BISA 2023 Conference

Name: BISA 2023 Conference
Start: 2023-06-20T09:00:00+01:00
End: 2023-06-23T23:59:00+01:00
Location: No location set

20 Jun 2023, 09:00 → 23 Jun 2023, 23:59 Europe/London

Description

Welcome to the event management area for #BISA2023. Here you can make submissions for our conference in Glasgow. We look forward to welcoming you at BISA 2023.

Contact

conferences@bisa.ac.uk

Tuesday 20 June
- 1
  
  Conference event / Uncomfortable histories: decolonising our universities? - Although this is open to all conference delegates you need to register in advance to attend at https://www.bisa.ac.uk/events/uncomfortable-histories-decolonising-our-universities Yudowitz Lecture Theatre, Wolfson Medical Building, University of Glasgow
Wednesday 21 June
- 2
  
  Conference event / Colombia River Stories: The Atrato River Guardians - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events Ballroom, Hilton
  
  Speakers: Jan Nimmo, Mo Hume
- 3
  
  Conference event / Exhibitor Hall Ballroom, Hilton
- 4
  
  Conference event / Politics of Wildfire - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events Ballroom, Hilton
  
  Speaker: Lorenza Fontana
- 5
  Panel / Assessing Military Transformation: Comparative Perspectives Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: WSWG Working group
  
  Chair: Patrick Bury (University of Bath)
  - Formative Experiences & Upcoming Challenges: The Impact of Operational Experiences on French Army Innovation
    
    My study investigates the impact of operational experiences on French army innovation. I provide a new case study to military innovation literature and explore further the interaction between bottom-up adaptation and top-down innovation. By providing a better understanding of force design and transformation the investigation looks to highlight key challenges the French army is likely to face in the future. First, it questions the role of the army by exploring the influence of domestic security on army transformation looking at the impact of Opération Sentinelle. It then looks at operations in Afghanistan and the Sahelo-Saharan strip to highlights the key role COIN campaigns have played in shaping the current army model and moulding French army’s identity. Finally, it investigates how the French Army is looking to transition from a COIN model to a model fit for ‘high-intensity’. I argue that although bottom-up adaptations have been well integrated to top-down innovation creating an overall coherent model, the recent ‘turn to high intensity’ calls into question its sustainability.
    
    Author: Lucie Pebay (University of Bath)
  - The Differentiated Diffusion of NATO Lessons-Learned Best-Practice: Military Learning in the Netherlands and Ukraine
    
    The ability to learn from exercises and operational experiences is essential to effective military adaptation, emulation and innovation, however little research has been undertaken on formal military ‘lessons-learned processes’. Drawing on extensive ESRC-funded original empirical research (ES/V004190/1) this paper examines the diffusion of the NATO lessons-learned process within a NATO member state (the Netherlands) and NATO partner state (Ukraine). In doing so the paper makes two important contributions to our conceptual and theoretical understanding of military learning. First, it draws attention to the utility of the academic literature on absorptive capacity to provide a diagnostic toolkit to explore best practice in military learning. Second, the paper contributes to theorising military learning. It finds that while structural variables, including threat level, organisational culture and bureaucratic politics play an important role in the identification and adoption of lessons-learned best-practice, it also illustrates the insights that process-based analysis can provide in improving descriptions and explanations of military learning. The paper argues that process research offers new tools for providing a ‘peek through the window’ at what is going on in organisational learning, as a contribution to military research and application in wider fields of public and private sector engagement in extreme contexts.
    
    Authors: Tom Dyson (Royal Holloway College, University of London) , John Tull (Royal Holloway College, University of London)*
  - Politics, the Media, and the Bifurcation of the American Military
    
    We are currently in the “Golden Age of Special Operations” – a period that began in the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when special operations troops and Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officers led the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan. For the first time, special operations forces were not only the main effort in a major military campaign – they were the only ground force engaging enemy formations in a major battle. Over the next two decades, U.S. special operations units became Washington’s preferred “force of choice” to fight America’s global wars against terrorists, revolutionary movements, and rival state and nonstate actors.
    
    These elite forces now enjoy unprecedented political support and bureaucratic confidence, and they have harnessed this newfound power to expand their organizational influence, increase their budget, and gain additional administrative powers through new legal authorities. These developments created an imbalance that has split the American military into two distinct entities across each of the four military services: special operations troops and their non-special counterparts.
    
    Using an extensive collection of primary source documents, a newly-developed data set, and the theoretical literature on civil-military relations and military innovation, I argue that these changes have undermined long-standing norms in American military professionalism and civilian oversight, which contributed to the failed war in Afghanistan, numerous ethical scandals, and led to ineffective security assistance efforts around the globe. Moreover, similar problems have begun to materialize in countries that emulated America’s commando infatuation which could reduce the ability of these states to effectively counter a growing number of regional security threats.
    
    Author: Stephen Grenier (Johns Hopkins University)
  - Inspiring Transformation: Exploring Commanders' Role in Driving Military Organizations' Redesign Using All-Female Military Units
    
    Under what conditions do states innovate or adapt through All-Female Military Units (AFMUs) in multinational interventions of the new century? AFMUs’ employment in operational theatres is an undeniable proof of the armed forces’ ground-breaking ability to transform. And yet, their study remains insufficiently investigated by the literature in Security Studies, both theoretically and empirically. To this end, this paper puts forward the ‘‘Innovation-Adaptation Theory’’ (AIT). AIT clarifies when states renovate or tailor their national military instrument to new operational demands. The qualitative study—based upon semi-structured interviews with Italian uniformed personnel deployed in Afghanistan and in Lebanon between 2010 and 2022 and a fieldwork at the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)—expands our understanding of how middle-European militaries, often neglected by traditional scholarship, may be both valuable sources of innovation and adaptation. To preview the conclusion, a higher state’s role of leadership in the mission increases chances to forging innovations. This variable is shaped, in turn, by Commanders’ perspicacity to leverage on lessons learned distilled from the past and wager on new potential solutions. By providing the first, fine-grained empirical analysis of two major instances of AFMUs—the Female Engagement Team (FET) and the Female Assessment/ Analysis Support Team (FAST)—I hope to further the debate on transformational dynamics within military organisations.
    
    Author: Cristina Fontanelli (University of Genoa)
- 6
  Panel / Critical Approaches to Feminist Foreign Policy: Colonial Logics, Hierarchies, Care and Anti-Genderism Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Columba Achilleos-Sarll (University of Birmingham)
  - The Postcolonial Feminist Take on Feminist Foreign Policy Analysis
    
    Comprising a review of qualitative methodologies in the existing analysis of Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP), this paper highlights the lack of postcolonial feminist critical approaches. Building on the critique offered by these approaches, this paper foregrounds the potential of postcolonial feminist methodologies in the discourse analysis of FFP, and how that might help reimagine an FFP, informed by local forms of knowledge. The goal is to contribute to a more nuanced mode of engaging with FFP offered by postcolonial feminist insights, and thereby also help reconstruct FFP as we know it.
    
    Author: Neha Tetali (Trinity College Dublin)
  - Feminist Foreign Policy for India? Conversing with the Anti-Imperial Past
    
    Building on my ongoing research on the international thought of Indian women envoys in mid twentieth century, this paper explores the questions of war, peace,nationalism and larger international vision of early Indian women leaders like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Lakshmi Menon, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur to name a few. Did Indian women nationalist leaders actively think of a future foreign policy for independent India? What were their ideas of interstate relationships? How did nationalism converse with the transnational solidarities and the world visions of the transnational anti-imperial women’s movement? What were the voices left out of the conversation thus throwing light upon the epistemology of independent India’s foreign policy? Looking for lost possibilities of anti-imperial state feminism, this paper borrows the idea of ‘useable history’ (Delap, 2020) to look at the formative years of Indian foreign policy and women’s narratives therein to explore the possibilities of a feminist foreign policy future. To this effect the study excavates foreign policy beliefs of elite women leaders employing the tools of feminist historiography and attempts for a gendered theorization of foundational years of Indian foreign policy.
    
    Author: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Feminist Foreign Policy, Colonial Logics, and Normative Hierarchies: Perspectives from India
    
    The proposed paper aims to investigate, why postcolonial states like India (with a focus on Modi 2014-2021), despite their stated commitment to gender norms, display strategic hesitancy to subscribe to the template of feminist foreign policy. Drawing on a postcolonial/ intersectional lens, the aim is to unpack the colonial logics, and normative hierarchies that underpin the universal template of feminist foreign policy despite its claim to epistemic plurality. The case of India, is particularly relevant, as India as a rising power claims itself also as a ‘moral power’ with a stated commitment to gender norms, but still steers clear from either adopting the NAP, or FFP. The empirical focus has a twofold purpose: first it explicates the feminist strategic thinking in different phases of Indian Foreign Policy, with a particular focus on the period 2014-2022. Secondly it highlights why postcolonial states like India, display strategic hesitancy to deploy the term feminist foreign policy. The paper problematizes a straightjacketed reading of this strategic hesitancy as case of lack of normative commitment, but more so as a case where states like India, look at templates of feminist foreign policy hinged on colonial logics that perpetuates structural and global inequalities. Through this analysis the attempt is to push for decolonizing the universal/ethical templates of feminist foreign policy that stem from the Global North.
    
    Author: Singh Shweta (South Asian University)
  - Complicating France’s feminist diplomacy narrative by examining the national context: the Republican model, the racialization of gender equality, and rising anti-genderism
    
    In recent years, a growing number of states with a Feminist Foreign Policy have turned the gaze to their national sphere to assess gender equality and have included an internal dimension in their feminist foreign policy strategy (see for instance, Sweden’s, France’s and Canada’s). Looking at gender relations introspectively also speaks to postcolonial/decolonial criticisms that the FFP imagines feminism to travel from the Global North to the Global South, West to East and that it is something to do ‘over there’ (Anstrop et al. 2021, p. 206; see also Achilleos-Sarl 2018). In an effort to (re)brand themselves through the application of feminist foreign policy, states in the Global North are produced as feminist agents of change and bastions of gender equality (Jezierska and Towns 2018). This paper illustrates the political purchase of re-entangling the domestic realm with foreign policy to trouble this story. I focus on three significant aspects of French gender politics that reveals France’s fragile relationship with gender: the ‘model Republicain’ and universalism in French society; the notion of ‘sexual democracy’ and the racialisation of gender equality; and the rise of (state-sponsored) anti-genderism since the 2000s.
    
    Author: Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU)
  - Exceptional Feminist States: The Paradox of Canadian and Swedish Narratives of Global “Care” and Indigenous Injustice
    
    Sweden and Canada’s self-identification as exceptionally “caring” and “ethical” states committed to the goal of global gender justice has found new meaning through the adoption of feminist foreign policies. However, despite demonstrating an explicit dedication towards feminist solidarity abroad, both states have failed to adequately attend to the care requests of the Indigenous peoples and communities living within their own seized and settled borders. A lack of self-reflection coupled with an unwillingness to atone for historical acts of colonial violence illuminates the flagrant hypocrisy associated with Swedish and Canadian claims to exceptionalism. Through an illustrative reading of state and church narratives, this paper examines the silences in state provisions of care and reconciliation vis-à-vis the requests for substantive care from Indigenous communities. In doing so, this article addresses a significant gap in the literature pertaining to the violent paradox of feminist politics abroad, and perpetuation of indigenous injustice at “home”.
    
    Authors: Jessica Cheung (Freie Universität Berlin)* , Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh) , Georgia de Leeuw*
- 7
  Panel / Emerging Technologies and the future of IR Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: ISET
  
  Chair: Lesley Masters (Nottingham Trent University)
  - Cyber Power: conceptual relevance and strategic purpose
    
    The UK’s National Cyber Strategy has as one of its main objectives to be ‘a leading responsible and democratic cyber power’ (2022, p. 11) by 2030. The concept is so central to the UK’s new approach to cyberspace that it appears 54 times across the whole document. In comparison, its 2016 Cyber Security Strategy did not refer to the concept at all. So, where does this concept come from? And is the UK an outlier in putting it at front and centre of its cyberspace strategic narrative? This paper traces the emergence of cyber power, from a relatively obscure academic concept over a decade ago to its contemporary policy relevance. It proceeds in three parts. First, it uncovers the intellectual evolution of the concept, identifying the key texts that contributed to its popularisation, and how dominant understandings of power and cyber were constructed. Second, it looks at the main (cyber-related) strategic documents of three main actors in the cyber-domain – UK, US, and China – to identify whether and how the concept is articulated as part of these actors’ cyberspace strategic narratives. Finally, the paper brings together the conceptual evolution of cyber power, and its strategic articulation across the three above-mentioned actors to assess both the relevance of the concept, as well as its contemporary strategic purpose.
    
    Author: Andre Barrinha (University of Bath)
  - Building Trust in the Age of Virtual Negotiations
    
    The Covid19 pandemic had an immense impact on multilateral negotiations as diplomats migrated to virtual platforms such as Zoom. This study examined whether Zoom enabled diplomats to initiate or continue multilateral negotiations that were paused due to social isolation. This question merits investigation as multilateral negotiations are rooted in trust among negotiators, alongside diplomats’ ability to read their counterparts’ body language and sense the mood among negotiators. To examine Zoom’s impact, a survey was disseminated among 100 diplomats who used Zoom during the pandemic to negotiate with counterparts. Results suggest that diplomats can “read” a virtual room and even discern their counterparts’ body language. However, diplomats stated that trust cannot be built in Zoom as that requires physical interactions, namely “hallway conversations” in which diplomats foster close working ties. Thus, Zoom may be used to continue negotiations that began offline, but not to initiate new negotiations. The study identified additional factors that impact virtual negotiations including “Zoom fatigue” and the chat application through which diplomats gauge the mood among counterparts. These results are important as multilateral negotiations are expected to become more virtual in the future as diplomats seek to reduce carbon footprints or manage crises in near real time.
    
    Author: Ilan Manor (The University of Oxford)
  - Imagining New Futures in Cyberspace: Unsettling Geographies of Metaphor
    
    The abstract and complex nature of cyberspace lends itself to rich metaphor and neologisms. While scholars have explored several common metaphors employed in the context of cyberspace, more attention should be paid not only to how these metaphors propagate a particular vision of cyberspace but also how these serve to naturalise, reify, and remove cyberspace and its related technologies, from the dynamics of its political and historical development. In this paper, I examine some notable spatial metaphors employed in the discourses on cyberspace and locate their multiple shifting geographies. I further assess their implications for not only how cyberspace is imagined, represented and contained but also how specific subjectivities may be constructed. I suggest that a fuller examination of these metaphors can serve to unsettle the specific geographies that implicate larger structural forces such as capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. More broadly, this analysis can allow for a more conscious and critical reading of cyber related technologies and build towards a more inclusive and equitable vision of cyberspace for future generations.
    
    Keywords: cyberspace, decoloniality, metaphor, space, geographies, capitalism, technology
    
    Author: Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney)
  - Cyberspace sovereignty in practice – a comparative case study of the EU’s and China’s regulations of cloud computing technology
    
    The debate about different forms of cyber sovereignty is largely theoretical and abstract. What is missing from the literature are empirical case studies of how states use cyber sovereignty in practice. This paper aims to address this gap by revealing how state actor(s) in the EU and of China apply cyberspace sovereignty to counter the increasing influence of technology companies, in the issue area of cloud computing technology. We look at how a state’s regulatory framework is used to counter the influences from these non-state actors. We will first assess how the EU exerts normative constraints towards foreign tech companies through a case study on Alibaba. Then, we will look at how China operates the regulatory power towards Apple icloud. We aim to contribute to the literature in two ways. Firstly, we aim to understand how state actors engage with giant technology companies in cyberspace. Secondly, we aim to unpack the similarities and differences between democratic and authoritarian regimes in exerting regulatory power towards rising tech companies. We draw primary data from interviews with technology companies and Chinese academics and publicly available documents.
    
    Authors: Theo Westphal (University of Sheffield) , Ruoxi Wang (University of St Andrews)
- 8
  Panel / From the Domestic to the International in the Middle East and Asia Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Imad El-Anis (Nottingham Trent University)
  
  Chair: Imad El-Anis (Nottingham Trent University)
  - Climate Change (Semi-)Rentierism in Jordan: saving the environment, supporting society and stabilising the regime?
    
    Jordan faces a number of political, social, economic and security challenges, each of which threatens the material and non-material interests of those residing in the kingdom, as well as the stability of the government and Hashemite regime. While problems such as global economic crises, inter- and intra-state wars, public dissent and dissatisfaction, rapidly rising living costs, and the burgeoning trade in narcotics have featured prominently in discussions of both Jordan’s stability and contemporary rent seeking behaviour, climate change has been ignored. This is problematic as Jordan is one of the most climate change vulnerable states in the world and has very limited adaptive capacities and low levels of resiliency. At the same time, successive Jordanian governments have been engaged in global climate change mitigation and adaptation discussions, developed Jordan’s climate change policies and institutional framework, and have actively sought external support for its adaptation and mitigation efforts. This paper contributes to discussions on Jordan’s political economy, rentierism, and climate change in small developing states by analysing the ways in which the Jordanian government uses climate change to seek rent from abroad, and the role this plays in climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in the kingdom. We find that the government ‘rents out’ Jordan’s stability and cooperation on climate change initiatives to the international community in order to support the national budget as well as support the material and non-material interests of Jordanians. However, failure to secure sufficient rent, implement climate change policies fully, and communicate adaptation efforts to the masses undermine the effectiveness of Jordan’s climate change policies.
    
    Authors: Imad El-Anis (Nottingham Trent University)* , Marianna Poberezhskaya (Nottingham Trent University)
  - How is Xi Jinping nationalising the curriculum? A decade of compulsory moral education in China
    
    This article looks at the nationalisation of education in China though the dissemination of a homogenous patriotic narrative in compulsory education (grades 1-10). Since Xi took power in 2012, his aim has been to construct a nation of patriotic citizens who equate China's prosperity with the CCP under his leadership, as well as with Socialism with Chinese characteristics, the latter increasingly shaped by Xi Jinping Thought. The analysis uses a mixed methods framework to look at moral education-related stipulations in key educational legislation from the last decade. It then compares it with the homogenous narrative on education disseminated by the latest two National Congresses of the CCP, as well as the September 2021 Law on Private Education, which cracked down on much of the curricular independence that previously defined the Chinese private education sector. The latest legislation, as well as Xi's political rhetoric, prioritise education as instrumental to the national rejuvenation discourse, and are increasingly regulating the curricula used in the private sector. The Centre is thus aiming to consistently disseminate a monolithic vision of ‘Chineseness’ in order to legitimise the Party’s existence and ensure its survival through the nurturing of new generations of loyal citizens.
    
    Author: Anca Crowe (Institute of Education, UCL)
  - Contentious Hydropolitics in the Middle East: Power Asymmetry and Environmental Shifts in the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin
    
    After decades of cooperative initiatives and competitive practices in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin, the contentious hydropolitics has yet to reach a definitive settlement, which is, in fact, more elusive than ever. This paper argues that the asymmetry in the relative state capacities of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq conditioned by interstate as well as intra-state developments has been the fundamental parameter determining the state and the progress of contentious hydropolitics in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin. This constitutes the power dimension of the issue. What is worse, shifts in environmental factors in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq induced by human interventions directly or indirectly have compounded the state and the progress of contentious hydropolitics in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin. This constitutes the water dimension of the issue. And in both dimensions, the state of affairs has deteriorated over time. This paper traces the progression of the contentious hydropolitics in the Euphrates-Tigris basin in three consecutive periods. The first period covers the Cold War era until 1991, the second period covers the two decades between 1991 and 2011, and the third period covers the post-2011 era. In each period, first, geopolitical developments that impinge upon the state capacities of riparian states are discussed. Second, shifts in environmental factors induced by human interventions, either directly or indirectly, are reviewed. Third, practical policies and political positions of each riparian state are investigated. And fourth, mechanisms, processes, and outcomes of dispute resolution efforts are examined.
    
    Author: Eyup Ersoy (King's College London)
  - Non-Western Experiences in Global Normative Governance: Turkish governmental and NGO participation in the ECOSOC
    
    This paper aims to examine and explore this nexus in the example of Turkish governmental and non-governmental participation in the norm-making processes within the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). As of 2021, a total of 59 Turkish non-governmental organizations obtained consultancy status at ECOSOC and participated in the work of the Council. While Turkish diplomatic missions and non-governmental organizations participate in the work of ECOSOC, their contributions (including the contestatory ones) to normative debates remain overlooked – while the governmental involvements may be said to be overlooked due to the recent realpolitik agenda of the government, the non-governmental side of the story remains unreasonably disregarded. An inquiry into the latter would well reveal a non-Western account of public expectations from and perceptions of the UN normative system. The paper intends to reflect on this by seeking answers to the following questions: (i) What are the motivations of diplomatic channels and civil society from Turkey to participate in ECOSOC?; (ii) How do they contribute to norm development processes in the Council (contestatory or supportive)? and (iii) how do the diplomatic missions and civil society interact as part of the normative agenda and works of the Council? The findings are based on (i) verbal and written statements by representatives of government and non-governmental organizations from Turkey at ECOSOC meetings between 2000 and 2020 and on (ii) interviews conducted with government officials and civil society representatives. The paper will present the preliminary findings of an ongoing project funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK).
    
    Authors: Husrev Tabak* , Ali Onur Ozcelik* , Kadri Kaan Renda (Hacettepe University) , Gurhan Unal*
- 9
  Panel / Grief and Memory in the Pandemic and Post-Pandemic world Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews) , Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Naomi Head (University of Glasgow)
  
  Discussant: Naomi Head (University of Glasgow)
  - Colonialism and Climate Change: Historical Trauma, Ungrieved Grief and Recovering a Future for Children
    
    The discussion between the developing and developed world in Egypt during COP27 brought the history of colonialism and its impact on climate change to the table, as did the earlier floods in Pakistan. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of unacknowledged grief and guilt, accruing over centuries, on our ability to move forward to a more sustainable future. At stake is not only a question of ‘loss and damage’ for those who have suffered disproportionately in the past and present, but also the need to acknowledge how past practice has set the stage for not only global inequality but climate change. Against the backdrop of this discussion, following a year of climate disasters across the world, we develop concepts of ungrieved grief and unacknowledged guilt, and the mechanisms by which populations collectively turn away from uncomfortable or shameful truths. The failure to look at the past has transgenerational consequences, as present distractions contribute to an inability to ‘see’ the consequences of present action for future generations. The paper concludes with an exploration of the contradictory pressures in the current context, highlighting both the impossibility and the importance of grieving as a planet.
    
    Authors: Nicola Mackay , Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews)
  - The premature ‘after’? Post-mortem, post-pandemic, post-conflict
    
    While formal peace agreements matter for ending armed conflicts, feminist scholars have drawn attention to the long shadow of violence and its afterlives. Populations affected by violence and scholars studying their experiences have invented language that better tracks with their sense of milestones. They have spoken of “the pre-post-conflict,” “the post-accord.” In this paper, I apply these insights to a different domain by considering the limits and possibilities of language about time in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. I reflect on how both the pandemic itself and the grief associated with it have shuffled time for the subjects of world politics. Drawing from autoethnographic data, and from the experience of teaching in the world politics classroom, I look to different sites and subjects and examine their conflicting desires: What does it mean to ‘return to work’, or to a ‘pre-pandemic normal’? Are such returns feasible or desirable? And what do language and its limits suggest about how the subjects of world politics make sense of the ruptures and continuities that grief, memory, and loss have brought into being? In exploring these questions, I build on Arundhati Roy’s invitation to treat the pandemic as a portal to imagining a different set of relations in the wake of loss.
    
    Author: Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews)
  - Transnationalising Memory? Nationalisation and the Pursuit of Accountability in Covid-19
    
    Three years into the pandemic and over 5 million deaths later, the COVID19 pandemic has, arguably, passed from a stage of uncertainty and emergency response to recovery. As part of this recovery, we are also moving into the active collective memory formation phase of the pandemic. Past pandemics have either faded from collective memory or been commemorated in overtly apolitical, predominantly “private” ways. This paper interrogates the forming collective memories and commemorative practices in response to the COVID19 pandemic. In doing so, we advance a theoretical framework drawn from literature on transitional justice and politics of memory which examines the linkages between the conceptualisation of the event's nature (e.g. its causes and harms), the politics of accountability (the question of who is responsible), and the practices of collective commemoration. We suggest that the past elision of pandemic deaths – and challenges to commemorating COVID19 in the present – is not solely attributable to the diffuse temporality and seeming “naturalness” of global public health challenges. Using the illustrative example of the UK's commemorative practices on the COVID19 pandemic, rather, we argue that the transnational nature of pandemics, and COVID19 in particular,
    poses obstacles to the formation of collective memory. We therefore suggest that nationalised struggles for commemoration and recognition are about making a transnational phenomenon sensible, and manageable which provides a constitutive groundwork for leveraging political claims of accountability within the existing statist political order.
    
    Authors: Yuna Han (University of Oxford)* , Katharine Millar (London School of Economics)
- 10
  Panel / International Political Economy of Trade Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Ben Richardson (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Ben Richardson (University of Warwick)
  - Labour Rights in UK Trade Policy: Mapping the Workers Who Matter
    
    In the academic literature on the trade-labour linkage it is commonly assumed that labour provisions in trade policies are intended to protect or raise the ‘national average’ of workers’ rights, however these might be measured and regardless of whether those jobs are connected to tradable goods and services. This paper instead starts from the premise that there is a political geography to the particular types of work and worker articulated within trade governance discourse. For example, rhetorical and legal references to the need to defend manufacturing jobs or tackle abusive practices in global supply chains carry within them implicit messages about who deserves what kind of support and the subnational or transnational locations where those people are likely to be found. By the same token, work clustered elsewhere tends to be politically marginalised. Interrogating the UK’s unilateral Developing Countries Trading Scheme, its bilateral FTAs that have done more than rollover an EU agreement, and its Export Finance agency, this paper seeks to map the workers who matter in UK trade policy.
    
    Author: Ben Richardson (University of Warwick)
  - The Cultural Foundations of UK Trade Policy
    
    Building on Bob Jessop’s work, our paper scrutinises UK parliamentary debates on the UK-Australia free trade agreement (FTA) to trace the economic imaginaries that animate trade as a new policy field within UK politics. Within the debates, we identify an overarching economic imaginary that reifies: (1) values of “free trade”, “international cooperation”, “democracy”, “high standards”, “animal welfare” and “climate action”; (2) the extraordinary agency of the Secretary of State for International Trade and the Government in shaping trade deals; (3) removing trade barriers, providing legal guarantees for non-trade public policy goals, and carrying out economic impact assessments as appropriate techniques of government on trade; and (4) democratic, accountable and transparent procedures in trade decision-making. These elements remain however imprecise and political actors contest UK trade agreements via three competing economic imaginaries which we call “Competitive Britain”, “State-Led Britain” and “Liberal Britain in a Rules-based World”. We argue that UK-Australia took its particular shape because a particular set of actors with a particular economic imaginary, namely “Competitive Britain”, were in key power positions allowing them to deploy their vision via free trade discourses, government institutions and economistic governing techniques that are contingent, but not fundamentally contested in UK trade policy post-Brexit.
    
    Authors: Silke Trommer (University of Manchester) , James Scott (King’s College London)*
  - I Heard it Through the (Trade) Grapevine: Explaining the Evolution of Ideas in Global Trade Governance
    
    The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is the centre of global trade regulation, but a host of other organisations engage in knowledge transfer, expert opinion and analysis. They represent a wide range of political positions but collectively they advocate new areas of possible regulation and provide analysis of existing and proposed policies both to the public and to policymakers. This paper elucidates the role of these organisations in shaping, constructing and reifying trade narratives by examining how ideas travel and are developed through this trade ecosystem. We will construct a unique dataset comprising approximately 1000 documents prepared for textual analysis, taken from several key trade-related institutions. We will use the dataset to perform an R-based text analysis, complemented by more in-depth qualitative analysis, to explore the transfer of recent trade policies through the trade eco-system, covering: (i) the ‘Made in the World’ Initiative and associated rise of Global Value Chain analysis; (ii) the Trade and Gender agenda; and (iii) the incorporation of the ‘Financial Inclusion’ agenda. In so doing, we will identify how ideas get adopted, adapted, and leveraged within the trade community, and the processes in which certain interests are either privileged or marginalised.
    
    Authors: Erin Hannah (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario) , Tyler Girard (Purdue University)*
  - The Performativity of UK Trade Negotiations with the EU
    
    This paper develops the argument that the hard EU exit entailed by the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) reflects the performative nature of the UK’s post-Brexit trade policy. Drawing on the work of J.L. Austin, we see the emphasis on the UK’s trade policy independence as a ‘self-enacting’ performance of Brexit focused on automatic sovereignty gains. We focus on three key aspects of the EU-UK negotiations and TCA. The first is the choice of an agreement model which sacrificed market access for regulatory autonomy and an independent trade policy. The second is that this trade-off between market access/growth and sovereignty was also reflected in the UK Government’s opposition to provisions on a level playing field. The same can be said of the third aspect we focus on: the UK’s tactic of holding out to the very end of the negotiations and then presenting the TCA as a set of hard-fought concessions to the UK policy position, on matters such as the level playing field, the role of the European Court of Justice or access to UK fishing waters. We argue that the UK obtained performative gains, with the Government able to claim it was making ‘sovereign’ choices, but at an economic cost to key economic sectors like finance, which it has downplayed. We conclude by arguing that, in contrast to its free trade discourse elsewhere, the UK Government has adopted a particularly strident and zero-sum conception of sovereignty in its relations with the EU.
    
    Authors: Gabriel Siles-Brügge (University of Warwick) , Tony Heron (University of York)*
  - Is There No Alternative? The MERCOSUR-EU Trade Agreement and Avenues for Resistance in the Global Political Economy
    
    By 2005, the Free Trade Area of the Americas was declared dead, the WTO Doha Round was at a standstill, and negotiations between MERCOSUR and the EU were suspended after an unsatisfactory exchange of offers. Brazil and Argentina were at the forefront of resistance to the EU and USA’s global trade liberalization agenda. Fast forward to 2019, the MERCOSUR-EU trade agreement is signed to much applause on both sides of the Atlantic – a win for inter-regionalism, MERCOSUR institutionalism, and the rules-based economic order amid the China-US trade war. What then does this agreement mean for counter-hegemonic resistance ‘from below’ in today’s global political economy, and how has resistance – both state and non-state – evolved over the intermediate period? Using primary and secondary sources, alongside 57 interviews with negotiators and activists across both regions, I conduct a process tracing analysis of the MERCOSUR-EU negotiations. On its surface, the agreement is one of the fairest of the EU’s recent negotiations with generous tariff reduction schedules for sensitive MERCOSUR industries and no TRIPS+ requirements for pharmaceutical patents. Nevertheless, the deal remains unratified, in part due to a 450-strong transregional civil society alliance. Ultimately a geopolitical deal, the final content of the agreement hides a complex web of resistance to trade liberalisation: between and within regions; between national leaders and civil servants; between the state and its citizens. By analysing these relationships, this paper contributes to academic and policy debates on the state of the liberal economic order and extant avenues for resistance and cooperation.
    
    Author: Asha Herten-Crabb (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 11
  Panel / International criminal law, atrocity and accountability Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Andrea Birdsall (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Andrea Birdsall (University of Edinburgh)
  - Ecocide: A 21st Century International Crime in the Making?
    
    Under international law, only four acts are currently recognized as international crimes: genocide, aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, it is not inconceivable that new international crimes will be established in the future. Indeed, there is presently a growing global movement, spearheaded by Stop Ecocide International and supported by networks of academics, lawyers, climate activists, governments, and prominent individuals, calling for ecocide to be made into an international crime. This raises a critical question that stands to revolutionize the future landscape of international criminal justice: Will ecocide come to be recognized by the international community as a new international crime? Importantly, this question cannot be answered without an appreciation of the concept of international criminalization. Drawing on a novel theoretical framework directed at analysing how and why the process of international criminalization unfolds, this paper examines ecocide’s prospects of being established as the fifth international crime. Through a systematic analysis of historical and contemporary efforts undertaken by state and non-state actors to criminalize ecocide, the paper will also demonstrate what the dynamics of international criminalization in the 21st century are, as well as how they differ to earlier instances of criminalization in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
    
    Author: Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England)
  - Preliminary examinations and the symbolic power of the ICC
    
    Preliminary examinations are one of the most powerful policy instruments that can be used by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and often their impact exceeds the one caused by actual indictments. The opening of a preliminary examination often has a spill-over effect, enabling the ICC to stigmatize certain violations and engage in dialogue with States to ensure accountability. Recently, the ICC concluded its preliminary examination of the situation in Colombia, the longest to date. Since the beginning, the Prosecutor maintained a permanent evaluation of the situation gathering information about alleged crimes, supervising legislative developments and shaping the public discourse on the local transitional justice system. This paper argues that there is much to be learned from the interaction between the ICC and the Colombian domestic authorities. The main argument focuses on how the ICC strongly have influenced the public discourse on accountability, looking at the court’s symbolic power and dialogical interactions with the national authorities.
    
    Author: Carolina Carvalho (University of Coimbra (School of Economics))
  - IHL and the regulation of large-scale criminal violence
    
    This paper asks whether IHL should apply to contexts of large-scale criminal violence. Through analysis of contemporary criminal groups in Latin America, it argues that while many would meet the IHL threshold for intensity of violence, fewer would meet the threshold for organization. Nonetheless, some could do so—and several scholars have argued that some parts of Mexico, for example, have been characterised as NIAC at least some of the time since 2006. Drawing on recent security studies literature on the characteristics of criminal violence, the paper argues that an important but only implicit assumption of IHL—namely that the parties to conflict are fighting to win a military victory—does not hold for criminal groups, and hence that the basic logic of IHL, according to which military necessity is weighed against humanitarian concerns, does not apply. This argument is further developed by considering what scholarship on civil wars tells us about the factors determining the level of compliance with IHL by non-state armed groups, and assessing the extent to which these might apply to criminal groups. The paper then turns to examine the wider consequences of a NIAC classification and the application of IHL. Since IHL is more permissive than IHRL in terms of the use of force, a NIAC classification risks increasing violence in state efforts to combat criminal groups. However, a NIAC classification can also serve to facilitate a more robust international response in terms of the ICRC, international justice, and the UNSC/R2P. Finally, the paper concludes with an overall assessment and some recommendations.
    
    Author: Miriam Bradley (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI))
  - The Crime of Aggression: A Major Challenge to Inclusive Rule-Based Global Order on Human Rights
    
    This paper focuses on the challenges the crime of aggression presents to post-Cold War efforts on multilateral cooperation, especially between the Global South and Western powers on human rights. Although the establishment of the International Criminal Court is seen as a major step forward towards cosmopolitanism, the paper argues that the Court’s inability to deal with this supreme international crime left the fundamental concern unaddressed raised by third-world states during Rome negotiations. It argues that despite resolving the definitional problem of aggression because of the amendments package adopted by the Review Conference and activating the Court’s partial jurisdiction over this crime, the UNSC retains the primary authority over aggression that will potentially politicize the Court. It examines the nature of the deep divisions between Western powers and third-world states that failed developing nations’ efforts to bring this crime under the Court’s independent authority. It argues that while the UNSC retaining the primary authority over aggression allows Western powers to continue to play realpolitik, the Court’s jurisdiction over other crimes provides legitimacy to their illegal humanitarian interventions in the Global South under their post-Cold War unilateral order which was the central concern developing countries wanted the Court to address.
    
    Author: Muhammad Ashfaq (University of St Andrews)
- 12
  Panel / Memory, Narratives, and Perceptions in World Politics Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Nicola Chelotti (University of Loughborough)
  - The Interplay Between Strategic Narratives and Events in Conflicts: Evidence from the Indo-Naga Conflict
    
    For both insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, narratives functions as sense-making tool through which events can be framed to ‘structur[e] the responses of others [their] development’ (Betz 2008: 510; Johnson 2018). Yet events themselves also hold the potential to either affirm or destabilise these narratives (Dooremalen 2021), with implications for the vital linkages between conflict parties and their constituents. There have been no attempts, however, to examine the relationship between conflict events, stability, and change in these contested settings. This article mobilises Ron Krebs (2015) framework to explore change and continuity in state and rebel narratives during low-level conflict in Nagaland, India. Unlike well-studied cases of wartime strategic narratives in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, the Indo-Naga conflict sits in the volatile, murky spaces between war and peace. Twenty-five years of ceasefire have been punctuated by ebbs and flows in low-level conflict and peace talks (Waterman 2021a). This has created a dynamic and unpredictable setting in which events have brought moments of convergence or threatened to destabilise the very foundations of the state-group ‘armed order’ (Staniland 2021), making the conflict a dynamic, deeply nuanced case in which to explore the relationship between events and narratives. We leverage granular conflict event data distilled from newswire sources and the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), mapping these against an original dataset of state and rebel narratives. Analysing moments of narrative contestation, affirmation and convergence, we identify critical moments of continuity and change through the relationship between events and discourse in armed settings.
    
    Authors: Alex Waterman (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)* , Ryan O'Connor (BCU)
  - Signalling and Perception in Australia and New Zealand’s Pacific Policy
    
    Faced with China’s growing presence in the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand (NZ) embarked in the late 2010s on major Pacific policy initiatives, the “Step-up” and the “Reset”. Both initiatives have involved substantial increases in development assistance, diplomatic posts, and high-level visit diplomacy. Yet, whereas Australia’s Step-up has focused in substantive terms on conventional security issues, NZ’s Reset has entailed greater emphasis on climate-change induced challenges in the Pacific, reflecting a more comprehensive understanding of security shared by Pacific Island Countries (PICs). These two initiatives signalled to PICs the two Australasian allies’ desire to remain their first-choice partners. To the United States, and other audiences, the initiatives signalled Australia and NZ’s resolve to assume greater responsibility in a context of growing geostrategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.
    
    Drawing on International Relations scholarship and communication theory, I conceptualize signalling as a form of inter-state communication through which a sender seeks to influence the behavior or worldviews of one or more receivers. The efficacy of such communication is determined not just by its costliness (as suggested by the mainstream literature on signalling) but depends crucially on how the signals are perceived by the respective receivers. The receivers’ interpretation of signals reflects, in turn, their past experiences with as well as other relevant behavior of the sender. The case of Australia and NZ’s recent Pacific initiatives illustrates these dynamics. PICs have welcomed the intensified engagement of the two traditional regional powers. However, discrepancies in Australia and PICs’ security narratives have put the efficacy of the Step-up into question.
    
    Author: Patrick Koellner (GIGA and University of Hamburg)
  - Right-wing populist contestation of the liberal international order
    
    This paper will contribute to the debate about the causes of contemporary contestation of the liberal international order (LIO) by right-wing authoritarian populists. The study will focus primarily on international institutions. Unlike most IR theories that see the sources of contestation of LIO as exogenous, similarly to Borzel and Zurn (2021, 825) we identify them as endogenous. In contrast to those authors, however, we show that they correlate mainly with the values represented by different institutions, rather than with their postnational, intrusive features. The quantitative analysis developed in the paper shows which values represented by international institutions are particularly contested by contemporary populists.
    
    Authors: Anna Wojciuk (University of Warsaw) , Maciej Górecki (University of Warsaw)*
  - Traditions, Dilemmas, and Emergence: An Interpretive Narrative Approach to Foreign Policy Roles
    
    This paper looks to consider an interpretive narrative approach to foreign policy (FP) roles. Much attention has been given to interpretive approaches to foreign policy analysis (FPA), in particular the way that FP traditions can be used to explain the web of historical beliefs of FP actors. However, traditions struggle to explain FP dilemmas, which are unusual or new circumstance. Dilemmas require agents to reimagine traditions to facilitate such contexts. One way that the interaction between traditions and dilemmas are articulated is in the changes in the narration of FP roles by agents. This paper will elaborate on this process by considering role emergence as a theoretical construct for understanding the interaction between traditions and dilemmas. As such, it seeks to evaluate the conceptual alignment between role emergence and interpretive narrative methodologies in FPA by considering the conditions of both dilemmas and role emergence. It will do so by delimiting traditions and roles in the case of emergence of British FP roles in the context of Brexit and the Salisbury poisonings. Overall, this will aid integration of role theory within the wider interpretive narrative methodological approach to FPA.
    
    Author: Sean Garrett (University of Bath)
  - Discipline through controversy: Constructing public perceptions through foreign policy 'talk'
    
    Most people never think about foreign policy. Fewer still adopt firm positions. Unlike domestic policy most people do not feel strongly invested in foreign policy decisions. Why then have these decisions sparked such controversy in American politics throughout the 2010s?
    
    Drawing on new primary and secondary material this paper investigates the function of foreign policy controversy during the Obama and Trump presidencies with a focus on the role of foreign policy ‘talkers’, defined as academics, journalists and legislators. Through a paired, most-different case study design this study takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore how these ‘talkers’ create controversy around particular foreign policy choices made by others in order to flag a divergence from agreed ‘rules of the game’ to a larger less-interested, and less-informed, audience who nevertheless have a stake in foreign policy issues. This advances two new concepts as part of the historical turn in IR scholarship. Firstly, this paper demonstrates the historical value of foreign policy controversy as an analytical tool and secondly it promotes detailed case study work of the blurred boundary between those who make foreign policy and those who talk about it.
    
    Authors: Joe Gazeley (University of St Andrews) , Daniel Mobley (University of Edinburgh)
- 13
  Panel / New approaches to state formation in Africa Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Peter Brett
  - Surrealizing the State: Understanding Absurdity and States at Work in Africa
    
    This paper looks at the role of absurdity in the workings of African states. There has been significant analysis exploring why African states do not necessarily operate in the manner outlined by political philosophers deriving from the Global North. Such critiques have often focused on the intersections between the public and private spheres, often referred to as neo-patrimonialism, but this notion has particularly racial undertones. More recently however, attention has shifted to looking less at how (African) states should function and examining them as works in progress or “states at work” (Bierschenk and Olivier de Saardan 2014). Surrealism can help theorise the incongruous but powerful connections and negotiations that characterise these workings, in which states surrealistically reveal the latent capacity for violence that underpins their existence. This paper, therefore, attempts to provide new insights into how states actually work, exploring the complex relationship(s) and realities between surrealism, humour and state legitimacy.
    
    Authors: Stephen Forcer (University of Glasgow)* , Laura Martin (University of Nottingham)
  - Against the Social Contract: The Somaliland Social Covenant as a Horizontal Model of Fellowship
    
    With the social fabric fraying across the world, as a result of inequalities in wealth and power reaching unsustainable proportions, global institutions are increasingly looking to a renewed social contract as a means to restore balance. This paper argues that, against this common assumption, the social contract, as a metaphor and model of vertical reciprocity between the State and Society, can only serve to reinforce the hierarchies that have obstructed sociopolitical change in the present. Instead, an alternative model of fellowship, coexistence and reciprocity will be presented: the Social Covenant. The Social Covenant, a conditional, intimate and non-hiererchical agreement between grassroots communities in the absence of the State, and which emerges during a time of crisis to unite such communities in a common mission, offers a promising avenue for how to shape political society in the future. The paper’s vision of the Social Covenant, while ultimately proposing an ideal-type model, is inspired by the very real political arrangement that emerged in post-conflict Somaliland, a self-governed region of Somalia that initially rebuilt society in the absence of a State. Drawing from extensive field research in Somaliland, the paper demonstrates the potential of horizontal, non-State forms of agreement can have in fostering less alienating and oppressive forms of communal life.
    
    Author: Matthew Gordon (SOAS, University of London)
  - Voluntary state-building in Africa: coproduction and contestation through unpaid labour
    
    How is the state produced in 2022? The exacting of unpaid labour in Africa has been through various iterations, through the colonial, early independence and contemporary neoliberal/post-liberal periods. While voluntary labour is becoming better covered in academic literature, we believe its relationship to state-building and the legitimacy of the state has been overlooked. We explore how 'voluntary work' is produced through the fusing of historical and contemporary, domestic and international, repertoires of voluntarism that have very real material implications in the wake of state retrenchment in Africa. We compare voluntary labour within the health sector, community policing and local peacebuilding, justice and governance interventions in Kenya. Studying such and the kind of society that people seek to establish through their labour reveals their imaginations of society, statehood and personhood. Voluntarism is thus a broader techne of governance, enacting and re-enacting a moral and political process of responsibilization, duty and political identity vis-a-vis the state. We conclude, therefore, that voluntary work, now-entrenched in public service provision, increasingly maintains the state in Kenya and beyond.
    
    Authors: Fathima Azmiya Baburdeen (Technical University Mombasa)* , Kathy Dodworth (University of Edinburgh)
  - External influence on political transformation in Africa- The international dimension of political settlement analysis
    
    The aim of this paper is to add the dimension of ‘external influence’ to the ongoing debate of political settlements. Though the concept of political settlements has broadened our understanding of how power configurations and elite incentives shape the deployment of political and economic institutions and much thought has gone into defining and measuring the constitutive elements of such settings the debate so far focuses largely on endogenous factors to explain how such settlements arise and transform. The emergence of settlements and their further development is seen as a result of intra-state dynamics between powerful groups that work in an aggregation process towards the emergence of tacit agreements between different blocs. In this paper, we argue that the role of external actors has to be considered if one is to understand the configuration of political settlements in Africa. In countries of the global South and especially in Africa, there is a significantly lower degree of autonomy at the state level vis-à-vis external actors, who traditionally have a major influence on core areas of state action. External actors can thus exert influence on many key areas that contribute to the emergence of powerful groups, coalitions, or factions in the polity and the genesis of new interests among them. Building on extant theorizing about the role of the international system on domestic politics in Africa and beyond this paper is concerned with the question: Can external influence provide an impetus for the realignment of political coalitions and subsequent changes to institutional arrangements?
    
    Authors: Georg Lammich (University Duisburg-Essen) , Christof Hartmann (University Duisburg-Essen)
  - Libya's Quest For Democracy: "Won the War But Lost the Peace"
    
    The present is always informed by the past and Libya’s political chaos is the perfect fit for this saying as from the dawn of the 21st century, Libya once again struggled with humanitarian intervention under the R2P by NATO as it once smashed by Italian occupation. Later on for almost 42 years, Libya became the two sides of a coin as on one hand, its economy reached at the pinnacle of the seventh sky, whereas its human rights were in peril under the authoritarian rule of Colonel Gaddafi. Apart from this, there has not been a single democratic election held after the end of the Arab uprising (to which they saw hope for democracy) in Libya due to the rivalries among the political parties such as the Unitary provisional unity government, Government of National Accord, National Transitional Congress and other stakeholders for the quest of power. This paper will try to highlight, the multidimensional problems which are being faced by the country on the way to establish a democratic political structure and will try to find that what measures should be taken in order to establish an effective authority capable of providing functional services with consistent institutions. The paper will try to find out why there is still a deficiency of democracy over the time after the fall of Gaddafi under the R2P operation led by UNSC. It will also try to find out how much the governance institutions functionally achieved their mission under the influence of internal and external multilateral actors. It will also try to find out the political changes that have been taken after the wake of the Arab Uprising and were they better than before? The aim of this piece is to examine the current political practices of Libya from 2011 - 2021 and the state administration process in order to examine the past and present administrative processes of the management processes that have been found in the social and cultural structure of the Libyan society and to make proposals for the future application of the ideal political system.
    
    Author: Akram Raza (Jamia Millia Islamia)
- 14
  Panel / Past, future and the present practice of critique in IR Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: CRIPT Working group
  
  Chair: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
  - Morgenthau’s thought on racial justice in America and why it matters
    
    It is commonplace for post-colonial IR to highlight the race amnesia integral to all strands of realism. This paper argues that such generalisation misrepresents Morgenthau’s thought on racial justice in America. The paper explores Morgenthau’s neglected writings in the mid-1960s/early-1970s to reveal that he incorporated racial justice into his conception of the national interest. Morgenthau argued that America was not capable of coming to a consensus over its national interest due its failure to define its sense of purpose. To define the nation’s purpose, Morgenthau argued, each generation of Americans needed to ask themselves anew: what does equality in freedom mean in the present historical context? In the context of his writing, such definition could not omit a key problem in American society: racial inequality. Morgenthau’s critique of American society was precisely in that it failed to negotiate its sense of purpose and grapple with the reality of racial injustice. Such failure was ultimately the reason why America failed in Vietnam. Rather than support Vietnam’s independence, America became a counter-revolutionary force, both in Vietnam and back home. The paper’s contribution lies is not only in setting the record straight on Morgenthau, but also highlighting that Morgenthau’s argument offers superior insights into the problems with US foreign policy today than contemporary realists.
    
    Authors: Felix Roesch (Coventry University)* , Haro Karkour (Cardiff University)
  - Critical Theory and IR in Retrospect
    
    While there is widespread recognition that the project of critique, which entered IR in the 1980s, has fallen into crisis, there is no consensus on either the cause or the meaning of this predicament. By locating it at the most general level, that of the international, this paper interprets the crisis of critique in relation to the wider theoretical malaise of IR since the end of the Third Debate. The paper argues that the fundamental deficit of critique in IR is that it has never articulated a compelling conception of the international itself that would displace the Realist/Liberal understanding. Instead, critique always engaged ‘mainstream’ IR within the space of the international, its assumption being that it could exist in and contest that space. What it has found, however, is that it cannot – hence its crisis or exhaustion. This failure, however, is in fact the real success of critique. For, in reaching its own limit, it has also exposed the limit of IR generally. What the failure of critique has revealed is that IR has no concept of the international. That is, it has no explanation of why there is such a thing as the international at all and what it means. This is the root of the contemporary malaise of IR – its own basic object is still a theoretical mystery to it. The crisis of IR, though, is that it cannot develop an adequate concept of the international, resolving the mystery at its core, and remain ‘International Relations’.
    
    Author: Andrew Davenport (Aberystwyth University)
  - Avoiding our Dystopian Future: What we can learn from a dystopian lens of analysis
    
    This paper will argue that by examining the genealogy of the dystopian tradition, it is possible to construct a theoretical lens through which one can evaluate the positive or negative outcome of the ever-changing complexities of our current reality. By connecting the inherent critique embedded in each dystopia to the works of political theorists, the gap between speculation and truth diminishes. This paper will begin by establishing that the use of the term ‘dystopia’ has increased over the past decade. Then, a genealogy of the genre, investigating examples of dystopian thought that preceded the coining of the term will be followed by an examination of the dominant dystopian themes that arise. Following, the correlation between the works of prominent political theorists, such as Adorno, Heidegger, Arendt etc., and the ideas that emerge from dystopian texts will be examined. Finally, the possibility of forming the themes and traits of the genre into a lens through which one could potentially analyse and, most importantly, criticise certain political and social phenomena will be argued. Dystopias portray distorted, negative, images of society through which, due to their intensity of their realism, we are given the tools to re-assess our current condition.
    
    Author: Aristidis Victor Agoglossakis Foley (University of St Andrews)
  - Construct Aggregate Status from Niches: Status: Addressing the Aggregation Problem in International Status Politics
    
    The definition of status as ”collective beliefs about a given state’s ranking on valued attributes“ is widely accepted. However, there are two prominent problems associated with this definition. One well-discussed is its material reduction tendency. More importantly, this definition raises the status aggregation issue: how do status beliefs develop and become widely shared collectively based on states’ divergent performances across a diverse set of attributes, given that different states might attach varying degrees of importance to different attributes and usually perform unevenly across valued niches? Drawing on status construction theory from social psychology, this paper contends status scholars need to distinguish two types of status: aggregate status and niche status. It argues aggregate status, defined as a political entity’s “standing relative to others in a deference hierarchy, is the type of what the status literature has been discussing. Meanwhile, niche status refers to a political entity’s standing relative to others in a niche such as a specific geographical region, a particular functional issue, and/or with regard to a valued trait. Inevitably, a state always has different niche statuses. Its aggregate status hinges on two other factors: the importance of the niches it occupies and the consistency of its performances across niches. Once established, a state’s aggregate status will affect its standings in emerging niches unless otherwise disproven by incompetent performances.
    
    Author: Pengqiao Lu (McGill University)
  - Fifth column politics in international hierarchies: ‘internal liminals’ in-between Russia and the West
    
    (How) do states use their (often imagined) ‘fifth column’ to manage relations with the international community? Empirically, this paper studies Russia’s fifth column politics as part of changing Russia-West relations (1999-2022). Theoretically, it starts from the fact of international social hierarchy, and employs the concept of liminality, i.e. in-betweenness, to reframe Russia’s politics as unfolding within a social ‘trilemma’ between the international hegemon, liminal states, and the latter’s ‘internal liminals’. The paper thus unpacks the intersection of local-international liminalities, assuming that the position of being neither within nor without international society affects a state’s practice towards its own ‘outsiders within’. In other words, liminal states are particularly prone to socio-political misrecognition (as fully-fledged state agents) due to expected but failed compliance with the core’s standards and therefore have a more acute need of creating a sense of agency. While ‘internal liminals’ threaten state agency by signalling plurality, dependency, and disorder, state practice towards internal liminals – be it sexual minorities, NGOs funded from abroad or former colonial subjects – can also simulate a sense of sovereign agency for the liminal state, seemingly allowing it to manage its outside. Reconceptualising oft-debated questions of liberal international order, and authoritarianism, this paper’s particular contribution is to highlight the role of internal liminals in international recognition struggles.
    
    Author: Anni Roth Hjermann (University of Cambridge)
- 15
  Panel / Responding to Outrage 1: Apologies, Inquiries, Commemoration, Scandal, and Truth and Reconciliation Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester)
  
  Chair: Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester)
  
  Discussant: Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester)
  - Scandals and the Politics of Justice
    
    This paper will explore the relationship between scandals and justice, with a specific focus on what our involvement in scandals says about our understanding of justice and the expectations we place on them. From this, it will identify the types of symbolic justice that can be enacted through a politics of scandals and how these relate to the possibility of emancipatory change. These three forms of justices are identified as follows: an exemplary form justice focused on gaging the need for accountability and retribution; a redemptive form of justice preoccupied with the redemption of the idealised identity of the community; and finally, a justice that is closer to a form of critical thinking. These forms of justice, more often than not, coexist and should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Rather, their meshing is a distinctive feature of scandals that helps us understand how they come to be invested as both moments of speaking truth to power, creating space for emancipatory actions, and moments when norms and social cohesion are reinforced.
    
    Author: Ana Flamind (University of Groningen)
  - Apologies as Banal Nationalism
    
    In this paper, I consider political apology to be an example of banal nationalism – a routinised and ritualised discourse that gives ontological primacy to the nation state. This, I argue, pertains to both the (anthropomorphised) apologising nation and the recipient nation. What are the implications of this? First, it diminishes the role of forces that transcend the state, such as white supremacy, racial capitalism, and colonial settlement. Second, it homogenises populations and erases cleavages among people and communities (both in the metropole and the colonised society) who have different degrees of culpability for the wrongdoing. This is respect to degrees of individual responsibility but also in respect to class, race, political disposition, and intergenerational culpability. Third, it underscores the problematic idea that the state must be central to transitional justice processes. In reproducing the centrality of the state, the ritual disallows more nuanced approaches to thinking about culpability and victimhood and curtails more imaginative ways to consider reparative processes.
    
    Author: Tom Bentley (University of Aberdeen)
  - Global Culture Wars
    
    “Culture wars” are typically studied as a problem of domestic politics. Less attention, however, has been paid to how political polarisation and so-called “identity politics” in the West are shaping global order. This paper is motivated by a desire to understand the link between three instances of culture wars going global: (1) neo-conservative Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention that identified culture war as the successor to the Cold War; (2) recent discussions amongst Chinese intellectuals on the destabilising effects of “white liberals” (baizuo 白左) and Black Lives Matter in the West; and (3) The rhetoric of “woke” in making sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the US conservative frame of “Woke War III” and Vladimir Putin’s anti-LGBT ideology. The paper aims to situate these three instances in the historical context of the current global disorder, where some scholars predict the bifurcation of international relations into competing blocs characterised by contrasting and competing values (e.g. liberal vs. authoritarian). In doing so, the paper aims to outline a research agenda for the study of “global culture wars”.
    
    Author: Liam Stanley (University of Sheffield)
  - Gendering the Politics of Accountability vs. Obscurity
    
    Bodies of academic literature dealing with the politics of scandal, secrecy and modes of accountability have for some time been treated as largely disparate despite their addressing of common themes. However, recent contributions have challenged this fragmentation, suggesting that modes of responding to scandal or outrage must be considered in conversation with one another, as well as in reference to the seemingly oppositional states of order/secrecy (Johnson et.al., 2022; Jester and Dolan, forthcoming). Prevailing interpretations of state accountability for gender-based harms in particular have tended to emphasise the normative importance of public expressions of accountability such as apologies and public inquiries, leaving the gendered and affective process of revelation largely unexamined. This paper aims to contribute conceptually to scholarly attempts to trouble the boundaries between denial/accountability, obscurity/transparency by positioning these unstable binaries alongside inherently gendered categories of public/private, rational/emotional. The paper traces the implications of such a conceptual framing in relation to the Republic of Ireland’s various governmental responses (including apology, public inquiry and commemoration) to public outrage over gender-based harms typified by the Magdalene Laundries.
    
    Authors: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire) , Emma Dolan (University of Limerick)
- 16
  
  Roundtable / Retaining the ‘critical’ in Critical Terrorism Studies: is it possible? 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.
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Chair: Rabea Khan (Liverpool John Moores University)
  
  Participants: Asim Qureshi (CAGE) , Rabea Khan (Liverpool John Moores University) , Anna Meier (University of Nottingham) , Kodili Chukwuma (Durham University) , Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St. Andrews)
- 17
  Panel / Seeing South East Europe Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Conveners: Miranda Loli (TU Darmstadt) , Lydia Cole (University of Sussex)
  
  Chair: Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
  - Selly joins the Romanian Land Forces: The Visual and Humour Politics of Military Recruitment on NATO’s Eastern Flank
    
    This article uses visual politics, humour, and gender in IR to unpack national, military, and geopolitical imaginations produced by comedy and jokes within military recruitment. Although NATO and its Western allies have increasingly used celebrities and influencers to promote the alliance, there is limited knowledge about NATO, celebrity politics, and military recruitment on its Eastern flank. Given Romania’s proximity to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the Romanian Defence Ministry cooperated with Selly (Andrei Selaru), a well-known Romanian influencer and comedian to develop a recruitment campaign to enhance its reserve forces. A 30-minute-long YouTube videoclip ensued showing Selly and his friend training with an infantry battalion that served in NATO missions. However, the videoclip was full of self-deprecating humour and jokes that ridiculed the military. By examining this videoclip and reactions to it, this article shows that comedy and jokes did not only undermine the militarised masculinity of the Romanian military but also provoked concerns about its geopolitical vulnerability to Russia, all of which led to renewed calls for further militarisation and rearmament. Therefore, by exploring the gendered narratives of this recruitment campaign, this article queries the disruptive potential of humour within militarism, violence, and geopolitical imaginations in and beyond Eastern Europe.
    
    Author: Sorana-Cristina Jude (Newcastle University)
  - The Art of Witness: Interventions in the Visual Political Economy of Wartime Sexual Violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina
    
    Building on calls to provincialise IR from Europe’s so-called peripheries and the wider aesthetic turn in international relations, this paper intervenes in the visual political economy of wartime sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In particular, it suggests that this visual political economy has produced its subjects as hyper-visible, with a marked “timelessness” to processes of witnessing (Hom 2018). The continued reproduction of this visual political economy shapes international ways of seeing, visioning, and knowing (war in) BiH. This paper examines three visual and performative interventions into the subject of wartime sexual violence by Bosnian artists and makers that speak back to this context: Lana Cmajcanin’s Trauma of the Crime (2005-2011), Jasmila Zbanić’s Grbavica, and Edina Husanović’s Holy Jolie. Situating these interventions in their temporal, social, and political contexts, the paper traces how each maker disrupts dominant modes of knowing in the visual political economy of wartime sexual violence. Adopting an orientation toward witnessing that negotiates between politics, silence and remembering, and the social and material struggles of survivors in the present, these makers gesture in a more complex process of bearing witness to trauma.
    
    Author: Lydia Cole (University of Sussex)
  - Seeing and Listening Otherwise: Rave Aesthetics and the Multisensorial Politics of/in War
    
    Combining critical trajectories in war and military studies with interdisciplinary research on dance and electronic music, this paper explores two documentaries that visualise entanglements between rave culture and the everyday politics of war by focusing on the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I illustrate, how, mediated through the aesthetics of rave and dance culture, the films produce a multisensorial landscape that complicates dominant imaginings of Bosnia simply as a conflict space, recalibrating our perceptions of the sensory politics of war, its reverberations in the everyday and the creative attempts to outlive its shadows. At the same time, the documentaries add interesting layers to the map of global dance and club culture by spotlighting how sonic, embodied, affective and material registers of the rave and club experiences circulate and are re-imagined through local complexities, creativity and everyday realities. Through the aesthetic of rave an intricate international political scene emerges, bringing into focus unique multisensorial and affective gradations and the ambivalent, sometimes creative, responses of those touched by war and its afterlives, but also revealing transnational connections and networks of solidarity through music and club culture that offset conventional ways of seeing Bosnia beyond war’s shadows.
    
    Author: Maria-Adriana Deiana (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Telling the Story they Want to Hear? Outside Influences on Artists in Moldova
    
    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, while most capitals were celebrating the restoration of local cultures and identities, in Chisinau many were rejecting the existence of a separate Moldovan nation. Moldovan nationalism produced an independent state, but not an independent nation (King, 2000, p. 3). Different countries started to contribute to Moldova’s national identity formation. The literature on outside influences in Moldova is extensive. This literature focuses on nation-building, contested identities and foreign policy (King, 1994; Kaufman, 1996; King, 2003; Fawn, 2004; Lavenex, 2008; Kennedy, 2013). The literature on these influences in the Transnistrian frozen conflict is even wider (Kolto, 1998; Neukirch, 2001; Popescu, 2005; Dura, 2011). However, the literature examining the role of external actors in the artistic production in Moldova is somewhat limited. This paper aims to assess to what extent these outside influences contribute to the development of artists’ political engagement and shape national identity discourses. The first section provides a brief critique of methodological nationalism in the study of artists and politically engaged art, notably by describing the mobility of artists and the transnational nature of artistic funding and ideas. The second section explores how governmental and non-governmental officials from Turkey, Russia, Germany, Romania, and the European Union support artists’ political engagement in different artistic fields, such as theatre, performance and cinema. The last section explains how some artists, working on commission, produce artworks whose message often seems the one the funders try to promote.
    
    Author: Giovanna Di Mauro (Defence Academy, KCL)
- 18
  
  Roundtable / The (absolute) state of the discipline: Expertise, engagement, ethics and Russia’s war on Ukraine 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?
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Chair: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
  
  Participants: Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University) , Bohdana Kurylo (UCL) , Stephen Hall (University of Bath) , Allyson Edwards (Bath Spa University)
- 19
  Panel / Through the lens of Struggle QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Decolonial Solidarity Activism: A Practical Survey across Four Cases of Settler-Colonialism
    
    Millions of people across the world are engaged in resistance against oppression, for their rights to be recognised and justice to be achieved. Resisting alongside and in support of them are ‘allies’ and ‘solidarity’ activists. This paper focuses on a particular group of allies; settler-citizens who refuse. These are members of the colonising population who co-resist alongside the colonised and Indigenous population. Some attention has been given to unpacking what 'decolonial solidarty' means in theory and practice and to conceptualising the anti-colonial settler-citizen, focusing in particular on their complex role and positionality. Existing empirical studies have drawn out some practical examples, with a focus on single case studies. This paper seeks to build on the existing work by providing a practical survey of the ways in which settler-citizens have engaged in decolonial solidarity and supported the resistance of colonised and Indigenous populations. It does so through four cases of settler-colonialism: Apartheid South Africa; Israel/Palestine; Australia and Canada. Data has been gathered through mixed methods: archival work, author conducted interviews and participant observation, social media research and extracting information from existing studies. In providing a broader survey of how decolonial solidarity has been conducted in different cases, this study provides suggestions on how to weaponize the privileged position of the settler-citizen in support of resistance movements, without reinforcing colonial dynamics.
    
    Keywords: Settler-colonialism; resistance; solidarity; Indigenous movements
    
    Author: Leonie Fleischmann (City University of London)
  - Jewish-Israeli Activists for Palestinian Rights: Relationality, Intimacy, and the Daily Praxis of De(Colonization)
    
    Situated within scholarship that has unraveled the paradoxical effects of waging solidarity struggles with the colonized from the ranks of the colonizer’s collective, this paper explores how this paradox unfolds in the case of Jewish-Israeli activists for Palestinian rights.
    
    It does so by looking beyond the arena of solidarity action and at the micropolitics of the everyday: at how activists go about their lives as first-class citizens, move through space, and relate to each other, to Palestinian partners and to the other Others – often socio-economically marginalized Jewish-Israelis – that are not the target of their activism.
    
    Through an in-depth ethnographic inquiry, the paper shows how, in each of these endeavours, acts of defiance of existing colonial relations and subjectivities coexist, and often intertwine in counter-intuitive ways, with the perduring projection and reification of structural privilege.
    
    Yet, the paper’s conclusion departs from that of the “impossibility” of a decolonial endeavor of the colonizer (Memmi, 1957). If indeed an uncompromising and fully consistent decolonial stance is unavailable to Jewish-Israeli activists, the paper finds that it is precisely when they acknowledge the ambiguity of their contribution, and engage nonetheless in grounded, bodily, affective encounters with multiple others, that they can become more subtly aware of their intersecting colonial privileges and begin to erode them.
    
    Author: Alice Baroni (Geneva Graduate Institute)
  - Imagining a Belonging: Muslim Women’s Identity and Politics
    
    “The Revolution Will Wear Burkas and Bangles” (Kiran Bhatiya 2022). Bhatiya discusses Shaheen Bagh Movement, a Muslim women’s movement in Delhi, that started with protests in December 2019 against the current government’s decision to pass Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which provides citizenship to six religious minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan while denying citizenship to Muslims from these countries. These protests took a national character and were led dominantly by women. In another context, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a Muslim-women-dominated group, started in 1994 against the enforced disappearances in Kashmir continues to protest and occupy public space for justice. The two movements contextualise their politics differently; Shaheen Bagh grandmothers protest the government’s anti-Muslim policies, and the women activists of APDP seek answers for the disappearances of their relatives, primarily from the Indian state. While the movements have a commonality of being Muslim and publicly adorning their Muslim identity by covering their heads, they could position women at the centre of future politics in their respective societies. The paper aims to discuss how space and political mobilisation have changed over time? What does this public space mean in terms of Muslim women‘s subjectivity as political subjects and how they imagine their futures given the constraints they operate from and within?
    
    Authors: Rubina Jasani (University of Manchester)* , Rohi Jehan (University of Manchester)
- 20
  Panel / US Grand Strategy: Domestic Sources and Regional Applications Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: Andrew Payne (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Nick Kitchen (University of Surrey)
  
  Discussant: Nick Kitchen (University of Surrey)
  - Living Systems Thinking in the US Army’s Maneuver Warfare
    
    This article analyses the social scientific thought of General Donn Starry and Colonel Mike Malone in the early 1980s. They worked with James G. Miller and his Living System Theory to reform the army’s organizational structure so it could fight wars in Central Europe and the Middle East in maneuver warfare. They used biological metaphors in their strategic thought rather than reaching for more mechanical ones. This was a direct opposition to Robert McNamara and their experiences as veterans of the Vietnam War. This investigation assesses how systems thinking and American social sciences shaped the army’s doctrine writers and their thinking about US grand strategy. Their work had grand strategic implications because the US army could fight in regions and win against a numerically larger foe in future wars.
    
    Author: Tom Furse (City, University of London)
  - Retrenchment Begins at Home: Domestic Constraints on Restraint in the Middle East
    
    Why has the United States struggled to "do less" in the Middle East? At a crucial moment of geopolitical change, the notion that blood and treasure has been invested disproportionately in a region of declining strategic importance to US interests is no longer anathema. Yet despite a growing recognition of this reality and strong majorities of public opinion in favour of ending the era of “endless war”, the underlying US footprint in the region has barely shifted. This paper addresses this puzzle by exploring the ways in which domestic constraints impede the pursuit of a coherent programme of retrenchment. In doing so, it challenges existing accounts which tend either to ignore the role of domestic determinants of grand strategy altogether or attribute the lack of strategic adjustment rather narrowly to the obstructionism of a foreign policy “establishment”. Drawing on insights from adjacent sub-fields concerning public opinion, foreign policy decision-making and civil-military relations, this paper argues that the pathways through which domestic political incentives have frustrated attempts to change the character and scale of America’s commitment to the Middle East are at once deeper and broader than is commonly understood. In doing so, this paper is intended as a response to and amplification of recent calls for scholars of US grand strategy to take more seriously the role of variables below the level of relative power and national resources.
    
    Author: Andrew Payne (University of Oxford)
  - Developing Digital ‘Peripheries’ for Strategic Advantage: A Comparative Analysis of American, EU, and Chinese Projects in Africa
    
    This paper explores the strategic logic underlying the US, China, and the European Union's respective efforts to build the cyber capacity of African states. By introducing a new theoretical model, the paper chiefly argues that cyber capacity building processes are viewed as strategically useful to donors (the US, China, and the EU) so long as they can reconfigure networked asymmetries in the donor's favour. Supporting the model, the paper empirically illustrates that investing in the cyber capacity of a recipient—in the form of infrastructural investments, knowledge transfers, and norm exporation—has been perceived by US, Chinese, and EU policymakers as a crucial strategic lever to strengthen their own positions in the global digital network. Therefore, digital 'peripheries', despite their scant representation in scholarship, have become crucial for American, Chinese, and European Union strategies in the digital domain.
    
    Author: Julia Carver (University of Oxford)
  - Promoting the Rule of Law as US Foreign Policy
    
    Both the ability and willingness of US policymakers to promote core values, such as democracy and the rule of law, have become increasingly challenged. This paper examines how the US has approached efforts to promote the rule of law as a foreign policy goal from 2008 to the present. It analyses both the overarching policy and specific US foreign assistance programs aimed at promoting democracy and the rule of law, their underlying program rationales, and the resulting impacts. Using a process-tracing approach that draws on interviews, contemporary documents, and other relevant primary sources, it argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, rule of law aid has changed remarkably little despite powerful and increasingly vocal critiques of its effectiveness, design, and implementation. It shows how rule of law promotion work generally emphasizes maintaining the status quo instead of seriously trying to promote a more just legal order. This tendency remains even in instances where clear evidence suggests that efforts are not working or are even counterproductive.
    
    Author: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
- 21
  Panel / What is the future of peacebuilding aiming at transforming violence? Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Conveners: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent) , Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg)
  
  Chair: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  - Critical Assessment of the UNs role in peacebuilding Kashmir: Challenges, Obstacles, and opportunities
    
    One of the earliest resolutions at the UNSC (resolution 47, April 1948) was on the Kashmir conflict, calling for military de-escalation and subsequent organisation of a “plebiscite administration” in Indian and Pakistani Administered Kashmir. However, there are several inconsistencies in the UN’s understanding of the Kashmir conflict which has led to a legacy of failure in peacebuilding and conflict resolution in Kashmir.
    On a theoretical level, the prime inconsistency is the perspective that the conflict is solely an interstate one between India-Pakistan (and now China) rather than a conflict of self-determination that exists within the state boundaries of three post-colonial nation-states. The paper claims that, this lens emerged from the setting of hierarchies/distinction between legitimate and illegitimate owners of decolonisation movements-where India and Pakistan are legitimate, but Kashmir (as an independent entity) was considered illegitimate. This theoretical distinction within the UN has led to the formation of states in postcolonial global south where movements of self-determination are constantly delegitimised of which Kashmir is an example. In the first section, this theoretical approach will be critically analysed.
    The UN’s statist approach to the Kashmiri conflict subsequently led to state centric peacebuilding and mediation efforts which are critically analysed in the second section of this paper. The UN military observer force, which was placed in Kashmir (in India and Pakistan) in 1949 has been unsuccessful in preventing the subsequent border conflicts between India and Pakistan (1965,1971,1999), the continuous human rights abuses in Indian occupied Kashmir and the escalation of militarisation in (Indian and Pakistan administered) Kashmir. There have been several structural and political obstacles to the process set out by the observer group. In this section, the paper will reflect on two specific aspects: firstly, the evolution of the relationship of India and Pakistan with the UN military observer group till 2014. Secondly, the paper will also look at missed opportunities and evaluate ineffectiveness of the organisation in peacebuilding.
    In the last section, a reflection on the effectivity of UN-peacebuilding, its relationship with different grassroots organisations, government organisations and the potential for re-imaging future engagement with the ongoing militarised conflict will be assessed. Here, the focus will be on the role of grassroots activists and organisations such as JKCSS and APDP will be elaborated on. Simultaneously, the paper hopes to elaborate on what alternative support and legitimation can be provided to the movements of self-determination in the case of Kashmir.
    
    Author: Arshita Nandan (University of Kent)
  - Peacebuilding as Violence Diffusion instead of Violence Transformation?
    
    Liberal and constructivist theories in IR and peacebuilding literature had high hopes for UN peacebuilding. The diffusion of (liberal or universal) norms, peace through international and regional cooperation, the protection of civilians and human security are still key elements of this thinking, with the addition of strong local ownership, resilience etc. What is left of these hopes? The practice of UN (military) peacebuilding, for example in the Sahel Zone, offers very different outcomes: Rising violence between peacebuilders and violent groups, against civilians, unstable governments and political orders, and a lack of international legitimacy. Furthermore, the UN is clearly only one of several external agents present – and regional organizations plus bilateral operations have not help to decrease, but instead led to an increase of violence. Currently, peacebuilding in the region appears much more as robust counterinsurgency and has effectively turned into a machinery of “violence diffusion”, instead of working towards peace. However, this is not a one way street and must not necessarily determine the future of peacebuilding. In the paper, I will present hints and traces of how UN peacebuilding could “demilitarize” and offer again pathways to the transformation of violence and to peace in the context of the Sahel Zone.
    
    Author: Werner Distler (University of Groningen)
  - UN Peacebuilding Efforts for Lasting and Just Peace: Considerations on UN’s Framework in the Context of Restorative Justice
    
    Promoting restorative justice in post-conflict societies has been one of UN’s several peacebuilding programmes, aiming at building lasting and just peace. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated in 2020, ‘re-connecting’ victims and perpetrators is key to prevent violence re-occurrence. However, this assumes that before violence occurs, people are connected to one another. Furthermore, in restorative justice programmes, UN’s narrative presumes that it is the ill-behaviour of some that breaks such connection. This paper questions both these interconnected assumptions, which the main relevant literature seems to overlook. Drawing from a growing body of research on restorative justice, reconciliation approaches, and communication, this paper argues that to build lasting and just peace, peacebuilding programmes need to take an overarching approach, considering areas where active conflicts and/or violence are not present. In other words, peacebuilding frameworks and narratives need to be reconsidered, starting from examining whether people are already ‘dis-connected’ from one another in no-conflict areas/times. Through discourse analyses, this paper investigates whether the social fabric is already rife with social divisions, the anti-room of conflict, examining discourses in different European countries between 2020 and 2022. It contributes important considerations to discussions on UN’s peacebuilding efforts.
    
    Author: Giulia Grillo (University of Kent)
  - International Peacebuilding in Atmospheres of Violence
    
    Research on international peacebuilding is characterised by two understandings of violence. Within an instrumentalist understanding of violence, violence is seen as a means for conflict parties to achieve their goals. In contrast, a structuralist understanding points to the structural causes of violent conflicts. As an alternative to this, the paper aims to formulate an affect-theoretical understanding of violence. This is intended to theoretically account for an experience frequently expressed by those affected by prolonged violence: that violence is something that is felt and shapes the social environment even when it is not directly carried out. Thus, following the affective turn, violence is understood as atmospheric, i.e. as something that surrounds us and is effective as a "potential" (Massumi), i.e. as a kind of threat that is constantly in the air.
    Following this, UN peacebuilding will be examined as something that is embedded in such atmospheres of violence, for example after protracted civil wars. Two UN peacebuilding missions (UNTAC in Cambodia and UNTAET in East Timor) will be used to show how peacebuilding practices shape such atmospheres of violence and attempt to transform them on the one hand, but on the other run the risk of becoming part of atmospheric violence themselves. The empirical material for this will be documents, reports, pictures and video material from the missions. On the basis of the two case studies, consequences will then be drawn for future peacebuilding.
    
    Author: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg)
  - Trust in state security institutions in post-war environments: the role of international organisations
    
    State security institutions such as the police, the judiciary, and even the military are some of the most important areas of state activity. They are responsible for the establishment of security and safety in a country, maintaining public order, enforcing the law, and prosecuting crimes. In fragile environments such as post-conflict or semi-authoritarian states, the reform of the security sector is a major endeavour, and often part of larger peacebuilding or democratisation efforts of the government as well as international donors. Yet, particularly in post-war environments, state security institutions are often not trusted and even feared by the population. This paper critically engages with the role of international organisations in trust-building endeavours. Previous research suggests that international peacebuilding missions can play an important role in building trust in post-war environments. Yet empirical evidence from recent cases such as Afghanistan and the Sahel show that this is often not the case. The paper critically examines previous peacebuilding missions with a focus on trust-building, and discusses pathways for future trust-building under challenging conditions, as well as the role of third parties in trust-building initiatives.
    
    Author: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
- 10:30
  
  Refreshment break: SPONSORED BY REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY (RIPE)
- 22
  Panel / Clubs, coalitions, and contradictions in the global nuclear order Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Convener: Megan Dee (University of Stirling)
  
  Chair: Hassan Elbahtimy (King's College London)
  
  Discussant: Hassan Elbahtimy (King's College London)
  - Birds of feather flock to Vienna? Analyzing states’ positions on TPNW
    
    In this paper, we use automated text analysis to study positioning of states during the First Meeting of State Parties of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in Vienna in June 2022. Our results shows that participants in the meeting can be placed along a single axis, roughly associated with whether they view nuclear disarmament in an “old” way as a primarily diplomatic problem or in a “new” way as a humanitarian and emancipatory issue. We identify that Western European participants and those closer to the US and Russia are more likely to see disarmament in the “old” way; whereas the Latin American countries are more likely to see it in the “new way”. Our paper provides a new, quantitative way of measuring states’ positioning vis-à-vis the TPNW and contributes to the emerging scholarship on the treaty.
    
    Author: Michal Onderco (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  - Minilateralism and the NPT
    
    The failure of the 2022 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference to achieve an outcome agreement has again highlighted the long-standing frustrations and stagnation at the heart of multilateral nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament negotiations. In this paper I ask whether, and to what extent, minilateralism, with negotiations conducted between a ‘magic number’ of ‘key’ states, holds the answer to progress for the NPT. Drawing on the extant scholarship surrounding mini-multilateralism, alongside historic and recent empirical developments in group politics within the NPT, the paper first distinguishes two types of minilateralism: procedural (focusing on the ‘Friends of the Chair’ practice) and political (focusing on the US-led CEND initiative), detailing their respective (de)merits for the legitimacy, efficiency, and effectiveness of the NPT as a multilateral forum. I argue that while the ‘Friends of Chair’ practice is now an important embedded process of NPT review conferences, CEND constitutes something of a new high stakes game, offering prospects for achieving genuine progress for the NPT, yet at the possible expense of the multilateral process itself. The paper concludes with suggestions for best utilising procedural and political minilateralism as States Parties now look to establish a working group on strengthening the NPT review process.
    
    Author: Megan Dee (University of Stirling)
  - Veto Players, Treaty Effectiveness, and Multilateral Nuclear Arms Control
    
    Why do some treaties face difficult entry-into-force prospects after negotiators agree on their legal provisions? Bilateral nuclear arms control treaties usually require simple exchanges of diplomatic notes to enter into force. Their multilateral counterparts often face more contentious journeys. These treaties usually indicate the number of states that must deposit ratification instruments, or may even require participation by specific states. This paper presents a theory of treaty entry-into-force. I argue that negotiators may identify key named veto players to ensure successful implementation. In both arms control and other areas of international cooperation, the more veto players an agreement mandates, the greater its potential effectiveness. Yet, unintended consequences may emerge as an expanded club of veto players increases entry-into force challenges. Put differently: There is a trade-off between treaty effectiveness and ease of entry-into-force. I demonstrate the logic of the argument with a case study of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Language requiring ratification by 44 named “nuclear-capable” states has created significant obstacles to realizing an inspectable global prohibition on nuclear explosive testing.
    
    Author: Stephen Herzog (ETH Zurich/Harvard Kennedy School)
- 23
  
  Roundtable / Contemporary Reflections on Critical Terrorism Studies 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.
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Chair: André Saramago (University of Coimbra)
  
  Participants: Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL) , Elisabeth Schweiger (University of York) , N/A , Julian Schmid (Central European University)
- 24
  Panel / Emotions, social movements and resistance Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow)
  - How emotional resource exchange combat violence against protestors in social movement? A case study of women’s empowerment in anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong
    
    Violence against protestors in repressed and authoritarian states has always been found. How do female protestors and women’s organisations combat it during movement repression? This paper explores the case of how female protestors, women’s organisations, and affinity groups encountered physical and sexual violence in the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong in 2019 by exchanging emotional resources. Violent actions by the Hong Kong Police Force have been criticised and traumatised protestors in the anti-extradition movement. The vulnerabilities of women in social movements lead the paper to focus on the human rights development of female protestors. This paper argues that female protestors and women’s organisations established an informal relationship network by exchanging emotional resources, i.e. mutual suffering experiences, and jointly engaging in protest events in the anti-extradition movement. Compared to rational and material resource exchange in social movement, this paper emphasises affective support, sympathy for victims of police brutality and sexual violence and a mutual-helping relationship between protestors, women’s organisations and affinity groups. They exchange emotional resources through interactions and relationship network construction to empower women and sustain the anti-extradition movement development. This paper acknowledges the borrowing of affective mobilisation as well as the empirical evidence from in-depth interviews and social network analysis to contribute to the literature debates on women’s political participation in the political arena.
    
    Author: Fiona Wong (University Of Edinburgh)
  - Feeling the Heat? Transnational Climate Elites Emotional Persuasion
    
    Scientists have identified the absence of global leadership as a crucial factor in the past 30 years’ failure to address the climate crisis. Studies in psychology also reveal that intense emotions are an essential element to drive people to act. This paper argues for the integration of emotions into the study of climate entrepreneurship. Recent research on transnational climate entrepreneurs has focused on their advocacy networks, skills, resources, and legitimacy. Environmental studies have generally emphasised how frames influence the rise of emotions such as eco-anxiety, but few scholars focus on what climate leaders say and feel. A better understanding of the emotions that drive these elites of transnational climate governance and how they use them to convince the public and other leaders will contribute to our knowledge of the mechanisms needed to provoke large-scale political change. In this comparative study, we conduct a content analysis of statements from diverse successful climate elite entrepreneurs, including billionaire Michael Bloomberg, youth activist Greta Thunberg, indigenous rights advocate Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Hollywood actress Jane Fonda, and former CEO of Unilever Paul Polman. We reveal how they use specific emotions and emotional metaphors to build their influence.
    
    Author: Philippe Beauregard (University of Aberdeen)
  - Black Lives Matter Movement: Emotions and Protests
    
    In this work, this study focuses on the linkage between emotions and protests to explore emotions and their roles in collective societal reactions. The core aim is to analyse how emotions diffuse at the transnational level as the coping mechanism of people to fight against global injustices. The illustrative case of the article is the Black Lives Matter Movement which has become into a global reaction against injustices and police brutality. The major turning point was the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man who was brutally killed by police officers in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. After the incident, the protests which initially started in the United States have spread quickly to various places. Social media, special slogans, and symbolic movements are addressed as key components of repertoires of the Black Lives Movement. Hence, this work sheds light on the impact of collective-level emotions in transnational protests regarding collective identity construction and hope for a change.
    
    Author: Efser Rana Coskun (Social Sciences University of Ankara)
  - Cucktales: Race, Sex, and Enjoyment in the Reactionary Memescape
    
    This paper navigates and traces the racial and gendered politics of reactionary memes through an analysis of one of the more widespread digital memetic expressions of contemporary reactionary politics: “the cuck”. A derivative of the term “cuckold” referring to a man who is being cheated on by his wife that can be etymologically traced back to medieval England , the cuck meme began its popular digital circulation in the chaotic, reactionary imageboards of 4chan around 2014 during the misogynistic Gamergate saga. The meme later enjoyed its peak popularity during the electoral campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 with variations on the meme “cuckservatives” and “libcucks” becoming popular insults against political opponents in subreddits such as r/_TheDonald and in the wider memescape. The meme still widely resonates amongst “incel” (involuntary celibate) communities on Reddit as well as the wider “manosphere”.
    
    While on the surface the meme refers to a simple “other-ing” device against those who are perceived as weak beta men, this paper, engaging with black feminist and Afropessimist literatures, contends that the particular mediatic circulations and variations of the meme gestures towards a more complicated relationship between race, enjoyment, and masculinity that haunts the political space of the memescape. In fact, it illuminates how a particular, historically situated mode of white, masculine subjectivity traverses the memescape in establishing and expressing a common reactionary sensibility resonating across personal, cultural, and political issues in composing a narrative of deferred and stolen enjoyment. It follows the cuck meme from pornographic anxieties about black men and white women to the Gamergate events of 2014, from international fears around migration to dissatisfactions of young wage workers. Through this examination, it asks: why does this particular meme resonate so strongly and widely amongst reactionary subjects?
    
    Author: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
- 25
  Panel / Exploring structures of power in space Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Sarah Lieberman (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  
  Chair: Sarah Lieberman (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  
  Discussant: Sarah Lieberman (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  - Space Technology as a Centrepiece for Strengthening Nigeria’s Regional Influence and Addressing Domestic Challenges
    
    Since its independence, Nigeria has acted and been portrayed as a regional hegemon in Africa. Nigeria’s influence in Africa is predicated on its oil revenue, economy, and military. However, Abuja’s hegemony is threatened by the unstable global oil price, a weakening economy, and national insecurity. Hence, Nigeria needs an enduring source of power for sustainable influence in Africa.
    
    Research on space capabilities as a source of power (spacepower) has recently gained momentum due to the increasing need for states to effectively act globally and essentially utilise space technology for achieving national goals. One approach for analysing spacepower is Susan Strange’s IPE structural power theory. This approach is especially crucial because it gives a state the power to shape how other states and their institutions must operate through the structures of security, production, knowledge, and finance.
    
    Nigeria has a space agency, satellites in orbit, and a currently built space laboratory and spaceport. These capabilities can be a reliable source (spacepower) for acquiring sustainable power. This study uses the structures of power to analyse Nigeria’s space capabilities and how they can be leveraged to strengthen Abuja’s regional influence and their potential to address domestic challenges. The research uses a qualitative method that combines document analysis and semi-structured interviews to provide answers to research questions.
    
    Author: Kehinde Abolarin (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  - A Scramble for the Stars? Current efforts at space colonization in the context of renewed Great Power Competition
    
    his work surveys the various current plans for the exploitation of interplanetary bodies. It then analyzes them in the context of renewed great power competition. It posits that these efforts, both private and national, are likely to further reinforce competition amongst the space powers as they look to increase their relative power vis a vis their adversaries. This is rooted in the reality that the plans as they stand have the potential to establish de facto national claims of sovereignty on interplanetary bodies for the purposes of economic and colonial activity. Resting upon insights gained from corporate and state-driven colonial activity of the past, it then explores how this has the potential to result in an interplanetary “land-grab” amongst space powers as colonization efforts begin in earnest. It concludes by outlining the opportunities for space powers looking to exploit the cosmos for strategic and economic gain while also addressing the inherent risks to international stability such a future seems set to entail.
    
    Author: Adam Nettles (Università degli Studi di Milano)
  - Structural racism in outer space
    
    The space race of the 20th century was dominated by two superpowers. However, in the 21st century many more players have a stake in exploiting the technologies and opportunities of space exploration. This paper explores the extent to which we can discern structural racism amid these coalitions of states and other actors, and what this can tell us about their behaviour in space. We have on the one hand the USA and its ISS partners Canada, EU and Japan and on the other, China and its partners from the Global South. The whiteness of one party compared to the other is immediately apparent but digging deeper we find more questions to unpack. Race is one of the key power structures on earth, shaping relations between individuals and states. This paper seeks to understand how structural racism on earth is mirrored in space. How does the language, imagery and experience of colonialism and white supremacy shape the public imagination when it comes to exploring space? To what extent have legacies of colonialism played a role in how partnerships develop? What insights can postcolonial analysis offer into China’s efforts to build its outer space silk road?
    
    Author: Laura Cashman (Canterbury Christ Church University)
- 26
  Panel / India's Conflicts and Its Quest for Power Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: T.V. Paul (McGill University)
  - Indo-European Partnership in the Post-Covid Era: How Mutual Complementarities and Strategic Expediency can help sustain the Democratic World Order?
    
    The Global Order is transitioning from a predominantly Liberal-Internationalist one into a more Neo-Realist one. Economically strong authoritarian states have escaped the need of political liberalization, and now pose significant revisionist threat to neighbors and the Democratic World Order.
    
    Most European states relied on the Trans-Atlantic Alliance for security, but traded with Russia for energy, and China for wealth. The intensification of the Sino-American Rivalry, the Covid-19 Pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine – have caused the revitalization of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, dismantling of the prospects of Euro-Russian détente, and ominousness in the embrace of China.
    
    Delhi has unique agenda of building a Realist Multi-Polar World but with Liberal Rule-Based International Order. Which includes ‘developing democracy’ with the fellow democracies, bolstering territorial integrity with other status-quoist states, deepening globalization with the Global North, and Climate Justice for the Global South.
    
    India has leveraged the security aspects of the American Hegemony - while procuring military technology and hardware from Russia. China too was seen as an incidental partner for development, but the Galwan Episode dispelled most such notions. Russia’s increasing dependance on China, and military reverses in Ukraine have raised concerns on the dependability of Indo-Russian ties.
    
    The paper proposes to study, firstly, how India and Europe could fill in the gaps in one another’s strategic calculus due to reduced propensity of their ties with China and Russia? India and Europe could work together on – Energy Transition, human development, Friend-shoring, Supply Chain Resilience, and defense technology.
    
    Secondly, how India and European nations, being fellow democracies, could cultivate a ‘Deep Globalization’ and integrate at economic, social, cultural, and political levels; and not simply trade and investment i.e., ‘Shallow Globalization’?
    
    Thirdly, would the democracies now work with realist notion of ‘Comparative Gains’ for systemic rivals, but conduct with the liberal notion of ‘Collective Gains’ for fellow democracies? If the Global Balance of Power has to be endured in the favor of democracies, then banding tighter is obligatory.
    
    References:
    
    Modi's Multipolar Moment Has Arrived, Derek Grossman (2022)
    
    Institutions of the Global South, Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner(2009)
    
    After Hegemony, Robert Keohane (1984)
    
    Structural conflict, Stephen Krasner (1985)
    
    The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearsheimer (2001)
    
    European Union and India: A Study in North-south Relations, D. K. Giri (2001)
    
    Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics Joseph Nye (2004)
    
    European Union and World Politics Andrew Moravcsik (2005)
    
    International Relations and the European Union, Christopher Hill, Michael Smith, Sophie Vanhoonacker (2005)
    
    Strategic Retrenchment and Renewal in the American Experience, Peter Feaver (2014)
    
    Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John Mearsheimer (2018)
    
    Venus and the porcupine: assessing the European Union–India strategic partnership, E Kavalski (2008) India and the European
    
    Union: From engagement to strategic partnership US Bava (2010)
    
    India and the European Union: A partnership for all reasons, RM Abhyankar (2009)
    
    The European Union in the eyes of India, Rajendra Jain & Shreya Pandey (2010)
    
    India and the European Union, RK Jain (2020)
    
    Economic Statecraft, David Allen Baldwin (1985)
    
    War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, Jennifer M. Harris and Robert Blackwill (2016) Advances in Geoeconomics, J Mark
    
    Munoz (2017)
    
    Geo-economics and Power Politics in the 21st Century: The Revival of Economic Statecraft, Mikael Wigell, Sören Scholvin, and
    
    Mika Aaltola (2019)
    
    Geo-Economics: The Interplay between Geopolitics, Economics, and Investments, Joachim Klement (2021)
    
    From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce, Edward N. Luttwak (1990)
    
    India–European Union Trade Integration: An Analysis of Current and Future Trajectories, Swetha Loganathan, Joshy Joseph
    
    Karakunnel
    
    and Vijay Victor (2021)
    
    Territoriality In The Globalizing Society: One Place Or None? Stefan Immerfall, Jurgen Von Hagen, S. Immerfall (1998)
    
    India should focus on building (human) capacities, not chips: Raghuram Rajan (2022)
    
    India's Size Illusion, Arvind Subramanian, and Josh Felman (2022)
    
    This is India’s moment of reckoning, Manmohan Singh (2022)
    
    Climate Action and Continued Globalization Joined at the Hip, Raghuram Rajan (2022)
    
    Author: Gaurav Bilthariya (Jamia Millia Islamia)
  - Theories on Status and India's Search for Major Power Status
    
    Along with the meteoric rise of China, there has been much interest in the emergence of India, as a rising power with one of the fastest growing economies in the world up until the 2019 Covid-19 Pandemic crisis. The rapidly developing US-China rivalry gives India an added importance in world politics today as India is the most significant swing power that can help balance China’s potentially aggressive rise in the Indo-Pacific region. Further, the strengthening of Hindu nationalism under Narendra Modi, who has been making strong attempts to emerge India as a leading power while at the same time taking populist postures internally and using international status enhancement for electoral victory evokes global interest. The dynamics of international status in domestic political contestation has not obtained much attention in the extant literature. Now that we have some three decades of data on India’s economic and military growth, we can make a better assessment of the achievements and shortcomings in comparison with others, especially China. Using the burgeoning literature on status quest this paper assesses their validity in the Indian context. What do these theories tell us about this case and how better can we understand it?
    
    Author: T.V. Paul (McGill University)
  - Rethinking the Status-Quo Drivers in Entrenched Conflicts: Kashmir and the Matrix of Legitimacy
    
    Various prolonged territorial conflicts in the contemporary era bear a similarity to the colonial era conflicts in terms of the questions of representation, repressions of rights, and resource extraction. I contend that the dominant narratives in such contemporary conflicts (relevant actors, issues at stake, trends) require a rethinking in normative rather than in power-political terms. I take the example of one such territorial conflict (in Kashmir) and put forward the original argument that the status quo drivers of these conflicts form a four-fold matrix of legitimacy, comprised of the use of agnotological governing practices for domestic populations; public diplomacy for non-government publics abroad; material gains for transnational corporations through sourcing of repression and surveillance infrastructures; and specific versions of the sovereignty argument for the international legal community.Viewing entrenched conflicts in this manner creates a move away from the dominant narratives and can aid in potential resolution by illuminating hitherto unrecognised levers of intervention. To conclude, I emphasise that the multidimensional human cost of such conflicts necessitates that we change our pedagogical lens and find the political intersections to build the material and ideational incentives for resolution.
    
    Author: Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster)
- 27
  Panel / NGOs and civil society: navigating a hostile and impoverished world Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Non-Governmental Organisations Working Group
  
  Convener: Angela Crack (University of Portsmouth)
  
  Chair: David Norman (University of Portsmouth)
  - Unique data, divergent values: international humanitarian organizations' variational uses of biometrics
    
    Humanitarian organizations are increasingly benefiting from biometrics technology. However, there are no one-size-fits-all biometric data collection, storage, processing, sharing, and protection in humanitarian response. While an emerging body of scholarship focuses on the use of biometrics in the humanitarian context, the existing literature fails to grasp the scope and causal mechanisms of variational practices. This paper aims to explain this issue by tracing the activities of The UN Refugee Agency, the United Nations World Food Programme, The International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, and World Vision International over the last decade. An initial literature review theorizes that four broad factors - principles and traditions, origins, institutional structure, and mandates and scope of action - explain differences in policies and field practices among humanitarian organizations. The second part of the paper draws on an analysis of the reports of the mentioned organizations, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with humanitarian practitioners to provide empirical analysis.
    
    Author: Caglar Acikyildiz (UPF & IBEI)
  - International humanitarian action in the context of organized criminal violence in Mexico
    
    The humanitarian consequences of organized criminal violence frequently equal or exceed those in armed conflicts. In 2018, for example, 78,667 people were killed violently in Brazil and 43,089 in Mexico, compared with 29,584 in Afghanistan and 16,905 in Syria in the same year. In light of this, international humanitarian agencies—which traditionally respond to armed conflicts and ‘natural’ disasters—are increasingly responding to large-scale criminal violence. An initial wave of literature made the case for a humanitarian response to urban violence, and made suggestions as to how humanitarian agencies should be responding (Harroff-Tavel 2010; Lucchi 2010, 2012; Savage and Muggah 2012). Subsequently, more critical literature has emerged, problematizing the framing of criminal or urban violence as humanitarian crises (Fiori et al. 2016; Reid-Henry and Sending 2014; Sandvik and Hoelscher 2016). However, there has been little work grounded in empirical research on how humanitarian agencies are actually responding in practice. Drawing on three months of research in Mexico, interviewing humanitarian agency officials, this paper begins to address that gap, providing an explanation of what the largest aid agencies are (and are not) doing in that context. It 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.
    
    Author: Miriam Bradley (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI))
  - Transforming or undermining the struggle? A comparative study of service delivery and civil society action in conflict-affected regions
    
    How does civil society engagement with service delivery influence processes of post-war transition and democratic change? What strategies and tactics do CSOs deploy in such contexts? This paper addresses these questions by examining civil society activism in four conflict-affected countries across two global regions – South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – and four countries – Tunisia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
    CSO engagement with service delivery is often viewed as depoliticising since it can alleviate pressures on unpopular regimes and may also draw CSOs more closely into line with the technocratic agendas of international donors. On the other hand, protests led by CSOs often focus on issues of service delivery and CSOs’ capacity to mobilise around issues such as education, health or waste management may act as flashpoints or ‘teachable moments’ around which wider struggles against governments or constitutions can be built.
    
    The paper provides a novel comparative analysis of how CSO roles are shaped by service delivery and social protection in conflict-affected environments. By comparing the experience, strategies, and tactics of civil society organisations in four conflict-affected countries across two world regions, the paper outlines the varied roles and trajectories of civil society organisations in conflict-affected regions, examining how protest or resistance movements are shaping government decisions in contexts of military rule, the extent to which volatile politics may create ‘open moments’ where social movements can advance progressive agendas, and how service delivery through the recent COVID pandemic may enhance or undermine CSO legitimacy.
    
    Authors: Oliver Walton (University of Bath) , Wali Aslam (University of Bath)*
  - Leave no one behind? Addressing linguistic exclusion in international development work
    
    The UN Secretary-General’s report, Our Common Agenda, reiterates the importance of the commitment of the Sustainable Development Goals to ‘leave no one behind’. However, the deleterious impacts of linguistic exclusion on international development work is barely considered by policy-makers and NGO practitioners, let alone satisfactorily addressed (Footitt et al 2020, Tesseur 2022). This paper gives an overview of a multidisciplinary research endeavour between IR/public administration and language/translation scholars to provide a local solution to this global problem. It describes how a Chichewa translation glossary of international development terminology was co-produced with communities in Malawi through participatory workshops, with the aim of facilitating communication between development stakeholders. It explains our achievements in enhancing the impact of this project by helping practitioners to run their own workshops in different languages. I argue that translation can be conceptualised as an anti-racist practice, and I reflect on lessons learned for academics and practitioners with similar normative and methodological concerns.
    
    Authors: Angela Crack (University of Portsmouth) , Michael Chasukwa (University of Malawi)*
- 28
  Panel / Ontological Security Studies in IR: Theory, Methods, and Approaches Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Bruno de Seixas Carvalho (University of Birmingham)
  
  Chair: Marco Vieira (University of Birmingham)
  - For a transhumanist approach to ontological security: desire-machines and the becoming-Britain of the ocean, and the ocean-becoming of Britain
    
    The field of Ontological Security Studies (OSS) have brought to the fore the articulation between emotions, identity, and foreign policy. Since its debut in the discipline of IR in the early 2000s, the initial insight that a pre-conceived self is maintained and recognised by interpersonal practices of trust, routine and biographical narratives has received a variety of insightful theoretical alternatives. Yet, the emphasis on a subject-centred analysis across these pluralist approaches has left a theoretical gap, unacknowledging the affective surrounding environments from which subjectivities emerge. Overcoming this limitation is important, as it expands OSS towards more contemporary issues such as climate change and the role of technology in subjectivities. In this piece I propose an analytical framework to address such limitation. I draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri to whom subjectivity is rather a movable outcome of encounters between transpersonal actors than an agency to be exercised by subjects. The environment has an affirmative role to play in such a process, because humans and nature are mutually entangled by what Deleuze and Guatarri call desiring-machines, in machinic (rather than mechanic) relations. This brings a transhumanist approach to ontological security, capable of accounting for the affective role of the environment. I empirically demonstrate my framework through the case of the maritime domain. I argue that sea-reliant states experience a sense of ontological maritime security through a machinic encounter with the surrounding environment of the ocean. This emerges through an asymmetrical process whereby the ocean become-states, and states become-ocean in face of a perceived existential erosion of states’ world view. I illustrate this argument historically analysing the development of Britain’s maritime security policy. This piece brings an innovative contribution to the field of OSS, incorporating the notion of desire beyond a humanistic perspective.
    
    Author: Bruno de Seixas Carvalho (University of Birmingham)
  - Transforming to Survive: The Role of OST in Shaping French Army Transformation
    
    My study investigates what survival means for the French land army and how it impacts its transformation. Guided by the idea that ‘culture influences action’ I offer a reading of military transformation framed by Ontological Security Theory (OST ). Originating from psychology and sociology, OST refines and broadens the survival assumption by offering ‘a two-layered conception of security’. The IR scholarship adopted the concept and scaled it to from the individual to the national level: to survive nation states look to be both physically and ontologically secure. In this study, I suggest the theory can also be applied to the institutional level (i.e. militaries also seek to survive in an ontological and physical sense). I use this original approach to investigate the transformation of the French land army. I claim the quest for survival results in co-dependant and sometimes conflicting needs: the need to transform to remain physically secure and the need to stay the same – to remain ontologically secure. Following this argument, my investigation (1) highlights at the role of identity and culture in shaping French army transformation; (2) looks at dynamics of continuity and change to better understand French army transformation.
    
    Author: Lucie Pebay (University of Bath)
  - Stimmung and ontological security: anxiety, euphoria, and emerging political subjectivities during the 2015 ‘border opening’ in Germany
    
    This article draws on Heidegger’s notion of Stimmung (mood, attunement, atmosphere) to further develop the study of public moods in IR. To that end, it synthesises two recent developments in ontological security studies (OSS), the decentred Deleuzian approach that emphasises the role of affective environments in subjects’ sense of and search for ontological security and Heideggerian readings of anxiety as (public) mood. The developed framework maintains OSS’ conceptual focus on anxiety whilst centring the locus of analysis around dynamic affective environments rather than individual subjects. This framework allows for exploring the relationship between anxiety and the radical agency, emerging political subjectivities, and intense (positive) moods it can facilitate. The empirical added value of this framework is illustrated through an analysis of the public mood of anxiety that preceded and enabled the “border opening” in Germany during the so-called migration crisis and the subsequent euphoria it engendered.
    
    Author: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of Warwick)
  - A European Story: EU Myth, Ontological Security, and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
    
    The Russian invasion in Ukraine presented a fundamental crisis for European energy, borders, cohesion, but also for its ontological security. Since February, EU leaders have grappled with existential questions which are rarely raised into the active discursive consciousness. In short, the invasion was a shock to the European sense of Self. For member states, this ontologically critical situation manifested in member states reversing long-standing policies or leaning on routinized relations. However, this shock was also felt in Brussels, and led to many high-level discussions about European identity, common history, and myths. This paper interrogates both how and where these discussions originated and what techniques EU leaders used to manage ontological stress during the first six months of the crisis. The analysis focuses primarily on statements made by EU Commission, Council, and Parliament officials and their narration of the crisis in Ukraine. In crafting a common narrative arc, the EU provided its member states with a source of ontological security. By using narrative analysis, this paper will also strengthen the link between language, ontological security, and performance thereby establishing a common analytical framework for identifying instances of ontological stress.
    
    Author: Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh)
  - Exploring the Ontological Security of Young Adult Migrants in Glasgow
    
    This paper investigates the links between the ontological security (OS) seeking processes of young adult migrants and macro-level immigration narratives in Glasgow, UK. While OS literature has often investigated the importance of individual biographical narratives on identity negotiation, this study looks at the importance of collective narratives in guiding the everyday behaviours of migrant subjects. The study builds on in-depth narrative interviews conducted with six young adult migrants. Visual arts research methods were used to generate participant artworks, including collage, which provide stimuli for discussion and a unique frame for analysis. These allow for the visualisation of OS and everyday routine, interactions. An OS theoretical framework is used to analyse how study participants attempt to establish security through a variety of coping mechanisms. The analysis explores how migrant individuals employ self-securitising measures and, in some cases, adopt nationalist political behaviours to avoid debilitating insecurity. The study has important considerations for research on migrants and minority groups across international settings and sub-state nationalist contexts, as well as returning to the micro-application of OST study.
    
    Author: Marcus Nicolson (Glasgow Caledonian University)
- 29
  Panel / Race, migration and trajectories of knowledge Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Terri-Anne Teo (Newcastle University)
  
  Chair: Terri-Anne Teo (Newcastle University)
  - Collective memories of forced displacement and the securitisation of migration at the Greek-Turkish borders
    
    This year marks the centenary of the 1922 forced displacement that followed a decade of warfare between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne legalised the expulsion of more than a million Greek Christians to Greece and that of approximately 400,000 Muslims to Turkey. The departure and arrival of both sets of refugees left indelible marks on both states and societies with the memory and trauma of refugeedom still remaining alive today. Fast forward a century, in 2015-2016, the region comes again to the epicentre of forced migrations when more than a million asylum seekers crossed the Greek-Turkish border in search of a better life. Following an initial, albeit short-lived welcoming/desecuritised response, the Greek state’s policies towards newcomers quickly rolled back to a state of increased securitisation. This paper focuses on the role of the Greek public’s collective memories of the 1922 events – which are known in the country as the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’ – in contemporary public attitudes towards immigration, security, and Greek-Turkish relations.
    
    Author: Dimitris Skleparis (Newcastle University)
  - The racial contract and nonwhiteness: Understanding race and migration in Asia
    
    This paper centres on understanding racial discourses of migration through Charles Mills’ racial contract, locating it within a non-Anglophone context. Knowledge is transformable, contextual and culturally specific, therefore indicating that knowledges of race and otherness must exist beyond the boundaries of European notions of race. When we refer to ‘whiteness’ within race and migration scholarship, particularly in ‘nonwhite’ host countries, is there a risk of using it as a placeholder for something else; is it perhaps imprecise, borrowed and insufficient? With these questions, I interrogate what ‘nonwhiteness’ means in the context of Singapore, how race is understood among ‘nonwhites,’ and the equivalences and distinctions among them/us. In so doing, this paper examines the knowledge-production of nonwhiteness beyond the ‘west,’ and within that, what values, terms and conditions constitute the racial contract(s), and how it affects the racialised experiences of migrants.
    
    Author: Terri-Anne Teo (Newcastle University)
  - Cross-border mobilities: mobility capital and the capital accumulation strategies of Palestinian citizens of Israel
    
    Over 10,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel – approximately half of whom are women – cross the Green Line on a regular basis to study at universities in the West Bank. Challenging reductive assessments that would dismiss these cross-border flows as simply illustrative of their relatively privileged legal, material and socio-economic status as citizens, this paper engages the concept of mobility capital and the work of feminist scholars on the capital investment strategies of women and minorities to reveal the more limited capacity of Palestinian citizens to cross the Green Line as well as the defensively oriented mobilising strategies which they have adopted not only to move but to maintain their presence, access their rights, and secure their future livelihoods in Israel. Arguing that these strategies should be seen as a counter-hegemonic form of capital accumulation based on the reappropriation of knowledge and know-how of border crossings, this paper seeks to advance recent calls to centre settler colonialism within the field of mobilities while drawing attention to the more complex interconnections that exist between mobility, capital and gender in the everyday life struggles of indigenous communities.
    
    Author: Una McGahern (Newcastle University)
  - Mapping the effects of insecure migration status: inequality, exploitation and violence
    
    Social and economic inequalities can be linked to violence and vulnerability to violence. This research draws on a bespoke database of empirical evidence drawn from third sector organisations in the UK to excavate the structural and systemic forms of discrimination and oppression that produce outcomes of violence, exploitation and inequality for people in insecure migration status. The qualitative analysis maps health inequality through intersecting pathways of immigration enforcement, policing practices, destitution, social isolation and maladapted support systems. The research considers how racializing and minoritizing structures undermine the types of security that are normally attached to citizenship and belonging. It finds that unequal forms of citizenship, residency, and immigration-based constructed dependencies such as spousal or employer-tied visas exacerbate vulnerability to violence and create a deep-rooted insecurity that prevents disclosure of violence and abuse, and precludes support-seeking. Drawing from the empirical data, this research contributes to our understanding of insecurity as a complex social experience that can be tied to (gendered and racialized) structural and systemic inequality. Empirically, it finds meaningful evidence of insecurity embedded in and produced by the way immigration is governed in the UK.
    
    Author: Alexandria Innes (City University)
- 30
  
  Conference event / Screening of “Veterans in Communities”: Re-imagining ‘transition’ through co-produced film QE2, Marriott
  
  Speaker: Dr Nick Caddick (ARU)
- 31
  Panel / Security, governance and peacebuilding Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: European Journal of International Security
  
  Convener: Jason Ralph (University of Leeds and EJIS)
  
  Chair: Jason Ralph (University of Leeds and EJIS)
  
  Discussant: Jason Ralph (University of Leeds and EJIS)
  - Proscribing time?: proscription and temporality in terrorism trials
    
    This paper explores the closely knit yet complex link between proscription and temporality through the examination of terrorism trials in Nigeria. Through the notion of proscribing time this paper demonstrates the ways in which proscription is enacted, imagined, and contested in light of important temporal implications. While proscription is notably meagrely discussed in relation to other well-known counter-terrorism tools such as military force – and despite a growing number of significant multi- and inter-disciplinary interventions – debates around proscription remain almost exclusively focused on the banning of particular individuals or groups linked to terrorism. This ‘actor-oriented’ focus, I argue, reinforces certain theoretical and ontological commitments recognisable in dominant analysis of terrorism, along with the limitations that this entails. Moreover, such a perspective is predominantly organised around a forward-oriented logic of security preemption which, I also argue in this article, does not fully reveal the complexity and broader consequences of proscription.
    Thus, drawing upon relevant insights about temporality especially as discussed in critical security studies, (critical) legal studies and beyond, this paper demonstrates how time is proscribed (rather than terrorist groups) to render visible the complexity and effects of proscription by examining terrorism trials in Nigeria, including the so-called Kainji trials. Specifically, by moving beyond actor-centred perspectives prevalent in much recent works on proscription, I illustrate the centrality – and complexity – of time and temporality in (legal) articulations of proscription, as well as the ways in which these are re-produced through language and labelling in juridical processes. The paper as such contributes theoretically to ongoing debates about proscription, and temporality in critical security studies more broadly. It also, empirically, make a worthwhile contribution to a relatively small, though important, scholarship on terrorism trials in Nigeria.
    
    Author: Kodili Chukwuma (Durham University)
  - Mobilizing Against Human Rights: Understanding the Securitization of SOGI Rights
    
    Contributing to the study of domestic and international strategies used by states and non-state actors to resist norm diffusion and erode internalization, this paper explores the phenomenon of “norm immunization” – i.e. the creation of legal barriers by a state with the purpose of fending off a transnationally diffusing norm by blocking its local advocacy. Under what conditions is norm immunization likely to occur and succeed? The paper identifies a critical condition for norm immunization in the area of human rights; namely, the discursive construction of certain rights as existential threats to the state’s collective identity. The main argument is that the ontological securitization of certain human rights alters the incentive structure faced by domestic political actors, increasing the political cost of moderation and thus unleashing a “race to the bottom” in policy preferences which results in political support for laws that immunize the state against contested human rights. Backed up by primary legal and parliamentary sources as well as interviews, the theory presented proves useful to understand the seven immunization attempts against SOGI rights identified in 2005-2015, as well as to explain why some of these attempts succeeded (Lithuania, Nigeria, Russia and Uganda) and why the others failed (Hungary, Moldova and Ukraine).
    
    Author: Fernando Nunez-Mietz (McGill University)
  - The Local Dimensions of Criminal Governance in Brazil
    
    The study of criminal governance has focused largely on a handful of cases in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Although these studies have made major theoretical and empirical contributions, this emphasis on a small selection of important cases, primarily Rio de Janeiro and sometimes São Paulo in Brazil, imposes limitations on inferences regarding spatial diffusion of criminal governance or effects of urban geography on distinct types of governance and violence. This project aims to systematically explore a broader selection of urban agglomerations and rural areas in Brazil. It is well established that criminal and parastatal groups have been spreading their presence across the country, establishing control over large portions of territory, exporting modes of governance, and maintaining relations of political hierarchy between center and periphery of their areas of territorial influence – not entirely distinct from core-periphery relations in traditional nation-states and empires or rebel groups and other violent transnational non-state actors. This project draws together scholarship on state formation, criminal governance and rebel governance to explore local forms of criminal governance and the geographic factors affecting patterns of criminal and political violence in Brazilian cities and derive theoretical insights that may be extended to other cases beyond Brazil.
    
    Authors: Daniel Rio Tinto (FGV RI / Fundação Getulio Vargas) , Dani K. Nedal (University of Toronto)*
  - The Contribution of the Gender Agenda to the Peacebuilding Proposal in UN Stabilization Missions: The Case of Haiti
    
    This article aims to present the contribution of the gender agenda in the proposal of United Nations stabilization missions. To this end, the work is based on the identification and quantification of citations regarding concerns about gender issues present in UN Security Council resolutions about the case study chosen for this work: the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (2004 - 2017). From the exposure of the evolution of the organization's peace agenda, highlighting the post-Cold War period in parallel to the research about the typology of Violence proposed by Johan Vincent Galtung (1930 - present), it is intended to locate the gender issue, both as part of the political-institutional agenda and by the academic-conceptual variable in the spectrum of violence and peace proposed by the author. Therefore, the research is based, initially, on qualitative analysis on the historical exposure guided by the Peace Studies literature and UN documents on its policy proposals; next, the location of the gender agenda will be exposed; finally, the quantitative analysis of citations that highlight gender as part of the UN institutional concern within the Haiti stabilization proposal serves as an indicator of the approximation or distancing of the agenda. In the end, the exhibit projects trends based on the survey within the limitations that the indicators may suggest of institutional referrals of the debate.
    
    Authors: Mariana Zamboni Carluccio , Lucas Barreto Rodrigues*
- 32
  Panel / State duties in the post-conflict period Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Elizabeth Brown (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield)
  - Can There be Creation Amidst Destruction? Secondary Rules of Change in International Humanitarian Law
    
    This article outlines some examples of secondary rules of change extracted from conventional IHL conferring private and public powers upon individuals for the creation or modification of legal situations during armed conflict. By uncovering these provisions and analysing them under the theoretical framework provided by prominent legal theorists, a more complete picture of IHL emerges. This picture portrays this legal regime as a complex system comprising not only primary rules of behaviour referring to the conduction of hostilities, but also secondary rules of change showing that legal creation is possible even amidst organised destruction.
    
    Author: Francisco Lobo (King's College London)
  - War Crimes Responsibility and Polarised Memories in Japan
    
    Following the end of World War II, Japan’s war criminals were put on trial for crimes against peace and war crimes. The Tokyo Tribunal was meant to hold leaders responsible individually and allow the country to move forward. However, Japan was unable to successfully address their collective responsibility for war crimes, due to legal and political failures of the tribunal. Japan’s memory of the war became polarised and led to a rise in nationalism and revisionism. This in turn prevented reconciliation with its own past and with China and South Korea. With the failure of political leaders to successfully engage in reconciliation, a non-governmental approach would be beneficial to depolarise the memory and acknowledge of the dark past. A depolarisation of memory through education and awareness of the past could reduce the public’s apathy towards the issue of war crimes responsibility and encourage reconciliation efforts.
    
    Author: Zala Pochat Križaj (King's College London)
  - Guantanamo Bay detention and prosecutions: explaining the persistence of an illegitimate system
    
    Under the terms of the Istanbul Protocol, if states have knowledge of torture having taken place, they have specific obligations to provide redress and rehabilitation for victims, and to pursue prosecutions for those responsible. Yet despite signing the protocol, the US continues to detain torture victims in Guantanamo Bay and in some cases, to pursue prosecutions against them within the Military Commissions system. Existing IR literature on US rendition and torture in the context of the war on terror has tended to focus on the program during the period of the Bush administration and shortly after. These accounts tell us much about the political contestation surrounding the torture norm during the headiest days of the so-called war on terror. However, with some exceptions, they have tended to view this contestation as largely settled in favour of the prohibition. Consequently, we are left with the question of how practices of detention and prosecution have persisted despite US commitment to the Istanbul Protocol and effective condemnation of US torture. This paper draws on interviews with the legal defence teams of the remaining Guantanamo Bay inmates and a broader analysis of the program to develop an account of how ongoing detention and/or trial by Military Commissions is possible. While the arguments of this paper are still being developed, it is anticipated that the concept of lawfare can help us develop an insufficient but necessary explanation.
    
    Authors: Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield) , Megan Price (University of Sheffield)
  - The Frontiers of Universality: The Application of European Human Rights Protections to British Islamic State Foreign Fighters Detained in Iraq and Syria
    
    British foreign fighters throughout the Islamic State’s former ‘Caliphate’ are currently being detained in conditions which fail to meet basic human rights standards. This analysis seeks to investigate whether Britain has legal and moral obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights to protect its citizens from these violations. Legal jurisprudence has seen traditional territorial understandings of jurisdiction increasingly supplemented by notions of effective control. Though norms on the extraterritorial application of human rights treaties are still emerging, there is significant evidence that Britain does have obligations to its imprisoned foreign fighters which it is currently failing to meet. By refusing assistance to these individuals and in some cases actively removing the protections afforded to them, Britain is delineating who is and who is not perceived to be deserving of rights. Ultimately, this is fundamentally at odds with the universalist spirit of the Convention and detrimental to the wider institution of international human rights law.
    
    Author: Elizabeth Brown (King's College London)
  - The Safe Schools Declaration and Jus Post Bellum
    
    The concept of jus post bellum implies a need to act morally and ethically (as well as lawfully) once conflict is over and post-conflict reconstruction is underway. For that to be possible, essential critical infrastructure needs to be available or, if not, needs to be reconstituted to allow for a stable and secure society to once again emerge. In a practical sense, this means that jus post bellum has a clear link to jus in bello and the protection of critical infrastructure during conflict itself (this is why the fundamental principle of distinction sits at the heart of targeting elements of International Humanitarian Law/the Law of Armed Conflict). This paper focuses on a vital element of critical infrastructure – that of education. The Safe Schools Declaration and the International Guidelines at its core were developed to enhance the protection of education during conflict. They were launched in 2015 and have already been endorsed by 115 states globally. The author of this paper was also the author of the International Guidelines to Protect Education from Military Use during Conflict. He will focus on those Guidelines, the thinking that went into them and will also go through the six guidelines to amplify each in turn. The subsequent impact of the Safe Schools Declaration and its Guidelines will be summarised with a particular focus on the situations in states affected by armed conflict, both International (IAC) and Non-International (NIAC). Two states that will feature in the presentation at BISA will be Liberia and Ukraine. In the former, around 95% of schools were badly affected by the civil wars that ended in 2003. In Ukraine so far an estimated 2,000 schools have been affected. Finally, the jus post bellum consequences of these and other wars will be addressed.
    
    Author: Steven Haines (University of Greenwich)
- 33
  
  Roundtable / Teaching IPE in Challenging Times 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.
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: Zoe Pflaeger Young (De Montfort University)
  
  Participants: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth) , Pinar Donmez (De Montfort University) , Zoe Pflaeger Young (De Montfort University) , Ben Richardson (University of Warwick) , Remi Edwards (University of Sheffield)
- 34
  
  Roundtable / Training “Early Career Instructors” in International Studies: Existing Efforts and Challenges, and Future Possibilities 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.
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: Misbah Hyder (University of Notre Dame)
  
  Participants: David Duriesmith (Department of Politics and International Relations, The University of Sheffield) , Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews) , Anna Meier (University of Nottingham) , Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews) , Louise Pears (University of Leeds)
- 35
  
  Roundtable / Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Occupations, Interventions and Exit Dilemmas 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.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: James Rogers (SDU)
  
  Participants: Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (Loughborough University) , Rob Geist Pinfold (Durham University) , Louise Kettle (The University of Nottingham) , Amnon Aran (City, University of London) , Sorana-Cristina Jude (Newcastle University)
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  Panel / Universality: A Hollow Norm or a Fundamental Necessity? QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Rahul Rao (Universtiy of St Andrews)
  
  Discussant: Rahul Rao (Universtiy of St Andrews)
  - Contesting Universals: Norms, Normativity, and the Global Governance of Human Diversity
    
    Universality – the notion of one set of rules or principles applying to all – has assumed an uncomfortable new prominence in world politics. The globalisation and transnationalisation of international society, coupled with global power shifts, reveal a normative diversity that challenges the very idea of a universal order of humankind. Starting from the assumption that universality and normative diversity are co-constitutive rather than incompatible, the paper explores how diverse actors cope with and contest universalised norms in a world shaped by diversity. We propose a three-dimensional theoretical framework of contestation that brings together critical-constructivist norm research, English School theory, and international practice theory to analyse how the notion of a universal global order becomes fragile when local meanings interact with universalised norms. Zooming in on the micro-scale of three different global governance institutions that are heavily confronted with co-constituting diversity and universality – the Arctic Council, the International Criminal Court, and the UN Security Council – we show how actors cope with normative diversity, deploying practices of both reactive and proactive contestation through which universalised rules, ideas or principles are objected to, critically questioned, and/or adapted.
    
    Authors: Holger Niemann (University of Hamburg)* , Antje Wiener (University of Hamburg) , Dennis Schmidt (Durham University)* , Maren Hoifus (Hamburg University)*
  - The Politics of Universal Crime
    
    Debates on the relationship between normative universals and political violence in post-Cold War world politics have examined liberal mobilizations of universal individual rights to justify aggressive foreign policies. Scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and international law has analysed the centrality of human rights, codified in international human rights law, in Euro-American arguments for the legitimacy of violent political campaigns directed at Non-Western states. This project turns away from the well-researched role of universal individual rights and towards the notion of universal crime in arguments that justify coercive political interventions in non-Western polities. The concept of universal crime captures the elemental idea that all of humanity can be injured by certain acts, today codified in international criminal law’s ‘crimes against humanity’. As such, this project centres the nexus between humanity and criminality, rather than individuality and rights, in arguments on legitimate violence in world politics. This endeavour yields two arguments. First, claims to a humanity universally injured de-particularize specific political interests and thereby have self-authorizing effects for those invoking it. Second, the notion of universal crime yields a distinct vision of humanity as the collective, yet hierarchically structured and minimally inclusive subject of world politics.
    
    Author: Sinja Graf (London School of Economics)
  - Universalism and Its Critics
    
    Many of the international laws and institutions in the contemporary global order assume a set of universal values. These include, but are not limited to: peace, sovereignty, human rights, the rule of law, democracy, environmental justice, and economic justice. While not accepted by every state or agent in the global order, these values underlie many of the formal agreements and arrangements in the contemporary political order. In recent years, scholars writing from a postcolonial and decolonial perspective have challenged the very notion of universality, and some of this critical attention has been focused on global institutions and laws. These critical perspectives bring out how the existing order was established without a diversity of perspectives and assumes binaries between civilized/uncivilized states. This paper reviews and takes seriously these critical voices, but seeks to find if there is any way to defend the universalism which lies at the heart of global institutions. It will focus on debates around human rights as a focal point of analysis.
    
    Author: Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews)
- 12:15
  
  Lunch: SPONSORED BY REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY (RIPE)
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  Conference event / Lunchtime history talk from the War Studies Working Group: The Clydeside Blitz. Speaker: Marc Conaghan Tay, Hilton
- 38
  
  Conference event / South East Europe Working Group AGM Don, Hilton
- 39
  
  Conference event / Ethics and World Politics Working Group AGM Dee, Hilton
- 40
  Panel / America First: Revisiting the Trump Presidency Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: Georg Löfflmann (University of Warwick)
  - Making America Unrecognizable: Trump and the Future of the Liberal International Order
    
    How has the Trump presidency affected the status of the United States as the leader of the liberal international order? This paper argues that Trump’s brash and chaotic diplomatic style and choices have affected the standing of the United States in the world and served to undermine the liberal international order it leads by making America unrecognizable to its close allies and friends. International orders are, first and foremost, a kind of recognition order: a social order that arranges states’ relationships with each other and guides their behavior through routinized relations of recognition. At the center of this recognition order is the leading power, or hegemon, who by virtue of its recognized status is able to define the rules, values, and norms that constitute the system. Central to the leading power’s status, however, is the recognition it receives from its friends and closest allies, who share a common vision of the international order and make a commitment to maintain it into the future. Even more, friends identify with each other on the basis of shared history and experience, a common set of values and priorities, and faithfulness to “a shared project of world-building” that reproduces the international order. In this context, the relationships a leading power has with its friends—and the relations of recognition that sustain those relationships—are the principal means by which the international order is created and reproduced. The paper shows how both Trump’s rhetoric and foreign policy decisions undermined these routinized relations of recognition—calling into question America’s commitment to the values at the center of the liberal international order—and limits American leadership going forward.
    
    Author: Michelle Murray (Bard College)
  - Power Analysis, Strategic Net Assessment, and the new Global Power Competition
    
    Great powers and less-than-great powers alike are re-organising their national security strategies around a renewed sense of global power competition. Yet the answers to questions of what that competition is for, and what it is over, remain unclear. 'Power' would seem to be operative concept, and so assessments of power are presumably crucial to successful strategy in this new era. This paper analyses the conceptual challenges of power analysis, in order to inform the conduct of strategic net assessment under conditions of Global Power Competition.
    
    Author: Nick Kitchen (University of Surrey)
  - "I am Inevitable": Trump, Thanos and January 6
    
    Hollywood has a long tradition of shaping and co-producing the discursive material that feeds into broader discourses of security and foreign policy. In the years since ‘9/11’ it has been the superhero genre and the cinematic universes of DC and Marvel that have re-negotiated collective crisis and trauma, and developed fantasies of protection, safety, and resurrection against the backdrop of the ‘War on Terror’ and more and more overlapping crises in international politics.
    
    During the Trump era, superheroes have been appearing all over the place in resistance to Trumpism and the MAGA movement. This can be seen films such as Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Black Widow, Shang-Chi, or The Eternals all of which seemingly help to develop a liberal counter-narrative to Trumpism, or TV shows from She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, or Ms. Marvel. Importantly, after the 2020 US presidential election was called for Joe Biden, Van Jones reiterated his previously mentioned comparison live on CNN, likening the battle of the liberal side of America against Trump to “Thanos vs The Avengers.” This paper argues that it is important to look at these popular cultural artefacts to make sense of the Trump presidency that found its preliminary end in the January 6 riots.
    
    Author: Julian Schmid (Central European University)
- 41
  Panel / Community, solidarity, and diversity Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism
  
  Convener: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism Working Group (BISA)
  
  Chair: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
  - Pacifism and Nonviolence: Discerning the contours of an emerging multidisciplinary research agenda
    
    Pacifism and nonviolence have separable foci and origins, yet they also share important similarities, and their respective histories are mutually imbricated. Both have, furthermore, been attracting growing scholarly interest in the twenty-first century. However, that scholarship has so far been scattered and nested in disparate sub-disciplinary debates and specialist publications. The time has come for a new and wider multidisciplinary agenda to coordinate several potentially fruitful and original strands of research on topics including: the varieties of approaches to nonviolence and pacifism; central accusations against pacifism; the tensions between pacifism and nonviolence; theories and practices outside the Global North; the multiple direct and indirect consequences of violence; the place of violence and nonviolence in political thought; the relationship between violence/nonviolence and gender, race, and other social identities; the religious roots of pacifism and nonviolence; the place of violence and nonviolence in popular culture (and the interests this serves); the potential for practical nonviolent policies of governance; predominant assumptions concerning violence in IR (about, e.g., terrorism, the international order, just war); what makes an act ‘violence’ and when direct action becomes ‘violent’; and methodological challenges in the study and pedagogy of nonviolence and pacifism.
    
    Author: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
  - An Exploration in Modern Alienation: Ulster Loyalists and the British White Working-Class
    
    Any long-term goals requiring global cooperation need the dedication and support of a vast array of communities. However, as we strive for these global goals, expressions of alienation, political disenfranchisement, and scepticism of global initiatives build in communities who feel left behind in an increasingly neo-liberalised and multi-cultural world. This paper compares narratives of alienation and disenfranchisement in two such identity groups: the Ulster Loyalist and British white working-class communities. The high levels of alienation and disenfranchisement reported by these communities, traditionally thought to hold privileged positions within their societies due to racial or religious hierarchy, deserve close investigation. By incorporating a critical narrative analysis of documentary and interview materials, the paper allows for a more detailed picture of how institutional discourses relate to the everyday stories of these communities. It argues that a wider understanding of alienation is necessary to meaningfully compare the narratives of these two communities. In doing so, this comparison reveals the role of systemic factors driving mass experience and expression of alienation across mainland Britain and Northern Ireland. It is hoped that this understanding can contribute to creating global agendas which do not further alienate these communities but build trust and promote peace and partnership.
    
    Author: Peter Bothwell (University of St Andrews)
  - Global domains: Reorienting transnational civil rights and solidarity in activism
    
    Reorientating global peace towards the transnational rather than international promotes the voices of those who have experienced injustice by creating links beyond the borders of the nation-state through horizontal thinking. Transnational solidarity movements have been significant in enabling and empowering connections among those facing injustice beyond the borders of nation-states. These connections allow an exploration of how individuals organise themselves around the shared goal of fighting oppression. Such relationships thus help to emphasise who is not represented by human rights. This paper is an interdisciplinary study. It builds on Inés Valdez’s theorisation of transnational cosmopolitanism, influenced by W.E.B. Dubois, (Valdez, 2019) with reference to feminist criticisms to develop a theoretical framework from a ‘bottom-up’ approach. The paper then applies this framework to empirical discussions of how communities in Northern Ireland, particularly Northern Irish Catholics, have placed themselves in wider solidarity movements since the formation of the country in 1921. In doing so, it explores how solidarity movements have occurred in different domains, from street protests to football stadia. It examines and criticises the concept of solidarity, including contentions that solidarity reduces agency of those facing injustice. As the discourse of transnational injustice continues to grow, so too may the significance of transnational solidarity.
    
    Author: Saoirse McGilligan (University of St Andrews)
- 42
  Panel / Global Challenges and Cooperation in an Unstable International Order Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: European Journal of International Security
  
  Convener: Danielle Young (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Laura Rose Brown (University of Leeds)
  - Doing order differently? The Quad powers, climate change, and the future of international governance and security in the 21st century
    
    Doing order differently? The Quad powers, climate change, and the future of international governance and security in the
    21st century
    
    Author: Rob Cullum (King's College London)
  - Diplomacy on Ice: Freezing and Thawing in International Cooperation over Antarctica
    
    This paper situates the diplomatic activities leading up to the 1958-9 Washington Conference and the negotiation of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in larger cultural imaginaries of ice, scientific exploration, and planetary threat. In particular, this paper focuses on the metaphor of ‘freezing’ as a diplomatically desirable outcome for competing territorial claims in Antarctica (Scott 2011; Mancilla 2018; Yao 2021), but also explores the accompanying metaphor of ‘thawing’ and its threat to humanity and collective politics. To do so, the paper puts formal diplomatic correspondence in conversation with popular explorers’ accounts of their voyages to Antarctica and dystopic science fiction (including Lovecraft’s 1936 At the Mountains of Madness and Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There) of what lurks beneath the Antarctic ice. To illustrate the continuing relevance of both metaphors on Antarctic diplomacy, the paper ends with a consideration of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCMALR) established in 1982 as part of the ATS. Here, I argue that the fear of thawing continues to inform and threaten the success of diplomatic efforts in Antarctica.
    
    Author: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary, University of London)
  - Future counterfactual scenarios and counter-hegemony in global nuclear order
    
    Recent literature advocates 1) adopting a Coxian or ‘neo-Gramscian’ approach to reforming the global nuclear order and 2) taking seriously the methodological need to think about the role of imagined futures and ‘timescapes’ in nuclear ordering. This paper proceeds in two parts. First, I argue that counter-hegemonic nuclear politics must move beyond both historically directed critique and discourse-focused approaches to reform. They should be oriented towards possible future developments which could prise open space for counter-hegemonic nuclear ordering initiatives—recalling that ‘prefigurative politics’ is an important element of counter-hegemony.
    
    Second, I draw on recent work which posits ‘future counterfactual’ scenarios in the context of nuclear strategy. I apply this logic two scenarios—which may not be probable but are thinkable and plausible enough that they must be taken seriously—which might offer opportunities to mount different forms of counter-hegemonic nuclear politics. These are 1) Welsh independence from the United Kingdom and the possible impact of independent Welsh nuclear disarmament diplomacy, and 2) temporary or permanent U.S. loss of centralized control over part or all of its strategic nuclear arsenal. The aim is not to predict outcomes but to prefiguratively demonstrate the possibility of mounting counter-hegemonic political responses in such scenarios.
    
    Author: Tom Vaughan (Aberystwyth University)
  - Solar geoengineering and nuclear governance parallels in an unstable international order
    
    An increasingly urgent aspect of the international politics of climate change is the governance of large-scale climate interventions such as solar geoengineering. This includes proposals for extensive Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), in which reflective aerosols are injected into the lower stratosphere to reduce solar radiation and cool global temperatures. SAI is gaining momentum as a potential response to the growing climate crisis but will have serious global consequences, which will depend on the political decisions about SAI use and governance. There is need for more research examining the global implications of this technology in terms of the international political context in which it is being developed. References to nuclear governance in solar geoengineering literature currently serve to provide political reassurance that it will be possible to design effective global governance mechanisms. However, comparisons between the two technologies are based on a partial reading of both historical and contemporary nuclear governance that minimises or ignores persistent challenges in nuclear governance to justify and legitimise solar geoengineering. This paper will examine the historical and contemporary linkages between two potentially planet-altering technologies that present substantial geopolitical and security concerns and demand effective global governance.
    
    Author: Danielle Young (University of Leeds)
- 43
  Panel / Hybrid peacebuilding in Africa? Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Peter Brett
  - Unpacking the international: politics of scale in hybridisation processes in Madagascar
    
    Scholars studying hybridisation in peace and conflict processes practice politics of scale. The knowledge they create in those fields create bounded containers of what they consider to be the “local” and the “international”. Such a practice could explain the dominant scholarship on liberal peacebuilding and the main understanding of the international attached to West which can be seen as territorializing elements and processes building up the dynamics behind hybridisation. Using the case of Madagascar, this paper uses the concept of scale in political geography to unpack the so-called “international”. It goes beyond the understanding of the international as liberal and explores the intricacies of the construction of the international as a practice by the actors involved in peace and conflict processes in relational and spatial terms. In addition, it unveils how the politics of scales of the actors involved in the dynamics behind the construction of the international.
    
    Author: Velomahanina Razakamaharavo (University of Reading)
  - Traditional authorities in hybrid peacebuilding
    
    Traditional authorities in hybrid peacebuilding
    Mohamed Abdi Mohamood
    
    A critical perspective on hybridity calls for a better understanding of the multiple theoretical frameworks that usually occur in the context of peacebuilding, development, and social justice modifications (Forsyth, Kent, Dinnen, Wallis, and Bose, 2017). Significant importance is placed on developing tools that allow participation of world views even though the principles of institutions and values of people operate inversely. Even though all scholars in the field of hybrid/post-liberal peace have a different understanding of the concept, they nonetheless agree on the framework's main components. The commonality they have is that they all critique the liberal peace in which they argue that its institutions, individuals, and actors are biased and that they are unable to bond successfully or engage with the values of the locals and their culture (Eriksson and Kostic, 2013). In the literature on hybrid peacebuilding, the notion of local is usually referred to customary, indigenous knowledge and traditional authorities such as elders and clan chiefs (Boege, Brown, and Clements, 2009, p.15). However, it is worth noting that the existing literature on hybridity romanticizes the locals and does not consider how local actors can both positively and negatively affect local peace processes. The scholars that promote hybrid peacebuilding advocate for the inclusion of these customary norms and traditional authorities in local peacebuilding processes (Mac Ginty, 2011). However, as seen in the case study of countries like Somalia, these traditional leaders can also be drivers of conflicts and become obstacles to peace processes. Therefore, this paper argues using Somalia as a case study, that the inclusion of local customs and traditions in peace building can be threatening in the sense that they can exclude women and youth from peacebuilding processes. To demonstrate this, this paper will analyse the different peace conferences that have been held for Somalia since the state collapsed in 1991.
    
    Author: Mohamed Mohamood (University of Leeds)
  - Power, Partnership and Peacebuilding: Examining an INGO’s Intervention in Farmer – Herder Conflict in Nigeria
    
    Abstract
    Partnership relationships between Northern-based International Non-governmental Organizations (INGOs) as donors and Southern-based Local Nongovernmental Organizations (LNGOs) as grantees, working together on peacebuilding intervention projects in the Global South is a subject of heavy debate, both in academics and in practice. Some scholars contend that this arrangement is characterized by unequal power structures and impositions which tend to silence local voices and concerns. The literature recognizes the challenge of power imbalance in the relationship but seems not to have sufficiently explored empirically how it manifests and impacts funded projects. It has also neglected to explore the role of the INGO's institutional funders and examine the tripartite power dynamics their inclusion creates. Thus, the overarching questions driving this study are how power asymmetry manifests in the relationship between INGOs and LNGOs, to what extent it impacts on funded projects, and how much of this is traced back to the INGO’s institutional funders. The research uses the case study of an anonymized INGO involved in building peace in the farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria’s North Central region. It adopts a qualitative approach and the tools for data collection include semi-structured in-depth and key-informant interviews (IDI and KII), and critical review of operating documents. Interview participants include management staff of the case study INGO, their institutional funders, LNGOs, project host community leaders and civil society development experts. The study uses Alan Fowler’s “authentic partnership” (1998) and French and Raven’s “power bases” (1969, 1965) as analytical prism; while relying on Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) and Principal-Agent Theory (PAT) as theoretical grounding. This work is an empirical contribution to the body of knowledge on power relationship between INGOs and LNGOs in the Global South, with an emphasis on funded projects. It seeks to address INGO – LNGO power relations empirically with a view to retooling and strengthening the relationship and engendering better value for peacebuilding projects for local communities.
    Keywords: Power polarity, Peacebuilding, Aid decoloniality, Post-conflict rebuilding, Funding pyramid
    
    Author: Martinluther Nwaneri (Aston University Birmingham United Kingdom)
  - Peace through Performative Art, Theatre, and Wrestling? The Intersubjective Co-constitution of Art by ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Peace Processes in South Sudan
    
    I consider three leading artistic and cultural endeavours in South Sudan: an artists’ collective which initially focused on visual and performance art, a theatre group, and organised wrestling competitions. Each endeavour became prominent post-independence, with most growing after the 2013 war began or recurred in 2016. These cases show how peace and art in South Sudan intersect and evolved in the last decade along three main, but not mutually exclusive, pathways: an evolution to activism (the artists’ collective); broad continuity (the theatre); and major interruption (wrestling), followed by imitation by successors. All three of these cases adopted, with varying degrees of introspection, classical liberal discourses of peace and conflict. All have been shaped by their founders’ own personal as well as wider popular demands for everyday and elite peace, by the presence of conflict and awareness of peace processes, and by a desire to influence—whether directly at the negotiating table or indirectly through mockery and social critique—South Sudan’s various engagements with peace. At the same time, it is these attempts at peace that have also played a role in constructing art, both in its organisational and aesthetic dimensions.
    
    Author: Aly Verjee (University of Gothenburg)
- 44
  Panel / Localising international law: the politics of bringing international law home Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Henry Lovat (University of Glasgow)
  
  Chair: Rachel Kerr (King's College London)
  - Lavender Tides: Elite-Led Mobilization and Segmented LGBT Marriage Legalization
    
    The past decade has brought a veritable sea change for the civil rights of LGBT people on each continent. Yet, the ratification and observance of the civil rights of LGBT people have been nonetheless highly varied from one country to the next. Whether through formal adoption, segmentation, or glocalization, many aspects of international law express Weber's Iron Cage (ex. Hironaka 2016). Institutional analyses have shown the particular isomorphic tendency of legal frameworks, including LGBT civil rights (Frank 2010). This paper adds to this discourse by moving away from institution-heavy analyses to argue that elite-led mobilization for and against a legal program explains the nature of an international law's local adoption. Elite-led mobilization, where individual actors shape public sentiment through various means, has been convincingly used to explain opposition to expanding civil rights (Bishin et al 2021). Through a comparative study of LGBT civil rights regimes in North and South America, the positive and negative interests that spur elite-led mobilization created a hard-fought, domino effect despite any opposition.
    
    Author: Connor Strobel (University of Chicago)
  - The Overseas Territories’ contribution to the Global Britain strategy
    
    After the decision of the UK to leave the EU, the UK Government established and promoted the idea of ‘Global Britain’, which is a vague concept which needs to be sharpened, and perhaps after the resignation of Boris Johnson as UK prime minister, a more marginal consideration. However, the truth is that the UK is no longer part of one of the world’s largest economic blocs and continues searching for a new role in the international community. This paper argues that the first step that the UK needs to take is to rebuild its Global identity in an inclusive manner, in part through its Overseas Territories. Aside from the historical and even nostalgic reasons, these territories, under British sovereignty, encapsulate British global identity and are part of the UK in a broad sense. The key issue, from a pragmatic point of view, lies in the fact that all of the territories are connected to different regional networks around the world and provide a great opportunity for the UK to extend its diplomatic, economic and environmental reach. However, this strategy not only needs to consider their contribution to ‘Global Britain’, but also the contribution that the UK can make to help the territories meet their current and varied challenges, including in some cases the conferring of more constitutional powers in areas such as external relations. In short, a relationship that is seen by both parties as advantageous.
    
    Author: Maria Mut Bosque
  - Whose Law? The Strategic Application of International Law in Human Rights
    
    What states are subjected to international legal criticism, and which states make such comments? Scholarship has increasingly considered the role and use of international legal claims in global politics. States may invoke international legal claims – instead of, or in addition to, political, ethical, or moral references – to frame criticisms of other states. It remains unclear, however, what makes a state more likely to make a legalized claim, as well as what types of states are more likely to receive such legalized claims. This paper examines these questions by analyzing all recommendations from the first two cycles of the Universal Periodic Review, a United Nations human rights mechanism where all states are reviewed and where any state may comment on the human rights practices of others. A unique coding of the legal character of recommendations allows for a two-pronged analysis – identifying which state receive legalized human rights comments and which states choose to make such comments. I theorize that strong democracies will be more likely to use international legal language in their comments, while states with middling human rights records will be more likely to receive legalized comments. This paper deepens our understanding of the political uses of international law in politics and human rights, the logics underpinning legalization in international relations, and the selective application of legal norms in international forums.
    
    Author: Kyle Reed (Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe The International Rule of Law - Rise or Decline?)
  - Enemy of the state: Citizenship deprivation and the problem of returning foreign terrorist fighters
    
    How can an individual’s human rights be protected in the context of states’ efforts to keep the nation safe? This question has gained renewed relevance with the proliferation of returning foreign terrorist fighters and the option of citizenship deprivation to counter the threat they are said to pose to national security. What used to be an ‘exceptional’ measure has become increasingly embedded in the UK over recent years, giving the executive broad discretion to deprive anyone of their citizenship if this was ‘conducive to the public good’.
    The paper analyses the case of Shamima Begum, a British citizen who left the UK to marry an ISIL fighter in Syria and her attempts to return to the UK as an illustration of how the measure is being applied in a discriminatory way. Citizenship has shifted from being a right to being a privilege, contingent on the Home Secretary’s assessment of whether an individual adheres to ‘British values’. The paper argues that citizenship has become a securitised and racialized concept that is conditional on ill-defined criteria of what it means to be a ‘good’ British citizen.
    
    Author: Andrea Birdsall (University of Edinburgh)
- 45
  Panel / Men and masculinities: vulnerability, militarism and peacebuilding Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
  - Instagramming the infantry: re-inscribing hegemonic military masculinity in the contemporary era
    
    Almost ten years ago, Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski suggested that we should be Rethinking the Man Question in international relations. More specifically, there has been much written about the relationship between gender and the military in recent years and of particular interest are works questioning the dominance of hegemonic military masculinity: to what extent is this central to modern armed forces? How has the integration of women impacted gender practices in the military? What is the role of LGBT personnel? This presentation considers the relationship between militaries and gender in the context of social media, where the British military is comparatively under-investigated. We ask to what extent the British Army constructs itself in hegemonically masculine terms on Instagram, a platform centring images. We focus on 1) the main, official account (https://www.instagram.com/britisharmy/) and 2) the account of the Army LGBT Network (https://www.instagram.com/british_army_lgbt/). Preliminary analysis suggests that the main account is much more hegemonically masculine than we might assume given recent rethinking of military masculinity. In contrast, the LGBT Network account positions the British Army as progressive, subverting representations of the institution as monolithically, hegemonically masculine.
    
    Author: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
  - Military Atrocity, Ontological Security and Warrior Masculinity on Trial
    
    This paper examines discourses of (white, male) innocence and insecurity mobilised around military atrocity crimes and how these relate to wider questions of militarism and ontological security. It explores how narratives of heroic and warrior military masculinity are drawn upon and called into question in conjunction with ideas of white innocence, male war duty and national sacrifice as a reaction to high-profile, alleged atrocity crimes committed by military personnel. It examines the case of Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated soldier, currently suing the newspapers that accused him of war crimes in a major libel suit. Through an analysis of public online spaces, evidence and testimony from the trial, as well as media and elite political narratives around this case, the paper explores the weighing up and potential discarding of warrior masculinity as anachronistic, brutal and no longer part of national mythmaking while at the same time the framing of militarised masculinity in relation to victimisation. It suggests that this duality is key to the wider politics of Australia’s war-making as well as to ideas about ontological (in)security in the liberal mode.
    
    Author: Hannah Partis-Jennings (Loughborough University)
  - Of Heroes and Victims: Constructing Hegemonic Masculinity and National Identity in Japanese "Abduction Issue" Discourse
    
    How do international relations incidents shape national identity? In Japan, a prominent case study to answer that question is found in scholarly discussions about how the “Abduction Issue”, a series of North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens, has facilitated a rightward shift in politics and attitudes. However, the role of gender in this shift remains unheeded. My research addresses this by examining the Abduction Issue through a feminist lens, arguing that gender is at the heart of both the problem stated and the solution implied in Abduction Issue discourse.
    
    I base this argument on two case studies of influential media concerning the Abduction Issue. The first case study are two posters which were part of a nationwide campaign, depicting a female victim and a male actor respectively. The second case study is former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s bestselling book “Towards a Beautiful Country” and the references to the Abduction Issue therein. Paying particular attention to the use of masculinities and femininities in these cases, my research supports feminists claims about the interdependence of masculinity and national identity, concretely demonstrating how through an explicitly gendered frame an international relations incident can be mobilised to shape both national identity and hegemonic masculinity.
    
    Author: Miklas Fahrenwaldt (University of Edinburgh)
  - Invisible Men: The injured lives of Afghan civilian interpreters
    
    This paper analyses the making and unmaking of injured Afghan interpreters’ masculinities who were employed by Western armies, based on in-depth interviews with wounded former interpreters in Afghanistan, Turkey and the UK. It traces the immediate impact and Western armies’ responses to injured Afghan interpreters a well as the medium- and longer-term impact, including on their resettlement prospects.
    
    This paper makes three interrelated arguments: first, it demonstrates that when locally employed civilian interpreters get injured, it fragments the military brotherhood in which they were already only precariously integrated. The differential treatment of injured locally employed civilian interpreters highlights the categorical and spatial separation implicit in the segregated brotherhood between Western military soldiers and their local interpreters. Secondly, we argue that injuries unmake the masculine role of provider for severely wounded interpreters. Still, injured young Afghan men who worked as interpreter seek to continue their role as masculine protector by hiding their injuries for their family members, who they do not want to burden with their pain and vulnerability. Finally, we suggest that while migration becomes an even more important alternative pathway to livelihood for injured interpreters, their injuries in fact compromise their resettlement chances.
    
    Attending to the voices of injured Afghan civilian interpreters employed by Western armies challenges the silence around their bodies and afterlives, which stands in sharp contrast to the increased recognition of the physical and psychological wounds of Western veterans. This omission is politically problematic, but also limits academic understanding of the differential gendered impact of injuries on a wider range of actors in conflict, who must navigate different as well as unequal social, cultural, political and legal arenas in the aftermath of their injuries.
    
    Authors: Sara de Jong (University of York) , Sayed Jalal Shajjan*
  - Social norm change during peacebuilding and the pathologisation of youth masculinities
    
    Over the past decade, there has been a growth of social norm change programming within sites of conflict and peacebuilding which explicitly aim to shift men’s relationship with gender. These initiatives aim to address a variety of issues including gender-based violence, violent extremism, violent conflict resolution and sexual health. Though these initiatives are diverse, they tend to focus on changing the attitudes, behaviours and identities of young marginalised men who are seen as being ‘at risk.’ At the same time these initiatives often rely on older men as potential role-models or advocates for change. This paper analyses these tendencies from a critical masculinities framework, suggesting that programming has unwittingly pathologised youth masculinities at the same time framing older men as natural authorities. Reflecting on fieldwork in Fiji, Aceh and a set of international expert interviews the paper concludes that existing social norm change programming during peacebuilding ends up prioritising the stabilisation of patriarchy over more meaningful change.
    
    Author: David Duriesmith (The University of Sheffield)
- 46
  
  Roundtable / Motherhood, Mothering and (Feminist) IR 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.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Julia Welland (University of Warwick)
  
  Participants: Shirin Rai (SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies)) , Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex) , Zoe Pflaeger Young (De Montfort University) , Laura Mills (University of St Andrews) , Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh) , Julia Welland (University of Warwick)
- 47
  Panel / Narrating race and coloniality QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St. Andrews)
  
  Discussant: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St. Andrews)
  - Soft Power in the Middle East: a Postcolonial approach
    
    Research on soft power and public diplomacy as one of its instruments has primarily focused on Western states (Cull, 2010; Nye, 2004). Others have associated soft power with Western and democratic states (Walker, 2016) The popularity that the concept gained has attracted researchers to think of ways to measure and analyse states’ practices (Darnton, 2020; Yarchi et al 2017; Laifer and Kitchen, N., 2017). Yet, during the last decade there is an emergent stream of critical scholarship on soft power: Melissa Nisbett and J. Simon Rofe (2022), argue that soft power polls are bias towards the West and the concept is Western by its nature despite being appropriated by authoritarian regimes, while Daya Thussu (2014) highlights the need to “de-Americanize” soft power to engage other states in the discourse; and Maria Repnikova (2022), questioning the very relevance of soft power in a non-Western context. Drawing on these developments, this paper argues that public diplomacy and soft power have been conceptualized in Western contexts and implemented by Western states; thus, they rely mainly on and reproduce the asymmetry between Western major powers and others. Furthermore, I advance the argument of a postcolonial approach needed to study non-Western powers’ understanding and engagement in public diplomacy. I will apply postcolonial theory and engage with IR scholarship addressing postcolonial questions to explore the impact of Western hegemony on public diplomacy and soft power in the context of the Middle East, an understudied region.
    
    Author: Rayan Alyusufi (Bournemouth University)
  - Interpellating the ‘British Subject’ and Creating the ‘Other’: media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn and the enduring legacy of empire
    
    Legacies of British imperialism, expressed through news content and coverage, represent a barrier to alternative political imaginaries and democratic possibilities. Digital and non-digital media work together in a hybrid system in which political news from professional news organisations dominates the UK media landscape (Chadwick and Vaccari, 2019). This system constructs and interpellates 'the British Subject’. That imaginary is defined in and through an idealised and sanitised vision of the British Empire. This imperialist understanding of ‘Britishness’ was used to dismiss, silence and demonise Jeremy Corbyn, during his time as Labour Party leader. This paper presents a selection of my research using a multimodal discourse analysis of its articulation during his four-year leadership. Analysing the visual dimension of meaning-making helps to better reveal how media power operates through a discursive articulation which relies on the invisibility of imperialism and interpellates the ‘British Subject’ whilst constructing the ‘other’. It aims to close down alternative political imaginaries and futures. Ultimately, the legacy of empire, via the power of the hybrid media, constitutes a significant barrier to political change in the UK. This, in turn, carries serious and important implications for the health and potential of British democracy and Britain’s role in world politics.
    
    Author: Maximillian Guarini (The University of Bristol)
  - Iran and the “Islamic bomb”: A study of liberal subjectivity and satire
    
    Satire is a type of composition that ridicules or censures someone or something. But does this mean that satirical texts are -by nature- critical of a certain state of affairs? This paper analyses the representation of the "crisis" on account of the Iranian nuclear program (2002-2015) in the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves. The paper conducts a narrative-visual analysis of a sample of cartoons published between 2002 (the onset of the “crisis”) and 2015 (when the “nuclear deal” was brokered between the P5+1 and Iran). It argues that the discourse of Nuclear Orientalism (Gusterson, 1999), articulated with other discourses such as petro-masculinity (Daggett, 2018), shapes the narratives through which the cartoons join the public debate on the (il)legitimacy of the Iranian nuclear program. The paper concludes that, despite the irreverent ways in which a satirical genre such as the political cartoon participates in discussions on world politics, it, de facto, contributes to consolidate the political and epistemic privileges of a rational liberal political subject over the pursuers of the “Islamic bomb".
    
    Author: Marina Díaz Sanz (University of Deusto)
- 48
  Panel / Nation, Nationalisms and Revolution: New historical-sociological approaches in national transitions. Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: HSIR Working group
  
  Chair: Selim Yilmaz (University of Nottingham)
  - 'The Volk Must Be Defended': Founding the German Nation-state and Ontological Security
    
    In this piece, I advance a re-evaluation of the foundation of ‘state identity’ by beginning with Foucault’s insight into the conceptual creation of the nation-state must be examined as a non-universal, historically contingent development. In order to situate my inquiry, I propose to critically interrogate the formation of the German nation-state, which was officially established in 1871, as a key moment in the development of ‘national security' as a material-discursive practice. This textual analysis draws from a series of cultural and political sources to sketch out some of the key moves in thought from the period to connect to the practice of statecraft. The study shows that the German nation-state’s raison d’être was born out of a sense of ontological insecurity yet also functioned to produce said insecurity as a raison d’état for imperial expansion. Thus, the peculiarity of German state formation both yields and is produced by a historical identity of German völkisch identity, which interplays with state identity. This has important implications for Ontological Security scholarship as it calls for a need to interrogate the basic foundations of the nation-state as a model if we are to understand more fully the phenomenon of state identity and behavior today.
    
    Author: Luther Lee McPherson IV (Virginia Tech)
  - The Established–Outsider Relations: Gossip and Stigmatisation in the Great Power-Rising Power Relations
    
    Do states behave similarly to humans? Do theoretical explanations of stigmatisation in the established-outsider theory apply to states? This paper takes an innovative psychoanalysis approach to understand the process of states’ power transitions. Great powers employ stigmatisation towards rising powers as a tool and means to maintain power and delay a power shift. The father of figurational sociology, Norbert Elias, in his established–outsider theory studied social inequalities based on the observation of an English town consisting of three zones. Yet, similar lessons can be drawn from the competition and relationship between states in the international system. States stigmatise for the simple reason of survival and security that is linked to the perception of threat inspired by neorealism. The synthesis of figurational sociology and neorealism creates a unique lens to view world politics differently. Two levels of historical analyses are employed to examine the power competition of great and rising powers from 1900 to 1945, and from 1945 to 2010. Findings suggest that the effort to promote soft power is crucial, and the increasing importance of soft power confirms that reputation and stigmatisation are means to maintain power. Furthermore, great powers do not use stigmatisation on all weaker states, meaning the higher the level of perceived threat, the more likely great powers will stigmatise rising powers to prevent the latter from growing. This research concludes by recommending rising powers to, firstly, expect stigmatisation by the great powers; and, secondly, pre-emptively work on soft power development to prevent aggressive confrontation.
    
    Author: Selim Yilmaz (University of Nottingham)
  - Realism and the Politics of Exile
    
    What is the relationship between realism and exile? Many twentieth century realists faced exile as a core biographical experience. And yet, beyond a generalized pessimism, exile’s effect on realism is not well understood. I argue that, for transatlantic realists, the idea of exile was both a key rhetorical device and an aspect, usually undiagnosed, of their relationship to ideology. First, the experience of exile allowed European realists in America to present themselves as sources of foreign wisdom, before elite American audiences. Here, exile was a source of status. Second, however, exile was a recurring tacit feature of how they interfaced with political ideologies. Lacking a vision of the good life of its own, realism has had an ambivalent relationship with mass ideological projects. Realists and their antecedents have successively attached themselves to European imperialisms, fascisms, American liberal anticommunism, leftist anti- interventionisms, and others besides. They have done so to access to political power and speak their truths to it. However, realists’ discomfort with utopianisms later drives them to reject these ideologies. Thus, none has become a durable ideological home. This recurring cycle of ideological exile has inscribed the exile experience in realism’s political ethos. In this sense, I argue, the realist experience of exile is not just an aspect of realist biographies, but a persistently constitutive feature of the intellectual project of realism itself.
    
    Author: Joseph MacKay (Australian National University)
  - Nationalism and Its Doubles: A Genealogy of the Civic/Ethnic Dichotomy
    
    The civic/ethnic dichotomy is no doubt the most influential conceptual framework for making sense of nationalism. It is associated with such illustrious names as Karl Marx, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Meinecke, Hans Kohn, and Ernest Gellner. Yet a proper understanding of the emergence and development of this dichotomy is still lacking. By reconstructing a critical genealogy of the civic/ethnic dichotomy, this paper makes three contributions. First, it problematises the widespread view that the civic/ethnic dichotomy has been a longstanding feature of nationalism studies. In fact, none of the aforementioned scholars refer to “civic” or “ethnic” nationalism. While dualistic conceptions of nationalism have a long history, the civic/ethnic dichotomy itself is a product of the late Cold War. Second, the paper problematises the assumption that civic nationalism has been seen as the “good” kind of nationalism and that ethnic nationalism has been seen as the “bad” kind. Instead, I show that the polarity of the civic/ethnic dichotomy has always been doubled, such that each pole functions as both cure and poison for the other. Third, the paper recasts the recent critiques of the civic/ethnic dichotomy as part of the history of that dichotomy. Rather than emanating from an entirely detached vantage point, the critiques of the civic/ethnic framework are a response to a particular historical moment: the disorientation of the Eurocentric international order.
    
    Author: Jaakko Heiskanen (Queen Mary University of London)
- 49
  Panel / Nuclear Politics Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
  - A good deep friendly look into the Atomic World
    
    My paper seeks to advance a rounded and grounded view of the nuclear subject and the Atomic World, more than is presently on the table. My insights in this area derive in the first instance from working as a geologist in Canada where I became involved in a search for uranium. This work triggered my curiosity about the nature of the energy in the atom. Nuclear physics determined in the 1930's that there are 'four-interactive-forces' in each and every atom. My introspective nature caused me to inquire about the metaphysics of these 'four forces'. This approach allows us to see how those 'four energetic qualities' in the atom are equally here at work between and within us humans. They are especially evident in our family lives.
    
    My concern for the nuclear subject led me to work at Dounreay, the reactor here in northern Scotland. I had grown up in a British colonial household, in Kenya, where my father was part of the British colonial administration. That experience helped me see how we British, along with the other nuclear nations, are working in the Atomic World as colonists. History is repeating itself. We are repeating ourselves. Indeed, what goes on inside our reactors looks like a modern equivalent of the African Slave Trade. Many avenues of inquiry open up from these insights.
    
    I've a website <www.holynuclear.uk> that elaborates on this abstract.
    
    Author: Ian Turnbull (Findhorn Foundation Community)
  - The long and winding road to nuclear amity: The Argentine-Brazilian nuclear rapprochement as viewed from the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
    
    This paper analyses the historical evolution of the nuclear relationship between Argentina and Brazil during the second half of the twentieth century (1946-1999). Ever since the beginning of their respective nuclear development programmes, the two Southern Cone powers have undergone a winding road alternating between open and secret rivalry, competition, coordination and cooperation on nuclear matters. Taking the model of Punctuated Equilibria (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; True et al., 2007) as a departing theoretical framework, this work finds that the nuclear-centred relationship between these two countries undergoes a path of sustained rapprochement, going from an initial equilibrium of entrenched rivalry to a final equilibrium point of open cooperation and quasi-integration of their nuclear policies. Nonetheless, this rapprochement is not carried out gradually and steadily, but it is rather ignited by a set of critical junctures that serve to change the direction of the nuclear relationship scheme that was prevalent at the time. To identify and make sense of these critical junctures, this paper engages with archival and diplomatic sources from both countries, so as to appraise the conscious choice for cooperation and mutual trust made by Argentina and Brazil on such a delicate matter, and disentangle the Argentine-Brazilian long road to nuclear amity.
    
    Author: Carolina Zaccato (University of St Andrews)
  - The symbolism of national legislation around nuclear weapons
    
    The relationship between the law and nuclear weapons is often examined not at the national level, but rather internationally, whether in terms of the threat of use such as the International Court of Justice debate in 1996; the The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 1970; or the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted by a vote of 122 States in favour at the United Nations on 7 July 2017. Yet nationally, many countries, nuclear and non-nuclear, have legislation around nuclear weapons. A more recent example of this is North Korea's new nuclear policy law in 2022. This paper offers a first mapping of national legislation around nuclear weapons worldwide, and considers the domestic purposes and drivers for these laws, and whether they fundamentally differ in purposes among nuclear and non-nuclear states.
    
    Author: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
- 50
  Panel / Politics of the Gulf Region Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Betul Dogan Akkas (Durham University & Qatar University)
  
  Chair: Mate Szalai (Ca Foscari University)
  - The influence-building strategy of small Gulf states in great powers
    
    While international observers mostly regard them as only oil-producing countries, the small states of the Persian Gulf region have been arguably successful in diversifying their political and economic toolkit to shape global affairs. In the context of renewed and intensified great power competition and the transformation of the global energy market, the five monarchies (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman) found various ways through which they can influence great powers and pursue their interests internationally. Nevertheless, due to their small size and the social preconceptions surrounding them, many observers failed to realize their exact role.
    The research aims at interpreting the five Gulf states’ position and strategy in relation to influence-building in great powers, most notably the US, the UK, the EU, Russia and China. While the analysis takes into account both traditional and non-traditional ways of interfering in the domestic and transnational sphere of decision-making, the focus will be put on elite-to-elite relations. Using a neo-Gramscian interpretative framework, the research will be conducted on both theoretical and empirical levels with the ambition of forming conclusions for the leverage of small states vis-á-vis great powers.
    
    Author: Mate Szalai (Ca Foscari University)
  - Qatari-British Relations Post Independence (1971-1980)
    
    Qatar got its independence in 1971 from the United Kingdom. The country did not have a strong development record. Infused with the windfall from the sale of oil , Qatar wanted to chart a modernization phase that allows it to be on par with other gulf states. The UK had a strong influence on Qatar’s development in political , military ,and economic spheres since it was the country that provided protection to Qatar before the independence. Relying on newly declassified documents from the British Archive, the paper aims through historical analysis to explain Qatar’s evolving partnership with the UK. The research question that guides the paper is how did Qatar relations develop following Qatar’s independence? and what were the main issues that guided the relationship through 1971 to 1980? The research will shed a light on small states foreign policies dealing with major powers specifically newly independent states dealing with their former colonizers. It will also shed a light on how small states internal needs guide their interactions with other states.
    
    Author: Sultan Al-Khulaifi (University of Glasgow)
  - Inclusive civilizational identity in regional peace-making: The case of the Abraham Accords
    
    In 2020 the UAE and Bahrain agreed to normalise relations with Israel leading to the signing of the ‘Abraham Accords’. Whilst the immediate strategic motivations are clear in the face of a threatening Iran and a retrenching US, I address the question: what are the purposes and significance of the agreements’ ‘Abrahamic’ civilizational identity framing? This paper builds on the ‘Civilizational Politics’ research framework (Katzenstein 2010; Bettiza 2014), drawing on constructivist IR, to evaluate this as a case of elite-led civilizational identity construction. In contrast to the Huntingtonian assumption of an inevitable clash between Islam and the ‘Judeo-Christian’ West, the Abrahamic construction emphasises common ancestry between Jews and Arabs. Analysing documents, discourse and elite interviews in Israel, the US, and the UAE, the paper explores the motivations behind the use of this ‘Abrahamic’ construction. It also analyses the processes of its institutionalization, including through the text of the accords, follow up working groups, and the construction of Abu Dhabi’s ‘Abrahamic Family House’. The potential motivations include an agenda to shift wider Arab attitudes towards Israel, respond to the Islamist challenge, and improve perceptions of Islam and the Gulf States in the West. The paper reflects on whether this inclusive civilizational construction has the potential to impact relations more widely between Western and Islamic societies, or to change dynamics relating to the Palestinian arena. As a case study of civilizational identity politics, it sheds light on the processes whereby elites seek to redraw transnational identity boundaries to legitimise their international agendas, and the potential and pitfalls of doing so.
    
    Authors: Marwa Maziad (University of Maryland)* , Toby Greene (Bar Ilan University)
- 51
  
  Roundtable / NGO/Practitioner perspectives: Towards a Feminist Foreign Policy in Scotland QE2, Marriott
  
  Practitioner perspectives: Towards a Feminist Foreign Policy in Scotland
  
  Chair: Dr Sophia Dingli and Dr Malte Riemann
  
  Sponsor: School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow
  
  Chair: Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow)
  
  Participants: Jamie Livingston (Oxfam Scotland) , Naomi McAuliffe (Amnesty International Scotland) , Marsha Scott (Scottish Women's Aid) , Janet Fenton (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Secure Scotland)
- 52
  Panel / Problematising Research Ethics and Methodology Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: Larissa Fast (UoM)
  
  Discussant: Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield)
  - A Methodology for Analysing the Effects of Climate Change on Maritime Security
    
    The links and dependencies between climate change’s effects on natural systems and their impacts on maritime security (in particular maritime crime) have been acknowledged by states, international organizations, and academics (e.g. Germond and Mazaris, 2019). Understanding them is crucial in order to address future threats to the global maritime order that will be deeply affected by the effects of climate change. However, the precise identification of these links requires developing a methodology at the intersection between social science and marine science to account for the cumulative nature of the effects and impacts in question, and thus help identifying precise issues and devising policy solutions.
    
    This paper proposes to base such framework for analysis on the underlying methodology of Cumulative Effect Assessments (CEAs). Although CEAs have so far mainly been applied to assess human impacts on ecosystems, it is possible to apply similar methods to study the links between climate change and maritime security (Roudgarmi 2018). To do so, we suggest using an Effect to Impact Pathway (EIP) methodology, as developed by Judd et al. (2015), to map the relationships between certain ‘Activities’ (e.g. human induced emissions of greenhouse gasses), the ‘Pressure’ engendered (e.g. warming sea temperatures) and their ‘Impacts’ (e.g. food shortages) via ‘Receptors’ (e.g. fishing communities) on certain sectors of society (in this case maritime migration and maritime crime, e.g. illegal fishing).
    
    It is then possible to generate an assessment map that investigates the ‘Impacts’ that the human induced greenhouse gas emissions have on maritime security. This map will be created using scientific data from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The resulting improved understanding of the whole effects-to-impacts relationships should contribute to policy responses. The paper shows the utility of a multidisciplinary approach in understanding causal chains that transcends climate science. The proposed analytical tool can then be applied in further studies to assess the dependencies and synergies between climate change and the occurrence of maritime insecurity.
    
    Authors: James Brennan (Lancaster University)* , Basil Germond (Lancaster University)
  - What Do We Know about Research Ethics Scholarship in Political Science? A bibliometric analysis
    
    In recent years, scholars of IR and political science have called attention to research ethics, as evidenced in calls for journals to require confirmation of ethical clearance prior to publication, demands for further resources and training for scholars, and a proliferation of publications on the topic. The intensification of interest in research ethics calls for closer scrutiny of this emerging area of study and its position in the discipline as a whole. This article conducts a bibliometric analysis of political science and international relations journal articles on research ethics in order to understand how the field generates and values scholarship on research ethics. The findings show that, to date, scholarship on research ethics is disproportionately produced by scholars that are traditionally under-represented in the academy, and that it has been comparatively undervalued in political science and international relations, rarely appearing in the discipline’s top journals and receiving comparatively fewer citations. We further find that much of what has been published on research ethics in political science has not been taken up by the so-called “mainstream”. These findings raise important questions about whose labour the field relies on to produce knowledge on research ethics, how that labour is valued, and the extent to which research ethics reflects a substantive area of inquiry, versus a disciplinary practice demonstrating commitment to ethical research.
    
    Authors: Rebecca Tapscott (Book Reviews Editor, Civil Wars journal) , Bart Gabriel (Geneva Graduate Institute)*
  - ‘Staying with’ the Paradox of Engaged Research: Lessons from Jewish-Israeli Activists’ ‘Imperfect Struggles’
    
    How can academic research be emancipatory while being intimately implicated in the reproduction of hegemonic hierarchies of people, themes, and practices?
    
    This dilemma has been crucial for engaged researchers, with the debate coalescing around two responses: upholding the separation between one’s academic and political personas, or fusing the two in the figure of the ‘scholar activist.’ While animated by the best intentions, the latter has resulted in setting agendas that are not only hardly achievable, but often counterproductive.
    
    The paper addresses this dilemma through a reflexive engagement with ethnographic fieldwork carried out among Jewish-Israeli activists for Palestinian rights. Having observed how their split identity and power-laden positionality mirror those of the engaged researcher, the paper draws attention to how some of these activists eschew unattainable ‘pure’ political stances to carry out instead ‘imperfect’ struggles which – through messy, grounded, affective engagements – disrupt colonial relationalities and subjectivities.
    
    Learning from these endeavours, the paper suggests that rather than trying to ‘solve’ the paradox of engaged research we should ‘stay with’ it: embrace the tensions this ‘contradictory location’ entails and work through them towards the achievement of a “less comfortable social science” (Lather, 2000) but one that can produce, precisely for this, profound subversive contributions.
    
    Author: Alice Baroni (Geneva Graduate Institute)
  - Ethics beyond the ethics board
    
    If research wants to contribute to a more equal world order and the challenges outlined in the Secretary-General agenda, this need to be reflected in research processes themselves. Especially remote and collaborative research poses a range of ethical challenges rarely considered by researchers, and less so by UK ethics boards. Because these approaches will likely expand in future, we must consider their implications. This paper reflects on the ethical challenges of field research for a time when travel is less possible or justifiable, even as peace and conflict researchers strive to remain attentive to local dynamics.
    
    While scholars have reflected on their practical implications, few turn to the ethical dimensions. These include issues of ‘researching the other’ which connect to debates of decolonising research and research methods precisely because they call for increased cooperation between researchers in different locales. The paper contributes to a culture of reflection on our own research and positionality, impacts on knowledge production and, most importantly, the people with whom we engage in the research process.
    
    Key words: research methods, fieldwork, research ethics; decolonising research
    
    Authors: Larissa Fast (University of Manchester) , Birte Vogel (University of Manchester)
- 53
  Panel / Silly IR: Interventions Into A Serious Discipline Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  
  Chair: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  - The politics of play: interrogating the seriousness of the silly
    
    This paper explores the extent to which play can operate as an antidote to the arch-seriousness of World Politics and IR. While usually treated as singularly unserious both in and beyond the academy, drawing on political, social, and philosophical theorisations of play, the paper seeks to trace play’s potential to precipitate powerful disruptions to the rigidities and absurdities of the (ostensibly) serious. At the same time, it moves beyond an idealised or romanticised analysis which locates in play the solution to the exclusionary power relations and marginalisations at work in the serious. The paper begins by conceptualising the ‘spark of silliness’ at work in play – understood as distinct from forms of gameplay with which it is often conflated in the current ludic century – seeking to excavate something of the ‘lifeiness’ of its embodied experiential effects. From there, it examines some possible panaceas of play, emphasising the extent to which it is recuperable into forms of global ordering. Finally, it deconstructs the binary logic operating in the association of play with silliness and non-play (such as work or academic study) with the serious by tracing the seriousness with which people play, and the silliness they bring to ostensibly serious spheres of life. It concludes that we should take seriously the silliness of play as a site of potentially radical disruption to the constraints of the serious.
    
    Author: Aggie Hirst (King's College London)
  - The absurd disembodiment of academic gravitas: interrogating the silliness of the serious
    
    This paper pokes fun at the arch-seriousness of World Politics via a decolonial critique of the (Western) intellectual subject. Drawing especially on the work of Ramón Grosfoguel (2007) and Sylvia Wynter (2003), I trace the pervasive and disciplinary seriousness of social science to the “disembodied and unlocated neutrality” (Grosfoguel 2007: 214) of Western knowledge. Colonial epistemology un-locates the speaking subject – a privilege that is largely withheld from racialised and gendered speakers – in the service of consolidating power through the epistemic representation of specifically Western knowledge as unbiased, neutral, objective, and impartial. This project must eliminate or compartmentalise1 modes of enunciation that dangerously disclose the speaker’s embodiment and locatedness, such as humour, cultural references, poetics, and so on. To subvert this colonial epistemic seriousness, this paper presents a parody of the absurd performance of unlocatedness that the Western claim to knowledge is founded upon, through which to view the spectral theatricality of ‘objective’ social science for what it is.
    
    Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The Epistemic Decolonial Turn, Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 211-223
    
    Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The new centennial review, 3(3): 257-337.
    
    Author: Thomas Houseman (Leeds Beckett University)
  - A playground of political possibilities: the cultural productions of resistance of the children of Shaheen Bagh
    
    This paper engages children’s active participation in the 101-day long anti-citizenship Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi, India (2019-2020) which began in resistance to the ruling Hindu supremacist BJP party’s passing of a citizenship law (Citizenship Amendment Act, CAA). This, in tandem with two other laws (National Population Register, NPR, and National Register of Citizens, NRC) criminalises Muslim, Adivasi (indigenous), Dalit (lower caste), and migrant existence in India.
    
    I argue that the children’s cultural productions of resistance at Shaheen Bagh disrupts these disciplinary functions of the neo-colonial Indian nation-state in two ways. Firstly, I argue the children’s play – banner and art-making, face-painting, and slogan chanting – transformed the protest site from being a ‘reasonable’ anti-CAA-NPR-NRC protest into a playground of political possibilities for living otherwise (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). This disrupts mainstream media coverage and liberal commentary which reduces the protests to being ‘sensible’, i.e., focusing on formally repealing the laws alone, rather than questioning borders and citizenship per se – as well as centring the ‘respectable’ protestors: the dadis (grandmothers) and mothers who ‘don’t usually protest’. By shifting the focus to the disruptive, playful praxis of children, I offer one way of reclaiming the resistance’s radicalism from this depoliticisation. Secondly, this move disrupts the hegemonic Hindu supremacist understanding of children as builders of a muscular, masculine, fascist Hindu nation. This resonates with Baspehlivan’s (2022) argument that the praxis of children’s im-maturity, i.e., play, has revolutionary potential for negating the mature functioning of the state, thus offering novel possibilities for futurity.
    
    Author: Mandeep Sidhu (University of Brighton)
  - Cucks, Blue Pills and Reactionary Freedom Fighters: The Violent Humour of the Alt-Right
    
    This paper interrogates the alt-right visual culture of memes, exploring how humour works politically within this context. While much of the literature on humour and global politics has focused on its emancipatory potential, this paper takes a more pessimistic approach by showing how humour, as it is used by the alt-right, serves a repressive and marginalising function. I conceive of three central mechanisms of humour to understand its role within alt-right digital spaces and make sense of humour’s specific politicality within this context: 1) humour does boundary work, 2) humour is performative, 3) humour is constructed as transgressive. I argue that through the everyday practices of humour, social boundaries are drawn and redrawn, subjectivities are constituted, and specific political claims are made. In doing so, I unsettle common sense assumptions underlying the discursive demarcation between humour and serious rhetoric. I argue that it is precisely this relegation of humour to the realm of the unserious which gives it the power to masquerade as benign or even inherently good, even when the humorous utterance is bigoted, discriminatory and violent. This undertheorisation of humour’s politicality is therefore implicated in its deployment as a rhetorical device by the alt-right
    
    Author: Elisabeth Moerking (University of Bristol)
  - The Silly and The Serious: Towards a Counterpolitics
    
    International Relations (IR) is a discipline that takes itself seriously. It deals with serious subject matters such as war, diplomacy, power, and violence, organising its disciplinary, empirical, and theoretical boundaries around events, objects, and subjects that are taken to be serious. This disciplinary seriousness does not only permeate what is studied but also how they are studied and who studies them. As noted by feminist and queer theorists (Enloe, 2013; Zalewski et al. 2015; Halberstam, 2011; Berlant, 1997), these disciplinary assumptions and performances often work for the exclusion of ways of knowing, understanding, and presenting politics that do not seem to easily fit the mould of seriousness taken as disciplinary common sense.
    
    This paper, in questioning the disciplinary, ontological, epistemological, and methodological seriousness that pervade constructions of the “international”, calls for what Lauren Berlant names a “counterpolitics of the silly object”. Three sites of intervention emerge in this inquiry: ontological, epistemological, and methodological. Ontologically, what do we lose when we construct a world that is inherently serious? How does our perspective shift when we take account of a world that is contingent, unexpected, and non-sensical? Epistemologically, how does IR scholarship discipline boundaries of acceptance and rejection, of good scholarship and bad scholarship across gendered, raced, and heteronormative differentiations of the serious and the silly? Can we know the world from a perspective that does not yield to these differentiations? Methodologically, what do we gain from analyses, perspectives, and performances that look at the “waste materials” of everyday communication: jokes, memes, reality TV shows, children’s cartoons, and more?
    
    Authors: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol) , Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow)
- 54
  Panel / Status and Recognition in International Politics Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Conveners: Steven Ward (University of Cambridge) , Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham) , Elif Kalaycioglu (University of Alabama) , Adam Quinn (University of Birmingham)
  
  Chair: Daniel Nexon (Georgetown University)
  
  Discussant: Daniel Nexon (Georgetown University)
  - Self-esteem and ideological self-view in the contest over US grand strategy
    
    Self-esteem and ideological self-view in the contest over US grand strategy
    
    Author: Adam Quinn (University of Birmingham)
  - International Status and National Pride
    
    International Status and National Pride
    
    Author: Steven Ward (University of Cambridge)
  - Great Powers, Great Pasts: Narratives of Decline and Promises of Renewal
    
    Great Powers, Great Pasts: Narratives of Decline and Promises of Renewal
    
    Author: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham)
  - Conceptual politics and resilience-at-work in the European Union post-Brexit
    
    Global developments, most notably Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments because these crises have accentuated some of its ontological and epistemological uncertainties and insecurities. Amidst this context, the EU’s resilience turn aimed at strengthening the EU’s ability to prepare and recover from external shocks and crises. However, the concept of resilience has also evolved since it was first adopted in the EU’s Global Strategy in 2016. In recent years, we have seen the EU turning back in on itself and abandoning the radical aspects of resilience. Hence a paradox has emerged – the more complex the problems faced by the EU, the more it turns away from the logics of complexity present in the idea of resilience. In this paper, we examine this conceptual shift and focus on how the exit of the UK from the EU means that neoliberal understandings of resilience, which so far were prevalent in EU
    humanitarian and development policy, have given way to a more continental approach to resilience emphasizing state-led responses and the notions of robustness and protection. This argument will be explored by examining the recently adopted Strategic Compass and the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
    
    Authors: Ana Juncos (University of Bristol)* , Jonathan Joseph (University of Bristol)
- 55
  
  Roundtable / Storying the International: Towards a more generous International Relations 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.
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: Shambhawi Tripathi (University of St. Andrews)
  
  Participants: Amya Agarwal (Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg) , Anthony Lang (University of St. Andrews) , Roxani Krystalli (University of St. Andrews) , Niharika Pandit (London School of Economics) , Pauline Zerla (King's College London)
- 56
  Panel / The Everyday in World Politics: Practices, Spaces, and Subjectivities Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Kyle Grayson (BISA)
  
  Chair: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
  - Private Sector Engagement in Humanitarian Action and the Dangers of ‘Everyday CSR’: Inappropriate at its Best, Harmful at its Worst
    
    Abstract Corporations nowadays are required to deliver goods and services beyond profitable management of business activities: companies have responsibilities toward people and the societies in which they operate. Having CSR strategies, ESG policy, and even promoting UN Global Compact are now considered responsibilities of corporations, which provides a legitimate aspect for their continued operation. The trend of acting on CSR and UN guidelines even goes as far as encouraging the private sector to engage in humanitarian action. However, corporations are not Samaritans. And they rightly should not be. This paper argues that corporations’ ‘Everyday CSR’ is inappropriate at its best and harmful at its worst. The duties and responsibilities in a humanitarian context require that corporations commit to the kind of humanitarian values and norm-based approach humanitarian INGOs have. This paper proposes ‘Corporate Humanitarian Responsibility’ (CHR) for corporations who want to engage in humanitarian relief efforts. In particular, it argues that corporations need to follow five distinct humanitarian responsibilities derived from the concept of humanitarian ethics, instead of ‘Everyday CSR’.
    
    Author: Chin Ruamps (Copenhagen Business School)
  - ‘A city of music, of social justice, of joy’: local identity and Ukrainian solidarity in Eurovision host city bids
    
    The UK’s offer to host the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in place of 2022 winner Ukraine will be the first time in the Contest’s history where one country hosts on behalf of another. Mega events such as Eurovision are typically understood as opportunities for host cities and nations to narrate their local identities or national brand on the global stage, attracting tourism, investment and cultural capital or soft power in the process. The dynamic of one country hosting for another therefore offers a unique opportunity consider how potential host cities articulate both their own local identities and international solidarity. This paper explores these dynamics by examining the bids of the seven UK cities that campaigned to host Eurovision 2023, with particular focus on the ultimately successful city, Liverpool. It uses narrative analysis of bid applications and supporting public campaign materials such as tweets and videos to consider how the cities connect their local identities with support for Ukraine. In doing so, the paper brings scholarship on the politics of Eurovision, cultural diplomacy, and cities in international relations into conversation to develop our understanding of sub-state localities as international diplomatic actors.
    
    Authors: Zoë Jay (University of Helsinki) , Ben Rosher (Queen's University Belfast)*
  - Cultural Victories: the making of military victory in the UK
    
    Military victory has been long understood as the outcome of battles: a time-altering event bringing war to cessation and restoring peace. This paper challenges this idea, arguing instead that victory is (re)made as much inside the battlefield as outside, during both war- and peace-time. Everyday culture is as crucial to victory as are war’s material outcomes. In fact, military victory is both material and narrational. To make this argument, the paper focuses on British culture to offer a sociology of UK victory practices. I start by tracing the idea of decisiveness back to history education through the analysis of GCSEs and A-level textbooks. I show that an association between victory and temporal finality is established through a pedagogy of cause/effect (or causal chains) in which military victories are identified as key martial events leading to historical change. The paper then moves to Remembrance Sunday commemoration rites, showing the paradoxical centrality of these continuously reproduced practices to the making of victory in World War One at 11am, on November 11, 1918. I conclude by offering an analysis of war-themed video games, underscoring their complicity to the making of victory in modern and contemporary conflicts.
    
    Author: Mirko Palestrino (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Aesthetics and Ontological Security
    
    Aesthetics can be manifested both as vulnerability and as a tool of securitisation of the states. Through aesthetic practices, states may appear differently than it otherwise would as aesthetics can be something to hide the imperfections as well as an aspiration for achieving beauty. Thus, aesthetics may not be just something to hide the insecurities but be an aspiration to become. This paper will investigate the identity-related stability application of ontological security and try to conceptualise aesthetics as an emancipatory agency. In other words, it will investigate aesthetic representation as an aspirational dimension of ontological security. Therefore, it asks how the practice of aesthetics play out in the self-creation and identity construction of a state? As our being is stretched over temporal and spatial dimensions that is subjected to change and, thus if we are to distinguish the fragments of our identities of past, current and future, what role does aesthetics play when we label identity something as a yearning, missing and in the revival of the lost identity. Would aesthetics become a tool to bridge the yearning part of our identity and the identity that we aspire to become? Can aesthetically cultural representations constitute a spatial context in which routine of a nation’s existence are performed?
    
    Author: Irem Cihan (SOAS)
  - The Silent Revolution: The birth of the EU sanctions policy at the End of History
    
    International sanctions have become a cornerstone of EU foreign policy over the last thirty years. Since the treaty of Maastricht, the EU became one of the most prolific users of international sanctions worldwide, second only to the United States. Currently targeting more than 30 countries through more than 40 regimes, sanctions have become something of a one-size-fits-all EU response to all kinds of international issues.
    
    Nevertheless, this embrace of international sanctions as a tool of foreign policy was not always as self-evident as today for the European chancelleries and public alike. While wary of using sanctions during the Cold War, Brussels gradually became a sanctions super-user throughout the last 30 years. While focusing on specific cases enables to understand the drivers and effectiveness of punctual sanctions regimes, focusing on the discursive context of sanctions permits to understand variation in the use of autonomous sanctions across time and space.
    
    Using archives and textual data, this paper aims to show how throughout the 90s, discourses around sanctions have shifted in Europe, and restrictive measures gradually came to be seen as a moral imperative for European decision-makers. It traces this phenomenon back to both internal and external factors, namely the need to define an EU foreign policy after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and the liberal push after the fall of the Soviet Union. In doing so, this paper aims to contribute to the European foreign policy literature, by showing how and why EU sanctions became a central element of its foreign policy, and to the sanctions scholarships, by offering a sanctioner-specific account of the increasing use of autonomous international sanctions as a tool of statecraft.
    
    Author: Jan Lepeu (EUI)
- 14:45
  
  Refreshment break: SPONSORED BY REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY (RIPE)
- 57
  Panel / Building and Contesting Global & Regional Order(s) Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: IIRG Working group
  
  Chair: Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (Cardiff University)
  - Differentiation through emulation: reading Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy through ontological (in)security
    
    This paper links notions of nation branding, status-seeking, and ontological (in)security to discuss the tension between the Japanese conservatives’ pursuit of ‘normalisation’ of security policy and Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIP). FOIP is former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s initiative to promote ‘values-based diplomacy’ and rule of law in the Indo-Pacific. I read FOIP as a (nation) branding strategy that informs the Japanese conservatives’ pursuit of ontological security, speaking to their sense of self-esteem (Browning, 2015), status-seeking, and home-seeking practices in the international system (Ejdus, 2019). Though scholarship on nation branding has mostly focused on how states brand their economies in neoliberal markets (Cho, 2017), this paper shifts the focus to how states brand their security policy, and how this informs their ontological (in)security. While Japanese conservatives seek to restore the ‘greatness’ of Japan’s past by removing post-war constraints on security policy, and by constructing a narrative that focuses on Japan’s exceptionality, they also seek club status and acceptance among Western nations and brand their security practices accordingly. Though FOIP is often associated with Japan’s power politics and rivalry with China, this paper suggests that it can be interpreted primarily as a question of being for Japan, which shows how it sells itself in a marketplace of like-minded states (Browning, 2015). Being a case of differentiation through emulation, FOIP epitomises the tension between status-seeking and exceptionality in the Japanese conservatives’ pursuit of ontological security.
    
    Author: Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick)
  - Orders of Contestation: Securitisation Cycles and the Liberal International Order
    
    This paper aims to develop a combined English and Copenhagen School approach to the ongoing crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). It starts by critically examining the traditional English School conceptualisation of ‘order’ as the ability of an International Society’s primary institutions to provide for predictably structured behaviour. Against predominantly structural conceptualisations, it proceeds to reimagine such orders in a Bourdieusian vein, as a contested field marked by an unequal distribution of various forms of capital, where shifting hierarchies of primary institutions are founded on a series of doxic assumptions and orthodox claims held by dominant constituencies. In these ‘Orders of Contestation’, ‘challenger’ constituencies question their ‘dominant’ counterparts’ normative and empirical doxa and orthodoxies with heterodox alternatives. The resulting cycles of politicisation, securitisation and counter-securitisation lead to either partial or fundamental transformations of the institutional-normative hierarchy underlying these orders, depending on whether the normative re-ordering and repurposing of primary institutions involves an overthrow of the doxa at a given order's core. The framework is subsequently applied to the LIO, where ongoing securitisation cycles are argued to have resulted in an increased questioning of the current order's doxic practices, opening the way towards a fundamental transformation in the not-so-distant future.
    
    Author: Kevork Oskanian (University of Exeter)
  - “In our system...there are some trying to change things”: Encountering human rights in the British military courts
    
    The British military has a long and turbulent relationship with human rights. There is a rich body of literature exploring the many ambiguities and contradictions that arise when considering the universalistic principles of human rights within an institution predicated upon violent forms of national protection. Discussions of the military’s interaction with human rights often centre around the supposed encroachment of civilian laws and norms upon military spheres, particularly during combat.
    Turning away from the obvious spaces of war and violence, this paper instead examines how human rights are encountered within the more ‘mundane’ context of the Service Justice System. Drawing upon observations of court martial trials and interviews with those working in the field of military justice, this paper asks what the particular struggles for rights in non-operational contexts can tell us about the workings of military power.
    By exploring which stories are written in and out of the courtroom, this paper argues that, although linked, encounters with rights in the Service Justice System do not map neatly onto ‘global’ human rights principles. Instead, these encounters illuminate the messy, unbounded, and ill-defined ways in which value is attached to particular conceptions of the ‘human subject’ over others within a military context.
    
    Author: Hannah Richards (Cardiff University)
  - Vikings and Shieldmaidens: Gender and Ontological (In)Security in the Nordic Extreme Right
    
    Extreme right groups often understand gender identity in ‘biologically’ reductionist terms; it is perceptible and directly impacts upon individual behaviour. Yet, members of these groups can upset binary understandings of gender and damage the ontological security of the group itself; this happens in the Nordic Resistance Movement. NRM men and women are expected to perform different kinds of gendered activism, the former as protestors and fighters, the latter as caregivers and mothers. When an NRM woman engages in protest, she challenges the stability of these gender roles. She does not conform with the NRM’s version of femininity nor can she be masculine, because of the NRM’s ‘biological’ understanding of identity.
    
    I argue that the activist resistance woman occupies a liminal space between the NRM’s versions of masculinity and femininity. I conceptualise this through the metaphor of the shieldmaiden, a Viking Age Nordic woman, considered an equal when fighting alongside men but who took on a ‘traditional’ maternal role once the fighting ceased. Nordic and Viking history are core to the NRM’s biographical narratives of its people and self; the contemporary performance of the shieldmaiden role strengthens the link between the NRM and its narratives, aiding ontological security. Therefore, I argue that the shieldmaiden acts as a source of both ontological security and insecurity.
    
    Author: Charlie Price (BISA & University of Warwick)
  - “What are the Rules in Hell?”: Squid Game, neo-Liberalism and Violence
    
    This paper looks at the highly successful Netflix show Squid Game. We argue that while the commercial and global dimension of the show demonstrates its economic success, Squid Game reveals itself to be an important political artefact to understand contemporary and overlapping financial, pandemic, and political crises. The show creates a world touching on themes such as existential crises, endemic insecurity and the violent nature of contemporary neo-liberal zeitgeist and society. They paint a world full of visible and invisible violences that affect the neo-liberalised subject. In doing so the show offers a variety of discursive elements of neo-liberalism and crisis global audiences are familiar with such as the importance of choice, the inescapable logic of participation and winning, the existential nature of activity, or the deadly implications of being left out/behind/abandoned and boredom. A particular focus, furthermore, lies on the illusion of voluntary participation, personal responsibility, and the infantilisation of the subjects participating in the game. Understanding these themes and why and how they can resonate with viewers can help us understand the way violent crises unfold and how popular culture helps (co-)constituting them.
    
    Authors: Julian Schmid (Central European University) , Megan Armstrong (University of Newcastle)*
- 58
  Panel / Colonial imaginaries and the politics of Space, Place and Memory Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Laura Routley (Newcastle University)
  
  Chair: Lorenza Fontana (University of Glasgow)
  - The geopolitics of colonial memories: urban ruination and remembrance in Palestine/Israel
    
    My paper explores how urban ruins and ruination in violent settler-colonial settings formulate spatial articulations of colonial memories. I will examine Palestine/Israel’s contested urban landscape as a palimpsest of ongoing struggle, where layers of material debris, memories and fantasies are intertwined, from ancient archaeological remains to recently demolished homes. More specifically, I will analyse the spatial articulation of urban memory as scars of warfare, representing traces of violence, repression and neglect and as living tissues in which people dwell, live and act. By taking the material, sensual, and more-than-representational features of the ruins into account, I will argue that spatialised memory of political violence, colonial ruination, and potential recovery render Palestine/Israel’s urban environment in a permanent state of geopolitical atrophy between violence and resilience, destruction and construction.
    
    Author: Mori Ram (Newcastle University)
  - Mapping the Empire: Russian History Textbooks and the Hierarchies of Memory
    
    Russia’s war against Ukraine has dramatically highlighted the significance of discourses of space and place in Russian memory politics. This paper will explore the ways in which Russian secondary education has engaged with changing interpretations of Russia’s historical relationship with space beyond Russia’s current borders. It will examine two sets of Russian officially approved history textbooks (2014/15 and 2021/22 academic years) to trace changes and continuity in meanings attached to the space and places in former parts of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Focusing on ideas of hierarchy, sacrality and destiny, it will investigate how images, maps and cultural artefacts that are employed in these textbooks rearticulate, challenge or reinvent colonial imaginaries.
    
    Author: Valentina Feklyunina (Newcastle University)
  - Competing (Hi)stories: Post-colonial Memory Politics in Kenya
    
    In Kenya, the election of President Mwai Kibaki, (2007) and the devolution of power from the eight provinces to forty-seven counties (2013) ushered in a new era of memory politics. It has brought to the forefront the issue of the representation of communities whose history, struggles and culture have historically been marginalized by the central government and are not identified with the national dialectic.
    In this presentation, I will examine the political dynamics surrounding various memorial institutions such as museums, mausoleums, jails, cemetery, and other memory spaces of colonial imprisonment in Kenya. I argue that despite being seldom examined by political science, these memory places are true socio-cultural puzzles that contribute to collective identity building by showing the complex articulation of colonial and post-colonial memory in the political domain.
    To emphasize the uses of State but also more local memories in nation (re)building, I will present a variety of results that I have collected thanks to a micro-sociological and ethnographic approach. My second contribution will be to show how and why the pluralization of the memory of colonial brutality has led to the emergence of conflicting and competing memories, embedded in community-led museums or initiatives at a county level to restore, reinvent or publicize these memories.
    
    Author: Chloe Josse-Durand (Newcastle University)
  - The Afterlives of Violence at sites of Confinement and Punishment in South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana
    
    This paper examines the material legacies of violence both through and at ex-carceral sites in South Africa and West Africa (Ghana and Nigeria). The histories of these sites are stretch chronologically from James Fort’s in Accra involvement in the Slave Trade to Constitution Hill built on the site of a notorious apartheid era prison including section number four where at points both Mandela and Gandhi were held. All the examined sites - Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, James Fort, Accra, and Freedom Park, Lagos, - are now heritage/tourist sites of some kind. This joint paper explores how the material architecture of these sites is implicated in the violence and what this means for their afterlives as sites of heritage and national memory.
    Often these sites are seen to represent past ills, implicitly or explicitly contrasted the more prosperous, just, ‘now’. However, as the paper acknowledges this narrative is often undercut by the sites themselves. In South Africa, over two decades after the end of a one of apartheid little action has been taken regarding aggrieved families. In Nigeria Freedom Park portrayed as a site exemplifying victory of colonialism is also the site that held political prisoners from the post-independence struggles over political power.
    This paper asks key questions about how the implication of the architecture of these sites in the violence that took place within them has been addressed or not addressed within their transformation into heritage sites. It explores the ways in which these sites continue to play significant roles in the production of political futures and asks how much these engage fully with the violence of these sites or instrumentalise them.
    
    Authors: Laura Routley (Newcastle University) , Yusuf Patel (Newcastle University)
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  Panel / Connections in International Peacebuilding: Networks, Ties & Friendships Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Conveners: Maria O'Reilly (Leeds Beckett University) , Hanna Ketola (University of Sheffield)
  
  Chair: Nilanjana Premaratna (Newcastle University)
  
  Discussant: Sorana-Cristina Jude (Newcastle University)
  - At the intersection of resistance and peace: Creative ties and communities of resistance in Northern Ireland’s contemporary arts scene
    
    There is a growing literature on the role of art and creative methods in the study and practice of peacebuilding. While we cannot presume that art will inevitably lead to peace, arts mediums can act as mechanisms for the creation of unique connections, networks and the development of communities of resistance. This, in itself, we argue, is a powerful intervention in the process of transforming relations still affected by conflict and challenging the dominant peace paradigm. We propose the case of the Array Collective as a productive case study through which to conceptualise how resistance and peacebuilding can intersect, and to what effect. Northern Ireland based Array Collective is made up of eleven artists of diverse background who were awarded the Turner prize in 2022 for their collaborative work which exposed key contentions and social justice issues that have been side-lined in the formal peace process in Northern Ireland. While such works would not traditionally be associated with peacebuilding practices, we aim to show its critical potential to continuously reimagine peace through activism and resistance. By exploring the role of creative ties and alternative connections we seek to contribute to ongoing critical and feminist peace scholarship, that seeks to understand peace beyond institutionalised discourses and practices.
    
    Authors: Heidi Riley (University College Dublin) , Maria-Adriana Deiana (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Women leaders and the question of representation
    
    Women’s meaningful participation in peacebuilding and their representation in leadership positions are associated with the success of peace processes. Hence, reserved seats for women, often known as gender quotas, are adopted to increase women’s participation in postconflict countries. Evidence shows that countries with gender quotas have 25.6% more women in politics on average than countries without quota provisions, and postconflict countries have achieved rapid progress in improving women’s participation in politics. Despite the increasing number of women in postconflict politics, the question of “representation” seems to be central to the gender and quota debate. The current debate on women’s representation is mainly divided into two categories: ‘descriptive representation’ and ‘substantive representation’. Although these overly simplified binary categories may have made it easier to understand the very complex, dynamic and unique experiences of women representatives in a black and white fashion, this divide is problematic in many ways. In this paper, I am interested in exploring the effectiveness of gender quotas and the question of representation through the lives and lived experiences of women politicians in Nepal. In doing this I pay close attention to innovative and dynamic networks and connections between women inside and outside the government and examine what these tell us about the representativeness of women politicians in Nepal.
    
    Author: Punam Yadav (University College London)
  - Familial ties and militarized violence: women in fighting forces in Nepal and Bosnia & Herzegovina
    
    Family as a gendered social institution sustains war both symbolically and materially. Building on feminist understandings of family as ‘militarized’, this paper examines the role of familial ties within and beyond fighting forces. Feminist scholarship has highlighted the ways in which family becomes entangled with military and political aims. How political leaders depict the nation as a family, assigning gendered roles in wartime (McClintock 1993); or how it is the family that provides the gendered distribution of social reproduction, which is indispensable for sustaining war (Hedstrom, 2020). This paper examines familial ties as a form of gendered relationality that is emergent from, and profoundly transformed through, war’s violence. How might familial ties be targeted as part of militarized violence – to be shattered and/or reconfigured? How do familial ties – and their transformation through violence – shape the lived experiences of women (ex)-combatants? We pursue these questions in relation to narratives that emerge from our research with women who participated as fighters/combatants in two distinct contexts: Nepal and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Our lens of familial ties offers crucial insights into how women are mobilised into participating in fighting forces as well as the forms of physical and emotional labour that underpin this participation.
    
    Authors: Maria O'Reilly (Leeds Becket University) , Hanna Ketola (University of Sheffield)
  - Role of Afghan Diaspora in Peace Process
    
    The civic and political domains in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan remain repressed, posing a formidable challenge to the attainment of internal peace. The repression underscores the crucial significance of diaspora in instigating a significant development by pinpointing a means of access. This study aims to explore the role of the Afghan diaspora and transnational groups and comprehend their perceptions, efficacy and challenges, and motivations for advancing peace in Afghanistan. The study will endeavour to answer the following questions:
    1. What is the role the Afghan diaspora and transnational groups in the Afghan peace process?
    2. What are the diaspora’s perceptions, efficacy, and motivation of peace activism?
    The study will employ a qualitative method and will build on in-depth semi-structured interviews with Afghan diaspora activists and experts. The data will be analysed deductively using a thematic analysis approach.
    
    Author: Abdul Ghani Amin (University of Exeter)
- 60
  Panel / Environmental and Human Crises in Global Ethics Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: EWPG Working group
  
  Chair: Susan Murphy (Trinity College Dublin)
  - Addressing children rights in the energy transition through energy justice lenses
    
    Climate change pressurise the global community to phase-out of non-environmental-friendly sources of energy by transiting to clean and green sources. This transition had and continue to have considerable effects, positive and negative on human-rights. While scholars have researched on the impacts of the energy transition on human rights in general and on gender rights, basically none of them have studied the impacts of the energy transition on children rights. This research thus intends to fill this gap based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children. It questions the consequences of the shift from fossil-fuel based energy systems to renewable energy on children rights from the energy justice perspective. Using desk-based research, the paper demonstrates how the energy justice tenets (recognition, distributive, restorative, and procedural justice) can address the justice and injustice of the energy transition on children and recommend that more interdisciplinary research must be done to provide evidence and guide policies.
    
    Keywords: energy justice, children rights, energy transition
    
    Author: Mathilde Pouhe (University of Dundee)
  - 'Displacement Without Migration': Towards a Normative Framework
    
    When the concept of displacement is used in popular, policy-focused and scholarly discussion, it is typically thought to be synonymous with forced migration: to be displaced is to be physically forced from one’s home. However, a number of social scientists have challenged this standard view of displacement in recent years, instead arguing that there can be ‘displacement without migration’ (Lubkemann 2007) in cases where involuntary processes disrupt people’s sense of home and place, even while they remain in their habitual locations. This may be the case in circumstances of war-time violence, colonisation, climate breakdown, gentrification, homelessness, or the social exclusion of minorities. While these scholars have given grounds for expanding the concept of displacement, they have not examined the normative or ethical implications of this broader view explicitly or in depth. In this paper, I begin to sketch a normative framework for approaching ‘displacement without migration’, seeking to understand how to identify and distribute responsibilities for this kind of displacement, and how the harms it causes should be redressed. The harms surrounding this broader form of displacement, I suggest, may be effectively remedied through the promotion of displaced people’s autonomy in situ, but in some cases they may also be meaningfully addressed by offering migratory opportunities to them in certain ways.
    
    Key words: displacement, migration, place, home, justice, responsibility, reparation
    
    Author: James Souter (University of Leeds)
  - A Responsibility to Protect Biodiversity?
    
    There has recently been an increased interest in so-called "Green Militarization" or "the war to save biodiversity" (R. Duffy). In broad terms, this refers to the increased militarization of conservation efforts, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, and Southern/South-Eastern Asia. Thus, Botswana has authorized the use of lethal force against (suspected) poachers, and the UK Army trains park rangers in Zambia in Operation Corded 9.
    The militarization of conservation raises a number of important questions. However, one relatively under-research issue concerns the legal and ethical justification for the use of force in order to protect nature. In a recent article, Amy Dickman and colleagues argue that the ‘instrumental value of the environment to human life, and the intrinsic value of individual megafauna’ is such that the use of force, including potentially lethal force, could be permissible (though they note there are other factors that limit the permissibility of such lethal force). Elsewhere, Robyn Eckersley has argued that the use of military force to stop “ecocide” could be considered a kind-of just war.
    This paper will consider these kinds of arguments, and analyze the prospects for an “environmental responsibility to protect”. The increased use of military force in conservation makes this an urgent and important project.
    
    Author: Sara Van Goozen (University of York)
- 61
  Panel / Far right politics and critical terrorism studies Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick) , Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield) , Alice Finden (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  
  Discussant: Anna Meier (University of Nottingham)
  - From “Evil Doers” to “Very Fine People”: The Politics of Shifting Counterterrorism Targets
    
    Over two decades ago, the United States launched the “global war on terror” to vanquish Al Qaeda and associated foes. This counterterrorism campaign has been characterized by abusive interrogations, indefinite detentions, targeted killing, and mass surveillance. Today, counterterrorist national security doctrine remains primarily targeted at thwarting Islamist terrorism, even as cascading forms of far-right political violence and terrorism sweep the country. The rapid ascendency of far-right extremism motivated by white supremacism and nationalism, neo-Nazism, and various conspiracy theories, raises questions about how the contemporary national security state will adapt. To what extent have US authorities utilized the legal framework of post-9/11 counterterrorism, as well as associated social and political discourses, to counter far-right extremism? Evidence from Trump’s “very fine people” remarks after the Charlottesville hate rally in 2017 to ongoing collaboration between some American police departments and far-right vigilantes and militias point to significant inconsistencies. This paper traces similarities and differences between state responses to varying threats and considers the implications of resultant patterns of national security practice for law, human rights, and security.
    
    Authors: Rebecca Sanders (University of Cincinnati) , Andrea Birdsall (University of Edinburgh)
  - The impact of educational and professional experience within non-state actor recruitment.
    
    As part of a wider project on the operational consequences of specific recruitment strategies, this paper will discuss the role of educational and professional experience within a set of case studies. These cases will be drawn from historical and contemporary examples with ultimate findings being directed towards the extreme right and how their recruitment strategies may be impacting various operational strategies. Obvious examples include the targeting of security professionals (the police and the armed forces) but others will be included. This paper will draw together lessons from organisational sociology, management and political violence. In investigating these issues, this paper will highlight to what extent organisations tailor their recruitment strategies to target different educational standards or target specific professional communities. This analysis will offer insight into the complex relationship between non-state actors, developmental strategies and the potential subversion of professional skills and training.
    
    Author: Patrick Finnegan (University of St Andrews)
  - Far-right violence in the media: the case of Portugal
    
    Abstract:
    Paralleled with phenomena such as the re-emergence of far-right parties and the normalization of far-right discourses, which transformed the European political landscape, the idiosyncrasies of violence such as the Christchurch mass shooting in 2019 or the US Capitol attack in 2021 configure critical challenges to society. This paper seeks to engage in the problematization of far-right violence and contribute to the underdeveloped study of this issue in Portugal by addressing the specific relationship between the Portuguese media and far-right violence. As a crucial way of communication, I argue that the media has an essential role in the production and consequent reproduction of narratives that influence the audience's perceptions and that are, sometimes, taken advantage of by far-right entrepreneurs. Through a thematic analysis of the media portrayals of key far-right violence cases in Portugal, I analyse the narrative constructed around their origins, actors, causes and consequences. This study contributes to broader debates around narratives and processes of (de)securitisation of far-right violence.
    
    KeyWords
    Far-right; Violence; Media; Narratives; Critical Terrorism Studies; Security; Securitization; Normalization; Thematic Analysis;
    
    Author: Marcos Rubén Bordalo Ferreira (Universidade de Coimbra - FEUC/CES)
- 62
  Panel / International Relations of Migration Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Foteini Kalantzi (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London)
  - The Diplomacy of Forced Migration Dataset (DiFMiD): Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in the Study of State-Organized Forced Migration
    
    This paper introduces the conceptual and methodological framework of the Diplomacy of Forced Migration Dataset (DiFMiD) project -- a study which includes more than 300 already-identified cases of diplomatically driven, managed or threatened incidents of organized forced migration. In the paper we address the challenges and implications of conceptualizing, categorizing and operationalizing this phenomenon. The types of cases include international population transfers, exchanges, expulsions, repatriations, and denationalisations. There is no single objective framework that can be applied to these categories, with existing studies and datasets heavily influenced by their disciplinary orientations. Repatriation, for example, could be categorised according to its definition in international law, or according to the use of the term by actors involved in the event. Similarly, what constitutes an international boundary is often subject to contestation and debate. The operationalization of each category thus has implications for the scope conditions, theories that can be tested, and findings of the DiFMiD project.
    
    Authors: Jente Althuis (SOAS) , Kelly Greenhill* , Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London)
  - Fighting to Not Be Left Behind in a Globalised Agriculture Economy: A Study of Rural-to-Rural International Farm Labour Migration from Ghana to Italy among Youth Farmers
    
    For decades, youth farm labour migrants from rural Ghana have wielded migration to rural Italy as a response to farming-related struggles that pose high-risk consequences for their livelihoods, families and society.
    
    This migration phenomenon occurs within the context of an international farm labour migration governance architecture with fragmented and varied policies and programmes at the micro and meso levels and on the backdrop of macro level laws to protect the rights of migrant workers. These altogether converge to construct and control migrant labour movements across socio-spatial areas between continents.
    
    Although micro- and meso-level policies and programmes targeting international migrant farm workers have formally precluded African migrant farm workers, they have nonetheless been unable to prevent their movements across to rural Italy.
    
    To study this, I draw on the case of Ghanaian farm migrant mobility from rural middle-belt agricultural regions to traditional rural southern Italian farming regions, relying on primary quantitative and qualitative data collected over the course of several months in 2021-2022.
    
    Analysis is done using the ‘agriculture-migration nexus’ framework. It explains the context in which this form of migration occurs at the intersection of production, financial and policy struggles in a globalised economy that generate high-stakes situations and corresponding creative responses among these farmers, as they fight for stable incomes, secure jobs and a future that does not leave them or their families behind. Additionally, the ‘sustainable food systems’ model is applied to unpack the consequences and implications.
    
    Key words: •migration •agriculture •labor •governance •international system •food security/politics •sustainable development •Ghana •Italy
    
    Author: Genevieve Odamtten (University of Bonn, Germany)
  - Translation as resilience: The case of Boochani’s “no friends but mountains”
    
    While Resilience is widely regarded as the ability to recover from trauma, and a capacity to persist or sustain health and psychological well-being in the face of continuing adversity (Olsson et al. 2015), for Larson (2013), as an ecologist, it operates as a “feedback metaphor”, which come from everyday parlance, are applied in science, and then feed back into society again, to describe and explain complex processes and systems dynamics including their expected, or even desired, outcomes. Through this conceptual lens, In this paper we are going to discuss how it is possible to account for resilience as a Translation in broader sense of conceptualization? Or the other way around. To meet this goal, The award-winning debut book of the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer, poet, and director Behrouz Boochani and his collaborators is explored as a case study. Boochani is subject to Australia’s offshore detention regime, detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea where he started to write No friends but mountains, the story of domination, oppression and submission of the displaced translating into a a paradoxically poetic language. The book was compiled over time, translated from Farsi, and smuggled out of Manus Island from thousands of text messages thumbed out on a mobile phone. This article will explore the emergent resilience discourse that has been emerged from Translation. It should be noted that in this study, translation invokes three different, yet related, metaphors as displacement, disclosure and discursive resilience.
    
    Keywords: Resilience, Translation, feedback metaphor, Boochani, refugee literature
    
    Author: Nasrin Ashrafi (KU Leuven)
  - The International Politics of Refugee Repatriation – Lebanon as a Case Study for State–Non-State Diplomacy
    
    Apart from Ukraine, the Syrian civil war caused the largest movement of forced migration in recent history: since 2011, more than 6.8 million people have fled the country – with Syria’s neighbouring states hosting most refugees. Yet, despite receiving large amounts of international aid, they – like other refugee-hosting states – increasingly stress their desire for refugee returns. This paper seeks to add to the international politics’ literature on migration diplomacy by theorising cross-border mobility in the Global South, specifically regarding when and how states return refugees. Lebanon is an interesting single case study because it hosts the largest number of refugees per capita globally. The paper theorises state-non-state interactions and how a state in the Global South negotiates with international organisations to facilitate refugee repatriation. In doing so, it reinforces the argument around states using refugee populations as a commodity rather than a population that seeks refuge from war and violence within its territory. Its insights can inform research in other contexts, having seen refugee returns to conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Somalia, or South Sudan; it also allows links to the European Union’s policymaking and its role as a significant donor to refugee hosting states such as Lebanon.
    
    Author: Judith Hoppermann (University of Glasgow)
  - Externalisation of migration management as foreign policy: Mapping actor coalitions and policy frames
    
    Recent decades witnessed a trend toward externalisation of migration management to stop migrants from initiating a journey to Europe in the first place. This involves a shift to foreign policy through visa restrictions, maritime policing, and increased funding for border controls in transit/origin countries. Although there is growing scholarship on the topic, existing research is mostly qualitative and often limited to brief periods. In a long-term and comparative investigation of this phenomenon, we ask: Which actors drive the agenda on externalisation of migration? When is migration to Europe presented as an issue of border/crime control, human rights, or sovereignty? We focus on the evolution (1995-2021) of two prominent global policy debates: Modern slavery and European migration management. Using Discourse Network Analysis, and 10,000 news agency articles, we identify/visualise the actor networks that define this phenomenon and the different meanings attributed to it over time. Our results show that the drivers of externalisation vary across these two fields in terms of actor types and proposed frames. While Modern slavery is presented as a case of international development, European migration management is pitched as a security concern. Our findings have important implications for the relationship between the Global North and South.
    
    Authors: Sofie Roehrig (Warwick University & TU Dresden) , Ece Ozlem Atikcan (University of Warwick)
- 63
  
  / 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 QE2, Marriott
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  Roundtable / Meet the Editors of Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Security and International Affairs Waverley, Marriott
  
  Meet the Editors
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: David Mainwaring (Cambridge University Press)
  
  Participants: Andrew Dorman (Chatham House) , Nisha Shah (University of Ottawa) , Cristina Stefan (University of Leeds) , N/A
- 65
  Panel / Power of narratives in Russian foreign and security policies Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: RESG Working group
  
  Chair: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
  - In-‘stability’ in Russia’s security strategy? The legitimations and paradox of policy changes
    
    This paper makes a contribution to strategic studies that engage with the practice and theory of legitimation. It is based on the analysis of political symbols of rhetoric that guide the policy re–making of Russia’s national security strategy in the interwar period from August 2008 to February 2022. My analysis of these symbols discloses a dynamic of policy changes that was initiated by president Medvedev’s justification of progressive goals of ‘world order’ and ‘modernisation’ through political association with the European Union (EU) and continued under president Putin’s justification of defensive goals of ‘world order’ and ‘modernisation’ in political association with NATO. I argue these self–legitimations of policy changes disclose the origins of justified belief in a new and deepening ‘geopolitical instability’ in Russia’s national security strategy. And this belief, in turn, explains the paradox to the delegitimation of the central doctrine of Russia’s security strategy during this interwar period, ‘stability’. In conclusion, I reflect on the normative implications of this finding for understanding the logic of self–defeat to desires for a modern ‘Euro–Atlantic’ political order.
    
    Author: Iain Ferguson (HSE University)
  - The British Foreign Policy Narrative of Russian Disinformation
    
    This paper maps the evolution of the British state’s beliefs about Russian disinformation and shows how these beliefs shape British foreign policy (FP) behaviour towards Russia. The British state’s FP narrative of Russian disinformation articulates a segment of the United Kingdom’s evolving threat perception of Russia. This threat perception has shifted from rare and indirect recognition of the potential for malign information interference, to framing Russia as “the most acute threat to our security” and labelling disinformation as one of the “state threats to the UK” in the 2021 Integrated Review. So how has the UK come to foreground disinformation in its perception of Russia? This research conceptualises the British state’s beliefs about Russian disinformation as part of the repertoire of the UK’s understanding of its own and Russia’s place in the world. In doing so it will reveal the intrinsic beliefs about Russian disinformation held by the British state and provide an alternative interpretation of the impact of disinformation at the level of FP. An interpretive narrative methodology is applied to reveal the British state’s experience of Russian disinformation as expressed in its FP narrative between 2011-2022.
    
    Author: Sean Garrett (University of Bath)
  - The ‘horror mirror’ reversed: Russia’s war on Ukraine through the lens of the Yugoslav conflicts
    
    In the mid-1990s, Nadia Arbatova called the Yugoslav conflicts a ‘horror mirror’ for Russia: ‘in bloodshed, destruction and in an atmosphere of hatred and mistrust Russia saw its own probable future and shivered with horror.’ Now that future has arrived. In this paper, I position the war in Ukraine in the longer-term perspective of the repercussions of the break-up of two communist multinational federations – the SFRY and the USSR – which raised questions about the borders, national identities and foreign policy orientations of the newly independent states as well as the role of outside powers in the respective regions. Those questions have not disappeared even in the Western Balkans where there has been relative peace for more than 20 years. I examine the current war in Ukraine through the lens of the Yugoslav conflicts in three sections. Firstly, I compare the situations and conflicts in the two regions, bringing out relevant similarities but also pertinent differences. Secondly, I examine the legacy of the Yugoslav conflicts and their implications for wider international relations with relevance for the war in Ukraine including: international norms on recognition, territorial integrity and humanitarian intervention; war crimes; and post-Cold War geopolitics in Europe. Thirdly, I look at how the Yugoslav conflicts contributed to the evolution of Russian foreign policy including in its own ‘near abroad’. I argue that this helps to explain but not to justify Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and some aspects of how it is being conducted.
    
    Author: James Headley (University of Otago)
  - Unveiling the Emotional Foundations of Russian-Armenian Relations: An Overview of the Role of Narratives and Myths in Russia’s Quest for Ontological Security
    
    Building upon the literature on ontological security, narratives, and emotions, this study seeks to: 1) contribute to the academic debate on the concept of regional security governance; 2) develop a toolkit for taking a closer look at the development of Russian-Armenian relations in connection to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. By siding with a part of the ontological security scholarship that addresses conflicts as an instrument for states to solve existential questions about their being and identity, I apply these considerations to regional dynamics, where power polarity and historical patterns of amity and enmity define states’ relationships. Therefore, I examine the correlation between great powers' ontological security quest, their intervention practices, and the emotional and cognitive definitions behind the securitization processes they engage with, so to provide a fruitful lens for seeking alternative explanations of the forces underpinning the articulation of the security governance. Drawing from the assumption that the latter cannot be consolidated purely through political agreements, economic investments, the exploitation of a territory’s resources, or the deployment of troops, I look at the emotional bonds, myths, and strategic narratives employed by the Kremlin to disguise its powerful grip on Armenia under the false flag of what both sides use to define a “strategic partnership”. Methodologically, after identifying three crucial turning points in the evolution of practices in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict (2016, 2020, and 2022), this study applies textual analysis to Russian and Armenian diplomatic delegations' statements, official press releases, and Russian and Armenian outlets of information to analyze the relationship between Russian narratives towards its role as Armenia’s security guarantor, its intervention in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and the diffusion and resonance of these narratives within the Armenian political spectrum. Overall, I contend that Russia has: 1) sought by intervention or mediation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict a placebo for its ontological anxiety problems; 2) leveraged the Armenian identity narratives focused on a self-image of suffering and fear inflicted by the "Turks" and relating the 1915 genocide events to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, portrayed as the latest in a long series of historical battles with their historical enemy. The fear of being left alone at the mercy of its rivals has thus dragged the Caucasian republic into an emotional regime that has isolated its interests from a closer relationship with the West and made the prospects for normalization with Turkey still very difficult to achieve.
    
    Author: Leonardo Zanatta (Corvinus University of Budapest)
- 66
  Panel / Problematising the Relevance and Potentialising the Possibilities of Political Marxism in 2022 Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Lauri von Pfaler (University of Helsinki) , Armando Van Rankin Anaya (University of Sussex) , Samuel Parris (University of Sussex) , Judith Koch (University of Sussex) , Kate Cherry (University of Sussex)
  
  Chair: Benno Teschke (University of Sussex)
  - Merchants and the Colonial Origins of the American Revolution, 1624-1776
    
    The paper argues that previous explanations of the American revolution, both fiscal-pressure (Wallerstein 1989) and abolitionism (Horne 2014) 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 previously sidelined British interloping merchants in the republican uprising and democratic constitution of the early American state.
    
    Author: Samuel Parris (University of Sussex)
  - Class Relations and Geopolitics of the Baltic ‘Crusades’ between the 12th and 14th centuries
    
    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.
    
    Author: Lauri von Pfaler (University of Helsinki)
  - The Failure of the Family Abolition Movement in the 1960s
    
    This paper 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.
    
    Author: Kate Cherry (University of Sussex)
  - In the Tracks of Diplomatic Praxis: Foreign Policy Analysis of the EU-UK Relations
    
    This paper studies the long-term diplomatic relations between the EU and UK that ultimately played a part in the making of Brexit. This is done through a radically historicist Foreign Policy Analysis. 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?
    
    Author: Judith Koch (University of Sussex)
  - The Making of Mexico: An International Political Sociology of Mexican Modernity
    
    In this paper, I present the outlines of my research project. The 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. The 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.
    
    Author: Armando Van Rankin Anaya (University of Sussex)
- 67
  
  Roundtable / Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights QE1, Marriott
  
  Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: Kurt Mills
  
  Participants: Pilar Elizalde (University of Oxford) , Naomi McAuliffe (Amnesty International Scotland) , Kasey McCall-Smith (University of Edinburgh) , David J. Karp (University of Sussex) , Natasha Saunders (University of St Andrews) , Elaine Webster (University of Strathclyde)
- 68
  Panel / Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities through Embodiment: Human Bodies of War (Panel 1) Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester) , Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  
  Chair: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester)
  
  Discussant: Kandida Purnell (Richmond American University London)
  - Producing Truth and Reconciliation: Embodying Accounts of Atrocity in Sierra Leone
    
    Witness to Truth: The Final Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a harrowing account of a civil war which has become synonymous with atrocity in the Western imaginary. The stories of violence recounted by survivors and witnesses show the individual and social trauma sustained, and cause a visceral affective response in the reader. While several studies have interrogated how particular forms of violence came to be in the conflict (see notably Mitton, 2015), the agency of the body of the sufferer has been markedly under-theorised in relation to Sierra Leone and more broadly. Drawing primarily on psychoanalytic theory, this paper interrogates relations between the body, the speaking subject, and Truth and Reconciliation as both a social process and textual artefact. Particularly, I analyse processes of materialisation (Butler, 1993) and (re/dis)embodiment (Purnell, 2021) to show how the body produces certain truth effects which cross temporal boundaries to enable the (re)construction of the fantasy of society over the trauma of conflict. I argue that, through its affective potential, the wounded body comes to embody the veracity, necessity, and efficacy of the Truth and Reconciliation process – indeed, that the body of the sufferer itself becomes the Witness to Truth.
    
    Author: Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  - Rendering Trauma and Violence In/visible: Affective Politics of German Veteran Bodies
    
    In 2018 and under pressure to account for increasing numbers of German soldiers returning from deployments with physical and especially psychological injuries, the German government introduced the contested status of veterans. Other than the official state politics surrounding (wounded) veterans, there is a number of veteran associations – these are networks of care, self-help, advocacy and commemoration. My focus lies on the performative power of embodied expressions of vulnerability through bodily acts, such as shaking, eye twitching or tears, as well as on the orchestration of bodies at events and spectacles rendering the veterans’ wounds in/visible (or otherwise affectively in/tangible). I investigate what politics and affective communities are interpellated by such bodily practices of showing/hiding trauma and violence. This study is based on my participant observations at veteran sports and commemoration events, comradeship evenings, as well as qualitative interviews. This multi-sited approach allows me to evaluate how different practices stick certain attributes to the image of veterans, and at the same time constitute a multi-faceted imaginary of violent situations that appear to have inscribed themselves into the veterans’ bodies. I draw on literature on affect/emotion and visuality in IR and Critical Military Studies.
    
    Author: Nina Reedy (University of Hamburg)
  - Trauma Imageries - Place, Space and the body as physical memories of war and trauma
    
    This paper explores experiences of war, displacement, and reintegration in Central Africa. It investigates the physical memories of war and the ways in which they shape experiences of displacement, of return and of reintegration. Specifically, it focuses on places, spaces, and bodies as central avenues through which war continues to be experienced after displacement and reintegration. The paper central argument suggests the physical illustrations of trauma that continue to be experienced offer key insights into youth postwar legacies. It frames displacement, return and reintegration as fundamentally lived experiences anchored in trauma reminders of conflict. The project utilises an interdisciplinary methodological approach anchored in narrative research to bring individual histories of war, of displacement and of reintegration to the forefront of the academic enquiry. Through body-mapping and narrative interviewing, it demonstrates how these physical legacies challenge narratives of war to peace transition in Central Africa. Body mapping is an embodied research method that places research participants at the centre of data collection and knowledge creation. The paper also relies on narrative discussions conducted with 50 youth in the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo to provide thematic insights into experiences of displacement, trauma, and war. The resulting histories highlight the trauma imageries of war in Central Africa through their embodied illustrations.
    
    Author: Pauline Zerla (King's College London)
- 69
  
  Roundtable / Review of International Political Economy 30th Anniversary: Editors’ Forum 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.
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: Aida Hozic (University of Florida)
  
  Participants: Aida Hozic (University of Florida) , Juanita Elias (University of Warwick) , Randall Germain (Carleton University) , John Ravenhill (University of Waterloo)
- 70
  Panel / Health, Security and Diplomacy from East to West Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Gavin Cameron (University of Calgary)
  
  Chair: Gavin Cameron (University of Calgary)
  
  Discussant: Rory McCarthy (Durham University)
  - “Hedging, Triangulation or Free riding? Choosing an Indo-Pacific policy for Canada”
    
    This paper examines the evolution in Canada’s Indo-Pacific policy, using hedging and triangulation as competing explanatory concepts and contrasting both with the free-riding that characterized its previous regional approach. The paper asks whether the policy can balance Canada’s economic interests in the region with long-standing security relations, most particularly with the United States and Australia. Canada’s past differentiation of security and economic approaches has become increasingly hard to sustain with China’s aggressive regional policy and use of coercive diplomacy. Canada has increasingly participated in ad hoc regional security initiatives but has limited capacity and engagement with Indo-Pacific security architecture. Canada inconsistently participates in the region’s economic architecture, despite the Indo-Pacific’s growing importance to Canada. Canada’s attempts to develop a new Indo-Pacific strategy reflects growing interest in the region and increased expectations from Canada’s allies that it will participate in regional governance more fully. The paper will therefore also consider the developing security and economic governance architecture in the Indo-Pacific as a series of opportunities for Canada to participate, or not, as part of its evolving regional posture.
    
    Author: Gavin Cameron (University of Calgary)
  - China in the Middle East: BRI and Sino-Iranian Relations
    
    This paper examines the prospects and challenges for China’s Belt and Road (BRI) Initiative in the Middle East with a focus on China’s relations with Iran. The region has been particularly important for China’s energy security and the BRI provides an ambitious framework to boost trade and investment opportunities for both China and the countries involved in the initiative. In this sense, Iran has been an important partner and its significance is manifested in the growing volume of Chinese investment in the country. Nevertheless, regional political and security complexities continue to present a challenge to China’s deeper engagement with the Middle East, and in particular with Iran. Added to these complexities is the regional involvement of Russia and the United States. In view of China’s strategic ambitions and its relations with regional and non-regional actors, the paper aims to evaluate the potential for the BRI’s success both in Iran and the Middle East in general.
    
    Author: Ozge Soylemez (King's College London)
  - COVID-19 and the reinscription of the racial capitalist foundations of the liberal international order
    
    The upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterised as a fundamental exogenous challenge to the liberal international order (LIO). In this article, I argue instead that the viral outbreak and attempts to contain, mitigate and counteract it have, in fact, reinscribed various domestic and global hierarchies that are enduring features of the LIO. By exploring three key dynamics of the pandemic, namely the unequal burdens of lockdowns, the imposition of border controls and movement restrictions, and vaccine production and distribution, I demonstrate this process of reinscription and argue that an important reason for the endurance of these hierarchies and of the LIO itself is the ordering function performed by racial capitalism. Thinking in terms of racial capitalism allows us to make sense of the (racialised) hierarchies of social reproduction and expendability, inclusion and exclusion, and production and distribution that have characterised the pandemic.
    
    Author: Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London)
- 71
  Panel / Understanding training and capacity building in peacekeeping Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: David Curran (Coventry University)
  - ‘Imagined Conflicts’: The role of education in conflict resolution in the Caucasus.
    
    Facing the challenging task of finding sustainable solutions to peacebuilding, conflict resolution applies a range of different tools. Among these tools, education has become increasingly prominent, as a way to engage with different conflict narratives and therefore a way to encourage dialogue between supposedly irreconcilable identities and claims. This paper contributes to the discussion about education as a conflict resolution tool by looking into the value of using fictitious case studies in education in conflict-affected environments. We argue that ‘imagined conflicts’ can be a tool for both practicing and learning about conflict resolution, by creating temporary spaces of constructive interaction between the conflicting parties. These spaces challenge participants’ existing ideas about conflict in general, as well as the ‘other’ in conflict. The analysis focuses on the use of fictitious case studies in an international conflict management course in the Caucasus. The authors ran a one-week intensive course at the NATO Defence Institution Building School in Tbilisi, involving both military and civilian officials from Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Based on semi-structured interviews, open-ended participant feedback and autoethnographic research, we discuss the rationale for and assess the impact of structuring the course around an ‘imagined conflict’ in this specific context, and assess to what extent this provides opportunities for future reconciliation.
    
    Authors: Norma Rossi (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst) , An Jacobs (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst)
  - Family Affairs and Peacekeeping: Shifting Home Dynamics of West African Peacekeepers
    
    In this paper, we focus on the intersection of international peacekeeping and the domestic lives of soldiers on deployment. Peacekeeping deployment preparation generally focuses on military issues, such as training, equipment, operational briefings, logistics, etc. Yet for soldiers, there is another important, and more personal, aspect to deployment planning: preparing their families. Based on in-depth interviews with United Nations peacekeepers in four West African countries, we explore how soldiers prepare their families for their departure and how they address family issues while away on the missions. We argue that the regular rotation of peacekeeping deployments has led to a pattern of military leadership on the home front acting as a "surrogate" family member for deployed soldiers. This involves intervening in issues related to military spouses, troublesome children, and resolving financial matters. This is often an uncomfortable situation for peacekeepers and marks shifting dynamics and tensions within armed forces due to deployments. In highlighting these unintended consequences, the research contributes to efforts to further understand the way United Nations peacekeeping can affect contributing forces, individual soldiers and the broader communities they are part of upon return home from the missions.
    
    Authors: Maggie Dwyer (University of Edinburgh) , Humphrey Asamoah (University of Amsterdam)
  - Teach them to fish: the European Union capacity-building approach in CSDP missions
    
    The EU invests a considerable amount of funding in capacity-building to promote peace and prevent conflicts in « fragile » countries. Most debates on security assistance assume that a peaceful end-point can be reached if local actors’ capacities are strengthened. As a result, thousands of EU personnel have been deployed to train, monitor, and mentor local security institutions in countries such as Mali, Somalia, and Libya. Drawing on policy documents, interviews, and participant observation in three EU pre-deployment trainings, the article aims to unpack EU capacity-building activities in CSDP missions. I argue that the EU capacity-building discourses present the narratives of the African continent as dangerous and in need of external steering. The EU frames African officers as actors who need guiding and coaching because of a perceived lack of capacity, power and knowledge. Mentoring and advising are promoted as de-politicized mechanisms to transfer knowledge to the local counterparts, presenting the EU as a functional actor. The perceived lack of local capacities legitimizes an increasing engagement of the EU in fragile countries.
    
    Author: Silvia Peirolo (University of Trento)
  - Peacekeeping training and civil-military engagement in MUNISMA
    
    Peacekeeping training and civil-military engagements in MUNISMA
    
    Author: Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
- 72
  
  Roundtable / What Now for Feminist Foreign Policy? Energy and Backlash 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.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Columba Achilleos-Sarll (University of Birmingham)
  
  Participants: Shweta Singh (South Asian University) , Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh) , Paul Kirby (Queen Mary, University of London) , Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh) , Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
- 16:30
  
  Refreshment break: SPONSORED BY REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY (RIPE)
- 73
  Panel / (Re)sources of capital Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  - Resource Nationalism, Decolonization and Fragmentation
    
    The transition to a low-carbon world invites us to reassess the utility of the frameworks that were developed to understand the interactions between energy systems and the modern world. To this end the article critically unpacks the key concept of resource nationalism which asserts that clashes between resources-rich states and extractive companies are of a cyclical nature and are predominantly triggered by a combination of economic factors. The analysis demonstrates that such a reading of the disagreements is of limited value and can only be presented if non-economic factors are largely downplayed. Most importantly, decolonization, which was a vital driver behind state-companies disputes in the second half of the last century, is often decentred in favour of other aspects, in particular, fluctuating commodity prices. The article argues that if resource nationalism remains to be valid, the focus on cyclicality should give way to greater historical contextualization and emphasis on individual cases.
    
    Author: Wojciech Ostrowski (University of Westminster; School of Social Sciences; Senior Lecturer in International Relations)
  - Selling Excellence: Hydrohubs and Policy Mobility in Neo-liberal World Order
    
    This paper sketches a new empirical phenomenon that commentators have named ‘hydrohubs’ (HHs). These are nations, city-states, and cities that seek influence and economic or political benefits through branding themselves as centres of excellence and expertise in water policy, management, and governance. Aspiring HHs conduct branding and promotion of their water sector internationally and nurture their legitimacy domestically. In addition to sketching and illustrating HHs as a new empirical phenomenon, we seek to make two conceptual contributions. First, we distinguish HHs from earlier forms of policy mobility in the water sector and argue that new concepts are required to make sense of it. Secondly, we bring nuance to the discussion on nation and city branding by suggesting a typology of HHs based on the scope and outreach of their operations. We illustrate the typology by two vignettes from the Netherlands as a “Global Hydrohub” (GHH) and Turkey as a “Regional Hydrohub” (RHH) and discuss implications of the rise of HHs for global water governance processes and architecture.
    
    Authors: Arda Bilgen (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Farhad Mukhtarov (Erasmus University Rotterdam)*
  - Power and struggle in supply chain governance: do worker-driven programmes offer an alternative to corporate social responsibility?
    
    Supply chains are frequently characterised by vast inequalities between actors. Their dominant governance mechanisms, such as corporate social responsibility programmes, fail to deliver purported benefits to workers who often experience low pay, poor conditions and abuse of rights. Yet alternative supply chain governance initiatives may present a way forward for the future promotion of worker rights. This paper draws on field-based qualitative research on a worker-driven social responsibility programme in Florida’s tomato industry, a global framework agreement and a conventional CSR programme, both in Costa Rica’s banana industry, to explore the potential for alternatives to CSR to address exploitation and the abuse of worker rights. Empirical, comparative analysis of these cases leads to a conceptualisation of supply chain governance as a site at which the interests of labour and capital come into tension with one another in contemporary capitalist production, entailing a struggle over power and the distribution of resources in favour of their respective interests. Alternatives to CSR hold the potential to both overhaul and reproduce the poor conditions and abuse of rights associated with ineffective CSR, though this may entail compromises, conflicts and co-optation.
    
    Author: Remi Edwards (University of Sheffield)
  - The nationalist turn in development aid
    
    Speaking specifically to the 'leave no-one behind' UN proposal, and drawing on fresh quantitative and qualitative research, this paper argues that development aid as an act of solidarity, economic justice or redistribution, which has always been undermined by donor interest and colonialism, has now been eroded by decades of securitisation, the rise in populism and a move to the right in many donor countries. Within this context, aid has been reconfigured in two ways. Firstly, it is used as an additional fund to protect national borders in a limited way. This differs from the securitisation of development programmes, which sought to bring about liberal transition through development interventions and is influenced by the nationalist turn in politics. Secondly, the ODA budget has been politicised in order to win votes against a backdrop of increasingly populist politics. In both the UK and the US, for example, cutting aid budgets and using aid to further foreign policy priorities aligns with the nationalistic sentiment evident in both the ‘America first’ and Brexit discourses. Thus, current concepts of aid, and securitisation as a framework to understand aid, are no longer sufficient. This paper sets out a new conceptual framework for understanding development policy and aid allocation that takes account of this new landscape. This new framework – the ‘nationalisation’ of foreign aid - is based upon an empirical investigation of the UK as core OECD donor, supplemented with examples and insights from additional OECD donor practice. We systematically evaluate four dimensions of international development intervention: policy, institutional context, aid allocation and impact, to build a new framework for understanding aid and development practice, which goes beyond securitisation.
    
    Authors: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London) , Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  - Beyond (pre-existing) institutions: Escaping the political resource curse in Timor-Leste
    
    Why do some countries escape the political “resource curse” while others do not? The vast majority of scholarship argues that avoiding the anti-democratic effects of natural resources, in particular oil, largely depends on the quality of institutions, both past and present. Drawing on the most-likely case of Timor-Leste, one of the world’s most oil-dependent countries but which has successfully developed into a consolidated democracy, we challenge dominant institutionalist theories. We show that Timor-Leste did not escape the curse because of good pre-existing political institutions, the creation of good natural resource governance institutions, or otherwise favorable structural conditions for the advent of democracy. Instead, we find that the ideological beliefs of the independence movement, the structure of political competition, as well as the approaches of external actors have resulted in a political commitment to democracy despite difficult structural conditions and strong incentives for the development of authoritarian governance. This argument highlights the importance of ideology, agency at critical historical junctures, and constructive international engagement.
    
    Authors: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London) , Moritz Schmoll (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University)
- 74
  Panel / Anxiety and Narratives in International Relations Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of Warwick) , Anne-Marie Houde (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Marco Vieira (University of Birmingham)
  - Theorising Postcolonial Ontological Security through Fanon and Lacan: The ‘White Mask’ in the ‘Mirror’ of Western Climate Coloniality.
    
    In this paper I offer a theoretical account of ‘postcolonial ontological security’. I critically juxtapose Fanon’s discussion, in Black Skin, White Masks, of the ‘epidermalisation’ of colonial oppression with Lacan’s theory of subjectivity formation. I argue that the articulation of Fanon’s ‘racial epidermal schema’, alongside Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, illuminate broader psycho-affective processes related to postcolonial states’ ‘internalisation of inferiority’ and ‘desire’ for Western modernity. I use the example of ‘climate coloniality’, understood as Western states’ control over climate agendas, finance, science, rules, and international institutions, to highlight the analytical potency of postcolonial ontological security, in terms of empirically revealing colonised-coloniser psychological logics and practices still at play in contemporary world politics.
    
    Author: Marco Vieira (University of Birmingham)
  - Contested Narratives, Anxiety, and the Reinforcement of Inequality Through the UK’s "National COVID Memorial Wall"
    
    This article contributes to knowledge on the contemporary politics of national commemoration – especially within the ongoing pandemic - by exploring the case of the United Kingdom (UK) and the ‘National COVID Memorial Wall.’ Using a combination of participatory in person and digital ethnographies, this article demonstrates how inequalities exacerbated through the pandemic have (mis)informed and are reflected in the physical and virtual construction of the self-proclaimed ‘National’ memorial appearing in London and online in spring 2021 within a context defined by competitive narratives of victimhood and commemorative crowding which come to define pandemic and ‘post’-pandemic society and make for anxious commemorative processes that ought to be approached by Governments’ with specific sensitivity. Crucially, as a warning to other communities and nations embarking on COVID-19 commemoration, this article argues that rather than opening up space within which to make victims of the pandemic visible and amplify marginalised voices and grief, the Wall is exclusive, exploitative, and effacing - maintaining normalised raced, classed, and gendered patterns of (in)visibility and inequality by fore-fronting the vision and aspirations of a privileged few - reflecting rather than disrupting contemporary UK politics and pandemic (mis)management by pushing towards the close of an ongoing disaster.
    
    Author: Kandida Purnell (Richmond American University London)
  - Anxiety, Fatigue and Living with Hybrid Warfare in Czechia
    
    Fuelled by the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the rapid rise of the notion of ‘hybrid warfare’ (HW) transformed the Czech security debate. Despite, the HW discourse heavily relies on old geopolitical tropes and anxieties linked to Czechia’s insecure positioning on the ‘Eastern boundary of the West’, a position that is seen as threatened also by the disregard of many Western allies. This generates intense feelings of ontological insecurity, giving the discourse a highly emotional nature – which makes critical engagement with it extremely difficult. In this paper, we turn to our personal auto-ethnographic reflections on the effects of HW the public debate, subjects enrolled within it, and possibilities of detachment and claiming a critical voice. Drawing on our and others personal narratives, we present several vignettes outlining experiences of academics, think-tankers, and public officers who remain at the side-lines of the HW debate. We discuss strategies that these actors employed to confront the debate and/or transform it. We thus recount the experience of living with hybrid warfare, including the affective states of anxiety and fatigue. In conclusion, we reflect on modes and possibilities of critique and thinking the alternatives of dominant security narratives from the margins of the debate.
    
    Authors: Jakub Eberle (Institute of International Relations Prague) , Jan Daniel (Institute of International Relations Prague)*
  - God (did not) save the Queen: Perception, Anxiety, and Narrative Contestation
    
    On 8 September 2022, after more than 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II passed away. The responses among the public, media, and state institutions to the news were varied, with competing views on the role of the monarchy and the legacy of the queen. The questions this paper seeks to answer are 1) why the monarch’s death was perceived as a critical situation and 2) how this moment led on the one hand to efforts to reaffirm the dominant UK autobiographical narrative, and on the other to efforts to contest this narrative. Drawing on the 10 days of mourning after the queen’s death, we illustrate our argument by exploring how the government and the royal family attempted to create a sense of continuity and transfer royal authority onto the next generation as well as how activists attempted to subvert this established narrative to problematise the country’s (post)colonial history and societal inequalities. Using Gestaltpsychology, we theorise the role of perception in subjects’ experience of critical situations as well as their subsequent attempts to manage the ensuing anxieties. More specifically, this paper enables a more nuanced understanding of how human perception enables and guides avenues for narrative contestation as well as conservative attempts to (re)establish the predominant autobiographical narrative.
    
    Authors: Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh) , Ben Rosher (Queen's University Belfast) , Anne-Marie Houde (University of Warwick) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of Warwick)
- 75
  Panel / Challenging eurocentrism and coloniality in terrorism studies Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick) , Alice Finden (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Anna Meier (University of Nottingham)
  - Juridico-Politically Distinct Forms of Exceptional Security Measures Against the Internal 'Enemy': Turkey Between 1971 and 2002
    
    This study aims to conceptualize exceptional security, which comprises states of exception, emergency, and state authorities’ other practices that result in the restriction/suspension of constitutional rights and liberties. While every constitutional order has regulations on exceptional circumstances that might require taking exceptional security measures, not every exceptional security measure is taken based on the code of law. There is a common tendency in the literature to conceptualize every practice that restricts/suspends rights and liberties as a state of exception. The present study argues that such a conceptualization has an essentialist logic that may not comprehend the specificities of different cases and their historical backgrounds. While acknowledging that the concepts of ‘exception’ and ‘emergency’ connote the coexistence of politics and security, this study attempts to show that these concepts refer to different juridico-political situations. To illustrate the distinct relationalities between the law and politics, it interrogates Turkey between 1971 and 2002, where various methods of taking exceptional security measures were employed against the ‘enemy’ mostly referred to as ‘terrorists’. Methodologically, the present study distinguishes between means of exceptional security by looking at who the decision-maker is and how exceptional security measures are decided and taken. Through the examined methods of taking exceptional security measures, it aims to illustrate that juridical conditions (constitutional, unconstitutional, or extra-constitutional) of exceptional security measures may vary contextually.
    
    Key words: emergency • enemy • exception • exceptional security • politics • terrorism • Turkey
    
    Author: Burcu Turkoglu-Payne (Bilkent University)
  - 'Tactical Reversibility' of the Terrorism Discourse in the Non-Western World: Turkey in the 1970s
    
    The construction of the dominant narratives of terrorism by the Western powers is frequently analyzed in the critical analyses of terrorism as dehumanizing and even resulting in the rule over non-Western societies. Even though these analyses make a significant contribution to our understanding of how dominant narratives are reproduced, their heavy emphasis on Western understandings of terrorism ignores the ways in which domestic actors in non-Western societies have used the concept of terrorism as a source of legitimacy through international entanglements of national narratives of terrorism. This paper proposes that critical terrorism studies should concentrate more on how non-Western societies adopted and reproduced the "dominant" narratives that can be found in international relations. For this aim, this paper draws on empirical evidence from the case of Turkey in the 1970s and Foucault's philosophical discussions on how a discourse can be "tactically reversible." This means that critical studies of terrorism should be more aware of their own Western-centrism in their emphasis on Western discourses and acknowledge that non-Western societies are not merely "passive receivers" of terrorism discourse but rather "active implementers" as well.
    
    Author: Tuncer Beyribey
  - Antecedents of Political Repression: The colonial roots of 21st Century anti-terrorism powers
    
    Anti-terrorism powers across the world are employed by liberal democratic states and
    autocratic regimes alike to identify and dismantle enemies of the state. While many states
    use such powers judiciously, in many more states the use of anti-terrorism powers since
    2001 has proven to be little more than repressive. The crucial precursor for all such anti-
    terrorism powers is the designation and proscription of an entity as terrorist. Recent
    scholarship has demonstrated the inherently political and often arbitrary determinations
    that lead to terrorist designations in the 21st Century, and their frequently counter-
    productive consequences. Yet, the antecedent practices of contemporary proscription
    powers are yet to be fully revealed: where did such powers first develop and mature, and
    what contributed their design? To address this question, this paper undertakes a
    genealogical analysis of the use of proscription powers in colonial administrations across
    the world, specifically those of Britain's colonial practices in Kenya and Nigeria in the
    1940s and 50s. The paper, first, draws out the discursive framing of (emancipatory)
    political movements in these countries as anti-state enemies, and identifies the laws and
    experimental repressive practices of exclusion employed by colonial authorities. Second,
    it traces the movement of these 'experimental' approaches into the UK's domestic anti-
    terrorism frameworks addressing violence in initially Northern Ireland and, latterly, the
    post-9/11 era. Finally, the paper traces the impact of colonial proscription practices on
    contemporary antiterrorism regimes worldwide
    
    Authors: Tim Legrand (University of Adelaide) , Lee Jarvis (UEA)*
  - The Political Economy of (In)security in Africa: The (Post)colonial Governmentality of (Counter)terrorism in Nigeria
    
    The unprecedented intensification of terrorism and counterterrorism in Africa post-9/11 has attracted a variety of conceptual perspectives and methods. Albeit initially neglected, the political economy of terrorism and counterterrorism has received recent heightened attention. I build on this incipient thematic attention to how both politics and economics interrelate to impact on (in)security, to critically disentangle this complex political economy. To do this, I discipline Michel Foucault’s ‘[neo]liberal governmentality’ with Charles Mills’ ‘Racial Contract’, by not only theorising ‘with Foucault beyond Foucault’, but radically theorising ‘with Foucault’ contra ‘Foucault’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 36) through a Foucauldian-Millsian interlocution. In doing so, I contend that the political economy of (counter)terrorism in Africa must be understood within peculiar (post)colonial governmentalities within specific societies that experience both phenomena. Through racializing and decolonising (neo)liberal governmentality, I unpack entangled African and European histories which have constituted a peculiar postcolonial political economy with conditions of possibility for (non)violent counter-conducts, which mobilise, and produce various forms of (counter)terrorist interventions. This approach, I argue, allows for an analysis of both historical and contemporary power relations as well as broader mechanisms and practices that shape the political economy of violence more broadly and (counter)terrorism, more specifically.
    
    Author: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick)
- 76
  Panel / Contemporary International Human Rights Challenges Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: Katarzyna Kaczmarska (University of Edinburgh)
  - Academic Freedom and the Virtual Space
    
    The significance of academic freedom - as a concept and as practice - for the discipline of IR has been growing rapidly. This, in particular, due to the internationalisation of Higher Education and the fact that during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, most of our teaching and research activities have moved online. We have surveyed over 1,000 academic faculty in the social sciences and the humanities across universities of Scotland, to learn how faculty experience academic freedom since the Covid-19 pandemic started. While scholars we surveyed are based in Scotland, the concerns our research outlines extend far beyond its borders. Scholars feel uneasy about online teaching and the safety of students based in non-democratic states. Some are finding it difficult to engage research participants using only Internet-based methods. The paper replies directly to the conference call and its emphasis on the anniversary of the Human Rights Declaration.
    
    Authors: Katarzyna Kaczmarska (University of Edinburgh) , Sarah Liu (University of Edinburgh)*
  - Digital Racism as New Generation of Threats to Human Security: The Case of Twitter
    
    Digital Racism as New Generation of Threats to Human Security: The Case of Twitter
    
    Sibel DİNÇ and Ayşegül BOSTAN*
    
    Abstract
    
    Supposed that it was perished in the globalised world, the concept of racism has been transformed into a type of new-generated-discrimination by new generation media tools recently. The new racism, namely digital racism, has been handled as a new generation of threat to human security in the UN Report 2022. The aim of this study is to obtain the adverbs of digital racist discourses, thereby such adverbs could facilitate to combat racism and give some hints to canalise the perception of the society into comprehensive inclusive sights. This paper handles inclusive and exclusive discourses towards the Syrian asylum seekers accommodated in Turkey on the digital platform, Twitter. The objective of the study is to analyse the political discourses on Syrian asylum seekers as one of the hot topics in Turkish politics. The interesting point is here the political party leaders tend to produce exclusive discourses against others to gain more votes from the population. As remembered that the Turkish presidential election will be held before July 2023, this period could be valuable to collect the data of this paper. The data, analysed by the method of content analysis, is comprised of the twits of the Turkish party leaders, Erdoğan-JDP, Kılıçdaroğlu-RPP, Bahçeli-NMP and Akşener-GP represented as group parties in the Turkish Grand National Assembly today, on the Syrian asylum seekers. The data that will be selected and analysed within the scope of the study was determined as the first part covering the last 3 months of 2022 and the second part covering the first 3 months of 2023 to examine the discourses between 2022 and 2023. The findings of this study are estimated that exclusive discourses will be based on political themes rather than economic and sociocultural themes such as citizenship, right to vote etc.
    
    Keywords: Digital Racism, Twitter, Political Party, Syrian Asylum Seekers, Turkey.
    
    *Research Assistant in Strategic Communication, Atatürk Strategic Studies and Graduate Institute, Turkish National Defence University, and PhD Student in Statistics Department of Yıldız Technical University, İstanbul, Turkey. Email: sdinc2@msu.edu.tr ORCID: 0000-0002-7456-8833.
    
    **Dr. Assistant Professor in International Relations and Regional Studies, Atatürk Strategic Studies and Graduate Institute, Turkish National Defence University, İstanbul, Turkey. Email: abostan@msu.edu.tr ORCID: 0000-0002-8731-2757.
    
    Authors: Sibel Dinç (Turkish National Defence University) , Ayşegül Bostan (Turkish National Defence University)
  - Human Rights in the Age of Sportswashing and the Role of Multilateral Organisations
    
    After more than seven decades of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), there are still frontiers to be conquered despite all the achievements. In the recent past, sportswashing has emerged as a potent tool for the states in general and the authoritarian ones in particular to mask the violations of human rights in their respective countries. The soft power accumulated by virtue of the successful hosting of events more often than not helps shift the discourse in their favour, a case in point being the hosting of the 2008 Olympics by Beijing. Apart from hosting mega events, ownership of football clubs all over the globe by sovereign wealth funds has also aided these efforts. The recent debate over Qatar hosting the FIFA World Cup 2022 and its abysmal human rights record in addition to questions over the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community have only intensified the concern over human rights when it comes to sportswashing. Multilateral organisations, thus, have an important role to play, when it comes to sportswashing. It cannot be business as usual by declaring the separation of sports from politics as the hosting of mega event is inherently political. They have immense potential by virtue of their influence and power to hold the regimes accountable on human rights even when sportswashing is pursued vigorously. Thus, the paper aims to look at the role which the multilateral organisations have so far played and can play to protect human rights in the present age of sportswashing. Drawbacks in the approaches pursued so far will also be looked while offering suggestions for the same.
    
    Author: Abhishek Khajuria (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Human Rights and Public Opinion: Does it matter how much the public cares about human rights?
    
    Public opinion is shaped by citizens’ interactions with human rights reports published at the domestic and international levels. However, there is little research studying the relationship between public opinion and human rights. This may be in the form of investigating how human rights perceptions are shaped among the public, or, conversely, how human rights perceptions of the public shape political decisions regarding human rights. The relationship between public opinion and human rights remains unexplored in the Global South, particularly in a pluralistic democracy such as India. With a rise in authoritarian regimes in many of the world’s democracies, it is important to measure citizen perceptions of those regimes. Studying the relationship between public opinion and human rights also has policy implications. To be representative of public interest, policymakers need to have an accurate sense of their constituents’ opinions about human rights. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, I contextualize and address an existing gap in studying the relationship between human rights and public opinion in the context of domestic politics. Second, I create a framework to explore the relationship between human rights and public opinions within the Indian political context.
    
    Author: Mitushi Mukherjee (Purdue University)
- 77
  Panel / Developing new and changing existing concepts related to climate change Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Environment Working Group
  
  Convener: EWG Working group
  
  Chair: Natosha Hoduski (University of St. Andrews)
  - National Approaches to Climate Security
    
    States increasingly recognise the security implications of climate change, evident in national security statements and majority support for climate security initiatives in international for a such as the UN Security Council. But how exactly is security understood, how is the threat of climate change viewed and whose security is represented as under threat from the effects of climate change? The answers to these questions are important in influencing the set of practices states consider or pursue in response to climate change. This paper, part of an ongoing Australian Research Council-funded comparative project, examines different choices made by a range of states who have embraced climate security, exploring in the process the origins of these choices and their implications for policy and practice.
    
    Author: Matt McDonald (University of Queensland)
  - The Rise of Carbon Disclosure in Global Climate Governance: A Network Analysis
    
    Governments increasingly expect corporations to disclose their climate impact. This apparent dominance of ‘governance-by-disclosure’ in global climate regime presents an interesting puzzle: Why did carbon disclosure become a key norm as opposed to stricter regulations on emissions? To answer this question, this paper employs a complex systems approach where networks of actors and ideas influence policy-making processes. Specifically, it uses Discourse Network Analysis to analyse how frames on carbon disclosure have emerged and prevailed in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The analysis uses 10,000 statements between 2000 and 2021 that reflect the plurality of arguments surrounding carbon disclosure used by private and public actors. Results from 2000s confirm the expectations of the socio-political theory of transparency where disclosure is framed as a response to pressure from stakeholders. However, since 2010, there is a clear trend towards institutionalisation where actors and associated frames have begun to converge around carbon disclosure as a more market-friendly measure compared to stricter regulations. Meanwhile, themes such as reputation, risk, effectiveness, ethics, and greenwashing maintained their salience throughout the debate. Overall, this study reveals why and how carbon disclosure has become such a key component of global climate-change-mitigation efforts.
    
    Authors: Vincent Boucher (Université Laval)* , Kerem Öge (University of Warwick)
  - Saving the environment or managing the biosphere? The nuclear testing debates in Cold War America, 1954-1963
    
    IR scholars increasingly recognise that the history of global environmental governance and the history of nuclear weapons development are profoundly intertwined. This has led some to characterise nuclear testing as the first global environmental issue. This paper argues that this depiction is misleading: instead, we should regard nuclear testing as the first global biospheric issue. Aside from arms control, the rationale for restricting nuclear testing was not environmental protection for its own sake. Rather, managing the environment was a way of optimising the conditions under which human life could flourish. Using archival evidence, I demonstrate how the nuclear testing debates in Cold War America reinforced and politicised an emergent understanding of the planet as a single, integrated whole, in which the fate of humanity, other lifeforms, and their habitats were inextricably intertwined. The proponents of limiting nuclear testing advanced what I term a scientific narrative of radioactive fallout. This portrayed radioactive fallout from testing as a risk to US national security because of the extensive, long-term damage it would cause the biosphere. I show how this narrative informed the evolving stance of US policymakers in the test ban negotiations leading up to the Partial Test Ban Treaty.
    
    Author: Mei Ling Young (University of Oxford)
  - Grounding the Common Agenda: Rethinking and Rerouting Global Aviation
    
    Fossil fuel powered air travel promises progress and growth, bringing economic development and international connectivity. But the massive expansion of global aviation, with its demands for more airports, its impacts on noise and air pollution, and its accelerating contribution, despite Covid, to rising carbon emissions and social inequalities and environmental destruction, makes it a critical societal problem. Indeed, for environmental protesters and movements, aviation is now viewed as a public bad in need of greater regulation and social transformation. Yet governments have been slow to tackle such demands. In The Common Agenda, aviation is only discussed in relation to the delivery of practical, global public goods, including ‘international civil aviation regulation’. Little is made of the demands to curb airport expansions and reduce flights that proliferate in many countries, though such struggles stress the vital importance of international action and cooperation. This paper sets out the challenges posed by global aviation and the struggles against its expansion, proposing a new post-aviation imaginary, as well as the political means for its achievement. In short, it critically evaluates the urgent need for a new global deal and ‘social contract between Governments and their people and within societies’ in aviation, nationally and globally.
    
    Authors: Steven Griggs (Staffordshire University)* , David Howarth (University of Essex)
  - Never the Same River Twice: anthropogenic and climate change-induced impacts on riverine borders
    
    Rivers and lakes delimitate nearly a quarter of all national boundaries, globally. While riverine and lacustrine borders provide many opportunities for collaboration, cooperation, and exchange, borders based on mutable fluvial landscapes can also lead to competition and conflict. As climate change and anthropogenic impacts influence river courses and water availability, the borders of countries and populations around these rivers are directly impacted by the character of these rivers. Many states with riverine and lacustrine borders do not have firmly demarcated state boundaries, and river avulsion and meandering, alongside changes in surface water quantity, can directly affect the borders of states. Climate change induced shifts in rain patterns are predicted to affect the spatio-temporal distribution of rain, meaning not only will the quantity of water change, globally, climate change will also lead to changes in the location and concentration of rainfall. This is likely to result in droughts for some areas and floodings in others, accelerating impacts on a river's character. Anthropogenic changes to surface water availability also pose major challenges, including damming, over-extraction, and redirection, resulting in the depletion and even drying of rivers. Both factors will substantially affect surface water quantity and quality in the coming decades that will alter river and lake dynamics. Understanding the role these vital resources play in interstate interactions is vital. This paper examines the impacts changes to riverine and lacustrine borders can have on state-based conceptions of sovereignty, identity, and citizenship as well as access to more material outputs, such as: changes in land, resource, and infrastructure access; food security; water for municipal, industrial, and agricultural use; and hydropower generation. To better understand these impacts, this paper will look at the effects climate change has had on the Semliki River between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the Danube between Serbia and Croatia, and the Orange River between Namibia and South Africa, as well as the populations dependent on these resources. This paper relies on multidisciplinary work within the fields of Geography and International Relations.
    
    Keywords: Hydropolitics, Climate Change, Sovereignty, Rivers, Environment, Sustainable Development
    
    Author: Natosha Hoduski (University of St. Andrews)
- 78
  Panel / Far-right movements and foreign policy influence: Insight from Eastern and Western Europe. Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: Sofia Tipaldou (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow)
  
  Chair: Maik Fielitz (University of Jena)
  - Behind the ban: Why do governments ban far-right groups?
    
    Bans and other proscription practices are longstanding instruments in some European democracies, used infrequently as a means to disrupt and diminish right-wing extremism and related threats. Recently, banning has acquired more transnational policy relevance and been discussed in supranational bodies in response to several conspicuous incidents of right-wing extremist terrorism. Yet in many cases, especially in countries where bans result from a ministerial rather than a judicial procedure, the reasons why a ban is imposed on a particular group are vague. What contextual and proximate conditions are necessary or sufficient to ban a right-wing extremist group? To answer this question, this paper draws on data from Germany--the state that has most frequently banned far-right groups--since 1990, considering every right-wing extremist group mentioned in reports by the federal Constitutional Protection Office. Two-step qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is used to identify different combinations of conditions sufficient to ban an organisation. The QCA results are complemented by a follow-on paired case study of two transnationally active groups. As the exemplar for banning practices against right-wing extremist groups, these findings from Germany are suggestive of possible policy and legal diffusion to other European states (including through EU bodies, such as the EU Internet Forum), where the need to address the threats of right-wing extremism have taken on a greater urgency.
    
    Author: Michael C Zeller (Bielefeld University)
  - Far-right parties’ attitudes to the EU in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
    
    Has the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed far-right attitudes to the European Union? And in what ways? To elaborate on these questions, we do a qualitative content analysis of party manifestos, public speeches, and media interventions of far-right party actors from the EU’s North and South, East and West, namely Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece. Building a data corpus from these original sources, mainstream and alternative media we identify continuity and change in the way far-right parties have framed the political identity and the foreign policy of the EU. We expect to find (1) a significant variance between far-right’s positions in different countries, (2), a significant variance when it comes to attitudes towards EU’s security and economic policies, respectively. Finally, we argue (3) that after the initial shock of the war, even the same far-right parties have shifted their framing as the war progressed.
    
    Authors: Maik Fielitz (University of Jena) , Julia Rone (Cambridge University)*
  - Far-right and foreign policy: Golden Dawn’s influence on Greece’s geopolitical narratives
    
    This article identifies the ways in which the far-right organization Golden Dawn (GD) has influenced the policy agenda and the frames of mainstream parties on foreign policy initiatives during the seven years that it sat in the Greek parliament. GD, a group grounded on its grassroots profile and with a well-developed non-party sector, was the first neo-Nazi party that entered a Western European parliament since WWII. Gaining popularity during the outbreak of the financial crisis in the early 2010s and watering-down its xenophobic rhetoric, it gathered twenty-one parliamentary seats in 2012 and remained in parliament for seven years, until 2019 for its involvement in a series of criminal offenses against both foreign and native citizens. The paper carries out content analysis of party manifestos and speeches delivered by the leaders of the parties in the Greek parliament in the period 2009-2016, in order to capture change across time, specifically pre and post GD entry in the Greek parliament. The focus of the analysis is on two Greek foreign policy issues, Turkey and North Macedonia, which often dominate the policy agenda. Whenever polarising foreign policy issues came to dominate the domestic political arena, Golden Dawn had an opportunity to spread its influence on policy agenda-setting, prioritising issues that have been supported by the more extremist groupuscules, paramilitary units, and ideologues affiliated with it. Our paper contributes to the debate on the influence of far-right non-party actors on policy outcomes through the shaping of geopolitical narratives that challenge both the EU’s current and future borders and its cultural identity.
    
    Authors: Jenny Mavropoulou (Panteion University)* , Sofia Tipaldou (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow) , Vasiliki Georgiadou (Panteion University)*
- 79
  
  Conference event / Gendering International Relations Working Group business meeting Tweed, Hilton
- 80
  Panel / Human and state security in Africa Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Tarela Ike (Teesside University)
  
  Discussant: Tarela Ike (Teesside University)
  - Managing Crises Multilaterally: a critical examination of multilateral approaches to crisis management in the Sahel and beyond.
    
    Crises grow increasingly more complex in an interconnected world and are interacting in novel and mutually exacerbating forms. The proliferation of complex, transboundary crises necessitate equally novel responses and the deployment of significant resources, numbers of actors and degrees of cooperation. Multilateralism has often been championed as a method of addressing such threats, particularly in Africa’s Sahel region which has emerged as a nexus for converging crises and international action. This research examines the prevailing approaches to multilateralism and crisis management in the Sahel region asking several key questions. Firstly, what are the prevailing approaches to multilateralism that can be identified in Sahelian Crisis management. Secondly, despite significant effort, expense and time have these approaches failed to reverse a deteriorating situation. Finally, as a ‘laboratory of experimentation’ for various forms of international cooperation what lessons can multilateral crisis management efforts in the Sahel provide academic and policy discourse beyond the region and in an era of increasingly complex crises. Through an analysis of state and international/regional organisation strategies for the Sahel complemented with interviews conducted with staff in relevant institutions active in the region, I argue that multilateral efforts have largely been ineffective in contributing to managing such crises because they have fallen into a prevailing approach characterised by overly state-centric, thematically truncated and quasi-cohesive strategies that have undermined efforts to reverse current trends. Addressing the challenges multilateral groupings have faced in the Sahel offers opportunities for critical reflection of crisis management in numerous contexts and settings.
    
    Author: Stephen Murray (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Ontological Security Meets Secessionism: The Case of Anglophone Conflict in Cameroon
    
    My paper is founded on two assumptions: first, that there is a neglected linkage between ontological (in)security and secessionist conflicts in IR in that theorists of secessionism do not approach secessionist conflicts with the prism of ontological security and, in like manner, ontological security theorists hardly engage the secessionism literature; second, that even when the relationship between ontological (in)security and secessionism is cursorily underlined, it is more often than not centred on interstate conflicts in the Global North―especially, in Europe. My paper for the BISA conference will attempts to this gap in the scholarly literature by reconciling ontological security with secessionism with a case study of the anglophone conflict in Cameroon.
    
    Author: Promise Frank Ejiofor (University of Cambridge)
  - The impact of COVID-19 on human security in Africa: A six country comparative study
    
    The paper analyses the impact of COVID-19 (and associated lockdowns) on the seven elements of human security (economic, food, health, environmental, political, personal and community security) in six countries in Africa. These countries are Namibia, Tunisia, Nigeria, Kenya, Gabon, and Angola; and were selected to ensure regional representation and language diversity (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese) in Africa. The analysis is based on Round 9 (2021/2022) Afrobarometer survey data. This data is based on randomly selected, nationally representative probability samples of between 1,200 and 2,400 adult citizens in each country. By means of a descriptive analysis of the survey data this paper demonstrates that in all six countries levels of human insecurity have increased since 2019, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This insecurity was more pronounced in countries with lower Human Development Index scores (such as Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya). Populations in the six countries expressed considerable economic insecurity in their negative assessments of their country’s economic condition and overall direction, their frequent lack of a cash income, and their limited optimism about the future. Job and business losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, and inadequate government assistance to tide them over, heightened their vulnerabilities. In substantial numbers, populations reported going without enough to eat, enough clean water, and medical care – challenges to food, health, and environmental security essential to a dignified life. Perceptions of personal safety varied across the six countries, with majorities in three countries reporting declines. Women and girls were particularly insecure judging from widespread reports of gender-based violence as a common occurrence, which was aggravated by COVID-19 and government lockdowns.
    
    Author: Guy Lamb (Stellenbosch University)
- 81
  Panel / Ideals and Interests in World Politics: Pragmatism in Theory and Practice Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Marianna Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  - Risk of Entrapment in Asymmetric Alliances: Assessing South Korea’s foreign policy during the US-DPRK nuclear crises
    
    How does the risk of entrapment affect the foreign policy of the weaker ally in an asymmetric alliance during crisis situations? Alignment theories and foreign policy analyses largely argue that the fear of abandonment guides weaker states’ alliance policies even at the risk of greater entrapment. Moreover, such cost-benefit analysis, as argued in the literature, reflects the military imbalance between the two allies. However, fears of entrapment and abandonment are not perfectly inversely related. While the weaker side of the alliance usually supports the stronger ally’s foreign policy decisions, we argue that the former will also withhold support or even contradict the latter’s established course of action in crisis situations should the aggressive actions put the weaker side’s survival at risk. By examining the weaker ally’s foreign policies under such a condition, we highlight that the support of the weaker side is not always unconditional, and variations exist. To test our argument, we conduct a within-case analysis and show when and how South Korea has sometimes deviated from the US’s preferred policy during the various US-North Korea nuclear crises in the post-Cold War era. We conclude with broad theoretical and policy implications.
    
    Authors: Soul Park (University of East Anglia) , Kimberly Peh (University of Notre Dame)*
  - Explaining Remainers in Military Coalitions: "The Coalition of the Dependent"
    
    Despite the recent focus on the factors explaining early withdrawals from military coalitions, no particular attention has been paid to the reasons underlying strong coalition loyalty. Similarly, while the literature on alliance burden-sharing points to potential factors highlighting why some coalition partners exhibit strong loyalty as coalition contributors in the first place, it overlooks why some of these partners eventually renegade while others remain till the end. The objective of this paper is therefore to address the phenomenon of strong military coalition loyalty. More specifically, it will be shown that the crucial factor behind loyalty is partners’ high degree of security dependence on coalition leaders. To check the impact of dependence and other competing variables on coalition loyalty I analyse the behaviour of big contributors in the Iraq War Coalition and subsequently trace dependency’s effects by conducting in depth analyses of the Polish, Australian, Georgian and South Korean missions.
    
    Author: Panagiotis Vasileiadis (University of Surrey)
  - Which carrots-and-sticks? Unpacking the choice of deterrent instruments
    
    Deterrence by state powers in the present days involves a wider portfolio of instruments, yet many of these “new” forms still remain underreported, and their influence generally underappreciated in international politics. Such dynamics point to an aspect which is often neglected: what are the motives and drivers behind the choice of these instruments? Why do some states choose certain instruments, while others not? This paper challenges the common wisdom that the choice of the instruments of deterrence relies on effectiveness-seeking and the achievement of punishment and/or denial strategies. While the logic of consequentiality is undeniably a key aspect in the decision-making of the coercer, elements such as ideology and identity also play a relevant role in the choice of deterrent instruments. Against this backdrop, the paper proposes an analytical framework which pulls together the interest in power politics and foreign policy, and intersubjectivity, in order to analyze the connections among and the interplay between the material and the ideational, social construction and rationality, and identities and interests in the choice of deterrence instruments. To strengthen this analytical framework, the paper draws examples from two countries: Russia and Turkey.
    
    Author: Chiara Boldrini (University of Bologna)
  - Principles or Pragmatism? Early Practice of Economic Interactions between European Community and Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1970s and 1980s
    
    Since the 1970s, the European Union (previously European Community) has pursued a balance between values-based norms and strategic pragmatism in trade and economic relations with ASEAN countries. This tension between interests and values was particularly visible in the EC’s relations with Indonesia under the Suharto regime. On the one hand, the regime’s anti-communist stance was strategically and economically significant to the Western bloc during the Cold War. On the other hand, the 32-year military dictatorship, its domestic human rights violations and its invasion of East Timor, directly contravened international norms and principles upheld by EC. This paper examines this tension between values and interest in European Community-Indonesia relations in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing upon government documents, newspaper articles and interviews. This analysis demonstrates that the EC, under pressure to uphold its normative values, initially sheltered its contradictory strategic preference by embedding its economic and trade relations with Indonesia under the multilateral mechanisms of cooperation with ASEAN. The EC’s expansion to new members, and the decline of the Soviet Union, however, gradually tipped the balance of EC policy towards values. This pattern follows existing accounts of the European Union’s “Principled Pragmatism” in global affairs, as it follows a pragmatic way based on a careful evaluation of the costs and benefits of its decisions. While tensions between human rights and economic interest remain contested in the EU-Indonesia relationship today, this historical case study demonstrates their long-historical roots, and theoretically enriches our understanding of “Principled Pragmatism.”
    
    Author: Zhihang Wu (University of Glasgow)
  - Multipolar Illusion: How the recent theoretical debate will fail to hit reality?
    
    The international system is at a crossroads, which has never been as uncertain as today's politics since the end of the Cold War. Struggle for power among second-tier states, civil wars and regional conflicts have been the main drivers of threat perception behind uncertainty. The mainstream analyses see ongoing instability as a result of multipolarity as if second-tier states challenge US supremacy. This study, instead, argues that the ongoing instability results from the Great Power Politics game being played in the gaps opened by the American neo-isolation grand strategy at the level of secondary states. Therefore, the international system analysis based on a systemic break creates a narrative around the multipolar illusion that also affects the discipline's future. Contrary to the century-long development of the discipline of International Relations, the theory establishes a new system narrative without a systemic break; that is, the theory misses the truth. In fact, the independent variable of the perception that will dominate both international politics and the discipline should be how the American Grand Strategy will be shaped in the future.
    
    Authors: Ahmet Arda Sensoy (University of Nottingham) , Muhammed Cagri Bilir (University of Leeds)
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  Roundtable / Whiskey and IR Roundtable – a Whiskey Optional recording. Sponsored by Clydeside Distillery QE2, Marriott
  
  Status Check
  
  We’ve run "Whiskey Optionals" on “The New Hierarchy Studies,” “International Relations in China,” “Constructivism,” “International Order,” and “Race and Securitization Theory.” Now we’re tackling a concept that cuts across all five of these topics: “Status.” Status is fundamental — one might even say “foundational” — to the study of human relations (international or otherwise), which might explain why we so often take its meaning for granted. What is the status of status in different theoretical traditions? Does status deserve its status as a key drive of international politics? Ali Bilgic (Loughborough), Rohan Mukherjee (LSE), Michelle Murray (Bard), and Steven Ward (Cambridge) join the podcast for a discussion of the past, future, and status quo of “status.” As with all our roundtables, whiskey is optional — but encouraged for those whose consumption is both legal and prudent.
  
  Do You Gramsci What I See?
  
  Ever wondered why the podcast spells it “Whiskey” rather than “Whisky?” Now you can learn the answer. That’s right, it’s a “live taping” of Whiskey and International Relations Theory. Woot! Come join Dan and PTJ for an uncharacteristically short set of takes (we really mean it this time) on Robert W. Cox’s classic 1981 article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory” (Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2). Stay to tell them what they get terribly, terribly wrong.
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: Daniel Nexon (Georgetown University)
  
  Participants: Michelle Murray (Bard College) , Ali Bilgic (Loughborough University) , Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (American University, Washington, D.C.) , Rohan Mukherjee (LSE) , Steven Ward (University of Cambridge)
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  Panel / Power contestations in everyday (in)security Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  
  Chair: Hannah Wright (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Everyday (in)security in British de-radicalization: “It might be nothing – but it could be something”
    
    Counter-terrorism responsibilities have been gradually dispersed across British society. The 2015 Prevent Duty mandated that all public sector workers must report so-called ‘signs of radicalization’ – such as “transitional periods” and “engagement with an ideology" – that their clients (schoolchildren and hospital patients) present. The most concerning referrals receive ‘de-radicalization’ mentoring on the Channel programme to preemptively steer them away from terrorism. This paper utilizes interviews with Prevent officials and Channel mentors, illuminating how (racialized) everyday lives, behaviours, and thoughts are made visible as potential terrorism risks through de-radicalization interventions. Rather than demonstrably ensuring security, pre-crime interventions instead operationalize and reproduce insecurity. De-radicalization practitioners reveal a constant state of freneticism and alertness central to their work: children presenting as harmless (in practitioners’ own words) are simultaneously imagined to be potential future terrorists, giving Prevent operatives sleepless nights. Banal, everyday behaviours and experiences – of being single, of being married, watching videos about geopolitics, having too much empathy – are all deemed possibly significant risk-factors to be anxiously dissected and managed before safety can be declared. Yet success is never complete, nor safety fully known. The drive to identify risk/safety is mobilized through profound insecurity, so that fears about the racialized unknown can be alleviated.
    
    Author: Tom Pettinger (Warwick University)
  - Covid-19 and everyday (in)security: How the coronavirus pandemic helped to reveal the Eurocentric foundations of Critical Security Studies
    
    This article assesses the lessons of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic for two important strands of Critical Security Studies (CSS) – securitisation theory and security cosmopolitanism – which are united by the limitations of their contextual foundations. We argue that the pandemic helps to reveal the specific historical, geographical, and social contexts – the Kantian peace of Europe – that informed their development, and which conditions their broader applicability. First, the article analyses the construction of ‘covid-secure’ spaces. Here, we explore the limits – and inversion – of securitisation, as the exception (danger) becomes the norm and normality (safety) the exception. Second, we analyse survival strategies in the pandemic, through the lens of security cosmopolitanism. For both, we show how CSS provides useful frameworks for the analysis of security’s creation and behaviour’s ethical calculation in the context of the pandemic. However, we stress the limits and Eurocentric foundations of approaches that would normalise the absence of threat and exceptionalise everyday conditions of insecurity, condemning those whose actions are inspired by different, structurally insecure contexts. In sum, the pandemic has brought home to Europe the security challenges – and the kinds of commonplace everyday insecurities – that have long plagued much of the world.
    
    Author: Jack Holland (University of Leeds)
  - Everyday resistance and agency in civilian-led counter-terrorism regimes
    
    Over the past decade, Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) has emerged as a new frontier in the War on Terror. The British government’s Prevent Strategy has been amongst the foremost proponents of this approach to combating terrorism. This policing moves quotidian counter-terrorism work beyond law enforcement structures and places these obligations directly on citizens. This paper problematises the interactions of these civilian ‘agents of state’ to their counter-terrorism obligations.
    
    Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with medics, educators, and social workers, this paper argues that while there is compliance with Prevent Duty measures, there is also resistance to these civilian-led surveillance duties. It is important to explore this contestation because it opens up new ways of tackling the threat of terrorism. This paper will demonstrate that contestation by citizens does not mean outrightly rejecting the need to combat terrorism. Instead, citizens resisting Prevent reclaim the existing safeguarding principles embedded within their professional obligations to support people that the policy would consider ‘vulnerable to extremism’. As such, these acts of contestation create a new technology of prevention that challenges the orthodox notions of threat and vulnerability and moves away from the oppressive structures of War on Terror.
    
    Author: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  - Security dilemmas: exploring everyday people’s conceptions, experiences and dilemmas
    
    As critical approaches to security have shown, the ‘content’ of what we include in ‘security’ is contextual. Security policies are embedded in societies and the way people think about it is dependent on their different positions in society. The powers deployed and expanded in the name of security shape everyday interactions and collective exercise of citizenship. As such, security practices become disciplining forces within socio-political relations. While there is strong evidence on how official narratives of security highlight specific sources of threat (i.e. terrorism), this paper advocates focusing instead on how citizens understand, value, expect, and experience security.
    
    In Spain, the practice of enlisting ‘society’ to security issues is crystallizing as part of the security paradigm. To raise security awareness among society, several policy initiatives have been deployed aimed at educating people into security threats. This paper brings a sociological account of lay citizen’s security culture as core to broader political cultures. Drawing on a multi-situated ethnography across Spain, we delve into everyday representations and practices of security problems and find spontaneous conceptions of security/insecurity emerging that relate to both negative security (as fear of crime/violence/war) and positive security (i.e. social security as related to social citizenship).
    
    Author: Laura Fernández de Mosteyrín (Spanish National Distance University, UNED)
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  Panel / Proxy Wars and Rebel Alliances: Indirect Intervention in Modern Conflicts Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham)
  
  Chair: Alex Neads (Durham University)
  - Strings Attached or Carte Blanche? How Foreign States Control Armed Groups
    
    How do foreign states exercise control over armed groups? State support to non-state actors is never a risk-free strategy. The provision of support to armed groups abroad may backfire. Proxies can divert resources, refuse to adhere to demands, or even abandon or turn against the state sponsor. To ensure compliance and mitigate the inherent risks involved in conflict delegation, we argue that states make use of seven types of control mechanisms when outsourcing violence to non-state armed groups: selection, contracting, checks and balances, monitoring, reporting, rewards, and sanctions. In this article, drawing on insights from principal-agent theory, we outline a theory of control and illustrate how various mechanisms have been employed by foreign state sponsors in the Syrian Civil War.
    
    Authors: Niklas Karlén (Swedish Defence University) , Vladimir Rauta (University of Reading)
  - The Internationalisation of Civil Wars
    
    Civil wars today rarely confine to the ‘internal’ feature of the violence presupposed by their label. This paper argues that the current and future study of civil wars must incorporate, conceptually and theoretically, a key empirical dimension: internationalisation. Our argument distinguishes between two logics of internationalisation in civil wars: (1) substitution, whereby civil wars become proxy wars; and (2) complementarity, whereby civil wars also become inter-state wars. First, we develop our argument theoretically and proceed with a theory-generating effort by discussing the characteristics of the two logics of internationalisation using the Yemeni civil war (2014 – present) as an ideal case study. We show how an under-appreciation of the variation of internationalisation has mischaracterised the internal-external dynamics of the Yemeni civil war across actor- and process-centred dimensions. Second, we trace the theoretical implications of our account of internationalisation onto the current and future of study of civil wars. Specifically, we formulate a series of puzzles for which our theory provides more robust explanations, thereby formulating some metatheoretical premises which correct the debate’s intellectual assumptions and practices, from which future research can benefit, and to which policymakers can appeal. In doing so, we aim both to bridge the past and future of scholarship and bring together academic and policy approaches to understanding the internationalisation of civil wars so that these worlds can speak to one another more coherently.
    
    Authors: Alexandra Stark (New America) , Vladimir Rauta (University of Reading)
  - Closing Windows, Proxy Effectiveness, and the Escalation from Direct to Indirect Support in Civil War: Evidence from the Italian Intervention in the Spanish Civil War.
    
    Foreign states can support warring parties in civil wars by sharing material and expertise (“indirect support”) or by to dispatching military forces to partake in combat (“direct support”). In many conflicts, states initially provide indirect support, and later expand their involvement to direct support. When does this transition take place? This paper argues that sponsors will provide direct support in the wake of a negative conflict outcome, represented by defeats of the proxy, when (1) battlefield action needs to be taken quickly before the costs of proxy war increase, and (2) the proxy appears unwilling or unable to obtain meaningful battlefield success. Faced with the prospects of a sharp increase in the costs of proxy war, and with no time to transfer skills to the proxy via training and advising, the sponsor will be incentivized to intervene directly before a window closes. The paper applies the logic of support escalation to case of the Spanish Civil War, process tracing the origin of Fascist Italy’s increasing involvement in the conflict between July and December of 1936. It shows that dictator Benito Mussolini first opted for indirect assistance to rebel general Francisco Franco. As the latter failed to quickly end the war, however, the former decided to send a significant troop contingent before the costs of assistance became too high. By explaining the shift from a logic of indirect assistance to one of direct support, this article significantly improves our understanding of the of use of military force in foreign civil wars.
    
    Author: Giuseppe Spatafora (University of Oxford)
  - Revolutionary Leaders and State Support for Rebel Groups in Africa
    
    State support for rebel groups is a pervasive phenomenon in Africa. This paper’s original dataset shows that 39 out of 47 mainland African states (83%) were sponsors and/or targets between 1960 and 2010. There were more than 200 unique triadic relationships between a sponsoring leader, a sponsored rebel group, and a targeted leader in this period. What explains why many African leaders use pro-rebel support as a foreign policy tool whereas others do not? Existing scholarship on Africa’s international relations typically focuses on personal survival. It sees all leaders as primarily reactive. Using a personal attribute approach, I provide an alternative perspective on African leaders that better explains pro-rebel support. I shift the focus to a subset of leaders that seeks more than just survival: revolutionary leaders—those seizing power by irregular means and implementing radical domestic changes. It is these leaders who, driven by largely ideology-based revisionist foreign policy objectives, are most commonly the first to target other leaders. I use Muammar Gaddafi to illustrate this argument and then systematically assess it employing the first leader-level dataset on pro-rebel sponsorship.
    
    Author: Henning Tamm (University of St Andrews)
  - Proxy Warfare and the Meaning of Alliances
    
    The provision of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and military hardware by NATO member states to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in March 2022 has raised in important question: can military alliances wage war by proxy? This has been an underexplored component of analysis of the Ukraine war, despite the total of US assistance alone standing at close to $5billion. Whilst Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused NATO of waging a proxy war against Russia by supporting Ukraine, Western policymakers have been reluctant to use the term to explain their attempt to undermine Russian military advances. So how can we best explain co-ordinated indirect intervention in a conflict by third parties and what are the implications for our understanding of such alliances? This paper will use the Ukraine conflict as a lens through which to look at the literature on proxy war and military alliances and put them together to explore a fundamental set of issues: firstly, whether the informal provision of weapons to a third party in warfare compromises the formal nature of alliances like NATO; secondly, whether tactical alliances forged for the purposes of defeating a common enemy are intrinsic to the nature of proxy warfare; thirdly, whether interventions like that seen in Ukraine mean that the term ‘alignment’ is a more accurate reflection of the strategic landscape than ‘alliances’ given the absence of formal military arrangements; and finally, whether arms transfers, like the provision of HIMARS and NLAWS to Ukraine, should conceptually be seen as acts of proxy war and whether they mark the formation of a new era of military alliance.
    
    Author: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham)
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  Panel / Regionalism in the Americas, North and South Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Tom Long (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Carolina Zaccato (University of St Andrews)
  - North America: Stagnation, Decline or Renewal?
    
    During the early 1990s, North American integration was an important case study for International Relations' study of regionalism; more recently, the region has mostly disappeared from IR even as attention to a "world of regions" booms. This presents something of a paradox: judged by levels of economic and social integration, North America is a cohesive and dynamic region. However, it lacks visibility, political leadership, and robust international organizations. This paper introduces a new volume that brings North America back into IR's study of regions and regionalism, while also asking what developments in IR can add to our understanding of North American dynamics.
    
    Author: Tom Long (University of Warwick)
  - The unprecedented labour rules in USMCA: Protectionist design, developmental outcome
    
    The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) contains unprecedented labour provisions, including a factory-specific rapid-response labour dispute settlement mechanism, the overhaul of the century-old Mexican trade union system, and the rule of origin that 40-45 percent of the value of autos be produced by workers earning at least $16 per hour. Drawing on over 80 interviews with negotiators, policymakers, labour union and business representatives in NAFTA countries, this paper revisits the debate on the protectionist vs developmental role of labour standards in free trade agreements. Although US Democrats and the Trump administration both pursued protectionist objectives, the left-wing Mexican President López-Obrador used USMCA to lock-in his labour reforms in light of domestic opposition. USMCA labour rules are likely to have developmental rather than protectionist effects for three reasons: they are not the most effective protectionist tool at the US’s disposal, they tend to promote social and economic upgrading, and they reduce opposition to USMCA in the US. Without a US-sponsored North American industrial policy, however, the promise that USMCA labour rules will result in US-Mexico wage convergence is unlikely to be fulfilled.
    
    Author: Ludovic Arnaud (University of Oxford)
  - Orchestrating regional cooperation on Chagas disease in Latin America. The role of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative.
    
    Chagas disease is a major regional health challenge in Latin America and one of the most neglected diseases in the region. Yet, no regional intergovernmental organisation from Latin America has ever taken the lead on addressing Chagas disease or other neglected diseases. Instead, a global health governance organisation, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), has become the lead actor in developing a regional approach to Chagas disease in Latin America. Since its creation in 2003, the global public-private partnership DNDi has become the leading global health governance actor in tackling neglected diseases worldwide. In confronting Chagas disease, DNDi has played a prominent role in orchestrating a rare and distinctive regional governance model by connecting public health actors from different world regions (Europe and Latin America) and governance levels (global, international, regional and local), empowering a range of local actors (community organisations, patient organisations, public health institutes, research institutes) and ideas from Latin America, transcending the North-South divide and a highly fragmented governance landscape while at the same time challenging deeply entrenched neocolonial governance structures and neoliberal market-based ideologies in global health. This paper explores how DNDi has orchestrated this regional governance approach at the global-regional nexus and how DNDi's activities can help us better understand the links between global and regional (health) governance.
    
    Author: Markus Fraundorfer (University of Leeds)
  - Regional migration governance and shared responsibility for women and girls on the move
    
    Latin America faces one of the largest mass migrations worldwide; by the end of 2022 more than 6 million refugees and migrants have left Venezuela, 84% of whom fled to the Latin American region. In central America, the number of asylum-seekers and refugees travelling northwards, particularly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, grew rapidly to almost 60% since 2016, due to a combination of gang violence, poverty, and the increasing impact of droughts on farmers forced thousands. Half of the displaced are women and girls.
    
    Regional frameworks have been important means to put migrants’ rights on the national agenda across Latin America. Yet, despite the rhetoric, these policies have not been fully implemented on the ground, and the safeguarding of the rights of migrants has profound limitations. In situations of unprecedented mass migration in the region we ask, what is the role of regional organisations in providing leadership for the protection of displaced women and girls? Specifically, how - if at all - have regional organisations developed a gender-responsive approach to migration and cooperation for migration and border governance?
    
    The paper looks at regional governance infrastructure is complex, including organisations such as the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the Central American Integration System (SICA) and argues that in contexts of mass displacement, regional normative frameworks have been institutionally anaemic and implemented unevenly or seemingly arbitrarily across the region. For this reason, migration governance has failed in allocating responsibility and forms of protection as a shared responsibility for women and girls on the move. Ultimately, the paper shows a clear gap between what regional governance can do, and how policy is actually translated into national laws and practice, particularly in relation to mainstreaming gender considerations into those laws and practices.
    
    Author: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton)
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  Roundtable / The Eurovision Song Contest and International Politics 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.
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Chair: Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen)
  
  Participants: Catherine Baker (University of Hull) , Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast) , Zoë Jay (University of Helsinki) , Bohdana Kurylo (UCL)
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  Panel / Violence and Empire Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick)
  - The ‘jungly-ness’ in the ‘garden’? Analyzing Epistemic frames and racialized discourses on the Ukraine Crisis
    
    The Russian invasion of Ukraine has bifurcated the ‘post-Covid’ world between the global north/west, which outrightly supported Ukrainian efforts against the Russian invasion and those who were more cautious about the sanctions regime and the tough stance, mainly countries located in the global south and east. In the discussions in the global north/west, there has been a renewed focus on hard security and state-based European/Western security order, the academic debate in the global south and east is different. In line with postcolonial and decolonial approaches, the argument is that responses to the Russian invasion reveal yet again the racial cartographies that dominate geopolitical thinking today: one where Euro-American spaces (“the garden”) and those designated for their protection as white or nominally white, are continuously produced as sacred and safe at the expense of proxy wars in the global south and east (“the jungle”).
    
    In this paper, we examine the epistemic frames and the racialized discourses used in the global north/west to describe the Ukraine crisis and the hierarchies that are perpetuated through them. Specifically, we explore the politics of knowledge production on Ukraine crisis regarding who sets the agenda, whose voices are prioritized and who is excluded/marginalized.
    
    Authors: Piro Rexhepi (Southern New Hampshire University)* , Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt)
  - The Use of Tear Gas on Black Lives Matter Protests in the United States
    
    Constituting approximately 25% of the “non-lethal” weapons market, tear gas has become a popular tool for enforcing political control. This paper will explore the weaponization of tear gas for the purposes of disciplining policed bodies, specifically Black Lives Matter protesters in the US. Drawing upon ideas of race, empire, identity, war, and biopower as they coalesce within metropolitan protest sites, this paper argues that such themes continue to have salience as colonial logics, power structures, and hierarchies are maintained within the modern era - in this case between the state and black citizens. With circumscribed (othered) populations rendered disposable, this paper highlights a specific manner in which tear gas has been employed by state authority - against protesting black Americans/those protesting in solidarity with black advancement - to show how this weapon simultaneously dehumanizes and governs. Through investigating the systematic and structural deployment of tear gas, the dynamics between citizenship status, history, and power that serve to justify the use of this chemical agent become clearer. As tear gas, far from a benign technological development, continues to change modes of governance and methods for activism across the globe, an analysis of its racialized employment is imperative.
    
    Author: Shala Cachelin (University of Westminster)
  - Global Britain, Greater Britain: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
    
    Dubbed ‘Empire 2.0’, Global Britain outlines the Conservative Party’s post-Brexit foreign policy ambitions, framed as an internationalist venture. Nevertheless, the prevalence of colonial references and related promulgation of the CANZUK alliance is decidedly narrower in outlook, reflecting the imperial agenda and deeper racial prejudice against non-white Commonwealth countries associated with imperial nationalism. However, beyond a yearning to recapture the grandeur of the imperial ‘golden age’, there is a lack of conceptual clarity as to what imperial nationalism entails and its implications. I argue that to understand this, we must consider imperial nationalism during empire. In this paper, I therefore highlight the discursive parallels between Global Britain and the nineteenth century narrative of Greater Britain, where imperial nationalists attempted to incorporate the White Dominions into British nationhood. Although this differs greatly from the goals of its contemporary Global Britain counterpart, legacies of race and hierarchy have persisted, along with the theoretical incoherence of emphasising sovereignty while endorsing imperialism. Hence, Global Britain is not a new policy, but a reproduction of pre-existing power structures. This comparative analysis thus presents a unique opportunity to understand the nature of imperial nationalism, and importantly the ways in which it manifests in British foreign policy today.
    
    Author: Katie Hudson (University of Edinburgh)
  - Long-distance militarism(s): Cooperative diasporic organizing and the transnational constitution of militarism(s) in/between India and Israel
    
    In mainstream and more critical IR scholarship, militarisms (and nationalisms) are typically understood, implicitly or explicitly, as bounded sets of relations concomitant with a given nation-state. This paper shifts the analytical frame by emphasizing how diaspora communities can be involved in reproducing militarisms transnationally and how this can occur through directly cooperating with diaspora organizations and lobby groups affiliated with other states whose perceived interests overlap. More specifically, this paper examines how militaristic Hindutva and Zionist organizations in the United States and United Kingdom have cooperated in efforts to advance their violent political projects through attempting to delegitimize criticism of Indian and Israeli practices of colonizing occupied peoples and territories while suppressing armed resistance movements. This has occurred in the context of a deterritorialization of ‘Indianness’ through advancing ‘long-distance nationalism’ as a strategic aim of Hindu nationalists in recent years. While reconceptualizing militarism as constituted transnationally through sites and relations across and between sympathetic diaspora communities, the empirical focus is on forms of organizing which escalated following the August 2019 decision by the government of India to revoke Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, which furthers domination and colonization of military-occupied Kashmir.
    
    Author: Derek Verbakel (York University)
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  / BISA 2023 reception: BISA in collaboration with The School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8AG
Thursday 22 June
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  Conference event / Colombia River Stories: The Atrato River Guardians - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events Ballroom, Hilton
  
  Speakers: Jan Nimmo, Mo Hume
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  Conference event / Exhibitor Hall Ballroom, Hilton
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  Conference event / Politics of Wildfire - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events Ballroom, Hilton
  
  Speaker: Lorenza Fontana
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  / Pop culture & politics – student work display by Maha Rafi Atal & Rhys Crilley. Find out more at https://twitter.com/rhyscrilley/status/1670814542618583042?s=20 Absolute Roasters coffee shop at Box Hub
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  Roundtable / A Summit of the Future in a Bordered World? Dee, Hilton
  
  How do we meet as “a summit of the future” in a world of borders? Where are the possibilities of genuine encounter and exchange when global segregationist policies keep people apart and allow only some to move across borders with relative ease? In this roundtable, we assess the role of borders and migration in some of the most significant challenges the world faces today: war and conflict, climate disaster, disease, capitalism, and imperialism. Human movements, in particular those without state authorisation, can serve as a useful lens to investigate these challenges that plague the international system and local experiences. When viewed through migration and its governance, what is revealed about these challenges but also about the shortcomings in addressing them? This roundtable brings together scholars who have investigated connections between migration, borders, and these important questions of the day.
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Chair: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Glasgow)
  
  Participants: Hassan Ould Moctar (SOAS) , Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield) , Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool and University of Duisburg-Essen) , N/A
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  Panel / Civil War Paths Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism
  
  Convener: Anastasia Shesterinina (University of York)
  
  Chair: Anastasia Shesterinina (University of York)
  - The Multiple Paths of the FARC-EP in the Colombian War
    
    Starting with the founding of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP) in 1964, we trace this organisation’s clandestine origins in the broader context of the peasant movement and contentious strategies against the Colombian state. This helps understand how a clandestine organisation, marginalised in isolated regions of Colombia in the 1960s and 1970s, evolved, from the 1980s onwards, into an irregular army. This wartime transformation combined internal dynamics, including recruitment of committed cadres, their socialisation, discipline, and organisational cohesion, with external dynamics, particularly the flow of economic resources, rebel governance, international support, and interactions with other armed groups. As a result, the FARC-EP was able to dispute territories with the Colombian military in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, the FARC-EP’s organisational changes and the Colombian state’s strengthening of its counterinsurgency capacities in the 2000s affected the FARC-EP internally and externally. Both were decisive for the negotiations between 2012 and 2016 in Cuba, which ended in a peace agreement. Over 90% of the FARC-EP demobilised and the organisation transformed into a political party. Yet, splinter groups emerged, complicating the implementation of the peace agreement in the midst of ongoing conflict with a range of armed groups in Colombia.
    
    Author: Eduardo Álvarez-Vanegas (University of York)
  - Impunity and State Splintering: Framing Violence in South Sudan’s Civil War Path
    
    Existing literature on the foundations of armed groups in South Sudan’s civil suggests that this is a clear case of state splintering, following the linear trajectory of state splintering - coup - civil war. However, contestations around December 2013 coup allegations and enduring violence before and after independence call into question the appropriateness of this understanding. This paper looks to the politics and practices of impunity to understand the origins and evolution of state splintering and civil war in South Sudan. It mobilises intersecting frameworks from memory studies and transitional justice to explore the role of impunity and accountability as both potential catalysts for, and consequences of, state splintering and conflict. This paper advances the importance of accountability and impunity in framing enduring violence at discursive and practical levels in South Sudan to understand the relationship between accountability, violence and peace in contexts where state splintering and civil war interact. It draws from memory studies to examine the role of claims and frames around the alleged coup on the subsequent evolution of South Sudan’s main armed groups. Drawing on transitional justice it further uses the politics of accountability to understand disputed histories of violent mobilisation and civil war path dependency in an environment where state splintering and war interact.
    
    Author: Sayra van den Berg (University of York)
  - Understanding Civil War from Pre- to Post-War Stages: A Comparative Approach
    
    Do armed groups’ origins shape the evolution of civil wars? Research has started to disaggregate armed groups, demonstrating the impact of their organisational foundations for conflict outcomes. However, we still know little about how armed groups emerge in different ways and how and to what extent these origins matter in the course of conflict. Alternating between the literature on armed group emergence and case analysis, we identify, map globally, and illustrate three broad categories of origins, that is, armed groups that emerge from clandestine activities, social movements and state splinters. We show that different origins shape armed groups’ initial internal and external relations but dynamics endogenous to civil war transform these groups, with implications for their relations. This discussion advances recent efforts to understand the importance of armed group emergence for overarching trajectories of civil wars by moving beyond static snapshots of these groups’ origins to appreciating their dynamic evolution.
    
    Authors: Anastasia Shesterinina (University of York)* , Michael Livesey (University of Sheffield)
  - From Clandestine to Social Movement Path: The Maoist ‘People’s War’ in Nepal
    
    This paper examines the emergence and evolvement of the Communist party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN-M) as a case of clandestine insurgency. What makes the CPN-M and its campaign of ‘People’s War’ (1996-2006) such an interesting case, is the way the CPN-M generated a broader Maoist movement, taking control over 70 percent of Nepal’s countryside within a decade. Drawing on life history interviews with people who participated in the movement, we examine how the CPN-M evolves from a clandestine formation to take on social movement characteristics. How do forms of mobilisation and membership evolve in the course of war? How do people who contributed to the movement understand this unfolding? In what ways do the origins of the CPN-M as a clandestine political party continue to matter for its war-time practices of mobilisation? In pursuing these questions, we advance a research agenda that aims to understand the unfolding of civil wars by examining the distinct origins of armed groups as organisations and the transformation of these origins over time (Shesterinina and Livesey, 2022). In doing so, we offer new insights into the literature on cladestinity and armed groups (Lewis, 2020), moving beyond origins into questions about transformation and unfolding.
    
    Author: Hanna Ketola (University of York)
  - A Social Movement Path? Sect-Based Divisions in the Lebanese Civil War
    
    Based on interviews collected via a life history approach with Lebanese ex-combatants and ordinary civilians who experienced the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, this paper explains the conditions of possibility for violence as part of a social process that unfolds during the periods of pre-war, war and post-war. This paper shows how violence as a social process varies between groups of the same and different religious sects. I argue that a dialectical relationship between a social movement and a counter movement had been growing for years and exploded at the inception of the war. I show that the organisational origins and alliances of both the movement and counter movement conditioned popular decision-making to pick up arms or not along sectarian lines. I also show how the unfolding of war events fragmented these alliances even when the sect-based divisions were preserved. I go beyond the deterministic approach that the literature on sectarianism tend to impose on ordinary Lebanese which reduces peoples’ group affiliation to their sect-based affiliations. I start by tracing the historical organisation of the warring groups across pre- to post-war contexts to explain how these organisational changes affect and are affected by the popular understanding of historical developments.
    
    Author: Toni Rouhana (University of York)
- 95
  Panel / Contestation of international order Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Conveners: Matthieu Grandpierron (Catholic University of Vendée) , Rafael Alexandre Mello (University of Brasilia) , Nino Kemoklidze
  
  Chair: Rafael Alexandre Mello (University of Brasilia)
  
  Discussant: Anne-Sophie Jung (University of Leeds)
  - Exemplarity in global resistance: beyond epics and romanticism
    
    The paper explores how exemplarity operates in global resistance. Attempts to transform the international order through revolutions, social movements or other types of resistance inspire, through example, new processes of contestation across time and space. Reconsidering exemplarity as an analytical framework allows to deepen into the long-term international legacies of activism. The framework builds upon revolutionary theories, as well as feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches on resistance. It considers the direct and material aspects of exemplarity (e.g. support to other sites of resistance, alternative transnational infrastructures), as well as the indirect and immaterial (e.g. the symbolism of the collective action or the ideas and cultures of resistance), from a critical perspective. Indeed, the potential of the collective action to challenge the international order, the alternative nature of the ideas involved, and the structural conditions of intersecting inequalities that shape and constrain its scope, account for the exemplary effects of an episode of contention. Still, the politics of resistance too are infused with power, and (non)exemplarity also exposes exclusionary alternatives and practices in collective action and romantic gendered understandings of resistance.
    
    Author: Iratxe Perea Ozerin (University of the Basque Country)
  - The establishment of communities of practice within fields: an analysis of the International Humanitarian City in Dubai
    
    Since its establishment in 2003, the free zone of the International Humanitarian City (IHC) in Dubai has expanded its facilities and services. Its members include key international humanitarian organisations, which established either an office or a warehouse in the zone and started speaking a common language. The paper asks how IHC members have grown into a community of practice made of humanitarian actors from the Gulf; humanitarians from the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organisations headquartered in and outside the West; and private sector companies. It argues that the practices of humanitarians in the IHC have become tightly intertwined through a process in four steps, culminating in an impact on IHC members' dispositions to act on the international scene. The study adds to mounting literature on communities of practice as an ordering principle in World Politics, but one that is consistent with the tenets of field theory since communities of practice must be located within broader dynamics that are primarily conflictual. The paper will also challenge the assumption that practices of humanitarian response by Western and Gulf organisations are incompatible.
    
    Author: Seila Panizzolo (University of Oxford)
  - Small states as order-makers: Kazakhstan and the Eurasian Union.
    
    This paper analyses how a small state like Kazakhstan can behave as order make. This is a critical question since order maker behaviour applies to great powers only, leaving small states to order taker position. Such attitude had contributed to neglecting Kazakhstan’s pattern of behaviour towards the re-integration of the post-soviet states into a new regional grouping. The literature claims ‘failed’ attempts in 1990s and sudden integration since 2000 without an understanding of Kazakhstan’s Eurasian integration input since 1994. This aspect of Kazakhstan’s behaviour has been understudied. However, from the small state’s perspective, a small state like Kazakhstan can behave as an order maker but in a specific issue area and, in the form of an issue corrector. This will be demonstrated with a particular focus on Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Union (EAU) project proposed in 1994. Reviewing the post-independence regional re-integration move of Kazakhstan through the analysis of the formation, implementation and control of the EAU I hope to suggest that the EAU project was to correct the course of the post-soviet regional integration towards a new organizational structure and not to balance against its initial formation in the framework of the CIS.
    
    Author: Birzhan Bakumbayev (University of Westminster)
- 96
  Panel / Emerging technology and international security Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: ISET
  
  Chair: Andre Barrinha (University of Bath)
  - The AI Commander Problem: Ethical-political and psychological dilemmas of human-machine interactions in AI-enabled warfare
    
    Can AI solve the ethical-political dilemmas of warfare? How is artificial intelligence (AI) enabled warfare changing the way we think about the ethical-political dilemmas and practice of war? This article explores the central elements of the ethical and political dilemmas of human-machine interactions in modern digitized warfare. While much of the present debate has revolved around ethical and legal concerns about fielding lethal robots (or "killer robots") into armed conflict, less attention focuses on AI-enabled warfare's ethical, moral, and psychological dilemmas. The article fills a gap in discussions of complex socio-technical interactions between AI and warfare. It offers a counterpoint to the argument that AI 'rational' efficiency can simultaneously offer a viable solution to humans' psychological and biological fallibility in combat while retaining 'meaningful' human control over the war machine. This Panglossian assumption neglects the psychology of human-machine interactions, the speed AI-enabled future wars will be fought, and the complex and chaotic nature of modern war. The article expounds key psychological insights of human-machine interactions to elucidate how AI shapes our capacity to think about future warfare's political and ethical dilemmas. It argues that through the psychological process of human-machine integration, AI will not merely force multiply existing advanced weaponry but will become de facto strategic actors in warfare – the ‘AI commander problem.’
    
    Author: James Johnson (University of Aberdeen)
  - Apocalyptic imaginaries: comparing visions of the future in discourses of nuclear weapons and autonomous weapons systems
    
    Nuclear weapons and autonomous weapons systems (AWS) seem like disparate weapons categories at first – the first having demonstrated the sheer indiscriminate destructiveness of their use, the latter portrayed as a futuristic military technology. However, both are also imagined as either apocalyptic super weapons that need to be banned, or as indispensable to states’ national survival and the international security architecture. Different actors deploy multiple and diverse imaginaries as visions of the future to make sense of nuclear weapons and AWS alike, and to legitimise or delegitimise policies of their regulation. Discussions in multilateral fora portray AWS as either potential killer robots or as a technology to increase accuracy and precision in the use of force; nuclear weapons are characterised as either the ultimate weapon of mass destruction or as a necessary deterrent. Our paper explores the discourses surrounding both weapons technologies, asking where actors develop similar imaginaries, where discourses intersect, and how this shapes attempts to regulate weapons technology. This comparison between the imaginaries used to make sense of nuclear weapons and AWS can help us shed light on the co-constitution of political orders and violent technologies.
    
    Authors: Jana Baldus (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt) , Anna-Katharina Ferl (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt)
  - What Can a Dalit perspective do for Cybersecurity? An Ambedkar-inspired Approach to Cybersecurity
    
    The discussion regarding cybersecurity in international relations today are reflective of two broader trends: (a) the conscious co-option of cybersecurity within the western dominated state-centric narrative of security- and (b) the use of this same lens to study the diverse insecurities faced by people in the third world within cyberspace owing to their existing unequal social structures. This article argues that a Dalit perspective will reveal the discriminating, oppressive and marginalizing practices within cyberspace experienced by people of a specific social communities consequently making them insecure within cyberspace, in this case, Dalits in India. More importantly, through Ambedkar’s annihilation of caste, the article aims to resurrect the debate around the sources of varied insecurities in cyberspace that people from Global South face in their day-to-day lives thereby challenging the centrality of state security and its application to Global South. To support this theoretical framework the article will examine the case study of #casteisttwitter where the Dalits along with other social groups in India demanded equal cyberspace ergo triumphantly bringing the insecurities faced by people as a result of caste within cyberspace at the core of cybersecurity in particular and international relations in general.
    
    Author: Anubha Gupta (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
- 97
  Panel / Gendering protest and activism : feminist solidarities and care across contexts QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  - Imagining a care curriculum
    
    In this article, through a care-infused and autoethnographic lens, I build upon Krystalli and Schulz’s (2022) work on ‘taking love and care seriously’ to imagine a Care Curriculum, drawn from protest-based care practices.
    
    As a participant in the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019 - 2020 in India, I found myself located in an insecure space, bounded by administrative, bureaucratic, structural, and infrastructural violences. Resisting institutions and laws that disenfranchised Muslims, Dalits, trans people, and immigrants, the protests challenged the violent conceptions of marginalized religious identities with a new idea of peace. Protest sites, such as Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, emerged as symbols for caregiving as resistance: a radical, queer, communal, and (dis)embodied resistance to the violent masculinities of a capitalist, neoliberal, and Hindutva state.
    
    In subsequent years, activists in the Farmers’ Protest – the largest protest gatherings in modern history – demonstrated other forms of care. From langar (communal kitchens) to songs, oral histories, stories, community libraries, and slogans, activists from historically exploited and marginalized communities reimagined collective grief, grieving, and care as not only work or labour, but as modes of political action, ingenious citizenships and transgressions that resisted the insecurity of of an uncaring state. My article views the two aforementioned Indian protest movements in light of their place-based care ethics, and asks: i) How is care redefined within the uncertain and liminal boundaries of a Third World protest? ii) (How) can such protest-based care practices be translated, taught, and communicated for diverse social movements and contexts?
    
    By speculating about a care curriculum, I ask if we can foster safer, more hopeful, and more democratic feminist futures by tending to the needs of others; if care can be directed to stand against institutional and state apathy.
    
    Author: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
  - Non-Western Feminist Internationalism: New beginnings at the Asian Relations Conference, 1947 ?
    
    The Asian Relations Conference of 1947 is described as precursor to the Bandung conference. However, much is yet to be written about what transpired at the conference and how that affected the ideas of ‘third world’ internationalism. Drawing from this tangent of inquiry, this paper spotlights the role of Indian women in the history of the Asian Relations Conference. As is well documented, many women delegates from across Asia attended the event (almost 38 women’s organisations and eminent women leaders in Asia were invited) which was presided over by Sarojini Naidu herself, an Indian woman nationalist leader. The writings that do throw light on the proceedings of ARC fall short in fleshing out the role of women delegates at the conference. Beyond occasional mentions much needs to be understood from the interactions of these women at this ‘opening act of decolonial solidarity’ (Thakur 2018), thus asking, where were the women in the international imagination of this landmark event of postcolonial world making? Employing feminist historiography, this archival study works towards filling this lacuna by exploring the assertions of non-western feminist internationalism at the ARC and evaluates how such an inquiry furthers our understanding of South Asian historical IR thus far.
    
    Author: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Domesticating vulnerabilities: A feminist analysis of ‘privatised humanitarianism’
    
    International responses to humanitarian emergencies are changing. While philanthropy and individual initiatives are part and parcel of humanitarian history, private individuals are increasingly asked by governments to contribute and participate in cross-border humanitarian efforts. One example of this is how nations in the Global North, such as the UK and Canada, have developed ‘refugee host’ programmes, asking private families to host refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine.
    
    In this paper we offer a feminist analysis of the vulnerabilities that such initiatives produce and how the thorny ‘public/private’ distinction challenges the existing humanitarian system and associated conceptions of rights, protection, and justice. Acknowledging that the humanitarian system is gendered, racialised and ableist in ways that generate and facilitate abuse and exploitation across and within national borders, we explore how existing institutional responses – in the shape of Prevention of Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment (PSEAH) and Safeguarding frameworks – can respond to the ‘domestication’ of humanitarian responses. We question the possibility for a truly ‘feminist’ humanitarianism in a field characterised by ever-expanding geographies and relations of vulnerability, where institutional responses consistently fail to challenge structures of power and injustice at the heart of humanitarianism, and consider implications for the future of international humanitarianism
    
    Authors: Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex) , Gabrielle Daoust (University of Northern British Columbia)*
  - ‘Why Haven’t You Known?’Transoceanic Solidarity and the Politics of Knowledge in Feminist Anti-Nuclear Activism
    
    This paper critically examines the character and extent of trans-oceanic solidarity in feminist anti-nuclear activism. Drawing on archival research into a British-based solidarity network, Women working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP), the paper centralises the rhetorical question ‘Why Haven’t you Known?’ demanded by Maori activist Titewhai Harawira of her British audience in 1986, and extends it to contemporary scholars of feminist anti-nuclear activism. The paper makes three main empirical claims. First the WWNFIP archive pulls Indigenous Oceanian women into the limelight as experts and teachers, with British-based counterparts playing a supportive role. Second, the archive foregrounds Indigenous knowledge claims about nuclear colonialism and correspondingly represents decolonisation as essential to nuclear abolition. Thirdly, solidarity is shown to be driven by knowledge claims that shape both sisterly closeness but also necessarily provoke the discomfort of potential white allies. Overall, the WWNFIP’s relatively successful construction of transoceanic solidarity, notwithstanding some ambiguities and limitations, points to the crucial relationship between knowledge and solidarity. The case study not only offers some valuable lessons for contemporary efforts to forge anti-nuclear solidarities but
    also disrupts dominant accounts of feminist anti-nuclear activism, past and present.
    
    Author: Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde)
- 98
  Panel / Literary IR: Existential dramas, dystopian futures and political science fictions Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
  - Tracing the Invisible (Wo)Man Trope in Literary IR: (Women's) Human Rights from Mary Shelley to Elisabeth Moss
    
    This paper traces the invisible person trope in Literary IR treatments of (women's) human rights, sexism, racism and other international law issues from Mary Shelley through H.G. Wells, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Atwood and the 2020 'Invisible Man' movie starring Elisabeth Moss, a feminist icon for her portrayal of Offred in the 2017 Hulu series of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I show how the figure of the socially isolated "invisible (wo)man" grew from Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man and 1832 short story "The Invisible Girl," followed by the global influence of her reader H.G. Wells's 1897 novel The Invisible Man and its 1930s Universal monster movie adaptations. The image of the invisible (wo)man has come to populate both Black and feminist existentialist and dystopian literature because of its power to connote the struggles of people oppressed on the basis of race and gender to find recognition of their humanity, citizenship and other rights in and across modern societies and nation-states.
    
    Author: Eileen M. Hunt (University of Notre Dame)
  - Love as a Kind of Rebellion: Camus on Revolution
    
    Albert Camus – a Nobel Laureate of Literature and doyen of mid-twentieth century existentialism – is associated with a contradiction. On the one hand, he is known for his involvement in and support of the French resistance, on the other, his reticence to support the Algerian War of Independence. Reading Camus’ Notebooks, correspondence and journalism alongside his self-styled literary cycles that centre on the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus and Nemesis, this chapter considers how Camus’ stance on rebellion and revolution is the product of his thought on love. In situating Camus’ work in a pied noir (French Algerian) literary tradition and its imagining of a Mediterranean utopia, the chapter suggests that his project offered Hellenism as a riposte to Christianity, a secular rendering of his fellow North-African, Saint Augustine’s thought. While normative evocations and postcolonial critiques of Camus abound, few use love as a lens to interrogate their encounter. Offering a contextualised reading of Camus’ secular revision of Augustine on the subject of love and war, this chapter explores how love and utopia are implicated in the sanction of forms of political killing in general, and unconventional warfare in particular. In the process, it considers how Camus’ work on love contributes to the burgeoning literature on political violence and utopia and their implications for the study of just war and necropolitics.
    
    Author: Liane Hartnett (Australia National University)
  - On the multiple purposes of social dreaming in the Anthropocene
    
    What is the purpose of social dreaming under conditions of the ongoing climate emergency? Despite worries about escapism, my argument in this paper is that both eutopian and dystopian visions have important roles to play in the epoch we have come to call the “Anthropocene”. One common way of envisaging these roles says that, while the former seek to galvanize an apathetic or shell-shocked audience, the latter try to warn us about future dangers yet to emerge. The problem with this picture of social dreaming’s multiple functions is that it misrepresents the complexity of inhabiting a climate-changed world. Through a reading of various examples of recent climate fiction, I shall claim that a more nuanced account is needed to explain how both eutopian and dystopian stories contribute to a better understanding of our current predicament. Such an account would have to demonstrate that hope and despair are in fact much more entwined with one another than is usually assumed.
    
    Author: Mathias Thaler (University of Edinburgh)
  - IR as 'Space' for politics and/or 'Place' for dreaming? Reading magical realist fiction as a reimagination of political space
    
    ‘Places’ invoke thinking about disciplinary articulations of what counts as political, and by extension, epistemological. In differentiating ‘places’ from ‘spaces’, environmental writer Julian Hoffman (2019 : 12) identifies ‘place’ as a “piece of a whole environment that has been claimed by feelings,” which invokes (re)thinking of disciplinary conceptions of spaces and how they often belie such affective investments. Who/what do we stand to lose in unemotional framings of disciplinary spaces? In this paper, I glean insights on the rearticulation of spaces from the literary genre of magical realism- which is specially hospitable towards the human ability to transform stultifying realities through their emotional dreaming. By reimagining belonging through the lens of emotional-relational humans who inhabit them, I propose magical realist fiction as an important feminist, aesthetic and decolonial method of reading/feeling spaces- the private, public and the international. Searching for emotional texture and affective geography as a critical project of reimagining and indeed, dreaming up political spaces, can become an important method learning “where knowers are situated” in learning “what the purpose of knowledge (and theory) itself is” (Tickner 2011 : 214). By looking at relational understandings of people with places in three books from magical realism, this paper shall also contend with the idea of belonging as a re-mapping of human- space relations.
    
    Author: Shambhawi Tripathi (University of St. Andrews)
  - Today was a Fairy Tale: The Structure of the Fairy Tale, War, and History
    
    Structuralism has become something of a bogeyman in cultural, social and political theory. The idea that a “structure” might condition our way of seeing the world has been overturned by many theorists in the academy. In this paper, I respond to this critique by suggesting that the there exists a fundamental structure of seeing the world which is shaped by the idea of a “happy ending”. Using JRR Tolkien’s lecture and essay, “On Fairie Stories” as a framing device, in which he argues that fairy tales are defined by the idea of a “happy ending”, I suggest that interpretations (both political and theoretical) are defined by the idea of a happy ending when interpreting war. That is, I argue that all war is defined through the idea of a happy ending, even when states lose their war(s). This structural assumption informs theories of war, victory and International Relations more broadly. I argue that this assumption structures scholarship on just war, international law, and international affairs more generally.
    
    Author: Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews)
- 99
  Panel / Militarism and war through the prism of Russian culture Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: RESG Working group
  
  Chair: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
  - '"Anyone can be a hero": Everyday hero-making and youth in Russia's war in Ukraine
    
    Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign aimed at revitalizing Russia’s historic claims to vulnerability at the hands of hostile neighbours. In past wars, popular stories of heroes have been utilised by the Kremlin to increase support for the military. Russia’s role as the aggressor, however, has made it difficult for Russian propagandists to build a cohort of heroes in this war. This paper examines Moscow’s efforts to make “everyday heroes” out of Russia’s children in the context of the war in Ukraine. Although youth are prevented from taking up arms, they nevertheless play important roles in supporting this conflict: sending letters to soldiers; performing concerts for war refugees; and “fighting” against the falsifications of Great Patriotic War memory. The paper argues that Russia is constructing contemporary wartime heroism not as a product of exceptional action but instead as a checklist achievement, and as one stage in a larger process of the militarisation of youth. This ‘hero checklist’ offers young people an opportunity to be part of the “Special military operation,” to ensure that the next generation of Russian citizens will be inspired by the militarised values of sacrifice, loyalty, and courage.
    
    Author: Allyson Edwards (Bath Spa University)
  - Identity as security: myths, militarism and the (re-) making of Russia
    
    This paper investigates the interplay between historical myths, identity and foreign policy in Russia. Taking as its starting point cultural vignettes that illustrate key myths about Russian identity, the paper presents in-depth empirical analysis of how these myths have developed through twenty years’ worth of official discourse, whilst tracing their origins back farther still. Such top-down expositions are then contextualised with reference to everyday expressions of agreement and resistance. The paper draws into sharp relief the tensions and contradictions underlying Russia’s militarised conceptions of identity, and the ways in which these have been manifested in Russian foreign policy. Not only did these undermine human rights before the invasion of Ukraine, but they have contributed to Russian war crimes in its aftermath.
    
    The analysis shows how on one hand, the Russian regime has increasingly subsumed culture and information within its approach to security and foreign policy misadventures over the last decade. Yet at the same time, both culture and information have become more contingent than ever before on a public sphere that the Russian regime cannot control, and has comparatively little mastery in. This opens up significant new spaces for disruption and resistance, which expand the arena for human agency whilst also complicating the picture for human rights.
    
    Author: Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University)
  - Russian Strategic Culture and Nuclear Weapons: Identity and Perception
    
    Contemporary debates on Russian nuclear weapons focus either on the technological aspects of said weapons, or on nuclear signalling, deterrence and declaration. This paper argues that understanding how Russian strategic culture feeds into its perception of the ‘self’ and the adversarial ‘other’ is fundamental to understanding Russian strategic weapons. Strategic culture creates space for construction, contention and affirmation of meanings which help actors make sense of their surroundings and available behavioural options. The key research question lies in explaining strategic policy choices of Russia. The aim of this paper is to perform ‘ideological excavation’ (Klotz and Lynch, 2014) at the site of production of Russian identity and perception, related to nuclear weapons, using discourse analysis and critical constructivist lens. This excavation will uncover the patterns of representation and self-conceptualisation and the way these patterns feed into nuclear weapons. These patterns, in turn, will show how policy decisions have been affected by the perceptions of Russia itself, its adversaries and available modes of behaviour.
    
    Author: Mikhail Kupriyanov (University of York)
  - War for children: the dynamics of militarism and anti-militarism in Russia
    
    Since the very beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, pundits have debated the factors that may have prompted Vladimir Putin to wage a war against Russia's neighbour. This paper focuses on the carefully curated domestic culture of militarism, with an emphasis on militarism addressing children and the youth. The younger generation has been specifically targeted by a host of state-sponsored initiatives. In addition to programmes of patriotic education and the Ministry of Defence-funded Yunarmiya, one important aspect of contemporary militarism in Russia has been the production of events for children that represent the war in a specific, mostly positive, way. My research has collated and analysed initiatives and events targeting children organised around the 2020 and 2021 Victory Day celebrations.
    I argue that the Russian state has encouraged militarism under the pretence of vospitanye, education and family entertainment. It was largely successful in mobilising parents to partake in various events with their children and in presenting children’s bodies as military bodies. This has had the effect of the infantilisation of war. These activities turned war into a normal event suitable for the little ones. Through a host of mundane activities involving the little and the young ones, militarist ideas became accepted and reproduced as though they were a cultural norm, which makes them difficult to challenge.
    
    Author: Katarzyna Kaczmarska (University of Edinburgh)
  - State perceptions of ‘foreign fighters’ in contemporary Russia: How ‘foreign fighters’ emerged as a subject and were constructed through discourse
    
    Studying the origins of the Russian understanding of the foreign war volunteering, popularly known as the ‘foreign fighter’ (FF) phenomenon, can be advantageous for at least to reasons. First, important contribution to the study of FF phenomenon and strategies to counter them can be made if we include the role of the state, particularly the aspect of responsibility for violence, with its consequences to both domestic and foreign policy. Russia’s distinctive practices towards FFs, first and foremost alleged state facilitation of their outflow to Syria and Iraq, as well as Ukraine in the past decade, can provide insight into domestic power structures as well as foreign policy choices. Second, most recent practices within counterterrorism framework, namely the use and abuse of power, tap into these discourses on ‘foreign fighters’ and make certain actions possible. By employing genealogical methods, and therefore paying attention to processual aspects of web of discourses, the main aim is to understand how ‘foreign fighters’ as a subject constructed through discourse, and by doing so, how power is practiced. This study builds on constructivist and poststructuralist literatures in the field of international relations. In order to explore how Russian military and security leadership formulated it thinking about FFs, it focuses its attention on siloviki structures as centres of practices of power, and maps discursive practices through contemporary Russian periodical journals in security and military studies fields (such as Voyennaya Mysl’) to examine how the state articulated statements on ‘foreign fighters’ across time.
    
    Author: Annamaria Kiss (King's College London)
- 100
  Panel / Pandemic Governance - Institutions and treaties in the times of COVID-19 Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Convener: GHWG Working group
  
  Chair: Eva Hilberg (University of Sheffield)
  - COVID in a Low-Trust Environment: The Case of Hong Kong
    
    Within the field of public health, there is now considerable evidence that trust is a key variable in determining the outcome of a range of health challenges. Over the past three years, this evidence has been applied to a range of single and multi-country studies on the implementation of pandemic mitigation policies. Frequently these policies focus on positive examples, where higher levels of trust were correlated with more successful efforts to stem the impact of the pandemic. But what about in societies where there is low trust? Hong Kong entered the pandemic after nearly six months of increasingly violent protests and riots against the government and yet, despite being on the frontlines of the pandemic, Hong Kong has come through the last three years with one of the lowest per capita death tolls of any jurisdiction. This paper uses qualitative and quantitative data from a large-n survey as well as documentary analysis to explore this apparent contradiction. Along the way, it unpacks the different types of trust (institutional, medical, and social) that collectively shaped behaviour during the pandemic. It will be shown how Hong Kong has managed to mitigate the pandemic despite an initial and ongoing low trust environment.
    
    Authors: Nicholas Thomas , Pang Qin (Sun Yat Sen University)*
  - Constructing a stronger WHO leadership in PHEIC
    
    The Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) represents an essential mechanism for the World Health Organization (WHO) to coordinate global health cooperation and reflect its governance capacity under the legal framework of the International Health Regulations. Nevertheless, the implementation of this mechanism has been subject to ongoing controversy and questions about the WHO's ability to provide timely and accurate early warning and coordination leadership. Covid-19, which ravaged the world, has once again exposed the dilemma of global health governance in which the WHO's authority and autonomy have been challenged. In order to strengthen WHO's leadership in international public health cooperation, this paper aims to build on constructivist theory and argues that WHO should seek to exercise stronger leadership to facilitate greater collaboration, strengthen its professional image and credibility, and thereby curb the interference of increasingly power-oriented financing issues.
    
    Author: Yujue Cao (University of York, Politics)
  - Understanding the Agency of an International Health Organisation Based on a Public-Private Partnership Model
    
    This study discusses the agency of an IO based on a public-private partnership (PPP) model, exploring GAVI’s secretariat’s influence on decision-making within GAVI. It is important to have a framework to understand IOs based on a PPP model because this type of IOs, which first became prominent in global health in the early 2000s with the creation of organisations such as GAVI and the Global Fund, have played an increasingly important role in global health governance.
    
    Applying Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore (2004)’s framework of IO authority to GAVI, this study aims at exploring how GAVI’s secretariat utilises the sources of authority in order to influence decision-making in GAVI’s board during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the data from the observations of GAVI Board meetings and the interviews with GAVI’s policy making actors in 2020 and 2021, I argue that that Barnett and Finnemore’s framework helps us understand the (partial) autonomy of IOs and applies to GAVI, an organisation based on a public-private partnership model, in a similar way to more traditional member state-based IOs, and that an exceptional situation tends to increase the secretariat’s exercise of authority.
    
    Author: Minju Jung (University of Sheffield)
- 101
  Panel / Projecting Spacepower and Terrestrial Interests Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Bleddyn Bowen (University of Leicester)
  
  Chair: Bleddyn Bowen (University of Leicester)
  - Legal contest and the competition to define ‘rules of the road’ for outer space
    
    Outer space is crucial to the functioning of the modern state – any state – and is indispensable to the great powers as an economic and military force multiplier. Developments of recent years have accelerated the battle to fill in ‘gaps’ in the existing legal regime governing space access and use. With commercial and military stakes so high, we therefore have a real-time case study in the formation of international law (IL) against the backdrop of classic international relations (IR) power struggles, uniting ‘real world’ and academic debates.
    
    Using a constructivist–rationalist approach, I explore how states strategically deploy IL to advance political interests in outer space. I assess such ‘legal contest’ by examining major legal claims/actions, accompanying justificatory discourse, and the reception of other states in the international system.
    
    I focus on legal contest surrounding questions of ‘who gets to benefit from space resources’ and ‘who gets to define which military uses of space are acceptable’. By comparing these examples, I tease out multiple ways by which states seek to leverage IL as a source of power, or substitute for other forms of (material) power in ensuring access (or denying others access) to space and its concomitant commercial and military advantages.
    
    Author: Haley Rice (University of St Andrews)
  - Nuclear Eyes: The Uses and Implications of Satellites for Arms Control Verification and Monitoring.
    
    The Cold War and Post-Cold War era witnessed one of the largest technological expansions for military and conflict management: satellites. Whilst the military use of satellites has received notable attention in terms of application for strategic and tactical operations, such as campaigns in Iraq and the War on Terror, the use of satellites for tracking, monitoring, and verifying nuclear weapons programs across the globe has received much less. This is surprising if one considers the impact that satellite intelligence had for the negotiation of strategic arms limitations. Whilst efforts in the late 1950s and early 1960s failed due to unreliable verification tools, the revolution in national satellite capabilities mean that by the 1970s the verification of arms control agreements became possible through the euphemism “National Technical Means” (NTM). The promise of mutually assured surveillance through intelligence satellites had the unforeseen effect of drawing the Cold War superpowers into a stabilising security arrangement. Intelligence satellites as NTM, have since been incorporated into the START treaties and for reinforcement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
    Recent negotiation and compliance issues show that the twenty-first century has made monitoring tasks more difficult and of high demand. In that context, the 1990s witnessed a new means of satellite verification: commercial satellite imagery – a sub-component of open-source intelligence. Indeed, commercial satellite imagery is extensively used for the verification tasks of the IAEA – a specialised agency of the United Nations. The challenge is how to make sense of the military-commercial relationship and the related political sensitives. It illuminates the debates between the risks of adversaries exploiting such commercial imagery and on the security benefits this form of unclassified intelligence provides. Making sense of the security implications of satellites as an evolving tool for verification and arms control addresses pertinent questions for international security: whether commercial satellite imagery will have a stabilising effect for nuclear tensions; the potential to integrate military-commercial satellite intelligence into an effective security regime; and the utility of satellite technology for preventing a devastating nuclear war.
    
    Author: Tegan Harrison (Cardiff University)
  - The Fylingdales Archive: opening the “black-box” of space surveillance
    
    In their summary for UNIDIR’s Addressing Nuclear Risks of Outer Space Activity for the United Nations General Assembly (2022), moderator Almudena Azcárate Ortega stated that it was vital for international space policy communities to have a greater understanding of the processes of space surveillance. Describing activities that manage the orbits of thousands of spacecraft, which provide vital services that sustain life on Earth, as a “black-box” that few outside this specialist area know how it works, nor have a sense of its history.
    
    For this presentation we will describe our work building the Fylingdales Archive, an online archive that makes public the operational history of RAF Fylingdales. Fylingdales is an early warning and space surveillance radar that sits on the edge of the North York Moors, which for over 60 years has tracked between 70% and 90% of all objects in Low Earth Orbit. During this time, individual engineers and UK-US service personnel have gathered 1000s of photographs, pieces of equipment, manuals, paper records and magazines that represent a vivid social history of space operations on Fylingdales Moor.
    
    We will describe how the Fylingdales Archive has emerged from a unique collaboration with RAF Fylingdales. Through this collaboration we innovated creative practice and post-qualitative research methods, which challenge conventional approaches to security studies and Astropolitics. We argue that space security environments are also places of lived human experiences, which form crucial (but over looked) parts of the “black-boxed” space surveillance assemblage.
    
    To do this we will highlight how local opposition to the demolition of the original “golfballs” at Fylingdales delayed compliance with the ABM treaty. How a Middlesborough photographer had the most privileged view of RAF Fylingdales’s construction than anyone else in the US or British Governments. And how the operation of RAF Fylingdales is deeply entwined with the release of records by ABBA, Lou Reed and David Bowie. Finally, we show how the Fylingdales Archive has been adopted by United Kingdom Space Command to represent their own service history.
    
    Biographies: Dr Michael Mulvihill and Chloë Barker are Co-Investigators on Arts and Humanities Research Council project Turning Fylingdales Inside Out: making practice visible at the UK’s ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station (AH/S013067/1) in School of Geography Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University.
    
    Keywords: Space Survellance, Early Warning, Space Threat, Astropolitics, Low Earth Orbit
    
    Authors: Michael Mulvihill (Newcastle University) , Chloe Barker (Newcastle University)
  - The Shifting Referents of Space Security
    
    The past decade has seen a resurgence in discussion about the opportunities and dangers of outer space. Space exploration is increasingly included in national security strategies, yet there are very different interpretations of what security in space means and how to achieve it. Some see space as an extension of terrestrial security and link exploration with armament, leading to calls to avoid a space arms race. The second major strand of discussion centres on the need for security from space and those who exploit it. Here we find conversations about satellites, spying, and the neo imperial ambitions of a select few countries. Finally, there has been a rising tendency to treat space itself as the referent object of security. In this vein, stewardship and sustainability play a role in maintaining this common global good. This paper interrogates the referent objects of space discourse. Using a corpus of 415 national security and defence documents spanning from 1998-2022 and annual UN General Assembly resolutions on the peaceful uses of outer space, we perform a genealogy of the securitization of space. We employ sophisticated natural language processing technologies that enable us to identify, group, and classify semantically similar conceptual formulations. Our methodology allows us to explore change over time and see if the shifting referent object in space security discourse implies wider shifts in understandings of security.
    
    Authors: Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh) , Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh)
- 102
  Panel / Re-theorizing emotions in world politics Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews)
  - A surprise to who? Queer feminist interventions in the study of white nationalism and affect
    
    The widespread resurgence of right-wing populism and white nationalist sentiments in liberal democracies has been a growing concern for the discipline of IR. Current nationalism research has sought to understand what makes them so attractive by focussing on affect and emotion. Yet, these literatures often sidestep critical engagement with existent feminist, queer and race-critical. Feminist, queer and race-critical interventions have highlighted how the legacies of colonialism and centuries of heteropatriarchal oppression reverberate in the societies of our present, most notably in the lingering attachments to white supremacy that are evidenced in current right-wing populism, but also in our current ways of studying it. Making these connections, this paper argues for revisiting the ways in which we study white nationalism and affect. This means interrogating the coloniality of current epistemologies in the study of white nationalism, and rethinking their attendant methodologies. Ultimately, it argues for the need to take our analysis beyond right-wing actors, white feelings and the present moment to explain the persistence of white nationalism in western nation-states. Consequently, critical research needs to centre the lived experiences and insights of those most affected and yet most marginalised by growing right wing presences: racialised and queer communities.
    
    Author: Elisabell Beyer (University of Manchester)
  - The Invisible Luggage of Ukrainian Refugees: Emotions, Trauma and Diaspora diplomacy
    
    Ukrainians fleeing their homes and leaving behind their life as they knew it, were taking with them not only physical objects, but also a heavy and invisible luggage: the emotional luggage that all displaced people, be it refugees, migrants, expatriates, carry with them. Migration is recognised as a key issue in public diplomacy and IR; yet the medium- and long-term consequences of the emotional luggage that shapes the identity and the integration of displaced people in their new host places have been rarely scrutinized in depth in public diplomacy and even in diaspora diplomacy scholarship. In fact, emotions in general are marginally discussed by public diplomacy scholars, with few notable exceptions (Duncombe 2019, Chernobrov 2022, Di Martino 2021). The marginality of emotions in the field is more surprising because the topic has become a rapidly growing field of inquiry in IR (Bleiker and Hutchison 2014, Koschut et al 2017). Drawing on these advancements in IR, we propose an engagement with the psychoanalytical work of Vamik Volkan (2017) to shed some light on the psychology of newcomers (Ukrainian refugees) and the reactions of a host population in the UK. We argue understanding the complex psychology, loss, emotions, and trauma of displacement is essential in diaspora diplomacy. It is necessary for theory building to develop analytical frameworks and research questions that link psychological processes with diaspora engagement and disengagement. In terms of practice, it can inform medium- and long-term policies of support and integration of refugees in host countries, as well as programs to encourage grassroots initiatives and increase multi-cultural awareness, communication and collaboration between newcomers and hosts. Psychoanalytical approaches can shed light on the psychological processes that make illiberal, populist, and extremist discourses effective as they instrumentalize chosen traumas and chosen glories.
    
    Authors: Alina Dolea (Bournemouth University) , Tabitha Baker (Bournemouth University)*
  - Emotion in Praxis: Change and the Affective Underpinnings of Global Order
    
    Practice scholars have so far largely overlooked the role that emotion and affect play in both the emergence and change of order in international politics. To address this oversight and link research on practices with the turn to emotion, this paper advances two related claims. First, taking orders to be multiple and overlapping instead of singular and static, it is argued that every social order is underpinned by a particular ‘feeling regime’ that constitutes a certain type of ‘background knowledge’ and disposes agents to act in specific ways. Changes in ‘feeling regimes,’ it is proposed, therefore affect social orders and their stability. Second, it is asserted that change to an order is not brought about solely by actions resulting from conscious deliberation, but primarily arises from the affective transactions between agents and their social as well as material environment that transpire during praxis—that is, during the spatio–temporally situated involvement in practices. These affective transactions thereby trigger a transformation of agents’ ‘feeling regimes’ and hence of the dispositions and behavioural patterns that (re)produce a particular social order. It is therefore claimed that change to an order always entails a change in its ‘feeling regime’ which takes place in praxis.
    
    Author: Joost Hendrik Pietschmann (University of St Andrews)
  - Feeling the difference: Emotions and Global IR
    
    This paper discusses how IR’s emotional turn could benefit from Global IR debates, especially by considering the multiple ways in which tempo-spatial differences, epistemological and ontological divergences across the globe can be taken into account when engaging with emotions in world politics. The study elaborates how Global IRʼs novel insights could provide significant tools for a broader understanding of emotions, calling for these to be more comprehensively studied and understood by considering the important role of past and extant forms of inter- as well as intra-societal difference. It argues that most of emotions-focused work in IR originates from a Eurocentric framework that is not necessarily just a problem deriving from the disciplineʼs own settings. In this regard, it explains how IR explores emotions in ways that tend to overlook emotionsʼ historicity as well as their spatial and global divergences. The paper develops its main claims by turning to the recent historiographical debates, and problematizes the frequent tendency to perceive, and impose, popular neuroscientific and other cognitive scientific paradigms as the ultimate means for studying emotions in IR. It also considers IR sociological dynamics that shape the prevailing approaches to emotions by analyzing some 150 articles published on emotions in IR journals in the 2000-2019 period.
    
    Author: Deniz Kuru (Goethe University Frankfurt)
- 103
  Panel / Reconceptualising IR Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Joe Lin (University of Bristol)
  
  Chair: Joe Lin (University of Bristol)
  - Decolonising IPE: A Taoist-inspired reflection on China and the Global Ecological Crisis
    
    A global ecological crisis is evidenced by frequent wildfires, floods, extreme heat waves, and biodiversity decline across all continents and seas. Yet business-as-usual capitalism persists because the COP26 saw a last-minute hitch of India and China on coal from ‘phase-out’ to ‘phase-down’. China is the biggest polluter in aggregate terms. However, holding its government accountable alone will not help us survive a global ecological crisis. In this critical conjuncture, the global ecological crisis must be one of the core concerns in IPE. The discussion must also involve confronting the coloniality of knowledge in IPE. The article offers a Taoist-inspired reflection upon the paradox between economic development (Euro-centric) and restoration of ecological health, using a lecture-seminar session on China and Energy and Environment as a case study. Taoism provides a non-western philosophical foundation for China to confront its environmental issues and restore a healthy interconnection between human development and dynamic nature. The earth’s ecological health can only be sustained by (1) following inclusive, dialectical-relational, and fluid principles, (2) shifting from a human-centric (though not necessarily humanism) to a cosmo-centric ethos, (3) being aware of the reversal at the extreme, (4) practising the action of non-action, and (5) re-acquiring awe of nature.
    
    Author: Joe Lin (University of Bristol)
  - What is Progressive about Pragmatist IR and what guidance does it offer those responding to the Russia-Ukraine war?
    
    Pragmatism has recently been described as ‘a sort of hidden paradigm in IR’ (Drieschova and Bueger 2022). I argue that this should no longer be the case. Philosophical Pragmatism, and the social and political theory it underpins, can cast helpful light on the challenges of our time. Furthermore, it can position IR so that the discipline plays a useful role in addressing those challenges. Pragmatism’s contribution extends beyond the analytical ‘eclecticism’ (Sil and Katzenstein 2010) and Pragmatist social theory (Hopf 2018), to include a normative approach that enables critical engagement with policy and practice (Ralph 2018). To consolidate that last claim, I argue in this paper that Pragmatism can in fact bring something new to IR’s assessment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been somewhat limited to a Realist / Liberal blame game. By clarifying that Pragmatism is more of an ‘ethos’ than a ‘paradigm’ I acknowledge that Pragmatism does not offer practitioners (understood broadly) a step-by-step guide for action. Nevertheless, I build on the center ground cleared by a Pragmatist critique of a liberal commitment to western values and a realist commitment to spheres of great power influence by drawing on the decentered and wider conception of democracy in Deweyan thought. This sees democracy as relational practice between the self and other, and not just a political practice within states, or a label used to identify and distinguish states. This provides the basis for an argument that supports the transatlantic response to the Russian invasion but calls on practitioners (at all levels) to (re)articulate a long-term vision of transatlantic common security whereby Russian (material and ontological) security is able to coexist alongside wider Europe.
    
    Author: Jason Ralph (University of Leeds and EJIS)
  - Twinning: Solidarity, Recognition and Restitution Meditations on the possibilities of a more radical conception of “International Friendship”
    
    Much influenced by the work of ethnographers and feminist academics, the concept of the ‘everyday’ has recently re-emerged as an important lens through which to envision the fields of global politics and international political economy. In this paper, I situate twinning as an example of everyday international relations that problematizes mainstream definitions of ‘international friendship’ and magnifies a whole range of translocal struggles that cut against the grain of prevailing popular discourses and national policy directives. In particular, it highlights three examples of twinning practice, past and present, that have challenged the status quo: twinnings established in opposition to the Contra War in Nicaragua; twinning as an act of recognition for communities in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, and lastly twinning as a vehicle for the recovery and repatriation of sacred artefacts to postcolonial Kenya. Through these examples, it argues for an alternative conceptualization of international friendship: one that pushes beyond the methodological nationalism and ontological rigidity of dominant approaches.
    
    Author: Holly Eva Ryan (Queen Mary University of London)
  - The experience of danger in International Relations
    
    The experience of danger in International Relations
    
    Threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of international relations, playing a central role in general theories of war, deterrence, compellence, alliance behavior, and conflict-resolution, and in shaping leaders’ responses in high-stake situations. Yet, we know little about how individual leaders experience security threats. Meanwhile, health and environmental studies have shown that the experiential mechanism informs individuals’ assessments of susceptibility to health and natural threats to a large extent. As such, there is good reason to believe that the experience of threat plays an important role in national security assessments as well. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the character of experience with the study of threat perception in international relations, and by testing this framework empirically on leaders embedded in different cultural settings perceiving different security threats in different periods of time, I demonstrate how individuals experience entities as dangerous. Thus, by illustrating the applicability of the framework to research in international relations, the paper contributes to both theorizing threat perception and to equipping policy practitioners with reflexive knowledge about their experience of threat.
    
    Author: Eitan Oren (King's College London)
  - An East Asian Genealogy of the Modern International Order: Transformations of Fractal Space
    
    This article seeks to contribute to the expanding investigations of the non-Western productions of the modern international order by tracing its East Asian genealogy. I argue the pre-modern East Asian spatial conception continues to constitute the modern international order in East Asia. The pre-modern East Asian polities shared a distinctive fractal spatial order in which each and every place implicated the entire shared spatial connections from its particular perspective. Thus, no place could be a part of another place, even when it could be enveloped in another place. This East Asian fractal space became one section of the composite modern international order after it had gone through two historical transformations. It first underwent partial territorialization in the early 18th century when it appropriated the linear and homogeneous space of early modern European geography. In the late 19th century, it went through another transformation under the pressure of the expanding imperial powers. Instead of being the primary spatial order in the region, it became a suppressed section of a composite order which consists of both the fractal spatial order and European territorial order. This composition generated a discordance, or hysteresis, between the territorial habitus and the logic of the fractal spatial order. The hysteresis has manifested in the form of intensifying historical disputes that have threatened the national identity and stability of East Asian states. The resolution to the compounding identity and, increasingly, security crisis can be sought only if the composite reality of the modern international order in East Asia is properly understood.
    
    Author: Inho Choi (University of Southern California and Berggruen Institute)
- 104
  Panel / Reflections on Preventing Violent Extremism QE2, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield) , Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick) , Alice Finden (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Julian Schmid (Central European University)
  - Should ‘all good citizens be counter-terrorism citizens?’: Prevent Strategy and the Securitisation of Citizenship
    
    The Prevent Strategy places a legal obligation on specified authorities to monitor people for signs of radicalisation and to keep them from being drawn into terrorism. This duty to conduct counter-terrorism policing within civic spaces has the dual effect of turning one section of society into ‘agents of state’ and another into suspects. The bifurcation is cemented further with calls for every ‘good citizen to be a counter-terrorism citizen’ (N. Basu, 2018). This paper will argue that Prevent is recalibrating the citizenship practice to turn citizens into moderate subjects who see counter-terrorism surveillance as their civic duty.
    
    To explore the securitisation of citizenship practice, this paper will use neoliberal governmentality to unpack how the rationality of Prevent, rooted in risk and radicalisation, is operationalised by shifting responsibilities to citizens. This framing is complemented by citizenship literature to explain how communitarian ideas of active citizenry serve as tools of population management. The point of intersection between these two literatures provides the foundation to analyse how Prevent has become diffused within civic life and repurposed the technologies of conduct control embedded within citizenship practice. This analysis is taken forward with findings from semi-structured interviews conducted with doctors, teachers, and social workers, to understand how civilians tasked with implementing the Prevent Duty conceptualise their duty to the state and their fellow citizens with reference to their new security obligations. By studying citizens who have unwittingly been turned into ‘agents of state’, this paper will present a new perspective on the expansion of the state’s security infrastructure and emergence of a new form of subjectivity rooted in citizenship practice.
    
    Author: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  - Exploring the Connection between Migration and Terrorism: Does the risk justify potential human rights abuses
    
    While migration has been an inflammatory issue for society for centuries, the 21st century has catapulted the issue into the realm of terrorism and radicalisation threats. The narratives around migration have been particularly used as a manipulative tool by conservative and populist governments which have seen an increase in support globally over the past two decades. Through an apparently tentative connection between migration and security threats, governments have striven to deter people from coming to their states both through legal and illegal means by creating difficult and, in some cases, traumatising situations where human rights adherence is only casually respected. This paper explores the migration-security-nationalist nexus whereby those coming from other countries feed into a narrative of fear put forward by governments. Focusing on the UK’s situation, the treatment of individuals from various countries including Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria will be explored in detail, through government document analysis, media narratives and public opinion scrutiny. The goal of this paper is to better understand if there is a deterioration of human rights adherence by the UK government in the face of a perceived security threat of terrorism, and to use the data uncovered to propose a framework within which academic research can more tangibly contribute to better migration policy development.
    
    Author: Erika Brady (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  - “Nous ne les laisserons pas passer”. Anti-Muslim narratives in French Counterterrorism
    
    In this paper, I analyse the evolution of French counterterrorism discourse to see if France’s approach to terrorism affects specific social groups disproportionately. I do so through critical discourse analysis of French counterterrorism legislation and action plans against radicalisation. The evolution of global security narratives has been deeply influenced by the emergence of the concepts of radicalisation and violent extremism, which took over security programmes worldwide, leading to a globalisation of anti-radicalisation programmes. On the contrary, for a long time, France resisted EU efforts to mainstream counterterrorism approaches based on the concept of radicalisation throughout the Union, claiming that “laïcité prevented it from joining the change” (Ragazzi 2022, 4). However, France’s approach to radicalisation changed in 2014 with the publication of the new Anti-Terrorist Action Plan (Plan de Lutte Anti-Terroriste – PLAT) and the 2016 Plan of Action against Radicalisation and Terrorism (Plan d’Action contre la Radicalisation et le Terrorisme – PART). The two plans led to a complete acceptance of the concepts of radicalisation in the French discourse on Islam and terrorism. In 2018, the government presented its new national preventing violent extremism (PVE) plan titled Prévenir Pour Protéger (Prevent to Protect), organised around the collaboration between the central government, territorial authorities (collectivités territoriales) and social workers, targeting youth and poorer social classes through collaboration with youth centres.
    By analysing the evolution of French counterterrorism legislation and national PVE plans, I highlight how French anti-radicalisation measures exacerbate pre-existing religious, ethnic and class divisions.
    
    Author: Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)
  - Rethinking Methodologies in Terrorism Studies: A Trauma-informed cognitive behaviour therapy single-arm mixed-method trial to encourage community reintegration of former Boko Haram members
    
    The issue of terrorism poses a global challenge, and in line with the UN Secretary-General’s report ‘Our Common Agenda’, the need to promote peace and prevent conflict is crucial. Of central importance is the methodological gap in terrorism studies, especially as it relates to the provision of evidence-based assessment of interventions aimed at addressing community trauma and improving the reintegration of former Boko Haram members. My study seeks to address this gap using a single-arm mixed method trial to examine the feasibility and acceptability of trauma-informed cognitive behavioural therapy to aid community acceptance and reintegration of repentant terrorists in Nigeria. Informed by data from 26 participants recruited from Bornu, Maiduguri, the study finds a high retention rate and acceptability. It also proffers a robust evidence-based account to aid the replication and advancement of methodology within terrorism studies.
    
    Author: Tarela Juliet Ike (Teesside University)
- 105
  
  Roundtable / Responding to Outrage 2: Apologies, Inquiries, Commemoration, Scandal, and Truth and Reconciliation 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?
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester)
  
  Participants: Zeger Verleye (University of Antwerp) , Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England) , Tom Bentley (University of Aberdeen) , Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester) , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) , Owen Thomas (University of Exeter)
- 106
  Panel / Teaching to Inspire in Challenging Times Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Convener: Ilan Baron (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Ilan Baron (Durham University)
  
  Discussant: Ilan Baron (Durham University)
  - Discussing apartheid: Challenges (and rewards) of teaching apartheid in international politics
    
    Based on the experience of recently developing and delivering the module ‘global apartheid regimes’ during the first term of 2022/3, I will discuss the challenges of engaging in the classroom with contested contemporary themes in international politics. Offered as a third-year module to undergraduate students at Newcastle University, the unit discussed apartheid as an historical object and a conceptual framework to analyse contemporary separation regimes. In this talk, I will share the pedagogical deliberation, frustration, and exhilaration inherent to educating in general and about conflicts associated with apartheid in particular. Specifically, the concerns and dilemmas of approaching a deeply contentious issue and my positionality as a scholar dealing with and originating from Palestine/Israel, which featured as one of the case studies. I will explore the conceptual challenges of exploring apartheid within a comparative framework and the applicability of the term to teachings on the conceptual constructions of a global ‘south’ and ‘north’, climate crisis, mobility, infrastructure and planetary urbanisation and the process of designing forms of assessment that reflect the inherent difficulties of teaching apartheid today.
    
    Author: Moriel Ram (Newcastle University)
  - Mastering the Socratic Method for Seminars in Social Sciences
    
    What is the most attention-grabbing teaching strategy? Anyone engaged in any form of teaching needs to be concerned about this question repetitively. This paper presents an innovative design for seminar teachings in social sciences and revives the classical teaching strategy of the Socratic method for modern learning environments. Human beings are living increasingly in a world dependent on technology and social media to communicate in which the global disruption brought by the pandemic has resulted in the deprivation of confidence and public-speaking skills. Students and anyone who is engaged in learning are especially affected by the process of social changes. This research argues that the best way for knowledge production comes with communicative interaction, and further advocates the effectiveness of the Socratic method in stimulating positive student engagement. As a reflection on the experience of teaching three distinct study disciplines for first-year and second-year undergraduate students in the United Kingdom, a set of innovative designs for the Socratic method in seminar teachings will be presented. The disciplines include American and Canadian Studies, Politics and IR, Sociology of Sport and German Studies. Findings suggest that the use of the teaching method encourages relatively quickly students to actively engage in seminars and improves the public speaking skills of students. Further research might take a quantitative approach in testing the innovative teaching approach.
    
    Authors: Selim Yilmaz (University of Nottingham) , Ximing Fan (Loughborough University)
  - Disrupting anthropocentric fantasies of authority and control: Climate change adaptation in the work of Jeff VanderMeer
    
    Debates around whether adaptation or mitigation are the most desirable (or feasible) strategies for humanity to take in the face of climate change have waned in recent years, as the world passes the tipping point and changes to the climate become inevitable. As adaptation fast becomes the dominant policy frame, we contend that adaptation narratives (re)produce an anthropocentrism that fetishizes human agency. While we have inflicted damage upon the climate, adaptation narratives tell us, it is still within our power to effect some level of control over a (changing) environment. In an attempt to critically engage the continuing fascination and fetishization of human agency, we turn to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and the novel Borne as a resource for thinking through human-nature relationships. Reading VanderMeer’s work and its horror through the register of the uncanny, we plot anthropocentric anxieties that nature may begin to forcibly adapt us to it. In doing so, this paper illustrates how science fiction (and popular culture more broadly) help make sense of contemporary environmental politics by disturbing anthropocentric illusions of power and control.
    
    Authors: Jennifer Hobbs (University of Leicester) , Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
  - Experiments in consciousness raising as critical IR pedagogy
    
    Pedagogies of International Relations are receiving renewed attention, as scholars recognise their profound and generative yet under-debated and under-developed critical potentials. Spurred by Hagmann and Biersteker’s (2014) call for a critical pedagogy of International Relations, this paper contributes to a growing literature that explores, interrogates and promotes pedagogic techniques and practices that transcend the narrow epistemological engagements concerned with knowledge transmission traditionally associated with the field. The paper introduces the critical practice of consciousness raising to an International Relations audience, by reporting recent experiments at a UK university that apply this practice in undergraduate teaching settings. Traditionally associated with the feminist movement, and with exposing the shared lived experiences of disadvantage and oppression more broadly, consciousness raising practices seek to foreground links between personal lives and socio-political contexts. As such, while UK undergraduates may not collectively suffer from those sources of oppression that such practices have traditionally targeted, the practice can viscerally expose students to the everyday affects of the international and their diverse places within it. As such, deployed as critical pedagogic practice, consciousness raising can build a powerful awareness of place and context and focus sustained attention on the very notion of relationality, which sits at the discipline’s core.
    
    Key words: pedagogy; practice; consciousness; relationality; experiment; affect; local; everyday.
    
    Author: Rupert Alcock (Bath Spa University)
- 107
  
  Roundtable / The Contemporary Asia-Pacific: A Region at Risk of Unravelling? 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.
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: John Ravenhill (University of Waterloo)
  
  Participants: John Ravenhill (University of Waterloo) , Robyn Klingler-Vidra (King's College, London) , Catherine Jones (University of St. Andrews) , Yang Jiang (Danish Institute for International Studies)
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  Panel / The Ideological Turn in International Studies Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London)
  - 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.
    
    Authors: Rochana Bajpai (SOAS, University of London)* , Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London)
  - 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.
    
    Authors: Alexander Mesarovich (University of Edinburgh)* , Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh)
  - Ideological Infrastructures in World Politics
    
    Debates over the role of ideologies in world politics – in, for example, guiding foreign policy, legitimating regimes, generating or undermine 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, or so I argue here. 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 later 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.
    
    Author: Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London)
  - 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.
    
    Author: David Lewis (University of Exeter)
  - Is World Politics Class Politics? Coalitions of Class Support and Voting at the United Nations General Assembly 1947-2019
    
    Class is neglected in the UN General Secretary's ‘Our Common Agenda’ and, indeed, most international relations research. Whilst recent research has explained the foreign policy positions of states in terms of the preferences of the ruling regime’s key constituencies of support, these accounts have not investigated how regime dependence on specific class-based social groups influences a state’s foreign policy. Marxist international relations theory places a central emphasis on class, but tends to underemphasize the role of institutions and the diversity of possible coalitions among classes. To rethink the role of class as an influence on inter-state relations, this paper draws on Aristotle’s analysis of the class character of political systems and the ‘opposition of constitutions’. This framework allows the paper to bring perspectives from liberal pluralism, Marxism and comparative politics into discussion with one another, and to derive a set of hypotheses about the relationship between reliance on the support of certain class-based groups and a state’s foreign policy, operationalized in terms of voting tendencies at the United Nations General Assembly. Drawing on data from the Varieties of Democracy project, fixed-effects regression analysis finds that dependence on support from specific class-based groups is robustly associated with distinct foreign policy preferences.
    
    Author: Nicholas Lees (University of Liverpool)
- 109
  Panel / The politics of nature and landscapes in South East Europe I Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Convener: Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen)
  
  Chair: Michiel Piersma (University of Liverpool)
  
  Discussant: Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen)
  - Hydropolitics in South-Eastern Europe: landscapes of socio-ecological contestations
    
    South-Eastern Europe (SEE) has been presented as the new frontier for renewable energy production – especially from hydro and solar – creating new water-energy-nature nexuses and contestations. As an energy systems transition, hydropower is becoming a salient example of the uneven impacts of new 'green' infrastructures. Meanwhile, ecofeminist literature is increasingly attending to the way in which the domestic can be a site, not only of vulnerability, but also of agency. Social reproduction practices both for survival and (by the same token) for revolutionary world-building can envision radically different solutions to our collective ecological peril. The presentation focuses on how recent hydropolitics in SEE has created new landscapes of resistance. The presentation aims to generate a conversation among work on gendered vulnerability, precarious movements and domestic activism, to propose further research on ecofeminist agencies.
    
    Author: Saska Petrova (University of Manchester)
  - The ‘greening’ of protest politics: explaining the significance of environmental frames in the Rio Tinto protests in Serbia
    
    Over the past decade, a wave of grassroots activism has emerged across South-East Europe. Such protest movements typically occur as a response to contentious infrastructure developments or proposals, are usually detached from formal civil society and the NGO communities that have developed over the past two decades, and tend to employ anti-globalist and green discursive frames. These mobilisations ‘formulate a profoundly anti-capitalist and radically democratic vision of their societies’, bringing radical politics back to the so-called ‘rebel peninsula’ (Horvat & Štiks 2015). The case of Serbia is particularly interesting: the country saw a significant mobilisation against the Belgrade waterfront development in 2015 but the activists initially made no mention of the environmental impact of the proposed scheme, nor did they seek to engage the city’s quite developed community of green NGOs (Fagan and Ejdus 2020). However, more recent protest, including the high-profile mobilisation against Rio Tinto lithium mines, now focus squarely on the environmental impact and newly emerging movement-parties have adopted the environmental issues into their programs. Therefore, the paper focuses on the explaining and conceptualising the ‘green’ shift – how should we understand emergence of ‘green-speaking’ movement-parties in Serbia? Drawing on the concept of ‘activist citizenship’ (Isin 2009) we argue that the shift is part of a move from ‘performative practices’ to ‘pre-figurative politics’ (Leach 2013), occurring as a consequence of social learning through a cycle of contention. It is also emblematic of both ‘strategic learning’ and ‘cognitive liberation’ (Kralj 2022). However, such analysis underplays the salience of the ‘green’ discursive. The use of the environmental frame to protest against government-backed schemes at a time when formal opposition and civil society spaces are increasingly constrained is reminiscent of the end of communist rule across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. We contend, therefore, that this new wave of environmental activism to register more fundamental dissent as part of eclectic grassroots mobilisations represents a particular democratic moment for Serbia.
    
    Authors: Sabina Pačariz (King's College London)* , Filip Ejdus (University of Belgrade)* , Adam Fagan (King's College London)* , Mate Subašić (King's College London)
  - Geopolitical positioning of environmentalists in Belgrade, Serbia: Environmental politics between imaginative geographies and material constraints
    
    Supralocal forces, such as international treaties on environmental protection or globally circulating scientific discourses, clearly shape the actions of environmentalist actors from the top down. Conversely, in this paper, I approach supralocal relations from the bottom up. Empirically, I focus on urban environmental activists in Belgrade, Serbia, who frequently invoke supralocal places and actors when they explain their own political action. Sometimes, they do it when envisioning ideal approaches to environmentalism. For example, they compare the context of their own work in Serbia with other cities or countries that are imagined as having higher environmental consciousness or better enforcement of rules. These ideas are frequently expressed using common Orientalist and Occidentalist tropes. At other times, activists are forced to reckon with material constraints on their agency. That requires finding ways to cooperate with international actors to access funding or raise visibility. By analyzing these discursive and material practices, I show how grassroots positioning of environmentalists within broader geopolitical constellations shapes political aspects of human-environment relations.
    
    Author: Ognjen Kojanić (University of Cologne)
  - "Green are fields, not mines": the case of lithium mining and resistance in Serbia
    
    This research is concerned with the emerging lithium extractivist frontier in Serbia. Lithium is one of the essential components for batteries in electric vehicles (EVs) as well as for renewable energy storage. It is thus central to the electrification of the transport and energy systems and for the green transition more broadly. The Jadar Project, led by Rio Tinto, was set to become the biggest lithium mine in Europe, with the planned start of construction in early 2022. Nevertheless, the project drew widespread resistance from locals, with escalating protests and thousands of people blocking roads towards the end of 2021, ultimately leading to the official cancellation of the lithium mining project in January 2022. Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this research examines the attitudes of locals and activists to lithium mining in Serbia. With a particular focus on the materiality of lithium as a “green” element, the spatiality of Serbia as a European periphery and the temporality of the Anthropocene as a state of emergency, this research seeks to address the largely neglected forms of harm that the global demand for lithium holds.
    
    Author: Nina Djukanović (University of Oxford)
- 110
  Panel / Trade in/and political economy Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Zoe Pflaeger Young (De Montfort University)
  - Gender Inequalities in the IPE of Trade Literature
    
    For all but the most ardent positivists, knowledge production is not seen as a neutral, value-free endeavour but one that is partly shaped by who is involved in its production. The need for greater diversity in which voices are heard in the academic literature is increasingly recognised, most notably in efforts toward ‘decolonising the curriculum’. This paper uses a unique, newly constructed dataset of authors of academic papers on trade in high ranked journals to explore the imbalance between men and women scholars publishing in the field. Examining all articles that list ‘trade’ as a subject in 26 IPE-related journals going back 20 years, we find a significant inequality, with around 70 percent of authors being men. This raises important questions concerning the nature of the literature on trade, the discipline more broadly and the types of knowledge being created.
    
    Authors: Valbona Muzaka (King's College London)* , James Scott (King's College London)
  - Locating British Consumers in Global Capitalism: Consumption and the Everyday Roots of Global Trade
    
    Consumers in the global North participate in a complex tangle of globe-spanning social relations. Consumption sits at the heart of modern globalisation, yet IPE lacks a compelling account of its role in generating, sustaining and resisting the unequal relations of global trade. Boosters of globalisation claim it is implicitly legitimised through its benefits to consumers. More critical accounts condemn wasteful or excessive consumption, encouraged by the demands of capital accumulation. These characterise consumption as either the revealed preference of sovereign consumers, or an afterthought to relations of production. By drawing on a wider literature that understands it as a socially and culturally embedded practice, the research presented here seeks to open the black box of consumption. It is explored through interviews with individual consumers, reflecting on their practices of consumption as captured through diary methods. Using an everyday IPE approach grounded in philosophical pragmatism, consumption is analysed through the concepts of habit, valuation and experimentation. It shows how aggregated individual consumption decisions structure incentives across the global economy, but that the context for these decisions is shaped by the relative abundance globally produced goods. Consumption is revealed as a complex and productive lens for understanding, and transforming, the social relations of the global economy.
    
    Keywords: Consumption, Everyday IPE, Pragmatism, Globalisation, Global Trade
    
    Author: Edward Pemberton (University of Sheffield)
  - Tweeting Trade: An Analysis of Contemporary Trade Discourse in Social Media
    
    The language we use to talk about trade conveys, disciplines, and cements expert knowledge about the possibilities of trade to work for goals such as sustainable development, gender equality, and global health. Increasingly, a complex network of international organizations (IOs) is operating in the trade landscape to assimilate, reproduce and, in some cases, challenge dominant forms of expert knowledge. This paper examines the dynamics and evolution of contemporary trade discourse through the use of social media by IOs to communicate about global trade. Using a computer assisted automated content analysis approach, we gather 12 years of social media data (2010 to 2022) from Non-Governmental Organizations’ (NGOs) and Inter-Governmental Organizations’ (IGOs) and explore the patterns with which these organizations use social media to promote trade-, equity-, development-, environment-, and health-related goals. We also use social network analysis to establish the strength of relationships between organizations and how these networks impact the discourses used across time and organizations. We will shed light on these dynamics by engaging the following questions:
    
    How do trade narratives gain traction and evolve through social media over time?
    
    How and when do IOs strategically leverage social media to drive, uphold, or challenge the global trade agenda?
    
    Where can we locate dynamic interactions between IOs and the cross-germination of trade narratives?
    
    By using an innovative methodology, this paper will shed light on the relationship between social media, expert knowledge, and contemporary trade narratives, dynamics which have thus far been overlooked in the scholarly literature.
    
    Authors: Tyler Girard (University of Purdue)* , Erin Hannah (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario)* , Andrea Lawlor (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario) , James Scott (King's College London)*
  - The New English Freeports: Neoliberal vision meets a post-liberal world
    
    Post-Brexit UK has conducted a form of ‘performative’ trade policy (Siles-Brügge) in which the assertion of national pride and difference override considerations of market access. A new form of Freeport was proposed by the Conservative Party - as a part of this Global Britain agenda - which argued that they could become ‘global trade and investment hubs’. The fact that ports were mostly in relatively deprived areas meant that Boris Johnson could also link them with a ‘levelling up’ agenda. The policy that was launched in 2020, did have levelling up as the main goal but it eschewed any radical deregulatory agenda and also included strict safeguards (including on security and on the right to maintain national trade defence measures). Meanwhile local bidders including Plymouth/ South Devon very much re-configured the national Freeport vision in terms of their own local strategy (developing the marine, space and naval sectors) and framed the Freeports as a means to lever funding from the centre. The result is a set of Freeports that echo some of the neoliberal ethos but are really quite indeterminate in terms of their meaning and impact. This paper undertakes a critical framing analysis of parliamentary debate and national policy documents on Freeports combined with analysis of local documents and field work in Devon (interviewing and workshops). It pinpoints the range of contradictions and tensions in the Freeport project as a symptom not just of Brexit but of the evolving, post-liberal, global political economy.
    
    Author: Patrick Holden (University of Plymouth)
- 10:30
  
  Refreshment break: SPONSORED BY WORLD POLITICS REVIEW
- 111
  
  Roundtable / Communication beyond the article Ewing, Marriott
  
  Publishing an article in a journal is the cornerstone of academia today: it’s necessary to get your research out in the world, and often a requirement of your job. Yet the process of publishing can be long and challenging, especially for early career scholars.
  
  However, there are many other ways to engage with the field. In this roundtable, experts will share advice on how scholars can engage with their peers and share their research without publishing in a journal. From established formats like book reviews, blogs, newsletters and op-eds, to podcasts and social media, this session will help you dip your toe into the IR space before (or alongside) publishing.
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: Mariana Vieira (Book Reviews Editor, International Affairs)
  
  Participants: Chrissie Duxson (Communications Manager, BISA) , Rebecca Tapscott (Book Reviews Editor, Civil Wars journal) , Migena Pengili (Assistant Editor, Civil Wars journal) , Isabel Muttreja (Marketing Manager, International Affairs)
- 112
  Panel / Contemporary Conflict: Challenges and Change Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: WSWG Working group
  
  Chair: Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (Loughborough University)
  - Oil-fueled Wars. The Influence of Volatile Energy Resources Prices on the Military Capabilities of States – a Comparative Study
    
    To effectively conduct modern wars not only weapons and munitions are needed, but also huge amounts of propellants, spare parts and auxiliary materials. Thousands of soldiers need their wages, accommodation, transportation and satisfying everyday needs. Therefore, in the turbulent and unstable world of the 21st century, securing the reliable sources of financing the military spending is a priority task in the area of military security of the state. This issue is more than elsewhere visible in the case states whose public finances are based on revenues from the sale of hydrocarbons. The aim of this research is to investigate and compare the case studies of six states recently engaged in some form of armed conflicts: Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The working hypothesis states that states relying on the sale of hydrocarbons as the main source of financing for their military expenditures are becoming more aggressive and tend to destabilize their regions of influence. Verification of the hypothesis will require answers to several research questions i.a.: what is the level of reliance on the sale of hydrocarbons of the states chosen as case studies?; what is the relationship between the prices of hydrocarbons and the amount of military spending of these states over time?; to what extent, are oil revenues used by these states to expand their armed forces?; what might be other objective and subjective causes of military build-ups of the given states? how, the volatility of this type of budget revenues influences political decisions in the area of military security?
    
    Author: Jarosław Jarząbek (University of Wrocław)
  - Political Mobilization and Urban Warfare: From the Urban as Terrain to the Urban as Power-structure
    
    Key words: Urban Warfare, Insurrectionary Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, Political Mobilization, Guerrilla Warfare
    
    Traditionally, theorists in the field of Urban Warfare, particularly in the early 20th century, have tended to reduce Urban environments in warfare to the category of terrain. Further theoretical and doctrinal developments have attempted to characterize Urban Armed Conflicts as existing in a multidimensional or multidomain space, incorporating telecommunications, civilian dynamics, and/or urban planning. In particular, modern commentators have focused on the capability for small groups of people, generally terrorists, to paralyze entire cities or societies with well coordinated attacks. However, these have not fundamentally avoided the conception of all non-military elements as essentially passive or environmental, rather than political subjects capable of being mobilized and even of acting independently. In this paper, we will attempt to develop an analysis of Urban Armed Conflicts (Armed Conflicts occurring in Urban Areas) which incorporates the critical perspective of urban geography as power-structure rather than strictly terrain or environment, illustrating how both historical and modern examples actively engage with these elements to decisively increase their military power, in particular in asymmetric conflicts. In Sub Saharan African countries like Nigeria or Ethiopia, rapid urban growth and urbanization as well as uneven economic development and political fragility contribute decisively to the emergence and prolongation of conflicts in urban areas. Furthermore, as areas of decreasing State influence, explored by the concept of Feral Cities, urban areas serve as staging grounds and origin of groups that seek to challenge State power. An understanding that blends and synthesizes the political and security understandings of the urban as terrain and power-structure is essential both from a perspective of decreasing State fragility as well as providing tools for liberation.
    
    Authors: Adrian López Fleming (University of Barcelona) , Esteban Brian Delgado Arias (Autonomous University of Barcelona)*
  - Confronting Russia in Cyberspace
    
    Russia has engaged in cyber operations against Ukraine and the countries that have been actively supporting Ukraine. Despite the 2010s being full of discussion and analysis of how cyber was the 5th domain of warfare, it is notable how little attention cyber operations in Ukraine have generated, and the dominance of the kinetic theatre.
    
    This article posits that explanatory power can provided by reconceptualising cyber operations in the context of the changing dyadic relationship between the real and virtual world. By identifying the four different temporal phases that underpin the development of our understanding of cyberspace and the relationship to armed combat a mismatch between policy and strategy becomes evident, and is visible in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
    
    Conceptually the observations raised in this article indicate that a return to consideration of cyber as a force-multiplier, rather than a separate domain of warfare may be optimal, and indeed, where the current trend of the real-virtual world relationship is heading.
    
    Author: Gavin Hall (University of Strathclyde)
  - Examining Convergence and Divergence in the Fighting Patterns of ‘Islamic State’ Jihadist Groups in The Wider Sahel
    
    This paper relates specifically to Our Common Agenda priority three - ‘Promote peace and prevent conflicts’. Despite significant increases in the military capabilities of Sahelian jihadists over the last decade, similarities and differences between the fighting styles of groups - especially those with common transnational jihadist affiliations - remain underexplored. This paper uses geospatial analysis to compare the attack patterns of the two Islamic State-affiliated jihadist groups in the wider Sahel: the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and the Islamic State in the Sahara (ISS/ISGS). While these groups share a common ‘Islamic State’ affiliation they operate in distinct local contexts, thousands of kilometres apart. As such, convergences and divergences in their military approaches can help us understand the relative and respective impact of local dyamics and transnational linkages on jihadist behaviour.
    
    Authors: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth) , Ed Stoddard (University fo Portsmouth)*
- 113
  Panel / Critical approaches to studying terrorism, counter terrorism and counter extremism in the Middle East Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Alice Finden (Durham University) , Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Rabea Khan (University of Edinburgh)
  - ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ and Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Examining Gender, Race, Faith and Coloniality
    
    In the last few years, the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda has come to dominate global security agendas and is presented as a shift away from the ‘hard’ security approaches of the ‘war on terror’ towards a ‘softer’ focus on addressing the underlying drivers of violence, such as poverty, unemployment and marginalisation. PVE frameworks are increasingly used by development actors. Whilst a number of scholars have questioned the effectiveness of PVE in reducing violent extremism, less attention has been given to how the agenda has been taken up by development actors in the Middle East and North Africa and the gendered and racialised consequences of such activities. Based on a postcolonial feminist reading of relevant policy documents (e.g. PVE National Action Plans, reports by international and local non-governmental, governmental and intergovernmental agencies) and semi-structured interviews with international and local development practitioners, this paper will explore the impact of PVE frameworks on development work in the Middle East and North Africa, with a specific focus on women’s groups and faith-based organisations in Jordan and Lebanon. The paper examines the racialized dimensions of the PVE agenda alongside the tensions and ambivalences that are present when women activists and faith-based organisations engage with it. Overall, we argue that the PVE agenda may simultaneously empower some civil society actors at the local level whilst reproducing dominant structures of gendered and racialised power at other geopolitical scales.
    
    Authors: Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick) , Jennifer Eggert (Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI) and the University of Leeds)* , Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)*
  - A Critical appraisal of Terrorism and Political Violence Writings in Arabic (2001-2021)
    
    This paper challenges Western epistemic violence central to terrorism studies scholarship through critiquing the centrality of the English language and the perspectives, experiences, and challenges facing Western states. In doing so, this paper exposes attempts to actively obstruct non-Western approaches to knowledge and, through a systematic review of ten Arabic-language journals, presents the concerns of non-English scholarship on terrorism.
    
    The canon of (critical) terrorism studies lacks sustained analysis of counterterrorism and the war on terror within Global South countries, despite the vast majority of terrorist and counterterrorist casualties continuing to occur outside the Western hemisphere. Hence, as a form of what Frantz Fanon called “epistemic disobedience”, this paper verifies the so-called “pernicious ignorance” of Eurocentric and English-speaking knowledge production which dominates the fields of terrorism and political violence studies. To resist the epistemic oppression of non-Western knowledge, this paper analyses non-English scholarship on terrorism in the Arabic-speaking world by surveying the ten leading academic and peer-reviewed journals in the Arabic language between 2001 and 2021 (Al-siyassa Al-dawleeya, Al-Moustakbal Al-arabi, Siyassat Arabia, Al-Demokrateeya, al-Majallah al-ʻArabīyah lil-Ulum al-siyasiyah, Mejalet al-diraasat al-dawlaya, Mejalet al-Ulum al-igtmaiya, Majalat Shiewon igtmaiya, Mejalet al-Ulum al-siyasiyah, al-Majallah al-ʻArabīyah lil-Dirāsāt al-Amnīyah). It explores the following: the main trends and debates in Arabic academia on terrorism and extremism; dominant theoretical frameworks and methodologies; the state of terrorism studies in the Middle East; the theoretical/ethical concerns of Arab scholars; and the legacy of the war on terror in the region.
    
    Author: Ahmed Abozaid (University of Southampton)
  - Vernacular security and religion in Tunisia: the role of local imams in the implementation of P/CVE measures
    
    The emergence of preventing and countering violent extremism programmes in the early 2000s led to a shift in global security narratives and practices. After their first appearance in Europe, P/CVE measures rapidly spread worldwide (Kundnani and Ben Hayes, 2018). Many western and non-western countries adopted the conceptual framework of P/CVE to legitimise tight state control over suspect communities. A crucial feature of these measures is to enlist key community actors (such as social workers or religious educators) to monitor suspect individuals and groups (Bastani and Gazzotti 2021). This is also the case in Tunisia, where the 2016 national strategy against terrorism introduced the concept of preventive measures, legitimising tighter state control over religious discourses and practices. To bring a decolonial perspective to the study of preventative measures in the country, I build upon the concept of ‘vernacular security’(Bubandt 2005; Croft and Vaughn-Williams 2016; Lee 2019) to examine how Tunisian imams involved in P/CVE programmes understand security, violent extremism, radicalisation, and their role as non-traditional security actors. To achieve this, I observe how imams describe their own experiences of security, in their own words and through their understanding. Through ethnographic interviews conducted with local imams between 2019 and 2020, this paper focuses on the way in which they perceive, re-enact and influence security practices, with a particular focus on the relationship between religion and security, a central subject in post-revolutionary Tunisia. In so doing, this paper argues that local imams involved in P/CVE programmes reproduce local and global security discourses, while at the same time refraining from their role in community policing.
    
    Author: Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)
  - Beyond a Western Narrative of Terrorism: The Case of Egypt (1952-present) from a Postcolonial Perspective
    
    In a “post-9/11” world, a dominant Western-centric narrative has emerged. It portrays terrorism as originating primarily from brown Muslim men, belonging to extremist groups, and primarily threatening Western security, even where transgressions take place in the non-West. While states in the Global South have long suffered from terrorism “pre-9/11”, the phenomenon’s Western-centric study has often overlooked such local contexts and histories. Despite the calls for theorizing beyond the West on security and terrorism, terrorism studies still lags behind. This lacuna creates an insufficiency for IR scholarship in fully understanding terrorism, global security responses, and the “international”. Egypt’s terrorism is understudied, with few works on terrorism drawing upon postcolonial theory. Accordingly, this dissertation examines these shortcomings by taking Egypt (1952-present) as a case study, and addresses “How have narratives of terrorism in the Global South influenced and been influenced by Western narratives of terrorism?”
    
    This project highlights two interlinked arguments: (1) Despite how Western-centric narratives operate through shaping the security imaginaries in the Global South, the Global South’s political elite still exercise agency in reshaping global definitions and interpolating their own realities. (2) The Global North can also adopt counterterrorism tactics from the Global South. In that sense, this research aims to present a novel analysis of the politics of terrorism by (1) revealing how travelling happens spatially in both directions from and to West and temporally from pasts to presents and (2) showing how the narrative evolves through the interplay of hybrid dynamics, in ways that shape security responses to terrorism across the globe. This work can be read as a contribution to the broader critique of Western-centrism in IR, approaches to security generally and terrorism specifically, and the advancement to Postcolonial IR, critical security and terrorism studies, and the study of terrorism in Egypt.
    
    Author: Lujain Meligy (Kings College London)
- 114
  Panel / Digital technology, social media and its politics Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: ISET
  
  Chair: Odilile Ayodele (University of Johannesburg)
  - Dual-use technologies as an emerging global problem
    
    The increasing use of dual-use technologies -technologies that can be used for civilian and military purposes- on the Internet has blurred the line between democratic and authoritarian states. Although most of the existing studies target authoritarian states, recent studies show a decline in digital democracy, raising the importance of preserving individual rights and highlighting the necessity for fostering democracy online. Rather than seeing it as a political regime problem, this article perceives dual-use technologies employment as a global problem which requires an international solution. To show that necessity, this article compares democracies and authoritarian regimes’ control of social media platforms and their impact on the fundamental rights of individuals. Therefore, the article consists of three parts. Firstly, it highlights common dual-use technologies employed on social media platforms, including surveillance, dataveillance, access restrictions, etc. Secondly, it discusses how the fundamental rights of individuals are impacted, like the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Finally, the article discusses some key developments from the UN HRC’s General Assembly resolutions, thematic reports from the OHCHR, etc. In addition to the UN documents, this article uses secondary sources, including Freedom on the Net reports and transparency reports from social media platforms.
    
    Author: Seher Kurt (University of Glasgow)
  - Russia’s Platform Bans and Wartime Censorship: Comparing State-Platform Conflict Dynamics
    
    Controlling the internet is key to today’s autocracies. But as they seek to control the digital domain, for example to enforce censorship, autocracies must deal with the private actors owning crucial elements of digital infrastructures: from social media platforms to app stores. Foreign ownership may significantly affect the capacity to leverage authoritarian control, for example when it comes to implementing internet shutdowns or online censorship (Earl et al., 2022; Pan, 2017). Given the fact that all autocracies except China are semi- or fully digitally dependent, it is imperative to study to what extent and in what ways these dependencies and their geopolitical implications shape or condition repressive capacities. The paper illustrates its theoretical argument through a case study of Russia, which, over the past decade, has steadily expanded its control over the internet and imposed a widening set of censorship laws. Yet, up until 2021, when Twitter was throttled over its refusal to remove protest-related content, Western platforms remained available alongside their Russian counterparts. As the regime itself turned more repressive, Russia's confrontations with Western social media over content moderation escalated. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were blocked as part of a wider crackdown on free speech and the imposition of wartime censorship. YouTube and Telegram, however remained available (at time of submission). This paper analyses how Russia’s protracted conflict with Western social media finally culminated in 2022 and seeks to explain the differences in how these extended clashes developed over time based on the respective platforms’ functionality, reach and infrastructural interdependence.
    
    Author: Mariëlle Wijermars (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)
  - Ukraine’s Digital Improvisation and the Reshaping of the Digital Society
    
    Throughout the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war, the Ukrainian government has used digital technologies to obtain foreign policy goals. This paper explores Ukraine’s activities through a new theoretical lens of digital improvisation. The paper argues that digital improvisation occurs when governments use existing technologies in new ways (e.g., social media) given that new technologies have yet to become readily available (e.g., VR). The article examines three forms of Ukrainian improvisation on social media including 1) exerting pressure on big tech companies to leave the Russian market 2) using humour to narrate the War and 3) crowdfunding the War effort. Next, the article explores the societal impact of Ukraine’s digital improvisation arguing that states’ use of digital technologies can lead to changes in personal usage of digital technologies. For instance, following Ukraine’s improvisation, social media users may become accustomed to donating to war efforts. Similarly, humour may impact users’ view of war as a costly and violent solution to crises. Thus, Ukraine’s digital activities may reshape attitudes towards war among digital society members. The paper concludes by examining whether other states are likely to mimic Ukraine’s digital activities, as has been the case in past conflicts, leading to an even greater societal impact.
    
    Author: Ilan Manor (The University of Oxford)
  - Combating Cyber Hate Speech Criminality: How Algorithms Are Changing Judicial Action against Violence
    
    As national governments are revising laws to tackle increasing online hate speech regarded as a pernicious social problem, the development of evolving algorithm approaches to detect digital hate crime has increasingly challenged the rules and logics of judicial action. Law enforcement agencies and officers cooperate with IT-experts who develop software programs as self-learner trained to be capable of distinguishing the criminal data from the non-criminal one. Meanwhile, questions arise concerning the scope and rules of a state’s duty to protect fundamental rights of its citizens: how many hate speeches is the state allowed to ignore? How many of them must an enforcement authority bring to the court? If even the legal experts are not sure of the applicability of old rules towards cyber hatred, what exactly can an algorithm contribute to facilitating analytic tasks while combating cyber hate crime?
    Using a mixed methodology of expert interviews and computational criminology that recurs to data science methods, this study highlights how the digital age is changing the outlook of judiciability in Germany between the protection of freedom of speech, the guarantee of social freedom, and data protection in the criminal justice system. The findings see the necessity of a trust-based cooperation between legal enforcement agencies and social media firms for efficient data detection process. The study particularly urges to remap hate crime whose role as a multiplicator in inciting violence and social unrest can no longer be approached through a deduction logic that often downplays its seriousness of the call to violence.
    
    Author: Miao-ling Hasenkamp (University of Rostock)
  - The regulatory challenges of global social media regulation: little trust, no confidence?
    
    Have we reached 'peak social media'? Significant disruptions in the activities of online platforms such as Meta's Facebook and Elon Musk's Twitter have brought into question the values possessed by leading figures within these companies. In the context of the Digital Services Act in the EU and the proposed Online Safety Bill in the UK, this paper will consider the challenges that arise in the regulation of the activities of online platforms in environments of low trust and perceived divergences in values. There are increasing complexities in the moderation of content, subject to significant variances throughout the world on the approach to issues such as hate speech, disinformation, and the idea of ‘lawful but harmful’ content, and the increased move to platform decentralisation also raises questions as to the effectiveness of existing regimes. This paper will consider the extent to which models of governance based on process, such as the Digital Services Act, or models based on substance, such as the Online Safety Bill, can address these emergent challenges.
    
    Authors: Ben Farrand (Newcastle University) , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
- 115
  Panel / Gendered narratives in counter terrorism Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield) , Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick) , Alice Finden
  
  Chair: Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  
  Discussant: Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - The Security Threat from Returning Foreign Fighters: A Human Rights Challenge of our Own Making
    
    The inconsistent and varied treatment of what have become known as ‘returning foreign fighters’ following the collapse of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is a cause for concern. Countries have developed their own strategies in terms of whether or not to accept these individuals back into their home countries, with a range of mechanisms in place such as removing citizenship from individuals and preventing them from returning to their home countries. The treatment of individuals who joined the Islamic State, however, is also inconsistent and murky. Men, women and children with a range of physical and psychological trauma are now situation in camps across the Middle East and their home countries seem to be at a loss on how to deal with them. With a variety of other challenges such as the War in Ukraine and the Cost of Living crisis, these country-less individuals have fallen through the gaps of media attention, and have been left without appropriate attention to human rights. As a result, the world is at risk of facilitating a new generation of radicalised individuals. This paper seeks to explore the treatment of those who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State upon their attempts to return. What is the different approach to men versus women and children? Why can these individuals not return to their home countries to be prosecuted appropriately within their own criminal justice systems? And does the deprivation of citizenship undermine the human rights of these individuals? This paper proposes that the consequences of ignoring these people may have far more harmful impacts on society globally and seeks to understand the balance of human rights and security which countries need to engage in.
    
    Author: Erika Brady (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  - Violent, Vulnerable, Victim: A response to terrorism studies’ approach to misogynist incel radicalization
    
    Following a series of deadly attacks, misogynist incels have piqued academic interest. However, recent attempts by terrorism scholars to understand incel radicalization, ideology, and mental health raise concerns. Relying on survey data, these contributions create an ‘Incel Radicalization Scale’ claiming to identify, measure, and help prevent radicalization among incels. In this paper, we caution against using this ‘Incel Radicalization Scale.’ First, drawing on a growing feminist knowledge base on incels and male supremacy, masculinity and violence, we question how core concepts (radicalization, violence, misogyny) and incels are defined. Second, we criticize the methods used for sampling and concept validation, including the reliance on incels' self-representation and the dismissal of their harmful online activity.’ Third, we assess what these shortcomings mean for conclusions regarding the ‘Incel Radicalization Scale’, the violent potential of incels, and the role of mental health and misogyny for male supremacist incel movements. We argue that these conclusions are prone to the dangers of legitimizing and platforming misogynist incel narratives of victimhood, overlooking the broader harms emanating from incel ideology, which are situated within wider societal structures normalizing misogynist violence and male and white supremacism. We therefore emphasize the importance of providing a comprehensive picture of incel radicalization that does not take incels' claims of ‘wounded male victimhood’ at face value, and considers how victimhood is conceptualized and negotiated in misogynist incel spaces.
    
    Keywords: misogyny, incels, radicalization, victimhood, terrorism, feminist analysis, violence
    
    Authors: Ann-Kathrin Rothermel (University of Potsdam)* , Lisa Sugiura (University of Portsmouth)* , Megan Kelly (University of Basel)
  - The impact of gendered narratives on Western women’s decision to join and leave the Islamic State
    
    What roles did beliefs about gender and gender roles have in Western women’s decision to engage with and disengage from the Islamic State? The IS used religion to justify a patriarchal structure in the territory it controlled, with women considered subordinate to men and spending most of their time in their homes (Spencer 2016). As a result, much of the literature on these women describes them as passive victims of the organisation (Ali 2015, Ahram 2015, Chatterjee 2016), even if they joined voluntarily for political and religious reasons (Loken and Zelenz 2017). They are speculated to have found their domestic roles frustrating or disappointing, especially coming from societies that valued female emancipation (Peresin 2015, Peresin and Cervone 2015). But for Western women, travelling to Syria to join the IS could have also felt emancipatory (Kneip 2016). It is therefore not yet clear if the IS’ gender roles affected women’s decisions to join or leave the IS. This paper responds to this gap by exploring Western women's the impact that the organisation’s gendered structures and the feminine ideals it promoted had on women’s decision-making. Using cognitive mapping to analyse a collection of media interviews with Western IS women, this study investigates how expected gendered behaviours affected their engagement with and disengagement from the IS.
    
    Author: Julia Canas-Martinez (University College Dublin)
  - Black Pills and Lonely Men: Examining Incel Worldview and Radicalisation with Theories from Terrorism Studies
    
    Recent violent attacks committed by self-proclaimed ‘incels’ have cast the spotlight on the subculture of so-called involuntary celibates. The near exclusively online community is comprised predominately of men bound by their perceived inability to have or maintain romantic relationships. The group is highly blame-attributing, casting the onus of their lack of success on women. As a result, the incel ideology boasts staunchly misogynistic views, often advocating for violence against women. As seen by past incel-inspired attacks, this blame often spills onto anyone with perceived romantic success. Along with intense hatred of women, the incel ideology employs ideations of racism, homophobia, and white nationalism. Despite an increase of academic attention, few have examined the link between incel ideology and terrorism. This paper seeks to apply theories from the field of terrorism studies to explore similarities between the incel movement and other terrorist movements. The construction of incel worldview and radicalisation is examined with existing theories of radicalisation, particularly those of strain and grievance and social movement theory. The findings of this paper aim to not only provide an alternative perspective to understanding this phenomenon, but to also inform prevention measures, a welcomed effort as incel violence continues to spread globally.
    
    Author: Grace Johnson (University of Aberdeen)
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  Panel / Global Perspectives on the Ethics of War, Violence and International Law Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: EWPG Working group
  
  Chair: David J. Karp (University of Sussex)
  - Hegel’s Critique of International Law
    
    Hegel’s provocative critique of International Law is that it is based on a flawed premise, i.e., that a formalistic, abstract rationalism can legislate and thereby regulate human behaviour across space and time. At the root of this flawed premise is a belief that legal conditions that hold in one era necessarily pertain in another. This fundamental error is masked by legal formalism in which adherence to formal principles is more important than the analysis of ethical and political problems that face parties in conflict. Formalism disrupts the capacity to perceive social, political, and ethical actuality, thereby reducing the legal theorisation to a series of one-sided, superficial appearances based on abstract scenarios from which elements that do not conform have been leached.
    
    For Hegel, social relations between peoples cannot be understood in such a one-sided manner. The relations of peoples to other peoples are twofold, not singular: there is a positive bearing ‘the calm and even co-existence of both side by side in peace’ and a negative bearing ‘exclusion of one by the other,’ and Hegel insists that ‘both are absolutely necessary’ (NL, 93). By prioritising one bearing – the positive - to the exclusion of the negative, legal thought goes astray. Legal thought compoundsthis error by seeking to apply legal solutions developed in contract law to international law. Hegel argues that such an approach is ‘inherently a self-contradiction’ (NL, 124) as the finite nature of
    contracts do not translate well to the conditions of international politics: appropriate legal arrangements of 1648 may no longer apply in 1999 or 2020. The content of international law therefore comes into contradiction with the form in which it is expressed. Although laws conceived in a onesided manner may have some applicability, they remain finite expressions of particular wills at specific times in what is an infinite social sphere. A law that is no longer in harmony with the ‘living present’ is one that ‘lacks understanding and meaning, even though it still may have power and force on the strength of the form of the law’ (Natural Law p. 130). The continued power of obsolete laws creates confusion and ultimately conflict as a new ethos contests its authority and the legitimacy of its continued use.
    
    Author: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
  - The West’s Politics of Aggression and the Global South
    
    This paper surveys the political, moral, and legal aspects of the concept of aggression and its implications for the Global South. It argues that the European powers employed a natural-law-based universal ideal differently among themselves establishing a pluralist international society for themselves but used that same ideal to impose an unjust extra-European order upon non-Europeans. It argues that while the post-WWI criminalization of aggression under the new rules of collective-security enabled the victorious European imperialists to punish the alleged aggressors against European nations, these rules also allowed them to keep colonies legitimizing their own colonial aggression against non-Europeans and their readmission into the global order on less favourable terms. It analyses the victorious Western powers’ resistance to a legally-binding definition of aggression and insistence on merely a moral obligation to jointly defend states against aggression, allowing them to continue to play realpolitik rendering ineffective legalist efforts to counter aggression. It examines post-WWII US-led Western powers’ employment of universal morality to justify aggressive wars to continue their imperial practices in new forms. It highlights the continuation of Western double standards to play politics of aggression evident from their response to Russian aggression against Ukraine and justifications for their own aggressive wars against non-Europeans.
    
    Author: Muhammad Ashfaq (University of St Andrews)
  - Decolonisation, Dewesternisation and the Responsibility to Protect
    
    Emerging scholarship has highlighted the role of Southern agency in the formation and subsequent development of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) (Acharya, 2013, Pison Hindawi, 2021), leading to claims that Southern agency is working to decolonise the norm. Whilst this work has played highlighted the key role that Southern agency has played in the formation and development of the R2P, Southern agency does not necessarily work to decolonise the norm. Drawing on distinctions between decolonisation and dewesternisation, this paper will argue that southern agency has served to dewesternise, but not decolonise, the R2P. In the process, it reflects on questions of what it means to decolonise international norms, and whether decolonial approaches to civilian protection should engage with, or delink from the Responsibility to Protect.
    
    Author: Robin Dunford (University of Brighton)
  - The ethics of gun control policy: Mapping actor coalitions and policy frames
    
    Most countries have a restrictive gun control policy but the legislative diversity and the surrounding ethical dilemmas remain an important puzzle for political scientists. Despite being a deeply polarised issue, the gun policy debate is different from other polarising policy debates in that it sustains a stable coalition structure over time. What explains this stability? We approach our question from the lenses of moral foundations. Moral Foundations Theory suggests that the framing of moral issues builds on six psychological foundations – Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity, Liberty. Studying the long-term evolution (2012-2022) of this policy in the United States, we argue that moral values anchor actors into stable antagonistic camps. Using Discourse Network Analysis, and 3000 news agency articles, we emphasize which moral foundations represent the glue that binds actors together and which foundations polarize them into opposing camps, ultimately explaining which (combinations of) foundations are decisive to understand and differentiate between the underlying moral system of gun rights and gun control supporters. We offer a toolkit to study ethical questions from an empirical perspective, which can be applied to a range of policy areas across the world.
    
    Authors: Ece Ozlem Atikcan (University of Warwick) , Tim Henrichsen (University of Warwick)
  - A "Just Vengeance" or just a vengeance? Analyzing the use of revenge as a just cause by jihadist terrorist groups
    
    Can revenge ever be a just cause for war? Contemporary jihadists of the likes of the Kouachi brothers frequently mention that they fight to “avenge the Prophet” or as a vengeance for the suffering of Muslims. Centuries before them, Just War thinker Gratian had declared that “a just war is that which is waged by an edict and though which injuries are avenged” (c.23, q.2, dpc2). Quoting Cicero’s De Republica, Gratian contended that “those wars are unjust which are undertaken without cause. For aside from vengeance or for the sake of fighting off enemies, no just war can be waged” (Rep. III. 35a). In both cases, revenge seemingly holds the status of a just cause or result of war, justifying the undertaking of conflict. Can fighting to avenge indeed be just? After going back to the Just War tradition’s treatments of revenge in jus ad bellum, this article investigates the vengeful “justifying narratives” proposed by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in French, English, and Arabic, between 2001 and 2020. In so doing, this article reviews how the various types of “jihadist revenge” claimed by the Islamic State and Al Qaeda may act, depending on their temporality and vengeful scope, as a just or unjust cause for war.
    
    Author: Marie Robin (Université Paris Panthéon-Assas)
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  Panel / Identity (re-)formation in and about Ukraine Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: RESG Working group
  
  Chair: Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University)
  
  Discussant: Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University)
  - Ukraine's national identity and foreign policy, 1994-2004
    
    This paper examines Ukraine's mass and elite identity meta-narratives, their contestation, and Ukraine's foreign policy from 1994 to 2004 by utilising insights from social constructivism, post-colonial literary analysis, and cognitive foreign policy analysis. Through an analysis of Ukrainian movies, novels, government- and private-owned newspapers, as well as books authored by Leonid Kuchma, President of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, this study investigates the historical roots of Ukraine's national identity and its pro-European choice made long before the events of 2014 and 2022. I argue that the masses' narratives of enthusiastic fatalism, disoriented irreversibility, audacious fearfulness, and marginal ambivalence overlap and contest Kuchma's narratives of irreversible past, uncertain present, European future, and pragmatic pluralism. The interplay of these narratives, in turn, shaped Ukraine's foreign policy in ways still felt today. This study challenges predominant views of Ukrainian identity as neatly divided between a pro-European Ukrainian-speaking West and a pro-Russian Russophone Southeast, as well as the centrality of "balancing" to Ukraine's foreign policy. Thus, I contribute a more nuanced understanding of Ukrainian national identity that re-centres Ukrainian perspectives amongst conversations about European and Russian interests.
    
    Author: Artur Nadiiev (University of Nottingham)
  - From friend to foe?: Exploring the context of attitudinal shifts among Ukrainian students towards Russian strategic narratives between 2011 and 2021
    
    This presentation will present the findings of opinion surveys conducted by the presenter in 2011 and 2021 among higher education students across Ukraine concerning the respondents’ attitudes towards the narratives projected by the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
    Given the annexation of Crimea and the military support to separatists in the Donbas region, it is unlikely to incite surprise that the survey findings show a marked deterioration in the degree of acceptance of Russian perspectives on a range of issues related to culture, values, foreign policy and the general socio-economic attraction of the Russian Federation.
    Yet this presentation will strive to provide a broader context to these shifts by exploring changes in Ukrainian policy in the sphere of cultural, linguistic and information sovereignty and security. Legislative changes related to documents such as the ‘strategy of national-patriotic education’ (2019), the ‘strategy for the promotion of the Ukrainian language until 2030 "Strong language - a successful state" (2020), the law ‘on ensuring the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language’ (2019) and the amended law ‘on television and radio broadcasting’ have impacted the ability of Russian positions to be reproduced and disseminated in Ukrainian media and education, and sought to promote Ukrainian cultural narratives, political positions, and language.
    The impact of such policy measures, as attested to by my findings and reflected in other opinion polls, is a powerful indicator of the sustainability of Ukraine’s Westward geopolitical choice.
    
    Author: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
  - Examining motives of foreign fighter mobilization: Lessons from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
    
    Existing research has suggested that mobilisation of foreign fighters is mostly influenced by religious and political motives. However, most of the extant studies have relied on secondary sources, and have not investigated the views, motivations or experiences of the actual active foreign fighters. This has resulted in case-specific findings that focus primarily on ideology and “grievances” as causes of mobilisation. By contrast, this explorative study investigates sociocultural incentives, individual perceptions, and material opportunities of foreign fighters to mobilize in armed conflicts despite and beyond religious-sectarian and political ideology-centred grievances. Tentative theoretical component of this study suggests that different mobilization motives of foreign fighter participation are not mutually exclusive, and that several explanations must be considered in conjunction with each other when studying reasons behind violent mobilization. Empirically, this study draws on unique face-to-face interview data, collected through ethnographic fieldwork with former, active and aspiring foreign fighters from over 20 different countries.
    
    Authors: Huseyn Aliyev (University of Glasgow) , Hana Josticova (University of Glasgow)*
- 118
  
  Roundtable / Methodological approaches to researching race and gender logics in the British Army 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.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
  
  Participants: Catherine Baker (University of Hull) , Kandida Purnell (Richmond American University London) , Emma Dolan (University of Aberdeen) , Natasha Danilova (University of Aberdeen)
- 119
  Panel / New directions in the study of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) and peace building processes: Global and local level evidence Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: Julia Palik (Peace Research Institute Oslo)
  
  Chair: Govinda Clayton (ETH Zurich)
  - The temporal and political economic dimensions of Mozambique’s peacebuilding project post-1992
    
    Mozambique’s peace process during the 1990s has been widely celebrated as one of the most prominent cases of a successful war-to-peace transition in Africa, and subsequently informed both peacebuilding theory and practice. However, Mozambique’s recent history presents a telling case of post-conflict state-building and the difficulties of securing durable peace. Two decades after the General Peace Agreement was signed and subsequent disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) took place, Mozambique’s warring parties, Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo), returned to armed conflict. This paper will reflect Mozambique’s peace process and the power sharing arrangements it created as well as the political economic foundations that shaped the country over the two-decade period before the recurrence of armed conflict in 2013. Moreover, the article will explore the temporal dimensions of the renewed armed conflict to uncover why, after two decades, Renamo returned to violence. The re-emergence of civil war in Mozambique challenges existing assumptions about why civil conflicts recur and whether disarmament projects can in fact create conditions for durable peace. This paper will argue that Mozambique’s incomplete peacebuilding process, power-sharing arrangement, imperfect democratic transition and political economy post-civil war failed to create conditions for durable peace.
    
    Author: Monique Bennett (Stellenbosch University)
  - Disarmament and peacebuilding in Namibia: 1989-2022
    
    In 1988 a peace agreement was secured between the major parties to the internationalised Angolan civil war, which also incorporated a ceasefire and commitments to end the protracted armed conflict in Namibia between the occupying South African government and the South West African People’s Organisation. That is, the peace agreement made provision for the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 435 (1978) resolution, which called for the withdrawal of South African occupying forces from Namibia and for the transfer of power to Namibians. In terms of this resolution, the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) was established with a view to facilitating the independence of Namibia through democratic elections. The peace agreement also made provision for disarmament, as well as the demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants. This paper will reflect on peace and security developments in Namibia over the past two decades with a view to determining why there was no significant conflict re-occurrence despite some of the parties to the previous conflict in neighbouring Angola (to the north) taking up arms in 1992 and fighting a destabilising war for ten years. The paper will argue that the peacebuilding process in Namibia, combined with the democratic transition in neighbouring South Africa (to the south), largely contributed to the absence of significant conflict reoccurrence in Namibia.
    
    Keywords: peacebuilding, Namibia, disarmament, armed conflict, peace agreement, conflict recurrence, internationalization
    
    Authors: Haylene Bossau (Stellenbosch University)* , Guy Lamb (Stellenbosch University)
  - A farewell to arms: under what conditions is post-conflict disarmament successful (or not)?
    
    This paper will examine conclusions from a large-scale qualitative structured focused analysis of 30 cases of civil wars that have ended with a Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme since the end of the Cold War. Since the late 1990s DDR has become part of the widely accepted orthodoxy of how peace should be built. However, despite the billions that have been spent on DDR there has been little academic research on how it affects peace and conflict. In the paper, the central outcome to be considered is whether a conflict has re-occurred within five years of a peace agreement that specified DDR. The paper will disaggregate the different effects disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, and examine both which has the most significant effects and also how they complement each other. It will also consider factors likely to influence success or failure, such as verification, third party presence (such as peacekeeping forces), specific goals for implementation, inclusiveness (particularly concerning women and womens’ groups), disarmament of groups not party to the peace agreement, and symbolic destruction of weapons. In doing so the paper will use new methods to advance our knowledge of the conditions under which peace can successfully be built.
    
    Keywords: comparative study, disarmament, armed conflict, DDR
    
    Author: Nicholas Marsh (PRIO)
  - Towards a theory on the symbolism of non-state actors ’ disarmament
    
    Prevailing theories of disarmament of non-state actors argue that groups agree to disarm either if a third-party security guarantee is present or if power-sharing propositions are included in the peace settlement. These security-focused perspectives however disregard the variety of underlying motivations of non-state groups to acquire or to lay down arms. How can theories of non-state actors’ disarmament be improved? This article proposes a symbolic framework to study the process of disarmament by focusing specifically on symbolic language and symbolic acts. The symbolic framework of disarmament can enhance our current understanding of disarmament in three main ways. It enables scholars to view disarmament not as an outcome but as a process; it opens up the temporal horizon of analysis by considering a wide range of motivations to acquire weapons in the first place, and because symbols are multivocal, this perspective encourages the integration of gender perspectives into the study of disarmament processes.
    
    Keywords: disarmament, DDR, symbols, rituals, civil war, peace agreements
    
    Author: Julia Palik (PRIO)
  - Disaggregating Provisions in Peace Agreements: The Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) Dataset, 1975-2021
    
    The international community has invested heavily in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs since the end of the Cold War. At present, many academics and policymakers consider DDR provisions a fundamental aspect of Peace Agreements (PAs). Despite DDR programs importance in war to peace transitions, there is currently no global and disaggregated dataset on DDR programs. This hinders our ability to identify trends and variation in DDR provisions and assess their impact on various outcomes related to peace. This article introduces the DDR dataset, which provides global and disaggregated data on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration provisions in 288 PAs over the period 1975-2021. We code several unique features of DDR provisions, such as the involvement of third-party actors in DDR provisions and the actors considered in these provisions, i.e., women and children ex-combatants. The DDR dataset has a potential to substantially improve of our understanding of the causes, processes, and consequences of DDR provisions in PAs.
    
    Authors: David Gomez Triana (PRIO) , Mauricio Rivera (Peace Research Institute Oslo)* , Ida Rødningen (Independent researcher)* , Julia Palik (PRIO)* , Nicholas Marsh (PRIO)*
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  Roundtable / Popular culture, world politics and pedagogy roundtable 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.
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: Kyle Grayson (BISA)
  
  Participants: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow) , Jane Kirkpatrick (University of the West of England) , Louise Pears (University of Leeds) , Nick Robinson (University of Leeds) , Alba Griffin (University of Leeds) , Maha Rafi Atal (Glasgow University)
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  Roundtable / Regulatory Disorder and International Trade in an Era of Pandemic, War, Populism, and Climate Collapse 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.
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: Gabriel Siles-Brügge (University of Warwick)
  
  Participants: James Scott (King's College London) , Tyler Girard (Purdue University) , Silke Trommer (University of Manchester) , Marc Froese (Burman University) , Erin Hannah (Western University)
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  Panel / Reparations after mass violence and repression – an instrument for a better future? Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg)
  
  Chair: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg)
  - ‘My dignity is not for sale’: Politics of reparation, recognition and citizenship in contexts of structural violence
    
    Reparation programs implemented in the context of transitional justice processes intend to meet survivors’ material needs in the wake of mass violence while at the same time aiming to provide recognition for the harm done. What happens, however, when the implementation of reparation policies intersects with processes of structural violence perpetrated by the state against its citizens; processes that have historical roots and are still ongoing? This presentation draws on examples from the cases of post-war Peru and Guatemala to analyse how survivors’ demands for reparations in the wake of armed conflict at the same time represent demands for structural socio-economic and political change in the form of inclusion and citizenship. It argues that, when these demands are not taken seriously, reparation policies might be perceived by survivors as a humiliating attempt to buy off their dignity. At the same time, the very process of applying for reparations might be harmful and lead to re-victimisation as survivors are confronted with institutions and bureaucracies representing the same state that perpetrated the violence or failed to provide protection against it.
    
    Author: Eva Willems (University of Marburg / University of Ghent)
  - Complex Victimhood of Combatants: The Case of Sexual Violence within Armed Groups in the Colombian Transitional Justice
    
    Sexual violence within illegal armed groups is an open secret in Colombia. Cases of rape, forced abortion, and forced contraception have been reported within the ranks of these groups (Colombian Truth Commission, 2022). However, the recognition of the victim status to fighters is politically and socially contested (McEvoy et al,2022). Colombia’s transitional justice treats victims and perpetrators as distinct binary categories (Zulver, 2022). This denies victim status to female fighters who suffer sexual violence. Female fighters are considered “undeserving victims” because of their participation in violence, and their soldiering is often associated with flaws in their femininity (Weber,2021; Sjoberg,2007). As such, their victimisation is seen as a consequence they must bear for their agency in violence and for not submitting to gender norms (Hearty,2018). By engaging in the “false dichotomy” of agency-victimhood, the Colombian legal system has decontextualised their experiences of sexual violence. In turn, it strips them of their victim status and rights to truth, justice and reparation like any other citizen. Building on the literature of victim and gender hierarchies, this paper examines traditional representations of fighters as enemies, and how the recognition of victim status challenges this representation in the case of sexual violence within armed groups in Colombia.
    
    Author: Daniela Suarez Vargas (Queen's University Belfast)
  - ‘Pour la justice, la vérité et contre l’impunité’: Victims as transitional justice actors in Morocco
    
    Over the last decades, transitional justice has witnessed a shift of focus from perpetrators towards victims and a growing emphasis on victim participation. In line with calls to put victims’ agency in the spotlight, this paper wants to highlight victims’ role as collective political actors in transitional justice processes by zooming in on victim mobilisation around reparations, accountability, and truth-finding in Morocco.
    As an aparadigmatic case of transitional justice where the elite showed limited interest in dealing with the past and no regime change occurred, Morocco is a fascinating case to study the role of victims in bringing about and shaping transitional justice and draws our attention to the capacity of survivors to position themselves and to raise demands towards the state in the midst of and despite limiting structures. A political situation best described as ‘transition within continuation‘ (Loudiy 2014: 82) furthermore means that mobilisation around transitional justice mirrors broader struggles around power and democratisation. Based on empirical insights, the Moroccan victim movement’s struggle for a meaningful transitional justice process will be analysed to shed light on the role of survivors as transitional justice actors that both resist official transitional politics and strategically push for their own transitional justice agenda.
    
    Author: Pia Falschebner (University of Marburg)
  - Intersectional Subjects of Transitional Justice: Studying the Gendered and Differentiated Impact of Collective Reparations in Colombia
    
    Feminist scholars and social-legal practitioners have shown how women are gendered subjects of Transitional Justice (TJ) due to intersecting violence and harm experienced. Hence, they advocated for gender-just and transformative forms of reparations that aim to subvert pre-existing structural inequalities and discriminations causing gendered forms of violence. Similarly, victims and survivors of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) population become queer and intersectional subjects of TJ and therefore hold a right to differentiated reparations. However, there exists scarce literature that defines what gender-just redress looks like or how transformative gender justice is implemented in practice. The ongoing Colombian domestic reparation process presents a pilot case for studying the recognition of gendered, queer and intersectional subjects as equal rights holders and the implementation of such gender-just, differentiated or ‘queer’ reparations. This comparative case study aims to identify new forms of gender justice for intersectional subjects of TJ. Based on expert interviews conducted with social activists of LGBT victims’ groups and NGOs in Bogotá, Medellín, and Barranquilla, the article seeks to analyze the impact of transformative reparations and critically discusses its long temporalities and its possibilities to transform deadly pasts and to build better and livable futures in the light of limited available financial resources.
    
    Author: Sophie Raehme (Central European University)
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  Panel / Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities Through Embodiment: Non-Human Bodies of War (Panel 2) Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester) , Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  
  Chair: Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  - Automating Empire: Rifles, Guns, and the Historical Embodiment of Posthuman War
    
    Scholarship on war experience has emphasised the centrality of technology in shaping the relation between war and the body. This paper historicises these dynamics by looking at the introduction of breechloading rifles and machine guns in late-19th-century British imperial warfare - especially the Anglo-Zulu War (1879). Looking at the role of these weapons in ‘automating’ the colonial battlefield, this paper calls for an understanding of war experience beyond the human body-subject. On the one hand, the agency of rifles and machine guns disturbed the gendered construction of the civilised nation as premised upon the relation between individual masculine warriors and collective experiences of war. While these innovations were praised for glorifying individual responsibility on the battlefield - an idea that was proved wrong in colonial settings - they also ignited anxieties about the emasculation of soldiering bodies. On the other, the natives’ perception of weapons challenged Western racial and civilisational hierarchies. Exemplarily, the Zulus saw modern rifles as a morally inferior weapon linked to hunting rather than war, rather than the embodiment of racial dominance. Underpinned by hierarchies that cut across the categories of humanity and animality in new ways, these experiences challenged the subjection of the Black animalised body to the Western technological one.
    
    Author: Italo Bradimarte (University of Cambridge)
  - Biometric Bodies: Collective Senses, Struggles and Cramped Space
    
    This paper deals with a puzzle central to debates on biometric borders - what is at stake in the datafication of the body? I seek to reorientate this debate towards questions of what biometric bordering work does in the world: the sites of violence and struggle that open up within the relation between the body and its rendering as data. I contend that its violence lies not in the singular moment of identification. Instead, I ask what kind of collective affects, experiences, and sensations, surround and inhabit bodies within the biometric encounter? And how can we understand what is done to the body in all its historical weight and complexity? I explore this through the idea of cramped space, where biometricised bodies are interlaced with global social relations that constrain action and circumscribe political possibilities. Here, a collective sense of the duress of border violence, and the political struggle at stake in biometric histories and futures, emerges. As a shared sensory relation to the world, cramped space comes to bear on those bodies who are, or could be, subject to biometric exposure. So too, a form of embodied political engagement is necessary to frustrate it.
    
    Author: Carys Coleman (University of Manchester)
  - Feeling the Trees Remember: Herbarium Assembly as a Performative Method of Data Collection in the Fieldwork
    
    Although the discipline of International Relations has incorporated transdisciplinary critique of humanist ontologies into its theoretical vocabulary, new materialist and posthumanist ontologies tend to be approached only as new tools for interpreting world politics rather than as socio-political imaginaries calling for a reconsideration of a research practice. Thus, human-centered methods of data collection such as interviews and participant observation remain primary for scholars doing fieldwork. This paper highlights the need for addressing this gap by providing an account of the author’s encounters with vegetation as "actants" in a memorial park to the Second World War in Saint Petersburg. To map out the affective intensities produced in vegetation’s participation in state-led militaristic memorial rituals, practices of mourning and negligent recreational activities, I introduce a practice of herbarium assembly as a performative method of data collection. Appearing in the black and white space of a conference paper, the leaves, petals, and crumbles collected at the park function as both a material, bodily archive of vegetation’s uses in competing memorial projects and as a non-representational cartography that highlights life and death as the everyday present of “memory” rather than the distant past it commemorates. By conceptualizing and performing herbarium collection as a creative method for studying the politics of non-human life, the paper contributes to studies of memorial vegetation, new materialist understandings of agency and performative methodology in IR.
    
    Author: Vladimir Ogula (Central European University)
  - Rhythms of Everyday Life in Militarised Occupation, Case-study of Srinagar
    
    This paper focuses on the conflict in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir. This conflict is characterised by the militarised occupation of the region and resistance for self-determination by indigenous populations. In 2019, there were over 500,000 military and police force stationed in the state of J&K and over the years the forces have become a permanent fixture of the day-to-day life of people in the region. The construction of infrastructure by the military apparatus has been used to control the rhythms of everyday life. However, there is little research on the extent to which these spatial factors vary over the regions, impact public life and change the nature of public space. By focusing on the spatial-temporal dynamics of the conflict, this paper aims to understand the changing nature of the occupation and simultaneously evolving resistance in the everyday. The data has been collected for a larger PhD project through several fieldworks; this paper will focus on the specific dynamics that have emerged in Srinagar. The methodology is inspired by interpretivist approach and rhythmanalysis. As rhythmanalysis focuses on space of interaction, this paper will analyse specific ways in which the local population perceives and interacts with spatial control.
    
    Author: Arshita Nandan (University of Kent)
  - Aesthetics of politics and prestige; a case study of securitization through image(s) in Pakistan
    
    A constant use of war-time/(Post) conflict aesthetical representation of women and children etched in materials and in performativity acts in Pakistan alludes to the embodied emotive memory of terrorism and its theatrical subjects. This materialist and imaginative (re)production is a generative of ‘affective components’ that fuels the ‘politics of sacrifice’. This in return serves as a post-war currency for those in positions of prestige: military and its cohort institutions to regenerate its central position as the primary liberator against a ‘vague’ enemy which is attacking the state from both frontiers. This regime of art (visual and discursive) defines the soldier, placing his/her subjectivity at a central stage of prestige. This paper employs critical visual analysis of a statue centered at GHQ-Intersection, Rawalpindi ,Pakistan. This statue is a representation of a wider aesthetic regime at play in the country that sets out to impose an order of uniform armed men protecting the civilian subjects via masculinized and militarized social hierarchy of authority. Employing recent feminist case studies of Maria Rashid (2020) and Shenila Khoja-Molji(2021) this paper combines the ‘aesthetic’ as explored by Jacques Racierè(2004) to explain the formative subjects in (post) conflict settings which is indicative of resurgence of bellicosity in Pakistani society.
    
    Author: Azka Durrani (National University of Modern Languages)
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  Panel / The Future of UK Foreign Policy QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Kaleem Hussain
  - The future of Gibraltar in a post-Brexit Europe
    
    The importance of Gibraltar from a geopolitical point of view explains why different states over time have tried to have political control over the region. It is part of an area that is used to surveil the entrance of the Mediterranean, which helps to manage the security agenda of Western countries. When Gibraltar approved its constitution in 1969, Franco reacted closing the border between Gibraltar and Spain and it was only opened in 1985 when Spain was about to join the European Union and after it signed together with the UK the Brussels Agreement in 1984. The UK was willing to veto Spanish membership to the EU if there was not a normalization of relations between Spain and Gibraltar by opening the border. In that agreement also the UK confirmed its willingness to discuss the sovereignty of Gibraltar. Spain since then has tried to explore that possibility many times with the UK but the latter was not interested. However, in 2002 they agreed to offer a referendum in Gibraltar which produced an outcome of 99% of votes in favor of staying under the control of the UK. After 14 years another referendum changed that perspective. Gibraltarians voted to stay in the EU - 96%-. Paradoxically, Spain is now under the umbrella of the EU, the UK is the one negotiating its new status and Gibraltarians clearly want to stay in the EU. Considering how Gibraltarians are linked to the British Navy and the role of the Navy in defending the status quo of states, this outcome, is even more significant. This paper attempts to develop an understanding of the matters that could be opened if the UK avoids an agreement with the EU that does not benefit Gibraltar and consequently it becomes independent from the UK.
    
    Author: Arantza Gomez Arana (University of Northumbria)
  - Sovereign role play: Scotland's emerging NATO role
    
    Since 2014, the Scottish government is expanding its repertoire of external behaviour. This pattern is evidenced by the construction and pre-socialisation of Scotland’s NATO role. Possible membership to NATO for an independent Scotland has encountered significant disagreement within the SNP and disapproval from existing NATO members. The evolution of this role shows a subtle realignment between what acceptable and unacceptable behaviour for Scotland would be as a NATO member. The construction of the NATO role during 2012 shows that the SNP are attempting to independently define their place in the world. Its evolution shows how socialisation is affecting this NATO role. This shows the complexity of external affairs policy within Scotland, subtly changing the theoretical linkage between SNP identity and Scottish government external affairs behaviour.
    
    By assessing speech acts within the SNP, this paper uses role theory to trace how influences including leader identity, party identity, constitutional limitations of the devolved framework have created the SNP’s NATO role and how pre-socialisation has affected the internal reconstruction of this role. When acting externally, Scotland encounters the behavioural expectations of this NATO role. These encounters pre-socialise Scottish desires within the expectations provided by others, thereby changing its NATO role.
    
    Author: Alexander Bendix (University of Edinburgh)
  - Examining the Impact of Myth on British Foreign Policy
    
    This paper examines three British foreign policy myths: the Suez myth, the Falklands War myth, and the Cold War myth. Using a discourse analysis of British newspapers and elite interviews, it considers the impact that the myths have had on popular constructions of British foreign policy events from their first telling through to the present, as well as their more direct effect on British foreign policy decision-making. From that, this paper i) demonstrates how myth can shape foreign policy perceptions and diplomatic behaviour and ii) introduces myth as a new analytical lens for studying foreign policy, opening the way for further innovative research on how different myths have shaped international relations.
    
    Author: Thomas Eason (University of Nottingham)
  - UK Foreign Policy: Is Iran still important to the UK?
    
    The UK and Iran have had a long, but often challenging, diplomatic relationship. In recent years, relations have been focused on security related issues, especially nuclear proliferation, the security of the Gulf and the arrest of British-Iranian dual national citizens. However, with the release of two British dual nationals this year, changing regional diplomatic dynamics and nuclear negotiations drawing to a close in Vienna, the time has come for the UK to re-evaluate its approach to Iran. This paper begins this process by challenging whether Iran is still important to the UK. It does so by providing discourse analysis of speeches and statements given by UK politicians and government representatives on Iran from the last twenty years. This analysis is used to determine the key areas of discussion for relations and how these have changed or developed over time. Primary data is collected from gov.uk, the United Nations and Hansard before being coded and run through NVivo. The findings determine what areas of relations have been important in the past and plots the trajectory of each of these issues in order to determine whether will remain important to the UK in the future.
    
    Author: Louise Kettle (University of Nottingham)
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  Panel / The Politics of Diaspora Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London)
  - Diasporic Geopolitics and the Rise of the Global South
    
    Over the past half-century, there have been significant global migration flows. This, combined with the rise in power of many countries across the Global South, has led to a transformation in how states engage with diaspora populations outside their territories. Countries such as China, India and Turkey, for example, were major migrant-sending states of the past, but have now become more economically developed. As aspiring great powers that seek to exert regional and global influence, their diaspora governance policies are also undergoing a transformation. States who viewed their diasporas as a source of migrant remittances in order to promote economic development increasingly take a broader foreign policy view of diaspora engagement. More and more, diasporas are understood to be important assets in promoting sending states’ geopolitical agendas, and as tools for realizing great power ambitions. This paper explores the rise of this new “diasporic geopolitics” and its implications for the next fifty years of global politics. What are the dominant features of diaspora governance policy changes? How should countries respond to the great power ambitions of states with large diasporas abroad? How might such transformations affect overall patterns of global governance and North-South relations?
    
    Authors: Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London) , Enze Han (The University of Hong Kong)
  - A Comparative Study of the Turkish Diaspora in Germany and the Armenian Diaspora in France in Terms of International Politics
    
    As they defy the conventional meaning of state, diasporic communities receive growing attention from policy makers around the world. However, some diasporas have shined out as a significant actors in the international scene while others have not. To present possible systematic explanation to this dissimilarity among diasporic communities in respect to success of the diaspora’s diplomatic power, this article focuses on a comparison of two cases: Turkish diaspora in Germany and the Armenian diaspora in France. Despite the Turkish diaspora’s high potential for political influence, they are not as effective actor as Armenian diaspora due to several reasons including but not limited to: their divided organizational structure, limited interest in European politics, and the current global conjuncture, the political and legal system of Germany and deficiency of formation of diaspora consciousness. Furthermore, the different extent of political opportunities in France and Germany for diasporic organizations, and harmony of interests and aims between French and Armenians invigorate the efficacy and diplomatic power of the Armenian diaspora in France. The study utilizes quantitative data including analysis of news, reports and interviews, existing statistics, surveys and reviews of the findings in the previous researches.
    
    Keywords: Comparative Politics, Diaspora, Diplomacy, Turkish Diaspora, Armenian Diaspora
    
    Authors: Alperen Usta (University of Leeds) , İsmail Erkam Sula (Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University)*
  - Ukrainian refugees as transnational diasporic actor
    
    This study focuses on Ukrainian refugees across Europe as a type of transnational diasporic actor in Ukrainian public diplomacy. As the war is still unfolding, refugees are constantly watching developments in the home country, especially because the majority long to go home (UNHCR September 2022). The working hypothesis of the study is that Ukrainian refugees will engage in initiatives to tell their personal stories and share experiences in an effort to build bridges with the host populations of countries that have received them, as well as to generate support for the war. Drawing on Vamik Volkan’s (2017) work on the psychology of “newcomers,” I will explore the relationship of Ukrainian refugees with the idea of home and with the Ukrainian government. Specifically, the focus will be on feelings towards the home country and its government. I will explore whether refugees feel supported, engaged, forgotten, or abandoned; and whether they seek to support the Ukrainian government’s public diplomacy efforts assuming roles of agents, instruments, and partners in public diplomacy (Brinkerhoff, 2019); or they emerge as disruptors (Dolea, 2022) and disengage with Ukrainian public diplomacy. The aim of the study is to trace emergent practices and discourses of Ukrainian refugees in 2 host countries –Romania and the UK – as well as the relationships they construct with home and the Ukrainian government, thus advancing studies on diaspora diplomacy (Ho & McConnell, 2017) and the role of emotions.
    
    Author: Alina Dolea (Bournemouth University)
  - South Asian Women Diaspora in UK: Challenges and Prospects
    
    This paper is focused on the women diaspora of South Asia in the United Kingdom, what challenges they faced and the prospects. The diaspora that originates from the seven South Asian nations—Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka—is mostly spread across UK. The twenty-million-strong, South Asian community presents a challenging yet rewarding opportunity for cross-cultural missions in nations which are now their home.
    The foremost challenge of the diaspora is integrating with the native community. To preserve cultural and social identity, South Asians keep their social and religious traditions and faithfully practice them in the host environment. Parents in the South Asian diaspora, for example, not only arrange their children’s marriages, but also arrange them within their own caste. Often they look for a spouse for their son or daughter in the place of their origin. Clinging to their traditions at the expense of openness to the host culture can hinder their integration with the host community.
    This paper also discusses the identity crisis of 2nd and 3rd generation diaspora. Identity is a challenge specific to the second and third-generation diaspora, born and raised in a host culture. The question each second and third-generation diaspora person faces is whether he or she is Asian, British or American. Within the diaspora community, the cultural gap between older and new generations raised in the host culture leads to conflict in matters of preserving tradition and cultural practices. I will give two short profiles from South Asian Diasporas communities with a particular focus on the efforts made by the different ethnic groups to preserve languages and customs. The South Asian presence in the UK originates from the 18th century when they were simply called "Overseas Indians". The 1991 census was the first effort to identify the different groups in South Asia living in the United Kingdom, with data showing that 3 million or around 5.5 percent of the population are South Asian society.
    Lastly, this paper discusses the education and employment issues that the women diaspora of South Asia faces. In spite of mission challenges that the diaspora presents, opportunities overflow to reach out to the women Diasporas. It plays a vital role in development and progress of their countries of origin. So overall, this paper explored all of the challenges and prospects that women face. Quantitative method of research is used in this research.
    
    Authors: Farzeen Shahzadi (Forman Christian College)* , Muhammad Irfan Haider (Government College University, Faisalabad (GCUF))
- 126
  Panel / The challenge and promises of ‘silence’ in global politics Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Sophia Dingli (University of Glasgow)
  
  Chair: Sophia Dingli (University of Glasgow)
  
  Discussant: Faye Donnelly (University of St Andrews)
  - Silence and the Global Economy of Not Listening
    
    The paper argues that silence needs to be conceptualised through what I call a global ‘economy of not listening’. This means that the communicative function of silence is predicated on ways of (not) listening that are linked to global relations of power. I conceptualise silence through a continuum that is not binary to speech but functions with text through layers of redactions, lack of reactions, absences, delays and omissions. For silence to be noted and gain a communicative role, the assumptions and expectations of speech by the listeners are crucial. Based on the case study of drone warfare and similar counterinsurgency practices by the Global North, the paper shows how the political work of silence is embedded within a field of expectations stemming from colonial relations of not listening that have been underlying violent counterinsurgency practices for more than a century.
    
    Author: Elisabeth Schweiger (University of York)
  - When arms speak, do churches fall silent? The silencing of religion and the out-break of war
    
    As transnational entities in the international society, religious actors strive for world peace. They usually count as norm entrepreneurs promoting peace negotiations and peaceful settlements between conflict parties. Yet when war breaks out, as a glimpse at the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Ukraine war reveals, the religious actors seem to fall silent.
    
    Author: Katharina McLarren (Universität Heidelberg)
  - From saving strangers to silencing mass atrocities? British Foreign Policy and the mass crimes against the Rohingya, the Uyghurs and in Yemen
    
    It was Britain under the New Labour government which founded an ‘ethical foreign policy’ when confronted with mass crimes in Kosovo pushing for the emerging norm of the responsibility to protect. In the last years, though, more and more mass crimes have been taking place and the former ‘leading hawk’ seems to have fallen silent. The paper examines this thesis by referring the most obvious mass atrocities of our times: the excessive war crimes in Yemen and the crimes against humanity (presumably even genocides) in Myanmar and China.
    
    Authors: Julia Heinle (University of Passau)* , Bernhard Stahl (University of Passau) , Jenni Rall (University of Passau)*
  - Suffocating interactivity and the right to Silence: Mapping interpassivity theory onto digital civil culture
    
    The article argues that the very features which make social media engagement facile and alluring – algorithmic automation, personalization, and gamification – generate afflictions and frustrations we witness in the digital public sphere at large. I draw on Gijs Van Oenen’s analysis of an interpassive turn in civic culture characterized by increasing incapacity of citizens to interactively re-affirm civic norms they wilfully endorse. Similarly, I argue that the expansion of digital media as a participatory realm gradually unsettles the tension at the heart of participatory democracy, namely, the desirability of active citizens' participation on one hand and the right not to participate, or the right to silence, on the other. By making interactive engagement appealing through gamification and nudging it increases participation and yet degrades its democratic legitimacy. Notably, interactivity remains the set-default in digital environments where silence simply does not register. Instead, it is replaced by interpassive forms of expression e.g., emojis, circulating in the digital economy of likes and shares. These digital affordances render digital speech prone to context collapse, i.e., parody or ventriloquism, as attested by Poe’s law. The risk of genuine civic expression being parodied or distorted in turn creates pressures for response in order reclaim one’s views and thus suppresses one’s right to silence. This dynamic helps to explain the prevalence of dark forms of participation online thriving on dark irony and vitriol, whose implications remain global in scale in so far as the interactive features are built in the algorithmic architecture of the digital platforms. In light of this analysis, I call for a renewed attention to the right to silence as a critical perspective for understanding communicative failures that frustrate digital public sphere and consider silence in terms of ‘patiency’ or response-ability as preconditions for more genuine communication capable of bridging partisan divides.
    
    Author: Lukas mozdeika (Oslo Metropolitan University)
- 127
  Panel / Third Nuclear Age Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Convener: Andrew Futter (University of Leicester)
  
  Chair: Andrew Futter (University of Leicester)
  - Democracy in the third nuclear age: technological change and political opportunities for democratic governance
    
    Technological change may well be moving the world toward a third nuclear age. This communication proposes to study the effect of technological change in a specific field of nuclear weapons politics: their domestic governance in democratic states. The uneasy relation between democracy and nuclear weapons and, more generally, the undemocratic nature of nuclear weapons governance has been the topic of several studies (e.g Born et al. (eds.), 2010; Scarry, 2014; Cooke et al., 2018). At the same time, students of democracy have tackled the issue of new technologies as factor of domestic political transformation in democratic states – usually for the worse (e.g Fuchs, 2018; Moore, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). These studies have shown how new technology have the potential to challenge current power distribution inside democratic states and favor concentration of power in a minority’s hand. It begs the question: are such change also at work in the already democratically deficient field of nuclear weapons governance? Can the third nuclear age also introduce a new era of domestic governance? Focusing on the evolution of information technology, and its impact of the traditional boundaries of nuclear secrecy (Moric, 2022), this communication proposes to study how technological change may change nuclear weapons governance inside democratic states. It aims to argue that new technology, rather than simply bringing new threats, may also offer new opportunities for actors usually marginalized in nuclear weapons governance – that is, civil society – to act upon nuclear choices. Thinking about the third nuclear age might also imply thinking about how the inclusion of these actors might transforms nuclear weapons politics.
    
    Author: Thomas Fraise (Sciences Po - CERI)
  - The global nuclear order divided: polarisation and social cohesion within the nuclear nonproliferation regime
    
    The global nuclear order and its core, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), have long been considered a polarised normative framework. However, this polarisation has increased in recent years, reflected in a growing incompatibility of political and normative views and a marginalisation of intermediate positions. This is particularly evident in discussions on nuclear disarmament: While a large number of states negotiated the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of the Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to accelerate nuclear disarmament, nuclear-weapon states are moving ahead with nuclear modernization and departing from past disarmament commitments.
    This article argues that the polarisation within the nuclear nonproliferation regime is closely related to increasing contestation of its fundamental norms. This radicalisation of contestation contributes to a divergence of already antagonistic positions, mostly along established group lines. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on how polarisation has been facilitated by group dynamics within the nonproliferation regime. In particular, the article addresses how contentious interactions between groups have led to a decline in social cohesion in the nonproliferation regime and thus provided a breeding ground for polarisation.
    
    Author: Jana Baldus (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt)
  - The Policy of the European Union towards Nuclear Weapons at the Beginning of the Third Nuclear Age
    
    The global nuclear order is becoming more unstable. Authors are discussing the dawn of a third nuclear age that is characterized by technologies that impact nuclear deterrence in multiple ways, by nuclear multipolarity and renewed competition between major powers. Moreover, global and regional arms control frameworks are collapsing or under pressure. In other words, the nuclear threat environment is deteriorating. Therefore, this proposal aims to focus on the policy of the EU towards nuclear weapons at the beginning of these turbulent times. The central research question is: in what ways does the EU engage and disengage with nuclear weapons? A preliminary qualitative content analysis of primary and secondary literature hints at engagement regarding nuclear arms control, but disengagement concerning nuclear deterrence. Subsequently, possible reasons for this difference are the presence of NATO as the main security provider in terms of nuclear deterrence and the disagreement between EU member states on this topic. However, if the EU wants to take on a more important role as a security provider, it should reflect more on nuclear strategy and deterrence, next to nuclear arms control. In addition to content analysis, this proposal wants to conduct elite interviews to verify and enrich the findings.
    
    Author: Wannes Verstraete (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
  - Reactive Rearmament? The Instability of a Post-Nuclear World
    
    In 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for its ground-breaking efforts” to prohibit nuclear arms. Yet if such a multilaterally disarmed world were ever achieved, just how secure would that world actually be? This paper begins from the premise that the knowledge required to reconstruct nuclear weapons can never be expunged from the world, meaning that rearmament – even in a world where all nuclear powers had dismantled their extant weapons – would always be possible. Accordingly, escalatory races towards nuclear reconstitution would remain possible during serious international crises between latently capable states, even if multilateral nuclear disarmament had previously been achieved. Crucially, moreover, unlike contemporary deterrence – which is stabilized by the survivability of the major powers’ seaborne nuclear arsenals – rearmament facilities would not be survivable, creating acute first-strike incentives. As such, the argument that conventional military aggression would be more likely in a non-nuclear world may indeed be commonplace, and a risk that disarmament advocates are willing to bear. But this paper’s rationalist analysis demonstrates that nuclear aggression would also be more likely in a world that had dismantled its extant nuclear warheads, casting doubt on the desirability of the disarmament goal.
    
    Author: David Blagden (University of Exeter)
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  Panel / Transnational Ideas and Identities Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Rory McCarthy (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Rory McCarthy (Durham University)
  - Explaining Islamist Party Change in North Africa
    
    Islamist organizations across the Arab world are transforming themselves from religious social movements into programmatic political parties. As capacious movements they were thought to enjoy a political advantage over their competitors. But in North Africa, pragmatic Islamist parties are facing unexpected electoral setbacks driven by disillusioned voters and authoritarian interference. This paper asks what happens inside Islamist parties after poor electoral performance. Comparing Islamist intraparty dynamics in Morocco and Tunisia, the paper asks: What explains variation in Islamist party strategy after poor electoral performance? Evidence of Islamist intraparty dynamics shows that ideology is not always the leading cause of division, but that strategy and organization also have fragmenting effects. Instead of asking about the causes of moderation, this question examines the effects that it has and how this shapes broader party systems. Using a structured, focused comparison based on qualitative fieldwork in Morocco and Tunisia, this project brings findings on political parties in the Global South into dialogue with theoretical debates about party behaviour derived from Western contexts.
    
    Author: Rory McCarthy (Durham University)
  - Explaining Mobilization Processes: The Case of Palestinian Activism
    
    Moments of political change – critical junctures in which opportunities for
    dissent arise – can have an impact not only on the ground in the home country but
    also on communities in diaspora. Mass protests and other forms of direct action
    against repressive regimes can mobilize diaspora communities even if previously
    politically repressed or largely disengaged. We build on literature that analyzes how
    such disruptions have impacts on activists in diaspora, and specifically focus on
    Palestinian diaspora activism in the United States following the latest wave of
    resistance in historic Palestine. Using semi-structured interviews, we argue that
    disruptions have differential effects depending on the previous experiences of
    activists. For those already politically active, disruptions can amplify internal
    conflicts in the diaspora community and prompt alienation or exit from activism. For
    new activists, disruptions instead have a mobilizing effect. These countervailing
    pressures ultimately change the nature of diaspora groups and reduce their efficacy.
    
    Authors: Nasri Almasri* , Alexei Abrahams* , Dana El Kurd (University of Richmond)
  - Imagined collectivities?: The Appeal of Social Imaginaries in the Global South and India’s Self-Image during the Cold War
    
    Much of the scholarship on the Cold War has tended to be great power- and Western-centric in orientation. This has deflected attention from interesting experiments in forging solidarity in the Global South that had informed identity making in South Asia in the 1980s; some which it was home to, others that drew the region into their ambit. Articulations of national identity, already evident in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, marked shifting definitions of the politico-cultural community in South Asia. Concurrently, there was a congealing of ideological connections that straddled continents such as the leftist solidarity epitomised by Afro-Asianism. Further, the rise of pan-Islamism brought into sharp focus not only the transregional networks that connected West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia, but also the sectarian contestations within the Islamic world. These cross-currents were to inform India’s worldview and how it positioned itself as a regional and global actor. How did social imaginaries such as these, variously imbued with nationalist and internationalist ethos, impinge upon Indian strategising and influence India’s self-image? Such solidarities, the paper argues, were moot to India’s assessment of its own state capacity in the 1980s and beyond. While some Cold War solidarities fragmented, others proved more resilient. It examines why and how certain ‘imagined collectivities’ continue to carry strategic potential for contemporary India.
    
    Author: Jayashree Vivekanandan (South Asian University)
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  Conference event / Astropolitics Working Group general meeting Dee, Hilton
- 130
  
  Conference event / Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group business meeting Spey, Hilton
- 131
  
  Conference event / European Security Working Group AGM Carron, Hilton
- 132
  
  Conference event / Global Nuclear Order Working Group AGM Don, Hilton
- 133
  
  Conference event / International Law and Politics Working Group meeting Endrick, Hilton
- 134
  
  / Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group AGM Almond, Hilton
- 135
  
  Conference event / 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 Morblas, Hilton
  
  Speakers: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh), Cherry Miller (University of Glasgow), Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh), Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London), Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow), Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
- 12:15
  
  Lunch: SPONSORED BY WORLD POLITICS REVIEW
- 136
  
  Conference event / Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group AGM Clyde, Hilton
- 137
  Panel / Border Making and Unmaking Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Ida Roland Birkvad (Queen Mary, University of London)
  - EU Border Security: Racial and Colonial Aspects of Crimmigration
    
    The European hostile stance towards migration at state level begins in the late 1960s ‘with a number of very inelegant and frankly racially discriminatory measures’ and other restrictive laws. Recent critical scholarship has established the racialised nature of this while tracing how imperialist ways of thinking, Eurocentric stereotypes and colonial mentalities still persist in EU border security, in securitised representations of immigration and in the regulation of inclusion and exclusion of migrants. This paper engages with this long EU border security history of constructing and excluding racialised subjectivities to inquire into its relation with human rights violations and to argue that it reaches its epitome in the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. It will explore the Pact’s racial and colonial undertones, considering in particular its external dimension and EU’s relationship with third countries. ‘A colonial approach’ according to UNHCR (2021), this externalisation of EU border security responsibilities, the paper argues, shows the serious racialised nature and effects of EU border security in the way it increasingly conflates mobility, crime and security, leading to the criminalisation of migration or ‘crimmigration’, but also to violence against migrants and their rights.
    
    Author: Myriam Fotou (University of Leicester)
  - (Un)settling Europe: from settler colonialism to Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’
    
    It is hard to deny the existence of a certain (post)colonial moment in migration and border studies. Over the past decade, authors have been increasingly attentive to the afterlives of colonialism in current border/ing regimes, bringing to the fore the ways in which borders continually operate within racial registers as well as their role in maintaining and deepening historical inequalities caused by empire, colonial accumulation, and so forth.
    
    Engaging with that literature, this paper makes the case that Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’ can be construed through the use of ‘settler-coloniality’ as a heuristic. Engaging with critical race scholars and indigenous scholarship on ‘settler coloniality’, I argue that the ‘arrival’ of migrants from the Global South in Europe’s soil operates as a challenge to Europe’s colonial position as ‘the universal settler’. The challenging to this order, I point out, brings with it anxieties that Europe is not only being 'invaded', but also that its resources are being 'appropriated' and that its 'culture' runs the risk of disappearing. Within such framework, border regimes become the very locus to mollify or eliminate such anxieties, reaffirming and securing Europe's privileged and monopolistic position as 'settler'.
    
    Author: Tarsis Brito (London School of Economics)
  - Mundane Manifestations of State Processes[1]” Postcolonial Resistance to U.K. Bureaucracy: Centring Migrant Women as they navigate ‘NRPF’
    
    Abstract: This presentation will be of a chapter within the PhD project.
    
    This interdisciplinary project uses postcolonial feminist critiques and a particular case study of women who have ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) in the U.K. to explore how the state interacts with migrant women. This project gathers rich data to center migrant women’s voices and explore how their identities are constructed by the state and how they resist and reclaim (Krishnadas, 2007) their multi-layered positions and identities. The project combines postcolonial legal methodology (Roy, 2008, p. 319) with empirical research in local partner agency Staffordshire North and Stoke-on-Trent Citizens Advice (SNSCA) to address the research aims. I am a volunteer and research assistant within SNSCA. The empirical part of this PhD gathers data using a combination of qualitative research methods including ethnography, participant action research, narrative interviews with migrant women as well as semi-structured interviews with staff at SNSCA. ‘NRPF’ is part of processes policing migrant women’s bodies, which I situate within a postcolonial critical framework to argue that the State ‘others’ these women, using bureaucratic systems, to keep them subjects of oppression in a form of ongoing modern-day colonialism. The research unpacks the State’s regime of mobility and hopes to assist SNSCA to lobby for policy changes. It will explore multi-layered power structures using critical analysis provided from postcolonial feminist approaches. Exploring everyday bureaucracy helps demonstrate how exclusion of subjects like migrants or ‘non-citizens’ works to contest an image of a congruent state (Mandelbaum, 2016, p. 188). By labelling migrant women with immigration statuses that include NRPF, the U.K. creates discourses where these women are not worthy of basic state assistance.
    
    [1] “mundane manifestations of state processes” is a quote from a paper by Tawil-Souri and is discussed in more detail further in the report (Tawil-Souri, 2011).
    
    Author: Sophia Taha (Keele University)
- 138
  Panel / Building Trust In An Uncertain World: From Individuals to Institutions, States to Societies Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Vincent Keating (University of Southern Denmark) , Nicola Chelotti (University of Loughborough) , David Wilcox (University of Birmingham) , Jiyoung Chang (University of Birmingham) , Agnes Simon (Comenius University)
  
  Chair: Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University)
  - Trust and Negotiations: Evidence from the United Nations
    
    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.
    
    Author: Nicola Chelotti (Loughborough University)
  - State Leaders’ Different Responses Toward Uncertainty: Fear, Trust and Hope
    
    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.
    
    Author: Jiyoung Chang (University of Birmingham)
  - Hypocrisy and Trust in the Liberal World Order
    
    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.
    
    Author: Vincent Keating (University of Southern Denmark)
  - Below the State Leader: Boundary Spanners and The Development of Trust Between Conflict Parties
    
    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.
    
    Author: David Wilcox (University of Birmingham)
  - Users' trust in the Moscow-Washington hotline
    
    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.
    
    Authors: Agnes Simon (Comenius University)* , Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University)
- 139
  Panel / Carceral Spaces: Logics, Histories, and Resistance Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Glasgow)
  
  Chair: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Glasgow)
  - Carceral Economies beyond Detention: Extraction in Refugee Humanitarianism
    
    In this paper, I argue for a topological approach to carceral space, to think creatively about how carceral spatial practices are, first, put to work in humanitarian responses to refugee mobilities and, second, open up new economic relationships in the process. The shift from camps to urban refugee and asylum-seeker accommodation and the use of non-penal infrastructure to house them has changed how disciplinary norms are mobilized. In this paper, I first argue that we need to unfix our conceptualisation of the carceral from enclosure. Second, I argue that these carceral topologies produce new operations of extraction in refugee humanitarianism. I explore how new configurations of urban hosting create opportunities for extraction that are not easily captured by theorisations of carceral enclosures alone.
    
    Author: Lauren Martin (Durham University)
  - What’s carceral about penality or penal about carcerality?
    
    Liminality and porosity are key concepts in prison studies, a sign of the blurred boundaries of the prison but also of the concept of carcerality itself. This paper explores contemporary developments in theorising the carceral, within prisons scholarship, contrasting this with other sites. A current research project I am pursuing, exploring bureaucracy as a fundamental source of violence in prison, provides a way of harnessing conceptual reflection to specific practices. I look at how things like paperwork, violence in/of administrative spaces and temporal phenomena of waiting and delay take on distinctive qualities in prison but reflect generic, profound harms of bureaucracy in other confining settings including asylum and migration processes.
    
    Author: Sarah Armstrong (University of Glasgow)
  - ‘Straying with the Trouble’: Fictioning the abolitionist imagination
    
    Critical penal scholars, abolitionists, and activists have noted that the necessity of documenting and critiquing the harms of incarceration can act to limit our capacity for developing truly transformative alternative visions and practices of justice. This paper reflects on findings from Prison Break (2021-2022), an interdisciplinary research project that used creative writing workshops to support UK-based activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice to create ‘social science fiction’ (Penfold-Mounce et al., 2011) to help imagine and enact a more just future. In this presentation, I will focus on the content and themes explored in the collection of short stories written and shared by participants as part of the project, discussing what they demonstrate about the (international?) contemporary abolitionist imagination, social justice, and visions for a future without carceral spaces and practices. I will also discuss the activist practice of collectively writing and sharing ‘visionary fiction’ (Brown and Imarisha, 2015) that inspired the project, and the methodological approach I developed to ‘fictioning’ (Burrows and O’Sullivan, 2019) critical utopias.
    
    Author: Phil Crockett Thomas (University of Stirling)
  - The ferry as method in the context of bordered/carceral spaces
    
    In this paper, I propose the ferry as method. With this methodology, the ferry is both a metaphor and a concrete vehicle of research through which to enquire into the ways in which the trajectories of the differential operations of the border go hand in hand with emergence of different forms of carceral spaces, as ferries, ships, ports and docks are transformed into spaces of containment, waiting, and administrative torture. I approach these processes by focussing on the official hotspots on the Greek border islands where the ferry connects to the hotspot’s spatial strategies of rendering people on the move (im)mobile and ‘redistributing’ them on the Greek mainland; and the more informal hotspots in Estonia and Scotland (UK) where cruise ships anchored at the ports of Tallinn, Leith (Edinburgh) and the River Clyde (Glasgow) are being used as accommodation centres for people escaping the war in Ukraine. These three examples show how ferries and ships immobilise people in floating detention, refugee camps and asylum registration centres, literally offshore, quasi-extraterritorial spaces, which nonetheless can potentially become mobile vehicles of deportation. In addition, with a methodology of ferries, I investigate the ways in which travel companies such as the Australian travel firm Corporate Travel Management (CTM) become implicated within ‘migration management’ through dubious contracts, by turning cruise ships into traveling control devices. Lastly, the ferry as method highlights how policies and infrastructures of ‘migration/refugee management’ travel across international borders (according to the logic of the hotspot), as the examples of Greece, Estonia and Scotland show us.
    
    Author: Aila Spathopoulou (Durham University)
- 140
  Panel / Constructing and managing ‘securitization’ Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism
  
  Convener: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism Working Group (BISA)
  
  Chair: Aleksandre Kvakhadze (Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (GIFSIS))
  - Ordering Securitisation, Spatialising Bourdieu: Saudi Arabia's role and the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
    
    Over the last decade, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has increasingly promoted the view of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a threat. The regime’s reservations towards the ‘spectre’ of the Brotherhood are not entirely new, but the processes, practices, and structures that have unfolded after 2011 are both normatively different and sociopolitically far-reaching for questions of power, order, and space. In effect, Saudi Arabia took over a pivotal and active role in the securitisation of the Muslim Brotherhood.
    
    Securitisation is the process of constructing threats, bringing them into life, perpetuating them, and/or recasting them across space and time. But its corollary does not stop there. In fact, I will argue, securitisation needs to be understood as a (re-)constitutive process to institute order. Saudi Arabia and others do not only promote and actuate on the threat of the MB to enact policy accordingly. They try to crystallise as truth normative conceptions of how the region should look like, what political projects are legitimate, who holds the dominant position in it; and other arbitrary divisions and gradations that organise the social space.
    
    Putting the focus on the case of Egypt, this paper combines underexplored aspects of Securitisation Theory, Bourdieu’s work, and Spatial Theory to try to better understand, on the one hand, how threat formation and management processes vis-à-vis the MB unfold and intersect and, on the other hand, the sociopolitical configurations that emerge in and across space.
    
    Author: Javier Bordón (Lancaster University / SEPAD)
  - Cultural Turn in Counter-Insurgency operations: Analysing the essentialised and instrumental use of culture in United States' military operation in Afghanistan
    
    This study tends to highlight the significance of culture and related concepts like ethno-
    symbolism in the counter insurgency operations taking Afghanistan as a case study. I
    hypothesize that if participants in an insurgency, the Taliban in this study, are not seen as a
    monolith but rather a heterogenous group with different cultural traditions in different
    geographical regions of the country bound by an ideological link, we are better placed to
    make use of that cultural knowledge in strategy to counter an insurgency. However, the
    literature that constitutes Afghanistan as an object of enquiry tends to fall into epistemic traps
    that ‘others’ the Afghan populace. The Human Terrain System (HTS) was specifically
    developed by the United States in their bid for cultural turn in COIN operations to reduce the
    human cost of war and to ‘Win Heart and Minds’ (WHAM). Twenty years of costly and
    unsuccessful intervention in Afghanistan and the mannerism of their exit indicates the failure
    of HTS. Though they placed ‘culture’ as centre of enquiry but could not jettison the
    underpinnings of Americentrism in their policy and adherence to rational choice theory which
    made it impossible to see ‘war’ from within. There is a need for detailed study of diverse
    tribal culture, prevalent myths, the code of conduct without othering the objects of enquiry,
    without necessarily instrumentalizing the ‘tribe’, and by suspending the academic bias
    towards violence. Though this article tends to be policy relevant, it is an attempt to challenge
    certain ontological and epistemological determinants of rationalism when studying non state
    armed groups.
    
    Author: Mohit Sharma (South Asian University, New Delhi)
  - Why the ‘Good’ Refugee is a Bad Idea: Tracing the Intellectual Roots of Ethnocultural Conflict in Myanmar
    
    The Rohingya issue has today been reduced to a single-issue debate fixated on the security dimension largely concerned with issues of illegal migration, religious radicalisation and terrorism. An opaque process of separating the ‘good’ Rohingya refugees from the ‘bad’ ones has meant that a sizeable stateless population will remain in a heightened state of vulnerability faced with the prospect of an indeterminate wait. The paper will situate the Rohingya issue historically within Burma’s tumultuous engagement with modernity and dominant elite articulations in early twentieth century and the role that these played in the construction of a distinctly ethnonationalist imagination. It will, in particular, try to understand why the Burma Research Society, an ostensibly progressive intellectual idea, consciously chose to privilege a dominant Burman-Buddhist national identity. It is these elite visions, the paper argues, that would foreshadow the faultlines of future ethno-cultural conflicts in the country and have a direct bearing on the fraught debates over identity today.
    
    Author: Nimmi Kurian (Centre for Policy Research)
  - The British Securitization of the Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Movement (REAR)
    
    In 1999, Professor Paul Wilkinson – a leading Terrorism Studies scholar – stated that setting aside the possibility that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could resume its campaign, “the Animal Liberation Front and its various splinter groups or offshoots are the most serious domestic terrorist threat within the United Kingdom” (Wilkinson, 1999). Yet, the British Government has decided to not add such groups to the Terrorism Act 2000. Terminology matters because it has direct consequences on the responses that governments orchestrate. Monaghan (2013: 934) argued that “the resources and measures to counter such political violence and to aid those targeted are not as great as they would have been if they had been recognized and considered terrorism.” Simultaneously, by doing so, Mills (2013) argued that the British Government allowed the British criminal justice system to criminalize animal rights and environmental groups and organizations that do not carry out acts against the law because the term “domestic extremism” is “too broad and use of the word ‘extremism’ too synonymous with that of terrorism” (p. 31). Applying Buzan et al.'s (1998) Securitization Theory, the present research sheds light on the discursive construction of the Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights (REAR) movement by British Members of Parliament.
    
    Author: João Raphael da Silva (UWE Bristol)
- 141
  Panel / Ecological Futures Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary, University of London)
  - Black planetary geographies: race, space and ontology in the Anthropocene
    
    The emerging field of Black geographies has become increasingly prominent within its own disciplinary boundaries but has yet to gain significant attention within International Relations (IR). However, IR has recently engaged in similar questions and there are multiple points of contact between spatial IR work and Black geographies. This paper will put these literatures in conversation and draw out opportunities for conceptualising the shifting, entangled scales of Black geographies, which have arisen through debates on the Anthropocene. Whilst much of the Black geographies work is grounded in specific struggles of place, particularly urban context in North America and Europe, IR is more concerned with politics at the national and global levels. I wish to draw these strands together with recently works that address race and the Anthropocene, to consider planetary Black geographies, which force us to simultaneously work at multiple scales, whilst questioning the ontological assumptions that underpin our conceptions of the spaces. I will argue that planetary Black geographies allow for an other-than-human space, one which is not necessarily enabled by the threat of climate change, but by the traumas of empire and the conceptual underpinnings of modernity. Through understanding the production of Blackness through the needs of the ‘human’ we can conceive of an untethered form of subjectivity that which is neither full embedded in a relational local sociality, nor in a cybernetic ecological system, but rather is diffused through a nomadic, errant subjectivity. This is a planetary space that sits uneasily with contemporary conceptions of global politics, but also expands outwards, both spatially and conceptually, from much of the work in Black geographies, creating new cross-disciplinary lines of flight.
    
    Author: Farai Chipato (University of Glasgow)
  - Indigenous-washing and colonial amnesia: how New Zealand’s nation brand frames the global climate crisis
    
    New Zealand’s nation brand has drawn ever louder accusations of “greenwashing” the country’s image in recent years. Through a critical semiotic analysis of Air New Zealand’s “Tiaki & The Guardians” safety briefing video, this paper shows that brand managers have responded with a strategy of “Indigenous-washing,” appropriating the Māori worldview to deflect attention from intensive farming’s carbon footprint and other environmentally unfriendly activities. More broadly, the paper makes an important contribution to the growing critical literature on nation branding by revealing the trans-national effects of image management practices. New Zealand’s nation brand not only positions the South Pacific country as an “untouched land,” but it also produces and disseminates a particular framing of the global ecological crisis, in that it obscures the role of colonialism in causing climate change and sidelines alternative futures proposed by Indigenous peoples.
    
    Author: Olli Hellmann (University of Waikato)
  - Radical time(s): emancipatory temporalities in ecological and Marxist thought
    
    This paper addresses the crisis of liberalism, as a global economic and political system, in terms of its temporal imaginary. As communities around the world struggle amidst the fallout from liberalist development, the time of liberalism, marked by narratives of universal progress and linear socioeconomic development, is losing its political purchase. Ranging from the Rawlsian idea of liberalism’s resilience and universality to Fukuyama’s universal theory of history that ended in liberal democracy, the liberal teleology underlying the modern/colonial capitalist project is increasingly contested. Indeed, due to it’s inability to address the multiple political, socio-economic and ecological crises central to contemporary political debates, liberal teleology is displaced by radical, emancipatory temporal imaginaries that grapple with the realities of widening inequality and immanent climate collapse. Besides foregrounding time and temporality as a crucial dimensions of analysis for grasping current political projects, I will be specifically discussing the radical ecological-temporal narratives proposed by groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Ende Gelände, as well as Marxist dialectical thinking on time, as offering glimmers of alternatives to the dominant liberal temporal framework.
    
    Author: Katharina Hunfeld (University of St Andrews)
- 142
  Panel / Global order and disorder QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  - Agriculture and International (Dis)Order: The FAO and the Embattled Legacy of Global Food Governance
    
    For over a decade, the global food system has been in disarray. From the global food crisis of 2007/8 and the Arab Spring of 2011, to the agrarian drivers of climate change and COVID-19, the role of food and agriculture sits at the centre of the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Yet IR scholars have been reluctant to interrogate the agrarian roots of international (dis)order. As a contribution to IR’s lost history of agricultural development over the long twentieth century, this paper offers a critical Gramscian analysis of the making of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the embattled legacy of global food governance. I aim to disentangle the political and intellectual struggle over the FAO as one centred around two contradictory logics – to nurture cooperation and knowledge-sharing among the world’s farmers on the one hand, and to further the hierarchical and exclusionary logic of capitalist development on the other. In tracing the ideological, institutional, and (geo)political contradictions of the FAO, I aim to contribute to IR’s account of the LIO and its contemporary organic crisis, expressed through a hegemonic/scientific imaginary of universal pretentions, yet without universal answers to the world’s long-standing agrarian questions.
    
    Author: Rowan Lubbock (Queen Mary, University of London)
  - Rethinking the origins of globalisation: international political economy and the production of the global scale
    
    There is a long and rich tradition of critical scholarship within international studies about what globalization is, what its main characteristics are, whether it is an old or modern phenomenon, and how it can be measured and assessed. This paper takes a fresh look at the historical and geographical origins of globalisation, arguing that globalisation is better understood as a scalar project based on the forging of a new international political economy for capitalist development. Drawing on the French tradition in geography, I first argue for the need to distinguish between mondialisation and globalisation as two distinct yet interconnected period of capitalist expansion that are at once in continuity and ruptured. Building on this distinction, I then argue that the 1870-1950 period oversaw the birth, growth, and consolidation of globalisation as first and foremost a process of universal and abstract time and space.
    
    Author: Sébastien Rioux (Université de Montréal)
  - Susan Strange and Authority
    
    In this paper I re-evaluate Strange’s legacy by reframing her central contributions to IPE from power and finance to authority and knowledge. This involves most importantly shifting her discussion of power from a focus on state activities per se to the broader and hybrid construction of authority, which I render as a collectively recognized capacity to act. She herself hinted at this in her later works, and I use this shift to amplify her insightful discussion of imperial authority under conditions of late twentieth century global capitalism. Reframing her contribution to IPE to embrace authority as its master concept enables us to see more clearly how the transition towards a knowledge economy portends – even in her time – deep-seated transformation in the organization of global capitalism. To do this I consider how the attention which she devotes to understanding such change signposts her idiosyncratic conception of history, which has been eclipsed in our appreciation of the principal analytical foundations of her work. This deeply historical account of change, I argue, captures both how her work connects to the scholars examined earlier, and why her work can help us to address the problem of history in IPE. A central objective of this paper therefore is to establish how her conception of history is an important but under-appreciated analytical foundation of her work. In this sense Susan Strange provides another link in the scholarly chain that establishes the utility for IPE of embracing a form of historical reasoning as part of its intellectual toolkit.
    
    Author: Randall Germain (Carleton University)
  - Sexuality and World Systems Analysis
    
    The subsumption of desire has been central to the maintenance of the American world system. It facilitated mass identification with ostensibly universal national ideals and obfuscated the gendered and sexualized hierarchies which guaranteed their universality. Under Fordism, the national ideal of suburban nuclear family life disavowed the estrangement of queer and racialized populations who were unable to assimilate to the prescriptions of this heteronormative nuclearity. The Fordist regime of accumulation rested on the assumption that not only could labor be rationally organized, but so too could the desires and pleasures associated with ‘family time.’ The commodification of leisure in the space of the home hence became central to the reinforcement of social integration. Under neoliberalism, the heteronormative family was privatized. That is, the family became a sacred and sanctified alternative to the Fordist welfare state. This national ideal of the private family masked the processes of dispossession, displacement, and death that constituted the underside of neoliberal gentrification, privatization, and redevelopment. Desire was once again subsumed under this social order, as affective investments in the private family secured the fantasy that it could guarantee enduring well-being and security. During both phases of US hegemony, the subsumption of desire in the historical process established an illusion of equivalence among members of the national body politic, while enabling the creation of particular racialized and non-normative gender and sexual hierarchies that were integral to the reproduction of US capital.
    
    Author: Alexander Stoffel (LSE)
- 143
  
  Roundtable / Imagining the future of International Politics Don, Hilton
  
  Imagining the future of International Politics
  
  Sponsor: Review of International Studies
  
  Chair: Martin Coward (The University of Manchester)
  
  Participants: Richard Devetak (University of Queensland) , Toni Erskine (Australian National University) , Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield) , Mark Lacy (University of Lancaster)) , Kyle Grayson (BISA)
- 144
  Panel / International institutions and regimes: making and unmaking international law Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Andrea Birdsall (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Rachel Kerr (King's College London)
  - International Cooperation in a Security Dilemma: Collective Enforcement of the SCS Arbitration Award
    
    The paper argues that within an anarchic international system, states would benefit from advocating a common cause. This paper fits well with the conference’s broader theme of IR’s contribution to the future of world affairs because of its theoretical framework and case study.
    The first part of the paper theorises how the global community promotes peace and prevents conflict by adhering to international law. To support this argument, the paper utilises Tang’s (2009) comprehensive exposition of the security dilemma to analyse and manage international conflict. Furthermore, defensive realists like Jervis (1978) claim that the security dilemma calls for enduring cooperation among states in response to a shared security issue.
    The paper then applies this security dilemma theory to the persistent Philippines-China maritime row even after the Permanent Court of Arbitration rendered its landmark decision on the South China Sea (SCS) Arbitration in 2016. The legal proceeding was based on the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the comprehensive framework for international maritime governance. However, 40 years after its signing, enforcement has been one limitation of UNCLOS. Nonetheless, the paper proposes ways by which states can apply the Tribunal Award as their collective response to the SCS disputes.
    
    Author: Chester Yacub (University of Nottingham)
  - Tracing the Origins of the UN’s ‘Respect, Protect and Fulfill’ Framework of Obligations for Human Rights: 1976-2000
    
    The 'respect, protect and fulfill' framework of state obligations for human rights is the most significant normative advancement over the past 50 years of the UN's efforts to realize socio-economic rights. However, the framework's historical origins, and particularly the political contexts behind these, remain underexplored. Based primarily on archival sources, complemented by a small number of elite interviews, this paper tracks the introduction of this framework into the UN system, especially through Asbjorn Eide's work on the right to food. At first glance, the historical record reveals a shift, from internationalist efforts to make radical changes to the global economic order—which had formed a key part of Eide's mandate as Special Rapporteur—to a narrower focus on states' domestic legal obligations. This was a wide-reaching success at demonstrating how socio-economic rights are as realizable as civil-political rights. But it sidelined the more radical demands of countries in the global South for fundamental structural change (the Right to Development). Instead of truly being a move from internationalism to statism about human rights, the paper ultimately uncovers a different dynamic, reaching a clear inflection point in 1989: the replacement of the 'political international' with the 'legal international' at the core of the human rights project.
    
    Authors: David J. Karp (University of Sussex) , Daniel Whelan (Hendrix College)*
  - Importance of ensuring socio-spatial justice through the UN human Rights Regime: Existing challenges and opportunities
    
    The existing human rights regime under the UN auspices has a robust arena of actions which are targeted to mitigate the claims of justice. The UN declaration and other principles astoundingly activate the perseverance in different domains of problems and challenges. The spatial perspectives of justice can be associated with such a robust purview indulging introspection of current opportunities and challenges. This paper signifies the methodical juncture of understanding spatial justice where the UN has diligently worked upon. The procrastination of the process in ensuring liberty and justice has been a crucial factor in this arena along with the lack of ideal prisms of spatial justice. In the broad spectrum of the UN oriented credo of Human Rights and justice, such an effective genre of justice can be inspected and explored extensively to address regional and global issues and crises. The attentive edifice of space oriented justice can not only focus on geocentric troubles but also it can lead to the panacea with the existential sociospatial dynamics. The credentials and credibility of spatial justice under the UN human rights structure can bring diverse concepts for speculating global and local issues. This essentializes incorporation of Soja’s Thrid Space, nostalgia of geospace, geocapacity and Creativity of the space etc. Such ideas are tuned with modern challenges along with the claims of postmodernism. In the crucial juncture of digital and neoliberal world scenario with derivations of neuroliberal idiosyncrasies, the understanding of spatial justice under the UN human rights regime has a crucial significance for human security challenges and diverse prospects in the mentioned arena. This paper focuses on the theoretical tools to understand spatial justice and its introspection and incorporation into the UN regime of human rights challenges and opportunities. The qualitative and normative methodology has been used along with both the primary and secondary resources.
    
    Author: Pranata Bhattacharya (Bankura University)
- 145
  Panel / Memory, Emotion, and Praxis: the (re)construction of ontological security in global politics Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Conveners: Terilyn Huntington (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) , Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh) , Ty Solomon (University of Glasgow) , deRaismes Combes (American University) , Kathryn Fisher (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Ben Rosher (Queen's University Belfast)
  - In the Shadow of the Stranger: Ontological Security and A Return to Enmity
    
    Putin’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates a newly persistent theme in IR of a return to Great Power politics. The revival of interstate enmity follows two decades of the GWOT characterised primarily by anxiety of ‘the Stranger’. The uncanniness of this recent revision deserves further unpacking. The ‘West’ is unproblematically good again despite decades of post-colonial critique; Nazis are bad despite a rise in populism; threats come from a clearcut outside and not the ambiguous border. This paper explores the return to enmity after—and in light of—an era of practices and doctrine addressing ‘Stranger-danger.’ Revisiting Schmitt’s concept of the political as the distinction ‘friend/enemy’, I foreground the role of ‘the Stranger’ as inhabiting the oblique separating the two subject positions. That in-between-ness is an integral frame for understanding the evolution of the praxis of 21st century war and casts a long shadow in critical security studies regarding how danger is discursively produced and politically practised. Eschewing ambivalence for certainty in the context of the failures of the GWOT not only speaks to an important shift in American identity, but it also effects issues like climate change, pandemics, and gun violence, which continue to inhabit the in-between.
    
    Author: deRaismes Combes (American University)
  - The Cold War Politics of Hockey: Ice sheets, iron curtains, and ontological security in the 1972 Summit Series
    
    In the late 20th century, ice hockey became a microcosm of the Cold War. Its gameplay evoked Doomsday time consciousness, its culture embedded militarism in liberal democracies, and its self-understanding as a violent ‘battle of wills’ epitomized nihilistic realism. Moreover, international competitions like the Olympics and the World Championships became referenda on the superpower clash of identities and ideologies. This paper examines the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the USSR. It occurred during a period of ontological insecurity in Canada, with the Quebec secession question and the quiet revolution well underway. By contrast, the USSR seemed ascendant, having crushed the Prague Spring only years earlier. The series featured noisy claims about national identity and ideological propositions repackaged around ‘style of play,’ few disputed that national and Cold War prestige were at stake, and there was no shortage of backchannel diplomacy throughout the eight fraught games. Decades later, collective memory of the Series exerts influence on Canadian national identity. Drawing on archives and memoirs, this paper unpacks ontological security in the Summit Series to further elaborate spectator sports as a mode of anxiety management and ontological security seeking.
    
    Author: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
  - Crafting a Cultural Mythos: 9/11, Major League Baseball, and Memory
    
    Societies use a variety of social institutions to repair injuries to their identities after ruptures in their ontological security. The rupture itself might heal, but it leaves behind a scar, a reminder of the injury suffered and survived. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks rocked America’s physical security, the country’s social institutions went to work to reestablish its national sense of ontological security. Major League Baseball took up this objective immediately following the attacks by serving as a unifying social force and by creating stable social routines of scheduled games and end-of-the-season pennant races in the face of national (ontological) security chaos. A consistent presence in American culture, Major League Baseball has served a vital role in observing and commemorating the 9/11 attacks for decades, even as many of its current players were small children on 9/11 (or were even born after the attacks). Focusing on the role of memory and commemoration in American culture’s process of healing and forging ahead, this paper investigates the ways that Major League Baseball has remembered, revered, and crafted an American mythos around 9/11.
    
    Author: Terilyn Huntington (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
  - Authenticity, identity, and the politics of food security
    
    Food and beverage encompass visceral dimensions of being (taste, texture, smell, sight, temperature) and security (from identity and belonging, to scarcity and access) that bring interconnected challenges into focus, speaking directly to the UN Secretary-General’s report, Our Common Agenda. For this paper, I focus on implications for ontological security given us/them dynamics of inclusion and exclusion around food. This includes politics and power (for example grain shipments out of Ukraine), cost and access (for example implications from climate change and inequality), and individual expression and collective identity (for example debates over who “belongs”, who is “authentic”, and what historical memories are voiced, or silenced, to legitimize political claims). Temporally, identities are often associated with foods that maintain a past, authenticity politics asserting present selves, or challenges to tradition through future innovation. In spatial terms, food labels are associated with specific geographies and traditions, through legal and discursive paths. Through this paper I employ an interpretive relational discourse analysis to better understand us/them identity dynamics and ontological (in)security, responding to the question “What can International Studies contribute to a Summit of the Future?” by engaging with the international politics of food, authenticity, and (non)belonging.
    
    Author: Kathryn Fisher (King's College London)
  - Atmospheric Memories and Ontological Security in the global Black Lives Matter movement
    
    As a transnational movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) ignited a range of affective atmospheres and public moods involving grief, anger, and injustice, and called forth complex histories and memories epitomised in part by conflicts over public statues and the spaces they dominated. IR scholars often conceptualize collective memory as narrative and discourse, yet as BLM demonstrates memories also involve deeply felt and visceral dimensions that provide affective force to publicly contested discourses. These felt and affective aspects of memory are themselves collectively shared, but are also more than the emotional reactions of individuals. How are these felt dimensions of memory (more than merely narratives of memory) transmitted across bodies, spaces, and borders? This paper suggests that collective memories become affective via shared public moods and affective atmospheres: diffuse and often inchoate emotional experiences, but which also powerfully shape the contours of public narratives of ontological (in)security. The paper explores the overlapping and multiple public moods of the BLM movement and suggests new ways of bringing together memory, ontological security, and affect studies in IR.
    
    Author: Ty Solomon (University of Glasgow)
- 146
  Panel / New dynamics of cooperation and interaction in Central Asia Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: RESG Working group
  
  Chair: Marcin Kaczmarski (University of Glasgow)
  - The Political Economy of Normative Resistance: Uzbekistan's balancing act amidst the war in Ukraine
    
    Sino-Uzbekistani relations represent both an exception in terms of Uzbekistan’s foreign policy and common views on China’s cooperation with developing countries. As for the first, China managed to maintain stable relations with erratic President Islam Karimov, while other great powers failed, becoming the country’s main trade partner and one of the larger investors in Uzbekistan’s economy, as well as an important associated in the field of security. Moreover, explanations in terms of dependency on China do not hold, as both in its security and economic relations with great powers, Uzbekistan has maintained an approach at times balanced and at times isolationist. Through an analysis of foreign policy communication and more than 40 expert and elite interviews during three months of fieldwork in Uzbekistan, this research traced the causal mechanisms that led to the success of Sino-Uzbekistani cooperation. The paper examines the political, cultural-historical and behavioural aspects of Sino-Uzbekistani relations and inverts the usual direction of studies on China’s influence by focusing on the role and agency of China’s partners in shaping their cooperation with the People’s Republic. The core contribution centres on Uzbekistan’s perception of agency in its relations with the PRC and the agential tools that enable it.
    
    Author: Frank Maracchione (University of Sheffield)
  - The Demise of the Russian Gravity Centre?
    
    Within the wider authoritarianism literature, there is a field analysing the idea of authoritarian gravity centres. This notion contends that some autocracies act as models for other authoritarian regimes and leaders in weak democracies to copy, thereby consolidating their power. It was argued that authoritarian gravity centres would challenge existing international values. Therefore, not only would they act as alternative models to democracy, thus strengthening the growth of autocracies globally, but they would also counter international norms which would improve the survival chances of autocracies and weaken democracies.
    Russia was widely considered in the literature to be a key centre of gravity for other autocracies and weak democracies to copy and form. However, Russia’s war in Ukraine since February 2022 has likely tarnished – at the least – Moscow as a model for other autocracies and has even resulted in calls for United Nations reform with Russia either removed as a permanent Security Council member or the council expanded. Analysing whether Russia was an authoritarian gravity centre and remains so is challenging, but this paper uses Central Asia as a case study to test whether Russia’s role as an authoritarian gravity centre is failing. To do this I draw on interviews with researchers and speeches made by Central Asian leaders during meetings with Russia officials, either through a one-on-one meeting or at regional organisations. The paper finds that Russia’s image has suffered, but that it remains a model, although one that is tarnished.
    
    Author: Stephen Hall (University of Bath)
  - The War in Ukraine and Kazakhstan: The Russian Question
    
    The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has left millions of Russians in the former Soviet republics. Kazakhstan declared its independence after having around 6 million of them. The so-called ‘Russian Question’ has emerged as a sensitive issue to deal in post-independence Kazakhstan. Solving ‘Russian Question’ in cooperation with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin has been uneasy, the first president of Kazakhstan has responded to consider placing the status of the Russian language into a state constitution, but rejected dual citizenship that Russia was pressing. This paper argues that while following a policy of satisfying Russia in the 1990s, Kazakhstan became a Russified country easy to be influenced by Russia. As a consequence, the ‘Russian Question’ that has been managed in the 1990s, brought a stable relationship with Russia and domestic stability, has emerged as a new challenge under a new context. The events since 2014 show that the ‘Russian Question’ has evolved to include Russian speaking Kazakhs. This has been revealed after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the literature that points to Kazakhstan as the next. |My paper, therefore, contributes to the analysis of the current situation that poses for Kazakhstan under a new context.
    
    Author: Birzhan Bakumbayev (University of Westminster)
- 147
  Panel / Public discourse on terrorism and security practices Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield) , Alice Finden (Durham University) , Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Laura Fernández de Mosteyrín (Spanish National Distance University, UNED)
  - “Rejecting Terrorism – ethnographic evidence on the salience of the concept”
    
    Keywords: terrorism, Palestine, ethnography, critical IR, narrative
    
    Despite the widespread securitization of ‘terrorism’ and its subsequent prominence within the ‘global War on Terror’, little attention has so far been paid to whether this term is equally salient globally. Put differently: is terrorism always a meaningful concept?
    
    An important priority of ‘critical’ approaches to terrorism has been acknowledging and creating space(s) for discourses on terrorism from ever wider-ranging contexts, challenging the core assumptions of traditional terrorism studies. Such approaches centre difference in what terrorism means, often paying close attention to how such differences are constructed. Exploring terrorism’s many meanings often assumes that terrorism – however understood – will necessarily be meaningful – this paper aims to trouble this assumption.
    
    Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, conducted between 2012-2017, in this paper I explore a set of experiences and testimonies in which respondents challenged the very concept of ‘terrorism’. Specifically, I seek to highlight the silences, contestations, discomforts, and outright rejections of the term ‘terrorism’ and to situate such rejections within wider patterns of resistance, which position the ability to (successfully) deploy the term ‘terrorism’ as a mode of colonial control. Such multivalent rejections of terrorism are significant both for how they challenge a fundamental assumption within Terrorism Studies, and for what they tell us about the deployment of the term ‘terrorism’ as an act of politics or – in a colonial context – domination.
    
    Via exploration of this data, I aim to do two things in this paper: firstly, to consider how refusing to engage with the term ‘terrorism’ denaturalises the concept’s salience and how silencing the term can constitute resistance in certain contexts. Secondly, to reflect on the methodological challenges associated with research on terrorism in contexts where its salience might not actually exist (or might exist differently). By examining the gulf between the ethnographic data generated at interview and the various observations outside of this context, I emphasis both the value and limitations of ‘ethnographic’ approaches to terrorism studies.
    
    Author: Carl Gibson (University of Nottingham)
  - Public Opinion and Counterterrorism Policy in the UK
    
    The extent to which security politics is closed and elite-driven preserve, or a more open, “political” process has been the subject of recent debate (e.g. Neal 2019). In these terms, the underexplored relationship between public opinion and security politics like counterterrorism is, the paper argues, deserving of more attention. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with political elites, the paper argues that political elites view public opinion as vital to counterterrorism policy, but, following the work of Herbst (1998) and others, it is argued that political elites as much construct public opinion as they do straightforwardly “respond” to it. These constructions take two forms; (i) indirect, where political elites construct representations of what they think the public wants and (ii) direct, where political elites actively engage in dialogue with sections of the public and thereby shape the nature of public views. These findings suggest (a) public opinion plays a more significant role in counterterrorism policy than is generally allowed for but (b) this is a complex, mutually constitutive relationship, rather than a simple causal one.
    
    Author: Michael Lister (Oxford Brookes University)
  - Contesting “forbidden” security practices in public
    
    Studies of “forbidden” security practices (here meaning practices which violate domestic or international law, or widely shared norms) usually presume that these occur in secret. Analysis of public debates around such practices therefore often focuses on the pivotal moment of “exposure”, and the ensuing scandal when such information is made public. But what happens when “forbidden” security practices are “born public”? Drawing on a study of public debate around the use of torture in the post-9/11 U.S. war on terror, this paper analyses the characteristics of public discourse about formally “forbidden” practices when these are made known not through an unmasking of secrets, but through open acknowledgements by the state. How does political debate unfold differently when violations are openly acknowledged, rather than excavated from the realm of covert action?
    
    Author: Lisa Stampnitzky (University of Sheffield)
  - CVE and Transparency: does it build trust and support
    
    Programmes which aim to counter violent extremism (CVE) have diffused globally and have become embedded in the work of the United Nations (such as the PRR programme). These programmes often require community support and trust to ensure their effectiveness or they have received criticism for undermining trust. Many scholars have claimed that CVE programmes should be more transparent and that greater transparency would increase trust and support for the programmes. Some CVE programmes have sought to be more transparent in this assumption. However, no evidence exists on whether transparency does increase trust and support in policy - in fact, transparency literature in other policy areas would suggest otherwise. In the following paper we present several survey experiments which test the effects of policy information and decision-making transparency on support and trust in the UK's Prevent programme. We find that policy information transparency decreases trust and support in the policy, whereas communicating the rationale behind decisions can increase decision acceptance and trust. The findings will help identify how CVE programmes can become more transparent and also build community support and trust to facilitate their work.
    
    Authors: Gordon Clubb (University of Leeds) , Yoshiharu Kobayashi (University of Leeds)* , Graeme Davies (University of York)*
  - Changes and continuities in the Spanish counterterrorist policies and practices after ETA
    
    In the last decade, the main terrorist threat in Spain has changed from an ethnonationalist one, represented by ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, 1958-2018), to one inspired by violent jihad. This variation has also produced a transformation in the Spanish counterterrorist discourses, policies, and practices. This article aims to analyse these changes and especially those condensed in the 2019 National Strategy Against Terrorism. The perception of the threat expressed in this Strategy and the description of its typology and possible scenarios in which this threat could materialize shape the Spanish counterterrorism policies and practices. This puts Spanish’s situation on par with that of neighbouring European countries and has accordingly modified its counterterrorist practices and policies (strategies, laws, parliamentary debates, institutional speeches, etc.). The Spanish case is exceptional given the experience of the institutions in dealing with terrorism for decades. This shows how a country, despite decades of experience, has to adapt its counterterrorist actions in the face of a new threat that is no longer national but international. This generates important and structural changes such as the appearance of the problem of radicalization, greater coordination with international counterterrorist actors, or the increase in the importance of the internet and the narratives that can be produced there.
    
    Author: Aitor Bonsoms (IBEI & Autonomous University of Barcelona)
- 148
  Panel / Recurring Global Crises and the Necessity of Feminist Political Economy Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester)
  
  Discussant: Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester)
  - A Feminist Political Economy Approach to Housing: The Case of Austria
    
    The ongoing crisis of housing has had manifold effects across different European countries, leading to a shortage of affordable housing, changes in social housing systems and more evictions in specific countries after the financial crisis post 2008. This paper will analyze the changes in the housing market in Austria, looking at the degree of (increasing) financialization and the household situation particularly in the current recession. The effects this has on lone parents, mostly women, and how individual households develop coping strategies regarding social reproduction of the household against rising rent and costs of living due to rising energy and food prices will be analyzed from a feminist political economy perspective of the everyday. The research question focuses on how an intersectional perspective of the everyday can grasp the different living conditions in a changing economic environment and what would be needed to safeguard households from income, food and energy poverty.
    
    Author: Stefanie Woehl (University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna)
  - The crisis in social reproduction and the gender-energy nexus
    
    In the current conjecture of an energy crisis that swept much of Europe, the paper centres on the gender-energy nexus, outlining its articulations in and through this crisis. Crucially, it approaches this crisis from the lens of social reproduction and unpacks its gendered nature. To do so, the paper conceptualises energy as deeply imbricated in social reproduction, arguing that its commodified and commercialised provision is an instance of the privatisation of social reproduction. It explores the gender-energy nexus its complexity, dynamism and uneven articulations across the global economy though existing work on energy poverty and gender in the UK in as well as existing research on energy debt in Greece and its linkages to the gendered nature of using and not being able to afford energy in households. In doing so, the paper highlights how energy is political in the gendered nature of its provision and usage, elucidating the embodied ways in which women are forced to get by and act as ‘fixes’ of this crisis.
    
    Author: Aliki Koutlou (University of Manchester)
  - Decentering and recentering crisis
    
    This paper considers how we might develop a decentred feminist IPE of crisis. As many feminist scholars have pointed out (Brickell; Hozic & True), a feminist engagement with crisis moves us beyond specific ‘crisis points’ (economic collapse, war, pandemics), and develops understandings of how crisis is constitutive of, and experienced via, slow structural inequalities – or ‘crisis ordinary’. Such an approach highlights how particular populations, marked by race, gender and the uneven processes of environmental degradation, experience vulnerability and precarity. As many feminist scholars argue a ‘social reproduction lens’ provides a unique vantage point for thinking about how crisis is experienced in everyday lives. The everyday/ordinary nature of crisis we suggest is best understood through a more expansive, decentred and provincialized social reproduction approach. This is one that disrupts mainstream (Western centric) narratives of capitalism, the state, the household and the division between waged/unwaged work embedded in much social reproduction theorizing, whilst simultaneously highlighting how context and location matters in thinking through the spaces, temporalities and violences of everyday life. Decentring social reproduction analysis in this way is, moreover, vital in terms of the development of relational forms of feminist solidarity.
    
    Authors: Jayanthi Lingham (University of Sheffield)* , Shirin Rai (University of Warwick)* , Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  - Crisis Macroeconomics – A Feminist Intervention
    
    Across a series of recent crises, macroeconomics has emerged as a key site of contest and intervention. The increased power of Central Banks, along with an expectation of their intervention in economic and ecological crises has led to the development of crisis macroeconomics – exemplified by the normalisation of so-called unconventional monetary policy. While the political and economic consequences of this trend have been well studied, there remains a significant lack of understanding of both the gendered nature of this type of governance, and its gendered consequences. This paper offers a starting point for such an analysis, through a focus on the gendered nature of inflation. Building on and updating Diane Elson’s work that identified an ‘anti-inflationary bias’ as a key pillar of male-biased macroeconomics (1991), this paper explores how inflation interacts with gendered structures of the economy. The paper combines an analysis of the gendered distributional consequences of inflation – driven by gendered inequalities in both income and wealth – with an analysis of how inflation interacts with the non-monetary economy. By showing how inflation shapes social reproduction, this paper shows how the burdens of both inflation and deflation are distributed in gendered ways, further demonstrating the need for a transformative macroeconomics.
    
    Author: Muireann O'Dwyer (University of St Andrews)
- 149
  
  Roundtable / Russia's Offensive War Against Ukraine 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.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: James Rogers (SDU)
  
  Participants: Ievgeniia Lukianchenko (University of Copenhagen) , Patrick Bury (University of Bath) , Hew Strachan (St Andrews) , Anthony King (University of Warwick) , Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (Loughborough University)
- 150
  Panel / Security, Strategy, and Statecraft Beyond Metropoles Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Toby Greene (Bar Ilan University)
  - A Comparative Role Theory Analysis on the Qatari and Emirati Foreign Policies towards the Libyan Civil War
    
    Although Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have various historical, political, cultural and structural similarities, they have followed different and even conflicting foreign policies towards the events, conflicts and civil wars in the Middle East, from Libya to Yemen, since the beginning of the Arab Uprisings. This study aims to investigate the reasons behind the differences between these two Gulf monarchies’ foreign policy attitudes against the Libyan Civil War by using role theory. In other words, this study will test the following hypothesis: The foreign policy attitudes of Qatar and the UAE towards the Libyan Civil War have differed due to their different national role conceptions. The theoretical framework and methodological tools provided by role theory will enable this work to analyse how international and domestic factors together have influenced the behaviours of Qatar and the UAE towards the civil war in Libya. In this regard, to explain the divergent foreign policies, Qatar and the UAE’s socialisation experiences as the external factors and domestic role contestations as the internal factors will be investigated by using content analysis and process tracing which are the main tools broadly employed in the existing role theory literature. This study will contribute to the role theory scholarship by combining socialisation experiences and domestic role contestations to explain foreign policy roles. Furthermore, it will enrich the theoretical approaches in foreign policy studies of the Middle East by applying role theory to the foreign policies of two Gulf countries.
    Keywords: Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Libya, Middle East Politics, foreign policy analysis, role theory, socialisation, role contestation
    
    Author: Yusuf Topaloglu (University of Edinburgh)
  - Uncertainty in Transition: The political setting in Libya after 2011
    
    Studies on the factors that determine transition trajectories in countries moving from authoritarianism have sparked a promising and increasing multidisciplinary discussion. The Arabic region represents an example for obvious divergent trajectories taken place within a same wave of political change. For instance, the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya all opposed authoritarian regimes, but Libya's conclusion was very different. Though Tunisia and Egypt have taken distinct democratic paths, the Libyan revolt sparked violent conflict that led to a civil war and the collapse of governmental institutions. This research aims to analyse the determinants that shaped the transition trajectory in Libya after the Arab uprisings by comparing the influence of political, security, and socio-economic determinants. The analytical framework of the thesis covers political, security, and socioeconomic dimensions of transitions. It introduces a configuration of factors aiming to explain how and why an array of domestic and external conditions can contribute to a particular transition trajectory.
    
    Author: Walid Ali (The University of Glasgow)
  - Seeking Autonomy under A Giant’s Roof: Nepal’s Erosion of Security Arrangements with India
    
    Hierarchical inter-state relations are pervasive in which a dominant state possesses setting certain rules and constraints for a subordinate counterpart. These are sovereignty restrictions that embody the terms of hierarchy but also easily become sites of political struggles when subordinate states seek greater autonomy. Under what conditions can a subordinate state successfully lift sovereignty restrictions? Which means it adopts is most effective? Based on a reconceptualization of hierarchy, this paper proposes a relational theory reorienting academic attention from structural and domestic factors to dyadic interactions. It contends that variations in lifting sovereignty restrictions critically hinges on two factors: commitment (a)symmetry and coercive costs. Commitment (a)symmetry measures whether there is a disparity between a sheltering state’s commitment to lift a sovereignty restriction and its shelter state’s commitment to preserving that restriction whereas coercive costs are the price that a dominant state perceives it will bear if it takes coercive measures to bring a subordinate state in line with it over the renegotiation of the terms of hierarchy. A subordinate state might use commitment-shifting mechanisms such as reassurance, compensation, and fragmentation to change its dominant state’s will to change the weaker side’s policy stance forcefully. Meanwhile, it may take advantage of cost-amplifying mechanisms such as association, fortification, and diversification to amplify the effect of the constraining factors that limit its patron’s freedom of action. The paper will apply the theory to explain the variations in outcomes in Nepal’s efforts to contest existing security arrangements with India in the 1960s and late 1980s.
    
    Author: Pengqiao Lu (McGill University)
  - The impact of small islands on national strategy: the case of the Azores in the Cold War
    
    Can sovereignty over small insular regions significantly affect a state’s strategy? The case of the remote Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, lying between Europe and North America in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, shows us that small islands can, under certain conditions, determine the orientation of national strategy. In this paper, I identify the main strategic functions performed by the Azores during the Cold War. Then, I show how these functions have both constrained and enabled Portuguese strategy at various moments during the Cold War. I find that at certain times the existence of the Azores gave central decision-makers more leeway in following strategies they were already intent on pursuing; while at other times the Azores forced the government in Lisbon to adapt its strategic principles, plans, and behaviour, closing off options which it may have preferred. Lastly, I attempt to draw general lessons about the management of strategically significant islands by central governments from the impact of the Azores on Portuguese strategy in the Cold War.
    
    Author: Tomé Ribeiro Gomes (CEI-ISCTE, Lisbon)
- 151
  Panel / Space Resources: A Non-Extractivist Future? Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Thomas Cheney (The Open University)
  
  Chair: Thomas Cheney (The Open University)
  - Space Resources, Corporate Actors and State Responsibility
    
    As space resource gathering opportunities loom, humanity is presented with the choice to recast its human values and relationships in the arena of this new frontier. These aspirations are dashed by the development of a space governance built on competing national regimes, reinforcing Western style neo-colonialism and a creeping militarisation of space in defence of the national interest in space assets. The corporate space industry is positioned as a key player at the heart of space resource governance, spurring normative trends towards self-regulatory regimes. State complicity with the activities of corporate space actors, coupled with a lack of international congruity as to, firstly, the meaning and extent of national activities (Article VI OST) such as resource extraction, and secondly, the reciprocal obligations arising in the performance of these, presents a significant and highly charged challenge. Moreover, a shift in the political narrative, within multilateral agreements such as the Artemis Accords, narrows the definitions of principled terms such as ‘benefit’ (Art I OST) away from pluralistic models of resource distribution towards ‘cooperation’, with the hegemonic status quo. This renders developing space nations reliant upon the sovereign will of the space superpowers for a share in the benefits of space resources. In the absence of a uniform common ground, alongside the inequality of law-making opportunities within the international arena, the international community’s hands are tied. This paper argues that a true reading of the Lotus judgment shifts the domination of national self-interest as vested in national regimes, to an emphasis upon international cooperation and co-existence. Releasing the Lotus principle stranglehold, would give new wings to the Outer Space Treaty regime, blending global administrative structures, collaborative governments and an enlightened world judiciary. Thus an emboldened international community could invoke the international responsibility of spacefaring States to enforce the collective interest in the use of, and the protection of space resources for the benefit of all humankind.
    
    Author: Fiona Naysmith (Open University)
  - Is The Moon A Fish?
    
    Is the Moon a fish? Around the time as when the Outer Space Treaty (OST) was negotiated, discussions on the “tragedy of the commons” and on the common heritage of humankind also took place. The discussion took place as part of the negotiations of the Law of the Sea regime within the UN. Language in the OST strongly suggests that some of the considerations that were discussed more thoroughly in the Law of the See negotiations, were also considered for regulating outer space. However, the language of OST is stuck somewhere between the language of rights and duties of what today is understood as the High Seas and the seabed, both areas that are outside of any state’s jurisdiction. While both the high seas and the seabed are considered a global commons (like outer space) they have radically different governance regimes. The high seas is a traditional commons, and therefore very much susceptible to the “tragedy of the commons” while the international seabed is a common heritage of humankind, a much more regulated and a much fairer governance regime when it comes to the states from the Global South. This paper will discuss the possible analogies that we can draw from the bundle of rules falling under the concept of the high seas and the international seabed for outer space and ultimately ask the question: is the Moon a fish?
    
    Author: Marjan Ajevski (The Open University)
  - Space Resources Governance: A Non-Extractivist Future?
    
    Space resource governance will be one of the most significant issues for the future of humanity. ‘Space expansionists’ are right to see an equivalence between now and the dawn of European colonization in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, this is not 1492. A colonial free for all does not have to be the future. This paper will argue that the Outer Space Treaty, for all its flaws, lays a foundation for a more sustainable future – one in which the resources of the solar system are used to build a better future for all humankind. This involves a change in how we think about resources – what they’re for and who they benefit – but one that is desperately needed writ large. The extractivist model of resource utilization that has dominated, particularly in the age of industrial capitalism has lea to ecological disaster and is ultimately future-depleting. A new post-extractivist model of resource utilization is necessary. One guided by the principles of stewardship and a recognition of the interests of future generations. One that recognizes that resources are not unlimited, and thus unrestricted use is not without consequence. This attitudinal shift is also relevant and necessary for the use of the resources of the other areas of the global commons – areas like Antarctica and the deep seabed. This is a topic of vital importance for a Summit of the Future. How resources have been regarded, and used, is one of the core drivers of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis. Space resources may be a ‘solution’ to these issues but not if they are merely used as a new fuel source for the processes that have led us to where we are. A new resource governance model is necessary; one that centres the planet, its peoples and a liveable future.
    
    Author: Thomas Cheney (The Open University)
  - Moving beyond the “Extractivist model” of resource utilization
    
    Moving beyond the “Extractivist model” of resource utilization will not only require a new form of space governance, but it will also require multi-faceted epistemological world view. Moving away from the model of nature as “resource” to more open and diverse conception of the universe, one that is more closely assigned to, what the Zapatistas call, “A world in which many worlds are possible.” For such a thing to exist, a radical reshaping of norms of governance and economic standards must have to take place, “more resources” is not the answer, but rather a more equitable and fair distribution of resources, a world order that situates humans as nature rather than above it and commitment to future justice. Addressing the challenges of space related governance on both national and international levels will be essential to this re-imagining that moves beyond not just the extractivist model but also beyond US military hegemony which structurally supports and benefits from genocidal colonial practices. Those involved in space exploration must first come to terms with the historic injustices and unequable governance practices in which the space industry is built upon so that the future need not replicate or continue violent activities. The very foundational values of the extractivist model are not conducive to any future in space or on Earth as those values are exploitative, colonial, and narrow.
    
    Author: Natalie Trevino (The Open University)
- 152
  Panel / The politics of nature and landscapes in South East Europe II Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Conveners: Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen) , Michiel Piersma (University of Liverpool)
  
  Chair: Lydia Cole (University of Sussex)
  
  Discussant: Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews)
  - Invisible Transformations: How tourism disrupts the Sarajevo cityscape yet leaves no trace
    
    This article explores the ways in which war tourism disrupts ideas of normal space within the Sarajevo cityscape, introducing a new invisible dimension to the city, that of the tourscape. Within the tourscape the normal space of the city, that is its mundane and everyday facades, face disruption and transformation as part of the performance of tourism. A street crossing is no longer a street crossing but instead a life-or-death journey as tourists re-enact runs between a snipers’ fields of vision. Likewise, the apartment building is no longer an apartment building, it is, on account of the splatter of the shrapnel hole (now filled in) an artefact, with its greying concrete immortalised in a thousand pictures.
    
    Rather than focussing on explicit memorial or touristic locations e.g. the Tunnel of Hope or the Sarajevo roses, the paper instead explores how tourism reveals hidden spaces of history, arguing tourism holds a power to paper new (yet old) meanings onto the cityscape for both guide and tourist alike. However it is a meaning which is visible only to those performing within the tourscape rather than the cityscape as a whole.
    
    Author: Freya Cumberlidge (Central European University)
  - Transformative justice as if the post-Yugoslav space, land, landscapes, and its peoples mattered
    
    The concept of transformative justice has been, with few exceptions, widely theorized from outside the post-Yugoslav space, and then ‘applied’ to it. While presenting itself as an alternative to the universalising, legalistic, and institutional focus of the liberal transitional justice model of the 1990s, transformative justice has developed without accounting for the experiences of violence and struggles for justice that emerged in the post-Yugoslav space, and that are interwoven with transnational histories of oppression, dispossession, and resistance. Building on a reflexive analysis of empirical material on post-Yugoslav justice movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, the paper rethinks the concept of transformative justice as a vehicle that allows us to work towards justice in pluriversal terms. It focuses on the meaning of transformation and change, and the kind of harms that give rise to transformation, and agency within these processes. Speaking to the calls for provincializing IR and thinking from the spaces that are not visible in theorizing from the anglophone core, the article engages with contested temporalities and ideas of change, intersectional harms, and with different genealogies of transformation to theorise transformative justice as if the post-Yugoslav space, land, landscapes, and its peoples mattered.
    
    Authors: Daniela Lai (Royal Holloway) , Sladjana Lazić (University of Innsbruck)*
  - Neglected beaches, felled trees and the political question of the 'natural' in Bosnia and Herzegovina
    
    This contribution draws upon a chapter of my PhD thesis on the everyday embodied engagements of youth with urban and natural landscapes in the city of Foca, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Situated in the lower Drina valley, at the edge of Sutjeska national park, Foca serves as a small urban centre for a mountainous, sparsely populated region. As with many of these smaller cities in post-socialist and post-war BiH, Foca's economy and population is dwindling. The town survives on the abundance of forests and adventure tourism, not only economically but understood through the lived experiences of Foca's citizens. In this paper, I attempt to understand the politics of these lived experiences in 'natural' Foca, through the engagements of local youth with these everyday landscapes of nature and natural riches. Inspired by political ecology, I understand power to produce environments into meaningful spaces: natural, beautiful, clean, spoiled, essential. In a methodology of participant observation and walking interviews among the rivers, parks, forests and beaches of Foca, this paper discusses the contestation of 'nature' in town. Essentially, I show the mundane-yet-intense relationship of my interlocutors and the green landscapes, which for them on the one hand predate current 'rotten' politics, and on the other whose precarious existence depends on it. These local attachments relate to the politics of the 'natural' that are simultaneously local, national and global: the erased remnants of recent war violence in physical environments, ecological degradation as a result of illicit hydropower dams, and the contested balance between tourism as a way of living and exploitation of natural resources.
    
    Author: Michiel Piersma (University of Liverpool)
  - Rural dreams of energy transition: Governing human-nature relations in (post-)socialism
    
    This paper explores ways in which specific conceptions of human-nature relations underpin engagements with rurality as a source of energy, labour, and food. I do this by examining past and ongoing projects of (green) extractivism in Cetinska Krajina. More specifically, I tease out the conceptions of nature—land, plants, water, and non-human animals—that underpin project plans, and their place within wider political economies. This area is paradoxically known for depopulation and war suffering, while situated in the hinterland of the developed tourist industry of southern Croatia. The Cetina River basin is the ‘hydropower giant of Croatia’ and home to the Peruća accumulation lake, built in in 1958 by relocating peasants and nationalising land. The lake embodies the anthropogenic power of Yugoslav socialism, and post-socialist dreams of tourism and energy development. Today, more scattered, but no less ambitious, plans abound. By putting in conversation different eras of energy transition, the paper highlights the continuity and malleability of ways in which rural human-nature relations become sites of modernist dreams.
    
    Author: Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen)
- 153
  
  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. Tay, Hilton
  
  Speakers: Annika Bergman Rosamond (Lund University), Cherry Miller (University of Glasgow), Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh), Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London), Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow), Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
- 14:45
  
  Refreshment break: SPONSORED BY WORLD POLITICS REVIEW
- 154
  Panel / Africa and Global Order Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Peter Brett
  - Decoy Forums: African States’ demands within International Criminal Court spaces for United Nations Security Council Reform
    
    Calls for United Nations Security Council (UNSC) reform from African states have been rung for decades. The Ezulwini Consensus (2005) sets out the collective demands from the continent – via the African Union – for this reform. However, the demands for reform have faced serious obstacles – in no small part due to the fact that UNSC reform requires the unthinkable: states (i.e. the five permanent powers) to cede power. Nonetheless, African states have maintained their calls for a more democratic UNSC that has fairer permanent representation. Interestingly, an international forum to which the UNSC reform agenda has been advocated has been the International Criminal Court (ICC). The decade-long period of tension between the ICC and several of its African members also saw grievances aired about the undemocratic UNSC configuration. This suggests that Africa’s dissatisfaction with the UNSC power structure has spilled over into other global governance institutions, like the ICC, because the UNSC (and ICC, for that matter) are seen as symptoms of an unequal global political system that needs reform as a matter of international justice and democracy. This paper explores African states’ uses of ICC-related forums to further their demands for UNSC reform through a critical discourse of country statements delivered by African states. This helps to improve understandings of Africa’s international relations as well as its strategies for exercising its relatively weak power position in global politics to assert its demands.
    
    Author: Maxine Rubin (University of Witwatersrand)
  - Is 'Global IR' decolonial? An comparison of the strategies of 'Global IR' and 'decolonial approaches to IR'
    
    Taking issue with the terminology and idea of 'the non-West', this paper seeks to examine the decolonial credentials of the new departure in International Relations scholarship called 'Global IR'. In examining the claims and preoccupations of Global IR, the paper seeks to examine areas of commonality and areas of divergence between Global IR and decolonial approaches. The argument advanced is that 'Global IR' - commonly centred upon themes such as 'IR from below', 'agency of the powerless' and the unclear divisions between the international and the domestic (Hurrell, 2016) leaves the discipline largely intact, making useful, 'diverse' additions which are not always useful, or do not always contribute to changed perspectives and paradigms at the heart of the discipline. These shortcomings are highlighted using Sabaratnam's (2011) typology of decolonial strategies.
    
    Author: Candice Moore (University of the Witwatersrand)
  - Claustrophobic Global Governance: Africa in the age of anarchy
    
    In this article, I reconstruct Steve Redhead’s concept of claustrapolitanism to explore the changes in global governance. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the speed of fragmentation of the traditional centers of the international system, and the consequent hemming in of the Global South, specifically African countries, has resulted in the near reversal of Africa's gains in terms of representation and agency. I argue that the apparent re-marginalization of the Global South in global governance is driven not only by the seismic shifts in the international system but is further exacerbated by an endemic global financial crisis, the growth of global populism, and the march towards deglobalization.
    
    Author: Odilile Ayodele (University of Johannesburg)
  - Post-coloniality in Africa-EU relations: contestations over trade and investment, different categories of human rights, and cultural heritage
    
    Relations between the European Union (EU) and Africa started as a colonial arrangement before evolving into a North-South construction that enabled the EU to largely impose its preferences on African actors. Colonial legacies have persisted after decolonisation, yet they are not always acknowledged in mainstream analyses of EU foreign policy and EU-Africa relations. Engaging with the literature on post-colonialism, this paper proposes to 'decolonise' Europe-Africa relations and to do it revisits the partnership between the EU and the African Union (AU) from the early 2000s, when the AU itself was established, to the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, which began less than a week after the conclusion of the sixth AU-EU summit set to mark a significant turning point in EU-AU relations. A number of examples are provided, notably in relation to trade and investment and the EU's ambiguous response to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) or with regards to the frequent clashes over different categories of human rights, including sexual rights, the issue of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, and the return of cultural goods.
    
    Author: Maurizio Carbone (University of Glasgow)
- 155
  Panel / Applied Challenges in peacekeeping operations Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
  - The UN and the Protection of Civilians: Sustaining the Momentum
    
    The protection of civilians (PoC) concept remains contested twenty-three years after the first PoC mandate. This article outlines the progression of PoC mandates drawing on examples from several missions to highlight the diverse nature of PoC and subsequent activities. Current PoC frameworks used by the UN do not assist with determining applicable legal standards. They lead the UN down an unsustainable path that risks diminishing political support for PoC, especially within intense conflicts and following well-documented protection failures. With ever-rising expectations from communities under protection, the UN’s ‘Three Tiers of PoC Action’, and the complexity and dilution of PoC mandates under a whole-of-mission approach. It becomes challenging to determine what missions must do to protect individuals. The paper argues that current definitions and practical applications of PoC have cast the net too wide, presented uncertainties and leave PoC open to attack from member states amidst a political climate of weakened support for collective security action. Instead, the discussion must shift toward a concise and shared understanding of what protection mandates entail for UN peace operations. The paper suggests how PoC can be reconceptualised to distinguish between a narrow and easily communicated minimum obligation to be placed on UN peacekeepers.
    
    Author: Alexander Gilder (University of Reading)
  - Operationalizing human security through protection of civilians? China’s participation in the UN Peacekeeping mission in South Sudan
    
    China’s relationship with human security has always been ambiguous. It has acted as the most vocal objector of the concept – contesting whether an individual could be the referent object of security – while simultaneously contributing the most troops of all five UNSC permanent members to UN protection of civilians (POC) peacekeeping missions. Tracing China’s understanding and operationalization of human security in South Sudan, we ask what China’s participation in UN peacekeeping means for human security. We argue that China pursues a dual-track approach to human security, within and outside UN peacekeeping. As part of the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), China upholds the “whole of the mission” principle, operationalizing human security through local community engagement and provision of protection and empowerment by its military and civilian components. Outside UNMISS, China understands the root causes of human vulnerability in South Sudan as development-related and shifts the referent object of security from local communities to the host state. The latter approach could harm the vital core of human security inverting the hierarchy of security referents from an individual to the state. There exists a misalignment between China’s dual approaches when gauged by the human security principle. We draw primary data from publicly available UN documents and elite interviews with the UN and Chinese peacekeeping officials and academics.
    
    Authors: Ruoxi Wang (University of St Andrews) , Mateja Peter (University of St Andrews)
  - UN Peace Operations and Spoiler Management
    
    The UN is frequently at the forefront of conflict management and resolution in countries wrecked by internal conflict. These efforts are often marred by so-called spoilers. Given the UN's general emphasis on the peaceful resolution of conflict, and its limited possibilities for enforcement, they are in a peculiar position when it comes to devising strategies on how to deal with them. In this paper, I build on existing literature to develop an overview of potential strategies that the UN and other conflict management actors have towards spoilers. I then propose a theoretical framework that sets out conditions that can explain which strategy the UN chooses within the constraints that it operates in. Finally, I test this framework with a comparative case study approach. Although the concept of 'spoilers' has lost some traction in peace studies, I argue in this paper that it is still a relevant analytical category to better understand the UN's conflict management efforts.
    
    Author: Tom Buitelaar (Leiden University)
  - Generating violence?: theorizing how ceasefire monitors lead to ceasefire noncompliance
    
    Many practitioners and scholars argue that the monitoring of ceasefires improves conflict parties’ compliance with their ceasefire commitments. This follows the wider rational institutionalist view that monitoring mechanisms increase the costs of noncompliance, and so incentivize actors to avoid such costs. However, in many cases, ceasefire non-compliance still occurs despite the presence of monitors. While some of this non-compliance is motivated by interests exogenous to the monitors, this paper theorizes that, under certain conditions, and contrary to the dominant arguments in the literature, the presence and engagement of ceasefire monitors can lead to ceasefire noncompliance by conflict actors. I theorize the mechanisms by which ceasefire noncompliance occurs because of monitors, and illustrate their operation through examples from cases from South Sudan and Ukraine.
    
    Author: Aly Verjee (University of Gothenburg)
- 156
  Panel / China in World Politics Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Marianna Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  - Rethinking great-power rivalry: the role of the EU in the US-China strategic competition
    
    US-China relations represent the most consequential bilateral relationship of our time. Yet, this relationship has developed into a state of serious ‘strategic competition’. What is more, when bilateral ties between such heavyweights become increasingly strained and confrontational, third parties, too, are immediately affected. However, such ripple effects should not be seen as a one-way street. Third parties, even if they are lesser powers, can have agency as well, and therefore they may likewise have influence on the US-China great-power rivalry.
    This rationale is certainly accurate for the EU, which itself has the potential to act as a great power internationally. Nonetheless, recent literature on EU-US-China triangular relations has mostly focused on analyzing the effects of the US-China strategic competition on the EU. This paper turns this predominant logic on its head and instead looks into how the EU impacts upon US-China relations. In so doing, the paper loosely employs a constructivist lens to investigate how the EU (and individual member states) perceive the US-China great-power rivalry, how the identities of the US and China are feeding these perceptions, and how these perceptions then shape European efforts to influence the changing contours of the relations between the US and China.
    
    Author: Sebastian Biba (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)
  - Creating a Clear Picture of the Gray: China's Smooth Transition into 21st Century Hegemony
    
    Historically, power transitions have been characterized by major power wars, made up of winners and losers in the international system. The current unipolar world order has avoided major power wars with nuclear deterrence, guided by US hegemony. Much discourse is placed on the future world order, in which the US is a weakening hegemonic power, prepared to cede its position to a rising, revisionist China. That said, how can a power transition be achieved if not through a major power war with nuclear weapons or violence leading to mere pyrrhic achievements? I argue that gray zone activities, as an analytic concept, offer the only realistic opportunity for a successful power transition in the current unipolar world order. Gray zone activities are strategic uses of revisionist powers' political, military, and economic capabilities to undermine more powerful, status-quo states, that do not warrant a military response. I use China as a single within-case study based on available research, open-source data, and official discourse to show that the gray zone concept can explain a modern power transition. In doing so, I establish a new structure for understanding revisionist state capabilities when faced with a status-quo defender with a preponderance of power.
    
    Author: Matthew Ellis (Purdue University)
  - Affective Decision-Making and Resistance to Chinese Coercive Diplomacy: A Three Country Comparison
    
    In this paper we examine how threats from China affect mass attitudes in the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Japan. We integrate theories of emotion into our understanding of coercive diplomacy and empirically test our theoretical expectations using a series of experiments relating to territorial disputes and coercive threats made by the Chinese Government. By applying Affective Intelligence Theory we develop a series of hypotheses relating to how anxiety and anger influence the likelihood of coercive diplomatic success. We find remarkably consistent results across all three countries that Chinese coercive diplomacy leads to a considerable level of backlash by stimulating anger amongst the public. This anger leads to acceptance of risk and drives behavioural responses increasing the likelihood of active resistance to China. While coercive threats tend not to elicit anxiety, where respondents are anxious they become more compliant to China's demands.
    
    Authors: Yihui Zhang (University of York) , Dan Keith (University of York)* , Graeme Davies (University of York) , Seiki Tanaka (University of Groningen)*
  - China’s Subnational Relations: Boosting Partnerships in Asia
    
    Although China is a relative late-comer to the practice of subnational foreign relations, it has quickly become an enthusiastic proponent of the practice. Since the first subnational agreement between Tianjin and Kobe in 1973, there are now thousands of subnational dyads being developed by Chinese provinces, cities, counties, townships, and villages. The purpose of this paper to identify the key aspects of China’s subnational engagements – both in policy/administrative terms as well as how they are operationally expressed. In doing so, this paper intends to illuminate common patterns in the behavior of Chinese subnational authorities as they develop transnational partnerships below and away from the state’s immediate purview. This paper analyses two sets of relations: between Chinese and Japanese dyads and between Chinese and Indian dyads. The Japanese case is used as it represents the oldest set of subnational dyads that China has pursued. In contrast, the set of Indian subnational ties are the latest set of dyads that have been created. Both are also interesting given the highly contentious nature of the national-level ties. An aim in selecting these two cases is to highlight an underexplored policy continuity in China’s international relations. After these relations are reviewed, the paper will explore some of the issues arising from China’s subnational engagements before concluding.
    
    Author: Nicholas Thomas (City University of Hong Kong)
- 157
  Panel / Colonising the Future Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Meera Sabaratnam (SOAS University of London)
  
  Chair: Aggie Hirst (Kings College London)
  
  Discussant: Rahul Rao (Universtiy of St Andrews)
  - A Postcolonial Critique of the Cyber Capacity Building Efforts in Africa
    
    A number of studies on the global politics of cyberspace have examined efforts of several State and non-State actors, yet, only a few try to reflect the position of African States on what securing the cyberspace should look like. Assessment of the limited literature rather buttressed the limitations faced by African countries in having their views expressed in international forums. This scenario is further complicated by the differing capabilities and interest of African countries in cybersecurity, that may result in hindering them from taking a firm position on matters pertaining securing cyberspace. Amidst these, cyber capable actors such as the US, the United Kingdom (UK) European Union (EU), and China are heavily investing in cyber capacity building initiatives in Africa. Postcolonial approach International Relations seeks to analyse issues from the perspectives of those who lack ‘power’ and emphases the criticality of representation and perception in determining what comes to be seen as standard or acceptable. Using the postcolonial theoretical tools and adopting a qualitative methodological approach, this research seeks to explore the likely outcomes of these cyber capacity building projects in Africa especially considering how these African states vote on issues bordering around securing the cyberspace, the opinions expressed and how they swing between the preferences of China and its allies on the one hand and western democracies on the other hand.
    
    Author: Onyendidi Olibamoyo (University of Bath)
  - Narratives of Progress and Coloniality: Lessons from the Colombian Experience
    
    This paper addresses the politics of territoriality of black communities in the Cauca region in Colombia. Since the 18th century, enslaved communities accompanied the process of liberation with proposals of ‘being with territory’. Although suffering modifications, practices of being with territory continued until the 21st century when black and indigenous communities signed the Ethnic Chapter of the Peace Agreement (2016) between the government and the FARC guerrilla. Different narratives of progress created openings and closures that allowed some forms of territoriality to flourish, while others were suppressed with violence. My analysis highlights the relationship between what narratives of progress make possible or visible, and how projects of territoriality interrupt these narratives by causing public disagreements. On this occasion, war was waged against their communities (de la Cadena). The paper sheds light on how in Colombia narratives of progress, supported by war machines provoked the displacement of seven million inhabitants, “de-territorializing people and establishing territories without people” (Almario).
    
    Author: Cristina Rojas (Carleton University)
  - Imperial Debt Formations and the Future of Global Order
    
    This paper elaborates the concept of ‘imperial debt formations’ as political-economic-moral infrastructures of power that organise world politics, not only in a relational sense but a temporal sense. Put straightforwardly, as argued by Di Muzio and Robbins, relations of debt always have a temporal implication and the condition of indebtedness itself can be understood as a form of colonising the future, because it constrains future activity through forward promises of repayment (and more). If we understand empires as not simply machines of extraction, but machines for organising relations of debt and obligation across not only space but time, then we have a better understanding of their relevance to contemporary global ordering practices and emergent counter-formations originating in the Global South. This paper explores how formations of (post)imperial indebtedness organise power relations, and in particular the possible futures of postcolonial states and global order itself.
    
    Author: Meera Sabaratnam (SOAS University of London)
  - Construction and Control of Cartographic Imaginaries in India and China: Kashmir and Taiwan
    
    This paper highlights the enduring importance of cartographic imaginaries on contemporary global politics. Representation of territory is central to the exercise of power by states and shaping the 'common-sense' of the cartographic imagination is at the forefront of this effort. In this paper, we analyse how manifestly disputed territorial claims are both represented and prosecuted by two major non-western powers, India and China. Specifically, we consider how India and China construct and control cartographic imaginaries in the case of Kashmir and Taiwan, entities that present existential anxieties for the two powerful states. We begin by laying out the rationale for why this is a useful comparison despite the differences in the regime type and in the legal and political status of the two regions. Both India and China represent Kashmir and Taiwan respectively as part of their sovereign territorial space in entirety, and they further consider these to be integral and internal to their national cartographic form. In the first part of the paper, we present the diverse ways in which this cartographic imaginary is constructed for both domestic and international audiences through repeated and reinforced visual representations that tie in to dominant historical narratives of possession and return. In the second part of the paper, we focus on how preferred cartographic imaginaries are controlled through punitive responses to any transgressions. Any contesting representation of Kashmir or Taiwan is considered to be inflammatory, provocative, and often results in a range of responses from aggressive public diplomacy to attempted military coercion. Here we highlight the strategies that are pursued by the two states at the domestic and international level across a variety of domains for any such transgressions (for example, media censorship, corporate sanctions, threat of fines, court cases, legislation such as the geospatial information regulation bill). In the final part of the paper, we discuss the implications of such cartographic construction and control for the hegemonic exercise of power by the two states. Evermore, IR scholarship acknowledges the significance of representation in constructing power projections, yet the spotlight is often on Western countries and historical trajectories. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the contemporary construction and control of cartographic imaginaries in the practices of powerful non-Western states.
    
    Authors: Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster) , Mariah Thornton (LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science))*
- 158
  Panel / Emotions, foreign policy and diplomacy Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Ty Solomon (University of Glasgow)
  
  Discussant: Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University)
  - Reputational Fantasies and Geopolitical Anxieties: TRT World on Turkey in Somalia
    
    In 2011, Somalia’s extreme drought and subsequent famine invoked a humanitarian response from Turkey which has since evolved into a comprehensive Turkey-Somalia nation-building partnership. In the existing literature, this partnership is assessed based on economic opportunity, religious and cultural affinity and strategic geopolitical interests, however, up until now, questions regarding the role of subjectivity, anxiety and identity have been largely missing from the debate. To address this gap, this article investigates Turkey’s Somalia policy from a Lacanian ontological security perspective, introducing the argument that Somalia presents an opportunity for Turkey’s reputational fantasies of benevolence to manifest whilst controlling geopolitical anxieties. This article contributes to ontological security studies by looking beyond state narratives to TRT World as a site of subject production. By conducting critical discourse analysis and visual content analysis on articles and videos published from February 2016 to date, this research reveals that TRT World is producing Turkey as an ‘Afro-Eurasian’ state with reputational fantasies of benevolence, grounded in notions of brotherhood with no colonial baggage and a first-mover geopolitical advantage.
    
    Keywords: Lacan, Ontological Security, Fantasy, Anxieties, Visual Geopolitics, Turkey
    
    Author: Jordan Pilcher (Loughborough University)
  - Exploring the limits of emotions in international relations: the cases of trust and revenge
    
    The theorization of emotions and their use as an analytical category has become much more commonplace in the international relations literature. Through the efforts of scholars working on these topics, we now understand that emotions have been a neglected category within the field and that their inclusion helps us to understand critical moments in the making of foreign policy. The purpose of this paper, however, is to probe the boundaries of what can be considered an emotion through the illustration of two concepts generally conceptualized as emotions that play central roles in organized violence: trust and revenge. We argue that it is difficult to proclaim that these two phenomena are emotions, but they are rather conflated as emotions by their emotional precursors or consequences. As such, we show that it might be misleading to reduce revenge and trust to the properties commonly associated with emotions in the literature. In making this argument, we therefore seek to provide a theoretical clarification over what might be considered an emotion in order to focus and refine this debate, and show why this matters to the study of war and conflict.
    
    Authors: Marie Robin (Université Paris Panthéon-Assas) , Vincent Keating (University of Southern Denmark)
  - Memory political deterrence in international politics
    
    Research on deterrence has long occupied a central role in International Relations. Traditionally used primarily within the context of hard military power in inter-state relations, the concept has increasingly been applied to new issue areas ranging from terrorism to cyber. Another stream of research has begun to explore the more social, discursive and ritualistic aspects of deterrence. While such scholarship has expanded our understandings of deterrence, the focus has largely remained on physical security. This paper expands the application of deterrence beyond physical security and applies it to ontological security, and more specifically to mnemonical security—a subcategory of ontological security. In the context of memory politics, the concept of deterrence enables us to understand memory political actions along an escalation ladder containing a variety of different measures, ranging from prescribing and proscribing memory political messages to explicitly punitive memory laws with extraterritorial appeal. We demonstrate the functioning of memory political deterrence with illustrations from two empirical contexts: the deterrent dynamic and the openly extraterritorial zeal of Russia’s imperial memory politics and laws, with a focus on Ukraine; and China’s bilateral and international memory political deterrence attempts toward Japan.
    
    Authors: Maria Mälksoo (Copenhagen University)* , Karl Gustafsson (Stockholm University)
- 159
  Panel / Feminism, gender and nuclear weapons: contemporary debates and new avenues for research Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Jana Wattenberg (Aberystwyth University/American University) , Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University) , Laura Rose Brown (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Emily Faux (Newcastle University)
  
  Discussant: Tom Vaughan (Aberystywth University)
  - Alternative visions of security? An examination of the role of gender within The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
    
    In January 2021, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force. Henceforth, states party to the treaty are prohibited from participating in activities linked to nuclear weapons. The TPNW is novel to the global nuclear order in both the consideration it gives to the gendered harms of nuclear weapons and the significant role of feminist activism that has underpinned its fruition. Yet, at present there is little research to consider how gender is constitutive of meaning within the discourses of the TPNW, and how gender is constituted through these discourses. This paper takes the official discourses of the TPNW as a case study to investigate the work done by gender in shaping meaning about nuclear weapons and security. The paper raises the discursive tensions emerging within TPNW discourses whilst unearthing the resilience of gendered notions of security. It scrutinizes the resilience of colonial and patriarchal logics, whilst drawing on the productive power of discourse to explain how these logics persist. These factors come to bear upon the question of what it means to seriously consider gender in relation to nuclear weapons, examining the extent to which ideas within feminist International Relations scholarship have been transposed into contemporary discourses on nuclear weapons.
    
    Author: Laura Rose Brown (University of Leeds)
  - Base women and beyond: Toward A Decolonial Feminist Research Agenda on Nuclear Bases
    
    The starting point for this paper is Cynthia Enloe’s ‘Base women’ chapter from Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989). Reflecting on the gendered politics of US military bases overseas, Enloe gives a richly suggestive account of the diverse roles of women in both sustaining bases and problematizing them. Surprisingly, this has not spawned subsequent research from feminist IR scholars working on nuclear weapons. Instead the field continues to lean heavily on Carol Cohn’s rightly famous 1987 article unpacking the ‘technostrategic’ discourses of US ‘defence intellectuals’. While I am excited by recent research that extends Cohn’s discourse-analytic approach conceptually and empirically to more diverse political and cultural contexts, I suggest in this paper that we should also consider another research agenda, one that takes inspiration not only from Enloe but also from anti-colonial, anti-militarist scholarship on bases around the world (Lutz 2009; Frain 2017). Such an agenda would entail moving from the discursive to material relations of power, and from policy documents and cultural formations to the physical sites and infrastructure, and the economic, embodied and affective interactions, through which nuclear colonialism is sustained and sometimes contested. The paper sketches out some ways in which we might collectively take this agenda forward.
    
    Author: Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde)
  - More women, fewer nukes?
    
    In recent years, a debate emerged about women in the nuclear weapons field. International organizations, states, advocacy groups and scholars have highlighted women’s underrepresentation and developed initiatives for their inclusion. This paper examines three narratives on women that shape the debate: women are missing, women are victims and women can bring change to the nuclear weapons field. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, it reconstructs the emergence of each narrative. In a second step, the narratives are critically evaluated. The paper argues that each narrative has empirical and conceptual weaknesses. Together, they can also create an ideal- type conception of women and femininity that leaves intact the stereotype of women as advocates for peace and disarmament. This finding makes a twofold contribution to feminist perspectives on nuclear weapons. First, it exposes the gendered dimension of three narratives that shape the debate on women in the nuclear weapons field. It, secondly, emphasizes the importance of reorientating feminist scholarship in International Relations (IR) to study the roles that women have played in the nuclear weapons field. Such reorientation can produce narratives of women who have been complicit to nuclear harms. These narratives can challenge the ideal-type images of women that are currently created in the debate.
    
    Author: Jana Wattenberg (Aberystwyth University/American University)
  - Implementing Change: A Poststructuralist Feminist Analysis of Nuclear Weapons Discourse in the Soviet Union and a Shift to Arms Control and Disarmament in the 1980s
    
    In the 1980s, the Soviet Union transitioned from stockpiling thousands of nuclear warheads to advocating arms control and global disarmament simultaneously reducing its nuclear arsenal. This represents a crucial moment in nuclear history that requires further examination if we are to continue working towards nuclear disarmament and arms control now. Russian invasion of Ukraine further essentializes the importance of strengthening disarmament efforts and continuing to pursue international dialogue on arms control. Explanations based on the rational deterrence are self-fulfilling - if states must arm to defend, then we are stuck in never ending security dilemmas. This paper emphasizes the significance of ideas, beliefs, and identity to states’ nuclear policy. Drawing on a poststructuralist gender-mindful discourse analytical approach, it explores the constructions of Soviet nuclear identity and policy during the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. It argues that the construction and reinforcement of an ethical, cooperative, peace-loving, and paternalistic nuclear identity opens spaces for progressive change in nuclear politics. Our approaches to the politics of global disarmament cannot be solely based on deflating the security value of nuclear weapons. Deconstructing the traditional masculine notions attached to nuclear weaponry is also essential for implementing change.
    
    Author: Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University)
- 160
  Panel / Interdisciplinary research in Security Studies Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: European Journal of International Security
  
  Convener: Tara Zammit (KCL)
  
  Chair: Jason Ralph (University of Leeds and EJIS)
  - The changing character of conflict and the space power dynamic
    
    The changing character of conflict and the space power dynamic
    
    Author: Marissa Martin (King's College London)
  - Service and securitisation: ontological security and the integration of women in the military space
    
    Service and securitisation: ontological security and the integration of women in the military space
    
    Author: Tara Zammit (King's College London)
  - Inspiring Terror: How Right-Wing Extremist Ideas and Violence Reproduce
    
    How does violence reproduce? This project traces the influences of eight right-wing extremists who committed acts of political violence between 2010 and 2022, and who documented their ideologies and motives in published manifestos written in English. These include the individuals behind the attacks in Norway (2011), Isla Vista (2014), Charleston (2015), Christchurch (2019), Halle (2019), Poway (2019), El Paso (2019), and Buffalo (2022). We conduct a citation analysis of these manifestos to create a representation of the social network(s) through which extremist ideas and acts of violence circulate–what documents do violent extremists read and cite, and to whom are they reacting? We determine whether different attackers look to similar or different sources of inspiration and question why this might be. The study also connects our findings to discussions concerning the diffusion of violence, and challenges a narrative that emphasises the “lone” characteristic of extremist violence.
    
    Author: Farah Rasmi (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva)
  - Balance of Initiatives: A New Theory of Power Competition
    
    Is there a state behaviour before balancing? Balance of Initiatives presents a novel theoretical explanation for the phenomenon of state initiatives. This paper argues that initiating is the ideal option for states to ensure survival and increase security in the international system after military build-up. States launch their initiatives to connect with the rest of the world while solving a common problem. The rationale behind the theory is that A competes with others to solve the existing problems of B, and gains influence over B as a result. State initiative is the strategy, and initiating is the behaviour. The puzzle of this paper contributes to the debate on states’ competition beyond military confrontation. The paper employs three statistical regression models to investigate the relationships between the launch of state initiatives and peace and conflict in the international system. Findings suggest that the initiating behaviour is highly promising for states to gain power, while the likelihood of military conflict remains low. In addition, initiating resembles the notion of self-help as helping others is the highest level of helping oneself after military capabilities. The theory of Balance of Initiatives offers states alternative explanations for their decisions in competing for power in the international system.
    
    Author: Selim Yilmaz (University of Nottingham)
  - ‘The EU’s Role in Multilateral Crisis Management: Lessons and Challenges from Multilateral Engagement in the Sahel for addressing international issues.’
    
    The proliferation of increasingly complex, transboundary crises necessitates novel responses and the deployment of significant resources and common approaches to cooperation. It is in this context that the EU has emerged as a key player in the multilateral management of complex global crises. This research examines the EU’s approach to international cooperation in managing crises in Africa’s Sahel region, a region described as a laboratory of experimentation’ for various forms of international cooperation and a convergence point for a myriad of crises from climate change to corruption. Based on a textual analysis of EU/Member state strategic documentation and informed by a series of interviews conducted with EU officials, state representatives and regional civil society from December 2021- June 2022, I argue that the collective contribution that the EU can provide in multilateral crisis management is undermined by a divergence in the conceptualization of multilateralism across EU institutions and member states which conflicts with other partners in the region and in turn negatively impacts the actualization of multilateral efforts in the ground. Secondly, I argue that there still exist challenges in implementing coordinated and inclusive measures with partners working across multiple levels. A better understanding of the challenges faced in multilateral crisis management efforts in the Sahel offers opportunities for academics, policy makers and practitioners both in the region and in other settings.
    
    Author: Stephen Murray (Queen's University Belfast)
- 161
  Panel / NATO and European Security QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Lorenzo Cladi (University of Plymouth)
  - Minilateral Security Cooperation as a Way of Ordering: The Case of NATO
    
    The proliferation of formal and ad hoc cooperation arrangements and the increasing complexity of the challenges and threats in the 21st century highlight the limitations of multilateral arrangements and formal international organisations. Cooperation on security and defence issues has demonstrated the increasing use of informal and small group settings as alternatives to formal multilateral frameworks, to advance and implement policies. European security is a prime example with the existence of a multitude of such informal and formal frameworks as well as club-like groups of like-minded states. Conceptually, the emerging scholarship has focused on different analytical approaches and concepts such as coalitions of the wiling, ad hoc coalitions for military operations and informal intergovernmental organisations (IIGOs). This paper examines the different minilateral groupings as a way of ordering European security relations with a particular focus on cooperation within NATO. The most prominent examples of minilateral groups include the E3, the Quad/the Quint, the Nordics and the Visegrád group. Based on the conceptualisations of informal cooperation and minilateralism, this paper sheds light on the effectiveness of both formal and informal minilateral cooperation arrangements within NATO by investigating their contributions to consensus-finding, policy-formulation and establishing new initiatives. The study of minilateralism and informal arrangements advances our understanding of alternative formats of global governance and cooperation arrangements in European security.
    
    Author: Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters (Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg)
  - Does neutrality still exist? Sweden's joining of NATO in the context of wider security alignment trends.
    
    Sweden has historically been viewed as a neutral nation to remain beyond the reach of its more powerful neighbours. Although Sweden has avoided war for over two hundred years, its neutral status is frequently questioned. It is argued in this thesis that Sweden's non-official standing involves military cooperation and partnership with western nations and NATO member states, providing it with more safety than its public status as a neutral nation. This thesis provides a history of Sweden's stance on neutrality from the late 19th century until the end of the Cold War. As early as World War II, Sweden adopted several terms to describe itself as neutral but ready to act should the Soviets threaten the country. In 1991, Russia was less of a concern to Sweden and its allies, but under Vladimir Putin's leadership, Russia has come to the forefront of NATO's security concerns. Sweden's support for membership in NATO reached its highest point in 2022. With the recent invasion of Ukraine, why did Sweden maintain its neutrality for so long until its recent NATO application? As a non-NATO nation, they have taken every measure possible to protect its borders and militaries just short of joining NATO. According to how it prepares for Russian aggression, one might think Sweden was a member of NATO long ago. In this thesis, I attempt to clarify Sweden's perception of itself as a peaceful state constructed over generations by its leaders and politicians that spread to its citizens.
    
    Author: Joe D'Aquisto (Tallinn University)
  - NATO as a community of values in the multi-order world
    
    NATO has through its long history proved to be remarkably agile and resilient in terms of being able to adapt to a changing global context. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February 2022, not only signalled the end of the global rules-based order and the beginning of a multi-order world, it also placed the Alliance in a new context with urgent demands for adaptation to a fundamentally altered European security architecture and for strengthening its continued role in sustaining the liberal international order. The questions addressed in this paper is what role NATO will play in sustaining the liberal international order in the new multi-order context. Can it deepen its role as a community of shared values whilst at the same time reinforce its role as a military alliance facing a now indisputable Russian threat? What threats and opportunities does the alliance face with Sweden and Finland set to join the alliance? The paper traces NATO’s historical oscillation between different role identities (as a community of values, a defence alliance and as a first responder to crises) and argues that it is time to fully recognise NATO’s fourth role identity as a defender of the liberal international order.
    
    Author: Trine Flockhart (University of Southern Denmark)
- 162
  Panel / Perspectives on Security (Force) Assistance: Principals, Agents, Continuity and Change Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Alex Neads (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Kristen Harkness (University of St Andrews)
  - Security force assistance, at home? Training, loyalty and control in the UDR
    
    The British Army has a long history of providing security force assistance around the world to both achieve its own long-term objectives and the partner’s immediate aims. Throughout this Britain has had to deal with the traditional problems of training, loyalty, and control in their various partnerships. What has been overlooked is the decades long assistance program directed towards the Ulster Defence Regiment, which simultaneously was seen as a part of the British Army but also as something distinct which needed assistance to develop its skills and achieve its aims. This distinct case of domestic security force assistance is possibly unique within the British experience and offers valuable insights into the problems faced by all actors engaged in these activities. By removing the ‘international’ element of this relationship it is possible to remove many of the easier explanations surrounding these difficulties and highlight the core issues which have true generalisability.
    
    Author: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln/University of St Andrews)
  - Dialogue not deference: a new theory of British Civil-Military Relations
    
    Discussions of military innovation and Defence reform should give greater attention to civil-military relations. It provides the overall framework shaping how Defence policy is discussed and decided; it also drives the behaviours of all involved. Civil-military relations creates incentives (sometimes unintended), impose freedoms and constraints, generate norms and even taboos. Nowhere is this more the case than in the UK with its uncodified constitution contributing to tensions and policy compromises. Lack of structure can be useful: ambiguity can provide flexibility. Unclear concepts though create the conditions for perpetually ‘muddling through’. Ill-defined roles and responsibilities within British civil-military relations generate ineffective national security policy and strategy.
    
    Author: Stephen Campbell (University of St Andrews)
  - Making Friends or Obstructing Rivals? Security Force Assistance and the Scramble for Influence
    
    Security Force Assistance (SFA) involves the provision of training and equipment by the armed forces of one state to those of another, and so represents the latest rebranding of an age-old international practice. At heart, SFA providers seek to improve the ability of recipient forces to deal with particular threats of mutual concern. As such, SFA is an inherently political undertaking; it seeks to actively shift the local balance of coercive power in furtherance of the donor’s political preferences. Even so, the political applications of military assistance have traditionally been subsumed in Western military doctrine by the technical challenges of building partner capacity. However, this emphasis on ‘stabilisation’ and ‘upstream capacity building’ is increasingly giving way to a new focus on ‘competing for influence’ against revanchist powers like China and Russia. This paper examines the impact of international competition on the politics and practice of SFA, and in particular the use of military assistance as a tool to ‘block’ the diplomatic advances of global rivals. In so doing, it explores the diversity of recipient reactions to international competition between rival providers of SFA to better understand the impact of SFA-as-influence on patterns of local military effectiveness and domestic political behaviour.
    
    Author: Alex Neads (Durham University)
- 163
  
  Roundtable / Refugees and (In)Security: Learning from Scottish ‘Exceptionalism’? Successes, Failures and Opportunities Lochay, Hilton
  
  Refugees and (In)Security: Learning from Scottish ‘Exceptionalism’? Successes, Failures and Opportunities
  
  Sponsor: School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow
  
  Chair: Ian Paterson (University of Glasgow)
  
  Participants: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Glasgow) , Ian Paterson (University of Glasgow) , Pinar Aksu (University of Glasgow) , Alison Phipps (University of Glasgow)
- 164
  
  Roundtable / Remembering Andrew Linklater Tay / Tweed, Hilton
  
  Speakers: Andre Saramago (Universidade de Coimbra), Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews), Prof. Chris Brown (LSE), Danielle Young (University of Leeds), Mustapha Kamal Pasha (Aberystwyth University), Toni Erskine (Australian National University), Vassilios Paipais (University of St Andrews), Prof. Vivienne Jabri (King's College London)
- 165
  Panel / Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities through Embodiment: Bodies of Resistance (Panel 3) Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester) , Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  
  Chair: Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  - Communicating the horror: wounded bodies, poetry, and resistance in Timor- Leste
    
    The main objective of this paper is to address the use of written text as an element that contributes to creating affective imagery of human rights violations in conflict resolution and post-conflict societies. I argue that through the poetry of Xanana Gusmão and other East Timorese poets, the images of wounded bodies were mobilised to connect the resistance movement to the International Human Rights Movement. This mobilisation aimed to call International Community’s attention to the human rights violations in Timor-Leste. First, I will discuss how the written text, particularly poems, is crucial to creating affective imagery perceptions and producing ‘(re/dis)embodiments’ (Purnell, 2021). Second, I will discuss how the East Timorese Resistance changed after the Santa Cruz massacre, focusing on a human rights rhetoric and giving more emphasis to its diplomatic front. Third, I will focus on analysing the poetry of Xanana Gusmão, leader of the FRETILIN and how it mobilised the wounded bodies as a symbol of the Resistance Movement in Timor-Leste. Gusmão’s poems show us the atrocities committed by the Indonesian government in Timor-Leste by presenting realistic recounts of massacre scenes and suffering from the East Timorese people.
    
    Author: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester)
  - Ocular injuries in the Colombian National Strike of 2021
    
    This paper discusses the themes of debilitation and disablement in relation to the ocular injuries inflicted by the riot police upon protesters during the Colombian National Strike of 2021, a two-month long streak of protests set against the backdrop of Colombia’s transitional process and a wave of social upheavals in Latin America. First, I use the notions of “debilitation” (Puar, 2017) and “slow death” (Berlant, 2007) to discuss drawn-out forms of harm, both material and discursive, that long pre-date and follow the moment of injury, and whose effects reach beyond individual bodies (Clark, 2019; Sharma, 2021). Second, I consider the ocular injury in terms of disability politics: despite the visual impairments that often result from ocular injuries, survivors do not always reclaim disability as an identity due to its perceived associations with vulnerability and trauma, among other factors (Ben-Moshe, 2018; Erevelles, 2011; Puar, 2017, 2021). Third, I address the affective significance of injured eyes, given the rich symbolism attached to vision (including themes of witnessing and recognition), as well as the visibility of the ocular wound as an enduring mark of participation in protest, and one that has been reclaimed as a symbol of resistance by survivors’ groups and activists (Misri, 2019).
    
    Author: Lucía Guerrero Rivière (University of Exeter)
  - Feminist decolonial heterotopias in Peace and Conflict Studies
    
    As soon as life experiences are addressed, resistances are materialised in the body. For this reason, Hyndman argues: “Epistemology is embodied” (2004:315). However, this is not the case for the discipline of International Relations, nor in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. To bridge this gap this research presents a dialogue between poststructuralism and decolonial feminism, in order to break down some of the (post)liberal assumptions. These, far from establishing an environment of peace, (re)produce multiple forms of violence, both epistemically and empirically by denying the plurality of experiences, what is called in these pages feminist decolonial heterotopias. In this sense, daily experiences permit addressing alternative narratives (Mateos & Rodríguez, 2021) which are spatialized in the bodies that resist a ‘continuum of violences’, using Sjoberg’s feminist concept (2014). It is by understanding the body as a legitimate space and scale that allow its conceptualisation as a somateca: “a living political and cultural archive” (Preciado, 2012:1). Adding therefore the spatial dimension is a way to reverse the subjugation of other knowledges (Foucault, 1980). Consequently, its politicisation entails the imbrication of heterotopias (Foucault, 2004), other/alternative spaces of struggle against the (post)liberal model. To illustrate this is presented the case study of Congolese protests against the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in DR Congo.
    
    Author: Judith Jordan Frias (Universidade de Coimbra)
  - Continuities of state terrorism of the Chilean dictatorship: feminist epistemologies to understand Political Sexual Violence in the "Chile Awoke Movement.”
    
    This work analyzes, from a Critical Feminist Epistemology, the continuities of police Political Sexual Violence (PSV) during two historical moments in Chile. First, the cycle of anti-authoritarian struggles against the dictatorship (1973-1989). Second, the Chilean social uprising that began in 2019. PSV was systematically applied against women involved in politics during the South American dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, sexual violence on feminized bodies represented both physical and moral domination of the ‘other’, with the aim of indoctrinating women and preventing them from participating in politics. After the dictatorship, survivors of the dictatorship and contemporary feminist groups alike construct the concept of PSV as serving a dual purpose: personal and political. When the 2019 Chilean uprising began, political violence was reactivated on a large scale, and these activists sought to help protesters through education and support to denounce these acts. This political activism was key to confronting and signifying these experiences, creating a common narrative that empowered people after the systematic violence used by the state to repel them from the protests.
    
    Author: Lidia Yáñez Lagos (University of Manchester)
  - Invisible bodies of war: British servicewomen on covert operations in Northern Ireland
    
    The role of British servicewomen during the Troubles in Northern Ireland is notably under-researched, even in comparison to recent scholarship on the role of women in paramilitary organisations (McEvoy, 2009, Alison, 2004, Ward, 2004, Dowler, 1998). This paper adds to the critical military scholarship on embodied experiences of war and the military body (Purnell, 2021, McSorley, 2015, Basham, 2013), by exploring how women’s bodies have been used as a tool for control by the British Army to sustain the negotiated gender order. By investigating the unique position of female covert operators and examining how their bodies were used, this research will be contributing to new understandings of military geographies and, in particular, how the difference between visible and invisible operations affected control over women’s bodies. This paper provides a much-needed contribution of previously unheard voices to both the history of the Troubles and to Northern Irish history, given new attention following the centenary of the Irish War of Independence (Kennedy, 2016, O Dochartaigh, 2016). Methodologically, this paper will contribute new creative approaches to engaging with the military community through their bodies and uniforms.
    
    Author: Hannah West (Cardiff University)
- 166
  Panel / Technicity in International Relations Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Conveners: Matthieu Grandpierron (Catholic University of Vendée) , Nino Kemoklidze , Rafael Alexandre Mello (University of Brasilia)
  
  Chair: Rafael Alexandre Mello (University of Brasilia)
  - Breaking News: Slime Mould Defeats Poverty!
    
    Over the past seventy years, international development and humanitarian aid have saved hundreds of millions of lives, lifted a billion people out of poverty, and improved the quality of life and prospects for half of the world’s population. These advances, framed within a mechanistic and linear paradigm, are now delivering diminishing returns as global social, economic, environmental, technological, and political systems become massively more interdependent.
    
    Though well established in the physical sciences, Complex System Theory is comparatively new to international development, yet it has the potential to provide funders, implementors, and local partners with an additional lens through which to understand Wicked Problems such as climate change, sustainable resource management, or public health resilience.
    
    Working with four to eight of the world's leading international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) across different sectors and countries, this research seeks to determine if training in ‘complexity’ and the provision of non-linear tools and methods to apply to multivariate development programmes quantifiably increase progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and their targets.
    
    Author: Alexander Knapp (University of Edinburgh Business School)
  - Organizational Decision-making under uncertainty: Planning for Leave-No-One-Behind in complex development agendas
    
    The purpose of the study is to identify decision-making elements necessary for improved ethical and evidence-based decision-making in international organizations for equitable outcomes for the most vulnerable (Leaving No One Behind), through exploration of interactions of variables at individual, organizational and systemic levels in rapidly changing, uncertain and complex external contexts. This is particularly the case in programming for the SDGs where goals, and interventions towards achieving these goals, are closely interconnected and require multi-dimensional/multi-sectoral approaches. Knowledge exists around “effective decisions,” where available knowledge, skills, methods, and deliberate effort at mediating the effects of inevitable challenges, are purposefully applied for impactful decisions, yet the real-world time, budget, political, and cognitive constraints faced by such organizations often makes this difficult to apply. This study adopts a multi-level approach to link features/challenges at macro/meso/micro levels, which usually are studied on their own and little cross-level application of findings. In international organizations (IOs), program/decision quality is assessed through evaluations, which for SDGs poses particular challenges in measuring and attributing impact toward Leave-No-One-Behind unless put explicitly at the forefront of each stage of planning/implementation. The field of organizational behavior has a rich body of research, which this paper seeks to apply specifically to IOs/UN operating at different levels simultaneously–local, national, regional, international, global, while facing multiple stakeholders. In IR, this multi-layered, multifaceted context has been researched paying more attention to the structural constraints IOs face, and long-term strategic development models, at the expense of identifying opportunities/spaces for agency for individuals in decision-making, and how drivers affecting decision-making (cognitive, social, perceptual, motivational, emotional, level of risk tolerance) act not only as limitations but also as opportunities.
    
    Author: Karin Takeuchi (Thammasat University)
  - Practice what you preach: a bibliometric analysis of the sociology of IR journal articles
    
    Nowadays, it is impossible to impress anyone with another study on a local (national/regional) IR discipline. Similarly, studies preoccupied with the disciplinary dynamics on the global level steadily made their way into the disciplinary mainstream. Methodologically, those range from eclectic qualitative case studies to large-scale bibliometric analyses of publication patterns, teaching practices, and scholarly preferences. Substantially, all of them are united by a single underlying issue: disciplinary dominance. The latter takes various forms, such as Core, Western, Eurocentric, US, positivist, and masculine dominance theses. Conventionally, the issue of disciplinary dominance is operationalized through the notion of diversity. In this sense, it becomes associated with patterns of disciplinary homogeneity. The latter range from the methodological preferences of IR scholars to those of geo-institutional affiliations of cited/publishing authors.
    
    This paper, in turn, aims to destabilize the current debates within the sociology of IR by applying the latter’s methodological and substantial orientations to the subfield itself. In particular, this implies a two-fold research strategy. First, in methodological terms, it generates data concerning author-level indicators, citation patterns and brings the two together within a spatial (geo-epistemic) perspective. Second, substantially, it asks a question of how diverse the published dimension of disciplinary sociology is. Following the subfield’s convention, the latter question applies to various issues ranging from the authors’ gender to the institutional affiliation of the most frequently cited scholars.
    
    In such a way, the paper’s primary research purpose is to demonstrate that the patterns of homogeneity characterizing the subfield are similar to those associated with its primary research/critique object, namely the discipline of IR.
    
    Author: Artsiom Sidarchuk (University of Milan)
  - Dependency Theory as Complexity Thinking: A Meta-Approach for Global and Planetary Analysis
    
    The ‘Disciplinary’ structure of International Relations obstructs how the complexity of the international (Kavalski 2015) requires an approach antithetical to subdisciplinary fragmentation and that embraces South-South and non-paternalistic North-South dialogue. I engage two such areas of thought that have not yet spoken but have independently offered meaningful assaults against mainstream IR: dependency theory and complexity thinking (CT). I propose that dependency theory, when understood as a form of CT, can be reconceptualized as dependency thinking (DT) and advanced as a meta-approach to examine a much broader array of global issues, beyond the Latin American economic dependency/development debates. While Western engagement with DT was all but abandoned in the 1980s, its relevance to Latin America and the global (semi-)periphery not only remains but has seen a renewed upsurge in the past decade regionally. In this light, I explore two propositions: first, Marxist historical materialism offers a model for understanding and explaining complexity; second, the Marxist variant of Latin American dependency theory is best understood within a CT framework and offers an enriching perspective for IR, concerning the workings of the global capitalist structure as a form of complex system. This paper’s main contribution lies in explaining that dependency thinking, when applied as a meta-approach, allows IR to incorporate significant onto-epistemological contributions to consider the variability in agency among the different societies in geopolitical and geoeconomic spaces. It furthermore interrogates (im)possibilities for confronting the deep crises of our global and planetary system.
    
    Author: Rafael de Mello (University of Brasília)
  - Quantum Physics and the Cold War: Dialectical Interpretations of Quantum Physics on Either Side of the Iron Curtain
    
    There has been an increasing amount of literature published on a "quantum international relations" in recent years. While the literature is heterodox, there is general agreement that the distinction between the social world and the material world is a relic of Newtonian thinking. Despite this, the role that global political tensions, such as the Cold War, played in shaping our understanding of quantum physics has not been explored. While scientists in the Soviet Union argued that quantum theory fit with a dialectical materialist ontology, Western scientists saw themselves as impartial and “objective” in their interpretations, resolving to focus on the science rather than its philosophical implications. However, there were exceptions. An exploration of the correspondence of Léon Rosenfeld, a Belgian, Marxist physicist who was a close friend and colleague of Niels Bohr, shows that while most of his peers reject the materialism of the Marxist ontology, they are much friendlier to dialectical understandings of quantum theory. By applying a dialectical perspective to interpretations of quantum physics on either side of the Iron Curtain, I argue that persistent tensions between materialism and idealism, realism and liberalism, are best resolved by a quantum, dual-aspect monist ontology which acknowledges the inter-penetration of opposites.
    
    Author: Andrew Milne (University of St Andrews)
- 167
  
  Roundtable / The War in Ukraine and International Law: Challenges, Contestation and Future Prospects 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?
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Rachel Kerr (King's College London)
  
  Participants: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London) , James Gow (King's College London) , Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield) , Henry Lovat (University of Glasgow)
- 168
  Panel / The political economy of financial governance Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Zoe Pflaeger Young (De Montfort University)
  - International tax policy as a signalling device: the case of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS
    
    When seeking to attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), low-income countries face competing demands: Many low-income countries deliberately use preferential tax regimes to attract FDI as part of their economic development strategy, often following the advice of international organizations. At the same time, many foreign investors include the reputation of an investment location and particularly its adherence to ‘good governance’ standards, of which ‘good tax governance’ – the adherence to best practices in tax policy mainly developed by the OECD – is a part, in their considerations when choosing investment locations. This creates a dilemma in the case of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS (IF): while on the one hand participation in the IF may enhance the reputation by signalling adherence to OECD best practices in international tax policy, it requires the adoption of minimum standards that curtail the scope of low-income states to use tax incentives to attract FDI. Building on a mixed-methods strategy comprising panel and interview data, this paper explores how tax policy makers balance these competing demands. It argues that the decision (not) to join the IF is shaped by three mechanisms: business lobbying, the diffusion of ideas by transnational experts, and the domestic politicization of taxation.
    
    Author: Katharina Kuhn (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - The politics of capital mobility in dollarized economies: comparing Ecuador and El Salvador
    
    This article discusses how political factors have shaped capital mobility in dollarized Latin American economies. Despite acknowledging the constraints imposed by the loss of monetary autonomy, I contend that government partisanship and societal pressures still affect the content and form of capital flow management even at the bottom of the global currency hierarchy. The comparative case-study on Ecuador and El Salvador since the late 2000s provides support for this argument. In both cases, administrations led by post-neoliberal left-wing parties increased the level of capital controls, while their right-wing successors gave a new impulse to capital account liberalization. However, the form of these regulatory cycles varied according to the strength of popular pressures. In Ecuador, where social movements had a strong mobilizational capacity, post-neoliberal governments repoliticized macroeconomic management, while their right-wing successor had to follow a gradualist approach in their neoliberal agenda. In El Salvador, on the other hand, given the relative absence of bottom-up pressures, post-neoliberal administrations kept a depoliticizing macroeconomic approach, while the right-wing successor faced little resistance to implementing a radical neoliberal agenda, which included even the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender alongside the United States dollar.
    
    Author: Pedro Perfeito da Silva (University of Leeds)
  - The political origins of financialisation. Central banks, fiscal policy and differential financial deregulation in the UK and Germany
    
    Political economists have stressed the role of the state when exploring the rise of financialisation in the 1970s. In this reading, state actors learned that finance could enhance their economic steering capacity, or solve a social, economic and legitimation crisis in a world of declining productivity. However, the process of financial deregulation was not pursued equally across all Western advanced economies. This article argues that in order to explain differential financial deregulation across cases we have to look into dynamics within the state and consider the local, institutional and experience-driven, political learning of central bankers. Archival material and process-tracing on two paradigmatic cases, Germany, and the UK (1965-1985), show that the Bundesbank and the Bank of England experienced the 1960’s rise of the Eurodollar markets differently with important consequences for future ability and willingness to innovate in the realm of financial regulation. Due to its high level of institutional capacity and ability to enforce deflationary polices, the Bundesbank experienced the 1960s as a period of stability and harmony with the government, inferring that the subsequent 1970s crisis could be resolved through an act of “plugging the holes” of a mostly functioning system. The weak Bank of England, on the other hand, had experienced the 1960s as a highly unstable, crisis-ridden and politically conflictual period. As a result, it came to support radical financial deregulation in the 1970s as a way to assert its power through markets, effectively “sidestepping” the government.
    
    Author: Inga Rademacher (King's College, London)
  - Same but different? Models and the politics of macroprudential policy diffusion
    
    Most scholarship to date has treated “macroprudentialism” as a relatively coherent approach developed through transnational processes of knowledge construction. Once we look at how macroprudential policy has been received and implemented at the national level, however, we are confronted with quite complex patterns of convergence and divergence. This paper argues that to make sense of these patterns, we have to pay attention to how central bankers have converged on an internationally developed and approved set of models and policy tools to bolster their scientific credibility and legitimacy, while simultaneously subjecting imported ideas and scripts to heavy processes of “translation”. Of particular importance in this regard are attempts at endogenisation and contextualisation of models and indicators imported from the transnational realm. The result of these processes is that while we are seeing an increasing convergence in the rhetoric, models, and policy instruments employed by different countries, a considerable divergence in how macroprudential policies are actually used remains. In drawing attention to processes of policy translation, the paper both reaffirms the inherently political nature of the operationalisation of transnationally validated ideas, as well as the importance of looking “under the hood” of supposedly technical models to properly appreciate how national differences are perpetuated underneath a more similar sounding discourse. While countercyclical macroprudential policies in Germany and the UK form the bedrock of the empirical part of the paper, it will be argued that the processes of translation thus uncovered are likely to be relevant to a much broader array of policy domains and countries.
    
    Keywords: IPE, debt, comparative political economy, politics of expertise
    
    Author: Nick Kotucha (University of Warwick)
- 169
  Panel / The pursuit of justice and fairness in climate change and environment agendas. Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Environment Working Group
  
  Convener: EWG Working group
  
  Chair: Susan Ann Samuel (University of Leeds)
  - A Global Court for Climate Change: A Proposal
    
    The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges the world has ever faced, yet the global response has so far been insufficient. In line with climate justice scholars like McKinnon, Page and Vanderheiden, this paper holds that climate change raises fundamental questions of justice – the uneven distribution of impacts, the historical responsibilities of a select few actors and the structural barriers towards change embedded within the global climate regime all require closer, critical examination in order to set the world on the path towards true climate justice. While there has been much debate amongst climate justice scholars about the international global governance framework and its role in (not) addressing climate injustices, there has been less discussion within this literature about the international legal system’s response. This paper addresses this gap by arguing that a Global Court for Climate Change could play a key role in the international community’s response to the climate crisis. Such a Court would be crucial for providing a space for the centralisation of climate justice concerns in a way that the current system fails to do.
    
    Author: Eleanor Wolff (University of Bristol)
  - Unpacking The Right to A Healthy Environment in a Political-Legal Discourse: A ‘Bold Action’ for Climate Justice?
    
    Unpacking The Right to A Healthy Environment in a Political-Legal Discourse: A ‘Bold Action’ for Climate Justice?
    
    The praxis of climate justice and the rise of international solidarity for climate action can be studied through contrapuntal reading of the Right to a Healthy Environment in a discourse of political-legal discourse; observing how the complementarity of law and politics is critical in the successful implementation of the ‘new’ right. In 2021, during the 48th Session of United Nations Human Rights Council, the High Commissioner for Human Rights Ms. Michelle Bachelet stressed the need for ‘bold action’ – where the new human right, the Right to a Healthy environment “serves as a springboard to push for transformative economic, social and environmental policies that will protect people and nature.” The recognition of the same in the UN General Assembly in 2022 – exposes the voting patterns that throws light on the rising international solidarity for environmental concerns – this is key in climate action.
    
    This interdisciplinary article argues how a political-legal analysis of the Right to a Healthy Environment posits a transformative narrative for climate justice – encouraging to analyze Our Common Agenda in its promise of justice to future generation is understood through critical theory. Albeit the Right to a Healthy Environment is not legally binding, the trickle-down effect of the same is promising – for the constitutional recognition of the same in nations, which will lead to stronger environmental laws, better enforcement, enhanced public participation in environmental decision-making and positive outcomes; again, reinforcing the need to study the complementarity of law and politics in this ‘new’ right. The article is divided into three – Part I unpacks the history of Right to a Healthy Environment and role of international politics in it – positing further how this influences climate justice and the norm cascade United Nations brings. Part II studies how the Global North-South voting patterns in UN Human Rights Council in 2021, and General Assembly 2022 informs the rise in international solidarity for climate action. Part III concludes how such a ‘bold action’ is key in representing the third world, particularly its marginalised and oppressed groups in laws and texts.
    
    Keywords: Right to a Healthy Environment, Climate Justice, critical theory, International Solidarity, Our Common Agenda
    
    Author: Susan Ann Samuel (University of Leeds)
  - Green Lairds, Rewilding and Claims to Land: Interrogating the political significance of symbolic masculinities to Land Reform
    
    Concerns are growing in the Highlands of Scotland that the involvement and investment of land-owning classes in rewilding projects marks the most recent manifestation of class and cultural domination of the region. Missing from these conversations is an exploration of how reforming land management without reforming land ownership may also act to preserve hegemonic masculine domination. This paper will contribute to ecofeminist and decolonial scholarship and present early findings on the significance of symbolic masculinities in the rewilding movement to the emerging politics of land in nature-based solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.
    The urgent demands these crises and the necessity to act quickly in line with international responsibilities has generated an impatience for an ecologically reformed rural land management. However the era of nature-based climate solutions has the potential to further deny fragile rural communities the land, and socio-ecological infrastructure, necessary to support socio-cultural life. The tensions embedded in the intersections of the rewilding and land reform movements in the Highlands offer a unique conjuncture to interrogate ecological masculinities and emotive and gendered claims to land in the era of nature-based climate and biodiversity solutions.
    
    Author: Heather Urquhart (University of Manchester)
  - The normalisation of territorial and political disappearance in climate politics and communication on climate change
    
    Climate change and international climate politics are dominated by inequalities (in responsibility, vulnerability, support received and decision power) and calls for climate justice have been amplified in recent years within civil society organisations, vulnerable nations and scholars alike (Sultana, 2022). It is almost accepted as a fact that some territories and nations will disappear as a result of climate change, in small island developing states (SIDS) and beyond (Kelman, 2018; Petzold and Magnan, 2019); however (apart from the inclusion of an aspirational goal of a maximum 1.5 degrees Celsius warming in the Paris agreement to respond to the concerns of small islands), this alone has not been sufficient for climate change and its geo-political impacts to be acted upon.
    
    This paper investigates how the question of survival and territorial and political disappearance is articulated and considered in climate politics, and how some threats have become ‘normalised’, almost accepted, in the mass media. Building on my work on discourses (Germond-Duret, 2022), frame analysis (Germond-Duret and Germond, 2022), as well as and coastal and marine spaces (Germond and Germond-Duret, 2017), the paper explores the representation and normalisation of islands’ disappearance in political statements and newspapers across the globe.
    The findings suggest that the question of survival and disappearance reveals a tension between worldviews underpinned by eco-optimism on the one hand (ignoring threats or relying on adaptation technologies to address them) and ‘eco-defeatism’ on the other hand (deep awareness and passive acceptance of the seriousness of the threats). Both views make threats almost invisible (either through ignorance, or because they are so overwhelming that one doesn’t face them anymore), and prevent pro-active climate policies.
    
    References:
    
    Germond, B., Germond-Duret, C. (2017), “Critical Geographies of the Ocean: Mobilities and Placefulness”, in J. Monios & G. Wilmsmeier (eds), Maritime Mobilities, Routledge, London, pp.25-41.
    
    Germond-Duret, C. (2022), “Framing the Blue Economy: Placelessness, Development and Sustainability”, Development and Change, 53 (2), pp.308-334.
    
    Germond-Duret, C., Germond, B. (2022), “Media Coverage of the Blue Economy in British Newspapers: Sea Blindness and Sustainable Development”, The Geographical Journal, [online ahead of print].
    
    Kelman, I. (2018), “Islandness within climate change narratives of small island developing states (SIDS)”, Island Studies Journal, 13(1), 149-166.
    
    Petzold, J., Magnan, A.K. (2019), “Climate change: thinking small islands beyond Small Island Developing States (SIDS)”, Climatic Change, 152, 145–165.
    
    Sultana, F. (2022), “Critical Climate Justice”, The Geographical Journal, 188, 118-124.
    
    Author: Celine Germond-Duret (Lancaster University)
- 170
  
  Roundtable / What's so Great Power about International Competition? 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.
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Chair: Daniel Nexon (Georgetown University)
  
  Participants: Tobias Lemke (Washington College) , Terilyn Huntington (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) , Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham) , David Blagden (University of Exeter)
- 16:30
  
  Refreshment break: SPONSORED BY WORLD POLITICS REVIEW
- 171
  Panel / Asia and nuclear weapons Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Convener: GNO Working group
  
  Chair: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
  - How Credible Nuclear Security Guarantees Can Backfire
    
    This project explores how credible nuclear security guarantees can backfire. Existing literature posits that the main challenge for nuclear security guarantees lies in making the promise of protection sufficiently credible. If allies do not believe their guarantor will actually come to their aid, they may seek alternate means of protection, including by investing in nuclear infrastructure. Credible security guarantees, on the other hand, are thought to reassure allies. In contrast to this approach, I argue that credible nuclear guarantees can backfire. These guarantees can cause clients to fear that their guarantors will drag them into a precipitous nuclear conflict. Fears of nuclear escalation by their guarantor can drive clients to distance themselves from their alliance or seek stronger independent nuclear capabilities. Using survey experiments and case studies of U.S. alliances in East Asia and Europe, this project explores the risks of credible U.S. nuclear security guarantees.
    
    Author: Lauren Sukin (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - North Korea and the NPT: Discordance between Nonproliferation Norms and Nuclearization
    
    Despite the progress of the NPT over the past half century, North Korea has been a thorn to the global nonproliferation regime in the post-Cold War. Often described as a renegade or deviant state, North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenals have undermined the nonproliferation norms and has brought about new secondary proliferation threats in the international system. Yet, a careful analysis of the interactions between the NPT and North Korea’s foreign policy behavior reveals a much more nuanced and complex relationship. Adopting a hedging strategy, Pyongyang has always regarded the nuclear option as a valuable tool to leverage its position with the NPT and get the international community engaged. Yet, the NPT has not deviated from its initial twin stance of upholding the nonproliferation norms and the complete denuclearization as its main objectives in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear threats. The very attempts to uphold the nonproliferation norms by the NPT has paved the way for Pyongyang’s nuclearization process after its withdrawal from the treaty. This has led to discordance between the two sides that has further amplified over the past two decades as the NPT continues to focus on denuclearization rather than arms control of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
    
    Authors: Kimberly Peh (University of Notre Dame)* , Soul Park (University of East Anglia)
  - North Korea's nuclear identity and implications for the nuclear order
    
    Existing scholarship on North Korea's nuclear ambitions generally attributes its nuclear program to a desire in deterring military external threats (especially vis-à-vis the U.S.). However, seldom have academics looked beyond this framework to consider additional meanings that the North Korean leadership attributes to its "treasured sword". This study adopts a constructivist approach based on the assessment of state identity by exploring the nexus between North Korea’s nationalist ideology and its nuclear program and how the resulting nuclear identity has become intrinsic to the North Korean regime, serving as the preferable means to achieve broader military, political and economic objectives, both in domestic and external affairs. By applying qualitative content analysis on North Korean state media, particularly reports from the Korean Central News Agency during the latest nuclear crisis (2017-2018), this paper traces the evolution of North Korea’s nuclear path and analyses it through the lens of its state ideology. It not only showcases an international perspective by exploring how the country's nuclear identity has shaped contradicting relations with the U.S., but also China and South Korea, but also how it has served as a means to stimulate support and legitimacy for the nuclear program and the Kim regime domestically. This study is relevant in terms of the existing policy debate regarding North Korea and its nuclear status, but also serves as an important call for considering more studies focusing on the impact or influence of domestic issues in understanding North Korea and the country's foreign policy, in the nuclear sphere.
    
    Author: Rita Durão (NOVA University of Lisbon)
  - Nuclear weapons, war, and civilian control: Principal-agent analysis of US non-use of nuclear weapons in the cold war
    
    This paper analyses why the United States did not use nuclear weapons during the Cold War using the principal-agent framework of civil-military relations. Since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, despite facing severe strategic and tactical tribulations during subsequent wars, the US refrained from using nuclear weapons. Existing explanations include nuclear deterrence and taboo theories, however these do not provide consistent explanations for the non-use of nuclear weapons. Instead, the indispensable factor that must be considered in decision-making for the non-use of nuclear weapons is civilian control. This paper demonstrates how US presidents controlled the attempts of US commanders to use tactical nuclear weapons. It theoretically explores how civilian supremacy over the military influenced nuclear weapons decision-making. An analysis of strategic interaction between political leadership and the military through the principal-agent framework provides a clearer explanation for the US non-use of nuclear weapons. This paper employs a historical case study using declassified documents to illustrate the theoretical lens through the cases of the Korean and Vietnam wars.
    
    Author: Juhong Park (University of Bath)
- 172
  Panel / Challenges and contestation of environmental agendas Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Environment Working Group
  
  Convener: EWG Working group
  
  Chair: Kate Matheson (University of the West of England)
  - UKOTs, Contested Spaces and the Environment
    
    The United Kingdom retains possession of 14 ‘Overseas Territories’ (OTs), framed by some as a colonial hangover, but by others as an integral part of ‘Global Britain’. In the post Brexit era, there was an attempt to position the UK as a broader, international player through the re-branding of the UK as ‘Global Britain’. The position of the OTs is, however, contested, with a number of territories subject to territorial claims either from their own residents or from other nation-states. This is experienced differently across the OTs,. In the South Atlantic, Argentina maintains its claim on both the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands.
    
    The development of Marine Conservation Areas (MCAs) alongside pre-existing Exclusive Economic Zones has expanded the UK’s global reach. Although this could be a source of further contestation, the reception of MCAs has been mixed. Based on interviews with policy makers and academics, this paper argues that focussing on environmental goals provides a more value neutral vehicle for negotiations around the future of the contested territories. It also allows debate on Global Britain to move away from parochial, UK goals to a greater, worldwide perspective whilst linking to UN development goals in relation to the protection of the environment.
    
    Author: Kate Matheson (University of the West of England)
  - Pluralising IR : Embracing a vernacular interpretation
    
    This paper takes a critical look at some of the recent arguments that have been put forward in the discipline of International Relations with regards to studying IR differently. While there has been a definite trajectory in these conversations, ranging from Relational IR, Global IR and Hybrid IR, the paper shifts this academic gaze by foregrounding it in the practices which are complemented by empirical observations from specific sites in global south and global North. Dwelling on the notion of critical sites of IR, it foregrounds a vernacular perspective, a term which I argue is important for pluralising International Relations. As a detailed example, I take the case of Meghna River Basin, which is a transboundary river basin - spread across India-Bangladesh border districts. It is also a riverine borderland inhabited by diverse indigenous communities. The focus would be on lived experiences, perspectives, practices and narratives associated with the Tanguar, a fresh water wetland, which has also been declared as an ecologically critical area. How the western/non-western/pluriversal IR translates down to the everyday practices and realities is the central focus of the paper.
    
    Against this backdrop, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the emerging debates on pluralising International Relations. The second section goes beyond theoretical tropes, and highlights the importance of critical sites to emancipate voices and discourses which respond to different ways of understanding on how policies and practices work. The third section develops space for a vernacular understanding and paves way for embracing ‘difference’ in International Relations.
    Methodologically, the paper employs an interpretivist approach relying on interviews and narrative analysis to examine the importance of ‘critical sites’ in IR.
    
    Author: Medha Bisht (South Asian University)
  - An Imagined Green Future World Order with Chinese Characteristics: How different conceptions of a sustainable order affect global climate cooperation
    
    As China increasingly engages in the international climate field, it brings along ideas such as building an “ecological civilization,” a “harmonious society,” and a “community with a shared future for mankind.” These framings point to a specific Chinese vision of a green world order, which has the environment at its substantial core and China at its political center. Moreover, these ideas have been sustained by significant advances in green technologies, which have provided China with significant economic power in addition to the symbolic rhetoric of those framings. Therefore, such concepts not only shape assumptions and worldviews but also have practical political implications, and technology lies at the heart of China’s future vision for a green world order. Amid this context, this research aims to assess how China’s conception of a green world order affects global cooperation in climate change. Theoretically, it uses the sociotechnical imaginaries framework combined with the literature on global climate cooperation. By bridging these two approaches, the research aims to contribute to the theoretical advances in the field of climate cooperation by bringing technology and the different imaginaries of world order to the discussion. Methodologically, it uses content analysis to examine official documents, speeches, statements, and interviews.
    
    Author: Bruna Bosi Moreira (University of Duisburg-Essen)
  - ‘Where We Need Water, We Find Guns Instead’: Debating Discursive Futures on the Brahmaputra
    
    The paper analyses India’s sovereignty claims on the Brahmaputra through the lens of securitization theory. The approach, which looks at the escalation of an issue from normal to emergency politics, allows us to examine the resultant redefinition of the state’s rights and prerogatives. Taking the Brahmaputra river basin as its case study, the paper looks at the multiple hydro-political contexts it presents wherein both India and China have made pitched efforts to assert their respective user rights on its waters. The securitization this has entailed, by way of structural, institutional and discursive mechanisms, has only served to amplify existing patterns of state behaviour. Some of the attendant implications of such securitization in India lend credence to that claim, be it hydro-nationalism, the prioritising of security over governance, the opacity in information sharing, or the disembedding of water from local, socio-cultural contexts. The paper examines why desecuritisation of the discourse on the Brahmaputra becomes necessary and desirable, and how it might be achieved. It argues that this would entail rescaling politics (the notion of ecological democracy being a step in that direction) and by implication, reconfiguring sovereignty itself.
    
    Author: Jayashree Vivekanandan (South Asian University)
- 173
  Panel / Citizenship: A Barrier to Rights and Inclusion? Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Katie Tonkiss (Aston University)
  
  Chair: Katie Tonkiss (Aston University)
  
  Discussant: Phillip Cole (University of the West of England)
  - 'Status Affects Everything': The Everyday Administrative Violence Experienced by Stateless Persons in the UK
    
    When one lacks citizenship and is stateless, one is denied a formal identity, left in a legal no-man’s land, formally excluded from society (Staples, 2007). State registration and the introduction of citizenship documents are cited by international organisations to be the solution to statelessness: Action 8 of the UNHCR Global Action Plan to end statelessness, to “issue nationality documentation to those with entitlement to it” (2014, 26) and the UN SDG 16.9 “legal identity for all”. However, as identified by Brinham “documents do not merely prevent and reduce statelessness; they also produce and reproduce it in multiple ways” (2019, 168). Documents not only relate to whether people are seen or unseen, but how and for what purpose (Brinham, 2019), “lead[ing] to both entitlement and deprivation, security and insecurity, empowerment and control, emancipation and repression” (Chhotray and McConnell, 2018, 118). This paper will explore the everyday administrative violence experienced by stateless persons before, during and after the process to legally regularise their status. This paper will identify the hostile borders encountered in their everyday lives and examine the simultaneous, contradictory affects of emancipation and repression instigated by identity documentation, challenging the view that state documentation provides a remedy to statelessness.
    
    Author: Eleanor Cotterill (Cardiff University)
  - Alternative Futures? Hyper-Local Spaces and the Theory and Practice of Noncitizenship
    
    In 2024, the UN will convene a Summit of the Future focused on global goals including inclusion (‘Leave no one behind’) and international law and justice including ‘legal identity for all’. Scholarship on statelessness and ‘noncitizenship’ (Tonkiss and Bloom, 2015) has already posed questions about this as a future aim and shown how both laws and ‘hierarchies of personhood’ (Kingston 2019) reproduce discrimination and exclusion. In considering this conference’s interest in what international studies can ‘contribute to a summit of the future’, this paper considers people with noncitizen legal identities and what they can tell us about the futures of justice and inclusion. The conference call also encourages IR scholars to think ‘about how the local and global interact’. This is welcome because IR has rarely ‘take[n] seriously enough the hyper-local – such as the home’ (Mac Ginty 2019, p. 235). This paper shows that taking home and the hyper-local seriously leads to alternative ways of theorising and practicing noncitizenship. It looks at hyper-local spaces of exclusion and inclusion, mindful to avoid romanticising the vernacular (Mac Ginty 2019, p. 238). Even so, it considers peace education in schools and conversational English classes as potentially subversive spaces of inclusion and suggests that the UN’s stated interest in ‘a renewed social contract anchored in human rights’ might be more helpful than international law for the future inclusion of people with noncitizen legal identities.
    
    Author: Kelly Staples (University of Leicester)
  - Citizenship, Cross-Border Surrogacy, and the 'Motherhood Mandate'
    
    This paper problematises citizenship as a remedy to statelessness by considering the role of heteronormative ideals of the family which function through citizenship to shape exclusion from secure status. In order to do so the paper focuses on cross-border surrogacy, through which parent(s) may commission a baby to be born via surrogate in another country. While this practice is prohibited in many countries, its legality in a small number means that each year many babies born through cross-border surrogacy encounter significant challenges in acquiring citizenship status. By examining a set of international case studies of children born via cross-border surrogacy, the paper argues that a ‘motherhood mandate’ (a social bias in favour of gestational motherhood) functions through citizenship to exclude children from formal status and, in some cases, the right to family life. In doing so, the paper brings new insights on the impact of heteronormative ideals of the family on access to secure status, and challenges from an intersectional perspective the idea that citizenship, as it is currently constructed, is necessarily an effective and lasting remedy to exclusion from status.
    
    Author: Katie Tonkiss (Aston University)
  - The 'Windrush Scandal', the Hostile Environment and Racialised Exclusion
    
    Identification systems are typically assumed an effective tool in the fight against exclusion. As these technologies improve, states are introducing more effective methods to identify and categorise their own citizens. Drawing upon the initial findings from oral history interviews conducted as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context’, this talk will explore prominent issues of migration, citizenship and forcible return within the context of the 2018 scandal. This affected thousands of UK residents from the Commonwealth, many of whom believed they were already British yet were erroneously informed they held an irregular migrant status and had no right of abode in the United Kingdom. Through analysis of material collated via discussions with senior diplomats and Caribbean High Commissioners representing Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, Belize, Barbados and the United Kingdom, this talk will show that, far from a mistake, the scandal instead evidences serious concerns with the ways in which ‘modern’ European nations are now identifying their citizens and who they are also choosing to exclude as non-belongers.
    
    Author: Eve Hayes de Kalaf (University of London)
- 174
  Panel / Contestations of (regional) hegemony Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: RESG Working group
  
  Chair: James Headley (University of Otago)
  - Understanding and Explaining the Heterogeneous Foreign Policies of Neighbouring Small States through the Prism of Relational Polarity: The cases of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia
    
    The traditional church of IR theories suggests that the neighbouring small states, located in a prima facie same security environment and facing the shared structural constraints stemming from system-forming ambitions of a nearby major power, are expected to behave similarly. However, in the case of the small states of the Caucasus region – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – one may clearly observe the opposite pattern of contrasting foreign policy behaviours, evolving from 2008 against the backdrop of the fluctuation of tensions between the divergent poles, namely Russia and the Euro-Atlantic Community.
    
    Examining the dynamics of polar transformation of the regional political landscape, this qualitative case study research investigates the rationales of contrasting diplomacies of the three non-Western small states of the Caucasus in response to the two external strategic shocks triggered by Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 and 2014 correspondingly. The analysis of characteristic features of asymmetrical relationships that these states dissimilarly developed with the divergent pole powers are explained through the lens of Constellation theory.
    The application of this theory was instrumental to argue that the relational nature of polarity is reflected in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia’s distinct perceptions about their salient environment, which significantly rationalized their position vis-a-vis conflicting poles. This important factor differently affects the external freedom of manoeuvre of these small states, hence making them behave heterogeneously in international politics.
    Along with the empirical contribution, the theoretical input of this research rests on the development of the toolbox of Constellation theory, permitting it to examine the heterogeneity of external strategies of the regional non-pole actors at times of emerging multipolarity.
    
    Author: Eduard Abrahamyan (University of Leicester)
  - My friend’s enemy/victim: China’s policy towards Ukraine
    
    Beijing’s conspicuous silence towards Ukraine has surprised many observers. China’s leader Xi Jinping has not talked to Volodymyr Zelensky since the beginning of the Russian invasion. While repeating its support for a peaceful solution and Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the official media, China has not taken any steps that might demonstrate a degree of solidarity with Ukraine. This attitude stands in sharp contrast to burgeoning pre-war economic ties between the two states. China was Ukraine’s biggest economic partner, while Ukraine mattered to China in such areas as agriculture or advanced military technology.
    The proposed paper analyses factors driving Beijing’s attitudes and policies towards Ukraine since February 2022. It argues that the pre-war combination of political distrust and failed strategic projects defined China’s policies at the time of the crisis. Despite growing economic ties, the Chinese elite looked at Ukraine’s post-Maidan Revolution governments with suspicion, as brought to power by the Western-led conspiracy. Moreover, strategic projects that had the potential to bring Ukraine and China closer together failed to materialise. The annexation of Crimea knocked out Ukraine as a link in the Belt and Road Initiative. China’s attempts to purchase leading aircraft engine producer, MotorSich, were blocked by Kyiv under US pressure.
    
    Author: Marcin Kaczmarski (University of Glasgow)
  - From Partner to Adversary: Russia and the Western Statebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina
    
    Moscow’s war on Kyiv turned international attention to Russia and Ukraine. Yet Moscow’s revisionist efforts go beyond Ukraine to the Balkans. Until recently, post-war state building in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been one of the few areas where the West and Russia managed a delicate and longstanding partnership. Western actors had the primary role in directing international statebuilding efforts. With its seats in the UN Security Council and the Peace Implementation Council for Bosnia and contributions to the UN missions, Russia also had a significant role in the process. However, this partnership ended as Russian assertiveness reached another climax when Moscow withdrew its support for international oversight in the country. Many argue that Western appeasement toward Russia had a role in encouraging Putin to follow his revisionist agenda in Ukraine, Bosnia and beyond. Moscow’s policy towards Bosnia presents ample opportunities to observe whether this argument holds or is just a post hoc explanation. Relying on primary sources, this study reveals a pattern by identifying where the Western and Russian agendas in Bosnia merged and diverged, how both sides managed such divergences and how the nature of these divergences evolved. It will be helpful to assess whether the West appeased Russia and what could have been done to prevent Russia from pursuing a revisionist path.
    
    Author: Abdullah Kesvelioglu (University of Edinburgh)
  - International Order, War, and the Struggle for Symbolic Capital: the Global South between Russia and the West
    
    This paper applies Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic capital’ to developing relations between the West, Russia, and the global South in light of the ongoing Ukraine war. Conceptualising International Society as an anarchic meta-field with its own distinct relationships of power and meaning, it first defines symbolic capital within this high-politics realm as a state and its “state nobility’s” ability to command prestige and recognition among its - formally sovereignly equal - peers. It subsequently examines the conventional sources of symbolic power within the Liberal International Order – including legitimate and stable domestic orders and economic success – and their relative shifts since the 2008 financial crisis. Both the West’s and Russia’s adoption of - at times contradictory - anti-colonial discourses in their justifications for practices in Ukraine are then posited to be attempts to mitigate – in the Western case – or exacerbate – in the Russian case – the compromising of the West’s near-monopoly on symbolic capital in the Liberal International Order, particularly among states in the global South. The paper concludes by surveying the reactions of states in the global South to both antagonists’ claims, in debates in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly among other international fora.
    
    Author: Kevork Oskanian (University of Exeter)
  - Russia, China and UN Peacekeeping
    
    While UN Peacekeeping was previously a 'safe area' it has now increasingly become an arena for norm contestation by Russia and China. China is more likely to vote in favour of peace support operations than Russia, which generally abstains on such resolutions. China's participation in MINUSMA shows that China is increasingly committed to international security. China endorses partially the ~R2P principle, and has also stopped criticising Western powers for intervening in Africa to stabilise certain regions via the new stabilisation template. China's participation also serves to position China as a responsible stakeholder rather than a revisionist power. Russia by contrast continues to position itself as a dissatisfied power pushing back on Western dominance of the UN agenda: for example it opposes the inclusion of gender components in peacekeeping mandates.
    This paper considers the role of Russian and Chinese discourses on UN peacekeeping in the context of their wider relations with both the Global South and the West.
    
    Author: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
- 175
  Panel / European Security beyond its borders Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters (Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg)
  - The Middle East North Africa migration crisis: mixed messages in the EU’s AFSJ/CSDP response
    
    For more than a decade the EU has struggled to address the migration crisis emanating from the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. CSDP missions since 2015 (Sofia, Irini) have saved hundreds of lives but have been subject to criticism for mixed messaging between a securitisation role and humanitarian intention. The mix may be inevitable and understandable but what measures would enhance both the role of the EU’s AFSJ and the CSDP humanitarian response and gain support from member states? The paper analyses the EU’s successes and shortfalls in addressing an ongoing crisis, and one overshadowed in recent times by the Russia Ukraine war and the ensuing energy crisis.
    
    Authors: Neil Winn (University of Leeds)* , Simon Sweeney (University of York)
  - The Russo-Ukraine war: strengthening the transatlantic bond?
    
    To what extent has the Russo-Ukraine war strengthened the transatlantic bond? There is broad agreement that the European states and their American counterpart share a bond from an economic, cultural and certainly security point of view. However, an analysis is lacking on the actual strength and endurance of the bond. In recent years, European states have often feared a distancing of their America counterpart. The Russo-Ukraine war of 2022 offers a very important case study to tackle this question because the Russo-Ukraine war allegedly contributed to (re) strengthen the bond between the European states and their American counterpart. This paper argues that whilst the Russo-Ukraine war contributed to bringing the European states and their American counterpart closer together. However, the bond between the European states and their American counterpart continues to rest upon a familiar pattern in their relationship which has contributed to making the bond possible, albeit problematic. This is the power imbalance between the US and the European states, which makes it difficult for Europeans to have a viable alternative to siding with the US. I illustrate this argument with reference to the run up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
    
    Author: Lorenzo Cladi (University of Plymouth)
  - Marching into Battle or Irrelevance? EU Rapid Reaction Capabilities after the war in Ukraine
    
    The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the EU Member States’ failure to independently evacuate their citizens from Afghanistan in 2021, has brought the EU’s rapid reaction capabilities to the fore. Within the Strategic Compass, the EU sets out a proposal to create a Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC). However, the EU Battlegroup Concept, on which it is based, has been at full operational capacity since 2007 and has never used. This paper argues that understanding the lessons from the Battlegroups will provide significant insights into the RDC and whether it will be deployable. Hence the research questions are: 1. What lessons can be drawn from the EU Battlegroup Concept? 2. How far does the EU Rapid Deployment Capacity learn the lessons of the Battlegroups and thus avoid the challenges afflicting them? The paper uses the concepts of norms and path dependency to underpin the analysis. The research has important implications for the EU’s rapid reaction capacity and for the capability initiatives currently ongoing in CSDP. After all, if the political willingness is not there to engage in the process of developing and deploying capabilities, then this will lead to a sub-optimal CSDP which fails to have ‘strategic autonomy’.
    
    Author: Laura Chappell (University of Surrey)
  - War in Ukraine and the End of Normative Power Europe
    
    The argument that will I put forward in my paper is that the European Union (EU) can no longer be conceptualised as a normative power in international relations, and especially in relation to Russia and Eurasia following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. That the EU is a normative power has long been accepted by scholars and even EU policy officials because the concept painted a compelling image of the EU’s distinct international identity, which has obviously been different from the identity of the nation states. This distinctiveness, as Manners explained in his original conceptualisation, stemmed from the EU’s ‘historical context, hybrid polity and political-legal constitution’ (Manners, 2002, p. 240). The key to Manner’s claim to originality was his reconceptualisation of the EU’s global role away from the civilian – military dimension towards a normative one, entailing the ideational power over opinion, rather than stemming from material capacities. While this conceptualisation has performed a valuable role of making sense of the EU’s unique international security identity, I argue that we have clearly reached its limits when assessing the EU’s approach to the geopolitics of Russia and Eurasia.
    
    Author: Kamil Zwolski (University of Southampton)
- 176
  Panel / Everyday affects of international politics Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow)
  - Don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining: Brexit, basic trust, and ontological security in Northern Ireland
    
    Since Brexit, the UK’s credibility as a reliable and trustworthy international partner has increasingly come under question as a result of their repeated attempts to renegotiate or avoid complying with various aspects of the Brexit deals agreed with the EU, particularly as they pertain to relations between the UK, EU, and Northern Ireland.
    
    Less consideration, however, has been given to the impact of Brexit on trust at the level of the everyday between the UK government and individuals and social groups. Drawing on interviews with UK, Irish, and EEA nationals living in Northern Ireland, this article engages in a critical reappraisal of Anthony Giddens’ original conceptualisation of basic trust in ontological security studies. Specifically, by engaging with interlocuters who have different forms of citizenship-relation with the UK (British/Irish/Both/EU), this paper seeks to better understand the ways in which a singular event (Brexit) engenders different disruptions to basic trust and to ontological security more broadly, and the implications of this for social cohesion.
    
    Author: Ben Rosher (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Ontological security and everyday defence mechanisms
    
    How do individuals navigate critical situations international politics and mitigate the anxieties they elicit in everyday life? Giddensian literature on ontological security would suggest that (collective) internalised routines and narratives provide a sense of certainty and stability that enable individuals to “go on” with everyday life. This article adopts a Kleinian psychoanalytical approach to show that when faced with anxiety about their internalised narratives being ruptured, individuals do not necessarily fall into “chaos”, as Giddens suggests. Rather, they rely on psychodynamic defence mechanisms such as denial and idealisation to protect their sense of Self and, by extension, maintain a sense of ontological security. The article builds on direct engagement with citizens and investigates everyday practices to cope with anxiety in relation to international politics through the analysis of individuals’ reactions to political cartoons from participants of 18 focus groups in three European countries. This provides a deeper understanding of individuals’ everyday defence mechanisms in response to critical situations at the international level that disrupt their understanding of collective narratives of being and belonging. The article thereby advances our theoretical and empirical knowledge of how international politics can affect individuals' everyday life and sense of self as well as shape political behaviour and attitudes.
    
    Author: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Warwick)
  - Affected bodies in contemporary militarism
    
    This paper explores the feelings and affects of audience members of three sites of ‘cultural militarism’: the Invictus Games, Warrior Games, and the Ms Veteran America contest. Drawing on ethnographic research methods, the paper tracks the affective economies of the contests, detailing how certain feelings, emotions and affects were heightened, while others were marginalised or completely excluded. Forwarding a conceptual argument that militarism can be understood as felt, and is experienced as both pleasure and harm, the paper details how contestants’ feelings of/about militarism across the three sites rely not just on their own participation and affective investment in militarism, but also on the broader ‘affective atmospheres’ of the events and the ‘communities of feeling’ generated by them. Understanding affect as not pre-discursive, but intimately entangled with the social, the paper will argue that these atmospheres and communities rely on, and reproduce, particular gendered, racialised and (neo)imperial imaginaries, and that audience pleasure in the events intermingles with the physical, emotional and affective depletions produced by militarism.
    
    Author: Julia Welland (University of Warwick)
  - “Refugee Fatigue”: emotions, attitudes and discourses towards Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Romania
    
    Images of bombarded cities, casualties and large groups of people queuing for hours to flee Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion generated a wave of emotional support and an outpouring of solidarity. In countries neighbouring Ukraine, citizens, NGOs, and governments mobilized to provide immediate humanitarian assistance at the border and convoys of food, medical supplies, and equipment into Ukraine. As months went by, the war’s consequences are gradually felt by Europeans, confronted with rises in energy prices, inflation, an overall cost of living crisis and over 7 million Ukrainian refugees estimated in November 2022. Media and NGOs have been reporting since summer of “refugee fatigue” and waning support for Ukrainian refugees across Central and Eastern Europe: rising tensions were especially recorded in Poland and Romania linked to perceptions of unfairness regarding the allocation of more resources towards refugees than towards local populations.
    We aim to trace the evolution of attitudes and discourses towards Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Romania since February 2022 to understand and map the rise of anti-refugee sentiment and tensions. We draw on the scholarship of emotions in politics and IR (Bleiker and Hutchison 2014, Koschut et al 2017) and call for more engagement with political psychology, especially cognitive and behavioural approaches, to look at the role of emotions in shaping representations through communication and processing of information. Emotions influence judgments and decisions by affecting the depth of cognitive processing of information (Kahneman 2011). Furthermore, we use theories of attitude change (Elaboration Likelihood Model) developed by Petty and Cacioppo (2012) to explore attitudes and behaviours of both newcomers and hosts and their evolution over time.
    Such insights are much needed as migrants and refugees have been often instrumentalized in exclusionary, highly dividing political discourses that vilified them across Europe; in turn, feeling marginalized and excluded, they have either disengaged or have acted as disruptors, for example by casting votes for far-right parties (Dolea 2022).
    
    Authors: Alina Dolea (Bournemouth University) , Dawid Pekalski (Bournemouth University)
  - Beyond Repression: Ideological Affective Disciplining of Marginal Voices in Azerbaijan
    
    ABSTRACT
    On the 27th of September 2020 war began between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. There was a surge in patriotism, and it became evident that most of the Azerbaijani population supported the war. Nonetheless, some alternative discourses emerged: in late September a group of 17 Azerbaijani leftists signed and anti-war manifesto which condemned the war, while in early October some Azerbaijanis signed a peace statement which called for immediate secession of hostilities.
    
    However, these anti-war voices subsequently faced strong backlash by common people who were in favour of the war. Hence, the people-to-people backlash acted as a force of affective disciplining. On the other hand, while the State did engage in coercive disciplining, it did not reach the level of violent repression.
    
    With this research, I therefore study if and how non-conforming voices can be pushed towards conformity by common people or society, who act as an extension of the State Apparatus. Emotions - like fear, shame and hopelessness - can mediate this disciplining process. Indeed, anti-war voices went directly against the national feeling rules which required being jubilant and proud for the on-going war. Given the will to totality of the State’s feelings rules and ideas about Karabakh, it possible to discuss this process as resistance to a dominant ideology. Hence, the power of authoritarianism must not be studied solely by looking at its direct repression, but also at its more diffused affective discipling through the inclusion of citizens within the State Apparatus. Finally, I also investigate the affective mechanisms that make non-conforming voices resilient and resistant to disciplining.
    
    Methodologically, I use post-structural insights and conduct in-depth interviews with anti-war voices to understand the psychological and emotional pressure they faced. Ultimately, this should help understand how non-conforming voices can be pushed to conformity towards the dominant ideology not just through oppression by the State, but also through affective disciplining by common people and society.
    
    Author: Cesare Figari Barberis (Graduate Institute of Geneva)
- 177
  
  Roundtable / Feminist Silences in International Conflict: Of What Do We Speak and to Whom? Waverley, Marriott
  
  xxxxxx
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster)
  
  Participants: Sameera Khalfey (University of Birmingham) , Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster) , Jamie Hagen (Queen's University Belfast) , Shirin Rai (University of Warwick) , Sophia Dingli (University of Glasgow) , Caitlin Biddolph (University of Sydney)
- 178
  Panel / Feminist and environmental world politics: challenges, opportunities and inconsistencies Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  - Trading feminist principles: WPS and corporate interests in feminist foreign policies
    
    Along with National Action Plans, feminist or gender-sensitive foreign policies are a potentially valuable mechanism for states to implement the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. It is also in the design and implementation of such policies that the contradictions between feminist principles and states’ interests relating to, for instance, economic growth through trade expansion become apparent. As such, the foreign policy arena can offer significant, evidence-based insights into the scope for states’ engagement with the WPS agenda.
    
    Against this background, the proposed paper seeks to examine whether, and how, feminist foreign policies have contended with the growing importance of corporate actors in international security. It proceeds in three parts. First, the paper reviews the WPS policy and scholarly literature that has considered the significance of corporate interests in contemporary international security. Second, it evaluates the ways in which feminist foreign policy – in principle – can incorporate the opportunities, and address the challenges posed, by corporate actors in realizing the WPS agenda. Third and finally, the paper assesses existing feminist foreign policies vis-à-vis their attention to corporate actors.
    
    Author: Soumita Basu (South Asian University)
  - Towards Feminist Peace? Implementing Gender Norms at the Global-Local Nexus in Kosovo
    
    This paper explores how global norms addressing gender equality are mainstreamed, operationalised and implemented in post-conflict states by international organizations (IOs), taking the international community in Kosovo as the primary case study. Research has shown that war and state collapse can serve as a window of opportunity and give rise to opportunities for women to participate in social and political spaces in ways in which they were previously unable to. IOs and their entities tasked with implementing global normative commitments at the global-local nexus constitute an important node in these potential processes of post-conflict transformation. Surprisingly, however, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted thus far to an exploration of the translation processes and implementation practices of these norms by international organizations at the ground level of practice. To what extent do international gender norms, enshrined in global policy frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), travel to post-conflict settings and affect everyday practice?
    
    To answer this question, this paper adopts a feminist approach to norm diffusion, focussing on a specific sub-set of gender equality and women’s rights norms – United Nations (UN) norms that relate to women’s economic empowerment – and their implementation in the case of Kosovo. Drawing on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, this paper engages in a qualitative study of Kosovo, to analyse the processes through which the international community has implemented global norms on women’s economic empowerment. Despite over two decades of efforts and interventions in the name of women’s economic empowerment, there has been little improvement in women’s material lives as reflected in their participation in the formal labour market. It is the process leading up to this outcome – the practices of domestic norm implementation involving interactions between various norms, stakeholders and domestic structures – that this paper seeks to explain. The paper brings together scholarship on feminist political economy, IR norm diffusion and international organizations to shed light on the oft-neglected economic aspects of peace- and state-building interventions and how these interact with women’s lived realties.
    
    Author: Lucy Maycox (University of Oxford)
  - Exploring gendered logics of climate change security narratives in UK and US climate change discourse
    
    Climate change has been increasingly conceptualised and presented as a security risk within domestic and global governance. While securitisation responses to climate change have been critiqued within a growing body of climate change security literature, the gendered logics which structure climate security discourse deserve further attention. As climate change is understood to compound gendered inequities in society, with women and girls often more vulnerable to climate change due to intersecting social inequalities, understanding how prominent climate change security discourses are gendered is imperative for feminist foreign policy concerns. This paper examines the climate change and energy security narratives and discourse of US President Joe Biden and former UK Prime minister Boris Johnson from January 2021 to July 2022, covering the COP 26 Summit in Glasgow and key moments of the beginning of the 2021 global energy crisis, to uncover the presence of gendered logics. It argues that if we are to take the proposals of the United Nations Secretary-General seriously, particularly the proposals to place women and girls at the centre and to protect our planet, the specific ways in which climate change is articulated as an issue of security must be considered.
    
    Author: Sian Perry (The University of Sydney)
  - Gendered Climate Security in the Blue Pacific: New Transformative Horizons for Feminist Foreign Policy
    
    The transformative potential of Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) remains elusive despite its rising momentum. First conceptualised as a mechanism for integrating gender equality into foreign and domestic affairs, FFP is now a contested paradigm (Thompson, 2020), balancing ethical ideals and pragmatism (Aggestam & Rosamond, 2019) with divergent normative underpinnings (Nylund et al., 2022). Largely grounded in liberal feminism, FFP ignores gendered power structures and colonial histories (Achillleos-Sarl 2018). Critical scholars assert that adopting a postcolonial intersectional lens could help FFP realise its potential as a transformative feminist agenda (Nylund et al., 2022). This paper seeks to understand the extent to which the Blue Pacific’s regional climate response constitutes a postcolonial, intersectional normative approach associated with a transformative FFP. This paper uses an ethics of care theoretical framework first conceptualised by Aggestam et al. (2019) to conceptualise FFP as relational, contextualised and gendered. For this paper, I will adopt a case study analysis of regional Pacific forums and conduct semi-structured interviews with Pacific gender experts and grassroots feminist organisations. I anticipate that my research results will show that the Blue Pacific’s regional climate response and the postcolonial, intersectional experiences of climate security will align with the transformative underpinnings of FFP. This research will contribute to the nascent postcolonial, intersectional FFP literature through a bottom-up feminist methodological approach that supports a decolonial and localised understanding of gendered peace and security.
    
    Author: Elzanne Bester (Victoria University of Wellington | Te Herenga Waka)
- 179
  Panel / Governmentality and Space Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: PPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Jeffrey Whyte (Lancaster University)
  
  Discussant: Jeffrey Whyte (Lancaster University)
  - Feminist decolonial heterotopias in Peace and Conflict Studies
    
    As soon as life experiences are addressed, resistances are materialised in the body. For this reason, Hyndman argues: “Epistemology is embodied” (2004:315). However, this is not the case for the discipline of International Relations, nor in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies.
    
    To bridge this gap this research presents a dialogue between poststructuralism and decolonial feminism, in order to break down some of the (post)liberal assumptions. These, far from establishing an environment of peace, (re)produce multiple forms of violence, both epistemically and empirically by denying the plurality of experiences, what is called in these pages feminist decolonial heterotopias.
    
    In this sense, daily experiences permit addressing alternative narratives (Mateos & Rodríguez, 2021) which are spatialized in the bodies that resist a ‘continuum of violences’, using Sjoberg’s feminist concept (2014). It is by understanding the body as a legitimate space and scale that allow its conceptualisation as a somateca: “a living political and cultural archive” (Preciado, 2012:1).
    
    Adding therefore the spatial dimension is a way to reverse the subjugation of other knowledges (Foucault, 1980). Consequently, its politicisation entails the imbrication of heterotopias (Foucault, 2004), other/alternative spaces of struggle against the (post)liberal model. To illustrate this is presented the case study of Congolese protests against the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in DR Congo.
    
    Author: Judith Jordà Frias (University of Coimbra)
  - Political memoirs in Iraq: Discourse analysis frameworks for state-building
    
    Poststructuralist thought has pushed the conceptualisation of state and society as constantly interacting with, and part of, social discourse. This places political memoirs in an important position; they have the ability to give insight into the core makings of the state. Iraq’s modern history has seen several publications, spanning the British Mandate and the Hashemite constitutional monarchy era. The 1921-1958 timeframe has been analysed with multiple claims and arguments made about the reasons for the failure of the Iraqi state apparatus. However, political memoirs have seldom been used beyond providing shallow confirmations of historical events.
    
    Utilizing poststructuralist discourse, viewing the State through social interaction, these memoirs offer an opportunity for understanding diverse conceptualizations of Iraqi state apparatus. I couple memoirs with discourse analysis to demonstrate how politicians like Ahmad Mukhtar Baban and Tawfiq al-Suwaydi were speaking at the intersection of Lacanian articulations of desire and ‘symbolic order’, as state leadership. In turn, I aim to open avenues into dissecting language, how events are portrayed, and that which is not written. Specifically, the research attempts to better understand the way in which the politicians interpreted their positionality as leaders of the state. In line with Epstein’s (2011) argument that ‘while the state does not speak it is talking’, the memoirs of Baban and al-Suwaydi are considered to analyse the perdurant (and at times violent) discourses upon which the Iraqi state was being built on.
    
    Author: Abdulla Al-Kalisy (St Andrews University School of IR)
  - Surveillance and suspicion: Cold War security at the US Passport Office
    
    During the Cold War, collaboration between the US Passport Office and US intelligence organisations was a recurring sensational topic in the popular press. In particular, reporting speculated on the relationship between Passport Office Director Frances Knight and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, between whom there was reported to be a direct ‘hotline’.
    
    This paper takes the security imaginaries constructed in such reportage as its starting point, contrasting these with the more mundane - but also more total - practices of surveillance reported by contemporary Passport Office workers. Considering state archives alongside oral history interviews with State Department workers produces a fuller picture of the US Passport Office’s importance for state security, and its role in broader surveillance infrastructures. I consider how the Passport Office not only accumulated an unprecedented repository of American citizen data, but actively worked to facilitate broader state use of this data in line with Cold War security concerns.
    
    Author: Catriona Gold (University College London)
  - Continuities of Care and Control: Fungibility of Exclusionary Space in an East German City
    
    This paper contributes towards the burgeoning literature dealing with the spatial governance of political and social Others. It specifically interrogates continuities of exclusionary policies pursued at particular spaces across different historical eras. It starts empirically by interrogating history of a building complex at East German city of Leipzig. The facilities in question have been used as a “workhouse” for homeless population in pre-WWI era, a Nazi forced labor camp, a psychological and venereological clinic by the communist regime, and since 2012 as an accommodation for asylum seekers. To make sense of this genealogy, I develop the notion of fungibility of exclusionary space which consists of the space serving the containment of social and political outsiders across different historical eras and political regimes. Drawing on historical records, official documents, and interviews with civil society actors, I argue that this fungibility is defined by mundane and unremarkable physical features of the site coupled with affective associations which posit it as a space which is outside of the fabric of the everyday life in the city.
    
    Author: Jakub Zahora (Charles University)
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  Panel / Innovating Feminist Theory and Practice within the Middle East Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Bronwen Mehta (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick)
  - An activist feminist ethnography through Twitter: Together we fight as fellows
    
    This paper examines underexplored online ethnography through Twitter and its intersection with feminist activism. It draws upon my experience conducting a feminist activist ethnography through the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi and Yemeni Feminist Twitters. I argue that long-term activism and online ethnography can enhance the researcher’s transparency, build rapport with various feminists, and emotionally connect them. Affects developed in online spaces can potentially forge friendships. However, friendships may not sustain due to the multiplicity of voices and discourses, which reveal divisions around strategies and priorities. Therefore, I propose approaching other activists as “fellows” rather than friends per se. This shift in the relationship gives the researcher and informants a critical space for constructive debate while sustaining mutual respect and a sense of commitment to the cause itself. It opens avenues for collaboration and unconventional methods of knowledge co-production. As fellow activists, the researcher and the researched can face many online challenges. An activist fellowship approach promises solidarity and support, bridging our differences and disagreements.
    
    Author: Balsam Mustafa (University of Warwick)
  - The pitfalls of ethics procedures: the tension between ethics and legal liability
    
    In this presentation, I reflect on ethical approval processes at universities in the Global North for qualitative research on and in conflict contexts. Drawing on own experience and semi-structured conversations with some PhD colleagues researching fragile and conflict-affected contexts in the Global South, I examine the tension between ethics and liability and the ways in which ethics procedures risk turning into a bureaucratic box ticking exercise, if not also a tool of exclusion and silencing of those most affected and marginalized. The paper addresses questions around autonomy, agency, ethics of care and justice in doing research in and with communities affected by conflict and human rights violations.
    
    It asks the following questions: 1) whose interest is at the heart of the process? 2) what assumptions demarcate the assessment and how that direct, and/or dictate, the research design? And 3) what measures are undertaken to ensure appropriate application of the pre-ordinate ethics?
    
    Through re-posing some of the basic questions, the paper aims to revisit some of the commonsensical ethical dilemmas while at the same time argue for the integration of a Deleuzian understanding of immanent ethics into ethical clearance regimes at the universities.
    
    Author: Roua Al Taweel (Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University)
  - “Solidarity across borders”: The construction of regional solidarities in the face of femicide
    
    In the wake of a string of femicides across Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria in 2022, we saw gender activists mobilising online. This social media mobilisation took many forms, from telling the stories of the specific murdered women, to calling for a regional women’s strike on July 6th, 2022. Images of the victims were frequently placed alongside each other, captions listed the women’s names in combination, references were made to ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘our women’ in the collective, strike organisers utilised the slogan “Taḍāmun ‘abir lilḥadūd” (Solidarity across borders). These acts cultivated a sense that these murders were part of a broader gendered struggle. This paper explores how regional solidarities were constructed through a multi-modal analysis of social media content from across the Middle East & North Africa, complemented by interviews with activists themselves. Challenging orientalist perspectives of a fixed and homogenous region, I will explore how different activists approach regional solidarity differently, continually constructing and reconstructing the borders through their use of language and issue framing.
    
    Author: Bronwen Mehta (University of Warwick)
  - The allegories of gendered citizenship in Egypt and Lebanon: Archives and daily narratives of feminist legal activism
    
    In this paper, I pull the veil of silence on acts of resistance to laws governing gendered violence in Egypt and Lebanon. Feminist legal activism is a modality of resistance that involves litigation in the courthouse and complementary public campaigning. The paper argues that laws governing gendered violence offer a site for feminist legal activists to engage with the state in a discursive interaction over the boundaries of women’s gendered citizenship and its influence on women’s material lives.
    
    The methodology is central to the paper's academic inquiry. This paper is an ethnography of archive material: litigation documents harvested from human rights organisations and litigation clinics, as well as oral narratives collected from feminist legal activism. Purposefully, the paper evolves into an archive to highlight the collective nature of feminist legal activism and the diversity of its membership: a character that appears central to shaping its mechanics and discourse. This archive fills a gap in the current academic debate on feminist constitution of the law: how it is made, reformed, and implemented in court.
    
    The paper compares the modalities by which the state reproduces its relationship with gendered citizens following a major event like the Arab Spring through heavy legal involvement in areas of gendered violence. The paper informs current academic debates on post-uprising state building in these two case studies.
    
    Author: Reem Awny Abuzaid (University of Warwick)
  - Intimacy in (the time of) crisis: Queering economic sanctions through the lens of heterosexual love
    
    The feminist project of engendering economic/financial crisis has rarely viewed economic crisis through the lens of intimacy. As highlighted by feminist work across various disciplines, certain gendered, sexualised and racialised intimate/familial regulations have historically helped to secure appropriate social reproduction necessary for the survival of the states, economies and households. Given the reliance of our larger (national and global) political economic structures on certain (hetero/homo) normative affective arrangements, this paper aims to explore the relations between the destabilised moments of crisis and normative affective/familial arrangements. Put differently, what can we learn about our larger political economic structures, including crises, if we view them through the lens of intimacy/affective arrangements instead of the more familiar categories of social reproductive labour, private, and personal.
    
    This paper seeks to address this question by looking at the impacts of sanction-induced crises on Iran through the lens of intimacy. Drawing on the life experiences of Iranian women and locating them within the various sanction-induced crises experienced over the last decade, it highlights the multiple ways in which economic crises are shifting the approaches of both the state and women to intimacy. In particular, increasingly non-normative heterosexual relations are developing in the country, partly as a coping strategy against the dire effects of sanctions and partly to resist the state's tightened grip on intimate matters of marriage, divorce, and reproductive bodies. Looking at economic sanctions through the lens of non-normative heterosexual love, it argues, can destabilise, make strange, and queer, our normative state-centric and disembodied understandings of sanctions.
    
    Author: Asma Abdi (University of Warwick)
- 181
  
  Conference event / Public lecture: War Studies Working Group Keynote - Professor Sir Hew Strachan 'Is the Nature of War Changing?' SPONSORED BY POLITY QE2, Marriott
- 182
  Panel / Relocating Religion and Religious Commoning as Transnational Solidarities Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  
  Discussant: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Against religious-inspired terrorism: Intersections of religion, race, and gender on discussions of agency in terrorism
    
    In 2015, the ‘phenomenon’ of women traveling to join ISIS seemed to have taken over the news. Various attempts to engage with the roles these women have played has focused on a shallow interpretation of agency, and depictions thereof. Much of the existing literature on women involved in terrorism not only focuses on the personal, but it treats the women themselves as the challenge for the existing parameters and policies set by the state, whilst simultaneously avoiding how these policies are inherently gendered. This paper seeks to meaningfully theorise agency beyond this binary and towards considering what this agency enables. How are our feminist ideas of agency situated within secular and (neo)colonial constructions of what it means to exercise agency? Using the case study of the UK government and media narratives of the women who joined IS, and building on postcolonial and decolonial feminist theorisations, this paper aims to uncover the racialised and gendered nature of these understandings of agency and how they are entangled with assumptions on race, gender, and religion. This emancipatory reconceptualization of agency is a step towards more meaningful collective feminist solidarity.
    
    Author: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St. Andrews)
  - Possibilities of Ahmadiyya Sabr as Global Peacebuilding Praxis
    
    The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community is a persecuted transnational Muslim group that self-identifies as Muslim, and this identity claim has been challenged by many South Asian and global Muslim leaders since its inception. This paper examines how Ahmadis enact sabr as praxis toward broader goals of spreading global peace and justice. Sabr, often translated as patience or perseverance, is an active form of embodied agency that I argue captures how Ahmadis simultaneously resist and conform to their sociopolitical contexts by carving out their own identity within Islamic “orthodoxy” and practicing tabligh [missionary and humanitarian work] globally. This notion of sabr seeks to challenge existing assumptions that actors who ‘oppose’ are inherently enacting resistance. What are the possibilities of conceptualizing opposition when considering the ethical intentionality of religious actors? For Ahmadis, the intention to oppose claims of heresy relies on an interpretation of sacred obligation to Islam that advocates for the embodiment of sabr in the face of difficulties, and this ethical intentionality is co-constituted by resistance and conformity. The Ahmadiyya’s explicit ethical commitment to continue their work, despite persecution and violence, to build a more peaceful world is exemplified through their slogan, “Love for All, Hatred for None”-- this is the Ahmadiyya ethic of sabr.
    
    Author: Misbah Hyder (University of Notre Dame)
  - Degh Tegh Fateh (the cauldron, the sword, the victory!): abolition as political-spiritual Sikh praxis
    
    This paper offers a personal reflection on how I understand the commitment of abolition as socio-spiritual, related to Gurmat (the teachings and praxis of being Sikh). Specifically, I focus on the praxis of Degh Tegh Fateh (the cauldron, the sword, the victory) to show how, contrary to Sikhi’s hegemonic co-option by and assimilation into secular colonial modernity, Sikhi is rooted in abolishing hierarchies of oppression and the structures which sustain them.
    
    Degh is embodied in the act of Langar, a praxis rooted in the physical and spiritual nourishment of all regardless of caste, wealth, and other hierarchies. Although Langar is hegemonically co-opted, secularised, and reduced to “free food” and “charity” in modernity, the foundational logic of miri-piri (the inseparability of the socio-temporal and the spiritual) in Sikhi roots Langar in a deeper socio-spiritual commitment to abolishing the structures which construct hierarchies and sustain oppression. How is this abolition achieved?
    
    Tegh embodies, to me, a Fanonian understanding of violence. Namely, colonial structural violence means self-defence cannot be ruled out for revolutionary praxis from the below for resisting, and ultimately abolishing, global structures of oppression which discipline through violence from above i.e., carcerality, policing, and exploitation. This focus on abolishing structures of violence from the below to achieve Fateh – a world otherwise – complicates reductive, homogenising notions of violence which obfuscate the role of power structures.
    
    Therefore, Sikhi commits to abolition as political-spiritual praxis. One needn’t look further than the Kisaan Morcha’s (Farmers’ Protests) praxis, resisting colonial modernity through Degh Tegh Fateh.
    
    Author: Mandeep Sidhu (University of Brighton)
  - Beyond Abjection: Protest Caregiving as Resistance
    
    Between August 2019 and October 2020, nationwide protests arose against India’s exclusionary Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, Citizenship (Amendment) Act, National Register of Citizens, and National Population Register. This fostered new systems and micro-economies of informal care, led by religious and gender minorities (Muslim women, Sikh farmers, transgender communities), located in physical sites of active resistance (Shaheen Bagh, Chand Bagh, Jama Masjid, Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi-NCR) and virtual spaces (including the Queer Muslim Project, United Against Hate). In this context and at these sites, I examine unpaid carework by transgender communities and Muslim women to understand care in non-monolithic frameworks as (i) queer emancipations, feminist solidarities; (ii) religious deconstructions of “abject” citizenship within hegemonic masculinities of the state;. I critically present caregiving as transgressive resistance, using secondary data and gendered media reportage of protests, alongside interviews with activists, lawyers, transgender and GNC individuals, student leaders, journalists, and members of protest sites. I draw from Charles Taylor’s Ingenious Citizenship, Oishik Sircar’s Spectacles of Emancipation, and Laura Kessler’s Transgressive Caregiving, alongside scholarship from the Global South. The study additionally utilizes primary insights from protests in New Delhi: songs, meals, rituals, faith practices, and anecdotes of care, and arguing for the importance of religion and faith as caregiving and reform in emanciaptory understandings of power, violence, and desire in South Asia.
    
    Author: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
- 183
  Panel / Responsibility to Protect and Evolving State Practice Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group
  
  Convener: IR2P Working group
  
  Chair: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University)
  
  Discussant: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University)
  - Exploring the Limits of Localisation through the UK’s Contestation of R2P’s Peaceful Measures in Syria
    
    This article explores how the UK’s selective neglect in linking the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to its peaceful responses to Syria reinforces the claim that R2P is predominantly understood as military humanitarian intervention, which is deleterious for building international consensus for atrocity prevention and response. It does this through an empirical case study of the UK’s responses to Syria during 2014-2016 when the UK’s peaceful responses expanded, providing rich data for examining their underlying motivations. The article provides a case study of the UK’s contestation of R2P’s peaceful measures that builds upon existing work around the limits of contestation and norm degeneration due to how it feeds back to the international level. The article also explores the intersection between contestation and localisation and how the UK’s particular localisation of R2P feeds into claims and fears of Western imperialism, which obstructs effective atrocity prevention and response.
    
    Author: Chloe M Gilgan (University of Lincoln)
  - Human security and accountability in the Central African Republic
    
    In its rhetoric, the United Nations foregrounds the importance of individual accountability for human rights violations. It also emphasizes the importance of transitional justice in which individual survivors deserve recognition for their suffering and should take a central place in decisions on what happens after periods of violent unrest. These commitments are in line with the central tenets of human security, another key discursive element of the UN’s work, that calls for putting people front and center in the organization’s conflict response. People working in and on UN peace operations have put considerable effort into mainstreaming this approach in the organization’s accountability work. However, this commitment runs into several obstacles on the ground. This paper analyzes these challenges in the context of the UN’s efforts to support transitional justice efforts in the Central African Republic, where the UN has an exceptionally extensive mandate to promote accountability for atrocity crimes. This paper argues that variance in understandings of transitional justice between the host state, the different interveners, and the local population, complicates the implementation of a human security agenda in the UN’s transitional justice work. These differences center around the facts that the focus on individuals does not necessarily match local expectations and that the emphasis on criminal justice limits attention to other initiatives. In addition, the state-centered nature of the UN poses a significant challenge to people-centered approaches in international interventions.
    
    Author: Tom Buitelaar (European University Institute)
  - ‘In our interests’: Human rights protection and mass atrocity prevention in the foreign policy of a ‘Global Britain’
    
    Brexit has prompted a series of questions about the role Britain should play in international relations. The discursive construction of ‘Global Britain’ has been one such response as seen most clearly in the 2021 Integrated Review of foreign policy and the salient effort to redirect Britain’s strategic national interest. Whilst research has focused on the implications of this foreign policy shift in defence, development, and security, considerably less attention is on its implications for Britain's commitment to international human rights protection and mass atrocity prevention which is at the heart of the relationship between the UK’s ‘interests and values’ (Gilmore, 2014). Policymakers outline a commitment to Britain as a ‘force for good in the world’, but the recent strategic shift in its foreign policy raises important questions about how this translates into its human protection commitments alongside parallel interests in trade and geopolitical relationships. Using examples of Britain's discourse and practice on human protection (Libya, Yemen, human rights sanctions), this article examines whether the broader discursive construction of Global Britain is the starting point of a more wholesale shift in British political discourse and practice on human rights and atrocity prevention according to how it conceives of the connection between its interests and values in its post-Brexit foreign policy.
    
    Author: Blake Lawrinson (University of Leeds)
  - A Desire, But Not Yet a Duty: The Ukraine War’s Revelations About Our Commitment to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P)
    
    Despite the establishment of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) norm, enacted in the U.N. by unanimity in 2005, it still faces many challenges regarding protecting against major humanitarian crimes. As an example, though R2P was intended to be a framework for the international duty to protect, it does not provide standardized solutions for every crisis, partly because assessments of facts and circumstances are often unclear. Nowhere is this more evident than the use-of-force provision under R2P’s third pillar. This under-researched area is of major importance in discussions about the enabling capabilities, cooperation between intelligence units, burden-sharing mechanisms, military operations, and resources that make third pillar (militarized) interventions possible. By simultaneously drawing on the experiences of Libya and Syria during 2011 and generating insights into the Russia-Ukraine War, this paper makes three arguments. First, the interaction between values, interests, and politics, on both national and international levels, determines whether and how states choose to militarily intervene (or not) to protect civilians from atrocities. Second, the strategic challenges of R2P implementation in Libya and Syria are significant factors in shaping the current discussions of intervention in Ukraine. Third, when analyzed together, the three cases call into question the viability of the United Nations in the implementation and enforcement of strategies specified by R2P’s third pillar.
    
    Author: Josephine Jackson (University of St Andrews)
- 184
  Panel / Security from the local to the global: Promoting peace, security and human rights Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism
  
  Convener: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism Working Group (BISA)
  
  Chair: Alex Crockett (Durham University)
  - Overcoming Social Categories to Promote Long-Term Peace and Prevent Conflicts: Considerations in view of UN's Summit of the Future
    
    In the UN’s report Our Common Agenda, point three on ‘promotion of peace and prevention of conflicts’ is key for peace-and-conflict scholars. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, societal divisions, extremist activities, and violence have increased. The current war in Ukraine warns us against the risk of more inter- and intra-state conflicts, potentially endangering UN’s democratic and peace efforts. This, however, encourages more research on how peace can be sustained. In peace and conflict studies, social-relations dynamics, particularly, the tenets on which they are built, are still understudied. Therefore, this paper looks at the way categorisation influences social relations to understand conflict persistence, peace support, and democratisation processes. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this study specifically looks at the cases of Germany and Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic through the analytical lenses of Bridget Anderson, James Banks, and Marshall Rosenberg. In different ways, these scholars highlight the long-term implications of ordering citizens into social categories. Using discourse analysis, it examines how a language of division can fuel social tensions and, potentially, induce violence. By analysing the effects of categorisation on societal (dis)integration, this paper advances peace and conflict studies, providing insights on why long-term peace appears difficult to achieve.
    
    Authors: Giulia Grillo (University of Kent) , Louise Tiessen (University of Kent)
  - Post-conflict security: Building a security force or buying one
    
    How do we create a new security force in a post-conflict state? To what extent is it possible to do so ethically, for instance, without the exploitation of individuals or exposure to intolerable risk? This is the question at the heart of post-conflict planning for the last Thirty years in which a ‘Westernised’ model of intervention and occupation has become dominant. They key objective has often been to build and train an indigenous security force to operate alongside and eventually replace foreign troops, an orthodoxy that has seen some notable recent failures such as in Afghanistan.
    
    With the increasing prevalence of private military contractors in deployments, providing everything from VIP security to logistics, what role do these elements have to play and what are the ethical concerns with widespread use of these forces. Might they represent an alternative approach to providing security, one that might be bought rather than built?
    
    This paper will build on my previous work examining the moral and ethical issues associated with building indigenous security forces as viewed through an ethical framework of Just War Theory and seek to expand that analysis to include the private sector element. Inspired by questions provoked from James Pattison’s excellent analysis in The Morality of Private War this paper will seek to expand my research into an adjacent and yet unfamiliar area that will bring with it an entire new set of moral and ethical issues to contrast with those previously explored.
    
    Author: Alex Crockett (Durham University)
  - Political Capacity and the Monadic Democratic Peace
    
    Kant’s original claim that democracies are monadicly more peaceful has received mixed
    support (e.g. Lake 1992; Benoit 1996; Russett and Starr 2000; Pickering 2002), leading some to suggest the claim has been falsified (e.g Rosato 2003; Quackenbush and Rudy 2009). However, insights into monadic democratic foreign policy behaviors, both conflictual and cooperative, may not solely be measurable through the presence of a democratic institutional configuration but also the extent to which those institutions possess high levels of political capacity. States across democratic and non-democratic institutional typologies exhibit variation in their ability to extract resources from domestic society as well as variation in domestic expectations on how those extracted resources are spent. High capacity democratic states may extract relatively high amounts of resources from their domestic population but demands for those extracted resources to be used for public goods expenditures may limit the state from engaging in a more costly conflictual foreign policy. This institutional resource constraint potentially provides evidence of a monadic democratic peace by fostering a relative avoidance of costly conflicts and reliance upon cooperative behaviors by a high capacity democratic state, resulting in greater external peacefulness.
    
    Author: J. Patrick Rhamey Jr. (Virginia Military Institute)
  - United Nations and Peacekeeping: A Glimpse of its Role in the Protection of Civilians in the Internal Conflicts
    
    In the aftermath of the catastrophic condition of the 1990s, the nature of the conflict changed from inter-state to intra-state. The genocide in Rwanda war in Kosovo, Burundi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and many other countries have proved that civilians are the major sufferers in the intra-state conflict as they become the major target of attack. The civilians not only accounted for the vast majority of casualties but were also forcibly uprooted from their places of residence, causing large-scale internal displaced people and large-scale refugees in the neighbouring countries.
    It would be significant to see whether the State, responsible for protecting the rights of the citizens themselves, becomes the violator of human rights, specifically in civil conflicts. This paper is an effort to look into these issues while protecting civilians in civil conflict and the role of the United Nations. Firstly the paper looks into the civil conflicts in different parts of the world and the condition of the civilians. Secondly, it looks into the policies, guiding principles, norms and mechanisms established by the United Nations to protect civilians. Thirdly, the paper examines the challenges, successes and failures faced by the organization in protecting civilians. Fourthly the paper deals with the assessment and lessons learnt so far.
    
    Authors: Vijay Kumar Gothwal (Jawaharlal Nehru University) , Renu Kumari (Jawaharlal Nehru University)*
- 185
  
  Roundtable / Teaching and Learning Café QE1, Marriott
  
  Teaching and Learning Café
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: Ilan Baron (Durham University)
  
  Participants: Zoë Jay (University of Helsinki) , Marie Robin (Université Paris Panthéon-Assas) , Laura Mills (University of St Andrews) , Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews)
- 186
  Panel / Trade agreements and disagreements Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Stephen Hurt (Oxford Brookes University)
  - Power and Path Dependence: Explaining continuity over change during the NAFTA renegotiation
    
    The renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was characterised by a power paradox: although US-Mexico power asymmetries increased since NAFTA was signed, the Trump administration was not able to implement most of its negotiating objectives. Drawing on over 80 interviews with negotiators, policymakers, labour union and business representatives in NAFTA countries, this paper expands Putnam's (1988) two-level games theory to include the role of path dependence. It argues that the costs of disrupting NAFTA changed the preferences of US domestic actors originally opposed to NAFTA (labour unions and most US Democratic representatives), while three US democratic institutions undermined Trump's ability to alter NAFTA: separation of powers, electoral competition, and the influence of civil society in politics. The findings suggest that the path dependence created by FTAs can insulate weaker countries from power asymmetries with their trading partner. This is most likely to hold in closely integrated regions with democratic institutions.
    
    Author: Ludovic Arnaud (University of Oxford)
  - Taking Back Control? Democracy and UK Trade Policy after Brexit
    
    The Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum campaign repeatedly claimed that the UK would be able to ‘take back control’. Trade policy became a particular focus of their post-Brexit vision and underpinned the arguments in favour of the UK leaving the customs union. This paper evaluates what has happened since Brexit with respect to trade policymaking in the UK. The significance of this issue was highlighted by a joint campaign in 2018 by an informal coalition of business groups, NGOs and consumer groups, which called for a ‘robust modern, inclusive and democratic governance model to oversee trade policy that has broad legitimacy in society’. The central argument of this paper is that two interconnected aspects to democracy and UK trade policymaking need addressing. First, the policymaking process needs an overhaul so that both parliamentary scrutiny and the scope for input from a range of stakeholders is meaningful. Second, we also need to focus on the content of the trade deals signed by the UK Government, given that they can also erode democratic control through clauses that benefit the rights of transnational corporations.
    
    Author: Stephen Hurt (Oxford Brookes University)
  - Ideas in international trade dispute settlement: the EU and China in the Multilateral Investment Court
    
    The paper investigates the different approaches of states to the Multilateral Investment Court (MIC) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism (DSM). In particular, the paper will focus on the role of domestic ideas in determining states’ approach towards the MIC and the WTO DSM. It will be argued that trade officials are the carriers of specific programmatic beliefs that influence their approach towards the DSM. Specifically, the programmatic beliefs that will be examined will be on the different ideas that the European DG Trade and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) have of the WTO DSM.
    One of the main contributions of the paper will be the further development of the study of ideas as drivers in international trade and international arbitration. If ideas have been used in the literature as a general term to indicate different level of abstract principles (e.g. worldviews, ideologies) or beliefs affecting political actions (e.g. Vivien A. Schmidt, 2008; Siles-Brügge, 2013; Goldstein, 2019), it is necessary to bring clarity and be more specific. For this paper, the term ‘idea’ will indicate that general category of abstract factors, and ‘programmatic beliefs’ as more specific kinds of ‘ideas’ that affect states in their approach to institutions. The paper will analyse the discourse around the creation around the MIC of the EU and China, examining how the international trade dispute settlement is changing according to a shift in domestic programmatic beliefs of its users, using process tracing as main method of inquiry.
    
    Author: Salvatore Barillà (University of Edinburgh)
  - Principles or Pragmatism? Environmental Sustainability Standards in EU-ASEAN countries FTAs: Case of EU-Indonesia FTA negotiation
    
    Under its newly published Indo-Pacific Outlook, European Union (EU) is pivoting its strategic focus to Southeast Asia. However, EU's strategic pragmatism and value-based principles inevitably clash in free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations between EU and ASEAN countries. On the one hand, EU is striving for strengthening its strategic influence and position in the Indo-Pacific region by negotiating more free trade agreements. On the other hand, EU, priding itself as a global normative power, has been the pioneering actor of promoting its high environmental sustainability standards in FTA with ASEAN countries with mixed environmental sustainability issues like palm oil production and deforestation. There is still ample space in current literatures for delving deeper into the conditionality in FTAs, in particular the part concerned with environmental sustainability. Thus, with the cases of EU-Indonesia Free Trade Agreement Negotiations, this paper will explore how EU pursues the balance of normative principles and pragmatism in the design of environmental sustainability standards in the FTAs with ASEAN countries. This paper will address a cutting-edge question in International Political Economy: explaining the growing efforts to impose policy conditionality around normative issues like environmental protection as part of trade treaties.
    
    Author: Zhihang Wu (University of Glasgow)
Friday 23 June
- 187
  
  Conference event / Colombia River Stories: The Atrato River Guardians - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events Ballroom, Hilton
  
  Speakers: Jan Nimmo, Mo Hume
- 188
  
  Conference event / Exhibitor Hall Ballroom, Hilton
- 189
  
  Conference event / Politics of Wildfire - Photo exhibition - Find out more on our featured events page https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events Ballroom, Hilton
  
  Speaker: Lorenza Fontana
- 190
  
  / Pop culture & politics – student work display by Maha Rafi Atal & Rhys Crilley. Find out more at https://twitter.com/rhyscrilley/status/1670814542618583042?s=20 Absolute Roasters coffee shop at Box Hub
- 191
  Panel / Arts, theatre and war: intimate politics, affective discomforts and 'messy' revelations Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Natasha Danilova (University of Aberdeen)
  
  Chair: Nilanjana Premaratna (Newcastle University)
  
  Discussant: Emma Dolan (University of Limerick)
  - An intimate theatre of war
    
    Abstract: Military theatre has in recent years become a popular form of communicating war stories to a receptive public audience, with examples including the Royal British Legion’s award winning The Two Worlds of Charlie F, Lee Hart’s Boots at the Door, and the annual appearance of Army@TheFringe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These kinds of military performance projects, like other cultural forms (see Woodward & Jenkings 2012 on military memoirs), often continue to follow the trend among popular engagements with war that prioritise images of heroic masculine soldierhood enacted in spatially ‘far away’ wars (see Purnell & Danilova 2018). Drawing on our theatre-based research with military partners across the UK, we consider how a feminist and participatory approach to military theatre can instead allow the geographies of war to emerge differently by making the familiar strange and centring intimate spaces of the home. We argue that theatre and performance can help destabilise masculinised narratives around the sites, spaces, and bodies of war, and shed new light on the domestic impacts of military participation. We conclude by asking; what does theatre-as-method make visible that would otherwise go unseen? And, what does this mean for theatre-based research as a feminist political intervention?
    
    Authors: Hannah West (Newcastle University) , Alice Cree (Newcastle University)
  - Stories in Transition: Film, narrative and agency in military veterans
    
    Abstract: Film is a source and site of agency (Harman 2019). Through film, marginalised or misrepresented groups and communities can reclaim the agency to tell their own stories about their lives. Understanding that veterans’ lives are often spoken about (by the media, academia, government, etc) the Stories in Transition project used co-produced film to explore veterans’ stories about their lives following transition to civilian life. As a two-year inter-disciplinary collaboration between academics, veterans and filmmakers, the project explored concepts of narrative and agency with three veterans’ charities using different artistic, cultural and sporting practices to support veterans in their transition. In this paper, I consider what kind of reflective space film created for veterans to interrogate and then represent their own transition experiences. I reflect on what each of the three films from Stories in Transition are doing and how/why they have been created to engage with various audiences. Lastly, I consider the limits of film as a representational practice together with the risky ethics of immersive co-produced research in veteran communities.
    
    Author: Nick Caddick (ARU)
  - Theatricality, liberal soldiering and the ‘messy’ politics of subversion
    
    Paper title: Theatricality, liberal soldiering and the ‘messy’ politics of subversion
    Presenters: Dr Natasha Danilova and Marianne Fossaluzza (University of Aberdeen)
    Abstract: Although advances have been made in the analysis of art (e.g. painting, poetry, photography), aesthetics and visual politics in IR (e.g. Bleiker 2017; Silverster 2020), war-thematic theatre has remained a relatively unexplored site of global war-sense-making. Furthermore, existing research has prioritised veterans’-led artistic forms of expression (e.g. Cree 2020; Dyvik and Welland 2018; Caso 2020), leaving less intellectual space for discussion of theatre as a complex space of (re)making the sense and sensibilities of modern Western liberal soldiering. Building on the in-depth analysis of the International Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2022), and over 40 interviews with artists, venue curators, military engagement teams, and feminist auto-ethnographies of productions staged across different festival locations (2017-2022) (e.g. Purnell and Danilova 2018; Dolan and Danilova 2022), we argue that theatre emerges as a multidimensional space in which neither state militaries nor veterans, nor artists or spectators have an upper hand at creating particular representational logics and modes of performativity. Instead, war-thematic theatre function as a gendered and racialised space which is shaped by multiple ‘patriarchal confusions’, (in)visibilities, embodied and affective contradictions of Western ‘gender-inclusive’ soldiering in the era of liberal wars.
    
    Authors: Marianna Fossaluzza (University of Aberdeen) , Natasha Danilova (University of Aberdeen)
  - The Art of War: Discovering Discomfort/Discomforting Discoveries
    
    Abstract: This paper advances a scholarship of discomfort as an innovative CMS approach to interrogate the art of war. Building on research examining US military/veteran artwork of post-9/11 controversial wars, it explores how discomfort – in relation to aesthetics and affect – can provide more textured representations of war and its experiences. Not only tracing the aesthetic, affective and discomforting within this art, this approach embraces aesthetics, affect and discomfort as methodologies. Retaining an openness that accounts for messiness and unease, it pursues lines of thinking that fall outside comfort areas regarding the subjects/objects ‘under examination’, its (re)thinking of IR/CMS/interdisciplinary scholarship, and its creative undertaking/presentation of research. It involves thinking through how discomfort can be a method – not only are the sites of research (and) encounter discomforting (by forging connections with military/veteran artists in terms of what they conducted/carry/create), but how we do this work on/with/in those sites is also discomforting – in challenging us as researchers to reclaim military-veteran research as careful, critical, creative encounters; in how creative work can re-present differently the ‘stuff’, re-place sanitised stories of the military, militarism and war; in how such work’s sense of incompleteness – despite traditional approaches’ insistence on easy, fixed conclusions – is a strength. Art and creative practice offer a discomforting incompleteness where multiple possibilities are reimagined. By examining military/veteran artwork through aesthetics, affect and discomfort, this approach offers destabilising conceptual, theoretical, and methodological insights for IR into war, security, and (non-)military/militarised bodies and experiences.
    
    Author: Laura Mills (University of St Andrews)
- 192
  Panel / Brexit and the (Geo)Political Imagination Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Kaleem Hussain
  - Make the Special Relationship Great Again: Brexit implications and the US influence on the Global Britain strategy
    
    The special relationship between the UK and the US has its roots in the 19th century and was solidified during the 20th century. One of the arguments for Brexit was grounded on the possibility of a closer relationship with the US, specifically regarding trade. The UK’s departure from the EU was based not only on gaining independence as political power but also on the ambition of being an agenda-setting power, looking into the US role in the world.
    We explore the importance of the transatlantic bridge on Brexit and answer the question of how the special relationship has shaped British foreign policy. Building on the literature on ideas on foreign policy, this research contributes to fulfilling the gap concerning how ideas emerge and arrive at the British political environment, influencing the foreign policy strategy delineation. The focus is to consider the ideational phase of the foreign policy adjustment process.
    The paper intends to trace the influences on the Global Britain strategy by analysing the foreign policy traditions, values, and identities. The period between 1987 and 2022 is examined, developing a comparative content analysis of both countries’ national security strategies and foreign policy documents. We claim that Brexit acted as an essential factor for the debate intensification concerning bilateral relations and that the US foreign security policy traditions had a particular influence in shaping ideas and strategy delineation of the British foreign policy after Brexit.
    
    Author: Catarina M. Liberato (University of Kent)
  - Satires of Brexit: The Discursive Construction of Political Failures in Contemporary Literature
    
    The paper explores how Brexit is constructed as a political failure in contemporary literature. While research has paid much attention to how meaning is attributed to Brexit in political discourse, it has largely ignored literature, and the arts more broadly, as an important site of meaning-making around Brexit. In addressing this gap, the paper focuses on selected political satires that form part of a wide variety of largely critical literary responses to Brexit for which literary scholars have introduced the category of “Brexlit”. It draws on a method of narrative analysis to reconstruct the main narrative elements that are used in these works to portray Brexit as a failure on three constitutive narrative dimensions: setting, characters and plot. The paper argues that Brexlit narratives bring in rich intertextual references to real political events and actors in the Brexit process, but do so in a way that mobilises the subversive potential of satires. Along these lines, Brexlit makes a distinct, and potentially very powerful, contribution to ongoing constructions of Brexit as a major political failure in broader public discourse.
    
    Authors: Mandy Beck (Chemnitz University of Technology) , Kai Oppermann (Chemnitz University of Technology)
  - Elite Perceptions of the Post-Brexit UK-Australia Relationship
    
    The relationship between the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia is long and deep. It is characterised by strong people-to-people links, shared military endeavours especially during the 20th century, and close – if lessening – trade ties. Since Brexit (2016-20), this relationship has been the focus of more attention from both the Australian and UK governments that at any time since the UK’s accession to the EEC in 1973. Despite the very positive energy galvanising this relationship from the Brexit referendum in 2016 to the signing of a Free Trade Agreement and the announcement of the AUKUS pact in 2021, differences between the two countries remain. Indeed, it may be that there are certain asymmetries in the relationship that are rarely mentioned in public discourse: Australia is a junior partner in the relationship; and there is a degree of scepticism towards the idea of ‘Global Britain’ and the Indo-Pacific Tilt amongst Australian policy elites. Based on semi-structured interviews with opinion-formers in Australia and the UK, this paper will present empirical findings on elite perceptions of the post-Brexit Australia-UK relationship in the context of the challenges of the 2020s.
    
    Authors: Ben Wellings (Monash University) , Richard Hayton (University of Leeds)*
  - The Brexit effect on the UK Higher Education and EU academics' career choices
    
    With Brexit, there were a preoccupation within Higher Education (HE) institutions regarding the future of research collaborations and the new funding frameworks. During the negotiation period, discussions within the political elite were focused on the economy, trade and future political alliances but not centred on the HE sector. However, the 2021 UK Government's foreign policy strategy of delivering international ambition as a Global Britain also included education.
    We argue that international education has been a foreign policy priority after Brexit. This paper looks into the importance of research cooperation between EU and other UK-based academics in the HE institutions. The literature focuses on the mobility of students and industry careers in general. There is a lack of research linking mobility and academic career choices in the UK HE, which is the aim of this paper.
    Tracing the influence of Brexit on UK HE through the lens of 3 EU case studies – France, Poland and Portugal – semi-structured interviews built on purposive sampling are conducted with academics that are currently based in the UK. We claim that Brexit operated as a disruptive phase of uncertainty in the UK HE, particularly for academics with research-centred careers.
    
    Author: Catarina M. Liberato (University of Kent)
  - Explaining Brexit’s Shortcomings: Success, anxiety, and evolving fantasies
    
    By ratifying the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Co-operation Agreement, Boris Johnson’s Government claimed it had delivered Brexit. However, the evidence increasingly suggests that this manifestation of Brexit negatively impacts the British people and economy. This research considers the narratives that try to make sense of this impact by focusing on the arguments advanced by the UK Government and Brexit-supporting press. Drawing on the insights of Lacanian-inspired Ontological Security Studies, it finds that Brexiteers claim that Brexit has been undermined and risks being thwarted due to the shortcomings of the previous government’s strategy, and external actors, like the European Commission and the French Government. Positioning these actors as barriers to Brexit allows Brexiteers to construct a narrative which offers success if the obstacles can be overcome. The fulfilment – jouissance – promised by the narrative is used to justify increasingly antagonistic rhetoric and behaviour, including unilateral action on the Northern Ireland Protocol. While a Lacanian view of ontological security suggests these actions can never truly deliver the promised fulfilment, they are likely to be particularly self-defeating, as they will trigger a response from the EU which further emphasises the costs of Brexit in the mind of the public.
    
    Author: Tom Howe (University of Warwick Politics and International Studies)
- 193
  
  Roundtable / Climate Change, Net Zero and Future Military Operations 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.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Duncan Depledge (Loughborough University)
  
  Participants: Matthew Stott (Cranfield University) , Duraid Jalili (King's College London) , Dhanasree Jayaram (Manipal University) , N/A
- 194
  Panel / Contentious Politics and Social Movements in the Middle East and Asia Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Aurelie Broeckerhoff (Coventry University)
  
  Chair: Aurelie Broeckerhoff (Coventry University)
  - Compressed Urban Expansion - Palestinian Urban spaces and politics
    
    Living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories meant accommodation and resilience. Compressed Urban Expansion is a term I devised to describe the experience of living in an area that is confined both in space and time, hence compressed, yet expanding uncontrollably in this confinement due to natural growth and change in internal demographics. The opposites in the term describe a dichotomy in the state of aspiration and reality of Palestinian Lives. Life expands and grows naturally, yet it is compressed through controls imposed by Occupation, and the population’s attempt to manage the compressions.
    Congestion, suppression, and suffocation are by-products of the original compression, and living in the OPT leads to adopting this compression and accepting its confinements as a natural destiny repackaging it as resilience. This compression led to stresses that became more and more visible as the population grew. In time, the stresses translated into violent expressions of discord on multiple levels.
    Compressed Urban Expansion - Evidence
    Evidence to support the above is visible on the ground in the lived experiences and practices of the Palestinian population. Solid Waste is removed on occasions, and often set on fire to burn, with visible impact on health and living patterns (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020). To be able to accommodate increases in housing demand, buildings have gone up vertically (Hillal & Al-Saqqa, 2015), eradicating the prevalent old building style in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the form of a family home with a plot of land around for growing fruits and vegetables. Water cisterns are now built on the roofs of the massive buildings to ensure adequate supply for the housing units and to store water in between the periods of water availability. This does not mean the water quantity is adequate for the families’ needs. The pursuant sewage infrastructure is cannot deal with the flow, leading to ruptures on occasions. In Gaza, sewages seeps into the aquifer and destroys natural habitats in the sea. Roads are becoming congested due to the large number of cars compressed in the confined and congested space, and time is stolen from the lives of those stuck in these traffic jams and on Israeli military checkpoints.
    The compression leads to destruction of aesthetics, contributing to deterioration in living standards. As the result of political conflict at large, and security fragility resulting from the agreements, the status of compression exploded in the face of the society. Small fights between children turn into violent clashes between larger families and clans. Disputes over car parking in the existing confined space end up in brawls, fist fights and property destruction, and gunfights might ensue. Those who fail to bring violence against external “aggressors”, end up bringing the violent outbreaks into their own homes, with increased cases of gender-based violence and of internecine infighting in the same household and increase in mental health related incidences.
    
    Author: Saad Aldin Halawani (Coventry University)
  - The Unemployed vs. the Jordanian State: The Battle against Precarity in Neo-Liberal Times
    
    Millions around the world live precarious existences. Precarious employment and unemployment are at the heart of precariousness. In 2019 hundreds of precariously employed/unemployed Jordanians marched on Jordan's capital Amman to demand their constitutional right to secure employment. Drawing on original fieldwork and research, the article contrasts the protestors' demands with the responses of the Jordanian state. I ask how the Jordanian unemployment movement can contribute to the debate on how economic rights can be achieved in a globalised world and what role the state needs to play in enabling these rights. Fundamental questions about the role of the state in the provision of rights have to be addressed including: what citizen rights are, who grants these rights, and what the role of the private sector is, if any. The case of the unemployment marches is part of a wider global story of protestors who are trying to hold on to a notion of a state which is on their side and provides them with rights. However, with pressure to roll back the state, states like the Jordanian state are less and less able to perform these roles, leaving citizens with no one to grant them their rights. Through the example of the 2019 unemployed marches, I explore a battle against precarity and ask what lessons we can draw from it in terms of securing economic rights for citizens under neo-liberal economic systems.
    
    Author: Sara Ababneh (University of Sheffield)
  - Oral history as participatory heritage protection in Masafer Yatta (occupied Palestinian territory)
    
    This paper presents the efforts of ongoing research into how Palestinians are seeking to protect their intangible cultural heritage, human lives and livelihoods under immediate threat. In May 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled to evict approximately 1400 people in 8 villages in Masafer Yatta. Since 2017, we have worked with local Palestinian youth from Masafer Yatta and surrounding areas who have recorded hundreds of hours of oral histories in their communities, building a rich inventory of intangible cultural heritage in this contested region. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities of using oral history as a method for conflict transformation from the bottom up. Using the example of our research in Masafer Yatta, we discuss the peaceful means by which people can use their cultural heritage to resist forcible violent displacement, defending their right to land and to a peaceful life in an otherwise asymmetric conflict relationship. Our paper makes a contribution to people-centred, participatory approaches in peace and conflict research and contributes to approaches that encourage peacebuilding from below.
    
    Authors: Aurelie Broeckerhoff (Coventry University) , Laura Sulin (Coventry University)* , Mahmoud Soliman (Coventry University)*
  - Why the Caged Bird Sings: Quotidian IR and Protest Politics in Asia’s Resource Frontiers
    
    The paper will engage with the radical democracy and critical participatory literature both empirically as well as theoretically to bring out the limitations of deliberative democracy. It particularly questions the taken-for-grantedness of consensus as a cornerstone of democracy and the easy equivalence that is often made between representation and participation. To what extent do resistance movements in Asia avoid the dangers of democratic elitism and offer spaces for new voices and identities? The paper will attempt to map the range of alternative mobilisation strategies being used by social movements in Asia both in terms of functionality as well as their role in meaning-making processes and practices. It will also compare and contrast this with the role that mainstream media has played in framing social movements in the region and to understand the respective audiences these cater to. In what ways can such counter-narratives help IR engage with issues of identity, culture as well as place-based politics more effectively?
    
    Author: Nimmi Kurian (Centre for Policy Research)
- 195
  Panel / Enmity, Great Power Competition, and Strategic Rivalry in US Foreign Policy QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: Oliver Turner (University of Edinburgh)
  - Individuals in Securitization: An Investigation into US Presidents' (De)Securitization of North Korea
    
    The usually conflictual US foreign policy toward North Korea entered a period of engagement during the Clinton administration. However, this policy was discontinued when George W. Bush took over the presidency. The extant literature fails to account sufficiently for the leaders behind these different foreign policies. Securitization theory demonstrates how leaders' decisions to speak of an issue as a security threat or not can lead to foreign policies that either resort to force or political solutions. But the theory's methodological collectivism inhibits explaining why some leaders carry out speech acts aimed at securitizing an issue while others try to desecuritize it. To answer this question, I draw on operational code and leadership trait analysis. I suspect that particular political beliefs and personality traits concur with leaders' attempts to securitize or desecuritize because they affect threat perception and the inclination to use force. My findings demonstrate how (de)securitization causally connects leaders' personalities and beliefs to conflictual or cooperative foreign policies. Scholars and policymakers can use this knowledge to better assess the behavior of states during crises.
    
    Author: Alexander Schotthöfer (The University of Edinburgh)
  - The Third Offset, Artificial Intelligence, and US-Sino Technological Competition: Reconceptualizing Remote Warfare in an Era of Great Power Competition
    
    The Trump administration is argued to have shifted the direction of American foreign policy through its strategic prioritization on great power competition. We know comparatively little about how this key aspect of Trump’s presidential legacy has impacted the use of the strategic practices associated with remote warfare and what this may mean for the continuing development of scholarship in this area. This paper consequently has two aims: first, to examine the impact of the Trump administration’s focus on great power competition on US’ policies regarding the development and use of autonomous weapon systems; and second, to assess what implications this may have for the study and conceptualization of remote warfare. Although some existing research has pointed to a connection between remote warfare and great power competition, as with the study of artificial intelligence as a remote warfare practice, this relationship remains underexplored and theoretically underspecified. To develop new insights in this area, this paper returns to the earlier debates on the Pentagon’s Third Offset Strategy championed by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and the character and drivers of technological competition in world politics. In doing so, it provides new insights into how we study Trump’s complicated presidential legacy, remote warfare, and contemporary American foreign policy.
    
    Author: Tom Watts (Royal Holloway University)
  - Too Much and Never Enough: Ontological Security and Sino-US Relations
    
    Sino-US relations are at the lowest point since the time of Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon. Whereas certainly there was never a shortage of contention before in this bilateral relationship, this level of vitriol and hostility is something more recent, and came on the heels of the Trump administration’s repudiation of the engagement paradigm that served as the underpinning of America’s China policy for decades. By all accounts, the Biden administration has doubled down on this “whole of state” approach to tackle the perceived China threat. China, in return, has been forced to modify its own objective and tactics.
    
    How can we best characterize this “new normal” in US-China relations? To that end, I plan to take a two-pronged approach. First, I will stack a full roster of issues and disputes bedeviling the relationship against a list of areas where even half-hearted cooperation is possible. I will then juxtapose this broad scorecard against a series of popular terms and concepts being used in both policy and academic communities, among which the new cold war (Harris & Marinova 2022), a security dilemma, and the Thucydides Trap have gained a great deal of currency. The goal is to evaluate their conceptual consistency and fitness with the US-China scenario. Preliminary analyses suggest they are either too narrow in the depiction of inter-state tensions, or not coherent enough as a social science concept.
    
    To make up for the lacunae, my second act is to introduce the concept of ontological security into the analysis. Critical questions that are worthy of careful investigations include: Have China and the US crossed the Rubicon and entered a chapter in history where they “prefer conflict to cooperation, because only through conflict do they know who they are” (Mitzen 2006)? What is their respective raison d'etre for pursuing a tit-for-tat mode of interaction? To what extent are they prone to seeing the other side as an existential threat? Does the divergence in political systems, which in turn engenders the difference between regime security and national security, matter in their construction of the other as a threat?
    
    Author: Xiangfeng Yang (Lingnan University)
  - Orienting the Tide: Israel, the pro-Israel network and the securitization of Iran in the United States
    
    This work investigates the process through which Iran comes to be perceived and defined in the United States. It takes specific interest in the actions of Israel and pro-Israel actors as vocal partakers in that process. It focuses on the process in which Israel and pro-Israel actors in the United States strive to make their narrative dominant in the field of “defining the trilateral relationship between the US, Iran and Israel”. Combining securitization theory, studies on identification and recent approaches to dominant narratives, it contends that the pro-Israel actors manage to overload the field to the extent that concurrent narratives are prevented to emerge. Through the various means examined by this work - formal and informal lobbying, financial support, Congress hearings, information providing, media appearances and general field saturation - these actors make Iran policy “a minefield”, that is a field one is deterred to enter.
    
    This work is based on 18 interviews with American lawmakers’ chiefs of staff and national security advisors, ex-government officials, journalists and lobbyists. It further relies on official documents, such as lobbying disclosures and Congress hearings. These materials suggest a near-monopoly in the knowledge and information production about Iran which participates in supporting a fertile ground for the adoption of antagonizing US policies towards Tehran.
    
    Author: Jérémy Dieudonné (UCLouvain)
- 196
  Panel / Feminist Political Economy in the European Union Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Muireann O'Dwyer (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Asha Herten-Crabb (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  
  Discussant: Aliki Koutlou (University of Manchester)
  - ‘The most important issue is to learn self-restraint’. Monetary policy and masculinities in the governance of the Eurozone crisis'
    
    During the Eurozone crisis, the governing council of the European Central Bank (ECB) was extremely men-dominated; with the representation of women between 2012 and 2014 reaching 0%. At the same time, the austerity and conditionality chosen as the ‘remedy’ for the Eurozone crisis was harmful to all genders, but in particular to women and LGBTIQ people. This paper asks – does masculinity have anything to do with this? Does masculinity matter in the governance approach of the ECB, and how? The paper examines the performative politics of the ECB presidents Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, as well as disagreements within the governing council of the ECB during the pivotal period of 2007-2012. It argues that performances of disciplinary masculinity and transnational business masculinity played an important role in conflicts over and the legitimisation of austerity and conditionality. Therefore, cultural gender politics might be a more constitutive dimension in political economy than is typically assumed.
    
    Author: Frederic Heine (JKU Linz)
  - Gender and Race in the Construction of the European Economy
    
    This paper approaches the question of ‘what is the European Economy’ from two novel perspectives – those of race and gender. Responding to the call to understand the EU as a postcolonial entity, and incorporating work from feminist political economy of the EU, it shows how gender and race are intrinsic to the construction – discursive, legal, statistical – of the European economy. Further, it highlights how the silencing of this fact, and the maintenance of strategic ignorance of the way that gender and race act in both historical and contemporary settings, is essential to the coherence of the European economy as a governable space.
    This paper uses a focus on various key examples of the ‘hidden’ roles played by race and gender to demonstrate what a more comprehensive account of the European economy would look like. These include the structure of European citizenship, the narratives of the European economy, and the mechanisms of oversight and measurement used by policy makers to both construct and govern this entity.
    Overall, this paper offers a new basis for our study of European economic governance, and contributes to growing attempts to bring intersectional approaches to the fore in feminist analysis of the European Union.
    
    Author: Muireann O'Dwyer (University of St Andrews)
  - Toward an EcoFeminist analysis of The EUs Green Deal
    
    The EU’s Green Deal makes bold promises. It aims to achieve net-zero targets by 2050 and to ensure that the transition to a decarbonised economy is ‘just and inclusive’. The Green Deal promises to put ‘sustainability and the well-being of citizens at the centre of economic policy, and to implement ‘a set of deeply transformative policies’.
    This paper asks how transformative the EU’s Green Deal really is, by applying ecofeminist analyses to it. These critiques go beyond some of the commonly applied Feminist Political Economy frameworks to examine relationships between nature, people and the economy. Ecofeminist critiques have pointed out how exploitation of natural resources, extraction, dumping, and ecological irresponsibility is actively promoted and incentivised in the current globalised economy, accruing profits to the Global North and driving ‘growth’ (Cohen 2017; Harcourt et al. 2015; Resurrección 2017; Wichterich 2015; Wynter 2003). They also highlight the gendered and racialized power relations that maintain htese ecologically unsustainable and unjust economic practices in the Global North; and gendered and racialised images and epistemologies that make them appear ‘natural’ or legitimate (Dengler and Strunk 2018; Salleh 2020; Shiva and Mies 2014; Di Chiro 2019).
    Applying these kinds of critiques, this paper examines how the relationships between people and nature are presented in the EU’s green deal. It asks how the relationships between justice and solutions to climate breakdown are articulated; whose well-being is included in the EU’s concepts of justice (Wichterich 2015; Douo 2021); and how the EU’s continued pursuit of growth in the Green Deal perpetuates or departs from existing hall marks of the EU’s economic organisation and integration – such as gendered social reproductive subsidies (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2021) environmental exploitation and environmental racism (Parasram and Tilley 2018; Hansen and Jonsson 2018).
    
    Author: Rosalind Cavaghan (Flax Foundation/University of Edinburgh)
  - The Recovery and Resilience Facility: A path to more Gender+ Equality?
    
    The Covid-19 pandemic has set economies of member states under heavy financial pressure, member states have therefore set up Covid-19 economic rescue plans for different sectors of the economy. The European Union has meanwhile installed a Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), meant to damper the effects of this widespread crisis, which has affected not only the hospital and care sector, but has led to lay-offs or forms of short-term work across member state economies and other countries. The RRF has been installed and member states have set up plans how to tackle the most pressing problems societies face today. Within the RRF, an evaluation for each member state is planned which is closely linked to the European Semester in the future. Some authors argue to involve the European Parliament (EP) more closely in the process of the RRF since the comitology procedure would lead to developments already perceived as undemocratic in the European Semester. The Council and EP should be involved in the process to guarantee a more democratic procedure based on national parliaments representations to assure that the RRF spending hits its targets. Since the RRF is designed to a quick fiscal stimulus and safeguard national economies from unexpected shocks in the future, the outline of the RRF is considerably different than normal Structural Fund payments to member states which have a much longer-term catch-up effect. The paper will investigate into exemplary member states engagement in this respect and which sectors of the economy consider gender+ relations and if the funding includes the targets set.
    
    Author: Stefanie Wöhl (University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna)
- 197
  Panel / Foreign fighting: towards better understanding and responses Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism
  
  Convener: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism Working Group (BISA)
  
  Chair: Cerwyn Moore (University of Birmingham)
  - The Evaluation of Internet-mediated Interview Methods in Studying Militant Movements
    
    The present paper is focused on evaluating internet-mediated interviews applied in studying militant groups. The research seeks to answer the following research question: ‘what are the benefits and limitations of interviews conducted via the internet in examining armed groups?’ The primary data collection technique is a series of semi-structured interviews with experts who had interviewed militants via the internet. The major findings of this research suggest that internet-mediate research offers new perspectives in studying militant groups and broader categories of social movements. The article will be structured in the following manner: the first part will overview the existing body of literature on technology-mediated research methods to identify the gaps in it. The next section will cover the methodological aspects of the research, which will be followed by an overview of the findings that emerged throughout the interviews. And the final section will draw together findings and discuss the advantages and limitations of internet-mediated interviews in the context of political violence.
    
    Author: Aleksandre Kvakhadze (University of Birmingham)
  - ‘They’re Coming Home’: Discourses on the Reintegration of Foreign War Volunteers
    
    The presence of foreigners and the role they play in conflicts abroad have increasingly become part of the public discourse. This has most recently been portrayed in the cases of fighting both for and against the Islamic State, but also with the creation of the Ukrainian Foreign Legion in 2022. Both contexts have resulted in questions regarding continuation and escalation of the conflicts, but also what happens when these individuals decide to return to their home countries. Through the use of discourse analysis, this paper, therefore, aims to understand how the German state, the media, and non-state actors have reacted to citizens returning from various conflicts abroad. Starting with the so-called ‘Spain fighters’ from the Spanish Civil War, the paper asks to what extent these different returnees were perceived as belonging to their home state? By looking at examples across multiple ideologies and time periods, the paper provides an important contribution regarding post-conflict reintegration, questions of citizenship, and understanding the potential consequences for future cases of ‘foreign war volunteering’.
    
    Author: Louise Tiessen (University of Kent)
  - Foreign Fighter Expertise: Myth or Reality?
    
    President Obama described veteran foreign fighters as ‘trained and battle-hardened.’ This is a sentiment widely shared among media, policymakers, and scholars. This paper seeks to provide clarity to this statement by drawing on the experiences and trajectories of foreign fighters from the Soviet-Afghan and Afghan Civil War. While it is often noted that foreign fighters had little to no impact on the actual outcomes during the Afghan conflicts, it is widely agreed that their participation in the conflict was transformative, leading to the emergence of its veterans as skilled conflict actors. However, among the narratives of foreign fighters themselves, the role of Afghanistan as a site of training and gaining the expertise of conflict is contested. Certainly, foreign fighters emerge with greater expertise in fighting than those armed group members with no conflict experience, but the isolation of the Afghan conflicts presented limited opportunities for concrete conflict experience. This chapter proposes that the two seemingly conflictual claims about expertise development can both be true. I argue that foreign fighters did overall gain a set of expertise—building training camps and gaining conflict skills—but that this expertise was limited. I also argue that expertise of foreign fighters in the Afghan conflicts was bound up within the mythology of participation and the victory of the Mujahideen, allowing those veterans to gain legitimacy in the Afghan Network and wider jihadist movement. Therefore, the conflict expertise of these foreign fighters was limited but reified by their membership to the Afghan Network. This paper helps understand how foreign fighters with limited conflict experience go on to gain senior positions and how this experience shapes these future organisations.
    
    Author: Nicola Mathieson (Australian National University)
  - The Problems with Framing the Response to Foreign Fighters as a Counter-Terrorism Issue: Learning Lessons from Research on Social Movements
    
    The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have raised concerns over the issue of foreign fighters. This concern is two-fold. It involves not only individuals who travel to participate in foreign conflicts, but also the perceived terrorist threat these individuals pose when they return to their country of origin. In developing counter-strategies to combat foreign fighters, the primary approach adopted by state actors has been to frame the response as a counter-terrorism issue. This paper argues that this framing is, for several reasons, highly problematic. First, foreign fighters are motivated to participate in conflict for a multitude of complex reasons, very few are attracted by the prospect of committing terrorist acts. Second, the counter-terrorism frame has led to the development of harmful policies that include expansion of police authority, travel bans, revocation of citizenship and criminal convictions without legal safeguards. Third, the policies developed in response to foreign fighters and returnees are not based on the academic research in this area or supported by evidence. This paper argues that if policies developed to combat the foreign fighter issue are to be effective, they should be evidence-based and take greater of academic research in this area. As such, we propose that counter foreign fighter policy could be greatly improved if policy-makers were to learn lessons from the academic research on social movements.
    
    Authors: Annamaria Kiss (King's College London)* , Christopher Baker-Beall (Bournemouth University)
- 198
  Panel / Migration in Asia Pacific and beyond Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Foteini Kalantzi (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool and University of Duisburg-Essen)
  - The populist radical right and the impact on migrant rights
    
    The rise of populism in the UK has been associated with the social and political mainstreaming of the radical right from 2000 onwards and escalated by a series of crises, such as the post-9/11 terrorism crisis, the 2008 economic crisis, and the 2015 refugee crisis. Immigration and the so-called ‘influx’ of asylum seekers into the UK since 2105 has been highlighted as a key factor for the mainstreaming of PRR politics. However, there are no substantial studies investigating how the network of PRR actors are shaping and changing migrant rights in line with their anti-immigrant and immigration rhetoric and policies. This study identifies direct and indirect strategies and tactics utilised by PRR actors to contest and change definitions and recognition of refugees and asylum seekers and their human rights over the past two decades. I conduct qualitative analysis of primary interviews with PRR actors and political and legal documents to uncover the mechanisms employed by a network of actors, and the political and judicial platforms used, to shape and change norms on refugee and asylum seeker rights in the UK. This paper situates PRR actors within the International Relations theoretical framework of norm dynamics and contestation, categorising PRR actors as progressive norm entrepreneurs, regressive norm entrepreneurs, and norm antipreneurs. The results of this study will demonstrate the ongoing contestation of the definitions and recognition of asylum seeker and refugee rights due to PRR political and legal strategies and tactics. The study will determine whether PRR activism is conducive to a human rights-based approach or if it has led to human rights backsliding of the rights of asylum seekers and refugees over the past 20 years.
    
    Author: Mabel Newton (University of Southampton)
  - Discourses on in/vulnerability within the ‘Compassionate Nation’
    
    Key words: Borders, Migration, Coloniality, Masculinities
    
    This paper considers how discourses on vulnerability are constructed and manipulated within anti-migrant politics in the UK context. Central to this is how discourses on migrant masculinities are imbricated with racial logics and histories of coloniality. This work focuses specifically on the passing of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (NBA) and the performative invocations of in/vulnerability within the justificatory terrain for the legislation. Rather than vulnerability framings producing a binary of in/vulnerability, the construction is set against discourses of ‘threat’ and ‘illegitimacy.’
    
    Discourses on vulnerability fit within a broader political project of ‘compassionate borderwork’ (Little & Vaugh-Williams 2017), which evokes an imperative to act due to the feminised migrant ‘in need of saving’, further justifying the expansion of militarised borders. ‘Compassionate borderwork’ draws upon neo/colonial narratives of ‘benevolence’ whilst simultaneously making life increasingly more violent for the migrant whose body is used to invoke discursive compassion. Relying upon affect theory and particularly Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work, the paper considers there is a temporal rift within these two representations; whilst ‘threat’ sticks to the body and constructs the racialised migrant as a ‘fearsome Other’, representations of feminised migrants as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘worthy of compassion’ are fleetingly and conditionally invoked to justify securitisation, only lingering whilst politically useful. Overall, this paper considers how deconstructing performative, reductive and fleeting invocations of vulnerability – and the corollaries of ‘un/worthy’ or ‘threatening’ – is essential to resisting the violence of the border.
    
    Author: Lizzie Hobbs (London School of Economics)
  - Emigration States and Interstate Bargaining Politics in the Global South: Multilevel Diplomatic Strategies, Norm Diffusion, and the Philippine State
    
    How do emigration states influence interstate bargaining politics in the international system? While international relations scholars of migration have highlighted the 'weak' negotiating power of Global South states in the international system, they have yet to feature emigration states' multilevel diplomatic strategies to overcome structural power asymmetries vis a vis powerful host immigration state. Building on Hollifield's migration state framework via the Philippine state, I argue that emigration states deploy multilevel diplomatic strategies via norm diffusion across national (learning), regional (cooperation), and global (signaling) levels toward multiple state and non-state actors (international organizations) to increase their global power in interstate bargaining. Second, these multilevel diplomatic strategies reflect their complex foreign policy agencies toward host states in the Global South. Using semi-structured interviews with Philippine state and non-state officials, process tracing, and document analysis of English, Arabic, and Tagalog state and policy documents, the study provides empirical insights into emigration states' multilevel diplomatic practices in interstate bargaining in the Global South. Theoretically, the study highlights Global South states' intricate cooperative diplomacy strategies that go beyond the conventional zero-sum game approach.
    
    Author: Froilan Malit Jr (University of Glasgow)
  - Carceral islands and archipelagic struggle: Acts of art and politics on Manus Island and beyond
    
    Since the 1990s the number of dedicated immigration detention facilities around the globe has proliferated, and while the rate of expansion has fluctuated in recent years the Global Detention Project currently maps 1377 immigration detention centres that collectively detain tens of thousands of people. These regimes of population management link sites in an archipelago of camps that share information and resources, replicate colonial logics, and forcibly mobilise or immobilise people between ‘islands’ of imprisonment.
    
    This paper interrogates the transdisciplinary concept of the ‘archipelago’ that has been used in different contexts as both a figure of carcerality and as a way of thinking new forms of solidarity and connection. The carceral archipelago describes a dispersed, yet interlinked, system of exclusion and enforcement. It also captures the violent fragmentation and dispossession inflicted through histories of (neo)colonialism. Drawing on acts of art, literature and resistance that have emerged from the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in PNG, this paper explores how people in detention and their supporters resist the carceral archipelago through another kind of archipelagic thinking. Their acts create new modes of relation, collaboration and resistance that subvert the logics of the nation-state and the scalar traps of the local or global.
    
    Author: Lucy Kneebone (Queen Mary University of London)
  - From (de)refugeeisation to Neosecuritisation: an analysis of North Korean refugees sur place
    
    This paper provides a set of analytical tools for studying refugees in the context of border crossing. To this end, this paper employs middle-range theory, situating North Korean border crossers represented as refugees, migrants, and defectors in various “space” including borders, camps, and courts. The term “border crosser” is used for stressing the uncertainty of legal status and thereby precarious rights protection during the cross-border journey. Firstly, this paper analyses legal status of North Korean border crossers in five states (South Korea, China, Russia, the UK, and the US) vis-à-vis North Koreans’ predicaments as refugees sur place. Here, international legal instruments and UNHCR play an important yet limited role in refugeeisation of border crossers in two phases of border crossing (i.e., physical event of crossing borders and subsequent legal or administrative processes). The legal status is then compared to this paper’s survey on self-identification of border crossers. Through this triangulation of factor analysis, this paper describes endogenous and exogenous variables of (de)refugeeisation. Notably, this paper focuses on the “agency” of (non)border crossers drawn on Foucauldian resistance and Bakhtinian answerability. In this view, border crossing is rephrased as self-emancipation practice in response to the body management of the states. This is further articulated upon this paper’s theoretical foundation, Ethics of Coexistence (EoC). To be specific, EoC addresses the power to restore the politics of migration against scapegoating mechanisms; the fitness of deviance for constructive social changes; and the resilience of human agents to risks in border crossing. This paper then develops Mobility-Identity-Security Analysis (MISA) and Biopolitical Risk Analysis (BRA) by reiterating the empirical case of North Koreans. In the former, (de)securitisation dilemmas, micro paradigm shifts, and locus of control exemplify each dimension of MIS, and the intersections and reverses of MIS are displayed. In the latter, an ecological understanding of risk, a risk transformation strategy in peace and agency nexus, and a matrix of urgency are illustrated. At the intersection of MISA and BRA is “Neosecuritisation”, a critique of traditional securitisation discourses in migration and refugee studies. Neosecuritisation reconfigures contentious arenas for asylum claims (economic, health, environmental) and definitions of “refugee” prescribed in the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1969 OAU Convention, and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration. This paper concludes with methodological, legal, and policy-relevant reflections on primarily but not limited to North Korean refugees sur place.
    
    Author: Dosol Nissi Lee (Center for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS))
- 199
  Panel / Power in Pop Culture and Media Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: PPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  
  Discussant: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  - Indonesian Show Trials on the Global Stage
    
    Why do anti-subversion trials under authoritarian regimes sometimes threaten to undermine government authority, even when a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion? This paper addresses the question via the examination of three Indonesian show trials that span the twentieth century. Combining a historical approach and discourse analysis, the paper argues that regime coherence, the media landscape, and the ability to mobilise opinion at an international level are important factors in influencing the varied consequences of show trials. It locates show trials as focal points whereby dissidents and marginalised groups can, on occasion, make an impact on a global stage even whilst subject to the power of the authoritarian state. However it also cautions that whilst show trials might sometimes act as ‘spaces of resistance’, the efficacy of such resistance depends on specific conjunctures of local and international forces.
    
    Key words: human rights, law, media, security, post structuralism, resistance
    
    Author: Matthew Woolgar (University of Leeds)
  - Television, Security and Vigil: nuclear weapons and popular culture
    
    BBC’s Vigil (2021), set onboard a fictional Trident Vanguard-Class nuclear submarine, has become the most-watched new drama in the UK. This paper asks; how are nuclear weapons represented in Vigil, and how do those representations function as a site of popular knowledge about nuclear weapons?. After outlining the relationship between popular culture and world politics, this paper narrows its focus to explore the relationship between popular culture and nuclear weapons. It then navigates existing critical literature on nuclear weapons, noting the imperative need for this research. Methodologically, the Social Semiotic framework is utilised for a multimodal analysis. Investigating Chilton’s (1985) findings, the analysis uncovers three key social and political consequences. Firstly, Vigil continues a gendered imagining of military and nuclear decision-making. Second, contradictory representations of nuclear weapons as agents of peace exist alongside representations of nuclear weapons as agents of destruction, providing the audience with critical “thinking space”. However, there is a continued and problematic reproduction of “Nuclear Orientalist” discourse. Finally, Vigil presents a military stalemate that maintains the status quo by suggesting that disarmament is a hopeless plight. Simultaneously, Vigil also moves nuclear weapons out of the military realm and into the political one, communicating the power of public opinion in ways that invite a more conscious and politically engaged audience. Overall, this paper illustrates that TV dramas, and similar cultural artefacts, have a lot to tell us about the production and reception of ideas about nuclear politics, with profound political consequences.
    
    Author: Emily Faux (Newcastle University)
  - From Let’s Go Brandon to Dark Brandon Rises: Competing Visions of America under Biden
    
    The aesthetic turn in International Relations and work on the Popular Culture-World Politics Continuum have opened critical and discursive spaces for the analysis of how we think about global affairs. This paper analyses the visions of international politics that popular culture produces, focusing on the Biden presidency and the way it is negotiated through popular culture. As a starting point, the NASCAR chant “Let’s go Brandon” has been appropriated and become a meme-fied artefact for right wing groups and Republican politicians to mock the president, becoming a theme for T-shirts and hats as well. The “Dark Brandon Rises” meme would then become a counter-narrative employed by Liberals and Democrats, outlining a space for the parallel contestation of politics and popular culture, blurring the lines between different genres and media. Scrutinising the competing visions and counter-visions of American politics during the Biden presidency and how they are negotiated in digital and cultural realms is the ultimate aim of this paper.
    
    Authors: Julian Schmid (Central European University) , Joel Vessels (Nassau Community College - SUNY) , Robert Saunders (State University of New York)
- 200
  Panel / Queering transnational (in)justices: critical fabulations, reimaginations Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
  - Revisiting homocapitalism and racial capitalism: Examining critical entanglements between identity and capitalism
    
    Since 2015, I've been thinking about the notion of 'homocapitalism', which is intended to capture an emerging relation between the mainstream of LGBT movements in various parts of the world and the structures, processes and institutions of global capitalism. Readers of my work have raised questions about the relationship between homocapitalism and racial capitalism, to which we must also add caste capitalism. As such, we need to ask not only what happens to identity and capitalism in their enmeshment with one another, but also whether the nature of this enmeshment has to be theorised differently in different contexts. In other words, is the 'homo' in 'homocapitalism' like the 'racial' in 'racial capitalism' and the 'caste' in 'caste capitalism'?
    
    Author: Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews)
  - Queering the Global Governance of Transitional Justice: Tensions and (Im)Possibilities
    
    Transitional justice (TJ), which consists of the various processes through which societies attempt to address past (and ongoing) legacies of conflict and violence, is at once a local, transnational, and global form of governance. Increasingly, TJ scholarship and practice has considered how gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, and other vectors of power and oppression are both addressed in and expressed through TJ mechanisms across country contexts. Encouraged by the small but growing body of scholarship queering transitional justice, I explore and develop a queer perspective to the global governance of transitional justice. I map existing queer contributions to better understand what queer approaches can bring to sites of transitional justice, which importantly includes considering the multiple and contested forms that queer takes. While these scholarly and practitioner interventions predominantly focus on the meaningful inclusion, participation, and protection of LGBTQIA+ persons in TJ practices, here I expand queer’s potential by considering how queer perspectives might expose the (cis-heteronormative, racial, carceral) violence of TJ and its institutionalisation at the global level. Moreover, I also reflect on how queer approaches illuminate both tensions and (im)possibilities, so that future TJ practices might be sites for/of transformation, intersectionality, and queerness. Queering the global governance of TJ offers opportunities to expand the social, political, and conceptual effects of TJ, and critically, seeks less-violent, more equitable and peaceful worlds both within and beyond formal articulations of justice.
    
    Author: Caitlin Biddolph (University of Sydney)
  - Forum-Shifting and Human Rights: Prospects for Queering the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
    
    An important dimension of thinking about queering responses to transnational (in)justices is considering historical queer exclusions. The adoption of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda by the UN Security Council constituted a forum-shift by women’s rights advocates away from the human rights system. The resolution reflected a strategic decision to bring women’s rights to the Security Council and forum-shift away from the consensus-based human rights system. Rather than focus on the compelling reasons to turn to the Security Council as a powerful forum to include discussions of gender and highlight women’s experiences, we instead consider the implications of this forum-shift for the concept of gender promoted by the WPS agenda. We look to this forum-shift in order to better-understand the persistent challenges that limit queer-inclusive and feminist WPS initiatives today. Queer critique points to the theoretical boundaries that underpin these practical exclusions, most notably boundaries between feminist and queer theory, but also boundaries with masculinities and trans-theorising. Queer critiques of the WPS agenda might be summarised as the agenda’s underpinning heteronormative assumptions, its continuing attachment to a gender binary, and emphasis on sexual danger combined with silence towards homophobic and transphobic violence. An investigation into the forum of WPS as space for promoting gender justice seeks to elucidate these critiques by revealing their origins within well-established limitations and exclusions of gender work in international law, in particular international human rights law. (This abstract represents research for a paper co-authored with Dr. Catherine O’Rourke (Durham University), forthcoming in Human Rights Quarterly).
    
    Author: Jamie Hagen (QUB (Queen's University Belfast))
- 201
  Panel / Rupturing Theory Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: TBC
  - Remembering the colonial difference: Utusan Melayu as a source of border thinking emerging from Singapore’s colonial experience
    
    This paper argues the importance of considering coloniality of power in discussions of global designs, using the case study of Singapore. Using Utusan Melayu, a colonial period Malay newspaper in Singapore, this paper highlights how alternative knowledges emerging from and responding to colonial legacies grant us important non-Eurocentric critiques of coloniality such as racial divisions of labour, spatial divisions to serve the global economy, colonial extraction and commodification of labour power from the global South to benefit the global North and the myth of beneficial/benevolent colonisation. The reconstitution of alternative knowledges allows us to understand how global coloniality is reflected in local histories. Engaging directly with the theme of the conference, this paper puts forward a foundational decolonial framework towards charting solutions for the future – exposing roots of coloniality that are hidden under the rhetoric of modernity and reconstituting alternative sources of knowledge . Alternative sources of knowledge not only lead us to different truths, but allows us access to different logics, which allows us to imagine different (decolonial) futures.
    
    Author: Muneerah Ab Razak (University of St Andrews)
  - The (mis)use of indigenous concepts: Ubuntu as a tool for peacebuilding in South Africa
    
    Recent critical perspectives on International Relations emphasise the need for indigenous concepts as a way of articulating contextually sensitive ‘alternatives’ to peacebuilding, that are not based on Eurocentric understandings. The African concept of Ubuntu has garnered a lot of attention in this regard. Yet, there is little empirical research looking at whether and how Ubuntu is important to those involved in/affected by peacebuilding initiatives in practice. Drawing on first-hand interviews and observations in Cape Town, this paper explores how Ubuntu is understood on the ground and whether it is important to Non-Government Organisations, community organisations, and individuals engaged in/affected by peacebuilding. These findings suggest that Ubuntu is important – particularly for community social cohesion and conflict resolution initiatives. However, how Ubuntu is understood and applied in practice is far more complex than has been previously understood in prior scholarship. As such, this paper argues for nuance and grounded research when discussing 'indigenous', 'decolonial', or 'Global' approaches to peacebuilding, and International Relations more broadly. It warns against the misappropriation of indigenous concepts as ‘ready-made’ alternatives to Eurocentric discourses. These findings speak to broader discussions on how indigenous concepts are (mis)used in studies of the international, and raise questions about why these concepts are being drawn upon, and who they are useful to.
    
    Author: Bryony Vince (The University of Sheffield)
  - Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s international thought
    
    The last decade or so has seen the sustained archival recovery and analysis of the Indian social and political thinker and activist, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s thought in global and imperial contexts. This paper extends this work by situating Kamaladevi’s transboundary civil society activism and writings, both within wider worlds of mid 20th C third-world women thinkers and intellectual currents of anti-imperial and anti-racist activism, thus framing my reading of such entangled practices of knowledge production as both relational and collaborative as a challenge to the ‘great men’ tradition of international political theory canons. I specifically focus on aspects of Kamaladevi’s internationalist thought: such as her views on race and imperialism as mutually imbricated and her invocations of global justice in the name of shared ‘humanity’. By doing so, this paper contributes to ongoing critical historiographies of empire, and postcolonial and non-Eurocentric women’s intellectual thinking to stress the importance of lived experience shaped by race, class, and gender as crucially constituting international intellectual knowledge production. Finally, through the case of Kamaladevi’s international thought, I critically examine and conclude with some reflections on the possibilities and limits of recovering historical ‘anticolonial’ women’s international thought.
    
    Author: Shruti Balaji (London School of Economics)
- 202
  Panel / The 'World's Policeman' No More? - Changes and Continuities in US National Security QE2, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: Nick Kitchen (University of Surrey)
  
  Discussant: Nick Kitchen (University of Surrey)
  - America First and the Populist Impact on US Foreign Policy and National Security under the Trump Presidency
    
    This paper examines the impact of nationalist populism on US foreign policy and national security under the Trump presidency. It considers how the framing of America First successfully exploited a long-standing gap between public opinion and the US foreign policy establishment in the United States on the extent of American global engagement. The paper explores how rhetorically America First combined populist anti-elitism with nationalist anti-globalism, establishing hostility towards the liberal international order as its most significant, consistent and politically relevant theme. In its emphasis of Jacksonian unilateralism and American military primacy, America First, at the same time, promoted a considerable degree of continuity, resulting in a persistent disconnect between a populist rhetoric of systemic change and radical reform and a political practice broadly in line with established precepts of US foreign and security policy, ranging from counter-terrorism policy to support of NATO. The paper concludes that America First successfully challenged a bipartisan elite consensus on liberal hegemony and military interventionism, significantly widening the space for debate on American grand strategy and reinforcing an overall discursive shift towards restraint among both political elites and public opinion.
    
    Author: Georg Löfflmann (University of Warwick)
  - Risk versus threat in the postwar American national security imaginary
    
    When critical security studies scholars engage with questions of risk management in international politics, most focus on the post-Cold War era and the challenges posed by terrorism, migration, international finance, and environmental degradation. Their contributions add value, but give the misleading impression that risk is the ‘new security’, i.e. that policymakers only started thinking in terms of risk after the USSR collapsed. I suggest that CSS scholarship tends to conflate the discovery of risk as a useful category of analysis with its novelty as a category of practice, and therefore misreads history in the same way as mainstream security studies theorists, who claim that the ‘traditional’ focus of national security has been mitigating threatening actors. Through a close reading of key policy documents of the postwar era, I show how America's leaders came to regard the world as a single entity facing an array of social, economic, and biospheric risks which required management. Risk management was an approach that was distinct from meeting the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its allies, and just as fundamental to conceptions of national security during the early Cold War. I illustrate this argument using the example of the Kennedy Administration's Alliance for Progress.
    
    Author: Mei Ling Young (University of Oxford)
  - The Influence of Public Opinion in the United States' Withdrawal from Afghanistan
    
    During the Afghanistan War, it became commonplace for scholars and commentators to refer to the conflict as being ‘forgotten’ in the United States. As Susan Carruthers (2011, 251) summarised with regards to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘not paying them much attention have been common responses among American civilians’. This ambivalence could also be seen in the sparsity of opinion polls in the US concerning the Afghanistan War for much of the conflict. However, in the build-up and execution of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the issue of public opinion began to reappear, with numerous polls on Americans’ views of the issue being widely reported. Furthermore, with both presidential candidates in 2020 campaigning against ‘forever wars’, a consensus has emerged around the influence of a war-weary American public in determining (a potentially hasty) withdrawal from Afghanistan. Studying congressional discourse, media coverage, and opinion polls, this paper explores the puzzle of a supposed switch in public opinion from apathy to driving a withdrawal from America’s longest war. In doing so, the paper provides a first take in exploring the influence of US public opinion on the issue of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Especially given the revelations of the Afghanistan Papers, this is an important case study for thinking about the relationship between war policies and democratic accountability in the twenty-first century.
    
    Author: Jonny Hall (University of Surrey)
  - Geopolitics from the locker room: How Trumpism responded to the gendered and sexualised discourse of US decline in the world
    
    This article offers a feminist analysis of the thesis of US decline, a prominent theory shared amongst IR scholars and US foreign policy experts about the end of US hegemony in the world. It argues that the gendered correspondences between ideas of decline and the feminisation of the US have enabled the rise of the phenomenon of Trumpism. To demonstrate this argument, this article zooms in on a particularly symbolic event, the ‘locker room talk’, the affair that disclosed Trump’s 2005 pussy-grabbing comments weeks before the 2016 US elections. I explore the locker room talk not as a single act of sexism but as re-masculinising the US and repairing US-American sovereign masculinity which had been in crisis, according to the thesis of decline. The article makes two contributions to International Relations. First, by examining how gender operates in the thesis of US decline, so far absent in IR scholarship, this articles acts a cautionary tale against declinism and narratives of falling empires. Second, the article contributes to studies on Trumpism as it relates to race and gender by introducing the concept of hybrid masculinity, a masculinity unique to the US that is raced white and infused with brutality.
    
    Author: Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU)
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  Panel / The Medicalization of/in Global Politics Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Conveners: Malte Riemann (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst) , Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
  
  Chair: Georgios Karyotis (University of Glasgow)
  - Medicalizing in/sanity? The politics of mental health awareness in the United Kingdom
    
    There has been a significant global increase in public health interventions aimed at raising awareness about the pervasiveness of mental health problems in the population over recent decades. This paper analyses and these interventions as embedded within a broader context of medicalizing mental distress in neoliberal societies. Through a genealogy of anti-stigma campaigning in the UK, I show that mental health awareness interventions promote a narrative of individual pathology and responsibility. The policy discourse with which anti-stigma interventions have been justified further reveals that mental distress is predominantly viewed as a burden for economic growth. Thus, interrogating the presumed scientific objectivity with which mental health awareness programmes are designed, exposes public mental health interventions as political projects firmly embedded within economic paradigms and bio-medical conceptualizations of mental distress. The paper highlights how medical knowledge intersects with neoliberal modes of governing populations through the medicalization of social crises and inequality.
    
    Author: Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
  - Creating community, constructing difference: medicalization, knowledge production and securitizing moves in AMR epistemic communities
    
    Several global health actors have identified antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a growing global challenge, leading to efforts to securitize AMR as an existential threat. While these securitizing moves have not yet succeeded in making AMR a top, urgent global priority, they have catalysed a nascent self-awareness of the community of AMR actors as an epistemic community. This article traces the construction of ‘the AMR community’ through shared concepts and expert functions, demonstrating that this community has become a site through which expert knowledge is asserted, produced and deployed in ways that medicalize AMR, and produce Othering and difference by constructing new subjectivities. It interrogates the racialized, gendered and North-South power relations that are re/produced through these processes, while also exploring the potential for challenging or destabilizing these power relations in the AMR response.
    
    Author: Suzanne Hindmarch (University of New Brunswick)
  - “Resilient Nation”: Iran’s Vaccination Policy as Status-Seeking
    
    Managing and preventing pandemics is a key function of modern sovereign states. How well they do so, is a source of status in international society and in the eyes of their citizens. As vaccines are a key technology of public health, their development, production and distribution are a source of status. Some states (most notably in “the West” or the “global North”) take for granted that they’ll be first in line, while others take for granted that they’ll be passed over and get once the rest have had what they need. China led the pack, developing the first vaccine, although recipients outside of China have been somewhat ambivalent. Whereas corporations in leading Western countries developed high-quality vaccines quickly, this actually only included a very limited number of countries; the United States, the UK and Germany. Other states, including almost all of the EU, relied on the early purchase and distribution of these vaccines. Then there is a third category of states - status-seeking outsiders - that build and deploy state capacity to achieve immunity levels on their own. Iran and Cuba are examples of such states. In this paper, Iran is an example of such a state, seeking to achieve status through producing its own COVID-19 vaccines both as material and symbolic resources. We discursively analyse the politics of vaccine development, and its status-seeking consequences, contextualising it both within the Iranian discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s hegemonic narrative of itself and its place in the world.
    
    Authors: Einar Wigen (University of Oslo)* , Alireza Shams Lahijani (University of Oslo)
  - Medicalising Conflict: A critical discourse analysis of public-health-based approaches to conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine
    
    Violence is increasingly framed as a public health problem and medical approaches to violence prevention are progressively occupying centre- stage in global responses to violence. This paper investigates the consequences of adopting such an approach in conflict and post-conflict environments. We do so by analysing the application of the Cure Violence (CV) model in Israel and Palestine. CV is unique in its approach as it sees violence as an actual disease that can be controlled and contained via epidemiological methods/strategies applied in disease control. Despite short-term success in reducing levels of violence, we argue that such an approach is at risk of de-politicizing conflict-resolution. Rooted in methodological individualism and evidence-based epistemology, this approach has the tendency to overlook structural causes and drivers of conflict, while concentrating its efforts on the individual alone. Conflict resolution, henceforth, becomes an individualized task, with the responsibility for success (or failure) entirely transferred onto the individual.
    
    Authors: Norma Rossi (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst) , Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow)
- 204
  Panel / The Past, Present, and Future of International Order Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Liane Hartnett (The University of Melbourne)
  
  Chair: Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews)
  - Normative Constellations of International Order: How International Orders Can Generate Shared Moral Responsibilities
    
    There are three ways that the nature of an international order can inform the moral responsibilities of the institutional agents within it. Two are straightforward. First, as international orders are constituted in part by norms, the responsibilities that states and other institutional agents are understood to bear are recognised and encoded in the international order itself. Second, international orders are variously constraining and enabling. The conditions they create inform what institutional agents can be considered answerable for. A third way that the nature of the international order can inform the moral responsibilities of its constituents is less obvious - and profoundly consequential in crises. Simply, particular distributions of political authority can generate shared responsibilities by making possible sophisticated forms of collective action. I will argue that any international order that creates the potential for ‘joint purposive action’ by 1) establishing channels for (formal and informal) deliberation and 2) fostering a willingness to coordinate actions (or a ‘participatory intention’) amongst its members, even in limited areas, will create shared responsibilities beyond existing areas of cooperation. In the face of existential threats (climate change, global pandemics, nuclear proliferation), we should strive for a future international order that promotes joint purposive action.
    
    Author: Toni Erskine (ANU)
  - Future Nostalgia: Reactionary World Ordering and Disordering in the Next Fifty Years
    
    Illiberal politics and reactionary nostalgia will shape the next fifty years. Attacking vulnerabilities in the existing liberal international order, populist leaders promise illiberal futures that draw on idealised pasts, for electoral gain. We locate today’s nostalgia in a larger universe of illiberal politics—a category including both left radicals and right reactionaries. We distinguish reaction by its backward-looking orientation toward an idealized past. We internally differentiate reactionary movements on two vectors: whether they are elitist or populist and whether they are moderate or radical in degree of reaction. We argue most reactionaries today are populist and comparatively moderate. We then identify two pathways through which reactionaries may transform world politics. In one scenario, reactionary alliances may capture existing intergovernmental organizations, rolling back liberal policies but leaving their basic structures intact. Given reactionaries’ revisionist promises, however, institutional capture may have unintended consequences. In a second scenario, even movements geared to limited disruption may become more radically transformative, whether intentionally or otherwise. While the former promises to further compromise liberal world ordering, the latter risks overthrowing the system. We map these possibilities onto the typology of reactionaries, weighing their relative risks of systemic transformation.
    
    Authors: Joseph Mackay (ANU) , Christopher David La Roche (CEU)*
  - Paths to Primacy: How Rising Powers Win Regional Domination
    
    This paper engages historical evidence from South and East Asia to examine how rising powers have historically won domination over existing international orders. Existing explanations of successful domination-seekers foreground a coercion-intensive path to primacy, through wars of universal conquest. Conversely, I argue that there are paths to primacy beyond blitzkrieg. Specifically, this paper will trace out an alternative path to primacy through displacement. This path to primacy rests on rising powers exploiting the existing order’s openness first to gain system access; second to surreptitiously cultivate alternative commercial and security patronage networks centred around themselves; and third to leverage these networks to displace and ultimately replace the incumbent international order. Historical evidence is drawn from the English East India Company’s conquest of India and the Qing conquest of China to illustrate this framework. The paper concludes with a brief plausibility probe of the framework’s applicability to understanding China’s current challenge to the US-dominated liberal international order.
    
    Author: Andrew Phillips (The University of Queenland)
  - “Indirect Warfare” and International Order
    
    How has international society ordered wars waged “indirectly”, and how have these wars ordered international society? This paper comparatively explores modern wars waged with indirect great power support for local forces. Its findings suggest these conflicts are both a product and source of order in international society. “Proxy warfare”, a Cold War term, has become politically contentious in the context of the war in Ukraine, labelling Ukrainian forces as “proxies” of the United States and other powers, rather than agentic forces. “Indirect” support of local forces by one great power against the forces and interests of other powers, has nevertheless been the most frequent and intense form of warfare in international society, since 1945. Since 1945, nuclear deterrence has increased the incentives for indirect warfare, and while the UN Charter has also outlawed aggressive war, indirect support of local forces has largely fallen outside international law. This paper suggests that great powers, due to fears of unintentional direct conflict, have also sought to informally order these wars, by seeking to confine their scope, to constrain their intensity, and by attempting to create and manipulate patron-client “proxy” relationships. The outcome of these wars waged indirectly, moreover, from the Korean War to Ukraine, have turn in also ordered international society, by redrawing the balance of power, and by enforcing the norms national sovereignty and non-intervention, albeit indirectly.
    
    Author: Aaron McKeil (LSE)
  - Love and the Liberal International Order
    
    Love appears an anathema to liberalism and its preoccupation with reason and interest. Yet, love forms part of the ‘normative complex’ (Phillips 2011) that produces and sustains the liberal international order. This article seeks to examine this paradox. Specifically, it asks: What insights might be gained into the logics of the liberal international order by better understanding its affective underpinnings? In a bid to answer this question, the article proceeds in three parts. First, it considers how and why the eschewal of love is commonplace in liberalism. Second, it uncovers love’s integral role in the liberal international imaginary of order, evident in the evocation of love in the constitution and defence of liberal community. Third, it posits that the complex of ‘liberal international love’ reveals the mutually constitutive role of affect and emotion both in the production and sustenance, and the promise and peril of the present international order.
    
    Author: Liane Hartnett (The University of Melbourne)
- 205
  Panel / The gendering of institutions: intersectionality, power and rights Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - Where are the men?: Male vulnerability in UN policy
    
    Over the past two decades, scholarly research and policy attention on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has grown steadily. While there is a strong foundation of research on female victims of CRSV, research on male victims continues to lag behind. Male vulnerability is still largely equated with front-line soldiers and perceived as reflecting those in active conflict. Although sexual violence has been recognised in the international agenda, it is associated with female suffering. UN resolution 1325 (2000), widely lauded as bringing gender-based violence into the mainstream UN agenda, only mentions female victims.
    
    This paper examines the gendered dynamics of conflict through the lenses of international policy and law, asking what provisions there are for male victims of sexual violence under the UN agenda. Through a comprehensive content analysis of UN resolutions and associated documents related to gender from 1325 onwards, this paper explores the gendered interpretations of sexual violence. Overall, the paper examines the structural issues that male victims and survivors of sexual violence face in achieving justice and recognition for what they suffered. It finds that while recognition of men as victims of sexual violence has shifted in a positive direction, there remains a long way to go if men are to be perceived as victims of sexual violence in the international, UN-led framework.
    
    Author: Anna Gopsill (University of London)
  - The Visual Reproduction of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Pillars of Gendered, Racialised, and Capitalist Power
    
    The United Nations Security Council Resolutions that comprise the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda form four pillars articulating core WPS principles and priorities: protection, prevention, participation, and relief and recovery. While scholars have already unpacked the discursive constitution and practical evolution of these pillars, they have focussed almost exclusively on their linguistic reproduction, usually through analyses of the National Action Plans (NAPs) of participating countries. We thus know surprisingly little about the role of visuality in the pillars’ reproduction. This paper therefore asks: 1) How do visuals reproduce the WPS pillars in NAPs? and; 2) How are gender, race, and (neoliberal) capitalism visually inscribed into the pillars and with what implications for the reproduction and/or disruption of global hierarchies of power? A visual feminist analysis of all NAPs published to date reveals how different images of men, women, and children are used to represent the pillars’ dominant, sometimes intersecting, themes of liberal feminism (participation), coloniality (protection), neoliberal development (relief and recovery), and the construction of men and masculinities (prevention). We conclude by exploring how the differing ease with which pillars are illustrated reflects broader trends in how comprehensively each policy area is serviced by the WPS agenda.
    
    Authors: Columba Achilleos-Sarll (University of Birmingham) , Francesca Melhuish (University of Durham)
  - “There is no one Palestinian woman” – lack of intersectionality within the UN Women, Peace & Security Agenda
    
    The United Nations Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda has become a well-known and internationally recognised framework within the field of peace and conflict studies over the past 20 years. However, one of the critiques of the WPS Agenda is that it privileges gender above any other significant power relation, such as race, class, or sexual identity in understanding women’s experiences in conflict. Although there has been some recent contributions on the Agenda’s failure to take into account intersectionality ( for example, Pratt, 2013; Jansson & Eduards, 2016; Hagen, 2016), there is a lack of clear empirical evidence in relation to how stakeholders at national level understand the WPS Agenda and intersectionality.
    
    This paper will examine how, for example, ethnicity, race, and/or geographical location, affect how the WPS Agenda is utilised and understood in Palestinian by national stakeholders. Understanding this puzzle, allows us to better conceptualise women’s experience and subjectivity, because as Wibben (2011) argues, insisting that there is only one singular narrative on women or security is “itself a form of political violence” (p.2). This paper is based on interviews conducted with 14 civil society organisations and individual experts in Palestine. This paper contributes to the theoretical discussion about intersectionality by using it as a lens through which we can understand women’s experiences at the national level, gaining insights not only into how women experience security but also into how their own identities or social locations can affect the ways in which they are able to participate in decision-making and political processes. This paper demonstrates how, political, racial, and ethnic divisions are problematic when it comes to the implementation of the WPS Agenda and, if they are not taken into consideration, there is a danger of further division, as well as the exclusion and silencing of the different voices that need to be heard as part of the process.
    
    Author: Laura Sulin (Coventry University)
  - For Better or Worse: Gendering the UN
    
    Promoting gender parity within the UN through quotas and special measures for women and a broader framework of women involvement in every sector of the international organization is an important aspect of the UN. Why is there a need for gender parity at the UN? What is the relevance of the UN Secretary General’s proposals across the twelve commitments regarding gender parity? Can UN be the beacon of gender equality in international organizations? This paper hopes to answer these questions from the feminist international relations approach. The first part of the paper will provide a brief outlook on international organizations from the feminist international relations theory and how the UN is situated. This part will emphasize how women’s representation and equality within the institution is a core value. The second part will analyze UN Secretary General’s particular principle on ‘placing women and girls at the center’ and how this in turn will contribute to UN’s reforming itself institutionally on gender equality and setting an example for others as well. The final part will analyze the outcomes of the research and provide a prescription for the posed questions.
    
    Author: Zeynep Selcuk (National Defense University)
  - Allies as Allies? The Politics of LGBTQ Rights and Inclusion at NATO in Queer International Times
    
    NATO increasingly defines itself as a values-led alliance; one that protects the territorial integrity of its member-states and one that champions democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Increasingly, LGBTQ rights are being included in these ‘NATO values’ with tentative institutional moves underway to promote LGBTQ visibility and inclusion, including two events held at NATO HQ in 2019 and 2021. These moves are replete with tensions in an institution dominated by cisgendered, heterosexual, militarised masculine norms and an alliance made up of thirty member states with differing socio-cultural and military levels of LGBTQ rights. They are also taking place in increasingly ‘queer’ international times, with competing framings of gender and sexualities being used by NATO and Russia to justify their respective foreign and security policies, including the war in Ukraine. Through in-depth analysis of NATO social media, online content, and military policy documents - combined with direct observations from the 2019 event - this paper offers a critical analysis of how LGBTQ ‘allyship’ is (re)conceived, mobilised, and strategically deployed at and beyond NATO at a time of increased conflict and hostility. In doing so, it traces the complex and contradictory links between institutional moves and their international effects.
    
    Author: Matthew Hurley (Sheffield Hallam University)
- 206
  
  Roundtable / What do we learn from the methods and ethics turn in peace and conflict studies? 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.
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Chair: Werner Distler (University of Groningen)
  
  Participants: Daniela Lai (Royal Holloway) , Birte Vogel (University of Manchester) , Lydia Cole (University of Sussex) , Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen) , Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University)
- 207
  Panel / Wider European Security Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Simon Sweeney (University of York)
  - Understanding Securitisation Success: A New Analytical Framework
    
    Securitisation studies is a vibrant, dynamic subfield which has provided vital insight into the processes of security (de)construction. Despite securitisation theory being subject to an ocean of critique, development and refinement, Balzacq et al. (2016) note that the ‘relevant criteria for adjudicating whether a development is an instance of securitization’ remains ‘a very significant problem’ in the literature. Whether securitisation happens or not (and to what extent and in what respects) is, arguably, the most important part of any study of (de)securitisation processes. A lack of clarity here is, therefore, untenable. This article addresses this gap, drawing on a series of core debates in securitisation studies alongside insights from Public Policy and Ontological Security Studies to develop an innovative heuristic framework to systematically analyse different types/dimensions of securitisation success and failure, as well as the grey areas in-between them. Disentangling success of the process of security (de)construction from the implications of such (de)construction – for agents, subjects and referents of securitisation – the article elucidates the complex, multi-dimensional and contested nature of securitisation success. Our original ‘success heuristic’ aims to guide rigorous empirical research and help systematise hitherto unworkable cross-case comparisons, while also productively advancing broader theoretical debates in securitisation research.
    
    Authors: Georgios Karyotis (University of Glasgow)* , Ian Paterson (University of Glasgow) , Andrew Judge (University of Glasgow)*
  - Lawfare, information warfare and the targeting of journalism: a critical approach
    
    This paper argues the illiberal targeting of journalism with apparently liberal means is a security issue. The discrediting of journalists with disordered information (dis/mis/mal information) and lawfare (spurious criminal and civil allegation) serves to undermine their reputations and deter others from following suit. This can be done within a domestic setting to maintain control on the news media and as a foreign policy tool of reputation management and/or covert action. This study takes a critical theoretical approach to argue that apparently liberal tools – freedom of expression and the rule of law – can be used as means to undermine trust in “news” and repress or deter the production of journalism as a form of speaking truth unto power. This paper tests the framework outlined by applying it to obvious cases such as Turkey and Russia – and less obvious instances within the ostensibly liberal democratic sphere – the UK, Malta. The framework makes a further case for considering political context alongside content of “disinformation” broadly defined because it presents threats to “liberal” democracy and security. It uses interview data and discourse analysis to argue that the security threat posed by the undermining of news and journalism is considerable and applies to the mainstream or legacy media as much as its social and online counterpart which has been the focus of literature to date.
    
    Author: Natalie Martin (University of Nottingham)
  - War by other, other means: the interactions between cybersecurity goals, digital sovereignty, and trade in digital goods
    
    Cybersecurity is a field dominated by concepts of ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’. Governed by understandings of the need for public-private partnership and the sharing of security as a common goal, a significant body of cybersecurity scholarship has focused upon the technicalities of cooperation, the proliferation of agencies and the linking of cybersecurity to broader security goals, such as those relating to organised crime, migration and combating terrorism. This article argues, however, that the interactions between cybersecurity and ‘real’ security goals are far more complex, and far more politically contentious than assumed. Using the example of the trade war occurring in the microprocessor industry, this article seeks to explore how concerns over digital sovereignty are shaping geopolitics beyond the field of cybersecurity narrowly defined. As conflict between the US and China grows, and with the EU seeing itself as caught in the middle, the securing of microprocessor supply chains has been seen as critical for three regional actors seeking to secure their position in the context of current geopolitical tensions. As the securing of physical assets important for digital connectivity becomes central to the EU’s cybersecurity policy through initiatives such as the Chips Act, trade mercantilism is reinforcing regulatory mercantilism, and vice versa. The key contribution to this special issue therefore is in demonstrating how lines between ‘cyber’ and ‘physical’ security are blurring to the point that they become increasingly meaningless, requiring cybersecurity’s scope to move beyond protection of information systems, and international relations’ consideration of security to include ‘cyber’ as standard, political and contentious, rather than as a niche area of technical interest.
    
    Authors: Ben Farrand (Newcastle University) , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
  - Regulating European defence industries and technologies: Time for reflection?
    
    The Russian war in Ukraine has turned many certainties about European defence policy upside down. This paper concentrates on one aspect - the regulation of European defence industries and technologies. Since the end of the Cold War national and EU level policies have tended towards a normalisation of defence firms, a less restrictive approach to arms exports and a neglect of the arms control agendas that had been an important part of detente in the latter years of the Cold War. While immediate attention has rightly been paid to supplying military equipment and training to Ukraine, the war has shown significant underlying weaknesses in existing armaments policies and a wide range of national responses, which only underscore the many different ways strategic autonomy is understood in Europe. This paper argues that current discussion centres on the two extremes of autarky and dependency and that while some correction to neoliberal policies is needed, a richer understanding of the concept of autonomy and the necessary trade-offs is needed.
    
    Author: Jocelyn Mawdsley (Newcastle University)
  - How energy security calculations influenced positions of major powers during the Ukraine conflict
    
    The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war has forced countries around the world to consider their positions on the conflict and their responses. Russia’s attack was a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, a fact that most countries in the West recognized and condemned. They also condemned the humanitarian disaster and the atrocities against civilians by Russian forces and their proxies. But for a number of governments around the world, concerns about energy security, dependence, as well as opportunities, have been quite decisive in influencing their balancing act toward the Ukraine war. This paper examines how energy-related priorities, pressures, and opportunities affected the stances of different major powers (such as India, Indonesia, Germany, etc) toward the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It argues, preliminarily, that countries in Europe, despite their direct dependence on Russian gas, have been more forceful in condemning Moscow and assisting Kyiv, while countries in other regions have taken a more equivocal posture, driven by energy needs and opportunities.
    
    Author: Sharad Joshi (Middlebury Institute of International Studies)
- 208
  
  Conference event / Working group convener meeting Clyde, Hilton
- 10:30
  
  Refreshment break
- 209
  Panel / Bratwurst and the Bear: German and Russian Foreign Policy Orientations in Contrast Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Arantza Gomez Arana (University of Northumbria)
  - Alexander or Ozymandias?: Russia’s Foreign Policy in Africa
    
    Since Vladimir Putin took power in 2000, Russia's focus on projecting power in Africa has become the norm for Russia's foreign policy. The qualities that make Africa ripe for Russia's foreign policy strategy offers an ideal setting for examining Russia's influence in vulnerable states. Russia's behavior in Africa follows a foreign policy theme under Putin's leadership, focusing on states with past or current fragmented governing institutions, interstate violence, rich in natural resources, and a history of colonialism.
    This paper asks, through a most-similar cross-case and within-case analysis: why do African government incumbents choose a Russian foreign policy model over traditional military intervention and security force assistance (SFA)? This paper explores why African states are moving from historically Western-supported foreign policy to a Russian model, one that is driven by access to material resources such as military hardware, private military contractors (PMCs), and insecure natural resource extraction. We introduce a cross-case analysis of the Russian model in Sudan and France's "traditional" interventionist model in Cote d'Ivoire. We then provide a within-case analysis of the two models in Mali as a validity check.
    
    Authors: Sky Kunkel (Purdue University)* , Matthew Ellis (Purdue University)
  - Understanding German foreign policy in the (post-)Merkel era
    
    This essay reviews four recent books on Germany’s foreign policy with emphasis on the era of Angela Merkel. The evaluation is based on their (a) added value to scholarship on German foreign policy, (b) theoretical sophistication and contribution to IR, (c) relevance also for the post-Merkel era. I argue that the books bring in valuable insights regarding the enduring, yet also changeable role of anti-militarism and provide knowledgeable analyses of the failure of Germany’s policies towards Russia. Importantly, they enrich also broader literatures, especially in their focus on discursive change (Stengel 2020) and state power in the EU context (Fix 2021). I demonstrate that these ideas help us understand also Germany’s struggle to redefine its role after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and offer more nuanced analyses of Germany’s specifics, staying clear of treating the country as a priori exceptional.
    
    Author: Jakub Eberle (Institute of International Relations Prague)
  - 'Civilian power' role contestation? Perception of Germany's Russia policy by the "Alternative for Germany" party during Angela Merkel's chancellorship
    
    In 1990, Hans Maull proposed a concept of ‘civilian power’ (Zivilmacht), suggesting a new type of leadership projection based on the assumption, the state claiming such leadership might build it up, basing on multilateral institutions and aiming to strengthen the international order based on the international law. Among the actors, which might try to implement such kind of national role, Maull particularly mentioned then recently re-unified Germany. The essence of 'civilian power' policies is, according to Maull, in attempting to 'civilize' the international order by reinforcing the influence of the international law, respecting human rights principles and aiming at peaceful and law-based conflict settlement.
    During Merkel's chancellorship, Berlin attempted to act in accordance with aforementioned principles on the European and international arena. In the particular case of Russia policy, this explains, on the one hand, Berlin's stance on imposing sanctions against Russia in 2014, and, on the other hand, Germany's engagement into conflict settlement negotiations between Russia and Ukraine within the Normandy format (2014-2022). Moreover, these considerations guided Berlin's steps toward upholding the economic cooperation with Kremlin and 'remaining in contact' with Moscow on the issues in Syria and Libya.
    
    Meanwhile, in 2013 the party "Alternative for Germany" (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) was established. Since then, the AfD has been constantly promoting close relations between the FRG and the Russian Federation and opposing to sanctioning Russia. Therefore, the AfD’s narratives were to significant extent in odds with the approaches to Russia policy, the third and the fourth Merkel's governments attempted to pursue.
    
    Against this background, it is necessary to look into the research question, in fact, whether the stance of the AfD on Germany's Russia policy is a case of a role contestation with regard to 'civilian power' based policies, pursued by the governments under Merkel.
    
    The review of the issue enables to understand the specifics of the FRG’s Russia policy under Angela Merkel and its perception within Germany's party-political landscape. The assessment is done basing on the methodology of foreign policy analysis reflecting the specifics of the “national roles” as well as reflecting the behaviors of political parties on foreign policy issues. Among other things, discourse analysis will be used to review the foreign policy documents and the speeches of foreign policy decision-makers of the FRG with regard to Russia during Merkel's chancellorship as well as the party (and after 2017 also Bundestag faction) leadership of the AfD. On the results of this review, it will be determined to what extent the Germany’s national role concept of ‘civilian power’ has been challenged by the narratives of the "Alternative for Germany" in case of Russia policy during the third and the fourth chancellorships of Angela Merkel.
    
    Key words: Germany, Russia, Alternative for Germany, foreign policy, national role, civilian power.
    
    Author: Viktor Savinok (Maria-Curie-Sklodowska-University)
- 210
  Panel / Civil society networks and transnational advocacy Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Non-Governmental Organisations Working Group
  
  Convener: Angela Crack (University of Portsmouth)
  
  Chair: Angela Crack (University of Portsmouth)
  - Governments, INGOs, and interpersonal networks. Employing Social Network Analysis to assess INGO independence
    
    This paper explores social network analysis (SNA) as a means for rethinking the nature of INGO-government relations in INGO countries of origin. Allegations of clandestine state influence on INGO practices and hidden political agendas are standard tropes in local and global debates surrounding the activities of international NGOs in sovereign states. While existing research on state-INGO relationships has scrutinised institutional patterns of cooperation and conflict, the present paper reviews methodological and conceptual innovations in social network analysis to trace and conceptualise the significance of informal interpersonal ties between state and non-state actors.
    
    Owing to its highly interdisciplinary roots, social network analysis is variously treated as a toolkit or a social theory its own right. Accordingly, the paper reviews standard methods and concepts utilised in social network analysis across the social sciences. Borrowing the notion of interlocking directorates, I develop 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. I thereby contribute to methodological innovation and the largely institutional literature on the interfaces between state-based and non-state forms of power in global governance and their implications for INGO independence.
    
    Author: Andrea Warnecke (Leiden University)
  - Whatever happened to ‘people-centered’ governance? ASEAN's dual democratic deficits and the challenge for civil society
    
    The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has in the last decade attempted to implement a more ‘people-centred’ approach to governance and shake off its reputation as an elite-driven regional project. Despite the rhetoric, little has actually changed in the formal institutional channels through which civil society organisations (CSO) can meaningfully influence ASEAN governmental policy. Compounding this problem is the well- documented ‘illiberal’ shift across a large number of ASEAN democracies, putting civic spaces under extreme duress. I argue that although the current outlook for democratic regional governance appears bleak, a more prominent role for the largest civic gathering in the region, the ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), could help to address these deficits. The forum has similarly struggled to gain political traction vis-à-vis regional governance, but recent CSO initiatives have hinted at a multi-stakeholder approach that might hold the key to unlocking the promises of a people-centred ASEAN.
    
    Author: David Norman (University of Portsmouth)
- 211
  Panel / Concealed violences: The ethics of knowledge during the Troubles Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Hannah West (Cardiff University)
  
  Chair: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln, University of St Andrews)
  - Competing voices and information recovery: Investigations into the use of informers during ‘the troubles’’
    
    Diverse forms of investigation have addressed controversies surrounding violence and the use of informers to collect intelligence during ‘the troubles’. Ranging from murder investigations to public inquiries, they have often faced difficulties getting access to all relevant information held by the security forces, and their outcomes have been met with varying degrees of acceptance. This paper assesses the impact survivors and victims’ families have had on these investigations, compared to the security forces’ impact. It does so by focusing on the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland’s investigations into a lethal shooting at the Heights Bar, Loughinisland, County Down, on 18 June 1994. Investigations into this terrorist attack claimed police Special Branch had protected informers allegedly involved in the attack from prosecution. The paper will demonstrate how survivors and victims’ families used the courts to get the Ombudsman’s report into the attack withdrawn, then accepted the replacement report, only for that one to be challenged by retired police officers instead. This analysis is particularly timely given that the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill seeks to overhaul the way similar controversies are dealt with by discontinuing and even prohibiting all such investigations in favour of information recovery.
    
    Author: Samantha Newbery (University of Salford)
  - Why is intelligence unethical? The case of the Northern Ireland conflict
    
    My previous research using Omand and Phythian’s Just Intelligence framework found that intelligence activities during the conflict in Northern Ireland were occasionally unethical. Whilst it emerged that most intelligence activities conduced were predominantly ethical, the unethical activities had major impact on the conflict and the state’s legitimacy. But why was intelligence occasionally unethical? Was it that there were simply ‘bad apples’ within the intelligence communities? Or was it more complex? Were there more institutional and structural reasons why intelligence during these two conflicts were unethical? This paper argues that there were common themes regarding why unethical intelligence sometimes occurs: different visions within the state of what success entailed; lack of communication of aims by government; lack of guidelines; lack of cooperation. Some of these lessons were learnt during the conflict, with most of its unethical activities occurring in the initial years of the Troubles. However, not all lessons were learnt. Knowing why some intelligence activities were unethical is important because Northern Ireland is used internationally as a case study regarding how to tackle terrorism and initiate peace processes. With the UK acting as one of the global leaders in teaching other states intelligence techniques, it is imperative that these intelligence techniques are indeed ethical.
    
    Author: Eleanor Leah Williams (Cardiff University)
  - The non-combatant on the “front line”: British servicewomen during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
    
    Critical scholarship recognises women’s longstanding but unacknowledged presence on the ‘front line’ (Enloe, 1988, MacKenzie, 2015) but tends to explore what it means for the servicewoman as an individual rather than considering why the military, as an organization, is invested in this myth (Sasson-Levy, 2003, Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah, 2016). A critical feminist discourse analysis, this research draws on twenty interviews with veterans from the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), Royal Ulster Constabulary and Women’s Royal Army Corps, combined with extensive archival material (policy documents, military records and media coverage). This paper examines how servicewomen’s war labour was controlled by the British Army, through policy direction that kept them unarmed and wearing skirts, labelled as ‘non-combatants’. The British Army employed a negotiated gender order or ‘bargain’ with servicewomen to assert control whilst permitting some individual agency to resist and subvert. In approaching the 50-year anniversary of women joining the UDR, given the scant research on British servicewomen during the Troubles, this is a timely contribution to Northern Irish history. Contributing to critical scholarship that recognises women’s presence in ‘front line combat’ as unacknowledged, this paper goes further in considering the implications of this control over servicewomen for how we understand military power.
    
    Author: Hannah West (Newcastle University)
  - Deciding who can and who cannot collect intelligence: developing a hierarchy of trust within uniformed intelligence gathering during the Northern Irish Troubles
    
    Throughout the Northern Ireland Troubles intelligence gathering played an ever-increasing role in combating paramilitary threats to the British state. This is a trend common throughout other British campaigns and which was accompanied by the ever-present questions about ethics and trust. These processes have received significant and growing attention from scholars of Northern Ireland in general and intelligence in particular. However, one element which has remained underdeveloped is the decisions about which organisations and their subunits were allowed or, indeed, trusted to collect intelligence. While the intelligence agencies were clearly designed to collect and assess intelligence, as the conflict progressed more and more uniformed troops from the British Army were involved in intelligence gathering. The increased focus on uniformed intelligence gathering even led to the development of tailored recce platoons. Interestingly though, one uniformed group, the Ulster Defence Regiment, which had been established explicitly to support the army through the benefit of its ‘local knowledge’ was prohibited from engaging in many intelligence activities. This then begs the question of how we determine who is and is not allowed i.e. trusted to gather intelligence and what this tells us about inter-organisational dynamics.
    
    Author: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln, University of St Andrews)
- 212
  Panel / Discussions of sustainability and climate change concepts using critical discourses Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Environment Working Group
  
  Convener: EWG Working group
  
  Chair: Saoirse McGilligan (University of St Andrews)
  - Posthuman Geopolitical Culture(s): Decentring the State in the Anthropocene Epoch
    
    Drawing on critical feminist, Indigenous, and imaginative approaches to planetary crises, this paper interrogates the anthropocentrism of contemporary geopolitical thinking. While some scholars (cf. Johnson et al. 2014; Lövbrand, Mobjörk, and Söder 2020; Dalby 2020) have made efforts to introduce a new form of geopolitics reflecting the realities of the Anthropocene Epoch – and its attendant warping of the field of action (i.e. the geos) – there has yet to emerge a new paradigm that actually decentres the state. Given that nearly aspect of geopolitics is or will soon be shaped by global environmental destabilisation, just as states – from plural democracies to authoritarian regimes – have demonstrated a stultifying short-sightedness in addressing the challenges of the New Human Epoch, it is incumbent on scholars to chart a new path forward. Using the Anthropocene as a tool to think with, this intervention scaffolds a new form of geospolitics. I argue that such an orientation is indispensable for navigating a coming world politics defined by global heating, rising seas, cataclysmic weather, biochemical disruptions, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, and ecosystem collapse.
    
    Author: Robert Saunders (State University of New York)
  - Vulnerability and resistance: Islanding climate change politics
    
    My paper engages critical feminist theory and Pacific Studies literature to explore the concept of vulnerability in climate change politics from a historical and postcolonial perspective. My paper argues that climate change vulnerability is a racialised and gendered concept that builds on historical imaginative geographies that have a colonial history and a paternalistic and developmental politics. This conceptualisation enables a First World fantasy of invulnerability, diminishing the importance of climate action and mitigation in particular. This argument is developed through an analysis of how vulnerability has been framed in key sites of climate politics, notably the IPCC and the UNFCCC, the origins of those framings, and their discursive effects. It also engages closely with the discursive strategies of islander discourse through texts including poetry, and satirical short fiction. I also seek to develop a new conceptualisation of vulnerability through the ‘islanding’ concept, drawing on the work of island scholars, artists and activists.
    
    Author: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)
  - Tackling Climate Change; A Collective Responsibility
    
    Climate change has been the in the news for long time and its results have been seen in many parts of world in different forms, for instance shifting rain seasons, untimely rain, and wet parts of the world changing into dry region. Every country of the world has felt the effects of climate change and no region is left untouched by this. Therefore, to tackle this issue, it is the responsibility of every country to take strict action with respective plans. Recently the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26) attended by 200 countries, decided and agreed upon immediate actions and planning for combating climate change which still remain in the documents but yet not materialized. Many of the important points of this conference like emphasizing green energy afforestation, arranging climate finance, controlling fossil fuel all these are few outcomes of the conference. But the burden of climate change mostly bestows upon the developing countries which act as repulsive for them for not coming to an agreement or common consciousness about climate change and they hesitate to cooperate and collaborate.This paper would tend to analyze how both the developed and developing countries can come to a common ground with an environment consciousness which affect everyone and effect everything. For example, emphasizing on afforestation and green energy. Moreover, it also emphasizes on creating awareness among the common masses through governments, NGOs and civil societies, to tackle environment change from grass root level to urban and industrial sectors.
    
    Authors: Mohammad Anash (Aligarh Muslim University)* , Sonu . (JMI)
  - Towards a Global Environmental Thought
    
    Climate change poses an imminent transnational danger to the planet, threatening future generations and deepening inequities of human rights. There is a common agreement among nations that drastic action must be taken, yet what type of action remains unclear. This paper argues that nations must conceive of a new global environmental thought by considering varying approaches towards the relationship between the human and the non-human. This can only be achieved if global thought reflects the realities of all humans. The paper is an interdisciplinary study. It first explores the concept the ‘Anthropocene’, examining the role of Western nations, corporations, and institutions. It then explores environmental thought in Pope Francis’ seminal encyclical Laudato Si’ (Pope Francis, 2015) with particular reference to how his experience in the Global South influenced his messages. It next contends for the necessity to engage with worldviews from across the planet. It does so by engaging with the research on the ‘Capitalocene’. In particular, it investigates the arguments of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marisol de la Cadena, Jorge Nahuel, and Anaru Eketone. Global thought will be at its most impactful when it represents not just the ontologies of the planet but creates dialogues between these ways of thinking.
    
    Author: Saoirse McGilligan (University of St Andrews)
- 213
  Panel / Feminism and changing International institutions Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Laura Mcleod (Manchester University) , Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
  
  Chair: Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  
  Discussant: Maria O'Reilly (Leeds Beckett University)
  - Inter-Organisational Cooperation in Conflict Early Warning and Response Since 1990s: A Cross-Case Study of Heavyweights
    
    A variety of inter- and intra-state violent conflicts and their internationalisation create an urgent impetus for global action, including international organisations(IOs) becoming ever more invested into conflict prevention. Considering their overlapping activities, as well as orientation on international principles (including cooperation and multilateralism), working together seems like an obvious outcome. But the question still remains: Do IOs actually cooperate?
    This paper (based on my dissertation project) offers insights on cooperation among inter-and non-governmental organisations in conflict early warning and response. The focus is on ‘heavyweights’ in the field: the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the African Union. Starting from the scope and nature of their partnerships from 1990s to 2022, the work sets to explore factors that influence decision-making in cooperation among the relevant bureaucratic units in charge of conflict early warning. Here, I consider both idiosyncratic organizational culture of international bureaucracies and their embeddedness into the world political environment.
    After mapping out the inter-organizational relationships, I zoom in on two sub-regions of the ‘Global South’ - Horn of Africa and Central Asia. For these purposes, qualitative cross-case analysis of primary sources (official documents, semi-structured interviews) and secondary literature is applied.
    
    Author: Alina Isakova (Bielefeld University)
  - Doing Gender in EU Foreign Policy
    
    Over the last two decades the European Union (EU) has sought to externalise its internal identity as a gender actor across a range of foreign policy practices. This move towards externalisation has been influenced in part by endogenous factors such as member states increasing commitments for feminist foreign policies. But this is also informed by exogenous pressures that push for the inclusion of global feminist principles such as those articulated within the WPS agenda. For the EU, attention to these pressures has increased the commitments to gender equality programmes and the inclusion of analytical concepts like intersectionality in development discourses. Prominent feminists within the EU external relations architecture, like MEP Hannah Neumann, contend that the inclusion of feminism makes for a materially different type of the international relations.
    But does this attention to ‘gender’ make for feminist external relations? In other words, to what extent do recent development inform transformation of EU external relations? Further, what type of feminism informs EU external relations? Using the nexus of development and security in EU external relations as a starting point, the proposed paper considers how EU external relations practitioners understand the inclusion of gender perspectives in their work. The proposed paper will include on the close reading of key external relations framework documents in the last decade, an evaluation of key policy frameworks and narrative interviews with practitioners. Analytically, it draws on Feminist Institutionalism and practice approaches within International Relations. The aim is to develop a typology of feminisms that informs EU external relations work with a view to understanding, first, the broader implications of this practitioner knowledge; and second, the extent to which transformative change within the EU’s external relations regime is possible.
    
    Author: Toni Haastrup (University of Stirling)
  - Organisational change in the UN system during the COVID pandemic
    
    Drawing on Feminist Institutionalism, critical management studies, sociological approaches and in-depth interviews with 28 staff from a range of UN organisations, this paper examines whether the complex and at times contradictory change processes taking place within the UN system during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic challenged or sustained existing gendered and racial hierarchical stratifications within the UN system. Specifically, the paper explores how women and men address the liminalities of silence, absence and presence within international institutional spaces during a global pandemic and examines the tactics they use to help progress their career while in lockdown and working from home. In doing so, the paper advances understandings of how Feminist Institutionalism helps explain how feminist advocates use strategic-level system-wide change processes to redistribute power and advance gender and race equality at the micro-level within international organisations.
    
    Authors: Georgina Holmes (The Open University) , Sarah Newnham*
  - Transformative indicators? Gender expertise and Technocratic peace
    
    In the last decade, the use of indicators to track implementation of international peacebuilding and peacekeeping programmes, policies and practices has proliferated. Indicators are criticised by many scholars for their technocratic, standardised and colonializing effects. This article follows a different line of inquiry: Can indicators be transformative? Contemporary critiques place indicators as bureaucratic artefacts in a vacuum, detached and decontextualized from the nuances of human agency that develop, utilise and subvert them. I draw on feminist science and technology studies to conceptualise indicators as powerful gendered technologies of knowledge creation developed, used and subverted by institutional actors. Drawing upon interviews with institutional actors and Secretary-General Reports, I track institutional narratives of one indicator (out of 26) developed to capture implementation of the United Nations’ (UN) Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The indicator investigated tracks the number of senior gender experts employed within UN peacekeeping and special political missions. Tracing the narratives of progress, skill and location in the reporting of this indicator between 2010 and 2020 highlights strategies deployed by feminist and gender advocates within the UN to prompt positive gender change. Whilst indicators hold the danger of reinforcing neoliberal norms, the failure to conceptualise the potential for feminist and gender advocates to develop, utilise and/or subvert them smacks of hubris and serve to limit opportunities for meaningful transformation.
    
    Author: Laura Mcleod (Manchester University)
- 214
  Panel / Gender-based violence within and beyond borders Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  - Gender violence in cyber-space: how to conceptualise international cybersecurity and cyber-crimes in a gender-sensitive way.
    
    The virtual nature of cyberspace makes it particularly challenging to reach a common definition and conceptualisation of what it is . In effect, even the different threat representations associated to cybersecurity build on different conceptualisations of what cyberspace is and, perhaps more importantly, come with different social and political effects. For the purpose of this paper, I will take into account the definition given by the Oxford dictionary describing cybersecurity as “[t]he state of being protected against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data, or the measures taken to achieve this” . In this definition, systems and humans are both subjects of cybersecurity and, thus, in the state of protection, go against one of the main questions associated to cyber-security, namely the “non-human referent object problematisation”. The field of cybersecurity is particularly interesting from a feminist perspective due to the highly gendered issues which could fall into this category, such as cyber stalking, electronically enabled trafficking, revenge-porn and hate speech against women . Contrary to the dominant visions that consider cyber-space and cyber-crimes as gender-blind or gender-neutral, I will argue how and why gender matters in international cyber security. Gender is, indeed, a factor of vulnerability, whether real or perceived, that shapes and influences online behaviours, determines access to the Web and defines power.
    After having analysed the relation between gender and cybersecurity and explained why gender matters in cybersecurity, my paper will focus on the different impacts that cyber-crimes and cyber-threats have on women. For this purpose, I will rely on two case studies: the impacts of Internet shutdowns on women and the use of the Internet of Things’ (IoT) devices. Then, taking into account the Feminist Istitutionalism approach as theoretical basis, I will try to explain why international cyber-security is still gender-blind. I will call for the redefinition of the traditional security term promoted by Realists in order to make visible the security threats to which women are exposed every single day. I will, finally, offer some suggestions on how a gender-sensitive conceptualisation of cybersecurity and cyber-crimes could be conceived.
    
    Author: Claudia Schettini (Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies)
  - Involuntary celibacy and intimate partner violence: theorising patriarchy for comparative work on gendered violence
    
    The goal of this paper is two-fold: first, it questions the distinction made between various manifestations of gendered violence and how they are studied in distinct silos of knowledge (re)production; second, it theorises patriarchy in a way that allows for comparative work between different manifestations of gendered violence. More specifically, this work is concerned with the study of involuntary celibacy and intimate partner violence.
    
    I draw on neo-institutionalism to argue that patriarchy is the result of human interaction that is structured around the interplay between ‘institution’ and ‘ideology’. I use a ‘continuum thinking’ approach in my reading of gendered violence to focus on the connections between manifestations of violence, rather than considering them discrete and isolated acts. Based on this, I argue that exploring gendered violence in terms of its function, i.e. to enforce and (re)produce male domination, allows for more comparative work. Patriarchy then becomes a lens to analyse different manifestation of violence, centred around gender as a defining feature, and according to which the relative positioning of maleness is dominant.
    
    Keywords: gender, violence, patriarchy, oppression, institution, ideology, involuntary celibacy, intimate partner violence, comparative work
    
    Author: Anne Peterscheck (University of St Andrews)
  - Sites of everyday gendered violence and feminist resistance in Southern Europe
    
    The paper explores sites of everyday gendered violence and feminist resistance in Southern Europe, considering how the politics of permanent austerity since 2010 in the region (re)produce and exacerbate this violence. It draws on Feminist International Political Economy (FIPE) and Feminist Security Studies (FSS), in order to expose the responsibility of austerian states and institutions as agents of violence when they put pressure on sites of everyday violence and exacerbate gendered insecurities through processes of dispossession, devaluation and discipline. The paper builds a bottom-up analysis, looking at specific sites of everyday gendered violence, such as the household, workplace, street, borders and political platforms, and exploring how they correlate with austerity policies and discourses. It also seeks to visualise the alternatives posed in sites of feminist resistance that confront the violence of austerity, mapping ideas and practices of resistance to counter gender violence in Southern Europe, including local and transnational organizing, community responses or less visible acts of resistance in complex sites of violence. Feminist activists and scholars have documented and performed different forms of resistance, in order to confront oppression, but also to render visible and politicise silenced and hidden violences. Feminist praxis and knowledge on resistance, thus, puts forward possibilities to confront an extremely violent global political economy.
    
    Author: Iratxe Perea Ozerin (University of the Basque Country)
- 215
  Panel / International Implications of State-Minority Relations in the Middle East Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Fiona McCallum Guiney (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Fiona McCallum Guiney (University of St Andrews)
  - Druze Community Resilience and Resistance: The Struggle of Druze Minority against Assad Authoritarian Regime and Networks in As-Suwayda (2018-2021)
    
    With the heightened sectarianism and violence stoked by the Syrian regime since 2011, the Druze in Syria have increasingly shown resilience to the Assad regime’s systemic political repression and violence, with forms of social resistance. They have found themselves victims of the Syrian regime and allies (Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah), as well as rebels, aiming to dismantle their relative autonomy. This research seeks to explore how minority groups are affected by conflict by presenting an analysis of recent community resilience during the escalations in As-Suwayda (the mainly Druze city in Syria), as part of a collective response and uprising against the Syrian regime between 2018 - 2021 in south-west Syria. The research aims to highlight that unlike other minority groups in Syria, the Druze have largely avoided being uprooted from their communities, turning inwards for both protection, social, and economic stability. Based on fieldwork and humanitarian missions to As-Suwayda between 2018-2019, it will discuss the security and economic challenges these groups face, their leadership, community solidarity, and mobilisation strategies. It argues that to fully understand why and how the Syrian regime tries to exploit and weaponize vulnerable minorities, we must move beyond generalizations of minority-state relations and explore the context for each group.
    
    Author: Mohammad al-Ashmar (University of St Andrews)
  - The Effect of Different Authorities on the Situation of Christians in Syria since 2011
    
    Since the beginning of the Syrian Uprising in 2011, there has been renewed interest in the state of minority communities in Syria, both locally and internationally. This was accelerated by the country’s division into local control areas, with the political and military forces in each area following their own policies toward Christian communities and other minority groups. Our study attempts to respond to the questions that such a situation provokes: How do these authorities treat Christians? How are different Christian populations affected by these different groups? And how do Christians navigate the particular circumstances in each of these areas of control? This qualitative research followed a descriptive-analytical approach and collected data from thirty semi-structured interviews with Syrian Christians and Muslims involved with this issue. The study draws important conclusions about the condition of Syrian Christians in light of the Syrian Crisis. It also shows how the Syrian regime has used the ‘Christians card’ to attain the West’s support in the name of minority rights.
    
    Authors: Samir Alabdalh (Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies, Istanbul)* , Nidal Alajaj (University of Kent)
  - Twenty Years of Silence: War, Displacement, and “Peace” through the eyes of the Domari of Iraq
    
    The 2023 BISA conference coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq. Much has been written about the events that have taken place in Iraq post-2003. The years-long insurgency against the U.S Coalition forces received a great deal of international attention, as did its evolution into sectarian civil war, and the later occupation of vast swathes of territory by the Islamic State. Throughout the past twenty years, one ethnic group of Iraqis has suffered more than most, yet they have remained diligently overlooked by the international community in all its manifestations. The Domari (Romani) people of Iraq have suffered brutal persecution since 2003. Already a stigmatised group, since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, they have become increasingly marginalised, securitised, and vulnerable; a situation exacerbated by their consistent erasure from narratives of war, displacement, and subsequent peacebuilding efforts. This paper is rooted in semi-ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the Iraqi Domari community in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. It aims to assist the Domari community in reclaiming both physical and narrative space in relation to war and peacebuilding by foregrounding Domari narratives surrounding their experiences of each. Furthermore, this paper will explore Domari responses and methods of everyday resistance to their enforced social positionality as Iraq’s most poverty-affected and stigmatised ethnic group, within a context of entrenched structural violence.
    
    Author: Sarah Edgcumbe (University of St Andrews)
  - Why do Christian communities support Middle Eastern authoritarian states?
    
    In the twenty-first century, Middle Eastern Christians have experienced limited political participation, discrimination and insecurity. Yet despite these conditions, Christian communities especially their religious leaders seem wary of democratization and the global minority rights discourse and mostly remain supportive of the authoritarian state. This paper puts forward two explanations for this apparent paradox. The first is that regimes are willing to delegate internal autonomy to religious institutions which allows religious leaders to preserve communal practices, liaise on the community’s behalf and minimise grassroots challenges to both religious and state authority. The second is that authoritarian states are considered security guarantors in contrast to the uncertainty of the political and security environment under alternative regimes. This was highlighted by violence against Christians in Egypt and Syria after the 2011 uprisings. Exploiting Christians’ fears of living under Islamist rule, authoritarian states garner Christians’ support without having to prioritise the community’s needs or improve their situation. Using the case studies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the paper argues that there is a low benchmark for guaranteed support – namely allowing internal autonomy and not openly siding with those targeting Christians – and consequently, Christian communities will remain wary of both domestic and external calls for democratization in the region.
    
    Author: Fiona McCallum Guiney (University of St Andrews)
- 216
  Panel / Migration and Refugees in Europe Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales)
  
  Chair: Benedetta Zocchi (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Discussant: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
  - Recontextualising modern slavery: Tracing the influence of a migration-control mindset
    
    Among European Union institutions, its member states, and external partners, issues of migration are increasingly discussed and incorporated into other policy areas. For instance, policies and agreements on trade, development cooperation, and stability and peace progressively mention and directly aim to address priorities related to migration management and control. In this paper, we ask: To what extent have the language and agendas of migration gradually entered and came to dominate debates and policies in the field of modern slavery? Through discourse network analysis, we map actor coalitions and their proposed policies to study the discursive links between migration and modern slavery between 1990 and 2021. To achieve this, we use four different textual sources (news agency reports, speeches from German and British national parliaments, and United Nations General Assembly speeches). We assess actors and their statements within a long-term historical and institutional context by using the concept of recontextualisation. We demonstrate that discourse and policies on modern slavery have shifted over time from an underlying logic of human rights and corporate responsibility to ideas that are associated with coercive migration control such as national security, border controls, and criminalisation to protect from a threatening external other.
    
    Authors: Ece Ozlem Atikcan (University of Warwick) , Sofie Roehrig (University of Warwick & TU Dresden)
  - Frontier-Making: Re-Imagining EUrope on its Dispersed Peripheries
    
    2015 is overwhelming identified as the benchmark date of a migration crisis in Europe. The presumed intensification and heterogenization of migration flows prompted EUrope to respond with an intensification and heterogenization of bordering practices. Looking at the combination of these two processes, in the last decade, scholars in migration studies became obsessed with borders. Crossed, trespassed, raised, enforced. The border represents today a central spatial and epistemic category through which we observe migrants’ mobilities, and produce knowledge about how they are governed, diversified, and deviated. Particularly across decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, borders have been emancipated from their linear and territorial dimension and promoted to methodological and epistemic instruments. In this paper, I contend that an overwhelming attention to borders as malleable and pluriform objects, and the indissoluble link between border enforcement and the invention of a migration crisis overshadowed the material histories and geographies through which these borders appear in the first place. By investigating cases of the prolonged, forced, and unexpected assemblage of migrants and inhabitants in the Western Balkans, this paper explores the entangled agencies, histories, and subjectivities that emerge from the encounter of subjects that EUrope intentionally positions on its peripheries and proposes an analytical move from border-thinking to frontier-making. Advocating for a dialogue between scholars in Critical Balkan Studies (CBS) and Critical Migration Studies (CMS), it introduces frontier-making as an approach to study encounters between subaltern subjects in contested spaces where EUropean disciplinary power is simultaneously constantly replicated and constantly subverted.
    
    Author: Benedetta Zocchi (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Push and Back: The Ripple Effect of EU Border Externalisation from Croatia to Iran
    
    Push-backs have become a key feature of EU migration controls since 2015. As this article argues, practices of push-backs stretch from EU spaces, such as Croatia, to its external borders and neighbouring countries, reaching as far as Iran. Although push-back tactics and their consequences are widely discussed in public, activist, and policy debates, as well as by people living in makeshift refugee camps; academic literature does not engage with pushbacks extensively. To address this gap, we set up the concepts of “push” and “back” to question a ripple effect of informal and violent border controls that transversely occur in different geopolitical contexts and timelines of migratory journeys. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two border locations: the Croatian-Bosnian border and the Turkey Iran border. We argue that the EU’s governance of its external border encourages symmetrical practices of “push” to different locations. We show that “pushes” generate multi- layered violence enmeshed in the local militarised security contexts when people are “back”; or forcibly returned to their starting locations. The analysis of “push” and “back” contributes to literature on the EU externalisation of migration governance and border violence, which we examine through informal and violent border practices in and outside of the EU.
    
    Authors: Karolina Augustova (Northumbria University)* , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) , Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University)*
- 217
  Panel / Migration in the Americas Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Christian Kaunert (University of South Wales)
  
  Chair: Andrea Pacheco Pacifico (Paraiba State University, Brazil)
  - The (im)possibility of desecuritisation: interculturalidad and refugees in South America
    
    This paper analyses the intersections between desecuritisation and critical interculturality, or interculturalidad, in a ‘Global South’ migratory context. Existing literature on desecuritisation of migration has given prevalence to Global North locales. Equally, scholars have debated the (im)possibility of desecuritisation in the societal sector reflecting European concerns. It has been established that the process of desecuritisation is linked to how societies understand and respond to diversity. For instance, in Central and Eastern Europe, desecuritising ‘Others’ could be either an impossibility at worst and at best, managed or reconstructed through intercultural or multicultural policies (Roe, 2006; Juttila, 2006). In light of this limited explanation to desecuritisation, this study brings to the fore interculturalidad. As an endemic concept to the Latin American experience, interculturalidad offers a ‘Global South’ decolonial view of inclusion which could help further understand desecuritisation outside Europe. This paper addresses the puzzle of the (im)possibility of desecuritisation through the study of the desecuritisation of refugees in Ecuador during the post-neoliberal tide (2007-2010). Ecuador constitutes a fascinating case given the paradigm shift in migration policies, practices and discourses, from a securitisation approach to a rights-based position. Drawing from existing Latin American literature on interculturalidad and empirical data from interviews, this paper proposes an innovative conceptual bridge between desecuritisation in particular and security studies more broadly, and intercultural approaches to diversity in a South American case.
    
    Author: Gabriela Patricia Garcia Garcia (University of Exeter)
  - Recognition of Environmentally Internally Displaced Persons in Latin America: The Brazilian case
    
    Latin American countries treat refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in different ways, particularly those who flee from environmental degradation or climate change. There are not regional standard rules, policies, or initiatives to recognise and protect them. Brazil, for instance, has two different regimes. Firstly, the 1997 Brazilian Refugee Law, that has enlarged the 1951 Refugee Convention definition to include displaced persons for grave and generalised human rights violation as refugees. And, the 2017 Migration Law, that may grant temporary resident visa for humanitarian reasons, including displaced for natural disasters. It means that Brazil recognises internationally environmentally displaced persons (EDPs), under the new 2017 Migration Law, with the option to apply for humanitarian visa, whilst environmentally IDPs remain invisible, without legal protection. This hybrid regime has culminated at difficulties at hosting and integration steps. The research question is: To what extent do some Latin American countries’ regimes for the recognition of EDPs, be they international or internal, lead to protection, in comparison with Brazil? The author has applied Bett´s regime stretching at the implementation level (2010), under a network society communicative model, to recognise them and give due protection (Pacífico, 2022).
    
    Author: Andrea Pacheco Pacifico (Paraiba State University, Brazil)
  - Transborder Politics in the Mexico-US Border: Producing Transborderism from Below
    
    This paper explores transborderism and its practices at the Cali-Baja region through the perspectives of transborder pupils and students living in Mexico, but attending school in the U.S. This population crossed the highly surveilled Mexico-U.S. border through the land Ports of Entry even twice a day. The narratives of documented border crossers, particularly transborder learners, have been missing in the myriad of Mexico-U.S. border scholarship. Such invisibility limits our understanding of the region and of transborder politics from below that understand the international as local and vice-versa, based on their intense practice of simultaneity. This paper is based on empirical data collected through ten months of fieldwork in Mexico and in the state of California. The ethnographic-bend transborder methods included in-depth interviews in Mexico and the US with twenty-seven former transborder learners, two policymakers in international education, and one scholar in the emergent field of transborderism. The findings reveal the following: (i) transborder population reconfigures the traditional pursuit of the American dream by including the Mexican side as part of the formula, (ii) documented transborder learners are highly vulnerable in particular at the border checkpoints and are invisible in border protocols about safeguarding minors (iii) international politics and policies from below are possible by looking at these transborder dynamics and understanding politics from a glo-cal perspective.
    Keywords
    Migration, International Borders, Postcolonialism, Transborderism, International Politics from below
    
    Author: Mabel Meneses (Sheffield Hallam University)
  - How do migrant children construct the International?
    
    Images and ideas of children have been used by different actors including decision makers, INGOs and activists to call attention to political agendas, sensitise audiences and justify policies. In the past 20 years, IR scholars have highlighted not only that the international constructs children but how children construct the “international” too. One of the most effective ways to perceive that is through the use of visual resources. However, methodological constraints may harm our access to children’s understandings of the “international”. This paper brings together the literature on children in IR and visual methods to analyse how Venezuelan migrant children construct the international. It employs visual methodologies to analyse drawings made by Venezuelan children in Brazil as part of the virtual exhibition “Fronteiras da Infância: Migração e Refúgio sob o olhar da criança” (Borders of Childhood: Migration and Asylum under the gaze of the child). Venezuelan migrant children tend to be silenced as triple victims being not-adults, forcibly displaced people and not from Global North countries. However, this research design allows us to recognise Venezuelan migrant children as actors in IR. We learn from their perceptions of the bilateral relations between Brazil and Venezuela and their ideas of peace and violence.
    
    Author: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)
  - Aging Out of place: The Implications of Trauma on Well-being Among Aging Refugees in The United States (US)
    
    Whereas substantial research shows that refugees encounter multiple traumatic events that impact their well-being, research on the implications of trauma on refugees aging out-of-place (i.e., aging in unfamiliar or foreign context), is mixed. As such the present quantitative study surveyed 108 refugee participants (from Bhutan, Burundi, and Somalia), aged 50+, living in the US to assess their well-being. Hierarchical regression was used to analyze the association between trauma (pre-migration trauma) and well-being. (life-satisfaction). Results showed no main-effects of pre-migration trauma on life-satisfaction, however, differences by sociodemographic factors (i.e., place-of-origin, sex, and length-of-residence) were noted. Pre-migration trauma was associated with life-satisfaction among aging refugees who were from Africa (Burundi and Somalia) but not among those who were not from Africa (Bhutan). Among African refugees, higher pre-migration trauma was associated with lower life satisfaction. Pre-migration trauma was also associated with life-satisfaction for both men and women. The effect was stronger for women than men. Lastly, there was an association between pre-migration trauma and life-satisfaction among those with high length of residence but not among those with low length of residence. This study highlights variations within refugee groups which is important in determining interventions for aging refugees in host communities.
    
    Author: Jonix Owino (Sacred Heart University)
- 218
  Panel / National security policies in light of the War in Ukraine QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters (Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg)
  - Renaissance of Bilateralism? Patterns of the UK’s Security Cooperation with EU Member States after 2016
    
    This contribution analyses the UK’s security bilateralism between 2016-22, when bilateral security and defence agreements were signed with 18 EU countries. To make sense of this strategy, the article questions whether the conclusion of so many agreements is a way to compensate for the absence of a separate EU-UK security treaty or a means to build leverage for UK interests. A comparison of the scope and content of the new bilateralism shows that, even under Boris Johnson, bilateralism is designed to fill Brexit-related gaps in consultation, coordination, and capability-building. Drawing on regime theory, the contribution further demonstrates the fragility of relying on bilateralism to replace multilateralism, in that increased flexibility is offset by the fact implementation relies on soft law mechanisms. The result is that the UK’s new bilateral regime may not be self-sustaining, although it does leave space for a multilateral initiative such as the European Political Community.
    
    Authors: Monika Brusenbauch Meislová (Masaryk University) , Andrew Glencross (Université catholique de Lille)*
  - Mapping security issues and their conceptualisations in current national security documents globally
    
    Scholars have long debated the widening of security agendas in conceptual and normative terms, arguing that security has, or should be, widened beyond traditional military-state security to include, inter alia, environmental, human, and gendered insecurities (Booth, 1991; Fierke, 1998; Hudson, 2005; UNDP, 1994). These debates are now prima facie reflected in public national security and defence documents, yet these documents – now published by 94 countries - have barely been studied by international security scholars. This paper systematically analyses how and by whom security issues have been constructed in these documents. We (1) map the issues identified by states in their current top-level public national security documents, and (2) analyse the varied ways in which they have been constructed as threats, risks, priorities, etc. We employ a unique comprehensive corpus of documents collected by us, and a bespoke implementation of automated semantic content analysis based on natural language processing technologies.
    
    Authors: Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh) , Roy Gardner (University of Edinburgh)*
  - Das ReBoot: The War in Ukraine and the Zeitenwende in German Foreign, Security and Defense Policy
    
    Three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in the Bundestag that the war constituted a watershed moment or Zeitenwende for European security and that as a consequence Germany would initiate a fundamental turnaround in its foreign, security and defence policy. This strategic reorientation would entail, among other things, a 100 billion Euro special investment fund for the Bundeswehr and the pledge to finally fulfil the NATO 2% target. Taking the Zeitenwende rhetoric as its starting point, this paper will analyse to what extent Germany has indeed initiated a structural reboot of its national security posture, considering a) German strategic culture and changing identity narratives pertaining to Germany’s role in the world, b) the structure, equipment, posture and societal status of the German armed forces, c) expert and media discourses regarding German national security and defence matters in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Our main argument is that far from a material dimension alone, the Zeitenwende indicates a reorientation of core strategic narratives, such as military reticence, that have been constitutive for Germany’s post-war historical development and that are now being contested between defenders of the status quo and advocates for change.
    
    Authors: Georg Löfflmann (University of Warwick) , Malte Riemann (University of Glasgow)
  - Civil society and the anti-colonial politics of security in Ukraine
    
    For critical security scholars, the notion of national security has largely taken a pejorative meaning as something that is, at best, too distant from the everyday concerns of ordinary people and, at worst, too dangerous for their rights and liberties. Nonetheless, the recent self-organisation of ordinary Ukrainians in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion calls attention to the local processes of mobilisation in the name of national security. Drawing on a vernacular contextual approach to security, this paper calls for the need to study the concept of national security in context and from the perspective of non-elite agents. I draw on over 30 semi-structured interviews with Ukrainian civil society groups, social media research and hermeneutic textual analysis to explore the understandings of national security among grassroots actors. I find that national survival was understood to be imperative for emancipation, and emancipation was imperative for national survival. To explain the intertwinement of these two meanings of security, I emphasise their embeddedness in the anti-colonial politics inaugurated by civil society in rejection of Russian colonialism. Engaging with agents’ everyday meaning-making contributes to critical security scholarship – namely Vernacular and Everyday Security Studies – by illuminating alternatives to the dominant, normatively negative conception of national security.
    
    Author: Bohdana Kurylo (Oxford Brookes University)
- 219
  
  Roundtable / Research, think tanks and foreign policy - challenges and opportunities for creating a more equitable international order (Wilton Park) Almond, Hilton
  
  Research, think tanks and foreign policy - challenges and opportunities for creating a more equitable international order
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Chair: Tom Cargill (Director, Wilton Park)
  
  Participants: Holger Nehring (Stirling University) , Tom Cargill (Director, Wilton Park) , Juliet Kaarbo (University of Edinburgh/Scottish Council on Global Affairs) , Sarah Snyder (Rose Castle Foundation)
- 220
  Panel / Rethinking East Asia’s Foreign Policies and Domestic Politics Through Emotions Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Phuong Anh Nguyen (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Oliver Turner (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Discussant: Karl Gustafsson (Stockholm University)
  - The politics of emotional deference to self-esteem: The case of Japan-US diplomatic negotiations in 1951
    
    This paper explores the politics of emotional deference in IR which involves the claim that certain actors’ feelings deserve consideration. This dimension can be observed when a leader of a lower-status state demands deference to self-esteem of another actor to a superior-status state. Under what circumstances does the leader get to express self-esteem of one's nation, and the target government recognise this call? I ponder upon this question by analysing diplomatic negotiations between Japanese and American policymakers over Japan’s independence and peace treaty in 1951. This paper examines emotional deference to one's self-esteem can leave some actual inequality untouched in a hierarchical relationship, which is related to specific rights and duties of a lower-status state. This paper builds upon the theoretical discussions on a distributive politics of emotion (Gustafsson and Hall 2021), which creates contestation over who gets to express emotions, and what emotions are perceived as (il)legitimate. The case study on Japan will contribute to the growing studies on the relationship between the emotional politics and foreign policy in the context of East Asia.
    
    Author: Chaeyoung Yong (University of St Andrews)
  - Interpreting the roles of emotional displays in states relations: Breaking down China’s reactions to US involvement in Taiwan in the 1950s
    
    In the 1950s, China’s interpretations of and reactions to the US’s Taiwan policies and involvement led to substantial impacts on Sino-US relations and regional instability. This paper revisits the history of China-US confrontation in East Asia using the conceptual framework of emotions and affect. Specifically, the paper looks into how Chinese leaders interpret and emotionally react to the involvement of the US in Taiwan since the 1950s. Although existing studies have applied rational choice approaches or cognitivist perspectives to understand China’s responses to US policies, few have examined the roles of emotions in leadership and decision-making. Therefore, investigating the cases via the lens of emotions and affect helps provide alternative perspectives to existing issues in Taiwan, thus suggesting that misreading others’ emotions may result in misperceptions, miscalculations, and reactions that could destabilize regional security. Particularly, the paper analyses four confrontation cases, including 1) China’s reactions to Truman’s pronouncement in January 1950, 2) the Neutralization Policy in June 1950, 3) Eisenhower’s Policy in February 1953, and 4) the Mutual Defense treaty in 1954-55. As the US-China rivalry continues to haunt the region until very recently, the paper attempts to comprehend potential crises or conflicts in the Taiwan Strait that remain relevant to current politics.
    
    Authors: Wei Luo (University of St Andrews) , Phuong Anh Nguyen (University of St Andrews)
  - The role of hope in adversarial relationships: Case studies of South Korean conciliatory gestures toward North Korea
    
    Why do some decision-makers, even when facing an adversary, dare to hope and respond not through threats and coercions but by initiating conciliatory gestures? This paper investigates the role of hope in the initiation and types of conciliatory gestures between two adversary states. Many studies supported that the relationship between emotion and reason is no longer dichotomic or contradictory in decision-making and is widely incorporated into foreign policy analysis. However, existing studies have marginalised hope in that they assume fear and anxiety usually dominate over hope in a self-help anarchic international system. Moreover, hope has been paid biased attention at best in terms of an obstacle to impede sensible decision-making. In order to fill this gap, cases between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been selected from two different time points: Sunshine Policy and Trustpolitik. There are two South Korean leaders who initiated conciliatory gestures at different times, but of different types. Also, we can see variations between the presence and absence of hope by the state leader at those times. This paper is expected to help us understand how individual emotion works in an East Asian structural context and promote peace in East Asia by exploring the relationship between hope and conciliatory gestures.
    
    Author: Jiyoung Chang (University of Birmingham)
- 221
  Panel / The Possible Political Worlds of Outer Space Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Sarah Lieberman (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  
  Chair: Sarah Lieberman (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  - The Future(s) of Outer Space: Speaking to (and Beyond) the Sustainability Agenda
    
    The UN Secretary-General’s report Our Common Future, proposed 12 key principals for consideration when deliberating and striving for a fairer future, these principals being couched within four broader organising frameworks. These targets are further supported by the more recent 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that has resulted in the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) taking the initiative Space4SDGs. The core mission of UNOOSA aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals that space should only be used for peaceful purposes and that the benefits of space should be for the whole of humanity. But recent years have seen a growing interest in – and interaction with – Outer Space by an increasing number of State and non-State actors. Each of these actors (re)produce their own discourses and future imaginaries to advance their respective operations and recent years have seen a growing number of those advocating for the enclosure and privatisation of Outer Space.
    
    Consequently, the principals and frameworks outlined within sustainable development and international environmental laws provide a timely provocation for contemporary deliberations on Outer Space. They ask us to consider notions of governance, ownership, and equity, along with deeper questions of societal structures and values at a time of intensifying interactions with Outer Space and its attendant futurity. This paper thus seeks to deliberate how the principals of international environmental law and sustainability laws may apply to Outer Space, whether they go far enough, and how and by what means a just Outer Space futurity may be achieved.
    
    Authors: Craig Jones (University of Strathclyde) , Saskia Vermeylen (University of Strathclyde)
  - Can Space Norms be Universal? Lets look to International Relations Theories for an Answer
    
    The idea that norms are universal in their constituting capacity has come under challenge especially in the literature on outer space norms. Key concepts like responsibility, capability and standards of behavior are under challenge as more and more nations establish their space programs. It is assumed that both states and private entities are playing an active role at the level of epistemic generation and organizational culture to constitute consensus with regard to developing space norms for encouraging 'responsible behavior' in space. Some of these norms are space debris removal, ban of Anti-Satellite testing as well as national Low earth orbit constellations, amongst others.
    
    This paper, hopes to capture and address some of these debates by focusing on empirical and theoretical questions associated with norms of outer space. The paper will utilize theories of International Relations (realisms, liberalisms, constructivisms, critical theories) to explain how norms are viewed and constituted by them. Once that is accomplished, the paper offers a robust caseof space norms (space debris removal, ASAT weapons testing, national satellite constellation to demonstrate how each theory perceives these developments).
    
    Understanding the evolution of norms related to outerspace, will not only help establishing a conversation with questions related to power, legitimacy, socialisation, and translation but also bring to fore the variation in perspectives related to the management of global commons and global public goods. Significantly, the outer space treaty sits at the intersection of mainstream and critical debates in International Relations. Indeed, there is a push back against mainstream analysis on space (Duedney) that calls for humanity to give up any space development goals.Besides, an alternative,or fringe discourse is emerging that challenges the mainstream Earth focused narratives on space norms.
    
    Given the critical growth of the contribution of space to the development of human society, this paper comes at a significant time, thereby filling a gap in international relations literature and its absence for understanding the role of space and space norms apropos the development and furtherance of a discipline. We seek a synthesis thereby contrasting if not reconciiing what appear to be incompatible and incommensurate perspectives, and offer a dialogic framework for foregrounding the complexities associated with space norms.
    
    Authors: Medha Bisht (South Asian University)* , Namrata Goswami (Arizona State University)
  - The representation of outer space: deconstructing the privatization-securitization nexus
    
    This paper unravels how outer space imaginaries influence the practice and decisions regarding outer space governance, in particular the privatization-securitization process.
    
    In an increasingly tense geopolitical context, outer space is becoming a crucial site for defence and security. Indeed, in a volatile military context, outer space is of strategic importance in terms of intelligence, multi-domain awareness, communication, deterrence, and more. At the same time, the past two decades have seen an unprecedented wave of private endeavours in space, from Virgin Galactic’s tourist suborbital flights to SpaceX’s contribution to established governmental programmes. These corporations have brought civilians and civilian interests into space (e.g. space tourism, transit of civilian scientists and technologies, critical satellite communication, planning for the exploitation of space’s resources). In doing so, they have started to challenge the monopoly of states as outer space actors.
    
    Decisions have to be made regarding outer space governance, sovereignty rights, property rights, as well as the role, rights and responsibilities of non-state actors. In particular, decisions are expected in the field of outer space security governance that is impacted by the increasing power of private actors.
    
    This paper postulates that such decisions are constrained by dominant narratives and competing discourses that represent and construct outer space. Thus, by adopting a critical geopolitics approach, it identifies four discourses underpinned by material and ideational factors and concludes on a practice of governance centred around a “privatization-securitization nexus” (This expression is ours: the paper will define what we mean by this).
    
    Authors: Celine Germond-Duret (Lancaster University) , Jamie Winn (Lancaster University) , Basil Germond (Lancaster University)
  - Outer space technology innovations: Media representations and environmental implications
    
    In this paper, I discuss how innovations of outer space technologies are represented in popular media articles, and assess what this means for contemporary environmentalism. Science and Technology Studies (STS) has offered us tools for understanding how technology developers influence public imaginaries in order to secure support and funding for their ventures. By tying real innovation to science fiction tropes and imagery of humans living among the stars, billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can be presented as saving humanity from the risks of climate change. I provide evidence from popular media articles which maintain this view, as well as articles which challenge it, and I question whether it is safe to place humankind’s future in the hands of a powerful elite. I argue that space exploration and colonisation could be useful for humans, but that this should not take precedence over tackling climate change on Earth. I suggest that viewing a socioeconomic elite as our protectors risks discouraging action against climate change, by implying that leaving Earth is a solution in itself.
    
    Author: Thomas Bosak (University of Manchester)
- 222
  Panel / The future of tech, the future of security? Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: ISET
  
  Chair: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  - Security vs. Privacy: A Discourse Network Analysis of Facial Recognition Technology
    
    The widespread use of facial-recognition technology (FRT) presents major human rights challenges; yet outside of the European Union (EU), few legally binding rules apply to FRTs. To address this puzzle, we use complex systems theory and analyse political debates on FRT. We argue that these debates are embedded in networks of actors and ideas that influence policy-making processes. We employ Discourse Network Analysis to trace the evolution of political frames within these networks in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU. Our analysis of 4000 political statements between 2000 and 2022 show that FRT has been framed as a solution for security and efficiency issues particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. However, since 2015, these frames have been increasingly challenged, shifting the discourse to concerns about lack of regulation, unlawful surveillance, bias, and privacy. The growing salience of critical frames and non-state actors in the EU have resulted in demands for tighter regulation of FRT, including a push for laws targeting the commercial exploitation and potential abuse of human data. Overall, our results show a significant link between actor and frame configurations within the FRT network and policy outcomes that impact citizens’ democratic rights and privacy.
    
    Authors: Kerem Öge (University of Warwick) , Manuel Quintin (Université Laval)*
  - Finding AI faces in the moon and armies in the clouds: Anthropomorphizing artificial intelligence in military human-machine interactions
    
    Since its inception, artificial intelligence (AI) has been conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms, employing biomimicry to digitally map the human brain as analogies to human reasoning. Hybrid teams of human soldiers and autonomous agents controlled by AI are expected to play an increasingly more significant role in future military operations. This article argues that until AI surpasses human intelligence, anthropomorphism will play a critical role in human-machine interactions in tactical operations, which depend on fast, cognitively parsimonious, and efficacious communication. Thus, understanding the various (social and cognitive) psychological mechanisms that undergird AI-anthropomorphism is crucial in determining the potential impact of military human-machine interactions. While the limitations of AI technology in human-machine interaction are well-known, how the spontaneous tendency to anthropomorphize AI agents might affect the psychological (cognitive/behavioral) and motivational aspects of hybrid military operations has garnered far less attention. The article identifies some potential epistemological, normative, and ethical consequences of humanizing algorithms (the use of anthropomorphic language and discourse) for the conduct of war. It also considers the possible impact of the AI-anthropomorphism phenomenon on the inversion of AI anthropomorphism and the dehumanization of war.
    
    Author: James Johnson (University of Aberdeen)
  - The Final First Word on Drones: An analysis of unmanned targeted killing in the war on terror
    
    9/11 has largely been represented as a moment of fundamental and irreversible change in how Americans perceive the world they live in; the onset of a new era of collective ontological insecurity. The resulting security framework structuring the war on terror reflected those anxieties in how they were or were not defined and justified to the public. One of the most ‘telling’ examples has been the government’s reticence regarding the covert drone program, one of the war’s worst kept ‘secrets’. Nonetheless, until the publication of the ‘drone handbook’ in the summer of 2016, principals in the Obama Administration had only acknowledged the program four times, even as alleged civilian death rates skyrocketed. This paper presents a discourse analysis of those four texts, asking what the spoken and unspoken in them says about US national identity, both at the height of the war and today. We argue that all four speeches problematically erase the Other from the narrative as it elevates a contradictory mix of fear and legal—hence moral—justifications to assuage the Self.
    
    Authors: deRaismes Combes (American University) , Terilyn Huntington (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
  - Overcoming challenges to defence decision-making in times of crisis: the AI-Public Private Partnership and the Anticipatory Governance
    
    Abstract: Decision-making is a foundational aspect of any organisation, including its governance. In the face of an environment with increasing complexity and uncertainty encompassing actors, threats, and challenges, several mechanisms have been implemented in order to improve decision-making processes and enhance the capability of responding to a diverse range of scenarios. In that sense, it is possible to infer that anticipatory governance emerged as a conceptual and applied innovation, which has been applied to several domains from 2012 onwards. However, in addition to this conceptual mechanism, there are ongoing efforts to transform the decision-making process in defence settings based on the ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).
    That’s in precisely the context of DARPA’s “In the Moment” programme, released in March 2022, and the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding between the European Commission and the stakeholder associations. Such associations, representing AI, data, and robotics, manifest state-level institutions' intentions to bring together trusted human and AI decision-makers to align decisions and generate problem-solving tools in a crisis scenario.
    Beyond the challenges posed by such innovative conceptual and technological efforts, some questions emerge: a) To what extent could AI be used to supplement human intelligence in decision-making? b) How effective is the alignment of artificial intelligence and human intelligence in decision-making? c) What is the role of AI both ex ante (as an advisor) and ex post (as a decision-maker) in relation to the human decision-maker? d) To what extent does the alignment of AI and human intelligence affect the implementation of anticipatory governance?
    In order to respond to these questions, this paper aims to present the context in which AI and PPPs started to abridge the decision-making processes, as well as how the concept of anticipatory governance unfolded in defence contexts. We aim to discuss qualitatively the effectiveness of AI in decision-making, focusing on neuroscience metaphors as our underpinning approach to depict this interaction during critical junctures, which are particularly common in times of crisis. This combination enables us to investigate the possibilities and limitations of using AI in decision-making, as well as how they would affect anticipatory governance, contributing to the debate about this future-ubiquitous reality in defence policy and the multiple stakeholders posed by PPPs.
    
    Authors: Tamiris Pereira dos Santos (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil)* , Migena Pengili (Assistant Editor, Civil Wars journal)
- 223
  Panel / Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Alexander Gilder (University of Reading)
  - Grand-Standing Instead of Policy-Making: Legislators, Parliamentary Questions and Transitional Justice in the Croatian Parliament
    
    We know little about how legislators engage with post-conflict justice in contrast to our grasp of the role of domestic and international civil society groups in policy deliberation. We study how politicians ask questions in parliament about transitional justice. Parliamentary questions, that can be oral and written, are an important tool to hold a government to account. We argue that the publicness of parliamentary questions matters. When a politician ask a question in parliament, they are concerned about reputational costs to themselves and to their party. In post-conflict societies, the costs are determined by the degree of dissent from dominant nationalist norms. We analyze 738 parliamentary questions about transitional justice in the Croatian Parliament (2004-2018). We find differences between oral and written questions. Legislators belonging to nationalist parties use oral questions more than liberals, and more than written questions. Overall, the share of oral question about war veterans, the most privileged stakeholder, is larger than their share in written questions. Lastly, oral questions are used to demonstrate partisanship, while written questions are used for policy deliberation across party lines. We identify the limitations of public policy deliberation on post-conflict justice, where parliamentary questions are used for nationalist grand-standing.
    
    Authors: Lanabi La Lova (LSE) , Denisa Kostovicova (London School of Economics and Political Science)*
  - When and where does agonistic transitional justice work?
    
    An emerging body of literature has identified an agonistic alternative to liberal peacebuilding. Recent scholarship has documented the presence of this agonistic peace, which centres on an embrace of contestation and multiplicity, at the grassroots level in cases such as Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. There are still questions, however, about how agonistic peace takes shape institutionally and at different stages of the peace process. This study examines the institutional presence of agonistic transitional justice in four cases: Colombia, Northern Ireland, Uganda, and Indonesia. Based on archival research and interviews in each of the cases, the paper explores where agonistic transitional justice is more likely to appear (including truth-telling and memorialisation initiatives) and why these areas are more conducive to an agonistic approach. The paper also considers the implications of the emergence of this agonistic alternative for the future of transitional justice and peace praxis.
    
    Author: Emma Murphy (University College Dublin)
- 224
  Panel / Variegations and Negotiations of Contemporary Crises of Social Reproduction Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  - Engendering the “resistance economy”: Social reproduction as a site of state politics under the sanction regime in Iran
    
    With the intensification of the US-orchestrated economic sanctions on Iran (loosely since 2012), Iranian officials – especially hardliners including the Supreme Leader himself, have repetitively pushed for developing a “resistance economy” doctrine to build resilience against sanctions. In their analysis of what policy shifts the “resistance economy” contains, most male-stream scholarship has narrowly focused on the “productive” sphere of “economy”, ignoring the increased gendered interventions of the Iranian state in this era in the assumedly “private” sphere of households, family structures and intimate matters of marriage, divorce and women’s reproductive rights. Detailing these gendered policy shifts, this paper argues that reorganisation of social reproduction and production across gendered lines through a wide range of gendered interventions has been at the centre of the Iranian state’s governance response to the various sanction-induced crises resulting in ever greater emphasis on a conservative male breadwinner/female home-maker model of family life. This gendered analysis of “resistance economy”, provides a novel understanding of economic sanctions and their gendered consequences, by locating households, social reproduction, and intimate geopolitics at the centre of the state’s resilience-building efforts against the various geopolitical and economic shocks of sanctions. Additionally, reorganisation of social reproduction and production has often been discussed in the context of countries in the Global North, and as driven by capital (i.e. neo-liberal restructuring and the state’s retreat). This analysis highlights the lesser-discussed role of the state and its interest in social reproduction and intimate geopolitics in an authoritarian MENA context.
    
    Author: Asma Abdi (University of Warwick)
  - A world through glass boxes: carcerality in crises and beyond
    
    From structural adjustments to global health pandemics, social reproductive work has filled the gaps at told and untold costs. Found in the intersections of gender, race, and coloniality, those primarily assigned with social reproductive roles often negotiate everyday practices of care through a prism of vernacularised modernity with hues of traditional beliefs systems. Yet, whichever way you look it falls on (predominantly) women to fill the gaps (in social provisioning), to block the cracks (in economic strains from rising living costs) and hold fort (through emotive and cohesive care for the family and community). Ontologically disconnected from pre-colonial epistemes, many post-colonial states persist in pursuit of development through neoliberal policies, deeply plugged into global political and economic frameworks that serve to undermine the very self-determination that fuelled all decolonial struggles. Do we look back to a past we don’t know or keep striving for a future in constant tension of self and state? This paper seeks to interrogate the possibility of a different world by drawing from decolonial feminist epistemologies- can we encounter an approach to development that is not carceral for women’s wellbeing and pervasive in its expectations of their caring?
    
    Author: Mouzayain Khalil-Babatunde (University of Warwick)
  - Contested Visions of Gender, Crisis, and Governance in the Post-Covid Global Political Economy
    
    As a number of feminist political economists have noted, the Covid epidemic increased the public visibility of social reproduction, and the inequitable relations of gender and race that underpin dynamics of production/social reproduction in capitalism (Mezzadri 2022; Ferris and Bergfeld 2022; Stevano et al. 2021). When schools and nurseries closed in many countries, it became clear that people cannot work without the support of public and private institutions, extended families and friends. The new designation of ‘essential’ workers cast dramatic light on the fact that special provisions had to be made to enable frontline health workers, social care staff, teachers, nursery nurses, and those involved in the production, sale and distribution of food, among others, to do the essential work involved in reproducing people and communities on a daily basis. At the same time, a host of studies by a wide range of actors have shown how the Covid crisis deepened inequalities along the lines of class, gender, race, nationality, citizenship status, dis/ability, and more, deepening pre-existing crises of social reproduction in many parts of the world (Acciari et al. 2021; Banerjee and Wilks 2022; Basak 2021; Rao 2021; Stevano and Jamieson 2021; Tejani and Fukuda-Parr 2021; Trommer 2022; Zulfiqar 2022). It is within this context that key institutions of global governance have published flagship reports on how countries should foster economic recovery that is more ‘gender equitable’ and/or ‘gender inclusive’. This paper surveys this landscape, asking what these roadmaps do, what unites them, and what sets them apart from each other. It critically compares reports by several key institutions – including the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the OECD – to some of the roadmaps, manifestos, and calls to action issued by feminist social movements in the wake of the crisis. In so doing, it elucidates the contested politics of gender equality in the post-covid global political economy.
    
    Author: Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester)
  - Migrant sex work beyond slavery and trafficking: sex work, unfree labour and the crisis of social reproduction in Ghana
    
    This paper examines the working lives of migrant women in the sex sector in Ghana, in light of surging global interest in the governance of “slavery and trafficking”. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered in Ghana in 2021, namely 30 interviews with migrant sex workers. Interview data document wide-ranging and systematic experiences of exploitation, including some of the most extreme forms of unfreedom considered “modern slavery”. Yet the overwhelming majority of workers report that they entered into and stay in sex work out of economic necessity (i.e. rather than individualised, extra-economic relations of coercion), typically due to caring responsibilities. This indicates that liberal accounts of modern slavery are inadequate to capture the material bases and political economic drivers of migrant women’s vulnerability and exploitation. As an alternative, the paper uses the lens of unfree labour to highlight how extreme exploitation emerges from a broader continuum of labour unfreedoms that are (re)produced through state laws and border regimes, neoliberal economic restructuring, and attendant crises of social reproduction. These crises determine the material conditions—of precarity, inequality, and insecurity—in which migrant women enter into and stay in highly exploitative forms of work within (and beyond) the sex sector in Ghana, as a means of household survival. The paper advances the critical literature on unfree labour empirically by exploring these dynamics in a West African context, in an informal, feminised industry comprising large numbers of internal and intra-regional migrants, and theoretically by linking sex work, unfree labour and (crises of) social reproduction.
    
    Author: Ellie Gore (University of Manchester)
  - “The Great Resignation” Crisis: Imagined Workers’ Empowerment and Gendered Disempowerment
    
    As the COVID-19 pandemic waned and global economy commenced return to “normal,” it became obvious that workers were not rushing back to their old jobs, especially in the United States. Dubbed “The Great Resignation” crisis, this lack of enthusiasm for work was explained by the pandemic-induced re-valorization of life’s priorities, romanticizing survival and lessons drawn from hardship. At the same time, the tightening of the labor market and concurrent wage increases were cited as key reasons behind the rising inflation in the U.S., justifying Federal Reserve’s change in interest rate policies. Totally overlooked were the gendered dynamics of “The Great Resignation” and the fact that the lowest returns to work in the U.S. were in sectors with the highest percentage of female labor force – food and accommodation, retail, and health care. In this paper we evidence this gendered nature of “The Great Resignation Crisis” in the U.S., compare it with re-employment trends in the EU and China, and analyze its interplay with gender-blind policies designed to address it. We argue that the evidence for “The Great Resignation” is rather thin on the ground. Instead, “the crisis” in the U.S. labor market overestimated workers empowerment, shifted attention away from the devastating effects of the pandemic on women and minorities, and created a pretext for “recovery” which ignores their needs.
    
    Authors: Xiao Sun (University of Florida)* , Aida Hozic (University of Florida)
- 225
  Panel / What Have We done? Reflections on War and Withdrawal in Afghanistan QE2, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Hannah Partis-Jennings (Loughborough University) , Sara de Jong (University of York)
  
  Chair: Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU)
  - Fuelled by Moral Injury? Veterans’ Advocacy to Evacuate their ‘Afghan Brothers’
    
    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
    
    Author: Sara de Jong (University of York)
  - The (Im)Possibilities of Feminist Militarism? The Case of Afghanistan
    
    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
    
    Author: Hannah Partis-Jennings (Loughborough University)
  - Failures of Statebuilding: Understanding the Collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
    
    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
    
    Authors: Florian Weigand (LSE)* , Jasmine Bhatia (Birkbeck University of London)
  - Women, Peace and Security - Afghanistan’s Women since August 2021
    
    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.
    
    Author: Neelam Raina (Middlesex University London)
- 226
  Panel / Worlding and Unworlding in IR Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Meera Sabaratnam (SOAS University of London)
  - Forgetting Disaster: Coloniality, Queer Unworlding, and the UK's Emergency Planning Industry
    
    This paper theorizes disaster, through a framework of racial capitalism. Using Black Studies and Afro-feminist critiques, the paper analyses research interviews with three leading emergency planning practitioners from the UK, to outline the racialized erasures embedded within disaster knowledge-and-practice. It traces disaster as a temporally and spatially bounded notion, revealing visibility and borders (of disaster) to be structured through racialized erasures, and as upheld by powerful libidinal drive. The paper reflects how the making of disaster operates through colonial production of racialized threat and practices of cleanliness. The argument emerges that ‘disaster’ is white suffering, which, through sanitizing and making orderly the disaster site, situates all forms of suffering manageable and controllable. This forecloses the possibility for needing to see and govern violence and suffering differently. The conversation highlights the conflicted state of practitioners enacting disaster knowledge, and offers a possible mode of resistance through processes of forgetting and abandonment. Deploying strong reflexivity as a methodology to encounter disaster knowledge within the framework of racial capitalism, allows the paper ultimately to argue for abandoning a commitment to projects of inclusion and visibility. Moreover, as disaster knowledge is constituted through colonial relationality, queer forgetting of disaster and the libidinal drive enable the terms of racial capitalism to be defiantly resisted. The paper denaturalizes security studies research on visibility, borders, and affect, arguing that each are central to the structuring of disaster. Unsettling the racialized politics of disaster enables the destabilization of racial capitalism itself to occur.
    
    Author: Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick)
  - Race and Empire in the International Relations classroom: towards reparative futures?
    
    This presentation invites to critically assess the perpetuation of racism and colonialism in university education in International relations.
    The research presented lies on two main theoretical stances, a postcolonial approach of colonial legacies to better understand the core features of the International system and a decolonial approach of the curriculum to open the possibility of thinking different pedagogical practices in order to overcome the structural injustice perpetuated by these colonial legacies.
    In this presentation, I develop an analysis based on two questions:
    - How are the issues of race/racism and colonization/decolonization referred to in International Relations programs?
    - What can be done to make the teaching of International Relations more accurate historically and more inclusive today in the perspective of reparative futures?
    To answer the first question, I present the results of an analysis of all programs (programs titles, courses titles) and (when available) course descriptions and syllabi in International Relations in Belgian Universities.
    In order to answer the second question, I develop an argument that both a decolonial approach of the discipline (decolonize the curriculum) and a decolonial approach of the classroom are necessary. The decolonial approach of the classroom invites us, as teachers, to truly engage in an anti-racist and anti-colonial process. It is about engaging with education as a practice of freedom (bell hooks 1994) by contrast to education as oppression (Freire 1968, 1996).
    
    By developing the above mentioned aspects, this presentation contribute to a debate about our collective future and critically engage with some of the key proposals made by the Secretary General (Leave no one behind, Ensure justice) in the suggested frame of a renewed social contract anchored in human rights.
    
    Author: Leila Mouhib (ULB)
  - Rethinking Non-Western Agency in International Studies
    
    This paper presents a critical rethinking of the role of non-Western agency in international studies, focusing on how an emerging literature on reactionary politics in the Global South challenge the foundations of postcolonial IR and its attendant biases towards understanding the colonial periphery as the privileged site for progressive, counterhegemonic politics.
    
    Postcolonial IR emerged as a way to both critique the Eurocentrism of traditional analytical approaches in the discipline, as well as to incorporate new sites for analytical, theoretical, and empirical enquiry (Seth 2011, Cox 1981). The wager was then that an incorporation of perspectives from outside the Anglo-European world would not only add empirical garnish to existing literatures on statecraft, global order, and modernity. Rather, postcolonial IR would critically rethink the discipline’s epistemological and political underpinnings.
    
    Within this tradition, scholars have been critical of the lack of engagement with non-Western political actors in world politics (Hobson 2012, Hobson & Alinejad 2017). In its wake, a broad body of scholarship has emerged as recuperative efforts to excavate histories of anti-colonialism and non-Western thought (Pham & Shilliam 2016, Shilliam 2015). These literatures underscored a preoccupation in larger social science literatures to understand how non-Western agency has impacted politics in the imperial metropole (Gopal 2019) or provided political alternatives to existing Western global order (Getachew 2019).
    
    While constituting vital historical and theoretical correctives, these literatures display what Ida Roland Birkvad has called a ‘progressive bias’, focused mainly on understanding non-Western agency as invariably counterhegemonic and directed towards an emancipatory politics (2020). An emerging scholarship seeks to challenge these preconceptions in the discipline by introducing more complex understandings of power in the periphery, and its histories of agency in the service of reactionary politics (Bayly 2022, Birkvad 2020, Rao 2020).
    
    This paper seeks to situate these interventions within the longer disciplinary history of postcolonial IR, enquiring into the theoretical, analytical, and political position of non-Western agency in international studies today.
    
    Author: Ida Roland Birkvad (LSE)
  - Economic Informalisation and the Shifting Ideas and Practices of Citizenship in Harare, Zimbabwe
    
    The economic crisis and widespread economic informalisation which characterised Zimbabwe from the late 1990s presented a major challenge to the government, civil society, and people in general. In urban areas, it led to a crisis of urban modernity and a disconnect between people’s modernist aspirations and survivalist reality as people perceived the informal sector as a transient phenomenon and aspired for the return of the formal economy. The government enforced the ideas of citizenship that were grounded in the early postcolonial notions, such as productivity, formal residence, employment, and taxation, and used these notions to repress and control the informal sector. However, those became virtually unattainable for many people. At the grassroots level, informal sector actors started gradually challenging those notions of citizenship and negotiating what citizenship meant for them in the current situation presenting alternatives to the modernist notions and reinterpreting them to meet the reality. They have been doing so by generating new ideas and debates and employing new citizenship practices that challenged the early postcolonial notions.
    
    Author: Kristina Pikovskaia (University of Edinburgh)
  - Futurities beyond debt bondage
    
    This paper seeks to imagine futurities beyond debt bondage by building on knowledges cultivated in social movements across the Global South.
    Since its creation in 1999, the Jubilee South network, a group of individuals, coalitions and organizations from the South within the global Jubilee 2000 movement, has developed conceptualizations of illegitimate, colonial, and ecological debt that challenge dominant understandings of international debt relations and "solutions" to debt crises as espoused by international financial institutions and several Jubilee groups in the Global North.
    
    Based on their place-based analyses of international debt relations, Jubilee South quickly recognized the inadequacies of debt relief initiatives such as IMF and World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and developed radical alternatives to still-widespread calls for debt relief that go beyond freedom from debt bondage to a life in dignity for all.
    
    The "global turn" in IR research has led to a broadening of the discipline that invites the study of international debt relations beyond parochial Western perspectives. The recent recognition of "blind spots" in IPE has helped focus attention on the periphery to capture knowledges that do not neatly fit into modern categories and to rethink the central role of race and colonialism in capitalist development. However, little attention has been paid to knowledges about international debt relations that have emerged in social movements in recent decades.
    
    In dialogue with the knowledges cultivated throughout the Jubilee South network this paper contributes to the emerging literature on postcolonial IPE. Engaging with the network's manifestos, pamphlets, websites, and speeches, as well as personal conversations with anti-debt activists and scholars, allows for a discussion of alternative conceptualizations of debt and visions for social justice.
    
    This paper demonstrates that we can greatly improve our understanding of ongoing struggles against imperial and colonial structures and our respective roles in them by taking the South as the starting point of our analysis and approaching debt relations through the epistemic struggles pursued in social movements.
    
    Keywords: International Debt Relations, Postcolonial studies, Racial Capitalism, Social Movements, Epistemic struggles
    
    Author: Sabrina Keller (University of Kassel)
- 227
  
  Conference event / Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group Meeting Kinloch, Hilton
- 12:15
  
  Lunch
- 228
  
  Conference event / BISA prize giving ceremony Tay, Hilton
- 229
  Panel / Boundaries of international law: issues and actors Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Henry Lovat (University of Glasgow)
  
  Chair: Henry Lovat (University of Glasgow)
  
  Discussant: James Gow (King's College London)
  - The effectiveness and validity of sanctions: Exploring Hans J. Morgenthau’s analysis and critique of international sanctions
    
    Much of the literature on international sanctions as a foreign policy tool has focused on their effectiveness and explored their theoretical and international legal implications, paying special attention to their impact vis-à-vis their intended purpose. It is noteworthy that Hans J. Morgenthau’s theory of sanctions has remained unexplored within these debates. Largely forgotten, his theory of sanctions explores questions that lie at the heart of both their role in contemporary international society and international law. Building on existing literature, this paper unearths Morgenthau’s theory of sanctions. In doing so, it explores whether his arguments on international sanctions are still relevant to contemporary international law. It does this by re-examining his works, which address both the nature, role, and power of international sanctions. In doing this, this paper brings Morgenthau’s legal thought to light, which highlights the artificiality of the division between law and morality. Ultimately, the paper explores the fundamental problems faced by international sanctions due to the nature of international society and international law, together with Morgenthau’s proffered solutions.
    
    Author: Carmen Chas (University of Kent)
  - Human rights vernaculars and international legal careers: the case of Seán MacBride
    
    Seán MacBride (1904-88) led an extraordinary international life, difficult to reconcile with prevailing accounts of how international lawyers chnage international relations. He was, successively, Irish delegate to the League Against Imperialism (1928-9), IRA Chief of Staff (1936-7), Irish Minister for External Affairs (1948-51), a central negotiator (1949-1950) and pioneering user (1958-1960) of the European Convention of Human Rights, Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists (1963-1970), chair of Amnesty International's International Executive Committee (1963-1974), first UN Commissioner for Namibia (1973-1976), and a winner of both the Nobel (1974) and Lenin (1975-6) Peace Prizes. This was, unsurprisingly, a thoroughly political life. MacBride was no expert within an ‘epistemic community’. Nor, moreover, was he a simple ‘norm entrepreneur’, who miraculously converted from militant nationalism to the principled cause of human rights. He can instead be more plausibly seen as a strategic investor of (national) political capital in new (international) legal fields.
    
    Even this picture is, however, misleading. International political sociologists have rightly emphasised how international careers should not be analysed separately from prior national political struggles. But MacBride’s career illustrates how these national struggles may themselves be shaped by local internationalist traditions and principles. He did not discover fair trial rights and campaigns to release political prisoners in Strasbourg or Geneva. These were already central demands of the Irish revolutionary and anti-imperialist movement in which he had been born and raised. His efforts to translate them into international law were thoroughly continuous with his earlier criminal defence work on behalf of (republican) prisoners. His example thus highlights the general importance for international relations of the local human rights vernaculars studied by historians and anthropologists.
    
    Author: Peter Brett
  - The Rhetorical Limits of Compliance: Genocide, Self-Defense, and Russia's International Law Justifications for the Invasion of Ukraine
    
    How far can international law be stretched to justify foreign policy choices? International relations scholarship has explored the strategic use of international legal claims in justifying foreign policy, noting that appeals to international law are central to foreign policy, particularly those surrounding the use of military force. While scholars have examined how these claims are made and what makes them effective justificatory tools, the limits of these claims - the conditions under which they fail - remain underexplored. This paper addresses this question with a qualitative analysis of the legal references in Russia's justifications for its invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian counterarguments, and the responses made by other states. Discourse analysis principles show how Russia attempted to weave together references to various bodies of international law - particularly sovereignty, genocide and human rights, and self-defense - to justify the invasion. I then further show how these justifications were contested by opponents, who employed more socially acceptable legal claims and interpretations, ultimately defeating Russia's legal justifications and raising the social costs of the invasion. This analysis contributes to scholarship on the use of international law in foreign policy, the place of legal rhetoric in international politics, and the role of legal claims in making and interpreting international law.
    
    Author: Kyle Reed (Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe The International Rule of Law - Rise or Decline?)
  - The Draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space
    
    Outer space has been a domain of great power competition since the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957. Countless everyday civilian and commercial activities also depend on space-based technologies. What happens in space affects us all.
    
    The international law governing outer space was agreed in the 1960s and 70s when the United States and the Soviet Union were the sole space powers. China has since developed significant space capabilities.
    
    China has since 2000 actively advocated for the international community to adopt a treaty to prohibit the placement of weapons in outer space. If the draft treaty proposed by China (joint with Russia) were adopted, it would represent a significant evolution in the international space law regime.
    
    This paper will revisit the history of China’s proposal and its reception by the West to present three aspects of the evolution of international space law that are worth revisiting.
    
    The findings have implications for our understanding of China as an actor in international law as well as the future management of the global commons.
    
    Key words: outer space; future of international law; space law; arms control; global commons
    
    Author: Michelle Chase (UNSW Canberra)
- 230
  
  Roundtable / Building Ecofeminist Analyses of Climate Breakdown 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.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Sherilyn MacGregor (University of Manchester)
  
  Participants: Rosalind Cavaghan (Flax Foundation/University of Edinburgh) , Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh) , Zarina Ahmad (University of Manchester) , N/A
- 231
  Panel / Challenging strategic assumptions and traditions around the bomb Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Convener: GNO Working group
  
  Chair: Patricia Shamai (University of Portsmouth)
  
  Discussant: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
  - The Disadvantage of Nuclear Superiority
    
    When crises occur between nuclear-armed states, do relative nuclear capabilities impact the outcome? Existing literature offers no consensus about nuclear superiority’s effect on crisis victory, but this paper demonstrates that this effect depends on the size of the disparity between states' nuclear arsenals. While superiority is correlated with victory in crises between states with similarly sized nuclear arsenals, superiority provides no advantage in asymmetric crises. Because a vastly inferior state risks annihilation in a nuclear conflict, it will acquiesce to an opponent’s demands before the crisis occurs, unless backing down implies an existential threat as well. Given an asymmetric crisis has emerged, therefore, the inferior side will be willing to bid up the risk of nuclear war, deterring superior opponents. Using quantitative analyses of crisis data, this paper shows the positive association between nuclear superiority and crisis victory decreases as the disparity between competing states’ arsenals increases.
    
    Authors: Abby Fanlo* , Lauren Sukin (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - The role of status in strategic arms control
    
    The paper explores the role of status considerations in strategic arms control agreements. I argue that strategic arms control agreements play an important role in international politics of status. For an aspiring power, they translate unilaterally achieved material parity into mutually recognized equality with an established power. Status accommodation can compensate for inadequate security provisions as well as for unaddressed broader security concerns. Strategic arms control agreements have the potential to transform the international security hierarchy by creating exclusive great-power clubs with a highly limited membership. Using the cases of Japan's participation in the Washington Treaty, Soviet-American SALT and START agreements and Russian-American post-2000 arms control agreements (SORT Treaty and New START), I investigate under which circumstances status considerations matter and when status considerations can trump security concerns. I also explore the limitations of the role played by status considerations by analysing China's unwillingness to engage in the strategic arms control dialogue with the US.
    
    Author: Marcin Kaczmarski (University of Glasgow)
  - The making and maintenance of extended nuclear deterrence: A critical discursive approach to an international security strategy
    
    Keywords: Nuclear Deterrence; NATO; Extended Nuclear Deterrence; Security Strategy; Nuclear Strategy
    
    The US’ extended nuclear deterrence (END) is widely perceived as an effective strategy for the defense of NATO members. This necessitates the assumption of END as efficient in deterring military challengers. However, this perception is largely based on assumptions derived from the material aspects of nuclear weapons, like their destructive power and the lack of feasible defense against them. This paper critically reviews and analyzes scholarly literature on the logic and theoretical assumptions concerning END and aims to identify contradictions and obstacles to it. Therefore, this paper asks whether the material aspects of END provide sufficient reason for supporting its assumed effectiveness as a deterrent threat. Shedding a light on obstacles and contradictions of this strategy is necessary to understand potential risks of NATO`s reliance on END. Preliminary findings indicate that these problems range from normative obstacles against the retaliatory use of nuclear weapons, to the question of whether END has any decisive effect on the behavior of potential challengers. If the findings show the insufficiency of the logical foundation of END to assume its effectiveness, further research should approach the question how END became and remains the central defense strategy of NATO without a resolution of the identified problems.
    
    Author: Konstantin Schendzielorz (University of St. Gallen)
- 232
  Panel / Critical War and Security Studies Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: PPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
  
  Discussant: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
  - Counting security in the vernacular
    
    Recent years have witnessed a ‘vernacular turn’ in critical security studies centred on the construction and functions of security speak in everyday contexts. In this article, I seek to push this turn forward by arguing for greater attention to the role of numerical claims and other quantitative rhetoric in non-elite discourse on security threats and responses. Doing so, I suggest, deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular, while providing important opportunity to strengthen this research through engagement with insight from literature on the rhetorical, sociological, and political functions of numbers. To illustrate this claim, I apply a new methodological framework to original data generated from a series of focus groups on (counter-)radicalisation. Doing so, I argue, demonstrates the importance of numbers for vernacular constructions of threat, evaluation of security policies, contestation of dominant security discourses, and depictions of public awareness.
    
    Author: Lee Jarvis (UEA)
  - War Crimes of Australian Special Forces During the Afghan War and Agamben’s State of Exception
    
    UN reports and the Report of Inquiry conducted by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) provide statistics and document details showing that ADF personnel operating in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2013 engaged in criminal conduct causing the death of at least 89 civilians and combatants during the Afghanistan war. Although the Australian government has initiated a legal investigation giving the impression that it is determined to bring the responsible ones to justice, there is a growing need to analyse the problem of international crimes committed by international peace operations personnel beyond the legal field. The crimes allegedly committed by the Australian forces on the territory of Afghanistan are undoubtedly incompatible with international norms and standards. Yet, in accordance with Agamben’s theory of “state of exception”, the violations indicate a field where exception becomes the rule rather than being simply an exception to the rule. Through conversation with Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer and the state of exception whereby a domestic legislating body assumes an a priori validity above and outside the law, this paper argues that the international community as a versatile and ubiquitous power constructs states of exception and homines sacri in a similar fashion at the international level.
    
    Author: Gözde Turan (Antalya Bilim University)
  - Experimenting with UAVs: surveillance and interventionism in Brazilian military
    
    This paper investigates how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been influencing interventionist dispositions within Brazilian military (in)securitization practices. Its main argument is that the expectation, importation, and experimentation with these artifacts already designed as facilitators for interventions reinforce historically built notions of military expertise as a prerogative to permanently intervene over the population, fostering contemporary tendencies of strategy focusing on preventive actions and risk management. It explores how these devices have entrenched within the military in the past two decades, (re)drawing its own interventionist know-how that propels the Armed Forces towards political administration and towards operations designed to engage over populations and areas deemed to be more prone to risk behavior, pose threats to national security, and require better management. Based on International Political Sociology and Critical Security Studies approaches on technology, (in)security, practices, and devices, this paper draws on an ongoing analysis of drone use by the Brazilian military, conducted through analysis of military manuals and academy papers, and an original survey conducted with the Brazilian Air Force.
    
    Authors: Jonathan de Assis (Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP))* , Mariana Janot (Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP))
  - Mutiny on the Twitch Stream: ‘Gamers for Peace’ and Veteran Resistance in Digital Spaces
    
    Facing its worst recruitment crisis since the establishment of an all-volunteer force in 1973, the United States military has accelerated its move into online spaces in a bid to reach younger and future generations of new recruits. While efforts have centred on a number of online spaces and digital influence strategies, the US military has especially entered the world of online video gaming via streaming platforms like Twitch.tv, and through sponsorship of ‘e-sports’ video gaming tournaments. This paper considers the cultural, political, and legal contours of these online, youth-focused recruitment efforts, as well as popular efforts to resist military presence in these spaces. Notably, we detail the activities of the recently established anti-war activist group Gamers for Peace (GFP), an offshoot of the Veterans for Peace (VFP) movement established by Vietnam-era veterans in 1985. Combining critical theory and participant observation, we detail the activities of the Gamers for Peace, notably how they leverage their subject positions as veterans with combat experience to disrupt US military recruitment efforts in online and digital spaces. In developing our case study, we attend to the cultural politics of recruitment and counter-recruitment in digital spaces, notably how the US military has leveraged currents of the online (alt-)right to bolster recruitment. Further, we consider how counter-recruitment efforts have by contrast focused on a constellation of progressive political and anti-war themes, including but not limited to: alternative options to the ‘economic draft’; progressive masculinities; and interrogating the intersections of the U.S. military and climate emergency.
    
    Authors: Jeffrey Whyte (Lancaster University) , Sarah Collier (University College London)*
- 233
  Panel / Emotions and international organizations Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Scott Edwards (University of Bristol)
  
  Discussant: Scott Edwards (University of Bristol)
  - A New Type of Othering? The EU as the “Other” in the British Prime Ministerial post-Brexit rhetoric
    
    The paper builds on emerging research on the affective polarization generated by the Brexit-based identification (Curtice, 2018; Duffy et al. 2019: 16; Murray, Plagnola and Corra, 2017). This polarisation has been intense in terms of emotional commitment, affect, stereotyping, prejudice and various evaluative biases (Hobolt, Leeper and Tilley 2018). The paper investigates if, how and to what extent the post-Brexit British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson (2019-2022), Liz Truss (2022) and Rishi Sunak (since 2022) have contributed to this polarisation, through their post-Brexit exclusionary rhetoric of othering vis-à-vis the EU. Taking the discourse-analytical perspective (Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Wodak 2011) and working with a dataset of the PMs’ speeches during their tenures, the paper investigates whether the British PMs constructively and reproductively constructed the EU as the non-liked “Other” to the British self since the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. More specifically, the inquiry is guided by Krzyżanowski’s (2010) operationalization of the Discourse Historical Approach. and point to the highly contradictory nature of the prime ministerial rhetoric.
    
    Author: Monika Brusenbauch Meislová (Masaryk University)
  - Everyday emotions and international organisations
    
    In recent years, various crises such as the financial crisis, Brexit, and the covid-19 pandemic have shed light on citizens’ dissatisfaction with International Organisations (IOs). Yet, despite their crucial importance for IOs’ legitimacy, individual citizens’ connection to these organisations remains understudied. This article contributes to the literature on emotion research in International Relations (IR) by exploring the everyday emotions of ordinary individuals about international organisations and their repercussions on world politics, moving beyond the state or community level to examine how citizens actually experience international politics. It does so by theorising emotional attachments to IOs and demonstrating how they shape perceptions and preferences that have an impact on the future of organisations, contributing to the “everyday turn” in emotion research in IR. Using the European Union as a case study, it analyses 21 focus groups with individuals from four different countries (Belgium, France, Italy, and Portugal) and provides a deeper understanding of the micro-political foundation that enables and legitimises government action, and against whose background international relations are conducted.
    
    Author: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Warwick)
- 234
  Panel / Feminist Foreign Policy: States, Leadership, Security and Everyday Knowledge Production, Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  - A Feminist Foreign Policy in the UK? Implications for Atrocity Prevention
    
    As an increasing number of states engage with feminist foreign policy (FFP), debates emerge about the meaningful engagement with “gender” in political initiatives. This paper first explores what an intersectional feminist foreign policy would mean for the United Kingdom and the limitations that the UK would first need to tackle in order to engage meaningfully with gender considerations in a “feminist” foreign policy project. Second, it explores an under researched topic, namely whether feminist foreign policies translate into more efficient efforts towards the prevention of mass atrocity crimes. This paper assesses what a meaningful engagement with gender equality norms and gender indicators would mean for the UK. This is particularly timely in the UK context, given the FCDO’s recent announcement that it is working towards developing a national Atrocity Prevention Strategy.
    Key words: feminist foreign policy, gender equality, atrocity prevention, UK
    
    Author: Cristina Stefan (University of Leeds)
  - The ‘Hillary Doctrine’ versus Feminist Foreign Policy: the logic of adopting gender equality measures within foreign policy.
    
    In recent years states have become more attentive to gender in their foreign policy. Two pivotal examples of this are the so-called ‘Hillary Doctrine’ as put into practice under Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State for the USA; and the adoption of a ‘feminist foreign policy’ by a range of countries, most notably Sweden. This article asks how each of these states understands their turn to gender in their foreign policy, looking at these policy agendas as enacted by Clinton and Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström - how do these two frameworks understand the importance of including gender equality within their foreign policy? What logic do they forward for embedding gender equality in their overseas work? It argues that the logic of including gender equality within foreign policy has moved from one based on the moral inclusion of women and gendered concerns, to an argument based instead on evidence and data. Arguments for gender equality in foreign policy must now be ‘smart’, with arguments based on ideology presented as being weaker and less persuasive. My paper contributes to the developing literature on gender and foreign policy but also, through a consideration of Clinton and Wallström, the role of women foreign policy leaders.
    
    Author: Jennifer Thomson (University of Bath)
  - The Everyday Knowledge Production of/on Feminist Foreign Policy in Germany
    
    Germany is one of the newest additions to the group of states pursuing a feminist foreign policy (FFP). Having adopted the term in December 2021, the German government is now working on developing the policy. This process has not only raised many questions about what an FFP would mean but also brought an oft-neglected group of knowledge producers to the fore: Foreign Office (FO) staff, now tasked with developing, implementing, and doing feminist foreign policy. As they engage in this knowledge production, FO staff not only navigate different institutional and international social relations that structure ways of knowing and producing (feminist) foreign policy. They also actively (re)produce these relations by contributing their own knowledge of what feminism is and how it should be practiced (or, indeed, if it should be practiced at all). This paper uses institutional ethnography to explore how feminism materialises (or doesn’t) in the FO’s everyday. Making visible the power relations that enable FO staff to speak, practice, and know feminism, it studies how feminist foreign policy comes to happen as it does and to what extent it reproduces and/or maintains dominant ways of knowing and making foreign policy.
    
    Author: Karoline Färber (King’s College London)
- 235
  Panel / Japan's Proactive Role in Contributing to Peace Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Bhubhindar Singh (Nanyang Technological University)
  
  Chair: Bhubhindar Singh (Nanyang Technological University)
  - Dysfunctional partners: emotion and the politics of anger in Japanese-Republic of Korea relations
    
    Despite common national interests including the existential nuclear threat from North Korea, sustained alliance alignment with the United States, shared liberal-democratic traditions and convergent economies, Japan and the Republic of Korea have long faced seemingly intractable challenges in moving beyond the legacy of history in building a successful bilateral partnership. The Liberal Democratic Party’s pragmatic and proactive foreign policy, whether under late Prime Minister Abe Shinzo or the current Prime Minister, Kishida Fumio, should in principle have allowed the two countries to move beyond such challenges and establish an effective cooperative relationship. This paper deploys new perspectives from social psychology, neuroscience and intellectual history to better understand how sentiment, mutual victimisation, the legacy of trauma, frustrated agency and political nostalgia continue to frustrate efforts at building an effective partnership.
    
    Author: John Nilsson-Wright (University of Cambridge)
  - ‘The Rinji Gaikō Curse: Overcoming Ad-hockery in Japanese Postwar Foreign Policy’
    
    While Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific concept has emerged as an initiative of global appeal, Japanese postwar foreign policy was long criticised for its lack of ambition and long-term vision. In the early postwar years, this reactive diplomatic posture was known as rinji gaikō (臨時外交) – ‘provisional, ad hoc diplomacy’ – and perceived as an unwelcome side-effect of the Yoshida Doctrine. This paper offers a historical perspective on some erstwhile attempts at overcoming rinji gaikō, drawing on diplomatic sources, diaries, and printed media from the 1960s-80s period. It examines how, in particular, the use of special envoys (semi-informal diplomatic agents appointed by the premier) was believed to be a viable solution to ad hoc diplomacy, leveraging personal rather than institutional networks and bypassing bureaucratic structures. I argue that, ironically, such attempts at personalisation and presidentialisation of Japanese foreign policy further contributed to, rather than countered, Japan’s ‘provisional’ diplomatic engagement.
    
    Author: Giulia Garbagni (University of Cambridge)
  - Japan as a global (partial) military power
    
    Japan is indeed emerging as a more prominent global and regional military power, defying traditional categorisations of a minimalist contribution to the US-Japan alliance, of maintaining anti-militarism, of seeking an internationalist role, or of carving out more strategic autonomy. This paper argues that Japan has fundamentally shifted its military posture over the last three decades and traversed into a new categorisation of a more capable military power and integrated US ally. This results from Japan’s recognition of its fundamentally changing strategic environment that requires a new grand strategy and military doctrines. The shift is traced across the national security strategy components of Japan Self-Defence Forces’ capabilities, the US-Japan alliance integration, and international security cooperation including UNPKO, and new bilateral partnerships and multilateral frameworks. The paper argues that all these components are subordinated inevitably to the objectives of homeland security and re-strengthening the US-Japan alliance, and thus Japan’s development as international security partner outside the ambit of the bilateral alliance remains partial and limited.
    
    Author: Christopher W. Hughes (University of Warwick)
  - Can Japan’s regional military exercises uphold peace and prevent conflict?
    
    Although constitutional status of its Self-Defence Forces (SDF) remains subject to intense political debate, Japan’s participation in military exercises beyond its US ally has grown quite rapidly. How military exercises may “shape” a more favourable international environment has drawn recent academic attention (Heuser at al 2017; Wolfley 2022). While Japan’s exercises with the United Kingdom have been examined (Heng 2021; Hughes 2021), a question remains whether Japan’s military exercises may in fact help shape regional order and stability. Japan’s Ministry of Defence for instance claimed the Malabar exercises “Crystalizes shared vision of "Free & Open Indo Pacific“. Drawing from interviews with SDF officers and civilian policymakers, this paper asks to what extent might these exercises help Japan achieve its desired vision of regional order and its signature policy of “proactive contribution to peace”? The paper suggests that Japan’s military exercises 1) socialise partners in shared (and expected) norms of behaviour and lingo through performative acts 2) conduct capacity-building for weaker partners 3) recruit partners and transform relationships to help uphold peace 4) enhance Japan’s own deterrence capabilities
    
    Author: Yee Kuang Heng (University of Tokyo)
  - End of the Yoshida Doctrine?
    
    Japan’s security policy is no longer confined to economic and political means, but also utilizes military means to achieve traditional and non-traditional security objectives. This illustrates the transformation of Japan’s policy of passive and minimal military usage based on the Yoshida Doctrine to a policy of “proactive contribution to peace”. A major example of this new direction is the Japanese government’s introduction of its own vision of a regional rules-based order – known as the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) - to ensure continued peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific. Many experts argue that security policy reforms like this implemented in Abe’s second administration are so radical that the Yoshida Doctrine is no longer relevant in shaping Japan’s security policy. This paper challenges that claim by presenting an anatomy of the Yoshida Doctrine and examining how its various tenets have been institutionalized and embedded into Japan’s policymaking process over time. Even though the Yoshida Doctrine has weakened, the article argues that the Yoshida Doctrine and its related principles and norms continue to set the parameters for Japan’s security discourse and influence policy outcomes.
    
    Authors: Soyoung Kim (Nanyang Technological University)* , Bhubhindar Singh (Nanyang Technological University)
- 236
  Panel / Knowledge production and peacebuilding Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: David Curran (Coventry University)
  - Coping, resistance, and myths: Humour as meta-data in peace research
    
    Conducting research in conflict-affected societies is never a straightforward endeavour. It requires the researcher to develop certain sensibilities and awareness of dynamics beyond the spoken and the obvious. In understanding how the current social and political circumstances shape the domain of what can and cannot be publicly discussed in a society affected by a conflict, researchers have argued that the so-called ‘hidden transcripts’ or ‘metadata’ of rumours, inventions, denials, evasions, and silences present a valuable repository of people’s thoughts and feelings that are not always articulated in interview responses. This paper argues that jokes often present a critical form of meta-data and thus explores the place of humour in peace research. It particularly zeroes in on three different functions of humour in conflict-affected societies: as a coping mechanism, as a resistance tactic, and as a myth-making domain. Drawing on research undertaken in the Balkans, the paper sheds light on the importance of humour not only as part of the context, but also as part of the data itself.
    
    Author: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)
  - Transformative mediation as a mechanism for inclusive peacebuilding
    
    This paper explores the concept of ‘transformative mediation’ as both a theoretical tool and practical approach in peacebuilding practice. Merging with literature on mediation, dialogue and peacebuilding with feminist scholarship on transformative justice, the paper examines how transformative mediation is implemented from a practice perspective and explores its potential to promote a more inclusive peace. The paper calls for a re-focusing of priorities in peace mediation practice to be more inclusive of structural and everyday violence as well as community and everyday concerns. Such a perspective is tied closely with more bottom-up approaches to conflict transformation and conflict prevention that recognises the power and agency of ordinary people, who may have very different perspectives on needs and values than those at the institutional level. The paper maps how transformative mediation is understood and practiced across a variety of contexts.
    Findings are drawn from interviews with mediation practitioners that use forms transformative mediation in their practice. This includes representatives from Mediation Beyond Borders, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. Findings examine common themes and approaches, such as trauma informed mediation, duty of care, arts practice and issues related to inclusions and exclusions of certain groups.
    
    Authors: Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen's University Belfast) , Heidi Riley (University College Dublin)
  - Knowledge production in peace and conflict studies: Through Dialogic Encounters and Intersectionality
    
    Knowledge production in peace and conflict research is influenced by a complex interplay of actors, processes and practices, and is a result of the interlocking of different hierarchies. Consequently, power asymmetries are not illuminated in peace and conflict research, which tends to be hegemonic leading to the reproduction of hierarchies it claims to contest. Building on this, in our paper, we critically explore who produces knowledge in peace and conflict and for whom? Our contribution combines Freirean conception of ‘dialogic encounters’ and Collins’ critical praxis of ‘intersectionality’ as a possible way to minimize epistemic and structural hierarchies in knowledge production, specifically in peace and conflict research. The concept of dialogic encounters and the conceptualization of intersectionality as a critical practice emphasize the political-practical dimension of knowledge production rather than understanding it as an end in itself. In contrast to claims of authoritative knowledge, which often characterizes Eurocentric work on peace and conflict, we argue for understanding research as a shared learning process in which knowledge is also produced for those who participate in it through participatory action research (PAR) for example. Our aim is to contribute to the decolonization of research methods in peace and conflict studies.
    
    Authors: Hanna Schnieders (University of Erfurt)* , Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt)
  - Moving from intention to impact: Reflections on (de)coloniality in promoting peace and transforming conflicts
    
    Peace and conflict studies engages with the state of our world by analyzing the root causes of armed conflict, the factors that enable conflict transformation and the mechanisms for ensuring long-lasting sustainable peace. However, there continues to be a dearth of research that confronts coloniality as a major root cause of historical conflict and posits “the all” (Mbembe, 2021) at the centre of finding peaceful solutions. Decolonization is a useful frame in peace and conflict studies that is both an event and an ongoing process that takes place at the structural, epistemic, personal and relational levels (Kessi, Marks and Ramugondo, 2020). Decolonization approaches are amplified by intersectional feminist views that aim to re-centre the voices of marginalized womxn (Ballo et al 2022). This paper requests for a shift of our attention away from liberal peacebuilding frameworks that focus on the function, motivation or intention of actors and processes related to conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty and towards peaces that (re-)centre the ‘local’, everyday, diverse voices that reflect on how peace has an impact on people and places. It posits that by identifying peace promotion work as structural, epistemic, personal and relational, we can begin to envisage a decolonial peace.
    
    Author: Rina Malagayo Alluri (University of Innsbruck)
  - The role of faculty members in peace education instruction: Understandings, pedagogies, and practices in Sri Lanka
    
    Abstract:
    
    After decades of ethnic conflict which destroyed the social, economic and environmental fabric, Sri Lanka is investing in a sustainable peacebuilding education programme. While most Sri Lankan government partnerships focus on introducing peace education programmes in secondary schools, little evidence is available about partnerships on peace education programmes at the higher education level.
    
    The Sri Lankan post-conflict context is characterised by increased state surveillance, security concerns, and self-censorship, presenting faculty members with additional tensions to navigate in peace education instruction. In this environment, faculty members have played an important role in delivering peace education programmes. However, Sri Lankan governments and empirical research have largely ignored this area, a gap this presentation addresses. The presentation is based on a study that employs a critical peace education model that questions societal power dynamics and indigenous meanings, and encourages inclusivity to position the Sri Lankan peace education context within wider theoretical approaches. The study draws on 32 semi-structured interviews, documentary evidence, and memos from the data collection and analysis stages.
    
    A range of influences are highlighted that direct faculty members understandings, which are rooted in western peace education theory, and Sri Lankan perspectives such as religion, history, culture, and personal transformation stories. Furthermore, the study chronicles how these understandings can guide classroom instruction through indigenous, traditional, collaboratively based innovative pedagogical approaches to support long-term peacebuilding efforts. This presentation provides key insights related to the roles higher education can play in shaping peacebuilding policy and practice in Sri Lanka and beyond.
    
    Author: Suren Ladd (University of Sydney)
- 237
  Panel / Militarisation and Carceral Landscapes Argyll, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Elisabeth Schweiger (University of York)
  
  Chair: Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield)
  - Police bombing and the colonial continuities of military counterinsurgency
    
    This paper investigates the colonial continuities of discourses around contemporary counterinsurgency measures in the Middle East. I compare the representation of ‘police bombing’ practices in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1920s and 1930s to contemporary representations of drone warfare in the same regions. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of British parliamentary debates as well as newspaper coverage, comparing representations in the past with contemporary discourses. I analyse differences in the framing of aerial violence while also highlighting some continuities in what is (not) discussed and the unspoken assumptions these debates rely on.
    
    Author: Elisabeth Schweiger (University of York)
  - Military Power and Police Power in Haiti: A Continuum of Violence
    
    Weeks before the de facto Haitian President was assassinated in July 2021, his ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond, defended Moise’s grasp on power and contended that the country was “quite safe” in spite of spiraling violence. Edmond claimed that the solution to Haiti’s ongoing political crisis was increased funding, training, and international support for the police. Since Moise became the latest victim of the violence he fomented, increased police training, equipment, and force has been a through line of the limited forms of international intervention that have occurred. Set within a global conversation about police abolition, this paper considers the continuum of violence linking military power to police power in Haiti. I begin with the US Marines’ decimation of Haiti’s army of independence in the 1920s, examining how the Marine occupation replaced Haiti’s original army with one whose main enemy was its own people. I trace how this turning point shaped the military-police continuum in Haiti through the Duvalier period, and into the recent and ongoing moments of continued US occupation and intervention. I argue that the contradiction of an army designed to suppress dissent among its own people has not been disentangled, and is consequential to understanding the current and ongoing political crisis unfolding in Haiti today.
    
    Author: Greenburg Jennifer (University of Sheffield)
  - Could Ukraine be Putin’s Afghanistan?’: Telling stories of counter-insurgency in Anglosphere intelligence analysis
    
    Counter-insurgency research has increasingly identified legacies of colonial myth-making and practice. 21st century counter-insurgency has undoubtedly drawn from colonialism’s blueprint and frequently stumbled in its shadow. But there is another side to this legacy. British and U.S. intelligence analysis tries to make sense of the world by looking at other states’ insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. Explaining how foreign counter-insurgents get things wrong is a crucial part of proclaiming Anglosphere intelligence’s clear-sighted objectivity, and of legitimising a world order with their own states at the top. The self-delusions and weak conclusions of this intelligence work are equally colonial in their lineage. This paper therefore follows two lines of inquiry. First, it looks back to 1950s-60s U.S. and British intelligence assessments of uprisings in Persian Gulf protectorates and in Soviet Union satellite states. These assessments tried to critique autocracies’ poor counter-insurgency strategy without evoking similar problems involving their own states. Second, the paper explores echoes of this strained effort in recent Anglosphere intelligence on insurgency in Russian-occupied Ukraine and on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. This intelligence reporting is not about gaining accurate knowledge. It is instead about tracing others’ strategic errors to fundamentally different, inferior political cultures.
    
    Author: Oliver Kearns (University of Bristol)
- 238
  Panel / Multilaterism, Multinationalism, and Cooperation in World Politics: Theory and Practice QE2, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Kyle Grayson (BISA)
  
  Chair: David Macfayden (Independent Researcher)
  - What Derso and Kelen’s political cartoons tell us about multinational cooperation
    
    In ‘Mrs Roosevelt’s Class on Human Rights’, the USSR delegate is consigned to the naughty corner. This cartoon by Hungarian émigrés, Derso & Kelen, famous in their day, features in their book on the nascent work of the United Nations. In the introduction, the two artists reflect: ‘It could be twenty years ago, or it could be a hundred years from now’. This 1950 volume is the last of their joint publications, which began in 1923 and which capture the Zeitgeist of the era. The paper draws on archival sources of their work, and a forthcoming book, to show what visual evidence contributes to the history of multilateral cooperation.
    
    The opening image of their visual history of the first decade of international cooperation under the League of Nations indicates that an organization that aspired to be universal, with positions open equally to men and women, was Eurocentric and male-dominated. Other cartoons depict League initiatives on justice, protecting minorities, reducing trade barriers, economics & finance, and intellectual cooperation; peace and disarmament get scarcely a mention. Their cartoons show, however, that European Union was conceived in 1929 as a peace project.
    
    This unique corpus of cartoons constitutes an important source for historians seeking to analyse multinational cooperation and to communicate its history.
    
    Authors: Stefan Slater (Independent researcher)* , David Macfayden (Independent Researcher)
  - Politics of Aspiration: Future Making or Governing Failure?
    
    How can we work towards a better future? What does it entail? In the past decade we have experienced multiple unexpected shocks that have shifted how we relate to each other in our respective societies. Yet regardless, we come together, even if along the dividing lines, around shared aspirations of a future yet to come. By theorizing politics of aspiration, this paper aims to introduce hope, imagination and dreams as part of international political negotiation of the collective Future. Future, in this context, is understood as a ‘cultural fact’ (Appadurai 2013) produced through social relations. The article interrogates the UN Secretary General’s ‘Our Common Agenda’ proposal 5 to ‘place women and girls at the centre’ from a regional perspective by analyzing the African Union’s (AU) emerging Positive Masculinities agenda. President of DR Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, is the Champion of the United Nations HeForShe campaign and hosted the 1st AU’s Men’s Conference on Positive Masculinities in Kinshasa. The AU is hosting the 2nd Men's Conference, complete with civil society consultations, in November 2922. Through this case I explore the different types of political work that go into generating shared aspirations and future visions around gender and masculinity. Theoretically, the article develops ‘politics of aspiration’ as a collective political practice of future-crafting which entails concrete actors and practices in international governance. In doing so, I bring forth the ‘dark side’ of aspirational politics (Finnemore and Jurkovich 2020) and the shortcomings of a politics where practices of forging shared visions of future are highly bureaucratic, performative, and top-down.
    
    Author: Karmen Tornius (Roskilde University / Danish Institute for International Studies)
  - Lessons from the past: governing global trade in the postwar scenario (1947-1971)
    
    The rise of institutional complexity, whereby policy issues are governed by a growing number of diverse and overlapping actors, is typically portrayed as a recent phenomenon only. However, even largely hierarchical complexes have often witnessed enduring contestation of their focal and long-standing international organizations. The paper focuses on the postwar trade complex, initially centered around the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). By drawing on new theoretical insights and primary sources, it displays how institutional complexity has been a defining feature of this complex, and how GATT’s leadership has been progressively challenged by major new actors. The paper offers two main contributions. First, it shows how the GATT reacted to external institutional threats by modulating its responses on the characteristics of the challenge faced. Second, it sheds a light on the many actors which contributed to govern global trade in the postwar years, including the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). By showing how these actors responded to distinct weaknesses of the GATT, the paper highlights their role in furthering a collective legitimation of the postwar trade complex and filling existing governance gaps.
    
    Author: Francesco Gatti (Scuola Normale Superiore)
  - Multilateral Discord: Examining the Emergence and implications of ‘Factional Multilateral Networks’ in an era of complex crises.
    
    States and international organisations approach the concept and practice of multilateralism in divergent and at times conflicting manners which can greatly impact the application of multilateralism as a means for addressing commonly shared threats to peace and stability. As we enter an era of increasingly complex and mobile crises it is of importance to examine how concepts of multilateralism are being approached by international actors and, what the implications of this proliferation of multilateralism means for cooperation and crisis management in the future. In this research I argue that the proliferation of approaches to multilateralism evidenced in today’s international system leads to a divergence in how states actualize multilateralism, how they choose to engage or disengage with the practice and how this impacts interactions with other states. I examine this emergent area of study through an analysis of the prevailing trends in multilateralism seen in global powers, drawing from interviews with state and international organizations to supplement this analysis. I argue that this conceptual proliferation has manifested in the emergence of ‘factional multilateral networks’ groupings of similarly aligned actors and in the course of this research examine the intricacies of these networks and also the implications of their presence in world politics in an era of increasingly complex crises.
    
    Author: Stephen Murray (Queen's University Belfast)
  - A Critical Assessment of ‘Like-mindedness’ in International Relations
    
    The intensification of great-power conflict has led to growing calls in the US and Europe for building, or strengthening, alliances and partnerships with “like-minded” countries so as to put themselves in a better position for the increasing geopolitical competition with authoritarian adversaries, notably China and Russia. In geo-economic terms, the notion of “friend-shoring” has been advanced to describe similar efforts at gradually replacing an inclusive global trade order and globally integrated supply chains with more strategically motivated trade and investment networks among “like-minded” partners.
    While the idea of “like-mindedness” is thus gaining traction in international politics, it has been subject to scant academic reflection and conceptual analysis to date. What is actually meant when the concept of “like-mindedness” is invoked? Is it mostly used opportunistically to designate any ad hoc alignment of interests between countries in a given policy field, or does it reflect a shift to a more substantive commitment to common values? And how does the empirical use of the term relate to what IR theory has to contribute in this regard? This paper will examine these questions by systematically analyzing the use of “like-mindedness” in US and European foreign-policy debates over the last 5 years.
    
    Authors: Bertram Lang* , Sebastian Biba (Goethe University Frankfurt)
- 239
  Panel / Neglected Concepts in Worldmaking Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Liane Hartnett (The University of Melbourne)
  
  Chair: Liane Hartnett (The University of Melbourne)
  
  Discussant: Eileen Hunt (Notre Dame)
  - Dualism, anti-dualism and the inter-generational politics of the ‘international’ in the Anthropocene
    
    Contemporary ecological crisis challenges International Relations (IR) to develop approaches that do not treat ‘nature’ as simply the background of human activity. In this context, there are numerous calls for an abandonment of ‘anthropocentrism’, along with the dualism it establishes between ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’, and its substitution with more ‘ecocentric’ perspectives that consider the interests of both human and non-human present and future generations. With reference to both a process sociological understanding of human/nature relations, and recent discussions about ‘uneven and combined developed’ in a theorisation of the ‘international’, the argument is made in this talk for the need to distinguish between ontological and analytical dualism. While proposing a theoretical avenue to overcome ontological dualism via the process sociological conception of ‘levels of integration’, the case is made for the need to preserve a form of analytical dualism that identifies the evolutionarily emergent distinguishing characteristics of the human species in the framework of which a theory of the ‘international’, and its embeddedness in ‘nature’, can be developed. Without an understanding of these emergent characteristics, neither the interests of future human and non-human generations, nor how best to account for them in contemporary decision-making processes, can be properly understood.
    
    Author: Andre Saramago (University of Coimbra)
  - Nature in International Relations Theory
    
    This paper interrogates the concepts of ‘nature’ and the fundamental work it does in IR theory. First, the paper highlights uses of the term to denote something inevitable – from the importance of an unchanging ‘human nature’ in classical realist thought to commercial exchange as ‘natural’ in liberal theorizing. In both instances, nature signifies a perennial force beyond human control. Second, the paper examines the use of ‘nature’ as a foil to international society and processes of socialization. Here, an imagined natural state predates society, and in many ways, socialization seeks to change what has been ‘pre-given’ by nature. Third, this paper investigates the use of the verb ‘to denature’ in critical IR to challenge a static understanding of the world. Critical scholars aim to historicize and contextualize concepts and categories to show they are not inherent, but were created by someone for some purpose, and therefore can be reimagined and recreated going forward. While this use of ‘nature’ posits it as a myth that must be overturned, it also reinforces an understanding of nature as unchanging and hence a false reflection of the social world. By thinking through these three interrelated ways ‘nature’ is used in IR theory, I show how much work the nature vs. society binary does in the way we seek to understand the international.
    
    Author: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary)
  - How silence makes our world
    
    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 constitutes 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 communicative silences manifest, what they ‘do’ in different communicative contexts and how they relate to existing power relations. This paper brings together the different strands of work on silence to theorise how silence constitutes the global. It discusses structural silences, communicative silence in institutional settings, like the UN, and processes like peacebuilding, as well as in diplomatic practices and the conduct of foreign policy. Finally, it examines silence as an ethical gesture in the context of movements for social, political and economic justice. The paper concludes that silence is certainly one of the most important forces in the constitution of the global in its ethical, micro and macro-political dimensions and one which we have still to pay adequate attention to.
    
    Author: Sophia Dingli (The University of Glasgow)
  - Astral traveling: anarchism and antipolitical worldmaking
    
    A bourgeoning literature has begun to recover the non-Western history of anarchist theory and practice. From Marseille to Tunis, Hong Kong to Tokyo, Buenos Aires to Manila, scholars have sought to “globalize” and “decolonize” anarchism by showing how anarchist ideas thrived among diasporic communities and in imperial cities. Thinking with queer utopian José Esteban Munoz, jazz musician Alice Coltrane, and black Marxist Cedric Robinson, this paper takes this literature forward by retrieving an alternative genre of anarchism. This is a subterranean style of anarchist thinking that is based—not on the dissemination of European Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and science—but on the dreamworlds, jazz grooves, and mystical folktales of the utopian margins. Travelling astrally, I follow Munoz, Coltrane, and Robinson in and out of this antipolitical universe, cracking open a radical worldmaking project that upends the dominant terms of order.
    
    Author: Ida Danewid (The University of Sussex)
- 240
  Panel / Opaque and Visible - Moving Geographies of Race Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Nicholas Barnes (St Andrews)
  - Commuting under Occupation: Depoliticization of Israeli Infrastructure in the West Bank
    
    It is now widely accepted in academic literature that in spite of its political salience, infrastructure rarely appears as an object of public inquiry: as famously argued by Edwards (2004: 185), “we notice [infrastructures] mainly when they fail, which they rarely do”. Accordingly, much of the existing scholarship seeks to problematize the political neutrality of infrastructural arrangements and interrogate their power-laden effects. By contrast, in this paper I discuss dynamics which seeks to render contested infrastructure as non-political for privileged segments of the public. I empirically focus on infrastructures governing mobility in the occupied West Bank. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine, and utilizing insights from studies of naturalizing colonial power through the interplay of material, spatial and discursive practices, I show how the racialized and criticized mechanisms of the Israeli control, such as segregated roads and checkpoints, are turned into mere features of the everyday life for the Israeli settlers. I argue that this is achieved by reframing them as matters of convenience that facilitate middle-class lifestyle rather than artefacts of settler-colonial regime. While conceptually developing notion of depoliticization of infrastructure in the context of colonial dominance, the paper thus also works towards better understanding of how the Israeli occupation becomes entrenched and unnoticeable for the Israelis.
    
    Author: Jakub Zahora (Charles University)
  - Pursuing Opacity: Geographies of Visibility in the Western Mediterranean
    
    Governments pursue the enhanced visibility of people and things. They observe and survey in order to codify, catalogue, classify and calculate. Rather than trace the contours of such projects, this paper seeks to provoke a more sustained engagement with modes of errantry that confound their logics of command and control. Building on more than twelve months of multi-sited ethnography in southern Spain and northern Morocco, it explores how marginalized communities contemplate and navigate unequal geographies of visibility. To do so, I revisit the work of Édouard Glissant and some of his interlocutors in the anti-colonial and Black critical thought traditions in order to contemplate fluctuating vectors of opacity amongst communities living in hashish trafficking hubs. Frequently stigmatized as violent criminals and indolent freeloaders—their itineraries effaced—inhabitants of the provinces of the Campo de Gibraltar (Spain) and Rif (Morocco) are regularly told that the solution to their ills lies in legality, in giving up on the shadowy activities that place them in opposition to the law’s luminous strictures. Yet transparency offers little, suspicions of criminality potentially annulled in exchange for a few bucks of welfare support, if that. Spaces grappling with detection and wrestling with capture may very well offer more. This paper explores these spaces, and the ostensibly deviant actors that populate them, without reading them as anomaly or disturbance but as compromised responses to imposed situations worthy of political and ethnographic reflection.
    
    Author: Jose Ciro Martinez (University of York)
  - Recruiting Racialised Others: Brokerage in War and Migration
    
    The divisive ideologies underpinning the so-called War on Terror and the criminalisation and vilification of refugees draw on and have sedimented a polarised West vs the Rest logic. In this interconnected yet divided world, selected racialized Others are recruited into mediating roles by hegemonic powers. This paper focusses on the rising demand for and role of racialized others who are recruited as cultural and linguistic brokers in the interfaces created by neo-imperial wars and migration. The paper connects historical work on the political demand for brokers in emerging settler and colonial bureaucracies with contemporary research data on brokers’ recruitment into migration management and the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Drawing on interviews with locally employed interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan and with migrants recruited into Western migration sectors, it argues that marginalized (and reified) identities and skills find themselves in sudden demand, to support projects of domination through governance. I argue that while this demand provides opportunities for some actors, their role often remains confined to that of native informants, providing access to ‘the Other’ rather than challenging the imperial centre. I finally suggest that racial and gender logics also contribute to making the market for brokerage volatile and the labour of many brokers invisible, underpaid and precarious.
    
    Author: Sara de Jong (University of York)
- 241
  
  Roundtable / Teaching International Relations digitally and online: challenges and opportunities for the future. 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.
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: J Simon Rofe (University of Leeds)
  
  Participants: J Simon Rofe (University of Leeds) , Louise Pears (University of Leeds) , Ashley Cox (University of London) , Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
- 242
  Panel / The Dynamics of Regional Identity-building in the Foreign Policies of the Western Balkans. Rethinking Agency and Embedded Peripherality QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Conveners: Antony Horne (University of Portsmouth) , Lydia Cole (University of Sussex) , Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen)
  
  Chair: Katarina Kusic (University of Bremen)
  - The Duplicity of the EU’s Normative Europeanisation: The Faultlines of Serbia’s EU Trajectory
    
    Mainstream scholarship has long emphasised the EU’s normative potential enacted by enlargement, with ‘Europeanisation’ cemented as a guarantor of democratic change. However, the EU’s defence of its stated democratic normative values is significantly challenged, from far-right ‘populist’ normalization, Brexit and authoritarian governance which reproduce ‘de-Europeanization’. This holds deep reverberations for the EU’s relations with the Western Balkans, a region long defined by its proximity to, and exclusion from EU-rope. Whilst mainstream Europeanisation debates emphasize the Western Balkans’ ‘de-Europeanization’, they overlook the EU’s role in undermining its stated democratic values through counter-intuitive border security interests and ‘stabilocracy’, and increasingly exclusionary formulations of ‘European values’.
    
    Informed by an inversion of Borzel & Risse’s (2012) model of Europeanisation as norm diffusion, this paper argues that the EU’s established mechanisms of normative Europeanisation via enlargement are highly vulnerable to ‘illiberal’ infiltration, forming patterns of duplicitous Europeanisation. Applied to the case-study of Serbia, this paper presents the findings of a sequential mixed-methods study which charts Serbia’s compliance with EU conditions alongside V-Dem datasets. This is complemented by Critical Discourse Analysis involving European and Serbian policymakers and ‘uncivil society’ actors to scrutinize the transnational networks which bind far-right and mainstream politics to understand Serbia’s duplicitous Europeanisation.
    
    Author: Antony Horne (University of Portsmouth)
  - From ideology-oriented to interest-driven foreign policy: Turkey’s pragmatic turn in the Western Balkans
    
    The scientific goal of this proposed paper is to explore and analyse the formation of relations between Turkey and the Western Balkan states in the 21st century. Since the early 2000s, the AKP government has sought to increase its involvement in the region, using historical and cultural references as foundation of Turkish foreign policy doctrine. Despite numerous efforts and attempts, Turkey’s regional cooperation initiatives did not bring the expected results. Following the introduction of the presidential system in 2018, Turkish diplomatic activities have become more pragmatic, as the authorities’ main objective currently is to enhance economic ties between Turkey and the Western Balkans.
    
    By employing available source materials and academic publications, this research seeks to identify reasons for the shift in Turkey’s approach towards the region. As part of the study, both official statements of prominent Turkish politicians as well as local perceptions of Turkey’s actions have been examined. Based on qualitative research methods (e.g. content analysis, political discourse analysis, process tracing method), this proposed paper aims at answering the research question of how a pragmatic change in foreign policy affects the implementation of Turkish strategic goals in the Western Balkans. In conclusion, scenarios for future developments are presented.
    
    Author: Jan P. W. Niemiec (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
  - Regional economic integration in the Western Balkans between cooperation and contestation: the importance of external influence on the process
    
    For the last one hundred years at least, regional cooperation between the Balkans’ countries has been under the strong influence of external factors – especially major powers. Today, it seems that the integrations of the Western Balkans show more similarities with the integration tendencies of the countries of the global South than the regional integrations in the Northern Hemisphere. In many areas (economic ties, political relations with third countries, security interdependence), the WB countries show significant, asymmetric relations with external actors (EU, Russia, USA, China) that decisively influence their regional economic integration’s motives and preferences, but also efficiency and dynamics of institutionalized regional cooperation. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis have only further highlighted this extra-regional dependence.
    
    Therefore, this paper will seek to elaborate on the importance of external influence on the process of regional economic integration in the Western Balkans. It seems that this integration is determined by the positions of the most important EU countries (Germany and France) and the United States. Special attention will be paid to the analysis of the origin, dynamics, and efficiency of the institutional arrangements of the two existing, albeit competitive, regional economic integrations: Common Regional Market and Open Balkan.
    
    Authors: Miloš Hrnjaz (University of Belgrade)* , Aleksandar Milošević (University of Belgrade)
  - Europe as a Bricolage: Complex Transformation of the Western Balkans
    
    The region of the Western Balkans has been characterized by economic backwardness, nationalist antagonism, and contested statehood. These features are considered as impediments to complex transformation. The asymmetrical and rule-based process of Europeanisation has been less effective in transforming the Western Balkans’ polities. The shift of the EU’s mode of governance to a flexible external governance of the region is the critical juncture of a radically different interaction between Europe and its periphery. The Berlin Process initiative constitutes this shift. The paper addresses the question how EU political strategies of region-building interact with domestic local elite that have an agency role in the complex transformation? The institutionalisation of region-building through the Berlin Process provides the context for assessing the interaction between external norm diffusion, practices of legitimate statehood, and the modernising policy goals of local elites. Based on the case-study of Albania, using process-tracing and critical discourse analysis, this paper argues that the interaction contexts and transnational integration regimes are the driving forces of region-building. A key finding of the paper is that Europe, with the shift in the mode of governance becomes less authoritative and used as a bricolage by local elites of the region.
    
    Authors: Marsela Sako (University of Tirana)* , Sokol Lleshi (University of New York Tirana)
- 243
  Panel / The Epistemes of Global Health - Data, Technologies, and Creative Engagements Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Convener: GHWG Working group
  
  Chair: Christopher Long (University of Sussex)
  - Growing up amidst violence: Mapping community-based mental health strategies for young people on Colombia’s Pacific Coast
    
    The municipalities of Quibdó, Buenaventura and Tumaco on Colombia’s Pacific Coast have been affected by long-term violence and inequality. In spite of the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas in 2016, violence by different armed groups continues to persist. Growing up in a context where social relations have become marked by violence can have severe impacts on emotional wellbeing, which in turn can affect opportunities for personal and community development. This paper discusses how community-based organisations compensate for the precarious, inexistent, or unsuitable social policies in relation to youth mental health in Colombia’s Pacific region. It describes the major mental health issues faced by children and youth in this region, to then explain the strategies and systems developed by the communities themselves to provide support and take care of mental health issues of their children and younger generations. These include formal psychological interventions, but also a range of psychosocial, artistic and cultural practices. Strategies often have an intersectional or intergenerational focus, to address the complexity of long-term violence in a region marked by racial, gender and socio-economic inequalities. This paper presents the initial results of an ongoing three-year research project carried out by the Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) and the University of Birmingham (UK). It identifies lessons learned on how to overcome gaps in mental health care provision in conflict regions, and on better adapt such support to the needs of specific ethnic, gender and age groups in Colombia’s pacific region.
    
    Authors: Camilo Romero (Universidad de los Andes)* , Sergio Arrieta Vera (Universidad de los Andes)* , Karina Martinez Rozo (Universidad de los Andes)* , Francy Carranza-Franco (Universidad de los Andes) , Juan Roberto Rengifo Gutierrez (Universidad de los Andes)* , Paul Jackson (University of Birmingham)* , Juan Pablo Aranguren Romero (Universidad de los Andes)* , Germán Casas-Nieto (Universidad de los Andes)* , Sarah-Jane Fenton (University of Birmingham)* , Sanne Weber (University of Birmingham) , Mónica Pinilla-Roncancio (Universidad de los Andes)*
  - Regulatory Bottlenecks in Global Health: The Case of UNESCO
    
    This paper will investigate regulatory bottlenecks in global health. International regulations typically evolve over four stages: (1) need identification and acceptance (2) drafting (3) adoption and (4) implementation. Effective regulation can be stymied at any of these stages. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for example, has been at the forefront of bioethics regulation in the last two decades. Yet recent attempts to establish international instruments have failed to get beyond the idea stage, even when the need for regulation has been clearly identified. In 2015 UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee recommended a ban on human reproductive cloning, but the organisation has not acted on this. In September 2017 the same committee, in its draft report on big data and health, recommended that UNESCO negotiate a convention on the protection of privacy, but this has also not been taken forward. Based on interviews with current and former members of UNESCO’s International and Intergovernmental Bioethics Committees, as well as observations at public IBC and IGBC meetings and analysis of official UNESCO documents, this paper will present possible reasons why these Stage 1 regulatory bottlenecks have occurred.
    
    Author: Adele Langlois (University of Lincoln)
  - Turbulent data governance: Antimicrobial resistance, diseases surveillance & biopolitics
    
    Health equality and health interventions are underpinned by national and global politics: technical decisions require political decisions about who should provide advice, what policies should be implemented, and how such policies should be enforced. Data and diseases surveillance have come to play a vital role in tackling global health challenges, like antimicrobial resistance (AMR). One key challenge for a global response to AMR is a perceived paucity of data. This paper demonstrates that while several large datasets relating to AMR exist, data remain incompatible, are often hidden behind paywalls, or controlled through limiting access to technical infrastructures. Thus, datasets currently do not translate into knowledge that enables co-ordination or even informs AMR governance. Instead, AMR surveillance is a highly political endeavour. The paper analysis the role of data and the mechanisms through which data are generated, accumulated, harmonised, analysed, and how data are used to inform a global response to AMR. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India and over 75 interviews conducted with experts in Southeast Asia, the US, and Europe, it argues that data governance is a field of political contestation where powerful state interests obfuscate global governance approaches. The paper further evidences global governance’s inherent tensions as more than contestation in a multilateral arena, but as micro-sites of resistance and post-colonial struggles.
    
    Author: Anne-Sophie Jung (University of Leeds)
  - The Social Lives of Stories – The role(s) of accounts of rare disease
    
    Patients’ stories are more than anecdotal evidence, and they travel in often unexpected ways. This paper argues that the telling and the sharing of stories can constitute an engagement of a different quality to statistical information, and traces their affective potential in different instances of patient engagement in the field of rare disease. Here, we rely on the notion of ‘stories’ to capture the expert labour that goes into defining, translating, and representing rare disease across different sites from research and innovation, to eventual authorisation and the marketing of orphan drugs. The central question of the paper focuses on the work that stories do in the space of rare disease, and how they can act as a source of complex interactions in and around patient participation. We argue that the notion of ‘stories’ can connect different elements of a ‘patient journey’ in a new and productive way, especially also by going beyond the immediate act of telling of the stories in different venues. This connection shows that individualised stories can also have a structuring, disciplining effect on interactions, creating for instance a model of a ‘good’ rare disease patient within individualised care practices, written into policy expectations, and influencing the very definition of a particular rare condition. Tracing these stories through decision-making processes concerning orphan drugs allows for reflection on the transcendental performative and affective elements contained in these interactions, and also on the potential limits of these performances in a very closely circumscribed and heavily regulated arena.
    
    Author: Eva Hilberg (University of Sheffield)
  - Medical Misrecognition: HeLa Cells and the Global Bioeconomy
    
    Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, aged 31, of an aggressive cervical cancer. In the process of her treatment scientists took cells from her tumour without her knowledge or consent. These cells, called HeLa, were the world’s first immortal human cell line. Today, HeLa can be found in almost any laboratory in the world. HeLa revolutionised the field of cell and tissue culture and have been used in the development of drugs and vaccines to fight polio, herpes, leukaemia, influenza, haemophilia and Parkinson’s disease. Yet, Lacks did not consent to the use of her tissue for research as at the time consent was not needed for research on human subjects. No law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient. Drawing from Hegelian recognition theory, this article argues that the scientific practice of tissue extraction without a patient’s informed consent is a form of institutionalised misrecognition. This institutional norm of tissue extraction without consent, prevalent in the field of US medicine at the time, denied the individual autonomy over their body and in turn dignity and self-respect. Medical misrecognition facilitated the extraction of Henrietta Lacks’ cells that now underpin the global bioeconomy.
    
    Author: Christopher Long (University of Sussex)
- 244
  Panel / The Future of Mass Atrocity Prevention Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Intervention and Responsibility to Protect Working Group
  
  Convener: IR2P Working group
  
  Chair: Dr Chloe M Gilgan (York Law School)
  
  Discussant: Dr Chloe M Gilgan (York Law School)
  - Informal Practices and The Future of Mass Atrocity Prevention: Exploring The Function of Arria Formula Meetings
    
    The UN Security Council is experiencing a period of increased tension between member states, in part caused by the ratcheting up of major power disputes. In this context, one can highlight a range of informal practices that have begun to gain greater traction in response to the ongoing challenge of supporting mass atrocity crime prevention. Most notably, the use of informal dialogue forums such as Arria formula meetings, which are increasingly utilised as critical sites for discussion of early warning initiatives outside of formal UNSC meetings. However, so far academic literature exploring the rise in the use of such forums and their effectiveness in supporting prevention activities has been limited. In response, this paper examines four key practical functions of Arria Formula meetings as part of an atrocity prevention strategy and draws on practice theory in order to further theorise the significant interplay between formal and informal practices within international organisations such as the UNSC. Through this analysis, it is argued that the increased use of such meetings is representative of evolving UN practice which is placing greater emphasis on the need for flexibility in addressing emerging threats to human protection as well as the importance of civil society actors in providing additional information and expertise to member states.
    
    Author: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University)
  - The Challenges of Atrocity Prevention at the UN
    
    This paper explores the challenges faced in preventing and responding to atrocities in the UN system. With a focus on the work of the Office for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, it highlights the obstacles faced by the special advisers and their team in fulfilling their mandate. It shows that, despite the centrality of the work of the special advisers to the core business of the UN, the evidence suggests that theirs are not mandates that are regarded as priorities by either member states, the wider UN system or the Secretary-General. While the office has contributed to preventing atrocity crimes in certain situations, its role continues to be marginalized in the wider UN system, with concerns about warnings about impending atrocities seen as alarmist and interfering with more powerful UN actors’ political priorities. In light of the increase in the commission of atrocity crimes globally, accompanied by a concerning rise in hate speech and incitement to violence, identity-based discrimination and intolerance, this does not bode well for the organisation’s future ability to prevent or respond to atrocity crimes.
    
    Author: Karen Smith (Leiden University)
  - The rise of non-Western powers and human protection: Mapping China’s approches in the norm cluster of prevention
    
    The importance of the preventive dimension of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been widely acknowledged but has undergone a great level of contestation. Based on this, the paper investigates the question of how states contest the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the prevention norms. The norm literature offers important insights into the contestation practices; nevertheless, they dominantly focus on the contestation toward an individual norm and pay inadequate attention to the fact that most norms do not exist in isolation but are interlinked to other conceptually aligned norms in a common issue area. To address this, I examine how China contests a cluster of prevention norms. I identify three types of prevention norms in the cluster, structured by three different logics: (1) conflict prevention based on a stability/peace logic; (2) atrocity prevention based on a humanitarian logic; and (3) root cause prevention based on a long-term capacity building logic which notably includes economic development, democracy promotion, and rule of law. Drawing on English- and Chinese-language official documents and elite interviews with Chinese diplomats and UN officials, I argue that the existence of the norm cluster enables China to twist atrocity prevention into conflict prevention and root cause prevention in line with its interests and ideological beliefs. This further allows China to dilute the cosmopolitan visions of the prevention norms with limited reputational costs. Empirically, to the best of my knowledge, it is the first systematic study on China’s prevention policy, as most scholarly attention has been given to the Chinese approaches to intervention rather than prevention.
    
    Author: Qiaochu Zhang (University of Manchester)
- 245
  Panel / Visual Politics and Political Futures: Images and their persuasive power Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Maximillian Guarini (The University of Bristol) , Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
  
  Chair: Maximillian Guarini (The University of Bristol)
  - Anticolonial Surrealism: Poetics & Liberatory Praxis
    
    The aesthetic turn in international studies has been primarily dominated by a normative focus on the visual– so much so that the terminology surrounding aesthetic politics and visual IR are often widely conflated. Although there’s an emerging literature around sound politics, visual inquiries, theories and methods are still vastly over-represented in comparison to other means of aesthetic engagement. I theorise that this epistemological asymmetry is born out of an understanding of aesthetics (rooted in Enlightenment thinking) which still runs through social science sub-disciplines today placing vision at the top of the sensory pyramid. In this paper, I propose, instead, a decolonial aesthetic framework building on the surrealist writings of Suzanne and Aime Cesaire. In doing so, I argue that the aesthetic turn has failed to take into account the emancipatory imperatives from the decolonial and anti-colonial literatures. In simultaneously being oriented towards the political and aesthetic, anticolonial surrealism gives us an interdisciplinary framework for thinking about the liberatory potentials at the productive intersection of politics and culture.
    
    Author: Sara Wong (LSE)
  - Images of the ‘body-in-suffering’ in memorialisation practices in Timor-Leste
    
    This paper aims to discuss the role of the images of the ‘body-in-suffering’ in memorialisation practices in Timor-Leste. Particularly, I argue that the mobilisation of images of bodies-in-suffering in memorialisation practices reflects an effort to challenge the official narrative that promotes the remembrance of the ‘heroes of the resistance’ while silencing the story of the young generation and other non-official members of the resistance fight. I will first discuss what it means to remember in Timor-Leste and how it intrinsically relates to the sacred, divine, living, and practical. I will also discuss the concepts of funu (struggle) and terus (suffering), how they are part of the ongoing construction of East Timorese nationalism, and how they affect memory practices. Second, I will address how the official narrative of heroism is being constructed in Timor-Leste through the construction of cemeteries such as the Garden of Heroes Memorial. Third, I will discuss how the idea of ‘victimhood’ that emerged in the post-independence period afforded new ways of remembering that past by re-centring the bodies-in-suffering in the narrative of the struggle for independence. I will focus on the Santa Cruz and Suai massacres ‘re-enactments’ memorialisation practices and the Comarca Balide Memorial.
    
    Author: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester)
  - Producing POTUS as a singular office: Images and the discursive construction of presidential leadership in the United States
    
    In leadership studies two broad models of leadership can be identified: a traditional individualistic mode – presenting leadership as action and activity at the top of hierarchical organisations, highlighting the importance of influence and ‘power over’ people and environments - and a more relational, collective (sometimes cited as feminine or feminist) model of leadership. Understanding discourses in a constitutive sense, as “dynamic constellations of words and images that legitimate and produce a given reality” (Iverson, Allan and Gordon, 2017), I argue that signifiers associated with a traditional, individualistic model of leadership act as tropes or available resources from which presidential leadership in the United States is constructed.
    
    This paper addresses findings from my multi-modal analysis of televised advertisements from the 2016 Presidential Election campaign, taking seriously the productive work done by visual imagery in the discursive construction of presidential leadership across these texts. Rather than aiming to trace how the use of particular visual and rhetorical tropes or devices might be explained by an individual candidates’ characteristics, background, or experience, my interest lies in unearthing the (limited) range of leadership styles or types that become associated with and accessible to modern presidential leaders through the images represented in candidate campaign communications.
    
    Author: Corrin Bramley (University of Bristol)
  - From Silence to Pride? A Queer Reading of the Swedish Armed Forces’ Pride Campaigns
    
    Military organizations increasingly communicate their acceptance of LGBTQI+ individuals through glossy visuals online. Yet, militaries are gendered institutions, in which the ideal soldier traditionally has been a straight able-bodied cis male. The article takes the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) as its case, since the organization publishes digital media campaigns that suggest not only their protection of LGBTQI+ rights, but also their status as a ‘queer’ and equal force. Through a narrative analysis of SAF’s Pride effort materials; mainly digital media content but also online/offline autoethnographic excerpts from Stockholm Pride 2021 and 2022; I identify patterns and tensions in the organization’s work towards an integration of LGBTQI+ rights. Drawing from feminist and queer studies in particular, the findings illustrate how SAF’s Pride campaigns echo some heteronormative and homonationalist ideas of what it means to be LGTBQI+ in Sweden and beyond. The campaigns can be understood as visual interventions in international and domestic politics, in which LGBTQI+ rights reify the military as a citizenship-certifying institution. The article argues that we should analyze visual materials published by military actors and the emotiveness embedded in or attached to them, to better understand how narratives categorize identities, as insiders and/or outsiders to the state.
    
    Author: Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)
  - The small-‘p’ politics of Street Art production in ‘Post’-Conflict Beirut and Belfast: Registering sites of intense urban creativity
    
    The research design for the project compared the urban and social phenomenon of street art in the post-conflict cities of Beirut and Belfast, over a four-month, blended case study and focused ethnography. The researcher conducted twenty-two semi-structured interviews with eighteen street artists, three festival organisers, and one city management official, and observed participants while volunteering at two street art festivals in Belfast. By shedding light on some of their artistic practices, the findings reveal that street art communities engage in small- ‘p’ political acts. They re-purpose taken-for-granted spaces within the city to demonstrate how street artists adjust their practices to reveal pragmatic and rule-based forms of placemaking to avoid jarring with sectarian identities while bringing attention to the democratic, transient, and transformative nature of their practices. While they do not have an impact on the nature of space, their interactions could remark on the possibilities for the co-production of space. Moreover, they intend to awaken the slumber of urban dwellers with the visceral enjoyment and experiences of creating and producing street art for the inhabitants of the space. While small, their artistic interventions gift the inhabitants of Beirut and Belfast with ephemeral and gratuitous forms of interactions that present an opportunity, however temporary, for different social worlds to meet.
    
    Author: Omar El Masri (University of Gloucestershire)
- 14:45
  
  Refreshment break
- 246
  Panel / 50 Shades of Critical Methodologies in Global Politics Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: IIRG Working group
  
  Chair: Stephan Engelkamp (King's College London)
  - Talking to the State: Interviewing the elites about what’s not to be said
    
    How can researchers conduct interviews about sensitive topics the interlocutors are unwilling to discuss? This article presents two research techniques particularly useful in arranging and conducting interviews about controversial or sensitive matters: real-life vignettes and adaptable self-presentation practices. Drawing on my fieldwork in Israel and the UK, especially transcripts and field notes from semi-structured interviews with 32 British and 38 Israeli state officials, the article contributes to the ongoing methodological debates on elite interviewing. It first presents the types of challenges I faced trying to get answers as to why secure and powerful states like the UK and Israel employ narratives of vulnerability in wartime public communication. Then it discusses how the use of real-life vignettes during interviews assists in introducing sensitive topics into the interview. I illustrate how they allow me to quickly establish the importance of the research phenomenon as well as to facilitate more open conversations. Finally, I show the benefits of the adaptable self-presentation technique. The goal of this practice is to conduct a responsive interview. One in which the researcher builds trust with the participant by bringing out its own biographical aspects that emphasize either its outsider or insider status.
    
    Keywords: interpretivism, methods, interviews, fieldwork, sensitive topics
    
    Author: Tadek Markiewicz (Uppsala University)
  - It is not Me. It is You! The EU as a Blame Target in the UK Government’s Official Post-Brexit Rhetoric
    
    Post-Brexit relationship between the UK and the EU has been marred by serious tensions, extraordinary uncertainty and the lack of trust, not least in terms of the fallout from the Northern Ireland Protocol. According to some, it might take a generation until the strained relationship heals. It is against this background that the article investigates and interprets the extent to which, and the particular ways in which, the UK government has conveyed, interpreted and evaluated blame of the EU in the context of post-Brexit strains. Working with a comprehensive dataset of UK Government official pronouncements vis-à-vis the EU and Brexit in the 2020-2022 period, the study surveys the blame patters during two key post-withdrawal phases of 1) the transition period (2020) and 2) the post-transition period (since 2021), thereby allowing for temporal comparisons. In so doing, the article draws on the insights of the discursive institutionalism theory (Schmidt 2008, 2020) as well as Hansson’s (2015, 2018, 2019) typology of blame avoidance strategies and adopts the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Wodak 2011).
    
    Author: Monika Brusenbauch Meislová (Masaryk University)
  - Scaling global governance
    
    The theoretical and historical point of departure for global governance scholarship is the nation-state: global governance continues to be defined as “governance without government”, and the story of the rise of the contemporary global governance system is told as the retreat or decline of the state. This paper argues that it would be more productive to think about global governance as governance at a global scale. Scale is the level at which governance objects are rendered, understood, and acted on; successful scale-making projects abstract from specific events to enable new forms and practices of governance. Instead of being linked to a particular set of actors, activities or issues, scale allows us to reimagine global governance as a form of rule predicated on an understanding of the world as one place. This suggests several new directions for research. First, that we attend to how global governance objects are scaled up from historically specific data and events, and consider what is marginalised or omitted from those renderings. Second, that we consider the processes of technoscientific knowledge formation and contestation that are bound up in scale-making projects. Third, that we revisit the state as an important site for agency and innovation in global governance.
    
    Author: Mei Ling Young (University of Oxford)
  - Carnal Apprenticeship and International Diplomacy, or: How I Became Another Expendable Intern at the OECD
    
    What can we learn about international diplomacy by studying its practice through the eyes and body of an intern? This article argues that in order to understand the making of diplomacy’s background dispositions, tacit rules, and situated know-how, researchers ought to consider apprenticeship as both an object and mode of social enquiry. This argument is based on ethnographic observations from my five-month internship at the Danish Delegation to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD. By translating Loïc Wacquant’s notions of “carnal connections” and “apprenticeship” into a context of diplomacy, I illustrate how the diplomatic intern is schooled—at a foundational, embodied level—to adopt codes of (diplomatic) professionalism during the course of their training: from initiation, through participation in everyday work, to subsequent assessment. In locating the intern theoretically and epistemologically, I point, more broadly, to the ways novice identities enable us to grasp core aspects of a practice’s making and transmission. I argue that the practices of novice identities, which have received scant attention in International Relations (IR) and Diplomatic Studies provide important insights into the making and sustenance of diplomatic practices and–in turn—offer a rich source of critique of the process of (not) becoming diplomat. In advancing this argument, I extend on and bridge two sets of literatures: practice theoretical scholarship on the everyday enactment of international diplomacy; and epistemological-methodological work on ethnographies that explore the Self as a source of knowledge in IR.
    
    Keywords: Carnal Apprenticeship, Diplomacy, Intern, OECD, Practice Theory, Wacquant
    
    Author: Frederik Carl Windfeld (European University Institute)
- 247
  Panel / Advancing Foreign Policy Analysis: Gender, Time and Roles Carron, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Conveners: Kai Oppermann (Chemnitz University of Technology) , Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt)
  
  Chair: Juliet Kaarbo (University of Edinburgh/Scottish Council on Global Affairs)
  - Feminist Theory and Israeli Foreign Policy: An Exploration of Three Domains
    
    There has been a growing literature on feminist foreign policy theory. However, the vast majority of studies have focused on Western cases, e.g., Sweden, the European Union, Canada and Norway, to name a few examples. Conversely, research on non-Western countries, such as Israel, is more limited. To address this gap this paper uses a feminist foreign policy lens to examine three domains in Israeli foreign policy: the ideational domain, with reference to Israel’s response to UNSCR 1325; the material domain, in connection to Israel’s development policy; and the institutional domain, in relation to the representation of females in the Israeli diplomatic corpus. Using hitherto unavailable data, which was obtained via a freedom of information request, the paper explores the three domains to assess how and to what extent Israeli foreign policy may be considered feminist. The findings are also used to reflect on feminist foreign policy theory more broadly.
    
    Author: Amnon Aran (City, University of London)
  - Gender and Foreign Policy Leadership
    
    This paper applies a ‘gender lens’ to leadership in foreign policy-making. Leadership here is understood as practiced by both individuals within governments, and states. First, the paper summarises findings from literature regarding gender and foreign policy leadership. Much work has focused on the obstacles facing women foreign policy leaders, the ways in which perceptions of their leadership is gendered, and the debate on the extent to which, if at all, female and male foreign policy leaders exercise leadership differently. The paper takes this literature further by considering how the findings might travel to different contexts in the Global South and in different political systems (hybrid democracies, authoritarian regimes). Second, the paper considers the literature that links gender equality in domestic contexts to global leadership on issues such as gender equality, peace and conflict, and climate change. It again extends the findings by applying them to examples from the Global South and authoritarian regimes.
    
    Authors: Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt) , Karen Smith
  - International Role Expectations and Domestic Role Contestation: The Biden Administration and the German Foreign Policy Debate
    
    The paper takes a role theoretical perspective to explore how the Biden administration’s expectations of German foreign and security policy under the new German coalition government interact with ongoing domestic contestation in Germany about the trajectory of German foreign policy. The starting points of the paper are twofold. On one side, the US is one of the most significant ‘others’ for German foreign policy outside the EU, and the shifting U.S. approach to Germany from the Trump to the Biden administration can therefore be expected to reverberate within the German debate. On the other side, German foreign policy has in recent years seen increasing contestation around Germany’s ‘civilian power’ role, which may at the same time feed into U.S. role expectations and be shaped by these expectations. Empirically, the paper builds on 25 recent expert interviews in Washington, D.C. about the Biden administration’s views on German foreign and security policy on a range of issue areas, including Germany’s relations to Russia and China as well as its approach to the EU and NATO. Theoretically, the paper contributes to efforts at conceptualising the dynamic interplay between international role expectations and domestic (vertical and horizontal) role contestation.
    
    Author: Kai Oppermann (Chemnitz University of Technology)
- 248
  Panel / Agendas for Reforming and Revitalising the United Nations Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: Volker Prott (Aston University)
  - Keeping the window of opportunity open to climate action: the political power of the UN Secretary-General
    
    The UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, affirms that “our window of opportunity to prevent worst climate impacts is rapidly closing.” One of the reasons for this climate inaction is a gap between discourses and declarations stating the gravity of climate change and the lack of concrete actions to prevent the global rise of temperatures. The SG is himself in a contradictory position, being at the same time an advocate for climate action and a (very) discrete figure in the political UN process. What is the real capacity of the SG to keep a policy agenda active? Through the study of Mr. Guterres first mandate, this paper examines the political work of the UNSG in a concrete policy sector, climate change. By tracing the SG’s actions, and through observations and interviews, we show that the SG uses both, traditional and new strategies to fight against the loss of political momentum. On the one hand, the SG uses its moral authority and symbolic position as a “norm entrepreneur” to encourage decision-making. On the other hand, the secretary-general concretizes a material power when he plays with time and space by multiplying venues for action and precipitating political engagement for policy implementation when other UN organs are unable or unwilling to act. More than a “guardian” of the UN commitments the SG has also become a policy entrepreneur in the climate sector, promoting the interest of the people of the world rather than those of the UN member states.
    
    Author: Luis Rivera-Velez (Université de Lausanne UNIL)
  - A Common Agenda? Fragmentation and Agenda-Keeping at the United Nations
    
    Competition between policy areas over political attention is high in the context of the United Nations (UN) fragmented system. UN staff always push their thematic agenda even if their specific issues are not perceived as a priority, especially in times of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine both illustrate such dilemma for UN actors whose main mandated activities were cast away on the short-term period. This communication presents a framework designed to study UN fragmented agendas and answer this overarching question: how do UN actors keep an issue, which is not seen as a priority, on the agenda in times of crisis? The literature cannot fully answer this question because of three main gaps: (i) research focuses on processes of agenda-setting, without fully grasping mechanisms of agenda-keeping; (ii) it explores functional divisions between international organizations without investigating the daily experience of diverging temporalities, and (iii) it questions the fragmentation of the governance system of a specific issue, instead of competition of that specific issue with other policy areas. To address these gaps, I propose a conceptual framework around the concept of agenda-keeping and two main research assumptions: I assume (i) that to keep an issue on the agenda, actors reframe the issue by proceeding to a hybridization process with the main competing policy domain involved in the crisis, contributing to a more ‘common’ agenda and (ii) that agenda-keeping unfolds through a form of resistance against the loss of political momentum and political space.
    
    Author: Lucile Maertens (University of Lausanne)
  - Reform of the UN in Promoting Peace & Preventing Conflict
    
    Abstract
    
    The recent war between Ukraine and Russia has brought to the fore the role, purpose and effectiveness of the UN in preventing conflict and promoting peace at the global stage. This has been further compounded by the global trend and direction of travel that was witnessed during Donald Trump’s term as President of the US (2017-2021) where there was a general disregard of the UN and many supra-national international organisations with respect to their counsel and opinion in preventing conflicts.
    
    The assumption of Joe Biden as President of the US in 2021 was going to see a diversion from the previous status quo ante and a move towards a global international polity where the US would focus more on the principle of human rights and justice and re-emergence of the role and importance of global supra-national organisations like the UN in providing effective power, diplomatic tact and leverage in promoting peace and preventing conflict.
    
    Despite the good will intent of the Biden administration since coming to power, there are multiple hot spots around the world such as Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Kashmir, Palestine-Israel that remain unresolved and where the term “never ending wars and conflicts” has been coined by some political observers and analysts.
    
    This paper will explore whether the time has come to reform the UN along with discussing what type of reforms are necessary to make the UN an effective supra-national body on the international stage that is respected by the comity of nations in promoting peace and preventing conflict.
    
    Author: Kaleem Hussain
  - Towards a better representation of small states in the UN
    
    Despite the growing leverage and importance of small states in international relations, global politics remained to be shaped dominantly by great powers. Despite the emergence of international law, the creation of the UN system, and the institutionalisation of world politics, states with limited resources remained to be secondary (or, even, tertiary) actors in formal and informal decision-making. Nevertheless, the better representation of small states in global discussions and international fora, would not only benefit themselves but, arguably, the whole international community - for systemic and political reasons, small states became the champions of transnational causes, including sustainability, green transition, or the further integration of international relations on the global and regional levels alike.
    The aim of the paper is to assess the influence and the political situation of small states in various UN bodies and analyse the main initiatives and possibilities which could enlarge their potential. The research will be put in the context of intensifying global power rivalry which threatens with a renewed neglect of small states, especially in the developing world. The investigation will also focus on the possible effects of the growing role of small states on key transnational issues and ongoing crises.
    
    Author: Mate Szalai (Ca Foscari University)
  - Re-Politicizing the UN: Lessons from Cold War Conflict Management
    
    Considering the great ambitions of global government and cosmopolitanism that have inspired political thinkers and practitioners since the Enlightenment, the helplessness of the United Nations (UN) in the face of military conflicts in our global age is surprising. This paper posits that we need a historical perspective to explain the simultaneous proliferation of international organisations and their continuing ineffectiveness in resolving rather than mitigating or avoiding conflicts. It reviews several Cold War conflicts—the Kashmir conflict shortly after the partition of India in the late 1940s, the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s, and the East Pakistan crisis of 1971—to examine the role played by the UN, the great powers, and other intervening forces. The paper argues that decolonisation and the prevalence of state sovereignty forced intervening powers, including the UN, to find strategies to circumvent international law, stretch and often overstep their mandates of engagement, or, increasingly, pursue intervention covertly behind a smokescreen of humanitarian aid and political impartiality. The result was the weakening of overt global governance and conflict management and an implicit strengthening of the Cold War status quo. The paper concludes with some reflections on potential historical lessons and makes a few suggestions as to how the UN system and global governance more broadly might become both more effective and legitimate.
    
    Author: Volker Prott (Aston University)
- 249
  
  Roundtable / Celebrating CPD's Early Career Paper Prize Winner 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.
  
  Co-chairs - Nisha Shah (University of Ottawa), Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London), Heba Youssef (University of Brighton), Jenna Marshall (Kings College London)
  
  Sponsor: Review of International Studies
  
  Chair: Nisha Shah (University of Ottawa)
  
  Participants: N/A , George Ygarza (University of California, Santa Barbara) , Christopher Choong Weng Wai (University of Warwick) , Sara Abdel Ghany (University of Warwick)
- 250
  Panel / Conceptual Challenges in peacekeeping operations Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
  - The dismantling of institutional logics in the peacekeeping complex?
    
    The paper is driven by the theoretical puzzle that the UNSC mandates regional peacekeeping missions under the framework of Chapter VII of the UN Charter and deploys Special Political Missions into the host states of regional peacekeeping missions. We argue that the mandating practice of the UNSC has transformed international peacekeeping into a peacekeeping institutional complex. Two separated and clearly defined realms of authority have become intertwined through a transfer of authority, and they have become even more complex through the co-optation of peacekeeping missions led by ROs through Special Political Missions. This has made peacekeeping operations an area of competing authority claims, in effect a peacekeeping complex, where an array of overlapping and non-hierarchical regimes concerning a particular issue generates system effects that could lead to inefficiency of the whole regime. By using the dataset MILINDA, we empirically investigate whether a peacekeeping complex exists by probing the strength of the association between the establishment of RO-led peacekeeping operations, and the one of Chapter VII mandates and Special Political Missions. While the empirical evidence points to the emergence of a peacekeeping institutional complex, what this means for the distribution of authority between the UNSC and ROs is not yet clear. This is part of the challenge of the peacekeeping institutional complex.
    
    Key words: peacekeeping, peacekeeping institutional complex, regime complexity, authority, legitimacy, hierarchy, UNSC-RO relationship, regional organisation, UNSC
    
    Authors: Anja Jetschke (University of Goettingen)* , Kübra Dilekoglu (University of St Andrews)
  - The Role of Trust in UN Peace Operations
    
    This paper examines how concepts from the academic field of trust research can be utilised to better understand the form and function of civilian protection in areas where a UN peace operation is deployed. Trust is rarely interrogated in the field of UN interventions. This paper addresses this gap by incorporating theoretical and methodological contributions from trust scholarship to attempt to develop a framework for better understanding how key stakeholders engaged in UN interventions perceive the role, nature and effects of trust in the relationships required to undertake such operations
    
    Authors: David Curran (Coventry University) , Charlie Hunt (RMIT)*
  - India and Security Council reform: an alternative approach
    
    The United Nations Security Council is infamous for its rigid institutional structure. Yet, as Pouliot (2021) has suggested, paying attention to practices presents a ‘gray area of institutional change’ in the Council’s work. Employing such theoretical insights into the UN, presented by scholars such as Pouliot (2021) and Wiseman (2015), the proposed paper explores evolving opportunities for India to shape the policies and practices of the UN Security Council. The thematic area of peacekeeping serves as a valuable case study, as India’s contributions to UN peace operations are well-documented.
    
    The proposed paper is divided into three parts. First, it presents a critical review of Indian interventions on peacekeeping in the Security Council. Second, it sets out the conceptual framework of the paper by highlighting the scope for institutional transformations that have emerged in the realm of the Council’s practices. Third, the paper assesses whether, and the extent to which, India has been able to leverage these opportunities vis-à-vis peacekeeping.
    
    In December 2022, India will complete its eighth term as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. The theme of its campaign for this seat was ‘NORMS: new orientation for a reformed multilateral system.’ The end of India’s term on the Council presents an opportune moment to examine, using the case of its engagement with policy deliberations on UN peace operations, an alternative approach to Security Council reform.
    
    Author: Soumita Basu (South Asian University)
- 251
  
  Roundtable / Debating the ‘International’ 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?
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Gulsah Capan (University of Erfurt)
  
  Participants: Ewan Stein (University of Edinburgh) , Zeynep Gulsah Capan (University of Erfurt) , Vivienne Jabri (King's College London) , Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews)
- 252
  Panel / Emerging Political and Ethnic Minority Dynamics in the South Caucasus Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Russian and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Cesare Figari Barberis (Graduate Institute of Geneva)
  
  Chair: Cesare Figari Barberis (Graduate Institute of Geneva)
  - (Post)Colonial Framework of Citizenship and National Identity: The case of Azerbaijan
    
    This research aims to conceptualize different versions of identity-formations, especially in diverse societies, as a critical debate in the state of art literature. Afterwards, it aims to map Azerbaijani version of identity-formation within this debate in since 90s up to date. As it is an interdisciplinary research, the theoretical part will be conducted within the disciplines of political and social theory benefitting from the post-colonial critique toward the origins of modern understanding of citizenship\group formations whereas the case study will include insights from contemporary history and comparative politics using the comparative method and critical discourse analysis. The research on this particular case study is expected to unravel the colonial as well as post-colonial influences on Azerbaijani state’s introduction of different national identity formations as a discourse, as well as its implications on cross-border minorities and the majority of the country alike. Lastly, I will reframe citizenship and identity-formation in Azerbaijan by using relational approach which would help to overcome the existing dualistic divisions of immanence and alterity. On the basis of this analysis, inferences from the case of Azerbaijan will be made for theoretical advancement in the field of ethnicity, citizenship and national identity studies.
    
    Author: Mirkamran Huseynli (Vytautas Magnus University)
  - The Mobility and Translocal Practices among Azerbaijani Community in Georgia
    
    Klaudia Kosicińska
    
    PhD student, Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
    
    In my presentation I want to show how mobility patterns and translocal practices among the Azerbaijani minority in south-east Georgia has changed since 2019. In my research I focus on the ethnically diversed Marneuli district, situated close to the border with Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Azerbaijanis are the largest minority here.
    In my research, through ethnographical fieldwork which I have done between 2018 and 2022, I try to examine the process of constructing the border between the two countries in material, social and symbolic dimensions.
    The border between Georgia and Azerbaijan after the outbreak of first a pandemic and then a war in Nagorno-Karabakh suddenly became material again when it was closed for more than two years in 2020. Have trips to Azerbaijan been replaced by other practices, and if so, which ones? Did permanent residence on one side of the border make Georgian Azerbaijanis feel all the more settled in Georgia, separating not only physically from Azerbaijanis but also mentally? How do those who, for family reasons and related to the issue of legality of residence, stayed on the other side by their own choice, react to it? To find the answer on the research questions, I want to look at the border between Georgia and Azerbaijan and the contexts in which it manifests and (dis)appears and what kind of practices it provokes. I understand the border as the material phenomenon of the division between states, which is still negotiated and contested, as exemplified by the pandemic and armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as the boundaries between community (boundaries) and state (Barth 1969).
    
    Selected references:
    Barth Fredrik, 1969, Introduction, in: F. Barth (red.) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Oslo: Universitetforlaget.
    Levitt Peggy, Nina Glick-Schiller, 2004, Conceptualizing Simultaneity. A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society, ”International Migration Review”, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1004-1039.
    Pelkmans Mathijs, 2006, Defending the border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
    
    Author: Klaudia Kosicińska (Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences)
  - Discourses on right-wing politics in Georgia - analyzing the case of illiberal protest movement
    
    On July 5, 2021, spontaneous mobilization took place in the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi,
    protesting the planned event of Tbilisi Pride Parade. By the end of the day, the demonstration
    evolved into violent clashes in different parts of the city in what was later labeled as “the battle
    between journalists and the violent protest activists”. In line with the mainstream framing, the
    illiberal groups that showed up in the street represented the “far right” and “fascist” ideology
    and gathered with the specific motivation to engage in violent actions. As a follow up of the
    street violence, which in itself represented relatively novel type of action repertoire for
    Georgian protest scene, the counter-demonstration was planned on the Tbilisi’s central
    Rustaveli Avenue for the next day by the right-wing political parties and ideologically affiliate
    non-governmental organizations to condemn violent actions of “right-wing” groups.
    By applying the critical discourse analytical tools, this paper seeks to establish some of the key
    features of mainstream narrative about “far-right” groups and its political and ideological
    components as well as its selective nature. Against the mainstream narrative of seeing July 5
    movement in terms “far-right” politics, and without trying to tackle the spontaneous popular
    reaction as a protest action incorporating any well-thought, progressive or emancipatory
    potential, the work will conceptualize the protest movement as a reaction of decades long
    institutionally established right-wing politics, which through various institutional and
    ideological mechanisms has divided Georgian society with hierarchical markers of
    “progressives” and “backward groups” and produced decades long institutional, structural and
    symbolic violence that has eventually evolved into physical violence in the streets of Tbilisi on
    July 5
    
    Author: Nino Khelaia (Humboldt University Berlin)
  - Negotiating Emotions in an Unwelcoming Context: Being Russian in Georgia During Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
    
    Cesare Figari Barberis, 4th year PhD at IHEID. Email: cesare.figari@graduateinstitute.ch
    Leonardo Zanatta, 2nd year PhD at Corvinus University. Email: leonardo.zanatta@studio.unibo.it
    
    Abstract
    While relations between Georgia and Russia have been confrontational since at least the beginning of the 19th century. Nonetheless, a large number of Russians presently live in Georgia: including the 20,000-40,000 who fled to Georgia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February. Ethnic Georgians’ reception of this first wave of arrivals was harsh. Given Georgians’ very strong support for Ukraine and their association of the current war with the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, anti-Russian xenophobia and discrimination increased sharply in the initial months following migration. For example, some Russians lost their job in Tbilisi because of their nationality, and anti-Russian graffiti appeared all over the capital. Tensions calmed subsequently, but there are still socio-emotional dynamics going on.
    The case is interesting within the Politics of Emotions framework, which are concerned with “who gets to feel what, when, how, and whose feelings matter” (Gustafsson & Hall 2021). Russians fled a country with its feeling rules, which are “rules about the verbal and non-verbal expressions of appropriate emotions in a given context” (Koschut 2020), and started living in a country with very different feeling rules. Indeed, in Georgia they faced institutional and social emotional obligations to somehow bear the guilt and shame of the actions of their country and nation. They also engaged in intra-Russian debates on emotional entitlements, as anti-war Russians felt that also they themselves were somehow victims, but struggled with deciding whether they were entitled to feel as such. Finally, they also had debates on hierarchies of emotional deference, with questions on if and how it was the case to manifestly show their consideration for the emotions of Ukrainians and Georgians, for example by participating in anti-Russia rallies while openly stating their Russianness.
    Methodologically, we have conducted 40 face-to-face and online semi-structured interviews with Russians living in Georgia, mainly in Tbilisi. Particular attention is given to the contrasting emotions and feelings expressed by Russians in Georgia, especially to how they cope with sedimented old feeling rules and at the same time with uncomfortable new feeling rules.
    
    Authors: Cesare Figari Barberis (Graduate Institute of Geneva) , Leonardo Zanatta (Corvinus University of Budapest)
  - Socio-political memories and imaginaries of (in-)justice: Critical perspectives from the 90s leftist generation in Georgia
    
    Veronika Pfeilschifter
    PhD Student in Caucasus Studies at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena
    v.pfeilschifter@uni-jena.de
    
    Abstract
    The post-Soviet left in Georgia is a theoretically and empirically under-reflected and not yet sufficiently understood historical and social phenomenon. This paper is an attempt to offer scientific ideological analysis which is based on grounded theory and inductively develop a ‘left-wing’ concept of justice. After drawing an empirical picture of two generations of Georgia’s post-Soviet leftists and outlining the plurality of left-wing ideologies, the paper examines their social conditions and social practices of justification.
    
    These steps help developing an own concept of justice: Based on in-depth conversations with 30 interlocutors in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi in September 2022 and April 2023, the paper has found that a localized justice concept consists of four main cleavages: the centrality of social justice and redistribution (social), the focus and precarity of gender (political), the importance of emotional coherence and retrospective compensation (affective) and finally the centrality of historical (un-)wholeness and ‘hopeful’projection into the future (historico-affective).
    
    The paper concludes by outlining the ideological contradictions among the post-Soviet left, and between them and the Georgian post-Soviet governments. Here, the differences between power centralization, revenge and social healing are explored.
    
    Author: Veronika Pfeilschifter (University of Jena)
- 253
  Panel / Global Authoritarianism and New Populisms Lochay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: PPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Jeffrey Whyte (Lancaster University)
  
  Discussant: Jeffrey Whyte (Lancaster University)
  - Putin’s deadly populism? Conceptualising populist war
    
    Populism has long been framed as a threat to liberal order and stability, but few have investigated how populism relates to war. Since Putin’s Russia arguably displays populist traits, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine makes this a burning question. Pre-2022, Russia was frequently seen as spearheading the global revolt against liberalism, which united many populist movements. A longstanding pillar of Putin’s discourse is that he knows and acts upon ‘the real’. Performing authenticity is considered a hallmark of populism by scholars. This performance extends to Russia’s warfare: the invasions in 2014 and 2022 were both justified with claims that the voice of ‘the people’ had previously been ignored. Putin also invoked history as the source of ‘real’ statehood. In the US, Trump showcased how the populist authenticity claim extends to calling out opponents' fakeness. Such claims find a fully authoritarian parallel in Russia in 2022, which jails anyone spreading ‘fakes’ about ‘the special military operation’. Is a violent friend/enemy Schmittianism the ultimate authenticity claim? Employing discourse analysis to interrogate concepts of populism, authenticity and war, this paper conceptualises populist war and asks: is Putin’s war in Ukraine populist?
    
    Author: Anni Roth Hjermann (University of Cambridge)
  - "Strong Family, Strong Nation": Populism and the Politics of Family in Turkey
    
    Following its reformist years (2002-2008), The Justice and Development Party (JDP) has gradually transformed itself into a hegemonic power in Turkish politics. Articulated based on the already-existing hegemonic discourses (e.g., religion, nationalism, militarism, masculinity) in Turkish politics, the JDP elites have articulated a populist discourse on family and family values. What is central to this populist discourse is the idea that the strength of a nation lies in its families and the strength of families lies in the number of their children. In this articulation, the idea of strong family is inextricably linked with ontological security of the nation and state. Building upon this idea, the populist discourse is two-layered. On the one hand, on multiple occasions, Recep Tayyip Erdogan – the leader of the JDP – has called Turkish citizens to have at least three children while simultaneously arguing that strong families lead to strong nations. On the other hand, Erdogan frequently encourages early marriage and criticizes childless women by locating the practice of abortion and LGBT communities as a source on ontological insecurity. Based on this logic, Turkey has recently withdrawn from the landmark Istanbul Convention on women’s rights by articulating the reason for withdrawal as “preservation of traditional family values”. Against this background, the central focus of this article is to reflect upon and problematize the populist discourse on family and the assumed link between strong family and strong nation. To do so, the paper draws on the Post-foundational Theory of Discourse (PTD) and Ontological Security Theory (OST).
    
    Author: Recep Onursal (University of Kent)
  - The hegemonic surfeit
    
    In this paper, I build on Gramscian notions of power by developing a notion I term ‘hegemonic surfeit’. For Gramsci and his adherents, the political and economic establishment fosters consent among subordinate classes through the dissemination, inculcation, and appropriation of seductive and pacifying ideologies. In this article, I argue that subordinate groups may adopt such ideals too well and to such an extent that it undermines key objectives of the ruling class. That is, the very success in imparting certain ideals among the population can magnify, become unwieldly, backfire and cause crisis for the political establishment. This, in other words, is the problem of too much hegemony. I illustrate this through the 2016 Brexit vote, in which hegemonic notions of xenophobia, nationalism and reverence for sovereignty, including from the Remain campaign, played a significant and pivotal role in sections of the electorate voting against the interests of the domestic and transnational ruling class’s commitment to the neoliberal enterprise of the EU. While not necessarily insurmountable, this has caused a significant crisis for the political establishment. In the conclusion, I contend that the notion of hegemonic surfeit has considerable value in understanding political crises far beyond Brexit.
    
    Author: Tom Bentley (University of Aberdeen)
- 254
  Panel / Innovative Approaches to Promoting Peace and Preventing Conflict: Aesthetics, Imagination, Critique and Engagement Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: Tim Aistrope (University of Kent)
  
  Chair: Tim Aistrope (University of Kent)
  - The Imagination and Peacebuilding
    
    The imagination is at the heart of what it means to be human. Yet, while International Relations (IR) researchers mobilise the term rhetorically, it remains under-conceptualised in the field and disconnected from compelling cross-disciplinary literatures. This paper charts the transformative implications of state-of-the-art research on the imagination for peacebuilding practices, emphasising the way interrelationships between self and society established in imaginative play cascade down through individual interpretation and shared practices to undergird social formations. We highlight the ground-breaking work of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and his contemporary adaption in Cultural Historical Activity Theory as one compelling resource for thinking through the imagination’s significance for overcoming deep-seated conflict. In doing so, we connect the imagination’s role in creativity, play and storytelling to contemporary research on relational peacebuilding that focuses on the impact of art, music, dance, drama, narrative and other creative activities, deepening their conceptual basis and indicating the potential for further advances.
    
    Authors: Tim Aistrope (University of Kent) , Shannon Brincat (University of the Sunshine Coast)
  - Conducting Care-full Research: Collaborative research amidst corona, a coup and other crises
    
    Feminists have long called attention to often profoundly uneven power relations in international relations research, the assumptions regarding of who is able to be a ‘knowledge producer’ and the risks of research that is extractive. In research ‘on’ and with young people, these dilemmas are compounded by ageist beliefs about youth competencies. This paper reflects on efforts by the authors to design and undertake a youth-led, adult-supported research project on youth activism and peace processes in South Sudan, Afghanistan and Myanmar through virtual interviews. It discusses how our approach to skills training, mentorship and research design empowers youth researchers to engage in dialogue with youth peacebuilders to establish a more collaborative research agenda. Broadly, centring collaboration as both an aim and approach offers opportunities for more responsive engagement with communities traditionally marginalised within the research environment. The global pandemic has raised questions about research at a distance, the requirements of ‘participation’, and the ethics of reciprocity with research participants as knowledge producers. In each country, challenges—poor internet access, a collapsing peace process, and a coup—raised difficult questions about the ethics of pursuing research in these complex contexts. We offer the idea of care-full research that centres a feminist, reflexive approach, is collaborative in multiple ways and generative of new possibilities of knowledge creation amidst multiple crises and beyond.
    
    Author: Helen Berents (Griffith University)
  - Performing Relational Peace and Peacebuilding through Theatre’s imaginary
    
    Emerging literature in critical peace studies emphasizes the relevance of studying the mundane bodies and webs of relationships at micro-level to gain a deeper understanding of the range of actors and complexity of peace produced on the ground. To contribute at this juncture, I explore the bilingual, multi-ethnic theatre group Jana Karaliya’s practices of performing sustained everyday coexistence in Sri Lanka. Applying the relational peace framework by Söderström, Åkebo and Jarstad (2018), I discuss nuances of peace and tension that become visible at three levels of the group’s performative engagement: frontstage symbolic relational engagement with broader societal narratives (integration), backstage everyday interpersonal engagement within the group (intertwined strands of tension), and offstage relational engagement with those external to the group (transformation beyond group boundaries). The study draws from participant observation and interviews with Jana Karaliya’s Sinhala and Tamil members, exploring their relational engagement over the changing phases of the Sri Lankan conflict. Multiple and at times discrepant behaviours, attitudes, and ideas on peace and conflict characterize relations with, within and beyond the group. I argue that performing sustained everyday coexistence in a pluralist society can make a significant contribution towards building relational peace even when the process may not necessarily lead to a transformation of political difference.
    
    Author: Nilanjana Premaratna (University of Newcastle)
- 255
  
  Roundtable / On intimate encounters in the field: trust, love, and research that notices 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).
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews)
  
  Participants: Naeem Inayatullah (University of Ithaca) , Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick) , Aida Hozic (University of Florida) , Rahul Rao (Universtiy of St Andrews) , Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol) , Aya Nassar (Royal Holloway University of London)
- 256
  Panel / Rethinking (Post)Conflict Societies and Subjectivities through Embodiment: Bodies of Terror and Counter-Terror (Panel 4) Ewing, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester) , Nicholas Gribble (University of Manchester)
  
  Chair: Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester)
  - The Bees Still Buzz: Reviving Resilience and ‘Mancunian Spirit’ through Collective Tattoos
    
    There has been much sociological work on community responses to social disasters, shaping a wealth of literature. However, such literature largely downplays the community responses to acts of terrorism, positioning the only valid responses as violent and psychologically long-lasting. Drawing on the Manchester Arena Attack of 22nd May 2017, this presentation critically explores the tattoo as serving a political yet commemorative function following social disasters. Rather than anger and fear being embraced by the Mancunian community, worker bee tattoos were widely adopted as a sign of solidarity in the aftermath both in and around the city of Manchester. I suggest that such affirmative gestures can deconstruct and reconstruct a distinctive politics of response to terrorism and violence, with the worker bee tattoo being a verbally silent yet visibly embodied political stance of both Manchester and terrorism at large. This presentation also prompts sociologists to consider how aesthetic considerations, like tattoo imagery and placement, may affect the degree to which a tattoo is viewed as communicative of a particular collective identity and history. As a whole, this presentation will allude to the idea that embodiment is one way in which individuals can resist the rhetoric of terrorism by drawing on empirical interviews with participants.
    
    Author: Ashley Collar (University of Manchester)
  - Embodying (in)security: Intimate warfare in Kenya
    
    In the last years, Kenya has become a laboratory for soft counterterrorism measures, particularly anti-radicalization programs that stand at the intersection of peacebuilding, development and humanitarian interventions with the objective to prevent violent extremism in so-called “at-risk” communities. At the core of these programs lies however a focus on the individual’s personal grievances that provide fertile ground for radicalization rather than historical injustices. In addressing these issues concerning the “intimate”, women are thought to hold a special role by leading trauma healing sessions and signaling risks among the communities. This article argues that these soft counterterrorism measures penetrate the intimate sphere and therefore directly intervene in the “everyday”. By translating “at-risk” groups to “problem-bodies” in hard-to-govern spaces, this article explores these prevention programs as governing tools to domesticate and pacify certain populations in Kenya through “self-help” initiatives, which are crucial to the re-engineering of the social composition. Finally, these prevention programs do no longer solely concentrate on managing bodies. Instead, they introduce the notion of resilience, which points at a shift to the mind and consequently produces new subjectivities. The article suggests that women are important actors within these new mechanisms of governance, which no longer just manage bodies but this time – the mind.
    
    Author: Nora Naji (University of Basel)
  - The field as a site of power: Exploring the racialised and gendered workings of counterterrorism through my bodily experience
    
    “You made my day, madam. We need more people like you at our venue.” These were the words of a Kenyan private security guard checking my Uber upon my arrival at a conference venue in downtown Nairobi. From 2021 to 2022, I conducted ethnographic field research on gendered security transformations within the Global War on Terror in the case of Kenya. During this research, I encountered the field as a site of power, manifesting and revealing the dynamics in which identities are created, contested, and transformed (Makana 2018). This article will explore the bodily and affective qualities of counterterrorism as a global security regime through my bodily experience. My identity as a thirty-something year old, white, unmarried woman was negotiated depending on the actors I was interviewing, ranging from Kenyan state military to British private security actors. Particularly the question of access to interviewees and information and my assumed sexuality as a (white) woman offers insights about the governance tools of a global system of power. Hence, this piece will discuss my embodiment of identities and the (in)securities I have faced through this experience, providing insights into the racialised and gendered working of counterterrorism.
    
    Author: Darja Schildknecht (University of Basel)
- 257
  
  Roundtable / The Global Space Age: Astropolitical Insights on Global Order 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.
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Chair: Bleddyn Bowen (University of Leicester)
  
  Participants: Molly Silk (Manchester University) , PJ Blount (Cardiff University) , Sarah Dunn (University of Leicester) , Christopher Newman (Northumbria University)
- 258
  Panel / The challenge of being prepared: military transformation as a response Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Cristina Fontanelli (University of Genoa) , Raphael Lima (King's College London) , Lucie Pebay (University of Bath) , Migena Pengili (Assistant Editor, Civil Wars journal) , Mehmet Onur Şahin (King’s College London)
  
  Chair: Lucie Pebay (University of Bath)
  - Same, Same But Different. Why do Armed Forces Adapt Dissimilarly Using The Same Military Practice?
    
    United Nations (UN) peacekeepers operate in some of the most fraught regions worldwide. As such, UN’s most active contributors have offered their experience to assist newest Troops Contributing Countries (TCCs) in their pre-deployment training (PDT). Accordingly, we should expect recipients to implement teachings as they have been conveyed by the provider. And yet, militaries change the way specific practices are employed and tweak their approach to military operations. Why do militaries adapt dissimilarly using the same practice? This paper provides a two-fold contribution to the literature on force structure and military transformation. First, it explores a non-Western case of redesign in peacekeeping operations, a subject that remains largely under-treated. Second, the paper shows how variations in the time available to adopt a certain practice may drive armed forces to revise similar operational challenges in a different way. To this end, I examine the Female Engagement Team (FET) in mission training delivered by the United Kingdom (UK) to
    Zambia forces since 2016 and subsequent Zambia transformation and deployment in
    United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA). Findings suggest that Zambia forces revised and implemented the FET practice differently in terms of unit composition and operational activities.
    
    Author: Cristina Fontanelli (University of Genoa)
  - Future of Warfare: Are the French and British Armies Prepared? Recreating Mass Through Technology and Cooperation
    
    Confronted to a fast evolving and challenging environment, France and the United-Kingdom are confronted to the same issue: both armies have shrunk and can’t afford to grow any bigger. Having the capacity to become mass-multipliers, cooperation and technology are thus core dimensions of contemporary transformation for the French and British armies. Yet the two armies share a different relationship with technology and have grown to become very different partners. This investigation examines why and how these professionalised armies sharing similar challenges invest in different army models and transformation. To that aim, I compare the French and British armies’ reliance on cooperation and technology and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. The first part of my investigation suggests French and British armies rely on different role conceptions to boost partnerships. The second part analyses core differences in the way (1) technology is perceived, (2) technology is integrated by the forces. I claim France relies on an all-capacity (broad design) experienced force presenting itself as credible. By contrast, the British army relies on a specialised technological force (narrow design) and seeks to be seen as reliable – especially by the U.S.
    
    Author: Lucie Pebay (University of Bath)
  - Charting Cyber Civil Wars- an upgrade in the nature of the warfare
    
    Cyber attacks, which are on the rise in inter- and intra-state theatres of conflicts, pose significant challenges to state and non-state actors in building strategic surprises for victory or domination. While cyber war among superpowers has received large attention by combining elements of operational history, military tradition, capabilities and foreign policy analysis, the literature on cyber civil wars remains a lay of land to be studied and further explored. The extant literature available on cyber civil wars concerns the use of cyber capabilities in civil conflicts (hackers’ communities), disinformation/malinformation, and the rivalry among HUMINT-SIGINT and Cyber. This paper seeks to explore and consequently put another stone in the literature
    of the civil war reflecting on what cyber civil wars look like? Where do they start and end? Which lines have they fought along? Who is responsible for providing damages to the victims? What proactive and reactive strategies are in place to mitigate the risks? The discussion embraces a variety of disciplines pertinent to security, defence, information and intelligence besides the dynamics of civil conflicts.
    
    Author: Migena Pengili (Assistant Editor, Civil Wars journal)
- 259
  Panel / The effectiveness of implementing environment and climate agendas Drummond, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Environment Working Group
  
  Convener: EWG Working group
  
  Chair: Sabina Crowe (Northeastern University/NYU in London)
  - What remains behind the door of the United Nations climate summit: Did COP26 meet or miss the UNFCCC's core target?
    
    From Paris to Marrakech, Bonn, Katowice, Madrid and Glasgow, countries have pursued the main objective of the UNFCCC- stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations- but have not been entirely successful. This article looks at the status of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the carbon market mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases, which have not yet been fully clarified from Paris to Glasgow.
    A qualitative meta-synthesis (QMS) was conducted for the analysis. Of the 35 articles, only 23 met the criteria to be included in the analysis. Thematic synthesis was conducted using 23 articles in the Synthesis Matrix table. A list of 4 themes emerged from the synthesis matrix table. Applying the qualitative evidence synthesis method to all studies resulted in qualitative descriptive evidence of change for article 6.2 (real change), article 6.4 (flawed change) and article 6.8 (no change). The article concludes that the market-based approach in Article 6.2 has undergone real change due to agreement between the BASIC group (India), the major economies (Germany), the other states (Canada) and the UK, Article 6.4 has undergone flawed change due to disagreements between the "other states" (i.e. Australia) and the EU, and finally Article 6.8, which is non-market oriented, was not changed due to disagreement between like-minded developing countries, the European Union and the US (Umbrella Group) and non-market approach is the important gaps for COP27 and further research.
    Key words: Climate change, Cop26, Carbon market, UNFCCC, Negotiations
    
    Author: Majid Asadnabizadeh (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University)
  - Effects of a carbon tax on meat and dairy consumption in the US
    
    High meat and dairy intakes among US consumers are associated with high carbon footprints and negative public health consequences. One way to reduce carbon emissions from the food system would be to change diets, so they contain lower amounts of animal-source foods and more fruits and vegetables.
    
    This paper investigates the potential effects at both the national and state levels of the imposition of a carbon tax on meat and/or dairy consumption in the US. Our analysis relies on the Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) demand system and employs US household scanner panel data from Nielsen.
    
    A Pigouvian tax on meat and dairy products that is proportional to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions these products generate would lead consumers to internalise their negative environmental impacts. Several scenarios are analysed as follows 1. a meat tax only 2. a meat and dairy tax and 3. a meat and dairy tax in correlation with a subsidy on fruits and vegetables. For each scenario we ask how the carbon tax would impact household preferences, and how overall household carbon emissions from the consumption of animal-based foods would change as a result.
    
    Author: Sabina Crowe (Northeastern University/NYU in London)
  - A Future Engagement or Disengagement between the EU and Turkey in the context of the Green Deal
    
    The Green Deal was declared by the EU in December 2019 which aims to fight against climate change, to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050 and to reduce gas emissions by 2030. Green Deal Action Plan was signed between the EU and Turkey on 16 July 2021. Although the relations between the EU and Turkey have fluctuated over the past two decades in terms of various dimensions, this deal can build a new framework of relations. This study focuses on diplomatic and economic aspects related to the Deal from different perspectives. In this respect, the present article answers: “How will green cooperation influence the trajectory of relations regarding Green Deal’s impact on the EU’s neighbourhood, particularly in Turkey?”. Tracing relations between the EU and Turkey in the last two decades, this study reveals possibilities of future opportunities and challenges in engagements between the EU and Turkey in the new framework of green cooperation. Through looking at institutional cooperation and bilateral diplomatic and economic relations, whether Green Deal is a challenge, or an opportunity will be examined.
    
    Author: Efser Rana Coskun (Social Sciences University of Ankara)
- 260
  Panel / Theoretical critiques to the global order Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
  - Are Domestic War Crimes Trials Biased?
    
    Post-conflict states increasingly hold domestic war crimes trials. But do they prosecute perpetrators fairly? Applying statistical modeling and quantitative text analysis to two original datasets based on 555 decisions delivered to Serb and non-Serb defendants in Serbia’s war crimes trials (1999--2019), we do not find evidence of ethnic bias but demonstrate conflict actor bias. Paramilitaries received harsher sentences than state agents of violence, such as army members, from the same ethnic group for the same offenses. Additionally, we show that bias manifests in the verdicts’ textual content. Paramilitary violence is depicted more extensively and with greater detail than crimes committed by state actors. We demonstrate how deniability of accountability, which incentivizes government collusion with paramilitaries during conflict, operates after conflict. A state cannot completely avoid criminal responsibility given the global norm of accountability. Nonetheless, it can use domestic prosecutions to minimize state wrongdoing by associating egregious violence with paramilitaries.
    
    Authors: Ivor Sokolic* , Denisa Kostovicova (London School of Economics and Political Science)* , Lanabi La Lova (LSE) , Sanja Vico*
  - An Anarcho-Pacifist Critique of the United Nations Security Council
    
    The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has faced many criticisms, but rarely have its critics drawn on both anarchism and pacifism to articulate a rigorous anarcho-pacifist critique of its design, track record and broader impact. Yet this theoretical angle – whose roots lay in the same fertile nineteenth-century context from which discussions about collective security grew to eventually lead to the founding of the United Nations – holds the potential to develop critical reflections that go further and deeper than those informed by prevalent International Relations theories. Firstly, with an eye on political outcomes, an anarcho-pacifist critique draws attention to those non-state interests, industries and constituencies that benefit, and those that are ignored, by the UNSC’s operation; denounces the ongoing and growing arms trade in which UNSC permanent members actively engage; and considers the role of the UNSC in not only maintaining but also helping legitimise a status quo that brings conflict and insecurity to many. Secondly, turning to concerns about warism and militarism, an anarcho-pacifist analysis critically reconsiders dominant assumptions about the need for potentially violent enforcement mechanisms to preserve peace and security; and argues that the impulse for constant military preparedness feeds the destabilising forces of militarism. And thirdly, with regards to broader political aims, an anarcho-pacifist critique contends that sustainable peace and security require socio-economic justice and not just attention to conflict and insecurity; and concludes that the very foundations of the Westphalian international order have to be reconsidered for the UNSC’s mission of safeguarding peace and security to have a chance of being fulfilled.
    
    Author: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
  - The rise of military power and the new security-peace paradigm in peacebuilding
    
    The fact that no new peacekeeping operations have been authorised in almost a decade and the fact that, the last and ongoing operations have focused on peace enforcement have fostered a debate over the status and survival of liberal peacebuilding as such. One of the missing links in these studies is military power. Whereas a rise in global militarism has been widely studied, its consequences in the peacebuilding realm has not followed through. Drawing on the sociology of global militarism, this paper argues that liberal peacebuilding has been transformed by new and increasingly important forms of military power. First, it shows an increasing reliance on military actors, means and goals, affecting how peace operations legitimise, organise and wage physical violence. Second, it explores changes on the social relations, knowledge production and practices that underpin liberal peacebuilding. The paper provides a wide thematic analysis of main UN and EU peacebuilding documents from 1991 to the present and analyses the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the findings from fieldwork, based on interviews and observations. The implications are not just how we must look at liberal peace from now on but the fact that new trends are being established without the likelihood to improve the impact of these interventions.
    
    Author: Iniguez Marta (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)
  - Peacebuiding and authoritarism: the missing link of the Legitimacy Market
    
    Several papers have explored how Peacebuilding operations can unintentionally contribute to consolidate post-conflict authoritarian regimes (Day, von Billerbeck, Tansey, Al Maleh, 2021, Harkness, 2022), detecting Day and colleagues that through CGF (Core Government Functions - one of the four categories of the OECD Creditor Reporting System) a causal relationship between Peacebuilding and authoritarianism can be established. Based on these works, our argument is that, in addition to considering CGC as a causal relationship, we can also propose legitimacy as a key element that complements this relationship. If Peacebuilders support their target states with material resources, they would also be strengthening the legitimacy of a small elite. In terms of gains and losses, legitimacy could be analyzed as a market, what I would call the Market of Legitimacy: if the elite in power that receives Peacebuilding support is increasingly strong and powerful, it would gain greater legitimacy by eliminating the market or the struggle that may exist between different actors (between those who want a democratic order and those who do not) and Peacebuilding missions could be unintentionally supporting or strengthening the legitimacy of non-democratic leaders. More specifically, if a country is authoritarian, receives a considerable percentage of GFCs (as these studies show) and also has a monopoly on the exercise of power (as measured by various indices we will propose), it will be difficult for a moderate opposition to gain access to government. To verify this, we will work with several case studies already used in the aforementioned work of 2021: Madagascar, Comoros, Cote D'Ivore, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, Kirgyzstan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia, Haiti).
    
    Authors: Marien Durán Cenit (University of Granada) , Alberto Bueno (University of Granada)*
  - Tilting the power imbalance? Theorising patron-client relations in security
    
    Clientelism is an enormous impediment to state-building and SSR. In security. clientelistic linkages between politicians and local elites (patrons) and security officers (clients) often extend the influence of clientelistic networks into state security agencies. This paper argues that clientelism in security differs from ‘conventional’, hierarchical patron-client relations and that officers do not stand under the typical and strict transactional obligations of clientelism. Officers often need to balance, at times competing, order from patrons and official superiors, and, in contexts with multiple patrons and clientelistic networks, accommodate to interests of other patrons.
    This paper proposes to study clientelistic linkages in security as heterarchies, meaning systems of multiple competing hierarchies. Such an approach allows to develop a broader typology of officers’/clients’ agency beyond being a patron’s henchman or competing over patron’s favours. In fact, officers/clients may have relatively more autonomy than ‘regular’ clients and seek to leverage this for their own (political) interests.
    This paper first surveys the literatures on clientelism and heterarchical orders before discussing a preliminary analytical framework for studying of clientelism in security, followed by a brief discussion of how this approach can be applied to the empirical cases of Lebanon and Mexico.
    
    Author: Francisco Mazzola (City University of London)
- 261
  Panel / Tools of Statecraft: Cooperation, Coersion, and Covert Action in US Foreign Policy QE2, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: Georg Löfflmann (University of Warwick)
  - U.S. Foreign Policy on Africa in a changing global order
    
    The global order is in metamorphosis, driven by international climate politics, economic decline, and other geopolitical pressures. Rather than staying on the periphery of this shift, African countries have collectively begun to assert their voices on various multilateral fora. The rapid rise of China's economic investment in Africa and the continent's continued dalliance with Russia has underscored the progressively dying influence of the US in Africa. Moreover, the emergence of African agency has direct implications for Africa's relationship with the US. Pointing to the weakening of US influence, the 2022 Russian-Ukraine war brought into sharp focus the need to recalibrate US-Africa relations as many African nations chose to forgo their usual support of US positions in favor of apparent neutrality at the UN. The slow pace of its international response to the Covid-19 pandemic also dented US-Africa relations.
    
    Global increases in food and petrol prices have threatened the continent's post-pandemic economic recovery and deepened the development financing lacunae on the continent. Faced with domestic challenges, China has been unable to fill this gap in financing as expected. The crisis has provided the US with an opening to redirect the dying relationship with the continent; President Biden's reboot of the Prosper Africa presidential initiative presents an opportunity for the relationship to gain more salience. Prosper Africa promises to promote two-way trade whilst pivoting to an investment driven relationship with continent. In a bid to 'affirm African agency', Biden is set to overhaul the US strategic partnership with Africa and move away from the apathy that historically marked its foreign policy.
    
    This article surveys four previous US presidential initiatives for Africa and the changes in the US strategy for Africa over three administrations. It centers on the Prosper Africa Build Together campaign to answer two key questions. First, does Biden's Africa policy illustrate a pivot away from realpolitik? And second, has there been a change in how African agency interfaces with the US in the global political system? In answering these questions, this article examines the shifting connection with key strategic US partners on the continent, Nigeria and South Africa, as well as changes to its relationship with the continent.
    
    Author: Odilile Ayodele (University of Johannesburg)
  - Toward a Theory of Weaker State Agency: Explaining Compliance and Contestation in US-Latin American Relations.
    
    Analysis of Our Common Agenda requires theory that is applicable to all states. However, historically the focus of IR theory has been overwhelmingly on large states and great powers, making it unsuitable for explaining the behaviour of the ‘rest’. Scholarship has produced many behavioural strategies available to weaker states in their interactions with great powers, but while many of these help in observing and describing the policies adopted by weaker states, put together they provide for a confusing mix that has little analytical value and is of limited utility for explaining why certain states choose one kind of behaviour over another. It also fails to address questions about the extent to which some strategies go well with others and yet others do not. Instead, such questions require investigation into the larger objectives that a combination of behaviours might serve. In other words, there is need for a theory of weaker state agency that focuses not on the chosen strategies but, rather, on the incentives, structures, and conditions that provoke them. This paper, while drawing on recent work in this sprouting research area, analyses Latin American behaviours vis-à-vis the United States between 1990-2010 to develop such a theory.
    
    Author: Quintijn Kat (Ashoka University)
  - The Logik of U.S. Humanitarian Intervention Policy - A Two-Level Game
    
    Abstract
    What is the nature of the U.S. humanitarian intervention policy? Security scholars have wrestled with this question since the institutionalization of human rights. At times, the answer seems clear when pundits and policymakers claim that 'politics stops at the wa- ter's edge.' These widely cited words mean that when it comes to the use of force, U.S. political leaders speak with one voice. Critics argue that 'sailing the water's edge' is what American leaders do. Yet as I demonstrate in this study, U.S. decision-makers engage in two-level games played simultaneously at the domestic and international level. This pa- per examines the interaction among four sets of institutional players in a two-level game: the President, the Congress, the bureaucratic politics, and the UN-Security Council. It analyzes the effects that material interests and ideological divisions, interactions, and institutions have on humanitarian intervention decisions. I use a multimethod research design to explain the U.S. humanitarian intervention policy. Focusing on a mixture of game theory and causal inference, I use the game theory to generate inductive representations of U.S. humanitarian intervention decision making, which I then empirically test via the statistics of causal inference.
    
    Author: Joseph M. Harrasser (University of Innsbruck)
- 262
  Panel / Trends and Challenges in Online Extremism Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Nicola Mathieson (Australian National University)
  
  Chair: Nicola Mathieson (Australian National University)
  
  Discussant: Nicola Mathieson (Australian National University)
  - We Want You!” Applying Social Network Analysis to Online Extremist Communities
    
    Current literature on online criminal and deviant groups recognizes the role of online forums in the transfer of knowledge and socialization of members, but debates on the role of the Internet in the socialization and radicalization processes in the context of online extremist groups persist. This study contributes to the discussion by examining online radicalization process through the use of social learning theory and social network analysis. This innovation allows for assessment on the impact of online interactions with forum members on radicalization process. Findings found strong support of differential association and differential reinforcement, but showed the possibility of other mechanisms, such as self-radicalization, at play. Findings from the study highlight the need to for theory integration, the inclusion of online peer association, and replication to address the complex phenomenon of online radicalization.
    
    Author: Yi Ting Chua (University of Alabama)
  - The Use of Out-Linking by the Far-Right
    
    Attempts to move right wing extremist groups/communities from online platforms has resulted in a move to ‘darker’ sites such as encrypted apps and online spaces that are less restrictive. There is a growing need to further research the uses, networks, cultures, and audiences, both within and across platforms. This research can then be used to design effective response(s). Macdonald et al (2022) recent report highlights this, their results show no discernible evidence pointing to out-linking being utilised to direct users to violent extremist spaces. However, there is room for further research here to employ a similar methodology to examine how the far-right is utilising out-linking and examining where these linking are directing their potential audience (Conway et al 2022, Berger 2022). It is possible that by hopping from one platform to another, the far-right are evading policies set up by platforms such as Twitter to ban the spread of hate online. Through the collection of data using common Far-right hashtags employed on Twitter, this paper will be able to answer how the far right are using Twitter as a communication tool. Decipher discernible patterns to any external websites that are being linked in tweets and highlight further need to monitor the actions. This paper discuss the need for automation of labelling data collection to assist in further effective examination of this area by enabling researchers to spend more time appraising work/review of content as required.
    
    Author: Lydia Channon (University of Swansea)
  - Gaming Platforms and Gamification: Challenges and Opportunities for Research and PVE Practice
    
    Since the terrorist attack in Christchurch in 2019 was livestreamed in the style of a first-person shooter game and a number of subsequent attacks with similar modus operandi followed, the possible interplay between gaming and radicalisation has become a new frontier for research on radicalization, extremism and political violence – but also for prevention practice and international and national policymaking. Indeed, both (transnational networks of) right-wing and jihadist extremist groups as well as radicalised individuals use gaming platforms in a variety of ways: By producing their own video games, by using existing video games, by communicating and targeting gamers in in-game chats or on gaming platforms, and by incorporating video game aesthetics and gamification into extremist propaganda. However, in-depth knowledge on the reasons and implications of this use is limited and the research gap surrounding gaming and extremism is substantial. Similarly, although prevention practice shows great interest in using gaming and gaming platforms for prevention and intervention projects, practical experiences and systematic reflection on the possibilities for prevention in the gaming sphere, are lacking. This article outlines a comprehensive research agenda that has been missing so far and derives challenges and opportunities for research but also for prevention practice, including possibilities to recognise and address users at risk of radicalisation as well as potentially promising approaches for prevention in gaming spaces.
    
    Authors: Julian Junk (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt) , Linda Schlegel (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt andGoethe-Universität)*
  - The Forgotten Rise of Asian Far-Right Extremism
    
    For the longest time, literature on far-right extremism has focused on racial supremacist groups and militias in the US and Europe. However, far-right extremism has come to encompass a whole range of ideologies and movements, such as anti-migrant nativist groups, conspiracy groups focused on state overreach, such as Q-Anon, anti-vaxxer movements, Islamophobic movements that pitch themselves as ‘counter-jihad’ groups including extreme right-wing nationalist Hindu and nativist Buddhist movements such as the ‘969’ movement, homophobic and misogynist groups in the ‘manaosphere’ such as “Incel”. What is little researched on are the manifestations of far-right ideas from this spectrum in Asia. This includes examining the initial inception of these ideas into Asia, the mobilisation and propagation of Asian adaptations of these far-right movements, how they strategically adapt their narratives to the Asian context, portray legitimacy and capture the victim narrative. Finally, the cross-pollination of far-right ideas from the East and West, including Asians ascribing to lesser understood groups from the West such as those promoting Goreposting and Schizoposting and celebrating a hybrid concoction of harmful ideologies will be illustrated.
    
    Author: Omer Ali Saifudeen (Singapore University of Social Sciences)
- 263
  Panel / What the ‘War on Terror’ Leaves Behind: Assessing International Security in a Post-Terrorism Era QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: European Journal of International Security
  
  Convener: Edward Newman (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Lee Jarvis (UEA)
  - Why we stopped worrying about terrorists and the bomb: The return of great power nuclear politics
    
    t has become commonplace to note the ‘return’ of great power politics and a concurrent shift awayfromafocusonterrorismtowardmajorinterstatecompetitioninInternationalPolitics. Many aspects of this trend have received attention in recent years, from trade wars and crisis management, tothe response to Covid-19 and most recently of all, the 2022 war in Ukraine. All point to the nature and quality of great power relations being the central axis on which the major questions of inter-state war, peace and cooperation turn once more. But under analysed so far has been the nuclear dimensions of this trend. This is important because we are on the cusp of a multipolar order where, for the first time, the ‘poles of power’ are nuclear- armed. In this article, we outline the historical context by analysing how the unipolar distribution of power over the last thirty years led to a diminished focus on the threat of nuclear war in favour of a focus on other (nuclear) risks, most prominently nuclear terrorism, nuclear counterproliferation and nuclear security. We then explore the dynamics of today’s emerging nuclear-armed multipolar system with a particular focus on great power relations, flash-points and tensions in the Euro-Atlantic and Asia. We conclude by arguing that after a generation spent focussed on ‘other’ potentially existential threats, the spectre of great power nuclear war has made an unwelcome return to prominence in international affairs.
    
    Authors: Benjamin Zala (Australian National University)* , Andrew Futter (University of Leicester)
  - Prevention and emergency measures: Terrorism and climate change on the security agenda
    
    his special issue’s focus on the declining salience of terrorism as a security concern, especially for liberal democratic states, encourages us to reflect on how states’ security agendas are constituted and the process through which these choices are made. For many, including some of us writing on the pursuit of the ‘war on terror’, it was always difficult to justify the primacy attached to this concern relative to the climate emergency, even in the early 2000s. With the unambiguous arrival of the climate crisis since, and increasing attention to climate change as a security issue, this choice looks more dubious still. This paper examines the parallel trajectories of terrorism and climate change as security issues in the heady days of the ‘war on terror’, reflecting on the choices to prioritize one possible threat, characterised by uncertainty, over another. Ultimately, I argue that political interests, reduced agency, the perceived need for broader societal change and the lesser visibility of climate change all militated against its securitization and prioritization relative to the terror threat.
    
    Author: Matt McDonald (University of Queensland)
  - When critical security thinking becomes mainstream: How, why, what next?
    
    Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also, we argue, raises significant issues for thinking through the future, priorities and purposes of terrorism and security scholarship. The article begins with two observations. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and – crucially – policy developments. Second, such ideas – including around the futility of 'war' on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure – were widely dismissed as lacking in policy-relevance, even utopian, when articulated by critically-oriented scholars. This paradox, we argue, engenders three crucial questions: (i) How do we account for the movement of critical ideas into the mainstream?; (ii) What becomes of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency?; and, (iii) What does this mean for broader relationships between security research and policy?
    
    Authors: Lee Jarvis (UEA) , Michael Lister (Oxford Brookes University)
  - Jumping on the cyber wagon: An autoethnographic confession of a terrorism-turned-cyber expert
    
    The truth is my head of school wanted me to take on the thankless job of “Director of Undergraduate Studies.” A few days after having failed to convince him that I really didn’t want to do it and (therefore) would be terrible at it, I saw an email about a research fellowship application for the UK’s signals intelligence organization GCHQ. I put together a proposal for an interdisciplinary project (politics, linguistics and computing) studying gender constructions of online narrative on violent extremism and got it. Since, I have migrated – like many others – from terrorism and counterterrorism “expertise” to cyber security “expertise.” In my defence, cyber security is as much in dire need of critical engagement as terrorism and counterterrorism was twenty years ago. To start with, “security” is almost always used uncritically and often interchangeably with resilience. But is this enough to justify a move that, in essence, is spurred by the migration of government funds from one overinflated security threat (terrorism) to possibly another overinflated security threat (cyber security)? Aside from ethics of joining the cyber wagon, the reflection will address the sociology and economy of migrations in security expertise and the risks they represent for policymaking.
    
    Author: Harmonie Toros (University of Kent)
- 16:30
  
  Refreshment break
- 264
  Panel / Contemporary Issues of Power and Security Almond, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: BISA
  
  Chair: David Blagden (University of Exeter)
  - Grand Strategy Under Decline: A Positional Approach
    
    How do great powers behave externally when in relative decline? Hegemonic stability theory predicts preventive war, neorealism expects the adoption of conservative strategies of retrenchment while innenpolitik theories point to policies, reflecting the preferences of domestic coalitions. But as per modern history, declining powers have seldom waged preventive wars, or retrenched nor have they aligned their behaviour systematically with sectional interests. In response to this issue of explanatory power this paper develops a theory of grand strategic adjustment which attempts to address the former through the following two tasks. First, by constructing a positional account of state preferences, which discounts the risky option of war or the counterintuitive option of renouncing what one has or wants through retrenchment. Second, by considering the different incentive structures and abilities of different types of decliners as determined by their varied power positions (first and second tier decliners) and the different degrees of decline they experience (acute and mild decline). Accordingly, great powers are expected to demonstrate a richer set of behavioural tendencies than the war/retrenchment dilemma. To test the theory, the cases of Britain's and France's grand strategy from 1879 to 1914 and from 1919 to 1939 are respectively analysed.
    
    Author: Panagiotis Vasileiadis (University of Surrey)
  - Spacepower Theory: Is there any such thing?
    
    The development of theory is a fundamental requirement to explain events that occur in the real world. The growing importance of space to countries is a phenomenon that has been more or less missed by the discipline of international relations, relegating space to the fringe as a variable or clubbing it into the domain of science and technology. Whereas the reality is 72 nations now have space programs, identity space as critical to the development of their societies and Great and Major Powers like the U.S.., China, India and Russia are including space into their grand strategic vision. Drawing from multiple perspectives (U.S., China, India, Russia), and supported by field work in the U.S., China and India, this paper will offer a nuanced assessment of the understanding of power and the underlying notion of legitimacy and norms that could inform the formation of spacepower theory (can we have a generalized consensus on these terms) drawn from sources like Han Feizi, Kautilya and Gandhi, and supported by ideas developed by Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight and Martin Saar. The paper is inspired by the research question: is there a spacepower theory that is generalizable across time and space and if so what about the unique strategic cultures of China, India and Russia that may deviate from that norm or do they?
    
    Author: Namrata Goswami (Arizona State University)
  - How Does Power Converge? Explaining Shifts in Relative Material Capability
    
    Shifts in the balance of power are of profound importance in international politics, yet their causes are insufficiently understood. This article demonstrates that variation in economic globalization is a key driver of such shifts’ occurrence, as well as accounting for their size and speed, thereby filling a major explanatory gap. Expansions of three vectors integral to economic globalization—trade, financial flows, and technology/labor diffusion—enable follower economies to grow faster than leading economies. Such differential growth, in turn, enables less-developed followers’ levels of per-capita development and total economic output—which together underpin national material capabilities—to converge on those of leading economies, shifting the international balance of power. This process is elucidated empirically with reference to the impact of international economic flows on power balances in three illustrative cases: the arc of Dutch power after 1581, follower economies’ convergence on UK productivity levels over 1871-1914, and the divergent growth trajectories of the early and late Cold War. The article’s findings carry implications for realist theories that link power shifts to conflict, liberal theories that link economic interdependence to international stability, and analyses of the causes and potential consequences of the rise of non-Western great powers today.
    
    Author: David Blagden (University of Exeter)
  - Negotiating Global Britain: Power, Status, and Prestige in Global Affairs
    
    Since Brexit, the UK has pursued a hard negotiating strategy in Europe, and softer negotiation strategies elsewhere, notably the Asia Pacific. Trade and security negotiations have been slow and antagonistic at home, but quicker with less friction beyond. What explains this unusual ‘twin-track bargaining strategy’, and what does it say about post-Brexit UK internationalism? This article argues that at the heart of this issue are assessments of identity, status, and prestige. On the one hand, the UK sees itself as ‘too big’ for Europe, seeing relatively little status gained from a European identity. On the other hand, status suppression in Europe is seen as responsible for becoming ‘too small’ elsewhere, particularly in the Asia Pacific. The UK thus sees more status and prestige to be (re)claimed from a global, over a European, identity. So while UK hard and soft negotiating strategies appear almost as opposites, they have comparable aims towards recapturing imagined status via the ‘prestige project’ of Global Britain. The article contributes to debates into the emerging course of UK post-Brexit internationalism, and to the relatively under-theorised significance of prestige in International Relations as a vehicle not only for constructing identities but deconstructing others considered undesirable.
    
    Authors: Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) , Oliver Turner (University of Edinburgh)
  - Where have the Canadians gone? Canadas virtual disappearance from United Nations security institutions
    
    Where have the Canadians gone? Canada’s virtual disappearance from United Nations security institutions
    
    “Since 1945, support for the United Nations in Canada has been akin to a national religion,” observed Adam Chapnik. Canada once was heavily committed to the UN’s two principal institutions for international security, the Security Council itself and UN international peacekeeping. Canada usually sought and won election to one of the Council’s non-permanent seats. Modern UN peacekeeping was largely invented by a Canadian, Lester B. Pearson, and thereafer Ottawa could once boast that the country was contributing substantially and had participated in just about every UN peacekeeping operation.
    
    Yet it has been about a quarter century since Canada last has been on the Security Council, and today scarcely more than a handful of Canadian military personnel are wearing blue berets or helmets. Why? This paper sorts out the explanations, ranging from a decline in Canada’s international status, a shift in the nature of UN peacekeeping itself, domestic politics, changes in Canada’s strategic culture, and competing demands on Canadian defence resources posed by other types of international security operations, especially under NATO.
    
    Key words: Canadian foreign and defence policy, United Nations, Security Council, international peacekeeping
    strong text
    
    Author: Joseph Jockel (St. Lawrence University)
- 265
  Panel / Crisis and crises Clyde, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University)
  - The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation in the Global South
    
    Efforts to improve adaptive capacity and reduce the vulnerability of local communities in the global south have involved many multilevel stakeholders, such as government agencies, donor agencies, NGOs, academia, and corporations. These actors usually bring new ways to adapt and shape the conduct of local communities in dealing with climate change through many adaptation interventions. Some interventions work well to improve the adaptive capacity of local communities, but others only redistribute gains and losses among local communities. Even the adaptation intervention might cause maladaptation, such as widening economic inequality among local communities. The question remains to what extent adaptation projects redistribute gains and losses in the global south. The analysis of this chapter draws from the political economy of CCA by Sovacool, Linnér, and Goodsite (2015). Their approach offers a systematic framework to analyse four political economy processes in four dimensions of development. Each process can be utilised to analyse the CCA challenges in each development dimension, including economic, political, ecological, and social. There are some limitations of Sovacool, Linnér, and Goodsite’s (2015) typology in analysing the CCA phenomenon in developing countries where the local communities’ cultural heritage practices remain strong in everyday life. This paper includes a cultural dimension in the analysis as a contribution. Climate Change Adaptation programs, by utilising modern techniques, sometimes force local communities to learn new techniques because they consider this as a better solution. This situation makes local communities to let go their cultural heritage practices and causes another maladaptation, cultural erosion. This paper selects four adaptation villages that get adaptation projects in Indonesia as case studies to expose how the political-economic processes in rendering adaptation projects increase the vulnerability of local communities and cause maladaptation, such as cultural erosion, widening inequality gap, and environmental degradation.
    
    Author: Stanislaus Apresian (University of Leeds)
  - Retrenchment and deglobalisation as growing responses to increasing global crises: A case study of the UK, US, Germany, and France
    
    In previous research, we have explored how despite the ‘Global Britain’ discourse, the UK has turned increasingly inwards in many policy sectors, a trend intensified following the Brexit referendum (Lazell & Petrikova, 2023). For example, since the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK reduced its development aid commitment from 0.7% Gross National Income (GNI) to 0.5%. Moreover, it is estimated that this year, 2022, the UK spent most of its aid funds on domestic issues rather than externally, particularly to pay for refugee housing (Dercon, 2022).
    In this article, I explore this ‘deglobalisation’ or ‘retrenchment’ trend in four major Western economies – the UK, US, France, and Germany, in three sectors - development assistance/climate finance, trade, and immigration. I hypothesise that the paradox observed in the increasingly nationalistic ‘Global Britain’ when it comes to aid provision can be observed more widely, beyond the UK and in a wider range of sectors. If real, this trend will certainly complicate efforts within the UN’s Common Agenda to improve the management of global commons and global public goods.
    
    Author: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
  - U.S. Support and Sovereign Debt: Crises and Consequences in International Capital Markets
    
    Standard economic theory suggests that states that fail to repay their debt obligations should be punished by financial markets with higher interest rates and restricted access to future loans. Empirically, many states face limited repercussions for default. Why? In this paper, we argue that the states that largely escape the punitive consequences of default are supported by the United States. These borrowing states' relationships with the United States will affect markets' perceptions of states post-default. US support repairs states' reputations faster than non-supported states. As a result, U.S.-supported states have less to fear by abandoning their debt obligations. We test our argument with a series of empirical analyses using data on debt restructuring episodes from 1975 to 2016. We find that states with stronger relationships with the United States are more likely to restructure existing debt obligations and are more likely to force large losses on investors. Yet these same states largely avoid the harsh consequences normally associated with debt restructuring. Supported states face lower borrowing costs and wait shorter periods of time to re-enter the bond market after a debt restructuring. Our argument and findings show the importance of how international factors change the incentives on how states operate in financial markets.
    
    Author: Patrick Shea (University of Glasgow)
  - Capability in the polycrisis era
    
    It is becoming widely accepted that we have entered the polycrisis era. Global challenges are becoming more frequent and occurring simultaneously, thus challenging the capability of states to effectively respond to them. While scholars have long studied capability in international cooperation, the polycrisis era poses novel challenges. Conventional approaches to overcoming capability challenges have usually focused on the use of incentives to induce cooperation. Such incentive mechanisms work under conditions of equilibrium, where the more capable actors provide incentives to the less capable ones. In this paper, I use the case of global climate cooperation, focusing on the net zero regime, to develop a more dynamic concept of capability. I show that endogenous capability is becoming increasingly more significant than incentive mechanisms in the provision of key global public goods. Insights from the paper contribute to our understanding of how we can redesign global governance regimes to work effectively in an increasingly challenging geopolitical environment.
    
    Author: Kennedy Mbeva (University of Oxford)
- 266
  
  Roundtable / Experiences of “Early Career Instructors” in International Studies: Struggles and Opportunities for Pedagogical Futures 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.
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: Misbah Hyder (University of Notre Dame)
  
  Participants: Caitlin Biddolph (University of Sydney) , Katharina Hunfeld (University of St Andrews) , Columba Achilleos-Sarll (University of Birmingham) , Carl Gibson (University of Nottingham) , Luther Lee McPherson IV (Virginia Tech) , Jakub Zahora (Charles University)
- 267
  Panel / Historical Colonialisms and World Orders Don, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: HSIR Working group
  
  Chair: Carolina Zaccato (University of St Andrews)
  - Escaping the Hobson-Lenin Zombie: Theorising the Internationally Entangled Origins of Modern Empires through the “Peculiar” Case of Japanese Imperialism
    
    Writings on the origins of late-nineteenth-century modern empires have tended to omit, mis-, or under-theorise the international dimension of the social processes that led to such imperial pursuits. This, as IR scholarship has increasingly highlighted, is the issue of internalism. Internalist issues or failed attempts to address them are indeed present in both the classical theory of the origins of modern imperialism — the Hobson-Lenin thesis — and its succeeding criticisms and alternatives over the past century. This collective failure, in turn, sustains flawed understandings of this “age of empire”, which is an important foundation of modern international relations. The limitations of internalism, I argue, are nowhere more detrimental than when the above theories are used to explain the origins of modern Japanese imperialism. Thus, to resolve this empirically driven crisis of internalism, I critically adapt a non-internalist approach — Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development — to account for the Japanese descent into imperialism. This account, if successful in better capturing the Japanese turn to empire, offers an escape to extant internalist readings of the origins of modern imperialism. Furthermore, it also contributes the recent call for a true “international turn” in the social sciences.
    
    Author: Huu Phu Gia Nguyen (University of Sussex)
  - The Re-emergence of Historical Norms: The Rise of the G7
    
    This paper develops a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the importance of historical norms in shaping and influencing contemporary world politics. Through a case study analysis of the evolution of the Group of 7 (G7) at the apex of world politics it argues that the ‘re-emergence’ of historical norms occurs when an international crisis has fractured the pre-existing framework of international order. In this situation dominant actors in world politics reach back to historical examples of past success in resolving international crises. These ‘norm revisionists’ perceive certain historical examples of the resolution of international crises to have been successful and transpose these norms onto contemporary international responses, thus ‘reviving’ a past historical norm. The development of this Norms Crisis Model contributes to the field of International Relations by situating the importance of recognising the role historical norms can play in shaping contemporary world politics, in doing so it builds upon the overlooked work of Coral Bell and Martin Wight on the role and importance of international crises fracturing the pre-existing norms of relations between states. It also contributes to the current literature on norms by challenging the idea that norms simply die away. Instead, the paper argues that norms can lie dormant until they are ‘revived’ by certain actors who shape, and use, said norms to respond to political and international crises.
    
    Author: Gregory Stiles (University of Sheffield)
  - A defensive notion of regionalism: The Pan-American Conferences and the emergence of a Latin American regional space
    
    This paper analyses the emergence of the idea of a distinctive Latin American region during the first Pan-American Conferences and at a momentum of American rise to hegemony in the Western Hemisphere (long before its ascension to the category of global superpower).
    It argues that the recently independent Latin American countries forged a ‘common front’ and started fostering the notion of a ‘Latin American regional space’ as separate from the construct of an ‘American hemisphere’ that the United States was trying to put forward at the time. Indeed, apart from the fight against new European incursions attempts in the region – embodied in the American-led Monroe Doctrine (1826) – the Latin American republics grew warier and warier of the growing American gravitation in the region, and thus more zealous of safeguarding their national sovereignty conceived as inextricably linked from the regional principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs. As a result, they challenged the US hemispheric ambitions by positing the idea of a regional construct that purposely excluded the United States. Put otherwise, Latin American diplomats saw in regional unity the way to protect and ensure their countries' recently acquired independence and contest an ever-increasing American influence of what they conceived to be exclusively regional, i.e. Latin American, affairs.
    Through archival work conducted in the Pan-American conferences' collection of the Archives of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this paper explores regional notions, understandings, and framings of perceptions of shared threats to national sovereignty and of the region’s role in countering rising American hegemonic pretensions and safeguarding the sovereignty of Latin American republics.
    
    Author: Carolina Zaccato (University of St Andrews)
- 268
  Panel / Methods of (Un)Seeing Dee, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Aya Nassar (University of Warwick)
  - The Role of Collaborative Methodologies in Decolonization
    
    In recent years, calls to decolonize the academy have become increasingly salient. Scholars have, for instance, generatively critiqued the persistent erasure of non-Western, Black, and Indigenous knowledge in university curricula and in research. Nevertheless, the decolonization agenda is laden with contradictions. Scholars have posited, for example, that decolonization requires material commitments, such as the return of Indigenous lands and historical reparations, as well as the wider transformation of not just of the political economy of academic knowledge production but also of the colonial local and global societies in which higher education institutions are embedded. This paper builds on these critical assessments of the decolonization agenda to push at its boundaries. Based on Maré from the Inside, a 10-year collaborative arts-based project co-organized by researchers, artists, and community organizers in Brazil, the US, and the UK, the co-authored paper will discuss the material, epistemological, and structural demands and contradictions of collaborative work that aims to further the decolonization agenda in higher education. In so going, it will investigate the role of arts-based, collaborative methodologies in the call to decolonize academia.
    
    Authors: Henrique Gomes (Redes da Maré/ Virginia Tech)* , Desiree Poets (Virginia Tech University)* , Andreza Jorge (Virginia Tech)* , Nicholas Barnes (St Andrews)
  - The many (in)visibilities in IR: Siting imperialism in postcolonial museum spaces
    
    The paper looks at how the global, national and local intersect in postcolonial museum spaces. Historical (re)constructions in European museums have consciously and deftly sidestepped direct allusions to colonialism. The paper focuses on the travelling exhibition, ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’, a collaborative project between the British Museum (BM) and two museums in India (a state-run institution, the National Museum, New Delhi, and an unaided organisation, CSMVS, Mumbai) in 2017-18 to commemorate 70 years of Indian independence. Using objects from BM’s collection exhibited in Delhi and Mumbai, the exhibition crafted a narrative of India’s ‘shared beginnings’ that situated Indian history within global, cosmopolitan frames. The paper argues that such a (mis)framing, which sidesteps the imperial history behind these acquisitions, typifies the invisibility of imperialism within IR. It draws on public history, which trains its gaze on how history is located, experienced and interpreted at distinct sites such as the battlefield, the museum and the border. In what ways can public history inform ongoing debates on museum politics within IR? In this regard, how have South Asian interventions influenced postcolonial IR? In making a case for decolonising the study of international relations, the paper examines the hitherto underexplored interface between public history and IR.
    
    Author: Jayashree Vivekanandan (South Asian University)
- 269
  Panel / Navigating polycrisis: UK foreign policy between national, human and planetary security challenges - Sponsored by Rethinking Security and University of Bradford Department of Peace Studies QE1, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: BISA
  
  Convener: Rethinking Security
  
  Chair: Larry Attree (Academic outreach coordinator, Rethinking Security)
  - Examining the UK Integrated Review Refresh: critical issues and priorities
    
    Examining the UK Integrated Review Refresh: critical issues and priorities
    
    Author: Owen Greene (University of Bradford)
  - Towards an alternative framing for UK national security policy
    
    Towards an alternative framing for UK national security policy
    
    Author: David Curran (Coventry University)
  - UK engagement with instability, conflict management and mediation
    
    UK engagement with instability, conflict management and mediation
    
    Author: Catherine Turner (Durham University)
- 270
  Panel / Popular culture, agents and identity in shaping the symbolism and status of nuclear weapons Spey, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Convener: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Patricia Shamai (University of Portsmouth)
  - Do Nukes go "POP"? Why we should engage with nuclear weapons through popular culture
    
    This paper makes the case that there are three critical reasons for scholars of nuclear politics to take popular culture seriously. These three reasons can be thought of in terms of the platform, the properties, and the personal. Firstly, citizens are rarely given the time and space to think about nuclear weapons – with levels of secrecy and lack of democratic deliberation inherent to nuclear policy. Popular culture is one of the most significant platforms where citizens are given – usually hours – of time to engage with nuclear weapons. Secondly, the material reality of nuclear weapons (subatomic processes, nuclear fission, radioactivity) makes them impossible to directly observe or describe without the use of abstraction and metaphor. Many properties of nuclear weapons themselves are conceivable only through visual imaginaries and fictional exploration. Finally, too often nuclear weapons are thought of as an artefact of a bygone era, or a terrifying possible future. This paper argues that popular culture is a necessary tool for changing these imagined bounds of time, bringing nuclear weapons into the personal, the everyday, and the here and now.
    
    Author: Emily Faux (Newcastle University)
  - Origins of the Nuclear Age: How Identity Influenced the Creation of the Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb
    
    It is vital to understand the psychology of leaders regarding nuclear weapons, and to do so, we must first examine the four most critical decisions made by leaders that took place at the dawn of the nuclear age. The first significant decision was regarding the creation of the atomic bomb by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). President Harry S. Truman, on the other hand, made three critical decisions: to utilize the atomic bombs in WWII, sanction the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and withhold the use of atomic bombs in the Korean War. Unfortunately, scholars overlook and neglect to address the psychological underpinnings of such significant decisions. Identity is one of the most overlooked and undervalued variables in understanding the creation and use of the first nuclear weapons. Identity is a set of complex, multi-layered constructs that cultivates and fosters one's sense of self. These layers are constantly shifting to reflect the present position an individual is facing. Understanding and examining the identities of FDR and Truman provides us insights into the reasoning behind their decisions. In FDR's case, two aspects of his identity shed light on the reason behind his decision: his health and cultural worldview. His health affected his psychological makeup; more specifically, it created a shift in his personality and his need for control. By examining his dichotomies, which are a unique characterization of one's cultural worldview, helps us comprehend the path that FDR took to initiate the project. In Truman's case, cultural worldview played a crucial part, specifically his military background as a soldier in WWI and how he based his decisions on what he would deem as 'morally correct.' Utilizing the lens of identity allows us to comprehend the psychological mechanisms behind a leader's decision-making process, and given today's political climate, it is imperative to understand.
    
    Author: Katie Titherington (University of Leicester)
  - Considering nuclear weapons as Benjamin's 'great criminal'
    
    In his ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin describes the power of forms of violence that exist outside of law. He suggests that such violence threatens law, comparing it to the ‘great criminal:’ one who performs great violence and garners the ‘secret admiration’ of those who witness their actions. However, they are admired because they can perform such violence outside of law, not for their violent results.
    
    While the acute fear of nuclear weapons has progressively diminished since the Cold War, they have consistently appeared in our fiction. In particular, the narrative use in entertainment fiction, through film and television, demonstrates the power of conceptualizing nuclear weapons as an idea, and operationalizing their immense destructive capacity as a plot device. This generates a fascinating inconsistency, because there is simultaneously a shared understanding of the exceptional power of nuclear weapons and a paucity of fear of the actual devices, many of which are maintained at high alert in the ‘real world’, presenting a constant and continuous threat to our right to life.
    
    As more states and global institutions recognize nuclear weapons as illegal, their continued existence in the ‘real’ and fictional worlds suggests they have become Benjamin’s ‘great criminal’ and have ‘aroused the secret admiration of the public.’ If so, what threats to the global community are revealed when we recognize that the destruction of nuclear weapons actually exists beyond the laws we designed to manage them?
    
    Author: Rebekah Pullen (McMaster University)
  - Reasoning Stigmatised Identity and Behaviour in Nuclear Governance
    
    There has been a flurry of interdisciplinary works in International Relations that combine psychological and constructivist theories to argue how persuasion and rhetoric effect social change and decision making in global politics. However, the field of nuclear scholarship has largely ignored this area of research in particularly building onto ideational concepts of identities, norms, and cognition of stigmatised actors in nuclear governance. Existing literature often treat non-complaint reasoning of stigmatised states operating in crisis to legitimise deviance, assume that these states employ a relatively restricted understanding of non-compliant behavioural logics, and construct the notion of deviant political outcomes to be relatively static and non-evolving. In bridging this research gap, my paper asks: How are stigmatised states able to justify non-compliance while simultaneously stressing on their compliant behaviour with hegemonic powers in nuclear governance? In answering this question, the paper argues that to make this apparent incongruence more socially presentable, stigmatised states often connect deviant performances to a previous act of compliance to enter into normative discussions with hegemonic powers. Hence, this paper contributes to the field of International Security Studies by stressing on the fluidity of identities and discourse in nuclear governance.
    
    Author: Aniruddha Saha (King's College London)
- 271
  
  Conference event / Screening of 'Black Bauhinia' followed by Q&A session with the director and the producers QE2, Marriott
- 272
  Panel / Space, security, and foreign policies in South East Europe Endrick, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Convener: SEEWG Working group
  
  Chair: Lydia Cole (University of Sussex)
  - Towards a new global paradigm (beyond western liberalism)
    
    This presentation reflects on Early Byzantine strands of political thought (more precisely, on viewpoints developed by Priscus of Panion and Procopius of Caesarea) in tandem with Anthony Kaldellis’ depiction of Byzantium as a representative politeia. It explains how Priscus’ and Procopius’ insights concerning the Eastern Roman Empire as lawful polity could allow us to envisage a new cosmopolitan paradigm, grounded on ‘bottom-up’ institutions of political representation. This paradigm could respond to a series of limitations that characterise the present standards of international cooperation, upon which transnational projects, such as the European Union, are predicated. These standards rely much on Immanuel Kant’s viewpoints on cosmopolitanism, but also on John Locke’s theory of Social Contract, which constitutes a genealogical evolution of Hobbes’ absolutist thought that I also intend to submit to scrutiny. In short, I set out to explain how this new cosmopolitan paradigm (based on this particular depiction of Byzantium as a ‘representative’ and ‘lawful constitution’) could respond to gaps identified in the liberal canon of international relations.
    
    Author: Michail Theodosiadis (Charles University in Prague)
  - The consequences of the EU negotiations on Turkish authoritarianisation
    
    My research aims to investigate whether – and if yes, to what extent - the long discussions between Turkey and the European Union (EU) on Turkey’s accession to the EU have had any consequences – intended and or unintended – in the authoritarianisation of the country.
    
    Turkey became an official candidate to accede to the European Union in 1999. Official negotiations started in 2005. After more than 20 years, Turkey has not accessed the EU, and the country looks like an almost dead case of the EU enlargement policy (Lippert 2021). Furthermore, after an initial period in which Turkey enjoyed some democratic reforms, the country has turned into an authoritarian regime (Yilmaz et al. 2019; Arısan 2019; Özbudun 2015; Tolstrup 2015; Adas, 2006).
    
    To some extent, the authoritarianisation of Turkey might appear a ‘violation of expectations’ (Curini & Franzese, 2020). This is because talks for acceding the European Union should impact constructing a well-functioning market economy and a solid and democratic state through the politics of conditionality. The EU cannot legally force candidate countries into good governance, but they should help governments’ behaviour through incentives and persuasion (Van Hüllen, 2012). Furthermore, existing literature shows that the requirements asked by the Union to gain membership have been historically positive (Vachudova 2006).
    
    All these reasons induced me to believe that looking at the intended and or unintended consequences of EU negotiations on the Turkish political regime might provide an innovative contribution, considering that the international dimension of Turkish authoritarianisation has received little attention (Kutlay 2020, Baykan 2018, Somer 2016).
    
    Author: Massimo D'Angelo (Loughborough University London)
  - The regional component of the far-right vote: An insight from rural Greece
    
    Most studies on far-right voting have highlighted structural factors for the electoral rise of far-right parties in Europe focusing on the aggregate level. However, a more careful look at the regional level reveals a more complicated picture. Studies, for instance, have shown that micro-exposure to refugees at the municipality level can reduce support for far-right parties even if the effect of overall migration on the electoral rise of far-right parties may be positive. In Greece, a country that underwent a crisis on multiple levels (economic, political and socio-cultural) in the 2010s, an extreme-right party with neo-Nazi characteristics—Golden Dawn (GD)—made its way to the parliament. This attracted worldwide scholarly interest which, nevertheless, centered on the national level and used large-N samples. Such studies do not explain the paradox of Eastern Peloponnese (i.e. Lakonia and Argolida), a region with low immigration, no contact to refugees, low unemployment, and some of the highest percentages for Golden Dawn. Lakonia, in particular, was GD’s stronghold from 2012 to 2015. This paper shifts the focus from the national to the regional level and from the aggregate to the individual. Drawing on original data from open-ended interviews with GD voters from Eastern Peloponnese and Athens, it aims to unveil far-right voters’ perceptions regarding key issues, such as the influx of immigrants and unemployment. By so doing, it disaggregates major factors that were tested on the national level and adds nuance to existing explanations regarding the electoral behaviour of far-right voters. Some of its findings are that immigration is more important a factor than the economy in regions with low numbers of foreigners and that chauvinism is a central component of protest voting. The findings of the paper make a contribution to the literature of far-right studies by introducing the factor geography and by relying on ethnographic methods for data collection.
    
    Author: Sofia Tipaldou (UC Berkeley)
- 273
  Panel / Technology and the practice of international relations Tweed, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: ISET
  
  Chair: Terilyn Huntington (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
  - Trust in AI: Visions of Artificial Intelligence Securing Governmental Interests
    
    In light of the development of artificial intelligence (AI), governments have focused on the regulation and funding of technologies for both military and civilian purposes. Finding themselves in a global competition, the European Union, China, and the United States have presented innovation policies which lay out their visions of AI. We argue that, despite different innovation cultures and institutional settings, visions of future AI development by the three governmental actors are all shaped by their perceptions of human-computer interaction and interest in guaranteeing security. Our analysis shows that across governmental documents, AI is perceived as a capability which can be used to enhance (supra)national interests while anticipated risks can be managed. This correlates with human-centered perceptions of technology and assumptions about human-AI relationships of trust, implying notions about interpretability and human control. We connect to interdisciplinary debates of critical security studies, human-computer interaction and Science and Technology Studies to gain a better understanding of innovation politics embedded in economic competition. Governmental visions of technology pose a relevant issue to the identity-security nexus in IR as they reflect both affective and instrumental accounts of trust that can inhibit efforts to control developments and offer grounds for cooperation based on common perceptions.
    
    Authors: Bao-Chau Pham (University of Vienna) , Anna-Katharina Ferl (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)) , Stefka Schmid (TU Darmstadt)
  - Videogames and environmental activism - creativity and optimism in spite of catastrophe
    
    Videogames are perhaps an unlikely site to explore questions of engendering positive encounters with environmental activism. This paper explores the scope of progressive social engagement and resistance through the exploration of videogames as forms and sites of resistance. At one level, games have been made which productively create spaces for social protest alongside the production of games that are specifically designed to offer positive alternatives to present capitalist practices. The interactive nature of the game itself is thus integral to building a progressive form of politics and resistance to our present trajectory. At another level, activists have used existing game spaces as sites of political protest and activism, either through participation in game spaces and/or critical engagement with the media through social media. Here, therefore, the game-space is used to offer critique and is used as a site of hope and optimism in relation to the environment. What this paper demonstrates, however, is that a framing of progressive environmentalism is relatively underdeveloped within the medium – the environment often remains an arresting backdrop which alludes to impending catastrophe rather than the articulation of a productive alternative which offers optimism and hope within world politics.
    
    Author: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  - The limitations of the ethical guidelines established by international organisations and Western researchers for digital surveillance technologies in the COVID era: focusing on the analysis of the Safety Band Policy in South Korea
    
    From the start of the COVID-19 public health emergency, many countries tried to control the coronavirus by introducing various countermeasures, including digital surveillance technology. In order to respect human rights, many Western countries and several international organisations established ethical guidelines because various government countermeasures for controlling infectious diseases may infringe upon individuals’ rights and their liberty (Starr, 1984; Choi, 2016). South Korea, which established itself by introducing strong and rapid measures such as widespread testing, digital tracking, and quarantine (Lee, 2020), decided to introduce electronic bracelets, namely the Safety Band Policy (SBP) in April 2020 to intensify the monitoring of those who break the quarantine rules. There were concerns and criticism over the policy threatening individuals’ fundamental rights and freedom, but the South Korean government continued with the implementation of the policy, and without any relevant ethical guidelines in place.
    
    The aim of this study is to explore the ethical issues surrounding the SBP, evaluate the appropriateness of the policy based on ethical guidelines, and identify its limitations when adhering to the ethical guidelines proposed by international organisations or Western researchers in the evaluation of the policy implemented in an Asian country. In order to identify any issues related to the topic and evaluate the policy, documentary research involving a literature review and policy research was conducted. In particular, this study utilised the value-critical approach analysis (Rein, 1983) to evaluate the SBP based on the ethical guidelines proposed by WHO, UNICEF, and researchers from Oxford.
    
    The findings revealed that the SBP is not a timely and necessary measure, lacks proportionality and regulations for data protection, and does not have sufficient legal grounding. Regarding the limitations of the application related to the ethical guidelines, the findings uncovered several points: firstly, the existing ethical factors (codes) of most ethical guidelines did not fully match the more practical problems associated with the SBP, so a few ethical elements had to be deleted or added based on its contextual use in Korea; secondly, most ethical guidelines did not reflect the architecture of technology in Korea (centralised, GPS based, and mandatory ones) that are different to those of western countries (decentralised, Bluetooth, and voluntary ones); thirdly, the kinds of digital technologies that had been used for controlling COVID-19 were different from country to country, so ethical guidelines or discourses regarding some of the technologies, such as electronic bracelets, did not exist. The findings imply that governments and researchers should scrutinise the level of systems for establishing ethical guidelines, or at least develop social debate regarding the ethical problems faced by each country or region to minimise the disparity regarding the ethical use of digital technology and to enhance international relations and cooperation.
    
    Reference
    Choi, E. K. (2016) Ethical responses to public health emergencies: The 2015 MERS
    outbreak in South Korea, Korean Journal of Medical and Ethics, 19(3), pp.358-374.
    Lee, M. S. (2020) Fragmentary thoughts about code of conduct and risk communication to prevent and control COVID-19 in Korea, 2020, Korean Journal of Health of Education and Promotion, 37(1), pp.103-107.
    Rein, M. (1983) Value-critical policy analysis. In D. Callahan and B. Jennings (Eds.), Ethics, the social sciences, and policy analysis (pp. 83-111). New York: Plenum Press.
    Starr. P. (1984) The social transformation of American medicine, New York: Basic Books.
    
    Author: Saebyoul Yun (University of Edinburgh)
  - Illusions of inclusion: Fintech in Africa
    
    Can fintech deliver on its promise of achieving financial inclusion in Africa? In this paper, I argue that the heady optimism around fintech is over-enthusiastic. Underpinned by the concept of sustainable financial inclusion, I review the fintech landscape in the West African and Southern African regions. I focus specifically on mobile money, and cross-border remittances, which I posit fit more accurately within Western-shaped imaginaries of modernity and inclusion. Whereas, in real terms, two primary issues obfuscate true inclusion. First is the intensifying digital divide. The narrowing of the digital divide has, ironically, deepened the gulf between those who have access to sophisticated technologies that allow them to use fintech solutions and the majority that do not. Second, the data governance rivalry between the EU, China and the US has complicated the landscape in which African countries have to innovate. Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of mobile money applications and African fintech unicorns. Still, those at the base of the pyramid have yet to reap the rewards of this disruption. Rather, shape-shifting firms and better-resourced citizens enjoy the fruits of the increased digitalization of the financial sector.
    
    Author: Odilile Ayodele (University of Johannesburg)
- 274
  Panel / The role of social media and technology in social conflict Kinloch, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism
  
  Convener: Political Violence, Conflict and Transnational Activism Working Group (BISA)
  
  Chair: Anastasia Shesterinina (University of York)
  - Rebel Loyalties: Rethinking loyalty and how it functions in violent groups
    
    This paper explores loyalty dynamics in violent groups. First, it challenges the way the concept of loyalty is currently used in studies of terrorism, insurgency and civil war. It then puts forward a new conceptualisation of loyalty, distinguishing it from related terms, that is analytically useful for the study of loyalty in violent groups. The paper then explores how loyalties can be constructed, reinforced and altered at different stages of an individual’s involvement in a violent group. This includes not only internal organisational practices and experiences but also factors external to the organisation that may impact group member loyalties.
    
    By placing loyalty at the centre of analysis – a concept that has up to now received very little scholarly attention – this paper offers fresh insights into rebel group dynamics. While many studies seek to explain what drives individuals to engage in or disengage from violent groups, this research offers a nuanced understanding of who or what individuals are loyal to and what causes those loyalties to develop and change.
    
    Keywords: loyalty, political violence, group dynamics, terrorism, insurgency, civil war, rebel groups.
    
    Author: James Hewitt (University of St Andrews)
  - Netflix and Kill: The Influence of Popular Culture on Anti-Technology Extremism
    
    Anti-technology extremism – or Neo-Luddism – is on the rise. As the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions promise to transform society, different extremist ideological milieus – among them, Insurrectionary Anarchism, Eco-Radicalism, and Eco-Fascism – have progressively taken a more radical stance towards technologies. Despite different narratives and end goals, these milieus have found a common inspirational figure in Theodore J. ‘the Unabomber’ Kaczynski. Kaczynski’s intellectual and operational influence on the contemporary Anti-Technology Movement is, indeed, quite palpable. As Fleming has recently argued (2021), Kaczynski’s thought was, in turn, a synthesis of the works of Jacques Ellul, Desmond Morris, and Martin Seligman. Yet, while the intellectual origins of anti-technology extremism have been the subject of scholarly inquiry, the influence of popular culture has been largely neglected. As novels, series, movies, and other cultural artefacts depicting dystopian future technological societies have mushroomed in the last decades, uncovering the influence that popular culture exerts on the Anti-Technology Movement could offer a refreshing analytical perspective and contribute to our understanding of the origins and prospects of anti-technology extremism.
    
    Authors: Aristidis V. Agoglossakis Foley (University of St Andrews) , Mauro Lubrano (University of Bath)
  - Human Rights after Information Politics?
    
    Since the mainstream human rights movement rose to prominence in the late-1970s, both knowing about and doing human rights has been marked by a very particular mode of activism: information politics. As practice, information politics operates by mobilising ‘thick rivers of fact,’ with the aim of shaming governments into reform. Much contemporary human rights practice thus combines a commitment to positivistic forms of knowledge-making that construct empirical ‘facts’ about violations, and a conviction that the mobilisation of these facts can, through shame, modify government behaviour.
    
    In recent years, however, the rise of far right, populist governments has engendered both the ‘retreat’ of shame as an operative concept in global affairs and nourished a growing ‘post-truth’ suspicion of facts. The present conjuncture thus represents a crisis for human rights that is not only political but also an epistemological problem regarding our ‘machineries of knowing.’ And while it might be tempting to hold onto the safety of facts, this article follows scholars across Science and Technology Studies and Media Studies in suggesting that such a move relies on established hierarchies between legitimate and illegitimate or politically contentious knowledge that will only reinforce this crisis. The paper contends that at the present moment it is therefore necessary to reimagine information politics and the epistemologies underpinning it.
    
    Pursuing this objective, this paper brings together Donna Haraway’s work on ‘situated knowledges’ and Maurizio Lazzarato’s writing on ‘counter-expertise’ to develop a more speculative and perspectival approach to human rights information. The paper outlines the ways in which the proposed approach furnishes information politics with a more democratic epistemology that is adequate to the increasingly authoritarian and post-truth conjuncture.
    
    Author: Josh Bowsher (University of Sussex)
  - Just Another Brick in the Wall? Facebook users in Israel and narratives on the conflict with the Palestinians
    
    Narratives have a significant role in times of conflict, as they provide justification and explanation to the conflict, its eruption, dynamic, and the desired solution (Bar-Tal 2007, 2013). Therefore, they are an important target for change, when promoting inter-group reconciliation (Salomon, 2004). Social media is one of the channels for constructing and disseminating those narratives, and it is seen nowadays as an important player during conflicts. Compared to traditional media, these platforms have potential to be more pluralistic, as dominant actors can be challenged by alternative actors with less resources and visibility (Fuchs, 2010). As a result, social media users can be exposed to alternative narratives in the context of the conflict.
    
    The paper aims to study the role of narratives in social media during conflicts, by focusing on the audience, social media users. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews with social media users in Israel, the study examine how they learn about the conflict with the Palestinians through the online platforms; how they interpret, engage with, and perhaps even disseminate narratives about the conflict and the other group; and how they think that those narratives influence on their views on the conflict. The findings and their Implications will be discussed.
    
    Author: Dana Guy (University College Dublin)
- 275
  Panel / The spatiality and relationality of security Waverley, Marriott
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Alice Finden , Tom Pettinger (University of Warwick) , Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  
  Chair: Michael Lister (Oxford Brookes University)
  
  Discussant: Michael Lister (Oxford Brookes University)
  - Making ‘space’ for resistance in critical analyses of security
    
    What does resistance look like for critical terrorism studies? How do methodological approaches influence normative commitments? This abstract responds to these prompts in the CST working group’s call for conference papers.
    
    Drawing on a survey of all articles published in Critical Studies on Terrorism over fifteen volumes, I note narrowness in the methods critical terrorism scholars employ to assess ‘terrorism’/counter-terrorism. Discourse analytic methods occupy a central place in critical terrorism studies, accounting for the majority of CSoT’s empirical treatments. Yet, the version of ‘discourse analysis’ operationalised in CSoT is an overwhelmingly linguistic one. Amongst hundreds of articles employing discourse analytic methods, only a handful approach ‘discourse’ in multimodal terms. That is, in terms of the diversity of ‘modes’ by which discourses take shape. I consider conceptual grounds for a ‘multimodal’ approach to discourse analysis: rooted in the writings of Michel Foucault, whose scholarship occupies a similarly central place in CSoT literature. I end with thoughts on the sensitivity to resistance and oppositional agency multimodal discourse analysis affords. I demonstrate this sensitivity in an assessment of multimodal data from Northern Ireland: considering spatial and visual materials associated with Belfast ‘peace walls’. The peace walls manifested state security discourses in their effects for Belfast spatiality. However, they also represented a canvas for paramilitaries and local groups to reimagine Northern Irish politics – in a way that diverged from state discourses. Not only can multimodality bring methodological plurality to CTS, then. It can also illuminate how non-state agents take ownership of, or reimagine, ‘security’.
    
    Author: Michael Livesey (University of Sheffield)
  - ‘Do we really need that here?’: Counterterrorism Training in Remote Communities
    
    As part of the UK’s Prevent Strategy, a wide range of public sector officials have taken part in WRAP (Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent) training courses, designed to explain the Prevent Duty and the signs of radicalisation. The existing literature has largely focused on WRAP training in the context of urban areas, but little attention has been paid to the delivery of training in more remote and island communities where concerns about extremism or terrorism may be less pronounced. This paper examines the delivery of WRAP Training in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, based on fieldwork in this area. It highlights that trainers would rely on local examples to overcome remote complacency. It examines concerns that the materials provided to them were insufficient and overly scripted, and the trainers’ decisions to deviate from or improve these resources themselves. It also examines the organic activity trainers undertook to improve their training sessions by developing their own resources and building their own networks to share best practices.
    
    Authors: Nick Brooke (University of St Andrews) , Colin Atkinson (University of the West of Scotland)*
  - Memorializing (violent) resistance to authoritarianism: Challenges and tensions at Portugal’s Museum of Aljube Resistance and Freedom
    
    Discussions of the future are interconnected with how the past is made sense of. Museums play a critical role in constituting and communicating meanings about historical issues and connecting them to contemporary and future concerns. In this paper, we examine the memorialisations of resistance movements, especially resistance to authoritarianism, as exemplified at the Museum of Aljube Resistance and Freedom in Lisbon, Portugal. Utilizing multiple autoethnographic perspectives of the authors as museum visitors, along with analysis of documents that outline the formation and establishment of the museum, and the museum’s social media presence, we outline how the museum makes sense of violence, resistance, authoritarianism, and war. Our paper makes two main arguments: one, a methodological argument on the role of autoethnography to understand meanings of violence and war, based on the authors' experiences of visiting the museum both as newcomers to and familiar with Portuguese history, respectively. Two, a theoretical argument regarding tensions about representing historical resistance movements and their uses of violence. We conclude that, in order to present a human rights-centric account of resistance, the museum has avoided grappling with violent resistance as a method of effecting change and challenging authoritarianism.
    
    Authors: Priya Dixit (Virginia Tech) , Albertina Magalhães (University of Coimbra)* , Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL)
- 276
  Panel / Understanding actors in peacebuilding Tay, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University)
  - Exploring temporality and spatiality of graffiti in a changing Belfast
    
    Graffiti as a method of public messaging is not a new phenomenon in Northern Ireland. The broad use of paint and marking through murals, kerbstones and written tags deliver territorial and political messages. Through a temporal and spatial analysis this paper illustrates that historical divisions and contemporary political challenges through graffiti. However, the city of Belfast is changing, and so is the graffiti. The type of graffiti, and the message it sends, has changed in terms of acceptance in different spaces across the city. Through a spatial and temporal analysis, this paper demonstrates an understanding of the way in which graffiti interacts with the changing city, and its understanding of violence, avoidance, memorialisation and current social issues in conflict-contexts. The key questions this paper aims to answer are: what is accepted in different spaces? How have these acceptances change over time? How does this connect to how the communities themselves have changed?
    
    Authors: Birte Vogel (University of Manchester) , Dylan O'Driscoll , Eric Lepp (Waterloo)*
  - “What we give up to get where we’re going”: Compromise in the institutionalising of youth peace advocacy
    
    In 2015 the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS), formalising an agenda for positive youth participation in peace and security. However, youth peace activists and their allies have been leading the building peace and addressing security risks long before this institutional recognition. In institutionalising youth issues the UNSC has positioned itself at the centre of long-ongoing debates about the role of youth in peace and security responses. For youth who have had their work and voice routinely dismissed and ignored, the presence of an institutional agenda provides opportunities, but it can also foreclose possibilities. For institutions, the inclusion of youth enables new activities, but also requires challenging long-established norms of youth exclusion.
    
    While compromise is often invoked to explain and describe institutionalising processes of advocacy efforts, this paper asks what compromise actually looks like for advocates and institutions in global governance. It forwards the concepts of critique, complexity, and consolidation as constitutive components of compromise to examine these processes of institutionalisation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with youth and adult advocates working on the YPS agenda; a critical analysis of UN and civil society documents related to the agenda; and over 200 hours of participant observation at virtual advocacy meetings, high level forums and public events, the paper explores encounters between the (often) radical agendas of youth peace advocates/activists and the institutionalising processes of the UN. Without homogenising either ‘youth’ or ‘institutions’, it argues that a more nuanced understanding of compromise enables a clearer picture of the affordances and limitations of youth agency and institutional agendas for peacebuilding.
    
    Author: Helen Berents (Griffith University)
  - Investigating the Role of Religious Women in Informal Peace-building Processes in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Comparative Case Study
    
    Low representation and participation of women in formal peace processes is a global challenge. The UNSCR 1325 resolution has been a concerted global effort towards tackling and addressing this challenge by mainstreaming gender into formal peace-building approaches, operations and processes (UN Security Council 2000). Whilst the UNSCR 1325 resolution has made some significant strides towards sustainable peace in widening women’s participation in formal peace processes and addressing gaps in gender equality within the global South (Hudson 2005), there is broad consensus amongst scholars that the resolution has been limited in its effectiveness within these contexts and has fallen short in achieving its aims (Hudson 2021, Alder 2021, Walker 2003, Jacobs 2002). Part of this is because not much attention is given to women’s engagement and participation at informal levels as the focus tends to be on efforts at more formal levels where women tend to be under-represented. In this regard, religious women tend to be an under-represented group whose roles during conflict and periods of transition are often under-studied and under-explored yet they are critical. In addressing this gap, the research questions I seek to explore are: How do religious women perceive and experience conflict? How does their gender and religion shape their experiences of, and agency in, conflict and during periods of transition? And, how do their efforts at the informal level influence or shape formal peace processes? To address these questions, I will draw on Helmke & Levitsky’s (2004) typology of informal institutions in comparative politics which I will apply to a comparative case study of four Sub-Saharan African countries which have a strong presence of religion and which have experienced conflict and/or undergone critical periods of transitions over the previous decade. These countries are: Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda and Nigeria. I will further draw on intersectionality and postcolonial feminist theoretical frameworks. The study will be based on ethnographic material which will be garnered through participant observation with women’s religious groups, in-depth interviews of women and religious leaders, as well as focus groups. The main contribution of the study will be in developing a conceptual and analytical framework in the form of a conflict analysis by theorising conflict from the bottom-up in centering its analysis on the experiences of religious women.
    
    Keywords: Gender, conflict, peace-building, religion, de-coloniality, intersectionality, Sub-Sahara Africa, global South.
    
    Author: Kuziwakwashe Zigomo (University of Kent)
- 277
  Panel / Violence, humanitarianism and gendered resilience in Africa today Ledmore, Hilton
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Jessica Hawkins (University of Manchester)
  - Gendering Counter-Terrorism: Silencing or Silence of Male Victims of CRSV in North-eastern Nigeria
    
    As part of the multiple gendered and sexual harms, there are developing arguments over the silencing of male CRSV victims (Touquet and Schulz 2021). While some argue that gender norms and a lack of agency contribute to victims' silence, others argue that victims exercise agency by speaking about their experiences, even if they are not heard (Touquet 2022) also known as "disempowered speech" (Hornsby 1995) or their words are lost in translation or filtered (Touquet 2022) or entextualised (Briggs 1993). We argue, however, that despite these improvements in CRSV theories and their implications for survivors, little is known about how the co-existence of normative and non-normative sexualities leads to the silence of male CRSV victims.
    
    This study is based on interviews with male CRSV victims, as well as security agents and aid workers in terrorism-affected northeastern Nigeria, where many survivors recounted refusing to share their experiences in order to avoid being revictimized, stigmatised, shamed, and humiliated for failing to measure up to normative masculine expectations that reject and discredit homosexuality. Building on Steven Pierce's theory that perceived cultural patriarchy and heteronormativity in Northern Nigeria are trademarks of Islamic theological reforms, and that normative and non-normative sexuality coexist and are mutually constitutive in Northern Nigeria (Pierce 2007). Although secrecy or being discreet about one's sexuality enables the co-constrictiveness of normative and non-normative sexualities because it is typically considered as a hallmark of good behaviour (Pierce 2007). As a result, we claim that silence by male CRSV victims is founded in cultural behaviour on the necessity for same-sex identities to be silent about their experiences or avoid displaying non-normative sexual encounters, which is perceived as an example of modesty. However, we propose that these cultural practises contribute to the silence of male CRSV victims, as they show their agency through silence as a form of negotiating societal acceptability, disregarding the sexual violence, or defending themselves from revictimization.
    
    This adds to the ongoing conversation on whether or not male CRSV victims are being silenced. Moreover, While being mindful of the complex sexual subjectivities of women during conflicts or in post conflict societies, understanding the contextual subtleties of CRSV against men may enable researchers and policy makers to gain a better grasp of the CRSV's complicated and multifaceted gender and sexual harms in different countries.
    
    References
    Hornsby, J. 1995. Disempowered speech. Philosophical topics 23 (2): 127–47
    Briggs, C. 1993. Metadiscursive practices and scholarly authority in folkloristics. Journal of American Folklore 106 (422): 387–434
    Touquet, H., (2022) Silent or Inaudible? Male Survivor Stories in Bosnia–Herzegovina, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 29, Issue 2, Summer 2022, Pages 706–728,
    
    Touquet, H., & Schulz, P. (2021). Navigating vulnerabilities and masculinities: How gendered contexts shape the agency of male sexual violence survivors. Security Dialogue, 52(3), 213–230
    
    Steven Pierce, S. (2007) “Identity, Performance, and Secrecy: Gendered Life and the “Modem” in Northern Nigeria” Feminist Studies, 33, (3): 539–565.
    
    Author: Emeka Njoku (University of Birmingham)
  - Demystifying reintegration: A Legal Education plus Trauma-informed therapy multicentred randomised-control trial to improve communities’ reintegration of former terrorists in Nigeria
    
    Terrorism is an issue of global concern. In line with the UN Secretary-General’s report ‘Our Common Agenda’, which looks at global challenges, one of the major proposals was the need to promote peace and prevent conflict. Of utmost significance in achieving this aim is the reintegration of former Boko Haram terrorist and their families, which appears challenging due to the neglect of the communities in the reintegration process, the trauma suffered and human rights abuses. Despite the important role of communities, to date, there appears to be no randomised control trial that has investigated the use of Legal Education plus Trauma-informed Therapy (LETIT) in aiding community acceptance of former terrorists in Nigeria. Our study makes an original methodological contribution which aims to assess the feasibility and acceptability of LETIT in fostering reintegration in Nigeria. 150 participants were recruited from Bornu (Maiduguri n=50), Adamawa (Yola n=50) and Plateau (Jos n=50). The participants were randomised to the LETIT intervention or the Media intervention. Outcomes were accessed using Trauma Screening Questionnaire (TSQ), Attitude towards repentant terrorists (ATRT), and Legal Awareness scale. The study found very good retention rates, with participants’ satisfaction higher in the LETIT group compared to the control group. We also found that the LETIT intervention appears effective in improving community acceptance of ex-offenders’ reintegration into society and, by extension, relevant for reducing reoffending.
    
    Authors: Dung Jidong (Nottingham Trent Univesity)* , Tarela Juliet Ike , Evangelyn Ebi Ayobi (National Open University)*
  - Women’s Adaptive Resistance and Non-neoliberal Resilience in Zimbabwe’s Urban Informal Sector
    
    It has been argued that resilience and covert and overt resistance have become essential for informal sector actors to withstand challenging economic and political conditions in urban Zimbabwe’s informal sector (Moyo, 2018; Musoni, 2010). I suggest that adaptive resistance and non-neoliberal resilience became primary mechanisms for survival in the informal sector. ‘Adaptive’ refers to the ability to use personal characteristics and networks to mitigate adverse circumstances, and ‘resistance’ implies the refusal to comply with the livelihood-threatening approaches of the authorities. Adaptive resistance acquired several dimensions – economic, political, spatial, gender, and age. Women in Harare’s informal sector successfully devised multidimensional adaptive resistance strategies by diversifying their income streams, navigating the political patronage networks, and using the physical space around them to earn an income. Their adaptive resistance, however, is different from the neoliberal concept of resilience which focuses on ‘individual responsibility’ (Joseph, 2013) as it is aimed at their survival and fight for a livelihood in adverse economic and political conditions. Adaptive resistance should be seen as a survival strategy and not a manifestation of neoliberalism as women in the informal sector expect a meaningful and positive return of the state into their lives.
    
    Author: Kristina Pikovskaia (University of Edinburgh)
  - Discomfort and difficult subjects: Reflections on teaching and learning in Humanitarian Studies
    
    This presentation draws on Boler and Zembylas’ explorations of Pedagogies of Discomfort to reflect on the teaching of difficult subjects in Higher Education. We provide examples from our work with undergraduate and post-graduate students of Humanitarianism as they tackle issues such as displacement as a consequence of war, gender-based sexual violence and processes of justice and reconciliation. We reflect on the use of texts and stories of the lived experience of conflict and disasters, exploring how pedagogical choices shape students’ knowledge and understanding but also, importantly, the ethical landscape of their engagement. Recognising and working with discomfort as full of pedagogical possibility, we will argue, is critical to ensuring students engage with these challenging issues sensitively and to acknowledging the emotional dimensions of such work. For scholars of international studies, we aim to connect theory and practice through critically engaged reflective practice that ensures difficult subjects such as conflict and violence are not avoided in the classroom environment.
    
    Authors: Helen Underhill (Kindling)* , Jessica Hawkins (University of Manchester)

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BISA 2023 Conference