BISA 2025 Conference

Name: BISA 2025 Conference
Start: 2025-06-17T09:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-06-20T20:45:00+01:00
Location: No location set

17 Jun 2025, 09:00 → 20 Jun 2025, 20:45 Europe/London

Description

Welcome to the event management area for #BISA2025. Here you can register for our conference in Belfast. We look forward to welcoming you at BISA 2025.

BISA conferences

conferences@bisa.ac.uk

Tuesday 17 June
- 18:00 → 19:30
  
  TU 17 Conference event / Public lecture by Professor Cynthia Enloe: What feminists reveal when they investigate masculinities: The case of military 'manpower'. Although this is open to all conference delegates you need to register in advance to attend at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/what-feminists-reveal-when-they-investigate-masculinities-tickets-1095161801429?aff=oddtdtcreator. The public lecture is organised in partnership with the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, the Centre for Gender in Politics and the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science at Queen’s University Belfast. Larmor Lecture Theatre, Physics Building, Queen’s University Belfast
  
  Speaker: Cynthia Enloe (Clark University)
- 19:45 → 21:30
  
  TU 17 Conference event / Postgraduate Network and first-timers meet up - Sponsored by the Postgraduate Network Upstairs function room, Sunflower Pub, 65 Union St, Belfast, BT1 2JG
Wednesday 18 June
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / An exploration of the race, colonialism and the binaries and hybridities of IR theory Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Leila Mouhib (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
  - The Problems with Studying Race and Critiquing Racism in International Relations
    
    Entering into the 21st century (especially since its second decade), IR discipline witnesses a boom in researching and critiquing how the global colour line cuts across crucial sites of practices, such as multilateralism and beyond. However, critiques of these critiques of racism in international relations also arise and often lead to murky debates. This is partially due to a lack of consensus and precise definitions of what one means by racism (as opposed to Whiteness or Westerncentrism). This paper aims to make sense of current critiques of racism in multilateralism (and in international relations more generally), by problematizing the central issues commonly underlying existing scholarship, i.e., the twin issues of analytical (or conceptual) binary and practical essentialism. I define analytical binary as the tendency to work with, rather than deconstruct, the existing non-White/White binary in analysis; practical essentialism is understood as the practice of reducing race to – and essentialising race as – biological differences, which are often operationalized as skin colour. It is “practical” in the sense that this normally does not happen at the conceptual level but at the level of research operationalization, which more often arises in quantitative research with large N data.
    
    This article considers Eurocentrism as the root cause that give rise to the twin issues, which in turn leads to certain hurdles. Eurocentrism manifests in three primary ways, first, the analytical marginalization of non-Euro/American practices, the uncritical extrapolation of Euro/American-generated critical theories to non-Euro/American contexts, and the negation of non-Euro/American agency, especially the agency of perpetration. With the case of
    China-Africa interactions, this article argues that the twin issues of analytical binary and practical essentialism cause three analytical and normative hurdles, i.e., the over-simplification of reality, the compromising of the strength of critiques, and the constraining of emancipation potentials.
    
    Author: Yang Han (University of Oxford)
  - The Limits of Global IR: Essentialist Categories, Domains of Marginalisation, and Hybrid Communities
    
    Global International Relations (GIR) is grounded in a West/non-West binary on which its denunciation of Western dominance builds. This concerns both the dominance of Western thought and perspectives and dominance in publication patterns. However, this paper argues that the binary is unsustainable and that GIR’s reliance on it perpetuates and produces forms of marginalisation in knowledge production and scholarship. Perspectives and communities that do not fit the categories of West/non-West fall in between the cracks of the divide, and dominance in current-day publication patterns is confined to a small groups of states rather than simply Western, as the paper demonstrates through a survey of prominent IR journals. Second, it identifies and discusses three domains in which marginalisation manifests itself in GIR as a consequence of its reliance on the West/non-West binary: the liminal semi-periphery, the West subaltern, and the non-West subaltern. To illustrate, the paper discusses the Indo community and one of its prominent members, Tjalie Robinson, as an example of a hybrid group that falls outside the scope of dominant, traditional IR and GIR. The experiences and perspectives of the Indo community force the IR discipline to reconsider the meaning and implications of core concepts and approaches of IR and defining moments of international history, including decolonisation, the historiography of political independence movements in former colonies, feminist critical security studies, and the construction of European identity and multicultural society. The paper concludes that globalising IR requires the abandonment of essentialist categories in both GIR’s conceptualisations of the world and in its categorisation of IR scholars.
    
    Author: Quintijn Kat (Ashoka University)
  - Securing the ‘non-Western Self’ in the ‘Western-led’ international order: Russian, Iranian and Chinese political discourses.
    
    The construction of ‘the West’ as spearheading the ‘rules-based order’ in political discourse – whilst actionably contravening it – implicitly pits the ‘Western Self’ against ‘non-Western Others’, contributing to uncertainty in the international order. By calling it "Western-led," this language infers an authority over global norms that excludes and marginalizes non-Western actors, prompting them to resist and reject this framing. Group identities drawn up by dominant Western powers – such as ‘liberal Self v. illiberal Other’ – provide Othered actors with the rhetorical weapon to attack the so-called Western-led international order; rejecting the order is not only politically convenient for certain actors to scapegoat the West, but it can align with a regime’s own legitimation narratives and unify them in their grievances. This paper explores how civilizational language mobilised by political leaders ostracised from the West – namely Russia, Iran and China – serves to secure their own identities by questioning the perceived legitimacy of the Western-led international order. That is, how do select global actors define their identities within the order vis-à-vis the West; and how do these conflicting identities contribute to ongoing uncertainty in international relations?
    
    Author: Uma Muthia (Monash University)
  - The “international” in/as movement: tracing colonial and racial hierarchies in the circulation of knowledges, ideas, and bodies
    
    The ontology of ‘the international’ has been a central object of debate in International Relations (IR). In grasping and defining the substance of IR, scholars have often resorted to different and conflicting ideas and conceptions of the nature of the ‘international’ as a socio-political domain of reality. In this paper, we argue that the idea of ‘the international’ in IR theorisation largely has been associated with notions of movement, motion, and circulation, either implicitly or overtly. We engage with theoretical approaches such as International Political Sociology (IPS) and Global Historical Sociology (GHS), showing that there is an unspoken consensus that bodies, ideas, and knowledges need to somehow transgress and transcend the boundaries of locality and ‘circulate’ in order to be taken seriously by the discipline as essentially ‘international’ phenomena. Engaging with post/decolonial theory and critical race studies, we explore the theoretical and political limitations and consequences of this almost intuitive association of the idea of the ‘international’ with ‘circulation/movement’ in IPS and GHS. Our central argument is that the continuous conflation of ‘international’ and ‘movement’ erases colonial and racial hierarchies concerning ‘who’ and ‘what’ gets to move and circulate in international politics, reinforcing IR’s white and colonial locus of enunciation.
    
    Author: Tarsis Brito (London School of Economics)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Anticolonial Solidarities and Resistance: Learning from Ireland to Palestine Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable addresses the horizontal and temporal learning and building of community that occurs between and across anticolonial movements. In speaking to the current moment of the Palestinian anticolonial struggle, this roundtable highlights the importance of transnational support in maintaining the resilience and vitality of anticolonial movements. This session explores the history of anticolonial connectivities, focusing particularly on Ireland and Palestine, as well as other sites of support. We hope to observe and discuss what travels between geographies of resistance, from the prisoners’ movement strategies, to anticolonial literature, and symbols, stories of heroes and other structures that sustain struggles over time. What does looking across sites of anticolonial struggle tell us about international relations more broadly, perhaps sitting at odds with the methodological nationalism that at times dominates the discipline. In this way, this roundtable collectively investigates anticolonial imaginaries and futures, and the ways in which solidarities allow to re-think contemporary political, economic and social relations.
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Rabea Khan (Liverpool John Moores University)
  
  Participants: Azadeh Sobout (Queen's University Belfast) , John Narayan (KCL) , Jack Mcginn (LSE) , Catherine Chiniara Charrett (University of Westminster) , Ghadir Awad (University of Michigan)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Applied History and British Foreign Policy Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: Jamie Barrow Gaskarth (The Open University)
  
  Chair: Hillary Briffa (King's College London)
  
  Discussant: William James (NTU Singapore)
  - Wagging the dog? Blair, Clinton, and the ‘Special Relationship’ in the Kosovo crisis
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Jonathan Esty (Johns Hopkins SAIS)
  - 1956 and all that: Is the Anglo-American alliance immune to political crises?
    
    N/A
    
    Author: William James (NTU Singapore)
  - The Anglosphere aphasia of AUKUS: Race, military superiority, and silent whiteness
    
    Frontier wars and recurrent coalition intervention rendered racialised military superiority affectively co-constitutive of the ‘old Anglosphere coalition’, now AUKUS. Yet, mainstream International Relations theories are either wilfully blind, or actively hostile, to the inclusion of race as a formative influence on world order building (Acharya 2022). This is compounded by the silence of AUKUS’ political elites, quiet on the formative role of racialised military superiority for alliance cohesion, despite AUKUS aiming to extend military supremacy through advanced technology. The ties that bind remain unspoken: Anglosphere aphasia pervades. To counter a troubling ‘silent whiteness’ (Crenshaw 1997), this article theorises the affective politics of racialised military superiority, and the productive role played by Anglosphere aphasia, to conceptualise the ‘Anglobal security ontology’ of AUKUS. To do so, it combines narratological analysis of racialised violence with constructivist analysis of contemporary security silences. The article draws on thirty-five elite interviews and a multi-stage, comparative computer-aided narrative analysis. The article calls for a research agenda and open public/policy debate on the problematic underpinnings of AUKUS – an unspoken formative ontology of recurrent, imbalanced, and racialised conflict.
    
    Author: Jack Holland (University of Leeds)
  - British Grand Strategy: The Implementation Gap
    
    Defence and security reviews are important public manifestations of British grand strategy. Commentary on these reviews overwhelmingly focuses on the preparation and content of outcome documents; but pays very little attention to implementation. The structures of accountability for many reviews are opaque. Personnel changes, compounded by shifting policy agenda and bureaucratic reorganizations, make tracing the extent and efficiency of implementation difficult. This paper seeks to ask whether implementation matters to grand strategy.
    Many of the reviews perceived most favourably are those with the weakest mechanisms for implementation. This carries the risk that our perception of whether a review was a ‘success’ or not may be inversely related to how far it actually brought about tangible changes in practice. The authors analysed each UK defence and security review since 1998, data for analysis comprised 3 workshops and over 60 interviews with senior officials. Drawing on insights from public policy and governance theory, as well as strategic studies, the paper will argue this has important implications for understanding the purpose of these reviews, how they link with different ideas about the nature of grand strategy, and how policy and strategy interrelate.
    
    Authors: Jamie Barrow Gaskarth (The Open University) , Maeve Ryan (King's College, London)*
  - Between Lancaster and Tokyo: British Strategy toward Japan in the Cold War
    
    The tension between domestic politics and foreign policy has been a perennial issue in national strategy. Be it the failed 2013 vote on Syria, Brexit, or UK-China relations, the United Kingdom has often found its strategic interests abroad undermined by political trends or public opinion at home in recent times. Such a dynamic was particularly prevalent in Britain’s strategy towards Japan in the post-war world. Whilst the country was not high on the list of Britain’s priorities during the Cold War, Japan’s wartime legacy, its geographical location, and its growing economic power meant British policymakers did establish a general strategy on how to approach the country, and how to integrate it into wider British interests.
    However, that same economic power, combined with a struggling British economy and bitter memories of Japan’s wartime activities, resulted in policymakers consistently having to factor in strong lobbying at home that often pushed for actions which ran counter to British foreign policy aims. Whether it was the textile mills in Lancaster, the yawning trade deficit or British car companies being swamped, prioritisation of objectives and often creative solutions had to be conducted to mitigate the tensions within British strategy.
    
    Author: William Reynolds (King's College, London)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Arts and Conflict: Bodies, Landscapes, and Generations Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable at the intersection of arts and conflict centres on the ways in which artists and the arts offer insights into the complexities, histories and legacies of war. Engaging with scholars and artists, we aim to explore the generational impacts of war through traumas, bodies, nature and histories. Bringing together research across contexts, methods and scholarly spaces, the roundtable will centre on the role of the arts to illuminate theoritical and empirical questions surrounding the study of war and its aftermath. Using artistic mediums to communicate, teach and research the complexities of conflict we hope to expand the interdisciplinary conversation of art and war studies, opening new dialogues with artists and scholars alike.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Pauline Zerla
  
  Participants: Rachel Kerr (King's College London) , James Gow (King's College London) , Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University) , Zala Pochat (King's College, London) , Anna Katila (City University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Control and Resistance in Global Health Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Convener: GHWG Working group
  
  Chair: Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
  - Greening the European Health Union: Practices of Resistance in the age of the Anthropocene
    
    Over the past years since the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Union has turned in to an increasingly relevant space for the shaping of health policy. Refoms under the banner of a stronger European Health Union however, have to a great extent focused on protection and preparedness against health threats such as pandemics. As the EU is moving towards a new Commission mandate, practices within the body of civil servants and other overlapping networks are pushing for different kind of reforms, integrating more holistic and green perspectives on health and security.
    
    Drawing on critical security studies and the notion of the so called anthropocene, this paper traces practices reatriculating different concpetions of what it means to be healthy and safe in times of tumulous change and environmental crises.´The material draws on interviews and key documents from the EU institutions.
    
    Author: Louise Bengtsson (Swedish Institute of International Affairs)
  - Sex and vaccines: The mpox epidemic and the limits of queer solidarity
    
    The 2022/23 mpox outbreak disproportionately affected queer people, and in particular gay men (upwards of 90 percent of cases in some contexts). When this became apparent very early in the epidemic, queer communities in the Global North were quick to mobilise, disseminating information in queer networks, altering sexual behaviours, and, when vaccines were made available, getting vaccinated. This mobilisation echoed – and undoubtedly was influenced by – past experiences with HIV/AIDS and in many ways emblematised forms of queer solidarity, advocacy, and community empowerment. Yet, simultaneously, the privilege of access to vaccines cannot be divorced from the wider global political economy of pharmaceutical products that leads to the neglect of diseases like mpox and other so-called neglected tropical diseases. In this paper, based on interviews with key informants working in queer advocacy spaces, I explore the forms of queer solidarity that arose during the outbreak (and place this in historical context), while interrogating the limits of this solidarity in the global context of medicine and vaccine haves and have-nots.
    
    Author: Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London)
  - The Emergence of Neuro-surveillance
    
    Recent investigations by international organizations such as UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Council into the detrimental effects of neurobiology have raised disturbing questions as to the power of this technology. This includes non-invasive techniques that can decode brain activity and extract information. Given that technology in the security sector is often many years ahead of what is publicly known, the implications of these factors reveal a situation where the brain is increasingly becoming transparent to security actors. This has opened up new ways in which the brain cannot only be read in terms of thoughts and emotions but also written to. The ability to write to the human brain so inducing involuntary thoughts, emotions and actions into innocent subjects opens up a terrifying new realm of surveillance, manipulation and torture. The effects of this new form of control including the psychological breakdown of the targeted individual and the complete deniability of those responsible replicate that of previous forms of surveillance including the organized or gang stalking of targeted individuals. This paper represents the first steps towards an investigation of this subject that may reveal the ultimate extension of sovereign power into new neurobiological domains.
    
    Author: Christopher Long (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Human Rights, Inequality, and Public Health: An Integrated Approach
    
    This paper critically examines the interconnectedness of socioeconomic inequality, public health, and human rights, arguing that disparities in health outcomes are deeply rooted in systemic inequalities perpetuated by governance structures that favor certain groups. Drawing on diverse case studies, it illustrates how these inequalities disproportionately impact marginalized populations, restricting their access to essential healthcare and exposing them to heightened health risks. The paper contends that addressing public health inequities requires more than medical interventions alone; it necessitates policies grounded in human rights principles and an understanding of the social determinants of health, such as economic stability, education, and living conditions. By integrating human rights into health policy, societies can work toward reducing health disparities and promoting a fairer distribution of resources and opportunities. This analysis contributes to ongoing scholarly debates on global health, inequality, and human rights, advocating for a transformative approach where health systems actively address inequality at its roots. The paper highlights that only through a rights-based, integrative approach can public health policies foster sustainable improvements in health outcomes, advancing a more just and inclusive future for all.
    
    Author: Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Critical approaches to feminist foreign policy: ethics, politics, security, justice and diplomacy Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
  - On co-optation, or: Making feminist foreign policy palatable
    
    ‘Everyone should understand feminist foreign policy!’ A ruling relation governing the practice of feminist foreign policy (FFP) in the German Foreign Office is that feminism and, specifically, FFP must be made accessible and palatable because they are not naturally so. This chapter interrogates this by asking for whom is feminist foreign policy inaccessible and why? What is at stake? And which strategies are used to make FFP more palatable and accessible? This chapter finds that FFP is seen as inaccessible to the wider German public due to their conservative political stance; diplomats because FFP potentially challenges key diplomatic relations; men because FFP is widely understood as a policy for women; and the so-called Global South because ‘it’ is seen as less progressive. At the same time, all these groups are positioned as important actors in the realm of FFP, either as recipients (Global South), implementers (diplomats), or decision-makers in the Foreign Office (male staff). Strategies for making FFP more accessible and palatable include reducing ‘the abstract’; using already established concepts such as diversity while avoiding contested terms like intersectionality; and privileging operationalising FFP over conceptualisation. As a result, more radical understandings of feminism and FFP are co-opted. Hence, FFP is not as transformative as it is made out to be
    
    Author: Karoline Faerber (Kings College London)
  - Feminist Foreign Policies at the Face of Climate Emergency
    
    In 2014, Sweden launched the world’s first feminist foreign policy (FFP), promoting gender perspectives and women’s rights across its international engagements. While numerous governments have followed suit they have not as yet placed climate change and emergency at the centre of their FFPs. Environmental degradation and global warming exacerbate societal issues, widen disparities, and increase food insecurity, resource scarcity and displacements – disproportionately affecting marginalised communities, including women. Despite this, climate change remains underexplored within existing FFPs. Building on my PhD research in this paper I examine how FFP states understand climate change and gender inequality and the extent they are currently developing gender-responsive climate policies. Importantly, what lessons can we learn to inform FFPs, and how can those insights be implemented in the future? Designed as a case study, the paper scrutinises the intersection of gender and climate considerations in the policies of FFP states. Using Bacchi’s WPR approach to analyse interviews with foreign policy experts and policy documents concerning gender (in)equality and climate change, this project will produce key knowledge of how these challenges are understood in current frameworks.These understandings ultimately shape whether policies find adequate solutions to a climate crisis threatening lives and ecosystems. My research moves beyond women’s rights and gender justice, suggesting lessons for inclusive solutions to the greatest challenge of our time.
    
    Author: Hanna Walfridsson (Edinburgh)
  - The good citizen's dilemma: balancing feminist norms with pragmatic realities in foreign policy
    
    Canada's reputation on the international stage has historically been that of a “good state”, committed to liberalism and multilateralism (Lawler 2013), a status that afforded it comparative advantages and a certain standing as a middle power (Potter 1996). The adoption of a feminist foreign policy (FFP) can be seen as an extension of this identity, with some states adopting FFPs to demonstrate their allegiance to the international liberal order and advance their interests (Thomson 2022, Zhukova et al. 2022).
    However, this liberal order has long been considered in crisis (Ikenberry 2018). Recently, Canadian foreign policy has also taken a historic turn, with the Minister of Foreign Affairs announcing a more pragmatic stance (Paquin & Blais 2023) - a change that may signify a departure from Canada’s previous reliance on normative posturing.
    This paper explores the effect of these emerging tensions on the development and promotion of Canadian feminist foreign policy by analyzing how perceived changes at the international level affect the articulation of feminism within a shifting normative identity in foreign policy. The analysis is based on discourse analysis, drawing on interviews with political and administrative staff within Global Affairs Canada and members of civil society involved FFP implementation. It also includes an examination of official documents published since 2017 in various foreign policy sectors (security, aid, development and trade).
    This research contributes to the literature on the evolution and resilience, if applicable, of feminist norms within a transforming international liberal order.
    
    Author: Emma Limane (Université de Montréal)
  - Rethinking Foreign Policy: Indigenous and Feminist Approaches
    
    IR and foreign policy literatures have begun paying increasing attention to ideas and practices that challenge the conventional approaches to foreign policy. While Feminist foreign policies by states, such as Canada, Mexico, and formerly Sweden, have sought to place gender equality squarely at the centre of foreign policy, Indigenous/First Nations approaches to foreign policy, a new and novel concept, foregrounds principles such as relationality, Indigenous rights and justice. Although Feminist and Indigenous scholars have respectively explored such approaches, these literatures have emerged largely in isolation. With a view of bridging this gap, our analysis draws on Native American Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance to explore the intersections – both theoretical and policy – between Feminist and Indigenous foreign policies. We seek not only to advance the theorising of ‘alternative’ foreign policies, but also identify lessons learned for more effective approaches and strategies mobilised by Feminist activist and sovereign Indigenous peoples.
    
    Authors: Outi Donovan (Griffith University, Australia) , Julie Ballangarry (Griffith University)
  - Feminist foreign policy and militarism - an abolitionist approach
    
    This paper aims to investigate the inherent tension between adopting a feminist Foreign policy (FFP) and the Continued acceptance and reliance upon militaristic solutions in traditional foreign policy and IR more generally. As purely ‘theorized,’ untainted by the compromises of politics, a FFP would introduce a fundamental shift—an epistemological if not ontological challenge to what is included in foreign policy and how states govern their international relations. While early FFP practitioners relied upon the ‘3rs’, rights, representations, and resources, feminist scholars have argued to push FFP further and to move it past a very neo-liberal framing as positive change. Therefore, scholarship argues for an FFP that challenges the gendered, classed, and racialized hierarchies upon which the international system has been built. It fundamentally rejects militarised solutions and would seek to make social change that moves humanity away from violence and militarism. Yet, reality does not often reflect Theory. As more states adopt an FFP, these policies are arguably siloed in deeply gendered ways and do not do the ontological transformation that a ‘truer’ ffp would demand. One of the biggest challenges to the wholesale, as opposed to siloed, adoption of a FFp remains a state’s commitment to military solutions and the continued existence of militarist ideas as valid and necessary. This raises a question around ‘Authenticity,’ which has been defined as the level of coherence between internal and external state policies (B-R, Duncanson, and Gentry 2022), but which should be expanded to evaluate the coherence between the adoption of FFP and other pieces of a state’s foreign policy. We employ an abolitionist approach in conducting our study.
    
    Authors: Caron Gentry (Northumbria)* , Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Emotions, Subjectivity and Fantasy Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)
  - Ontological security and the cruel optimism of a bordered world
    
    One of the most pressing challenges facing the planet is that our current border imaginaries are unsustainable. By the end of 2022, for reasons including conflict, globalisation, and climate change, over 281 million people currently live in a country other than their country of birth, either out of choice or necessity. Furthermore, borders obscure the racialised violence that maintain them and harm those whom they nominally seek to protect; by creating a fear of the monsters who live out there, borders limit our social worlds and opportunities in the name of protection and security. Despite this, people remain emotionally attached to borders.
    
    Drawing on ontological security studies and Lauren Berlant’s work in cultural theory, in this paper I argue that our prevailing relationship with borders is one of cruel optimism. That is, our attachment to borders, while comforting, inhibits our ability to live a full life. I put cruel optimism in conversation with ontological security studies – the psychological need for security of the “self” – to better understand the emotional needs that that borders satisfy in order to begin to envision how these needs can be otherwise satisfied in a way that is able to realise more ethical and less violent alternatives to our bordered world.
    
    Author: Ben Rosher (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Self-trust, fantasies, and knowledge: the emotional dimensions of US’s India Policy
    
    The paper will investigate the US’s contemporary foreign policy approach towards India through the lens of ontological security. It has been suggested that from the US’s perspective, a “special relationship” with India helps it mitigate anxiety arising out of uncertainties of power transition and the concurrent rise of emerging powers (Chacko, 2018). However, this paper argues that such suggestions capture only part of this complex relationship. Despite being on an upswing, the relationship still suffers from Cold War-era misgivings and mistrust, as well as from routine distress situations arising out of geopolitical misalignments on a range of international issues, from the Russia-Ukraine war to the sanctioning of Iran. How is it, then, that a relationship so uncertain in itself manages to become a vector of certainty in an era of uncertainty? To answer this question, this paper draws on the literature on self-trust, fantasies, and knowledge, focusing on the emotional underpinnings of knowledge creation, particularly knowledge about the significant other. It argues that knowledge provides a sense of certainty about the other, but this requires that the self trusts that the knowledge it has about the other is accurate. Fantasies become a part of the same knowledge-creation process, where fantastical narratives about the other allow mental simulations of the other’s likely future behaviour. By engaging in all such processes, this paper argues, the US gains a sense of certainty vis-à-vis India’s potential behaviour, reinforcing the durability of its India policy. This paper will make an important contribution to the literature on ontological security in international relations by revealing how self-trust, knowledge, and fantasies work together to provide a sense of certainty in a largely uncertain relationship.
    
    Author: Shalabh Chopra (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
  - Boredom in World Politics: Call for Transgression Against the Liberal International Order?
    
    In this paper, I study how boredom emerges in, builds up through and influences the course of international politics. Based primarily on Heidegger’s theorization of boredom as a fundamental mood inherent to human existence, I conceptualize boredom as a negative affective condition associated with the discomfort with feeling determined by and stuck in time, a sense of lost subjectivity, and the perceived deprivation of capacity for purposeful action. The crisis of agency signaled by this mood calls for a solution to mitigate its felt ramifications, which inclines actors toward transgressive behavior. Informed by this theoretical framework, I demonstrate that a globally traceable mood of boredom has been growing and discuss the subversive implications of the widespread attunement to boredom for the liberal international order (LIO).
    
    Diplomatic norms and practices typically originate from inscrutable antiquated European customs that mean little, if anything, to contemporary representatives of states and international institutions. These repetitious and highly procedural methods commonly seem pointless, as the world abounds with deadlocks in negotiations, political stalemates, and frozen conflicts, many of which involve decades of restless waiting and standstill. International organizations grapple with accusations of political impotence and irrelevance with their unwieldy bodies wrapped up in the mesh of their own rules and bureaucracies, incapable of rising to the needs and challenges of the day. Let alone resolving ongoing impasses, the largest international organization, the United Nations, has become another source thereof with its fruitless resolutions, barricaded budgets, and obsolete structural hierarchies. The global economic system and international law further snarl up world politics’ tangle with their stringent rules, anachronistic standards, unavailing methods, and bodies with overlapping jurisdictions. In this context, I argue that political elites’ growing boredom with the convoluted and ineffectual ways in which things (do not) work may prompt acts of transgression against the LIO.
    
    Author: Batur Ozan Togay (Koç University)
  - The fantasy of the successful intervention: Ten years of intervention failure in the Sahel and the meaning making of staff
    
    What explains international interveners' persistent attachment to liberal intervention policies that have consistently failed to stabilise conflicts? This paper argues that the Lacanian concepts of fantasy and object cause of desire hold significant interpretive value. Through 65 interviews and an analysis of the meaning-making narratives of EU personnel working on Europe's decade-long intervention in the West African Sahel, this paper argues that staff are attached to the desired object of 'the successful intervention' and the fantasy that (European) intervention can and will one day stabilise conflict somewhere, given the right conditions. EU staff in the Sahel pursue this fantasy despite being confronted daily with the failure of their programmes and escalating conflict, as well the dearth of ‘success stories’ in interventions globally – from Afghanistan to Somalia and DRC. To sustain their fantasy, EU staff invest significant energy into ‘learning lessons’ from the Sahel to improve future interventions. This investment enables the resilience of liberal intervention; through constant focus on ‘what went wrong’ personnel are able to go on solving the puzzle of how to make interventions effective, and can ignore or suppress the question of ‘why is European intervention beneficial at all?’ The lack of concrete benchmarks for judging when an intervention has failed creates ambiguity that keeps the fantasy alive; if staff can keep plausibly denying failure, they can keep intervening in the hope of one day attaining the successful intervention. Using psychoanalysis, this article provides a novel insight on how liberal intervention ideology is sustained through the everyday meaning making narratives of staff members.
    
    Author: Katherine Pye (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Environmental injustice and inequality in a degrading climate Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow)
  
  Chair: Leah Owen (Swansea University)
  - Building the 'armed lifeboat' – how do Global North institutions develop militarised border regimes in a changing climate?
    
    This paper seeks to map the process by which violent border policies emerge in response to perceived climate threats, through a detailed case study of Frontex and its public-facing security documents.
    
    Drawing on a range of scholarly explanations – from Malm’s (2021) evocation of an explicit, consciously ethnonationalist/ethnocapitalist ‘fossil fascism’, to the Transnational Institute’s focus on more immediate profit motives, and ‘the business of building … the global climate wall’ (2019, 2021) – I focus on the development of border militarisation at Frontex. By tracing the development of Frontex’s ‘security outlook’ – as captured by its ‘Annual Risk Analysis’ documents, as well as its more recent ‘Strategic Risk Analysis’ publications – I argue that there is neither an overt programme of xenophobia, nor simple profit-seeking opportunism. Rather, they reflect a ‘garbage-can model’ (Cohen et al, 1972) of organisational development – a gradual (or in some cases, strikingly rapid) accretion of disparate policy priorities that ratchet towards increasingly militarised policies, as climate is attached to existing perceived threats and vulnerabilities.
    
    In doing so, I seek to illustrate how xenophobic and militarised policies have – and likely will continue to – come about in response to perceived climate threats.
    
    Author: Leah Owen (Swansea University)
  - Epigenetics, and the Lager Politics of Air Pollution, and Public Health in Postgenomic India
    
    Every year, especially in the winter months, most northern cities of India, particularly Delhi, experience air pollution levels that exceed permissible limits, challenging public health norms. Despite this, ordinary people often perceive it as a routine event, and no collective actions are observed, raising questions about the underlying causes of this inaction. The relationship between air pollution and public health is understood within the field of epigenetics in the postgenomic era. The underlying assumptions in the process of correlating public health and air pollution mutually shape the larger politics of the environment and health in this era. This paper attempts to explain the political nature embedded in the perception of air pollution in relation to public health, using the framework of Science and Technology Studies (STS), by examining contemporary and earlier debates on this relationship. The visibility of air pollution depends on scientific processes, whether assessing its severity or its impacts on human health. The findings suggest that what constitutes air pollution is not strictly defined, relying on sociotechnical imaginaries, with its impacts often expressed by scientists in terms of probability and indirect effects. The concepts of public health and air pollution appear to be shifting from collective responsibility to individual responsibility.
    
    Author: Santosh Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Social Reproduction and Nature in the EU’s Growth Model after the Green Deal
    
    Starting from the constructivist premise that the ideas embedded in policy matter, this paper draws on feminist and ecofeminist and political economy frameworks to analyse on how care and reproduction, in natural and social reproductive spheres are constructed in EU Economic policy after the European Green Deal (EGD).
    
    Feminist analysis of the EU’s growth model before the EGD highlighted how EU policy entrenched created gender inequalities, apportioning disproportionate burdens and disadvantages on some actors, namely women and racially minoritised/marginalised people whilst simultaneously maintaining a ‘strategic silence’ (Bakker 1994) about these outcomes. These analyses consistently drawn on an expanded concept of the economy which identifies the social reproductive sphere as the foundation of the productive economy, premised on a reproductive subsidy (Heintz 2019; Nelson 2006; Mies 2014; Cavaghan and O’Dwyer 2018; Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022; Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014). However, the feminist political economy (FPE) frameworks used to date to analyse EU economic policy, elide some of the most important economic relationships which the Green Deal rhetorically claims to alter – namely the role of nature and our reliance upon it.
    
    To fill this lacuna this paper draws on Ecofeminist political economy frameworks. These throw our attention onto the hegemony of instrumental and exploitative epistemologies that elide the necessity of care and reproduction – not only in relation to social reproduction but also our natural world (Abazeri 2022; Battacharyya 2018; Brand 2022; Fraser 2021; Andreucci and Zografos 2022; Salleh 2020; MacGregor 2021). Findings expand feminst perspecties on the EU’s economic model and make an ecofeminist contribution to existing literatures querying the potentials and limits of green growth and de-growth models (Hickel 2018; Saqer 2023; Mahon 2019; Schmelzer 2016).
    
    Author: Rosalind Cavaghan (Flax Foundation/University of Edinburgh)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / From War to Peace: The Politics of the Troubles Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Michael Cox (London School of Economics)
  
  Chair: Michael Cox (London School of Economics)
  - The Consequences of Britain’s Longest War
    
    This panel revisits the ‘troubles’ and asks a series of questions about how and why those years of war shaped the politics of the British Isles, how peace was eventually negotiated and discusses the consequences of that settlement. Experts reflect on how education, society and policing were affected towards the end of the ‘troubles’. It also asks what lessons can be learnt for other divided places.
    
    Author: Martin Thorp (Loughborough University)
  - ‘Reflections on How Wars End’
    
    This panel revisits the ‘troubles’ and asks a series of questions about how and why those years of war shaped the politics of the British Isles, how peace was eventually negotiated and discusses the consequences of that settlement. Experts reflect on how education, society and policing were affected towards the end of the ‘troubles’. It also asks what lessons can be learnt for other divided places.
    
    Author: Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (Loughborough University)
  - Lessons for another place: From Belfast to Seoul
    
    This panel revisits the ‘troubles’ and asks a series of questions about how and why those years of war shaped the politics of the British Isles, how peace was eventually negotiated and discusses the consequences of that settlement. Experts reflect on how education, society and policing were affected towards the end of the ‘troubles’. It also asks what lessons can be learnt for other divided places.
    
    Author: Wooyun Jo (Loughborough University)
  - Integrating Education in the Shadow of War
    
    Integrating Education in the Shadow of War’
    
    Author: Fiona Stephen (LSE)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / India: Politics, Diplomacy, Development Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Convener: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
  
  Chair: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
  - Green Developmentalism: Hydropower and the Politics of Energy Transition in India
    
    This paper examines the political economy of hydropower in India since its reconfiguration as 'green' energy in the early 2000s. Despite India's significant hydropower potential, two-thirds of which remains untapped, the sector has faced challenges in attracting private investment. The paper explores the historical context and policy changes that have shaped the industry, highlighting the Indian state's role in framing hydropower as a climate-friendly alternative, and de-risking investments through the loosening of regulatory hurdles and dilution of environmental regulations. It thus characterises the emergence of a particular brand of “green developmentalism” in India that, while reflecting broader trends in de-risking a hyper-financialised sustainable development, takes a distinctive form. By critically analysing the state's strategies to promote hydropower, the paper contributes to broader debates on sustainable development within the imperative of energy transitions, and the political dynamics of infrastructure investment in the global South. It also addresses the complexities of multi-scalar governance, security concerns, and the interplay between domestic priorities and global environmental narratives. The research is grounded in extensive fieldwork and interviews, providing a nuanced understanding of India's hydropower policies since the sector’s rebranding as green energy, and their implications especially for the politics of India’s energy transition.
    
    Authors: Vasudha Chhotray (UEA)* , Harsh Vasani (FLAME University)
  - Getting a Glass of Water in the Global City: Institutions, Identities and Inequalities in Urban India
    
    The paper delves into how global cities or world-class cities have been imagined in the Global South. Such aspirations have urged many cities to better integrate with the world economy and pushed many service delivery institutions (SDIs) to embrace market-friendly reforms. In the context of water supply, SDIs have neatly balanced the need for efficient market-friendly reforms and implementing populist schemes crucial for re-election of incumbent governments. However, a sizeable portion of the working class such as migrant labourers typically remain outside such a framework. This was seen most clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic and the national lockdown that followed when water - for washing, cleaning, or drinking, was not accessible to thousands of people. With raging inequalities along status, caste, and class, this paper outlines how SDIs (in)directly reproduce inequalities and identities. Such imaginings have deep repercussions for the 21st-century globalized world.
    
    Author: V Mark Gideon (University of Delhi)
  - Post-Colonial India, The World Bank, and the Agrarian Roots of International (Dis)Order
    
    At the dawn of the post-war international order, the challenges of food and agriculture were formidable. Seeking to tackle the contradictions of surplus production and starvation, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was created as a vehicle for bringing order to the world’s fields. Yet 20 years after its inception, the FAO was suddenly eclipsed by the World Bank as the world’s leading global governance institution for agricultural development. While initially hostile to food and agriculture as a target for development assistance, the Bank’s approach to lending turned on a dime, with enormous sums poured into agricultural assistance and lending for small farmers. This curious transformation in both Bank policy and international development more broadly has been radically neglected within the IR/IPE disciplines. I argue that the catalyst for this transformation in Bank policy can be traced back to the entanglement between fields of postcolonial India and the geopolitics of development during the early Cold War. Those at the helm of the emergent ‘American Century’ put every effort into stabilising India’s development as the counterweight to the peasant-led communist revolution in China. I therefore read India’s road to development as refracted by a mutli-scalar process of ‘passive revolution’. While US officials (including those in the Bank) sought to engineer a passive revolution of ‘developmentalism’ across the Global South, Indian officials were pursuing their own passive revolutionary strategy for the purpose of nation-building. Early encounters between the Bank and Indian development officials brought to light the indispensable role played by the countryside in the making of (inter)national order. Yet in seeking to implant capitalist ‘rationality’ into Indian soil, rural development policy undermined the twin goals of equity and stability among rural classes. The paper thus brings into sharper focus the long-neglected agrarian roots of post-war international (dis)order.
    
    Author: Rowan Lubbock (Queen Mary)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Lost in Transition? Movements and Contestations from South East Europe Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Convener: SEEWG Working group
  
  Chair: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)
  - How Does an Extractivist Frontier Come to Being? The Case of Lithium Mining in Serbia
    
    This paper is concerned with the emergence of a new lithium extractivist frontier in Serbia, and the local resistance to it. The Jadar Project was set to become the biggest lithium mine in Europe, an element widely understood as crucial to the so-called green transition as a key component of batteries used in electric vehicles. However, following mass protests, the project was cancelled in January 2022 before the construction began. While long histories of extractivism mark a divide between the Global South where mining takes place, and the Global North where the materials are enjoyed, the urgency of the green transition reveals core/periphery relations as dynamic and expanding towards new extractivist projects closer to “home”. Within this context, the mine occupies a liminal space where Serbia is referred to as being at the “doorsteps of Europe” by the mining company Rio Tinto which at the same time promises to position the country as “the European hub” for green energy. Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the article investigates how extractivist frontiers emerge and are contested in Serbia. I argue that this frontier is always in an ongoing process of becoming, embedded in multiple forms of attachment and resistance that emerge around local relationships with the soil, land, history, and memory, and their reverberation and remobilisation in the struggle against lithium mining.
    
    Author: Nina Djukanović (University of Oxford)
  - Kosovo and the EU: communicative discourses between an emerging state and a state-building Union
    
    The primary objective of this research is to analyse the communicative discourses between the domestic actors in Kosovo as an ‘emerging state’ and the EU as a ‘primary state-builder’ in a semi-peripheral European country such as Kosovo. Building on the theoretical frameworks of communicative action, critical discourse analysis and decolonial/postcolonial studies, this study will critically assess the domestic agency in Kosovo and the dynamics of communicative discourses between Kosovo as an ‘emerging state’ and the EU as a ‘primary external state-builder’ through discourse analysis. The EU has been identified as one of the main external state-building actors in Kosovo and since March 2011 it has taken on the role of facilitating the Kosovo-Serbia Dialogue on a ‘comprehensive normalisation of relations’ between the two countries. Kosovo remains in an in-between state of being unequivocally European and permanently detached from the EU. This entanglement of EU’s state-building efforts and Kosovo’s projected European future opens up new avenues for further research into narratives, discourses and communication among the two.
    The study is motivated by the growing schism between the EU and Kosovo in their respective communicative discourses about ‘Europeanness’ and the ‘European path’ for Kosovo. This research attempts to explore how the communicative discourses between Kosovo and the EU have changed over time as manifested around key critical junctures, particularly since the current Kosovo government took office in 2021. It will adopt the decolonial study approach in assessing the Kosovo domestic agency and its potential to act, communicate and relate to the EU. The key research questions are: how
    
    Author: Fjolla Ceku Sylejmani (University of Graz)
  - Green Activism in the Era of re-democratization: does a centre-left Government in Power Make a Difference?
    
    Recent research on air pollution activism in Poland has documented evidence that despite the “green conservatism” bordering on “environmental nativism” (Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021) of the Law and Justice government (2015-2023), political elites reacted positively to air pollution activism.activism (Malby et al., 2024). This was explained in terms of the concurrence of (i) a particular (health) framing of air pollution, (ii) the devolution of power and responsibility for managing air quality to the regional government, (iii) the circulation of new information and data, and (iv) the emergence of new actors and activist strategies (Subašić, Birch, et al., 2024). Since the 2023 election of Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) and the commitment of the Tusk government to restoring liberal democracy and returning to a ‘European’ and liberal path, we examine whether the pace of progressive environmental reform has increased, and the capacity of activists to influence political elites has been augmented (Malby et al., 2024). Focusing on climate activist campaigns, we interrogate a core assumption within the scholarship on green activism, namely that progressive environmental agendas are most likely to occur under green, alternative and liberal (GAL) governments, whilst traditional, authoritarian and nationalist (TAN) governments are commonly associated with climate change scepticism (Lockwood 2018, Colvin and Jotzo, 2021). We also use the case of Poland during the PíS and PO governments to consider the extent to which environmental issues can still be said to exacerbate left-right polarization. We employ a qualitative approach combining results from a scoping focus group and a series of interviews conducted we plan to conduct in early 2025 across Poland.
    
    Authors: Marek Jozefiak (Uniwersytet Warszawski)* , Mate Subašić (Manchester Metropolitan University) , Adam Fagan (King's College London)*
  - Transitional justice and threat perceptions: Under what interactional contexts is transitional justice viewed as zero-sum?
    
    Intractable conflicts and post-conflict processes, including transitional justice, are seen as zero-sum situations. People view war crimes trials, reconciliation processes, reparations and many of the other central processes of transitional justice as zero-sum, where one party’s gains is offset by other parties’ losses. This can cause an aversion to the process, since individuals tend to avoid situations they believe to be zero-sum. Regardless of whether or not it is, viewing transitional justice as such can aggravate interactions between people involved in the process. This stunts the conflict transformation process by building a shallow peace. Studies show that zero-sum beliefs are asymmetric, context-specific and defined by identity politics, but this has yet to be applied to transitional justice. We do not understand under what conditions zero-sum beliefs become salient and no studies have examined zero-sum constructs of transitional justice interactionally. This paper ask, under what interactional contexts is transitional justice viewed as zero-sum? The paper draws on data from twelve inter-ethnic focus groups conducted with youths on topics of transitional justice in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia. The paper uses Conversation Analysis, a micro-analytic approach to the analysis of turns in conversations, to analyse zero-sum beliefs in transitional justice interactions. The findings show that in some situations, transitional justice is viewed as zero-sum, but in others it is not. This depends on the regional and national political context surrounding the discussions; the perception of who individuals believe is gaining; and, whether the discussion is focused on macro issues (tribunals, recognition of statehood and lands swaps) or micro, everyday issues. By understanding when zero-sum beliefs are salient in interactions, we better understand under what conditions individuals are prepared to engage in transitional justice. This can help better promote the development of a deeper, more sustainable peace.
    
    Author: Ivor Sokolic (University of Hertfordshire)
  - Unequal Knowledge Production in EU Enlargement Relations: A Look at the Use of Hegemonic Narratives in Shaping European Integration in the Western Balkans
    
    Unequal Knowledge Production in EU Enlargement Relations: A Look at the Use of Hegemonic Narratives in Shaping European Integration in the Western Balkans
    
    Author: Victor Jimenez Rivera (Tallinn University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Military encounters I: sites and spaces of CMS Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Laura Mills (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Laura Mills (University of St Andrews)
  - Opening the black box: algorithmic regimes of targeted social media advertising in international security
    
    In 2022 tech "entrepreneur" Elon Musk bought the social media networking site Twitter and subsequently renaming it X. There has been a growing interest in the number of advertisers who have been leaving this platform and what this might potentially do for its market value. As a result of social media's significant global reach, a variety of recent articles have examined the issue of targeted advertising in the context of democracy and misinformation (Bay, 2018). Social media companies have been highly selective in the information shared about how their targeted advertising works, leaving gaps and making this an ontological and epistemological puzzle. This article aims to render this less of a “black box,” specifically with regards to advertising by actors involved in international security (broadly defined), which has up to now been less well-explored. What use, for example, might militaries make of this feature? How might arms manufacturers present themselves within these adverts? And how might people be targeted? Making use of Lee Ann Fujii’s concept of accidental ethnography, data collection for this article began in 2021, when I started to log the advertisements that I (someone with an evident security interest) began to receive. The article begins by examining the methods and politics of targeted social media advertising. It then moves on to explore the security actors targeting me, the explanations offered for targeting, and an analysis of the types of material received. Overall, it concludes that the discourses contained within targeted advertising related to international security legitimises the actors in question. With minimal information offered, the article calls for greater transparency.
    
    Author: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
  - Of Rubble, Ruins and Bulldozers: Punitive Populism, Popular Culture and The Missing Link in Critical Military Studies
    
    The article seeks to examine the under-studied interplay between punitive populism, popular culture and critical military studies within the context of the rise of authoritarianism in India. Bulldozer, seen as a formidable machine, has traditionally been conceived as a harbinger of development and urban planning. However, it insidiously symbolizes the unchecked sovereign power, used for demolishing homes of minority groups and subverting principles of justice under the current political leadership in India. The spectacle of violence perpetrated by bulldozers is crafted for visibility, to see the strong state in action against the purported enemies (minorities) for its spectator-citizens, who often hysterically
    cheer for these actions, thus serving to legitimize state response.This potent form of militarism based on revenge fantasy of an anxious majority is increasingly permeating in the iconography of right-wing Hindu nationalism with a rise in trending Hindutva pop songs. These music videos are cultural artifacts embedded with punitive themes and motifs, thus serving as conduits for cultivation of cultural consent and normative reinforcement of state violence. The article proposes bulldozer as a heuristic device to help in recalibrating our understanding of the embodied/affective/sensory politics of violence, enabling us to explore the militarized quotidian living. The article endeavors to make a conceptual contribution to expanding the scholarly interventions to critical military studies by investigating the implications of militarization as embodied in bulldozer justice campaigns and their glorification in popular culture propagated by the Indian state.
    
    Author: Ananya Sharma (Ashoka University)
  - Capturing audience and curatorial reflections on the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition ‘Northern Ireland: Living with the Troubles’ (2023-2024)
    
    The discipline of international relations has traditionally ‘under-appreciated’ museums (Van Veeren 2020), despite their role in performing global politics (Welland 2017; Lisle 2006). War museum exhibitions enact the social ordering of national cultural heritage, often sanitising the moral messiness and dark cruelty of war due to their role as shared educational spaces. Much of the critical work on museums and war focuses attention on the exhibitions’ objects and the surrounding discourses that give them meaning (Lisle 2006). We shift attention to visitor responses and reflections from curatorial and exhibition museum workers. Our study uses a ‘walking the museum’ (Thobo-Carlsen 2016) and focus group approach to examine how three different groups (British military veterans who had served in Northern Ireland, Irish community members in Manchester, and politics and history students from Salford University) engaged with the ‘Northern Ireland: Living with the Troubles’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (London and Salford, 2023-2024).
    
    The exhibition offered an innovative approach, presenting contested narratives side by side, and with explicit curator notes on why certain events or stories were chosen. In this paper, we discuss how a ‘dialogical approach’ (Caddick et al. 2019), that privileges sociability and affective encounters in the interpretation of the museum’s visual culture, not only provides insights into the museum’s representational and commemorative practices, but also values the everyday expertise that each group brings to the exhibition and their collaborative sense-making through reflections and storytelling.
    
    Authors: Jenna Pitchford-Hyde (University of East Anglia)* , Katy Parry (University of Leeds)
  - Booth Babes, Drones and Desire: Theorising the Arms Fair through (Auto)Ethnographic Fieldwork
    
    ‘Arms fairs’ are exemplary sites for studying the materialisation of the global military-industrial complex, holding the spectacular-cum-banal everyday of ‘defence business men’ as they trade military technologies. Ripe with drones and desires, these sites brim with a sexual politics endemic to corporate defence culture that takes on new forms in its encounter with bodies out of place, such as the woman researcher. In this paper I dig into the theoretical, empirical and methodological implications of my experience of the sexual politics of ethnographic research in arms fairs during 2023 and 2024, meanwhile global arms stocks hit “all-time highs” amid the ruination of communities in Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine and beyond.
    
    Conducting ‘arms fair fieldwork’ as a young woman is a process of studying-up laden with sexual violence. This violence includes subtle to direct forms of objectification and sexual harassment, denoting the racial, patriarchal and heteronormative ‘politics of desirability’ that structure men’s, women’s and genderqueer experiences in this space: ordering each body in a hierarchy of desirable vs undesirable and alpha vs beta. What does the heavily policed politics of desirability among defence business men disclose about the role of toxic masculinity in rationalising and constituting the military-industrial complex? How does this politics link with a global politics of disposability that renders certain bodies saveable and others disposable in the name of ‘security’? What can the sexual politics of the arms fair tell us about the normalisation of military-industrial interests in contemporary politics?
    
    Author: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Models of state building Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: david curran (Coventry University)
  - How 'Muscular Mediation' Ended Liberia’s Long-Running Civil War
    
    The recent theory of 'muscular mediation' hypothesizes that coercive diplomacy can end a civil war – even if it is not 'ripe for resolution' – by proposing a compromise and then coercing the opposing sides to accept it. However, in the four cases examined to date, there is not yet a documented success where this strategy both forged peace and avoided backfiring by triggering massacres. This paper tests the theory in another case, Liberia in 2002-2003, which may be the first documented success. It finds that several third parties did successfully pressure all three armed factions in Liberia’s civil war to lay down arms and accept a compromise peace agreement that has endured, without backfiring by provoking massacres. However, it also finds that these third parties acted somewhat independently, so there was not a joint 'strategy' of muscular mediation that guided them, although the evidence does confirm the theory’s hypotheses about the conditions under which coercive diplomacy can compel an equitable peace without sparking massacres. The remaining question – whether a muscular mediator can achieve such success via an intentional strategy – calls for additional case studies.
    
    Author: Alan Kuperman (University of Texas at Austin)
  - Regional conflict prevention and peacebuilding regimes: resilience in the context of global geopolitical tensions?
    
    This paper examines the extent to which regional regimes that have been developed since the 1990s to facilitate conflict prevention and peacebuilding may be resilient in the context of increased global geopolitical tensions. It develops a framework of assessing the resilience of such regimes to increased constraints and challenges arising from increased great or regional power rivalries, and the applies it briefly to assess the determinants of resilience of conflict-prevention regimes in several sub-regions, including West Africa, East Africa, and SE Asia. The paper then develop its analysis through a more detailed case study of the resilience of the regional and international mechanisms for conflict-prevention and peacebuilding in South East Europe – particularly the Western Balkans. It argues that although OSCE conflict prevention measure are largely blocked by the tensions between Russia and NATO/EU, in practice the sub-regional conflict prevention regimes established in Europe since the end of the Cold Wat are constituted by a complex of institutions and arrangements that remain functional in South East Europe; contributing to their wider resilience . Thus the increased risks of conflicts and instability in this region can still be addressed by the remains of the conflict prevention and peacebuilding regime clusters, but with better prospects for success for some conflict risks than others.
    
    Authors: Henry Smith (Univeristy of Bradford) , Owen Greene (University of Bradford)
  - Historicising International Territorial Administration After War
    
    The war between Russia and Ukraine, along with ongoing violence in Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon, raises questions about governing targeted territories after the end of war. A key approach currently under discussion is the temporary international administration of disputed areas. This model, last implemented in East Timor and Kosovo following the Cold War, represents one of the most comprehensive forms of international peacebuilding, blending peacekeeping and state-building policies to allow time for a sustainable resolution. This paper aims to historicise this maximal form of international governance by tracing a genealogy of international territorial administration and demonstrating its deep connection to decolonisation policies first introduced by the League of Nations after World War I and subsequently expanded by the United Nations. This genealogy reveals that international administrations, as well as comprehensive peacebuilding missions, have developed their policy instruments in part from the experiences of international decolonisation. The paper’s goal is to analyse the origins and evolution of external territorial administrations, with a particular focus on whether contemporary approaches to such governance reflect the original commitment to decolonisation.
    
    Author: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg, Germany)
  - Investigating the Afghanistan investigative reports
    
    The 2021 retreat of international troops and organisations from Afghanistan, following 20 years of intervention, highlighted the fragility of the intervention-backed political order and exposed its lack of legitimacy. At the same time, the deep socio-economic entanglements between foreign interveners and the Afghan society became apparent in the attempts of many Afghans trying to leave a country under renewed Taliban rule. The withdrawal challenged longstanding narratives of intervening countries as benevolent, reliable partners, prompting numerous official investigations, government and parliamentary reports. A comparative analysis of these reports—focusing particularly on the treatment of Afghan Locally Employed Staff (LES)—reveals how intervening actors view themselves as military and humanitarian forces, as well as their perceptions of Afghan society and the mission's objectives. Furthermore, we argue that these reports, despite their purported critical approaches, reflect efforts to shape dominant narratives of blame, creating distance from perceived failures while constructing notions of closeness toward certain Afghans deemed "worthy" of protection. In contrast, others are portrayed as responsible for the breakdown or as adversaries. This study draws on empirical examples from German, Dutch, UK, and US reports to illustrate these dynamics of global hierarchy making.
    
    Authors: Werner Distler , Sara de Jong (Department of Politics and IR, University of York)
  - Exposing double standards or establishing a new standard? China’s human rights discourse
    
    People's Republic of China’s approach to human rights has significantly evolved over the last few decades. While during the Mao era, human rights were largely rejected as part of the foreign policy agenda, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square events a new strategy has gradually emerged. In order to face the increasingly pressing international human rights criticism, China has made rhetorical commitments to a state-centred understanding of human rights.
    Since 1999, China is publishing the “Human Rights Record of the United States” in response to the “Annual Country Reports on Human Rights” that are prepared by the US State Department for each country in the world except the US. This paper examines the “Human Rights Record of the United States” to explore Chinese discourse on human rights rather than addressing the situation in the US. This paper argues that it serves as a counter-measurement of US dominance in the human rights discourse and more importantly to legitimise an alternative narrative that furthers China’s foreign policy through specifically its human rights agenda. This agenda diverges from established international standards and has very serious implications considering the increasing influence exercised by Beijing globally.
    
    Author: Ilia Xypolia (University of Aberdeen)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Mourning, Migration and Maturity: the politics of (un)belonging Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  This panel would continue some of the discussion on mothering from BISA 2024 and raise new issues around how we negotiate grief while working in international relations, conflict studies, youth studies, peace studies, postcolonial studies— how is this intersected by the dislocatedness associated with migration and how caring responsibilities are intensified when we are ‘out of place’. What does it mean to think of older age mothering and ageing/mature bodies/minds/selves as we navigate conferencing, ageing parents, older children, long working/commuting days, COVID aftermaths, increasing and chronic stress related illnesses and what it means to be senior or junior in academia. How does the conversation change when we look at mothering from this more inclusive, broader and deeper perspective? What does it mean to do IR in the midst of these kin and other responsibilities and conditions? What do we do when our kin is many miles away, suffering or in need? How does that affect how we think about the international and what kind of IR scholars we can or should be?
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Julia Welland (University of Warwick)
  
  Participants: Gurchathen Sanghera (St Andrew's) , Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast) , Marsha Henry (Queen's University Belfast) , Toni Haastrup (University of Manchester)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / No united Ireland on a dead planet Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  
  Chair: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  
  Discussant: John Barry (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Balancing Ireland's 'green questions': the environment and climate as preconditions of reunification
    
    In recent years, debates surrounding the reunification of Ireland have gained significant momentum, fueled by the Brexit referendum result and the electoral successes of Sinn Féin on both sides of the border. Much of the discourse has focused on the economic and political prerequisites for reunification, as well as the anticipated costs and whether these should be the primary consideration. However, the environmental and climate-related conditions that would be necessary for reunification have received little attention. This omission is particularly striking given that Ireland functions as a single biogeographic entity, divided only by a relatively recent and historically contentious political boundary. Additionally, many of Ireland's most sensitive and protected conservation areas span this border.
    
    This paper explores the divergence in environmental governance across the Irish border, examining how and why this divergence has expanded since Brexit, and what implications this has for the future of nature and climate in a reunited Ireland. By focusing on the cross-border site of Sliabh Beagh, I highlight the contrasting approaches to conservation and environmental oversight. I argue that framing reunification in terms of protected sites and priority species—rather than solely through economic arguments—could provide a more compelling foundation for reunification campaigns.
    
    Author: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  - Ecology, Economy, and Irish Unity: A Post-Growth Critique
    
    This paper adds important post-growth and ecological–economic perspectives to the growing debate on Irish reunification by placing the planetary emergency at the heart of the political economy of the issue. An account is provided of overlapping and interlinked global ecological crises, and the case is made that any argument for or against Irish reunification is ill-informed and incomplete without an understanding and acknowledgement of our stark and unstable planetary future. Moreover, this contribution to the debate presents some post-growth political economy perspectives that identify economic growth as the driver of ecological breakdown. Therefore, the Irish unity project (and all those involved in the debate, both for and against) must consider a post-growth position rooted in science-based and non-negotiable ecological realities. An ecological–economic and socio-economic critique of growth regimes, often proposed as the basis of a united Ireland economy, is presented to advance the need for a post-growth alternative.
    
    Author: John Barry (Queen's University Belfast)
  - The Emerging Politics of Rights of Nature in Ireland, North and South: Reflections and Aspirations
    
    The rights of nature, while mostly recognised in indigenous communities and Latin American countries, are no longer an exotic concept in Ireland. In 2021, the three local councils on the island of Ireland—Donegal, Derry City and Strabane District, and Fermanagh and Omagh—consecutively passed a resolution to recognise nature as the subject of rights, and hence development plans, planning decisions, and other relevant environmental frameworks. The rights of nature gained heightened attention in 2023 when the Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss in the South included a referendum on the rights of nature as part of its constitutional reform. Although the recognition of the rights of nature is essentially a political process, its implications have been predominantly explored from legal perspectives (i.e. what are the legal obligations for public authorities when nature is considered a rights-holder?). While reflecting on the current situation of the rights of nature in Ireland under shifting political and economic conditions, this paper seeks to explore how the language of rights, which has originated from human-centric and universal principles, has empowered political actors, reconfigured policy processes, and stimulated political negligence and resistance against the rights of nature. Specifically, the following topics are addressed: the construction of ‘nature’ in the rights of nature campaigns in Ireland, the empowerment of new political actors and bonds (i.e. ‘ecological solidarity’), and the dilemmas and challenges of such rights-based approaches to nature in the Irish context and their implications for peace.
    
    Author: Juneseo Hwang (The University of Hamburg)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Outer Space and the Challenges of Economic Interests, Environmental Distress, and Legal Disputes Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Sarah-Jane Pritchard (Lancaster University)
  - On the Question of Distributive Justice for the New Space Economy
    
    The dominant paradigm of Astropolitics continues to be inspired by the worldview of Political Realism. The transformations due to the involvement of private corporations raise certain normative queries, which the dominant framework considers irrelevant. Although Critical Astropolitics has begun to incorporate such concerns, it doesn’t reflect much on the fundamental aspects of distributive justice. This paper enquires whether the distribution of the benefits from space exploration aligns with the conception of justice, and if the existing models of space governance are sustainable.
    
    The first aspect elaborates upon the criterion of accessing the means and benefits of space exploration. While on paper, the 2015 U.S. Space Act allows any individual to set up their company and fulfil its commercial objectives in space, the question of relevance is, who can invest in such expensive projects? Private wealth today has become the criterion for accessing the potential benefits of exploring space, leading to a denial of agency for those who cannot afford the cost. The structural constraints exclude certain people from the benefits of such endeavours.
    
    The second aspect elaborates upon the unfair obligations towards the negative externalities. While the developed nations of the global north, who had previously amassed wealth through colonialism, are today able to benefit from space ventures; the global south—without similar advantages—bears an equal burden from the impacts of climate change. This does not provide a level playing field for the poorer nations. It raises the larger question of who is to stop the rich from escaping to some other planet, due to climate change on Earth. Such perspectives enable us to analyse the systemic injustices, within which, the global space sector operates.
    
    Keywords: Astropolitics, Distributive Justice, Space Governance, Global Inequality
    
    Author: Akash Barua (University of Delhi)
  - The ‘New’ Enterprise: Outer space security in the context of public-private interactions
    
    This paper explores the public-private dynamics within the space sector in the context of outer space security.
    Since the Cold War, outer space, security and geopolitics have been intrinsically intertwined. In the 21st century, these connections are all the more salient as the world has moved towards increasing geopolitical competitions and (cold) wars. In this context, space assets provide essential services for security and defence, ranging from photographic reconnaissance to frontline military communications.
    At the same time, the private sector continues to develop in outer space both in terms of the scope of business and operations and the ‘power’ held by space companies. Whilst giants like SpaceX make headlines, the number of small-to-medium space enterprises continues to grow. Moreover, in an increasingly competitive and congested domain, western states in particular have become ever more reliant on their private space sectors and have sought to further develop and support them.
    Thus, this paper examines where these private sector actors sit within the domain of outer space and the implications of their presence regarding space security. Based on my ongoing PhD research, the paper aims to try and identify the implications of the private space sector on security through exploring the public-private dynamic within the UK & US. Furthermore, it argues that whilst often aligned, the aims and objectives of private sector entities do sometimes differ from their respective state which, in turn, offers potential consequences for outer space security.
    
    Author: Jamie Winn (University of Lancaster)
  - Adaptation in Outer Space: Rethinking Sustainability Beyond Mitigation
    
    As the discourse around outer space evolves, it often zeroes in on space debris mitigation and active debris removal. These strategies have been extensively researched and acclaimed. Yet, this article dares to shift the narrative, championing adaptation as a critical yet underexplored avenue for ensuring the sustainability of outer space.
    
    In our current cosmic landscape, sustainability challenges in outer space echo the urgency of climate change on Earth. The need for sustainable commercial activities and state-led missions is pressing, demanding innovative solutions. This article delves into the concept of adaptation, a theme scarcely addressed but ripe with potential. By developing and advocating for adaptive strategies, this research breaks new ground, offering a fresh perspective on space sustainability.
    
    This article emphasises environmental sustainability and adaptation strategies, guided by the principles of international environmental law, notably the use of Article 3 of the Outer Space Treaty of 1966. It scrutinises domestic, regional, and international declarations, principles, and soft laws to propose robust adaptation measures.
    
    The methodology marries doctrinal research with socio-legal analysis, transcending traditional boundaries and illustrating the interconnectedness of space law and environmental stewardship. Primary and secondary sources serve as the foundation, driving innovative and original insights.
    
    Our exploration posits adaptation as an essential complement to mitigation, urging the space community to adopt a dual approach. By considering adaptation, we unlock new pathways to preserve the final frontier for future generations, ensuring that our ventures into space are both visionary and responsible.
    
    Key Words: Space Debris, Adaptation, Mitigation, International Law, Environmental Law, Sustainability
    
    Author: Scott Steele (Anglia Ruskin University)
  - Reconceptualising Public International Law to Futureproof Outer Space against the Abuse or Misuse of Space-Based Technologies.
    
    International space law struggles to exercise effective governance over advanced technologies whose effects are truly global. This paper analyses intersections between international space law and public international law, seeking to futureproof Outer Space against the abuse or misuse of space-based technologies. Space governance must respond to the challenges of advanced dual-use technologies, and make high-level, hardline distinctions between positive and negative uses. To situate this discussion, this paper analyses recent proposals for space-based solar radiation modification (SRM), including sun shields the size of Brazil, which intend to block solar radiation from reaching Earth. Of immediate concern, SRM is scientifically uncertain, risking the destabilising of Earth-Space systems. SRM requires a continuous deployment period of 150-400 years, binding future generations; failure to maintain the system risks termination shock, an uncontrolled overheating spiral on Earth. The distributive effects of SRM cannot be predicted and will be subject to, as yet unmeasurable climate crisis variables. Despite the risks, there is growing pressure to upscale SRM trials with a view to deployment in order to buy time, and in some cases, to sidestep independence from fossil fuels. Confronted with these uncertainties, certain regional blocs, such as the Small Island Developing States are striving towards a collective approach to the climate crisis. Others, such as the United States, are driving towards societal climate securitization in defence of a business as usual model. Outer Space is dominated by a US-led extension of the military-industrial complex, in which tech bros dominate the playing field, operating in a near permissionless regime, and risking a ‘Wild West of tech exploitation’. This raises concern as to who decides whether to deploy high-risk technologies such as SRM in Outer Space, who will control it once deployed and for whose benefit, and by what means can, or should decision-makers be held to account.
    
    Author: Fiona Naysmith (Open University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Social reproduction offers an important theoretical framework for understanding the gendered division of labour that underpins the reproduction of life itself and raises questions such as who does paid/unpaid social reproductive work, how it is valued and the resources allocated to supporting it, without which those doing this work can experience depletion. However, most of these debates are theorized from experiences and localities in the Global North. This Roundtable aims to pluralize the theoretical premises of social reproduction through interdisciplinary conversations, taking into account global south focused empirical cases, and exploring new methodologies to build a global progressive agenda able to speak to the challenges that processes of life-making are facing worldwide.
  Based on their current work, the participants will address the following questions:
  1. To what extent does social reproduction account for complex experiences of life-making under global capitalism in different parts of the world and in what ways does it need pluralizing in our approaches?
  2.How does location matter when it comes to social reproduction?
  3. What methods and methodologies do we work with to build alternative practices of knowledge building/creation about social reproduction?
  The Roundtable builds on the work of the Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches Network and hopes to extend and deepen its analyses through theoretical, empirical and methodological insights.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Shirin Rai (SOAS)
  
  Participants: Asma Abdi (University of Exeter) , Juanita Elias (University of Warwick) , Serena Natile (University of Warwick) , Laura Horn (Roskilde University, Denmark)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Rethinking Nuclear Order: Survival, Victimhood, and Resistance Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University) , Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  - Thinking through and beyond survival in a nuclear age
    
    This article investigates the assumption that survival should form the goal of both the politics of nuclear weapons and of International Relations. Rather than being a self-evident grounding upon which political contest then plays out, survival has its own implications and limitations, which have become stretched to the extreme in the thermonuclear age where survival has become premised on the threat of total annihilation. As such, nuclear weapons allow us to unpack ‘survival’ in a unique way because they have the power to destroy everything: to end all survival. Yet at the same time nuclear weapons have become deeply embedded into our world. In an age of thermonuclear weaponry, survival has thus become a paradox that structures the ambivalence of nuclear technology and the tensions of nuclear politics. The article first establishes the nature of assumptions of survival as a taken-for-granted goal of IR and nuclear weapons politics. It then argues that the paradoxical logic of survival as annihilation that accompanied the nuclear era has resulted in a politics of repetition in which both deterrence and disarmament actors have become trapped. The article ends by outlining the limits of understanding whose survival is at stake in nuclear weapons discourse.
    
    Author: Laura Considine (University of Leeds)
  - The Competing Securitisation Moves of Nuclear Deterrence and Humanity’s Survival
    
    This article discerns between the securitisation moves of
    nuclear deterrence and a securitisation of ‘humanity’, holding implications
    for disarmament proposals – particularly those that seek to delegitimise
    or devalue thermonuclear weapons (e.g. Ritchie, 2013; Kurosawa, 2018).
    The Russo-Ukrainian war and strained NATO-Russia relations serves as
    the case for this investigation. Great-power competition inhibits the
    pursuance of existential security – outlined by Nathan Sears (2020;
    2021) – due to greater prospects of nuclear use. Establishing existential
    security would come at significant cost, however, incurring its own
    securitisation risks. Nonetheless, it is an ideal state of being for humanity
    at the onset of the Third Nuclear Age. The article’s theoretical
    contribution consists of developing Sears’ frame of existential security in
    a nuclear politics context whilst also elaborating on a concept of securitisation 'depth'. The ethicopolitical dilemmas of deterrence are shown to
    obfuscate an objective existential threat to the species – which should not
    be overridden by any states’ interests. This threat is poorly articulated in
    speech acts alone, otherwise the scholarly focus of securitisation analysis. The normative argument of the article derives from a
    discrepancy between, and conflation of, these ‘symbolic’ and ‘real-
    physical’ existential threats in deterrence practice – gambling with
    humanity’s long-term trajectory.
    
    Author: Rhys Lewis-Jones (Cardiff University)
  - Becoming (un)nuclear: (de)politicising collective memories of nuclear violence in postcolonial South Korea (1945-75)
    
    Critical approaches to nuclear order examine ideational, material, institutional, and postcolonial elements of power embedded in the nuclear order, by which they substantially uncover hierarchical relationships rooted in nuclear order. However, the perspective of other political belongings and actors who are (almost) destroyed has not been substantially explored in these approaches. My project intervenes at this point and asks the following question: How did victimhood relating to nuclear technology inform the emergence of nuclear order from 1945 to 1970? Focusing on Hiroshima/Nagasaki in 1945 and the Bravo test in 1954, I collected data from official and civilian archives in Japan to conduct genealogical analysis. I argue that nuclear victimhood paradoxically contributed to the idea of nuclearism that certain countries can justify their nuclear weapons while others cannot. The specific process of this paradoxical contribution is depoliticization of the Bravo test in 1954 as something related to natural disasters. This movement triggered the separation of nuclear uses from tests in the discourses of nuclear victimhood, leading to problematising nuclear tests and less problematising nuclear possession, which ultimately naturalised nuclearism. This project will contribute to critical nuclear studies, by illuminating the role of nuclear victimhood in the genesis of the nuclear order.
    
    Author: Woohyeok Seo (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / SPERI Presents… “Towards a Political Economy of organised violence: war, technologies, labour, and (re)production” Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  SPERI Presents… “Towards a Political Economy of organised violence: war, technologies, labour, and (re)production”
  
  Conveners: Elena Simon, University of Manchester; Frank Maracchione, University of Kent and SPERI - University of Sheffield
  
  Chair: Remi Edwards, SPERI - Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield
  
  Participants:
  
  Vicki Reif-Breitwieser, University of Sheffield, SPERI
  Joanna Tidy, University of Sheffield
  Elena Simon, University of Manchester
  Frank Maracchione, University of Kent, SPERI
  Beryl Pong, University of Cambridge
  
  This roundtable discusses the Political Economy of violence committed by, between and within states. Critical Security and Military Studies and Feminist IPE have been at the forefront of researching war and violence, but often parallel rather than in conversation with each other (Stavrianakis and Stern 2018). While Feminist Political Economy research on war has highlighted gendered, militarised labour (Enloe 1983), the connections between welfare and warfare (Cowen 2005) and the violence against women (e.g True 2012), mainstream IPE has studied the political economy of liberal interventionism and conflicts, often drawing on historical examples (e.g. Coyne and Mather 2012). Critical Security studies studied technologies of power, and the privatisation of security (Abrahamsen and Leander 2016), reconceptualised (in)security and sought to understand how security labour is shaped by contemporary capitalism (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017). Recent moves in critical military studies investigated war’s materiality (e.g. Tidy 2015, Basham 2018) and how technologies of armed violence are applied to produce global order (Stavrianakis 2023). Both disciplines brought to the fore racial, gendered and colonial power relations in global war. Taken together, these contributions suggest that the production and maintenance of contemporary war and violence is rooted in capitalist economies and movements for non-violent futures are inherently situated in and shaped by the economies that make violence possible. So, what would a Political Economy of contemporary war and violence look like?
  
  The roundtable will be recorded and will become an episode of the podcast series New Thinking in Political Economy, hosted by Dr Remi Edwards. The series is part of the SPERI Presents… podcast, produced by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, taking on the big questions in political economy within and beyond the discipline. SPERI Presents... brings insights from foundational debates and brand-new research in the field to make sense of the social world around us by foregrounding the power relations of the global economy. We invite academics and practitioners to discuss contemporary capitalism, its ever-shifting dynamics, crises, and governance - and how this shapes our experience of everyday life.
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: Remi Edwards (University of Sheffield)
  
  Participants: Joanna Tidy (University of Sheffield) , Vicki Reif-Breitwieser (University of Sheffield) , Beryl Pong (University of Cambridge) , Frank Maracchione (University of Kent and SPERI-University of Sheffield) , Elena Simon (University of Manchester)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Subversive Pedagogies in Global Politics Roundtable Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  This roundtable explores pedagogical innovations in global politics that subvert pedagogy-as-usual via an emphasis on joy, care, intimacy and encounter. The discussion will focus on the under-recognised potential of pedagogy to shape political inquiry, inviting deeper engagement with its power and its promise. The contributors to the roundtable are united in their contention that pedagogy should be understood as going beyond the epistemological to the ontological - shaping not just what we know, but how we learn, relate and act. While pedagogical practices in global politics still tend to prioritise Enlightenment principles of decontextualised rationality and universality, this roundtable discussion features pedagogies that subvert these dominant narratives and expectations. Including several recent BISA Teaching Excellence Award winners, the roundtable discusses innovative theoretical and practical approaches to learning and teaching in global politics, in particular highlighting ways in which joy, relationality and care are central to learning. It invites audience members to critically reflect on their own pedagogical values and practices in light of the novel visions of pedagogy and learning practices shared by the panellists.
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: Louise Pears (University of Leeds)
  
  Participants: Naomi Head (University of Glasgow) , Monika Barthwal-Datta (UNSW Sydney) , Claire Timperley (Te Herenga Waka--Victoria University Wellington) , Brent Steele (University of Utah)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  WE 18 Panel / Taking Seriously the Unserious in Resistance: The subversive force of pop culture in non-Western states Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Colin Y. Yang (University of Bristol) , Sonja Nicholls (University of Bristol) , Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University) , Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  
  Chair: Colin Y. Yang (University of Bristol)
  
  Discussant: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  - Queer Visibility in the Age of Platform Capitalism: How do queer vlogs perform subversive queer politics in China?
    
    Through a digital queer Marxist lens, this paper studies the complex digital material conditions around queer media representation in China today against a background of stringent censorship and state-led promotion of heterosexist-nationalist ideologies. It unpacks firstly, how queer vlogs on Bilibili.com, a Chinese equivalent of YouTube, use stereotypes as a gateway to visibility. Moreover, by constructing an online persona that performs a camp style with Chinese characteristics, these vlogs, though mediated by commercial platforms, constitute resistance against both the erasure of queer visibility and hetero- and homo- normative ideals. Employing multi-modal critical visual methods including semiotics, discourse, genre and compositional analysis, this paper also sheds light on how, in doing so, these queer vlogs perform queer politics and bottom-up digital activism in non-aggressive, non-violent, individual and creative ways. The paper proposes a more nuanced approach toward queer visibility and queer politics in visual culture in the age of platform capitalism and in a society where formal social activism protests are prohibited under the ideological promotion of “social harmony” and “positive energy”.
    
    Author: Colin Y. Yang (University of Bristol)
  - Carceral Memes for Cynical Teens: Authoritarian (Dis)Investments in the Turkish Memescape
    
    This paper centres a popular meme in Turkey, “Silivri Must Be Cold Right Now”, to dispel the notion that oppositional laughter in authoritarian contexts are necessarily resistant. Referencing the largest political prison in Turkey, the Silivri meme circulates the Turkish memescape as an ironic acknowledgement of the country’s expansive carceral regime and its repression of oppositional voices. The paper argues that while on the surface the meme seems to be a critique of the government, it in fact works to reproduce the broad affective and ideological conditions of its carcerality. This memetic carcerality works through producing two subjects: 1) a cynical subject who enjoys a safe yet non-threatening position of ironic criticism and 2) a sadistic subject who enjoys reminding others that the threat of incarceration is always around the corner. I argue that both these subjects use pop cultural humour and digital irony to position themselves in relation to a carceral regime that aims to consolidate the state and its reactionary politics. Against the impasse that is produced by a crude attachment to humour’s seemingly oppositional impulse, the paper argues that humourlessness in the face of a debilitating and cynical humour can actually become a more powerful political strategy against state authoritarianism and carcerality.
    
    Author: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  - K-Pop in North Korea: Investigating how popular music can become subversive at the point of consumption
    
    K-Pop has developed an audience in North Korea despite rigorous censorship laws, which have increased since the 2020 border lockdowns. South Korean songs have been entering the ‘hermit kingdom’ through diverse, covert mechanisms, with observers arguing it has the potential to cause internal unrest and refugees labelling it a ‘peaceful version of the nuclear bomb’. To understand this phenomenon further, this paper goes beyond focusing on the projection of music, to follow constructions of popular music within North Korea and examine how popular music can become a subversive force when it is engaged with in the political-ideological framework of another state. This paper situates itself within Popular Culture and World Politics and addresses the ‘sonic gap’ in IR by developing an approach which considers music’s subversive impact through the context of its consumption. It takes an infrapolitical approach and utilises ‘repertoires of resistance’ to treat musical interactions as acts of resistance and observe how individuals assert their agency by drawing upon learned acts of resistance within the power configurations of their context.
    
    Author: Sonja Nicholls (University of Bristol)
  - Touristic Neoliberalism: Resisting Authoritarianism in Revolutionary Cairo
    
    This paper studies the relationship between urban tourism in Cairo, the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and the intensified neoliberal authoritarian regime that succeeded it. Tourism is a powerful global system. It governs a complex array of people and places, categorising and (de)prioritising them based on whether they are of value for tourism. ‘Touristic neoliberalism’ denotes how Egypt’s neoliberal restructuring since the 70s relied on and was (re)shaped by tourism, in the context of Egypt’s longer authoritarian history. This paper focuses on local struggles against the unequal conditions of touristic neoliberalism in four critical sites of contestation in Cairo – the Pyramids of Giza, Khan-al-Khalili Market, Garbage City and Tahrir Square – during the period surrounding the 2011 Egyptian revolution (2009-2014). These conditions resulted from three decades of national neoliberal reforms in the context of broader neoliberal globalisation and Egypt’s history of authoritarianism. Touristic Neoliberalism asks the following: how did contestations surrounding urban tourism not only fail to disrupt neoliberalism in Egypt but also play a crucial role in shaping a new adaptation of (neoliberal) authoritarianism? I argue that tourism in Cairo is a linchpin of the post-revolution adaptation of neoliberal authoritarianism in Egypt, which relies on previous hierarchies and new forms of control.
    
    Author: Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University)
- 10:30 → 10:45
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 10:30 → 18:00
  
  / Exhibition hall open The Exchange, Europa Hotel
- 10:30 → 11:30
  
  / Refreshment break The Exchange
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Anticolonial Solidarities and Resistance Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: CPD/CST
  
  Convener: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St Andrews)
  - Transnational Visions of Solidarity in the Global Student Intifada in the Netherlands
    
    With the beginning of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Palestine solidarity is emerging as a distinctively internationalist endeavour, connecting the struggle against local forms of oppression such as racialized police brutality, occupation and neocolonialism globally – as in the case of the wave of student encampments and the broader movement that activists have embraced under the denominator of global student intifada. That being the case, activists are subject to divide-and-conquer strategies that pit supposedly naïve, good-willing white students against racialized figures of international or non-students and/as ‘outside agitators’. In the Netherlands, municipalities and the police routinely ban demonstrations and implement security checks under the pretext of such violent agitators allegedly trying to ‘hijack’ peaceful protest.
    In this paper, I offer an analysis of this division through Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s notion of ‘unchilding’, which I contrast with what I call the ‘unadulting’ of students. Departing from participatory and autoethnographic research, I then address the queer-feminist imaginaries of anticolonial resistance, mutual aid and care as practiced in the encampments, and how they embrace the figure of the ‘outside agitator’ in a gesture against the whitewashing, pacification, and depoliticization of resistance and Palestine solidarity. In a last step, I reflect on the implications of this deliberate, queered positionality of the outside agitator for migrant, non-white, non-Western political subjectivity in the Global North as the genocide continues to unfold.
    
    Author: Alina Achenbach (University of Groningen)
  - An arms trade from below: improvised weapons and the framing of anti-colonial resistance
    
    This paper uses a post-colonial and feminist analysis of improvised weapons production by anti-colonial movements to unsettle dominant depictions of such actors as terrorists and raise questions about the possibility of solidarity. Scholars are by now familiar with the way that anti-colonial violence, usually glossed as terrorism, is depicted as barbaric, irrational, and perfidious (“queered”, in Jasbir Puar’s formulation). However, as well as being criticised for these “excessive” and hyper-masculine displays of violent agency, the agency of anti-colonial movements is also routinely downplayed and derided, often through feminisation. Such actors are commonly criticised as cowards for hiding behind civilian “human shields” (usually, it is emphasised, women and children). In addition, movements are depicted as dependent proxies, even dupes, of malign foreign states and/or rival sub-imperial powers, such as Iran, China, or Russia. Starting from an analysis of Israeli portrayals of Hamas weapons factories as exemplifying “terrorist” malevolence, this paper shows how craft weapons manufacture exceeds and subverts such framings. It develops this analysis by situating improvised weapons production in a longer anti-colonial history stretching back to the Algerian FLN and the Viet Cong and then by comparing Hamas’ endeavours with the adaptation of commercially available drones by the Ukrainian military. Viewed in this light, rather than revealing perfidy and dependence, improvised weapons production becomes a kind of “arms trade from below”, a display of ingenuity and an assertion of independence. It also raises questions about what anti-colonial solidarity should mean in such conditions, particularly when critiques of the arms industry and armed struggle have so often been made by feminists.
    
    This paper is submitted for consideration for the joint CPD/CST panel on Anticolonial Solidarities and Resistance
    
    Author: James Eastwood (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Conceptualizing terror work, terroristization, and terrorwashing in Palestine
    
    This paper explores the politics of deploying the term ‘terrorism’ in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023. Working within a critical terrorism studies framework, it explores four key discursive episodes that are emblematic of a phenomenon that this paper conceptualizes as ‘terror work’.
    
    ‘Terror work’ entails the political wranglings /strategies of actors to define their violence against (often non-state) adversaries as ‘counterterrorism’ and, as such, benefit from permissive norms within the structure of the Global War on Terror that legitimate violence as counterterrorism. By advancing the concept of ‘terror work’ - itself inspired by the critical legal concept of ‘legal work’ - I aim to highlight the politics of deploying the term ‘terrorist’ beyond the permissibility of just physical violence as counterterrorism.
    
    Specifically, I argue that terror work – the ability to use power to define ‘terrorism’ in alignment with particular counterterrorism agendas – aims not only to make acts of violence permissible, but to expand the acceptable remits and normative limits of the term ‘terrorism’ itself. In so doing, state actors especially are able to deploy violence as counterterrorism in spaces where it might otherwise be questions, resistance, or rejected.
    
    By looking at Israel’s designation of non-militant Palestinian actors as terrorist, I aim to highlight examples of terror work. Relatedly, I link terror work to the related concepts of terroristization (the discursive production of all Palestinians as terrorist) and of terrorwashing (the retroactive deployment of the term terrorist to redirect scrutiny for acts that violated global norms).
    
    Author: Carl Gibson (University of Nottingham)
  - Countertopographies of Anticolonial Worldmaking: Puerto Rico, the Pacific, and Beyond
    
    On October 27, 2023, following twenty days of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of an immediate humanitarian truce between Israel and Hamas. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a country with longstanding colonial ties to the U.S., voted against it, a move decried by many Marshallese activists. Given the RMI’s own historical struggles for self-determination, their voting record on Palestine provokes two key questions: First, what are the limits and possibilities of contemporary anticolonial and decolonial solidarities across the Global South, and what bearing do extant imperial topographies have on these solidarities?
    
    To address these questions, this paper maps a countertopography of anticolonial worldmaking that encompasses Palestine, the Pacific Islands, and Puerto Rico. It traces a history of support among U.S.-colonized peoples for Palestinian (as well as Irish) self-determination struggles from the 1970s to present. As anticolonial activists in those sites explicitly connected distant freedom struggles to their own—often facing criminalization and state repression for doing so—they created what Sara Awartani calls “a reimagined geography of liberation that simultaneously declared solidarity while also disrupting narratives of US exceptionalism” (2017, pg. 201). Attention to contemporary solidarities between Palestine and the U.S. territories should thus be understood within this longer political history.
    
    Awartani, S. (2017). In Solidarity: Palestine in the Puerto Rican Political Imaginary. Radical History Review, 2017(128), 199–222.
    
    Author: Emily Mitchell-Eaton (Colgate University)
  - ‘A temporary measure to meet a passing emergency’: on the birth of British counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland
    
    British counter-terrorism originated in the 1970s, in the UK Government’s efforts to contain violence of Northern Ireland’s so-called ‘Troubles’. Now-familiar measures like stop-and-search, executive exclusion, or detention without charge first entered the UK’s domestic security arsenal through the passage of the 1973 Emergency Provisions Act and 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Both these acts emerged as part of the UK Government’s response to its assumption of Direct Rule responsibilities in Northern Ireland, following the suspension of devolved administration in 1972. Moreover, both were seen amongst legislators as being antithetical to their cherished mythology regarding Britain’s ‘liberal’ domestic security tradition.
    
    Government ministers pursuing this counter-terrorism agenda understood MPs’ fears regarding the ‘unpalatability’ of novel powers put forward in their legislative programme. They thus embarked on a carefully-curated rhetorical package, by which to overcome parliamentarians’ fears and assure their support for new laws. This paper explores how that package took shape. It traces the reappearance of long-standing tropes on Northern Ireland, within Government ministers’ arguments in favour of novel counter-terrorism – particularly, tropes regarding the abnormality of Northern Ireland’s ‘present circumstances’ or ‘permanent emergency’, with which parliamentary audiences were familiar. The paper unpacks such tropes, dwelling especially on their peculiar temporal parameters, and clarifies their function for 1970s counter-terrorism discourses: namely, clothing ‘exceptional’ provisions in a language ‘accepted’ amongst legislators. The paper will interest scholars of historical IR looking to deepen our understandings of the histories of ‘terrorism’ discourses; as well as scholars of ‘timing theory’ and the uses of different notions of ‘time’ in political rhetoric.
    
    Author: Michael Livesey (University of Sheffield)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / At the Frontiers of International Studies: the Emerging Prominence of Law, War Crimes and Genocide over 50 Year and New Research for the Future Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  In 1975, law was barely noticed as feature of international life, although always a present condition for governments. The Helsinki Final Act that year resoundingly emphasised that political agreement was more possible and powerful than gaining a legal end to the Second World War. The My Lai massacre raised attention, but no real focus, on war crimes. The mass murder in Cambodia elevated use of the word 'genocide', but no more than that. Yet, 50 years later, every event involving political violence and armed conflict invokes calls 'war crimes' and 'genocide' by one side or both, or by observers, as well as calls for truth, reconciliation and peace and security through justice. And international criminal justice has not only been the most radical innovation of the era, making individual human beings subjects of international law for the first time, rather than states alone, but is has also become a major growth industry, both in the 'real' world, with tribunals, courts, cases and investigations ever more numerous (if challenged), and as a brand new branch of international studies. The roundtable will reflect on this historical evolution in practice, conceptualisation, theory and example, while also examining new research at the frontiers of knowledge and understanding on relevant issues and cases or mass atrocity, law, politics, investigations, contestations and reconciliation attempts, including Ukraine-Russia, the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Yugolslavia, Slovenia, Iraq and more, as well as key shifts in the broad focus of scholars.
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Gabriel Gow (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Participants: David Bicknell (King's College London.) , James Gow , Elizabeth Brown (King's College London) , Maxwin Rayen (King's College London.) , Zala Pochat (King's College, London) , Gabriel Gow (University of Edinburgh)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Base Women and Beyond I: Contemporary feminist research agendas on military/nuclear installations and their discontents. Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde) , Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast)
  
  Chair: Marsha Henry (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Discussant: Cynthia Enloe (Clark University)
  - The Contested Afterlives of Nuclear Bases
    
    This paper enquires into the complex, contested legacies of nuclear bases once they have been dismantled. Drawing on both a wide range of literature on everyday encounters with military and nuclear sites and what they leave behind, and on preliminary fieldwork, we bring into feminist conversation the sites of past US nuclear submarine facilities at La Maddalena in Sardinia, Italy, and Holy Loch in Scotland, UK. We will reflect on our initial findings from archival, oral history and walking strategies about how the remains of military infrastructure in these sites interplay with landscape, gendered community relationships and cultural memory. We will also begin to develop our analysis of the implications of these two cases for the more general process whereby militarism and nuclearism are sustained in particular places in the everyday, long after any physical infrastructure has been shut down - and how this process might be challenged.
    
    Authors: Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde) , Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast)
  - From Miners to Mothers: Between Nuclear Secrecy and Daily Life
    
    Nuclear weapons, deterrence and their impacts are predominantly discussed from the perspective of the potential aggressors. Those affected by the production, locally and beyond the state level, seem invisible in the overarching, abstract discourse of nuclear deterrence. A completely under-theorised hidden story is the uranium mining in the Ore Mountains. Between 1946 and 1990, Wismut's uranium mining in Thuringia and Saxony contributed to the former Soviet – now Russian – nuclear weapons programme and was established as one of the world's top four uranium producers during the Cold War, a legacy that continues to shape regional identity to this day. All sectors – from the economy and health to culture – were subordinated to uranium mining for nuclear weapons production. Unsurprisingly, not only the miners themselves but also their families were deeply embedded in the nuclear weapons production apparatus. This study explores how nuclear secrecy, misogynistic narratives, and the ambivalences surrounding uranium mining have influenced the daily lives of families, particularly women, from that time through to the present day. Inspired by Cynthia Enloe’s question, where are the women, this research places women’s roles at the centre of its analysis. Critical methods within an intersectional feminist framework will be employed, utilising empiricism and an acknowledgement of the social experiences and knowledge of those affected.
    
    Author: Elisabeth Saar (Uppsala University)
  - Sexual Politics, the Everyday and The Everywhere War that Never Was
    
    This paper uses feminist approaches and insights from Future Studies to explore how the prospect of nuclear war during the Cold War west was understood to shape the present and potential everyday. Exploring artistic, visual, and material representations of the first nuclear age, the paper argues that the prospect of nuclear attack troubles the boundaries of bases, battlefields, and military encounter, asserting the totalising, everyday nature of war preparations. Read in relation to the importance of military bases in understandings of the Cold War, it explores how the objects and visuals associated with nuclear weapons explicitly produce war preparation as everyday, everywhere, emotive, and embodied, extending the boundaries of military installations and logics. It further suggests that the capacity of nuclear war to produce a slippage between military space and everyday space is laced though with sexual and racialised body politics. Focusing on artistic works depicting the consequences of atomic bombs and testing, the curation of Cold War materials in the Imperial War Museum (UK), and the US phenomenon of ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’, the paper explores how feminist readings of the spatial, material, and visual dynamics of nuclear weapons emphasize gendered notions of almost-war in everyday spaces.
    
    Author: Hannah Partis-Jennings (Queen's University Belfast)
  - More-than-human difference and resistance in transnational nuclear ecologies
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Steven Farquar (Queens University Belfast)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  WE 18 Conference event / Book Launch: A Century of State-Making in Iraq: Baghdad, Kurdistan, and the Development of the Constitution Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Speakers: Marianna Charountaki (University of Lincoln), Michael Mulligan (Euro University of Bahrain), Moritz Mihatsch (University of Cambridge), Sheraz Ibrahim (British International University, KRI, Iraq)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Bringing sexy back: relocating the sexual in International Relations Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Where has the sexy gone in International Relations, as a discipline, as pedagogy, and in its research methods? This panel brings together scholars who engage with the erasure of (a)sexuality, the politics of sex and intimacy in pedagogy, theory and ethnography, and who engage with the sexy/sexual as a generative analytical frame. We consider IR's epistemological and ontological terrain shifts, with renewed lenses including antinormativity, bisexuality, bordering, and the fictioning of intimate ethnographies. Through these frames, we ask if the discipline might just collapse were we to acknowledge ourselves, our interlocutors, colleagues, and pedagogies within sexual frames.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
  
  Participants: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews) , Patrick Vernon (University of Birmingham) , Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London) , Dean Cooper-Cunningham (University of Copenhagen) , Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Diagnosing Security or the Medicalization of Knowledge, Authority, and Resistance in IR Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Long before the COVID-19 pandemic have critical security scholars pointed to the increasing securitization of public health. The COVID-19 crisis has further amplified the importance of such calls, sparking a variety of important investigations. What has received little attention so far, however, is the global trend towards the medicalization of society and by extension the disciplinary realm of International Relations. This roundtable draws attention to this trend by investigating multiple sites where medicalization of/in Global Politics is enacted. Four thematic questions anchor the discussion. First, what types of knowledge does medicalization privilege or marginalize, specifically focussing on how medical frameworks obscure or silence alternative viewpoints. Second, how does medicalized security influence political legitimacy? As scientific authority rises, medical classifications and “objective” terminologies lend a veneer of neutrality that masks cultural biases and shapes perceptions of political authority. Third, what subjectivities emerge from practices of medicalization? For example, how do diagnostic frameworks influence and shape identities in ways that may reinforce societal inequalities and exclusions. Finally, we consider possibilities for resistance, investigating how activism and scholarship might challenge the disguised biases of medicalized security practices..
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Chair: Malte Riemann (Leiden University)
  
  Participants: Alireza Shams Lahijani (University of Oslo) , Jana Fey (University of Sussex) , Norma Rossi (University of St Andrews) , Peter Marton (Corvinus University) , Stefan Elbe (University of Sussex) , Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Roundtable / Gender-Based Violence, Organized Crime and Transitional Justice: A Comparative Roundtable on Colombia, Mexico, and Northern Ireland Berlin, Europa Hotel
  Objective: This roundtable seeks to interrogate the complex intersection of gender-based violence, transitional justice, and organized crime, particularly (but not exclusively) drug trafficking, in three contexts where peacebuilding efforts coexist with ongoing armed violence: Colombia, Mexico, and Northern Ireland. Despite their different contexts, all three regions currently face a continuum of violence. The emergence of organized crime and organized criminal groups in these contexts disproportionately impacts women, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds such as Indigenous women, Afro-descendant women, LGBTQ+, migrant women, and rural and working-class women, amongst others.
  
  By exploring these diverse cases, the discussion aims to:
  
  Critically evaluate the limitations and shortcomings of traditional,
  “paradigmatic” frameworks of transitional justice in addressing
  gender-based violence linked to organized crime.
  
  Examine how organized crime and the legacies of armed conflict
  exacerbate gender-based violence and perpetuate cycles of insecurity
  for women, particularly from marginalized backgrounds.
  
  Critically discuss gender-sensitive peacebuilding and transformative
  justice approaches that address structural inequalities and
  prioritise women’s lived experiences, aiming for deeper, more
  inclusive, and sustainable solutions to gender-based violence and
  injustice
  
  This roundtable brings together women scholars from diverse geographical, academic, and professional backgrounds to foster a comparative dialogue. The goal is to explore ways to bridge the gaps between transitional justice, gender-based violence, conflict studies, and organized crime studies, offering fresh perspectives and practical insights from each case study
  
  Contexts:
  
  Colombia’s over six decades of armed conflict, driven by paramilitary
  groups, guerrillas, and drug cartels, has left a lasting legacy of
  violence and instability (Colombian Truth Commission, 2022). While
  the 2016 Peace Agreement marked a critical step towards peace, the
  persistence of drug trafficking and other illicit business such as
  illegal mining, human trafficking and human smuggling continues to
  fuel conflict, with devastating consequences for women and
  marginalized communities (Ombudsman's Office of Colombia, 2024).
  Dissident guerrilla factions, remnants of paramilitary forces, and
  new organized crime groups wield sexual and gender-based violence as
  weapons of terror, control, and political suppression. Their primary
  targets? Women, particularly peasant, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and
  LGBTQ+ individuals, who continue to face the compounded impacts of
  systemic inequality and organized crime violence (Sisma Mujer, 2021;
  Caribe Afirmativo, 2024; Stallone & Zulver, 2024). This stark reality
  underscores the urgent need for justice and inclusive strategies that
  address these interconnected forms of harm.
  
  Mexico’s "War on Drugs" began in 2006, when President Calderón
  initiated a militarized approach against drug cartels. Official
  sources state that the ‘War on Drugs’ has claimed the lives of about
  350,000 people, while more than 72,000 are missing because of
  enforced disappearances. While reasons for the strategy’s failure
  vary, its impact on Mexican lives, especially women, is profound, as
  Mexico remains engulfed in violence. Critics, including NGOs and
  international bodies, have condemned Mexico’s human rights
  shortcomings (Anaya-Muñoz and Frey, 2019) and the ongoing "invisible
  wave" of violations against women (Tamés, 2019). Reports from the UN
  and Inter-American Commission highlight inadequate protections for
  women and urge comprehensive measures (CEDAW, 2012; CIDH, 2019).
  
  Northern Ireland has made important progress in peacebuilding since
  the Good Friday Agreement (1998), yet the legacy of The Troubles,
  particularly gender-based violence, remains unresolved. Paramilitary
  groups, though less visible, continue to exert control through
  coercion, fear, extortion, drug trafficking, and exploitation (House
  of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committe, 2024), with women in
  abusive relationships with paramilitary-affiliated men suffering the
  most (McAlister et al, 2021). These women face not only intimate
  partner violence but also the broader influence of paramilitary
  power, which limits their freedom and safety (Swaine, 2024; Hughes,
  2022). The normalization of violence in paramilitary-controlled areas
  has pushed many young people, including women, into crime and sexual
  exploitation (Kelly, 2024; BBC, 2024; Walsh, 2022). In this sense,
  lasting peace in Northern Ireland has not been fully achieved, as
  paramilitary control and its gendered impact continue to fuel cycles
  of violence and fear.
  
  Each region selected for this roundtable has faced unique challenges related to the legacies of armed conflict and organized crime. While we recognize the particularities of each case and how they are shaped by their unique contexts, we believe they share common challenges that are further exacerbated by the pervasive hyper-masculinization of violence, the devaluation of the feminine, entrenched cultures of silence within communities, and a significant absence of a gender-sensitive approach among authorities and judicial institutions. They, therefore, serve as important examples for exploring how to tackle the intricate continuums of violence within the contexts of transitional justice and peacebuilding.
  
  Key questions:
  
  Transitional Justice and Definitions of Conflict
  
  What are the limitations of paradigmatic definitions of “conflict”?
  
  Should transitional justice mechanisms apply in "non-paradigmatic"
  contexts, for example: context of ongoing conflict such as Mexico’s
  “War on Drugs,” and if so, how can they adapt to these situations?
  
  How might expanding this definition help capture the experiences of
  those affected by organized violence, particularly women?
  
  About organized violence and organized violence groups
  
  Is there a correlation between the public violence perpetrated by
  organized criminal groups and the private violence experienced by
  women, such as conforming to traditional feminine roles in the
  household, intimate partner violence, and coercive control?
  
  To what extent are these forms of violence distinct, or are they
  interrelated in some way?
  
  How has the hypermasculinization of violence shaped responses to
  gender-based violence in Colombia, Mexico, and Northern Ireland, and
  what strategies can deconstruct these norms to promote inclusive
  transitional justice?
  
  Women’s experiences of gender-based violence in conflict
  
  How can transitional justice frameworks move beyond tokenistic
  inclusion of women to achieve feminist transformations in
  peacebuilding?
  
  What adaptations are needed to address structural violence, such as
  economic marginalization, political exclusion, and gender inequality,
  that exacerbate women's vulnerabilities during conflict?
  
  Members of the roundtable
  
  The chair and discussants bring expertise closely aligned with the roundtable’s themes: transitional justice, gender-based violence, and organized crime in conflict and post-conflict settings. Each participant offers a unique blend of academic and practical perspectives, creating a rich foundation for discussion. The group includes scholars at various stages -PhD candidates, early-career researchers, and established academics- with expertise in gender-based violence, human rights, transitional justice, feminism, international studies, political science, and Indigenous studies across the three focus regions: Colombia, Mexico, and Northern Ireland. Many also have hands-on experience in activism, public policy, civil society work, and litigation, grounding the discussion in real-world insights. This diverse and interdisciplinary team, which includes voices from the regions under study, provides an invaluable opportunity to share context-sensitive knowledge, analyze case-specific challenges, and explore comparative strategies for addressing these critical issues.
  
  Chair: Dr. Yassin Brunger (Queen’s University Belfast)
  
  Dr. Yassin Brunger is a Lecturer in Human Rights Law and Co-Director of the Gender, Justice, and Society research network at Queen’s University Belfast. For over a decade, Dr. Brunger has worked at the intersections of law and politics, conflict and peace and justice, and the rule of law. She is an expert on international criminal courts, sexual and gender-based violence, and feminist legal theory. Her published research explores gaps between international and comparative legal processes and the lived experiences of conflict-affected communities.
  
  Discussants
  
  Dr Daniela Suárez Vargas (Queen’s University Belfast)
  
  Dr. Daniela Suárez Vargas is a Colombian lawyer and an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University Belfast, specializing in victimhood, sexual and gender-based violence, and transitional justice in conflict settings. She holds a PhD in Law from Queen's University Belfast, where she was an AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium scholar, as well as an LLM in Human Rights and Criminology from the same university and a law degree from Universidad del Rosario in Colombia. Her research examines how victimhood narratives in Colombia’s transitional justice process shape the recognition of sexual, reproductive, and gender-based violence experienced by combatants in guerrilla and paramilitary groups. Daniela has also worked as a lawyer and researcher in the areas of international criminal law, human rights, international humanitarian law, and the UN Women, Peace and Security Agenda.
  
  Diana Ortega Torres
  
  (Queen’s University Belfast)
  
  Diana Ortega Torres is a final-year PhD student at Queen's University Belfast, School of Law. She worked in the nonprofit sector and as a high school teacher for five years before transitioning into academia. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from her home country, Mexico, and an MA in Conflict Transformation from the Mitchell Institute at Queen's University. Diana currently teaches modules on communications, mass media, and contemporary conflicts at ITESO University in Mexico. Her PhD research examines transitional justice through an intersectional feminist lens, focusing on non-paradigmatic cases such as Mexico’s ongoing conflict, the 'War on Drugs,' with fieldwork in two high-risk states with high levels of gender-based violence
  
  Monica Pitt
  
  (Queen’s University Belfast)
  
  Monica Pitt is a PhD student at Queens University School of Law, in a partnership between the university and the Committee for the Administration of Justice. She previously held an MA from the University of St. Andrews in history and social anthropology before obtaining her MLitt at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Through her work with CAJ, she worked on the Bitter Legacy: Impunity in Northern Ireland report, where she focused on gendered violence in interrogation. Her PhD research focuses on the use of oral history to generate a fuller understanding of sexual and gender-based violence during the Northern Irish conflict, particularly as weaponized by the state.
  
  Aoife Clements
  
  (50:50 NI & Queen’s University Belfast)
  
  Aoife Clements is the Founder of 50:50 NI and a PhD at Queens University School of Law. With a background in politics and women’s rights, Aoife is committed to advancing gender equality and ensuring the inclusion of women in the legislative process. Aoife has earned her BA in Anthropology and Law from the London School of Economics and an MA in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Durham University. She is currently researching the experiences of domestic abuse survivors in Northern Ireland as they navigate the criminal justice system in pursuit of redress.
  
  Dr Claire Wright
  
  (Ulster University)
  
  Claire Wright is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Ulster University. She has also held academic positions at Queen’s University Belfast, Universidad de Monterrey, and Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. Claire holds a PhD in Contemporary Political Processes and a Masters in Latin American Studies from the Universidad de Salamanca. Her research focuses on politics in Latin America, including the participation of Indigenous and other ethnic peoples, peacebuilding, and emergency powers. Claire’s research has been published widely in English and Spanish and she has also acted as a consultant for UNDP and Cooperación Española on the issue of extractive industries and prior consultation.
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Chair: Yassin Brunger (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Participants: Claire Wright (Ulster University) , Daniela Suarez Vargas (Queen's University Belfast) , Diana Ortega Torres (Queen's University Belfast) , Aoife Clements (Queen's University Belfast)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Governance, Infrastructure & Institutions in a Digital World Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Chair: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
  - The Geopolitical Futures of Responsible AI
    
    This paper reflects on what, and whose, geopolitical futures are being imagined, enacted, and foreclosed in projects to advance, ‘responsible’ artificial intelligence (RAI). These reflections are grounded in the unease we experienced during a research council-funded project to help museums with colonial collections reflect on how to use RAI. We use this funding experience as an autoethnographic case study of the costs of how AI futures are epistemologically validated and realized by institutions.
    
    Museums increasingly use AI—e.g., collections management and interactive visitor experiences—but such uses are particularly fraught given that UK museums are sites of ongoing colonial power (Turner and Tidy, 2020), and AI ‘depends on and was made possible’ by global colonial structures of knowledge, power, and violence (Adams, 2021; Tacheva & Ramasubramanian 2023). Our experience highlighted numerous anxieties surrounding decolonization and the fetish of positive AI futures, and we argue such anxieties and fantasies are a central part of the infrastructures that maintain the coloniality of present-day museums.
    
    Being expected to pursue ‘positive AI futures’ in this constellation of coloniality compels us to ask: What kinds of geopolitical futures are being invested in through such projects and what might disinvestment look like? How can we imagine the decolonized museum in a way that rejects the compulsion to integrate AI and the futures such compulsion upholds? And, who is ‘we’ in light of the geopolitics of research funding structures that enable such projects?
    
    Authors: Amy Gaeta (University of Cambridge) , Joanna Tidy (University of Sheffield)
  - International Cyborgs: Bureaucracies, Infrastructures, and Big Tech
    
    Information technologies (ITs) are essential to the functioning and legitimation of international organizations (IOs) in global governance. A lot of the infrastructures and expertise that are necessary for the use of ITs, however, are controlled by so-called Big Tech companies. IOs’ increasing reliance on Big Tech raises the question of their independence vis-à-vis these companies. Yet, in IR, IOs have been conceptualized as rules-based bureaucracies whose authority stems from their automatic control of technical expertise and knowledge production (Barnett and Finnemore, 2012). Thus, IO theory does not leave sufficient room to question the influence of Big Tech on IOs. In this paper, I argue that cyborg theory provides the appropriate framework to reconceptualize IOs as socio-technical bureaucracies that constantly adapt to changing environments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and document-based research, I show that the technical resources of the United Nations (UN) agencies are not de facto features of their bureaucracies, but active sites of political struggles that reshape who IOs are and how they change. I focus on the adoption of cloud computing by the UN system as a whole, with a specific attention paid to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the oft-neglected UN International Computing Centre (UNICC). Theorizing IOs not only legally – through their bureaucratic rules – but technologically is important because it opens the possibility to both study the role of Big Tech in constituting IOs and raise the question of their capture by these companies.
    
    Author: Adrian Calmettes (The Ohio State University)
  - EU Data Sovereignty: an Autonomy-Interdependence Governance Gap?
    
    The EU has explicitly linked the concept of data sovereignty to its ambitions as an international regulatory agenda-setter in its position as self-described Geopolitical Union. In particular, the EU has expressed repeatedly its desire to ensure its strategic autonomy, reducing its dependence on third countries and their key industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the data governance ambitions, highlighting the ‘autonomy-interdependence’ governance gap, in which the EU’s desire to ensure autonomy clashes with the inherently interdependent nature of data flows between states, and its dependence on non-EU data servers. Using the case study of semiconductor supply chains, this paper analyses the data dimension of this EU-designated critical technology, and the flows of information relating to the research, design, and fabrication of these chips. Considering the EU’s attempts to control data under its Data and Data Governance Acts, it argues that the EU will have considerable difficulty in operationalising these data sovereignty ambitions, particularly as they relate to ensuring that all data stays within the EU, or within its sphere of regulatory influence.
    
    Authors: Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University)* , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / How do museums, statues and cultural artefacts remember and forget? Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Shikha Dilawri (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Decolonizing Statues: Reframing Aesthetic Interventions in the post-colonial Indian state
    
    The article seeks to contribute to the burgeoning literature on decolonizing memory within the discipline of International Relations by highlighting the contradistinction between the material forms of memorialisation carried within the post-colonial Indian state. It argues that the state-led statue erections of adivasi leader Birsa Munda are attempts at selectively framing and freezing his legacy as an anti-colonial icon. These material-hegemonic framings of national memory tend to depoliticize the contemporary struggles of adivasis living under abject conditions of dispossession subject to paroxysmal violence. Rather than treating statues as passive objects, the article explores the simultaneity in attempts at appropriation and obfuscation of memory-orders by the state. Drawing on Maurice Halbach’s framing of collective memory and Mathew J. Allen’s work on political economy on memory, the article attempts at highlighting the commemorative practices of adivasi populations through the empirical referent of the Pathalgadi movement. The quotidian acts of memorialisation embodied in the materiality of ‘smadhi sthals’ are subaltern attempts at reclamation of Birsa Munda’s legacy. In exploring these sites of memorialisation also doubling as symbolic performances, the article aims at unpacking their disruptive potential as mnemonic labour in the present times.
    
    Author: Ananya Sharma (Ashoka University)
  - Deploying Hazy Clarity: Thoughts on ‘method’, memory, and international studies
    
    This paper aims to orient thinking towards that which refuses to disappear and haunts our studies of the international. We study scenes from two novels, Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest and Choi In-hoon’s A Grey Man, both of which center themes of re-membering, dis-memberment, memory, and (already) knowing. The scenes present well-illustrated depictions of living trauma using dream sequences, a mode of writing that renders memory open for study that we describe as ‘hazy clarity.’ Together, both scenes offer ‘hazy clarity’ as a method for engaging memory of trauma in a way that avoid predetermining the readers leap to solutions. Revising Lindqvist (1992), we suggest that the courage to draw conclusions can come out of such hazy clarity. This approach can make that which has been rendered as ‘excess’—that which is not or cannot be explained by the main modes through which we study the international—available for deployment against those dominant modes of inquiry. While IR’s engagement with novels has been minimal, our study of these two scenes indicates how novels can teach us to have a more expansive as well as more granular understanding of how we might understand legacies of colonialism/coloniality, how they manifest, traverse, and get reproduced. Our central question is: What IR would look like if we took these things seriously? This paper argues that dreams and memory, ghosts and exorcism, need to populate our study of the international and that ‘hazy clarity’ offers opportunities for doing so.
    
    Authors: Shiera Malik (DePaul University) , Olivia Rutazibwa (London School of Economics)*
  - ‘A Fragment of a Future or a Ruin in Reverse?’: Piecing Together a Connected World in Museum Spaces
    
    Travelling exhibitions have found favour with many European museums as part of their effort to make their collections accessible to a wider audience. ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’ was a collaborative project between the British Museum and two museums in India. Another such exhibition, Tate Britain’s ‘Artist and Empire’, travelled from London to Singapore. Both exhibitions used objects from the BM’s and Tate’s collections to craft a narrative on colonial history within global, cosmopolitan frames. Pitching history at a global level enabled them to present the empire as an interconnected world, within which the circulation of objects was to be appreciated. The paper argues that such a feel-good framing, which sidesteps the imperial origins of the objects on display, typifies the invisibility of imperialism in the public domain. By drawing on competing curatorial narratives on colonialism, it highlights the dynamic and non-linear ways through which the connected world is continually built and dismantled in museum spaces. In a world where ‘encyclopaedic’ museums hold sway as the custodians of global history, Vik Kanwar’s evocative phrase is a timely reminder of the fragment’s potential to redefine the whole.
    
    Author: Jayashree Vivekanandan (South Asian University)
  - Archives and Decolonial Pedagogy: Tools for Unlearning
    
    Calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ have been mainstreamed in many universities but there is growing recognition that decolonisation involves more than changing reading lists. This paper explores the use of archives within university classrooms as a means for creating spaces of decolonial education. Between 2023 and 2024, we brought undergraduate students of International Politics at Durham University (UK) to visit British colonial archival documents housed in Durham. We then carried out focus groups with the students. This paper explores key findings that came out of these encounters with regards to decolonial learning. We suggest that archival encounters can act as moments of disorientation and ‘unlearning’ that challenge students’ assumptions and present them with alternative histories and possibilities for the future. Furthermore, in examining the affective moments that archives spark, we argue that such encounters can foster a deep form of learning and can create just and inclusive classrooms. In such ways, archival tools help to interrogate eurocentric knowledge bases of the university and provide methods of imagining otherwise.
    
    Authors: Alice Finden (Durham University) , Kavi Abraham (Durham University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Hydropolitics in a Changing Climate Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Danielle Young (University of the Ozarks)
  
  Chair: Michael Mason (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Decolonising climate resilience and water resource management: Fijian water management and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in international development
    
    Climate change and its impacts present a very real and immediate threat to Pacific Island communities. Consequently, development aid in the Pacific is increasingly geared towards climate resilience and adaptability initiatives. This year (2024) at COP29 the Moana Pavillion has created space for Pacific voices to be heard. Despite calls for inclusive development approaches, external development initiatives have fallen short of true knowledge sharing and fostering local ownership of development actions. ‘Inclusive’ frameworks have been shaped by residual colonial power-knowledge dynamics prioritising science and ‘modern’ (Western) knowledge over local/indigenous knowledge and epistemologies, leading to one-way knowledge exchange and effectively silencing local knowledge from development and climate solutions.
    
    My research explores how these power-knowledge dynamics have been reproduced through and embedded in development approaches and attempts to challenge dichotomies of ‘Indigenous’ versus ‘modern’ within this context. It unpacks the concept of ‘indigeneity’ in the Pacific and how the term ‘indigenous’ has been used to create a global hierarchy based on a metanarrative of development and progress. Scholarship must rethink how knowledge is defined and valued in academia and development practice and should challenge the IR discipline and its assumptions about legitimate knowledge systems and epistemologies. By acknowledging different types of knowledge and the agency of local voices as owners of and actors in climate solutions, development aid can create more sustainable, inclusive and effective action.
    
    Author: Elizabeth McGowan (University of Leeds)
  - Towards Hydro-Transparency on the Euphrates-Tigris Basin: Mapping Surface Water Changes in Iraq, 1984–2015
    
    This paper uses open-source software to examine surface water changes in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin from 1984–2015, focusing on Iraq – a downstream riparian state. The timeline captures the impact on Iraq of upstream dam construction, notably in Turkey and Iran, conflicts, and political transformations, and a period of protracted drought across the basin between 2007–18. Between 1984–2015, the area of permanent water in Iraq declined by a third, with greatest losses in the south. There was an 86 percent reduction in area of the Mesopotamian Marshes. In contrast, over the same period, the area of permanent water in Turkey increased by over a quarter. Mapping long-term changes in the occurrence and variability of surface water is a necessary step in achieving greater hydro-transparency; that is, the open availability of information on the movement, storage and management of water within and across state borders. Increased hydro-transparency, through the public provision of evidence-based information, can build trust between the riparian states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran), informing options for more sustainable, equitable and reasonable utilisation of basin flows.
    
    Authors: Michael Mason (London School of Economics and Political Science)* , Arda Bilgen (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Azhar Al-Rubaie (Freelance Journalist)* , Noori Nasir (University of Basrah)* , Zeynep Sila Akinci (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)*
  - International River Basin Treaty between Newly Independent States: Colonial and Local Engineers
    
    The study explores why international river basin treaties were established among newly independent states.
    
    Despite fears of "water wars," data shows cooperation between states is historically more common. In the post-colonial period, newly independent states created international institutions, such as treaties, to manage water for nation-state modernization. Under what conditions were the international institutions established?
    
    Two systemic perspectives dominate prior research. At the systemic level, realist theories suggest that power asymmetry and a geographic position (upstream vs. downstream) influence cooperation. A state's dependence on the river and low transaction costs encourages treaty formation. At the national level, strategies such as issue linkages and side payments effectively foster negotiations. However, these approaches fail to explain why newly independent states pursued international agreements despite coordination challenges: After independence, rivers became cross-border concerns, transforming local matters into international negotiations, posing a challenge for successor states in navigating these complex treaty-making processes.
    
    This study introduces a micro-level argument, highlighting the networks among engineers before/after independence. Local engineers worked with colonial engineers during the colonial period. The former developed their knowledge of modern technology for managing water resources from the latter. They were also familiar with how the public used and demanded water resources. Even after independence, ex-local engineers still exchanged knowledge across national boundaries. Such a process gave the ex-local engineers a knowledge advantage over political elites in charge of international treaty negotiation. Such superiority helped to reconcile preferences between negotiating independent states, in other words, resolved the coordination difficulty.
    
    The interactive mechanism among engineers are analyzed by drawing from archival/secondary sources focusing on three case studies: the 1959 Nile Agreement, the 1960 Indus Treaty, and the 1992 Alma-Ata Treaty. This study shifts the focus from systemic and national-level explanations to the influences of networks on forming international treaties.
    
    Author: Haruna Kuraishi (University of Tokyo)
  - A processual approach to Equitable Resilience: Insights from recent droughts in Lake Naivasha Catchment Area, Kenya
    
    This paper explores justice and equity dimensions in droughts and drought resilience by focusing on the ongoing drought in Lake Naivasha Catchment Area. As one of the agricultural and commercial horticultural hubs of Kenya, Lake Naivasha catchment area is strongly affected by the ongoing droughts. Traditionally known as a water-abundant area in Kenya, recent droughts have led the Lake to recede to a level not seen since the 1940s. For example, it was reported that several streams and rivers feeding the lake had dried up by October 2022. These events impact smallholder farmers, commercial farmers and pastoralist communities unequally, as each has developed different capacities to absorb, adapt to and cope with the ongoing drought. Our fieldwork in the region comprised semi-structured individual and group interviews with representatives of all Water Resource User Associations (WRUAs) of the catchment area. We analyse these data using a conceptual framework that integrates equitable resilience literature with the concept of historical process that is prominent in the environmental justice literature. This enables us to situate local, contemporary inequalities faced by smallholder farmers and pastoralist groups within global and historical processes, such as commercialisation of land, agriculture and natural resources, and development of global supply chains. We show that these processes have systematically marginalised those groups in Kenyan politics, inequitably enhancing their vulnerability to drought and undermining their resilience. Thus, this paper provides a timely empirical and conceptual intervention into the emerging equitable resilience literature by providing a comprehensive account of injustices related to the ongoing droughts in Kenya, while connecting this literature to broader socio-economic and political processes shaping local resilience practices. This processual approach to equitable resilience will enhance analysis of resilience to other disasters.
    
    Authors: Imogen Bellwood-Howard (Institute of Development Studies)* , John Wesonga (Jomo Kenyetta University of Agriculture and Technology)* , Tim Hess (Cranfield University)* , Jerry Knox (Cranfield University)* , Robai Liambila (FineResults Research Services)* , Ramazan Caner Sayan (Swansea University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / International Politics of Cultural Heritage (RIS special issue) Room 6, Assembly buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University) , Elif Kalaycioglu (University of Alabama)
  
  Chair: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University)
  - Returning Colonial-Looted Heritage: Contrasting Approaches to Art Restitution in Belgium and the United Kingdom
    
    The past decade has seen a broader ‘reckoning with the past’ as European societies are starting to grapple with the often violent and deceitful circumstances through which now-treasured pieces of art and heritage made their way from their colonies to the local museums in the metropole. Museum administrators have long argued that their ethnographic museums’ objective is to educate the populace about cultures around the world. Others advocate for restitution, arguing that rather than an education purpose, these museums perpetuate colonial practices and appropriation. Caught between these arguments, former imperial states have adopted different approaches to the restitution of colonial-looted art. The analysis uses a comparative case study approach, structured focused comparison, and qualitative data. On the one hand, both Belgium and the United Kingdom (UK) have extensive colonial art in their national museums. But while Belgium has made inroads into provenance research and has declared art restitution a national objective, the UK has long refused art restitution. How can we explain these differing approaches, while both states are liberal European democracies subject to similar international expectations and norms? Using primary data from newspaper articles and interviews with museum administrators, civil society groups, and policymakers in both countries, the paper charts and explains the contrasting approaches of Belgium and the UK to demands for restitution from source communities abroad and from domestic groups. After discussing the ways in which these states have agreed to and/or refused to return objects, the paper explains the causes influencing states’ willingness to return, including the extent to which a country has started to confront its own colonial history. The paper contributes to emerging research on museums as sites of International Relations and transitional justice in established democracies.
    
    Author: Franziska Boehme (Texas State University)
  - Nineteenth century ‘antiquities rush’ and the international competition for cultural status
    
    This article examines the 19th century ‘antiquities rush’ – the frenzy of archaeological digging, scientific expeditions, and straightforward looting of artifacts in the broader Mediterranean – through the framework of international status competition. The article makes three principal arguments. First, it situates culture at the foundation of international status-seeking and demonstrates the importance of cultural objects as status symbols for states. Second, it establishes that it was specifically the cultural extraction of Greco-Roman antiquities that was critical in the establishment of the 19th century international cultural hierarchy that attributed high rank to states that claimed to be the cultural heirs of ancient Rome and Greece. Third, it shows that it was through cultural extraction and its domestic narration by major national institutions (museums and the press) that empire was made more domestically legitimate and legible for the citizens in imperial metropoles. Cultural extraction, therefore, was not an epiphenomenon of imperialism, but its central feature. To illustrate these arguments, the article focuses on the international competition between France and Britain for the extraction of the Parthenon Marbles from Greece and, once they were moved to Britain, the way in which they were narratively constructed as status symbols for the British empire.
    
    Author: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University)
  - Object Extensions and Narrative Connections: Politics of Silk Roads Exhibitions
    
    A video shared by Xihua news agency in 2021 presents a compilation of objects that have been gifted by the Republic of China and asks: “do you know that inside the buildings of the UN agencies, there are a lot of art pieces from China.” Unlike the contested and therefore more vocal claims to artifact restitution, heritage object-extensions in the form of gifts or temporary exhibitions receive less media and scholarly attention, and they are often interpreted as forms of desirable, peaceful cultural exchanges. And yet, as this paper shows through an analysis of Silk Road exhibitions, these heritage displays are significant moments of global cultural politics. Part of their significance resides in the cultural-historical narratives that are crafted around these traveling objects. At the same time, these exhibits create occasions for formal visits, increased diplomatic dialogue, and the conclusion of agreements for further cooperation, including and extending beyond the cultural domain. To illustrate these dynamics, the paper focuses on Silk Road exhibits held by the People’s Republic of China in developing countries. This empirical focus is based on existing research, which has shown that while exhibits in developed countries often emerge through a curatorial give and take, the exhibits in developing countries are prepared domestically in China, which has control over the choice of material artifacts and attendant narratives. First, I show how these exhibits communicate recurrent themes of familiarity and historical cooperation, at the same time as they tailor their emphases to the exhibition-receiving country through careful artifact curation. Second, I analyze instances of cultural and economic cooperation that are agreed upon around these exhibitions, focusing on how similar narrative frames travel between the exhibitions and these political relations.
    
    Author: Elif Kalaycioglu (University of Alabama)
  - Ethics, Peace and Masculinized Protection – A Feminist Analysis of World Heritage and Cultural Property
    
    UNESCO was established to ‘contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture’ and to further ‘universal respect for justice, the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms … for the peoples of the world’, irrespective of ‘race, sex, language or religion”. Key to this ambition is the protection of the world’s cultural property (CP) and world heritage (WH) from armed conflict and destruction. Several international conventions have been put in place to protect tangible and intangible cultural property and heritage from militarism and war. Yet, the convention texts tend to construct notions of humanity within masculinist language, and, as such, exclude women from discursive constructions of entitlement and responsibility. Such texts also are inattentive to the legacies of colonialism and empire and their continuous implication in war and conflict, and, by extension, the destruction of cultural property and heritage. A key position in this article is that these gendered and colonial silences have led to the privileging of typically western, militarized and masculinist approaches to the protection of cultural property and world heritage. As I demonstrate through a detailed discursive analysis of key documents this involves treating some states, often located in the global North, but not always, as highly masculinized, civilized, rational, and as such able to preserve and protect their national heritage from destruction, while others are feminized and viewed as irrational, and, therefore incapable of offering protection. While there exists prolific scholarship on the colonial assumptions that undergird WH, there is limited research on the gendered dynamics that also inform heritage and cultural property policies and practices. Inspired by Iris Marion Young’s work (2003, 2007), this article explores the masculinist and militarized protection logic that undergirds the sheltering of WH and CP from armed conflict.
    
    Author: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Japan’s emerging regional and global security role: new sources of national and international cooperation and legitimacy Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Convener: Chris Hughes (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Chris Hughes (University of Warwick)
  - US-ROK-Japan Trilateralism: Virtual Alliance Building and its Limitations
    
    Since the advent of the Camp David Agreement in August 2023, decision-makers in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington have substantially enhanced cooperation between their three countries, particularly in security and defence policy. Historically, such cooperation has oftens seemed like an elusive goal. During the 1960s and subsequently, the United States frequently sought to overcome historical tensions and the legacies of the Japanese colonial period in Korea that ensured that popular opinion in both Japan and South Korea remained stubbornly resistant to the idea of closer bilateral let alone trilateral cooperation. This paper considers the factors that have helped minimise such tensions and considers which actors in the three countries have been most active in fostering cooperation as well as the regional and global contextual issues driving the new trilateral partnership. The paper also considers the impact of the new Trump administration and weakened and arguably increasingly unpopular leadership in Tokyo and Seoul when thinking about future security cooperation.
    
    Author: John Nilsson-Wright (University of Cambridge)
  - Why Article Nine doesn’t matter. Re-evaluating Japan’s security capabilities
    
    Japan’s technical security capabilities have changed. The creation of the Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade, the ongoing conversion of its two Izumo-class helicopter carriers into light aircraft carriers, and its planned procurement of four-hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles (part of a larger ambitious plan to double its defence spending), empower Japan with the technical military capabilities to participate in expeditionary military operations alongside US forces in the Indo-Pacific; or, to use the nomenclature of the US-Japan Alliance, to ‘wield its own spear’. Nevertheless, there is a semantic bent to the Japan security debate which emphasises Article Nine, and the broader ‘exclusively defence-oriented defence’ framing of Japan’s security policy, to argue that Japan remains unable to wield its new security capabilities as a ‘spear’. In this paper, I argue that these arguments overlook the important societal context which was responsible for encouraging the strict enaction of Article Nine to constrain the Japan Self-Defense Forces during the Cold War; one which is changing in the post-Cold War period. Using a New Durkheimian understanding of civil society, I compare cultural artefacts from the two periods to demonstrate a societal shift that reduces Article Nine’s influence and thus its relevance in the Japan security debate.
    
    Author: Max Warrack (University of Warwick)
  - Catching up on defense innovation: the case of NATO, the EU, and Japan
    
    In an era of US-China technological competition and rapidly evolving security threats, NATO, the EU, and Japan are also intensifying efforts to advance defense innovation to maintain military-technological superiority over potential adversaries. It is assumed that the world is likely to be split into two technological camps, one centered around the US and the other around China. Is this bifurcation a useful framework to understand the current dynamics in defense innovation? Are NATO, the EU, and Japan in the US camp? The objective of this research has two levels. The systemic-level aim is to validate this assumption and the unit-level aim is to examine the drivers, players, characteristics of, and approach to defense innovation by three actors: NATO, the EU, and Japan. The structure of this research is based on the why-who-what-how framework. It argues that the three actors play a vital role as a defense entrepreneur and an equal partner alongside others in the defense ecosystem.
    
    Author: Nanae Baldauff (NATO Defence College)
  - Connecting the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific: Japan’s Joint military exercises (JMEs) and cross-regional defence cooperation
    
    Joint military exercises (JMEs), many involving Japan, the United States, its Euro-Atlantic allies and partners, are proliferating in the contested Indo-Pacific as a theatre of strategic competition. Multiple configurations are manifesting, from bilateral exercises between cross-regional partners (UK-Japan Ex Vigilant Isles; Germany-Japan Ex Nippon Skies), expanding of bilateral exercises to foster cross-regional participation (eg France-Japan Ex ARC21 plus US and Australia), to cross-regional multilateral exercises that are ad hoc (Ex Pacific Crown with UK CSG21, Japan, US, Canada) or institutionalised (Australia-led Ex Pitch Black involving US, Japan, UK, France and Germany). This paper reflects upon Japan’s instrumentalisation of JMEs as a strategic tool to encourage and embed cross-regional defence cooperation between US partners and allies from the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific. It considers firstly issues of agency, symmetry and initiative in managing cross-regional defence cooperation. Second, it highlights how Japan has tackled the logistical, legal, political, operational practicalities involved in organizing for successful cross-regional JMEs. Finally, it addresses the need to properly understand and manage the politico-strategic nuances involved in partnership engagement dynamics.
    
    Author: Yee Kuang Heng (University of Tokyo)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Military encounters II: creating and imagining CMS Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Laura Mills (University of St Andrews)
  
  Chair: Laura Mills (University of St Andrews)
  - Beyond America's Army: U.S. military recruitment in the eSports era.
    
    International Relations scholars in recent years have argued that games and gaming are poorly understood and under-researched within the discipline. Hirst (2022) observes that gaming is regarded by many academics as singularly unserious despite now being the leading form of entertainment worldwide in terms of sales.
    
    The notable exception to this depoliticization of gaming is an abundance of studies that look at gaming as a part of a so-called ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’ (MEC), especially in relation to U.S. Military recruitment. In particular, America’s Army, a free game produced directly by the U.S. Army that functioned as an extremely effective recruitment tool, has been studied extensively under the conceptual umbrella of the MEC.
    
    America’s Army has quietly gone from millions of players to hundreds, unable to compete in a gaming industry that has moved largely towards a free-to-play business model. While many Academics wrote about the success of the game, few if any have documented its sunset.
    
    This paper draws on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted online to explore the U.S. Military’s sharp pivot towards recruiting via eSports and gaming forums in the wake of America's Army's obsolescence; In doing so, I propose that an Assemblage-based understanding of gaming is better-able to appreciate games as focal points for online interaction and opposition, rather than end-point products of the Military-Entertainment Complex.
    
    Author: Oliver Donnelly (Queen’s University Belfast)
  - Military TikTok Influencers in (Re)constructing Gendered Military Identities, Nationalism, and Militarism in Thailand
    
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    Author: Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat (University of Leeds)
  - Creative Methods in Critical Military Studies: Exploring Imaginaries of Nuclear War
    
    This paper/presentation will share the process and outputs, as well as personal reflections, on my use of creative methodology (specifically collaging and fictional writing) to understand imaginaries of nuclear war. Creative research methods do not prioritise intellect and scholarship over imagination and creation but understands their combination - creative intelligence - as the key to an analytic project reaching new spaces.
    (I) Collaging allows engagement with ‘scrappy research material’ where it is neither possible nor desirable to collect systematic data because that data shifts and moves. If nuclear imaginaries resemble a collage - with contradictions, overlaps, and shifting centres - then why not approach it through collaging?
    (II) When imagining nuclear war, the narrative bounds are undefined, messy, permeable, and always intertextual. Writing as method points to the methodological importance of acknowledging the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction.
    
    Author: Emily Faux (Newcastle University)
  - Creative writing and critical military studies: Engaging imaginations for feminist learning
    
    This presentation will discuss how different forms of creative writing can be used to support feminist learning in military contexts. The presentation will discuss two interrelated research projects: (1) fiction-based research about women’s gendered experiences as relates to war, militaries, and paramilitaries; (2) autoethnographic and program evaluation research about expressive writing workshops for women who served in the Canadian military. The presentation will build on contemporary work related to creative methods in military studies (e.g., Cree, 2023) to demonstrate how writing and reading stories about complex women affected by war and (para)militaries can support feminist learning about the interconnections between self and society, civilian and military. Using snippets from short stories, a novel, and an expressive writing chapbook, it will highlight how creative methodologies and imaginative engagement can facilitate a feminist critique of militarism, military power, and military culture. The presentation will conclude with recommendations for engaging with creative forms of research as advocates, researchers, educators, and/or students working in military contexts.
    
    Author: Nancy Taber (Brock University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Peacekeeping and peace building in Africa Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Owen Greene
  - Does the Nature of NGO Partnerships Shape the Effectiveness of Their Peacebuilding Intervention? An African Case Study.
    
    Abstract
    There is a lack of empirical clarity on the implications and ramifications of NGO partnerships for peacebuilding interventions in Africa. This paper, using a case study from Nigeria, argues that the nature of partnerships between international NGOs and local NGOs significantly influences the effectiveness of their interventions. The case study examined a peacebuilding initiative led by an international NGO in collaboration with two local NGOs in Nigeria. The data reveals an exclusion of community voices, resulting in a flawed theory of change, project imposition, and a failure to establish sustainable peace. Therefore, the paper highlights the need to rethink NGO partnership dynamics. This study contributes to the literature on peacebuilding NGO partnerships and peacebuilding in the Global South.
    
    Keywords: NGO partnerships, Peacebuilding NGOs, Peacebuilding effectiveness, Africa, INGOs-LNGOs
    
    Authors: Martinluther Nwaneri (Aston University)* , Martinluther Nwaneri (Aston University Birmingham United Kingdom)
  - The relationship between peace education and external stakeholders in Sierra Leone
    
    From 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leone experienced a devastating civil conflict as a result of political instability, financial corruption, ethnic divisions, and social marginalisation. The ending of the civil war and the promotion of peace and reconciliation through the method of peace education provided a backdrop for this paper to analyse the role of external stakeholders in promoting peace education. Through the evaluation of educational programmes, this paper presents the changing norms of international order from Westphalianism to post-Westphalianism, provoking the wide engagement of organisations of different levels to achieve a self-sustainable peace. By using evidence from documentary sources and interview data from the author’s PhD, the methodology of International Relations Theories will be adopted for further investigation to address the following question: what is the role of external stakeholders in promoting peace education in Sierra Leone? Analysis of the engagement between internal and external actors indicated that peace education was adopted as a combination of external-led top-down and bottom-up approaches in post-conflict Sierra Leone. This study suggested that although education intervention in Sierra Leone can be treated as a good example of post-conflict reconstruction, external-led peace education and the appearance of peace can hardly be maintained without solid self-sustained high-capacity public institutions. Moreover, there is little evidence to indicate whether the engagement of multiple external stakeholders may threaten Sierra Leone’s autonomy or undermine its national authority.
    
    Author: Yi Yu (Tsinghua University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Pulling on Threads: Exploring Trustworthiness and Trust within Relational Contexts Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: David Wilcox (University of Birmingham)
  
  Chair: Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham)
  - Cooperation In Space: Fear of Death, Trust and the Uniqueness of Space Diplomacy
    
    Space is rapidly becoming a multi-actor domain, no longer dominated solely by the few Cold War powers, it is now the playground of many space-faring actors including medium states and private commercial companies. In this paper we seek to examine the role of fear of death and trust as two alternative explanations for understanding cooperation in space. To do so, we draw on interdisciplinary literature on fear and trust to examine cooperation around the International Space Station (ISS). The paper seeks to contribute to the emerging literature on space diplomacy and trust, arguing that space diplomacy is a unique form of diplomacy which must be understood on its own terms, rather than the long-established territorial model, with its corresponding assumptions and theories.
    
    Authors: David Wilcox (University of Birmingham) , Carol Buxton (University of Birmingham)*
  - A role theoretical explanation of the Moscow-Washington hotline’s conflict management function
    
    The Moscow-Washington hotline is a rapid communication device that was established to prevent conflict escalation into nuclear war by allowing Soviet and American leaders to speak to each other. Based on this, the majority of the existing scholarly literature about the hotline attributes its conflict management function to its speed and direct communication. However, talk may be cheap, and it is unclear why leaders would not deceive each other or continue antagonistic distrust-based interaction that prevented them from reaching agreements or compromise via lower level diplomatic channels. We follow the small number of IR scholars who suggest that the hotline had a symbolic function, but we suggest a different interpretation of its symbolism. Thus, in this article, we use symbolic interactionist role theory to argue that the hotline was an informal institution symbolizing trust and to explain how the hotline fulfilled its role as a risk of war measure via its trust function.
    
    Authors: Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University) , Agnes Simon (Comenius University Bratislava)*
  - Internal trust in UN peacekeeping: manifestations, methods, and meanings
    
    This paper examines how professionals who work in the United Nations peace operations bureaucracy understand and enact trust. Trust is often implicitly assumed as synonymous with the outputs of peace operations (Rice et al., 2021), yet there is a dearth of academic research which examines how trust is built, maintained, and lost between those who undertake peacekeeping on behalf of international organisations. Similarly, in the UN’s ‘New Agenda for Peace’ (2023), trust between people, their governments and the UN is highlighted as fundamental to international peace and security. However, despite existing research from other fields on the impact of internal relations on organisational functioning (c.f. Nienaber et al., 2019; Wo, 2019), there is limited reflection on how trust within the UN might impact on how trust is operationalised in international peace and conflict resolution. Using empirical data from interviews with staff, the paper identifies four key bases of trust that inform how these professionals build, manage and maintain interpersonal and inter-agency trust relationships. It explores both formal and informal mechanisms of trust building, maintenance and repair, as well as identifying what interpersonal and structural factors lead to trust breaking down.
    
    Authors: Charis Rice (Coventry University)* , david curran (Coventry University) , Charles T. Hunt (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University)*
  - Officially Unofficially: Exploring Trustworthiness, Trust and Trusting in Track II Interactions
    
    Trustworthiness and trust have long been referred to by academics and practitioners involved in Track II initiatives, though this has largely been in passing and it is generally assumed that Track II structures can develop trust due to their relative openness. Given such assumptions, a lack of robust analysis of trust is surprising, especially given its importance being regularly recognised and captured by concepts such as the late Herbert Kelman’s “working trust”. In this paper we engage in a deeper analysis of trustworthiness, trust and trusting in Track II initiatives to develop a framework of Track II trust. We draw on both discursive materials written by Track II practitioners and elite interviews with Track II academics/practitioners to explore the complexity of trustworthiness, trust and trusting in Track II initiatives. By looking across both Western and Non-Western cases, we identify similarities and differences in the way trust is developed and mediates relationships both between participants and broader relational structures. In so doing, the paper seeks to speak to both academics and practitioners in better understanding what we mean by these concepts within the “grey space” of Track II initiatives.
    
    Authors: David Wilcox (University of Birmingham) , Scott Edwards (University of Reading)*
  - Trusting old friends: the Euro-British intelligence sharing relationship through Brexit and beyond
    
    This article investigates the recent evolution of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK)’s intelligence-sharing relationship, and its reliance on mutual trust to overcome legal, political, and strategic challenges. In fact, despite continuing to share security interests, the quick succession of Brexit and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine have demanded the EU and UK to rethink and adapt the way they share intelligence for foreign security policy. Building on sociological and relational approaches to intelligence cooperation, I unveil the Euro-British relation as composed of an inter-polity, an inter-organisational, and an inter-personal level, revealing how cooperation and trust in intelligence sharing are understood and operationalized differently on each. Through elite interviews with security professionals, I explore how each level reacted differently to change, due to varying reliance on more formal or informal elements of trust. For this reason, the paper concludes by offering policy suggestions for the relationship’s long-term future. At the same time, the theoretical and conceptual framework provides a valuable tool for granular investigations of evolving intelligence relationships, in Europe and beyond. This addresses a crucial gap in the discipline that still focuses on alliance formation but lacks insight on how alliances address and overcome crises.
    
    Author: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Returning to Some Basic Questions: Social Reproduction and IPE of everyday life Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (University of Liverpool)
  
  Chair: Stuart Shields (The University of Manchester)
  - Narrating the Search of a Methodology of the Household
    
    This article narrates the search for a methodology of the household. It builds on the feminist tradition of narrating scholarship and develops a conscious attempt to integrate ourselves and our histories through reflexive practice into our research. Building on insights from feminist feminist multidisciplinary research we develop four moves to transform the household from a conceptual black-box or, at best, another sphere hierarchically below the state and the market (and thus subordinate to it) into a heuristic device that informs methodology, where theory and practice interface. Firstly, we assign agency to the household, thus transforming it from a receiving unit into an agential object of analysis. Secondly, we provide a roadmap for (re-)distributive mechanisms within and across households. Thirdly, we account for harm that is produced by political economic phenomena, whether this exists as violence, pain or deprivation, and fourthly, we locate the household in time and space to account for the multi-scalar political economic connections that manifest at the intersections of the social forces of gender, race, and class. Through these four moves that constitute the search for a methodology of the household, we bring into focus how the household acts as a force in socio-economic transformation by producing, reproducing, and consolidating financialized capitalism. The paper concludes with the call for a shared research agenda that forges a new path beyond just challenging existing scholarship to actualizing feminist critique as a critical methodology of international political economy.
    
    Authors: Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (University of Liverpool) , Johnna Montgomerie (University of British Columbia)
  - “Tariff is the Most Beautiful Word”: Why We Need A Feminist IPE of Trade
    
    Donald Trump has reignited debates about trade policy, generating much discussion in public and private spaces about the implications of tariffs, protectionism, and the future of the liberal trading regime. Now, more than ever, it is important for feminists to develop the tools to analyse and theorize the impacts of trade on social reproduction, and on gendered and intersectional forms of inequality. While critical approaches to IPE have long focused on trade, feminist IPE has been relatively silent. This may be partly because trade has tended to be understood as a form of ‘high’ politics rather than as a set of social relations that are integrally connected to everyday life and relations of social reproduction. Addressing this oversight, our paper develops a feminist political economy analysis of trade that offers an historically informed account of how global trade and trade governance are rooted in social power relations, including the social relations of gender. We show how key ideas, institutions and relations of power have shaped global trade relations in ways that subordinate, devalue, marketize and exploit economic activities, rationalities and values associated with femininity and feminized, racialized and class-based ‘others’. Drawing primarily on work being done by a growing number of civil society organizations engaging with the mainstreaming of gender in trade policy, we outline what a more progressive and ecologically sustainable feminist future might look like: an essential task in these troubling times.
    
    Author: Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Revisiting Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University) , Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  - Nuclear Nonproliferation via HEU Minimization: Progress and Challenges
    
    Since the 1970s, the United States has led an international nonproliferation effort to phase out commerce in highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is one of the two nuclear explosives ever used to make nuclear weapons. Substantial achievements include the following: converting more than 70 research reactors worldwide to use low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel that is more resistant to proliferation; designing virtually all new research reactors to use LEU fuel; and expanding the LEU requirement to medical-isotope production, US army reactors, and US space reactors. Now, however, the United States risks undermining this progress by utilizing massive amounts of weapons-grade uranium for two projects: constructing the prototype of an exotic nuclear powerplant; and supplying nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, a non-nuclear-weapons state under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This paper details the progress and challenges of HEU minimization, and then explores policy options to ensure that US initiatives to promote both nuclear energy and Asian security do not unintentionally foster the spread of nuclear weapons.
    
    Author: Alan Kuperman (University of Texas at Austin)
  - The future legitimacy of the nuclear nonproliferation regime
    
    New global political challenges, ranging from multipolarity to emerging technologies, are contesting the legitimacy of the nuclear nonproliferation regime in general, as well as its institutional foundation, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in particular. Since the NPT is based on a grand injustice, questions about fairness and legitimacy of its normative foundation arise in the face of new, structural developments in international politics. This paper aims to identify, describe and assess the possible impact(s) of these contestations on the nonproliferation regime's legitimacy, understood here as a "right to rule". The paper does this by way of developing standards according to which one could assess the level of normative legitimacy of the regime and, consequently, explain its survival prospects. So far, the nonproliferation regime has proven its resilience but, the findings of this paper might suggest a need for the regime either to reform or be replaced. Answering the question about the regime's legitimacy contributes not just to discussions about the dynamics of global nuclear order but also to wider debates about the legitimacy of international institutions and norms underpinning them.
    
    KEYWORDS: nuclear weapons, nonproliferation, regimes, legitimacy, international security, norms
    
    Author: Kenan Kadic (Bielefeld University, Germany)
  - Substantive Commitment or Symbolic Rhetoric? Evaluating Diplomatic Declarations on "Irreversibility" in Nuclear Disarmament
    
    Amid escalating tensions among nuclear-armed states, renewed arms races, emerging proliferation fronts, and heightened nuclear threat levels, progress in global nuclear arms control and disarmament appears bleak. Since the 2010 NPT Review Conference, states have struggled to produce a consensus final document, primarily due to conflicting views on geopolitical disputes. Against this backdrop of division in multilateral nuclear diplomacy, the concept of “irreversibility” in disarmament has been repeatedly reaffirmed by a broad range of states – including the P5. Introduced in the 2000 Review Conference final document, “the principle of irreversibility” serves as a key step toward implementing the NPT’s disarmament pillar. Since then, commitment to the concept has consistently appeared in NPT documents, working papers, and statements. This paper argues that “irreversibility” has the potential to serve as a unifying concept in an otherwise fragmented arms control and disarmament regime. However, frequent rhetorical references to the concept in nuclear diplomacy lack clear explanations of what states mean when affirming their commitment to “irreversibility”, risking its effectiveness as a driver of progress. This study uses content analysis of NPT statements and interviews with diplomats from nuclear and non-nuclear states to examine whether diplomatic declarations on “irreversibility” in nuclear disarmament reflect genuine commitment or primarily serve as symbolic rhetoric.
    
    Author: Cornelia Hedløy (King's College London)
  - An Analysis of Quadrilateral Diplomacy during the First North Korean Nuclear Crisis
    
    The North Korean government surprised the world by announcing its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) on March 12, 1993. North Korea had been a member of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime for many years. It joined the IAEA in 1975 and the NPT in 1985. As the only NPT state party that eventually withdrew from the treaty later in 2003, their first attempt to leave the nonproliferation regime in 1993-1994 is an interesting case for nuclear history and international relations literature. This crisis ended with the Agreed Framework between Washington and Pyongyang in December 1994, and since then a number of academic and policy-relevant works have examined the issue to better understand the causes, process, and outcome of this crisis. However, comprehensive historical works based on extensive multi-archival research have been limited, and little attention has been paid to the role of the IAEA. This research traces the nuclear diplomacy between the four main actors - ROK, DPRK, US, and IAEA - from the early 1990s to 1994 in order to shed new light on why this crisis began and how it ended. This paper analyzes declassified documents from the ROK National/Diplomatic Archives and the IAEA Archives, as well as other available sources from the United States and North Korea.
    
    Author: Se Young Jang (University of Vienna)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Space Warfare and its Impact on Security and Governance Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University)
  - Governing international cooperation in outer space exploration
    
    During the late twentieth century, technology development in the outer space sector was the domain of government-funded space agencies. However, in the twenty-first century, government agencies have diversified their approach to outer space and the private sector has emerged as a key player, driving the increase in commercial space activities. Private companies are undertaking technology development in space exploration, under contract from government agencies. This shift poses both opportunities and challenges for international cooperation which is crucial for advancing space exploration and technological development.
    
    As part of the changing dynamics within the space sector, public-private partnerships are becoming increasingly important. However, there is a lack of clear regulatory frameworks and governance structures to guide these partnerships, especially those operating internationally. The current governance framework for outer space is not equipped to deal with the current environment where private companies have become major players in the outer space sector. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the challenges of governing international public-private partnerships between government agencies and the private sector in outer space exploration, which has not been widely examined in previous literature.
    
    Author: Sarah-Jane Pritchard (Lancaster University)
  - Ballistic Encounters: Nuclear Territories in Outer Space
    
    This paper focuses on how space war itself structures the prevention of an arms race through the specific and enduring problem of space-based strike weapons. It asks why and how does the looming presence of orbital battle stations persists as an ordering force in PAROS despite remaining technological unfeasible and unactualized? It argues that the space-strike debate ultimately revolves around nuclear legitimacy with questions of space war actually questions of nuclear war. To do so, the paper shows how political mobilizations and epistemological battle to "know" and bound the space-strike - materialized through distinct legal frameworks, strategic doctrines, and technical standards - co-produce and sustain the space strike territory as a nuclearized geography of conflict.
    The paper argues that space-strike functions as a martial assemblage, constructed not only through strategic designs but also through projected fears, strategic anxieties, and existential nuclear risks. The discussions on the "relativistic weapons effect" and the notion of "pre-crisis rationality" are used to show how the mere potential for space-based conflict amplifies anxieties and tensions within the global security framework. This performative dimension—where perception becomes reality—demonstrates the ways space-strike functions less as a physical capability and more as an escalatory threat that permeates PAROS discourse.
    Ultimately, the space-strike assemblage does not just build on the legacy of nuclear deterrence – it reorders the conditions under which war is anticipated, planned and resisted. Space is a domain of existential spillover; space war is an expression of nuclear war.
    
    Author: Tegan Harrison (Cardiff University)
  - Secrecy or Security: The Potential Role of Information Exchange in Balancing the ‘Orbital Security Dilemma’
    
    The space domain is becoming increasingly contested and securitised. Increased ASAT weapons testing in the last decade as well as development of counterspace capabilities by a variety of countries are contributing to increased tensions and suspicions about activities and goals among space-faring nations. This is what is contributing towards what some scholars have termed the “orbital security dilemma”, whereby states are taking measures to increase their own security in space operations, inadvertently threatening other space powers. This paper seeks to fill a scholarly gap in applying conventional theory to the space domain, and will consider whether exchanging space information, such as situational awareness data and other information on orbital activity, can increase trust and transparency between space-faring nations to help balance the security dilemma in space. It will consider whether transparency can be an effective tool in fostering cooperation under such a dilemma and will contemplate how such transparency may manifest. The paper will speak to ongoing debates about how a state could communicate a desire to establish or maintain a condition of strategic stability in space, and how we can apply and adapt traditional concepts in international relations to new strategic domains.
    
    Author: Zoha Naser (King's College London)
  - The weaponisation of ‘responsibility’ in space security
    
    This paper examines weaponisation of the concept of ‘responsibility’ in political competition over space security. In the arena of outer space arms control, Russia and China have long sought a capabilities-based approach (premised on controlling weapons), rejecting a behavioural-based approach (premised on differentiating ‘responsible’ from ‘irresponsible’ actions) favoured by the U.S., its allies, and a growing list of cross-regional states. In this context, Russia and China have both argued vocally against the ‘responsible’/‘irresponsible’ binary as overly simplistic, subjective, and ripe for political abuse. Despite these objections, both Russia and China continue to deploy the concept themselves, specifically by labelling others’ actions or policies ‘irresponsible’, and subsequently shifting responsibility (in the sense of liability) for any related fallout or consequences. Russia’s deployment of the concept of ‘responsibility’ would lay the groundwork for military targeting of other states’ commercial space assets where these are deployed in an armed conflict. China’s usage of the concept supports its broader legal manoeuvring to use military space policies as a means of establishing hostile intent, and thereby differentiating between accident vs. attack in the event of an incident or altercation in space. This paper therefore profiles several ways the concept of ‘responsibility’ is deployed in an effort to shift the strategic operating environment in space security.
    
    Author: Haley Rice (University of St Andrews)
  - The Shock of the New: Hybrid Warfare, Digital Warfare and Outer Space
    
    In 1980 the Australian art critic Robert Hughes produced a Television series for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) entitled ‘The Shock of the New’. It dealt with the development of Modern Art in the 20th Century and specifically how society, particularly in Europe and the United States, reacted to it. Many found the movements such as Cubism, Dadaism and Futurism shocking, illogical, unconventional, and incomprehensible. In the book produced to accompany the series Hughes wrote a chapter called ‘The Mechanical Paradise’ which focused on how the advent of technology affected Modern Art; particularly mass production, the invention of the aeroplane and the motorcar. These developments were seen by utopians and idealists as the great liberators of mankind; devices that would emancipate man from the shackles of bounded living and consistent overwork.
    
    Likewise, the emergence of Hybrid Warfare, Digital Warfare and developments in Space technology in the 21st Century are the new 'Shocks' which humanity is grappling with. Dual-use technologies and the increasing commercialisation of Outer Space are of increasing importance and interest. How democratic societies can build resilience against Hybrid Threats and Digital Warfare when they are employed by authoritarian regimes is a timely question, as is the future of global governance and regulation of activities in Space when past legal frameworks are increasingly being seen as redundant and ineffective.
    
    These avenues of research make up the core of my PhD Thesis, which I have been researching for the past year. My intention is to present the current state of my research to the Astropolitics Working Group at the BISA Conference next year and receive feedback.
    
    Author: Thomas Knight (Canterbury Christ Church University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  Roundtable / Special roundtable celebrating the work of Dr Emma Hutchison Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
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  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Chair: Marcelle Trote Martins (University of Manchester)
  
  Participants: Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast) , Roland Bleiker (University of Queensland) , Pauline Zerla , Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews) , Chaeyoung Yong (University of St Andrews) , Naomi Head (University of Glasgow)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / The Aftermath of COVID-19 I: States, Borders and Global Infrastructures Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Convener: GHWG Working group
  
  Chair: Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London)
  - WHO’s pandemic response recommendations after COVID-19: Lessons learned or learnings lost?
    
    Public health and social measures (PHSM) were used at an unprecedented scale to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. While the patchwork policies applied by national and subnational governments was often criticised as lacking coordination, the World Health Organisation (WHO) nonetheless exerted normative influence by endorsing and recommending certain policies. Recent World Health Organization (WHO) publications reflect an increased acknowledgement of PHSM as an essential element of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR). This is also reflected in the expansion of PHSM-related core competencies in the revised International Health Regulations (IHR). Meanwhile, the WHO is developing a research agenda on PHSM effectiveness to inform future PPPR recommendations. In this article, the revised IHR are assessed alongside several recent WHO publications that give recommendations on the use of PHSM and compared against pre-COVID-19 documents. The analysis shows that although new evidence has not yet been systematically accounted for, recommendations have changed substantially. Interventions targeting infected individuals have been transformed to population-wide, “whole-of-society” measures, notably with respect to quarantine, face masks, and travel restrictions. This points to an evident normalization of PHSM applied during the COVID-19 pandemic despite meagre evidence for their effectiveness and increased recognition of immense collateral damage. A systematic evaluation of the effects of PHSM during the COVID-19 pandemic is imperative before revising changes in recommendations.
    
    Author: Jean Von Agris (University of Leeds)
  - WHO’s Healthy Return? The Expansion of IO Autonomy in Crises
    
    When do IOs grow in response to crises? Despite extensive discussions about a crisis of multilateralism, IR literature offers limited insights into the factors influencing the impact of specific crises on an IO. This paper builds upon scholarship on IO autonomy, funding, performance, and the transformative potential of crises, to theorise the causal pathway through which major crises influence IOs. It specifically examines how factors like pre-crisis bureaucratic entrepreneurship, proactive crisis management, and alignment with permissive political conditions can lead to significant institutional changes. Using qualitative methods including process tracing, qualitative text analysis, and elite interviews, I conduct a detailed investigation into the strategic adaptations and governance innovations occurring within IOs during crises. WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a pathway case, demonstrating how the organisation navigated the crisis to achieve a landmark increase in member states’ assessed contributions, significantly transforming its autonomy. By elucidating the complex interplay between crisis dynamics, bureaucratic initiative, and political contexts, this research enhances our understanding of how IOs manage crises and the critical factors influencing their ability to expand autonomy. The findings offer insights for policy development, suggesting pathways to enhance the resilience and effectiveness of IOs in navigating and capitalising on crises.
    
    Author: Florian Brunner (Nuffield College, University of Oxford)
  - Splintering the Democratic Wave: How Pandemics Influence the Democratisation of Hybrid Regimes
    
    Previous perspectives on hybrid regimes invite us to view this political system as robust, maintaining stability through a nexus of democratic and authoritarian components, with performance legitimacy a central aspect. Yet, since COVID-19, hybrid regimes have encountered enormous volatility in their democratic status due to the extensive crisis management interactions required during pandemics, and how performance legitimacy has unfolded. This paper presents the research question of whether pandemics hold enough volatility that impacts hybrid regime stability, arguing that to fully understand the dynamics of this volatility, as well as the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic as a policy challenge, we must understand how combining preexisting regime features with crisis governance effectively leads to four different pathways for hybrid regimes. Such pathways have been identified as increasing democratisation, increasing authoritarianism, random fluctuations, and unchanged. Analysing VDEM data that is integrated with datasets that capture COVID-19 mortality data, policy response type, and policy stringency data from a 2020 starting point until a 2023 cutoff for multiple countries classified as hybrid regimes, this paper provides empirically supported statistical drivers of the various pathways. This analysis supports the primary hypothesis of hybrid regime destabilisation influenced by pandemics and exacerbated through institutional governance, and the subsequent display of shifts within their democratic level. These shifts are hypothesised to be due to the interaction between centralised or co-opted policy decision making, and the output legitimacy of rising or falling COVID-19 mortality rates. Each pathway is dependent upon COVID-19 mortality as a measure of performance legitimacy, and a gage of policy success and citizenry support or dismay for incumbent performance.
    
    Author: Keiron Burgess (Swansea University)
  - A health-security industrial complex? Public and private sector involvement in health bordering policies and technologies
    
    There have been decades of public health scholarship and rhetoric opposing the use of borders to attempt to control infectious disease outbreaks. Such measures, it has been shown, are ineffective, risk discriminatory and rights-breaching policies and practices, and distract attention (and divert resources) from the types of public health intervention that might actually deliver work. Despite this, during the COVID pandemic the vast majority of the world’s governments did implement border restrictions of one type or another. Perhaps even more notably, many in public health called for such measures to be made more stringent.
    
    The argument of this paper is that, in the aftermath of COVID, we are seeing the emergence of a ‘health security industrial complex’ which, amongst other things, is normalising, and building the infrastructure for, continued disease-related bordering. The private sector plays a wide range of key roles in the design and implementation of this health security borderwork, not least through the installation of new technological infrastructure at points of entry. This, it is argued here, complicates our intuitive understanding of how bordering decisions are made. And whilst these developments have often been spurred by the experience of health emergencies, they may well lead to path dependencies that increase the likelihood of health security bordering in normal times. Drawing on a range of case studies of different elements of health bordering, this paper will examine both the evidence for the emergence of an industrial complex, and why we should be worried about it.
    
    Author: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / The Future of Security Studies Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: European Journal of International Security
  
  Speakers: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham), Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (University of Loughborough), Jason Ralph (University of Leeds), Ruth Deyermond (King's College London), Timothy Edmunds (University of Bristol)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / The Role of Elites in Ontological Security Studies Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Until recently, Ontological Security Studies (OSS) in IR has primarily been concerned with how states react to various forms of negative rupturing effects to their identities, usually caused by experiences of trauma, shame, fear, and anxiety. This focus on the unitary state was then challenged by a new wave of scholarship exploring the ontological (in)security of individuals and their everyday experiences of ontological (in)security. Yet what is the role of elites in OSS? The scholars on this roundtable have engaged with this question in other way or other, implicitly or explicitly – the purpose of this roundtable is therefore to assemble their different insights on the role of elites in OSS to answer questions such as the following: what is their role in the identification of crises and the ontological security-seeking process? How can we conceptualise elites and how does analytically prioritising elites help us expand the research programme of OSS? And finally, what is the relationship between elites as distinct actor vis-à-vis other existing levels of analysis in OSS? In doing so, the roundtable will further our understanding on the relationship between the level-of-analysis and ontological (in)security and.
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford)
  
  Participants: Ben Rosher (Queens University Belfast) , Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) , Jonny Hall (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Martin Kirsch (University of Cambridge)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  WE 18 Panel / Trade Politics from Above and Below Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: James Scott (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Marc Froese (Burman University, Canada)
  
  Discussant: Marc Froese (Burman University, Canada)
  - Investment as Expectation: redrawing the boundaries of state power
    
    The last three decades have seen a surge in foreign investor vs. host state arbitration that is unprecedented in international law: around 120 states are known to have been respondents in one or more of the over 1,000 cases concluded. Apart from the colossal amounts investors – for only they can request arbitration – have demanded in compensation for alleged state acts of c/omission, what is of particular interest is what lies at the core of these cases. Ultimately, they are about redrawing the boundaries of states’ regulatory power itself. One important outcome of such case arbitration has been the emergence of the ‘investment-as-expectation’ perspective which, relying in particular on the ‘legitimate expectations’ principle, has gone beyond contractual commitments between states and foreign investors to cover, among other things, regulatory acts impacting the expected income flows on the part of the investor. I argue that the emergence of the ‘investmentas- expectation’ perspective is deeply bound up with the increasing importance of the asset form in contemporary capitalism. Apart from the more familiar kinds such as land, intellectual property, platforms etc., the asset form includes the very infrastructure contracts and long-term service contracts that often are at the heart of investment arbitration cases. Their future cash flow is the basis of their present value, and the stability, durability, and security of such value is of paramount importance to their operation as assets. It is precisely with an eye to maintaining these assets’ calculability and value that foreign investors tend to prefer contractual techniques, including private arbitration, insofar as they impose on states negative duties.
    
    Author: Valbona Muzaka (Kings College London)
  - Who Speaks? The Multilateral Politics of Voice in Investor State Dispute Settlement Reform
    
    Efforts to reform investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) are well underway in Working Group III of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL WGIII). Participants have made progress on a number of fronts and will ultimately reshape the way in which investment chapters in preferential trade agreements and investment treaties are enforced. In this paper, we examine state participation and ask who speaks most on the negotiating room floor. Combining quantitative analyses of speaking points and a content analysis of legal documents, we find that investor home-states continue to command the spotlight in formal discussions on the future of the ISDS system. However, their interests are not equally reflected in draft statutes and provisions. There appears to have been considerable room for multilateralism at the margins due in part to a handful of influential home country reformers and new alliance building. The politics of multilateralism of trade policy therefore continues to change as global south countries leverage formal sites of diplomacy to resist the inter-state hierarchies that drove consensus building in the past.
    
    Authors: Julia Calvert (University of Edinburgh) , Andrea Gimeno Solaz (University of Edinburgh)* , Charlotte Rommerskirchen (University of Edinburgh)*
  - The Show Must Go On: How International Organizations Enact Their Power Through Public Events
    
    Amidst increasing institutional complexity, international organizations (IOs) are under pressure to maintain their legitimacy or else risk different types of disintegration, replacement, or even ‘death.’ Building on a growing body of work that explores the particular organizational features or legitimation strategies that explain IO survival, we theorize how IO ‘public events’ operate as a tool through which IOs can enact their power in a crowded institutional landscape. We argue that such public events – highly publicized gatherings of state representatives, IO staff, and civil society organizations that foster dialogue rather than negotiated cooperation – serve two key political purposes for IOs: (1) establishing ownership over existing or new issues in global governance; and (2) shaping the global agenda on a specific issue. We empirically study the development of rival public events by the United Nations Trade and Development (UNTAD) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to govern the “digital development” space, drawing on participant observation at both events and interviews with officials involved with public event planning across IOs. By bringing research on event management together with scholarship on IOs, we aim to sharpen our understanding of the performance of power by IOs in complex institutional environments.
    
    Authors: Tyler Girard (Purdue University, Indiana) , Quynh-Anh Nguyen (Purdue University, Indiana)*
  - Understanding Trade Policy in Sovereignty Claims
    
    To what extent do sub-state sovereignty movements consider trade as a factor in secession planning? Independence movements in political units such as Scotland and Quebec are often compared on policy dimensions such as the fiscal or economic agreements that will emerge between sovereign nations post-secession, however, decidedly little attention is paid to what expectations the independence movement has with respect to continuity in their participation in bilateral or multinational or trade agreements. This paper compares the discourses of trade across two aspirant sovereign political states – Scotland and Quebec – with attention to the expression of trade ambitions through political and media discourses. We compare the asserted expectations of the independence movements, particularly as expressed through political parties (the SNP and Parti Québécois), with those of the extant nation to see what degree of congruence exists and to identify potential gaps in expectations that will prompt policy disagreement should independence be successful. Supplementing a content analysis of the historical discourses of trade around the 1995 Sovereignty Referendum on Quebec Independence and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, with contemporary interviews with members of regional and national trade offices, we offer a diagnosis of the limit infrastructure that exists to coordinate trade policy between aspirant and extant nations and the incongruence between states that may provoke sustained policy challenges post-successful bids for independence.
    
    Authors: Tyler Girard (Purdue University, Indiana) , Andrea Lawlor (McMaster University) , Erin Hannah (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario)
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  / Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group Annual General Meeting Dublin, Europa Hotel
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  / Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group Annual General Meeting Grand 4, Europa Hotel
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  Lunch - Sponsored by the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) 1h The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel
  
  The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Causal Inquiry in International Relations Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  A roundtable on Humphreys and Suganami, Causal Inquiry in International Relations (Oxford University Press 2024). The product of a ten-year collaboration, this ground-breaking work defends a new, philosophically informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. It explores philosophically-informed debates about causation in IR, lays out the underlying logic of causal inquiry, and explores the methodological implications of this logic, including for causal inference and causal explanation. It also considers how causal inquiry relates to other approaches to the study of world politics, including normative, interpretive, critical, and historical inquiry. The book is likely to be of interest to a wide range of academics and research students in International Relations and has been published open-access by Oxford University Press, making it free to download around the world.
  
  Note: We have two participants coming from Sweden, but the Swedish Midsummer celebration is 20-21 June, which will make return travel difficult for them. If the roundtable is accepted, please could it be scheduled for the first day of the conference (the 18th), or if that is not possible, the second day (the 19th)? Thanks!
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Chair: Adam Humphreys (University of Reading)
  
  Participants: Ludvig Norman (Stockholm University) , Hidemi Suganami (Aberystwyth University) , Charlotta Friedner Parrat (Swedish Defence University) , Adam Humphreys (University of Reading) , Joey O'Mahoney (University of Reading)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Climate leadership in a disintegrating international order? Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds)
  - Geopolitics and climate change: the future of climate leadership
    
    One, if not the, challenge for international politics in the next fifty years is climate change and climate-related crises. As BISA celebrates its first fifty years, the discipline’s studies on climate-related topics are healthy and important. More focus is required, however, on the international politics of climate change: that is, on how climate now forms an integral part of geopolitical reconfigurations. As one contribution to this focus, this paper considers the UNFCCC processes and whether its multilateral framework for climate action and ambition can hold together with ever-increasing temperature rise, on the one hand, and increasing nationalism and populism, on the other. The absolute need to link climate mitigation and adaptation targets with climate finance and both with an accelerated transition away from fossil fuels is clear. With the expected withdrawal of the US from major multilateral commitments, including the Paris Agreement, what new configuration of international climate leadership can be entertained that will have traction on these two links? A study of both the outcomes of COP29 and preparations for COP30 should help suggest where this new configuration is going to emerge and how politically effective it may be in the context of the changing world order.
    
    Author: Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds)
  - Middle power climate diplomacy: Germany, Japan and the UK. Who can lead?
    
    Germany, Japan and the UK, as fellow members of the G7, are comparable ‘middle powers’ with a history of engagement with the climate change regime. Both Germany and the UK (particularly since the arrival of the Labour government) have aspired to international climate leadership; Japan less so, but with the potential to play a similar role in Asia in the future. This paper will provide a comparative mapping of the different forms of leadership these states have exerted since Paris, in terms not only of their NDCs and funding activities, but also their level of participation in various climate fora. Some anomalies are immediately evident. Germany, for example, provides significantly more climate finance than the UK but has less representation in terms of committee memberships, facilitating roles etc. We explain these differences through an assessment of each country’s international climate activity against four types of leadership – structural, entrepreneurial, cognitive and exemplary – which in turn relate to their respective national strategic priorities, political cultures, domestic politics and social movements. The election of Donald Trump and the probable absence of the US raises the significance of such middle power climate diplomacy.
    
    Authors: Marit Hammond (University of Warwick)* , Asami Miyazaki (Kumamoto Gakuen University / University of Keele) , John Vogler (University of Keele)*
  - Turkey’s Balancing of Renewables and Security: A Middle Power in Energy Transition
    
    This paper commences an exploratory research into the energy strategies of middle powers. Middle powers face unique challenges in shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy: they are often energy import-dependent and constrained by limited influence over global energy markets. Yet, they are increasingly aware of the need for sustainable development and enjoy a certain degree of geopolitical autonomy. This paper’s case study is Turkey, which seeks to reduce its dependence on foreign energy sources by investing in renewables while securing its energy security through ongoing fossil fuel exploration and transit infrastructure.
    
    This study examines Turkey’s energy transition strategy within a pragmatic adaptation framework. It highlights Ankara’s energy policy as a mix of sustainability objectives and security needs. The study evaluates Turkey’s policies against regional factors, including its pipeline collaborations with Azerbaijan, electricity exchanges with Iran, and strategies to diversify oil imports. It discusses how Turkey's dual approach to energy might influence its regional power and diplomatic standing in the Middle East.
    
    I aim to achieve two goals through this presentation and its accompanying feedback: first, to grasp the broader theoretical significance of uneven development in energy transition as countries like Turkey combine both high- and low-emission energy systems; second, to explore the possibilities for a more expansive comparative analysis of middle powers in energy transition.
    
    Author: Yavuz Tuyloglu (University of Groningen)
  - (Epistemic) Inequalities in Climate Governance: The IMO Marine Environmental Protection Committee
    
    A wealth of literature has demonstrated that despite nation-states in the Global South being disproportionately exposed to the adverse effects of climate change, there are a range of barriers to their equal participation in climate negotiations (Falzon 2023; Dryzek and Stevenson 2015; Schroeder 2010; Gupta 2005). This paper contributes to this literature by examining how such inequalities manifest in negotiations relating to the regulation of GHG emissions in international shipping – specifically, in the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Marine Environmental Protection Committee (MEPC). It argues that in this setting, oft-described inequalities relating to deficits of resources and expertise intersect with the distinctive power structures and public-private relations of maritime commerce and the IMO. This illustrates the mutability of the enaction and reproduction of institutional hierarchies in climate governance.
    
    Authors: Anna Finiguerra (King's College London) , Alex Gould (King's College London)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Conflict & Technology in Insecure Territory Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Chair: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
  - Demystifying deterrence in the age of AI
    
    Deterrence has made a comeback in public debates about global threats. This paper questions the relationship between the proliferation of deterrence discourse on the one hand, and the simultaneous proliferation of militarized remote and autonomous systems (RAS) on the other. Drawing upon notions of ritual, performativity, and ambiguity in deterrence theory (Malksoo 2021), I interrogate how RAS may complicate existing deterrence theory and practice. First, RAS complicate traditional human-centred deterrence, where human agents are thought to signal, communicate, threaten, punish, and react to other humans. Yet, the introduction of artificial intelligence into the broad spectrum of conflict - from resort to force decision-making, to drones, lethal autonomous weapons systems, and human-machine teams - undermines deterrence in its displacement of humans and human judgement. Second, while humans are displaced in both the decision-making cycle and in terms of their role in combat, at the same time deterrence paradoxically requires demonstration and visible presence to be effective. Many AI-enabled systems and/or their capabilities are often (naturally or deliberately) invisible and thus cannot be demonstrated. As such, this paper concludes that RAS, encompassing both hardware and software, reconfigure the social meaning of deterrence in their displacement of humans across physical and cognitive domains.
    
    Author: Bianca Baggiarini (Australian National University)
  - New technologies and total mobilisation of state resources in the context of the war in Ukraine.
    
    The war in Ukraine is the first case of total war after the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This paper explores how new technologies are used by Ukraine to mobilise society and the economy, how they are transforming the relationship between people and the political economy, and imposed new risks for civil society.
    
    Firstly, civilians can operate as a bridge between sensors and shooters with the use of apps and engage private surveillance to feed to the army networks. The main reason for the employment of the “crowd-sourced civilian sensor-network” is the mass use of drones in the conflict. Similarly, intensified cyber warfare relies upon the private sector and volunteers. Secondly, Ukraine’s domestic market is reliant on global supply chains, instant communication, and satellites. Tech giants have gained considerable political power in the conflict. The outcomes of war are becoming increasingly reliant on private/internal and external actors.
    
    Russia’s 2022 invasion forced Ukraine to mobilise its society and economy for resistance. Hyper-connectivity between civilians and the army, as well as between Ukraine and global supply chains has far-reaching consequences in the context of conflict. On the one hand, it blurs the distinction between civilians and combatants, on the other hand, it undermines the core responsibility of the state, that is to protect citizens, by reducing control over the production of the war machine.
    
    Author: Kamila Kwapinska (University of Kent)
  - Predicting Protracted War Through Identity Change On Social Media
    
    In an era of pressing and complex conflict, International Studies faces new challenges in accessing the data needed to predict and track protracted war. We can look to new ways to study identity, especially as it relates to International Relations and peacekeeping. Traditional methods of studying identity present challenges in conflict zones; social media’s vast data offers a real-time alternative. Using the Russia-Ukraine war as a case study, and examining high-engagement posts from influential accounts across Russia and Ukraine, this research identifies trends in identity shifts through user interactions such as likes, shares, and comments. The project has four aims: tracking identity shift trends through social media, analyzing the impact of significant events on identity, understanding identity changes that prohibit peacebuilding, and applying this research to past and future conflicts. This research proposes a framework for tracking identity factors that signal protracted conflict, allowing earlier identification of protracted conflict, and improving peacebuilding strategies, imperative to advance our conflict-prediction methodologies. By combining social media analysis with established identity metrics, this research suggests a new approach to predicting protracted conflict, setting a foundation for predictive, robust, and responsive International Studies over the next fifty years.
    
    Author: Dylan Tucker (University of Leeds)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Critical Perspectives on NATO Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable brings together a range of critical perspectives on NATO. Against the backdrop of NATO’s return to the spotlight, capturing global headlines in response to the Russia-Ukraine War. Russia’s war on Ukraine, including the Russian intervention and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, has gravely affected international security, not least by raising concerns about the threat of nuclear war. Within this context, the Alliance appears to be returning to its Cold War roots as its membership has expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Ukraine itself desires NATO membership. All of these dynamics have renewed conversations about the opportunities and challenges of the Alliance’s growth in size and means. Here we are interested in unpacking the seemingly contradiction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ security within the workings of the Alliance. The roundtable will focuse on a range of critical feminist perspectives to address several related issues (e.g., Human Security, LGBTQ Rights, and Feminist Foreign Policy). By exploring perspectives on NATO from within the Alliance, the roundtable also aims to examine perceptions of civil society and the public of the Alliance (including anti-NATO activism), and to interrogate NATO’s visual and spatial politics.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London)
  
  Participants: Maria Mälksoo (University of Copenhagen) , Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London) , Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh) , Michael Mulvihill (Teesside University) , Chloe Barker (Newcastle University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Disappearances and Mass Graves: Exploring Repressive Violence and Human Rights Challenges Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Iosif Kovras (University of Cyprus)
  
  Chair: Iosif Kovras (University of Cyprus)
  - The Afterlife of Disappearances: A Forensic Approach to the Study of Clandestine Violence
    
    The paper addresses the puzzle of why violent actors engage in strategic exhumations, relocating victims' remains post-conflict when they no longer pose a security threat. We argue that analyzing the strategic management of victims’ remains (‘afterlife of violence’) can reveal a lot about the logic motivating actors to deploy clandestine repertoires of violence. A new global repository of countries with strategic exhumations supports a comparative analysis of Cyprus and Chile. Despite differing conditions, both cases show systematic disinterment processes. We argue international accountability and organizational capacity drive these actions, with motives and capabilities varying between conflict and authoritarian settings.
    
    Authors: Nikandros Ioannidis (Cyprus University of Technology, University of Cyprus) , Iosif Kovras (University of Cyprus)* , Marisol Intriago-Leiva (Servicio Médico Legal of Chile)* , Maria Mikellides (University of Cyprus)*
  - Twice disappeared: mass grave disturbances and their effects
    
    Disturbance of mass grave, including the relocation of human remains to secondary or tertiary graves, is one of the biggest challenges to successful mass grave investigation, engagement and protection. Taking recourse to MaGPIE’s mapping effort and continually growing database, we analyse the effects of such practices from the perspectives of data assemblage, forensic investigations and international criminal law to shine a light on the persistent, destructive and distressing effects of such practice on survivors.
    
    Authors: Emily Fisher (Bournemouth University)* , Ellen Donovan (Bournemouth University)* , Melanie Klikner (Bournemouth University)
  - Can digital recording and mapping be a form of protection of the dead?
    
    The question as to whether digital recording on a map may constitute a form of (non-physical) protection of the dead challenges the boundaries and conceptualization of protection measures in the context of mass graves. Based on the premise that international law requires exacting documentation and record keeping in relation to the dead and enforced disappeared, this contribution offers an analysis of the potential of mass grave mapping as a specific form of protection for the dead. While the focus is on mass grave mappings specifically, the question has relevance for wider practices of open-source human rights documentation and the possible protection levels open-source mapping can offer more generally. Such contribution to knowledge and practice is increasingly pressing in situations where physical protection of the dead is not forthcoming, and as an avenue to offer some (albeit incomplete) protection mechanisms for emerging mass grave landscapes: migratory deaths and the threat of mass fatalities arising from extreme climatic events.
    
    Author: Melanie Klinkner (University of Bournemouth)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Everyday peace and local peace building Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  - Liminality in cross-community dialogue
    
    To mobilise communities in conflict towards dialogue is an ongoing challenge in many conflict and post-conflict settings. Increasingly, we see the supposed solution of walls and fences to keep people apart and thus keep an appearance of peace. As we know, however, increasing segregation only tends to further feelings of distance towards the other side and leads to an increasing stereotyping of ‘the enemy’.
    Cross-community dialogue is a central means of counteracting these tendencies in segregated and divided communities. In this paper I would like to discuss the relevance of liminality, and particularly, of liminal spaces for cross community dialogue. The paper uses the example of two organisations involved in cross-community projects, one in Belfast, Northern Ireland and one in Nicosia, Cyprus, and how the use the in-between of the border to create neutral zones of gathering where both communities can come together without losing face and without putting themselves into harm’s way.
    I argue for the central relevance of the physical position of those space in or on the border and the symbolic power that lies in a repurposing of the material reality of security infrastructure for projects of mental de-bordering.
    
    Author: Lena Merkle (Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany)
  - Realising the local turn in practice
    
    Whilst the local turn in peace and conflict studies has called for locally-built and locally-informed peacebuilding, in practice, despite a rhetoric of localisation, this has not really happened. Rather, there tends to be preferred local actors brought into externally designed programmes that often lack context-informed elements with these actors often having adapted their approach to fit with the perspectives of international actors. In other instances, there are programmes that have some elements of being locally-informed but lack the care to understand the different dynamics and intersectional perspectives. “The local” becomes a homogenous category that fails to reveal lived experiences and more specific opportunities for peace. The significant inroads that have been made in peace and conflict studies are slow to make their way to practice. One substantial roadblock is that due to the context-specific, intersectional-understanding nature of these advancements, they take both time and resources that are not necessarily appreciated, or seen as feasible, in the peacebuilding practitioner field. It also requires time and attention to build equal local partnerships to develop and roll out programmes, which is not always aligned with how the international peacebuilding system is set out. This article aims to empirically understand this failure, whilst highlighting pathways for a local turn in practice.
    
    Author: Dylan O'Driscoll (Coventry University)
  - Youth-led indicators for the Youth, Peace, and Security Agenda
    
    In 2015, the United Nations Security Council formalised the global Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda through Resolution 2250 (followed by Resolutions 2419 (2018) and 2535 (2020)). The YPS agenda has, for the first time, formally recognised the positive role of youth in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. As it has been increasingly adopted by institutions globally, there have been growing calls to establish indicators to monitor and evaluate the success of YPS initiatives that have proliferated throughout the world. However, such efforts have been patchy, and despite the principles of the agenda, often do not involve youth themselves.
    
    In this context, this paper presents findings from a project that sought to examine how power holders and youth peace actors propose to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the YPS agenda across diverse conflict-affected and post-conflict areas. In it we present youth-developed indicators that emerged from a survey, focus groups and a collaborative mapping activity, and put them in critical comparison with indicators proposed by institutional actors. This paper demonstrates the dissonances between aims of local peace actors and institutional objectives, the complexities of meaningful monitoring of peacebuilding agendas, and the potential for youth-led interventions to evaluation and progress.
    
    Authors: Yulia Nesterova (University of Glasgow) , Timothy Dziedzom Amaglo-Mensah (University of Glasgow)* , Helen Berents (Griffith University, Australia)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Exploring the Climate-Nuclear Nexus Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Matthew Rendall (University of Nottingham) , Franziska Stärk (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy Hamburg)
  
  Chair: Laura Considine (University of Leeds)
  
  Discussant: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow)
  - Building siloed futures: The climate-nuclear nexus (or lack thereof) in strategic forecasting and scenario wargaming
    
    Climate change and nuclear danger are structuring forces in world politics, owing to their shared potential to reshape, disrupt, and collapse prevailing global order and human life as we know it. How do national security organisations imagine these existential concerns, and to what ends do they deploy these imaginaries? Which accounts are upheld and valorised, and which are suppressed? To answer these questions, this study analyses how climate change and nuclear danger are embodied in scenarios, simulations, and wargaming activities in the context of the American national-security system. Borrowing from Science and Technology Studies, it defines and describes how these organisations develop a shared, existential sociotechnical imaginary. By doing so, it uncovers important ways that these organisations anticipate, frame, and crucially construct the future, thus advancing our understanding of both imaginative processes in the national security context, as well as the likely trajectory of response and governance to crucial existential problems defining 21st century international politics.
    
    Authors: Robert Cullum (King's College London) , Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds)
  - Stuck in the Post-problem Stage – Explaining Intergenerational Apathy on Nuclear Weapons
    
    Nuclear deterrence presents an existential threat to future generations through the potential nuclear winter effects of large-scale nuclear war. With over 12,000 warheads, the current global arsenal has the capacity to devastate the environment and living conditions of our descendants many times over. Yet, intergenerational justice concerns remain peripheral in nuclear policy discussions, with the present generation failing to enact adequate measures to protect future ones. How can this apathy be explained?
    
    This paper employs Anthony Downs' “issue-attention cycle” model to explore how the nuclear threat initially captured public attention, only to gradually fade from focus. Downs suggests that once a problem has gone through the cycle, it may sporadically regain public attention and typically commands a higher average level of consideration compared to those that have not. However, when considering generational timescales, the lack of direct visual reminders or firsthand experiences related to nuclear weapons may cause new generations to gradually accept the post-problem stage of the cycle – essentially, the nuclear status quo – as normal. This normalization process shifts the baseline for what is perceived as acceptable and contributes to long-term apathy regarding obligations to future generations.
    
    Authors: Franziska Stärk (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy Hamburg) , Matthew Rendall (University of Nottingham)
  - “Existentially” threatening? Exploring the intertwined history and limitations of nuclear and climate threat discourses
    
    Climate change and the dangers from nuclear weapons are framed as two, sometimes interlinked, existential threats to humanity. Both are seen as human-made disasters that could be avoided if common sense prevailed, and as threats to human life on earth. Yet, action commensurate with such a framing is notably absent and the world is far away from eliminating the threats of climate change and nuclear war. This raises questions about the meaning, effects, and failure of the notion of “existential threat”, especially in a field like IR, whose concern is to such a large extent with security. By tracing and comparing nuclear and climate threat discourses, this article seeks to unpack the notion of “existential” in security politics. How do their conceptualizations overlap/differ and with what (un)in tended effects? How do understandings of these issues as “existential” threats inform contemporary policies? In answering these questions, this article provides insights into the conceptualization of existential threats and their limitations for security policy.
    
    Author: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
  - Colonial Legacies and Environmental Justice in the Sea of Islands: Comparing Nuclear Testing and Climate Change Compensation
    
    Since World War II, the Sea of Islands--the Pacific region where people live on islands and are connected by their common ocean—has faced two major socio-ecological crises with lasting existential impacts: nuclear testing and climate change. From the 1940s to the 1990s, nuclear testing in Māòhi Nui/French Polynesia, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati caused widespread contamination and environmental damage, including the destruction of fishing grounds, and forced resettlements. Climate change, meanwhile, presents severe threats through rising sea levels, extreme weather, and loss of livelihood. Both crises are rooted in colonial histories, with powerful states denying the rights of local populations. In both cases, island communities and governments have called for justice and compensation. In international regimes on climate change and nuclear weapons control, discussions on loss, damages as well as victim/survivors’ assistance are increasingly prominent.
    
    This paper compares compensation claims and policies related to nuclear testing and climate change. It explores how these mechanisms may reflect and reinforce colonial power dynamics, for example if they are used as geostrategic tool to enhance influence. It will focus on the USA, France, and Great Britain—responsible nuclear powers and high-emission countries. The aim is to provide insights into compensation mechanisms that better align with the calls for justice from nuclear survivors and climate activists.
    
    Author: Janina Dannenberg (University of Hamburg)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / French Intervention in North Africa and the Sahel: Local, Regional and Global Security Trajectories Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Marine Gueguin (Leeds Beckett University) , Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)
  
  Chair: Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)
  - France in the Sahel: Unveiling colonialities of power and space(s) and rethinking the everyday-militarization
    
    The withdrawal of the French military operation Barkhane from Mali in 2022 was driven by strong anti-French sentiments in the Sahel. France’s military interventions in the Sahel have sparked significant debates and scrutiny within the discipline, in particular looking at the regional response to armed conflict, organized crimes, and terrorism in conjunction with African partners (FCG5S). However the underlying colonialities that shape such operations, in particular the construction of the ‘outside’ space(s) and the everyday-militarisation remain overlooked. Of significance, at a micro-level, France’s interventions and counterterrorism strategies in the Sahel operated and translated into the everyday and continuous militarisation of space(s). By scrutinising historical and contemporary contexts around military powers and interventions in space(s), the paper explores the intricate linkages between France’s colonial past, neo-colonial structures, colonial legacies and the present-day with Barkhane and Serval military interventions. Conceptualising the ‘coloniality of space’ following a decolonial approach, the paper argues for a rethinking and deconstruction of France’s military interventions. The concepts of colonial continuities and patterns of continuities have been largely under-explored vis-à-vis France’s intervention in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and Mauritania (Chafer et al., 2020) as a denial. It questions, therefore, how space(s) are (re)produced and (re)constructed by the French counterterrorism strategy to build the ‘Françafrique’ and the quadrillage de l’espace. The paper critically examine the role of France in the Sahel, with a specific emphasis on unveiling colonialities of power and space(s) questioning the vernacular military interventions and French military involvement in a complex security challenges zone
    
    Author: Marine Gueguin (Leeds Beckett University)
  - Colonial Legacies and Securitization in Development: A Critical Analysis of the French Development Agency’s 2021-2025 Strategy in North Africa
    
    Can development strategies shape ideas, narratives, and practices of security? Additionally, can we trace the enduring impacts of colonial occupation and governance through these development programs? Scholars in development studies have noted that international aid programs often extend colonial practices. Similarly, research on the "security-development" nexus has explored how certain security concepts shape relationships between former colonial powers and former colonies, often leading to the securitization of development policies.
    
    Building on these insights, this paper examines the 2021-2025 strategy of the French Development Agency (Agence française de développement – AFD), specifically its regional directorate for North Africa (Direction régionale Afrique du Nord – DRAN), which covers Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.
    
    The strategy emphasizes three main objectives: enhancing resilience to climate change, strengthening the social contract, and promoting social and economic transformation. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper demonstrates how specific economic and social issues are securitized and how the French approach to development in some of these countries is influenced by a legacy of colonial governance.
    
    Author: Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)
  - Ceci n’est pas un “colonial reckoning”: France and its allies in the Sahel at the end of Barkhane
    
    Throughout its ten-year intervention in the Sahel, France tried to 'Europeanise' its engagement and was mostly successful, securing the long term involvement of many El member states. However, as the conflict worsened and accusations of failure multiplied, anti-French sentiment rose among Sahelian populations. While France was the driving force behind the intervention, European staff began to blame it for the failure: the accusation of 'neo-colonial behaviour' became a site of contestation for France and its allies. Drawing on 55 anonymous interviews and fieldwork in Mali during the drawdown of Operation Barkhane, this article analyses how France and its European allies understand the failure of their intervention and the rise in anti-French sentiment. I argue that the departure of France has not led to a colonial reckoning: both France and their allies take a narrow and reductive view of what neo-colonialism is. Despite being ejected from the region, French staff remain resolutely attached to their intervention doctrine in Africa and many think they will return to the Sahel in the future. Meanwhile, European staff blame French neocolonial behaviour to deflect and disavow their own colonial anxiety and the failure of the intervention. They take the ejection of France to be a license for further interventions in the Sahel led by them: without France, EU institutions and member states such as Italy and Germany continue the maintenance neo-colonial border regimes and security assistance.
    
    Author: Katherine Pye (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Negotiating sovereignties in Niger
    
    In this paper, I examine how foreign intervention forced a redefinition of Niger’s sovereignty. I draw on post-structuralist approaches to sovereignty, treating the concept as constructed, its meaning changing over time. I analyse how the meaning of sovereignty became destabilised as foreign militaries intervened in Niger to support in the fight against terrorism and control of migration. As military intervention violates the concept of sovereignty, it is usually accompanied by a justification discourse produced by both the intervenors and actors in the host countries who may support the intervention. I analyse such justification discourses produced between 2017 and 2023 in Niger. I then examine the practice and performance of sovereignty by the Nigerien state in the context of foreign military presence. I find that despite the justification discourse, the meaning of sovereignty continued to be contested resulting in the concept becoming chronically destabilised. This created space for the military junta to reclaim the meaning of sovereignty that aligned with Nigeriens’ imagining of the state.
    
    Author: Aoife McCullough (London School of Economics)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Ideas, History, and Agency in IPE Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Conveners: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science) , David K. Johnson (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  
  Chair: Chris Clarke (University of Warwick)
  
  Discussant: Chris Clarke (University of Warwick)
  - The Imperial Origins of the Federal Reserve System
    
    How did the US Federal Reserve System become the global structural force that it is today, regulating the supply of money and credit on a global scale? Standard accounts explain the emergence of the Fed in 1913 as an institutional response to the disorder of the domestic US banking system, the international role of the dollar being a later development with little place in its original design (Meltzer 2004). Those who have investigated the international dimensions of the Fed’s origins (Broz 1997) have emphasized the importance of export interests in propelling the US policy elite to establish a central bank. This paper argues that the international sources of the Fed were far more central to its formation than either of these approaches suggest. Drawing on primary and archival documents, I investigate how the intellectual architects of the Fed drew on their experience in international financial integration in the US state’s newly established colonial empire – from the Philippines to Cuba – to inform their designs for the American central banking system. Uncovering the imperial origins of the Fed clarifies how a purportedly domestic institution exercises structural power in the world economy.
    
    Author: David K. Johnson (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - On the merits and limits of Polanyian Analysis in the Global South: Embedded Economies and Neoliberal Transitions
    
    The use of Karl Polanyi’s concepts and theories is receiving a new wave of appreciation in Political Economy. In particular, scholars are frequently using the idea of the Double Movement to understand recent social, political, and economic transformations in countries of the Global South. What does the transposition of this concept through both space and time elucidate? What does it obscure? In this paper, I argue that Polanyian analysis remains especially useful to explain the evolution between states, societies, and the economy during neoliberal transitions. It accounts for the rise of neoliberal state/economies through processes of globalization, and is also well-suited to explain counter-movements that led to post-neoliberal compromises and the expansion of welfare and social security in many emerging economies. On the other hand, I argue that its explanatory power in non-democratic contexts, when “re-embedding” happens without a significant push from below, remains limited. What we can do in these cases, I propose, is to complement Polanyian analysis by looking into what kind of State Projects, from a strategic-relational perspective, support this process. I illustrate the theoretical argument through a discussion of Thailand’s “embedded neoliberal” compromise in the years following the Asian Financial Crisis and IMF austerity policies.
    
    Author: Aila Trasi (Johns Hopkins University and Goethe University Frankfurt)
  - Forestalling Hegemonic Decline: Joseph Chamberlain and Britain’s Return to Mercantilism
    
    Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST) remains one of the most influential systemic theories of international relations. Given the United States’ relative decline, the rise of China and the Sino-American trade war, HST is more relevant than ever. As a structural theory, however, HST glosses over those pivotal individuals who drive domestic policy back into alignment with the dictates of the evolving systemic structures. This paper demonstrates the significance of Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) who led that realignment at international and domestic levels in the economic case of the British hegemonic decline a century ago. Inspired by the British Historical Economists, he sought to revert the UK’s loss of competitiveness to its rising challengers Germany and the United States by raising protectionist tariffs. Chamberlain thus made a first, crucial step to reorient Britain’s commercial policy towards the economic and political consolidation of the Empire through mutual preferential trade until this inter-generational effort was accomplished politically when Britain departed from free trade and adopted Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference in 1932. Drawing on extensive archival research, the paper examines how this pivotal individual and his decades-long campaign drove Britain’s trade policy back to mercantilism. It highlights the contingency involved in economic policymaking and deepens our understanding of the contemporary relevance of this crucial IPE case.
    
    Author: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - The racialisation of mundane economic language
    
    There are compelling arguments that political economists are uniquely suited to measure the ‘wages of whiteness’, or the material impacts of the racial regime of white supremacy. However in this paper, I argue that political economists must also account for the ideational environment that allows such inequality to be legitimised. Indeed, I contend that the practice of giving meaning to economic language obfuscates the imperialist context in which this language emerged. The drive to catalogue the material, then, ought not to foreclose an investigation of more banal processes of political ideology that can imbue mundane economic language with whiteness. To demonstrate my case, I analyse the rhetorical situation of the 2024 US presidential election. While there is abundant evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates modelled more overt forms of racist argumentation, the number one issue mobilising voters was ‘the economy’ and the rise of prices/inflation according to the most credible polling firms. Instead of seeking to uncover prejudicial beliefs of voters, I provide evidence that ‘the economy’ is a linguistic/rhetorical device that normalises the hierarchisation of human beings that bestow material privileges to those aligned with whiteness at the cost of violence against minoritised groups.
    
    Author: Jessica Underwood (University of Warwick)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Indebtedness as a political condition Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Mustapha Pasha (University of Aberystwyth)
  
  Discussant: Mustapha Pasha (University of Aberystwyth)
  - Race, Subprime and the Financialisation of Predatory Lending
    
    The shift from exclusion to super-inclusion in the 2000s US subprime boom is often seen as an important turning point in how finance can prey on marginalised borrowers. This turn is often explained as an outcome of misaligned incentives that allowed financiers to charge high interest and fees while passing on any risk via securitisation. While differentiated outcomes are acknowledged, focusing on Wallstreet sidelines the constitutive role of racialised and gendered practices in the making of financialisation. By contrast, we adopt a historicist approach to foreground the social struggles in producing financial structures in unexpected ways. We trace racialised practices as exceptional experiments from the 1920s onwards to document the significance of racialisation for how predatory lending changed over time. We find that subprime was significant because it changed predatory lending from a logic of rentierism to a logic of raiding, a systematic version of equity stripping. This was not pushed by Wallstreet but by local real estate developers in response to the distinct nature of racialised practices.
    
    Authors: Samuel Knafo (University of Sussex) , Mareike Beck (University of Warwick)
  - Complex indebtedness and international order
    
    This paper articulates two inter-related arguments: first, that politics itself is about the authoritative organisation of relations of indebtedness, and second, that international ordering practices can be understood through the prism of ‘complex indebtedness’. The notion of ‘Complex indebtedness’ elaborates an alternative basis for thinking about the nature and form of ‘globalisation’, both in a historical and contemporary sense, better capturing the interplay between empire, sovereignty, capitalism and democracy than the liberal notion of ‘complex interdependence’. It speaks to questions within IR about how to theorise the nature of the ‘international’, which has for too long centred questions of multiplicity and difference over asymmetric interpellation and struggles against it. By centring relations of indebtedness as constitutive of political ordering both within and across national borders, we advance towards a more useful understanding of the origins and distribution of power.
    
    Author: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  - Race and Debt: On the Other Side of Whiteness as Property
    
    The concept “Whiteness as property,” originally formulated by Cheryl Harris (1993), has recently been the object of renewed interest within the field of critical phenomenology (Guenther 2019; Luzardo 2023). In this paper, building on analyses by Harris and Guenther, I interrogate to what extent a materialist account of race needs to take into account how “the other side of the coin” of Whiteness as Property is not merely dispossession of land, territory, wealth, and bodies, but debt. Connecting the flourishing literature on Whiteness as Property with different accounts of debt and indebted lived experience (Graeber 2011, Ferreira da Silva 2022, Lazzarato 2012, Zambrana 2021) as well as with my own work on immigrant experiences of indebtedness in a Norwegian context (Rathe 2023), I ask: what does it mean to understand racialized lived experience through the moral-economic relation of debt? I argue that while “Whiteness as property” offers a unique materialist framework for understanding racialized lived experience beyond questions of identity, such analyses can benefit from turning the spotlight on the peculiar dynamic of debt that seem to go hand in hand with various forms of racialized existence. This work, however, requires remaining sensitive to how different contexts will inevitably inform different of debt-relations, questioning the universability of any phenomenological account of race and debt.
    
    Author: Kaja Jenssen Rathe (Arctic University of Norway)
  - “A Landmark Moment”: Debt, coercion, and the destruction of the Ethiopian developmental state
    
    In July 2024 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $3.4 billion credit arrangement for Ethiopia, conditioned on significant monetary policy reforms. The IMF has long been calling on Ethiopia to abandon its currency peg and remove barriers to foreign private capital participation. These calls were resisted by the developmental regime which governed the country from 1991-2018. However, with the emergence to power of a new Prime Minister in 2018, there has been more acquiescence to these calls, as demonstrated by the Ethiopian government’s decision to float its currency in 2024. The paper provides a historical materialist analysis of indebtedness in Ethiopia, focusing on the 1991-2018 and post-2018 periods. It contrasts the resistance and quasi-compliance that characterized the relationship between the Ethiopian government and creditors between 1991 and 2018 to the post-2018 era of acquiescence. It contends that the post-2018 economic liberalization measures in Ethiopia were driven by external creditors, highlighting how debt is being used as a tool to dismantle the developmental state and pave the way for the entry of private capital into the Ethiopian economy. With special attention to agency, the analysis highlights how debt continues to be used as a tool of capitalist coercion.
    
    Author: Fikir Haile (Acadia University, Canada)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Islam and Islamism Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Regine Schwab
  
  Chair: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
  - The Limitations of the Islamist Electoral Advantage: Evidence from the FJP government in Egypt
    
    Amidst electoral victories during transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, and Islamist-led government in Morocco and Turkey, scholars tested the ‘Islamist electoral advantage’ generated by social service provision. It was argued that Islamist parties were responsible for only a fraction of the array of services provided by Islamic activists, instead enjoying ‘reputational benefits’ due to their association more broadly with a religious and civic minded trend within society. However, Islamist parties face a different challenge in government than in opposition. Their continued popularity (and electoral success) depends not only on the support of religious voters, but also the party’s performance in government providing services and managing the economy for all citizens. Whilst a robust service provision infrastructure is well-suited to generating support whilst in opposition, governing effectively entails increased expectation towards wider delivery from the local to the national level across the state. This heightened expectation tasks the movement party with upscaling its ‘particularistic’ provision of services – enjoyed by supporters of the movement - into a ‘programmatic’ one – distributed nationally by the central state. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and its ill-fated Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) was elected then led the government during 2012-13 before being deposed in a military coup. This paper demonstrates that during this period the movement/party did not only present itself as the political face of a broader tendency within Egypt’s Islamic movement but worked to centre itself as the direct source of food, medical services, and public security for Egyptian citizens. Through interviews with Brotherhood members, FJP parliamentarians and cabinet ministers, this paper demonstrates how limited resources and a failure to gain effective control of state institutions, prevented efforts to upscale the movement’s service provision efforts to a programmatic, national level, highlighting the limitations of the ‘Islamist advantage’ when in government.
    
    Author: Neil Russell (Glasgow Caledonian University)
  - Islamophobia: The First and Second Order Spillover Effect
    
    There are approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide, making up 25.8% of the global population. As of 2017, over 300 million Muslims reside in countries as minorities globally accounting for 1/5 of the global Muslim population. In Europe, Muslims are an estimated 25.8 million – 5% of the population. This data indicates that rest of the Muslims Muslims live as minorities outside of Europe.
    
    Since the end of the Cold-War, and particularly post-9/11, there has been a proliferation of Islamophobic literature and content produced in the West. This raises questions about the kind of impact these highly sophisticated ideologies have on countries in the Global-South where Muslims constitute a minority because rules that determine and guide the place of production of Islamophobia are usually different from those that govern the place it receives.. When it travels from the West without its context and field of production and inserts itself in countries such as India (with the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism), it configures differently. As such, India which is home to the second-largest Muslim population (200 million) in the world, produced 55% of the world's anti-Muslim content on X in 2022. Muslims are the largest minority in India. In Sri Lanka, located south of India, Muslims make-up the second-largest minority which at 9.7% of the population. The Islamophobia produced in India is consumed and has ripple effects in Sri Lanka.
    
    This paper will look at the first and second order spillover effect of Islamophobia produced in the West in countries like India and Sri Lanka. The paper will present research findings from a discourse analysis that will connect Islamophobic themes originating in the West with the Islamophobic knowledge re-production in India and their impact in Sri Lanka.
    
    Author: Shifana Niyas (Trinity College Dublin)
  - The Mental Curtain: An Ethnographic Exploration of Muslim Hui Women’s Education in Northwestern China
    
    Muslim women from China’s third largest minority group, the Hui, face ‘cultural conflict’ between party-state discourses of Han-dominated modernisation, heavily promoted through the state education system, and community Islamic traditions, which include limited education and early marriage for girls. A conceptual link may be drawn between differential educational outcomes, internalisation of religious-cultural norms, and community perceptions of the value of state schooling. This qualitative study of two Hui communities of differing economic development in Ningxia province will draw on interviews with girls, parents, imams and officials, as well as Hui women at university in provincial capital Yinchuan and national capital Beijing, to examine experiences and views of state education; how students and their families navigate intersecting forms of cultural conflict for ethnic and religious minorities and for women; and how these together influence female educational experiences and outcomes. Throughout, young Hui women’s agency and voice in negotiating their educational trajectories with families, communities and schools will be emphasised, in a way thus far missing from the mostly Western- and male-dominated scholarship on China’s Islamic minorities. Data will be thematically and comparatively analysed, generating insights of use in the culturally sensitive promotion of female empowerment and educational equity among China’s Muslim communities and beyond.
    
    Author: Beibei GAO (King's College London)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Law and War: New Challenges Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: ILPG Working group
  
  Chair: James Gow
  
  Discussant: James Gow
  - International Humanitarian Law & the Moral Machine: AI & the Role of Emotions in War.
    
    The dichotomy between conflict decision-making and emotion is often used to justify the outsourcing of human decisions and actions to AI as a more ethical and superior way of conducting war. Yet, this remains a largely unexplored area in contemporary research and literature. This paper will reflect on various disciplines including bio-psychosocial and systemic approaches to better understand and highlight the importance of human qualities such as emotion, reason, judgement, empathy, and caution in conflict decision-making.
    
    It will then outline the importance of human emotions in framing the relationship between AI and humanity, particularly when it comes to lethal targeting and conflict decision-making. It will also set out a framework that allows us to evaluate the use of AI on the battlefield in a meaningful way in order to assess its compliance with International Humanitarian Law.
    
    Author: Jake Oakes (University of West of Scotland)
  - AI, War and (In)Humanity
    
    By removing, reducing and reconfiguring human activity on the battlefield, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in war has significant implications for armed conflicts, their regulation, and humanitarianism as a whole. Despite the precision and reliability that might be achieved through the increased automation of wartime decisions and actions, such as the selection and engagement of targets, the capacity of a machine to apply human traits such as empathy and caution is dubious at best. From a humanitarian perspective, outsourcing life and death decisions to machines is highly problematic.
    
    In response to this, the argument made in this paper is threefold, highlighting: the need for a broadened definition of military AI as a tool for human ends; that military AI (its development and use, as well as attitudes towards it) risks the problematic and unprecedented removal of humanity from war and its regulation; and that humanity should be used as a criterion for the use of AI in war, in order to fortify the humanitarian project in the face of contemporary challenges, and ensure as robust protections as possible for civilians and combatants alike.
    
    The application of AI need not, and should not, mean the complete removal of humans from military actions and decisions, the delegation of human duties to machines, or the replacement of human beings with technology. Rather, AI’s use should be exclusively limited to effectively supplementing and facilitating human agency and decision-making: a tool at the service of human actors, for the extension of human agency and the augmentation of human decision-making: a technological means for strictly human ends.
    
    Author: Joanna Wilson (University of the West of Scotland)
  - Treaties or taboos? Examining the norms and legal principles constraining the use of expanding bullets
    
    This paper rethinks weapons limitation initiatives through the lens of the “taboo.” This area of international law, which has traditionally aimed to protect combatants and non-combatants from unnecessary suffering in war, has come to be regarded as an important component of international peace and security. This paper analyses the taboos surrounding the use of expanding bullets, which have yet to be the subject of systematic analysis despite their status as the first conventional weapons to be regulated under IHL. It discusses the origin of the taboo associated with the use of expanding bullets and the perceived horror brought forth by their use in war. It engages with the literature on the taboos surrounding the use and non-use of these bullets and questions the degree to which they have influenced the decision of states to not use them. Finally, it confronts the political and national interests underlying the decisions of states to either use or not use expanding bullets in international and domestic conflicts. In doing this, the paper shows why ideas of the ‘taboo’ are more nuanced than conventionally thought, and how they lose effectiveness when under conflict with other, more powerful taboos.
    
    Author: Carmen Chas (Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid)
  - Breaking the Code of Silence: Afghanistan War Crimes Accountability in Australia and the United Kingdom
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Elizabeth Brown (King's College London)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  WE 18 Panel / Meet the Editors of the Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Security, and International Affairs Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Speakers: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham), Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh), David Mainwaring, Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Middle Space Powers and Non-State Actors in Outer Space Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Cameron Hunter (Copenhagen University)
  - Middle powers: The question of sovereign space
    
    This paper analyses the concept of sovereignty in, around, and about outer space as it relates to middle powers – specifically Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Does sovereign space exist? What does it mean to have sovereign space capabilities? With the increasing acknowledgement of the shifting strategic threat and changing character of war by these countries, more pressure has been placed on middle powers, and allies to the United States, to develop space capabilities in a concept known as ‘allied by design’. As such, this paper aims to broaden the understanding of sovereign space – arguing that while middle powers have developed and are developing sovereign space capabilities, they have not done so without their allies in mind. While sovereign space capabilities do exist for middle powers – independent space power does not.
    
    Author: Marissa Martin (King's College London)
  - International cooperation and space development: an analysis of Brazil’s partnerships in the space sector
    
    This article investigates the impact of international cooperation on Brazil’s space program, specifically addressing the question: how does such cooperation influence the development of Brazil’s space capabilities? The hypothesis suggests that, as an emerging power in the space sector, Brazil faces constraints in developing an autonomous program. In this context, international partnerships may be crucial in enabling more ambitious projects through cost-sharing and technology transfer. After a literature review on the global political dynamics surrounding space governance and cooperation, particularly in the Brazilian context, we conducted a systematic analysis of the program’s activities in satellite development. Using official government and media sources, we identified and examined international partnerships and their characteristics, creating a comprehensive database of Brazil’s international cooperation agreements in the space sector. This analysis underscores the importance of bilateral and multilateral agreements for fostering partnerships, co-development, and technology sharing. Preliminary findings indicate that one of the program’s most successful projects resulted from a partnership with China, suggesting that cooperation may be instrumental, though not all collaborations have yielded concrete outcomes.
    
    Author: Raquel Gontijo (PUC Minas, Brazil)
  - European Multinationals in the African Space Industry
    
    The African space industry in recent times has experienced transformation and rapid development due to the increase in investment from international players. Among the prominent actors are the European multinationals that have contributed not just to the development of the sector but have invested in high technology and knowledge transfer for sustainable benefit. Despite years of collaboration, the European Union (EU) and Africa signed a partnership agreement in 2000, setting out eight strategic objectives, of which space science and technology are pivotal. As the states and organisations constantly engage to benefit from foreign direct investment (FDI) and ongoing projects within their regions, the EU strongly pursue economic and political relations with its African counterparts through which European multinationals operate on the continent (Ascani, Crescenzi, and Iammatino, 2016). The EU conglomerates leverage the EU-African partnership as a basis for their operations in Africa. The multinationals’ operation is also motivated by the emerging nature of the African market (Tallio, 2014). Liberal institutionalism, a strand of liberal theory which covers international institutions, is applied to the discourse. The theory analyses the operations of the multinationals, particularly how their mission and expertise sync with the development of the African space industry and society. Essentially, the paper discusses the critical role the EU conglomerates play in shaping the space landscape in Africa and the contributions they make to satellite technology and sustainable development. Among other findings, the study found that, though European multinationals have played and still play crucial roles in the space sector in Africa, including societal development, it has also created a challenge for the space firms originating from the continent. On the other hand, the European companies are not the only formidable actors in Africa, Chinese firms are also involved in the space industry, adding to the complexity of the sector.
    
    Authors: Kehinde Abolarin (Liverpool John Moores University) , Samuel Oyewole (University of Pretoria, South Africa)*
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Past and Emotions: Trauma, Nostalgia, and nationalism Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Chaeyoung Yong (University of St Andrews)
  - The Trauma Competition: how narratives of the cultural trauma of the communist past are narrated by Bulgarian political elites
    
    Recently, increased academic attention has been paid to the role of narratives surrounding trauma and humiliation in populist political discourse. Originally, this attention largely examined the narrative responses of populist political figures to the genuine grievances of the people they claim to represent (cf. Homolar and Löfflmann 2021; Giurlando 2020; Hochschild 2016). Contrastingly, an emergent body of literature focuses on the active construction by political elites of the traumas and humiliations underpinning these narratives, through the manipulation of politicised readings of historical events (cf. Toomey 2018; Freistein et. al. 2022). We contribute to this latter approach by examining the case of Bulgaria, where conservative and liberal elites both lay claims to being the ‘true’ agents responsible for resolving the ‘traumas’ of the country’s communist past. This is based on a broadly shared construction of the nature of Bulgarian communism, and its (assumed) function as the main obstacle to the rectification of the country’s economic and social challenges and for its future westwards foreign policy orientation. Yet, despite advancing similar narratives surrounding the trauma inflicted on the country’s people by the past regime, conservatives and liberals in Bulgaria use this historic trauma to legitimise (or delegitimise) the policies and practices of their opponents as being necessary for the country’s restitution. In doing so both groups ensure strict adherence to specific policy positions (i.e. support for a free market economy, westward foreign policy orientation). We demonstrate that this delegtimisation and policy control stems from competing narratives of who ought to be considered the true ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of the crimes of the past.
    
    Authors: Petar Bankov (University of Glasgow) , Michael Toomey (University of Glasgow)
  - The Global Politics of Scapegoating: Afterlives of International Socialisation
    
    This paper proposes a theory of scapegoating in international politics and theorises how states use scapegoating to deal with self-resentment in the context of international socialisation. Where IR’s socialisation literature has largely overlooked the dynamic afterlives of international socialisation, this paper examines how states’ memory of their encounter(s) with international society shapes their subsequent politics. I suggest that many states, after having navigated international social hierarchy from below, remember their past socialisation efforts as a paradoxical double failure, as having 1) betrayed the state’s authentic identity by emulating international standards, but then 2) ultimately failing to adapt adequately, staying backward. I then argue that some states keep these memories of failure at bay using scapegoating, defined here as a particular type of Othering that externalises undesirable Self-parts, constituted after painful experiences like failed socialisation. The theoretical argument is illustrated through the case of Russia. The paper analyses Russia’s narrative about its 1990s (re-)encounter with ‘civilisation’ as this memory developed from 1999 and into the 2010s. I argue that Russia used Ukraine as a scapegoat for Russia’s painful failures in navigating international society, projecting the undesirable (‘Inauthentic’ and ‘Incompetent’) aspects of itself onto Ukraine.
    
    Author: Anni Roth Hjermann (University of Cambridge)
  - Stories of Loss: The Common Narratives of Populism in the Context of International Politics
    
    Populist rhetoric is known for constructing virulent images of insecurity and for portraying countries as facing imminent societal collapse. This paper builds on the growing body of literature in International Relations that explores how populist narratives entwine individual existential anxieties with concerns about economic, societal, and political change at the domestic and global levels. It focuses on how right-wing populist narratives create the imaginary of a present in existential crisis and why this matters for international politics. As this paper shows, populist stories of loss are built around the creation of a rupture between a country’s past greatness and its bleak present. They bring to the fore fundamental questions of autobiography at the level of the individual and the collective Self. This nurtures a nostalgic desire for a simple, stable, and certain storyline that aligns socio-political preferences with the need for reconstructing identity around radical resistance against policies, practices, and people associated with ‘progress’.
    
    Author: Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick)
  - A New Elizabethan Age: ARIA and the Nostalgic Politics of Anglofuturism
    
    New Elizabethanism characterised the period surrounding the mid-20th Century Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Drawing parallels with the 16th Century reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, the New Elizabethan mood promised to deliver the country from a winter of wartime crisis into a spring of hope, creativity and technological revolution. This paper uses the recent creation of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) as a window into the emotional resonance of New Elizabethanism in contemporary imaginaries of a post-Brexit Global Britain. Drawing on a wealth of parliamentary debates and reports about ARIA’s creation, it shows how modern and forward-looking proposals for reinvigorating Britain’s ‘global scientific superpower’ status are underwritten by nostalgia for an early imperial age, allegedly founded on individual brilliance and heroic exploration. In doing so, it challenges conventional understandings of nostalgia as simply melancholic and backward-looking, showing how the emotion also shapes political visions of a bright and hopeful future. However, the paper also argues that forward-looking nostalgias can have a dark side. This becomes apparent when we locate post-Brexit New Elizabethanism within an international and intellectual Anglofuturist project interested in racist and eugenicist methods of propelling 'white' nations forward. By exposing the networks, ideologies and emotions that underpin this broader Anglofuturist agenda, the paper contributes to growing field-wide calls to reckon with how colonially-rooted imaginaries of race continue to shape the theory and practice of international relations.
    
    Author: Francesca Melhuish (University of Southampton)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  WE 18 Conference event / Professor Michael Cox War Studies keynote - Belfast Days: Teaching War - Living Peace, 1972-1995 SPONSORED BY POLITY Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Speaker: Michael Cox (London School of Economics)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Reflections on gender, peace and security with Northern Ireland’s feminist activists and peacebuilders (Sponsored by the Centre For Gender in Politics at QUB) Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Speakers: Avila Kilmurray (Social Change Initiative), Charmain Jones (Women’s Spaces Strengthening Women's Role in Peacebuilding), Cynthia Enloe (Clark University), Danielle Roberts (Reclaim the Agenda/Alliance for Choice), Louise Coyle (NI Rural Women’s Network (NIRWN)), Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast), Tara Grace Connolly (All Ireland Women’s Forum/UN Youth Delegate)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / Remaking military identities? Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Hannah Richards (University of Bristol)
  
  Chair: Hannah Richards (University of Bristol)
  - The role of the enemy for military identity
    
    The illegal Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022 has led to significantly revised tasks and purposes for most militaries in Western Europe. After a post-Cold War period of down-scaling and professionalization, with many militaries’ main focus being directed toward participation in international missions in the name of countering (comparatively) diffuse threats in the form of failed states and international terrorism, the recent decade is marked by a return to territorial defence of the home territory as main task and purpose. While some scholars have argued that ‘having an enemy to fight and a home territory to defend’ represents a more ‘traditional’ and motivating story about who militaries are and what they are supposed to do than participation in international missions, others maintained that the post-Cold War period produced ‘neural’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ militaries with purely defensive self-understandings in many parts of Western Europe. At the same time, a systematic theoretical and empirical focus on the role of enmity for military identity/the identity of the military as an organisation is largely absent in scholarship on military identity. This seems surprising in the light of a longstanding and rich strand of research in International Relations scholarship theorizing and studying the role of the constitutive other for collective identity formation. To shed light on to what extent (not) having an enemy affects military identity, this paper studies identity construction in militaries in different historical circumstances and constellations, relying on both document/practice analysis and interviews.
    
    Author: Nicola Nymalm (University of Edinburgh)
  - Military Violence & the Swedish Defense Family: A Feminist-Queer Reflection on Metaphor
    
    In this article, we reflect on the Swedish Defense Family; its relationship to violence; and our positions within it as civilian researchers. Through conversations with each other, reflections on our joint workplace (a defense university), and the broader Critical Military Studies literature, we ask: what does it mean to be in this family, who can be a member, and how does the family manifest military violence? Using ethnographic vignettes, we illustrate how different forms of militarised practices both serve to draw us in and reject us from the family. We trace how emotions (anxiety, pride, pleasure, confusion) that accompany military projects – and its calls to family – work to obscure military violence. Informed by feminist-queer research, we argue that these emotions are evocative of spaces-in-between, where the stated claim of the Swedish military and other actors in the defence sector to integrate LGBTQIA+ and gender perspectives stands in tension with their mandate to further violence. In conclusion we suggest that family as metaphor can be used to approach and understand militaries and their claim to violence; and that the positions and spaces of in-between are particularly well-suited for undertaking this critique.
    
    Authors: Jenny Hedström (Swedish Defence University)* , Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)
  - Military Women’s Mediated Identities and Self-Representation During the Prolonged Military Coup and Nationwide Anti-Military Protests in Thailand
    
    This presentation is my working paper, combining my own reflections and empirical findings related to the mediated life of Thai military women during two pivotal sociopolitical transitions in Thailand: the 2014 military coup and the rise of anti-military protests among young generations beginning from 2019. Precisely, I employed my positionality as a former Thai military officer examining my lived experiences as well as that of other military women through interview conversations. I argue that these sociopolitical transitions significantly defined and shaped Thai military women’s relationship with the military and our sense of selves, which became our everyday military practices. Furthermore, social media, which plays a crucial role in the mediated construction of military self and identities, also captures a multitude of the challenges faced by military women, stemming not only from the inherently gendered nature of the military, but also from serving during one of the most complicated periods in the history of the Thai military. This has further exacerbated the integration of military women, our experiences, presence, and visibility, resulting in feelings of deep conflict, trivialisation, and marginalisation.
    
    Author: Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat (University of Leeds)
  - The New Christian Militarism: religious policing in Brazil and the far-right beyond Bolsonaro
    
    In recent years, Evangelical groups have become increasingly involved with police forces worldwide. This can be seen in initiatives like promoting religious conversion among officers and organising prayer campaigns with crime-affected communities through policing partnerships. However, in countries like Brazil, such activism is also having troubling consequences, such as far-right radicalisation among officers and the strengthening of militarised forms of social control. This paper examines the political impact of Evangelical activism in the police forces in Brazil, focusing on two conceptual fronts. Internally to police battalions, I seek to understand religious justifications of policing and authority, whilst externally I seek to analyse community policing projects and the use of religion to promote social change. By analysing three Evangelical chaplaincy networks I will explore how the merging of Evangelicalism and policing may be reshaping democratic governance and potentially reinforcing authoritarian forms of social control from below, away from media attention and mainstream political debates. This research will combine ethnography, document analysis and semi-structured interviews, based on a multi-sited fieldwork conducted over a 12-month period in Brazil. These methods, in turn, will inform a historical sociological analysis of the construction of Evangelical police culture, which will add a substantive contribution to debates about the intersections of religion, policing and social control, as well as the social and political dynamics of far-right radicalisation.
    
    Author: Rodrigo Campos (Research Associate, University of York)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / The Aftermath of COVID-19 II: Management, Discourse and the Everyday Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Convener: GHWG Working group
  
  Chair: Christopher Long (Queen's University Belfast)
  - The Contributions of American Labour Law to the Deaths of Despair Crisis in the United States
    
    Abstract
    Since 2014 US life expectancy has been in a state of stagnation and decline. Two economists investigated this trend and found that an alarming number of suicides, overdoses or poisonings, and alcohol-related diseases, collectively labelled Deaths of Despair, was partially driving it. The most common victims are working class individuals without college degrees. A common factor behind Deaths of Despair is long term economic hardship. Moreover, between 1999 and 2022 approximately 3.1 million people have died due one of these three causes. Using psychologist LM Dodes theory of addiction which indicates that it stems from a feeling of powerlessness as a theoretical foundation this paper will examine how the US legal doctrine of Employment-at-Will and faults within US labour law has created a workforce that is at the whims of their employers. Its socio-legal analysis uses numerous International Labour Organisation conventions and recommendations such as Convention No. 158, Convention No. 87, and Convention No. 98 as key points of references on how the US is falling short and perpetually ceding power to employers. The primary victims of Deaths of Despair have been experiencing increasing difficulty in the modern American labour market which no longer values low-skill labor. These factors combined with deindustrialization have hurt the working class and are a major factor behind Deaths of Despair. Due to the complex nature of the factors behind Deaths of Despair, weakened labour unions and Employment-at-Will can be viewed as a partial explanation behind this epidemic.
    
    Author: Quinn O'Mahar (Ulster University)
  - Philanthrocapitalism and local responses to health emergencies: the case of G10 Favelas in Brazil
    
    The power of philanthropic foundations over global policymaking has been addressed by international studies for at least a decade, as well as the relationship between philanthrocapitalism, the emerging and market-based form of philanthropy, and global health policymaking. The health field stands out as a field of action for major philanthrocapitalists and for a large number of studies about it, especially during emergencies. Nevertheless, these studies are still focused on international organisations or based on cases from North America, and there is still no intersection with studies on responses to health emergencies. Aiming to bridge these gaps, this article analyses a case of local response to COVID-19 crossed by philanthrocapitalism and its relationship with social policies in Brazil. The analysis was carried out using a framework developed from a systematic review of other cases of philanthrocapitalism in the Global South. This framework highlights the patterns and specificities of the relationship between philanthrocapitalism and social policies in middle and low-income countries. The study on the response to the pandemic promoted by G10 Favelas, a non-profit organisation of the ten largest favelas in Brazil, followed a process-tracing logic and supported a discussion on the relationship between philanthrocapitalism and health emergencies.
    
    Author: Luiza Witzel Farias (King's College London and University of São Paulo)
  - ‘Managing Down’: Exercising Professional Discretion in the South-West of England Care Homes during the Pandemic
    
    This qualitative study investigates how care homes in South-West England managed and responded to the everyday challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic While many studies explore the impact of the pandemic on care home staff, residents, and families, limited research addresses care homes staff experiences with filtering top-down rules and guidelines during 'uncertain times'. Drawing on the concept of street-level bureaucracy, this study examines how professionalism operates under crisis conditions and how it impacts discretion and organizational response within care homes. Based on fourteen semi-structured interviews with care home staff, including managers, analysis highlights care homes engaged in effective response mechanisms and developing policy practices in response to the needs of staff, residents and their families by moving beyond the scope of established guidelines. By mobilizing professionalism discretion under crisis conditions, care homes initiated bottom-up policy practices, centred around four different categories: strengthening infection control and prevention, promoting socialisation, enhanced communication and fostering intra- and inter-professional teamwork. This study, in contrast to the existing research highlighting a bleak picture of the challenges experienced by care homes during the pandemic, emphasises the ability of care home staff to take action and their resilience in facing pandemic-induced challenges.
    
    Author: Selin Sivis (University of Bristol)
  - Banality and spectacle in the Covid-19 pandemic: analysing care’s differential temporalities
    
    The Covid-19 pandemic testifies to the exhaustion of the binary distinction between the exception and the everyday. By generalising an experience of ‘crisis ordinariness’ (Berlant 2011) it provides a space that evokes new imaginaries of crisis, both through public problematisations of being-in a stretched emergency and the simultaneous governmental attempts to enclose these experiences. In this paper we turn to care, not only as an omnipresent condition of the human (Gilligan 1993), but as a lens that helps to conceptualize crisis management. As care integrates urgency and timelessness (Villa 2020), it lends itself to an analysis of how the Covid-19 pandemic moved beyond the everyday/exception binary. To do so, it mobilises an analytics of banality/spectacle to account for the dynamic movements of the moral economy of care underlying the Covid-19 crisis (see Fassin 2021). To trace these movements, it turns to two specific locales associated with the ‘beginning’ of the pandemic in the German context: public expressions of solidarity with care workers and media coverage of care work and infrastructures related to the first infections detected. Following the oscillations between spectacle and banality then serves to problematise differential regimes of care’s temporality. While spectacular care adheres to a modern imaginary of time as unfolding progressively through adequate solutions and fixes, and lends itself to an orderly temporal narrative of the pandemic, banal care relates to time as an endurant work in the present that needs to go-on without the promise of immediate betterment. Tracing how Covid’s spectacles of care fade out into the banalities of life with disease complicates questions of temporality in crisis responses. Against the hopeful suggestion that the pandemic has enabled an epidemiological view of society (Bratton 2021), this paper problematises the ineptitude regarding the temporal underpinnings of the pandemic: its banal, endemic (non-)rupture.
    
    Authors: Katharina Wezel (University of Tübingen, University of Groningen) , Nicolas Gaeckle (University of Groningen)*
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / The IPE of Industrial strategy, global value chains and production Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working group
  
  Chair: Julia Calvert (University of Edinburgh)
  - A Study on The Impact of Brexit on the UK Approach to Computing Power
    
    The literature on geoeconomics and economic statecraft has shown that market size can shape a country’s industrial strategy. In particular, it can motivate a focus on negative economic statecraft - the use of policy tools to coerce adversaries – or positive economic statecraft – the use of policy tools to boost the domestic development and uptake of strategic technologies. But how do countries adjust their industrial policies after withdrawing from a sizable market? This paper seeks to answer this question by focusing on the case of the UK and its cloud computing ecosystem. In the aftermath of Brexit, the UK has withdrawn from the EU Single Market and vowed to become a science and technology superpower. Access to scalable computing power is considered crucial to achieving this strategic objective. While the EU has adopted stringent data sovereignty rules to bolster its cloud ecosystem and reduce its dependence on American cloud giants, the UK strategy does not feature any sovereign agenda. Rather, it emphasises the UK openness to foreign investment in the sector. We explain this by arguing that, after its withdrawal from the scalable EU Single Market, the UK has less bargaining power with US cloud giants and relies more on positive EC tools like attracting investments and increasing spending than negative EC tools such as data localisation mandates. To test our argument, we use data about UK inward foreign direct investment and UK research and development spending from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as well as data on the UK computing ecosystem. Our findings inform scholarship at the intersection of international political economy and the governance of emerging digital technologies.
    
    Author: Filippo Gualtiero Blancato (University College London (UCL))
  - Worker-consumer alliances through supply chains in a post-CSR world
    
    Alliances between workers and activist consumers were central to spurring the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in supply chains, as firms conceded responsibility for intensifying abuse of often racialised workers in an era of globalised production. Researchers and activists have shown that 30 years of CSR has failed to address pervasive inequalities in supply chains, while the promise of alternative worker-driven governance models and human rights due diligence legislation for corporate accountability further contest CSR. In addition, worker-consumer movements have themselves been criticised for failing to incorporate working-class voices and reproducing racialised relations of vulnerability and responsibility between North and South. The supply chain institutes these relations, positioning workers and consumers at opposite ends of the chain, dispersed across geographic space, with corporate narratives of ethical consumption constructing the Northern consumer as the benefactor and saviour of Southern and migrant labourers.
    
    This presentation offers the research agenda of a proposed project that will explore the potential and political economy of contemporary worker-consumer alliances in an era of declining CSR legitimacy. The project will investigate worker-consumer relations in two industries with different geographies of production: the Costa Rica-UK banana supply chain, and the UK’s domestic horticultural supply chain. It examines a long-term alliance in the banana industry and a developing alliance in horticulture, both of which explicitly seek to centre workers’ experiences and seek alternatives to CSR for extracting worker gains. However, the project also seeks to explore how these alliances are underpinned by everyday experiences of labour/consumption and racialised, binarised worker/consumer identities by engaging bringing together workers and consumers outside of organisational structures. The presentation reflects on the potential for contemporary worker-consumer alliances to erode these racialised worker/consumer binaries, denaturalise supply chain exploitation and extract meaningful gains for workers by looking beyond CSR.
    
    Author: Remi Edwards (University of Sheffield)
  - The political economy of industrial meat production
    
    This paper investigates the political economic implications of the current capitalist food regime through the lens of intensive animal production. The costs of large meat production complexes are externalised by the nature of the value chain, which operates in a structure that makes invisible the linkage of responsibility – thereby protecting corporate actors. The Danish ‘pig industrial complex’ is used as a case that illustrates contemporary clashes between what is now a corporatised agricultural value chain against a political climate leading towards radical sustainable transformation, enforcing a renegotiation of the agricultural sector’s license to operate. The Danish meat production sector continuously undergoes structural reconfigurations that places political and economic salience on farmers and large processing companies. The analytical approach combines a focus on the porosity of national borders that are both permissive to increased pig trading flows, but also serve the pig sector’s interests in limiting the potential risk of transferring disease between producing countries, thereby entangled with border politics. It also poses the question of the role of industrial relations politics to influence corporate strategy of European multinational meat corporations.
    
    Authors: Laura Horn (Roskilde University, Denmark) , Marie Huntley Andersen (Roskilde University)
  - A strategic-relational state? Freeports and the UK State in the Global Political Economy
    
    Freeports were (re)introduced to the UK in 2019 as a part of its post-EU trade strategy. The aim was to help level up poorer regions of the UK by bringing in private investment and connecting to global supply chains. There is a general consensus that Freeports have not fulfilled the hopes for (or fears of) a radical deregulated special economic zone. The eight English Freeports have evolved to be very different in geographical scale, focus and institutional form. The new Labour government has pledged to continue and expand them. All of this begs the question as to what their role is? Strategic-relational state theory (Jessop, 2007) offers one theoretical lens for understanding them. Ensembles of local actors (public and private) have connected with the state to gain resources and encourage investment. Yet the more strategic implications of this theory seem less relevant: it is not clear how effectively the central government is steering them or how they fit into any kind of national spatial industrial strategy. To explore this question, this paper engages in a documentary analysis and interviews of local elites (in two Freeports in particular) to analyse how they have developed, as well as how they relate to central government and global geoeconomic forces.
    
    Authors: Nichola Harmer (University of Plymouth)* , Patrick Holden (University of Plymouth) , Tom Arnold (Heseltine Centre Liverpool)* , James Goulbourn (University of Plymouth)*
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / The Iceberg and the Freezer: The Planetary Politics of Freezing and Thawing Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the planetary politics of freezing and thawing, materially and metaphorically. Materially, freezing and thawing has a central place in the environmental and political consequences of climate change – from the receding of glaciers; to the rise in sea levels; to the thawing of the tundra; to unprecedented access to shipping lanes and underwater resources (Dodds and Nuttall 2016; Rowe 2020; Wrigley 2023). In addition, our mastery over the ice through the development of refrigeration transformed global capitalists circuits and made ice a commodity to be bought and enjoyed (Hobart 2022). Metaphorically, freezing and thawing has also served as a framing device for our thinking about global politics – from the Cold War; to freezing and thawing diplomatic relations; to cold, hard facts; to cryogenic seedbanks that seek to freeze time and nature (Harrington 2022; Yao 2022). In addition, quests to conquer frozen places as the ultimate frontier often reinforces global hierarchies and racial difference (Wedderburn 2023; Yao 2024). This roundtable puts these differing analytical strands in conversation to explore the co-constitutive relationship between the materiality and imaginaries of freezing and thawing, and how these understandings shape planetary politics in the Anthropocene.
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow) , Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London) , Cameron Harrington (Durham University) , Albert Van Wijngaarden (University of Cambridge) , Danielle Young (University of the Ozarks)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / The spaces and place of migration Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Amanda Beattie (Aston University)
  
  Chair: Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool)
  - Less-than-human governing practices / more-than-human migratory claims
    
    This paper revisits research undertaken in the Mexico-US border region during 2011 and 2012 to consider how ‘things’ left behind by people migrating across the Sonoran Desert can shed light not only on the lived experiences of precarious migration, but also on implicit and indirect demands to life and humanity that such experiences can generate. Reflecting both on the risks of silencing that can arise through an analysis of things, as well as on the ways in which things can help tell stories in contexts where the scope to speak out is limited, the paper considers how a more-than-human approach can facilitate a migrant-oriented analysis of migratory claims even where there are challenges to the analysis of spoken demands. It explores how such a focus can uncover important struggles over governing practices that dehumanise and dispossess people who travel through perilous environments such as the desert.
    
    Author: Vicki Squire (Warwick University)
  - The Role of Migrant Refugee Community Organizations Supporting Refugee Asylum Seekers Within Local and Regional Migration Ecosystems
    
    This project examines the relationship between a Migrant Refugee Community Organisation (MRCO) and their local authorities, to understand the power dynamic and how the relationship impacts the space within the migrant ecosystem. MRCOs offer a place of sanctuary to new arrivals attempting to navigate their way through the systems and processes of a new country. However, it is not only MRCOs who have an impact on migrants but also other actors within the migration ecosystem such as local authorities. Therefore, the dynamic of this relationship is investigated, through a postcolonial lens, to uncover whether this relationship is conducive to the support provided to newcomers, or whether it hinders services.
    
    Author: Tara Morton (Aston University)
  - Refugee Housing in ‘the city’: an examination of the everyday and the national in International Migration.
    
    This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of ‘the everyday’ in International Relations. It examines the lived experiences of refugee housing in England. Refugee housing is a particularly useful way of interrogating the relationship between the local and the national. Refugee arrival and dispersal policies are enacted at the national level. They are practiced at the local level. In this article we report on the findings of our study of refugee housing in Birmingham, UK. We adopt a mixed methodology, interdisciplinary in nature, that situates the lived experience of refugee communities, and those that support them, alongside empirical quantitative data that examines austerity cuts and the impacts this has on the local provision of housing. The data reveals the negative impact of national government policy at the site of the everyday. Our study revealed the personal toll that this relationship can have, on people and their communities.
    
    Authors: Geetha Ravishankar (Aston University)* , Amanda Beattie (Aston University)
  - Sea migration and boat spaces: materialities and infrastructures of mobility across maritime borders
    
    This project examines boat migration across the English Channel as I investigate the types of spaces and materialities that are created and experienced within the journeys made. My research comprises of vessel analyses of boats that reflect three key types of boat space: carceral, rescue, and non-white. These spaces are fluid and are not confined to themselves; vessels can be sites reflecting multiple spaces at once. By ‘space’, I refer to Doreen Massey’s definition, which sees space as that which is socially constituted and always under construction, and spatiality to mean the politics within such a space. Boat migration with a focus on spatiality will be examined on the theoretical bases of wet ontology and Object-Oriented ontology, both of which I use to work towards a decolonial examination of understanding and portraying boat spaces within, and beyond, migratory journeys.
    
    Author: Georgina Holmes (Aston University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / War and the Lessons of History Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Wooyun Jo (Loughborough University)
  
  Chair: Wooyun Jo (Loughborough University)
  - How to cooperate with a dictator: lessons from Great Britain and Fascist Italy
    
    International relations during the interwar years are often reduced to one long ‘road to war’ between the western democracies and the revisionist fascist powers. My paper problematises this approach by examining how and why Fascist Italy cooperated within the postwar order for more than a decade before a definitive rupture in relations with its former wartime allies. The ‘unfinished peace’ after the First World War offered significant opportunity for the young Fascist regime to pursue further negotiations with the British to bring to fruition the unfulfilled imperial programme of its Liberal predecessors. This paper narrows in on negotiations over one outstanding item on the agenda – the Jubaland transfer – to demonstrate that it was precisely these discussions with the British about Italy’s unresolved imperial claims that drew the intrinsically revisionist regime into a range of diplomatic exchanges and gave the young Fascist regime a stake in the future postwar order. In practice, Fascist Italy’s determination to secure the transfer of Jubaland from British Kenya to Italian Somaliland deeply entangled the new revisionist regime in broader multilateral initiatives concerned with European security, economic reconstruction, and the nature the postwar order as a whole.
    
    Author: Jessi Gilchrist (Kings College London)
  - Cold War Memory and Contemporary Chinese Foreign Policy : between historical learning and rejecting “Cold War mentality”
    
    Against the background of rising geopolitical tensions, IR scholarship has increasingly examined the role of history and historical learning in contemporary politics. Existing literature on memory in China largely centres on nationalist sentiments tied to the pre-Communist era, such as the “Century of Humiliation” and its contemporary politicization by the Chinese Communist Party. As a consequence, it is ill-equipped to make sense of the recent rise of Cold War analogies globally and their effects on Chinese foreign policy. By contrast, this paper examines the role of the (old and new) Cold War and its memory in China. To do so, the article examines how the memory of the Cold War era is employed within contemporary Chinese elite discourse, drawing on content analysis of Chinese and English language sources. The article finds that the Cold War is mobilized in Chinese discourse in two opposing ways, (1) as a historical period offering important lessons for contemporary great-power competition especially in terms of the Soviet Union’s decline; and (2) as a misleading and politicized analogy of U.S.-China relations which undergird a “Cold War mentality” deemed detrimental to Chinese interests. The findings suggest complex and contradictory uses of the past in contemporary China as the leadership needs to navigate its foreign policy in an era of strategic competition.
    
    Author: Stephanie Winkler (Goethe University Frankfurt Stockholm University)
  - What can we learn from war?
    
    With over 110 active armed conflicts in the world, within and between States, there is no denying that studies of war and armed conflicts form a part of International Relations studies as a key aspect if international relations. The question is – what can International Humanitarian Law teach us about International Relations, and what can International Relations inform us about International Humanitarian Law.
    
    From the snapshot of post-World War Two, and the global movement to develop laws aimed at protecting individuals in armed conflict, to now, there has been a significant change in how armed conflicts are viewed.
    
    This paper will consider what the two areas can teach us about the other, including the lack of implementation by both International Organisations and States, of International Humanitarian Law and how this impacts International Relations. It will also consider how countries’ disregard of International Humanitarian Law contributes to strained International Relations and whether increased compliance or respect would go some way to remedying this tension. When International Humanitarian Law is based on commonly agreed treaties, what can those processes, and the behaviour within the treaties, teach use about International Relations. It will also consider the expansion of the ‘hot battlefield’ and how this could further affect International Relations.
    
    When International Relations are focused on the relationships between states and the people who govern them, this paper will consider whether International Relations can teach us anything about the development of International Humanitarian Law and parties’ behaviour within armed conflict.
    
    Looking forward this paper will also consider whether cornerstones of International Humanitarian Law, such as agreeing treaties to benefit humankind and respect for individuals, both combatants and civilians, could inform the study of International Relations and the wider future of International Relations.
    
    Author: Brianna Meaney (Lawyer)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  WE 18 Panel / War in Ukraine: New Interpretations Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Mike Williams (Syracuse University)
  
  Chair: Mike Williams (Syracuse University)
  - From Chechnya to Ukraine: Russian use of indigenous forces for post-conflict security
    
    With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 there has been a marked increase in interest in Russian actions in Chechnya during the Chechen Wars 1994-2009. Over time it has become clear that some of Russia’s nascent plans for post-conflict security provision and many of the actions conducted by Russian forces in occupied territories share tragic parallels with previous actions in Chechnya. With the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 raising the possibility of an end to the war in Ukraine that will see significant Ukrainian territory under Russian control, what can we expect from Russian control over these areas?
    
    This paper will focus on the Second Chechen War of 1999-2009 and the Russian use of indigenous elements to establish a new government and security apparatus in the aftermath, and how this enabled them to (seemingly) pacify a region with a long history of resistance. The purpose of this paper will be to explore whether a similar approach may be utilised in Ukraine or whether the differences between the two cases will see the Russian state adopted an evolution of their older methodology.
    
    Author: Alex Crockett (Durham University)
  - Understanding food warfare in Ukraine
    
    The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has placed food in the international spotlight. The two countries are global exporters of essential resources such as wheat and sunflower oil, representing key providers for many states in the global South. However, while an increasing number of studies has begun exploring the effects of the conflict on food security, less attention has been devoted to the strategic and tactical dimensions underlying these processes. What role does food play in Russia’s war on Ukraine? This paper addresses this question by introducing the concept of “food warfare.” Building on various strands of scholarship on food usage and dynamics of weaponization, it offers a framework for understanding and unpacking the manipulation of nourishment by state actors. As the paper shows, belligerents in Ukraine have deliberately resorted to food resources to undermine adversaries, turning them into both a means and a target of military actions. Specifically, five food warfare practices – siege, blockade, contamination, capture, and destruction – are identified as affecting conflict dynamics. Each practice is described conceptually and analysed within the framework of local operations. By shedding light on an overlooked dimension, the paper contributes to the research on conflict. As it concludes, there is a need to deepen awareness of the use of food on the ground, developing targeted initiatives to prevent manipulation while enhancing local resilience capacities.
    
    Authors: Simone Papale (University of Parma) , Emanuele Castelli (University of Parma)
  - Gender Hierarchies During and After War: Does Women's Presence in Armed Groups Affect Women's Empowerments? (a comparative analysis of the UK, Ukraine, and Colombia)
    
    As academic debates on conflict-related sexual violence, female fighters and women’s roles in peacebuilding processes have shown, gender matters for dynamics of war and peace. To which extent wars themselves represent a critical juncture for the re-construction of gender hierarchies, however, remains contested. Women who joined armed groups during war may experience ‘de-securitisation’ and loss of freedoms in the post-conflict period, due to the re-assertion of everyday essentialist stereotypes which question women’s military and political skills. However, recently growing body of literature indicates that wars may be critical junctures for women’s ‘empowerment’, and that there might be a correlation between the number of women in armed groups during war and women’s political rights after war.
    In this conference paper, we present preliminary findings about women’s roles in state and non-state armed groups, their expectations of women’s ‘empowerment’ after war and realities of persistent gender hierarchies. Drawing on evidence from secondary sources and discussions in a series of multi-disciplinary workshops in 2024, we highlight common experiences for women in armed groups in Colombia, Northern Ireland and Ukraine, and what lessons can be drawn about the possible links between gender dynamics during and after war. We will pay particular attention to the complex relationship between feminism and patriotism, and why women’s representation in armed groups may matter for women’s representation in formal political institutions and strength their voices in society.
    
    Authors: Yevgeniia Gnatchenko (University of East Anglia) , Ulrike Theuerkauf (University of East Anglia)
  - Serbian Foreign Fighters and the War in Ukraine: Ideology, Solidarity and Digital Kinship
    
    The paper investigates why a relatively high number of Serbian foreign fighters joined the Russian side in the Ukraine War. Although the Serbian government has criminalised foreign fighting, at least a few hundred Serbs have participated in this conflict, with a steady stream of new volunteers joining. Common reasons cited for their involvement include poor socioeconomic conditions, financial gain, and a desire to repay Russian fighters for their participation in Yugoslav wars. In contrast, this paper proposes that ideology and micro-level group solidarity play significant roles in both individual and collective motivations to engage in fighting and aims to provide a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, Serbian foreign fighters are affiliated with a larger ideological sphere commonly referred to as radical or extreme right, which broadly aligns with the ideals of the Russian ‘civilisationist turn’. This ideology has penetrated micro-level interactions and solidarity between the Serbian and Russian right-wing groups, leading to relatively high motivation of Serbian right-wing groups to join the War in Ukraine. On top of that, the paper invokes the concept of ‘digital kinship’ to elucidate the role of digital platforms in ideologisation and micro-level solidarity development. The paper examines Serbian foreign fighters’ networks and narratives to demonstrate that their motivation to fight is rooted in this civilisationist discourse, which portrays the West as corrupt and decadent while attributing Christian and traditional values to the East, supported by the sense of solidarity and digital kinship between the right-wing groups’ members.
    
    Keywords: foreign fighters, War in Ukraine, radical/extreme right, civilisationism, digital kinship, Serbia
    
    Author: Goran Tepšić (University of Belgrade)
- 14:45 → 15:00
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 14:45 → 15:45
  
  / Refreshment Break The Exchange
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / (Re)Thinking Touristic Governance Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University)
  
  Chair: Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast)
  - “Cleaning Al-Mu‘izz:” Tourism and the Re-securitization of Urban Space in Post-Revolution Egypt
    
    Shari‘a al-Mu‘izz li-Din Allah is a long thoroughfare that snakes through the heart of Historic Cairo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Egypt’s premier tourist destinations. In the wake of the January 25th Revolution of 2011, the street underwent a profound sociospatial transformation due to the collapse of the country’s tourism sector and a security vacuum stemming from the retreat of the police: historic structures were vandalized and looted, motorized vehicles reclaimed the once-pedestrianized street, vendors opened stalls in front of registered “monuments”, and mosque courtyards were converted into parking lots or cafes. Following the military coup of 2013, the authorities responded to these “encroachments” with the “Cleaning Al-Mu‘izz Street Campaign.” This initiative aimed to re-pedestrianize the street, repair damaged structures, and clear garbage, graffiti, and vendors. It also sought to re-securitize the route via the establishment of a police unit to manage traffic as well as the construction of security stations. In this paper, I query this initiative, focusing on how tourism was mobilized as part of the campaign to “clean up” al-Mu‘izz,. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how the restoration of the country’s tourism sector was used to justify a broader state effort to increase surveillance and intervention in Cairo–and thus re-assert physical and symbolic control over the city and, by extension, Egypt, after the upheaval of 2011-2013.
    
    Author: Claire Panetta (Sewanee: The University of the South)
  - Touristic Zoopolitics: Governance, Coloniality and (de)Humanising Practices
    
    In the context of neoliberal colonial capitalism, many countries are economically dependent on tourism and compete fiercely for international (often Western) tourists. Consequently, diverse tourism stakeholders represent, restructure, and manage ‘their’ territories and citizens as desirable/safe ‘tourism destinations’ and ‘touristic figures’ to attract/satisfy international tourists. This, we argue, is indicative of a mode of governance that harks back to the colonial practices of zoos and human zoos, what we call ‘touristic zoopolitics’ (Becklake and Wynne-Hughes 2023). Drawing on ethnographic research in Egypt and Guatemala, and engaging with theories of bio/zoo/necropolitics, along with the work of critical migration/mobilities, post/decolonial, and black studies scholars, this paper theorises and interrogates the logics, relations, and practices underpinning touristic zoopolitics. Starting from specific geographic, cultural and historical contexts, we show how this contemporary mode of governance is hierarchically reordering and reproducing places and people, in (de)humanising ways, often with nefarious consequences.
    
    Authors: Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University) , Sarah Becklake (Leibniz University Hannover)*
  - From Oppression to Mobility: the Boer Concentration Camps and War Tourism
    
    In the context of the Second Boer War (1899-1902), between Great Britain and two Boer Republics - The South African Republic of Transvaal and the Orange Free State- the concentration camps, where Boers were allocated, stand out as the epitome of contested British imperial governance and military practices. In 1901, Emily Hobhouse, a reformer and social worker, visited the concentration camps in South Africa and wrote a report describing and denouncing the inhuman living conditions in such places. Later on, museums of the war in South Africa were opened; memorials were erected and tours to battle fields and concentration camps were organized. Nowadays, several touristic activities are associated to the memory of the war, be it real or created, and Emily Hobhouse´s name evoked as a leading figure who “fought” the war through diplomacy and humanitarian action. In this paper, I intend to address the context that paved the way for the emergence of such places (and spaces), from the ideological and political point of view; to look at how they functioned, and to study the transformation they have undergone throughout the times and how/why they have become sites of interest for tourists.
    
    Author: Carla Larouco Gomes (ULICES (University of Lisbon))
  - Railways of Territorial Reorganisation: The Discourse-War of the “Maya Train”
    
    The ‘Mayan Train’ in southern Mexico is not just a train, and certainly not a Mayan one. Rather, the striking name of the government's flagship project is the most prominent expression of a discourse war: presented as a tourism project connecting archaeological sites and Caribbean resorts, bringing prosperity to the local population, the train turns out to be part of a ‘territorial reorganisation’ of global significance. Connected to the ‘interoceanic corridor’ and accompanied by the construction of harbours, airports, industrial parks, and urban zones managed by the military and implemented by transnational corporations, the ‘train’ must be understood as the latest step in the colonisation of a historically resistant region. In four parts, tourism will be presented as a discursive and material weapon in the war for (self-) governance, (im-)mobility and (in)security in the region. From ‘mangrove’ Sisal to ‘military camp’ Xpujil, from ‘ocean-door’ Felipe Carillo Puerto to the ‘pyramid hotel’ in Cancún.
    
    Author: Victor Hübotter (Leibniz University Hannover)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Aesthetics and pop culture in poststructuralist IR Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: PPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
  - Theorizing Hyperreality and Visual Securitization: The Case of Resurrection Ertugrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid
    
    Visual securitization as a framework indicates whether the images can speak security without necessarily discussing types of images. This article asks how the securitizing discourse can be normal for an audience to accept it: One day, the West is a security threat; the other day, it is a long-term friend in Turkey. This study shows this is possible via the moving images’ power of establishing a hyper-reality that perpetuates a context of securitization. However, while securitization is perpetuated, the narrative is flexible enough to move the same issues to desecuritization. This is because the politician’s image is the “plot” spoiler and “plot setter,” which is accepted as true by the audience. With this, the audience accepts (de)securitization before the politician (de)securitizes the issue through discourse. This type of imagination and the intertextual relationship between how the state's survival can be actualized in TV series can be best explained via hyperreality. Through the incongruent political turns of President Erdoğan vis-à-vis the West, Resurrection Ertuğrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid series play the securitizing visuals’ role in creating hyperreality. The study contributes to the framework written by L. Hansen (2011) by problematizing the relationship between images’ representation, distortion, and replacement of reality from Baudrillard’s perspective. As a case study, the Turkish government visually securitizes the West and creates a hyperreal context to refer to. The amalgamation of visual securitization and the hyperreality concept of J. Baudrillard proposes a new framework comprised of four staged simulacrum analyses. By doing so, the question of how televisual images can precede politics and take a crucial part in securitizing discourse without representing reality can be understood. The proposed framework and the case study shows how the JDP government can make incongruent policy turns vis-à-vis the West without audience backlash.
    
    Author: Onur Tugrul Karabicak (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
  - Envisioning Identity: The Aesthetic Dimensions of National Roles and Ontological Security in International Relations
    
    This paper aims to conceptualize the link between aesthetics, national roles, visions, anxiety, and ontological security within IR theory. Focusing on agents’ temporal reflexivity along with social, it examines how identity is manifested through visions of the future, portraying the Self, and acting as mechanisms for managing anxiety and the function of the roles in that. It analyses roles’ connection to scripts, their performative, relational, colorful moving story nature, with deliberate aesthetics akin to drama. Nations may want to play a consciously constructed roles in a certain script that can be tied to aesthetics, wanting to appear and presenting themselves in specific way and contexts. The paper explores how an image does not solely exist; rather, nations enact roles, project an image or aesthetic representations to create visions, achieve ontological security, and manifest identities. Drawing on previous literature defining visions as ‘poetic images’ and ‘creative spaces,’ it investigates the aesthetic dimension of visions as stages for performing their roles, specifically through roles projected in visual productions. It examines how visual narratives create specific roles and project distinct images of nations. What role are they projecting, showing, what kind of image, and what is the aesthetic dimension of that role.
    
    Author: Irem Cihan (SOAS)
  - “Our mums would call us in for dinner. But noone calls us anymore”: Squid Game, neo-liberalism and abandonment
    
    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. 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.
    
    Author: Julian Schmid (Central European University)
  - Unsettling Rebellion
    
    The politics of rebellion has fundamentally shaped recent British political discourse, mobilized by actors across the ideological spectrum. Rebellious movements like Black Lives Matter, #KillTheBill and Palestine Action have forced a reckoning with the racial and imperial contours of the British state; meanwhile Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have placed the climate emergency at the centre of political discourse. These movements mount important challenges to entrenched hierarchies of liberal/racial capitalism. At the same time, and in sharp contrast, a series of more reactionary political currents have also mobilised the intellectual, aesthetic and affective politics of rebellion. This includes right-wing media and think tanks, Conservative politicians, elements of the far-right, anti-trans activists, and anti-mask/COVID ‘sceptic’ activists. This phenomenon raises questions about how rebellion functions as a source of legitimacy in liberal democracies, even for groups that do not seek substantive shifts in existing power structures, or whose politics are straightforwardly exploitative, oppressive or supremacist in character.
    
    Through a media analysis of major British newspapers, this paper examines the disjunctions and resonances between these contrasting figurations of rebellion. It explores the ambiguous political life of rebellion, questioning whether reactionary uses of rebellious rhetoric merely co-opt progressive language or reveal deeper, complex relationships and inheritances. It argues that apparently contradictory or hypocritical mobilisations of rebellion demonstrate the bourgeois or liberal character of both right and some apparently left-wing articulations. By investigating how rebellion is increasingly deployed in the service of reactionary politics, the paper also explores how it might be reclaimed for more liberatory projects.
    
    Authors: Daniel Newton (University of Bristol) , Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol)
  - You Should Have Seen This Coming: Trump, Twitter and the Digital Aesthetics of Fascism
    
    How do the dual mechanisms of social media image circulation and invisibility mobilise offline political violence? This paper conceptualises the ‘digital aesthetics of fascism’ to examine the role former President Donald Trump’s Twitter images play in cultivating an imagined ‘American’ identity based on gendered and racial hierarchy, exclusion and ultimately violence. We find that Trump’s images are extremely homogenous – more white, more masculine, older age demographic – which tracks with the limited existing research on Trump’s broader social media platforms. However, we go a step further to theorise how those categories not widely shown – women, racialised groups, young people – perpetuates a semiotic violence making significant proportions of the United States body politic invisible, not part of the idealised ‘America’, and therefore more vulnerable to violence offline. We argue that this matrix of hyper(in)visibility cultivates an increased legitimization of far-right politics by reaffirming particular hierarchical power relations as the ‘norm’, providing a pathway to offline violence like the 6 January 2021 riots. In doing so we highlight the need for an IR discipline that can effectively examine what online violence makes possible beyond the digital context in an era of right wing populism.
    
    Authors: Tim Aistrope (University of Kent) , Constance Dubcombe (University of Copenhagen)*
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Africa: politics and power Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: AISG Working group
  
  Chair: Fikir Haile (Acadia University, Canada)
  - From exclusion to empowerment: unveiling the pathways to social mobility for Somaliland’s Gabooye
    
    This paper aims to analyze the opportunities for social mobility in the Gabooye community, an marginalized minority in Somaliland, in a society characterized by strong social and cultural homogeneity. Through qualitative data gathered through interviews, focus group discussions, and documentary analysis, this study employs a grounded theory approach to identify the different layers of Gabooye as they face economic, social, and political challenges. The findings suggest that despite long-standing institutionalized discrimination and historical positioning of the Gabooye community as marginal, their struggle for economic self-sufficiency, social acceptance, and political recognition are never-ending efforts, and they are active in such struggles. This study synthesizes three primary dimensions that affect the social movement process: economy, society, and policy. Economically, Gabooye has leveraged its craftsmanship to meet market demands, yet they face challenges from foreign competition and inadequate government support. Socially, younger Gabooye generations have helped alter perceptions through education and intercommunity interactions. Deep cultural stereotypes and slow integration are major challenges. This article emphasizes the need for affirmative action, action-oriented policies, and inclusive approaches in policy development and implementation to address community-specific needs and enhance participation in decision-making. This article concludes with comprehensive plans for Gabooye’s social mobility, including policies to leverage different economic bases, diversify industries, reform the education system, and enact legislative measures. These policies address traditional industries, raise awareness to combat stereotyping and prejudice, and reform the legal system to ensure political representation and to protect the local economy. This article offers valuable insights for sociologists and social policymakers by highlighting the necessity of a fairer society in Somaliland, where the disadvantaged Gabooye group can progress and ascend the social hierarchy.
    
    Author: Zakarie Abdi Bade (Ankara Yildirim Beyazıt University)
  - Civil Society and Internet Shutdown Lawsuits in Authoritarian Courts in Africa
    
    This paper examines when civil society challenge government-ordered internet shutdowns in Af-rica. I argue that CSOs go to court even in unfavourable autocratic contexts when they engage in supportive alliances, both domestically and across borders. Using fuzzy-set qualitative compara-tive analysis, I systematically link documented internet shutdowns in African countries between 2011 and 2023 to configurations of relevant hard and soft organizational capacity characteristics such as leadership, resources, collaboration and partnerships, and solidarity networks. The results support a positive relationship between leadership, collaborations and partnerships as well as solidarity networks in countries that experienced an internet shutdown lawsuit. The study also shows that independence, proximity, and speed are key reasons why CSOs decide to file internet shutdown cases in sub-regional courts. Overall, it underlines the importance of supportive alli-ances (soft capacity characteristics) as key factors in CSO decision to challenge incumbent gov-ernments` extra-legal digital rights reaches.
    
    Author: Michael Asiedu (University of St.Gallen, Switzerland)
  - Beyond Resource Scarcity: Postcolonial Politics and Environmental Conflict Management in Southwest Nigeria
    
    Environmental scarcity is understood to exacerbate violent conflicts by inducing competition for scarce resources. However, existing scholarship has not sufficiently addressed how colonial legacies structure environmental conflicts and how they are responded to in postcolonial contexts. This study combines environmental conflict theory with data from extensive fieldwork in Southwest Nigeria to examine how three regional policies—Amotekun, open grazing ban, and ranching—address resource competition and conflict between farmers and nomadic Fulani herders.
    
    It argues that although environmental degradation and population spikes have intensified the Southward migration of nomadic herders and resource competition, postcolonial political contestations fundamentally determine how these environmental pressures are transformed into conflicts and addressed. Nigeria's failure to address the farmer-herder conflicts nationally is not merely a result of resource scarcity but also reflects how colonial legacies and ethnic tensions constrain environmental resource governance. Therefore, Southwest regional policies represent both a response to environmental pressures and an assertion of resource governance autonomy against the postcolonial state structures.
    
    This analysis reveals crucial weaknesses in environmental conflict theory's ability to account for how colonial state formation shapes resource governance. Hence, a modified environmental scarcity theory that integrates postcolonial insights is proposed. By underscoring that effective resource management requires close engagement with both technical aspects of scarcity and the complex politics and histories that determine resource access and governance, this paper highlights important implications for environmental governance in postcolonial societies.
    
    Keywords: Environmental Conflict, Postcolonial Theory, Resource Governance, Farmer-Herder Conflict, Southwest Nigeria
    
    Author: Ifeanyichukwu Charles Nweke (Leiden University, Netherlands)
  - Rethinking the declining state of democracy: A social constructionist thematic analysis of perceptions towards African and western international relations on the state of democracy in Nigeria
    
    Democracy represents one of the most formidable forms of government designed to promote citizens’ participation and choices in elections. However, in Africa, recent development suggests a declining state of confidence in democratic governance. Drawing on a social constructionist thematic analytical lens, the paper analysed Nigeria’s recent elections in 2023 to understand public perceptions and attitudes towards democracy and the electoral processes. Data was drawn from newspaper sources and government reports, including openly available data on social media handles of major news outlets in the country. The study finds that there was a perceived sense that democracy appears to have failed and denotes the problematisation of international bodies both within the African continent and beyond reluctance to intervene in the electoral processes or call out the irregularities in the elections, which appears to be marred by corruption, lack of transparency and voters’ subjugation. The study recommends the need to reignite citizen trust in democratic processes through early intervention to instil confidence in democracy and dispel the quest for military rule and takeover.
    
    Authors: Dung Ezekiel Jidong (The University of Manchester)* , Evangelyn Ebi Ayobi (National Open University)* , Tarela Juliet Ike , Mieyebi Lawrence Ike (Southern New Hampshire University)*
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Algorithmic Warfare: How Decision-Support Systems Reshape Military Practices and Regulation Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Jasper van der Kist (University of Antwerp) , Rupert Barrett-Taylor (Alan Turing Institute)
  
  Chair: Jasper van der Kist (University of Antwerp)
  
  Discussant: Matthew Ford (Swedish Defence University)
  - Stack Militarisation: Understanding Platforms on the Frontline
    
    Increasingly, platform companies find themselves in the frontline of fighting wars or other existential threats to the state, because they have the technological means to integrate and analyse huge amounts of data. The work on technological platforms therefore supports a variety of (non-market) relations, such as military command and control, use-of-force, as well as logistics. This article develops the notion of ‘stack’ in order to conceptualise the ways in which militarisation is made possible across public/private domains and on these platforms. The article understands stacks as weaving multiple technical layers, making possible a range military activities. Understanding platforms as stacks draws attention to the dynamic and multivariable militarisation practices. The article uses Palantir, Anduril, Shield AI as examples to show how this ‘thinking tool’ can work. By so doing, it aims to contribute not only to a better understanding of these new military practices and their implications for contemporary warfare.
    
    Author: Jasper van der Kist (University of Antwerp)
  - Virtualising Militarism: International Security and Immersive Technology
    
    Immersion has been a key theme in a range of digital processes that shape international society. Virtual Reality, as the ‘thick’ end of immersion, portends a pathway towards the ultimate digitally mediated experiences of social life, entertainment, philanthropy and education. A central application for the technology, both historically and in projected futures, is in the immersion of military personal in real, or virtual battle spaces. This paper sets out to establish a contemporary operationalisation of the term ‘virtualisation’ in practical terms, to understand a process through which digital tools with an immersive interface continue to be mainstreamed. It will specifically consider these applications in militarism by developing an understanding of the driving factors behind the continued development and deployment of immersive tools, focusing on the dynamic between corporate tech giants and defence institutions.
    
    Author: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
  - Weaponisation of Cyberspace: International Legal Strategies to Combat Digital Incitement to Atrocities
    
    The rapid expansion of digital platforms has created unprecedented avenues for expression and influence but also poses serious risks when used to incite mass violence. This paper delves into how cyberspace has been weaponized to facilitate hate speech that escalates into calls for mass atrocities, such as genocide. The paper considers how the international legal framework addresses the unique challenges posed by online incitement, including issues of jurisdiction, enforcement, and evolving technologies. By focusing on examples of AI-driven content manipulation and misinformation campaigns, the paper underscores the difficulties of applying existing legal norms to digital contexts. It calls for a rethinking of international regulatory approaches to ensure accountability while preserving freedom of expression. Ultimately, the paper advocates for enhanced international cooperation and outlines innovative legal solutions to curb the spread of online incitement and protect vulnerable communities from hate-driven violence.
    
    Author: Kateryna Kyrychenko (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Alternative Ethics of the International/Global Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: EWPG Working group
  
  Chair: Natasha Saunders (University of St Andrews)
  - REFRAMING UNIVERSAL ETHICS: NEO- VEDANTIC VISION OF INCLUSIVITY
    
    The paper seeks to provide an intervention to the existing global normative framework by foregrounding Neo-Vedantic intervention of Tagore. Present global norms are eurocentric, monocausal and based on episteme of modernity. Tagore’s Neo Vedantic perspective provides an alternate to the singular definition of norms by providing for possibility of their coexistence. The heuristic potential of Normativism to comprehend the intricate layers of world politics through diachronic history is often overlooked. The paper attempts to decolonise global norms rooted in Western philosophical tradition where Rights have precedence over Good. This, however, does not resonate with societies nesting on its antithesis. The Neo-Vedantic perspective dwelling on Universal Humanism of Tagore hinges on Relational Ontology where relations are prior to existence. By immersing in Tagore’s literature of Manusheer Dharma, Gitanjali, Kabuliwala and Religion of Man, the paper seeks to analyse his philosophy of “Yatra Viswam Bhavati Ek Nidam” (The World is a Single Nest) which encourages a revaluation of normative and ethical considerations. The paper presents the possibility of rising above exclusivism and provincialism to forge an international community using eclectic influence of Tagore, highlighting that the other is part of the self.
    
    Author: Archita Sharma (University of Delhi)
  - Towards A Theology of Peace: Peace as a way of life
    
    As the existing geopolitical order trembles under internal brittleness and external rupture, basic foundational assumptions of international relations must be revisited. In this paper, I propose a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of peace, one no longer dependent on prevailing assumptions of the nation-State and liberal institutions and norms. Drawing from the unique case of Somaliland, a political experiment in indigenous, non-State peacebuilding, this article will propose a holistic model of peace that incorporates both material and normative dimensions. Indeed, rather than treat peace as a social condition or political foundation upon which more ambitious social projects such as socialism or democracy can be built, this paper will argue that peace must serve as the primary regulative ideal for organising society, one that normatively and ethically intervenes to arrange social relations in its image. Based on a theoretically-informed faith that a peace-based orientation brings out the highest and most animating features of social practice and communion between peoples, this argument concludes by demonstrating practical ways in which a fidelity to peace can overcome the competitive, violent, exploitative determinism of the existing order. As such, what is presented is a theology of peace.
    
    Author: Matthew Gordon (Independent Scholar)
  - Confronting the Negative: Hegel’s Theory of International Law in The Philosophy of Right
    
    Confronting the Negative: Hegel’s Theory of International Law in The Philosophy of Right
    
    Author: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Base Women and Beyond II: Contemporary feminist research agendas on military/nuclear installations and more than human resistance . Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast) , Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde)
  
  Chair: Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde)
  
  Discussant: Hannah Partis-Jennings (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Protecting Mother Earth: Nature and Environmental Materiality in Anti-Nuclear Peace Camps
    
    In response to nuclear proliferation following NATO's 1979 Double-Track Decision, several women-only peace camps emerged next to nuclear installations. Two of these camps were the Danish Ravnstrup- (1984-1985) and the British Greenham Common peace camp (1980-2000). Research shows how the material environment and physical location influenced daily life at the camps (Christensen 1989; Krasniewicz 1992; Cresswell 1994; Navickas 2023; Eschle 2016). However, there is a lack of work focusing on environmental materiality as a fundamental factor in shaping the anti-nuclear protests at peace camps.
    Drawing on archival material from the camps and utilizing a transnational approach, this paper will demonstrate that the embodied, material reality of everyday life such as the weather, mud, and sleeping in benders became essential parts of daily life and had a profound impact on the anti-nuclear protest. Using the concept of socio-technological imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015), I will show how the women involved connected imaginaries related to nuclear technology, gender, and nature. Through this intraaction, nature shifted from being a backdrop for protests to becoming an active actant in shaping ecofeminist identities and approaches to peace in the shadow of nuclear annihilation.
    
    Author: Ida Marie Lybecker Korning (University of Strathclyde)
  - At the periphery of nuclear bases: women at La Ragnatela camp
    
    Women that take part in anti-base movements and campaign for anti-nuclear policies place themselves outside of military bases, in an attempt to contest nuclear politics. They escape ‘feminized silence’ (Enloe, 2014: 147), and they disrupt the carefully designed gendered dimension of military bases. Something that, following Enloe's account, is a necessity for US security. This paper places these rebellious women at the centre of its feminist research, with a provisional account of La Ragnatela protest camp and its feminist history. Following Greenham Common’s anti-nuclear movement, Italian women established a separatist camp in 1983, called La Ragnatela or “The Spider’s Web”. The feminist camp was determined to oppose the Italian government’s commitment to turn the old military airport in Comiso, Sicily, into a NATO nuclear base. My inquiry focuses on the little-known Italian peace camp, in order not only to understand its place in Italian antinuclear and feminist activism but also to unveil its transnational dynamics. Drawing on my preliminary PhD work and as-yet limited archival research into this case, I will investigate if the camp, placed outside of a nuclear base, was successful in constructing a collective feminist identity and in opposing nuclear policies, militarism and gender dynamics.
    
    Author: Emma Ottanelli (University of Strathclyde)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Conflict in South America: Trends and Developments Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Tara Zammit (Kings College London)
  
  Chair: Tara Zammit (Kings College London)
  - Translating warfare: doctrinal translation and the diffusion of military innovations
    
    From time to time, military doctrinal concepts are adopted worldwide across distinct military organisations. The literature on military diffusion and political sociology have already identified this issue. Yet, most studies still concentrate excessively on the diffusion of technologies or organisational practices across allies or competitors. But how do military doctrines circulate to distinct strategic environments? We argue that military doctrines are not ‘lost in translation’ but rather translated to different organisational cultures. We employ the concept of ‘military doctrinal translation’ to illustrate how the same concept becomes distinct from the source with unique meanings depending on where they are assimilated. To tackle this complex research problem, we use the case study of how the U.S. Army concept of Full Spectrum Operations (FSO) was implemented by the Brazilian Army in the 2010s. The Brazilian version of FSO took centre stage on how the organisation adapted to new domestic roles and mission areas (e.g., law enforcement and crime-fighting, border patrolling, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief) and had overarching sociopolitical consequences. It thus represents a case of a Global South organisation with no formal military alliance ‘translating’ a foreign concept to adapt to new roles and missions.
    
    Authors: Raphael C. Lima (King’s College London (KCL)) , Mariana Janot (São Paulo State University - UNESP)
  - Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Future Warfare in the Brazilian Armed Forces
    
    This work explores the sociotechnical imaginaries of the Brazilian Armed Forces regarding future warfare, analyzing how emerging technological demands impact Brazil's strategic autonomy. Unlike traditional approaches in International Relations, which often treat technology as an exogenous element or residual variable, we argue that technology should occupy a central position in analyses of international dynamics. Through a co-production process, technology intertwines in dense sociotechnical systems, shaping and being shaped by different actors and artifacts. Thus, this research is guided by the following question: to what extent does the Brazilian Armed Forces' visions of future warfare constrain the country's strategic autonomy? Our hypothesis is that such future visions are anchored in a hegemonic military sociotechnical imaginary that defines future warfare based on normative expectations about scientific and technological innovations. To test this hypothesis, we will conduct a content analysis of Brazilian military documents addressing future warfare to identify the elements and values that compose these imaginaries. The theoretical framework draws on the concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and technodiversity to comprehend and further challenge the notion of linear and universal technology development and innovation. We understand that the idea of sociotechnical imaginaries enables us to analyze how visions of science and technology influence social projects and shape desirable or undesirable futures. We argue that these imaginaries function as infrastructures of planned futures, directly linking technological choice – allegedly a technical and neutral matter – to strategic and political fields. Therefore, this work contributes to understanding how sociotechnical imaginaries inform the Brazilian Armed Forces' strategic decisions and the possibilities for building alternate warfare futures.
    
    Author: Jonathan de Assis (Instituto de Políticas Públicas e Relações Internacionais (IPPRI-Unesp), Brazil)
  - From Patriot to Profiteer: Unveiling the Allure of Mercenary Life for Colombia's Veteran Warriors
    
    This research explores the exportation of Colombian veterans to mercenary groups as the core of a larger market for non-state violence. With 43 percent of Colombia's population living in poverty, many of the 10,000 annual retirees from Colombia's military struggle to reintegrate into civilian life. Faced with limited vocational training and lack of social security, these veterans possess skills that rarely transfer to civilian professions. As a result, many are drawn to lucrative jobs with private NSAGs in Mexico, Yemen, Afghanistan, and other regions with ongoing conflict, where they can earn up to $3,150 USD per month, along with free accommodation, food, and transportation. The study proposes two hypotheses: (1) veterans are more likely to join mercenary groups when they perceive a civilian lifestyle as socioeconomically and culturally worse than their time in the Colombian military, and (2) veterans prefer to join mercenary groups that support state-backed militaries over those that curb or defy the state, implying a significant ideological component of the labor market. The research aims to examine Colombia's role as a key supplier to the labor market for non-state violence and the challenges it presents to parties seeking to broker peace.
    
    Author: Chelsea Thorpe (University of Cambridge)
  - Moral Order, Social Transformation, and the Logic of Anti-LGBT Violence during Colombia’s Paramilitary Incursion
    
    The Colombian Civil War featured significant civilian victimization, notably by government-aligned paramilitaries targeting perceived guerrilla sympathizers. A puzzling aspect of the war is the targeted violence against LGBT populations, who were not linked to any ideology or main conflict cleavage. Despite this, paramilitary groups targeted LGBT individuals with notable brutality. This unique pattern raises questions: Why would paramilitaries direct resources toward targeting a social minority not clearly involved in the conflict? Why did the characteristics of this violence vary, and why was it so brutal? This paper proposes a theory of wartime anti-LGBT violence, examining paramilitary actions in Colombia through a comparative analysis of two paramilitary blocs. It reveals that variations in violence stemmed from differing paramilitary efforts at social transformation within local communities. This theory enhances our understanding of wartime social processes that transcend conventional political motives, reinforcing the importance of diverse perspectives in studies of contentious politics.
    
    Author: Samuel Ritholtz (University of Oxford)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Critiquing Diplomacy and an anticolonial lens of treaty making Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Heba Youssef (University of Brighton)
  - Haitian Futures Past: Rethinking international relations at the intersection of military interventions and cultural diplomacy
    
    It is almost two years since Haiti requested military assistance from the international community to address a worsening political and humanitarian crisis in the country. Six months ago a Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) led by Kenyan troops and authorised by the UN Security Council deployed a contingent of troops who have been struggling to deliver the necessary stability that would enable elections. Amid this ongoing political turmoil, the familiar ‘repertoire of Haitian abjection’ has once again been reanimated across mass media platforms.
    
    In seeking to reflect on what role the international community can productively play in the restoration of Haitian politics, this paper will turn to Haiti’s futures past and share from a research project at the intersection of international relations, history and visual culture studies. It will turn to another Haitian political leader, President Dumarsais Estimé, who issued a very different invitation to the international community in 1948. Estimé was the driving force behind a project of cultural diplomacy – the Bicentenaire de Port-au-Prince – which interlinked domestic and foreign policy agendas seeking to promote international partnership of benefit to regeneration efforts in Haiti following the departure of occupying US forces a decade earlier. Estimé simultaneously lobbied the UN hard to host one of UNESCO’s first ever development projects, in Haiti’s Marbial Valley during the late 1940s. The Estimé government’s concurrent collaboration with the international community in these two projects demonstrates the administration’s keen awareness of emergent international agendas and the ways in which Haiti and Haitians could exert influence and agency by contributing to new global projects
    
    Amid ongoing turmoil in Haiti, this paper seeks to consider if revisiting these visions of Haitian futures past could influence how international actors perceive and deal with current political developments in this beleaguered Caribbean nation.
    
    Author: Wendy Asquith (University of Liverpool)
  - Wabanaki Relational Sovereignty and Treaty-making
    
    This paper develops our understanding of sovereignty through an engagement with Indigenous political thought and practice. In doing so it furthers present conceptualizations of “relational sovereignty” as a way of articulating how Indigenous nations exercise decision-making power collectively. It does so through a historic case study of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The Confederacy is made up of 5 Indigenous nations that inhabit the Dawnland, today known as the Maritime peninsula of Canada and the United States of America (USA).
    
    The Confederacy has its roots in inter-Indigenous contests over territory, but was most fully realized in diplomatic relationships with the English and French empires that arrived in, and sought control over, Dawnland in the 17th and 18th centuries. During this time, Wabanaki nations exercised relational sovereignty while collectively developing treaty relations with the European empires, most notably the Peace and Friendship treaties that the nations see as continuing to guide relations with Canada and the USA today. Relationality, then, offers an alternative expressions of sovereignty as seen through the analysis of the Confederacy’s intra-diplomatic practices, and treaty-making with the British and French.
    
    Author: Liam Midzain-Gobin (Brock University, Canada)
  - Unmasking the Gendered, Sexualized, and Racialized State's Sovereign Performativity via Diplomatic Discourses in China and India
    
    In IR studies, the traditional definitions of state sovereignty are made meaningful via the idealized binary logic, and the state can be seen as a masculine and heteronormative actor from a feminist lens. The binaries like men/women, masculinity/femininity, and heteronormative/homosexual which are expressed in mainly Western discourses, play a crucial role in creating a fixed gendered/gendering understanding of state sovereignty and how diplomats represent the state. Given that the understanding of what is considered 'femininity' and 'masculinity' can be very different across cultures in times and spaces, the gendered understanding of state sovereignty in China and India can be influenced by the Western imperialism, producing an orientalist reading and gendering of state's sovereignty. In order to tackle this challenge, this research uses the plural logic of and/neither to contest the either/or representational logics and to understand how diplomatic discourses from China and India respond to the ambiguity of the state sovereign subjectivity. By adopting a multi-method qualitative analysis, combining thematic and Foucauldian discourse analysis, this research seeks to answer the questions of how are state's sovereignty performed by diplomats in China and India? And how does this plural performativity of sexualized sovereignty challenge and/neither reproduce the modern Westernized diplomatic order and their embedded knowledge production? I argue that the performativity and reproduction of China's and India's body politic could be seen as a drag performance. Diplomacy as a deeply sexualized and racialized field, its discourse can help to produce the West as the knowledge-producer and the non-West as the knowledge-receiver and at the same time reproduce the West as the knowledge-received and the non-West as the knowledge-producer. Such an analysis of non-monolithic sovereignty would help to unmask the gendered, sexualized, and racialized performativity of state's sovereignty and contribute to decolonial thinking in (neo)imperial sexualized order of diplomacy in international studies.
    
    Author: Hongli Liu (King's College London)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Dynamics of Institutionalisation and Deinstitutionalisation in the International System - Part I Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg, Germany) , Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  
  Chair: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  
  Discussant: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  - Institutionalising international power and deinstitutionalising colonialism. How the United Nations became an actor in decolonisation
    
    The United Nations was founded, among other reasons, with the goal of institutionalizing political power at the international level, particularly to counter and thus deinstitutionalize colonialism and imperialism. This aim has been—and continues to be—reflected in various institutional mechanisms for decolonization, such as the Special Political and Decolonization Committee and the Special Committee on Decolonization. To understand these processes of institutionalization, IR literature has primarily focused on the diplomatic level. In contrast, this paper examines the emergence of international power within the dependent territories themselves during decolonization. Using Actor-Network Theory, it shows how international power emerged through a network of actors connecting international organizations like the UN with local actors in the territories. It explores the various instruments in this network, which can be seen as prerequisites for international power to take effect. These include international missions, such as visiting and observer missions, as well as fact-finding initiatives, all of which have historically contributed to making the United Nations a powerful actor. The paper illustrates this with examples such as the first UN mission to Western Samoa in 1947.
    
    Author: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg, Germany)
  - Multi-alignment and power relations at times of deinstitutionalisation
    
    During the Cold War, non-alignment aimed to establish a normative alternative to the dominant rationale of big power alliance/balancing that resulted in block polarization. In the currently reconfiguring international order, we argue, multi-alignment offers a revised and more finessed normativity that can provide a way forward for the governance of the commons within multipolarity. While non-alignment main concern was preventing escalation, making the preservation of the statu quo desirable; in the current context, however, global challenges (climate change, migration flows, challenges to territorial integrity) require proactivity, through global concerted action, and not reactivity, preserving the statu quo. This communication focuses on addressing this question by examining global power relations away from traditional understandings of power as domination, by focusing on the subaltern perspective of small states and their emphasis on cooperation over competition. To do so we will draw particularly from postcolonial understandings of IR, as well as sociopolitical concepts such as care, vulnerability and empowerment, all of it underpinned by specific case studies for illustration.
    
    Author: Mario López Areu (Comillas Pontifical University Madrid)
  - “A Battle for Peace”: Historicising Soviet foreign policy thinking and practice between multilateral cooperation and “active measures”
    
    Current instances of the United Nations’ powerlessness in the face of military conflict and escalation put into relief the inherent limitations and contradictions of post-WW II multilateralism and the close entanglement, if not means-end relationship of violence and peace (however understood). This paper aims to explore this entanglement in the case of the Soviet Union from a historicising perspective on international politics. Building on Cold War history and IR research, it seeks to show how the country’s foreign policy thinking and practice was related to certain theories of social change and world revolution which foregrounded particular measures and strategies. Thus, while hitherto research has focused on logics of mutual deterrence and escalation as driver of aggressive foreign policy, this analysis seeks to unpack the conceptual grounding of the Soviet international engagement, including international institutions, development aid, political influence-mongering and intelligence and military intervention. The analysis draws on coverage from various Soviet newspapers and international politics scholarship from selected periods. Within the panel, the paper thus provides a perspective on the role of deinstitutionalisation and side-lining of institutions, and particularly of the United Nations, in the process of their constitution and establishment under active support of the Soviets.
    
    Author: Philipp Lottholz (Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany.)
  - UNASUR - the institutional foundations of a project of regional leadership in South America: Overlapping regionalisms and foreign policy ambitions
    
    The consolidation of Brazil’s project of regional leadership involved the promotion of an institutional design that could reflect the South American interests and the regional foreign policy autonomy detached from the US influence. Since 1948 the multilateral layout in the Americas was dominated by the US ideological input with the creation of the Organisation of American States. OAS performed a decisive role in the US – Latin American interactions, but after the end of the Cold War the institution started losing its credibility among Latin American states. Given the US failure to build a new version of Panamericanism, new institutional arrangements emerged, and one of the Brazilian bids to gain regional leadership was embodied in UNASUR, the first South American permanent organisation that gathered the totality of the states of the region. How did the US reacted to this initiative? How did UNASUR increased the Brazilian possibilities of leading the South American countries as a block vis-à-vis the US? Following a Neoclassical Realist approach to foreign policy decision making this paper will address the process of institutional creation and foreign policy aspirations in the Western Hemisphere, looking specially at the interaction between a US led OAS versus a Brazilian led UNASUR.
    
    Author: Juan Velez (University of Kent)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Everyday narratives of crises Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford) , Marcus Nicolson (Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research, Italy)
  
  Chair: Ben Rosher (Queens University Belfast)
  
  Discussant: Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick)
  - “They seem to be getting on fine without us”: differentiated narratives of EU (de)politicisation in post-Brexit England
    
    The 2016 Brexit referendum was a watershed moment for the politicisation of the European Union in the UK. Much has been written about the politicising and polarising effects of the referendum, along with the Leave result’s subsequent contestation in the media as well as in national and European election cycles. Using media discourse analysis and in-depth focus group data, this paper examines how everyday narratives of the European Union reflect the extent of the (de)politicisation of the EU and its institutions in England eight years on from the referendum and four years after the UK’s formal departure from the EU. We compare citizens’ narratives of the EU to the framing of UK/EU relations in the media, juxtaposing the differentiated narratives and constructions of EU (de)politicisation in post-Brexit England. We find that while everyday narratives of UK/EU relations reflect a declining level of politicisation within the public, with many expressing a sense of resignation and apathy towards the future of the EU without the UK as well as doubts towards European democracy more generally, this often lies in contrast with the framing of the EU in the UK media. While the saturation of EU issues in the media has declined post-2016, the remaining coverage frequently highlights points of extreme contention and conflict between the EU and UK, especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. The implications of this for understanding the dynamics of EU (de)politicisation in a former member state are discussed.
    
    Authors: Louis Stockwell (University of Warwick) , Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford)
  - #RestartTheEconomyNow: using netnography to access everyday economic belief during the Covid-19 pandemic
    
    Scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) have called for greater attention to the role of everyday actors in the constitution of the global economy. While the field has championed in-person methods for amplifying everyday actors, social media remains a relatively untapped resource. In this paper, I make a case using ‘netnography’ (Kozinets 2019) to uncover everyday economic belief. Unlike automated data collection approaches, netnography is immersive, seeking to capture cultural knowledge, shared meanings and the context of everyday life. I provide an overview of netnography, how it might be used in IPE, and what are some of the ethical considerations. To demonstrate its potential, I share findings of a netnography of the social media campaign to support the ‘Reopen the Economy’ movement, mobilising protests against stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. A surface reading of this movement might perceive ‘the economy’ to mean employment and small businesses. However, using netnography, it is possible to see that this concept represents an antagonism to social insurance, to differently racialised people and to non-citizens. I conclude that while there are limitations and ethical challenges, social media provides unparalleled access to everyday economic belief.
    
    Author: Jessica Underwood (University of Warwick)
  - “Changing Perspectives on Europe from the Borderlands”
    
    People living in European borderlands have a close relationship to the border, often having to cross it every day for work or familial reasons. These populations are therefore directly affected by recent re-bordering trends in the EU. Nonetheless, the voices and narratives of people living in borderland areas are often overlooked in the literature.
    Border scholars have found the media, including social media platforms, to be fueling borderland insecurities and to be a venue for rising nationalist political sentiments (Renner et al., 2022;). Perceptions of Europe are often included within these narratives, which are shapes by social contexts and local dimensions (Scalise, 2015). However, the literature in border studies has rarely focused on the perspective of national minorities to analyse the effects of these ruptures. This is the research gap which the present study attends to.
    The empirical data focuses on a thematic analysis of 1,705 news articles from eight minority newspapers in six European borderland contexts (in Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Slovakia). These media narratives are complimented by the narratives of young adult borderlanders (aged 18-30). Through the analysis I develop an understanding of how national minority newspapers report on borders, and how these contrast with the perspectives of citizens. It is revealed that open borders are of particular importance to borderland communities, who feel increasingly detached from state-level decision makers, and whose localness is also disconnected from the European Union. The analysis shines a light on the often-invisible perspective of national minorities in border and European studies.
    
    Author: Marcus Nicolson (Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research, Italy)
  - “Fragmented Narratives Across the North-South Divide: Macroeconomic Indicators and the Differentiated Constructions of the Eurozone crisis”
    
    Economic crises are some of the most significant events of recent decades, although as constructivist and discursive studies have consistently highlighted, these should be seen as socially constructed instead of observer-independent phenomena (Abdelal et al, 2013; Moffit, 2015). Much has indeed been written about the narratives that, by framing and making salient particular policy problems and solutions (Blyth, 2014; Borriello, 2017), serve as key discursive elements in crisis management efforts. Comparatively little emphasis, however, has been placed on the specific role played by macroeconomic indicators within these, particularly in relation to issue salience and evolution – something problematic, given their key role as technical frames within economic discourse (Mügge, 2016, 2020). This article attempts to provide insights into this by analysing the relationship between media coverage of macroeconomic indicators and of the construction of economic crisis narratives. Using media data collected via Lexis Nexis, and taking the example of the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis, we provide a longitudinal analysis of the salience and framing of macroeconomic indicators in the construction and evolution of economic crisis narratives over time. In doing so, this article contributes to the literatures on framing and on the politics of economic indicators, particularly by highlighting the role that these indicators play within the construction, evaluation, and resolution of crises in media discourses.
    
    Authors: Louis Stockwell (University of Warwick) , Guillermo Alonso Simon (University of Warwick)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Financing the future? Challenges in the political economy of climate Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group (bisa)
  
  Chair: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  - Green finance as financialized planning
    
    The last decade has seen a proliferating debate on green finance amongst both academics and practitioners. The issue of green finance lies at the intersection of three key topics in political economy: climate change, financialization, and the return of the state. From that, green finance is part of a plurality of ‘green’ interpretations of long-standing analytical subjects, be it green industrial policy, green central banking, green developmentalism, or the green state. Here, we argue that green finance can be understood through the lens of ‘financialized planning,’ and that doing so provides conceptual coherence that ties surrounding literature together. What we term ‘green financial planning’ captures how states’ use of various policy tools exercise planning an economic transition, such as central banking, industrial policy, and financial regulations. Rather than merely assets bearing green labels, green finance understood in this way provides insights into how differing state-capital relationships shape progress on greening financial systems differently across countries, including the state-driven approach in China and de-risking approach in the US. Our intention is that this contributes a common basis through political economy scholarship can approach the plurality of topical debates surrounding green finance
    
    Author: James Jackson (University of Manchester)
  - Corporate Environmental Pacts: Business Discourses of Collective Action, Storytelling and Authenticity
    
    Investigating how actors involved in corporate environmental initiatives seek to govern stakeholders, this research focuses on specific voluntary private governance initiatives, which I term ‘corporate environmental pacts’. Pacts are initiatives that encourage business members to ‘take action’, certify those actions, market those actions and build virtual communities. Addressing a clear research gap around such initiatives, I investigate the strategies and communications employed by two corporate environmental pacts – 1% for the Planet and The Climate Pledge, and their members.
    
    To better understand the governance relationships at play in corporate environmental pacts, interviews with 14 participants who work for pacts or member organisations, as well as data from pact websites and social media, were subjected to a comparative discourse analysis. The research uses governmentality theory to explore how discourses and logics of socio-environmental change figure in efforts to alter stakeholder behaviour.
    
    I argue that pacts and member companies have comparable ‘theories of change’. These logics represent courses of action made visible and deemed possible. Pacts couch their agency as ‘corporate collective action’ – collaboration and knowledge-sharing between businesses. Their communicative practices are framed as ‘storytelling’, a marketing technique encapsulating tensions present in brand ‘authenticity’, anticipating the greenwashing critiques that often accompany sustainable consumption practices.
    
    Author: Samuel Toscano (University of Manchester)
  - Carbon Disclosure and Climate Change Mitigation in the EU: Evolution and Dominance of Transparency Frames
    
    This paper investigates the rise of governance-by-disclosure in the global climate regime, questioning how carbon disclosure has become a dominant norm over more strict regulations. Employing discourse network analysis, we analyse the evolution of carbon disclosure frames in the European Union (EU) between 2000 and 2020. We show that debates on carbon disclosure were initiated by non-state actor coalitions that framed transparency as a risk moderator and an economic opportunity for businesses and investors. These findings confirm the expectations of stakeholder and economic theories of transparency, emphasising privatisation and marketisation as pivotal drivers of the disclosure regimes. Additionally, since early 2010s, we observe an increasing trend towards institutionalisation/diffusion. Especially after the Paris Agreement, European actors have converged around regulatory frames in addition to existing dominant frames on economic benefits and stakeholder interests. Reflecting increasing consensuality of frames, this period also coincides with a significant expansion in policy initiatives advocating for greater mandatory disclosures.
    
    Authors: Kerem Öge (University of Warwick) , Federico Chaves Correa (Université Laval, Canada)*
  - Pathways to Climate Finance: Navigating Intermediary and Direct Access for Africa’s Private Sector
    
    The bulk of climate funding has so far targeted public sector projects, but there have been increasing calls, both nationally and internationally, to channel more funds to the private sector. Very little, however, is known about how these funds reach the private sector and who gets access. In this paper, we examine how climate finance from multilateral development banks (MDBs) trickles down to the private sector in Africa–the largest employer on the continent. Using cases from Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa, we explore the rationales behind the pathways through which climate-linked funds from the African Development Bank reach their private sector beneficiaries: direct access and local financial intermediaries. Drawing on interviews with private sector stakeholders and MDB officials as well as board documents from major multilateral climate funds, we find that the choice of pathways is influenced by concerns over risk, efficiency, and transaction costs. Our paper contributes to the literature on the dynamics of private sector financing by MDBs and advances the growing body of work on multilateral climate finance flows to low and middle-income countries.
    
    Author: Tetsekela Anyiam-Osigwe (Princeton University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Foreign and security policy in the Indo-Pacific Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  
  Chair: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  - India’s Participation in the Quad and its place within the Indo-Pacific Security Architecture
    
    The Indo-Pacific has emerged as a focal point of evolving geostrategic realities, marked by intensifying great power competition and multiple challenges posed by China. This shift in focus from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific has created a new rallying point for key players to articulate their strategic postures, as demonstrated by the resurgence of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). At the same time, the deepening ties between the U.S. and India underscore India’s crucial role in regional stewardship within the Indo-Pacific security architecture. This paper explores the research question: How has India’s participation in the Quad between 2004 and 2024 reflected its Indo-Pacific strategy amid growing Chinese assertiveness? Employing a theoretical framework that combines the balance of threat theory and defensive realism, this study provides a comprehensive lens to assess the evolutionary dynamics of India’s foreign policy, specifically through its approach to the Quad and its strategic positioning within the complex geopolitical landscape of the Indo-Pacific. Drawing on an interpretivist perspective and a qualitative methodology, this research examines key policy documents, official statements, and political speeches to elucidate India's role in the Quad. The analysis concludes that India’s engagement in the Quad aligns with its broader strategy to uphold regional stability and advance a free and open Indo-Pacific while emphasizing multilateral cooperation and strategic partnerships with major players in the region.
    
    Keywords: India, Indo-Pacific, Quad, United States, China
    
    Authors: Deepthi Suresh (CICP-UMinho, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal) , Laura C Ferreira-Pereira (CICP-UMinho, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal)*
  - Foreign Policy as Veto Player Theory?: Taiwan Arms Purchases from the US
    
    This paper analyses Taiwan’s foreign policy towards the United States using Veto Player Theory to explain the differing outcomes in arms purchases during the first administrations of Presidents Chen Shui-bian (2000–2004) and Tsai Ing-wen (2016–2020). While Taiwan and the Taiwan-Strait have become a focal point of current international relations, the field of International Relations is still short of literature with Taiwan’s foreign policy not as the object but as the subject. Combining public policy theory and International Relations, the study identifies key veto players, both formal and informal, who influenced decision-making processes regarding arms procurement from the U.S., such as the Legislative Yuan (LY), the Executive Yuan (EY), and external actors like China and the United States. By applying George Tsebelis' veto player framework, the thesis investigates why Chen Shui-bian was unable to execute his planned arms deals, while Tsai Ing-wen succeeded in securing significant arms packages. The research finds that the constellation and foreign policy preferences of veto players, particularly the alignment of interests within Taiwan’s legislative bodies, as well as external geopolitical pressures, critically shaped the outcomes of Taiwan’s arms procurement policy. Actors anticipate the decisions and preferences of formal and informal veto players and take measures accordingly. The study concludes that the structure and cohesiveness of veto players within Taiwan's political system were decisive in enabling or hindering policy change, offering insights into how future administrations, especially the current Taiwanese government mirroring Chen Shui-bian’s first administration, might navigate similar challenges.
    
    Author: Lewin Jander (National Chung Hsing University)
  - The European Union’s navigation of the United-States China rivalry: strategizing or muddling through?
    
    The reconfiguration of the post-Cold War world order since the mid-2000s has generated growing competition between poles and prompted a redefinition of the interests and positioning of each actor. The European Union (EU)’s strategic adaptation to these changes has been primarily a response to the constraints imposed by the decline of American hegemony and episodes of erosion of the transatlantic link, and by the growing weight of the United States (US)-China rivalry on an increasing number of issues. Among the many areas catalysing these reconfigurations, the Indopacific is particularly illustrative of the multifaceted challenges the EU’s strategic adaptation faces. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, since a strategy, its development and objectives are contextual and relational, the US-China rivalry and the challenges posed by the EU’s relationship with both are central – hence RQ1: to what extent and how are US-China rivalry and the relationship with both channeled in the EU’s positioning? Second, EU foreign policy being “multilevel” and “multilocational” and involving nuances in member states’ interests and approaches vis-à-vis the US-China rivalry and the Indopacific, the elaboration dynamics of the EU’s strategic positioning require us to examine the positions of relevant member states and the content of the EU-level balance achieved – hence RQ2: to what extent and how are member states’ approaches articulated in the EU’s positioning? Building on a three-pronged operationalisation of the “strategic hedging” conceptual framework as applied to the EU and articulating these two levels of analysis (RQ1 and RQ2), the paper argues that, ultimately combining “principled pragmatism” and “strategic autonomy” – two concepts at the heart of the EU Global Strategy – the EU develops a form of a strategic pragmatism in terms of conceptualisation, formulation and implementation of its positioning, aiming to find strategic coherence in complexity.
    
    Author: Brice Didier (Sciences Po & IRSEM)
  - Global Disorder and the Opportunities for the Global South: Critical Realpolitik View
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Sasikumar Sundaram (City, University of London)
  - The Strategic Interaction Problem: Why Russia and China have Abandoned their Peaceful Grand Strategies?
    
    N/A
    
    Author: T.V. Paul (McGill University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Governing and Problematizing Global Health Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Convener: GHWG Working group
  
  Chair: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
  - Named: The Onomastic Governance of Global Health Emergencies
    
    Countries all around the world face the threat of deadly infectious disease outbreaks. Yet even the most elementary international response – naming a new epidemic – triggers diplomatic firestorms because disease names can potentially also stigmatise nations, decimate economies, and perpetuate coloniality. How, then, are disease outbreaks officially named in international relations? What political pressures influence international onomastic practices? Why do names ultimately exert such power in world politics? This paper initiates a new research field it calls international political onomastics to analyse the naming practices around global health emergencies. Such investigation reveals, more broadly, how international relations are onomastic relations.
    
    Author: Stefan Elbe (University of Sussex)
  - Technologies of access: how technological advancements have shaped the ‘access to medicines’ agenda in global health
    
    Strengthening access to medicines and vaccines has long been an important goal of global health governance. Indeed, the institutional architecture of global health is shaped by organisations that are mandated to facilitate the financing, development and distribution of medicines and vaccines, including some of the largest ones, like the Global Fund, Gavi and Pepfar, as well as a myriad of product development partnerships. But how did access to medicines and vaccines emerge as a key policy goal for global health? What created the perception that access to medicines and vaccines is a major problem to be addressed by global health governance? Existing literature has highlighted three main dynamics: disease outbreaks, notably HIV/AIDS, Ebola and Covid; the emergence of an international regime of intellectual property protection; and the perceived impact of infectious diseases on development and security. This paper contributes to this literature by taking a different analytical angle. It explores the role that technology has played in shaping the access problematique in global health. It will show how, at different times, technological advancements shaped how the problem of ‘access’ was understood and institutional responses devised. Drawing inspiration from Foucault’s concept of ‘problematisation’ as well as STS-inspired work on infrastructures, the paper examines three historical periods during which the problem of access was (re)defined on the global health agenda: the emergence of the Children’s Vaccine Initiative in the 1980s; the debates on Access and Benefit Sharing in the 2000s; and regional manufacturing in the 2020s.
    
    Author: Anne Roemer-Mahler (University of Sussex)
  - The role of epistemic communities in global governance of human genome editing: an advocacy coalition framework analysis
    
    2020-21 saw the publication of five international reports and/or standards on human genome editing (HGE). In September 2020, in “Heritable Human Genome Editing”, the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Germline Genome Editing recommended an international body on crossing scientific and ethical thresholds in HGE. In October 2020, in its “Statement on Human Genome Editing”, the World Medical Association outlined recommendations for governments. In May 2021, the International Society for Stem Cell Research updated its “Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation”, to include HGE. In July 2021, in “Human Genome Editing: A Framework for Governance”, the World Health Organization made recommendations on governance mechanisms at institutional to global levels. Finally, in December 2021, UNESCO issued the “Report of the International Bioethics Committee on the Principle of Protecting Future Generations”, which supports the WHO Framework, whilst also calling for the development of international law to prohibit heritable genome editing. This paper frames the teams of writers of these reports/standards as epistemic communities, each arriving at conclusions and recommendations based on a set of normative and causal beliefs. We analyse the impact of these epistemic communities on international HGE policy using the Advocacy Coalition Framework. We conclude that progress on enacting the recommendations of these epistemic communities in the international policy subsystem has been stifled by (a) the nuanced differences in the recommendations of the five different communities (b) the disjunct between the communities as scientific experts and those with the power to make international laws and policies and (c) the lack of dominance of any single coalition.
    
    Authors: Adele Langlois (University of Lincoln) , Catherine Yuk Ping Lo (Maastricht University)
  - From objects of expertise to objects of experience in global governance: The iterative picturing of contagion
    
    At first glance, contagion appears to be a simple phenomenon that requires drastic measures to contain it. However, on closer inspection, contagion shares characteristics with many other concerns in global governance: the more we attempt to define it, the more it disintegrates under scrutiny. One way to approach this fuzziness is to analyze the material and semiotic construction of objects in a granular and very detailed manner. With our paper, we seek to offer a different approach. We suggest that the multiplicity of contagion should be as well approached by a mode of ‘looking at’ the surface of large objects – and not only by de-blackboxing their construction. Such an approach moves beyond objects of global governance as created and produced by expertise.
    Bringing into conversation the academic debates on object IR and on visual studies, we introduced the idea of iterative picturing as a means to, firstly, preserve the largeness of contagion as an object by looking at its surface, and second, to also broaden our understanding of these objects not only as a manifestation of expertise but as experience. We argue that objects of global governance are inevitably, though to varying degrees, experienced and that this experience contributes significantly to their status as large objects. We introduced three interrelated views on the surface of contagion in the empirical context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, taken together, emphasize the complexity and fluidity of contagion as a large object: the epidemiological, clinical, and personal view.
    
    Authors: Katharina Krause , Luis Aue*
  - Hospitality for Migrants in the National Health Service: Blurring the Boundaries between Care and Harm
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Moises Vieira (University of Manchester)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Indebtedness in, of and to the Global South Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  
  Discussant: Samuel Knafo (University of Sussex)
  - Tax in Times of Debt: Towards a domestic political economy of fiscal distress
    
    Many lower-income countries are facing sovereign debt crises, and over 3 billion people live in countries whose governments spend more on interest payments than health or education. Large and rapid increases in tax revenues have emerged as the main tool of fiscal consolidation in response to this predicament. Yet there is little evidence for their political viability, nor their wider consequences. How do citizens respond to tax burdens to raise payments for creditors abroad? Do higher debt burdens change the shape of tax politics – for instance, are governments more willing to tax elites, and introduce difficult reforms, or do they encourage short-termism? This paper locates the relationship between tax and debt in current policy discourses and outlines a research agenda that is based in the political economy of the current sovereign debt crisis and the practicalities of tax policy and administration in LMICs.
    
    Authors: Philip Mader-Holden (University of Sussex)* , Max Gallien (University of Sussex)* , Martin Hearson (Institute of Development Studies / University of Sussex) , Mary Abounabhan (University of Sussex)*
  - Infrastructures of Indebtedness: India Stack and the Rise of Household Debt in India
    
    Household debt in India has grown significantly in the last decade. During this period the India Stack vision for digital infrastructure development has been installed and has expanded rapidly. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the two. Household debt in India has increased from around 9% of GDP in 2014 to over 17% in 2024. This rise comes in the context of India being known as a nation of savers. India Stack is a project about more than just lending, it is an all-encompassing digital infrastructure to promote financial and social inclusion. This paper interrogates the political economy of India Stack, to better situate and understand the rise of the Stack in relation to the rise of household indebtedness. It draws attention to the limits of the socio-technical vision of progress that India Stack embodies, and the new potential harms and vulnerabilities produced by fintech-enabled indebtedness.
    
    Author: Chris Clarke (University of Warwick)
  - Beyond Debt and Dispossession: African Struggles for Land, Dignity and Justice
    
    In contemporary global discussions about debt and justice, the voices and struggles of African activists and grassroots movements often remain marginalized. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on experiences of the Church Land Programme in South Africa. It thus challenges dominant Western narratives around debt and social justice by highlighting the entanglements of colonialism and empire in shaping contemporary worlds. By engaging with the work of the Church Land Programme, this paper explores the critical intersection of debt, land and social justice in the context of South Africa.Drawing on both activist knowledge and academic research, the paper aims to expand the conversation on justice by emphasizing the importance of African and Afro-descendant experiences and knowledges in the discourse on debt and reparations. By bringing grassroots movements into the center of the debate, the presentation argues for a broader, more inclusive understanding of justice that not only addresses economic disparities but also acknowledges the deep spiritual and cultural importance of land to marginalized communities. In doing so, it offers critical insights into how resistance to empire can forge new pathways toward social, economic, and spiritual justice.
    
    Author: Sabrina Keller (Humboldt University Berlin)
  - The Gift that Left a Debt: Understanding Discourses of Indebtedness in Resettlement Policies for Afghan interpreters Employed by Western Armies
    
    While conservative and right-wing politicians are loath to acknowledge colonial debt and tend to deny responsibility for refugees due to harms caused by foreign policies, their statements about the duty to protect Afghan interpreters, employed by Western armies are rife with references to ‘indebtedness’, and ‘betrayal’, if this debt is not honoured. For instance, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel stated that “we owe an immense debt of gratitude to the brave individuals who have worked side by side with our Armed Forces”. This paper interrogates this language of indebtedness by drawing on Marcel Mauss’ theory of gift-exchange (1925), following Heins, Unrau and Avram’s proposal (2018) to apply his work to International Relations. In Mauss’ gift theory, the receiver of the original gift is haunted by debt if they have not offered a return gift. Recognising this gift logic opens up interesting questions about ethics and accountability and helps situate Afghans’ claims to protection in relation to historical demands for rights by other marginalised and non-citizens (African Americans; indigenous people; women) who supported war efforts.
    
    Author: Sara de Jong (Department of Politics, University of York)
- 15:00 → 19:00
  
  WE 18 Conference event / Interdisciplinary Dialogues on Artificial Intelligence IR (Sponsored by Queen's University Belfast and BISA's Emerging Technologies Working Group) ECIT Momentum 1-0, Queen’s Titanic Quarter, Queen's Road, Belfast, BT3 9DT
  
  Speakers: Dr Deepak Padmanabhan (Queen's University Belfast), Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast), Prof. Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster), Dr Sandra Scott-Hayward (Queen's University Belfast), Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Introduction to Book Publishing Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  N/A
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Chair: Juliet Dryden (BISA)
  
  Participants: Isobel Cowper-Coles (Palgrave Macmillan) , Fiona Richman (The Oxford Publicity Partnership) , Don Jacobs (Georgetown University Press) , John Haslam (Cambridge University Press) , Atifa Jiwa (Bloomsbury)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Neo-liberal militarisation and the "progressive" way of war Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Joanna Tidy (University of Sheffield)
  
  Chair: Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex)
  - Total defence for whom? Investigating the boundary-making of Sweden's preparedness efforts
    
    Sweden is increasingly pursuing its goal of ‘total defence’. The overarching aim is “all-encompassing military preparedness” (Åse and Wendt 2022: 226; see also Ericson, Svenbro and Wester 2023) throughout all levels of society. Within the civil sphere, this is reflected in the re-issuing of the ‘if crisis or war comes’ pamphlet, adapted from its original Cold War issue to the context and potential crises of today. Likewise, Swedish politicians have repeatedly appealed to Swedish citizens to take preparedness seriously and the most recent slogan of the annual national preparedness week was “get going!” – calling Swedish citizens to get involved and to be prepared.
    
    However, the extent to which these preparedness efforts are inclusive, i.e. directed at all of Swedish society, is unclear. Prior critical research on war and militaries has shown that processes of militarisation rely on and perpetuate the making of boundaries, both materially and imaginary (Sylvester 2010, 2013; Parashar 2015; Ridden 2024). I investigate this boundary-making within the context of preparedness. Who is represented in Swedish preparedness efforts? How are questions of gender, race and class dealt with or incorporated in these efforts? I conduct a critical discourse analysis of all material concerning preparedness within the Swedish context, these include pamphlets, reports, government documents and speeches, as well as museum exhibitions about (historical) preparedness – exploring narratives of inclusion and exclusion within Swedish preparedness efforts.
    
    Author: Luise Bendfeldt (Uppsala University, Sweden)
  - The Ecological Way of War: The Politics of Sustainable Violence
    
    This paper critically examines the recent interest of Western militaries in the development of “green” practices, technologies and institutions to face the impending challenges of climate change. Reading these tendencies through the lens of decolonial and environmental political thought, I trace the emergence of an “ecological way of war” as an extension, rather than limitation, of Western (il)liberal and colonial modes of martial violence. First, I discuss how efforts to “green” warfare are not diverging from the history of Western military power. Instead, they relate to a strong colonial legacy of war as a tool to control and manipulate ecologies, environments and atmospheres. Second, I explore the ethical stakes of making martial violence “sustainable”. Against liberal democratic dreams of conflict prevention, the grammar of sustainability seems to conjure images of “carbon neutral” permanent war where destructive violence becomes less costly and total war inceasingly excusable.
    
    Author: Italo Brandimarte (King's College London)
  - War, Labour, and the politics of military unions
    
    This paper asks: what do military unions mean for understandings of militarism? Competing framings of and investments in military institutions, military personnel, military power and violence, along with different perspectives on the essential terms of the relationship between soldier and liberal state play out in political debates regarding the right to military labour association. This encompasses both the fundamental right to association and also the form it should take (for instance a full union or an alternate form without a right to strike). In this paper I reflect on these debates through lenses provided by critical and feminist understandings of militarism, military power and military violence in conversation with understandings of labour and power from political economy. I focus my discussion on european militaries where there exist strikingly divergent approaches to military labour association (from full rights through to none at all). At their heart debates about military labour association often centre on whether soldiers should be understood within labour terms, as workers (as EUROMIL, the European umbrella organisation of military labour associations has it - “workers in uniform”) or whether they are a ‘special’ category of citizen whose ‘military service’ is unique and elevated from the grubbiness of labour relations as a matter of service, duty, and national honour. These positions are very different in how they view the essential terms of the relationship between soldier, state, and nation yet they both seek to uphold military power, the effectiveness of military institutions and projects of military violence. What does this mean for our understandings of how militarism works in liberal states?
    
    Author: Joanna Tidy (University of Sheffield)
  - A new geopolitics of climate mitigation and adaptation: centering carbon bootprint in emission reductions
    
    This paper examines the present and anticipated challenges that climate change poses to military forces. It explores the strategic and operational changes that are being undertaken by the armed forces of NATO and non-NATO states to prepare for the future under a ‘climate-degraded’ environment. To do this, a comparative analysis of NATO and select non-NATO states is undertaken. Primary data from national security strategies, military doctrines, manuals, speeches, etc, are thematically analysed to identify patterns, and themes between data and assess how various militaries are working on challenges posed by climate change.
    
    This paper advocates integrating the military into the climate accountability and transparency framework. The Armed Forces have managed to avoid accountability and transparency of its GHG emissions even as other sectors have faced increasing scrutiny. This is especially concerning as, according to some sources, the Armed Forces are the “largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world.”
    
    The paper will address the pertinent question of what International Studies can achieve over the next 50 years by advocating for more openness and reform of a sector that has hitherto remained outside the climate accountability framework. It seeks to challenge the securitised narrative around emissions from the world’s military forces as the world moves away from the 1.5-degree goal. This paper will examine the inequities associated with the "carbon bootprint" by incorporating an Indigenous perspective from the Global South, thereby highlighting the disproportionate impact and environmental costs of military emissions on marginalized communities.
    
    Author: Harsh Vasani (FLAME University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / A "NewSpace" Race? The Ultimate High Ground? Or an Orbital Wild West? The Narrative Construction of Space Power Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Convener: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Tegan Harrison (Cardiff University)
  - Space Trope Bingo
    
    It is not secret that the space community uses lots of jargon and a sea of acronyms. Like in any specialized group, a shared vocabulary can ease communication among various actors and also denote in-group status for individuals. At the same time, such constructions often frame and shape the overall understanding of the subject at hand. This can be seen through various tropes that are used to shorthand concepts. In the world of space, discourse is often situated within a number of tropes, to the extent that one might set up a bingo card based on phrases link "the new space race," "the ultimate high ground," "trillion dollar industry," and on and on. While the notion of playing bingo while listening to speakers at a conference is humorous, it is also revealing as to how much these tropes and their underlying ideas shape our knowledge about space. This is particularly interesting in the context of space, which for most commentators is never directly experienced, and as a result these tropes help to construct a nomos of space that frames discourse and action. This paper will engage with these narratives and their impact on the ongoing construction of the human experience of and in space.
    
    Author: PJ Blount (Durham University)
  - Defining Success in Space: Rethinking Power Metrics and Strategic Language in the New Space Age
    
    When measuring strategic success, language is paramount. In a dynamic New Space Age, there is a pressing need for new frameworks to assess power and track the growth of space power. Space power is increasingly seen as an indicator of a state’s overall strength. By refining how we measure and evaluate a state’s space power and its trajectory, we can gain insight into the sustainability of national ambitions and the defining features of cohesive strategic approaches. Notably, there is no universally accepted method for defining and measuring power within international relations. Power theories are inherently adaptable, evolving with context and objectives. Definitions of strength and power vary, shaped by diverse strategic postures and subjective narratives of achievements. Success can be measured in various ways—by budgetary impact, levels of sovereignty, specific capability advancements, achievements beyond Earth’s orbit, or positioning relative to other actors. While these metrics offer useful insights, they also pose risks of unrealistic goal-setting, bias, and ambiguous value capture mechanisms. This presentation explores critical questions: What does it mean to thrive in space? Do we share a common understanding? What are the implications of misaligned and conflated language within this evolving strategic domain?
    
    Author: Julia Balm (King's College London)
  - Ritual Interaction Chains in US-China Lunar Competition
    
    The US and China both seek to utilise lunar exploration as a method to boost state power and compete with their rival. An underexplored question is why highly symbolic practices, such as planting the national flag in the lunar soil, produce powerful shared emotions and anoint new systems of rules or morality. While the discourse of a “new commercial space age” attempts to solidify an economic justification for the huge expense of even modest Moon landings, the lack of valuable resources makes financial gain an unlikely explanation. A military justification also remains elusive, despite the efforts of a minority of advocates. This paper turns to the concept of Randall Collins’ ritual interaction chains to provide a sociological exploration of the actions and reactions of the so-called “New Moon Race”. While identities are clearly at stake in space competition, by analysing the workings of specific practices, such as sending robotic probes versus human crews, this paper identifies how abstract ideas of belonging and prestige are acted out into something more tangible.
    
    Author: Cameron Hunter (University of Copenhagen)
  - Nothing new under the Sun? The “Global Space Age” approach to Astropolitics
    
    This paper proposes an overarching concept of the “Global Space Age” as a more useful narrative framing for understanding and researching humanity’s practical ‘Space Age’ – the material use of outer space and related technologies in the run up to and after 1957. There are a number of different framings or narrative devices for making arguments or observations about outer space today in academia, journalism, government, military, and industry communities. These include First, Second, and Third Space Ages, NewSpace, a ‘new Space Race’, a ‘commercial Space Age’, and Space 4.0, to name a few. These framings are not without merit – but their various merits are their collective undoing. The trouble with these phrases or epochs is that they each describe valid observations about outer space that have been true to varying extents since 1957. Instead of these framings I propose the notion of the “Global Space Age” which argues against rigid categorisations of ‘eras’ in space to emphasise important and existing facets of international politics in space since the mid-20th century: (1) that space has always been an internationalised realm with multiple important actors, including before Sputnik’s launch in 1957; (2) and that commercial industry has long been crucial to the exploitation of outer space. This approach contributes to researching and studying astropolitics by: 1) embracing a diversity of actors and transnational forces in a time and place materially dominated by two superpowers; 2) demonstrates the long lead-time of technological development and supports the “shock of the old” rejoinder to technological novelty discourse; 3) emphasises the statist dominance of the global space economy even as more private companies enter the global space industry.
    
    Author: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University)
  - Space as Panopticon: The Impact of New Technologies and Conspiracy Theories
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Jeni Mitchell (King's College London)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Planetary Politics: Foundations and Crisis Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable considers the problem of planetary politics by stepping back to consider our founding images and institutionalisations of the political as they have related to the Earth. Based around a series of commentaries on Stefanie Fishel and Anthony Burke’s new book, The Ecology Politic, participants consider whether the modern state is doomed to remain irredeemably entangled with capitalism, an “extractive state” enacting a “sovereign ban of nature” that is now our foundational structure of international law and order. They ask what it means to live at the planetary scale when we are already acting at it, discuss the problematic ontologies of global climate and environmental governance, and consider the decolonial and new materialist vision of the Anthropocene the book argues. Is an Ecology Politic possible or desirable and are there further possibilities or lines of flight to be considered?
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Anthony Burke (The University of New South Wales)
  
  Participants: Stefanie Fishel (University of the Sunshine Coast) , Cameron Harrington (Durham University) , Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University) , Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Queering the Carceral State: Race, Gender and Sexuality Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Conveners: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London) , Patrick Vernon (University of Birmingham)
  
  Chair: Marsha Henry (Queen's University Belfast)
  - The State as a Killing Machine: The Death of Queer Radicalism
    
    This article explores the emergence of modern statehood as being directly tied to colonial histories, making the state dependent on the reproduction of colonial exploitation, extraction, and death. In other words, the globalized modern state cannot be detached from colonial histories of colonial violence that targeted uncivilized bodies in an effort to tame them under the pretence of civilization. In exploring these dynamics, this article highlights the heteronormative structures of violence inherent to the state, categorising queer lives as uncivilized, in need of civilizing or death. Building on these histories and by conceptualising the state as a killing machine, the article argues that the modern state has, and continues to, kill queer radical politics. The article explores histories of violence directed towards queer individuals and queer organising. It focuses on US and British history of anti-homosexuality legislation and targeted campaigns against queer people and politics before examining contemporary LGBTQ+ rights as a system of co-option and delegitimization of queer radicalism.
    
    Author: Andrew Delatolla (University of Leeds)
  - Coloniality, Militarism and Everyday Politics
    
    In my intervention, I will query the terms and conditions of the 'postcolonial' by framing it as a continuation and morphing of colonial tactics, practices and control to offer a conceptualisation of the coloniality of modern/postcolonial states. By focusing on India's military-colonial occupation of Kashmir, my paper will query the gender, sexual, racial, temporal and affective logics that seek to justify occupation, and how modern states use colonial logics along with civilisational chauvinism to justify militaristic control over dissident lands and peoples. In thinking with the condition of occupation in Kashmir, at the margins of the Global South, my paper will also query how this locational shift prompts an epistemic change to rethink how we understand militarisation and coloniality, and the amenability of gender, sexual and racial logics in ordering and regulating state control.
    
    Author: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Excess, disbelief and epistemic injustice: state responses to bisexual+ people and racialised communities in France
    
    An all-too-common response to bisexual+ people disclosing their sexuality is that they are mistaken or that their identity is only temporary. Beyond harming bisexuals as knowers, when bordering actors disbelieve bisexual+ people seeking asylum about their sexuality, this can subject them to detention and deportation. As the state denies bisexual+ people’s knowledge of their sexuality, it similarly denies racialised and migratised communities’ knowledge of their experiences of racism and violence. In June 2023, uprisings erupted across France in response to the police murder of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Moroccan and Algerian descent, but state officials repeatedly disputed the existence of structural police violence or racism. Conducting fieldwork on bisexual+ asylum-seeking in France at the time, I was struck by the parallels between the epistemic injustice the state inflicts on populations it deems excessive, and the violent consequences from police and bordering actors that epistemic injustice simultaneously enables and obscures. This paper analyses photographs and observations from Paris and its suburbs during the period of the revolts. From this analysis, I identify links drawn by French demonstrators between police and bordering violence and unpack how “republican universalism” allows state authorities to deny the experiences of bisexual+, racialised, and migratised communities, in turn enabling further state violence.
    
    Author: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)
  - Posthuman Genocide
    
    Huge optimism swept through the UK with the election of the first Labour Government in almost two decades, but as the government settles into power it seems as though little has changed. Whilst the tone of political discourse has certainly shifted from an overtly discriminatory one to one associated with good governance, stability and hopefulness, little seems to have changed in the carceral policies that are being advanced by the UK Government. Focusing on the concept of ‘mobility’, this paper studies the policies through which migrants, trans people and working-class people are some of those whose mobility/capacity to move has been particularly policed by both the pre-election Conservative Government and the new Labour Government. By highlighting relative policy continuity between the parties versus a sharp distinction in the language they used in the 2024 General Election campaign, the paper interrogates the carceral policing of minoritised groups’ movement as a fundamental (i.e. common sense) logic of managing crises associated with neoliberalism. It does so by developing critical migration scholarship on bordering with a focus on the policing of the mobility of all groups who do not conform to White, heteronormative and cisgender citizenship models.
    
    Author: Patrick Vernon (University of Birmingham)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Revolution Vs Evolution: Debating Technology and the Character of War Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous systems, robotic weapons, and quantum technologies (to name but a few) are either already impacting war, or are poised to 'revolutionise' contemporary conflict. Yet what will this revolution look like and is it just new technologies that are dominating and altering the character of war in novel, disruptive, and unforeseen ways?
  
  This roundtable brings together an international mix of leading experts in new technologies and conflict to discuss how (and how not) new and old technologies are altering the landscape of modern warfare.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (University of Loughborough)
  
  Participants: Mike Williams (Syracuse University) , Neil Cooper (Kent State University) , Jean-Francois Belanger (Royal Danish Defence College) , Anthony King (University of Exeter)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / The Middle East in the International System Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Moritz Mihatsch (University of Cambridge)
  
  Chair: Moritz Mihatsch (University of Cambridge)
  - Petrostates to Planetary Powers. Competition for regional hegemony in space.
    
    This paper investigates the dynamics of symbolic power and environmental authority, within the competition between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for regional hegemony in outer space. Against a backdrop of economic transitions to post-oil futures and reconfigured geopolitical alliances, both nations’ space programs serve as potent instruments of statecraft, embodying aspirations for economic leadership and geopolitical influence in West Asia. The competition between the UAE and Saudi Arabia offers critical insight into the mobilisation of space initiatives as a locus of competitive state power in the twenty first century.
    
    Author: John Donovan (Open University)
  - Informal institutionalisation in social movements: New frameworks through Iraq and Argentina
    
    In this article I look at two seemingly autonomous and horizontal movements: The October movement in Iraq that started in 2019 (otherwise referred to as Tishreen, meaning October), and the 2001 Argentine December revolt. While differing in location and time, in each of these movements we find autonomous and horizontal tendencies, and yet they are rarely defined as institutional creations. By rejecting the state entity I argue they had simultaneously institutionalised by addressing their shared behaviours, desires and actions through an economically, culturally, financially, or socially enforceable metric. Simply constricting or enabling certain behaviours may be considered more akin to cultural practices or patterns of behaviour but I argue that their ability to discursively reshape structural societal dimensions, such as the state, the state-society relationship, and the citizens' position through an enforcement of behaviours is the formation of an informal institution. That is, informal institutions and informal power literature offer a more rigid theoretical background to the networks forming that are themselves looking to reconfigure the macro elements of modern society. By positioning themselves as rejecting traditional power sites such as the state, or even the state-citizen relationship, they form competitive and substitutive informal institutions (Helmke and Levitsky, 2006), rather than networks, that reject the formal arena. While those in Argentina sought to simply tear their relationship away from the state and recreate an independent political system, members of Tishreen opted for a methodology that had them competing with the state entity by enforcing their patterns of behaviour upwards, rather than framing themselves as a separate entity. In both scenarios the form of movement, or claim-making, acts as a simultaneous informal institutionalisation through its ability to enforce, constrict, and enable behaviour, and thus structuring social interaction along members’ perceived metrics
    
    Author: Abdulla Al-Kalisy (St Andrews University School of IR)
  - The Political Economy of Authoritarian Populism in Turkey: A Polanyian Reading
    
    Once billed as an up-and-coming neoliberal democracy, Turkey is now a vanguard of authoritarian populism with strong state capitalist tendencies. How did this happen? Drawing on Polanyian insights, this paper suggests that much of recent Turkish political economy under the ruling AKP can be read as the failure of a rightwing countermovement to evolve into a sustainable political project under conditions of embedded neoliberalism. Unable to deliver on their promise of repairing the social strains of market expansion in a firmly neoliberal setting, such countermovements will find it difficult to maintain their delicate cross-class coalitions without straying from democratic politics and mobilising new modes of state economic involvement. Even with such departures from the original script, the chances of success may be slim. In the Turkish case, the AKP’s desperate efforts to retain power have relied on extreme levels of policy pragmatism and radical state capture. Yet given Turkey’s deficit-led, debt-driven growth model and weakened political institutions, the outcome so far has been rampant cronyism, systemic upward redistribution and chronic economic stagnation, putting the party’s fortunes at risk and undermining the country’s developmental prospects.
    
    Author: Ali Burak Guven (Birkbeck, University of London)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  Panel / The Russo-Ukrainian War and Beyond Room 3, Assembly Buildings
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Wooyun Jo (Loughborough University)
  
  Chair: Wooyun Jo (Loughborough University)
  - The weaponisation of artificial intelligence in the Ukraine war
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Hermione Spencer (Loughborough University)
  - The wider implications of the Ukraine war on the High North region
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Harry Macnamara (Loughborough University)
  - Privatised warfare: Investigating private contractors in Ukraine
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Felix Auboeck (Loughborough University)
  - Psychological trauma on the battlefields of Ukraine
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Martin Thorp (Loughborough University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Transnationality, identity and belonging Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Selin Sivis (University of Bristol)
  - Indian Prime Minister Modi’s Diaspora Outreach: A Quest for Recognition
    
    My paper aims to expand the literature on India’s engagement with its diaspora, which is often viewed through the lens of economic benefit or soft power. I argue that the Indian Prime Minister Modi’s outreach to the diaspora can also be understood as a quest for recognition. I elaborate on this by engaging with the burgeoning literature on ‘status’ in International Relations.
    
    Broadly, the quest for recognition manifests in three main ways: (a) positioning Bharat as a leading force in the world through narratives such as Vishwaguru and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, which aims to upend the dominant standards of civilization; (b) an attempt to claim parity with the valued traits of established powers by flaunting a rising India and the organized strength of its successful diaspora; and (c) domestic signalling, which boosts Modi’s own stature in the eyes of the domestic audience as a leader who has brought respect to India and Indians on the world stage.
    
    To demonstrate this further, I analyze Indian Prime Minister Modi's mega rallies abroad, such as the Howdy Modi and Wembley Stadium rallies. Methodologically, this study will employ discourse analysis, focusing on speeches, media reports, semi-structured interviews, government publications, and a review of existing literature on Modi’s foreign policy.
    Syncing the domestic and external dimensions helps one understand the following: (a) foreign policy narratives like Vishwaguru; (b) intensifying trend of leveraging international for the domestic; (c) intensifying assertiveness in Indian foreign policy; (d) conceptualization of diaspora from the vantage point of a rising power's status-seeking strategy. Lastly, I map the broader change and continuity vis-a-vis India's imagination of its diaspora.
    
    Author: Paras Ratna (National University of Singapore)
  - Alternative Kurdishness: Identity Construction among the Kurds of Central Anatolia in Diaspora
    
    This study explores the unique identity formation of the Kurds of Central Anatolia, a lesser-known subgroup within the Kurdish diaspora who have resided in the regions of Ankara, Konya, and Kırşehir for over 400 years. With identifying with the broader Kurdish identity associated with Kurdistan, this group has also cultivated an "alternative Kurdishness," shaped by historical migrations and the enduring pressures of Turkish nationalism since the early Republic era. Drawing on diaspora and sub-identity theories, this research examines how this alternative Kurdish identity persists and evolves, particularly after significant waves of migration to European countries, such as Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, since the 1960s. Despite common experiences of marginalization, the Kurds of Central Anatolia have developed distinctive cultural and political characteristics, setting them apart from other Kurdish communities. The study is grounded in extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, offering new insights into how transnational migration impacts identity construction within ethnic communities. This research contributes to the literature on diaspora dynamics, ethnic politics, and identity formation by introducing the concept of "alternative Kurdishness" and examining the complex interplay between nationalism, migration, and identity in a transnational context.
    
    Author: Haci Cevik (University of Potsdam)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  WE 18 Panel / Violence, non-violence and resistance Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Rabea Khan (Liverpool John Moores University)
  - Palestine solidarity as an indicator of extremism: British state’s criminalisation of activism
    
    This paper speaks to current interventions being made in Critical Terrorism Studies to unpack the criminalisation of Palestinian liberation as terrorism. This paper draws attention to the far-reaching impacts of this framing by focusing on how the British state has used different security measures to target local Palestine solidarity actions. This is not to put the oppression faced by Palestinian people on an equal footing with the repression of solidarity work in the UK but to show the extensive remit of the settler colonial project that targets civil liberties beyond its immediate geographical scope.
    
    Since the 7 October attacks and the escalation of genocidal violence in Gaza, the British state has routinely deployed counter-terrorism measures to criminalise Palestine solidarity efforts. This paper will look at how the Terrorism Act 2000 and Prevent Duty have been used to target a cross-section of people and activities. While the empirical analysis mostly focuses on post-7 October developments, I will argue that these current attacks are rooted in a historical framing of Palestine as an indicator of extremism. Throughout the development of the Prevent Duty, support for Palestine has been presented as a possible cause of radicalisation. This made it easy for not just the British state but also the rightwing media sources to target ordinary citizens for espousing ‘extremist views’ as Palestine solidarity movement picked up pace.
    
    Over the past year, we have seen an increase in Prevent referrals and a dangerous expansion of the Terrorism Act 2000 resulting in arrests and convictions for items of clothing, writing social media posts, making speeches, or holding placards. These actions significantly stretch the parameters of what can be counted as ‘terrorist’ activity. This will not only have detrimental effects on civil liberties but will also further normalise framing of anti-hegemonic narratives as security threats.
    
    Author: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  - Delineating Logics and Practices of Violence in the Islamic State Conflict
    
    This paper unpacks a theoretical framework wherein contributions from decolonial theory, racial capitalism, and postcolonialism are combined to reconceptualise a critical approach to contemporary political conflicts. Applied to the case of the war against Islamic State (IS), this framework moves past existing attempts to explain the violence of IS as deriving from either primordial or instrumental impulses, or some reconciliation between the two. Instead, it posits that the discursive justifications for and kinetic practices of IS violence can be productively reimagined by placing them into conversation with the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) military interventions in Iraq and Syria. Decoloniality, racial capitalism, and postcolonialism offer powerful theoretical bases for situating IS and CJTF violence together, in terms of their respective epistemic, material, and semiotic dimensions. Decoloniality’s focus on episteme visualises how threats are constructed within the Eurocentric imaginary, amplifying IS violence as monstrosity whilst simultaneously naturalising and domesticating CJTF violence into appearing unthreatening. Racial capitalism’s focus on materiality visualises the perpetuation of a colonial hierarchy in the global division and forms of labour, as well as the keen interest of IS and the CJTF in preserving the economic status quo in Iraq and Syria. Postcolonialism’s focus on semiosis visualises how violence constructs racial differences between colonial and colonised subjects, producing IS and the CJTF as Manichaean avatars of good and evil, whereas an emphasis on their relationality yields firmer footing for critical interventions to oppose the violence of both. Normatively then, this paper establishes a theoretical space for critical scholars to use in grounding the violent legacies of colonialism within understandings of contemporary neo-colonial conflicts.
    
    Author: Cian Bear (University of Warwick)
  - Transversal Alliances to Counter Transnational Impunity: Rethinking accountability of surveillance and spyware technologies in state crime through collective movements
    
    This paper seeks to advance the conceptual framework of ‘transversal alliances’ as a blueprint through which to hold states accountable for crime carried out in conjunction with big-tech. The past two decades have seen the practice of multinational technology companies sharing users’ data across borders for ‘security’ purposes , as well as the routine export of surveillance and spyware technology to states where enforced disappearances and murder are endemic. This sharing of technology and metadata have enabled the identification, tracking and targeting of protesters and political opponents, as well as insurgents. To date, however, the transnational, clandestine, covert and opaque nature of these operations has rendered accountability difficult. National oversight structures have often served to act in symbiosis with secret state violence, enacting impunity and obfuscation (Bigo, McCluskey, Treguer 2024, Kniep et al 2022). The occasions in which victims have received justice has been confined to the juridical realm, relying heavily on the work of investigative journalists and researchers (Shabibi 2024, Blakeley and Raphael 2020). In bringing together the work of investigative journalists and transdisciplinary social scientists, this paper seeks to rethink accountability in novel and creative ways. Instead of fashioning investigative techniques narrowly as ‘method’, it develops the idea of ‘transversality’ and building of collective voices, who may have diverse positions and trajectories but share in the common project of fighting impunity.
    
    Authors: Emma Mc Cluskey (University of Westminster) , Sam Raphael (University of Westminster)* , Claire Lauterbach (Independent)* , Namir Shabibi (University of Westminster)
- 16:30 → 16:45
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / 50 years and counting: reflecting on the discipline and profession of International Studies (past BISA Chairs, hosted at the Assembly Hall at the Assembly Buildings Conference Centre) Assembly Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  N/A
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Chair: Mark Webber (University of Birmingham)
  
  Participants: Chris Hill (University of Cambridge) , Richard Whitman (University of Kent) , Barry Buzan (LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science)) , Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (University of Loughborough) , Chris Brown (London School of Economics) , Ruth Blakeley (University of Sheffield)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Championing Pedagogical Scholarship: The ASPIRE Network for Politics and International Relations Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Teaching tracks have become increasingly common across UK institutions as demand grows for high-quality education. With a focus on pedagogical research and innovation, these career paths actively further the quality, accessibility and experience of student education in higher education. However, career progression and job descriptions can vary widely across institutions, with some academics reporting lower job satisfaction, lower morale, and the potential for perceptions of inferiority when compared to colleagues in more traditional combined posts (Bennett et al. 2018).
  In 2024, nine Politics, International Relations and Development colleagues from four UK institutions came together to found the Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education (ASPIRE) Network for academics on teaching-track career paths in our discipline. ASPIRE seeks to represent and advocate for staff on this career trajectory, influencing academic institutions and policy makers to help shape how the teaching-track path functions, how staff can progress within these roles, and how these positions can be used to innovate in high-quality research and teaching in politics and international relations. Launching formally in June 2025 the network aims to empower members to navigate their career paths more effectively, while also fostering the development of research in teaching and learning. In solidarity with members at different career stages across multiple UK institutions, the network will provide guidance to academic leaders seeking to support and champion the Teaching and Scholarship trajectory in their institutions.
  In a period of perpetual political uncertainty and as calls grow to reshape the study of politics, ASPIRE therefore takes up the charge to equip the next generation of educators with the tools and vision to meet future challenges head-on. We believe that by prioritising pedagogical scholarship and diverse perspectives, ASPIRE can contribute to a more adaptable and inclusive future for Politics and International Studies, one that engages critically with the changing political landscape, and which prepares students to do the same. This roundtable will present ASPIRE’s mission to BISA members, sharing how the network fosters a platform for mentorship, best practice sharing, and policy advocacy that connects theory to urgent, real-world applications.
  Attendees will gain insights into ASPIRE’s strategic initiatives, including its upcoming launch, resources for SoTL research, and avenues for cross-institutional collaboration. By convening this roundtable, ASPIRE seeks to connect with BISA’s engaged community to reinforce teaching and scholarship as essential pillars of academic practice in Politics and International Studies. Together, we aim to nurture a community ready to support and drive an evolving discipline, grounded in pedagogical excellence and responsive to the complex demands of the next fifty years.
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Chair: Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Hillary Briffa (King's College London) , Louise Pears (University of Leeds) , Anna Plunkett (Kings College London) , Madeleine Le Bourdon (University of Leeds)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Cyber-Strategy in South Asia Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Chair: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
  - Strategic Adaptation in the Digital Age: The Symbiotic Relationship Between State Control and We-media in China
    
    This study examines the paradox of We-media’s (Self-media, or Zi Meiti) growth in China—a new form of digital media that has developed despite increased state control, especially under Xi Jinping’s government. It focuses on how We-media practitioners navigate the ambiguous and restrictive guidelines imposed by the Chinese government. Using a political economy lens, I introduce the Strategic Diversification (SD) Model to explain how We-media practitioners adjust content creation and monetisation strategies to align with state goals while maximising profitability. In a dialectic relationship with state power, content creators employ sub-channel accounts, platform diversification, and content-washing tactics to exploit gaps in regulatory frameworks, attracting sizeable audiences while avoiding censorship. Rather than challenging the state, these adaptations enable We-media to support the government’s broader goals of economic growth and social stability. This study challenges the binary framing of state control versus media commercialisation, revealing a symbiotic relationship where We-media aligns with the Chinese state’s objectives under Xi Jinping’s administration in digital China. Findings from this research contribute to a nuanced understanding of digital media's role under authoritarian governance and broaden our view of state-media dynamics in a commercially driven yet politically controlled landscape.
    
    Author: Cong Nie (The University of Sheffield)
  - The More, the Merrier: Singapore's Data Cables Fixation and the Changing Balance of Digital Power in the Indo-Pacific
    
    The underwater data cable industry, historically dominated by the United States (US) and its allies, has become a focal point in the intensifying technological rivalry between global powers, particularly the US and China. Amid this geopolitical contest, Singapore, a city-state in Southeast Asia, has emerged as a strategic network connectivity hub within the international telecommunications architecture. Hosting forty submarine cables, with plans to double this number by 2033, Singapore’s deliberate accumulation of communication infrastructure reflects its ambition to solidify its status as a critical node in global digital connectivity. This study interrogates the strategic implications of Singapore’s growing dominance in submarine cable infrastructure, asking how the management of these vital landing points enhances its geostrategic importance and what it gains in the process. Employing new materialism as theoretical lens, it explores the material agency of submarine cables as more-than-human actors that actively reshape global telecommunications security practices and policies. By positioning Singapore, as both a beneficiary and a driver of undersea infrastructure's geopolitical significance, the study reveals how digital infrastructure not only reflects but also produces power dynamics in contemporary international relations.
    
    Author: Cynthia Mehboob (Australian National University)
  - Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems and Strategic Stability in Nuclear South Asia : Exploration of Risk, Predictability and Controllability
    
    The dynamics of interaction in South Asia particularly between India and Pakistan have been
    characterized by an absence of nuclear use, along with the persistence of sub-conventional
    warfare and limited conventional conflict which have been explained theoretically through the ‘stability-instability paradox’. In the India-Pakistan dyad, nuclear deterrence stability has been mired by consequential if not interminable high risks with both sides testing each other’s resolve to confirm escalation is both ‘controllable and calculable'. With the development of tactical nuclear weapons by Pakistan and sporadic escalatory events orchestrated by China, salami slicing territory its shared border, India’s quest for escalation dominance in South Asia based on its nuclear posture has increasingly come under fire. Given that nuclear weapons are ‘not seen as the answer to problems of conventional defense’. There exists a critical firebreak between conventional and nuclear conflict. With India’s military modernization and its strong intent to not just modernize but also integrate autonomy in preexisting systems in all theaters of conflict. Autonomous weapon systems (AWS) capable of selecting and engaging targets with greater precision and speed at reduced personnel costs in denied environments, become a suitable emerging technology to bridge the firebreak between conventional and nuclear conflict. Despite their undeniable relevance, there has been no comprehensive study of the implications of autonomous weapon systems on stability in Nuclear South Asia.The fact that these technologies can be potentially destabilizing warrants a pre-emptive study. Similar to nuclear weapons, it would be imprudent to wait until war of this kind breaks out in South Asia to think about stability dynamics. Within the broader contours of dynamics of strategic stability in South Asia, the paper will examine the stability dimensions of autonomous weapons and the risk, predictability and controllability of these weapons in South Asia.
    
    Author: Abhishank Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Dynamics of Institutionalisation and Deinstitutionalisation in the International System - Part II Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent) , Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg, Germany)
  
  Chair: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  
  Discussant: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg, Germany)
  - At the end of (neo)trusteeship
    
    After the Second World War and again in the post-Cold War era, the UN oversaw the paths to independence of particular territories or even actively shaped the building of new states. In the mid-20th Century, the UN institutionalised the Trusteeship System for so-called Trust Territories, which seized its activities in 1994. In the 1990s, we saw the rise in practices often defined as neo-trusteeship, or liberal state-building and peacebuilding, in conflict-ridden societies based on Security Council mandates – now also a disappearing practice. The presentation will engage with two cases, one from each form of state-building, namely Papua New Guinea (independence in 1975) and Timor-Leste (independence in 2002), and reflect on the effects and (unintended) consequences of the deinstitutionalisation of international mandates on stability and conflict dynamics in the concerned societies. However, the end of (neo)trusteeship mandates and the emergence of independence are not merely domestic events but understood as internationalised events and processes, allowing us insights into regional and transnational power dynamics and practices and ideas of international institutions and sovereignty in their particular historical period.
    
    Author: Werner Distler (University of Groningen)
  - From Trusteeship to Peacebuilding: Contesting Alterity in International Efforts to Foster Peace and Development
    
    The United Nations (UN) plays a key role in creating global norms and regulatory frameworks, but often faces criticism for imposing “universal” standards that clash with local priorities and customs. Critics highlight the Eurocentric nature of its institutions, and Western biases, especially the Trusteeship Council and Peacebuilding Commission. Emerging research shows that great power politics were reflected in the Trusteeship system, while the UN’s liberal peace model institutionalised within UN operations since the 1990s is linked to failures in achieving sustainable peace. Although the UN is attempting to shift toward sustaining and more adaptive peace processes, it remains uncertain whether it can foster alternative governance approaches in the long term. This paper uses Structured Topic Modelling on a newly compiled UN dataset to analyze political contestation, erasure, and the institutionalization of governance norms, exploring how current efforts to promote alternatives are affected by this history.
    
    Author: Aidan Gnoth (Philipps University Marburg)
  - Arms control in times of war: Under what conditions are international institutions deinstitutionalized?
    
    The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have severely undermined the effectiveness of international arms trade regulations. Germany plays a key role in this narrative by providing substantial arms support to both Israel and Ukraine. This highlights a tension between its declared aim to maintain a restrictive arms export policy and the actual export practices that suggest a selective compliance with international norms, leading to a deinstitutionalisation of international institutions. This paper proposes to explore the critical question: under what conditions are international institutions and norms, such as those regulating the arms trade, subject to deinstitutionalisation? Within a historical institutionalist framework, the paper traces Germany’s regulatory shifts over time, identify patterns of selective compliance and explore the underlying drivers of these choices. The paper aims to offer insights into the broader implications of selective adherence to international norms, particularly how it affects the credibility of international institutions and the stability of the arms trade regime. The research contributes to a deeper understanding of how institutional norms are upheld or undermined in times of geopolitical tension, with significant implications for global security and the future of international law.
    
    Author: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
  - The Ambivalent Institutionalization of National Minority Rights: Austria-Hungary and the League of Nations in Comparison
    
    Austria-Hungary is considered to be one of the first states to institutionalize the rights of national minorities, at least in some areas. Contemporaries also held fundamental discussions about which models were suitable for guaranteeing a balance of interests between state power and minorities - a debate that also met with international interest. During the First World War, the political persecution of potentially disloyal groups led to the dismantling and therefore the deinstitutionalization of this minority rights' system. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, however, the concepts developed also served as a point of reference for some states - such as Estonia, Latvia and Czechoslovakia - when implementing minority rights. The victorious powers also attempted to institutionalize a system for the protection of minorities within the framework of the League of Nations in order to contain inter-state conflicts and ensure the loyalty of new citizens. This system proved to be ineffective in mitigating conflicts over border demarcations. This presentation attempts a comparative analysis of the failure of both approaches to the formation of legal systems for national minorities from the perspective of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. It examines the motives and implementation of the legal models as well as the corresponding power constellations. It attempts to identify factors that caused continuity and disruption. It also asks what changes the concepts that emerged in Austria-Hungary underwent and what effects their implementation had in post-imperial contexts. Finally, against the background of preliminary developments in Austria-Hungary, the mechanisms and ambivalences of the League of Nations' minority rights system are also assessed.
    
    Author: Peter Haslinger (Herder Institute, Germany)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Emerging frontiers in global governance and finance Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: James Scott (King's College London)
  - Reframing International Organisations’ Impact: The Effectiveness of Anti-Corruption Policies in a Multipolar World, Case Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro
    
    Controlling corruption is a global concern and a crucial aspect of democratisation. This study explores the impact of international organisations (IOs) on states’ control of corruption, focusing on the conditions under which IOs are most effective. While traditional literature on IO impact focuses on the importance of enforcement through conditional rewards and changing norms through socialisation, this paper introduces a new theoretical condition for impact: the desirability of ‘black knight’ actors—those who offer an alternative source of rewards and benefits to a state, that undermine IOs’ anti-corruption efforts. The existing theoretical body of work on IO impact has underestimated the significance of the then-unipolar world order, often extrapolating from immediate post-Cold War scenarios. This paper uses case studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro and argues that the existing debates should be reframed and account for multipolarity. IO impact is examined through three key outcomes: (i) policy adoption, (ii) policy implementation, and (iii) policy impact. Through the use of process tracing and the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data, including 22 interviews and informal observations, this research examines two types of corruption: state capture, where a few individuals or interest groups dominate state processes for their benefit, and petty corruption, where public officials extract bribes from citizens. The findings suggest that without the West being the sole option, IOs’ Western-prescribed policy changes are less likely to be adopted. By theorising that black knights significantly impact IO efforts, this research reframes existing scholarly debates on IOs and introduces a new theoretical condition for their impact.
    
    Author: Julie Lespinasse (London School of Economics and Political Science))
  - Why do governments commit to multilateral tax cooperation? Bureaucratic politics, international tax policy, and the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS
    
    The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of multilateral tax cooperation not only among OECD and G20 countries, but also among countries in the Global South. This stands in stark contrast to expectations of existing literature, according to which governments are reluctant to commit to multilateral tax cooperation frameworks to protect their national tax sovereignty, particularly when they rely on tax incentives to attract FDI. Yet, multilateral tax cooperation frameworks such as the OECD’s Inclusive Framework have seen an impressive uptake by countries across the world.
    Why do governments commit to multilateral tax cooperation frameworks regardless of these concerns? Building on theories of bureaucratic politics, this paper argues that a government’s stance towards multilateral tax cooperation frameworks reflects the outcome of bargaining processes between different governmental stakeholders, each of which holds distinct preferences in international tax policy. Building on novel qualitative data from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, the paper finds that the institutional configuration of bureaucratic bargaining processes enables different ideas about international tax policy to shape policy outcomes. In particular, two aspects explain the stance of lower-income countries towards multilateral tax cooperation frameworks: first, the degree of institutional separation of fiscal from investment policy, and second, the relationship between bureaucratic stakeholders and political principals.
    The paper makes three contributions. First, it conceptualizes international tax policy as distinct issue area and identifies the role that multilateral tax cooperation plays in achieving different policy objectives in international tax policy. Second, by using novel data from South and Southeast Asia, the paper adds to an emerging literature on the political economy of international tax policy that has largely neglected lower-income countries. Third, the paper illustrates how models of bureaucratic bargaining can be applied to non-Western contexts and to issue areas other than foreign policy.
    
    Author: Katharina Kuhn (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - ‘Revolutionaries of Counterrevolution:’ The Global Political Economy of American Christian Nationalism
    
    American Christian nationalism is a political movement built around a myth of divine national destiny. As numbers of white, religious voters decline, it has become one of the foremost drivers behind authoritarian populism in American politics and around the world. The movement’s goals are to simultaneously protect the cultural influence of its adherents and to enhance the power resources of the American state in a rapidly changing international system. Recent sociological research frames Christian nationalism as an isolationist movement with limited influence beyond its national context. This paper traces the substantive and procedural elements of this anti-liberal ‘counterrevolution’ through the movement’s many moving parts - religious ministries, legislative networks, policy institutes, pseudo-legal agreements such as the Geneva Consensus Declaration, and the offices of elected officials. Using methods from global political economy and insights generated in religious studies, the authors demonstrate the increasing centrality of the institutions of Christian nationalism to both American foreign policy formation and global governance leadership. The institutions of Christian nationalism have become a regime complex for managing the reconfiguration of American power in a decaying order.
    
    Authors: Gina LoCicero-Froese (University of Alberta)* , Marc Froese (Burman University, Canada)
  - Passive in Name Only? Democratisation and Disintermediation as Legitimising Narratives for Passive Asset Managers
    
    Passive Asset Managers (PAMs) BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are popularising passive investment, managing trillions of dollars of investments on behalf of millions of people. Passive investment tries to match the market rate of return by tracking indices (e.g. FTSE100), rather than outperform them. Despite their central position in financial markets, PAMs face opposition from the right over perceived ‘wokeness’ related to the ESG agenda and from the left for over-concentrating financial power. In response, PAMs argue they are democratising and disintermediating finance, thereby claiming they merely reflect investors wishes. These narratives do not reflect the practices of asset managers. Instead, the connections with index providers and proxy advisors represents a centralisation of financial organisation. The narratives of democratisation and disintermediation seek to legitimise both the passive investment strategy and PAMs in the eyes of politicians and regulators. The millions of investors that asset managers represent are mobilised to lobby politicians to encourage retirement saving, to oppose divestment from state pension funds and for opt-outs from financial regulation over ownership concentration. Ultimately, whilst PAMs legitimise themselves by deploying narratives of democratisation and disintermediation to argue they are passive institutions not exercising power, this ignores the power embedded in the narratives they deploy to legitimise themselves.
    
    Author: Dan Wood (University of Warwick)
  - The Bretton Woods Roadshow: International Order Building and Everyday Legitimacy
    
    This paper argues that everyday perceptions inform the design and stability of international orders. Studying the American approach to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, it finds that everyday perceptions of economic inequality within the United States influenced the American elite policymakers’ strategies and positions before and during the conference itself. Adopting an everyday approach, the paper documents how both conscious and unconscious forms of everyday challenge were present in the years that led up to the conference, and that they partly were motivated by frustration over inequality as experienced and perceived by American everyday agents across racial, gendered, and economic divides. Doing so, the paper demonstrates how the historical experiences with everyday struggle throughout the interwar years as well as non-elite perceptions during World War II formed an important backdrop to the conference and ultimately played an important role in shaping the postwar international monetary order. Empirically, the paper relies on a range of primary sources held by multiple archives throughout the United States that provide unique insight into the everyday and elite politics of this period. More broadly, the paper showcases how non-elite, everyday perceptions of contemporary affairs influence and shape the stability of hegemony as well as international orders. This has important implications for the study of international dynamics. The field of International Relations has long been occupied with questions related to elite policymakers’ (mis)perceptions and how they inform foreign policy. The evidence I present in this paper demonstrates that non-elite, everyday perceptions are just as important.
    
    Author: Kasper Arabi (University of Warwick)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Everyday challenges within places of sanctuary and hostile environments Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
  - Navigating Everyday Insecurities: Social Networks and Resilience Among Nigerian Refugee Women in the UK
    
    This paper examines the role of social networks in shaping Nigerian refugee women's perceptions of everyday security and insecurity in the UK. Drawing from informal conversations and participant observations with Nigerian refugee women, it explores how social networks both mitigate and exacerbate insecurity within their host country. Social networks serve as essential resources, offering emotional support, cultural affirmation and practical assistance. However, these networks can also introduce vulnerabilities, such as dependency on unstable relationships or exposure to exploitation. Through a feminist security studies lens, this study highlights the interplay between individual agency and structural constraints that influence Nigerian refugee women's experiences of safety.
    
    Author: Boluwajo Kolawole (Newcastle University)
  - Fractured Journeys: The Slow Violence of Migrant Healthcare Bureaucracy in the Digital Age
    
    This paper explores how digital technologies and data practices shape migrants' access to healthcare in Italy, focusing on the complex interplay between digital and paper-based bureaucratic systems. Drawing on fieldwork across multiple sites, it examines how the digitalization of health assessments, data registries, and electronic health records intersects with long-standing paper-based processes, often creating a fragmented and inconsistent experience for migrants. The study highlights how digital tools can both facilitate and hinder access to care, particularly for unregistered migrants or those in temporary facilities like Lampedusa and Palermo, where digital systems are often disconnected from the realities of on-the-ground healthcare provision. Despite the potential of digital technologies to streamline care, the paper argues that these systems often reinforce inequalities by failing to address the embodied experiences of migrants and their diverse healthcare needs. This is particularly evident in areas like trauma care, maternal health, and mental health support in reception and detention centres. By examining the continuum of digital and paper-based bureaucracy, the paper calls for a more integrated and inclusive healthcare approach that bridges the gap between technology and the lived experiences of migrants, ensuring equitable access to care throughout their journey.
    
    Author: Alba Priewe (University of Warwick)
  - COVID-19 Coping Strategies: Perspectives of Older Refugees and Non-Refugee Participants in The United States (US)
    
    The ongoing discussions about the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic emphasize the necessity of understanding its impact on aging populations, particularly underrepresented groups such as refugees. This study investigates how COVID-19 has affected older adults in the U.S., focusing on both refugee and non-refugee populations. Conducted in the East Coast region, the research involved in-depth interviews with 81 individuals aged 55-69 (average age 66.3), including 35 refugees and 46 non-refugees. Participants were asked to share their experiences and challenges during various phases of the pandemic—before, during, and after- allowing for a comprehensive exploration of their experiences. Thematic analysis of the interview data revealed that while both groups encountered similar challenges, these issues were particularly more pronounced for older refugees, shaped by their unique backgrounds and experiences. Notably, both populations employed social support as a coping mechanism. However, refugees leaned more towards traditional and herbal medicine, along with cognitive reframing, while non-refugees tended to foster a positive mindset and embracing / adopted new technologies to stay connected and engaged. These findings highlight the importance of recognizing the distinct experiences of older refugees during the pandemic. Understanding the varied implications of COVID-19 on older adults is crucial for developing tailored interventions that address their specific needs and enhance their overall well-being. This research not only contributes to the literature on aging and public health but also emphasizes the necessity of inclusive approaches in health interventions for marginalized communities. Such insights are essential for fostering resilience and improving outcomes for aging populations in a post-pandemic world.
    
    Author: Jonix Owino (Sacred Heart University, Connecticut)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Gender Crossing Borders Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: GIRWG Working group
  - Beyond the Battlefield: How the CJTF Women Shape Peacebuilding Through Psychosocial Support
    
    The Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a community-based group, is a significant force in the war against Boko Haram. Established in 2013, the CJTF was formed to support military efforts in protecting local communities from Boko Haram attacks. Their deep knowledge of the local terrain, language and intelligence-gathering skills have played a key role in Nigeria’s counterinsurgency efforts.
    The contribution of women to counterinsurgency operations cannot be overstated. However, within the CJTF, women's roles are often confined to the ‘female domain,’ such as offering psychosocial support to women and girls who have survived Boko Haram abduction. These survivors, often victims of severe gender-based violence, including sexual abuse, frequently return to their communities pregnant or with children born of these violent encounters, facing deep social stigma.
    The Bulumkutu Interim Care Centre (BICC), a state-run transit facility, is responsible for providing care to children and women impacted by Boko Haram. Its purpose is to “rehabilitate” them, with one of its mandates being to offer psychological support. However, a report by Amnesty International revealed that they did not receive any psychosocial assistance at the centre. Female members of the CJTF, in interviews I conducted with them, confirmed that they took on the role of providing this critical support to the women and their children, compensating for the formal institutions' failure to address these needs.
    Beyond merely offering support, women within the CJTF often integrate indigenous processes rooted in local customs and cultural practices to help survivors. These processes, grounded in traditional healing, allow for more community-accepted forms of psychosocial support. This approach aids in the emotional recovery of these survivors and fosters community-wide healing and resilience.
    Therefore, this paper aims to illustrate how psychosocial support, enriched by indigenous methods, is delivered to these women and how this, in turn, contributes to peacebuilding efforts.
    
    Author: Onyinyechukwu Nkemdilim Durueke (Aberystwyth University)
  - Decolonisation as a pre-condition for future Russo-Ukrainian feminist solidarity?
    
    A debate about epistemic violence among feminist scholars and how it impedes genuine transnational feminist solidarity has been reinvigorated since Russia’s moral-conservative nationalism culminated in a full-scale invasion. Many scholars from Ukraine and Central Eastern Europe have addressed their feminist homologues in “the West” to point out that key feminist principles like anti-imperialism, intersectionality and centering the voices of those affected, were not applied in the case of Russia’s aggression.
    
    For any potential future cross-border solidarity between Russian and Ukrainian feminists to have a chance, this reflection would also need to take place among Russian feminists. I thus ask in this paper whether this debate has travelled to Russia; I wonder whether Russian feminists have - as an extension of the usual West-East transnational feminist discussion - enquired East-East power relations and their imperial history.
    
    As an empirical basis I compare two cases of Russian feminist activism: the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAS) and The Way Home. In particular, I look at manifestos they published (and their responses in the West and in Ukraine), the self-published FAS magazine “Woman’s Truth”, the groups’ telegram channels and triangulate this with six interviews with feminist activists I conducted in the first year of the full-scale invasion.
    
    I find that while FAS shows a consciousness of the debate the attempts at critical self-reflection are limited, while The Way Home does not even acknowledge the issue. I finish with an assessment of the prospects of future transnational solidarity in the region.
    
    Author: Leandra Bias (Institute of Political Science)
  - Cultivating Power and Leverage: Beyond Women's Inclusion in Peace Negotiations
    
    Women Peace and Security scholars and activists have long championed women’s inclusion in peace negotiations given the political opportunity these processes present marginalized groups. Within this advocacy, there is an expectation that women can exert significant influence on negotiations and this influence is narrowly conceptualized as the number of gender-specific provisions in a final agreement. However, there has been little consideration of the power dynamics inherent to the deeply militarized and masculinized space of peace negotiations. Therefore, this paper asks: what types of leverage and power do women’s activists possess in formal peace negotiations? I explore this question through examination of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) in the 1996-1998 Good Friday Agreement negotiations. Drawing from archival documents and 42 elite interviews with NIWC negotiators and British and Irish Government officials integral to the conduct of the negotiations, I find that as a low-status party, the NIWC did not have the coercive power to make explicit demands and insist on particular provisions. However, they built substantial soft power through a problem-solving approach in which they developed relational, informational, moral, and procedural forms of power. This approach not only strengthened their bargaining power, but moved the talks through key moments of intransigence. These findings problematize the common characterization that all actors enjoy equal influence in peace negotiations and highlight the strategic political agency of women’s activists whose contributions include, but extend far beyond, a simple tally of gender provisions.
    
    Author: Alex McAuliff (TUFTS university)
  - Feminist spatial interventions in the “international”: regulating political spaces with/for women refugees in the UK
    
    Colonial histories embedded within the global migration system shape contemporary perceptions of refugee women, often casting them as "vulnerable victims," "beggars," or "humanitarian objects" rather than recognizing them as actors entitled to rights under international law. These perceptions restrict their political agency, relegating them to "death worlds" and quasi-open-air prisons in third countries of asylum, where they are systematically excluded from socio-political and economic life, even in the absence of formal detention. This exclusion underscores the feminist International Relations (IR) theory principle that "the personal is international," illustrating how international status limits refugee women’s ability to participate politically. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper explores the innovative spatial interventions developed by self-identified feminist and women’s organizations within the British refugee sector to bolster refugee women’s political authorship and autonomy, even before they secure legal status in the UK. These interventions include: (1) feminist grassroots organizing that fosters networking and community-building independently from refugees’ ethnic communities, often dominated by men; (2) workshops and lectures designed to enhance refugee women's communication skills and body language, facilitating engagement with media and public officials, understanding of the UK asylum system, and articulation of political messages; and (3) including refugee women in political rallies and events to amplify their voices and recognize their agency. Such strategies counter the stereotypical representation of non-Western women as passive and backward, fostering solidarity between local and foreign women and challenging global hierarchies within the study and practice of international politics. By doing so, these interventions disrupt hegemonic narratives of "white women saving brown women from brown men" (Spivak, 1993).
    
    Author: Zeynep Kilicoglu (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Governing collapse: States and state based governance in a changing climate Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group (bisa)
  
  Chair: Stanley Wilshire (University of Manchester)
  - When do oil autocracies commit to climate change mitigation?
    
    Existing literature suggests that there is an autocratic disadvantage in tackling climate change, even amongst oil-rich countries. The importance of democratic institutions for climate change mitigation is further highlighted in the study of Tadadjeu et al. (2023), additionally implying an autocratic disadvantage in tackling climate change in oil-rich countries. Yet, I find anecdotal evidence suggesting that there is no universal disadvantage of autocracies, as some oil and gas- (hydrocarbon) rich exporting autocracies are more committed to climate change mitigation than other hydrocarbon-rich exporting autocracies. To understand why some hydrocarbon-rich exporting autocracies are more committed to climate change mitigation than their peers, I examine whether the level of dependence on hydrocarbon rents explains the difference in the adoption of renewable energy policies. Using panel data over the period of 2005-2019 for a sample of 33 countries, I find that climate change mitigation commitment is more likely in countries with smaller dependence on hydrocarbon rents – specifically, below the average of 21.1% of GDP amongst hydrocarbon-rich exporting autocracies over 2005-2019 – than in countries with larger dependence. My results have implications for the understanding of political institutions regarding climate policy. For autocratic governments still highly dependent on hydrocarbon rents, they can understand that they need to invest in economic diversification to reduce their reliance on oil and gas and ultimately meet their mitigation goals. My study can also help international policymakers identify aiding factors in the adoption of renewable energy policies.
    
    Author: Winifred Michael (University of Essex)
  - Historicising the De-Risking State
    
    As countries grapple with questions of how to transition towards more sustainable outcomes, scholars and policymakers alike have seen a resurgent interest in the possibilities of the state as a vehicle for environmental transformation. Foremost amongst the various typologies advanced in recent literature has been the derisking state, a conceptual device deployed to understand the myriad ways in which the nation-state ‘enlists private capital into achieving public priorities by tinkering with risk/returns on private investments’ (Gabor, 2023: 1). In this paper, we seek to expand our conceptual comprehension of the derisking state in twin directions such that its ability to generate empirical insights is strengthened. Initially a mapping exercise of the existing derisking literature allows for the articulation of an intervention matrix in which the different derisking strategies (monetary, fiscal, financial, regulatory) engaged in by nation-state are catalogued. Then, the paper will reveal the longer history of derisking in the United Kingdom (UK) demonstrating it as a centuries-old practice that has played a pivotal role in the formation of the British political economy.
    
    Authors: James Silverwood (Leeds Beckett University) , James Jackson (University of Manchester)*
  - Too little, too late, too much? British climate governance after Extinction Rebellion and Net Zero
    
    Drawing on critical political economy, this paper examines how, since 2018, the technocratic approach to climate governance in the UK has fallen into a deep crisis. Since 2018, there has been a major re-politicisation of climate governance after the rise of Extinction Rebellion. In response, the Conservative Party initially worked to secure the legitimacy of the technocratic framework by taking on the Climate Change Committee’s guidance for a 2050 net zero target and adopting a more transformative approach to climate governance. However, they have failed to translate this increased ambition into a coherent programme of accumulation by decarbonisation, leading to warnings by the Climate Change Committee that their policy packages are inadequate. In turn, the limits of their climate policy have fed into their rising illiberalism as they’ve ignored successful legal challenges that have highlighted the inadequacy of their policy, and increasing authoritarianism, as they’ve responded to ongoing pressure from the climate movement by weakening protest rights. I conclude by arguing that this deep crisis suggests that this system of technocratic climate governance has become exhausted.
    
    Author: Stanley Wilshire (University of Manchester)
  - Understanding the norm localization of multistakeholderism in the experimental low carbon transition of Chinese cities
    
    In recent decades, the traditional, state-based, top-down model of global climate governance has increasingly struggled to meet the immense challenges posed by climate change. In response, various new carbon governance arrangements have emerged, where non-state actors collaborate with state actors to provide collective goods, and thereby adopt governance functions that have formerly been the sole authority of sovereign states. This shift has fundamentally redefined the configuration of authority in global climate governance, pulling the practice of global governance towards the inclusion of multiple stakeholders. A new multistakeholderism norm emerges and gets institutionalized. Despite the growing body of literature on this emerging norm, we still have limited knowledge about its impact on governing authority structures and normative understandings of good governance within national jurisdictions.
    
    Taking a constructivist norm localization theoretical approach, this research aims to investigate the translation and practice of multistakeholderism in the local context of China. To achieve this, this study examines the experimentation process of low carbon transitions at the city level in China. As a process of governing by trial, the experimentation allows the public authorities break down organizational insularity to cooperate with actors outside of the confinement of political structures. During the cooperation, how the decision-making and implementation authority is distributed between different actors provides a scope for us to observe China’s response to the emerging new multistakeholderism norm. Through an empirical investigation of the low carbon experiments in China, this research will provide a clear understanding of what multistakeholder inclusion means in the domestic settings of China and how this localized normative notions about legitimate political authority shapes the local governance arrangements in the area of climate change.
    
    Author: Junyi Hao (Durham Univeristy)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Life and Death on the Balkan Route: Violent Borders Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  The ‘Balkan Route’ - a set of intersecting routes of mobility to and through the EU - is, as Piro Rexhepi notes, ‘... a corridor of transitional and transient sites of migrant mobility’ but also one in which multiple actors, including the EU, enact ‘containment and controls.’ The EU’s containment and controls in the region have given rise to violence used to enforce borders, both at the EU’s external borders in Hungary, Croatia and Greece but also within the ‘Balkan Route’ in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Border violence against people on the move is widespread, systematic and institutionalised, it is enacted at the border but also in cities, camps, at sea, and through policies that govern life and death on the Balkan Route.
  
  Violent borders shape every aspect of life and death of people on the move. In life, people on the move experience spatial segregation, inability to access basic health care as well as sanitary facilities, and the aspect of "making insane" - the impact on mental health and the lack of instruments to face problems of depression. In death, the institutions, spaces and policies that govern mobility of people on the move, also govern their (in)visibility after death. On the ‘Balkan Route’, we find a context in which death of people on the move disappear into bureaucratic statistics and procedures, and whose graves are hidden and obscured from public view, taking with them any evidence of violent deaths and violent borders.
  
  Against this background, the panel asks: How are the lives and deaths of people on the move regulated along internal and external EU borders? What violent practices of border enforcement practices and infrastructures shape mobility? We ask, how does the violent enforcement of the border lead to deaths of people on the move, and why are those deaths made invisible?
  
  The roundtable brings together early career academics and established scholars, whose aim is to open a discussion of the centrality of the border within the field of International Relations, challenge the field’s narrow approach to structural violence of the border, and bring the border rituals of life and death to the centre of knowledge production within the field.
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Chair: Marianna Karakoulaki (University of Birmingham)
  
  Participants: Marianna Karakoulaki (University of Birmingham) , Noemi Bergesio (University of Bologna, Italy) , Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University) , Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool) , Pat Rubio Bertran (Aston University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Methodological considerations in peace and conflict Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University)
  - Autoethnography and the Military? Examining NATO Military Training and Culture through Adapted Autoethnography
    
    This paper explores the use of autoethnography as an innovative method to research military training. Autoethnography interprets the lived experiences and self-reflections of the author, who participates in and is directly impacted by the main research space. Understandably, militaries are exclusive entities and conducting research to better understand them can be severely restricted. When insiders to the military domain – military training in this case – undertake military-related research, they are often well placed in terms of access and unique insights. In such instances, these individuals become ‘dual-hatted’ as practitioners (insiders) and researchers (outsiders), which can be a rewarding, yet challenging positionality to undertake. Autoethnography provides a fruitful way to explore this insider-outsider positionality. However, it is not without its ethical and practical challenges. Drawing on ongoing research into military training for NATO troops, this paper starts by discussing the traditional application of autoethnography and how it has been adapted to accommodate the restrictions associated with military-related research. The paper then explores the opportunities and challenges associated with conducting autoethnography within a military training research context. To conclude, the paper discusses the potential of further developing autoethnography as an innovative research method in military research.
    
    Author: Gena Sturgon (Coventry University)
  - Perpetrators’ Narratives on the Colombian Armed Conflict. An Analytical Contribution to Peace Studies in International Relations
    
    Perpetrators' narratives present complex challenges in transitional justice processes. They can range from being the subject of intense scrutiny to being marginalised or ignored altogether. Despite this, these narratives have significant political influence and can support or hinder memory-building, truth-seeking and peacebuilding efforts. This paper examines perpetrator narratives to elucidate the use of violence during Colombia's armed conflict through the analysis of archival material from transitional justice institutions and interviews with ex-combatants in the country.
    
    The narratives identified range from justifications of violence, typical of the defence of war as a political option, to confessional and restorative narratives produced within transitional scenarios and encounters with victims. The diversity of these narratives reflects different conceptions of the use of violence and the complexity of peacebuilding in a country like Colombia, where debates on peace, truth, justice and non-repetition of violence are acute and highly topical.
    
    Exploring the complexity of perpetrators' narratives raises ethical and political dilemmas. However, by critically engaging with these narratives, we can foster a more inclusive and transformative approach to understanding the complexities of violence and the discourses we construct about it. This approach can help us to understand how and why narratives of violence emerge. It aims to enrich readings of peacebuilding in international relations, offer a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of peacebuilding, and contribute to academic discourse in the field.
    
    Author: Irene Piedrahita (University of Glasgow)
  - Safeguarding culture during war
    
    Cultural heritage is often at risk and under attack, either directly or indirectly, when violence and conflict escalate. This paper presents findings from a participatory intangible cultural heritage project that trained youth in the occupied Palestinian territories in heritage safeguarding approaches using oral history interviews. Since its inception in 2017 until now, the conflict landscape in which this research has taken place has changed significantly, and violence against Palestinians has increased. In this paper, we discuss the experiences of youth from Gaza and the West Bank who participated in our project and how – or whether – they consider the role of cultural heritage safeguarding as a form of peacebuilding during times of violent conflict. The analysis draws on data collected as part of the evaluation activities conducted during the four project phases. The main findings from this analysis reflect that working with intangible cultural heritage contributed to peacebuilding outcomes across the core domains of security, socio-economic development, political inclusion and reconciliation. We discuss each of these domains and highlight what youth gained from and through their participation in the project. Our paper shows that while the value of ‘softer’ approaches to peacebuilding may be questioned during war, they contributed to helping conflict-affected communities cope with and respond to violent conflict. This makes intangible cultural heritage safeguarding a valuable contribution to peacebuilding efforts.
    
    Authors: Aurélie Broeckerhoff (Coventry University) , Mahmoud Soliman (Coventry University)* , Elly Harrowell (Coventry University) , Marwan Darweish (Coventry University)* , Laura Sulin (Coventry University)*
  - Relational governance as a theory for peace building
    
    The number of global conflicts is on the rise and talks about peace are widespread. For the first time in decades, we also see a war in Europe, and Europeans discuss peace in many forms. This strengthens my observation that we only talk about peace in war, degrading scholars and policymakers to firefighters. This paper argues that we need to change this mode of thinking and view peace-making and building as a process that needs our continuous attention and active work, especially in peaceful times. To that end, this paper asks the question: How might thinking of relational governance as a theory of peacebuilding help us navigate creating sustainable peace? Taking the example of the Minsk Agreement (2015), the presentation illustrates how thinking relational governance as a theory of peacebuilding can be productive for peacemaking. I suggest that we think of peacebuilding as a wicked problem: a problem that defies all attempts to define it and one that is constituted by manifold, complex relational settings. In this case, it is constituted by the violent structures of global capitalism and (post-)colonialism, the influence and lack thereof of global governance structures, border regimes, national/local and regional interests, lack an overabundance of expertise and based on all of this, no agreement how the problem can be tackled. This relational notion of wickedness requires a move away from our substantialist commonplace governance approaches towards governance as a relational process.
    
    Author: Benjamin Klasche (Tallinn University, Estonia)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Methodologies and future directions for Queer(ing) Conflict Research Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable includes reflections about the methodologies and future directions of queer conflict research from the editors and several contributors to the book Queer Conflict Research: New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence (BUP). Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides a foundational guide to queer methodologies in the study of political violence and conflict.
  
  Contributors provide illuminating discussions on why queer approaches are important, what they entail and how to utilise a queer approach to political violence and conflict. The chapters explore a variety of methodological approaches, including fieldwork, interviews, cultural analysis and archival research. They also engage with broader academic debates, such as how to work with research partners in an ethical manner. Including valuable case studies from around the world, the book demonstrates how these methods can be used in practice. It is the first critical, in-depth discussion on queer methods and methodologies for research on political violence and conflict.
  
  We will use this roundtable to reflect on the methodologies we use in each of our approaches to queer conflict research, as well as where we hope this broader research agenda goes in the future.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  
  Participants: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester) , Pınar Erdem (University of Bremen) , Samuel Ritholtz (Oxford University) , Dean Cooper-Cunningham (University of Copenhagen) , Andrew Delatolla (Leeds University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Middle East Politics: Authoritarianism, Violence, and Solidarity Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Yasmeen Mekawy (Northwestern University in Qatar)
  
  Chair: Yasmeen Mekawy (Northwestern University in Qatar)
  - Intra-Group Competition in Consociational Democracies: Iraq's Intra-Majority Rivalry
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Zeidon Alkinani (Georgetown University in Qatar)
  - War and the Researcher: How Violent Contexts Shape Ethnographic Work and Identity
    
    Research conducted in violent environments remains largely speculative, with limited insight into how violence shapes the perceptions of those involved (Krause, 2021; Campbell, 2017; Nordstrom & Robben, 1995). While practical and ethical research guidelines emphasize informed consent, risk-benefit analysis, and researcher security, these frameworks often diverge from the actual lived experience (ibid, 2017; Cronin-Furman & Lake, 2018). Consequently, the core focus of research in such settings becomes obscured. Should researchers prioritize the subject matter, the project, or their own safety? These critical considerations, though essential, can seem irrelevant when faced with the immediate reality of violence (Hamber et al., 2015). Originally, my research began as an auto-ethnographic exploration of how communities navigate change. Over time, it evolved, incorporating themes of identity, nationality, citizenship, and belonging, with the eventual overlay of war-time violence. This transformation mirrored my own encounters with war and violence. At the heart of my work are the practical and ethical complexities of conducting research as an auto-ethnographer. Coming from a war-affected community, my research journey has forced me into a liminal space, where identity, belonging, and the ethics of researching under violence are deeply interrogated (Berry et al., 2017; Behar, 2022). This experience has compelled me to expand my understanding of the cyclical nature of violence, through the lens of my own identity and sense of belonging. This project recounts my experience of conducting research under violence and offers new ways of understanding researcher vulnerability, identity dynamics, and adaptive methodological and ethical considerations.
    
    Author: Mohamed Soufan (Balsillie School of International Affairs, Canada)
  - The role of the security establishment in authoritarian resilience
    
    This paper examines how security services, military institutions, and patron-client networks reinforce authoritarian regimes, using Syria’s Assad regime as a primary case study. Despite considerable internal and external pressures since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, the Assad regime has shown remarkable resilience. This study explores how authoritarian mechanisms such as coercion, surveillance, and patronage distribution strengthen the regime’s control. Adopting a mixed-method approach, the research includes qualitative interviews with former intelligence agents and military personnel, quantitative surveys of the Syrian diaspora, and network analysis to investigate interactions within Syria’s power structures. By situating the Syrian context within broader theories of authoritarian resilience, this study aims to contribute to academic discourse on authoritarianism and regime stability. The research also holds significant policy implications, offering insights that could inform security sector reforms. As authoritarianism resurges globally and democracy faces strain worldwide, this study is particularly timely, enhancing our understanding of the strategic foundations that enable authoritarian regimes to endure.
    
    Author: Yassmine Tlass (University of Kent)
  - Making Solidarity Sexy: Frivolity, Social Media, & Political Engagement in the MENA
    
    The issue of Palestine has historically mobilized contentious politics in the MENA, functioning as a gateway to dissent in activists’ home countries. The current genocide in Gaza may play a similar politicizing role for gen Z youth and subsequent generations, who have grown up fully connected to the Internet, and have been more immersed in global events and exposed to a steady stream of endless catastrophes and graphic images, constantly mediated and remediated. At the same time, the shift from legacy to networked media has produced a meme-ification of politics, whereby the gravity of events is leavened by humor, and tragedy sometimes trivialized in the process.
    
    What effect does the current saturated media environment (markedly different from the Web 2.0 of the early 2000s) and the meme-ification of political conflict and war have on the politicization of youth in the region? What emotions does it mobilize, and what types of solidarity and political engagement does it facilitate and foreclose? What are the implications of this for the future of contentious politics in the MENA? This paper examines youth engagement with the ongoing genocide through social media, particularly the case of the “Hot Houthi,” a viral microcelebrity depicted as a young, attractive Yemeni pirate ostensibly involved in the Houthi rebels’ hijacking of commercial ships in the Red Sea in order to leverage a ceasefire on Gaza. Rashid el Haddad, also referred to as “Tim-Houthi Chalamet” quickly became a symbol of regional resistance of the underdog, making solidarity “sexy.” Analyzing this and similar viral moments, this paper asks, does the frivolity/play associated with such viral microcelebrities undermine the revolutionary potential of a media object and reduce serious political issues to empty spectacle? Or does it amplify it by making solidarity sexy and political engagement pleasurable?
    
    Author: Yasmeen Mekawy (Northwestern University in Qatar)
  - “Holocaust > Nakba > Oslo? Collective trauma memory and intractable conflict: problems and possibilities.”
    
    The conflict in Israel-Palestine is in a catastrophic phase. This paper explores the role of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian trauma-driven collective narratives in perpetuating the conflict and argues that those narratives must be transformed before any political settlement can succeed. The paper engages with scholarship on the collective memory of both Holocaust and Nakba to analyse the process of emplotment by which those events are constituted and remembered through acts of narration. It illustrates how the traumatised worldview of survivors has entered the bloodstream of each community’s narrative culture, engendering fear, anger, defensiveness and distrust. Every episode in the conflict is generated by, and interpreted through, these trauma-driven collective narratives.
    
    The paper then looks to the memoirs written by key actors in the Oslo Channel of 1993 and poses the question: what can these texts teach us about the possibilities for the reshaping of collective trauma memory? Key findings are developed through close textual analysis of memoirs by the likes of Uri Savir, Ahmed Qurei, Yair Hirschfeld and Mahmoud Abbas. The Oslo Accord failed to achieve a lasting settlement because the collective narratives of each community generated violent opposition from maximalists on both sides. However, at the same time, the negotiators’ memoirs show that constructive interaction between longstanding enemies can build trust and friendship. We might call this the Oslo Effect. This paper’s key findings support the view that, for any future settlement to succeed, collective narratives must first be reshaped through the recreation of the Oslo Effect at a societal scale. Drawing on intergroup contact theory, I argue that the wider population can experience the same transformation through slow processes of constructive intergroup contact to generate new forms of memory emplotment.
    
    Author: Andrew Palmer (Canterbury Christ Church University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Militarism in Popular Culture: Comparative perspectives Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Emma Brewis (University of Leeds)
  - Nuclear war is science-fiction: reframing, reimagining, and remediating narratives of nuclear weapons and war.
    
    It is the paradox of science-fiction that fact and fiction are inevitably blurred. It is also the paradox of representing nuclear war. The blurring of fact and fiction renders the representation of nuclear war inescapably entangled with speculation and imagination. It is important to problematise this assumption of ‘authenticity’ that may be equated with the ‘truth’ of war and navigate how narratives that transcend the boundaries of realism can access a greater, more fundamental ‘truth’ that is missed in attention to the ‘facts’. Rather than resigning nuclear war to a space of fiction and myth, this entanglement presents an opportunity for change. Author Margret Atwood (2011) outlines the ‘unique affordances of science-fiction’ compared to other genres of fictionality. Using examples from popular culture across mediums and genres, as well as some of my own fiction-writing and artwork, I demonstrate how each of these affordances apply to the nuclear subject, and how they render science-fiction a powerful tool for understanding nuclear war and for questioning the nuclear status quo. I conclude with a three-part framework for narratives that contribute towards a better future: (i) reframing the past by recentring the stories we tell about the nuclear age on the nuclear mundane and the subaltern; (ii) reimagining the future by constructing nuclear-free protopian fiction, and (iii) remediating the apocalypse by embracing transmedia-oriented narratives. Staring at a future more unbelievable and overwhelming than most dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, “it seems appropriate that a work of fiction should be commissioned to find the solution” (Gyngell 2009, 8).
    
    Author: Emily Faux (Newcastle University)
  - Technologies of war; technologies of peace; technologies of victory: Understanding technological militarism through, with, and despite pop culture
    
    Military technology’s role in contemporary warfare is unquestionably important. From off-the-shelf FPV drones in Ukraine to multi-million dollar supercomputers running simulations of nuclear stockpiles, contemporary warfare is inconceivable without advanced technology. Political rhetoric, however, tends to focus on the human component from the heroic soldier to the “human in the loop” arguably moderating the view of warfare as inhumane and contributing to a militarised society. When we look to popular culture though, we see more complicated representations. Cinema, art, and photography in particular have the opportunity to both reinforce this heroic image of the citizen-soldier and represent war as a human phenomenon but also to undermine the individualistic approach and show war in its merciless, uncaring, and ultimately inhuman character. This paper seeks to explore this tension between the reality of war and the political representation of those who fight with cultural articulations that problematise this.
    
    Author: Cahir O'Doherty (University of Groningen)
  - Military Violence in Manga: Contemporary Japanese Militarism and Rehabilitating Military Violence
    
    Popular culture is often discussed in terms of its ‘banality’, i.e., how it reinforces socially constructed interpretations as ‘commonsensical truths’, around which government policy is woven or to which it is geared. This encourages a focus on how it sustains what is already there, however, as well as reproducing social constructs, popular culture can also introduce different ones to challenge and recalibrate established ‘truths’, clearing the way for changes in government policy. Using a New Durkheimian framework to emphasise popular culture’s capability to disrupt as well as reinforce ‘commonsensical truths’, I identify two market trends in manga: the conservative adult market in the 1980s; and moe-ification in the 1990s, that disrupt Japan’s military taboo, clearing the way for positive representations of military violence conducted by the Japan Self-Defense Forces to return to mainstream Japanese media. I further identify three patterns of violence: constrained, frantic, and spectacular, which are constituting an overall positive, but amorphous, vision of military violence; one which can be constrained for antimilitarist sceptics concerned about resurgent militiarism, which can be forceful for citizens concerned for their own security in the context of increasingly unstable world; and one which can be unapologetically dominant for nationalist conservatives.
    
    Author: Max Warrack (University of Warwick)
  - Superheroes in World Politics: Looking Forward, Looking Back
    
    This paper presents core arguments of my book with EUP, titled Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century. Through the paper I will repackage important foundational aspects of IR for audiences that require a modern and accessible imagination. It engages with superheroes in a way that illustrates not only their long history but furthermore elaborates crucial changes of foreign policy and security discourses and practices through time via superheroes. Superheroes’ cinematic appearances have been shaping and (co-)constituting the ‘War on Terror’ and post-‘9/11’ security discourses, positioning popular culture as a series of political artefacts with important things to tell us about the real world. Far beyond the mere representational and symbolic reading of superheroes, the paper reveals important elements of post-‘9/11’ discourses and international security that might otherwise not be understood at best and misunderstood at worst. In doing so it paints a picture of life-worlds that are produced through popular culture and the everyday in which these worlds are constantly negotiated.
    
    Author: Julian Schmid (Central European University)
  - The Media at War and the Mediatization of War in Science Fiction From Joe Dante’s The Second Civil War (1997) to Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024)
    
    Information, and what it is or should be, is at the heart of the works examined. The media, through journalists and photojournalists, play a central role in war, both in the course of the conflict and in the way belligerents and civilians are perceived and portrayed. The media are used to demoralize or disinform the enemy, heroize or demonize the actions of troops or individuals, and provide a biased national or international narrative to gain support, aid, or non-intervention. What is more, the independence of the media seems to have become a myth, as they need money to survive and do their job, and whoever provides the money therefore has enormous influence over what they do, say or show.
    It is precisely this question of field reporting and the specificity of the war correspondent’s profession, as well as journalistic independence and neutrality, that the works examined here explore. As actors/observers, these journalists are both those who give images and coherence to a reality that is difficult to grasp and accept (even for themselves), and those who shape history. In this way, the media is a weapon that can do as much damage as bullets and, if used properly, can help groups of people overthrow governments and take control of the nation.
    
    Author: Danièle Andre (La Rochelle, France)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Narrating Security: Security narratives in policy and practice Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Convener: Thomas Martin (Open University)
  
  Chair: Thomas Martin (Open University)
  - The Language(s) of War: Metaphor, Language, Modernity, and the Inadvertent Makings of International Conflict.
    
    ‘War’ is a perennial issue of world politics. Building upon the insight that war is a socially constructed phenomena (Bartelson 2017; Butler 2016; Wilhelmsen 2017), one to be ‘explored… not explained or counted by IR theory’ (Barkawi 2023, 292), this paper asks what role language plays in making modern international conflict. Putting forward the early stages of an ongoing research agenda, the paper confronts the disturbing fact of wars continuance in world politics, despite elaborate normative, legal, moral, and even aesthetic rejections of this form of transboundary encounter, developed over centuries (if not longer). Taking these injunctions seriously, the project explores how the ‘language of war’: the elective framing of international issues within militarized metaphors – ‘trade wars’, ‘hybrid wars’, ‘drug wars’, etc. – enacts particular processes which participate in the outbreak of armed (international) conflict. Specifically, the project imagines that the language of war not only reflects but actively shapes the predispositions and decisions leading to conflict. By framing international disputes in this way, language establishes a symbolic landscape that makes recourse to violence appear permissible, advantageous, and then necessary. It argues that the metaphor of war operates through, and indeed pervades, the ‘ordinary security language’ (Leader Maynard 2022) which attends the modern international state system. By explicitly deploying such framings, which are easily brought to the surface, the language of war – inadvertently, at first – enacts a cycle of radicalisation between domestic constituencies, international diplomacy, and (political) elites. In this way, the paper begins to ask how we can talk ourselves into war.
    
    Author: Thomas Peak (University of Vilnius)
  - Why do states publish national security strategies?
    
    This paper examines why states publish national security strategies through analysis of the explicitly stated rationales in these documents from 1987-2024. While many security strategies are produced without explicit justification, those that do explain their creation reveal several key motivations. First, legal and constitutional requirements often mandate their production, particularly in established democracies, indicating these documents' role in civil-military relations and democratic oversight. Second, significant changes in the security environment frequently trigger new strategies, as seen following major global events. Third, states produce these documents to provide strategic direction and institutional guidance while promoting transparency with domestic and international audiences. Fourth, many strategies are published to fulfil international commitments, particularly among NATO members and emerging democracies. Finally, regular review cycles and government transitions often prompt new publications. Interestingly, states with stronger democratic traditions tend to be more explicit about their reasons for publishing these documents, suggesting transparency about strategic planning may itself serve democratic accountability. This analysis contributes to our understanding of why states engage in public strategic planning and how these documents serve both practical and symbolic functions in national security governance.
    
    Author: Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh)
  - ‘I do not consent!’. Conspiracy theories, populism, and contending security narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic
    
    There is an emerging consensus that conspiracy theories can fuel extremism and undermine democratic institutions. That framing fits comfortably within well understood practices of state securitization, which have recently targeted conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation as threats to national security. Likewise, mainstream politicians and science experts have often dismissed conspiracy theorists through demeaning, moralistic and anti-populist language. While these issues have been examined in recent scholarship, less has been said about the extent to which conspiracy theories also position the security policies of the state as an existential threat.
    We argue that security discourses and conspiracy discourses should not be understood in isolation. Instead, we show that these narratives are entangled in contending securitization processes. On the one hand, the securitisation of conspiracy theories by the state tends to harden beliefs and accelerate in-group dynamics amongst communities censured for their dangerous ideas. On the other hand, when state security policies are securitised in conspiracy theories, those policies lose traction not just with groups advancing such narratives, but also with wider publics, who become aware of resistance to them. We demonstrate this argument through the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered both securitization practices by central governments and forms of contestation through conspiracy theories. To support our argument, we provide illustrations from several Western European countries where these contending securitisation processes opened up space for resistance to what came to be seen by many as draconian policies. We suggest that the contending securitization processes identified here reflects a wider relationship between elite and popular securitisation, which has been under examined in the securitisation literature, despite its significant ramifications for how security policy is legitimised and contested.
    
    Authors: Ugo Gaudino (Kingston University) , Tim Aistrope (University of Kent)
  - LGBTQ+ Individuals as a Transnational Threat to ‘Our’ Children Citizens: The Cases of Turkey and the United States
    
    The role of children as a security mobilizer is underexplored in security studies, despite the fact that the invocation of children as the ideal referent object is transnational and applies for physical and ontological security threats. Children symbolise various temporalities—the past, present, and future – and also act as a blank slate for the imagined ideal citizen. Using the US and Turkey as comparative cases, we argue that framing children as the referent object of security has allowed for more brazen anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. This paper explores the securitisation of LGBTQ+ individuals and organisations and their (assumed) transnational character against ‘us’ – the ideal citizens with ideal families that constitute the nation – and, in particular, ‘our’ children. Children’s position as both the vessel of the future and ideal citizen means any threats against them can bolster policies by harnessing fears about the nation’s existence in the future. Moreover, the same security frames exist across the world, especially amongst right-wing populist discourses like the US Republican Party and Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Crucially, by framing LGBTQ+ individuals as the threat and children as the referent, these discourses make claims about who belongs in the nation and who does not. As children are attributed no political agency, they have been addressed as the fragile element that needs absolute protection for ‘us’ to have a future as a nation. Discourses around “making America great again” or Turkey’s “returning to its origins” have aimed to shape the future through temporal policies inspired by the nation’s past (children: past, present, future).
    
    Authors: Burcu Turkoglu-Payne (Bilkent University) , Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh)
  - Human Rights in a Contested Global Order: Rethinking the Role and Influence of Informal Practice at the United Nations
    
    Human Rights in a Contested Global Order: Rethinking the Role and Influence of Informal Practice at the United Nations
    
    Author: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / New Technology and Military Innovation Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Joe Murphy (The University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Joe Murphy (The University of Edinburgh)
  - Military models: a conceptual framework for the diffusion of military innovations
    
    Over time, military organisations tend to converge into similar organisational patterns. The diffusion of military innovations—broadly defined as large-scale changes in organisations, technologies, doctrines, and strategies to increase the capacity to generate military power—tends to be responsible for this convergence. The literature discusses the issue widely, using a myriad of theoretical lenses. Yet, few studies consider that innovation rarely diffuses isolated but tends to carry a specific view of how to prepare and employ military force. When scholars analyse it, they use conflicting concepts to refer to the same issue (e.g., ‘agendas’, ‘styles’, ‘ways of warfare’). Then, how can we understand organisational convergence among militaries worldwide? I argue that we need a middle-ground concept to understand how these force templates diffuse. I then define ‘military models’ as this missing analytical link. Defined as ‘interconnected sets of military innovations that become templates for reform in a given domain, field, region, and historical moment,’ the concept provides clearer parameters and methodological regard for diffusion studies. To advance my argument, I offer a conceptual literature review and use the diffusion of the post-Cold War U.S. military model as a plausibility probe. I then conclude by illustrating the possibilities for future research.
    
    Author: Raphael Lima (King’s College London (KCL))
  - Weaponizing Social Media and Internet by Hamas: A Non-Kinetic and Digital Response to American Foreign Policy in the Middle East
    
    The primary aim of this research is to examine the non-kinetic aspects of 21st-century non-state actors like Hamas Military Strategy through the theoretical lenses of information, intelligence, and proxy warfare. The research aims to understand how the information and intelligence warfare of Hamas in the 21st century is weaponizing social media in the digital age to respond to American Foreign Policy and to achieve hostile agendas in international politics and relations. By deconstructing the Hamas attack of 2023 on Israel, the Israel-Hamas War (of October 2023), the current research aims to develop a theoretical framework of the non-kinetic and digital character of warfare of Hamas in international relations, American Foreign Policy, security, and war studies. To achieve this interdisciplinary objective, my research uses post-structuralist iniquity of power dynamics to examine the internet and social media as potential power challengers to conventional power corridors. The research used discourse analysis on publicly available Hamas social media posts (of X and Facebook), TikTok and YouTube videos to analyze the discourse and how it is helping Hamas to win and hearts of the Muslim population against American Foreign policy and Israeli aggression against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The research concludes by developing a theoretical framework of Non-Kinetic Warfare and Weaponizing Social Media in information and non-kinetic warfare and security studies. The research also adds to American Foreign Policy literature on the Middle East and provides empirical evidence of the usage of social media by groups like Hamas and the public to counter American support to Israel and propagate anti-American narrative in public opinion, domestic politics and international relations.
    
    Author: Maryam Nazir (Forman Christian College, Pakistan)
  - War in Hands: A Digital Proxy Warfare Perspective
    
    Before the 21st-century digital revolution, warfare was traditionally understood across three domains: air, land, and sea. However, the rise of the internet and social media has introduced a fourth, non-kinetic domain known as “Digital Proxy Warfare.” This form of warfare represents strategic competition in the digital realm aimed at shaping public opinion. Unlike conventional cyber or information warfare, digital proxy warfare is conducted through decentralized agents—including intentional digital operatives and unwitting social media users.
    This research argues that the rapid dissemination of information and deep social media engagement among citizens have established the groundwork for sophisticated yet economically efficient digital proxy warfare, challenging traditional, state-led concepts of information and cyber warfare. This phenomenon presents a novel and unprecedented threat to national and international security, posing challenges for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in war and security studies.
    To address existing conceptual gaps on digital-led proxy warfare, theoretically, this research builds upon Mumford's (2013) framework of Proxy Warfare and employs an empirical approach, using a Google survey to collect and analyze data. Using purposive and random sampling techniques, the survey targeted undergraduate and postgraduate students in International Relations, War, and Security Studies, as well as academics and national security personnel, including members of Pakistan’s Cyber Command and Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR). The study examines the impact of digital proxy warfare in key geopolitical events, including the Fall of Kabul (2021), the French protests against police violence (June 2023), Iran’s women’s rights movement (2022), regime changes in Pakistan involving the removal of former PM Imran Khan (2022-2023), and the Russia-Ukraine conflict (2022).
    The findings contribute to an advanced understanding of how state and non-state actors exploit digital spaces to influence social media narratives, offering new insights into the role of non-kinetic warfare in contemporary war and security studies.
    
    Author: Mudassir Farooqi (Forman Christian College, Pakistan)
  - The Future of War Is Not Remote: Great Power Competition, Remote Warfare, and War in the Indo-Pacific
    
    This paper redefines the conceptual and empirical boundaries of remote warfare scholarship by exploring its relationship to the US Department of Defense's (DoD) evolving strategic focus on great power competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Existing remote warfare literature has almost entirely drawn from the empirical study of post-9/11 Western counterterrorism and stabilization operations. It has faced criticism for oversimplifying the character of contemporary warfare and for lacking conceptual clarity. This paper builds on these critiques by identifying another important gap in remote warfare scholarship: the failure to critically interrogate the shift in the DoD’s defense planning priorities from irregular warfare toward preparing for high-intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
    
    To address this gap, this paper examines three recent DoD initiatives—AirSea Battle, the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, and the Replicator Initiative—highlighting how they challenge many of the assumptions underpinning existing remote warfare scholarship. These initiatives suggest that the future of war is likely to be less “remote,” less asymmetrical, and more geopolitically significant than existing remote warfare scholarship implies. On this basis, this paper argues that a hypothetical US-China war fought in the Indo-Pacific cannot be classified as remote warfare, providing an intuitive but important empirical contribution that sharpens the concept’s currently fuzzy boundaries of contrast.
    
    This paper makes a wider contribution to security studies scholarship by arguing that the study of remote warfare should be reconceptualized as a "trading zone" for understanding the production and effects of different forms of distance in war. This move would not only help revive the currently dwindling interest in the concept but also better situate it within the broader debates on the changing character of warfare.
    
    Author: Tom Watts (Royal Holloway University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Roundtable / Objects and Projects of Climate Politics: International Studies and the Politicization of a Climate Governance Object? Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  How might governance practices and projects objectify climate/politics?
  This panel will provide a space for reflection on and discussion of: existing and emergent debates on climate as a 'governance object' within International Studies; objects and projects of climate politics in a wider sense; and potential new directions within scholarship on these topics and themes.
  
  Drawing on their research into, variously, international-institutional politics of climate change, relationships between expert/knowledge, power and action in climate politics, and interactions between science, policy and society (including detailed studies of governance frameworks and assessment processes and networks of expertise related to climate change negotiations, the IPCC, social movements, and geo/climate engineering proposals) contributors to the roundtable will be invited to engage with, consider, and reflect on key themes and issues including:
  
  concepts, objects, and considerations of climate politics in a wider context of ‘objectual international relations’ (cf. Esguerra/Global Studies Quarterly special issue, 2024)
  
  types of malleability and forms of politicization and contestation in relation to climate governance objects, projects, and objectives
  
  roles and relative significance of academic, activist, and scientific knowledge and expertise in constituting and contesting objects of climate governance and their projected futures
  
  political projects and policy debates related to current contexts and issues such as mitigation, climate finance, opposition to extractivism, and proposals for/emergent technologies of climate engineering and intervention.
  
  The roundtable will also provide scope for discussion (including audience/Q&A engagement) of a range of different conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches as employed and explored by the works of the contributors.
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Columba Peoples (University of Bristol)
  
  Participants: Olaf Corry (University of Leeds) , Columba Peoples (University of Bristol) , Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University) , Ina Möller (Wageningen University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / Perspectives on British (I)PE Room 3 , Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  The roundtable is an opportunity to bring together leading scholars to reflect on the past, present and future of British (international) political economy. British (I)PE is defined here to include not only British or ‘British School’ IPE, but also work in British political economy and British economic policy more broadly. The intention is to foster a more inclusive dialogue among political economists beyond the traditional boundaries of IPE to encompass CPE and political science. Participants will be invited to define the contours and characteristics of British (I)PE, to discuss the state of the field, its historical lineages and distinct traditions, and to outline its key contributions with respect to theory, empirics, methods and/or pedagogy. The roundtable is an opportunity to begin a conversation about the future of British (I)PE, to support the next generation of scholars and scholarship in this area, and to build an interdisciplinary academic network with a view to organising future events and initiatives.
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Chair: Inga Rademacher (City University of London)
  
  Participants: Remi Edwards (University of Sheffield) , Ben Rosamond (University of Edinburgh) , Scott James (King's College London) , Scott Lavery (University of Glasgow) , Johnna Montgomerie (University of British Columbia)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Re-thinking International Relations and Development Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Convener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  
  Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  - GLOBAL PEACE FOR A BOOMING WORLD ECONOMY
    
    The restoration of the world was imperative to re-establish international administration and global governance after its destruction by WWII. The Marshall Plan and the creation of the United Nations were therefore important. Studies confirm that several European states' economies were rehabilitated by the US sponsored program, in the aftermath of WWII. Theorists, researchers, thinkers, teachers, educators and others were all concerned with the issue of conflict and conflict resolutions and how to come to better solutions in order to avoid eventual world conflicts. All efforts made to achieve the goal were rendered possible in order to benefit from a relatively peaceful world in comparison to WWII. In spite of war atrocities, international administration and global governance and the common sense of humanity conflicts still burst out. Nowadays, the context of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict involving many European forces tends to revert back to WWII. It seems today useful rethinking Immanual Kant's Perpetual Peace or the Democratic Peace Theory. World political leaders have to promote peace and tolerance on the global scale in this contemporary era. As a result of the research, the planetary population will experience less wars when the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is respected and implemented in its pure form. The research is conducted through deductive reasoning. Primary and secondary sources of information in forms of academic articles and books, newspapers, interviews, official documents and others. These sources are in English, French and swedish. The research is both quantitative and qualitative, and encloses a theoretical perspective section. The Democratic Peace theory is detailed in order to confirm or reject the hypothesis once the study of the empirical facts is completed. The limits of the research is related to the title of the project, meaning from WWII (1939-1945) to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war (2024).
    
    Authors: Ley Gregoire Ikpo (Stockhoml University)* , ley G. IKPO (Stockhoml University)
  - Majoritarian Politics and the Challenge of Developing Plurality in International Relations (IR)
    
    The ‘Big Bangs of IR’ debate has urged for a rereading of international relations while at the same time emphasizing multiple and plural perspectives towards the development of the discipline. Yet, a focus on developing a plural perspective often neglects other ‘smaller’ histories and voices of minorities. In the context of a multicultural society like India, the demand for public space and voice by minorities is being strongly resisted by majoritarian politics and right-wing revivalist groups that have ‘captured’ such processes, politics, and norm-setting. As a consequence, this politics of exclusion and othering has recreated new structures of oppression and violence. This paper raises the concern of ensuring we consider multicultural diversity in developing plural histories. The paper therefore seeks to tie the local with the international by paying closer attention to how multicultural theories that stress recognition and representation may hope to pave the way for a more representative understanding of IR.
    
    Authors: Niamkoi Lam (University of Delhi) , V Mark Gideon (University of Delhi)
  - Military Intervention and Sovereignty: Intersubjectivity and Creative Reconfiguration of Sovereignty
    
    This paper aims to investigate the inter-subjective dynamics that is instrumental in the constitution of sovereignty of states. Within mainstream International Relations theory, sovereignty is taken as a fundamental attribute of states. It is understood as a prerequisite for stepping into the comity of nations and is considered insular, inalienable, and sacrosanct. However, from a contrary perspective, various critical and sociological theorists argue that sovereignty is itself a product of the state’s interaction and is not something ‘given’ that states carry when they enter the international realm. As contemporary experience reflects, the façade of sovereignty is used as an alibi for decisive military intervention required in the face of several ethno-nationalist movements. Often, these ethno-nationalist movements culminate into genocide, refugee crisis, and the emergence of failed states which leads to gross violations of human rights. This paper explores the impediments that sovereignty throws in the path of humanitarian military interventions and looks for possibilities that could be extracted through a creative reconfiguration of sovereignty. The study will rely on a comparative case study to examine the dilemma of humanitarian military intervention and the allegations of selective approach by Western powers. The two cases chosen would be the NATO intervention in Kosovo and the Rwandan genocide. The logic of the two cases rests on the premise that Kosovo serves as a critical case while Rwanda stands as a unique case.
    
    Author: Pranjal Kuli (North-Eastern Hill University, India)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Studying emotions: Insights from disciplines beyond IR Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Amanda Beattie (Aston University)
  - When trees speak and the birds hear: Affective Politics of more-than-human dreamworlds
    
    While there has been burgeoning engagement with emotions in global politics, this has not led to a recognition of emotional relations beyond the state and human. Is political agency the sole province of human beings? Or can trees, birds and lakes tell their own stories and enact another politics? The uncritical acceptance of humans as the only wise (if wayward) protagonists of global politics is rooted in colonialism and its enduring legacies in contemporary discourses of extinction, conservation, and rewilding. What stories and sites of affective politics go missing in the historical treatment of humans as the sole protagonists of global politics? Reading fictional accounts of emotional relations and recovering situated stories of more-than-human flourishing; including migrations of endangered bird-species and the role of trees as witnesses and keepers of relations to place for displaced/dispossessed populations, this paper presses closer to the affective labour of more-than-human protagonists in repairing relational attachments to make a case for an affective politics which recognises more-than-human dreamworlds and forms of mutualism which emerge even in the wake of loss. Transcending mainstream approaches, this paper calls for paying attention to the affective entanglements between more-than-human agents in rebuilding and reimagining sociopolitical worlds amid widespread destruction, for cultivating an alternative politics of flourishing.
    
    Author: Shambhawi Tripathi (University of St. Andrews)
  - The Feeling of Political Concepts: Introducing Emotion and Desire into Conceptual History
    
    This contribution will sketch out a novel methodological approach for exploring the role of desire and emotion in conceptual change. It speaks to IR's growing interest in conceptual history, which has proven a valuable tool for understanding how key concepts, such as sovereignty, security, and war have evolved over time and influenced political practices. However, a limitation of existing work has been a focus on rational, conscious thought, at the expense of emotion, desire, and affectivity. While the recent "emotional turn" in IR has highlighted the need to take into account the role of emotions in political decision-making, these insights have yet to be integrated into an understanding of conceptual change. My paper argues that we need to understand how key concepts are emotionally constituted, and how their transformations are driven, not solely by rational debate, but also by emotional and affective shifts. In other words, I argue that changes in concepts must not be understood merely as changes in ideas and practices, but also as changes in feelings, desires, and emotions. This paper develops a methodological approach for advancing this angle, which will help explain political phenomena - such as the rise of national populism in countries around the world - that seem to defy reason.
    
    Author: Michael Anglim (King's College London)
  - "Melodies of Politics: Rabindra Sangeet and Emerging Metaphysical Perspectives in International Relations"
    
    The paper seeks to impart a fresh ontological stance of perceiving politics by giving art, specifically music, a chance. Music offers a fresh way of comprehending human nature which is instrumental in broader understanding of the genesis, meaning and significance of key political challenges. Music carries the potential of finding new vision (i.e. listening capabilities) rather than just new facts. In this direction, the paper uses Tagore’s Rabindra Sangeet to uncover such a vision that exemplifies a rhizomatic approach. "Tomar Holo Shuru, Amar Holo Sesh" is one such Rabindra sangeet which emphasizes the fluidity persisting between self and the other and that our identities are shaped by our interactions with those around us. While figures like Barenboim, Said, and Nussbaum, among others, have long been vocal about this issue, the field of international relations has scarcely engaged with this area. Methodologically, the paper relies on a hermeneutical approach to discern the political in music of Rabindranath Tagore. This paper offers a pathway to foster more nuanced insights and responses to the pressing dilemmas of the political through such an analysis and reconnecting the world in an unconventional way.
    
    Author: Archita Sharma (University of Delhi)
  - Enacting revolutionary imaginaries: the catalyzing effect of the Khartoum sit-in
    
    On April 6, 2019 protestors managed to occupy the military headquarters in Khartoum, which was to become the largest and longest sit-in during Sudan’s December revolution. Throughout its 58 days of existence protestors not only managed to appropriate the place, oust president Omar al-Bashir and set up a whole infrastructure to accommodate the needs of protestors coming from all over the country; they also created what some call “the liberated land of the headquarters”. Based on a triangulation of narrative interviews and visual analysis, complemented by expert interviews, this paper analyzes the prefigurative politics enacted by protestors in the Khartoum sit-in and the vision of an alternative Sudan that they were fostering. Deploying a spatio-temporal lens, the paper first presents the imaginaries created in the sit-in, while also shedding light on the recreation of already existing social structures and grievances. It further seeks to show the catalyzing and affective effect the sit-in space had in fostering new networks and strengthening existing movement structures. Finally, it sheds light on the violent dispersal of the sit-in and how this event affected the perceptions of those imaginaries as well as the further developments of the Sudanese revolutionary movement.
    
    Author: Myriam Ahmed (Freie Universität Berlin)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Temporal Security in International Relations Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Chair: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Discussant: Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick)
  - Not in but through history: Temporal narratives and (non) State Formation
    
    While the ‘turn’ to history in IR has dislodged state essentialism and emphasised the constitutive role of violent nonstate actors (VNSAs) in contested processes of state formation, studies on the mutual constitution between states and VNSAs have so far left unquestioned the temporal frameworks of such processes. By drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on time in IR, this article advances the investigation of the temporality of history and claims that the history/sovereignty nexus is a key site of the aporetic tension between history and theory in IR. To develop this claim, I showcase how the problems of historicity and sovereignty play out in the context of Italian state formation. First, I show how authoritative claims reproducing the ‘time of the state’ work to temporalise the non-state while simultaneously reinstating the state’s legitimate claim to the monopoly of violence as the condition of possibility for progressive time. Second, I show how the Sicilian mafia embraced, reproduced, and contested such temporalizing histories through the temporal figuration of nostalgia. This analysis exposes how, through this very process of contestation about ‘history’, the form of sovereignty is reproduced as the organising temporal principle of politics.
    
    Author: Norma Rossi (University of St. Andrews)
  - Whose side is time on? The victory and timing dynamics of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine
    
    Theorists and practitioners of international politics increasingly tout time as a key vector of security in the twenty-first century. While temporal dynamics and concerns have always inflected politics, from Ecclesiastes’ ‘a time for war and a time for peace’, to Hitler’s rage that ‘time is always against’ the Third Reich, the war in Ukraine pushed time and timing to the forefront of contemporary concerns about war and the future of international order. This paper begins to catalogue and unpack salient temporal tropes in the discourse of the war, as well as the diverse and interweaving timing processes and dynamics influencing its possible resolutions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine augurs the return of territorial conquest, achieved by conventional war but seasoned with nuclear blackmail’s threat of apocalypse. The war threatens not only Ukraine’s sovereign integrity but the ‘future of democracy’ and the existence of ‘Europe’ as a political project. Russian aggression builds on denials of Ukraine’s historical and cultural facticity or ‘right to exist’, imbuing questions of victory and defeat with do-or-die meaning. Ukraine’s self-defence depends upon complex timing issues like military aid manufacture, delivery, and usage restrictions; how long international sanctions will take to stay Putin’s hand; when to call for negotiations; and the impacts of seasonal climates on offensives and counteroffensives. Alongside these complex processes, we have seen increasingly hardened and mutually exclusive visions of victory forwarded by both belligerents, while their allies ponder more ambivalent settlements. As previous work on victory culture suggests, the more dichotomous such victory discourse becomes, the longer and more brutal the war is likely to be. Put briefly, nearly every element of Russia’s war in Ukraine invokes existential stakes, staunch visions of victory, and complex timing dynamics, all with stark implications for the future of Ukraine and the international European order.
    
    Author: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
  - Envisioning Future Deterrence: Peace, Accountability and the End Times after the Russo-Ukrainian War
    
    The Russo-Ukrainian war has been accompanied by competing global visions for the post-war settlement, discrete articulations of the parameters of the peace, and the debates over possible and desirable ways of establishing accountability for the aggressor. The nature and ambitiousness of the envisioned peace (the cessation of hostilities versus a just and sustainable peace), along with varying understandings of Russia’s ‘strategic defeat’ and Ukraine’s victory, ranging from the denial of Russia’s strategic war aims to Ukraine’s fast membership in the EU and NATO, have become part and parcel of the discussions about future deterrence and containment strategy, post-war condition of Eastern Europe and the international order at large. This paper investigates the recurring political and academic exchanges during 2022-2024 about the envisioned endings, peace settlements, and Ukraine’s security-political future-related scenarios as distinctly charged political designs for the post-war interaction order between the United States, Europe, Russia, and the so-called Global South. Various peace plans (e.g., Zelenskyi’s 10-point Peace Formula, the Chinese-Brazilian ‘Friends of Peace’ plan), policy visions and rumours against the backdrop of the incoming Trump administration’s emergent policy on the issue display distinct historical understandings and political framings of deterrence, containment, appeasement, assurance and humiliation. The visions of future peace reflect definite temporal sources and reference points of ontological security for Ukraine, its regional neighbours, Europe, the US and the institutional West at large. The nature of the end of this war marks the ‘end times’ to wildly varying degrees for the engaged actors across the globe. Peace agreement as a ritual component of ending a war has become a political battlefield over envisioning future world order, demonstrating the malleability of the notion of deterrence therein.
    
    Author: Maria Mälksoo (University of Copenhagen)
  - "If I could turn back time": Temporal Security, Ontological Disruption and Germany’s Zeitenwende
    
    The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, described by Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a Zeitenwende (historic turning point), marked a critical disruption in European security and triggered a fundamental rethinking of German foreign, security, and defence policy. This paper explores the invasion as a temporal shock to Germany’s ontological security. Building on the 'temporal turn' in International Relations, we argue that the war not only violated Ukraine's sovereignty but also shattered a broader sense of chronological continuity in European security, long defined by reduced defence spending and the assumption that interstate war was obsolete. Where previous studies have focused on temporal security within national contexts of collective memory, this paper expands the concept by embedding it within a geo-temporal framework, considering how international narratives of war, peace, and order shape state behaviour. We contend that the war disrupted long-standing German paradigms such as Ostpolitik and Wandel durch Handel (change through trade), leading to the emergence of the Zeitenwende narrative, which calls for a revitalized military and leadership role in European defence. Yet, this narrative remains constrained by incremental policy implementation and historical associations with Germany’s militaristic past, creating ongoing ontological insecurity about Germany’s role in European defence.
    
    Authors: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London) , Malte Riemann (Leiden University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  WE 18 Roundtable / The 2024/25 Strategic Defence Review: Submissions and Reflections Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable discusses the outcomes of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) and its implications for UK Space, reflecting the panelists’ recommendations to the SDR and reflecting on the outcomes announced in 2025. On 16 July 2024, the new Labour Government announced a Strategic Defence Review focused on determining the roles, capabilities, and reforms required by UK Defence to meet the challenges, threats, and opportunities of the twenty-first century. The review aims to ensure that Defence is affordable within the resources available and aligned with the trajectory toward 2.5% of GDP. Additionally, it seeks to position Defence as central to the security, economic growth, and prosperity of the UK. Leading up to the evidence submission, there was uncertainty regarding the Starmer government's enthusiasm for space and its support for developing the National Space Strategy. Will this new government take a definitive position on space? If not, how can public policy issues concerning emerging threats be addressed within the constraints of the budget? given the UK's historical mix of pragmatism and skepticism toward space? What is the impact of the SDR on the UK role in space going forward?
  
  Sponsor: Astropolitics Working Group
  
  Chair: Chloe Barker (Newcastle University)
  
  Participants: Bleddyn Bowen (Durham University) , Benedict Baxendale-Smith (King's College London) , Michael Mulvihill (Teesside University) , David Dunn (University of Birmingham)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Theorising non-violence and the possibility for repair Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)
  - Violent orders: the epistemic violence of political apologies as standards of memory
    
    The past five decades can be described as the age of accountability. Since the then-Chancellor of Germany Willy Brandt kneeled on the site of remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970, in act of an apology for Nazi crimes, the so-called political apologies have boomed. As of 2024, several hundred political apologies have been offered and received, and new calls for states to apologize for their wrongdoings continue, making such actions a global standard of memory. This is despite - or perhaps because of - a widespread understanding that political apology is a Western model of moral remembrance, which gained its prominence in the specific context of the post-Holocaust Europe. This paper discusses the Euro-centric biases of these memory standards and explores the extent to which widely accepted norms and standards of moral remembrance have been supported by exclusion, denial and erasure of certain people and harms. The paper first examines how political apologies limit our understanding of violence. It provides a systematic review of a political apologies database, asking questions such as: What violence needs to be acknowledged/apologized for? What actions and omissions get to be remembered and commemorated? Who is perceived as having acted in violent ways? Next, the paper discusses cases of genocide which are seemingly outside the standards of memory, namely the genocide against indigenous populations of Tasmania and the Selk’nam in Chile, and what learning about them might change about the scholarly and practitioner imagining of the futures of justice, reparations and commemorations of mass-scale atrocities. The paper fills in a gap in the International Relations literature about the role of violence, particularly epistemic violence, in building and sustaining the current liberal international order, while also imagining alternative futures.
    
    Author: Maja Davidovic (Cardiff University)
  - A decolonial critique of the nonviolent resistance literature on Western Sahara (and beyond)
    
    This paper is part of my ongoing PhD project which seeks to explore how the return to armed resistance by the Polisario Front to liberate Western Sahara from Moroccan colonial occupation is affecting Western humanitarian aid. I do so through researching how the discursive representations of Sahrawi refugees as ideal and hence worthy of international support are unsettled by this return to armed resistance.
    
    This paper, part of my theoretical framework, seeks to put forward a decolonial critique of the research on nonviolence in the context of Western Sahara and of the nonviolence literature in IR more broadly. Sahrawis’ unarmed resistance (between 1991 and 2020) has been a recurrent focus of Western discourses on Western Sahara within and beyond academia. I argue that these discourses, which are intimately entangled with discourses on gender, Islam and modernity, participate in constructing an image of Sahrawis as particularly worthy.
    
    I aim to show how, enabled by methodological whiteness, much of this literature engages – more or less advertently – in (re)producing Orientalist/racist/Eurocentric tropes, and cultivates epistemologies of ignorance, immanence, innocence. My argument is that ultimately such discourses can only partake in sustaining colonialism for Sahrawis and White supremacy more broadly.
    
    Author: Manon Minassian (University of Glasgow)
  - The coloniality of the Quest for Saving Grace of Peace Studies
    
    Overt the last two decades, the scholars of peace studies, predominantly based in Global North metropolitan academic centres, have tried to ‘capture’, imagine, and theorise the elusive and alluring phenomena of ‘the local’ through concepts of local ordering, everydayness, empowerment, and inclusion/participation. While these so-called ‘turns’ in scholarship have raised important questions about the dominant practices and normative underpinnings of the “liberal peace” approach and international interventions, they nevertheless met their own limits. The limitations have been particularly pronounced in the domains of accounting for structural conditions of global racial hierarchies (Azarmandi 2024), indigenous onto-epistemologies (FitzGerald 2023), the colonial matrix of power (Quijano), and different ways of knowing and living “an/other peace”(Shroff 2019). By drawing on the anticolonial and decolonial feminisms, and geo-political epistemic grounding in post-Yugoslav, post-war experiences, in this paper, I focus on the politics of knowledge production about local ordering in Peace Studies. In particular, I focus on its un/intended consequences - silences, erasures and re-production of coloniality of knowledge under the guise of finding an alternative to the consistently failing liberal peace and inadequacy of the Western epistemic authority/monopoly in Peace Studies.
    
    Author: Sladjana Lazic (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Totality, Smallness, Intimacy, Gigantism: Rethinking the Politics of Scale Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Musab Younis (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  
  Discussant: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  - On the scale of a whale
    
    The non-Marxist left’s romance with the smallness of the local is most famously expressed by E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973). Although Schumacher observes that there is no single answer to the question of scale, he argues that ‘we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of gigantism’ and concludes that ‘it is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness’. These he identifies as a propensity to non-violence, reduction of harm and error, and a greater sense of community and stewardship. The gravitation towards the local and the small scale as respite from, even if not an adequate response to, agglomerations of power and capital has become such a commonplace of left utopian thought that it is no longer even considered worthy of comment. Yet gigantism in nature – and specifically in whales – disturbs the connotations of violent, pathological, unnatural growth that attach to gigantism in political thought. Could understanding gigantism in whales help us to appreciate the circumstances in which enormous scale makes a kind of sense, challenging the prejudice against gigantism and the suspicion of totality that pervades the post-Marxist left?
    
    Author: Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews)
  - Returning to the total
    
    Over the past four decades, just as capitalist power was being projected on an unprecedented scale across all corners of the planet, (postcolonial and decolonial) feminist and queer epistemologies were simultaneously mandating an emphasis on contingency, singularity, difference, discontinuity, and exception. This mandate has taken two seemingly divergent forms: an imperative to scale down to the intimate, the everyday, and the embodied, on the one hand, and to scale up to the many worlds of the pluriverse, on the other. Both these forms, we argue, tend towards ontologization and prove inadequate to the task of grasping the global relations that underpin the polysemic crises of the present global order.
    These two tendencies converge in their rejection of thinking in ways that are seen as totalizing. By dismissing totality thinking as totalitarian; an attempt to violently impose a universal truth on the particularities of human experience, however, feminists have left us ill-equipped to address the totalizing systems of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism that organize our lives across the various scales, spheres, and divides of modernity. In this paper, we return to ‘totality’ as a useful methodological device that maintains the dialectical movement between the abstract and the concrete, the micro and the macro, the private and the political, and the local and the global. We especially draw on recent developments in transfeminist writings to demonstrate its analytical and political purchase for postcolonial feminist and queer theorizing today.
    
    Authors: Ida Roland Birkvad (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Alexander Stoffel (London School of Economics and Political Science)*
  - Avuncular affinities: recasting the ‘uncle’ as a global problem
    
    Feminist and queer scholarship has read the figure of the 'uncle' – or the “avunculate” (Sedgwick, 1994) – as holding the potential to carve out space for non-conformity, or for thinking relationality beyond the nuclear family form. Yet invocations of the ‘uncle’ also call up more unsavoury references to figures that uphold these very structures: from Uncle Sam, to Uncle Tom, to the right-wing Hindu ‘Sanghi’ Uncle, to the uncle circulating online conspiracy theories. Centering this less sympathetic reading of the uncle, this paper homes in on a particular iteration of this figure: the Hindu, upper caste diasporic uncle, operating in lockstep with capitalism, imperialism, and (settler-)colonialism. In this way, this paper moves away from prefiguring the uncle as necessarily challenging convention, or as otherwise transgressive – a tendency that also shapes scholarship on diaspora. The paper similarly pushes against particularist, domestic, reading of the uncle. Rather than privileging the fragment, as is common to feminist and diaspora studies, drawing inspiration from emergent literature within ‘Critical Aunty Studies’, this paper explores the varied, political, economic, and cultural projects mobilized through the figure of the uncle. Reading the uncle in relation to scholarship on middlemen, compradors, and the native elite, this paper shows that the kinship and affiliative networks of these figures are not territorially bound, nor is the nuisance they present confined to the proverbial kitchen table. Instead, these uncles uphold
    and advance wider hierarchical and exclusionary structures that undergird contemporary crises, presenting a problem on a global scale.
    
    Author: Shikha Dilawri (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Escaping intimate power
    
    The paper connects feminist writing on resisting intimate partner violence to anticolonial writing on resisting imperialism. It focuses, in particular, on Haitian anticolonial writing published since the country's independence in 1804, and a body of practice-oriented feminist scholarship published from the 1970s. Drawing this unusual comparison and finding a number of shared conceptions across these bodies of writing, it suggests ways in which a combined approach—a sense of how ’the personal is imperial’—can help to theorise the operation of power across scales.
    
    Such an approach must address the perils of political metaphor, especially the type that uses gendered violence as an analogy. Both exponents and opponents of colonialism have used gendered violence as a metaphor referring to imperial desire, possession and control. How can intimate and imperial scales of power be understood together without resorting to analogy? In responding to this question—which is central to understanding the interrelationship of scales more broadly—the paper will draw on, and respond to, debates in trans, queer and feminist phenomenology.
    
    Author: Musab Younis (University of Oxford)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / Tragedy and Irony: Just War and Intervention Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: EWPG Working group
  
  Chair: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
  - Ethics, Politics and the ‘Solidarity of the Shaken’ in Jan Patočka’s Reflections on War
    
    This paper explores the ethico-political significance of Jan Patočka’s work, focusing considerable attention on his best-known but most elusive text: Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Patočka’s reflections on war, sacrifice, and the front-line experience in the sixth heretical essay have elicited a range of mixed responses from his interpreters, giving rise to some of the most conflicting interpretations of his thought. While some commentators have accused the Czech philosopher of glorifying war, others have found ample evidence in his writings to refute such charges. Taking as its starting point the ambivalent reception of the Heretical Essays in the Anglophone literature, this paper revisits one of Patočka’s most provocative claims in this text, namely, that despite the utter destructiveness of the front line there is nevertheless an element of positivity in the experience of war, something that can give rise to an alternative ethics and meaningful political action – what Patočka called the “solidarity of the shaken.” Through an examination of Patočka’s treatment of war and technology, and his inscription of both phenomena within the register of his philosophy of history, this essay seeks to bring more fully into view the political and ethical implications of his philosophical claims. My broader my aim is to examine what Patočka’s reflections might offer for the understanding of the nature of war more generally and our own century’s addiction to conflict in particular.
    
    Author: Evgenia Ilieva (Ithaca College, New York)
  - Defending the Lives of Others: A Duty to Forcefully Intervene?
    
    Responsibility to Protect doctrine assumes that there exists an underlying humanitarian duty to forcefully intervene in situations where innocent human lives are threatened with unjust violence. But what is the philosophical basis for the humanitarian moral obligation that underpins the R2P doctrine? I demonstrate that a third-party should use forceful intervention (which might include lethal force) to protect an innocent human life in cases where the intervener has a duty to rescue the potential victim’s life and the use of force is morally permissible. Then I argue that a potential intervener is permitted to kill the attacker when he has an impartial reason for doing so: the attacker is unjustly threatening an innocent person’s life. Impartial justification is important in such cases, I argue, because it affirms the equality of all humans: that one human is not worth intrinsically more than another.
    
    Author: Shannon Ford (Curtin University, Australia)
  - Climate change and the justice of war
    
    That war has adverse effects on the natural environment has been well documented since at least the Vietnam war, when the Americans used herbicides to deprive guerrilla fighters of their hiding places in the deep foliage of the jungle. Likewise, the military has repeatedly been criticized for the environmental impact of military readiness, including on global carbon emissions. Still, active kinetic wars continue to be fought. At the time of writing most prominently Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. Unlike with past wars, however, the carbon emissions of these wars are being charted. Moreover, these figures intermittently feature in the mainstream media.
    This suggests that there is an appetite for taking seriously the carbon effect of war. Taken together with the fact that natural carbon sinks are finite, the situation raises some crucial questions regarding whether carbon intense wars are ethical, in a sense of morally justifiable? In line with this, this paper is concerned with the following research question: What does climate change do to the justice of war? In answering this question, we commence from the ‘just war theory’, the authoritative statement on the ethics of war. We examine: How would/does climate change, or taking climate change seriously, affect the three categories of just war (jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum)? Our aim is to examine and chart the ways in which climate change is likely to affect these three categories of war, or else specific principles within the just war theory , with a view to determining whether in the age of the climate emergency, carbon intense war remains ethically viable.
    
    Authors: Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham) , Duncan Depledge (Loughborough University)*
  - Rotten Compromise within Jus Post Bellum: exploring the role of compromise in post-conflict security
    
    Recent conflicts such as in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen close co-operation between foreign actors and local indigenous actors with the aim of building and maintaining security. When utilising local indigenous security forces there will inevitably come some challenges that the foreign actors must be aware of.
    
    If the foreign actors are conducting themselves, and the operation in question, in accordance with Jus post Bellum then it means they are acting in a way that is defined by a certain moral framework and in accordance with restrictions that place limits on their actions. The indigenous forces that they are utilising however may not share those morals, they make take actions (both before and after involvement with the foreign actors) that challenge or break the moral framework understood by the foreign actors. In supporting or enabling these actions, the foreign actors face a moral compromise; if utilising the local indigenous forces is truly necessary for the provision of security then accepting their morally dubious practices may be required even if it goes against the morals of the foreign actors themselves. They must, in a sense, compromise on their morals for what seems like a worthy cause. The question is, how much compromise can be permitted and how might that compromise be regulated?
    
    This paper will utilise the concept of Rotten Compromise in conjunction with the moral framework of Jus Post Bellum to explore the limits of acceptable moral compromise in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    
    Author: Alex Crockett (Durham University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  WE 18 Panel / War and Nature I: On the Eco-Social Costs of Warfare and Military Build-Up [Panel 1] Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Esther Marijnen (Wageningen University, Netherlands) , Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)
  
  Chair: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
  
  Discussant: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
  - Wounded landscapes: Exploring nature as a site of trauma in war
    
    This project broadly explores embodied histories of war, displacement, and trauma in Central Africa through the natural landscape that grounds them. The paper central argument suggests that exploring wartime trauma as embodied within nature and alongside communities offer key insights into the wounded landscape of war and its collective legacies. While there is growing scholarship on nature as injured by war – which this work enters in dialogue with – this project centres on nature as the visual landscape of community’s trauma in war. Specifically, it considers environmental spaces as avenues through which the trauma of wartime continues to be collectively experienced. The paper utilises an interdisciplinary methodological approach relying on body maps and short films produced in the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. The resulting visual histories highlight natural spaces of trauma as existing alongside, and embodied within, communities in war. Via this frame, I interrogate the ways in which war transform natural landscapes and the environment more broadly.
    
    Author: Pauline Zerla (Kings College London)
  - Paris is Burning: Bridging Legal Gaps in Climate and Conflict Accountability
    
    Military conflicts increase greenhouse gas emissions and dismantle natural and societal climate adaptation mechanisms, creating feedback loops of conflict-driven climate harm. International humanitarian law offers weak environmental safeguards, but the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement, influenced by strategic lobbying, permit the underreporting of military emissions. In a search for existing and efficient legal solutions to close this gap, this research provides an alternative path to the abovementioned: a reshuffling of existing state responsibility principles.
    
    First it asserts that state obligations to prevent climate harm strictly demand peace-oriented, environmentally sustainable policies. Then it argues for the superimposition of these duties and goal limitations on the liability principles for the military harm resulting in environmental damage as established by diverse tribunals and ICJ. That should lead to state responsibility for military climate damage, the proceedings of which should be pursued parallelly to the main liability proceedings.
    
    Critically analyzing the processes of UNCC and E-ECC, the research synthesizes the political and legal requirements for pursuing such litigation. Recognizing that militarized climate impacts disproportionately threaten small island states, it will broaden the understanding of the victim's status. Finally, it will shed light on the impact of IPCC report gaps for the attribution, demanding change.
    
    Author: Madara Malnika (European University Institute)
  - Taboo termination: water weaponization and intersectional water security
    
    This paper explores the weaponisation of water through an intersectional water security framework. According to The Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology database, there have been at lease 62 instances of water weaponisation since 2020. Of the recent instances of weaponization, the majority were accounted for by two conflicts: (1) Russia and Ukraine, where both countries strategically sabotaged dams and other waterworks; (2) Israel and Palestine, where Israel destroyed water infrastructure, restricted water supplies to the area, and used water to flood tunnel complexes. These cases challenge claims of a moral “taboo” against weaponizing water in conflicts. This paper explores how water weaponization differentially affects individuals and communities along intersecting vectors of inequality. We develop our argument in three steps. First, we consider how issues of race and ethnicity are increasingly configured alongside factors of class, gender, or caste (among others) in understanding water weaponization. Second, we build a case for why intersectionality matters by examining the (comparatively) small but significant studies that combine multiple aspects of inequality in their analyses of water weaponization. Finally, we consider what difference an intersectional approach to water weaponization makes, using it to critically appraise, analyse, and respond to the place of water as a conflict tool.
    
    Authors: Cameron Harrington (Durham University) , Jeremy Schmidt (Queen Mary University of London)
  - More-than-human alter-geopolitics: everyday securitisation of non-human life and habitats during Russia’s war in Ukraine
    
    Russia’s war in Ukraine has profound consequences for more-than-human life and natural environments. War injury and contamination of soil, air, waterways, flora and fauna, alongside catastrophic attacks on infrastructures that support more-than-human life, ground compelling accusations of ecocide as a weapon of war against Ukraine. However, overly deterministic definitions of ecocide emphasize ultimate destruction, erasing the persistent relations among human and non-human animals, and ecologies, and occluding on-the-ground efforts to secure them. This presentation draws on wider research conducted with people displaced from Ukraine to explore how mutual existence with, and care for, more-than-human life can decentre and complicate anthropocentric stories of military violence and devastation. Informed by intersectional feminist thinking, we present narratives that demonstrate an alter-geopolitical approach to securitising more-than-human bodies and habitats during wartime. We argue that this renders more complex existing approaches to wartime ecological vulnerabilities and uncertainties and outlines more nuanced responses to care and concern for more-than-human life affected by war.
    
    Authors: Svitlana Odynets (University of Northumbria, Newcastle)* , Kathryn Cassidy (University of Northumbria, Newcastle)* , Maria Dubrova (University of Northumbria, Newcastle)
- 17:30 → 19:15
  
  WE 18 / Titanic galleries open – Free museum entry in your own time for all three-day and Wednesday ticket holders 1 Olympic Wy, Belfast BT3 9EP, United Kingdom
- 18:30 → 20:30
  
  Conference event / BISA 2025 Reception Titanic Belfast, 1 Olympic Wy, Belfast BT3 9EP
Thursday 19 June
- 07:00 → 08:15
  
  TH19 / Run led by Eve Harrison-Taylor. Meet outside the Europa Hotel, 5k route followed by an optional coffee
- 08:00 → 09:00
  
  TH 19 / Navigating Critical Approaches to IR: Troubleshooting your PhD. This event is sponsored by the QUB School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy & Politics, and the QUB Mitchell Institute. Although this is open to all conference delegates you need to register in advance to attend at https://indico.bisa.ac.uk/e/troubleshootingyourphd Lobby Bar, Europa Hotel
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Approaches to reparative and transformative justice in response to European imperialism: Shaping contemporary international relations Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Conveners: Asha Herten-Crabb (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin)
  
  Chair: Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin)
  - "40 acres and a mule”: How the framework of reparations can be used as tool for decolonisation and the fight against anti-Black racism in America
    
    My research seeks to address reparations through the prism of the contemporary manifestations of the legacies of slavery and legal segregation in America. The goal is to articulate a way to achieve some form of reparations that will feed into the larger goal of decolonisation and the fight against anti-Blackness. I draw on the past to help shine light on present consequences of that past that I argue tend to be overlooked when discussing reparations and can’t always be solved through monetary payments as many have suggested (Craemer et al 2020). I intend to focus on socio-economic factors such as the growing phenomena of gentrification and over/under policing of Black bodies in specific areas of the U.S. My entry point into the debate on reparations in America intends to be what is now known as H.R 40 (Lee 2023). The bill seeks to establish an official commission whose sole task will be to study and develop reparations for Black Americans. The bill however mainly focuses on reparations for slavery and “discrimination” and seems to define reparations as “a formal apology and compensation.” (Lee 2023). While I agree with that approach, my research will seek to focus on current harms and offer a different approach to reparations.
    
    Author: Marochka Minkeng (University of Sussex)
  - What are remedy and repair approaches? Why are they important for struggles towards justice?
    
    There are bodies of literature on reparations in state-to-state contexts, truth commissions for the remedy of human rights abuses, and in approaches to land redistribution. However, this literature is largely compartmentalised to pursuits in different countries. What is missing is an overarching synopsis of the contextual and conceptual layers of reparations and the differing perspectives between them in the context of how historically marginalized communities challenge dominant structures of power. These various struggles for reparations could be better understood to elicit what learning there could be between and across them. This missing layer of review and analysis would enable the application of reparations into other areas where it can add value, particularly in approaches to global justice. Reparations can disrupt the orthodoxies of development: its ideas are capable of unsettling thought processes and slowly enabling a re-envisioning towards different solutions. This presentation will summarise a range of claims and current forms of reparation, including the contestations within these areas and the role and impact of social movements for reparations. Second, it will look at the overlap of reparations with relevant conceptual fields of literature such as decoloniality. Third, it will unpack what the value of reparations approaches, through restorative justice, repair, restitution and other approaches, is to contemporary struggles for justice, thereby offering ideas for civil society.
    
    Author: Priya Lukka (University of Leeds)
  - Towards a Truth-Telling Commission on British Imperialism
    
    This paper explores the potential for a Truth-Telling Commission on British Imperialism to confront the historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism within Britain, its relationships with former colonies, and the international order as it evolves today. While truth commissions have effectively exposed colonial harms and promoted reconciliation in other contexts, Britain has yet to undertake such an initiative despite its central role in global imperialism. Drawing from transitional justice literature and decolonial thought, this study compares truth-telling commissions in British settler-colonies like Australia and Canada to extract relevant lessons for the UK. Using qualitative methods, including fieldwork, stakeholder interviews, and public engagement, the research proposes a blueprint for Britain to confront its imperial past and lays the groundwork for reparative justice. This paper contributes to dismantling the silences around empire by exploring how institutionalized truth-telling could challenge the enduring legacies of imperialism, supporting movements for justice and equality in Britain and its former colonies. It also highlights the ontological, epistemic, and material challenges of establishing such a commission, inviting further scholarly inquiry and public debate on the necessity and feasibility of truth-telling mechanisms. By positioning Britain as a focal point for historical silencing, this research advances critical understandings of imperialism’s persistent influence on contemporary global structures and the new world order in the making.
    
    Author: Asha Herten-Crabb (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Reparations and the Metropoles of Empire
    
    This contribution is part of my doctoral research project on reparations and reparatory justice in the (former) metropoles of colonial imperialism, more concretely on the historical and current reparations efforts after the British Empire. Understanding calls for reparations not only as transformative and reconciling but also as disruptive and resistant, this paper seeks to investigate how demands for reparations have challenged and continue to challenge the current state of the colonial and imperial metropoles. With this contribution, I draw on concepts of reparations and reparative justice as well as concepts on metropole/periphery, empire and imperialism. What is meant by reparations and reparative justice? How are metropoles conceptualised? And finally, how do different ideas and demands for reparations challenge the multifaceted dimensions of empire and metropole? Thinking with the colonial boomerang, worldmaking approaches and a processual understanding of reparations, this contribution suggest that reparations are a necessary framework to think about the interweaving of past, present and future while critically investing and blurring the lines of metropole and periphery. This will be complemented with insights and first findings from field research in Britain and participatory action research over the past two years drawing on participatory observations, interviews, archival data and joint organising. This contribution it aims to contribute to discussing how claims for reparations have shaped the (former?) metropoles of empire.
    
    Author: Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Beyond the Silk Roads: Navigating the complexities of Central Asian relations with the People’s Republic of China Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Conveners: Frank Maracchione (University of Kent and SPERI-University of Sheffield) , Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  
  Chair: Frank Maracchione (University of Kent and SPERI-University of Sheffield)
  - China’s Dichotomous Rise: How Self-Categorisation Reproduces a “Threat” vs. “Peaceful” Logic in International Relations
    
    Why does the stark “China threat” vs. “peaceful actor” dichotomy persist, even though China’s foreign policy has grown increasingly articulated? This article argues that China’s own efforts to present a “peaceful rise” paradoxically reproduce the very threat the country aims to negate. Drawing on Social Categorisation Theory and Self-Categorisation Theory, the article shows how China’s self-categorisation directly engages external categorisations of hostility and revisionism and thereby supports the same dichotomy it seeks to refute. In so doing, this research demonstrates how even apparently benign self-categorisations can paradoxically entrench the very dichotomies they aim to dismantle, offering new insights into why polarised views of rising powers endure. The article examines this dynamic through a case study of China’s self-categorisation in Kazakhstan, using visual narrative analysis of three Chinese state-sponsored documentaries on China’s responses to Covid-19, which were broadcast in Kazakhstan at the height of the country's lockdown.
    
    Author: Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Shared Concerns, Distinct Perspectives: Public Opinion on China’s Influence in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
    
    This paper investigates shared trends in public opinion on China in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, focusing on how economic opportunities and concerns shape perceptions across the two countries. Previous studies have focused on Sinophobia in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but more recent data suggests that perceptions in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are becoming more Sinophilic. Drawing on data from the Central Asia Barometer Survey, this study examines both positive and critical views that have emerged as China increases its economic presence in the region through investments in infrastructure, energy, and other sectors. While both nations recognize the potential benefits of Chinese investment, concerns over debt dependency, land acquisition, and labor issues present significant points of caution. Findings show that Kazakhstan's initial high favorability towards China decreased in the late 2010s in response to sovereignty concerns and opposition to foreign labor before recovering in 2022. Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan, similar sentiments reveal an appreciation for economic gains alongside fears of dependency and loss of local control. This comparative analysis sheds light on how public opinion is shaped by local socio-political contexts and shared regional dynamics, including the influence of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This paper offers insights into how Central Asian nations like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan navigate the complex balance between economic engagement with China and concerns for autonomy and long-term sustainability.
    
    Authors: Rashid Gabdulhakov (University of Groningen)* , Frank Maracchione (University of Kent and SPERI-Sheffield)* , Islam Supyaldiyarov (Suleyman Demirel University)* , Jessica Neafie (Nazarbayev University) , Khiradmand Sheraliev (American University of Central Asia)*
  - Sinophobia in the Global East: anti-Chinese sentiment and activity in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan
    
    Global expressions of negativity towards the People’s Republic of China and its economic presence have received extensive empirical coverage but little substantive theoretical attention in international studies. In this paper, we start developing a theoretical framework and typology for global anti-China/anti-Chinese sentiment and activity around the world with the aim of defining Sinophobia and examining its conceptual and empirical overlaps with and distinctions from anti-Americanism. We explore the plausibility of our theoretical framework by analysing the evolving response to China’s rise, influence, and presence over the last decade in two case studies: Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The data we draw upon comes from existing events/protests datasets, including ACLAD and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, and the Central Asia Barometer, which we develop and complement with new data: an original dataset of anti-China policy and semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders including experts, state and local officials and civil society leaders conducted during fieldwork. Our analysis of Sinophobia, aims to allow us to distinguish between the political, societal, and policy causes and implications of different forms of anti-China and anti-Chinese sentiment and activity in the two countries, to be tested on other case studies in Global Majority countries.
    
    Authors: Jamie Gruffydd-Jones (University of Kent)* , Frank Maracchione (University of Kent and SPERI-Sheffield)
  - Energy Rents, Remittances and Regional Trade Cooperation in Central Asia
    
    Since the mid-1990s, Rentier State Theory (RST) has been utilized by Central Asian scholars to analyze emerging political and economic dynamics. Despite a considerable body of work that has been produced, relatively little time has been spent discussing ways in which the Central Asian region might contribute to the development of RST. This article seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the linkages between rent and regional cooperation. In addition to scrutinizing classical rentier states we also examine the effects that rent and remittances have had on other states in the region. The analysis shows that access to rent makes governments of resource-rich Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan reluctant to expand regional cooperation while remittances earned by citizens of the resource-poor Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan disincentivise elites of those countries from working towards cooperation. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that Uzbekistan, which sits between two sets of cases due to depleting resources and an unstable flow of remittance inflows, is most likely to push for regional connectivity. Our findings are confirmed by the gravity model of trade and have implications for the studies of regional cooperation in other parts of the world.
    
    Author: Wojciech Ostrowski (University of Westminster)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Bridging Gaps: Advancing Latin American Studies in International Relations Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable brings together researchers with extensive expertise in Latin American studies across a range of International Relations (IR) approaches and methodologies. Despite the growing relevance of Latin America in global governance, security, and international political economy, the region remains significantly underexplored in mainstream IR scholarship. This lack of focus creates challenges for researchers, limiting opportunities for collaboration, comparative analysis, and theoretical innovation.
  
  The session aims to foster a dialogue that bridges these gaps by uniting scholars with expertise in areas such as foreign policy analysis, regional security frameworks, democratisation processes, migration and post-hegemonic regionalism. Participants include researchers examining the intersection of populism and foreign policy, border studies, the role of leaders in decision-making, and the evolution of health diplomacy and social policy in the region. By incorporating diverse theoretical perspectives, this roundtable offers a space to identify synergies and advance a collective understanding of Latin America’s contributions to IR.
  
  Importantly, the roundtable includes scholars at various career stages, from early-career researchers to established academics, based at a range of institutions across the UK. This diversity ensures a dynamic exchange of ideas and experiences, fostering potential collaborations. Topics to be addressed include regional governance, security dynamics, and the role of Latin America in shaping global norms. By amplifying the voices of researchers focused on Latin America, this roundtable seeks to strengthen the region’s presence in IR scholarship and inspire new avenues of inquiry within the discipline.
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Chair: Brigitte Weiffen (The Open University)
  
  Participants: Brigitte Weiffen (The Open University) , Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton) , Raquel Gontijo (PUC Minas, Brazil) , Thais Doria (University of Warwick) , Andrea Oelsner (University of San Andrés)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Building, Maintaining, and Changing Global Order(s) Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: IIRG Working group , Stephan Engelkamp (King's College London)
  
  Chair: IIRG Working group
  - China’s Global Civilization Initiative as Strategic Meta-Narrative
    
    In recent years China has put forward new global governance initiatives, with the apparent goal of reforming areas of international order such as security or development. Among these is the Global Civilization Initiative, which aims to promote shared values, “inter-civilization dialogue” and cultural diversity. Unlike its more high-profile predecessors the Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative, however, the Global Civilization Initiative does not seem to focus on an immediately pressing issue in global governance. Civilization, unlike development or security, is not a well-established global public good and there are no high-profile international institutions dominated by the United States in this area that China might seek to displace. Yet the fact that it shares the same naming convention as these other major initiatives indicates the project’s importance to the Chinese government. This paper analyses the Global Civilization Initiative as a strategic meta-narrative that attempts to shape a shared understanding of how ideational forces, such as values, ideology and culture, should interact at the global level. It investigates what it tells us about China’s approach to the global governance of ideas, and explores its implications beyond just assisting the Chinese government to push back against the universalism of Western liberal democracy.
    
    Author: Kingsley Edney (University of Leeds)
  - Anti-Technology Extremism in the Anthropocene: Ideological Expressions of a Shared Anxiety
    
    Anti-technology extremism is emerging as a significant force in contemporary political violence, with the potential to shape an era. Although still on the fringes, the frequency and severity of attacks targeting technology have escalated over the past two decades. While opposition to technology is not new, the most advanced forms of modern anti-technology extremism are found within three distinct ideological milieus: insurrectionary anarchism, eco-extremism, and eco-fascism. Within these milieus, the rejection of technology takes on an anti-civilisational dimension, with the ultimate aim of dismantling the techno-industrial civilisation. As such, these milieus, despite differing in narratives, strategic approaches, and ideological foundations, share a common goal: to reject the Anthropocene – a period marked by human domination and technological proliferation. This paper explores anti-technology extremism as a response to the Anthropocene, investigating how technology is depicted as the linchpin of human supremacy and the foundation of modern civilisation. By identifying the ‘homo anthropocenicus’ – those individuals who, due to factors such as class, race, or gender, have become both the architects and beneficiaries of the Anthropocene – the paper delves into the motivations behind this violent opposition. Finally, the paper addresses the practical implications: What can be done about the Anthropocene? How do these three extremist milieus envision and enact their struggle against technology and, by extension, the Anthropocene itself? In answering these questions this study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the politics of anti-technology by offering a nuanced analysis of the ideological commonalities and divergences within these milieus.
    
    Author: Mauro Lubrano (University of Bath)
  - Ontological Security, Modernity, and Founding Narratives of States
    
    Ontological Security Studies has made important contributions for understanding how actors cope with the disruption to their identities and how they try to re-establish functioning autobiographical narratives. Yet is has to go a longer way to establish how different structures of modernity, which is a foundational conceptual element of the theory, affect the nature of ontological crises, biographical narratives, and the courses of actions pursued by actors to as a result thereof. This paper develops a historically contingent understanding of modernity that circumscribes the ideational scope that actors have available to reconstruct their autobiographical narratives. I showcase this argument by focusing on founding narratives of states: attempts to construct a state's foundational narratives that position itself in the international system, while simultaneously enrolling its society in the narrative it seeks to project internationally.
    In doing so, the paper contributes to our understanding of modernity in IR, furthers our understanding of the level-of-analysis question by focusing on elites rather than homogenous state actors, and helps understanding state reconstruction projects.
    
    Author: Martin Kirsch (University of Cambridge)
  - Navigating the insider/outsider positionalities in ethnographic fieldwork in International Organizations
    
    How does ethnography enhance our understanding of democratic spaces within International Organizations (IOs)? Why is it important for International Relations (IR) scholars to address current disciplinary challenges by exploring ethnography in IOs? This paper argues that ethnography offers essential insights into the democratic spaces of International Organizations (IOs), specifically illuminating how civil society groups, particularly transnational religious networks, navigate and impact multilateral governance. Focusing on the Organization of American States (OAS), this study reveals the strategies and motivations of religious coalitions as they engage with critical human rights issues. On the one side, conservative religious groups leverage media, performances, and rallies to challenge progressive agendas, while on the other, alternative religious alliances form strategic collaborations with feminist and LGBTIQ+ groups to advocate and lobby for inclusive policies. This analysis underscores the methodological importance of ethnography in International Relations (IR), as it captures the nuanced dynamics and lived experiences of religious actors within these democratic spaces. The author’s own positionality—as both an insider and outsider—enriches the study, based on in-depth ethnographic research conducted at official and non-official meetings of the OAS such as the Summit of the Americas (June 2022) in Los Angeles, CA, the 52nd OAS General Assembly in Lima, Peru (October 2022), the 53rd OAS General Assembly in Washington DC (June 2023), and two regional meetings of the studied coalitions in Argentina and Uruguay. This research advances an understanding of how ethnographic approaches can confront pressing challenges in IR by uncovering the complex interactions shaping IO governance.
    
    Author: Ely Orrego Torres (Northwestern University)
  - “Not Everything Was Done by the Americans”: The British Origins of IR in China and the Development of Sino-British Transnational Elite Knowledge Networks from the 1970s to the 2000s.
    
    Over the past decade, a new historiography has emerged that examines the origins of the Chinese International Relations (IR) discipline and Chinese conceptions of world politics. This historiographical approach focuses on the post-Mao era, a pivotal period that enabled the introduction of Western IR traditions through the efforts of U.S. institutions and Sino-American educational exchanges. While the role of U.S. institutions was indeed crucial in promoting Western IR after 1978, much of the literature overemphasizes the significance of Sino-American connections, which obscures the contributions of other influential actors to the development of Chinese IR and the socialization of Chinese IR scholars.
    
    This article, through a transnational historical approach, original archival research, and elite interviews, offers a novel account of how British universities contributed to the rise of Chinese IR. I argue that British universities not only played a significant role in the academic socialisation of Chinese IR scholars and the expansion of Western IR in China, but also facilitated the emergence of a transnational elite knowledge network of IR scholars that supported the management of Sino-British relations in post-Mao China.
    
    Author: Ferran Perez Mena (Durham University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Creative methods for bringing the climate into collective existence Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)
  
  Chair: Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
  
  Discussant: Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
  - Affective Dispositions and creative nonfiction: the journey towards intimate ethical communities
    
    This paper draws on the pre-existing conversations of autoethnography and affect theory to imagine the disposition required for agents to notice. In articulating an affective disposition to notice the paper makes an argument that our biographical histories inform not just our position as authors but as audience members as well. This positioning of the individual as an hermeneutical being opens up ways of engaging with creative forms of nonfiction. I argue that so understood individuals, in relation, have the potential to open pathways to alternative visions of the political community, imagined as widely as possible. The argument is made that affective dispositions play a role in whether such communities can, and do, incorporate the non-human alongside the human. In making this argument the paper attends to ongoing conversations within the ethical pluriverse and what this means for a more intimate rendering of ethical international relations.
    
    Author: Amanda Beattie (Aston University)
  - Bringing the territory of the mind into ethnographic study of climate politics
    
    Understanding the relationship between ourselves and the biological world is becoming ever more urgent and critical to addressing climate change. Multi-territorial methodology is a collaborative method that we are developing for a British Academy project that aims to centre climate agreement-making in the Amazon through study of Brazil’s presidency of COP30. The researcher’s reflections are a central pillar of the ethnographic method. However, the researcher’s mind as a territory with its own land relations that inform how climate politics are experienced and made sense of remains largely outside ethnographic reflection. In this paper, I begin to explore how explicit recognition of the territory of my mind through my research practice offers a unique way to bring a living world into knowledge of the negotiation room and challenges a politics that, at present, is failing to prevent dying worlds.
    
    Author: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)
  - Thinking and writing through ‘affective alliances’
    
    This paper takes inspiration from Ailton Krenak’s reflections on ‘affective alliances’ that presuppose bonds between worlds that are not equal, calling upon us to slow down as we ponder the radical inequality of both ‘people and beings’ as we inhabit our daily lives and think about world politics. Following Krenak, I explore what it might mean to be ‘in constellation’ with human and more-than-human others, in proximity and at a distance, as ethical, political, academic, and creative practice. Zooming in on ways of knowing, being and co-creating that affirm interdependence rather than disconnection I glean resources from reflexive writing, critical pedagogy, and art-based research to encourage more plural sensibilities to selfhood, otherness, and our embeddedness in the more-than-human world.
    
    Author: Erzsébet Strausz (Central European University)
  - Vegetal Storytelling for Environmental Justice
    
    This paper expands on Jamie Allen’s concept of “planetary intimacy” (2024) as the “trust and vulnerability necessary for building networks of solidarity”. Specifically, I discuss methods to create intimate learning in and outside the classroom to facilitate a sense of closeness with nonhumans to build more just worlds with them. Specifically, my contribution reflects on the experience of leading storytelling workshops to explore the possibility of “vegetal intimacy”. These workshops guide participants to reflect on their life with plants as an affective experience of worldmaking. As a result, the workshops practice the political potential of vegetal intimacy in creative ways to shape new and more radical ways to imagine the future.
    
    Author: Giulia Carabelli (Queen Mary University of London)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Critical Drone Scholarship beyond the War on Terror Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Emil Archambault (University of Durham) , Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  
  Chair: Emil Archambault (University of Durham)
  
  Discussant: Emil Archambault (University of Durham)
  - Coercion from Afar: Exploring the Coercive Effects of Armed Drones from a Feminist Perspective
    
    Over the past two decades, drones have transformed war(s) and the conduct of hostilities. While the effects of their use have sparked extensive debate – particularly in the context of counterterrorism operations – disagreement seems to persist regarding their role in and effects on coercion. While some scholars argue that drones’ loitering capabilities come with increased coercive potential vis-à-vis other weapons, others see (the threat of) ‘remote warfare’ as lacking the resolve shown by ‘boots on the ground’. This paper builds on the existing literature on gender and drone violence to look at a more integrated use of armed drones in contemporary wars. It argues that assessing the coercive character of armed drones requires consideration beyond their technological capabilities and highlights the importance of the socio-political context in evaluating their coercive effects. Adopting a feminist perspective, it posits that the ambiguous coercive character of armed drones stems from their simultaneous hyper-masculinising and feminising effects for the states that deploy them. Ultimately, this paper provides insights into the gendered nature of armed drones and indicates how taking a feminist approach to the question of whether drones can coerce requires us to rethink the concept of coercion itself.
    
    Author: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - ‘They know my guys are good’: Physicality and Elitism in Canadian Drone Operator Identity
    
    Military drone operators have long been a particular kind of military member. For states that had them, drones were primarily long-range assets, where operators engaged targets at a distance and often stayed far away from the grit of war. As a result, they were sometimes portrayed as lesser military members, even cowards, both within and outside of military institutions. In the last five years, smaller, shorter-range drones have been proliferating among state and non-state actors. The war in Ukraine has also shifted the idea of what a drone operator is, with Ukrainian operators being portrayed as close to the front line, but still technically proficient. Using interviews with Canadian army members who use drones, this paper shows the shifting narratives around drone use are reflected in Canada as well. One unit in particular was attached to the idea that drone operators were in some way more ‘elite’ than average soldiers, expressing this through physical and mental strength. This re-negotiation of drone operator identity changes the way that drone operators are perceived beyond the war on terror, shifting the focus away from cowardice and towards a regular or elite military member.
    
    Author: Bibi Imre-Millei (Lund University, Sweden)
  - Drone Training: Normate Extinction in the Militarized University
    
    This paper argues that drones are becoming compulsory fixtures in everyday life of (neo)liberal democracies in the Global North. To trace this argument, I examine the rise of drone education programs—UAV engineering and operating programs in US universities—and put forth the concept of “drone training” to articulate how the drone—as a technology and a process of subjectification—is transforming the desired form of the liberal subject. I have two objects of study: The programs’ marketing materials, which largely occur in engineering and robotics departments, and the press surrounding the annual Drone-Brain-Race at the University of Florida. The 'training' I describe is more than simply teaching students how to build and operate drones but the process that produces the normate subject of the drone age. My analysis is guided by conversations about compulsory able-bodiedness in Critical Disability Studies (McRuer 2006, 2018; Puar 2017; Kim 2017), which I use to understand how the discourse around drone technology in US higher education implicates the values of human ability and passivity. This article develops Critical Drone Studies by arguing that disability is central to understanding drone technology’s role in militarization subjects that are supposedly ‘safe’ from drones by living in the heart of empire.
    
    Author: Amy Gaeta (University of Cambridge)
  - ‘Hot Air in Shenzhen’: Experimental Attachments in Drone Leisure/Security
    
    In analysing predominantly Anglo-American applications of a narrow set of drone technologies and practices, largely through a logic of Empire, early critical work on drones has made important contributions by relating the drone’s political impact to its materiality, dominant visual regime and articulation of colonial technologies (Gregory 2011). Still, a great deal of this work has emphasised particular understandings of space, technology and human agency. I argue that these assumptions reproduce and enable particular geopolitical futures not just through the drone’s material functioning, but also through the way drones are imagined. To think about how drones operate adjacent to, alongside and juxtaposed to this dominant imaginary, I re-conceptualise our multifaceted material-affective attachments to the drone and its promises. Concentrating on experimental practices of leisure and security in the city of Shenzhen, I argue we require new critical vocabularies to analyse China’s more-than-human drone entanglements and the unstable encounters that amplify, subvert and rework them. I show that this means considering how we encounter drones across a range of sites – certainly those that generate explicit violence such as borders and battlefields, but also those less obvious sites of leisure and entertainment that attach us to violence in much more implicit ways.
    
    Author: Callum Smith (Queens University Belfast)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Discourses and practices of the international Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: PPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  - Stable economies/stable gender order
    
    In this paper, I adopt a queer, post-structuralist approach to political economy by interrogating how economic meaning-making is inherently bound up with and (re)produces the stability of the gender binary order. I argue that the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) imperative for economic stability depends on the coherence and stability of the binary gender order and the heterosexual matrix; that a stable economy needs a stable gender order. To do so, I develop a queer discourse (and visual) analysis that interrogates 93 of the Fund’s publications on gender, including 77 online publications and 16 online videos. I find three dominant subject positions, ‘the working woman, ‘the heterosexual nuclear family’ and the ‘risky sexual subject’. In this paper, I work to denaturalise these subject-positions, revealing how the ideological work of sex, gender and sexuality structure the very production of economic knowledge. This has limiting political effects, because it circumscribes possibilities for economic behaviours and structures around particular expressions (or performances) of neoliberal masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality and homonormativity. I find that the Fund’s policy positions are expressly heterosexist, and that more broadly, the ordering of economic knowledge is deeply imbricated with the binary gender order. This paper is therefore a call for political economists to take queer theory seriously, and for queer theory to interrogate questions of political economy.
    
    Author: Georgia Peters (University of Sydney)
  - Making ‘Domestic’ Terrorism in the Aftermath: Inquiries and Internal Reviews in Britain
    
    This paper explores how inquiries and internal reviews into terrorist attacks make them ‘domestic’, by discursively separating political violence from its international, political and historical context. By undertaking fact-finding work, inquiries apply a technocratic, micro-level focus to the days, hours, minutes and seconds before an atrocity – jettisoning the international and historical factors which may otherwise have appeared relevant. The violence is produced as an ‘event’, discrete in its nature, and disconnected from international politics, foreign policy and international history. Inquiries and internal reviews tend to create knowledge, instead, around ‘missed opportunities’ for security professionals to have intervened in the short-term or missed chances for information sharing between frontline agencies and counterterrorism officers. They then draw a linear connection to the technocratic solutions which would close off the potential for a repeat occurrence, recommending adjustments to communications technologies used by the emergency services, training for event staff, or additional reporting requirements for stockists of chemicals or vehicles that have been used in recent attacks. But amongst this prosaic work of ‘bounding’ and knowing the event, occurs a simultaneous unknowing of any connections to international politics, foreign policy and history. Drawing from work on ignorance studies, the paper explores how inquiries – in their search to ‘know’ – also enact a profound unknowing of the international drivers of terrorist attacks. The work of the aftermath involves this deeper reconstitution of the socio-political imaginary, through unknowing any connections between foreign policy and the ‘blowback’ of violence upon the metropole. Inquiries and reviews construct ‘domestic’ terrorism through this ontological work of unknowing. The imaginary of ‘radicalisation’ facilitates much of this work. It assists the sidestepping of foreign policy as a motivation for attacks, before locating the causes of terrorism in the unregulated spread of extremist material online, and its consumption by vulnerable individuals.
    
    Author: Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Warwick)
  - Resistance to the International.
    
    This paper explores the problem of theorizing resistance and the international simultaneously and/or in the same place. The paper first explores the negative: because of disciplinary frames, resistance and the international are generally treated as mutually exclusive. How can practices which occur inside sovereign states now also exist outside them? The social quality of resistance is presumed to impossible in the spaces and temporalities provided by the international. Attempts to scale up local resistance to international resistances and/or explore novel forms of international resistance that express themselves locally appear misguided. Second, the paper explores the affirmative: the problem of theorizing resistance and the international also exists in their similarity. The concept of resistance owes its existence to Newtonian principles that appeal natural and therefore universal and such principles are foundational to universalist theories of the modern sovereign state project and, therefore, the international. Resistance and the international are indebted to the same modern epistemological and ontological commitments. If they are cut from the same modernist cloth, can resistance be positively thought outside this paradox without falling back into the negative problem of social? The paper concludes by arguing against both negative and positive propositions. Instead, it proposes theorizing resistance as a concept in need of release or suspension from its excising conceptual paternity. Resistance must, in other words, be treated in its own right – not as an effect of subjects and/or objects colliding in a predetermined theatre (of politics and/or power), nor as a force that emerges from the outside or beyond, but instead as a disposition that is indifferent to forms of politics, power and knowledge that claim it as a dependent variable. This disposition, in other words, resists the problem by theorizing resistance and the international simultaneously and/or in the same place as “resistance to the international.”
    
    Author: Geoffrey Whitehall (Acadia University, Canada)
  - The ‘Bodies-in-Suffering’ of COVID-19 in Brazil
    
    This paper proposes that COVID-19 presents a challenge to the idea of the iconic image and that the problem of the images is not the images per se, but how we look and engage with them. I argue that we must look at COVID-19 from a perspective that allows us to see beyond the iconic images to address a form of suffering that is not iconic or visceral but silent, mediated and subjective. This paper will focus on the case of COVID-19 in Brazil and the testimonies given by victims and families of victims of COVID-19 during the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI). I will first discuss the power of the image in international relations and how iconic images have framed debates over conflicts and war. Second, I will discuss how it is possible to go beyond the mere looking at images to consider a perspective in which it is possible to ‘watch’ the ‘bodies in suffering’ and challenge our affective engagement with the pain of others. Third, I will discuss some visual representations of COVID-19. Lastly, I will address the testimonies given during the CPI, and how it is possible to (re)address them to engage with a perspective that allows us to acknowledge people's suffering during COVID-19.
    
    Author: Marcelle Trote Martins (University of Manchester)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Engaging Defence and Security policy through different stages of academic careers Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable brings together academics from different institutions and stages of career to discuss how they and their institutions engage defence and security policy makers and implementers. The intent of this roundtable is to demonstrate how academics at different career stages can and do engage with government in different ways. We will cover traditional pathways such as direct secondments and sponsored research, but also more emergent partnerships such as direct involvement with government activity by academics outside of funded participation, ad hoc relationships that have spun out of more organised efforts and how all of these provide different opportunities for academics to engage policy figures. The members of this round table are drawn from a variety of backgrounds and will show the myriad different ways engagement can take place.
  
  **** note for organisers - One of our participants (DB) has security concerns so would prefer to remain unlisted on the final programme. They have also requested that their participation be concentrated on the last day. The roundtable can progress without them but it would benefit if these concerns could be addressed.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln)
  
  Participants: Alex Neads (University of Durham) , Kristen Harkness (University of St Andrews) , Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln) , Amy Mumby (University of Lincoln)
- 09:00 → 18:00
  
  / Exhibition hall open The Exchange, Europa Hotel
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Existentialism for existential times? Contemplating the Anthropocene, and other catastrophes Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)
  - New Existentialism, Climate Security and the Shadows of Strategic Ignorance
    
    Much has been said about climate security in reference to the ‘threat multiplier’ frame while others have sought to include the planetary and ecosystems as policy contexts. In this paper, I argue that climate security as currently conceived in strategic policy documents and in the academic literature is an exercise in strategic ignorance, one that requires a discounting of existential risks. The discounting of existential and extreme risk, however, produces not a manageable policy context, but instead helps responsibility-bearing institutions such as the state to evade responsibility of foreseeable harm. I add to existing discussion in the climate security literature that unless directly linked to questions of accountability and responsibility in reference to harms, climate security does not provide security for climate or people. In doing so I seek to innovate the philosophical understanding of existentialism as accountability for one’s action, to build a novel approach to understand responsibility as responding to past, present, and foreseeable harms. I argue this is particularly relevant in the context of future questions about existential climate politics as they unfold.
    
    Author: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
  - The Paradox of Post-Conflict Suicides and Existentialist Ontological Security
    
    Camus’ Sisyphus shoots off with the bold claim that, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem: that of suicide’. Should we accept philosophy as the master science of sciences in the ordo cognoscendi, suicide ought doubtless to be a prime interest in International Relations (IR) as well. However, suicide remains largely untheorised beyond disquisitions dependant upon questions of terrorism and political activism. Indeed, scholarly works such as Michelsen’s (2016) explore the self-sacrifice of combatants or actors, where suicide both possesses purpose and enacts a political agenda, but eschew senseless suicidal acts of everyday people. A chief example of this is presented in the case of the so-called ‘ceasefire generation suicides’ in Northern Ireland. There, during the 26 years after the peace agreement suicide rates have amounted to double the number of conflict-related deaths during the Troubles (NISRA 2024). Especially significant is that the 25-34 age group accumulates the highest number of deaths by suicide—a segment of population that was very young or not even born yet when the conflict ended. While IR’s focus on ‘political’ suicides (Fierke 2013) remains here uncontested, it produces the upshot of depoliticising everyday suicides. Drawing on the scholarship from peace psychology and qualitative field research undertaken in the region, this paper repoliticises the issue and considers the potential contributions of existentialist philosophy and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) to this rare but critical case of suicides in post-conflict societies. It does so not from the worn-out positivist approach of causal analysis; rather, it seeks to understand the international political sociology of the following question: how can peace bring about the ultimate and signifying, however paradoxical, violence—that exerted upon oneself after the enemy has ceased to be a threat?
    
    Author: Albert Cullell Cano (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - When and how did everything become so existential?
    
    When did everything get so existential? Novel arguments about living freely amidst social alienation emerged in the early-20th century to grapple with epochal transformations and war. Yet today, many of existentialist patterns of thought and action have evolved to destabilize our life in common while imbuing daily existence with a pervasive sense of dread. Birthed as diagnosis of and antidote to crisis, existentialism ended up convincing many that every uncertainty or difference marks a full-blown existential threat. Drawing on theories of popular culture from within and outwith IR, this paper asks how existentialism turned all our times into existential problems. It begins with existentialists’ own dissemination efforts through novelisation, drama, popular magazine writings, and more. It then charts existentialism’s supernova-like expansion through nearly every genre of popular culture in the latter 20th century. Music, film, television, and literature helped introduce multiple generations to existentialism, but also resulted in the ‘jargonization’ of, among other things, ‘authenticity’ as a check on ’alienation’. This unintended effect transformed the philosophy of freedom in diverse but often perverse ways, as can be seen across right wing, white power, incelibate, climate denying, and conspiracy theory communities, all of which invoke the tropes and logics of existentialism while denying and fomenting moment that threaten our common existence.
    
    Author: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
  - Living in times of climate change: Finding meaning in the face of possible extinction
    
    Climate change presents not only a policymaking problem, but also a fundamental challenge to the way we make sense of the world. One of its many effects has been to upset our experience of time. The seemingly eternal geophysical world is now changing before our eyes, creating a permanent sense of urgency about ever-smaller windows of opportunity, while modernity’s notion of continuous progress is no longer tenable when “the end of the world” is a genuine possibility. But what does it mean to live in times of global climate change? How does awareness of climate change affect the human condition and our visions of politics? To answer these questions, this paper draws on philosophical existentialism’s insights about the experience of dread and the search for meaning. Empirically, it investigates the temporal imaginaries underpinning visionary projects aimed at safeguarding humanity, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the “Billion Year Archive”. It finds that apocalyptic visions of the future clash with the human inability to imagine one’s own non-being, making it difficult for most of us to fully face up to the threat of climate change. This illuminates one of the psycho-philosophical challenges posed by climate change, explaining why so much of our contemporary politics rests on fantasies of survival.
    
    Author: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Financial regulation from past to present Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Martin Hearson (Institute of Development Studies)
  - The impact of welfare on capital controls
    
    This paper investigates the relationship between welfare state and capital flow management. Using macro-sociological data, it assesses the impact of social spending on the level of capital controls. With the aim of complementing the literature on the implications of financial liberalization for welfare regimes, we argue that the amount of welfare spending and, more importantly, its coverage and direction affect the degree of capital account openness. In theoretical terms, such relationship is consistent with protective and productive functions of welfare states. Empirically, both correlational evidence and a short prototypical case study on Chile and Uruguay indicate that countries with more traditional approaches to welfare - that segment the working class and redistribute horizontally - tend to adopt higher levels of capital controls; while countries with more active welfare measures and more inclusive social policies tend to be less reliant on capital account restrictions. In a context shaped by recurrent financial instability, the paper encourages the view of welfare states as macro-prudential tools that allow states to conciliate the requirements of capital accumulation and the need for socio-political cohesion.
    
    Authors: Pedro Perfeito da Silva (University of Exeter) , Martino Comelli (Slovak Academy of Sciences)*
  - Historically Stalled by Design? - Understanding the Slow Progress of the Capital Markets Union (CMU)
    
    This paper explores the slow development of the CMU despite the pressing need for macroeconomic stabilisation in light of COVID-19, Brexit, and ongoing challenges posed by the EU's green transition, digitalisation, and European sovereignty. As financing questions have climbed to the top of the agenda, the EU is renewing efforts to establish a more centralised supervisory framework to enhance the efficiency of its financial markets. Yet, persistent obstacles remain, including the fragmentation of European capital markets, a heavy reliance on bank funding, and political resistance to deeper financial integration and harmonisation. As EU authorities currently push for expanded powers to oversee major stock exchanges and cross-border financial infrastructure, including proposals to strengthen ESMA, the CMU’s stagnation is frequently linked to contemporary challenges. To gain a deeper understanding of the obstacles hindering CMU’s progress, this paper traces its historical roots to contextualise its current stalemate.
    Building on accounts that highlight EEC member states' resistance to free capital movement prior to the liberalisation shift in the 1970s and 80s, this study traces the development of the CMU from its first formal mentioning in the 1966 Segré Report. It analyses intra-EEC rivalries, especially the views of European banks, securities firms, insurances, and stock exchanges on the Commission's early initiatives for market-based finance. Apart from these underexplored agents, the UK's role in shaping the regulatory agenda to protect the City will be examined.
    Using archival research, BIS and IMF data, and policy documents, this paper explores the agents and strategies that have influenced the CMU as a cornerstone of European economic integration. Situating the CMU's contemporary slow progress within the broader contexts of European financial history and global financial hierarchies, this paper contributes to broader discussions in IPE regarding the evolution of financial systems in light of national and supranational interests.
    
    Authors: Alexis Drach (Université Paris 8) , Judith Koch (University of Sussex)
  - The international character of national currencies: the creation of a monetary unit of account in Argentina, 1875-1881
    
    Some scholars in the nominalist tradition explain the origins of money as arising from the imposition of an abstract unit of account by the state. This paper studies the genesis of the national currency in Argentina and argues that the creation of the monetary unit of account involved not the proclamation of an abstract unit but the inscription of a new unit into an existing international standard. In colonial times, the territory of contemporary Argentina was under the monetary system of the Spanish Empire. This remained the case even after the May Revolution in 1810 because civil wars and the division of the country prevented the creation of a national currency. It was only after unification in 1861, when the foundations of the nation-state began to be laid, that attempts at creating a national unit of account began: starting with law 733 of 1875, followed by law 974 of 1879, and concluding in 1881 with the passing of law 1130, known as Ley General de Monedas (General Currency Law). By reviewing legal documents and legislative debates, I show that the different attempts at creating a national unit of account involved deciding whether to set the new unit equal to or as a fraction of an existing international unit, including Japanese yens, U.S. dollars, British pounds or, what was finally chosen, Latin Monetary Union’s francs. In turn, the monetary units of all these currencies in competition for becoming world money were set to a quantity of silver or gold. Thus, even when the choice of a national unit of account was arbitrary in terms of the international monetary unit to which it would be pegged and at which proportion, it was far from an abstraction but a concrete decision within the framework of an international monetary system.
    
    Author: Nicolás Aguila (Universität Witten/Herdecke)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Governance and Legitimacy in a Changing Technological Context Room 5, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Chair: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
  - From Boom to Bust: How Digitalized Actor-Network Theory Explains the Rise and Fall of Taobao Villages
    
    Abstract:
    The digital economy has been transforming rural development, as evidenced by the emergence of new spatial forms like Taobao Villages in peri-urban areas. In this paper, we introduce a new concept—Digitalized Actor-Network Theory (DANT)—to analyze a typical digital economy platform. Specifically, we examine the emergence of actors, driving mechanisms, and digitalized social networks within Taobao Villages in China. Our findings reveal that: 1)the formation and growth of Taobao Villages involve ongoing and immediate communication with diverse actor-networks; 2) key actors, including government entities, e-commerce experts, local social networks, and Taobao live streamers, collaborate to build networks at various stages based on their specific objectives, visions, and values; 3) Actors within the network continually adapt their identities through effective and immediate online communication facilitated by the digital economy platform. We anticipate that this study could advance the enduring Actor-Network Theory (ANT) into the new digitalized era, thereby challenging traditional production-side urban economics theory.
    Keywords: Actor-network theory; Rural redevelopment; Taobao Village; Transformation mechanism
    
    Author: Zhonghua GU (Guangzhou University, China)
  - Cyber Governance, Policy Challenges and Opportunities in Post-conflict Somalia
    
    Post-conflict societies face unique governance challenges, particularly in managing the intersection of traditional governance structures and the rapidly evolving domain of cyberspace. This paper examines the complexities of cyber governance and policy development in post-conflict environments, using Somalia as a key case study. Somalia’s journey from a failed state towards stability has been complicated by the rise of cyber threats, the digital divide, and fragile governance structures, which pose significant barriers to effective cybersecurity policy and governance mechanisms.
    Cyber governance is essential in ensuring the protection of critical infrastructure, mitigating cyber threats, and fostering long-term state-building efforts. In post-conflict Somalia the development and implementation of comprehensive cyber policies are often hindered by a lack of institutional capacity, political instability, and weak regulatory frameworks. This paper builds on existing literature about the relationship between technology and post-conflict governance (Brinkerhoff, 2006; Menkhaus, 2018) focusing specifically on the role of cyber policies in supporting or undermining state-building efforts. While mechanisms, outlined in Somalia’s NCA (2017), are steps toward creating a centralised regulatory framework, they remain underdeveloped due to the country’s fragile political context. This paper explores the complex dynamics of cyber policy and governance in Somalia, a country grappling with the remnants of civil unrest while navigating new frontiers in cyberspace. Cyber governance, including policies and strategies, are crucial to rebuilding efforts as they intersect with national security, international collaboration, and regional stability. Drawing on recent developments in Somalia and the involvement of regional and international organisations this paper examines how existing frameworks address critical infrastructural vulnerabilities, digital divide and support cyber resilience in fragile political environments, compounded by social factors. By addressing the implementation gaps and the role of external actors in these processes, the paper aims to propose a more sustainable path for cyber governance and its implications for state-building efforts.
    
    Author: Ramsha Ashraf (Northeastern University London)
  - Authoritarianism within Democracies: Democratisation and Digitalisation in the Republic of Korea
    
    Authoritarianism threatens democracy but coexists within democracy in the digital era. Digital authoritarianism and democracy scholars, using a practice approach, have asserted that authoritarian and democratic regimes implement authoritarian practices (AP) in the digital sphere, such as blocking websites or filtering their contents. While this approach helps us comprehend real-world practices, it needs a comprehensive framework to examine the dynamics behind them.
    Current studies have neglected the relationships among entities involved in digital authoritarian practices (DAP). The practice lens enables a focus on the entities implementing AP, more than on the government. The digital era, characterised by technological advancements, has seen corporations emerge as major political actors, transforming traditional government-centred governance.
    Furthermore, scholars overlook democracy's interactive features. While the practice approach is beneficial in examining authoritarianism in democracy, it should not neglect the outcomes of DAP. In a democracy, the social reaction to AP is an input into the political process. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the existence of authoritarianism in democracy in the digital sphere and the results of these practices.
    Adopting the concept of a “hybrid regime”— authoritarian and democratic traits coexist in a single state—expands the digital sphere. Analysing the Republic of Korea as an explorative case study highlights two distinct relationships among four entities - government, parliament, citizen and social media enterprise, involved in DAP within a democracy: cooperative and conflictive. Examining the legal framework for AP in a democracy and developing policies that align with emerging technologies will help us understand the involvement of democratic government entities in AP and the public's response to them.
    This research aims to develop a framework for analysing DAP in democracy by exploring why democracy allows digital authoritarian practice? How are multiple actors engaging in these practices in democracy? What are the relationships between these entities?
    
    Author: Sahngmin Shin (University of St Andrews)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Home and Homemaking in International Relations Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Home is one of those concepts that we all, consciously or not, relate to on a daily basis. Simultaneously the most universal and particular of concepts, home is fraught with contestation. Whether home is understood as a politically demarcated territory which ‘The Home Office’ governs and wars are declared in the name of; a spatially defined dwelling where people live, work and die; a site for political, social and cultural formation; a ghostly reminder of a place one used to belong to; or a destination one wishes to arrive at, home is as Katherine Brickell has argued ‘one of the most idealized sites of human existence’. Idealised for the promises it holds and the hope it contains, how it is supposed to function, who is welcome in it, who is responsible for running it, how this is done, and with what emotional, economic and creative input.
  
  With some exceptions, Home, in whichever way it is approached, is not a common site for investigations in the discipline of IR. Wishing to rectify this, through an exploration of home at various levels – the personal, the communal, the national, and the international – this roundtable explores the how home functions in international relations. Phenomenologically it explores the ‘emotional desire’ (Diane Chambers) of home at these various levels, as well as unpacking the material and embodied practices and costs associated with home and homemaking in several different sites. From this the roundtable invites a space from which to begin an examination of what it recognises as a neglected focus for the discipline.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  
  Participants: Julia Welland (University of Warwick) , Pauline Zerla , Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex) , Chana Rose Rabinovitz (Queen Mary University of London) , Shirin Rai (SOAS)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Imageries of Nation: Nationalism, Gender and Militarization Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Gendering Narratives of Military Widowhood, Bravery and Sacrifice: A Study of War Widows in India
    
    This paper looks at the narratives around war widows in India and the construction of the glorified and self-sacrificing "Veer Naris" (Warrior Women). Feminist scholars have been arguing for long that militaries and militarism cannot sustain without the control of women and notions of ideal femininity. The construct of Widowhood have recieved relatively less attention by Feminist Scholars. This study critically analyses the construction of the ideal narrative of "Veer Naris" that inevitably leads to the militarization of the Indian war widows. The paper explores how the state controls the Indian war widows and their associated narratives for militaristic purposes. What are the implications of this co-option of their trauma and suffering through the state-driven narrative of "Veer Nari"? How does this glorified narrative of the self-sacrificing warrior women contrast with their lived realities? What roles do these narrative plays in the context of the Indian military? War widows do not constitute a homogeneous group; these women are divided along the lines of caste, class and religion. Some war widows join the military, and others do not. The paper analyses state policies of compensation, welfare and recognition of war widows and print media narratives to deconstruct the narrative of war widows as "Veer Nari".
    
    Author: Kiran Chauhan (Jawaharla Nehru University)
  - Feminist Discourses as a Legitimising Tool for Nationalist Imaginaries in Kashmir : 2019-2024
    
    I seek to address the role of feminist discourses in legitimising nationalist imaginations in Kashmir. I employ a feminist-informed discourse analysis to identify the construction of gender identities in postcolonial nation States. The Kashmir conflict results from competing nationalist identities manifested as dominant/subversive hegemonic constructions constituted within feminist discourse. I employ a Gramscian framework of hegemony and argue that contesting ideologies of Kashmiri and Indian Nationalism are built on consensus in Kashmir’s civil society using women’s mobilisation and representation. By looking at the period after the abrogation of Kashmir’s special constitutional status, I argue that women’s participation in social-political movements aimed to 1. assert India’s claim on Kashmir 2. support Kashmir’s autonomy 3. politicised issues as citizenship reinforcing contesting nationalist ideologies (Indian and Kashmir). A key claim of this paper is that feminist politics is not always antagonistic to nationalist projects but can legitimise them using the case of Kashmir. The postcolonial dimension of the Kashmir conflict originates from the coloniser's epistemological dominance and India’s assertion of national identity results in militarised colonial projects, failing to account for Kashmiri women’s histories and experiences. I address this silencing of women’s voices by using narratology, focusing on verbal discourses where lived experiences of Kashmiri women challenge colonial historiography. I focus on women-led organizations Zanaan Wanaan and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons that support women impacted by conflict and targeted by India, an issue insufficiently covered in International and National Media. The UN 2000 Women's Peace and Security Agenda in India is informed by hegemonic constructions of Indian Nationalism and focuses on reducing conflict-related sexual violence and adding more women to the Armed forces. It fails to address the vulnerability of Kashmiri women. By foregrounding feminist discourse as a basis for contesting nationalist imaginaries - I offer alternatives to such securitisation.
    
    Author: Divyangna Sharma (The University of Edinburgh)
  - Femininities in Masculinities, Masculinities in Femininities: A Historical Perspective on the Construction of the Indian Nation
    
    Extant literature has established the significance of gender in nationalisms. Queer Theory has called upon scholars of International Relations (IR) to reapproach core IR concepts centring a queer lens. This paper builds upon these two axes to discern what gender relations and ideals have historically underlain the multiple imaginations of the Indian nation. The paper traces ideals of masculinities and femininities revered through different visions and eras of Indian history. In so doing, it argues that not only have these ideals continued to change over time, but multiple meanings of masculinities and femininities have co-existed, competed, and intersected, creating a complex gendered history of Indian nationalisms. Equally, however, some continuities remain in how gender is defined across eras. Significantly, the paper goes beyond the binary of masculinities versus femininities to demonstrate that in India, historically, the two have been co-constitutive: it locates the existence of the feminine in the masculine, and the masculine in the feminine. The paper then considers what ideals have remained common across periods, what have been forgotten, and what this means for contemporary national imaginations. It draws on Feminist IR theory, Postcolonial theory, and Queer Theory, illustrating a non-Western understanding of gender informing nationalisms.
    
    Author: Shireen Manocha (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE))
  - Gender, Nationalism and Militarism in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Why Do Women Join the Peshmerga?
    
    Women’s involvement in the armed forces is a contested topic within feminist scholarship. Insights on women’s motivations in the so-called “Global South” enrich prevalent Western debates on this issue. This article analyzes why women join the armed forces of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), the Peshmerga, from an intersectional perspective. Based on interviews with female Peshmerga of two distinct generations and ethnographic observation in Erbil, the capital of the KRI, this study concludes that Western gender-stereotypes are not always applicable in the Kurdish context. The paper argues that personal and ideological motivations for joining the Peshmerga are intertwined. Furthermore, it highlights the interconnectedness of family and nationalism in Kurdish society and culture based on past and ongoing insecurity in the region. In the KRI, female Peshmerga not only defy mainstream gender-stereotypes, but also stereotypes of Middle Eastern women’s supposed passivity, highlighting the importance of intersectional approaches. As “double-oppressed” people, as Kurds and as women, the regional focus on Kurdistan highlights the role ethnicity and gender play regarding conflict and (in)security and how we study it. The paper speaks to Feminist literature on agency, gender, and nationalism as well as gender and militarism.
    
    Author: Rawina Trautmann (European University Viadrin)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Immigration Detention: Investigating the Persistence of a Failed Project Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
  - Recycled Sites of Incarceration
    
    Contemporary sites of closed immigration detention across the US, the UK, and Australia are defined by hostile, carceral infrastructures designed to separate and contain. Despite purportedly detaining immigrant populations for administrative purposes, detention centres appear as prisons that distance non-citizens from frameworks of rights and operate with high rates of physical and emotional abuse. These centres are interesting sites of analysis in and of themselves. They often have uses that precede that of immigration detention, with many centres previously functioning as military bases, weapons testing grounds, quarantines, or prisons. This paper focuses on repurposed sites of confinement in migration governance, investigating what the recycling of these spaces reveals to us of the sinewy web that connects the current management of immigrant populations to histories of race, empire, and militarism. The paper will examine the physical infrastructures and geographic locations of these recycled centres and what the repurposing of these sites reveals of the interplay between social systems of domination.
    
    Author: Andonea Dickson (University of Edinburgh)
  - Webs of carcerality: transnational economies of immigration detention and resistance
    
    This paper interrogates the impacts of processes of privatisation and financialisation on the global diffusion of immigration detention. Focusing on the USA, UK, and Australia, it examines the role private corporations and financial interests play in the promotion and spread of detention infrastructures and deterrence logics internationally. In doing so, it details how detention economies are imbricated with those of border security, policing, militarisation, and the prison, weaving a web of carcerality within and between these countries. This provides valuable insights into the mutual reinforcement of outsourcing and externalisation processes and the role of immigration detention in the transnationalisation of migration governance. Furthermore, tracing the international webs of carceral economies raises important questions about the entanglement of racial capitalism, sovereign power, and neoliberal statecraft. Finally, drawing on fieldwork with civil society actors, the paper concludes by asking how these insights might inform strategies of detention abolition and resistance to border violence.
    
    Author: Thom Tyerman (University of Edinburgh)
  - Immigration Detention & Racial Capitalism
    
    Immigration detention systems are expanding across the world despite their failure to deter immigration and despite the fact that they regularly involve inhuman and degrading treatment, as well as discrimination on the basis of race, gender and class. This paper investigates why by examining three factors that help us to understand why immigration detention policies continue to be pursued: (1) the ways in which detention acts as a spectacle; (2) the role of different non-state actors that encourage the expansion of detention; and (3) histories of colonialism that connect to current detention policies through their similarly racialized use of violence and incarceration. In doing so, I argue that understanding immigration detention within a framework of racial capitalism allows us to see how the contemporary political economy of immigration detention builds on longer carceral histories of empire.
    
    Author: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
  - Displacing border violence: Floating detention, everyday incarcerations and abolitionist journeys and horizons
    
    In this presentation I explore the complex interplay between mobility, freedom, and borders as the result of the global landscape of migration and border control, in the context of the Bibby Stockholm barge on the Isle of Portland. Based on ethnographic research on the Isle of Portland between May and September 2024, I approach these issues methodologically from the situated angle of the embodiment of everyday incarcerations and injustices in the concrete experiences of people (including the researcher herself), as they walk to and from and in between the multiple prisons on the islands. I am particularly interested in the ethico-political issues and possibilities at stake in walking together in a context of unfreedom as well as the context of academic research and the boundaries of the so-called ‘field’. By reflecting on the ‘carceral view’ of the barge from the vantage point of another prison, the HMP the Verne, and its simultaneous invisibility down at the port, I proceed with a discussion on imaginaries and experiences of everyday incarcerations but, also, connections emerging between groups of people that states aim to divide and separate along racialised and gendered lines. I conclude this discussion with an image of a travelling ship that was visible in the horizon, as we engaged in conversations about our ongoing journeys that brought us to the Isle of Portland and our dreams for future ones and hopes to reconnect, to reflect on abolitionist views and horizons. In this way, floating vessels transcend their immediate physical presence, becoming symbolic of people's desires to connect and their dreams to travel against and beyond borders and prisons.
    
    Author: Aila Spathopoulou (University of Stirling)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Pedagogical approaches to nuclear politics Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Pedagogical Approaches to Nuclear Politics continues and expands upon a recent workshop which gathered scholars and practitioners to explore innovative methods for teaching on issues related to nuclear politics. The roundtable will feature discussions on traditional and critical approaches, syllabus innovations, and best practices for training the next generation of nuclear experts. There will also be strong representation from the Decolonizing Nuclear Studies team, who will be able to share interactive teaching resources with the audience. The roundtable will be of value to educators, researchers, and practitioners of nuclear politics.
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Chair: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow)
  
  Participants: Anne Harrington (Cardiff University) , Emily Faux (Newcastle University) , Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde) , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Performing Alternative Worlds Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working group
  
  Chair: Andrew Davenport (Aberystwyth University)
  - Why is there no pacifist international theory? Actually, there is.
    
    This paper examines an overlooked site of intersection between pacifism, theology, and International Relations (IR) theory. Frequently discussed as a key theoretical approach to IR, the ‘English School’ investigates the normative dynamics, practices, and intersubjective structuration of order co-constituting International Society, i.e. societies of states. Traditionally employing Martin Wight's ‘Three Traditions of International Theory’ (Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism), the International Society approach has overlooked a coherent pattern of pacifist international thought, known as ‘Inverted Revolutionism.’ Despite its potential to illuminate contemporary political phenomena, this has been overshadowed by a prejudice that all transformative Revolutionism is inherently violent. This paper rearticulates Wight's forgotten tradition of Inverted Revolutionism through an interpretive fusion with Judith Butler’s feminist-oriented nonviolent political thought, critically recentring nonviolence within international theory. Ultimately, this article (a) revitalises pacifism as central to international theory, broadening conceptual and analytical tools, and (b) contributes to debates on nonviolence, bringing international political theory into the fold. Subsequently, this paper revitalises pacifism within International Relations theory, addressing core challenges and needs for contemporary normative scholarship of pacifism in a global world. By integrating nonviolent thought and broadening analytical tools, it promotes diverse perspectives essential for advancing international studies in today’s complex political landscape.
    
    Author: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)
  - Acting prefiguratively: towards an ontology of prefigurative political action
    
    The concept of prefigurative politics has gained an increasing amount of scholarly attention over the last several years with substantial research done on its relevance as a mode of resistance to global capitalism (Raekstad & Gradin, 2022; Monticelli, 2023). Prefigurative approaches to defiance are often contrasted to contentious and strategic modes due to their insistence on the unification of the means and ends relationship in political action. While this has resulted in a plethora of inter-disciplinary research on ‘world building’ and constructing alternatives to the status quo, little to no attention has been paid to the onto-logic of prefigurative political action and how best to conceptualize the enactment of prefiguration (Fians, 2022).
    This paper will address the lack of onto-logical analysis of the mode of political action that prefigurative politics enables. I trace the roots of the strategic and contentious onto-logic of political action in the (post)Hegelian and Marxist tradition according to which an act is political if it involves the active negation of the present (political) conditions for the sake of achieving a pre-defined end.
    Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and his Nietzschean inspired critique of (post)Hegelian dialectical conceptions of sublation, the paper will argue that prefigurative politics are underpinned by an affirmative onto-logic of political action. Instead of engaging in active negation of the status quo as in traditional and contentious modes of resistance, the enactment of prefigurative action involves the passive affirmation of alternative beliefs, habits and ways of life.
    
    Author: Borislav Tsokov (University of St Andrews)
  - In what way is silence performative: investigating the disciplinary effects of a performative understanding of the politics of silence
    
    This paper contributes to the growing caucus of scholars who point to the need to think about the multimodal qualities of silence in international politics (Hatzisavvidou, 2015: Freeden, 2015; 2023; Dingli, 2015: Dingli and Cooke 2017: Vieira et al., 2019: Hansen, 2019). This is because theorisation of how silence relates to politics has moved away from thinking about silence only as the effect of violence or domination–in contrast, silence is theorised as something that cannot be absolutely abolished but a productive problematic that can be an important part of, rather than antithetical to, understanding how political agency is enacted. Here, on the one hand, there is a joint interest in thinking about agency in less disciplined and established ways and thus there is a turn toward seeing how silence can upset dominant disciplinary framings of how political agency can be expressed. However, on the other hand, a keyway that the political potential of thinking about silence in a way that undisciplines our accounts of agency–especially expressions of agency from marginal(ised) positions–has been to cleave to performative theory of agency to capture this process. There is thus, a move toward a performative theory of agency as an attempt to move away from a logocentric account of what silence does in politics. Subsequently, this paper engages with the promises of, and limits to, performative accounts of silence due to a concern that a performative theory of silence may not do justice to the ambiguous, undisciplined, and chaotic way moments of silence can upend existing accounts of how political agency can be understood, articulated, or enacted. In light of this point, the paper thinks through the politics of silence in order to more adequately address the challenging ways in which silence is entwined with international politics and moments of politicisation.
    
    Author: Luke Lavender (Queen May University of London)
  - Care-full refusal: the generative potential of a politics of refusal in global politics
    
    A politics of refusal has increasingly been presented in global politics scholarship as a promising approach for addressing hegemonic colonial, patriarchal and capitalist systems. Rather than seeking to ameliorate, appease or resist these interlocking systems of oppression, the power of a politics of refusal lies in its complete rejection of the underlying logic of these systems. Yet, precisely because of its confronting stance, a politics of refusal can limit its appeal to those comfortable with radical politics. In this article I seek to challenge this perception, drawing on the work of Audra Simpson, bell hooks and Joan Tronto to develop a theory of care-full refusal, showing how conceptualising refusal as an act of care may broaden its appeal. Focusing on its generative and care-filled qualities, refusal thus becomes a mechanism through which traditionally disadvantaged groups can challenge and transform interlocking systems of oppression.
    
    Author: Claire Timperley (Te Herenga Waka--Victoria University Wellington)
  - In Search of Genuine Dialogue Between IR and History
    
    Despite Historical IR’s successes, we argue it has largely failed to foster genuine dialogue between IR and History. While IR scholars have increasingly incorporated H/history into their work, they have often done so without historians’ feedback. Further, historians have resisted similar engagement with IR. Though much of the explanation for this rift lies in History, this paper focuses on the shortcomings of IR’s outreach. We argue that, though Historical IR has brought historical sensibilities, methods, and secondary literature to IR, it often does so in a piecemeal way targeted exclusively at IR’s mainstream that neglects standards of evidence and argumentation in History. Building a genuine interdisciplinary dialogue, we argue, requires a two-step process. First, Historical IR must synthesize these pieces to better appeal to standards of historical knowledge production. Second, scholars must reflexively identify places within History where they can contribute to ongoing debates. To illustrate Historical IR’s potential as a bridge, we turn to the recent ‘history wars’ at the American Historical Association (AHA) and related controversy over the New York Times’ 1619 Project. We demonstrate how Historical IR can help bring theoretical reflexivity to History to focus resources on past harms that have metastasized into contemporary global injustices.
    
    Author: Adam Lerner (UMass Lowell, USA)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Power, State, and International Relations with South East Europe Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Convener: SEEWG Working group
  
  Chair: Nina Djukanović (University of Oxford)
  - Theorizing Hyperreality and Visual Securitization: The Case of Resurrection Ertugrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid
    
    Visual securitization as a framework indicates whether the images can speak security without necessarily discussing types of images. This article asks how the securitizing discourse can be normal for an audience to accept it: One day, the West is a security threat; the other day, it is a long-term friend in Turkey. This study shows this is possible via the moving images’ power of establishing a hyper-reality that perpetuates a context of securitization. However, while securitization is perpetuated, the narrative is flexible enough to move the same issues to desecuritization. This is because the politician’s image is the “plot” spoiler and “plot setter,” which is accepted as true by the audience. With this, the audience accepts (de)securitization before the politician (de)securitizes the issue through discourse. This type of imagination and the intertextual relationship between how the state's survival can be actualized in TV series can be best explained via hyperreality. Through the incongruent political turns of President Erdoğan vis-à-vis the West, Resurrection Ertuğrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid series play the securitizing visuals’ role in creating hyperreality. The study contributes to the framework written by L. Hansen (2011) by problematizing the relationship between images’ representation, distortion, and replacement of reality from Baudrillard’s perspective. As a case study, the Turkish government visually securitizes the West and creates a hyperreal context to refer to. The amalgamation of visual securitization and the hyperreality concept of J. Baudrillard proposes a new framework comprised of four staged simulacrum analyses. By doing so, the question of how televisual images can precede politics and take a crucial part in securitizing discourse without representing reality can be understood. The proposed framework and the case study shows how the JDP government can make incongruent policy turns vis-à-vis the West without audience backlash.
    
    Author: Onur Tugrul Karabicak (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
  - The Intersection of Global International Relations and the Middle Powers concept: Agency as a form of Resistance
    
    This research explores the underexamined intersection between the concept of middle powers and the Global International Relations (IR) framework, evaluating the analytical insights each offers the other. It examines (1) the limitations that the Global IR lens reveals in the middle power concept, including its Western-centric orientation and state-centric focus, and (2) the limitations of the Global IR agenda highlighted by examining middle powers, particularly its inability to explain how reformist middle powers may misuse Global IR principles to justify populist or autocratic policies. The research argues that, by broadening the concept of agency, Global IR provides a novel perspective for understanding reformist middle powers’ resistance to the liberal international order as a response to Western-dominated IR. Using the case of Turkey, this study contends that marginalization from dominant power structures drives reformist middle powers to pursue status and agency by advocating for a more inclusive and equitable international system.
    
    Author: Nilufer Gunes (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE))
  - From Radical Right to Reactionary Internationalism: Serbia, Russia, and the War in Ukraine
    
    This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on reactionary internationalism by linking it with scholarly discussions on civilisation and civilisationism, which have mostly been running in parallel trajectories. By doing so, it attempts to address the question of how the radical right, rooted in numerous particularisms, such as cultural, national, and religious, has managed to foster a global movement with a universalist ideology that poses a significant challenge to the liberal international order. Through an analysis of the relevant literature and a case study of the Serbian radical right, this paper tries to elucidate this question and bridge the gap between the two debates by demonstrating that civilisationism forms the core of reactionary internationalism, unifying the radical right from the West to the East. This paper examines the Serbian case and its history of civilisational and geopolitical reactions as a possible paradigm for the contemporary radical right in general. Furthermore, it explores the role of Russian revisionism and war in Ukraine in shaping this civilisational discourse, specifically considering the narratives built around the Serbian foreign fighters’ network in Ukraine. An additional contribution of this article is that it provides a non-Western perspective on civilisation, religion, and nationalism.
    
    Keywords: reactionary internationalism; civilisationism; radical right; Serbia; Russia; war in Ukraine
    
    Author: Goran Tepšić (University of Belgrade)
  - The Balkans between caution, threat and promise: how the prospect of EU accession shapes [trans] national identities – and the other way round
    
    Over thirty years after the first shots were fired in the series of armed conflicts that led to [or were caused by?] the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, the scenes broadcasted live begin to fade in the collective memory of the greater public, politicians and policymakers worldwide. Though the fighting has been officially over for – also – a long time, the spectre of the first European war to be broadcasted live still constantly and continuously haunts discussions around the political future of the former Yugoslav republics, especially in terms of EU accession. Though frequently highlighting the need for Balkan countries to look forward, the lingering, implicit message recalling the brutality of the 1990’s wars is present in almost every political speech - especially those from EU leaders - ranging from a looming memory, a warning, a wary embrace and a threat. And by doing so, these past conflicts undergo a continuous process of resignification and reappropiation, systematically altering and bearing a huge impact on their present and, most importantly, their future. By analising contemporary political discourse around the Balkans (and also discussing how the term is currently understood), in postfoundational, Derridean terms, this paper aims to investigate how the region is, as of 2024, being discursively constructed in political, historical and geographical terms, and how the prospect of EU accession plays a crucial role of identity-shaping and identity-performing, not only for the Balkan countries, but also for the EU itself.
    
    Author: Daniel Pedersoli (The European University, Madrid)
  - War and the totalitarian party-state: National Role Conceptions as guiding distinctions in Hoxha's Albania
    
    Role Theory suggests that National Role Conceptions (NRC) are self-defined, often informed by socio-economic needs, political goals, and elite and popular culture. However, when totalitarian regimes born of war and revolution merge party and state structures, the ruling ideology and animating narratives of a formerly underground organisation can directly provide a state’s understanding of the international. This is conducive with Niklas Luhmann’s notion of organisations as self-reproducing communication systems which construct their environment with internal resources. Indeed, because party-states strongly resist functional differentiation, they act as if one giant national organisation.
    
    This paper considers the self-radicalisation of the Albanian Party of Labour and its path to international isolation. Its performance of NRCs such as ‘example’, ‘defender of the faith’ and ‘anti-imperialist agent’ strongly confirmed its self-understanding as an exemplary organisation which destroyed the class domination of foreign-backed elites and secured national independence. The extremely repressive form of nationalist Stalinism developed thereafter lent on indigenous, Jacobin and Leninist sources which valorised violence and conceptualised the outside world as intensely hostile to Albanian sovereignty. This created a path dependent cybernetic loop of internal purge and international isolation, leading to its final destination as a last bastion of high Stalinism into the 1980s. Communist Albania provides a useful limit case for the study of similar processes in post-conflict regimes like that in Zimbabwe, North Korea and other ‘isolate’ dictatorships.
    
    Author: Joe Ruffell (Open University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / R2P, Intervention, and Conflict Management Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University)
  - Regimes of International Conflict Management: A Historical Perspective, 1945–today
    
    Social science and legal scholars usually approach international conflict management—ranging from unilateral or multilateral forms of diplomacy and economic pressure to covert interference and open military intervention—based on rather static and presentist definitions and typologies. This paper encourages us to widen the view by including historical context as a crucial but often overlooked variable. It argues that the frequency, form, and outcomes of international action to manage conflicts and crises are to a significant extent determined by the given historical ‘regime’ of international conflict management. The paper defines a ‘regime’ of conflict management as the wider political, military, legal, and mental frameworks within which the international community debates and addresses regional conflicts and crises. In a historical birds-eye perspective, the paper identifies the major shifts in regimes of conflict management from 1945 until today. To do this, it examines contemporary debates among scholars and policymakers about foreign intervention in connection to human rights and international law. It then places these debates in the context of quantitative changes over time, focussing on UN peacekeeping operations and UN Security Council resolutions passed and vetoed. The paper also refers to several key cases of international conflict management since 1945. It finds that a Cold War cycle of experimentation (1945–1955), expansion (1955–1965), and contraction (1965–1982) of open and ‘robust’ international conflict management was repeated in surprisingly similar form in the post-Cold War era, where interveners moved from experimentation and gradual expansion (1982–1989) to rapid expansion (1989–2011) and decline (since 2011). The paper concludes with a few reflections on how to assess, from a historical perspective, the current crisis of international conflict management and the liberal international order more generally.
    
    Author: Volker Prott (Aston University)
  - Farewell the Responsibility to Protect? False Death, Grave Crisis, Future Opportunities
    
    The paper argues that the norm/death narrative surrounding the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has problematic implications for both its critics and defenders. Critical claims that the norm is dead create an overly high benchmark by which to measure the norm against. The implication of which is that it allows RtoP defenders to relatively easily make the case that it is not dead. This is equally problematic, however, as this falls into the trap of downplaying the crisis facing the norm. To put this another way, norm studies only get us so far and we need to better understand the political environment in which all human right’s norms now find themselves in. Building on contemporary reassessments of the false assumptions embodied in the RtoP project, the picture presented here is far graver than is commonly found in studies that conclude the RtoP has not declined in the manner suggested by critics. Going forward, there appears to be three positions: status quo, reform, and abandon but whichever one academics choose to uphold, they must factor in, and respond to, the developments and false assumptions outlined here.
    
    Author: Adrian Gallagher (University of Leeds)
  - The “Paradox of Intervention”: Judging the Reparative Potential of Military Approaches to Mass Atrocity Prevention
    
    The endeavour to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities via military means continues to suffer from a “duty-specification” question, whereby it is unclear who has the primary responsibility to step in when a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations. One possible solution to this is to prioritise blame-based allocation, by arguing that states which are in some way culpable for the occurrence of mass atrocity crimes beyond their borders have a reparative obligation to prevent, mitigate, or end them. Yet, this gives rise to another problem: the so-called “paradox of intervention”. In other words, though a culpable actor might have a responsibility to its victims, an intervention it conducts is unlikely to be welcomed and is ethically suspect. At the same time, however, displacing a responsibility to intervene elsewhere runs the risk of letting culpable actors off the hook. The author makes efforts to explore this paradox specifically in the context of the UK intervening in its former colonies by asking, centrally, can military approaches to atrocity prevention ever be reparative?
    
    Author: Adam Cooper (University of Leeds)
  - Responsibility to protect and Women in Armed Conflict
    
    Human rights abuse during armed conflict particularly on women has been distinctively and widely documented and therefore in the context of the discourse on Responsibility to protect wherein the mandate is to protect civilians, the questions on the security of women constitute an important aspect. Responsibility to Protect, particularly the Pillar II emphasis on “International assistance and capacity building” necessitates the intervention on the doctrine of responsible. Thereby outlining the interplay of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) with the themes of Women Peace and Security (WPS).
    This paper seeks to examine the existing commitments of R2P doctrine and how it can be applied in the interest of women’s rights in conflict situations. By outlining the themes of Women, Peace and Security the paper intends to analyze the configuration of R2P and WPS within the ambit of United Nations Security Council.
    
    Keywords
    Responsibility to Protect; Women Peace and Security, Norm Diffusion; Gender equality; United Nations (UN); Peace Building;
    
    Author: Niamkoi Lam (Delhi University)
  - Successful Humanitarian Intervention without Regime Change: A Case Study of Sierra Leone
    
    Humanitarian intervention often faces the challenge of balancing human rights protection with state sovereignty. The risk of regime change resulting from such interventions remains a crucial obstacle, as it often sparks controversy, opposition from the international community, and potential negative consequences. The United Kingdom’s intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 is a notable example of how military force can be employed as a "force for good" to protect civilians. While some view it as a straightforward example, it offers critical lessons on restoring political stability without violating state sovereignty or inciting regime change, thus upholding the principles of international law.
    This paper uses process tracing to examine the UK’s involvement in Sierra Leone, examining how its strategy successfully prevented the collapse of the legitimate government, restored order, and supported long-term stability while avoiding regime change. By comparing the UK’s intervention with earlier failed efforts by ECOWAS and the UN, the paper identifies key factors for success and explores how external actors can address humanitarian crises without undermining the legitimacy of local political institutions.
    By analysing this case, the paper emphasises how humanitarian interventions can achieve their goals without breaching state sovereignty or triggering regime change. This offers valuable insights for future interventions and ongoing debates on decoupling humanitarian actions from political objectives.
    
    Author: Yihui Wang (University of Leeds)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Regions, Norms and Power Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Laura Southgate (Aston University)
  
  Chair: Laura Southgate (Aston University)
  - India’s Quest for Global Power: Multi-Alignment or Multi-Purpose?
    
    Soon after the start of the War in Ukraine, India coordinated with both Ukraine and Russia to arrange for safe passage for its citizens in the region. However, “Operation Ganga,” as these efforts became known, is only one example of how India has pursued a strategy of multi-alignment. Today, India views itself as a multi-aligned power, where the country maintains diplomatic ties with global powers that are often adversarial towards each other (Hall, 2016; Raghavan, 2017). India’s multi-alignment has no doubt situated the country in a useful geopolitical position—as a burgeoning ally of the U.S., a lucrative partner for the U.K., and an important market for Russia. And yet, the country’s tenuous relations to China suggest that there are potential failure points to full-scale multi-alignment, especially given India’s own rising power ambitions. This paper considers the historic value of India’s multi- and non-alignment alongside its impact on the country’s quest for global power, arguing that India must adapt its multi-aligned policies to the realities of realist great power competition. The paper proposes an innovative pathway for India’s future as a global power: instead of multi-aligned, India should consider a multi-purpose strategy that focuses on advocating for specific policy objectives via transnational cooperation, dialogues, and agreements.
    
    Author: Janani Mohan (University of Cambridge)
  - China in a World of Orders in East Asia: Understanding Norm and Social Interaction Dynamics in Regional Order Construction
    
    This research explores China’s role in shaping regional orders in East Asia, highlighting the complex ways it interacts with varying regional and international frameworks. As China ascends as a global power, its engagement with both global norms and regional institutions fosters a dynamic interaction between international expectations and localized practices. This study investigates China's nuanced approach to distinct regional orders in East Asia, focusing specifically on security, economic, and environmental domains.
    
    Building on the foundational work of Alastair Iain Johnston and Amitav Acharya, this study utilizes norm circulation theory to analyze China’s engagement with regional orders. This theory emphasizes that global norms are not simply adopted but are localized and adapted by domestic actors before being reintroduced into international settings. China’s interactions exemplify this bidirectional process, whereby it both adopts and reshapes norms to align with its national interests and regional strategies.
    
    The research focuses on how China’s approach varies across different issue-specific orders. By examining the distinct ways China engages with security, economic, and environmental frameworks in East Asia—a region marked by economic interdependence and complex security dynamics—this study aims to reveal the motivations underlying China’s selective engagement and adaptation of norms. This approach underscores the coexistence of overlapping, sometimes contradictory clusters of order rather than a singular international framework.
    
    The guiding question is: Why does China engage differently with various regional orders in East Asia? Through case studies, this research shows how domestic actors in China navigate and reshape international norms. By clarifying the dynamics of China’s regional interactions, the study contributes to understanding norm localization and the complex interplay of global and regional orders in a multipolar world.
    
    Author: Ruizhe Zhang (University of Bristol)
  - Explaining ASEAN Institutional Balancing Success and Failure
    
    ASEAN members have a mixed record of success at responding to security challenges and balancing external threats. During the Cold War, member states worked together to contain Vietnamese aggression after its invasion and occupation of Cambodia. This success has not extended to the South China Sea dispute, where ASEAN claimant states have failed to generate a united response to China’s violation of maritime sovereignty. What explains ASEAN member state’s mixed record of success at balancing external threats? This article outlines the internal and external factors that impact member state ability to mobilise ASEAN to balance against a common security threat. Through an examination of state capabilities, state allies, and ASEAN institutional constraints, the paper demonstrates the important role of the target state for institutional balancing. In doing so, it presents an original contribution to both neorealist and institutional realist theory.
    
    Author: Laura Southgate (Aston University)
  - The Rise of Transregionalism in Contemporary World Politics, 1989-2024
    
    In years after the end of the Cold War, various forms of transregional cooperations emerged in world politics to facilitate broader economic and security cooperation across the globe, taking the advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalisation. For example, the Australia and Japan initiated Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to advance free trade commitments from Asian and Pacific countries. However, more recently, competing attempts have been made by rising and great powers to establish trans-regional cooperationsto advance their visions of ‘multi-polar’ world order, such as the Belt and Road Initiatives or Eurasian Economic Cooperation. The emergence of these transregional cooperation projects raises important questions around the purposes of these projects and broader implications for contemporary international order. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the emergence, dynamics, and evolution of such transregional cooperation after the Cold War. My preliminary analysis suggests that transregionalism emerged primarily to (1) institutionally backup the national interest of great powers and rising powers; and (2) to bring economic benefits through economic partnership that would enable great powers and rising powers to widen its influence in global politics. To substantiate the argument, I establish a novel dataset comprising of regionalism and transregional cooperations from 1989-2024, combined with two case studies of contemporary transregionalism, namely the Quadrilateral Security Cooperation and the Belt and Road Initiative.
    
    Author: Ahmad Umar (Aberystwyth University)
  - Navigating Asymmetry in the Indo-Pacific: Taiwan’s Three-Level Game in the Era of Multipolarity
    
    The strategic relationship between the United States (US) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) continues to dominate the discourse of power politics in the twenty-first century. Over time, the strategic relationship between the two competing powers has changed from competitive cooperation to strategic rivalry, giving rise to the question of peaceful coexistence. Apart from the great power tussle, the picture is getting more complicated with the growing tension in the Indo-Pacific region, which gave the presence of middle powers like India, consolidating its strategic partnership with the US under the framework of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD). Despite regional competition between New Delhi and Beijing has intensified, India does not follow in the exact footsteps of the US in countering the PRC. The complex triangular relations among the US, China, and India bring a set of challenges and opportunities for Asia's secondary powers like Taiwan in the era of multipolarity. This paper makes a noble contribution by bridging the US-China-India triangle with Taiwan's strategic navigation of asymmetry in the Indo-Pacific. Borrowing the idea from Putnam's two-level game, this paper instead argues to lever between hegemonic US and China rivalry and regional India-China competition; Taiwan's strategic navigation is based on a unique three-level interaction/ game (International-Regional-Domestic). This research uses the global polarity debate of international relations with the emergence of a multipolar world order system as a conceptual framework to unpack Taiwan's three-level game. As a flashpoint between the US-China competition and the improvement in India-Taiwan relations in the recent past, Taiwan is an ideal case amid this emerging strategic triangle. Twenty elite semi-structured interviews and government documents/ policy papers compose the qualitative data of this paper.
    
    Authors: Chun-Yi Lee (University of Nottingham)* , Raian Hossain (University of Nottingham)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Reimagining Development Aid: Challenges and Alternatives in EU and UK International Development Assistance Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  This roundtable critically examines evolving challenges and critiques of EU and UK international development aid, addressing key issues such as gendered impacts, nationalisation, populism, neoliberalism, financialisaton, aid as reparations, and the growing prioritisation of ‘security’ concerns, including migration. In line with BISA’s theme of exploring alternative visions of the global, this session problematises current aid approaches that often favour national and populist agendas and commercial interest over sustainable, equitable development. The panel features six experts with diverse perspectives, who will go beyond critiquing existing frameworks, to explore options for more inclusive, human-centred approaches. Furthermore, they aim to bridge academic insights with practitioner needs, examining the opportunities and challenges scholars face in engaging effectively with policymakers in today’s development landscape.
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  
  Participants: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London) , Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth) , Jack Taggart (Queen’s University Belfast) , Richard Whitman (University of Kent)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Revisiting Realist Ethics Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
  
  Chair: Jamie Barrow Gaskarth (The Open University)
  - Public intellectual without a theory: Mearsheimer’s two ethical worldviews
    
    As a theorist, Mearsheimer holds a survivalist ethical worldview. As an American, Mearsheimer’s priority is America’s survival. America’s survival can be attained, according to Mearsheimer’s neo-realist theory, through its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and containment of rising competitors in other regions. The theory says little about states that pose no threat to their regional balance of power or America’s global power position. Despite this, in a number of media appearances Mearsheimer condemned Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians since 7 October 2023. Where does this condemnation fit into the theory’s ethical worldview? Are Mearsheimer’s personal ethics in Gaza compatible with his theory? In answering these questions, the paper firstly shows an ethical limitation in Mearsheimer’s theory. Mearsheimer presents a personal ethical viewpoint in Gaza because his theory’s ethics of survival has little to say about Israel’s actions. He is, thus, a public intellectual without a theory. The ethical limitation, secondly, reveals that Mearsheimer’s theory misrepresents states’ foreign policy priorities. As Mearsheimer agrees, Israel’s actions impact America’s position globally and domestically. His theory’s ethics of survival however focuses on material power and states’ potential for hegemony. It thus fails to present this case as a foreign policy priority for America.
    
    Author: Haro Karkour (Cardiff University)
  - Georg Schwarzenberger: Power, force, and ethics in international law
    
    Georg Schwarzenberger’s oeuvre has remained significantly underexplored despite his status as an important International Law and International Relations scholar in the twentieth century. Like other classical realists, he was an émigré trained in the legal science of Weimar Germany. He presented the social background of international law in terms of the irreducible hostility between states, was amongst the first to explore the standard of civilisation in international society, and argued for the urgency of laying down generally valid legal standards to articulate the gap between present-day reality and a civilised world community. Schwarzenberger’s theory offers an unflinching account of the weaknesses of international law that transcends the narrow account of realism that has come to dominate International Relations discussions today. This chapter analyses the fundamental aspects of Schwarzenberger’s theory of International Relations. It explores the elements at the heart of Schwarzenberger’s theory of International Relations through a detailed examination of his works, which, though examined infrequently and practically forgotten, retain their relevance today. In doing this, the chapter articulates the different factors at the heart of his analysis of international law and the laws of armed conflict. It highlights the conflicting roles played by power and ethics in international law and society. Finally, this chapter explores Schwarzenberger’s suggested solutions for the problems facing international law and argues for their continued relevance today.
    
    Author: Carmen Chas (Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid)
  - ‘WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ANXIOUS’ The meta-ethics of Anxiety in interwar IR
    
    Traditional ‘objectivist’ approaches to the subjective feeling of safety have given way to the study of security as the metaphysics of international politics. But the ‘discovery’ of security as the summum bonum of international order, as well as of ‘insecurity’ as a fundamental feature of the human condition, is hardly of recent vintage. Given today’s concern of security theorists with angst, it is surprising how little attention they have paid to the ubiquity of anxiety narratives in interwar political thought.
    
    In this paper, I argue that anxiety, as a descriptive concept of the human predicament of standing face to face with the uncertainty of existence and the fear of death, was present in several portrayals of ‘human nature’ as existentially insecure in interwar IR – broadly understood. While I focus mostly on the existential realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, I demonstrate how the concept of anxiety was central to a wider transatlantic intellectual community that shared the same fears and hopes regarding human destiny. Like many others, Niebuhr’s laying out of the Heideggerian take on the Aristotelian tension between ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’ led to the acknowledgement that while ultimate security was a historical impossibility, its materialization in limited and precarious forms of political community made it a reachable end that could be more desirable than overambitious world order proposals.
    
    Author: Guilherme Marques-Pedro (University of Groningen)
  - Machiavelli, Carr and the Impure Ethics of Realism in The Twenty Years’ Crisis.
    
    This paper has two aims: first, to establish the nature of the relationship between Machiavelli and E.H. Carr; secondly, to assess Morgenthau’s claim that the Machiavellian perspective as employed by Carr leaves a theorist ‘philosophically ill-equipped’ to think ethically about IR. The article explores the parallels and affinities in Carr and Machiavelli's work and argues that Carr was perhaps more Machiavellian than he realised or was willing to admit, and that as such, he may – contra Morgenthau - be better philosophically well-equipped to deal with the question of the relationship between politics and ethics than critics have recognised – a ‘dangerous’ Machiavelli, but not a ‘disastrous’ one. Reading these authors in parallel allows us to gain a more developed sense of how both both deal with the vexed relationship of ethics to politics. While Machiavelli does not concentrate primarily on IR, what he does say suggests that he thinks international politics are inherently unstable and therefore without any chance of improvement politically or ethically. His true importance lies in demonstrating the possibility of a political ethics and the articulation of such an ethic applied to domestic politics, which, with some adjustments, could be made to serve as the basis for a realist international ethics. Carr's close adherence to Machiavelli's formula suggests that this was also his template – but was he successful in applying it to IR? By examining the two thinkers in parallel, and differentiating them when necessary, the nature of Realist ethics in political theory and IR becomes clearer and one gains a greater insight into this mode of thought about ethics. For both thinkers the universal problems of ethics are best understood in terms of judgement that allies moral requirement with political necessity.
    
    Author: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
  - The Virtue of Prudence and the Realists, Classical and Structuralist
    
    The virtue of prudence is often claimed by, and attributed to, both classical and structural realists. But what does it actually mean to be ‘prudent’? In modern English ‘prudence’ is associated with caution, even with passivity, and when realists invoke the notion it is often in order to stress the importance of not acting forcefully in a given situation. On the other hand, the classical Greek conception of phronesis, which can claim to be the origin point of prudence as a virtue, is about the exercise of judgment to produce right action which may or may not involve caution. Sometimes the right thing to do will be to throw caution to the wind and this is difficult to reconcile with the ordinary language meaning of the term ‘prudence’. Moreover, the notion of phronesis involves more than a cost-benefit analysis of action – a much more demanding account of the virtues is necessarily involved in assessing what is prudent from this perspective. These issues will be explored by investigating the role of phronesis in classical thought and the role of prudence in modern realism. Proponents of the latter sometimes claim to be inheritors of the former, but it will be argued that this is often not the case.
    
    Author: Chris Brown (London School of Economics)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary bodies: feminism and beyond Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Lizzie Hobbs (London School of Economics)
  - Where are the bodies? The (in)visible violence of counter-terrorism in the colonial archives
    
    Is it possible to research the embodiment of violence in largely disembodied archives? In addition, how is the researcher themselves embodied in this act of researching violence? This paper tells an archive story, that of a researcher looking for the physical and emotional, in a largely disembodied corpus of texts on the violence of counter-terrorism in French colonial Indochina. Through asking a simple question – where are the bodies? – I trace the different ways in which bodies appear and disappear in the archives, both now and then. As a largely disembodied corpus, colonial archives first work to make bodies invisible: bodies are counted by nothing personal is mentioned, violence is euphemised or not recorded, and the bodies that appear are only those that serve a (colonial) purpose. Equally, the way colonial archives are available today serves to disembody violence: rationally organised as a library, the colonial archives itself disembody the researcher. In a second time, however, this paper also shows how bodies re-appear in various ways, both in the past and the present. The embodiment of violence appears in the interstices of documents, revealing glimpses of physicality. In the same way, the supposedly disembodied act of conducting archival research is in fact largely embodied, especially when it comes to violence. Overall, therefore, this article asks questions about trust, objectivity and the purpose of archival research, and extends the reflection on the way coloniality (dis)embodies, both in the past and present.
    
    Author: Xavier Mathieu (University of Sheffield)
  - Voices from the margin: Using body-mapping as a decolonial approach to understand women’s experiences of violent extremism in Kenya
    
    In Kenya, policies and programmes aimed at countering violent extremism define this phenomenon using a top down, Western-based, and colonial perspective, focusing on Muslims’ violence and Islamist groups (Aroussi 2020; Oando and Achieng 2021). This paper explores the understanding of violent extremism (VE) among Muslim women in the Coast of Kenya, a community that is located at important junctures, subject to recruitment by armed groups such as Al-Shabab and experiencing violence as the state attempts to counter VE. The article uses body mapping as a method to study VE from an embodied, bottom-up perspective. Centring Muslim women’s voices as co-producers of knowledge on VE is important for its decolonising and empowering potential and due to their positioning by patriarchal state institutions and the international community as both ‘the suspect’ and ‘the solution’ to political violence (Ahmed Ali and Kizi Nzovu 2023).
    Our participants used VE to refer not only to violence by Al-Shabaab but also gender based violence, gang violence, and State violence. These findings pose an important tension for critical scholarship on the concept of VE. Using two selected body maps, we interrogate the use VE as a framework for analysing harms in women's lives. We argue that as a community bearing the brunt of countering violent extremism initiatives (CVE), our participants deployed the language of VE as an act of resistance, both to the violent policing produced by CVE policies, and by the patriarchal violence visited upon them by men in their lives.
    By sharing our method, this article contributes to emerging literature about the potential of using arts as a decolonial approach to research. The article also contributes to feminist literature and existing debates in the field on the linkages between gender based violence, gang violence, state violence and violent extremism in the Kenyan context and beyond.
    
    Authors: sahla Aroussi (Leeds University) , David Duriesmith (The University of Sheffield)
  - Toward the Global Body
    
    For several decades now, a ‘turn to materialism’ has been announced across the social sciences that makes epistemological, ontological, and methodological claims about the nature of materialism. In particular and of relevance for an IR audience, I’m interested in the ways in which ‘the global’ structures the turn to materialism, and I do this through a discussion of how ‘the body’ has been conceptualized and materialized as a core concept through which this question has been explored by feminist, queer, and anti-racist thought, as well as for the work that ‘the body’ does in stabilizing configurations of the state, epistemology, and political power, pace Epstein. The relationship between ‘the body’ and the ‘global’ both historically and contemporarily will be examined with particular reference to the work of Yusoff, Povinelli, Ferreira da Silva, and Wynter as part of a broader project that askes what the relationship between bodies and embodiment, the state, and world order look like that was built on the theory and theorizing of bodies and embodiment and its relation to power from those who carry with them the legacies of exclusion from, or violent inclusion in, modern political subjectivity and the figure of the human.
    
    Author: Lauren Wilcox (University of Cambridge)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Seeing Resistance: Visual Narratives and Counter-Politics in Contemporary International Relations Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Raquel Silva (Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon)
  
  Chair: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  - Visualising Resistance: A Research-to-Film Project on Portugal’s Armed Struggle Against the Dictatorship
    
    This paper analyses the process of transforming research originally conducted for my doctoral dissertation into a documentary film, examining the unique personal and professional challenges, as well as the opportunities this shift brings to engage with visual politics. It explores how the documentary amplifies the underrepresented narratives of three revolutionary groups—LUAR, ARA, and BR—that resisted Portugal’s authoritarian regime leading up to the Carnation Revolution of 1974. By blending archival research, personal interviews, and creative storytelling, the film reanimates the experiences of former militants while connecting their legacy to contemporary discussions on resistance and social justice. The project unfolds in two phases: first, through in-depth archival and oral history research, gathering insights from former militants, historians, and witnesses; and second, by transforming these findings into a documentary film designed to bridge academic and public audiences. Through visual storytelling, this approach not only conveys historical content but also invites viewers to reflect on the ongoing relevance of these struggles. By engaging with visual politics, the documentary film highlights the impact of collective memory on identity and resistance, offering a platform for marginalized voices and reshaping Portugal’s historiographical landscape. Ultimately, the documentary film seeks to turn these life stories into powerful visual narratives, making history accessible, fostering a deeper understanding of Portugal's revolutionary past, and allowing for a meaningful discussion of present struggles.
    
    Author: Raquel Silva (Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon)
  - Visual epistemologies of border violence
    
    Violence against people on the move is systematic, and has become a well-documented form of border ‘management’ and externalisation. This is especially the case at EU borders along the so called ‘Balkan Route’, where pushbacks - the informal expulsions of people on the move to another country - where people on the move are attacked, physically and verbally abused, denied medical assistance, detained or imprisoned, usually by border officials in countries along their journeys to safety. However, such violence often made invisible and great lengths are taken by perpetrators to render it secret and it works alongside what De Genova called border spectacles’ of enforcement. In this paper, we explore the intersections of border spectacles, concealment of border violence and ways of knowing, seeing and showing violent borders through a discussion of an animation, The Pushback, we co-created with a grassroots organisation and an animation artist. We use our animation as a starting point for a broader discussion of visual epistemologies of border violence, and we raise questions about who is rendered visible and how, through reporting on border violence and our own research. We ask: what are the visual ways of knowing EU borders, and the violence which has become a key component of border policies? We examine the creative possibilities of visual storytelling and visual epistemologies of borders and border violence, by reflecting on how we co-produced a short animated film, The Pushback. The Pushback animation we present here is a creative intervention, expanding the existing counter-archive of border violence. We contribute to the broader discussions of border aesthetics, and visual politics of the border by creating our own visual material and using it as the basis of a discussion of visual epistemologies of border violence.
    
    Authors: Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University) , Arshad Isakjee (University of Liverpool)*
  - ‘F*cking Terrorist Putin’: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Populist Aesthetics of Security
    
    Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has promoted the discourse of a brave, freedom-loving people confronting a malevolent, authoritarian adversary. What makes this security discourse distinct is the aesthetic manner in which Zelenskyy has performed it – impassioned, sentimental, blunt and informal, coupled with strategic use of humour. Focusing on Zelenskyy as an incarnation of a populist type of leadership, this paper aims to examine the relationship between populism, security and aesthetics. I argue that populists tend to embrace a performative representation of (in)security intended to resonate with the experiences of those who find themselves at the margins of global security politics (whether in a real or imagined sense). I show that by embodying the Ukrainian people as an empowered political subject capable of agency, Zelenskyy seeks to challenge its assigned role as a passive victim or a bargaining chip in great power politics. This research contributes to the IR scholarship on the aesthetic, performative, and affective dimensions of populist security imaginaries, shedding light on how populist actors may prompt a recasting of the aesthetic regime of global politics with its concomitant hierarchies and inequalities.
    
    Author: Bohdana Kurylo (Oxford Brookes University)
  - Too Complex for the complex: Military games as sites of resistance
    
    Military-themed games have been an object of interest to numerous scholars in politics and international relations over the last two decades. Much of this research has fit under the umbrella of the so-called ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’, which might be understood as a symbiosis of militarised themes and Entertainment, in which the entertainment industry collaborates with the defence industry and/or state agencies to produce narratives that construct a sense of global insecurity, which may be resolved by military intervention (Höglund and Willander, 2017; Wark, 2005). This framework, despite its popularity, neglects to account for the iterative, unpredictable character of the gaming medium, and the opportunities that this affords to subvert the ‘meaning’ of the media from within: Games are not fixed at the point of being a ‘boxed product’, but rather, are experienced differently based on how players interact with them and each other.
    
    This paper looks at examples of resistance and opposition to the military entertainment complex coming from within the games themselves: problematizing the linear understanding of how games and military narratives are produced by this ‘complex’. I discuss examples from Military-produced games, recruiting forums, and eSports events, displaying the benefits of Assemblage as a tool to understand the relations between games and the world, with reference to my own research on U.S. Military Recruitment, Simulation, and welfare programs.
    
    Author: Oliver Donnelly (Queen’s University Belfast)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / UACES Panel: What is the role of Professional Associations in advancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Higher Education Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Professional associations have long served as important spaces for knowledge exchange, collaboration, and advocacy within their fields. However, their potential as catalysts for advancing equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is increasingly recognised, yet often underutilised. This roundtable brings together members and committee members of the University Association for European Studies (UACES), the Irish Association for Contemporary European Studies (IACES), BISA and EISA to explore the role of professional associations in embedding EDI principles into the core of knowledge production, reflecting on how they can act as powerful forums for developing and promoting transformative pedagogies and practices.
  
  Participants will engage with the following question: How do professional associations leverage their structures and networks to challenge systemic inequities in research, teaching, and in higher education policymaking? We will explore the broader themes of knowledge production inside and outside the classroom. The discussion will cover strategies for supporting underrepresented voices, creating platforms for interdisciplinary dialogue, and encouraging membership focused initiatives that align values of inclusion.
  
  Ultimately, this roundtable seeks to reflect an acknowledgement of the evolving responsibilities of professional associations within a changing and often contentious global higher education landscape. Through this collective discussion, we may find pathways to generate best practices.
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Chair: Viviane Gravey (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Participants: Giada Lagana (Cardiff University) , Toni Haastrup (University of Manchester) , Shamsoddin Shariati (Maynooth University) , Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast) , Laura McLeod (University of Manchester)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / Vernacular and everyday securities in policy and practice Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Convener: Thomas Martin (Open University)
  
  Chair: Thomas Martin (Open University)
  - Relational security: a 'vernacular turn' in in the Pacific
    
    Dominant scholarship of security in the Pacific focusses on policy as well as discourse analysis. Little research examines how the people of the Pacific, understand and conceptualise security in their daily lives. Inspired by the ‘vernacular turn’ in critical security studies, this paper attempts to address this limitation by drawing on Samoan understanding of security in their vernacular. In doing so, it seeks to expand the literature on vernacular security and understanding of security in Samoa (and more broadly the Pacific).
    
    Author: Maima Koro (The University of Adelaide)
  - Vernacular security, national security, and the politics of security policymaking
    
    National security strategies have become a commonplace feature of the modern state’s security toolkit. They represent key sites for articulating how states conceptualise and narrate their core values and interests, that which threatens these, and the approaches being taken to counter these threats. Such strategies ‘speak’ in the name of a national citizenry, but their actual engagement with national publics is often limited. The concept of ‘vernacular security’ has the potential to speak to, nuance, and perhaps disrupt these official accounts of national security. Exploring security through the ‘vernacular’ offers the opportunity to allow diverse publics to narrate the threats they face to their security, and the ways they would seek to collectively manage them. This paper sets out an agenda for engaging with vernacular security politics across diverse publics in order to speak to, and potentially broaden, the accounts of ‘security’ present in national security strategies.
    
    Author: Thomas Martin (Open University)
  - Strategies of critique in vernacular security discourse: an analytical framework
    
    Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ‘vernacular security’ with its emphasis on non-elite discourse on security. As an explicit alternative to more traditional forms of security research, such work is typically situated alongside other ‘bottom-up’ approaches to critical security studies with shared ambitions of disrupting hegemonic ways of thinking and doing security. In this article, I argue that existing work on vernacular security gestures at, rather than fully articulates, its criticality, with more attention needed to the status, meaning, and functions of critique therein. In order to address this lacuna, I present an original typology of four types of critique found in vernacular security discourse on below-the-line news media commentary on the politics of extremism: Objectivist, (De)constructivist, Normative, and Articulations of alternativity. This typology, I argue, demonstrates the heterogeneity of critical anchors, gestures, and targets within vernacular discourse on (in)security, as well as the mobilisation of different critical strategies therein. This plurality – and the absence of any necessary normative orientation within vernacular security speak – suggests that research on such discourse may sit more comfortably within broader, non-prescriptive, conceptions of critical security studies, than within narrow understandings organised around notions of disruption, emancipation, or progress.
    
    Author: Lee Jarvis (Loughborough University)
  - The securitisation of the French space(s) and body(ies): the everyday application of a colonial counterterrorism strategy
    
    In the context of 2015 Paris attacks, France strengthened its focus on countering terrorism, securitising the threat of terrorism, and normalising the exceptional measures. Of significant importance is the deliberate expansion of anti-terror measures beyond their original counterterrorism scope. Understudied in Critical Terrorism Studies is an exploration of the dynamics of everyday logic in the French context, looking at the colonialities of the everyday application of anti-terror strategies. France emerges as a compelling case study that vividly illustrates how political practices and discourses position the domestic space as the focal point of protection and security through militarisation and securitisation post-2015 attacks. It questions the interplay between anti-terror measures and their applications in the past, in the urgency, and beyond. How do these measures, originally designed for countering terrorism, transcend their initial purpose to militarise other space(s) as an expression of colonialities? What mechanisms underlie the application of such measures, facilitating the diffusion of quotidian military control and surveillance, all justified under “national security”? Is everyday security for everyone, everywhere? The paper follows a socio-spatial approach to security, underscoring the importance of a comprehensive analysis of the intricate connections between security dynamics and the spaces and bodies they securitise, police and militarise in the everyday. Therefore the paper uncovers the quotidian utilisation of CT techniques and tools that ultimately create space(s) of (in)security, militarise the domestic space and securitise bodies rooted in colonial legacies.
    
    Author: Marine Gueguin (Leeds Beckett University)
  - Operationalising vernacular security: A mixed methods approach to understanding security.
    
    This paper reflects on the process behind the Alternative Security Review, a mixed methods approach to understanding citizens’ perception of security and insecurity. The paper situates itself in the field of Vernacular Security, which “focuses attention… on the experiences of people subject to, or governed by, security policy in quotidian and everyday sites such as homes, workplaces, and public spaces” (Lee, 2023).
    
    The paper will offer two main contributions. Firstly methodologically, it will reflect on the mixed-method process of gaining the perspectives of those voices otherwise excluded from mainstream analysis, through asking questions not often considered in formalised security policymaking practice. Secondly, in relation to security discourse, it will ask to what extent these bottom up processes can impact elite-level policymaking. It will identify key methodological challenges and opportunities, and outline the value of the approach taken in providing insights into security discourse.
    
    Authors: Anna Gillions (Coventry University)* , Zsofia Hacsek (Coventry University)* , david curran (Coventry University) , Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor (Coventry University)*
- 09:00 → 10:30
  TH 19 Panel / War and Nature II: On the Eco-Social Costs of Warfare and Military Build-Up [Panel 2] Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Jan Selby (University of Leeds) , Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)
  
  Chair: Esther Marijnen (Wageningen University, Netherlands)
  - Solar geoengineering in the context of international political instability and climate militarism
    
    A looming challenge for international order in the coming decades will be how to address anthropocentric climate change. As hopes fade that international efforts to reduce carbon emissions through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be sufficient, some scientists and policymakers have started to turn to emergent technologies such as solar geoengineering, particularly Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), as a possible solution to the growing climate crisis. However, these technologies present a number of environmental and geopolitical risks. Contrary to claims that it will be vulnerable nations lead the way on SRM or that it will be developed for their benefit, SAI can only be practically deployed and maintained by countries with large-scale industrial capacities such as the major military powers. As calls for the declaration of a ’climate emergency’ increase, the turn to an ‘emergency’ response may become politically appealing sooner rather than later even if there remain outstanding uncertainties about its risks and benefits. This paper explores SAI as a potential arena for the expansion of climate militarism in a race to claim control or dominance of the atmosphere in the context of increasing international tensions and instability.
    
    Author: Danielle Young (University of Leeds)
  - Doing Security in Green Transition, or Why and How Were Some Rocks Made Strategic?
    
    Amid an ecological crisis of its own doing, the EU’s historical foundation on security and economic growth is evolving to include a third dimension in sustainability. The European Green Deal agenda envisions a 'green tripod' of growth, security, and sustainability, which relies on minerals the EU does not possess and that might not even exist. Drawing on the concept of resourcification, according to which resources are not but 'become', the study probes the role of security logic in the political formation of strategic minerals as both a condition for and outcome of the European Green Deal. Consequentially, I argue that a comprehensive understanding of the European Green Deal requires a trialectical approach to security, economy, and ecology, as neglecting any relationalities of the three results in an insufficient view of security’s material force. By uncovering the role of security in perpetuating a social metabolic rift, the analysis posits the logic of security as a critical site of struggle for eco-social system change.
    
    Author: Teemu Vaarakallio (Swedish Defence University)
  - “Wind-powered Gripen, piloted by Gretas”: Resisting the Military Green Transition
    
    Along the logic of ‘less fuel, more fight’ – decarbonising defense to reduce emissions but not missions – Western military sectors are presenting military practice as a driver of climate action and centering the arms industry as a guarantor of sustainable development. What critics have parodically described as a ‘military green transition’ toward “wind-powered Gripen, piloted by Gretas”, referring to the fuel-hungry fighter jet Gripen and climate activist Greta Thunberg. This irony is well placed. The trend towards greening is paralleled by a historical upsurge in military spending, weapons production and the re-centralisation of militarism in national security doctrines. Military sectors are both deepening their fossil fuel lock-in and increasing their reliance on mineral extraction to join the green energy transition; ever-intensifying war and militarism’s dependence on extractivism.
    
    In this paper, I capture the ongoing militarisation of eco-social challenges through the concept of ‘green militarism’. Developing a geopolitical ecology of green militarism, I juxtapose the promises (meaning) and practices (materiality) of the military’s emergence as climate actor – engaged in climate governance – with the underlying material realities of the military as ecological actor – sustained by and productive of detrimental eco-social conditions. The paper interrogates the consequences of green militarism for eco-social justice struggles and foregrounds its disruption by resistance movements tackling militarism and extractivism as joint harms. Doing so, I identify the geopolitical interests that drive military climate action, along with the struggles over meaning and material resources that mark global efforts toward either a military green or an eco-socially just transition.
    
    Author: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)
  - Climate Politics in the Shadow of Genocide
    
    As if climate change was not challenging enough already, humanity’s efforts to address it are currently unfolding against a backdrop of escalating great power tensions, multiple wars, entrenched authoritarianism, resurgent far-right movements and, not least, a genocide. But what actually are the implications of this extremely fraught geopolitical conjuncture for climate politics? How are today’s international climate negotiations being affected by the terrible wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere? And how, more broadly, should we understand the relationships between climate change on the one hand, and such ‘big politics’ on the other? Reflecting on these difficult questions and several decades of work on climate and environmental issues, this paper will argue that both climate change and our responses to it are deeply political, and inevitably shaped by political and conflict contexts. And in light of the ongoing Western-backed atrocities in Gaza plus the re-election of Donald Trump, the paper will also venture a more specific thesis: that if humanity is to successfully transition away from fossil fuels, then a fundamental shift towards a global politics centred upon practices of solidarity, demilitarisation and reconciliation will be required.
    
    Author: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
- 10:30 → 10:45
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 10:30 → 11:30
  
  / Refreshment Break The Exchange
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Asian foreign policy and security Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  
  Chair: Alexander Schotthöfer (The University of Edinburgh)
  - The other China or an emerging Taiwan? Democratic Taiwan and British foreign policy, 1996-2021.
    
    This paper outlines the emergence of Taiwan as a foreign policy ‘issue’ in British parliamentary foreign policy debates in the first 25 years after Taiwan’s democratisation. The Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ and in particular defensive co-operation, is quintessential to the UK's foreign policy, with Britain also a permanent member of the UN Security Council, yet there exists scarce literature on Taiwan's role in British foreign policy and how Britain might respond to escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait. This paper therefore excavates the discursive trajectory of Taiwan in British foreign policy debates, providing a timely equivalent to the developed scholarship afforded to US foreign policy debates on the role of Taiwan. A focus on discursive construction recognises Taiwan's unique plight, as an essentially “philosophical” (Brown & Wu, 2019, p. xxii) phenomena in global politics, a battlefield of semantics where dominant discourses serve to contest and constrain what Taiwan is, or isn’t, perceived to ‘be’. This paper’s discourse analysis seeks to rescue Taiwan's integral specificity and how dominant discourses serve to delimit Taiwan’s international space. The initial findings of this project outline the extent to which Taiwan was principally conceived of as a primarily economic phenomena in foreign policy debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet where amidst the development of Taiwan’s maturing democracy and the crushing of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, Taiwan emerged as a central feature of growing concern amongst MPs about China. As such this paper recognises that whilst Taiwan has ‘emerged’ in British foreign policy discourse it has yet to become an established British foreign policy ‘tradition’ (Bevir, 2009) deemed as intrinsic to British foreign policy objectives. Therefore, this project seeks to address a fundamental knowledge gap in understanding how Taiwan is considered, contextualised and addressed in British foreign policy.
    
    Author: Max Dixon (University of Portsmouth)
  - Being the Voice of the Global South: An Assessment of India’s Recent Security Council Terms
    
    Towards the end of India’s 2021-2022 term as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, its External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said that India had ‘sought to be the voice of the global South on many issues of concern… [and] tried to not only articulate their interests and anxieties but also tried to see whether we could serve as a bridging role in the Council.’ This is in keeping with India’s political legacy at the United Nations. However, the ‘interests and anxieties’ of countries in the global South are increasingly fragmented; India, on its part, has adopted a ‘multi-aligned’ foreign policy approach, even as it has retained its historical role. The proposed paper seeks to critically assess the ways in which India sought to be the voice of the Global South during its seventh (2011-2012) and eighth (2021-2022) terms as a non-permanent member, through a close examination of its statements at the Council’s Open Debates as well as additional primary data. The findings shed light on India’s difficult balancing act as well as South-North dynamics at the Security Council.
    
    Author: Soumita Basu (South Asian University)
  - Narrating (un)certainty: India’s foreign policy amid the US-China strategic rivalry
    
    This paper seeks to understand how India’s foreign policy discourse interprets and understands the escalating US-China strategic rivalry. In a world marked by uncertainty, India’s “risingness”—defined as a socio-political condition that makes the rising state's elite acutely aware of their enhanced ability to influence global norms and the international order—prompts it to take a more prominent role in world geopolitics. This shift is also reflected in its growing strategic alignment with the US, and opposition to China. However, this evolution has sparked concerns regarding India’s self-identity—the foundation of which has been an aversion to engagement in power politics. This research, therefore, frames this emerging dynamic as a power-morality tussle influenced by India’s postcolonial self. Subsequently, using a narrative approach, it seeks to understand narrative connections between the US-China rivalry and the themes of power politics and morality in India’s foreign policy discourse. To understand this dynamic, it analyses three data souces: 1) public-political, i.e., parliamentary speeches, statements by political leaders, key policymakers, reflecting the broader public and political mood; 2) academic-political, i.e., think tank and university publications, often ideologically aligned with political parties; 3) print media, i.e., India's influential English dailies covering broad discursive areas.
    
    Author: Shalabh Chopra (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Carceral systems and the border Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol)
  - Between Settler Imperial Borders and the Postcolonial State: Migration Governance through Development Infrastructure in Southern Mexico
    
    As part of his re-election campaign, Donald Trump pledged to crackdown on ‘irregular migration’ by increasing border security and initiating mass deportations. Anti-migrant policies, particularly those implemented by conservative or far-right parties, are often highly visible and provoke mobilizations from migrant rights and migrant justice movements. However, less visible policies, particularly those that externalize or outsource ‘Global North’ borders to the ‘Global South,’ often go under the radar of migrant justice movements. Moreover, with some notable exceptions, they often remain ‘invisible’ through the collaboration of Global South states. This paper seeks to examine one such case of border externalization to illustrate the imperative for an internationalist migrant justice movement which can account for how migrants are increasingly caught between (settler) imperial borders and postcolonial states. Focusing on the migration politics of the US and Mexico, this paper examines how two megaprojects, the so-called ‘Mayan Train’ and Interoceanic Corridor, are being mobilized by the Mexican state to stop migration from southern Mexico and Central America to the US. The paper argues that these megaprojects will function as internal borders, whereby migrants are allowed to work in the tourism sector and industrial parks facilitated by these megaprojects, while also laying the infrastructural foundation to police migrants ‘out of place’ and those seeking to migrate to the US. The paper contributes to literature examining Global North anti-migrant politics, the politics of “outsourcing” or “externalizing” borders, and the development-migration nexus.
    
    Author: Debbie Samaniego (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
  - “No tears for the sovereign”: Exploring aesthetic challenges to the UK ‘small boats crisis’
    
    This paper critically examines instances of ‘counter-aesthetics’ that disrupt the racialised aesthetic regime underpinning the operation of the UK sea-border and the re/production of the so-called ‘small boats crisis’ in the English Channel. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics, I conceptualise potential avenues for rupturing the representational regime of the border. I extend Rancière’s formulations of renegotiation by engaging post- and decolonial perspectives on resistance through aesthetics. By foregrounding registers of race and empire as central to the aesthetics of border enforcement, I offer a re-reading of ‘border aesthetics’
    Building on this theoretical framework, I analyse three forms of counter-aesthetics, each challenging the border’s violent logics of exclusion: (1) counter-evidencing and counter-mapping projects, which engage in a politics of witnessing and visualising the border’s racialised violence; (2) counter-narrations in the form of documentary photography and filmmaking, which destabilize the ‘common-sense’ of the border; and (3) ‘border art’ that directly or indirectly intervenes in the border’s ‘partition of the sensible,’ opening up spaces for reimagining the nation and its borders.
    
    Author: Silvester Schlebrügge (University of Warwick)
  - From Prison to Prison-like & the liminal spaces in-between: Carcerality, the 'FNO' & the UK detention estate
    
    This paper explores the interconnections between discourses on migrant masculinities, coloniality and racialisation in the context of the UK detention estate. I consider how bordering and the carceral state intertwine through a nexus of racialised policing and immigration enforcement to enact processes of illegalisation on migratised bodies. Within this I explore the construction of the ‘Foreign National Offender’ (FNO) – or criminalised non-citizen – in the political imaginary and how this construction is imbricated with processes of racialisation and histories/presents of coloniality. I argue that the construction of the masculinised ‘FNO’ as a phantasmic figure of fear is a central mechanism through which the securitisation of bordering is legitimised. I consider the specific and differential discourses on racialisation used within the ‘FNO’ label and the malleable ways in which it becomes attached to specific bodies. Through tracing the affective, discursive and material imbrications of bordering with carcerality, I argue that border resistance has to centre anti-carceral abolitionist visions within.
    
    Author: Lizzie Hobbs (London School of Economics)
  - The politicisation of terrorist content online by/in the EU as a tool of imperial repression
    
    I want this abstract to be considered for the panel "Anticolonial Solidarities and Resistance"- 'This research critically examines the multifaceted repression experienced by Palestinians and other individuals or collectives within the European Union (EU) who oppose Israel’s settler-colonial actions in the online space, particularly following the events of October 7th, 2023. Accused of “supporting terrorism,” these individuals face heightened scrutiny and censorship under EU regulations aimed at combatting “terrorist content” online. This study interrogates the politicized framing of terrorism within the EU’s regulatory framework, especially within the Digital Services Act and Regulation (EU) 2021/784. The analysis highlights the weaponization of the term "terrorism" to delegitimize resistance movements and critique of Israel’s policies, exacerbating the marginalization of Palestinian voices. By examining the operationalization of these laws, including the issuance of Removal Orders (ROs), the research emphasizes how these frameworks disproportionately target content related to Palestinian human rights, conflating legitimate resistance with terrorism. The study further explores the broader consequences of these measures, particularly the chilling effect on free speech, political participation, and the risks to professional livelihoods. It concludes by highlighting the broader implications of EU content moderation practices for freedom of expression, urging a reconsideration of the international and domestic politics shaping the definitions of “terrorism” and the mechanisms of online repression.'
    
    Author: Itxaso Domínguez De Olazábal (European Digital Rights)
  - Racialised Bordering Practices in the NHS
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Kathryn Zacharek (University of Brighton)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Cultural Artifacts get Political!: From Friendship and Immigration to Exceptionalism and Global Inequality Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Julian Schmid (Central European University)
  - Friends against Brothers: Representation of Friendship in Lana Bastašic’s Catch the Rabbit
    
    Lana Bastašić’s best-seller Catch the Rabbit (2021 [2018]) centres on the friendship between two teenage girls, one Muslim and the other Orthodox Christian, who become estranged and meet again after twelve years. This novel explores ways in which teenage girls construct their worlds through each other in the context of discrimination against and disappearances of Muslim members of their community in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bastašić’s portrayal of the two women as teenagers and adults avoids cliches of harmony, capturing jealousy, distrust and hurt. This friendship is based on navigating the two women’s disagreements, and my paper asks how this depiction challenges a liberal paradigm of friendship. Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship(1994) uncovers and critiques the tradition following Aristotle and Montague that connects male friendship with fraternity – a familial relationship of brotherhood – to democracy and closeness, not emotionally but through agreement and objectives. Derrida’s thinking about male friendship as a privileged political reference point based on similarity offers a starting point for this paper. In it, I will argue that Bastašic’s depiction of a female friendship, which can hold difference, helps rethink the meaning of diverse forms of friendship in politics and peace.
    
    Author: Anna Katila (City University)
  - The Happiest Place on Earth? Disneyland, US Exceptionalism and the Everyday Politics of the American Dream
    
    What can Disneyland tell us about the (changing) politics of American exceptionalism? This paper will argue that Disneyland is built upon an exceptionalist understanding of America’s history (and future) in order to present a space which both embeds at home and exports abroad American exceptionalism, identity and beliefs. It will do this by exploring the lands within the parks as 'iconic sites' that memorialise and display America’s greatness, looking at how these draw on the nation’s expansionist history through spaces such as ‘Main Street’ and Frontierland’ that (re)present America as it once was, but also spaces that view America as it could be such as ‘Tomorrowland’ and ‘EPCOT’ which seek to make real a utopian vision of the future only possible through democratic neoliberal capitalism. It will argue that much like the American dream itself Disneyland is mythical, presenting a version of the nation that never really existed, but acts as a physical manifestation of America’s unique history and exceptional identity that is then exported across the world through its global locations. My paper will develop an everyday politics approach that draws on literature on banal nationalism, popular culture and consumerism to explore how Disneyland embeds and exports America.
    
    Author: Elicia Coles (University of Warwick)
  - “Even the fascists were not as vile as these orcs”: Lord of the Rings in Contemporary (Culture) Wars
    
    The study of popular culture within world politics has become an increasingly vibrant research agenda over the last two decades. However, partly owing to its poststructuralist origins, much of the research in the area had focused on interpretations of the political meaning of artefacts of popular culture, rather than how they are engaged with and rearticulated politically by audiences. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by analysing how the Lord of the Rings as both an overarching narrative and artefact of popular culture has become part of two contemporary wars- that which is currently taking place in Ukraine, and the ongoing global ‘culture war’. In particular, the paper focuses on the discourses of the war in Ukraine, where the official and unofficial message has been to portray Ukraine as aligned with the forces of good, whilst often presenting Russian soldiers as ‘orcs’ and by extension Russia as the forces of evil. In conjunction to this, the paper also surveys how the Amazon series Rings of Power became part of the global culture war, which Putin has also used to elicit support from the right in the West. In doing so, it is argued that popular culture artefacts can do more than reflect real world politics but can inform them through offering powerful discursive narratives of othering and identity. Further, the study of Lord of the Rings is demonstrative of the malleability of popular culture artefacts, which can be rearticulated discursively to justify a wide range of political and security interventions. Finally, as a consequence of this, it is argued that the ‘culture wars’ necessitate further study to illuminate how discourses of popular culture have concrete effects on war and foreign policy.
    
    Authors: Ryan O'Connor (Birmingham City University)* , Euan Raffle (Birmingham City University)
  - Navigating cultural exchange frameworks amid global tension: Challenges in UK-China film collaboration between "cultural relations" and "cultural security"
    
    Over the past decade, British engagement with China has transformed across multiple dimensions—trade, foreign policy, security, and cultural relations. However, this shift has been under researched in its impact over the creative sector, where an initial emphasis on cultural exchange has given way to a more protectionist outlook.
    Focusing on the years 2013 to 2021, this paper explores film co-production as a case study of "cultural diplomacy" aimed at bridging differences and engaging with the rapidly growing Chinese market. However, as geopolitical tensions have intensified, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global flows, and China’s cultural policy pivoted toward "cultural security," this once-promising area of collaboration now faces important challenges. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews, official documents, and policy analyses, this study argues that beneath the terms "cultural diplomacy" and "cultural security" lie two distinct systems of values and meanings in the UK and China. These diverging systems are embedded in each country's political and cultural policy infrastructures and manifest in contrasting approaches to cultural diplomacy.
    This paper situates the challenges of film collaboration within the broader IR debate on cultural exchange, questioning how the shift from "cultural diplomacy" to "cultural security" shapes the future of UK-China relations. By unpacking the complexities of these contrasting policy approaches, this paper contributes to BISA’s 50-year reflection on emerging challenges in International Studies, highlighting how cultural engagement must evolve to address new global tensions and value systems.
    
    Author: Giulia D'Aquila (King's College London)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Feminist perspectives on violence: visibility, survival and resistance Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable brings together scholars for discussions on feminist perspectives on violence and war. Our current moment is host to a proliferation of violences globally – those perpetrated through colonial, imperial and neocolonial patterns; those fuelled by inner- or interstate conflict; those found within daily, intimate levels. While some forms are rendered hypervisible, others become eclipsed and fall out of common lexicon.
  
  Feminist organising has been at the heart of struggles against different forms of violence, including state and imperial violence. Feminists have interrogated heteropatriarchal, capitalist and anthropocentric framings of conflict; drawn attention to the fluid boundaries of war and peace; exposed the violent constitution of gendered and racialised subjects and shown how violence affects them differently.
  
  Feminist approaches have also clashed, however. Liberal feminist narratives have been used to legitimise colonial and racialised forms of (state) violence throughout the global war on terror, and, more recently, violence in Gaza. Forms of radical feminism are being channelled to undermine trans and queer lives. Feminists have also justified peacekeeper’s violence in the name of protecting national communities.
  
  This roundtable asks how feminist approaches help us to understand ongoing violences particularly concerning how forms of violence are made visible, invisible or hypervisible, and what tools feminist approaches provide us to draw connections and solidarities between different struggles. This roundtable both draws attention to these tensions and seeks to bring us back to the role that feminisms can play in exposing violence, creating resistance and fostering transnational solidarity.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Alice Finden
  
  Participants: Amya Agarwal (University of Sheffield) , Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick) , Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh) , Sladjana Lazic (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Genocidal Conjunctures and the Politics of Futurity in the Middle East Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Sophie Chamas (SOAS, University of London)
  
  Chair: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Seeds of Revolution: Egyptian and Syrian Solidarity with the Second Palestinian Intifada as the Germination of the 2011 Uprisings
    
    This paper looks at the way two movements in solidarity with Palestine themselves laid the groundwork for (supposedly unrelated) revolutionary moments in their domestic contexts. It asks how political imaginaries born out of contention in extreme repressive contexts can produce other possibilities and major unintended ramifications, using the case studies of Egypt and Syria. In September 2000, upon the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada, protests in support of the embattled Palestinians broke out across the region in ways rarely seen before. The Mubarak regime in Egypt, having deployed extreme repressive measures against Islamists and civil society actors in the 1990s, was advised by the Clinton Administration to allow some protest as a pressure valve, while Syria’s newly anointed President Assad was allowing a tentative opening in civic activism, with demonstrations for Palestine deemed a tolerable form of public expression. Neither knew these were to sow the seed of the revolts that broke out a decade later, with activists cutting their teeth building the demonstrations, forging ties of solidarity, testing the limits of what was possible in the public sphere, and developing repertoires of contention. This paper asks what implications there are for analysing protest as worldbuilding, even when the world is decades delayed and even hidden (from the participants themselves) – where solidarity creates new possibilities and demands domestically.
    
    Author: Jack McGinn (London School of Economics)
  - Palestine and the Quest for Justice in Past and Future History
    
    This paper investigates the mediation of the war on Gaza, drawing mostly on social media content and mainstream Western news coverage. It unpacks how the Palestinian solidarity movement reacted to mainstream Western media complicity and racialised bias in war coverage. It asks: With the outpouring of visual content documenting atrocity, how has the Palestinian solidarity movement represented the history of structural violence and colonisation in the region? I discuss the different ways that history has been summoned, both in its past and future iterations. History emerges through slogans, frames and visions that perceive and discuss the ethnic cleansing in Gaza through the Nakba (the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians). History is also futurized in calls for archiving for the future and insisting that Palestinians will find justice in future history. I conclude with addressing what these tactics reveal about the shelf life of “witnessing” as a post WWII moral and political framework to discuss atrocity.
    
    Author: Omar Al Ghazzi (London School of Economics)
  - A Haunting on X
    
    This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian activists, intellectuals, journalists, scholars and cultural producers in Gaza, anticipating their own impending death in the face of an Israeli onslaught determined to find, target, and snuff them out, requested that the world give them a political afterlife and become ‘other’, become revolutionary, in conversation with their ghosts. It focuses on the Gazan poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 7th, 2023. Since his death, Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’ has circulated routinely across the globe. It makes routine appearances on social media, is read out at protests and vigils, and has featured on banners held during marches and hung up in the halls of universities by student protestors, some of whom have renamed halls after him. The tweets he wrote have also continued to circulate, and are regularly quote tweeted by pro-Palestine activists as a means of responding to unfolding events and preventing those he held responsible for his death from escaping accountability. Refaat knew he was likely, if not certainly, going to die. I argue that the inevitability of death in this case was productive of an anticipatory politics of haunting that asked those of us who would live on, outside of but for Gaza, to be in conversation with and in service to its ghosts. This insistence on living on after death gives new meaning to the Palestinian phrase, ‘existence is resistance’, expanding existence beyond the realm of the living to encompass the dead and their enduring political legacies.
    
    Author: Sophie Chamas (SOAS, University of London)
  - Liberation Dreams and Im/possibility of Palestine
    
    This contribution analyses the liberal and oppressive processes of making Palestinian realities impossible through the politics and ideology of Zionism and German Staatsräson or‘reason of state’. Against this backdrop and through the optics of Magical Marxism I explore the potential of dreams and the imagination for Palestinian Liberation.
    
    Author: Hanna Al Taher (TU Dresden)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Geopolitical Challenges of US Foreign Policy in the 21st Century Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London)
  - The ‘Havana Syndrome’ Controversy and US Foreign Policy: Imaginaries of the New Cold War
    
    In 2016, dozens of American embassy staff in Havana, Cuba, reported suffering from mysterious cognitive and neurological symptoms. It was initially conjectured that the symptoms could be attributed to sonic attacks from a novel weapon, though the likelihood of this was consistently disputed. Confounding medical researchers, the condition came to be known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. In subsequent years, the phenomenon expanded to other locales, affecting hundreds of US and Western diplomats in Cuba, China, Vietnam, Washington, DC and elsewhere. This paper explores the debates and depictions of ‘Havana Syndrome’ in US foreign policy. It situates the controversy in the changing geopolitical environment of the previous decade, which witnessed increased tensions between the ‘great powers’. Because of the frequent speculation that Russia could be behind the ‘attacks’, the Havana Syndrome controversy provides fruitful terrain to explore US imaginaries of the ‘new Cold War’. Blending content and discourse analysis of reports and statements in US policy and media circles, the paper leverages the controversy to trace the fault lines, boundaries, and uncertainties of the ‘new Cold War’. It argues that the phenomenon not only reflects the anxieties of this new geopolitical reality, it illustrates the power of imagination in creating these new realities.
    
    Author: Rubrick Biegon (University of Kent)
  - Constructivism and the Capitol Riots: Beyond single dominant national security narratives
    
    Constructivist research has established that (inter)national politics is structured by periods of enduring stability, characterised by (limited) rhetorical innovations, and moments of rapid change, as new (structuring) narratives are forged. However, this understanding has been mapped onto an ontological assumption that single, dominant organising national security narratives are possible and normal. In the contemporary era, this is not currently the case: the era of single, dominant national security narratives is over. Constructivism must be updated. We explore this in the US case, characterised by inward-looking, hyper-partisan politics. Combining Constructivist insights on language with interdisciplinary work on eventful sociology, we explore the construction of the Capitol Riots in US political debate as a confirmatory, rather than rupturing, event for the two distinct and synergistic national security narratives that now structure US politics. To do so, we produce and analyse a new dataset of 1000+ political and media texts. We show how and why conservative and liberal elites failed or declined to construct the event as a pivotal moment of temporal rupture. Our findings demonstrate that Constructivism’s explanatory potential remains powerful but requires updating to meet the demands of the new, hyper-polarised US politics, never mind the variegated contexts of Global IR.
    
    Author: Jack Holland (University of Leeds)
  - Another Loss of China?: On the Discourse of Engagement Failure in U.S. Policy towards China
    
    This study investigates the role of selective amnesia when a state updates its foreign policy preferences. While traditional approaches to selective amnesia within a state’s policymaking community suggest how the dismissal of failures leads to reckless policies (Philpott 2009; Krishna 2001), this article argues that the overemphasis of failures can have a similarly detrimental effect. Drawing upon the narrative that U.S. engagement with the People's Republic of China (1972–2017) has been a “failure” (Johnston 2019; Fingar 2021), this study identifies three ways in which such selective memory has shaped policy swings. Firstly, the exaggeration of past losses encourages a more confrontational posture in future bilateral disputes; secondly, the disparagement of past gains weakens efforts to stabilize existing ties and address shared challenges; and thirdly, the reconstruction of “means” as “ends” introduces new sources of friction in an already strained relationship. While policymakers often construct these narratives to justify foreign policy adjustments ex post, presenting historical policies as “failures” can lead to overconfident, risky decisions and missed opportunities for continued cooperation. In so doing, this article highlights the overlooked but significant role that historical narratives—both positive and negative—play in shaping the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy, not only toward China but also Russia, Israel, and beyond.
    
    Author: Haitong Du (University of Oxford)
  - The Political Foundations of America's Commitment to the Middle East
    
    This paper examines the origins of America's strategic commitment to the Middle East. It traces the establishment of a robust overseas presence in the region to a series of decisions taken by the Carter and Reagan administrations designed to respond to an "arc of crisis". In doing so, however, it sheds new light on the surprising degree to which these efforts were shaped by domestic political concerns. The paper therefore makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of grand strategy. First, whereas existing literature emphasises variables at the international level, this paper highlights the role played by domestic political forces in mediating the impact of geopolitical changes on a state's regional posture. The impact of electoral constraints, lobby groups and congressional pressures is shown to be complex - at times accelerating the establishment of an overseas presence, at other times constraining the ability of officials to do so. Second, the paper draws on extensive original archival research and a series of elite interviews with senior administration officials to help us gain a fuller understanding of how the United States became so deeply enmeshed in the regional security architecture of the Middle East. In doing so, it also offers a series of salient lessons and analogies for the present moment, in which scholars and policymakers debate how best to "rightsize" the military footprint in that region while dialling up the commitment to other theatres in response to new and renewed geopolitical challenges from China and Russia.
    
    Author: Andrew Payne (City St. George's, University of London)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Global Futures Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working group
  
  Chair: Borislav Tsokov (University of St Andrews)
  - Alignments in Flux: Civilisational States, Smaller Powers, and the New Global Order
    
    The rise of civilisational states, such as China and Russia, is reshaping global politics and challenging liberal norms. Current discourses either nuance the essentialism of ‘civilisation’ by linking it to state practices or develop relational accounts focusing on the agential role of great powers and smaller states. Christopher Coker provides insights into how great powers deploy civilisational narratives, while Amitav Acharya and Andrew Phillips explore agency through localisation and customisation processes. However, this paper argues that these approaches do not fully capture the emergent dynamics of integration processes—both planned and unplanned—that redefine global alignments and shape smaller states like Hungary and Serbia.
    Building on Andrew Linklater’s work on the contradictions of integration processes and the symbolic dimensions of civilising processes, this paper identifies three critical dynamics shaping these transformations: symbolic syncretisation, state-formation, and nation-formation. These processes illuminate how symbolic, institutional, and ideological shifts within smaller states deepen their alignment with civilisational powers and their normative orbits. For example, Serbia’s democratic backsliding reflects both domestic political transformations and the gravitational pull of civilisational states offering alternative governance models and narratives of pride and sovereignty. Such transformations challenge the Liberal International Order (LIO) not only through strategic recalibrations, but also through cultural, governance, and normative changes, reinforced by contradictions within the LIO itself.
    This paper critiques traditional binaries of democracies vs. autocracies and Cold War-inspired concepts like balancing and bandwagoning, arguing instead for a relational, process-oriented approach to understanding how integration processes reshape global politics. By bridging Global IR, Hierarchy Studies, and Process Sociology, it challenges deterministic accounts of an inevitable return to realpolitik espoused by some realists and national-populists. Ultimately, it argues that recognising the contradictions and incompleteness of these integration processes is essential to mitigating global fragmentation and fostering alternative pathways for coexistence in a multipolar, multicivilisational world.
    
    Author: Alexandros Koutsoukis (Universtiy of Central Lancashire)
  - Rebels Without a Cause (For Hope): On Nihilism and the Disappearance of the Future
    
    This paper explores the rise of nihilism within contemporary violent extremism, examining how a loss of hope for the future shapes the motivations and behaviours of groups and individuals engaged in political violence. Historically, extremist ideologies often promised radical change, envisioning an idealised – or, at a minimum, a rosier – future. Despite their violence, extremists often sought to leave the world a better place than they found it, at least according to their worldview. However, recent cases of violent extremism reveal an increasingly nihilistic outlook among certain individuals and groups, who reject not only the present order and status quo but also the possibility of any constructive alternative. Here, violence ceases to be a means to an end and becomes an end itself. This trend is especially pronounced within ideologies responding to the Anthropocene, where the reality of environmental collapse intensifies a sense of futility and despair. Drawing from political theory, this paper engages in an interdisciplinary analysis to understand the emergence of nihilism across various ideological milieus, such as incel subcultures, insurrectionary anarchism, and eco-extremism, investigating the convergences and divergences characterising this shift towards nihilism. While some recent analyses have suggested that the emergence of nihilism marks the end of ideology in violent extremism, the paper argues that, instead, nihilism becomes an integral part of it. Rather than signalling the loss of ideology, the rise of nihilism points to the disappearance of the future from it, particularly within the context of the Anthropocene.
    
    Authors: Mauro Lubrano (University of Bath) , Aristidis Victor Agoglossakis Foley (University of Amsterdam)
  - The Antropocene and the challenge of the international for the future of critical international theory: Lessons from Nikolai Bukharin
    
    The discipline of International Relations (IR) has amply recognized how contemporary processes of ecological breakdown, increasingly summarised under the heading of the Antropocene, pose a fundamental challenge to the state-based international system. Consequently, there have been calls within IR for the development of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘planetary’ perspectives that permit to address these phenomena at a global level via the political integration of humanity. And yet, most of these calls assume an idealistic outlook, laying out what would be the most adequate way to address the Anthropocene, but being much less forthcoming in discussing the actual political practice that could make their proposed solutions a reality. In a way, they remain at a utopian level of argumentation, without engaging with actual political practice nor with the challenges posed by the fragmentation of humanity into a multiplicity of political units. This fundamental ‘international’ condition needs to be addressed if critical international theory is to move beyond utopian proposals and reconnect theory with practice in ways that ensure its relevance into the future. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this revitalisation of critical international theory in the Anthropocene by addressing the work of an apparently unlikely figure in this context: Nikolai Bukharin. The Bolshevik revolutionary was one of the few that realized the political challenge of the ‘international’ for global transformation projects. Faced with the failure of the spread of socialist revolutions to other European countries, Bukharin confronted the political challenge of promoting global change amidst the international fragmentation of humanity. His answers to this challenge reconfigured not only the role of the national and the state in emancipatory critical projects but also the conception of the relation between human societies and non-human nature in ways that are increasingly relevant to the contemporary challenges posed by the Anthropocene.
    
    Author: Andre Saramago (University of Coimbra)
  - Deep Global Futures: World Politics in Post-Human Times
    
    As discourses of future world orders conjure up increasingly catastrophic visions of climate disasters, human extinction and techno-war, IR’s understanding of the future remains problematically human-centric. Building on Environmental Studies, Black and Indigenous Thought, and Science and Technology Studies, this paper rethinks extant understandings of time in world politics to appraise the politics of global futures critically and creatively. First, we claim that we need to move beyond a notion of time centred on the human subject to foreground geological and multispecies visions of futurity, where humans do not occupy a privileged place in global political ecologies. Second, we stress the historical co-constitution of the time of world politics and colonial violence, reflecting on the entanglement between race and the future of (some kinds of) humanity. Lastly, we experiment with narratives of techno-war that bring the future of conflict outside the scope of human agency, speculating about the possibility of wartime(s) beyond human extinction. Together, these moves set the stage for an international political sociology of deep global futures that takes seriously the role of time in shaping the subjects, limits, and trajectories of world politics.
    
    Authors: Mirko Palestrino (Queen Mary University of London) , Italo Brandimarte (University of Cambridge)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Global Health Governance, Equity, and Justice: What can IR contribute? Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  The field of global health politics is now well-established within International Relations (IR), including as a working group within BISA. Over the past 20 years, much of IR's contribution to global health has taken a critical approach, highlighting how global politics can create and exacerbate health inequities. However, there has been less progress in proposing actionable visions for achieving a more just and equitable world. What would 'global health equity' or 'global health justice' look like in practice, and how would we recognize it? What contributions can current global health governance structures make, and where do their limitations lie? What are the global political obstacles to achieving health equity and justice, and where are the opportunities for meaningful progress? This Roundtable brings together leading scholars from the fields of IR, global health politics, international law, and philosophy in a critical dialogue to address these conceptual and empirical questions. It explores potential points of connection between IR and other disciplines that grapple with similar challenges. Acknowledging the unique challenges faced by individuals at the intersection of various marginalised identities, the Roundtable will also discuss frameworks that support agency and justice, promoting more nuanced, equitable, and inclusive global governance. In doing so, it directly responds to the conference theme, examining whether IR as a discipline is equipped to meet the challenges of the future, and exploring what IR can contribute to—and learn from—other disciplines.
  
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Chair: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
  
  Participants: Anne Roemer-Mahler (University of Sussex) , Renu Singh (Durham University) , Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton) , Sridhar Venkatapuram (King's College London) , Peter West-Oram (Brighton and Sussex Medical School) , Stefan Elbe (University of Sussex)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Identity and belonging in the UK Armed Forces Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Amy Hill (Newcastle university)
  
  Chair: Tara Zammit (KCL)
  
  Discussant: Tara Zammit (KCL)
  - Diversity and Belonging in the military context: Tensions and trade-offs with diversity policies in the UK Armed Forces, inhibitors of inclusion and belonging.
    
    This paper is about the tensions and trade-offs of diversity promotion and meritocracy in the Royal Air Force. The paper draws on evidence collected from recent media attention and exiting literature, combined with the authors reflexive stance from her own service in the Royal Air Force to reflect on the impact of diversity policies on the service culture and personnel. The Royal Air Force has long prided itself on its meritocratic system and historically distinguished itself against the other UK services by promoting its non-traditional accessibility to individuals from all groups. However, recent public events, including the non-statutory inquiry into gender harassment and bullying in the RAF Aerobatic Display Team ‘The Red Arrows’, and the inquiry into positive discrimination recruitment practices which exposed a ‘toxic culture to chasing diversity statistics’, have offered insights to a problematic organisational culture when it comes to diversity and inclusion practices. This paper uses these insights to discuss the impact these paradoxical incidents have had on the organisational culture and on the people who serve within the organisation.
    
    Author: Amy Hill (Newcastle university)
  - Performative Veteranhood: The contentions between the young and the old, and the importance of visual identity and belonging to women veterans of the British Armed Forces.
    
    This research explores the distinctions between younger and older women veterans of the British Armed Forces through their experience of performative veteranhood. Through a series of interviews, it becomes apparent that there is a consistent divergence in the performative nature of veteranhood between the two groups. Despite unique experiences, themes such as Identity, Fictive Kinship and Belonging are reproduced in each case. Previous research has shown that the older generations of veterans rely on a visual veteran identity. This is demonstrated in this research by the joining of associations and clubs, receiving magazines, and the keeping abreast of veteran-related affairs. However, research into the younger generation and their relationship to performative veteranhood is limited. Younger veterans seem to be less inclined to join military-centred groups and prefer to distance themselves from the visual and gendered sense of veteranhood. It became apparent that there are a series of contentions between the two groups, often tending towards knowledge, perceived quality of experience, and gendered groupings. This research aims to provide insight into how these contentions help to affirm the identity of each group, using qualitative methodology and gender-related concepts from Queer theory.
    
    Author: Victoria Sutch (Cardiff University)
  - ‘All identities are equal, but some identities are more equal than others’ - How military institutions create a sense of lack within Servicepersons through internal ‘Ethos, Values and Standards’ policy.
    
    Recent Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force recruitment campaigns and diversity initiatives portray the Services as meritocratic workplaces where social ‘difference’ is welcomed. Despite these efforts, research on serving and veteran women, LGBTQ+ personnel and minority ethnicities evidence enduring workplace inequality.
    
    Organisational discourses communicating the ‘ideal’ Serviceperson are underpinned by ongoing institutional commitment to conservative binary assumptions around gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. This systemic endorsement of a particular ideal undermines institutional aims regarding diversity and inclusion.
    
    This paper critically examines the key policy documents which set out the core ethos, values and standards for each of the 3 Services to identify dominant discourses of the ideal military worker. An initial and uncritical reading of these texts suggests that the values and standards therein are categorically neutral; equally able to be demonstrated by any individual. However, this paper argues that the policy documents illustrate an organisational ‘regime of truth’ which privileges a white, middle class, male, heterosexual subject position through leveraging historical, sociocultural and ideological narratives. The positioning of this specific masculinity as having ‘innate and natural’ suitability for military service casts ‘others’ as lacking or liminal based on their (in)ability to demonstrate these preferred attributes.
    
    Author: Annie Geisow (Oxford Brookes University)
  - An exploration into female veterans’ experiences competing in sport after sustaining a disability and the impact this has on their sense of self-identity.
    
    This research aims to explore the phenomenological experiences of female veterans who have acquired a disability and who participate in high level competitive sport. The research team deemed it necessary to include both physical and psychological disabilities due to the bidirectional relationship that exists between both disability types and identity. The acquisition of a physical disability may catalyse identity struggles, whilst the challenge to one’s identity may induce mental health struggles. Previous studies have shown that engaging in competitive sport can help disabled veterans establish a sense of self-continuity, form meaningful relationships, and foster a positive post-military identity. However, previous research has largely focused on male veterans, whilst studies on the experiences of female veterans' transition to civilian life post-disability remain limited. This is despite the fact that women undergo unique experiences both during their service and when reintegrating into civilian life. Therefore, this study investigates how competing in sport influences female veterans’ sense of self and identity after sustaining a disability. Using a qualitative methodology, this research seeks to provide valuable insights into the unique subjectivity of female veterans and how these experiences impact self-understand and sense of identity.
    
    Author: Anna Hendrick (Liverpool Hope University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Life and Death on the Balkan Route: Traces and haunting Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Convener: Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University)
  
  Chair: Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University)
  - The Afterlives of Crisis: A hauntological reading of refugee encampment on Samos
    
    This paper explores sites of dememorialisation (Sendyka, 2016) in the Greek border zones of the European Union, with a specific focus on the island of Samos. It focuses on spaces of support and encampment used to house people on the move over the last decade which have been abandoned and returned to the landscape, as well as on spaces of burial of those individuals lost as they attempted perilous journeys to safety. Drawing on the growing literature on hauntology (Fiddler et al, 2022), the paper explores questions of memorialisation and active forgetting drawing on patchwork ethnographic methods (Günel & Watanabe, 2024) including -photography and qualitative interviewing to more deeply understand these spaces and the traces of stories and ephemera within them.
    
    Author: Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool)
  - The Ghosts of Moria: The Refugee Camp as a Liminal Political Space of Haunting
    
    Moria, the notorious refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos had been described by many as a ‘living hell’. In September 2020 a fire burnt the camp to the ground leaving asylum seekers homeless for days. For the thousands of asylum seekers who lived in Moria, the camp was both a convivial place of belonging and a state of exception where hope and suffering clashed on a daily basis. This paper will draw on Jessica Auchter’s politics of haunting and will take the reader on a walk through Moria’s burnt remnants. Drawing on a combination of documentary photography and photojournalism this paper will reflect on Moria before the fire, in its immediate aftermath and on what has been left behind. The Ghosts of Moria will argue that the refugee camp can be approached as a liminal space of mortality where a refugee’s life and death become political in their absence.
    
    Author: Marianna Karakoulaki (University of Birmingham)
  - In trains, among freight, and under trains: the alignment of bodies and railway transport
    
    This paper looks at how bordered affects are formed and reproduced in the relationship of railway infrastructure and practices of migration (and migration control). Focusing on the train line running from Šid (SRB), through Croatia (HRK), to Dobova (SLO), it asks how railways–as socio-spatial objects–are involved in both the anticipation and hope of forward movement, as well as the governing of (im)mobility, migrant racialisation, incarceration and deportation. Through testimonies of the Šid-Dobova line between 2015-2020, I explore how the potential and foreclosure of mobility can be part understood through the alignment of bodies in trains, among freight and under trains, in particular through the traces these bodies leave in their wake (Sharp 2016). I argue that attending to the positions of people on the move--as “humanitarian passengers”, “clandestine stowaways”, and “deportees”--highlights key aspects of the EUropean border regime, in particular how border enforcement articulates itself to corridors of capital, commodities and labour mobility. Using an affective approach to viapolitics (Walters 2015), the paper emphasises the relational and inter-object “accrual” (Ahmed 2004) of particular bordered affects within railway space, and the imprint of bodies on chains of governance, logistics and humanitarianism.
    
    Author: Simon Campbell (Aston University)
  - Cramped spaces, intimate traces: Material and embodied geographies of the “Balkan Route” in and around Trieste
    
    Since 2018, the Italy-Slovenia border and the city of Trieste have become an integral part of the so-called ‘Balkan Route’, contributing to this border’s stratified history. This chapter starts from material traces as a lens to look at the everyday violence that people on the move are subject to in Trieste. This, I argue, contributes to the creation of “cramped spaces” within the urban tissue. Adopting the conceptualisation of Walters and Lüthi ( 2016), I look at “cramped spaces” as spaces of spatial segregation which may become spaces of resistance, struggles, and negotiation of collective practices of “becoming and remaking”. Looking at intimate traces can provide an interesting angle to look at the intersection between the material and discursive realms, and the interplay between the scales of everyday life and of official narratives concerning the presence of people on the move in Trieste. In fact, intimate traces produced in response to everyday violence testify to migrants’ struggles and place-making tactics in this territory. At the same time, the intimate sphere is co-opted into anti-migration narratives of ‘garbage’ to divert the attention from the local government’s inaction.
    
    Author: Noemi Bergesio (University of Bologna, Italy)
  - Interrupting police violence in the Bulgarian-Turkish border: where border violence, migrant solidarity and international activism meet
    
    As legal routes to seek asylum in the EU continue to be remarkably scarce, exclusive, racist and brutal, people on the move traverse the green border between Turkey and Bulgaria by their own means in order to exercise their rights. In response, Bulgarian border authorities execute violent manoeuvres to terrify and push-back racialised subjectivities using EU funded materials. Strategies of deterrence to people on the move are diverse and systematic, from pro-active methods - beatings, confiscation of personal belongings, unlawful transportation from Bulgarian border sites to Turkey - to passive approaches - rejection of emergency assistance and criminalization of those who are willing to provide such help.
    
    In this context of state-terror, international volunteers and migrant solidarity networks are currently putting their effort in interrupting Bulgarian border-police violence. This paper will explore how a diverse group of volunteers and activists indirectly or directly affected by border police abuse are resisting border violence through direct action and radical presence. As attempts to prevent border violence through advocacy have been extensive over the years and non-the-less arguably ineffective, we will reflect on the strengths and limitations of these semi-structured interventions as well as in its conditions of possibility, articulated by the coming together of “international” activism and “migrant” solidarity.
    
    Author: Leandro Navarro Cabanas (University of Liverpool)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Margins, Militaries, and Militarization in Russia's War Against Ukraine Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Ian Garner (Pilecki Institute, Warsaw)
  
  Chair: Matthew Ford (Swedish Defence University)
  
  Discussant: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
  - Killing as Belonging: Discourses of Russia’s Marginalized Soldiers and Atrocities in Ukraine
    
    Despite the enormous death tolls at the front in Ukraine, the Russian state has consistently managed to meet and, as of the time of writing, even exceed its military recruitment targets. Although the war against Ukraine has often been described by scholars as an ethnonationalist conflict dominated by a quasi-genocidal Great Russian ideology, the Kremlin has drawn its army from a broad section of society. Soldiers are drawn from a wide range of marginalized groups, including ethnic, gendered, and sexual minorities.
    
    Recruits at the front, regardless of their marginalization or status as well remunerated contract or forcibly mobilized soldiers, have behaved with impunity, indulging in widespread atrocities on and around the battlefield. Crimes including the murder and torture of civilians and the execution of wounded and captured enemy combatants have been widely reported by credible media and government sources. Nonetheless, scholarly and journalistic explorations of the link between the state’s purportedly genocidal policies and the enactment of on-the-ground atrocities — especially those committed by soldiers from beyond Russia’s ethnic majority — has been limited. In this paper, I explore discourses around the intersection of military recruitment propaganda, discussions of killing on veterans and serving soldiers’ social media (VK, Telegram) groups, and interviews with serving and former Russian soldiers from marginalized (LGBTQ+, ethnic minority) groups. I propose that killing becomes an act of (self-)transition between social margins and centre. I thus contribute to a broader conversation about militarism, military violence, and ethnonationalism in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
    
    Author: Ian Garner (Pilecki Institute, Warsaw)
  - From Destabilising to Destroying the Ukrainian Nation: The Evolution of Russia’s Policies Targeting Ukrainian identity and Cultural Heritage in the Occupied Territories (2014–2024)
    
    Mounting evidence of Russia’s war crimes and repressive policies in the occupied territories has compelled a growing number of scholars and policymakers to recognise the colonial nature of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This paper retraces the evolution of the mechanisms and objectives of Russia’s occupation policies from 2014 to 2024, focusing on the cultural and educational spheres. While these policies have been methodically executed since the start of the Ukrainian-Russian war, their objective has evolved from eroding Ukrainian social cohesion as a tool of political destabilisation (before 2022) to eradicating Ukrainian national identity as a tool of imperial subjugation (after 2022). The analysis systematises available evidence by looking at two distinct dimensions. The physical dimension concerns the deliberate damage or destruction of cultural heritage sites and architectural buildings, the looting of Ukrainian museums and libraries, but also the erection of new monuments and spaces of collective memorialisation. The psychological dimension refers to indoctrination and militarisation programmes targeting children and youth through the local educational systems. Overall, this study explains how political indoctrination and cultural assimilation programmes, which had been originally designed to influence the reintegration of the so-called ‘Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics’ into Ukraine on Russian terms as part of the Minsk diplomatic process, eventually prepared the ground for crimes later characterised as amounting to (cultural) genocide following the start of the full-scale invasion.
    
    Author: Jaroslava Barbieri (University of Birmingham)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Navigating Gender, Caste, Race, Ethnicity in the Postcolonial South Asia Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Shipra Shukla (Amity University Haryana)
  - Rediscovering Feminism: The Story of Revolutionary Politics in the Global South – A Case of Post-Colonial Sri Lanka
    
    This research seeks to critically examine feminist political movements within post-colonial Sri Lanka, a nation emerging from a protracted civil conflict. In the Global South, post-colonial politics often developed in opposition to colonial rule, emphasizing nationalism and localism. However, Sri Lanka’s post-colonial political institutions retain Western models of representative democracy, alongside capitalist economic systems, caste structures, class hierarchies, and gender inequalities. Within these frameworks, Sri Lankan feminism has intersected with anti-colonial nationalism, ethno-nationalism, and working-class politics.
    
    This study focuses on Tamil revolutionary politics, an ethnic minority movement that aims to counter the oppression and marginalization imposed by Sri Lanka’s post-colonial institutions. Over time, these movements adopted a militant approach grounded in Marxist-Leninist ideology, resulting in a prolonged civil conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
    
    The research is based on qualitative empirical data collected through semi-structured interviews with six former female LTTE combatants now living in exile in London. Their narratives were analyzed using critical discourse analysis, providing unique insights into the development of feminist consciousness within Sri Lanka’s complex socio-political landscape. This research applies Sheila Rowbotham’s radical feminist scholarship as its theoretical foundation, framing the investigation into how feminist ideas have manifested within Sri Lanka’s post-colonial context.
    
    The key finding is that feminist revolutionary consciousness in post-colonial Sri Lanka primarily aligns with nationalism or class politics. For Tamil women, ethno-majoritarianism inherited from colonialism has often prioritized nationalism over class solidarity, presenting a stark choice: militancy or subordination to systemic oppression. Although these Tamil women are part of the working class, they remain excluded from class-based politics due to the pervasive influence of ethno-nationalism, a gap often overlooked by prevailing feminist scholarship.
    
    This research addresses a critical gap in understanding the intersections of class, ethnicity, and gender, providing significant insights into redefining feminism.
    
    Author: Aruni Samarakoon (University of Hull)
  - The Shattered Home: Exploring the Consequences of Enforced Disappearances on the Concept of Home in Kashmiri Secessionist Movements
    
    The paper examines the repercussions of Enforced Disappearances on the notion of Home in secessionist movements within the Kashmir region of India. In these conflict zones, encompassing combatants, insurgents, and civilians, a significant transformation occurs in the understanding of Home. Focusing on the aftermath of violent secessionist conflicts, this paper delves into the consequences of shattered homes resulting from unresolved demands for secession and the subsequent resistance against such aspirations. The anticipated return of disappeared militants or non-combatant civilians, which ultimately fails to materialize, fundamentally reshapes the meaning of Home. Numerous individuals subjected to enforced disappearance, including former militants, stone-pelters, and individuals branded as ‘troublemakers’ by the state, remain untraceable. Among them are married men with families, leaving their wives in a perpetual state of uncertainty regarding their marital status. Referred to as 'half-widows', these women find themselves unable to move forward as traditional widows do, trapped in the expectation of their husbands’ return. In a deeply patriarchal society where men traditionally shape the dynamics of home, the absence and uncertainty surrounding these men instigate profound changes in the lives of these women and their perception of Home. Drawing on narratives of half-widows, this paper delves into the experiences of half-widows. By illuminating the altered meaning of home and the challenges encountered in post-conflict reconstruction, the study highlights the enduring longing for return that remains unrealized. These half-widows bear the burden of their husbands’ disappearance, caught between yearning for their return and the inability to forge ahead and rebuild their lives in today’s post-conflict Kashmir. This paper provides a distinct lens to examine the notion of Home when the anticipated return fails to materialize. It advances understanding of the extensive ramifications of unresolved conflicts and the intricate process of rebuilding homes.
    
    Author: Shipra Shukla (Amity University Haryana)
  - Navigating (Post)Empire: Women’s Experience in German Everyday Foreign Policy in Delhi
    
    Ever since its emergence, women have been holding various roles in diplomacy and foreign policy. In the wake of the Second World War, especially, women‘s positions as ‘diplomatic wives’, on the one hand, were central to national or (post-)imperial foreign policy interests. On the other, as non-diplomatic staff, women were tasked with specific gendered and racialized roles within a foreign country’s diplomatic institutions. Aside from diplomacies, these institutions included cultural and economic actors, like language centers, schools or private corporations. This paper asks about women’s experience in the everyday of such informal foreign policy spaces of former imperial powers.
    Given its centuries-long presence on the Indian subcontinent and its imperial past, this paper takes German diplomatic presence in India as an example. It zooms in on the German school, the cultural Goethe Institute and Siemens AG. Based on photo-elicitation interviews conducted across Germany and in Delhi, it asks what complex or maybe even contradictory roles German and Indian women had in these spaces and how they navigated German foreign policy presence in postcolonial Delhi. Second, it juxtaposes these interviews with findings from previously conducted archival research in the German Federal Foreign Office on the selected institutions. Drawing on feminist postcolonial theory, the paper, then, demonstrates how cultural and economic institutions were both central realms of foreign policy and sites of social reproduction to which, in the context of post-empire, women were crucial. Contributing to feminist scholarship in foreign policy, this paper provides a historical analysis that centers on women in 20th century male-dominated foreign policies. In addition, it adds to studies on the under-researched German involvement in empire and its aftermath in India in the 20th century.
    
    Author: Madita Standke-Erdmann (King's College London)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Pushing the Frontiers: Reshaping Peace and Security Frameworks in Africa Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Joan McDappa
  
  Chair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
  - Utilising Space Resources in Tackling Insecurity in Africa: Challenges and Prospects
    
    Africa faces complex security challenges that hinder its socio-economic progress. The utilization of space resources presents a novel and effective means to address these issues, offering solutions ranging from enhanced surveillance and monitoring to improved communication infrastructure and disaster response capabilities. This article discusses the significant potential of space-based technologies to strengthen security measures across the continent. It also examines the challenges that impede the full deployment of these resources, such as high costs, limited technical expertise, regulatory gaps, and reliance on foreign partnerships. By analysing both the prospects and challenges, the article underscores the importance of regional collaboration, policy development, capacity-building, and public-private partnerships as pathways to leverage space resources for a more secure and resilient Africa.
    
    Author: Dominic Okoli (Kingston University)
  - Frontline Perspectives: Restructuring Deradicalization, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration Strategies in Nigeria's Fight Against Boko Haram
    
    For over a decade, the Boko Haram insurgency has devastated the Northeast of Nigeria, heavily straining the nation’s military and socioeconomic resources, destabilizing the region, and resulting in extensive loss of lives and property (Sasu, 2022). In response, Nigeria launched the Deradicalization, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration (DRR) programme under Operation Safe Corridor (OSC) in 2016, introducing a soft approach to complement the ongoing military counteroffensive against violent extremism in the Northeast (Salihu, 2021).
    This paper investigates the experiences of Nigerian security forces tasked with delivering the DRR program under OSC for former Boko Haram combatants. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the study explores the psychological and operational perceptions of DRR actors and how they internalize their roles within this programme. While existing research primarily examines the DRR policy's impacts on communities and the challenges of reintegrating ex-combatants, this study uniquely focuses on those delivering the programme, revealing the complexities of balancing military responsibilities with rehabilitative goals. The findings indicate that prolonged engagement with the program not only shapes security forces’ perceptions of ex-combatants but also underscores the critical need for enhanced psychological support for DRR practitioners.
    In light of these insights, the study advocates for a significant restructuring of current counter-extremism efforts, which often fall short in reflecting knowledge and due consideration of the impact of these actors on the expected outcome. It therefore advances a more inclusive and effective policy development that incorporates the perspectives of frontline actors and extends beyond conventional military interventions. By reframing existing DRR frameworks, policymakers are equipped to address the associated multifaceted challenges, while fostering sustainable peace and stability in Nigeria’s Northeast and the wider Lake Chad region.
    
    Author: Celestina Atom (Teesside University)
  - Understanding the Nature of Peacebuilding NGO Partnerships in Africa: Insights from a Case Study in Nigeria.
    
    This paper explores the nature of partnership relationships between peacebuilding International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) and Local Non-Governmental Organizations (LNGOs) in Africa. The paradoxical relationship between INGOs and LNGOs has been a significant topic of debate in international development, with scholars highlighting a lack of sufficient empirical studies focused on specific case studies, contexts, and operations that reveal the nature, dynamics, effects, and dimensions of these partnerships. To address this gap, the paper examines a peacebuilding intervention led by an INGO in collaboration with two LNGOs in the farmer-herder conflict in North Central Nigeria, aiming to generate data and provide insights into the dynamics of these partnerships. The study employs Alan Fowler’s (1998) Authentic Partnership Principles (APP) as a conceptual analytical framework. The findings indicate unilateral decision-making, exclusion in visibility, and micromanagement issues, calling into question the authenticity of the partnership. The uneven nature of this partnership poses a significant challenge to attaining its peacebuilding goals. Considering the prevailing and emerging regional security threats, an effective relationship between both actors is an essential element to be considered and addressed in Africa’s peace and security framework. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature on NGO partnerships and peacebuilding, localization, and power shift.
    Key-words: Nature of partnership, Peacebuilding, Peacebuilding intervention, NGOs, Africa
    
    Author: Martinluther Nwaneri (Aston University)
  - Invisible Victims: Terrorism, Gendercide, And The Victimisation of Men/Boys in Nigeria
    
    Although gender-based violence against men and women in the form of sexual violence has been examined in the literature on Islamist insurgency in the Lake Chad region―the Sahelian zone at the conjunction of Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad―minimal scholarly attention has been given to gendercide, that is, the gender-selective massacres of civilian men and boys by terrorist groups. The limitation of gender-based violence to sexual violence in the gory Islamist insurgency forecloses scholars from problematising the myriad ways men/boys are not invariably perpetrators but victims of gender-based violence beyond the conventional emphasis on sexual violence. This article transcends the existing scholarly fixation on sexual violence to critically assess the gender-selective killing of civilian men and boys by terrorist groups as a strategy to vitiate competition from potential combatants. Drawing on scholarship on gendercide which frames the phenomenon as emblematic of gender-based violence and on twenty-two ethnographic interviews conducted in Nigeria with victims/survivors and ex-Boko Haram/ISWAP fighters, this article assesses how and why assumptions of gender are pivotal to the selective massacres and victimisation of civilian men and boys. This article expands the understanding of victimisation/victimhood of men and boys in gender-based terrorist violence and advances a reflection of these insights in future counterterrorism and counterinsurgency frameworks in Africa.
    
    Author: Promise Frank Ejiofor (University of Cambridge)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Reflections on Identity/Nationality, Positionality and Knowledge Production in researching (Counter-)Terrorism in the Global South Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Conveners: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick) , Emeka Njoku (University of Birmingham)
  
  Chair: Emeka Njoku (University of Birmingham)
  - Reflexivity and the Global South: Displacement and (Counter-)Terrorism in Nigeria
    
    Reflexivity and the Global South: Displacement and (Counter-)Terrorism in Nigeria
    
    Author: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick)
  - ⁠Navigating 'Political Undesirability': Identity Negotiations in Critical Terrorism Research in Nigeria
    
    ⁠Navigating 'Political Undesirability': Identity Negotiations in Critical Terrorism Research in Nigeria
    
    Author: Joshua Akintayo (University of Kent)
  - In the Shadow of the Nigerian Civil War: Reflexivity on the Lived Experiences of Children of Survivors Studying Conflict, Security, and Violence
    
    In the Shadow of the Nigerian Civil War: Reflexivity on the Lived Experiences of Children of Survivors Studying Conflict, Security, and Violence
    
    Authors: Ernest Nnabuihe (Caleb University, Nigeria)* , Emeka Njoku (University of Birmingham)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Relationality in civil war: Toward a research agenda Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Studies of civil war have increasingly referred to relationality as crucial to understanding a range of conflict dynamics, from identity formation to mobilization to organizational politics of armed groups to rebel governance. How relations between different actors involved in civil wars evolve over time has also been shown to shape overarching trajectories of civil wars. Yet, the concept of relationality remains underdeveloped in civil war studies as it is used to convey a variety of meanings. Whereas feminist and interpretivist scholars of war, for example, situate relationality in the realm of socially embedded individuals and focus on the importance of quotidian relations of family and friendship, scholars of contentious politics trace interactions between aggregate actors, such as the state and social movements. This roundtable brings together established and early career scholars situated in different ontological, epistemological, and methodological traditions to outline distinct approaches to relationality in civil war and discuss specific relations associated with these approaches and their effects on broader dynamics and processes of civil war. The aim of the roundtable is to chart a research agenda that leverages the multi-layered nature of relationality in civil war and points ways forward in future studies that centre complex relations between multiple actors involved in civil wars.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Anastasia Shesterinina (The University of York)
  
  Participants: Tiina Hyyppä (University of Helsinki) , Finn Klebe (University College London) , Johanna Söderström (Uppsala University) , Hanna Ketola (Newcastle)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Researching ‘Military Social Harm’ Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Owen Thomas (University of Exeter)
  
  Chair: Victoria Basham (Cardiff University)
  
  Discussant: Victoria Basham (Cardiff University)
  - Exposing and revealing (in)security: Scandals, guilty secrets, and the promise of counter forensics
    
    Making (in)security public often occurs through the frame of scandal. Scandals reveal failures as individuated malpractice or malfunction but foreclose acknowledgement of systemic and structural harms. Drawing on British public inquiries (including Bloody Sunday, the Iraq War, and Grenfell Tower), the paper explains how this foreclosure occurs through reliance on methodological individualism and the exposure of individual responsibility (“guilty secrets”) as a way of staging credibility. An alternative form of making security public is found in civil society “counter forensics” groups. Using the interactions between the Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the Iraq “Chilcot” Inquiry as a case study, the paper shows how counter forensics reveal patterns of socially mediated and preventable harm. This approach can expand societal acknowledgement of security practices and their harmful effects, providing an alternative register to reveal, debate, and contest (in)security.
    
    Author: Owen Thomas (University of Exeter)
  - Military Harms and the Harms of Militarism
    
    The discipline of criminology is often presumed to have paid limited attention to military issues, however such a belief is incorrect. Despite concerns related to ‘militarism’ having been largely displaced within criminology for matters associated with ‘militarization’, interest with military personnel as ‘deviant’ social actors have been a consistent – albeit marginal – feature of criminological literature since (at least) the late 19th century, with the first critical criminological commentary on military personnel and ‘militarism’ emerging in the early 20th century. Following an arcane, but sustained, period of such scholarship after the Second World War, the commencement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 21st century spurred a new era of criminological interest in the study of current and ex-military personnel. Conceptualised as a ‘criminological-military enterprise’, such research has been variously engaged with framing the individual and collective needs, or criminogenic characteristics, of this dually problematic and seemingly ‘vulnerable’ population as an exceptional – and at times pathological - social group in need of further analysis, treatment and understanding. It will be argued that such an enduring ‘enterprise’ has displaced a capacity to foreground, and pursue, a critical understanding of both ‘military harms and the harms of militarism’ within criminology.
    
    Author: Ross McGarry (University of Liverpool)
  - The Perverse Institution of the British Military
    
    For decades the British military has been beset by scandal and afflicted by allegations of institutional and individual wrongdoing both at home and abroad. Claims of sexual and racist violence, discrimination against LGBTQ+ and female personnel, and the systemic adoption of practices of torture and unlawful killing, mark the contemporary history of the armed forces. Institutional responses have been to address these issues as isolated problems (typically conceptualised as the result of individual bad behaviour) that can be resolved by regulatory and organisational reform or punishment through public inquiries and criminal justice measures. Scholars have effectively critiqued these mechanisms. However, we argue that they have relied too heavily on exposing rationalities of military power, and fail to recognize the irrational perversity that is often at the heart of its organisational practices. Bringing together analysis of two seemingly disparate examples (the absurd attempt in the late twentieth century to justify the continuation of the ‘gay ban’ and the sexualised nature of ill-treatment of detainees evident in the Iraq occupation) we illustrate that such acts and behaviours are symptomatic of the British military as a perverse institution. Three elements reveal the perversity : (1) Individual and group pleasure in the infliction of sexualised violence and humiliation, (2) a warped relationship with reality that both sees and refuses to see such behaviour, and (3) drawing the complicity of the law, the British state, and its people, to ignore, excuse, and legitimise the continuation of this violence (Long 2018). We argue that charting the multiple dimensions of this perversity is a necessary step to understand the nature of military violence and begin to determine what responses might better address it.
    
    Authors: Sarah Bulmer (University of Exeter)* , Andrew Williams (University of Warwick)
  - “They’re funny things accidents, you never have them till you’re having them”: What can Eeyore tell us about military compensation claims?
    
    Recent scholarship on concepts like ‘Military Social Harm’ (Basham et al., 2024) expands our understanding of harm beyond direct or physical violence, challenging conventional frameworks of scrutiny and accountability. Yet state institutions often have great difficulty understanding the causes and consequences of these harms, or even acknowledging the harms at all. In this paper, we demonstrate both this foreclosure and absurdity of state-led accountability mechanisms through an analysis of annual reports from the Common Law Claims & Policy (CLC&P) team responsible for processing compensation claims against and on behalf of the Ministry of Defence (MOD) at home and abroad (1997-2023). We map the nature of the different claims, the rationales for their acceptance or rejection by the MOD, and the narrative framing by the CLC&P team. Our analysis demonstrates how these reports make specific harms legible within official narratives, reflecting a particular understanding of harm and responsibility. The reports reveal the British military’s claimed rights and prerogatives, to frame certain modes of violence as necessary, unavoidable, or inevitable. Additionally, the reports rely upon and affirm a specific causality to rationalise and restrict responsibility. Through our analysis, we demonstrate how compensation provides a partial account of harms produced by activities involved in retaining and deploying military power and ask whether reveal how compensation itself is complicit in the production of violence it is often used to remedy.
    
    Authors: Hannah Richards (University of Bristol) , Owen Thomas (University of Exeter)* , Sarah Bulmer (University of Exeter)*
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Rethinking ‘Security’ in Indo-Pacific Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Convener: Ahmad Umar (Aberystwyth University)
  
  Chair: Michael Cox (London School of Economics)
  - Marginalized maritime security? The challenge of ocean dependent communities to understanding Indo-Pacific maritime security
    
    Maritime security in the Indo-Pacific is understood in a myriad of ways, but remains state-centric. Decision-making is mostly undertaken by states with few avenues for involvement of non-state actors across the domestic and regional scales. The results are exclusivist strategies to address maritime security, combined with securitisation and militarist logics of security. Where inclusive whole-of-society/system/nation responses are articulated, they remain focused primarily on state-centric security practices. Extra-regional states perpetuate this logic by overemphasising regional geopolitics. However, these dynamics are slowly shifting. Marginalized communities - women, Indigenous Peoples, minority ethnic/religious groups, youth, and low-income groups – are challenging the hegemonic practice of maritime security in the region. They are disproportionately impacted by maritime insecurities and play critical roles in ocean and coastal development and security. By drawing upon a communities of practice framework of interaction we highlight how marginalized actors and their everyday practices are increasingly recognised as central to governance. Different actors involved in advocacy - such as Indonesia’s Solidaritas Perempuan (SP), Ocean Justice Initiative (IOJI), and Indonesian Fisheries Workers Union (SBPI) - and governance spaces such as the Makassar Strait Marine Spatial Planning are highlighted as key facilitators of interaction. Their activism ultimately transform our conceptions of maritime security in the Indo-Pacific through a justice-centred lens.
    
    Authors: Senia Febrica (Lancaster University)* , Scott Edwards (University of Reading)
  - India, the United States, Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific: Interests, Strategies and Prospects for Security Cooperation
    
    The relationship between India and the United States has been transformed in the 21st century, with shared economic and security interests in Southeast Asia. On the one hand, the rise of China and its economic and military expansion in the region, and the failure of US policy to improve ties with China, which can be attributed to various geopolitical and economic factors, and India’s rise as a rising power have propelled Washington to urge New Delhi to play a major role in managing regional affairs of Southeast Asia, particularly by engaging Vietnam and the Philippines. For example, while India has agreed to provide a 300 million credit line to strengthen Vietnam's maritime security, New Delhi has delivered the first batch of the BrahMos cruise missile system to Manila. On the other hand, the US presence through military alliances and security ties with Southeast Asian countries has become an enabling factor for India to boost engagement and effectively counter China’s rise. Although this is a significant development, US-India bilateral ties and engagement in Southeast Asia are not free from challenges. While India wants to promote a multipolar order in the region, which refers to a balance of power among major countries, the US wishes to continue dominating Southeast Asia. This article examines the nature and future cooperation between India and the US in Southeast Asia. It addresses four questions: What are the interests of both countries in the region? What strategies have they used to fulfil the objectives? How far and to what extent have they achieved their shared objectives? What are the significant challenges facing their engagement in Southeast Asia?
    
    Author: Sumit Kumar (University of Delhi)
  - The Outer Space Dimension in Indo-Pacific Security: An Indonesian Perspective
    
    This paper explores the often-overlooked outer space dimension of the Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Whilst terrestrial, maritime, aerial, and cyber aspects of the Indo-Pacific have been extensively studied, the increasing importance of spacepower in shaping the regional dynamics warrants closer examination. To put this complex environment into perspective, this paper focuses on Indonesia, as a pivotal actor in the Indo-Pacific, in navigating the regional competition and cooperation in and through outer space, particularly among three prominent space powers, namely China, India, and Japan. This paper shows that the outer space has become an avenue for emerging of intra-regional rivalries with global implication beyond an externally induced US-China rivalry in the region, which provides a spacepower-less middle power like Indonesia with an opportunity to navigate it. Drawing on a three-dimensional space diplomacy conceptual framework, the paper examines Indonesia’s perspective of outer space security from three level of analysis: bilateral, regional, and global.On the bilateral level, Indonesia enjoys stable yet restricted cooperation with the three space powers. On the regional level, Indonesia maintains participation in each of the three space powers’ regional initiatives as well as other arrangements (ASEAN-COSTI-SCOSA and UNESCAP-ICC-RESAP) without a commitment for integration. On the global level, Indonesia keeps a non-aligned position among the three space powers regardless their measures to represent the Indo-Pacific countries at the global space forums, particularly at the United Nations.
    
    Author: Deden Alfathimy (University of Leicester and Indonesian Research & Innovation Agency)
  - No More “Awkward Middle Powers”? Indonesia and Malaysia’s Foreign Policy Examined
    
    This paper engages with recent international relations theorising and scholarship on middle powers in Southeast Asia, particularly as it pertains to Indonesia and Malaysia. These are two rising middle powers under the leadership of senior statesmen Prabowo Subianto and Anwar Ibrahim. Both leaders have recently announced their interest to join BRICS as partners, even though they are also members of ASEAN. What explains this move, and what does it tell us about the characters of Indonesia and Malaysia as mjiddle powers? This paper argues that both leaders have attempted to shape their country's middlepowership in new – but not always successful – ways, against the context of geopolitical rivalry between the great powers (the US and China) and as Muslim-majority countries during a time of war and tension in the Middle East. To substantiate the argument, this paper examines the track record of each leader’s new administration on the foreign policy front to determine two key aspects: how each has shifted attention to new and emerging partnerships, especially within the Global South; and whether both countries have successfully demonstrated norm entrepreneurship in regional and global organization
    
    Author: Julia Lau (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / Seeing and Speaking International Relations Room 5, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Convener: IRSS Working group
  
  Chair: IRSS Working group
  - Videogames as pop cultural artifacts in discourse on future war
    
    As videogames become a mainstay in popular culture, there is a need to take a critical approach to their long-term impact on how we construct the ‘future’: videogames have the capacity to behave as not just sites of knowledge construction, replication, modification, or rejection, but also sites of interactive speculation, where individuals immersively ‘play’ within futures. However, popular culture, and videogames more so, are an often-overlooked element in international relations (IR), due to being viewed as artifacts of ‘low’ politics. Building on an emerging literature of videogames in IR, this research challenges perceptions of high-low valuations of cultural artifacts as well as pushing analysis of videogames beyond their tangible offerings such as recruitment and training.
    
    Taking a constructivist approach to IR and utilising a survey and several focus groups with videogame players, the research produces an assessment of how videogames fit into the wider cultural network of meaning-making in relation to future conflict, and how players relate games to other fictions and cultural artifacts. Finally, it produces an analysis of the place for videogames in relation to war and conflict, their positives and drawbacks, and an overall argument for why videogames- and popular culture more broadly- matter to how we think about war and conflict.
    
    Keywords: Videogames; futures; war and conflict, culture; constructavism
    
    Author: Erin Niamh McNally (Lancaster University)
  - Russia´s power between the lines: Russian Foreign Policy discourse in Twitter amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflict
    
    What kind of power is Russia? This enduring question regarding how other actors perceive Russia has led to its categorization as a ‘dissatisfied,’ ‘revisionist,’ or ‘reformist’ power. However, it is equally important to investigate how Russia presents itself to the public. Amidst the coronavirus crisis, Russia has portrayed itself as a responsible power by providing humanitarian assistance and even cooperating with the USA, often perceived as its adversary. During the war in Ukraine, Russia has framed itself as a dissatisfied power compelled to engage in a defensive war. Amidst the Israel-Hamas conflict, it has presented itself as a power that respects international law. This study examines Russian official foreign policy discourse across these three case studies by employing framing analysis to identify the dominant frames Russia uses for its self-representation. The period under analysis is between December 2019 and December 2024. The findings demonstrate how Russia’s foreign policy framing reflects its status-seeking behaviour in a highly competitive international environment and at the same time its efforts to avoid international isolation. Finally, it confirms the use of disinformation strategies to portray a different image to international audiences and cause societal disunity as well as doubts over Western behaviour and policies.
    
    Author: Maria Papageorgiou (Newcastle University)
  - Dilemmas and Threat Perception in the Indo-Pacific: The Case of the Sino-Indian Rivalry and the Role of Quad in the Region
    
    The concept of Security Dilemma explains how states' actions to enhance their security can lead to increased insecurity for others, potentially resulting in conflict due to the anarchical international system. This causes states to rely on their capabilities for survival, leading to a perception gap, uncertainty, and misinterpretation of defensive actions as offensive threats, contributing to the escalation of the security dilemma. Critics of Realism argue that its emphasis on material capabilities and state behaviour may overlook the influence of non-state actors, ideational factors, ‘threat language’, ‘Securitisation’ by ‘speech actors’, and transnational issues in shaping International Relations (IR). Amidst these debates in IR theory, the ideas of ‘threat perception’, ‘threat notion’, ‘misperception’ etc. play a key role in research on war, deterrence, coercion, alliances, and conflict. A compelling case study is the rivalry between China and India in the Global South, marked by territorial disputes, strategic competition, military build-ups, regional rivalries, nuclear dynamics, and historical legacies. In recent years, the rise of China's national power has sparked global concerns about the "China threat theory," influencing the foreign policy of different nations toward China. This paper cites the Sino-Indian competition in the current Indo-Pacific geopolitics and the existence of quasi-alliances/minilaterals like the Quad. It aims to capture perspectives of Constructivism and Realism on the source of threats to understand the perceived threats from China in the region and promote a cross-theoretical dialogue in security research. Factors such as threat perception, material capabilities, uncertainty, power perception, intention, identity, and insecurity in the Indo-Pacific region continue contributing to the rivalry between India and China.
    
    KEYWORDS
    China; India; IR Theory; Indo-Pacific; Threat Perception; Quad
    
    Author: Oorja Tapan (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The (re)design of science-policy relations in environment & nuclear governance Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)
  
  Chair: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)
  
  Discussant: Clare Stevens (Cardiff University)
  - Posthuman political scale and the climate science policy interface
    
    This paper considers the political relationship between science and politics - and the political dilemmas of the planetary - via the lens of scale in global climate governance through the UNFCCC. The state system conceives of scale as smooth and infinitely expandable, even beyond the limits of the Earth system, a mappable and predictable space of resource extraction, trade and military manoeuvre. Yet planetary scales are jagged, linking the very small and the very large, and raise profound questions of knowledge, measurement, precaution, and limits. With a focus on the key constructs of "carbon space", "carbon budgets" and "net zero", the talk considers the challenges of scientifically representing a dynamic and changing climate system in the Paris Agreement at a time when humans are already acting beyond the limits of the planetary.
    
    Author: Anthony Burke (The University of New South Wales)
  - The IPCC as a site for learning to reconceptualise science-policy relations in IR
    
    The IPCC started out as an epistemic community, at least in practice and has become increasingly known as a central site of negotiation in climate agreement-making. In this paper I explore how conceptions of science-policy interactions and relations have co-evolved with the IPCC as a global assessment body designed to inform the collective response to climate change. I take the reader on a journey through the concepts that have been central to developing understanding of what this body is and does, which include the epistemic community model, notions of a boundary, the metaphor of co-production and more recently, as a central site of agreement-making. Agreement-making recognises sites of knowledge production as critical to how global environmental issues are collectively known and addressed and makes order – the distribution of economic, scientific, social, and political resources – central to analyses of science-policy relations. This approach highlights, that the negotiation of collective action begins with global scientific assessment as a process for determining the meaning of the issue for order and order-making.
    
    Author: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)
  - Science, Diplomacy and Nuclear Dealmaking: Reexamining the Limited Test Ban Treaty
    
    In this paper we develop a new framework for understanding the role of scientific expertise in nuclear negotiations through an examination of the case of verification in the Limited Test Ban Treaty. What states may or may not do with nuclear technologies is highly regulated at the international level through a system of bilateral and multilateral agreements. Although the substance of these agreements is access to and manipulation of the physical materials that constitute nuclear weapons, the purpose of these agreements is often to resolve political conflicts that go beyond the narrow technical questions at hand. We argue that technological justifications by experts for what is or is not scientifically possible serve broader political functions in treaty negotiations, enabling political settlements that may be unsavory or unpopular to remain implicit in the technical terms of the agreement. At the same time, embedding political meaning within technical terms creates possibilities for political contestation through technological resistance. It incentivizes scientists to channel their advocacy into developing new technologies that push existing boundaries and challenge the political consensus.
    
    Author: Anne Harrington (Cardiff University)
  - Germany’s Arctic Science Policy: The Case of the Alfred Wegener Institute
    
    The Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) is Germany’s largest marine and polar research facility, with over 1000 researchers tackling ecological crises from ocean acidification to sea ice and biodiversity loss. This article explores how the actors in and around the epistemic community at the AWI – researchers, project officers, policymakers, diplomats, and more – generate advice for political action on behalf of the German federal government, how this advice is received, and how its implementation may involve or affect the AWI. Herein, the paper focuses on two sites of science- policy interaction in particular: 1) the Arctic Dialogue, a semi-formal, semi-annual exchange between German polar researchers – primarily represented by the AWI – and various German ministries involved in and affected by Germany’s Arctic policy guidelines, and 2) the German Arctic Office, founded in 2017 by the AWI in collaboration with the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to further improve the communication between political decision-makers and Arctic researchers. To investigate these sites of interaction, the author analysed dissemination and policy materials published by the AWI and German government. In addition, the author generated participant observation data and conducted semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with researchers at and outside the AWI as well as German, European Union, and Arctic policymakers and diplomats over the course of a twelve-month period in 2024 while embedded at the AWI as a visiting researcher.
    
    Author: Charlotte Gehrke (German Institute of Development and Sustainability)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The Emotional Politics of Subjectivity in International Relations Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford) , Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick)
  
  Chair: Brent Steele (University of Utah)
  - Becoming a Collective Subject: The Role of Guilt, Shame, and Heteronormativity
    
    This paper brings together post-structural feminist work with the literature on Ontological Security,
    to explore the productive role that gendered feelings of guilt and shame play in the formation of collective subjectivity. Drawing on the existential anxiety literature, OS scholars have highlighted the role of guilt and (self-)shame in subject-formation processes, suggesting that subjects’ sense of Self is often shaped by a quest to (re)establish moral purpose in their lives when failing to meet external expectations. I combine this literature with Judith Butler’s work on the heterosexual matrix, to argue that these feelings are inherently gendered, as they are associated to failing to meet the expectations of heteronormative frameworks of recognition. The paper illustrates this argument though an analysis of the (re)negotiation of the defeat in World War II and the non-intervention in the 1990-91 Gulf War in the Japanese security policy discourse. I show how shifting refence objects of shame and guilt are produced within heteronormative frameworks of recognition and (re)produce deeply gendered notions of subjectivity.
    
    Author: Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick)
  - Translating the Narrated Self in Ontological Security
    
    The concept of the Self is crucial for ontological security but has only begun to receive focused scholarly attention. Although some have worked to differentiate the Self from identity and have explored the debate about the state Self, it remains unclear whether and how researchers can access the Self. This paper proposes a new analytical framework for understanding how the Self can be visible within narrative analysis. This framework consists of four narrative pillars: autobiography, home, significant others, and identifications. These pillars interact and bear different weights depending on the context, but they make up the narrative fabric of the Self which is visible in both the everyday and during times of crisis. This system connects narrative analysis more closely to ontological security theory and offers an epistemological window into the Self. The performances of these narratives are visible in everyday foreign policy and in this paper are evidenced in analysis of speeches in the UN Security Council by the Indian, Kenyan, Irish, and Albanian Ambassadors immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
    
    Author: Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh)
  - Living with Bregret: Ontological Security and Subjectivities of Remorse after Brexit
    
    During the referendum on whether to leave or remain within the European Union (EU), British voters were promised by the Leave campaign that voting for Brexit would lead the United Kingdom (UK) to sunlit uplands, including the control of borders, economic prosperity, and legal sovereignty. However, while fantasies of a more successful Britain were emphasised, any potential negative consequences of voting “Leave” were dismissed or downplayed by the campaign. Now that Brexit is done, voters are having to confront the reality of “taking back control” and what it means not to be a member of the EU anymore. Drawing on novel focus group data, we interrogate how the gulf between the rhetoric of Brexit and reality has disrupted voters’ sense of ontological security and engendered what we term, subjectivities of remorse. We show that a mismatch between expectations and reality generates anxiety that can lead to a sense of fatalism regarding a decision made and influence how optimistic or pessimistic individuals are about the future.
    
    Authors: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford) , Ben Rosher (Queens University Belfast)
  - An Appetite for Destruction: Relief, Satisfaction and Destruction in Far-Right Discourse
    
    This paper offers a reading of how far-right groups produce desires for different kinds of subjectivity, through focussing on positive, native, and ambivalent emotional discourses. Subjectivity is a heavily theorised and contested concept; this paper positions subjectivity as something that is desired which manifests in different forms in different contexts. I suggest that different kinds of far-right subjectivities are attached to different emotions, both positive and negative. Thus, this paper looks to different emotion-derived subjectivities and asks what this means for understanding far-right politics.
    
    I draw on the scholarship of Lyotard to argue that the desire for subjectivity is more than individual, it is part of a libidinal economy where emotions are mobile and desire structures collective behaviour. This paper suggests that there are multiple far-right fantasies of subjectivity that relate to structural feelings of relief, satisfaction, and destruction. I argue that each of these emotions is reflective of a desire for certain subjectivities. It is only when understood through frameworks of desire that we can see why individuals would seek a subjectivity premised upon the destruction of their own identity, something which is commonplace in far-right discourse.
    
    Author: Charlie Price (University of Warwick)
  - Remembrance Inc: exploring the temptations of performance-enhancing remembrance and the politics of corporate vicarious military subjectivity in Britain
    
    Emerging IR scholarship on vicarious identity argues that, in the context of anxieties around contemporary wars and national identity, nations often attempt to rally national support by promoting vicarious identification with military sacrifice. In Britain, this has entailed appeals to past military glories and commemorative symbols, with citizens being encouraged to live through the nation’s military past as well as their own ancestral connections to it to experience belonging and ontological security. While scholars have recognised that corporate entities are important intermediaries and beneficiaries (both financial and reputational) of such trends, in this paper I argue that such entities have engaged in 'vicarious militarism' in deeper ways than have been hitherto recognised. Firstly, the paper shows how sports clubs, supermarkets, and train operators have increasingly vicariously appropriated historical corporate legacies that are inherently nostalgic and designed to authenticate their specific patriotic credentials. Importantly, while such efforts often aim to activate consumers’ desires for vicarious national belonging, they are also seen as conferring internal performance-enhancing benefits. Secondly, the paper explores the politics of corporate vicarious military subjectivity, noting that while some corporate identifications ‘pass’ without notice, others generate anxieties regarding the erosion of military subjectivities and prompt considerations of authenticity.
    
    Author: Joseph Haigh (University of Warwick)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The Evolving EU Security and Defence Policies Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - Into the Fold. Local Actors and Transnational Governance of Preventive Counterterrorism in the European Union
    
    The violent attacks of 9/11 introduced a new global consensus of what terrorism is and how to counter it. A global “preventive turn” in counter-terrorism resulted from this consensus; in Europe, preventive approaches were enthusiastically accepted by national actors and EU institutions, even by countries well accustomed to fighting terrorism. Why was preventive counter-terrorism enthusiastically accepted by all? And why does it occupy place of honour in the EU’s counter-terrorism strategy? This article puts forward a theory of transnational indirect governance, using orchestration theory and a case study on the preventive counter-terrorism. It argues that through its championing of preventive counter-terrorism, more easily accepted by Member States precisely because of its preoccupation with social policy, the EU has actually managed to achieve governance capabilities, compensating its lack of access to the field with institutionalised influence and leverage over the main actors involved at implementation, practitioners.
    
    Keywords: European Union; counter-terrorism; Prevention of Radicalisation; indirect governance; practitioners
    
    Author: Inés Bolaños Somoano (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionalsal Affairs, IBEI)
  - From Anti-Piracy to Naval Warfare: A Changing European Union in a Changing Sea?
    
    This research focuses on the changing nature of the maritime security operations of the European Union (EU). The swift from an anti-piracy mission (Atalanta) to a typical naval warfare operation (Aspides), formally launched on February 19, 2024, will be explored in this article.
    
    This mission will be discussed by looking at the strategic, political, and operational perspectives of the various EU's member states. A particular emphasis will be given to the different policies and practices of Northern, Central, and Southern countries, the different responses of large and small navies, and the neutral states. This approach will allow the research to contribute to the growing research agenda focused on ‘small navies’, often disregarded by previous literature.
    
    Maritime security is now recognised to be a crucial area of EU security and is also a vibrant field within current academic discourse. This dimension is now recognised as being fundamental to national security and European security.
    
    This paper will mainly employ a qualitative approach by exploring a broad corpus of primary and secondary in fifteen different languages and over forty different anonymous elite interviews with former and serving high-ranked policymakers, military personnel, diplomats, and politicians across all the EU’s member states. A similar approach will involve historical, geopolitical, and strategic analyses aimed at finding the rationales behind the changing character of the EU's maritime security operations, particularly in the latest Aspides.
    
    Finally, this research will inform the academic debate, civil servants, and military personnel in Brussels and, to a broader extent, in the various countries part of the European Union regarding the development of the 2024 Operation Aspides, the existing trends, and the likely implications for each country in the increasingly changing global maritime domain.
    
    Author: Giovanni Parente (Maynooth University)
  - EU Crisis Management as an Instrument of Migration Control: Securitisation at the Institutional Level
    
    As political violence erupts across the Sahel, scholars must ask why liberal interventions have failed to bring peace to the region. The EU has increasingly utilised its crisis management missions in Mali as instruments of its migration policy, effectively putting its own security concerns about migration ahead of local interests. Why has the EU prioritised migration control to the detriment of its other policy goals in third countries? This paper investigates the driving forces behind securitisation in the EU institutions to understand how migration control has recently come to dominate the mandates of the EU’s crisis management missions, looking at Mali as a case study. The paper adopts a post-structuralist theory of securitisation as a dynamic and intersubjective process wherein actors performatively exchange validity claims about the external world, which iterate upon their shared logic of security. This is coupled with a discursive institutionalist methodological framework that is sensitive to the systemic and actor-centred ways in which security is constructed, negotiated, and contested within political institutions. Using mixed-methods discourse analysis, the paper argues that actors in the EU institutions securitise migration to claim authority, which recursively causes migration to become more deeply embedded in the institution’s epistemic terrain of security.
    
    Author: Thom Vigor (University of Kent)
  - European Discourses on War Economies
    
    The war against Ukraine has led to a sea change in European countries’ attitude to arms production. European states and the EU have sought to dramatically improve their own military readiness and capability and concomitantly provide Ukraine with the arms and ammunition needed to fight against Russia. However, both governments and the European Commission rapidly discovered that their defence industries lacked the capacity to produce arms in the quantities needed for the first high intensity war in Europe for almost 80 years.
    Since March 2023, in response to this problem, the then EU Commissioner for defence industry, Thierry Breton, and other policy entrepreneurs have regularly invoked the need for European defence industry to move to war economy mode. While the use of the term has not always been appreciated by member states (Schulz, 2023), the idea is materialising into more concrete proposals. The paper investigates how Europe is re-imagining the political economy of defence production and innovation in face of the industrial challenges revealed by the Ukraine war. It asks how defence industrial priorities are being imagined, negotiated and contested among different European countries, where NATO and EU membership now largely overlaps but not without consequential exceptions? It also investigates the extent to which negative trade-offs are being factored in or ignored. Contrary to many commentators, who are currently calling for the diversion of monetary, industrial and institutional resources to the defence sector without consideration of the consequences, the paper is mindful of C Wright Mills’ (1956) warnings of the need to consider how civilian social institutions and processes could be permeated negatively by the war economy logic.
    
    Author: Jocelyn Mawdsley (Newcastle University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The ICC and Hybrid Courts: Processes of International Criminal Law Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: ILPG Working group
  
  Chair: James Gow
  
  Discussant: James Gow
  - A genealogy of positive complementarity
    
    According to the principle of complementarity, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is complementary to national criminal jurisdictions, which means that the duty to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of international crimes belongs primarily to states, and not to the ICC. As such, for the ICC to be able to intervene, a state must be either unwilling or unable to genuinely investigate or prosecute. However, under the Rome Statute, complementarity is more than a technical concept. One of the major innovations introduced by the ICC is a positive understanding of complementarity, which places greater emphasis on prevention, partnership, and dialogue, with the aim of building a broader culture of accountability. Positive complementarity refers to the court’s efforts to encourage states to carry out genuine domestic proceedings, and can be achieved through many different strategies (e.g., monitoring, consulting, outreach, transparency). Although efforts are being made to increase the role of the ICC in engaging with national authorities under the banner of positive complementarity, there is still not enough clarity on how this concept is being interpreted and applied. Inspired by Foucault’s genealogies, this paper aims to write a “history of the present”, by examining how the ICC’s positive complementarity policy came to be through a genealogical lens, challenging the dominant narratives.
    
    Author: Carolina Carvalho (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
  - ‘Last resort’ or ‘a position to assist’? Tracing the development of positive complementarity regimes
    
    Across the course of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, international and national courts have repeatedly flirted with the notion of some notion of a collaborative international/national approach to justice – to quote ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, that the organisation should be a 'hub at the centre of our collective accountability efforts', rather than 'the apex of the international criminal justice movement'.
    
    This paper seeks to explain these phenomena – from their success as ambitious programmes of judicial assistance, drawing together the best of both worlds – to their failures as paternalistic, 'international-knows-best’ approaches. In doing so, it identifies not only the dysfunctional and successful elements of such initiatives, but also the context that these occurred in – how these arenas of accountability were opened, how they were justified, and how they influenced each other. It finds that while 'positive complementarity' (and similar) projects have been common across history, they have had relatively little influence on each other. Even the ICC's own commitment to the concept has been stop-start and inconsistent. The paper investigates why this is the case – why international and legal institutions repeatedly converge around positive complementarity approaches, and why these disparate genealogies often find dead ends, and thorny legal and political dilemmas.
    
    Author: Leah Owen (Swansea University)
  - The Manifestation of Hybridity at Hybrid Courts: A Gender and Race Analysis of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the Special Court for Sierra Leone
    
    Analyses of international justice mechanisms have demonstrated the operation of gendered and racialized power within ad hoc tribunals and more permanent international criminal justice courts. Amidst these critiques, and general efficiency issues, the international community has sought to diversify current structures of international criminal justice, leading to the implementation of hybrid courts. Discussions around hybrid courts are hopeful about their ability to remedy some of the issues international mechanisms face, with many arguing that these courts are better placed to deliver inclusive and bottom-up justice through the local engagement they foster. However, scholarly literature on hybridity more broadly positions the concept as inherently problematic. Post-colonial researchers have argued that hybridity, rather than addressing existing power structures, can perpetuate these structures by creating amalgamated international/national spaces. Working between these critiques, my research explores how hybridity manifests at hybrid courts, and to what effect. This dissertation examines the manifestation of hybridity by evaluating if two hybrid courts mobilise alternative discourses of gender and race, or if they (re) produce existing racialized and gendered power structures evident within international justice. I explore this question using post structural discourse analysis of documentary and interview data drawn from the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). This research further contributes to conversations around the feasibility of hybrid courts to remedy some of the gender and race issues within international criminal justice.
    
    Author: Charlotte Carney (University of Sydney)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The Politics of Human-Machine Interaction in Military Technologies Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Anna Nadibaidze (University of Southern Denmark) , Bibi Imre-Millei (Lund University, Sweden) , Tom Watts (Royal Holloway University) , Emil Archambault (University of Durham)
  
  Chair: Tom Watts (Royal Holloway University)
  
  Discussant: Natasha Karner (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
  - Peacekeeper, Warfighter: Perception of Canadian Military Identity and Ethical Reflections on Military Drone Use
    
    The Canadian military primarily uses short-range unarmed small drones but plans to introduce long-range armed drones and integrate various autonomous capabilities. While Canada adapts to the changing technology environment pushed by current conflicts and large states with immense weapons arsenals, there is little focus on how military members in these ‘adapting’ states see their role in these changes. The way that military members fit technological use into their lives relies on narratives around what type of military they believe they are part of. For Canadian military members this is structured around two poles: peacekeeper and warfighter. Canada has long portrayed itself as a peaceful and peacekeeping state which seeks to uphold a liberal international order, but Canadian participation in the NATO coalition during Afghanistan changed the character of the military to one which was focused on warfighting. These identities remain in tension in the Canadian military today, affecting how military members view the integration of armed and autonomous drones. Based on interviews with Canadian military drone operators, this paper argues that ethical reasoning among these individuals is affected by the type of military member they want to be and the type of military they want to be a part of.
    
    Author: Bibi Imre-Millei (Lund University, Sweden)
  - Human-Machine Visuality and Representations of War
    
    This presentation examines how emerging technologies shape the visual experience of military violence among Western democratic publics. The ongoing war in Ukraine has seen a proliferation of technologically-generated images of warfare, such as videos from the perspective of first-person video drones; in both Gaza and Ukraine, there have been a rapid increase in the use of machinic representations of violence, generating synthetic representations of violence from novel perspectives, which provide new ways of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing violence. While much research has examined how combatants – such as drone operators, and more recently FPV drone operators – have had to grapple with these new visual perspectives and modes of vision, these novel perspectives also impact how democratic publics see and perceive military violence.
    This presentation, therefore, examines the intersection of human and machinic vision and technologies of representation, and its political impacts. Drawing on engagement with open-source visual research methods and interviews with visual researchers, this presentation will examine how these new visualities of war shape democratic publics’ experiences of military violence, bridging the remoteness prevalent in contemporary warfare. In particular, I will argue, this human-machinic visual interaction provides potential new avenues for the contestation of state military practices.
    
    Author: Emil Archambault (University of Durham)
  - War Reimagined? US Strategic Culture, Artificial Intelligence, and Great Power Competition
    
    Drawing from the International Relations (IR) literature on strategic culture and security imaginaries, this paper examines the transition in American defense planning from the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to great power competition. Since the mid-2010s, IR scholars have paid increasing attention to the subject of great power competition, especially as it relates to the development of military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapon systems (AWS). However, there has been much less focus on how these developments relate to GWOT-era debates on military transformation, what they reveal about the processes of change and continuity within American foreign policy, and why the great power competition framework has been so rapidly embraced by the Pentagon. This paper provides new insights into these dynamics by empirically tracing the evolution of the Department of Defense’s thinking on the role of technology in war, from post-9/11 debates on military transformation through subsequent initiatives under Obama (Project Maven, Third Offset Strategy), Trump (Mosaic Warfare), and Biden (Joint All-Domain Command and Control, Replicator Initiative). Theoretically, it brings the literature on strategic culture into greater dialogue with recent advances in the study of security imaginaries to extend understanding of U.S. cultural conceptions of what war is and how war “ought” to be fought. Through this intervention, this paper makes a wider contribution to IR scholarship by examining how Pentagon officials have interpreted the great power competition framework as a means of accelerating the return of high-intensity, high-technology warfare against a (near) peer competitor as the focus of American defense planning.
    
    Author: Tom Watts (Royal Holloway University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The Sociocultural Life of Injury, Loss, and Recovery: Global South Contributions to Rethinking the International Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Convener: Madonna Kalousian (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Vivienne Jabri (King's College London)
  - Traumatic injury and transgenerational entanglement
    
    Trauma and injury are two concepts that might be used interchangeably to refer to a wound but can also be distinguished in important ways. The purpose of this paper is to unpack the various intersections between injury and trauma and what is at stake for conceptions of agency, justice and healing, highlighting the complementarity of the two concepts. Because the word trauma has been so heavily psychologized since the beginning of the 20th century, it is difficult to understand its impact beyond the individual. Approaching the concept from a different angle, in relation to patterns of socio-political hurt and transgenerational entanglements arising from them, provides a an opening to a more complete picture of how an unresolved and unacknowledged past of injustice stands in the way of agency in moving forward toward a more sustainable future.
    
    Author: Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews)
  - Navigating Injury and Trauma in Addressing Gender Injustices
    
    This paper explores how trauma reveals the enduring impact of injury from gender injustices. Trauma uncovers a sense of betrayal, injury, and harm by exposing the illusion of security. Narrating traumatic injury may also serve as a catalyst for agency in addressing structural injustices. This paper builds upon theoretical explorations of the interplay between injury and trauma, especially from postcolonial and feminist perspectives. It examines how the enactment of trauma may create spaces for acknowledging deep-rooted injury on postcolonial subjects' bodies and colonial legacies. The paper empirically investigates trauma stories surrounding gender-based violence in Afghanistan, particularly after the Taliban's return in August 2021. This research seeks to contribute to the ongoing conversation on the implications of traumatic memory and injury in fostering community agency within a framework of global justice.
    
    Author: Chaeyoung Yong (University of St. Andrews)
  - Injury, the political and the international
    
    We witness the conduct of war targeting populations and are compelled to ask about the conditions of possibility for such conduct with impunity. War is constitutively of injury, but its mark must be traced in relation to the subject, to populations targeted, to infrastructures and public spaces, and the very possibility of politics. Using the concept of injury, and drawing on critical political thought, this paper focuses on the concept’s generative force, beyond conflict and beyond war, towards justice and the distinctly political processes that produce judgement and the potential of repair. The paper will consider how the international, as a distinct location of politics, might answer the promise of justice steering the argument between claims that the structure of the international is itself injurious to those that seek repair and redress through its mechanisms.
    
    Author: Vivienne Jabri (King's College London)
  - Legacies of Injury at Al-Khiam: Visuality, Political Spectacle, and Histories under Excavation
    
    The cultural and symbolic reproduction of Al-Khiam, a town in the south of Lebanon and a detention centre which carries its name, has had significant country-level implications manifesting in various ways, including in the layers of history omitted from the narrative of this particular site of injury. This paper argues that the visual intervenes in order to excavate buried histories and latent meanings made invisible by discursive, political, and ideological discourses which have sought to organise meanings for Al-Khiam. How does the visual trace injury and re-imagine possibilities of recovery? To what extent can it recentre the experience of populations violently excluded from ‘the international’? In answering these questions, this paper argues that the artwork of Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas reassembles fragments of Al-Khiam’s history, excavating individual narratives of incarceration and occupation, while Ahmad Beydoun’s audio-visual recreation of Al-Khiam relocates it within a broader landscape of injury enacted against not only the detainees, but also an entire civilian population. This paper contends that the visual plays a significant role in revealing the political contestations around sites of injury, while reimagining a specific moment in space and time.
    
    Author: Madonna Kalousian (King's College London)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  TH 19 Panel / The many Faces of Security Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Tadek Markiewicz (Uppsala University)
  
  Chair: Tadek Markiewicz (Uppsala University)
  - Knowing the Cold War?
    
    For many, the Cold War constitutes a distinctive era of the 20th century that has organized international and domestic politics, and the production of knowledge and theories about International Relations. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the phrase the “end of the Cold War” has become ubiquitous to herald a new period of new (non-state) actors and processes of globalization and governance that popularized “new” (meta-) theories about international politics. With the seeming dawn of a “new Cold War” between the United States and China and the return of geopolitics, commentators are quick to call for yet another reconsideration about international politics and its theories.
    
    This article problematizes the role of the “Cold War” as an organizing principle of international and domestic politics and as a way of knowing by problematizing the notion of the Cold War itself as a stable reference point. Instead, the article argues that the Cold War has always been a construct of the respective present where politics, memory and political order, domestic and international, converge. The article does so by collecting and critically engaging with diverse meanings of the Cold War from different temporal and spatial vantage points.
    
    Author: Stephanie Winkler (Goethe University Frankfurt Stockholm University)
  - How did we end up here? Exploring the theoretical and methodological values of a genealogical approach to understand war in UN peacekeeping
    
    What underlying assumptions about ‘war’ exist in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping? How have these assumptions changed over time? What have these assumptions meant for how peacekeeping is shaped? In this paper, I focus on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the genealogical approach I take on understanding ‘war’ in UN peacekeeping. An interpretivist way of studying war does not see military and political action, behaviour and institutions as given, but seeks to question the meaning-making behind how this came to be. In her research on how peacekeeping comes to be known, Henry (2024, p. 3) writes that we should understand peace operations “not as a neutral and noble mission to maintain global peace and security, but […] as a complex and multifaceted power project”. I explore how genealogy help us understand this. Genealogy is not a history of what has been said and done, but what has constituted the assumptions and knowledges that serves as basis for what has been said and done. I ask not what war is, but instead how war has been spoken of and known throughout UN peace operations history, and why it seems to be so difficult to speak of war in the UN.
    
    Author: Moa Peldan (Swedish Defence University)
  - Insider, Outsider, or Something in Between? Why Self-Reflexivity Matters
    
    The ethnographic turn has opened a range of new epistemological, ontological, and methodological insights into the field of International Relations (IR). By challenging state-centric top-down approaches and generating valuable bottom-up insights, ethnography helps to understand the workings and impact of complex global politics beginning from the local/regional. Self-reflexivity and discussions on insider/outsider positionalities are key elements of ethnographic work. This article argues for a more nuanced understanding of researchers’ multiple and overlapping identities and thus questions the strict categorization of researchers as either insiders or outsiders of the regions and groups studied. Drawing on the author’s own experience as a second-generation female Kurdish immigrant from Europe, who conducted fieldwork in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, this paper highlights the importance of including self-reflexivity as a research practice. This study reflects on the challenges and opportunities researchers, who embody a bridge of “Global South”/“Global North” positionalities, face. Among the reflections are feelings of guilt, gratitude, and discussions of power relations, privilege, and extractivism.
    
    Author: Rawina Trautmann (European University Viadrin)
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  Lunch - Sponsored by the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) 1h The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel
  
  The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel
- 12:25 → 13:15
  
  Conference event / Prize giving ceremony - Lunch will be available in the room Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
- 12:30 → 13:30
  
  Conference event / International Law and Politics Working Group annual general meeting Dublin, Europa Hotel
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / (Counter)solidarities in times of genocide. Historical and contemporary links of SEE societies with Palestine and Israel Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  The death toll in Palestine caused by the Israeli army increases progressively despite difficulties from Palestinian authorities to accurately account for those killed or missing as a result of destroyed infrastructure (Khatib et.al., 2024). This unprecedented violence is not new. According to the International Court of Justice, numerous reports of UN Special Rapporteurs on the Palestinian territories and a handful of international organisations, Palestinians have been living under conditions of apartheid and racial segregation since 1967. Despite the landmark ruling of the International Court of Justice on the plausible risk of genocide against the Palestinian people, across the west, solidarities with Palestine have been hushed, toned down (Bastašić, 2023) or outright policed (Thompson and Tuzcu, 2024). Elsewhere, solidarities with Palestine have been self-policed or erased in function of geopolitical calculations (Musliu and Rexhepi, 2024).
  
  This roundtable takes stock of the historical and contemporary ties between the Southeastern Europe region and Israel / Palestine and discusses (counter)solidarities and structural complicities in times of genocide. Socialist Yugoslavia, as one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, was instrumental in the recognition of Palestine as a full NAM member state in 1975 (Horvat, 2023). Both NAM and Socialist Yugoslavia contributed greatly to recognition of the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination as a part of the circuits of decolonial solidarity that both helped to sustain (Baker, 2018). At the same time, socialist Yugoslavia also maintained economic links with Israel (Stubbs, 2020). Following the successful enactment of the Non-Aligned Movement, a good number of Palestinian doctors, nurses, pilots and educators studied in former Yugoslav cities (Lazić, 2021). Other countries in the region’s relations with Palestine and Israel, such as Greece and Turkey, have also historically oscillated between strong support for the Palestinian cause and close ties to Israel.
  
  Against this backdrop, over the last year and a half we are witnessing most SEE governments either abstaining or voting against so much as a ceasefire in Gaza, with other governments, such as Serbia, actively collaborating in arming Israel. From the grassroots level, however, the emerging social movements are challenging these complicities and silences of the regional governments while calling for boycott and organising transnationally. These transnational solidarity networks ground and build their symbolic and material actions both on the previous channels of mutual support and artistic collaboration, while at the same time creating new relations and entanglements.
  
  Among these historical and contemporary ties and tensions, this roundtable discusses: a) what legacies of the post-Ottoman predicaments,the Non-Aligned Movement, and the 1990s wars can help us understand (counter)solidarities with Palestine; b) how can we read the popular and government responses towards the ongoing genocide in Palestine; c) what (counter)solidarities with Palestine are articulated in places heavily exposed to Western and American liberal interventionism (e.g. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo); NATO membership (e.g. Montenegro, Macedonia), capitalist disciplining (e.g. Greece); warfare technologies and externalization of migration (e.g. Turkey; Croatia).
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Chair: Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University)
  
  Participants: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol) , Sladjana Lazic (University of Innsbruck, Austria) , Catherine Baker (University of Hull) , Nisan Alici (University of Derby) , Vjosa Musliu (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB))
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Roundtable / Bridging the Gap: Navigating Communication Barriers in Global Health Politics Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  The field of global health politics is marked by a high degree of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Whilst this is widely seen as a core strength and key intellectual attraction, it can also make effective communication much more challenging for researchers and practitioners alike. This roundtable will explore those communication challenges in the field of global health politics, and will bring together the collective experience of the roundtable participants about how to best navigate those challenges they have encountered in their research. Specifically, the roundtable will explore questions like:
  
  How can International Relations researchers best communicate more critical social science issues around politics, power, and ethics to wider audiences in the field?
  
  How can researchers communicate effectively about global health politics with vulnerable, marginalized and/or precarious groups, many of which do not possess much specialist medical or public health knowledge?
  
  How do global health actors reconcile the need to communicate with highly divergent audiences when managing global health issues?
  
  How can International Relations scholars navigate epistemic differences between the social, medical and life sciences in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research?
  Sponsor: Global Health Working Group
  
  Chair: Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
  
  Participants: Katharina Wezel (University of Tuebingen) , Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield) , Stefan Elbe (University of Sussex) , Anne Roemer-Mahler (University of Sussex)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Childing IR Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Conveners: Caitlin Mollica (University of Newcastle) , Helen Berents (Griffith University, Australia)
  
  Chair: Helen Berents (Griffith University, Australia)
  - Wither the Responsibility Obligation: Acknowledging young people's political interactions with global governance
    
    On March 17, 2023, Vladimir Putin and the Commissioner for Children’s rights were indicted for the war crimes of unlawful deportation of children. This indictment, which invoked the child to pursue legal accountability, is informed by the protectionist mandate of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Children (UNCRC). At the same time, children in Gaza are increasingly under threat, with thousands killed, injured and displaced. Despite the scale of these threats, the international community has largely stalled in its response to protecting these children. Thus, the experiences of these children illustrate an abdication of the international community's responsibility. Drawing on examples from the international response to children’s experiences in these conflicts, this paper examines the limits of the responsibility obligation as a mandate for action. It asks: How can we reframe well-worn discourses on responsibility to and for children? I suggest that the international responses reveal that the politics of childhoods in international law serves to further the agendas of external actors rather than respond to children’s individual needs. I argue that to fulfill its obligations, global governance architecture must reconstitute discourses of responsibility to acknowledge the ownership that children possess as citizens.
    
    Author: Caitlin Mollica (University of Newcastle)
  - Childing War
    
    What should we make of a warplane as a playground feature or war museums hosting children’s birthday parties? Children’s encounters with war narrative and the easy, often light-hearted coexistence of childhood and militarism across innumerable settings of everyday life are reminders that simultaneous with the militarization of childhood is the childing of militarism. Deeply invested with social meaning, imagined childhood brings content and implications to encounters with militarism that go beyond inculcation of children, affecting how militarized practices are decoded more generally. Children’s presence in militarized spaces, war remembrance, and more is, for other subjects as much as for children themselves, a constituent in making meaning of militarism as a benevolent force. We might therefore reframe the question of how militarized toys, spaces, and performatives have come to be seen as appropriate for children to one that asks whether, in a world dominated by martial politics, it could be otherwise. This paper develops conceptual insights urging that investigations into the ways militarism interpenetrates children’s lifeworlds must at the same time sustain affirmation of imagined childhood as an always-important social technology of governance that plays an indispensable part in the everyday (re)production of martial politics and the political viability of war.
    
    Author: J Marshall Beier (McMaster University, Canada)
  - Violence across generations: Israeli state production (and dismantling) of Palestinian Childhood
    
    Since 2023, international humanitarian agencies have highlighted the deleterious effect of Israel’s military campaign to remove Hamas operatives, with a particular focus on the number of women and children maimed or killed. Indeed, Palestinian children have long suffered under the settler colonial rule of Israel as second class citizens. This paper analyses how power and violence coexist with generational-based violence, as wielded by the Israeli state against children, both before and after the current military campaign. Notions of childhood and adulthood are mobilized and re-ordered by state actors at will to arbitrarily police the boundary between innocence and culpability. By framing children as criminals or potential terrorists, the state legitimizes punitive, often illegal, measures, including arrests, detentions, and violence. This analysis offers a deeper understanding of how the occupation enforces systems of control and the production of different child subjects, including the illegal detention of children and as human shields.
    
    Author: Kate Macfarlane (Charles Darwin University, Australia)
  - Childing IR in the context of peacebuilding
    
    The dominant approach to peacebuilding since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been that of the liberal peace model, which contributes to the obfuscation of children in International Relations (IR) in multiple ways. Firstly, those intervening tend to promote a vision of the child, which rests primarily on Eurocentric ideals of childhood as a time of innocence, vulnerability, and incapacity. Secondly, the process of peacebuilding under the liberal model, as top-down and technocratic, curtails the prospects for more bottom-up and local level engagement. Thirdly, liberal interventions pursue a liberal agenda, which tends to institutionalise the child as either risky or at risk and diffuses ideas about childhood in ways that are often decontextualised and culturally insensitive. If children have been overlooked in the context of IR, liberal peace interventions are both a reflection of this omission and a cause for the continued understandings of childhood which keep them hidden. Through the case study of peacebuilding, this paper contributes to ongoing conceptual discussions of the omission of children in IR, while simultaneously offering an account which both traces the multifaceted reasons for this exclusion, while also expanding on new opportunities for childing IR.
    
    Author: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Comparative and individual foreign policy strategies Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  
  Chair: Thomas Eason (Aston University)
  - Myth Diplomacy: Ukraine’s Use of Myth as a Diplomatic Tool Following the Russian Invasion
    
    This paper introduces the concept of "myth diplomacy", the role and function of myth as a tool in diplomacy, by studying how Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has use local political myths held by the audience in diplomatic speeches to build emotional connections and inspire action following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It does this through a discourse analysis of President Zelenskyy’s speeches to UK audiences, in which he uses the myths of Churchill and WW2, and an interview with a member of President Zelenskyy’ speech writing and advisory team. From that, this paper illustrates the effectiveness of myth diplomacy in mobilising support. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding not just of Ukrainian diplomatic strategy in war time, but more generally of how myths can be employed in modern diplomatic practice, offering valuable insights for both scholars of Diplomacy Studies and diplomatic practitioners.
    
    Authors: Thomas Eason (Aston University) , Artur Nadiiev (University of Nottingham)
  - Unpacking hedging strategies: evidence from Brazil and Mexico
    
    The concept of hedging has become prominent in discussions about foreign policy strategies of major countries in the Global South. However, the term has been used loosely in academic and policy circles, and its meaning is often ambiguous. This paper aims to clarify the practice of hedging through an empirical examination of Brazil and Mexico’s foreign policy responses to shifting great power dynamics. We will investigate the concrete foreign policy tools and approaches employed by these governments, with a view to understand whether and how they hedge against perceived excessive influence from the United States and China. Drawing on primary sources, especially tweets, public speeches, and government documents, our analysis explores whether and how Brazil and Mexico engage in hedging, and what hedging means in practice. Our main hypothesis is that, while rhetorical commitments to multilateralism, multi-alignment, and strategic autonomy are common, specific foreign policy tools and approaches vary significantly. These differences are shaped by a range of domestic and systemic factors, suggesting there is need for more nuanced, context-specific understandings of hedging. We move beyond the general notion of hedging and explore the nuances of how hedging is operationalized, including motivations, challenges, and perceived trade-offs involved.
    
    Authors: Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes (University of Southampton; Institute for Applied Economic Research) , Felipe Krause (University of Oxford)*
  - Ukraine - (Re)Branding the Nation in Wartime
    
    Since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24th 2022, Ukraine has undertaken a purposive branding process in order to garner support from its potential global allies. This project has served as a way to communicate with foreign public audiences, to disseminate a wartime narrative against the Russian Federation. Whereas older narratives regarding Ukrainian identity were dominated by external actors, with Ukraine as a ‘post-Soviet’ country, this has since shifted after the 2022 invasion. A new self-created narrative (a brave and unified Ukraine) has been successfully constructed through programmes such as the 'Be Brave Like Ukraine' campaign, alongside a wide range of cultural initiatives across the globe. Particularly, new modes of communication, such as videos, photos, memes, and graphic elements, have been actively used in Ukraine’s wartime branding strategy.
    
    Drawing on the respective backgrounds of the researchers, namely nationalism and public-diplomacy, this paper aims to analyse visual modes of communication in Ukrainian branding campaigns, as public diplomacy in the digital age has transformed and embraced more creative ways of communication. Of particular note, has been Ukraine’s ability to transform the image of some of the more extreme nationalist elements that emerged after the initial 2014 War in Donbas, effectively rebranding groups such as the 12th Special Operations Brigade or ‘Azov Battalion’. The Ukrainian government attempting to purge extreme far-right elements, and removing some of the more divisive symbols from their attire. This tension, between nation-branding and nationalism in Ukrainian image projection, is an area of study that our research will also address.
    
    Authors: Jack Cathcart (University of Bristol) , Gökçe Aydemir (University of Bristol)
  - Latin America's Engagement with the Liberal International Order: A Review of Regional IR Scholarship
    
    Over the past fifteen years, the debate on the past, present, and future of the "liberal international order" (LIO) has been a focal point in Anglo-American and European International Relations (IR) scholarship. Latin America, despite its long engagement with questions of international order (Long 2018; Thornton and Rodriguez 2022), has played a minor role in these North Atlantic discussions. But what role has "LIO" occupied within Latin American IR debates? This study conducts a large-scale review of leading IR journals in the region, revealing that the concept of "LIO" has held limited significance in publications. However, around 2016, Latin American scholars began engaging with the "crisis" of LIO, reflecting a shift in regional discourse. We qualitatively assess each usage of "LIO" and related terms, finding that prior to 2016, "international," "global," and "world" order typically referred to power distributions marked by U.S. unipolarity and globalization's expansion. Post-2016, LIO is referenced primarily in relation to the diffusion of power away from the United States. Our findings suggest that while Latin American IR scholars are attentive to similar global shifts, the specific framing of international order as "liberal" has limited resonance in the region.
    
    Authors: Tom Long (University of Warwick)* , Thais Doria (University of Warwick)
  - Between affinities and divergences: a comparative analysis of the foreign policies of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
    
    This article compares the foreign policy and international insertion strategies of the governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, focusing on three key areas: 1) relations with the Western bloc, particularly the United States (US) and the European Union; 2) relations with the axis that challenges Western hegemony, notably China and Russia; and 3) governance and regional integration. Brazil and Mexico are currently the only actors in Latin America with a coherent international agenda and the necessary instruments to assume some form of regional leadership. Despite the ideological affinity shared by their leaders, we suggest that the governments of López Obrador and Lula have different priorities and strategies for international insertion. Furthermore, Lula's election for a third presidential term, instead of bringing Brazil and Mexico closer together, seemed to impose new obstacles to the Mexican president's plans to strengthen his influence in Latin America and the Caribbean as a way of counterbalancing the asymmetries that mark Mexico-US relations. The theoretical basis of this study is grounded in Comparative Foreign Policy Analysis. The methodology involves content analysis of speeches by the presidents and their respective foreign ministers and document analysis.
    
    Author: Fabiana De Oliveira (State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ))
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Constructing and othering in framings of migration and mobility Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Michael Toomey (University of Glasgow)
  - Refusing Hospitality - Refusal as Resistance & the Decentering of the Host in Critical Migration Studies
    
    In researching migration, there is an ontological favoring of arrival and departure at work which neglects the dynamic of movement, the layering of multiple temporalities and spatialities that contour migratory journeys and make up the particular ‘unsettled’ worlding of people on the move. Focusing on critical cultures of embodying, resisting, and traversing border technoscapes, critical migration scholars have therefore more recently ventured into centering subversion, autonomy, but also refusal and resistance of the ‘migrant’/’guest’ role.
    Informed by participatory research with people on the move active in the Palestine solidarity movement (in Germany, the Netherlands, and Lebanon) I theorize refusal as resistance. Departing from Derrida’s notion of ‘hostipitality,’ I show how the current migration regime conceives of migrants as guest-figures, whose temporal coevalness is structurally denied. By refusing this hostile hospitality, refusing the figure of the guest, people on the move question the bio-/necropolitical apparatus that is built upon the notions of crisis by means of their very practice of precarious homemaking. In a last step, I move toward formulating a decolonial perspective toward migration studies, which questions the use of ‘crisis’ itself as epistemological prism towards migration and mobility.
    
    Author: Alina Achenbach (University of Groningen)
  - The Life Cycle of Nativism as a "Bad" Norm: Coopting the "Good" Norms of Anti-Racism and Diversity
    
    Although the case-selection bias in constructivist IR literature towards liberal or "good" norms has been widely noted, the inverse notion of "bad" norms remains critically under-theorized, vaguely defined, and often essentialized. In order to understand what "bad" norms are and how they relate to ostensibly "good" ones, our project focuses on the global rise of nativism, a political logic aiming to restrict migration in order to prevent non-“native” peoples from ostensibly threatening the idealized homogeneity of the nation-state. This imaginary threat frames migrants as demographically and/or culturally "colonizing" the "native" peoples of host nation-states, as with the nefarious spread of so-called "replacement" discourse. Building off our ongoing work that adapts the "life cycle" model for historicizing the peculiar relationship between the "bad" norm of nativism and the "good" norms related to refugee protection, we extend this analysis by examining how nativism subverts from within anti-racist norms by coopting the keyword "diversity." We start in 1968 with the origins of the European New Right and the inauguration of a long-term, metapolitical strategy for countering the hegemony of the liberal international order. Next, we trace how this metapolitical strategy unfolded in the context of the protracted crises of globalization and potentially reached a tipping point circa 2014-2016. Finally, we reflect on how nativism as a "bad" normative process is shifting the boundaries of politically acceptable discourse in the west, considering how nativist political elite are acting as "bad" norm entrepreneurs.
    
    Authors: Michael Toomey (University of Glasgow) , Jeffrey Benvenuto (Gratz College, USA)*
  - The Urgency of Conceptualizing the Noncitizen: A Comparative Case Study of Asylum, Migration, and Borders
    
    In order to understand the casual cruelty inflicted at various border crossings and the widespread loss of life, I argue in this paper that we must first return to core concepts of citizenship and citizenship theory: specifically, the role of the noncitizen. An important, yet overlooked, factor that is blocking progress in these fields is a lack of empathy for migrant noncitizens, asylum seekers in particular. This stems from a deliberate positioning in legislative and societal discourse that has served to reduce the noncitizen to a mere “opposite” of a citizen. Understanding the noncitizen’s deliberate positioning is essential to evaluating the distance between citizens and noncitizens, and is a matter of not just conceptual but practical urgency.
    
    Drawing upon current noncitizenship theorists and the work of Hannah Arendt, this article will critically evaluate twenty-first century government policy regarding the asylum seeker, utilizing the United States and the United Kingdom as comparative case studies. It will further draw parallels between the time Arendt was writing in and our own, and the importance of interrogating the differences. Lastly, it will conclude that citizenship is, first and foremost, found in our relationships with each other. Consequently, the only means by which to remove these barriers to progress is to critically examine why this distance was created and the varying means by which it impedes the universal right to live in a political community. Asking how to rebuild these relationships, in an era of ever-increasing polarization and misinformation, is an essential first step.
    
    Author: Anna Mason (Northeastern University London)
  - An endogenous ‘migration crisis’? Exploring frame emergence, dominance and drain in the European migration debate
    
    There has been significant scholarly attention to the ‘migration crisis’ in 2010s, which has mostly been studied as an exogeneous shock in the migration literature. In this paper, we challenge this premise and study the evolution of the migration debate in Europe from a long term and relational perspective. Instead of treating the ‘crisis’ as an exogeneous shock, we conceptualise it as a socially constructed opportunity structure, which was partly endogenous to the existing patterns of the migration debate. With the support of Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), an application of social network analysis (SNA) to policy debates, as well as 16 in-depth interviews with the EU, IO and NGO officials, we map actor coalitions and their proposed policies in the debate on migration to Europe between 2000 and 2020 (12,000 coded statements). Studying how interactions among migration frames influence which actors use which frames, in what ways and when, we ask: When is migration an issue of border/crime control, human rights, sovereignty, or solidarity? How do these meanings evolve and diffuse across time? Specifically, how do frames on migration interact with one another? When do actors prioritise certain frames over others? How does the so-called crisis relate to these patterns? We argue that the ‘crisis’ emerged from existing frame interactions, but at the same time, it opened up a new discursive space (frame emergence) and triggered new power dynamics between established actors (frame dominance, frame drain) in long-standing debates, leading to a new status quo after it subsided.
    
    Authors: Ece Ozlem Atikcan (University of Warwick) , Tim Henrichsen (University of Warwick)* , Sofie Roehrig (University of Warwick & TU Dresden)*
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Environment and Climate Politics: Another 50 years? Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable, consisting of the convenors of the new Environment and Climate Politics working group, will be a reflection on why this topic needs to be central to IR over the next 50 years. Political decisions over the course of the last 50 years have left the world on the precipice of multiple intersecting environmental tipping points. For many, the results have already been catastrophic. It will be politics that determines how those consequences continue to unfold over the next 50 years. Realities of geopolitical conflict and competition and the international distribution of power and resources cannot be bracketed in research and debates about possible futures. British IR, with its pluralist orientation, has the potential to produce research and analysis that shapes understanding of and engagement with the possible futures of environment and climate change over the coming decades. This roundtable will consider possible future research directions, and pitfalls, in the international politics of climate change.
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
  
  Participants: Danielle Young (University of Leeds) , Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto) , Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds) , Ebony Young (University of Glasgow)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / From Pixels to Politics: Popular Culture, Political Narratives and Communities Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Danièle Andre (La Rochelle, France)
  - Politics in Play: Exploring Online Political Engagement in GTA V Roleplay Communities
    
    Since its launch, Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) has attracted over 140 million players, making it the sixth most-played video game of all time. More than a decade after its release, the game continues to thrive as a space for vibrant online roleplay communities. These communities create immersive political narratives within the game, holding elections, appointing players to political positions, and broadcasting their activities to millions of viewers on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Contrary to claims of declining public engagement with politics, these virtual spaces demonstrate an evolving form of political participation and community building. This paper presents preliminary findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in these online communities, examining how players navigate, engage with, and conceptualise political processes in a digital environment. This project ventures into rarely explored territories within international studies, engaging with groups overlooked by scholars to propose novel opportunities for political engagement, challenging its conventional definitions.
    
    Author: Emma Brewis (University of Leeds)
  - Navigating Trump 2.0: A Pop-Culture Guide to the Rise of American Fascism from Sinclair Lewis to the Late-Night Deathwatch
    
    ‘Being right sucks’: This was scribbled on the chalkboard in the opening credits of The Simpsons the week after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In actuality, the long-running animated series had predicted him to win the 2024 race in Season 11’s ‘Bart to the Future’ episode (2000); this prognostication has now come to pass. My paper examines how popular culture has signposted the impending of rise of fascism in the US from Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935) up through what I am calling the ‘Late-Night Deathwatch’, the media assemblage associated with talk show hosts who have offended Trump and now nervously await his ‘retribution’ once back in office. Reacting to the October 2024 recorded interview with Trump’s former Head of Staff, John Kelly, in which the retired Marine general placed his boss ‘into the general definition of a fascist’, my analysis interrogates the premise that Trump’s second term signals America’s long-presaged embrace of fascism. I do this via an assessment of what ‘fascism’ looks like in the twenty-first century, Americans’ proven and pervasive distrust of the federal government, and what role social media, podcasts, and other forms of popular culture play in contesting and abetting the country’s growing embrace of authoritarianism.
    
    Author: Robert Saunders (State University of New York)
  - World War “C”: The influence of film narratives on the COVID-19 response
    
    Is it possible to trace a parallel between the COVID-19 response and ideas generalized in popular culture, particularly movies? This paper aims to answer this question, using the film World War Z as a comparison tool. Although there are many similarities between the movie plot and the global response to the pandemic in a securitized context, the view of the relation between world politics and popular culture as a continuum adds complexity to this case. The presence of visual, narrative, and cinematic cues that can justify a war-like response during a pandemic and the reach of relevant film production on the subject are crucial to better understand the potential impact of movies on real life politics related to the COVID-19 response. This paper tests the hypothesis that film narratives influenced political behavior in international relations during the pandemic. There is great potential in broader research about the influence of film narratives on political behavior during pandemics, as a more in depth understanding of the impact of film on securitization and global health emergency responses can bring a relevant contribution to the field of cultural studies and international relations.
    
    Author: Etienne Franca (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
  - Videogames, resistance and extremism made playful
    
    This paper explores the intersection of videogames, resistance, and the concept of "extremism made playful." It addresses concerns that mainstream videogames may inadvertently promote extremist sentiments, a phenomenon Wells et al. (2024) describe as "soft sell white supremacy." This term highlights how certain games reflect and reinforce racial and structural inequities, sometimes aligning with extremist worldviews. Military games, for instance, can promote white nationalism under the guise of play.
    The paper discusses how everyday extremism manifests in gaming, often dismissed as trivial or playful. This normalization of extremist behaviour in casual settings can cause significant harm, particularly to marginalized groups such as ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women, who experience these behaviours disproportionately.
    Despite these challenges, the paper acknowledges efforts by the gaming industry to create more inclusive play spaces. The industry is increasingly using technology to clean up play, driven by commercial imperatives cantered on building more inclusive play spaces to increase player numbers. Games such as FC25, GTA6, and the Call of Duty series have all sought to tackle extremism in everyday life – how successful these moves have been is, of course, up for debate.
    
    Author: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Hidden Spaces of Gender, Peace and Security Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London) , Maria O'Reilly (Leeds Beckett University)
  
  Chair: Hanna Ketola (Newcastle)
  - WPS and Climate Change in South and Southeast Asia
    
    The proposed paper aims to address the following question: in what ways has the women, peace and security (WPS) discourse been, or can be, used to contend with climate change concerns within the feminist peace agendas in South and Southeast Asia? In both the regions, civil society actors have advocated for a holistic feminist peace agenda that takes account of non-traditional security concerns, including climate change. The paper examines the extent to which these efforts are reflected in the WPS National Action Plans as well as the Regional Plan of Action on WPS of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (the South Asian region does not have a comparable action plan). The empirical analysis will consider similarities and differences in advocacy for, and implementation of, relevant WPS provisions in the two regions and assess the scope for cross-regional learnings. The findings are expected to shed light on the ‘localization’ of a dimension of the WPS agenda – climate change – that has received increasing attention in recent years. In the 25th anniversary year of the passage of Resolution 1325, these findings should offer new insights into the trajectory of the WPS agenda in South and Southeast Asia, that – going forward – may also be meaningful for other regions and the global policy discourse.
    
    Authors: Soumita Basu (South Asian University) , Tamara Nair (Nanyang Technological University)*
  - Positioning Gender in Peace Architectures: the Case of Mindanao
    
    Space making, shaping and taking are at the heart of the political struggles and contention in societies emerging from armed conflict. One of central aims of peace processes is rendering political decision-making more inclusive. The purpose is to open officialised spaces for participation with a view to increasing diversity of views and interests. Such discourses are particularly prevalent in the context of gender equality and efforts to increase women’s participation. Such efforts seek to ‘position’ women and communities in the emerging societal landscape following an armed conflict and ‘reposition’ them vis-à-vis the pre-existing structures of governance. Focusing on spatial logics, this analysis explores such positionings of gender in peace architectures. In examining the peace process in the Mindanao region in the Southern Philippines, where women’s descriptive and substantive representation have been high, the analysis seeks to ascertain the extent to which political and policy spaces have opened up to women and other constituencies traditionally marginalised in the region’s governance? In what ways are spaces occupied and navigated by women and gender activists? Where in the peace architecture, consisting of officialised and non-officialised spaces, have women and the gender agenda gained inclusion?
    
    Author: Outi Donovan (Griffith University, Australia)
  - Wagamama: Gendered Norms and Disaster Risk Reduction in Japan
    
    We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR). Gender has been central to the SFDRR. The mid-term review of the SFDRR brought renewed attention to addressing the structural causes of gender inequalities for inclusive and sustainable disaster risk reduction (DRR). Achieving gender equality by 2030 is also one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Despite all the efforts and discussions on a gender sensitive approach to DRR, we have only touched the surface of the problem, and progress on achieving gender equality has been slow. In this paper, we examine the gendered impacts of disasters in Japan. We extend our analysis beyond the discussion of women as mere victims or vulnerable and delve deeper into the far-reaching consequences of embodied gendered social norms and cultural practices which get exacerbated in times of crisis. This paper is based on research of many years in the field of DRR in Japan. It analyses several published accounts of people’s experiences from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the recent 2024 Noto Earthquake. We argue that the embodied social norms and cultural practices have a far greater impact on women, girls and gender minorities than what has been addressed in public discourse. We propose that, for DRR to be gender equitable and inclusive, these embodied social norms and cultural practices must be considered. Special measures must be taken to avoid unintended consequences of disasters, particularly when planning for disaster preparedness, evacuation, mitigation, reconstruction and recovery.
    
    Authors: Miwako Kitamura (Tohoku University)* , Punam Yadav (University College London)
  - Objects and Stories of Women, Peace and Security
    
    Museum objects and exhibits provide crucial insights into gendered experiences of conflict and insecurity. Physical artefacts and material texts that are displayed in museums can reveal hidden stories about the diverse lives and experiences of women who have fought against violence and oppression and sought to promote peace and security. This paper foregrounds museum objects and exhibits as important sources of knowledge about gender, peace and security. We outline a bottom-up, feminist materialist methodology for identifying and analysing objects and exhibits of - rather than on - W/women, P/peace and S/security. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in the North of England, we highlight two hidden stories of feminist peace activism and anti-colonial struggle. Overall, we argue that knowledge produced by and within museums can help reclaim the transformative vision behind the Women, Peace and Security agenda to achieve feminist peace and security.
    
    Authors: Maria O'Reilly (Leeds Beckett University) , Laura McLeod (University of Manchester)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Immersive Platforms in Digital Society Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Chair: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
  - The Immersive United Nations: An Actor-Network Examination of the UN’s Adoption of Virtual Reality Technology and its Role in Virtual Interaction, Training Simulations, and Awareness-Raising.
    
    This paper investigates the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) technology by three United Nations organisations through the theoretical framework of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It focuses on three case studies across the UN ecosystem, each representing a specific function of VR: Multi-user Virtual Environments (VEs) for virtual interaction, cinematic VR for awareness-raising, and VR training simulations. Rooted in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and increasingly applied in IR, ANT provides a means to theorise the sociotechnical relationships that arise between human and non-human actors within a network, awarding technology with agentic qualities. As the interaction between the material and social aspects of VR technology and UN operational practices is investigated, this paper will highlight the constraints, alterations, and enhancements that the technology brings to IOs' work.
    The author seeks to answer the following research questions: How does the adoption of VR technology at UN agencies impact IOs' operational practices? And what are the broader implications of VR adoption for understanding change in IOs' practices in a digitalising international sphere?
    To answer the above questions, the study employs a qualitative methodology, triangulating data from semi-structured interviews, virtual observations, and the analysis of relevant documents. This study contributes to the emerging body literature on ANT in IR, to studies on IO change and innovation, digital diplomacy, ICT4D, as well as the broad literature on immersive technologies, thus providing insights into the future of development work.
    
    Author: Francesca Liberatore Vaselli (Oxford University)
  - Algorithms and Extremism: Exploring How TikTok’s Algorithm Structures the Manosphere
    
    At the heart of the fluidity of modern digital realities, transformed incessantly by echo chambers, misinformation and social media, lie the structuring abilities of algorithms. Influenced by often biased criteria, the way that algorithms are defining private and public life has brought questions of online identity and how users construct their senses of Self at a time when the digital realm is becoming increasingly prominent. Most notable is the question of whether the algorithm changes how users perceive (and construct) themselves.
    The scope of this paper is focused on mapping out the structuring effect of algorithms as well as addressing the question of how to study the effects of algorithms. Looking at the provisional findings from applying social network analysis to TikTok’s algorithm, it discusses the construction of echo chambers and the algorithmic paths users follow as they consume content online. These findings subsequently have important links to extremism and patterns of radicalization, especially for ideologies like masculinism which call for the (re-)establishment of male domination and benefit strongly from the algorithmically-structured spaces of social media.
    
    Author: Clara Jammot (King's College London)
  - Narrative-Practice Interplay in The Integration of Technologies in Public Spaces and The Consequences for Digital Security
    
    Technologies are increasingly integrated into our public spaces. They collect and send information on air quality, traffic, waste and more to meet efficiency, safety, and environmental targets. As these spaces become more connected, digital security vulnerabilities and risks multiply. I argue that risks and vulnerabilities are not currently well addressed in the process of implementing new technologies in public places. Based on 23 international interviews with actors involved in the process of integrating these technologies, I show that narratives which are currently exchanged do little to assist in managing digital security risks. These narratives are based on generic innovation and technology narratives of the past. Throughout the process of integrating technologies into public spaces, such narratives interplay with practices in a way which often has negative consequences for digital security. To improve digital security for technologies in public spaces, we should consider how we can use more effective narratives and what happens to these narratives in practice.
    
    Author: Rebecca Hartley (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - (De)Gendering Online Radicalisation: Is Cyber-Security Regulation on the Right Track?
    
    The role of gender in shaping the outlook of violent extremism (VE) in many European societies becomes increasingly intriguing. Female involvement in political and religious movements that engage in VE reveals diverse roles, motivations, and participatory forms. Women or girls who join extremist movements, for instance, have organized women-only online spaces as part of their ‘everyday practice’. Rising home-grown radicalisation among young male refugees in their new host countries also shows how diverse Islamist terror organisations have used social media to spread their political agenda and to circulate gender stereotypes narratives, fake news, and misogynist ideology.
    Our paper employs a case study approach to examining the role of gender in shaping the nature of extremism in cyber space and police responses to radicals’ online propaganda and communication. We argue that the focus on radicalization and gender might prove to be contra-productive as they fall short of providing insights into how new social media has enabled people interested in these ideas to form communities, conspiracy theories and distrust in institutions. We provide insights into the ways in which extremist views are communicated in cyber space, how such activity is monitored and how sociotechnical concepts and tools (e.g. a theory of media effects, algorithm meaning-making, online community-shaping) might help address the pitfalls of mainstream concepts while tackling the challenges posed by the spread of virulent fringe ideas in the cyber space leading to violence.
    
    Authors: Jim Moir (University of Abertay Dundee)* , Miao-ling Hasenkamp (University Rostock)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / International Orders and Ordering Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working group
  
  Chair: Borislav Tsokov (University of St Andrews)
  - A Recognition Theory of Agency in International Politics
    
    Who matters in the study of international politics? To date, IR and IPT have been dominated by ideal theories that begin by positing a set of abstracted agents (typically states) and relations between them based on parsimonious, simplified understandings of static interests. Even constructivist theories that recognize evolution in agents' identities and interests, nonetheless typically begin by assuming pre-existing ideal-typical agents arguing, for example, that 'anarchy is what STATES make of it' and bracketing the constitution of the state actor. This tendency towards ideal theory has analytical utility, but, when pursued at the exclusion of non-ideal theory, has the pernicious effect of depoliticizing ontological questions that are, in reality, deeply political. To remedy this gap, this paper adapts Axel Honneth's theory of recognition to the international arena, arguing that international agency is an emergent property of social systems. While much literature in IR on recognition focuses on legal recognition between states, this paper argues for a more foundational conception of the international as an arena of recognition between and across social groups. This theorization has three distinct advantages: First, it repoliticizes the constitution of international agency that is too often assumed in scholarly models. Second, it provides, in Honneth’s words, a “social theory with normative content,” facilitating a new bridge between positive and normative questions. Third, it points to a new empirical agenda examining struggles for recognition in international politics beyond the state, including over the inclusion or exclusion of new actors, interests, or relations. The paper illustrates this framework’s utility with reference to multiple examples, including international reparations, war crimes tribunal, and climate governance.
    
    Author: Adam Lerner (UMass Lowell, USA)
  - Dehumanization: humanity and dignity deprivation in global crises
    
    How do dehumanizing narratives and practices exacerbate vulnerabilities and inequalities during global crises, and what implications do these have for human dignity and social justice in contemporary global politics? Drawing on multidisciplinary literature on dehumanization, this article posits that dehumanizing narratives and practices exacerbate vulnerabilities and inequalities during such crises; therefore, comprehending these discourses and practices is vital for developing thorough scholarly analyses and political interventions that uphold human dignity and promote global social justice. This article maintains that dehumanization must be taken seriously as an analytic concept in International Relations, and this concept can be useful to understand the causes and consequences of 21st century global crises that systematically deprive other human individuals their sense of dignity. The article probes that argument using three illustrative case studies—the Refugee Crisis in Europe, the post-9/11 War on Terror, and the post-COVID-19 crisis in Gaza/Palestine.
    
    Author: Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University)
  - Anarchy or Capitalism? It’s Both, Stupid! Combining Neorealist with Marxist Explanations for the Origins of Imperialism
    
    According to common Marxist accounts (e.g. Luxemburg 2003; Lenin 2015; Harvey 2017), the origins of imperialism can be explained by capitalism’s need for expansion. Yet, what about empires predating capitalism, such as the Roman Empire? We propose that a structural-realist lens, particularly offensive neorealism, provides crucial elements for explaining motives behind imperialism. For this purpose, we combine Waltz’ (1979) defensive neorealism and Cohen’s (1973) proposal for a political theory of imperialism, grounded in the anarchic international system, with later advancements of realist theory, notably Mearsheimer’s (2001) offensive neorealism. Despite the latter’s obvious usefulness in explaining motives for expansion, it has not yet been explicitly applied to imperialism. Thus, we develop Cohen’s sketch for a realist theory of imperialism further and illustrate its empirical applicability through the comparative study of three cases: the Roman Empire; the British East India Company; and US military interventions in Iran, Chile, and Vietnam during the Cold War. Doing so, we pay particular attention to how a neorealist theory of imperialism relates to Marxist accounts and how capitalist and pre-capitalist cases of imperialism differ. By developing offensive neorealism as a theory of imperialism, we contribute a missing piece for understanding imperial motives that accounts for both political and economic drivers, significantly advancing the theoretical discourse on the origins of imperialism.
    
    Authors: Florian Brunner (Nuffield College, University of Oxford) , Pao Engelbrecht (The University of Chicago)*
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Ontological security between existentialism and psychoanalysis: The anxiety of the liberal international order Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh) , Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
  
  Chair: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
  - Liberal Absurdity: Finding and Losing Meaning After the Fall of Western Hegemony
    
    Liberal internationalism is in an increasingly beleaguered and ‘absurd’ position. Historically, a liberal internationalist cosmology provided existential sustenance for states and populations seeking ontological security in an uncertain world. However, the weakening of Western hegemony and the global strengthening of illiberal political movements place liberal internationalism—as a system of meaning—in an increasingly precarious position. Moreover, growing awareness of liberal internationalism’s entwinement with (post-)colonial violence threatens to further undermine its existential foundations. Drawing on Albert Camus’s absurdism and existential psychology, this paper develops the concept of ‘liberal absurdity’. This concept captures the tension between the yearning for meaning found within a Western-liberal cosmology, and the growing fragility of this system of meaning. This paper also engages with decolonial critiques of liberal internationalism as a prism for thinking about how liberal-Western subjects might respond to this seemingly absurd condition.
    
    Author: Alistair Markland (University of Sussex)
  - Psychoanalytical v Existentialist traditions in Ontological Security Studies
    
    This paper, part of a broader joint project, provides a comparative analysis of two increasingly prominent streams within ontological security studies – works drawing from the psychoanalytic and existentialist traditions. We provide summaries of each tradition, tracing their import to OSS through the works of key thinkers and texts. We appraise the benefits and features of each, where they have or might overlap, and where contrasts emerge including shaping some debates within OSS. To the latter, we delineate the ‘stakes’ of differences between each and how those unfold into different theorizations of, and politics for, the ontologically (in)secure subjects of global politics.
    
    Authors: Catarina Kinnvall (Lund University)* , Jennifer Mitzen (Ohio State University)* , Brent Steele (University of Utah)
  - Power, Glory, and Nation Rebranding in Non-West: A Quest for Authentic Existence in Declining Liberal Order
    
    In a globalised world, many states seek to promote their international reputation and sphere of influence by relying on various advertising campaigns and methods. Coined as nation branding in the International Relations field, this practice enables actors to imagine and then present themselves in a historically specific form. In the wake of the declining liberal global order, some non-Western states being ruled by authoritarian leaders, such as China, Russia and Turkey, have been in the process of ‘rebranding’ their existing self-image. In doing so, they draw aspirations from their glorious imperial history and rich cultural heritage, disseminating subjective grand narratives about their self. We argue that this extant body of literature has not fully addressed two intertwined points. The first point underlines the identity transformation that non-Western states have undergone in light of the declining liberal order and their search for ‘authenticity’ as a by-product of this decline. The second is the direct relationship between the existential quests of these states and their rebranding practices. This article cross-fertilizes nation branding with the unexplored authentic self concept in existential philosophy literature to offer nuanced insights towards these specific developments. Proceeding on this, it develops a conceptual framework looking at the complex relationship between nation branding, geopolitical desires, and public diplomacy.
    
    Authors: Bahar Rumelili (Koç University) , Umut Can Adisonmez (Izmir University of Economics)
  - Some of you may Die, but it’s a Sacrifice I am willing to make’: The Role of Existentialist Narcissism in Making The International
    
    In his famous psychoanalytical work on The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker quotes Aristotle’s aphorism that ‘luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow’. Captured neatly in Shrek’s Lord Farquaad’s meme that ‘some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make’, international political practice is – historically and contemporaneously – riddled with examples of agents feeling and expressing an existential narcissism in which ‘practically everyone is expendable except ourselves’ (Becker 1973, 2).
    Building on a burgeoning scholarship of ontological security and existentialism in IR, this paper seeks to explore this kind of narcissism as a potentially foundational practice for making ‘the international’. Grappling with the question whether/how studying ‘the international’ requires a theoretical abstraction at least in some form (Erikson Rio 2024; Herborth 2021), the paper asks whether/how ‘the international’ necessarily cultivates an ideological, epistemological, and practical temptation to omit oneself from ‘necessary sacrifices to save the planet’, and/or to maintain that Others should ‘bear the consequences’ of pervasive global problems.
    Informed by other scholarship on narcissism in IR (Hagström 2021, 2024; Harden 2021; Volkan 2014) and in broader psychoanalysis from the likes of Becker, Freud, and Rank, the paper argues that an analysis of the intersections between narcissism and ‘the international’ helps to progress the study of existentialist/anxious global futures in IR scholarship. By finally exploring possible avenues out of IR narcissism, it places the study of existentialism and ontological security at the very heart of what it means to research ‘the international’.
    
    Authors: Lucas Knotter (University of Bath) , Lucas Knotter (University of Groningen)*
  - Reading Our Age of Anxiety Through W.H. Auden
    
    “The world needs a wash and a week’s rest.” So begins the 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning poem The Age of Anxiety by W.H. Auden. Set at the tail end of WWII, the poem features four characters in dialogue on themes of war, modernity, identity, fate, and, above all, loneliness. The poem was influenced by both Heidegger and Kierkegaard and represents a snapshot of global affairs which was marred by existential dread and uncertainty. As the characters try to make sense of the world, the poem culminates in one man announcing: “We would rather be ruined than changed, we would rather die in our dread, than climb the cross of the moment, and let our illusions die.” This line resonates particularly in our age of anxiety and especially when reflecting on discourses around the 2024 US Presidential election. Like the characters in Auden’s poem, US political factions were mired in their own individual dread which could not sufficiently be mutually articulated or understood. American politics is caught between the illusion of wholeness and the promise of individual freedom, a space where existentialism thrives. I argue that existentialist dread can be an effective starting point for understanding the competing realities at play in the US elections. I analyze election discourses through the lens of The Age of Anxiety to further demonstrate how existentialist literature can elucidate the contemporary political moment and our resistance for change.
    
    Author: Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Open Access Publishing in International Studies Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Amidst calls for greater inclusion in knowledge production, Open Access (OA) publishing has become essential to this effort, aiming to provide free access and unrestricted use of electronic resources for all. Within International Studies, this entails the provision of academic output that is not dependent on the reader's physical abilities, institutional affiliation, or disposable income. This roundtable unites a diverse group of scholars from various backgrounds, institutions, genders, and stages in their careers to explore the evolving landscape of OA publishing. Participants will address several critical questions: What should OA publishing be, and what is its function? How is it connected to knowledge production and dissemination? Can we entrench or broaden its principles, and if so, how?
  With each participant affiliated to a leading journal of British International Studies, this discussion will analyse the current state of OA publishing in the field and envision its future, considering challenges and opportunities in accessibility. Ultimately, this event seeks to foster actionable strategies for enhancing OA's impact within the discipline and to democratise knowledge so to ensure diverse voices are heard by a global plurality of readers. Hence, it serves the needs of researchers and educators while addressing contemporary challenges in the field.
  
  Sponsor: European Journal of International Security
  
  Chair: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)
  
  Participants: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham) , Marianna Karakoulaki (University of Birmingham) , Jack Holland (University of Leeds) , Mark Salter (University of Ottawa / Security Dialogue) , David Mainwaring
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Preventing 50 More Years of Neocolonialism in Aid? Interrogating and Disrupting Neocolonial Humanitarian Relationships within Europe and Beyond Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: Cecelia Lynch (UC, Irvine, USA)
  
  Chair: Callum Smith (Queens University Belfast)
  - Humanitarian colonialism in Ukraine: an analysis of the role of NGO security management in the reproduction of neo-colonial practices in the humanitarian space
    
    In the immediate response to the Russian invasion in Ukraine many humanitarian organisations have opened offices and hospitals in Ukraine. While some organisations already had a presence in a development capacity, for many this was new territory. Ukraine therefore makes an interesting case study to investigate the extent of recurring patterns and structures that are reminiscent of colonial practices. Humanitarianism is increasingly critiqued for its role in the perpetuation and replication of neo-colonial structures. This is not only visible in outwardly practices facing the recipients of aid and the impact on the context in which it operates, but also internally vis-a-vis its employees and the reproduction of bias towards the operational context. This paper asks to what extent the humanitarian response to the war in Ukraine resonates with these images. We zoom in on the NGO practice in security management. The practice highlights many of the paradoxes present in humanitarianism. Firstly, the overfunding of the humanitarian aid in Ukraine. There is a disproportionate amount of funding available, which is also reflected in the budget that most NGOs have for security. This is in contrast to many places worldwide, where arguable more funding is needed. Secondly, the war in Ukraine is a war with a frontline, as opposed to a counterinsurgency context, therefore there are many areas where high levels of securitization are not required. Thirdly, NGOs reportedly experience difficulties with the recruitment of local security staff. Instead, they rely on traditional security actors who often have limited experience working in the NGO space, or bring in expat employees, reproducing colonial hierarchies in security management. Fourthly, related to this is the increasing influence of “security experts”, individuals at think tanks, NGOs and on social media who increasingly fill the gap of institutionalised local knowledge.
    
    Authors: Mila Shutova (Geneva Graduate Institute)* , Dalia Saris (Queen Mary University London)
  - Postcolonial Urban Refugee Politics and Survival in the Global South
    
    This paper explores the postcolonial governmentality and neoliberal governance of refugee assistance programs in urban spaces. While a considerable body of research interrogates the colonial relationships embedded in formal refugee spaces, such as camps and settlements, much less is understood about the relationships between colonialism, refugee governance, and humanitarian aid in urban spaces. My paper addresses this gap in literature through shifting the physical default geography of refugee assistance from the camp to urban centers in the Global South. In so doing, the project draws on literature that examines humanitarian world-making (Feldman 2018) and subjective life-making (Huq and Miraftab 2020), to ask if and how refugee experiences unfold outside of spatially-demarcated camps and settlements, and away from the border. In so doing, the project teases out ways in which postcolonial governmentality and neoliberal governance within refugee protection is both reproduced and ruptured via the ‘care and maintenance’ of refugee assistance programs in urban areas. This project is based on field work in urban refugee centers of Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi. I examine how refugees deploy humanitarian frameworks to access care in non-humanitarian spaces, under conditions of prolonged temporary asylum in the Global South.
    
    Author: Udita Ghosh (University of California, Irvine)
  - Aftereffects of European Colonialism: Cameroonian and/vs. German perspectives of the Decolonial Turn in Humanitarianism
    
    Is the decolonial turn more than just another buzzword? In our work examining humanitarian aid relationships between Germany and Cameroon, we have found diverse meanings and decolonizing practices among aid groups and think tanks in both countries. This is, we assert, in considerable part due to a context of an insufficiently explored colonial past. Our paper, based on interviews and a late 2023 workshop bringing together interlocutors from both sides, analyzes these meanings and practices of decolonization for Cameroonian, German and transnational aid interlocutors, as well as the barriers and possibilities they see from related demands. We look at the challenges posed by a specific linkage between colonial and contemporary, post-colonial forms of aid/humanitarianism in the context of a nostalgic invocation of the German colonial past by some Cameroonians on the one hand, and an insufficient reference to the structuring German colonial presence in Cameroon on the German side. Under these conditions, can a common and shared understanding of the terms of decolonization of present relations be constructed? Our paper explores the extant and possible negotiations necessary for constructing such a shared space that accounts for an ever-present past.
    
    Author: Nadine Machikou Ngamen (University of Yaoundé II, Cameroon)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Relations between Global North and Global South Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Pedro Perfeito da Silva (University of Exeter)
  - Geoeconomics, unilateral turn in trade and negotiating environmental standards in EU free trade agreements with Global South: the case of the EU-Indonesia FTA
    
    In recent years, the European Union (EU) has introduced a series of new unilateral trade instruments, such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). These unilateral measures are intended to complement environmental standards and conditionality incorporated in the EU bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), fostering stronger enforcement and greater policy coherence in enhancing environmental sustainability in trade. However, the rise of geoeconomics in the EU’s trade policy introduces a critical dynamic in assessing the interplay between these two approaches, particularly in the context of more balanced EU-Global South relations. Using the EU-Indonesia FTA negotiation as a case study, this article explores whether geoeconomic objectives in EU-Global South trade relations reinforce or weaken the complementarity between the EU’s unilateral trade tools and the environmental conditionality within its bilateral trade agreements with the Global South. It draws on semi-structured interviews with executives, parliamentarians, and civil society organizations in both the EU and Indonesia, as well as documents. This article argues that the EU’s geoeconomic turn will likely undermine the complementarity between these two approaches during both the negotiation and implementation stages of the FTAs with the South. First, as EU’s trading partners in the South are more aware of their geoeconomic positions and increasingly adopt a stronger stance, they leverage bilateral FTAs to negotiate for greater policy flexibility and exemptions from EU unilateral trade regulations, as seen with Indonesia. Second, the introduction of unilateral regulations fragments and complicates the negotiation and implementation of environmental standards within bilateral trade agreements. Discourses around unfairness and the perception of unilateral trade barriers diminish the Global South’s accountability in environmental sustainability and reduce pre-ratification legitimacy pressure regarding environmental commitments in the EU FTAs.
    
    Author: Zhihang Wu (University of Glasgow)
  - Politicisation of Aid: Analysing Aid and Local Politics in Afghanistan
    
    This study focuses on the political economy of aid and its impact on domestic political dynamics, shifts in power relations, order, fragility, and broader state-building efforts over the past two decades under President Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and President Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021). Building on Alex de Waal’s ‘political marketplace’ framework, which focuses on trading political loyalty in exchange for order among state, international, and local actors, I argue that sustaining a political marketplace is crucial for maintaining order, while its disruption fuels conflict and ultimately leads to state collapse. I propose a typology categorising three main avenues—cash shipments, international lucrative contracts, and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) funded projects—through which aid flows sustained the functionality of a political marketplace under Karzai. In contrast, Ghani’s disruption of the marketplace fuelled conflict and contributed to his government’s downfall. This disruption was also compounded by shifts in the positions of international actors, particularly U.S. negotiations with the Taliban, including the Doha Agreement, which accelerated state collapse. This article draws on extensive literature and first-hand data from over 100 key informant interviews conducted in Kabul in 2018, offering new insights into the political economy of aid, domestic politics, and state-building in conflict-affected settings.
    
    Author: Sarajuddin Isar (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands)
  - Policy- and output-driven economic inequality implications of Aid for Trade flows in recipient developing countries
    
    The Aid for Trade (AfT) initiative was formally endorsed at the WTO 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial Conference, in an attempt to push forward the development agenda of the organisation. In the last 20 years, it has become one of the most successful development assistance initiatives available – at least in what concerns donor disbursements, both absolute and relative to other development aid. Yet most available assessments are narrowly concerned with assessing the trade-specific merits of the initiative, largely dismissing broader development contributions (or lack thereof). This paper questions the development merits of the AfT initiative from a broader, holistic understanding of development. In particular, the paper is concerned with assessing both the direct (output-based) and indirect (policy-based) potential impacts of AfT flows over levels of economic inequality in recipient developing countries. The paper employs panel data analysis to explore the hypothesis that AfT flows may indeed aggravate conditions of economic inequality in receiving economies, in so doing contributing to a deterioration of their long-term development prospects. The implications of this must be thoughtfully taken into consideration in the context of an aid initiative which normatively justifies the pro-development credentials of the multilateral trade system, and empirically diverts resources away from other development aid funds with a stronger social development rationale.
    
    Author: Andrea Gimeno Solaz (University of Edinburgh)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Rethinking Knowledge Production on Africa beyond data sources: Addressing the Systemic Silence of Africa’s original theoretical contribution and innovation Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Francis Ethelbert Benyah (University of Copenhagen) , Aboabea Akuffo (University of Oxford) , Pearl Puwurayire (Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany)
  
  Chair: Faisal Garba Mohammed (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
  - Toward Epistemic Sovereignty: From Empirical Informants to Theorists in Global Knowledge Production
    
    Research designs primarily follow inductive and deductive reasoning, either moving from theory to data or from data to theory. While these approaches are foundational to rigorous research, the pressure to conform to pre-existing theoretical frameworks has become a routine exercise in many academic settings. This often results in a disconnect between theory and other components of the study, such as analysis and conclusions, weakening the coherence and depth of the research.
    This issue disproportionately affects African scholars, both in the Global North and South, due to the pressure to apply external theories. While critical engagement with theory can address some gaps, such frameworks remain limited. Encouraging African scholars to advance their fields beyond the role of “native informants”, to develop new theories that accurately reflect their research findings and the sociopolitical nuance within Africa is essential. Through a critical reflection of my experience employing inductive logic to construct a new theory, I highlight both the institutional limitations, and the intellectual rigor involved in constructing theory from empirical insights. I discuss the process of navigating institutional pressures to ground my research in established theories, the increased scrutiny it attracted, and the challenges in articulating the emergent theory derived from my analysis. I answer the questions:
    • In what ways does framing African research within foreign theoretical paradigms limit the accurate representation of African experiences?
    • When a context-specific theory is absent, can robust research, sound analysis, and persuasive arguments stand alone as sufficient contributions?
    • How does grounding African research in theories with roots in different empirical and scholarly contexts affect the objectivity of inductive research on Africa?
    The goal is to underscore the need to encourage control over knowledge production on the continent, narratives, or practices that have been historically marginalized, and to rethink global knowledge systems.
    
    Author: Aboabea Akuffo (University of Oxford)
  - Rethinking urban ‘Informality’ – Exploring Hybrid Transport Infrastructure Delivery Configuration in Urban Ghana.
    
    The concept of informality has dissipated deeply into the narratives of infrastructure delivery in urban Ghana. While this concept has offered a basis for labour categorisation and forming territorial boundaries, it has also been argued to be ‘Western’ and often presents ‘blurry’ infrastructure realities in urban Ghana. This paper seeks to rethink the concept of urban ‘informality’ and offer an alternative framework that acknowledges the material interplay of the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ realities that exist in Ghana's transport infrastructure. By focusing on ‘hybrid delivery configuration’, this study emphasises how Ghana’s transport infrastructure is not simply an ‘informal’ response to gaps in formal provisions but a complex, contextually driven configuration that creatively adapts to rapid urbanisation, limited state resources and diverse socio-economic realities. This hybrid approach better reflects the fluid interactions between state and community actors, challenging conventional binaries and advocating for policy frameworks that support these adaptive, blended systems as essential components of urban transport in Ghana.
    
    Author: Pearl Puwurayire (Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany)
  - The (Dis)content Typology: State Behaviour in International Organisations and the Africa-International Criminal Court Relationship
    
    The fear of a mass exodus of African members from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the decade between 2008 and 2018 indicated that the Court was in trouble. While the “Afrexit” did not become a reality, it prompts an important question: how do states behave in international organisations when they are (un)satisfied? This paper proposes the (dis)content typology as a heuristic tool for classifying state behaviour in international organsations into five categories: active support, constructive criticism, substantive opposition, formal withdrawal, and silence. I argue that this typology is more comprehensive than comparable typologies of state behaviour. The typology is empirically dervied through the critical discourse analysis of 192 country statements delivered by African ICC members, documentary analysis of AU decisions, the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties’ Bureau decisions, relevant ICC Chambers decisions, news sources, and interview data with diplomatic representatives of ICC member states as well as ICC officials. The paper advances the literature focused on assessing the legitimacy of international organisations by contributing a toolkit that can be used across different multilateral forums to categorise state behaviour. It contributes to the ICC-African relations literature through its understanding of this relationship as fundamentally a matter of international relations – something hitherto underappreciated due to the focus on legal criteria of state behaviour. Lastly, it furthers the general (Africa’s) International Relations literature by using the African region to generate a broadly applicable typology. This is notable given the tendency for International Relations scholars to see the region as one where theories and other analytical devices are applied rather than from which new ones are generated.
    
    Keywords: Africa; International Criminal Court; state behaviour; legitimacy; typology
    
    Author: Maxine Rubin (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)
  - Unpacking the Visual Discourses and Counter-Discourses in China-Africa Relations
    
    This paper examines the evolving relationship between China and Africa as a pivotal example of South-South cooperation, with a focus on the dynamic interplay of political and cultural power. Since the mid-20th century, China and African nations have expressed mutual support, a relationship that has grown significantly through China’s expanding development financing in Africa since the 2000s. As this geopolitical alliance strengthens, an equally influential visual landscape has emerged, reflecting and shaping public perceptions of China-Africa relations.
    
    Grounded in field research in Nairobi, Kenya, this paper analyzes visual representations of China-Kenya relations created by both Chinese state actors and independent Kenyan artists. It explores the purpose, function, and reception of these images: do they reinforce the political alliance, challenge it, or serve as creative tools for critique and resistance? Through a combination of archival research on CCP propaganda, field research on Kenyan satirical art, and visual discourse analysis, this study interprets the symbolic narratives embedded in these visual representations.
    
    This work contributes to the literature on China-Africa relations and Visual IR by illuminating how visual art mediates international relationships, challenging hegemonic narratives, and offering new perspectives on China’s engagement with Africa.
    
    Author: Jessica Ré Phillips (SOAS, University of London)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Science Fiction, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Future war – New Avenues for IR Research? Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  It is well-established that popular culture has real implications for the ways in which international relations are understood and practiced. Yet the extent to which popular culture shapes our expectations and imaginaries of IR futures warrants further inquiry. To aid in this effort, this roundtable brings researchers together to debate what the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries – drawn from the field of Science and Technology Studies – can teach us about how, why and when certain ‘popular’ visions of the future come to be embedded discursively and materially across societies, and the extent to which these become a resource for policymakers. More concretely, we are specifically interested in the role that science fiction plays in the creation of sociotechnical imaginaries of future war, and their potential to shape real world policy decisions. Our roundtable marks the start of what we hope is an ongoing discussion, providing a route for initiating a new dialogue amongst scholars interested in how the study of science fiction, sociotechnical imaginaries and future war intersects, with a view to developing propositions for novel areas of future research.
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Duncan Depledge (Loughborough University)
  
  Participants: Qiaochu Zhang (University of Southern Denmark) , Samo Zilincik , Tom Watts (Royal Holloway University) , Linda Ruppert (University of Freiburg, Germany)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / Spaces of support and resistance between and beyond borders Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Heather Johnson (Queens University Belfast)
  - From the Humanitarian Camp to the High Seas: Challenging the production of the exceptional through the everyday
    
    Scholars in IPS engaging with issues relating to mobility grapple with how various dynamics “escape” nation states and their borders. These approaches challenge understandings of the international that are often locked in conceptions of space and the political that are based around territory and states. Yet, the spatial and material implications of concepts such as the “space of exception”, or spaces that materially challenge the logics of territory (cyberspace, the high seas, refugee camps) have been left undertheorised. These spaces however are not “negative space” outside territory but rather sites with their own material and political specificity.
    Through a focus on mobility as a global challenge, this paper explores this friction, to consider how the exceptional and international become diffused in ordinary living and everyday practices. We offer two distinct examples through which to analyse these dynamics; the ability of humanitarian practice to consign spaces to the realm of exception and the ways in which commercial logics of maritime transport have carved out the space of the sea as beyond legal oversight and protection. These show the crucial frictions behind the production of the exceptional through the everyday, as both a conceptual and methodological tool.
    
    Authors: Hannah Owens (University of Hertfordshire) , Anna Finiguerra (KCL)
  - Search. And Rescue?
    
    This paper is a consideration of boat migration, placing our contemporary responses and practices within a longer historical context and considering what is revealed about the fundamental building blocks of the international order, namely borders, states, and people on the move or kept still. I orient the discussion around the question of Search and Rescue (SAR) on the high seas, asking how imaginations and practices of ‘rescue’ are manifest against the mobility of people crossing borders, how rescue situates and emplaces individuals and states in relation to one another, and what actions have been taken to re-imagine these relations. There are two key arguments I wish to advance here: first, that questions of SAR and their enmeshing with migration turn on contestations over responsibility and sovereignty; and second that it is not rescue, but rather search that is the mobilising concept.
    
    Author: Heather Johnson (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Saving lives, wishing deaths: The aesthetics of the humanitarian border in the context of the UK ‘small boats crisis’
    
    As this paper argues, to speak of an ‘aesthetics’ of a border entails discussing both its scopic and representational regimes. Examining how the border perceives and categorizes subjects, as well as how it itself is perceived as a ‘common-sense’ aesthetic object, the paper demonstrates how these dimensions of border aesthetics are deeply interwoven and foundational to the operation of a racialised border regime.
    The November 2021 sinking of a migrant boat in the English Channel – a pivotal event that saw the highest death toll within the ‘small boats crisis’ – serves as a case study. This tragedy exposed the border’s politics of ‘selective in/visibility,’ where passengers were repeatedly denied rescue by French and British authorities over several hours on various dubious grounds. Discourses following the sinking reveal the perverse aesthetics of the humanitarian border, which simultaneously speaks of threats and victims, of defending against the wicked and rescuing the innocent, while pursuing a politics of death under the guise of protecting life.
    
    Author: Silvester Schlebrügge (University of Warwick)
  - Civil fleet airborne operations and the disobedient gaze: Counter-mapping the Mediterranean
    
    Irregular migration’s political prominence has led to profound shifts in the governance of mobility and the rapid evolution in state border security efforts, particularly in the use of technology in the governance of migration. In response to the precarity of irregular migrant journeys through the Mediterranean Sea, there has been a rise in civil society Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) committed to providing humanitarian assistance for migrants in transit. This creates contested spaces: states aim to exclude those migrating through violent bordering practices, while NGOs’ acts of solidarity offer support to traverse the harsh environment of the sea and increasingly, through their work in the skies above. Both the sea and sky are utilized as spaces of migration control while simultaneously being transformed into sites of resistance by NGOs through their counter-surveillance and human rights monitoring. Importantly for SAR activists, the Mediterranean airspace serves as a valuable site to employ a “disobedient gaze” (Heller et al. 2017) to observe, document and publicize human rights violations being perpetrated by the EU, in concert with the Libyan Coast Guard. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of technology in NGO SAR operations, with a particular focus on airborne operations. Airborne operations rely on several high and low tech capabilities in their work, from satellite-based imagery, radar surveillance and increasingly, drones. In response to the continued persistence of boat migration at sea, examining airborne SAR operations provide an opportunity to see how they enact a disobedient gaze through the use of various technological tools, serve as a form of counter-mapping the Mediterranean surveillance landscape and challenge the spatio-political governance of the sea.
    
    Author: Michael Gordon (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / State, state-making and the policing of race Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Catherine Chiniara Charrett (University of Westminster)
  - Israeli Private Security within the Imperial Laboratory
    
    In the midst of the ongoing mass violence perpetrated by the Israeli state, private corporate entities continue to find themselves deeply entwined with the military apparatus. Not only do they find themselves providing many of the products and services used by the state, but more and more frequently they are becoming key cogs in the pursuit of extended strategic goals. What place do these private companies then occupy in the landscape of contemporary empire? This paper investigates the discursive self-representation that a selection of Israeli companies engages in, constructing a nexus of threats that constitute a general “global crisis” and their position as part of a framework of solutions to be implemented across the world. The analysis will subsequently identify this process as part of the formation of an apparatus of the laboratory, a strategy for the preservation and proliferation of empire in the moment of contemporary capital.
    
    Author: Seif Hendy (University of Exeter)
  - Conceptualizing the Postmortem Body and Racialized Violence in the 1985 Bombing of MOVE
    
    In May 1985 six adults and five children connected with an organisation called MOVE died in a fire in a home in West Philadelphia. The fire was caused by a bomb the Philadelphia Police Department dropped on the house after a standoff between the city and MOVE. As I have argued elsewhere, the MOVE bombing and the violence of the standoff, which involved both the police and fire departments, must be understood not as an anomaly but rather part of a long history of militarised policing and racialized violence in the United States (Hall 2021) In this paper, I look at the aftermath of this event – specifically examining what happened to the bodies of the MOVE members and their children after the bombing. Drawing on recent reports resulting from investigations into the retainment and use of MOVE member remains without consent at Princeton University and University of Pennsylvania, I argue that in the decades since 1985 the practices of excavation, processing, and forensic analysis that led to the fragmentation and circulation of the MOVE remains show how the body continues to be a site of racialized violence after death. Through engagement with this specific case, the paper reflects on broader questions about how we conceptualise the postmortem body in IR. While drawing on current scholarship that sees the postmortem body and bones as political, I argue that these conceptualisations need to better account for the ways that the postmortem body is shaped by historical and ongoing global structures of racialized violence and commodification.
    
    Author: Katharine Hall (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Anti-Colonial Insurgency as People’s War: Rethinking International Law of (Counter)insurgency
    
    One of the primary discourse of justification of the ongoing Zionist genocidal war on Palestinian people has been through the logic of ‘human shield.’ As an international law category, this logic enables militaries to collapse the civilian/combatant distinction, as civilians supposedly lose their protection through their alleged use by combatants for military advantage, and as such, their murder becomes justifiable collateral damage. Despite its IL veneer, there has been an enormous push back on this logic from activists, politicians, and legal scholars - both for the lack of evidence, as well as its systematic contravention of categories of distinction and proportionality, which has also became the legal basis of the case of genocide against Israel.
    
    As the genocidal war expands to Lebanon, In this paper, we propose a critique of the widespread adoption of IL paradigms of civilian/combatant within critical scholarship and radical politics in order to analyze the current genocidal onslaught. Rather than wagering the case of genocide on disproving the allegations of human shield, using examples and formulations from earlier era of anticolonial/antiimperial resistance movements, genocide becomes a rational military strategy for colonial states, precisely as population became an intractable vector of resistance, rather than normatively accepting submission in face of extreme forms of oppression.
    
    The primary reason the civilian/combatant distinction appears blurred within anticolonial context has to do with the fact that forces of armed struggle emerge form the population, and must be understood as people’s institution rather than through IL categories of war. By becoming immanent to the categories of IL, we unwittingly take part in foreclosing the legitimacy and strategic interests of people’s war, and cede ground to the colonial strategic interest in order to separate the resistance forces from the people as the sinews of its strength and legitimacy.
    
    Authors: Abdul Vajid Punakkath (Goldsmiths, University of London)* , Islam Al Khatib (London School of Economics)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 / Teaching & Learning Cafe Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Speakers: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick), Alice Finden, Christopher Featherstone (University of York), Erin Hannah (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario), Ilan Baron (Durham University), Kavi Abraham (Durham University), Norma Rossi (University of St Andrews), Shambhawi Tripathi (University of St. Andrews), Valentina Amuso (UCL)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Teaching Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Activities for the Classroom. Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  This roundtable engages in a collective exploration of the complexities of teaching (counter)terrorism in higher education through a critical, interdisciplinary lens. Bringing together diverse scholars, it presents innovative approaches and practical insights aimed at challenging conventional pedagogies and fostering critical thinking, reflection, and active engagement among students. The discussion will explore innovative methodologies that draw on popular culture, debates, simulations, and artistic approaches, which push traditional classroom boundaries. Global perspectives are incorporated throughout, enriching the conversation with diverse regional contexts. This session will provide essential tools for educators and scholars to navigate the complexities of (counter)terrorism studies, bridging academic gaps and expanding the boundaries of how (counter)terrorism is taught and understood.
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Chair: Alice Martini (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
  
  Participants: Louise Pears (University of Leeds) , Julian Schmid (Central European University) , Raquel Silva (Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon) , Carl Gibson (University of Nottingham)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / The Political Dimensions of Humanitarian Food Crises Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Conveners: Caitriona Dowd (University College Dublin) , Kristina Tschunkert (University of Manchester)
  
  Chair: Kristina Tschunkert (University of Manchester)
  - Determinants of Food-Related Violence
    
    Violent conflict is the key driver in global food crises. However, not all conflicts – nor the violent tactics employed in them – result in the same depth or breadth of impacts on food systems and resulting humanitarian needs. Specifically, in some conflicts, food resources are actively leveraged and targeted by conflict actors, while in others, they are more broadly disrupted and distorted through conflict’s effects. This study sets out to understand the conditions in which political violence directly involving food and food systems is strategically employed by armed actors. To do so, it draws on a novel sub-set of disaggregated violent event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) specifically involving food and food systems across sub-Saharan Africa. The findings have implications for scholarship on the conflict-hunger nexus; the suitability of policy and practical measures aimed at discouraging, preventing and mitigating specific food-related violence tactics; and post-conflict recovery, accountability and justice in contexts affected by severe food crises.
    
    Author: Caitriona Dowd (University College Dublin)
  - Non-state armed groups as food system actors in Somalia and Haiti
    
    Violent conflict is the primary driver of food crises worldwide. However, our understanding of the specific role non-state armed groups (NSAGs) play in food systems remains incomplete. There is limited evidence on how NSAGs shape food systems, including through forms of (non-)violent regulation; where NSAGs intersect with different stages of the food value chain, beyond production alone; and comparative analysis of NSAGs across diverse contexts, security environments and food systems. This study addresses these gaps through a comparative analysis of NSAG food system engagement in Haiti and South-Central Somalia, drawing on primary qualitative data. We find that i) NSAGs are active at every stage of the food system; ii) this activity is often systematic in nature; and iii) NSAG engagement share several commonalities across Haiti and Somalia, despite very different contexts. In identifying this, we make several contributions, including advancing research on conflict and hunger to highlight precise mechanisms by which violent actors disrupt and shape food systems; and contributing to research on rebel and criminal governance by highlighting a heretofore neglected domain of armed actor governance (food systems).
    
    Author: Denise Ripamonti (Dublin City University)
  - The contested agency of humanitarian NGOs in the conflict-hunger nexus: the case of Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières in the Ethiopian famine, 1984-1985
    
    Humanitarians tend to promote depoliticised narratives of famine so they can prioritise the immediate goal of saving lives. However, in the context of the Ethiopian civil war in the mid-1980s, Oxfam and MSF had to confront the fact that aid was being subverted by the central government as an instrument of oppression against Tigrayan and Eritrean communities. Indeed, the forced resettlement of famine-afflicted communities to the supposedly more fertile South of country was a classic case of what has been called ‘repressive developmentalism’ – spoken of in the language of benevolent agricultural transformation, yet in reality a violent counterinsurgency operation.
    
    How the NGOs reacted was telling – MSF spoke out about humanitarian complicity with resettlement (and was expelled from Ethiopia in December 1985), yet Oxfam stayed silent. Given the recent recurrence of famine caused by conflict in Tigray, this paper demonstrates the urgent need for historical consciousness in current humanitarian policy debates. To do this, it asks two central questions – how did NGOs rationalise the tensions between the short-term alleviation of suffering and the political causes of the Ethiopian famine, and to what extent should we regard humanitarian organisations as distinct actors with agency in a cyclical conflict-hunger nexus?
    
    Author: Maria Cullen (University of Manchester)
  - WFP’s Approach to Conflict Sensitive Humanitarian Action
    
    Deep into the 21st century, conflict remains the greatest driver of humanitarian needs as well as the main impediment to principled humanitarian action. Contemporary conflicts are characterised by the erosion of IHL, the manipulation of humanitarianism by political actors and, increasingly, the use of food as a weapon of war. As the world’s largest humanitarian agency, WFP operates in many contexts where it risks getting caught up in political/military dynamics and inadvertently exacerbating the very conflicts it seeks to mitigate. WFP has therefore committed to a “conflict sensitive” approach, meaning it will endeavour to: understand the contexts it operates in; understand the interactions between its interventions and those contexts; and use this knowledge to minimise negative impacts and maximise positive impacts on conflict. WFP’s 2023 corporate Conflict Sensitivity Mainstreaming Strategy will equip staff with the capacities to recognize and mitigate conflict sensitivity risks. Recognising that such risks can arise from any part of a humanitarian operation, the strategy adopts a whole-of-organisation approach, establishing pathways to build capacities and mainstream conflict sensitivity across programmes and operation. This paper will explore WFP’s adoption of conflict sensitivity as a minimum standard, as well as the process and intended impact of its new strategy.
    
    Author: Ronan MacNamara (World Food Programme)
  - Exploring Reciprocal Sharing and Social Capital-Building in Humanitarian Food Assistance
    
    This paper explores how the sharing of humanitarian assistance has implications for social capital-building in conflict-affected contexts. Technocratic approaches to humanitarian response view sharing as, at best, leakage and, at worst, aid diversion, overlooking the potential for social capital-building inherent in reciprocal sharing practices employed by communities. Drawing on research conducted in Northeast Nigeria, the paper highlights how people frequently shared humanitarian assistance (food or cash). The insurgency in the region has severely weakened social fabric, eroding trust and disrupting social interaction. However, the act of sharing, motivated by reciprocity (the expectation of future return or a sense of community), fostered social cohesion by strengthening both ‘bonding’ (within groups) and ‘bridging’ (between groups) social capital. While, in this context, sharing appears largely voluntary, some intended beneficiaries reported a risk of being pressured to share due to social dynamics or threats from non-state armed groups. The paper calls for research that looks beyond the material benefits of humanitarian aid to consider the social and political dimensions of sharing within humanitarian responses to food insecurity. Peacebuilding approaches allow for exploring the reciprocal elements of food aid to develop a more nuanced understanding of the impact of humanitarian aid in conflict-affected societies.
    
    Author: Kristina Tschunkert (University of Manchester)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / The Politics of Antagonism - Populist Security Narratives and the Remaking of Poltiical Identity Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Participants of this roundtable will debate the identity performing role of nationalist populist security narratives and their impact on voter mobilization and policy legitimation in the USA and beyond, based on the recently published monograph 'The Politics of Antagonism'. The book argues that populist rhetoric primarily appeals to voters' insecurities and emotions, remaking the concepts of Us and Them in the process. Going beyond existing research on populism and security narratives, the book links insights from political psychology on collective narcissism, blame attribution and emotionalization with research in political communication on narrative and framing. Populist security narratives have labelled progressives, political opponents, immigrants, racial justice activists, and key institutions of liberal democracy collectively as ‘enemies of the people’. This security imaginary threatens the ideational and institutional foundations of democracy by reframing politics as an existential struggle and perpetual culture war against an internal Other. The political identity and legitimacy of democracy are simultaneously reframed and parochialized around the specific vulnerabilities, anxieties and insecurities of a core constituency of White working-class and non-college educated voters in the 'heartland'. A particular focus of the roundtable will be on the conceptual implications of these research findings for the study of identity in IR.
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Chair: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London) , Maria Mälksoo (University of Copenhagen) , Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick) , Ben Rosher (Queens University Belfast) , Frank Stengel (Universität Kiel, Germany)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Panel / The Politics of UN Peacekeeping: Doing, Knowing, Speaking and Training for Peace Operations Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Conveners: Moa Peldan (Swedish Defence University) , Anastasia Prokhorova (European University Institute)
  
  Chair: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  
  Discussant: Marsha Henry (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Robust in name only? Understanding the extent to which UN peacekeepers kill and injure during operations
    
    How does a researcher of UN peacekeeping operations understand the extent to which UN peacekeepers intentionally kill or injure others in carrying out their mandated tasks? This paper is built from this relatively straightforward question. It identifies that knowledge in this space is contested and at times opaque, whether by design or by coincidence. The extent to which UN interventions normalise ‘militarised ideologies and practices’ (Gelot and Sandor 2019) such as normalising the use of violent force has been explored with regards to strategic-level reports on peacekeeping (Riis Andersen 2018), robust peacekeeping (Karlsrud 2015, Hunt 2017), and particular missions (Gauthier Vela, 2021). Through investigating the gaps in knowledge concerning the act of intentionally wounding or killing, the article identifies a gap which requires further investigation to build a fuller picture of the militarization of UN peacekeeping. By doing so, it also raises important questions about accountability, power imbalances within knowledge production, and the conflict resolution potential of the UN.
    
    Author: david curran (Coventry University)
  - Undoing war within peacekeeping: a genealogy of power, race, and gender in UN peace operations
    
    Peacekeeping is intimately attached to war (Henry, 2024; Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018). The United Nations (UN) continuously makes clear that peacekeeping is not an army to be used in conflict and that it should be distinguished from military interventions and warfighting. At the same time, peacekeeping has over time exhibited an increased trust in military solutions, especially the use of force, to solve ongoing conflicts and to promote peace. How can we understand the relationship between peacekeeping and war? How does ‘war’ permeate the politics of peacekeeping, and what kind of politics and global order does this produce? Regarding war as a generative force of political and social order (Barkawi and Brighton, 2011), this paper explores how ‘war’ is understood in UN peacekeeping and what this can tell us about the production of racialised and gendered ways in which UN peacekeeping’s role and purpose are framed. Through a genealogical approach, I trace how the concept of ‘war’ is understood throughout UN peacekeeping history, drawing from postcolonial and feminist scholarship calling for a more nuanced understanding of an ever-present war that carries certain power dynamics into the present-day policies and practices of liberal international politics.
    
    Author: Moa Peldan (Swedish Defence University)
  - Race and Gender in the Global Politics of Peacekeeping Training
    
    United Nations reports and independent inquiries into its peace operations often suggest that better trained peacekeepers would better protect civilians and implement other mandated tasks. While closing the training gap is commonly framed as a performance issue subsumed by the goal of increasing peacekeeping efficiency, this understanding obscures the global politics of peacekeeping training. Most peace operations today take place in the postcolonial space, with the persisting ‘colour line’ (Henry 2024) dividing the ‘northern’ peacekeepers who ‘lead’ and ‘southern’ peacekeepers who ‘bleed’ in peace operations (Coleman and Job 2021). In turn, peacekeeping training is typically built atop military institutions and security assistance networks inscribed with particular forms of masculinity and colonial lineage. I focus on where race and gender sit in the global infrastructure of peacekeeping training and how they can be made visible. Specifically, by asking explicitly political questions such as who is considered a peacekeeping expert, who is designing the training materials, who is financing the training, and who is to be trained, this paper sets out to unpack the epistemic, material, and normative acts of order-making inhabiting the training space. To make this argument, I rely on (non)participant observations of peacekeeping training as well as interviews with trainers, peacekeepers, and UN officials.
    
    Author: Anastasia Prokhorova (European University Institute)
  - Human Security, Protection of Civilians, Responsibility to Protect: a discursive economy of protection in UN discourses
    
    Since its creation, the United Nations (UN) has sought to safeguard international peace and security. Be it human rights, biodiversity, or security, protection has become a buzzword that permeates all UN actions. In this article, we seek to discuss the concept of protection operationalised by the UN on three discourses, namely Human Security (HS), Protection of Civilians (PoC), and Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), because they have gained space and legitimacy through multiple actors, processes, and agendas in different historical conjunctions. To this end, we explore how these discourses manifest in the UN based on what we denominate the discursive economy of protection. Methodologically, we employ discourse analysis tools to explore UN documents that reiterate the different manifestations of protection when addressing HS, PoC, and RtoP by developing three analytical categories: threats, tutelage, and salvation. This article seeks to contribute to an emerging discussion within critical approaches to humanitarian and/or military interventions that focus on the discourses that organise, systematise, and guide the political and legal processes and actions promoted by the UN.
    
    Authors: Pablo Victor Fontes (Rio de Janeiro State University)* , Ana Carolina Macedo (Independent researcher)* , Victoria Motta de Lamare França
- 13:15 → 14:45
  TH 19 Roundtable / UK security policy: Refreshing or disintegrating reviews? Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  Having inherited a national security and foreign policy framework set out in the 2021 Integrated Review undertaken under Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak’s Integrated Review Refresh in 2023, the past 12 months since the 2024 general election has seen a range of foreign and security policy reviews covering defence, development and international partnerships, plus conversations in the policy community about how to revive the UK's role in conflict prevention. Reflecting on these developments, this roundtable asks:
  
  How much security policy rethinking has been undertaken in the Labour Party's first year back in government?
  
  How well have perspectives from security scholars and practitioners been brought into these policy conversations and reflected in their outcomes?
  
  And what perspectives need to come onto the table for the new Government to navigate potentially stormy seas ahead?
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Chair: Hillary Briffa (King's College London)
  
  Participants: Richard Reeve (Rethinking Security) , Toni Haastrup (University of Manchester) , Owen Greene (University of Bradford) , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) , Maeve Ryan (KCL)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / What Should be Done? Who is to Blame? Navigating Individual, Collective, and Institutional Responsibility in War Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Attributions of moral and legal responsibility are invoked in both calls to action and charges of transgression in the context of war. International norms pertaining to armed conflict – prohibitions against waging wars of aggression, for example, and against conduct in which civilians are intentionally targeted, or force is used disproportionately – entail responsibilities to exercise restraint. Such responsibilities may be directed at states (the US or UK, Russia or Israel), soldiers on the battlefield, military and political leaders in the war-room, and citizens like you and me when it comes to voting for – and censuring, including protesting against – the states and leaders that act in our name. Moreover, judgements of blame and culpability are voiced when these responsibilities are abrogated. Such judgements are used to justify sanctions, charges of criminality, and coercive responses (sometimes, problematically, in the language of retribution). Where duty and blame are assigned – whether directed towards individual human actors, distributed amongst groups of individuals (like citizens), or judged to rest at the level of an institution (such as the state) – matters profoundly. This roundtable will explore problems of responsibility attribution (and misattribution) in the context of current crises, such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Mitja Sienknecht
  
  Participants: Valerie Morkevičius (Colgate University, USA) , Toni Erskine (Australian National University) , James Pattison (University of Manchester) , Chris Brown (London School of Economics)
- 14:45 → 15:00
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 14:45 → 15:45
  
  / Refreshment Break The Exchange
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / After Invasion: Expressing Security and Foreign Policy in IR Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Cornelia Baciu (Kiel University)
  
  Chair: Mitja Sienknecht
  
  Discussant: Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Expressing Security in Small States: Ontological Security and Agency
    
    This paper identifies the distinct patterns of expressing security in small states and asks when, how and why they are likely to impact foreign policy. We argue that expressivist representation is a mechanism for small states to construct ontological security in a strategic environment characterized by little predictability and stability. Constructing ontological security through expressing security increases the capacity to navigate difficulties arising from a profound feeling of present and future safety, belonging, and trust. It is a way for small states to 'realize agency' in international affairs. We explore and unpack the link between expressivism and ontological security in small states foreign policy in three illustrative case studies and identify the lessons for understanding small state foreign policy as well as expressions of security and foreign policy more generally.
    
    Author: Cornelia Baciu (Kiel University)
  - The Moldovan State between Russia, Romania and the EU: A Case for International Relations
    
    In the wake of Ukraine being invaded by Russia and second, due to its fast-track for EU membership, Moldova is suddenly in the limelight as possible candidate for both roles: the next country to be invaded by Russia and/or vying for EU membership in tandem with Ukraine. This paper offers a conceptual outline of three different explanations of Moldova’s path after its 1991 independence. The Moldovan case of 1991 is a striking case for this kind of analysis, and yet it has received surprisingly little attention. The formation and continued independence of Moldova as a nation state in the early 1990s and mid 2020s constitutes an unusually dramatic case of a ‘foundational’ decision. Between Russia, Romania and the European community, the country at the crossroads was confronted with crucial ontological questions of – who are we in terms of Statehood and self-determination of what self? On the International Relations (IR) map, cases of dissolution of states are relatively rare, and unifications even more so. They often raise big questions for international law about recognition and statehood, as previous cases of Kosovo, Bosnia Hercegovina, Eritrea, Palestine or Taiwan have shown. For IR these cases are intriguing because we most often look at what a unit does, not how it comes to be one. The to be or not to be decisions are hard to handle, because almost all approaches (from realism to ontological security) assume in one garb or another some kind of will to survival, continuity or being – of the unit that already is. Or one must invoke some retroactive performativity and the being to be is treated as if it already was prior to the becoming and therefore it could will its own coming into being.
    
    Authors: Ole Wæver (University of Copenhagen) , Cornelia Baciu (Kiel University)
  - Present at the Invasion: Issue Ownership, Party Competition and the Politicisation of the Ukraine War
    
    Why did populist parties seek to politicise the European response to the Ukraine War in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Slovakia, but not in Poland or the United Kingdom? Such disparity among party positions is surprising given evidence that right wing populist governments are less enamoured with the broader Western strategy of containment than their centrist counterparts. While existing approaches have focused on the Atlanticist and anti-Russian sentiments of Poland and the United Kingdom and their strategic culture, such explanations have not taken into account key partisan dynamics. Drawing on theories of party competition and politicisation, this article argues that the crucial factor informing the degree of politicisation is the ideological position of the government in power at the time of Russia’s invasion. Where populists were already in power, they were forced to own the national response to the War and benefited from the spike in pro-Ukraine public opinion. Liberal and centrist governments following in their wake lacked any incentive to challenge this position, with which they were broadly aligned. In contrast, where populists were in opposition at the time of the invasion and centrist forces owned the response, an easy pathway to politicisation as differentiation (Cadier 2024) presented itself, empowering partisan factions more sympathetic towards Russia. Empirically the article demonstrates the validity of this argument through case studies of the Netherlands, France, Italy, the UK, Slovakia and Poland.
    
    Author: Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh)
  - The Security of Borderlander Identities: Exploring the Narratives of Young Minority Members in Border Regions
    
    In recent years the European Union has witnessed an increase of re-bordering processes, which have had a significant impact on border regions, and the national minorities that inhabit them (Opiłowska, 2021). Securitising narratives are often used to justify the need for border closures, and subsequent measures designed to protect state interests. While much of the literature in border and security studies has explored geopolitical and elite-level perspectives, less attention has been paid to the voice of individual citizens, and their (re)interpretations of macro-level political narratives. As such, this paper explores how young people in borderland regions respond to securitising border narratives.
    This study draws on data gathered through interviews and creative arts research workshops conducted with young people (aged 18-30) from borderland regions in South Tyrol, Italy, and Silesia, in Poland and Czech Republic. Participants were asked to respond to border narratives collected from minority media and to share their experiences of borders and Europe as young members of a national minority. We therefore focus on issues of identity and belonging from the intersectional perspective of young minority representatives living in peripheral border regions.
    A theoretical perspective of vernacular border security (Vaughan-Williams, 2021) is used alongside ontological security theory (Giddens 1991), to analyse how young borderlanders have experienced recent border crises, relate to securitised border narratives, and reflect on their identities. Thus, we argue that this bottom-up perspective of the securitisation processes can help scholars better understand the complexities of life for young borderland citizens and their relationship with macro-level narratives.
    
    Authors: Marcus Nicolson (Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research, Italy) , Elżbieta Opiłowska (University of Wroclaw, Poland)*
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Avoiding Armageddon: Coral Bell’s Contribution to International Relations Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Co-convened by Professors Erskine (ANU) and Wheeler (University of Birmingham), ‘Avoiding Armageddon: Coral Bell’s Contribution to International Relations’ seeks to bring together leading and emerging scholars to reflect on Bell’s contribution to the discipline of international relations (IR) and our understanding of international politics. The roundtable is inspired by the co-convenors’ belief that Bell’s work has not achieved the recognition that is deserves. It is also motivated by the contention that her work on nuclear crises and great power relations speaks directly to current global security challenges and proposed existential threats, especially in the domains of nuclear weapons and AI. Moreover, how we locate Bell’s scholarship within the pantheon of IR theories, and Bell’s relationship to the English school, will also be focal points for the roundtable. In order to engage with these themes, we have invited panellists to address one or more of the following questions: What was Coral Bell’s contribution to the discipline of IR and/or our understanding of international politics? How is her work still relevant today? And, why has she not been given the recognition that one might argue she warrants as a central figure in IR given her contribution and on-going relevance?
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
  
  Participants: Benedict Moleta (ANU) , Michael Cox (London School of Economics) , Gregory Stiles (University of Sheffield) , Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham) , Cornelia Navari (Emeritus, University of Birmingham)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / Beyond Linear Time: Memory and Temporality in International Relations Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  This roundtable explores how non-linear conceptions of time reshape our understanding of power, memory, ethics, and identity in global politics. By critically examining the hegemony of linear temporal frameworks, the discussion seeks to uncover their limitations in IR theory and practices and explore how understanding alternative temporalities provides new insights on thinking ethics in world politics. Participants engage with diverse fields such as quantum science, memory studies, indigenous knowledge, and global ethics to examine the intersections between temporality and memory, ethics, and justice. This roundtable aims to foster innovative conversations about reinterpreting historical events, addressing memory disputes, and imagining new frameworks for interdisciplinary research in international studies. By doing so, it aligns with BISA 2025’s mission to promote interdisciplinary or 'un-disciplining' approaches to international relations.
  Key themes:
  • Is the concept of linear time inherently hegemonic?
  • What are the limitations of linear conceptions in IR theory?
  • What does non-linear time mean in reshaping the ground of ethical debate about world politics?
  • How can we critically assess the dominance of linear time and explore pathways to embrace plural temporalities?
  • How do different temporal frameworks reinforce or disrupt existing power structures?
  • What are the limitations of knowledge production on non-linear time and temporality and their normative implications?
  • What is the role of temporal othering in maintaining global hierarchies?
  • How does memory and trauma impact temporal understandings of world politics?
  • How can historical events be reinterpreted through non-linear temporalities?
  • What is the relationship between time, identity, and embodiment in political contexts?
  • How does the interplay between collective memory and temporal frameworks influence ontological security in international politics? Can embracing non-linear temporalities destabilise or reinforce this sense of security?
  
  Sponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Chaeyoung Yong (University of St Andrews)
  
  Participants: Askel Bagge Hvid (University of Copenhagen) , Ritu Vij (University of Aberdeen) , Phuong Anh Nguyen (University of St Andrews) , Jonathan Blom (University of Copenhagen) , Kimberly Hutchings (Queen Mary University of London) , Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Genocide: Issues, Debates and Responses Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: ILPG Working group
  
  Chair: Henry Lovat (University of Glasgow)
  
  Discussant: Henry Lovat (University of Glasgow)
  - Certain norms are better to be left unsaid?: Remedial Secession as Concealed Principles
    
    The disconnection between discourses and practice has been an interesting avenue for constructivism research. The literature largely focused on situations where policy-makers claim that they follow certain norms while their practice belies it, with the theory of “Organized hypocrisy” as one of the representative arguments. But is the opposite—policy-makers follow certain norms while refraining from stating so—possible?
    I argue that it is, and I term this type of norm as “Concealed Principles”, a principled belief at a personal level that is not disclosed to others. This occurs when policy-makers personally believe in the appropriateness of a certain normative idea but they are also aware that this idea is controversial (for instance, because it contradicts the existing norms). As such, it is likely to occur at the very early stage of the norm life-cycle, possibly acting as a precursor to a norm entrepreneur.
    To illustrate this, I show that the idea of remedial secession—the belief that governments who badly mistreat their minorities continuously lose the right to govern them—acted as concealed principles for mediators in the case of Kosovo. The empirical material is based on extensive interviews with policy-makers involved in the mediation process leading to the independence of Kosovo.
    
    Author: Kentaro Fujikawa (Nagoya University, Japan)
  - Starvation as a genocidal crime? Status and Opportunities of The Prohibition of Starvation in International Criminal Justice
    
    n November 2024, a UN Special Committee accused Israel of “using starvation as a method of war” in the Gaza Strip, leading to “mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions” for Palestinians. This accusation urgently invites legal scholars and practitioners to re-trace the issues surrounding the classification of starvation as a crime, its intersections with genocide, the legality of using starvation as a means, and the ensuing responsibility and accountability in international criminal law (ICL). Supported by a combined critical historiographical and legal perspective, this paper highlights how deliberate starvation has been a familiar tool both for state actors and warring parties to exert pressure and power for achieving political and military objectives. Its comparative analysis of the mass starvation under Mao’s regime during the 1950s in China and the current Israel-Hamas war will help shed light on the dynamics of international criminal regime while tackling a variety of legal, political and ethical challenges. They range from the diUiculty of evidence-gathering, the ambivalent role of technology/AI in armed conflicts, the protection of victims’ rights in light of the UN 2006 Basic Principals, decision by the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as provisions in the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to the scope of culpability individual state and non-state leaders face. We argue that the awareness of recognizing deliberate starvation as a crime and its intersections with genocide and (specific) crimes against humanity oUer new possibilities of creating additional legal rules in ICL by introducing a distinction between the basic and qualified forms of a criminal oUence as well as criteria of criminalizing bad policy decisions such as the use of civilian population in service of the perceived needs of political movements.
    
    Author: Miao-ling Hasenkamp (University Rostock)
  - Genocide denial as an obstacle to world society
    
    Nowadays, when the crime of genocide is gaining significant relevance in the context of wars ranging from those in Ukraine to Gaza, it is important to address the dangers of genocide denial as well as the importance of genocide prevention and remembrance to international security. The ongoing conflicts erode the already fragile legitimacy of the United Nations (UN) as the prime international organization responsible for ensuring peace and security. In light of these developments, this paper has several aims. First, it shows how the denial of the Srebrenica genocide and the failed efforts to prevent the adoption of a UN resolution commemorating this genocide pose serious obstacles for the wider genocide prevention agenda. Secondly, assuming that genocide prevention is in retreat, the paper questions the utility of international organizations as sites where principles and norms of international law, humanitarianism are (re)produced. Finally, the conclusion takes an English school theoretical lens to argue that genocide denial and prevention point to a difficult road ahead for states towards an ideal world society, in which states' commitment to pursue universal principles takes precedence over national political-security interests. The findings invite scholars to think about international security, legal and political implications of failing to prevent genocide but also opportunities for how to respond to future human rights challenges.
    
    Keywords: genocide, Srebrenica, denial, prevention, world society, international organizations
    
    Author: Kenan Kadic (Bielefeld University, Germany)
  - Wagging the dog? Blair, Clinton, and the ‘Special Relationship’ in the Kosovo crisis
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Jonathan Esty (Johns Hopkins SAIS)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / How peculiar is post-Brexit Northern Ireland? Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Giada Lagana (Cardiff University)
  
  Chair: Giada Lagana (Cardiff University)
  - I can’t go on. I’ll go on: Identity and perpetual Brexit in Northern Ireland
    
    For most of the UK Brexit is now done. While there are many things that can and should be done to improve relations between GB and EU, there is nothing that has to be done. Northern Ireland, however, remains a place where problems are parked rather than solved. The Protocol, Windsor Framework, and Democratic Consent Mechanism, combined with the sectarian divisions exacerbated by the referendum means that Brexit is very much a live issue that is having an enduring effect on identities across the region.
    
    In this paper, starting with existential meditations from Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable and drawing on data from the 2024 Northern Ireland General Election Survey, I attempt to sketch the complex identities that are developing in post-referendum Northern Ireland and untangle the hopes and aspirations that are enabling people to go on living in a perpetual Brexit.
    
    Author: Ben Rosher (Queens University Belfast)
  - The operation and evolution of Northern Ireland's post-Brexit institutional framework
    
    The implementation of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland is governed by three UK-EU bodies:
    i) The Joint Committee is to oversee the implementation of the Protocol.
    ii) The Specialised Committee on the Implementation of the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland is to facilitate and administer the Protocol.
    iii) The Joint Consultative Working Group is to inform the work of the Specialised Committee.
    In addition, there are now formal structures for stakeholder engagement between business and civic groups in Northern Ireland. Even aside from the unique nature of these arrangements for all concerned, there is the complexity of communication and coordination between regional (devolved) structures and national and supranational ones. This paper arises from the ESRC-funded project 'Governance for 'a place between’: the Multilevel Dynamics of Implementing the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland'. This paper draws upon data from participant observation, elite interviews, and stakeholder workshops. It also includes comparative analysis between the operation of these institutions and the work of the UK and EU Domestic Advisory Groups and Civil Society Forum, which are more standard bodies for overseeing EU external agreements.
    
    Author: David Phinnemore (Queen's University Belfast)
  - How 'no diminution of rights' in Northern Ireland could diminish Westminster's power
    
    Article 2 of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland commits the United Kingdom to there being “no diminution of rights, safeguards and equality of opportunity” in Northern Ireland as a result of the UK's withdrawal from the EU. This relates to the section on that theme included in the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement. Whereas the rights and safeguards set out in the 1998 Agreement were largely political commitments rather than legally-enforceable, their reference in the Protocol gives them a much more significant status. Moreover, it has led to an unprecedented situation in which the protection of rights in Northern Ireland under Article 2 now has implications for laws made in Westminster. Recent rulings by the High Court and Court of Appeal in Belfast (on the Legacy Act and Illegal Migration Act) have found the Article 2 commitments to have reach-back into the whole of the UK. These rulings are being challenged by the UK Government, which apparently does not wish for its powers to be constrained by commitment to be ECHR-compliant and to uphold certain other rights in Northern Ireland. Moreover, it does not wish to see an asymmetry in rights protections across the UK. Giving both legal explanations and examples of the practical and political implications of Article 2, this paper explores how Article 2 has become one of the most consequential aspects of the Protocol, with implications for the UK and EU that were genuinely unexpected at the time it was negotiated.
    
    Authors: Lisa Whitten (Queen's University Belfast) , Katy Hayward (Queen';s University Belfast)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Integrity and Accountability in Feminist Protection Frameworks: Challenges and Opportunities for Quality of Governance Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Conveners: Sabrina White (University of Leeds) , Camille Maubert (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Outi Donovan (Griffith University, Australia)
  
  Discussant: Sabrina White (University of Leeds)
  - Integrity systems: connecting gender goals and sexual exploitation and abuse to anti-corruption in defence and security sector governance
    
    Anti-corruption measures are a core aspect of integrity systems in security sector governance. Defence and security institutions are also increasingly expected to integrate gender as part of wider normative developments that largely draw from the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Yet anti-corruption measures and integration of gender and social inclusion concerns are often considered separately. In particular integrity systems tend to neglect attention to sexual exploitation and abuse and wider concerns with gender-based violence perpetrated by military personnel. This paper first considers how gender, race and coloniality characterise this arbitrary separation. It then makes the case for viewing gender equality and gender goals as an integral part of integrity systems in security sector governance and theorises the implications of this connection.
    
    Author: Sabrina White (University of Leeds)
  - Oversight mechanisms overlooking gender: A feminist institutionalist approach to examining gender sensitivity and mainstreaming across Britain's counterterrorism oversight governance infrastructure
    
    This paper critically examines the oversight governance infrastructure in place to monitor, evaluate and safeguard CONTEST – Britain’s counterterrorism strategy – to show how existing counterterrorism policy and practice often negatively impacts women’s safety, security and rights. By drawing on the relationship between policy design and implementation, governance and gendered security, I explore the role of gender in CONTEST’s oversight infrastructure. Using feminist institutionalist tools and discourse analysis of textual material and interview data, I interrogate how CONTEST activities in formal and informal oversight mechanisms at micro, meso and macro levels are regulated, how they operate in gendered ways, and with what gendered outcomes for women. I argue that, despite an increased awareness of women’s complex roles and experiences in relation to terrorism and violent extremism, existing formal oversight governance mechanisms are largely gender blind. While gender-sensitive evolution is evidenced in informal oversight activities at the micro-level, there is limited evidence of formal systematic, evidence-based and gender sensitive oversight infrastructure. This poses challenges for the effectiveness of counterterrorism responses as institutional knowledge and practice related to women’s involvement in terrorism and violent extremism is shaped by gendered assumptions. This research contributes to advancing a transformative, theoretically innovative, and policy-oriented research agenda, and drives forward feminist efforts to prioritise gender-responsive security governance practices to ensure adequate safeguarding and protection of women’s rights, safety and security across countering terrorism policy and practice.
    
    Author: Sofia Patel (Kings College London)
  - Feminist Values, Local Realities: Interrogating the Integrity Gap in Protection Practice in the Democratic Republic of Congo
    
    Using data collected with local and international NGOs in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, this paper highlights the tensions between the ethical tenets and rights promoted by NGOs in their gender protection programming and the personal values and behaviours of the agents in charge of those programmes. By contrasting codes of conduct, programme materials and PSEA guidelines with NGO agents’ attitudes and experiences, the paper shows that agents working in protection programming may nevertheless hold gender-inequitable beliefs and display improper and harmful behaviour. This disconnect is analysed through the lens of integrity – understood as consistency with one’s values –, leading to a discussion of how agents at the forefront of gender protection perceive and interact with feminist accountability mechanisms. By using critical and post-colonial frameworks, this paper explores why some agents’ behaviour is inconsistent with protection standards, how they elucidate this discrepancy, and whether this says something about the perceived legitimacy of gender protection principles.
    
    Author: Camille Maubert (University of Edinburgh)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Kurdish Activisms: Art, Memory, and Self-Defence in the Struggle Against Oppression Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Nisan Alici (University of Derby)
  
  Chair: Nisan Alici (University of Derby)
  - Between Persistence and Constraint: Kurdish Activism for Dealing with the Past
    
    This paper examines the trajectory of activism around transitional justice, peace, and reckoning with the past in Turkey, focusing on the Kurdish conflict. For decades, a wide-ranging network of activists, politicians, lawyers, practitioners, intellectuals, and artists—including direct victims and survivors of state violence—have mobilised to demand accountability, truth, memorialisation, and justice. These efforts have even led to unique initiatives, such as the unofficial Truth and Justice Commission for Diyarbakır Prison. However, formal political processes have increasingly restricted these activities, stifling creative approaches to addressing historical injustices. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with Kurdish individuals in activist spaces, this paper illuminates the diverse emotions, motivations, and setbacks contributing to a recent decline in enthusiasm and engagement with transitional justice and efforts to confront the past.
    
    Author: Nisan Alici (University of Derby)
  - Navigating Conflict: Self-Defence, Non-Violence and LGBTI+ Activism
    
    How can self-defence be understood in non-violent terms and as a principle of social movement organising? To what extent is a reconceptualization of self-defence as an organizing principle, viewed through a lens of non-violence, helpful in understanding emancipatory politics? Drawing on the particular conceptualisation of self-defence developed by the Kurdish movement in Turkey, particularly the Kurdish Women’s Movement, and putting it in conversation with broader literature on self-defence, this paper explores the framing of self-defence as a non-violent form of resistance. Accordingly, this paper draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews with Kurdish LGBTI+ activists, the archives of Turkey’s oldest LGBTI+ magazine, Kaos GL, and materials related to the Kurdish movement. The paper historicizes the idea of self-defence within Turkey’s broader LGBTI+ movement and discusses the different forms it takes, specifically in the Kurdish LGBTI+ mobilisation, such as storytelling and organizing.
    
    Author: Hakan Sandal-Wilson (London School of Economics)
  - Relational Art and Feminist Narratives of Memory: Women Ex-Prisoners' Experiences in Diyarbakir Prison Through Participatory Practices
    
    This paper explores the use of relational art approaches in amplifying the multiple memories of women ex-prisoners from Diyarbakir Military Prison, infamous for human rights violations following Turkey’s 1980 military coup. Drawing on my PhD fieldwork in 2021 and extended data collection in 2024, the study examines participatory art methods as alternative means of seeking truth. The Diyarbakir Prison Truth Investigation and Justice Commission, established by civil society actors in 2007, was the first informal truth commission in Turkey. This initiative was further developed by the Diyarbakir Prison No. 5 Museum Coordination Center's art project and the 2016 exhibition Women and Diyarbakır Prison No. 5. Twenty-two ex-prisoners were paired with activist-artists to create relational, feminist-sensitive art that transcends stereotypical gender narratives. By focusing on diverse identities—as women, activists, writers, and mothers—the exhibition challenged misogynistic perceptions and dominant narratives. This relational process fostered temporal connections between artists and ex-prisoners, while creating a critical space for memory making. However, the project’s limitations include limited engagement with the politically diverse women ex-prisoners, including those in diaspora.  This study highlights the transformative potential and constraints of relational art practices in truth-recovery, illuminating silent stories and underrepresented perspectives of Kurdish women’s experiences.
    
    Author: Gunes Dasli (Loughborough University)
  - Archiving and Curating Kurdishness: Activism in Kurdish Cinematic Culture
    
    This paper examines how Kurdish documentary cinema functions as a form of memory activism, contributing to the shaping and reclaiming of Kurdish cultural memory. It positions Kurdish cinema as a transnational, decolonial practice that challenges dominant historical narratives. Through the preservation and sharing of individual and collective histories, memories, and stories of trauma and resilience, Kurdish documentary films serve as critical tools against cultural erasure and provide a platform for marginalized voices.  In the context of minority and indigenous filmmaking, memory activism becomes not only an aesthetic choice but also an ethical and political commitment to honor the voices of those systematically silenced. This research uses critical visual analysis (Rose, 2022) and Veysi Altay’s film Bîr (The Well, 2018) and Berke Gol’s film Dargecit (2024) as case studies to explore how Kurdish documentaries construct alternative memories that resist colonial perspectives. Rather than focusing on trauma and victimization, these films build narratives of struggle for human rights and resilience. The analysis situates Kurdish cinema within broader concepts of memory studies, including stateless memory (Hirsch, 2019), visual or mediated sites of memory, and the role of audio-visual archives (Brunow, 2015) in preserving histories when no official state record or recognition exists.
    
    Authors: Fatma Edemen (Jagiellonian University)* , Cem Koc (Ulster University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Middle East foreign policy and security Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  
  Chair: Eyup Ersoy (University of Birmingham)
  - The Drone Effect: Populist Foreign Policy and the Rise of Drone Exports in Turkey
    
    Middle powers have been increasingly exporting autonomous weapons, commonly referred to as drones, into armed conflicts, transforming global warfare through their cost-effectiveness and strategic advantages. This article examines the transformative impact of a major regional middle power, Turkey's expanding drone exports by investigating the populist foreign policy frames used by Turkish political elites, which enable them to position themselves as challengers to the dominance of established arms manufacturers and the international order. Consequently, this study explores how populists in power justify arms sales by demonstrating how the solidarity frames employed by these elites highlight how such sales provide weaker states with opportunities to counter and deter rivals. While the paper shows how solidarity frames in foreign policy are intertwined with an "us versus them" distinction on the international level, by investigating the case of Turkey, it also contributes to debates surrounding the ethical dimensions or drone warfare and the impact of arms sales on human rights.
    
    Author: Begum Zorlu (City, University of London)
  - Saudi Arabia Against the Houthis: Intervention Failure in the Yemeni Civil War
    
    States continue to execute military interventions in civil war settings. The military intervention of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, along with its allies, in the civil war in Yemen constitutes one recent example. On the other hand, military interventions rarely achieve the strategic objectives they are initially expected to fulfil, and frequently culminate in intervention failures. This chapter presents a critical analysis of the military intervention of Saudi Arabia in the civil war in Yemen that lasted for seven years. It is argued that Saudi military intervention in Yemen could not deliver the strategic objectives devised and declared by the Saudi leadership, and accordingly, constitutes another case of intervention failure. In this chapter, first, a general overview of the causes of intervention failure in international affairs is presented. Second, the strategic objectives pursued by the Saudi leadership in its military intervention in Yemen are discussed, the paramount of which was the elimination of the perceived threat posed by the militant group known as the Houthis. Third, the extent to which Saudi Arabia has achieved its declared objectives through the military intervention is assessed, and it is asserted that there exists substantial discrepancy between the objectives of the intervention and its eventual outcomes. Fourth, arguing that Saudi military intervention in Yemen represents a case of intervention failure, the underlying causes of this failure are investigated. The underlying causes are classified into four distinct sets as related to Saudi Arabia, to Yemen, to the regional context, and to the international context.
    
    Author: Eyup Ersoy (University of Birmingham)
  - From Multi-regional Power to Status Quoist: Turkey’s ambitions in West Asia
    
    Turkey's foreign policy has transformed from the Kemalism doctrine to the Erdogan’s hegemonic vision. Erdogan's policy of 'Neo-Ottomanism' replaced the notion of Kemal's isolationism and neutrality, which highlighted Turkey's assertive and ambitious footprint in regional and global politics. With the onset of the Neo-liberal paradigm and democracy promotions adhering to the norms of the European Union, the Ozal government focused on its structural reforms where Turkey acted as a bridge between the 'Oriental' and the 'Western World,' where it diversified its foreign policy aligning with the Soviet Union. Therefore, highlighting the fall of the Cold War crisis in the 1990s, it witnessed the changing world order in which the United States (US) became the dominant power influencing global politics. Following this, the US viewed Turkey as a strategic partner due to the Gulf Crisis, in which the latter projected itself as the stabilizer and net security provider in the West Asian region. In this context, Turkey's aspiring role as a multi-regional power has manifested itself in the region through its policy of 'Zero Problems with Neighbors' since the Post-Cold War crisis. Subsequently, the advent of Erdogan's governance in 2003 proactively asserted its hegemonic ambitions that focused on reviving the 'Islamic Ummah' through its broader 'Turkiye' policies.
    Therefore, this study analyzes Turkey's foreign policy from multi-regional power to the status quoist since the Post-Cold War. Through a qualitative approach, this article analyses a case study of various West Asian countries, such as Greece, Cyprus, Syria, and Iran, that would test the hypothesis. Such cases would analyze Turkey's hegemonic ambitions and its policy implementation challenges. Further, this paper will evaluate the 'Decision Making Theory' as a conceptual framework.
    Thus, the paper aims to show Turkey’s rising ambitions and challenges in the West Asian region.
    
    Keywords: Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-liberal, Cold War, Decision Making Theory
    
    Author: Rajat Biswakarma (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India)
  - Small state role-taking and foreign policy shift during international crisis
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Petr Buriánek (Institute of International Studies, Charles University in Prague)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Mundane Affects: making sense of banal, ordinary and non-spectacular lifeworlds Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Chair: Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Discussant: Christine Agius (Swedish Defence University)
  - Meals-Ready-To-Eat, Humanitarian-Daily-Rations, and PlumpyNut
    
    If “an army is a creature that marches on its stomach”, as is sometimes attributed to Napoleon, then the different forms and functions of military food must say something about the military understands what war to be and what soldiers need. The evolution of military rations after the RMI illustrates real changes in both the requirements of modern warfare and who the soldiering population might be, and the evolution of humanitarian daily rations and Ready-to-use-therapeutic-food demonstrates the complex politics, political economy, and social theory of humanitarianism. In particular focusing on military and humanitarian provisioning, we find a material trace of changing taste, evolving science and technology, different notions of war, and changing cultural norms.
    
    Author: Mark Salter (University of Ottawa)
  - “We Want a Refund!”: Promises, Techno-patriotism and Affective Detachments at the Drone Show
    
    This paper considers forms and intensities of detachment from the drone-saturated, techno-patriotic mythologies of the ‘China Dream’. To do so, it analyses recent drone shows where this imagined future and its accordant promises are not only mobilised, but also contested and reworked. In thinking through detachments, I contrast my account with extant readings of these shows which, by assuming the intrinsic sublimity of the drone’s material-technological features, have suggested that bodies cannot fail to be attached to them and their promises (Ruppert 2022). Instead of painting these spectacles as stages for the performance of human-led scripts of the international, I argue that emergent forms of detachment are politically salient for the ways that they refuse assumptions about the affectability and manipulability of bodies in such spaces. Thinking about the drone show as a scene of detachments therefore foregrounds moments where the promises that the drone makes available feel empty, or where their illusory status is suddenly recognised. On these occasions suspicion, ambivalence and disaffection meet dominant fantasies of techno-patriotism in ways that do not align with state power, or even coalesce into recognisable modes of resistance. I argue that centring detachments alongside attachments therefore enables critical literature on drones to move beyond analyses that 1) emphasise the drone as an object of state power, 2) deconstruct the representational and discursive register to the neglect of analysing the body and how it ‘sticks’ to particular objects, 3) employ relational ontologies that reconstitute the state as the primary driver of drone attachment.
    
    Author: Callum Smith (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Understanding Terrorism as Mundane: Inquiries, Reviews and the Pre-Emptive Imaginary of Banality
    
    Socio-legal and security scholars have explored how, in terrorism trials, there occurs an intense affective clash between the spectacular and the mundane (De Goede & De Graaf 2013; Anwar & Aardse 2024). Pre-emptive imaginaries have constructed 'precursor offences' of financial transactions or internet downloads, bringing banal, everyday micro-happenings into the arena of national terrorism trials. This paper does not explore terrorism trials but instead explores how post-terrorist inquiries and reviews also place the mundane centre-stage. Like trials, inquiries construct knowledge about spectacular, sensationalised violence as - paradoxically - the product of extremely mundane moments. Inquiries and reviews locate danger in the mundane moments leading up to an attack – domesticating it within long accounts of perpetrator movements, phone calls, Amazon purchases, and gym memberships. This is very different from the securitised imaginaries of foreignness and religiosity often promoted by security officials. But pre-emption still underscores this work: by knowing the minute-by-minute precursors to a past attack, we might be able to spot these same signs in the future and intervene. The pre-emptive imaginary of the mundane allows the identification of technocratic failures that facilitated misrecognition of threat. These can then be projected into the future as technocratic fixes, while evacuating the political, the international and the historical from the frame.
    
    Author: Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Warwick)
  - Unsettlement: arrhythmias in asylum
    
    This paper explores the multiple time horizons that shape experiences of resettlement for irregular migrants and asylum seekers. Using illustrations from both Canada and Australia, I interrogate the dominant and linear understanding of the timelines of resettlement schemes and associated, in particular, with procedures. The imaginations of resettlement are of a process that moves from emergency to ‘normality’, and that further locates the asylum seeker and newcomer non-citizen as in the emergency frame, while those who have achieved status (refugee protection, residence, or citizenship) are normalised, disappearing into the general public. Thus, acute interventions and understandings of necessary and urgent support exist within short time horizons. The experience of migration – and particularly of forced migration – does not fit comfortably within these imaginations, and the experience of time as it relates to, for example, trauma, loss, and dislocation, is multiple, circular, and fragmented – not the imagined linear progression of settlement. There is an arrythmia, therefore, that jutters between support provisions and expectation, and the everyday needs of the asylum seeking population.
    
    Author: Heather Johnson (Queens University Belfast)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Nations, Borders, Security Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Convener: Zeng Ee Liew (University of Surrey)
  
  Chair: Zeng Ee Liew (University of Surrey)
  - Crafting Minor Nationalism: Schoolbook Narratives and Identity Formation in Wa State, on the China-Myanmar Borderland
    
    This study explores how schoolbook narratives shape minor nationalism within Wa State, an autonomous region in the China-Myanmar borderlands governed by the United Wa State Army. Though officially part of Myanmar, Wa State operates largely outside Myanmar’s central control, managing its own governance and military structure—a sovereignty-like status rooted in historical resistance to state integration, as described in James Scott’s concept of “Zomia.”
    
    Wa State’s dual-language education system, using Burmese and Chinese, is central in shaping its unique identity. These schoolbooks present history and values reflecting Wa State’s ‘in-between’ status, balancing influences from Myanmar and China. This research examines how Wa State selectively adopts elements from the political narratives of each country across different historical periods, aligning with Myanmar’s discourse during the British colonial era and shifting closer to China’s influence during and after the Cold War.
    
    By analysing these educational narratives, this study provides a micro-level perspective on minor nationalism. It illustrates how regions with complex political affiliations use education to navigate their ‘in-between’ status, forging an adaptable identity within a contested borderland.
    
    Author: Xu Peng (SOAS)
  - Beyond Borders: China's Evolving Role in International Counter-Terrorism Amidst Shifting Global Dynamics
    
    Amidst the ongoing calls to reshape and "undiscipline" the field of International Relations (IR), the rise of China as a global power poses new challenges and opportunities that question the discipline’s readiness for the future. While debates often centre on China’s resistance to democratization and its potential to disrupt international security, less attention has been given to its emerging role in international counter-terrorism. This paper explores China's shifting strategy, moving from its traditional non-interference policy to a more outward-focused approach driven by economic and security imperatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Despite the institutionalisation of counter-terrorism cooperation within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and bilateral partnerships, China's involvement remains sporadic and ad hoc, marked by regional disparities.
    The paper analyses China's interactions across regions, from Central Asia, where it contends with local grievances over the treatment of Uyghurs while relying on private security expansions, to Southeast Asia, where collaborative measures include weapons provision and intelligence groundwork. In contrast, China's approach to Afghanistan and Syria highlights its preference for reconstruction and humanitarian aid over active counter-terrorism cooperation, influenced by its cautious stance in the US–Russia rivalry. The findings indicate that China's selective engagement reflects an evolving, pragmatic response to global extremism, balancing its strategic interests with adherence to non-interference principles.
    This paper employs a qualitative research approach, synthesising primary sources such as policy documents, official statements, and international agreements, alongside secondary literature that includes academic articles, reports, and expert analyses. Comparative case analysis is used to highlight regional variances in China's approach, including its strategic partnerships and interactions in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Syria.
    
    Author: Chi Zhang (University of St Andrews)
  - Relational theory of world politics and indigeneity: a Naga political experience
    
    Plurality in International Relations begets a multitude of “narratives within narratives” intertwined with both universal and differentiated experiences. Within a non western IR theory, a decolonial approach to the IR discipline encapsulates an indigenous peoples experience that explains the political world through IR and vis-a-versa.
    Nagas, an indigenous tribal community in India experienced a peculiar nationhood, one of which has sub-nationalism and a longest armed conflict with the Indian state. The current protracted peace process assumes certain stability and normalcy however it is ridden with sharp undercurrents. The public memory of a long drawn decade of violence, and a public anxiety around the questions of political rights and peace in the region constitutes everyday life in the region. In between assimilation within the national mainland in political administration, and an ethnic political identity in a neoliberal, and a globalized world merits the attention of it through a theoretical standpoint. Questions of Indigeneity from a community land ownership to the politics of it at both national and international merits analysis in forming the possibilities of Naga international theory.
    Through relational theory this paper seeks to explore the question of state and sovereignty within the Naga experience of nationhood, security, of border, of the tribal community across international borders and the everyday experience of ethnic and gender based violence and a peace process.
    
    Author: Niamkoi Lam (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Rethinking Thai foreign policy?
    
    The study of Thailand’s foreign policy remains an underexplored field, in which standard and somewhat uncritical assumptions have dominated for many decades. These include the recurrent trope of the country’s ‘bamboo diplomacy’, a stance that supposedly allowed Siam to avoid direct European colonisation. Latterly, bamboo diplomacy has been seamlessly incorporated into the popular notion of ‘hedging’, inter alia, to explain the ways in which Thailand balances the competing regional demands of China and the United States (see Alderman, McCargo, Gerstl and Iocovozzi 2024).
    
    This paper argues for a more nuanced analysis of Thai foreign policy, which places emphasis on the veto power exercised by the influential and coup-happy military. Despite the attempts of the former Thaksin Shinawatra administration to subordinate foreign policy to civilian and trade-driven agendas (see Pavin 2010), I will demonstrate that on issues ranging from Cambodian border disputes to the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor indeed the Prime Minister’s Office is empowered to determine Thailand’s crucial stance on foreign policy matters. Foreign policy is a highly contested space that illustrates the fragmented nature of the Thai elite and the ultimate dominance of the military, along with its close ally the monarchical power network. Drawing on extensive Thai language research including elite interviews, the paper offers a bold and original argument that has a salience beyond the Thai case, given that many states in the Global South also experience comparable elite fragmentation and inter-agency contestation.
    
    Author: Duncan McCargo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
  - Understanding Taiwan's International Affairs through Metis Diplomacy
    
    Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, lost its United Nations (UN) membership in 1971. Since then, it has lost diplomatic ties with most states, including the United States. This has led Taiwan to become what experts have called a ‘contested state’ a ‘quasi sovereign state’. Despite their awkward status in the international arena, the Taiwanese government has made various attempts to seek more international recognition of its sovereignty.
    
    With the question of “How has Taiwan obtained international recognition and participated in international organisations as a contested state” in mind, this paper will make use of the conceptual framework of ‘metis diplomacy’, first coined by Gezim Visoka. This framework was used in his analysis of how another contested state, Kosovo, gained international recognition of its status as a sovereign state. Thus, it will be used here to understand how and whether Taiwan has been able to achieve more international recognition. In addition to testing the suitability of this framework on a state like Taiwan, it will, through understanding the everyday discourse, everyday practice and everyday diplomatic entanglements of Taiwan, explore how Taiwan managed to expand its international presence of sovereign statehood, even though it is considered to be a “contested state”.
    
    Through the use of discourse analysis and practice tracing as its main methods, this paper will argue that ‘metis diplomacy’, while less successful in allowing Taiwan to participate in international organisations, was quite successful in strengthening Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty and that the framework has been useful and applicable for the case of Taiwan.
    
    Author: Zeng Ee Liew (University of Surrey)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / New theoretical and methodological approaches to emotions Room 5, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: EPIR Working group
  
  Chair: Marcelle Trote Martins (University of Manchester)
  - Tracing Emotions in Process Tracing: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities in International Relations Research
    
    Process Tracing (PT) is a qualitative research method that investigates causal mechanisms through detailed case studies. Although widely adopted in political science, its integration with the study of emotions—a growing focus in International Relations—remains underexplored. This article examines the risks, challenges, and opportunities of incorporating emotions as causal mechanisms within PT.
    
    Emotions, often analysed through discourse, are subject to scepticism regarding their traceability and role as causal agents. However, this article argues that emotions leave discernible traces that can be systematically examined in political contexts. Drawing on Social PT, the study utilises ‘experience-near’ data to explore how the perceptions of both senders and receivers of emotions influence political actions. By linking emotions with observable behaviours, the article illuminates how actors interpret and respond to others' actions, emphasising emotions as critical drivers in political processes.
    
    The article makes a three-fold contribution. First, it reviews how emotions have been treated in PT literature, identifying gaps arising from their under- or over-socialisation. Second, it proposes a conceptual framework that incorporates emotions into PT, bridging theoretical and methodological approaches. Finally, it demonstrates this framework through a practical reconstruction of a published PT case study, illustrating how emotions can be traced.
    
    By addressing challenges such as the subjective and context-dependent nature of emotions, this article develops a methodological strategy for tracing emotions as causal mechanisms. It advances a more emotion-sensitive PT approach, enriching scholarship in International Relations and extending the applicability of PT across the social sciences.
    
    Author: Massimo D'Angelo (Loughborough University London)
  - Integrating The Appraisal Theory of Emotions into Existing IR
    
    This paper inspired by the seminal question of Sara Ahmed: ‘what do emotions do?’ To answer this question, this paper adopts Lazarus and Falkman’s (1984) two-tier (primary-secondary) appraisal theory of emotions drawing parallel it with a process tracing research methodology. First, it clarifies how the ‘emotional turn’ in neuroscience and psychology has reshaped IR studies, illustrating that emotions act as complements rather than contradicting traditional notion of rationality. Second, it underscores the imperative of positioning emotions as a ‘great frontier’ in IR studies. To this end, the appraisal theory is proposed as analytical tool within the prevailing Realist framework, enabling nuanced integration of emotional dynamics. Lastly, it introduces each stage of the appraisal process between the conflicting states, demonstrating the role of a) the perceived emotions stemming from traumatic events as a primary appraisal b) in accordance with the perceived emotions (negative) to make own risk assessment and formulating effective coping strategies as an integral part of the secondary.
    
    Author: Selma Imamoglu (Durham University)
  - Restrained Emotionality: The Minimal Use of Emotions in Russian Foreign Policy Discourse Towards the Global South
    
    Since Russia’s ‘authoritarian turn’, marked by the 2013 Foreign Policy Concept, Russian high-level foreign policy discourse has frequently employed emotionally charged language, particularly towards the West. These discourses often encompass defensive narratives, positioning Russia within an anti-imperialist framework intended to resonate with Global South countries, which have grown significantly as alternatives to Western partnerships since 2013. Given this shift, one would expect Russia’s discourses towards the Global South to feature a similar, if not stronger, use of emotional expressions to foster solidarity, cooperation, and shared emotional identity in opposition to Western influence. However, this paper reveals a puzzlingly limited emotional engagement in Russia’s addressing the Global South. An initial assessment shows that, despite intensified engagement, Russia’s discourses towards Global South countries exhibit a markedly restrained use of emotional expressions compared to its discourses involving Western issues. Emotional peaks, moreover, occur predominantly in response to Western behaviour or ‘accusations’ regarding Russian actions in the Global South. Emotionalisation in discourses centred exclusively on Russo-Global South interactions is thus minimal. Focusing on two key ‘blocs’ of states - BRICS and the African Union (AU) - this paper examines how and why high-ranking Russian officials minimise emotional language in direct engagement with non-Western partners. By adopting an intersubjective, social-constructivist conceptualisation of emotions and emotionalisation, I comparatively analyse official Russian-language statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, and Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova towards BRICS and AU from 2013 to the present. To accomplish this, I employ a mixed-method design integrating Emotional Discourse Analysis (EAD) with Sentiment Analysis. In doing so, this paper contributes to ongoing debates in International Relations regarding Russo-Global South relations by offering insights into Russia’s nuanced discursive articulation and use of emotions within specific geopolitical contexts, alongside possible hierarchical variations in emotionality within Russian political discourse.
    
    Author: Greta Bordin (University of Groningen)
  - ‘Dangerous microbes in the bosom of the fatherland!’ Exploring infiltration, intimacy, and the genocidal securitisation of space
    
    'Infiltrators'; 'fifth columns'; 'cancers' – how does the location of a supposed threat affect how extreme violent movements react to it? Intense emotional responses of disgust and fears of 'contamination' often coexist with more conventional 'strategic' arguments, with striking similarities between them. Despite important work in social psychology and conflict studies, accounts that bridge such affective and material readings of security discourse remain elusive.
    
    Drawing on Neilsen’s concept of ‘toxification’ (2015) and Moses' notion of 'permanent security' (2021), this paper outlines a model of 'intimate threat,' by which extreme securitisation of a minority group, and imagery of dehumanised, pathogen-like enemies, can combine with particularly deadly results, mobilising, directing, and patterning extreme responses – in this case, genocidal mass violence. To assess the importance and impact of this phenomenon, the paper combines three 'straw in the wind' tests to demonstrate its effect: the presence and impact of disgust as a key component of intimate threat that is already recognised to significantly affect behaviour; the seemingly close causal/temporal linkage of intimate threat propaganda and violence; and the necessity of emotion-laden and securitising language working in concert to produce genocidal (as opposed to merely mass or structural) violence.
    
    Author: Leah Owen (Swansea University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Perpetual Crisis, World (Re)Ordering and Peace: Perspectives from the Margins Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Conveners: Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt, Germany) , Patricia Rinck (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
  
  Chair: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)
  - Everyday Peace - Local Peace Beyond the State
    
    Everyday life is the taken-for-granted, somewhat internalized day-to-day experience of the social, cultural, political, and economic realities we live in and navigate through. Everyday life does not take place separate from ‘high level’ politics or conflict, rather, these elements (and the power relations within them) are replayed within the everyday. Yet, for most of the 20th century, approaches to, and debates on, peacebuilding and peacemaking have been dominated by an analysis of states and key international institutions. The crisis of liberal peacebuilding has encouraged some scholars to shift their attention to other actors and understandings of peace that might be more culturally grounded and resonate with diverse approaches to peace and peacebuilding. Our paper has two main goals: firstly, it seeks to understand the intellectual and epistemological roots of the everyday peace concept and how it fits within the broader field of IR. Secondly, it explores the potential methodological innovation and applicability to contexts beyond its conceptual birthplace, Northern Ireland, to understand what kind of knowledge(s) can be accessed by studying everyday peace. We set out the broader intellectual shift in Peace and Conflict Studies that allowed a focus on the ‘local’ and the ‘everyday’ in particular. Our paper conceptually interrogates the idea of the everyday, and how the everyday peace lens allows for a different kind of knowledge to be produced beyond Western epistemologies. It engages with how everyday peace methodologically allows for a deeper engagement with the local context in which peace and conflict take place. Conceptually, everyday peace thus moves away from blueprint solutions, through making an effort to understand local issues and solutions, whilst providing an alternative way of looking at conflict dynamics.
    
    Authors: Birte Vogel (University of Manchester)* , Dylan O’Driscoll (University of Coventry)
  - The role of methods in witnessing and participating in worldmaking at the margins of Europe: Reflections on patchwork ethnography and activist scholarship
    
    The way we do research can and does affect how we think about, engage with, and explore approaches to worldmaking and marginality. Approaches to research play a role in what we recognise and witness and how we influence and construct the worlds we engage with. Building on the work of scholars such as King (2016) and Picozza (2021), I ask what role there is for activist scholarship in thinking about questions of worldmaking in spaces and places of marginality. Specifically, I ask how taking an activist approach to our scholarship can facilitate deeper engagements with alternative forms of worldmaking that take place in spaces and places of displacement support. I argue for a research approach grounded in activist scholarship focused on long-term interventions best understood as ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel et al, 2020; Günel & Watanabe, 2024), focused on relationship building, reflexivity, and politically driven research. I make two arguments. Firstly, that researchers themselves can participate in forms of worldmaking when working with communities to develop and enact projects. Secondly, that participation of this sort enables a recognition of different approaches to building collective worlds that may be missed through relying on less embedded research methods.
    
    Author: Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool)
  - Peace at the margins? Peacebuilding and patriarchal world ordering in Sierra Leone
    
    In this paper, I offer a feminist lens on international peacebuilding as a means of world ordering. I argue that looking at peacebuilding as a world ordering process through a feminist lens uncovers the patriarchal assumptions underlying world order conceptions that shape how peace is approached and (the gender) order upheld in externally supported war-to-peace transitions. Taking a closer look at the peacebuilding process in post-conflict Sierra Leone, which has been portrayed as one of the most successful cases of international peace- and statebuilding, the feminist lens makes visible how peacebuilding worked as a conservative form of world ordering that strengthened the patriarchal, gerontocratic order. It can be used to reconceptualise important concepts used in peacebuilding-as-world ordering, to analyse how these world ordering processes unfold in practice, and to problematise current injustices and point to alternatives. The feminist lens on world ordering can then be understood as an attempt at re-ordering from the margins (of conventional discourse) by grounding epistemology in the experiences of those at the margins of society.
    
    Author: Patricia Rinck (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
  - Advancing Peace and Conflict Studies with the Global South – Building Bridges and Creating Solidarities
    
    Peace and Conflict Studies was broadly founded in the Northern Hemisphere, influencing how scholars understand patterns of peace or violence in the Global North via a core-periphery relationship with the Global South, automatically rejecting alternatives like Third Worldism. This has led to the implicit strengthening of asymmetric colonial power structures in the way knowledge about peace, security, development and order has been produced. Thus, there is a need to make the discipline more inclusive by setting a different agenda by taking cognizance of the grounded and global scale realities– political, economic, and social – of the Global South. This paper addresses this gap and contributes to an emerging research agenda outlining the different trajectories of conflict and violence, justice and peace both in the Global South and North. It establishes comparative parameters of debates on peace and war in a thorough academic discussion not only ABOUT but WITH, and perhaps also LED by the Global South, combining innovative and synergetic thinking between scholars across different locations. The primary objective is to pave the way for an inclusive “Global Peace and Conflict Studies.”
    
    Authors: Solveig Richter (University of Leipzig, Germany)* , Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt, Germany)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Proximity and/or Distance: Navigating Ethics and Methodology when Researching Militarized Spaces, Subjects and Participants Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Bibi Imre-Millei (Lund University, Sweden) , Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)
  
  Chair: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University)
  - Performing Seriousness, Building Trust: Reflections on Conducting Fieldwork with Military Personnel as an Early Career Researcher
    
    This paper draws on feminist and queer scholarship to explore the productive and unproductive tensions associated with the need to be “taken seriously” as early career researchers, particularly regarding how this may impact fieldwork decisions in militarized environments. While emphasizing the risks of seeking “incorporation” into patriarchal systems, many feminist and queer scholars suggest that the concept of “seriousness” continues to operate as a mechanism for both inclusion and exclusion within and outside academia. Drawing from this body of research and my personal experiences interviewing personnel from the Japan Self-Defense Forces and defence-related institutions, I examine the complexities of navigating the positionality of early career researcher when conducting fieldwork in militarised settings. In my fieldwork, performing “seriousness” was crucial for establishing trust with research participants. I found that the need to be perceived as trustworthy—particularly when that perception was lacking—often influenced whether I emphasised or minimised the feminist and gender aspects of the research, depending on the interviewee. By discussing the ethical and methodological implications of these choices, this paper reflects on the challenges of early career researchers in navigating their intimate and gendered positionality within militarised settings.
    
    Author: Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick)
  - Fieldwork in war – access by action
    
    This paper is an adapted version of text from my at the time of the conference soon-to-be-published monograph on combat cohesion, featuring intensive fieldwork in Ukrainian frontline areas. My work starts with the intent of emphatic research that focalizes the warfighter. I discuss how I managed to gain access by positioning myself proximate to potential research participants – offering up myself as an insider and sharing relevant skills from my career as an active-duty army officer in Sweden. My access came from engaging with warfighters, proving my worth as an insider yet still being an outsider to their chain of command and social settings. This gave me a comparatively easy time to gain trust from potential participants, and highlighted a dynamic in which I as a researcher was not only extracting but ‘earning’ data in exchange for trust by showing my commitment to their cause. I also discuss the ethical implications involved in asking about potentially traumatic experiences, experiences many participants were hoping to never again remember.
    
    Author: Daniel Smith (Swedish Defence University)
  - “You should speak to the gender people”: Navigating proximity and distance around elite interviews in the security and defence sector
    
    Researchers conducting interviews in the security and defence sector inevitably face challenges related to access and secrecy. Feminist scholars often encounter additional barriers, as their topics and approaches may be perceived as risky, irrelevant or undesirable, leading potential interviewees to decline or refer the researcher to “the gender people”. This dynamic significantly impacts how much scholars are willing and able to disclose about themselves and their research while making sure to uphold feminist research ethics. Navigating these obstacles shapes the interview process, especially when managing proximity and distance with interviewees. While much of the existing literature focuses on the interview itself, this paper posits that the effects of the proximity-distance continuum materialize from the initial contact with potential interviewees and extend far beyond the interview’s conclusion. Drawing on insights from elite interviews in the German security and defence sector, it argues that framing one’s research in a way that seems more appealing to potential interviewees to get them to participate in a study often carries risks for both researchers and participants. These include challenges to informed consent and the possibility of participants feeling misrepresented in research outputs as well as the risk of scholarly militarization and inadvertently reinforcing militarized narratives.
    
    Author: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - Apologist, Critic, Other? The empathy-critique continuum in feminist ethnographic research on military members
    
    As feminist researchers who use ethnographic methods to engage with military populations, we encounter tensions in the way we present ourselves to participants. A number of researchers have approached the topic of closeness with military members while critiquing militaries, and associated strategies for trust and empathy. Some highlight the importance of co-production and an emphatically critical soldier-centered approach, others discuss feminist ethics in these spaces. In this article, we build on this research and draw from our own work in Canada and Sweden, to delve into the ways we present ourselves when encountering participants on their own terms (central to feminist ethnographic work). We outline how our research participants have sometimes related to us, and how we tweak our identities to present ourselves in the way that would best build trust. The apologist – a naive girl happy to be taught, the critic – the woman who challenges military norms and is thought of as potentially threatening, or a civilian Other – who is difficult to relate to, but perhaps distant enough to open up to. Our experiences highlight the performativity sometimes required to ensure trust, and potential productive impact, tension, and strain they create within the researcher, and in the researcher-participant relationship.
    
    Authors: Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University) , Bibi Imre-Millei (Lund University, Sweden)
  - Interviewing Returnee Foreign Fighters: An Insider Perspective
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Joshua Farrell-Molloy (Malmö University)
- 15:00 → 17:00
  
  TH 19 Conference event / Publishing in War and Security Studies: Sponsored by War Studies Robinsons Pub, 38-40 Great Victoria St, Belfast BT2 7BA
  
  Speakers: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham), Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (Loughborough University), Michael Williams (University of Syracuse), Wooyun Jo (Loughborough University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Secrecy and the (re)making of the global (dis)order Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Elspeth Van Veeren (University of Bristol)
  
  Chair: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester)
  - The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics: Conspiracy Theories and the Crisis of Liberal International Order
    
    Contemporary international politics is defined by a so-called crisis of liberal international order. A central feature of this crisis is the erosion of epistemic sovereignty; the loss of a shared register through which authoritative interpretations and statements about the world can be made. From QAnon to covid denialism, populist actors stand accused of propagating conspiracy theories that defy liberal norms and reduce the complexity of global politics to simplistic and divisive accounts of malign plots by global elites. This conforms to traditional approaches to conspiracy theories in which they are described as psychological pathologies of individuals (or networks of like-minded individuals) located at the political fringes. Contrary to these traditional accounts, this paper argues that a feature of this contemporary moment is the prevalence of conspiracy theories at the heart of liberal order itself. Responding to unexpected setbacks or disruptions of liberal order has prompted liberal commentary to make sense of these events: from the election of Donald Trump to Brexit. We argue that liberal commentary has tended to account for such events in conspiratorial terms. As a result, the crisis of liberal international order has been rendered intelligible as a result of secret and nefarious actors: from hostile foreign powers to shady transnational networks. Crucially, such modes of story-telling amount to a collective act of denialism and exoneration: in which responsibility for crisis is externalised onto illiberal others, thereby exonerating the liberal self. In an age of poly- and perma-crisis, this amounts to a catastrophic failure of imagination that forecloses the potential for imagining new and more just orderings of global politics.
    
    Authors: Owen Thomas (University of Exeter) , Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester)* , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University)*
  - Cybersecurity, trust and subterfuge at the interfaces of secrecy (infra)structures
    
    Threats to the cyber security of systems usually rely on subterfuge to undermine trust in systems. To gain access to a digital system, the programmer of an exploit must trick the human user, or the system, into thinking that the code has legitimate authority for access. Here, 'trust' is predominantly viewed as a social or a psychological accomplishment, a matter of fooling humans who are often designated as “the weakest link”, or as a technical matter of verifiable engineering standards. However, this is a one-sided perspective. By comparing contemporary cyber operations with cryptography practices during WW2, this paper will show how trust is also profoundly mediated with and by ‘things’ as much as bodied labour, to highlight a more structural account. By shifting away from purely intentional conceptions of subterfuge and trust, such an approach will sketch how arrangements of humans and machines are each productive parts of the machineries of knowledge and secrecy production. The richer and less agent-centred theorisation of trust and subterfuge proposed by this paper can thus challenge some of the novelty claims of contemporary cybersecurity discourses, whilst also contributing to recent more structural accounts of secrecy and cognate concepts.
    
    Author: Clare Stevens (Cardiff University)
  - Scheming Like a State: The Political Logic of Cunning Intelligence
    
    In recent years international politics has become increasingly preoccupied with the problems and potential of 'secret statecraft'—the exercise of state power through hidden, deceptive, subversive or manipulative means. Yet despite the urgency and continuity of these issues across a range of conflicts and crises, existing critical scholarship lacks a satisfactory theoretical framework for understanding the underlying logic that connects these practices to broader questions of security, power, and political rationality.
    This paper develops a critical genealogy of metis, or 'cunning intelligence', arguing that this ancient notion is alive and well, hidden within practices of security and tacitly operationalized as a political logic that has been misunderstood in critical security scholarship. While theorists influenced by James C. Scott and Michel de Certeau tend to reduce metis to tactical practices and local knowledge, this paper argues that cunning represents a strategic logic of 'manipulative power', a general mode of adversarial rationality made salient by recent technological, geopolitical, and sociopolitical changes.
    
    Through a critical genealogy and a pragmatic concept analysis of cunning concepts and discourses, the paper reveals cunning as a distinctive political logic—a normative approach to judgement and action under adversarial conditions—one requiring forms of knowledge, skill and reasoning distinct from those governing forceful coercion or diplomatic persuasion. Operating through mechanisms of detection, reversal, and deception, cunning problematizes traditional Western conceptions of security, power, reason and political knowledge. This theoretical intervention moves beyond existing accounts that locate cunning merely at the level of practice or tactical resistance, or exclusively within authoritarian politics, instead revealing the hidden role of cunning in Western political epistemes.
    
    By explicating its intellectual history and theoretical structure, this paper argues that cunning has reemerged as a central logic of contemporary international politics, with profound implications for the practice, norms, and critical study of international relations.
    
    Author: Sam Forsythe (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt/ Goethe University Frankfurt)
  - Femininum Suspectum: Suspicion, secrecy and insecurity and the reproduction of global gender order
    
    Feminist theorising has a long history of thinking through secrecy. This work however is often implicit and contained within ongoing conversations around the division of the public and private, the silencing, invisibilisation, and marginalisation of women’s voice, labour, and knowledge, and the relegation and sequestration of women and sexuality to the intimate and domestic sphere, which is nonetheless publicised and policed when deemed transgressive. The histories of women’s persecution and gender-based violence, as well as the struggles for greater rights are also intertwined with secrecy. Therefore, to better understand the interconnections of role of secrecy within crisis and (dis)order requires, as this project contends, a reclaiming of feminist theorising and its insights into the role of gender and sexuality in (re)making the world through secrecy. Feminised subjects have a troubled relationship with secrecy as a force and it is this relationship that this paper sets out to interrogate. To do this, this paper proposes first, to undertake a re-reading of three key strands of feminist theorising to better understand the relationships between secrecy and (dis)order. Second, it recovers the longer history of the development of a specific transgressive feminine subject, the suspicious feminine (femininum suspectum) that inhabits different abject figures in Anglo-American history. Third, it brings these insights into conversation with secrecy studies. Bringing these strands together, the paper offers a three-part framework for understanding gender and secrecy, inequality and disorder.
    
    Author: Elspeth Van Veeren (University of Bristol)
  - Aliens exist: exploring secrecy and revelations through UFOs/UAPs, National Intelligence, and Blink 182
    
    This paper examines the intersection of security, knowledge, power, and popular culture, focusing on how security information is concealed and disclosed. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," also known as the UFO report. It detailed 140 cases of "unexplained" unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and suggested they might pose a threat to US flight safety and national security. The report, based on a 2019 hearing which referenced three videos initially released by the New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSAAS), led by Tom DeLong of the pop-punk band Blink-182. DeLong celebrated his involvement with merchandise that said “Tom was f****ing right: aliens exist”. Yet in the report various explanations for the UAPs were proposed including classified US military projects or technology from foreign entities like China or Russia, but excluding extraterrestrial life. This paper explores how DeLong, a known conspiracy theorist and singer of "Aliens Exist," became part of a US military disclosure and its implications for the dissemination of information. Ultimately, it seeks to enhance our understanding the complex relationships between culture, knowledge, power, and security.
    
    Authors: Louise Pears (University of Leeds) , Anna Miller (North Carolina State University)*
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Securing the future? Environmental security in the 21st century Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Danielle Young (University of the Ozarks)
  
  Chair: Danielle Young (University of the Ozarks)
  - Uncontested terrain: How and why has the military moved from pariah to a leader on environmental/climate security
    
    In the 1990s when environmental security first gained mainstream prominence, environmentally-minded academics viewed the involvement of the military into this agenda negatively. Nowadays, these same academics have shed their reservations. They, and a younger generation of scholars, embrace the military’s role in climate security. But what has changed so that the military has moved from pariah to a valued leader on matters of environmental and climate security? Drawing on lived experience, observation and readings of the literature, this paper proposes a series of hypotheses that together aim to explain why this shift in perception occurred. The hypotheses relative explanatory value is established via informal interviews with leading academics and cross-referenced with the relevant literature. The paper ends by warning that consensus on the military’s role ought not breed complacency. It ends by identifying existing examples of how being critical is reconcilable with consensus.
    
    Authors: Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham) , Chad Briggs (Asian Institute of Management)*
  - Assessing Regional Integration Efforts to Foster Sustainable Development in North-East Africa
    
    Freshwater scarcity, underdeveloped infrastructure, and economy, alongside severe climate conditions of equatorial and near-equatorial areas, have long cast a negative effect on both agri-food policies and development conditions of the African continent in general for the last 25 years at least. Countries of North-East Africa are no exception to this, as severe droughts have numerously caused humanitarian crises in this region, with Ethiopian and Sudan drought and hunger crises being the most acute in the latest decade. Access to freshwater was highlighted both as a crucial value and an international goal in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. With a view to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, this issue remains vital in the most drought-prone areas of the world, particularly in North-East Africa.
    
    This paper assesses joint regional initiatives of the North-East African countries that deal with promoting the MDG/SDG goals. It focuses on the efforts and projects of regional integration groups, such as The IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) Partner Forum and The Nile Forum (Nile Basin Group) to evaluate the policies that were applied jointly by the countries of North-East Africa region to achieve MDGs and their prospects of continuing any effective joint policy-making in this respect. The paper overlooks the origins and the dynamics of this developing regional integration group in particular and evaluates both the failures and successes that were achieved to this date starting in 1996 (before this date, the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGADD) was in action since 1986). Focal attention in this paper is attached to fighting droughts and overcoming their consequences with the joint effort of all countries in the region.Possible scenarios for fostering joint regional integration efforts with the help of the UN (especially UNECA) and the international community are suggested.
    
    Author: Natalia Piskunova (Moscow State University)
  - Managing or Providing Security in a Melting North? Exploring the Ways in which Non-Traditional Modes of Securitization Camouflage the Augmentation of Traditional Security Paradigms.
    
    How is security conceptualized in the face of climate change? In my contribution, which draws on conceptual considerations of my PhD project, I suggest locating security meanings within sovereignty iterations. Using the Canadian Arctic as a “laboratory”, the research will examine to what extent (with shifting ecological conditions) states are asserting renewed (territorial) control over these spaces by employing non-traditional means of securitization.
    
    Concretely, the project will look to "territorialization" processes in the US and Canadian Arctic, by zooming into three conceptual arenas, which all display a form of sovereignty (re)iteration in response to an “Artic opening”; First, (1) Renewable energy infrastructures as means of territorialization. By including renewable energy into national security strategies, based on arguments of effective occupation of a perceived terra nullius, the U.S. and Canada position their environmental commitments within a competitive geopolitical narrative, akin to traditional energy exploitation strategies. The second arena is that of (2) Military territorialization. Here, the focus will lie on the Canadian Rangers, whose patrolling activities enact a form of effective occupation that combines state security with Indigenous and local involvement, illustrating a complex interaction between national and local, as well as civil and military sovereignties and security paradigms. As such, the Rangers embody a unique blend of local knowledge, environmental expertise, and state authority. A third conceptual arena labeled (3) Legal Territorialization takes a legal geography approach to continental shelf disputes in the Arctic.
    
    Overall, it is asked: are we dealing with an “old wine in new bottles” situation? To find answers, the research will explore the extent to which new modes of “doing security” may camouflage what they are re-enforcing: traditional security frameworks (unfit for ecological realities), yielding the question whether responses to a climate changed Artic (and world) are managing security meanings rather than providing security.
    
    Author: Svenja McGrath (Hamburg University)
  - Exerting influence from the margins: the relations between NATO and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on climate-related issues
    
    How, and to what extent, do actors on the margins of an international organisation (IO) exert their influence? In contrast to a monolithic view of IOs, as well as discursive and policy-based analysis of NATO’s construction of climate change as a threat, which prevail in most studies, the aim of this communication is to shift the focus from NATO’s political centre of gravity, and to consider external actors that have been playing their part in institutionalizing climate issues into NATO’s mandate. Rooted in a sociological approach to international organisations, I emphasize the role of immediate organizational environment and boundaries to broaden the analytical perspective on organizational change. The main argument underlying this communication is that stimulating, and encouraging, the politicized consideration of climate issues at NATO does not initially come from NATO’s political pillar, made up of the Allies and the Secretariat, but rather from NATO’s organisational margins. Thus, this work takes as a case study the political relations between NATO and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (PA), from the 1980s until today. More precisely, it will thoroughly analyze the practices of influence of the PA to spur NATO Allies to treat climate change not just as a scientific problem, but more importantly as a political one. These practices include, among others: reporting and spotlighting issues; informal, and formal lobbying; building social bridges between the two organizations. In turn, I will show that PA’s influence vis-à-vis NATO is primarily indirect. This communication relies on an empirical-inductive analysis, based on NATO archives (comments on the recommendations and resolutions adopted by the PA, from the Secretary-General and members states), as well as those of PA (committees reports, annual session reports), supplemented by a dozen interviews with members of the PA, in post between the 1980s and today, and online documentation.
    
    Author: Charlotte Desmasures (CERI, Sciences Po Paris)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Security governance in policy and practice Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Convener: Larry Attree (Rethinking Security)
  
  Chair: Larry Attree (Rethinking Security)
  - Into the Fold. Local Actors and Transnational Governance of Preventive Counterterrorism in the European Union
    
    The violent attacks of 9/11 introduced a new global consensus of what terrorism is and how to counter it. A global “preventive turn” in counter-terrorism resulted from this consensus; in Europe, preventive approaches were enthusiastically accepted by national actors and EU institutions, even by countries well accustomed to fighting terrorism. Why was preventive counter-terrorism enthusiastically accepted by all? And why does it occupy place of honour in the EU’s counter-terrorism strategy? This article puts forward a theory of transnational indirect governance, using orchestration theory and a case study on the preventive counter-terrorism. It argues that through its championing of preventive counter-terrorism, more easily accepted by Member States precisely because of its preoccupation with social policy, the EU has actually managed to achieve governance capabilities, compensating its lack of access to the field with institutionalised influence and leverage over the main actors involved at implementation, practitioners.
    
    Keywords: European Union; counter-terrorism; Prevention of Radicalisation; indirect governance; practitioners
    
    Author: Inés Bolaños Somoano (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionalsal Affairs, IBEI)
  - Silent Coups? Institutional militarization in Latin American Drug Wars
    
    Transnational criminal organizations are a substantial challenge for much of the Latin American region. Many governments have responded by utilizing military force to combat these groups, with various levels of involvement of soldiers in public security activities. From the use of paramilitary police in Brazilian favelas, to the war mentality to fight gangs in El Salvador and the outright armed intervention to push back criminals in Haiti, the boundaries between the military and civilian spheres is blurring at a rapid pace. This paper is part of a PhD dissertation looking into the militarization of government agencies in Mexico, where the armed forces control approximately 17% of the state budget while also operating banks, airports, customs offices, commercial airlines and construction projects. It argues that the traditional methods of measuring militarization or militarism (military spending as % of GDP, number of troops and equipment) do not account for the profound institutional changes caused by the extensive use of the military in government or the eroding authority of civilians in security policy and practice.
    
    Author: Agustin Berea (University of St Andrews)
  - “"Navigating the Complexities of Global Nuclear Governance: Insights from South Asia”
    
    The Global Nuclear Governance is at a critical crossroads, facing the challenges from the divergent approaches involving multilateral treaties, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, voluntary export controls, and a reliance on deterrence. These varied approaches create inconsistencies and reveals the systematic limitations, as illustrated by the unique dynamics of the South Asian Nuclear order, where the prevailing international nuclear norms faces legitimacy concerns. The lack of adherence to the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) by nuclear-armed South Asian states underscores the inadequacies of current strategies, emphasizing the need for an updated, holistic approach. Despite the IAEA's achievements in promoting nuclear safety, it faces the limitations, particularly with nuclear armed states. At the same time, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), although supported by many, encounters the resistance from Nuclear Powers. This research aims to examine the persistent challenges in global nuclear governance, with a specific focus on South Asia as a case study in alternative nuclear governance approaches. The study argues that understanding South Asia's nuclear strategy, especially the India-Pakistan nuclear dynamic, as a deviant case could provide the insights into more comprehensive strategies for global nuclear governance , extending beyond the traditional non-proliferation frameworks and reflecting the need for adaptable and inclusive nuclear governance mechanisms.
    
    Author: Binita Adhikari (South Asian University)
  - Pathways to enhanced cooperation: An exploration of public-private governance arrangements for the protection of critical maritime infrastructure - A case study of Ireland
    
    The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in October 2022 put into sharp focus the vulnerability of the ‘invisible’ systems of cables and pipelines traversing the oceans. With this renewed focus, there has been acceptance that state cooperation with the private sector - who finance, install, and maintain critical maritime infrastructure - is an essential part of protection efforts. Yet multi-actor cooperation is challenging. This can relate to different governing pressures and priorities but also working cultures and resource capacity, which can lead to miscommunication, duplication of effort and more siloed governance approaches. This paper explores the ways in which Ireland – a maritime crossroads for transatlantic data cables positioned at the periphery of Europe – governs the critical maritime infrastructure that traverses its maritime domain. Through an analysis of publicly available policy documents from both government and industry, supplemented with focus groups and key actor interviews, the paper maps existing governance arrangements between public and private sector entities. It then explores the key barriers to improving cooperation in this context and argues that networked governance arrangements, seen in other complex maritime security contexts, offers a valuable mechanism to deconflict the work of disparate actors involved in critical maritime infrastructure protection.
    
    Authors: Robert McCabe (Coventry University) , James Malcolm (Coventry University)
  - Violent non state actors, intelligence capabilities and emerging technologies
    
    The internet has been proclaimed a disruptive technology by scholars of power asymmetry, emerging technologies, and even intelligence, on the basis that it diffuses power previously held by states to non-state actors.
    
    This paper argues that the ability of a violent non-state actor (VNSA) to leverage the disruptive power of the internet is contingent on this actor's effective control over a territory and its infrastructure. It argues that semi-state actors like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi Group are gaining a power advantage through internet-based intelligence capabilities, while these same capabilities have a negative effect on guerrillas and resistance movements.
    
    There are two notable contributions made by this research. First, it introduces nuance to the unchallenged notion that designates the internet as a disruptive technology. Second, by focusing on the intelligence capability of VNSAs, it engages with an aspect of VNSAs' use of emerging technologies that is not sufficiently addressed by the literature, which has been focused on uses for communication and propaganda.
    
    The insights provided by this paper are significant because they offer a novel angle to engage with the effect of emerging technologies on the power dynamics between states and non-state actors. In turn, this creates a new perspective to navigate states' response to opportunities and threats presented by emerging technologies. Lastly, it is one of very few works that address the intelligence capability of violent non-state actors.
    
    Author: Ino Terzi
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Solidarities and revolutions: Queer, feminist and other forms of resistance organising Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)
  - In the clarity of my rage you will see it: Making visible the ordinary violence of Germany’s liberal democratic order
    
    This paper centres marginalised – that is racialised and trans/queer – people's feelings of anger to make visible how white supremacist heteropatriarchy remains entrenched in liberal regimes today, with the case study of Germany. Following their anger, this paper aims to uncover the invisibilised violence that the order of the German nation-state rests upon, as it instantiates itself in the ordinary unfolding of communal life, in everyday encounters and affective relations. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with members from marginalised communities, the paper firstly demonstrates how their anger has long since been invisibilised to maintain 'the peace' of Germany’s positive self-image, and how this erasure is violent in and of itself. Secondly, tracing the lineage of their anger, it reveals the historical ongoingness of the injustices that they continue facing. This illuminates the long durée of dispossession, exploitation and subjugation that they have been subjected to by the hands of the German state, and how German society benefits from these injustices to this day. Lastly, their anger points to the hypocrisy of the liberal promise of equality, freedom and prosperity, as these privileges remain policed along gendered, racialised and sexual lines to uphold the privileged positions of white heteronormative Germans vis-à-vis all ‘others’.
    
    Author: Elli Beyer (University of Manchester)
  - Queering International Solidarity: What does a queer British response to queerphobia in Uganda look like?
    
    What does a queerer sense of international solidarity look like? In this paper I will examine interactions between queer theory and solidarity to produce a framework for a queerer sense of international solidarity. The Anti-Homosexuality Acts in 2014 and 2023 in Uganda massively ramped up the criminalisation and securitisation of Uganda’s queer population, resulting in international condemnation, including from the British state. Whilst this was an unprecedented reaction by the British state in terms of international queerphobia, it is also did not address the colonial history that led to this modern queerphobic legislation. Therefore, it is imperative to understand how a queer British response to this queerphobia in Uganda may manifest.
    
    The findings in this presentation speaks to relevant literature, Queer International Relations theory and findings of focus groups conducted with British queer people surrounding international queer solidarity. This examines both how a British queer response interacts with the British state, and how this solidarity can occupy spaces outside of the state. I then relate this to other work, such as the work of NGOs and solidarity with LGBT+ asylum seekers. Therefore, the overall approach I take to formulate a queer British response to Ugandan queerphobia is to both examine the British state response through the theoretical lens of Queer International Relations, and to examine the response of queer British NGOs and the opinions of the queer British community. This all helps to formulate what a queerer international solidarity may look like, and what the results of applying queer theory to performances of solidarity may be.
    
    Keywords: Queer Theory, Development, Queering, Solidarity, Decolonialising, Uganda, NGOs.
    
    Author: David Murphy (Lancaster University)
  - Queering human rights in Egypt through the figure of the irredeemably Westernised human rights defender
    
    This article examines how human rights in Egypt have been framed as irredeemably Western and deviant, leading to a pervasive political subjectivity among Egyptians that they are unprepared for self-governance and democracy. Through state-led discourses, human rights defenders (HRDs) are depicted as agents of foreign agendas, promoting individual civil and political rights that conflict with collective economic and social needs. These portrayals have enabled the Egyptian state to justify repression, positioning human rights as incompatible with Egyptian values and reinforcing the belief that Egyptians are not yet ready for democracy. The article focuses on the deployment of these discourses against the backdrop of the January Revolution, when HRDs were increasingly marginalised and associated with moral deviance, especially through their defence of LGBTI+ rights. By contrasting the state's narrative of ‘the right kind of rights’ with the broader global discourse on human rights, this analysis reveals how this framing serves as a counter-revolutionary tool, reinforcing the perception that democratic self-governance must be postponed until Egyptians can demonstrate ‘honourable’ conduct. This dynamic entrenches authoritarian rule and curtails the possibility of transformational change. Moreover, the article argues that while human rights in Egypt constitute a counter-revolutionary and liberal technology of government, they also, through expanding the contours of citizenship, destabilise state-enforced binaries of ‘honourable’ Egyptian identity versus ‘Western’ deviance, playing an important role in revolutionary mobilisation.
    
    Author: Amira Abdelhamid (University of Sussex)
  - Beyond empire and the nation: intersectional struggles and grassroots organizing of transnational Chinese feminist and queer activists
    
    Recent years have seen the growing presence of feminist and queer activism across diasporic Chinese communities in Europe and North America. Distinct from previous forms of pro-democratic advocacy among the Chinese diaspora, these grassroots organizations are more explicitly aligned with broader progressive movements, including anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, in both home and host societies. However, with a few exceptions, these emerging spaces of transnational activism and identity formation remain largely underexplored in academic research. Based on ethnographic research and our own (as scholar-activists) involvement in these movements, this paper aims to delineate how diaspora Chinese feminist and queer groups in the UK organize, negotiate their identities, and imagine transnational solidarity by creating what they call ‘a space of possibilities’. Inspired by the activists’ call for only ‘crossing, but also redrawing borders’, we theorize the creative resistance of transnational Chinese feminists as grassroots borderwork, drawing on their engagement with local migrant rights groups, the pro-Palestine solidarity movement, and solidarity with South Korean and Iranian women. By doing and undoing borders from below, these emergent forms of transnational solidarity highlight the interconnectedness of different terrains of injustice across assumed geopolitical boundaries and essentialist identities, staging a feminist and anti-colonial critique of oppressive binary structures in both ‘North’ and ‘South’, ‘China’ and ‘the West’. Recognising and articulating its political significance therefore contribute to recent contributions in postcolonial feminist scholarship, such as Tafakori (2021) on Iranian women’s campaigns, that underscore how transnational feminist solidarity could create new spaces of connection beyond binary frameworks, liberal moral geography, and state-centric geopolitical antagonism.
    
    Authors: Chenchen Zhang (University of Durham)* , Xianan Jin (SOAS, University of London)
  - More Than the Sum of their Parts: A feminist queering of the discursive constructions of the peacekeeper in NATO and UN’s peacekeeping operations
    
    n/A
    
    Author: Andréa Noël (Universität Duisburg-Essen, Fakultät für Politikwissenschaft)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Spatialities and Relationalities of the International Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working group
  
  Chair: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)
  - Power and Passion: Niccolò Machiavelli’s Legacy for E. H. Carr
    
    Power is the cornerstone concept of international relations realism. However, the realist conception of power is under constant challenges. For scholars like David A. Baldwin and J. Ann Tickner, realism views power as material assets a country commands, which neglects the non-material and relational dimensions of political power. This article refutes this criticism by showing that a realist tradition shared by Niccolò Machiavelli and E. H. Carr conceives political power as both relational and emotional. Following Hans Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, this article defines tradition as a story about continuity and discontinuity in beliefs shared by thinkers of different historical periods. It will engage Carr and Machiavelli in a Gadamerian dialogue over what power is. Assessing Carr and Machiavelli’s agreements and disagreements over power will generate a comprehensive story about how Machiavelli’s conception of power continued and evolved in Carr’s IR realism.
    
    The key finding of this article is that, for the realist tradition under analysis, political power is an emotional relationship underpinned by four passions: hatred, love, ambition, and fear. For both Machiavelli and Carr, power is fundamentally derived from these passions instead of material factors like armies or wealth. For both thinkers, power is a relationship in that political agents do not own this emotional relationship as an asset but participate in it as agents. In other words, for Machiavelli and Carr, political agents are driven by their passions to interact with each other. For them, power is an affective relationship, an irrational realm fundamentally motivated by passions. As the 50th anniversary of BISA is approaching, power remains one of the most challenging issues in IR. I sincerely hope this article can help IR scholarship address this timeless challenge with timeless wisdom from the realist tradition.
    
    Author: Mian Xu (University of St. Andrews)
  - Distance from Whom, Where, and Why?: On Different Distanciations and the Critical Project in International Relations
    
    Distance is needed to critique social and political phenomena that comprise global politics and to critique oneself; one must be able to dissociate oneself (to at least some degree) from social structures, and our subjectivities, so as to reflect on them (and ideally, thereby move towards changing them). Yet, this paper argues that there are also instances where distance does not support critique. Specially, I focus on the ethics of care as a theory which reveals how fulfilling the scripts of patriarchy necessitates a loss of ‘voice,’ i.e., a loss of authentic self-connection that results in a warped separation of the self from the self. This loss of voice, I suggest, impedes our ability to speak authentically and connect with, listen to, and respond to others. More simply, here, the separation of self from self creates further separation from those with whom we are in relation. Distance in this instance works against critique: when we are constantly struggling with our own fragmentations and dissociations, we are distracted from struggling against the separations and fragmentations that are produced by social structures in world politics, from working together to critique and rebuild our global relations. Ultimately, the objective of this paper is to map some of the complex ways in which various distancings can play out, and how they can support or alternatively hinder the critical project in international relations.
    
    Author: Maggie FitzGerald (University of Saskatchewan)
  - Spatialising security, securitising space: their interplay at the core of the political
    
    Security and space arguably are amongst the most important concepts in politics and IR. As scholarly research has advanced the premise that security is not objective, but rather something that humans (re)produce, discussions have moved to interrogate security ‘by’ and ‘for whom’, in which context and for what purposes; with implications for what we mean by ‘security’. Academics have differentiated between state and people-centred, top-down and bottom-up, elite and vernacular, Western-centric and post-colonial approaches, amongst others. Meanwhile, intellectual ruminations about space have produced a multiplicity of theoretical and/or analytical categories. Rather than an absolute phenomenon, scholars have argued for linear, relative and relational ontologies, as well as physical/material, social, lived, or symbolic approaches to space. Both security and space are embedded in how we make sense of political phenomena, like identity, power, authority and order. Yet their conceptual and empirical interplay is too often overlooked.
    
    This paper argues for the need to revise the ontology of security and space to centre their interplay at the core of the political. In their separate ways, security and space are open-ended processes impacting on and ingrained in relations. By incorporating some of the ontological arguments about space in the work of Doreen Massey to security and, on the other hand, applying the logic of Securitisation Theory to space, it is possible to animate debates about how political realities come into being. To illustrate this theoretical endeavour, I will explore several empirical examples in the Middle East, where the interplay can enhance our understanding of politics and, potentially, in the broader Global South.
    
    Author: Javier Bordón (Lancaster University / SEPAD)
  - On the Relation between the Political and the International
    
    It is widely recognised that IR suffers from both an ongoing identity crisis and an inferiority complex in relation to the other social sciences. This paper proposes that the deepest reason for this debilitating condition is that IR has not understood the meaning of its own central object: the international. It further proposes that the cause of this deficit is the failure of IR to think the relation between the political and the international. Rather, even as it separated itself from Political Science, IR has always simply assumed the normative primacy of the bounded space of the ‘inside’. On this assumption, the international can then only appear as secondary and residual – the formless ‘outside’ space that is classically understood by Realism as anarchic, conflict-ridden and resistant to progress. The paper critiques this foundational assumption at a metaphysical level. Drawing on Hegel, it first correlates the inside/outside division of IR with the inside/outside structure of consciousness. It then shows how, at the culmination of the dialectic, the oppositional structure of the inside/outside division is transcended altogether into what, at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel terms ‘Absolute Knowing’. The paper concludes that it is this condition of achieved totality that is the properly metaphysical meaning of the international.
    
    Author: Andrew Davenport (Aberystwyth University)
  - Assembling Ages: How Times of Technology Make Space for Modern International Theory
    
    Within the theorisation of International Relations (IR), a recurrent practice has been to use technological developments as organising temporal devices indicative of new ‘Ages’. The advent of the ‘Atomic Age’ (or ‘Nuclear Age’) was taken by some of IR’s most prominent thinkers as fundamentally altering the dynamics of international politics. More recent identifications of an ‘Age of Extinction’ – subsuming nuclear existential threats into industrial-technological overexploitation of the Earth – suggest that now might be the time of ‘planet(ary) politics’, existential crisis, and, possibly, the End Times of IR. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘chronotopes’ this paper seeks to analyse how such Ages assemble and delimit the space(s) of the international: in ways that privilege certain conceptions and assumptions of what it means to be modern within such timeframes. Critical reflection on the (techno)politics of Ages within IR, the paper seeks to argue, constitutes a distinctive contribution to established scholarship on time and temporalities within International Studies. This case is made by outlining and then undertaking, by way of exemplification, a chronotopic analysis of John H. Herz’s theorization of International Politics in the Atomic Age, comparing and relating that to more recent IR scholarship on the Age of Extinction.
    
    Author: Columba Peoples (University of Bristol)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / The IPE of global environmental governance Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Erin Hannah (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario)
  - Locking in neoliberal climate governance? A critical political economy of the UK’s Climate Change Act
    
    In this paper, I develop a critical political economy account of the UK's 2008 Climate Change Act. This Act is at the core of the UK’s claims to climate leadership, and the relatively rapid decarbonisation that has occurred in the UK since it was passed. The Act committed the UK to legally binding emissions targets and founded the Climate Change Committee to advise on the UK’s carbon budgets, as well as potential opportunities to meet these budgets. In this paper, I argue that the Climate Change Act can be best understood as an attempt to formalise a technocratic system of climate governance focused on credibility for investors. Particularly, I examine how the Climate Change Act led to a system of climate governance that incorporated the neoliberal state's commitment to 'fiscal discipline', the protection of asset values and profitability. To develop this argument, I critically analyse the transformations in British climate politics that led to the Act being passed, and the system of climate governance that the Act created.
    
    Author: Stanley Wilshire (University of Manchester)
  - Debt-for-Nature Swaps and the Privatization of Structural Conditionality
    
    Recent, high-profile debt-for-nature swaps – which exchange debt relief for nature conservation commitments – have privatized structural conditionality. This most controversial form of conditionality, whereby public creditors transform debtor state institutions and policymaking agendas, is now an instrument of private-led nature conservation promotion. Drawing on evidence from large-scale, albeit understudied, commercial swaps with Belize, Barbados, Ecuador, and Gabon, I advance three claims. The swaps are private as international NGOs and investment banks have led the design, negotiation, and implementation of their nature conservation commitments. They are structural because these commitments transform domestic nature conservation governance. And they constitute conditionality due to their stringent enforcement mechanisms. Private structural conditionality’s intrusive nature further challenges restrictive conceptions of private environmental authority. Through these swaps, private actors leverage existing indebtedness to govern as authoritative principals delegating nature conservation commitments to debtor states. They thereby circumvent ex ante multilateral deliberation in environmental and sovereign debt forums.
    
    Author: Connor O'Brien (University of Cambridge)
  - The Shadows of the Green Transition: Everyday Political Economy and Extractive Violence in Latin America
    
    This paper critically examines the hidden costs of the ‘Green Transition,’ by considering the renewed push for resource extraction in Latin America, in particular for ‘climate-critical minerals’ like lithium. Framed as a transformative and just shift aimed at sustaining economic growth and simultaneously mitigating climate impacts, the 'Transition' obscures the violent histories of resource extraction it claims to transcend. The move towards ‘green extractivism’ thus presents itself as a break from prior ‘dirty’ extractive-led developmental models, yet rather than a transformative departure, represents an intensification of extractivism as it strategically adapts to meet the contemporary demands of the global economy.
    
    Beneath its ostensibly benevolent character, ‘green extractivism’ has produced novel forms of extractive violence, made politically legitimate through a ‘green’ capitalist logic. This is enabled by the alignment of state and corporate interests, which mutually reinforce each other and delegitimise alternative political realities, especially those of directly affected campesino and indigenous communities. By illuminating these ‘shadows’ of the 'Transition', this paper interrogates the resilience of extractivism within the Anthropocene, challenging assumptions that its global dominance, and relevance in maintaining the capitalist system of production, is weakened.
    
    To achieve this it employs an Everyday IPE framework and draws on fieldwork conducted in the ‘Lithium Triangle’, both of which engage with the day-to-day realities along emerging extractive frontiers. This builds a local-to-global understanding which demonstrates that micro-level dynamics are inextricably linked to international politics, and is vital in understanding how wider power regimes perpetuate inequality in mundane ways. As such, it reveals how deeply rooted colonial hierarchies persist as the harms of capitalist development continue to be outsourced to the Global South, for a sustainable 'Transition' elsewhere.
    
    Author: Vicki Reif-Breitwieser (University of Sheffield)
  - Authoritarian Legitimation: Accumulation, Climate Crisis and the Search for Consent in Late Neoliberalism
    
    In a context of generalised stagnation, neoliberal governments throughout the globe have elevated home affairs policy and advanced a ‘mutated’ politics of legitimation characterised by forms of ‘othering’ and hostility towards the political system. While scholars of authoritarian neoliberalism have mapped these shifts in some good detail, the literature has yet to offer a fuller theorisation of legitimation in late authoritarian neoliberalism. Through a mixed Marxist-Foucauldian framework, we conceptualise the contradictions of this “authoritarian legitimation” as it is both faced by, and feeds off, resistance from below. We argue that legitimation increasingly depends on, and cultivates, a “reactionary” form of common sense that aims to restore and defend the normalcy of an inward-looking, regressive and fossil-fuelled neoliberalism. We offer a case study of the legitimation of the emerging authoritarian neoliberal climate regime, looking at both the neoliberal “heartlands” and Global Southern neoliberal states. We show that this regime, characterised by the rolling out of undemocratic green transitions paired with the repression of climate protest, seeks to maintain electoral support for the collapsing status quo among limited segments of the population who may be aligned with authoritarian values. In this context, governments seek to re-enlist citizens to shore up a neoliberal project based on a fossil-fuelled mode of living and economy, while simultaneously facing political and geoeconomic pressure towards decarbonisation. The contradictions of these late authoritarian neoliberal governing strategies point to both renewed strengths and fragilities in neoliberalism’s armour.
    
    Authors: Joseph Ward (University of Sheffield)* , Rosa Maryon (Cardiff University)* , Thomas Da Costa Vieira (London School of Economics)
  - Carbon Club’s Energy Transition: The Win-set Area and Geoeconomics of Transitioning Energy Sector in Resource-Rich Countries
    
    This article raises an important question about the stigmatisation of resource-rich countries as climate laggards due to their slow participation in multilateral schemes. Despite this perception, they are actively working on greening their energy sector through bilateral alliances. How can we make sense of this seemingly contradictory behaviour? Instead of relying solely on multilateral governance like the UNFCCC, Indonesia and Australia take strategic bilateral approaches using trade and investment agreements to accelerate their energy sector transition. This study examines the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA) and its following energy transition projects.
    This article contends that the energy transition in resource-rich countries is shaped by political and institutional efforts to balance industrialisation interests. These countries seek to maintain competitive energy prices for economic growth while addressing international pressure on climate change and promoting renewable energy development. The carbon club is also trying to capture regional demand for sustainable energy to maintain its regional energy market dominance. A bilateral approach through trade and investment allows alliances to pursue more aligned and complemented aims that parallelly serve their political and economic interests. The argument is developed using primary and secondary data collected through interviews and discourse analysis of the government’s official documents, constitutions, and mass media through an international political economy lens. The findings of this study have the potential to significantly contribute to the literature on the linkages between trade agreements and energy transition, a field that has yet to explore the role of bilateral partnerships fully. This study’s findings could potentially reshape international political economists’ perspectives on the energy transition in resource-rich countries, underscoring the significance of this study.
    Keywords: Energy Transition, Resource-Rich Countries, Trade and Investment, International Political Economy
    
    Author: Cahyani Widi Larasakti (The University of Melbourne)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Thinking about Gender, Security, and Foreign Policy in Contemporary Global Politics Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Masculinity transformation and peace programming: The case for a structural turn
    
    Over the past decade years there has been a rapid growth in programs which attempt to shift notions of masculinity in conflict-affected societies. These initiatives commonly focus on shifting norms which associate masculinity with violence, strength or dominance in order to forge durable peace. Such efforts often framing their involvement in relation to health promotion, community wellbeing or development, positioning change around individual transformation. This paper explores the interplay between gendered norms and structural incentives which shape enduring militarisation.
    To do this it explores the results of fieldwork in Fiji and Aceh (Indonesia) conducted in 2018 and 2019 to interrogate how interventions branded ‘gender transformative’ were constrained compared to peace efforts which were gender-insensitive. Focusing on political economy, foreign policy, and civic structures the paper explores the interplay between persistent patriarchal and militaristic norms, and the structural forces which shape them. From this, it presents the case that more structurally significant interventions in Aceh and Fiji would have been possible, but would have required broader engagement across elements of the peace-industrial complex. The paper concludes by considering what three potential areas of work which could better address the incentives and disincentives that promote violent masculinities during peace initiatives.
    
    Author: David Duriesmith (The University of Sheffield)
  - Doing the Dirty Work: Social reproduction and gendered labour divisions in armed rebel organizations
    
    Who undertakes the grunt work of sustaining rebellions? Despite emerging literature on the role of women in armed groups and rebellions, there is little scholarship and understanding of the gendered divisions of labour, particularly of social reproductive labour, within these organizations. This research paper unravels the role of social reproduction, specifically of care and domestic labour, for revolutionary struggles to \textit{maintain} itself within epochs of strife. Using a novel dataset and typology, it provides a foundation on the invisible underbelly of labour that is necessary for armed organizations to pursue their ideological goals. At the same time, theoretical cleavages arise on the limitations of peacetime social reproduction theory while exploring \textit{what it means to take care of each other} within contexts of protracted violence. Thus, what is the relationship between care and fighting for freedom? I argue that traditionally `women's work' taking place in armed rebellions must be conceptualised beyond mere survival but as pivotal for rebel viability through enacting affect and emotional labour in the pursuit of interpersonal social cohesion. In other words, rebellions rely on the (im)material affect of social reproductive labour, largely undertaken by women and those with lower social status, to continue their ideological pursuits.
    
    Author: Carina Uchida (University of Oxford)
  - Gendering Indian Diplomacy: Delhi’s reception of the first women diplomats
    
    Diplomatic literature so far points us towards the recruitment and career progression of women diplomats in home foreign offices. There has been little work undertaken to qualitatively better understand their postings abroad. In recent times scholars of gender in diplomacy have produced valuable datasets expanding our understanding of gendered diplomatic postings. This paper intends to tie this data with feminist historiography to relate women diplomats to a relatively new site, the host country and culture. The location studied here is the Indian capital of New Delhi and the culture of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. ‘Gendering Indian diplomacy’, the larger project this paper is a part of, locates women in Indian diplomacy to investigate the gendered nature of Indian foreign office, policy and practice, to begin with. The study takes into account approaches towards gendering any institution, looking inwards and outwards. While significant attention has been paid to the internal operationalisation of gendered power relations thus far, this paper takes the leap towards the external operationalisation of gender in the workings of MEA. Methodologically, the paper connects the gendered postings with feminist historiography to understand India as the receiver of women diplomats and how it adds to our understanding of New Delhi as a ‘suitable’ posting of women in diplomacy. At the same time it interrogates how Indian diplomacy received women foreign representatives in its formative years as its own women diplomats struggled to gain equal status in the foreign service. Thus turning the prior investigations on its head.
    
    Author: Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - Everyday Spaces, Gendered Boundaries and the Afghan Woman: Critical Perspectives on UNSCR 1325, Participation and Resistance
    
    In the proposed paper, I aim to investigate gendered boundary work in the everyday spaces for women (family, community, provinces) in Afghanistan with a focus on the participation pillar within the framework of Women, Peace and Security Agenda. United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security( WPS) was adopted on October 31, 2000. I particularly focus on ‘locally grounded agents’, in this case the Afghan women who blur or resist the gendered boundaries in the everyday spaces in Afghanistan. Adapting, and building on the scholarship of Mannegren Selimovic, Xavier Guillaume and Jef Huysmans, Walker and Renata Summata , I present a framework of boundaries as practices, and enactments which allows me to analyze the everyday for women in Afghanistan, with a focus on family, community and provinces. I argue that the framework of boundaries as enactments has unmarked potential to provide insights into how normative frameworks like UNSCR are translated into everyday life by, and for women in Afghanistan. Relatedly a key contribution of this study also is that, it highlights two contrasting patterns of resistance, each with its implications for the study of agency and resistance of Afghan women. Methodologically I draw on my field work in Kabul, 2016, and from elite interviews between 2022-2024.
    
    Author: Shweta Singh (South Asian University)
  - Meanings, knowledge, and actors in Women Peace and Security: the role of Civil Society Organisations
    
    This paper will challenge normative conceptualisations of the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and the role of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). The paper will explore the diversity of meanings that constitute WPS and the role that Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) play in its construction as a field of study, practice, and policy, contributing to an understanding of how the project of WPS changes if and when the political, discursive and institutional contributions of CSOs are re-centred. The paper will explore the relationships and dynamics of power that shape the global project of WPS, challenging the geo-epistemic ‘home’ of WPS in both the so-called global north and global multilateral institutions. The paper will argue that understanding the dominant axis of power and hierarchy present in knowledge production within WPS provides an opportunity to explore potential challenges to this hierarchy; questioning how the borders of WPS are contested, and actors’ roles are defined and challenged, through the emerging discourses, gaps, silences, and (re)articulations of WPS.
    
    Author: Florence Waller - Carr (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Tools of Statecraft, Diplomacy, and Technology in US Foreign Policy Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: USFP Working group
  - Irrevocably broken or Ephemeral disconnection: America’s experiments at coalition building in the Global south
    
    Since the end of the cold war, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proved to be the
    most substantive threat to the longevity of the current liberal international order. This
    Revanchist attempt by Russia undermines the foundations of the underlying constitutive
    order and has exposed deep fractures in the international system. State responses to this
    global inflection point can be summarized into three broad categories: first, opposition to
    Russia exemplified by America and its enduring allies; second, solidarity with Russia
    exhibited by targets of adversarial western policies such as China and North Korea; and third, passive neutralism and active non alignment endorsed by countries in the global south such as India and Indonesia. Given that this third category of states does not represent a coherent confederacy with a unified agenda. Why has America and the pacific federation failed to generate a consensus on the fundamental issue of the legitimacy of using force to change borders despite the affinity of post-colonial states towards the Westphalian order and its attendant values of equality and non-interference. Moreover, why is American coalition building in the Global south failing to materialize into more expansive notions of support?
    
    Author: Abhishank Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  - 100 Days & 75 Years: The Future of the US and NATO
    
    The incoming Trump administration will significantly shape the positioning of the US role in NATO. Throughout his first administration, President Trump repeatedly criticized the reliance of NATO on US funding and the impact of NATO on U.S. security interests, stating that the United States should withdraw from the security alliance. This rhetoric resulted in bipartisan Congressional legislation in 2024 that requires the President to have two-thirds of Senate approval to withdraw the United States from NATO. And yet, serious concerns over reduced US support still exist, with many member states like the United Kingdom already publicly discussing the importance of a consistent US role. Given these political statements, this paper will study the legacy of the first Trump administration’s attitudes towards NATO and the second Trump administration’s policies in its first 100 days to assess the future of the US role in NATO. The paper argues that the Trump administration has created increased instability within NATO, diminished trust in US guarantees, and reduced the overall credibility of the alliance. The paper will also analyze the response by other member states, suggesting that they will need to enhance their own credibility and contributions to ensure that NATO remains strong for another 75 years.
    
    Author: Janani Mohan (University of Cambridge)
  - Nuclear Politics and Conventional War: Evidence from Elite Military Opinion
    
    Prominent scholars and policy analysts fear that re-emerging great power nuclear rivalry will prove destabilizing to the international security environment, re-opening longstanding debates about the link between nuclear politics and conventional conflict. How does the nuclear balance affect preferences for conventional uses of force? We develop hypotheses drawing on the stability-instability paradox (SIP), which we then test with conjoint experiments focused on potential conflicts between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and North Korea. Fielding this survey on an elite sample of students from the U.S. Naval War College, we vary strategic stability in each scenario and then measure support for U.S. military action. The project advances the survey experimental literature on nuclear politics by connecting it to attitudes toward conventional conflict, and it contributes to ongoing policy debates about the risks presented by the growth of China's nuclear arsenal and a "tripolar" nuclear world.
    
    Author: So Jin Lee (University of Pittsburgh)
  - A Comparative Analysis of U.S. Cognitive Strategies: From the Cold War to the Digital Age
    
    This observation examines the development of US cognitive warfare strategies, focusing on the move from Cold War-day psychological operations to fashionable- day- moment information manipulation in the digital age. During the Cold War, the United States utilized misinformation and psychological operations to influence both Russian citizens and global thoughts, creating international views and geopolitical dynamics. In today’s multipolar world, advancements in information technology and the expansion of global networks have transformed the landscape of cognitive warfare. Modern strategies increasingly rely on cyberspace, big data, and social media to influence both state and non-state actors. This study examines the validity and evolution of US cognitive warfare methods by using a historical comparative analysis. It also explores how these tactics have adapted to a multipolar global order, where information authenticity, cybersecurity threats, and competition from a range of actors complicate traditional strategies. Case studies from the Cold War and subsequent program actions provide insight into how the US has managed to overcome the growing challenges of cognitive warfare, including the restrictions imposed by contemporary interconnectedness and intercultural interdependence. This research contributes to the understanding of modern information warfare in the context of great power competition, offering a framework for analyzing the effectiveness of these strategies in influencing both global and domestic actors.
    
    Authors: Le Fu (Shenzhen University) , JIAYUE LI (Lingnan University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / US-China Tech Race: Actors, Strategies and Outcomes Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: Yvette To (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
  
  Chair: Catherine Yuk Ping Lo (Maastricht University)
  - The Dragon’s Global AI Dream: Coalition Building, Periodisation, and Internationalisation
    
    This article investigates how China’s participation in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance was impacted by multiple domestic non-governmental stakeholders, including large technology companies and civic groups. Employing the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), this article analyses how multiple stakeholders in China’s nascent AI policy subsystem expressed their policy beliefs, built advocacy coalitions, and shaped China’s AI policy agenda, especially its engagement in global AI governance. Employing the discourse network analysis (DNA), systematic discourse data was extracted from China’s news media between 2013 and 2023. The main findings show that non-governmental stakeholders played an important role in the formation of China’s national AI plan before 2017, which mainly focused on domestic economic development. However, after the central and local governments became more actively involved in the subsystem, China’s AI policy agenda moved towards a more internationalised direction. The change was because the dominant coalition’s policy core beliefs had turned from “using AI to benefit domestic industrial upgrading” to “using AI to lead global AI governance for the competition with US in the future”. This article contributes to current research on China’s policy process in nascent systems regarding emerging technologies, shedding light on the dynamics behind Beijing’s more proactive approach to global AI governance.
    
    Author: Hengyi Yang (Maastricht University)
  - Continuity and Change in China’s Arms Control Diplomacy in an Era of Geopolitical Competition and Technological Rivalry
    
    The world is witnessing an era of intensified geopolitical competition and technological rivalry between China and the United States, extending into the realms of military technology and weaponry. Against this backdrop, this article examines the continuity and change in China’s approach to arms control diplomacy since 2013. It focuses on two case studies: (1) nuclear weapons and (2) military artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on elite interviews and open-source documents in Chinese and English, this paper argues that China’s arms control diplomacy has exhibited far greater consistency than is commonly depicted or expected in existing literature. The paper identifies five areas of consistency in China’s arms control diplomacy: a realist worldview, an emphasis on the leading role of great powers, a government-centred approach, an aversion to coalitions, and an inward-looking focus. Using Bourdieu’s practice theory, this paper examines the reasons behind the strong continuity in China’s arms control diplomacy, even amidst significant shifts in the geopolitical landscape and the rise of new technologies. It also contributes to the literature on China’s arms control policy, which has primarily focused on China’s nuclear diplomacy prior to the 2000s, by providing insights into its broader and more recent arms control strategies.
    
    Authors: Qiaochu Zhang (University of Southern Denmark) , Guangyu Qiao-Franco (Radboud University, Netherlands)*
  - Semiconductor Firms in US-China Tech Competition: Institutional Differences and Strategic Choices
    
    The intensifying technological competition between the United States and China has become a defining feature of contemporary global politics, particularly in semiconductor manufacturing, where both countries employ export controls, investment restrictions, and talent policies to secure strategic advantages. Existing research often adopts a state-centric lens, overlooking the distinctive interests and strategic motivations of private semiconductor firms—such as SMIC and Huawei in China, and Intel and Qualcomm in the United States—that do not always align directly with government foreign technology policies and may subtly influence US-China technological competition. This study addresses this gap by incorporating private sector actors into the analysis, utilizing an interdisciplinary approach informed by applied economics to classify the strategic responses of semiconductor firms within divergent regulatory environments. By comparing the strategic options available to firms within the contrasting US and Chinese institutional frameworks, the research reveals the dual role of these firms as both instruments of state policy and autonomous entities pursuing self-interest. Findings underscore the complex interplay between market dynamics and national policy objectives, offering policymakers nuanced insights for managing spillover risks associated with US-China technological competition and regulating large technology firms.
    
    Author: You Wang (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
  - The Securitization of China’s Health Biotechnology by the United States: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Analysis
    
    Health biotechnology has emerged as one of the pivotal arenas in the strategic competition between the US and China. The BIOSECURE Act of 2024 aims to prevent federally-funded US pharmaceutical companies from engaging with identified “companies of concern,” which include the Chinese BGI Group and WuXi AppTec, viewed as threats to US national security. By drawing insights from public policy literature, particularly the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), this paper demonstrates how a revised securitization framework, focusing on the concepts of “audience” and “audience acceptance,” can be applied to elucidate the securitization process of Chinese health biotechnology by the US government. The paper reveals that such a reconceptualization facilitates a precise definition of audience, encompassing distinct groups clustered within advocacy coalitions; recognition that these coalitions exhibit different policy beliefs and degrees of coordination; and a more structured analysis of the connections between audience and their respective impacts on the securitization process. The paper contends that the US securitization of health biotechnology reflects a broader trend of techno-nationalism, where countries increasingly perceive scientific and technological advancements through the prisms of national security and economic competitiveness. Such securitization nevertheless may have detrimental effects on global biomedical advancement and health security.
    
    Author: Catherine Yuk Ping Lo (Maastricht University)
  - Mismatches, Mobility and Volatility: China’s Strategies for Chip Talent
    
    This paper investigates China’s responses to the global contest for science and technology talent within the semiconductor industry amidst geopolitical tensions with the United States. It has two main objectives. First, it challenges the prevailing narrative that places Xi Jinping at the forefront of China’s strategy to enhance self-reliance in the sector. By examining policy documents, we argue that the Chinese Communist Party’s focus on the semiconductor industry predates Xi Jinping. Rather than initiating these efforts, Xi has accelerated and expanded them, driven largely by China’s economic conditions and the ongoing global technological revolution. Second, using the frameworks of institutional theory and human capital development, this paper analyses the interactions between educational institutions, which produce science and technology talent, and the demand for such human capital at the firm level. Based on primary data collected from key stakeholders across the semiconductor value chain, we find that the misalignment between state innovation policies and industry needs, along with the volatility and mobility of talent in various segments of the semiconductor value chain, explains why China’s efforts to develop talent for high-end chips have only been partially successful. This paper reveals institutional barriers to human capital development in high-end technology sectors.
    
    Authors: Winston Lee (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) , Yvette To (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  TH 19 Panel / Unravelling migration narratives: examining policy and legal structures globally Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Timothy Edmunds (University of Bristol)
  - The Securitisation of Migration Policies in the Context of Far-Right Parties Influence
    
    Migration has become a central issue in contemporary politics, increasingly interlinked with security concerns under the influence of rising far-right movements. This research examines the relationship between the securitization of migration policies and the rise of far-right political movements, focusing on how anti-immigrant rhetoric shapes security discourses and influences migration policies. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of the Copenhagen and Paris Schools of securitization, the study addresses two key questions: How do far-right parties contribute to the securitization of migration, and through what mechanisms do these movements influence policy changes? How do these processes vary across national contexts?
    This research employs a comparative analysis of political speeches, party manifestos, and migration policy shifts from 2019 to 2024 in Germany, France, the UK, and Turkey, identifying patterns in how far-right rhetoric impacts migration policies. This period captures significant socio-political shifts, including post-Brexit adjustments in the UK, the rise of Germany's AfD, the influence of France's National Rally, and Turkey’s increased focus on migration. Additionally, the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament elections and post-COVID-19 dynamics provide a unique context for examining intensified far-right influence.
    Through qualitative content analysis, this interdisciplinary study in political science, sociology, and communication reveals how migration is framed as an existential threat both rhetorically and through policy measures. The research contributes to the understanding of migration and security by examining how far-right narratives shape policies, offering insights for more balanced and inclusive approaches.
    
    Keywords: Migration policies, securitisation, far-right political movements, anti-immigrant sentiments, comparative analysis
    
    Author: Gizem Aksit Ergen (Newcastle University)
  - Understanding Migration through a Third World Lens: The Case of US Policies and Their Impact in Latin America
    
    This research analyzes the impact of Global North migration policies on the sovereignty and self-determination of Global South countries. It examines the structural factors influencing migration trends in Latin America through a Third World approach to law, emphasizing historical roots such as colonialism and imperialism that continue to shape current migration patterns and socioeconomic conditions in countries of origin.
    
    The study employs a qualitative methodology, featuring an extensive literature review and an analysis of migration policies and laws in the United States and Mexico during the Trump administration. This case study explores how US migration policies affect migrants and the sovereignty of their countries of origin. It includes case studies from the United States and Mexico, supplemented by testimonies from migrant lawyers to illustrate the conditions and treatment migrants experience both in their home countries and at their destinations. Additionally, reports from international organizations and legal documents related to human rights and migration are analyzed.
    
    The ultimate goal is to contribute to a critical understanding of migration in Latin America from a Third World legal perspective. The findings aim to reveal the structural and historical inequalities perpetuating forced migration, as well as the challenges to the sovereignty and self-determination of Global South countries. Furthermore, the research underscores the need for effective implementation of human rights and social justice for migrants.
    
    Authors: Luiza de Almeida Bezerra (University of Coimbra, Portugal)* , Carolina Carvalho (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
  - The Genealogy of the ‘Safe Third Countries Rule and Practices as Political Notion: Its Conceptualization in Europe between the late 1960s and the early 1990s.
    
    The Safe Third Countries rule and practices (STC) plays a crucial role in the ‘extraterritorialization’ of asylum processing.
    
    STC is the most advantageous political concept, specifically the ‘governmental’ device of keeping away migration from home-territories. States are able to effectively evade obligations and rules imposed by the international community, while limiting the critics of unlawful and illegitimate behaviour towards refugees and vulnerable migrants.
    
    STC has mostly been researched by legal scientists in relation to the violation of international humanitarian/refugee laws. However, STC as a political concept is rarely examined in depth.
    
    This paper conceptualizes STC as a ‘political’ notion and aims to elucidate the genealogy of STC as a governmental device.
    
    Firstly, this paper argues that the establishment of STC is divided into two stages.
    The first is the emergence of the notion of First Asylum Countries(FAC) until the early 1980s, which was considered as a possible way to organize ‘burden-sharing’ among relevant countries in the Indo-Chinese Refugee Crisis.
    
    The second is the birth of STC based on FAC in Europe in the late 1980s/1990s, which aimed at ‘burden-shifting’ and developed the shared perspective of ‘transterritorial’ spaces between origin/destination states. This has paved a way for the externalization of border control.
    
    Moreover, this paper makes two assumptions.
    
    Beyond Eurocentrism, the 1970s/1980s saw knowledge (re-)production and the dissemination of novel ideas between Europe and other regions, including Asia/Africa, in the shaping of this unprecedented concept.
    
    Next, its genealogy, facing ‘refugee crises’ from the 1970s up to the present, demonstrates why a global(regional) governance of 'humanitarian migration’ tends to fail; and why this has contributed to the restriction of migration/asylum policies rather than the improvement of global refugee protection.
    
    This paper is based on social constructivist/Foucauldian theories. The research is conducted through the analysis of documents, including published/archival documents and parliamentary protocols.
    
    Author: Ryo Kuboyama (Bielefeld University, Germany)
  - A New Way to Think of Global Migration Governance: Neoliberalism, Ultra-nationalism, and the Global Normative Governance of Migration
    
    The study of global migration governance typically entails practical governance architecture, or the lack thereof. When norms of migration governance are examined, it is usually to account for practical governance. For instance, transnational ideas like ultra-nationalism have been used to explain the migration policies of Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in the United States and Hungary, respectively, while neoliberalism has been associated with migration regimes of Justin Trudeau and David Cameron in Canada and Britain, respectively. Yet, ideologies need not be associated with tangible policies to govern since norms proscribe and prescribe behaviour, and because their constituted attitudes as well as the expressions of these attitudes can shape system / societal outcomes (e.g., shape citizens’ reception of immigrants and immigrant integration) independently of tangible policies. Therefore, with evocative insights from Europe, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this paper argues that three global trends currently anchor the global normative governance of migration, which is increasingly anti-immigrant. First, is the ongoing normative convergence between the global left and right, both of which are increasingly skeptical and cynical about immigration, thereby preventing a viable counter-normative project that anchors pro-immigrant predilections in the contemporary era. Second, is the liberalization of norm production or the fact that an increasingly large number of ‘elite citizens’ are able to condition what people consider as acceptable behaviour, attitudes, or dispositions independently of official policies. Third, is the real-time global diffusion of ideas that facilitates the transfer of ideologies and ideas from one location to both near and very distant places, thereby increasing the scope of whose attitudes can be influenced, from where this could happen, and who has the capacity to do so. Consequently, the paper argues that in the absence, and independently, of tangible governance mechanisms, global ideologies currently govern migration across national borders in contemporary society.
    
    Author: Surulola Eke (Queen’s University, Canada)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / War in the Middle East: Global and Regional Perspectives Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Speakers: Amnon Aran (City, University of London), Andrew Payne (City St. George's, University of London), Katerina Dalacoura (LSE), Sam Rose (Director of UNRWA, Gaza)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  TH 19 Roundtable / “Dedicated to those friends with whom, out of a different loyalty, I must now openly disagree” – the political stakes of ‘beefs’ Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  In 2024, Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ brought his 10 years of ‘beef’ with Drake into the spotlight. While pop culture pundits ruminated on years of coded exchanges (aka ‘subliminals’), a deeper engagement unravels a clash between a key voice of hip hop’s black empowerment project and the subsequent neoliberal incursion into the genre. Their ‘beef’ lays bare the multiple conjunctures between culture as emancipatory possibility and its counter-revolutionary cooptation. It also becomes our point of departure for a roundtable exploring the frayed junctures in/of movements, clashes between artists, organisers and writers, even splinters in intellectual traditions, as inherent in attempts to create, build and generate other radical possibilities, when these relationships are structured by violence. We trace the “beefs” between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Buber, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, June Jordan and Adrienne Rich, among others, through anti-colonial and liberationist lenses, asking what the curious stories of broken alliances, friendships, solidarities and shared visions can tell us about the corrupting and coopting power of racial, capitalist, imperial and gendered relations. And, thus, what are the stakes of building movements that can contend with, learn from and perhaps 'trouble' the structures that shape beefs in the first place.
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol)
  
  Participants: Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London) , Ajay Parasram (Dalhousie University, Canada) , Koshka Duff (Nottingham) , John Narayan (KCL) , Heba Youssef (University of Brighton)
- 16:30 → 16:45
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  TH 19 Conference event / Keynote: Professor Roland Bleiker (Queensland) - Seeing and Sensing World Politics SPONSORED BY THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY Assembly Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Speaker: Roland Bleiker (University of Queensland)
- 18:30 → 19:30
  
  TH 19 Conference event / Belfast Blitz History Talk by Scott Edgar, Editor of Wartime Northern Ireland Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
- 18:30 → 20:30
  
  TH 19 Conference event / Contested Heritage: Curating conflict in and about Northern Ireland. The panel will be sponsored by the Journal of War and Culture Studies who will be funding an accompanying drinks reception. Although this is open to all conference delegates you need to register in advance to attend at https://indico.bisa.ac.uk/event/530/ 28 Bedford Street, BT2 7FE
- 18:30 → 19:30
  
  / Ethics and World Politics Working Group Annual General Meeting Paris, Europa Hotel
- 18:30 → 19:30
  
  TH19 / Gendering International Relations Working Group Annual General Meeting Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
- 19:00 → 20:00
  
  TH 19 Conference event / Environment and Climate Politics on the Brink: social enterprise visit and working group reception Brink! Belfast Stories, Union St, Belfast BT1 2JG
Friday 20 June
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / AI and the Decision to Wage War: Identifying and Mitigating Risks Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Convener: Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
  
  Chair: Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham)
  - A king above the law: ‘autocratic intelligence,’ resort-to-force decision making, and democratic legitimacy in war.
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Bianca Baggiarini (ANU)
  - AI, Trust, and the War-Room: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in the US Military’
    
    What shapes military attitudes of trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI) used for strategic-level decision-making? When used in concert with humans, AI is thought to help militaries maintain lethal overmatch of adversaries on the battlefield as well as optimize leaders’ decision-making in the war-room. Yet it is unclear what shapes servicemembers’ trust in AI used for strategic-level decision-making. In October 2023, I administered a conjoint survey experiment among an elite sample of officers attending the US Army and Naval War Colleges to assess what shapes servicemembers’ trust in AI used for strategic-level deliberations. I find that their trust in AI used for strategic-level deliberations is shaped by a tightly calibrated set of technical, operational, and oversight considerations. These results provide the first experimental evidence for military attitudes of trust toward AI during crisis escalation, which have research, policy, and modernization implications.
    
    Author: Paul Lushneko (US Army War College)
  - ‘Borgs in the Org’ and the Decision to Wage War: The Impact of AI on Institutional Learning and the Exercise of Restraint
    
    rtificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly infiltrate what is arguably the most consequential decision that we can collectively make: the decision to wage war. While ample attention has been paid to the emergence and evolution of AI-enabled systems used in the conduct of war – including lethal autonomous weapons systems under the confronting banner of ‘killer robots’ – the prospect of AI driving this necessarily prior stage of war-making, the crucial determination of whether and when to engage in organised violence, has received less attention. Following recent studies that have begun to redress this relative neglect by examining particular risks and opportunities that would accompany the infiltration of AI into resort-to-force decision making, this paper will explore and evaluate another, hitherto overlooked, potential consequence of this anticipated development. Namely, we will consider how the use of such AI-enabled systems is likely to alter the very structures, cultures, and capacities of those collective bodies charged with exercising forbearance in the resort to war – and what impact this transformation could have on their propensity to do so.
    
    Author: Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
  - ‘Waltzing into Uncertainty: AI in Nuclear Decision Making and the Dangers of a New Arms Race’
    
    This paper critically examines the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into nuclear command and control systems and its implications for traditional nuclear deterrence and the emerging AI arms race among major powers. While Kenneth Waltz’s deterrence logic posits that nuclear weapons induce caution among rational actors through the threat and fear of mutual destruction, AI challenges this stability by introducing speed, opacity, and algorithmic biases into decision-making processes. Russia’s pursuit of AI capabilities, driven by a strategic imperative to counter perceived technological advances by the United States and China, exemplifies how AI integration risks fuelling a new arms race that could pose serious challenges to strategic stability. This paper argues that the incorporation of AI into nuclear command and control systems risks undermining the rational deterrence that has long prevented nuclear conflict. Furthermore, the competition for AI superiority in nuclear command and control can and will lead to an arms race, as states strive to outmatch each other’s technological capabilities. This competition could make decisions to use nuclear weapons (both strategic and tactical) less predictable and more likely. To manage these risks, the paper advocates for transparency protocols and trust-building measures to limit AI’s role in nuclear command. Ultimately, preserving stability in an AI-enhanced world requires balancing te
    
    Author: Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University)
  - Proxy Responsibility for AI-based Decisions in the Resort-to-Force’
    
    ntegrating AI into military decision processes on the resort-to-force raises new moral challenges, particularly with regard to responsibility for decisions made or significantly influenced by AI-enabled systems. A key question is: who is responsible when AI-enabled systems significantly influence such decisions? I argue that while we cannot attribute responsibility to the systems themselves, we must identify proxy responsibilities (Sienknecht 2024) in their environment to substitute for the missing human actor. In this paper, I elaborate the concept of proxy responsibility within human-machine teaming in the context of recourse to force. I propose to compartmentalize the resort-to-force decision-making process and implement an AI department that integrates the various institutions and systems involved. This AI department would be an institutional response to an institutional problem, as decisions on the use of force are usually made and shaped by different institutions. However, a substitute is never as good as the original, so at the end of the paper I discuss the potential risks of an institutional response and suggest possible safeguards to avoid such pitfalls. This approach helps to mitigate the complexity of integrating AI into military decisions and aims to contribute to ethical and responsible use
    
    Author: Mitja Sienknecht (European University Viadrina))
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Carceral Presents and the Neoliberal University Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Academic knowledge is produced within neoliberal comfort zones that demand increasingly surveilled, securitized, and commodified scholarship, cloaked in the language of engagement. In its neoliberal form, academic knowledge can sideline or serve carceral systems, obscuring the violence affecting the people and communities we – as differently positioned scholars working in the neoliberal university – collaborate with; from Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Palestine, to Germany, Switzerland and the United States. As such we ask: whom does our knowledge truly serve, when those we work alongside live in carceral presents where they are not only displaced but also labeled undocumented and rendered "illegal," or, if documented, forced into constant surveillance as they endure the violent journey toward formal residency or citizenship? This roundtable brings together interdisciplinary scholars in feminist, queer, trans, gender and sexuality studies, and grapples with the question of research methods and writing, centering how scholars, their co-travellers, and interlocutors experience and relate to border and deportation regimes. Underscoring the interplay between racialization, migration, intimacies, and ecology, under the policing eyes of institutions, agencies, and organizations, we pay attention to non-carceral methods. To do so, we reflect on the potentialities and strategies of organizing, as well as the challenges of rebuilding liberatory worlds alongside an academic praxis unbound from its carceral mode.
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Chair: Neslihan Yaklav (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Participants: Sarah El Bulbeisi (Orient Institut Beirut) , Umut Yildirim (Geneva Graduate Institute) , Isabel Käser (Universität Bern) , Paniz Musawi Natanzi (The University of Pennsylvania)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / China in the international political economy Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Tyler Girard (Purdue University)
  - Racial capitalism and China’s quest for oil in Iraq
    
    In recent years much has been made of China’s rise in the global south and decline of Western hegemony. In Iraq this has played out most clearly in the way that European and US oil multinationals are increasingly being replaced by Chinese majors. However, little empirical work has been undertaken to understand whether Chinese capital behaves differently from the capital of other nations on the ground. In this paper, I draw on extended ethnographic field work in the oil producing regions of Southern Iraq, to show that there is a perception that Chinese firms adopt a more flexible form of capitalism than their Western counterparts and are therefore better equipped to manage the (dis)order of the Iraqi state. I engage with the theory of racial capitalism to argue that this works to enforce racialised binaries about good white capitalism and the unruly capitalism of upstart Chinese companies. In a context of comparative racialisation, racial-economic figurings of “Asianess” render both Chinese capital and labour as inferior and primitive, even though other subordinated non-white groups, such as Iraqi workers, are often materially worse off and engage in similarly flexible practices. Thus, the paper’s findings add nuance to debates about Chinese capitalist practices in the global south and attest to new configurations of race and labour in the world economy.
    
    Author: Taif Alkhudary (Uni of Cambridge)
  - Why Being Sanctioned Changes How You Think
    
    Extant literature on economic sanctions has predominantly focused on sanctions levied by Western countries. Policymakers and academics alike have dismissed sanctions by China, Russia, and other non-Western states as merely symbolic given their negligible economic impact on Western targets. In this paper I challenge the argument that Chinese sanctions against the West are merely symbolic. I argue that while Chinese sanctions may not have had a substantial economic impact on targeted individuals and organizations, they have caused a measurable change in rhetoric towards China. To test my theory, I make use of quantitative textual analysis techniques to find changes in the way that targets of Chinese sanctions associate words such as “cooperation” and “China.” I source my data from publications by the Mercator institute, a think tank which was targeted in March of 2021 and statements made by sanctioned MPs and Congress members. I use a difference in differences model with a synthetic control unit to estimate the causal effect of sanctions on the alignment of actors with China. I support my analysis with case studies. This paper contributes to the literature on sanctions effectiveness by providing a novel methodology and theoretical approach to assessing sanctions effectiveness.
    
    Author: Jeffrey Love (Oxford University)
  - Shaping the Digital Trade Order: Understanding China’s Role in the WTO’s Joint Statement Initiative on E-Commerce Amid Geoeconomic Rivalries
    
    This paper investigates the emergence of a plurilateral framework for digital trade at the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on E-Commerce, contextualized by global power transitions and geoeconomic rivalries. Digital trade has featured on the WTO agenda since the 1998 E-Commerce Declaration and the Doha Declaration, culminating in the launch of the JSI negotiations in 2019 by 76 Members. Initially resistant, China has since become one of the most active participants in shaping these negotiations. Drawing on recent conceptual debates on structural power in International Political Economy (IPE) literature that link productive power and global value chain (GVC) dynamics, this study examines China’s growing influence in the WTO negotiations compared to the United States and the European Union. It explores how China leverages its strategic position in digital GVCs, intellectual property (IP) assets, and technological standard-setting to contest and institutionalize norms for digital trade. By contrasting the multilateral process with regional and bilateral digital trade frameworks led by traditional powers, the paper sheds light on how technological transitions and structural power dynamics shape the contested emergence of a global digital trade regime. The paper offers a novel conceptual framework for understanding regime formation in the digital economy and its implications for global governance and geoeconomic competition.
    
    Author: Serdar Altay (London School of Economics and Political Science/Istanbul Technical University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Comparative Perspectives on Conscientious Objection in Turkey, Ukraine and Russia Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Dina Bolokan (University of Bath)
  
  Chair: Dina Bolokan (University of Bath)
  - “I Will Rather Die on My Way to Freedom Than on the Frontline:” Exploring Experiences among Fighting-Aged Ukrainian Men Who Flee the War
    
    Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has implemented a travel ban prohibiting most men aged 18-60 from leaving the country. In addition, a recent mobilization law, implemented in May 2024, expands recruitment mandates and imposes stricter penalties for those who fail to comply. Despite these measures, draft evasion remains a growing issue, with an estimated 946,000 men fleeing to the EU alone to avoid mobilization. While public discourse often addresses the military challenges posed by this exodus, little attention has been paid to the individual experiences, narratives and challenges of the men who defy the law and choose to leave. How do these men make sense of their decision to flee instead of fighting, and in what way does this decision both reflect and redefine their gendered and national identities as men and as Ukrainians? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Ukrainian men who fled the war, the study examines how these men navigate intersecting experiences of guilt, fear, agency, and freedom of choice. Offering unique empirical insights into contemporary experiences of draft evasion in modern international warfare, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of how the war and mobilization policies shape masculine identities and social hierarchies in Ukraine.
    
    Author: Sofie Rose (Center for War Studies Denmark)
  - A Socio-legal Analysis of the Right to Conscientious Objection in Turkey
    
    This paper examines the right to conscientious objection in Turkey by drawing on the claim that the rise of militarisation brings about a rise of demilitarisation attempts and “militarism can be reversed.” Arguably, existing literature has hitherto focused either on the legal or on the sociological aspects of the right to conscientious objection in Turkey. As such, the impacts of social norms on the legal process remain largely neglected. However, the military is not only a war-machine but also an institution influencing society at large; therefore, the military’s workings require analysis from a sociological perspective. As a result, this paper explores the social norms reinforcing militarism and argues that antimilitarist critique of conscription requires an investigation into gender. It utilises the concepts of feminist curiosity and hegemonic masculinities. Reflecting on eighteen semi-structured interviews conducted with the conscientious objectors in Turkey, it adopts an empirical, a feminist, and an antimilitarist approach to the militarisation process. It discusses the ways the conscientious objectors challenge the sociological elements, which maintain the conscription system and ask for societal change. The narratives emerged out of the interviews illustrated the role gender plays in the normalisation of militarism and the intersection between the military, militarism, and hegemonic gender relations.
    
    Author: Demet Asli Caltekin (Durham Law School)
  - Conscientious objectors seeking asylum: A comparative perspective
    
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    Author: Özgür H. Çɪnar (University of Greenwich)
  - Men Avoiding the Military: Between State Repression in Russia and Asylum Struggles in Europe
    
    This paper examines the difficult stage experienced by conscientious objectors, particularly in the context of Russia’s military mobilization, based on interviews with men from Russia. These individuals, who resist conscription on ethical grounds, occupy a precarious position within the social and political landscape. They cannot fully express or participate in society on their own terms due to the constant fear of rejection, persecution, or criminalization, yet they are also unable to secure asylum in countries offering refuge. This condition of being unable to engage meaningfully in their home society, while at the same time lacking the protection of asylum frameworks, places them in a state of socio-legal precarity. The paper explores the legal, social, and political dimensions of this precarious condition, analyzing the challenges faced by conscientious objectors within and outside of Russia. It highlights the intersection of war, state repression, individual antiwar ethics, and transnational mobility, showing how these individuals resist militarization while simultaneously confronting the absence of viable options for safety and belonging.
    
    Author: Dina Bolokan (University of Bath)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Critical and transformative pedagogies in IR Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Madeleine Le Bourdon (University of Leeds)
  - Fostering Transformative Pedagogies in Global Education Partnerships
    
    Global Education Partnerships (GEPs) have come key component of Universities’ strategies globally engaged students. Varying in scale, time and levels of formality across programmes and modules GEPs provide staff and students opportunities to collaborate and widen their teaching and learning. Yet, the motives and dynamics of GEPs have been heavily contested by critical internationalisation scholars (See for Stein 2021; Craig et al 2024). From the competitive market for international students, to the hierarchy of knowledge production, the equity and reciprocity of global education partnerships has come under increasing scrutiny.
    This paper seeks to explore these dynamics in depth drawing on research at the University of Leeds that sought to understand the obstacles and opportunities in fostering equitable and reciprocal partnerships both within the University and the global partner. Split into three sections, the paper will firstly outline how, reflecting much of the literature, initial staff surveys exposed the inequality and lack of reciprocity staff experienced within the University in establishing and maintaining such partnerships. In reaction to this, our research refocused more closely on dynamics within the institution itself. Thus, the second section will outline key considerations, processes and people that are essential in building such partnerships within UK institutions, highlighting the micro and macros individual and institutional tensions and opportunities in building effective partnerships. Thirdly, the paper will present our ‘manifesto’ of guiding principles for fostering equitable and reciprocal partnerships within and across institutions, audited by critical internationalisation experts from external institutions.
    The paper will conclude by arguing we must think critically about the everyday politics of power dynamics and institutional processes in fostering transformative GEP, while honouring the complex global context in which UK and global partners. Critically, this paper wishes to bring into dialogue how we get better establish equitable and reciprocal international education partnerships for all.
    
    Author: Madeleine Le Bourdon (University of Leeds)
  - Reimagining Security Studies Education: A Non-Compartmentalized Pedagogical Approach
    
    Addressing the challenge of teaching security without reproducing dominant structures and forms of knowledge is critical for all attempts aimed at reimagining the discipline. Security analysts prefer to examine immediate necessities rather than longer-term possibilities, exceptions rather than norms, empirical rather than theoretical knowledge, practical applicability rather than guiding principles. These tendencies are often justified through rhetorical claims about ‘realism,’ despite the necessarily contentious character of what counts as real or realistic and overwhelming evidence of the mutually constitutive character of present moments and historical trajectories, norms and exceptions, empirical and theoretical knowledge as well as principles and practices. Yet as critical approaches to security try to insist, relations between these paired terms are always complicated, in ways that often suggest different possibilities for being and acting politically. Such attempts are often met with predictable accusations of a naïve retreat to abstract theorizing lacking real-world applicability. This paper develops a pedagogical contribution by designing, applying, and reflecting on a strategy that bridges the gap between thinking and practicing security. This paper challenges traditional security teaching methods by adopting what we call a non-compartmentalized pedagogy. It encourages the exploration of diverse theoretical perspectives and their practical implications, highlighting the inherently political nature of theorizing security. This approach aims to provide a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of security, moving beyond the 'add and stir' approach (Bilgin 2010) to genuinely integrate diverse traditions into the discipline.
    
    Authors: Norma Rossi (University of St Andrews) , Malte Riemann (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst)
  - Empowering Youth as Catalysts of Change: An Analysis of Youth-centric Pedagogies in Non-Formal Peace Education in Sri Lanka
    
    Since the United Nations Security Council adopted the Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS) agenda in 2015, global discourse has increasingly recognised youth as active agents of change, challenging historical narratives that view them solely as perpetrators or victims of violence. Peace Education plays a crucial role in equipping youth with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for meaningful social impact, empowering them to become transformative change agents. However, formal education often underutilises Peace Education, creating a gap that Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) work to address. Effective Peace Education for youth requires pedagogies that resonate with learners' interests and have transformative potential.
    
    This paper critiques eleven youth-centric pedagogies employed by a leading NGO in post-conflict Sri Lanka, drawing on empirical research, including interviews with four programme facilitators and seven youth participants. These pedagogies include interactive lecture-based presentations, activity-based learning, dialogue, arts-based pedagogies, sports-based pedagogies, film discussions, intergenerational and intercultural exchanges, challenge-based learning, debate, research, and video production.
    
    The analysis explores how these pedagogies embody holistic, participatory, cooperative, humanistic, and experiential principles essential for impactful Peace Education. Furthermore, the paper classifies these pedagogies into three categories: (1) critical pedagogies—such as lecture-based presentations, activity-based learning, dialogue, arts-based pedagogies, sports-based pedagogies, film discussions, debate and research—that foster critical thinking; (2) pedagogies of resistance—including challenge-based learning, dialogue, debate, research and video production—that empower youth to turn ideas into action for social change; and (3) inter-generational and inter-cultural pedagogies—in particular exchanges—that particularly enable lived experiences of solidarity across generations and cultures.
    
    Author: Janith Jayatilake Kankanamalage (University of Leeds)
  - (De)securitisation theory in the classroom: decolonising the Self through creative pedagogy
    
    Premised upon the urgency of mitigating coloniality in the classroom, this paper advocates for arts-based methods as a decolonial practice for teaching and learning IR. It draws from the authors' experiences as educator and learner in a collage-making workshop organised as part of a 'Securitisation of Migration' module. We argue that turning the classroom into a site of image production, through collage-making, elicited reflexivity upon seemingly abstract concepts and empirical realities and enriched the potential to challenge hegemonic knowledge. Thus, the classroom became a site of possible contestation against the institutionalisation of Security repertoires. Through autoethnography, the paper presents three stops in the journeys of both educator and learner: i. the preparatory stage of the workshop, ii. the collage-making activity, and iii. the collage as an output. This work contributes to the ongoing debates of decolonising higher education and scholarly efforts to address (de)securitisation theory’s colonial, gendered and racialised dimensions.
    
    Authors: Marvella Horthy (University Graduate) , Gabriela Patricia Garcia Garcia (University of Exeter)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Ruminations on war, violence and unmaking of political space in a time of permacrisis Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Conveners: Tiina Hyyppä (University of Helsinki) , Birgit Poopuu (Tallinn University)
  
  Chair: Tiina Hyyppä (University of Helsinki)
  - Civilians and wartime order: local councils during the Syrian civil war
    
    Several works have showcased how civil action and rebel governance evolved during the Syrian war, but the combination of these, civil governance, has not received enough attention. This paper focuses on local councils, a type of wartime order that civilians initiated in the opposition-held areas. Drawing from extensive, in-depth interviews with former council members and people who worked with the councils, I argue that analysis of on nonviolent activism and both pre-existing and new social ties help us understand how this particular form of wartime governance was established and how it evolved. Past experiences of activism mobilized some people for the revolution and governance and affected the way governance was planned. The months-long transition from a peaceful uprising to a civil war created a generation of activists who mobilized parallel to the rebels. In addition, civilians’ social ties affected their independence from fighters and how an area was governed. The fact that local councils have largely ceased to exist should not stop us from researching these civil institutions as they inform us of new ways wars can be governed.
    
    Author: Tiina Hyyppä (University of Helsinki)
  - Mediterranean Vacuum: the (Un)Making of a Political Space amid Struggles and Crises
    
    This work seeks to understand the reasons behind, and the implications of, the ‘weakening’ of the Euro-Mediterranean space, assessing both the idiosyncratic failures of the EU foreign policy as a field, and the changes (and roles) of post-uprising North African domestic political fields in this process. These developments, it is argued, challenged the historically Euro-centric orientation of Mediterranean relations established after the USSR’s dissolution, thereby legitimating new logics. Such a process led to a political vacuum in the Mediterranean space. The latter is seen as a situation in which a political space is not ‘governed’ by a clear symbolic vision (willingly or unwillingly accepted). In this context, new ideas and symbolic structures ‘circulate’ through the Mediterranean, (potentially) affecting its political shape and power dynamics.
    Drawing on comprehensive qualitative data collected through interviews and participation in formal political fora and meetings in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Brussels, and juxtaposing it to descriptive statistics and official politcy documents, this paper highlights the logics behind the current power developments in the Mediterranean region. The findings contribute to the IR literature in two ways. Theoretically, by engaging with the definition of political vacuum from an IPS perspective. Empirically, by showing the new nature of this region and the cultural and political struggles for its dominance, wherein new and old actors attempt to impose their visions. This paper thus underscores how the Mediterranean today diverges fundamentally from the region conceptualized by the West throughout the 1990s, and how the new geopolitical landscape is affecting the way North/South and West/East divides are thought of.
    
    Author: Emanuele Errichiello (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE))
  - Impossible People in an Impossible Revolution: When Radical Politics Is Met with Violence
    
    This paper studies the Syrian activists’ experiential knowledge of the Syrian Revolution. It plumbs the tension of being situated both in violence and nonviolence while standing up for freedom and dignity. Puzzling over this situatedness – impossible people in an impossible revolution – matters because it asks us to consider, following Judith Butler, how lives can be (made) so livable and unlivable at the same time. So doing, it disrupts narratives of the Syrian revolution that, firstly, fail to take into account the complex structures of violence within which the Syrian revolution unfolded; and secondly, operate with binaries of revolution-war, nonviolence-violence. Remaining curious about the Syrian activists’ actual experience and circumstances – while aware of the limitations of my scope – this article provides, relying on decolonial feminist perspectives, a more experiential and relational reading of the Syrian revolution.
    
    Author: Birgit Poopuu (Tallinn University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / European Security: National Foreign Policies in a Changing Context Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - Technopopulist foreign policy: the cases of Italy and France
    
    Populism is often portrayed as having drastic consequences for states’ conduct of foreign policy. The view that the rise of populists, such as Orbán in Hungary and Trump in the US, is seen as a challenge to the world order confines populism to so-defined illiberal politics. This overlooks that populist political approaches can also be identified in so-defined liberal democracies, as the new political logic of contemporary times, cutting across parties’ traditional ideological divides. In this paper, we propose to use Bickerton and Accetti’s description of technopopulism to analyse the rise of populist tendencies in Italy and France, particularly focusing on their foreign policy. By showing that there is no antithesis between the ideals of technocracy and those of populism, Bickerton and Accetti have opened a field of enquiring for leaders who claim legitimacy both from assertions to competence and from direct popular support, independently of intermediary institutions. Technopopulism has yet to be applied to the field of foreign policy, a gap which we aim to fill here. Using the framework of discourse analysis based on Hansen’s method, we analyse foreign policy discourses in two countries that have had important technopopulist movements, particularly with the rise of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy and Emmanuel Macron in France. We look at three types of discourses in both cases – official discourses such as speeches and foreign ministry communications, semi-official discourses such as editorials and interviews of key participants, and wider political discourses in popular culture. We show that technopopulist modes of governance have had a profound impact on foreign policy decision-making in both cases, and compare the lessons learned.
    
    Authors: Giulia Grillo (University of Kent) , Charles Devellennes (University of Kent)
  - The Illusion of Power: UK and EU Global Strategies and the Reality of Decline
    
    Since 2016, the EU and UK have pursued a global strategy for the Indo-Pacific region, integrating foreign policy with security, defence, diplomacy, and economic partnerships. This paper argues that Brexit reduced the global influence of the UK and EU, encouraging status-seeking behaviour and global strategies. It claims this global focus worsened the decline in regional cooperation. The EU’s weak response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its limited role in the Israeli conflict highlight its declining power in foreign policy, stressing the UK’s role in the CFSP and CSDP.
    
    This research analyses UK and EU foreign policy through a social constructivist lens, focusing on agenda-setting and implementation. Using a comparative design, it examines the narratives of global strategy and the Indo-Pacific focus via content analysis of selected policy documents, speeches, and social media posts from key political actors.
    
    The UK and EU have different foreign policy approaches but share core values. A new Labour government offers a chance to redefine their relationship beyond a third-country framework, promoting deeper cooperation. This shift could enhance collective security and align diplomatic efforts. This paper examines scenarios for a stronger UK-EU relationship, focusing on integrated security cooperation.
    
    Author: Catarina M. Liberato (University of Kent)
  - Brexit and the Trust Paradox of Sovereigntist Internationalism
    
    A growing number of sovereigntist governments, on both the right and the left, are challenging the liberal international order and its institutions. Many of them aspire to preserve deep international cooperation while taking back control from supranational authorities. In doing so, they encounter a trust paradox since their ideological commitments push them towards promoting trust-based institutions while at the same time rendering them less trusting and trustworthy. We illustrate our argument through a case study of the May government’s conduct of the Brexit negotiations from 2016-2019. Drawing on elite interviews, we show how the UK government sought to transpose existing forms of economic cooperation into looser institutional arrangements to ‘take back control’, but failed to generate sufficient trust to convince the European Commission to continue deep cooperation while relaxing existing control mechanisms. Our argument contributes to literature on trust in international cooperation by highlighting the ‘demand-side’ of trust and the variance in how much trust different types of actors need to achieve similar levels of cooperation. It also helps us to understand the dilemmas faced by contemporary populist governments when attempting to return control to the nation state without sacrificing the benefits of deep international cooperation.
    
    Authors: Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) , Tobias Wille (Goethe University Frankfurt)*
  - Cooperation or competition? German and Polish security leadership in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region
    
    The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to a significant deterioration in the European security environment. However, how Europe should respond not only in terms of assistance to Ukraine but also in respect to defending the European continent and providing a deterrent, and who has the ability to shape and lead that response is under question. In this regard it is necessary that all European countries step up and enhance their ability to provide for European defence. This is particularly the case for those countries who could do much more in respect to providing for European security, especially medium and large European countries who could undertake a leadership role, and those countries which have a knowledge of the region. Hence, this paper focuses on Germany and Poland, two central European countries whose security is interlinked with Eastern Europe, and their ability to provide regional security leadership. The paper asks how far do Germany and Poland's leadership roles converge or diverge in shaping security cooperation in the Central and Eastern European region regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Thus, this research offers a novel examination of German and Polish security leadership in CEE, advances the application of role theory in security studies by combining it with leadership concepts, and explores the potential for German-Polish co-leadership in addressing regional security challenges.
    
    Author: Laura Chappell (The University of Surrey)
- 09:00 → 16:15
  
  / Exhibition hall open The Exchange, Europa Hotel
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Facets of Friendship in International Politics Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Felix Berenskötter (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Felix Berenskötter (King's College London)
  - 'Frenemyship' in China-African Relations
    
    This paper explores the tension of friendship within the framework of international relations, specifically in the context of China-Africa relations. Building on theories of friendship between states, this study examines the balance of mutual respect, support, and reciprocity that underpins true friendship. However, it challenges the notion of altruistic relations between states, arguing instead that interests and rewards, whether overt or covert, are often central. Frenemyship—a blend of “friend” and “enemy”—is introduced as a political concept to describe relationships marked by both cooperation and underlying tension. The China-Africa relationship exemplifies this duality. While Chinese infrastructure projects in East Africa, such as the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya and TAZARA in Tanzania, are presented as benevolent developments, they often lead to debt dependency and erosion of sovereignty through “debt-trap diplomacy.” This paper illustrates how these projects, framed as partnerships, ultimately reflect a “frenemy” dynamic by creating economic dependence and threatening national sovereignty. By analyzing these dynamics, this paper positions “frenemyship” as a critical concept for evolving our understanding of friendship in international relations and understanding the complex, ambivalent alliances in global politics.
    
    Author: Ré Phillips (SOAS University of London)
  - Trust, Friendship and IR
    
    Rather than questions about what international friendship is, what international friendship is for, or what international friendship does, this paper seeks to discuss how international friendship is done. That is, it focuses on the practice of friendship at the international level—on the enactments that allow its production and reproduction. To this end, the paper moves from the more general to the more particular, offering first some reflections about the development of the international friendship literature, followed by a discussion of the implications of studying international political friendship in terms of our understandings about the nature of reality and social facts. Focusing on friendship in IR, the paper argues that the practice of international friendship is a practice imbued with trust, which itself can take many forms and appear in different areas of international social life. In this context, trust is understood as a pre-rational emotion which will allow for a friendship disposition.
    
    Author: Andrea Oelsner (University of San Andrés)
  - Shared Futures: Reading International Friendship through the Concept of Trust
    
    This paper explores the concept of trust as it plays out in international friendship. Intuitively, this may appear redundant, as trust is intrinsic to and, perhaps, the key feature of friendship. It is assumed to just ‘be there’ and expressed in practices such as the sharing of private information/secrets and in the expectation that friends will support each other in times of need. Yet precisely because trust is so central, and because ‘international friendship’ is not a straightforward phenomenon, we need to have a conceptual grasp on its meaning. This paper approaches this task in three steps: (i) reviewing different ways ‘trust’ can be conceptualised in general, (ii) developing a reading that is intertwined with the chosen ontology of ‘international friendship’, and (iii) clarifying its place in the logic explaining the formation and decline of such friendship. The aim of this contribution is to offer a nuanced reading of trust as having a cognitive, affective and normative layer that, ultimately, is anchored in time. It supports this with illustrations of how such trust plays out in international politics.
    
    Author: Felix Berenskötter (King's College London)
  - Shifting Paradigms: Analyzing the Concept of Friendship in US International Relations Media from Bush to Trump
    
    This paper examines the discursive deployment of “friends” and “friendship” in public-facing US international relations media. Instead of analyzing interstate relations against pre-figured understandings of what friendship is (and is not), the paper examines how a vision of “friendship” emerges and changes over seventeen years, from the final months of the George W. Bush administration to the early months of Donald Trump’s second administration. This timeframe allows for an analysis of how international relations media use the notion of friendship to indicate shifts in US international policy priorities and alliances. The primary sources for this study consist of documents obtained from a non-partisan international policy think tank and keyword-searched for friends and friendship. The anthropological-analytic adopted here maintains that to understand what people mean by “friendship,” one needs to observe how people deploy it. A preliminary finding suggests that US international relations media increasingly conceive friendship as fragile, flawed, and instrumental. The conclusion discusses the findings in the context of changing US domestic discourses about who and what to trust.
    
    Author: Amy Stambach (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
  - Friendship and Self-confidence in India’s evolving Israel policy
    
    This paper explores the role of friendship as a tool for boosting self-confidence among rising powers, focusing on India’s evolving foreign policy discourse. “Friendship” has recently become commonplace in India’s diplomatic lexicon, with leaders—including its Prime Minister—referring to India as Vishwa Mitra (friend of the world). This study draws on emerging literature on friendship in International Relations (IR) to understand how India leverages this notion to enhance its image as a confident, active participant in the international system. Rising powers like India experience “risingness” as a “socio-political condition” (Kristensen, 2019) that calls for self-confidence—a blend of self-affirmation, risk-taking, and a departure from established patterns of behavior—in order to legitimize their rise. This involves establishing meaningful relationships with major powers in ways that demonstrate trust and commitment. India’s recent tilt towards the West, despite its historical anti-West leanings, can be understood as a reflection of this phenomenon. Accordingly, this paper analyzes India’s changing foreign policy on Israel, a country with which it historically avoided forging close ties. It argues that recent and repeated public affirmations of friendship with Israel reflect India’s attempts to showcase self-confidence as a rising power, ready to break with tradition and announce its arrival on the world stage.
    
    Author: Shalabh Chopra (University of Canterbury)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Feminist critical engagements with culture, art and world politics Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  - Curation as method: on practice, care and un-sited (auto)ethnography
    
    Curation is a political practice as much as it an ethical and relational one. In IR and politics, curatorial practices have been the focus of scholars interested in exploring its connections with militarism and war, as well as political violence and subjecthood, more broadly. In these analyses, curation is predominantly dealt with as an empirical phenomenon. In contrast, this paper asks what can be gained by engaging with curation as a methodological practice, building on insights from the turn to creative practice in aesthetic politics. This paper draws on practice-based (auto)ethnographic insights from curating a visual art exhibition in early 2024, in collaboration with an artist exiled from Myanmar. Through a feminist ethics of care framework, I consider how curation is both a political and relational practice with implications beyond art and culture alone. I explore how curation as method opens up wider questions of un-sitedness, further problematizing the constitution of fundamental aspects of ethnographic inquiry such as: participants/interlocutors, the field, and positionality. I argue that utilizing a reflexive, feminist approach to care as an ethical entry point to curation provides a unresolved framework for acknowledging the impossibility of fully embodying a practice of care in structures of violence, power, and hegemony - but an ethics that still centers the orientation to persist, as a political imperative.
    
    Author: Sara Wong (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - A Korean-Chinese wave and Postfeminism in Thai Women’s Cosmetic Surgery
    
    Social scientists have adopted a gendered lens to investigate body modifications, including cosmetic surgery (CS). Wider discussions involve the impacts of geopolitics and sociopolitical notions upon aesthetic practices. This paper explores how such impacts manifest in CS amongst young Thai women, drawing on 50 online interviews and a poststructuralist feminist perspective. In a broad sense, postfeminism – a Western-originated concept characterised by independence and a neoliberal ethos – encapsulates interviewees’ CS stories. That is, self-improvement, individualised justifications, and de-politicisation (away from glaring patriarchal discourses) abound in such stories.
    
    The paper argues that a Korean-Chinese wave influences beauty-based individualisation/de-politicisation, demonstrating national/ethnic hierarchies and a neoliberal climate. The author uncovers the dominance of South Korea in CS experiences. This dominance refers to Korean media, plus the global image of Korea associated with CS specialism. As Chinese culture has long permeated Thai society, Chinese spirituality – plus socioeconomic privilege tied to Chinese ethnicity – also facilitate young Thai women’s self-beautification. By contrast, white Western and Japanese components are comparatively marginal in these participants’ accounts. This presentation would generally contribute to gendering international relations – particularly gender studies, global politics, sociology, and cultural studies.
    
    Author: Chalisa Chintrakarn (University of Birmingham)
  - Reimagining Value in Fast Fashion’s Waste Economy
    
    This paper explores how artistic interventions can subvert conventional notions of value within global garment supply chains, focusing on how artists and activists creatively repurpose waste to critique the dominance of fast fashion. In so doing, these practices reveal new possibilities for understanding value beyond buyer-driven commodity chains. Through examples of striking artistic interventions—such as transforming a clothing waste dump into a fashion runway—the paper demonstrates how waste can be reimagined and reclaimed, disrupting associations between fashion and the power of corporate control. These interventions not only highlight the environmental and social costs of fast fashion but also challenge the very production of waste, prompting a re-evaluation of what is considered valuable. The analysis draws upon feminist international political economy, which highlights the systemic devaluation and marginalisation of female labour and bodies, often cast aside as “waste” in the global economy. It also incorporates insights from feminist and queer studies of art and fashion, which explore how the reuse and repurposing of clothing resist conventional narratives of wasted lives and resources, and makes a wider contribution to discussions of resistance within studies of visual politics. Artistic and activist practices that repurpose discarded materials serve to reshape perceptions of value and agency, revealing value creation in fast fashion as a site of struggle - one that is marked by gendered contestations over the creation, and appropriation of value (and the power dynamics that reinforce them). Such interventions not only challenge the gendered and sexualised hierarchies embedded in global garment supply chains but also offer a vision for more sustainable and inclusive alternatives, inviting a discussion of how art as activism can disrupt capitalist logics of consumption and waste.
    
    Author: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
  - Shifting representations of WWII Romanian female aviators: A dual propaganda analysis of the White Squadron
    
    As BISA marks its 50th anniversary, it is an ideal moment to reflect on the evolution of international studies and the role of propaganda in shaping historical and political narratives. This paper engages with the intersection of history, memory, and politics in international studies, while addressing the gaps in war propaganda studies.
    
    The propaganda study, particularly in wartime, has piqued the interest of many researchers over the last decades. Furthermore, women’s portrayals in WWII propagandistic campaigns have attracted specialists from various fields, gender studies, gender politics, national identity, or memory studies.
    
    Existing research examines women’s roles through the lens of a single political regime, often overlooking the complex interplay of contrasting political ideologies. I aim to fill this gap by analyzing the dual instrumentalization of female pilots, specifically the White Squadron, within both Nazi and post-war communist propaganda in Romania. By examining this case study, I explore how gendered narratives were used by these two undemocratic regimes to manipulate public opinion, while also considering how the women themselves understood their roles in these conflicting political contexts.
    
    The White Squadron, a group of female pilots who served in medical evacuation and reconnaissance during WWII, was initially celebrated as symbols of national pride and female empowerment. However, after the communists took over, their image shifted dramatically: they were vilified as traitors, responsible for war crimes. This paper compares the propaganda narratives of both fascist and communist regimes, examining how each constructed the image of these women to align with their respective ideologies. Fascist propaganda portrayed them as heroes, while communist narratives framed them as enemies.
    
    In addition to state propaganda, this study analyzes the autobiographical memories of the female pilots through their diaries and testimonies, by investigating how these women navigated their dual roles as both symbols of national pride and betrayal.
    
    Author: Maria-Diana Petru (Charles University, Prague)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Foreign affairs, theoretical perspectives, and the domestic domain Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  
  Chair: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
  - The Promise and Peril of International-Backed Legal Reform
    
    International aid providers have long supported legislative drafting and reform in the Global South to advance the rule of law and promote human rights. By partnering with host states, they seek to pass regulations that transform non-state justice forums into something akin to the modern justice systems in the Global North (or rather an idealized version thereof). This paper explores the underlying logic of these initiatives before examining their empirical consequences. Ultimately, a review of internationally backed legal reform efforts finds that their impact is decidedly limited. International efforts to impose change almost never work. Worse they can provoke a backlash or disrupt existing, effective justice forums. When advances occur, they are generally modest and tend to hinge on whether the state supports those efforts and whether state and international activities are deemed legitimate by those legal authorities and their communities more broadly.
    
    Author: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
  - Determinants of Rebellion. Party Unity and Defense Policy in Italy (1994-2020)
    
    What determines members of parliaments’ (MPs) decision to vote against military missions abroad? Scholars of comparative politics have explored the factors influencing MPs’ propensity to rebellion from the party line. However, the specific attention devoted to rebel behaviours regarding foreign and defence policy remains limited. While the role of parties and cabinets has been extensively studied in the Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature, the attitudes of individual MPs have been largely overlooked. Yet, it is crucial to comprehend MPs’ stances toward troops’ deployment, explaining the drivers of their choices. This understanding not only enriches our comprehension of votes on missions abroad but also provides deeper insights into parties’ inner dynamics on military operations, underscoring the significant role of MPs in shaping foreign and defence policy.
    The manuscript focuses on Italian MPs’ roll-call votes from 1994 to 2020. Italy provides a fascinating case study: since the end of the Cold War, national participation in military missions has dramatically increased; nevertheless, not all missions encountered the favour of all MPs. Moreover, the case of Italy offers a stunning variation in terms of electoral laws, governments, and parties. Through a series of logit analyses, the paper examines the sociological and institutional causes leading MPs to adopt rebellious behaviours. A brand-new dataset on the Italian MPs’ peculiar characteristics (gender, age, background, number of mandates, and expertise) allows for identifying recurring patterns and assessing the impact of individual, partisan, and systemic determinants. Therefore, this study contributes to the current FPA (and parliamentary affairs) literature, providing among the first quantitative studies on MPs’ attitudes towards military missions.
    
    Authors: Fabrizio Coticchia (Università degli Studi di Genova)* , Francesco Baraldi (Università degli Studi di Genova)
  - Coalition Politics, Decisions on the Use of Force, and Political Survival – A Comparative Analysis
    
    This paper explores how considerations with domestic political survival shape coalition government decision-making on the use of military force. To this purpose, it extends the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision-making (PHT) to the study of coalition foreign policy in parliamentary democracies. PHT represents one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive-rationalist divide in Foreign Policy Analysis and posits a two-stage model of foreign policy-making: In the first stage, actors rely on a non-compensatory strategy as a cognitive shortcut to eliminate unacceptable alternatives and to reduce the decision-matrix. In the second stage, actors switch to a compensatory mode of information processing and select the remaining alternative which maximises expected utility. While there is broad agreement that the non-compensatory dimension on the first stage of PHT concerns the domestic repercussions of foreign policy, it is less clear how the theory should operationalise the ‘domestic politics’ dimension. The paper contributes to this debate for coalition governments and their decisions for or against the use of military force. Specifically, it suggests that the non-compensatory dimension in coalition foreign policy consists of the expected impact of foreign policy on coalition survival. The paper introduces different types of coalition governments and offers an illustrative case study to exemplify its theoretical argument.
    
    Authors: Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) , Kai Oppermann (Chemnitz University of Technology)*
  - Feminist Foreign Policy Meets Foreign Policy Analysis
    
    Over the past two decades an exciting and enriching theoretical and empirical debate on Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) has emerged. However, we contend that the first wave of the debate falls short in terms of explaining the causal mechanisms that might explain why FFP rises, endures and in some cases is abandoned. In an attempt to redress this and move the debate to its next agenda, we propose bringing FFP into conversation with FPA in relation to three key issues. Firstly, we argue that FFP scholarship should adopt an explicit conception of the state, which we contend it currently does not do. Secondly, there is value added to opening up the black box of the state and systematically exploring the effects that both domestic political and leader-focused factors could exert on the pursuit or rejection of FFPs. Thirdly, scholarship could shift the emphasis from the articulation to the implementation of FFPs. In so doing, the next FFP agenda could contribute to a greater understanding of the drivers of decision making, conflict and cooperation in international relations, in an era in which gender has become a flashpoint for contestation between international actors.
    
    Authors: Amnon Aran (City, University of London) , Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) , Karen E. Smith (LSE)*
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Hidden Spaces of Gender, Peace and Security: Panel Two Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: Hanna Ketola (Newcastle)
  
  Chair: Heidi Riley (University College Dublin)
  - Hidden yet ‘with people’: clandestinity and social reproduction in civil war
    
    This paper examines clandestinity as a relational dynamic of civil war. Building on feminist theories of social reproduction, we explore clandestinity as a set of practices that not only relies on but generates relationships, including affective ties. How is clandestinity as a set of practices pursued by armed groups variously in relation to the ‘people’ and in relation to the state? What kinds of relationships do these practices rely on and generate? We explore these questions with reference to the Maoist movement in Nepal, drawing on ethnographic research with ‘whole-timers’ who participated in the movement in as fighters, artists and political cadres. We illustrate how clandestine practices of sheltering and provisioning relied on gendered labour whilst generating crucial spaces for further mobilisation. We then delve deeper into how the whole-timers interpreted their relationship to the ‘people’, thereby offering crucial insights into the affective and ideological dimensions of clandestine mobilisation. Our paper advances a feminist theorisation of clandestinity that centres social reproductive labour and pushes the Conflict Studies scholarship to rethink how relationality is conceptualised in context of clandestine movements and civil war.
    
    Authors: Nabin Bibhas (Independent Researcher)* , Hanna Ketola (Newcastle)
  - Feasibility and Ethical Considerations of Using Photovoice to Explore the Experiences of Adivasi Women in Conflict Zones
    
    This paper examines the use of the photovoice method to study the experiences of Adivasi women in conflict-affected Chhattisgarh, India, focusing on the intersection of gender, violence, and resistance. The paper discusses how photovoice can empower marginalized voices by allowing participants to document their everyday lives and experiences of violence, resistance, and activism. In addition to presenting the methodological potential of photovoice, the paper explores the feasibility and ethical challenges of implementing this approach in a conflict zone. Key concerns include participant selection, the logistical difficulties of providing cameras and ensuring safe participation, and ethical dilemmas such as ensuring confidentiality, obtaining informed consent, and protecting participants from further harm in a politically volatile context. Through these considerations, the paper seeks feedback on the practical and ethical implications of using photovoice in sensitive and high-risk environments. The insights gained will contribute to refining the methodology and ensuring its ethical application in research on gender, peace, and conflict.
    
    Author: Bulbul Prakash (University of Manchester)
  - Maps, objects, and gendered stories: Discovering regional variations of peace in Sri Lanka
    
    Existing scholarship on victor’s peace and illiberal peacebuilding follow macro level analysis around state policies and practises, and therefore offer a singular narrative of peace. Everyday peacebuilding troubles this singular narrative and displaces peace, however, the analysis it offers is micro level and is focused on individual experiences. Consequently, there remains a critical gap in understanding variations of peace that arise from the interplay between individual experiences and overarching political processes at the regional level, and how these understandings are gendered. In order to build peace nationwide, we need methods through which we can grasp and make visible these varied manifestations of peace. Based on a study in post-military victory Sri Lanka, we show how a methodology based on objects and mapping used in focus group interviews could effectively tap into hidden personal stories and enable eliciting distinct ways in which women and men conceptualise and represent regional narratives of peace. In doing so, the paper problematises singular narratives of peace associated with state-centric peace processes and calls for a nuanced approach that is contoured to specific regional histories and gendered cultural and political conditions across the country.
    
    Authors: Nilanjana Premaratna (Newcastle University) , Malin Åkebo (Umeå University, Sweden)*
  - Feminist Fieldwork Ethics and Research on/with Female Combatants: Ethics is not a Burden!
    
    This paper examines the ethics of conducting fieldwork-based research on/with female combatants. We critically evaluate the benefits, challenges, and limitations of using ‘feminist fieldwork’ to explore the diverse and situated conflict experiences of women who joined fighting forces. Drawing on our experiences of undertaking fieldwork in conflict-affected Bosnia & Herzegovina, Liberia, and Nepal, we explore the key ethical challenges that feminist researchers may encounter before, during, and after fieldwork in sites of conflict. We explore key questions such as: how do we define ‘female combatant’, and therefore whose voices/experiences are included in our research? How can we construct knowledge about the complex realities and everyday lives of women and girls in armed groups, given that these experiences are so often written out the histories of war and armed conflict? We discuss the strategies that can be used to (co-)produce research on/with female combatants. Overall, our paper highlights the importance of continuously foregrounding ethics across the whole ‘life-cycle’ of a research project.
    
    Authors: Maria O'Reilly (Leeds Beckett University) , Punam Yadav (University College London) , Leena Vastapuu (Swedish Defence University (Sweden))
  - Emotional safety and sensitive topics. Towards a trauma sensitivity research approach
    
    Researchers of sensitive topics such as gendered aspects of peace and conflict need to address complex ethical issues – including psychological dimensions of their research – often with few resources or little awareness of the need for emotional safety and support (Howe 2022). This paper draws on my own experiences as qualitative field researcher, in particular from my current research project on the transgenerational travelling of war experiences. It asks: How can we increase the emotional safety of research participants and of researchers in projects with sensitive research topics? I argue that there is a need for a deeper understanding and awareness of trauma and for training in and the application of trauma-sensitive mindfulness skills in the area of peace and conflict studies. Research institutions have a responsibility not only to address emotional safety of research participants, but also of their researchers. Some academic institutions require the review of emotional safety through Research Ethics Committees (McKenzie et al. (2016), but this is usually research participant focussed and does not address the issue of what additional support is required for researchers to ensure their own well-being while working on trauma related topics (Williamson 2020). This paper proposes a trauma sensitive research framework including ‘trauma-informed methodologies’ and makes a contribution to the wider discussion of research ethics of fieldwork in the particular area of gender, peace and conflict.
    
    Author: Melanie Hoewer (University College Dublin, Ireland)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / How fascism and whiteness encounter territory, property and land Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Akanksha Mehta (Goldsmiths)
  - Reimagining International Studies: Decolonial Dangers and the Case of South Asia
    
    Over the past two decades, several International Studies scholars have powerfully argued that the discipline is ripe for decolonial critique and reimagining. However, there has not been sufficient attention paid to the “decolonial dangers” that Mignolo and Walsh warn against, particularly the risk of decoloniality being co-opted by the state. In this paper, I will build on my previous work on the dangers of decoloniality, which has focused on the rise of right-wing hyper-nationalism in India and its co-option of the decolonial framework to legitimise its agenda. I will address the question of how we can build a mestizo South Asian decolonial approach to International Studies as an answer to Deepak’s emphasis on Hinduism and Hindutva as the “authentically” indigenous framework for India and South Asia. Using decoloniality as my theoretical framework and Smith’s methodology of decolonial indigenous qualitative research, I will argue that there is room for a relational and mestizo approach to decolonising South Asian International Studies by exploring the relationality of diverse philosophical and spiritual ideas that have contributed to the distinctive culture of the sub-continent. I will contribute to International Studies scholarship by drawing on the insights of researchers from diverse disciplines who have suggested that decoloniality risks legitimising exclusionary ideas such as Hindutva. I will further explore how decoloniality can help to globalise International Studies while circumventing the dangers of decoloniality, using India and South Asia as a case to make broader claims for the discipline at large.
    
    Keywords: colonial; decolonial; decoloniality; Asia; non-Western; knowledge production; epistemologies
    
    Author: Saloni Kapur (FLAME University)
  - “White Indigeneity” in the Postcolonial World
    
    The politics of race and identity, while always important in modern politics, is particularly salient in current global politics. With the retreat of globalisation, the consolidation of the populist right and the return of discourses of sovereignty, nationalism and identity are now crucial for contemporary political contestation. This paper investigates the importance of white identity through the counter-intuitive lens of the politics of indigeneity, placing this new articulation in the context of previous forms of colonial/post-colonial racial politics. It traces the evolution of colonial governance in Southern African settler states during the early 20th century from the civilizing mission, the indirect rule, before examining the current popularity of what I call “white indigeneity”. This rising articulation of whiteness takes on the mantles of minority and indigeneity, appropriating forms of anticolonial politics that were formerly resisted by the right. By examining the shifts, both in the political economy of settler colonial politics, and the political identity attached to them, the paper draws out the distinctiveness of current forms of right-wing whiteness, which emphasise the mistakes of colonialism, racial separation, and expulsion, rather than control and exploitation. By looking at colonial discourses of race in the British Empire, South African and Zimbabwe, the argument uses the extremes of settler colonial forms of politics to illuminate the broader global forms of politics that are popular among the global right.
    
    Author: Farai Chipato (University of Glasgow)
  - “Ridiculous Germany:” the Colonial, Land, and Claims of Decolonization
    
    In the context of Germany’s undying support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Daniel Denvir recently asserted that “Germany has become without question one of the world’s most ridiculous countries.” Germany’s sponsorship of Israel runs parallel to its engagement with demands to account for its colonial history, which it does primarily through the idea of “Aufarbeiten” – (to “process” / “catch-up on”). Drawing on Indigenous, decolonial, and abolitionist theorizations of the colonial, this paper analyses the nature and extent of this engagement and what it reveals about how Germany perceives this colonial history and present. The paper evaluates these claims by studying three different spaces that differently implicate Germany: Palestine, Tanzania, and Mexico. Germany is one of the strongest allies of Israeli settler colonialism today. Further, German entities advance the anti-Indigenous “Tren Maya” in southern Mexico and land grabbing for fortress conservation in Tanzania. The paper argues that any engagement with the colonial must centre the question of land. When applied to Palestine, Tanzania, and Mexico, Germany appears to have not only failed to embark on a pathway toward redressing the colonial, but instead is actively advancing settler colonialism, coloniality, and racial capitalism. As such, this paper engages with one of the most pressing problems in international studies today: how does the colonial manifest in an international order in perma-crisis?
    
    Author: Felix Mantz (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)
  - Becoming Property: (Dis)possession and the Making of International Order
    
    This paper looks at the ways in which colonial and modern ideas of property and possession structure international politics. Addressing a certain elision in International Relations (IR) theory concerning the role of property in global dynamics of power and security, the paper contends that looking at property can further IR's understanding of key dimensions of international order. In conversation with postcolonialism and race studies, this paper starts by addressing the foundations behind the idea of modern property, illuminating its enmeshment with racial-colonial dynamics of subjugation, exploitation, and accumulation. It then explains how colonial imaginaries of property and property-making practices were involved in the making, reproduction, and policing of the so-called modern international order. Specifically, it shows how (dis)possession, as both a process of making property and dispossessing others, was central to the production of modern sovereignty and the constitution of global colour lines, two foundational pillars of our (post)colonial international order. The paper finalises by illustrating how a critical engagement with ideas of property as simultaneously an idea, object, and praxis can advance and bridge contemporary debates on coloniality and race in IR.
    
    Author: Tarsis Brito (London School of Economics)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Laboratories or worldmakers? What are the Balkans in and for International Studies? Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  The Balkan peninsula has long been of interest to International Relations scholars, perceived as turbulent, fragmented lands where some of the world’s most pressing problems can be observed; Europe’s ‘other’ (Todorova 1997); and an interesting case study through which different International Relations theories can be tested. At the level of international law and policy, the Balkans have for the longest time been ‘a site of experimentation’ (Tzouvala 2014) of new techniques, models and projects. To illustrate, the former Yugoslavia was the first one to be subject to an UN Security Council-established ad-hoc international criminal tribunal and has since become one of the main ‘recipients’ of the global transitional justice project; a justice ‘laboratory’. Yet, more recently, scholars from the Balkans have sought to amend some of these epistemic injustices and alleviate some of the epistemic violence by, among others, highlighting the agency of Balkan people as epistemic subjects and not merely epistemic objects, and the Balkans as a site of theory building and not merely theory testing in International Relations (Kušić 2021; Stavrevska et al. 2023).
  This roundtable gathers Balkan scholars across career stages, theoretical and methodological approaches, geographical locations and ethnicities, to reflect on the place and the role of the Balkans in the past 50 years of International Relations scholarship. The panellists will discuss what the Balkans have been in and for International Relations in the past decades, reflecting on major ‘trends’, ‘debates’ and ‘turns’ in the scholarship and drawing on examples, anecdotes and illustrations from their research and professional experiences. In line with the conference theme, the panellists will also discuss potential new and improved research avenues, imagining what the Balkans could be for International Relations of the future.
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Chair: Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
  
  Participants: Maja Davidovic (Cardiff University) , Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol) , Agata Domachowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University) , Vjosa Musliu (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB))
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Local productions of security Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Alice Finden
  - The Local Security Entrepreneur
    
    In the wake of the introduction of counter-radicalisation initiatives such as the Prevent Duty, a new cadre of local-level national security actors emerged: the ‘local security entrepreneur’. These are figures who were made responsible for the delivery of counter-radicalisation initiatives within their local area, or their organisation, often without a formal background in security or law enforcement. These individuals were required to develop a range of expertise relating to the signs of extremist behaviour or attitudes, the ways in which to effectively feed local ‘intelligence’ into national security frameworks, and how to effectively instil security policies within their area or workforce. In some instances, they became responsible for delivering training to others placed in these roles, and served as a vital conduit of information about how and why counter-radicalisation measures work.
    
    This paper examines the local security entrepreneurs through semi-structured interviews with a range of frontline actors who took leading roles in delivering the Prevent Duty in Scotland. This paper shows how these figures adopted an entrepreneurial spirit in the ways in which they created social networks, teaching resources and narrative frameworks as they wrestled with their new responsibilities. In doing so, it examines how Prevent (and other national-level counter-radicalisation strategies) adapt, and are adapted, to the local, and how this can disharmonise security strategy in small but important ways. It concludes by reflecting on whether these local adaptations are necessary, and to what extent they affect counter-radicalisation at a national level.
    
    Author: Nick Brooke (University of St Andrews)
  - Community as a site of counter-terror governance
    
    In December 2022, the Mayor of London announced ‘record funding’ for grassroots community groups to tackle extremism and hate crime. This reinforces the state narrative that ‘communities’ are ideal partners for pre-emptive counter-terrorism work and has been the driving force behind policing slogans like ‘communities defeat terrorism’. Given the amorphous nature of the term ‘community’, the shifting of security responsibilities downwards can range from nation-wide campaigns calling for mass vigilance to programmes that provide funding to charities for doing counter-terrorism work. As a result, we have seen community-based organisations (CBOs) that provide important social support, like housing advice or language proficiency courses, relying on funding from the Home Office for incorporating counter-extremism work in their daily activities. This paper will analyse the now-defunct Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT) programme that provided funding to CBOs for carrying out different counter-extremism activities. While the programme is no longer active, it provides useful insights into how the British state has tried to sanitise counter-terroism in the community as care-based work while perpetuating racialised surveillance practices. The programme demonstrates how Orientalist tropes are deployed to identify risks and reframe social issues like forced marriage and female genital mutilation as ‘extremist’ risks to national security. As the new UK government is starting work on yet another counter-extremism strategy, it is important to reflect on previous interventions in this area so we can be aware of the risks associated with such initiatives.
    
    Author: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  - Supporting self-surveillance: teachers safeguarding pupils from the Prevent Duty Guidance.
    
    British teachers are mandated to implement the Prevent Duty Guidance, by identifying and referring those deemed to be ‘at risk of’ ’extremism and radicalisation (HM Government,2023). Since Prevent statistics commenced, schools have consistently made approximately one third of all the referrals; the majority out of all the designated authorities, including the police (Home Office, 2023).
    
    The framing of the duty in formal policy and professional directives as an unexceptional extension of established safeguarding responsibilities, has eased its accommodation into institutions, including the educational sector (Heath-Kelly and Strausz, 2018). Teachers’ compliance with the duty, is therefore, interpreted by some academics as indicative of the broad ‘acceptance’ of the absorption of counter terrorism into routine safeguarding practices (Thomas, 2024), however, this overlooks the power of the mandatory status of the policy, as articulated in professional directives (DfE, 2021; Ofsted, 2019).
    
    Notwithstanding revisions and reviews of the policy, a number of tenacious criticisms of it endure, some of which are especially pertinent for practitioners’ working in the education sector; the reinforcement of Islamophobia and the chilling effect of the policy on human rights (Amnesty International, 2023; Scott-Bauman, 2020). Rather than alleviating the problem of the disproportionate number of Muslim pupils referred to Prevent, which culminate in ‘no further action’ or the increasing number of referrals of children who display solidarity with Palestine (Amnesty International, 2023, p.3; NEU, 2024), the IRP ushered in repressive recommendations which intensify anti-Muslim sentiment and silence critical speech (Shawcross, 2023, p.6-9)
    
    Informed by empirical data generated by qualitative interviews with frontline practitioners, this paper argues that teachers resist and rework Prevent including by supporting pupil ‘self-surveillance’ practices (Mythen, Walklate and Khan, 2012). This paper argues therefore that practitioners’ enactments of the mandatory policy, are sensitive forms of anti-colonial resistance which safeguard racialised communities from primary harms and iatrogenic harms.
    
    Author: Jane Horton (University of Liverpool)
  - Deconstructing terrorism and reintegration: A qualitative study of community attitude towards the reintegration of former Boko Haram members and their families in Nigeria
    
    Terrorism is an issue of global concern, and the use of the term is widely contested with no agreed definition. Yet, there exists a paucity of research on how affected communities construe terrorism as a language and construct in informing attitude towards the reintegration of those once affiliated with terrorism and their families from a critical terrorism perspective. Drawing on a Critical Terrorism Studies lens and underpinned by social constructionist and social identity theories, the study dissects how the language of ‘terrorism’ is used in problematic and contested terms to decide, justify and sustain who gets labelled as unrepentant terrorists and reaction towards reintegration. The study drew on empirical data collected from 150 participants recruited from Borno, Adamawa and Plateau states in Nigeria. It also finds that factors such as government responses to repentant terrorists seem to influence how terrorism is construed, distrust in government reintegration approach, and the inadvertent labelling of former Boko Haram members and their families as terrorists underserving of forgiveness and reintegration. The study also found affected community resentment and a quest for harsher punishment and responses to such groups due to perceived government support in incentives to encourage desistance from terrorism whilst affected communities and those in internally displaced persons camps are left to languish in poverty. In conclusion, the study calls for and recommends a better conceptualisation and fair usage of the term ‘terrorism’ to avoid the blanket extension and negative adverse impact on former Boko Haram members and affected families with implications for undermining government reintegration efforts.
    
    Authors: Tarela Juliet Ike (Teeside University) , Evangelyn Ebi Ayobi (National Open University) , Mieyebi Lawrence Ike (Southern New Hampshire University)*
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Norms, Politics and Law: Processes, Intentions and Impacts Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: ILPG Working group
  
  Chair: Melek Saral (Social Sciences University of Ankara and University of Warwick)
  
  Discussant: Melek Saral (Social Sciences University of Ankara and University of Warwick)
  - Solving the soft law riddle: insights from IR theory
    
    Over the last 20 years there has been a pronounced reduction in the amount of binding, or hard, international law being produced by states. States have grown wary of creating hard international law and have begun to prefer softer, non-binding alternatives. International legal theory has struggled with how to theorise soft international law because of its non-binding nature. And yet the majority of international legal theory accounts of soft law do see it as international law, rather than simply political agreements between states and therefore in the province of IR, often theorising it as a lay-over on the way to hard law. But this ignores the reason soft law has proliferated in the first place: states are reluctant to be bound. Theorising soft law as simply a version of hard law is limited and international legal theorists have struggled to account of soft law’s compliance pull or normativity. This is where IR theory, specifically constructivist and English School understandings of normativity and international society, can provide insight. They can offer ways to understand normativity that do not rely upon bindingness but offer deeper ideas of normativity as drawing upon social norms, erasing the conceptual divide between legal and social norms.
    
    Author: Adriana Sinclair (University of East Anglia)
  - Toothless tigers? The pitfalls of applying regional democracy clauses
    
    Since the end of the Cold War, a growing number of regional organisations (ROs) around the world have formally adhered to democracy as common norm and have adopted institutionalised mechanisms to protect it, often referred to as democracy clauses. Yet, their mere existence does not tell us much about the actual application of those clauses in response to democratic erosion or breakdown. Regional democracy clauses are often political declarations, and even if legally binding, their application is highly inconsistent and politicised. Based on empirical research on ROs in Latin America and a comparative assessment of evidence from Europe and Africa, this paper explores why ROs so often find themselves at an impasse concerning the application of their democracy clauses. I argue that the application of democracy clauses and thus the mitigation of democratic crises is often impeded by norm contestations over the meaning of democracy and power contestations between states in the region, both of which fuel the politicisation of decision-making within ROs. At the same time, politicisation is reinforced by deficiencies in the institutional design of democracy clauses, creating a vicious circle.
    
    Author: Brigitte Weiffen (The Open University)
  - In the name of Religious Freedom: Transnational Religious Mobilization in the Organization of American States (OAS)
    
    Religious freedom is important in the construction of international global history and its definition has been taken for granted in legal and political institutions worldwide as a universal and democratic principle. It is endorsed in legal and public policy circles around the world, such as constitutions, state offices of religious affairs, and international law. How do international organizations and civil society groups interpret the right to freedom of religion or belief in the (Latin)Americas? How these definitions and interpretations are inspired in the circulation of ideas between the United States and Latin America, or between Europe and Latin America? In this paper, I delve into the mobilization of the concept of “religious freedom” at the Organization of American States (OAS). I argue that transnational religious networks (Evangelicals and Catholics) from the Americas have mobilized and strategized the discourse of religious freedom in three different ways: Firstly, at the General Assembly of the OAS, particularly, the speeches of the Civil Society Dialogue when arguing conservative discourses to backlash against gender rights by using the language of human rights. Secondly, as lobbying for the “Resolution of Religious Freedom” with high-representatives. Thirdly, through two cases of transnational legal mobilization by religious networks at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: the Case Pavez Pavez vs. Chile; and Case Beatriz and others vs. El Salvador. This paper seeks to contribute that there is no single and static use of the concept of “religious freedom” by transnational networks in the Americas because they are using different strategies to mobilize their political and moral agenda.
    
    Author: Ely Orrego Torres (Northwestern University)
  - Revisiting Indivisibility of Human Rights: Prioritization of Rights and Norm Evolution in Transitional Countries
    
    The evolution of human rights norms in transitional countries is a complex and multifaceted process that involves shifts in legal, political, and societal frameworks. Transitional countries, defined by their movement from authoritarian or conflict-ridden regimes to more democratic or stable governance systems, face significant challenges in shaping human rights practices and standards. Central to this process is the prioritization of certain human rights over others, often driven by political, economic, and social factors. While the universalism of human rights suggests that all rights are indivisible, many transitional states face the reality of limited resources, competing priorities, and varying public demands that necessitate a hierarchy in the implementation of rights. This paper examines the dynamics of human rights norm evolution in transitional contexts, analyzing how political actors, legal frameworks, and social movements contribute to the prioritization of certain rights and how these choices shape the development of human rights norms both domestically and internationally. By exploring the causes and implications of rights prioritization, this research aims to contribute to the broader understanding of how human rights norms evolve in contexts of political transition, and how such transitions influence the international human rights discourse. This paper will use Tunisia as a case study to illustrate the real-world application of these theoretical concepts, exploring how the country’s post-uprising transformation has shaped the evolution of human rights norms and priorities.
    
    Author: Melek Saral (Social Sciences University of Ankara and University of Warwick)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Nuclear Weapons and Regional Security: Ideas and Challenges Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford) , Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University)
  
  Chair: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  - Nuclear Stewardship and AUKUS: Australia’s New Role
    
    This paper interrogates the multiple dimensions of Australia’s stewardship of weapons-grade uranium. In September 2021, AUKUS was announced - a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). Most notably, Pillar One of the AUKUS deal comprises the exchange of nuclear-powered submarines and highly enriched or “weapons grade” uranium (HEU) to Australia. The transfer of HEU to a non-nuclear weapons state (NNWS) is unprecedented and has inspired debate about the impact of AUKUS on an already stressed non-proliferation regime. Therefore, this paper interrogates the multiple dimensions of Australia’s responsible nuclear stewardship of these materials. This paper utilises a document analysis to examine social and institutional challenges, such as attaining a social licence domestically, the role of nuclear legacies, and international commitments. It also presents recommendations on how Australia might address these challenges. Overall, Australia will have new responsibilities to address - that extend beyond technical and operational factors - if it is to be a responsible nuclear steward of HEU.
    
    Author: Natasha Karner (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
  - Unmaking a Nuclear Commitment: The Bureaucratic Politics behind Germany’s Failed 2009/2010 Nuclear Sharing Withdrawal Initiative
    
    Bureaucratic politics plays a significant, though often understated, role in shaping nuclear policy within states and alliances. This paper applies this framework to examine a pivotal episode in German nuclear policymaking: then-Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle’s 2009/2010 initiative to remove U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons from Germany. Since Greece’s withdrawal in 2001, this initiative marked the first and only instance in which government actors from a European nuclear sharing state—not merely its parliament—pursued withdrawal as an official policy, enshrined in a coalition agreement. Despite early momentum, the initiative ultimately stalled due to opposition from key bureaucratic actors within both the United States and Germany, notably the German Chancellery and the Foreign Office itself. Drawing on elite interviews and newly accessed archival material from the German Foreign Office, this study traces the interdepartmental negotiations, conflicting interests, and strategic pressures that shaped the initiative’s trajectory. In exploring this case, the analysis highlights the role of bureaucratic agency in nuclear alliance management and considers its broader implications for democratic accountability.
    
    Author: Franziska Stärk (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy Hamburg)
  - Political Sources of Nuclear Strategy: India 1988-2008
    
    While India presented a systematic plan for universal nuclear disarmament to the UN General Assembly in 1988, it conducted nuclear tests in 1998, and subsequently negotiated the India-US Nuclear Agreement (2008). Nuclear decision-making is entwined with strategic as well as diplomatic considerations; but when do states adapt nuclear strategy for cooperation, and when for confrontation? The paper examines variations in Indian nuclear diplomacy by integrating insights from Diplomatic History, Strategic Studies, and Comparative Politics through a FPA (Foreign Policy Analysis) lens. It identifies domestic politics as a crucial variable therein and argues that the matter is not whether domestic politics influence changes in nuclear diplomacy, but rather how and when. The period between 1988 to 2008 represents a crucial phase in Indian history, as India navigated the post-Cold War landscape as a rising power and the accompanying choices, themes and tensions continue to shape Indian diplomacy. Based on 36 elite interviews and archival sources across multiple sites within India, this exercise historicizes and expands the understanding of diplomacy in a rising power in tandem with the parallel reconfigurations of global order and domestic politics. Such an exercise contests conventional understandings of nuclear strategy and widens the conceptual and empirical template of nuclear proliferation and security studies with historical grounding.
    
    Author: Shounak Set (KCL)
  - The foreign policy of a progressive realist power: The UK’s role in the global nuclear order
    
    UK foreign, defence and security policy is in another critical period of renewal of its nuclear deterrent in what policymakers interpret as an increasingly challenging international order. Whilst the election of the Labour government promises change, its “progressive realism” in foreign policy unsurprisingly appears to represent much more continuity with previous Conservative governments in the field of nuclear deterrence. However, with pressure on the UK’s defence expenditure, and reports of increasing costs in the production of the new Dreadnought submarines, there remains fundamental questions regarding the UK’s place in the global nuclear order, and global order more broadly. This paper examines this complex relationship between the UK’s nuclear deterrent and global role at this crucial point in its foreign, defence and security policy. Whilst accepting that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is, and will continue, to form a core part of its defence and security identity in international relations, this paper argues that the UK is facing a fundamental dilemma in its foreign policy. This dilemma is between the necessity to retain its status as a nuclear power at significant expense, while facing domestic and international pressure to increase its defence expenditure and capabilities beyond its deterrent in a demanding political and economic climate. This paper argues that how the UK navigates this dilemma in the coming years will have significant implications for its role in the global nuclear order.
    
    Author: Blake Lawrinson (University of Leeds)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / On Decolonial IR: Perspectives from India Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Convener: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)
  
  Chair: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)
  - Perils of Decolonizing IR: The Hegemony of Dharma
    
    Relational concepts carry the potential of taking the discipline beyond Eurocentrism. However, the way relational concepts are integrated with civilization superiority needs to be problematized. The paper identifies problems/omissions at four levels: (a) translation practices where indigenous terms end up seeking convergence with existing Eurocentric concepts, or are mistranslated; (b) romanticizing the past to the extent of ignoring/overlooking negative elements; (c) hegemonizing majoritarian ideas at the cost of subsuming or marginalizing alternate narrative; and (d) effort to replace Eurocentrism with different variants of ethnocentrism.
    While the problems of Eurocentrism have been debated much in the past few decades and decolonial theories do provide a possible way out, it is pertinent to address the problems identified above. In this direction, the paper seeks to engage with marginalized alternate narratives. Rooted in critical theoretical tradition, the paper explores ideas/concepts that carry emancipatory intent. It focusses specifically on the concept of Dharma rooted in the Hindu civilization. It engages with its multiple meanings and different connotations with an effort to seek non-hegemonic relationality. The concept of Dharma is examined in relation to the problems/challenges identified above. The paper concludes by locating the possibility of decolonizing with a focus on vernacularization and pluriversality.
    
    Author: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)
  - Decolonizing the Canon of Just War Theory
    
    Just War Theory has been predominantly developed within Western philosophical traditions, often neglecting indigenous and non-Western perspectives on conflict and justice. This exclusion can reinforce colonial narratives by dismissing the legitimacy of resistance movements against imperial powers as unjust due to the neglect of indigenous and non-Western perspectives in Just War Theory. Just War Theory had roots with Roman Empire dominance over the communities outside the pax Romana, holy Christianity of Augustine and Aquinas against non-Christian communities, and justification of colonial violence for the conquest of the "New World," as evidenced in the works of influential figures such as Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, who significantly contributed to its early principles. Their works often justified the subjugation of indigenous peoples, portraying it as necessary under the guise of moral and civilizational imperatives. This article explored the concept of just war within natural law, transitioning it from the theological realm to a secularization and universalization context. This shift constructs the legitimate authority of Eurocentric states within the framework of justifying war. From a decolonial perspective, the article critically analyzes the theological, philosophical, and socio-political structure of Just War Theory. Further, this article examines the difference between 'rightness' and 'legality' to explore how concepts like international law and universal law affect the freedom of indigenous peoples by reinforcing the Eurocentric legitimacy of wars through natural law.
    
    Author: Ningthoujam Koiremba Singh (University of Delhi)
  - Decolonizing World Order: A Pluriversal Intervention
    
    This paper explores the concept of decolonising the world order through a pluriversal lens, proposing a radical reimagining of global power structures to honor diverse epistemologies and dismantle colonial legacies. Conventional international systems, rooted in colonial histories and Western-centric paradigms, often marginalize non-Western cultures, knowledge systems, and worldviews. A pluriversal intervention seeks to challenge this by advancing a world order that respects the coexistence of multiple ways of knowing and being. Drawing on decolonial theory, postcolonial critiques, and examples from indigenous and Global South perspectives, this paper advocates for a more inclusive approach to global governance, economics, and cultural exchange. Such an approach promotes the genuine plurality of values, institutions, and practices that reflect the world’s diverse communities and histories. By fostering inter-epistemic dialogue and equitable structures, a pluriversal world order would not only dismantle hierarchical and exclusionary practices but also cultivate a sustainable and just global community, responsive to the unique needs and aspirations of all. This paper offers both a theoretical framework and practical pathways for advancing pluriversality in international relations and beyond.
    
    Author: Archita Sharma (University of Delhi)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Operationalising peace building and stabilisation Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: david curran (Coventry University)
  
  Chair: david curran (Coventry University)
  - Experiments in Liberation: Reimagining political community beyond the State in Somaliland and Rojava
    
    Over the past few decades, scholarship on 'ungoverned spaces', or 'areas of limited statehood', has expanded dramatically. Such studies generally focus on those armed or rebellious actors who seek to reproduce or replace the State with some equally hierarchical, coercively-controlled entity. In a few notable instances, however, historical circumstances have emerged that are favourable to radical experiments in alternative governance models. This paper will look at two such cases -- Somaliland and Rojava: the former an improvised peace compact between clans, the latter an ideologically inspired project of democratic confederalism. Despite surfacing under relatively different circumstances, with Somaliland, an isolated African nation, established following state collapse, and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, existing amidst a multipronged anti-state insurgency, a transnational jihadist movement, and the central government, the two political entities also exhibit certain interesting parallels. The paper, which draws upon the respective area specialisms of the two co-authors, will offer a comparative analysis of Somaliland and Rojava, in order to better understand the distinct imaginaries and practices of political community that such non-State experiments operate under. The goal will be to explore the prospects for alternative political and territorial models that go beyond stabilisation and elite compact, and which also work to address, at least to a certain extent, issues of egalitarianism and justice.
    
    Authors: Regine Schwab , Matthew Gordon (Independent Scholar)
  - Legitimacy and Stabilisation: A Local Perception Survey in Mosul
    
    The past decade has witnessed an intensified debate around the urgency to resort to stabilisation efforts in order to address the challenges posed by conflict and terrorism. Despite its conceptual ambiguity, stabilisation has gained ground as an international practice and its meanings have undergone a process of gradual adaptation. Initially interpreted as part of ad hoc military coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has since been integrated in UN peacekeeping missions in Congo, Mali and CAR. More recently, it has evolved as predominantly civilian-led efforts in diverse contexts such as post-Islamic State Iraq, the Lake Chad region, and Mozambique. Scholarly literature underscores that stabilization efforts in conflict-affected contexts deviate from previous peacebuilding or statebuilding approaches in several key aspects. Notably, they highlight how stabilization prioritises security over transformative objectives such as democratic change and envisions a diminshed role for traditional intervening actors. In an effort to broaden the discussion on the potential of stabilisation, this paper investigates how stabilisation efforts not only entail a change in objective, but also in the relationship and dynamics among actors at the international, regional, national, and local levels. How these actors are perceived locally then become key in order to assess the achievement of stabilization efforts. Through a case study of stabilisation efforts in Mosul following its liberation from the Islamic State, the paper presents the results of a local perceptions survey conducted in the city in November-December 2023. Based on the findings, the paper argues that local perceptions of stabilization are influenced by people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the actors involved in stabilization.
    
    Author: Irene Costantini (University of Naples L'Orientale)
  - Understanding the relationship between social welfare, peace and conflict in the MENA region
    
    The relationship between social welfare and peace is complex, bidirectional, and sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, social welfare programmes may improve state legitimacy, enhance social cohesion, or reduce horizontal inequalities, all of which may in turn reduce the likelihood of conflict. On the other hand, armed conflict or other forms of societal violence are likely to undermine social welfare and social protection systems, making them more politicised and undermining their effectiveness by eroding public trust and state capacity, reducing available financing for social welfare, or by increasing the extent of external engagement. In conflict settings, elites are more likely to establish social welfare schemes in ways that benefit their own social group, a dynamic which can exacerbate conflict. Inadequate services may generate conflict in the form of violent or non-violent protests. Conversely, wars may create moments of opportunity where new rules of the political game can be established, when public expectations about the role of the state change, and where political leaders have space to make radical changes to the social contract.
    
    In this paper, we show that the bi-directional relationship between social welfare provision and conflict have been connected in existing work by four main mechanisms (state and non-state legitimacy, social cohesion, horizontal inequalities, and economic development), which in turn are shaped by two further factors (the design of the social welfare programme, and the underlying political settlement). We advocate a more contextualised approach and illustrate the potential of this approach by exploring the relationship in the MENA region, drawing on comparative research in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. Our analysis demonstrates the limitations of Weberian approaches to the state, emphasising how in many MENA countries, states rest on transactional models of governance based around clientelism and authoritarian bargains, which heavily condition the relationship between social welfare and conflict.
    
    Author: Oliver Walton (University of Bath)
  - Supporting Self-determination to End Civil Wars: Why It Is Uncommon but Not Unseen among Western States
    
    Many rebels fighting for secession demand a referendum on independence. Even though the international community is usually unwilling to support self-determination in peace processes, there are rare cases where mediators and other international actors supported self-determination to resolve civil wars. How can we explain this variation?
    As a contribution to the literature on the resolution of self-determination conflicts and the burgeoning literature on state recognition, this article aims at understanding why Western states, the most powerful group in the international community, support self-determination in peace processes in rare cases. This article argues that their support for self-determination has been seen when three conditions were met: (1) the resolution of the conflict is essential for Western states, (2) self-determination is the only feasible option to resolve the conflict, and (3) Western states hoped that the peace agreement containing the clause on self-determination does not necessarily lead to secession.
    Utilizing extensive original interviews with Western policy makers involved in mediation processes, the author’s argument is discussed through four deviant cases where Western states supported self-determination in peace processes: Bougainville, Eritrea, Kosovo, and Southern Sudan.
    
    Author: Kentaro Fujikawa (Nagoya University, Japan)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Participatory Action Research and the Future of IR Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Juan Mario Díaz (University of Sheffield)
  
  Chair: Juan Mario Díaz (University of Sheffield)
  - Hybrid Ethnography: A Framework for Studying Hybrid Agreement Making Spaces
    
    In response to COVID-19 lockdowns various political processes embraced hybrid operating modalities (synchronous online and in-person options). Though in-person events have returned, international agreement making spaces (Hughes et al., 2021) continue to utilize digital technologies for participation. This has implications for political processes and for those researching them. What are the effects of hybrid modalities for researchers studying agreement making? How does the incorporation of online modalities shift possibilities of social science research? Informed by an ethnographic sensibility, participant observation has been a core method in scholarship on international negotiations (Campbell et al., 2014; Vanhala et al., 2022). I argue that social science researchers can research politics of power, representation, and agreement making processes through participant observation of hybrid field sites. I provide a framework for scholars wishing to research hybrid agreement making sites. From 2021-2024 I have conducted a multi-sited hybrid ethnography of a working group within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While most research on the UNFCCC is conducted by scholars using a unimodal, in-person approach, one third of the total participants in the UNFCCC’s ad-hoc work program on the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance participated virtually. This paper highlights the importance of studying hybrid spaces and provides a framework for scholars seeking to conduct hybrid ethnography.
    
    Author: Diana Elhard (Northwestern University)
  - Paper 2: Understanding citizen agency through extending epistemologies.
    
    This paper argues that the privileging of certain kinds of knowledge in global, development and international studies results in blind spots in terms of understandings of the individual and collective that shape citizen agency. It also limits the scope for equitable international research relationships. Participatory research processes can offer opportunities for marginalised groups to reflect on lived experience and construct knowledge, using a range of methods that enable different ways of knowing to be expressed. This knowledge can subsequently be brought into dialogue with other forms of knowledge, and with policymakers (Howard, Ospina and Yorks, 2021). In PAR, the process that leads up to engagement with duty bearers is crucial; it is where communicative confidence is grown, and divergent views can be expressed and acknowledged in order to move towards a sense of collective, and capacity for collaborative action (Shaw, Howard & Lopez-Franco, 2020). This paper will draw on research conducted in Uganda, Ghana, India, Colombia and the UK, which worked with marginalised groups to analyse their experiences and to engage with dutybearers to build more accountable relationships. The paper will reflect on how an extended epistemology can on one hand deepen understandings of citizen agency, and on the other hand inform democratic research practice (Brydon Miller 2008).
    
    Author: Jo Howard (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex)
  - Paper 3: Undoing hierarchies in IR and PACS: Through critical pedagogies and PAR
    
    The basic foundations of International Relations (IR) and Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) were broadly conceived in the Northern Hemisphere. The theoretical and conceptual frameworks devised to explain the realities of the North have been conveniently appropriated to study conflicts in the Global South, namely Africa, Latin America, South Asia or South-East Asia. The result has been an explanatory deficit; the quest to understand and explain the conflictual realities of the Global South, the subtle distinctions which would have required indigenised conceptions, theorisation and methods, have been squeezed-into the context specific conceptions of the North. This necessitates the need to explore critical method(ologies) like participatory action research (PAR) more strongly rooted in the epistemes and ground-realities of the Global South to deal with the hierarchies in PACS and IR. This paper is a starting conversation to identify how IR and PACS can use PAR, as a methodology from the Global South to examine, understand and undo (post) colonial hierarchies while contributing to de/post-colonial praxis. Through empirical insights from PAR projects in India, the paper advocates for critical global perspectives to decolonize dominant conceptions of the ‘global’, the ‘international’, ‘peace’ and ‘conflict’ that have privileged specific forms of knowledge (re) production while also bringing in cross racial/ethnic solidarities against dominant ways of thinking, knowing, doing and being.
    
    Author: Siddharth Tripathi (Universität Erfurt)
  - Paper 4: The Coloniality of Doctoral Research in IR: The need for a participatory and decolonial praxis.
    
    Recent calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have underscored the need to conduct research not on, but with and for historically marginalised voices. Participatory and collaborative methodologies offer a practical way forward by centring co-created, context-specific research grounded in reciprocity, relationality and experiential knowledge. Despite a recent surge of interest in Participatory Action Research (PAR) across the Social Sciences, researchers have largely overlooked the importance of PAR in doctoral research, as well as the difficulties of implementing it at this level. Based on autoethnographic reflection and existing literature, this paper highlights the situated challenges of doing participatory doctoral research in IR, including the institutional, structural, financial, and temporal constraints. It argues that the structure of conventional PhD programmes reinforces extractive, colonial dynamics by prioritising individualism and rapid data collection over meaningful, collaborative engagement throughout the research process. The paper offers tangible examples for PhD researchers on how to embed the values of PAR in their work, as well as more radical suggestions for rethinking the structure of doctoral research programmes to encourage, normalise, and support a participatory and thus decolonial praxis. If we are to move beyond colonial and hegemonic methodologies in IR we must embed collaborative, dialogical, and horizontal research practices that disrupt traditional power imbalances early on in the research process. This requires a radical reimagination of doctoral research from the ground up.
    
    Author: Bryony Vince-Myers (University of Sheffield)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Peace, Conflict, and Development Room 5, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Convener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  
  Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  - Sierra Leone and Peace Education: a case study of transportation poverty in the aftermath of civil war.
    
    Unequal access to education and employment inequalities were major issues that led to the Sierra Leone civil war from 1991-2002. Many educational practices were introduced to the country in the direct aftermath of the war to bring more positive changes such as education opportunities and reconciliation. However, by using the social constructionist approach in our analysis, we found that infrastructural issues were neglected by researchers and practitioners which had §a long-term negative effect on local residents. In particular, transportation poverty became a major issue in preventing the delivery of peace education practices and teaching pedagogies by preventing regular travelling from urban to rural areas. Consequently, more inequalities could be found in areas of social services. This study suggests that peace education initiatives should consider whether these promoted practices will generate different forms of inequalities.
    
    Author: Yi Yu (Tsinghua University)
  - Child soldiers in South Asia: Navigating identity and agency between childhood and adulthood
    
    This paper analyses the conflict and post conflict experiences of former child soldiers previously recruited by non-state armed groups in South Asia. International humanitarian narratives of child soldiering enforce a child victim/non-agent characterisation , which assumes that children have qualitatively distinct experiences and needs to adult combatants. However, this paper argues that the lived experiences of child soldiers is framed by a child-adult interconnection, which is evident in their actions as social and political agents. This paper draws on primary source of data (n=80) based on semi-structured interviews conducted with former child soldiers recruited to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists) and the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, over a six month period in 2018. The findings are structured into conflict and post-conflict experiences. In conflict, while victimised by their recruitment as children, they exercised ‘adult’ forms of agency in their armed roles and responsibilities, including developing political commitment. Secondly, in post conflict settings, a child soldiers’ social and political outcomes in both formal institutional and informal processes of demobilisation, is characterised by the re-establishment of adult power over the child subject across formal institutional environments, and through their informal social experiences of return. The findings contribute to a more fine-grained view of children's identity and agency in conflict.
    
    Author: Kate Macfarlane (Charles Darwin University, Australia)
  - Advocate, Victim or Conflict-mongerer? Negotiating the Ambiguous Roles and Politics of the Tamil Diaspora in Transitional Justice
    
    Diaspora have long been regarded as important stakeholders and participants in homeland conflict and peace building processes, and there is an emerging literature on how diaspora participate in Transitional Justice processes that goes beyond essentialist and binary analyses of diaspora as either peace wreckers or peacemakers. Building on this literature, this article explores the politics of diaspora claims-making in processes of Transitional Justice. Specifically, it examines the role and power of the Tamil diaspora in the fraught Transitional Justice process in Sri Lanka through an exploration of (discursive) practices and struggles unfolding in and around the UN Human Rights Council.
    The paper rests on a multi-method study of Tamil diaspora involvement in global and homeland governance, including multi-sited ethnographic research with the Tamil diaspora (e.g. at the UNHRC in Geneva in March 2017, and in Toronto and London between 2016-2018), open ended interviews with activists and professionals involved in the Sri Lankan TJ process, as well as desk research of policy documents and online archives.
    
    In examining the discursive, bureaucratic and spatial political struggles that structure the UNHRC sessions and events relating to Sri Lanka, it becomes clear that they are not just about the shape that a TJ process should take, but over who is allowed to speak on the issue (and for whom), how and where. Consequently, rather than see struggles over legitimacy and representation as purely endogenous to the Tamil diaspora and broader Sri Lankan state and civil society, this article shows how they are situated within overlapping and often contradictory (global and local) fields of practice, which cast diaspora ambiguously, sometimes as victims or perpetrators of human rights abuses, sometimes as legal experts, and sometimes as members of a global civil society.
    
    Author: Catherine Craven (University of Sheffield)
  - "You talking to me?": An examination of non-state armed groups’ communication and legitimation strategies in the United States and Northern Ireland
    
    Recent scholarship on non-state armed groups (NSAGs) concentrates on their emergence and impacts, examining their recruitment tactics, motivations, and impact upon nation states. The majority of this scholarship studies groups in the Global South, arguing NSAGs in such settings are detrimental to social and cohesion and to effective governance. However, there is less focus on armed groups in Western states, despite a long history of NSAG action in many such states. In this paper, we call for provincializing the study of NSAGs by examining their histories and impacts in the West. Drawing upon our ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with key stakeholders, as well as on textual and visual analysis of NSAG-produced resources in the United States and Northern Ireland, we focus specifically on the modes by which NSAGs work to legitimate themselves as part of the political structure in Western democracies. We argue NSAGs strategically utilize one or more modes of legitimization-popularization, formal recognition, and deputization/paramilitarization-to gain authority for their antidemocratic actions. We conclude by critically reflecting upon these modes of legitimization of armed groups in relation to ongoing concerns about democratic backsliding in the United States and other similar democracies.
    
    Authors: Priya Dixit (Virginia Tech) , Carolyn Gallaher (American University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Power Shifts and their Implications Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham)
  
  Chair: Hillary Briffa (King's College London)
  - The Consequences of Narratives of Decline on Foreign Policy Preferences
    
    Narratives of international decline occur frequently, often independent of “objective” measures of decline. For example, in the late 1950s John F. Kennedy railed against the so-called missile gap and declines in American prestige as the United States entered the 1960s. Yet his declinist rhetoric was built around myths that could not be sustained, even early on in his presidency. Why do narratives of international decline resonate with publics? In contrast to recent work that suggests that declining power leads to retrenchment, I argue that narratives of decline most often lead to public preferences of “punching back” against decline. Declinist narratives often sustain policies of global expansion to save face, regain lost glory, and reverse decline. In this paper, I explore the link between narratives of decline and foreign policy opinion using a survey experiment of US-based respondents. This research will have timely implications for US-China relations, debates over US decline, and the rhetoric of a major declinist: Donald Trump.
    
    Author: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham)
  - Hegemons in Power Transition: ‘When Your Order Turns Against You.
    
    Conventional wisdom treats hegemons in decline as status-quo powers preoccupied with the preservation of an open international economic order conducive to their interests. This paper challenges the standard narrative by highlighting that as they near “power transition”, hegemons acquire a vested interest to challenge the same order they actively contributed to building in the first place. This is because of their unique sectoral composition, necessitating a more closed economic order, as the best way to seek economic power. Hegemons’ revisionism is highlighted through an in-depth analysis of interwar Britain’s repudiation of the gold standard, multilateral free-trade and the open-door.
    
    Author: Panagiotis Vasileiadis
  - Technology, Leadership and Hegemonic Change
    
    Is the dominance of new technological sectors decisive in periods of power transition? Evolutionary economics suggests that successful bids for hegemonic leadership are associated with first mover advantage in leading edge technologies, since dominance in new technologies creates opportunities for supplying essential infrastructure necessary for their diffusion. Yet how such infrastructure is governed is a significant component of how well it is perceived to operate: the ability of great powers to sustain dominance of leading-edge technological change is shaped by the quality of state leadership. Particular modes of governance may raise switching costs for certain types of actors to prohibitive levels, and so limit the effective scope of a particular actors’ socio-technical system. We illustrate this argument by discussing the emerging geopolitics of net-zero: specifically the competition between the United States and China to master green technologies, and to offer mechanisms by which to diffuse their models of net-zero transition throughout the international system.
    
    Authors: Simon Curtis (University of Surrey)* , Nicholas Kitchen (University of Surrey) , Panagiotis Vasileiadis*
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Resisting Complicity with Genocide in Universities and Academic Spaces (Part 1): Activism and Pedagogy Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  In what ways are Western universities and academic spaces complicit in genocide, and how can we actively resist this complicity? This roundtable will critically explore how universities and academic forums in the Western world, including those within the field of international studies, contribute to or tacitly support genocidal violence—particularly in the context of Israel's prolonged and Western-backed assaults on Gaza and, since September, on Lebanon, alongside Israel’s long-term scholasticide against Palestinians.
  Building on existing calls to decolonise the university, as well as critiques of the neoliberal university, this session will examine how academic institutions’ structural and colonial biases and their material participation in the structures of racial capitalism perpetuate silence and complicity around issues of genocide, revealing deeper layers of structural violence within Western "liberal" academia. We will discuss ongoing efforts by university staff and students who are actively resisting this complicity, including divestment and boycott campaigns, on-campus student-led encampments, and teaching and academic events aimed at challenging these injustices.
  This roundtable brings together scholars who are directly engaged in movements to disrupt the status quo and advocate for institutional accountability. By providing a space to share experiences and strategies, this session will support the broader movement to end academic complicity in colonial violence.
  N.B. Part 2 of this roundtable is "Complicity with Genocide in Universities and Academic Spaces (Part 2): Silencing Palestine"
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Catherine Chiniara Charrett (University of Westminster) , Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick) , Leila Mouhib (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) , Amira Abdelhamid , Simon Campbell (Aston University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Security policy & practice: lessons from the Good Friday agreement Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  A quarter century after the Good Friday Agreement, this panel asks: what can be learnt from the process of ending the conflict and consolidating peace in Northern Ireland about how security policy and practice can support peacemaking? And what further dialogue and reform is still needed to consolidate a peaceful future in this region?
  
  Suggested convenor: Larry Attree (Rethinking Security/BISA SPP co-convenor)
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Chair: Sean McGearty (Maynooth University, Ireland)
  
  Participants: Marie Breen-Smyth (Surrey; 2021-2024 Independent Reviewer of National Security Arrangements for Northern Ireland and of the Justice and Security (NI) Act 2005) , Fionnuala ni Aolain (former UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Honorary Kings Counsel, Regents Professor, Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society (University of Minnesota); Professor, Queen's University of Belfast) , Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University) , Davy Beck (Asst Chief Const, Police Service of Northern Ireland) , Monica McWilliams (Commissioner on the Independent Reporting Commission for the disbandment of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, signatory to the Good Friday Agreement, co founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, former Chief Commissioner of the NI Human Rights Commission)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / Technological Trends and Future War Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Neil Cooper (Kent State University)
  
  Chair: Neil Cooper (Kent State University)
  - Emerging technologies that catalyse the civilianisation of warfare: evidence of ongoing normative transformations from Ukraine
    
    Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, extensive open technological innovation has enabled civilians to participate more intimately in hostilities. Due to their global proliferation and diffusion, uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) now have low lower barriers of entry for production and innovation. With off-the-shelf commercial and civilian-built platforms now a common sight on Ukrainian battlefields for multiple purposes (including belligerent harm), civilians are participating in the war as producers of UAS and knowledge exchangers. While such efforts would likely be considered as indirect participation in hostilities, there is still a lack of international consensus specifically on grey-area participation that risks further blurring the distinction between civilians and members of armed forces. Civilians are integral to Ukraine’s aim to domestically produce 2 million UAS in 2024, providing a powerful case for a revision of international norms on civilian participation in warfare.
    
    The developments in Ukraine do not occur in a vacuum and it is important to understand their normative implications. Employing Simon Pratt’s mechanisms for normative transformation (convention reorientation, technological revision, and network synthesis), I argue that three phenomena contribute to normative transformation, making is more acceptable/appropriate for civilians to participate in hostilities at a more intimate level. First, a discursive switch in elite messaging after Russia’s full-scale invasion increased the willingness of the state’s institutions to recognise and legitimise civilian efforts. Second, the increased accessibility and availability of UAS technology and supplementary knowledge has made it easier for civilians to create platforms with meaningful influence for the war. Third, network synthesis between civilian UAS producers, civilian and state-led crowdfunders, and the Ukrainian state’s institutions have opened new relationships that are structuring closer civilian influence in the war. Together, these three phenomena provide subject to study potential normative transformation in the context of civilian participation in hostilities.
    
    Author: Joe Murphy (The University of Edinburgh)
  - The French Army transitions to 'High Intensity' Warfare: Strengths, Drawbacks, and Challenges of French Ambitions.
    
    After three decades of expeditionary warfare, the French army is undergoing a profound transformation to confront the new challenges of a changing operating environment. Exploring four key areas - recruitment and retention, equipment, logistics and support, and training – this comprehensive study delves into the French army’s shift towards 'high intensity' warfare, highlighting the challenges of aligning ambitious strategic goals with limited resources. In doing so, it examines the army's shortcomings as it transitions to Great Power Competition and evaluates its efforts, or lack thereof, in addressing the identified issues. The findings, based on over 30 elite interviews, highlight that French ambitions, at both national and institutional levels, are driving positive change but also have the potential to impede the efficiency and sustainability of the force. This study provides valuable empirical analysis that sheds light on the evolving security environment, contributing to the growth and advancement of military innovation studies.
    
    Author: Lucie Pebay (University of Bath)
  - Invisible frontlines: cyber operations in Iran's military strategy
    
    Iran's actions have the inherent capacity to impact security both in the Middle East and globally. Therefore, understanding the theory and the practice of Iran's military strategy, in all its facets, is critical. Existing research suggests that any such effort should also include understanding the role of Tehran's offensive cyber operations (OCO). Arguments about the growing importance of OCOs within Iran's military strategy are also supported by the empirical evidence; which points to a marked increase in Iran's reliance on cyber operations over the past decade.
    
    While the literature has engaged with the topic of Iran's military strategy, and several analyses have shed light on aspects of the Iran's cyber capabilities, the relationship between Iran's OCOs and Iran's military strategy remains understudied. To address this gap in the literature, this paper sets out to investigate how OCOs fit within Iran's military strategy. Or, put differently, to what extent does the use of cyber operations reflect Iranian military strategic thinking? In so doing, this project aims to enhance our understanding of Iran's military strategy, its use of OCOs, and the relationship between the two.
    
    This paper begins with a description of the Iran's military strategy and discusses its distinctive features: asymmetric nature, strategic depth, war aversion, crisis extension ability. Then, it analyzes several Iranian OCOs. Finally, it assesses what the empirical evidence from such operations says about the extent to which the use of OCOs reflects Iranian military strategic thinking.
    
    Author: Eugenio Lilli (University College Dublin)
  - ‘The Digital Battlefield as a New Battle Space’
    
    Like modern societies, militaries are increasingly reliant on digital platforms to change the way that planning and fighting are done. From ‘smart logistics’ to automated battle management systems, wars are likely to get more sensors, networks and data centres while legacy and new equipment will be increasingly fitted with digital devices that can send, receive, and decide (Neads, Farrell and Galbreath 2023). This change in war fighting is not only a response to the way society has become increasingly digital but also is the result of a long standing effort by militaries to increase the tempo over and above their adversary. Digital platforms allow for increased data transfer, the introduction of automated and machine learning systems and increasing granularity in the data feedback and analysis. Today’s Western militaries are under increasing anxiety that to outlast the expected war with China, digital platforms are needed to make them more agile, mobile and responsive. At the same time, digital platforms, once at war, become themselves subject to war. As a result, digital systems will have to be more resilient and redundant while the threat of disruption and subterfuge will be persistent. This paper is an initial look at what is referred here as ‘the digital battlefield’ to see how militaries are seeking to use networks, human-machine teams and artificial intelligence to fight the next major war.
    
    Author: David Galbreath (University of Bath)
  - Open-Source Investigations and the Visualisation of Mass Violence
    
    Open-source (OSINT) researchers tend to concentrate on individual, prominent events of violence, parsing through details to uncover hidden causal chains and establishing evidence of responsibility. Alongside these episodic investigations, however, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza have led researchers to use OSINT techniques to represent large scales of systematic violence, such as attacks on cities, housing destruction, or the decay of agricultural land. These investigations force researchers to grapple with expanded scopes of violence, both temporally and geographically. This presentation, therefore, interrogates how visual OSINT investigations can grapple with conceptions of violence that take into account systematic campaigns of violence, structural forms of violence, and mass destruction.
    This presentation, furthermore, will investigate how these representations of expanded acts of violence shapes the experience of war that is transmitted to domestic publics. Building on research into the politics of casualty counting and of American campaigns of targeted killing in the War on Terror, and supported by interviews with researchers and OSINT investigators, this presentation will suggest that increased visual representations of systemic violence can change democratic debates and pressures concerning (Western) responsibility for military force.
    
    Author: Emil Archambault (University of Durham)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / The Troubles: A regional perspective Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University)
  - Geographical reputation and operational reality: testing myths and opinions from the Troubles
    
    This paper will investigate the relationship between geographic areas and the operational histories of non-state actors associated with them throughout the Troubles. This assessment will allow us to establish whether local reputations were earned, the result of positive or negative information campaigns, or whether they have emerged following the conflict as localities deal with their histories. This paper will build on previous work that has sought to challenge the prevailing narrative of Belfast and other large urban centres as the main sites of conflict during this period. To do so, it will identify the dominant ‘story’ or reputation of an area and test this against the operational histories to gauge levels of alignment or divergence. Preliminary findings demonstrate how internal rivalries and politics have resulted in some areas growing more dominant in the narrative than their history ought to allow while others have been awarded far less attention than deserved. Understanding how these reputations were built and maintained will assist us in explaining why certain actors and sub-units were given so much weight during negotiations or why certain areas maintains their dominance in the legacy of the Troubles. In doing so this paper will both confirm some prioritisations but also challenge others.
    
    Author: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln)
  - Policewomen across the Province: Mapping regional dimensions to the Troubles
    
    Throughout the Troubles (1968-1998) in Northern Ireland, women served in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and later, following the Good Friday Agreement, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), being out on the ‘front line’ day and night. This presence of policewomen defied traditional societal expectations and threatened male dominance of the ‘front line’, such that their participation has been written out of the mainstream conflict histories, compounded by enduring political sensitivities mean that former policemen and women continue to maintain low profile. This study examines the oral archive of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation mapping the oral testimonies of over 30 former policewomen to compare women’s ‘front line’ experiences across the different geographical areas they operated in to produce a visual representation of regional variation. The findings challenge generalisations that assume homogeneity of servicewomen’s experiences, by exploring how their role and integration differed between rural and urban settings and uses this as a platform for considering how gendered power dynamics manifested differently across regional settings. Foregrounding the voices of policewomen demystifies the regional dimension to the conflict, destabilises state control over whose voices are valid narrators of war stories and challenges assumptions surrounding what it means to be a combatant. This timely intervention, 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 and the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
    
    Author: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University)
  - A Geography of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Urban Areas of Northern Ireland: Comparative PIRA Violence in Belfast and Derry, 1970-1975.
    
    Considering regional differences is an important imperative in the study of violent conflict. Stathis N. Kalyvas has emphasized that incorporating the local into research often uncovers the plurality of experiences and outcomes of conflict, as well as the presence of an ‘urban-bias’ in research on political violence that overlooks the significance of rural areas. In recent years, a growing body of literature concerning the Northern Ireland conflict has emerged that considers the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s (PIRA) violent campaign in rural areas including work by Henry Patterson, Amy Grubb and Thomas Leahy. However, regional differences between separate urban areas remain significant. This paper will draw upon local newspaper reportage, statistical data on conflict casualties and preexisting research to emphasise the disparity between PIRA violence in Belfast and Derry from 1970 to 1975. In Belfast, the PIRA conducted three somewhat interconnected campaigns against security forces, civilians targeting mostly property, as well as sporadically against loyalists, and inflicted significant civilian casualties. Significantly lower civilian casualties inflicted by the PIRA in Derry have been explained by arguments that their campaign was almost exclusively directed against the British Army in the city. However, this ignores the PIRA’s under-researched bombing campaign against civilian business premises in Derry’s city centre. This paper aims to illustrate the regionalised nature of political violence between different urban areas and not only across the urban-rural divide.
    
    Author: Robert Taylor (Cardiff University)
  - De-and re-bordering Northern Ireland: how Cross-border Cooperation Intertwines Spatial and Institutional Patterns of Exclusion and Inclusion, Subordination and Horizontality
    
    During the last years, scholars have broken up dichotomies that have shaped our understanding of cross-border cooperation. In geography, the confrontation between a territorial and a relational reading of space has given way to approaches that stress their dialogue. In political science, a struggle between a focus on government and governance has shifted towards a recognition of their coexistence. In this sense, cross-border networks no longer appear as antipodes to territorial borders, scalar relationships, sectoral differentiation and political hierarchies. Rather, they constitute and condition each other. While both geography and political science stress how connections mingle with patterns of exclusion and subordination, scholars rarely bring spatial and institutional accounts together. This paper aims at bridging the gap between spatial and institutional approaches of cross-border cooperation. With regard to theory, it embeds similarities in their ontological focus on structures and strategies in a strategic-relational approach. Empirically, the paper examines the policy cycle and policymaking realities of cross-border cooperation on the Island of Ireland, which has had over the years a unique peacebuilding functional dynamic. The conclusions imply that EU cross-border cooperation in Ireland embodies a dynamic balance of spatial and institutional boundlessness and boundaries.
    
    Author: Giada Lagana (Cardiff University)
- 09:00 → 10:30
  FR 20 Panel / War and Nature III: On the Eco-Social Costs of Warfare and Military Build-Up [Panel 3] Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Esther Marijnen (Wageningen University, Netherlands) , Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
  
  Chair: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)
  
  Discussant: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)
  - Performing Alternative Worlds through Struggle: Black Communities, Conflict and the Struggles over Pluriverse in Colombia
    
    Since the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and FARC-EP, communities on the Colombian Pacific coast have continued to struggle in the context of evolving conflict dynamics and the encroachment of colonial racial capitalism. Their struggles are often framed either as resistance against armed groups or, increasingly, as environmental struggles. This paper offers an alternative understanding, arguing that Black communities’ struggles are neither ‘just’ reactions to external circumstances nor can be framed in terms of environmental struggles. Thinking about conflict-related forms of resistance and struggles for territory/environment as separate is, in itself, a colonial legacy and a reflection of ways of thinking grounded in the foundational dichotomies of Western (colonial) modernity. Building on decolonial scholarship and ten months-long ethnographic research, I show how these should be thought of not only as ontological struggles but as forms of relational ontologies through which different worlds are continuously performed. This is a significant analytical move that enhances our understanding of these struggles and contributes to the growing literature on relational ontologies and the pluriverse, challenging the discipline’s dominant canon.
    
    Author: Kacper Przyborowski (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico)
  - The significance of nuclear weapons waste: time and technopolitics at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in nuclear New Mexico
    
    IR scholarship on the international politics of nuclear weapons does not meaningfully engage with the politics of nuclear waste. This article makes the case for nuclear weapons waste as an integral part of the US nuclear weapons complex and of international nuclear politics more broadly. Waste is not simply a by-product or one of many reasons for nuclear disarmament, but is a component of nuclear weapons politics that needs to be actively investigated and addressed. I argue that nuclear waste matters and I develop a technopolitical and narrative framing grounded in work from outside of IR through which to begin to incorporate weapons waste into our understandings of the global nuclear weapons complex. This is expressed through three propositions: that waste is not just a by-product but a core part of the nuclear weapons system; that nuclear waste governance exhibits dynamics of technopolitics; and that nuclear waste infrastructures have narrative and temporal significance. The article develops these statements through fieldwork on the sites of US nuclear weapons waste complex in New Mexico, focusing specifically on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) the only permanent geologic disposal site for nuclear weapons waste in the United States.
    
    Author: Laura Considine (University of Leeds)
  - When Park Rangers Become Soldiers: Green Militarism and (Foreign-Assisted) Military Training for Conservation
    
    Militarised conservation is accelerated when insecurity—violent conflict or heavily armed poaching—poses an immediate threat to wildlife and the integrity of protected areas. However, militarization often remains long after acute threats fade. To understand how violent conservation becomes an engrained state of affairs, this article proposes to focus on broader atmospheres of green militarism. It explains why rangers continue to be trained for war even without any immediate security threats. Focussing on Uganda, we show how the NRA/M government has extended military logics into nearly all civilian sectors and issues, including conservation. We explore how training curriculum and practices encourage park guards in Uganda to become ‘like soldiers’ and adopt a warfare mentality. In-depth fieldwork in Murchison Falls National Park revealed how such training represents occupational violence against the rangers themselves and contributes to their use of lethal violence against park intruders. This training is provided by the Ugandan army and through its military partnerships with the UK and US. The same curriculum for warfare is used for conservation. Therefore, militarisation is not only prompted by immediate security threats; but also the broader geopolitics of green militarism prompted by the interest of authoritarian-military governments and their international backers.
    
    Authors: Ivan Ashaba (University of Antwerpen)* , Esther Marijnen (Wageningen University, Netherlands)
- 10:30 → 10:45
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 10:30 → 11:30
  
  / Refreshment Break The Exchange
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Panel / Academic standards in the time of ‘Fast Research’ Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Review of International Studies
  
  Speakers: David Mainwaring, Lauren Rogers (University of Edinburgh), Monika Barthwal-Datta (UNSW Sydney/ International Studies Quarterly), Soumita Basu (South Asian University), Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Civil Wars and Non-State Actors Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Harry MacNamara (Loughborough University)
  
  Chair: Harry MacNamara (Loughborough University)
  - Band of Believers?:The Influence of Religion on Rebel Group Cohesion
    
    How does religion shape rebel group cohesion? A near consensus exists among scholars and policymakers around the belief that religion acts as a unifying force for insurgents. In this paper, I demonstrate that the opposite is true. My argument draws attention to the common practice of religious outbidding among rebel leaders. This tactic can exacerbate divisions between moderates and extremists and can lead to collective splits. To illustrate the plausibility of my argument, I offer two forms of evidence. First, I leverage the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence (FORGE) dataset to analyze the extent to which armed groups that draw on religion splinter compared to their secular counterparts. My analysis illustrates that religious groups are nearly 25% more likely to split than their secular counterparts. Second, I provide a within-case analysis of rebel group fragmentation in the Southern Philippines to illustrate the religious outbidding mechanism. My argument and findings contribute to the study of both religious violence and civil wars more broadly. They draw attention to a potential risk faced by rebel leaders that mobilize along religious lines and have implications for how we understand a range of other conflict outcomes, including conflict lethality and termination. This study also links to this year’s conference theme by drawing attention to how international studies can continue to provide new insights that challenge widely held and highly influential conventional wisdoms.
    
    Author: Jason Klocek (University of Nottingham)
  - Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Rebel Legitimacy
    
    Rebel legitimacy, the acknowledgment of a rebel group’s rightful authority over a certain territory and its population, is key to understanding a wide range of civil conflict processes, from rebel emergence and recruitment to the institutionalization of rebel rule, or the successful transformation of former rebels into political parties post-conflict. Rebel legitimacy is context-dependent and varies throughout conflict; yet, this variation has been insufficiently explored. Although legitimacy for many rebel groups, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, or the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Syria, has fluctuated throughout their conflicts, the sources of this fluctuation require more attention. We propose a typology explaining conditions under which rebel legitimacy likely varies temporally and spatially using observable indices of external and domestic legitimacy. This typology identifies four drivers behind temporal and spatial variability in rebel legitimacy: (1) the nature of the political order, particularly the degree of territorial authority contestation at different points in the armed struggle; (2) the level of external support, specifically military assistance and diplomatic recognition from third-party states; (3) rebel group characteristics, such as the group’s ideology and leadership cohesion; and (4) the governance practices implemented, i.e., the extent to which rebels institutionalize a parallel governance apparatus in areas under their control at different conflict stages. Our typology enhances scholarly understanding of the temporal and spatial dimensions of legitimacy shifts throughout the life cycle of rebel groups.
    
    Author: Adrian Florea (University of Glasgow)
  - Narratives of Repatriation: a comparative analysis of the construction of foreign fighter policy
    
    In 1938, the League of Nations established a special committee to oversee the repatriation of foreign combatants from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The process required that foreign combatants—who are now broadly referred to as foreign fighters—be returned to their countries of origins unless 1) that state no longer exists or 2) the individual could not safely return. The approach during the Spanish Civil War and the narratives around the status of foreign fighter returnees differs vastly from those towards other generations. This paper compares how narratives around returnees have been constructed by states, international organisations and media across an initial three cases: the Spanish Civil War, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and Ukraine.
    
    Author: Nicola Mathieson (University of Liverpool)
  - Blood Money: Unraveling the Organizational Ecology of Mercenary Groups in Civil Wars
    
    This research explores how mercenary groups organize and compete in intrastate conflicts, focusing on their roles as non-state armed groups that financially gain from direct combat. Despite the literature on mercenarism, the organizational ecology and impact of mercenary groups on civil war dynamics remain understudied. Drawing on organizational ecology theory, this study proposes three hypotheses to address the relationship between mercenary groups and other armed actors, the structure of the market for force, and the impact of conflict intensity on organizational strategies. Using a qualitative research design combining semi-structured interviews, social network analysis, and process tracing, the study analyzes data from Colombia, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone. The research challenges assumptions about increased demand for private military services due to Western interventions, disentangles the overlooked dynamics of mercenary groups engaging in direct combat, contests the state-centric model of the market for force by proposing the resource partitioning model, and offers a novel application of organizational ecology theory to private violence in post-Cold War settings. By comparing cases with varying conflict intensities and market structures, this study generates insights into the conditions under which different organizational strategies emerge and succeed.
    
    Author: Chelsea Thorpe (University of Cambridge)
  - Transnational Paramilitaries and the Emergence of New Inter-State Wars in the Middle East
    
    Two conflicts have shaped the geopolitics of the Middle East significantly in the last decade: The Yemen War, with the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels, and the Gaza War, in which an Iran-led coalition, including Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi paramilitaries have joined Hamas in the war against Israel. These wars have been described as proxy wars or ‘internationalised civil wars’. Nonetheless, such categorisations fail to grasp the fundamental nature of these conflicts and their sources. Rather, this paper suggests that these conflicts mark the rise of new inter-state wars. This definition relies on the spread of these conflicts across various countries and the belligerents’ nature, which do not fall neatly into traditional categories of state and non-state actors. However, these wars should be seen as new inter-state wars, as they differ significantly from previous inter-state wars in their duration and lethality: They have been longer and deadlier toward civilians than most past inter-state wars in the Middle East. After establishing the nature of these wars, the paper then seeks to explain the causes for their difference from previous inter-state wars. It argues that it is the participation of transnational paramilitary forces that have contributed to these wars’ duration and lethality: Actors such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi paramilitaries have incorporated tactics associated with domestic conflicts into the international arena, now combined with unprecedented access to weapons that in the past have been the exclusively at the hands of conventional militaries, such as ballistic missiles, drones, and maritime capabilities. This combination has contributed significantly (though not exclusively) to the eruption and evolution of the new inter-state wars in the Middle East and potentially beyond the region.
    
    Author: Yaniv Voller (University of Kent)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Complicity with Genocide in Universities and Academic Spaces (Part 2): Silencing Palestine Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Why are nominally “liberal spaces” of Western academia engaged in authoritarian practices of repressing freedom of expression and academic freedom? Since October 2023, we have witnessed a worrying trend of universities in several Western countries repressing, cancelling, surveilling and even punishing expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people and/or critical voices against Israel’s genocide. This silencing of anti-genocide voices could be considered a form of complicity with genocide. This roundtable will shine a light on the various ways in which universities and academic forums in the Western world, including those within the field of international studies, contribute to or tacitly support genocidal violence through their repression of staff and students speaking out against Israel's prolonged and Western-backed assaults on Gaza and, since September, on Lebanon, alongside Israel’s long-term scholasticide against Palestinians.
  We will discuss the types of measures and discursive practices deployed by university managers, academic leaders and other academic stakeholder to suppress opposition to genocide and solidarity with the Palestinian people. Building on existing calls to decolonise the university, as well as critiques of the neoliberal university, this session will examine how academic institutions’ structural and colonial biases and their material participation in the structures of racial capitalism perpetuate silence and complicity around issues of genocide, revealing deeper layers of structural violence within Western "liberal" academia.
  This roundtable brings together scholars who are directly engaged in movements to disrupt the status quo and advocate for institutional accountability. By providing a space to share experiences and strategies, this session will support the broader movement to end academic complicity in colonial violence and explore ways to counteract various forms of institutional repression by university administrations and other vested interests.
  N.B. Part 1 of this panel is entitled, "Resisting Complicity with Genocide in Universities and Academic Spaces (Part 1): Activism and Pedagogy"
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (Aston University)
  
  Participants: Heba Youssef (University of Brighton) , Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield) , James Foley (Glasgow Caledonian University) , Alice Finden (Durham University) , Andrew Delatolla (University of Leeds)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Conflict-Related Gender and Sexualized Violence in a Diverse World: Seeing and Feeling Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Laura Sjoberg (Oxford University)
  - Masculine Humiliations: Violence and Social Control in the Islamic State
    
    This article examines how masculine humiliations function as a tactic of violence and social control in revisionist state-building by non-state armed groups. The analysis focuses on the Islamic State’s (IS) occupation in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. Using a semiotic analysis of images from the group’s English-language propaganda magazines, Dabiq and Rumiyah, we show how violent struggles for power utilise masculine humiliations as a mechanism of social control and through which to reorientate hegemony. The study draws upon Klein’s triangle of humiliations, which relies upon the interaction of a humiliator, victim and witness. We find that IS militants - as humiliators - acted to “civilise” civilian men through both direct victimisation and witnessing the violent intra-communal punishment of a deviant “Other”. Recognising that humiliations are shaped by societal gender norms, the novel analysis brings together masculinity scholarship from across conflict and terrorism, human dignity studies and psychology literatures.
    
    Authors: Gina Vale (University of Southampton) , Heidi Riley (University College Dublin)
  - Entanglements of care and violence: theorising on social reproduction and care through analysis of ‘interstructuring oppressions‘
    
    This manuscript offers, by working with footnoted subjugated knowledges of feminist thinking (see e.g. Sylvester 2007) on interconnections between ecology and interstructural oppressions, a conceptual framework for theorising care and social reproductive futures as entanglements of care and violence. Our starting point are the two widely used definitions of feminist ethics of care by Fisher and Tronto (1990) and Tronto (1993) but our focus is on their less visited footnotes focusing on ecology and caring of the environment. By conducting archival analysis of the lesser known sources we wish to engage with the 1970’s and 1980’s thinking of the interconnections between care, social reproduction, and overcoming “interstructuring oppressions of race, class, sex, and ecology. (King 1981, Ynestra 1981, Ruether 1975, Collins 1974, Collins 1990/2000). Rereading of feminist subjugated knowledges and connecting them to their feminist contemporaries, we aim to build bridge between the diverse Ethics of Care and Social Reproduction scholarship and contribute to discussions centering on anthropocentrism, whiteness, and intersecting inequalities in care and social reproduction. The manuscript is part of the Envirocare project funded by the Research Council of Finland (2023-27).
    
    Authors: Violeta Gutiérrez Zamora (Tampere University, Finland)* , Ilona Steiler (Tampere University, Finland)* , Satu Sundström (Tampere University, Finland)* , Marjaana Jauhola (Tampere University, Finland)
  - Impractical Practices? UN Peacekeeper Training and 'womenandgirls'
    
    The presence of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) is felt throughout all active (and former) UN peacekeeping operations. The UN has acknowledged peacekeeper misconduct and has worked to identify and combat SEA in its missions. Nonetheless, peacekeeper SEA continues to be reported to the UN, sex economies near missions continue to flourish, and ‘peacekeeper babies’ continue to be ostracised.
    The UN's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda forefronts the importance of gender mainstreaming, resulting in the homogenisation of 'womenandgirls'. This approach overlooks the gendered and racialised hierarchies that exist in peacekeeping operations. The reality on the ground points to the racialised hypersexualisation and Othering of the ‘peacekept’ by their ‘protectors’, forming understandings of who is worth protecting. By problematising the way that WPS considers SEA during peacekeeping operations, I situate my analysis at the critical juncture that wishes to take gender and race seriously, whilst identifying that current WPS practices fall short of effective change.
    Using decolonial feminism and intersectionality, I rely on a normative framing of gendered and racialised security to critique peacekeeper SEA as a problematic practice. The UN has failed thus far to effectively convey the issue, specifically in poor peacekeeper (pre-) training material which allows for peacekeeper SEA to continue without extensive deterrent in the field.
    
    Author: Emily Gee (University of Leeds)
  - Gender minorities and populism in South Africa: The EFF’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela #1655
    
    Contributing to the body of existing empirical studies of populist discourse promising emancipation of gender minorities, this study explores the emergence of gendered identities in populist political discourse in South Africa. In doing so, this paper draws upon the Laclauian approach to populism, defined by an understanding of populist politics as a political logic based on symbolic signifiers. The study examines the case of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa and the contradictions between public promises to emancipate gender minorities – a discourse reliant on the legacy of Winifred Madikizela-Mandela – the strictly controlled internal leadership of the party, and patriarchal party elites. In this way, the paper aims to contribute to Laclauian conceptions of populism with a distinctly sociologically-informed study of populist discourse as presented by the EFF on platforms such as X, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. This study historicises the rapid surge and recent decline in support received by the EFF from 2013 to 2024 through an examination of gendered discourses, arguing these are not only informed, but reliant on defection from the liberation party in the South African context, lending new opposition parties emergent from factions within the African National Congress (ANC) the rights to use of liberation histories. This study thus examines the emergence of gender minorities as key subjects in the discourse of political parties run by patriarchal elites and bridges the gaps between theories of patriotic histories, liberation legacies and the forms of populist discourse emerging in post-Marikana South Africa through a thorough examination of the EFF’s use of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's legacy to portray ideals of gender emancipation.
    
    Author: Hannah Shaw (University of Leeds)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Creating Ontological Security in International Relations Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Convener: Cornelia Baciu (Kiel University)
  
  Chair: Brent Steele (The University of Utah)
  
  Discussant: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
  - Expressing Ontological Security. NATO and EU Responses to Russia’s Invasion in Ukraine
    
    Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion in Ukraine has generated fear and anxiety across societies in Europe and beyond. What Russia has attempted with Ukraine – an imperial takeover of a neighbouring territory through a war of conquest in which the aggressor threatens the use of nuclear weapons is extremely rare since the Second World War. Juxtaposing Ontological Security Theory (Mitzen 2006; Giddens 1991) and criminal justice research (Stahn 2020), this article introduces the notion of expressivism to demonstrate how ontological security has been created in the Euro-Atlantic order after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. Ontological Security (OS) refers to the security of Self. Studies on ontological security seeking at IOs level are rare (Flockhart 2020; Steele 2008). I argue that international organisations pursue ontological security seeking through expressivist practices in order to avoid overwhelming fears and anxieties at institutional and societal level. I define expressivism in International Relations as practices of representation of, and the articulation of, a moral reaction towards a certain behaviour of a political actor, embodying a reflexive intention, moral commitment or attitude. Through expressivist practices, political actors, such as state or other international agents, project a certain intention and normative desire. Empirically, I illustrate the proposed typology of expressivist practices and hermeneutically interpret how they create ontological security by studying examples of expressivist practices embraced by NATO and the EU in reaction to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The article makes an interdisciplinary contribution, advancing approaches on the entanglements of ontological security studies and order on the one side, and expressivist accounts of international criminal justice on the other side. Expressivist lenses allow us to capture mechanisms of how ontological security is regained in the context of war, and how the intentions behind those practices consolidate the OS order.
    
    Author: Cornelia Baciu (Kiel University)
  - Climate Effects and the Loss of Routines: Reflexivity and Resilience in Ontological Security Theory
    
    The literature on ontological security has quickly and extensively widened the debate about the assumptions underwriting security scholarship. In doing so, it has helped advance our understanding of how ontological security can at times outweigh more traditional security concerns. This paper argues, however, that when faced with the existential politics of climate change, the ontological security literature struggles with the tension that is inherent in the materiality of climatic effects, the lived reality of climate effects, and the otherwise ontological effects of climate change loss, for example, the loss of territorially and spatially rooted routines. I posit that this tension arises because so far ontological security studies has paradoxically examined conditions of ontological insecurity rather than theorise the conceptual underpinning for ontological security. This paper remedies this gap, by developing an argument that shifts the conceptual tenets of ontological security literature, namely crises, routines and anxiety, towards extraordinary politics, reflexivity and resilience. The move towards the conceptual reframe allows us to dissolve tensions around the material and ontological dimensions of climate effects.
    
    Author: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
  - Aesthetics of Being, Aesthetics as Becoming
    
    Aesthetics can be manifested both as vulnerability and as a tool of securitization 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 conceptualize aesthetics as an emancipatory agency. In other words, it will investigate aesthetics as hopeful and 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 represented cultural productions constitute a spatial context in which routine of a nation’s existence are performed?
    
    Author: Irem Cihan (SOAS)
  - From War to Welfare: Ontological Security-Seeking and Consumption Practices in the Postwar Britain and Germany
    
    Ontological Security Studies (OSS) is primarily concerned with how actors, usually states, cope with anxieties, traumas, and various other ailments that befall them as their identities are no longer reconcilable with their social reality. This has generated a voluminous body of scholarship that helps us understand crises and the consequences of the securitisation of identity. Yet more work needs to be done for understanding how individuals cope with ontological (in)securities in healthy ways. This article therefore seeks to move beyond OSS’s traditional research agenda focused on state actors and critical junctures. Instead, it develops the argument that individuals’ consumption practices, understood as acts of self-authorship and autonomy, can significantly reshape their autobiographical narratives and routines. The article explores this broader argument in by following the recent (re)turn towards the microlevel in IR and OSS and putting it into conversation with historiographical and sociological theorisations of consumption. Arguing that OSS has largely framed individuals as actors with little agency whose ontological (in)securities are primarily shaped by the state, the paper then theorises different acts of consumption as forms of asserting agency, autonomy, and, ultimately, as an act of security-seeking. This conceptual argument is then explored in two short case vignettes, the emergence of affluence in Britain and Germany in the 1950s.
    
    Author: Martin Kirsch (University of Cambridge)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Gendering (counter)terrorism Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Xavier Mathieu (University of Sheffield)
  - Deradicalising Misogyny: Countering Red Pill Violence and Extremism in the Manosphere
    
    In the 1999 film The Matrix, the protagonist, Neo, must choose between two pills: a blue pill that offers blissful ignorance, and a red pill that promises the harsh truth of reality. Over two decades later, the concept of the "Red Pill" has been co-opted by online anti-feminist communities, where it symbolizes an awakening to a worldview that frames men as victims of a society shaped by feminism and women’s sexual autonomy. This ideology, propagated by the Manosphere, often leads to radicalization, with members espousing extremist beliefs and engaging in violent acts, including mass shootings and terroristic attacks. This paper engages with the evolving discourse on misogynist terrorism, focusing on how individuals disengage from the Manosphere and its Red Pill rhetoric. Drawing on interviews and analyses of online forums, this study seeks to identify the key factors that facilitate individuals' departure from these radicalizing spaces. By developing grounded theory from the experiences of those who have left or are in the process of leaving, this research will address two central questions: What factors enable disengagement from the Manosphere? And how can these insights inform more effective counter-terrorism strategies and policies aimed at preventing misogynist extremism?
    
    Author: Kate Scott (University of Sydney)
  - Judged and Tried: An Interrogation of the Social Construction of Female Political Violence in German Domestic Courts
    
    Female agents of political violence have gained increasing public and academic attention in the last 15 to 20 years. Seeking to trouble the multiplicity of gendered binaries around which (women’s) terrorism is rendered (un)intelligible, critical and especially feminist scholars have centred academic, media, popular cultural, and policy discourses. Yet, legal contexts have thus far largely escaped feminist scrutiny. In this paper, I argue that legal settings are important sites to interrogate the social construction of female political violence. Domestic proceedings are especially fascinating as they are structured around the encounter of women stylised as terrorists and various societal actors (not) doing this stylising. In this sense, the courtroom as a space of sense- and ‘truth’-making is a theatre in which the institutionalized violence of the state meets the violence of the terrorist subject against the backdrop of larger societal structures of power. Drawing on courtroom ethnographic data generated on multiple terrorism trials in Germany, I showcase the unique potential courtrooms offer to interrogate the relational, embodied and culturally as well as historically contingent dynamics inherent in gendered discourses on anti-state violence.
    
    Author: Carlotta Sallach (Central European University)
  - A mixed-method investigation focused on the impact of gender stereotypes on news coverage and the manifestations of gender framing on women associated with jihadist terrorism.
    
    This paper investigates how gender stereotypes shape the portrayal of female jihadist terrorists in print news media across six Western countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland, from 2001 to 2022. Previous studies have highlighted how media framing of women linked to terrorism often relies on unproven and stereotype-driven narratives. Building on this work, this study explores gendered media narratives on a larger scale, comparing portrayals of women to men within jihadist terrorism contexts. Central to the research is an original dataset of 1000+ individuals associated with jihadist terrorism as featured in media reports, incorporating over 50 variables to comprehensively analyse these portrayals. Employing a mixed-methods approach grounded in gender and media studies, the research combines descriptive and advanced quantitative analysis with qualitative media analysis.
    
    Findings reveal that stereotypical traits, such as youthfulness and relationship status, significantly influence media coverage of females. Women fitting traditional gender stereotypes receive more extensive quantity of the coverage, highlighting how deeply gendered narratives shape their representation in media. These results illuminate the restrictive influence of gendered media portrayals on the public perception of female jihadists.
    
    Author: Olivia Caskey (University of Portsmouth)
  - Social exclusion and the Securitisation of Islam in North-West Europe: patterns of gendered Islamophobia in Denmark and the Netherlands
    
    Securitization Theory offers a framework for understanding how issues are constructed as security threats. According to Balzacq (2010), securitization involves establishing a connection between an object and a perceived threat to that object; securitizing is the act of identifying a phenomenon, event, or person as a source of insecurity or threat to individuals, states, or political communities. The process of securitization unfolds through "securitization moves," where actors (usually political leaders) articulate and propagate the notion that a particular issue constitutes a security threat. When these moves are successful, the issue becomes securitized, resulting in the acceptance of extraordinary measures to address the perceived threat.
    
    This paper examines the dynamics and effects of gendered securitisation of Islam in Northern Europe, looking at the interactions of Muslim women citizens with State bodies (education, police, administration, etc.), media representations and chiefly and most importantly via the everyday interactions of Muslim citizens with the social mainstream of Northern European States.
    
    The paper uses securitisation theory, concretely Cesari’s (2009) Securitisation of Islam theory, adapted with post-Copenhaguen reformulations of Securitisation that draw empahsis on the audience response and dialectical nature of securitisation processes.
    The paper applies this theory inductively to focus on social exclusion and discrimination, to highlight how “non-elite” actors (journalists, everyday citizens) also shape socio-political perceptions of European security issues. Furthermore, the cross-country comparison will shed light on the interplay between securitising agents, securitising moves and how different national cultural models of inclusion or exclusion, in combination with the “war on terror”, racializes and excludes Muslim European women, rendering them unsafe and unwanted.
    
    Empirically, this article will draw on the DRIVE’s H20 project interview materials with Muslims citizens, with a particular focus on the Danish and Dutch data, which provide two highly comparable but distinct case studiess.
    
    Authors: Inés Bolaños Somoano (Leiden University) , Catia Moreira Carvahlo (Dublin City University)* , Tahir Abbas (Leiden University)*
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / New actors and issues in global finance and fintech Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Pedro Perfeito da Silva (University of Exeter)
  - Gendered labour produces finance: Navigating profits and care as intermediaries of finance
    
    Financial actors often characterise finance as abstract. This narrative of finance as abstract is commonly incorporated in critical finance scholarship which highlights the effects of depersonalised, abstracted debt when repackaged as financial instruments. However, such a narrative ends up obscuring the everyday practices and labour that produce finance. My ethnographic research with microfinance branch staff in West Bengal shows that finance is produced by intermediaries’ labour. Moreover, this labour is gendered as intermediaries extend affective labour and women workers in particular perform social reproductive labour to ensure that financial services can be rendered standardized. This builds on feminist political economy scholarship and demonstrates how gendered forms of labour are directly capitalised to generate financial returns. Finance workers negotiate financial requirements for profit maximization with affective, personalised ties with clients to generate trust. Women workers doubly negotiate their professional roles and unpaid social reproductive work which is essential for standardising financial services. As finance workers navigate gendered, moral and financial economies, their everyday labour challenges theoretical distinctions in political economy between finance and labour and, productive and non-productive forms of labour. This highlights how contemporary finance capitalises upon wide-ranging gendered labour to expand services to underbanked populations.
    
    Author: Tanushree Kaushal (Geneva Graduate Institute)
  - Finance or Technology: Explaining the Adoption of FinTech Regulatory Sandboxes
    
    What drives governments to either promote or restrain the growth of new Financial Technologies (fintech)? The global rise of fintech firms has prompted governments to consider how best to balance managing the risks of new and untested technologies with encouraging innovation and growth. Regulatory sandboxes have emerged as a novel policy tool to address this dilemma. Yet, their adoption across the fintech sector remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we analyze the factors influencing the global adoption of fintech regulatory sandboxes. Our findings indicate that policies fostering technological innovation, such as e-government initiatives, are strongly associated with a higher likelihood of sandbox adoption, while financial policies – such as openness – have limited explanatory power. Additionally, countries with greater public integrity and common law legal systems are more inclined to establish these institutions. These findings suggest that fintech policies may correspond more to the political economy of technological innovation rather that of finance.
    
    Author: Alfredo Hernandez Sanchez (TSMPI Vilnius University)
  - Mario goes to the moon: Fraud and exploitation in the world of crypto-games
    
    In 2022, global revenue from the video game market reached $185bn, exceeding that of the film and music markets combined (Arora 2023). The white paper released by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 has spurred applications of blockchain technology in an ever growing set of areas, but these have been dogged by fraud and theft. Crypto-games are an emerging element of this market integrating blockchain technology into games, often on the basis of a ‘play to earn’ model, and is largely unexplored in academic literature to date. This paper examines two of the biggest crypto-games: (i) Axie Infinity, which at its peak had 2.7m daily users and was briefly the primary source of income for significant numbers of people in the Philippines; and (ii) Decentraland, the associated cryptocurrency (Mana) of which has a current market cap of over half a billion US dollars. The paper begins the analysis of this emergent phenomenon by evaluating whether these two games are instances fraud, as has characterised much of the crypto universe. Secondly, it evaluates whether they represent new avenues of exploitation, through examining the economy of Axie Infinity and whether those seeking to earn a living from it were simply being exploited by others who would earn greater rewards from their work.
    
    Author: James Scott (King's College London)
  - The Political Economy of the Mini-Budget Crisis: Intra-Elite Conflict, Nexus Realignment, and Britain’s Macroeconomic Regime in Transition
    
    More than two years on from Liz Truss’s ill-fated premiership, the legacy of the mini-Budget continues to shape the British political economy. While existing analyses often focus on the role of Truss’s personal blunders, the mechanics of the LDI crisis in the pension sector, or conspiracies of deep state collusion, this paper adopts a different approach. It seeks to use the mini-Budget event as a case study to examine the internal dynamics of the British state apparatus in response to an emergent financial crisis. Drawing on literature on structural power and state theory, it frames the mini-Budget as a form of intra-elite conflict between Truss’s libertarian economic project and the autonomy of the macroeconomic policymaking institutions of the British state. It contends that the Truss administration’s rebuke of these institutions and its break with expectations of fiscal discipline amidst the Bank of England’s transition toward monetary tightening provoked an institutional backlash that exacerbated market instability and reinforced a conservative macroeconomic consensus. Reconstructing the events of September-October 2022, this paper shows how key actors within Treasury, the Bank of England, and the OBR leveraged their unique position within the British state to protect their institutional autonomy, realigning around an agenda of fiscal conservatism and technocratic control that continues to dominate the macroeconomic regime of the UK.
    
    Author: Dillon Wamsley (University of Sheffield)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / New methods of migration control Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Samah Rafiq (King's College London)
  - Via Roxham Road: Viapolitics, Asylum Seeker Journeys, and the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement
    
    The Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement’s (STCA) 2023 amendment brought an end to the Roxham Road route by extending the STCA’s coverage to include unofficial ports of entry. Roxham Road, an unofficial crossing between the Canada-US border, saw 4,517 asylum seekers cross via the Road into Canada in February 2023, but only 69 in April 2023 following the March 2023 amendment (Government of Canada, 2024). Its closure has pushed migrants with the hope of seeking asylum in Canada to treacherous, and sometimes deadly, routes to avoid being sent back to the US (Cone, 2023). Critics have called for Canada to withdraw from the agreement, citing the US’s human rights violations, procedural differences which disadvantage asylum seekers in the US, and broader US policy that is unsafe for LGBTQ refugees (Moore, 2007; Arbel, 2013; Hartsoe, 2021). This focus on potential destinations’ safety is state-centric and elides the agreement’s effects on asylum seekers’ journeys. Going beyond a state-centric approach, this paper uses a viapolitical lens to examine unofficial routes into Canada. Viapolitics calls attention to how roads and vehicles can help us think critically about migration, displacing border- and state-centrism (Walters, 2015). Heeding this call, this paper asks how asylum seekers’ experiences of unofficial routes, particularly via Roxham Road, have changed pre- and post-amendment. Referring to periods pre- and post-amendment, I will use archival materials including information about taxi services to Roxham Road and advice on crossing from migrant-facing organisations to understand the changes in routes and experiences. A viapolitical approach to examining the Roxham Road route invites new ways of thinking about the Canada-US STCA and the harms it produces by thinking beyond the border, and instead how journeys to, through, and from borders come to be, and importantly, what this means for asylum seekers.
    
    Author: Madeleine Berry (Queen Mary University of London)
  - From State to Market: Outsourcing of functions in international migration control
    
    To manage international migration, states often contract certain roles with migration control regimes to private actors. Examples include carrier sanctions, security companies managing migrant detention, and outsourced visa application services. While research exists on what has been termed the “migration industry” that focuses on for-profit private actors in migration control, this research remains limited, focuses more on the social and economic aspects of this industry, and includes for-profit actors in informal/illegalised pathways to migration within the ambit of the migration industry. This paper argues that formalised pathways to migration can now be characterised as state-private hybrid regimes of migration control as states formally contract out certain aspects of migration control to private actors in a domain purportedly driven by the security concerns of the state, and that a new research agenda focusing on these hybrid regimes in formal pathways can present ways to study the drivers and effects of this rising privatisation in migration control. The paper outlines two logics in which privatisation is justified – expertise and efficiency and presents the case of visa application companies as an example. The paper invites IR scholars to investigate the effects of these hybrid regimes on concepts like sovereignty and security and their practice, on the everyday operations in migration control, on the individual migrant, while locating it within the disparity in access to international spaces for individuals from the global north and the global south.
    
    Author: Samah Rafiq (King's College London)
  - Do refugee policies change depending on where the refugees come from? Evidence from the United Nations
    
    Recent decades witnessed an increasing politicisation of refugee flows, with a growing debate on the role of international law and protection of refugees on the one hand and increasing trends of securitisation and externalisation of migration management on the other. Although there is growing scholarship on the topic, existing research is mostly focused on the European Union (EU) and its reaction to refugee flows, lacking a global perspective. Moreover, the current literature is mostly qualitative and often limited to brief periods. In a long-term and global investigation of this phenomenon, we ask: How do governments present the issue of refugee flows in a global arena such as the United Nations (UN)? More importantly, do they change their policy proposals as a function of where the refugees are originating from? Focusing on the annual sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, we focus on the long-term evolution (2000-2020) of the global debate on refugee flows. Based on Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), a mixed-methods technique that combines qualitative content analysis with quantitative social network analysis, on 630 speeches from the UN General Assembly, we show that the actor networks and proposed policies vary depending on the geographical location of the refugees. For instance, governments tend to use security framing when refugees come from Africa. We also identify a coalition of Oceanian governments advancing frames concerning climate change induced displacement. These findings have important implications for the relationship between the Global North and South.
    
    Authors: Ece Ozlem Atikcan (University of Warwick) , Sofie Roehrig (University of Warwick & TU Dresden)* , Tim Henrichsen (University of Warwick)*
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Nuclear Deterrence and Coercion in the era of strategic competition Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford) , Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University)
  
  Chair: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  - Deterrence by Environment: Preventing Attacks at Nuclear Energy Facilities during the War in Ukraine
    
    Although traditional nuclear deterrence frameworks conceptualize responses to nuclear warfare, these frameworks exclude conventional warfare that damages nuclear energy facilities. Warfare on nuclear energy poses a significant challenge to our understanding of deterrence, given its similarity to low-yield nuclear attacks in potential impact and the weakness of existing international norms preventing its use (Ackerman, 2016; Davis, 2023). This paper utilizes insights from the attacks on Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl during the War in Ukraine to explore the development of deterrents and norms. The paper proposes the existence of a new form of deterrence that transcends current frameworks of resilience, denial, and punishment: deterrence via short- and long-term environmental factors. Such “deterrence by environment” at nuclear energy facilities includes the immediate impact of warfare on nearby attacking forces as well as the prolonged radiation risk within contested territory. Such a deterrent may influence future decision-making by countries with nuclear energy programs, like the United Kingdom, to disincentivize attacks on their own facilities.
    
    Author: Janani Mohan (University of Cambridge)
  - The ‘Linkage Dilemma’: Europe’s Approach to the Physical Protection of Nuclear Facilities Against Attacks
    
    Attacks against nuclear facilities are typically associated with the Middle Eastern region. Yet, episodes have also occurred in Europe. In 1943, Allied forces carried out the first attack against a nuclear facility, targeting the Norsk Hydro hydrogen-electrolysis plant in Norway, a central element of Nazi Germany’s effort to develop nuclear weapons. Fast forward to 2022, the Russian military targeted the Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in Ukraine, Europe’s largest operational nuclear facility. Over the nearly eight decades separating these two episodes, European countries have been at the forefront of the debate on how to define, address, and prevent such incidents. The 1980s, particularly, were a pivotal decade for discussions on the issue. As negotiations progressed on the Radiological Weapons Convention and the first incidents of attacks on nuclear facilities since World War II emerged, Sweden spearheaded efforts to raise and integrate the issue of nuclear facility protection within the convention negotiations. The Swedish proposal marked the inception of formal discussions on nuclear facility protection as well as the onset of divergent viewpoints on the matter. Subsequently, debates intensified regarding the intersection between traditional radiological weapon concerns and the ban on attacks on nuclear facilities, resulting in pronounced divisions among European stakeholders. In parallel, these years witnessed the highest concentration of episodes of attacks ever recorded. This article seeks to trace the development of European states’ approach, both as individual entities and as a collective, regarding attacks on nuclear facilities, with a focus on the early 1980s. As this practice persists as an enduring feature of the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, remaining permissible as a policy option, it becomes pertinent to examine the historical engagement of European states with this issue. How have European states – individually and collectively – engaged with and influenced the debate on protecting nuclear facilities against such attacks?
    
    Author: Ludovica Castelli (University of Leicester)
  - Global Security in the Era of Rising Great Power Competition and the Relevance of Nuclear Weapons
    
    Are nuclear weapons still relevant to global security? Compared with the nuclear confrontation in the depths of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and deterrence appeared to have lost their salience. The focus in strategic studies changed to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and sub-conventional conflict. But with the conflict in Ukraine and the increasingly confrontational relationship between the United States and China, this narrative has come into question as Europe is witnessing an armed conflict on a scale unprecedented since 1945. In the context of increasing geopolitical rivalry between the main nuclear powers, the risk of armed conflict and the potential escalation to the use of nuclear weapons is increasingly interpreted as a fundamental challenge to the stability of the international system based on nuclear deterrence.
    There are three factors that, according to the recent literature, raise the risk of nuclear use:
    The first is a decline in deterrence stability due to technical advances, the modernisation of nuclear forces and the emergence of a third nuclear superpower (China). The second is what is described as increasing “entanglement” between nuclear and conventional strategic capabilities. The third is the increasing preparedness to use military force in the context of intensifying great power competition. This study argues that the opposite is the case and that these developments are misinterpreted. It demonstrates that nuclear deterrence between the Great Powers remains robust and argues that in the third nuclear age direct armed conflict between the main nuclear powers remains unlikely. It posits that the “stability/instability” paradox defines the strategic environment and that even though the risk of armed conflict between states has increased, the main military powers rely on conventional forces to deter or engage in such conflicts.
    
    Author: Christoph Bluth (University of Bradford)
  - Civil Nuclear Coercion: State-Sponsored Nuclear Facility Attacks as a Coercive Strategy
    
    Russia’s military occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is the most recent emergence of the understudied phenomenon of state actors and their proxies engaging in intentional, nefarious acts against nuclear facilities. This paper seeks to explore why states engage in this strategy, despite the potential risks to life, the environment, and the potential for future escalation. Our theory, which we term ‘civil nuclear coercion’, argues that states employ this strategy to shape the actions of the target state and to influence them to align with the coercer state’s wider goals and priorities. Our theory is supported by a series of case studies that demonstrate the various tactics of coercion states and their proxies employ to achieve this end. Our findings raise serious questions about the future implications of civil nuclear coercion in a world of shifting norms and geopolitics. We also evaluate the current global landscape of international humanitarian law, global norms and governance, and industry guidance to propose how states, with this theory in mind, could make themselves more resilient against such attacks.
    
    Authors: Zoha Naser (King's College London) , Sarah Tzinieris (King's College London)*
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Pop culture and IR: violence and/in popular culture Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Moa Peldan (Swedish Defence University) , Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)
  
  Chair: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
  
  Discussant: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow)
  - “Seeing through soldier eyes”: A Video Analysis of Swedish Peacekeeping Narratives in Military Reality TV
    
    Military reality TV enables militaries to invite civilian audiences into an interactive, ‘entertaining’, and first-person relationship with war. What does it mean to “see through soldier eyes”? This article contributes with novel insights on the subtle forms of audience participation in militarism through a video analysis of three Swedish military reality TV shows: “Peace Force”, “War for Peace” and “Peace Soldier”, which depict Swedish soldiers on deployment in Afghanistan and Mali. The first two are about the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) and the third one shows Swedish peacekeepers in the United Nations mission in Mali, MINUSMA. The viewer gets to see how the soldiers handle death, love, conflict and being away from home. Drawing from Critical Military Studies and Visual International Relations scholarship, we argue that the soldiers’ storylines and the visual representation of their service conveys a specific racialised, classed, gendered vision of Swedishness – portraying Sweden as peaceful, gender-equal, humanitarian, and secular. Through these shows’ aesthetic registers, choice of music and color, the Swedish military involvement in these missions is rendered ‘palatable’ (Jester, 2023) and accessible for a Swedish audience through familiar binaries of peace/war, home/away, boredom/excitement, enemy/ally and progressive/backwards.
    
    Authors: Moa Peldan (Swedish Defence University) , Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)
  - Gendering Brazilian funk and militarisation: Kátia Flávia, .38 carregado, and women contesting violence
    
    The paper uses Brazilian funk as a lens for understanding the particularities of Brazilian militarisation from a queer/feminist perspective. We explore funk’s gendered constructions, how these intersect with race and class, and trace its imbrication in broader histories of drug trafficking, police violence, and international trade (Moreira, 2017; Costa de Faria, 2015; Ribeiro, 2021; Sneed, 2007). Funk has its origins in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the marginalized favela communities of Rio de Janeiro. Whilst it is now a world-renowned rhythm, coming to global prominence at the turn of the 21st century via artists such as MIA and Diplo, it continues to be stigmatized and criminalized due to its association to violent territories, Black communities, and sexualised lyrics celebrating ‘bandido’ (‘thug’) and ‘poor/simple’ ways of life. The paper focuses on a less common type of funk, sung by socially and economically marginalized women, largely from the favelas of Rio. We suggest that women’s funk cultural expressions offer important insights into both understanding - and contesting - violent forms of militarisation and its multiple (colonial, capitalist, militaristic) manifestations in Brazil, tracing its implications for the study of global politics and the broader field of International Relations.
    
    Authors: Izadora Xavier do Monte (Maria Sibylla Merian Center) , Olimpia Burchiellaro (University of Essex)
  - Brat security: NATO and the de-politicising function of internet meme culture
    
    As ‘brat summer’ came to an end in September 2024, NATO posted on Instagram an image of the word ‘peace’ on a neon-green background with black lowercase font in a parody of an album artwork. Named after the breakthrough album by Charli XCX, ‘brat summer’ – associated with notions of rejecting hegemonic feminity, day drinking, early 2000s fashion, recreational drugs, and ‘being a little messy’ – achieved popularity with the millennial generation in Western Europe. We seek to take an intersectional approach to this specific Instagram post and contextualise NATO’s ‘peace’ meme within wider debates about international organisations and their use of social media. What about this image, containing the innocuous word ‘peace’, provoked such a deep response of disbelief, cringe, and discomfort for Instagram users beyond other typical corporate posts? NATO represents an old-school form of traditional diplomacy, collective security, and militarisation – far removed from the ‘brat’ aesthetic. The hypocriscy of NATO implicitly endorsing a meme that is constitutive of illicit drug use and ‘white girl’ crime-evasion feels problematic. We take NATO’s ‘peace’ as an impetus to think around international agencies’ use social media as a de-politicising technology while communicating relatability and playfulness, obscuring their own role within violent hierarchies.
    
    Authors: Luise Bendfeldt (Uppsala University) , Margot Tudor (Department of International Politics, City - University of London)*
  - MY P**** IS BIGGER THAN YOUR D****: Cinematic Representations of Militarized Masculinities in the Age of Drone Warfare in Good Kill (2015) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
    
    Although the consequences of drone warfare on counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and civilians have been researched, its relation to military personnel and the practice of soldiering remains at early stages of exploration.
    This research raises the question: How are militarized masculinities of military pilots cinematically represented in popular culture in the context of drone warfare? Following a critical visual methodology informed by a poststructural feminist insights, the research conducts a film analysis of two US-American movies, Good Kill (2015) and Top Gun: Mavericks (2022).
    The analysis deploys close yet complementary methods: narrative and (visual) discourse analysis. It emerges as a result that male fighter jet pilots are represented as embodying a hegemonic form of militarized masculinity despite the existential threat posed by the unmanned turned of warfare. In contrast, military pilots engaged in drone warfare do not uphold their associations to hegemonic forms of militarised masculinities. Through their interaction with drone technology, they are effectively feminized and emasculated. The findings have broader implications for military recruitment strategies, but also for a growing number of militaries and security actors turning toward semi-automated technologies, and the support and acceptability thereof in the context of increasing militarization in Western societies.
    
    Author: Andréa Noël (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Problems without Passports: Transnational Threats and Security Challenges Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  This roundtable will explore the national security implications of "problems without passports" – former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s term for transnational challenges that evade traditional boundaries and defy simple policy solutions. Focusing on issues like climate change, pandemics, transnational economic crime, disinformation, and threats in space and cyberspace, the discussion will examine how these complex, interconnected risks disrupt the conventional frameworks of national security. Panellists will analyse the limitations of existing security architectures in addressing such pervasive threats, highlight the need for a more adaptive and inclusive policy approach, and debate innovative, cross-sectoral strategies that draw from environmental, health, finance, psychology, and technology disciplines. In doing so, the roundtable will consider how broadening the national security agenda to integrate global and human security concerns might redefine and strengthen the UK’s approach to these pressing issues. By facilitating dialogue across academic disciplines, policy sectors and perspectives, this roundtable seeks to promote a more resilient, policy-engaged understanding of security challenges that extend beyond borders, better equipping the UK to respond to an era of shared, borderless threats
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Chair: Hillary Briffa (King's College London)
  
  Participants: Jessie Hamill-Stewart (University of Bath) , Maria Nizzero (RUSI) , Jon Roozenbeek (King's College London) , Maria Julia Trombetta (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Reflections on training military personnel for peace operations Blackstaff, Grand central Hotel
  
  It is thirty years since the UN General Assembly first recognised the importance of training military personnel for peacekeeping activities. Since then a considerable architecture has been created which seeks to provide some sense of standardisation and transfer of key norms which are valued by the UN to military personnel.
  This roundtable will reflect on the challenges of training peacekeepers for peace operations. In particular it will ask the extent to which those aspects which are fundamental to peace operations are transferred in the training context to soldiers from national militaries, what are the key challenges associated with this, and what this may tell us about the future direction of peace operations, and those militaries who are asked to undertake them.
  Panellists on the roundtable will reflect on their experiences of researching training as well as participation as trainers of military personnel for peace operations. They will be asked the extent to which the training system as we know it is sustainable, and whether we should look anew at undertaking training for peacekeeping.
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Chair: david curran (Coventry University)
  
  Participants: Gena Sturgon (Coventry University) , Anastasia Prokhorova (European University Institute) , Anne Flaspöler (Durham University) , david curran (Coventry University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Reinventing the West through the Balkans: Balkanization, Euro-Atlantic Policies, and the (Western) Balkans Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable explores the complex discourse of 'balkanization' and its profound impact on Euro-Atlantic policies toward the Western Balkans. Based on Liridona Veliu Ashiku's recent book, "'Balkanization' and the Euro-Atlantic Processes of the (Western) Balkans: Back to the Future," participants will discuss how the concept of 'balkanization' has been used as a strategic framework by the EU and NATO to assert Western unity and identity. Through a genealogical analysis spanning from the Balkan Wars to North Macedonia’s name change in 2018, this work reveals how the EU and NATO have consistently employed 'balkanization' to define the Western Balkans as 'other,' enabling political elites to advance unity within the West.
  
  This roundtable brings together scholars and students of Southeast Europe, International Relations, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, and History, aiming to deepen our understanding of how historical narratives and contemporary policies intertwine. By examining these dynamics, participants will consider the ongoing relevance of 'balkanization' and explore pathways for redefining relationships in the region, especially as global power structures shift in an increasingly multipolar world.
  
  Sponsor: South East Europe Working Group
  
  Chair: Liridona Veliu Ashiku (University of Notre Dame)
  
  Participants: Catherine Baker (University of Hull) , Sladjana Lazic (University of Innsbruck, Austria) , Maria Adriana Deiana (Queen’s University Belfast) , Liridona Veliu Ashiku (University of Notre Dame)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Religion meets Time: Colonial and decolonial hi/stories Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Mirko Palestrino (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Making Time: Queer Temporalities in Diasporist Judaism
    
    In the context of increasingly militant Zionist consolidation of Jewish identity, this paper examines a transatlantic movement of people in the US and UK enacting Jewish identity without Zionism. This analysis does not seek to define Judaism without Zionism, or purport to detail a singular Jewish condition, but rather, to illustrate one possibility of ‘doing Jewish’. An embodied alternative to the hyper-masculine, ethno-national, exceptionalist ideologies promulgated by the Israeli state, this way of doing Jewish is embraced by communities in the North-Atlantic Jewish leftist milieu. Building on the work of Atalia Omer (2019), Santiago Slobadsky (2014), and Judith Butler (2012), among others, this analysis looks at the role of queerness in these spaces, asking how queer identities and their attendant critiques of sexuality and gender break down conceptions of purity, which often police Jewish communal boundaries. In addition to the productive tensions of unfixed boundaries, this paper looks at the deconstructive possibilities of queer time (Halberstam 2005) and Jewish time, examining the deployment of non-normative temporalities by Jewish people in movement spaces. Using both ethnographic and historical data, this paper asks, what possibilities do alternative relationships to time engender and what limitations to utopic visions remain?
    
    Author: Chana Rose Rabinovitz (Queen Mary University of London)
  - The “R” word: Decolonizing Religious Freedom in the Americas
    
    This paper argues that people across the Americas are actively contesting and redefining universal concepts inherited from the liberal international order, particularly the notion of "religious freedom." Rather than examining how governments or international organizations define this concept, I focus on the voices and politics of transnational and regional civil society networks within the Organization of American States (OAS). Can religious freedom be reimagined when defined by those who experience it most directly? Is it possible to frame religious freedom as a human right rooted in decolonial, feminist, ecological, Indigenous, and hemispheric epistemologies? I explore how diverse identity groups—including feminist, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, evangelical, and other religious coalitions—have engaged with and redefined religious freedom from 2018 to 2023 in multilateral spaces of the OAS. Through a decolonial lens, this study reveals how intersecting identities shaped by race, gender, and spirituality contribute to the creation of new political subjects within global governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at OAS General Assemblies, the Summit of the Americas, and an interpretive analysis of civil society roles in international organizations, this research presents an innovative perspective on the evolving discourse of religious freedom.
    
    Author: Ely Orrego Torres (Northwestern University)
  - Temporal oddities in the contemporary culture war over the British Empire
    
    This paper offers an analysis of the deployment of time by conservatives engaged in the defence of the British Empire. Specifically, I capture two alternative conceptions of how conservatives present time. The first, I term the “continuous one nation” conservative approach: there is a temporal arc that links the empire with the present – a moral continuum that binds the actions of the past with today’s living community. The second is the “temporally segregated neoliberal” approach: the past is ontologically and normatively distinct from the present; it is over and complete and does not meaningfully impinge on the present. I explore these conceptions of time through an unpacking of four tropes of colonial apologia. 1. That citizens can feel pride or shame for their nation’s past. 2: That Britain provided prosperity and democracy in ways that endure today. 3. That contemporary racism and inequality are not a direct result of empire. 4. That one cannot judge the past by today’s standards. I discuss how, despite time and its passing being crucial to conservative ideology, the tendency among conservatives to shift between the “one nation” and the “neoliberal” conceptions of time reveals an incoherence at the heart of this tradition.
    
    Author: Tom Bentley (University of Aberdeen)
  - Liberated Futures and Futurites beyond Anti-Zionism
    
    Since the originary moments of political Zionism in the 18th century, Palestinian and Jewish (and Palestinian Jewish) thinkers and organisers have articulated forms of solidarity with each other across borders in order to oppose the colonial racism and antisemitism inherent to Zionist thought. Such forms of solidarity have become more urgent and more clear in many leftist quarters since October 7. Solidarity movements with Palestinians, especially by a growing number of Jews openly stating that they are anti-Zionist, are growing. Whilst these reactions to Zionism are necessary for fighting the Israeli state, this paper asks what a form of internationalist politics around Palestine that does not centre opposition to Zionism (even if it is anti-Zionist) might look like. Drawing on our ongoing conversation, we examine the role of "Magical Marxism", the imagination, lost Jewish-Palestinian histories, and theories of futurity to envision forms of solidarity that are not primarily reactions to Zionism but that actively imagine and create a shared future free from its violent, life-flattening constraints. Through this conversation, we aim to engage critically with the foreclosures imposed by Zionism and to imagine an (im)possible common future rooted in a present politics of solidarity and liberation dreams.
    
    Authors: Hanna Al Taher (TU Dresden) , Howie Rechavia-Taylor (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Societal resilience and challenging power Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
  - Russia’s war against Ukraine as an imperial/colonial war: perspectives from Aotearoa New Zealand
    
    There is growing literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine as a war of colonialism/imperialism, with Ukraine’s resistance envisaged as an act of decolonisation, and mainstream IR accounts as acts of coloniality/epistemic imperialism (e.g. Barkawi; Hendl et al; Mälksoo; Oksamytna; Snyder). At the same time, since October 2023, the war in Gaza has been widely condemned internationally as an imperialist war, and Israel is often categorised as a settler-colonial state. Such condemnation is common in Aotearoa New Zealand, itself a settler-colonial state where there are ongoing debates about how to decolonise. In this paper, I outline and analyse the postcolonial perspective on the war in Ukraine and then focus on approaches to the war in Aotearoa New Zealand – in the media, in politics, among the public, and in academia. Drawing on interviews with Ukrainian academics based in New Zealand (and Australia), I will investigate to what extent the postcolonial perspective has been taken up or rejected, especially as it intersects with accounts of the Israel-Palestine war and developments in Aotearoa New Zealand itself.
    
    Author: James Headley (University of Otago New Zealand)
  - Closing the doors on Russian information influence? Exploring the differences in audience receptivity to Moscow's strategic narratives in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia
    
    Since acquiring independence in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the former Soviet republics have pursued different approaches in their relations with Russia. Growing divergence or maintained proximity in political and economic affairs are often reflected in the degree of openness on the level of culture and information flows; the extent to which Moscow-oriented products, outlets and ownership in education, media, cultural and other related sectors are accepted or resisted by local political actors. Where channels advancing Russian narratives are able to operate freely and uncontested, the narratives they disseminate will tend to be more sympathetically received by audiences than in territories where policies have been enacted to reduce the accessibility of the information space.
    
    This paper will highlight differences in openness to information flows from Moscow between Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia, which are reflected in the findings of attitudinal surveys conducted among target audiences in those countries. It will be argued that variation in receptivity, including the extent of resilience or susceptibility to target narratives, are to be understood as a result of different policies, practices and ideational perspectives characteristic of each case country.
    
    Author: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
  - Women's Anti-War Resistance in Russia after 24.02.2022
    
    Mass demonstrations after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, which had attracted an unprecedented number of women, subsided in March 2022 due to severe state repercussions. Anti-war resistance across Russia, however, continues to take place but has moved from the level of organised groups to the individual level and has adapted its forms and locations. This paper explores women’s everyday anti-war resistance in Russia and illuminates their motivation and forms of resistance, with particular attention to embodied experience as a motivating factor in their protest. Based on the analysis of publicly available reports of women’s protests in both Russian and international newspaper, this article deepens and nuances our understanding of the creative ways in which Russia’s women are resisting the authoritarian regime and complements research on more organised women’s protest groups like the Feminist Anti-War Resistance or ‘The Way Home’ initiative by mothers and wives of Russian soldiers.
    
    Author: Ina Friesen (Aberystwyth University)
  - Voluntary Civil Defence Organisations in Georgia: From Everyday Militarisation to the Societal Quest for War Preparedness
    
    It has been long acknowledged that understanding militarisation requires looking beyond battlefield and military organisations. Zooming onto Georgia, this paper argues that everyday militarisation dynamics in the Georgian context evolve in relation to the country's national defence needs and regional security concerns. Rather than focusing on defense policy, the paper explores how the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been woven into the existing war imaginaries of Georgian society rooted in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Building on the literature on everyday militarisation, this paper looks into the role of voluntary defence organisations that provide free basic military trainings to civilians. The two most prominent organisations in Georgia, “Aisi” and “General Giorgi Mazniashvili Youth Legion” declare themselves as independent voluntary apolitical organisations. While their establishment precedes the war in Ukraine, 2022 Russia’s full-scale invasion provided an impetus for their revamped popularity, attracting individuals of various ages, sex, occupations, and ethnic backgrounds. While both groups aim to contribute to the overall national defence preparedness and promote the military profession, they cooperate with however remain autonomous from the state institutions. Activities are funded through donations and partnerships with small enterprises.
    
    Through interviews, this research studies the ideas that bound the individuals behind voluntary defence organisations. Applying the concept of militarisation to the Georgian case reveals the complexity of the factors where the notions of the individual and collective effervescence coalesce. Banal militarism embedded in everyday life is met with the state’s effort to harness societal patriotism into the resource for national defence preparedness. Similar voluntary defense organisations have gained momentum in other countries, particularly the Baltic States and Poland, emphasising the transnational nature of militarisation practices. Providing situated knowledge on militarisation in Georgia can provide insights into a larger phenomenon which can also potentially elucidate how related ideas and practices transcend national borders.
    
    Author: Rusudan Zabakhidze (Swedish Defence University)
  - Reactionary Internationalism as a Challenge to Liberal International Order: European Radical Right Parties and the War in Ukraine
    
    This paper analyses the rhetoric of European radical right parties ― such as the National Rally, the Freedom Party of Austria, and Fidesz ― regarding the War in Ukraine. It aims to distinguish their position on this matter and determine if it leads them towards a more moderate ideological standpoint, in line with the 'liberal consensus', or if it intensifies their struggle against the Western liberal order and makes them even more radical. Recent debates in International Relations have introduced the concept of reactionary internationalism, a more or less homogenous ideology of a global anti-liberal right-wing movement with its connections to Russia, China, and other illiberal actors. Despite efforts to strengthen ties, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has presented a setback, creating an opportunity for the liberal community to come together and rediscover a sense of unity. Based on these assumptions, this paper employs discourse analysis to examine whether there is a shared ideology of reactionary internationalism among the actors associated with the European Parliament’s Identity and Democracy group, and how the ongoing War in Ukraine impacts it. Furthermore, the paper explores a more general question of whether this shared ideology poses a threat to the liberal international order.
    
    Keywords: Liberal International Order, Radical Right, Reactionary Internationalism, War in Ukraine
    
    Author: Goran Tepšić (University of Belgrade)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Southern Strategies: Foreign Policy Perspectives of Global South States Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Conveners: Thais Doria (University of Warwick) , Nicholas Lees (Department of Politics, University of Liverpool)
  
  Chair: Nicholas Lees (Department of Politics, University of Liverpool)
  
  Discussant: Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)
  - Navigating the New Cold War and Gaza: South Africa’s human rights foreign policy in a shifting geopolitical landscape
    
    This paper analyses the intricacies of South Africa’s human rights based foreign policy within the context of a shifting geopolitical landscape, characterised by a ‘new cold war’ and conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. While the liberal international order underwritten by the United States is under threat, not just from emerging powers with alternative approaches to human rights, but from the West’s inconsistent application of human rights principles, South Africa seeks to position itself as a guarantor of global human rights. In doing that, the paper examines the complexities emerging from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, threats to leave the International Criminal Court, and its voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly. In doing that, the paper highlights how South Africa is seeking to navigate and influence the evolving the global human rights framework despite competing narratives and approaches.
    
    Author: Obert Hodzi (Department of Politics, University of Liverpool)
  - Diversity in Discontent: The North-South Divide at the United Nations and Foreign Policy Variation Across the Global South
    
    Voting at the United Nations General Assembly is often used to evaluate the foreign policy positions of states relative to one another. The voting record indicates a persistent divide between the Global North and Global South in terms of their assessments of US leadership and the liberal international order. This paper expands the focus beyond voting to investigate what other indicators can tell us about the foreign policy positions adopted by different states across the Global South. Through text analysis of United Nations General Debate speeches 1991-2021, the paper demonstrates that high-income, politically liberal states are more likely to discuss human rights and humanitarian issues in their speeches, whilst lower-income and economically peripheral states are more likely to discuss poverty, injustice and development. Additionally, a cluster analysis of foreign policy behaviours of states 2012-2016 further confirms the existence of a North-South foreign policy divide, but also indicates substantial heterogeneity in the Global South. ‘Critics’, ‘rejectionists’, ‘conservatives’ and the ‘true non-aligned’ differ from one another in terms of the aspects of the liberal international order they reject, criticise or endorse. There is diversity in the discontent of the Global South.
    
    Author: Nicholas Lees (Department of Politics, University of Liverpool)
  - A Postcolonial Middle Power: An Intellectual History of Indonesia’s Foreign Policy since 1945
    
    This paper aims to assess the diverse intellectual traditions that shape Indonesia’s foreign policy since 1945. I argue that Indonesia has an evolving, competing international thoughts that are shaped, largely, by two key sources of identity, namely Indonesia’s history as a postcolonial state, and a geopolitical perception as a middle-power in international politics. These historical and political perceptions have shaped five prominent traditions that shape Indonesia’s international thoughts. First, the nationalist tradition emphasises the importance of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and rejection of Western dominance and intervention. Second, the rationalist tradition maintains a pragmatic and careful approach to International Relations and takes seriously Indonesia’s position and capability as a middle power. Third, the traditionalist position embraces culture and religion –particularly Java and Islam—that shapes the beliefs of Indonesia’s leaders. Fourth, the realist traditions emphasise the national interest and the importance of Indonesia’s defence against potential aggressors. Finally, the growing critical tradition, espoused by feminist, left-wing, and liberal activists after Reformasi, emphasises Indonesia’s values as a ‘good international citizens’ and preservation of justice. I reflect on how these five traditions locate Indonesia as an Asian Middle Power in changing international politics since 1945.
    
    Author: Ahmad Umar (Aberystwyth University)
  - Navigating Ambiguity: How Narrative Identity Shapes Indonesia and Brazil’s Foreign Policies
    
    In recent years, Indonesia and Brazil have shown seemingly inconsistent stances toward international conflicts: while adopting a passive approach to Russia’s aggression, they have taken a firm stand against Israel in the Gaza conflict. This paper argues that traditional geopolitical analyses, which emphasize strategic interests and constraints, fall short of explaining these foreign policy choices. Instead, we propose that the narratives these countries construct about themselves, deeply tied to their historical identities, offer a more comprehensive understanding of their behavior.
    Indonesia and Brazil’s foreign policies reflect their self-images as advocates for oppressed nations and resistance to Western dominance, narratives rooted in colonial legacies and past struggles. These biographical narratives shape their diplomatic choices, manifesting as what may appear to be ambivalence but is, in fact, a reconciliation of strategic interests with identity-driven priorities. By exploring these narrative identities, we reveal how Indonesia and Brazil balance between pragmatism and the symbolic weight of their Global South identity.
    This paper thus offers insights into how states interpret their global roles, suggesting that foreign policy in the Global South is not merely reactive but also reflective of deeper historical and identity-based narratives. These perspectives enhance our understanding of the complex and often ambiguous ways Indonesia and Brazil engage with international crises, especially in Europe and the Middle East, providing a nuanced view of how narrative identity informs global political actions.
    
    Authors: Moch Faisal Karim (Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia)* , Thais Doria (University of Warwick)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Splintered Realities and Digital War: Infrastructures of Conflict and Community Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Matthew Ford (Swedish Defence University)
  
  Chair: Shane Brighton (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Discussant: Shane Brighton (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Fighting and Living the Epic War: How Russians Resist Fragmentation and Individuation in Online Spaces
    
    Conflict simultaneously destroys subjectivities and identities and creates myths that come to define social groupings. Meanwhile, scholars argue that social media equally fragments individual realities and allows users to bond around shared truths in bubbles of (un)reality.
    
    In this talk, I explore how Russians on a range of platforms, including VK and Telegram, have navigated these divides to—drawing on Baudrillard—engage in shared discursive practices that see ordinary users and the state come together to co-create an “epic”—in Bakhtin’s terms, a closed and harmonious world—of the war against Ukraine. The fluid and fast paced social media platform allows this epic to be constantly created and recreated in response to perceived setbacks in the war. Users thus immerse themselves in an online hyperreality where the present war is always certain to match up to, and even eclipse, the great myths of the nationalist past.
    
    Author: Ian Garner (Pilecki Institute, Warsaw)
  - Inventive digital witnessing during Russia’s war in Ukraine
    
    Civilian actors in Ukraine and beyond are using digital platforms to witness Russia's war, i.e. to document, archive or investigate the war through platform-specific data and media practices. These digital witnessing practices, which can also be seen as digitalized resistance, are part of a historically and geographically diverse phenomenon of mediatised war witnessing. I propose that some digital witnessing practices on social media platforms (e.g. by prominent journalists, investigative collectives or war influencers) represent a form of witnessing aimed at exposing war experiences and crimes. In this talk, I focus on those digital witnessing practices that are less concerned with accountability through exposure, rational discourse and empathic solidarity, but rather create alternative witnessing forms. Drawing on a case of inconspicuous and non-institutionalised witnessing on Telegram (Bareikytė & Makhortykh, 2024) and other cases, I speculate on the potential of such obscure, inventive and creative forms of digital witnessing.
    
    Author: Miglė Bareikytė (European New School of Digital Studies)
  - Infrastructures of Knowing: Citizen Epistemic Agency in the Digital Spaces of War
    
    Given the increasing fragmentation of the online ecosystem shaped by authoritarian state interventions and platform logics, the digital realities of wars also become splintered. Focusing on Russia's war on Ukraine, I investigate the digital communicative acts of citizens and their impact on wartime knowledge production. I argue that citizens' affective media practices are central to establishing epistemic agency in the context of participatory warfare. Drawing on ethnographic observations of Ukrainian social media spaces during Russia's invasion, I reflect on how such media practices are strategically adopted and enacted by citizens in wartime. In order for these practices to coalesce into sustainable infrastructures of knowing that support epistemic authority, citizens combine repertoires of narrative resistance and tactics of algorithmic agency. Such affective practices aim to contest grand geopolitical war narratives and the 'West-splaining' that tends to dominate wartime knowledge production, reshaping how embodied knowledge of war circulates in global networks.
    
    Author: Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University)
  - Infrastructures of knowing and its implications for military targeting
    
    Digital infrastructures are now a mundane feature of everyday life. Smartphones make it possible to produce, publish and make sense of the world. The enabling networks, platforms and devices that make this possible in peacetime continue to work in wartime. This is creating new possibilities for knowing, amplifying and participating in war. The quantity of footage from Ukraine drives home the deeply mediated and ubiquitous nature of all things digital in war. This is refashioning military targeting, creating open kill chains where seeing, knowing and killing have moved beyond the control of the military into civil society more broadly.
    
    Author: Matthew Ford (Swedish Defence University)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Teaching emotions in Politics and IR Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  This roundtable explores innovative approaches to incorporating emotions into the teaching of politics and International Relations. Panelists will discuss strategies for engaging with complex political concepts and global issues through affect and emotions. It aims to spark a broader conversation about the role of emotions in politics and IR pedagogy, encouraging researchers to reflect on their own teaching practices and consider innovative and critical approaches to bringing emotions into IR. Panelists will share concrete examples from their teaching experiences, demonstrating how teaching emotions can deepen ways of learning IR. The roundtable will also discuss potential challenges and ethical considerations when bringing emotions into the classroom.
  
  We will explore the following themes:
  
  -Designing syllabi, assignments, and tutorial exercises to engage with the emotional dynamics of global politics
  -Ways to incorporate emotion/affect and embodiment into general IR modules
  -Guiding students to engage with different methodologies in researching emotions
  -Reflecting on emotions of instructors and students in classroom settings, and dealing with emotionally sensitive topics such as war and trauma
  -Exploring reflexivity and ethics of discussing emotions in classrooms by building on critical pedagogies (e.g., feminist, decolonial approaches)"
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: EPIR Working group
  
  Participants: Simon Koschut (Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) , Amanda Beattie (Aston University) , Naomi Head (University of Glasgow) , Norma Rossi (University of St Andrews)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / The Future of the ‘English School’ Approach to International Studies: Continuity, Adaptation, and Transformation in a Global World. Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  As BISA marks its 50th anniversary, it is opportune to reflect on the past half-century of International Studies and its key theoretical approaches. Closely tied to BISA’s development, for over sixty years the 'English School' (ES) approach has significantly contributed to our grasp of the normative foundations underpinning International Society. However, as International Studies grows increasingly pluralistic, global and interdisciplinary, reassessing the relevance of this approach is crucial. Faced with evolving challenges outside of its initial horizons - from environmental crises to transnational cyber politics - questions about the applicability of the ES framework are more urgent than ever. What can this approach offer today?
  This roundtable examines the future of the ES approach, examining whether its foundational assumptions sufficiently meet contemporary needs. Established scholars and early-career researchers of varied backgrounds, genders and ethnicities will critically evaluate its limitations and identify developmental pathways. They will seek to rearticulate the conceptual framework of international and world society so to better address global normative challenges, incorporating neglected perspectives. Through dynamic, multi-faceted dialogue, this roundtable will equip International Studies with a refined conceptual toolkit that can firmly articulate the pressing challenges facing global international society, overcoming past theoretical limitations and strengthening our field for the future.
  
  Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group
  
  Chair: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)
  
  Participants: Mateusz Ambrożek (Vistula University, Warsaw) , Seán Molloy (University of Kent) , John Williams (Durham University) , Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / The Myths of Certainty: Myth, Magic, and Uncertainty in International Relations Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Aishling Mc Morrow (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Chair: Aishling Mc Morrow (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Discussant: Aishling Mc Morrow (Queen's University Belfast)
  - A world of uncertainties and a world of solutions: India’s framing of global uncertainties
    
    This paper examines how the socio-political condition of risingness—the notion that a rising power should play a more active role in world politics—shapes India’s responses to ongoing global uncertainties. Prompted by this condition, yet still bound by its long-held tradition of non-alignment, India responds in innovative ways. The paper argues that India’s foreign policy discourse frames uncertainty as a problem requiring solutions. In line with its increasing right-wing Hindu nationalist tilt, these solutions are sought from Hindu traditions. Climate change, for example, is presented as addressable through insights from ancient Vedic literature. Geopolitical conflicts, such as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, are considered resolvable through the Indian philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (roughly translated as “the world is one family”). Such framings were also prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, where images of world leaders folding their hands in a gesture resembling namaste were portrayed as a unique Indian solution to curb virus spread. Building on this framework, the paper explores how driven by the condition of risingness and drawing from Hindu traditions, India seeks to redefine its identity from a non-aligned bystander to a problem-solver that has solutions for a world marred by uncertainty.
    
    Author: Shalabh Chopra (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
  - Guardians of Humanity: Justifying Nuclear Possession
    
    This paper grapples with the myth of Western, and particularly, US guardian-ism, as a way to justify the possession of nuclear weapons. This paper draws upon the stories told by US officials in conversations around the possession of nuclear weapons, and in response to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It argues that in response to this treaty, which seeks to make the possession of nuclear weapons illegal and illegitimate, The United States has crafted narratives that serve to create and uphold a world in which their possession is legitimate, necessary, and wise. This paper show that these narratives are underpinned with colonial and gendered myths. Hence, the state attempt to resist a world in which its reliance on an ability to cause mass destruction is challenged, with simplistic, cohesive myths. This paper shows that these myths are built through the rhetoric of government officials, and in the architecture of Washington DC, hence showing how states’ myths are made and sustained. This paper also looks affectively at these myths in order to understand what these narratives are doing. It draws on empirical interviews with US government officials, as part of the scholar’s PhD empirical research.
    
    Author: Zeenat Sabur (University of Manchester)
  - Making Sense of the Senseless: The Role of Myth and Magic in International Relations
    
    This paper seeks to examine the ways in which myth and magic become written onto traumatic events, such as colonialism and oppression, across international relations. I argue that cultural myths often emerge as coping mechanisms to help societies think through, and process, previously unimaginable suffering. Taking the example of folklore across the island of Ireland, this paper examines the tales that took hold during colonisation and positions them as efforts to write certainty onto greatly uncertain times. Using Foucault’s genealogy, I analyse how a narrative of a capricious nature of magic emerged amidst colonisation and took hold, despite running directly counter to the deep institutionalisation of religion in society. Crucially, then, this paper seeks to present the layers of meaning and layers of experience that these myths and legends untangle and overwrite as a way of making sense of the senseless and as a way of coping with the horrors of invasion, oppression, and colonisation. In all, the paper seeks to trouble a singular reading of international relations and highlight the centrality of myths and mythmaking to the discipline.
    
    Author: Aishling Mc Morrow (Queen's University Belfast)
  - After the Stranger: Productive readings of ambivalence in and beyond (Western) poststructuralist IR
    
    This paper builds on the concept of the Stranger/strangeness to open up and question predominant binary conceptions of identity formation/Self and Other dynamics in poststructuralist IR that rest on an ontology based on structure characterised by ‘difference’, and the constant temptation to either turn difference into equivalence or expel it as ‘threatening otherness’. Contrary to these premises, our starting point is an understanding of the human condition characterised by relations and ambivalence. We invoke the Stranger as a figure embodying in-betweenness/ambivalence and engage with approaches that – instead of reading strangeness as a source of insecurity – stress the productive, integral role of ambivalence in the process of (collective) identity formation. While taking inspiration from the Derridian emphasis on the ethos of accepting undecidability and, in the first part of the paper, engaging with post-structuralist thinkers who – often only tacitly – have evoked productive understandings of ambivalence, the paper also seeks to address what has been criticised as a reification of eurocentrism in poststructuralist scholarship. It thus additionally draws from Global IR scholarship and ontologies beyond the Western philosophical orbit that invoke non-substantialist and non-dualist subject-object relationships. Finally, the paper then illustrates these theoretical insights by, for instance, looking at successful diplomacy/mediation as productive engagements with strangeness in empirical examples.
    
    Authors: Felix Berenskötter (King's College London) , Nicola Nymalm (University of Edinburgh)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / The politics of diasporas and and diasporas within global politics Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Marius Mehrl (University of Leeds)
  - Host country Citizenship regimes, Transnational political mobilisation, and the Emigrant Vote in Turkish Elections, 2014-2023
    
    Migrants are transnational political actors who can be politically active in both their host and origin country. They can organise and/or vote in both countries, but are also subject to political mobilisation and rules governing their access to formal political participation in the two contexts. Here, we focus on Turkish emigrants to examine how citizenship rules governing access to host country political participation and transnational political mobilisation and campaigning from their origin country affect their participation in origin country elections. Regarding citizenship rules, we investigate how dual citizenship, which affects both the legal membership and emotional attachment to their host and origin countries, shapes their involvement in origin country politics. For transnational political mobilisation and campaigning, we seek to understand how Turkish politicians’ visits and the presence of political organisations, by mobilising and reconfiguring such attachments to the origin country, motivate emigrants’ vote choice. We quantitatively analyse data covering all elections where emigrants were allowed to vote. Our findings highlight the importance of emigrants' confined transnational citizenship and of political mobilisation via grassroots organisations abroad. High level visits by politicians show little effect. This study contributes to our understanding of migrants’ political behaviour in transnational contexts, and how they engage in the political lives of both their countries of residence and origin.
    
    Authors: Selin Sivis (University of Bristol)* , Marius Mehrl (University of Leeds)
  - Bridging Continents: The Evolution of the Chinese Diaspora in Europe and Its Impact on Sino-European Relations
    
    This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese diaspora in Europe from the 17th century to the present, emphasizing its profound influence on national relations between China and European countries. Beginning with the earliest Chinese sojourners brought by missionaries and traders, it traces the waves of migration spurred by historical events such as the Opium Wars, World Wars, and China’s Reform and Opening Up. The study examines how these diasporas were not only responses to global geopolitical shifts but also catalysts that reshaped bilateral relations. By exploring the changing roles of the Chinese diaspora—from scholars and labourers to merchants and entrepreneurs—the paper highlights how their integration into European societies influenced perceptions and policies on both continents. It delves into the reciprocal impact of Chinese government policies toward overseas nationals and European immigration laws, revealing a complex interplay that has shaped migration flows and diaspora experiences. Through global diaspora governance frameworks, the paper argues that the Chinese diaspora has been instrumental in fostering cultural exchange, economic cooperation, and diplomatic dialogue between China and Europe. By illuminating the diaspora’s role as a bridge between East and West, the study offers fresh insights into the significance of transnational communities in international relations. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of how diaspora dynamics can influence and enhance national relations, providing valuable perspectives for scholars and policymakers in the fields of diaspora and migration studies, international relations, and global history.
    
    Author: Nannan Li (Durham University)
  - Diaspora and Homeland Peacebuilding: A Comparative Study of Afghan and Iraqi Diaspora Engagement with External Support amidst Post-9/11 Peacebuilding
    
    Scholars have increasingly focused on the role of diasporas as significant non-state actors within the international system (Adamson, 2002; Cohen, 2005; Demmers, 2007; Kadhum, 2020; Koinova, 2012, 2010). Nonetheless, the extent of their interaction with external support systems and the potential for peacebuilding differs markedly across various contexts. For example, in the lead up to the peacebuilding in Iraq amidst post-9/11 events, the Iraqi diaspora has demonstrated a strong mobilisation (Bensahel et al., 2008; Kadhum, 2017). In contrary, the Afghan diaspora's engagement is viewed as a weak mobilisation. Despite several similarities, Iraq and Afghanistan have undergone markedly different peacebuilding experiences, with Iraq's initiative remaining ongoing while, Afghanistan's ceded, following the withdrawal of the US in 2021. This disparity prompts an inquiry as to how and why these two diasporas interacted with US support in distinct ways, as well as their varying durations of peacebuilding experiences. This thesis will systematically analyse the interactions between diasporic agency, and structures to ultimately develop a typology of factors that either facilitate or hinder positive relations between diasporic actions/agency, external support, and peacebuilding (Denscombe, 2014). Through a qualitative approach (Creswell, 2023), this research aims to deepen our understanding of how strong and weak mobilisation strategies impact the substance of external support in peacebuilding efforts (Bensahel et al., 2008; Bouma, 2000; Cottey, 2003; Kadhum, 2017; Krampe, 2013; Sharan, 2023; Vanderbush, 2014). By going beyond single-case studies, the thesis seeks to contribute to a deeper theoretical understanding of the dynamics of external support structures, the actions, and capacity of diasporas, and the potential for peacebuilding. This thesis will contribute original knowledge about the Afghan and Iraqi diasporas and will also help in spotting early warning signs of weak relationship patterns to prevent similar in the future.
    
    Author: Abdul Ghani Amin (University of Exeter)
  - Comparative Perspectives on Russian Exodus: Migration to Serbia and Turkey
    
    This study examines the recent migration from Russia to Serbia and Turkey, offering a comparative perspective on the demographics, motivations, and circumstances of those fleeing the current political and economic environment in Russia. By exploring who these migrants are and the diverse factors driving their decisions to relocate, this analysis sheds light on the experiences they encounter in their respective host countries. The comparative framework investigates the responses of both Serbia and Turkey—nations with different geopolitical alignments, economic structures, and migration policies—towards the emerging layers of the Russian diaspora. This comparison enriches our understanding of diaspora formation in non-Western settings, highlighting the adaptability of transnational groups and how different political regimes shape the contours of diaspora mobilization. By comparing the Russian diasporas in these two host countries, the study contributes to the broader discourse on migration, identity, and diaspora strategies in different political contexts which offer varying opportunity structures.
    
    Author: Nemanja Nemanja Kidzin (European University Institute)
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / Transatlantic Security Challenges during Trump's Second Mandate Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - The Future Challenges for NATO with a Second Trump Administration: Lessons for East Asia
    
    With the outcome of the U.S. election pointing to a second Trump administration, concerns about NATO's future and the stability of transatlantic ties have intensified. Trump’s "America First" policy, often likened to a new "Trump Doctrine" or even a modern Monroe Doctrine, signals potential shifts in U.S. commitments abroad, raising urgent questions about alliance security. During his first term, Trump’s frequent threats to withdraw from NATO, coupled with his insistence on allies meeting the 2% GDP defense spending target, strained relations within the alliance. Trump’s demands for increased cost-sharing among allies foreshadowed his administration’s view of U.S. alliances as transactional rather than strategic. In the current landscape—with ongoing crises in Israel and Ukraine, as well as enduring tensions with Russia in Europe and China and North Korea in East Asia—these priorities could destabilize established security frameworks.
    A second Trump administration may reinforce a multipolar world, where the U.S., traditionally seen as a stabilizing superpower, takes a step back. While Trump's stance is not fully isolationist, it emphasizes reduced U.S. involvement, which could harm U.S. credibility and weaken alliances built to counterbalance shared threats. This paper explores the future challenges for NATO under such a doctrine, analyzing the possible impacts on alliance cohesion and security.
    In addition, this study draws relevant lessons for Taiwan and East Asian countries, particularly those that rely on U.S.-backed alliances to deter regional threats. As East Asia navigates shifting power dynamics, the implications of U.S. foreign policy under a renewed Trump administration carry significant weight, necessitating strategic considerations for Taiwan and other regional actors.
    
    Author: Jim An Chin Cheng (PhD Student, NSYSU, Taiwan)
  - The Impact of Insider Threat Upon International Collaboration in the Outer Space Domain
    
    There is a growing concern that the deepening instability which permeates the contemporary geopolitical domain will influence the collaborative nature of international research and constrain its empirical validity. The consequences of this limitation are likely to have a significant impact upon the spirit of wider international relations, and present clear opportunities for exploitation by those governments who seek to destabilise the Rules-based International Order (R-bIO). In an attempt to shed light upon this circumstance, this paper is specifically concerned with the challenges associated with contemporary insider threat and emphasises the vulnerability of the outer space domain to hostile covert influence. The paper begins by defining the key concepts associated with insider threat and highlights the evolving trends in the area. Thereafter, a detailed analysis of those aspects of the space domain that are especially vulnerable to insider threat is presented and the term 'Networked Threat' is introduced to account for those circumstances in which an intentional actor exploits (legitimate) credentials or access to disrupt or degrade a third-party. Finally, a psycho-social model of insider threat mitigation that aligns the Capability Opportunity Motivation-Behaviour (COM-B) paradigm with established agent recruitment modalities is presented as a credible means of understanding and limiting insider threat within the contemporary space domain.
    
    Authors: Damian Terrill (Ministry of Defence) , Markos Trichas (BAE Systems)*
- 10:45 → 12:15
  
  FR 20 / Working group convener meeting Grand 4, Europa Hotel
- 10:45 → 12:15
  FR 20 Panel / World order and collective organic intellectuals Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Stuart Shields (The University of Manchester)
  
  Chair: Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (University of Liverpool)
  - Unravelling from Within?: The OECD-DAC as a Collective Organic Intellectual in the Foreign Aid Regime
    
    The foreign aid regime has long been a core component of the Liberal International Order (LIO), positioning Western states as benevolent donors to the Global South while embedding recipient states within global capitalist markets. Today, however, the regime has come under strain, not only due to external pressures accompanying the rise of China but also due to significant internal shifts and challenges. This article argues that the foreign aid regime, embodied by the OECD-Development Assistance Committee (DAC), is unravelling primarily from within. Once central to establishing and sustaining foreign aid as a collective Western project, the DAC now faces unprecedented threats to its coherence, credibility, and legitimacy. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of the ‘collective organic intellectual’, this paper examines the DAC’s historical role in maintaining hegemony within foreign aid and traces the internal dynamics that increasingly compromise its function. By situating the DAC’s evolution across three key periods—from the Cold War to the contemporary ‘Second Cold War’—this analysis reveals that the most profound threats to the DAC’s hegemonic role stem from shifts in member state priorities, increasing self-interest, and challenges to the ethical foundations of foreign aid, raising questions about the future of the DAC and the foreign aid regime within a fragmented and contested global order.
    
    Author: Jack Taggart (Queen’s University Belfast)
  - The EBRD and the new state capitalism: the collective organic intellectual strikes back
    
    The 2020-2021 EBRD Transition Report is a remarkable document. The cover featured a cartoon graphic of a faceless ‘Eastern European’ ‘babcia’ looming over the happy populace of an indistinct city scape as if Godzilla was destroying it. If the cover lacked clarity the report’s subtitle explained it more clearly: The state strikes back. The threat is the historical aberration of the state socialist period, the ultimate justification for reducing the state’s role.
    
    The paper utilises the collective organic intellectual framing to analyse the EBRD’s role in the recent re-legitimisation of state intervention. The paper analyses the ongoing contradictions between the historically stated position and the EBRD’s own recent developing perspective on the new state capitalism.
    
    The papers unfolds across four sections. First, I frame the role of the collective organic intellectual in the global political economy. Section two focuses on the changing theorisations of the withdrawal of the state in post-communist transition. The third section shows how the debate has shifted from the withdrawal of the state to the new state capitalism across an extended historical period. The final section on the 2020-21 Transition Report analyses how and why this report amplifies a set of perceived threats to successful transition.
    
    Author: Stuart Shields (The University of Manchester)
  - The Atlas Network in India on Climate Scepticism and Fossil Fuel Industry
    
    The Anthropocene has posed one of the greatest challenges to the contemporary global political economy. An apparent climate coalition has been institutionalised by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and their adaptations by the World Bank’s Environmental and Social Standards and International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards on Environmental and Social Sustainability. However, counter-movements to climate change have also emerged, questioning the persuasiveness of climate-related arguments or seemingly defending the fossil fuel industry (McKie, 2018; Vowles, 2024). Some of this content has been produced and disseminated by the think tanks affiliated to the Atlas Network around the world (Plehwe, 2022).
    
    This paper uses the Gramscian concept of collective organic intellectuals to apply to the Atlas Network which is rooted in the Mont Pelerin Society and its construction of neoliberalism. The paper focuses on the organisational function of the Atlas Network in India where the climate policy-making is pro-environment. Focusing on the two think tanks within the Atlas Network, namely the Center for Civil Society and the Center for Public Policy Research, the paper examines the extent to which the Atlas Network is effective in India in producing climate policy scepticism and/or defending the fossil fuel industry therein.
    
    Author: Esra Nartok (Leiden University)
  - Damned if you do: Ukraine, the Reform Matrix, and the collective organic intellectuals of WB, IMF, and EU
    
    Amidst the horrific effects of Russian invasion, Ukraine is surprisingly advised to keep its market economy intact while planning (post)war recovery and implementing EU accession reforms. The paper explores the contradictions between the aims – aid and recovery - and means – funder input and de-regulation - of Ukraine’s financial assistance (aid and debt) and (post)war reconstruction approach encoded in the Reform Matrix, the evolution of the Ukraine Recovery Conference annual frameworks, and the sovereign debt dynamic and restructuring negotiations.
    The Matrix is unprecedented in its reach and scope and consists of four structural elements - the EU Commission's Recommendations for Ukraine's EU candidate status, IMF Loan Conditions, The Ukraine Plan under the Ukraine Facility, and the World Bank Conditions (Development Policy Loan (DPL) and includes measures aimed at implementing recommendations and conditionalities necessary for assistance to continue. It contains in total 314 conditionalities and recommendations (142 of EU Enlargement, 135 Ukraine Plan, 20 IBRD DPL, and 17 IMF EFF) and 520 indicators on which dispatch of assistance depends. Content and phases of the Reforms are analysed in the paper. I explicate the continuities and contradictions in the marketisation legitimising narratives of the “collective organic intellectuals” (Gramsci) of the EU, IMF, and WB vis-à-vis Ukraine even when the state is presently the leading economic force, FDI non-existent, and within the EU the state plays an increasingly heavier role. I show that the market deregulating push amidst a war paid by debt leads to GDP erosion, uneconomic fiscal shrinkage effects, and long-term de-development.
    
    Author: Yuliya Yurchenko (University of Greenwich)
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  / Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group meeting for workshop consultation Dublin, Europa
- 12:15 → 13:15
  
  Lunch - Sponsored by the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) 1h The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel
  
  The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Accountability in Contemporary Conflict Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: ILPG Working group
  
  Chair: James Gow
  - Norm Expressivism and Punishment in Criminal Justice and International Relations
    
    Although expressivism has been studied in relation to criminal justice since the emergence of modern international criminal law, an expressivist perspective in norms and criminal justice research resurfaced in the past decades, inviting a new viewpoint on the dynamic interplay between norms and symbolic action in International Relations (IR). Situated as an account of punishment, expressivism has been criticised for being too abstract and lacking an immanent meaning, or for its dialectic position in relation to punishment. Addressing this theoretical shortcoming, this article remediates our understanding of norm expressivism, establishing new knowledge of the meaning of norm expressivism in IR and clarifying the relationship between expressivism and notions of punishment in criminal justice and norm research. To this end, it unpacks the rhetoric of countries’ delegates at the United Nations (UN) in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I examine crucial examples of expressivism: disagreement pronouncements, denunciation of norm violation, postulation of guilt, and penal analogies. While criminal justice research posits expressivism as a distinct account of punishment, the novelty of this article consists in illustrating how, even in the absence of judicial prosecution in the courtroom, expressivist rationales can have a re-enforcing scope on the international legal order.
    
    Author: Cornelia Baciu (Kiel University)
  - Skeleton Roads: Accountability Challenges from Bosnia to Ukraine
    
    N/A
    
    Author: James Gow
  - Innovative Multi-Level Accountability Mechanisms for Russian Atrocities in Ukraine: A Model for the International Community
    
    The unprecedented scale and complexity of Russian war crimes in Ukraine have necessitated a multifaceted approach to accountability, integrating national, regional, and international justice mechanisms. At the national level, Ukraine’s judiciary has undertaken the primary responsibility, documenting, investigating, prosecuting and convicting the vast majority of war crimes domestically, even amidst the actively ongoing war. Regionally, collaboration with over 27 countries, facilitated by entities such as Eurojust and Europol, has enhanced investigative efforts and evidence collection, while the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) plays a crucial role in addressing human rights violations linked to the war. Internationally, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been pursuing accountability for high-ranking perpetrators, reinforcing international legal mechanisms for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Complementing these efforts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) addresses state-level violations, reinforcing Ukraine’s comprehensive legal strategy. To fully address the breadth of the committed Russian crimes and prevent impunity for the act of aggression, discussions around establishing a Special ad hoc Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine have gained momentum. Additionally, the pursuit of civil liability and reparations seeks to hold the aggressor country accountable for the harm and damage inflicted, adding another dimension to the comprehensive efforts to achieve justice and redress. This paper examines the interplay of these diverse accountability initiatives, offering insights into their collective role as a pioneering model for international justice, with implications for conflict resolution and legal accountability in international studies.
    
    Author: Kateryna Kyrychenko (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Anti-militarism in a time of genocide Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Over recent decades International Relations scholarship has fostered important contributions to the study of anti-militarism (Stavrianakis, 2010; Cockburn, 2012; Rossdale, 2019). This has charted the ways in which NGOs, social movements, and ordinary people across the world have resisted militarism, including through campaigning for arms controls, direct action, protest, education, and more. Since October 7th and the commencement of the genocide in Gaza, these practices have garnered new momentum, witnessing unprecedented protests, blockades, labour struggles, lobbying, legal challenges and awareness raising aimed at disrupting the flow of arms to Israel. Anti-militarism has been thrown into the spotlight as never before, revealing both its importance but also some limitations of existing approaches. This roundtable brings together scholars of anti-militarism in its various guises to consider what anti-militarism means in this time of genocide, what we can learn from recent developments, and what IR scholarship can (and perhaps cannot) tell us about these movements.
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: James Eastwood (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Charlie Thomas (Queen Mary University of London) , Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol) , Catherine Chiniara Charrett (University of Westminster) , Izadora Xavier (IRC-BIRTS, Freie Universität)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Beyond Postcolonial Critique: Theoretical and and Political Alliances between Hindutva and Zionism Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  The recent book Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism published in 2023 closes with a conversation between the professor of Jewish Studies, Stefan Vogt, and the Indian historian and scholar of postcolonial theory, Dipesh Chakrabarty. The dialogue, which queries how amenable Jewish history is to postcolonial studies as well as considers similarities between Indian anti-/postcolonial nationalism and the history of Zionism and Israel, reflects key developments this roundtable seeks to address. These include: widening conversations about the contemporary state and boundaries of postcolonial theory; and a seemingly emergent dialogue between segments of South Asian postcolonial studies and Jewish studies which contemplates the resuscitation of Zionism as a project of ‘self-empowerment’ and ‘liberation’.
  
  The roundtable will speak to these developments within academia, while also considering the wider backdrop within which they take place. Indeed, invoking notions of victimhood, Zionism and, in particular, Hindutva, have been championed as postcolonial/decolonial political projects by their proponents with growing regularity. Such claims occur alongside mounting documentation of the increasingly close alliance between Israel and India, and Hindutva and Zionism, in recent years, enabling the settler colonial projects in each country to flourish. These connections also transcend the boundaries of the nation-state, reflected by affinities between segments of the Jewish and (Hindu, upper caste) Indian diaspora. This roundtable takes these wide-ranging developments as a starting point to assess the state of postcolonialism and Jewish studies in the current conjuncture with attention to the distinct, but connected, projects of Zionism and Hindutva.
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews) , Howie Rechavia-Taylor (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Ida Roland Birkvad (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Darcy Leigh (University of Sussex) , Akanksha Mehta (Goldsmiths) , Shikha Dilawri (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Change and stagnation in the politics of extractivism Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  
  Chair: Yelda Ercandirli (University of Leeds)
  - Geopolitical Gains, Climate Losses: Unpacking the Environmental Costs of Lunar Resource Rivalry
    
    Competition between the US, China and other spacefaring states to establish a permanent base on the moon is progressing at an accelerated pace . Lunar resource exploitation and the construction of permanent settlements on the Moon are frequently framed as solutions to environmental crises on Earth. However, discussion about the environmental impacts on Earth and on the Moon, of space launches and lunar mining is limited. In an era in which geopolitics are heavily influenced by environmental concerns articulated in governance instruments such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, such relative silence is perplexing. Through the lens of environmental authority, this paper critically contrasts the ‘benefits for all humankind ‘ proclaimed by space powers and NewSpace corporations, with the marginalization of environmental and climate change impacts.
    
    Author: John Donovan (Open University)
  - Resource Imaginaries and Critical Minerals Governance: Reconciling Global Imperatives with Local Realities
    
    The global transition toward renewable energy has positioned critical materials at the nexus of environmental sustainability and geopolitical competition. As nations race to secure supply chains for essential resources, a complex value regime is emerging, characterized by competing priorities and contested narratives. This paper examines how different resource imaginaries shape governance frameworks for critical minerals within the context of the European Unions recent Critical Raw Materials Act.
    Utilizing a narrative approach, the paper investigates three dominant resource imaginaries relating to security, the green transition, and just transition, that structure contemporary debates around critical minerals governance. While these imaginaries shape policy frameworks, we argue that they risk either depoliticizing mineral extraction through technocratic sustainability discourse or securitizing resource access through various crisis narratives. Both tendencies risk marginalizing local environmental justice concerns and bypassing community consultation through regulatory fast-tracking. The paper demonstrates how the alignment between dominant resource imaginaries and local visions for the ‘good life’ is crucial for developing resilient governance frameworks.
    The paper concludes with a discussion on how responsive governance frameworks might better integrate global strategic imperatives with place-based visions of development, to avoid exacerbating socio-environmental conflicts and ensure just transitions.
    
    Author: Liv Nielsen (University of Southern Denmark)
  - Going green in Portugal: Assessing the entanglements of environmental security and mining.
    
    The discovery of large reserves of lithium in Portugal’s north-east has placed the Iberian country at the centre of political discourses that connect green capitalism with neo-liberal environmentalism. As the demand of energetic transition from fossil to renewable sources, places lithium mining as indispensable on the manufacturing electrical vehicle components, foreign investments to develop and to increase mining activity closer to protect natural areas have been announced. This scenario, this paper argues, enables Portugal to be placed at the centre of key discussions and dilemmas concerning environmental security, and climate change. As a country which traditionally is not a key actor on global security issues, arguably, Portugal may be posed to play a larger role. However, already at the centre of protests by local populations, the mining project is likely to project state-centric discourses whilst critical ones may be subdued. By examining existing discourses of different involved parties, this paper aims to contribute to critical discussions in environmental security, by centring key aspects of anthropocentric planetary living. The paper also aims to contribute the larger literature that examines the politics of energy transition and its challenges in the context of climate emergency.
    
    Author: Maria Bastos (London School of Science and Technology)
  - Green Transformation as a New Form of Capitalist Accumulation: Extractivism, Universities and Turkey’s Climate Denial
    
    In this study, I analyse renewable energy and green transformation practices, which have recently been on the agenda in Turkey, as in other advanced and late capitalist countries, from a Marxist political economic perspective. Critical approaches define green transformation and renewable energy pursuits as a new strategy of the neoliberal economic order. In this study, I take the existing literature one step further and define the green transformation as a new strategy of accumulation in the financialised capitalist system and a new order of appropriation and exploitation at the global and local levels in terms of distributional relations. In Turkey, the promises of green transformation and renewable energy meet on two conflicting planes but regulated by capitalist principles. Firstly, there is no interruption in extractivist activities, especially gold and coal extraction. Secondly, with the claims of renewable energy and green transformation, universities ensure the continuity of capitalist knowledge production by ignoring the impact of capital relations on the process of destruction of nature. In this study, from a dialectical materialist perspective, I argue that Turkey's environmental policy is actually a kind of climate denialism, that it cannot be separated from regional and global hegemonic struggles, and that it directs its climate policies within the framework of its commercial relations with the EU and BRICS.
    
    Author: Yelda Ercandirli (University of Leeds)
  - AMLO's oil nationalism and the legacies of colonial resource extraction
    
    Mexico's oil history is strongly tied to its national identity, with the oil nationalization of 1938 representing a national symbol of sovereignty. AMLO's presidential term (2018-2024) was characterized by strong support for the oil industry and a melancholia for the success of the oil expropriation. Throughout his political career, AMLO had a clear priority to pursue energy sovereignty - with fossil fuels at the center stage. Despite the implications of the climate crisis and the indebtedness of PEMEX, AMLO's government continued to invest in the sector, sidelining a sustainable energy transition. In this paper, I present a discourse analysis of the speeches and legislative debates during AMLO's presidential term (2018-2024). For this analysis, I use a postcolonial lens alongside a discourse historical approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the legacies of colonial resource extraction and the valuation of an extractivist mode of production. In this analysis, I compare a historical and a contemporary corpus to build historical links of language and discursive themes, which nowadays are used to justify the continued extraction of fossil fuels. National ownership of extractive means of production became a symbol of independence which became embedded in the collective memory. The underlying linguistic themes of sovereignty and nationalism mirror historical discourses that have been reframed to reflect a contemporary view of resource nationalism. This work aims to contribute to the understanding of state behavior in environmental issues using a postcolonial approach. This perspective offers a critical and nuanced view of the reluctance to change energy policy despite the challenges of the climate crisis.
    
    Author: Perla Polanco Leal (University of Manchester)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Colonial Postcolonial Decolonial Working Group -Early Career Paper Prize 2025 Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  N/A
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Participants: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St Andrews) , Priya Dixit (Virginia Tech) , Lucy Rebecca Cannon (University of Warwick) , Asad Zaidi (University of Westminster)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Connections and Disconnections between Migration and Violence Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Arpita Chakraborty (Dublin City University)
  
  Chair: Arpita Chakraborty (Dublin City University)
  
  Discussant: Mirna Guha (Anglia Ruskin University)
  - I might be a citizen, but I don’t feel like one’: Domestic abuse vulnerabilities of Asian women in East England
    
    Drawing on the concept of ‘situated citizenship’ (Behl 2019), this paper analyses life-history interviews of Asian women who have experienced or witnessed domestic abuse within kin and community networks in East England. It focuses specifically on the experiences of British women from the Mirpuri Pakistani diaspora in Peterborough, to demonstrate how women’s experiences with service providers in a region with minimal presence of ‘led by and for’ services, produces a form of precarious gendered and racialized citizenship that
    sharpens the conducive context (Kelly, 2016). Women’s participation in transnational marriages with men from Pakistan, under varying degrees of ‘choice’ and coercion, is coded as a community-rebuilding exercise in a context where scattered diaspora emerges against socio-economic precarity and political conflict. When abuse occurs, women are pressured to stay, with gossip among kin and community taking on a vitriolic force to ensure conformity and silence. On seeking support from statutory service providers, women encounter
    racialized stereotypes and the threat of migration-related abuse which highlight the liminality of their citizenship status. Voluntary services emphasize ‘exit’ as a solution, demanding a form of ‘forced migration’ (Bowstead,2015) to refuges, disregarding social consequences for victims-survivors and their children. The persistence of gendered and racialized forms of discrimination, despite the possession of ‘passport privilege’,
    urgently calls for intersectional, decolonial and culturally responsive modes of service provision by state and voluntary services, and hints at a potential solidarity between migrant and citizen victims-survivors of domestic and sexual abuse in England and Wales.
    
    The data presented in this paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the domestic abuse vulnerabilities of Black and racialized women in East England, funded by Anglia Ruskin University, a Home-Office funded service at Peterborough Women’s Aid, and the Medical Research Council’s UKPRP VISION research consortium.
    
    Author: Mirna Guha (Anglia Ruskin University)
  - A Peripheral Lens: Ireland, the EU, and Migration Policies in Postcolonial Perspective
    
    This article explores the relation between EU and Irish migration policies through a postcolonial lens, highlighting Ireland’s unique position within Western Europe. Unlike most Western European states, Ireland has no history as a colonial power, and therefore most non-EU migrants arriving in the country are not from former colonies. This study examines how Ireland, balancing its opt-in flexibility in EU migration measures and its Common Travel Area (CTA) with the UK, navigates EU migration strategies. The CTA has shaped Ireland’s border policies, leading to its decision not to join the Schengen Area and adding complexity to its alignment with EU regulations. Through document analysis and interviews with policymakers and civil society organizations (CSOs), this article analyzes how Ireland selectively adopts EU directives, recently choosing to opt into the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, while previously abstaining from other measures. Ireland’s legislative approach underscores the nuanced impact of historical and geopolitical factors on migration governance. By positioning Ireland as a case study, this article offers insights into how colonial legacies and unique regional arrangements shape policy responses, challenging assumptions of uniformity within EU migration governance.
    
    Author: Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)
  - Mobility, safety, freedom: How do the Indian women migrants in Germany experience power and agency within intimate relationships?
    
    My paper will discuss narratives emerging from my ethnography on the Indian migrants in
    Germany in which I look into the marriage scape as a site for negotiation of agency and power relationship under the umbrella of intimacy. The paper draws on an existing framework I built in my book (2023) on the tripartite liaison between “mobility, safety, freedom” and explores how these frameworks emerge in relation to each other and interact with one another to define and reproduce intimacy and agency for women in wedlock. The paper is based on the fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023, on the Indian Blue Card holders and students in Germany.
    
    Author: Amrita Datta (Bielefeld University, Germany)
  - Migration and Interpersonal Violence: Connections and Disconnections between ‘Home’ and ‘Family’
    
    There has been a rapid rise in migration from Asia to Europe and North America in the past decade. While these migrant groups have been the subject of policies, political debates, and scholarly research, not much has been written about the transnational bonds that remain between migrants and their families back home and their role in sustaining interpersonal forms of violence. This paper will look at how transnational bonds between migrants and their anchor families continue to have a gendered impact on migrants. In particular,
    through cases of women migrants, I will show how interpersonal forms of violence not only continue but are often exacerbated by the transnational networks of kinship control exercised by those who remain in their home countries. Key forms of such violence include control over reproductive decisions, financial decision making, emotional abuse, and relegated physical abuse.
    
    Through semi-structured interviews conducted with migrant people from South Asian communities living in Ireland from an intersectional postcolonial feminist theoretical approach, the author will analyze the various ways in which coercive control is exercised transnationally on these migrant women. Focusing on this particular aspect of interpersonal violence will also unpack the intersection of cultural, legal and social ramifications of differential understandings of what constitutes violence. The paper will also show how
    cultural and religious markers are often employed to exercise coercive control on women, and now the lack of transnational laws and contradictory national laws deem any relief impossible. The paper ends with a discussion on the forms of challenges such transnational forms of interpersonal violence brings up for domestic violence agencies working within national frameworks.
    
    Author: Arpita Chakraborty (Dublin City University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Criminalising Ecocide: The Rome Statute and Beyond Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  In September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa formally introduced an amendment to the Rome Statute, aimed at adding ecocide to the list of international crimes falling under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The submission marks a new high point in the history of efforts to establish a new international crime of ecocide; one, which, over the last few years, has gained prominence in diverse contexts such as the Association of Small Island States, the Russia-Ukraine war, the European Union, and the Council of Europe. This raises a range of questions, not least how diplomatic negotiations on ecocide will unfold, and its relationship to broader issues of global environmental politics. In addition to potentially being the first new crime to be added to the Rome Statute since the founding of the ICC, its ongoing process of international criminalization is also notable for being driven by a global social movement, Stop Ecocide International. This roundtable draws together scholars with an interest in ecocide from both international relations and international law to reflect on these developments, examine the consequences of ecocide’s unique path to international criminalization, and to situate this within wider global relations of power.
  
  Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England)
  
  Participants: Ievgeniia Kopytsia (University of Oxford) , Alex Hoseason (Aston University) , Martin Crook (University of the West of England) , Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Critical perspectives on contemporary capitalist accumulation Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Martin Hearson (Institute of Development Studies)
  - Rolling the Dice: Capitalism, Trafficking and Speculation across the Western Mediterranean
    
    This paper ruminates alongside two hashish traffickers whose lives span the Strait of Gibraltar in light of their simultaneous critique and embrace of the speculative underpinnings of contemporary capitalism. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s allegorical image of chance, illustrated in his delightful portraits of the gambler, I foreground these traffickers’ distinctive engagements with and recounting of uncertainty in their profession. Faced with disempowerment and marginalization, these men chose to redress structural exclusions by embracing the perils and possibilities of the illegal drug trade. In the borderlands in which they operate, where amassing wealth relies on playing the hinge between licit and illicit, private and public, violence and law, traffickers constantly make decisions in the absence of full knowledge. They speculate to accumulate. Yet rather than distorting markets or disfiguring ‘true’ value, as heterodox critiques of capitalism would lead us to surmise, I show how such speculative practices illuminate something central to contemporary economic life. Calibrating risk while confronting uncertainty is as important on financial markets as it is on the hashish-packed speedboat. Outlawed chancers submerged in the Western Mediterranean’s circuits of desire, accumulation and reasoning, traffickers may very well offer a refracted image of capitalism’s speculative strictures.
    
    Author: Jose Ciro Martinez (University of York)
  - A Strange Political Economy: Stuart Hall, Susan Strange, and the Role of Culture in Global Politics
    
    While Susan Strange's four-structure framework of international political economy remains influential, her conceptualization of the knowledge structure remains undertheorized. With that in mind, this paper takes seriously Christopher May's (1996) brief suggestion that 'culture' may act as foundational to the global political economy. This offers a productive starting point for expanding Strange's framework by bringing Strange's writing on 'Structural Power' into conversation with Stuart Hall's cultural studies work on cultural-hegemony. Through a feminist analysis of Hollywood's political economy throughout the 20th century, this paper demonstrates how culture mediates social reproduction through the (re)production of gendered ideologies, labor relations, and popular discourses. By examining the interplay between studio financing, production decisions, and gender representation on screen, alongside the material conditions of women's labor in the film industry, this study reveals how Strange's four structures - production, security, finance, and knowledge - are fundamentally shaped by and reproduce patriarchal power relations. This analysis not only extends Strange's framework but also illuminates how structural power in the global cultural economy has historically constrained both the representation and economic opportunities of women in one of the world's most influential cultural industries.
    
    Author: CJ Simon (University of Sheffield)
  - Making sense of Turkey’s antinomies since 2018: A Critical IPE Perspective
    
    Since 2018, the dynamics of Turkish political economy have been marked by significant economic challenges, including currency crises, the impact of the Covid pandemic, and runaway inflation, along with increased geopolitical tensions and conflicts. Concomitantly, the economic and monetary policymaking experienced several sharp oscillations within the stimulus/pro-growth and the contraction/stability pendulum during this period. A key turning point has been a far more visible shift towards orthodox economic management in the aftermath of the May 2023 general elections, arguably a major factor of bringing a swift defeat of the governing AKP in local elections in March 2024. How can we explain these zigzags that have taken place within a short time span? Why would a government abandon a politically successful accumulation strategy which led to its 2023 election victory? Conventional perspectives on Turkish political economy have strived to explain this period and political-economic shifts largely with reference to the domestic political dynamics. Where the global political economy dynamics are considered, conventional IPE versions of ‘authoritarian state capitalism’ analysis were reproduced within the Turkish context. The paper critically engages with these conventional approaches to Turkish political economy, highlighting their limitations in explaining Turkey’s recent economic and political shifts. It proposes instead a critical IPE approach, drawing broadly on a non-reductionist 'open Marxist' perspective, which positions the oscillations and inconsistencies outlined above within a broader contested ‘politics of governing alienation’ (Copley and Moraitis 2021) at the intersection of domestic political dynamics and global capitalist social relations (i.e. tensions between domestic legitimacy and competitive world market dynamics). While sustaining a class-analytical perspective, this perspective develops a critique of state-centric perspectives operating through false dichotomies.
    
    Authors: Mehmet Erman Erol (De Montfort University) , Pinar Emine Dönmez (De Montfort University)
  - Who Benefits? Reimagining the Epistemology and Pedagogy of Susan Strange
    
    Amidst political, economic, and ecological upheaval, it is imperative to interrogate who truly benefits from these global disruptions. This paper reimagines Susan Strange’s epistemology and pedagogy by employing her political economy method centered around critical questions: Who gets what? What goes where? Who benefits? Strange’s legacy of challenging conventional power dynamics during the Cold War serves as a foundation for examining pressing issues such as stagflation, inequality, and ecological degradation.
    Through this lens, this paper will illuminate the power structures that sustain inequality and instability. Using Strange’s concept of the ‘Westfailure’ system, which reveals how affluent nations prosper at the expense of broader human welfare, this paper connects to the environmental and social crises we face today. By engaging with her insights, this paper emphasizes the urgent need to recontextualize the epistemology of the international, enhance the understanding of global power relations, and call for a transformative pedagogy that fosters equity and sustainability for all.
    The paper prioritizes the recontextualization of epistemology to emphasize the importance of critically questioning power structures and examining distribution patterns. This process must involve redistributing knowledge production to incorporate diverse perspectives. By fostering innovative pedagogical practices that challenge traditional teaching methods, both scholars and students can engage in these transformative efforts. Reimagining the global crisis responds to calls for change, where the study of the “international” produces powerful advocates for equity and sustainability in an increasingly complex global landscape.
    
    Author: Johnna Montgomerie (University of British Columbia)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Culture, Politics, and Identity in the ‘Celtic Fringe’ Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Robert Saunders (State University of New York)
  
  Chair: Cahir O’Doherty (University of Groningen)
  
  Discussant: Michael Toomey (University of Glasgow)
  - England’s First and Last Colony: A Postcolonial Wales?
    
    Are the Welsh a postcolonial population? The answer is not self-evident, but the query affords ample opportunities for engaging with provocative questions within the discipline of International Relations (IR). This is particularly true for scholars whose research focuses on the British Isles and those peoples who call the Atlantic Archipelago their home. The paper makes a contribution to the discipline of IR by contextualising the case of the Welsh people (y Cymru) within the congeries of Celtic peoples whose ‘postcolonial’ condition is less controversial (particularly the Irish, Scots, and Manx). The case of y Cymru, the paper argues, unsettles key historical narratives, territorial assumptions and binaries centred on race in IR generally and postcolonial IR particularly. Beyond the discipline, this contribution complicates the already roiling debate around identity politics in a post-Brexit UK as its constituent peoples seek to refine various fidelities, affinities, distinctions, and differences.
    
    Authors: Haro Karkour (Cardiff University) , Robert Saunders (State University of New York)*
  - Brexit and Gendered Silencing in Northern Ireland: The Failure to Uphold the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
    
    This paper examines the impact of Brexit on women in Northern Ireland, focusing on the failure to uphold the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. From November 2022 to August 2023, we conducted research for the Equality Commission Northern Ireland, collaborating closely with third-sector organisations and engaging with women representing diverse identities and from both rural and urban areas. Our findings reveal significant gendered impacts across areas like rights, socio-economic conditions, and violence against women. However, the exclusion of women and gender equality advocates from Brexit negotiations and implementation hindered the consideration of these issues, despite Northern Ireland's status as a post-conflict society where WPS principles should apply. The UK, Ireland, and the EU largely failed to consult with women or the women’s sector, perpetuating what Wright and Bergman Rosamond (2024) describe as "gendered silences." This concept reflects both the disregard for women's voices and the structural neglect of gender justice in policy-making. We reflect on the challenges we have encountered in discussing our research and its findings regarding the specific impact on women in Northern Ireland, despite statutory obligations to protect these rights under Section 75.
    
    Authors: Ruth McAreavey (Newcastle University) , Katharine Wright (Newcastle University)
  - A Bullet for the Cause? The Irish Language, Identity Politics, and Intergenerational Trauma in Kneecap (2024)
    
    The 2024 film Kneecap links questions of sustainable peace, post-conflict resolution, linguistic rights, and intergenerational trauma through the (Irish) medium of hip-hop, drug use, and recreational violence. Blending the real and the representational, the film centres on the three members of the hip-hop band Kneecap and their efforts to gain fame, while also highlighting everyday issues of culture, identity, and politics in Belfast. Our paper exploring these interconnections proceeds in four parts: 1) a précis of the film, a discussion of its use of sound, symbols, and space, and overviews of its characters; 2) a visual, sonic, and narrative analysis of the film’s representation of identity politics associated with the ‘ceasefire generation’ in the North of Ireland (focusing on class, gender, sectarianism, and drug use); 3) an exploration of how the Troubles still haunt the North of Ireland while remaining somewhat (sexually) fetishised; 4) contextualisation of the Irish language as a tool of political agency that binds and divides its speakers to/from each other, the British state, and the Republic of Ireland. In addition to the film itself, we analyse paratexts produced by the band, many of which focus on specific places and space in Belfast and beyond.
    
    Authors: Robert Saunders (State University of New York) , Cahir O’Doherty (University of Groningen)
  - Is It Too Soon to Play The Troubles? Ludic Geopolitics Comes to the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland
    
    Why do we play games? To have fun, relieve stress, distract ourselves from the ‘real world’? Or to expand our knowledge, demonstrate our prowess against others, or even plan for war? When it comes to historical role-playing games (HRPGs), another layer is added; such ‘games’ can help us reclaim the past, rewrite loss, understand the present, and script the future. Promised as the next in a series of boardgames that put the player into asymmetrical conflict/counter-insurgency gameworlds, Compass Games’ The Troubles: Shadow War in Northern Ireland 1964-1996 is a card-driven simulation focused on paramilitary and security force conflict that engages ‘national and international political affairs that saw the British Army undertake the longest deployment in its military history – on its own streets’. Are we ready to play a game about the 20,000 lives lost in the Troubles? If so, who will you play? UDR, PIRA, or the RUC? Will you support or oppose Ulsterisation? Will you grass? How will you fundraise? What are ‘legitimate targets’? Our paper examines the game’s design and potential player intentionality in the context of the conflict, from the seeking of synthetic experiences (mindset reorientation, guilt-purging, catharsis) to politicised play wherein gamers seek agentic feedback loops by placing themselves in the geopolitical imaginary of the Troubles, while operating within established historical structures of the era.
    
    Author: Joel Vessels (Nassau Community College (SUNY))
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Effects of humanitarianism in action – from top down to grassroots approaches Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Miriam Bradley (University of Manchester)
  - ‘Sewers, asphalt, streets and lighting...that's what people need’: Destabilising the social cohesion agenda through infrastructure
    
    Formal camps continue to be the main site of research and aid policy, positioning refugees living outside of camps - those considered ‘urban refugees’ - as a risk. Refugee communities are increasingly geographically spread, and more difficult to identify, categorise and contain. Yet, policy requires clear categories, resulting in an international aid policy unable to effectively respond to refugee needs.
    Drawing on nine months of ethnography conducted in the refugee-host village of Zaatari, Jordan, this paper embeds the humanitarian concept of social cohesion into the Centre; a refugee-led education initiative established in the village in 2016. I use the Centre as a keyhole from which to study the ambivalences that a social cohesion agenda, and its implementation, bring when enacted in a refugee-host village. This ambiguous term appears in nearly every state and international strategy, project and programme related to (urban) refugees in Jordan since 2011. As a mechanism of governance, social cohesion renders social problems found in any community a security concern. Through identifying the various perceptions of security which differentiate between the municipality, the residents and the humanitarian, this article encourages an alternative approach to cohesion and (in)security, focused on infrastructure and the materiality of everyday space, in order to understand the limits of humanitarian programmes.
    
    Author: Hannah Owens (University of Hertfordshire)
  - Making 'ProGres': UNHCR, Cloud Technology, and the Protection of Refugee Data
    
    This article examines the evolution of 'ProGres': the UNHCR's digital registration and identity management solution, in operation since the early 2000s. It presents ProGres as more than a humble software system but, rather, as a vital index for understanding how technological change has complicated the task of refugee protection, while illuminating institutional innovations at the heart of UNHCR's response. Drawing on interviews with key UNHCR personnel, the paper shows how the shift from paper-based to networked- and, finally, cloud-computing systems challenged UNHCR's conventional exercise of privileges and immunities under the terms of the Vienna Convention. It then conceptualises the agency's response in terms of an emerging practice we call 'liminal data sovereignty' – capturing how UNHCR has pioneered a new refugee data protection regime through partnerships with both states and Big Tech. The paper makes significant empirical and theoretical contributions to the burgeoning literature on digital humanitarianism.
    
    Authors: Andrew Dougall (University of Oxford) , Sebastian Kaempf (University of Queensland)*
  - Grassroots humanitarianism in the UK: a counterforce to affective border violence
    
    People seeking asylum around the world face escalating levels of surveillance, securitization, violence, and hostility. In the UK, both Labour and Conservative governments have progressively worked to create an increasingly 'hostile environment' for asylum seekers. Apart from violent practices of deportation, detention and dispersal, the effects of recent policy decisions have seen immigration control creep ever further into the everyday and intimate lives of migrants and people seeking asylum who are denied the right to work and subject to a series of restrictions on their mobility and access to welfare support. These policy developments are said to have generated affective border violences that intrude into the bodily realms and emotional everyday realities of people seeking asylum, producing constant discomfort, precarities and insecurities. In light of that, the proposed paper aims to study grassroots organizations (composed of refugees and citizens) in support of asylum-seeking populations in the UK and how they practice grassroots forms of humanitarianism by enacting relations of mutual(reciprocal) care and solidarity at the local level that potentially disrupt statist territorially bounded notions of political belonging and categorizations of ‘host’ and ‘guest’ (‘us’ and ‘them’). With a particular focus on cultural and social engagements promoted by grassroots groups, this paper seeks to explore to what extent and how social and cultural activities such as artistic practices undertaken by asylum seekers hold the potential to foster relations of solidarity, mutual care and empathy in ways that recognize the voice and dignity of people seeking asylum and hence move beyond statist categorizations of citizen and non-citizen and challenge affective technologies of border governance.
    
    Author: Leou Yang (University of Manchester)
  - Localization in the Rohingya refugee response
    
    The humanitarian localization agenda calls for power and resources to be transferred from international actors to local and national responders in the places affected by crisis. Despite a consensus that humanitarian responses should become more localised, debates persist on how best to achieve this practically. Moreover, there is little evidence to show how such a shift in power affects humanitarian outcomes. This paper asks how localization is understood and implemented in the Rohingya refugee response in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, and with what consequences for the Rohingya population there. It argues that the response scores high on many of the criteria against which localization is measured. For example, Bangladeshi NGOs and Bangladeshi staff of international agencies have significant power and resources. However, the response also exemplifies many of the critiques of the localization agenda, notably in terms of who constitutes a “local” actor and how well local actors can withstand governmental pressures and maintain their independence and neutrality. Moreover, localization in the Rohingya refugee response fails to achieve some of the most important underlying goals of the localization agenda and may even be counterproductive for the achievement of some of those goals. Indeed, many Rohingya individuals and community groups believe that the layers of Bangladeshi bureaucracy and NGOs between international actors and themselves have restricted their own access to power and resources, and reduced the quality and effectiveness of the humanitarian response. Finally, the paper draws out some more general conclusions about the shortcomings of the localization agenda and dominant conceptualizations of localization when applied in refugee crises.
    
    Authors: Miriam Bradley (University of Manchester) , Megan Smith (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)*
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Feminist approaches to visual and technological world politics, Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (University of Edinburgh)
  - Locating the digital: Examining why place remains important within social media activism against gender-based violence in the MENA region.
    
    Across the MENA region, we are seeing the development of an expansive ecosystem of social media accounts dedicated to tackling gender-based violence through education and awareness raising, strategic campaigns, community-building, naming and shaming perpetrators and much more. This was expanded and exacerbated in the COVID-19 pandemic context. Across Instagram, Facebook and X, we see activists navigate the complex dynamics of place, (re)producing, reinforcing, challenging and dismantling borders between nations and communities, often simultaneously, while also interacting with narratives of universalism. In examining these navigations it becomes clear: place remains an important dimension of digital activism. Using a digital ethnography framework that combines observations, multimodal content analysis and interviews with 20 activists, I will be answering the question of why this is the case - unpacking the motivations, pressures, digital affordances and more to offer insight into contemporary feminist activism’s relationship with place and centre feminist activists as ontological agents that shape our understandings of a constructed place. This paper is part of my broader PhD thesis that uses Social Movement Theory to examine the role of locality and place across 85 anti-gender-based violence activist accounts in the MENA region, with a particular focus on Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco.
    
    My intervention comes partly in response to discourses of the global #MeToo, as well as more broadly contributing to scholarly efforts to challenge early tech-optimism that promoted the idea of a dislocated internet unbridled by national borders and offering new possibilities for transnational activism. While doing so, my research complicates the common trend in scholarship of binaristically juxtaposing the notion of the global or transnational with the local and particular, to instead present an understanding of place that is dynamic, varied and multiplicitous.
    
    Author: Bronwen Mehta (University of Warwick)
  - Female Drama: TV Serials as Pop Cultural Capital in Contesting Gender Norms
    
    In authoritarian environments, how can citizens publicly contest conservative gender norms? The political science literature on media and authoritarianism largely focuses on news coverage and digital platforms. This paper turns the spotlight on entertainment media by examining the roles dramatic serials play in oppositional discourse. I argue the public visibility and emotional resonance of highly popular TV serials make them a form of pop cultural capital – i.e., an attractive, efficient vernacular resource – that social media users draw on in expressing political preferences and seeking to persuade others. Drawing from sociology and media studies, the paper treats citizens of authoritarian regimes as both audiences and mediators of TV content. I theorize the “everyday” contention practice of pop cultural contestation: how and why these individuals creatively repurpose characters and plot lines from TV dramas in relatively “benign” and thus low-cost social media posts. Focusing on gender roles, I develop my argument in the context of the ruling AKP’s “New Turkey” – a conservative socio-political project with an explicit biopolitical component – by using the most-watched Turkish family drama Kızılcık Şerbeti (Cranberry Juice, 2022-2024). I create a dataset of Twitter (X) and Instagram posts referencing the series in the four months prior to the May 2023 elections. I then use intertextual analysis to extract focal points of discourse on female characters, identifying common frames that challenge regime-prescribed gender roles and call for political change. My findings advance studies of authoritarianism by examining the micropolitics of gender contestation through a vernacular media lens.
    
    Author: Lisel Hintz (Johns Hopkins University SAIS)
  - The Gendered Logics of International Cybersecurity - How Masculinities Shape the UN OEWG on ICTs
    
    International Cybersecurity is a mostly gender-blind policy field, shaped predominantly by state-centric perspectives and definitions of cyber threats and interests that promped traditional security measures. They focus on safeguarding critical infrastructure and boosting military capabilities for potential cyber operations. However, this dominant focus overlooks not only human and feminist security but actively undermines it. Using insights from feminist security studies, this paper argues that gender is a critical category for understanding the violent dynamics that unfold within international cybersecurity policy. Specifically, I analyze how both dominant and alternative understandings of cybersecurity, particularly at the United Nations Open-Ended Working Group on Security of and in the Use of Information and Communications Technologies, are influenced by constructions of masculinities and femininities. I explore how these gendered narratives interact and shape policy outcomes, revealing how traditional gender norms define which interpretations of cybersecurity are considered „normal“, realistic, and feasible, while alternative, gender-sensitive approaches are often dismissed as unrealistic or naïve. This analysis contributes to a broader understanding of how gendered power dynamics inform international cybersecurity discourse and highlights the need for the development of more inclusive, human-centered approaches to cybersecurity approaches which align with the needs and realities of those most affected.
    
    Author: Clara Perras (PRIF - Peace Research Institute Frankfurt)
  - Does the camera colonise? Body, sexual torture and photography in conflict zones
    
    A particular photograph from the infamous riots in 1983 also known as Black July in Sri Lanka was widely circulated. The picture showed a naked Tamil man on a bench trying to hide himself while several young Sinhalese men around him stand laughing and jeering. As one of the Sinhalese men prepares to swing a kick at the crouching man, the photographer captures the iconic moment of vulgar display of cruelty, racism, perversity. Leaked pictures or video footage of torture has now been commonplace since the Abu Ghraib episode, making it ‘normal’ to circulate pictures of tortured prisoners/inmates. While sexual torture has been legitimised and rationalised as a strategy, the techniques used are deeply intertwined with processes of racialisation, sexualisation and queering the victims. Camera thus works as an extension of the phallus that captures, penetrates, allowing the voyeur to get closer to the object of gaze, while maintaining a physical distance. By analysing in person interviews and testimonials of torture survivors from two conflict zones – Kashmir and Sri Lanka – this paper explores two critical aspects of sexual torture. First, it interrogates and disrupts the dominant narrative that positions sexual torture merely as a method of strategy or war tactic. Second, it examines the role of camera in constructing hierarchies that transcends the perpetrator-victim power dynamic, thereby transforming it into a voyeuristic spectacle. These images and footage become commodities, circulating as pornographic fodder for social media and markets, legitimising violence against bodies branded as terrorists/traitors. The perpetrator and camera, both acting in tandem, do not merely extract information; but inscribe the tortured bodies with racialised and sexualised markers of deviance. This results in queering the tortured body, rendering them as sites of subjugation and stripping them of any possible resistance against the state.
    
    Author: Urmi Gupta (BML Munjal University, India)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Foreign policy, identity, and domestic actors Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
  
  Chair: Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - New Directions in Populist Foreign Policy Studies: Perspectives from South Asia
    
    The proposed aims to put forth a detailed mapping of populist foreign policies in South Asia, with a focus on India, Maldives and Pakistan. It aims to contribute to the limited , but growing literature on populism, and foreign policy.Conceptually, I adopt a poststructural conceptualization of foreign policy as a site for the constitution of difference along the lines of the domestic/ external and self/other (Campbell 1992), and build on its intersections with populism as political logic(Laclau 2005)
    The case of India, Maldives and Pakistan are interesting case studies situated in South Asia. While India, still has been the focus of the growing scholarship on populism, and populist radical right, Pakistan remains limited to few studies examining it as a case of Islamist civilizational populism, and Maldives remains on the margins of the research on both the scholarship on populism, and on populist foreign policy. In the case of BJP, and India, I will select the year 2014 ( and overall focus on the period 2014-2024) as this marks the year, when BJP under the leadership of Prime minister Modi came to power. In the case of Maldives the focus will be on 2013- 2024, as this allows me as researcher to study the differing dynamics of the India Out, and India first campaign deployed by all three different political regimes. For the case of Pakistan, I will focus on Imran Khan and PTI (2018-2024). In order to study all these three cases within the identified time frames, the proposed study will be grounded in an discursive analysis of Populist Right Publications
    
    Author: Shweta Singh (South Asian University)
  - Narratives of Restorative Disinformation: Addressing China’s Crisis of Meaning about Xinjiang
    
    This paper argues that deceptive narratives can be a deliberate strategy used by states not only to destabilise adversaries but also as a method to restore their own ontological security during crises of meaning. Typically viewed as a tool to undermine others, deception is reframed here as a method of restorative disinformation, where states deploy false or manipulated information to reassert their identity. Unlike traditional propaganda, which builds coherent identities through truthful or one-sided storytelling, restorative disinformation protects the Self by distorting facts, reshaping narratives to foster ambiguity and mistrust. Drawing on insights from narrative theory, the paper explores how and why states deploy deceptive narratives as a strategy to alleviate crises of meaning and restore ontological security, particularly when traditional methods of authentic, affirming storytelling fail or are inadequate.
    The argument is illustrated through a narrative and a semiotic analysis of China’s (dis)information campaign on Xinjiang following the two 2019 letters to the United Nations Human Rights Council—one signed by states condemning China for human rights violations and the other defending it. It examines key textual and visual materials, including the whole universe of White Papers published on Xinjiang and short docufilms released on Chinese embassy websites. The narrative analysis focuses on how China reconstructs events and key issues to counter external criticism, while the semiotic analysis explores the visual metaphors, tropes, and symbolic elements embedded in the promotional materials. This dual approach highlights how deceptive narratives are crafted both through language and imagery.
    This paper addresses a gap in ontological security studies, where security mechanisms have been categorised, but the specific methods employed by states remain underexplored. It also challenges the assumption that disinformation is purely an offensive tool, suggesting instead that it can also function as a restorative response to states’ perceived crises of meaning.
    
    Author: Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Justice for the Win? Engaging Non-State Justice as Counterinsurgency
    
    Non-state justice, generally rooted in religion, custom or tradition, enjoys widespread legitimacy and effectiveness in conflict-prone states. Indeed, these forums are often the most dominant form of legal order, even surpassing the state itself. In these circumstances, foreign aid providers view these forums as a promising way to advance state-building, promote stability, or even undermine anti-regime insurgencies. However, little empirical work has been done concerning the actual work undertaken by external actors and the consequences of those efforts. Drawing on two case studies of places with robust legal pluralism that have received extensive foreign assistance, namely Afghanistan (2002-2021) and Timor-Leste (2002-2022). It draws on extensive in-country interviews, contemporary documentation, and relevant secondary literature.
    The paper highlights how international actors seek to capitalize on supporting effective non-state justice systems to maintain order and bolster regime stability by offering material support or technical assistance. At the same time, non-state judicial actors, such as the Taliban’s rival justice system in Afghanistan, can pose a profound, even existential, threat to the state. International actors could support the criminalization of non-state justice forums or even the use of force against non-state justice sector personnel. When non-state authorities enjoy significant authority and autonomy, rejection strategies tend to generate strong, even violent, opposition from those targeted. For example, international assistance in Afghanistan repeatedly attempted to harness the legitimacy and authority of tribal-based justice to defeat the Taliban and bolster the floundering Islamic Republic. However, external efforts alienated powerful tribal authorities. Worse, these efforts led to violent reprisals against the people who worked with international personnel. Alternatively, as in Timor-Leste, programming can boost the capacity of non-state justice actors in a way that supports stability and even strengthens the state itself.
    
    Author: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
  - Being hawkish to be democratic
    
    How do citizens assess the democratic performance of political elites? Existing research emphasizes their partisanship or policy preferences as primary factors. This article shifts the focus to their foreign policy reputation, specifically whether they are seen as hawkish or dovish toward authoritarian foreign rivals. I contend that a hawkish reputation can be seen as effective in defending democracy and its principles, leading the public to perceive such leaders as more democratic than those with a dovish stance toward authoritarian rivals. I empirically test this argument through conjoint experiments conducted cross-nationally in the United States and South Korea.
    
    Author: Jungmin Han (Trinity College Dublin)
  - Bringing the domestic factors in alliance politics: alliance contestation by second-tier states
    
    Why and under what conditions do states contest their ally or alliance? In recent years, some states have adopted alliance strategies that are difficult to capture with conventional balancing, bandwagoning, or hedging propositions. One example is the divergence between the Visegrad Group countries concerning their relationship vis-à-vis NATO and Russia. Balance-of-threat theory suggests that these countries should all be wary of Russian aggression and resolutely back NATO. However, this has not been the case for Hungary and, recently, Slovakia. This paper, which represents the starting point of a PhD research project, claims that leaders and governments may contest their alliance for domestic gains without a genuine intention to realign.
    After an overview of the core tenets of alliance politics (balancing, bandwagoning, hedging), the paper will turn to the Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature underlining the importance of domestic factors, such as party politics, public opinion and institutional constraints in foreign policy making. Then, building on recent efforts to incorporate domestic factors in alliance politics, the paperwill pave the way toward a definition of “alliance contestation” and a set of hypotheses on the domestic conditions that facilitate this phenomenon.
    
    Author: Fabio Maina (University of Genoa)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Future Peace: Peacemaking in an era of multipolar geopolitics, authoritarianism, and “new” actors Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  This roundtable seeks to discuss the prospects for peace and peacemaking amid the collapse of the Liberal International Order. The current peacemaking landscape lies somewhere been the fragmentation of the existing system, the remnants of that system (e.g., the UN Permanent 5) and emergence of apparently new peacemaking actors and modalities. The roundtable discussion will revolve around where to place the BRICS, authoritarian peacemakers, regional organisations and others in a changing peacemaking landscape in which ideas and practices of international cooperation, democracy, rights and civil society seem under threat. Practical, conceptual and ethical concerns attend the decline of liberal internationalism and the rise of alternative forms of peacemaking. These real world changes also pose questions for Peace and Conflict Studies – especially its critical branches – and how issues of sustainability, redistributive justice, and rights can fit within emerging paradigms for peace. The Roundtable will be structured via a set of questions from the chair and involves a mix of established and early career scholars as well as scholars originating from the global north and the global south.
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Chair: Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University)
  
  Participants: Kodili Chukwuma (Durham University) , Oliver Richmond (University of Manchester) , Shrishti Rana (University of St Andrews) , david curran (Coventry University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / German foreign policy Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: FPWG Working group
  
  Chair: Rachel Herring (Aston University)
  - From Pragmatism to De-Europeanisation; The Policy Of Wandel Durch Handel’s Effects On German Relations With China
    
    Wandel Durch Handel has featured as a key philosophy in German foreign policy since the late 1960’s. Following this policy has resulted in Germany forging close economic ties and dependencies on autocratic states such as Russia and China; creating massive economic growth but also consternation from human rights and democracy activists. Despite wide and varied criticism of the policy, problems arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise of China, and a ‘Zeitenwende’, Berlin elites still seem unwilling to definitely change course and abandon Wandel Durch Handel. The staying power of this outlook has also had influence on the EU’s policy, especially towards China. This paper analyses the pervasive ideational power of Wandel Durch Handel in German policy in relation to China, utilising discursive institutionalism to understand actors sustaining the the policy, and from there examining its effects on EU policy. The effects of Wandel Durch Handel are then applied to the framework of de-Europeanisation, creating an understanding of whether this policy, utilised in the contemporary political climate, constitutes a break away from EU values; favouring economic gains for Germany at the expense of European solidarity.
    
    Author: Jacob Hickey (Northumbria University)
  - Vicarious identification and Russia’s war on Ukraine: Comparing British, German and Latvian foreign policies
    
    So far, scholars working in the field of ontological security theory do not sufficiently account for how geopolitical change affects states’ ability to construct stable narratives of the self. Consequently, I undertake a comprehensive comparison of how European countries responded to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, something that has hitherto not been conducted. British, German, and Latvian foreign policy discourse is analysed comparatively with the concept of vicarious identification, which explains how ontological security is maintained through the identification of shared values and characteristics in a friendly nation.
    
    Firstly, I survey the development of British, German, and Latvian historical memory to determine Lacanian master signifiers of national identity and their influence on foreign policy. Then, I analyse official British, German, and Latvian foreign policy discourse to compare how master signifiers influence vicarious identification with Ukraine. It is found that British and Latvian historical memories enable strong vicarious identification with Ukraine. By contrast, German vicarious identification with Ukraine is weaker, as key axioms of historical memory are challenged by the invasion. This has prompted adaptation of master signifiers of national identity, permitting a hard line towards Russia and an end to the taboo on the provision of lethal aid to conflict zones. Germany's response supports a theory of change in master signifiers: they are fundamentally enduring, yet able to be reinterpreted in response to geopolitical change.
    
    Author: Karl Stuklis (University of Glasgow)
  - Between partnership and rivalry: Germany’s ambivalent securitization of China 1994-2024
    
    While securitization theory and the securitization of China have attracted considerable attention in academia, there is less research on securitization as the transformation of a previously positive relationship of partnership. We argue that this dynamic can be explored by looking at German debates on China responding to the challenge of a more assertive and authoritarian China. In the first systematic longitudinal narrative study on the topic, we look at securitization trends in 232 German parliamentary speeches on China and the Sino-German relationship from 1994 to 2024 and investigate to what extent and how German articulations adhere to threatification, riskification, or normal politics. Conceptualising the narrative transformation of the relationship between Germany and China as the ambivalent securitization towards rivalry, we argue that German securitization narratives are marked by adjustment and adaptation, reconfiguring German discourse by highlighting continuity at some levels while enabling change at others.
    
    Authors: Maximilian Tkocz (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)) , Holger Stritzel (King's College London)*
  - Civil society diplomacy: The role of civil society-building in German foreign policy in Central Europe
    
    This paper investigates how changes of Polish national government have influenced official German narratives about Poland. While the return of Donald Tusk in 2023 was welcomed by the German government as a chance to rebuild relations with one of its most significant partners, reflection on what lessons should be drawn from recent turbulence in Polish-German relations has been minimal in both political and academic circles.
    Drawing on theories of special relationships in international relations and constructivist literature on narratives and speech, this paper analyses official German discourse, drawing on over 100 speeches and press conferences.
    The paper starts by building a framework of official German narratives about Poland, revealing five key trends in how Poland is rhetorically constructed. The framework draws on existing literature, but is also supported by a corpus analysis of 21st century German political speeches. This constitutes an important methodological contribution towards a more linguistics-oriented approach to discourse analysis in political science. This framework is then used to structure a more detailed analysis of German political speeches and press conferences, which compares the narratives across three time periods (2007-2015, 2015-2023, 2023-2024). While recognising the importance of other factors (e.g. the party affiliation of the speaker and geopolitical events, not least the war in Ukraine since February 2022), the paper distinguishes between 'essential' and 'non-essential' narratives of special relationships, and argues that in both cases there were varying degrees of adjustment which were linked to the changes of government in Poland in 2015 and 2023 respectively.
    In addition to its novel methodological approach, this paper makes an empirical contribution to our understanding of German-Polish relations, as well as offering theoretical insights into the shifting nature of domestic politics and narratives in special relationships between states.
    
    Author: Rachel Herring (Aston University)
  - Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Behaviour: The EU’s Response to China’s Rise
    
    Thucydides’ trap illustrates the uncertainties and anxieties that arise when a new power emerges on the international stage. The rise of China is not only an inevitable variable for the Asia region but the whole world. Within the European Union (EU), perspectives on China’s ascent are primarily contextualized within the framework of international political economy. Nevertheless, the EU’s pursuit of ontological security remains an often-overlooked dimension in the discourse on EU-China relations. According to Giddens, states seek not only physical security but also ontological security—defined as the quest for a stable self-identity and the affirmation of subjectivity from other international actors. This study seeks to examine the EU's foreign policy towards China through a cognitive-cultural lens, positing that the EU’s policy is influenced not solely by concerns for physical security but also by the pursuit of ontological security. It will investigate strategic culture as a repository of pre-existing schematic experiences that are mobilized within the ontological security process, notably shaping state behaviour in efforts to achieve continuity and mitigate uncertainty. This research aims to advance the scholarly discourse on foreign policy analysis and provide deeper insights into the motivations underlying state behaviour. As for methodology, this paper will conduct a content analysis of official EU documents and expert interviews to identify key themes, discourses, and narratives surrounding perceptions of China and their influence on policy.
    
    Author: Tian Gao (Ghent University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Narratives and the Making of US Foreign Policy and National Security Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: US Foreign Policy Working Group
  
  Convener: USFP Working group
  
  Chair: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Narrating Future War: Reimagining Enmity during the Collapse of Bipolarity
    
    This paper places analytic attention on the discursive processes of forming and becoming to better understand how strategic ontologies shape what matters in international relations. It explores how political agents within the US defense establishment envisioned future war during the end of the bipolarity and with what effect. Using the example of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the paper shows that events in the international arena can drive forward the development of a new security plotline precisely because political agents assign causal properties to them. As the paper argues, interpreting events such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as the marker of a new era of uncertainty in international security that necessitated maintenance of US military superiority is the result of an agentic process that shifts the balance in favour of one narrative or another. Events shape but do not directly channel how narratives evolve.
    
    Author: Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick)
  - Constructing “Afghanistan”: U.S. Political Discourse of the 2021 Afghanistan Withdrawal
    
    This paper uses discourse analysis to examine how the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 has been framed in American political discourse. As recent scholarship has shown (Hall 2022, 2024), perceptions of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ in the War on Terror have had important consequences for U.S. ontological (in)security and the political standing of American presidents. These narratives, as politically contested constructs, shape the public understanding of America's place in the world. Studying major political speeches, congressional debates, and media content, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of how ‘Afghanistan’ has been constructed during the Joe Biden presidency, particularly in terms of the ‘lessons’ that have been put forward by politicians and commentators. Much like the important ‘lessons’ of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, these debates shape American self-perceptions and foreign policy outlook. This is especially so for the second term of a Donald Trump presidency, given Trump’s role in the Doha Agreement and his later criticism of the Biden administration’s withdrawal.
    
    Author: Jonny Hall (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - Does it matter if the truth of narratives is irrelevant? International leadership and Donald Trump
    
    This paper explores the normative dimensions of the role of narrative in IR. Dilemma: The scholar can “call out” actors projecting false narratives for malevolent purposes, but narrative itself need not be true in politics. Snyder (2024) argues: ‘a liberal has to tell a hundred stories … A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist has just to be a storyteller’. The purpose of a storyteller’s narrative – their political imagination given form – is to convince, mobilise, affirm. Their audience does not seek empirical verification of the narrative because they do not need it. The ontological status of narrative is unrelated to its truth-content. Trump has arrived as an effective storyteller by trial and error. Koschorke (2018: 4) argues this is a wider pattern: ‘As in a vortex, mixed within [a narrative] are elements of truth, semblance, hearsay, ignorance, error, lies.’ We analyse the first six months of Trump’s foreign policy narratives and identify the normative frameworks actors home and abroad use to respond. This contestation allows us to open new questions missing in the critical IR scholarship since the ‘narrative turn’.
    
    Authors: Ben O'Loughlin , Alister Miskimmon (Queen's University Belfast)*
  - The Rise and Fall of a Contested Strategic Narrative: The Belt and Road Initiative and US-China Relations, 2013-2023
    
    US-China relations have soured over the last decade, developing a multifaceted strategic competition which has shifted and evolved across this time. One area of this strategic competition is China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 as a series of infrastructure and connectivity projects, and quickly gaining traction as China’s ‘project of the century’, along with associated pushback from the US and its allies (Zhao, 2021; Shah, 2023).
    
    This research investigates the evolution of the contestation of Belt and Road by the US and China, based on a comprehensive review of Chinese government publications and US strategic discourse on BRI, and interviewing key policymakers and scholars working on BRI. Utilising a strategic narrative approach, as popularised by Miskimmon et al (2013), the research focuses on how strategic narratives on BRI are deployed by Chinese and US geostrategic elites, and explores the interaction between these competing narratives. Thus, as well as tracing the evolution of US-China relations and the emergence of strategic competition, further insight into the use of narrative in international relations is also found through the case study of Belt and Road.
    
    Keywords: US-China relations, Belt and Road, strategic narrative
    
    References:
    Miskimmon, Alister, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle. Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. New York: Routledge, 2013.
    
    Shah, Abdur Rehman. ‘Revisiting China Threat: The US’ Securitization of the “Belt and Road Initiative”’. Chinese Political Science Review 8, no. 1 (1 March 2023): 84–104.
    
    Zhao, Minghao. ‘The Belt and Road Initiative and China–US Strategic Competition’. China International Strategy Review 3, no. 2 (1 December 2021): 248–60.
    
    Author: Nick Sundin (Newcastle University)
  - Isolationism past/present: Unpacking the domestic discourses of US foreign policy in the 1960s and 2020s
    
    This paper uses securitization theory to examine the isolationism discourse used to describe and analyze Donald Trump policies. Theorizing isolationism as a performative security discourse, with reference to historical US isolationism discourses from the 1960s, this paper interrogates the functions of contemporary isolationism discourse.
    
    The paper does not hold that isolationism is/was a coherent foreign policy strategy or history. However, this discourse does (re)perform identity and history, and disciplines foreign policy approaches and knowledges.
    
    Though isolationism discourse often uses the vocabulary of foreign policy and is usually anchored to events related to international relations, it is primarily a domestic discourse. This discourse, like most foreign policy discourse, is grounded in allegedly objective understandings of international relations and history, but functions in concert with political and electoral strategies.
    
    Specifically, the paper references the discourse of George Wallace’s presidential and gubernatorial campaigns in the late 1960s, as well as the isolationism discourse used to describe him and his potential voters. This case study is used to understand Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements as electoral politicking with very little actual foreign policy discourse (or indeed foreign policy). As such, accusations of isolationism, while attempting to critique foreign policy, are instead dealing with electoral politics and (re)productions of identity/history.
    
    Author: Daniel Mobley (University of St Andrews)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / New challenges and approaches in global IR pedagogy Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Blake Lawrinson (University of Leeds)
  - Levelling Up International Studies: Using Video Games to Teach IR
    
    To meet the needs of international studies as a developing discipline, this paper discusses how video games can contribute to evolving IR pedagogy by making complex topics more accessible, relatable, and engaging. Reflecting on the creation and first season of Leveller, a podcast which uses video games as a springboard and lens through which to discuss political issues, this paper presents a case study on cultivating a more inclusive, versatile and innovative approach to expand the pedagogical toolkit. The podcast combines episodes which allow for reflection on how political topics are presented in video games with guest episodes in which the two hosts interview a fellow academic about their own research, while drawing links to a video game. In doing so, the podcast reimagines how scholars, educators, and students can engage with complex global issues. In creating a space to grapple with imagined scenarios that in some ways mirror real-world crises, this novel pedagogical approach aims to foster critical thinking, empathy, and a nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness of global challenges.
    
    Authors: Adam Cooper (University of Leeds) , Emma Brewis (University of Leeds)
  - Transitions in Access and Mass Higher Education: Australia and Britain in Times of Change. ( Based on a book The Challenge of Change: Access and Opportunity in Mass Higher Education. 2024. Pub. Engagement Australia.( ISBN 9781805179078)
    
    The book pivots between the 1970s and the mid-2020s using the notion of ‘threads through time’ including the upsurge of opportunity and aspiration which appeared to drive HE and Access yet encompassed the emergence of new forms of inequality in both Great Britain and Australia. This was an international phenomenon which continues to shape the educational and occupational worlds we live in across widely differing cultures.
    Globalisation, cosmopolitanisation and internationalisation of learning opportunities impacted everywhere, alongside intensive local and community pressures for change and equity. The transformations brought about by widely adopted neoliberal economic and social policies re-shaped the purposes of universities in a period of market predominance. New elitism and hierarchies of value now associated with universities mean we now have mass participation but also differentiation rooted in racial, ethnic and social divisions. Universities now serve conflicting ‘publics’, where race, ethnic identity, class and transnational identities can clash and where notions of the common good must engage with the steep gradient of differentiated value ( league tables which help determine and legitimise historic and contemporary inequalities).
    The book explores the possibilities of a critical and what Stuart Hall called a ‘universal curriculum’ as a response to the reshaped public sphere.
    
    Authors: James Nyland (Engagement Australia/University of Bolton) , David Davies (University of Derby)
  - Knowledge, pedagogy and the future of Global International Relations
    
    Reflections on the discipline of International Relations (IR) and its future have significant implications for the pedagogy of IR. Whilst scholarship on the study of Global IR presents important contributions to understanding the past, present and future of the discipline through its critical reflections of the diverse foundations of IR (see Acharya and Buzan, 2019), it is only more recently that research has been examining the pedagogical impact of Global IR on the discipline (see Ettinger, 2023). This paper aims to contribute to this scholarship on IR pedagogy and Global IR through analysing the relationship between knowledge and pedagogy in the teaching and learning of IR. It argues that proposing, and addressing, questions on the future of international studies and Global IR pedagogy necessitates that both educators and students as co-creators of IR knowledge, learning and practice are reflexive on what we know about the discipline of International Relations, how we know it and how this informs the teaching and scholarship of the discipline. Reflections on these questions brings attention to the critical role of pedagogy in interpreting, learning, and teaching the past, present and future of international studies. This paper aims to provide an assessment of these questions in the context of a critical engagement with the teaching and scholarship of Global IR.
    
    Author: Blake Lawrinson (University of Leeds)
  - Humour and scandal: Teaching Academic Skills in a Politics and International Relations Degree
    
    Teaching academic skills as part of a politics degree is often a challenging task with both student engagement and attendance key issues to overcome. Solutions to these issues, such as integrating academic skills training into pre-existing taught programmes and content that have a compulsory and/or assessed element have often been perceived as the only viable route to improve engagement with this important area of a students life cycle in Higher Education.
    
    This paper argues that this solution is not the only pathway to achieving effective student engagement and learning with academic skills and may in fact undermine some of the key attributes of academic skills, such as genuine reflective learning. Based on the design and evolution of a non-compulsory academic skills course that ran alongside pre-existing programme content, as well as two years data on engagement and feedback, it establishes that academic skills teaching in a politics degree can be effective if designed and framed around a teaching technique that combines both humour and political scandal.
    
    The paper argues that students engage with academic skills content when it is made directly relevant to their perceived purpose in studying a politics degree and that this initial engagement can be reinforced by the careful use of humour in establishing real-world relevance to the academic skills they are being introduced to. This semi-reflective paper makes the case for a student centred approach to teaching academic skills that challenges the move towards generalisation of ‘skills’ within Higher Education.
    
    Author: Gregory Stiles (University of Sheffield)
  - Teaching International Relations (IR) in an Indian University Classroom
    
    The paper discusses the challenges of teaching IR courses as part of the undergraduate (UG) program at the University of Delhi. With the recent implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) in 2020 across Indian universities, longstanding pedagogical practices across disciplines have been significantly impacted. In the context of IR, while the NEP framework remains ambitious in what such IR courses hope to deliver as learning outcomes; concerns under the same such as fewer classes per semester without shortening the syllabi requirements; larger batches of students compromising teacher-student ratio; and, mandatory submission of multiple internal assessments by students seem to compromise the learning outcomes. Among other concerns, such practices together have impaired individual teacher's ability to effectively impart disciplinary fundamentals (especially to 1st year UG students) and, pay heed to the nuances of individual syllabus topics. Having taught four core IR courses and two other elective courses on Human Rights in an international context over the last four years, the author argues that under NEP, the challenges of teaching and engaging in IR courses in the classroom remain formidable in the seeable future.
    
    Author: V Mark Gideon (University of Delhi)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Peace and Conflict on the African Continent Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
  - Complementary or Conflictual? Legitimation Struggles in the African Union – United Nations Peacekeeping Partnership
    
    The partnership between the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (UN) is arguably the most institutionalised case of strategic cooperation for contemporary international peacekeeping. While built upon the pursuit of complementarity, the AU-UN partnership often presents conflict. This article examines this conflictual dynamic through a less explored legitimacy perspective and argues that the inter-institutional conflict stems from legitimation struggles of the peacekeeping agents. By doing so, the article departs from studies analysing the partnership as an operational tactic for effectiveness and situates it within the broader normative context of contemporary multi-agent peacekeeping. Through discourse analysis of strategic documents, it identifies three main areas where legitimacy claims lead to conflict: normative grounds for authority; institutional capacity; and peacekeeping principles. The article additionally highlights the complexity of legitimation struggles in a peacekeeping partnership that involves an interplay of self-legitimation, mutual legitimation, and de-legitimation.
    
    Author: Daeun Jung (University of Warwick)
  - Consent Practices, Crises and Reordering in Peacekeeping and IR: The Case of MINURSO in Western Sahara
    
    This paper proposes to put into conversation the scholarship on consent in philosophy, feminist theory, IR and peacekeeping, and to examine the problem of consent in peacekeeping from an international practice perspective. This leads to theoretically approaching consent as a communicative social act, a socially constructed practice or set thereof, and one that is inherently normative and processual in nature. On this basis, I distinguish between practices of consent establishment (diplomatic negotiation, declaration, access enablement, facility provision), consent maintenance (reproduction, renegotiation, crisis prevention and management) and consent reduction and withdrawal (symbolic subjection, operational obstruction, declarative and/or coercive exclusion). Empirically, I examine how consent has affected the fate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) and its continuous ‘walking on a tightrope’ as one of the longest-lasting UN peacekeeping operations currently in place, and one operating in the context of a particularly protracted and intractable conflict. I specifically focus on relational tensions and two recent micro-crises associated to consent from the Western Sahara conflict’s two parties, upon the background of the current general ‘crisis of consent’ for UN peacekeeping operations: the 2016 expulsion of MINURSO civilian staff by Morocco, and the post-2020 restrictions to its freedom of movement and supplies by the Polisario Front. The analysis addresses three questions: To what purpose and how did the parties make these consent crises? How did MINURSO govern them, i.e. how did it practically renegotiate the consent in jeopardy and/or navigate the reduction thereof, reordering its relations with the parties? And what are the (disruptive or reproductive) effects of such micro-crises on the broader picture and relational order of the protracted macro-crisis that is the Western Sahara conflict?
    
    Author: Irene Fernández-Molina (University of Exeter)
  - The Impact of Social Capital on Reintegration of Ex-Combatants in Nigeria
    
    The post-conflict reintegration of ex-combatant is a complex and challenging effort globally.
    Though it requires a comprehensive approach, reintegration is an antidote towards
    sustainable peace in societies recovering from conflict. Nigeria’s Boko Haram conflict has
    produced large numbers of ex-combatants who require proper reintegration. There is limited
    literature on how to reintegrate Nigeria’s ex-combatants. Thus, the current effort seeks to
    establish various factors that can help in reintegrating Boko-Haram’s ex-combatants in
    Nigeria’s affected regions, by assessing the impact of social capital on reintegrating excombatant in Nigeria. The article adopts a qualitative research method. While utilizing a
    desk review of secondary materials largely gathered from media reports, academic journals,
    and government publications, the piece employs thematic method for data analysis to
    examine and understand patterns pertaining to social capital within the gathered data,
    enabling a deeper comprehension of its influence on reintegration endeavours. The review of the impact of social capital on the process of reintegrating former Boko Haram combatants into Nigerian communities reveals that there is trust deficit in the entire project of DDR. The study emphasises the crucial significance of social relationships, community networks, and societal norms in promoting effective reintegration procedures by synthesizing information from previous studies.
    
    Authors: Michael Aleyomi (Federal University Oye Ekiti, Nigeria)* , Celestina Atom (Teesside University)
  - Understanding Regional Peacekeeping: Evidence from ECOWAS’ Interventions Practices
    
    The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) interventions have typically
    been analysed through the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) framework, given the organization's
    protocols for humanitarian crises interventions. However, preliminary analysis suggests a
    discrepancy: ECOWAS seems to intervene primarily in democratic crises rather than
    humanitarian ones. This study aims to investigate the gap between ECOWAS' stated policies
    (representational knowledge) and actual practices (practice knowledge). By using practice
    theory to illuminate the background knowledge driving ECOWAS' intervention decisions, this
    project seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of regional peacekeeping efforts. This
    research is particularly timely given West Africa's persistent instability and the challenges faced
    by the United Nations in conducting peacekeeping operations in the region.
    
    Author: Cristina Conte (Australian National University)
  - Making meaning from failed interventions: The ambivalent relationship between European interveners and local counterparts in the Sahel
    
    How is it possible for interveners on the ground to keep working on stabilisation interventions that they know have repeatedly failed to improve conflicts across the world? Interveners “hop” from one conflict to another—moving from Congo to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Mali—inhabiting what Autesserre calls ‘Peaceland.’ At each new conflict, they attempt to apply the same capacity-building and security sector reform policies that they saw fail in previous postings. Based on document analysis and 65 in-depth interviews with EU staff working on the Sahel conflict in Mali and Niger, this paper is a micro-level examination of what makes intervention meaningful for interveners, who are all too aware of their poor track record at building long-term peace. Using relational and psychoanalytically informed theories of meaning making, I find that their complex and ambivalent relationships with local counterparts play a crucial role. On one hand, these relationships provide a sense of purpose, as interveners find meaning in the bonds they form and the recognition they receive from local partners. On the other hand, they express frustration with their counterparts, blaming them for the intervention’s failures—citing a lack of political will, incompetence, or indifference. The effects of this double-sided relationship are permissive: by framing failures as the responsibility of local partners, they avoid fully confronting the ineffectiveness of their interventions while preserving meaningful relationships with Sahelian counterparts. This dynamic enables them to continue their work, despite the dearth of 'success stories' of the policies they implement worldwide.
    
    Author: Katherine Pye (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Power, alliance and security in Asia Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews)
  - Reconfiguring the Border-Making between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea
    
    Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) share a unique border. Just like in most other post-colonial states, they embrace the concept of uti possidetis juris, preserving the boundaries drawn by colonial powers—the Dutch, British, and Germans during the 19th century. Consequently, the geometric lines on the map cut through cultural groups, languages, and traditional lands, making cross-border interactions somewhat challenging. This paper aims to discuss how the Indonesia-PNG border is being constructed after independence. By using Constructivism in International Relations, this paper argues that although the border is a product of colonialism, it can be improved by involving participatory of various actors in the border-making process. This article contributes in two ways. Firstly, it will introduce an alternative view of how post-colonial states manage and construct their borders, which differs from the border management in other regions (for example, the European Union). Secondly, it will enrich the methodological approach by democratising the border through the involvement of both state and non-state actors (such as churches, border communities, and non-governmental organisations), thus making it more inclusive and participatory. In this paper, some materials will be drawn from the author's PhD fieldwork conducted between March and June 2024 on the Indonesia-PNG border.
    
    Author: Johni Robert Verianto Korwa (University of Southampton)
  - Security dilemmas, Alliances and Alignments in East Asia
    
    Undeniably the structures, institutions, alignments and social relations between state and non-state actors are changing. Commentators (such as Robin Niblett) have framed these changes as ‘a new cold war’ or have used the language of the cold war (bipolarity, spheres of influence, technology competition, separation of markets) as a tools to explain the changes that are underway. At least one element of these discussions concerns how states align. Western powers (including the UK, US, and Australia) have used the term ‘like-minded’ to describe the selection of partners. However, often these relationships are less formal or institutionalised than the formation of NATO or bi-lateral security treatise during the cold war nonetheless they are intended to augment or support existing formal relationships. These relationships have been considered as mini-lateral relations (such as AUKUS, or the QUAD) or more informal relations such as the trilateral grouping between ‘Japan-South Korea that Victor Cha described as a ‘quasi-alliance’.
    These minilateral and informal groupings raise questions about how they fit into existing alliances structures and whether they are the response to existing concerns about the credibility or commitment to those structures in a changing world, or whether they create or exacerbate existing concerns about those structures. Understanding these new tessellations in geopolitics and how they affect and effect the emotions and management practices of formal alliances is an essential aspect of understanding anxiety and alliance management.
    In unpicking these complexities this chapter starts from early alliance literature and debates of the security dilemma. In particular highlighting that for much of the scholarship in this area the demarcation lines between rational assumptions and the role of emotions were at least blurred if not non-existent.
    
    Author: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews)
  - Virtual Reality in International Relations: Reimagining Security Literacy
    
    Greater imagination arises from a greater sense of empathy. Virtual Reality (VR)—an ultimate empathy machine—can be a practical starting point for nurturing such a sense. However, in stark contrast to the increasing usage of VR technology in other social science realms, such as tourism and military training studies, its use in international relations (IR) is curiously absent. The same holds true for IR pedagogy. In the era of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), IR must develop suitable measures and pedagogies regarding spatial computing, ranging from modality to affordance. VR offers a unique platform to create immersive simulations of global scenarios, allowing policymakers, scholars, and even ordinary people—who should be the principal agents of vernacular security—to experience diverse geopolitical realities firsthand. In addressing this scenario, this analysis first conducts a stocktaking of current IR-VR literature and its possible linkages. It then focuses on nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula by examining how VR can contribute to fostering IR literacy (in this case, security literacy) in our society. In doing so, the paper provides an arena in which practitioners, theorists, students, and laypeople can engage in more imaginative, innovative, and collaborative problem-identification and problem-solving processes in IR thinking.
    
    Author: Seongwon Yoon (Hanyang University)
  - Transnational Repression and Regime Types: China and India
    
    This paper concerns evolving tactics of transnational repression (TNR) as practised by differing regime types. TNR consists of "employing a toolbox of diverse and aggressive tactics to control their citizens, or sometimes even non-citizens, abroad" (Freedom House). Systematic tactics -- direct attacks, long-distance threats, mobility controls, and manipulation of institutions in other countries -- rely on intentional intimidation to silence critical voices, undermine rule of law, and ultimately affect democratic values. Conventionally practised by authoritarian states, academic discourse on TNR tactics rightly urges democracies to enact policies to combat this. However, beyond developing resilience to TNR, democracies may resort to subsets of TNR under certain domestic political conditions. Comparing evidence from China and India and focusing specifically on non-physical TNR: (a) long distance threats (coercion-by-proxy, digital threat, and spyware) and (b) mobility controls (passport or overseas citizenship revocation), this paper analyses why and when certain TNR tactics are adopted by democracies where electorally legitimated political projects of authoritarian populists are ascendant and face a legitimacy threat from dissent in diaspora. A comparative/contrastive analysis of these selectively convergent dynamics across world's largest authoritarian state and world's largest democracy can strategically assist us in defending democratic values through an empirical indexing of TNR complexity and spread.
    
    Author: Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster, London)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Reflecting on 50 years of security scholarship Boardroom, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  The 50 years since BISAs inauguration have seen significant changes in the security landscape. In some ways, approaches to ‘national security’ have remained consistent. In other ways, conceptualisations of, and approaches to, security have evolved significantly. Security strategies, concepts and frameworks have adapted to keep pace with an era of health emergencies, climate breakdown and geopolitical confrontation. Over the past decades, security studies has developed into a bustling disciplinary space, where new approaches, such as human security, securitisation, vernacular security and intersectionality sit alongside more conventional understandings of conflict and defence. This roundtable invites a reflection on the evolution of security studies across the last 50 years, and asks:
  
  • How has security studies changed since the inauguration of BISA 50 years ago?
  • Are the concepts and insights of security studies capable of addressing the social, political and ecological challenges of the present time?
  • How can security studies scholarship facilitate better policymaking going forward? (And is this something to which it should be concerned?)
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Chair: Thomas Martin (Open University)
  
  Participants: Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews) , Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast) , Jamie Barrow Gaskarth (The Open University) , Jan Selby (University of Leeds) , Michael Cox (London School of Economics)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Spaces of refuge in the corridors of Higher Education Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  How do spaces of refuge come into being? This roundtable attends to the challenges and possibilities facing those who travel through the corridors of Higher Education. Our conversation is necessarily global and acknowledges the intersections and divergences of colleagues throughout the world as they seek to balance the challenges of research, teaching, and administration. We pay particular attention to the invisible labor that all too often contributes to periods of fatigue, uncertainty, and burn out.
  
  To develop this conversation more robustly this roundtable wonders at spaces of welcome and unwelcome within the discipline of International Relations. It invites colleagues to reflect on the journeys towards welcome, and the interruptions and easings that this journey has prompted. We invite colleagues to bring tacit embodied knowledge alongside more objective forms of being and knowing. The invitation is cast widely in the hopes of better understanding diverse forms of unwelcome, and the move to collective forms of welcome and how those spaces might be supported into the future. The roundtable draws from ongoing discussions in Feminist International Relations, Pedagogical discourses, Political Theory and Disability Studies provoking discussions of care, failure, and support that push back against the very structures that inspire this conversation.
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Amanda Beattie (Aston University)
  
  Participants: Kate Schick (Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington) , Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex) , Laura Mills (University of St Andrews) , Elena Sohanpal (Aston University) , Laura McLeod (University of Manchester) , Luke Marlow (Aston University)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Stigma and Discourse in Nuclear Politics Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Conveners: Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University) , Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  
  Chair: Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University)
  - Iran's Nuclear Reappraisal: From the Shah to the Islamic Republic
    
    This paper examines Iran's domestic nuclear reappraisal, first under the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and then the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Iran, between 1977 and 1980. The paper posits that the financial crisis of 1977, rather than the 1979 revolution, was the impetus for Iran's decision to reassess its capital-intensive nuclear power programme, leading to the establishment of a high-level government commission which recommended a nuclear moratorium. In the final days of the Shah's reign, the imperial government cancelled construction of two French-built nuclear power plants in Iran. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Iran did not initially oppose nuclear power, but the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and ensuing hostage crisis made continuation of the Pahlavi-era programme all but impossible. Drawing on declassified US government documents and Persian-language primary sources, the paper sheds light on the nature and dynamics of Iran's nuclear decisionmaking during one of the most formative periods of modern Iran.
    
    Author: Nima Gerami (King's College London)
  - Sympathetic Nuclear States? The Absence of Apology and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons
    
    On 27 April 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron stopped short of apologising to Polynesians over the underground and atmospheric nuclear tests conducted from 1966 to 1996. To date, none of the nuclear-armed states has ever formally apologised for the harm caused by nuclear weapons, with leaders acknowledging a “debt”, as the French Polynesia case shows, but refusing to say, “we are sorry”. This article examines cases where nuclear-armed states stopped short of apologising for using and testing nuclear weapons, theorising how these speech acts contribute to sustaining the nuclear status quo. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, our argument is twofold. First, we will argue that using affective language works to produce a particular kind of possessor, reducing the horrors of misdeeds and thus obscuring the purported necessity of apologising. Second, we will argue that the absence of a formal apology mobilises existing expectations about what an apology is and what it is for that works to reiterate a continuum of responsibility that legitimises nuclear possession and helps sustain the dominant relations of power in nuclear politics.
    
    Authors: Thomas Gregory (University of Auckland)* , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow)
  - When Deviant States Speak and Act: The Cases of India, Germany, and Iran Engaging in Corrective Behavior
    
    Existing literature treats the corrected identity of stigmatized states as i) non-stigmatized, ii) a parolee whose past crimes are not forgotten, and iii) a legitimate identity that fails to get reintegrated with the group of the stigmatizers. In each of these dynamics of social (non)recognition, one is left unsure whether the amendment of non-compliant speech or the correction of an undertaken incongruent act can lead to any form of legitimate recognition from the normals. In addressing this gap, this paper argues that corrective identity typologies are dependent on the ways in which the stigmatized convinces the stigmatizer of the former’s new identity, rather than the engaged corrective act. To do so, and using the empirical cases of India, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Iran, this paper develops a political rhetoric typology employed by the stigmatized in terms of forensic rhetoric (using a track record of past compliant acts in wanting justice for oneself), compliant rhetoric (acceptance of previous incongruent acts and discourses), and stasis rhetoric (robust contestation discourses over long periods of time). Alongside rooting this typology in the anxious relationship between the stigmatized and the stigmatizer, this paper contributes to the scholarship on stigma management and the literature on political rhetoric.
    
    Keywords: Act; Behavior; Identity; Rhetoric; Stigmatized
    
    Author: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford)
  - Does MAD Trump an Integrated Approach? Examining deterrence and the stigmatisation of nuclear weapons under a Trump administration
    
    A stigma has emerged towards WMD (chemical, biological and nuclear weapons), and the term is synonymous with the stigma. Historically, nuclear weapons have overshadowed chemical and biological weapons threats, however the stigma has been shaped by international recognition of the collective abhorrent nature of all three of these weapons. The deterrent strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) underpinned this belief. WMD were not used due to fear of their effects.
    Today, we face threats from a wide range of technologically advanced strategic non-nuclear weapons as well as WMD. We are now in a third generation of nuclear weapons threats. Nuclear weapons are smaller and can be utilised as both strategic and battlefield weapons. This could potentially alter our understanding of the WMD stigma. Does MAD still apply?
    US and European policy experts have sought to deter modern threats through an integrated approach, working with partners and using all tools of power across domains, spectrums of conflict and geography to address modern threats. The Trump administration is indicating a different approach, ‘peace through strength’. Central to this will be recognition of the power and strength of US military capability and a return to MAD.
    This paper examines attitudes of policy experts towards WMD today. I argue that nuclear weapons still reinforce the WMD stigma. The development of non- nuclear strategic weapons, as well as technological advances in warfare highlight the evolving conceptualisation of this term. Efforts to deter these weapons have been driven by a historical recognition of the threats from these weapons. The Stigma is still of importance and efforts to deter future threats need to promote stigma enhancing norms.
    
    Author: Patricia Shamai (University of Portsmouth)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / The state, politics and governance of political violence Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Rabea Khan (Liverpool John Moores University)
  - Naming the ‘Islamic State’: A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Terminology and Naming Politics in Chinese State-Controlled Media"
    
    This thesis explores the unique nomenclature used by Chinese state-controlled media to refer to the ‘Islamic State,’ offering a contrast to the existing focus on Western media portrayals within current scholarship. It recognizes that naming is a social act in which news media serve both as name-givers and as the primary channels through which names and discourses reach the public. Since each designation carries specific political connotations, the terminology chosen by Chinese media sheds light on the conventions and politics of naming within a state-controlled media context. The politics of naming involves contestation over how names are created, assigned, and challenged, shaped by broader global dynamics. This study addresses a critical gap by examining how the ‘Islamic State’ is named in the Chinese media landscape, providing a foundation for analyzing the politics of naming.
    Using an instrumental approach to discourse analysis, this study investigates the naming practices for the ‘Islamic State’ in key state media outlets, specifically the Xinhua News Agency. Combining corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis, the research seeks to uncover the social ideologies underlying these naming practices. The analysis covers the period from the declaration of the Caliphate in 2014 to the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.
    This study is guided by two primary research questions: the shifts and changes in naming conventions and the politics of naming. The findings indicate that ‘Islamic State’ gradually replaced ‘ISIL’ as the primary term following its self-rebranding, while ‘Daesh’ emerged as a disruptive term in late 2015. Additionally, Xinhua constructs distinct identities for ‘Islamic State’ under various designations, linking ‘Islamic State’ to militancy, ‘ISIL’ to terrorism, and ‘Daesh’ to terrorism. Xinhua’s approach remains detached, strategically aligning with global counter-terrorism discourse when referencing ‘ISIL’ and intentionally avoiding the ideological implications associated with ‘Daesh.’
    
    Author: Qiang Zhang (University of Sheffield)
  - To ‘fight for earth or dirt’: Comparing representations of the ‘nation’ in the English language propaganda produced by the Islamic State and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (and its predecessors)
    
    This paper explores representations of the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in the English language propaganda produced by the Islamic State, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and the latter’s predecessors. This analysis enables a broader exploration of the groups’ contrasting strategic narratives, namely their narratives of sovereignty and political legitimacy. This paper draws on constructivist and postructuralist approaches to discourse analysis and concepts and methods drawn from visual methodologies to analyse the discursive practices used by these groups to represent the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in their propaganda content. This links to discussions within Terrorism Studies about changing trends within the jihadist milieu. It contributes to research on the strategic narratives constructed by jihadist groups and their ability to produce distinctive discourses when drawing on a common stock of cultural models and texts from within the jihadist and broader Islamist milieu. This paper explores the relationship between the ideologies of these respective groups and their social practices, particularly their acts of violence, through an analysis of the representation of these social practices in the groups’ propaganda content. This analysis has a range of important policy implications, informing actors as to the differences between these respective groups and the potential for different approaches to these actors.
    
    Author: Harrison Swinhoe (University of Leeds)
  - New Trends of Islamophobia in the Counter-Extremism State
    
    This paper explores how experiences of Islamophobia have changed in recent years with the rise of counter-extremism programmes and policies. It suggests that young Muslims in North-Western Europe are experiencing high levels of Islamophobia that differ from those experienced by the previous generation at the start of the Long War on Terror. Most notably, as Countering Violent Extremism policies have become more covert, so too have the experiences of Islamophobia. The research is drawn from 419 interviews, many with young Muslims who have experienced instances of Islamophobia in education, employment, healthcare and other sectors. A result of the European Commission-funded DRIVE project, this paper finds that Islamophobia is experienced amongst young European Muslims differently according to national, local and demographic contexts, but that core trends remain – most notably, a fear of securitisation from Countering Violent Extremism programmes, and a resultant ‘masking’ of their Islamic identity to avoid further securitisation. Young Muslims also exhibit poorer mental health than majority populations and are more likely to consider their generation worse off than their parents. These findings are important in understanding current and changing trends in Islamophobia in North-Western Europe, and the impact of contemporary Countering Violent Extremism.
    
    Author: Richard McNeil-Willson (University of Edinburgh)
  - Far Right Conspiracy Theories & Egyptian Political Narratives: Insights from the Field
    
    Following the January 2011 and July 2013 uprisings in Egypt, a wave of conspiracy theories emerged, encompassing anti-liberal, anti-Western, and anti-Islamist sentiments. One prominent claim, propagated by Islamist Selim al-Awwa, alleged that churches were stockpiling weapons and detaining Muslim women (Zuhur and Tadros 2015, 121). Al-Awwa further asserted that it was a Muslim’s religious duty to rescue these women and prepare for an alleged war that Egyptian Christians were supposedly planning against Muslims. The violence that ensued against the country’s Christian population is but one of many examples of how conspiracy theories can turn into deadly events.
    
    The study of conspiracist thinking and its impact on politics has recently gained prominence, particularly with the rise of far-right conspiracy theories in the West. Most of this research, however, either focuses on popular conspiracist thinking in Western countries, or on state-led conspiracism in non-Western autocracies. My ethnographic research innovates on existing bodies of scholarship by exploring how some members of the Egyptian public incorporate conspiracy theories into their understanding of politics, and how conspiracies contribute to the construction of their social imaginaries. Drawing on testimonials from my fieldwork in Egypt, I analyze how conspiracy theories serve as a lens through which some Egyptians interpret and narrate political events. I examine how global and local conspiracist narratives intersect. This work contributes to our understanding of the malleability of conspiracy theories, how they resonate in non-Western contexts, and the potential for such narratives to provoke violence beyond Western settings.
    
    Author: Farah Rasmi (The Graduate Institute of Geneva)
  - Crushing Dissent by Countering Extremism? A Framework for Analysing Illiberal P/CVE Practices Across Bangladesh, China, Somalia, and Nigeria
    
    Scholars have increasingly examined how policies aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) have been co-opted to justify authoritarian practices and promote assimilationist agendas. Similarly, research within the fields of Critical Studies on Terrorism (CST) and authoritarian diffusion recently found the role of counter-terrorism policies in suppressing human rights. Despite this, a systematic framework to analyse P/CVE as a mechanism sustaining authoritarian and illiberal governance remains absent.
    
    This paper seeks to fill that gap by conceptualising P/CVE practices as illiberal prescriptions shared by the rulers and the ruled to stabilise the regime through elites’ legitimising discourses, regulative policy measures, and the coerced or voluntary compliance of non-state actors under the banner of countering vaguely defined “extremism.” Additionally, this paper aims to understand the drivers of illiberal P/CVE practices in non-Western contexts.
    
    To do so, drawn from norm diffusion and international (human rights) law, the paper proposes an original analytical framework. This framework categorises political discourse, legislation, law enforcement, and civil society participation into “liberal” and “illiberal” P/CVE through 41 indicators. Using a most-different-systems design (MDSD), it explores the conditions fostering illiberal P/CVE across case studies in Bangladesh, China, Somaliland, and Nigeria.
    
    As one of the few comparative analyses of P/CVE in non-Western settings, the study makes significant empirical contributions. It also makes theoretical contributions by bridging CST, P/CVE, and authoritarian diffusion literature, shedding light on how illiberal leaders exploit counter-extremism as a toolkit for repressing dissent and curtailing human rights.
    
    Authors: Mohammad Islam (University of Leeds and University of Dhaka)* , Mohamed Mohamood (University of Leeds) , Kelechi Okengwu (University of Leeds)* , Hengfeng Zhao (University of Leeds)
- 13:15 → 14:45
  FR 20 Panel / Transnational governance from metropoles to diaspora and back Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St Andrews)
  - The (imperial) conditions of possibility for Tamil diaspora governance: A practice-centered analysis of global and historical security entanglements
    
    Global diaspora populations are increasingly the explicit target of governance processes that seek to curtail their transnational political activities. In the burgeoning literature on transnational repression, such governance is predominantly attributed to the extraterritorial practices of authoritarian home states or other actors in the diaspora sending state. This leaves the broader global and local politics of transnational repression unaddressed, and does not account for variation in how transnational repression is (en)countered by liberal host-states. This paper suggests that, in order to fully understand the contemporary politics of diaspora governance - including through transnational repression - we have to understand not only the diaspora-homeland relationship but attend to the global and imperial conditions of possibility of this governance.
    
    Drawing on multi-method research, and utilising a practice-analytical lens that centres repressive and securitizing governance experienced by the Tamil diaspora community in the UK (and globally), this paper argues that - beside homeland politics - hoststate interests in the domestic and international sphere are key to understanding how contemporary diaspora repression plays out. Furthermore, the paper shows that many of the repressive practices aimed at the UK-based Tamil community, from overpolicing to the creation of suspect communities, are fundamentally rooted in - if not direct continuations of - British colonial governance. Diaspora repression therefore relies on and is made possible by entanglements between home and host-state, as well as between past and present. Fundamentally, the paper advances debates on connected sociologies and global histories on how to study the present with the past, both conceptually and empirically.
    
    Author: Catherine Craven (University of Sheffield)
  - Empire, Race, and Connected Histories of Democratization
    
    The nation-state has long been privileged as the unit of analysis in political science research on democratization. My paper problematizes this tendency, otherwise known as ‘methodological nationalism,’ in the context of recent moves in the field to "return to history" (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010) and revisit the "first wave" of democratization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the methodological nationalism of much democratization research has led to the recurring misrepresentation of many ‘first-wave’ European democracies as nation-states rather than imperial states, obscuring the prevalence of autocratic racial rule in their territories beyond Europe. I suggest, moreover, that recentring the imperial character of early European democracies – such that they appear more akin to conventionally recognized 'herrenvolk' democracies like Apartheid South Africa, albeit on a transcontinental scale – may complicate dominant geographic and temporal assumptions about the historical rise of modern liberal democracy itself. Building on efforts in postcolonial and global historical sociology to advance “connected histories” of modernity, I propose that historical democratization research should attend more closely to the co-constitution of liberal democracy between the West and non-West through struggles to resist, transform, and dismantle imperial rule as opposed to presuming its linear diffusion from the former to the latter. To illustrate what a ‘connected histories’ approach to democratization would entail, I examine the intra-imperial contests over citizenship, suffrage, and representation that unfolded during the "federal moment" of the post-war French Empire.
    
    Author: Emerson Murray (Northwestern University)
  - Kashmiri Internationalism: Sheikh Abdullah and the Quest for Self-Determination
    
    This paper traces the attempts of the leading Kashmiri nationalist, Sheikh Abdullah, and the advocacy efforts of the India-Pakistan Conciliation Group to secure international support for a plebiscite in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Focusing on Abdullah’s 1964-65 trips to Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom, it examines his proposal for the creation of a confederation between India, Pakistan, and Kashmir. In doing so, it situates Abdullah within the pantheon of anti-colonial nationalists who challenged conventional conceptions of national self-determination and postcolonial sovereignty.
    
    Author: Tarika Khattar (University of Cambridge)
  - Citizen Impunity and Authoritarian Resilience in the Middle East
    
    While acknowledging geopolitical factors and state strategies as influential in perpetuating authoritarian rule in the Middle East since the 2010-2011 uprisings, this paper focuses on the political attitude of ‘ordinary citizens’—the large segment of people who don’t enjoy special political or economic privileges nor have vested interests in the governing system—being viewed here as active agents in perpetuating authoritarianism, rather than simply the object or victim of authoritarian control. Asking ‘why many Middle Eastern citizens, while significantly suffering under authoritarian rule, refrain from active dissent and occasionally resist democratic reform,’ the paper explores how public submission to and limited dissent against authoritarianism are partially the product of ‘citizen impunity’—ordinary citizens’ capacity to navigate hardships and authoritarian subjugation by manipulating formal systems, bypassing laws, and escaping public responsibilities—embraced over decades by the region’s populations, becoming definitive of public mentality and attitude.
    To date, the concept of ‘citizen impunity’ remains poorly developed in the growing literature on authoritarianism, which continues to lack a rigorous people-centred understanding of public passivity toward, and complicity with, authoritarian rule. By contrast, many Middle Eastern thinkers have placed the issue of political passivity and citizen impunity at the heart of their intellectual endeavour and anti-colonial struggle with some, like Malek Bennabi and Bachir El-Ibrahimi, connecting political passivity under authoritarianism to the loss of moral values and indigenous identities. Recognizing the value of region-based efforts at explaining local political attitudes, this paper grounds its study of citizen impunity in the intellectual heritage and reformist projects of modern Middle Eastern thinkers, arguing that citizen impunity, this capacity to manoeuvre authoritarian systems and navigate hardships, although irregular, limited and unguaranteed, effectively gives many Middle Eastern citizens a sense of empowerment and agency that constantly attach them to the authoritarian status quo.
    
    Author: Engy Moussa (Cambridge University)
  - Standing up with Chinese diasporas
    
    Discrimination and anti-Asian hate targeting Chinese immigrants has grown since 2020, reflecting both Covid-19-related prejudice and geopolitical tensions between China and the West. In the same period, many feminist and queer activists escaped from China to the UK, seeking refuge from an increasingly illiberal, patriarchal, and queer-hostile culture in China, only to find themselves still targeted by a powerful Leninist state that has grown its far-reaching global presence. Consequently, we observe that Chinese female and queer-identifying immigrants in the UK experience a particular kind of “double terrorism”. On the one hand, they are described by the Chinese Communist Party as “foreign hostile forces” that provoke “gender antagonism” and that need to be surveilled and controlled; and on the other hand, they face suspicion within the British public discourse, sometimes portraying them as Chinese spies. This “double terrorism” affects the entire UK Chinese diaspora, from students to activists.
    
    No academic work to date explores this “double terrorism”, or the strategies that can be deployed to resist such pressures. This gap in understanding can be attributed, in part, to the insularity of the Chinese overseas community and a lack of active engagement with these immigrants in research. Therefore, we adopt a knowledge co-production approach, collaborating with a group of London-based Chinese feminist stand-up comedy artists and Chinese students. Through this collaboration, we provide training to interested King's Chinese students on storytelling and comedy performance, inviting them to share their lived experiences as “double terrorists” in the UK through stand-up comedy. These events will serve as a safe place for Chinese immigrants to voice their experiences, while also generating knowledge on the “double terrorism” experienced by the community, and offering recommendations for better engagement from British higher education institutions and the public.
    
    Author: Yanran Yao (King's College London)
- 14:45 → 15:00
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 14:45 → 15:45
  
  / Refreshment Break The Exchange
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Beyond the liberal international order Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Ilan Baron (Durham University)
  - Anarchist world order(s): Reflecting on antiauthoritarian solidarity and internationalism through the lives and ideas of early 20th-century Asian anarchists
    
    Anarchist theory and practices have often been connected with violence and chaos with limited connections made to social ties and community-building. Yet, as Ruth Kinna on anarchist internationalism and Benedict Anderson on historical transnational anticolonial anarchism have shown, there are examples of historical anarchist-led solidarity in thought and practice. This paper takes inspiration from Kinna and Anderson, among others, to consider meanings of antiauthoritarian solidarity and internationalism through the ideas and experiences of early 20th century Asian anarchists. Methodologically, the project draws upon writings and life experiences of historical Asian anarchists, especially from Japan and India. It also analyzes texts, popular representations of key anarchist-led movements and anarchist activists (e.g Har Dayal of India and Kanno Sugako of Japan) to illustrate how early 20th century Asian anarchists saw the world and their place in it. Overall, this project argues that an analysis of these anarchists’ experiences and ideas offer ways to understand anarchist solidarity and community beyond ethnonationalism as well as theorize a globalized orientation with regard to meanings of internationalism and world society. The paper also offers opportunities to reflect on historiography of women anarchists, especially those whose narratives-like Sugako’s-were (re)written by their male contemporaries.
    
    Author: Priya Dixit (Virginia Tech)
  - Beyond Crisis: The Identity Politics of International Order
    
    Why is the international order so often introduced as “in crisis” or “threatened”? Actors around the world – though predominantly in the West – frequently emphasize the current perils facing the international order. In that regard, securitisation theory provides an insightful account of the processes that such discourses put in motion. However, this paper goes beyond it and examines how the discourse of international order is actually about far less global struggles, rather defining one’s role and identity in a given relationship. It thus investigates what the discourse of international order accomplishes for – or against – various actors.
    
    Reflecting on the concept of international order has been a central concern in the field of International Relations. Yet, we still lack a precise understanding of how it works and what it does. Drawing on recent literature on international practices (Adler & Pouliot, 2011) and the conceptualization of international order as a narrative (Homolar & Turner 2024), this paper argues that international order is about identification processes and related relationships that are sustained by some discursive dynamics as well as participate in some. However, this paper distinguishes itself from existing scholarship by arguing that, far from transcendental or even truly international, the discourse of international order is first and foremost about the reproduction of specific identities and their related relationships.
    
    In that perspective, defending the international order is synonymous with upholding the current dominant identifications of the self and the other and therefore reproducing the power relations underpinning them. On the contrary, unsettling the international order means unsettling these dominant identifications and the relationships they sustain. Therefore, playing the insecurity card further entrenches and radicalizes the dominant identifications, as it prompts us to “defend” the international order and thereby (re)assert more forcefully the identification elements at play in that discourse.
    
    Author: Jérémy Dieudonné (UCLouvain, Belgium)
  - Asian Values as International Thought: The “Singapore School” and the Liberal International Order through the 1990s
    
    Within much popular commentary, the 1990s have been held hostage by romanticised narratives about the Liberal International Order (LIO). This narrative posits a clean progression from the LIO’s birth in the ashes of the second World War, to its apogee in the 1990s within the unipolar moment, to its decline in the mid-2010s. Challenging this narrative, this paper reconceptualises the “Asian Values debate” within international theory, utilising the tools of global intellectual history. Casting skepticism on universalist narratives through cultural resources, Asian intellectuals challenged various tenets of the LIO and United States’ hegemony across different fora, including American elite house journals outlets like Foreign Affairs, as well as various United Nations’ events. Traversing the lineage and encounters of the “Singapore School” - the primary purveyors of Asian Values discourse - this paper surfaces two interrelated critiques about the LIO’s sacralised account: it emphasises how its triumph in the 1990s was a contingent outcome that required compromise and negotiation; and that the LIO has never displayed a pure, all-encompassing form, instead exhibiting a localised, composite character. A refreshed conception of the 1990s thereby reveals how international political theory can afford greater clarity to the current historical juncture, destabilising idealized notions about the nature and historicity of international orders.
    
    Author: Quah Say Jye (University of Cambridge)
  - Trump's New America and the Emerging World Order
    
    This paper examines the impact of Trump's 'New America' on world order. The 2025 US election has resulted in a comprehensive vote for change, emanating from multiple tensions in domestic politics. In the first part of the paper, we examine the takeover of the Republican Party by Trump, arguing that this second term takes us beyond Trump-ism as a cult into an era of fascist politics. Scholars have, for years, whispered the F word in relation to these developments, with commentators often positing that it is 'wilful blindness' not to recognise the fascist trajectory. We outline reasons why the unfolding of Trump 2.0 provides an evidentiary basis for crossing the threshold into explicitly naming it as an instance of 21st century fascism. Fascism as a revolutionary anti-establishment movement of radical conservatism presented itself as resistance. Its resemblance to right-wing radicalism notwithstanding, we argue that the specific nature of Trump-ism in 2025 and its characteristics that we elaborate, provide sufficient basis for using the term. In the second part of the paper, we consider the anti-hegemonic nature of the emerging world order, and specifically its implications for global governance. We investigate the global impact of an ostensibly nationalist and transactional foreign policy promise offered by his regime. Here, we consider the different regional theatres, with special attention to China and East Asia. In Trump's New America, marked by a different interpretation of American exceptionalism, we are interested in studying what the significant continuities/changes might be in an ideologically polarised era of policymaking, further steered by billionaires. We outline different scenarios concerning the emergent global order. This will be crucial for understanding how the necessary coordination will be achieved for global governance, as it has most direct implications for a range of issues, not the least of which is climate change.
    
    Authors: Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster, London) , Barry Buzan (London School of Economics)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Bordering and migration control Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton)
  - Performative Peoplehood: On the Territorial Limits of Legal Security
    
    The tension between the promise of human rights ‘everywhere’ and ‘for everyone’ with the democratic claim of ‘the people’ over its territory has long been identified in the literature. But while political theorists have tackled the challenge of the rights of others, the idea that popular legitimacy may be a power strategy to justify territorial jurisdiction, and control over resources, has not been properly addressed. That is my aim here. I argue that, in modern democracy, the demos constitutes a speech act that is central to the sovereign logic of territorial appropriation. Claiming jurisdiction over its legitimizing source – ‘the people’ – is what allows states to establish legal boundaries and territorial borders and hence exclude others from access to citizenship and/or territory. As the case of island states demonstrates, failure to do so may come at the cost of state discontinuity. Their example shows how the human rights of several populations are compromised by the impossibility of sovereign authorities to claim control over territory. As ‘vanishing states’ are forced to explore new hybrid forms of political community, they challenge the people-territory nexus that sits at the core of sovereignty. As they seek to retain territorial jurisdiction over areas (like their maritime zone) whose resources become less available to the populations that are forced to leave, they will also attempt to claim jurisdiction over their ‘landless’ people.
    
    Author: Guilherme Marques-Pedro (University of Groningen)
  - Liberal Regionalism, Illiberal Borders: Navigating Contradictions in South America's Migration Governance
    
    South America has developed an intra-regional migration regime that has received a lot of scholarly attention due to its liberal and open policies and narratives. However, at the same time, literature has highlighted the ‘gap’ between this liberal approach and more restrictive implementation, with increased border militarization, and restrictions on movement. This dichotomy between the liberal narrative and securitizing border practices is the focus of this study. We use ontological security theory to understand the importance of continuous narratives and everyday practices in building trust and a sense of security within a population. This leads us to our central research question: how can ontological security theory help us to understand the contradictions within SA migration governance? We analyse bordering practices across the region in the post-COVID period, which has been characterized by several ‘waves’ of border militarization. Through a critical discourse analysis of media and political speeches we illustrate how elites have been able to uphold the liberal migration narrative while implementing increasingly securitized border restrictions.
    
    Authors: Marcus Nicolson (Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research, Italy) , Leiza Brumat (Eurac Research, Italy)*
  - Regional Governance and Gender-Responsive Approaches to Forced Migration in Latin America
    
    Latin America is experiencing one of the largest migration crises globally, with nearly 8 million Venezuelans displaced by 2024 and a rapidly increasing number of asylum-seekers and refugees fleeing violence, poverty, and environmental degradation in Central America. Women and girls comprise half of these displaced populations, facing heightened vulnerabilities. This paper examines the role of regional organisations in advancing gender-responsive migration governance, focusing on South and Central America. Specifically, it interrogates how frameworks like those under MERCOSUR and the Central American Integration System (SICA) address gendered drivers of migration and their impact on displaced women and girls.
    The analysis argues that while regional normative frameworks offer progressive guidelines for gender-responsive governance, their implementation at the national level is undermined by sovereignty concerns, security priorities, and "institutionalised ambiguity." This results in uneven and ad hoc policy practices that fail to safeguard the rights and wellbeing of displaced women and girls. Using a feminist International Relations lens, the paper highlights the paradox of regional migration governance: despite commitments to gender-sensitive policies, states frequently prioritise migration control over rights-based approaches. The paper contributes to broader debates on gender-responsive migration governance in the Global South.
    
    Author: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton)
  - Walking on a Rope’: The Experiences of Asylum Seekers Navigating Multiple Border Spaces Inside and Outside Europe
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Sarah Elmammeri (University of Liverpool)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Colonialism, counterterrorism and the emergency Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)
  - Dark Diplomacy and State Terrorism: Portugal, Rhodesia and Apartheid 1960-1994
    
    The 1990s in South Africa saw unprecedented levels of political violence whilst negotiations for a democratic transition were ongoing. Much of the blame for the violence was placed on a ‘Third Force’ of nebulous origins. This paper proposes that a covert alliance, Aliança Contra as Rebeliões em Africa, (Alcora) between white minority rule in Southern Africa (Portugal, Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa) laid the foundations for a type of state terrorism which deliberately sought to sow division among liberation groups. The direct result of such a strategy was instrumental in the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, and a deliberate attempt to foment civil war in South Africa in the 1990s.
    
    Author: Simon Taylor (Durham University)
  - Terrorism, Violence and the Political: Red and White Terrors in French Indochina
    
    In this article, I trace the way in which the label of ‘terrorism’ forges and defines what is (normal and abnormal) politics, and vice-versa. Rather than starting from the assumption that ‘terrorism’ and ‘politics’ pre-exist each other, I explore how these fields co-constitute each other in the act of labelling violence. Going beyond the idea that ‘terrorism’ is a way to either contest or confirm the political nature of violent action, I explore how the use of ‘terrorism’ to label certain movements politicises (rather than depoliticises) them, in a specific way. This article identifies three categories of politics that the ‘terrorism’ label helps construct. First, ‘terrorism’ refers to a ‘savage’ form of politics, where violence takes the place of politics itself. Second, the ‘terrorism’ label reduces the politics of ‘the terrorists’ to the pursuit of self-interest. Finally, the ‘terrorism’ label is used to identify a sphere of ‘diseased’ politics, a politics that has gone too far beyond the rational. To support these claims, I engage in an in-depth exploration of the way the ‘terrorism’ label is deployed in the context of colonial Indochina. Following recent interventions showing how the ‘terrorism’ label has a long colonial genealogy, and furthering efforts to historicise the study of terrorism, I focus specifically on an under-studied colonial context in order to explore the work ‘terrorism’ does in shaping the space of the political.
    
    Author: Xavier Mathieu (University of Sheffield)
  - Far Right Terror as White Settler Violence: Reading Christchurch through Settler Colonial Studies
    
    In 2019, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, committed two massacres in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand killing fifty-one Muslim worshippers and wounding forty-nine. Tarrant saw in Muslims ‘invaders’ in a white man’s country whose presence is a threat to both white civilisation and white dominance in the settler colony. Tarrant saw himself as part a global network of white supremacist movements across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand attempting to reassert white supremacy as the organising principle of political order.
    This paper examines the relationship between white supremacist violence and settler colonialism through focusing on the responses from the political class in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, the ways in which the media class across the political spectrum framed and reported on the attacks, and Tarrant’s own representations of his motivations. The settler state and Tarrant hold competing notions of settler nationhood, and act to secure that settler nation in distinct ways. Through a critical reading of these sources of discourse, we can better understand the distinct ways that settler colonial dominance is secured through violent processes that can either undermine state control in favour of white settler nationalism or reaffirm the sovereignty of the settler state. However, both are ultimately still underpinned by white possessive logics of settler colonialism.
    By engaging literature from settler colonial studies, critical theories of race, and Indigenous studies, the paper centres whiteness and settler colonialism in understanding both acts of white supremacist violence and state security responses.
    ehjqi
    
    Author: Katherine Newman (UNSW)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Connectivity and collaboration: potential avenues for the future of WPS Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  As the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda approaches its 25th Anniversary in October 2025, this panel focuses on the future of WPS in the context of perpetual political crisis (rise of populism, climate emergency, increasing disaster risks, lack of investment, disappearing interest and enthusiasm) and uncertainty. Here, the roundtable will focus on the potential and impact of connectivity and collaboration at both the conceptual and practical levels. It will ask if theorising and working from a holistic and interconnected perspective can support responses to the current and future crisis and uncertainty, how to work effectively across silos and boundaries, how to support connections between academia, CSOs and policymakers, and how WPS can learn from and connect to other movements. Together we will also explore the value (and limitation) of having the anniversary effect.
  
  Sponsor: Security Policy and Practice
  
  Chair: Florence Waller - Carr (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  
  Participants: Danielle Roberts (Reclaim the Agenda) , Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester) , Punam Yadav (Univarsity College London) , Laura McLeod (University of Manchester) , Florence Waller - Carr (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Decolonial, anti-racist and abolitionist pedagogies in International Relations Part I: Experiences, Experiments and Responses Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  As institutions embedded in the structures of racial capitalism (Gerrard, Sriprakash and Rudolph 2022), universities contribute to colonial and racial systems of oppression. Although resistance to this has always been a reality, the last few years have witnessed social movements across the world calling for the decolonisation of the university. Decolonisation of research and disciplines and decolonisation of curriculum and pedagogy are the most obvious paths upon which to embark towards decolonisation and perhaps the routes in which educators have more impact. In the discipline of International Relations (IR), post and decolonial perspectives have always been present (Henderson 2017; Vitalis 2015), although marginalised for a long time in a discipline characterized by eurocentrism (Hobson 2012) and whiteness (Sabaratnam 2020). Nevertheless, decolonial and postcolonial scholarship in IR has progressively evolved over the past 25 years as illustrated by an abundance of literature.
  The emergence of new epistemological communities within Western academic institutions in the late 20th century led to changing understandings of what constitutes knowledge and its purposes (Bhambra 2016). Scholars and practitioners from post-colonial and marginalised communities have foregrounded voices and perspectives that have previously been erased or silenced. Decolonial and abolitionist theories and debates have challenged mainstream knowledge, its hierarchies and its pedagogical operations, as well as the very function of education as an emancipatory and liberatory process vis-à-vis inequity-reproducing institutions that have played a leading role in marginalising indigenous knowledge systems and maintaining racialized hierarchies. These developments have also shown how the language of decolonising the university, as well as the language of anti-racism, are increasingly being coopted by many institutions in a neo-liberal take on diversity.
  Convenors of this roundtable therefore stand with Tuck and Yang (2012) when they remind us that decolonisation is not a metaphor and with Sara Ahmed (2006) when she warns us about the harmful effects of such co-optation. In this context, the literature on abolition in education constitutes a valuable reflection on the possibilities of countering this co-optation process (Abolitionist university studies 2023; Neal and Dunn 2020; Love and Muhammad 2020; Dunn, Chisholm, Spaulding and Love 2021).
  In the light of the above, this roundtable gathers interventions bringing empirical reflection, based on specific pedagogical experiments/experiences in the classroom, using critical, radical, decolonial, abolitionist or anti-racist pedagogies in conversation with IR and institutional responses to these.
  Interventions will focus more specifically on:
  - The development of a decolonial praxis in the naming of race and racism in the French context, with Tal Dor, Manel Ben Boubaker and Christine Mussard.
  - The possibilities brought by student-staff network with an experience at The University of Manchester, with Luke Bhatia.
  - The prospects and challenges of anti-racist and decolonial pedagogies in De Montfort University (Leicester), with Amina Easat-Daas and Pinar Donmez.
  - The inputs of indigenous knowledge in IR education through cartography, with an experience in Brasil by Marcia F Camargo.
  
  Speakers are Tal Dor, Luke Bhatia, Amina Easat-Daas, Pinar Donmez and Marcia F. Camargo.
  Convenors of the roundtable are Leila Mouhib (chair) and Heba Youssef.
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Leila Mouhib (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
  
  Participants: Pinar Emine Dönmez (De Montfort University) , Marcia F. Camargo (Federal University of São Paulo) , Heba Youssef (University of Brighton) , Luke Bhatia (The University of Manchester)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Doctrine & Strategy Copenhagen, Europa
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Felix Auboeck (Loughborough University)
  
  Chair: Felix Auboeck (Loughborough University)
  - Soldier, State and Industry: Interest-Driven Dynamics of French Transformation
    
    The process of military innovation is often viewed as a hierarchical, where the political institution sets strategic objectives that guide the military's needs and transformation. The military communicates its operational needs to the industry, which is tasked with meeting those needs. However, this process is more complex and involves constant communication among various actors, each seeking to secure unique interests that ultimately affect the process and the transformation. While the French Army is primarily responsible for its own transformation, the political establishment and the defense industry play critical roles in shaping the process and guiding decisions. This study builds on this understanding to examine how civil-military relations influence the French Army's transformation. It explores how these three actors and their relationships impact the Army’s transition to a new strategic context. By investigating this complex interplay, the study reveals how each actor contributes to both the strengths and weaknesses of the French approach and presents military transformation as a system of choice and compromise.
    
    Author: Lucie Pebay (University of Bath)
  - Mind the Civil-Military Gap: Comparing Responses to Military Recruitment Crises in the UK and Ireland
    
    Citizens’ willingness to undertake military service has important implications, both for national security and the tenor of domestic politics. In early 2022, thousands of ordinary Ukrainians took up arms to defend their country in an outpouring of national resistance, and the country’s ongoing efforts to resist continue to depend in part on the ability to fill its army’s ranks. Even in peacetime, military recruitment crises matter: they can reveal underlying tensions between the values and attitudes of those in uniform and the civil societies they serve, which might in turn endanger core tenets of democratic civil-military relations. Yet, the extent to which recruitment crises become wider crises in civil-military relations depends, in part, on how military institutions decide to respond to them. This paper examines the response to recent military recruitment crises in the all-volunteer militaries of two neighbouring democracies: the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In both cases, profound military recruitment crises challenged core elements of military institutional culture, creating feedback loops that had the potential to close emergent civil-military gaps. This paper examines the factors affecting military responses to recruitment crises, to assess their implications for democratic civil-military relations and the production of military power. For the British Army, this resulted in (contested) efforts to reposition the public image of military following decades of counterinsurgency and overseas interventions, in a conscious effort to reconnect with wider social morays. Conversely, in neutral Ireland, where the Defence Forces had long been committed to UN peacekeeping as their raison d’etre, the military struggled to shed its bellicose image, leading ultimately to increasing political tensions between government and army.
    
    Authors: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln) , Alex Neads (University of Durham)
  - Parallel Military Control Structures in Afghanistan
    
    This project examines the wartime command and control of American special operations forces. Lawrence Freedman, Anthony King, and others have recently explored how modern warfare requires senior military commanders to balance political dynamics, innovation and change, and the devolution of authority. This project contributes to these lines of inquiry by identifying and analyzing wartime parallel military control structures that transcend official command arrangements. Using recently declassified documents and interviews with special operations personnel, military commanders, and policymakers, this paper will assess how analogous military control affiliations led to operational success or failure. The effects of these control relationships were felt far beyond the battlefield and served as an important indicator whether mid- and long-term strategic goals were realized. A total of four case studies will be explored. The first two will examine the transformation of Task Force 714 and the reorientation of its successor organization – Task Force 626 – in Afghanistan. The remaining two case studies will probe how Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force – Afghanistan transitioned from major combat operations to advisory and training activities in 2002 and how it incorporated the Afghan special operations enterprise into the coalition's order of battle a decade later.
    
    Author: Stephen Grenier (Johns Hopkins University)
  - Clausewitz, Trump, and the "American Way of War" in the 2020s.
    
    This paper will draw on two 'classics' of the literature: Clausewitz's On War and Weigley's The American Way of War to interpret President Trump's strategic beliefs. As BISA marks its 50th anniversary, and the relevance of IR and War Studies is questioned, this paper will argue that a return to the classics of our discipline has much to offer scholars. Indeed it can provide a powerful conceptual lens for understanding the 'Black Swan' phenomena that is the Trump presidency.
    
    Weigley's 20th century classic (1973) identified the quest for decisive victory as the core characteristic of the American Way of War. However, President's Trump's first term in office, and his 2024 campaign rhetoric would suggest a break with this approach, and indeed with other American Ways of War such as Boot's 'Small Wars' (2002).
    
    To interpret Trump's break with the historical tradition of the American Way of War this paper will step back into the 19th century and draw on concepts Clausewitz articulated in On War (1832). Clausewitz, and readings, and re-readings, of his text have understood war as a social phenomena characterised by:
    
    the continuation of politics/policy by other means
    
    war as a realm of chance, hazard, and friction
    
    war as a space of violence with a tendency to intensify and escalate towards an ideal type of "absolute war".
    
    This paper will suggest that Trump's rhetoric, and to an extent his actions resonate and rhyme with 2. & 3. rather than 1. the aphorism typically associated with Clausewitz. The Trumpian imagination does indeed see war as realm of hazard, chance, and intensifying violence. Thus, war is ultimately to be avoided and lacks utility as a tool of policy/politics.
    
    Author: Christopher Macallister (University of Hull)
  - Digital Memory, Radicalization of Archives, and the Question of Collective Memory in the Digital Age
    
    Since its rise in 2007, the digital age of social media platforms has radically challenged the established norms of archiving war, violence, and national security. The substantial inflow of data and information shared by social media users form the basis of today’s digital archives, which in turn shape collective memory. The digital age has challenged established bureaucratic governmental archives and thus the role of social media platforms in the ecology of war, collective memory, and national security warrants deeper academic inquiry to develop a novel understanding of digital memory.
    This research aims to explore how Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter are redesigning the politics of narratives and collective memory in the context of warfare and national security. Through the conceptual lenses of politics of narratives, digital and the social psychology of attention and control, the study explores how social media users, both intentionally and unintentionally, influence the construction of collective memory. The research hypothesises that the digitalisation of memory challenges not only the authenticity and originality of archival data but also the bureaucratic mechanisms reminiscent of Weberian governance that attempt to distinguish between right and wrong in the construction of national narratives. Thus, digital archives have emerged as a new battleground in contemporary warfare, one that merits close academic attention in the fields of memory, war, and security studies.
    This research examines the CIA's drone warfare (2004-2018) in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, focusing on the challenges faced by state bureaucracies in constructing a coherent collective memory of drone warfare—both in Pakistan and the United States. By applying discourse analysis and content analysis to social media posts related to CIA-led drone strikes, the research develops a theoretical framework for understanding digital memory in the context of drone warfare and the broader implications of digitalised memory in contemporary conflict.
    
    Authors: Muhmmad Younis (Forman Christian College University, Pakistan) , Mudassir Farooqi (Forman Christian College, Pakistan)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Emerging Military Technologies in Theory and Practice: Critical Approaches to Knowledge and Governance Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Ishmael Bhila (Paderborn University, Germany) , Natasha Karner (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
  
  Chair: Natasha Karner (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
  - Conceptualising and Problematising Scientific Objectivity in Algorithmic Warfare: A Postcolonial Deconstruction of Machine Rationalities
    
    The ideas of scientific objectivity and rationality have animated the accelerated development and use of autonomous weapons systems, Machine Learning techniques, sensors, and related technologies in warfare. Yet, this objectivity in algorithms in applying violence is questionable in many ways. Despite the remedial potential of algorithmic techniques in bringing good to humanity, machine rationalities in warfare also have the potential to perpetuate and amplify arbitrary values and realities of violence. Looking closely at the various stages/levels of an autonomous system used for violence, I argue that the idea of scientific objectivity in violence is illusory at best. I argue that, in the first place, these technologies – particularly those aimed at targeting humans – are fraught with imperial rationalities at political and philosophical levels, with the concept of policing remote populations central to the ideas that constitute algorithmic warfare, particularly in the Global South. The ‘objectivity’ that defines the techniques in algorithmic warfare involves using statistical instruments that find patterns, classify humans, label them, and make decisions based on the principles of speed and efficiency. However, all these practices are also closely related to the logics of disciplinary control (Downey, 2024) that lead to biases, ‘hallucination of threats into being’, psychic imprisonment (Hoijtink, Arentze & Gould, 2024), and a host of other dehumanising effects (collateral bodies, ‘digital dehumanisation’, using vulnerable populations as test subjects, algorithmic distance, and so on). This paper, therefore, questions the epistemological foundations for the use of algorithms and machine autonomy in the application of violence and suggests critical approaches to the governance of algorithmic warfare cognisant with lived realities.
    
    Author: Ishmael Bhila (Paderborn University, Germany)
  - Algorithmic Aperture: Revealing and Concealing the Battlefield
    
    This paper explores how military Artificial Intelligence (AI) simultaneously reveals and conceals the reality of the battlefield. The application of military AI promises to enable greater accuracy, situational awareness, and depth of field in conflict. Yet by narrowing its focus on specific labels, identifiers, and geographical scopes, it is both revealing and concealing important details of the battlefield. AI systems provide a passage to see the world in minute detail, yet this is confined to the framing and limitations of the algorithm. In addition, AI-Decision Support Systems (AI-DSS) may present a series of options for courses of action, yet these too are limited. Overall, whilst bringing certain things to light, the use of military AI puts others in the dark, and what is cast aside is deemed as irrelevant and becomes invisible in conflict decision-making. This is a process of willing knowing to willing unknowing, where a choice is made on what permits the use of force on the battlefield and what details we are willing to miss or hide by giving less weight to them. This is problematic for broader situational awareness, the application of violence, and humanitarian safety. Therefore, this paper explores this dangerous dichotomy of military AI.
    
    Author: Natasha Karner (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
  - Killer Robots within the Ibero-american Social Networks: Looking for Anthropomorphism in the Debate
    
    This study employs social network analysis to examine online discussions about killer robots and the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems within the Iberophonic community, particularly after the exponential growth and popularisation of AI in general at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. The analysis will focus on the discussions centred around the anthropomorphism in the public perception of AI in weapons and its relation to pop culture. Additionally, we consider discussions about the need for international regulations to govern the development and use of AI in weapons systems. This research assesses the debate on AWS within social networks by portuguese and spanish-speaking communities, highlighting their role as rule-makers. The role of new media in shaping public representations of AWS is also considered. Given the geographical diversity of portuguese and spanish-speaking countries, analyzing these countries can reveal a broad range of interests and impacts on global security dynamics. The positions of these emerging economies can significantly shape international norms and regulations. This study uses Antroscore to identify anthropomorphic language in our corpus, collected through an Twitter/X API.
    
    Authors: Sabrina Medeiros* , Luis Campani (Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Portugal) , Samuel Martins*
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / European Security and the War in Ukraine Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: ESWG Working group
  
  Chair: Fabrizio Coticchia (Università degli Studi di Genova)
  - Interdependent interlocutors: the UK, the Continent, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
    
    Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine caused in all European countries “a process of rethinking national defense and the national role in European security” (Johansson-Nogués, Ojanen and Zardo, forthcoming). For the UK, ‘freshly Brexited’ at the time of the invasion, this has meant a simultaneous re-pivot to the European continent and the necessity to reshape the relationship with a European Union it is no longer part of.
    This article examines how the UK has engaged with various European security forums on four key areas of foreign security: sanctions, intelligence sharing, defence-industrial cooperation and space infrastructure. These case studies, pivotal to the international response to Russia’s aggression, highlight two levels of Euro-British interdependence: the first regarding knowledge and information, and the second concerning material resources, both military and non-military.
    Through a process tracing methodology, this analysis reveals how the UK weaponised various knowledge interdependences to reshape its relations and address material interdependences with the EU, NATO, but also in minilateral groupings. Thus, this paper’s first contribution is theoretical, and shows how knowledge circulation theory is not just useful to reveal informal power dynamics in information sharing but - in doing so - exposes patterns for material cooperation. Empirically, it explains the UK’s recent cooperative choices, ultimately demonstrating how Euro-British interdependencies remain at the core of ‘Brexited UK’s security strategies and positioning.
    
    Author: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  - Evolution of Natural Gas Conflicts in Europe: A Network Analysis of Energy Security
    
    The strategic value of natural gas also increases the likelihood of conflict along the value chain. This presents two fascinating puzzles for political scientists: What are the key political and economic sources of natural gas conflicts? How do political debates and security concerns around natural gas evolve over time? In a refreshing theoretical divergence from the traditional energy security literature, this paper analyses natural gas trade as a complex production network. It uses a cutting-edge new method called Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) to analyse how political and economic actors frame natural gas security. By tracing how certain political frames around natural gas appear and diffuse, this method identifies key points of stability and disruption within the network and reveals patterns of cooperation and conflict in natural gas trade over the last two decades. Overall, the key argument of the paper is that natural gas transit security in Europe is affected by institutional discontinuity across political territories, power asymmetries between producers, transit states and consumers, and competition for rents among state and non-state actors. These three key variables explain why natural gas routes have been constantly reimagined in the last two decades. This original and innovative work will transform the academic conversation on natural gas trade by bringing transit networks and their impact on security to the forefront.
    
    Authors: Kerem Öge (University of Warwick) , Tim Henrichsen (University of Warwick)*
  - Crisis and Change in Strategic Culture: EU Member States in Time of Ukraine Crises
    
    Previous studies have focused on the change and continuity of strategic culture in Europe and their impacts on the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). However, there is no theoretical explanation for the change in strategic culture and no explicit mechanism from drivers to strategic cultural change. The study argues that crises represent windows of opportunity for strategic culture to change. It applies realist constructivism to develop an analytical framework for explaining change in strategic culture, followed by three hypotheses. The framework shows that within the EU, crises are likely to induce change in five dimensions of national strategic culture under conditions of systemic pressures and norm entrepreneurs. In order to test the framework, the study selects Germany, France, Poland, and Sweden as cases to identify their national strategic cultures before and after two crises: the 2014 Ukraine crisis and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. Assisted by qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the study aims to verify the three hypotheses and conclude how crises lead to strategic cultural change in the EU context.
    
    Author: Yingjian Li (King's College London)
  - Escalation Dynamics in the Russia-Ukraine War: Between Great Power Peace and World
    
    From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Putin and others in the Russian elite used alarmist language implicitly threatening escalation to a direct war with NATO, including the use of nuclear weapons. Western leaders also feared this possibility, with President Joe Biden warning of a potential World War Three. Western critics of military support for Ukraine and of the lack of a diplomatic track warned that the West and Russia risked being trapped in an escalatory cycle that would end in a nuclear war. So far, escalation to a wider war between Russia and the West has not happened. Against this background, this paper will explore escalation dynamics in the Russia-Ukraine War. The paper will draw on existing literature on conflict escalation and crisis and intra-war behaviour. The paper will argue that, notwithstanding Russia’s unprovoked aggression and war crimes, both the West and Russia have behaved with important elements of restraint. In particular, this has included: the West’s decision not to become directly involved as a combatant; Russia’s decision not to target NATO states militarily, especially supply routes for Western military assistance to Ukraine; the non-use of nuclear weapons by Russia; and cautious responses to incidents which might have triggered escalation (such as Russia missiles falling on the territory of some NATO states). The paper will explore the possible reasons for the limited escalation of the war to date, including: the overall balance of power between the West and Russia; nuclear deterrence; the likely consequences of a conventional war between Russia and the West; the maintenance and use of channels of communication between the West and Russia. The analysis will suggest reasons for cautious optimism about the prospects for continued great power peace in the 21st century.
    
    Author: Andrew Cottey (University College Cork)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Global Vulnerabilities and Challenges to Orders Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (Cardiff University)
  
  Chair: Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (Cardiff University)
  - Money Talks: Vulnerability Discourses in Climate Finance Negotiations
    
    The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) provides mandates to achieve treaty aims, including those related to climate finance. The interpretation and enactment of these mandates are key to understanding the implementation and effectiveness of resulting outcomes. These processes can be explored through the establishment and operation of the ad hoc work program on the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance (NCQG), created by the UNFCCC in 2021. The NCQG was mandated to provide input on a new international climate finance goal prior to 2025. This article traces how UNFCCC mandates related to climate finance recipients are made meaningful within the context of the NCQG. Based on previous agreements those “particularly vulnerable” to climate change should receive financial assistance. I explore different discourses of vulnerability in relationship to possible recipients within NCQG deliberations to understand how vulnerability is characterized and used by different actors. I present an analysis of the NCQG process from 2022-2024. Data come from NCQG documents, interviews with NCQG staff and participants, transcripts and fieldnotes from a hybrid ethnography of UNFCCC climate finance meetings. I find three patterns of vulnerability discourse and offer initial explanations for when and how certain actors employed them during NCQG deliberations.
    
    Author: Diana Elhard (Northwestern University)
  - What does the European Political Community tell us about international society at the regional level?
    
    In a contested and competitive global order, understanding how regional cooperation is sustained is increasingly important. Brexit, migration, and the rise of authoritarian populism have challenged what it means to be European and how this translates into regional institutions.
    
    In this light, the emergence of the European Political Community (EPC) is arguably significant as the latest addition to Europe’s extensive regional architecture. The EPC emphasises informal/private micro-practices of interpersonal relations alongside formal/public macro-practices of performing European unity and values. This contrasts with the densely institutionalised framework of the EU.
    
    In this paper, I contend that the EPC reinforces particular English School ontological, epistemological and empirical claims for regional international society. First, it supports Knudsen and Navari’s (2019) proposed structuration theory, by illustrating how situated actors are involved in elaborating values and organisations. Next, the absence of summit communiques or press conferences requires a hermeneutic approach to interpreting what is in the minds of those who act as states, as Manning (1962) argued. Third, the EPC speaks to the pluralist European regional international society proposed by Diez and Whitman (2002) as existing alongside a solidarist EU comparator, but rooted in “more informal norms, rules, institutions and boundaries”.
    
    Through an analysis of interviews with European diplomats, this paper will argue that the EPC provides evidence of the continuing importance for European policymakers of maintaining 'raison de systeme', despite the myriad challenges Europe faces. It will also suggest ways that informal bilateral relationships can be better incorporated into existing theories of international society.
    
    Author: Jane Stevens (Open University)
  - A Change of Heart? Explaining Central Europe’s Puzzling Acceptance of Ukrainian Refugees
    
    In 2015 Central Europe stood at the forefront of anti-migration positions in the EU. Right-wing populists across the region securitised refugees by presenting them as an existential threat. By March 2022, Poland and Czechia received some of the highest numbers of Ukrainian refugees with open arms. How can we explain this change of heart? And is it really a change of heart? Last year, the enthusiastic welcome of Ukrainian refugees came as a pleasant surprise to us. What did we miss? We believe that we should have focussed less on the securitisation of migration and more on area studies and ontological security. Drawing on this literature we propose a nuanced, contextual and historically grounded reflection of the 2022 refugees’ acceptance in contrast to 2015. Studying the Czech and Polish cases, we counterintuitively argue that the welcome of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine strengthened both states’ domestic ontological security.
    
    Authors: Jessie Barton Hronesova (UNC Chapel Hill)* , Tadek Markiewicz (Uppsala University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Infrastructural violence and settler spaces of control, Palestine and beyond Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Techno-Political Control and Epistemic Violence: Israeli Dominance over Telecommunication Infrastructure in Gaza
    
    The Israeli attacks on Gaza after October 7 starkly revealed the profound disparity in communication access, as Gazans were repeatedly cut off from the world for extended periods. This raised scrutiny of Israeli control over Palestinian access to global networks, where, for example, Gazans could only use outdated 2nd generation mobile networks, even as Israel operated on 5th generation technology. This paper aims to critically analyze the duality of Israel’s control over telecommunication infrastructure by integrating existing literature on Palestinian access to telecommunication infrastructure with a contextual analysis of qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted in Gaza. Supplementing Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, we argue that Israel’s systematic level of technology control and infrastructural oppression emphasized by near-total information blockade exceeds the framework of colonialism and dehumanization that Said outlined. By situating this case in relation to other historical episodes of colonial infrastructural control in French Algeria, Apartheid South Africa, and US Jim Crow, we sketch out the consequences of this control for broader questions of authoritative representation and imposed dependence. The intentional degradation of Gaza's communication infrastructure is viewed as part of a broader strategy of techno-political control and a method of epistemic violence, wherein the ability of Palestinians to communicate their reality to the world is systematically gagged.
    
    Author: Ghadir Awad (University of Michigan)
  - Life and Death on the Walls of Polis: Urban Space and Class in Empire's Kabul
    
    This research explores the intersection of Afghan society, class, and urban life in Kabul, examining the ways in which proximity to 'Empire' shaped the lives of its people. Focusing on Kabul province, the study will analyse how imperial influence manifested through urban planning, security infrastructures, and class structures. Drawing on biopolitical works of Foucault, Agamben and Mbembe, with the concept of heterotopia, the research will map key urban elements such as military barracks, checkpoints, and green zones, exploring their role in defining spaces of safety, exclusion, and exposure to violence. Kevin A. Lynch’s seminal work, The Image of the City, will guide the analysis of Kabul's urban form through its categories of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, offering insights into how urban space reflects broader social and political dynamics. The study will also investigate how different social classes in Kabul navigate these spatial configurations, considering how Empire's forces constructed definitions of life and death. The research aims to illuminate the complex relationship between urbanisation, class stratification, and the violent realities of life under Empire's rule, providing a critical lens on the role of urban space in shaping social identities and experiences in Afghanistan.
    
    Author: Anil Yildirim (University of Exeter)
  - Rehabilitating Sovereignty? Reconstruction Projects in Gaza and the Cementing of the Israeli Control
    
    Rehabilitation of the physical space is usually perceived as a common good, seeking to return the damaged environment to its previous state. This paper seeks to problematize this understanding by relating the practices of reconstruction to sovereign power and to show how they can work towards maintaining and even strengthening control and dominance. Drawing on the materialist conceptualizations of sovereignty, I propose that reconstruction in the wake of large-scale destruction is crucial for (re)established state presence, power and influence via material practices. The paper then investigates these dynamics with reference to the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip and the efforts to rehabilitate Gaza after the repeated Israeli onslaughts that resulted in the gradual degradation of its physical environment, and by extension social relations engendered by this environment, over the two decades. I argue that via the restrictions on import of building materials and overall influence over the shape of the rebuilding of Gaza, Israeli state authorities have severely undermined the Palestinian sovereign aspirations. In turn, this has strengthened Israeli sovereign control and rule over the Palestinians. The paper thus demonstrates that reconstruction policies should be studied more closely with regards to what political projects they facilitate and which ones they prevent.
    
    Author: Jakub Zahora (University of New York, Prague)
  - The Yanomami Mining Boom Warfare: Critiquing Capitalism and War with Davi Kopenawa
    
    In this paper, I analyse the de/territorialisation practices of the political and economic processes embedded in the capitalist expansion in the Yanomami indigenous land territory (Brazil). There is a growing body of literature on International Relations that engages with Indigenous people and knowledge (Shaw, 2002; Sampson, 2002; Beier, 2002; Shapiro, 2004b; Picq, 2013; Urt, 2016; Delgado, 2021; de Leon, 2022). However, with few exceptions (Gonçalves, 2014; Kumarakulasingam; Ngcoya, 2016), there is a lack of interventions that take Indigenous conceptual elaborations as the referent through which to question the international and its multiple forms of operation. Given this, the paper is divided into three parts. First, I briefly outline the process of invading the Yanomami’s liveable space throughout the 20th century, focusing specifically on the expansion of gold mining (garimpo) (Le Tourneau, 2012; Ramos, 1993). Second, I analyse how the Brazilian military played a role in diffusing capitalist-colonial relations by facilitating the spread of gold mining activities in Indigenous territory via military infrastructures. In this regard, by drawing on the literature on logistics and infrastructures (Chua, Danyluk, Cowen, Khalili, 2018; Khalili, 2017; Rodgers, O’Neill, 2012; Larkin, 2013), I establish an association between military and capitalist expansion. Lastly, I engage with the thought of Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman and spokesperson, in his book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Kopenawa; Albert, 2013) as a counter-anthropology/reverse anthropology of the white-capitalist-colonial world (Viveiros de Castro, 2015) and a shamanic critique of the “political economy of nature” (Albert, 1995, p. 23). This aims to understand how Kopenawa comprehends the processes of the materialisation of capitalism (Tible, 2019) and war (Fausto, 1999; Viveiros de Castro, 2002), developing a comprehension of the entanglements of capitalist and colonial warfare through alternative conceptual elaborations based on Indigenous knowledge.
    
    Author: Brunno Cunha (Queen Mary University of London)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Innovations and Puzzles in Queer International Relations Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: GIRWG Working group
  
  Chair: Laura Sjoberg (Oxford University)
  - Rethinking political violence and 'the international': Queer/feminist activist perspectives from Brazil
    
    The paper draws from authors’ ongoing engagement with queer/feminist activists in Brazil to rethink conventional understandings of ‘violence’ and/in 'the international'. One of the main challenges in studying violence is the normativity which tends to attach to the concept: when it is seen as ‘legitimate’ (eg. used by state actors), violence is usually defined merely as the ‘use of force’. Meanwhile, other forms of violence are persistently pathologized, seen as requiring intervention/correction/moralization. Queer/feminist perspectives shed light on the gender/sexual politics of violence and how its domestic/public architectures share origins and legitimation in patriarchal regimes. At the same time, such perspectives tend to marginalize contributions from the global South, especially activist forms of knowledge production. Against this, we draw from the perspectives of queer/feminist activists resisting political violence in Brazil (including police violence, gentrification, and gender-based/queerphobic violence) as key to theorizing the international dimensions of violence as a system sustained and normalized via enduring realities of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. We do not merely seek to add or absorb Brazilian queer/feminist activist perspectives as 'local case studies' of violence/resistance but as key contributors to our political imagination in the making of alternative (queer/feminist) utopias.
    
    Authors: Olimpia Burchiellaro (University of Essex) , Amanda Alvares Ferreira (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro) , Xaman Pinheiro Minillo (Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil)* , Izadora Xavier do Monte (Mecila - Maria Sibylla Merian Centre: Conviviality-inequality in Latin America)
  - Queering sexual violence in conflict zones: Case studies on Kashmir and Sri Lanka
    
    The existing scholarship on conflict related sexual violence (CRSV) indicates certain conflicts attracting significant international attention and hyper-visibility, either due to high incidence of rapes or clear evidence of sexual violence employed as a ‘weapon of war’/war tactic. This framing of sexual violence as strategic has side-lined other complex motivations in conflict zones. In the context of South Asia, the strategic lens struggles to explain sexual violence in the region as the data doesn’t reflect high incidence of cases. This doesn’t necessarily indicate an absence of sexual violence but rather highlights a complex relationship between gender, conflict, and power in the region. Reporting on sexual violence is extremely low, as it is highly stigmatised and silenced. One of the reasons for the silence is the overshadowing nature of the larger political and militarised conflict that contributes to the invisibility of everyday losses, pain and suffering. By analysing two protracted conflicts – Kashmir from India and Sri Lanka as case studies, this paper adopts a queer methodological lens to examine sexual violence. Queering the discourse on sexual violence challenges the dominant narrative of strategy, by exploring how sex, sexuality and desire intersect with violence. Sex is not necessarily opposed to violence, as often portrayed in conflicts. The paper structures its argument through three critical interventions in the discourse of sexual violence. First, it interrogates the silence surrounding sexual violence in Kashmir and Sri Lanka, examining how this silence is produced and reinforced. Second, it unpacks the entanglements of power, pleasure, sex and violence that extend beyond the strategic logic of sexual violence. Finally, it critiques the heteronormative, racialised and colonial underpinnings inscribed into the practices of sexual violence. By doing so, the paper aims for a reimagined discourse on sexual violence in the context of South Asia.
    
    Author: Urmi Gupta (BML Munjal University, India)
  - “We do not have the luxury of being queer here.” Authoritarianism, Liberal Peacebuilding, and the WPS Agenda’s Queer Perspectives Problem
    
    The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda’s global call for women’s inclusion in peacebuilding has increasingly become a cornerstone of the liberal peacebuilding project. The implementation of WPS priorities around the world has raised a number of criticisms, including questions about the extent to which adoption of WPS national action plans (NAPs) proffers legitimacy for authoritarian countries on the world stage, as well as the myriad ways that the WPS agenda has ignored LGBTQ experiences with peace and violence. I build on these critiques to argue that, in the case of illiberal states with strong resistance towards gender equality and LGBTQ rights, the public acceptance of WPS priorities produces collusion between authoritarian states and liberal peacebuilding processes under an exclusionary, heteronormative framework. Spotlighting post-civil war Burundi as a case study, I argue that civil society’s embrace of the WPS agenda in Burundi has reinforced rigid, binary conceptions of gender and cemented an ideal-type ‘woman participant’ worthy of inclusion in the public arena. Drawing on content analysis of Burundi’s NAPs and interviews with civil society stakeholders, I show how a queering of Burundi’s WPS policies reveals not only that such policies are a symbolic form of power vis-à-vis the Global North, but they also work to solidify a heteronormative, cisgender framing of ‘women’ that accepts only ‘ideal’ women—married, elite, educated, straight, cisgender mothers—as potential leaders in peacebuilding. While these ‘exceptional’ women are increasingly finding themselves a seat at the table, those who exist outside this archetype remain excluded and erased from national WPS priorities.
    
    Author: Kara Hooser (University of Chicago)
  - Equality Loading: The State of LGBTQ+ Acceptance in Greece
    
    On 16 February, Greece adopted a new law legalising same-sex marriage following a joint proposal between New Democracy (Greece’s conservative Government) and Syriza (Greece’s ‘left-wing’ opposition). Protests, led by the Greek Orthodox Church, elected far-right parties and far-right political groups (loosely defined), erupted across the country. At the same time, much of the Greek media fuelled negative perceptions of the proposed law and of the LGBTQ+ community more broadly.
    
    In this paper, we aim to explain the state of LGBTQ+ acceptance in Greece. We argue that although this change shows a promising step towards equality in the country, the reality on the ground is different. Despite the efforts of the Greek government to present itself as a progressive liberal party in line with the EU’s values, the Greek society is conflicted between acceptance and hostility. By looking at the Greek media and other sources concerning hate crimes towards members of the LGBTQ+ community, we seek to show that the conservative nature of Greek society persists.
    
    Authors: Marianna Karakoulaki (University of Birmingham) , Jonathan Pettifer (University of Birmingham) , Apostolia Karakoulaki (Papaphilippou and Associates, Thessaloniki Law Firm)*
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Maritime Governance and Security: Zones, Hotspots, and Practices Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Conveners: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews) , Charlie Pearson (Queen's University Belfast)
  
  Chair: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews)
  
  Discussant: Timothy Edmunds (University of Bristol)
  - Overlooked and Forgotten: Seeking a Place for Africa in the Indo-Pacific
    
    In recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of strategic positioning on the Indo-Pacific from countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea, among others. Indeed, the European Union has identified the Indo-Pacific as a key priority for its foreign policy in the coming decade, owing to the projection that this will be the theatre for pivotal issues on the international agenda, notably due to the ongoing geopolitical battle between the powers of East and West. However, Africa is often overlooked and left out of these strategic positions and debates, in some cases not being included in geographical delineations of the Indo-Pacific region. This is not helped by the fact that, barring some Western Indian Ocean island states, most African states seem to have no strategic thinking that encompasses the Indo-Pacific. What, then, is the role for Africa in the Indo-Pacific? This article will explore how existing strategic thinking from countries around the world position the Indo-Pacific, what thinking is emerging from Africa pertinent to this region, and how African states can assert themselves to forge a place in the Indo-Pacific.
    
    Author: Lisa Otto (University of Johannesburg)
  - Coordinating for maritime security? The Whole-of-Government approach, civil-military dynamics, and the illusion of innovation
    
    The nature of contemporary security threats has led governments to reorganize their security sectors through a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, establishing structures to enhance collaboration. Maritime security exemplifies this trend of reorganizing governance, because of its distinct challenges and the explicit requirement that various stakeholders are involved. It has therefore gained significant attention as a fertile ground for innovative practice. Despite the growing importance of these structures, however, they remain under-studied as distinct actors. This lack of attention is surprising given the implications of privileging certain actors within these frameworks, and the distinctly new spaces of civil-military relations they imply.
    
    This paper analyses the implications of the ‘whole-of-government’ approach on the provision of maritime security in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on how this organises civil-military relations. It highlights how regional militaries have effectively captured the provision of ‘whole-of-government’ responses in practice - limiting the role of civilian agencies and creating barriers to innovation. By making this argument, the paper not only contributes to a more in-depth analysis of the actors involved in maritime security provision, but also questions the limitation of claims that evolving security practices are sufficiently innovative to address the divergent governance challenges the maritime domain implies.
    
    Author: Scott Edwards (University of Reading)
  - Spatial Considerations and Zonation Strategy in Maritime Migration Security: The Mediterranean SAR Frontier
    
    Spatial considerations have been effectively adopted into maritime security studies, ranging from historical analyses into the legal regime of UNCLOS regarding the governance of zones, to the High Risk Area associated with Indian Ocean piracy. This paper takes this spatial focus to the Central Mediterranean, considering how zones are strategically utilised to enforce EU maritime security, as it counters migration. The term Zonation Strategy is introduced to provide name and framework to the practice of adopting zones into security configurations. Search and rescue (SAR) zones are units of analysis, and are theorised not as fixed rescue-spaces, but as dynamic and politically charged. Empirically, this paper also introduces the term SAR frontier, to identify the type of zonation strategy employed in this particular configuration. It is herein stipulated that the EU engages in zonation strategy, whereby it strategically implements a SAR frontier at the meeting point of Libyan and EU SAR zones. It is at this SAR frontier that a type of boundary exists, based upon the legal assignment of rescue responsibility and obligation, which permits the EU to relinquish its own obligations, handing them over to the Libyan Coast Guard, thus preventing migrant arrivals and forcing maritime security enforcement southward.
    
    Author: Charlie Pearson (Queen's University Belfast)
  - South Atlantic Ocean Governance: development, sustainability, and defense in ocean space considering Brazilian approaches
    
    This study explores Brazil's role in shaping South Atlantic Ocean governance, highlighting the specific challenges and opportunities and the high policy themes that maritime spaces present in terms of defense, development, and sustainability. With a vast coastline and jurisdiction over the so-called Blue Amazon, Brazil occupies a strategic position that influences national, regional, and global approaches to sustainable management and maritime security, which also needs to receive attention from the state now and for the future. Endowed with innovative structures that respond to maritime spaces' fluid, interconnected, and often contested nature, ocean governance in the South Atlantic involves distinct legal, environmental, and security challenges to design public policies. The article in question focuses on two main aspects. First, it investigates the elements that differentiate ocean governance from the development of Brazil's perception and political structure. It also considers aspects of maritime security in adaptation to the current dynamic environmental and jurisdictional demands of maritime areas. Second, the study analyzes the evolution of maritime security practices in Brazil, where agencies such as the Brazilian Navy and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) play roles in monitoring, protecting, and supporting the safe use of these waters in their broad dimensions. It discusses how these institutions, through technological advances and policy integration, contribute to ocean governance frameworks at the macro and micro levels, which seek to address transnational threats, biodiversity conservation, and national and regional cooperation.
    
    Authors: Daniele Dionisio da Silva (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)* , Carolina Ambinder (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil)* , Sabrina Medeiros (Lusófona University, Portugal)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / New advances in theoretical and historical IR Helsinki, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: John Williams (Durham University)
  - Medievalism in the Knowledge Production and the Abuse of History in IR
    
    This paper critically discusses the positionality and controversies in and around the concept of New Medievalism (NM) as coined by Hedley Bull (1977) in IR literature. NM is a metaphor based on the historical analogy of the contemporary world with the European Middle Ages. It creates a future scenario in which the state system is replaced by "the system of overlapping authorities and multiple loyalties" that develop due to the consequences of globalization and neoliberalism in governance. Taking into account this conceptual complexity, there is a question: how to define NM in IR? This paper argues that NM is a liminal concept in the context of how it projects world order as well as due to NM's positionality in IR academic discourse. Namely, as the project demonstrates, NM transgresses the modern imaginaries of world politics as well as the modern underpinnings of knowledge production. That manifests in three issues: 1) the conceptualisation of the international; 2) the framing of IR subject matter; and 3) the epistemic anxieties in knowledge production associated with NM.
    
    Author: Aleksandra Spalińska (University of Sussex and European University Institute)
  - The Impossible Job? Decolonising the English School
    
    This paper explores the potential for a decolonial English School (ES). This appears improbable given the ES’ reputation for conservatism, especially in its foundational writings between the 1960s-1980s. Furthermore, Post-Cold War ES enthusiasm for humanitarian intervention and a liberal solidarism promoting a global international society that was distinctly Western. This has aged poorly as both non-Western states reasserted a more ‘Westphalian’ interpretation of non-intervention and decolonial intellectual moves have problematised epistemological, historiographical, and normative assumptions underpinning an individualistic and universal liberal subjectivity.
    What is the basis for a decolonial ES? Buzan and Acharya’s ‘Global IR’ sees potential in the ES, particularly via the ‘world history’ element of that agenda. This, however, is a minimalist (at best) account of decolonial work. ES as way to analyse long-run, deep-rooted social structural change offers more. Buzan’s big picture theorising is one instance, but misses the long-run, deep-rooted social structural changes revealed by a decolonial intellectual history and a pluriversal ontology. This is where real potential lies, based on three distinctively ES features.
    1. A historically curious account of international societies as historically and regionally differentiated. That curiosity can extend into the ontological pluriversality of different ways of being in the world that long-run, deep-rooted social structural change has created, obliterated, and creolised.
    2. Dismantling/decentring the intellectual traditions central to the ES adds to its analytical power by redrawing major conceptual contribution to understanding international order. This engages the epistemological imperatives of decolonial theorising, via reimagining the status and function of Primary Institutions as simultaneously constitutive and regulative of actors and establishing normativity in international standards.
    3. This can be more than a one-way street. Historical accounts central offered by decolonial theorists can be excessively homogenised and simplified, asserting causality in a contingent world, and denying agency. The ES can help.
    
    Author: John Williams (Durham University)
  - Apprehending the relationship between quantum technologies and racial-ecological violences through a material genealogical approach: a case study of diamond power from South Africa to Palestine
    
    What can a diamond do? Quantum physicists have been preoccupied with this question since the potential for diamonds (or rather, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) properties of diamonds) to be harnessed as quantum qubits was confirmed by Professor Jörg Wrachtrup in his search for the ‘Magic Russian Diamond’ circa 2005. Diamond NV enabled quantum technologies are now the vanguard of military development, with companies like Lockheed Martin and Element Six particularly enamoured by their quantum sensing potential as a way to make drones and other Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ‘un-jammable’. Yet the diamond whispers a word of caution against the time-less narrative of ‘new precision technologies’. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad, this paper takes a quantum approach to the material relationship between racial and ecological violences diffracted through space and time, from the Kimberley diamond rush in South Africa to the ongoing conflict in Palestine. The value of tracing this entangled violence lies in the ways that it renders the subaltern or subterranean time-spaces of war, colonialism and violence intelligible. This practice also raises a novel and consequential subset of questions: what is the political and ethical power of radical material re-membering? How can the field of Quantum International Relations be held responsible for and challenge some of the political and ethical issues posed by Quantum Field Theory, with its own often violent ontology?
    
    Author: Georgia Mansell (Queen Mary University of London)
  - 'Return to sender': making sense of reactionary securitizing audiences in securitization theory
    
    Securitization theory famously depends on the acceptance of a securitizing move by a relevant audience. More than twenty years on, the questions of who, what and where the audience is, as well as how the audience accepts or rejects the securitizing move, constitute a significant and persistent gap in the literature. This paper makes the case for a theoretical re-engagement with the audience through Judith Butler's concept of 'counter-speech' (1997). It suggests that, beyond mere rejection or acceptance, the audience may sometimes constitute a 'counter-audience' which not only rejects the securitizing move but shifts the focus from the existential threat being presented to the existential threat to freedom posed by the imposition of emergency measures. Through the example of Canadian pandemic-era protests, it argues that the audience should be understood not only intersubjectively, as others have put forth, but as an agent itself capable of security utterances, and thus capable of transforming and disrupting the security field. These security utterances—in Butler's terms, this 'counter-speech'—occur in the gap between the securitizing speech act and its effects. Tightening the gap tightens the possibility of this counter-speech. Securitizations which occur incrementally or over a longer temporal period may therefore be more likely to incur counter-speech which 'returns' the threat to its speaker. This has particular implications for the securitization of threats with long temporal horizons, such as climate change or future pandemics.
    
    Author: Emily Pomeroy (Aberystwyth University)
  - Philosophizing Cultural ‘Intelligence’: Prolegomena to any future Counterinsurgency
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Mohit Sharma (South Asian University, New Delhi)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Policy, Politics, and Development Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Convener: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
  
  Chair: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
  - Thinking about philanthrocapitalism and social policies beyond high-income countries: actors, processes, and effects
    
    International studies have noted the growing power of philanthrocapitalist foundations over global policymaking for at least a decade. However, studies on philanthrocapitalism, the emerging form of philanthropy in this decade, are still focused on international organisations or North American cases. This article addresses these gaps by asking (1) how philanthrocapitalism has been studied, and (2) what are its operational patterns in the Global South. To answer these questions, we conducted a systematic review of studies on philanthrocapitalism in middle and low-income countries. Based on this review, we trace the methodological trends in scholarship and develop a framework that explores the relationship between philanthrocapitalism and public policy in the Global South through three main categories: actors, processes, and effects. This framework reveals the specificities of this phenomenon beyond North America and high-income countries as well as points of convergence with previous findings. This article also discusses the limitations and challenges that emerge from the framework, as well as proposals to advance knowledge on philanthrocapitalism in the Global South.
    
    Author: Luiza Witzel Farias (King's College London and University of São Paulo)
  - Explaining Variation in Corruption Protests
    
    Since the mid-1990s, anti-corruption initiatives have gained prominence on the international agenda, breaking the so-called "corruption taboo" in policy circles and emerging as a critical political issue in both developed and developing countries. The early 2000s witnessed a surge in anti-corruption parties, policies, and movements, while protests against corruption have become increasingly common since the late 2010s. However, the underlying drivers of these protests remain underexplored. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature on anti-corruption mobilizations by conducting the first systematic time-series cross-sectional study of anti-corruption protests. Leveraging multiple Big Data sources, we develop regression models to examine the determinants of corruption-related protests. Protest data is sourced from Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), with corruption-related protests identified through keyword analysis and classification models. Our explanatory variables include metrics of change in the quality of political institutions and economic output, as well as shifts in corruption perception indices, Google Trends data on corruption-related keywords, and event data on corruption investigations and accusations from the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS). Our findings suggest that fluctuations in perceived corruption levels significantly predict an increase in corruption-related protests. Moreover, consistent with existing research, we find that grand corruption—linked to high-level government officials—serves as a much stronger protest trigger than petty corruption.
    
    Author: Alfredo Hernandez Sanchez (TSMPI Vilnius University)
  - The EU Trust Fund for Africa: Frontiers, Development Aid, and the Reinvention of Eurafrica
    
    Some of the key but often forgotten issues dominating the European discussions surrounding the adoption of the Treaty of Rome in the 1957 revolved around a singular question: what to do with ‘our’ colonial possessions? More specifically, European unity was often read in Eurafrican terms, whereby the unification of Europe’s imperial powers was to help them maintain authority over the African continent. Although direct expressions of this important objective of European unification soon faded as the wave of decolonisation swept across the continent, the imperative to try and consolidate influence over Europe’s African frontiers remained. Development aid, soon funnelled through the newly formed European Development Fund (EDF), was one of the principal means through which such influence could be sustained.
    
    Over 60 years later, the EDF also became the largest financial contributor to a new development tool designed to help manage African migration to Europe: the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. This paper retraces the historical links between the European continent’s historical integration process and the EUTF for Africa. Focusing on the role of EU member-state development organisations as some of the Trust Fund’s main implementing partners, I read the Trust Fund’s programmatic interventions as representing a reimagination of the old Eurafrican project. Whilst the specific ideals of the two eras differed, the EUTF and the Eurafrican project are united by a shared purpose: to manage and control African spaces situated on the frontiers of Europe.
    
    Author: Floris van Doorn (University of Helsinki)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Producing enemies Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Inés Bolaños Somoano (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionalsal Affairs, IBEI)
  - A Shift in Narratives: The (German) Foreign Fighter in Ukraine
    
    The presence of foreigners and the role they play in conflicts abroad has 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 after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. 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. This paper takes a narrative approach in understanding the relationship between the state and its citizens joining a foreign conflict, in this case that of the war in Ukraine since 2014. Crucially, it analyses the shifts in construction and reaction to the German foreign fighter before and after the Russian invasion in 2022. It argues that not only is the question of ‘who’ is joining the conflict critical, but also which ‘side’ the individual finds itself on. The paper provides an important contribution to understanding the differences in time and context and how this affect’ the (potential) returnees’ threat perception.
    
    Author: Louise Tiessen (University of Kent)
  - Governing global enemies. The UN and P/CVE as a Foucauldian dispositif
    
    This research aims to expand my analyses of the UN Security Council’s Prevention and Countering of Violent Extremism (P/CVE) as a Foucauldian dispositif of liberal government. Centred on early-detection, P/CVE tasks civil society with the prevention of extremism at a social level. In this sense, this research will reflect on how P/CVE displays features of liberal governmentality as it relies on civil society’s liberty and self-regulation mechanisms. Furthermore, the research will aim to deepen the reflection on how P/CVE also works as a liberal mechanism of subjectification as it sketches the ‘(undesirable) extremists’ and the ‘(desirable) moderates’. These subjectivities emerge at the intersection of various global power structures (re)assembled by the same dispositif. Therefore, analysing P/CVE as a Foucauldian dispositif of liberal government allows us to grasp how power circulates in society in heterarchical, subtle ways. Moreover, it also uncovers how liberal government works through the (re)production of hierarchical, racialised, and gendered social structures in its differentiations of the (governed) freedom produced.
    
    Author: Alice Martini (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
  - The Role of Religious Concepts in Political Propaganda on Terrorism in Spain: The Madrid (2004) and Barcelona (2017) Attacks
    
    In this presentation, I will argue that in mainstream media, religious concepts were systematically exploited for propagandistic purposes intended to ‘manufacture the consent’ of the Spanish population, obstructing public deliberation regarding the Madrid (2004) and Barcelona (2017) attacks, and strengthening Spanish ‘democracy’ by defining it in opposition to ‘jihadist terrorism.’
    
    In particular, I will discuss, first, the emergence and consolidation of the use of ‘jihad’ (جهاد) and ‘Islamism’ in Spanish and Catalan mainstream media as supposedly synonymous with political violence and terrorism in the name of Islam, beginning with the national cover of the Spanish newspaper of record, El Mundo, in its issue of March 15th, 2004. Second, I will examine the metaphorization of the 13-year absence of major attacks between the Madrid bombings and the Barcelona incident as a baraka (بركة) in the Spanish mainstream newspaper of record, El País, which reduces this period to a simplistic “blessing of peace” that has supposedly expired when “terrorism” occurs. Third, I will analyze IS’s conceptualization of the victims of the Barcelona attacks as “Jews and Crusaders” (اليهود والصليبيين), also stated as “Crusaders and Jews,” in its 95th issue of the weekly newsletter Al Naba, contrasting with the Spanish mainstream press, which would typically describe them as "innocent citizens."
    
    I will conclude that religious terminology—especially when used in mainstream media—can serve as a potent tool for shaping public opinion, constructing national identity, and delineating perceived threats. By selectively framing certain terms or ideas, propaganda can both oversimplify and intensify the perceived dichotomy between national or democratic ideals and “jihadist terrorism,” or alternatively, between righteous “soldiers of Allah” and “Jews and Crusaders.”
    
    Author: Carlos Yebra Lopez (California State University at Fullerton)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Russia and the West: identity construction; disinformation and Western policy dilemmas. Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham)
  
  Discussant: James Headley (University of Otago New Zealand)
  - What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about Russia: the failure to examine the UK-Russia relationship in the 21st century
    
    Since the end of the Cold War the relationship between the UK and Russia has been largely neglected in foreign policy scholarship. In contrast, in the last decade, and particularly since the start of the war against Ukraine, UK policy discussions of Russia have proliferated, but discussions are largely concerned with military and or ‘grey zone’ threats. Several key areas remain under-explored in both policy and scholarly contexts, including the roles of oligarch money and Russian governmental influence in UK political life. This paper examines the silences in academic and public UK discourse on the UK-Russia relationship since the turn of the century. It argues that the academic incuriousity about Russia is a reflection of a wider post-Cold War disengagement from the study of Russia and the decline of Russia-related expertise and interest in Western (in this case, UK) policy and scholarly communities. It suggests that the relationship between knowledge production and policymaking has contributed to the absence of focus on Russia. It argues that the failure to ask difficult questions about Russia in policymaking contexts or to ask almost any questions about UK-Russia relations in the academic community has significantly limited understanding of the challenges Russia poses for the UK and for wider European security.
    
    Author: Ruth Deyermond (King's College London)
  - The UK’s Indo-Pacific Tilt and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a policy dilemma.
    
    This paper explores the ways in which the Sino-Russian partnership affects security calculations of Western states, with a focus on the UK and how it tries to navigate the challenge of continuing to ‘tilt’ towards the Indo-Pacific, while addressing the security challenge of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Europe.
    
    A deepening Sino-Russian partnership poses new challenges to UK interests in the Indo-Pacific as well as new opportunities. China and Russia are systemic competitors and their deepening alignment entails greater regional polarization. States like India and Vietnam that are Russian partners but China’s neighbors, face an uncertain security environment, while Japan and South Korea seek greater engagement from partners outside the region to enhance its stability.
    Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stated that ‘based on discussions concerning the situation in Ukraine, it is not possible to speak about the security of Europe and the Indo-Pacific region separately and that the participation of Asia-Pacific partners in the meeting clearly showed our solidarity and sent a strong message to the international community.’
    Kishida’s statement captures perfectly the UK dilemma. The Integrated Review Refresh placed more emphasis on UK cooperation with Europe and the EU, but UK security is framed by its desire to work with the US- but what happens when the UK has different interests?
    
    Author: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
  - British Foreign Policy and Russian disinformation: A Provider of Truth?
    
    Part of the UK’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine is to be a counter-disinformation actor. This includes ‘pre-bunking’ disinformation before Russia’s invasion, developing domestic resilience, and debunking Russian narratives in multilateral forums. The UK has come to understand that it has a role as a provider of truth in the context of Russian disinformation. I argue that being a provider of truth is not just an identity, but a foreign policy role. The provider of truth role embeds international expectations for appropriate international behaviour in the context of Russian disinformation. Utilising a combination of role theory, narrative methodology and interpretive process tracing, I show how the role of provider of truth emerged since the 2014 invasions of Ukraine. As the UK interprets Russian disinformation at key moments, it developed an expectation for a special role to defend a ‘rules-based international order’ from Russian threats and to support allies in their own efforts against disinformation. Interpretations of Russian disinformation against Ukraine, Western elections, and the Salisbury poisonings, to name a few, has produced a set of policies, narratives and expectations that the UK will counter disinformation with ‘truth’.
    
    Author: Sean Garrett (University of Bath)
  - The role of recognition practices in Russian identity construction vis-à-vis the West
    
    Viewing Russia’s divergent recognition practices during/after Kosovo 2008 merely as an effort to subvert the West underestimates the influence of norms and identity on foreign policy. This study aims to investigate how identity, instead of power politics, accounts for the differences in Russia’s recognition policies in Kosovo (2008) and Crimea (2014). The study asks: “What accounts for the differences in Russia’s recognition policy in Kosovo (2008) and Crimea (2014)?” The two sub-questions are: Which factors affect Russia’s recognition discourse? and Is there a shift in Russia’s recognition discourse in Kosovo (2008) and Crimea (2014)? I argue that a shift in Russia’s ethical construction of identity between Kosovo (2008) and Crimea (2014) led Russia to focus more on its moral responsibility due to the presence of human rights violations in the international community when determining recognition foreign policy decisions. The structure analyzes discourses during Kosovo (2008) and Crimea (2014) to examine the shifts in Russia’s identity construction. As witnessed in the research paper, the Russian ethical construction of identity is different in the Kosovo (2008) case and in the Crimea (2014) case. The study builds on the literature on norm shifts, international law, and identity construction and adds to the literature on Russia’s identity, recognition practices, and understanding of norms. The study contributes to a more informed understanding of Russia’s foreign policy discourse and recognition practice.
    
    Author: Jessica Dorsch (Kings College London)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Reform, feminism and radical critical thinking: Affective identity of female veteran scholars re-encountering the military institution Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  This roundtable seeks to explore the affective identity of a growing community of female veterans turning to the academy to understand their gendered experience of military service, asking what motivates them to want to potentially reshape the narrative on military service and what this means for their attempts to bring about reform to the institution. Speakers will consider the encounters we have in feminist spaces and with the military, exploring what we can learn about opening up spaces for radical critical thinking. The roundtable will be informed by the following questions:
  What does it mean to attempt to bring about reform to the military institution? What are the possibilities and limits of this reform? What is it about our particular identity as ex-servicewomen that contributes to opening avenues for reform?
  How does the history of feminism and pacifism influence our encounters with feminist scholars and feminist service personnel? What hope is there for feminist anti-militarism to bring about radical decolonial reform to the military institution?
  How does our complicity with hegemonic institutional behaviours when serving influence our responsibility to effect change?
  How do we navigate the tension between advocating for research that foregrounds contemporary servicewomen’s voices when we feel that our critical distance from the military is what has been pivotal to how we now see our military service and the institution? Can we engender an emancipatory research agenda and what does it look like?
  
  Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working Group
  
  Chair: Ross McGarry (University of Liverpool)
  
  Participants: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University) , Sophy Antrobus (Freeman Air and Space Institute, Kings College London) , Amy Hill (Newcastle university) , Annie Geisow (Oxford Brookes University) , Nancy Taber (Brock University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Rethinking Ontological (In)Security: Towards New Theoretical Horizons Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)
  
  Chair: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford)
  - Birth of a Nation: The Cultural Economy of Ontological (in)security Narratives
    
    Popular culture powerfully shapes security narratives in global politics, yet remains underexplored in Ontological Security Studies (OSS). This paper bridges this gap by synthesising OSS with Cultural Studies to analyse how cultural products influence collective identity and security perceptions. Placing postcolonial OSS's engagement with Lacan in conversation with Stuart Hall's work on representation and the political economy of cultural production, the paper develops a multi-level framework mapping the psychological, semiotic, and socio-economic mechanisms by which popular culture interacts with global politics. To test this framework, the paper analyses the production and reception of D.W. Griffith's landmark film "Birth of a Nation" (1915). This analysis reveals the unique emotional role popular culture played in nativist white supremacist discourses of early 20th century America, while illuminating the complex network of writers, producers, financiers, audiences, and critics that shaped the film's (in)securitizing power. This historical moment thus offers contemporary scholars a fuller, more nuanced picture of how ontological (in)security narratives are produced and contested within popular culture.
    
    Author: CJ Simon (University of Sheffield)
  - ‘Japan is not, and Will Never Be, a Tier-Two Country’: Performances of Masculinity, Heteronormative Status-Seeking and Ontological (In)Security
    
    Scholars in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) have increasingly afforded more attention to dynamics of status-seeking in the formation of subjectivity, and to the gendered nature of auto-biographical narratives. While both theoretical moves are important, the interconnection between these two strands of scholarship remain relatively underexplored, thus limiting our understanding of how the formation of gendered subjectivities is impacted by longing for status in heteronormative spaces of recognition. This paper seeks to enhance gendered approaches to ontological (in)security by showing how heteronormativity and recognition shape subject-formation processes. By bringing together the literature on status-seeking, ontological (in)security and post-structural feminism, it argues that collective subjects (states) articulate their status-seeking quests and subjectivity in response to domestic and international hierarchies of recognition. Empirically, the paper focuses on Japanese policymakers’ articulation of state subjectivity and anxieties of being a ‘tier-two country’ since the postwar era. Through an analysis of the different performances of masculinity advocated by different Prime Ministers, the paper argues that these represent a quest for more ‘conforming’ articulations of great power masculinity in international politics.
    
    Author: Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick)
  - The Positions of Ontological (In)security in International Relations
    
    What is ontological security? Recent scholarship on ontological security in International Relations has increasingly turned to the concept’s theoretical origins in psychoanalysis and existential philosophy to address the field’s (meta)theoretical limitations. This article argues that this development also necessitates an interrogation of the concept of ontological security itself to address the field’s remaining theoretical tensions. Further developing the nascent Kleinian approach to ontological security, the article conceptualises ontological security as a position that denotes the way in which subjects, be they individuals, groups, or states, manage anxiety. To develop this proposition, the article draws on Melanie Klein’s work on the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to elucidate the positions of ontological (in)security, their respective defence mechanisms against anxiety, and their socio-political implications. This Kleinian approach facilitates a clear theoretical distinction between security and insecurity, providing an analytical toolbox to differentiate the various ways in which anxiety is managed in different positions. This framework particularly underscores the ethical, reparative, and transformative potential of the position of ontological security, aspects that have received limited theoretical and empirical attention to date.
    
    Author: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / The European Union and its foreign relations Room 4, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: IPEG Working Group
  
  Chair: Mareike Beck (University of Warwick)
  - Constructing fiscal rectitude at the margins of the Euro: the epistemic politics of fiscal credibility in Spain and Italy during EMU accession
    
    The recent turn in Constructivist Political Economy towards Practice Theory has highlighted how ideas change and become actionable when operationalised through different practices. When combined with prior studies on the performativity of economic policy, this sheds important insights on how the public nature of these practices allows for expectation management to play a key role in economic governance. However, while much emphasis has been placed on the performative character of monetary policy, less attention has been paid to fiscal policy – which, given the role and public character of fiscal rules, targets, and commitments in neoliberal discourse and practice, entails neglecting how a significant part of contemporary economic governance works. To tackle this gap, this article analyses how ‘fiscal rectitude’ as a norm is operationalised and performed through various policy practices, in which expectations management play a crucial role. It analyses Spain and Italy’s accession to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in the 1990s, using these as case studies of countries that, on the one hand, adapted to a new standard of fiscal rectitude (the Maastricht Treaty’s fiscal requirements); and on the other, despite having opposite public financial situations by the beginning of the process, were maligned in public discourse, portrayed as being fiscally profligate throughout the period of EMU accession. Through archival research of the period’s multilateral surveillance meetings, as well as through policymakers’ own biographical accounts of the process, this article argues that fiscal commitments were reproduced through the production of economic knowledge and of policy commitments, inscribed in programmatic documents. As such, it identifies the substantial epistemic politics at play in the performance of fiscal rectitude, developed through the practices of the EMU’s multilateral surveillance system, and evaluated by various audiences – mainly other member states, Community institutions, the press, and financial market actors.
    
    Author: Guillermo Alonso Simon (University of Warwick)
  - Atlantic Antagonisms: The political economy of US-EU relations in a changing global order
    
    The election of Donald Trump in the 2024 US elections has again brought to the fore serious questions regarding the future of transatlantic relations. Tensions over trade, security and industrial strategy have the potential to create a rupture in US-EU relations and threaten to destabilise the liberal international order. In this article, we interrogate the present tensions in US-EU relations by situating them in a broader context of the political economy of Atlantic order. We make two arguments. First, that the disruption represented by the second Trump administration needs to be understood in relation to a broader set of ‘Atlantic antagonisms’, old and new, which have long shaped relations between the US and Europe. In particular, we trace the development of a new set of antagonisms relating to trade and industrial strategy, which took shape during the age of neoliberal globalisation and erupted in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Second, we argue that these Atlantic antagonisms were historically managed through the institutions and rules of liberal international order, which served as a form of ‘release valve’ for pressures in US-EU relations. Under the contemporary conditions of global disorder, we conclude, that option might now be foreclosed.
    
    Authors: Scott Lavery (University of Glasgow) , Davide Schmid (Manchester Metropolitan University)*
  - Made in CEE: The Auto Industry and the Geo-Economics of EU-China Relations
    
    Since the EU launched its anti-subsidy probe into made-in-China electric vehicles (EVs), Chinese manufacturers have increasingly localised their production in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to avoid potential tariffs. Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia have attracted much of this investment. While this influx of Chinese capital could accelerate the EU’s green and digital transitions and enhance electromobility in the Visegrad Four (V4) states, it also raises significant concerns. Not only could it undermine the competitiveness of European carmakers, but it further deepens the EU’s dependence on China at a time when the bloc is actively pursuing its de-risking agenda.
    
    Another concern relates to the lack of opportunity for the respective V4 states to move up the global value chains. A major argument is that Chinese EV manufacturers, with their vertically integrated supply chains, do not require significant local value addition. Yet, this has also been the case under the regional dominance of German carmakers, with the V4 states being integral to German supply chains while serving as the manufacturing hub for the European auto industry.
    
    Putting the EU angle aside, this paper explores the relationship between the position of the V4 states in European (and indeed, global) automotive supply chains and their respective policies toward China by analysing the broader geo-economic structure that both constrains and enables the agency of CEE elites. The paper highlights the diverse interests at play within these states (including those represented by labour unions in German-owned automotive subsidiaries) rather than focusing solely on the interests of their Western European neighbours (especially those of the German carmakers). Drawing causal inferences in a critical realist manner, the analysis is framed by a historical materialist approach inspired by the works of Poulantzas and Gramsci, with a focus on core-periphery dynamics within the global automotive industry.
    
    Author: Dominika Remžová (University of Nottingham)
  - American Power, Europe and the Ukrainian Conjuncture: Unity, Unevenness and Strategic Heteronomy
    
    The surface appearance of the Ukraine-Russia War was one of unity and “civilisational solidarity” (Foley and Unkovski-Korica, 2024) between the states and peoples of the broadly defined NATO bloc. Efforts to understand the war through the objective lens of competitive rivalry, conflict and uneven-combined development have therefore centred on the macro dynamic of growing multipolarity. By contrast, this research examines how waging a civilisational war (albeit vicariously) has contributed to reorganising the NATO bloc itself. It analyses the uneven distribution of the costs and consequences, centring on the core problematic of NATO: namely, the possibility of European power(s) achieving “autonomy through alignment” (Lavery and Schmidt, 2021) with US strategy, given Europe’s military dependence. Three vectors of intra-NATO redistribution and reorganisation are considered: between Europe and America; within the multilevel European power structure; and between social classes. NATO’s maximalist response to Russian aggression, I argue, has confirmed strategic heteronomy: Europe’s dependency, that is, upon the agency of an increasingly unpredictable external power. Statistical data confirms the Ukraine war as a pivotal conjuncture in solidifying Europe’s post-2008/9 competitive weakness and military dependence. Conversely, the European Commission under German leadership has strengthened a foreign policy portfolio based on a defensive and Atlanticist account of civilisational defence and solidarity: maximally anti-Russian, anti-migrant and pro-Israeli. The tension between these facts have rarely been examined. Drawing on a neo-Gramscian framework, this research argues that the absence of open internal conflict results from the success by which European states and ruling classes have passed the costs of war onto the domestic working class. The ideological success of the Ukraine conjuncture (2022-3), in a broader context of endemic exogenous crises, therefore permitted class pacification which in turn allowed European elites to accept re-subordination to American power.
    
    Author: James Foley (Glasgow Caledonian University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / The Global Politics of Tourism: Contemporary Reflections Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Since Cynthia Enloe’s powerful analysis of the global politics of tourism in her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989), tourism has slowly gained scholarly attention as a crucial international phenomenon. Tourism is a powerful global system and an immense form of cross-border mobility. It governs a complex array of people and places, categorising, ordering and (de)prioritising them in complex ways. Tourism is also shaped by and (re)shapes diverse forms of power and relations globally, in the context of modern colonial capitalism. This panel takes the opportunity to look back at the scholarship on and developments in tourism since 1989. It examines how tourism currently enacts power in the world, and (re)shapes (among other things) spaces, (in)securities, economies, identities, policies, and relations at various scales. It asks the following questions: (1) How does tourism shape our day-to-day lives? (2) How has tourism transformed our world? (3) How has tourism become a globally powerful phenomenon? This roundtable addresses these questions and identifies also the opportunities to challenge the underlying global (im)mobility regime which (re)produces different privileged/marginalised modes and figures of human spatial mobility – such as ‘tourism/migration’ and ‘the tourist/the migrant’ – in the hope of a world with greater social and ‘mobility justice’.
  
  Sponsor: Post-Structural Politics Working Group
  
  Chair: Audrey Reeves (Virginia Tech)
  
  Participants: Debbie Lisle (Queen's University Belfast) , Sarah Becklake (Leibniz University Hannover) , Cynthia Enloe (Clark University) , Somdeep Sen (Roskilde University, Denmark) , Kristin Lozanski (Kings University College at Western University)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / The Politics of Speaking and Thinking Climate Change: Who, What and How? Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Convener: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group (bisa)
  
  Chair: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London)
  
  Discussant: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London)
  - Constructing climate change litigation: how legal storytelling shapes our political imagination
    
    Climate change litigation, since its inception in the early 2000s and subsequent boom post-2015, has become a mainstream tool for climate and legal activists to open up new pathways for achieving climate goals worldwide. The literature has framed climate litigation as developing in ‘waves’ (Peel and Osofsky 2013) which have primarily focused on single-jurisdiction studies, regulatory outcomes, building out typologies for the expanding number of cases, and analysing the movement on a global scale (Setzer and Higham 2023; Hilson 2020; Batros and Khan 2022). However, there is limited scholarship which discusses the worldmaking potential of climate litigation and its strategic narratives.
    
    Within International Relations (IR), worldmaking has been applied to ideas of empire, foreign policy, the making of international orders, and more (Getachew 2019; Milne 2015; Berger 2022). This paper will draw upon worldmaking’s insights into alternative worlds and knowledge structures in order to examine the construction of climate legal storytelling. Through the use of interviews with participants and text-analysis of petitions, I will uncover how plaintiffs and litigators translate environmental harm into a legal story and what visions of the future these stories are illustrating. In doing so, I hope to scrutinise who is empowered to tell stories within climate litigation and the challenges of legal frameworks in the global fight for climate justice.
    
    Author: Meredith Warren (Queen Mary, University of London)
  - Understanding the world politics of climate change with theories of time and music
    
    Understanding the relationship between world politics and climate change is more necessary than ever, yet this relationship is vexed by problematic conceptualizations of time that subtend much theoretical literature within International Relations (IR). As Hutchings argues (2008), assumptions about time are deeply formative to judgements about world politics, yet in IR these assumptions tend to be trapped within the epistemic horizons of modernity. This raises theoretical and normative problems. How then can this relationship be best examined and understood?
    
    In the spirit of this conference’s theme, I ask what new theoretical directions scholars can take to address this crucial relationship. Drawing on my ongoing PhD research, I present a novel engagement between the ‘temporal turn’ in IR theory and music philosophy. This latter site of scholarship has examined the multiplicity of temporal registers, values, and scales within music and asked how these cohere within the singular conceptual object of music. I transpose the analytics developed within this literature to the relationship between world politics and climate change to make sense of its ‘messy mix-up of time scales’ (Malm 2016). This helps to make sense of how the various ‘presents’ of world politics (Hutchings, 2008) and climate change come to be formed by arranging these scales in specific ways.
    
    Author: Christopher McAteer (York University, Toronto)
  - Anthropocentric sovereignty and the mastery of nature
    
    Sovereignty in the study of global politics is highly anthropocentric. The entities that are understood to produce power and authority, whether state or non-state, exist solely within the human realm. The question that follows is whether this anthropocentrism is problematic. In this paper, I contend that it is, particularly when considered within the context of anthropogenic climate change. I argue that shifting away from the ideological disposition of human domination over nature that drives anthropogenic climate change requires understanding how the same ideological disposition has shaped the development of hegemonic sovereignty discourses. By critiquing the dualist human/nature ontological framework on which those discourses depend, I support calls for International Relations to adopt a pluri-versal approach to sovereignty, where alternative political imaginaries of power and authority – and particularly those that might be better suited to addressing a warming planet – contest and transgress the constraints of a uni-versal (patriarchal, racist, anthropocentric) sovereignty. This paper is part of a larger thesis on the development of a more-than-human reconfiguration of sovereignty within the context of anthropogenic climate change.
    
    Author: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / The Third Nuclear Age: Understanding and Addressing Contemporary Nuclear Challenges Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  The world has recently entered a dangerous new era of nuclear politics. Longstanding arms control treaties have collapsed, and every nuclear weapon state is modernising or increasing their nuclear arsenal. Relations between these states are at an all time low as great power competition returns to the fore of international affairs, and protracted conflicts involving nuclear weapon states continue to rage. In this context, this roundtable seeks to make sense of the Third Nuclear Age by outlining its contours and key issues, whilst also exploring potential pathways for addressing current challenges in order to revitalise stability and encourage peace. This roundtable brings together the authors of two recent books on the Third Nuclear Age with several emerging scholars working on a diverse range of issues shaping contemporary nuclear politics. From the rituals of contemporary deterrence practice, to the politics of arms control and disarmament, via the rise of Artificial Intelligence, regional dynamics, and the significance of gender, this roundtable explores the complex milieu of issues facing today’s global nuclear order in the Third Nuclear Age.
  
  Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working Group
  
  Chair: Ludovica Castelli (University of Leicester)
  
  Participants: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow) , Luba Zatsepina (Liverpool John Moores University) , Andrew Futter (University of Leicester) , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow) , Shivani Singh (Aberystwyth University) , Cameron Hunter (University of Copenhagen)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Understanding peacekeeping operations Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Daeun Jung (University of Warwick)
  - Customary land rights in contemporary peace process implementation
    
    This paper reviews how land, housing, and property issues, particularly related to the customary rights of internally-displaced populations, are treated in the negotiation and implementation of contemporary peace agreements between states and non-state armed groups. While many contemporary peace deals include commitments related to land reform and transitional justice and reconciliation for displaced communities, I find that implementation both by state mechanisms and UN agencies have much to be desired, particularly when violators themselves are peace agreement signatories, and current systems treat internal displacement as a short-term humanitarian and primarily rural issue instead of a cyclical element of long-term spatial dynamics in the affected region, both rural and urban. I expound by discussing emerging evidence from two major peace deals signed in the last decade, namely the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the 2016 Final Agreement between the Government of Colombia and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), as well as other relevant identity-based conflicts in Asia and the Pacific. I conclude by discussing potential policy options for addressing the structural issues preventing ‘durable solutions’ for HLP implementation in the context of a peace agreement.
    
    Author: Maria Carmen Fernandez (University of Cambridge)
  - Military Training for Cultural Property Protection – the State of the Art and Future Directions
    
    A feature of military operations since the Hague Convention of 1954, cultural property protection efforts by the military have been subject to renewed interest in the light of conflict-induced damage to cultural heritage in Mali, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. This paper examines how militaries are currently trained to carry out cultural property protection (CPP) activities. As with many activities not strictly linked to conventional military functions and tasks, CPP activities often face a level of reluctance and disregard at being adopted into the military domain. Although some acknowledge the potential of such activities as a “force multiplier”, done badly they risk further inflaming tensions between military personnel and local communities, and other civilian actors. The paper sets out some of the barriers facing effective uptake of CPP training, gaps in the current provision, and what the future trajectory of CPP training for the military might be. In particular it examines the tension between the imperative to improve CPP practice through greater inclusivity, and the specific needs of military training, which often privilege a more narrow, mission-oriented focus.
    
    Authors: Gena Sturgon (Coventry University) , Elly Harrowell (Coventry University)
  - Navigating Invisibility in Transitional Justice Processes: Victims, Survivors and Combattants
    
    This paper will explore the strategies women in the post-Boko Haram Lake Chad Basin use to navigate the “invisibility” deriving from continuous marginalization by state institutions, social norms, and international humanitarian practices. Drawing from interviews with 65 women spanning victims, survivors, and former combatants of the Boko Haram crises, it examines how “invisibility”—the erasure of women’s individuality and agency in transitional justice processes—shapes their lives post-conflict. Structured in four parts, the paper first contextualizes “invisibility” as an outcome of homogenizing constructs that reduce diverse experiences into monolithic victimhood. Next, it identifies the inadvertent agents of invisibility, illustrating how state, military, and humanitarian entities reinforce marginalization by overlooking women's agency in rebuilding their own lives. The third section, the paper's core, provides an in-depth analysis of how women navigate their invisibility: from forming justice-seeking associations, leveraging or "courting" patriarchal norms to meet survival needs, divorcing traditional expectations, and in some cases, exploiting invisibility for ideological or financial motives. By identifying the different ways women navigate invisibility, the paper will argue that women’s agency takes on many forms and despite attempts at systematic erasure, still plays a significant role in post-conflict outcomes.
    
    Author: Oluwapelumi Obisesan (SOAS)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Visual Iconicity, Methodology, and Interdisciplinary Approaches Room 5, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: International Relations as a Social Science Working Group
  
  Conveners: Marianna Espinós Blasco (Ulster University) , Janica Ezzeldien (University of Glasgow)
  
  Chair: Léa Lamotte (University of Bern)
  - Visual, participatory, and transformative pedagogical methods: collage and body mapping to explore everyday practices in South America and Spain
    
    In recent years, participatory visual methods have gained prominence in social research, offering innovative ways to engage with participants and explore complex social phenomena. This paper presents the diverse array of visual, participatory, and transformative pedagogical methods to collect data and disseminate the findings of my PhD in Geography, which examines the effects of “more-than-rational” (sensations, emotions) and spatial dimensions (at body, domestic kitchen, and foodscape scales) on everyday food practices in Ecuador, Argentina and Spain. Through the utilisation of techniques such as collage, body mapping, social cartography, collective drawings and theatrical body postures, collaboration with participants and artists was undertaken to valorise this visual material and create additional visual products for dissemination, namely the fansines “Come y Habla” (Lamotte et al., 2024) and the videoclip “(Re)posionar(se) en el sistema alimentario”. A dialogue using the World Café method with the panel participants is proposed to address the methodological questions that emerged from this experience. The collective reflection will focus on a) whether interactive creative visual methods are always, and for whom (researchers, participants, final audience…), “transformative”; b) how collaboration with artists should be conducted to achieve a balance between the expression of the participants' voices, scientific interest, and aesthetics; c) how situated visual research results should be disseminated in other cultural contexts; d) what ethical considerations should be followed in collaborative visual research. In conclusion, a discussion is proposed on the development of visual research methods that can be implemented with minimal resources in pursuit of degrowth and sustainability principles, as for research projects with constrained financial resources. The outcomes of the discussion may be presented in a comic strip format, although alternative presentation methods could be considered.
    
    Author: Léa Lamotte (University of Bern)
  - The Icon, Distributed: Visual Spectrums in News Photography
    
    There is a handful of widely recognised and remembered photos that provide broad audiences with a stable resource for public discourse and a sense of continuity. Scholars call these photos icons. However, changes to our media landscape, most notably those introduced by digital photography and social media, are eroding the stabilising function of icons and the sense of continuity they provide viewers. In this paper, my objective is to retheorise iconicity and the icon to account for these changes. To do so, I focus on the news, which has been the source of most iconic photos. I argue that we need to rethink how icons work in the news in two fundamental ways. First, with regards to individual news photos, I argue that iconicity is best understood as a spectrum, reflecting a degree of adherence to a visual blueprint shared by icons, not, as it is usually understood, as a category established through the inclusion of certain photos and the exclusion of others. Second, I argue that news photography as a whole can be thought of as an icon because it shares a common visual structure. I also discuss the implications that these retheorisations of iconicity and the icon have beyond news photography.
    
    Author: Cormac Opdebeeck Wilson (University of Queensland)
  - Politics of (in)visibility in the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda: a Visual Analysis
    
    This paper examines the politics of (in)visibility of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, a tool aimed at mainstream gender in the international peace and security arena, by analysing the images in the UN Secretary General’s Annual Reports on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SVC). These images are not the main elements of the reports but work as visual landscapes with underlying ideologies. This paper aims to answer three key questions borrowed from Fairclough (1995) to enquire media outputs, drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories. First, it answers how the is world represented, using Hansen’s intertextual framework and through document analysis, exploring the images’ (con)text. Second, it examines what identities are set up, focusing on how gender, sexuality, and coloniality are represented in these images, revealing the underlying power dynamics. It uses visual qualitative content analysis as a key method for organising image content into major themes. Third, it explores what relationships are set up between those (subjects) involved, through discourse analysis, testing Pratt’s (2013) feminist postcolonial critique of the WPS agenda, which illustrates how the WPS agenda reproduces the concept of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, identified by Spivak (1994), but with a particular modification as some ‘brown women’ become international community auxiliaries. This dynamic also bears resemblance to the war on terror subsequent to the 11S (2001). The paper concludes that the images from the Annual Reports represent gendered, sexualised, and racialised subjects perpetuating militarised actions in the name of ‘saving the brown women’.
    
    Author: Marianna Espinos Blasco (Ulster University)
  - Feminist politics on the wall: painting as activism in the streets of Belfast
    
    Belfast has a history of political mural painting, going back to the beginnings of the 20th century, and particularly exacerbated throughout the time of the conflict, with murals representing geographical, cultural and political separation between communities. Traditional muralism tends to exclude women from political representation, or to reduce them to certain roles, usually linked to (mythical) figures of motherhood. Recently however, new actors have taken the brush, and the street art scene in Belfast has been growing. The politics of street art go beyond the usual green/orange divide, showing women as political actors. Feminist activists especially have taken advantage of this form of expression, and have used street art (murals, but also graffiti and stickers) to demand progress for women’s rights and the rights of the LGBTQI+ community. This paper will explore the way painters have decided to represent those political demands, the choices they have made on which demands to represent, and the links between artists and activists. I will also highlight the ways politically active women in Belfast have interpreted and analysed these new representations. I will rely on visual analysis (especially compositional and semiotic analysis) of murals seen in Belfast between 2022 and 2024 and on interviews conducted with 16 politically active women in 2022 and 2023. The goal is to show the inherent political character of (in)visibility, and the way feminist activists in Belfast have been thinking about visuality in a city that has long been relying on muralism for political communication.
    
    Author: Marie Migeon (University of Basel)
  - Beyond the Visual: Exploring Sensory Modalities in Representations of Refugees in German Television News Coverage
    
    The role of visuality in contemporary processes of representations and perceptions of migrants and refugees is becoming increasingly complex due to the interplay of several communication channels. Previous research has examined the ways in which regimes of visuality contribute to the sociomaterial (re)production of race in a variety of media, emphasising the role of visual elements. Drawing on the notion of contemporaneity to investigate the experience of stimuli across multiple sensory modalities within a specific timeframe, the study maps the aural, visual, and temporal dimensions that are intrinsic to the process of news-making. It examines how visual representational practices in information dissemination may both displace and emplace individuals. Recognising how inter-modality and multisensory representational practices may capture the co-constructed nature of race and migration, the study investigates how they may both displace and emplace individuals. Through a multimodal analysis of German television news coverage of Die Tagesschau, it examines how various modes of communication contribute to the construction, transmission, and reinforcement of racial categories in the representation of refugees. The paper makes the case that contemporary processes of racialisation extend beyond mere visual phenomena, but rather emerge through the interactions between different representational and perceptual modalities. Each of these forms shapes how refugeeness is perceived, experienced, and reproduced in public discourse in a different way. By investigating the process of creating multisensory communicative experiences, the study aims to expand on the ways news discourses configure social identities and forms of being as understood via the perceptions of others.
    
    Author: Janica Ezzeldien (University of Glasgow)
- 15:00 → 16:30
  FR 20 Panel / Women, Agency and the Dynamics of Civilian Protection Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Aurélie Broeckerhoff (Coventry University)
  
  Discussant: PKPBG Working group
  - Navigating Identity Categories in Victims/Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Rwanda and the Balkans
    
    Categorisation of people who suffered wartime harm as victims is a means of accessing justice and redress. Engaging with the notion of victimhood as a socially-constructed category, scholars have highlighted the role of power and politics in the categorisation of victims. This has led to the creation of victim rivalries, and the neglect of certain types of harms in transitional justice processes, particularly those related to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). This paper critically evaluates the categorisation of victims in transitional justice, which relies on externally-constructed categories as a reference point, overlooks the victims’ multiple identity categories pre- and post-conflict, and prioritises public processes at the expense of the private and intimate. We examine how SGBV victims/survivors navigate their multiple identity categories in the context of post-conflict injustice. Drawing on the voices of women from Rwanda and the Balkans, we analyse how they self-ascribe identity categories and problematize the ‘work’ these categories do or don’t do. We reveal the ways in which women from divergent contexts of war and genocide—and more than 30 years from the original source of violence—embrace, suppress, reject or ambivalently negotiate ‘publicly’ imposed victim categories while contending with their old identities along with those forced upon them, such as motherhood, womanhood, girlhood or survivorhood. These insights reveal a complex terrain of the private, which in turn casts existing categorisation of victimhood related to SGBV and its implications for justice as reductive, incomplete, uncertain, and disconnected from the everyday lives and needs of affected women.
    
    Authors: Denisa Kostovicova (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Myriam Denov (McGill University)* , Venera Cocaj (London School of Economics and Political Science)*
  - Enduring Resilience: Three Decades of Strategic Resistance by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir
    
    In Indian-controlled Kashmir, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), led by women seeking justice for relatives who were forcefully disappeared by the Indian state after the 1989 anti-India armed uprising, shows remarkable resilience. This paper examines APDP’s three-decade-long resistance against enforced disappearances through four key parameters. First, it analyses how APDP transforms passive waiting into active resistance by strategically mobilising and forming global alliances to amplify their voice against state oppression. Second, it explores the concept of 'thakawath' (exhaustion) as a sustainable tool of resistance, where members navigate between bodily exhaustion and active hope in their pursuit of justice. Third, it investigates APDP's commitment to documenting enforced disappearances through meticulous record-keeping and evidence gathering, creating an archive that challenges the state's narrative. Fourth, it examines how APDP reclaims visibility through the production of symbols like memorials and calendars, constructing a subaltern counter-history against state-sanctioned memory formations. Through these parameters, the paper demonstrates how APDP, primarily led by women, has evolved from a small group of affected families into a powerful voice against state violence, while simultaneously challenging patriarchal norms within Kashmiri society. Their sustained activism not only demands accountability for disappeared persons but also redefines the role of Kashmiri women in conflict narratives.
    
    Author: Rohi Jehan (University of Manchester)
  - Women’s Agency, unarmed community self-protection and the Anglophone secessionist conflict in Cameroon
    
    The paper contributes to the further nuance of unarmed civilian protection (UCP) integrating gendered perspectives. It argues that to make further advancements in the protection of women and civilians more generally, UCP must begin to recognise and maximise women’s agency, proactiveness and resilience in protecting themselves and fellow women/civilians in times of war. It does so, drawing on the feminist scholarship and field research on UCP in Cameroon’s Anglophone conflict. The anglophone conflict has been ongoing since September 2017 between the government security forces and armed separatist groups calling for the independence of ‘Ambazonia’ in the country’s two English speaking regions- Northwest and Southwest. Still a hidden and neglected conflict, the Anglophone conflict has had devastating impact on civilian lives, especially women and children. Despite its impact, international and regional intervention have been close to non-existent, hence, civilians especially women, have had to device their own strategies, maximising homegrown, contemporary and non-violent approaches to protect themselves; what has become known as unarmed civilian protection. UCP is a relatively new concept and while it is gaining attention in academia and international spaces, its understanding through a feminist lens remains underexplored in research and scholarly literature especially with regards to Cameroon. Thus, the paper contributes to exploring and understanding women’s agency in UCP in Cameroon discussing the different non-violent protection strategies women and women groups employ, their accompanied challenges and implications for future discourse and implementation of UCP.
    
    Author: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
  - Protecting “civilians” in the context of “criminal wars”: evidence and insights from Mexico
    
    The global burden of homicide is now double that of conflict deaths and nearly 40% of homicides worldwide are connected to crime, mostly organized crime and gangs, and a body of scholarship on the dynamics of inter-cartel and state-cartel violence has emerged. While much of this new scholarship on “criminal wars” has relevance for thinking about the protection of the population, little explicitly addresses the question of how “civilians” are threatened or protected. This paper draws out from this large and growing body of work on criminal violence relevant information and insights on “civilian” insecurity and protection in contexts of large-scale criminal violence, with a primary focus on Mexico. It makes three main arguments. First, the threats facing the population from criminal violence are not well understood and more systematic data collection and analysis would be valuable. Second, international responses—including both legal developments and practical efforts by international actors to protect the population—have not kept up with changes in the nature of collective violence. Third, the government response has (ostensibly) focused on eliminating criminal groups, with less attention to the specific threats posed to the population or the vulnerability of the population to those threats. At the national and sub-national level in Mexico, there have been efforts to draw up legal and policy frameworks to support the victims of criminal violence and state responses to it—but the effectiveness of these in practice seems limited.
    
    Author: Miriam Bradley (University of Manchester)
- 16:30 → 16:45
  
  / 15 minute transition
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Border Struggles: Criminalisation, Mobility and Solidarity Paris, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
  
  Chair: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
  - The El Hiblu 3: Transgression, solidarity and migration
    
    In March 2019, three teenage asylum seekers were arrested upon their arrival in Malta. The government charged them with terrorism and alleged that they had hijacked the El Hiblu, a merchant vessel that rescued the three teenagers alongside over one hundred other people, in order to avoid being forcibly returned to Libya. I use the El Hiblu case to examine the ways in which people on the move and activists working in solidarity with them transgress state boundaries and categories to contest EU borders, despite the increasing state criminalization and violence they face. In doing so, they recreate spaces from the Mediterranean to European cities and enact different visions of our societies. The El Hiblu case allows us to explore the ways in which transgressive acts, from autonomous migration to solidarity practices, that occur at sea and within European territory connect, challenge our conceptualization of borders.
    
    Author: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
  - Search and Rescue in the central Mediterranean: between solidarity and control
    
    Since 2014, numerous non-governmental organisations or small associations have operated search and rescue (SAR) operations in the central Mediterranean.
    
    Since then, several governments have followed one another in Europe and specifically in Italy, challenging the organisations' crews and structures to cope with changing policies. From 'angels' to 'taxis' of the sea, the activists in solidarity with people on the move have been criminalised and discouraged.
    
    In this paper - the result of experiences on board various ships, as an activist researcher -, I firstly highlight how the various relationships between (supra)state bodies and NGOs influence not only the relationships between different NGOs but also between NGOs and individuals working within them.
    
    Secondly, I highlight how the different motivations that drive activists/rescue workers to set sail create very different forms of solidarity and/or assistance. The very materiality of the sea exposes everyone to a specific form of vulnerability that creates a situation of inevitable emergency. Attempts to cope with it construct efforts to control the moment of encounter at sea and cohabitation on board. However, they often risk replicating neoliberal patterns of migration management.
    
    Finally, I highlight the forms of resistance and struggle on board ships against such models, both by activists and people on the move.
    
    Author: Jasmine Iozzelli (University of Turin, Italy)
  - Struggles for (in)visibility in the central Mediterranean as strategies for exercising the right to leave and to life
    
    In the Mediterranean, human mobility continues to be a contentious issue of life and death: over 59,200 people lost their lives there since 2014. European states have increasingly delegated “rescue" responsibility to countries on the Mediterranean’s southern shore, such as Libya and Tunisia. At the same time, southern European states have tried to limit their responsibility for rescue. While externalization aims to limit departures, the criminalization of civil rescue aims to limit the presence of 'inconvenient observers' at sea, and their ability to rescue. All this exacerbated the 'rescue gap', culminating in the strategies of 'closed', 'unsafe', and 'distant' ports. This paper reflects on the struggles 'for life', understood as rescue and disembarkation in a place of safety. It also considers the different policies and practices of visibility of people crossing the Mediterranean Sea, and the contested relationship between visibility and survival. While the exercise of the right to escape is only possible under conditions of invisibility - as is protection from refoulement - only visibility can allow for rescue in case of danger. Yet, visibility may not be a sufficient condition to guarantee rescue. From the 'left-to-die boat' to the Easter Monday massacre and to Cutro, the competent authorities were fully aware of the exact geolocation of the people who lost their lives hours later. Through an analysis of the actors involved, this contribution sheds light on the struggles for (in)visibility by people on the move, as an essential instrument for exercising the right to leave and to life.
    
    Author: Chiara Denaro (University of Bologna, Italy)
  - Maritime mobility control in Australia: from “stopping boats” to the making of carceral seas
    
    The detention of people seeking asylum at sea is emerging as an increasingly prominent feature of maritime boundaries internationally. While this maritime detention occurs in the US, the Mediterranean, and parts of Asia, Australia maintains a pre-eminence in the field of detaining non-citizens, sanctioning detention at sea without any time limit for the purpose of removal. This paper examines the centrality of carceral mobility to the Australian agenda of deterrence. With recent monitoring reports providing new insights into what detention at sea looks in Australia, we are able to more fully witness this otherwise obscured practice and its ad hoc architectures. Far from “stopping the boats”, this thalassic geography appears as inscribed with the traces of a colonial present, in which racialised and criminalised people are subjected to forced mobilities in the form of modern floating prisons.
    
    Author: Andonea Dickson (Edinburgh University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Colonial Violence and the African Renaissance Amsterdam, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Lesley Masters (Nottingham Trent University)
  
  Chair: Tarela Ike (Teesside University)
  - 'African Renaissance as a Response to African Segregationist Policies Under Apartheid
    
    The concept of African Renaissance embodied by Thabo Mbeki, has had a tremendous impact on the perception of African elites throughout the continent but more particularly in southern Africa. History of the African continent was for may year a preserve of European historians, and their vision of Africa and its history ruled supreme even among African historians. Yet, one of the consequences of African Renaissance was to emphasize the importance of African identity, heritage and values, advocating the rediscovery and celebration of African culture as well as the promotion of education seen as a cornerstone of African Renaissance. Investing in education, research and innovation being seen as crucial for building a knowledge, that contributes to African understanding of the continent past, present and future.
    
    Author: Jean Perois (Catholic Institute of Vendée, France)
  - Racialisation with African Characteristics: The Case of Ethnic Discrimination in Nigeria
    
    Despite the theoretical import and analytical utility of racialisation in underscoring how groups are racialised in modern times, the concept has received minimal attention in Africanist scholarship. With the exception of South Africa where, because of its horrific history of apartheid, racialisation has been employed to reflect on the oppression of black people, the concept is yet to be embraced in discourses of ethnic discrimination in much of Africa. The consequence is that Africanists tend to think of Africa as a non-racial continent where tribalism is predominant and to externalise racism as a phenomenon particular to Western societies where the black-white racialisation binary tends to be the norm. For many Africanists, tribalism is to Africa what racialisation is to the West: they are not coterminous. In this research article, we utilise the crucial case of racialisation of ethnicity in Nigeria―one of Africa’s most ethnically diverse states―to deconstruct this hegemonic binary thinking that forecloses many Africanists from seeing how racialisation is embedded in discourses of ethnic discrimination beyond the black-white dualism and how racism is a characteristic feature of African societies.
    
    Authors: Joshua Akintayo (University of Kent)* , Promise Frank Ejiofor (University of Cambridge)
  - Breaking Waves: Exploring the Applicability of the Rapoportian Wave Theory to Lusophone Africa
    
    In the mid-2000s, David C. Rapoport (2004) theorized that modern terrorism can be historically seen and understood through the Anarchist (1st/1879–1920s), Anticolonial (2nd/1919–1960s), New Left (3rd/1960s-1990s) and Religious (4th/1979–2020s?) Waves. Since the Rapoportian Wave Theory was launched, its explanatory power has been widely debated; sometimes challenged, but usually tested, corroborated, and applied to uncover overlooked Waves (da Silva, 2020). However, the uniqueness of Portuguese colonialism seems to have temporally displaced Waves. In Portugal, on April 25, 1974, the Carnation Revolution that ended the Estado Novo dictatorship boosted decolonization processes across Lusophone Africa. In Mozambique, the Anticolonial Wave-like Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO) began to carry out attacks around the time that the Religious Wave should have been starting. As the Religious Wave concludes, Ansar al-Sunna began to seek to establish a caliphate around the late-2010s. In Angola, Waves are not clearly delineated. From 1975, the Anticolonial Wave-like União Nacional pela Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) fought a civil war against the New Left Wave-like Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA). Succeeding United Nations-led peacekeeping operations led to its ending through the Luena Memorandum on April 04, 2002. Meanwhile, the Anticolonial Wave-like Frente de Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda (FLEC) continues to seek sovereignty for the province of Cabinda. Such cases corroborate da Silva (2023: 426) critique that “[…] the Rapoportian Wave Theory should be recalibrated to broaden its geographical coverage and handle the complexity that some organizations pose to it.” The present research tests the explanatory power of Rapoport’s (2004, 2022) Wave Theory by discussing these cases not only to analyze whether the previous Waves have occurred as theorized but also to evaluate whether the conditions for the 5th/Far-Right Wave are present throughout Lusophone Africa.
    
    Authors: João Raphael da Silva (Ulster University) , Guilherme Dias (Roskilde Universitet, Denmark)
  - Standing By Yourself: State-Society Relations and the Understandings of Informality and Entrepreneurship in Zambia
    
    This paper focuses on the grassroots understandings of informality among Zambian urban entrepreneurs and argues that they lead to varying experiences of entrepreneurship, formalisation processes, and relationships with the government.
    Informality in the Zambian urban economy rarely means what it does in other contexts – the lack or absence of formal business registration with government agencies. It is closely tied to the notion of entrepreneurship and implies that it is a set of economic activities that occur outside the government domain (civil service or government contracts). The desire to get access to stability and security of the government world via contracts and tenders is what motivates people to register with the authorities in the first place. Despite registration, entrepreneurs still un-formalise themselves by identifying out of the formal economy and operating in traditionally informal economic spaces – marketplaces, streets, and backyards. While the prevalence of the informal economy and government policies supportive of entrepreneurship stimulate people’s self-reliance, despite the decades of neoliberal reforms, people continue to see the government as a solution to entrepreneurship’s risks, precarity, and limitations. This partly has to do with the economic history of Zambia as it is a former labour reserve and government-driven economy and partly with the economic hardships and prevalence of precarious livelihoods, especially in women-dominated sectors, which makes entrepreneurship the only income-generating option for many people. These experiences shape people as economic and political subjects who, on the one hand, seek a dependent relationship with the government to boost their businesses and, on the other hand, seek to un-formalise themselves to escape the limitations of formal employment.
    
    Author: Kristina Pikovskaia (University of Edinburgh)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Cultures of Representation Copenhagen, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group
  
  Convener: Stephan Engelkamp (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Stephan Engelkamp (King's College London)
  - The Political Sociology of the Science Fixation in International Relations
    
    This paper critiques of applications of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and quantum physics to explain human and state behaviour in the field of IR, particularly as those applications are used to account for political violence generally and war specifically. This paper builds a sociological case about the rise (and potential fall) of 'science' in IR scholarship. It outlines the ways in which performances of science, 'mainstream' and 'critical,' carry with them a particular weight in the evaluation of the disciplinarily-prized search for knowledge cumulation. We outline three major flaws with 'scientific' performances of scholarship, discussed next to the strategic advantages of deploying scholarship with these flaws - the claim to metaphorical deployment hiding analogical deployment, the problem of mechanisms, and the characterization of analysis as determinative when it can be at best suggestive. We then discuss the ways in which these main flaws are often hidden and subverted even as work that performs 'science' is criticized, contributing to a fixation on science in the discipline with clear implications for organizing scholars in the field. The paper concludes by suggesting that the fictions and fantasies of science in IR structure what 'IR' is and how it is understood to work.
    
    Authors: J. Samuel Barkin (University of Massachusetts Boston) , Laura Sjoberg (Oxford University)
  - The International Politics of Infographics: Visualising Palestine and the Anticolonial Legibility
    
    The so-called visual turn in IR has demonstrated that constellations of seeing and depicting are highly relevant for the discipline but so far, only scant attention has been paid to data visualization in spite of the international prominence of these practices. The paper addresses this lacuna by closely investigating the Visualising Palestine (VP) project that produces infographics related to the Israeli rule over, and violence against, the Palestinians. Drawing on visual analysis of the VP materials, I argue that the VP project works against strategies of obscuration, justification and relativization of the Israeli state violence by rendering Israeli policies legible and clearly communicated. In doing so, the paper makes three contributions. First, it provides an exploratory conceptual discussion of the salience of infographics for international politics. Second, it introduces and employs the notion of anti-colonial legibility to make sense of the VP’s practices. Last, it enriches the investigations of visual constellations in Israel/Palestine by discussing how the projects such as the VP contest the Israeli dominance via visual materials.
    
    Author: Jakub Zahora (University of New York, Prague)
  - Rally 'Round the Screen: Audio-visualizing Foreign Threat Construction
    
    Authoritarian regimes often instrumentalise threats from abroad in consolidating rule at home. Linking themes such as territorial integrity and cultural preservation to foreign aggressors enables repressive elites to claim that their continued tenure is rightful and necessary. Whereas leaders in all regime types amplify external threats to boost nationalist support and divert negative attention, authoritarians’ capture of state media institutions provides them with deeper, wider, and more engaging toolkits for doing so than democratic leaders. However, the predominant focus on rhetoric in political science studies of rally ‘round the flag efforts leaves video-based tools autocrats use to engage audiences in legitimizing their rule understudied. Our rally ‘round the screen approach thus seeks to audio-visualize political science analysis of such efforts by specifying the meaning-making and emotion-evoking functions of regime videos and studying them in practice. Examining the case of AKP-led Turkey, we construct an original dataset of all videos (n = 11,165) released by ruling party and state institutions’ YouTube channels from 2005–2022 and delimit a subset of all curated videos referencing foreign Others. We then use intertextual analysis to extract common themes present in constructing these Others as threats through constellations of storytelling, imagery, and sound effects.
    
    Authors: Lisel Hintz (Johns Hopkins University SAIS) , Jonas Draege (Oslo New University College)*
  - Sketching the Parameters of British Arctic Culture
    
    This contribution presents an inquiry into contemporary British Arctic culture. The paper is founded on the premise that policies do not appear out of thin air but are rather discursively constructed through layers of knowledge which contribute to social legitimacy. With a view to reconstructing what these layers comprise and what kind of policies are ultimately plausible as a result, the paper analyses a cross-section of contemporary Arctic discourses represented in different media, such as newspapers, TV programmes, and popular fiction that have addressed different British age groups over the last decade. By turning towards representations of the Arctic and its manifold issues in everyday culture, the paper adds a corrective dimension to the analyses of policy-making that focus on the role of government representations or think tanks, which prevail in Arctic policy commentary.
    
    Author: Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (Cardiff University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Decolonial, anti-racist and abolitionist pedagogies in International Relations Part II: Frameworks and theories Grand 1, Europa Hotel
  
  Despite bell hooks’s assertion, in 1994, that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”, the development of such a radical space within IR appears to remain limited on many levels (Sen 2022; Sondarjee 2023); resources on teaching practice in IR from a decolonial, abolitionist and/or anti-racist perspectives do not necessarily abound. Nevertheless, this roundtable seeks to demonstrate that many educators in IR are implementing these liberationist practices in and through their teaching. The RT brings a few of them together offering a space to collaborate and think about the articulation between theories and practices, with the objective of collectively developing abolitionist, decolonial and anti-racist praxis in IR pedagogies. We hope that our RT will serve to light a flame that can be carried forward in academic spaces.
  Roundtable speakers: Alyssa Claire Arends on “Queer decolonial approaches to IR pedagogy”, Amira Abdelhamid and Marianela Barrios Aquino on “Ethical pedagogies based on the approaches of bell hooks, Cusicanqui and Freire, Althea Rivas will be looking at the relationship between politics, scholarship and practice in relation to race and racism in IR and the everyday realities of the academy, and Jenna Marshall and Sharri Plonski will be bringing together legacies and realities of liberationist movements from the plantations to Palestine into the teaching of IR, and weaving this with the everyday battles of marginalisation and silencing in academic spaces.
  Covenors: Heba Youssef and Leila Mohieb
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Chair: Heba Youssef (University of Brighton)
  
  Participants: Amira Abdelhamid , Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London) , Jenna Marshall (KCL) , Marianela Barrios Aquino (University of Portsmouth)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Emotional Hierarchies in International Relations Grand 2, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Anne Flaspöler (Durham University) , Alice Finden , Kavi Abraham (Durham University)
  
  Chair: Karin Fierke (University of St. Andrews)
  
  Discussant: Naomi Head (University of Glasgow)
  - Family Matters: Theorising the Significance of Familial Relations within the Context of Politicised Captivity
    
    The family is rarely a topic of international politics, but politicised captivity is one of the few domains where familial relations can play a prominent role. Families can provide a tangible manifestation of the humanity and individuality of the captives, can become activists and advocates on behalf the captives, and can themselves become political resources employed by other actors. In this piece, we examine the case of the families of Japanese abductees by North Korea to shed light on the paradoxes of the position of families in situations of politicised abduction. In particular, by examining the cases of these families, we argue that we can observe both the power and limits of emotional capital within international politics.
    
    Authors: Phuong Anh Nguyen (University of St Andrews) , Todd Hall (Oxford University)*
  - Affect, Values, and Social Action: A Pragmatist Contribution
    
    Much work on emotions and affect in IR depends on rejecting traditional rationalist models of political decision-making and action. Emotions, often figured as socially produced and reflexive categories of feeling, shape political outcomes outside of – or sometimes through – rational action. Affect, on the other hand, consists of embodied and ‘visceral’ dispositions. As Brian Massumi argues, affect is a force that operates autonomously, prior to, and below conscious cognition, reconfiguring political relations in a way that cannot be grasped by reflective frameworks. A large body of work has now demonstrated the role of emotions and affect in international politics, tracing the political effects of or way in which discourses produce fear, anxiety, guilt, etc. But are there other ways to theorise the relationship between embodied feelings and political action? In this paper, I draw on Alain Locke’s pragmatist approach to value theory. Locke understands values as guides for social action, but such values are neither universally given nor individually conceived but derived from affective responses to objects within concrete social situations or events. Locke, then, provides a pragmatist take on the role of affect and emotions in shaping action by emphasising how feelings function to signal different value commitments. By reframing affect within a value-centric pragmatist tradition, this paper suggests new pathways for theorizing the role of emotion in IR, enriching this expanding body of literature.
    
    Author: Kavi Abraham (Durham University)
  - Emotional States: Protection vs Security and the Cases of Shamima Begum and Leonora Messing
    
    The paper is interested in emotional hierarchies and in how they are reinforced by value systems and ‘internalised power relations’ (Hutchison et al 2024: 157). Who is allowed to feel, be, desire, and know what (Agathangelou 2019: 212)? To this end, the paper looks at the cases of Shamima Begum (UK) and Leonora Messing (Germany), two girls who joined ISIS being 16 and 15 years old respectively. The stories of both girls were published in form of podcasts by investigative journalists in the UK and Germany. Yet, the outcome of their stories couldn’t be more different. While Shamima Begum is still in the al-Roj detention camp in Syria with her British citizenship removed, Leonora Messing returned home with her kids to Germany, faced legal proceedings, and was released on parole. We look at the government responses in both cases and illustrate how they play with emotive imagery and discourse appealing to protection and security, and whose to prioritise – the collective’s (nation) or the individual’s. Given the contrast in outcome, we address to what extent emotions are gendered, raced, and classed within internalised hierarchies and power relations.
    
    Authors: Anne Flaspöler (Durham University) , Alice Finden , Jutta Bakonyi (Durham University)*
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Framing domination and narratives of colonial control Madrid, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group
  
  Convener: CPD Working group
  
  Chair: James Eastwood (Queen Mary University of London)
  - China’s Rise through Western Eyes: Evaluating Representations of China’s Rise in the Context of US Foreign Policy during the ‘Old and New Cold War’
    
    The dominant Western-centric discourse on China’s rise in Sino-American relations is perceived as either a threat to be contained or a non-threat needing integration into an American-led international system. Yet while China is seen as a rival, there remains hope it could become a responsible stakeholder. I argue that the core of Sino-American rivalry comes from neocolonial conquest and desire, mirrored in colonial discourses surrounding China’s rise that inadvertently reinforces American hegemonic power by reducing China's ascent to an objectified Other. My aim is to uncover how language shapes Sino-American imperial encounters within asymmetrical power structures, revealing the racialised and orientalised Othering of discourses on China’ rise within the context of both the Old Cold War (1949- 1979) and the New Cold War (2013-2023) narratives. Initially seen as flattering, China’s mimicry of United States has now become a source of fear and repulsion. Using a postcolonial approach to Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), I explore how colonial narratives on China’s rise justify and legitimize American foreign policies of engagement and containment. My analysis highlights the intricacies of colonial legacies and racialised discourses shape Sino-American imperial encounters and the ways American Exceptionalism and Orientalism underpin foreign policy outcomes.
    
    Author: Margaret Jane Go (University of Westminster)
  - 'Common Sense' and the British Empire
    
    In July 2020, in the context of a reinvigorated Black Lives Mater movement and the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an episode of Moral Maze that debated ‘the morality of the British Empire’. Deploying Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of intellectuals and ‘common-sense’, I argue that this episode of Moral Maze functions as an exemplary site that illuminates how the cultural establishment could digest, interpret and domesticise counterhegemonic narratives over the British Empire. Through a textual analysis of the programme, I demonstrate how the legacies of the British Empire are: 1: Reduced to a dinner table debate. 2. Packaged in a balance-sheet format that weighs up the ‘good and ‘bad’ aspect of empire. 3. Framed as temporally remote from contemporary society 4. Presented to be so ‘complicated’ as to evade strong condemnation. I suggest that such framings are pervasive within government and establishment representations of the British Empire in the current British ‘culture war’. Moreover, these representations function to tranquilise counternarratives and reproduce conservative ‘common-sense’ notions of both the past and the present. In the conclusion, I consider the frailties of such ‘common sense’ approaches to empire and how they may be overturned.
    
    Author: Tom Bentley (University of Aberdeen)
  - Labour Transformation and Ocean Territorializations in the Development of Modern/Colonial Capitalism
    
    This paper investigates the political economic discourse of "improvement" and project of civilization through paid labour emerging at the formal end of slavery in the British empire and the advent of Asian indentureship. Drawing on archival as well as long established secondary literature, I approach re-reading the history in a decolonial way intended to foreground the lateral racial violence between Asian and African workers in mid 19th century Caribbean plantations and the gradual, imperial territorialization of ocean-space into legible capitalist space along coastal communities in the liminal spaces of British imperialism. I reject the modern/colonial framing of ocean-space as mere separation, danger, or obstacle, and consider how other-than-modern approaches to land/water relations at the limits of empire's reach were silenced in the long-march to civilizational "improvement." Ultimately the paper seeks to consider how the presumed morality and civilizational mission of post-slavery British imperialism sought to "improve" slavery as a mode of labour, but also rendered vibrant ocean spaces inert; reduced to distances and/or obstacles to 19th century globalization and civilization.
    
    Author: Ajay Parasram (Dalhousie University, Canada)
  - Tracing postcolonial foodways: the aesthetics of SPAM & legacies of U.S. empire in the Transpacific
    
    This paper explores the complex intersections of empire and food practices through the ubiquitous presence of SPAM in the Transpacific, a product deeply intertwined with legacies of U.S. imperialism, military occupation, and war across the region. Originally developed in Austin, Minnesota in 1937 as a non-perishable food for American GIs during WWII, SPAM has since become a staple across much of the Transpacific. Many places where SPAM is still omnipresent, such as Okinawa, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and the Marshall Islands, have been subject to US military occupation and/or presence. SPAM can be thought of not only as a foodstuff and a historical vestige of war, but also in how it manifests in diverse cultural expressions in the contemporary—from Hawaii’s SPAM JAM festival to anticolonial poetry from Guam to Korean budae jjigae (“army stew”). In exploring these gastro-imperial intimacies, this paper highlights how taste and food cultures are intricately entangled with relations of power, often overlooked in aesthetic approaches that instead tend to favor textual, visual, and (to a lesser extent) sonic registers. Following SPAM’s transnational manifestations and circulations illustrates how thinking through aesthetics, broadly understood, helps bridge conceptions of the everyday and contemporary articulations of imperialism.
    
    Author: Sara Wong (London School of Economics and Political Science)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / IPE of Finance Blackstaff, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Political Economy Working Group
  
  Convener: Scott James (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Scott James (King's College London)
  - The Political Economy of Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) Funds and the September 2022 Gilt Market Crisis
    
    The nadir of Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership was the crisis in UK gilt markets that unfolded in late September 2022. Following the government’s mini-budget which pledged £45bn in unfunded tax cuts, international investors took flight, causing a run on sterling and an unprecedented spike in gilt yields. This triggered a liquidity crisis within UK defined-benefit pension schemes and the ‘pooled’ Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) funds in which they had invested. To stem the market panic fuelled by mounting collateral and margin calls, the Bank of England (BOE) was forced to launch a large but time-limited gilt buying programme. The episode has revived long-standing concerns about the use of LDI strategies by pension schemes to manage asset-liability positions whilst increasing leverage and returns to funds through the use of derivatives and repo markets. The paper aims to shed new light on the role and function of LDI funds in the UK, and to unpack the drivers and dynamics of increased concentration and ‘herding’ in UK gilt markets. We also set out to explain how and why industry and regulators collectively failed to foresee and/or mitigate the resulting accumulation of systemic risk in the face of repeated warnings.
    
    Authors: Mareike Beck (University of Warwick) , Scott James (King's College London)
  - Central Banks and the Varieties in Financial Stability Policy
    
    Financial stability choices of central bankers are generally geared to two key goals: the immediate support of financial institutions during a crisis and the prevention of moral hazard, and thus, of future financial crises. Often officials are confronted with a trade off between these two goals if they find themselves in a moment of financial distress because if they intend to effectively and rapidly direct support to financial actors, they may have to set aside concerns about future financial instability. While scholars have increasingly engaged with the question of financial stability policy since the GFC, there is little research on whether there have been regimes of financial stability policy in different countries which have existed before the crisis (and may have contributed to financial instabilities which led to the crisis in the first place). This study conducts a historical comparison of the Fed and the Bank of Japan between the 1980s and the 2010s. It finds that the Fed acted like a “firefighter” focused on fast and effective support for financial markets during moments of financial distress, while the BoJ acted like a “guardian of long-term stability” always considering long-term stability and moral hazard before engaging in support for financial markets. Likely this differential response to financial distress has led to considerably more stable financial markets in Japan and less so in the US. On the other hand, the lack of support for financial markets through the BoJ may explain why economic growth has been stagnant since the 1990s. This article explains the differential approaches to financial stability through an institutionalist approach which highlights the role of the institutional proximity of central bankers with the banking system via micro-prudential banking supervision versus macroprudential supervision.
    
    Author: Inga Rademacher (City University of London)
  - Manufacturing Information, Influence and Images for Global Finance: The Role of Lobbying for the City of London
    
    Similar to other geographies, the UK has institutional groups who lobby for financial services, including a focus on the City of London. Founded in 2010 in the shadow of the global financial crisis and a perceived anxiety for a cross-sectoral entity, TheCityUK is now the main such body for UK finance. The organisation plays a prominent role providing both summary knowledge on, and networking possibilities for, UK-based financial players. However, beyond the TheCityUK’s own story, we know little about its history, internal functioning, and wider political impact. This paper argues that the organisation is involved in the manufacturing of information, influence, and images which are aimed at expanding and legitimising the power of the financial industry. Two dimensions are explored. First, TheCityUK’s conventional visible lobbying work is unpacked, including publications, event management, and networking. Second, the more subterranean position of the body within UK government agendas is examined, including how it deploys its extensive connections to further private interests. A spotlight is draw on its underappreciated role passing the landmark Financial Services and Markets Act 2023. The paper makes a wider contribution on understanding the reproduction of power in finance, particularly the ties between institutional power and discursive power.
    
    Author: Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (SOAS)
  - To Hike or Not to Hike? The Politics of Eurozone Monetary Policy Expertise During COVID
    
    In an age of uncertainty and poly-crisis, the taken-for-granted technocratic governance by numbers at the heart of international economic integration is re-politicised. This paper investigates how this politics of expertise plays out in the media by tracking discussions between different types of monetary policy experts, so-called central bank watchers. Using the discourse network analyser, it unpacks the evolution of discourse coalitions in the discussion on the nature of inflation and adequate monetary policy action in the Eurozone. Examining the period between the first inflationary uptick in January 2021 and the European Central Bank’s first rate hike in July 2022 in European broadsheets, the paper’s findings provide an actor-based understanding of ideational stability and change in Eurozone monetary policy debates. In contributing to an understanding of the discursive construction of crises, the paper speaks to a broader research agenda on the sensemaking processes that link technocratic, supranational institutions and international organisations to national public spheres, influencing their reputation and effectiveness.
    
    Author: Anna Zech (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Interrogating security from a relational standpoint: perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Farset, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group
  
  Conveners: Birgit Poopuu (Tallinn University) , Benjamin Klasche (Tallinn University, Estonia)
  
  Chair: Birgit Poopuu (Tallinn University)
  
  Discussant: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)
  - Mapping the Peripheral: A Critical Approach to Culturally Embedded Knowledge in the Estonian Borderland
    
    This paper uses a critical relational approach to assess the different (in)securities of a peripheral and marginalised Estonian community to explore lessons on human security. This approach aims at studying global politics by focusing on the local context and bringing the voices of those in peripheral areas to the fore. By focusing on the Kungla Fishing Community in Narva, the border town between Estonia and Russia, the paper amplifies the need to understand the insecurities and cultural bordering of the local communities, who are all too often excluded from societal cohesion processes, to aid in providing the social and political tools to produce promotive societal integration. This leads to the research problem of how Narvans’ everyday acts of socio-cultural bordering (re)create insecurities, and threaten social cohesion and, by extension, national security. A critical relational approach facilitates focusing on the specific relations that matter to Narvans, gaining a more complete understanding of the forces that both constitute and contest the border, and produce the mutual dissociation that has established a national and social divide within Estonia.
    
    Methodologically, this paper is taking a bottom-up perspective, through the vehicle of ethnographic relational interviewing, which produces a selection of narrative-vignettes of the borderland of Estonia. Firstly, the narrative-vignettes highlight the importance and potential of attending to culturally embedded knowledge on both a local and human level, Secondly, they raise essential questions about power relationships, security and social integration within Estonia society by highlighting what everyday acts of socio-cultural bordering look like in actual practice.
    
    Author: Kevin Molloy (Tallinn University, Estonia)
  - From Sudan to Palestine…and Ukraine: A critical relational perspective on solidarity from the Global East
    
    Post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, parts of the global East (especially the Baltic countries and Poland) have garnered more epistemic authority to define matters of global politics and are more firmly creeping into the global North. For instance, Estonia has to understand that the way it extends solidarity to Palestine or Ukraine is impacted by colonial relations of the past and present that have produced very different racial hierarchies and inequalities. However, in the context of global solidarity, the global East still has a special responsibility due to its own colonial relations. Writing from Estonia, we use Estonia’s understanding of solidarity with reference to Palestine and Ukraine to unpack how our understanding of coloniality matters in how we extend solidarity. We argue that a critical-relational notion of solidarity, based on different understandings of coloniality and the power relations embedded, allows us to explore these differences and make sense of global solidarity regimes. It forces us to understand power relations of coloniality and histories of colonialism which make the case why Estonia and the global East needs to express solidarity for conflicts in the global South which also cannot be simply expected the other way around.
    
    Authors: Birgit Poopuu (Tallinn University) , Benjamin Klasche (Tallinn University)
  - Orthodoxy, Politics, and Kirillism: Reassessing Post-Soviet Church-State Symphonia in Patriarch Kirill’s Russia
    
    Following the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Kremlin agreed to maintain good relations without interfering in each other’s affairs. This model of Church-State relations, known as ‘symphonia’, nevertheless seems outdated. Since the election of Kirill as Patriarch of Moscow in 2009, the boundary between the temporal and spiritual powers in Russia has become increasingly blurred. While this development is often interpreted as an attempt by the State to take control of the Church, the reverse is no less true. Aware that the Kremlin lacked a structured ideology to justify the autocratisation of its regime, the Church agreed to play the role of the substitute as long as it could advance its conservative agenda. How, then, has the ROC become a key actor in contemporary Russian politics, particularly in defending so-called family values? Through concrete case studies and discourse analysis of Russia’s foremost political and religious leaders, this paper investigates the social issues on which the Church is trying to exert its influence and the means it uses to do so. It also demonstrates how the Church is encouraging the autocratisation of the Russian regime to increase its political influence. The author concludes by proposing to replace the previous Church-State ‘symphonia’ with the new notion of ‘kirillism’, which better reflects the growing influence of the ROC in Russian politics.
    
    Author: Paul-Henri Perrain (Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic))
  - Russia - Ukraine war and Kazakhstan Balancing Russia on a particular issue: the case of ‘Political Integration’ within the EAEU
    
    In IR, there is an assumption that small states face two foreign policy options: bandwagoning with the stronger power or balancing against it. In such circumstances, it has been argued that small states usually bandwagon rather than balance. Despite that, there is a problem in differentiating between bandwagoning and balancing, because it is a one-way option, not two. The Ukraine case is an example of its desire to bandwagon with the West for economic, political and security shelter. It is, therefore, a one-way option since then it will balance against Russia from being within Western institutions. However, this paper will argue that a small state may balance the stronger power. The case of Kazakhstan’s balancing Russia against the idea of political integration will demonstrate that a small state like Kazakhstan can balance the stronger state but on particular issues.
    
    Author: Birzhan Bakumbayev (Astana International University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Interrogating the 'wisdom' of counterterrorism methodologies Berlin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Rabea Khan (Liverpool John Moores University)
  - “Accelerationism” and its status as a term within terrorism studies
    
    In recent years, the world has witnessed the rise of a new wave of violent far-right extremism. Significantly, this development has coincided with a new type of organisational structure within many neo-Nazi terrorist groups. These groups now increasingly organise in decentralised environments, emphasising an ideology of leaderless resistance, while making efforts towards the destabilisation of society at large.
    Contemporary terrorism studies has often referred to the ideology of this particular milieu as “accelerationism.” However, this term can carry an array of meanings and associations. It has been utilised to refer to phenomena as wide-ranging as Marxist political strategy, a specific class of British philosophy from the 1990s, and is increasing used as a signifier for certain far-right internet groups operating mostly in an online context. This terminological ambiguity can lead to a pronounced lack of clarity when used as an etic term within scholarship, especially when the intended meaning is left ill-defined.
    This paper aims to provide an outline of the history of the term “accelerationism” and its changing meanings. It will investigate the origins of the term, how it came to be appropriated by far-right groups, as well as how it ended up as a popular term in academic discourse. Finally, it will critically reflect on the theoretical implications of this history for scholarship in terrorism studies.
    
    Author: Milan Reith (Radboud University, Netherlands)
  - Counter-Radicalisation and Online Learning
    
    The introduction of the Prevent Duty in 2015 imposed a legal obligation on universities to play a frontline role in identifying and preventing radicalisation and extremism. This development sparked significant debate and concern about the ways in which universities could become sites of surveillance. Much of the focus of these debates has been on the classroom as a physical space, and yet increasingly education is moving into a wider array of spaces with online and distance learning growing in popularity.
    
    Despite this shift, little attention has been given to the application of Prevent to online or remote students, particularly those studying in different legal jurisdictions. This development raises important questions about the legality and applicability of Prevent to this growing student cohort.
    
    This paper reflects on how a number of UK higher education institutions that offer distance learning provision apply Prevent to their student cohorts in other countries, and considers the implications of the approaches they take. This is achieved through a review of policy documents and semi-structured interviews with frontline staff, and those responsible for determining Prevent policy within an institutional setting. In doing so, the paper reveals a patchwork approach, highlighting a lack of sector-wide consistency.
    
    Authors: Patrick Finnegan (University of Lincoln) , Nick Brooke (University of St Andrews)
  - Making (non)sense of deradicalisation: ambiguity, ambivalence, and emotional-bodily struggles in the field
    
    This paper is about making sense, or rather making nonsense, of the messy process of becoming the ‘deradical’. It is about emotions, embodiment, and deradicalisation. Above all, this paper ‘messes’ with the ordering ambitions in the production of knowledge within the (critical) study of terrorism and counterterrorism. Existing ways of knowing try to control (and solve) terrorism and its countermeasures by forming them into neat units of analysis. Emotion, affect and sensation have come to play a vital role in this quest and desire to ‘make sense’, not least in the conception and enactment of deradicalisation. While, at the same time, these phenomena eschew this kind of stability. By continuing to assume ‘making sense’, instead of ‘making nonsense’, as something desirable, the messiness (the multiplicious, ambiguous, ambivalent, relational, etcetera) of these phenomena is lost or displaced into ‘otherness’. This paper attempts to disrupt and reshape the ordering ambitions in the (critical) study of terrorism and counterterrorism. It does this by engaging with the deradicalisation phenomenon through embodied-reflexive ethnographic fieldwork of lived experiences among deradicalisation practitioners and (former) radicals and the poststructuralist, posthumanist, and queer onto-epistemologies of Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze. In contrast to previous work, this paper does not aim to resolve the messiness, including the ambiguous, ambivalent, and multiplicious, but tries to make these other(ed) realities visible.
    
    Keywords: Deradicalisation, emotions, critical terrorism studies, poststructuralism, posthumanism, onto-epistemology, embodied-reflexive ethnography.
    
    Author: Yrsa Landström (Swedish Defence University)
  - A Tale of (Non)Violence and (Non)Extremism: Unpacking the Politics of Violent Extremism in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin
    
    From so-called fanatics in the Indian subcontinent to Jihadists in contemporary politics, states have often devised various means to address threats to their existence, interests, or self. Radicalization and violent extremism have become increasingly useful concepts that underlie policy instruments – Countering Violent Extremism – for states to manage and govern ‘problematic’ ideas and populations which pose threats or risk. This paper addresses these dynamics within the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin (LCB) where growing threats and risks to individuals and communities have been persistent but where ‘extremism’ has been selectively adopted in labeling these groups even in situations where violence is acknowledged as a constant or where there is ‘extremism’ without violence. This paper argues that the discourse of ‘violent extremism’ encounters complex forms of resistance and resilience in the Sahel and LCB. The first challenge emerges from contentious biographical narratives where attempts to produce stable national selves in overlapping sovereign terrains with transborder communities with historical biographies that sometimes may challenge statist narratives or even population-centric biopolitical ones such as those deployed by Europe and other Western entities to govern migration ‘upstream’, thus further complicating the politics of violent extremism in the subcontinent. Thus, contrary to the societal access and control which counter-radicalization and CVE could offer, adopting similar discourse within the Sahel and LCB is fraught with unexpected, localized challenges.
    
    Author: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Masculinities in Conflict and Peacebuilding Grand 4, Europa Hotel
  
  While research on the roles of militarised masculinities as well as on the impacts of armed conflict and peacebuilding on women and girls have attracted growing interest in the past decades, civilian masculinities in conflict and peace have been few and far between. Bringing together authors of a recent (March 2025) publication on the impacts of conflict, displacement and peacebuilding on civilian masculinities, the roundtable will discuss how masculinities are both shaped by and shape these processes. The contributions underscore the need to examine these masculinities by going beyond simplistic narratives, as well as recognise the continuing global reverberations of racialised colonial structures, of militarism and occupation, and of heteronormative patriarchy.
  
  Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working Group
  
  Chair: Philipp Schulz (University of Bremen)
  
  Participants: Sara de Jong (University of York) , Henri Myrttinen (University of Bremen) , Fionnuala ni Aolain (former UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Honorary Kings Counsel, Regents Professor, Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society (University of Minnesota); Professor, Queen's University of Belfast) , Heidi Riley (University College Dublin) , Pınar Erdem (University of Bremen) , Kara Hooser (The Ohio State University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Military Assistance and Alliance Building Grand 5, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Marissa Martin (King's College London)
  
  Chair: Marissa Martin (King's College London)
  - The problematic association between foreign military assistance and increased terrorist attacks in recipient nations
    
    Foreign military assistance is intended to support security forces in recipient nations to fight insurgencies, maintain stability and political order. However, the literature indicates that foreign, and in particular US military assistance is associated with an increase in anti-regime violence. The negative effects are contingent on certain regime characteristics with new or personalist regimes being more prone to an increase in anti-regime violence. Niger, a country with a personalist regime, experienced a steep rise in foreign military assistance between 2013 and 2023 and a corresponding increase in anti-regime violence. In this paper, I use Niger as a most likely case to investigate whether the causal mechanisms proposed by the literature explain the increase in anti-regime violence. I find that the rationalist causal mechanisms, focused on leaders’ coup proofing strategies in response to foreign military assistance, do not adequately explain the rise in anti-regime violence in Niger. I analyse the micro-dynamics of the increase in anti-regime violence in two regions in Niger and find that the increase follows the typical patterns of violence in civil war whereby insurgent groups increasingly use selective violence until they achieve full control over an area. Foreign military intervention was associated with increased anti-regime violence because interventions happened when violence had started to escalate. However, foreign military intervention didn’t curb the escalation of violence, and it’s probable that the strategies it used (alignment with ethnically based militia groups, targeting of jihadist leaders, lack of operational support to internal security forces in the event of an attack) contributed to increases in violence.
    
    Author: Aoife McCullough (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  - The meaning of military assistance: creating value during security (force) assistance activities
    
    The provision of military training and assistance by one state to the armed forces of another is a long-standing and ubiquitous feature of international relations. Existing research has highlighted the centrality of politics to the (often limited) impact of such programmes on recipient capabilities, behaviours, and preferences. Where interests align, it is argued, assistance activities can achieve dramatic transformations. When they diverge, programmes flounder as recipients resist the advice of their patrons, or else divert foreign military aid to their own particular ends. While compelling, this principal-agent account of security assistance nonetheless overlooks the myriad other aims pursued through military-to-military training relationships – beyond the improvement of local military effectiveness – by both patrons and clients alike. Often, these alternate agendas coalesce alongside more conventional training aims, or are pursued through them without being dependent upon them for success. This paper examines how different parties construct mutual value during security assistance relationships, exploring the ways in which strategic considerations, bureaucratic agendas, and local relationships interact to create diverse (and sometimes contradictory) understandings of the utility, value and meaning of military assistance.
    
    Author: Alex Neads (University of Durham)
  - Do Principles Become Agents? Security Assistance between cooptation and orchestration
    
    Under which circumstances is security assistance effective? This article aims to build a theoretical framework to help scholars and practitioners evaluate the effectiveness of security assistance (SA). Security Assistance consists in outsourcing the conduct of stability operations to local partners, increasing their military capacity and professionalism. While existing literature has highlighted SA's diverse and adaptive nature, it lacks an empirically grounded definition of success. By integrating the governor’s dilemma theory with SA literature, this article introduces the concepts of agent control and competence as benchmarks for successful SA. Thus, instead of measuring the extent to which providers achieve their foreign policy goals, this framework assesses SA effectiveness based on the role recipients play as policy intermediaries. This approach facilitates case-specific observations, also allowing for broader generalizations across cases. It constitutes an attempt to provide the practice of SA with a coherent set of concepts concerning the aim, the scope, and the limitations inherent to the relationship between providers and recipients. Therefore, first, the article reviews existing SA and policy evaluation literature. Second, it introduces the competence-control framework and suggests operational measures for control and competence. Third, it discusses preliminary findings along with current limitations and challenges
    
    Author: Jean-Marie Reure (University of Genoa, Italy)
  - My Agent’s Agent: Principal Agent Theory and the problem of local indigenous security forces
    
    The application of Principal Agent Theory to civil-military relations establishes a system of delegated authority between the Principal; the civil authority, and the agent; the military. The theory holds that the military acts on the command of the civil authority to undertake missions that they have deemed in the best interests of their populations. Inherent in this system are conflicts of interest, questions of accountability and a constant struggle between the intentions of the principal and realities of how the agent must undertake their tasks.
    
    The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have presented a challenge to the application of this theory, as these operations featured not only a principal agent relationship between the civil authorities of the various foreign actors and their respective militaries but also feature local ingenious civil authorities and their respective security forces. These local indigenous elements were often acting as agents of both the foreign principal and their agents, creating an incredibly complicated picture that leads to questions of where ultimate authority lies, how to hold individuals within this ecosystem accountable and how to create a system of ethics to govern the actions of these agents.
    
    The purpose of this paper will be to expose the complications created by adding these additional elements to the Principal Agent relationship and to show how a lack of clarity on where authority lies, and who is responsible for the actions of those agents operating on their behalf, creates a system that struggles with the reality of modern conflicts.
    
    Author: Alex Crockett (Durham University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / New Directions in Development Panorama, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Global Politics and Development
  
  Convener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  
  Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
  - Global Governance Without the USA, Possible? A Study of Deep-Sea Mining
    
    The US has often, albeit not always, played a leading role in shaping global governance while China has been a rule-taker in the same process. This paper tries to re-examine this global rule-making situation from deep-sea mining (DSM), a policy area from which the US has been conspicuously absent.
    
    An international governing regime for commercial DSM is being developed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The US is not yet a full member of the ISA because Republican Senators have rejected the ratification of UNCLOS. It is fair to assume that the US Senate will not be ready for ratifying the treaty in the foreseeable future.
    
    This paper asks, in particular, whether the global DSM governance process will be overwhelmingly dominated by China when the US is absent from the negotiation table. Historically ‘cooperating without America’ was possible and has been reasonably effective, as shown in the cases of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and the International Criminal Court. Can other Western countries take up the slack again when the US is not present in DSM?
    
    Authors: Lai-Ha Chan (University of Technology Sydney) , Pak Lee (University of Kent)*
  - Hawking labour: Why are international labour protection instruments adopted by some countries but not others?
    
    This paper explores why international labour protection instruments, such as the International Labour Organization Convention 129 (C129), Labour Inspection in Agriculture, is adopted by some countries but not others. International organizations (IOs), such as the ILO, are central to the diffusion of acceptable governance norms and practices. Although largely successful, their influence varies across states and issues. In scholarship on global governance, the variable adoption of governance standards inspired by IOs is attributed to differences in the broader policy environment of states, including the position of hegemonic powers on the prescriptions or governance instruments of IOs, the disposition of peer states to those initiatives, as well as the domestic politics, society, and political economies of states. Based on norm localization scholarship, the manifestation of the abovementioned factors in states should produce different institutional responses to global norms, standards, and initiatives. However, there is a lot more to learn about the variable adoption of the governance instruments of IOs, such as ILO C-129, which provides inspection guidelines to protect workers' rights across the agricultural value chain. Therefore, this paper explores the following question: why, despite having similar policy environments that should inspire the adoption of ILO C-129, have Nigeria and Kenya ratified this international governance instrument while Ghana and Tanzania have not? In exploring the abovementioned question, I undertook a qualitative grounded theory research based on data triangulation across the abovementioned case studies. By analysing government policy documents and interviewing policymakers across the cases, the paper theorizes on the bureaucratic and political traditions, practices, and norms that support or impede the localization of international governance instruments.
    
    Authors: Andrew Grant (University of Cambridge)* , Surulola Eke (Queen’s University, Canada)
  - The Decolonisation of International Development in Africa: The Vital Use of the Yoruba People’s Ifá Epistemic System in a Decolonised Development Agenda in Nigeria.
    
    Ifá, the oral literary of the Yoruba people's epistemic system, relegated by the colonial legacy rooted in Western liberal norms and epistemes, can be brought to the fore and mainstreamed in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through its financial inclusion toolkit. Nigerian people have been oblivious to what they already knew. How, and why this happened - through 1980s and 1990s neoliberalism and global financial institutions development agenda - is a theme of this paper. In fact, within the complex, uniquely Yoruba epistemic system, community-based financial institutions already exist lending themselves to the principle of 'start from where we already are’. Acknowledgement and healing of the collective social trauma, resulting from the successive failed neoliberal market-orientated development paradigms, may be essential to this process. Nevertheless, any reform of a market system, even with Amartya Sen’s style of Western development that is critical of the market, will still propagate the Western contractarian philosophical conception of the self, as opposed to the Yoruba indigenous episteme intrinsic understanding of the self as existing only when obligated to society.
    
    Author: Luqma Temitayo Onikosi (University of Brighton)
  - AI Colonialism: Environmental Damage, Labor Exploitation, and Human Rights Crisesin the Global South
    
    The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming technology but also raising serious human rights concerns, particularly in the Global South. This paper contends that current AI development practices—relying heavily on low-cost labor and resource-intensive processes—aggravate global inequalities and infringe on the rights of marginalized communities. Essential tasks, such as data labeling and processing, are frequently outsourced to workers in countries like India, Kenya, and the Philippines, who endure low wages, limited protections, and precarious conditions. This model exemplifies “AI colonialism,” where benefits of AI advancements accrue in the Global North, while the Global South bears the environmental and economic burdens. The environmental toll is also significant. Training large AI models consumes vast energy resources, worsening ecological degradation in already climate-vulnerable regions. This exacerbates environmental inequalities and depletes natural resources, further entrenching cycles of exploitation and underdevelopment in these areas. This paper advocates for concrete reforms: the establishment of international labor standards, transparency throughout AI supply chains, and environmentally sustainable practices that respect the rights and dignity of workers in the Global South. It emphasizes the urgency of action, warning that, without systemic change, AI risks becoming a tool of exploitation rather than a force for global progress. The paper calls upon governments, international organizations, and the AI industry to adopt a human rights-based approach, ensuring that AI development supports a fair and sustainable future for all.
    
    Author: Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University)
  - Reassessing the China Model: An Ideological Spectrum Analysis
    
    The existing Liberal International Order faces mounting challenges, both material and ideological, with China playing a central role. Often perceived as a threat to democracy due to its authoritarian political system and influence on developing countries, China is frequently discussed through the concept of the “China model,” which contrasts sharply with liberal democracy. This article argues that the China model is not merely a concept, but an evolving discourse driven by dynamics of stigma and regime legitimacy. It is rooted in the historical debate between “Sinification” and “Westernization,” symbolizing China’s long struggle for recognition as part of the “civilized” world. Simultaneously, it reflects the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy concerns and its project of constructing a new official ideology. Thus, the debate around the China model serves as a lens to explore ideological contestation among Chinese intellectuals. This study introduces a framework based on three ideological types and re-examines the diverse perspectives surrounding the China model. Additionally, it investigates how official discourse incorporates and utilizes these debates. The findings highlight the variety and complexity of discourse around the China model, noting that official discourse increasingly adopts left-wing rhetoric while emphasizing a more conservative ontology. In conclusion, this article sheds light on the intellectual tensions within China, offering a deeper understanding of the nation's self-identity and its vision of its place in the world.
    
    Author: Caice Jin (University of Exeter)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Ordinary Affects of Global Reactionary Politics Grand 3, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group
  
  Conveners: Elisabeth Moerking (University of Bristol) , Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow) , Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  
  Chair: Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  - The Weaponisation of Affect as Gendered Punishment
    
    This paper looks at the weaponisation of ‘flat affect’ as a medium through which punishment can be enacted upon bodies, generally, and female bodies specifically. Taking the case of Shamima Begum, I argue that her stoicism – whether a personality trait, a strategic decision, or the result of severe trauma – was operationalised by the mass media as a tool to condemn her further for her affiliation to ISIS. Crucially, the paper contends that her affective dispositions, or better said, the lack of, deviated from the idealised feminine (stereo)type of the emotional and expressive mother, specifically. From this, I conceptualise that the ultimate punishment enacted on her, stripping her of her British citizenship, can be positioned as reactionary politics to her flat affect, far more than her terrorist crimes which, beyond affiliation to the Islamic State, have never been named by the UK state. Thus, this paper raises important questions surrounding how, at its most extreme interpretation, affective dispositions that are codified as deviant to the female body rendered Begum stateless, and, thus, became a vehicle through which international law can be broken.
    
    Author: Aishling Mc Morrow (Queen's University Belfast)
  - “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”: Everyday Attachments to the White Hetero-Patriarchy in Hallmark Christmas Movies
    
    The Hallmark Channel is an American media company that offers its viewers a range of made-for-television mystery and romance movies. However, the channel’s most recognisable television output is the Hallmark Christmas movie, which has become a genre in and of itself. Typically set in small towns across New England, Hallmark’s America is always straight, mostly white, and until recently, almost entirely Christian. This paper explores the ways in which the everyday cinematic comforts of Christmas (think: hot chocolate, baking cookies, singing carols) animates affective attachments to an illusory “golden age”, particularly through the construction of a national fantasy that centres on the white, hetero-patriarchal family, traditional gender roles and heteronormative romance. Through an emphasis on the “authenticity” of small town life and a longing to return to traditional family values, these movies articulate shared affective resonances that shape Christmas as a site of restoration of the nation. Although mostly set in the United States, the Hallmark Channel is part of an international market of cable television, and distributes its media in over 30 different languages. As such, these movies constitute a global projection of American national identity that is increasingly informed by a Trumpian desire to preserve the heteropatriarchy of a white, Christian America.
    
    Author: Elisabeth Moerking (University of Bristol)
  - Battles for History: Desire, Enjoyment, and Far-Right Identity Phantasies in Video Game Modification Practices
    
    The far-right holds a vision of how its chosen identity and its associations appeared in the past - and, by extension, how they should look in the present and future. Indeed, understanding and interacting with the past, its people, its boundaries and its (in)justices are necessary features of far-right identity narratives and constructions. Drawing on the literatures on psychoanalysis, affect, emotion, and the everyday in International Relations, this paper argues that videogames are an underappreciated epistemological site for the study of how global politics are experienced, negotiated, and contested in everyday life. We look at ‘grand strategy games’ to explore how they constitute an opportunity for players to relive and undo the traumas and (re)imagine the glories of their nations, as well as (re)construct and enjoy identity phantasies and alternative histories. Players can play a game to produce their own geopolitical and identity phantasies, but they can also change the rules and the very design of the game – from enabling genocide game mechanics to rewriting the culture and ethnicity of populations. Thus, we look to the modification of videogames, which already provide freedom to rewrite histories, to understand how far-right phantasies are embedded, communicated, lived, and enjoyed in everyday life.
    
    Authors: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) , Charlie Price (University of Warwick)
  - Zombie Nation: The Politics of Vulgarity in the Contemporary United Kingdom
    
    Achille Mbembe diagnoses an ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ at the heart of postcolonial state power (1992). In the obscenity of its clientelism and the absurd ‘dramatization of its magnificence’, Mbembe suggests that the postcolonial state invites laughter from its subjects. Against common wisdom, however, Mbembe argues that this popular laughter does not pose a significant political threat to the operation of state-power. Instead, he suggests that the convivial, familiar vulgarity of the state ensnares the dominant and the dominated alike in an impasse of ‘mutual zombification’. The state’s grotesque displays of excess leave it incapable of addressing the material needs of its subjects, whose laughing acceptance render them incapable of collectively mobilising against it.
    In this intervention, we draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of Mbembe in order to consider the ways in which vulgarity, buffoonery and play have instituted a form of ‘zombification’ in the contemporary United Kingdom, focusing in particular on the 2010-2024 Conservative Government. We contend that this zombification closely relates to the increasing powerlessness of both the state and the citizen under neoliberal market-dependence and austerity. When politico-economic sovereignty pivots elsewhere, the clientelist state becomes an aesthetic site of vulgarity and excess and its disenfranchised citizens become routinely invested in its ridicule – neither capable of enacting lasting change. To explore this argument, we look at two sites: the carnivalesque revelry of the Johnson government’s COVID-19 response and the mockery faced by Liz Truss in her short tenure as a prime minister.
    
    Authors: Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow) , Uygar Baspehlivan (University of Bristol)
  - The Role of Satire in Navigating Identities: The Performance and Governance of Germanness
    
    This study looks at how humour is used to perform, (re)define, and negotiate identities in the context of migration. It examines how satirical articulations offer a critical angle for engaging with the relationship between identities and governmental practices. While previous research ha shown how practices of laughing may both challenge and reproduce hierarchical structure through the perpetuation and normalisation of racist humour, these dynamic processes remain under-explored in the area of migrant comedy. Drawing on Wedderburn’s (2021) framework of humour’s multifaceted capacities, this study explores how Muslim communities in European host countries perform satire. With a focus on the post-2015 German context, it examines Datteltäter’s work and their use of humour to challenge the impunity of microaggressions. The study seeks to investigate how the group’s satirically performed subversion of everyday experiences of "migratised humour" reflects the biopolitical governance of identities. In so doing, it critically engages with the proposed approach and interpretations of their experiences of migration and the constructions of identities which challenges the universality of naturalised structures of acceptability and renegotiates the link between humour and Germanness. Thus, this work contributes to discussions on identities and biopolitics by providing further insights into the link between state control, practices of migratisation, and the decolonisation of humour.
    
    Author: Janica Ezzeldien (University of Glasgow)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Regulating Threats through Artificial Intelligence: Transformations in Governance and Security Dublin, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group
  
  Conveners: Anne-Sophie Jung (University of Leeds) , Laura Jung (University of Graz, Austria)
  
  Chair: Laura Jung (University of Graz, Austria)
  
  Discussant: Anne-Sophie Jung (University of Leeds)
  - The co-production of cyberbiosecurity: framing cyber risks and biological danger in AI-driven biology
    
    Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools are transforming life science research and biomedical applications, driving major advancements in genomics, epidemiology, biotechnology, and many other fields. These technologies are revolutionising how scientists collect and analyse data, conduct experiments, and explore complex biological systems. However, the growing reliance on AI, as part of a broader trend to ‘digitise biology’, has also warranted fears of cyber attacks that may spread diseases, cause deaths, or enable the development of biological weapons. In response, ‘cyberbiosecurity’ has emerged as a new field of research and policy analysis to study cyber-bio risks and develop ways to prevent them through pre-emptive security measures. This paper interrogates the co-production of cyberbiosecurity in two ways. First, it analyses how futuristic scenarios of cyberbio risks are primarily ‘technified’ and apolitical, i.e., granting legitimacy to specific technical epistemic communities in life sciences and computer sciences, and alienating important disciplines that study cybersecurity as a ‘technopolitical’ issue, including international relations (IR). As such, the paper highlights the significant political implications of current modes of technification and securitisation of the cyber-bio convergence, which necessitate an engagement with and from scholars in IR and security studies. Secondly, the paper investigates the implications of considering the entity of ‘life’ as a primary referent object of security on understandings of cyber threats per se. Hence, the paper asks, how adding a ‘biological’ layer to perceptions of cyber threats may influence the future of cybersecurity scholarship and governance.
    
    Author: Noran Fouad (Manchester Metropolitan University)
  - Measuring ‘Excess Risk of Basic Emotions’: The Surveillance of Population Mental Health in Times of Polycrisis
    
    This paper addresses the growing interest from governments and their public health institutions in tracking mental health - alongside other health data - during times of crises, e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. We are witnessing a new drive to ‘rapidly identify geographically concentrated emotional reactions after traumatic events’ and to ‘provide a timely flow of intelligence’ on population mental wellbeing which relies on the quantification of mental distress. Mental health surveillance on this scale is usually facilitated through and under the umbrella of public health and there is a growing body of scholarship discussing population wide mental health screening attempts and introducing specific (often automated) public health protocols. Drawing on previous scholarship in global health and international relations (e.g. Howell 2011; Elbe 2010), this paper problematizes automated mental health surveillance as an extension of neoliberal governance to monitor populations’ emotional responses to overlapping and recurrent crises. As such, this paper shows that mental health surveillance and data processing requires close scholarly scrutiny in an age of increased social uncertainty/unrest, where ‘crisis’ can become a signifier for numerous situations and where crises are perpetual, i.e. requiring ongoing surveillance.
    
    Author: Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
  - The Algorithmic Politics of Antimicrobial Resistance: From Surveillance to Security
    
    As global health threats like antimicrobial resistance (AMR) escalate, the governance of public health is increasingly shaped by AI-driven tools that promise to integrate disparate data sources and enhance predictive capabilities. This paper critically examines the role of algorithms in AMR surveillance, specifically in the context of the One Health approach, which seeks to integrate data from human, veterinary, agricultural, and environmental sectors. While algorithms promise enhanced efficiency and precision in mapping AMR patterns, they also introduce new governance challenges that mirror existing political and structural hierarchies. Drawing on case studies from the European Union and India, this paper explores how surveillance systems and algorithms—designed to process and analyze vast datasets—are entangled in complex political narratives. Central to this paper is the argument that algorithms, far from being a neutral, objective tool, reinforces the political dynamics of current global governance hierarchies, particularly through the control and framing of data. Building on the concept of "data sovereignty," the paper investigates how algorithms become a mechanism of power to shape access, interpretation, and application of AMR data across borders and sectors. By engaging with the tension between technological potential and political contestation, this paper critically assesses the intersection of algorithms, surveillance, and AMR, revealing how algorithmic processes both challenge and perpetuate global inequities in global governance.
    
    Author: Anne-Sophie Jung (University of Leeds)
  - Predicting the Unpredictable - AI, Epistemic Control, and the EU Border Regime
    
    This paper examines the development of AI-based migration prediction tools within the European Union (EU). While these sophisticated, albeit experimental tools are attracting significant funding from state, international, and humanitarian actors, assessing their future role in migration management is difficult: On the one hand, the prospect of harnessing increasing volumes of online, Google Search, and social media data promises increasingly accurate predictions of population movements and raises the prospect of prediction-based pushbacks. On the other, present shortcomings of these models, including biased training datasets and flawed underlying theoretical assumptions, cast doubt on the accuracy even of future models. Against this background, the presentation considers these tools as means to take epistemic control of an essentially unknowable phenomenon: what makes migration complex, namely the unpredictable dynamics of violent displacement and the highly subjective decision to flee, must remain out of reach of statistical models. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with model developers, the paper considers prediction models developed by the EU’s Asylum Agency (EUAA) and ITFLOWS, an EU-funded research consortium. Grounded in a decolonial and feminist data justice approach, the paper interrogates how these technology-mediated bordering practices serve to advance and entrench a future-oriented racialized EUropean border regime.
    
    Author: Laura Jung (University of Graz, Austria)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Researching in a world on fire: What are we doing? Board Room, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working Group
  
  Conveners: John Barry (Queen's University Belfast) , Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
  
  Chair: John Barry (Queen's University Belfast)
  - “It’s my lecture and I cry if I want to” Navigating academic practices in a world on fire
    
    “It’s my lecture and I cry if I want to” Navigating academic practices in a world on fire
    In my contribution, I explore the contradictions and tensions of academic practices (mainly situated in a Northern European context, with anglo-american inflections) in the climate collapse. Against the background of an increasing discussion of the role, responsibilities and practices of academic practitioners in research, teaching, and outreach, I highlight several core dimensions that also resonate with broader discussions in International Relations, namely 1. the role of emotions in academic practices, most often the invisibility thereof, but more recently also the emerging discussion of e.g. climate grief in researchers 2. The boundaries of academic practices, specifically with regard to activism, eg. participation in protests and civil disobedience, and how these boundaries are reinforced, perpetuated, or contested in academic communities, and 3. embodied scholarship, that is how personal experiences of and situatedness within climate collapse are integrated (or marginalized) in research, teaching and academic communities.
    
    Author: Laura Horn (Roskilde University, Denmark)
  - Walk with me: forests and riverside walks as IR pedagogy
    
    How can the study of conflict, peace, and policy evolve to better situate itself in hyperlocal ecologies? This paper includes interviews with researchers, teachers, and students of International Relations in Scotland on the role of forest and riverside walks in pedagogy and research methodology. Engaging with existing scholarship including Emma Bond's "Writing Migration Through the Body" and Halberstam's "side-by-sidedness of adjacency" I ask how walking side by side with a teacher, a student, a colleague, or an interlocutor helps thicken place and research alike, reimagining an otherwise distant research practice within skinscapes and place-based histories. In doing so, this research makes recommendations for new modes of ethically incorporating walks within the study and practice of IR as a discipline.
    
    Author: Q Manivannan (University of St Andrews)
  - Vulnerable Research
    
    This paper is a proposal for embracing ‘vulnerable research’ as a way to reckon with doing research that is political, ethical, and honest about the role of research in perpetuating global harms. I call this vulnerable research, because this approach requires letting go of the justifications upon which much of academia relies, and also the authority and privilege being an academic lends us. This process is one which I am attempting to navigate, whilst also being a precarious researcher who is also fighting to enter this space. Rather than suggesting a new research method, this article’s contribution is to bring together and engage with three different but related literatures that are all asking questions of research methodologies in their own way. Roughly, these literatures approach ethical questions from a position of reflexivity, decolonisation, and climate politics. To these literatures I also add my experience and difficulties with researching vulnerability and climate politics whilst being committed to feminist and decolonial principles, that include avoiding the reproduction of the harms I am studying.
    
    Author: Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
  - How is fieldwork so extractivist (and what we can do about it)
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Franziska Müller (University of Hamburg)
  - What is to be Done?: The Role and Responsibility of the Academy and Academics in a World on Fire
    
    'What is to be Done?: The Role and Responsibility of the Academy and Academics in a World on Fire'
    
    Author: John Barry (Queens University Belfast)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Shaping International Order? Opportunities and challenges to the EU’s global influence Room 1, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: European Security Working Group
  
  Convener: Andrew Cottey (University College Cork)
  
  Chair: Alister Miskimmon (Queens University Belfast)
  
  Discussant: Ben O'Loughlin (Royal Holloway)
  - The EU: Searching for a New Strategic Narrative
    
    This paper will examine the evolution of the European Union’s strategic narratives. It will argue that this can be understood in terms of three phases: the Cold War, during which the EU’s predecessors narratives where of European as a peace project to be achieved primarily by internal economic integration; the post-Cold War period (the 1990s and 2000s), when the strategic narrative was as of the EU as ‘a force for good in the world’, as enshrined in the 2003 European Security Strategy; and the current period, since the 2010s, when the EU is struggling to define a new strategic narrative for itself (as, it will be argued, reflected in the 2016 EU Global Strategy and the 2022 EU Strategic Compass). The paper will explore the issue of the extent of harmony or dissonance between the EU’s strategic rhetoric and the substance and impact of EU policies and the issue of who are the targets of EU strategic narratives and the extent to which different targets are receptive to EU strategic rhetoric.
    
    Author: Andrew Cottey (University College Cork)
  - Compatibility, Convergence and Contestation: navigating complex narratives and relations between African and European actors in an era of increasing multipolarity
    
    The contemporary international system is in a transitional period towards an uncertain and distinctly multipolar age and within this context the European Union has emerged as a significant voice in the renegotiation a new global order as it pivots towards a more ‘Global EU’. This article examines African narratives and perspectives on the EU’s conceptualisation of an emerging global order and explores the interaction between actors and narratives across both regions. Focusing on the Sahel region as a nexus point for inter-regional interaction this research identifies multiple competing African narratives towards the EU, its role in the global order that both converge conform, and contest the EU’s narrative on the emerging order. As the EU/AU navigate an increasingly multipolar system and increase the frequency of their interaction better understandings of the relational dynamics and points of friction therein presents opportunities for more effective cooperation and inter-regional governance. Utilising content analysis of strategic narratives from EU/AU and their member states supplemented with interviews with policy makers and civil society in both regions, this article contributes to academic and policy discussions on the emerging role of (sub) regional organisations and enhances understandings of navigating the complexity of relational dynamics between diverse parties.
    
    Author: Stephen Murray (Queen's University Belfast)
  - Colonialism and Green Deal Diplomacy: Diverging Narratives on Systemic Injustice, and the Negotiation of Climate Futures
    
    The EU positions itself as a climate leader through policy frameworks such as the European Green Deal to drive decarbonisation and the move towards a circular economy. It has also committed itself to carbon neutrality by 2050. Externally, Green Deal Diplomacy is used to shape foreign policy, and to “advocate for the EU’s vision of the transition towards a sustainable future…and help others to do the same” (Borrell, 2019). The EU’s Climate Diplomacy has the aim to “accelerate a global energy transition that is just, inclusive and leaves no one behind, promoting energy efficiency, renewable technologies and well-functioning global markets” (EEAS, 2021). However, the narratives that shape EU Green Deal Diplomacy policies and tools are embedded within the broader colonial history of resource extraction and “solutions put forward lend themselves to the entrenchment of patterns of socially and ecologically uneven exchange” (Bhambra and Newell, 2022). Through narrative analysis of interviews, and policy and official documents this paper will trace the diverging narratives between EU Green Deal Diplomacy practitioners, climate activists and professionals in Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. It will argue that competing visions of world orders limit the ability of the EU to advocate for a Green Deal that does not acknowledge the parameters of the colonial history in which it is embedded. Policy frameworks require an understanding of colonial histories to develop climate futures that are just and question the very systems of injustice that produced climate change.
    
    Author: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
  - Embedding the EU's Connectivity Narrative within Afro-Eur-Asia's "Interlocking Regional Worlds"
    
    N/A
    
    Author: Emilian Kavalski (Jagiellonian University)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Simulation in IR pedagogy: Promises and perils Rome, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews)
  - Engaging Students in Civil War and Peacebuilding Topics through Lego
    
    Teaching international affairs, particularly topics like civil war and peacebuilding, involves navigating sensitive and complex political landscapes. This paper focuses on using Lego as an innovative pedagogical tool to teach these challenging subjects. The paper uses Object-Based learning to explain the principles and methodology behind using Lego, and its applicability to teaching civil war and peacebuilding. Despite extensive pedagogical research on the advantages of object-based teaching, Lego has not been systematically employed in the political science and IR classroom. The paper will present case studies from our own classroom experiences to show that using Lego provides cheap, quick and effective approaches for hands-on engagement; critical discussions; and including students come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
    
    Authors: Giuditta Fontana (University of Birmingham)* , David Wilcox (University of Birmingham)
  - 'Immersion' in Simulations in teaching spaces
    
    Simulations have long been considered to be a highly effective tool for teaching. As an interactive and experiential learning experience they can engage students in topics but also lead them into new ways to critically analyse readings or evaluate analysis that they develop. However, a central challenge is ensuring a balance between students being 'immersed' in the activity and empowered to take decisions and enact innovative ideas at the same time ensuring they do not 'learn the wrong things'. As a learning experience with profound resonance for the players the former is seen as essential whereas the latter can be a disaster.
    This paper considers the role of immersion in validating a learning experience but also as a risk that students go off track with the intended learning outcomes or even the contents of the module.
    The paper starts from a discussion of what is meant by immersion, the relationship it has to an effective simulation, and then outlines a range of options that can be used to offer guardrails in a classroom.
    
    Author: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews)
  - Using simulation exercises to improve the confidence and competence of Higher Education staff in making referrals to Prevent in the UK
    
    In 2023, William Shawcross published an independent review on the UK’s Prevent strategy, which seeks to prevent people from becoming radicalised and potentially being drawn into terrorism. One of the key findings of this report was a need to improved training among those sectors which are required to identify and refer individuals at risk of radicalisation through the Prevent Duty – local authorities, education, healthcare, police and criminal justice agencies. This paper presents the research conducted at Canterbury Christ Church University to explore how enhanced training through ‘Hydra’ simulation exercise can improve the confidence and competence of Higher Education staff to make necessary and appropriate referrals. Participants completed two surveys - prior to the exercise and following the exercise - which resulted in actionable insights into the effectiveness of this approach. The findings of this research highlighted the positive outcomes of the simulation and resulted in the roll-out of this enhanced training programme across Canterbury Christ Church University.
    
    Author: Erika Brady (Canterbury Christ Church University)
  - Extracting Employability: Closing the Widening Participation Gap in Politics Teaching Through the use of Model Summits
    
    Teaching politics and international relations in Higher Education has shifted in recent years towards a focus on soft skills with employability as a core output alongside traditional subject material. The need to improve graduate outcomes in response to historical tuition fees increase has driven institutional and sector-wide responses that focus on add-ins, or additional support and opportunities for students to gain experience and soft skills, as well as reflective learning on translating these skills into statements of employability.
    
    Yet, embedding a hands-on approach to teaching skills has proven difficult to achieve with reliable results. Instead, degree programmes are often based on assumptions of students' pre-existing skill sets, or an expectation that students will learn academic and professional skills as a byproduct of their degree.
    
    This paper argues that these assumptions are problematic as they avoid focusing on the need to bridge the skills-gap present in students from Widening Participation (WP) backgrounds. In turn, it establishes that subject specific teaching has the potential to integrate this needed focus of skills training through the adoption of model summits both within and alongside core teaching.
    
    The ‘soft skills’ increasingly sought by employers, such as complex problem solving, leadership, public speaking, resilience, and active critical thinking, are core outputs of model summits that drive students towards fast-paced interactive learning. Embracing the use of model summits as both a teaching tool and an alternative mode of assessment presents opportunities for the enhancement of teaching and learning practice. It also provides students with the opportunity to extract key soft skills during their degree studies, potentially bridging the wider attainment gap for WP students.
    
    Authors: Scarlett Vickers (University of Sheffield) , Gregory Stiles (University of Sheffield)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Sovereignty, democracy and protest movements in global politics Lagan, Grand Central Hotel
  
  Sponsor: British International Studies Association
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Louis Stockwell (University of Warwick)
  - Democratic Backsliding in Turkiye: A Case Study of the Gulen Movement
    
    The decline of the Ottoman Empire led to the emergence of the new Turkiye in 1923, guided under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which enthralled the recognition and consolidation of the new structure that emphasized modern and Western orientation. In Turkish democracy, the military acted as the guardian of the constitution and intervened in politics, frequently favouring Kemalist values. The lack of political freedoms and a stable democratic culture fabricated the operation of civil society organizations in a formidable manner. In the late 1970s, the civil society organization called the Gulen Movement served at the grassroots level and provided education and humanitarian aid services. Therefore, the Gulen activity primarily focused on synthesizing the aspects of Modernity and Islam. It emerged as a crucial doctrine for the upsurge of its democratic modernity. With the height of the multi-party system and the onset of the Neo-liberal paradigm, the rise of the Anatolian middle class succoured the magnification of the Gulen movement on one side and new political actors like AKP (Justice and Development Party) on the other. Consequently, the Gulen movement endeavoured to fill the vacuum through its pertaining role in the democratic structure of the modern state of Turkey.
    Therefore, the research aims to analyse the part of the Gulen movement through Gramsci's concept of 'Cultural Hegemony' as a theoretical framework. Through a qualitative approach, this research explains the civil-military relations in Turkiye and the liaison between the Gulen movement and the AKP government post-2003, strengthening and deepening Turkish democracy. Further, the paper will also discuss the response of the AKP government under Erdogan's rule and its measures towards the Gulen movement after 2016, when their relations soured and when Turkish democracy backslides due to increasing authoritarianism.
    
    Author: Rajat Biswakarma (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India)
  - Abstention as the principle of wisdom? Understanding party motivations for direct democratic boycotts as delegitimisation strategies
    
    This paper investigates the puzzle of how and why political actors delegitimise direct democratic processes by calling for boycotts. While previous research has identified factors such as the presence of turnout quorums as potential key tactical motivations for boycotting parties, these studies have mostly been purely experimental designs or focussed on single countries or referendum cases. This paper sheds new light on referendum boycotts, taking a broader comparative perspective by mapping all cases globally where any political actor has called for a boycott since 1990. Using this data, along with multinomial regression analyses, we firstly propose a new typology of referendum boycotts based on the qualitative justifications of boycotting actors. Additionally, we find that contextual factors of democratic status, issue type, and turnout quorums play a significant role in shaping the explicit motivations of boycotting parties. We argue that central to all boycott motivations, however, is the concept of legitimisation.
    
    Author: Louis Stockwell (University of Warwick)
  - Navigating the Resilience and Resistance of Social Movements in the Age of AI Surveillance
    
    The rights to privacy and free speech are dead in the age of digitalisation when AI and algorithmic systems have become increasingly prevalent across both private and public sectors. This paper critically examines the following question: ‘How can we, ordinary civilians, remain resilient and resist injustices in the age of AI?’. First, I discuss why the right to privacy and free speech are ‘dead’ in the age of AI, providing a critique of how the ambiguous definition and patriarchal nature of the 'national security' exclusion clause is used to surveil people. Second, I uncover the concerning trend of suppression and censorship on social movements through the activists' experiences in the Free Palestine movement in the EU. Using a relational lens, this paper investigates the collaboration between authorities and big tech companies who utilise AI as tools for 24/7 mass surveillance, highlighting the colonial legacy and capitalism's role in these relationships. Finally, I argue that both academia and the policymakers must shift the conversation from identifying and reacting to potential human rights violations to developing frameworks that scrutinise abuses of 'national security' by authorities, demanding greater transparency and accountability when such a clause is invoked.
    
    Author: Yee Ting Aires Chung (Tallinn University, Estonia)
  - Resistance, Hope, and Law during and after the 2024 Bangladesh Protests
    
    This paper examines how the hopes generated by mass protest movements for rights, justice, and equality fare in the post-protest period. Perhaps because we live in what can seem like “hopeless times” of authoritarianism, climate emergency, and inequality, there has been a resurgent attention to hope – in activism, arts, and politics. Yet, the role of hope in and after protest movements, such as Bangladesh’s 2024 Student-People’s Uprising, remains under-studied. Under Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year premiership, Bangladesh gained a reputation for democratic backsliding, corruption, and digital repression. In June 2024, students took to the streets after the Supreme Court reinstated a discriminatory quota system for government jobs. Although hundreds were killed, the protest transformed into a mass movement that forced Hasina’s resignation and ushered in Nobel prize-winning development economist Mohammed Yunus as interim head. Our paper analyses post-protest hopes for accountability, constitutional change, and social justice in Bangladesh as revealed through focus groups in Dhaka and Chittagong. It also discusses the role of arts and participatory arts-based methods, as well as the larger political economies of hope in Bangladesh. In these ways, our paper makes a wider contribution to the growing literature on “constructive resistance” – that is, the prefiguring or enacting of alternatives to existing power – which, as Roland Bleiker (2021) argues, “chang[es] how we – as collectives – think and imagine the world differently.”
    
    Authors: Janjira Sombatpoonsiri (GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Germany)* , Nilanjana Premaratna (Newcastle University) , Lars Waldorf (Northumbria University, UK)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / The Politics and Practice of Human Rights and Humanitarianism Penthouse Suite, Europa Hotel
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
  - Assessing the Impact of OHCHR Field Operations: Decision-Making and Effectiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa
    
    This article examines the impact of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Sub-Saharan Africa through its regional and stand-alone offices. In recent years, host countries like Uganda have increasingly questioned OHCHR’s effectiveness and withdrawn support, citing their capacity to manage human rights independently. Despite OHCHR’s decades-long presence, its impact at the ground level remains underexplored. Acknowledging OHCHR’s non-random selective office placement, this study proposes an empirical framework for analyzing its decision-making and operational processes. Using a novel hand-collected sample including the universe of OHCHR's local and region offices openings and closures from 2000 to 2022, I document that they are often established in stable, less violent countries with lower human rights and democracy records, with stand-alone offices frequently located in resource-rich, economically underdeveloped nations.
    Although human rights scores appear to decline following office openings, this pattern reflects selection bias rather than actual deterioration. Once this issue is properly controlled for, data reveal that regional offices improve local human rights conditions, while stand-alone offices show no significant impact. These findings contribute to the debate on OHCHR’s strategic challenges and effectiveness.
    
    Author: Cristina Conte (Australian National University)
  - Corruption and Human Rights
    
    Since the late 1990s, corruption has become a buzzword in public and policy discourse towards developing countries. Since the emergence of the discourse, corruption has been portrayed as a hurdle for appropriately and/or even fairly allocating resources for international development. In the last decade, corruption has been increasingly featured as a human rights issue. This paper investigates the conflation of corruption and human rights in the EU. Over the past few years, the EU has started adopting a human rights-based approach to corruption for both member-states and third countries. Yet, the cultural insensitivity and ideological framing of the current approach augment problems in development and democratisation policies. The inadequate understanding of corruption makes it harder to promote development/democracy because it does not fully grasp the complexity of the phenomenon. Hence, the aim of this paper is twofold: i) to explore the ideological and political underpinnings in the understanding of corruption as a human rights issue; and ii) to explore the impact of such approach in policymaking in relation to development and democracy.
    
    Author: Ilia Xypolia (University of Aberdeen)
  - Caught between principles and politics: UNRWA and the humanitarian aid battlefield in the Gaza War
    
    In the geopolitically fraught terrain of Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Near East (UNRWA), has long relied on humanitarian principles to secure operational space. The 2023 Gaza War, while devastating for Palestinians, has also had consequences for UNRWA, which has been targeted militarily and politically. To what extent, and for what purposes, has UNRWA articulated core humanitarian principles in its public statements during the Gaza War? Evidence is drawn from a quantitative content analysis of public statements from UNRWA, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Amnesty International (AI) to compare humanitarian and human rights discourses. A census sample of press releases, reports, and official statements from the first 10 months of the war was analyzed. The research finds that UNRWA was more likely to articulate humanitarian principles, particularly humanity and impartiality, than AI and HRW, whose discourse was more politicized. UNRWA’s use of these principles spiked following key events that threatened UNRWA’s physical and organizational survival, including after Israel’s allegations that UNRWA staffers participated in the October 7 attacks. This research provides deeper insight into how humanitarian organizations respond to reputational and operational threats and how humanitarian principles might be employed strategically to diminish such threats.
    
    Author: Denis Kennedy (College of the Holy Cross, USA)
  - Severing International-Domestic Links: State Repression Aimed at Inhibiting the United Nations Human Rights System
    
    State repression aimed at preventing citizens from sharing information or expertise with UN human rights bodies is a novel but important form of repression. In UN vocabulary this is known as “intimidation and reprisals for cooperation with the United Nations in the field of human rights.” This paper argues that repression aimed at individuals or groups trying to share information with the UN is meant to silence critics of the state in question and therefore manipulate the human rights record of that state as documented by the UN. By punishing individuals who work with the UN the state aims to sever links between the domestic sphere and international visibility and, ultimately, accountability. The objective is a sanitized version of the state’s human rights performance shorn of dissenting voices. This is a common strategy: the NGO International Service for Human Rights has created a dataset from these reports that records details of over 800 events between 2010 and 2022. This paper evaluates the determinants of this repressive strategy. Using Heckman selection model and zero-inflated negative binomial model to account for selection bias and model count data with an excess of zero counts, the paper hypothesizes four logics that can explain variation in states’ usage of UN-focused repression. Two logics are domestic and pertain to the nature of domestic repression and political regime type. Two logics are international and have to do with voting patterns at the UN and representation in UN human rights bodies. After evaluating the determinants of UN-focused state repression, the paper turns to a case study to assess the effectiveness of the strategy: repression by Venezuelan authorities of individuals and groups attempting to work with the UN human rights machinery.
    
    Author: Alexander Dukalskis (University College Dublin)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / The global dynamics of counterterrorism Room 3, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group
  
  Convener: CST Working group
  
  Chair: Marine Gueguin (Leeds Beckett University)
  - Preventative Detention and Internment: The evolution and folley of anti-terrorism incarceration
    
    A critical analysis of historical and contemporary use of preventative detention and internment as tools in anti-terrorism efforts offers some particular insights into their ineffectiveness. By analyzing the evolution, application, and the controversies surrounding their effectiveness and ethical implications, this work lays bare the folley of such policies. It explores key case studies, from wartime internment practices to post-9/11 detention policies, highlighting how governments have justified these measures in the name of national security and anti-teroroism. Finally, this analysis will critiques the long-term consequences of such practices, including their impact on civil liberties, the rule of law, and public trust.
    
    Author: Ashley Carver (Saint Mary's University)
  - Global silences as privilege: The international community’s white silence on far-right terrorism
    
    Silences are not only absences in the spoken discourse or gaps in the discursive texture of international politics. They are important nodes of this texture and, as such, they constitute the political too. The said and the unsaid may work together to reify knowledge and shape international politics. Starting from this idea, this article scrutinizes global counter-terrorism as a discursive formation, composed of a spoken and an unspoken sphere. Within the silent dimension, the work focuses specifically on the silences in far-right terrorism and extremism. Scrutinizing global counter-terrorism as a racialized formation, the article argues that these silences are produced and reproduced by whiteness. Within the international community’s debates, whiteness gives rise to two kinds of silence – silence as the unspoken and the spoken as silencing. Examining them through the prism of whiteness, the article shows that these silences allow the maintenance of white privilege. This is the privilege of not being identified as a terrorist Other and not becoming the object of counter-terrorism measures, while having this privilege silenced and hidden. This work thus shows that, as gears of discursive formations, silences are racialized and may have colors – in this case, the color of white privilege.
    
    Author: Alice Martini (Complutense University of Madrid)
  - Counterterrorism, the Prohibition of Torture and the Undoing of Human Rights Knowledge
    
    This paper analyses the links between the production of knowledge on human rights violations and broader contestation around security, counterterrorism and human rights. While research on norm contestation has produced important findings on the strength of global norms, I argue that this literature would benefit from a greater focus on degrees of contestation (not types) and how states often seek to avoid substantive contestation around ‘strong’ jus cogens norms such as the prohibition of torture. The paper suggests that an analysis of the political struggle for the command of credible information on human rights is necessary for a fuller understanding of norm contestation dynamics. This argument is developed though an analysis of human rights organisations’ efforts to highlight Spain’s use of torture during its campaign against the Basque militant group, ETA. In response, Spanish officials used denial and what I call ‘inverse shaming’ to undermine the credibility of their accusers. The analysis shows how these rhetorical moves can effectively impoverish public debate on torture and enable the continuation of human rights violations. The paper demonstrates that (non)knowledge production and different degrees of contestation have important implications for human rights, counterterrorism and the relative strength of international norms in diverse local contexts.
    
    Author: Frank Foley (King's College London)
  - The Transnational Reach of White Supremacist Music: Strategic Responses to Hate-Driven Propaganda
    
    Our paper investigates government responses to combat hate music, focusing on White power music and its associated merchandise, which represent some of the most visible forms of right-wing extremist propaganda. The term White power identifies the music’s ideology and signals affiliations with various underground, nationalist, and internationalist movements. Spanning multiple genres—from punk and metal to folk—the music has been actively used by over 500 bands worldwide to recruit and radicalise young people, supporting both national and transnational extremist groups. With increased internet access and social media, this number continues to grow, enabling extremists to reach broad and diverse audiences across national boundaries.
    
    The research examines how this music and merchandise are marketed to youth through digital platforms. Extremist groups have shifted from closed forums and exclusive mail-order systems to widely accessible online platforms and mainstream digital stores, allowing them to bypass traditional restrictions and reach larger audiences. Despite hate music being illegal in certain countries, it remains readily available to buy, sell, and trade on multiple global platforms, making it easily accessible. With provocative lyrics and merchandise designed to resonate with young people, these sales strategies not only facilitate indoctrination but also provide a primary funding source.
    
    Through comparative analysis, our paper explores how various governments respond to the challenges posed by the global spread of hate music. This includes examining legislative measures such as banning extremist groups and restricting hate music distribution. In addition to these legislative actions, our paper investigates other countermeasures, such as public awareness campaigns and enhanced digital monitoring strategies, to assess their effectiveness in reducing the appeal of hate music among at-risk youth. Our paper aims to provide insights into the comprehensive strategies required to mitigate the ideological and financial impacts of White power music on society.
    
    Authors: Bradley Galloway (Ontario Tech University)* , Jamie Noulty (Queen's University, Canada)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Theoretical approaches to peacebuilding Room 6, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group
  
  Convener: PKPBG Working group
  
  Chair: Dylan O'Driscoll (Coventry University)
  - What is the point of reconciliation? Finding a role for the concept in peace research and practice
    
    A large literature on reconciliation has emerged in response to political transitions since the 1990s, yet the value of the concept within peace and conflict studies is unclear. Definitions are contested, impressionistic, or overlap with other concepts, while ‘reconciliation’ remains politically controversial in many conflict-affected societies. This paper considers the four leading understandings of reconciliation: reconciliation as peacebuilding, reconciliation as transitional justice, reconciliation as forgiveness, and reconciliation as identity change. Each is assessed according to whether it is 1) conceptually coherent, and 2) likely to be credible to people in conflict. The paper argues that by restricting reconciliation’s meaning to a modified version of the fourth understanding – reconciliation as transformed social identity – the term can hold a distinct meaning in the peace studies field and direct a clear research agenda, as well as avoid unnecessary political criticism and misunderstanding.
    
    Author: David Mitchell (Trinity College Dublin at Belfast)
  - The Roads to Power? Chinese Foreign Aid, Spatial Practices, and Authoritarian Statebuilding in Africa
    
    Since the 1990s, peacebuilding debates have explored the appropriate rules and institutions for governing post-conflict states. With the decline of liberal statebuilding, authoritarian powers have increasingly engaged in post-conflict peacebuilding, employing distinct strategies to expand their influence in the Global South. Contrary to liberal expectations, many states have adopted authoritarian statebuilding models characterised by conflict management, domestic hegemony, strategic manipulation of both Western and non-Western donors, and a high modernist agenda involving large-scale infrastructure construction. This paper examines the impact of international authoritarian influence on domestic statebuilding, focusing on how Chinese-funded transportation networks shape state strategies in Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. Drawing on Michael Mann’s state theory, it conceptualises the infrastructure-statebuilding nexus, arguing that Chinese-backed infrastructure can strengthen state presence in critical regions, support economic growth, enhance state capacity for repression, and enable societal penetration through expanded administrative infrastructure. This paper contributes to current discussions on the global rise of authoritarian powers, authoritarian statebuilding in post-conflict settings, and the infrastructural perspective in international relations.
    
    Author: Yong He (University of Exeter)
  - Simultaneity of Conflicting Values in Northern Irish Cross-Community Work
    
    In this paper I approach the existence of seemingly conflicting goals and values in cross-community activists and participants in Belfast. The paper specifically concerns itself with involved individuals who were previously active participants in the troubles and have now chosen to be active as community activists within cross-community cooperation projects or partake in these projects consistently. In their work the thus promote values of cooperation, collaboration and understanding that seemingly clash with simultaneously held believes about the future of Northern Ireland as well as their previous involvement in the troubles.
    The paper is based in ethnographic research in Belfast and an analysis through grounded theory. It theorises preliminary finding from participant observation, interviews and workshops with predominantly men who are and were organised in paramilitary structures and ex-prisoners as well as members of cross-community projects.
    Those men tend to articulate such seemingly mutually exclusive values on a regular basis and thereby give voice to the complexity of their everyday. In this paper I attempt to make sense of these apparent discrepancies through different explanations such as agonistic peace and cognitive dissonance but mainly through an appreciation of the impossibility and simultaneity of the everyday in Northern Ireland.
    
    Author: Lena Merkle (Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany)
  - The illiberal victor’s peace in Iraq: statebuilding, peacebuilding, and sustainability
    
    What is sustainable peace and what does it look like? This paper investigates the question in the Iraqi context following the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2017, where successive governments have not addressed many of the root causes that led to the group’s emergence but rather consolidated a victor’s peace. Key grievances such as corruption, unemployment, the weak rule of law, militia impunity, and insecurity remain, hallmarks of what Smith et al (2020) refer to as illiberal peace and others refer to as state ‘weakness’. Despite this, Iraq appears relatively stable. Statebuilding and peacebuilding, long considered mutually dependent in liberal thought, remain co-constitutive but operate differently in the Iraqi context. Since 2017, both processes have largely been bottom-up rather than top-down and negotiated rather than implemented according to a pre-conceived normative design. The Iraqi reality challenges conventional notions of boundaries between formal and informal actors, with multiple centres and networks of power from militia to tribes that variously compete with, cooperate with, and represent the state. Rather than a neo-Weberian model, Iraq seems more akin to what Dodge (2018) and Zubaida (1989), drawing on Bourdieu’s work, have described as a political field. This paper substantiates arguments around the need for locally focused grassroots peacebuilding which embraces alternative conceptions of political order to the traditional state, in line with Clement’s (2008) notion of grounded legitimacy and Menkhaus’s (2007) mediated state. It argues for the need to understand key units of international relations such as the state differently, offers original empirical analysis, and considers implications for future peacebuilding practice. The analysis draws on a book manuscript currently in progress, based on over 50 original interviews with Iraqi and international stakeholders.
    
    Author: Jacob Eriksson (University of York)
  - Developing a framework for integrating intangible cultural heritage safeguarding and peacebuilding
    
    Recent years have seen an increased interest in the peace potential of cultural heritage safeguarding activities, particularly in contexts that have been impacted by protracted violence or social conflict. Most scholarship so far has focussed on the ways that interventions to protect or restore tangible cultural heritage in the wake of conflict might contribute to building sustainable peace. Far less consideration has been given to the role of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) protection in achieving this goal, perhaps because of existing biases towards tangible heritage protection, and the difficulty of measuring and reporting on ICH initiatives in a donor-driven context. Building on the experience of an initiative to protect conflict-affected heritage in the occupied Palestinian territory, we propose a model for integrating approaches to ICH safeguarding with peacebuilding. This model identifies three key actions in safeguarding ICH – recording, transmitting and building capacity – that contribute to four domains of peacebuilding (security, reconciliation and justice, socio-economic foundations and political). Our model, we argue, provides a framework through which the peace potential of activities to safeguard ICH can better be conceptualised and understood, thus enhancing the ability of peacebuilding interventions to take a more integrative view of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding, and vice versa.
    
    Authors: Elly Harrowell (Coventry University) , Aurélie Broeckerhoff (Coventry University) , Mahmoud Soliman (Coventry University)* , Laura Sulin (Coventry University)* , Marwan Darweish (Coventry University)*
- 16:45 → 18:15
  
  FR 20 Roundtable / Understanding Identities in the Middle East: The Role of Structure and Agency Room 7, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Western perspectives on identities in the Middle East often lack nuance. Much academic research and media frame these identities as victims of authoritarianism, with limited or no agency. This roundtable brings together the voices of five researchers from the region to offer a more sophisticated view. It explores how identities have evolved under colonial and authoritarian structures and how they have been shaped and reshaped by local and regional media, social movements, and neoliberal development paradigms. Using various epistemological approaches, the speakers unpack the evolution and formation of identities while accounting for the structure and/or agency in their assertion. By situating their analyses within historical and social contexts, they demonstrate how identities have evolved and what acts people have taken to reclaim them in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Their contributions challenge the reductionist views prevalent in academia and media, offering complex insights about identities in the Middle East.
  
  Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group
  
  Chair: Zeidon Alkinani (Georgetown University in Qatar)
  
  Participants: Abdulla Al-Kalisy (University of St. Andrews) , Ghadir Awad (University of Michigan) , Wassim Nabouls (University of St Andrews) , Zeidon Alkinani (Georgetown University in Qatar)
- 16:45 → 18:15
  FR 20 Panel / Why Wars Occur and How They End? Minor Hall, Assembly Buildings Conference Centre
  
  Sponsor: War Studies Working Group
  
  Convener: Nick Caddick (Anglia Ruskin University)
  
  Chair: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
  - When Do Defeated Aggressors Initiate Revanchist Wars? An Outline of Revanchism Theory
    
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    Author: Mateusz Ambrożek (Vistula University, Warsaw)
  - The Cycle of War Legitimization: A Dynamic Approach to Justifying Wars in the 21st Century
    
    This paper presents an original theoretical model, “The Cycle of War Legitimization,” which explores the dynamic evolution of justifications for armed conflicts in the 21st century. Unlike traditional linear approaches, this model captures the iterative nature of legitimizing war, structured around four key phases: initial justification, conflict dynamics, social reactions, and post-conflict evaluations. Each phase reflects the interplay between moral, political, and social dimensions, highlighting how these factors influence the shifting legitimacy of military interventions over time. By integrating qualitative content analysis, comparative case studies, narrative analysis, and quantitative data evaluation, the model provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex processes that underlie war legitimization. To demonstrate its applicability, the model is applied to major contemporary conflicts, including the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, and Ukraine. These cases illustrate how justifications, initially rooted in moral or political objectives, evolve as conflicts progress and how international and societal reactions impact the perceived legitimacy of war efforts. The analysis also includes the role of media narratives, public opinion, and international responses, showing how they contribute to the construction and deconstruction of legitimacy. This model contributes to the literature on modern conflict studies by offering an adaptable tool for researchers and practitioners in international relations. It provides valuable insights into the dynamics of war justification, serving as a critical resource for analysing the complexities of conflict legitimacy in an increasingly interconnected global arena.
    
    Author: Ioan-Mihai Alexandrescu (Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania)
  - Gripen, Gretas and Green Militarism: Challenging the Military Green Transition
    
    Along the logic of less fuel, more fight – decarbonising defense to reduce emissions but not missions – military sectors across Europe and North America are presenting military practice as a driver of climate action and centring the arms industry as a guarantor of sustainable development. What critics have parodically described as a ‘military green transition’ toward “wind-powered Gripen, piloted by Gretas”, referring to the fuel-hungry fighter jet Gripen and climate activist Greta Thunberg. This irony is well placed. The trend towards greening is paralleled by a historical upsurge in military spending, weapons production and the re-centralisation of militarism in national security doctrines. Military sectors are both deepening their fossil fuel lock-in and increasing their reliance on mineral extraction to join the green energy transition; ever-intensifying war and militarism’s dependence on extractivism.
    
    In this paper, I capture the ongoing militarisation of ecological and social (eco-social) challenges through the concept of ‘green militarism’. Developing a geopolitical ecology of green militarism, I juxtapose the promises (meaning) and practices (materiality) of the military’s emergence as climate actor – engaged in climate governance – with the underlying material realities of the military as ecological actor – sustained by and productive of detrimental eco-social conditions. The paper interrogates the consequences of green militarism for eco-social justice struggles and foregrounds its disruption by resistance movements tackling militarism and extractivism as joint harms. Doing so, I identify the geopolitical interests that drive military climate action, along with the struggles over meaning and material resources that mark global efforts toward either a military green or an eco-socially just transition.
    
    Author: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)

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BISA 2025 Conference

The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel

The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel

The Exchange, Library and Piano Bar at the Europa Hotel