant and meaningful, ought to change the locus from the comfort zone of ivory towers to the predicament of the marginalised. Does this indicate a return to the Marxian roots, which ostensibly speak for the proletariat? Does the situation necessitate a robust engagement with authentic perspectives, and in a way, experiential accounts of thinkers such as B.R.Ambedkar in the Indian context? The paper grapples with these questions.
    
    Author: Madhan Mohan Jaganathan (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Bringing emancipation to the fore: Can the marginalised reclaim dignity?
    
    The discipline of International Relations (IR) is hegemonic. The sacrosanct sovereign states exclude the voices from the margins. The uneven impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the issue of marginalisation. The paper argues that despite the claims about inclusive democracy, the fact remains that people in India are marginalised at various levels; social exclusion being one of the most conspicuous markers of such marginalisation. While the economic costs of the pandemic have been well documented, the material bases of caste are ignored. The obsession with methodological nationalism denies any engagement with the margins. By having a limited ontological stance, the discipline of IR narrows its scope and allows the perpetuation and sustenance of exclusion by the states. Therefore, the paper argues for bringing emancipation to the fore. The argument rests on the theoretical premises of Aberystwyth School of Critical Security Studies, which asserts that the foundation of real security is established in the pursuit of emancipation. However, the paper seeks to redefine the idea of emancipation by postulating in the form of ‘dignity as emancipation’. The paper uses the writings of Ambedkar and EVR Periyar alongside the untold stories from the margins to redefine emancipation in terms of dignity.
    
    Author: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)
  - Rethinking marginalisation in International Relations: the ‘new normal’
    
    The Covid-19 pandemic has proven that a biological hazard can shake the states to their foundations, indiscriminately. Risk assessment and preparedness to fight a health care emergency is underprivileged globally. This observation incites thinking about the security protocols of the state. Sadly, it remains confined to the military and strategic aspects. A micro-level analysis demonstrates the urgency of critical governance on matters that concerns every common citizen. A global evaluation of the extant practices would, however, show that the world is focused still on high politics, liberal economism and strategic hallmarks. This paper argues that there are circumstances, albeit rare and temporary, which renders the common citizenry as ‘marginalised’. To this extent, the ‘citizen’ becomes the ‘other’ to the state machinery. The bragging of achievements —whether success in elections or a strategic/diplomatic victory— falls flat at the surge of Covid-19 cases. Nonetheless, IR has mostly refused to venture out from its salutations to the great powers. The hegemony at this stage seems superfluous at the face of managing the pandemic. By taking insights into the global cases of survival and denial during the pandemic, a ‘new normal’ in IR is desirable that which shall make marginalisation, the cynosure of the discipline.
    
    Author: Amna Sunmbul (Greenwood High International)
  - Entangling Mental Health in IR: Breaking the Silence and Addressing the Stigmatisation
    
    The unprecedented onslaught of Covid-19 has led to a worldwide disruption of what was once considered normal in academia. Scholars across disciplines, including IR, grappled with the uncertainty that negatively affected their mental health. The unexpected rupturing of academic time and space has also led to a much-needed self-introspection and debate around inequalities and marginalisation that have often plagued academia.
    The proposed study argues that mental health has always been an intrinsic part of the research trajectory, yet it has been grossly ignored in IR. The theoretical ivory towers of IR are opposed to any self-reflexive discourse, yet failed spectacularly when pandemic laid bare its futility in addressing these critical issues. Using ‘autoethnography’, the proposed study seeks to address issue of mental health through ‘High Impact PhD Memes’— from a Facebook page wherein scholars across disciplines share self-reflexive memes of their PhD research and struggles in pursuit of academic excellence. The study draws inspiration from insightful work of Katarina Kušić and Jakub Záhora on ‘failure of fieldwork’ in arguing that these academic themed memes offer creative insight as to how ‘self’, while entangling with ‘memetic satire’ seeks emancipation by bringing forth the issue of mental health in research amid pandemic.
    
    Author: Manu Sharma (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  Panel / Polish International Studies Association: The Role of the Main Actors in the Indo – Pacific Regional Order, Neoliberal Perspective Room 4
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Convener: Edward Haliżak (University of Warsaw)
  
  Chair: Edward Haliżak (University of Warsaw)
  - QUAD in US strategy in the Indo-Pacific region
    
    The QUAD will likely be the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy. In this regard, his administration’s approach is effectively picking up where the Trump administration left off and continuing within similar policy boundaries. For the past four US presidencies, the US has been incrementally transforming the Cold War-era “hub and spokes” security system of East Asia into a format of networked multilateralism where the spokes are encouraged to forge bilateral and trilateral ties amongst themselves, thus becoming semi-hubs themselves. The QUAD is the embodiment of this shift as its members are increasingly networked into a complex web of mutual agreements. This paper aims for a theoretical explanation of the embrace of the QUAD as a tool of its security policy in the Indo-Pacific.
    
    Author: Jan Hornat (Charles University)
  - China's strategies in the Indo-Pacific region
    
    China, unlike other actors, has not announced a formalized strategy for the Indo-Pacific region, and its reaction to the US move is a function of the continuation of its actions taken earlier in this region, which may be traced back to 1979, i.e. the launch of the program of the Four Modernizations. For the purpose of studying Chinese regional strategy, which is characterized by a long time horizon, we will refer to neoliberal institutionalism, as its assumptions regarding "relative gains" and "absolute gains" allow a more adequate explanation of China's motives.
    
    Author: Edward Haliżak (University of Warsaw)
  - Transatlantic Community vs the Indo– Pacific
    
    The purpose of the presentation is to describe the motives for the positive involvement of the Transatlantic Community in shaping the order in the Indo-Pacific region. This process can be considered on two planes. The first is manifested at the NATO level in the form of the declaration regarding the situation in the Indo-Pacific region and specific activities of this institution in the form of various types of missions. The second one manifests itself on the political level and consists in supporting the liberal order based on values, referred to as "Open and Free Indo-Pacific". The effectiveness of this support is and will be a function of the coherence of Western countries' actions, the emanation of which is the Transatlantic Community.
    
    Author: Aleksandra Jarczewska (University of Warsaw)
  - India’s contribution to regional order in the Indo-Pacific: domestic politics and international institutions.
    
    As the largest resident naval power in the Indian Ocean, India has on various occasions contributed to regional order. It has responded to political crises in the neighbourhood, provided humanitarian aid in the face of natural disasters, and security to the international sea lines of communication. However, the capacity to play a role of ‘net security provider’ has been limited due to resources as well as political constraints. Of late, with the emergence of international coalitions such as the Quad, mini-lateral groupings like RIC (Russia-India-China trilateral), as well as deepening bilaterals with key players (US, France, Japan, Australia, Vietnam), India is increasingly embedded in overlapping and cross-cutting security arrangements, of varying degrees of institutionalisation. In this paper, the relationship between domestic politics and international institutions will be explored to examine the delicate balancing act that India continues to pursue between hedging, engaging and balancing against China in the Indo-Pacific.
    
    Author: Jivanta Schottli (Dublin City University)
  - The EU strategy towards Indo-Pacific
    
    The principal aim of this paper is to analyse the EU strategy towards challenges and opportunities related to the emergence of the Indo-Pacific region in a period of growing U.S-China competition. The importance of the region and its emergence, as well as the rise of China in the region, for the purpose of this paper, are perceived as the independent variable. The dependent variable is the role of Indo-Pacific region in the EU external strategy. The intervening variable, which had an impact on the above-mentioned variables, constitutes the US Strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. The paper will attempt to answer the following research question: Why, despite the divergence of interests in the Indo-Pacific between the EU member states and the differences in defining the region in geographical terms, was the EU successful in adopting its strategy towards the Indo-Pacific?
    Answers to this question will allow verification of the adopted hypothesis indicating that within the EU, despite the differences in policies and strategies of particular EU members towards the Indo-Pacific, in 2020-2021, under the influence of the dynamics of intra-regional relations (the Chinese factor), they began to redefine their role and position towards the Asian continent. It is to be implemented based on the assumptions of China's soft balancing policy and unequivocal support for the Indo-Pacific concept, based on a democratic and liberal order (as an alternative to the order proposed by China).
    
    Author: Jakub Zajączkowski (University of Warsaw )
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  Roundtable / Post-Liberal Statebuilding and Social Ordering in Central Asia and beyond 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.
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Chair: John Heathershaw (University of Exeter)
  
  Participants: Nargis Nurulla-Khodzhaeva (Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU), Moscow ) , John Heathershaw (University of Exeter) , Anna Kreikemeyer (Institute for Peace and Security Policy Hamburg (IFSH) Hamburg) , Timur Shaikhutdinov (Civic Union “For Reforms and Result”, Bishkek) , Philipp Lottholz (CRC "Dynamics of Security") , Karolina Kluczewska (University of Ghent)
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  Lunch 1h
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  Roundtable / Brazilian IR and Marxist Research Room 1
  
  The influence of Marxist thought in the human sciences throughout history cannot be ignored, even by its most active critics. In History, Sociology, Economics, Linguistics, among others, the contribution of Marxists to the epistemology, ontology and theory of these areas was intense. However, the same does not occur in the field of International Relations (IR), in Brazil and abroad. IR, traditionally understood as (generally conflictual) relations between states in an anarchic international system, has been systematically distanced from the thought inaugurated by the founders of modern socialism; it is one of the few social sciences in which it has been relatively easy to avoid an encounter with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
  In fact, since its birth as an area of scientific knowledge in 1919, IR has insisted on ignoring (thus far for over a century) Marx and Engels and the Marxists, their theorisations and concrete analyses of international phenomena. It has been argued that Marxism would have nothing to say about international relations, considered to be an economistic theory that reduces the phenomena of international politics to the dynamics of the capitalist economy; that it does not offer a theory on the state (the main agent of international relations); that it is merely a normative perspective dedicated to the socialist utopia and thus incapable of carrying out analyses of concrete reality; or that it is even one more among the various Eurocentric perspectives that would not be useful to analyses of the periphery (on these arguments, see Sclofsky and Funk, 2018).
  In Brazil, the field follows the same line, except perhaps in the area of International Relations Theory (IRT). In that area, however, some textbooks of IRT present a Marxist theory pertinent to IR in which Marxism and Marxist-inspired approaches appear as possible theories of IR. Nevertheless, in both cases the entries of Marxism occur in a caricatured way, concealing the potentiality of this critical thought for the field and revealing an ignorance about the vast field that is Marxism and its various contributions to international relations. What calls our attention is that some approaches do not even quote or make reference to Marxist studies, especially when referring to Marx and Engels, who supposedly have remained oblivious to the issues of international politics. They hide the copious studies by Marx and Engels on the subject.
  The RIMA Network (Rede Relações Internacionais e Marxismo) has represented, in Brazil, an attempt to overcome Disciplinary IR's marginalising overtures against both Marxism and peripheral thinking in its colonised adoption by mainstream Brazilian academia. The proposed roundtable aims first to present a general overview of RIMA's activities as well as what has been published and researched in Brazilian IR from Marxist perspectives. This will be followed by a discussion around what this variety of perspectives contributes to understanding International Relations as a Social Science (IRSS). Most particularly, the participants will be questioned on how Brazilian Marxism has advanced within IR beyond works produced within Marxism as a broader research programme and why this is relevant for IRSS.
  Our roundtable participants, all members of RIMA, are in different moments in their professional careers and represent varied perspectives within Marxist theory. In speaking to the empirical contributions and advancement of theoretical thinking, the roundtable will cover theoretical contributions from the Poulantzian, neo-Gramscian and Dependentista perspectives, and possibly others, as well as discuss what these have to contribute to debates on peripheral agency and systemic dependency.
  
  References
  SCLOFSKY, Sebastián; FUNK, Kevin. The Specter That Haunts Political Science: The Neglect and Misreading of Marx in International Relations and Comparative Politics. International Studies Perspectives, v.19, n.1, 44–66, 201
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Chair: Rafael Alexandre Mello (University of Brasilia)
  
  Participants: Caio Martins Bugiato (Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ)) , Pedro Salgado (University of Brasilia (UnB)) , Mariana Davi Ferreira (University of Campinas (Unicamp)) , Maíra Machado Bichir (Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA))
- 13:15 → 14:45
  Panel / EU Agencies in Transnational Criminal Enforcement Room 2
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales)
  
  Chair: Jacob Oberg (Orebro University)
  
  Discussant: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
  - No More Ransom: Uberization of Europol’s Public-Private Partnership
    
    This paper aims to examine to what extend Europol associated the 'No More Ransom' project is a genuine online sharing platform. It investigates Europol’s executives claim with sharing economy variables; technology-driven accessibility, transaction cost, and trust-building through three beneficiaries of the platform: victims, law enforcement agencies (LEAs), and private companies. The article's core argument is that 'No More Ransom' is a fully-fledged sharing platform for victims to download decryptors. However, as for LEAs and private companies, it needs to be developed further in terms of transaction cost and trust-building mechanisms to enhance public-private partnership (P3).
    
    Author: Ethem Ilbiz (University of South Wales)
  - The normative justification for having a European FBI
    
    This paper considers the constitutional and normative justification for transforming Europol into a fully-fledged supranational agency. It begins with a discussion of the narrative of Europol, its emergence and the earlier developments of law and policy in this area, including the rationale for creating this agency. Based on this discussion, the paper subsequently discusses the constitutional restrictions for developing Europol’s operational powers. It discusses critically the scope, limits and nature of Europol’s powers as well as its operating structure in light of Article 88 TFEU and the new Europol Regulation. Finally, it penetrates the justifications for giving powers to a centralised European police force to directly investigate crimes and proposals to give Europol more and binding operational powers. The key argument advanced is that the economic rationale, moral and democratic premises for accepting Europol intervention in the area of criminal justice must, in order to ensure the legitimacy of EU criminal policy, be confined to protecting clearly defined transnational interests or transnational implications attached to a regulated activity or problem. For this reason it is proposed that complex transnational criminal activity circumscribes the scope for Europol’s intervention in the area of operational cooperation in criminal justice. This, however, makes a case for giving Europol binding powers to coordinate and manage national investigations with respect to serious cross-border crime.
    
    Author: Jacob Oberg (Orebro University)
  - The Development of Europol’s External Relations: Towards Supranationalism?
    
    This paper examines the extent to which, if any, the development of Europol’s external relations over time has contributed to the integration of EU policing and criminal justice. More precisely, with reference to the academic debates on ‘intergovernmentalism’ and ‘supranationalism’, it examines the extent to and the ways in which the growth in Europol’s external relations has indicated a move away from intergovernmentalism towards more supranationalism in the EU’s policing and criminal justice cooperation. It does so by systematically examining the development of Europol’s external relations over time using a continuum ranging from ‘intergovernmentalism’ to ‘supranationalism’ as ideal-types, whilst arguing for not reducing supranationalism to the ‘Community method’. The paper shows that the balance between intergovernmental and supranational features in the governance of Europol’s external relations has changed over time as the latter have been gradually reinforced. Starting from a position close to the intergovernmental pole of the continuum, Europol has moved significantly towards the supranational pole, especially after the Europol Regulation began to apply in 2017.
    
    Author: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  Panel / Italian Political Science Association: A Renewed Interest in the Study of Italian Foreign Policy Room 3
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Convener: Francesca Longo (University of Catania)
  
  Chair: Francesca Longo (University of Catania)
  - The G20 and Italy in the International System: Keeping Our Dreams Alive?
    
    The G20 and Italy in the International System: Keeping Our Dreams Alive?
    
    Author: Carla Monteleone (University of Palermo)
  - Allies do not back down. A cross-national survey experiment on audience costs among the European publics
    
    Domestic political conditions shape foreign policy decisions in democratic systems. According to the audience costs theory, leaders incur in reputation costs if they escalate a foreign military crisis through the threat of the use of force and then back down. This would prevent democratic leaders from issuing empty threats, making their international commitments more credible than those of their autocratic counterparts. The theory has been developed considering almost always the case of the United States, with basically no research on Europe. However, it is essential to analyse how the European publics react when exposed to a possible foreign policy crisis. We study audience costs, reporting on a set of pre-registered randomised online survey experiments conducted on representative samples in Italy and other three European countries (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom). This paper is one of the first steps in the evaluation of the audience costs theory in parliamentary democracies and has implications for our understanding of the preferences of European citizens on foreign military crises and the enactment of a common defence strategy.
    
    Authors: Pierangelo Isernia (University of Siena) , Francesco Olmastroni (University of Siena) , Sergio Martini (University of Siena)
  - The UE-turn of a populist movement: at the roots of the M5s foreign policy agenda
    
    The nexus between the evolution of populism in Italy and its impact on foreign policy is still an under-studied topic. This study helps in illustrating both M5s’s foreign policy vision and the relevance of the Italian case in understanding the nexus between populism and foreign policy. Unlike other expressions of Italian populism, the M5s appeared as a “pure form of populism” classifiable in the category of “valence populism ”, or populism focused on non-positional issues such as the fight against corruption, increased transparency, democratic reform and moral integrity, while emphasizing anti-establishment motives. In no other European country can we find a similar case, although there are other cases of “valence populist parties” . This study shows how a rapidly growing valence populist movement invented its foreign policy before reaching power and how it adapted this programme once in government. In particular, the analysis helps to understand the EU-turn that has characterized the foreign policy agenda of the M5s. After having evoked the possibility of Italy’s exit from the eurozone in 2013, in the years following 2019 the M5s appeared to be in favour of strengthening the European institutions.
    
    Author: Emidio Diodato (University of Perugia)
  - Italian Hybrid Diplomacy
    
    Italian Hybrid Diplomacy
    
    Author: Raffaele Marchetti (Luiss University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  Panel / Populism, Turkey and Regional Politics Room 4
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Convener: Recep Onursal (University of Kent)
  
  Chair: Vito Morisco (University of Exeter)
  - Ressentiment, status and populism in international relations
    
    This paper focuses on “ressentiment”, a reaction emerging from situations of profound systemic injustice and inequality, which includes, but goes beyond, ordinary sentiments of resentment. While the role of ressentiment in populist discourse has already been discussed in the literature, and the claim to moral superiority as a powerful status-enhancing strategy used to offset it has also been studied, research so far has rarely explored the particular role of ressentiment in the triangle of international relations, populism and emotion. The resentment resulting from status denial in international relations, such as not being admitted to an international organization, can activate underlying ressentiment and serve as a strong tool for populists in foreign policy discourse. Populist leaders can make claims of moral superiority against the status-denying institutions, and these are given particular force by the background situation of latent injustice. This paper will focus on ressentiment in Turkish foreign policy discourse vis a vis the European Union in reaction to the stagnated membership process, employing mixed methods and corpus-assisted discourse analysis to establish the linkages between status, ressentiment and claims to moral superiority.
    
    Author: Melike Akkaraca Kose (Universidad de Navarra)
  - From Ancient Rome To Ankara: Erdogan’s Catonism
    
    Barrington Moore focuses to explore the origins of dictatorship and democracy with some cases like Germany or Japan in his well-known book, ‘Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy’. Indeed, Turkey’s early Republican period under the Mustafa Kemal’s regime may become a case for Moore’s thesis. Following the abolishment of the Caliphate, Mustafa Kemal’s regime began a social and cultural revolution in order to achieve civilisation and the Westernisation process. Mustafa Kemal and his associates aimed at transforming all the cultural and symbolic aspects associated with the Islamic way of life, including equal rights for women, reforming the language, and the creation of a new national and cultural identity, that of being Turkish. However, Mustafa Kemal changed the direction from a reformist liberal approach to militant and authoritarian secularism and modernisation process due to the lack of bourgeoisie in Turkey.
    
    Indeed, Kemalist modernisation process may become Moore’s one of the cases such as Germany and Japan in terms of the capitalist reactionary and authoritarian routes in modernisation process. However, Moore’s approach can be expanded as AKP’s and Erdogan’s history with regards to the last part of Moore’s book and his point of Catonism. Moore focuses economic relations between the classes in order to explain the modernisation process of the countries and economy is one of the most important indicators for democratic or authoritarian states. Moore rejects the assumption that the behavior of a class in any particular situation is determined by the "economic factor" rather than the "religious factor" or the "diplomatic factor." Social class is the unit of analysis, but in its cultural, ideological, and political concreteness, not only in terms of its members' abstract economic interests. However, in the last part of his book, he mentions the conservative or radical imagery for understanding the origins of dictatorship. According to Moore, radical and conservative rhetoric help to control the whole country within the authoritarian regimes. Moore gives a very good example from the Ancient Rome’s political figure, ‘Cato the Elder’ to explain this phenomenon and this research tries to engage Catonism with AKP’s policy under the Erdogan’s leadership.
    
    Author: Caglar Ezikoglu (Cankiri Karatekin University)
  - The Cultural Politics of Lesson-Learning: Historicising Public Inquiries into British Invasions of Iraq, 1917-2016
    
    This paper argues that public inquiries into British military interventions have served as political devices in ensuring the protection of the liberal state and the preservation of public morale during war. Using the case studies of the Mesopotamia Commission (1916-1917) and the Iraq ‘Chilcot’ Inquiry (2009-2016) – invasions into Iraq during the First World War and the Global War on Terror, respectively – this paper examines how the inquiries’ identification of transgression, scope, and shared tropes of lesson-learning sought to restore public trust in the state whilst attributing responsibility to a small party of ‘bad apples’. Taking a multi-archival approach, this paper compares the two inquiries and their role within broader British political schisms and cultures of the time. By focusing on technical failings and issues of miscommunication, both inquiries avoided scrutiny into British political cultures and systemic causes for the invasions, instead refocusing on individual wrongdoing and responsibility. Thus, the inquiries delineated between the aspects of British conduct in war which were deemed ‘suitable’ for change, and which were considered unavoidable for a state in the pursuit of war. This paper contributes to scholarship on British foreign policy, Middle Eastern conflict, and historiographies of colonialism, shedding light on the impact of British public inquiries in shaping societal memory and ideas of legitimate state violence in the aftermath of the invasion(s).
    
    Authors: Margot Tudor (Politics Department, University of Exeter) , Owen Thomas (Politics Dept, University of Exeter) , Catriona Pennell (History Dept, University of Exeter)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  Panel / Theory, Technology and International Relations Room 5
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Convener: Anna-Karin Eriksson (Linnaeus University)
  
  Chair: Bohdana Kurylo (UCL)
  - Feminist historiographies and the memorialization of sexual violence in comfort women activism and analysis
    
    To memorialize sexual violence is particularly difficult, because histories of sexual violence are veiled in multiple layers of silence. While feminist historiographies are concerned with practices of un-silencing to establish hitherto silenced knowledges, their reliance on silence-and-speech as each other’s alleged either/or alternatives risks to sustain marginalization as it feeds un-silenced histories into existing structures and thereby intensifies rather than un-does marginalization. This paper addresses challenges to narrating and problematizing sexual violence in feminist activism and analysis by differentiating un-silencing practices from a constitutive approach to feminist historiography. It suggests that while gendered memories, understood as the products of prior histories, end up as descriptions of former comfort women’s ordeals that leave the constitutive conditions of possibility of those histories unchallenged. By instead understanding mnemonic practices as epistemic regimes that connect the past to the present, the paper highlights how women’s classed, gender and raced positionalities condition contemporary descriptions of their roles at war and circumscribe sexualities in the war’s aftermath. The paper illuminates how the contextualization of survivors’ war experiences as parts of their everyday lives at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo highlights multiple structures of marginalization and thereby unsettle official silencing.
    
    Author: Anna-Karin Eriksson (Linnaeus University)
  - Tackling Cyber Crime during the Pandemic: An Effort to Save Mankind
    
    The world’s population is facing the adverse impact of coronavirus. It not only deteroited physical health but also left a deep impact on mental and psychological health . The worldwide spread forced the government to impose nationwide lockdown at the global level. The sudden lockdown witnessed an exodus of migrant laborers, crippling health system, digital education and weakening of the economic structure. It also brought complete lockdown which forced millions of office workers to work from home. The meetings are now held using tele-working arrangements and accessing non-public data online. The lockdown increases the scope for criminals to exploit vulnerabilities and commit financial crime. People are in today’s world, more connected by communications and information technologies than ever before. It has brought closeness and compactness in people’s lives. Telecommunication systems and computers play a vital role impacting by transmitting voice and data digitally across transnational borders. It implies free communications of thoughts, ideas, and which instilled a great sense of freedom and openness to the people to understand their political processes. The availability of resources and information and information systems technologies has made our lives more efficient. But with the new advancements, it too produces a negative impact which the people are facing in today’s lives. With the advent of 21st century, the nature of threats have also changed where the crucial security threats that a state faced are no longer conventional forces or the armies of other states. The whole game of offence and defence attacks has shifted its gambit on cyber-crimes. As during the lockdown we mostly relied upon digital technology which brought both positive and negative recursions. In the new global world we are dealing with more heinous and invisible crime which is cyber crime. In regard with the above discussion this paper will try to highlight the surge of cyber-crime with the sudden breakout of pandemic resulting in complete lockdown all over the world/ It will try to investigates what are the threats of the cyber crime and how the world at the global level initiated efforts to combat this form of crime to let mankind survive in the future world.
    
    Authors: Shalini Prasad (UNIVERSITY OF DELHI) , Abhay Kumar (University of Delhi)*
  - Marxism and the origins of International Relations
    
    Traditionally, the origins of International Relations (IR) as a stand-alone academic discipline have been traced to 1919 and the inspiration of a generation of so-called liberal idealists. Since the late 1990s, however, a growing revisionist literature has challenged both of these assumptions. First, revisionists usually claim that the roots of IR may lie at the turn of the twentieth century or after the Second World War. Second, they contend that the emphasis on liberal internationalism is over-stated. One issue that has not been treated by either traditional or revisionist scholars is the role of Marxist thought in the formative years of IR. This is striking because the first four decades of the twentieth century were not only crucial for the development of IR, they were also an exceptionally fertile period for Marxist political thought—this was, after all, the era of Lenin, Kautsky, Bukharin and Luxemburg. Is it really possible that these Marxist intellectuals had a negligible impact on early IR, as the historiographical literature would have us believe? Contra this position, Building on the work of revisionist scholars, the thesis reconstructs the writings of five benchmark IR thinkers. and reviewing the cases of Henry Brailsford, Leonard Woolf, Harold Laski and Norman Angell, I argue that Marxism played a significant role in the formative development of IR.
    
    Author: José Ricardo Villanueva Lira (Universidad del Mar)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  Roundtable / Translocal Households in the Context of Covid-19 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
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  
  Participants: Henrice Altink (University of York) , Sara Stevano (SOAS University of London) , Saba Joshi (University of York) , Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway, University of London) , Juanita Elias (University of Warwick) , Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS, University of London)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  Panel / Foreign Policy, World Order Relations and China Room 1
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Daniela Irrera (University of Catania)
  - Varieties of Hedging: Risk, Threat, and the Rise of Foreign Policy Innovation
    
    Hedging is a popular, but contested, concept for understanding the rhetoric and behavior or states in the Asia-Pacific amid the deepening US-China competition. But what precisely is hedging and how are Asian states hedging? To unpack this concept, I disaggregate foreign policy orientations of states based on two dimensions: (1) the focus of their strategy—risks versus threats; and (2) the mode of their strategy—management versus insurance. On the former, risks refer to the state’s potential for loss (given a threat), while threats indicate the likelihood of harm or exploitation, based on the capabilities and intentions of another state. On the latter, management entails actions to mitigate vulnerability, whereas insurance signifies actions to secure against a possible contingency. Using this framework, I identify three varieties of hedgers—entrepreneurs, shirkers, and opportunists—and distinguish them from a commonly conflated group: balancers. To illustrate empirically, I compare three hedgers: (1) Malaysia the entrepreneur; (2) India the shirker; and (3) South Korea the opportunist. The qualitative variations in their hedging behavior demonstrate the nature and scope of foreign policy innovation among Asian states in the shadow of great power competition.
    
    Author: Eun A Jo (Cornell University)
  - An International Adventure Meets a Domestic Quandary— Risks for China’s Belt and Road Initiative due to Domestic Political Economy
    
    Unveiled in 2013 China’s belt and road initiative (BRI) has aroused wide international attention, as well as criticisms and positive appraisals. The existing literature is primarily concerned with potential economic effects of the BRI on the participant nations and with interpretation of the Chinese motivations and its payoffs from this ambitious initiative. It conveys grave concerns about the negative effects of China’s expanding global clout, including the entrapment of the recipient nations in debts, as well as a realist perception of the Chinese rising influence at the expenses of the West and its allies such as India. This article attempts to moves beyond somewhat simplistic and over-used (neo-)realist, security, and international-level analyses populated in the existing literature. It purports to examine an under-researched aspect of the BRI in the existing literature, that is, the domestic and external political and economic risks the BRI could entail for China. In the analysis the author examines the domestic-international and political-economic linkages of the BRI projects and effects of these projects on China. The tentative findings suggest that the BRI incurs noticeable risks for China, including grievances of the Chinese populace at the diversion of domestically-needed resources into external adventures, low overseas economic returns of the BRI projects, and a backlash from nationalist sentiments in recipient nations. It proposes that an optimistic estimate about China’s international payoffs from the BRI need to be balanced against an appreciation of these substantial risks associated with domestic political economy and governance. The study thus demonstrates the necessity to study a major international strategy by any nation by taking into account the domestic dimension and its implications.
    
    Key words: Chinese foreign policy, domestic-external linkage, international economic strategy, development project, domestic politics, critique of realism.
    
    Author: Hongyi Lai (School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK)
  - Equal Distance but not Hedging: Maintaining Equilibrium by Great Britain under US-China Competition
    
    The paper shows the idea of maintaining equilibrium. Under hegemonic shifts (which cause bipolar system) regional power strives to equalization of the levels of relations with each of great powers. When challenger rises, regional power sees a threat to the stability of the system and, consequently, to its position in this system. Therefore, it aims to minimize the effects of increasing rivalry by establishing cooperation with each of the great powers. Regional power notice, however, that relations with one great power are more advanced than with the second one, and therefore tries to level them. When this goal is achieved, the regional power tries not to deteriorate relations with each of the great powers by maintaining equilibrium, i.e. a situation in which each act of cooperation with given great power results in a different act of cooperation with the second great power. This theory will be tested by analyzing British behavior under contemporary US-China competition in 2017-2019.
    
    Author: Mateusz Ambrożek (University of Warsaw)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  Panel / Interrogating Transnational Anti-gender Politics Room 2
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Aiko Holvikivi (LSE) , Tomás Ojeda (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Billy Holzberg (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
  - Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland
    
    Scholars of politics and international relations have recently seen a burgeoning interest in how right-wing populist actors stage security threats. In contrast, this paper investigates how feminist movements resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: The March of Independence and the All-Poland Women’s Strike. The former is an annual event during which right-wing groups march together to symbolically defend Polish national identity against its perceived enemies. The latter refers to a series of feminist performances during the 2020-1 protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The paper draws on Judith Butler’s theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the pro-choice movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The result helps scholars to reimagine the relationship between populism, security and feminist politics.
    
    Author: Bohdana Kurylo (UCL)
  - Thinking from Hanau: The anti-gender politics of right-wing terrorism
    
    On the 19th of February 2020, eleven people were killed by a Nazi terrorist in the German city of Hanau. Attacks such as these need to be understood in relation to a long history of right-wing terrorism in Germany and growing transnational terrorist networks. In this talk, I argue that what connects these attacks to other right-wing terrorist attacks in Germany and beyond is the perpetrators' adherence to conspiracies of the ‘great replacement’ which fuse racist and anti-gender narratives to conjure the spectre of the extinction of the white race through migration and falling birth rates allegedly caused by feminist emancipation. In doing so, I dispute ‘lone wolf’ narratives and argue that the sexual politics expressed by these actors such as the presumable threat of a declining populous, the possessive claim over female sexuality and calls for the protection of the white nuclear family are part of wider (neo-)colonial fantasies of white male decline. These ‘great replacement theories’ operate as an extension of the ‘logics of obliteration’ inherent in transnational anti-gender discourse (Hemmings 2020) which target racialised minorities, liberal elites (framed as Jewish conspirators) and feminist and queer activists as threats to white masculine hegemony.
    
    Author: Billy Holzberg (King's College London)
  - Anti-gender campaigns and abortion: Feminist strategies against reactionary biopolitics in Chile
    
    The attacks against ‘gender ideology’ and feminism have reshaped not only the discussions around abortion and sexual and reproductive rights in most Latin American countries, but also feminist strategies, discourses and articulations aimed at counteracting these conservative narratives. In this presentation I analyse the socio-political debate of abortion in Chile from 2015 (when the bill to liberalise abortion was introduced by president Bachelet) to the emergence of COVID-19 and the process of changing the Chilean Constitution in 2021. I discuss whether the anti-gender recrudescence could be better understood by the increasing importance of feminist voices in both academia and activism against the forceful imposition of women’s ‘natural role’ of reproduction and motherhood. I will discuss some of the feminist strategies against ‘anti-gender forces,’ particularly the cooptation of feminist struggles by conservative groups, who have claimed to be the ones resisting neoliberalism and the ‘real defenders’ of women’s rights. I contend that feminist organizations have shown the importance of resisting reactionary modes of biopolitics in contemporary Chile, particularly those that act upon the individual body through sex education, ‘the family,’ and the reinforcement of traditional gender roles. They do so by 1) understanding abortion as an issue of social justice; 2) addressing the politics of affects involved in the experience of abortion; and 3) considering the collective or relational aspects of choice and autonomy.
    
    Author: Lieta Vivaldi (Universidad Alberto Hurtado)
  - Thinking anti-gender politics through a transnational frame
    
    Protesters on the streets of São Paulo burn Judith Butler in effigy. The Hungarian government bans educational and media materials that ‘promote’ homosexuality or gender affirmation surgery. The Turkish government withdraws from the Istanbul Convention on violence against women. A British and two North American academics submit a series of fabricated papers to gender-related scholarly journals. These are all manifestations of transnational anti-gender politics. What do they have in common? How do they differ? And what can they tell us about global contestations today? In this paper, we adopt a specifically transnational feminist frame to examine a body of emerging research on anti-gender mobilisations across the world. We show that this body of work highlights the importance of interrogating transnational connections, such as networks of strategising, the development of epistemic frames, and material support, while also emphasising the need to examine these in relation to local histories and particularities. We discuss how a transnational perspective on anti-gender politics troubles the assumption that the epistemic bases of anti-gender politics are the exclusive reserve of far-right populism, of non-feminist activists, or of religious fundamentalism. We demonstrate that anti-gender mobilizations are shaped by and embedded in wider structures of coloniality and need to be understood in close relation to the ongoing realities of racial capitalism and intensified nationalisms across the globe. We thus argue against any attempt to construct Eurocentric teleological narratives about progress on the question of gender equality, as emerging research challenges us to ‘see,’ analytically speaking, the complicities of (white) mainstream feminism, academic knowledge production, and ostensibly liberal states with anti-gender epistemologies.
    
    Authors: Aiko Holvikivi (LSE) , Tomás Ojeda (London School of Economics and Political Science)*
  - Protecting children from homosexual contagion – Anti-gender and the politics of childhood in populist illiberal Hungary
    
    Controlling women’s, children’s and LGBTQ people’s sexuality has been part of exercising state power in different political regimes, including in the growing ‘anti-gender’ politics in some European states (Corrêa et al 2018; Graff & Korolczuk 2022). European countries where anti-gender politics is deployed at governmental level, are centralizing power and eliminating democratic processes (Roggeband & Krizsán 2020). New scholarship argues that anti-gender politics is a manifestation of democratic deficit and reinforces the autocratization of the state (Denkovski et al 2021). Recent political developments in Hungary demonstrate the importance of exploring the politics of childhood as part of anti-gender politics and strengthening autocratic power. The anti-gender political climate in Hungary contextualizes the current ‘sex panic’ and fear of ‘homosexual contagion’ (Lancaster 2011). This presentation seeks to explore the intersections of children’s rights, LGBT+ rights, child protection discourses and public education, aiming to map how anti-gender politics is deployed by an increasingly authoritarian political leadership in an attempt to control and regulate children’s sexualities. Recent examples of homo- and transphobic school curricula, laws, government politicians’ public communications and media discourse will be discussed, in order to demonstrate how exercising control over children’s sexualities work via education contents; governmental communication about childhood and sexuality; and restricting children’s/youth’s access to information about sexuality.
    
    Author: Dorottya Rédai (Central European University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  Panel / Military Humanitarianism: The Nexus of Humanitarian Impulses and Military Means in the Twentieth Century Room 3
  
  Sponsor: British International History Working Group
  
  Convener: Margot Tudor (Politics Department, University of Exeter)
  
  Chair: Brian Drohan (U.S. Military Academy – West Point)
  
  Discussant: Fabian Klose (History Department, University of Cologne)
  - Fraught Humanitarian Influences in the Caucasian Borderlands: Investigating Relief Efforts through the Lens of the 1919 American Military Mission to Armenia
    
    In August 1919, fifty-three American service members left behind the war-torn Western Front to embark on an investigative mission to former Ottoman territory. There, on orders from President Wilson, they would assess the potential cost of committing resources to restore governance in Anatolia and Caucasia. As they ventured deep into the interior, the American Military Mission to Armenia encountered Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Azeris and various other geopolitical groups vying for legitimacy amid lingering devastation and uncertainty. Through the mission’s records, I have a different lens to examine interactions between local elites and relief workers. Not only do the mission members’ observations, paired with local sources, illuminate this fraught relationship, the mission’s itinerary serves as a vehicle to challenge homogenous characterizations of the region and helps expose alternate outcomes for a fallen empire in flux.
    
    When Wilson directed the mission, resurgent violence obscured all predictions on the future of Ottoman territory. Not only were the victorious Allies still reconciling the effects of WWI, but localized events heightened instability. Among them, the Armenian Genocide had eliminated vast swaths of the Anatolian population, the Turkish War for Independence had begun, and Wilsonian idealism had inspired new claims to territory. Witness to this were relief workers, interspersed throughout the mountainous Caucasian frontier who attempted to manage the refugee crisis. Though local leaders accommodated the mission’s requests to move through no-man’s land and observe the situation, it was the impartiality that American officers engendered in the region that exposed them to contentious complaints of unfair relief distribution and the deplorable refugee conditions. For this paper, I will focus on the final three days of the mission’s remote itinerary from Erivan to Nakhichevan and their observations on how relief organizations engaged in local power dynamics, which ultimately influenced their final recommendations to Wilson and the world.
    
    Author: Rose Horswill (U.S. Military Academy – West Point)
  - Waging War in the Name of Peace: The Genesis of UN Peacekeeping, 1946-1955
    
    This paper examines the tentative non-armed beginnings of the United Nation’s functional shift into field-based conflict response and peacekeeping in 1946. Beginning with an examination of the public calls for UN armament in the nuclear age, this paper tracks the formative public debates and organisational practices that each anticipated an aspect of the future armed peacekeeping project. From military observers during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 to the deployment of a - limited - military force in Korea in 1950, these early experiments in the military sphere helped pave the way for the first armed UN mission in 1956. It explores the incremental development of a ‘peacekeeping project’ with the construction of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO), established during the conflict in Palestine, and the later evolution of the UN Command in Korea. Experimenting with multilateral operations in military spaces, such as the Korean war, legitimised the waging of war – or military intervention – as a peaceable pursuit, authorised and managed by the international organisation. These foundational experiments in an ‘international military’ shaped the UN leadership's design of later armed battalions and foreshadowed the geopolitical authority of later UN peacekeeping missions. The UNTSO mission and the UN Command in Korea brought together a group of legal, military, diplomatic, and international bureaucratic actors into an epistemic community of liberal internationalists seeking military means to implement their politics and global ideals. Despite broadly sharing the same liberal internationalist vision, they debated alternative imaginaries of future UN peacekeeping, considering the construction of a permanent UN police force or, even, a standby peacekeeping army that would evolve into the UN peacekeeping project in 1956.
    
    Author: Margot Tudor (Politics Department, University of Exeter)
  - Defining Violence and Humanitarian Action: The Language of Ethnic Cleansing Among International Interveners in Bosnia, 1992-1995
    
    This paper explores how and when the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Committee of the Red Cross invoked the term 'ethnic cleansing' during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). It argues that a discourse analysis of public-facing documents allows us to explore institutional mandates, international frameworks for intervention, and the role that conceptualizations of international law plays in the creation of militarized humanitarian action.
    
    As a new term to describe an old method of warfare, 'ethnic cleansing' became the watchword for the humanitarian response in Bosnia as it symbolized all that the international community was seeking to protect civilians from. Since the cessation of hostilities, Western scholars have focused much of their attention on the failure of the militarized ‘humanitarian intervention’ to stop the worst of the genocidal policies of Radovan Karadžić. This paper takes a step away from the intricacies of on-the-ground humanitarianism and instead employs an analysis of language to better understand the foundation upon which the lead intervention actors understood their roles within the militarily-supported humanitarian action in Bosnia.
    
    Drawing on archival sources alongside rich scholarly debate, this paper explores what we mean, what we lose, and what we gain from using the term 'ethnic cleansing' to describe the violence that armed actors enacted upon civilians in Bosnia. By keeping civilian protection at the centre of the analysis, this paper seeks to highlight the integral role that discourse plays in (re)creating and (re)producing the conditions for international humanitarian intervention.
    
    Author: Helen Kennedy (Carleton University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  Panel / Political Theologies and Socio-Political Practices Room 4
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: John-Harmen Valk (Leiden University)
  
  Chair: John-Harmen Valk (Leiden University)
  - Blumenberg, “Residual Needs” and the Political Theology of the International
    
    Recent explorations of the political theology of the international have largely unfolded at the level of the history of ideas (Molloy 2017; Bain 2020). To the extent that this focus reinforces the reductive notion of religion and theology as pertaining to the level of belief, it fails to fully capture how modern secular international political thought and practice is intertwined with its purported, religious other. This paper explores the thought of a key critic of political theology, Hans Blumenberg, whose secularization narrative has been central to political theological discussions beyond IR. Blumenberg is an important figure for this paper because he is a critic who, interestingly, recognizes the importance of attention to the level of embodiment rather than simply to the ideational level. The paper flags the important, albeit recessed, theme of “residual needs” in Hans Blumenberg’s thought while also highlighting the problems arising from his acknowledgment of the non-cognitive dimension. A better understanding of the merits and limits of Blumenberg’s account serves to identify a direction which the political theological conversation in IR would be wise to follow, one which might also entail the recovery and adaptation of certain long-downplayed themes in the thought of certain past IR figures.
    
    Author: John-Harmen Valk (Leiden University)
  - Embodiment and Healing in Indigenous and African Theologies
    
    European debates about the theological characteristics of embodiment address issues of mind/body bifurcations as well as mythological notions of “bodies”. I focus in this contribution on indigenous conceptions of healing, which usually reunite mind and body into holistic notions of the embodiment of health. Participant-observation in eastern Kenya as well as a meeting with healers who are also religious leaders in Senegal both demonstrate the importance of embodiment in notions of both illness and health, and bring together spirituality and bodily healing in ways that necessitate going beyond Euro-focused debates on conceptions of religion, the limits of embodiment, and connection to spirituality. Attention to these understandings from Kenya and Senegal have important implications for any exploration of the political theology of the international.
    
    Author: Cecelia Lynch (UC Irvine)
  - On the Appeal of Sufi Theoretical-Practical Theology in IR
    
    The understanding of contemporary IR remains perturbed by a range of unsettled debates: (1) realities of one world versus many worlds; (2) boundaries of inside versus outside; (3) trials of pain-receiver versus pain-giver; (4) implications of reason versus emotion; and (5) supremacy of science versus metaphysics. Frequently, the offshoots of these debates trigger an unsubstantiated tug-of-war between the two distinct geo-cultural groupings, the former dominated by the West and the latter embodied by the non-West. This paper aims to show how the tripartite scheme of Sufi theology – that is, ‘aql (rational along with reflective thinking), naql (religious tradition), and kashf (direct intuitive knowledge) – responds to these unsettled debates, thereby carving an alternative theoretical-practical pathway to reconcile the tensions between different worlds and to deal with the challenges of current global politics.
    
    Author: Deepshikha Shahi (University of Delhi)
  - Eschatology in World Politics: The Apocalyptic Imaginary and the Problem of Historical Action
    
    This paper is a sketchy attempt to discuss the relevance of eschatology for world politics through the history of the ideas that have shaped twentieth century political eschatologies. The paper explores the relationship between the apocalyptic imaginary that came to mean and point to a more dualistic, otherworldly, catastrophe-oriented version of eschatology and a more engaged, this-worldly, messianic vision of eschatological thinking that engages the problem of historical action in a nihilist era. Apocalyptic narratives, such as Gnosticism and its revival in twentieth century polemics, are important in this story and their influence will be duly discussed. Finally, the recent revival of Pauline thought among contemporary post-Marxists will also be addressed as an example of the return of eschatological thinking in secular or atheist philosophical and political theory circles reflecting the power of a theological discourse that is far from irrelevant in our so-called secular age. Indeed, eschatological thinking emerges as a narrative structure that reveals important things about the nature of our engagement with the world as historical beings and political actors.
    
    Author: Vassilios Paipais (University of St Andrews)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  Roundtable / Re-imagining International Relations: Proposals for Building a Decolonized Discipline 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.
  
  Sponsor: Review of International Studies (journal editors only)
  
  Chair: Maja Zehfuss (Københavns Universitet)
  
  Participants: Ajay Parasram (Dalhousie University) , Lisa Ann Richey (Copenhagen Business School) , Dana El Kurd (University of Richmond) , Kristina Hinds (The University of the West Indies) , Somdeep Sen (Roskilde University) , Consolata Raphael Sulley (University of Dar es Salaam) , Ilan Kapoor (York University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  Roundtable / The Transformative Potential of Feminist Foreign Policy – Early-Career Scholars’ Perspectives 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?
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Jamie Hagen (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Participants: Bruna Soares de Aguiar (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) , Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University) , Karoline Färber (King’s College London) , Jessica Cheung (Freie Universität Berlin) , Dipti Tamang (Darjeeling Government College,)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  Roundtable / ACUNS: Ideas for the 2023 United Nations 'Summit of the Future' Room 1
  
  ACUNS
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Chair: Lise Howard (Georgetown University)
  
  Participants: Yvan Yenda (Central State University) , Richard Ponzio (Stimson Center) , Nudhara Yusuf (Coalition for the UN We Need)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  Panel / Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Internacionales: Pandemics: The Catastrophic Crisis. Transregional Governance and the Provision of Public Environmental Goods in the Americas Room 2
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Convener: Jessica Lillian De Alba Ulloa (Universidad Anáhuac México)
  
  Chair: José Ricardo Villanueva Lira (Universidad del Mar)
  - Transregional governance and the provision of public environmental goods in the Americas
    
    The foundations of world reordering in the 21st century require the reconfiguration of regionalism. Formal and state-centric regionalism today more than ever faces other forms of relation. Informal regional schemes aim for the provision of public goods through transnational governance, articulating multilateral interests of various units and political subjects. The provision of public goods through transregional channels also reconfigures the concept of the "public" to broaden it to a multiplicity of agents and topics. The goal of this paper is to analyze how transregional governance reconfigures the provision of public environmental goods through three interaction processes in the Americas: confrontation, complementarity, and substitution.
    
    Author: Marcela López-Vallejo (Universidad de Guadalajara)
  - Truth, Post-Truth and Coronavirus: A Challenge to World Order and International Relations
    
    Post-truth and Coronavirus is a terrible combination that has imposed unimaginable challenges to the whole of humanity and that will last through the third decade of the 21st century. Almost all the certainties we had about modernity in science, health, the media, democracy, institutions, elections, the truthfulness of facts, technology or progress have been shattered. Because of the pandemic and disinformation, the erratic and uncertain nature of a liquid reality is increasingly evident. The SARS-CoV-2 virus was joined and assimilated by the phenomenon of increased post-truth mainly due to the use of new technologies on digital platforms. This presentation aims to analyze, from the perspective of International Studies, how both post-truth and Covid-19 represent a challenge for the international order and how we can understand it from IR theories.
    
    Author: Alberto Lozano-Vázquez (Universidad del Mar)
  - Constructive, middle, and regional powers: the creation of global governance to address a multidimensional and systemic international crisis
    
    The current international system faces central challenges. The lack of an hegemonic power that imposes order and stability in the world, coupled with the enormous challenges faced by international institutions when dealing with critical situations—such as Covid-19 and its economic consequences—as well as growing nativist tendencies around the world, have created a growing need for innovative alternatives that can provide public international resources, such as global governance. This paper argues that regional, middle, and constructive powers can and should play a role not only in filling this power vacuum on a global level, but also in building and strengthening global governance in these times of multidimensional and systemic international crisis.
    
    Author: Jorge A. Schiavon (CIDE)
  - Imagining the world beyond liberalism
    
    The challenges of the international system must be resolved by means of the imagination and its ideology and utopia binomial. Necessary changes have to come from self-criticism and through theoretical developments that can occur in the context of global geopolitics. Recognition of the morality of a state system points towards ways to resolve contemporary problems proceeding from a concept of limited sovereignty that represents the morality of the state system in terms of the right to occupation, basic justice and collective self-determination. The necessity to review the state system involves reflection on multilateralism, on its opportunities and limitations in response to the necessities of humanity, considering culture as something heterogenic. It is important, also, to rethink economic relations, prioritizing the individual over production and over commerce as the measure of development.
    
    Author: Jessica Lillian De Alba Ulloa (Universidad Anáhuac México)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  Panel / Covid-19 and the Politics of Trauma Room 3
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Auchter Jessica (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) , Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
  
  Chair: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
  - The securitisation of COVID-19 pandemic - Human biosecurity, new nationalisms and the challenges to EU migration agenda
    
    Since the declaration of COVID-19 pandemic, states have been invoking the need of exceptional measures to deal with exceptional circumstances, arguing that the pandemic poses an existential threat to their community.
    Since January 2019, the securitisation of COVID-19 speech has been used as an argument and a tool to foster stronger measures against migrants, and it has been deepening populist and right-wing speeches in Europe and in the United States.
    Initially by othering COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus” or the “Virus from China”, many world leaders tried to dissociate themselves in a move to politically blame and shame China.
    The handling of global health intertwined with the fracturing international migration governance has raised the need to further investigate to what extent will the securitization of the pandemic will affect the migration agenda and how the declaration of human biosecurity emergency may deepen the idea of borders as security threat.
    Using a securitisation theory lens, this paper seeks to understand how the biosecurity claim, such as the many times summoned argument of the need to “flatten the epidemic curve”, is being used to close borders and how it will ultimately impact on the international migration management.
    
    Authors: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales) , Joana Pereira (University of South Wales)*
  - Trauma and Incomprehensibility: a New Approach
    
    This paper purports to examine the politicization of Covid-19 rhetoric in the US, Europe, and Brazil in order to rethink two widely used concepts in the field of critical security studies: the idea of trauma (as an incomprehensible event) and the notion of disposability (as the biopolitical management of undesirable lives). We first focus on the very idea of trauma-as-incomprehensible, to trace the way in which Covid-19 has been framed as such, drawing on already existing framings from Holocaust studies, the rhetoric of atrocity, and scholarly work on trauma and memory. We examine how the framing of Covid-19 is as a dual trauma: one which resembles warfare with an enemy agent and one which resembles a crime against humanity with no agent but with deep economic casualties. We then turn to the politics enabled by the notion that such trauma is incomprehensible by focusing on two key facets: the death toll itself and the politics surrounding counting and mourning lives lost. By exploring different designations of essential workers and their role in societal functioning, we question the way biopolitical approaches have tended to describe the dynamics whereby life is made disposable.
    
    Authors: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England) , Jessica Auchter (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
  - Neoliberalism as Comorbidity: The Political Economy of Latin American Pandemic Responses and Future Trajectories
    
    Despite significant variation in pandemic responses, Latin America has been among the
    world’s hardest-hit regions. At one end of the spectrum is Brazil, whose president has been
    accused of pursuing a “genocidal” anti-public health agenda that has resulted in the world’s
    second-highest death toll, as well as economic ruin. In seeming contrast, Chile has one of the
    world’s top vaccination rates, but also recurring surges in new cases. For its part, Uruguay was
    feted for largely controlling the spread of the pandemic in its early days, and without imposing
    a full lockdown. It currently has the world’s worst rates of new infections and deaths.
    We argue that what has produced disturbingly similar outcomes in seemingly disparate
    countries is a shared commitment to neoliberal governance: that is, pandemic responses that
    are based on individual and family responsibility, fail to provide material resources to allow
    populations to stay home, and rely on eviscerated public health systems. In turn, as we explore,
    the pandemic represents a potential inflection point in the regional political economy, as elites
    who seek to minimize interruptions to the status quo and are poised to push for post-pandemic
    austerity face increasing contestation by oppositional forces who desire non-neoliberal
    alternatives.
    
    Authors: Kevin Funk ( Columbia University) , Sebastián Sclofsky (California State University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  Roundtable / ISA: COVID and the Future of International Studies 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.
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Chair: Mark Boyer (University of Connecticut)
  
  Participants: Krisitian Gleditsch (Essex University) , Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield) , Cemal Burak Tansel (Newcastle University) , Maria Malksoo (University of Copenhaggen) , Deborah Avant (University of Denver)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  Panel / Surviving the Post-imperial World: Post- and Decolonial Perspectives to Global Challenges Room 5
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Chair: Somdeep Sen (Roskilde University)
  - Rio de Janeiro in the (inter)national circuit of tourism
    
    This paper aims to investigate how the local and global are entangled in the production of the Rio de Janeiro as a tourist destination. Through an analysis of the archives of RioTur, Rio de Janeiro's official tourism enterprise, particularly its Strategic Planning (2017-2020) and the photo album “Rio Lifestyle”, available on the RioTur’s Flickr account, I noted the hyper-visibility of white bodies and of “Zona Sul” — the most affluent region of the city where most of the places sold as tourist attractions are located. The paper proposes the following argument: the image of Rio de Janeiro as a tourist city that circulates in the (inter)national is (re)produced by two abyssal lines: a geographical and a racial one. These lines constitute a violent regime which controls the movement of black bodies through the city and orients how these bodies can be presented in Rio. In this sense, I argue RioTur’s aim to present Rio as a modern city to the world is animated by a “imperial gaze” (FANON, 2008) that is manifested in a myriad of practices, including those of the tourist industry.
    
    Author: Caroline Gomes (Master´s student in Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro)
  - Decolonial Climates: rethinking the politics of climate change through Inuit art
    
    In Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, one of the front lines of global heating, a number of Indigenous artists have spent the past decade critiquing mainstream understandings of climate change. Through film, music, performance art, and literature, a loosely connected group of Inuit artists have questioned the role of the state and international institutions in governing climate change in favour of radical decolonial frameworks. This presentation will ask how Inuit artists have been engaging in discourses on climate change and how their work is intervening in the politics of the planetary crisis. It will also ask how a decolonial approach to understanding climate change can help to move beyond a framework grounded in states and institutions and towards a genuinely planetary politics.
    
    I will analyse several key works by the experimental performance artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, an Inuk artist based in Iqaluit, whose work frequently engages with climate change and the lineages of imperialism and colonialism in the Arctic. I will draw on the scholarly work of Glen Coulthard, Kyle Whyte, and Anna M. Agathangelou, to ask whether Bathory’s work fits into a decolonial framework of self-recognition and whether it identifies the climate crisis as an intensification of already existing colonially induced environmental change. I hope to argue that Bathory’s artworks intervene in the politics of the climate crisis and offer a radically decolonial vision for our planetary futures.
    
    Key words: climate change; art; indigeneity; decoloniality.
    
    Author: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  - Decolonizing Activist Research: Ethical and Epistemological Considerations in Research with Communities of Color and Indigenous Communities
    
    As an activist and a researcher, I consider activist research to be an approach that most centrally is guided by ethics of commitment and care, moving solely beyond a focus on political alignment (Hale, 2006). In this paper, I will argue in favor of expanding our understanding of activist research beyond overtly political acts of solidarity and explain why commitment and care to a “community of resistance” (Davis, 2011) should be understood as the guiding ethics of an activist research approach. I will explore decolonized approaches to research that women of color and Indigenous women activist researchers in the social sciences have developed that center commitment and care, including “re-membering” (Blackwell 2011); practicing ongoing reflexivity (Grande 2016); centering Indigenous epistemologies (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey, and Wright 2014) and community-led research (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey, and Wright 2014; Smith 2012), as well as the challenges of implementing these approaches within political science. Finally, I will discuss ethical and epistemological considerations that activist researchers need to take into consideration when doing research with communities of color and Indigenous communities, including the right of refusal, limits on research, and moving towards strengths rather than deficit-based research (Tuck and Yang, 2016).
    
    Author: Hannah El Silimy (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)
  - #IndiaStandsWithIsrael: Digital, participatory, transnational militarism on Indian Twitter during Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza
    
    IR scholarship on the relationship between new forms of information/communication technologies and militarism is in its infancy and little attention has been paid to how social media users participate in processes of militarism. Contributing to this emergent body of work, this paper examines how the legitimation and normalization of political violence was constituted through the activity of Indian Twitter users during Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza and the events immediately preceding it. It examines how an ideological affinity and mutual legitimation of militaristic, supremacist nationalisms has been apparent in the ways online Hindu nationalists have been vociferous in supporting violent Israeli state practices and policies. This is evident through liking, sharing, commenting on, and/or producing content which reproduces several identifiable, overarching narrative tropes concerning ‘terrorism’ and ‘national defence’. Drawing on the work of other scholars, we emphasize how militarism is best understood as a sociological phenomenon with deep and far-reaching embeddedness in social relations, fusing the ‘everyday’ and the international, and as constituted through social practices involving, but not limited to, the state. We suggest that to account for the enduring and pervasive reach of militarism in world politics, greater attention should be directed towards the digital, participatory, transnational dimensions of militarism.
    
    Authors: Derek Verbakel (York University) , Angshuman Choudhury (Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi)
  - The Game of Climate Blame
    
    The Game of Climate Blame,
    
    Authors: Mohnish Mohammad (Jamia Millia Islamia) , Rehana Manzoor (Jawaharlal Nehru University)*
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  Roundtable / UACES: How Can European Studies Survive? 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.
  
  Sponsor: Conference/Management
  
  Chair: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
  
  Participants: Ben Farrand (-) , Maxine David (-) , Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling) , Richard Whitman (-) , Ben Martill (-)

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BISA 2022 Conference (virtual stream)