Exhibitor Hall Room: Ballroom, Hilton

Politics of Wildfire - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events

• Lorenza Fontana

Room: Ballroom, Hilton

Critical Approaches to Feminist Foreign Policy: Colonial Logics, Hierarchies, Care and Anti-Genderism (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton Orthodox approaches to foreign policy privilege national and international security, economic growth and a variety of other national interests over feminist values and norms. Feminists have challenged every aspect of this understanding of foreign policy by asking questions such as “what is security?” “How is it best achieved?” “What are the detrimental effects of militarism on people’s wellbeing”? What colonial and gendered privileges prevail in the conduct of feminist foreign policy? What kind of feminism undergird states’ adoption of pro-gender foreign policies? Do feminist foreign policies obscure distinctively western understandings of feminism? What are the effects of trailblazing feminist foreign policies beyond borders without anchoring them in societal concerns? To date few FFPs actually are steeped in such critical questions, rather they reproduce orthodox interest-based, gendered and colonial understandings of foreign policy practice and world politics. As such they do not fully engage with the structural intersectional inequalities that undergird world politics, leading to gendered and colonial effects, and, at times harm and violence. This panel brings together five papers that all seek to challenge orthodox understandings of feminist foreign policy, in particular by addressing questions of colonial logics, normative hierarchies, anti-genderism as well as the lack of care and intersectional sensitivity in actual feminist foreign policy conduct. Empirically the papers centre on both non-western and western states including Canada, France, India and Sweden. The papers employ a range of feminist research methods.

Emerging Technologies and the future of IR (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel bring to the fore the role of digital technology in diplomacy including digital diplomacy in the UAE's foreign policy, the impact of technology in shaping virtual negotaitions, defining the future of cyberspace, and questions of cyber power.

From the Domestic to the International in the Middle East and Asia (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton This panel examines challenges ranging from the domestic to the international which confront states in the Middle East and Asia. We consider how the pandemic has changed India's approaches to multilateralism and China's strategy of nationalising its education curriculum. We look at the impact of climate on state policies, from contentious hydropolitics in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin to Jordanian rent-seeking driven by climate change.

Grief and Memory in the Pandemic and Post-Pandemic world (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton Grief is everywhere, from the millions who died globally during the pandemic to losses and human rights violations in Ukraine, Ethiopia and other conflict zones to climate disasters, from Pakistan, to Nigeria, California or the Amazon, to the death of the British queen, an iconic figure covering a 70 year landscape of history, to a quickly disappearing way of life signalled by energy shortages and climate change. There is no shortage of things to grieve about, yet, the Queen’s funeral aside, there has been very little willingness to acknowledge that everything has changed and must change, which, as Judith Butler notes, is the core of grief. Grief in this case, is not purely in the moment but needs to be situated in relation to an unacknowledged past, as witnessed in the range of memories invoked in the context of the pandemic, relating for instance, to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, an eerstwhile Russian empire or World War II. What is the relationship between grief and the acknowledgement, not only of loss in the present but also of unacknowledged past suffering and injustice? What is the relationship between grief and memory, looking back, and the future, looking forward? Connection: This panel will theorize the relationship between how populations have dealt with grief against the backdrop of the pandemic and the emerging post-pandemic world, and why this is important for realising aspects of the Common Agenda set out by the UN Secretary-General, including protecting the planet, accounting for the interests of future generations, managing the global commons and global public goods, leaving no one behind and a renewed social contract focused on human rights. It further highlights memories of colonialism that are only beginning to be discussed in the context of climate change, and how important the unacknowledged past is for repairing the planet for future generations.

International Political Economy of Trade (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton This panel brings together scholars studying the International Political Economy of trade with a focus on contemporary debates in the UK, EU and multilateral trade regime.

International criminal law, atrocity and accountability (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton International criminal law, atrocity and accountability

Memory, Narratives, and Perceptions in World Politics (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Memory, Narratives, and Perceptions in World Politics

New approaches to state formation in Africa (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton This panel showcases a range of innovative new approaches to the study of state-building and state formation in Africa. Three papers examine humour and surreal as components of 'state at work', 'bottom-up' social covenants in Somaliland, and voluntary and unpaid labour. Two other papers - focusing on recent Libyan history, and the external dimensions of political settlements - examine more international aspects of these processes.

Past, future and the present practice of critique in IR (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton Past, future and the present practice of critique in IR

Responding to Outrage 1: Apologies, Inquiries, Commemoration, Scandal, and Truth and Reconciliation (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott In the aftermath of public revelations of harms, wrongdoing or scandal, political actors and institutions have a number of mechanisms available to them in the process of reputation management, reconsolidating legitimacy, and re-establishing political and social order. Such mechanisms include public inquiries, expressions of contrition, memorialisation, and the establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs). While each of these devices have been the focus of considerable academic research in recent years, it is noticeable that such literatures are often disconnected from one another and do not sufficiently build on each other’s findings. This is a missed opportunity, not least because they share many of the same concerns, including the power dynamics within transgression management; questions of who does and does not have voice within such processes; and the class, gendered and racialised aspects of supposedly reparative processes. As such, the goal of this roundtable is to bring together researchers on public inquiries, remorse, memorialisation, TRCs, and scandal with a view to building connections between these literatures and considering how each other’s empirical and theoretical insights may mutually enhance our understandings of the politics of responding to harm, wrongdoing and scandal. Participants on this panel will address the following questions: • How is wrongdoing rendered legible through particular narrative techniques? • What techniques do actors employ in responding to wrongdoing? How do these techniques function to order and domesticate harmful violations? • Who is authorised to identify and respond to transgression? • What potential is there for a range of actors within society to challenge, contest and disrupt dominant attempts to manage harms? • What are the principles which guide and are reproduced by the management of scandals, wrongdoings and violations? • What temporalities are at play in the identification and response to scandal? How do these temporalities structure and define public inquiries, remorse, memorialisation and TRCs?

Retaining the ‘critical’ in Critical Terrorism Studies: is it possible? (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott In light of the BISA CST Working Group’s call to discuss the fundamental questions around the identity and practice of Critical Terrorism Studies, this roundtable seeks to question whether we can truly be ‘critical’ when studying ‘terrorism’. The roundtable brings together scholars who seek to interrogate and contest current modes of knowledge production which continue to produce harmful, colonial, and biased scholarship on ‘terrorism’. Amidst a current, global and academic, decolonial turn, the question of how to study concepts, such as terrorism, which are deeply embedded and entrenched in racial, gendered, and colonial structures, becomes all the more important and urgent. This roundtable is motivated by the recent theoretical disappointments in scholarship in the field, and is geared at starting a deeper conversation around the coloniality present at the heart of the discipline. Recent scholarship published in ‘critical’ journals have been criticised for their perpetuation of colonial tropes, Islamophobia, and weak evidential grounding, which has brought to light concerns regarding the mainstreaming of critical approaches. In addition, calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of the discipline open up the crucial debate and question of co-optation, mainstreaming, and diluting of critical and anti-colonial approaches more generally. In conclusion, this roundtable seeks to reflect on what it truly means to be ‘critical’ when we study ‘terrorism’ in the modern-colonial world.

Seeing South East Europe (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott This panel asks: How do we see and see from South East Europe? Within International Relations (IR), South East Europe has often been discussed, represented, and reproduced from the outside. Where featured, South East Europe becomes a stage on which IR’s theories, ideas, and imaginaries play out. Rarely is South East Europe constituted as a site of seeing IR in and of itself. Drawing together calls to provincialize IR from the region (e.g. Mälksoo 2021) and scholarship from the aesthetic turn in IR (e.g. Bleiker 2001), this panel examines five sites of IR’s making: military recruitment videos from Romania, visual art that invites a complex witnessing of sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), insights from the Manifesta Art Festival in Kosovo, documentaries on rave culture in BiH, as well as reflections on the political imaginaries of Moldovan artists. In this way, papers all engage with creativity, artistry, and visuality from the region in ways that disrupt rigid ways of knowing South East Europe, making space for a more complex reimagining.

The (absolute) state of the discipline: Expertise, engagement, ethics and Russia’s war on Ukraine (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drew into question many of the underlying assumptions of contemporary IR, and has produced many high-profile examples of scholars making calls that are spectacularly wrong – and getting things wrong can have dramatic human rights implications on the ground. Whilst our purpose as academics may not be to make predictions, it is certainly to learn from our mistakes. Over a year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this panel offers the opportunity to do just that. Participants with a range of disciplinary and geographical expertise will be debating questions such as: What analytical and disciplinary shortcomings has the war brought to light? Whose perspectives have been prioritised and occluded in mainstream analysis – and what impact does this have on public discourse? How can we best manage the relationship between academia and practitioners? What does the war tell us about the relationship between international institutions and human rights? How do we maintain ethical scholarship, relationships and outreach in the context of an ongoing war? And finally, what lessons should we be learning for the future?

Through the lens of Struggle (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott Compilation Panel

US Grand Strategy: Domestic Sources and Regional Applications (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott This panel examines the development and implementation of US grand strategy, focusing in particular on its domestic sources and implementation across multiple regions. First, Peter Harris and Macy Palbaum examine the influence of domestic constraints on strategic adjustment, highlighting the challenges faced by recent administrations in bringing about a "pivot" to Asia. Andrew Payne then explores the other side of this coin, exploring how domestic political considerations have made it difficult for successive administrations to do less in the Middle East. Tom Furse drills further into the domestic sources of grand strategy, tracing the ways in which intellectual, organisational and doctrinal factors have shaped the ability of the United States to fight wars in Central Europe and the Middle East. Finally, Julia Carver places things in a comparative context, assessing US efforts to build cyber capacity in Africa as a means of gaining strategic advance in the global digital network, specifically in the context of Chinese and European efforts in this area. Taken together, these papers shed light on critical debates in the study of US grand strategy, including the issue of change and continuity, the identification of under-appreciated sources of and constraints on grand strategy, and variation across regional contexts.

What is the future of peacebuilding aiming at transforming violence? (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton The key aim of peacebuilding is to transform violent conflicts into non-violent ones. In recent years, debates around post-conflict peacebuilding revolved around the involvement of the international community, and the ownership and responsibility that is taken by national governments and local communities in post-conflict countries in promoting peace after major conflict. There has been a lot of criticism towards the role the United Nations and other international actors play in post-conflict peacebuilding, e.g. for example, that they perpetuate postcolonial hierarchies in international efforts to build peace. As a result, amongst others, different UN agencies have critically engaged and changed their practices on peacebuilding. However, problems still persist in norms and practices of post-conflict peacebuilding. This panel speaks to this year’s CfP of the BISA Annual conference 2023 and critically reflects on the future of peacebuilding. Papers in this panel critically engage with the question whether the United Nations is up to the challenges of promoting peace and prevent conflicts – and whether there are any other alternatives.

Contemporary Reflections on Critical Terrorism Studies (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This roundtable puts forward a collective reflection on CTS in a dynamic and innovative way, delivering papers where authors reflect on this school of thought and on ways to further engage with other disciplines, topics, and ways of knowing. Papers in this panel aim to push CTS’ boundaries by imagining what else can be done and how it can be done in CTS – e.g., engaging with other disciplines, engaging with new topics, or putting forward new approaches to terrorism and counter-terrorism. In other words, chapters will address current “gaps” in CTS, and each reflection will push CTS forward in a different way.

Emotions, social movements and resistance (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott Emotions, social movements and resistance

Exploring structures of power in space (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott This panel will examine space power through different lenses, the authors will explore the structures that impact upon relationships in space. The selected papers will look at structural power, racism, links to past colonialism, and ways that space policy favours different interests. Through these lenses we will establish a closer understanding of what constitutes space power.

India's Conflicts and It's Quest for Power (BISA) Room: Carron, Hilton India's Conflicts and It's Quest for Power

NGOs and civil society: navigating a hostile and impoverished world (Non-Governmental Organisations Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton This panel explores advances in research on NGOs and civil society organisations (CSOs) working in fragile, conflict-affected, politically hostile and/or low-income contexts, particularly in terms of their internal dynamics and local impact. Acikyildiz seeks to explain differences in policies and field practices among humanitarian organizations with regard to biometrics technology, focusing on their principles and traditions, origins, institutional structure, and mandates and scope of action. Walton and Aslam offer a comparative analysis of how CSO roles are shaped by service delivery and social protection in conflict-affected environments; using the case studies of Tunisia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Bradley focuses on humanitarian action in the context of organised criminal violence in Mexico. She argues that the particular dynamics of criminal violence, and the fact that international humanitarian law does not apply, generate a unique set of challenges, limiting the work of humanitarian agencies, and leading to compromises on humanitarian principles. Sovner examines how CSOs responded to reduced funding and a hostile political atmosphere in Central and Eastern Europe, arguing that organizational theory provides insight into the strategic responses of organizations and processes of resiliency in the context of democratic backsliding. Crack and Chasukwa share a methodological innovation for tackling the issue of linguistic exclusion in international development work – a problem which is rarely considered by academics, policy-makers and NGO practitioners, but that has significant implications for the SDG ambition of ‘leaving no one behind’.

Ontological Security Studies in IR: Theory, Methods, and Approaches (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton Since the early 2000s, Ontological Security Studies (OSS) have significantly contributed to the understanding of identity, emotions, and agency in world politics. The plurality of the field is shaped by three “schools of thought” that, although far from mutually exclusive, have explored different theoretical/analytical approaches to the process of ontological security. The so-called sociological school understands ontological security primarily as embedded in the social structures constitutive of the shared norms that underpin individual attitudes. It largely relies on Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, with an analytical focus on role of national biographies and trust. The existentialist school shifts the theoretical focus and analytical direction towards individual anxiety, the very notion of being and its finitude. Theoretical inspiration lies on the works of Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. The Post-structuralists propose an ontological view that moves beyond overarching social structures to understand subjectivity through immanent discursive constructions of affective/emotional attachment. This schools borrows its theoretical framework mainly from the works of Jacques Lacan. This panel seeks to contribute to development of these schools, illuminating their overlapping dimensions, mutual contribution, and points of contention. It welcomes a broad range of perspectives revolving around, but not limited to, the schools above mentioned. These encompass working papers, thesis chapters or book sections, including theoretical, policy-oriented, and empirical work.

Race, migration and trajectories of knowledge (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Racialising and minoritising structures historically undermine the types of security attached to citizenship and ‘belonging’. These emerge across local and global scales, from immigration infrastructure to everyday racism, extending from localised narratives around collective memory to transnational discourses of ‘whiteness’ and ‘nonwhiteness’. Acknowledging the inextricability of European racism and immigration, there is significance in looking at how race is ‘made, remade and unmade discursively and materially in the context of migration and border struggles’ (Moffette and Walters, 2018: 102). Racialised pathways of immigration enforcement are entangled with policing practices, policies of population control, and maladapted support systems. Where these have visibly led to unequal health outcomes, residency, and immigration-based dependencies, these structures also raise questions about absences of knowledge around those who have fallen between the gaps, and those who have died or disappeared. Which actors produce what kind of knowledge on dead or disappeared "non-citizens"? How is this produced knowledge used and abused in the regulation of migrant bodies that are (still) alive and moving? How do collective memories and traumas of forced displacement shape contemporary border control practices? Examining the intersection of race, migration, history and security, this panel traces the connections and tensions between local and global infrastructures, prevailing relationships between the dead and alive, and trajectories of knowledge and collective memory that include and exclude the missing and marginalised.

Screening of “Veterans in Communities”: Re-imagining ‘transition’ through co-produced film

• Nick Caddick (ARU)

Room: QE2, Marriott ‘Veterans in Communities’ tells the story of the group of the same name, based in Rossendale, Lancashire, UK. The film reveals how veterans are using art alongside outreach work to re-establish meaning and community in life after military service. This is one of three films produced from the Stories in Transition project which uses co-produced film and organisational case studies to reveal the everyday politics of military-to-civilian transition. By co-producing the film, the veterans took ownership of their stories despite the public narratives which claim various (unrecognised) truths about veterans’ experiences. The story they tell proclaims the vital, life-saving work of community building and integration. We hear deeply affecting testimonies about relationships which preserve life and foster hope, and see how creativity works to build the confidence needed for a fulfilled life. After the film has been screened, we invite the audience to discuss how co-produced film can provide an ethical and creative space in which to re-imagine political ideas like ‘transition’. We consider the impact of film both within and beyond the creative space it opens up to explore the everyday politics too often glossed over by the traditional preoccupations of international studies.

Security, governance and peacebuilding (European Journal of International Security) Room: Don, Hilton Security, governance and peacebuilding - a panel put together by EJIS

State duties in the post-conflict period (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton The study of *jus post bellum* is a burgeoning area of scholarship within the fields of international relations and international law, reflecting an implicit understanding that states’ moral obligations to those caught up in conflict do not cease once they have left the battlefield. This panel seeks to further expand on this flourishing area of literature, taking a broad approach to the post bellum period, encapsulating both states’ legal and ethical duties following the conclusion of conflict, as well as those which are triggered by combatants excised from the battle whilst fighting is still underway.

Teaching IPE in Challenging Times (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel aims to discuss experiences of teaching international political economy in challenging times. Following the shift to online and hybrid forms of teaching during the pandemic, many of us are now facing intensifying pressures of ever-increasing workloads, threats of redundancies, large-scale curriculum restructuring, and growing precarity. We want to share strategies and approaches to teaching that might help each other to navigate these challenges, offer solidarity to one another, as well as embed analysis of these issues and everyday experiences within our teaching practice.

Training “Early Career Instructors” in International Studies: Existing Efforts and Challenges, and Future Possibilities (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton An emerging conversation in learning and teaching circles draws attention to the pedagogical training and support of the next generation of International Studies scholars and instructors, or the “Early Career Instructor” (ECI). This roundtable engages that conversation by bringing together a diverse group of established and emerging scholars to discuss the state of instructor training in International Studies at the individual, institution, and scholarly association level. Participants will consider questions such as: What kinds of mentorship and training opportunities are currently being offered to ECIs? What kinds of support are most valuable to best prepare individuals for success in early teaching experiences? What institutional programmes are effective in scaffolding and supporting new instructors? What forms of support and training can we develop for the future? What topics and techniques are most in need of further attention? How can mentors assist in the transition into teaching? Who is doing the instructor training labour within university spaces? How is instructor training mentorship valued within International Studies as a discipline? Participants include postgraduates, as well as mid-career and senior full-time instructors, including those who work at teaching centres. This roundtable seeks to highlight who is doing the labour of preparing instructors for teaching within higher education, especially in institutions that look vastly different than 3-5 years ago, and how International Studies is part of the future of pedagogical training for ECIs.

Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Occupations, Interventions and Exit Dilemmas (War Studies Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton This roundtable will address how and why territorial occupations and interventions end. From Ukraine to the West Bank and Afghanistan and beyond, occupations and exit dilemmas permeate contemporary geopolitics. However, the existing literature on territorial conflict rarely scrutinises a pivotal, related question: what makes an intervener withdraw from an occupied territory, or entrench itself within it? This roundtable will address this question. Given the local salience of occupations and interventions, this roundtable focuses primarily (but not exhaustively) on the Middle East, the Israel-Palestine conflict and Russia’s ongoing occupation of parts of Ukraine. It will thus compare diverse cases of occupations, interventions and exits and ask: what commonalities exhibited across each case? Is there a clear pattern of interactions and processes that causes an intervener to end its occupation and withdraw? Why did some interventions and occupations end, whilst others remain stubbornly persistent? What lessons can be learned from interventions that have ended that are pertinent for those that are ongoing today? Each scholar brings a different focus: Israeli foreign policy (Prof. Amnon Aran); Israel’s security and territorial policies (Dr. Rob Geist Pinfold) Russia’s occupation and exit dilemmas (Prof. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe); great power occupations and exits in the Middle East (Dr. Louise Kettle); and how interventions have affected regional security and cooperation (Prof. Louise Fawcett). The above participants are at divergent stages of their careers, spanning full professors, heads of department and early career researchers. Each comes from a different institution; some identify primarily as historians, others as scholars of international relations and international security. The roundtable falls under the purview of the War Studies Working Group and will be chaired by the working group’s co-convenor, Dr. James Rogers. NB: two of the roundtable’s potential participants have childcare responsibilities on Friday (23 June) and have therefore asked for the roundtable to be held on the 21st or the 22nd. I have informed them that I can make no guarantees but did promise to pass on the request when submitting this roundtable proposal.

Universality: A Hollow Norm or a Fundamental Necessity? (Ethics and World Politics Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott How can a culturally and politically diverse international community address shared problems of global order without a set of universal normative assumptions? Can universalism play a role in contemporary global governance? Drawing on recent developments in IL and IR theory, and here especially international practice theory, norm contestation, and global ethics, the panel brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore conditions of global ordering based on the past, present, and future of universality by focusing on four contested sites of global governance: international criminal law, human rights protection, development and environmental politics. Its principal aims are 1) to provide new theoretical insights from the humanities and social sciences on the question of universality; and 2) to create a dialogue among scholars working on political theory, moral philosophy, imperial history, and IR norms research.

Lunchtime history talk from the War Studies Working Group: The Clydeside Blitz. Speaker: Marc Conaghan Room: Tay, Hilton Sponsored by War Studies Working Group

South East Europe Working Group AGM Room: Don, Hilton

Community, solidarity, and diversity (Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism) Room: Carron, Hilton Circulating around disenfranchisement, marginalisation and other 'injustices,' this panel addresses responses built on solidarity, resistance as well as more fundamental considerations around pacifism and non-violence. Perspectives draw heavily on lived experiences of left behind and alienated communities both within subnational and transnational contexts across India, Palestine, Northern Ireland and Kurdistan.

Global Challenges and Cooperation in an Unstable International Order (European Journal of International Security) Room: Dee, Hilton The possibility of governing nuclear technology, climate change and other global challenges is currently predicated on the assumption of liberal international order informed by an understanding of state responsibility. However, this order is experiencing a period of disruption that has placed stress on extant and emerging global governance regimes and brought the assumption of their efficacy and viability into doubt. This panel will focus on how cooperative, effective governance of potentially planet-altering issues like nuclear weapons, climate change, or emerging technologies and exploration can be fostered or derailed by the international political context in which it develops and whether and how that context contributes to exploitative, exclusionary governance by domination or imposition.

Hybrid peacebuilding in Africa? (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton This papers on this panel use African examples to both critique and illustrate the very contemporary notion of hybrid peacebuilding. They examine the 'politics of scale' behind 'hybridity' in Madagascar, relations between local and international NGOs in Nigerian farmer-herder conflict, and the role of traditional authorities in hybrid peacekeeping. A final paper investigates how art, theatre, wrestling and ('high' and 'low') peacebuilding processes have all informed each other in South Sudan.

Localising international law: the politics of bringing international law home (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton Localising international law: the politics of bringing international law home

Men and masculinities: vulnerability, militarism and peacebuilding (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton This panel brings together five feminist-informed papers that all critically engage with men and masculinity, not least by problematizing the meaning of masculinity across cultural, social and political settings but also by exploring its militarized and often damaging effects in times of war and conflict. Though the papers concede the close linkage between militarism and masculinity they all aim to move beyond that co-constitutive relationship by exploring the ways in which masculinity is derived from national identity, distinct military structures and age. What is more the panel demonstrates the ontological insecurities and vulnerabilities that also surround masculinity. The papers employ a range of methodological approaches and empirical examples in a fruitful way providing for constructive and innovative conversations.

Motherhood, Mothering and (Feminist) IR (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Feminists have long grappled with, and been troubled by, the experience and concept of motherhood. Rightly critiqued by feminists as an essentialising and limiting abstraction, the figure of ‘The Mother’ has been lazily deployed in patriarchal societies to curtail women’s full inclusion across social, political, economic, and cultural institutions. With respect to the discipline of IR, for all its ‘turns’ to embodiment and ‘the everyday’, to what extent does it account for the lived realities of having children and raising families, as well as the thorny questions of who does what? Who gets what? Who carries what burden and for how long? And how does, and should, any of this translate into research, teaching, and citizenship in a department? Set against the backdrop of the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on academic mothers; a crisis in childcare provision in the UK and beyond; and an increasingly precarious HE sector, particularly for ECRs and those most likely to have/be thinking about starting families, this roundtable asks what mothering – broadly conceived – means for/to international studies as a discipline, and for feminists within the discipline both materially and conceptually. Does motherhood/mothering shape (feminist) IR? To what extent does feminist IR confront the challenges and potentials of mothering, particularly in relation to the experience of mothering through different – racialised, classed, sexualised – bodies, as well as how mothering/motherhood changes through life? How might the experience of mothering challenge existing feminisms in the discipline? This roundtable is intended as an opportunity to discuss and grapple with questions animating our professional lives and shaping our engagement in/with the discipline.

Narrating coloniality (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott Compilation Panel

Nation, Nationalisms and Revolution: New historical-sociological approaches in national transitions. (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton This panel compiles regionally diverse papers, from the Americas, to Europe to Asia, looking at various dimensions in the uneven transitions to multiple modernities.

Nuclear Politics (Orphan Papers track) Room: Tweed, Hilton Nuclear Politics

Politics of the Gulf Region (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton This panel reflects new scholarship on the politics of Gulf states, examining small state strategies in developing policies towards Britain and other great powers, Turkey's role in Kuwaiti power projection, and rethinking the Abraham Accords from a civilisational politics perspective.

Practitioner perspectives: Towards a Feminist Foreign Policy in Scotland (BISA)

• Marsha Scott (Chief Executive, Scottish Women's Aid)
• Naomi McAuliffe (Programme Director Amnesty International Scotland)
• Jamie Livingston (Head of Oxfam Scotland)

Room: QE2, Marriott Practitioner perspectives: Towards a Feminist Foreign Policy in Scotland

Problematising Research Ethics and Methodology (Orphan Papers track) Room: Don, Hilton Problematising Research Ethics

Silly IR: Interventions Into A Serious Discipline (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton This panel interrogates the politics and limits of the binary between seriousness and silliness in International Relations as a discipline that fundamentally takes itself seriously. Through a series of theoretical and empirical interventions, and against disciplinary boundaries that produce the site of International Relations as "serious" for the exclusion of alternative spaces of expression and knowing, this panel disrupts, decenters, and deconstructs the binary of the silly and the serious. In doing so, it explores the productive and creative possibilities and limits of silly objects, subjects, and performances in International Relations and IR scholarship. Three of the papers ask various theoretical questions about how seriousness is expected, imposed, and structured in processes of knowledge production in the discipline and the ways in which silliness, play, and parody may disentangle such boundaries. These papers are then followed by two empirical interventions which respectively interrogate the possibilities of children's play and silly resistance in India's Shaheen Bagh protests and the reactionary politics of Alt-Right humour that functions through ambiguating the lines between silliness and seriousness.

Status and Recognition in International Politics (BISA) Room: Clyde, Hilton **Panel Description:** The papers in this panel all focus on the struggle for, or impact of, status and recognition in international relations. Their theoretical interventions focus on key questions such as how states’ self-representations or self-images matter in the pursuit of recognition or in hotly debated grand strategies, the interplay between status and national identification, and how the state’s position is narrated. Empirically, the papers focus on a broad range of sites, from the pursuit of cultural recognition through world heritage to the minds of the US public. Methodologically, the papers range across quantitative and qualitative approaches, from survey experiments to qualitative process tracing, from interviews with US elites to archival research. These papers, individually and collectively, seek to provide theoretical and empirical insights to important questions of status and recognition as well as international order and grand strategy from diverse perspectives.

Storying the International: Towards a more generous International Relations (BISA) Room: Argyll, Marriott The past decade has seen a welcome expansion of stories in International Relations. Thinkers of global politics have dedicated serious effort towards investigating the methodological and epistemological advantages of turning towards stories and storytelling, arguing that the leap towards stories holds the key for developing theories in international relations that listen and respond rather than observe and explain. By highlighting how stories collapse the already precarious demarcation between the self and other, such scholarship shows us how stories can expand the landscape of the discipline with their indelibly inclusionary texture. Explicating the multiplicity of motivations and dilemmas of characters who are embedded in and simultaneously resist the structures that constrain them, stories help in lowering the guard and beckon us to participate in an immersive and potentially transformative experience, in a way that the focus shift from ‘solving problems’ to ‘paying attention’: to the affects that stories produce in their readers. This relationality that develops between the writing and the reader, in turn, enables emotional empathetic responses in the reader towards the written. The transformative value of paying attention to stories, about/in the international, is first and foremost the generosity they accord to us, by making room for a “intimacy with doubt” in a discipline that has historically been preoccupied with eradicating it (Inayatullah 2001). Following Jenny Edkins’ question- “What does the story do that other forms of writing cannot?”, this roundtable is interested in tracing the degree of empathetic imagination we can hope to incorporate into our writing about the world, once we begin to take stories seriously. By exploring sites, modes and methods which allow us to reach for alternative ways of reading, writing and feeling the political, this panel hopes to draw attention to the emancipatory power of stories for breaching cherished edifices of what counts as knowledge in the discipline of IR. Bringing together academics, activits and other creatives, this roundtable aims to engage with- -Different genres/modes of storytelling- fiction, epic, poetry, others- as ways of imagining the international. - Stories as feminist, decolonial and aesthetic routes to alternative forms of knowledge. -Methodological insights from working with stories in the international. -Stories as conceptual and ethical (re)visions in the discipline. -The relationship between stories as sources of knowledge in IR. -Stories as a sustained challenge to linear ways of thinking about space, time and identity in international politics.

The Everyday in World Politics: Practices, Spaces, and Subjectivities (BISA) Room: Ewing, Marriott The Everyday in World Politics: Practices, Spaces, and Subjectivities

Colonial imaginaries and the politics of Space, Place and Memory (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton This panel explores entanglement of space and place with memory in colonial and decolonial politics. It explores how space/place interact in relation to both how past colonial practices are remembered and how contemporary colonial practices are intimately linked to discourses of the heritage of space/places. These memory politics of colonialism are extremely diverse from a reckoning with former brutality to memories of spaces/places which deny the coloniality of practices. The panel pulls together papers working on a diversity of contexts shaped by colonial forms of politics. Their explorations of the entanglement of space and place with memory are undertaken from different angles, examining both the discursive productions of memory and the significance of material remnants and ruins. However, all the papers speak to the ways in which memory and space/place are central to the formation of identities, the production of states and to the evolution of colonial imaginaries.

Connections in International Peacebuilding: Networks, Ties & Friendships (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton Successful international peacebuilding outcomes relies on the forging of connections. The publication of the UN Secretary General’s report on ‘Our Common Agenda’ and its key proposals are a powerful reminder that contemporary challenges such as ending war, preventing armed conflict and building peace can only be achieved through cooperation and a collective commitment towards a better future. Within this context, the interrogation of the connections that are forged, threatened, broken down, and remade through war/armed conflict and peacebuilding processes is crucially important in explaining global change and rethinking our engagement with key questions about human rights and justice in international political life. By adopting a feminist lens, the panel moves beyond existing critiques of the distinction between different levels of analysis in international politics (micro, meso, macro). Instead, it examines connections across and between these levels, and how those connections are created, sustained, and reinforced by different actors and through violent or peaceful means. By building on empirical material drawn from a variety of geographical, political, and social contexts, the panel raises methodological and theoretical questions about the role, types, and effects, and locations of connections that exist within peace and conflict. It explores familial ties and (ex)combatants; the creation of networks of resistance through art within peacebuilding contexts; furthermore, professional networks of gender experts are investigated, highlighting how sustaining these networks are central to effective responses to gender-related crises in international peace and security. Finally, the panel explores women in leadership positions and their relation to peacebuilding by assessing how women’s meaningful participation in peacebuilding and their representation in leadership positions are associated with the success of peace processes.

Environmental and Human Crises in Global Ethics (Ethics and World Politics Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton This panel covers a range of ethical debates in the context of intersecting global crisis. It includes papers on: migration, displacement, refugee protection, food security, biodiversity breakdown and energy transitions.

Far right politics and critical terrorism studies (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton This panel brings together work that investigates intersections between far right politics and counter terrorism. Papers consider a range of debates, from the location and efficacy of the 'terrorism' narrative for this form of politics through to investigating legal and policy adaptations within counter terrorism practice.

International Relations of Migration (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton This panel analyses the international relations of migration.

Live Podcast: Whiskey and IR by Drs. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson & Daniel Nexon. Sponsored by Clydeside Distillery and featuring Alistair McDonald, Distillery Manager. Patrick and Dan work their way through a piece of international-relations scholarship. And drink whiskey. Separate registration is essential for this event: https://www.bisa.ac.uk/events/whiskey-and-ir-podcast-and-roundtable-bisa-2023 Room: QE2, Marriott

Meet the Editors of RIS, EJIS and IA (BISA) Room: Waverley, Marriott Meet the Editors

Power of narratives in Russian foreign and security policies (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton This panel aims to discuss the narratives in Russian foreign and security policies

Problematising the Relevance and Potentialising the Possibilities of Political Marxism in 2022 (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton Since its inception in the Brenner debate in the late 1970s, Political Marxism (PM) has been the target of much criticism from many corners. The denunciations of the framework have revolved around four partly distinct and partly complementary critiques: economism, gender blindness, Eurocentrism, and disparaging of racialised aspects of socio-economic development. At the same time, however, the framework has also been going through fruitful intra-paradigm debates, for example around the much-critiqued concept of market dependency, the importance of international dynamics and foreign policy making, and the status of agency in historical political economy accounts. The panelists all share a broad commitment to the continued relevance of PM as an approach that can, due to its radically historicist foundations, illuminate central aspects of political and socio-economic dynamics of change on all levels of social practices and structures. The scholars work on radically distinct questions and time periods, yet have felt that PM or radical historicism opens up the possibility of asking highly original questions and answering them in an original and ambitious way. The purpose of the panel is to showcase the continued vitality of the framework to fellow International Relations and Political Economy researchers through five specific research projects. Kate Cherry's research title is 'The Making of Neoliberal Families: Social Conservatism and the Privatisation of Housing in Britain'. Part of her research project asks why the first wave family abolition movement failed during the permissive moment and how to read this through a radical historicist framework that problematises the reliance on market imperatives unable to escape the liberal imaginative. By asking these questions, she criticises PM for treating gender relations as epiphenomenal to capitalist social property relations, and questions whether radical historicism is capable of moving beyond that blindsiding. Judith Koch's research is titled 'Still Splendid Isolation? Brexit in the Longue Purée of British Foreign Policy Exceptionalism', and it focuses on Brexit, studying it both from a Foreign Policy Analysis and a Political Economy perspective. Her framing of the question of why Brexit happened turns the conventional and popular paradigm on its head by asking why did the UK stay within the EU for as long as it did, and why did the strained relations between the two not lead to a Brexit before 2016? In this paper, she seeks to understand EU-UK relations through a radically historicist Foreign Policy Analysis. Armando Van Rankin Anaya's research is titled 'The Making of Mexico: An International Political Sociology of Mexican Modernity'. His investigation aims to provide a large-scale reconstruction of the Mexican trajectory using a Geopolitical Marxist approach. The study applies the framework to the study of a colonial and racialised context thought to be beyond the purview of PM, thereby showing the relevance of the approach. Van Rankin Anaya's underlying claim is that the uniqueness of Mexico's modernity - modern state apparatus, capitalism, and nationalism/citizenship - is anchored in a set of historical specificities rooted in the conflictual Mexican trajectory built from the Spanish colonisation of Mesoamerican civilisations in the 16th century onwards. Lauri von Pfaler's research is titled 'Social Relations and Geopolitics in the Making of a Scandinavian Inter-State System'. It provides a long-term reconstruction of the social and geopolitical changes constituting the current political geography of Northern Europe. This paper seeks to understand the role of the only recently feudalised and Christianised Scandinavian kingdoms in the feudalisation and Christianisation, the so-called 'Europeanisation', of the Baltic Sea, between the 12th and 14th centuries. It argues that the geo-socially specific feudal polities accumulated vast territories on various sides of the Baltic due to the interplay of three co-constitutive 'levels': 'internal' class relations, 'external' inter-Scandinavian geopolitical pressures, and the wider geo-social order of Northern Europe. Samuel Parris's research is titled 'The Making of the New World: Franco-British Geopolitical Rivalry, Settler Colonialism, and the Early American Republic, 1624-1823'. He will present a paper titled 'Merchants and the Colonial Origins of the American Revolution, 1624-1776'. It argues that previous explanations of the revolution, both fiscal-pressure and abolitionism based, leave fundamental questions about the revolution unanswered and suggests that to comprehend this transformation requires a PM-inspired, radical historicist assessment of the complex entanglements engendered by competing British and French social property regimes and strategies of colonialism in North America. The paper underlines the importance of the sidelined British interloping merchants in this process.

Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (BISA) Room: QE1, Marriott Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights

Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities through Embodiment: Human Bodies of War (Panel 1) (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton This first panel explores the production and productiveness of bodies and their parts within conflict and post-conflict regimes. Our exposure to violence as embodied beings has been studied from various perspectives, with our situation in regimes of life and death and constitutive vulnerability being well established. However, the agency of the body and flesh, and the experiences and sensations that surround and inhabit bodies as a consequence of war, have been widely overlooked in academic discussion. This panel focusses on agency of the body and its parts during and post-war, and how processes and practices of embodiment occur in relation to violence. Particularly, we interrogate how violence against bodies and their parts interacts with and interrupts processes of materialisation, and causes the production of new affective regimes which have wide-reaching social consequences. Our bodies are always invested with markers of identity such as race, sex, and age, but reproduce and remake them in various ways. With recent stories of mass graves in Ukraine and Canada, conflict-driven starvation in Tigray and Myanmar, and constant accusations of ‘improper’ conflict behaviour and crimes against humanity driving media attention, it is impossible to ignore the body and embodiment as significant in how we understand violence, society, life, death, and the human. From the scars, wounds, and death that result from combat, we produce narratives which are always being negotiated both socially and - crucially - with the body itself. Exploring this through the medium of body mapping, truth and reconciliation, and the post-conflict visuality and practice of ex-combatants and veterans, this panel considers the importance of the performative body in social and individual identity production. **Thematic Introduction to the Panel Series:** As Elaine Scarry famously argued, the primary mechanism of war is bodily violence. Our bodies themselves are integral in how we create typologies of violence, from 'war' to 'protest' to 'terrorism'. The effects of conflict go beyond the immediate violation of bodies, which post-violence continues to be politically productive within affective and materialist economies operating in radically restructured social spheres. These panels explore possibilities for rethinking war and conflict by considering the ways in which they are embodied experiences. Firstly, they consider how individual experiences of being embodied in and post-conflict relates to social identity, and how embodiment and identity are unstable and change over time. Secondly, the panels reflect on the social characteristics and production of bodies in relation to traumatic experiences. Thirdly, while human bodies are central to the practice of war, they exist within constellations of non-human bodies which play a significant role in producing understanding of conflict and society.

Review of International Political Economy 30th Anniversary: Editors’ Forum (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton Established in 1994 as a “forum for heterodox international political economy” and a journal devoted to “constructing” the identity of IPE as much as to its reflection, Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) has lived up to its mission through periods of dramatic changes and successive crises in global economy. RIPE’s editors, editorial board members, and international advisory members represent a venerable “who’s who” of IPE, whose own research trajectories embody a plurality of approaches and themes that the journal continues to nurture and debate. While RIPE’s 30th anniversary in print features early career scholars, this roundtable assembles RIPE’s past and current editors in order to look at the way the journal constructed the history of IPE and opened spaces for alternative research agendas. The roundtable reflects editors continued commitment to attracting and fostering new scholarship and demystifying process of peer review and publication in the journal.

Security and Diplomacy from East to West (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott This panel examines security and diplomatic architectures across the region, ranging from the impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative on the Middle East, to the South Asian regional security complex, Canada's hedging and triangulation approaches in the Indo-Pacific, and regional cooperation among new leaders in Central Asian states.

Understanding training and capacity building in peacekeeping (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott Papers analyse how peacekeepers are prepared, trained for deployment, how the EU engages in capacity building, and the wider experiences of peacekeepers in their domestic lives

What Now for Feminist Foreign Policy? Energy and Backlash (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton Almost a decade ago, Sweden declared that it would pursue a ‘feminist foreign policy’. A more explicit signal of political intent than previous commitments to the so-called Women, Peace and Security agenda or gender equality in development assistance, feminist foreign policy generated significant activist and scholarly interest, and was taken up by a series of other governments (to date, Canada, Luxembourg, France, Mexico, Spain, Libya, Germany, Chile, and the Netherlands). Ruling parties elsewhere – such as the Westminster Parliament and the Scottish Government – have advocated for or promised to adopt something similar. Along with activist campaigns for feminist foreign policy in dozens of other contexts, this burst of activity indicates a growing energy and leads to numerous questions about what the ambition means in practice. Yet there is now also a backlash against feminist foreign policy, most obviously in Sweden where the new government has retracted the term and abandoned the commitment. This roundtable convenes scholars of feminist foreign policy to take stock of energy and backlash and to ask where the project now stands. The present and future of feminist foreign policy goes to the heart of ‘Our Common Agenda’ proposals on centering women and on peace and conflict prevention, speaking centrally to conference themes and ongoing policy debates. Each contributor has researched feminist claims on foreign, security and development policy in particular governance settings. Each will speak to one of those sites of contention, from familiar cases such as Sweden to ambivalent developments in the UK to lesser-discussed contexts like South Asia or regional institutions like NATO.

Anxiety and Narratives in International Relations (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton Anxiety is a fundamental part of human subjectivity. In the last decades, it has become clear that the traditional anxiety-containing mechanisms are increasingly being subjected to pressure from world politics. Globalization, decolonization, (recurring) crises, and violent conflict have uprooted individuals, states, and communities across the world, culminating in emotional turmoil, existential uncertainty, and ruptures in narratives. These narratives, the stories that humans tell themselves to make sense of the chaos of late modernity, lead to contestations and the re-establishment of hegemonic narratives when disrupted. This eclectic and intellectually diverse panel investigates various ways in which anxiety is elicited by contemporary (inter)national politics, how it becomes politically relevant, and with what consequences. The individual papers comprise Lacanian, Gestalt psychological, and mnemonic approaches to anxiety, use discursive, interview, and auto, in-person, and digital ethnographic data to explore postcolonial states’ ontological security-seeking practices, narratives of hybrid warfare, the contestation of hegemonic narratives, and the remembrance of groups after Covid-19 and violent conflict.

Challenging eurocentrism and coloniality in terrorism studies (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel traces the colonial heritage of security measures, and links issues of race to discourses on terrorism

Contemporary International Human Rights Challenges (Orphan Papers track) Room: Clyde, Hilton Contemporary International Human Rights Challenges

Developing new and changing existing concepts related to climate change (Environment Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton Climate change and environmental degradation can have profound impacts on security and actors' conceptualisations of norms, identity, borders, citizenship and sovereignty. This panel explores how concepts change and are further developed in the face of major challenges such as climate change by using a variety of methods and theoretical approaches. Case studies include carbon disclosure, borders along rivers and lakes, regulating aviation, nuclear testing and broader security implications of climate change.

Far-right movements and foreign policy influence: Insight from Eastern and Western Europe. (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton European far-right groups reject the global geopolitical order as it exists. This given, the progressive entrenchment in their respective national political systems raises a number of questions about far right’s potential impact on global politics, such as the distancing from European principles and norms in national political discourses and practices. The bulk of research on the far right tends to focus on parties and on their impact on policy-making, especially in the field of integration and immigration. The limited research on foreign policy and the relationship to Europe – a domain closely connected to the ethno-centric and even expansionist ideology of the far right – is striking. This panel opens up academic debate about the possible ways in which far-right movements can have an influence on geopolitical imaginings of Europe and the ways in which we can estimate the extent of said influence. Our panel thus contributes to the ongoing debate in the critical geopolitics literature on the ways through which ‘EU’rope is contested and played out in political discourses and practices through a spatial diverse approach. The papers offer country-specific evidence of culturalist and particularist interpretations of nations in the broader regional and European context and constitute the first systematic exploration of the ways in which foreign-policy topics are contested by the discursive practices of far-right non-party actors.

Gendering International Relations Working Group business meeting Room: Tweed, Hilton

Human and state security in Africa (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton This panel showcases new topics and approaches to human and state security in Africa. Its papers rethink ontological security through the example of conflict in Cameroon, critically examine multilateral conflict management in the Sahel, and assess the influence of Covid-19 and Portuguese colonial legacies on human security today.

Ideals and Interests in World Politics: Pragmatism in Theory and Practice (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton Ideals and Interests in World Politics: Pragmatism in Theory and Practice

Live Podcast: Whiskey and IR - Separate registration is essential for this event: https://www.bisa.ac.uk/events/whiskey-and-ir-podcast-and-roundtable-bisa-2023 (BISA) Room: QE2, Marriott Live Podcast - Whiskey and IR

Power contestations in everyday (in)security (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This panel explores the politics of (in)security by looking at practices taking place within the mundane interactions of everyday life. Covering a range of contributions from de-radicalisation to Covid-19, we interrogate how security is conceptualised by introducing new actors, spaces, and practices. In this process, we unpack the diffusion of security practices within different facets of civic life and bring to the fore the security/insecurity binary. As such, we move beyond the traditional security narratives and highlight the ‘insecurity’ embedded within security-making interventions. Through this we tease out the tension between the agents and subjects of security, the actions that create security and insecurity, and how these interactions unfold in the banality of everyday spaces.

Proxy Wars and Rebel Alliances: Indirect Intervention in Modern Conflicts (War Studies Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott From Ukraine to Libya, Syria and Yemen, modern wars are infused with significant levels of indirect intervention from third parties. This panel explores how principals and agents interact in these conflicts and assesses the impact this has on conflict conduct and outcome. Such proxy wars will be framed in different lights across the five papers on this panel. Stark & Rauta explore how the engagement of third parties in civil wars can internationalise them to such an extent that the intra-state conflict evolves into an inter-state one. Karlen and Rauta focus on the operational relationship between proxies and their sponsors by examining the mechanisms through which foreign states control armed groups. Spatafora concentrates on the underexplored yet fundamental question of when and why an initial proxy intervention may develop into a direct intervention and the implications this has on our understanding of escalation in proxy war studies. Using a large data set covering half a century of conflicts across Africa, Tamm offers a mixed method investigation into armed support for rebel groups in revolutionary wars. Finally, Mumford puts alliance theory and proxy war studies into dialogue with each other to explain co-ordinated indirect intervention in a conflict by formal alliances using the Ukraine war as a case study.

Regionalism in the Americas, North and South (BISA) Room: Ewing, Marriott A confluence of factors -- the pandemic and uneven recovery, growing great-power rivalries, and economic uncertainty -- are creating a dynamic context for regionalism and regional organisations in the Americas. This panel examines changes in, and challenges for, regional cooperation in North America, South America, and the Western Hemisphere more broadly. How do efforts at regional governance fit within practices and institutions of global governance? The panel explores how different regional constructs and organizations have confronted shared challenges including migration, health, and global economic competition. Across the papers, the authors explore the difficulties of establishing credibility and sustainability for regional projects in the face of transnational challenges and political change.

Roundtable: The Eurovision Song Contest and International Politics (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott The Eurovision Song Contest, next to be hosted in Liverpool on Ukraine’s behalf in May 2023, illustrates many dynamics of the international: from the embodied performances of collective identity made by hosts and entrants which both play on and help constitute imagined relationships between national, civic, supranational and sexual belonging, to the roles of non-judicial/legislative actors in international contentions over LGBTQ+ visibility. One of Eurovision’s most iconic winners, Conchita Wurst, inspires an organising motif for Cynthia Weber’s intervention into ‘Queer IR’ and provides the cover image to Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons’ ‘Queer Wars’. Its significance for public diplomacy has been illustrated by the growing stakes of asserting Ukrainian culture and nationhood to a transnational public, and by the BDS campaign’s mobilisation against Israel hosting Eurovision in 2019. Its contemporary footprint on host cities mediates everyday queer experiences of in/security and the international through the structure of cultural and competitive mega-events. Among the many knowledges that help reveal these insights is knowledge about popular culture, politics and security stemming from the post-Yugoslav space. Taking Eurovision 2023 as a starting-point, this roundtable will look to the immediate future of such knowledges against the background of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Violence and Empire (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Compilation Panel

Exhibitor Hall Room: Ballroom, Hilton

Politics of Wildfire - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events

• Lorenza Fontana

Room: Ballroom, Hilton

Pop culture & politics – student work display by Maha Rafi Atal & Rhys Crilley. Find out more at https://twitter.com/rhyscrilley/status/1670814542618583042?s=20 Room: Absolute Roasters coffee shop at Box Hub

Civil War Paths (Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism) Room: Don, Hilton How do conflicts turn violent? How do civil wars unfold over time? How do distinct dynamics of civil war affect the post-war potential for peace? These are the driving questions of the Civil War Paths project “Understanding Civil War from Pre- to Post-War Stages: A Comparative Approach,” funded by a £1.2m UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. Addressing these questions, the papers in this panel analyse the evolution of civil wars in a subset of cases selected for the project from a process-oriented, actor-centered, and relational approach. Shesterinina and Livesey outline the theoretical framework and research design of the project. They argue that civil wars follow different paths based on how they emerge, unfold, and end or transform and trace the foundations of different paths to the organisational origins of non-state armed groups in clandestine activities, social movements and state splinters. How non-state armed groups form shapes their embeddedness in the territories they seek to control and their capacity to engage with state forces. However, their interactions with other non-state, state, population, and external actors can change these trajectories in the course of hostilities. Based on this starting point, empirical papers explore path-dependent and endogenous dynamics in cases that represent each of these formations, based on immersive fieldwork in the areas, to understand whether and how armed group origins condition the evolution of civil wars. Ketola examines the case of Nepal where the origins of the CPN-M as a clandestine political party had a significant effect on its strategy and forms of rebel governance. Yet, examining a wartime shift from clandestine to organised path, Ketola argues that endogenous dynamics are key to understanding post-war legacies. Problematising the social movement origins of armed groups in the case of Lebanon, Rouhana uses a bottom up approach to understand the conditions of possibility for violence at the brink of the war in 1975 and how violence was sustained for the next 15 years at the popular level. Álvarez-Vanegas asks whether the clandestine origins of the FARC-EP led to distinct organisational forms having roots in the peasant movement and contentious politics in Colombia. He traces the transformation of the organisation as a result of both internal and external dynamics. Sayra van den Berg focuses on the case of South Sudan where the origins of armed groups in regime fragmentation, particularly a coup d’état attempt, have been widely acknowledged but can be challenged by applying the combined memory studies and transitional justice framework as the very framing of the violence as a coup shaped mobilisation on both sides in the conflict. Combined, the papers demonstrate the importance of disaggregating organisational trajectories of non-state armed groups for our understanding of different paths civil wars follow and redefine civil war as a complex process that connects the pre-war, war and post-war stages of conflict through evolving interactions between states, non-state armed groups, local populations, and external actors involved. These findings have implications for future studies of civil war and policy on this dominant form of contemporary armed conflict.

Contestation of international order (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton The topic of the contestation of the international order is a very prolific topic since 2012, and even more since the war in Ukraine. The international order is contested in various aspects: challenges to the interpretation and meaning of international law; contestation of political equilibrium achieved after the collapse of the USSR; contestation of social practices harmonizing interactions between actors on the international and regional scenes. This panels offers to look at how the international order is contested at the three levels of analysis used in IR theory: the world, the state, the individuals.

Emerging technology and international security (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton This panel focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in addressing the ethical-political dilemmas of human-machine interactions, the challenges of artificalial intelligence and the development of weapons, and shines a light on the growing concerns around cyber security and cyber operations.

Gendering protest and activism : feminist solidarities and care across contexts (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott In times of rising domestic and international inequalities, gendered violence and discrimination, militarism, conflict as well nuclear threat, it becomes important to investigate the significance of feminist protest, solidarities and care within and across borders. What is more it is important to offer feminist analyses of the gendered and liberal dynamics of seemingly humanitarian initiatives that lay claim to be steeped in care and a commitment to transnational solidarity. This panel is composed of five papers that in a variety of ways address the issue of feminist solidarities, care and humanitarianism, including cultural protest, anti-nuclear activism as well as non-western forms of internationalisms, all offering critical analysis of such practices, while exploring their feminist underpinnings. What is more the panel unpacks new forms of knowledge production and notions of care and relate that discussion to feminist values and norms as well as transnational movements more broadly.

Literary IR: Existential dramas, dystopian futures and political science fictions (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott From foreign and security policy, to political institutions, marginalized subjects, and war and peace, international studies scholars have become increasingly cognisant of the influence of narrative on global politics. Thanks to their ability to constitute (auto)biographical, historical, and temporal sensibilities, stories help identities form, actors act, policies legitimate, history unfold, and political scientists make sense of it all. Yet despite such advances, international studies has been comparatively less attentive to the links between politics and literature. This panel advances a ‘literary IR’ by exploring the impact of literature on political analysis, and by asking what treating political analysis itself as literature might entail and disclose. Authors put classics of modern literature, including fairy tale, science fiction, and existentialist drama in conversation with core international studies concerns like war, history, revolution, gender, climate change, and the discipline itself. These discussions are united by an interest in the narrative elements hidden in political phenomena as well as novel ways in which thinking about narrative function and form can help us understand and deliberate on politics in productive ways.

Militarism and war through the prism of Russian culture (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton The panel explores militarism and war in Russia through the prism of Russian culture.

Pandemic Governance - Institutions and treaties in the times of COVID-19 (Global Health Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton The pandemic has proven a challenge to the entire apparatus of Global Health Governance, exposing both the weaknesses and the strengths of existing rules and conventions. One outcome of this is the realisation of a pressing need for more reliable instruments and structures of accountability in a sphere that is at the same time essentially global and also necessarily local in application. High-level debate includes the possible revision of existing mechanisms such as the International Health Regulations (IHR), the pivotal effects of declarations of a public health emergencies of international concern (PHEICs), the controversies arising around the issue of patent waivers, the dimensions of the role of the public-private-partnerships in health governance, and also the potential for a new global pandemic treaty. This panel delves deeply into these urgent questions for global health governance, and seeks to chart the implications for the course ahead.

Projecting Spacepower and Terrestrial Interests (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton This panel discusses the recent past and present of the use of outer space for core state interests, particularly in military, intelligence, and security dimensions. In short, it explores critical issues in world politics as they are playing out in outer space. Over 70 years of the Space Age has led to a reliance in the United States on satellite systems for critical infrastructure. However, it is not solely a story of the United States and security-seeking behaviour. This panel also explores a British perspective to military space activities, increasingly prominent discussions of space laws, rules, and norms in governing the use of space for all actors in space, and also questions the contested concept of 'space security' itself to provide a broad perspective and interrogation of how states use spacepower for their own terrestrial interests.

Re-theorizing emotions in world politics (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Re-theorizing emotions in world politics

Reconceptualising IR (BISA) Room: Ledmore, Hilton Reconceptualising IR

Reflections on Preventing Violent Extremism (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott This panel critically interrogates PVE measures

Responding to Outrage 2: Apologies, Inquiries, Commemoration, Scandal, and Truth and Reconciliation (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton In the aftermath of public revelations of harms, wrongdoing or scandal, political actors and institutions have a number of mechanisms available to them in the process of reputation management, reconsolidating legitimacy, and re-establishing political and social order. Such mechanisms include public inquiries, expressions of contrition, memorialisation, and the establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs). While each of these devices have been the focus of considerable academic research in recent years, it is noticeable that such literatures are often disconnected from one another and do not sufficiently build on each other’s findings. This is a missed opportunity, not least because they share many of the same concerns, including the power dynamics within transgression management; questions of who does and does not have voice within such processes; and the class, gendered and racialised aspects of supposedly reparative processes. As such, the goal of this roundtable is to bring together researchers on public inquiries, remorse, memorialisation, TRCs, and scandal with a view to building connections between these literatures and considering how each other’s empirical and theoretical insights may mutually enhance our understandings of the politics of responding to harm, wrongdoing and scandal. Participants on this roundtable will address the following questions: • How is wrongdoing rendered legible through particular narrative techniques? • What techniques do actors employ in responding to wrongdoing? How do these techniques function to order and domesticate harmful violations? • Who is authorised to identify and respond to transgression? • What potential is there for a range of actors within society to challenge, contest and disrupt dominant attempts to manage harms? • What are the principles which guide and are reproduced by the management of scandals, wrongdoings and violations? • What temporalities are at play in the identification and response to scandal? How do these temporalities structure and define public inquiries, remorse, memorialisation and TRCs?

Teaching to Inspire in Challenging Times (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This panel explores different strategies and experiences to guide and inspire us in the classroom as teachers. The study of International Relations has always involved addressing difficult topics and concepts. However, what is new is a kind of universal trauma and anxiety that both educators and students bring to the classroom due to our experiences of the global pandemic and the potential destruction of the planet due to climate change. Moreover, public debates about culture are reshaping (or revealing) narratives around identity and values that can be unsettling. How, with such challenges, can we contribute to making learning about a world that seems to be falling apart inspiring? What can we learn from traditional teaching methods and what new technological tools can we bring into the classroom? How can popular culture help to address difficult topics in our learning? How can we approach controversial tactics in the classroom? And how do we encourage our students to confront difficult questions that could ask them to question their positionally in the world?

The Contemporary Asia-Pacific: A Region at Risk of Unravelling? (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott Over the last half century, the Asia-Pacific region has been the principal growth engine of the global economy. The integration of countries into global value chains has contributed to rapid rates of economic growth, albeit often accompanied by increased income inequality, and by relatively small shares of value-added being captured locally. For some observers, the growth of economic interdependence has provided the foundations for enhanced inter-governmental collaboration and is one factor in the absence of major inter-state conflict in the region since the Sino-Vietnam war of 1979. Contemporary developments appear to put the prosperity and peace of the region at risk. The emergence of techno-nationalism in Europe and the United States in response to the Covid pandemic and Beijing’s increasing assertiveness is likely to produce a significant re-direction of value chains in support of “friend-shoring”. In turn, what some observers have termed the “new mercantilism” is encouraging countries in the region to revert to state-led approaches to upgrading local competencies. Meanwhile, environmental concerns and resource scarcity are increasingly constraining growth and exacerbating inter-state tensions. This roundtable will bring together five specialists on East Asia and the Asia-Pacific whose expertise spans international political economy, environmental, security and governance issues. It will be particularly concerned with the nexus between political economy and interstate security. But it will also explore the impact that the trend towards “friend-shoring” is having on relations between the state and business in East Asian countries. The roundtable will interest not only specialists on the Asia-Pacific but will also afford an excellent opportunity for postgraduate students to gain insights into the rapidly evolving political economy of this significant region.

The Ideological Turn in International Studies (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott **Panel Abstract:** Traditionally, International Relations scholars have accorded ideology a marginal role in world politics. Recently, however, a slew of scholars have mounted the argument that ideology exerts much more influence on the behaviour of states, the character of international norms and institutions, and the existence, reach and agenda of transnational organizations and movements, than traditionally thought. These scholars charge that the neglect of ideology has left IR with a profound blindness to many of the key driving forces and transformations in world politics, undermining efforts to address the world's current and future challenges. This panel will present and discuss five examples of such scholarship, that analyse ideology's international role through diverse approaches and across a range of different global challenges in world politics. **Chair:** Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London) **Papers** 1. **Katherine Mann (University of Cambridge), 'Beyond 'Us' and 'Them': The Interaction of Ideology and Social Hierarchy in Shaping Violent Practices'** - A growing body of conflict scholarship examines the mechanisms through which armed group ideology influences combatant perceptions of social in-groups and out-groups and, in turn, their violent behavior. These studies elucidate why certain groups are subject to violence and not others, yet they often take for granted the characteristics of violence itself. Why, in some cases, do armed groups target different out-groups with divergent patterns of violence or with more extreme forms of violence than others? And why are certain people within out-groups, such as women, subject to unique violence? This article highlights that social relationships are far more complex than simply demarcating ‘us’ and ‘them,’ emphasizing that hierarchies also exist within these in- and out-groups. Ideology may influence how combatants collectively understand these hierarchies and, as a result, impact what forms of violence are considered ‘appropriate’ against sub-communities within out-groups. Adopting a relational understanding of violence allows us to recognize how particular forms of violence take on different (and often intersectional) ideological and normative frames, depending on whom they target. I substantiate these claims with evidence from two armed groups that have engaged in conflict-related sexual violence: the FARC in Colombia and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. 2. **Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London), 'Ideological Infrastructures in World Politics'** - Debates over the role of ideologies in world politics – in, for example, guiding foreign policy, legitimating regimes, generating or undermining norms, provoking state and non-state violence, or stabilising international organizations – depend on assumptions about how ideology might influence political outcomes. International Relations theorists must work with at least a tacit account of the ‘power of ideology’ – the causal mechanisms or constitutive relationships through which ideology could be relevant. Yet no such account of ideology’s power has been systematically and effectively articulated in IR scholarship. Three broad tacit accounts do exist – focused on ideological belief, on the instrumental use of ideology as a political tool, or on ideology as manifested in discourse – but all suffer from important explanatory paradoxes and confusions. I proceed to offer a more effective account which presents ideologies as a kind of cultural ‘infrastructure’ that sustains, shapes and sometimes transforms patterns of collective political action through multiple interacting causal mechanisms. I draw on empirical research from political science, political psychology, political theory, sociology and history, as well as insights from social theory and complexity theory, and apply my account to key changes in world politics, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the restructuring of the liberal world order in the late 20th Century, the growth of religious and far-right terrorism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With a proper theory of ideological infrastructures, I argue, we are able to capture the importance of ideology in world politics, without presenting it as simply overriding or displacing rational power-politics and self-interested cooperation. 3. **Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh), 'Not Right Now? The Delayed Effects of Brexit on Foreign Policy'** - The 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom ushered in a period of political chaos, culminating in the collapse of Theresa May’s government and the rise of the pro-Brexit faction within the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson. Despite early indications that foreign and security policy would be an important area of stability post-Brexit, the Johnson government oversaw efforts to shift Britain’s international role in important ways, including in overseas development aid, the strategic relationship with the EU, in the signing of new trade and security agreements, and in changes to the UK’s force posture. None of these changes were inherent in the Brexit agenda, but may rather be traced back to the ideological concerns of the Johnson government – especially its preoccupation with sovereignty – and to the significant domestic changes which occurred during the course of the EU-UK withdrawal negotiations. Drawing on over 20 interviews with policymakers and senior think-tank officials, this paper demonstrates the impact the growth of conservative ideology has had on UK foreign policy since the 2016 vote. In doing so, it contributes to our understanding of the link between party ideology and foreign policy and the conditions under which party positions ‘matter’ for external policies. 4. **Fiona B. Adamson and Rochana Bajpai (SOAS), 'Varieties of Nationalism in Decolonial Thought: Algeria and India Compared'** - Situated within the decolonial turn in IR and Political Theory, this paper undertakes a critical examination and comparison of nationalist thought in the Algerian and Indian anti-colonial movements. The paper examines internal debates between liberal imperial, religio-nationalist and radical strands of anti-colonial thinking, tracing their connection to both metropolitan, but also broader global circuits of religious and political transnationalism. By placing figures and movements – such as Abd-el-Kadar, Messali Hadj, Ferhat Abbas and Frantz Fanon in the case of Algeria, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in the case of India -- into dialogue and situating them in the broader political context of global ideological contestation, the paper seeks to unpack notions of decoloniality and anti-colonial nationalism, pointing to ways forward for the development of a richer understanding and more plural conceptualisation of decolonial thought. 5. **David Lewis (University of Exeter), 'The Role of Ideology in Russian Foreign Policy'** - Many scholars have been sceptical of the role of ideology in post-Soviet Russian foreign policy, viewing Russia's leaders as driven either by ruthless realpolitik or by narrow personal material interests. Yet Russia's invasion of Ukraine appears to demonstrate the importance of ideational factors in shaping Russian foreign policy decision-making. In this paper I seek to conceptualise an emerging Russian ideology, based on fundamental tenets of radical conservative thought but as yet only loosely formulated as a coherent guide to political action. This set of ideas is based on underlying philosophical beliefs about the nature of political order and political change and the role of states and other actors in the international system. As such it offers an interpretative framework for understanding the past and the present, but it lacks a clear programme for the future with popular and universal appeal. Nevertheless, its overlap with thinking in other authoritarian regimes and right-wing populist movements suggests that it forms part of a global ideational trend that is not unique to the Russian experience. As such, it is unlikely that ‘Putinism’ will disappear with Putin - many of its core features will prove to be enduring in Russian political thought.

The politics of nature and landscapes in South East Europe I (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Landscape, nature, and resources are key features of South East European politics: Yugoslav socialism was based on modernist extraction of natural resources and many wars were fought in now protected landscapes. Today, land is a site of both resting places and agricultural reforms; forests and rivers are being turned into militarised borders; and human-nature relations are brought to the fore by environmental movements that contest the exploitation of natural resources under the guise of ‘green transition’. In close conversation with a second panel, this panel will examine the power in - and of - landscapes and environments as spaces of meaning. Whether as sites of memory and identity, or resource extraction and protest, the panel zones in on the varied political dimensions of human-nature relations.

Trade in/and political economy (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton A panel on the theory and practice of trade in/and political economy.

Contemporary Conflict: Challenges and Change (War Studies Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott Contemporary Conflict: Challenges and Change

Critical approaches to studying terrorism, counter terrorism and counter extremism in the Middle East (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton As we mark twenty years since the onset of the ‘War on Terror’, critical approaches to counter terrorism and extremism in the MENA region remain marginal. The well-established field of critical terrorism studies remains eurocentric in its empirical and theoretical focus, and Arab states are often cast as exceptional in their implementation of countering terrorism and extremism laws and policies. Yet, many Middle Eastern states are promulgating anti-terror laws and Countering/Preventing Violent Extremism (C/PVE) frameworks similar to those implemented by other states globally, whilst international donor funding is being increasingly channelled to civil society organisations in the Middle East in order to implement such programmes. This panel brings together a multi-disciplinary range of scholars in order to explore new approaches to studying terrorism and extremism in the context of the Middle East and North Africa. Following Edward Said’s concerns around the discursive and material production of an essential ‘Middle East’, we ask whether and how it is possible to study terrorism in the Arab world without reproducing stereotypes of ‘the terrorist’. We ask to what extent is it possible to ‘decolonize’ and ‘gender’ scholarship on terrorism and counter-terrorism through the use of decolonial and feminist approaches and what are the theoretical and ethical issues involved in such a move? Furthermore, and taking specific issue with the recent development of ‘soft’ C/PVE approaches, we ask about the role played by local actors in the production of such frameworks, and whether they end up reproducing the same epistemological, methodological and normative problems associated with ‘terrorism’.

Digital technology, social media and its politics (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton This panel focuses on technology, social media, and the digital society including questions relating to Russia's censorship, social media and mass surveillance, the Ukraine's engagement in reshaping digital society, as well as highlighting the impact of hate speech and racism in the digital space.

Gendered narratives in counter terrorism (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel brings together papers that highlight what a gender lens can bring to key areas of research in critical terrorism studies. Papers ask about what gendered structures underpin the violence of both state and non state security.

Global Perspectives on the Ethics of War, Violence and International Law (Ethics and World Politics Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton This panel addresses the ethics of war, violence and international law, from various theoretical, geographical and empirical perspectives. It offers competing worldviews on matters related to: the responsibility to protect, the just war tradition and international law.

Identity (re-)formation in and about Ukraine (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton This panel focuses on the processes of identity formation in and about Ukraine.

Methodological approaches to researching race and gender logics in the British Army (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton This panel brings together scholars who apply feminist, gendered and critical race theories and a range of methodological approaches to explore issues around access, proximity and distance when conducting research with the British Army.

New directions in the study of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) and peace building processes: Global and local level evidence (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton **New directions in the study of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) and peacebuilding processes: Global and local level evidence** Since the 1990s, the international community has invested heavily in disarmament programs which are seen as an integral part of interventions aimed at building peace in post-accord countries. However, scholars and policymakers know little about how the various disarmament programs differ from one another in their design and impact. The articles in this panel address this gap by applying a range of methodologies at different levels of analysis, such as: a large-N quantitative study; a medium-N comparative study, qualitative case studies, and a theoretical paper. All papers apply a strong gender focus. The papers of this panel systematically study post-accord disarmament across space and time, enabling us to identify conditions under which disarmament was and was not able to prevent conflict recurrence. The panel will provide critical input to stakeholders in disarmament by providing empirically sound policy recommendations on disarmament design.

Popular culture, world politics and pedagogy roundtable (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Our understanding of the multidimensional challenges set out in Our Common Agenda requires an engagement with popular culture. Popular culture matters to world politics; to how we experience, understand, and know the international. It can help us to understand complex global challenges from multiscalar and multigenerational perspectives. International Studies programmes increasingly recognise this as popular culture becomes present in our curricula, from being used to work through tricky concepts in seminars to appearing in full modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level. This roundtable brings together people who use popular culture in their teaching or who teach world politics and popular culture to ask questions about their experiences in the classroom, in course design and in their own departments to understand what pedagogic opportunities popular culture offers international studies. Participants also draw on their pedagogic research on popular culture in international studies to consider new and innovative ways pop culture can be used in teaching.

Regulatory Disorder and International Trade in an Era of Pandemic, War, Populism, and Climate Collapse (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott The postwar liberal order predicated on human rights, open markets, and liberal democracy is being dismantled from the inside. The structural realignment of voting blocks in leading states has given rise to a populist threat to regulatory transparency and trade policy coherence. In this new regulatory disorder, tech start-ups promise new opportunities for the intensification of trade in services. But even as services trade flourishes, multilateral regulation has come under threat in a range of policy domains, from the digital economy to intellectual property rights, and the organization of dispute adjudication. Finally, the invasion of Russia has provoked an economic response in Europe and North America that has replaced GATT circumspection about national security with an emerging system of security-first trade policy goals. Professors Silke Trommer and Erin Hannah discuss the significance of equity and inclusion at the WTO at a time when leading states are rebalancing cooperation and national security priorities. Professor Tyler Girard maintains that technology continues to facilitate globalization even as leading states work to unwind the previous decades of integration. Professor James Scott speaks to the intensification of systemic inequities, arguing that rising powers will play a more important role in the creation of the next order for trade than they did at the GATT. Professor Froese argues that the future of trade regulation will be one of more law and less order, as regional governance replaces multilateral priorities for the US, the EU, and China. Professor Gabriel Siles-Brugge will chair the proceedings.

Reparations after mass violence and repression – an instrument for a better future? (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott Reparations are one of the main pillars of transitional justice, with the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation guaranteeing victims’ right to ‘adequate, effective and prompt reparation for harm suffered’ (art. VII b). In fact, besides truth and accountability, reparations are amongst victims first demands in the aftermath of violence. The general assumption is that reparations are an instrument for a better future for both victims and societies affected by violence. Reparations should contribute to reconciliation and compensate survivors for past suffering. Despite the importance of reparations for victims and survivors and the enshrinement of the right to reparations in international law, the realisation of reparation programs has faced serious limitations and a gap between claims and decisions for reparations and their actual implementation. At the same time, questions around who can receive reparations as well as the topic of victimhood more generally remain highly politicised in many post-conflict contexts and impact the non/implementation of reparations, a factor that has not sufficiently been explored to date. The panel investigates the topic of reparations as a potential instrument for a better future and the outlined gaps from different angles, bringing together insights from a variety of case studies in transitional societies. By exploring the entanglement of reparations with other dimensions of transitional justice such as accountability or truth-finding as well as analysing the role of different conflict types and political framework conditions, the panel aims to further our understanding of the factors that determine reparation politics and their outcome. At the same time, the panel also draws attention to the way survivors themselves impact the transitional justice process, mobilising around own transitional agendas and acting as political collective actors in their own right.

Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities Through Embodiment: Non-Human Bodies of War (Panel 2) (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton While most understandings of war focus on the human, ‘war’ as a structure both disrupts the world in its corporeal being and further redefines how we understand the world and make it significant in our lives. Both material objects and technological systems underpin our understandings of ‘human’, ‘world’, and ‘society’ today, and all are remade through the practice of conflict and violence. As such, we need to explore how artifacts, objects, images, and technology are vital aspects of societies and how they impact conflict, conflict resolution, and attempts to (re)build social cohesion. In this second panel, we aim to reconfigure the earlier discussion of ‘human’ bodies of war to focus on its non-human elements, so as to highlight how embodiment is not solely anthropocentric but rather our human embodiment requires our entanglement within material and virtual surroundings. Our production as humans is fundamentally reliant on the non-human, and the agency of the systems in which we find ourselves imbricated. Understanding the agency of these systems and positioning them as actors is something which is regularly overlooked by researchers, in both their focus and practice. As such, this panel explores the non-human from a variety of perspectives, focussing on how different forms of space, sensation, and sensibility are produced. Engaging with the natural world, technology systems, weapons, statues, and infrastructural rhythms, we will illustrate how our surroundings produce a variety of embodied experiences which both are necessary for our humanity, but also transcend the human as the subject of analysis. **Thematic Introduction to the Panel Series:** As Elaine Scarry famously argued, the primary mechanism of war is bodily violence. Our bodies themselves are integral in how we create typologies of violence, from 'war' to 'protest' to 'terrorism'. The effects of conflict go beyond the immediate violation of bodies, which post-violence continues to be politically productive within affective and materialist economies operating in radically restructured social spheres. These panels explore possibilities for rethinking war and conflict by considering the ways in which they are embodied experiences. Firstly, they consider how individual experiences of being embodied in and post-conflict relates to social identity, and how embodiment and identity are unstable and change over time. Secondly, the panels reflect on the social characteristics and production of bodies in relation to traumatic experiences. Thirdly, while human bodies are central to the practice of war, they exist within constellations of non-human bodies which play a significant role in producing understanding of conflict and society.

The Future of UK Foreign Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott The Future of UK Foreign Policy

The Politics of Diaspora (Orphan Papers track) Room: Lochay, Hilton The Politics of Diaspora

The challenge and promises of ‘silence’ in global politics (BISA) Room: Almond, Hilton Silence and silencing have been of concern to scholars of international relations for at least three decades. Early works parsed the ways in which silencing is constitutive of epistemic, structural and institutional domination, while the latest literature has discussed the productive and resistive functions of silence and focused on communicative silences. Particularly, scholars examine how these silences manifest, what they ‘do’ in different communicative contexts and how they relate to existing power relations. This panels brings together scholars at the cutting edge of these developments. On the one hand, panellists engage with the ways in which the elision of silence in the global digital sphere has fostered miscommunication and apathy, while silence as ‘patiency’ may allow for better communication. On the other hand, panellists engage and with and theorise the silencing of atrocities and its productive functions, examining how governments and other actors keep their silence in relation to humanitarian catastrophes that they witness or perpetuate, and what factors enable this. Consequently, the papers brought together in this panel demonstrate the centrality of silence for understanding global politics and particularly its implication in, how it functions to constitute barriers to the implementation of the UN General Secretary’s agenda and its possible contribution to addressing challenges which necessitate effective communication and democratic participation.

Third Nuclear Age (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott Panel examining whether the world is moving into a new and potentially more dangerous Third Nuclear Age.

Transnational Ideas and Identities (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton What are the roles of transnational ideas and identities in contemporary politics? In this panel we examine the trajectory of Islamist ideas within political parties and through organic intellectuals. We look at the mobilisation of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe, and South Asian social imaginaries during the Cold War.

Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group business meeting Room: Spey, Hilton

European Security Working Group AGM Room: Carron, Hilton

Global Nuclear Order Working Group AGM Room: Don, Hilton

International Law and Politics Working Group meeting Room: Endrick, Hilton

Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group AGM Room: Almond, Hilton

LUNCH AND ROUNDTABLE - Towards a Feminist Foreign policy in Scotland: Pitfalls, Promises and Lessons Learned. SPONSORED BY THE SCOTTISH COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS (SCGA) in collaboration with The School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Separate registration is essential for this event: https://www.https://www.bisa.ac.uk/events/towards-feminist-foreign-policy-scotland-pitfalls-promises-and-lessons-learned

• Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh)
• Cherry Miller (University of Glasgow)
• Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
• Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
• Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow)
• Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Room: Morblas, Hilton This roundtable brings academic experts together to reflect upon the formation of the Scottish government’s Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP). Participants will reflect on the formulation of Scotland’s policy, lessons learned from other states’ experiences regarding the promises and difficulties in forming and enacting FFP, the effects of anti-feminist backlash and the conundrum of developing equitable cooperation with partner states in the Global South. This event is supported by a Scottish Council on Global Affairs Engagement Award. Chair: Dr Sophia Dingli and Dr Malte Riemann

Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group AGM Room: Clyde, Hilton

Building Trust In An Uncertain World: From Individuals to Institutions, States to Societies (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton Description of the panel In accordance with the Secretary-General’s 12 key proposals, this panel aims to explore how “building trust” can help “promote peace and prevent conflicts” in various contexts. First, dealing with the crisis of the liberal world order, US-Russia, Israeli-Palestinian, Inter-Korea relations and UN, this panel investigates how trust can be built and be an important factor in managing these crises. In order to do this, the papers in this panel will conceptually and theoretically disentangle trust from legitimacy, confidence, and hope, so that we can scrutinise various phenomena which hinder us from overcoming challenges in international relations, such as uncertainty or hypocrisy. In addition, as this panel includes five papers ranging from trust in the liberal world order and international organisation to individuals and communication devices, it can provide a productive discussion on how studying micro-level phenomena can help us understand macro-level issues. Finally, scholars represented on this panel come from a range of career-stages and institutions inside and outside the UK, utilising different methodologies and case studies as well as differing conceptualisation of “trust” yet a shared interest in better understanding “trust” in international relations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract **State Leaders’ Different Responses Toward Uncertainty: Fear, Trust and Hope** Jiyoung Chang (PhD Student, Department of Political Science, University of Birmingham) : Rationalist IR theorists assume that under anarchy there is always a permanent state of fear and uncertainty. And many other scholars open up spaces for trust as a precondition for peace/cooperation rather than the unavoidable tragedy. However, the former president of South Korea and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Kim Dae-jung, said “we try all our best to keep peace on the Korean peninsula. It does not matter if the other side is good or evil. It is not because we trust them, but because we hope peace.” As we can see in this short phrase, trust and hope should be distinguished in terms of a precondition for cooperation/peace. In this sense, first, this paper conceptually disentangles hope from trust and argues that a state leader’s hope for peace should not be dismissed as a lack of vigilance or as “cheap talk”; rather, it can transform a conflict by initiating conciliatory gestures between adversary states, leading to increased cooperation. Second, borrowing concepts and theories from psychology studies, this paper investigates the conditions under which state leaders can experience hope. Based on these theoretical reviews, this paper finally explores the role of hope in the initiation and types of conciliatory gestures between two adversary states. **Trust and Negotiations: Evidence from the United Nations** Nicola Chelotti (Lecturer, Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance, Loughborough University (London campus) ) : What exactly does trust make possible in diplomatic negotiations, and what kind of trust is doing the work – trust between states, or trust between individual diplomats? The paper analyses the enabling power and the boundaries of trust in UN diplomatic negotiations. More specifically, we test the independent and interaction effects of interstate- and interpersonal-trust upon a number of negotiation activities, including information sharing and flexibility in the negotiating positions, using a vignette experiment we conduct with national diplomats based in their permanent missions to the United Nations in New York. This is part of a multi-year project aimed to study how trust develops and functions in the committees of the United Nations. **Hypocrisy and Trust in the Liberal World Order** Vincent Keating (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark) : The liberal world order is being increasingly challenged by illiberal powers who use claims of hypocrisy against Western states as a means to harm both the states themselves and the underlying values. At the same time, the nature of this harm is unclear in the existing literature, with some scholars suggesting that hypocrisy is fundamentally erosive of legitimacy, and others suggesting that it is erosive of trust. Through a comparative theoretical analysis of legitimacy and trust via this problem of hypocrisy, this paper demonstrates why trust is the more important factor, and what this means to the continued sustenance of the liberal world order in the face of these persistent challenges. **Users' trust in the Moscow-Washington hotline** Eszter Simon (Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham Trent University) Agnes Simon (Educational Developer, Centre for Scholarship and Teaching, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia) : The Moscow-Washington hotline has been a crisis communication device that has linked US presidents and Soviet (now Russian) leaders. Simon and Simon (2020) has argued that the hotline is a trust-based device. In this paper, we argue that the hotline can only fulfil its trust function in crisis communication if actors believe that they can trust the device itself. After elaborating on our theoretical angle about the difference between trust and confidence, we discuss (1) what efforts were made to make the hotline a trustworthy institution, (2) what lapses in its reliability happened over the years and (3) what additional efforts were made to improve it. We define trustworthiness in terms of the hotline’s (a) technical reliability, i.e., ability to transmit between leaders, including the security of encryption and the transferring of messages quickly to decision-makers, (b) speed and accuracy of the translation of message texts, (c) exclusive use by Soviet and American leaders, (d) message ownership, including drafting, by Soviet and American leaders, and the (e) maintenance of secrecy of hotline messages. **Below the State Leader: Boundary Spanners and The Development of Trust Between Conflict Parties** David Wilcox (PhD Student, Department of Political Science, University of Birmingham) : Within current International Relations (IR) trust literature, the focus for examining interpersonal trust has been on state leader relationships or how interpersonal trust at the state leader-level can develop into inter-societal or institutional trust. Yet below-state leader level actors like ministers, diplomats, negotiators and even well-connected individuals are more than capable of developing relationships of interpersonal trust which they can use to influence the relationships between states, organisations and state leaders. I argue that these below state leader level actors can be recognised and examined by conceptualising them as boundary-spanners. Boundary-spanners are actors who operate along the boundary between a bounded unit and its external environment. I argue this allows for considering interpersonal trust between actors other than the state leaders and how this can impact other relations between states and/or organisations. I apply this concept to a single case study of Dr. Yair Hirschfeld’s activities in 1988-1993 which were crucial for the establishment of Oslo Channel between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation and without who the Channel would not have developed.

Carceral Spaces: Logics, Histories, and Resistance (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Scholarship on different forms of carceral spaces, such as prisons and immigration detention centres, is often siloed in different disciplines. In this panel, we bring together scholars investigating these different forms of carceral spaces on land as well as at sea. What can we learn about the logics, narratives, materialities and histories behind different forms of incarceration? How do different carceral spaces connect and converge within and beyond international borders? And what does resistance to different carceral practices look like? In bringing together a diverse group of scholars, the panel is interested in how our analyses shift by being in conversation with scholars studying other forms of incarceration.

Constructing and managing ‘securitization’ (Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism) Room: Ledmore, Hilton Securitization as threat formation and management process is utilized for different reasons by diverging actors across space. The panel looks at visual configurations of power and political construction of sight and practices; how to make use of cultural knowledge in strategy to counter an insurgency; how and why securitization of ethnic minorities, as well as animal rights and environmental groups and organizations in different cultural contexts are constructed; how the securitization as a process and policy could be better understood.

Ecological Futures (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton Compilation Panel

Global order and disorder (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott A panel on world systems, order, and disorder.

Imagining the future of International Politics (Review of International Studies) Room: Don, Hilton Imagining the future of International Politics

International institutions and regimes: making and unmaking international law (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott International institutions and regimes: making and unmaking international law

Memory, Emotion, and Praxis: the (re)construction of ontological security in global politics (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott The papers on this panel investigate the ways that states, groups, and/or individuals grapple with crises that produce ontological insecurity, the social processes that repair identity-ruptures and rehabilitate ontological security, and the memorializations that preserve the memory and examine the scars of insecurity. These are all constructive social processes that occur intentionally and inadvertently, but serve vital roles in observing, examining, and celebrating survival in face of crises. These papers cover a variety of social contexts and cases by which ontological insecurity has been addressed and overcome by way of memory, emotion, and praxis.

New dynamics of cooperation and interaction in Central Asia (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton The panel explores new patterns of cooperation and interaction in Central Asia.

Public discourse on terrorism and security practices (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This panel investigates the public discourse on terrorism and security practices

Recurring Global Crises and the Necessity of Feminist Political Economy (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton Foregrounding Feminist International Political Economy perspectives - in particular work that uses the framework of social reproduction - this panel examines how contemporary crises (ecological, energy, housing, financial, cost of living etc.) are experienced and negotiated in everyday gendered practices, how they challenge us to rethink how and what we study as feminist political economists, and what they mean for feminist praxis. In engaging with work on ‘crisis’ we recognise that crises may stem from specific ‘catastrophic events’ (war, pandemics, economic collapse, disasters), as well as the impact of slow structural inequalities including environmental degradation, depletion through social reproduction, and lasting racialized discrimination and disadvantage that are the continuing legacies of colonialism. Gendered experiences of crises are shaped by these historical/overlapping structural inequalities, as are the struggles and negotiations for survival and transformation. The panel seeks to (a) understand crises in relation to everyday gendered political economies, including everyday practices of care, caring, and carelessness; (b) document and reflect on how periods of crisis and conflict shape what kind of feminist research can and should be conducted; and (c) explore what this means for feminist praxis.

Russia's Offensive War Against Ukraine (War Studies Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott Building on the 2022 BISA War Studies Roundtable on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, our 2023 session on 'Russia's Offensive War Against Ukraine' will analyse the developments that have taken place during the armed conflict over the last 12-months.

Security, Strategy, and Statecraft Beyond Metropoles (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton Security, Strategy, and Statecraft Beyond Metropoles

Space Resources: A Non-Extractivist Future? (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton Space resources must be a key focus of any Summit of the Future. The coming ‘scramble’ for lunar resources raises urgent questions for the future of the governance of the global commons (connected to similar questions in Antarctica and the deep seabed). Additionally, if, as space advocates argue, space resources represent a bonanza that will provide for a glorious human future, then it is vital to give thought to how the interests of those future generations can be or will be incorporated into the space resource governance regime. It is also necessary to consider the structural inequalities in the international system, the likelihood that the benefits of space resources will not be enjoyed by ‘humanity’, and appropriateness of viewing space resources as solution to resource ‘scarcity’. Further, as has been seen time and time again, an understanding of resources as limited often gives rise to conflict and space may prove to be no different. Space resources matter beyond consideration of the consequences for space. Space resource governance raises, and touches upon, many of the issues facing the world more broadly – namely the appropriate and sustainable use of resources in the face of an ecological catastrophe. This multidisciplinary panel of space governance and ethics scholars will discuss some of the aspects of space resource governance and the implications for broader global governance that are vital for any Summit of the Future.

The politics of nature and landscapes in South East Europe II (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott Landscape, nature, and resources are key features of South East European politics: Yugoslav socialism was based on modernist extraction of natural resources and many wars were fought in now protected landscapes. Today, land is a site of both resting places and agricultural reforms; forests and rivers are being turned into militarised borders; and human-nature relations are brought to the fore by environmental movements that contest the exploitation of natural resources under the guise of 'green transition' In close conversation with a the first panel, this panel will examine the power in - and of - landscapes and environments as spaces of meaning. Whether as sites of memory and identity, or resource extraction and protest, the panel zones in on the varied political dimensions of human-nature relations.

Towards a Feminist Foreign policy in Scotland: Pitfalls, Promises and Lessons Learned. SPONSORED BY THE SCOTTISH COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS (SCGA) in collaboration with The School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow.

• Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• Annika Bergman Rosamond (Lund University)
• Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
• Cherry Miller (University of Glasgow)
• Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
• Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh)
• Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow)

Room: Tay, Hilton Towards a Feminist Foreign policy in Scotland: Pitfalls, Promises and Lessons Learned. SPONSORED BY THE SCOTTISH COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS (SCGA) in collaboration with The School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow.

Applied Challenges in peacekeeping operations (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton This panel explores various operational issues in peacekeeping, including civilian protection, ceasefire monitoring, spoilers, and contributions

China in World Politics (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott China in World Politics

Colonising the Future (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton The promises of the future – of progress, development and hope – have been powerful dimensions of modern politics, and perhaps most acutely in the context of colonial and post-colonial politics. It is well-understood that civilisational hierarchies were in recent centuries expressed temporally in the North Atlantic – that civilisations were at different stages of development and potentially progressing towards the state of the European vanguard. Such a widespread idea was a powerful ideology in the maintenance and spread of colonial rule. It is with this history and awareness that this panel explores what international studies can contribute to a summit of the future today, through understanding contemporary futurity in its colonial and post-colonial contexts. United by this theme and focus of inquiry, the papers address a range of different topics located in different geographical areas – urban development in India, the politics of cyberspace in Africa, peace processes in Colombia and structures of indebtedness in the Global South. Together they explore how conceptions of the future and of progress impact the political horizons of the (post)colonial present.

Emotions, foreign policy and diplomacy (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton Emotions, foreign policy and diplomacy

Feminism, gender and nuclear weapons: contemporary debates and new avenues for research (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel examines the current state of research on gender, feminism, and nuclear weapons. Feminist literature offers a range of approaches that can be used to rethink and reshape global nuclear politics. The panel looks at how feminist thought has been applied to nuclear field, assesses the policy implications of existing feminist perspectives and highlights directions for future research on feminism, gender and nuclear weapons. Papers are going to provide answers for three guiding questions: How has feminism been incorporated into scholarship on nuclear weapons? How has gender been used in nuclear policy debates and in scholarship on nuclear weapons? Which feminist traditions are missing in feminist perspectives on nuclear weapons?

Interdisciplinary research in Security Studies (European Journal of International Security) Room: Endrick, Hilton The panel offers an interdisciplinary approach to research and practice aimed at informing the 2024 Summit of the Future. It addresses questions including: What does the future of conflict look like? Which actors will be at the forefront of conflict and peace making? What can an International Studies approach tell us about the likelihood of success for these proposals? The panel seeks to identify gaps in the current research– for example, changing approaches to and methods of engaging in conflict – to better understand how we can address these challenges moving forward. By incorporating insights from fields including (but not limited to) ontological security studies, space defence policy, and counterextremism, the panel seeks to explain why multidisciplinary, collaborative analyses of these questions can offer more nuanced and proactive responses to facilitate positive exchange and debate in how we contemplate and critique these proposals moving forward.

NATO and European Security (European Security Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott This panel focuses on NATO's (renewed) role in European security including its role in the war in Ukraine, how this has triggered Sweden's membership application and the rethinking of cooperation within and through the Alliance.

Perspectives on Security (Force) Assistance: Principals, Agents, Continuity and Change (War Studies Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton Training other states’ security forces has been described as a means of power projection on the cheap. Recent analyses have variously characterised the practice as a form ‘vicarious’ or ‘remote’ warfare, in which the risks and costs of military activity are transferred from interventionist to local proxies and civilian populations. However, such descriptions concomitantly threaten to obscure the independent political agency of recipient security forces during international training missions, and with it, the complicated principal-agent relationships that frequently shape the dynamics of training, control, effectiveness, and intervention. This panel charts the principal-agent politics of security (force) assistance through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, contextualising recent trends in the provision of military and intelligence aid.

Refugees and (In)Security: Learning from Scottish ‘Exceptionalism’? Successes, Failures and Opportunities (BISA) Room: Lochay, Hilton Refugees and (In)Security: Learning from Scottish ‘Exceptionalism’? Successes, Failures and Opportunities

Remembering Andrew Linklater

• Andre Saramago (Universidade de Coimbra)
• Danielle Young (University of Leeds)
• Vassilios Paipais (University of St Andrews)
• Chris Brown (LSE)
• Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
• Vivienne Jabri (King's College London)
• Mustapha Kamal Pasha (Aberystwyth University)
• Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews)

Room: Tay / Tweed, Hilton This roundtable offers reflections on the life and work of Professor Andrew Linklater, who sadly passed away in March of this year. A trailblazer in the discipline of International Relations, Linklater’s exceptional scholarship shaped IR in both recognisable and subtle ways. His writings meld diverse disciplines, including Philosophy, International Relations, Politics, Sociology and History. A prolific thinker, Linklater’s most important works include Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations; The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era; The Problem of Harm in World Politics; and The Idea of Civilization and the Making of the Global Order. Linklater was not only a brilliant scholar but an inspirational teacher for scores of students across continents. An outstanding mentor, his kindness and generosity were legendary. This roundtable is a small tribute to the late Andrew Linklater.

Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities through Embodiment: Bodies of Resistance (Panel 3) (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton While ‘war’ is constructed as a battle of like powers, and ‘terrorism’ is constructed as radical violence, resistance and occupation require a different understanding of violence. Resistance in particular produces differently performing and embodying bodies which materialise in diverse and competing ways. We aim to call attention to the many ways in which resistance fights are embodied in societies which are characterised by brutal police and military action as well as longer-term structures of oppression. People and groups involved in resistance have to embody the contradictions between being a whole human body and not being a human, between the violence of freedom and the violence of oppression, and between individual and group. The bodies of resistance members are vital in welding these contradictions and tensions into an understandable, relatable, and affective representation which can function both at a discursive and material level. In this third panel, we aim to explore different types of practice relating to resistance and occupation, to highlight how bodies are produced and mobilised in specific ways both by oppressors and oppressed. Calling attention to the aims of the struggle, we address conflicts in Timor-Leste, Chile, Colombia, Congo, and Ireland, to examine embodied practices and the relation between bodies, representations, narratives, and resistance. **Thematic Introduction to the Panel Series:** As Elaine Scarry famously argued, the primary mechanism of war is bodily violence. Our bodies themselves are integral in how we create typologies of violence, from 'war' to 'protest' to 'terrorism'. The effects of conflict go beyond the immediate violation of bodies, which post-violence continues to be politically productive within affective and materialist economies operating in radically restructured social spheres. These panels explore possibilities for rethinking war and conflict by considering the ways in which they are embodied experiences. Firstly, they consider how individual experiences of being embodied in and post-conflict relates to social identity, and how embodiment and identity are unstable and change over time. Secondly, the panels reflect on the social characteristics and production of bodies in relation to traumatic experiences. Thirdly, while human bodies are central to the practice of war, they exist within constellations of non-human bodies which play a significant role in producing understanding of conflict and society.

Technicity in International Relations (International Relations as a Social Science Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott Social sciences started with the will to achieve the same level of precisions in results as hard sciences. As a result, social sciences have engaged into a prolific debate about research methods, how to conduct research, while in parallel, research tools have become more and more sophisticated. These trends impact how we do research and the relations between theory and practices; how we understand IR; how we reflect upon and engage with previous researches; and how we conceive decision-making. This panel offers to discuss these issues.

The War in Ukraine and International Law: Challenges, Contestation and Future Prospects (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott This roundtable is a joint initiative by the International Law and Politics and Russia and Eurasian Security Working Groups. It joins scholars with regional expertise with experts in international law and politics, human rights and international humanitarian law to address the question of what is at stake for the future of international law, the regulation and conduct of armed conflict and the international justice and human rights regimes. The war in Ukraine has led to enormous suffering and loss of life and on the one hand could be argued to illustrate the weakness of international law – the invasion itself was a clear violation of the law prohibiting the use of force, civilians and civilian targets appear to have been deliberately targeted and Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory was unlawful. Meanwhile, accusations of war crimes and even genocide have been made by both sides. As we approach the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and consider a new Common Agenda, what role can international law and international institutions such as the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice play in addressing the challenges of promoting peace and ending conflicts, ensuring justice and establishing an international social contract rooted in human rights?

The political economy of financial governance (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott A panel on the political economy of finance, banking, and governance.

The pursuit of justice and fairness in climate change and environment agendas. (Environment Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton The pursuit justice and fairness in climate change has been one of the key lobbying messages of non-government organization, developing countries and small island states in its climate change campaigns. Various provisions in international law supports the call for climate justice but there are still a couple of topics that are discussed less such as the concept of animal rights, the right of everyone to have a clean environment, and the denormalization of the natural disasters. This panel covers five topics relating most of the topics of justice and fairness in achieving climate objectives. The first one talks about the proposal to create a global court for climate change and climate justice that could play a key role in the international community’s response to the climate crisis. The second talks about the political and legal basis for having a healthy environment. The third panel explores the representation and normalisation of island’s disappearance in political statements and newspapers across the globe. Fourth one talks about and management reform using feminist and decolonial scholarship. Last paper in this paper argues on the importance of including animal rights and animal welfare as part of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. By discussing the concepts of fairness and justice and climate change, this panel aims to further amplify the voice that are mostly affected by climate change. This includes people from the developing countries, vulnerable states, and even non-human beings that rely on the nature of living.

What's so Great Power about International Competition? (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott Five years ago, few policy analysts — and fewer international-relations scholars — spoke of “great-power competition.” But by 2019, as one journalist put it, "great-power competition" was being “invoked from Aspen to Israel to South Korea, and by U.S. officials making the case for all sorts of policies.” Its ubiquity is even more remarkable given that no one seems to know what the term means. Debates about “great-power competition” tend to pivot on the nature of “competition.” Instead, this roundtable focuses on the “great power” part of the equation. Participants closely examine — and generally challenge — three common assumptions of the “GPC” literature: First, that states are “great powers” to the extent that they possess certain attributes, such as power-projection capability, significant instruments of economic power, or international recognition. Second, that middle-tier and weaker powers play a secondary role in a “competitive” international system. Third, that "great powers," however we define them, display distinct behavioral patterns from other states.

Challenges and contestation of environmental agendas (Environment Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton Major environmental challenges require not only successful negotiation of solutions, but especially an effective implementation across the local, sub-national and national levels of governance. However, this is often highly contested by various groups affected, especially if local communities in the global south are negatively impacted. This panel explores deeper insights into contestation of water governance especially with regards to borders and security aspects and the role art can play to achieve objectives. It also discusses how actors use framing and other techniques to advance implementation that meets their interests such as the use of environmental goals as a neutral vehicle for negotiations in the United Kingdom's contested territories and China's conception of a green world order.

Citizenship: A Barrier to Rights and Inclusion? (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton This panel critically examines the extent to which citizenship, as it is currently constructed, offers an effective remedy to statelessness and exclusion. Commitment 4 of the Our Common Agenda Report (United Nations, 2021), to ‘abide by international law and ensure justice’, includes a specific focus on ‘legal identity for all, (an) end to statelessness and protection of internally displaced persons, refugees and migrants’. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has highlighted the potential limitations of allocating citizenship status as a measure to alleviate the vulnerabilities and harms experienced by stateless people and those excluded through irregular status. This literature suggests that, far from being anomalies, such exclusions are an enduring feature of citizenship regimes globally. This panel examines the challenges presented by citizenship as a means through which to pursue the aims of Commitment 4, and explores alternative ways of theorising – and practising – remedies against exclusion from legal status.

Contestations of (regional) hegemony (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel explores how different actors - great powers and small states - challenge the existing hegemonies.

European Security beyond its borders (European Security Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton This panel looks Europe's capabilities in maintaining peace and security in Europe and outside its own borders, such as the EU's crisis management activities and capabilities, Europe's transatlantic relations with the US and its normative power.

Everyday affects of international politics (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton Everyday affects of international politics

Feminist Silences in International Conflict: Of What Do We Speak and to Whom? (BISA) Room: Waverley, Marriott xxxxxx

Feminist and environmental world politics: challenges, opportunities and inconsistencies (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton Gender and climate justice have become key norms in world politics with an increasing number of actors, including states, international institutions and civil society, pushing for a more radical politics that takes account of such normative shifts. For example, a number of countries recently have adopted feminist platforms for their foreign policy conduct as well as their international security engagements, while others have become known for their climate activism and push for environmental sustainability. The enactment of climate justice and feminist values, broadly defined, offers many opportunities to transform the power relations and gendered dynamics of world politics. Yet, world politics is a complex space where a range of ideas co-exist and compete, at times, disabling systemic transformative change from taking place – there are many gendered silences in global environmental politics, not least women’s climate (in)security. Meanwhile, a range of (neo)liberal ideas tend to prevail within the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and individual states’ efforts to conduct feminist foreign policies. This panel identifies such inconsistencies with emphasis on climate change the WPS agenda and FFP and doing so across a range of national and international contexts, though all with an ambition to identify the gendered logics of some of the most pressing issues in contemporary world politics.

Governmentality and Space (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This panel explores critical themes on governmentality and space.

Innovating Feminist Theory and Practice within the Middle East (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott This panel offers insights into feminist and queer perspectives on gendered struggles in the Middle East and North Africa. It does so through a range of important interventions on and innovative contributions to radical and feminist methodology, theory and research ethics procedures. Looking across Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq, the five speakers draw on a broad spectrum of contemporary case studies, investigating the gendered dynamics of intimate relationships, online spaces, transnational solidarities, conflict research and litigation processes. Challenging the boundaries between scholarship and activism, these papers fundamentally question the traditional dichotomies between researcher and the researched and, consequently, articulate a vision of future gender research that is grounded in critical and creative approaches and immanent ethics. In doing so, we open up understandings of ‘resistance’ to foreground as knowledge sources the experiences of both young women and ourselves as researchers.

Public lecture: War Studies Working Group Keynote - Professor Sir Hew Strachan 'Is the Nature of War Changing?' SPONSORED BY POLITY Room: QE2, Marriott Professor Sir Hew Strachan will give a lecture entitled 'Is the Nature of War Changing?'

Relocating Religion and Religious Commoning as Transnational Solidarities (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton Recent scholarship in International Studies and Peace Studies has engaged with critical conversations on secularism and secularity in grassroots solidarity as well as transnational movements, alongside the role of religion and religious plurality. There is a renewed need in light of the UN Secretary General’s call to ‘promote peace and prevent conflicts’ and ‘a renewed social contract anchored in human rights’ to consider religion as a perdurant presence in diverse sociocultural environments, and their contextual role as practice and reform in the Global South. Furthermore, building upon the Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Working Group's call for examining radical futurities and commoning, this panel consolidates scholars who study the possibility for alternative imaginations and critical fabulations of the future, relying upon the immense cultural memory of religious communities in diverse world regions. Engaging with such notions with their ontological and epistemological pluralities, scholars are further faced with a need to document, rethink, and reimagine solidarity as a culturally rooted concept, one that develops and shifts *alongside* and *as* religion. In this panel chaired by **Nicola Pratt**, scholars attempt to (re)locate religion in the creation and building of (trans)national solidarities, of intra- and inter-faith anti-colonial connectivities (Gani, 2022) that transcend national boundaries and work toward common goals of abolition, liberation, agency, and peace. **Mandeep Sidhu** explores abolition as a politico-Spiritual Sikhi praxis, engaging with the Sikhi triptych of degh tegh fateh. **Sarah Gharib Seif** critiques scholarly conceptualizations of agency in consideration of intersections of race, religion, and gender with women who join ISIS. **Misbah Hyder** reviews the potential for sabr (patience, perseverance) in the Ahmadiyya Muslim community as a mode of global peacebuilding. **Q Manivannan** considers (public) grief and grieving alongside religious and faith practices in protests as caregiving, reform, and peacebuilding in South Asia. With comments and discussion led by **Khushi Singh Rathore**, the panel aims to further ongoing discourse on religion, solidarity, and peace, with the potential to translate its learnings to proximate academic disciplines including anthropology, sociology, conflict studies, and international law.

Responsibility to Protect and Evolving State Practice (Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott This panel focuses on evolving state practice when it comes to the challenge of responding to mass atrocity crimes and attempting to hold those accountable for such violations. It draws together several case studies and examples, including the foreign policy approach of the UK, the international response to transnational justice efforts in the Central African Republic and the consequences of the Ukraine conflict for the future of state support for the R2P norm.

Security from the local to the global: Promoting peace, security and human rights (Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism) Room: Almond, Hilton This panel examines complex problems of security at the local and global levels. Papers consider how sustainable, long-term peace and security can be built; explore ethical concerns of post-conflict security building; problematise the way security is used to justify policy; and consider different actors and themes under the security umbrella.

Teaching and Learning Café (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott Teaching and Learning Café

Trade agreements and disagreements (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton A panel on trade agreements and trade disputes/disagreements.

Exhibitor Hall Room: Ballroom, Hilton

Politics of Wildfire - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events

• Lorenza Fontana

Room: Ballroom, Hilton

Pop culture & politics – student work display by Maha Rafi Atal & Rhys Crilley. Find out more at https://twitter.com/rhyscrilley/status/1670814542618583042?s=20 Room: Absolute Roasters coffee shop at Box Hub

Brexit and the (Geo)Political Imagination (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Brexit and the (Geo)Political Imagination

Climate Change, Net Zero and Future Military Operations (War Studies Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton The unfolding climate crisis affects a wide range of military concerns. Evidence is mounting that climate breakdown is threatening lives, disrupting food and water supplies, impacting health, impairing livelihoods, damaging homes, and displacing large numbers of people. Scholars and practitioners have warned repeatedly that this deepening crisis is exacerbating the risk of instability and violence. The direct impact of climate change on military preparedness and operations has also warranted attention, while more recently, there is a growing understanding that militaries cannot continue to burn vast amounts of fossil fuels if climate change and national net zero commitments are to be kept, and the worst-case security scenarios avoided. This roundtable brings together a diverse group of scholars to discuss ways to develop a more holistic and inclusive approach to addressing the implications of climate breakdown for defence and security: one which combines emerging concerns about climate change a potential ‘threat multiplier’, with an appreciation that efforts to adapt and mitigate will fundamentally transform the ways in which militaries operate, what kinds of missions they are tasked with, what types of capabilities they need, and when and where they deploy.

Contentious Politics and Social Movements in the Middle East and Asia (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton This panel examines a range of contentious politics. Speakers examine the occupied Palestinian territories, focusing on compressed urban expansion and how oral histories enable bottom up conflict transformation. We consider precarity and protest in Jordan, and alternative mobilisation strategies among social movements in Asia.

Enmity, Great Power Competition, and Strategic Rivlary in US Foreign Policy (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott This panel examines US relations with strategic rivals and competitions with the United States.

Feminist Political Economy in the European Union (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton How can we apply the theories and methods of feminist political economy to the European Union (EU)? Despite a highly developed corpus of feminist work on questions of economic policy, employment policy, care and social reproduction, there is still limited application of this work to the EU. This is particularly concerning given the increasingly prominent role played by EU institutions, including the Commission and the European Central Bank, in shaping economic and social circumstances both within and outside the EU’s borders. In this panel we invite feminist political economists to take up the call to analyse the EU – we welcome work on any aspect of EU policy or politics that draws on feminist political economy. We are particularly interested in work that recognises the intersecting consequences and determinates of political economy.

Foreign fighting: towards better understanding and responses (Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism) Room: Dee, Hilton The presence of so called ‘foreign fighters’ in conflicts has attracted increasing public and scholarly attention in relation to the fight against the Islamic State and the current war in Ukraine. Particular attention is given to their role in the continuation and escalation of conflict, as well as to the policies targeting them upon their return to their home/host country. The papers will explore different angles of how we can better understand and respond to foreign fighters; problematise the influence of ‘foreign fighters’ on conflicts; and consider how they can best be studied.

Migration in Asia Pacific (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton This panel discusses migration in Asia Pacific.

Power in Pop Culture and Media (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton This panel explores issues of power in popular culture and media

Queering transnational (in)justices: critical fabulations, reimaginations (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott What does it mean to queer the law, as text and as practice? How different is this ‘**queering**’ in scholarly encounters with jurisprudence, institutions, and colonial governance practices, and how different are these encounters in the Global North and the Global South? Bringing together scholars of critical legal thought from across the globe in conversation, this panel hopes to not only review and reimagine our ideas of ‘*doing*’ the law and ‘*doing*’ justice, but also rethinks the formulation of global (in)justice via predominantly cis-hetero-patriarchal vocabularies. In the panel, **Rahul Rao** engages with the relationship between homo capitalism and racial capitalism; **Jess Gifkins** and **Dean Cooper-Cunningham** present their research on queering atrocity prevention in the United Kingdom and Italy, engaging with contemporary debates on R2P policies and (trans)national interventions; **Jamie Hagen** attempts to better understand approaches toward queering the Women, Peace, and Security agenda as a space for promoting more holistic gender justice; **Dipika Jain** considers questions of epistemic justice in the context of transgender rights in the courtroom, viewing the NALSA judgment in India and the importance of incorporating temporal pluralism; and **Caitlin Biddolph** reimagines the queering of global governance in transitional justice contexts. Largely, the panel imagines queering as an emancipatory (trans)national project, considering synergies in diverse sociocultural and political contexts, and essential shifts in contemporary international studies scholarship towards queerer, more pluralistic politico-legal futures.

Rupturing Theory (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott Compilation Panel

The 'World's Policeman' No More? - Changes and Continutities in US National Security (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott This panel examines the transition of US national security from a predominant focus on counter-terrorism and military interventions over the last twenty years towards strategic rivalry and great power competition. It investigates US public opinion and a growing sentiment of non-interventionism, as well as enduring patterns of counterterrorism policy and remote warfare within the larger context of risk management and US national interests.

The Medicalization of/in Global Politics (Global Health Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott Long before the COVID-19 pandemic has begun to permanently reshape our world have critical security scholars pointed to the increasing securitization of public health (e.g. Elbe 2010; Wenham 2019). The COVID-19 crisis has further amplified the importance of such calls, sparking a variety of important investigations (Greitens 2020; Passos and Acácio 2021). What has received little attention so far, however, is the global trend towards the medicalization of society and by extension the disciplinary realm of International Relations. This panel draws attention to this trend by investigating multiple sites where medicalization of/in Global Politics is enacted. We ask: what knowledge practices are enabled and/or silenced through the medicalization of society? By interrogating how medicalization shapes our understanding of the nature of threat and conflict, we also open a conversation about the range of consequences that this paradigm shift brings for our imagined futures. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has starkly emphasized the need to question the roles that medical and scientific knowledge play in determining the boundaries of legitimate discourse in the management of global health emergencies. Bringing together a multidisciplinary set of papers, this panel therefore creates space for an important conversation about the changing role of medical knowledge in global politics.

The Past, Present, and Future of International Order (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott The steady rise of China, the decline of US power, and the emergence of multipolarity suggest the international order we inhabit is imperilled. Now is the time to survey the existing order, to learn vital lessons from the past, to imagine what future international orders could look like and indeed what form we want it to take. Looking at the past, present, and future, this panel revisits the perennial problem of international order. Seeking to learn lessons from the past, panellists ask: How have “indirect wars” ordered international society? And how have rising powers historically won domination over international orders? Similarly, in a bid to better understand the mutually constitutive role of affect and ethics, another panellist asks: what are the affective underpinnings of the present order? Finally, imagining the future, we ask: How might illiberal politics and reactionary nostalgia compromise world ordering? And, more hopefully: how can international orders be designed to generate shared moral responsibilities?

The gendering of institutions: intersectionality, power and rights (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton This panel is composed of five papers that all explore the gendered dynamics, hierarchies and power relations undergirding international and domestic institutions including the UN and NATO. The papers raise a range of questions pertaining to intersectionality, the gendered, queer and racialized underpinnings of such institutions as well as the absence of men in some aspects of UN policy-making. The papers then bring new insights into the gendered institutional dynamics of global politics and security relations within and beyond the UN, with the women peace and security agenda being key to such scholarly debates. Moreover, the papers challenge the frequent employment of gendered, sexed and racialized binaries in international institutions and argue for an intersectional approach.

What do we learn from the methods and ethics turn in peace and conflict studies? (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton The past years have seen an increasing interest in aspects of methods and ethics in peace and conflict studies, as well as IR and social sciences more generally. A number of volumes, special issues and other formats have covered various topics and thus formed a more solid basis for dealing with issues of access, safety, transparency, (contested) epistemic authority and effects and impacts of research in complex and difficult research contexts. This panel asks what are the precise take-aways from this new wave of publications and which aspects require further discussion, attention and action on part of scholars and the academy more generally. Specifically, contributors will address tensions and dilemmas that persist in peace and conflict research despite all reflection and awareness, and will discuss possible approaches to deal with these more effectively. Relatedly, a second main theme of the panel concerns the question as to how institutional practices and frameworks need to (and can) be adapted to reflect the realities of contemporary field research. A third theme will serve to place this discussion into the wider debate on knowledge production, pedagogy and epistemological diversification of social sciences, which has prompted scholars to rethink the premises of academic research in light of the lifeworlds and ontologies of the places they set out to research.

Wider European Security (European Security Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton This panel addresses a variety of European security issues ranging from cyber and defence industry to information warfare and securitisation.

Working group convener meeting Room: Clyde, Hilton

Civil society networks and transnational advocacy (Non-Governmental Organisations Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton This panel conceptualises and analyses civil society networks across borders, and considers the potential they hold for more transparent, humane and democratic governance. Gutterman focuses on the “global anti-corruption movement” and explores patterns of variation and/or conformity in leading INGO’s strategic practices in this field of transnational advocacy. Norman discusses the possible role of ASEAN People’s Forum in addressing the deficits of democratic regional governance. He highlights recent civil society initiatives that have hinted at a multi-stakeholder approach that might hold the key to unlocking the promises of a people-centred ASEAN. Schapper introduces the concept "super-network" in her discussion of the R2HE Coalition. These are collaborative transnational advocacy networks (TANs) operating across policy fields and building a network structure above individual TANs. Warnecke explores social network analysis as a means for rethinking the nature of INGO-government relations in INGO countries of origin. She develops a new approach that combines multiple data sets on interpersonal and interorganisational ties for assessing the patterned relationships and social distance between governmental and non-governmental organisations in the British overseas development and aid sector.

Concealed violences: The ethics of knowledge during the Troubles (War Studies Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton Northern Ireland continues to be used as a case study globally regarding how to combat “terorrism”/non-state violence and initiate peace processes. This panel asks what lessons are being lost through the marginalisation of some voices from dominant campaign histories. Compounded by the renewed focus on Northern Irish history since the centenary of the Irish War of Independence, this panel will open up a new conversation about practices of state-sanctioned violence during the Troubles and their representation in mainstream histories of the conflict. Contributors will be asking questions about the ethics of knowledge practices, for example intelligence activities, and of knowledge production, including examining who are deemed valid narrators and whose voices are left out.

Discussions of sustainability and climate change concepts using critical discourses (Environment Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton The conceptualisation of a common agenda, climate justice and environment consciousness have a deep and wider meaning that goes beyond the assigned definition from global agreements. To achieve climate change and environment objectives requires the unpacking of concepts to reveal its socio-political underpinnings. In this panel, several concepts in sustainable development, climate change, and environmental political takes on a more critical evaluation. This panel compiles five research relating to the concepts of climate change, anthropocentrism, global environment, commons, and environment consciousness using critical thought. One of the papers is on the idea of climate change as a racialised and gendered concept that builds on historical imaginative geographies that have a colonial history and a paternalistic and developmental politics. The second paper also uses critical feminist theories as well as indigenous, and imaginative approaches to planetary crises, interrogating the concept of anthropocentrism in contemporary geopolitical thinking. The third paper talks about the concept of new global environment thought by considering human and non-human relationships. This covers the idea of “Capitolocene”, “Anthropocene”, and “Laudato Si”. Fourth paper talks about the framing behind the idea of "commons” and how it relates to the idea of self, space, and the collective. Last paper is also on the idea of commons but more on how developed and developing countries can create a common ground on environment consciousness. From these five research, the panels aims to open the discussion behind the concepts that surround different environment agenda. By using the critical lens in the discussion of the concepts, meeting environment targets is not merely just achieving but more on becoming conscious of the values that it contain.

Feminism and changing International institutions (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton What processes and practices are regional and international institutions changing in order to develop a better gendered response to global crisis? It seems evident that the way forward is the insertion of feminist perspectives within the structures of the institution: but how is this best done? This panel investigates various institutional contexts – the UN System, the EU – to highlight how actors pay attention to global gender concerns. There is a particular focus on the work that feminist and gendered advocates do within institutional structures to enact gender-positive changes: from utilising bureaucratic tools such as indicators, to the development of gender-equality programmes and exploiting opportunities afforded by systematic changes. The gendered intersections with colonialized and racial implications of these changes are also evaluated.

Gender-based violence within and beyond borders (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton The international community, civil society and individual countries have come to treat gendered violence as a wicked problem in global and domestic politics, viewing it as one of the world’s most urgent harms. While women and girls are more likely to be exposed to gendered and sexual violence there has been a recent call for an intersectional approach to such violent practices, taking account of other vulnerable groups, including boys and men exposed to war time rape. There appears to be increasing acceptance that such violence is near endemic, occurring in private and public settings, domestically and internationally. This tells us that gendered violence needs to be studied through a range of lenses and across a variety of national and international contexts, with the five papers on this panel all contributing to feminist knowledge production in relation to gendered violence. All five papers recognize the complexities and entanglements that surround gendered based violence, whether in the context of war and conflict (or peace) or in the everyday lives of individuals, so as to capture such things as intimate partner violence, gendered violence in cyberspace, gendered and racialized violence and feminist resistance to such violence.

International Implications of State-Minority Relations in the Middle East (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Minority communities in the Middle East have often been characterised in Western policy circles as one of two extremes – avid supporters of authoritarian states or persecuted minorities living in a hostile Muslim environment (Mahmood 2016; Rowe 2018). In the Middle East, their minority status is often denied by both a group and the state due to connotations with Western intervention to ‘protect’ minorities (Rowe 2018). This panel seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the experiences of Middle Eastern minorities, how these shape their relations with the state and the implications for international discourse on minority rights, democratization and peacebuilding.

Migration and Refugees in Europe (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton This panel includes papers discussing migration and refugees in Europe.

Migration in the Americas (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott This panel discusses migration, refugees and internally displaced people in the Americas.

National security policies in light of the War in Ukraine (European Security Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott This panel addresses European security issue with a focus on the war in Ukraine and how different states have re-positioned their national security and defence policies, including Germany, the UK and Ukraine itself.

Practical Policy Steps to Future Orders in World Politics (BISA) Room: Almond, Hilton Practical Policy Steps to Future Orders in World Politics

Rethinking East Asia’s Foreign Policies and Domestic Politics Through Emotions (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This panel aims to explore East Asia’s foreign policies and political elites’ behaviours in diplomatic exchanges through the lens of emotions. Recent research on emotions has helped us explain how emotions play a significant role in shaping political perceptions and behaviour, how international actors may manipulate or deploy emotions for strategic purposes, and how political struggles can also be fought over the appropriateness of feeling and expressing emotions. Employing various approaches to emotions, this panel attempts to contribute to ‘globalising IR’ by revisiting the processes of decision-making and diplomatic exchanges in East Asia to highlight historically constituted emotional dynamics. In particular, the four panellists tackle different discourses of emotions to provide perspectives on the shared historical-sociological experiences between decision-makers in East Asia. **Connection**: This panel will contribute directly to the understanding of the Common Agenda set out by the UN Secretary-General, which includes various themes of preventing conflicts, building trust and boosting partnerships. The panellists will touch on multiple security and trust crises that East Asian states are dealing with, thus suggesting alternatives to the UN’s approach to peace and cooperation.

The Possible Political Worlds of Outer Space (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott This panel considers the politics of space governance and commercial activities, space sustainability and environmentalism, and new approaches to international space law. These pressing present-day issues will have lasting consequences into the future, and new approaches to dealing with them have the potential to set all manner of new precedents for the generations to come in astropolitical governance as existing frameworks for space activities are rather broad, aspirational, and wide open to interpretation as unsettling parallels from terrestrial environmental politics appear to be mirrored in outer space.

The future of tech, the future of security? (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel considers the role of artifical intelligence in the military and defence context including the anthropomorphizing of AI, defence decision-making and AI, Human Security and AI, and the politics and discourse around the use of technologies such as drones and facial recognition technology (FRT).

Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton Papers investigate questions around transitional justice across different contexts.

Variegations and Negotiations of Contemporary Crises of Social Reproduction (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton A bourgeoning body of Feminist International Political Economy scholarship has emerged to document the ways in which the Covid-19 crisis erupted in a context where crises of social reproduction and process of what Rai et al. (2014) refer to as ‘depletion’, were already unfolding in similar yet variegated ways across the globe. These multiple crises of social reproduction are rooted in and reproduce relations of gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, coloniality and more. Optimists have pointed out that in recent years, crises of public health, the environment, energy, displacement, housing/homelessness, the cost of living, etc., have increasingly been the focus of public debate, drawing attention to dynamics that feminists have long documented. Yet, they continue to be fuelled by the forces of globalization, neoliberalism, financialization, and militarism, which have heightened the contradiction between the extended power of capital and sustainable, progressive, forms of social reproduction for the majority of the world’s population (Bakker and Gill 2003; Braedley and Luxton 2010; Dowling 2021). The papers on this panel examine different aspects of the ongoing crises of social reproduction that are unfolding in different parts of the world, the ways in which they unfold on gendered and racialised terrain, and how they are negotiated and resisted at different sites and scales, from the level of global governance to the level of the everyday.

What Have We done? Reflections on War and Withdrawal in Afghanistan (War Studies Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott This panel examines the withdrawal of NATO forces from a 20-year war that apparently no one won. It considers the impact of the promises made in relation to security, gender equality, state-building, and humanitarianism. The panel reflects from different perspectives on the question of whether the hindsight now afforded by the chaotic withdrawal and Taliban take-over casts new light on established dogmas in relation to Afghanistan. Are the current humanitarian crisis, state-collapse with Taliban rule and increased refugee flows confirming the findings of studies conducted during the 20 year war, or does the current post-withdrawal situation offer novel insights for IR - especially in the subfields of war and security studies, humanitarian and gender politics - into how the past twenty years have unfolded? This panel addresses these questions from different angles, analysing the everyday and structural gendered and racial violence, manifest in ‘feminist’ militarism, civil-military cooperation, state-building and stabilisation efforts and refugee resettlement. It ultimately returns to the question ‘What have we done’, can anything/anyone be 'redeemed' and what does this fraught legacy mean for the future of Afghanistan as well as future wars elsewhere? **Below we list the 5 papers and corresponding paper presenters:** **The (Im)Possibilities of Feminist Militarism? The Case of Afghanistan** *Dr Hannah Partis-Jennings, University of Loughborough, UK* Feminists have long critiqued the framing of war in Afghanistan as salvation for Afghan women and have pointed to the problematic co-optation of gender within the international statebuilding project in the country more broadly. The hasty abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021, further demonstrates the problematics around ‘feminist’ militarism. This paper argues that the war and international withdrawal shed particular light on critiques of ‘feminism’ in foreign policy, including questions of sustainability, instrumentalism, racialised imaginaries, and the structural depoliticization of feminist ideas. However, equally, the particularities of everyday resistance demonstrated by Afghan women and their allies, were generated, even facilitated, within the compromised space of war, and bound up with the international project and notions of the liberal peace. The feminist space and work that did manage to flourish in Afghanistan since 2001, the paper suggests, was very specifically undercut by the messy withdrawal of international troops and funding, and that betrayal continues to be a source of suffering and crisis in Afghanistan, negating even the compromised possibilities of ‘feminist’ militarism. Keywords: Feminist; Militarism; Afghanistan; withdrawal; statebuilding **Fuelled by Moral Injury? Afghan Veterans’ Activism to Evacuate their ‘Afghan Brothers’** *Dr Sara de Jong, University of York* In this paper I analyse the advocacy efforts by Afghanistan veterans on behalf of Afghan interpreters and other locally employed staff, who supported them in their missions. With local staff’s association with Western forces exposing them to targeted threats, they have sought protection through evacuation and resettlement. Afghan veterans have become what some would see as unlikely advocates for refugees' rights, with their investment in rescuing their former local colleagues offering a route to ‘redemption’ in the context of a 'failed war'. The main source for the analysis offered here are semi-structured interviews (2017-2022) with veterans from the UK, Canada, US, Germany and the Netherlands, who engaged in lobbying efforts and founded advocacy organisations for Afghan interpreters. This paper brings together literature around ‘moral injury’ (e.g. Molendijk 2021) with scholarship on veteran activism (e.g. Schrader 2019) to develop the argument that veteran activism on this issue is firstly fuelled by moral injury and secondly a strategy to cope with their broader sense of moral injury generated by the failed war in Afghanistan. However, it also concludes that veterans’ activism simultaneously deepens their moral injury as it increases awareness of the structural injustices around the treatment of local staff. Keywords: Afghanistan; veterans; activism; Afghan refugees; moral injury **Can Militaries “Do Good”? The Complications of Civil-Military projects** *Dr Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, UiT The Arctic University of Norway* This paper reflects upon the narratives and practices of the Norwegian military and humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan during the 2001-2014 US-led, NATO supported intervention. In particular the paper will focus on a specific civil-military project that was intended to educate anesthesia doctors and technicians at Afghan hospitals. This project was caught in between priorities of the Norwegian government and deployed, military medical personnel who wanted to make a difference on the ground. This was problematic in light of the political intention (the “Norwegian model”) to enforce a clear divide between military and civilian efforts, polarising assumptions about militaries and aid and their capacities to work with and for Afghan people and authorities. The project was to a degree caught within the power dynamics between foreign actors (both militaries and aid agencies) and local communities and authorities. In evaluating this project (which could not be completed until the Afghan doctor could get out of Afghanistan), positions of virtuousness by Norwegian actors in relation to local actors frequently reflected racialised, cultural and gendered biases by both military and aid actors, that hindered the potential success of a project with good intentions. Keywords: Afghanistan; civil-military relations; gender politics; international security **Failures of Statebuilding: Understanding the Collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.** *Dr Jasmine Bhatia, Birkbeck University of London and Dr Florian Weigand, LSE* Why do statebuilding efforts fail, even when supported by powerful international coalitions? The rapid collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan shocked many contemporary observers and exposed severe weaknesses in the international community's ambitious twenty-year statebuilding programme. This paper focuses on two questions: 1) What accounts for the rapid collapse of the Islamic Republic and the lack of resilience in Afghanistan's state institutions? 2) What are the implications for mainstream assumptions about statebuilding theory and practice in chronically-insecure states? Drawing from an elite bargains framework and several interviews with senior officials, we argue that, while the Republic had significant structural weaknesses that threatened the regime's long term survival, the rapid collapse of the country was accelerated by several contingent factors related to elite decision-making from international and Afghan elites. More optimal outcomes were possible had different decisions been taken in the lead-up to the collapse. We reflect on implications for statebuilding and intervention going forward. Keywords: Afghanistan, Peace Process, Statebuilding, Intervention, Taliban, Insurgency **Women, Peace and Security - Afghanistan’s Women since August 2021** *Dr Neelam Raina, Middlesex University London* This paper will use an overarching narrative built within the Women, peace and security agenda and how this operates and appears for women and girls in Afghanistan. It will journey through the UNSCR1325 and the various National Action Plans that were set up by various nations that crumbled very quickly. With the quick return to exclusion from the peace talks, exclusions experienced through evacuation and resettlement policy and a complete disregard for built in cross cutting inequalities that - the experience of intersecting exclusions and what these mean to the everyday experience of being an Afghan woman shall be discussed within this paper. The complete collapse of the humanitarian aid programmes and related policy, with gender ‘mainstreamed’ for the last two decades within them, and what this indicates for the future of any such policy needs critical reexamination. This paper shall raise questions about the current status of gender related policy within conflict and fragile settings and the commitment to these going forward. What is clear from Afghanistan’s recent experience allows us to question the depth and applicability of these approaches and how quickly they become hollow and meaningless in the face of crisis. Keywords: Gender, Women, Peace and Security, Exclusion, Inequality, Policy.

Worlding and Unworlding in IR (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott Compilation Panel

Building Ecofeminist Analyses of Climate Breakdown (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton Climate breakdown is finally on the mainstream policy agenda. Protecting the planet is the second of the twelve key proposals in the UN Secretary General’s 'Our Common Agenda' statement, which BISA has chosen as organising principles for the 2023 conference. Civil society actors articulating critiques and solutions that highlight the linkages between colonial legacies, gendered inequalities, racism, peace and security, and climate justice are finally gaining high visibility. Key global organisations such as the UN and the EU also appear to be responding to climate breakdown, for example promising implement a ‘Green Deal’ or recognising links between conflict over natural resources and women’s security (UNSCR 2242). Many critics have noted, however, that these kinds of initiatives do not go far enough in tackling the underlying causes of climate breakdown, the historically entrenched asymmetries in consumption that cause them, and gendered, racialized and Eurocentric assumptions that help to sustain them. Indeed, these kinds of critiques have not historically enjoyed a central place in policy making institutions or international studies. This RT brings together scholars working to investigate these intersectional dynamics in climate breakdown and proposed solutions to it. Ecofeminist and decolonial critiques have pointed out how exploitation, extraction, dumping, and irresponsibility is actively promoted and incentivised in the current globalised economy, accruing profits to the Global North, driving ‘growth’ and creating debt and conflict. The Round Table aims to foster dialogue between scholars working on these issues to explore questions such as: How do current multilateral systems tackle climate breakdown, for example in WPS agendas, Green Deals or global negotiations such COP events? How have these processes perpetuated or displaced neo-colonial dynamics? How are the relationships between ‘social reproduction’, ‘production’, and nature understood in global governance and how are these relationships altering or continuing in the current era? Which actors and whose knowledge enjoy attention in global governance institutions? How can we apply Ecofeminist principles and practices within often highly abstracted academic research? What tools and concepts do we need to fully understand the politics of climate breakdown and decarbonisation - how to these challenge prior analytical approaches? Each RT speaker will address these questions as they relate to their own research and experience for 5 (or 10) minutes, after which the discussion will be open to all participants. A chair will facilitate the session to maximise interaction, sharing, listening and debate. We intend for this session to depart from traditional conference sessions which give the majority of the time to a small number of speakers. In this way it is consistent with ecofeminist praxis.

Challenging strategic assumptions and traditions around the bomb (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton This panel considers and challenges various key assumptions and traditions associated with nuclear strategy and practice.

Critical War and Security Studies (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel explores critical themes in contemporary war and security studies

Emotions and international organizations (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Emotions and international organizations

Feminist Foreign Policy: States, Leadership, Security and Everyday Knowledge Production, (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton A growing number of states have adopted feminist platforms for their foreign policy conduct, a move that could be considered both innovative and progressive. While states’ FFPs share a number of features including support for global gender equality, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, the conduct of feminist leadership and diplomacy there are significant variations between them. This panel provides a set of critical reflections on the empirical contents as well as the feminist and ethical ambitions of states’ FFPs, including those of Germany, Sweden, the UK and the US. All four states could be considered supporters of global gender justice, though they vary in their ambitions. What is more they vary in their willingness to reflect on their location within privilege and wealth. Thus, it is central to unpack the gendered (and intersectional) power relations that undergird their FFPs as well as the securitised and militarised expressions of their foreign policies, many of which are inconsistent with feminist calls for demilitarisation and peaceful conflict resolution. A critical approach to the study of FFP also requires reflecting on the leadership style of states that seek to further feminist values and norms beyond borders, not the least the role of diplomats and female leaders in the everyday implementation of such global agendas, as well as their contributions to new knowledge production. All five papers are steeped in a critical feminist ambition and rest on a range of research methods

Japan's Proactive Role in Contributing to Peace (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton One of the most underappreciated developments in the context of the US-China rivalry has been Japan’s security policy expansion. As it seeks to maintain peace and prevent conflict, Japan’s security policy has transformed from a passive and minimalist version where the focus was on economics (based on the Yoshida Doctrine) to one where it adopts a policy of "proactive contribution to peace". The contribution is no longer confined to economic and political means, but also through the use of its military and various other means to achieve traditional and non-traditional security objectives. At the same time, the Japanese government has also introduced its own vision of regional order – known as the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) - to ensure continued peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific based on a rules-based order. This panel focuses on Japan’s contribution to peace and to the prevention of conflicts in the Indo-Pacific order amid the worsening US-China rivalry. It not only examines the resilience of the foundation of its peace-based Yoshida Doctrine, but also various policies and initiatives that may help Japan become a more proactive contributor to peace and global security.

Knowledge production and peacebuilding (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton Panel explores peace education, (de)colonially in peace, knowledge production, transformative mediation, and the role of humour.

Militarisation and Carceral Landscapes (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott This panel researches the porous boundary of neoliberal military, policing and everyday violence within a colonial historical context, drawing on postcolonial, feminist and Marxist theories. The panel addresses both military practices and their conditions as well as policing practices. It challenges the idea of a binary line separating them, showing instead the continuum of policing and military force. The papers focus on different case studies and conceptual points but share a critical perspective that questions Western-centric assumptions about policing and military violence which embeds the analysis of contemporary practices within a colonial historical context.

Multilaterism, Multinationalism, and Cooperation in World Politics: Theory and Practice (BISA) Room: QE2, Marriott Multilaterism, Multinationalism, and Cooperation in World Politics: Theory and Practice

Neglected Concepts in Worldmaking (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton Worldmaking is a rather amorphous concept. Coined by Nelson Goodman (1978) in a philosophical text that discusses aesthetic imaginings of worlds, it has been subsequently used in myriad ways (e.g., Bruner 2001, Milne 2015, Kondo 2018, Srinivasan 2019) and has notably been popularised by Adom Getachew (2019) to connote the schemas formulated by strands of mainly Black-Atlantic anti-imperialists to describe an internationalism that was neither anti-national nor anti-state. As others (Cubukcu et al 2021) have noted, however, the concept is rich in generative possibilities encompassing phenomena such as nationalism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and solidarity. Seeking to contribute to this burgeoning set of conversations, this panel considers some of the neglected and under-theorised concepts of worldmaking. In this vein, the panellists examine nature, silence, love, as well as dreamworlds, jazz groves, and mystical folktales in a bid to interrogate and complicate our understandings of worldmaking.

Opaque and Visible - Moving Geographies of Race (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott Compilation Panel

Teaching International Relations digitally and online: challenges and opportunities for the future. (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton This roundtable explores digital and online learning in teaching International Relations. It recognises the recent experiences of digital and online teaching brought about by the COVID 19 pandemic - framed as an 'emergency' contingency - alongside longer term developments in digital pedagogy. The roundtable brings together colleagues from a variety of institutions with distinct experiences of digital and online - including a leading learning designer - to consider challenges and opportunities that go beyond those that arose due to COVID. The roundtable recognises the value of drawing on different disciplinary approaches but equally looks to our disciplinary context and the use of digital means to allows for consideration of questions of accessibility and decolonising digital spaces. The roundtable format invites BISA colleagues to share their lived experience of digital learning and contemplate what best practice might look like for the future. The roundtable also acts as an opportunity to share with BISA members the opportunity to contribute to a planned publication in this realm.

The Dynamics of Regional Identity-building in the Foreign Policies of the Western Balkans. Rethinking Agency and Embedded Peripherality (South East Europe Working Group) Room: QE1, Marriott The Western Balkans have long been perceived in mainstream IR as a region divided by the competing interests of external hegemonic actors, chiefly among them being Russia, China, Turkey, the USA, NATO and the EU. Ongoing intractable problems of nationalistic antagonism, revisionism, and hybrid regimes typified by competitive authoritarianism and state capture pose lasting challenges to achieving genuine political reconciliation and transformative justice. These challenges have left the region susceptible to conditions of liminality and external dependence, a set of conditions which have been sharpened by recent events, from the ‘Refugee Crisis’, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. However, many accounts within mainstream IR reproduce top-down, often Eurocentric representations of the Western Balkans as a region merely defined by external interests and internal fragmentation, rather than a political unit in and of itself. Featuring wide-ranging contributions from Dr. Avdi Smajljaj, Jan Niemiec, Tony Horne, Drs. Aleksandar Milošević & Miloš Hrnjaz and Drs. Sokol Lleshi & Marsela Sako, this panel seeks to engage in the endeavour of ‘worlding’ from the Western Balkans by exploring the various dimensions of how the region negotiates centre-periphery relations at the regional level. The papers contained within this panel critically examine this from two distinct, yet intersecting angles. These are the conflicting external interests of regional hegemons from the EU, Russia and Turkey which shape regional political outcomes on one hand and the internal dynamics of regional identity and institution building itself in the Western Balkans on the other. As such, the purpose of this is to not only re-centre South-Eastern European perspectives about foreign policy and regional cooperation, but also to generate theoretical and conceptual insights into the study of regionalism more broadly within IR and Area Studies along the continuum of centre-periphery relations.

The Epistemes of Global Health - Data, Technologies, and Creative Engagements (Global Health Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton The different epistemes of global health have become highlighted by the recent crisis, where graphs and charts formed the basis for political decisions and directly gave rise to new rules for behaviour in many parts of public life. But these effects are not limited to the current preoccupation with the pandemic, the entanglement of data and political decisions much rather suffuses global health governance in a broader sense. This panel looks beyond the pandemic to the ways in which data and technologies have shaped our understanding of health and illness in a variety of contexts, and also explores some of the knowledges that are left out of the current data-centric view of health governance. Importantly, these oversights and discontinuities are not without measurable effect, as they can give rise to regulatory bottlenecks and missed opportunities for the research and development of new treatments and approaches.

The Future of Mass Atrocity Prevention (Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott This panel brings together research that examines the preventive dimension of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), highlighting a range of contemporary challenges that are shaping state approaches to mass atrocity prevention both domestically and externally. The papers on this panel therefore highlight issues connected to how states interact through UN institutions when approaching atrocity prevention, the influence of domestic foreign policy dynamics in the contestation of atrocity prevention norms and the importance of a cosmopolitan duty to prevent negative harms. Consequently, each of the papers raise provocative questions about the future effectiveness of atrocity prevention initiatives and shine a light onto the opportunities for further progress.

Visual Politics and Political Futures: Images and their persuasive power (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott We are living in an increasingly visual age. As we find ourselves constantly exposed to information from a variety of sources, visuality is playing an important role in our lives and this is likely to accelerate in future as a result of technological developments especially. Visual cues in a variety of forms can have a huge impact on the persuasive power of communication. Whether they appear alone or, as is often the case, accompanied by text, they can inform whether or not we find a particular message convincing. Despite their increasing importance and relevance, visuals are often still treated as secondary to the persuasive power of text. This panel brings together a variety of papers that take visuality seriously and traces – in the broadest terms – the operation of power. The panel explores themes of place including urbanism and digital space, communications by political leadership and organisations such as militaries, experiences of violence in anti-colonial environments and how conflict is memorialised in the construction of nationalism. The panel showcases a wide variety of topics and approaches to engender dialogue about how we might understand and research the politics and power of visuality.

Advancing Foreign Policy Analysis: Gender, Time and Roles (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Carron, Hilton This panel will discuss original and innovative theory-guided works in the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). The hallmarks of FPA are its penchant for actor-specific, middle-range theorising and for interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspectives. Theoretical approaches in the field can be differentiated along several dimensions, such as levels of analysis, whether they are structural or agent-orientated, or whether they are constructivist, rationalist or cognitive/psychological. At the same time, FPA has a rich tradition of efforts at theoretical integration. Against this background, this panel brings together papers that elaborate on different theoretical perspectives in FPA and apply these perspectives to a broad range of specific empirical puzzles using a variety of methods.

Agendas for Reforming and Revitalising the United Nations (Orphan Papers track) Room: Endrick, Hilton Agendas for Reforming and Revitalising the United Nations

Celebrating CPD's Early Career Paper Prize Winner (Review of International Studies) Room: Waverley, Marriott This roundtable spotlights the work of this year's paper prize winner. The prize is aimed at supporting CPD’s early career members in the development of peer-reviewed work, while at the same time carving out space in International Studies to engage with the question of empire and coloniality as fundamental to the discipline. In addition to being invited to present their paper at this year's conference, the prize winner will be mentored through the review process at Review of International Studies, as a co-sponsor of the prize. This process will enable the desk-review to be waived, and the paper to be sent directly to external reviewers, who will make all final decisions about accepting the paper for publication.

Conceptual Challenges in peacekeeping operations (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton Panel explores approaches to understanding peacekeeping operations. includes papers analysing legitimacy, institutional logics, trust, Security Council Reform and ambiguity in policy.

Debating the ‘International’ (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton International Relations as a discipline continues to have a contentious relationship with its object of inquiry. What is the ‘international’? How has it been traditionally defined and how have these mainstream definitions been critiqued? The roundtable aims to intervene in these debates at the intersection of international political sociology and historical sociology and problematizes how the international has been understood and employed within the field of IR and further engages with issues of its (lack of) conceptualization. The roundtable aims to open for discussion a series of questions, that include but are not limited to; how to approach the transformation(s) of the international, what is the role of hierarchies in this process, what is its relation to other concepts (such as sovereignty), how to locate the international, and what is its relations to the discipline and disciplinary politics?

Emerging Political and Ethnic Minority Dynamics in the South Caucasus (Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton This panel discusses emergent socio-political dynamics of political and ethnic minorities in the South Caucasus. The area is currently going through many macro-geopolitical changes, and this affects also more meso and micro-local dynamics. And while the former macro are quite widely discussed by mainstream media and academia alike, the latter meso and macro arguably receives less attention. This is particularly true when discussing minorities in the South Caucasus, political and ethnic alike. Hence, with this panel we discuss and bring attention to also these meso and micro-level dynamics. For example, how Russians who fled Russia for Georgia adapt themselves both emotionally and socially in a context which is at times openly hostile to them. How the far-right and the far-left in the South Caucasus absorb fand re-elaborate their theoretical ideals, and how they then operate in a political context where they are still marginal voices. How minority ethnic Azeris in Georgia, after Azerbaijan closed all of its land borders in 2019, changed their mobility patterns and translocal practices to adapt to the new geopolitical reality. Finally, how an increasingly authoritarian State like Azerbaijan uses western-importeed discourses on multiculturalism to narrate and present itself externally, but does so in a way that fits the existing political system. These political and ethnic minority dynamics in the South Caucasus are ongoing and will become increasingly relevant in the coming years. And as the macro-geopolitical conditions keep changing, we can expect also the meso and micro-sociopolitical dynamics to keep evolving and increasingly become relevant.

Global Authoritarianism and New Populisms (Post-Structural Politics Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton Global Authoritarianism and New Populisms

Innovative Approaches to Promoting Peace and Preventing Conflict: Aesthetics, Imagination, Critique and Engagement (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Almond, Hilton This panel explores new avenues for promoting peace and preventing conflict via innovative approaches to the theory and practice of peace-building. While the United Nations (UN) and other international organisations have dedicated substantial resources to overcoming deep-seated conflict and fostering sustainable peace, many scholars and practitioners have highlighted limitations in prevailing approaches, including the persistence of colonial, gendered and ageist perspectives, as well as top down practices that apply generic frameworks to diverse circumstances. This panel brings together four papers that take these critical interventions seriously, extending them further and exploring a range of potential alternatives. Nilanjana Premaratna builds on a relational peace framework to investigate the bilingual, multi-ethnic theatre group Jana Karaliya’s practices of performing sustained everyday coexistence in Sri Lanka. Tim Aistrope and Shannon Brincat connect relational peace with cross-disciplinary research on the imagination that emphasises the deeper significance of creativity, play and storytelling for building trust and working through social divisions. Meanwhile, Constance Duncombe and George Karavas use innovative visual and social media methodologies to demonstrate an underlying convergence between the liberal peace and China’s ‘developmental peace’, often positioned as a distinct alternative. Contextualising these papers, Helen Berents outlines a reflexive approach to peace research that centres a feminist ethics of care, which she develops through critical engagement with her own project on youth activism and peace processes in South Sudan, Afghanistan and Myanmar. Taken together, this panel foregrounds critical and innovative approaches to promoting peace and preventing conflicts, addressing key priorities identified in the UN’s Our Common Future report, including on building trust, boosting partnerships, listening to and working with youth, and, ultimately, leaving no one behind.

On intimate encounters in the field: trust, love, and research that notices (Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group) Room: Argyll, Marriott "Some stories are crying out to be told. Some stories have already been told but no one listened. When the time is right you will remember having been told some stories. You will pass some stories on, and you had better be careful." (PoetryProse, Robbie Shilliam) How can international studies scholars perform research as if people matter? (Koomen) How can it pay critical, feminist, class-, and environmentally conscious thought to encounters in the field that are not often spoken of? This roundtable brings together a carefully curated list of individuals, each of whom have worked as practitioners and scholars alike, to critically reflect upon and draw insights from their fieldwork encounters. It draws from and reflects upon stories of solidarity, trust, friendship, love, and care in their diverse relationships with other scholars, interlocutors, fixers, translators, interpreters, friends, local organisations, politicians, journalists, and most of all, with sensitive and vulnerable populations in diverse cultural, social, and political contexts. Working, interviewing, researching, and living in conflict-afflicted regions to countries in the midst of wide scale protests and democratic unrest, the roundtable seeks to relay stories of building trust, raising cooperation, preventing conflict, and working with young individuals at the grassroots to build peace. As such, this conversation holds critical insights for the Secretary-General's proposals for a renewed social contract, to attempt a collective imagination of what such a contract must be constituted of. Learning lessons from working with the people who are most affected by a Summit of the Future, the roundtable is a step forward in the attempt to 'leave no one behind', driving the scholarly impetus to understand how best to include stories from the periphery. To do so, this roundtable will exclusively root itself there -- the magnified margins, the speaking subaltern (Spivak), and the caring corners -- to understand how we tell the story of theory (Shilliam), and understand these productive tensions, contrasts, and differences, to ultimately find ways to fill a conference room with tales of intimacy and entanglement, alongside "knitting, stitching, storytelling and love" (Hozic).

Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities through Embodiment: Bodies of Terror and Counter-Terror (Panel 4) (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Ewing, Marriott The body and its affective potential are central to the images of terrorism which permeate global media. The suicide bomber, public executions, and stabbings all rely on production of the body within an affective regime, and in which the body - both of the terrorists and the terrorised - exerts agency beyond the subjective goals of the actors. Such forms of violence demonstrate, beyond their attributed political messages, a radical approach to the human body - or, more specifically, to bodily and embodied practices which function to disrupt the body politic at its core.Similarly, counter-terrorism measures produce and deploy bodies in a variety of ways to produce a certain form of ‘security’. This requires that bodies of both ‘potential terrorists’ and ‘potential victims’ materialise in particular ways and embodying certain characteristics within ‘at-risk’ social contexts. These bodies are again reproduced and redeployed in new ways in post-terrorism environments, where bodies of victims, attackers, survivors, and the public at large are all remade according to political logics of security. However, our bodies are not passive within these regimes, and exert affective agency both with and beyond the subject. In this fourth panel, we focus on different embodied practices around terrorism, counter-terrorism, and the social and political responses to the former. Particularly, we investigate how these political phenomena produce discourses and regimes in which the body itself functions both as agent and representation, and comes to embody certain competing narratives, emotions, and subjects. This is done through papers on the Manchester Bombing in 2017, (in)security practices in Kenya, and agonism in Israel/Palestine. **Thematic Introduction to the Panel Series:** As Elaine Scarry famously argued, the primary mechanism of war is bodily violence. Our bodies themselves are integral in how we create typologies of violence, from 'war' to 'protest' to 'terrorism'. The effects of conflict go beyond the immediate violation of bodies, which post-violence continues to be politically productive within affective and materialist economies operating in radically restructured social spheres. These panels explore possibilities for rethinking war and conflict by considering the ways in which they are embodied experiences. Firstly, they consider how individual experiences of being embodied in and post-conflict relates to social identity, and how embodiment and identity are unstable and change over time. Secondly, the panels reflect on the social characteristics and production of bodies in relation to traumatic experiences. Thirdly, while human bodies are central to the practice of war, they exist within constellations of non-human bodies which play a significant role in producing understanding of conflict and society.

The Global Space Age: Astropolitical Insights on Global Order (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton The political study of outer space – or astropolitics – is something that has until recently featured as a niche specialism in the United States. Today thousands of satellites orbit Earth, providing critical infrastructure through large technological systems, creating political, economic, and social forces beyond the direct control of the United States in an environment and 'geography' that has long been surrendered by social scientists to the ‘hard sciences’. Earth orbit is already the scene of international power politics and is shaped by the forces of international anarchy, and more and more states are formalising their space activities with space agencies and new military space institutions and formations, each seeking to benefit from and shape the governance and exploitation of Earth orbit for practical terrestrial purposes. This roundtable features experts on China, Russia, and global governance in space to to guide a discussion on the changing shape of global order in space, and what the Global Space Age means for terrestrial politics and the study of International Relations in the years to come.

The challenge of being prepared: military transformation as a response (War Studies Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton How states can, should, and are preparing for the challenges of an increasingly volatile, complex, and threatening environment? This panel holds that military transformation is an essential avenue of research to support and better equip actors facing these challenges. As such, it offers a variety of western and non-western perspectives on military transformation and the changing nature of war in the view of developing the research field and offering a critical outlook on transformation choices and practices. The wide-ranging studies look at the following issues: the emergence of cyber wars as potential game changers; the integration of technology and collaboration in the French and British armies; the challenges of adopting military transformation across different settings in South America; a case-study of the Zambian forces to see why armed forces adapt dissimilarly despite using the same military practice; and finally, the effects of defence offsets in Turkey. The panel aims to demonstrate not only how each region chose to "be prepared" for emerging threats and issues from the international environment, but also what reinforces and hinders military transformation beyond the popular buzzword, as well as the changing character of war with the rise of the cyber domain.

The effectiveness of implementing environment and climate agendas (Environment Working Group) Room: Drummond, Marriott The implementation of the Paris Agreement negotiated in 2015 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change remains a major challenge for countries. Following the submission of Nationally Determined Contributions, countries face the difficult task of implementing their commitments. What is the effect and effectiveness of different policy instruments such as carbon taxes and carbon markets? How can a circular economy be implemented? How do global south countries impact negotiations within the UN? These are some of the aspects explored by this panel.

Theoretical critiques to the global order (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Papers pose questions of existing sources of governance in the peace and security field. Includes critique of UN institutions, war crimes trials, and peacebuilding, informed by anarchist perspectives, militarisation, authoritarianism, and patron-client relations.

Tools of Statecraft: Cooperation and Conflict in US Foreign Policy (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: QE2, Marriott A look at the use of diplomacy and interventions as tools of US foreign policy.

Trends and Challenges in Online Extremism (BISA) Room: Clyde, Hilton Extremist and terrorist actors are increasingly operating online. These actors continue to adapt and outmanoeuvre counter-terrorism measures and content moderation policies. This panel examines the trends and challenges of online extremism from the migration of extremists from social media to gaming and alternate platforms, far-rights actors in Asia, to new techniques for understanding online extremist networks. As the line between online and offline becomes increasingly blurred, terrorist exploitations of online platforms challenge traditional conceptions of terrorism and counter-terrorism measures.

What the ‘War on Terror’ Leaves Behind: Assessing International Security in a Post-Terrorism Era (European Journal of International Security) Room: QE1, Marriott John Mearsheimer warned, early in the ‘War on Terror’, that terrorism was a distraction drawing resources away from the real dangers confronting the world’s major powers. From a very different epistemological and political standpoint, critical security and terrorism scholars were concomitantly making similar arguments, pointing at the systematic inflation of the “threat of terrorism” and the implications of this for state repression, violence and injustices across the world from illegal wars, to the stigmatization of Muslim communities and the implementation of ‘preventing violent extremism’ programs across health, education and social care sectors. Now, after more than two decades of the “terrorism era,” policy and scholarly attention appears finally to be heeding these calls and turning elsewhere: away from terrorism. Thus, on the one hand, we are witnessing the return of “old fears”, particularly around great power rivalry and interstate conflict, evidenced most dramatically in the ongoing war in Ukraine. At the same time, this revitalisation of 'traditional’ security concerns dovetails with growing attention to new areas of concern such as cyber security, and with the belated recognition of non-traditional security issues such as climate change which are finally beginning to gain serious attention amongst specialized audiences and broader publics alike. This panel enquires into this reassessment of terrorism as a security threat and its impact upon security policy and scholarship.

Crisis and crises (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Clyde, Hilton A panel on crisis and crises in/of/and IPE

Experiences of “Early Career Instructors” in International Studies: Struggles and Opportunities for Pedagogical Futures (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Lochay, Hilton This roundtable contends that close attention ought to be paid to formative experiences in learning and teaching in International Studies, especially the support and pedagogical training needed as IR scholars begin their teaching careers. While “early career instructor” (ECI) experiences are likely to be highly varied, insights into the experiences of ECIs will offer important lessons on how we can support new instructors to teach IR in an ever-changing world. This roundtable also considers ECI experience in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shaped the early years of their teaching. Participants will consider questions such as: How do ECIs prepare to teach their first courses? What challenges did participants face as they were preparing to teach for the first time? How did the COVID-19 impact their teaching, especially given the increased shift to online and hybrid learning? How are ECIs developing pedagogical approaches within IR and incorporating inclusive pedagogy into their courses? Participants include postgraduates, recent PhDs including postdoctoral fellows, and full-time instructors. By approaching these questions from multiple perspectives, this roundtable helps to enrich and enliven our understanding of the current state of what it means to be an ECI in the academy and teaching International Studies, and what future steps can be taken to improve the early career instructor experience.

Historical Colonialisms and World Orders (Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group) Room: Don, Hilton This panel brings together new research on historical and theoretical thinking on colonialism and world order from the past to the present.

Methods of (Un)Seeing (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Dee, Hilton Compilation Panel

Navigating polycrisis: UK foreign policy between national, human and planetary security challenges (BISA) Room: QE1, Marriott In March 2023, the UK’s Integrated Review Refresh set out a vision for engagement with ‘a world defined by danger, disorder and division’. The UK’s investments in confronting Russia, and competing with China via military presence in the Indo-Pacific and the AUKUS nuclear alliance carry rapid-escalation risks and require evidence-backed strategic thinking, resources and capacities that are in short supply. Such reprioritisation of geopolitical contestation sits uncomfortably with the immediate, overlapping and/or existential challenges of meeting vast human and planetary security challenges, even as UK investments in international development and cooperation are shrinking. These include the squeeze on human societies amid climate emergency, economic volatility, political polarisation, and a global decline in respect for democratic and human rights. Noting that a new UK government may have scope to recalibrate the UK’s overseas agenda, this panel offers space for leading scholars to debate how the UK can strike a balance between managing global geopolitical competition and aggression, helping to address instability on and beyond Europe’s fringes (while absorbing the lessons of past experience), and promoting cooperation to address looming structural problems and human security crises.

Popular culture, identity and the symbolism of nuclear weapons (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Spey, Hilton This panel brings together the relationship between popular culture, stigmatization and symbolism of nuclear weapons. The role of history, identity and the law around nuclear weapons are also examinded in this panel.

Screening of 'Black Bauhinia' followed by Q&A session with the director and the producers Room: QE2, Marriott

Space, security, and foreign policies in South East Europe (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Endrick, Hilton This panel examines different dynamics of space, security, and foreign policy in SEE. The papers examine the interplay of EU negotiations and the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey; Byzantine political thought and international cooperation; the regional component of far-right votes in relation to migration and employment in Greece; anti-corruption knowledge production practices; and policy responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Technology and the practice of international relations (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Tweed, Hilton This panel addresses questions concerning the emergence of digital authoritarianism, ethical guidelines in digital surveillance, videogames and environmental activism, developments in Fintech, and the role of artificial intelligence in securing government intersts.

The role of social media and technology in social conflict (Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism) Room: Kinloch, Hilton Social media and technology influence movements and behaviours, but also pose challenges to how we study them. This panel will examine approaches to knowledge production in human rights; virtual recruitment and digital resistance practices; the role of popular culture in extremism; how social media can be used to diminish conflict; and how social media can help us gain a better understanding of lived experiences.

The spatiality and relationality of security (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Waverley, Marriott This panel interrogates the spatial and relational dynamics of security measures, and how memory and resistance are (re)negotiated of violence and governmental measures of control

Understanding actors in peacebuilding (Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group) Room: Tay, Hilton This panel is composed of research which engages with trade union, religious women, youth, graffiti artists, and former combatants.

Violence, humanitarianism and gendered resilience in Africa today (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Ledmore, Hilton This panel explores (gendered) responses to violence and extreme precarity in Africa. Its papers examine women's experience of gender justice after violence in Sierra Leone, women's non-neoliberal resilience in urban Zimbabwe, the silencing/silence of male victims of sexual violence in North-Eastern Nigeria, and the use of Legal Education plus Trauma-informed Therapy to aid community acceptance of former terrorists in Nigeria. A final paper discusses how to tackle some the discomfort that arises when teaching topics like these in the classroom.