BISA 2026 Conference
Welcome to the event management area for #BISA2026. Here you can register for our conference in Brighton. We look forward to welcoming you at BISA 2026.
-
-
6:15 PM
→
7:45 PM
TU02 / Public lecture by Ilan Pappe. Although this is open to all conference delegates you need to register in advance to attend at: https://www.bisa.ac.uk/events/public-lecture-gaza-epicentre-breakdown-international-order.This public lecture is sponsored by the University of Brighton's Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics
-
6:15 PM
→
7:45 PM
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Roundtable / (Re-)Building our Nuclear IQ: Scholars and Practitioners in Conversation
This roundtable brings together diverse experts within the nuclear field to explore how the United Kingdom and its allies can better navigate a rapidly changing nuclear order. Key issues addressed by this discussion include the relationship between nuclear and conventional platforms, the politics of nuclear deterrence and disarmament, and the implications of evolving Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. The session furthers efforts to build a “community of practice” for sustained dialogue between scholars and practitioners in the Third Nuclear Age.
Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupChair: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)Participants: Jack Crawford (RUSI) , Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow) , Arun Dawson (Kings College London) , Andrew Dorman (Chatham House) , Alice Spilman (University of Leicester) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / A Widening and More Complex Security Agenda for EuropeSponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: ESWG Working groupChair: ESWG Working groupDiscussant: ESWG Working group
-
In this article, I investigate how embodied acts of vulnerability reflect a deliberate and agentic mode of security politics (Butler 2016, 22) that is practiced by non-state actors. The Securitization Studies literature continues to privilege state actors as securitizing actors, elevate speech acts above other modes of securitizing practices, and prioritize state-led security practices with insufficient attention to how non-state actors address engage in this space. Alternative, embodied modes of constituting threats, insecurities, referents, and security practices remain underexplored. Drawing on examples such as direct actions, hunger strikes and protest marches in Australia and the EU, I conceptualize such embodied acts as a mode of security politics where threats, insecurities and security references are co-constituted via the (im)mobilization of the body in particular ways, and whereby the embodiment of vulnerability along these lines is itself a security act, i.e. a response to the threat or insecurities being articulated.
Author: Monika Barthwal-Datta (UNSW Sydney) -
The proliferation of border technologies, particularly data extraction and algorithmic processing of data, has raised public and scholarly concern about discrimination, rights violations, and the amplification of violence for people on the move. Marketed as deterministic and ubiquitous improvements to the status quo, these innovations have been criticised for their technosolutionist approach to security ‘problems’. This paper proposes to illuminate the political dynamics of ‘techno-solutionism’ and develop a more specific intervention about security problems and technical fixes by exploring how corporate actors formulate problems and solutions in their patent applications and granted patents. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of problematisation, we analyse patents owned by nine companies holding contracts for existing and new EU border control and migration management databases. Focusing on biometrics and other AI technologies, we show how patents articulate trivial, insignificant, and small problems that nonetheless necessitate major, significant, and massive technological solutions. Therefore, we argue that it is crucial to shift from a general critique of techno-solutionism to a more precise interrogation of the specificities of problematisations by various actors, including the contradictions between the corporate identification of problems and the justification of solutions.
Authors: Claudia Aradau (King's College London) , Charlie Ackland -
Recent geopolitical developments, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, US ‘tariff wars’, and, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have put questions of supply security back on the agenda for European countries. This new focus on supply security is perhaps particularly visible in the area of food supply, and stands in sharp contrast to the de-securitization of food that followed the end of the Cold War. This paper takes a closer look at Sweden, which is a particularly illustrative case, where the entry into EU in the 90’s saw previous emphasis on preparedness and stockpiling policies as part of total defence, turn into food policies that emphasised international competitiveness and just-in-time distribution. The recent turn ‘back’ to total defence strategies include food preparedness and draw a lot of its vocabulary from the historical total defence tradition. But it remains unclear to what extent food supply really is becoming part of the new security agenda. In the paper, we seek to understand the dynamics of food as a security problem. Using Swedish parliamentary data covering the last 100 years, the development of food as a security issue in the Swedish national context is analysed, capturing periods of both securitization and de-securitization of food. By understanding more about how food security has been part of defence and preparedness policy debates historically, we contribute to a better understanding of the conditions affecting the current state of food security and preparedness policy in Sweden, which hopefully can inform the broader understanding of this issue in the European countries.
Author: Johanna Pettersson Fürst (Department of Government, Uppsala University) -
I argue that addressing the vulnerabilities of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and their value chains benefits from a comprehensive understanding of resilience. In this paper I explore the threat landscape and resilience practices linked to SMRs from a geopolitical perspective in the context of green electrification. I utilise the concept of ‘risk’ to capture the change in our understanding of ‘threat’ as something calculable with a means-end rationality to something less concrete and unforeseen, demanding preparedness and planning. This also broadens the scope of threat types considered, including physical, informational, cognitive, and social. For resilience, I incorporate a comprehensive understanding to capture the implications of disruptions in SMR operations on society, economy, and nature. This turns attention to the means and practices required to maintain resilience at a social - rather than mere plant or grid - level. I utilize these concepts to guide the qualitative content analysis of 45 scientific articles and expert documents focusing on SMR vulnerabilities. The analysis provides a broader understanding of the threat landscape of SMRs compared to existing literature, sheds light on required resilience practices, and existing knowledge gaps. It also provides a comprehensive approach to the analysis of risk and resilience, looking at these from an inherently social perspective.
Key words: geopolitics, threat, risk, vulnerability, resilience, small modular reactors, green electrificationAuthor: Anna Claydon (Tampere University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Africa: Conflict and CooperationSponsor: Africa and International Studies Working GroupConvener: AISWGChair: Manu Lekunze (University of Aberdeen)
-
Ranching is widely promoted as a technical solution to the protracted farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria. While successful in other contexts, the policy has encountered significant resistance within Nigeria, raising questions about its applicability in this particular multiethnic, politically polarised society. This paper contributes to rethinking international studies by challenging dominant assumptions about conflict resolution and governance in the Global South. Drawing on 69 in-depth interviews with farmers, herders, and peacebuilding practitioners, this paper examines how ethnic identity shapes the perception and reception of ranching policies. For some communities, ranching symbolises modernity and sustainable land use; while for others, it is viewed as an exclusionary measure, disproportionately affecting certain ethnic groups and reinforcing historic grievances. This paper argues that in plural societies, even neutral-sounding technical policies can become politicised, ethnically coded, and conflict-generating. The findings challenge the assumption that conflict resolution can be achieved solely through technical fixes, and instead call for more inclusive, participatory, and context-sensitive policy design that moves beyond Western-centric frameworks. The paper contributes to broader debates on securitisation, policy framing, and governance in multiethnic states.
Author: Rebecca Ebenezer-Abiola (University of Aberdeen) -
This paper examines the political risks and implications of maritime boundary disputes on the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Guinea. Drawing on Douglas M. Johnston’s functionalist theory of boundary-making at oceans, the study contrasts cooperative approaches to security (positive security) with the realist paradigm’s emphasis on negative security. This study rethinks maritime boundary disputes in Africa through political risk analysis, presenting a new framework for understanding how territorial uncertainties shape investment, governance, and regional security in the offshore hydrocarbons sector. The key contribution is applying the concept of political risk to explore conflict—especially over maritime boundaries—and cooperation, such as joint development zones. This approach extends beyond traditional conflict analysis; rather than merely identifying the main actors, strategies, and scenarios, it focuses on how these disputes impede the development of the region’s oil and gas industry. Although the topic is thematic, it also questions whether current paradigms, methodologies, and concepts in political science (negative security, conflict analysis, anarchical system…) remain relevant and capable of addressing future challenges, or it’s time to integrate new concepts (political risk). Employing a qualitative methodology based primarily on secondary sources, the paper identifies three main political risks for the hydrocarbon sector: legal uncertainty over sovereign rights, weak protection of corporate interests (cases of Angola and Equatorial Guinea), and restricted access to offshore resources (case of DRC), compounded by maritime security challenges. Focusing on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, the paper argues that political risk should not be understood solely as an investor concern but also as a method and concept in political science and international studies for examining the evolving relationship between sovereignty, resource governance, and regional stability.
Key words: political risk, energy, security, maritime boundaries, Gulf of Guinea, Africa
Author: Khadija ALAOUI (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P)) -
How does Saudi Arabia’s footprint in West Africa reflect and reshape patterns of power, partnership, and uncertainty in the Global South? Focusing on development, security, and geostrategic cooperation under its Vision 2030, the paper explores how the Kingdom’s engagements with Ghana and Senegal, supplemented by comparative insights from Nigeria, illuminate the opportunities and tensions of South–South diplomacy in a multipolar age. Drawing on field interviews, policy analysis, and project-level evidence, it traces how Saudi initiatives in infrastructure, finance, and stabilization efforts interact with local priorities and competing external actors. The paper uses the framework of dialogic soft power to examine how attraction and legitimacy are co-produced rather than imposed. It proposes that Saudi–West African relations offer a microcosm of the Global South’s adaptive strategies in the face of global uncertainty. It contributes to ongoing debates on middle-power agency, developmental geopolitics, and the ethics of cooperation beyond traditional donor–recipient hierarchies.
Author: Muhammad Dan Suleiman (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals) -
This paper examines how resilience is understood and enacted by local actors in response to violent extremism in Northern Nigeria. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, it demonstrates that resilience is conceived not merely as a reaction to violence, but as a proactive moral and social project grounded in amāna (trust) and ibāda (service to God). Traditional and religious leaders engaged in peacebuilding understand their authority as moral rather than coercive, rooted in social legitimacy, historical memory, and everyday practices of preaching, education, and moral guidance. Their counter-narratives resonate not simply because they reject extremist ideology, but because they align with lived realities, communal values, and the socio-economic interdependence of community life. By conceptualising resilience as a relational and performative practice, the paper shows how moral authority functions as a form of local agency within hybrid governance contexts. It critiques top-down approaches that treat resilience as a technical and one-size-fits-all policy, and instead advances a nuanced understanding of resilience as a social process enacted through everyday practices of trusted actors. In doing so, the paper contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship reframing resilience not as a static attribute or the product of external intervention, but as both a capacity and a process shaped by local agency, cooperation, social ties, and community resources.
Author: Ibrahim Machina Mohammed (PhD Student)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Assessing the Emerging Illiberal Order for TradeSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: James Scott (King's College London)Chair: James Scott (King's College London)
-
This paper develops the concept of ontogenerative power to explain how new domains of global governance come into being. It traces the relational, creative process that enabled the emergence and successful negotiation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). While research on the GATS’s origins remains limited, this study builds on the seminal work of Drake and Nicolaidis (1992) on epistemic communities and draws on extensive archival and interview analysis of services discussions from the 1960s up to and through the Uruguay Round negotiations. The analysis shows how countries, international institutions/secretariat, and external business and academic stakeholders engaged in ontogenerative power dynamics —transforming what was once seen as a non-tradable activity into a governed, rules-based global regime for services trade.
Author: Lauren Sheppard (King's College London) -
In response to escalating geopolitical conflict, countries are increasingly attuned to the use and design of export control policies. What explains the varied designs of national export control regimes? This paper uses New Zealand and Australia as comparative cases to explore the processes through which export control regimes are adapted to changing geoeconomic circumstances and the role of firms in these dynamics. While each country is export-dependent and closely aligned with the United States, their export control regimes have recently diverged. Australia enacted sweeping legislation in 2024, yet New Zealand has pursued incremental revisions in its export control legislation reforms despite political awareness of its deficiencies. Empirically, we draw on legislative debates, public comments, government reviews, and interviews with both political and business elites. Drawing from scholarship on the securitized political economy, we show how the elevation of human rights (rather than military) concerns can limit the ability of policymakers to pursue large-scale reforms and amplify the influence of businesses in the process. Amid growing investment in AI, chip, and technology development, our work offers insight into the role of business interests in the adaptation of export control regimes and the conditions under which trade is securitized.
Authors: Andrea Lawlor (McMaster University)* , Tyler Girard (Purdue University) -
The neoliberal emphasis on minimal state involvement in the economy, which has
dominated mainstream economic thinking from the 1980s, has come under
increasing challenge. The growth of sovereign wealth funds, the expansion of state
owned enterprises, and the re-emergence of state-led industrial strategy has
generated a renewed focus on the active role of the state and the rise (or return) of
what is often called state capitalism. This paper examines the reaction to this
phenomenon within key institutions of global economic governance. While existing
work in this regard has focused on the bastions of neoliberal thinking, namely the
World Bank, IMF and WTO (Alami and Taggart 2024), this study turns to UNCTAD as
a significant yet understudied case. Given UNCTAD’s historical association with
structuralist economics and advocacy of state-led development, it provides a useful
counterpoint. Through a discourse analysis of key policy documents, we compare
UNCTAD’s approach to state capitalism with that of the WTO across central trade-
related policy domains. This comparison offers insight into how these institutions
conceptualise and operationalize state capitalism in line with their respective norms,
mandates, and institutional histories.Authors: Erin Hannah (King's University College at the University of Western Ontario) , James Scott (King's College London)* , Julia Calvert (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Authoritarianism, democratisation and PeaceSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: David Curran (Coventry University)
-
Coloniality of Peacelessness: Comparing Colombia’s Liberal and Turkey’s Authoritarian Pacifications
Contemporary critical peace studies have produced influential currents such as critique of liberal peace showing the limits of mimicking western state-building, advances by hybrid/everyday peace including the agency of the local, and decolonial peace showing how our imagination of peace is originally colonial. Each one of these currents exposes the limits of state-centric peacebuilding and the persistence of violence in “post-conflict” contexts differently, yet despite these advances, the field still falls short of grasping how the modern nation-state remains structurally integrated with the coloniality of power in reproducing violence. Through a comparative historical analysis of two most different conflict settings—Colombia and Turkey—this article examines how processes of state formation and nation-building have been intertwined with conflict dynamics from their inception. It argues that state-centrism is not merely problematic for its legitimation of (structural) violence, but because it continuously re-enacts colonial forms of domination under postcolonial elite control, thereby rendering violence interminable. In this way, peacebuilding reproduces coloniality of power, and hence, peacelessness. The analysis first traces how colonial logics embedded in the very notions of “nationalism” and the “nation-state” shaped both contexts. It then compares how these logics governed questions of indigeneity in Colombia through mestizo nationalism, and minoritisation in Turkey through Turkish nationalism, each provoking societal insecurity in different levels to sustain elite rule. Finally, by contrasting post-agreement Colombia (often advanced as a liberal peace success) with post-2015 Turkey (marked by authoritarian pacification), the article shows that both reproduce the colonial genealogy of state violence through new modalities of control. In doing so, it calls for a rethinking of peace beyond both the state and the coloniality of power that it embodies.
Author: Jan Yasin Sunca (ULB - Univeristé libre de Bruxelles) -
This paper investigates international election observation as a transnational field in which liberal ordering logics are enacted, reproduced, and contested. Drawing on a Bourdieu-inspired practice approach, I analyze how election observers produce “electoral truth”. Based on participant observation on OSCE and EU missions between 2022 and 2025, 17 interviews with election observers, and a career trajectory database, the study traces how hierarchies, tacit norms, and reporting routines sustain the field’s epistemic authority through narratives of neutrality and technicality. Election observation, I argue, embodies a domain characterized by asymmetric professionalization, stratified authority, and the continuous negotiation of legitimacy across transnational and national boundaries. The doxic belief in the superiority and universality of a Schumpeterian-Dahlian model of liberal democracy provides coherence to the field, while moments of interpretive struggle - within missions and across organizations - reveal its endogenous contestedness. As such, election observation is not merely a technical exercise but a socio-politically embedded practice that illuminates how global actors sustain and contest liberal ordering on a micro-level. By reinterpreting election observation through a sociological lens, the paper contributes to IPS debates on transnational fields and the micro-politics of liberal international ordering, foregrounding the productive tensions between neutrality, authority, and contestation in Bourdieusian field analysis.
Author: Markus Pollak (Central European University) -
Democratic transitions are notoriously fragile. It is well established that democratization often falters, especially in states emerging from authoritarian rule. What is less recognized, however, is that democratization and autocratization can unfold simultaneously—within the same regime, across different arenas of governance. This paper argues that treating these processes as distinct obscures the complex and often contradictory pressures faced by transitioning states. By examining Myanmar’s regime trajectory from 2008 to 2021, the paper explores how sudden regime change can occur within an ongoing transition, compounding the challenges of democratic consolidation. Drawing on Myanmar’s shift from military-backed civilian leadership (2008–2015) to a pro-democracy civilian government (2015–2021), it demonstrates how the very mechanisms of democratic progress can generate vulnerabilities that facilitate autocratic reversal. The 2021 coup d’état, far from being a simple rupture, is shown to be the culmination of unresolved tensions within the transitional process itself.
Author: Anna Plunkett (King's College London) -
Civil society organizations (CSOs), including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are important actors to international development and peacebuilding efforts, frequently involved in democratization processes in post-conflict settings. The literature on CSOs in authoritarian states underlines the restrictive environment CSOs face and the strategies they develop in return to counter these restrictions. Less discussed are the trajectories that lead to this polarization, especially in the context of the relationship between internationally funded CSOs and NGOs, and ‘institutionally weak’ post-conflict and post-colonial states. Drawing from the history of Burundi after the 1993 civil war, this paper discusses how the relationship between CSOs, NGOs and the government in Burundi has been intertwined through cycles of façade cooperation, cooptation and repression. It paints a more complex picture of the co-constitutive relationship between these sets of actors, in a context where development and peacebuilding projects have served to drive economic and symbolic competition. The paper explores whether popular perceptions of CSOs as instruments for resource capture have helped legitimize the restriction of their work as well as the rise of parallel government-backed CSOs.
Author: Elizabeth Paradis (University of Cambridge)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Authority, Legitimacy, and Informality in Contemporary International OrganisationsSponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupConvener: Kseniya Oksamytna (City, University of London / King's College London)Chair: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
-
This paper examines how authority emerges in and around international organisations (IOs) without prior contractual delegation by states. Using the case of national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and their transgovernmental network, GANHRI, it develops the concept of delegation without design. The Paris Principles were drafted by NHRI officials in 1991, annexed by the UN Commission on Human Rights and endorsed by the General Assembly in 1993, then operationalised through GANHRI’s Sub-Committee on Accreditation, which regulates NHRI access to UN forums. This causal pathway is under-specified within Principal-Agent models that presuppose ex ante contracting, unified principals and predefined control mechanisms. The paper theorises a reflexive mechanism of authority formation grounded in peer coordination, recursive review and strategic ambiguity, amounting to an organisation of self-organisation subsequently legitimated by states within IO procedures. Methodologically, it employs process tracing drawing on archival materials, UN records and interviews. The contribution is two-fold, it refines IO scholarship on delegation by identifying how regulatory authority can emerge through networked practice, and it specifies when and how IOs can institutionalise non-state generated standards into participation and compliance rules without treaty design.
Author: Tom Pegram (University College London) -
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been often criticised for imposing austerity measures with adverse distributional outcomes, disproportionately hurting the poorest and most vulnerable groups. Yet, the IMF has also been increasingly vocal about the importance of social protection and the need for mitigating inequality, to the extent that both the research output of the organization and high-level speeches of IMF management have designated inequality as a “macro-critical” issue. This contrast raises important questions: Why does the IMF’s own official discourse on inequality not manifest in norm- and policy change? Why is the Fund not “walking the talk”? We build on approaches in organisational sociology that take seriously both individuals and their embeddedness in institutional structures and culture and hypothesise two mechanisms to explain this gap. First, we posit that demands from principals and the external environment may clash with the organizational culture of the Fund, thereby causing the hypocrisy, or façade, observed in practice. Second, we propose that at the individual level, norm entrepreneurs on distributional issues may be hindered by two factors: ambiguity over the interpretation of inequality as a “macro-critical” issue and its operationalization in lending programs; and lack of formal institutional channels to transform new knowledge into policy action. We test these hypotheses using a mixed methods approach that combines a survey of IMF staff across levels and departments with in-depth interviews. Our findings suggest that rather than being “orderly”, the hypocrisy of the IMF over distributional issues is quite disorganised.
Authors: Timon Forster (University of St Gallen)* , Aila Trasi (Johns Hopkins University) -
Since its creation in 2009, the UN Security Council’s Office of the Ombudsperson (OO) has been locked in a protracted struggle with its principal. While the Council repeatedly sought to curtail the Ombudsperson’s autonomy—through restrictive mandates, poor working conditions, and delayed appointments—the eminent jurists heading the Office have learned to “fight back” through subtle institutional maneuvers, public reporting, and quiet diplomacy. Despite recurrent attempts at undermining it, the OO has become a surprisingly solid and effective corrective in the UN’s counterterrorism regime. This dynamic is puzzling: rather than a clear-cut case of principal control or agency slack, the UNSC–OO relationship unfolds as a tacit and iterative contest over authority. We argue that this pattern results from the mediation of the principal–agent relationship by external legitimacy audiences—notably courts and advocacy networks—that constrain the Council’s capacity for control while providing the OO with normative resources to resist. These audiences define the bounds of acceptable action, within which both actors navigate a precarious equilibrium – what we call the legitimacy frontier. Drawing on semi-structured elite interviews with Ombudspersons, UN officials, and state representatives, the paper traces this legitimacy-mediated struggle to theorize how IO authority evolves under normative constraint.
Authors: Christian Kreuder-Sonnen (University of Jena)* , Anette Stimmer (University of St Andrews) -
How do powerful states control policy implementation in international organizations (IOs)? We argue that agency of individuals and interpersonal relations between them are overlooked aspects of how states exercise informal control over IO policy implementation. To understand it, we propose the concept of graduated control. States can choose from three mechanisms of informal control: joint forums, strategic appointments, and intermittent meddling. A joint forum involves officials from both member states and the IO cooperating closely on the implementation of an IO programme. This is the costliest mechanism of informal control since it places significant demands on member state representatives’ time, weakens the perceived IO legitimacy, and risks information diffusion. Strategic appointments entail lobbying to place citizens of the country that exercises informal control in key roles within a particular IO programme. Such citizens then coordinate with state officials in the capital or in the field. This is the medium-cost option since such lobbying requires time and diplomatic capital and may also undermine the perceived IO legitimacy. The least costly option, intermittent meddling, consists of sporadic communication between member state representatives and IO officials through ad hoc channels, such as relaying one-off messages through embassies, intermediaries, or in-person encounters. The choice of informal control mechanisms depends on the strength of a member states’ national interests in the country hosting the IO programme. Strong interests justify the costs of a joint forum, while medium interests are likely to lead to a preference for strategic appointments and weak interest to intermittent meddling. We demonstrate the logic behind these choices with case studies of three UN peacekeeping interventions – in Haiti, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – based on more than 150 interviews with former and current UN officials.
Authors: Kseniya Oksamytna (City, University of London / King's College London) , Oisín Tansey (King's College London)* , Sarah von Billerbeck (University of Reading)* , Birte Gippert (University of Liverpool) -
Those who draft resolutions in International Organizations (IOs) can significantly influence their content and acceptance, yet not all states are interested in drafting, so-called “penholding.” Veto powers Russia and China barely draft any Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. In the African Union (AU), states rely on drafting by international bureaucrats or independent experts. Why (not) hold the pen? The prevailing focus on the benefits of penholding has left the disadvantages and trade-offs underexplored: penholding can provide agenda-setting, position-taking, and informational advantages, but states may avoid drafting to reap efficiency gains, shift blame for negotiation failures, and preserve state sovereignty. When choosing whether to penhold, states weigh up the advantages and disadvantages. States may resolve this trade-off by delegating some or all tasks associated with penholdership (e.g. leading negotiations, writing the initial draft). We distinguish between four types of negotiating states based on their delegation choices regarding penholding. We explore the (dis)advantages of these choices through case studies of the UNSC and AU Peace and Security Council, drawing on interview and archival research. This paper thus challenges the prevailing assumption that penholdership is a generally desirable role, while showing that drafting procedures and states’ delegation choices affect decision-making outcomes in IOs.
Authors: Anette Stimmer (University of St Andrews) , Nicole De Silva (Concordia University)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Beyond post-Soviet transition: the political economy of Central AsiaSponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Frank Maracchione (SOAS University)Chair: Stuart Shields (The University of Manchester)
-
Following the Chinese mantra of 'let the small go and the big stay', the telecommunications sector was one of the first to be liberalised in Uzbekistan. It is one of the most dynamic sectors, covering a wide range of economic activities, from smart cities and banking to agriculture and the internet. However, there is still a lack of understanding regarding how these services are produced, who produces them and who they are produced for. This paper will examine the role of international players in telecommunications services and consider whether they contribute to Uzbekistan's structural transformation. By examining the major market players, including local, Turkish, and Chinese providers, the paper will explore whether these services have become a means of establishing multiple political, cultural, and material channels between international investors and the domestic economy. The relationship between national state capacity and foreign capital inflow will be explored to shed light on challenges linked to national infrastructure and investment in technology-intensive sectors.
Author: Lorena Lombardozzi (SOAS) -
In recent years, Uzbekistan embarked on an expansive development agenda supported by international development organisations, under the aegis of the ‘Green Economy’. Within the agricultural sector, this entails an overhaul of the former cotton-centred production model in favour of high-value crops and vertically integrated clusters, irrigated using the most up-to-date technologies. This paper argues that such a process entails ‘hydrosocial reterritorialisation’ of the rural landscape, legitimated by the ‘green’ agenda. In Uzbekistan, ‘hydrosocial reterritorialisation’ is characterised by a process of verticalization, where resource-sharing relations which predominated under the cotton monoculture are disembedded in favour of individualised, water-efficient, and increasingly ground-water reliant irrigation. Using the case of the pseudo-anonymised village of ‘Dostlik’ in the Samarkand region, this research looks at local manifestations of Uzbekistan’s current hydro-agrarian overhaul, to argue that by facilitating water grabbing, hydrosocial reterritorialisation becomes the locus of agrarian change in what eventually unravels as a process of ecological precarity for farmers who lack the means to compete with agribusiness. This is experienced most acutely by the scattered and informalised smallholding sector, whose challenges to access water raise the question around their continued importance in Uzbekistan’s agrarian future.
Author: Madina Gazieva (Dublin City University) -
Chinese investments in Uzbekistan have recently expanded from the extraction of raw materials to manufacturing. Qualitative interviews conducted in Uzbekistan in 2024 found that this new form of Chinese investment is considered to be helping Uzbekistan move up the value chain through the transfer of technology and know-how. The production of electric vehicles (EVs) in the free industrial zones is a case in point. This article engages with the literature on the new state capitalism to problematise this perspective. This literature identifies a clear empirical tendency for the state to intervene in the economy including as owner of capital leading to state-led investment and production via industrial policy. First, the article inscribes China-Uzbekistan relations in the framework of new state capitalism. Second, it contributes to this framework by highlighting that, while industrial development indeed occurs, it does so based on production for the domestic market and, often, of technology that has become obsolete for the global market. Third, this results in stunted forms of development, which, for Uzbekistan appear in the ongoing mass migration of parts of the population. This is because they are unable to find formal industrial jobs in the country due to the limited scale of domestic industrial manufacturing. As such, the article showcases the potential limits to China-led development in the state-owned car manufacturing sector in Uzbekistan.
Authors: Frank Maracchione (SOAS University of London) , Franco Galdini (University of Birmingham)* -
This paper examines how Kazakhstan, as a middle power, sustains and balances energy partnerships with both the European Union (EU) and China amid the emergence of a green multipolar order. Through a case study of Kazakhstan’s evolving energy transition, the paper traces the development of its multivector policy tools, including diversified financing and supplier portfolios, selective regulatory alignment with EU climate and sustainability frameworks, and governance arrangements designed to preserve flexibility. These instruments enable Kazakhstan to pursue simultaneous cooperation with both partners while maintaining strategic autonomy.
Recent geopolitical shifts have deepened Europe’s engagement through its search for low-carbon supply chains and standards, while China’s recalibrated Green Belt and Road Initiative has expanded through new renewable, grid, and hydrogen ventures. Together, these dynamics are reconfiguring Kazakhstan’s industrial base and regulatory landscape, opening new spaces of contestation beyond hydrocarbons.
By situating Kazakhstan within the broader transformation of global production and green industrialisation, the paper argues that the country’s multivectorism exemplifies middle-power agency in the multiplex order where states navigate overlapping regimes of sustainability, capital, and technology. The analysis contributes to debates on the political economy of transition and the emerging architecture of green multipolarity, showing that interdependence today is shaped less by alignment or dependency than by adaptive statecraft.Authors: Jessica Neafie (Nazarbayev University) , Mukhtar Amanbaiuly (Tsukuba University)* , Adiya Akhmer (Nazarbayev University)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Roundtable / Borders in IR: Reflecting on the Last Decade, Reimagining the Next
A decade ago, the so-called ‘migration crisis’ was at the forefront of news media across the globe. As thousands of people arrived on the shores of EUrope seeking safety, calls for solidarity and dignity spread across continents. But while, the summer of 2015 became known as the long summer of migration, 2016 signified a long winter of border politics. The erection of border walls within Europe; the election of nationalist and far-right governments; the vilification of the migrant; attacks on solidarity and social movements; and a wider securitisation can be seen as an impact of border politics. While the discipline of IR was called to address these issues, its approach on the border remains limited – despite calls for re-evaluation throughout the years.
This roundtable brings together scholars whose work has largely focused on borders and migration who will reflect on borders in IR during the last decade and will attempt to re imagine the border for the next. Some of the questions they will try to address are: What lessons have been learnt during the last decade? Why does IR resist a more critical conceptualisation of the border? In what ways can the border be re-imagined and what would it look like in the decade to come?
Sponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupChair: Davide SchmidParticipants: Vicki Squire (University of Warwick) , Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool) , Marianna Karakoulaki (University of Birmingham) , Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh) , Phil Cole (University of the West of England) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Childhood as a Technology of Global GovernanceSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: J. Marshall Beier (McMaster University) , Helen Berents (Griffith University)Chair: Helen Berents (Griffith University)
-
Modernity constructed childhood in a very specific way with the development of laws, norms, organisations, meanings and scientific studies on people in a young age. The concept of children, as an object of control and discipline of the modern childhood, has its clear definition connected with a ‘becoming’, immaturity, innocence, purity and in need of adult protection. This modern way to construct childhood and children was and continues to be criticised by Childhood Studies scholars that analyse children as a socially and politically category and children as subjects of their own experiences. Although the modern concepts of childhood and children have been questioned by IR scholars as well, contemporary global politics uses this modern discourse of childhood as a strategy of remediation or demands for retribution. We can observe this in images of refugee and migrant children as the aesthetics of crisis in Global South. Childhood is a dispositif of power and technology of control through which global politics (re)produces discourses of subjection and erasure of lived experiences of children. We discuss childhood as a dispositif of power. This concept (re)produces the imaginary of children as a singular category that ignores experiences of ‘deviant children’ that do not fit the idea of ‘normal children’. Adopting the case of global migration politics, we analyse the national children as a the ‘normal children” and the ‘deviant children’ as the migrant children. We will develop this argument in three phases: first, we will discuss childhood as a dispositif of power in the global contemporary politics especially in the area of migration politics. Secondly, we will discuss the categories of ‘normal children’ and ‘deviant children’ as a technology of control. Finally, we will analyse how children’s migration experiences can be seen as a counter argument to the discourse (re)produced by the dispositive of childhood.
Authors: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield) , Henrique dos Santos Barros (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)* -
Considering, on one hand, liberal militarism as a concept that shapes how liberal states are organized and produced through force, and on the other hand, the modern binaries of child/adult, civil/military, and peace/war as constitutive of the liberal social order, this article argues that children recruited by the (liberal) state’s Armed Forces are framed as “children who soldier” rather than as the ‘pathological’ child-soldier. Drawing from the case of the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), our analysis emphasizes that, through liberal militarism, the (child) subject links their identity, awareness, and behavior with the goals of an Armed Force – that is, soldiering. In this context, military recruitment is depicted as a peaceful, non-threatening path to becoming a productive, civilized (adult) soldier. Ultimately, unlike the ‘deviant’ child-soldier discourse, the category of children who soldier permits a political interpretation of ‘normalcy’ rooted in the liberal myth of the child/adult, civil/military, and peace/war binaries, which form the basis of modern narratives about the liberal state and childhood. In conclusion, the article highlights how the power dynamics at the core of the liberal state shape the militarization of children and how these narratives reinforce existing views on childhood and the modern international landscape, while marginalizing alternative perspectives of militarized children as deviance in distant lands.
Authors: Marcos do Vale Araujo (State University of Rio de Janeiro) , Jana Tabak (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)* -
Building from recent work on childhood in IR, this paper approaches childhood not as a time of life but as a social imaginary and a cardinal category of identity/difference analogous to gender or race. Disaggregating children and childhood is a first critical step toward apprehending imagined childhood as a social technology of governance. To elaborate this, the paper works through three distinct but interrelated dimensions of how we might think about ‘the age of childhood’. The first of these points to how imagined childhood (disaggregated from children) belongs to a particular historical era (or age). The second acknowledges its defiance of chronological human age in the ways that, in the manner of its becoming a technology of governance, childhood is variously withheld (including from children) and ascribed (including to adults). The third reflects on the historical ‘age of childhood’ as also the historical age of other things (like advanced colonialism, for example) that have traded on imagined childhood at an ontological level. Taken together, these reflections reveal the meaning-making work of imagined childhood as a governance technology at all scales from the personal, to the local, to the global.
Author: J. Marshall Beier (McMaster University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Climate Change and International Order (I)Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)Chair: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)
-
Does the ending of the current world order spell the end of politics understood as collective and solvable ‘global challenges’? Answering this question is difficult because world order has so far been conceptualised overwhelmingly in terms of actors alone - their relative strengths, alignments, differing values and clashing interests. Problems or objects of governance figure only in in this debate terms of whether an increasingly fragmented world order will be able to adequately manage them. For this reason, while the current Western-led order and its regimes and institutions are recognised to be in crisis, shifts and changes in global objects of governance have gone largely unnoticed. This paper brings together for the first time ‘world order’ literature and the emerging field of ‘object-oriented IR’, to examine how world orders and emergent governable entities affect each other. It takes the case of ‘the climate’ arguing it is affected by upheavals in world order but is also changing in subtle other ways that could have profound impacts back on world order.
Author: Olaf Corry (University of Leeds) -
This article repositions climate change as constitutive of order’s transformation by foregrounding the politics of grievance. While International Relations (IR) scholarship typically treats climate change as a problem for international order it tends to describe justice grievances that emerge from climate effects as epiphenomenal governance issues. Instead, we argue that that climate-justice grievances are not epiphenomenal disturbances but productive forces that unsettle the material and ideational foundations of international order. Developing a taxonomy of climate grievances, differentiated by the severity of losses imposed, the claims expressed, and the (non)responses they elicit, we show how their articulation and contestation reshape the relationship between governance and public spheres thereby shaping and spurring the international order’s transformative processes. In mapping these dynamics, the article makes two central contributions. First, it expands IR’s analytical vocabulary by situating grievance as a driver of systemic change in a warming world. Second, it rethinks the relationship between order and justice, demonstrating that as climate effects deepen and overwhelmingly characterise the experiential reality, the two become mutually constitutive rather than axiologically opposed. The argument suggests that sustaining international order will depend less on its forceful preservation than on how grievances are rendered visible, recognised, and addressed substantively rather than performatively.
Authors: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)* , Rob Cullum (Universiteit Leiden) -
This paper examines how the evolving dynamics of climate leadership, centred on the European Union (EU) and China, are reshaping the norms and power structures of international order. As the EU’s long-standing claim to normative climate leadership confronts internal political fragmentation, economic insecurity, and declining global influence, China has advanced an alternative model grounded in state-led transition, industrial policy, and South–South cooperation. These contrasting approaches reveal much about the intersection of climate diplomacy, legitimacy, and global justice in an era of geopolitical disorder.
Through comparative analysis, the paper explores how the EU’s leadership—rooted in regulation, example, and consent—contrasts with China’s more pragmatic model, whose legitimacy derives from its capacity to deliver rapid, large-scale transition, particularly across the geopolitical Global South. It further considers how China’s leadership, while gaining traction through performance and delivery, remains more contested within the geopolitical Global North, where claims to authority are still measured by transparency, participation, and normative commitment. By connecting literatures on climate leadership, just transitions, and international order, this paper argues that the contest between EU and Chinese approaches reflects an ongoing reconfiguration of the moral and political economy of global decarbonisation. Rather than a straightforward shift in leadership, this evolution suggests a more complex and regionally differentiated redefinition of what legitimate climate authority may come to mean in a multipolar world.
Authors: Clare Richardson-Barlow (University of Leeds) , Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds)* , Emma Haglund (University of Leeds)* -
The paper explores international perspectives and insights on a) the impacts of the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and the broader increase in international conflict since 2022, on global climate politics; and b) the implications of this changed landscape of international conflict for global climate politics going forward. The paper draws on around 40 interviews conducted during late 2025 and early 2026 with mid- and high-level government, multilateral and civil society actors from across the globe, all of whom have been heavily involved in international climate fora, as well as on evidence obtained from recent UNFCCC and related meetings attended by the author. The paper focuses on reporting and mapping the diversity of official and activist, and Northern and Southern, perspectives, insights and experiences, and by interrogating the reasons for this diversity and accompanying uncertainties and silences. It explores these issues around three themes: Ukraine; Gaza; and the future. This paper is the first output of a wider project on the linkages between climate action, war and the transformation of international order.
Author: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Confronting Violence: Anticolonial Feminist and Queer ApproachesSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConveners: Priya Raghavan (Institute of Development Studies) , Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)Chair: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)Discussant: Priya Raghavan (Institute of Development Studies)
-
In 1999, US anthropologist David Stoll published a critique of Mayan K’iche’ activist and Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum’s personal account of experiences of violence endured by herself, her family and community during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict and genocide. The critique, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, alleged factual inconsistencies and a political agenda behind Menchu’s claims, which are highlighted in her acclaimed autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Stoll’s critique generated significant controversy amongst the academic community of (predominantly US-based) anthropologists, many of whom responded in support of Menchu and the work she has done for indigenous and human rights and justice.
In this contribution, I focus on the meanings, representations, and implications for understanding violence and its memory as collectively felt and held. I first ask, what structures of power are instituted and reinscribed in the critiques of Menchu’s accounts of violence, and how are they challenged, not only by Menchu, but also by those who defend her? Secondly, how can researchers ethically assemble, protect and engage with collectivist accounts and testimonies of violence, like that shared by Menchu? Informed by communitarian feminist and feminist postcolonial and decolonial critiques, and the concept of testimonio, I highlight the emancipatory epistemic and ontological possibilities for understanding violence in relation to collectivist framings and community. I contribute a reading of violence that aims towards a transcendence of linear conceptualisations of time and space, and considers the representations of violence and its recollections as political and dynamic. I argue that violence recounted through means such as testimonio, and in relation to collective experiences and memory, pushes feminists to broaden understands violence as existing across various registers, whilst simultaneously engaging with the contentious and inevitably political aspects of recording, naming and recognising violence in its diverse manifestations.
Author: Julia Hartviksen -
This article reflects on the ethical and methodological complexities of researching gender-restrictive rollback and the movements resisting it, conceptualising rollback as a contemporary, transnational modality of gendered violence. Drawing on the authors’ experience conducting a donor-commissioned rapid scoping review of feminist and queer anti-rollback resistance across fourteen countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the paper surfaces the epistemic and political risks embedded in studying violence and resistance at a distance. It engages feminist, anti-colonial and social movement scholarship to explore concerns around visibility and erasure; conceptual imposition and epistemic violence; representational risk and responsibility; and methodological nationalism and exceptionalism. Recognising that research on rollback remains imbricated within the hierarchies of power it seeks to unsettle, we advocate for a politics of radical complicity: an approach that embraces ambivalence, acknowledges the partial and extractive nature of knowledge production, and meaningfully accompanies a range of ‘accomplices’ confronting gendered and intersectional harm. Aiming at explosion rather than resolution, the paper invites further reflection on how to collectively reckon with the difficulties and discomforts entailed in feminist knowledge production.
Authors: Tessa Lewin* , Priya Raghavan (Institute of Development Studies) , Samreen Mushtaq* , Chung Ah-Baek* -
This paper interrogates how caste is (re)produced in the feminist classroom, reflects on the authors’ diverse roles in perpetuating and resisting this violence, and is an invitation to collectively embrace - and hold each other accountable to anti-caste feminist pedagogy. The starting point for this undertaking is a recognition of caste as a structure of violence that is materially and discursively reproduced through pedagogic encounters. Attending to the simultaneous brutality and banality of caste violence (Patel and Da Costa 2022), our approach to recognising and resisting caste in the feminist classroom embraces the shift from analyses of caste as spectacular violence to a framework of everyday violence (Ambedkar Age Collective 2015, Bhoi and Gorringe 2023), mapping and interrupting the routine, ordinary mechanisms through which caste hierarchies and their damaging effects take root in and through feminist pedagogy.
Our aim is not so much to single out and chastise feminist classrooms (including our own) for their failings, but to recognize the gap between rhetoric and reality, aspiration and realization, that continues to haunt them, and uncover the ways in which this gulf is fundamentally structured and maintained by caste. The paper opens by situating the authors and inquiry within our respective (and multiple) social, epistemic, ideological and locations, explaining our choice of research ‘sites’, outlining our collective approach and the epistemic and political allegiances and imperatives that inform them. We then offer an analysis of caste in the feminist classroom, drawing on anti-caste literature and our own experiences to categorise a series of savarna moves to innocence through which caste is disappeared, displaced, or domesticated in the classroom, while also attending to how the violence of caste (re)articulates precisely as it is disguised. Finally,we offer some tentative reflections (and surface tensions) on building and sustaining anti-hierarchical feminist classrooms and futures.
Authors: Chandni Sai Ganesh* , Priya Raghavan (Institute of Development Studies)* , Harshul Singh
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Contested Currents: Water Rights and Water InjusticeSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Scott Steele (Anglia Ruskin University)Discussant: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
-
Since their partition as successor states to British India in 1947, India and Pakistan have maintained a fraught and violent relationship, characterised by territorial disputes, ethnic rivalry, nationalist politics, and proxy warfare fuelled by their colonial legacy. These dynamics resulted in four Indo-Pakistan wars, primarily centred on the contested regions of Jammu and Kashmir. Amid these hostilities, the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) stood out as a rare instance of durable cooperation between the two countries, regulating transboundary water and allocating usage rights over the Indus River Basin, thus withstanding war periods and diplomatic rifts. However, after the Pahalgam terror attack in April 2025 in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, India announced the suspension of the IWT and began unilaterally withholding and releasing Chenab’s River flow, marking a watershed moment in bilateral relations. Drawing on the conceptual framework of water weaponisation, this study examines how India’s unilateral management of the river’s waters constitutes a case of international water weaponisation and a violation of the international water taboo that prohibits such practice. This paper argues that the breakdown of water cooperation through the suspension of the IWT puts in question the international norms underpinning the water taboo, potentially setting a dangerous precedent for interstate and intrastate relations that challenges this taboo.
Author: Margarida Gama (University of Coimbra, CES, FEUC) -
This paper introduces hydro-transparency as an analytical concept that refers to how and why water data/information is disclosed, who transfers and receives such data/information, and the political-economic structures shaping information flows. Informed by a synthesis of critical transparency studies with hydropolitical analysis, it invites critical examination of the political conditions shaping differential availability of information about the movement, storage and management of water. Such an approach challenges three common assumptions about transparency in transboundary water governance: that it is necessary for cooperation, that it operates as a simple binary of openness versus secrecy, and that it is a fixed condition. It is argued instead that transparency is a dynamic, political process where disclosure and concealment can coexist based on strategic interests rather than technical considerations. These claims are substantiated through an empirical examination of selected moves to hydro-transparency in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin (ETB), one of the most securitised river basins in the world. Turkey's upstream position and governance capacity allow it to maintain information advantages, yet downstream states (Iraq and Syria) have resisted basin-wide transparency mechanisms that would counteract information asymmetries because the proposed measures would not alter unequal relations of hydropolitical power. The securitisation of water in the ETB encourages states strategically to engage in selective disclosure or concealment of water data based on their geopolitical interests rather than cooperative norms. Open-source water data has potential to disrupt traditional state-centric approaches to information control, potentially empowering less powerful state and non-state actors to make accountability claims against dominant ones.
Authors: Arda Bilgen (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Michael Mason (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
Pakistan today stands at the crossroads of climate collapse and geopolitical neglect. It emits less than one percent of global carbon, yet suffers some of the world’s deadliest floods, cloudbursts and unpredictable rains. The 2022 floods alone submerged one-third of the country, exposing how global carbon inequality translates directly into human misery. This paper situates Pakistan’s crisis within the broader theory of environmental justice and postcolonial political ecology, arguing that the global climate order reflects a moral failure of responsibility and reciprocity.
At the same time, the paper examines the emerging “water weaponization” in South Asia, where both India and Afghanistan have used upstream control and dam politics to pressure Pakistan. This dual exposure—to external carbon injustice and regional hydro-politics—makes Pakistan a unique case study in climate vulnerability and security. Methodologically, the paper relies on a combination of policy analysis, media archives, and first-hand interviews with local communities and water experts, connecting environmental data with lived experience. It calls for a rethinking of justice in both climate and transboundary water governance.
Keywords: climate injustice, Pakistan floods, global carbon inequality, water weaponization, Indus Waters Treaty, Afghanistan dams, South Asia, environmental ethics
Author: Haris Aziz -
Water grabbing has emerged as a conceptual and empirical tool to examine water control across multiple scales. The concept gained scholarly attention as large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) targeted agriculturally viable lands, often with direct water access suitable for irrigation. These processes redefine local water allocation and access, enabling water grabbing for commercial actors. While traditional literature links water grabbing to LSLAs driven by global trends, infrastructure, and national agendas, we offer a complementary lens, and arguing local dynamics in drought settings can be as influential as global and national processes in leading to water grabs. We empirically explore this by focusing on recent droughts in Kenya’s Lake Naivasha region, a major horticultural and floricultural hub in Kenya, examining how commercial farmers, smallholders, and pastoralists compete for scarce water to cope with drought. We highlight the unintended consequences of local coping strategies, where each actor strives to sustain livelihoods, inadvertently contributing to water grabs and reinforcing unequal power relations. By doing this, we conceptualise “resilience” as a form of water appropriation and demonstrate the direct relationship between resilience capacities and water grabbing.
Authors: Ramazan Caner Sayan (Swansea University) , Imogen Bellwood-Howard (Institute of Development Studies)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Contesting Power from Below: Grassroots Resistance, Civil Society Agency, and the Transformation of GovernanceSponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConvener: Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL)Chair: André Saramago (University of Coimbra)
-
Climate activism has surged worldwide, with nonviolent sit-ins playing a central role in demanding urgent policy action. In Portugal, these protests have garnered significant public attention, raising essential questions about social resistance and public perception. Drawing from Nonviolent Action Studies, we analyse how Portuguese climate sit-ins are signified and which factors shape vernacular narratives of support and backlash. Through social media analysis, we examine public responses to these protests, revealing how various factors shape opposition and supportive narratives. Our findings highlight both well-studied elements such as perceptions of violence, and understudied factors including perceptions of legality and threats to everyday security. In Portugal's highly polarised social context, with increasingly effective state smart repression, these factors generally shape public opinion against climate resistance, with support increasing only when perceptions shift the subject of insecurity from protesters to the state. By examining digital narratives surrounding these sit-ins, this paper offers insight into how vernacular discourse influences the evolving landscape of climate activism, situating Portuguese protests within global patterns and highlighting the significance of nonviolent action in climate justice efforts. This study enriches understanding of contemporary climate resistance and the construction of support and backlash, providing valuable implications for activists, policymakers, and scholars.
Authors: Daniel Santos (Loughborough University) , Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL) -
This paper discusses the synergies between nonviolent forms of community-led unarmed civilian protection and these communities’ grassroots resistance against physical and structural violences in contexts of armed conflict. While the literatures on civil resistance and unarmed civilian protection have been growing over the last three decades, few studies have brought these two forms of nonviolent action at the grassroots level of communities into one conceptual and analytical framework. What is more, unarmed civilian protection is sometimes seen to passively cement the power status quo and hence dismissed as a form of resistance. This paper tries to remedy this misconception by taking first steps towards a protection-as-resistance framework. Empirically, it draws on the rich insights of the Creating Safer Space research network, which supported 26 research projects with communities in 11 low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, to better understand and support unarmed community self-protection amidst violent conflict.
Author: Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Aberystwyth University) -
This paper conceptualizes the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) positive complementarity policy as a space of resistance, where civil society actors actively engage with, reinterpret, and at times resist the logics and structures of international law. Positive complementarity has been used as an umbrella term to describe a wide range of measures and activities aimed at encouraging and supporting domestic authorities in the investigation and prosecution of core international crimes. Yet, beyond its institutional framing, the discourse of positive complementarity has been increasingly appropriated by civil society actors who deploy its language and principles to advance their own visions of justice and accountability. Drawing on critical legal studies and postcolonial theory, this paper argues that grassroots engagement with the ICC has transformed positive complementarity from a top-down policy instrument into a contested arena of meaning-making. Within this space, civil society actors challenge the monopolization of justice by legal and political elites, reclaiming positive complementarity as a vehicle for participatory and locally grounded accountability. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper situates positive complementarity within broader debates on transnational power, local agency, and the politics of resistance. It highlights how everyday actors, far from being passive recipients of international law, actively contest and reshape the meanings and practices of justice from below.
Author: Carolina Carvalho (University of Coimbra (School of Economics)) -
This study examines the formation and dynamics of social capital within Colombia’s LGBTQIA+ communities in the aftermath of the peace agreement between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—FARC, with a focus on the lived experiences and initiatives of 14 grassroots organizations. By centring the perspectives of these local actors, the research highlights how LGBTQIA+ communities define, confront, and navigate violence, fostering networks of collaboration, mutual support, and solidarity from the ground up. Employing a mixed-methods approach structured into two participatory research phases, the study combines qualitative and quantitative insights to co-produce knowledge with community members. It emphasizes the critical role of inclusive, locally-driven everyday strategies for peacebuilding and historical reparation, demonstrating how grassroots approaches can inform broader frameworks such as queer practices of place and queer geographies. Recognizing LGBTQIA+ individuals as victims of armed conflict, the study advocates for reparative mechanisms grounded in their narratives and experiences. Moreover, it showcases how community-led initiatives serve as practices of historical recognition, territorial reclamation, and resilience, countering the dislocations and deterritorialization imposed by armed violence. Ultimately, this research underscores the transformative potential of grassroots LGBTQIA+ activism in shaping socially just, locally-informed peace processes.
Author: Gustavo Hernández-Calderón (Humboldt University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Creative and Visual Approaches to PoliticsSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
Abstract
Once the longest-standing Portuguese settlement in the Far East, Macau is today a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (December 1999 – present). This paper aims to examine the aesthetic potentials of public-facing work in Macau, where Portuguese is one of two official languages. It investigates how government efforts and publicly funded initiatives are fomenting shared ways of seeing Lusofonia and encouraging popular gazes of a festive multicultural cityscape, in particular the political ambiance in the here and now. Our method is unconventionally conversational, as one reflects on her photography as a camera enthusiast and the other uses anecdotes to relate her public administration experience. The research asks how the Lusofonia is repurposed for modern public administration. Effectively, colonial-era symbols are used in city aesthetic production, and foreign elements are indigenized in Macau and fed into vibrant Lusophone crossings. Macau has not actively sought to erase symbols of non-Chinese history, rather the city has purposefully curated colonial symbols befitting a contemporary interpretation. The city identity of Macau today – bilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and architecturally blended – is in part history and in part contemporary politics. We encourage local-based scholars to make use of their own selves methodologically when studying the urban and the political. The discussion of urban-political relations is broadly applicable to postcolonial urban scenes, especially where international tourism is thriving, so as to examine from-the-inside-out the rehabilitation of foreign administration histories. The case of Macau challenges our understanding of the “postcolonial” city.Authors: Kaian Lam (University of Macau) , Thacker Cheok (University of Macau)* -
Why does the racialised family recur as the queer of colour’s main antagonist? How does the notion of migrant familial dysfunction aid and abet the state and capital?
Keeping these questions in mind, this paper's starting point is a short documentary on the Gay Black Group, a Black and Asian organisation formed in the 80s in the UK, in response to state racism and alienation from the white queer scene. Starting with a discussion of the function of ‘family’ in the documentary, particularly what demands it masks and what politics it enables, the paper considers how the immigrant family's dysfunction figures into neoconservative and neoliberal fixations on the family as a key site to reproduce both the British nation and capital. It then considers how 'common sense' regarding the queer of colour's alleged alienation from culture and family serve to uphold the family unit, so long as it is maintained as nuclear, white and British. Through queer of color critique, Marxist feminism and family abolition Keep It Against The Family reflects on queer of colour politics here and now in, through, and beyond the hold of the family.
Author: Abeera Khan (SOAS, University of London) -
Storytelling, by way of recalling memories, cements identity to become an important source of legitimacy and belonging in displacement contexts. These fragments of memory are pieced together by multiple generations, creating non-linear stories, moulding official discourses with family histories to stimulate unspoken emotions. Drawing on nine months of ethnography, engaging mobile methods, and participatory film-making and creative workshops in northern Jordan, this paper illustrates how stories ‘make us feel in place in the world’ (Madouly and Nassar, 2021: 14).
It works through various forms of storytelling beyond linguistic articulations to include movement, art and emotion, showing that our methods and ways of learning must constantly adapt and be flexible to the dynamic worlds we research, acknowledging the potential troubles which arise when trying to represent others. As a methodological enquiry, this paper interrogates the ethics around participation while engaging creative space as an alternative to technocratic narratives populated by the international aid regime and academic space. Thinking with a storytelling method invites us to consider ‘how we re-tell the narrative we uncover, encounter, or retrieve’ (ibid: 21), to provide an ethical bridge between the communities we research and the academy (Tilley, 2017).
Author: Hannah Owens (University of Hertfordshire) -
Among the possibilities stories hold for transforming political imaginations, the capacity for ethical action and reflection must surely be among the most compelling. Each act of narration that takes an IR scholar’s analytic interest can be understood as an event with ethical dimensions and consequences. Yet while narrative approaches to IR continue to grow in popularity, IR scholarship mostly lacks an overt emphasis on the study of narrative as a project of ethical political inquiry. Drawing on narratological and literary scholarship, as well as social scientific narrative inquiry and ‘socio-narratology’, I offer reflections from two strands of ethical thinking on narrative: dialogical ethics and rhetorical ethics. While the former focuses on the ethical qualities of relationships that are established in the process of telling, listening and responding to stories, the latter scrutinizes the ethical worlds that stories themselves construct through the formal properties of narrative such as character, plot, and setting, and on narrative as a form of ethical communication. Both perspectives offer theoretical and practical resources with the potential to further enrich narrative scholarship in IR. In this conceptual paper reflecting on the ethics and politics of storytelling, I aim to discuss and illustrate such potential through examples drawn from the world of narrative research in IR.
Author: Nick Caddick (ARU)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Critical Ontologies of War in UkraineSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: Sophia Anders (London School of Economics)Chair: Sophia Anders (London School of Economics)
-
This paper examines cultural spaces – physical and social environments where people gather around creative practice – as underexplored sites of ontological security in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While current ontologies of war understate civilian agency, cultural spaces reveal communities actively resisting oppression while simultaneously building independent futures. Drawing on the place-biographies of selected cultural spaces, interviews with cultural practitioners, and participants' oral histories, this paper demonstrates how these sites simultaneously decolonise memory from Soviet and Russian dominance while enabling citizens to imagine alternatives. It shows that they do so by offering environments for expressing new ideas, experimenting with new perspectives, and contributing to collective senses of normalcy and agency. In an act of "radical hope", these "spaces of imagination" empower resistance against an aggressor attempting to erase Ukraine's past, present, and future. This transforming role of cultural spaces further reveals the intimate relationship between heritage, place, and identity, while demonstrating how war alters public cultural functions.
Author: Sophia Anders (London School of Economics) -
This paper explores how Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) has become a site of ontological security production and creative resilience in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moving beyond its role as critical infrastructure, the railway system in Ukraine has emerged as a platform for everyday storytelling, artistic intervention, and collective identity reimagination. Drawing on a multi-modal narrative analysis of media productions, art installations, sonic environments, and interviews with railway workers and passengers, I trace how railways contribute to Ukrainians’ ontological security by shaping their autobiographical narratives of the resilient national Self. I identify four mechanisms that underpin this phenomenon: civilian protection narratives that depict railway workers as heroic figures; integration with Europe through performative infrastructural practices; operational continuity as a form of resistance through normality; and homecoming symbolism that reinforces emotional ties to displaced territories. Ukrainian Railways, therefore, exemplifies how technical systems can be repurposed a cultural and aesthetic vehicle of resilience, transforming wartime mobility into a creative strategy of resistance.
Author: Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics) -
Arts and culture are playing a pivotal role in the war in Ukraine. Russia's colonial aggression is predicated on trying to erase Ukraine as a collective identity, and in the process Russia is systematically targeting, destroying or stealing artistic and cultural expressions of this identity (Mälksoo 2023). Yet, as perhaps an evitable consequence of this violence, arts and culture have also become critical sites of resistance (RES-POL 2025). This paper traces three modalities of creative resistance in Ukraine. The first is the arts as therapeutic practices which helps communities respond to the war and become more resilient to its enduring effects. The second is as a decolonial reckoning as the arts both look to purge the legacies of colonial extraction and oppression and create a new image of peace and of a ‘free Ukraine’. The final way is through the mobilisation of culture as an explicit tool of warfare through the creation of ‘Cultural Forces’ brigade within the Ukrainian army. This brigade uses arts and culture the help sustain soldiers and civilians fighting and living across the front line. Beyond empirical significance, exploring these three modalities also looks to further expand arts in conflict research, which has focused on concepts more closely aligned with peace and peacebuilding (reconciliation) than resistance.
Author: Henry Redwood (King's College London) -
This paper explores the Geos – an ontological category at the centre of contemporary military violence (Griffiths and Redwood 2024) – in relation to Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine by focusing attention on the global networks and assemblages of power and material practices, and their historical precedents, that both sustain and resist contemporary warfare. We interrogate the empirical entanglements of war with the geos through a close reading of three sites in Ukraine. 1. Crops. These are a target of violence, source of life and resistance practice (particularly the phenomenon of small-scale agriculture and home gardening), as well as hugely consequential for global food markets. 2. Rare earth minerals. These are a principal focus of certain global powers as they define their ‘interests’ in the war, as well as having significant consequences for both local and planetary ecological health. 3. Land mines. Ukraine is the most mined country on earth. These devices present not only an immediate threat to populations, but their seeping toxicity stretches the temporality of war and its violence, as well as pushes us further underground to understand the ontology of contemporary war. Turning to these sites helps both reinterrogate what ‘war is’ today as well open up sites and practices of resistance.
Author: Mark Griffiths (Newcastle University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Critical Torsions, Contorting the Critical: Ontological Security Studies and the Epistemological Politics of Self-CritiqueSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: Bruno Sowden-Carvalho (University of Birmingham) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)Chair: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
-
This piece argues that ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations rests on a foundational asymmetry: whilst privileging 'security', it has left the 'ontological' curiously undertheorised. I offer a friendly theoretical critique, contending that OSS remains constrained by what I call 'Giddensian gravity', a theoretical pull that reifies the self as the container of political ontology, neglects the surrounding environment's constitutive role in shaping subjectivities, and obscures ontological insecurity (OI) as a positive condition of being. I claim that Anthony Giddens' structuration theory fundamentally transformed R.D. Laing's original conceptualisation of OI, displacing its affirmative character and foreclosing transhuman dynamics. To address this limitation, I develop a post-Giddensian framework through Deleuze's Spinozist philosophy, particularly his univocal ontology and the concepts of affect and affection. I reconceptualise OI as an affirmative, transhuman condition perpetuated through bodily encounters, from which ontological security emerges only as transient and incidental. Affect operates as incorporeal movement propelling political transformation, whilst affections capture the corporeal traces through which the surrounding environment shapes subjectivities. This framework repositions OSS's contribution to constructivism by offering affective alternatives to discursive approaches, and advances critical security studies by theorising insecurity as affirmative rather than as a condition requiring resolution.
Author: Bruno Sowden-Carvalho (University of Birmingham) -
‘The West’ today comprises an assortment of select nation-states, bound together by shared narratives that maintain the ontological security of ‘Western’ identity. Moments of intra-Western crisis, however, can reveal how these narratives strategically conceal contradictions and tensions within ‘the Western Self’. The 2018 U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal is one such internal crisis in a series of critical events reverberating within the so-called West today. This crisis ruptured ‘Western’ autobiographical narratives linked to global leadership, multilateralism and liberal values, provoking ontological questions within ‘Western’ nations. The UK, as a major producer of ‘Western’ discourses – particularly through its news services – globally disseminates and normalises narratives about the ‘Self’ and ‘Others’. But how do news narratives of British national identity converge with ‘Western’ identity amidst a backdrop of internal crisis and uncertainty? This paper applies a Kleinian approach to Ontological Security Studies to understand how anxiety about the collective Selves – national and civilizational – is managed in the British press through Kleinian defence mechanisms such as idealisation, splitting, and projection. The position of ontological (in)security reveals how autobiographical narratives in British news can both separate British identity from a broader ‘Western’ identity, while simultaneously reinforcing its connection to it.
Author: Uma Muthia (Monash University) -
In November of 2023, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome began its “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author” exhibition, which was opened by the then recently elected Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni. Meloni was elected at the head of a right-wing coalition that promised a reinvigoration of Italian society, from manufacturing to schooling; so why was her government’s first cultural output focussed on a long dead British-South African? Even before coming into power, Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), has made Tolkien’s work a mainstay of its politics, appropriating and repackaging its Manichean narrative of good versus evil. In this paper, we look at how Meloni and FdI have appropriated Tolkien’s work through, what we call, ritualistic practices of enjoyment. We analyse Meloni’s and FdI’s ritualised engagement with Tolkien, both in a beyond the exhibit, and argue that this serves to structure collective political subjectivity. We argue that this work of fantasy is more than escapism, it is a fantastical worldview that informs action, provides psychological relief, and allows the far-right to communicate its enjoyment of cultural production.
Authors: Charlie Price (University of Warwick)* , Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick) -
Research on Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has rapidly increased in recent years and, in many ways, become a victim of its own success. Once a radical intervention in International Relations (IR) that challenged the status quo and our very understanding of security, the field has witnessed a proliferation of loosely connected studies and attempts to typologise and “mechanise” the field in a manner that mirrors the trajectory of soft constructivism in the 2000s. This expansion, while intellectually diverse, has led to a loss of coherence and, more critically, a loss of purpose. It has also contributed to the depoliticisation of security, as politics are increasingly marginalised and security reduced to technical mechanisms detached from their social and political context. As OSS becomes domesticated within the IR mainstream, it risks forfeiting the critical and transformative potential that once distinguished it. What began as a project for understanding the existential and psychoanalytic foundations of political life increasingly serves the discipline’s conventional aims rather than challenging its boundaries and providing unique insights. This paper argues for reclaiming critique and, with it, reclaiming the political in OSS by returning to its existentialist and psychoanalytic roots. By re-centring questions of ethics, ambivalence, and responsibility, OSS can recover its immanent potential as a critical project. In doing so, it may once again speak meaningfully to the real world and reaffirm its commitment to explaining and transforming political life rather than merely fitting into IR.
Authors: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) , Christopher Browning (University of Warwick)* , Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague))* -
Ontological security studies has tended to focus on states’ attempts to maintain stable self-narratives through definition against an external other. More recently, the concept of vicarious identification has been applied to international relations to understand how self-narratives are upheld through the identification of shared values and characteristics in friendly states. It is believed that differing foreign policy responses of states to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine can be explained through the conceptual lens of vicarious identification. Consequently, I undertake a comprehensive comparison of British, German, and Latvian foreign policy discourse from the initial months of the invasion. 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 relate to vicarious identification with Ukraine. It was found that British and Latvian foreign policy actors expressed vicarious identification with Ukraine to uphold established narratives of national identity. In contrast, due to key axioms of national identity being challenged by the invasion, German foreign policy actors sought to induce vicarious identification with Ukraine to help justify a reformulation of Germany’s foreign policy through the concept of Zeitenwende (a change in times). The results of this study shed further light on the mechanisms through which self-narratives are able to adapt to geopolitical shocks in order to maintain a stable sense of self.
Author: Karl Stuklis (University of Glasgow)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Emerging challenges in the (geo)politics of AI governance and regulationSponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Anna Nadibaidze (Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark)Chair: Anna Nadibaidze (Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark)Discussant: Emil Archambault (School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham)
-
Today’s dynamics related to AI developments are discussed not only in terms of coexistence but as an existential risk to humanity and its survival. Different international actors (from states to organizations or big-tech companies) have started describing their positions and priorities which produce and reproduce similar trends. The paper asks how policy actors employ AI-related risks to ground the policy legitimation. The paper overviews state actors – the US, China, the United Kingdom and Japan, and organizations – the Council of Europe, the United Nations, and the European Union. Methodologically, the focus is on different documents released by the actors specifically dedicated to AI and AI governance. The paper argues that despite using the notion of risk as a leading and overlapping notion to raise urgency, these actors reveal their own political preferences. These priorities include not only their approaches towards technology but also how these actors position themselves in the international stage.
Author: Justinas Lingevičius (Vilnius University) -
The concept of Responsible AI has emerged as an influential governance framework to address the challenges associated with the development and use of AI technologies across both civilian and military domains. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, this article argues for conceptualizing Responsible AI as a narrative sustained by various actors across multiple spaces and with different political objectives. It conducts a narrative praxiography of how state actors create and sustain visions of what is ‘responsible’ use of AI technologies, especially in the context of employing AI systems to support human decision-making. This is illustrated via a study of three states with different narratives and practices of Responsible AI: France, the UK, and the US. Based on an analysis of open-access sources such as strategies and policies, contextualized by interviews conducted with AI governance experts from these states, the article proceeds in two main steps. First, it unpacks the official narratives maintained by state actors and their differences across the three contexts, showcasing that Responsible AI is a broad concept that can be narrated in various ways. Second, it assesses whether the practices of those states align with their narratives, highlighting the need to question the objectives behind these narratives.
Author: Anna Nadibaidze (Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark) -
Given the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the governance of such technology has become a new arena for geopolitical competition and asserting leadership in establishing international principles. While existing debates on global AI governance focus largely on major powers such as the United States, China, and the European Union, the role of middle powers – particularly those in the Global North – remains understudied. This article examines how middle powers contribute to the evolving landscape of global AI governance through a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and South Korea. It analyses (1) their positions on AI governance, which are informed by domestic priorities and by the need to respond to initiatives advanced by major powers, and (2) the diplomatic practices through which they seek to advance these positions at the transnational level. The findings demonstrate that middle powers have become increasingly important in shaping AI governance. However, differences in domestic preferences and in their strategies of hedging between major powers have led to divergent governance approaches. The study provides new insights into the agency of Global North middle powers in global AI governance and their role in sustaining and redefining order in an increasingly turbulent international system.
Authors: Qiaochu Zhang (European University Institute) , Caice Jin (University of Exeter) -
Private technology and AI companies have become central actors in contemporary security innovation, yet their influence on the legal frameworks that govern war remains poorly understood. This paper examines how the integration of AI-based platform infrastructures such as Palantir’s Maven for NATO redistributes authority over the construction of legal categories in military targeting. Rather than merely supporting decision-makers, these systems classify, prioritize, and transform data into actionable designations of “combatant” or “civilian.” In doing so, they perform legal work upstream, embedding assumptions about who may be killed and on what evidentiary basis into code, data models, and interface defaults. This often occurs outside traditional legal and democratic oversight, allowing technology companies to quietly participate in norm-shaping processes. Using the notion of infra-legalities, the paper traces how mundane technical choices (data interoperability, risk thresholds, labeling schemes) materialize as operational norms of distinction within NATO’s targeting cycle. The argument challenges prevalent regulatory approaches that treat law as external to AI technology and instead shows how legal meaning is enacted within sociotechnical infrastructures. Ultimately, the paper contends that safeguarding international humanitarian law’s protective function requires attending to the privatized sites where legal categories are increasingly made.
Author: Martine Jaarsma (University of Antwerp)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Gender, Resistance and Governance: Women’s Agency in Post-Conflict Societies in the Global SouthSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConveners: Shelliann Israelsen (Radboud University) , Muhammad Ammar Hidayahtulloh (Radboud University)Chair: Shelliann Israelsen (Radboud University)
-
This paper examines Las Cuchas Tienen la Razón (The Cuchas Are Right) as a living site of feminist resistance and memory artivism. Painted in Medellín in 2025 by youth artists, activists, and cuchas (an affectionate Colombian term for elder women, often mothers or kin of the disappeared), the graffiti emerged after the first human remains were found at La Escombrera, a landfill and a territory that speaks truth long identified by the women buscadoras (those who search for the disappeared) despite state denial and public disregard. Its erasure by local authorities sparked solidarity actions across South and North America, and Europe, revealing how territorial memory moves through the land, walls, bodies, and digital space, forming feminist ecologies of memory and care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper engages with collective aesthetic and affective practices that sustain truth-making and make visible relational, intergenerational political agency between women buscadoras and youth artivists in Colombia’s post-accord context marked by persistent violence. It argues that feminist artivism enacts and weaves decolonial ecologies of memory and care, where mourning and remembrance become collective practices of relational care toward bodies, land, and community. These practices offer new ways of imagining justice, repair, and truth and stand as a living insistence that remembrance, when rooted in embodied territories of care, refuses erasure.
Author: Sophie Raehme (Central European University) -
State and regional intergovernmental organisation policies on UNSCR 1325 provisions often identify bold ambitions that align in promising ways with regional perspectives on peace and security. These extend the focus of security from a “state-based” focus to one that takes in non-traditional security threats to peace, prosperity and well-being in the region. The practical take-up of these provisions in Pacific policy is far less advanced. Concerningly, WPS policy debate in most Pacific Island states has become dominated by a conservative security sector focus that emphasises increased integration of women into security agencies. This paper discusses recent cross regional research undertaken for the Pacific Islands Forum on Pacific Island state’s WPS policy design and implementation. It shows how current securitised WPS practices create constraint both for women within Pacific Island state security agencies, and certainly for civilian women peace leaders who are struggled to be heard outside these agencies. It also shows how these are resisted. It concludes with reflection on policy innovation that might be developed to create space for a more balanced and enabling WPS approach.
Author: Nicole George (The University of Queensland) -
This paper investigates how women’s groups resist post-conflict marginalisation and reshape governance in post-conflict contexts. Using a feminist institutionalism approach, we conceptualise women’s agency as both gendered resistance and institution-building. This dual lens allows us to capture how women challenge exclusionary power structures and actively participate in creating new institutional norms, practices and alliances. Our analysis focuses on two networks of women’s organisations, Balai Syura Ereung Inong Aceh and Rede Feto Timor-Leste, in Aceh and Timor-Leste, respectively. These cases illustrate how women’s groups navigate complex political landscapes in the aftermath of conflict. The paper argues that women are not peripheral actors in post-conflict reconstruction but central agents in shaping the emerging political order. Drawing on archival research, field observations, and interviews with women activists, male politicians, international actors, and religious leaders, our analysis reveals how women’s collective action in post-conflict contexts operates simultaneously within and against dominant institutional arrangements. We show that the agendas and strategies of women’s groups are contingent on multiple intersecting factors, including the gendered legacies of conflict, the influence of international actors, resistance from male elites to women’s rights discourses, and the enduring power of informal institutions such as customary and religious norms.
Authors: Muhammad Ammar Hidayahtulloh (Radboud University) , Shelliann Israelsen (Radboud University)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Imagining Politics Otherwise: Popular Culture, Security, and the Aesthetics of DisruptionSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)Chair: Anna Katila
-
An examination of 21st-century science fiction works (such as The Doctored Man, The Chimera Brigade, DMZ, Masquerade, The Second Civil War, and Civil War) reveals how their connection to specific historical periods evokes feelings of both familiarity and strangeness. This approach enables audiences and readers to distance themselves from historical facts and patterns, fostering unease about past events. Consequently, science fiction encourages reflection on present-day situations with less emotional involvement.
This reflection on the present occurs through the emotional bond formed with the characters and their life paths. By not directly addressing the present, these stories provide an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on past events, one's ancestors' actions, and one's own reactions in similar situations. Science fiction demonstrates the importance of understanding these reactions and emotions, recognizing their influence on behavior, and being more mindful of the motives behind one’s actions and reactions.
Author: Danièle ANDRE (La Rochelle Université) -
Focusing on the music, performance, political actions, and legacy of David Bowie, this paper explores the ability of popular culture and celebrity to engage audiences on questions of international politics that transcend time and space. Especially since the advent of streaming, cultural outputs have a temporal elasticity that enables them to speak to political concerns in the time and space they were produced, but also whenever and wherever they are consumed by audiences in the past, present, and future. Bowie was an active artist from 1964 until his death in 2016. Most analyses focus on how his works can be read in the context of when they were made or released, with little emphasis on their politics. There is, however, a more temporally long-term aspect to the significance of Bowie’s contributions to culture, society, and politics that warrants exploration as an example of how popular culture can globally engage citizens politically. This paper will explore how Bowie’s work engages critically with existential (in)security through nightmarish dystopian visions, fear of and opposition to nuclear weapons, and demands for “a better future” which seek tolerance and understanding along lines of gender identity, sexuality, race, culture, and nation using newly available material in the David Bowie Archive at the V&A East.
Author: Trevor McCrisken (University of Warwick) -
The literature on videogames and representations continues to discuss games through a gendered binary in which women are seen as remaining marginalised to secondary roles and/or as hyper-sexualised. Whilst such examples do exist, this paper explores the importance of the growth of action-centred games which challenge such depictions, including those in which the player is placed in the role of a woman (i.e. you ‘have to’ play as a woman character (e.g. Horizon Zero Dawn, Control, Gears 5)), those in which you can ‘choose’ to play as a man or woman (e.g. Assassins Creed Valhalla), and those in which you can design your own character (so often breaking out of a gender binary). The paper argues that such trends are far from marginal and are in fact increasingly widespread. Some of the reactions of ‘gamers’ to such changes have been violent and hateful: seen, for example, in the case of The Last of Us Part 2 and the forthcoming GTA 6 on the basis that you have to play as a woman. Such examples occupy considerable media and academic commentary but this paper argues that they are atypical: most games do not excite such reactions. In fact, most such changes have been met with minimal comment by players and/or journalists, so amounting to an ‘unpolitics’ of gender (which masks some very real change). This paper argues that these changes in the games industry have been largely ignored by academics, who still remain fixated on either emphasising a lack of change in relation to representations and/or focused on high-profile atypical cases of extreme responses by players to change that has occurred.
Author: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Political Theologies Against the Colonial StateSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: Emma Davis (Northwestern University)Chair: Emma Davis (Northwestern University)
-
The term ‘Hierarchy’ has its origins in the work of the 6th century Syrian monk known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. His blend of Neoplatonism and Christianity produced the term ‘Hierarchy’ meaning ‘Holy-Order’ to describe a normative cosmological vision defined by relations of service rather than a stratification of reality based on violence. This paper looks at how this concept shaped early Christian views of the international and how these conceptions might be brought to bear on questions of racism and coloniality. It ties these points to contemporary work that is being done in liberation theology and shows how this tradition of political theology can be seen as offering a critique of the modern-secular-colonial matrix that continues to define contemporary international relations.
Author: Theo Poward (University of St Andrews) -
This paper explores the political theologies of Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (1880–1957), focusing on their critiques of mainstream Zionism and the liberal nation-state. Active in early-twentieth century Palestine and aligned with binational Zionist movements, both Buber and Radler-Feldman rejected the liberal political order as incompatible with Jewish theology. They regarded state sovereignty as a form of idolatry that usurped divine authority and assimilated Jewish political identity into a Christian-secular nation-state model. Their understanding of the Jewish collectivity as being constituted in relation to God and Torah, rather than by human agency alone, challenges IR theory’s conventional assumptions about autonomous group self-determination. Their vision also disrupts IR’s territorial assumptions: the Biblical land of Israel, for them, was not a sovereign possession but a theologically charged space that resists incorporation into legal regimes of property and statehood. This paper situates Buber and Radler-Feldman within post-secular debates in IR, arguing that their thought challenges IR's core assumptions about sovereignty, identity, and space. By recovering their political theologies, the paper calls for a re-examination of foundational IR concepts in light of traditions that resist supposedly secular paradigms.
Author: Emma Davis (Northwestern University) -
This paper explores the connections or lack of between International Political Theology, as a growing field within International Relations, and the Islamicate. By Islamicate I refer not only to theological concepts within Islam, but their practice and application by Muslims - not territorially-defined as a Muslim world, but even as minority communities outwith. While there is considerable overlap and intersection with political theology from Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, among others, I explore in this paper the relative lack of engagement with Islamic concepts in International Political Theology beyond brief (often negative) comparisons with predominantly western views of political violence in Islamic theory and practice. I reflect on the possible historical, conceptual, and political reasons for this, and how or why this apparent breach even needs to be bridged.
Author: Jasmine Gani (LSE) -
The majority of IR Theory, even in its more critical iterations, holds on to a teleology of history. The world as we find it might be transformable, but not in ways that would take us back to worlds overlain by the violence of colonial modernity. This paper draws on a tradition of kabbalistic thought rooted in historic Palestine and the broader world of Islamo-Judaic co-habitation and intellectual production which reached across from Baghdad to Al-Andalus for over a millennium, a tradition of Islamo-Jewish thought that is of Palestine, but not of Zionism or associated violent teleologies. In particular the paper explores the writings and thought of Haim Shaul Dweik Hakohen, a Syrian kabbalist who migrated to Al Quds in 1898, and who produced a series of texts that centres a retrieval of divine worlds thought to be lost to the violence of the biblical Creation. The paper argues that the retrieval embedded in Haim Dveik’s epistemic world contains lessons for how IR might respond more productively to calls from colonised peoples for the return of their lands and livelihoods, centring the wretched of the earth in our development of concepts and theories, rather than the masters of war.
Author: Clive Gabay
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Populism and Foreign Policy in a Changing International OrderSponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConveners: Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University) , Leslie Wehner (University of Bath)Chair: Consuelo Thiers (The University of Edinburgh)Discussant: Kai Oppermann (TU Chemnitz)
-
In The Populist Prince, I offer a theoretically grounded analysis of the resurgence of personalist, centralist, emotionally charged, and contentious leadership in contemporary politics. Drawing upon Machiavelli’s insights from The Prince, I argue that “neo-Machiavellian populism” explains how leaders consolidate power by manipulating fear, identity, and institutional weakness.
Bridging classic philosophy with contemporary psychology, political science, foreign policy analysis, and leadership studies, I argue that the most consequential populist leaders of the twenty-first century operate not merely as demagogues but as strategic actors who combine moralized rhetoric with a calculated approach to politics, including violence. They subvert the post-World War 2 liberal-democratic consensus through ideology, and performative mastery of crisis and fear.
Integrating comparative case studies from diverse political contexts, The Populist Prince advances a framework for understanding the psychological and structural mechanisms that enable personalist leaders to thrive under conditions of democratic erosion and global uncertainty. It ultimately invites scholars and practitioners to reconsider the enduring relevance of Machiavellian statecraft in an era defined by spectacle, emotion, and crisis.Author: Özgür Özdamar (Bilkent University) -
Multilateral collaboration through international organisations (IOs) is among the key characteristic of the liberal international order (LIO). Populist leaders are often described as challengers to this order since, from their view, it is held to benefit the “elite” at the expense of the “people”. But do populists represent an unequivocal challenge to international organizations and the LIO more broadly? This paper explores the public engagement of three populist leaders – Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and US President Donald Trump – with various IOs in different policy areas: the World Trade Organization (trade); the United Nations with a particular focus on the UN Security Council (security); and the International Criminal Court (law). The paper suggests that rather than representing an outright challenge, populists in power exhibit a more nuanced approach to IOs. States’ geopolitical position and the specific nature of international regimes lead populist leaders to adopt varying stances on international organizations. What populism does is provide a coherent ideational and discursive frame to evaluate the nature of IOs and legitimize varying, often contradicting positions.
Author: Angelos Chryssogelos (London Metropolitan University) -
Does populism influence leaders to take foreign policy risks? The existing literature on populism has successfully outlined the domestic implications of populist government formation, but theory-driven analyses of populism’s international impact, particularly in shaping foreign policy change, are still scarce. Specifically, IR scholarship is still coming to terms with how and why populist leaders make foreign policy decisions, as well as the external conditions conducive to policy changes. This paper looks to explore these questions by way of an in-depth case study of Turkey’s changing policy to Syria (2011-2013). Utilising a framework that combines Prospect Theory with the politico-strategic approach to populism, this paper applies a qualitative frame analysis methodology to evaluate Prime Minister Erdogan’s assessments of the impact of the 2011 Arab Uprisings on Turkey’s position in the Middle East, and whether changes to this framing predisposed Erdogan and his ministers to abandon relations with Syria’s Assad regime in favour of the opposition. In doing so, this paper will contribute to the growing research agenda on populist foreign policy, through demonstrating how populism’s uninstitutionalised decision-making process and reliance on continued mass-mobilisation through confronting threats to ‘the people’ render certain policy choices more likely.
Author: Ben Seymour (Nottingham Trent University) -
This paper explores the connection populism as a stylistic performance and leadership branding in the international. The paper brings together the literature on branding, and foreign policy roles to trace how individuals use the international as a theatrical stage of recurrent stylistic performances. Populist leaders develop and promote a type of leadership brand in the international by locating different type of individual roles that underpin their brands and solidify the emotional bond and nexus leader and people against an undesirable elite. The main claim of this paper is that the type of populist leadership brand or political personas these leaders build and enact is a performative act that impact foreign policy relations as their framing of foreign policy is a performance of a recurrent crisis and of urgency that needs prompt leadership solutions that are usually out of the norm. While the leader performance unfolds in front of a domestic and international audience, it is this former dimension where crisis and urgency representations of the international are amplified by the leader as these actors need to keep the existing emotional bond of the populist leadership brand with followers and prevent audience costs coming from the people of the populist project.
Author: Leslie Wehner (University of Bath) -
Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, albeit to different degrees and through distinct strategies, have emerged as two of the most significant challengers to the Western political order and its social imaginary. Since the 2010s, both leaders have increasingly foregrounded civilizational discourses and post-imperial imaginaries that shape domestic politics and legitimise assertive foreign policy. This article takes Putin and Erdoğan as a comparative case study to critically examine the political discourses through which Russkiy mir and neo-Ottomanism function as populist projects that moralise geopolitics and normalise states of exception. Theoretically, it advances a synthetic framework that integrates Laclau’s theory of hegemony, Lacanian notions of affect and jouissance, and Ontological Security Theory to explain how civilizational imaginaries are discursively constructed, affectively invested, and routinised as security practices. Methodologically, the study employs comparative discourse analysis of speeches, strategic doctrines, ministerial statements, and emblematic policy episodes from the 2010s onward, operationalising how both leaders articulate hegemonic discourses and affective post-imperial narratives and tracing their translation into foreign policy practices. Empirically, the paper shows that both regimes converge on
anti-Western exceptionalism, charismatic leadership, and moralised geopolitical repertoires, while diverging in their grammars of belonging and in the foreign policy instruments they employ. It argues that costly and escalatory foreign policy routines persist because of their affective returns, particularly the forms of enjoyment derived from attempting to “repair”imperial loss and from promising renewed jouissance. The article contributes both a transferable analytical toolkit for studying post-imperial populist foreign policy and a refined account of how identity work and affect sustain adventurous external behaviour under conditions of ontological insecurity.Authors: Leonardo Zanatta (Corvinus University of Budapest) , Recep Onursal (University of Kent)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Reframing Korea in Contemporary International Studies: Narratives of Identity, Memory, and PowerSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: Hazel Yeoun Choi (Cardiff University)Chair: Hazel Yeoun Choi (Cardiff University)Discussant: Sarah Son (University of Sheffield)
-
How do small acts in everyday life reshape wider political order, how does that change across contexts? Using Korea, an experimental site for rethinking recognition rules,as a vantage point, I read five autobiographies by North Korean women through the lens of identity as repeated social practice, comparing how those practices work in North Korea and after settlement in South Korea.
In North Korea, women maintain a sense of self by interpreting norms flexibly and carefully mobilising informal networks. These quiet practices create micro-orders and shadow recognition, yet under repression and limited channels for expression, their effects remain local and seldom change formal rules.
After migration, capacity expands, and categories are renegotiated: women learn institutional literacy, widen roles in community, and move into writing and public speaking, carrying private experience into shared narratives. Institutional and cultural support can open doors yet sometimes re-fix the “defector” label; authors counter by foregrounding multi-layered selves as professionals, community leaders, or writers. Everyday practices accumulate into local recognition and open public/institutional channels, shifting recognition rules in ways that indirectly reconfigure order over time. The analysis shows that politics is made where everyday life, discourse, and institutions meet, and that the same actors’ capacity to reshape order is contextually-conditional.
Author: Hazel Yeoun Choi (Cardiff University) -
Environmental issues are far from immune from entanglement in issues of memory and identity politics. This paper examines South Korean discourses on Japan's 2021 plan to release water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This unilateral announcement has faced significant political controversy in Northeast Asia, exacerbating mistrust towards Japan and fear of potential harm in South Korea. Drawing on discourse analysis of the National Assembly, newspapers, and civil society (April 2021 to August 2023), the paper illustrates the extent to which these discourses exemplify enduring insecurities within the wider East Asian region. It discusses how these insecurities are linked to North Korea’s nuclear experiments, US-China competition, and historical tensions following Japanese colonial rule in the early part of twentieth century. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that environmental concerns can be profoundly influenced by both political and historical tensions, shaping approaches to addressing shared challenges posed to the region’s natural environment. By examining the South Korean discourses on the Fukushima Nuclear water release, it explores the role of historical memory in the perception of environmental challenge and how transnational environmental challenge is understood as an international political agenda.
Author: Yeonsu Lee (University of Leeds) -
K-Pop is a core component of the Korean Wave. Born out of a globalisation project, its export-oriented purpose has fed into its in-house production practices, aesthetics, and narratives. K-Pop content is designed to appeal to different global markets whilst still containing identifiably Korean characteristics, thereby creating a glocalised genre of pop music. Whilst it is well understood that K-Pop is promoted as a ‘soft power’ attraction with considerable economic benefit for South Korea, through its cultural hybridity it is also producing and circulating narratives of a modern, globally interconnected Korean identity.
This paper argues that the proliferation of K-Pop offers a unique vantage point for understanding how popular music can construct national identity in international relations. K-Pop is a multi-sensory genre, comprised of pronounced sounds, choreographies, fashions, and visuals. Examining popular acts such as Blackpink and HUNTR/X (K-Pop Demon Hunters), I discuss the use of linguistic combinations, music production, and local symbols and aesthetic experiences to illustrate how national identity narratives are being (re)-configured within K-Pop’s cultural repertoire. More broadly, I suggest that Korea’s accelerated modernization and surge in popular cultural output illuminates how pop music can contribute to the construction of a state’s imagined futures in international contexts.Author: Sonja Nicholls (University of Bristol) -
South Korea’s transformation from a colonised and aid-dependent state into an OECD-DAC (Development Assistance Committee) donor has been celebrated as a success story. Along with other East Asian nations, its modernisation is often portrayed as distinct from Western trajectories. Yet while debates have focused on Korea’s ‘unique’ development model and close ties to domestic corporate interests, the postcolonial dynamics behind this transformation have received little attention. This paper argues that Korea’s trajectory unsettles binaries such as North/South, modern/traditional, and donor/recipient, calling for a more critical reading of how emerging donors navigate global hierarchies of development. Drawing on discourse and institutional analysis of Korea’s DAC accession process and its approach to partner countries, the paper examines the implications of Korea’s paradoxical stance. It shows how its ambivalent identity, shaped by a history of subjugation and rapid ascent, have sustained hierarchies rooted in traditional development regimes while promoting empathy with the Global South. The paper argues that postcolonial memories and aspirations for recognition have produced hybrid logics of aid that risk replicating the very hierarchies they aim to transcend. By analysing Korea as a postcolonial donor, it highlights how identity and memory shape the uneven terrain of contemporary development cooperation.
Author: Uijin Im (University of Sussex)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Roundtable / Religion and (dis)information: establishing a new research agenda
Research on the impact of religion on societies has increasingly had to acknowledge how religion is being reconfigured in alignment with global mass media, information and entertainment trends. Accordingly, various case-based studies have interrogated mainstream religious actors’ engagement with (dis)information and its implications in various global settings. Others have interrogated the relationship between extreme or fundamentalist religious belief and belief in false information and conspiracy theories.
Yet despite this empirical boom, little work has made the cross-case comparisons necessary to conceptualise the ways in which religious actors can function as information actors beyond the religious realm, or how religious organisations’ engagements with information relate to the nature of their host regime or the broader global media ecology. This panel offers such a new direction. It combines insights from across IR, Religious Studies and area studies and touches upon the religion-information relationship across Eastern Orthodoxy, Slavic Paganism, Turkish media-politics, the Catholic Church in the Philippines, Falun Gong in China, and Rastafari online spirituality. Building on this broad base, the panel seeks to build some conceptual and analytical coherence to the exciting work currently being undertaken on the topic of religion and (dis)information.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University)Participants: Natalie Martin (University of Nottingham) , Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University) , Paul-Francois Tremlett (The Open University) , Natasha Lock (King's College, London) , Victoria Hudson (King's College London) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Same Foundations, New Directions: Examining Trust Across Different Levels and Contexts in International StudiesSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: David Wilcox (n/a)Chair: Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University)
-
Does trust matter in diplomatic negotiations, and what does it enable diplomats to do? This paper addresses these questions using an original dataset of 170 surveys conducted with UN diplomats based in New York. We distinguish between two forms of trust: (a) interstate trust – shared, intersubjective trust between states; and (b) interpersonal trust – trust between individual diplomats. We examine whether these forms of trust operate independently or interact, asking whether interpersonal trust can facilitate cooperation even amid state-level distrust. We also consider cognitive and affective trust in the UN system, as well as the general propensity to trust. We test the effects of trust on three dimensions of negotiation behaviour: the use of distributive tactics, logrolling, and flexibility. The findings show that trust shapes some (but not all) negotiation dynamics: interpersonal trust reduces the use of distributive tactics, interstate trust enhances flexibility, and logrolling appears largely unaffected by trust levels.
Author: Nicola Chelotti (Loughborough University) -
This chapter investigates how trusting becomes institutionalized. By moving beyond models that emphasize trust as a psychological or interpersonal phenomenon, the study introduces three analytical shifts necessary for understanding the institutionalization of trust: from trust-building to trust-maintenance, from individual relationships to impersonal devices, and from deliberate choices to routine practices. It uses an illustrative, empirical, historical case from the realm of International Relations, the Moscow-Washington hotline between the United States and the Soviet Union as a “trust device” established and used to prevent, first and foremost, nuclear war. Overall, the chapter contributes a process-based integration of prior work on trusting and institutions.
Authors: Guido Moellering (University of Witten-Herdecke, Germany)* , Eszter Simon (Nottingham Trent University) -
Understanding the dispositions of individuals has long been
an area of interest to scholars of International Relations, from exploring the role of political psychology of state leaders to understanding foreign policy decision-making, with applied scholarship on identifying different types of dispositions, attitudes and personality traits. However, the existing literature on identifying dispositions to trust is severely lacking,
constraining scholars seeking to understand how these dispositions interact with the social interactional models of trust seen in the literature on face-to-face diplomacy and the interpersonal paradigms of IR. The paper proposes five proxies that can be used to identify individuals as either generalised or particularised trustors: i) political ideology; ii) worldview; iii) foreign policy stance; iv) mental attitude; v) perception of risk. To demonstrate the general utility of the proxies and how they can be used to examine individuals—including, but not exclusively, state leaders—the paper applies them to five key individuals involved in the 1992-1993 Oslo Channel between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Overall, the paper seeks to provide a framework for future scholars to analyse individuals in both single- and comparative-case studies, both historical and contemporary.Author: David Wilcox (University of Birmingham) -
The role of disinformation is growing at a considerable rate as a key weapon in the information influence operation arsenal of hostile states. Public exposure to and engagement with disinformation causes sociopolitical polarisation, electoral destabilisation and democratic vulnerability, exacerbating existing challenges of declining trust, civic engagement and political participation.
Public resilience against disinformation depends upon ontological security and systemic trust, and the ability to discern and deflect disinformation at an individual and societal level. This paper explores how attuned publics are to hostile state disinformation campaigns, how they navigate the everyday disinformation landscape in a post-trust society, and what comes next for international security and the field of international studies in terms of the potential implications of variable public trust and perceptiveness around disinformation and information influence operations.
This paper draws upon insights from an ongoing three year ESRC project exploring how foreign-state information influence operations (IIOs) have an impact on public opinion and policy decisions. Empirical data derives from five UK and Irish public focus groups conducted in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin, alongside in-depth interviews with practitioners working in the field of analysing, countering and defending against foreign-state information influence operations.Authors: Matthew Francis (Coventry University)* , Charis Rice (Coventry University)* , Jenny Ratcliffe (Coventry University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Spaces of / for Resistance, Agency and Activism in Global PoliticsSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)Chair: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)
-
At a moment when International Relations faces resurgent militarism, the global spread of anti-gender politics, and the re-securitization of everyday life, revisiting what we mean by “security” has become urgent. Despite decades of critique, the discipline remains largely shaped by state-centric and masculinized understandings of protection, marginalizing feminist and decolonial perspectives. Drawing on fifteen semi-structured interviews with Colombian feminist activists and analysis of peace and security policies, this paper explores how feminist movements in Colombia have re-imagined the meaning and practice of security during and after the 2016 Peace Agreement. I conceptualize this dynamic as “gendering security and securing gender.” Gendering security captures feminist efforts to challenge militarized logics and redefine peace around justice, care, and inclusion. Securing gender, conversely, highlights how states and international institutions—amid anti-gender backlash—regulate and depoliticize feminist claims by stabilizing normative gender roles. By tracing how Colombian activists navigated and transformed these tensions while embedding gender-sensitive provisions in the peace accord, the paper shows how feminist actors contest security from below. This case offers a critical re-thinking of how International Studies can respond to global backlash and remain fit for a more inclusive and uncertain future.
Author: İpek Bahar Karaman-Yılmazgil (University of Manchester & Bilkent University) -
The (re)activation of socio-political conflicts in the home country evokes particular sentiments within diasporic communities that influence their identity construction and their transnational politics. This paper argues that an intersectional outlook on the role played by affects and emotions would benefit the IR diaspora political mobilisation scholarship. The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) uprising (2022-2023), a civil resistance struggle of unprecedented weight in Iran, represented a key moment for Iranian diaspora human rights activism. Within an important section of the Iranian community abroad, sentiments such as nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary years of the Pahlavi monarchy and discordant party politics involving old foes started resurfacing with more intensity due to WLF. By relying on the analysis of both oral and textual sources, this paper shows that those (re)activated affects and emotions favoured the human rights activism of first and second-generation Iranian women located in Spain, as made visible through their increasing presence in contentious and institutional public spaces and discourses in the country of settlement.
Author: Sheida Besozzi (University of the Basque Country)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Technologies of violenceSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Christine Agius (Swedish Defence University)Chair: Christine Agius (Swedish Defence University)
-
In Queer International Relations Cynthia Weber discusses the subjective logic of “and/or”, where things can be connected and disconnected simultaneously. This powerful idea draws out the contradictions, multiplicity and queerness of concepts in the political sphere. In this presentation, I demonstrate the relevance of the subjective “and/or” for the relationships between security and theology via the Military Chaplaincy. For, the Chaplain is the epitome of this relationship, being both a theological figure (a Priest, Imam, Rabbi, etc.) and a military asset. Yet, this is not reflected in the academic disciplines that support military chaplaincy – or security more broadly – leaving a gap in conceptualisation between security and theology in academia, and the ministry of the military chaplain and the military that she serves.
Particularly, I will explore this problem the context of technology in the future battlefield, where the challenges of technology demonstrate how security and theology go hand-in-hand, alongside the frictions that these disciplines cause each other. Using the Military Chaplain as a lens to see these contradicting connections more clearly. By doing this, I will demonstrate the interconnected and yet distinct place of theology in the practice and theory of security, and the place of security in the practice and theory of military chaplaincy. To more completely conceptualise these disciplines and their shared challenges.Author: Kenneth Wilkinson-Roberts (Lancaster University) -
The proliferation of artificial‑intelligence (AI) applications across all sectors of society has become a defining political issue of our time, oscillating between narratives of opportunity and threat. Within this broader debate, AI in the military domain occupies a particularly prominent position. Recent scholarship has converged on human control—its definition and mechanisms—as a central regulatory consensus for military AI. Yet the conceptual and operational foundations underpinning proposals for human control remain insufficiently examined.
This paper offers a critical, theoretical inquiry into human control of military AI. Drawing on post‑ and transhumanist literature, it problematises the prevailing conception of “humans” and the broader human‑technology interaction framework that dominate current control debates. The central argument is that the regulatory imperative of human control conflicts with the techno‑optimist discourse that pervades political, military, societal, and industrial circles. By exposing this tension, the study aims to enrich normative discussions about the governance of AI in the military domain.
Author: Hendrik Huelss (University of Southern Denmark) -
The War on Terror brought about a conscious understanding of the ways in which technologies of warfare and counterinsurgency were being spatially reoriented. The militarisation of policing and urban surveillance were evidence of the ‘war coming home’, and the parallels between the management of conflict zones and urban governance provoked a reevaluation of state violence, coloniality, and empire. Our contemporary moment has retained these practices though in a new context: that of the crisis of the liberal international order. It is within the context of this crisis that we see the emergence of ‘technological solutions’, namely the Smart City, that ostensibly ensure security in this increasingly unsafe world. This paper investigates the place of the Smart City within this current framework of permanent crisis, its origins in colonial counterinsurgency, and how it creates a pipeline through which urban space can absorb the infrastructure of violence cultivated within the domain of militarism. Through the adoption of this infrastructure, a reconstitution of the border and a reformation of citizenship take place, and a new political space governed by the symbiosis of private corporate and state interest begins to emerge. The context of Israeli occupation and segregation has been selected as a portal for the exploration of these themes. The analysis will subsequently identify the particularities of 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 crisis.
Author: Seif Hendy (University of Exeter) -
Weapons of Mass Population? Pronatalism, settlement, and passportisation in Russian-occupied Ukraine
How does Russia instrumentalise demographic engineering to consolidate territorial control in occupied regions of Ukraine? Addressing the urgent demographic crisis by stimulating population growth has been a feature of each iteration of Russian National Security Strategy under Putin. However, Russia’s attempts to secure success on the battlefield have led to increasing policy incoherence between demographic and national security policies. This paper analyses Russia’s security strategies, family policy, and settlement incentives to assess how demographic policy is weaponised to achieve security objectives and expand Russian-citizen settlement in occupied Ukrainian territories (including Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson). Drawing on existing literature which frames Russia’s war in Ukraine as an imperial conquest, this paper will also evaluate the settler-colonial logics underpinning these wartime policy developments. The corpus includes official government documents such as Russian national security strategies (2009, 2015, 2021), demographic and family policy, and presidential/governmental decrees, as well as NGO/IO reporting on forced deportations and population transfers. While existing scholarship treats Russian pronatalism and territorial expansion as separate policy domains, this paper makes a unique contribution to the literature by demonstrating that demographic policy has become a weapon of war and a tool of military consolidation.
Author: Ailbhe Cannon (London School of Economics and Political Science)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / The IPE of the United KingdomSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
From the "asset economy" perspective, policymakers appear increasingly trapped by their reliance on the logic of asset-price inflation. In this paper, I shift the focus from housing assets to housing liabilities, in order to better anchor the analysis of infrastructural power. Although the IPE literature has tended to parse the power of debt mainly in terms of liquidity and asset prices, a closer look at the history of UK monetary policy reveals the pivotal importance of housing liabilities. From the 1930s to the present, the power of interest rates to influence the UK economy has been overwhelmingly channelled through the infrastructure of housing liabilities, from the jerry-building boom of the 1930s, to the mortgage cartel of the postwar decades, to the mortgage bills of the post-Thatcher era. To their disappointment, policymakers found again and again that interest rates had little influence over the general demand for credit, or over the general level of business investment -- except as by-products of the effects on the infrastructure of housing liabilities. Opting to calibrate these effects, policymakers honed an unprecedented degree of infrastructural power over the economy.
Author: Michaela Hamilton (University of Sussex) -
The power of finance has been an area of great interest since the Global Financial Crisis. Within the field of International Political Economy, analysis has focused on structural and instrumental power of banks, while non-bank financial institutions, and insurers in particular, have received less attention. This neglect is significant, as the insurance industry is central to risk management, necessary for global finance and trade, and plays a vital role in household and government finances. This paper aims to redress this blind spot by developing new frameworks of power, capturing insurers’ role as risk mitigators rather than credit facilitators. The paper develops these frameworks through the case study of the Solvency UK directive and process tracing. The UK insurance industry is both domestically significant and internationally important, while Solvency UK is an opportunity for firms to influence regulation and showcase instrumental power. The paper demonstrates that insurers face different constraints when lobbying for policy change due to unique business models and structural standing within the UK. It further shows that manifestation of power varies between different types of insurers. The paper further develops our understanding of an important industry in IPE by deepening and diversifying our conceptions of power in finance.
Author: Aulon Ramadani (City St George's University) -
This paper examines Britain's pivotal shift from free trade to protectionism following World War One, focusing on Winston Churchill's role as a key agent of ideational and policy change. Drawing on archival documents and contemporary sources, I demonstrate how individual beliefs and strategic ideas shaped major economic policy transformations at a critical juncture in international political economy. Churchill presents a compelling case study for understanding the interplay between ideas, material interests, and institutional constraints in trade policy formation. The paper makes three theoretical contributions to IPE scholarship. First, it demonstrates that belief plays a vastly larger role in political economy than conventional analyses acknowledge, particularly during periods of uncertainty. Churchill's 1925 decision to return Britain to the Gold Standard at pre-war parity exemplifies how policy makers' beliefs about credibility, stability, and international order can override technocratic advice and shape both currency regimes and trade policy trajectories. The resulting overvaluation and uncompetitiveness made protectionist measures increasingly necessary, demonstrating how currency regime choices constrain subsequent trade policy options. Second, it shows how pragmatic realism, rather than rigid ideology, allowed Churchill to reconcile his commitment to free trade principles with support for Imperial Preference and protectionism when Britain's relative power position demanded adaptation. Third, it reveals how imperial sentiment and economic self-interest were actively constructed and deployed by policy elites to legitimate policy reversals. This case illuminates broader theoretical questions about how ideas matter in IPE: not as epiphenomenal justifications for material interests, but as frameworks that define strategic options, constitute interests, and enable political coalitions across periods of systemic transition.
Author: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / The militarisation of UK security politicsSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: spp working group spp working group (bisa)Chair: Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London)
-
This presentation will explore the rhetoric and arguments made in the Government’s 2025 national security strategy, and its implications for areas that are de-emphasised, such as non-military stabilisation, development, peacebuilding, women, peace and security, and climate change.
Author: Larry ATTREE (Rethinking Security) -
The 2025 Strategic Defence Review, pitched as a 'root-and-branch review of UK Defence', promises to make the UK safer through a series of measures. Among these are increased defence spending, treating the defence sector as an 'engine for growth' and a so-called whole-of-society approach to defence. As feminist and other critical scholars have long argued, any increases in spending and attention to defence tend to come at significant cost to other forms of safety such as social security. Drawing on recent work with co-authors on the concept of military social harm (Basham et al, 2024), this presentation will examine the potential harms of the measures envisaged in the SDR and other less visible ones. It will explore what an increased focus on defence might mean for the democratic scrutiny of military power and how a social harm approach might engender stronger democratic oversight.
Author: Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) -
On the verge of Labour’s election victory in 2024, David Lammy set out ‘progressive realism’, a foreign policy doctrine that would “use realist means to pursue progressive ends”, a mission of “ideals without delusions”. Progressive realism would address climate change, democratic backsliding and the crisis of multilateralism, all the while alive to the balance of power. Within eight months the doctrine had been paired with a vast budgetary shift from development aid to the military, and a target of 5% of gross national income to be spent on defence, resilience and security. Lammy is no longer Foreign Secretary, and progressive realism is less often spoken of. For many critics, this confirmed that the ‘doctrine’ was little more than a public relations gloss. In this paper I dig further. First, I present an alternative history of Labour foreign policy, looking at contentions over decolonisation, collective security, ethical foreign policy, the responsibility to protect and internationalism. Second, on ‘progressivism’, I show how Starmer and Lammy renounced the broader view of security that had gained such momentum since the 1990s. As well as radically reducing aid in perpetuity, recent defence and strategic discourse largely abandons prior commitments to gender equality, global justice and ’non-traditional’ security threats. Third, I suggest that the government’s version of ‘realism’ has been contradictory, combining elements of 'sovereign capability’ with a persistent Atlanticism binding Whitehall to Washington. As well as disappointing eft internationalists, progressive realism has therefore also obscured profound questions about British statecraft.
Author: Paul Kirby (Centre of Women, Peace and Security, London School of Economics) -
Mainstream British memories of war have set up a context that facilitates militarisation and discounts pacifist critique, as particularly notable since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This paper illustrates this by focusing on two notable examples of such memories of war: annual remembrance commemorations around the Red Poppy, and mainstream myths about the Second World War (WWII). Poppy commemorations reproduce a blinkered memory of British wars and feed the military-industrial-entertainment complex. WWII is remembered as a just and necessary response to the threat posed by Hitler, where sober and sacrificial Allied realism was needed to overcome the pacifist delusions of the Munich Agreement, thus simplifying and glorifying Allied motives and responsibilities for the war. Both memorial frames overlook the violence of war, its aftermath, and the way in which it transforms its participants. These memories also set a backdrop that facilitates militarisation offensives such as that witnessed since 2022. A revisionist pacifist critique exposes these dynamics, complicates such widespread narratives, and critically reflects on the militarisation path on which the United Kingdom has enthusiastically embarked.
Author: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / The security landscape of West Africa in a changing regional and international contextSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Giulia Piccolino (Loughborough University)Chair: Giulia Piccolino (Loughborough University)Discussant: Stefan Wolff (University of Birmingham)
-
As we unpack Russian strategies of influence and political interference in Africa, we often miss the agency of African actors: what can we understand from their behavior regarding Moscow? Are they puppets in a New Cold War or manipulating superpowers for their own agenda? The answer lies in between. Drawing from preliminary research on multiple countries (including Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Côte d’Ivore, Chad, Cameroon & Senegal), we present three categories of actors (elites, civil-society organizations, propagandists) supporting Moscow’s strategy. We try to explain the motivations, political agendas and expected gains of these actors, but also the narratives that bind them with Russia. Aware of the risks and benefits, these actors want to get rid of all the constraints involved in dealing with their internal conflicts by joining a new strategic alliance. It is a pact that closes some doors with the Western World, traps them in their own security struggles but opens new opportunities.
Author: Jonathan Guiffard (Institut Montaigne) -
Parallel forces are not a new development and have been extensively deployed in responding to West African conflicts, such as Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. In contexts where a UN operation is deployed, parallel forces can help respond to crises and undertake activities beyond what the UN is able to or is willing to perform. Existing scholarship has explored factors behind the decision to deploy parallel forces, but there has been little examination of why host governments choose to terminate their deployment. This paper looks at the expulsion of MINUSMA to argue that the push for robust peacekeeping has increasingly made host governments see the value of UN peace operations not in terms of civilian peacebuilding, but rather in terms of militarized extension of state authority. At the same time, the liberal character of UN peace operations sits at odds with the priorities of authoritarian governments. The deployment of parallel forces is therefore a means by which host governments can audition potential alternatives that can meet their desire for regime security.
Author: Eugene Chen (King's College London) -
Although the coastal countries of West Africa have not experienced full scale internal conflicts in recent years like the Sahelian countries, several of them have been the target of cross-border attacks perpetrated by either jihadist groups or pro-governmental militias. In this context, civil-military committees (CMC) that bring together representatives of the local security forces and civil society to discuss and address security problems have become increasingly popular as a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiative. International partners, such as the UNDP and USAID, have encouraged the adoption of this model. This presentation interrogates the usefulness of the CMC in addressing new security threats by looking at Côte d’Ivoire and Benin. While the Ivorian CMC have been established in the context of Security Sector Reform and have no explicit CVE mandate, the more recent Beninese CMC have been set up for CVE purposes. Extensive field research carried out in Côte d’Ivoire suggests that the CMC experience a tension between their peacebuilding and CVE mandates, and that they can best prevent radicalization indirectly, addressing inter-community tensions. Future field research will aim to ascertain whether these findings can be replicated in Benin, where the CMC face a much more tense security situation.
Author: Giulia Piccolino (Loughborough University) -
Since 2019, Ghana has implemented a National Framework for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism, developed by a high-level committee of security officials, researchers, and international experts. The Framework adopts a human security approach and has achieved notable results through coordination among security agencies, active participation of civil institutions, and trust-building efforts with communities in Northern Ghana.
As the Framework undergoes review, this paper argues that a fundamental issue has been overlooked: the relationship between state institutions and Fulbe pastoralist communities. Across the Sahel, the marginalization of Fulbe pastoralists has facilitated jihadist recruitment, often in contexts shaped by conflicts over pastoral land and environmental governance. While recent scholarship cautions against mechanically applying Sahelian trajectories to coastal states, ethnographic fieldwork suggests that Fulbe communities also experience forms of marginalization in Ghana.
However, what kinds of marginalization are at stake, and how might they shape potential vulnerabilities to radicalization? The paper argues that in Ghana, the most consequential forms of marginalization do not primarily revolve around farmer–herder conflicts. Rather, they are rooted in the insecure citizenship status of Ghanaian Fulbe, and vary across age, gender, education, occupation, and socio-economic position.Author: Martha Populin (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
WE03 Panel / Theories of Change for Nuclear DisarmamentSponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConvener: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds)Chair: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds)Discussant: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds)
-
What status, if any, do national boundaries hold within the functions of global nuclear politics? Adopting methodological insights for studying Large Technical Systems (LTS) from Science and Technology Studies, the framework developed in this paper reconceptualises the Global Nuclear Arsenal (GNA) as a single LTS, rather than as discrete national stockpiles. The immediate goal of the paper is to produce an understanding of the relationship between the social construction of the GNA’s function and the technical outputs of the system regardless of the claims of its managers. In practical terms, this means tracing the socio-technical connections between the components. Empirically, the analysis challenges deterrence advocates’ claims that they control the arsenals of their own, and adversary, states. As an international LTS, the web of socio-technical connections is too complex that any one group can be said to be in control. The paper concludes from this approach that the GNA is a threat to modernity itself. These findings are especially important for discerning the de facto ethics of the GNA through its threat to the rights of people living under its sway, even in nuclear-free zones. Democracy and justice in global nuclear politics therefore demands the dismantling of the GNA.
Author: Cameron Hunter (University of Copenhagen) -
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 critical 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, NATO 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 how bureaucratic agency can constrain nuclear policy choices, complicating both democratic accountability and transformative change in nuclear weapons policy.
Author: Franziska Stärk (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH)) -
This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding nuclear disarmament as a process of transformative social change rather than a technical or institutional endpoint. It argues that theorising multilateral nuclear disarmament requires “anticipatory” rather than empirical theory: one that imagines how an alternative world could be made possible. Drawing on Robert Cox’s distinction between problem-solving and critical theory, the article situates disarmament within the broader project of re-ordering global power relations that sustain nuclearism. It integrates insights from Futures Studies to frame nuclear disarmament as an ethical, participatory, and value-driven practice of imagining and inventing new forms of global security. It maps a diversity of theoretical approaches to reveal how different traditions explain or enable change. Building on Barry Buzan’s concept of nested institutions of international society, the article conceptualises a “global nuclear society” structured by contradictory norms of sovereignty, deterrence, and equality. It concludes that theorising nuclear disarmament entails uncovering these contradictions and identifying feasible transformative pathways that link imagination, ethics, and power. In doing so, it seeks to re-centre disarmament as both a theoretical and political act of inventing humanity’s future beyond nuclear violence.
Author: Nick Ritchie (University of York) -
This paper looks at how feminist thinkers have conceptualized change towards nuclear disarmament. We start by mapping how the existing feminist literature on nuclear weapons has implicitly or explicitly imagined change, whether in terms of agendas for gender equality or those focused on anti-militarism. We suggest that more attention needs to be paid to processes of change, alongside a focus on the end goal of disarmament. Aiming to open up the nuclear field, we revisit historical and sociological feminist debates about change more broadly, beyond the nuclear sphere, which can expand our theoretical toolkit and offer inspiration for feminist conceptualizations of nuclear disarmament. Rather than developing a universal feminist theory of nuclear change, we consider the benefits of feminist-oriented, context-specific and reflexive explorations of change that simultaneously reflect on the material and discursive realms of nuclear weapons.
Authors: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) , Jana Wattenberg (Aberystwyth University/American University)* , Hebatalla Taha (Lund University)*
-
-
10:30 AM
→
10:45 AM
Break 15m
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Asking ‘is the discipline fit for the future?’ in an unequal UK higher education sector
This roundtable reflects and draws on the British Academy Shape Observatory’s recent report on Politics and International Relations provisions in UK higher education sector to address the three key questions of this annual convention: Is the discipline fit for the future? What needs to change and how can that change happen? Are we ready for what comes next? Despite increasing demand for taught programmes in Politics and International Relations, the growth of PIR “has been highly uneven across institutions, and Politics and International Relations has decreased as a share of all students over the past 4-5 years.” Focusing on the latter findings, and the decisions that modern universities have had to take in suspending PIR degrees in recent years as a result of low recruitment numbers, this roundtable will discuss the imbalances of PIR’s prosperity and the implications of this unevenness for the future of International Studies. The roundtable will raise questions about access to subjects within International Studies, the reproduction of systematic inequalities in the Higher Education sector, and importantly the impact of the uneven growth of International Studies for Students entering the field, and for international relations more widely.
How will International Studies rise to the global challenges of the coming decades and what kind of new thinking, methods and approaches to research will International Studies develop given that these subjects may in the future, only be taught in Russell Group Universities? How will the barriers to engaging and participating in International Studies affect the pluralism and diversity of International Studies and in this context, how apt/equipped is PIR to address issues of systemic inequality, racism, misogyny, transphobia? This roundtable will combine diverse experiences in of researchers and teachers of international studies across institutions in the UK sector to bring to light a vital issue for the future of International Studies, yet one that remains too often silent.
Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupChair: Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU)Participants: Francesco Belcastro (University of Derby) , MATTHEW HURLEY (Sheffield Hallam University) , Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU) , Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London) , Zainab Younes (BISA member) , Kimberly Hutchings (Queen Mary University of London) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Centering Palestine 1
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Climate Change and International Order (II)Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)Chair: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
-
Over the last decade, green technologies have been deployed at record-breaking speeds across the global political economy. No actor has been more important to this process than China, which now dominates most of these technologies. In this perspective article, we contend that, in effect, China is subsidising a global green transition. While climate policy scholarship provides detailed accounts of China’s state support, it does not capture the critical ramifications of China’s approach to the green transition for other countries. We argue that internal competition within China is increasingly having an impact outside of China. This creates a yet underexplored tension at the heart of climate policy between the ability to compete with China and meeting climate targets. We therefore argue that the implications of Chinese subsidies present dilemmas for the EU and the US and, by extension, avenues for the literature on global climate policy for decades to come.
Author: James Jackson (University of Manchester) -
Populism is often understood as rhetorical opposition between “the people” and “the elites,” and frequently associated with climate denialism. This paper examines a different and increasingly consequential configuration: populist leadership in regional powers that are simultaneously drivers of carbon-intensive growth and acutely climate-vulnerable. Specifically, it focuses on Narendra Modi (India) and Prabowo Subianto (Indonesia) and conceptualises both leaders as navigating dual climate policy roles.
On one side, India and Indonesia continue to expand industrial production, energy demand and resource extraction, for example of coal, nickel, and deforestation. This both reflects developmental priorities and, at times, convergence with climate-rollback positions similar to those of Donald Trump. On the other side, both states are deeply vulnerable to climate harms, for instance through heatwaves, coastal erosion, or floodings. They use these vulnerabilities to consolidate a Global South voice that advocates for CBDR, climate finance and technology transfer. Crucially, both India and Indonesia are regional powers with significant traction in South Asia and Southeast Asia respectively. Thus, their climate discourse contributes to the construction of an emerging international climate dis(order): a fragmented landscape of overlapping cooperation, resistance, and contested responsibility.
Empirically, the paper analyses political speeches, summit interventions and social media performances. Its analysis shows that Global South populist climate politics cannot be reduced to Western-style climate denialism, nor do they fully align with liberal climate governance. Instead, they produce selective cooperation, which supports decarbonisation and adaptation when it enhances national influence but resists external conditionality and reframes burden-sharing onto the Global North.Author: Simon Kaack (University of Bath) -
Solar geoengineering or Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a suite of emerging technologies that deflect a certain amount of incoming sunlight. Interest in these technologies within the scientific community is driven by increasing concerns about climate change and the need to quickly lower global temperatures. While these technologies are capable, to varying degrees, of providing such a cooling effect we challenge the assumption that they should be thought of only, or even primarily, as ‘climate interventions.’ SRM modelling tends to investigate ideal scenarios in which global cooling is achieved while avoiding disruptive side effects, which requires careful and sustained cooperation over decades or even centuries. In a world where great-power rivalry is again becoming increasingly commonplace, we argue that it is not cooperation, but competition that may drive actors to engage with SRM. It is as likely that the technology will be used to realize other strategic interests, including maintaining control over a key international space, achieving an economic advantage, or simply demonstrating power. Competitive, coercive SRM development and use needs to be taken seriously in order to understand both the climate and political risks these technologies pose. Interdisciplinary cooperation and engagement is essential to navigate the development of SRM in the context of intensified geopolitical rivalries.
Authors: Ina Moller (Wageningen University)* , Danielle Young (University of Leeds) -
Climate change adaptation is reshaping the governance of shared water resources, with significant implications for regional and international order. In transboundary river basins, adaptation measures rarely stop at national borders: they interact with pre-existing hydro-political arrangements, altering power relations and potentially triggering both conflictive and cooperative dynamics. This study examines these dynamics through a multiscalar analysis of the Syr Darya River Basin in Central Asia, a region where climate pressures intersect with post-Soviet political fragmentation, energy–water interdependencies, and shifting regional relations. Drawing on literature on environmental peacebuilding, adaptation and resilience-building, and transboundary water governance, as well as qualitative insights from Kyrgyz stakeholders, the study explores how adaptation processes unfold across scales and how they reflect, challenge, or reproduce regional geopolitical hierarchies. The findings show that adaptation, conflict, and cooperation coexist as interlinked and evolving processes shaped by asymmetrical power relations and institutional constraints. Crucially, what constitutes adaptation at one scale may generate tensions or conflicts at another, underscoring the need to understand cross-scalar feedbacks in transboundary governance. The case highlights how climate adaptation is not merely a technical or environmental challenge but part of the broader processes through which international and regional orders are being reshaped. It argues for conflict-sensitive and cooperative approaches that acknowledge the multiscalar and political nature of adaptation in transboundary contexts.
Author: Eugénie Stoclet -
Environmental defenders around the world are increasingly threatened by criminalization, physical violence, disappearances, and assassinations. Activists in Southeast Asian countries face similar forms of extractivist repression. Cognizant of this issue in the region, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) adopted in October 2025 the Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy, and Sustainable Environment, which includes the protection of those who work for the environment. Defending the defenders, however, needs a better understanding of the socio-ecological conflicts that prompt them to mobilize and the narratives that create a hostile landscape for their advocacy. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives on political ecology, this paper explores the patterns of threats against environmental defenders in Southeast Asia. To understand these conflicts, a systematic analysis of published reports, news articles, and scholarly studies focusing on the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand—the deadliest countries in the region for activists fighting deforestation—was employed. The objective of this study is to uncover the agential, spatial, and discursive patterns of threats against environmental defenders. Understanding these patterns aims to contribute to a critical analysis of socio-ecological conflicts in Southeast Asia and offer practical recommendations for global environmental justice.
Author: Dahlia Simangan (Hiroshima University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Constitutive Technologies: Violence, Sovereignty, and Decolonial FuturesSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: Elsa Bengtsson Meuller (Goldsmiths, University of London) , Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney)Chair: Elsa Bengtsson Meuller (Goldsmiths, University of London)Discussant: Elsa Bengtsson Meuller (Goldsmiths, University of London)
-
Emerging technologies have increasingly gained prominence driven by numerous anxieties about the anticipated possibilities of their influence on the political and public sphere . Focussing specifically on AI and drawing on existing critiques that focus on AI’s entanglements with technology corporations, we examine the temporal politics embedded in how AI is discursively constructed as nascent, unprecedented, and future-oriented. By interrogating the ubiquitous classification of AI as an “emerging” technology, we argue that this designation has significant political consequences for the growing influence of technology corporations that reiterate historical and contemporary power asymmetries. Our central provocation critiques the perpetually “emerging” understanding of AI through a decolonial feminist analytical framework that examines the temporal (who declares technological “newness” and what histories are erased) and epistemic (whose knowledge counts as innovation and whose labour remains invisible?) aspects of this discourse. Through a critical examination of statements by prominent Tech CEOs and their media circulation, we trace the ways in which “emergence” operates as temporal hierarchy that naturalizes and legitimates western, masculinised subjects while simultaneously obscuring the racialised and gendered exploitation, resource extraction, and epistemic violence that constitute AI systems.
Authors: Elsa Bengtsson Meuller (Goldsmiths, University of London) , Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney) -
Creating care in uncommon sites, such as the digital, is part of commoning – or ensuring possibilities for robust life to all – that activists seek through undercommoning, part of making alternative means of care that follows in the Black radical tradition. Undercommoning allows us to reimagine feminist care beyond traditional and institutional contexts under capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. With the growth of the political, sexual, and domestic violences facilitated by digital technologies, and particularly after the shadow/ban on ‘gender’ and ‘women’ by the authoritarian governments, often in collusion with techbros, there is easy and commonsensical justification in downplaying technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TF-GBV) as a security issue. This draws from the conventional understanding that TF-GBV are less “real” or “harmful” than physical ones. Drawing on feminist security studies (FSS), feminist international relations theories, intersectional feminism and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) literatures, we examine how feminists further the undercommoning of the digital as a site of care through fugitive planning and abolitionism, in part by drawing – subversively – on the National Action Plans of WPS agenda in South Asia and Americas. The paper contributes to gender and cybersecurity studies, TF-GBV studies, Digitalization, WPS studies and feminist security studies.
Authors: Crystal Whetstone (Bilkent University) , Luna K C (University of Northern British Columbia) -
Generative AI has increasingly been used to develop non-playable videogame characters (NPCs) that more realistically enhance the affective and aesthetic affordances in videogames. This article analyses how such AI systems reproduce modes of colonial body regulation. Drawing on Joshua Whitehead’s (Oji-Cree) cyberpunk poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, I reflect on the ‘digital dysphoria’ engendered by the behavioural responses and emotional simulation that AI-driven NPCs perpetuate. Central to this analysis is Whitehead’s characterisation of ZOA, the “NDN-machina” that provides the theoretical grounding for understanding Indigenous presence as inherently disruptive to colonial computational arrangements. Whitehead’s recurring motifs of technological haunting articulate ways of theorising Indigenous presence that transcend western distinctions between human/machine, suggesting possibilities for designing AI systems around Indigenous understandings of agency distributed across human, non-human, and AI/technological artefacts. This article contributes to Indigenous futurisms, queer of colour critique, and critical AI studies by suggesting ways of critiquing those AI systems that dilute the material conditions of embodiment and treat it as visual or representational. Exploring the possibilities of a framework of speculative embodiment, this article illustrates how Indigenous and queer epistemologies offer transformative alternatives to extractive colonial logics particularly in contexts where digital ‘bodies’ become sites of both colonial violence and resistance. In so doing, this analysis proffers Indigenous poetics as an epistemological intervention into AI applications such as NPCs in videogames, that move beyond algorithmic simulation to facilitate alternative pathways of becoming.
Author: Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Corruption, Integrity and Defence & Security InstitutionsSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConveners: Georgina Holmes (The Open University) , Sabrina WhiteChair: Sabrina WhiteDiscussant: Sabrina White
-
Often, when we think about corruption, we think of abuse of power by those in public office for personal gain, such as financial gain through embezzlement, fraud, influence peddling and other forms of dishonesty. Reflecting on field research undertaken with Ghana Armed Forces and the Rwanda Defence Force, this paper inverts the idea of corruption in military institutions by examining how forms of gendered corruption manifest during the research encounter, and considers how corruption shapes the research findings.
Author: Georgina Holmes (The Open University) -
Much work on accountability in security governance neglects the critical role and concept of integrity, which refers to the moral values, norms and rules underpinning the behaviour of individuals, institutions and organisations and the processes and procedures of policy implementation. Integrity is commonly connected to anti-corruption work, and increasingly in security sector reform and governance spaces. Yet, it has a wider application and relevance. Through a case study on UN responses to peacekeeper-perpetrated SEA, this paper argues that integrity is a useful lens for analysing practices of implementation of frameworks and responses to gender and protection issues in security governance. An integrity approach connects values underpinning norms in gender and protection frameworks to specific sets of practices to promote and address violations of these values. This paper makes a conceptual contribution to the literature on gender and protection by centring and integrity lens that allows exploration of how normative and ethical ideals are translated into specific practices, processes and institutions that are themselves shaped by value-based behaviours. It makes an analytical contribution by applying the concept and practice of an integrity system to analysing how implementation of policies and frameworks happens.
Author: Sabrina White
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Discourses of development, revolution, and soft power in the 'Global South'Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
Abstract:
This paper re-examines the roots of state fragmentation in Syria through the synthesis of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Malek Bennabi’s concept of Colonisability. While Orientalism illuminates the external production of domination through colonial discourse and intervention, Bennabi’s notion of Colonisability exposes the internal conditions of societal stagnation that make domination possible. Brought together, these frameworks offer a dual lens for analysing how external and internal forces have interacted to sustain political factionalism in post-colonial states. Using a qualitative, theory-testing process-tracing method, the paper traces Syria’s political evolution from the late Ottoman period to the contemporary civil war. It shows that neither Orientalism nor Colonisability alone adequately explains Syria’s chronic fragmentation. Rather, it is their intersection, manifest in elite co-optation, institutional manipulation, and the external legitimisation of competing power centres that perpetuates state disunity. By integrating Islamic and post-colonial thought, the study contributes a new theoretical synthesis for understanding how colonial legacies and internal vulnerabilities combine to reproduce factionalism. It speaks directly to BISA 2026’s call for “new thinking and new directions,” arguing that International Studies must engage with underused intellectual traditions to grasp the persistence of state weakness and dependency in the Middle East and beyond.
Keywords: Orientalism; Colonisability; Syria; post-colonial state; factionalism; governance; Middle East; decolonial theory.
Author: Ahmad Alkuchikmulla (SOAS and University of Bath) -
This paper presents a new multi-theoretical lens combining poststructuralism, constructivism, and postcolonial theory to rethink soft power in postcolonial contexts, with an empirical focus on Lebanon. Existing mainstream literature on soft power often neglects how power is experienced/contested in societies shaped by complex colonial and neo-imperial legacies. The paper addresses this shortcoming by situating Lebanon - a site of overlapping colonial histories and geopolitical contestation - as a central case to explore how soft power operates through localised narratives of identity and resistance that disrupts Western hegemonic discourse. This novel intervention brings together poststructuralism's attention to discourse and power/knowledge relations with constructivist emphasis on identity, while grounding analysis in the postcolonial understandings of inherited power asymmetries. This approach reveals the nuanced ways in which power is both appropriated and resisted in Lebanon, exposing the limitations of dominant theory that overlooks such subaltern agency. This contribution advances postcolonial IR by demonstrating how empirical engagement with Lebanon’s colonial and postcolonial realities deepens understandings of power’s contested meanings beyond dominant epistemologies. In doing so, it offers an alternative epistemology vital to the ongoing decolonisation of international studies, enriching the Global IR agenda with more context-sensitive analyses of power dynamics in the Global South.
Author: Zainab Younes (BISA member) -
Building on the argument that development is deeply entangled with the colonial legacy, I contend that the development agenda functions as a vehicle of collective traumatisation for African local populations, who are ostensibly its intended beneficiaries. This collective traumatisation is largely unacknowledged and operates at a subconscious level. Drawing on Fanonian’s (Frantz Fanon) theory of colonial violence and the psychology of oppression, as well as Akeian’s (Claude Ake) abstraction of development as a form of unacknowledged collective trauma, I argue that because development remains tethered to its colonial roots, it has produced intergenerational, subconscious collective trauma that continues to shape the everyday experiences of African communities. I will show that development causes collective trauma which are unacknowledged because it is subconscious, and how that has affected Nigerian society with a particular focus on the way Nigerian people have ignored ‘what they have already known’ (indigenous epistemes such as the Ifá thought system) and continued to look to the West’s development paradigm. I imagine a future of decolonised development that will use ‘start from where we already are’ with our own existing cultural praxes and epistemes to build appropriate socio-economic policy frameworks to help heal the effects of this unacknowledged subconscious collective trauma that has gripped Nigerians.
Author: Luqma Temitayo Onikosi (University of Brighton)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Doing Refugee Law Empirically: Reflexivity from the FieldSponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupConvener: Irem Sengul (Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University)Chair: Dallal Stevens (Professor)Discussant: Martha Gayoye (Keele University)
-
The methodological choices affect the design of research from the very beginning, determining which questions are asked and by what means they are explored. The empirical research process is equally significant, as it continuously (re)shapes the trajectory of the study—a dimension often missing in doctrinal analyses of international refugee law. This paper draws on instances and reflections from three empirical studies I conducted between 2016 and 2024 with refugees and humanitarian organisations in Turkey which is among top refugee hosting countries for the last ten years. By foregrounding the negotiations of multiple identities and agencies among researchers, refugees, and humanitarian workers, it examines not only how fieldwork is experienced by a female researcher, but also how feminist encounters and positionalities actively shape the research process itself. It disrupts conventional understandings of what it means to be displaced, to feel at home, protected, or cared for through feminist engagement in empirical refugee law research.
Author: Irem Sengul (Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University) -
Some of the largest refugee movements have occurred in those parts of the world which are neither part of the international refugee law regime, nor have a domestic refugee law framework. Thus, while these refugee phenomena are frequently discussed in non-legal disciplines e.g. sociology, anthropology, international relations, there is a dearth of scholarship from a legal perspective. The presumption appears to be that a) states without refugee law lack any legal framework for the protection of refugees and; b) that these states have little to teach us about asylum practice from a legal perspective. While neither of these presumptions are true, an absence of clearly defined legislation or case law around refugees creates a necessity for empirical work to illuminate asylum practices in these countries. At the same time, due to the ambiguous status of refugees in non-refugee law states, such research presents some specific practical and ethical challenges. This paper will reflect on these based on such research carried out on Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
Author: Simon Behrman (University of Warwick) -
This paper makes the case for a socio-legal approach to refugee law through reflections on qualitative fieldwork with refugee communities and institutional actors in Germany. Drawing on interviews with refugees, government officials, NGOs and international organisations, it explores how formal categories of status, integration and protection are interpreted, negotiated, and, at times, resisted in everyday life. The analysis reflects on the practical and ethical dimensions of conducting empirical legal research – from gaining access through personal and professional networks to navigating gendered and linguistic dynamics with participants and interpreters and adapting to moments of uncertainty that reshaped the course of the study. These encounters reveal the limits of text-based legal analysis for understanding protection as experienced and contested, and show how law is lived through affective, relational and institutional practices. The paper argues that socio-legal inquiry is essential to understanding how refugee law works in practice. It brings to light the power relations, institutional routines and emotional dynamics that shape legal outcomes, and calls for a more reflexive awareness of how methods, ethics and knowledge production intersect.
Author: Yasemin Karadag (Hitit University) -
The aim of this paper is to introduce the uninitiated to the challenges of qualitative research and to provide an outline of best practice for those interested in conducting fieldwork on forced migration. While there is much that can be learned from non-law disciplines in carrying out empirical research, embarking on qualitative research can be daunting for many new to the methodology, and, perhaps, especially for academic lawyers. The paper will draw on the presentations of all panellists, together with the presenter’s own fieldwork on refugee policy in Jordan and the experiences of other socio-legal scholars working on forced migration. It provides an overview of the many factors that can impact qualitative research, some of which have been discussed by the panellists–inter alia, personal, gender, emotional, access challenges, legal, political, contextual, ethical, and power dynamics. It moves on to provide suggestions on how to anticipate possible challenges through careful and effective project design, and how to prepare for the many issues that can arise through skill development and training.
Author: Dallal Stevens (Professor)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Engaging Europe: Recalibrating UK–EU Relations in the Post-Brexit EraSponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)Discussant: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
-
Norms, Institutions, and the limits of post-Brexit bilateralism: a case study on UK-German relations
Since Brexit, the United Kingdom has sought to recalibrate its relations with European Union member states through intensified bilateralism. While Brexit advocates portrayed this as an expression of regained sovereignty, the EU profoundly shapes post-Brexit bilateralism through the Withdrawal Agreement and Trade and Cooperation Agreement on the one side, and the terms of membership on the other. This paper addresses the question if and in what way EU norms and institutional procedures also shape the UK’s bilateral relations with member states. Grounded in regime theory, this research conceptualises post-Brexit bilateralism as a form of nested regimes within a broader European regime complex with the EU at its centre and multiple points of overlap that allow for both legal and normative influence. The analytical focus is on the extent to which the UK’s bilateral regimes are shaped by EU procedural norms – particularly consensus-seeking and the so-called coordination reflex – and how these interact with the UK’s post-Brexit emphasis on sovereignty and autonomy. This is empirically explored in a case study on UK-German relations, which emphasises the practical relevance of the theorised normative factors. To put their effect in context with the EU’s legal influence on bilateral relations, the analysis zooms in on three policy areas in which the EU’s treaty-based competencies vary: i) trade (high), ii) research and higher education (medium), and iii) security and defence (low). Data is drawn from elite interviews with senior policymakers, diplomats, and experts in both the UK and Germany alongside official documents and public statements from both governments since the Brexit vote in 2016.
Authors: Carolyn Rowe (Aston University)* , Tobias Hofelich (Aston University) , Ed Turner (Aston University)* -
The July 2024 election of a Labour government after 14 years of Conservative rule – characterised by the UK’s chaotic withdrawal from the EU – has placed the spotlight on the Labour Party’s European policy post-Brexit. The existing literature highlights some of the difficulties which the ‘Europe question’ presents for Labour, given the high proportion of leave supporters in the Labour heartlands, the readiness of Reform and the Conservatives to accuse Labour of ‘betraying Brexit’, and the electoral difficulties entailed by the pre-2019 commitment to a ‘second referendum’. This paper argues that Labour’s European policy faces a deeper problem – namely, an underlying belief that the party can negotiate bespoke forms of association on the basis of its Europeanist credentials. Drawing on interviews with policymakers, speeches and memoranda, we show how these ‘cakeist’ beliefs embody a broader myopia in the UK regarding the EU’s interests post-Brexit and fail to appreciate the risks involved in granting such concessions to the UK. Our argument helps to explain why the Starmer government has pinned hopes for a political and economic renaissance on ‘resetting’ relations with the EU, as well as the reasons why this is likely to be frustrated.
Authors: Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) , Pauline Schnapper (University of Sorbonne Nouvelle) -
On 17th July 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Prime Minister Keir Starmer signed a landmark treaty on friendship and cooperation between the United Kingdom and Germany. Immediately dubbed the “Kensington Treaty”, the aim of the new agreement was to strengthen bilateral relations between two of Europe’s largest economies, one an EU Member State, the other now an outsider. The two sides expressed their ‘desire to join forces for a prosperous, secure and sustainable future for their citizens and their open, democratic societies in the face of fundamental changes in the geopolitical environment’. The Kensington Treaty covers a wide array of policy areas, including ‘diplomacy, security and development’, ‘defence cooperation’, ‘internal security, justice and migration’ and ‘economic growth, resilience and competitiveness’. That the UK should seek a bilateral arrangement with the EU’s largest Member State was unsurprising – bilateralism was a hallmark of the UK’s engagement with other countries before Brexit and they are arguably even more crucial for third countries than for EU insiders. Yet how do we account for the decision of Germany, one of the EU’s most committed members, to engage is such a comprehensive treaty with the UK? Drawing on in-depth analysis of documentary sources as well as off-the-record interviews with key decision-makers in both countries, the article seeks to understand the motivations for the treaty, how the bilateral and multilateral relationships can co-exist for each side, and the likely implications for new patterns of external differentiated integration as the UK pursues its wider reset with the EU-27.
Authors: Julie Smith (University of Cambridge) , Brigit Bujard (University of Cologne) -
Multiple aspects of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) – Brexit – have raised questions of political legitimacy. Attracting particular attention have been the arrangements established by the Protocol on Ireland/Northen Ireland, now ‘Windsor Framework’. Designed inter alia to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, these arrangements involve the application in Northern Ireland (NI) of EU acts governing customs and the free movement of goods. This regulatory alignment is also dynamic; amendments and replacement acts apply automatically and without UK involvement in their adoption. This has been the subject of considerable contestation with extensive concerns being raised about the ‘democratic deficit’ of the arrangements.
Drawing on the concept of throughput legitimacy, the paper assesses the contribution of EU, UK and joint EU-UK structures and processes that have been developed to address these concerns during the implementation of the Protocol/Windsor Framework since 2000. The paper focuses on the initial informal and over time increasingly formalised engagement of EU and UK officials with civic and business stakeholders from Northern Ireland. Drawing on official statements as well as privileged insights into the evolution and operation of the engagement, the paper considers the role that stakeholders have played in identifying issues of concern regarding the operation of the Windsor Framework and contributing to problem-solving by the EU and UK. Drawing on regular polling of NI voters’ views, the paper provides an initial assessment of the impact of stakeholder engagement on the legitimacy of the Windsor Framework arrangements.Authors: Katy Hayward (Queen's University Belfast)* , David Phinnemore (Queen’s University Belfast)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Environmental Political EconomySponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Leah Owen (Swansea University)
-
Global momentum towards restricting the production of climate-heating fossil fuels is
increasing, with important implications for pathways to development and prosperity
beyond fossil fuels. Yet understandings of the comparative political dynamics driving
this process are lacking. Based on original quantitative and qualitative research in eight
first-mover countries that have unilaterally adopted supply-side policies to limit fossil
fuel production (Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Greenland, Sweden
and the UK), we identify overarching lessons that can be derived from the experience
to date of these countries regarding (i) the drivers of these policies, (ii) the specific
forms they take, and (iii) how effective are they at leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
This enhances our understanding of this critical new frontier in climate governance by
embedding analysis in the political economy of development in these countries.Authors: Freddie Daley (University of Sussex)* , Lukas Slothuus (University of Sussex)* , Peter Newell (University of Sussex) , Daniela Soto Hernandez (University of Sussex)* -
South Africa became an important case study for international financing to support the energy transition in 2021 when it signed the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with a range of western financers at COP26. However, the JETP – which provides for US$8.5 billion – has been criticised by several stakeholders for its dependence on loans. Representatives from the labour movement have described the agreement, and the type and pace of transition it imposes, as an infringement of South African sovereignty that will create new forms of dependence with the West. For these actors the energy transition that the JETP envisages is a form of neocolonialism, which delegitimises the transition and risks derailing it entirely. Through 40 key informant interviews, and 3 one-day workshops with over 130 workers in the South African coal belt, we explore the emerging layers of coloniality in the country’s energy transition. We argue that climate coloniality operates via the logics of accumulation by dispossession and epistemic dispossession where the promotion of energy privatisation and international green capital is achieved through, and reproduces, epistemic injustice for coal belt communities. Reclaiming sovereign voice is thus framed as central to re-embedding justice in a transition that promises the most significant upheaval in South Africa’s political economy in recent history.
Authors: Ruth Bookbinder (University of Leeds) , Alex Beresford (University of Leeds) -
This paper investigates whether and how economic complexity influences deforestation patterns in the Brazilian Amazon. Using municipal-level panel data from 2006 to 2024, we analyse correlations among the Economic Complexity Index, average income, and deforestation indicators across Brazilian biomes. We observe a significant pattern: Amazon municipalities with high deforestation activity but an average extent of deforestation — which we refer to as deforestation frontiers — tend to have higher ECI values and income levels than both low- and high-deforestation areas. This indicates that, in deforestation frontiers, there are short-term increases in complexity and prosperity, which decline once environmental degradation passes a critical threshold. This dynamic is consistent with ‘boom-and-bust’ development cycles. By examining the link between productive diversification and environmental degradation, the paper offers new insights into how regional development pathways in deforestation frontiers can sustain environmental and economic vulnerability despite apparent advances in economic complexity.
Authors: Rafael da Silva da Costa (University of Warwick) , Fernando Rugitsky (SOAS - University of London)* -
This paper advances a critical political economy account of climate governance by comparing Turkey’s recently enacted Climate Law with the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal (EGD). While Paris and the EGD already rely on market instruments and technocratic control, Turkey’s law extends these logics. It broadens the scope for commodification and financialization: land, water, forests, carbon sinks, and “ecosystem services” are reframed as assets to be priced, traded, and bundled into financial products.
Rather than treating transition policy as a neutral sequence, we read it through ongoing cycles of enclosure, dispossession, and re-regulation. The law enables new rounds of control via carbon markets, offset schemes, stringent disclosure/reporting mandates, and “transition finance,” shifting decision-making over nature and infrastructure toward large, well-capitalized actors, including multinational firms and cross-border financiers. In practice, agriculture, energy, and construction become testing grounds where environmental functions are converted into revenue streams and balance-sheet items.
These shifts are not distributionally neutral. Costs and risks are likely to be offloaded onto workers, smallholders, tenants, and informal producers—through higher energy and transport bills, compliance burdens pushed down supply chains, and “green” urban renewal that raises rents. Peripheral regions and fiscally constrained municipalities face sharper trade-offs than core industrial districts and large conglomerates. Internationally, Turkey converges with EU models where profitable and diverges where state–business coalitions seek discretionary rents, expanding room for greenwashing.
Overall, the law operates less as a neutral tool of decarbonization than as a transition regime oriented to assetization and accumulation, consolidating elite power and reproducing regional unevenness. We conclude by outlining non-commodifying pathways—public planning, publicly led investment, democratic ownership, and commons-oriented provisioning—for a more just transition.
Author: Emre Telci
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Exploring the relationship between imperialism, coloniality and environmental degradation ISponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St Andrews)Chair: Sarah Gharib Seif (University of St Andrews)
-
The scientific term “Anthropocene” can be read as a diagnostic frame of modernity whose mainstream uptake has largely failed to discern the (colonial, capitalist) pattern of history that led some ways of manifesting “Anthropos” to dominate over all others, human and nonhuman. The Anthropocene indexes more or less subtle assumptions of universalism, mastery, anthropocentrism, and eurocentrism (Moore, Di Chiro, Chakrabarty). To this well-established list of shortcomings, this political theoretical paper adds another: the Anthropocene is ill-suited for one of the delicate tasks required in the urgent 2020s, i.e., critiquing environmental science. One of several Anthropocene alternatives, the “Plantationocene”, is more promising. It insists on historicising today’s climate and biodiversity crisis to the social and ecological transformations of early capitalism, colonisation, and slavery—and, as I argue, it invites a helpful critique of science. For example, it shines a light on the role of early botanists to perfect monoculture plantations, ignoring racialised enslavement and catalysing the spread of plantation-based rule, under the guise of objectivity and progress. Contemporary plans to “manage the planet” through terraforming and geoengineering (Crutzen) are not so different from this legacy, and this should give us pause. Fortunately, an ameliorative role for environmental science also becomes clear by the lights of the Plantationocene diagnosis: to join a multilateral effort to “de-plantation” Earth by countering structures of domination over land and labour in the global commodity economy. Overall, the paper takes seriously the power of “epochal” frames to obscure or illuminate historic causes of socioecological destruction as well as the forms of knowledge that abet them.
Author: Grace Garland (University of Edinburgh) -
"Zoos remain among the most common visiting sites in many places around the globe, yet their significance as an international political space remains somewhat underexplored in IR scholarship. This is especially striking, given the growing body of IR research critiquing some of zoos’ basic make-up, premised on ‘dogmatic ontologies that privilege human life’ and ‘the separation between the natural and human worlds’ (Erhoukhmanoff and Harker 2017). Moreover, since zoos around the globe are deeply steeped in imperial histories – originating out of aristocratic menageries, evolving into 19th-century venues of scientific modernity and public displays of colonial exoticism – they provide further insight into how imperial extraction practices have sat at the foundation of international status-seeking, and how these practices reverberate into contemporary international political hierarchies (Subotić 2025).
This paper will therefore investigate the role of zoo operations in intersecting the maintenance of human-nonhuman and Global North-South modes of supremacy. Comparing the London and Amsterdam Zoos and their respective (non-)engagement with issues of ecological (post-)imperialism, the paper seeks to explore the ways in which hegemonic anthropocentric discourses and practices continue to reinforce the convergence of human-fauna domination with (post-)colonial international politics. Besides the most egregious similarities between (historical) speciesism and racism found in (neo-)imperial narratives, zoos may 1) serve to white-wash states’ (post-)colonial and environmental extractive practice; 2) function akin to imperial museums as repositories of ‘mankind’s heritage’, enabling a (self)-representation as ‘guardians of global nature’; and 3) constitute sites of (post-)imperial infrastructural prowess at the expense of animal well-being.Author: Lucas Knotter (University of Bath) -
Transboundary water governance in West Africa is a complex arena in which local, regional, and global actors struggle for discursive hegemony over managing the precious resource. However, contemporary hydropolitics literature often overlooks the origins and genealogies of the ideas, discourses, and practices in circulation. Focusing on the Volta basin, this paper interrogates the ways Anglo-European experts shaped the construction of this hydrographic unit from the colonial period through the postcolony. Grounded in historical institutionalism, the paper blends expertise and science and technology studies with critical decolonial theory. Data collection features original archival and documentary research across the UK, France, and Ghana, combined with interviews with a diverse range of experts on the Volta. Through critical discourse analysis, the paper unpacks the complex array of actors, coalitions, agendas, and narratives that legitimised, institutionalised discourses that became hegemonic over the decades. We hypothesise that a dual process shaped later governmentalities in the Volta basin throughout the 20th century. First, the subjectivation of actors across generations, ranging from imperial explorers to colonial administrators, and from cooperation advisors to development consultants, who became “experts” by appropriating the inherited knowledge-power of their predecessors. Second, the objectification of the basin rendered this a legible, measurable, governable, and exploitable hydro-spatial economic unit. By tracing the multigenerational lineages of experts and their concurrent construction of the basin, this paper will reveal how these networks (re)produced, circulated, and translated colonial ideologies, epistemic hierarchies, and imperial logics into technocratic water management frameworks that perpetuate asymmetrical power relations in African waterscapes.
Author: Emmanuel Valax (University of Geneva) -
This paper examines the enduring contamination of soils and water by chlordecone, a toxic pesticide banned in France but used extensively in the French West Indies between 1972 and 1993, as a manifestation of slow violence and environmental coloniality. Drawing on archival research, governmental reports, and secondary environmental studies, it situates chlordecone within the wider framework of environmental governance and extractive capitalism. The paper argues that the persistent ecological degradation and public health crisis represent a form of postcolonial environmental injustice, where racialised and economically marginalised communities bear the long-term consequences of decisions rooted in colonial exploitation and metropolitan indifference.
Through an interpretive qualitative approach, the study explores how the ongoing contamination exemplifies the temporal and spatial displacement of harm characteristic of slow violence, while also exposing the structural continuities between plantation economies and modern agro-industrial systems. The analysis highlights how governmental and corporate responses have perpetuated asymmetries of knowledge, responsibility, and remediation, reinforcing a colonial hierarchy of life and environmental worth. By framing the chlordecone crisis as both ecological and epistemic violence, the paper calls for renewed recognition of environmental reparations as part of decolonial environmental justice and suggests that understanding such “slow disasters” is critical to dismantling the epistemic and policy frameworks that normalise ongoing harm in postcolonial ecologies.
Author: Alastair Munro (University of Nottingham) -
Colonial rule operates through the domination of ecological desire—the power to shape the environment and define its future possibilities. This paper explores how these dynamics unfold in Kashmir under Pakistan’s administration, particularly along the Line of Control. I examine how the environment becomes a contested stage for competing desires, filtered through the ongoing Occupation of the former princely state and indigenous demands for azadi: self-determination: sovereignty: freedom.
The military’s ecological interventions, such as large-scale tree plantation campaigns, seek control and predictability, imposing order on the landscape through the planting of thousands of trees in perfectly straight lines. These state-led projects contrast with more spontaneous and unruly ecological practices of residents, whose actions reflect a broader moral and imaginative capacity at play. Notably, residents engage in acts like namesake tree plantations, foraging, and ""flower bombing""— small-scale, mostly personal practice of deliberate scattering of seeds on public land—which challenge military attempts to control both the land and the imagination. Flowers that bloom near barbed wire, sandbags, and army barracks create a subtle yet powerful counterpoint to the harsh realities of militarized infrastructure, signaling a vision of Kashmir yet to come.
In militarized Kashmir, the environment is not only a site of conflict but also a co-produced terrain. By examining the intersection of colonial power and resistance through local ecological practices, I show how the environment in Kashmir becomes a speculative site where domination and the desire for self-determination unfold in parallel.Author: Omer Aijazi (University of Manchester)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Foreign Policy Strategies in EurasiaSponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Stephen Hall (University of Bath)Chair: Stephen Hall (University of Bath)Discussant: Stephen Hall (University of Bath)
-
This research explores the changing global order and the evolving nature of regionalism, with a focus on “cusp states” in Regional Studies, where they have been underrepresented. The term “cusp state” refers to states that lie uneasily at the intersection of multiple regions and do not fully belong to any single regional grouping. This paper develops the concept of the cusp state through a Coxian theoretical lens. Robert Cox’s approach encourages a rethinking of the interconnected structures within the multiplex world order, enabling a more nuanced and comprehensive analysis of regional dynamics, and offers a better ground to understand the unique position of cusp states and their ‘atypical’ behaviours. Using a case study approach, the research focuses primarily on Türkiye, with additional references to other cusp states. The study aims to help political actors better understand cusp states and shape foreign policy accordingly, while also offering an innovative contribution to International Relations by incorporating cusp states through a Coxian analytical perspective.
Author: Safiye ErgunKaya (University of Limerick) -
Under what conditions do some small states change their foreign policy from balancing against to bandwagoning with great powers? The extant research on alliance strategies of small states offers various explanations. The conventional realist perspective suggests that alliance-building results from the structural effect of either the distribution of power or the balance of threat. Thus, they maintain that small states bandwagon with geographically close great powers rather than balancing against them. A group of scholars studying domestic sources of foreign
policy argues that, due to the distinctive characteristics of Third World countries, domestic threats and regime survival (at the expense of state security) motivate small states to seek alignment with stronger states. Given that these approaches are based on the premise that security is the state of being free from physical threats, they fail to explain the changes and continuities in Uzbekistan’s foreign policy towards Russia and the West. More specifically, the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, who had conducted a multi-vector foreign policy, decided to align with Russia amid wide criticism by the international community for human rights violations during the Andijan massacre in 2005. Thus, building on the ontological security literature in International Relations, I argue that the stigmatisation of Uzbekistan by major democracies for autocratic practices posed a normative threat to Karimovs regime. This, in turn, put the regime in a state of ontological insecurity and caused Karimov to change a balanced foreign policy to siding with major autocracies to boost his political legitimacy. To test my hypothesis, Uzbekistan is selected as a crucial case, while Belarus and Kazakhstan are hard and negative cases, respectively. The analysis will be based on official statements and documents, as well as secondary literature, which will be used to trace the process of change and continuity in Uzbekistans foreign policy.Author: Otabek Akromov (Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National university) -
Military alliances are often seen as hierarchical security institutions in which materially powerful members use ‘sticks’ (threats of abandonment) and ‘carrots’ (reassurance) to shape the behaviour of their weaker alliance partners. However, institutionalised alliances provide protégés with opportunities to bargain for more favourable terms rather than merely accepting their patron’s preferences or leaving the alliance. Within these bargaining processes, weaker allies may employ two distinct strategies: They can cultivate a reputation as a “loyal ally” and leverage their record of allegiance or, alternatively, signal disengagement - by abstaining from military exercises, delaying or refusing cooperation, or even threatening withdrawal - to bargain with their major power partners. Under what conditions do weaker allies adopt loyalty-based bargaining strategies, and when do they turn to disengagement threats?
To address this question, the paper examines the bargaining strategies employed by Armenia in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) using process tracing and expert interviews. While Armenia maintained the image of a loyal ally of Russia and CSTO member states until 2022, it has increasingly resorted to disengagement signals, culminating in the ‘suspension’ of its CSTO membership in 2024. The analysis reveals how unmet security expectations reduced the effectiveness of loyalty and prompted Armenia to re-assess its patrons’ reliability, resulting in a shift toward disengagement threat-based bargaining.
By examining intra-alliance bargaining dynamics and how weaker allies bargain with their major power patrons to secure reassurance, this paper contributes to our understanding of how weaker states can exercise agency and bargain with materially stronger partners within hierarchical security institutions.Author: Maximilian Krebs (University of Greifswald)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Latin American perspectives on Migration GovernanceSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Discussant: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton)
-
This article examines the disjuncture between normative ambition and practical implementation in Latin American migration governance. Despite the proliferation of regional frameworks, governance has shifted away from multilateral, rights-based commitments towards fragmented, security-driven approaches. Drawing on International Relations and critical migration studies, the article conceptualizes this transformation through the lenses of policy ambiguity and ad-hocracy, addressing them as modes of rule rather than symptoms of institutional weakness. Through a comparative analysis of responses to Venezuelan displacement, the Darién Gap crossing, and Central American migrant caravans, the study argues that states deprioritize human rights–based approaches to migration governance in favour of security and sovereignty concerns. Instead, they adopt discreet and flexible policies that undermine regional solidarity and international humanitarian efforts, reinforcing broader trends of securitization and migrant precarity. Theoretically, the article contributes to debates on regional and global migration governance and regionalism by applying the concepts of policy ambiguity and ad-hocracy to the under-examined Latin American context. It extends their analytical scope beyond Europe and offers insights into the hollowing-out of regional solidarity as an outcome of discretionary migration governance.
Authors: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton) , Cintia Quiliconi (FLACSO Ecuador)* -
This article examines the lived experiences of two groups of border crossers during President Donald Trump’s second term (Trump 2.0): (1) returned Mexican migrants, and (2) regular (trans)border crossers. Using Testimonio methodology and interviews, this qualitative research explores how the hyper-securitised discourse of Operation Aurora shapes border crossers’ experiences of deportability, defined as the constant vulnerability to arrest, removal, and loss of rights to future migration (Talavera, Núñez-Mchiri & Heyman, 2010). Preliminary findings from testimonios and interviews in shelters for migrants in the Mexican border city of Mexicali, and with transborder populations, reveal that deportability moves across (un)documented Mexican border crossers, inhabiting a persistent condition of strangerhood, understood as ‘not someone we do not recognize but someone we recognize as a stranger’ (Maldonado, Licona & Hendricks, 2016:32). These findings provide a grounded understanding of deportability compared to prior U.S. administrations and contribute to ongoing academic discussions in migration studies, critical race theory, and border studies, particularly by applying a Testimonio framework and transborder approaches.
Author: Mabel Meneses (Sheffield Hallam University) -
Most political economic analysis on migration have historically focused on a migrant sending/receiving country divide, and on labour migration and remittance patterns. Few scholars have problematised it considering their interconnections with various migration statuses, the political economy of war and conflicts, and to the issues of forced (and mostly irregular) displacement. This paper addresses that, by focusing on the interconnectedness of legal and illegal, state and non-state, economies funded by forced displacement patterns, which both emerge as a result of the creation of migrant control and regulation strategies and help reinforce them. I do so by analysing three cases: 1) Afghans and Haitians coming to Brazil after the Taliban takeover and the 2010 earthquake, respectively; 2) the cross-border irregular movement of migrants in the Darién region, which borders Colombia and Panamá; and 3) the creation of a Ministry for the Salvadoran Diaspora by Nayib Bukele’s government in 2021. By placing the forced migrants themselves as the market from which to profit from, this paper demonstrates the unequal structures of these dynamics, as products and basis of the colonial matrix of power (Grosfoguel and Quijano), their dehumanising effects (as human-commodities (Mbembe), and their embeddedness in current neoliberal interests of the capital.
Author: Natalia Cintra de Oliveira Tavares (University of Southampton) -
Children migrate for different reasons, including fleeing persecution with or without adult family members. Scholars in International Relations (IR) have highlighted not only how the international constructs children, but also how children construct and “shape global politics”. However, methodological constraints make it challenging to access children’s perceptions on international issues, such as forced displacement, and asylum. This article answers the question: “how do children perceive the concept of asylum?” By combining the literature on children in IR and visual methods, we explain how Venezuelan migrant children in Brazil express their displacement and welcoming experiences in their drawings. We analysed 58 drawings by Venezuelan children, produced on the border, as part of the Brazilian Public Defender’s Union (DPU), virtual exhibition “Fronteiras da Infância: Migração e Refúgio sob o olhar da criança” (Borders of Childhood: Migration and Asylum under the gaze of the child). Venezuelan migrant children tend to be silenced as triple victims: non-adults, forcibly displaced, and not from countries in the Global North. This article allows us to see how children deconstruct the concept of asylum by reinforcing happy images from their home country (Venezuela) and representing their welcome in Brazil as part of cooperation between Brazil and Venezuela.
Authors: Henrique Barros (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)* , Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Local and Regional DevelopmentSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
Self-help groups (SHGs) for rural women in India are integral parts of development policies such as the distribution of welfare schemes, building up of financial discipline, lending of microcredit, forging community support and solidarity, and helping them in finding work to earn living wages. However, the reality on the ground for Scheduled Caste (SC) women in rural India is quite the contrary. SHGs have not only failed to provide welfare benefits and decent work to the SC women in rural India, but it has also led to their increased indebtedness and worsening of socio-economic conditions. SHGs and microfinance groups act as convenient sites for banks and Microfinance Institutions in India to extend financialized debt. This process is more pronounced for the groups of Scheduled Caste women due to their precarious employment, lack of other opportunities for upward mobility, burden of socially reproductive labour, and discrimination from the state. Additionally, by making membership of SHGs a compulsory condition for receiving welfare benefits, the state plays a central role in trapping SC women in SHGs and allowing finance capital to use these as sites of accumulation. Based on 41 interviews conducted across 7 districts in the state of West Bengal, India, of a diverse range of participants, including Scheduled Caste women, Scheduled Tribe women, General Caste women, and representatives from the finance sector, this study examines how the state and financialized debt in rural India works in alliance to reproduce caste-based marginalisation for SC women while facilitating financial accumulation; a process that is termed as caste capitalism.
Author: Ujan Natik (University of Manchester) -
Across the world, innovation districts are being adopted as a disruptive but generative solution to post‑industrial decline and inefficient land use in urban centres and as an effective means of bringing inclusive economic dynamism, quality jobs, and improved
public spaces to city neighbourhoods. Their advocates often point to the pioneer‑
ing transformation of the 22@ District in Barcelona, Spain, the world's first such district. This paper challenges the celebratory discourse surrounding the Barcelona case, and with a critical eye on how innovation district transformation is conditioned by the prevailing global political‑economic context. It also chronicles how this transformation has continually ignited forms of class‑based struggle in Barcelona by embattled residents angered at how their own
neighbourhood has been used as an urban laboratory and site for speculative forms
of capital accumulation. Ultimately, this paper challenges the notion that ‘innovation’ is always and everywhere a beneficent force through a critical examination of the disruptive consequences of innovation district transformation, by engaging with the existing literature and by interrogating the dominant narratives that celebrate innovation districts as being universally positive. Instead, it underscores the tensions and contradictions inherent
in them while identifying them as being typical of what Jamie Peck has theorised as a late entrepreneurial conjuncture in global-urban political economy.Authors: Jose Mansilla (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)* , Greig Charnock (University of Manchester) , Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)* -
The global rise of financial technology, or fintech, has profoundly transformed relations between finance, regulation, and citizenship. With investments soaring from USD 9 billion in 2010 to over USD 200 billion in 2021, fintechs have become central to financial inclusion agendas, particularly in the Global South. In India, home to 25 percent of the global fintech client base, government policies have actively promoted fintech adoption as a means to expand credit access without traditional banking infrastructures. Yet, as fintechs proliferate, they reconstitute state authority through new regulatory arrangements. This paper investigates how fintechs reshape state regulation under India’s emerging regime of “self-regulation,” wherein industry bodies, rather than state agencies, govern financial practices. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with fintech regulators with interviews and participant observation among 50 fintech borrowers in Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, this paper examines how this regulatory transformation affects borrowers’ experiences, accountability, and gendered vulnerabilities. By tracing the cross-scalar politics of fintech regulation, the paper argues that the digitalization of credit reconfigures state-society relations, making citizens increasingly responsible for their own welfare through market participation.
Author: Tanushree Kaushal
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Masks off: Critical Theory after Liberalism
This roundtable considers what the current conjuncture, marked by the unravelling of a liberal order, means for critical theorising. Critical scholarship in the field of International Relations has long been preoccupied with exposing liberalism's contradictions, illuminating how it functions to mask social violence on a global scale. Yet as liberalism declines, this raises questions over whether such analyses are equipped to diagnose and address the morbid symptoms that characterise the present ascendancy of the global far right. As recent interventions have underscored, notions of homonationalism and pinkwashing, as well as critiques of liberal inclusion more broadly, appear to address a set of concrete conditions from another time. This roundtable asks how we got here, and whether critical theory has the tools to help us navigate what many refer to as the current ‘masks off’ moment. Participants will consider how social reproduction, race, sexuality, and class have become sites where liberalism’s disintegration is most acutely felt, and how critical theory might reimagine its project beyond the ruins of the liberal international order. The panel asks: What is lost, if anything, in the rubble? And what is the role of critical thought under ascending fascism?
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Ida Roland Birkvad (Queen Mary, University of London)Participants: Ida Roland Birkvad (Queen Mary, University of London) , Shikha Dilawri (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Howie Rechavia-Taylor (LSE) , Alexander Stoffel (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Miri Davidson (University of Warwick) , Abeera Khan (SOAS, University of London) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Middle Space Powers? The struggles and opportunities in space beyond the 'great powers'Sponsor: Astropolitics Working GroupConvener: Bleddyn Bowen (BISA)Chair: Sarah-Jane Pritchard (Lancaster University)
-
The growing integration of commercial and civilian space systems into military operations has shifted the strategic paradigm of spacepower from one of dual-use advantage to dual-risk vulnerability. States now rely on privately owned and institutionally governed space infrastructure for core defence functions without possessing sovereign control over their operation. This diffusion of authority fragments command, introduces strategic latency, and enables adversaries to exploit commercial actors through cyber intrusion, grey-zone coercion, and legal ambiguity. As a result, deterrence - traditionally grounded in state ownership, unity of political and operational control, and predictable signalling - has been structurally weakened. This article argues that the challenge is not commercialisation itself, but the absence of mechanisms to govern it in support of national strategy. Through shared resilience, pre-delegated authority, and harmonised allied governance, states can restore credible spacepower and reassert sovereignty in an era defined by dependence.
Author: Scott Mackie (University of Durham) -
As a space-faring nation, Japan stands out by being an atypical space actor. Unlike Western space actors who often transplant terrestrial diplomatic ideas to the space domain, or Eastern actors who rely on science diplomacy through independent engagement, Japan’s approach to space diplomacy is tied to recognising space as a foreign policy domain. This has allowed Japan to establish itself as a space actor that can cultivate its economic, diplomatic and defence interests within a unique domain of global politics. While IR scholarship has been opening up to the concept of space diplomacy, there is a need to rethink the concept considering the uniqueness of the space domain. By drawing upon the policy entrepreneur role within Kingdon’s Multi Stream Framework and elite interviews, this paper contributes to understanding Japan’s space diplomacy as a model for bridging Western and Eastern space actors.
Author: Carol Buxton -
In September 2025, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius announced €35 billion in funding for space security through 2030 and revealed discussions on developing offensive capabilities. Four years earlier, his predecessor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had declared at the inauguration of the Bundeswehr’s Space Command that “for Germany, space operations are always defensive operations.” This radical change in discourse reflects the Zeitenwende, the “change of era” proclaimed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After decades of chronic underinvestment since the end of the Cold War, the Zeitenwende seeks to increase funding for the Bundeswehr in the context of growing strategic competition in space.
This study explores whether these developments mark a new trajectory in German military space policy, adopting a constructivist approach grounded in the concept of strategic culture, understood as the interpretation of historical experience by national political actors (Berger, 1996). It examines whether Germany is departing from its traditional “civilian power” orientation (Maull, 1990) — based on multilateralism and reluctance toward military engagement — that has long shaped its space policy.
To this end, the analysis traces the evolution of German military space policy since its origins in the aftermath of the Kosovo War. The notion of a broader “normalization” of German military policy (Hellmann, 2006) can be extended to the space domain—reflecting a growing acceptance of space as a strategically significant arena for national security (Peoples, 2013). This historical grounding of Germany’s strategic culture serves to highlight that a paradigm shift is currently underway and assess what its implications might be for the future.
Author: Lise Dubois (University Jean Moulin Lyon 3) -
The resurgence of great power rivalry has redefined the dynamics of global governance, technological cooperation, and strategic competition. The space sector, once dominated by multilateral cooperation and civilian objectives, has become an increasingly contested domain, where technological leadership, dual-use innovation, and control over orbital infrastructure serve as instruments of geopolitical influence. For emerging powers such as Brazil, this shifting landscape presents both opportunities and constraints for achieving strategic autonomy.
This paper examines how the renewed competition among major powers — particularly between the United States and China — affects Brazil’s capacity to pursue independent development in the space sector. The analysis considers Brazil’s historical trajectory in space cooperation, including its partnerships through the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), regional initiatives, and bilateral projects with diverse partners. It highlights the tension between maintaining technological access and avoiding dependency amid the politicization of supply chains, export controls, and emerging standards for space governance.
Drawing on the concept of autonomy as relational and multidimensional (encompassing technological, industrial, and diplomatic dimensions) the study assesses Brazil’s strategic position within the evolving global space order. It argues that great power rivalry pressures middle powers to balance openness and self-reliance, potentially constraining their policy space while stimulating domestic innovation and regional cooperation.
By mapping the intersections between geopolitical competition and national technological strategies, the paper contributes to broader debates on autonomy, multipolarity, and governance of global commons. It concludes by reflecting on possible future scenarios for Brazil’s role in the space domain, emphasizing foresight as a key tool for navigating uncertainty and preserving strategic autonomy.Author: Raquel Gontijo (PUC Minas, Brazil)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Military Peacekeeping and the Politics of Protection
UN Peacekeeping operations are increasingly judged on their ability and willingness to protect civilians from threats and atrocities. Protection of civilians is enshrined in key UN strategic and operational documents and has been likened to a new norm for the UN. Similarly, local communities hold protection expectations of UN peacekeepers including, but not limited to, active military protection from imminent threats. While the robust turn in peacekeeping has provided detailed debates about the challenges and potential pitfalls of militarizing the UN, we know surprisingly little about how exactly UN peacekeepers use military force and, crucially, how such use of force for protection is perceived by local communities. This roundtable focuses on recent debates that shine more detailed light on the operational, community-focused, and local aspects of peacekeeper’s use of force. Specifically, this roundtable addresses variation in local community’s legitimacy perceptions of peacekeepers’ use of force; how and why UN peacekeepers use force for protection purposes and they are trained in doing so; and how we can theorize protection from threats and atrocities in a pluralistic manner.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Birte Gippert (University of Liverpool)Participants: David Curran (Coventry University) , Linnéa Gelot (Swedish Defence University) , Anne Flaspöler (Durham University) , Adrian Gallagher (University of Leeds) , Walt Kilroy (Dublin City University) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Ontological (in)security and the politics of state personhoodSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConveners: Bianca Naude (University of the Free State) , Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)Chair: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)
-
The introduction of ontological security to mainstream security studies inaugurated two debates. First, ontological security baptized the security of conventional IR as ‘physical,’ which cried out for explicit thematization. Second, the ‘level of analysis’ problem was a disciplinary gatekeeper bottlenecking early ontological security research. Initially pitched as a question of whether an individual level need could be ‘scaled up’ to groups, lurking in the background was the question of whether state-centric ontological security studies necessarily assumed that states really are persons. Different scholars have responded in different ways, from adopting the ‘as if’ approach, to taking Wendt’s provocation at face value. In this paper, which is part of a larger “Introduction to Ontological Security Studies,” we discuss the state-centric approaches and their rationales and limits, societal approaches, and approaches centered on individual subjectivity. We then consider some recent thematizations of personhood, and, placing the old and the new side by side we propose new areas for research.
Authors: Brent Steele (University of Utah) , Jennifer Mitzen (Ohio State University)* , Catarina Kinnvall (Lund University)* -
This paper examines how the defining elements of statehood and sovereignty are being re-evaluated in light of the de-stabilising effects of climate change. It revisits the classical legal conception of statehood – anchored in the Montevideo criteria of territory, population, government and capacity to enter into relations – and interrogates how these legal foundations intersect with cultural, political, and identity-based understandings of what it means to be a state. Bringing together international legal theory, political thought, and sociological perspectives, the paper explores how sovereignty has historically operated both as a juridical status and as a lived expression of collective identity. It traces how territoriality, embodiment, and recognition have co-constituted the modern state, and considers how these dimensions unravel when land territory becomes precarious or even ceases to exist. In doing so, the paper asks whether sovereignty can be imagined as relational rather than spatial, and how state identity and legitimacy might persist when physical territory submerges.
Authors: Lisa Otto (University of Johannesburg) , Agnes Rydberg (University of Sheffield) -
The state-as-person assumption is far from commonly accepted in the field of Ontological Security Studies (OSS), in that scholars either deeply engage with it or fully discard the state as the level of analysis. This paper takes the as-if assumption seriously and argues that it is essential for state-level theory building in OSS, by demarcating ontological from physical security concerns. Yet, somewhat counterintuitively, nowhere is this more visible than in ‘hostage diplomacy’: Diverting from the old population/territory/authority state definition, I argue that political hostages, being held abroad, embody the Westphalian nation state more than any abstract state-body idea ever could. The physical threat to the lives of individuals activates state-level ontological security demands exactly because it (threatens to) violate the very construct of a whole, intact nation state. By critically dissecting this in a post-Westphalian context, the paper brings levels of analysis (individual and state) into dialogue within the OSS field. With the case study of Israeli hostages since October 7, the paper deals with implicit and explicit consequences of statehood, further complicating questions of state borders and occupation of the Gaza Strip as well the role of individual lives within the (state level) Self- Other identity formations.
Author: Christian Sigl (University of Regensburg) -
This paper rethinks the idea of state personhood by focusing on the fusion of leader and state in highly personalized regimes. Classical constructivist accounts treat the state personhood as an analytical tool. This paper is building upon the debate on state personhood, internal and external referential logic in ontological security studies, and the state-society complex. It argues that in certain contexts, state personhood leads to the emergence of the sovereign-self. The sovereign-self is a fused unit in which the personal identity of an authoritarian leader and the collective identity of the state become mutually constitutive. Through the mechanisms of absorption (the leader internalizing national traumas, myths, and missions) and projection (the transference of personal existential woes such as mortality, ambition, and legacy onto the state), the sovereign-self becomes a new fused unit of analysis, distinct from individual leader or the state. Drawing on the cases of Russia and Serbia, the paper traces how Vladimir Putin and Aleksandar Vučić discursively merge their biographies with the state’s historical trajectory, embodying the nation’s endurance and destiny. In doing so, it re-embeds state personhood in the lived, affective, and biographical processes of embodiment and agency, contributing to recent debates on state personhood.
Author: Milan Varda (University of Belgrade) -
Building on Wendt’s claim that states can be treated as persons, this paper revisits state personhood through Ontological Security Theory (OST), reconceptualising it as a dynamic performance of identity rather than a stable condition. It develops a framework of five performative patterns: Harmonizer, Guardian, Seeker, Chain and Shifter, as a process-based framework for tracing how states narrate and adapt their identities, contributing to efforts to refine OST as a more empirically grounded, relational account of state identity. Drawing on forty-six elite interviews with policymakers, scholars and industry practitioners, the study examines Japan’s ontological security and alliance politics in outer space through dual-use technologies: Active Debris Removal (ADR) and Space Situational Awareness (SSA). ADR advances responsible innovation, while SSA embeds Japan in U.S. defence architecture, deepening alliance dependence, and constitutional dilemmas in security policy. These performances demonstrate how Japan’s identity is enacted through recurring patterns of continuity, responsibility, recognition, dependence, and adaptation. They reveal that Japan’s identity is sustained not through autonomy, but through the continual negotiation of stability and self-understanding in relation to others. Moving beyond gestures toward relationality in OST, this paper develops a patterned account of performativity in identity formation and anchors it within the state personhood debate.
Author: Sylwia Monika Gorska (University of Lancashire)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Ontological Security and the Populist Radical RightSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConveners: Maximilian Tkocz (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)) , Rachel Herring (Aston University)Chair: Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick)Discussant: Thorsten Wojczewski (Coventry University)
-
Contemporary right-wing populism is usually characterised as a transnational phenomenon in response to economic displacement, voter discontent with political elites that are perceived to no longer enact the interests of the people, or various culture-war issues. Yet populism is frequently not brought into conversation with concepts that allow historicising it more broadly within the context of the modern period (ca. 1789-) as such. To do so, the paper argues that right-wing populism is part of a broader recent trend to re-personalise rule through changed understandings of authority, sovereignty, and expertise. I utilise ontological security theory to elucidate these broader arguments, which theorises ongoing anxieties and insecurities of groups and individuals as response to the alienating and destabilising implications of continuously changing and expanding global hierarchies, and demonstrate them in a case study of right-wing populist politics in the United States and Western Europe in the 2020s.
Author: Martin Kirsch (University of Cambridge) -
This paper explores the entanglement of populism and ontological security in contemporary Turkey through the aesthetic and affective dimensions of political performance. Building on recent understandings of populism as an embodied and symbolically mediated performance, the study examines how Turkish populism mobilizes religious symbols, visual tropes, and cultural imaginaries to stabilize its sense of self amid embedded ontological anxieties. Through nationalist-religious visual motifs, character archetypes, uniforms, rituals and soundtracks as aesthetic carriers of populism in government-supported historical TV series, Turkish populism constructs an emotional narrative of loss and restoration while traveling toward a future of an imagined past. In this sense, the populist project rearticulates the boundaries of belonging, justifying the regime’s legitimacy while projecting the image of a neoliberal-conservative nation-state in which populism constitutes the ideological form of an institutionalized regime and the vision of a glorious “New Turkey.” By analyzing the performative aesthetics of populist discourse and media culture, this paper argues that populism in Turkey functions as a mechanism for seeking ontological security to heal the perceived dislocation between the nation’s self-image and its place in a rapidly evolving global order. The Turkish case illustrates how populist politics deploy affect, performance, and visual culture to negotiate the existential insecurities of modern statehood.
Author: Irem Cihan (SOAS) -
Beginning in August 2025, a grassroots movement known as Operation Raise the Colours spread rapidly across the United Kingdom. Activists and participants continue to tie St George's Cross and Union Jack flags to lampposts, painted them on roundabouts, ultimately saturating public spaces with nationalist symbols. When councils began removing flags citing safety concerns, many participants framed this as an example of elite betrayal. They responded by intensifying their flag-raising activities and spreading the movement to dozens of towns and cities. This paper examines Operation Raise the Colours as mobilisation of, and responses to, ontological insecurity. Drawing on ontological security theory (Giddens 1991; Steele 2008; Kirke and Steele, 2023) and populism scholarship (Moffitt 2016; Mudde 2004, Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017), I analyse how the movement both exploits and reflects anxieties about British identity, immigration, and national belonging through material-performative practices. The analysis begins to outline three dynamics. First, the lamppost flags function as material 'ontological anchors' (Rumelili 2015) that help to transform abstract anxiety into tangible collective action. Second, the movement's viral spread demonstrates how ontological insecurity becomes socially contagious through processual means as continuously networked communication. Third, this form of ontological security-seeking attempts to be zero-sum: flags that provide security for "the people" simultaneously create insecurity for minorities and immigrants who often experience flag saturation as a social threat. The paper contributes to understanding how populist movements mobilise anxiety through everyday vernacular material practices, and illuminates plausible conflictual dynamics of ontological security in increasingly polarised societies.
Author: Xander Kirke (Northumbria University) -
n/a
Authors: Maximilian Tkocz (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)) , Rachel Herring (Aston University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Pandemic governance in historical and contemporary perspectiveSponsor: Global Health Working GroupConvener: GHWG Working groupChair: Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
-
This paper examines how vaccine diplomacy has been used by revisionist states, principally Russia and China, to advance alternative visions of international order. During the COVID-19 pandemic, scholarship analysed vaccine diplomacy as a pandemic-specific phenomenon, with limited contextualisation in the longer history of medical diplomacy. How did the Soviet Union and China use medical diplomacies to advance their geopolitical interests during the Cold War? How did these earlier experiences shape their approach to COVID-19 vaccines? This paper focuses on two case studies: the Chinese Medical Teams (CMTs) in Africa and the Soviet export of the polio vaccine. It argues that both states developed medical diplomacy as part of foreign policy to narrate global hierarchy, signal normative superiority, and cultivate geopolitical alignments. These strategies were shaped by the medical instruments deployed and the exporting state’s vision of world order. Drawing on Historical International Relations, the paper shows how medical tools were strategically selected and narrativised. Re-situating COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy within this lineage reveals continuities, challenging the assumption that pandemic-era vaccine diplomacy was unprecedented. Instead, COVID-era vaccine competition reiterates established revisionist soft-power practices within global health governance.
Author: Iris Magne (KCL) -
The city of Manaus, located at the heart of the Brazilian Amazon forest, was considered the national epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several epidemiological studies have shown that death and case rates alone do not account for the overall scale and dimension of the crisis. This can be attributed to the history of precarious health infrastructure and the prevalence of non-specialised personnel in the northern region of Brazil. It is also a consequence of the collapse of this healthcare system, facilitated by the actions of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, and his allies at the state and municipal levels. When statistics failed to convey the magnitude of the tragedy, the enduring markers of the Manaus crisis became photographs of the city’s most calamitous sites disseminated in journalistic publications worldwide. Among these, images of the public Nossa Senhora Aparecida Cemetery were among the most recurrent representations of the situation.
This article analyses photographs from a 317-item iconographic archive depicting the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Cemetery. These photographs were taken by four Manaus-based journalists between the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic – broadly between March 2020 and January 2021. Due to restricted access imposed by quarantine measures, these images constituted the principal record of the event, illustrating the crisis for both national and international audiences. They also document the timeline of events that followed the collapse of the funeral system – from the alarming decision to adopt mass graves during the first wave to the revised plan for individual burials in the second. Most importantly, this article's goal is to understand them as they embody and territorialise the failure of the Brazilian state to guarantee the right to life – here interpreted also through the right to dignified burials and mourning practices – to COVID-19 victims and their families.Author: Mariana Cabral Campos (King's Kollege London / University of São Paulo) -
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the structural inequities and governance gaps in global and national health systems. Within this context, the paper critically examines the role of global non-governmental actors, specifically that of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and philanthropic foundations, in shaping India’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper looks at their involvement in the Indian health sector within the broader context of neoliberal globalisation, which has transformed the global health governance (GHG) landscape since the late twentieth century. It employs Robert Cox’s Gramscian concept of hegemony as its theoretical framework to understand how neoliberalism has impacted global health governance and how, as a result, global non-governmental actors have consolidated market-centric logics and technocratic practices within the health sector. The study tries to explore how these actors have influenced India’s pandemic management through advocacy, service delivery, and agenda-setting. Using the qualitative case-study approach, the research analyses primary and secondary data from INGOs, philanthropic organisations, and policy documents, as well as semi-structured interviews. It argues that while these actors have provided vital support during the crisis, their growing influence has also reflected and consolidated the neoliberal restructuring of India’s healthcare system. The study will contribute to the discourse on global health governance, neoliberalism, and global political economy. It will further offer insights into the implications of privatisation and philanthropic models of health governance in the Global South and during public health crises.
Author: Anurag Acharya (South Asian University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Preparing for war in the 21st century: Lessons from Ukraine
Friedrich Merz stated that the West was neither at war or peace with Russia and war at the sub-threshold level appears to be ongoing between the West and parts of what John Ikenberry has referred to as the Global East. This roundtable looks to consider what this might mean for the West. As part of this it will consider amongst other things the following questions:
1. Is the West a useful prism?
2. To what extent is technology transforming the battlefield?
3. What does the Russia's illegal war in Ukraine tell us about the future of war?
4. What is the future for NATO and European security under a Trump Presidency?
5. Is the nuclear taboo at an end?Sponsor: War Studies Working GroupChair: Andrew Dorman (Chatham House)Participants: Tracey German (King's College London) , Stephen Grenier (Johns Hopkins University) , Joyce Kaufman (Whittier College) , Bence Nemth (Kings College London) , David Dunn (University of Birmingham) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Preparing for what comes next? Civil and military preparedness in and beyond the Nordic modelSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConveners: Johanna Pettersson Fürst (Department of Government, Uppsala University) , Louise Ridden , Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)Chair: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)Discussant: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)
-
In recent years, the Baltic Sea region and its islands have been the site of multiple security challenges such as grey zone activity, sabotage, and military incursions. Transformed from a ‘sea of peace’ to a ‘NATO lake’, this space remains crucial for maritime control and geostrategic purposes. Subsequently, the Baltic Sea islands are conceived as a vital frontline or ‘chain of defence’ for Nordic, Baltic and, more broadly, NATO security. Regarded as both a strength and a vulnerability, islands such as Gotland have been remilitarised, and the military and defence status of others, such as Bornholm and Åland, are being reconsidered. This paper asks: How are islands conceptualised as exceptional spaces of security making and war preparedness? Whilst enfolded into security bordering practices of regional and national defence, islands occupy a hazy or liminal space in global security practices and geostrategic imaginations. By bringing island studies (nissology) into conversation with (critical) security and military studies, this paper explores questions of agency, bordering practices and how war preparedness differs in the context of island spaces.
Author: Christine Agius (Swedish Defence University) -
‘Step into the war’ is the instruction given to visitors at the Danish War Museum in central Copenhagen, where they are invited to ‘feel the horror and fascination of war’ (Krigsmuseet 2025). Inside the museum there are interactive exhibitions where visitors can ‘try the shackles and feel the whip’ of 18th century sailors, and to attempt to ‘escape the drone’ and ‘fool a real thermal camera’. The gift shop offers the chance to ‘bring home a piece of history’, including ‘toys and war gadgets’. Taking these affective experiences of the museum as the impetus, this paper asks: how are affective imaginaries of war curated in the Danish war Museum? And what role do fun and play have in these curations? Ultimately, it argues that the museum effectively recasts war as a game – something that can be played, tried out, and reenacted with fun. This move strips war of its violence and re-presents it as an affective and formative experience of learning through play.
Author: Louise Ridden -
In order to ensure civilian involvement in preparedness efforts, governments must reach large swaths, if not all, of the population. In this paper, we investigate how preparedness efforts are communicated to different audiences using a variety of tools. These mobilisation efforts need to be diverse and adapted to different parts of the population so as to ensure total defence. As such, we examine popular culture as a channel for preparedness communication, by analysing TV series such as Nedsläckt land on SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster. There are a number of reality show-type TV series in which different people are exposed to different crisis-like scenarios which they have to respond to and ‘survive’. In this paper, we thus ask: What particular threats and responsibilities are emphasised in these popularized narratives of coming wars and/or crises? How does this material appeal to and engage different audiences, such as through gamification of preparedness, humour, or reflecting common formats such as reality tv shows. Through our analysis of the televising of the concept of total defence, we emphasise how defence policy seeps into our homes as entertainment.
Authors: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)* , Johanna Pettersson Fürst (Department of Government, Uppsala University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Reflecting on the first decade of the journal Critical Military Studies
The interdisciplinary journal Critical Military Studies was established during 2015 with a remit to challenge military power; a decade on from its first publication, a Special Issue of the journal was commissioned to critically reflect upon its endeavour as an intellectual project. Chaired by one the Critical Military Studies Special Issue Editors, this Roundtable consists of several authors - from across the academic career stages, from PhD to Professor - involved in the ‘CMS@10’ Special Issue, including one of the Special Issue’s Guest Editors. Each speaker will discuss their contribution to this bespoke collection of articles with a view to facilitating a reflective and constructive conversation about the 10 year anniversary of Critical Military Studies, and ways forward for the journal into the next decade.
Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupChair: Laura MillsParticipants: Bibi Imre-Millei , Ross McGarry (University of Liverpool) , Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University) , Liam Markey (University of Liverpool) , Nancy Taber (Brock University) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Rethinking Crisis Management in a World of Multiple Nuclear Adversaries: New Thinking for a Dangerous CenturySponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConvener: Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham)Chair: Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham)
-
N/A
Authors: Phil Williams (University of Pittsburgh)* , Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham) , Ken Booth (Aberystwyth University)* -
N/A
Author: Nicola Leveringhaus (King's College London)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Rethinking Ideology in Asia at end of the Liberal International OrderSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: David Brenner (University of Sussex)Chair: Maya Nguyen (University of London)Discussant: Heidi Wang-Kaeding (University of Keele)
-
From Techno-nationalism to Techno-globalism: Technology, Sustainability, and China’s new world order
With the Trump Administration’s attack on the current Liberal International Order, many are looking to China to fill this emerging gap in global leadership. Rather than frame this in terms of great power competition, the paper starts from examining how Beijing sees national prosperity and global order increasingly through the race to create frontier technologies and achieve sustainable development. Many have profitably studied technology and sustainability in China as separate national policies. This paper is innovative in two ways. First, it looks at how technology and sustainability interact, shaping each other in both supportive and contradictory ways. It uses Science and Technology Studies methods to explore not only how technology shapes society, but also how diverse social actors shape both technology and sustainability experiences. Second, see this as evidence of Beijing’s 'techno-nationalist' policy, the paper moves beyond such methodological nationalism to analyse these policies and experiences in a multi-scalar way that explores how national plans take shape through practice in local, national, and global spaces. With this nuanced multi-scalar analysis of the technology/sustainability dynamic, the paper will rethink China’s geopolitical impact by developing ‘techno-globalism’ as an ideological concept, asking is the PRC moving from techno-nationalism to techno-globalism?
Author: William Callahan (Singapore Management University) -
All too often Central Asia's international relations are seen through the lens of geopolitical competition for resources and influence. This, however, overlooks not only the considerable agency of Central Asian states but also the significant Soviet legacies shaping their international interactions and preferences. This paper conceptualizes the role of Soviet legacies of ‘techno-futurism’ in Central Asia’s particular domestic/external nexus. The region was intended as a laboratory of Soviet modernity, with explicit intent to signal Soviet techno-futurism to neighbouring regions, for example in the monumental ‘greening the steppe’ project or the space programme. Legacies of these projects have led to ecological nightmares such as the drying of the Aral sea but have also shaped post-Soviet trajectories. This includes echoes of techno-optimism as a form of ‘bricolage ideology’, no longer serving socialism but mobilized for authoritarian legitimacy and control. Central Asian authoritarian leaders have built new futuristic cities in the steppe, and more recently have become open to Chinese versions of techno-futurism, especially in digitization and digital surveillance, with large-scale Chinese surveillance projects implemented in several Central Asian cities. Echoes of Soviet ideology are beginning to shape Central Asian-Chinese interactions and anchor the specific role of China in the region.
Author: Stefanie Ortmann (University of Sussex) -
Amidst domestic democratic rollbacks, the regional rise of China’s role in conflict management, the increasing presence of Russia in the Asian security sector, and the withdrawal of US influence, peacebuilding faces a range of competing ideas and sets of practices in contemporary Southeast Asia. The paper explores what the current concept and practice of ‘peacebuilding’ means in the region in relation to both internal conflicts and cross-border dynamics. The paper shows how competing, but interacting, visions of ‘peace’ run through current state and regional policies and practices towards managing enduring conflicts. While Southeast Asian countries take different approaches to managing conflicts and influencing conflict outcomes, they also work collectively through the ASEAN regional forum, while simultaneously attempting to balance China’s (and increasingly, Russia’s) influence. In this fragmented and competitive environment, increasingly illiberal approaches have dominated conflict management. However, civil society organisations and more moderate governments continue to push for negotiated and inclusive settlements, with varying degrees of success. Drawing on case studies from Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Cambodia and Myanmar, the paper reflects on emerging outcomes of some of these fragmented approaches to peace, the implications for civilians, and which models of peace are likely to succeed in this multi-polar context.
Author: Claire Smith (University of York) -
Scholarship and policy on the political economy of rebel groups usually focuses on their illicit financing by way of extractive economies and criminal business. But the political economy of rebels cannot be reduced to rent-seeking or revenue streams financing their war effort. This article argues that to understand the political economy of rebel movements, we need to take the role of ideology more seriously. To do so the article zooms into Kachin State in Myanmar’s borderlands. The region is home to decades-old ethnonational conflict and rebellion led by the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO). Rich in natural resources and located between China and India, Kachin State has also become a focal point of geoeconomic rivalry. This has heightened since the KIO has seized some of the world’s largest rare-earth mines in 2024. By historicising the KIO’s engagement with resource extraction as part of a broader nation-building project, the article demonstrates how the group’s actions are informed by developmentalist ideology rather than mere profiteering or war financing. Reconceptualising war economies through the lens of ideology opens new avenues for scholarly analysis and policy engagement with armed groups and rebel governance.
Author: David Brenner (University of Sussex)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Rethinking climate and developmentSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Ramazan Caner Sayan (Swansea University)Discussant: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
A vast literature has debated the effects of natural resource wealth, especially oil, on democracy. Despite increasingly sophisticated methodological analyses, there is still no consensus on whether or not a so-called "political resource curse" even exists. However, there is substantial evidence for two propositions. First, significant oil wealth stabilizes authoritarian rule by bolstering rulers’ ability to pay off and/or repress dissenters and society at large. Second, oil’s effects are neither fully deterministic nor uniform across time and space. Some countries have not been "cursed" or have even been "blessed". Overwhelmingly, however, existing literature characterizes the effects of oil as primarily a matter of domestic politics. However, closer examination shows that many international structures, institutions, and policy decisions shape both the impact of oil and the nature of the state. While there have been occasional acknowledgements of international factors, most notably regionalism, neighborhood effects, and great power competition for oil resources, there have been no systematic attempts at cross-case comparisons of highly resource-dependent states. This paper begins to fill this gap by looking at how international actors have influenced both regime behavior and the prospects for peace and conflict. Ultimately, it demonstrates that to understand the political impact of oil on governance, it is vital to look beyond domestic factors.
Authors: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London) , Moritz Schmoll (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University) -
Global forms of violence, climate change, populism, and fake news represent some of the global challenges directly affecting local communities. However, local communities are, if at all, little prepared to understand and address such challenges. While lacking capacity, know-how, and adequate organization, local communities experience various facets of unsustainability. The dynamic between global challenges and local communities is further uncovering a transformation of IR phenomena, slowly attracting the attention of the discipline. Building on this literature, the paper focuses on contexts of unsustainability and related reactions of local communities. The paper provides a conceptualization of “unsustainability” to explore how local communities respond to global challenges. To answer this question, the paper employs a qualitative-interpretive methodology and data collected through empirical case studies. The cases focus on the practice of community foundations, organizations that have a broad mission and work to consolidate the capacity of local communities. The cases analysed will focus on challenges such as war, climate change, hybrid war, and authoritarianism, and how they unfold in local communities. The gathered data will be used to construct a matrix of factors that enable local communities to effectively address global challenges.
Author: Stefan Cibian (Făgăraș Research Institute) -
The line separating foreign and domestic politics in much of the International Relations (IR) literature is increasingly challenged by the planetary nature of shared crises. As global capitalism depletes social and material resources living beings needs to reproduce life across the inexorably interconnected ecosystems on Earth, strategies for mutually assured survival emerge as both urgently needed and foreclosed by the current systems of governance. Feminist political economists, from Veronica Gago to Nancy Fraser and Ilene Grabel have highlighted the structural opening emerging from the shared experience of oppression under colonial capitalism that have the potential to inform collective transformations of eco-social organization. This paper theorizes the past year of the anti-system civil movement in Serbia as a collective approach to planetary repair, encompassing efforts to rebuild (i) social contract (including inter-ethnic reconciliation); (ii) democratic governance (through alternative public institutions); and (iii) ecologies (in opposition of developmentalist extractivism). Caught in the geopolitical quagmire of resource grab, the mass movement in Serbia offers lessons of reclaiming internationalist quests for collective liberation amidst the traps of liberal cooptation.
Author: Gloria Novovic (King's College London) -
The literature on Global Governance has transcended the traditional fields of International Relations and Global Political Economy by giving legitimacy to non-state actors and fora as sites of power, politics, and practice in governing global issues. Specifically, Global Governance acknowledges markets, civil society, international organizations and various national and transnational actors and interests as shaping global governance and accepts norms, ideas, discourses and knowledge as important factors in shaping global governance. In this way, it has moved beyond the assumptions that rational- and self- interests alone are what motivate decisions. However, the Global Governance literature, much like its disciplinary predecessors, focuses primarily on how the world is ordered, and less on the processes through which governance is established and how change happens, particularly for developing a more equitable and sustainable global political economy. This paper juxtaposes development in practice and the roles of civil society and social movement actors in this process with the global governance and global political economy theories to develop an analytical framework to better understand how different actors, initiatives, and governance mechanisms contribute to generating genuine sustainable and equitable development. It draws on a range of historic and contemporary theorists who consider how change happens, with an emphasis on Albert O. Hirschman’s idea of possibilism to consider how dynamic and iterative processes can contribute to transformational change. This lens is in now way a blueprint of how change happens, but rather provides one way in which scholars might begin parsing out the processes that results in governance outcomes that generate outcomes that contest existing structures in the global economy.
Author: Kim Burnett (St Francis Xavier University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Sites of security, control and resistanceSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Kathryn Fisher (King's College London)
-
Within liberal orders, the state’s use of repression is not an anomaly but a historical constant. States have always deployed it for political ends, although its intensity and scope have varied across time and space. Although the legal system may equalise all citizens and territorial spaces within the state boundaries, states can still target specific individuals and locations. Repression can be employed in varying juridico-political contexts and can take different forms, but it always sits in places. This paper offers a spatiotemporal analysis of state-conducted political repression by examining how legal and extralegal modalities of state power were differentially deployed across Turkey’s national territory between 1923 and 2019. Drawing on extensive archival data, it reveals how repression operates as a spatial technique of governance as law and repression intertwine in the production of political order. The paper bridges insights from the literatures on repression and on states of emergency and exception. While repression studies often remain descriptive and quantitative, privileging statistical precision over contextual depth, scholarship on emergency and exception tends to conceptualise state interferences with rights as external to legality. Whereas the former treats law merely as an instrument without any constructive force, the latter overlooks the legal embeddedness of repression within state rule. Departing from both perspectives, this paper conceptualises repression as a historically constant mode of governance that operates through proactive and reactive forms, rather than as episodic violence or permanent lawlessness. By foregrounding the territorial differentiation of repression and juxtaposing Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast with its metropolitan provinces, the paper demonstrates how the law and the denial of it can function to produce politically and legally differentiated spaces within the state borders.
Author: Burcu Turkoglu (Bilkent University) -
This study investigates how and why the Fergana Valley became a durable “threat space” after 2001, even as radical Islamist groups were relocating beyond Central Asia and their influence in the region was receding. The research puzzle arises from the paradox that the Valley was not targeted during periods of greater Islamist activity in the 1990s, but became the focal point of spatialized and militarized practices only in the aftermath of 9/11. The literature at the intersection of IR and geopolitics provides useful discussions on territoriality and identity, yet it largely neglects the question of how security practices become spatialized, evolve over time, and interact with international dynamics. Conventional Area Studies accounts portray the Valley as inherently strategic or prone to instability, while critical work in the region focuses on securitization or human security. Neither strand sufficiently explains the historically specific transformation of the Valley into a securitized space nor its relationship to global counterterrorism practices. Methodologically, the paper employs discourse analysis of state speeches, policy documents, and international security initiatives, tracing the evolution of radical Islamism and corresponding security measures. It demonstrates that the militarization of the Valley after 2001—manifested in border mines, “courage schools,” intensified surveillance, and the policing of religious practices—was enabled by the Global War on Terror. Through partnerships with the United States, Russia, and China, Central Asian regimes translated external resources and concerns into domestic authoritarian strategies. The findings show that the Valley’s securitization was not the inevitable product of geography or threat, but the result of relational processes in which marginal actors reproduced the international order at the local level. This case highlights how domestic and international practices are mutually constitutive, offering important insights for Global IR and the relational turn by demonstrating how the “international” and the “local” co-produced security practices.
Author: İpek Nil Ozat (Bilkent university) -
Critical Security Studies cannot adequately theorize contexts where communities maintain alternative worlds under conditions designed to ensure their impossibility. This paper charts new directions for CSS by examining Kurdish experiences in Rojava, demonstrating how interdisciplinary frameworks can address contexts where existing analytical categories structurally fail.
Through ethnographic research with local civilians navigating daily security decisions, I theorize layered insecurity—a novel framework for analyzing contexts where multiple actors simultaneously deploy contradictory security logics. Interviews reveal how communities navigate external elimination pressures from technologically superior forces (Turkish drones, ISIS networks, Syrian state apparatus) while managing complex dependencies on international coalitions whose advanced weapons enable defense while constraining political autonomy. Participants describe keeping basic weapons at home while depending on coalition military technology—a technological asymmetry forcing engagement with actors who simultaneously protect and control. This reveals CSS's inability to theorize how technological asymmetry compels communities to position themselves simultaneously as partners, threats, and autonomous actors.
I advance three new directions for CSS. First, layered insecurity as analytical framework for contexts where multiple technologically asymmetric actors create overlapping contradictions. Second, protective militarization—reconceptualizing military organization as infrastructure for defensive worldmaking when communities lack technological capacity for autonomous defense. Underground networks serve dual functions: bomb shelters during drone strikes and spaces for cultural transmission. As one participant explained: "Every morning I leave home saying goodbye as if I won't return. Not dramatic—practical." Third, interdisciplinary methods integrating anthropological ontological frameworks, decolonial scholarship, and multi-scalar ethnography to center local perspectives on navigating technological dependence and political autonomy.These directions enable CSS to theorize security realities its current state-centric, technologically-naive frameworks cannot comprehend—opening pathways for analyzing how communities sustain alternative worlds while navigating contradictory relationships shaped by technological asymmetry.
Author: Neslihan Yaklav (PhD student in Politics Science, QUB) -
This paper examines the terrorism trial as a site of resistance. Terrorism trials are conventionally thought of as settings in which the state re-asserts its authority over those charged with challenging its monopoly on violence. Yet, given the interactive and inherently political nature of terrorism proceedings, the courtroom also offers a space for defendants to further their political projects and continue their struggle over power with the sovereign nation. Whereas current conceptualisations of the courtroom acknowledge the presence of dynamics of liminality and the potential for failure of the political trial, they stop short of a nuanced and comprehensive theorisation of (the potential for) resistance by so-called terrorist actors. Drawing on the case studies of the Red Bridges in Italy and the Reichsbürger trials in Germany, we argue that paying closer attention to the organisational and ideological logics of the group in question as well as the socio-political contexts within which their trials are placed paints a more differentiated picture of the modalities of resistance in terrorism proceedings.
Author: Carlotta Sallach (Central European University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Taxation and the current moment in International Political EconomySponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConveners: Katharina Kuhn (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Matti YlönenChair: Matti Ylönen
-
Why did the US government (not) cooperate on multilateral corporate taxation during Trump’s
first term? Based on exclusive interview material with senior tax bureaucrats, this paper
provides a descriptive account of the preference formation within the US Treasury Department regarding the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project during Trump’s first term. The account shows that US tax bureaucrats not only successfully advocated for multilateral negotiations within their own government, but also participated constructively in the multilateral negotiations at the OECD, despite a growing conflict with the US Treasury Secretary, the White House and domestic business representatives. Although the US tax bureaucrats were not allowed to agree on a final draft, they paved the way for the successful agreement a year later under the Biden presidency. The case study describes the interplay between domestic factors such as party politics and public opinion with structural power and epistemic communities. In contrast to game theory models that treat state preferences as given, and in addition to studies that identified the global diffusion of digital taxes as a decisive exogenous factor, this study highlights the need to analyse (government) preferences regarding multilateral cooperation as part of a political process.Author: Jonas Horn -
A central question in international political economy concerns the role of domestic forces in shaping global economic outcomes. This question has largely been delegated to comparative political economy, yet CPE has struggled to explain developments in international taxation. Existing approaches, primarily centered in the varieties of capitalism approach, often treat the evolution of tax regimes as driven primarily by international pressures, with domestic institutions exerting limited influence beyond temporarily mitigating the effects of globalization. This paper revisits the domestic foundations of international tax competition through a growth model perspective. I argue that domestic growth coalitions mediate and refract international pressures rather than simply absorb them. By linking growth model theory with IPE, the paper demonstrates that variation in countries’ engagement with tax competition reflects differences in the composition and power of domestic growth coalitions. Moreover, these coalitions are themselves shaped and empowered by international trends: global financialization strengthens domestic financial sectors and promotes financialized growth models, while export-led coalitions maintain distinct fiscal strategies. The analysis reveals that international tax competition is not purely a global race to the bottom but a process filtered through and exacertbated by nationally specific growth models.
Author: Saila Stausholm (CBS) -
This paper examines how regional collaboration among Sub-Saharan African (SSA) tax authorities is reshaping North–South power relations in global tax governance. Over the past decade, most SSA countries adopted OECD-based transfer pricing (TP) rules to curb illicit financial flows and strengthened their capacity for TP audits. While these standards provide a framework to challenge profit-shifting, they also embed asymmetrical governance structures that privilege OECD norm-setters, multinational corporations, and professional service firms. The widespread adoption of OECD TP standards has created powerful network effects that discourage policymakers from pursuing simpler or more context-appropriate approaches (Vet, 2023), reinforcing institutional path dependency and governance lock-in. Yet, regional initiatives such as the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) are fostering new forms of Southern norm entrepreneurship. Through these platforms, African tax officials leverage shared expertise and technocratic collaboration to articulate regional priorities and challenge OECD dominance using socio-technical resources (Hearson, Christensen & Randriamanalina, 2022). In Finnemore and Sikkink’s (1998) terms, this development signifies a phase of norm emergence where SSA countries move beyond the role of passive norm-takers. It also shows that constructivist policy learning (Stone, 2004) is not just a process of socialization but also a vehicle for contestation and agency, demonstrating how regional cooperation can create new types of influence within seemingly locked-in global governance structures.
Author: Cassandra Vet -
The adoption of the OECD’s Global Anti-Base Erosion Model Rules (GloBE) – colloquially known as ‘Global Minimum Tax’ – in 2021 was hailed as something close to a revolution: since January 2024, firms above a certain size have to pay a minimum of 15% on their profits in every jurisdiction in which they operate; if they fail to do so, their headquarter jurisdiction or eventually even third countries will have the right to collect the outstanding tax. The idea behind GloBE was to reduce tax competition worldwide to level the playing field between smaller domestic and large international firms while protecting the tax base of governments. But does this strategy actually reduce tax competition - and if so, for whom? This paper argues that GloBE has been largely successful in reducing tax competition by stabilising effective corporate tax rates globally at a minimum of 15%. However, at the same time, GloBE has shifted competition from tax to expenditures, thereby producing additional fiscal pressures for capital-importing economies in the Global South. As the introduction of GloBE pushed governments to look for alternative tools to attract investment, many governments in the Global South have adopted new legislation to offer subsidies and other expenditure-based incentives, thereby replacing tax competition with expenditure competition. The paper makes two contributions: first, it conceptualizes ‘expenditure competition’ as a global dynamic akin to tax competition in which governments use expenditure-based incentives to attract international capital. Second, the paper builds on an in-depth case study of investment incentives in Vietnam to show that GloBE, while reducing tax competition on paper, has created additional fiscal pressures for capital-importing economies in the Global South.
Author: Katharina Kuhn (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
Prohibitively expensive access to international finance, unsustainable debt burdens and the consolidation of a post-development-aid world means that it has never been more important for countries across the Global South to raise more revenue domestically through taxation—Domestic Resource Mobilisation (DRM)—than it is now. However, increasing DRM remains a major challenge for governments struggling with high levels of domestic informality, tax evasion, and international profit shifting. Under-taxation is emblematic of economies across the Global South, and evasion and informality are particularly acute in Latin America. Since the turn of the millennium there have been a range of policies implemented by Latin American governments to build a bridge into the informal economy, to try and formalise the informal, to support DRM. We engage with one of these policies, the Monotributo or Mono Tax in Argentina: a policy designed for informal sector workers to contribute a nominal amount to the Argentine state in return for access to social security, which registered 2.9 million taxpayers by 2023. The recent abolition by President Milei of the Montributo’s entry level for the most precarious workers, we argue, is less about cost saving for social security but more about ideology and social politics related to informality. Drawing evidence from extensive fieldwork conducted in Buenos Aires in 2019 and 2023 and supported by qualitative online questionnaires, this study argues that ideologies of taxation and partisan affiliation significantly shape social attitudes to informality in Argentina. We argue that informality is seen by some as a de facto tax subsidy which can shape opposition to schemes designed to permeate into the informal sector whilst exacerbating deep political cleavages and causing barriers to DRM. In doing so, we make a novel contribution to international political economy debates by bringing into conversation literatures on informality, taxation, and ideology.
Authors: Graeme Young* , Matthew Barlow (University of Glasgow)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Roundtable / The Art of Politics: Aesthetic Dimensions of Repression, Resistance, and Reparation
This roundtable explores the political power of art in contexts of repression, resistance, and reparation. Art has long made visible both direct and structural violence experienced by women, racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ communities, migrants, political dissidents, and other marginalised groups. Its sensory register - visual, auditory, tactile, and more - shapes how political realities are experienced and understood. As Bleiker (2017: 262) observes, aesthetic engagement can challenge what is visible, thinkable, or debatable in politics. The discussion will examine how art functions across three dimensions:
1. Repression: How states and institutions deploy aesthetic regimes to control narratives, reconstruct history, and reinforce exclusionary identity narratives.
2. Resistance: How artists and social movements expose injustice, contest power, and mobilise publics through visual, performative, and participatory practices.
3. Reparation: How art contributes to collective memory, recognition, and societal healing, offering alternative frameworks for justice and reconciliation.By integrating scholarly and practice-based perspectives from academics and artists, this roundtable highlights the politics of art as a lens for understanding and transforming global political dynamics. It will showcase how artistic interventions can both illuminate structural inequalities and act as catalysts for social and political change.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupParticipants: Debolina Maity (University of York) , Anna Katila , Lydia Cole (University of Sussex) , Ioana Popescu (University of Edinburgh) , Sophie Raehme (Central European University) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / Tourism, Power, and Postcolonial Politics: Critical perspectives on global mobility and governanceSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University)Chair: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)Discussant: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
-
This paper examines how Iranian outbound tourism to Turkey has evolved from a leisure activity into a subtle form of everyday political practice shaped by the post-revolutionary context of the Islamic Republic. Drawing on concepts of political tourism and everyday resistance, it argues that Iranian citizens’ travel choices reflect complex negotiations with state-imposed restrictions on culture, economy, and social freedom. Through an analysis of post-1979 political developments, sanctions, and socio-cultural constraints, the study identifies travel to Turkey as a space where Iranians temporarily escape domestic limitations while simultaneously expressing silent dissent. Turkey’s geographical proximity, visa-free access, and cultural familiarity transform it into a symbolic site of comparative normality an alternative modernity that challenges the ideological boundaries of the Iranian state. By reframing tourism as a political and social act, this paper contributes to broader debates on resistance, mobility, and the politics of everyday life in the Middle East.
Author: Shahrzad Akbari (Cardiff University) -
This paper contributes to the emerging field of critical tourism geopolitics by examining how tourism itself functions as a mode of governance. Rather than asking how tourism should be governed, it reorients the question to explore how tourism governs – how it enacts power and shapes geopolitical relations. Drawing on empirical examples from across the Global South and North, the paper analyses tourism’s entanglement with coloniality, political economy, and security, revealing how these dynamics produce hierarchical and exclusionary relations that are often obscured in mainstream governance frameworks. It argues that tourism governance as commonly practiced reinforces global inequalities and fails to address the structural causes of displacement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. By engaging with critical geopolitical theory and mobility studies, the paper highlights how tourism reproduces a global (im)mobility regime that privileges certain mobile subjects (e.g., tourists) while marginalising others (e.g., migrants). Ultimately, it calls for a shift toward mobility justice, challenging dominant narratives of tourism as a benign force for development. This approach offers new insights into the performative and transformative effects of tourism on institutions, spaces, and populations, and underscores the need to rethink tourism governance through a critical geopolitical lens.
Authors: Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University) , Sarah Becklake (Leibniz University Hannover)* , Kristin Lozanski (King's University College at Western University)* -
The heritage hotel boutique is a multiple space: a place of business, consumption and tourism. It exists as a microcosm of commodity fetishism through exhibition, ‘souvenirisation’ and a knowledge economy. Through visits to Singapore's Raffles Hotel, I show how touristic sites such as the hotel boutique performs as a contact zone between colonial and postcolonial histories. I contextualise the boutique within the twofold process of tourism in Singapore, that is, the ‘touristification’ of history and the historicisation of colonial tourism that coproduces dominant narratives of the nation's racialised past. Within that, I ask what racial capital looks like when appropriated by the postcolonial state, and its conceptual significance. Second, I show how whiteness is reappropriated by the postcolonial state within its ‘touristified’ history, flattened and homogenised through statecraft, and conflated with the wealth, civility and presumed success of the nation. This adopted utility of whiteness in the postcolonial space speaks to hegemonic discourses as dominant yet susceptible to disruption, through the reappropriation of white supremacy for other means, namely reinforcing state-sanctioned narratives.
Author: Terri-Anne Teo (Newcastle University) -
Despite its increasing popularity and multiple contributions to the global economy, contemporary research on cruise ship tourism remains understudied and relatively uncritical. This paper aims to fill that gap by critically analysing how three major cruise lines, including Carnival Cruise Line (CCL), Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), virtually position the local histories of postcolonial states in their online advertisements. Focusing on the Caribbean archipelago, I argue that CCL, RCI and NCL work to temporally displace and nostalgically remember the region’s colonial past within their online marketing, in order to make those destinations appear more paradisical and marketable to prospective passengers. By downplaying the violent activities of European colonialism and erasing those more recent movements of Caribbean independence and emancipation, cruise lines work to reproduce, reinforce and normalise the notion that the Global South needs to just ‘move on’ from colonialism, as if to suggest that legacies of European empire have no impact on the world in the present day. These findings demonstrate that cruise lines are henceforth eager to distance themselves from issues and legacies of European colonialism, because these stories and encounters are deemed ‘unsellable’ to paying tourists, but also in an effort to conceal the role that the cruise ship industry has played in the continued exploitation and appropriation of the Global South.
Author: Genevieve Gunn (Cardiff University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
WE03 Panel / What next for Feminist Foreign Policy?Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)Chair: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
-
Over the last eleven years, we have witnessed the rise and subsequent fall of feminist foreign policy (FFP). Initially heralded as a progressive answer to global power politics, FFP has failed to deliver on its promise to transform foreign policy’s deeply unequal constituent norms, practices, and subjectivities. But why is that so? Drawing on the first ethnography of feminist foreign policymaking, this article provides an answer by interrogating German diplomats’ quotidian practices in the Federal Foreign Office. It shows that diplomats presumed that feminism – and therefore FFP – was not naturally intelligible to three key foreign policy audiences: the German public (too conservative), the ‘Global South’ (not progressive enough), and diplomats themselves. To the latter, FFP constrained diplomatic relations with non-feminist actors and restricted male diplomats’ careers due to its emphasis on women’s representation. Yet, FFP had to be made palatable to all three groups to ensure policy implementation. Diplomats responded to this conundrum by producing FFP as ‘accessible’, with a focus on accessibility to men. This entailed depoliticising and co-opting feminist concepts such as intersectionality. Accessibility became a “brick wall” (Ahmed 2012) to more radical notions of feminism, while giving the outward appearance of progress. Hence, FFP could not possibly be transformative.
Author: Karoline Färber (University of Erfurt) -
States whose international identity had rested on liberal normative leadership have historically aligned the defense of gender equality with national security. In this regard, Thomson (2022) successfully argued that states which adopted a feminist foreign policy have leveraged liberal norms to enhance their international status. This is evident as late as 2024 in Canada’s defence policy, which “recognizes gender inequality as a root cause of conflict” (Canada 2024, 14). However, research also tells us that once adopted, feminist commitments can be coopted, sidelined, or quietly erased (Von Hlatky 2022; Zahar and Deschamps-Laporte 2023). Despite Canada’s self-proclaimed feminist leadership, the insertion of feminist perspectives into security discourse remains fragmented and in flux.
This chapter interrogates the contested afterlives of feminist commitments within multilateral security settings; particularly as they confront anti-gender backlash and a fragmenting liberal order. Focusing on the Canadian case, we ask when, why and how feminist norms are defended, dimmed, or abandoned by states that claim a feminist identity; and, crucially, when they are framed in tension with national security imperatives. To provide an answer, we map the operationalization and afterlives of feminist commitments across Canada’s engagement in two multilateral sites (the United Nations and NATO). Both sites have recently been the setting of heated debates around international security challenges related to the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict. The analysis draws on official statements, public documents and policy instruments produced between 2017 and 2025, alongside 20 semi-structured interviews with Canadian officials directly involved in advancing feminist commitments in these arenas. The chapter offers a nuanced analysis of the intersection between feminist and security commitments in a changing world order. It provides an initial response to what drives competing hierarchies of order, contributing to broader reflections on gender, power, and international society (Towns, Dunne, and Reus-Smit 2017).
Authors: Marie-Joëlle Zahar (Université de Montréal)* , Emma Limane (Université de Montréal) -
This paper seeks to provide a critical reflection on the epistemology underlying feminist foreign policy (FFP), its development and its conception. While FFP is neither homogeneous nor unitarily defined, it can be broadly understood as a multidimensional approach that fundamentally emphasizes the needs, experiences and well-being of marginalized groups and individuals that challenges major paradigms, ‘traditional’ concepts, global power hierarchies and hegemonic systems. As such, FFP is often perceived and presented as a seemingly universal normative approach, either withholding or not addressing its epistemic embeddedness and epistemic biases – in theory and practice. However, FFP, and especially its past and historical emergence, must be critically investigated. Comprising and (re)producing particular knowledge, FFP is situated in certain contexts and embodies a specific positionality that needs to be addressed and questioned: To what extent does FFP embody kinds of epistemic violence(s)? In what ways is epistemic violence(s) inscribed in the conception of FFP? And what impact does it have on power dynamics and FFP? Does FFP (re)produce certain power dynamics in the international sphere, or does it fulfill its potential to offer a power-critical and transformative approach to foreign policy? This paper starts from the hypothesis that the emergence and historical foundation of FFP are rooted in certain narratives that are epistemically shaped by white, Western narratives and concepts. Hence, FFP entails forms of epistemic violence that are perpetuated through its (re)presentation and public perception. A deconstructive approach aims to shed light on the epistemic violence of FFP as well as the role of FFP in the reproduction of various interconnected power structures. Thereby, the paradox of FFP’s self-expectation and claim in opposition to its lack of a critical reflection of FFP’s inherent epistemic violence is dismantled and (gender) hierarchies illuminated.
Author: Lena Wittenfeld (University of Bielefeld) -
As climate change literally transforms our world, mainstream security discourses centre around how global warming and environmental degradation heighten the risk of armed conflict, constructing climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’. Many states respond to the securitisation of climate change through militarised responses. Yet, this is inherently contradictory. Not only does militarisation create insecurities for women, girls and other marginalised groups, it diverts attention from tackling root causes of climate change. In this work we put forth two key arguments: climate change simultaneously exacerbates existing inequalities and disproportionately impacts marginalised individuals, and second, capitalism reflects masculinist modes of domination, through extraction and exploitation of people, nature and resources. We illustrate our arguments by focusing on feminist foreign policy (FFP). FFP challenges traditional, realist perceptions of foreign and security policies, emphasising a wide array of insecurities experienced by women and marginalised individuals, who feel the full brunt of the climate and eco-crises. By drawing on its feminist roots, FFPs could shed light on power structures fuelling the climate crisis: patriarchy and capitalism. We turn to the illustrative case of Sweden and the rise and fall of its pioneering policy, exploring key documents on FFP, national security strategies and declarations of foreign policy, using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to be approach. In so doing, we seek to understand how climate related problems are defined and the extent to which those problematisations employ the language of securitisation and militarisation. Our findings suggest a tendency to privilege orthodox and militarised notions of national security, which prioritise the well-being of institutions above that of the environment and the many species nested in it. Instead, we argue that it is vital to move beyond state-centric security notions, towards not just human but ecological security.
Author: Hanna Walfridsson (University of Edinburgh) -
In the past decade feminist foreign policies have emerged across a range of states and institutions as ethical alternatives to realpolitik. Rather than reproducing masculinist values and gender inequalities FFPs seek to further gender equality and justice globally. However, few studies thoroughly have addressed FFP states’ implication in processes of militarism, armament and martial politics. Drawing upon our previous work we suggest that all FFPs need to be authentic, accountable and ambitious (Bergman Rosamond, Duncanson and Gentry forthcoming, 2022). We critically explore the relevance of FFP in times of war and radical right populism and reflect on the inconsistencies between FFP and militarism. We also engage with feminist pacifism and critiques of orthodox (masculinist) notions of just war (Sjoberg 2008), investigating their relevance for a critical FFP research agenda. We propose that abolitionist feminism adds rigour to that agenda. Our empirical analysis rests on a feminist narrative approach.
Authors: Annika Bergman Rosamond (The University of Edinburgh) , Caron Gentry (Lancaster)
-
-
12:15 PM
→
1:15 PM
Lunch Break 1h
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / (Re)examining the connection between diaspora and decolonial & counter-hegemonic politicsSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConveners: Oula Kadhum , Catherine Craven (University of Sheffield)Chair: Catherine Craven (University of Sheffield)Discussant: Oula Kadhum
-
The Russian invasion of Ukraine marked a turning point in the country’s foreign policy towards its neighbour but also heralded a domestic war on those who opposed its actions. The war thus occasioned a new temporality for anti-war Russians, where a more authoritarian and repressive Russia came into being. The temporality of the invasion of Ukraine thus provoked moral dilemmas and discussions about who and what it means to be Russian today. For ethnic Russians from the regions who migrated from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the war thus occasioned transnational counter-hegemonic and decolonial identities and movements to oppose Russian imperialism whilst simultaneously resisting colonial practices and structures at home. Ethnic activists abroad have supported activists inside the country, informed the regions about the realities of Putin’s war and helped ethnic Russian men, who have been disproportionately drafted for war, to escape mobilisation. Through transnational decolonial practices and acts, these communities resist Russia’s imperial and authoritarian nationalism by inspiring ethnic identifications, pride in ethnic languages and culture and political autonomy. In other words, the anti-war transnationalism of Russia’s ethnic communities seeks to dismantle the legacies of empire past and present while asserting new political futures for Russia’s ethnic regions. The paper thus sheds light on transnational decolonial movements by native populations abroad, an under researched area in diaspora and post-colonial studies.
Author: Oula Kadhum (SOAS University of London) -
How do diaspora organizations engage in transnational political claims-making within autocratic states in the Global South? Traditional scholarship tends to examine diaspora organizations’ decolonization efforts in the Global North, sidestepping the large-scale grassroots-level decolonization processes linked to diplomatic efforts within autocratic regimes in the Global South. Drawing on three Filipino diaspora organizations’ decade-long grassroots decolonization efforts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, I argue that diaspora organizations’ strategic weaponization of diplomatic recall contributes to decolonization by contesting the colonial-era power structures, racialized hierarchy, and labor exploitation that marginalize vulnerable diaspora communities. Despite embedded constraints within autocratic regimes, these diaspora organizations have deployed delegitimization, expulsion, and demotion of senior state officials as counter-hegemonic resistance to end colonial-era corruption within labor-export regimes. Methodologically, I employ semi-structured interviews with Filipino diaspora leaders, combined with process tracing, decade-long field observation, and secondary analysis of Filipino and Emirati newspapers. Ultimately, the study advances debates on global diaspora politics, decolonization, and autocracy by highlighting diaspora organizations’ counter-hegemonic grassroots mechanisms and processes to decolonize exploitative migration systems and infrastructures in the Global South.
Author: Froilan Malit Jr (SOAS University of London) -
The German state’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech and protest since the beginning of the Israeli genocide in Gaza has often been attributed to that country’s complicated post-Holocaust memory culture. Missing from such interpretations is the German attitude towards critical Jewish voices in the country, whether German, Israeli or other, who have denounced the weaponisation of antisemitism (Jewish Currents 2022) to justify or downplay the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the German state’s public commitment to Israel as its “staatsräson,” what the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called “German catechism” (2022). Prominent critical Jewish figures (Feldman 2023) have been censored, fired and even accused of antisemitism by a predominently non-Jewish German establishment, which led George Prochnik, Eyal Weizman & Emily Dische-Becker, all of whom are Jewish, to declare that “once again, Germany defines who is a Jew” (2023).
This paper proposes to explore these Jewish reactions to Germany’s weaponisation of antisemitism through an analysis from the periphery. In other words, it will seek to ask the question: what happens when those who are spoken about rather than spoken or listened to speak back? It will also critically re-assess German pro-Israel politics as an attempt to rewrite German history itself (DW 2025), including by downplaying far right and neo-Nazi antisemitism (Mashiach 2025).
Moses, A. D. (2021) The German Catechism, https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/
Feldman, D. (2023), Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you’re a Jew who criticises Israel, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/13/germany-jewish-criticise-israel-tv-debate
Prochnik, G., E. Weizman, E. Dische-Becker (2023). Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew, https://granta.com/once-again-germany-defines-who-is-a-jew-part-i/
Jewish Currents (2022), The Trouble with Germany, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-trouble-with-germany-part-1
DW (2025), Merz blames antisemitism in Germany on migration. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-merz-extremely-satisfied-with-trump-talks/live-72794062#liveblog-post-72810114
Mashiach, I. (2025), An Incident of Bias: Antisemitism-Monitoring in Germany under Scrutiny: A Report on the Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS), https://diasporaalliance.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/RIAS_English-final.pdfAuthor: Elia Ayoub -
To understand how contemporary migration politics shape international relations, research must transcend statist and presentist frameworks and instead pay attention to how the colonial past is entangled with the present.
Cross-fertilizing literature that centers the coloniality of contemporary migration politics with work on diaspora power in IR, this paper argues that the entangled nature of contemporary migration politics can best be made visible through an approach which centers diasporic connections.
To support this argument, the paper draws on three years of qualitative multi-methods research, including ethnographic observations, interviews and document analysis (contemporary and archival), to develop an understanding of British migration politics through its connections with two diasporic formations that are presently negotiating their position in the “Global Britain” project, and that emerged through Britain’s imperial and postcolonial politics: Hongkongers, and Chagossians.
The paper illuminates how contemporary Britain deals with the political consequences of its past. It shows that ‘Global Britain’ is constituted in and through its connections with these (post)colonial diasporic communities and moves us towards a better understanding of how and under what circumstances diaspora (re)create or challenge hegemonic politics.
Author: Catherine Craven (University of Sheffield)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Affective Rhetorics of the Far Right and International Politics
International Relations has long been attentive to questions of power, legitimacy, and political order, yet it has only recently begun to take seriously the emotional and rhetorical dimensions through which these foundational concepts are constituted. The international political landscape is currently reshaped by the global resurgence of right-wing movements - populist, nationalist, and otherwise - animated in particular by affective energies. This roundtable will shed light on how affect and rhetoric work in tandem as instruments of political mobilisation and legitimisation. It will show that emotions such as fear, pride, resentment, and joy are not merely epiphenomena of political discourse; they are integral to the construction of identity, the delineation of enemies, and the justification of violence and exclusion at both domestic and international levels.
By bringing together scholars working across different methodological and theoretical traditions, this roundtable seeks to advance a dialogue on how emotional and rhetorical practices underpin the international legitimacy and transnational diffusion of right-wing politics, and their practical impact on the liberal international order. Focusing on the nexus between rhetoric and emotion in right-wing politics from an International Relations perspective, it will explore how affective appeals shape foreign policy narratives, geopolitical imaginaries, and global hierarchies and in what ways emotional registers sustain visions of national destiny, sovereignty, or civilisation in the face of perceived decline or threat.
Sponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupChair: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford)Participants: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London) , Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU) , Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick) , Ty Solomon , Karl Gustafsson (Stockholm University) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / After (human) rights? What's next.
In the context of multiple contemporary global crises for progressive and radical politics, how do we understand the meaning, value and future of human rights? What does it mean to think 'after' rights? Should we aim to do so? Why or why not? This roundtable critically evaluates the 'After Rights' research project led by Prof Louiza Odysseos and Dr Bal Sokhi-Bulley, and charts next steps and new research directions stemming from this project's contributions and insights. Drawing from across multiple disciplines including IR, politics, philosophy and law, and bringing early career researchers together with more established scholars: contributors will discuss emerging directions and trends in human rights theory and practice, including: the vernacular; the more-than-human and less-than human; rethinking concepts of responsibility and commitment; de-centring the law; and re-centring rights struggles. The roundtable also showcases the work of the Centre for Rights, Reparations and Anti-colonial Justice, based at the University of Sussex, the local host for this year's BISA conference
Sponsor: Centre for Rights, Reparations and Anticolonial Justice, University of SussexChair: David J. Karp (University of Sussex)Participants: Paul-Hendrik Reiman (University of Sussex) , Bal Sokhi-Bulley (University of Sussex) , Louiza Odysseos (University of Sussex) , Quynh Pham (Colby College) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Ask me Anything: IR journal publishing
This AMA is your chance to pick the brains of the editors of six leading IR journals on matters large and small. Where do they stand on making research data open? Is AI going to turn the publishing world on its head? Why do desk rejects seem to be more common these days? Are there too many journals or too few? Whatever happened to the book review? Why did they decide to become an editor, and do they enjoy it? Ask them anything…except why they rejected that paper of yours two years ago!
Sponsor: British International Studies AssociationChair: David MainwaringParticipants: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University) , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) , Lauren Rogers , Mariana Vieira (International Affairs (Chatham House)) , stefano ponte (copenhagen business school) , Sergio Catignani (University of Exeter) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Bipolarity, Tripolarity, or Multipolarity? The contested shape(s) of the new international order
The demise of the rules-based liberal international order has rapidly accelerated since the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025. Despite this, the contours of any new order are at best slowly emerging and there is no consensus among scholars about what will emerge, how, why, and when. This roundtable will explore different views on possible and probable trajectories of the current re-ordering and offer insights on how different theoretical and normative perspectives on international order shape our understanding of what is likely to emerge and whether and how possible trajectories can be shaped towards what would be desirable to emerge.
Sponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupChair: Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham)Participants: Mark Webber (University of Birmingham) , Richard Whitman (University of Kent) , Stefan Wolff (University of Birmingham) , David Dunn (University of Birmingham) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Book Roundtable: Occupying the Everyday and discussion on Coloniality, Militarisation and Anticolonial Queer Feminist Politics
This roundtable is focused around Niharika Pandit's new book, Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir. The roundtable invites anti-militarist, gender and queer thinkers to speak to the book's key ideas on militarisation as a logic of coloniality; transnational anticolonial feminist politics; and how settler/occupier states enforce sovereign control in everyday life as opening new directions and possibilities in gender, sexuality and anti/decolonial thinking within international studies.
The roundtable participants will reflect on the broader questions of anticolonial feminist politics, the co-option of gender and sexual freedoms in colonial projects, the importance of thinking with marginalised geographies in the Global South, contemporary (post)coloniality, global militarisation and the politics of solidarity by engaging Niharika's work with their own research, thinking and organising.
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Hannah Wright (University of Manchester)Participants: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London) , Sophie Chamas , Priya Raghavan (Institute of Development Studies) , Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol) , Jasmine Gani (LSE) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Capitalism, Materialism and RevolutionSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
Since 2019, Mexico’s national development plans have claimed that the Mexican government would catalyze a historic ‘transformation’ that prioritizes the well-being of the most vulnerable in Mexican society, including poor and Indigenous populations. Key to this transformation are development projects such as the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT) and Mayan Train which have been resisted by the very people the state claims will benefit from their construction. This paper uses racial capitalism, extractivism, and carcerality to explore to what extent these development projects are mechanisms to consolidate the power of the state and diminish autonomy of particularly Indigenous peoples in southern Mexico. The paper begins by examining to what extent the development projects function through racial capitalism, invoking old colonial logics of Indigenous peoples as ‘docile’ and ‘cheap’ labor. Drawing on grey literature and policy documents, the paper then interrogates the extractivist desires underpinning state narratives that portray the south as an “abundant” and “untouched” frontier of national progress. Finally, it considers how the securitization of these projects—through their classification as “national security” infrastructure—enables the deployment of carceral tactics to suppress resistance. In doing so, the paper argues that Mexico’s current development agenda extends rather than ruptures the racialized and extractive power relations between the ‘colonial’ state and the (still) resistant south.
Author: Debbie Samaniego (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa) -
A defining characteristic of historical materialist approaches to IR is the challenge they pose to the notion that the international is derivative of states and any presumed ontological primacy of states over social relations, rather than vice versa. One corollary is a practical emphasis on internationalism as a value and a practice over and against statism or liberal cosmopolitanism. Radical internationalism can be distinguished by its emphasis on the role of collective social action in the making and unmaking of regimes, states, and even state systems, premised on the view that history is ultimately made by the “masses in motion.”
This paper explores the vagaries and contradictions of radical internationalism in the context of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution based on participant interviews and five years of documentary research. From the mountains of Kachin, Karenni, and Chin, Myanmar’s borderlands to regional metropoles, Moscow and Beijing to Naypyitaw, it outlines international dimensions of a dialectic of revolution and counter-revolution since 2021. This includes anarchists, communists, and missionaries enlisting in a people’s war against a neo-fascistic regime and a counter-revolutionary bloc confronting them with materiel and propaganda. The paper “centres the periphery” by exploring global and world-historical implications and lessons of this struggle to restructure Myanmar’s postcolonial state amidst collapse of liberal hegemony and growing contestation over the emerging multipolar world order.
Author: Charlie Thame (Thammasat University) -
This paper examines the entangled history of International Labour Politics (ILP), understood here as the modern, nation-state-led model of labour governance. Existing scholarship has largely narrated the history of ILP through the institutional and intellectual evolution of the International Labour Organization (ILO), framing it as an extension of European social reforms, working-class movements, or the Wilsonian diplomatic order. More recent studies have traced its genealogy to various epistemic communities such as European trade unionists, social democrats, and reformist intellectuals. While these accounts are historically significant, this paper proposes an alternative, trans-imperial perspective on the emergence of ILP. It argues that a distinct regime of colonial labour governance developed through diplomatic and administrative interactions among Britain, France, and the Netherlands, from early anti–slave trade negotiations (1815 onward) to the regulation of Indian indentured labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in this case, colony states such as colonial India, Reunion, Guadeloupe, Suriname, Mauritius etc are also involved). Drawing on primary diplomatic correspondences from the Foreign Office records at the National Archives, London, and secondary historical sources, the paper conceptualizes this trans-imperial regime as a precursor to modern International Labour Politics. However, the study does not treat the regime as a reified entity. The paper also tries to read the changes in dominant ideologies from anti-slave trade politics to the indenture system, from that of a humanitarian-theological discourse to a more utilitarian one. Beyond reconstructing the genealogy of ILP’s form and content, the paper also interrogates the emergent grammar of the international system as revealed through this institutional history. Rather than replacing Western origins with non-Western ones, the analysis foregrounds the relational entanglement between them as the true object of study.
Author: Karthik Payyalil (Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence) -
Critical scholarship convincingly presents tourism in the Global South as a form of neocolonialism. Research demonstrates that Western/Northern tourists and corporations exploit the people, states, cultures, environments, and economies of the tourist destinations for their own benefit. Feminist scholarship further reveals the ways gender is employed that make possible the subordination and exploitation of these destinations. This paper investigates the degree to which tourism in Cuba is consistent with these gendered socio-cultural constructions and patterns of exploitation. In contrast to most destination states, the Cuban state has exerted considerable control over the tourist industry, including purposefully collapsing the industry following the 1959 revolution and deliberately resuscitating tourism in the early 1990s but largely keeping it under state control. Drawing on fieldwork in Cuba, this paper assesses whether the Cuban state’s strict management of the industry on the island has mitigated the neocolonial exploitation and gendered patterns that are endemic in the industry in much of the rest of the Caribbean.
Key words: neocolonialism, Global South, tourism, gender, Cuba
Author: Lana Wylie (McMaster University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / ii. Circulating Violence and Capital: The (Geo)Political Ecologies and Geographies of Military TechnologiesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConveners: Mark Griffiths (University of Newcastle) , Nico Edwards (University of Sussex) , Benjamin Neimark (Queen Mary University of London) , Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex)Chair: Benjamin Neimark (Queen Mary University of London)
-
Military Training Areas (MTAs) occupy a crucial position in the geographies of war preparation, materially, symbolically and ecologically. Over the past decades, they have been variously conceptualized: as sites of conflictual heritage and collective memory; as normalized spaces within discourses of green militarization (Woodward, 2001); as banal outposts of militarization serving nation-state or imperial agendas (Davis, 2011); and as terminal nodes in weapons logistics chains and loci of slow violence (Martini, 2015). This paper advances an alternative reading of MTAs as socio-ecological formations that exceed conventional binaries such as war–peace and civil–military. Drawing on the frameworks of military–civil entanglements (Woodward, Jenkings & Mulvihill, 2023) and geontological thinking (Griffiths, 2022), we examine how institutional practices, nonhuman ecologies, and discursive regimes converge to shape what we term the ecologies of war preparation.
While acknowledging the need for a processual reconstruction of key elements, we recognize that MTAs evolve through non-linear and often contradictory relationships among actors and natures. This complexity calls for empirical engagement with, rather than mere reproduction of, commonly used binary distinctions. After reviewing the multiple approaches adopted by critical military studies in defining the spatial dimension of MTAs, we analyze the Capo Teulada MTA in Sardinia, Italy. Currently used by Italian and NATO forces, Capo Teulada has in recent decades become a strategic asset in Italy’s participation in the NATO alliance (Esu & Maddanu, 2025). The area has also become a focal point of legal disputes and local mobilizations, largely due to the enduring environmental impacts of weapons testing and training activities. Here, environmental, health, and political justice concerns intersect with broader debates on militarism and the environmental consequences of military activity.
Authors: Giacomo Spanu (University of Palermo) , Carlo Perelli (University of Cagliari) -
Abstract: Mortar bombs are used by state and non-state actors across the world. They are an old-fashioned, technologically basic and yet ubiquitous weapon. When fired many do not function, meaning that they lie waiting, unstable and dangerous scattered in fields and on roadsides. Faced with one such mortar in Baji, Iraq while working in explosive ordnance disposal I pictured the hands that had touched it before mine. How did those people perceive the mortar? This paper picks up this question and asks: How do people perceive objects designed to kill while living and working alongside them? And more specifically, what can the lifecycle of an 81mm mortar teach us about the way that humans relate to weapons of war? Taking the mortar as my starting point, I explore the perceptions of those working in production, sales, deployment and the mortars afterlife. My research has taken me from a factory in Wales to a testing centre in Austria, from arms fairs across Europe to a firing range in England and into people’s memories of conflict and post-conflict Iraq. Researching a mortar’s life is a route into understanding the networks, relations, and infrastructure at the heart of the ‘militarism of everyday life’ (MacLeish 2013, 24). Through this research I explore the social relations and dynamics of power, masculinity and domesticity which lead to the perpetuation and proliferation of weapons and armed conflict.
Author: Rosanna O’Keeffe (University of Oxford) -
The War on Terror brought about a conscious understanding of the ways in which technologies of warfare and counterinsurgency were being spatially reoriented. The militarisation of policing and urban surveillance were evidence of the ‘war coming home’, and the parallels between the management of conflict zones and urban governance provoked a reevaluation of state violence, coloniality, and empire. Our contemporary moment has retained these practices though in a new context: that of the crisis of the liberal international order. It is within the context of this crisis that we see the emergence of ‘technological solutions’, namely the Smart City, that ostensibly ensure security in this increasingly unsafe world. This paper investigates the place of the Smart City within this current framework of permanent crisis, its origins in colonial counterinsurgency, and how it creates a pipeline through which urban space can absorb the infrastructure of violence cultivated within the domain of militarism. Through the adoption of this infrastructure, a reconstitution of the border and a reformation of citizenship take place, and a new political space governed by the symbiosis of private corporate and state interest begins to emerge. The context of Israeli occupation and segregation has been selected as a portal for the exploration of these themes. The analysis will subsequently identify the particularities of 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 crisis.
Author: Seif Hendy (University of Exeter)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Conflict and contestationSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)Discussant: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
-
This paper examines how democratic backsliding has transformed universities into battlegrounds for political control across South Asia. Through a comparative analysis of South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Bhutan), we demonstrate that declining academic freedom is correlated with broader democratic deterioration in the region. Our original mapping of socioeconomic and political indicators reveals a discernible pattern: governments increasingly use universities to advance ideological projects, suppress dissent, and settle conflicts over national identity. The analysis reveals three key mechanisms of political control: systematic capture of university governance through loyalist appointments, securitisation of campuses through legal harassment and surveillance, and neoliberal restructuring that prioritises market-driven curricula over critical inquiry. As South Asian governments face demographic pressures from massive youth populations and unresolved questions of national identity, the university has emerged as a critical arena where struggles over democratic governance play out.
Author: Namgyel Wangchuk (University of Westminster) -
As the discipline of International Studies looks to its future, we must also revisit how we understand the endings of political struggle. Research on resistance and contentious politics overwhelmingly privileges success: revolution, regime change, and reform - while failure is treated as absence, silence, or defeat. This paper argues that studying how resistance fails reveals the limits of prevailing assumptions about nonviolence, the boundaries of “civility” in collective action, and the conditions under which power reasserts itself. Building on a comparative analysis of eighty unsuccessful civil resistance campaigns, I trace recurring patterns in how movements lose momentum, escalate, or are contained and reabsorbed by existing regimes. Conceptually, I offer a framework for analysing failure not as the opposite of success but as a distinct political process. Methodologically, the project demonstrates how close comparative analysis can uncover patterned trajectories without erasing local specificity. By centring decline, erosion, and escalation, the paper reorients the study of civil resistance toward the political afterlives of failure: how movements fade, transform, or persist beyond apparent defeat.
Author: Joana McCloy (University of Oxford) -
Gen Z “revolts” in the Global South: The underlying causes, contagion effects, and security implications
The September 2025 protests by Nepal’s Gen Z youth, sparked by the government’s decision to ban 26 social-media platforms, brought down the regime within 48 hours. This uprising drew inspiration from earlier protests in Indonesia, the Philippines. Although the immediate triggers of these revolts across the Global South differed, they exhibit common patterns: reliance on social media, widespread violence, and deep resentment against inequality. Gen Z movements have recently spread to Peru, Madagascar, and Morocco, too.
Despite the far-reaching political and security implications of these developments, academic literature in International Relations (IR) has not kept pace. Most literature focus on a single case-study analysis without connecting Gen Z movements emerging in different locations in the Global South. Clearly, Gen Z movements are a new political movement, quickly spreading in the developing world, challenging the established system and powers. Therefore, Gen Z revolts have raised questions: Are Gen Z movements merely responses to the domestic crises or do they reflect a broader failure of the capitalist global system that has produced unprecedented economic inequality? If the latter, will they spread further? Could they become key drivers of violent conflict in the developing world? What will be their global security implications? The proposed paper aims to examine these issues through two guiding questions:
• Why are Gen Z youths rebelling in the Global South?
• What are the global security implications of these violent youth-led movements?
This study will employ a multiple case study approach, focusing on recent Gen Z uprisings in the Global South: Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines. This paper will offer new insights into the causes and security implications of emerging Gen Z revolts in the Global South that has received limited attention.Authors: Shrishti Rana (University of St Andrews)* , Shrishti Rana (University of St Andrews) -
After World War II, NATO was established to safeguard its members’ freedom and peace in the context of the threat posed by the USSR. As a result, member states were able to further develop their democratic institutions and were given the opportunity to consolidate democracy within NATO. On the other hand, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Georgia, which experienced 70 years of Soviet occupation and terror, were asked to develop democratically before being considered for NATO membership. This study focuses on the effects of security cooperation on democratisation, particularly the presence or absence of security alliances with democratic states, as a factor shaping democratisation under conditions of the threat posed by the former imperial centre and an authoritarian regional hegemon, investigating both inter-state and intra-state politics in Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
Contemporary democratic theories cannot explain how a state can achieve consolidated democracy when they face external threats and interference from non-democratic states while not having national security guarantees (from democratic alliances). Traditional analysis of democratisation (specifically in an era when not only physical occupation but also cyber mechanisms are used) without understanding of the interrelationship between state security issues and democratic development fails to give a full picture of democratisation. This study argues that small states aiming to develop democratically and achieve consolidated democracy, but facing external threats and interference from undemocratic, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes, can only consolidate democracy if they have national security guarantees from an alliance of other democratic states.
Author: Tea Tutberidze (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Social Sciences & Public Policy, School of Security Studies, Department of War Studies, King’s College London)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Critical Pedagogies and Action Research in Peace and Conflict StudiesSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt)Chair: Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt)Discussant: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
-
Only recently has scholarship begun to recognize the importance of integrating Peace and Conflict Studies with migration research. Specifically, we need to go beyond structural links and related questions about return migration. Instead, a focus on migrants' experiences of displacement shows how these more fundamentally complicate the spatial epistemology between "war there" and "peace here." To understand these experiences and rethink peace transnationally, we must also examine how translocal connections influence the processes through which peace knowledge is created. This paper pushes that discussion forward by proposing participatory approaches as a methodological bridge between the two fields. Drawing on Orlando Fals Borda's tradition of Participatory Action Research (PAR), it defines participatory research in Peace and Conflict Studies as a locally rooted but transnationally connected practice of co-creating knowledge. Going beyond recent work on migrants' experiences, knowledges, and practices of peace, the paper argues that participatory methodologies enable a shift from studying diasporic experiences to co-creating knowledge with diasporic actors as epistemic partners. Speaking to critical debates on epistemic violence and disciplinary boundaries in PCS, the paper demonstrates how participatory methodologies can disrupt Eurocentric hierarchies of expertise on peace and complicate our understanding of the "local" of post-conflict contexts."
Author: Amelie Harbisch (University of Erfurt) -
The practice turn has shifted focus from discourse to the embodied and relational aspects of politics, while broadening the range of relevant actors in IR. By foregrounding everyday practices, it highlights the roles of those often considered as merely “governed” or “affected”. Studies demonstrate, for instance, how local women's initiatives contribute to peacekeeping efforts, refugees claim their political rights, and children and young people shape debates as norm entrepreneurs. Research on these actors’ engagement often employs participatory methods aimed at collaborative knowledge production. Yet, such participatory research always runs the risk of “methodization” – that is, a reduction of “participation” to mere inclusion rather than enabling co-production of knowledge. The paper argues that praxeological perspectives provide epistemological foundations for deeper reflexivity on the relationality and contextuality of research encounters. Bourdieusian concepts such as habitus and field serve as flexible “thinking tools” for an adaptive and co-productive approach to data generation and analysis. This makes it possible to address the dialogical dimensions of participatory research and generation of knowledge. Given the persistent structural hierarchies and colonialities in research constellations, praxeological perspectives offer the opportunity to view participatory research with “everyday actors” not only as a process of inclusion, but as dialogue.
Author: Nadine Benedix (Technical University of Darmstadt) -
Colonial hierarchies and their diverse manifestations in peace and conflict studies (PACS) have gradually moved to the forefront of scholarly attention. However, there have not been systematic efforts to question the epistemological, ontological and methodological foundations of PACS. The theoretical and conceptual frameworks devised to explain the realities of the Global North are now conveniently superimposed to study conflicts as ‘case studies’ in the Global South(s) including Africa, Latin America, South Asia or South-East Asia. This results in an explanatory deficit; the quest to understand and explain the conflictual realities of the Global South(s), the subtle distinctions which would have required indigenised conceptions and theorisations have been squeezed-into the specific conceptions and theories produced (by few) in the North. This necessitates the need to explore critical ‘alternative’ methodologies and praxis more strongly rooted in the ground-realities of the Global South to move towards pluriversal and relational peace. Building up on post/decolonial, feminist and queer methodologies, this contribution is an effort to facilitate dialogues and conversations to reiterate, examine, analyse colonial hierarchies in PACS and explore ways to deal with them through de/post-colonial praxis.
Author: Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / East Asia in turmoil? domestic and international challengesSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConveners: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews) , Yuka KobayashiChair: Catherine Jones (University of St Andrews)
-
Is Gen Z revolting? This paper will examine the growing salience of Gen Z in fronting political dissent across the Indo-Pacific, since 2020 notably in Thailand and Myanmar, but latterly also in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal. Are the new generation more critical, more radical and bolder in their political demands? If so, why do we see relatively little overt support for progressive causes among younger voters in various Southeast Asian countries, and indeed large youth votes for authoritarian legacy candidates such as Bongbong Marcos and Prabowo? The paper will examine comparative trends with a cautious eye to avoiding catchy generalisations that are insufficiently grounded in evidence. Keywords: Gen Z, protests, progressive politics, Southeast Asia, Indo-Pacific.
Author: Duncan McCargo -
After the Cold War, states and regional organisations have engaged in cooperation beyond their regional boundaries, for example by enlarging its cooperation, establishing diplomatic initiatives, or creating institutionalised space for cooperation with extra-regional great powers. This expansion of regional cooperation is known as ‘trans-regionalism’. This article advances a new interpretation of how and why small and middle powers engage in transregional cooperation. Drawing on the case of ASEAN, I argue that the small and middle powers engage in trans-regional encounters to resolve their geopolitical anxiety. ASEAN, primarily, attempts to resolve this geopolitical anxiety by expressing its normative vision of order –defending sovereignty, non-interference, and institutionalised cooperation— and providing institutional spaces to engage with great after the Cold War. While this normative ordering strategy has worked under liberal international order (1990s and 2000s), ASEAN’s effort to address its geopolitical anxiety was limited under US-China multipolar strategic competition (2010s-present). My assessment provides a new conceptual framework to understand the contemporary politics of trans-regionalism from the perspective of small and middle powers.
Author: Ahmad Umar (Aberystwyth University) -
This paper examines the impact of China’s industrial technology investment on Southeast Asia, focusing primarily on the digital and tech sectors and the impact of ‘robotification’ (i.e. industrial automation). We examine the socio-economic effects of robotification in China and Southeast Asia, and tracing them at the domestic, regional and global levels. The phenomenon of ‘dark factories’ - where lights are left off and work is undertaken by robots alone - are a striking symbol of the impact of robotification. China’s deployment of robots in the manufacturing sector has an impact on the manufacturing and technology sectors but also creates unemployment, job loss as well as changes to the socio-economic chains. The mass layoff of SOE workers -‘xiagang’ - which dominated Chinese domestic politics two decades ago, is now an issue that links China and Southeast Asia. The implications of mass redundancies, unemployment, under-employment, and associated socio-economic harms, point to current and future turmoil; a result the large-scale deployment of efficiency improving technologies and closer economic relations with China. We address questions about the extent to which these forms of investment are creating turmoil and how this affects regional and global economic order.
Authors: Edward Lamb , Daniel Thumpston* , Yuka Kobayashi (SOAS) -
Following the shift from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement, all states, including China (formerly a non-Annex 1 developing country), now have decarbonisation commitments under the Nationally Determined Contributions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. To fulfil these commitments, China aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. To this end, the country has been investing heavily in renewable energy and developing smart grid technologies. These developments are now reaching beyond China’s borders and bringing its partners in Southeast Asia into its ‘community of shared destiny’ as it pursues a ‘Green Belt and Road Initiative’. For Southeast Asian countries that now face similar decarbonisation commitments, China is an attractive partner for renewable technologies. However, this creates other challenges in terms of dependencies and circular economy requirements, particularly in the context of de-risking. Southeast Asian states must balance multiple environmental, economic and geopolitical tensions: decarbonisation commitments, the effects of climate change, the continuing need for economic development, problems of economic security, self-sufficiency and over dependence. In this article, we explore questions on the forms and extent of turmoil created by Chinese dominance in renewables and its impact on Southeast Asia.
Authors: Yuka Kobayashi , Daniel Thumpston* -
Recent dialogue between foreign policy analysis and works on the multiple streams framework has increasingly focused attention on the significance of policy entrepreneurs in agenda setting and decision-making to explain foreign policy change. This paper aims to contribute to this dialogue by stressing that whether policy entrepreneurs are successful in coupling ideas from the policy community with the foreign policy making process to move beyond perceived ineffective policy will depend on the availability and size of a policy window, a concept that has remained seriously under-analysed and under-specified in most works applying insights from public policy works on the policy process to foreign policy analysis. The paper suggests that in relation to bilateral foreign policy as made by US administrations the size of the policy window has recently been conditioned by five factors: the investment of administration officials in the existing policy, perceived geopolitical pressures, the prevailing grand strategy, the level of intra-administration contention, and the access policy entrepreneurs have to policy makers. I illustrate my argument with reference to US Burma policy, a case associated with a long history of different kinds of policy entrepreneurs being quite successful in moving US policy when the latter has been judged to be ineffective. Specifically, I focus on the Biden administration’s reluctance to: a) fully implement the 2022 BURMA Act and b) provide more than limited support to the parallel National Unity Government that has sought to remove the Burmese military from Myanmar’s national politics.
Author: Jurgen Haacke (LSE)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Games, Seriously? The proliferation and possibilities of wargames and simulations in International Relations
Until the early 2010s, International Relations' (IR) engagement with games was limited a few historical case studies, occasional classroom roleplay, and some student experience enhancement. Focused on the serious business of statecraft and war, games and play were assumed by the field's mainstream to be steadfastly outside IR's remit. With the turn to the study of popular culture as an important site of global politics over the past fifteen years, however, an important literature on the politics and possibilities of videogames played for entertainment has developed. Moreover, as the use of games across business, health, education, government, and defence has expanded apace more recently the field has become interested in so-called serious gaming. The serious applications of games now range from recruiting and training military personnel and first responders, to experimentation with conflict scenarios and disaster relief, to forecasting consumer and voter behaviour, and much more besides. At the present time, scholars in IR are scrambling to keep pace with these developments, and are seeking to establish the requisite sub-fields and methods necessary to effectively study and utilise serious games of various kinds. This roundtable brings together leading scholars of serious games to evaluate the state of the field, showcase the important work done to date, and scope possibilities for future research.
Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: Thomas Martin (Open University)Participants: Sabrina Medeiros (Lusófona University) , Aggie Hirst , Iain Farquharson (Brunel University) , David Banks (Kings College London) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Gender and resistance in environmental politics ISponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConveners: Tom Carter-Brookes (Keele University) , Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)Chair: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)
-
This paper offers a critical review of literature on gender-responsive climate policy, with a particular focus on how such frameworks conceptualise vulnerability and risk in climate-affected regions. While these policies often aim to address gendered dimensions of climate impact, they are frequently shaped by institutions in the Global North and rely on quantitative approaches that may overlook the complexities of lived experience. As a result, they risk simplifying intersecting forms of harm and reinforcing hierarchies in knowledge production.
Rather than focusing on suffering as a central analytic, this paper foregrounds the agency and resilience of women who resist both environmental degradation and the technocratic interventions designed to manage it. Through an exploration of feminist leadership and collective praxis in the Global South, the paper considers how alternative modes of climate governance - rooted in resistance and situated knowledge - challenge dominant narratives of vulnerability.
Finally, the paper reflects on how this body of literature can inform methodological approaches in sensitive research contexts. It considers how discomfort, reflexivity, and openness to non-traditional methods might offer more ethical and responsive ways of engaging with communities and knowledge systems often marginalised in climate discourse.Author: Amy French (The Open University) -
In recent years farmers protests have emerged both in the UK and Europe, part of which has been a backlash against efforts to move towards greener farming practices. In amidst the contestations of green agricultural transitions, farmers will have to keep farming and keep producing food. Farmers often have deep affinities for their industry, for most it is more than a job, it is a way of life. Our paper picks up this idea through the concept of Good Farmer Identity, which posits that affinities for (often industrialised) practices of food production are a key element of many farmers (re)producing their self-identity (Burton et al., 2021). We will show that though far from a homogenous identity, the academic literature to date shows us that good farmer identity is typically a masculinised identity, shaped by patriarchal structures. With this in mind, we interrogate the idea that masculinised farmer identities may also be a potential site of petro-masculinities (Daggett, 2018). We will illustrate this via an examination of media sources related to UK agriculture.
Authors: Sophie Lively (University of Newcastle) , Tom Carter-Brookes (Keele University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / IPS@20: Contesting Big Tech, Digital Transformation, and Infrastructures
This roundtable features authors who have contributed to the International Political Sociology 20th Anniversary Special Issue. The roundtable will explore the implications of big tech, digital transformation, and infrastructures on the international, the political, and the sociological in the present and into the future. The roundtable will be conducted in a "Question Time" format.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Kyle Grayson (BISA)Participants: Tobias Liebetrau (CERI, Sciences Po, Paris and Danish Institute for International Studies) , Andreas Langenohl (University of Giessen) , Jutta Bakonyi (Durham University) , Rocco Bellanova (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) , Shrey Kapoor (University of Basel) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Keynote: Waging war, making peace from South Africa to Northern Ireland, the Middle East to Ukraine: an IR perspective
N/A
Sponsor: War Studies Working GroupChair: Mick Cox (LSE)Participants: Richard Hargy (Queens University Belfast) , Caroline Kennedy-Pipe (University of Loughborough) , Aaron Edwards (The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst) , Fiona Stephen (Former Director of the Northern Ireland Council on Integrated Education) , Mary Kaldor (LSE) , Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Liberalism and the Geoeconomic turn in trade policy: beyond crude binariesSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: Patrick Holden (University of Plymouth)Chair: Patrick Holden (University of Plymouth)
-
This paper analyses the EU’s response to global pressures such as the China shock and the illiberalism of Trump. While a lot has been written on this already, this paper contributes by using a broader concept of liberalism and focusing on the internal and external dimension of EU policy. It looks at how ‘geoeconomics’ interplays with liberal norms and logics in the EU’s external trade policy but also its internal regional integration (via a study of Competition Policy). A range of official and quasi-official texts from the past 5 years are analysed in terms of the balance between liberalism and more power-centric approaches. The textual analysis method here is a form of deductive thematic coding. I delineate key themes such as neoliberalism, liberalism, neomercantilism, power, protectionism and so forth, also outlining preliminary codes (key vocabulary and logics). The texts are then manually coded, using NVivo software, and this is supplemented by a trained Chat GPT model thematic coder. The coding will then be compared and ‘agreed’. This empirical textual research is embedded in broader theoretical analysis and a pilot study of policy outcomes.
Author: Patrick Holden (University of Plymouth) -
The European Union’s (EU) trade policy is undergoing a profound transformation, increasingly shaped by the interplay of economic liberalisation, sustainability, and security objectives. This evolving "trade-sustainability-security triangle" is (re)configuring the ideational foundations of EU trade policy. This article investigates how the relative weight of these logics has changed over time, both broadly and in relation to specific trade partners. We draw on a novel dataset of more than 2,000 press releases from the Directorate-General for Trade (1975–2025), analysed with the support of a large language model (LLM). Our findings reveal that EU trade policy is in flux: increasingly tied to security and sustainability concerns, while the traditional emphasis on free trade has been downgraded and economic development has disappeared from official discourse. As a result of this diversification, the EU’s overall trade policy orientation becomes more complex or ‘messy’, with new trade-offs, but also possible alignments, emerging between liberalisation, sustainability, and security means and objectives. This article advances debates on the politicisation of trade in a geoeconomic and planetary context, offering new insights into how the EU strives to balance its economic, sustainability, and strategic priorities amid a volatile global landscape.
Author: Caroline Bertram (University of Cambridge) -
China’s economic and technological rise and greater international assertiveness during the 21st century have challenged both the United States and the European Union. The two polities have pursed different objectives in response. The US has engaged in strategic competition and, under President Trump, broad confrontation with China. The EU has sought to strike a balance between “de-risking” its economic relationship with China and cooperating where their interests overlap, e.g. climate change. This paper analyzes the extent of transatlantic policy convergence and cooperation across six policies that are central to strategic competition with China. Four address specific strategic concerns – two of these are defensive (limiting Chinese firms’ participation in 5G telecommunications networks and screening inward investment for security risks) and two are offensive (controlling exports of and screening outbound investment in advanced technologies to deny them to a (potential) adversary). The other two policies – diversifying sources of critical raw materials and semiconductors – aim to reduce vulnerability to coercion. These policies vary in terms of the extent of transatlantic convergence and of cooperation. This paper argues that this variation reflects the interaction of differences in threat perceptions and degrees of institutional capacity.
Authors: Scott Brown (University of Dundee)* , Emili Sabanovic (Georgia Institute of Technology)* , Alasdair Young (Georgia Institute of Technology)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Migration and Borders: Contesting Sovereignty, Protection, and (In)SecuritySponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: Ben Rosher (University of Gothenburg) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)Chair: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)
-
Critical migration and border abolitionist scholars have long since demonstrated that our current border imaginaries are materially unsustainable and morally unjustifiable in the face of climate change, globalisation, and conflict. However, there is a tension between border abolition and human rights that has yet to be resolved. How can asylum seekers be kept safe in a borderless world? That is to say, if we abolish borders, what mechanisms are there to stop those being persecuted being pursued by their persecutors (specifically state actors)? In this paper I do not offer an answer to this problem, but rather to open a provocation by critically engaging with existing literature on border abolitionism and human rights to get a sense of where an answer may lie, and what action we, as border abolitionists, have to take to get there.
Author: Ben Rosher (University of Gothenburg) -
The UK government further intensified their “crackdown on illegal working” through a new
scheme introduced in September 2025, which extends the surveillance of migrants by
making digital ID mandatory for proving their Right to Work (Home Office, 2025; PM’s Office,
2025). Work is thus one of many aspects of life where the reach of the UK’s hostile
environment is exemplified (Barnes, 2017). Drawing on postcolonial feminist theorising and
interview data developed with local actors involved in fast fashion manufacturing in the UK,
this paper will illustrate how such a scheme increases different types of insecurities (I focus
on socio-economic and legal) that are already unevenly distributed on migrants and
racialised people. Not least, the coupling of labour market enforcement with immigration
enforcement means their employment rights are curtailed (LBL, 2024), including fear of legal
action (El-Enany, 2020; Aliverti, 2020).
Garment workers in the UK, predominantly South Asian women, are simultaneously
‘workerised’ yet disciplined by the power of state border and migration regimes.
Workerisation refers to how ‘migrants’ (broadly conceived) in labour markets are compelled
via “the development of formal and informal measures” to participate “in economic sectors
affected by shortages of workers” (Schmid and Bird, 2024: 8). This is positioned alongside
the purposeful fluidity of immigration and employment rules that allow control over and
superexploitation of migrants’ labour (Portes and Ventura-Arrieta, 2022; Tazzioli and Garelli,
2018). Colonial state and capitalist interests (the latter in this case being British brands) are
protected: They can squeeze and superexploit the labour of racialised populations, but then
impose ‘wageless life’ or remove their access to (predominantly citizenship) rights. Thus, I
argue, these garment workers are precarious and sometimes illegalised ‘relative surplus
populations’ (De Genova, 2010; Sullivan, 2022), rooted in long-standing British colonial
exploitation of racialised and feminised populations via its textile and garment industry.Author: Susannah Williams (University of York) -
This research critically deconstructs the persistent presence of sexual violence along international migration routes. There is robust evidence that sexual violence along these routes, while intersecting with existing vulnerabilities to violence, is often indiscriminate, affects all genders, and functions as an extreme articulation of power in an ungoverned international space (Innes and Pullerits, in draft). There is a dearth of protection in international law and governance that protects migrants in transit. Indeed, being in transit, particularly without state-authorisation, situates the migrant in an international space. Violence that happens in this space is not protected under the refugee convention which is limited to protection from violence in the country of nationality or habitual residence. Due to ever stricter border controls, migrants without documents are produced as a market for facilitators and smugglers to move across international borders. The use of (sexual) violence is common amongst facilitating networks, which often involves transnational organised crime (Soria-Escalante 2022, Rubini 2024, Adeyinka 2023, Infante 2020). This research draws on evidence of the transnational immigration governance, synchronous with sexual violence along migration routes, to argue that states have no interest or incentive to suppress violence used in the context of undocumented movement of people across borders. This violence functions consistently with the immigration-deterrence mechanisms and logic adopted by (global North) states. States appropriate the violence of transnational criminal gangs as a means of immigration deterrence. There is consequently a lacuna of accountability for the use of violence against migrants by both transnational criminal networks and states.
Author: Alexandria Innes (City, University of London) -
The plethora of studies on the ‘Hostile Environment’ have been characterised by an emphasis on the ‘newness’ of this policy, which was introduced in 2012 by the then Home Secretary of the United Kingdom Theresa May to ‘create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ (Hill, 2017), by excluding those classified as ‘unlawfully resident’ from social, political, and economic life. The exclusionary and insecuritising effects of the policy are felt by racially minoritised communities across Britain, including those who have been illegalised, and those wrongfully pursued as ‘illegally resident’ such as the Windrush Generation. But is ‘border internalisation’ in the UK ‘new’? And do claims of ‘newness’ inadvertently invisibilise the historic legal and ontological harm done to racially minoritised people throughout the 20th Century?
The article brings contemporary critical migration scholarship in conversation with key anti-racist and anti-colonial texts from the mid/late 20th Century, to examine the extent to which the ‘newness’ of Britain’s internalised immigration regime is overstated by contemporary scholars. In particular, the article explores the ways in which border internalisation was used by the state to control and harass Black and Asian communities in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. I draw upon archival and legal data, collected at the Black Cultural Archives (Brixton) and online databases such as Hansard, between January-July 2024.
Based on this analysis, I encourage scholars to exercise caution when conceptualising border internalisation as a new phenomenon. I argue
that, although the Hostile Environment does represent an unprecedented expansion of Britain’s internalised bordering regime, this expansion should be understood as a continuation of long history of border internalisation, and within the longue durée of colonial state violence (Axster et al, 2021), designed to police and exclude racially minoritised peoples.Author: Melissa Williams (University of York) -
This paper develops the concept of digital externalisation to analyse how biometric and digital identity infrastructures are used to extend border controls beyond national borders, particularly in the Global South. While border externalisation typically refers to offshoring migration control through diplomacy, enforcement, and capacity-building, we argue that digital systems, such as biometric databases and digital ID schemes, now form a central mechanism in this process. Often introduced under the guise of development/migration management, these infrastructures are shaped by funding and policy agendas driven by actors in the Global North. Drawing on research that connects border externalisation with the datafication of mobility, we situate these practices within longer histories of colonialism and imperial power. Our analysis combines a systematic literature review with empirical mapping of biometric and digital ID systems, using academic sources, civil society reports, and industry data. We trace key actors, funding flows, and implementation practices, highlighting the role of private firms and international organisations. These infrastructures act as tools of pre-emptive control, but they also provoke tensions and resistance. The paper calls for a more integrated research agenda to understand how digital technologies are reshaping global mobility governance along postcolonial lines.
Authors: Vicki Squire (University of Warwick) , Ece Ozlem Atikcan (University of Warwick)* , Derya Ozkul (University of Warwick)* , Philippa Metcalfe (University of Warwick)*
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Pillars of Authoritarianism in EurasiaSponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)Chair: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)Discussant: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
-
The contemporary world is getting increasingly authoritarian. According to V-Dem, 71% of the world's population currently lives under authoritarian political regimes. There are officially more autocracies than democracies in the world. The short-lived triumph of liberal democratic ideologies in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War seems to be over.
This provides political scientists with a challenge to better understand the existing authoritarian spectrum, its roots, normative foundations and diversity of autocratic political regimes.
In this paper, Dr Aijan Sharshenova, a leading visiting researcher at the Social Sciences Research Centre, Riga Stradins University, will discuss what autocratic diffusion is and how autocracies learn from each. Aijan will dive into specific ways that authoritarian regimes of wider Eurasia adopt each other’s normative and legislative toolkits, know-how in oppression and persecution of independent media and civil society and reinforce each other’s normative discourses. Her research is an ongoing academic and policy endeavour to dissect autocratic alliances, authoritarian learning and know-how, and how it might shape the dominant political systems of the future world.
This paper is currently being prepared for a special issue publication. The first draft will be ready in November 2025.Author: Aijan Sharshenova (Riga Stradins University) -
This article develops the concept of autocracy commercialisation by examining how tifa (提法) - fixed political formulations - act as discursive borders that circulate authoritarian practices beyond China’s borders. Often seen as instruments of domestic ideological control, tifa also function transnationally, framing China’s political system as structured, coherent, and exportable. By codifying state-approved meanings, they make authoritarian governance appear both understandable and appealing to external audiences. The analysis focuses on tifa deployed in China’s responses to episodes of political unrest in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. These moments of instability in neighbouring authoritarian regimes create opportunities for Beijing to reassert the appeal and adaptability of its own governance model. Drawing on Chinese official discourse, the article traces how tifa are mobilised across different registers of foreign-facing communication. Using an interpretive, narrative-based, and comparative approach, it classifies tifa by function and examines how they contribute to the transnational commercialisation of China’s governance model.
Author: Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
Illiberalism’s outlaws: authoritarian blacklisting and the consolidation of transnational repression
This paper sets out the emerging topography of transnational blacklisting between the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the Eurasian Economic Union. Amid the ongoing global reversal of democracy and human rights, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to deepening, and powerful, alliances of authoritarian states, and specifically the implications of these illiberal cross-border configurations for human rights and political freedoms (e.g. Conduit, 2020; Cottiero & Hoggard, 2021; Debre, 2020). This paper contributes to this literature by mapping the coordination of illiberal alliances' national and regional security priorities and, amongst these specifically, the mutual enforcement of national anti-terror blacklists designating organisations and individuals as terrorist, dissident or enemy of the state. Freedom House (2021) has called on scholars to ‘expand research into the consequences of transnational repression for targeted communities, since these mechanisms enable alliance states to target, pursue, and extradite blacklisted individuals from across the breadth of the alliance’s jurisdictions and beyond. The paper commences by drawing from Agamben’s (2005) theoretical work that frames state blacklisting as pivotal to the ‘very codes of political power’ in modern sovereignty and the ‘state of exception’ in emergency rule (Agamben, 2005), and from critical security scholarship that unpacks how security norms are generated, internalised and operationalised (e.g. Bigo 2006; Jackson; Jarvis). In doing so, the paper (i) develops a framework of illiberal blacklisting imperatives to analyse the bureaucratic architecture of authoritarian cross-border security cooperation and (ii) concludes by describing the global implications of the emerging illiberal alliances’ category of outlaws.
Author: Tim Legrand (University of Adelaide) -
The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the reverberations of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have dramatically reconfigured South Caucasus geopolitics, reinforcing Azerbaijan’s strategic role as a hub for Europe-Asia connectivity and global supply chains. Amidst a shifting regional and global order, Azerbaijan has sought to mainstream two seemingly progressive agendas into its foreign policy repertoire: the green energy transition and the fight against neocolonialism. In parallel, the government has intensified repression of critical voices, while seeking to normalise its military settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Combining debates on global authoritarianism with insights from epistemic governance, this paper examines green politics and anti-(neo)colonialism in contemporary Azerbaijan as authoritarian practices. It asks: how and for which goals are these agendas mobilised by actors within and beyond the state in post-2020 Azerbaijan? And what do they reveal about the globalised nature of authoritarianism in Azerbaijan and beyond?
Building on fieldwork and on the close reading of secondary sources, the paper argues that green politics and anti-(neo)colonialism simultaneously produce legitimacy for domestic authoritarian governance and for Azerbaijan’s repositioning within global moral and political economies. It also demonstrates that state-driven authoritarian practices create opportunities for non-state actors (CSOs, think tanks and cultural institutions), who reproduce them to maintain relevance or access resources within a repressive civic space.
By showing how authoritarian practices are imbricated in transnational financial flows – including Western development interventions for climate action, peacebuilding and democratisation, the paper contributes to critical scholarship on authoritarianism beyond state-centric and normative frameworks. Moreover, through the case of Azerbaijan it illuminates how authoritarian actors in semi-peripheral Eurasian states (mis)use emancipatory politics to adapt to a changing global order.Author: Laura Luciani (Ghent University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Political Mysticism: Dialogue, Dissonance and the Divine.
This roundtable seeks to bring together mysticism and political theory. Mysticism can be understood as an aspect of theology and spirituality that focuses on devotional practices that attempt to enact some form of union with the divine. In this interpretation mysticism can arguably be discerned in all the world’s theological traditions, with these variegated practices also inspiring quite un-traditional explorations of spirituality outside (and often against) any institutionalised faith. The political implications of Mysticism hold the potential for both a subversive voice of social justice and a ritualised vehicle for social harmony, aspects which have been long discussed and debated in various traditions.
Mysticism has influenced a full spectrum of political engagement from anarchists who argue that union with the divine translates to opposition of all worldly power structures, to more institutional interpretations which emphasise the social cohesion brought about through ritualised devotion to the divine. The apparent paradox of emphasising both unity and differentiation simultaneously lends mystical theology to various conversations currently underway in political theory; from post-anarchism to relational ontologies and pluriversality.
The roundtable brings together some experts who share an interest in mysticism but approach it from different angles and backgrounds with the aim of demonstrating that the political aspects of mysticism offer a basis for dialogue between and across the worlds that make up the “international”. In this way, it seeks to foreground ways of conceptualising global politics that provincializes western approaches as just one among others, whilst also centring questions of justice and ethics. The hope, and expectation, is that we can learn from each other and encourage others who might share the interest but not know where to start.
Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupChair: Theo Poward (University of St Andrews)Participants: Emma Davis (Northwestern University) , Mustapha Pasha (Aberystwyth University) , David Newheiser (Florida State University) , Keith Lewis -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Studying Peacekeeping in Transition: Responding to Institutional Change and Geopolitical Transformation
This roundtable launches a newly published forum in International Peacekeeping that speak to central questions about the past, present, and future of peacekeeping studies. The forum considers how peacekeeping should be studied at a moment when multidimensional UN missions are closing and the overall number of deployed peacekeepers is in sharp decline. While some interpret this as the end of peacekeeping, contributors argue that what we are witnessing is not disappearance but transformation. The forum identifies new directions for research: moving beyond mission-level analysis to the study of practices and legacies; situating UN operations in a broader repertoire of international conflict management, including regional interventions and special political missions; and analyzing peacekeeping itself as a dependent variable shaped by geopolitical, institutional, and host-state dynamics. Taken together, these interventions call on scholars to rethink the conceptual and methodological foundations of peacekeeping studies, ensuring that the field remains responsive to both academic debates and evolving practice. Bringing together contributors of this forum, this roundtable provides a space for reflection on how we study peacekeeping, what questions should drive the research agenda, and how peacekeeping scholarship can continue to inform international efforts to manage conflict in an era of shifting global order.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Vanessa Newby (Monash University)Participants: David Teiner (Trier University) , Allard Duursma (ETH Zurich) , John Gledhill , David Curran (Coventry University) , Tom Buitelaar (Leiden University) , Oisin Tansey (Kings College London) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / The Importance of Leaders in Foreign PolicySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Maísa Edwards (Kings College London)
-
This paper forms the historical chapter of a doctoral dissertation examining the adaptive dynamics of Feminist Foreign Policies (FFP). Grounded in feminist institutionalism (Mackay 2010; Holmes 2020) and feminist historical approaches to international relations, it traces the longue durée processes through which gender norms and equality practices became embedded within the machinery of Canadian foreign policy since the Second World War, creating the institutional preconditions for the articulation of a FFP under Justin Trudeau.
Responding to recent calls to theorize FFPs through a more systematic conception of the state (Aran, Brummer & Smith 2025), the chapter asks: how did Canada’s foreign policy institutions evolve to produce the normative and bureaucratic conditions that rendered a feminist turn both thinkable and actionable? It reconstructs how equality frameworks and gender mainstreaming mechanisms (developed across diplomacy, development, trade, and defence) were progressively consolidated into enduring administrative norms. By tracing how these practices enabled “insider feminists” to leverage institutional openings, the paper foregrounds the historical and structural dimensions of feminist policy agency.
Based on process-tracing analysis, over thirty elite interviews, and forthcoming archival research in Ottawa (December 2025), the chapter contributes to feminist IR, foreign policy analysis, and public policy scholarship by historicising the institutional genealogies of Canada’s feminist turn, theorising feminist statehood, and identifying the concrete instruments through which feminist actors sustain gender equality commitments within state practice.
Author: Emma Limane (Université de Montréal) -
Attention to leaders in International Relations has been growing, and leaders have long been a focus in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), yet research on leaders rarely uses the counterfactual method. This paper argues that counterfactuals are good for leader analysis, as they centralise the question of ‘actor dispensability.’ Counterfactual methodology fits with FPA’s challenges to structural assumptions and perspectives that embrace the contingency of international outcomes by foregrounding the agency of policymakers. This aligns squarely with counterfactual analysis, as it addresses the hindsight bias which reinforces deterministic readings of the past. FPA research on leaders – e.g., how their traits, beliefs, and experiences affect foreign policies -- provides the necessary theoretical foundations to systematically link counterfactual changes in leaders to their impacts in IR. We also suggest that counterfactuals can uniquely support recent advances in FPA research on leaders – such as those examining leaders and populism, gender, emotions, time, and how leaders ‘break bad’. Our paper aims to harness the untapped potential of counterfactual methodology for scholarship on leaders, to guide and accelerate recent advancements, to demonstrate best practices around their use, and to establish counterfactuals more firmly as a valuable method in FPA and IR.
Authors: Juliet Kaarbo (University of St Andrews) , Ryan Beasley (University of St Andrews) , Kai Oppermann (TU Chemnitz)* -
When Kim Dae-jung pursued his Sunshine Policy toward North Korea, it seemed as if nothing could make him leave the chosen path of engagement. The South Korean president stayed the course despite numerous North Korean border crossings as well as skirmishes and battles occurring during his presidency. Instead of adjusting South Korea’s foreign policy, he even resorted to secret payments to the North Koreans to arrange the historic inter-Korean summit. Drawing on the epistemological approach to the study of conflicts, we argue that Kim Dae-jung operated under a 'cooperation schema' resulting from his perception of North and South Korean goals as being in alignment. Our argument is supported by operational code and leadership trait analyses which found that President Kim indeed not only thought of inter-Korean relations primarily in terms of cooperation but also possessed a relatively inflexible and closed personality that enabled him to cognitively hold his ground in the face of contradictory situational cues emitted from North Korea. These findings are important for foreign policy analysis and the study of conflict resolution as they suggest a personality type that is more likely to unfreeze long-lasting conflicts and implement (newly) cooperative foreign policies toward a traditional enemy.
Authors: Jiyoung Chang (University of Birmingham)* , Alexander Schotthöfer (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / The Securitisation of Solidarity: Terrorism Frameworks, State Complicity, and the Repression of Palestine Activism in Europe and BritainSponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConveners: Alice Finden , Amira AbdelhamidChair: Alice Finden
-
In recent years, we have seen proscription used increasingly on a wider range of organisations. Exploring the case of the United Kingdom, the article delves into the widening of proscription from Hamas’ political wing in 2022, to the listing of Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 2024 and Palestine Action in 2025. While proscription has always shaped and reinforced a specific definition of terrorism, the article argues that these new linkages have untethered the connection between proscription and terrorism. The article reflects on how advocacy groups are navigating this liminal space, one in which showing ‘support’ for a proscribed organisation or analogous political objectives makes them terrorists. In doing so, the article contributes to this special issue on proscription by examining its expanding scope, which increasingly encompasses new targets and emerging issues.
Authors: Sophie Haspeslagh (King's College London) , Kodili Chukwuma (Durham University) -
This paper explores how experiences of proscription impact the means by which individuals can access human and democratic rights, in the context of the UK’s counterterror banning of Palestine Action. In June 2025, the UK Government banned activist organisation Palestine Action, prompting widespread protests and a proliferation of counterterror arrests, with 2025 representing the greatest number of counterterrorism charges since the introduction of the Terrorism Act 2000. Whilst the proscription of Palestine Action is perhaps the most controversial example and the first Palestinian activist organisation proscribed, it is one of over 80 organisations banned by Britain as part of a growing international trend seeking to curtail non-violent activism under counterterror legislation (Haspeslagh 2021; Jarvis and Legrand 2019; McNeil-Willson 2024; Zeller and Vaughan 2023). Whilst research has tended to consider either the organisational impact of proscription (Macklin 2018) or its associated political processes (Jarvis and Legrand 2020), more research is needed on the effects of proscription on an individual level, particularly how it interacts with and exacerbates patterns of social and societal exclusion (Abbas and McNeil-Willson 2025). Through interviews with activists directly impacted by the counterterror proscription of Palestine Action, this paper explores how proscription is acting to change the means by which individuals and communities are able to access and engage with democratic and other civil and human rights, even after organisational disengagement, and the implications this has for long-term patterns of (in)security.
Author: Richard McNeil-Willson (University of Edinburgh) -
This paper approaches the Gaza solidarity encampment as a political formation in the context of the university, through the lens of heterotopia. In the paper, we examine the fraught politics of solidarity within and beyond Gaza solidarity encampments. We explore the networks and practices of solidarity through which the encampment organised itself, and the university executive board’s response to those practices, to show how the encampment mirrored and inverted the university’s official missions of student and civic engagement. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research at the Newcastle Gaza Solidarity Encampment between May and July 2024, we show how the encampment became a struggle over the university itself, where encampment participants and the executive board imagined and aimed to realise dissonant imaginaries of the university through drawing strict boundaries around legitimacy of participation, right to the campus space, relationship with local solidarity networks, and the securitisation of students themselves. Further, we approach the encampment itself as a heterotopic space, composed of different people with diverse affiliations, relationships and materials, that shape its internal politics of solidarity, activism, and survival. Through this paper, we aim to show how the politics of solidarity is limited by, and transgresses the neoliberal university, and the wider securitisation of dissent.
Authors: Ichamati Mousamputri* , Una McGahern (Newcastle University) , Jemima Repo (Newcastle University)* -
The unfolding genocide in Gaza has invited scrutiny on the permissibility of violence and the disciplinary mechanisms that have been used to silence critique of such violence within UK universities. Academics have raised ethical questions about the role and responsibilities of universities towards affected students. Less focus has been placed on the ethical and moral dilemmas posed to the formation, preservation and loss of friendship experienced by students resulting from their support for Palestine. Drawing from narrative interviews with Arab, Palestinian and/or Muslim students in UK universities, this paper examines the cognitive dissonance described by students resulting from the challenge of living two lives: one where the predominate ‘business as usual’ response negates personal impact and silences personal suffering and the other where the devastating impact of loss transforms the very nature of how friendship can be meaningfully formed. The paper argues that the question of Palestine is a litmus test for organising friendship based on a shared value system. Whilst this is often connected to shared positionality in terms of key identity factors such as ethnicity and religion, significant transracial friendships can be forged through a shared moral compass centred on Palestine support, but which requires reflexivity on positionality and power to speak on Palestine to avoid marginalising Palestinians. The paper contributes to work which rethinks the international through analyses of micropolitics of friendship, solidarity and ethical and emotional drivers that make meaningful connections possible amid structural constraints to belonging that engender feelings of loss, harm and betrayal.
Author: Madeline-Sophie Abbas (Lancaster University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / UK Grand Strategy in Africa.
The Labour government that came to power in the United Kingdom in 2024 immediately launched a consultation on how to shape its approach to Africa. The consultation reported in June 2025, arguing that the United Kingdom aimed to develop a new approach to Africa that is ‘based on genuine partnership, rooted in mutual respect, and reflecting how Africa, the United Kingdom and the world have changed.’ The need for a new approach assumes that the previous approach was not fit for a ‘changed Africa, the world and the United Kingdom.’ However, the current policy debates do not clearly articulate the approach the United Kingdom seeks to abandon or the new approach it seeks to adopt. This roundtable will facilitate a discussion between leading experts in African Studies to debate ideas which can contribute to a better UK approach to African affairs. The debate will seek to answer two questions: What type of grand strategy could the United Kingdom employ in its African affairs to increase the prospect of achieving its interests? How might the interests of African states also be considered in analysing this process?
Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working GroupChair: Manu Lekunze (University of Aberdeen)Participants: Anne Mdee (University of Leeds) , Ben Page (UCL) , Lesley Masters (Nottingham Trent University) , Gearoid Millar (University of Aberdeen) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / UK-EU foreign and security cooperation post-Brexit: Divergence or convergence?Sponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: Laura Chappell (University of Surrey)Chair: Laura Chappell (University of Surrey)
-
Security was held to be an area of the Brexit negotiations where the United Kingdom could negotiate an outcome embodying both continuity and generous terms owing to the indivisibility of strategic interests, the low salience of security cooperation, and the intergovernmental nature of cooperation. Yet considerable divergence in outcomes emerged between internal and external security matters: In external security, expectations of a comprehensive agreement were dashed, with both sides resorting to an entirely unstructured relationship (Martill and Sus, 2021). In internal security, considerable continuity in cooperation between police and judicial authorities was maintained with arrangements going beyond practitioner’s expectations (Davies and Carrapico, forthcoming 2025). This variation is puzzling, not least given the commonalities of security cooperation, but also the higher sovereignty costs involved in internal security matters. In this monograph, we argue that the variation can be explained, on the one hand, by the degree of symmetric interdependence in the internal security domain and the absence of feasible alternative venues to cooperate with EU member States in this area, which risked a significant security gap on both sides in the absence of an agreement. On the other hand, the book argues that the variation is due to the increasing politicisation of external security matters and the resulting incentives on both sides to demonstrate greater autonomy in this area. Wishing to contribute to the existing literature on UK foreign policy and its approach to Brexit negotiations (Glencross, 2022; Meislova and Glencross, 2023), our argument helps explain the conditions under which continuity can be negotiated following exit from an international organisation and highlights distinct domain-specific dynamics within UK-EU security cooperation which have received little attention to-date.
Authors: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) , Monika Brusenbauch Meislová (Masaryk University) , Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) -
Many EU members have upended their defence perceptions, policies and calculations, due to a set of pan-European critical challenges for security, including the war in Ukraine and the evolving US retrenchment from European security affairs. The UK, alongside several EU countries was at the forefront of the international response to the Russian invasion. This not only provided an opportunity for a renewed coordinated response to the war among the UK, the EU and other NATO members, but also created space for re-engagement in the UK-EU relationship, signaling a more substantive engagement with the question of Europe’s defence capabilities. Defining the European Defence Ecosystem as the policy environment in which European and international security and defence actors operate, this paper argues that despite the UK-EU rapprochement following the drift of Brexit, the lack of formal defence engagement between the two sides is a weak link in the Ecosystem. In this context, how far do the UK and EU approaches to European defence align? The paper takes stock of the UK’s and EU’s approaches to the European defence ecosystem, highlighting priority and agenda alignment as well as actions to mitigate the risks within the ecosystem. In so doing, the paper focuses on areas where the UK and EU work together, which in turn highlights where gaps in the European Defence Ecosystem are located, offering a systems view approach of the organic development of their defence relationship.
Authors: Monika Sus (Hertie School) , Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) -
The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union has not only transformed its foreign policy orientation but also the venues through which it seeks to exert influence. This article addresses the puzzle of venue repurposing - the ways in which existing diplomatic and security frameworks are adapted to serve new strategic objectives once access to EU decision-making is lost. An expanding body of scholarship has recently paid attention to UK foreign policy post-Brexit, including the role of domestic politics, new foreign policy narratives that are one step removed for the EU, alternative foreign policy venues, and policy variation within the UK’s foreign policy towards the EU. The present authors have also recently discussed the reinforcement of bilateralism with EU Member States within the UK’s foreign policy and whether it relates to dynamics of de-EUisation and de-Europeanisation. Beyond bilateralism, however, little is known about the way the venues traditionally used by UK foreign policy have shifted in the context of post-Brexit UK-EU relations. The proposed article will compare the pre- and post-Brexit usage of four venues traditionally employed in UK foreign policy towards Europe: 1) cooperation with the EU; 2) bilateral cooperation with individual Member States; 3) cooperation via international organisations; 4) informal cooperation. By focusing specifically on the case study of law enforcement cooperation, the article explores how these four venues have been repurposed to achieve British foreign policy ambitions for this policy area and reflects on what these changes mean for the UK’s role as a European internal security actor.
Authors: Sarah Wolff (Leiden University) , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) -
When European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, uttered the term “European Defence Ecosystem” it signaled a policy change within the EU as a new approach to the recent geopolitical challenges in the continent. While the term has not been politically clarified, this paper uses it within the context of UK-EU defence capability development to create an analytical framework for the European Defence Ecosystem since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Conceptualised as the system of actors, institutions and processes engaged in European defence, we envision the Ecosystem as the policy environment in which European and international security and defence actors operate. Existing approaches have focused on individual components of the broader European Defence Ecosystem at the expense of the whole and have comparatively little to say about how different institutions shape outcomes and interact with one another. In answering the question, how can we conceptualise and operationalise the European Defence Ecosystem, we integrate an agent-centred approach focusing on how actors navigate the institutional complexity which characterises the Ecosystem. The approach emphasises the role institutions play in shaping actors’ preferences and channeling individual agency, drawing on research from both new institutionalism and the public policy toolkit. Our perspective also captures the ways in which individual agents navigate and shape institutional complexity, allowing us to highlight core relational dynamics in the European Defence Ecosystem and better understand the broader security landscape in which the UK and EU operate.
Authors: Theofanis Exadaktylos (University of Surrey)* , Laura Chappell (University of Surrey)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Weaponised critical mineral supply chains - taking stock of responses in Europe and the AmericasSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: Stina Torjesen (University of Agder)Chair: Julian Germann (University of Sussex)
-
A key obstacle to the development of predictable supply chains is the lack of well-functioning financial markets which could allow private sector actors to hedge their exposure and plan their supply chain needs. Individually and collectively, many governments are increasingly considering guaranteed prices for select critical minerals, proposing government stockpiles for raw and processed metals and using new tools to encourage investment. The urgency that the US government ascribes to this sector is prompting significant changes to government’s role in markets and supply chains. This paper assesses how the use of these tools, their externalities, and how policy divergence may reshape regime governance.
Author: Rachel Ziemba (Center for a New American Security) -
Brazil’s economic diplomacy has sought to preserve autonomy amid intensifying US-China rivalry. While Chinese demand remains vital to Brazil’s export model - especially in agriculture and minerals - the country also depends, to a large degree, on access to the US market, as well as on American technology and investment. This paper argues that Brazil’s response has been largely pragmatic rather than strategic: it hedges rhetorically but aligns materially with existing liberal trade structures. Drawing on debates about economic statecraft and geoeconomic vulnerability, the paper explores how Brazil’s position reveals the limits of “South–South solidarity” in a world of weaponized interdependence.
Author: Felipe Krause (University of Oxford) -
The European Union has countered concerns over safety of supplies in critical minerals by forging strategic partnerships with key supply countries and envisioning fully circular value chains in sectors such as batteries. Shredded battery waste (‘black mass’) takes centre stage in these efforts. Large volumes of black mass currently flow out of the European market, but the EU has taken measures to stop the leakage and promote the use of recycled content in new battery production. European battery recycling lags, nevertheless, behind China and building resilience through circularity remains an elusive goal for Europe. This paper builds on interviews with key stakeholders and offers a relevant case study of how, under the auspices of the Critical Raw Material Act, Europe seeks to lessen its reliance on Chinese supplies.
Author: Stina Torjesen (University of Agder) -
In October 2023, the European Union formed a critical raw-material partnership with Zambia, as part of various African collaborations under the EU Global Gateway initiative. The EU aims to diversify its mineral supply chains to reduce dependence on China, which has led the global mineral market in recent years. For Zambia and other African nations, this partnership offers an opportunity to move from raw commodity production to manufacturing finished and value-added products. The EU, engaged in the mineral security alliance launched in 2022, collaborates with the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, and India to boost investments in mining and related sectors, enhancing competitiveness against China. The EU’s proposal to African countries, such as Zambia, promotes ethical and sustainable practices to improve environmental and social governance standards in partner nations, aligning with EU norms. Moreover, the EU seeks to attract investment into African mining and midstream sectors. This paper examines the EU’s efforts in Africa, focusing on Zambia, exploring areas of convergence and potential divergence between EU and African interests, as well as analysing the strategies of the USA, China, and other emerging economies.
Author: Patience Mususa (The Nordic Africa Institute)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Roundtable / What’s next for gender and IR? New thinking, new directions
Departing from this year’s conference theme, this roundtable seeks to establish and discuss what’s next in the field of gender(ing) and IR. This includes both persisting trends and themes, as well as discussions of what might await in the future. Potential examples include the increased pushback against and opposition towards ‘gender’ within global politics; milestones of 25 years of the Women, Peace and Security agenda; the (continuing) struggle for equal rights and rights of bodily autonomy; increased processes of militarisation and war-making; and the need for intersectional solidarity. Beyond topics of scholarship, we also encourage discussion of our work environments; how to navigate increasingly hostile, ever-precarious structures and the shrinking space afforded to feminist voices. We ask participants to both reflect on their past and existing work within this field, others’ work as well as what they are turning their attention to in the years to come.
Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupChair: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)Participants: Dean Cooper-Cunningham (University of Copenhagen) , Caron Gentry (Lancaster University) , Annika Bergman Rosamond (The University of Edinburgh) , Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University) , Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Where Politics Happens: Gendered Everyday LifeSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Hazel Yeoun Choi (Cardiff University)Chair: Magdalena Svetlana Rodekirchen (University of Manchester)Discussant: Magdalena Svetlana Rodekirchen (University of Manchester)
-
International Studies has often overlooked how global power is lived and negotiated in intimate spaces. This paper highlights the importance of considering how everyday politics shape lives from below by looking at girls’ experiences. Drawing on a rare longitudinal dataset that follows twenty-four girls and their caregivers in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic from early childhood to adulthood (ages 6 to 18), this paper explores how politics is forged within familial and community constraints.
Parents’ efforts to “protect” daughters by restricting movement and relationships reveal how global hierarchies of gender, morality, and development are reproduced through care and control. On the other hand, girls’ acts and attitudes of negotiation, resistance or adherence shed light on the ways agency emerges within constraint, transforming the mundane into political encounters.
Drawing from feminist IR and development, the paper reframes the international as a lived, relational process. It demonstrates that the politics constituting global orders are also enacted in households and communities, where gender, social norms, and power intersect. Attending to these spaces challenges the discipline to rethink who counts as a political actor and where politics truly takes place.
Author: Belen Garcia Gavilanes (Cardiff University) -
The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 triggered nationwide protests in Iran, bringing global attention to Iran. While these public acts were powerful, this research examines the quieter, everyday forms of resistance that often go unnoticed. Under an authoritarian order shaped by religious rule and long-running sanctions, women face dense constraints that narrow the space for overt protest. Drawing on 10 semi-structured interviews with Iranian women across different ages and backgrounds, I explore how they navigate gendered controls and resist them, often in private settings. Subtle practices - small dress choices, coded speech, and acts of emotional resilience – contest gendered power and renegotiate the boundaries of state authority.
By analysing lived experiences through the lens of feminist and everyday politics, this highlights that repression acts as a channeling mechanism: it relocates the site of contention from streets to private space. This repression also works as an unintended catalyst: it deepens ties, builds skills of evasion, and cultivates durable routines of resistance over time. Resistance persists and often strengthens through mundane practices of survival, care, and quiet defiance. This study contributes to International Studies by theorising how authoritarian power both redirects and ignites everyday resistance in repressive contexts.
Author: Hazel Yeoun Choi (Cardiff University) -
This paper explores the critical intersection of motherhood and International Relations, arguing that understanding the political role of motherhood is essential for challenging traditional frameworks and integrating gender as a fundamental element in state identity, power dynamics, and international security. It critiques conventional IR theories that often overlook gender and identity, presenting motherhood as a significant site for understanding state behaviour and legitimacy. I delve into historical and contemporary reproductive actions, such as abortion and infanticide, that women have employed as acts of defiance against colonial and state control. Then, using Argentina and Brazil as case studies, this paper moves on to illustrate how states utilise maternal narratives for national identity while women leverage these roles to resist patriarchal structures. In Brazil, the role of Mãe Preta and mothering in criminal-controlled neighbourhoods is explored as a way of understanding Brazil’s national identity and attitudes towards security. Meanwhile, in Argentina the Madres y Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo exemplify how maternal roles can be transformed into powerful political tools, reshaping national identity and advocating for human rights.
Author: Katherine Pickering (Cardiff University) -
This article explores how the gendered governance of urban (im)mobility – particularly through the regulation and contestation of street harassment – (re)produces neoliberal authoritarianism. Focusing on post-revolutionary Egypt, it situates women’s constrained mobility within the broader consolidation of neoliberal authoritarianism following the 25 January Revolution. Through a case study of HarassMap, a grassroots initiative aimed at challenging the social acceptability of sexual harassment, the article examines how non-state actors negotiated shifting political conditions and an increasingly repressive state apparatus. Drawing on interviews with HarassMap staff (2014–2018) and critical scholarship, the study traces the evolution of the organization’s strategies: from community-based outreach during Egypt’s transitional period to constrained engagement under President el-Sisi’s regime, which simultaneously appropriated women’s protection and suppressed public activism. The article argues that HarassMap’s interventions redirected gendered governance toward everyday conduct and subject formation, yet also reproduced neoliberal hierarchies and exclusions. By foregrounding the relational and multi-agent governance of urban (im)mobility, the article contributes to critical understandings of how neoliberal authoritarianism is sustained through mundane, spatialised practices. It highlights the ambivalent role of grassroots activism in shaping dominant political and economic orders, offering insight into the gendered logics underpinning contemporary authoritarian neoliberalism.
Author: Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / Worldmaking: advances in a new agendaSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University) , Rob Cullum (Universiteit Leiden)Chair: Nicola Nymalm (University of Edinburgh)
-
How can futures without nuclear weapons be imagined from within International Relations (IR)? This article details a speculative future-making exercise that applied the collage method in the IR classroom to gain insight into how participants think about nuclear weapons futures and the obstacles encountered to conceiving of futures without nuclear weapons. It finds that two broad thought structures are at work to condition the boundaries of imagination: ‘nuclear exceptionalism’, which works to constrain imaginary processes, and ‘nuclear ambivalence’, which permits the imagination of a wider range of futures. This article makes two core contributions. The first is pedagogical, demonstrating how collaging can facilitate critical reflection on the boundaries of imagination regarding nuclear weapons. The second is conceptual, illustrating the development and practical application of the ‘worldmaking’ concept in IR, widening its analytical potential and showing researchers and practitioners a creative method of advancing an antinuclear politics of the future.
Author: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) -
What is worldmaking? Disciplinary International Relations (IR) has seen a profusion of interest in this concept, and it currently enjoys novel disciplinary application. It has been used to advance a wide range of studies including on counterinsurgency, post-hegemonic nuclear affairs, international law, post-colonial institution-building, and progressive grand strategy. Worldmaking’s enormous range of potential applications has incurred perhaps justifiable criticism that it remains too diffuse a concept with little clarity as to its different modes of application. Consequently, this paper will advance a new conceptual approach to worldmaking, consisting of three parts: aggregation, coherence, and construction. Aggregation refers to the process of drawing together fragments of an existing world, usually in response to some kind of disaggregating shock or trauma compelling reassembly of a new world. Coherence refers to the process of relating those fragments in novel ways to one another, so that they might be used to constitute a new, internally-consistent world, often disciplined around the priorities and objectives of the worldmaker. Finally, the process of construction refers to the ‘real-world’ steps taken to build a world reflecting the mental model built in the first two phases. This model represents a significant step forwards in advancing novel IR theory.
Author: Rob Cullum (Universiteit Leiden) -
Much ink has been spilled on the Westphalian world as the dominant but also a highly violent and unsustainable way to ‘do’ world politics. However, what to do with Westphalia following an ‘alternative’ worldmaking has been underexplored, and the implicit assumption that it would/should be supplanted by a more peaceful and sustainable post-Westphalian world risks reproducing the Hegelian master/slave logic. Furthering L.H.M Ling’s (2014) Daoism-inspired insights, this research maintains that as part of an evolving global yin-yang dialectical process Westphalia is never fully dominant nor eradicable; moreover, multiple intersecting and co-constitutive worlds exist of which the Westphalian is one of many. This claim is grounded on three creative imaginaries about the body in East Asian medicine: Seeing the body as ‘a cosmos in miniature’ (Kaptchuk 2000) dissolves the whole-part dichotomy in IR in a way akin to quantum physics (Fierke 2022); as ‘living in two or more worlds’ (T.W. Kim 2024) provincializes biomedicine and its ‘one-world’ onto-epistemology on which IR has been based (Chen & Krickel-Choi 2024), and; as having fuzzy and non-exclusionary boundaries (Ling 2016) allows us to reimagine, and belong to, various communal bodies beyond Leviathan and anthropocentrism.
Author: Ching-chang Chen (Ritsumeikan Asia-Pacific University) -
Recently, the concept of ‘worldmaking’ has opened fruitful avenues of research on anticolonial political thinkers in the twentieth century, recovering their “enunciations of universality” in and beyond national liberation movements (Bell 2013; Getachew 2019). This paper asks: who gets to make and take worlds through a feminist reconceptualization of worldmaking. Empirically, the paper presents a historically grounded account of the international political ideas generated by a cohort of elite Indian women political thinkers in late British India. Drawing on archival material on anticolonial women’s activism, I argue that ‘worldmaking’ allows us to i) rupture the ‘nation’ as the (sole) analytical dividing line; ii) move beyond colony-metropole dyads, iii) centre lateral transnational solidarities; and iv) allow for transgressive readings of colonial archives. Drawing on postcolonial feminist political theory and IR, the paper proposes a feminist reading of the paradoxical nature of worldmaking to account for how anticolonial women thinkers navigated the politics of difference (the ‘paradoxes’ of simultaneously being a woman/Indian/Asian/human) that became constitutive of their productive political claim-making. Through this, the paper distils two payoffs of the ‘paradoxes of worldmaking’ theoretical framing. First, it allows us to capture the multiplicity and heterogeneity of elite Indian women’s political agency rather than viewing them as ‘oppressed’ or as ‘passive victims’ in historical international relations. Second, and more broadly, it points to how marginalised political leaders make legible claims to international political belonging when their claims to knowledge are rendered absent or read from single-point identity markers.
Author: Shruti Balaji (University of Cambridge) -
Worldmaking is, inter alia, a form of temporal ordering. While we all make (our own) worlds to address individual existential anxieties and give meaning to our finite lives, ways of making meaningful worlds are also socially embedded and operate at scale across time and space. The notion of ‘modernity’ captures one such recently dominant form of socially embedded worldmaking and is defined by particular temporal precepts: the idea of continuous progress, the corresponding belief that the future will be better than the past, and the adjacent notion that the future is subject to human control. Yet, existential threats such as climate change challenge these beliefs and thus undermine modernity’s ability to assuage existential anxieties and provide guidance for action. This paper identifies and analyses two responses to the anxieties caused by modernity’s decline. One has been to extend the present into the future, for example by storing and ‘backing up’ all kinds of contemporary human artifacts and envisioning their usefulness hundreds or thousands of years from now on. Another has been to try to return to the past, for example by investing in technologies, such as geoengineering, that generate the fantasy of being able to return to an era prior to climate change (“pre-industrial levels”). Ultimately, this paper finds that both responses desperately seek to maintain the validity of modernity’s precepts in the face of fundamentally changed conditions and thus represent a form of climate change denial. What is needed is the recognition that we are in a transition toward a time of postmodernity which requires new ways of seeing and making our world(s).
Author: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
WE03 Panel / ‘From Technosystems to Cosmotechnics: Thinking security politics among the machines"Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)Chair: Toni Erskine (Australian National University)
-
It is now commonplace to argue that our concepts and practices of security are not fit for purpose in conditions of the Anthropocene. This of course denotes a situation in which fundamental and purportedly universal distinctions are increasingly called into question (nature and culture etc) and reworked through relational ontologies, indigenous cosmologies, and so forth. Such fundamental challenges are not new to security studies, from nuclear weapons to contemporary debates on AI, technological changes are also often said to demand similar radical rethinkings – though such demands are often sidestepped with the erasures, occlusions, denials and deferrals that critical scholarship attempts to foreground. Lurking within this, though, is a possibility of reinforcing the same techno-political imaginations that these developments posit and profit from.
In this paper I seek to think through the sense that security politics is out of phase with its problems by drawing on different (though related) strands of STS and Philosophy of Technology. While there is now a mature set of debates about STS and security studies, the role of technical and non-human agencies and infrastructures in security practices etc, I seek here to think more deeply about what Security means when it is conceived as operating – as Simondon might have said – Among the Machines. What understanding of systems, processes and practices does this require? What might thinking through modes of technicity (as system, world and cosmos) as creative, transductive, and pluriversal require of and offer the study of security? Thinking particularly from notions of technosystems (Feenberg), automatic societies (Stiegler), and Cosmotechnics (Hui) I seek the frictions and potentials of thinking security as, with and through technics. In particular I do this through the challenges of sensory, calculative and lethal processes and their pharmacological consequences and inheritances.Author: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast) -
This paper analyzes the production of military operations in peripheral contexts, considering
the relations that local forces establish with technological innovations. Focusing on the
Brazilian case, it delves into the technological solutions to enhance situational awareness
and command and control capabilities, interrogating how these technologies matter in the
process of imagining and producing contemporary modalities of military violence. Drawing
from CSS and STS, especially Lucy Suchman’s work on imaginaries of omniscience, this
paper expands a previous research on drone use by the Brazilian military (Janot and Assis
2025) to understand how their practices and expectations circulate between urban and
jungle environments by looking at operations conceptualized and performed in the Amazon
region. While both contexts are framed by the armed forces as a complex, foreign terrain
that needs to be perceived, controlled and managed through systematic intelligence, the
Amazon is being further imagined as a hub for opportunities in learning and innovating due
to its framing as an unique hub of risks and threats (border dynamics, organized crime,
environmental issues, international disputes, traditional and originary communities). Hence,
this work will argue that information technologies matter in producing new forms of military
authority that emphasize the armed forces’ logistics and managerial capacities in
administering complex environments, not only because of how they are used, but how they
are expected and imagined by the agents when they perceive and conceive the world
around them as theaters of operation.Author: Mariana Janot (São Paulo State University) -
Weaponry, and especially weapon systems, are traditionally defined in Military
Studies and International Security by their purpose instruments of violence. From
this perspective, weaponry is conceived as a technical element meant to optimize
and maximize the capacity for violence. The impact of this view on the field leads
to the assumption that technical artifacts are not subject to evaluative, theoretical,
or conceptual considerations, even though they are among the explanatory
elements of international security dynamics. This paper addresses this issue
through a critical conceptual framework drawn from Science and Technology
Studies (STS) and Critical Military Studies (CMS). Rejecting the notion of a single,
autonomous Technology, we seek to identify and discuss the characteristics of
what we call alternative military cosmotechnics. We argue that weaponry offers a
critical threshold for accessing a complex network of relationships that
encompass diverse actors, knowledges, interests, practices, and temporalities.
Drawing on secondary sources, we apply technography— an interdisciplinary
methodology for the detailed study of skills, tools, knowledges, and techniques in
everyday life—to analyze how weaponry is articulated within the warrior
cosmotechnics of certain South American Indigenous peoples. This approach
provides analytical tools to outline technopolitical perspectives that challenge
hegemonic technology, enabling the imagination of alternative technological
futures grounded in different cosmotechnical concepts. The findings aim to
contribute to broadening the research agenda within the fields of STS and CMS.Author: Jonathan de Assis (Instituto de Políticas Públicas e Relações Internacionais (IPPRI-Unesp)) -
When a drone strikes during breakfast, injuring your children while ISIS and Al-Nusra attack on the ground, where is safety? Critical Security Studies cannot answer this question because it lacks frameworks for analyzing how civilians maintain alternative worlds under simultaneous, overlapping violence from multiple actors. This paper introduces layered insecurity—a condition where aerial bombardment, ground attacks, sleeper cells who are your neighbors, and state surveillance converge in everyday spaces, making survival inseparable from cultural persistence.
Through ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish civilians in Jazira (Cizîrê) region using object biographies, photovoice methodology, and participant observation, I demonstrate how technologies designed to eliminate Kurdish ontologies paradoxically become infrastructure for their preservation. This technological hybridity challenges CSS assumptions that militarization destroys indigenous ontologies. Instead, Kurdish civilians transform threat technologies into survival infrastructure through indigenous relationality. Connected terraces enable rapid escape and traditional gatherings. Weapons protect bodies and the seasonal ceremonies, collective deliberations, territorial relationships that constitute Kurdish being-in-relation. Defensive architecture preserves rather than fragments cosmic practices when organized through relational rather than strategic principles.
Through this I show, first, how multiple actors deploying different elimination technologies across generations create conditions requiring constant material navigation rather than political resistance or accommodation. Second, technological hybridity shows the same infrastructures serving strategic survival and cosmic maintenance simultaneously, operating through embodied practices rather than ideological claims. Third, civilian experiences reveal ontological persistence as creative transformation of threat technologies rather than cultural preservation against them—communities sustaining alternative worlds through rather than despite militarization under conditions designed to ensure impossibility.Author: Neslihan Yaklav (PhD student in Politics Science, QUB)
-
-
2:45 PM
→
3:00 PM
Break 15m
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / (Im)Migration Discourses and SolidaritiesSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
This paper draws on a comparatively underexplored concept in Franz Fanon’s work, specifically how the coloniser’s ‘guilt complex’ manifests in bodily ways, to analyse the role of the phallus in current British anti-immigration discourses. The paper argues that this concept is useful to understand both the fear and the popularity of the phallus as a discursively constructed threat to whiteness. After outlining the Fanonian theoretical framework, the paper offers a broader historical contextualisation of the centrality of the phallus as a symbolic threat to whiteness within the (post-)colonial imaginary. The paper then situates the UK Reform Party’s discursive construction of (non-white) male immigrants as posing a sexual danger to (white) British women in this context. The contribution is twofold: first, the paper contributes to postcolonial IR by highlighting the contemporary relevance of this neglected concept in Fanon’s body of work. Second, the paper contributes to poststructural critiques of popular/populist discourses on immigration and border-crossing by situating (post-)colonial racism against idealised/fantasised bodies representing the nation/Self/female and the foreigner/Other/male.
Authors: Robert Saunders (State University of New York)* , Haro Karkour (Cardiff University) -
Research using ethnographic observation of the international/transnational has largely focused on intergovernmental and international fora, migration networks, and popular culture. Ethnographic observation of the work of state administrators of international phenomena is rare. The rarity of ethnographic observation of everyday administrative work dealing with the international is due to the difficulty, or at times impossibility, of accessing fieldsites relevant to such questions due to the struggles around negotiating secrecy. In responding to this challenge, turning to the past can be interesting. Thinking transversally, this paper suggests historical ethnography as a way of circumcising this problem. This paper argues for further use of administrative archives as a site of observation. Such use can allow us to better “intensely observe” the everyday work of practitioners. This is the second intervention of this paper, and it is one in the field of historical approaches in IR. Historical IR scholars have rarely used the archives in order to make sense of the everyday of state administrators. In doing a historical ethnography of administrating international phenomena, this paper will focus on the governance of migration. I will focus on the case of the governing by French native affairs officers of the Moroccan migrant population in post-Second World War Paris. I will investigate how these officers gathered intelligence on Moroccans, what this intelligence told them and what they did with this intelligence. In elucidating these colonial officers’ everyday, I will uncover how these officers knitted – or tried to knit – relations of trust, allyship and how they navigated enmity and hostility in an imperial context. In this sense, this paper will go beyond the usual focus on international migration governance from the top and will try to understand how this governance operates in the everyday.
Author: Yazid Benhadda (MECAM, University of Tunis) -
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 aims to present some of my initial findings which are taking shape in the early stages of data analysis. Specifically, the paper focuses on understanding how the NGOs involved in the Sahrawi refugee camps have textually and visually represented Sahrawi refugees, Sahrawi history, and the role and missions NGOs perceive themselves as playing within this history. This paper evaluates the discursive changes that took place after 2020 and the return to armed resistance. I pay special attention to how the return to armed resistance is articulated and silenced in most instances. I use Laclau and Mouffe’s model of discourse analysis to make sense of the data collected and draw from postcolonial theorists to approach how these (changing) discursive articulations are informed by colonial arrangements.
Author: Manon Minassian (University of Glasgow)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Author Meets Critics: Marina Duque's The Making of International Status
Scholars have traditionally assumed that status is a function of state attributes, particularly material capabilities like military and economic resources. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of research, Marina Duque argues instead that status depends on patterns of state relations. To understand how international hierarchies of status are established, Duque traces their roots back to key transformations that magnified global inequality at the foundation of the modern international order. As Europeans turned to imperialism in the nineteenth century, status distinctions legitimized inequality by drawing a boundary between “civilized” Europeans entitled to sovereignty and “uncivilized” non-Europeans unable to govern themselves. Once established, status distinctions reinforced inequality via cumulative advantage mechanisms: the higher standing a state enjoys, the more it attracts additional recognition. It is no coincidence that, to this day, status evaluations rely on governance ideals associated with the West. By analyzing the global network of diplomatic relations since the early nineteenth century, The Making of International Status develops a theory of status that situates the concept at the heart of contemporary international politics.
Sponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupChair: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University)Participants: Ayşe Zarakol (University of Cambridge) , Elif Kalaycioglu (The University of Alabama) , Rohan Mukherjee (LSE) , Marina Duque , Edward Keene (University of Oxford) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Centering Palestine 2
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Challenging Nuclearism: Memory, Militarism, and Everyday PracticesSponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConveners: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow) , Woohyeok Seo (LSE)Chair: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds)
-
Feminist IR and multidisciplinary literatures have foregrounded the everyday impact of military/nuclear bases on the landscapes, economies, cultural and social relations of the sites they occupy. Building on such work, our project explores the consequences of the disbandment of bases. It is tempting to interpret base closure as a sign of de-militarisation or de-nuclearisation. Yet, existing research illustrates how “post” military/nuclear sites are contested terrains shaped by the enduring (absent) presence and significance of militarism and nuclearism. In that light, our paper examines the afterlives of two US Cold War nuclear submarine facilities, with a particular focus on the impact on place and on landscape/seascape: at La Maddalena in Sardinia, Italy, and Holy Loch in Scotland, UK. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes, informed by walking and other movement methods, we trace complex geographies “haunted” by ghostly military infrastructure, layered military histories and often-invisible environmental legacies, as well as by incomplete processes of economic restructuring and cultural practices of remembering and forgetting. We discuss the significance of these sites for broader critical engagement with the seductions of militarism and nuclearity, and reflect on the (micro)possibilities for place-specific resistance and recovery.
Authors: Maria-Adriana Deiana (Queens University Belfast)* , Catherine Eschle (University of Strathclyde) -
International Relations (IR) scholars often examine how collective memory of nuclear violence is depoliticised, yet the means of violence - nuclear weapons themselves - have been less explored in this process. This paper investigates one specific mode of depoliticization in postwar Japan: technocratic silence. This term refers to the tendency to frame nuclear violence in purely bureaucratic and scientific terms, thereby sidelining memories of nuclear violence. Using official and civilian documents from 1945 to 1975, I conduct a genealogical analysis of the term 災(sai; disaster) – a term primarily reserved for natural calamities. I argue that the term 災 became a key pathway to depoliticise nuclear violence by categorising the atomic bombings as a generic, apolitical disaster. This normalisation enabled the Japanese government to construct a hierarchy of nuclearity in its narrative of victimhood. By applying災 to nuclear uses while simultaneously distinguishing between "accidents," "tests," and "possession," the government's rhetoric diverts criticism toward external nuclear testing while implicitly normalising and legitimising nuclear possession by major powers. This paper ultimately contributes to memory studies and critical nuclear studies.
Author: Woohyeok Seo (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)) -
My proposed contribution explores how feminist and de-colonial activists contest nuclear weapons governance “from below”, particularly in an increasingly digital world. Drawing on practice theory and norm contestation scholarship, the research explores how feminist and de-colonial actors contest nuclear ordering and norms through bottom-up practices. Methodologically, it utilises praxiography, digital ethnography, and participatory workshops. Preliminary findings reveal actors critiquing a ‘nuclear habitus’ — a gendered and hierarchical field maintained through technostrategic discourse and institutional gatekeeping — and the development of corresponding counter-practices through which feminists reimagine nuclear politics. In this process, they are frequently constituting their contestation practices through combining activism, academia, and art. I am contributing to the conferences’ aim for making IR ‘fit for the future’ through three theoretical and methodological advancements: First, foregrounding micro-practices of contestation, the research contributes to rethinking global nuclear ordering and re-centres to governance from below. Second, through digital ethnography, I develop a toolkit for analysing and reflecting upon new activist practices in a digital world, and contribute to understanding how digitalisation changes hierarchical dynamics in ‘the international’. Third, through conducting workshops with activists and artists, I widen IR’s understanding of ‘expertise’ and use futuring as a stimulus: imagining the future, either utopias or dystopias, has proven an effective method for groups to engage in discussions.
Author: Jannis Kappelmann -
As the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) approaches its first review conference in 2026, universalisation remains a key action point for advancing nuclear disarmament. While scholars and policymakers have extensively engaged with the concerns of non-member states, the literature has paid less attention to the perspectives of nuclear umbrella states that attended TPNW meetings as observer states. In the context of the third nuclear age, characterised by increasing global security instabilities and a surge in discourses supporting the strategic utility of nuclear weapons, it is crucial to evaluate the nuclear discursive landscape and identify opportunities to improve disarmament efforts. This article offers a timely analysis of the claims made by these observer states and provides policy recommendations for enhancing universalisation efforts. Our analysis focusses on the normative pillar of universalisation, which emphasises fostering greater acceptance of the underlying rationale for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, grounded in humanitarian imperatives. To develop this analysis, we will map the discourses of the last three meetings of state parties, identifying the key issues and solutions proposed by these states. We will then assess how these claims impact on the continuity or disruption of knowledge structures that sustain the nuclear status quo, such as nuclear deterrence assumptions, and evaluate how the TPNW has addressed these challenges. The article concludes with policy recommendations for improving universalisation efforts.
Authors: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow)* , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Circulating Violence and Capital: The (Geo)Political Ecologies and Geographies of Military TechnologiesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConveners: Mark Griffiths (University of Newcastle) , Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex) , Benjamin Neimark (Queen Mary University of London) , Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)Chair: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex)Discussant: Benjamin Neimark (Queen Mary University of London)
-
Amid proliferating and intensifying social, ecological and armed disasters, Europe is militarising at pace. While states across the continent gut spending on public services and fall chronically short on climate mitigation, arms factories and military training and testing sites expand at triple speed – expanding as well the life-cycle harms and geopolitical ecologies of “defence readiness.” Despite the vast socioecological costs of arms production, trade and use, military-industrial expansion is legitimised through the circulation of what I call the “arms = peace = sustainability” narrative. This narrative represents arms production as a precondition not only for peace and democracy, but also social and environmental sustainability; indeed, for “a stable and sustainable future” (European Defence Agency 2023). Through the concept of “weaponised sustainability”, this paper captures how European arms networks are rewriting ethical finance frameworks and intensifying their green- and social-washing campaigns: putting “sustainability in action,” as suggested by BAE Systems. In effect, the narrative and material conflation of sustainability with military-industrial growth is enabling increased public and private investments in arms, while diverting resources from people and planetary wellbeing and silencing public critique of arms production and profiteering. I argue for rethinking sustainability altogether by foregrounding anti-imperial and anti-militarist approaches to socioecological harm reduction.
Author: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex) -
The world has never spent more on war preparation. Simultaneously, record numbers of people are being forced to flee conflict and violence. The arms trade is a key link in the chain between the obscene amounts that (some) governments spend, the weapons their companies produce, the wars and violence they fuel, and the death and displacement they generate. While military spending and weapons production are concentrated in the USA, Europe, Russia and China, the economic, political and social costs are felt most violently and directly in the countries of the global South. Increasingly, populations in the global North are realising the costs being imposed on them, too – the opportunity costs that military spending poses for inequality, social spending and climate action.
This paper takes a journey through the global arms bazaar to draw connections between where weapons are made, the circuits they move through, and the sites of violence they’re used at. It tells a story about how the arms trade facilitates both domination and resistance: a global story that puts western and non-western involvement in the arms trade into conversation. Drawing connections between sites of violence means we no longer need to choose which humanitarian crisis is “worst”, or whose violence is more egregious. Rather, we can ask what the social forces are that drive war and violence, so that we can pursue solidarity as a shared fight in the unfolding, ongoing process of decolonization and changing global order.
Author: Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex) -
Each F-35 is made with ~15,000 tonnes of aluminium, steel, and titanium, as well as multiple rare earth and technology-critical elements that are crucial to its military capacities. Beryllium, tantalum, gallium, and other elements—the F-35 has been labelled a “flying periodic table” (Abraham 2015, 168)—make higher altitudes and speeds possible, they increase stealth and navigational capacities, and they power advanced targeting and precision software. They also connect the hardwares and capacities of advanced militaries with a dispersed geography of extraction and minerals processing (see Rubaii et al. 2025). From here, raw materials further disperse into networks of manufacturing, comprised weapons companies and their various subsidiaries, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors. In this exploratory paper, the F-35 fighter jet programme is read from a perspective of the earth, or the extractive and contaminating processes at the base of the world’s largest weapons project. By tracing lines of supply and complicity, the paper makes connections between war’s effects on environments and public health at sites of extraction (e.g., the DRC) and sites of deployment (e.g., Gaza).
Author: Mark Griffiths (University of Newcastle) -
What do military critical mineral supply chains look like? Well, it seems, nobody really knows for sure. Military ‘prime’ contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, rely on tens of thousands of subcontractors and suppliers to obtain the vast portfolio of minerals embedded in their hardware. To put this into context, it is widely reported that a F-35 fighter jet needs up to 900 pounds of rare earths, and a Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine, close to 9,200 pounds. Yet, rare earths, a group of 17 heavy metals that are abundant throughout the Earth's crust, are neither rare, nor many of them sourced directly from the Earth at all, but obtained as secondary products of industrial fly ash, slag, and red mud. How does one make sense of it all, and what are the theoretical and methodological tools available that can handle these unwieldy and complex issues of military extraction and procurement?
This paper takes a geopolitical ecology lens, or geopolitical and political economic analyses of military supply chains, to see what is behind the veneer of military critical mineral use and critical mineral reliance more broadly. We use a full social-life cycle assessment tracing the veins of one of the most lethal killing machines of the past 25 years – the MQ-9 Reaper Drone. We measure and map the global climate and local socio-ecological footprint of its critical mineral supply chain and check-out what’s ‘under the hood’ of the Reaper through a forensic analysis of its constitutive parts.Author: Benjamin Neimark (Queen Mary University of London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Co-Constituting Sexuality, Gender, and the International OrderSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: David Eichert (University of Oxford)Chair: Shruti Balaji (University of Cambridge)
-
This paper examines the moral economy around sex as a constitutive force in contemporary geopolitics. It argues that ideas about “normal” sexuality—particularly heterosexuality, monogamy, and binary gender—have long structured international order and continue to shape global politics today. Historically, European colonial powers exported sexual norms as markers of “civilisation,” displacing local gender and sexual systems. In the twenty-first century, similar dynamics underpin emergent moral geopolitics. More contemporarily, Russia’s opposition to so-called “Gayropa” exemplifies how moralising discourses around sexuality and “traditional values” are mobilised to challenge Liberal International Order. Parallel discourses are parroted transnationally by far-right leaders who frame the defence of “traditional values” as a global struggle against “wokeness.” To make sense of this convergence, the paper proposes a queer-realist framework that bridges realist and queer International Relations theory. Rather than privileging material, institutional, or ideational power alone, a queer-realist lens explores how the regulation of sexuality and gender intersects with other forms of power in the making of geopolitical projects and international orders. This approach recentres the political in IR theory and provides new tools for analysing how sex and sexuality shape the evolving post-liberal international landscape.
Authors: Anders Wivel (University of Copenhagen)* , Dean Cooper-Cunningham (University of Copenhagen) -
This paper builds upon extant literature on gender and nation/nationalisms by putting it in conversation with Queer and Trans Theories. It argues that although previous literature successfully establishes that gender is central to nationalisms, it tends to think in binary terms of masculinities and femininities. Accordingly, the paper moves towards theorizing the potential contributions of Queer and Trans theories in comprehending transitional periods when nations and their self-identifications are in a flux. The paper suggests that examining the concept of the nation through a non-binary lens allows IR to identify the ‘in-betweenness’ of national imaginations and its implications for how a nation locates itself in the international arena.
The paper draws upon the Indian example, arguing that currently evolving national imaginations in India also play a role in reimagining India’s location in world politics. A nation typically imagined as feminine (Mother India) is being attributed more masculine traits in contemporary (Hindu nationalist) imaginations, as it also retains its femininity. This masculine stance allows India to depict itself as transitioning from a nation grappling with postcolonial realities to a nation finding its ‘footing’ in the international arena. Thus, the paper suggests that a Queer and Trans Theory lens would help move beyond binaries such as masculine/feminine, modern/traditional, etc., complicating our existing understandings of the nation, especially in postcolonial and non-Western contexts.
Author: Shireen Manocha (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)) -
Queer feminist organizing has played a significant role in women’s peacebuilding work, including in anti-war and abolitionist organizing. Yet queer identities as a part of their organizing are continually marginalized in the histories of the women’s peacebuilding movement, and feminist strategies for resisting patriarchal violence. Some of the challenges that lead to this erasure include lack of data collection about individuals in the LGBTQ community, limited resources for researching marginalized populations and institutional homophobia. By engaging with resources in the Human Sexuality Collection, we can begin to answer some of these questions through the personal records of lesbians involved in organizing, as well as through some of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that may have been engaged in peace and justice work not often viewed central to the peacebuilding movement. The Queers for Economic Justice illustrates the importance of the groundbreaking intersectional practices of this NGO, and the groups approach to addressing economic injustice through a queer lens. Bringing a feminist curiosity to my research practice allows me to think about value of these stories of queer peace activists and queers fighting for economic justice as important to ongoing efforts to address gendered harms in global conflict, through non-violent resistance.
Author: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester) -
In this article I analyze an emerging trend of generative AI videos which represent nation-states as sexy humans and humanoid animals. Drawing from critical IR theories about gender, sexuality, and the performative enactment of the nation-state, I examine how these AI videos (re)produce the nation-state as a coherent and seductive figure in world politics. Most notably, I find that these videos affirm racist and populist representations of ethnically pure nation-states, masking long histories of colonial and xenophobic violence. I argue that this artificial version of the world, coupled with the presumed algorithmic neutrality of generative AI, obscures how human actors make the nation-state system commonsensical with technology, reifying a visual and symbolic system of politics in which alternatives to hegemonic power structures are undesirable and unthinkable. I conclude by questioning whether generative AI has the potential to offer a counter-hegemonic narrative for world politics, proposing a research agenda for thinking critically about artificial intelligence and IR.
Author: David Eichert (University of Oxford)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Ethics and politics of inter-faith and educational dialogue in times of international crisisSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Siobhan Bygate (University of hertfordshire)Chair: Nick Caddick (ARU)
-
This paper analyses how inter-faith and educational dialogues can sustain social cohesion and foster peace in the midst of global crises. Drawing on The Manifesto for the Recognition of the Ontological and Universal Right to Peace (Benyahia, 2025), the UN-indexed study Faith in International Charters and Treaties, and the national framework Adaptation du discours religieux musulman en France developed under two independent commissions at the Grande Mosquée de Paris, it approaches faith as a normative and diplomatic force shaping the ethics of multilateralism.
It first examines key initiatives — A Common Word (2007), the Document on Human Fraternity (2019), and the Charter of Makkah (2019) — which collectively outline a universal grammar of fraternity grounded in human dignity, coexistence, and solidarity. These frameworks demonstrate how inter-faith cooperation can function as a preventive response to ideological polarisation and geopolitical division.
The paper then introduces the concept of metagogy, understood as an education of pacificity that cultivates discernment, empathy, and critical verification as civic and spiritual competencies. Such education re-establishes trustful and democratic spaces of expression within schools, universities, and local communities.Finally, the study develops the notion of spiritual diplomacy as an ethical complement to traditional multilateralism. By strengthening the capacities of faith-based and civil actors, spiritual diplomacy enhances the moral legitimacy of peace processes and promotes a coherent, value-driven approach to global governance.
Together, these dimensions define an integrative model of dialogue rooted in ontological peace — where faith, education, and diplomacy converge to regenerate trust, human dignity, and shared meaning in a fractured world.
Author: Boumediienne Benyalia -
The recent Gaza/Israel conflict, for example, has tested the UK’s multicultural cohesion, creating deep concern about humanitarian crises abroad while simultaneously heightening anxieties around free speech and personal security at home for many and varied communities. Concerns about the right to protest, the freedom to express one’s views without fear of prejudice, and the perception of safety within educational institutions have become pressing.Two sectors play a critical role in either strengthening or undermining social cohesion during such crises: faith communities and educational institutions. Educational settings can serve as spaces for open dialogue, critical engagement, and the development of good practice in free speech, tolerance, and informed debate. Faith communities, meanwhile, can either foster reconciliation and peacebuilding, or inadvertently amplify divisions and tensions within and between communities. Our research suggests the important role of the above two factors in building and maintaining community cohesion at local level in a globalised society, informing how to build, maintain and make resilient safer and more inclusive communities across the UK. We explore how international crises influence local community relations in a single city, a town characterized by significant ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. Specifically, the research examines how educational institutions and faith communities at a local level can foster dialogue, resilience, and social cohesion during times of heightened international and domestic tension.
Authors: Siobhan Bygate (University of hertfordshire) , Mohammed Alramahi (University of Bedfordshire)* -
In a world increasingly marked by war, displacement, and moral polarisation, the erosion of the global order and waning confidence in multilateral diplomacy have rendered the search for ethical frameworks capable of sustaining peace and human dignity for all more urgent than ever. This paper explores how inter-faith dialogue and faith-inspired ethics can contribute to sustainable peace and human rights in times of international crisis. Drawing notably on the OHCHR Faith for Rights framework, and the Bangkok Declaration on Faith, Dharma and Human Rights, it situates faith traditions as potential mediating forces between global human rights norms and local moral economies. Through a focus on GCC region—particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where recent labour reforms, including the partial and full dismantling of the kafala system, have redefined the ethics of migration and work—it critically examines how faith and moral reasoning intersect with the pursuit of dignity and social justice. It considers both the theoretical premises of these reforms and their practical implementation, assessing the extent to which ethical and spiritual narratives can inform rights realisation within politically and culturally sensitive contexts. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach, treating inter-faith dialogue as an epistemic space where ethics, governance, and lived experience converge. By examining the intersection of faith, human rights, and peacebuilding in a region emblematic of both global inequality and moral reform, the paper positions the Gulf as a microcosm of wider international crises—where competing narratives of modernity, faith, and justice collide. Ultimately, it argues that faith-based ethics can contribute to re-humanising international relations, offering a moral compass for sustainable peace amid the fractures of a divided world
Author: Nora Wolf (Qatar Centre for Peace & Democracy) -
International crises, structural political challenges, and unaddressed divisions create risks for multicultural and infra-secular societies in terms of polarisation along ethnic, political and religious dimensions. In an increasingly multi-polar world, of competing economic positions and political approaches, the impact of international crises has become increasingly nuanced for local multi-cultural and infra-secular communities within sovereign states. The most recent case of the Gaza/Israel conflict suggests that ‘Infra-secularity’ is a more accurate description than post-secularism to analyse globalised worldwide society, with reference to safe and more inclusive UK communities. The escalating and continuing conflict has increased tensions within the UK’s diverse ethnic and faith communities. There is a critical need to engage in dialogue across and within communities between diverse community stakeholders to build collaborative community spiritual capacity to restore trust, support community cohesion and wellbeing. This research asks the question: How might international crises impact the possibilities for safe and inclusive domestic national communities? Further, we explore how and whether inter-faith dialogue can promote cohesion rather than polarisation? Drawing insights from our collective experiences of facilitating and contributing to inter-faith dialogue, and interviewing with faith leaders and attendees from student and staff in Higher Education and wider communities, we reflect on the emotional weight and complexity of dialogue, together with the wider societal politics that shapes the spaces in which dialogue unfolds, and the implications of inter-faith dialogue for scholars of international studies and the communities they work with and belong to.
Authors: Siobhan Bygate (University of hertfordshire) , Nick Caddick (ARU) , Margaret Greenfields (Anglia Ruskin University)*
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Gender and resistance in environmental politics IISponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConveners: Tom Carter-Brookes (Keele University) , Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)Chair: Tom Carter-Brookes (Keele University)
-
This paper examines the strategic use of essentialist ecofeminist discourse to achieve materialist ecofeminist political goals. It investigates how a community of women smallholder farmers in Pará, Brazil, deployed essentialist ecofeminist discourses to achieve radical materialist transformations of gender and agricultural relations. Drawing on walk-along, focus group, and qualitative interview data, I analyse how smallholder women in an environmental settlement tactically deployed naturalised women-environment narratives while successfully pursuing the restructuring of agricultural production and community decision-making. In doing so, participants partially subverted Western development agencies' liberal feminist assumptions about women’s empowerment and environmental stewardship to secure resources for collective transformation. This use of essentialism as a means of resistance operates through invocation of maternal earth-protection and knowledges that legitimise women's authority while enabling them to dismantle patriarchal household structures and implement an agroecological planting system focused on biodiversity and reforestation. By converting oppressive narratives into tools of resistance, they achieve materialist ecofeminist goals through tactical deployment of the very discourses meant to constrain them. At the same time, the transformative potential of essentialism as a tool of resistance is limited in that it risks re-producing the triple burden of women’s productive, social reproductive, and conservation care labour. Far from suggesting a return to old essentialisms, this case instead challenges Global North ecofeminist scholars to look carefully at the use of ecofeminist tropes as a form of strategic resistance to – at least partially – dismantle the very patriarchal and colonial structures they are designed to uphold.
Author: Magdalena Svetlana Rodekirchen (University of Manchester) -
This paper examines the gendered dimensions of resistance within climate-affected households in district Sargodha, Central Punjab, Pakistan. The impact of shifting climate patterns is increasingly disrupting agricultural practices, crop yields, and the livelihoods of farmers. Moreover, intra-household relations and gender roles are undergoing complex renegotiation due to climate-induced ecological stressors. Drawing on feminist political ecology and feminist political economy, the paper explores how women’s adaptive practices within a patriarchal agricultural setting, ranging from informal income generation to intensified farm work and emotional labor, constitute a subtle form of resistance to environmental hardships and entrenched patriarchal norms. It also examines how patriarchal norms and masculine identities resist the evolving gendered division of labor and agricultural adaptation to climate change, illustrating how vulnerability and power intersect under ecological stress. Situated within Sargodha’s socio-political landscape, this is an empirical, prescriptive study. Data was collected through structured and semi-structured interviews with key informants and analyzed using SPSS and NVivo, highlighting how everyday acts of adaptation serve as feminist resistance and challenge patriarchal, masculinized agrarian norms in rural Punjab that hinder climate adaptation practices amidst Pakistan’s changing environmental politics The paper will contribute in informed policy recommendations and practical interventions at enhancing women’s role and understanding of patterns of masculine resistance towards climate adaptation strategies.
Author: Aroobah Sarfarz Lak (National Defense University, Islamabad, Pakistan) -
This paper argues that nuclear testing and nuclear waste constitute acute, intersectional, and complex forms of patriarchal violence. It does so through comparing government discourses surrounding the justification of nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands and industrial pollution in Northamptonshire. Both led to issues of infertility, miscarriage, and children born with birth defects. It proposes a new theoretical framework called ‘Interkincentrism’, which builds upon existing frameworks of intersectionality, incorporating indigenous epistemologies to highlight the ways in which marginalised women have doubly suffered - both physically and psychologically - from anthropocentrism. This dual suffering must be examined through a Kincentric lens that considers both women and nature in unison with one another. The dominant narratives, social hierarchies, and dichotomies by systemic oppressors have facilitated transgenerational violence, subjugation, and silencing of the marginalised ‘subaltern’ from society (Spivak, 1988, 28). As many environmentalists have noted, these systems have worked simultaneously to both commodify and destroy the Earth, apparently for the sake of human progress. This anthropocentric way of thinking is heavily dependent on similar dichotomies that view humans as subjects and nature as an object. Drawing on Spivak (1988), the paper analyses the extent to which anthropocentric discourses silenced or excluded women’s suffering and highlights the inherently patriarchal nature of these practices. Through inter-textual analysis, it identifies key themes within these narratives such as ‘rationality’ or ‘civilizationist’ dichotomies, obstetric violence, and the omission of women from both scientific research and the political sphere. Through its case studies, the paper demonstrates the harmful, complex, specific effects of systemic anthropocentric misogyny in discourse and the catastrophic effects it has for marginalised women’s mental and physical wellbeing.
Authors: Frances Blair , Tom Walsh (Lecturer of International Relations and Politics at KCL and LSE) -
This paper focuses on the concepts of vulnerability and resistance in climate politics, focusing on how gendered and racialised discourses relate to material outcomes. Climate change is posed as a form of colonial violence and a site of struggle over whose lives are to be enriched and whose vulnerabilised and the discursive justifications for the ensuing inequalities.
Drawing on a new book, to be published with Liverpool University Press in 2026/27, this paper first outlines the critique of vulnerability, drawing on feminist arguments around paternalism and victimisation. It then offers an alternative: a breaking down of vulnerability into the concepts of precarity, which builds on the work of political economists; grievability, which builds on the work of Judith Butler, and ‘islanding’ a resistance concept that builds on Pacific Studies. Taken together, this paper turns vulnerability discourse on its head and tries to relocate these conversations within the reality of climate change.Author: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester) -
Environmental activism, along with other forms of civil activism, has undergone a drastic transformation in Hong Kong since 2019. Public protests have become significantly less accessible and activism increasingly takes on “non-confrontational” forms. Despite these shifts, recent scholarship has considerably attention on environmental movements and governance in Hong Kong such as land activism, rural activism, food activism, urban farming, and marine animal advocacy. However, existing scholarship rarely examines eco-activism in Hong Kong through a feminist lens. This absence reflects broader political and epistemological dynamics between feminism and environmentalism in both social movements and knowledge production, such as the disjuncture between feminist and ecological movements (MacGregor 2009), or the erasure of feminist contexts and politics in academic fields like environmental humanities (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018). This paper first explores overlooked feminist concepts and practices, including the circulation of ecofeminist ideas and their integration with peace, sustainability, and the livelihoods of working-class women through the works of Chan Shun-hing and others. Second, it develops the concept of slow activism to propose a feminist approach to social movements, one deeply connected to everyday life politics, which questions conventional definitions of activism as well as the suppression of it. Slowness offers an indeterminate temporality of resistance that problematizes both the narratives of progress embedded in development projects and the narratives of decline surrounding social movements in increasingly authoritarian contexts (Tan 2024).
Reference:
Hamilton, J. and Niemanis, A. (2018) ‘Composting feminisms and the environmental humanities’ Environmental Humanities 10(2):501-527.
MacGregor, S. (2009) ‘Natural allies, perennial foes? On the trajectories of feminist and green political thought’ Contemporary Political Theory, 8(3): 329-39.
Tan, J. (2024). ‘Slow resistance: Feminist and queer activism in ‘illiberal’ contexts’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241286987Author: Jia Tan
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Global governance in contested timesSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)Chair: SERDAR ALTAY (London School of Economics and Political Science)Discussant: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
-
The rapid disintegration of the international liberal order taking place in the current moment is situated within a process of capitalist restructuring which has long been underway. One analytical tool that has gained considerable attention in recent scholarship is the concept of a “new” state capitalism, used to describe the return of the economic role of the state, including statist policies, institutions, and norms in the world economy, and the proliferation of state-capital hybrids, paying particular attention to emerging economies, especially China. If International Studies is to meet the global challenges of the coming decades, it must look beyond Global North perspectives and incorporate theoretical approaches which take seriously the role of the state in development. With this goal, I contend that this “new” state capitalism, defined by Alami and Dixon as the rapidly increasing share of the activities of the world capitalist economy being undertaken directly by states, including as the promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital, is the emergence of a pluripolar world order. That is, if the world capitalist system is understood though uneven and combined development, and the role of the state is recognized as being historically bound up with the development of capitalism, this shift in the world order is not a case of state capitalism replacing liberal capitalism, but of combined development prevailing over uneven development as emerging economies are increasingly able to pursue their development goals.
Author: Natalie Braun (York University) -
Governments do not accept foreign aid uncritically. Instead, they negotiate with the aid donor, for instance, the design of internationally funded projects, and what aid can be used for. We thus increasingly know that recipient governments are important players in shaping how aid is disbursed to their country. Yet, we know little about how variation in this relationship over time influences aid outcomes. In this paper, I show how the IO-recipient government relationship is key to the implementation of IO projects. I argue that the relationship has a tension at its core: while relations of solidarity marked by a harmonious relationship between the IO and government are key for timely delivery of in-kind assistance, such as houses and food, contestation of the other’s exertion of power to make decisions on project design and implementation may be needed for governance outcomes, such as changing regulations and reforming government departments. I make this argument by drawing on 152 interviews on four hard cases: IO projects in the housing and agriculture sectors – one World Bank and one United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project in each sector – implemented in the small island developing state Dominica in the Caribbean after Hurricane Maria destroyed the island.
Author: Valerie de Koeijer (Leiden University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
This roundtable features authors who have contributed to the International Political Sociology 20th Anniversary Special Issue. The roundtable will explore the implications the Anthropocene, the discipline, and the far right on the international, the political, and the sociological in the present and into the future. The roundtable will be conducted in a "Question Time" format.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Kyle Grayson (BISA)Participants: Chenchen Zhang (Durham University) , Italo Brandimarte (King's College London) , Ali Riza Taskale (Roskilde University) , Miri Davidson (University of Warwick) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / In the Face of Authoritarianism: Contesting Power across Migration, Policing, and Crisis PoliticsSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)Chair: Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
-
Across the UK, US, and Australia immigration detention can be understood as a transnational carceral web (Mainwairing et al, forthcoming) comprising entanglements of corporate and state power which entrap people, spaces, and communities in relations of harm and exploitation, while in the process producing carceral economies and subjects. The carceral logics embodied in this web have their roots in the persisting coloniality of state-making and racial capitalism. In the face of an expanding carceral web, various forms of resistance have emerged. Here we identify the work done to prise apart strands of the web, liberate people and spaces from their entrapment in the carceral web, and challenge the web through collective acts of refusal. Drawing on interviews with organisers, advocates, activists, and people with lived experience of detention across Australia, the UK, and USA, we explore strategies of resisting the carceral web including counter-mapping, economic boycotts and divestment campaigns, the use of hunger and labour strikes within detention, the building of webs of care, and leadership by experts by experience. In doing so, we seek to complicate binary debates between ‘abolitionist’ and ‘reformist’ approaches to detention and highlight the transnational connections between local and national struggles.
Authors: Thom Tyerman (University of Edinburgh) , Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)* , Andonea Dickson (The University of Edinburgh)* -
In October 2025, mothers in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas searched for the bodies of their sons following the deadliest police inflicted massacre on record in the city. At the time of writing 132 people were killed in a single police operation. This paper examines the lived experiences of feminist, Black, and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders in Brazil as they navigate intensifying authoritarian violence and shrinking democratic space. Grounded in ethnographic testimonies from feminist and women activists in Brazil, the research situates their experiences within the broader framework of the Feminist Cities Colab project, shedding light on how everyday life in urban peripheries become shaped by security discourses, policing as state repression and feminist resistance.
Through narratives of survival under Bolsonaro’s far-right regime—and the disillusionment that followed the return of leftist governance—the paper discusses how state violence and neoliberal dispossession converge to racialise insecurity and inflict an emotional toll on activism at the frontlines. Simultaneously, from contested politics emerge alternative infrastructures of care, collective protection, and political education, that reimagine uses of urban space, reconfiguring the city as both a site of international harms and a terrain of insurgent solidarity.
Reading feminist testimonies as theory, the paper argues that feminist rights defenders in Brazil articulate a critical epistemology of resistance that challenges dominant security paradigms. Their reflections expose how authoritarian strategies—surveillance, militarised policing, and moral governance—are lived and contested through gendered and racialised bodies. In doing so, they expand the political imagination of what safety, justice, and democracy can mean in contexts of enduring colonial and patriarchal violence. Ultimately, their stories show how imagining feminist cities is part of a broader lived praxis of survival and resistance within a global architecture of authoritarianism.
Authors: Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti (University of Bristol) , Julia Hartviksen (University of Sussex)* , Laurie Denyer Willis* , Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes* -
The Trump administration’s rapid expansion of immigration controls across the United States is often cast as exceptional. Taking a historical, transnational view reveals that this rising authoritarianism is intimately tied to the proliferation of walls and cages across Western states over a number of decades. Sustained efforts by politicians across the ideological spectrum to detain, deport, and criminalize migrants have reshaped societies, undermining democracy and contributing to a drift toward authoritarian forms of government. This is encapsulated by the present commitment to deportations, in which governments internationally are designing and implementing regimes to deport non-citizens to third states, permanently offshoring obligations to asylum or the settlement of particular non-citizens, while eliminating legal safeguards for those affected.
This paper traces the rise of authoritarian practices in the migration governance of the UK, the US and Australia throughout the 21st century, practices that predate Trump's second term in power and that, we argue, lead directly to our contemporary moment. This historical analysis reveals the ways that governments have long experimented with authoritarian practices in the realm of migration policies, and how these practices spill over to affect citizens and non-citizens.
Finally, we turn to the grassroots movements that confront this expanding carceral and xenophobic order. Against the backdrop of ethnonationalism and corporate profiteering, these networks of resistance articulate alternative political imaginaries—grounded in mobility justice, care, and collective autonomy—that challenge the authoritarian blueprint structuring contemporary governance.
Authors: Thom Tyerman (University of Edinburgh)* , Andonea Dickson (Queen Mary University of London)* , Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Individuals in United Nations Peace OperationsSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Fanny Badache (Geneva Graduate Institute)Chair: Camille Bayet (Centre Thucydide - Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas)Discussant: Georgina Holmes (The Open University)
-
The topic of diversity is ubiquitous in today’s societies. International Organizations (IOs) are not immune from this trend. The United Nations’ discourse and policies point to a strong commitment to foster diversity within its bureaucracy. But does diversity make a difference in the daily work of the UN? This issue is particularly important to tackle since research in management and organizational psychology tells us that workforce diversity is a double-edged sword for organizations. Until today, no studies have investigated the impact of workforce diversity in the context of international administration. This paper fills this gap and studies diversity effects among civilian peacekeepers. The theoretical framework bridges public administration and peacekeeping research and proposes to study diversity effects along two dimensions: inward and outward. In the inward dimension, I present how UN staff use skills and knowledge related to their geographical background in their work. In the outward dimension, I demonstrate that diversity is used by civilians to gain access to host state’s political elites and to contribute to fostering perceptions of the mission’s impartiality. This paper speaks to both peacekeeping studies and to broader debates on the role of individuals in International Organizations.
Author: Fanny Badache (University of Geneva) -
Humility was formally adopted as a core value of the United Nations in 2021, yet its meaning and implications for peace operations remain largely unexamined. While principles such as consent, impartiality, and the limited use of force have long defined UN peacekeeping, humility introduces a distinct normative frame centered on openness, self-awareness, and receptivity that may reshape how legitimacy is cultivated in field engagements. This paper interrogates the conceptual foundations and organizational significance of humility in the context of civilian UN staff interactions with local stakeholders. Drawing on original interviews and interdisciplinary literature in organizational theory, political science, and psychology, it develops a relational framework that treats humility not as a personal trait but as a situated practice shaped by institutional roles, operational constraints, and socio-political context. The analysis explores how humility is invoked, interpreted, and enacted in peace operations, and where it may come into tension with other core values. This inquiry is especially urgent at a time when the multilateral system faces profound legitimacy challenges and the future of peacekeeping is increasingly uncertain. The paper contributes to emerging debates on values-based reform and offers a theoretical foundation for understanding humility as a lens for rethinking international engagement in peace operations.
Author: Emily Paddon Rhoads (Swarthmore College) -
Providing direct support to host state security forces is a common feature of multilateral peace and stability operations, often with the goal of bolstering state capacity and authority amid ongoing conflict. This goal often co-exists alongside multilateral commitments to uphold international human rights norms and, in some cases, actively protect civilians from violence. Reconciling these goals becomes challenging when local security forces are responsible for serious human rights violations, including attacks on civilians. Drawing on evidence from UN stabilization operations, this article develops the concept of protection dilemmas to capture situations in which individuals must juggle competing objectives related to human rights and civilian protection, on the one hand, and direct support for host state security forces on the other. It then explores the defining characteristics of these dilemmas and the strategies that field personnel use to cope with them. I argue that protection dilemmas arise out of conflicting normative commitments and the multilateral process by which mandates are crafted. They are iterative, recurring, and interconnected, and they manifest across tactical and operational levels within a mission. To manage them, field personnel draw on skills and practical knowledge gained through experience to interpret formal guidance. Recognizing the origins, characteristics, and impact of protection dilemmas sheds light on the relationship between norms and practices in global security governance, while also providing useful insights for practitioners and policymakers.
Author: Marion Laurence (Dalhousie University) -
In this paper we ask how microcrises- flare ups that may lead to potential escalation- are managed by agents and communities of practice in intractable conflicts- a situation of persistent and ongoing crisis. We focus on a specific community of practices bringing together antagonistic parties and the international community: the Tripartite Meetings bringing together Israel’s Defence Forces, the Lebanese Armed Forces and the United Nations in South Lebanon (2006-2023). We explore how agents within communities of practice navigate micro-crises. Adopting an inductive, theory building approach, we examine three micro-crises and explore the actions and reactions of the Tripartites to contain them (or not). This article makes several important contributions to ongoing debates about crisis management and international relations.
Authors: Vanessa Newby (Monash University) , Chiara Ruffa -
This paper examines how individual actors within United Nations Special Political Missions (SPMs) interpret and navigate ambiguity in their daily work. Ambiguity pervades SPMs—from the deliberately open language of Security Council mandates to the shifting expectations of stakeholders and the fluid political environments in which missions operate. Drawing on empirical illustrations and practitioner perspectives, the paper focuses on how mission leaders, political officers, and field staff engage in interpretive practices that transform ambiguity from an obstacle into a working resource. For individuals in SPMs, ambiguity is a double-edged condition: it enables flexibility, creative problem-solving, and diplomatic maneuvering, yet it can also generate confusion, competing interpretations of authority, and uncertainty in decision-making. The analysis explores how personnel balance the need for clarity and accountability with the necessity of maintaining space for negotiation, coalition-building, and adaptation to rapidly changing contexts. By shifting attention from institutional mandates to the lived agency of mission staff, the paper argues that ambiguity is not merely a structural constraint but a strategic instrument that individuals actively interpret and deploy in pursuit of peace and political progress. At the same time, it warns of the risks when ambiguity becomes excessive, eroding coherence or responsibility. Overall, the paper contributes to understanding how individual agency and interpretive practice shape the effectiveness and legitimacy of peace operations in an increasingly complex and uncertain political landscape.
Authors: Tom Buitelaar (Leiden University) , Vanessa Newby (Monash University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Intelligence and Disinformation in European SecuritySponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: ESWG Working groupChair: ESWG Working groupDiscussant: ESWG Working group
-
This article explores the Anglo-American intelligence relationship in order to understand how it responds to radical leadership changes that hinder the trust and predictability among the parties. Following the second election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, the British intelligence community revealed doubts and resistances about sharing intelligence with the USA. The Trump administration’s choices in appointing intelligence Directors, its decision to suspend intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and its hostile stance even with its historical partners raise questions about the “special relationship” ’s ability to overcome crises and adapt.
By applying a sociological-relational lens to intelligence cooperation, this article unveils the UK-US’ “special relationship” to be composed of three layers: the inter-polity one, in which governments interact with each other on matters of intelligence and security; the inter-agency one, and the inter-personal one, where practitioners work with each other or share intelligence. Building on previous research, this article explores how these layers of the cooperative relation respond differently to crises and changes, due to the different ways trust and cooperation are understood and set up in each level. Through interviews with British and American intelligence practitioners, alongside the analysis of primary and secondary literature, this work reaches two findings. The first speaks of the importance of lower-level intelligence sharing relations, such as the interpersonal and inter-agency ones, whose path dependencies and reputations are slower to build but also to erode. Secondly, from a theoretical perspective, the article identifies the various components that make a partner predictable, and offers insight into the mitigating factors that help against unpredictability.Author: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London) -
This paper seeks to examine how ideas of legitimacy within EU intelligence liaison frameworks are placed vis-à-vis the tangible outcomes governments seek out of it. Defining ‘legitimacy’ as the shared European political norms and values purportedly embodied by the EU, the study interrogates the interaction between these two forces by examining why bilateral and multilateral intelligence-sharing among EU member-states persists despite formal institutions for intelligence liaison at the collective EU level being available. Using an overarching cybernetic epistemological framework, it argues that ideas of legitimacy within EU intelligence liaison have been subordinated to member-states’ pursuit of tangible strategic deliverables. It notes that emphasis on the latter guides their use of formal EU bodies to determine collective strategic focus in line with national interests, while seeking to address shared security concerns through more active intelligence-sharing via more informal groupings. By dissecting the trade-offs between strategic deliverables sought from intelligence liaison and the logics of legitimacy underwriting it in this manner, the study makes an original contribution to the undertheorised yet increasingly policy-relevant field of literature on intelligence diplomacy as a dimension of contemporary international relations.
Author: Archishman Ray Goswami (DPhil International Relations, University of Oxford)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Laughing Matters: The Global Politics of HumourSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConveners: James Bassett (University of Warwick) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York)Chair: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford)
-
This paper analyses the role of humour used in cartoons which forms bottom-up power to maintain democracy. It not only enacts as bottom-up power but also embodies the freedom to offend. Using eight Indian political cartoons published between 2014 and 2019, during the first term of the current ruling government, this study explores how these very cartoons of Satish Acharya- a famous Indian cartoonist depicts the Indian Prime Minister and the evolving image of his leadership. Hence, the article investigates: in what ways does incongruous humour function as a phenomenon of bottom-up power and as freedom to offend? Employing a semiotic and rhetorical mode of reading, I would like to outline the following inductive categorisation of the nature of humour in political cartoons: contradictory exposure, playful reframing, moral ridicule, and authoritarian unmasking. This approach provides me ways to decipher the nuances of visual satire as both a form of critique and regulation of political power to keep the democracy alive. Instead of focusing the cartoons as messages that find their significance in the form of audience response or journalistic merit, I see them as visual practice of power that has the power in itself to question the authority. Therefore, in doing so, the paper situates humour in political cartoons not as disruption, but as a democratic gesture that keeps power accountable in the visual field of politics.
Author: Debolina Maity (University of York) -
Refugee memes shape public imaginaries of displacement by using humour to transform complex experiences into condensed, accessible, and shareable digital forms. This project explores the politics of memes in relation to how these digital images, particularly (GIF) memes, shape public imaginaries of migration and belonging in Germany through spatial and temporal aesthetics. Drawing on Massumi’s (2015) notion of ontopower as the regulation of affectivities and Baspehlivan’s (2023) work on memescapes to turning to the affective designs of memes, the visual and invisual modes of circulation and centring their templated ways of othering as a key logic of networked feeling. It looks at datalogical forms of perception involved in their generation and the production of temporalities, situating memes within broader infrastructures of sensing and control in forced migration discourse. Focusing on gif-temporalities, the project foregrounds the looping affects of memes, their repetition, delay, and modulation, as modes of in-betweenness that produce dis- and reorientation. It analyses clusters tagged “#refugees,” “#Germany,” and “#Tagesschau,” to explore the affects that “stick” (Ahmed 2006) across Syrian and Ukrainian contexts to contribute to an understanding of how humour becomes recoded through visual repetition. By recognising the blurred line between memes and GIFs, the paper argues that these temporal images reconfigure resonance through looping aesthetics, making visible how digital humour and its affective infrastructures sustain the ontopolitical governance of emotion, visibility, and belonging.
Author: Janica Ezzeldien (University of Glasgow) -
Memes were central to the Trump/MAGA 2024 election campaign and have become a key focus of digital diplomacy by US State social media accounts, including the White House and Department of Homeland Security. This paper situates the growing popularity, circulation and affective excitements that pertain to MAGA memes in the IR literature on humour and global politics in general, and the emerging work on the affective politics of memetic engagement, in particular. Building on the complex, polysemic and rhizomatic qualities associated with meme cultures, we explore the affective dimensions of MAGA memes to identify the contingent and often counter-intuitive politics of these ecologies of meaning making. In particular, drawing on our previous work on ontological (in)security that identifies the links between the anxiety alleviating potential of humour and how its routinisation through memetic engagement can build political identity, we provide a critical perspective on differing forms of affect, including, excitement, oppositional anger, playful joy and ‘cringe’. In critical terms, a key reason why the ‘troll President’ has so successfully mobilised the affective ecology of MAGA memes is through his openness to bottom up and participatory forms of memeing. We provide theoretical and practical reasons why more recent appropriations of meme culture by state institutions, especially in what might be termed the ‘second wave’ of JD Vance memes, may backfire.'
Authors: Christopher Browning (University of Warwick) , James Brassett (University of Warwick) , Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) -
This paper argues that a crisis of overproduction in US media has manifest in the emergence of a post-truth world. Drawing on a Marxist view of capitalist society, the paper examines how comedy podcasts and meme culture are a consequence of this overproduction crisis. In this view, capitalism has an inherent tendency to produce more goods than society can actually use or absorb. As such, competitive forces within the media industry have created too much content for the market, that is audiences, to meaningfully process. Legacy media, strained by collapsing business models and a dependency on social media platforms, has become an increasingly irrelevant node in a saturated media landscape. The paper focuses on two examples of this diversified media ecosystem. First, podcasts hosted by comedians like Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon, thrive by converting ambiguity and contradiction into long-form entertainment. Here, meaning is destabilised and ideology is interwoven seamlessly with entertainment, making confusion both palatable and profitable. Second, meme culture on X offers a parallel expression of the crisis. Humorous memes circulate as compressed ideology: affective fragments and inside jokes that atomise argument. They are central to how information is distributed and processed on social media. Elon Musk’s claim that the users of X ‘are the media now’ is emblematic of this shift in the production of information, argument and entertainment. This diversification of production in media is not, however, the democratisation of media. On the contrary, platforms for the production of media, such as Spotify, X and YouTube, remain the property of a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. As such, this crisis, while holding an opportunity for the radical re-envisioning of what media could be, also reveals how humour and ideology can be harnessed for profit and control.
Author: Alex Sutton (Oxford Brookes)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Narrating Futures Otherwise: Complexity, Hope, and the Politics of Imagination in Transitional Colombia
This roundtable convenes scholars focused on Colombia’s transitional process to examine how narratives and visions of the future are created, experienced, and contested in the wake of armed conflict. In mainstream peacebuilding discourse, the future is often portrayed through the lenses of hope, reconciliation, and progress. Yet, the everyday perspectives shared by victims, ex-combatants, and local communities reveal more intricate, ambivalent, and at times unsettling temporalities.
Participants will discuss how these future-oriented imaginaries both sustain and challenge the transitional project: how they intertwine memory, affect, and political expectation; how they articulate uncertainty and waiting as lived temporalities; and how they redefine what “peace” might mean beyond institutional or developmental frameworks. Engaging theoretical, ethnographic, and conceptual perspectives, the roundtable seeks to rethink the role of imagination in transitional contexts — not merely as a horizon of hope, but as a contested field where justice, recognition, and belonging are continuously negotiated.
Considering Colombia’s current context — marked by persistent violence, social unrest, and renewed forms of exclusion — reflecting on the politics of futurity becomes both urgent and complex. The roundtable asks how narratives of the future emerge amid ongoing instability, and how they shape (or are shaped by) the fragile temporality of transition itself. By centring Colombia, it invites a broader reflection on who gets to imagine the future, which futures remain unthinkable, and how the turbulent present complicates the very possibility of imagining transformation.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Irene Piedrahita (University of Glasgow)Participants: Marta Domínguez-Mejía (University of Antioquia) , Irene Piedrahita (University of Glasgow) , Daniela Suarez Vargas (Queen's University Belfast) , Andrés Eduardo Celis (University of Deusto) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Oligarchic Sovereignty: Technology and the Future of Global OrderSponsor: Review of International Studies
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Power and Knowledge Production in Global HealthSponsor: Global Health Working GroupConvener: GHWG Working groupChair: Andreas Papamichail (Queen Mary University of London)
-
Much of the infrastructure developed to support biosecurity efforts is focused on mobilizing the insights that the life sciences can provide into the development of new medicines and medical countermeasures. A particular focus has emerged in which the macro-structures within states, markets and international institutions have been utilized to manipulate and intervene in life at a molecular scale. Key material infrastructures including universities, hospitals, laboratories and research funding bodies are also now key to biosecurity efforts that emphasize the role of private industry in the translation of scientific insights into new medical defenses. This presentation investigates the post-COVID biosecurity environment in the US in relation to the lessons learned from Operation Warp Speed. Previous US biodefence activities were focused on developing medical countermeasures to be stockpiled and used “just in case” of an emergency involving a specific pathogen. Lessons from COVID-19 and the Warp Speed Operation have instigated efforts that seek to develop medical countermeasures “just in time” to respond to an emerging pathogen threat. This paper will investigate the proposed infrastructural changes that must be implemented in order to carry out this approach including centralized capability leadership and realigned public–private partnerships.
Author: Christopher Long (Queen's University Belfast) -
Data are a critical tool for global health governance structures. Whilst the politics of indicators has been well analysed, there has been little interrogation of the ways in which questions are negotiated and knowledge produced in the process of administering surveys themselves. Data collectors are rarely included in any analysis of surveys and quantification, despite being the frontline of data production. This paper draws on interviews with global health experts (n=22) and from a case study of sexual and reproductive health governance in Ghana in which statisticians and data collectors were interviewed (n=32). Understanding their experiences exposes the disconnects between the macro and micro politics of survey instrument design, development, and funding, as well as the role of surveys as treatments, rather than simply neutral fact-finding missions. Treatment includes knowledge exchanges between data collectors and participants, as well as the effects of asking specific questions and making others invisible. This paper illustrates how data are shaped not only by questions developed in the Global North but through negotiation, conversation, and collaboration between data collectors and respondents. It exposes how ‘cleaned’ datapoints make invisible critical details and insights that offer essential information for global health.
Author: Joe Strong (QMUL) -
The Trump Administration’s cuts to foreign aid have severely impacted health management across the world. Funding reductions have resulted in diminished access to HIV antiretrovirals in Africa, job losses among healthcare workers in low- and middle-income countries and weakened support for sexual and reproductive rights in the Global South. These cuts to foreign aid in analyses of global health tend to be simplified as a manifestation of Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric, rooted in the promise to put ‘America First’. In this paper, I suggest an alternative reading of Trump’s approach to global health and argue that – rather than a mere manifestation of an ultra-nationalist agenda – it enacts a global biopolitics of health management operated both within and outside the US borders. Domestically, this biopolitical approach operates a necropolitics that frames certain population groups as less deserving and increases their risk of health deterioration and death. Internationally, this biopolitics enacts a necropolitical logic that devalues certain forms of life by deploying foreignness as a metric of disposability. While tracing the harmful impacts of this approach, the paper draws on Butler’s concepts of precarity and grievable lives to consider emergent forms of resistance that mobilise body vulnerability as a site of political agency and a means of securing health for those racialised as 'others'.
Author: Moises Vieira (University of Manchester) -
Violence is increasingly framed as a public health problem and medical approaches to violence prevention are progressively occupying centre-stage in global responses to violence. This article investigates the consequences of adopting an epidemiological approach in conflict and post-conflict environments. We do so by analysing the application of the Cure Violence (CV) model in Israel and Palestine. CV is unique in its approach as it sees violence as an actual disease that can be controlled and contained via epidemiological methods/strategies applied in disease control. Despite short-term success in reducing levels of violence, we argue that such an approach is at risk of de-politicizing conflict-resolution. Rooted in methodological individualism and evidence-based epistemology, this approach has the tendency to overlook structural causes and drivers of conflict, while concentrating its efforts on the individual alone. Conflict resolution, henceforth, becomes an individualized task, with the responsibility for success (or failure) entirely transferred onto the individual.
Authors: Norma Rossi (University of St Andrews) , Malte Riemann (Leiden University) -
Using insights from postcolonial and decolonial theory, this paper critically examines how enduring colonial logics shape practices of science diplomacy in global health governance. It argues that the enactment of science diplomacy is influenced by competing interests and uneven power dynamics, which limit its purported neutrality and universal benefit. The paper further explores how science diplomacy, positioned at the intersection of science, policy, and International Relations, can reproduce rather than redress colonial hierarchies through ongoing tenets of control, extraction, and loss.
Focusing on the Joint External Evaluations (JEEs) and National Action Plans for Health Security (NAPHS) as mechanisms of pandemic preparedness embedded in the International Health Regulations (IHRs), the project aims to understand how historical postcolonial asymmetries between former colonising and colonised states can persist within ostensibly cooperative frameworks. Drawing on the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic as a case study, it analyses how interactions between the United States, the United Kingdom, Liberia, and Sierra Leone illustrate the often-unequal interplay of collaboration, authority, and expertise within contemporary science diplomacy.
Employing a mixed-method approach that integrates document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and network analysis, this research offers new critical insights into how the practice of science diplomacy, vis-à-vis the JEEs and NAPHS, can perpetuate colonial hierarchies of power through processes of collaboration, decision-making, and expertise. In doing so, it seeks to understand how lessons from past applications of the JEEs and NAPHS can inform future ones, thus to meet the global challenges of the next 50 years, the concept and practice of science diplomacy must continue to critically engage with its colonial inheritances. From this, there can be the cultivation of more pluralistic, reflexive, and equitable approaches to collaboration, knowledge production, and decision-making in science diplomacy.
Author: Shaunna McIvor (Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU University of Sussex)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Queering the Crisis: Stuart Hall and the International
Stuart Hall's work is vital to academic understandings of culture, race, media representations, discursive formations and historical epochs (specifically that of neoliberal capitalism). That being said, it is rarely engaged within the field of international relations, which remains sceptical of cultural and sociological approaches to research. Despite its huge contributions to cultural studies, a gap in Hall's work exists with regards to sexuality and gender. Responding to both of these silences, this roundtable brings together a range of leading IR scholars who deploy aspects of Hall's work in ways that are attentive to sexuality and gender to make sense of crisis/transformation in world politics. Included in the panel are innovative applications of Hall's work to diverse topics including global capitalism, contemporary moral panics, migration, anti-gender politics, security and (post)coloniality.
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Jasmine Gani (LSE)Participants: Alexander Stoffel (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Ellie Gore (University of Manchester) , Yoav Galai (Royal Holloway, University of London) , Patrick Vernon (University of Wolverhampton) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Reparations between Momentum, Co-optation and Elite CaptureSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConveners: Victoria Klinkert (St Gallen) , Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin)Chair: Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin)Discussant: Jenna Marshall (Universität Kassel)
-
Any definitions of reparations is contingent on who is tackling the topic and what aspect of the current world order reparative actions should tackle and why. But a simple definition that can encompass the overall idea of deep, meaningful and long-lasting change that reparations has come to represent is one that sees reparations as a “program of acknowledgment, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice”(Darity, 2020a). What differs is how one thinks this can be achieved. My proposed research takes the view that reparations, as a way to correct contemporary manifestations of past wrongs, should occur through the vital role that grassroots movements play in enacting structural change. Using insights gained from structural injustice approaches, and a combination of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with both grassroots activists and local politicians, I aim to shed light on the work of grassroots movements and their impact on the daily life of Black Americans. This in turn will provide a much less explored take on the debate on reparations, the role of grassroots movements and the possibility that incremental structural change at a local level can be an important contribution to the larger, world-spanning goal of reparations.
Author: Marochka Minkeng -
This contribution looks at a decade of pan-African organising for reparations in the 1990s, illustrating how reparations discourse evolved from continental Africa to the imperial metropole of Britain. Focusing on the pivotal decade between Lagos 1990 and Durban 2001, it analyses how reparations served as both a point of reference for grassroots organising and as a framework for anti-colonial worldmaking between Nigeria, Barbados, South Africa, Jamaica, and Britain. While grassroots organising has spearheaded the cause for reparations, the 1990s are the starting point for the institutionalisation of a movement. Reparations become a tool to negotiate international relations and anti-colonial worldmaking, uniting pan-African policymakers across the world. Rather than approaching reparations through normative frameworks, this contribution foregrounds the geopolitical dimensions of reparations as a tool for negotiating international relations and anticolonial worldmaking. Drawing on archival research and interviews, and engaging with scholarship by Forrester and Getachew alongside Nkrumah and Garvey, the paper takes seriously the agents and claims of reparations as anticolonial politics, offering a new analytical angle that centres the movement's transformative potential in reshaping global power relations.
Author: Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin) -
Reparations are now receiving needed attention in the social sciences. Bhopal Gas Disaster survivors have been fighting for ‘reparations’ against harms to their bodies, environments and livelihoods since 1984. Their 40-year old campaigns for legal justice and compensation in Indian and US jurisdictions have much to teach us about the politics of (elite) capture of reparative efforts for justice and environmental and health restitution. They showcase how legal doctrines such as forum non conveniens and parens patriae privileged corporate elites and enabled the dismissal of survivors’ court cases for justice and compensation and disempowered them as Indian citizens by making them wards of the state unable to chart their own legal pathways. This inflects existing analyses of the harms of co-optation and ‘elite capture’. And yet, taking a capacious understanding of reparations beyond legal-political realms, and reading Bhopali sociopoetic practices of survival and sociality as forms of reparative mutuality, helps analyse how these exceed but remain at risk of (elite) capture. The paper examines the aim at citizen science and campaigns for establishing the Chingari Rehabilitation Centre and Sambhavna Clinic, as well as other forms of mutual care and aid in the context of ongoing struggles for justice.
Author: Louiza Odysseos (University of Sussex) -
In the wake of the global racial justice uprisings of 2020, elite actors and institutions—from financial conglomerates such as Lloyd’s of London to collective initiatives like the “Heirs of Slavery”—have signalled moves away from imperial ignorance and toward a supposed reparative justice. They have entered a moral economy of racial reckoning. This paper interrogates these gestures as sites where liberal order seeks to recalibrate its moral legitimacy under the sign of accountability. Reading these practices through the lens of elite capture and moral economy, it examines how the move from imperial ignorance to responsibility-taking functions less as rupture than as a managed rearticulation of imperial reason. The paper asks what epistemic, affective and moral regimes underpin this shift, and how reparative discourse becomes domesticated. Finally, it situates these elite reckonings within the broader reactionary conjuncture—the “far-right” backlash against decolonial and reparative claims—to assess whether such moral economies can withstand or merely reproduce the contradictions of the liberal racial order. In doing so, the paper explores the limits of elite trajectories from imperial ignorance to responsibility.
Author: Victoria Klinkert (St Gallen)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Revisiting Gulf Politics Amid Shifting Regional (In)Securities
This roundtable aims to explore the transformations in Gulf affairs through the intersecting lenses of domestic, regional, and global politics. Against the backdrop of shifting regional insecurities in the broader Middle East, the discussion brings together diverse perspectives on the evolving political, economic, and social dynamics of the Arab Gulf monarchies.
Adopting a multilayered approach, the roundtable will address developments in international relations, domestic governance, energy politics, and social change in the Gulf. As an annual scholarly recap, it seeks to provide a comprehensive platform for critical reflection on the past year’s key trends and trajectories in Gulf politics and their implications for regional order and stability.
Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupChair: ISMMEA Working groupParticipants: MEHMET RAKIPOGLU (University of Exeter) , Javier Bordón (Lancaster University / SEPAD) , Mate Szalai (Corvinus University of Budapest) , ISMMEA Working group -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Science and the (Re)Making of World Order: From Standards of Civilization to Planetary Governance
International Relations (IR) has traditionally conceived science as primarily an instrument of state power, perceiving areas such as science diplomacy and science governance as primarily tools for the pursuit of state interests. This roundtable questions that narrow understanding of the role of science in IR and proposes an expansion of the way science can be thought of and researched within the discipline. Science is here understood as a primary site of social struggle where different conceptions of human beings’ relations with each other and the rest of nature are advanced, contested and reshaped, and consequently where world orders are made and remade. Bringing together scholars working on the historical role of science diplomacy in defining 'standards of civilization', the political ecology of ecocide, and the contentious knowledge politics of geoengineering, we explore science as a constitutive force of global politics. We discuss how scientific practices and technoscientific communities have historically shaped the hierarchies and institutions of international society; how science expresses the division lines between particularistic and planetary orientations in global international society; and how contemporary techno-scientific fixes seek to reshape collective understandings of possible global futures? Moving beyond a conception of science as a tool, this roundtable investigates it as a battleground where the very terms of planetary order and future civilization are being contested and defined.
Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupChair: André Saramago (University of Coimbra)Participants: Ina Möller (Wageningen University) , Danielle Young (University of Leeds) , Alex Hoseason (Aston University) , André Saramago (University of Coimbra) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Security cooperation and alliances in uncertain timesSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Larry ATTREE (Rethinking Security)
-
With the rise of China and an intensification of great power competition in recent decades, small states are attempting to foreground a middle position between the two without explicitly choosing one great power over the other – an approach commonly known as hedging. I challenge the notion that great power competition is the only structural driver that small states strive to hedge. Instead, I argue that they are hedging against the risks stemming from the multipolar, interventionist and fluid international order. This expands our understanding of hedging as small states’ alignment behavior beyond (non-)choice between two great powers. In a multipolar, interventionist and fluid order, maintaining and expanding a dynamic portfolio of multi-alignment with multiple partners in multiple issue areas becomes the optimal and most preferred strategic choice for states to preserve their strategic autonomy and resilience. I draw from two Southeast Asian countries – Myanmar and Thailand – to illustrate how these states, since the beginning of the Cold War, strived to maintain and expand their portfolio of external engagements, with varying degrees of success, over time.
Author: Thu Htet (University of Oxford) -
This work analyzes how Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP) conduct and receive maritime diplomacy actions across overlapping multilateral and interregional frameworks in the South Atlantic. Mapping these layers - such as CPLP, ZOPACAS, regional coordination centers under the Yaoundé Architecture, and African Union initiatives - the study highlights how institutional redundancies and fragmented mandates shape the practice of ocean governance. Drawing on African and t South Atlantic perspectives, it examines the tensions and opportunities created by this institutional density, particularly in addressing piracy, illicit trade, and environmental threats. Rather than prescribing new designs, the analysis contributes a critical account of how PALOP actors navigate and negotiate across these frameworks, showing how overlapping arrangements affect both regional agency and the articulation of Global South approaches to ocean governance. In conclusion, it reflects on how these dynamics illuminate the broader challenges of multilateralism and trans-scalar governance in the South Atlantic. Based on trans-scalar ocean governance, these structures must go beyond naval collaboration to encompass aerial and satellite surveillance capabilities, enhancing regional efforts to leverage the utility of technologies to support African decision-making on maritime security governance.
Authors: Sabrina Medeiros (Lusófona University) , Daniele Dionisio da Silva (UFRJ)* -
NATO states and Japan share much in common, including core values of democracy, rule of law, human rights, and free markets. They also share a mutual security provider in the United States. Yet despite many common interests across economic, political, and security domains, relations remained strikingly undeveloped for most of the post-WWII era. This gradually changed in the early 2000s following 9/11, and again in the 2010s with the emergence of a more expansionist China. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO-Japan relations have been dramatically upgraded. This paper addresses how the evolution of NATO-Japan cooperation has been principally driven by their respective security scopes and the idea of a shifting ‘geography of danger’. When NATO and Japan are focused on regional issues, such as border disputes, security interests are incompatible and cooperation is sluggish. Yet as NATO and Japan expand their scopes globally to incorporate such issues cyber and supply chains, security interests align and cooperation is spirited. In systematically tracing this transformation and the practices it entails over the post-Cold-War period, we illustrate the past and present interlinkages between the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic and offer insight into the future course of NATO-Japan relations amidst what former NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg has termed the shifting geography of danger.
Authors: Wrenn Yennie Lindgren (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)) , Matthew Brummer (GRIPS Tokyo)* -
Given the military and political utility that partners can bring to missions and operations, it is straightforward to understand why NATO member states welcome their contributions. Partners can enhance both military and civilian capabilities that member states do not readily possess or are unwilling to provide, while external contributions also bolster the legitimacy and visibility of the Alliance’s international action through extended multilateralism. The same cannot be said, however, for partners’ motives for engagement–particularly in the case of those for which membership is not an option, such as non-European partners. Indeed, their participation in NATO-led multinational military operations has received limited scholarly attention and remains undertheorized, as extant research generally amounts to a disparate body of literature lacking a systematic understanding of partners’ motivations. These are puzzling, since partners do not enjoy the same alliance benefits accorded to member states–notably treaty-based security guarantees–that might otherwise incentivize burden sharing in military operations. This study focuses on NATO’s ISAF mission in Afghanistan and seeks to explain the patterns of partner-state contributions. Mirroring previous research on democratic participation in multinational military operations and NATO burden sharing, it employs qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to test a multicausal theoretical framework. Results are expected to document the complex interplay of multiple causal paths leading NATO partners to commit capabilities to ISAF, thereby contributing to a more systematic understanding of partnership dynamics in multinational military cooperation.
Author: Benjamin Bertrand (University of St. Gallen)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Society and Security in the Asia-Pacific: Mutual (De)construction and Governance Chal-lengesSponsor: Asian Political and International Studies AssociationConvener: Ella Bullard (BISA)Chair: Christian Schafferer
-
Southeast Asia is deeply affected by conflict and conflictual legacies, whether colonial, Cold War, territorial, ideological, religious, or related to resources. A premium is placed on national economic development, security, political sovereignty and territorial integrity. De-spite dramatic progress in economic development and governance, however, major chal-lenges to human security endure. In some cases, these have been exacerbated by national security and development policymaking. At the same time human insecurity and distributive injustices threaten to undermine peace. This presentation addresses Southeast Asian excep-tionalism towards global governance, the successes of regional governance initiatives, but also whether they can deal with contemporary challenges. It further deconstructs the nega-tive and counter-productive impact of state-centric security and development foci while also broadening the analysis of human security contributions to include conflict drivers from the arena of human development. In other words, analysis of the spillover between traditional and non-traditional security perspectives is expanded along both the vertical and horizontal axes. The problems are illustrated by case study analysis of two of the most challenged countries in the region, Lao PDR and Timor-Leste.
Author: Brendan Howe (Ewha Womans University) -
This paper examines how the integration of military elites into political and economic spheres undermines political accountability during democratic backsliding. Moving beyond overt tactics such as electoral manipulation or court-packing, it argues that elite recruitment, that is the embedding of military figures in civilian governance and business, can gradually erode checks and balances without direct military intervention. A new theoretical framework identifies three pathways through which elite recruitment leads to weakened accountability: (1) patronage and commercialism, in which control over economic resources establishes loyalty networks that circumvent institutional oversight, (2) executive delegation, in which civilian leaders’ reliance on military elites establishes dependencies that diminish oversight, and (3) normative diffusion, in which military participation in civilian roles normalizes and validates their influence. Through comparative case studies of Indonesia and the Philip-pines, the paper analyses formal recruitment (cabinet appointments, judicial posts, and state enterprises) and informal recruitment (business networks, advisory roles, and media sym-bolism). The paper demonstrates how these processes reconfigure accountability structures and blur civilian-military boundaries. By conceptualizing elite recruitment as a subtle form of militarization, the study contributes to debates on democratic erosion and provides poli-cymakers with insights for identifying and mitigating gradual, nonviolent threats to demo-cratic governance.
Author: Carmen Wintergest (Heidelberg University) -
This paper explores how the Kuomintang’s (KMT) legacy of securitisation and defence infrastructure in Taiwan during Martial Law (1949–1987) continues to influence national identity and ontological security. It emphasises Taiwan’s evolving international position and how this legacy shapes collective self-understanding. The research investigates civil society responses to the removal of military cinemas, the demolition of veteran villages, and the transformation of the port and waterfront of Taiwan’s southern metropolis, Kaohsiung, since the early 2000s. It considers how dismantling Cold War-era infrastructure affects public perceptions of the self and “the other” – particularly China. Drawing on insights from ontological security studies, the paper analyses how physical infrastructures once helped stabilise Taiwan’s identity under authoritarian rule, and how their removal in a liber-alising, democratic context generates both anxieties and opportunities for reimagining na-tional narratives. The study highlights the interaction of civil-military relations, spatial memory, and Taiwan’s changing foreign policy stance amid external threats and internal shifts. The research supports a documentary film project, Ghosts of the ROC, which visu-alises these contested spaces and personal stories, offering a reflective perspective on how infrastructure mediates Taiwan’s international self-positioning amidst ongoing geopolitical tensions.
Authors: Malte Phillip Kaeding (University of Surrey) , Heidi Wang-Kaeding (Keele University) -
The prospect of reunification between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) continues to shape South Korea’s political discourse, national identity, and security strategy. Although unification remains a constitutional aspira-tion, its perceived desirability and feasibility have shifted across generations amid persistent military threats, alliance politics, and regional competition. This study employs latent class analysis (LCA) to identify unobserved subgroups within South Korean society defined by shared patterns of identity, threat perception, and policy preference. Using data from the Unification Perception Survey (2007–2024), it examines how these latent structures evolve over time and across generations. The analysis uncovers complex trade-offs among security concerns, economic burdens, and moral-ethnic obligations. Findings indicate a declining belief in unification as an “essential” goal and rising support for peaceful coexistence or deterrence-based stability, particularly among younger cohorts. The study contributes to understanding South Korea’s evolving national identity and security politics by (1) concep-tualizing identity as a multidimensional, security-embedded construct; (2) linking genera-tional socialization to changing threat perceptions; and (3) showing how internal identity diversity constrains and enables foreign policy choices. Together, the findings illuminate how identity and security interact in shaping South Korea’s unification discourse.
Author: Christian Schafferer (Overseas Chinese University) -
This research aims to examine the question of why and how one country has sustained a continuous civil movement against authoritarian rule, while the other grapples with estab-lishing a culture of civil society or fostering an enabling environment, by employing a com-parative case study as part of the qualitative research methodology, between North Korea and Myanmar (Burma) under the authoritarian regime. For example, ordinary citizens in North Korea face challenges in organising effective resistance against the regime. The po-tential for significant change in North Korean society lies with economic elites, specifically the middle-income class and street-level bureaucrats. However, they have tended to align themselves with the existing power structure and preserve their privileged status in society. Thus, civil society would play a crucial role in preventing corruption and narrowing societal gaps. Although the North Korean regime does not function for its people, international aid can bring about changes by supporting capacity building and development. This was evi-dent in the Central and Eastern European countries during the democratic transition period, where international aid served as a catalyst for instilling a culture of accountability and ex-panding market-associated changes for civil society empowerment. Yet, there are challenges in how international aid can function in a country like North Korea, where the state regime is hesitant to accept external aid support, especially from so-called Western countries, not to mention the current sanctions regime. With this in mind, the proposed research will carry value-added because it is rarely dealt with in the field of study.
Author: Sojin Lim (University of Lancashire)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / Soft Power and Discursive CompetitionSponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)Chair: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)Discussant: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
-
The war in Ukraine has generated unprecedented global debate, much of it unfolding across digital platforms. While scholarly attention has largely focused on Russian state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation, a striking but underexplored phenomenon is the role of non-Russian voices – particularly Western bloggers and former military veterans – in actively supporting and amplifying Russia’s war effort online. These actors, often with significant followings on Twitter/X, YouTube, Telegram, and Substack, act as informal advocates of Russian narratives, blending personal authority with alternative media ecosystems. This project asks, why do these individuals support Russia, and how does Moscow’s soft power resonate with them? Drawing on digital ethnography, discourse and content analysis, and social network mapping, the study examines the ideological framings, lived experiences, and geopolitical imaginaries that underpin this support. It explores how admiration for Russian strength and order, resentment of perceived Western decline, and narratives of betrayal by political elites intersect with military and cultural identities. By situating these voices in wider currents of illiberal attraction and anti-establishment sentiment, the research challenges simplistic accounts of ‘brainwashing’ and highlights the agency of these actors in adapting and reframing Kremlin talking points. In doing so, the project contributes to debates on authoritarian soft power, transnational influence operations, and the porous boundaries between state-driven propaganda and grassroots digital activism. It raises important ethical considerations around researching politically sensitive online communities. Ultimately, the study sheds light on how Russia’s war is legitimised and sustained in Moscow, and in global digital publics far beyond Russia’s borders.
Author: Stephen Hall (University of Bath) -
This paper examines how Russian international relations and political science scholarship has constructed NATO’s role and legitimacy in relation to Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden). While Russian officials have long framed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential security threat, the intensity of such narratives varies sharply across neighboring regions. Why, for instance, was Ukraine’s NATO aspiration presented as a casus belli, whereas NATO membership in the Baltics or Nordics provoked little comparable alarm?
Drawing on a systematic review of Russian-language academic publications from 1991 to 2025, the paper analyzes how scholars have narrated NATO’s presence, characterized each region’s relationship with the alliance, and recommended Russia’s appropriate response. Using discourse analysis, it identifies meta-narratives of encirclement, betrayal, and civilizational hierarchy.
The analysis shows that Russian academia produces a selective logic of threat rooted not in consistent security concerns, but in the imperial reimagining of identity and space. Ukraine is discursively constructed as an “improper self” whose Western alignment violates Russia’s imagined boundaries; the Baltics as a “lost frontier”; and the Nordics as “disappointing neutrals.” These narratives expose not security dilemmas or material threats, but the persistence of an imperial epistemology that reimagines power and hierarchy as constructed features of Russia’s neighborhood. The paper contributes to debates on Russian strategic culture, critical security studies, and the epistemic foundations of empire in international relations.
Author: Artur Nadiiev (University of Nottingham) -
International higher education mobility has long been considered as both a source and an indicator of a nation’s soft power. The experience of spending a longer period of time, often at a formative life stage, in a foreign country, can have a strong socialising effect on the inwardly mobilise students. The language skills, cultural familiarity and affective ties, as well as the personal connection forged may shape a person’s life path and worldview. Among other beneficiaries, such ties are especially likely to work in the favour of the host country as the country is likely to become more intelligible and sympathetic to foreign citizens, who in turn may behave in ways that turn out to be of service to the host state. This experience can have a significant, ongoing impact as the students are disproportionately likely to go on to occupy leadership positions in the home countries, or even stay in the destination state, thereby contributing to ‘brain gain’. As such, encouraging the inflow of students from overseas can be an effective strategy to aid in the cultivation of the benefits of soft power. Yet, higher education mobility is not only a tool to build attraction abroad, but also a wider indicator of a polity’s soft power standing at a given point in time, as potential students are consumers on a dynamic and growing international marketplace; countries should appeal – across a range of economic, social, political, cultural and other matrices – to would-be buyers of their educational services. Thus, higher education mobility figures offer a highly informative insight into a given nation’s soft power attraction.
Author: Victoria Hudson (King's College London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Teaching for the Future: Pedagogical Innovation in International Studies
The future isn’t coming — it’s already here. This roundtable dares to ask: what if the way we teach International Studies is the very thing holding it back? As global crises grow more interconnected and student expectations shift, traditional models of lectures, seminars, and assessments appear increasingly outdated.
Bringing together pedagogical innovators, the roundtable rethinks how we teach, who we teach for, and what we teach toward. It will explore what kinds of teaching practices can address the complexity of global politics, how diverse methodologies shape students’ understandings of international realities, and what pedagogical innovation means in a world of crisis, inequality, and digital transformation. It also asks: are our students ready — or are we the ones who aren’t? How can we, as International Studies educators, take the next steps in exploring what is possible — and what is needed — in contemporary education?
Contributors will share examples of experimentation and risk-taking in pedagogy, including immersive simulations, decolonised and multilingual teaching, digital innovations using AI or VR, and student-led curriculum design. Together, these discussions aim to advance a more adaptive, inclusive, and future-oriented International Studies pedagogy.
Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupChair: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)Participants: John Paul Salter (UCL) , Carmen Fulco (Kings College London) , Hillary Briffa (King's College London) , Jeremy Moulton (University of York) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / The IPE of European UnionSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
Geographical indications (GIs) are the most political form of intellectual property in EU trade policy. Unlike patents or trademarks, they tie value to place, tradition, and cultural heritage, making them identity-laden instruments of regulation. While the European Commission promotes GIs as protecting farmers and exporting regulatory standards, their role in trade negotiations is paradoxical. In some agreements, GIs serve as deal-makers, offering symbolic wins that facilitate domestic support and external concessions (as in CETA or Japan). In others, they become deal-breakers, provoking resistance from generic-term producers abroad and intensifying ratification struggles (as in Mercosur or Australia).
This paper asks: why do GIs smooth agreement in some cases while derailing others? Drawing on a mixed-methods design, it combines an original dataset of EU trade agreements (2000–present) with comparative case studies of Mercosur, CETA, Japan, and Australia. Quantitative models test whether the intensity and design of GI chapters affect negotiation outcomes, while process tracing and discourse analysis unpack how GIs are framed as “farmer protection,” “cultural heritage,” or “quality.”
The paper advances debates on regulatory power Europe, agri-food politics, and politicisation by reframing GIs as conditional bargaining levers. It contributes both theoretically and practically, identifying design features that mitigate deadlock risks in highly politicised trade negotiations.
Author: Emilio Del Pupo (University of Helsinki) -
With hardening border controls and sanctions regimes, advances by anti-immigration parties, and fragile economic growth across diverse geographies, the transnational mobility of high-net-worth individuals has gained greater prominence in literature spanning international political economy and migration studies. Schemes offering visas and citizenship through investment requirements represent attractive options for elites seeking to hedge against volatility at home. European Union access has proved particularly lucrative, and Brussels has led in pressing member states to alter or scrap these policies.
Via a comparative, qualitative content analysis supplemented by elite interviews and covering Malta and Cyprus, this paper asks how the legitimacy of investment migration policies is constructed in interactions between governments and domestic constituencies. Located on irregular migration routes, these two small states have both granted naturalisation and residency via investment to several thousand third-country nationals over the last decade but exhibited significantly divergent responses to EU pressure.
How are high-net worth arrivals and their societal value framed and related to other categories of third-country residents and wider national policy agendas? What transnational networks and ideological projects do these policies reflect and appeal to? Examining how the value of elite mobility is contested domestically provides granularity on the commodification and stratification of mobility rights, the regulation of wealth in the global economy, and the strategies employed by small states to navigate international relations.
Author: Jacob Grech (European University Institute) -
For decades after establishing the EU, member state representatives, policymakers, business representatives, members of the European Parliament, academic experts and numerous others have discussed why and how the EU should harmonize corporate tax systems. In 2011, a concrete legislative proposal – the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) – was put forward after over a decade of development. While negotiations seemingly went nowhere, the idea was slightly modified and then re-launched in 2016. This paper argues that the re-launch of the CCCTB as an anti-avoidance tool in 2016 can partly be explained by the rise of a centre-left project that successfully politicized the issue of corporate taxation since 2012 – well after the global financial crisis. However, the structural power of capital, manifested amongst other things in the existing network of tax havens and the continued ability of mobile capital to shift profits, proved decisive in the prevention of any political agreement on adopting the CCCTB. Assuming a historical materialist policy analysis, this paper explores not only the struggle over corporate taxation between capital and a centre-left project and how this materialized through EU institutions, but also unravels the overlapping as well as opposing interests of different capital fractions. In doing so, it shines a light on how the ‘case of taxation’ can expose the persistent need for national borders – and, thus, states – within a neoliberal project, while the latter is often characterized to be solely focused on globalisation and liberalisation of capital flows. Drawing on 28 expert interviews and an in-depth analysis of meeting reports of the Council of the EU, this paper contributes to our understanding of how underlying power relations shape tax policy, because it regards the state not as an actor itself, but as the terrain through which the struggle over taxation materializes.
Author: Indra Römgens (Radboud University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / The state, personified: Whither IR’s contested subjectSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConveners: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University) , Bianca Naude (University of the Free State)Chair: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
-
This paper revisits Alexander Wendt’s claim that states are persons, arguing that while the analogy is conceptually compelling, it remains ontologically and ethically incomplete. Drawing on constructivist and post-structuralist thought, it contends that the personhood of the state cannot be understood apart from its capacity for violence. Like human beings, a state’s moral and legal consciousness does not precede violence but emerges through it. Morality, ethics, and international law therefore function not merely as constraints upon violence, but as discursive frameworks that render it intelligible, legitimate, and, at times, necessary. Through an analysis of contemporary global responses to Ukraine and Gaza, the paper demonstrates how moral narratives selectively humanise or dehumanise states, revealing the performative nature of ethical judgement in international society. By reframing the state as both a moral and violent actor, it argues for a conception of statehood in which morality is contingent upon power and harm, rather than transcendent. This reconceptualisation exposes the uneasy coexistence of violence and virtue at the heart of the modern international order and offers a lens through which to rethink the ethical and political dimensions of state action in a globally contested world.
Author: Matshepo Tshabalala (University of Witwatersrand) -
Alexander Wendt (2004) worried that his theory of ‘the state as person’ allowed only ‘an impoverished and truncated’ kind of person – an “‘artificial” person’ rather than a “‘natural” one’ – in the absence of an account of ‘collective consciousness’. This paper will make three claims in response to Wendt’s unease. First, it will argue that Wendt’s pathbreaking work valuably demonstrated that IR’s pervasive state-as-agent assumption need not be conceived merely metaphorically – a move with profound ethical as well as ontological significance. Second, it will suggest that his iconic claim that ‘states are people too’ anticipated a regressive tendency in contemporary IR theory among positions that seek to defend the agency of the state by reviving anthropomorphising moves and seeming to link the adequacy of a defence of state agency to how closely the state can be shown to mirror flesh-and-blood individuals in every respect (including, for example, the possession of consciousness). Third, it will look to the AI-driven ‘intelligent machines’ of the 21st century to construct a typology of distinct variations on agency and moral agency for IR – ‘flesh-and-blood’, ‘institutional’, and ‘synthetic’ – which problematizes Wendt’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ agents and defends a robust, unapologetically non-human account of (moral) agency.
Author: Toni Erskine (Australian National University) -
An implicit feature of International Relations (IR) scholarship since Hobbes, the concept of state personhood acquired an explicit vocabulary 25 years ago when Alexander Wendt argued that “states are people too”. While still contested, theories building on the idea that states can be treated like persons have proliferated over the past two decades. Though marked by significant epistemological divergence, these approaches assume – to some degree or another – ontological flatness between states and their constituents. The move has been both productive and contentious: while it has enabled novel articulations of state agency, it has attracted critique for erasing power hierarchies embedded in social and political life. Grounded in dualist metaphysics where ontological unity is assumed to erase difference, these critiques commit an important category error: through a read of Advaita Vedanta, Daoist cosmology, and the philosophy of Ubuntu, the paper demonstrates that difference is not subsumed by unified ontologies, but constitutive of it – saturating being with form and texture. Seeing state personhood through this lens allows IR to retain the concept’s analytic power without sacrificing sensitivity to the inequalities of social relations. This (re)opens space to think through international politics unconstrained by the problematic dualisms that have long structured the discipline’s epistemic imagination.
Author: Bianca Naude (University of the Free State) -
This paper explores whether Sylvia Wynter’s redefinition of the human offers a viable response to the question of “human nature” and the meaning of “personhood” in International Relations (IR). Rejecting essentialist conceptions inherited from Western modernity, Wynter exposes the colonial overrepresentation of “Man” as the universal human, an epistemic fiction that grounds IR’s rationalist and liberal paradigms. By contrast, she proposes a view of humanity as hybrid, biocultural, and narratively constituted: a species that lives through meaning rather than fixed essence. Read alongside Lacan, this conception gains psychoanalytic depth. For Lacan, the human subject is structured around a constitutive lack, an existential void that compels symbolic and fantasmatic constructions. “Man,” in Wynter’s sense, appears as one such fantasy: a culturally specific attempt to fill the void of being and universalise a Eurocentric ideal as human nature. Together, Wynter and Lacan reveal how states, ideologies, and institutions reproduce global orders that manage this lack through symbolic structures. Reimagining the human as a meaning-seeking, narratively grounded being destabilises IR’s naturalised assumptions of egoism and rationality, opening spaces for psychoanalytical, decolonial, and existential approaches to world politics, where the question of human nature is not answered but continually re-enacted through stories of being.
Author: Marco Vieira (University of Birmingham)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Roundtable / Value Struggles in Contemporary Capitalism
The question of how value is created, appropriated and distributed is at the centre of current international political economy discussions. What is the ‘value’ of things, services and experiences? Who decides what value they have? How is value imbricated with moral, ethical and political ‘values’? What valuation processes are employed to assess value? What are the struggles around value creation and appropriation, and how do they change in time? How do we account for the material, immaterial and experiential elements of value? These are all key questions that inform the way power is exercised in the pursuit of economic activity, including in global value chains. In other words, struggles around ‘value’ are key for understanding key dynamics in contemporary capitalism, including their distributional consequences for producers, workers and nature – both in the global South and the global North.
The roundtable brings together scholars who have engaged with various forms of analysis on value creation, capture, and redistribution from a range of perspectives and in different locations. The panellists are invited to reflect on how these processes have informed their work and the IPE field more broadly – and to reflect on what insights the concept of ‘value struggles’ could bring to thinking about current economic transformations and challenges. The panel coincides with the 2025 publication of Stefano Ponte’s book ‘Value struggles: Looking at capitalism through the wine glass’ (Bloomsbury Academic), which this panel also seeks to celebrate. Stefano’s book examines three sites of struggle: place, nature and people (class, race and gender) and how different ‘worlds of valuation’ are leveraged by specific groups of actors to maintain existing power imbalances or to attempt to challenge them.
Sponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupChair: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)Participants: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick) , stefano ponte (copenhagen business school) , Liam Campling (Queen Mary University London) , Peter Newell (University of Sussex) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / War and Civilian HarmSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: Joe Murphy (The University of Edinburgh)
-
What role does agent collaboration between national elites, local elites, and the civilian population play during episodes of ethnic cleansing? How does the tripartite collaboration between these agents impact the operationalisation of ethnic cleansing? The literature on ethnic cleansing has undergone several advancements since its inception, particularly in our understanding of strategic and pre-war socio-political factors and how these impact the onset of ethnic cleansing. The goal of our research is to provide a theoretical framework for better understanding the internal dynamics of ethnic cleansing. We posit that analysing the role of agent collaboration between national elites, local elites, and civilians is essential for understanding how and why ethnic cleansing unfolds the way it does. Each agent has a unique function for the realisation of the ethnic cleansing policy. Ethnic cleansing should not be interpreted as a purely top-down process but one wherein a tripartite of collaborators is fundamental for operationalising and driving the violent cleansing process. To illustrate our theory, we analyse the typical cases of the Kosovo War (1998-1999) and the ongoing conflict in the Rakhine State, Myanmar. Drawing upon detailed primary and secondary data, our examination of these cases illustrates the necessity of agent collaboration during ethnic cleansing and the importance of analysing ethnic cleansing from different methodological perspectives.
Authors: Matthew Tentler (University of Glasgow) , Nicole Loring (Southern New Hampshire University)* , Damir Kovačević (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire)* -
“Water and blood cannot flow together,” declared Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, on 12 May, 2025. This was a dictate to revoke water sharing with Pakistan in the wake of violence in Kashmir. Recent conflicts around the world have brought renewed attention to the use of water in warfare. This use is at odds with a longstanding moral current – a water taboo – in the international community that prescribes high standards for water sharing and denounces water weaponisation as morally objectionable. What is the status of the water taboo today? Extending norm evolution scholarship into norm regression, this essay analyses the successes and limits of a moral aversion to weaponising water in war. Qualitative foreign policy analysis of the United States, India, Russia and Ukraine in the early-mid 2020s indicates that the taboo’s influence has been moderated by permissive interpretations of military necessity and construction of the adversary as located outside of the norm community. These findings contribute new insights into taboo limits in international conflict, and offer future avenues for policy to charter peace and security around water.
Author: Charlotte Grech-Madin (Australian National University) -
This paper examines how brutality against LGBT people during the Colombian Civil War functioned as a mechanism of social transformation through processes of dehumanization. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork in conflict-affected regions and extensive archival research, I argue that Colombian paramilitaries weaponized anti-LGBT violence as a semiotic tool that both communicated social reforms as well as disciplined the local population into compliance. By transforming bodies into symbols, these actors used violence to socialize civilians into new moral orders that redefined belonging. In my two field sites of Montes de María and Magdalena Media, I trace how the language and violence of dehumanization enabled moral justification for brutality, allowing civilians to interpret anti-LGBT violence as necessary, even righteous. This violence thus reified difference and also reconfigured social identity itself: remaking victims’ personhood, reshaping their communities’ social position, and redrawing the boundaries of the polity.
Author: Samuel Ritholtz (University of Oxford) -
We have become accustomed to talking about civilian casualties with reference to the legal codes and moral norms that regulate the harm inflicted upon civilians, but surprisingly little attention has focused on how we see this harm in various visual forms—from tables, charts and graphs through to images, video and artwork. Drawing on Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière and Jenny Edkins, this paper will outline the theoretical foundations that underpin an ambitious new research project on visualizing civilian harm, which examines what civilian harms we see and how we see these harms. Focusing on three visual representations from the recent conflict in Afghanistan, this paper will examine how these visualizations worked to reinforce particular notions about what counts as acceptable violence, circumscribing who can be seen as a civilian and what counts as a harm whilst also obscuring the actual violence that was inflicted on Afghan civilians. At the same time, this paper will consider the counter-visualizations that were constructed in response, focusing on how these visual representations could disrupt a normative framework that renders civilian lives so losable in certain situations.
Author: Thomas Gregory (University of Auckland)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
WE03 Panel / What next for UK climate and environmental politics?Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow)
-
Since becoming Green Party leader in 2025, Zack Polanski has openly described himself as an eco-populist, arguing that “Britain is not broken because of migration. Britain is broken because of inequality.” His attempt to reframe “broken Britain” around inequality and the climate crisis marks one of the clearest efforts in recent British politics to reclaim populism from the right. What makes this project particularly interesting is the way Polanski performs political strength. Rather than relying on the familiar figure of the “strong man”, he projects conviction through openness and moral clarity, often speaking plainly on issues such as racism and inequality. This style captures key elements of populist authenticity while rejecting its exclusionary tendencies.
This paper uses Polanski’s leadership as a case study through which to consider whether a distinct form of left climate populism is beginning to emerge in Britain. Drawing on post-Marxist and critical approaches to populism, it asks whether eco-populism can serve as a genuinely transformative project or whether it risks reproducing the moral and institutional constraints that limited Corbynism. The paper argues that Polanski’s attempt to centre inequality within ecological politics reveals both the enduring appeal of populism’s antagonistic logic and its potential to be re-directed toward inclusion and sustainability rather than nostalgia and division.
Author: Luis Harrison (Leeds Beckett University) -
Could the acceleration of the climate crisis create an opening for ecofascist politics? In this study we refine theoretically our understanding of ecofascism, acknowledging the inherently offensive, expansionist logic of fascism represented in the Volk, Kampf, Lebensraum triad. We then use representative survey experiment data from 1,967 UK residents to examine how susceptible the electorate is to such ecofascist ideas and whether exposure to climate change threat makes them more susceptible. Findings indicate that approximately one-fifth of the UK population is susceptible to an ecofascist ideology rooted in Volk, Kampf and Lebensraum. A sense of climate despair and anomie stemming from climate change threats, combined with predispositions toward social dominance and authoritarianism, and a conflicted relationship with nature, increases susceptibility to ecofascism significantly. We conclude by emphasising that this susceptibility could be exploited by right-wing actors in the future and the necessity to develop progressive responses to climate change threat.
Authors: Alex Beresford (University of Leeds) , Viktoria Spaiser (University of Leeds)* , Kris Dunn (University of Leeds)* -
The governance of the UK is often categorised as a ‘two-party’ system; but at least four UK parties have not received this memo. In particular, the 2024 General Election revealed an evolving electoral landscape, in which growing polarisation saw the Green Party, and Reform UK, come in second place in 138 of the 650 constituencies. As Labour secured a 174-seat majority with just 33.7% of the vote, in the next general election, very small swings could lead to a transformed House of Commons. In response, we ask: where are the sites of starkest political polarisation in the UK, and which issues are at the forefront of these locations? To answer these questions, we have created a full dataset of all 138 such parliamentary constituencies, and their wards, and their boroughs, resulting in 1916 cases. We classify these cases according to certain key themes, such as whether they include universities, and map these against the environmental narratives in play across these constituencies, which we analyse further through interviews with local party figures. We find that Anti-Net Zero Populism, alongside an emerging ‘green populism’, represent the frontline at which political contestation is occurring in the UK, even if there are few seats in which the Greens and Reform are in competition with one another. Our results emphasise the importance of climate politics, and environmental protection more generally, as a core electoral issue in the UK, and speak to the ongoing partisanship and polarisation of environmental politics that has returned since the late 2010s
Authors: Soham Banerjee* , Matthew Paterson (University of Manchester)* , Paul Tobin* , Louise Thompson* , Lucie Middlemiss (University of Leeds)* , James Jackson (University of Manchester) -
The Climate Change Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 was the first legislation in Northern Ireland to address the Sustainable Development Goals and climate policy in Northern Ireland; its introduction also meant that Northern Ireland was the last country in the UK to install such climate legislation. Civil society actors were instrumental in reaching this landmark. Yet was this moment of unprecedented cross-community climate support in a country where the discourse of politics is dominated by national identity tensions only possible because of the collapse of the devolved Executive? This presentation considers the devolved multilevel governance of the Sustainable Development Goals in Northern Ireland with the example of the Climate Change Act. It discusses opportunities to increase participatory democracy and build cross-community support. It then indicates the challenge regional political tensions pose to climate policy governance with reference to Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the UK and on the island of Ireland. It argues that the opportunities and challenges in Northern Ireland reflect the inflection point for democratic satisfaction at which global politics finds itself in the face of the climate crisis. While the Act shows a chance for cooperation focussed on a collective future that is driven by innovations in participation, political leaders’ prioritisation of regional tensions risks democratic deficiencies which question not only the governance of the SDGs but the sustainability of the democratic system in Northern Ireland.
Author: Saoirse McGilligan (University of St Andrews)
-
-
4:30 PM
→
4:45 PM
Break 15m
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
WE03 / Conference Keynote: Kimberly Hutchings - 'Violence and the meaning of peace' SPONSORED BY THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY
-
6:30 PM
→
8:30 PM
WE03 Conference event / BISA 2026 Reception
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Advances in IPE TheorySponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
The New International Economic Order (NIEO) played a formative role in shaping International Political Economy (IPE), not just as a redistributive project of the Global South, but as a catalyst for rethinking the governance of multinational corporations. Sparked by mounting evidence of corporate misconduct – from transfer pricing abuses to political interference – the NIEO agenda helped institutionalize a global conversation about the structural power of firms and the limits of national regulation. I show how this moment gave rise to a rich and until recently largely forgotten, strand of early IPE scholarship focused on “corporate escape”: i.e. the strategic evasion of accountability by multinational enterprises.
Rather than viewing the NIEO as a utopian initiative, I trace how its associated technocratic ambitions – especially through the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) and the broader Code of Conduct movement – shaped the early contours of IPE as a discipline. This includes the development of regulatory proposals, accounting standards, and conceptual tools that foregrounded the political agency of firms. I also recover the contributions of Northern economic nationalists and public intellectuals, whose work paralleled and informed NIEO debates, challenging bipolar core-periphery models. By reconstructing this intellectual and institutional history, I argue that the NIEO’s legacy offers a critical vantage point for understanding contemporary struggles over corporate power. It invites us to revisit foundational questions in IPE about sovereignty, transparency, and the epistemic conditions of economic governance, with a renewed interdisciplinary lens.Author: Matti Ylönen (University of Helsinki) -
Scholars of Global Political Economy (GPE) have been relatively slow to draw on queer theory, in part due to perceived tensions between materialist and postmodernist approaches. Some of these tensions have been resolved over the past two decades through an emerging body of research that seeks to harness queer insights for the study of diverse political economic phenomena. While this literature has usefully centralised matters of sexuality in GPE—and specifically documented how (queer) sexual and gender power relations are constitutive of the global economy—it largely conceives of queer as a theoretical toolbox to be used in ad hoc and topic-specific ways. The relationship between queer theory and methodology in GPE research is scarcely discussed. This paper addresses this gap by identifying two key ways through which the praxis of GPE research can be ‘queered’: firstly, by conceiving queer as a mode of inquiry in GPE; and secondly, by deploying queer as a method for GPE. This combination of mode and method offers an alternative way of thinking-doing research in GPE that unsettles taken-for-granted categories, norms, and meanings and parses the power relations that undergird them. It further spotlights how processes of inclusion/exclusion work to (re)produce the field of GPE and offers fresh critical insights into what GPE scholars know and how they come to know it.
Authors: Magdalena Svetlana Rodekirchen (University of Manchester) , Ellie Gore (University of Manchester) -
We often consider workers and consumers as separate, binarised actors in systems of global production – workers produce, and consumers consume. Ostensibly, when it comes to struggles to improve working conditions for producers, those binarised sets of actors have adverse or even fundamentally divergent interests, with workers wanting higher wages and consumers lower prices. Research on labour agency has identified myriad forms of agency that workers exercise in this regard (both individually and collectively), while other literature has identified marketplace decision making and more direct forms of activism as forming the core repertoire of consumer agency.
What is the relationship between worker and consumer agency? At the empirical level, we have observed alliances between worker organisations and consumer activists, with diverse outcomes between cases. Further, consumers often feel they understand something of workers’ experience through engagement with ethical certification and other corporate affirmations of decent work in global supply chains. This paper seeks to intervene at the conceptual level, however, to problematise the binarised identification of workers and consumers, when in capitalist economies, the vast majority of us are in fact both, potentially opening up space for solidarities. Focusing on food supply chains, it theorises the possibility for mutual formation of demands on the most powerful actors – namely supermarkets – and the barriers to doing so in the context of geographically dispersed industries, racialised worker repression and a global cost-of-living crisis.
Moving beyond industrial relations, market-oriented and social movements approaches to worker and consumer agency, the paper advances a political economy of worker-consumer relations and agency in an unstable global production regime. It argues for an everyday approach that foregrounds the potential and contradictions of combined worker-consumer agency for both disrupting and reproducing broader social relations of capitalist production and persistent, intensifying exploitation.
Author: Remi Edwards (Queen Mary University of London) -
This article introduces the concept of ontological imperialism to theorise how hierarchy is maintained within the global political economy through the stabilisation of meaning itself. Building on critical and postcolonial traditions in international political economy, it argues that domination today operates not only through material or institutional asymmetries, but through the ontological foundations that define what counts as knowledge, value, and legitimate order. Ontological imperialism describes the recursive process by which Northern actors and institutions universalise particular ontologies - of property, development, sustainability, or humanity - as the taken-for-granted basis of global cooperation. By tracing how these ontological premises underpin successive regimes of governance, the article reveals the limits of existing critical approaches that focus on exploitation, dependency, or ideology without examining how the very categories of political economy are constituted. The argument advances an ontological political economy framework that integrates material, epistemic, and ontological dimensions of power, showing how hierarchy persists through the reproduction of world-making assumptions rather than the imposition of rules alone. In doing so, it provides new theoretical foundations for analysing the endurance of empire within ostensibly post-colonial global orders.
Author: Asha Herten-Crabb (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
While there are many thousands of articles analysing the USA in leading International Political Economy journals, it is more rare to find research that looks at the sovereign political communities within American borders, such as the Navajo, Cherokee, Choctaw and the 524 federally recognised tribes within the territorial boundaries of the USA, composed of an estimated population of 5.2 million people. This is reflective of a larger trend of neglecting Indigenous communities globally, not just in the USA. How could greater representation of First Nations economic issues and thought improve the study of International Political Economy? In this paper, I theorise how greater attention to Indigenous Political Economy could serve to improve the field of study and the impact of political economy scholarship on marginalised groups global. I focus on three potential foci of research: First Nations economic policy, lessons drawn from ‘the Great Dying’ and Indigenous economic thought. There is relative lack of engagement regarding tribal public communications and Indigenous activism around political economy topics such as pipeline access, Stolen Sisters and data centre expansions. Political Economy scholarship on climate catastrophe literature rare engages with or seeks to learn from the first human made climate catastrophe that killed 90% of the Indigenous American population in the sixteenth century. Finally, ‘normal’ concepts in political economy, such as land and labour, still naturalise meanings generated from racialized and false understandings of the Americas in the early centuries of European colonialism. I conclude that the lack of engagement with these issues reproduces the racialized assumption that the sovereignty of these nations either does not exist or is not significant in an ostensible ‘International’ field of political economy. I conclude with an urgent call for amplifying First Nations in the field of study towards to production of an Indigenous Political Economy.
Author: Jessica Eastland-Underwood (Durham)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Art, Images and Affects: Rethinking IR through Aesthetic PracticesSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
The roles of murals in conflict and peace have been thoroughly explored in the past few decades, with increased consideration for visual analysis in International Studies. The roles of murals for political communication, territorial demarcation and memorialisation, among others, have been studied, with a focus on the images themselves, or on the role of murals in public space. In Belfast especially, researchers have shown the role of both traditional murals and new street art in the peace process.
This exploration has made clear how images in public space produce and reproduce narratives on the conflict and peace processes. It has also highlighted the political role of emotions in this, demonstrating how anger, grief and joy can be mobilised politically around murals. This paper will go further and interrogate the processes before the images, focusing on the site of production of street art. I will especially highlight the need to include ethnographic and participatory methods in these explorations, to go beyond the walls and images and understand the political processes that lead to painting a specific mural. Directly working with artists and activists in processes of street art creation inscribes itself in new directions for International Studies, with the development of both transdisciplinary and arts-based methods. It is especially central in grasping the political role of emotions in these processes, as artists and activists approach street art with hope, joy, as well as anger towards a stalling peace process.
Author: Marie Migeon (University of Basel) -
Donald Trump’s first White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky resonated around the world, breaking diplomatic norms and being labelled as “great television” by Trump himself. I take Trump’s comment seriously, analysing several foreign policy stunts by the second Trump administration as part of a larger shift away from rationalist logics of international relations and towards a “hyperreal” mode instead. Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” describes a state of discourse where the imaginary is no longer an abstraction of the real but rather entirely independent of it, the metaphor of a metaphor. I argue that hyperreal logic already dominates popular culture and social media discourse, making its extension into international politics the continuation of an ongoing ontological shift in Western societies. With his reality television background, Trump is a native of hyperreality who embraces spectacle and outrage in his politics. This article shows how seemingly outlandish proposals like the annexation of Canada are entirely logical in hyperreality, where the creation of spectacle and attraction of undivided attention are key modes of exercising power. Studying International Relations in an age of hyperreal politics then requires openness to methods and ideas already established in cultural studies and directing serious attention to the unserious but spectacular.
Author: Miklas Fahrenwaldt (University of Edinburgh) -
This paper examines the afterlife of the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian child whose body washed ashore in 2015, as a case study in the exhaustion of the iconic image. Initially framed as a catalyst for moral clarity and political response, the image appeared to crystallise public affect and prompt shifts in migration policy, particularly in Germany. Yet within weeks, its meaning fragmented under conditions of algorithmic circulation, media saturation, and securitised reframing.
Drawing on affect theory and psychoanalysis, the paper conceptualises this shift as a form of non-closure - an oscillation between iconic desire and epistemic instability. The Kurdi image did not stabilise meaning but exposed its volatility, triggering what Berlant (2011) calls cruel optimism: a structure of attachment to images that promise moral repair while delivering political fatigue.
The paper draws on media analysis, policy discourse, and scholarly commentary to show how the body-in-suffering becomes a site of overexposure rather than transformation. In doing so, it reframes iconicity not as a stabilising force but as a residual fantasy operating under liquid conditions of witnessing.Author: Marcelle Trote Martins (University of Manchester)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Atrocities and the Architecture of Global AccountabilitySponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupConvener: ILPG Working groupChair: Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England)
-
Over the course of its institutional life, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been criticized for the political asymmetry of its prosecutions and has repeatedly disavowed its obligation to investigate and prosecute certain violence. As a result, the contemporary project of so-called 'global justice' has been characterized by the same racialized asymmetries of imperial colonial projects which preceded the formation of the United Nations. It is this history that makes the present political moment appear as if a significant shift in the politics of responsibility. For the first time, Global South states seem to be using international courts to challenge underlying colonial logics. Two separate atrocity trials—at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and ICC—suggest this is a moment for optimism as they reckon with continuing colonial violence in real time. Drawing on resources from other contexts of political reckoning, this paper considers what happens to radical demands for accountability when they are channeled through liberal frameworks. I conduct a political ethnography of the atrocity trial for genocide to understand how and why perpetrators are found criminally responsible. I ask, why does the crime of genocide require the 'specific intent' (dolus specialis) to destroy a group, as such?
Author: Megan Manion (University of Minnesota) -
This paper provides a framework for studying international accountability creation. It argues that international accountability can create normative agency in three fashions: 1) a global-constitutionalism fashion embodying the meaning of a penalty for breaking the law that involves a collective action of a regional or global community to hold the wrongdoer accountable; 2) a deterrent fashion epitomizing the meaning of a preventive disciplinary form of correction; 3) and an expressivist fashion, in which accountability manifests as a materialization of knowledge production. To illustrate my argument, I investigate the accountability countermeasures taken in response to the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine as a case study. What Russia has attempted with Ukraine – an imperial takeover of a neighbour territory through forced occupation – marks a ‘watershed moment’ (Terlikowski et al. 2023) in the international system after the Second World War. I exemplify several accountability mechanisms by the EU: The Joint Investigation Team, International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression; The Core International Crimes Evidence Database, and trace the role which these initiatives played in the establishment of the Special Tribunal of Aggression against Ukraine.
Author: Cornelia Baciu (Saarland University / University of Copenhagen) -
What role does the defence counsel play in international criminal justice? This paper explores how the role of the defence counsel is understood in international criminal justice, interrogating what competing and various conceptualisations reveal about the character of international criminal law as both a legal practice and a normative project. Despite the centrality of legal representation to fair trial guarantees enshrined in international legal instruments—from the ICCPR to the statutes of international tribunals—defence lawyers as practitioners and participants within the practice of international criminal justice remain underexamined. This scholarly lacuna reflects the ambiguous and often uncomfortable position defence practitioners occupy within the field: essential to its legitimacy, yet institutionally and symbolically marginalised. Drawing on literature, tribunal statutes, and preliminary empirical research, the paper develops a conceptual framework to analyse how defence counsel navigate their complex position through five ideal-type archetypes: the (1) Criminal Lawyer, committed to protecting defendants’ rights; the (2) Officer of the Court, a coequal participant in truth-seeking; the (3) Provocateur, challenging the premises of international justice; the (4) Human Rights Advocate, pursuing normative reform through defence work; and the (5) Legitimator, stabilising the system’s procedural credibility. Ultimately, these archetypes illuminate how defence counsel function simultaneously as an insider and outsider to the practice of international criminal justice. The paper thus argues for an understanding of the defence not merely as a procedural safeguard but as a constitutive site where the meaning and legitimacy of international criminal justice is constructed, contested, and reproduced—bringing to light the kind of justice international criminal justice can, or cannot, deliver.
Author: Yuna Han -
Despite critiques from practitioners (Seils, 2016), academics (Robinson, 2010; Megret, 2010), and even the International Criminal Court (ICC) itself (OTP Strategic Plan, 2015), attempts to position the court as an active assistant in promoting and supporting domestic accountability efforts continue. Rather than focusing on these conceptual and normative debates (about what positive complementarity should be), this paper investigates what concrete actions the ICC has taken to further this principle (that is, examining what positive complementarity actually is). Through a detailed examination of ICC positive complementarity actions, the indicators of success the court has placed on itself (KPIs), and statements by the Office of the Prosecutor, this paper assesses the extent to which the ICC has translated its rhetorical commitment to positive complementarity into tangible action. The findings suggest that while the ICC has made a significant effort to reframe itself as a positive complementarity actor, this aspiration has largely failed to materialise in practice with attempts to rebrand as a supportive ‘hub’ for post-atrocity accountability largely concealing a highly hierarchical approach to post-conflict justice.
Authors: Leah Owen (Swansea University) , Carolina Carvalho (University of Coimbra (School of Economics))
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / Blue Justice: What research agenda for a sustainable and inclusive ocean
This roundtable will explore how International Relations and Politics can, or should, approach emerging global challenges in the ocean and advance blue justice in the context of growing blue economy developments and “blue acceleration” (Jouffray et al, 2020). While International Relations and environmental politics have only recently begun to engage with the ocean space, this neglect largely reflects dominant Western imaginaries, which have historically overlooked the ocean from a social science perspective. In contrast, other regions and cultural traditions have long recognized the ocean as a vital site of social, political, and epistemological significance. An increased interest in the past 15 years has resulted in further research and academic publications on the human geography on the marine environment and on ocean governance and policy. Yet, judging by the limited number of publications on the ocean in the main academic journals dedicated to environmental politics, further work is critically needed to address the interplay between blue development, power asymmetries and access to marine resources, sovereignty claims, global ocean sustainability, and the role and recognition of coastal communities in these processes. In other words, it is crucial to deepen our understanding of how future ocean developments can be just and fair (Germond-Duret et al., 2023) and to shape a “new politics for the ocean” (Armstrong, 2022). The roundtable will explore:
▪ how International Relations and Politics can approach emerging global challenges in the ocean
▪ how it can provide alternative knowledge on the very concept of ocean justice; not just why it matters and what it means, but who it matters to and what it means for whom
▪ barriers to enable different stakeholders, particularly ocean dependent communities to have fair access to the ocean and have their say in research and ocean policy
▪ creative approaches to bring ocean-dependent communities’ voices into research and decision-making processes
▪ actionable recommendations for scholarly agendas, funding priorities, and policy engagementIn addition to insights from the panellists, the roundtable discussion will incorporate visual material from around the globe (e.g. photographs, short video clips) offering diverse perspectives and grounding the conversation in lived experiences and global contexts.
Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: Celine Germond-Duret (Lancaster University)Participants: Antje Scharenberg (University of Southampton) , SENIA FEBRICA (Lancaster University) , Peter Newell (University of Sussex) , Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Cities and Infrastructures as sites of struggle over freedom and powerSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
How do empires "end" materially? This paper argues that post-imperial transitions operated not through clean diplomatic breaks but through infrastructure's violent attempts to impose territorial order onto populations empire had regionally entangled. Reframing Hiroshima not as a singular site of atomic detonation but as an imperial metropole deeply integrated into Japan's colonial circuits—connected to Korea through decades of labor mobilization, kinship networks, and military-industrial production—the paper examines how 1945-1947 repatriation infrastructure attempted to sort Korean atomic bomb survivors into bounded national territories yet revealed this as fundamentally impossible.
I develop "infrastructured regionalism" as an analytical framework attending to how material systems simultaneously enabled and constrained postwar mobility while producing the national categories through which populations were sorted. The paper demonstrates how infrastructure became the contested site where postwar boundaries were materially produced: repatriation bureaus collapsed atomic harm into generic war damage erasing colonial histories, regional disruptions (mines, disease, strikes) exceeded state control, and Korea's partition further fragmented what repatriation presumed as singular "homeland." Survivors navigated through rumor networks, unofficial boats, and circular movements that defied territorial logic, revealing empire's spatial entanglements persisting in bodies and routes no administrative reordering could eliminate.
The paper contributes to decolonial IR by demonstrating how infrastructure operated as regional geography-making: material systems that simultaneously attempted territorial sorting and perpetuated empire's cross-border entanglements, revealing postwar order as emerging through failures, exclusions, and the improvised circuits marginalized populations navigated.
Author: Minah Kang (Johns Hopkins University) -
Over the past few decades, China's ethnic policies have become flashpoints of discussion in Western media and international scholarship. In response to the complexities of ethnic relations, Chinese authorities have increasingly adopted a culturally oriented approach to shaping minority identities, aligning them with the state-promulgated framework of "unity in diversity" (Duoyuan Yiti)—a national identity of the Chinese nation comprising 56 officially recognised subordinate ethnic groups. Focusing on Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China, this study draws on nearly a year of fieldwork and 50 semi-structured interviews, alongside an analysis of ten officially designated cultural symbols, to examine how state-promoted representations of Mongolian culture contribute to identity formation. It argues that while these official cultural symbols, framed within the national narrative, contribute to the partial preservation of Mongolian traditions, they simultaneously construct a rigid and stereotypical image of nomadism. This portrayal detaches Mongolian culture from processes of urbanisation and modernisation, limiting its capacity to evolve. Consequently, this state-led culturalisation fosters a form of internal Orientalism within the Mongolian community itself, producing dichotomous discourses such as steppe versus city, nomadic versus agrarian, which deepen cultural anxieties and fuel fears of assimilation.
Author: Yannan Li (Lancaster University) -
Over the past decade, a discourse of civilisation that emphasises the cultural and traditional elements of Hinduism in a Hindu nationalist way has been circulating in Indian politics under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party – BJP). Accordingly scholars have intensified their efforts to understand the various political, diplomatic and economic aspects and implications of Indian civilisationalism (see: Haug and Roychoudhury, 2023; Mawdsley, 2023; Nartok, 2023, Chacko and Thakur, 2025). This paper furthers the discussion by focusing on the impact of Indian civilizationalism on urban space which has been marked by grand mega-projects evoking India’s civilizaitonal legacy. Accordingly, this paper poses the research question: How does the idea of revoking Hindu civilization manifest itself in New India’s urban design? The aim of this paper is to provide both a conceptual and empirical intervention into discussions about the manifestations of India’s civilizational legacy by conducting qualitative research based on extensive content analysis of three distinct but exemplary sites in India – an ancient site (Lothal) in Ahmedabad, a temple (Ram Mandir) in Ayodha and a memorial (Shiv Smarak) in Mumbai. The paper integrates perspectives from urban studies, geography and cultural studies. By combining and utilising concepts of “nationalist urbanisms” (Kusno, 2004), “financialised urbanity” (Lukas and Duran, 2019) and “geopoetics” (Nassar, 2023), the paper reveals how civilisational ideas intersect with material structures rooted in colonial and capitalist regimes of capital accumulation and how they are specifically utilised to advance BJP’s civilizational agenda in urban space at the intersection of public, private and cultural sectors.
Author: Esra Elif Nartok (Leiden University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / Co-producing Knowledge in International Studies: Challenges, possibilities and futures
Contemporary scholarship in International Studies is increasingly engaging with collaborative, co-produced, and participatory approaches to knowledge production, which seek to create knowledge with those directly affected. Despite this, they remain marginal in formal methodological discourse, and many scholars do not self-identify with the label "participatory". This roundtable convenes voices from across disciplines, fields, epistemic traditions, and geographic contexts to bring these diverse and long-standing practices into conversation. Our aim is to reflect on the promises and limitations of collaborative inquiry in international studies, identify areas of shared terrain, and ask what comes next for co-production in the field. Together, we ask: What are the specific benefits and obstacles to co-production in international studies research? How do different disciplines and fields navigate the constraints and opportunities of collaborative inquiry, and what best practices might be shared? Are our institutional systems and cultures set up to support co-production, and if not, what changes might be needed?
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Bryony Vince-Myers (The University of Sheffield)Participants: Bryony Vince-Myers (The University of Sheffield) , Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield) , Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Aberystwyth University) , Siddharth Tripathi (University of Erfurt) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Colonial Astropolitics and Terrestrial Space InfrastructuresSponsor: Astropolitics Working GroupConvener: Bleddyn Bowen (BISA)Chair: Sarah Dunn (University of Leicester)
-
This paper critically examines the development of space capabilities in Nigeria in the context of China’s increasing investment in foreign space development. While China’s investment in the Nigerian space economy has improved the country’s satellite infrastructure, this has also produced long-term dependencies that challenge the notion of independent development. As such, this paper engages with modernisation theory and seeks to assess the extent to which existing frameworks in international relations can help make sense of space capability development. This paper argues that the geopolitics of space, intertwined with national security agendas and foreign policy, can increasingly be found in the foreign development agendas of major space powers and deserves further critical attention within the space policy literature. As the case of Nigeria illustrates, one starting point for a deeper engagement with space capability development, is by looking closely at the perceived trade-off between technological development and dependency on established space powers. By examining the utility of existing development frameworks, e.g. modernisation theory, we further deepen the discussion to suggest that traditional theories fall short of encompassing the complexities that drive space capability development.
Authors: Kanzy Seireg (Government of Dubai, Economy and Tourism) , Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Contested Europeanness: Integration, Identity, and PowerSponsor: South East Europe Working GroupConvener: SEEWG Working groupChair: Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool)
-
This paper analyses the communication discourses between Kosovo and the European Union concerning Kosovo’s ‘Europeanness’ and its ‘European path,’ with particular attention to the manifestation of Kosovo’s domestic agency in these exchanges. Grounded in the theoretical framework of communicative action, the study employs critical discourse analysis to examine how Kosovo articulates its ‘Europeanness’ and negotiates its position vis-à-vis the EU. Kosovo remains in an ‘in-between’ state of being European and lingering on the path towards the EU, which has acted as its primary state-building actor and, since 2011, facilitator of the Kosovo–Serbia Dialogue. The research is motivated by the widening discursive gap between the EU and Kosovo, particularly following the formation of Albin Kurti’s government in 2021. It asks: How is Kosovo’s ‘Europeanness’ and its ‘European path’ contested within Kosovo-EU communication discourses? What do these contestations reveal about Kosovo’s domestic agency and its capacity for discursive influence? By examining how local actors challenge dominant EU narratives and articulate visions of Kosovo’s European trajectory, this paper explores the potential of speech and discourse as sites of agency and meaning-making in Kosovo’s relationship with the EU.
Author: Fjolla Ceku Sylejmani (University of Graz) -
The research examines how discourses of Europeanness are constructed and questioned in debates on EU enlargement, in the light of its contested transformative approach centered around democratisation and emerging geopolitical paradigm. It investigates how enlargement is framed discursively in the European Parliament and in the national parliaments of Serbia and Montenegro. These two SEE countries are marked by contrasting trajectories in the EU accession negotiations process in recent years. While Montenegro forges ahead as a frontrunner in EU accession negotiations, Serbia is experiencing stagnation after a decade long democratic backsliding and authoritarian drift, which shapes the position of these countries in the symbolic map of Europe. Using thematic analysis, the research identifies patterns in argumentation, value frameworks, and political narratives in MPs’ parliamentary speeches across all party groups, through which Europe and European identity are discursively constructed and redefined. We link our research to broader debates on different approaches to the enlargement policy and the role of enlargement discourses in shaping identity of both the EU and the candidate countries. By uncovering tensions between the EU’s normative self-representation as a democratising actor and the pragmatic approach to the enlargement, we shed a light on the contested meanings of Europeanness. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the political discourse surrounding Western Balkan integration from a perspective identity politics and offer insights into both the obstacles and opportunities shaping the future of the EU enlargement and (Southeast)European identity amidst the geopolitical shift.
Authors: Ivana Milićević (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade) , Tara Tepavac (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade) -
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, justified by claims of protecting transborder ethnic communities, has disrupted the international normative framework governing transborder engagement (Pettai, 2024) and prompted initially a unified response from the European Union (Meissner & Grazziani, 2023; Fiott, 2023). These developments have driven Western Balkan states to reassess their transborder ethnic policies, given their historical and political ties with neighbouring co-ethnic populations. While scholars have examined the geopolitical and enlargement implications for the region (Džankić, Kacarska & Keil, 2023; Anghel & Džankić, 2023; Kolarski, 2022), this paper focuses instead on kin-state politics and kin-minority mobilisation in the Western Balkans.
Building on prior research identifying the EU and the OSCE as key ‘norm-setters’ shaping transborder ethnic relations (Udrea, 2017; Waterbury, 2008, 2010; Fox & Vermeersch, 2010; Lantschner, 2023), the paper re-examines the EU’s continuing capacity to inform kin-state engagement. It does so by analysing the responses of Western Balkan countries through the lens of their varying levels of integration and dependency on the EU. Extending Johnston’s (2024) framework, which categorises the impact of the EU’s kin-state normative framework on countries by proximity to the EU (members, candidates, non-candidates), this study introduces a status quo vs. revisionist distinction to explain deviations from expected kin-state policy patterns.
Empirically, the paper draws on kin-state policies and EU progress reports to uncover how domestic political agendas intersect with European conditionality. Conceptually, it advances the idea of “revisionism from within” to describe how EU member states such as Croatia and Bulgaria engage in assertive kin-state politics toward transborder ethnic communities in the Western Balkans by utilising their position within the EU to impact normative framework. In doing so, the study offers a novel framework for understanding how EU membership itself can generate new forms of normative contestation in the governance of transborder ethnic relations.
Author: Mate Subašić (Liverpool John Moores University) -
European integration in the Western Balkans has been framed as a democratizing process having a transformative effect on post-socialist states aiming to join the EU. Despite its progress toward fulfilling EU conditionality, Serbia, as other states in the region, has seen developments resulting in state capture and democratic backsliding, contrary to normative expectations on European integration. Contributing to research reevaluating the EU’s role in the region, this article argues that European institutions have played a key role in legitimizing the entrenchment in power of a Serbian elite coalesced in the SNS party led by Aleksandar Vučić, in spite of the EU’s knowledge production crafting a hegemonic narrative equating European norms and values with democracy. The paper uses a critical discourse analysis of government communication on EU-Serbia membership negotiations to understand how the relationship between European integration and state capture is framed and legitimized by Serbian and EU actors. The paper argues that these dynamics are best understood relationally, rooted in the Global East conceptual framework proposed by Müller (2020). Using this framework, the paper argues that the unequal relations deepened by the seemingly contradictory mutually constitutive processes of European integration and state capture underlie the power relations defining existence in the Global East as a liminal semiperipheral space.
Author: Victor Jimenez Rivera
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Critical and creative approaches to teaching IRSponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupConvener: Nick Caddick (ARU)Chair: Nick Caddick (ARU)
-
Presenting two innovative exercises that can be utilised in undergraduate and postgraduate education courses to introduce war and peacebuilding, whilst also encouraging teambuilding and the inclusion of students with different language backgrounds and learning styles. The exercises engage students in building, concept analysis, and storytelling with and through LEGO® bricks. They draw on the literature on playful learning, which proposes that kinesthetic experiences (such as those provided through LEGO®) provide the freedom to experiment, reflect, and anchor thoughts, allowing for critical reflection without directly challenging individuals on sensitive topics. The article provides the full process of the two exercises, from their theoretical grounding in playful learning, to the execution of the activities, and finally to presentation of the benefits and shortcomings of using LEGO® in the classroom, as captured through our observations and a student survey. On these bases, we suggest that LEGO®-based activities could be a valuable addition to the existing portfolio of playful learning techniques.
Authors: David Wilcox (n/a) , Giuditta Fontana (University of Birmingham)* -
International Relations education needs a new lease on life. The rapidly shifting World Order has left many of the theoretical foundations of IR in question by students, policymakers, and large swaths of society. Educators are tasked with navigating an increasingly challenging political dynamic in their teaching methods. To accommodate polarizing political perspectives in the classroom, there is a need for greater ingenuity in undergraduate education, which is currently in peril. Under these conditions, my work calls for a new way of engagement in the IR field that can reach across political divides to create opportunities for imagination in the classroom. Building on works such as World War Z (Brooks, 2006) and Theories of International Politics and Zombies: Apocalypse Edition (Drezner, 2011), I combine zombie-based storytelling in IR teaching practices to reclaim apocalyptic-themed creativity in the classroom. Through a historical analysis of zombie-based literature and rebuffed calls for new teaching practices, I show how the living dead can meet the needs of the modern student. Ultimately, I provide the ends, ways, and means necessary for IR to inject undead imagination into an increasingly challenging educational environment.
Author: Matthew Ellis (Purdue University) -
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has emerged as a dominant pedagogical approach across disciplines, with its roots in medical sciences and increasing adoption in fields such as International Relations. While PBL offers valuable opportunities for students to engage in collaborative, experiential learning focused on practical problem-solving, this paper critiques its essentialist framing of problems as pre-existing entities awaiting resolution. We argue for a Critical Problem-Based Learning (CPBL) approach that interrogates the co-constitutive nature of problems, their theoretical underpinnings, and practical solutions. Such an approach emphasizes the importance of teaching students to critically examine how problems are framed, whose interests are served, and the implications of proposed solutions. This approach not only bridges theory and practice but illuminates the dynamic nexus between them, encouraging students to recognize how theoretical frameworks shape the identification of problems and influence the design of practical interventions. By reframing PBL through a critical lens, this paper offers pedagogical reflections to enable learners to interrogate the foundational assumptions that underpin both problems and their proposed solutions.
Authors: Malte Riemann (Leiden University) , Norma Rossi (University of St Andrews) -
Amid the proliferation of technological innovations such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are changing how students learn and a global political arena characterized by upheaval, crisis, and conflict, there is increasing impetus to reconsider how we teach international politics. The mainstream of the field – especially in North America – remains dominated by positivist research and pedagogy, with its focus on value-free knowledge and the separation of the researcher from their object of study. Accordingly, many international politics courses seek to introduce students to various paradigms, themes, and topics from an ostensibly objective perspective. However, in the present era, where much of what has been taken for granted as settled knowledge in the field is constantly being challenged, and the stakes of international politics feel immense, if not life-or-death, this pedagogical approach is neither well equipped to explain the present moment nor best placed to face the future.
To speak to this, drawing on critical perspectives in IR, which emphasize the importance of context and positionality, I designed two simulation-based introductory global politics courses in my first year as an Assistant professor of Politics at Acadia University. In contrast to the types of simulations often used in the field of International Relations, where students are placed in positions of power (such as delegates in Model United Nations panels), students in these classes occupied roles with varying degrees of power, from leaders of postcolonial states negotiating with the IMF to forcefully displaced families crossing borders. Highlighting specific simulations that engendered animated discussions, the paper draws out the advantages of this pedagogical approach, contending that simulations can be effective in helping the next generation of global politics students grasp the weight of their research and scholarship, by placing them as participants in global politics, rather than positioning them as neutral observers.
Author: Fikir Haile (Acadia University) -
A now rich body of pedagogical literature in International Relations explores the various unique opportunities presented by creative and arts-based teaching and assessment. However, this literature has often focused on positioning these tools as normatively valuable by appealing to wider debates on EDI, decolonising the curriculum, and UDL amongst other issues. Given the wide-ranging challenges posed to Higher Education by AI, workable models for authentic and creative pedagogies are more necessary than ever. This paper responds by providing a framework to translate the reflexive, emotive, and visual elements of artefacts produced in the IR classroom into marking criteria categories. Drawing from our experiences embracing creative pedagogies such as photography, collage-making, zine-making, and creative writing in varying student cohorts, we propose a marking grid aimed at IR educators. In doing so, our intervention demonstrates that arts-based and authentic assessments can be used as practical tools for engaging students in embodied/affective forms of learning which subvert traditional understandings of IR in productive ways.
Authors: Gabriela García García (University of Surrey) , Emma Dolan (University of Limerick)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Critiquing Horizons of Power: Rethinking Revolution, Silence and World PoliticsSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: CRIPT Working groupChair: CRIPT Working group
-
The most recent debates in the Political Marxist literature have revolved around the methodological emphasis on agency in class struggle, and the notion of “radical historicism” proposed by Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke. I advance that discussion here by exploring two key contributions of this “radical historicism” to a Marxist conception of Geopolitics. First, the notion of class as process and the genealogical conception of subjects, moving away from notions of consciousness and rationality derived from the logic of capitalism or from any other mode of production. Second, the different lens on the social production of space that effectively expands geopolitics beyond the narrow conception of “international” disputes between great powers. The main implication here is shifting the understanding of the state as the traditional core unit for analyses of geopolitics and international relations. By grounding it on long-duration analyses of state-formation as the outcome of competing spatial practices of accumulation – understood as geopolicies – it allows for a significant expansion of the empirical inputs that sustain theorisations of international relations. This results in a contribution to the debates about eurocentrism both in Marxism and International Relations, as it posits the necessity of historicist analyses of geopolicies that compete with those privileged by traditional accounts in both fields.
Author: Pedro Salgado (University of Portsmouth) -
It was noted in the wake of the Arab Spring that the absence of social revolution as a horizon of collective mobilisation is both puzzling and urgent. Its demise has nevertheless been celebrated by liberals as the end of the “modern myth” of revolution birthed in the French and articulated by Marx. This judgement is influenced by the philosophy of Arendt, which establishes several antinomies to assess the normative quality of revolutions, including the bifurcation of political and social revolution, agency and structure, and as events and processes. Her philosophy has traction with diverse scholars and policymakers, from critical theorists, Cold War liberals, to Straussian neoconservatives, and has been endorsed by revolution scholars for evaluating the emancipatory ethos of revolutions hitherto underemphasised in empirical studies.
This paper challenges these positions by demonstrating that Arendt’s antinomies are empirically unsound, politically debilitating, and normatively untenable. It argues that we must look elsewhere for a humanis framework adequate for the twenty-first century, such as that found in Hegel and Marx. Their dialectical approaches to revolution can help overcome Arendt’s antinomies and inspire a genuinely emancipatory perspective that is more attuned to contemporary political realities and consonant with pioneering relational and processual sociologies in IR.
Author: Charlie Thame (Thammasat University) -
Social reproduction theory has been spearheaded by Marxist feminists to configure the myriad of gendered and racialised ways society is maintained over time. Yet social reproduction has seldom been applied to international relations, despite its analytical power to connect intimate practices of reproduction to systemic orders. This stems from misconceptions of the `international system' as a high-level, structural entity devoid of banality and mundane social processes. To refute these, often violent, assumptions, I argue for a social reproduction theory of/against international relations to unravel the ways in which naturalised orders in the discipline are perpetuated and sustained. By bringing an interdisciplinary conceptual analysis of social, cultural and ideational reproduction, I propose a theory of mutual co-creation that subjugate international relations as rigid in its world-making. This framework highlight the mechanisms of disciplinary maintenance on material and conceptual fronts, and how they mutually reinforce one another in order to perpetuate notions of order, sovereignty and security. Together, naturalised assumptions of the discipline, previously understood as immovable and stagnant, are interrogated to require labour that is often unequal and rife with unfreedoms to keep them conceptually and materially afloat. Simultaneously, foregrounding social reproduction not only exposes hidden underbellies that underwrite the discipline, but allows for envisioning ruptures in which alternative futures can be rehearsed, contested and struggled over. A social reproduction theory \textit{against} international relations calls for re-representing care, vulnerability and daily reproduction as a site of the international, and within that process, a beckoning for a politics of survival and relationality rather than preserving sovereign powers.
Author: Carina Uchida (University of Oxford) -
Foucault delivered the lecture series Society must be defended (SMD) at the Collège de France in 1975-76. First fully published in the early 2000s, SMD was positively received by IR scholars who were quick to draw connections between its themes of war, biopolitics and state racism and the US-led war on terror. While very influential, SMD has had nothing like the impact within IR as Foucault’s later work on ‘governmentality’. Fifty years after the lectures were delivered, this paper revisits SMD. Which themes are still relevant? How does SMD appear when read in light of the fracturing of geopolitics and the rise of right-wing populist governments in many regions of the world? The paper makes three arguments about SMD fifty years on: (i) Whereas IR scholars took up the idea of ‘biopolitics’ from SMD, they paid less attention to Foucault’s analysis of ‘race struggle’. SMD offers us an analytics of ‘struggle’ which is relevant to the project of a genealogy of politics. Contemporary themes of ‘culture wars’ can be fruitfully read in this light. (ii) Scholars influenced by Foucault also took up the theme of ‘state racism’ but in the process have tended to overlook other ways Foucault’s methods help us understand the politics of racism. The paper develops this point through an analysis of contemporary anti-antiracism. (iii) In SMD Foucault warns against the tendency of the left to invoke ‘science’ to legitimate itself (eg, scientific Marxism). This critique also needs to be revisited in an age of right-wing populism when scientific reason itself is under attack.
Author: William Walters (Carleton University) -
As of late (Lavender et al., 2025), the field of silence studies has substantiated Ferguson’s (2003), and now Vieira’s (2025), claim that “silence […] can be used to constitute selves and even communities”. Subsequently, scholars of silence are concerned with how silence can be constitutive to politics, and to this end said scholars have moved away from thinking about agency in logocentric and voluntarist terms. However, in shifting away from a logocentric and voluntarist account of agency, there is a notable absence in the silence studies literature regarding reflections on how engaging with the politics of silence transforms our understanding of what politics as a general activity involves. This paper attempts to, subsequently, do good on the calls within silence studies (Jung, 2021: Ferguson, 2003 and 2011; Rollo, 2017; Vieira, 2025) to think through how silence transforms our understanding of politics. In doing so, the paper proposes that the politics of silence can be transformational regarding how we understand politics in both domestic and international contexts in three ways: regarding, 1) how politics happens, 2) where politics happens, and 3) when politics happens. By relating silence to these axes of politics, the paper proposes that a promising way that silence challenges and transforms our thinking of what the activity of politics involves is by enabling us to think differently about what the choreography of politics involves. The paper therefore shows how the politics of silence relates to the choreography of politics to the end of transforming our understanding of what is involved in politics in both domestic and international contexts, a point that is substantiated in the context of how silence has been an explicit part of British pacifist politics in the 20th and 21st century.
Author: Luke Lavender (Queen Mary University of London)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Decolonial and discourse-centred approaches to 'terrorism'Sponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConvener: CST Working groupChair: CST Working group
-
During the War on Terror, Western states have implemented numerous military interventions in efforts to combat terrorist actors or rogue state benefactors. Foreign policy analysis (FPA) notes an increasing "parliamentarisation" of powers in this context, wherein Western legislatures obtain greater oversight over military actions and are more willing to oppose their executives on questions of implementing them. For the most part however, FPA has not included an awareness of the endurance of colonial legacies of war-making in explanations of parliamentarisation. This paper deepens understanding of those legacies by highlighting the figure of the ghostly in legislative justifications for and against intervention. Using a hauntological lens to illuminate the influence of the ghostly on post-Iraq war-making, this paper undertakes a discourse analysis of legislative debates in the US, UK, and France regarding five interventions in Iraq or Syria between 2013-18. Contra FPA expectations of increasing parliamentarisation, the power of parliaments to scrutinise, prevent, or even support executive war-making fluctuates based on how effectively ghosts are exorcised from public debates. Parliamentarisation does not by itself reduce the frequency of interventions. To explain the latter, we need to understand how the ghostly interacts with the colonial in the War on Terror.
Author: Cian Bear (University of Warwick) -
How the News Works (or Does It?): Factors that Influence British News Media Co-optation by the State
This paper interrogates the relationship between the media and the state with regards to how the news media operates in the United Kingdom, and particularly when it comes to reporting on ‘terrorism’. I identify five distinct factors (organisational/editorial control, closeness and access, ‘what the reader wants,’ resources, and impartiality) that affect how news media organisations operate, their motivations, and how this leads to co-optation by the state in their reporting, particularly on ‘terrorism’. Together, all five factors demonstrate how these institutions are inherently structured by the state’s interests (particularly the government). Furthermore, this article also displays the ways in which these factors are structured into the workings of the institution – they are rarely explicit decisions. Based on semi-structured interviews, as well as primary and secondary research, I highlight these factors as areas where it might seem that media institutions have “relative autonomy” (in the words of Stuart Hall), and detail how that autonomy is structured and influenced by the colonial interests of the state. Ultimately, this paper provides a rigorous empirical understanding of how news media comes to be influenced by, and in service of, the interests of the state, as those interests often align with their own.
Author: Sarah Gharib Seif (King's College London) -
Why does Saudi Arabia persistently appear in global discourse as an exporter of extremism in West Africa despite extensive evidence of its developmental and humanitarian engagement? This paper interrogates how knowledge, power, and security narratives intersect to shape perceptions of the Kingdom’s role in the subregion. Drawing on a Creative Eclecticism Framework that integrates Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and postcolonial critique, the paper identifies two key discursive asymmetries. A horizontal visibility asymmetry amplifies ideological linkages between Saudi Arabia and militancy while muting the Kingdom’s record in infrastructure finance, relief assistance, and multilateral security cooperation. A vertical responsibility asymmetry simultaneously absolves Western actors of accountability for direct interventions and destabilizing practices. Grounded in evidence from Nigeria, Mali, and Ghana, the paper demonstrates how these asymmetries reproduce Orientalist hierarchies and obscure African agency in defining security and development agendas. It calls for a decolonial reframing of the security–development nexus that applies consistent, evidence-based standards to all external actors.
Author: Muhammad Dan Suleiman (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Discourses in (In)SecuritySponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics)Chair: Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics)Discussant: Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics)
-
The war in Ukraine and the straightforward Western support to Kyiv have contested the fundamentally pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian policy of the Hungarian government. This paper argues that although the Hungarian government remained markedly pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian, it adopted varied responses to the war at different levels of government to cover the majority of the electorate and satisfy the needs of different domestic audiences.
This study examines the multi-level communication that characterizes the Hungarian political field in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. For this purpose, it relies on critical discourse analysis of the political stakeholders and discourse-makers of Hungarian foreign policy: the Hungarian opposition, the President of Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the Foreign Minister, and the pro-government media.
The paper argues that the media dominance of the Hungarian government enables the maintenance of discursive variation, making the discourse polyphonic. The differences among these various discursive roles are not necessarily palpable, as governmental or government-related actors do not generate debates. They may shift their stance on the war, but they agree with the fundamental policy line defined by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, underlining the importance of peace.Author: Tamas Dudlak (University of Pécs, Hungary) -
Within OSS there has been a considerable focus on autobiographical narratives as a prerequisite for ontological security. Unique to state actors, autobiographies reaffirm continuity by ‘telling a story of the self’. However, the recognition and acceptance of state identity narratives, particularly by ‘significant Others’, is not guaranteed. Thus, as the constitutive core of the Self, misrecognition of – or open challenges to – the content of a state’s autobiography can expose actors to ontological insecurity. Accordingly, this paper draws on the scholarship of (mis)recognition and ontological security to advance the argument that Ukrainian war narratives, and their reappropriation of historical and cultural property, have contributed to existing Russian anxiety over its sense of self by contesting the foundations of its autobiography. This paper pays close attention to the perpetuation of antagonistic narratives throughout Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine, before highlighting the articulation of incompatible perspectives on sovereignty and diverging representations of (historical) Ukrainian and Russian identity. This explication of Ukraine’s refusal to recognise the Russian ‘story’, and the active contestation of key ‘identity markers’ during wartime, seeks to link relational and internal aspects of ontological security with processes of (mis)recognition to understand Russian refusal to undertake real diplomatic reconciliation with Ukraine.
Author: Georgina Taylor (University of Leeds) -
The Russian expansion into the Muslim world started with the conquest of Kazan in 1552 and then continued through conquests in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Although these three peoples had many experiences in common under Russian and Soviet rule, there are also many areas of difference. This is most notably the case since the collapse of the Soviet Union when their connections and experiences of post-Soviet Russia have diverged radically. However, despite these areas of convergence and divergence, comparative studies of these three different cases have rarely been done. This paper draws from a book I am writing on Russia and the Muslim world where these three cases are included as the first three substantive chapters. Comparing these three cases, it is argued, provides critical insights into the strategies and approaches taken by Russia to incorporate Muslim peoples into the Russian/Soviet polity and, in the case of Central Asia, to agree to their secession.
Author: Roland Dannreuther -
Given Russia’s consecutive military doctrines’ clear messages to its neighbours and beyond on considering the former Soviet area as its “vital sphere of interest” and further elucidation of its enshrined commitment ‘to defend’ thereof, the aim of this paper is to examine the driving forces behind the military doctrines of Russia, on the one hand, and Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, one the other, targeted to illuminate their implications for security dynamics in the post-Soviet space, with an account of the reassessment of both theory and practice applicable therein.
Regardless of their essence—offensive, defensive or deterrent—and determinants affecting the choices, doctrines are ‘operational’ responses for the states seeking security. Having said that, if a state is permanently driven by security dilemma considerations—and, in the meantime, claims to seek security, what are the parameters of security and consequently, security space it constructs while interacting with other states? What is the red line between expressed and actual identity?
Intended to be a new theory of practice, the analysis of military doctrines—as the point where epistemology and ontology converge—empowers the study on the post-Soviet space security with both descriptive and prescriptive analytical tools, meanwhile, thwarts to put massive epistemological and ontological burden on the statements deduced by realism’s mainstream simplified theories of geopolitics or ‘Realpolitik’ provided that though the latter could offer a good framework to explain the doctrines devised by the authoritarian regimes, they lack descriptive repertoire of tools to depict the practices employed by the democratizing states that are constructed upon their identities and values as the expression of their interests. On the top of that, by adopting a pragmatist approach, the study gains additional prescriptive leverage for outlining the basis behind the system-transformation-oriented doctrines and their consequences for security dynamics in the post-Soviet space.
Author: Ruzan Pluzyan (University of Bath)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / EU Trade and Sustainable Development Governance in the Global SouthSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConveners: Emilio Del Pupo (University of Helsinki) , Zhihang Wu (University of Glasgow)Chair: Emilio Del Pupo (University of Helsinki)
-
This article introduces a new conceptual framework – Co-Power Europe (CPE) – to analyse the European Union’s (EU) external policies. Using the case study of trade and sustainable development chapters (TSD) in the EU’s preferential trade agreements with third countries, it addresses two key shortcomings identified in the literature: the EU’s persistent reluctance to accord TSD chapters equal status with trade liberalising provisions, and the lack of shared ownership felt by many trade partners towards these chapters. While these shortcomings are well known, they have not led to a broader rethinking in mainstream research and policy. Drawing on insights from decentring scholarship, development studies and earth system governance literature, the CPE framework advances a more holistic, reflexive and collaborative approach to TSD. It proposes three key dimensions for assessing the EU’s external policy: (1) openness and reflexivity in the negotiations, (2) mutuality in implementation that resists hierarchical dynamics, and (3) a problem-solving approach to dispute settlement focused on addressing concrete challenges rather than reinforcing compliance-based divisions. Relying on elite interviews with EU and trade partner officials, as well as negotiation records, the findings suggest that the EU’s rigid, template-driven approach and its confinement of TSD negotiations within a single chapter, rather than allowing for cross-chapter concessions, challenge the legitimacy and effectiveness of these chapters. In an increasingly complex, fragmented and multipolar world, rethinking the EU’s external policy is essential, and embracing its potential as a co-power offers a pathway toward more legitimate and thereby effective global engagement.
Author: Caroline Bertram (University of Cambridge) -
The European Union (EU)’s recent unilateral trade instruments—most notably the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)—have emerged as a flagship of “green regulatory power,” linking market access to the externalisation of sustainability standards. Yet, across the Global South, responses to the new EU Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) regulations are far from uniform. While governments often denounce these measures as violations of sovereignty, domestic non-state actors respond in strikingly hybrid ways—not merely rejecting or accepting them but strategically repositioning themselves around them.
Comparing Brazil and Indonesia, this paper traces how agribusiness groups, environmental NGOs, and smallholder organisations navigate EU TSD governance. Drawing on document analysis, stakeholder statements, media discourse, and semi-structured interviews, it argues that responses to EU green regulatory power are not binary. Instead of simple compliance or resistance, Southern actors deploy EU TSD regulations as political resources—simultaneously contesting their legitimacy while selectively harnessing their effects. The paper reveals how Brazilian farm lobbies frame TSD regulations as protectionist interference, whereas many NGOs and producer associations weaponise them against domestic rivals; in Indonesia, responses are fragmented between reform-minded actors and those aligning with executive calls for flexibility. The study reopens and advances the Brussels Effect debate by decentring the EU and analysing how Global South actors actively shape and deconstruct, rather than merely receive, EU TSD governance.Authors: Zhihang Wu (University of Glasgow) , Emilio Del Pupo (University of Helsinki)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / Exploring failure and frustration: solar radiation modification and simulation work as a research method
Over the past year, we have developed an innovative methodology to explore the geopolitical challenges posed by solar radiation modification technologies that are being researched to cool global temperatures. We have designed and run a series of open-ended, research-driven simulation workshops designed to investigate decision-making in non-ideal scenarios, drawing on the expertise of a network of interdisciplinary participants. Wargames and crisis simulations are common research tools employed in a variety of settings to understand how actors will behave in a given scenario and to assess possible outcomes. However, many wargames and simulations focus on how participants might ‘win’ or produce the optimal solution to a predetermined scenario where clear rules and structured relationships are fixed (Shephard 2017; Solinska-Nowak et al. 2018). In the case of SRM, the anticipated solution is often an effective governance framework. The aim was not to push actors towards an ideal-type solution, but explore the cooperative and conflictual interplay between power, prestige, and environmental reality under conditions of complex uncertainty. Rather than assuming predetermined parameters, the methodology employed in this project advanced an open-ended simulation where, through their engagement with each other, participants collectively co-produced a shared understanding of the geopolitical and environmental stakes involved in SRM deployment, the evolving relationships between key global SRM actors, and potential points of failure when it comes to governance. Developing interactive, interdisciplinary research methods may be a key means of understanding and untangling complex political debates in the context of faltering global climate cooperation.
Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: Danielle Young (University of Leeds)Participants: Lesley Masters (Nottingham Trent University) , Perla Polanco Leal (The University of Manchester) , Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University) , Colleen Golja (Imperial College London) , Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London) , Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / Feminist Solidarity amidst Planetary Threats: Between Foreclosures and Possibilism
What are feminist solutions to crises of planetary proportions? How can we envision a good life amidst genocide, ecocide, and fears of rising fascism? How do we stand united against heteronormative dogmas? How do we build feminist alliances and move from theory to concrete political action of re-organizing our societies and ecologies in the interest of mutually assured survival?
This roundtable will gather four feminist scholars at different career stages working on feminist solidarity from the perspectives of political economy, labour, queer theory, and social movement studies. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, roundtable participants will discuss feminist solidarity mediated by reflexive feminist praxis, coalition-building, efforts of countering political (self)-betrayals, and re-thinking feminist political projects amidst shared planetary threats.
Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupChair: Shirin RaiParticipants: Malena Bastida Antich (LSE) , Shirin Rai , Gloria Novovic (King's College London) , Sophie Chamas -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Gender, Sexuality and Civil SocietySponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConveners: Chana Rose Rabinovitz (Queen Mary University of London) , Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Patrick Vernon (University of Wolverhampton)
-
In an age when one can engage in homosexual sex and serve in the military and get married wearing Pride merchandise sold at a multinational corporation (Duggan 2004, Puah 2007) this paper argues that ‘queer’ practices remain political and politicizing. This paper, however, argues that practices of queerness continue to produce subcultures (Halberstam 2005) which are structured by and reproduce non-normativity. By taking as an example the ways in which young Jewish queers in the US and UK engage in the unlearning of Zionism through queer community, this paper argues for 'queer' practices as necessarily politically engaged. Based on nearly three years of ethnographic research, this paper traces the overlap between queer practices amongst young Jewish people in the US and UK and their embrace of anti-Zionist politics. This paper analyzes research participants narratives of becoming anti-Zionist, tracing the ways in which participation in queer spaces precipitated questioning of structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, including the nation-state. This paper concludes by introducing ‘Jewish Diasporism’, a growing movement whose adherents demonstrate the co-constitution of queerness and anti-Zionism amongst Ashkenazi Jewish people in the US and UK.
Author: Chana Rose Rabinovitz (Queen Mary University of London) -
Collective and alternative spaces may disrupt normative definitions of sex and gender, but what happens when civil society strives to reinforce dominant narratives? This paper examines early twentieth century anti-trafficking organisations to understand how ‘white slavery’ discourse offered a platform to reify contested understandings of race, gender, and sex in Edwardian England. By examining the work of the National Vigilance Association (NVA), it is possible to trace how their mandate to prevent the exploitation of young women harmonised with nationalist movements seeking to establish England as the moral centre of imperial rule. Within the NVA’s organisation, a complicated reimagining of gendered and class roles was taking shape as more middle-class English women stepped into the officer’s role, austensibly protecting foreign and working-class women from sexual exploitation. Yet this advancement relied on the assumed victimization and helplessness of racialised and/or working class women. Examining this relational power dynamic within the NVA helps to articulate how anti-trafficking rhetoric operated on an international level to establish England as a morally justified colonial ruler. This work carries significant implications for our understanding of the contemporary anti-trafficking sector which often relies on similar saviour-like narratives of intervention.
Author: Anna Forringer-Beal (University of Manchester) -
EuroPride 2022 in Belgrade was event that many will not easily forget. First announced as cancelled by the Serbian President, then banned by the Minister of Interior, to eventually being allowed to take place by the Prime Minister, participants and organisers of EuroPride were put through a rollercoaster of politics. This paper seeks to trace the politics that governed EuroPride – a pan-European Pride event (its roots firmly in Western Europe) that is licensed to be hosted in different cities each year ¬–, which represents a European concept and practice that transferred to Southeastern Europe. Yet, whether this ‘transfer’ was successful is a topic of intense debate. The EuroPride saw the Serbian government mock supporters of LGBT rights and actively sought to undermine the event, resulting in a spectacle of conflict. This raises many questions as to what politics are at play and for whom Pride was performed as three separate narrative emerged: the European Pride Organisers Association claimed this EuroPride was the most important in their history, local activists wondered whether the event could be called a success, and the government insisted the event no march had taken place. Drawing on the work of Baudrillard, the paper engages in an analysis by asking whether EuroPride became a simulacrum of Pride. Doing so, the paper looks beyond the superficial politics of EuroPride, and asks critical questions of what issues were allowed to be seen, what was made invisible and ultimately, what whether EuroPride was more than the symbols it engaged.
Author: Koen Slootmaeckers (City, University of London) -
The central challenge for people claiming asylum because of their sexuality is proving that sexuality to state decision-makers. There are overarching themes that decision-makers look for in their evaluations of the “truth” of these claims, such as a proximity to fixed, Eurocentric ideas of homosexuality, or the apparent consistency of a claimant’s narrative. However, decision-makers also value some forms of evidence more highly than others, particularly witness statements from citizens of the receiving state or letters of support from trusted organisations. This makes the legal, social and material work that support organisations do also operate as borderwork. Participation in an organisation’s activities becomes a vital part of convincingly (re)producing a claimant’s sexuality in the receiving state. Concurrently, the state outsources the evaluation of the “truth” of that sexuality to actors in the support sector. Based on findings from interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, lawyers, journalists and the staff of LGBTQ+ asylum support services in the UK and France, this paper explores the ways in which LGBTQ+ asylum support services can therefore simultaneously facilitate and hinder access to asylum by acting as gatekeepers of queer sexuality and thus the border.
Author: Aine Bennett (University of Warwick)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / History, Identity, and Spatial Politics in Understanding Contemporary TurkeySponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: ISMMEA Working groupChair: ISMMEA Working group
-
This paper explores the relationship between state power, nationalism, and minority experiences by paying particular attention to the affective dimension. My examination draws on in-depth interviews conducted with Armenians born and raised in Turkey and currently residing in Canada. The paper explores how Armenians, an ethnoreligious minority in Turkey, experienced and navigated an exclusionary, nationalist landscape, and how, looking back, they make meaning of these memories. The affective dimension of these experiences, powerfully encapsulated by the salience of fear, emerges as particularly critical in shaping interactions with fellow citizens as well as encounters with the state and other institutions. In these narratives, fear, which is inextricably linked to the political sphere, has an enduring quality across time and space, its effects expanding into participants’ post-emigration lives in Canada. While emotions mediate everyday interactions, the paper also demonstrates instances when they drive individual action.
Scholars studying minority experiences inside exclusionary landscapes have largely focused on the cultural sphere, exploring how individuals consume, talk about, and experience nations and nationalism through ritualized everyday practices. While these studies provide valuable insights into how nationalism works on the ground, they tend to neglect the enduring salience of political power in shaping everyday interactions. Similarly, the affective dimension of everyday interactions and their relationship to the political sphere remains understudied. Drawing on rich data on Armenians’ encounters with neighbors, friends, strangers, and state institutions, my work seeks to contribute to the existing literature by addressing the relationship between nationalism, political power, and emotions.
Author: Yesim Bayar (St. Lawrence University) -
The “Eastern Question” question discourse has extensively been analysed in the 18th and 19th centuries. This paper focuses on the 1920s when the Eastern Question is largely assumed that it was settled. The establishment of the Republic of Turkey with the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 is considered as the solution of the Eurocentric issue of the addressing the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Using previously unexplored archival sources, this paper historicises the “Eastern Question” of the 1920s, when a new order was formed. It argues that the discourse should be understood as an Orientalist construct that evolved and endured in the Western public discourse.
Author: Ilia Xypolia (University of Aberdeen, UK)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / How to prevent civil war recurrence: learning from failure
This roundtable will discuss the main findings of a new book published by OUP on the successful management of protracted peace processes. Based on a multi-year, USIP-funded collaborative research project by scholars at the universities of Birmingham, Duesseldorf, and Hamburg, the key insight is that on average the incorporation of measures to include women in post-conflict society in a peace agreement reduces the probability of conflict recurrence by 11%. Even more significantly, if this process occurs alongside UN leadership, the probability of conflict recurrence is reduced by 37%. These results were obtained through the application of a novel multi-method, multi-stage framework combining machine learning, statistical analysis, and in-depth case studies.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Giuditta Fontana (University of Birmingham)Participants: Giulia Piccolino (Loughborough University) , Stefan Wolff (University of Birmingham) , Kristin Bakke (UCL) , Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Human ProtectionSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University)
-
The paper presents preliminary findings of pilot research on women’s unarmed protection strategies in the ethnic and political conflict in Northern Ethiopia. Doing so, the paper contributes to the gendered dimensions of UCP in Ethiopia which remains less understood and under-explored. In 2020, Ethiopia descended into violent political and ethnic conflict in its northern province, popularly known as the Tigray conflict. Described as one of the deadliest and forgotten armed conflicts in the 21st century, the Tigray conflict has claimed the lives of about 700,000 people, coupled with 100,000 women subjected to rape and hundreds of thousands internally displaced (New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, 2024; The Economist, 2024). Although the Tigray conflict officially ended in November 2022 with the signing of a peace agreement, sporadic violence continues to occur and the situation remains critically unsafe, especially for women. The rates of sexual violence, kidnappings and other atrocities continue. Yet, empirical research exploring grassroots nonviolent protection strategies women employ to protect themselves and fellow civilians in Ethiopia have been generally lacking. Drawing on feminist security studies and nonviolence theory, the paper presents new empirical insights into women’s protective agency demonstrating that, women are not passive recipients but active agents in their own protection
Authors: Laura Sulin (Centre for Peace and Security, Coventry University)* , Nancy Annan (Coventry University) -
Why do armed actors protect civilians in some areas and target them in others? Existing research has shown that violence in civil wars is closely linked to territorial control, yet it often treats armed groups as unitary actors and overlooks variation within them. This project examines how changes in territorial control and governance practices shape strategies of violence and restraint by both rebel and state armed groups across different regions and over time. The study argues that civilian protection depends not only on whether an actor controls territory, but also on how it governs and interacts with local populations. Using spatially and temporally disaggregated data on territorial control, governance activities, and civilian targeting, the project analyzes variation within conflicts to uncover when and where civilians are most at risk or most protected. By integrating governance and temporal dynamics into the control–violence framework, this paper advances theoretical understanding of civilian protection in civil wars and provides practical insights for anticipating and mitigating civilian harm.
Author: Hyunjung Park (University of York) -
Abstract
Why does peace remain so elusive in contexts of long-term conflict? In many cases, the answer lies not in the absence of peace agreements, but in the fragmented social and political landscapes they attempt to unify. Myanmar exemplifies this challenge. Since independence, it has undergone three major peacebuilding efforts, each of which has collapsed. The most recent, the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), initially promised progress but ultimately unraveled—coinciding with a dramatic escalation of violence in regions previously untouched by civil war.
This paper reassesses the literature on protracted conflicts by foregrounding the role of sub-national variation. It argues that localized experiences of violence create microclimates of trust, distrust, and competing political orders, which complicate national-level peace processes. Using Myanmar as a case study, the paper analyzes the implementation of the NCA in Karen and Shan States. In Karen, the ceasefire fostered relative stability; in Shan, divide-and-rule tactics persisted, undermining collective peace efforts.
The NCA became a contested space where actors pursued divergent strategies, interpreted terms differently, and formed unstable alliances. Rather than producing consensus, the agreement exposed the fractured nature of Myanmar’s political terrain. Peace, in this context, was not a shared goal but a site of competition and failed cooptation.
By examining these dynamics, the paper calls for a more socially attuned and locally grounded approach to peacebuilding—one that recognizes the multiplicity of actors, histories, and interpretations embedded in protracted conflict.Author: Anna Plunkett (King's College London)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Implementing National StrategySponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Jamie Barrow Gaskarth (The Open University)Chair: Olivia O’Sullivan (Chatham House)
-
Since the end of the Cold War, British policymakers have continually aimed to project the role of a great power, however defence acquisition decisions often expose underfunded ambitions, resulting in capability gaps and cost overruns. The paper suggests that failures of British defence policy can be better understood by examining the gap between declared strategy—the official statements of government intent—and revealed strategy—the reality conveyed through actual acquisition decisions. Employing a comparative case study approach, it explored how successive governments’ perceptions of Britain’s role in the world have shaped procurement decisions, and how these decisions, in turn, have exposed structural and cultural constraints in defence decision-making.
Author: Michelle Howard (King's College London) -
This paper assumes the existence of a ‘strategic triangle’ comprised of the United States, China and Russia. The triangle’s three points approximate poles of power in the international system – so, we can talk of tripolarity as the operating environment of American grand strategy. In this environment, the United States is in an invidious position, facing two strategic competitors who are pragmatically aligned and not susceptible to wedging. Dealing simultaneously with two major rivals has led to a debate on prioritisation in which China has won out as America’s more pressing concern. If American grand strategy is finally pivoting to Asia (or, at least away from Europe), what consequences follow for the implementation of US policy on NATO and Ukraine? Has the United States finally called time on the strategic holiday enjoyed by its European allies? Should the European allies seek to keep NATO relevant by undertaking its own pivot to Asia and China?
Author: Mark Webber (University of Birmingham) -
Defence and security reviews are important public manifestations of British national strategy. Commentary on these reviews 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, shifting policy agenda and bureaucratic reorganizations, make tracing the extent and efficiency of implementation difficult. 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.
Using data collected from 3 workshops and over 60 interviews with senior officials involved in defence and security reviews since 1998, the authors chart how implementation operates in practice. They then compare this with existing theories of implementation in the literature on organizational strategy. The paper will thereby offer both empirical insights into how strategy is implemented, and nascent theorization on the range of possible systems of implementation available to policymakers and how far strategic failures are attributable to the specific ones adopted in the UK defence and security field.
Authors: William Reynolds (Kings College London) , Maeve Ryan (Kings College London) , Jamie Barrow Gaskarth (The Open University) -
Debates about British strategy making date back to the previous Labour government and have been a regular area of debate ever since. This is often identified as a failure to marry 'ends', 'ways' and 'means' and thus of policy formulation. Rather less attention has been given to the implementation dynamic. Using a series of case studies this paper looks at the challenge of implementation identifying the factors that contribute to the mismatch between policy formulation and implementation.
Author: Andrew Dorman (Chatham House) -
Many national disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies fail not because they lack evidence, but because they struggle to translate strategy into action. In such a hazard-prone region, failure to implement DRR strategy has severe consequences for both economic stability and human security. This paper explores practical ways to bridge that gap and move from strategy design to real, on-the-ground implementation across Southeast Asia. It introduces four tools that help make policies deliverable: Anchors (creating authority and accountability), Bridges (setting clear timelines and handovers), Ratchets (making progress irreversible), and Relays (building capability and knowledge transfer). Together, these tools help government agencies and partners translate strategy into action and ensure momentum is maintained. The study draws on publicly available documents including ASEAN and AHA Centre guidance, United Nations Sendai Framework progress reports, and materials from organisations like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Japan International Cooperation Agency. It also reviews national budgets, audit reports, and training materials to identify how DRR strategies move from policy to practice. Each tool is tested against evidence such as finance and legal documents, procurement records, and public training curricula to show what successful implementation looks like in real time. The paper contributes in two ways. First, it explains why some strategies become operational while others stall. Second, it provides a practical diagnostic playbook that policymakers can use to strengthen implementation, funding, and coordination. Ultimately, it provides a practical framework for translating DRR strategy into actions that can improve disaster readiness and resilience across Southeast Asia.
Author: Laura Southgate (Aston University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / Maximizing impact: Communicating research to diverse audiences
Academics dedicate enormous time and effort to undertaking and publishing their research, yet communication surrounding research findings remains an after-thought. This challenge is especially acute for scholars from marginalized communities and early career researchers, who face systemic barriers in academia and additional challenges in reaching their targeted audiences.
This roundtable brings together a diverse range of communication experts to present and discuss various formats, strategies, skills and best practices for maximizing the reach of our research publications. Key questions include: What does it mean to communicate research effectively and why does it matter? How can we measure the true reach and influence of academic work? What tools and methods can scholars employ to broaden their audience? From academic blogging, to podcasting, book reviews and social media assets, join us to discuss how different technologies can help address these critical questions and learn how to make research more inclusive, influential and far-reaching.Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Mariana Vieira (International Affairs (Chatham House))Participants: Rheea Saggar (International Affairs journal, Chatham House) , Brent Steele (University of Utah) , Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews) , Zara Qadir (Global South Hub) , Chrissie Duxson (BISA) , James Rogers (Cornell University) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Memes, Microbes, and Mockery: Popular Culture as Political PraxisSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)Chair: Danièle ANDRE (La Rochelle Université)Discussant: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds)
-
Stories about pandemics or epidemics, as told in pop culture receptions, oftentimes begin with the emergence of a mysterious, unknown disease in some remote area in the Global South labeled as “hot zones” (Wald, 2008). The moment of discovery, of making the virus visible, is frequently presented as historic and as a game changer in the fight against the outbreak. The proposed paper offers an exploration of the material-semiotic qualities of virus imagery alerting us to the complex relationship between image and virus. I argue that visual manifestations of the virus matter for the health-security nexus in three ways: 1) the making of the virus and its introduction as an actor to the health-security nexus, where it contributes to the 2) deepening and to the 3) widening of this nexus. I develop this argument by considering the entangled emergence not only of microscopic images connecting scientists, viruses, electron microscopes, and laboratories but also by analyzing models, paintings, plush toys, and stock images in order to appreciate the interconnected semiotic and material features of viruses’ visual manifestations.
Author: Katharina Krause -
In 2009, the website Drawball.com provided users with a blank circular canvass upon which they could alter the colour of one pixel at a time. Quickly, this canvass took on the shape of the Polish flag, despite the efforts of other users to prevent this occurrence. When the US Capitol was stormed on January 6, 2021, observers noticed the presence of the national flag of Kekistan. This was unusual for two reasons: first, that the rioters were US nationalists; secondly, that Kekistan does not exist. When online spaces are colonised by citizen patriots and the flag of a fictional fascist state is flown as protestors storm government buildings, then we must acknowledge that contemporary geopolitical imaginaries go beyond material space.
Using the popular culture artefacts of Kekistan and Polandball, this paper argues that online spaces represent unique challenges for contemporary understandings of geopolitics. Through these cases, this paper interrogates the emotive politics of vicarious identification with fictional geopolitical entities and their manifestations in both offline and online spaces. Fundamentally, this paper is a provocation that asks us to question our preconceptions of what constitutes the geopolitical.
Author: Charlie Price (University of Warwick) -
Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival, this paper interrogates a tactical shift in opposing creeping authoritarianism in Western democracies through what I refer to as performative transgressive frivolity. On 2 October 2025, in Portland, Oregon, local activist Seth Todd donned an inflatable novelty frog costume and appeared at a protest of the aggressive arrest and deportation actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) under the current administration of US President Donald Trump. Social media quickly responded with images, memes, and TikTok videos of befuddled federal agents backing away from a slowly advancing Todd. After being pepper-sprayed through the air-vent hole of his costume and telling a journalist later that ‘I’ve definitely had spicier tamales,’ Todd was labeled as the Anti-Fascist Frog; and a movement was born. One that, in solidarity, crossed the Atlantic to Dublin, Ireland, where on 18 October, the day of a nation-wide ‘No Kings’ Protest in the US, protestors gathered in front of the US Embassy, many wearing their own inflatable costumes. As it spreads and scales across the US and beyond, this seemingly fatuous gesture is an expression of political protest rooted in ‘tactical frivolity,’ wherein absurdist humour disrupts power asymmetries and challenges dominant political framings. Following historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, performance is inherent to authoritarianism, with populist political movements relying on and requiring a particular ‘aestheticization of politics.’ Protesting via the inflatable frog costume – now with an ever-expanding puffy wardrobe of unicorn, dinosaur, chicken, and other performatively non-threatening characters – skewers the hyper-masculine aesthetic favoured by agents of the state, and punctures narratives of security that frame left-leaning American cities as ‘war zones’ under the thrall of Antifa and foreign ne’er-do-wells.
Author: Joel Vessels (Nassau Community College - SUNY) -
Meme finance presents novel challenges for financial governance. The rise and fall of meme stocks, the proliferation of meme coins, and social media memes offering (and satirising) financial advice and events, all point to how memes and finance have become increasingly interconnected, if not partially co-constitutive, in recent years. Trends such as the emergence of meme stocks in retail investing and scandals associated with meme coins have presented novel tests for policymakers and regulators responsible for financial stability and consumer protection. This paper considers meme finance as a problem of financial governance. It asks: how is the role of economic knowledge and expertise in shaping policy and regulation challenged (or reaffirmed) by meme finance? How is the economic orthodoxy underpinning financial governance impacted by meme finance? The paper examines the emergent governance of meme finance in the UK, the US, and India. It explores how the limits of financial governance are being questioned and reconfigured centred on three key issues: the speculation/investment distinction, the gamification of financial investment, and the incorporation of digital financial infrastructures further into everyday life.
Author: Chris Clarke (University of Warwick)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Middle powers and developmentSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: SERDAR ALTAY (London School of Economics and Political Science)Discussant: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
The tariffs imposed unilaterally by US President Donald Trump substantially altered the dynamics of international politics. For some, the high tariffs imposed on Brazil and India (50%) worked to unite the BRICS. As these states tended to maintain closer ties with the West, rejecting more polemical matters in the BRICS, the tariffs would have arguably led them to adopt more favorable positions on proposals that were not in the US's interest. A divergent perspective is that the tariffs divided the group, as Trump applied different levels to BRICS member states. From this perspective, the BRICS members that did not face significant US tariffs, such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, preferred to avoid a more confrontational stance. As the group's decisions are based on consensus, both perspectives seem reasonable. This research seeks to assess that. Using official documents issued by the BRICS and its members, I will evaluate whether the tariffs altered the group's discourse and, if so, how. As this research seeks to identify transformations in power dynamics, critical discourse analysis is the optimal method for evaluating how the tariffs altered power dynamics within the BRICS. Assessing the BRICS' response is a crucial contribution to our understanding of this group amid rising geopolitical tensions.
Author: Luis Octavio Gouveia Junior -
Abstract:
This paper explores Türkiye’s middle power diplomacy through the analytical frameworks of strategic autonomy, soft power, and agency in International Relations, elucidating how middle powers navigate a global order characterized by great power rivalries. Türkiye represents a particularly interesting case, as it demonstrates that middle powers can exercise meaningful agency, simultaneously advancing normative objectives, cultivating regional and global influence, and leveraging soft power, thereby challenging conventional IR conceptions that depict such actors as peripheral or constrained.
Empirically, the paper examines Türkiye’s engagement with the United Nations, regional organizations, and international development initiatives, complemented by cultural diplomacy instruments such as media, educational exchanges, and humanitarian assistance. Türkiye’s provision of humanitarian aid to African and Asian states, encompassing disaster relief, medical support, and capacity-building initiatives, exemplifies its strategic use of soft power to consolidate legitimacy and influence. Moreover, Türkiye’s diplomatic engagement with major powers including Russia and China underscores its capacity to negotiate agency and maintain strategic autonomy within complex geostrategic environments.
By integrating theoretical perspectives with empirical analysis, the paper contends that Türkiye exemplifies an innovative model of middle power diplomacy, wherein soft power and multilateral engagement converge to enable agenda-setting and norm-shaping. The paper contributes to broader debates concerning strategic autonomy, middle power agency, and the evolving dynamics of global governance.
Keywords: Middle power diplomacy, Türkiye, soft power, strategic autonomy, multilateralism, humanitarian aid, global governanceAuthor: AIMAN UROOJ (Department of Political Science, University of Delhi) -
This proposal seeks to connect the debate on the role of interest groups in participatory democracy with the analysis of foreign policy on health. To pursue this objective, the study focuses on a specific participatory institution: the Executive Group of the Health Industrial Complex (GECEIS), in Brazil. Created by the president Lula administration at the outset of its third term in 2023, GECEIS embodies a developmentalist strategy aimed at advancing the industrialization of the Brazilian pharmaceutical sector. GECEIS brings together government agencies, public institutions, civil society associations, and private-sector organizations. Its main goals are to reduce Brazil’s dependence on imported pharmaceutical products, to foster international cooperation in health, to attract investment, and to design supportive public policies. I seek to analyze how the trajectory of neo-developmentalist policies in the pharmaceutical sector has shaped the role of participatory institutions in health foreign policy. Using historical institutionalism, I investigate how earlier health policies influenced the creation of new institutions and associations and how the government now seeks to coordinate their interests through GECEIS. The study also explores whether this historical trajectory affects GECEIS’s ability to both manage these diverse interests and to contribute to a foreign policy that supports the national pharmaceutical industry. Methodologically, I will employ process tracing, drawing on evidence from regulations, technical and diplomatic notes, reports, meeting records, and official statements issued by government agencies and GECEIS members.
Author: Cristiane Pereira (Instituto de Relações Internacionais da Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) | Kings Brazil Institute at Kings College (UK))
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Migration representationsSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Janica Ezzeldien (University of Glasgow)
-
Over the past decade, particularly since the onset of the Syrian war, the images of suffering, embodied in a ‘voiceless’ and ‘helpless’ figure, has become a central trope in representations of refugees, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants. This paper examines the politics of these figurations and explores their role in our understanding, framing, and making of borders. By mapping the world-making power of figures, it investigates how the production, circulation, and persistent repetition of abject imagery of refugees construct a figure of empathy, and how this figure enables new border institutions, techniques, and technologies, while simultaneously concealing existing social and political power relations and inequalities. Using Australia’s border politics as a case study, the paper argues that figures are fluid positions on the multiple lines of border politics. The overreliance on and repetition of the abject figure enacts borders in exclusionary and repressive ways. By focusing on both the state and pro-refugee advocacy figurations, the paper demonstrates how certain figurations not only produce violent border structures through practices of ‘weaponised care’, but they also limit our ability to imagine counter-maps and alternative narratives that could challenge and transform these structures.
Author: Umut Ozguc (Macquarie University) -
On March 4, 2025, the United Kingdom’s Home Office launched a digital campaign in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, using targeted advertisements to deter prospective migrants from attempting to enter the UK illegally. The campaign depicted mugshots of ‘failed migrants’ whose facial features were pixelated and concealed from view. Accompanying text, spread over the eyes of the migrant, cited the dangers associated with irregular migration, including testimonies of drowning and slavery. This digital campaign marked a significant development in the digitalization of deterrence strategies, leveraging AI-generated imagery and algorithmically targeted messaging to influence migration decisions at their source. While the literature on anti-immigration advertising has examined campaigns targeting domestic audiences in migrant-receiving states, less attention has been afforded to digital deterrence strategies aimed directly at potential migrants. The increasing role of digital technologies in migration governance requires a closer examination, including the visual politics underpinning these campaigns to understand the ways emergent technologies reframe migration as a risk to potential migrants. We examine how these visual images (re)construct migration as criminalised threat by eliminating the faces and individuality of people shown.
Author: Janica Ezzeldien (University of Glasgow)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / New Directions in Discourse Analyses of Foreign and Security PolicySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: Thomas Diez (University of Tuebingen)Chair: Thomas Diez (University of Tuebingen)Discussant: Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick)
-
This paper offers a polemic rejoinder to the debate about the relevance of discourse-theoretical approaches to foreign policy analysis (FPA). It argues that Discursive Foreign Policy Analysis (DFPA) is now a well-established approach to the study of foreign policy and its proponents should not be too defensive about their achievements. On the other hand, there is a problematic tendency to reduce the study of discourse to a method, which obscures DFPA’s roots in critical theory and its explicit dedication to ‘changing the world’ (Marx). To gain broader relevance, DFPA should return to these roots and double-down on this ethical and political dimension, which is too often overlooked in the existing research. I will discuss this in two steps. First, I will review the recent call for a ‘critical turn’ made by some mainstream FPA scholars, suggesting that this opening could offer space for an interesting intellectual encounter. Important caveats are in place, though, especially concerning the potentially rather limited scope of critique that the mainstream FPA may be ready to accept. Second, and more importantly, I will turn to the question of DFPA’s broader public role, where I will argue for taking a more active public role, and outline what this might look like.
Author: Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague)) -
Lately, there has been a growing interest in the role of ideologies in International Relations (IR). While this scholarship has shown how ideology impacts on foreign policy and world politics, it predominantly reduces ideologies to belief systems that influence policy preferences and outputs. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse theory (PDT), this article aims to complement this research by drawing attention to a different dimension of ideology in foreign policy: the attempt to mask over the discursively constructed character of social reality and thereby promise to satisfy ‘our’ – ultimately unfulfillable – desire for ontological wholeness and security. The article discusses how foreign policy can be used for this ideological operation by narrating it as a political practice that can either make ‘our’ nation-state whole (again) or threaten its very being and survival. Through this re-conceptualization of ideology, the article also relates the study of ideology to the concepts of identity and affect in IR and shows how the illusive promise for whole identities and social orders drives the affective investment in specific political projects. The article illustrates its arguments through an analysis of the nexus between foreign policy and ideology in the discourses of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States.
Author: Thorsten Wojczewski (Coventry University) -
In analyses of security policy, discourse has largely been used either to explain continuity by pointing to security cultures and discursive constraints to policy formulation or to critically engage with practices of othering and the construction (and reproduction) of (mostly national) identities. I argue that we need to pay more attention to the performativity of security discourse in the construction of and stabilisation of societal orders through the articulation of antagonistic frontiers and discursive nodal points. Acknowledging earlier Foucauldian work on security, I thus treat "security" as an empty signifier that requires connections to other concepts in order to become meaningful. Through these linkages, a particular vision of society is inscribed into the broader debate as a given so that security becomes a "technology of power". What has been discussed as a process of "securitisation" in the literature, i.e. the discursive process of moving an issue from the realm of politics to the realm of security, may thus be reconceptualised as a particularly strong form of fixing the meaning of "society", in which the articulations of threats, referent objects and emergency measures serve as the rhetorical vehicles to inscribe particular metanarratives. Security policy is therefore never only about security; it affects many aspects of our daily lives. Likewise, security policy does not only emerge from particular societal contexts but serves to construct these contexts. And while othering is an essential part of security discourse, it becomes effective only through the linkage with the construction of what is considered essential for society. As an illustration, I will provide a brief analysis of debates within the EU about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in which articulations of security serve to construct different "Europes" as referent objects tied to different conceptions of the essential pillars of (a) European order.
Author: Thomas Diez (University of Tuebingen)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Securitisation, security logics, and exceptional politicsSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Thomas Martin (Open University)
-
International Studies faces an era of global uncertainty and ploycrisis where diverse issues easily blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional security areas. Among these issues, transnational environmental risks accelerate global uncertainty. In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred and caused a tsunami, leading to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. After over a decade of treatment to remove radioactive materials, in 2021, the Japanese government announced a long-term plan to release the Fukushima nuclear treated water. This decision has sparked significant controversy over the safety issues of the Fukushima water, particularly in South Korea. This paper examines the conflicting South Korean discourses surrounding the Fukushima water release at both domestic and international levels. It argues that the political response to transboundary environmental risk is fundamentally shaped by both scientific assessment and struggles for symbolic power and recognition. With discourses on the Fukushima water release in South Korea, this paper employs the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to explore the multifaceted dynamics of nuclear technology and policies. The Fukushima water release inherently relates to the use of nuclear power, which is a key political and economic issue in South Korea and even East Asia. Employing critical discourse analysis, this study recasts Korea as an analytical vantage point to reveal how non-traditional security elements converge with geopolitical tensions, offering new insights to comprehend and manage the entanglement of traditional and non-traditional security issues.
Author: Yeonsu Lee (University of Leeds) -
This paper focuses on the often-overlooked impacts of counterterrorism programming on children and families who, while not direct recipients of interventions, are nevertheless implicated through their relationships. Using Friedman and Ketola’s (2023) concept of relational harm—the broader harm that individuals and communities experience through the targeting and control of their intimate relationships—this study examines how contemporary security practices generate harm through relational and affective networks rather than only through direct state intervention.
Taking a critical and feminist approach, I examine the policies of migration governance and diaspora politics in the UK to ask how is familial harm produced through the securitisation of whole communities, and how do connections to others become a source of (in)security and vulnerability? Using discourse analysis to analyse public records, community documents and individual experiences, I offer insights into the relationship between the family, state practices of ‘security’ and the process of ‘securitisation’, revealing how racialised and gendered security logics extend deeply into the social fabric, (re)producing familial harm and reshaping everyday life.
As International Affairs looks to the next 50 years, this paper shows how Britain’s security infrastructure remains rooted in colonialist, patriarchal and racialised norms, where ‘security’ is contingent. Through an innovative methodological and theoretical approach grounded in ethics, care and relationality, the paper contributes to rethinking what rights and protections are required to enable security at the individual and family level, and how counterterrorism policy and practice must adapt to minimise experiences of harm for those who interact with counterterrorism infrastructure. In doing so, it invites counterterrorism scholars and practitioners to move beyond critique and toward the dismantling of existing institutional structures to enable more just futures—ones grounded in feminist principles of rights, humanity, and equity, and responsive to the emerging global challenges of the coming decades.
Author: Sofia Patel (King's College London) -
For over three decades, securitisation has been the dominant trend shaping migration policies in Italy, which has intensified in recent years. Meloni and her government have implemented migration policies, claiming success in reducing the number of irregular migrants in Italy with a vast consensus from International and European leaders. This raises a question: does Italy have ‘a successful recipe for securitising migration’? To answer this question, this paper examines how securitisation of migration has evolved in Italy and to what extent it proves to be successful following the 2015 migration crisis and how it shapes the narrative surrounding the decrease in irregular arrivals in Italy.
The analysis of laws and decrees traces how official discourse and practice have evolved in the past ten years, becoming more nuanced. The language used has shifted from technical and bureaucratic vocabulary addressing migrants, such as ‘applicant(s)’ and ‘seeker(s)’, to more generic and charged terms like ‘immigrant(s)’ and ‘foreigner(s)’, fuelling the perception of migration as a matter of security. Moreover, engaging with the literature in the field of Italian migration policy, the paper shows how practices have become more sophisticated, leveraging externalisation of borders, delegitimisation of the protection scheme, and police enforcement in migration management.
An early analysis of the findings suggests that the security frame remains dominant both in discourses and practices over the 10-year time frame analysed. Triangulating these findings with migration and asylum data, the paper evaluates the degree and dimensions of securitisation ‘success’ and for whom, offering new insights into the evolving dynamics of Italian migration governance.Author: Andrea Scalera (University of Glasgow) -
This paper contends that one of Nigeria’s overlooked security failures lies in the politics of language use in securitisation. Far less attention has been paid to the implications of language in framing/naming threats and how such framing/naming influences security policy. Building on critical security studies, securitization theory, and scholarship on the framing of political violence, the study examines how framings such as “terrorist,” “bandit,” “unknown gunmen,” and “insurgent” are selectively deployed by state actors and media outlets to construct narratives that amplify specific threats while obscuring structural drivers of violence. These linguistic framings normalise securitised and militarised responses, thereby foreclosing non-kinetic solutions that target inequality, corruption, and governance failures. This paper addresses this gap by making three arguments. First, the labelling of IPOB as a terrorist organisation illustrates the heuristic and politically contingent nature of terrorism discourse, narrowing legitimate political engagement while legitimising coercive state responses. Second, the construction of insecurity is inseparable from political leadership, with elites deploying securitising language to consolidate authority, as seen in the contrasting framings of IPOB and Fulani herders. Third, the language used to “name the enemy” fundamentally shapes governance, distorting policy priorities, and reinforcing state power by deciding which forms of violence are criminalised as terrorism and which are normalised within the political order. Ultimately, the study highlights how ‘naming the enemy’ (threats to national security) in Nigeria poses a core operational security challenge that necessitates a recalibration of how threats are identified and addressed.
Authors: Chukwuemeka Oko-Otu (Canterbury Christ Church University) , Ogedengbe Bunmi (University of Central Florida)* -
In securitization theory, exceptional politics is often contrasted with the politics of the everyday, which emphasises the routine operation of 'normal' politics. States of emergency (SOE) suspend the rights of citizens and by their nature disrupt the regular procedures of so-called ordinary politics. However, the normative means by which this 'ordinary' political life is imagined in the literature is often confined to Western, liberal contexts. This dichotomy between exceptional and everyday politics is problematised by recent and historical postcolonial cases. Drawing on postcolonial theory, timing theory, and frame analysis, we comparatively examine recent and successive states of emergency enacted in the English-speaking Caribbean countries of Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago in order to highlight the ways in which emergency politics has become a routinised aspect of everyday life, particularly with regard to law enforcement and public safety. The casual reception of emergency measures in these contexts challenges the prevailing academic and legal scholarship regarding states of emergency in democracies, inviting questions as to why the imposition of lengthy and frequent periods of exceptional politics is received and accepted by these audiences despite shifting rhetorical justification, public dissent, and constitutional challenges.
Authors: Jason Camacho (Aberystwyth University)* , Emily Pomeroy (Aberystwyth University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
This roundtable will discuss the recently published book Small Revolutionaries: Participation of Children and Youth in the Vietnam War by Mai Anh Nguyen (Cornell University Press, 2025). After initial comments by the author, Helen Berents, Synne Dyvik, Seb Rumsby, and Claire Smith will offer their reflections on the book. Q&A will follow.
From the book’s description: In Small Revolutionaries, Mai Anh Nguyen analyzes the life histories of young Vietnamese who participated in the military struggle against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies from 1955 to 1975. Their contributions took many forms: intelligence gathering, camp care and maintenance, even the building and destruction of roads using simple tools. Through these activities and others, young people contributed to the victory of the Vietnamese revolutionary forces. At the same time, they displayed significant political awareness, kindness, and empathy, as well as remarkable resilience while navigating the physical dangers and emotional challenges of war.
Nguyen examines the predominant social order at the time, which emphasized family loyalty, collectivism, and concern for one's community, as well as communist ideology, which children and youth internalized as part of their lives before joining the military effort. Together, these forces influenced the broader Vietnamese concept of childhood and the wartime experiences of young recruits. In Small Revolutionaries, young people emerge as active, socially engaged, and intelligent individuals with valuable and insightful stories to tell.
Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupChair: David Brenner (University of Sussex)Participants: Seb Rumsby (University of Birmingham) , Helen Berents (Griffith University) , Claire Smith (University of York) , Maya Nguyen (University of London) , Synne L. Dyvik (University of Sussex) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Technology and War – AI and Military RoboticsSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: Hermione Spencer (University of Loughborough)
-
This article examines how artificial intelligence decision support systems (AI-DSS) may disrupt nuclear crisis decision-making by reshaping the interaction between human cognition and machine reasoning. As nuclear-armed states integrate AI into nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) systems, long-standing assumptions about deterrence—credibility, ambiguity, and signaling—face unprecedented challenges. By bridging deterrence theory, emerging technologies, and strategic culture, it offers a novel framework for assessing how AI reshapes escalation dynamics and crisis outcomes. The article argues that the strategic impact of AI depends less on its technical capabilities than on how human decision-makers interpret, adapt to, or resist machine outputs. Using the fox-hedgehog cognitive heuristic, the article explores how divergent thinking styles shape human–machine interaction, highlighting the psychological, institutional, and cultural filters through which AI recommendations are processed in high-stakes settings.
Author: James Johnson (University of Aberdeen) -
Modern warfare contains a wide variety of networks that are reshaping battle. Whether through satellites, UAVs, latent sensors, automation and AI, the ability to sense and make sense is becoming fundamental to the data driven era of modern warfare. This paper will look at how militaries are seeking to enhance their ability for sensing and sense-making that puts the network at the centre of modern warfare. Relying on a constitutionalist theory born from the post-human politics literature, the paper seeks to understand how networks reroute the combat experience and battle behaviours. This project is part of a wider project on 'digits at war' which seeks to introduce post-humanism as a way to interpret the way that mechanical constitutions shape political behaviours. Using Ruth Miller's critique of 'stalled traffic and faulty networks', this project seeks to place warfare within the mechanical worlds of networks.
Author: David Galbreath (University of Bath) -
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has encouraged Ukrainian society to vastly mobilise behind defence-tech, especially aerial drones. Grassroots organisations have appeared to produce drones from kitchens to startups, while state-sponsored organisations have emerged to expedite the innovative and mass scaling capacities of proven technologies. With a relentless need to innovate and adapt to the latest advancements on the battlefield, I argue that Ukraine’s innovative resilience represents a unique hybrid total defence model that blends bottom-up creativity with top-down support. I present an innovation/counter-innovation cycle to visualise the process and build on existing total defence literature by presenting that strategic logics behind total defence can and should be fluid and adaptable to allow innovation to thrive using four case studies. Ukrainian innovation can offer lessons for NATO and European states building resilience in the contemporary hybrid and conventional threat environment.
Author: Joe Murphy (The University of Edinburgh) -
States have consistently misjudged the speed, scale, and diffusion pathways of the drone revolution. While governments focused on high-end platforms and traditional export controls, the real transformation occurred through commercial supply chains, illicit component flows, and the rapid adaptation of open architectures by state and non-state actors alike. This paper draws on emerging evidence from conflict zones and findings from ongoing research on semiconductor and robotics supply chains to show how overlooked vulnerabilities, permissive markets, and fragmented regulation enabled a global surge in low-cost robotics.
Author: James Patton Rogers (Cornell University) -
This presentation explores the discursive significance of « drones » in contemporary public debates on defence and security. In the summer and fall of 2025, as European countries engaged in rapid rearmament programmes to counter foreseen Russian threats, the idea of a “drone wall” – alternatively composed of drones and meant to counter drones – emerged as a salient element of public discourse, touted among others by European commission President Ursula von der Leyen. While drones – in all their varieties – have become a mainstay of contemporary warfare, particularly in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, the notion of “drone” continues to carry images of futurism, of technological proficiency, and of quasi-omnipotence. This presentation, therefore, through an analysis of European public discourses about military defence and rearmament, examines how – and why – drones constitute such a central discursive trope in plans for the defence of NATO. Through this analysis, this presentation will further examine the connection between the technical, material, and discursive components of the drone, and the interplay between material and political conceptions of military technology.
Author: Emil Archambault (School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Panel / Waiting for Disaster?Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk)
-
The discipline of International Relations (IR) is currently witnessing the active rethinking of the norms of state sovereignty as those norms become increasingly untenable amid rising sea levels. The case of a state losing its land territory due to submergence or physical changes that render it uninhabitable is historically unprecedented. In response, policymakers, practitioners and academics are taking steps towards discursively securing the continuity of sovereignty and statehood for small-island states that are at risk of losing their land territory, in part by refuting the possibility of state death and devising frameworks for alternative forms of statehood. In this paper, I suggest that the discursive reproductions and reconfigurations of sovereignty taking place within the context of anthropogenic climate change reveal the productive power of the earth and climate system. I propose that climatic forces and processes shape the conditions of what can be thought, and in the case of rising sea levels are contributing to the dislocation and reorganisation of the state sovereignty discourse, as that which has long been taken-for-granted—the stability and permanence of the land—no longer accords with lived experiences. In so doing, this paper seeks to contribute to growing efforts in IR to understand global politics through an approach to discourse analysis that sufficiently recognises the entanglement of the human and nonhuman, or the said and the unsaid, in meaning-making processes.
Author: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow) -
The endeavour to build an archive that can last a billion years and help civilization rebuild after the occurrence of an apocalyptic event raises questions about the reasoning behind such endeavours and what they can tell us about the existentialist times we live in. This paper provides an in-depth engagement with the so-called Billion Year Archive, the flagship project of an American non-profit organization aimed at securing civilizational knowledge by distributing it across the solar system. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies and philosophical existentialism, this paper successively analyses assumptions about security, the apocalypse, and civilizational knowledge inherent in the project and shows how the same assumptions inform thinking elsewhere in society about how to achieve security in the Anthropocene. More importantly, however, the analysis reveals the Billion Year Archive to be driven by age-old, and ultimately very human, concerns about the meaning of life, death, and the need to matter. This should give us pause, seeing as it points to a disconnect between our existential needs and our reliance on science and technology for answers to contemporary problems.
Author: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University) -
From rising geopolitical tensions between global superpowers to the death-throes of an economic system nearing structural breakdown, there is a growing anticipatory sense that we are on the verge of ‘something happening’, either the collapse of the economy, of the nuclear peace, or the environmental biosystems through which we sustain our global livelihood. Yet, an increasingly popular internet meme that circulates across an assemblage of social media platforms, blogposts, and betting websites collectively articulates a different sentiment of world-historical eventlessness: ‘nothing ever happens’. The meme, often invoked when a ‘major political event’ seems to be unfolding such as a nuclear showdown between Iran and the United States or a global stock market crash, rests on the comic assumption that such anticipatory moments often resolve anti-climactically where the mundane, boring status quo of world politics is quickly restored: tensions are deflated, the market is restored, accountability deferred etc. On platforms such as X and Instagram, digital users vote on whether a particular political development will result in ‘something happening’ or will ‘nothing keep not happening’? On digital betting websites such as ‘polymarket’, ordinary people ‘jokingly’ gamble on, on up to millions of dollars’ worth betting pools, whether something will happen in a particular political month or not, e.g. ‘will Putin invade Poland’ or ‘will the AI Bubble burst’? This paper articulates the popular affective structure of this phenomenon as an emergent future politics of ‘suspended anticipation’. The paper argues that world politics today, as mediated through digital circulations, is temporally felt as a tense situation of anticipation, of ‘being on the verge of an event’ which never arrives yet, in its constant suspension, puts palpable affective-aesthetic pressures on the modes and practices through which political subjects experience and orient themselves towards the atmospherics of the present moment.
Author: Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk) -
Uncertainty, social grievances, and bleak forecasts—dystopias dominate our time and have become a prevailing trend in literature, (pop) culture, and beyond. Many cultural critics interpret this phenomenon as an expression of radical pessimism in an era of multiple crises and the catastrophes of the Anthropocene. However, not all of these narratives are purely grim. Many explore how individuals, even in the midst of catastrophe, find the courage to fight for justice, build communities, and actively drive change. Such stories go beyond traditional dystopias and emerge as anti-dystopias.
In my paper, drawing on selected works of science fiction, I define anti-dystopia as a distinct genre and narrative framework that challenges the notion of societal hopelessness. Examples of anti-dystopian novels include Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. In film and television, The Kitchen and The Last of Us, among others, reflect this perspective. Anti-dystopian stories express the urgent desire to resist present and future crises while envisioning real alternatives to social collapse. Unlike utopias, which often depict idealized and unattainable futures, anti-dystopias generate impulses for tangible change from within a state of crisis.
The paper further develops the concept of anti-dystopia, which was published as book in German by oekom in April 2025 under the title Zukunft ohne Angst: Wie Anti-Dystopien neue Perspektiven öffnen (Future Without Fear: How Anti-Dystopias Open Up New Perspectives), for an English monograph.
Author: ISABELLA HERMANN -
The paper examines Walter Benjamin’s idea of Divine Violence and seeks to understand Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste in its light. Divine violence is understood here in the revolutionary sense that breaks away from the mythical cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence. The philosophical argument is extended to the Indian context where even after constitutional provisions and promises of social justice, the society is pervaded by social inequalities. In this context, the ideas of Ambedkar seem emancipatory as it seeks to annihilate caste as a category. The paper argues that the moment caste, in its present form, is annihilated, their remain no à venir, to use Derrida’s terminology. Though the paper does not question the novelty and suggested goodness of the idea, it seeks to engage with the philosophical dilemma of it. In this regard, the paper tries to addresses some questions: Is emancipation possible through annihilation of caste? Is annihilation of caste as divine violence desirable and possible? If possible, what comes next? Can achievement of justice be considered beyond the mythical cycles and short-term goals? The paper further investigates the idea of emancipation suited to the Indian context that demands reformulating a theory of emancipation beyond the Anglo-Saxon notion of it. The paper has a critical-theoretical orientation and borrows from the Frankfurt School, the Aberystwyth School and Post-Structuralism. It engages with them with reference to Ambedkar’s writings and Benjamin’s conceptualization. It seeks to bring out the alternate narratives on justice and provide an understanding of resistance from the margins.
Author: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
TH04 Roundtable / When Solidarities Break: Learning from the "Beefs" of Liberation
Why do radical alliances so often splinter? This roundtable reframes the infamous "beefs" within liberation movements—from the disputes over tactics and strategies to the very definition of liberation—not as failures, but as crucial diagnostics of power. We argue that these clashes between artists, organizers, and intellectuals are inevitable symptoms of working within systems of racial, capitalist, and imperial violence. By examining these broken solidarities, we uncover how power co-opts and corrupts. Moving beyond viewing these "beefs" as simple personal dispute our conversation focuses on the critical stakes for contemporary organizing: how can movements learn from internal conflict to build more resilient and self-critical praxes that actively trouble the structures they seek to dismantle?
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: John Narayan (King's College London)Participants: Jenna Marshall (Universität Kassel) , Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London) , John Narayan (King's College London) , Heba Youssef (University of Brighton) -
10:30 AM
→
10:45 AM
Break 15m
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Middle-Power Diplomacy in a Changing OrderSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: ISMMEA Working groupChair: ISMMEA Working group
-
The various modernisation and green transition projects in the Gulf region, taking place in the Vision 2030 and other framework programmes, enjoy a wide range of international support from European governments and businesses alike. Many analyses are written about these initiatives, mostly from the perspective of economic diversification and the lowering ratio of fossil fuels in national energy mixes. When it comes to the social aspects, the majority of observers focus on women’s rights, the decreasing level of youth, unemployment, cultural transformation, or the rise of renewables and green hydrogen.
In this context, the bottom-up perspective of the local communities and the effects of a wide range of projects on urban and natural environments have been neglected in the academic literature. However, emerging reports indicate increasing regional inequalities, dispossessions, and the lack of accountability.
The paper aims to investigate the social aspects of modernisation projects in the Gulf region through the concept of just transition. After adapting the term into the Gulf context, the paper will use Vision 2030 as a case study and its effects on two regions in the country – the Eastern Province and Jeddah. The methodology of the paper relies on stakeholder interviews, a study trip, and an overview of the literature.
The research aims to contribute to three academic discourses. First, it seeks to add value to interpret the concept of just transition in an authoritative non-Western political context. Second, the paper will shape the ongoing debates about the assessment of Vision 2030 and other regional development programmes nearing completion. Third, it will also emphasise a unique perspective on EU-GCC and UK-GCC relations and advise what role they can play in making planning in the Gulf more inclusive.Author: Mate Szalai (Corvinus University of Budapest) -
The rise of assertive, pragmatic and often opportunistic strategies in foreign policy coincides with the return of a systemic macro-competition between powers that seek to enhance their position. The aim of this paper is to explain the concept of transactionalism through a deep foreign policy analysis and demonstrate how it occurs in official discourses produced by the elites. Selecting Turkey’s energy diplomacy towards EU as case study, the paper wants to measure how such behaviour can be detected through a qualitative content analysis. Depicting it as a foreign policy behaviour that overcomes the fear for risks of hedging, the paper defines transactionalism as a foreign policy approach based on the following principles: favouritism for bilateralism over multilateralism, absence of a grand strategy and preference for regionalism, adoption of short-term aspirations over long-term projects, presence of a nationalist status-seeking rhetoric and finally, opportunistic view of systemic crises to enhance status. Providing a nuanced definition of this behavioural posture, the paper analyses the Turkish geopolitics of energy in its relationship with EU from 2018 to 2025, focusing on specific security events that ultimately brought Ankara to dialogue with Brussels: Eastern Mediterranean Crisis in 2019-2020; Southern Caucasus Instability in 2020-2023; Russia-Ukraine war 2022-2025. Commenting on a discoursive analysis of Turkish foreign policy, the paper contends that Turkey has manifested an open transactionalism towards the EU in the initial phase, for then reducing it in favour of a hedging strategy that aims to mitigate tensions while maximising opportunistic crises.
Author: Edoardo Lavezzo (University of York) -
Turkey’s recent military ascendance—exemplified by its drone diplomacy, naval expansion, and cross-regional interventions—has redefined its position within the shifting architecture of global order. This paper argues that Ankara’s strategic assertiveness embodies not only material power projection but a deeper ontological security practice: the quest to stabilise national identity amid the disintegration of the post-Cold-War order. Combining ontological security theory (Giddens; Mitzen; Steele) with the English School’s concern for legitimacy and recognition, the paper conceptualises Turkey as a post-Western middle power negotiating between its NATO commitments and its Global-South ambitions.
The study adopts a qualitative interpretivist approach, integrating discourse analysis and process-tracing of policy documents, strategic speeches, and defence-industrial narratives. This enables a close reading of how military practices and symbolic repertoires—such as the Türkiye Yüzyılı (Century of Turkey) discourse—reproduce Turkey’s self-conception as both Western-allied and civilisationally autonomous. The paper triangulates textual sources with empirical data on drone exports, naval deployments, and alliance diplomacy to illustrate the recursive interaction between narrative identity and material strategy.
This paper situates Turkey within the broader transformation of post-Western international society, showing how ontological insecurity can generate creative strategic activism rather than defensive retrenchment. It argues that Turkey’s evolving military identity represents a hybrid form of agency that both contests and sustains global order. By bridging identity theory, critical security studies, and English School scholarship, the paper offers a novel conceptual lens on the moral and structural dimensions of middle-power transformation. It aims to provoke debate about how identity-driven militarism is reshaping the meanings of legitimacy, recognition, and order in the twenty-first century.
Key Words: Turkey, Ontological Security, English School, Middle East Policy, Global Order
Author: Adem Ali İren (Suleyman Demirel University) -
Saudi Arabia is undergoing a period of intense changes at home and in its foreign policy. In hardly understood yet very consequential ways, Saudi Arabia’s policymaking is said to be intersected by an overarching principle: moderation. Domestically, moderation purportedly informs the range of state-led measures and initiatives impacting on various fields of activity and their relations, linking politics, society, economics, and religion. Externally, the Kingdom aims to present itself as a moderate player and a responsible diplomatic actor, seeing the turbulent context in the region and beyond as an opportunity to play a relevant role in some of the most pressing conflicts of the day.
This article examines how the idea of moderation, as a category of practice and principle of (di)vision, helps to shed light on Saudi Arabia’s doing in and across the domestic and external levels, as well as to highlight the tensions and potential contradictions amongst spaces of activity and across time. The term ‘moderation’ to refer to Saudi Arabia’s policy is certainly not new, however, its implications for domestic governance, diplomatic posture and, crucially, for the entanglement between the two since the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman remain conspicuously underexplored. Moderation situates the regime’s action in and across a constellation of conflicts unfolding both inside and outside the Kingdom, shaping the usually overlapping and sometimes paradoxical meanings of the practice. By looking at Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic action with Iran and in relation to conflict scenarios in Gaza, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, as well as domestic developments, we try to unpack how moderation informs and is informed by Saudi policy.
Authors: Javier Bordón (Lancaster University / SEPAD) , David Hernández Martínez (Complutense University of Madrid)*
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Africa: Security and AccountabilitySponsor: Africa and International Studies Working GroupConvener: AISWGChair: Tarela Juliet Ike
-
Sixteen years ago, the Nigerian government launched a disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) programme called the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) to end decades of resource conflict and unrest, as its host communities absorbed most of the national budget in the Niger Delta region. Thirty thousand ex-combatants were registered as beneficiaries of PAP. Unfortunately, child soldiers were not included in the registration. Any child involved in regular or irregular fighting units is considered a child soldier. The problem is that when child soldiers are excluded from DDR processes, as seen in PAP, they are compelled to self-demobilise, become invisible to formal reintegration. Thus, they self-reintegrate by depending on informal support systems.
Given this context, family and community support for child soldiers often wrestles with ethnic politics. While they aim to foster a sense of belonging that facilitates access to education, skills training, and mental health support, the region's ethnic politics may influence how child soldiers access reintegration. This dynamic is shaped by power relations that can create tensions and limitations, thereby affecting self-reintegration efforts. The study examines three ethnic groups in the Niger Delta states of Delta, Edo, and Rivers, namely Ijaw, Ogoni, and Urhobo, to understand the factors crucial to reintegration. The study investigates, employing Roger Mac Ginty’s “Everyday Peace theory” through qualitative interviews with 71 participants, how ethnic politics can deepen the hindrance and marginalisation of reintegration for child soldiers in post-conflict contexts, or improve access to reintegration. Thus, affecting the circumstances of rebuilding their lives in Nigeria.
Keywords: DDR, Child soldiers, Self-reintegration, Ethnic Politics, and Niger Delta.Author: Margaret Ifeoma Abazie-Humphrey (University of Bristol)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Capitalism, state violence, and non-aligned humanisms
N/A
Sponsor: Centre For Global Political Economy, University of SussexChair: Matt Broomfield (University of Sussex)Participants: Matt Broomfield (University of Sussex) , Armando Van Rankin Anaya (University of Sussex) , Joely Thomas (University of Sussex) , Kacper Przyborowski (University of Sussex) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Computer Says “War”? AI and Resort-to-Force Decision Making (Prospects, Peril, and Proposed Policies)
Computer says, ‘war’? Our question is intended as a provocation. Yet, it is not the product of futuristic forebodings directed at ‘the singularity’, a hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence (AI) would surpass our human capacities, escape our control, and (some argue) threaten our existence. Rather, it aims to paint a picture that is more mundane and more immediate. It depicts a scenario in which existing AI-driven technologies influence state-level decisions on whether and when to wage war – either through AI-enabled decision-support systems or various manifestations of automated self-defence. Such a scenario is soberly informed by what we maintain are impending changes in strategic decision making – changes that we have robust reasons to anticipate and can already observe in nascent form. This panel, which marks the final stage of a 2.5-year collaborative research project funded by the Australian Department of Defence, will address themes of trust, responsibility, nuclear deterrence, and institutional change as it explores the risks and opportunities that will accompany AI infiltrating state-level deliberations over war initiation. Moreover, panellists will propose policies to mitigate the former and enhance the latter as we anticipate this transformation.
Sponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupChair: James Patton Rogers (Cornell University)Participants: Nicholas Wheeler (University of Birmingham) , Mitja Sienknecht , Paul Lushenko (US Army War College) , Toni Erskine (Australian National University) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Debating Multilateral Responsibilities in a Contested World OrderSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Tom Buitelaar (Leiden University)
-
This paper critically examines the evolving concept of "special responsibilities" through the lens of the UN Security Council’s ongoing legitimacy challenges. During a period of profound shifts in global governance, it is argued that the traditional, power-centric understanding of special responsibilities, primarily vested in the P5, is facing significant erosion and contestation. Scholarship on the concept of special responsibilities has so far been relatively limited when it comes to fully examining the impact of recent shifts towards a more multipolar world order. In response, the paper argues that the principle of special responsibilities is now being directly challenged at multiple levels, both in international and domestic forums. To support this argument, the article focuses on three interconnected challenges: increased demand for equality and representation, the rise of unilateralism and nationalist politics, and division over how to respond to new and emerging security threats. All three of these challenges together have begun to significantly erode the structures and function of the Security Council as well as undermine support for the principle of special responsibilities at the global level.
Author: Samuel Jarvis (York St John University) -
Rising global authoritarianism is reducing the effectiveness of international leverage to fulfill global responsibilities, such as those concerning the responsibility to protect (R2P) and international human rights norms. This ‘Leverage Challenge’ has several elements, from the effects of international condemnation being watered down by reduced consensus to authoritarian powers offering alternatives to trade and aid without any human rights conditionalities attached. How should those concerned about the fulfilment of global responsibilities respond to the Leverage Challenge? This paper explores the case for inculcating international leverage to fulfill global responsibilities. It first sets out the prima facie case for inculcating international leverage, before considering three objections. It rejects the first two objections – that inculcating leverage is wrong because (1) leverage is paternalistic and (2) inculcating leverage increases the preponderance of stronger actors over weaker ones. The paper then presents a third, more nonideal objection. This accepts that leverage can be, on occasion, justifiably inculcated, but (3) also holds that the dangers of authoritarian capture of leverage can render inculcating leverage unjustifiable.
Author: James Pattison -
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 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. Interestingly, in 2021, the Chinese Government published prior to that of the US. This paper examines the “Human Rights Record of the United States” to explore Chinese understanding of 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, UK) -
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, on women, peace, and security (WPS), was adopted on the 31st October 2000. It acknowledged the role of women in peacemaking, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, humanitarian response, and post-conflict reconstruction. It included four pillars: participation, protection, prevention, and inclusion in relief and recovery efforts. While the adoption of the resolution has seen some success, yet, twenty-five years on, its implementation still faces challenges. Not only has its use been haphazard, but the proportion of women involved in peacekeeping processes remains low. Moreover, prevention, support, and justice for victims of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) are rare and often exclude heterodox women and other gender minorities from participating in peace processes. It also ignores the idiosyncrasies of local contexts. This paper explores some of the structural, bureaucratic challenges facing its implementation and offers recommendations such as: mandtory gender-sensitive training for all peacekeepers, and an increase in the number of women being deployed as military observers, civilian police officers, and humanitarian personnel, the provision of Gender and Women’s Protection Advisers to envoys, inclusion of gender-disaggregated data in future all peacekeeping mission reports.
Author: Adi Rumale (SOAS)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Decolonial Approaches to the non-humanSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
This paper interrogates imperial domination and its resistance in relation to the establishment of a large-scale plantation economy on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in the early period of its Danish colonisation (1733-1803). Recent scholarly contributions to the study of imperialism in Historical International Relations (HIR) have emphasised the need for relational approaches to empire. While such approaches are highly valuable because they allow for the study of both past and present imperial formations, the study of imperialism in HIR remains largely anthropocentric. This paper advances a relational conceptual framework to the study of imperial domination and its resistance based on Actor-Network Theory, that takes into account the role of more-than-human entities. Through archival research, this new framework is put to work in a detailed study of the first seventy years of plantation imperialism on St. Croix, thus shedding light on the Danish imperial polity in the Caribbean, which has received only very little attention in IR. The stories told of imperial domination and resistance within the paper involve complex networks of human and more-than-human actors: ships, colonial administration, racism, violence, disease, hurricanes, poisoned stakes, terrain, weaponry, sugar cane, enslaved bodies, and even magic emerge as sources of agency and change. Non-anthropocentric accounts of imperialism and its resistance, such as the one presented in the thesis are important, if IR is to confront the many extractivist, exploitative, and racist socioecological crises of our time, which some have called the Plantationocene.
Author: Johannes Feldt (University of Copenhagen) -
In Latin America, Indigenous and Black communities promote relational ways of living through a harmonic relationship between humans and nature. These relations sustain human life and maintain the existence of non-human life, but have been threatened since the beginning of the colonial project, with its more recent expressions translated into the language of development and progress. Considering the many situations all around Brazil where indigenous and quilombola territories were damaged to promote development, this paper questions ‘how can development projects promote insecurity, death, and dispossession in racially marginalized communities?’. Thinking of necrodevelopment as necropolitics through development projects, some cases will be presented as examples about how some people’s relations with their territory were disrupted by projects in the name of progress and modernity, provoking insecurity, deaths, and epistemicide. The examples mobilized for the analysis are the impact of dam collapses in Brumadinho and Mariana (State of Minas Gerais) affecting the Pataxó, Pataxó Hã Hã Hãe, and the Krenak peoples; and the Alcântara Space Center installed in quilombola territory (State of Maranhão). Mobilizing a relational, decolonial, and pluriversal IR theoretical literature, this paper can bring a contribution to the critical security studies, offering the idea of necrodevelopment as a conceptual tool to study the security dimension of development projects while also considering the importance of the worldviews/cosmovisions of Indigenous and Black/quilomobola communities.
Author: Rafael Bittencourt (Universidade Federal de Goiás) -
We often imagine continents being colonized by people but in Australia it was arguably sheep and their wool that made British settlement economically and, thus, politically sustainable. This paper takes a long historical view on the role that sheep pasturing had on the colonisation of Australia and the role of the colony in the making of the British empire and in the world economy of the 19th and 20th century. Using a feminist and decolonial lens, the paper argues that pastoral agriculture was successful in creating a new 'world' in the antipodes because it represents more than a simple economic enterprise. Animal husbandry creates social structures that root families and communities on the land they are settling and becomes thus foundational to the imperial fabric of the new colonies.
Author: Catherine Goetze (University of Tasmania) -
This paper examines discourses and realities of mine site rehabilitation in so-called Australia. It investigates claims that mining can not only repair damage done to the land, but actually ecologically improve the land. It shows how these outlandish discourses draw on colonial environmental imaginaries of Indigenous landscapes as ‘barren’ and colonial capitalist ideologies of improvement. It further shows how parallel logics of rehabilitation facilitate the exploitation of labour – rehabilitation discourses reassure mine workers that they can break their bodies on the mine site, in anticipation of their future repair. I challenge the widespread belief (even among environmental groups) that it is possible to rehabilitate mine sites, let alone improve them (rehabilitation is in most cases physically impossible). This brings into sharper focus a) how (the promise of) rehabilitation is a lullaby which allows damage to occur in the first place, and b) (together with my second paper) the work that mining does in settler colonial contexts. I argue that while mining claims to produce improved lands, it in fact produces landscapes which are drastically less usable by Indigenous people (and others) and thus an attack on Indigenous sovereignty. This paper intervenes in debates on the possibilities of regeneration from colonial capitalist ruination (Tsing 2003, Khayyat 2022).
Author: Iona Summerson (SOAS, University of London)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Ethics and/of Migration: Research and PolicySponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working GroupConvener: EWPG Working groupChair: EWPG Working group
-
Points-based immigration regimes are often touted as an acceptable form of immigration control because they don’t actively discriminate between migrants on any criteria other than “skill”. This paper questions this premise by challenging what it means to be “skilled” and how one may become considered as “skilled” and the implicit discrimination contained therein. Against a background of global inequality, skills are not equally and neutrally distributed across populations, but instead track factors such as sex, (dis)ability, nationality, and class. We also highlight how points-based immigration regimes link migrant rights to their employment status and require them to use these “skills” to contribute to the economy. This requirement exposes them to further discrimination as a subclass of workers who are disciplined through the threat of deportation or destitution if they are unable to find work or are forced to leave their employment. This paper thus makes the case that points-based immigration regimes can often be more discriminatory compared to other regimes by simply replacing direct with indirect discrimination, thereby generating the appearance of fairness over a reality of marginalisation.
Authors: Sara Van Goozen (University of York) , John Evemy (University of York) -
Based on personal ethnographic fieldwork among migrant and refugee groups residing in Poland, I examine the ethical challenges faced by researchers throughout the entire research process—from field entry to the global dissemination of results. The paper argues that ethics in migration studies is not confined to consent or confidentiality but evolves dynamically as the researcher’s role shifts from observer and participant to interpreter, communicator, and advocate.
The analysis suggests to trace the five (and not limit to) interconnected levels of ethnographic practice: (1) fieldwork through observation, participation, and the collection of life stories; (2) interpretation by the researcher; (3) interaction with peers and with research participants as co-interpreters; (4) presentation and negotiation of findings in academic and public fora; and (5) the potential influence of research on decision-making at local, national, and international levels. At each stage, ethical tensions emerge—between representation and agency, authenticity and advocacy, and the narratives constructed.
Drawing on Hastrup’s A Passage to Anthropology (1995), Callaway’s Ethnography and Experience (1992), and Amrit’s Constructing the Field (2000), the paper highlights how researchers’ positionalities and interpretive choices shape both the ethics and outcomes of their work. Insights from Appadurai (1996), Pink (2013; 2016), and Fassin (2011) further situate these dilemmas within globalised fields of mediation, humanitarian reason, and moral responsibility.
Ultimately, the paper questions whether International Studies as a discipline is adequately equipped to interact with migration studies. What transformations in epistemology, methodology, and pedagogy are needed for research to remain ethically grounded while influencing international policy and scholarship?
Key words: migration, ethnography, fieldwork, research ethics, interpretation ethics.Author: Olga Khabibulina (Institute of Slavic Studies Polish Academy of Science) -
This paper explores the power of narrative as a means of undermining the hostile environment faced by migrants in the UK. In doing so, it analyses how encounters between migrants, bordering practices and exclusionary policies have been transformed into tools of advocacy through storytelling. By foregrounding narrative as both testimony and intervention, the paper highlights how storytelling amplifies marginalised voices, fosters solidarity, and challenges dominant discourses that frame migrant communities as a threat. Drawing on Levinas’ concept of responsibility for the Other, it argues that stories constitute an ethical endeavour that reveals everyday forms of hostility and inspires collective action. Building on the grey literature produced by migrant rights grassroot movements, the paper draws attention to the use of narrative practices to advocate for more hospitality for migrants. From this perspective, the article reveals an understanding of storytelling as a political strategy and method for critical reflection, coalition-building and change-making across multiple domains of migrant life.
Author: Moises Vieira (University of Manchester) -
Climate change poses numerous threats to Indigenous peoples. Particularly salient is the issue of planned, permanent relocation away from at-risk coastlines, also called ‘managed retreat’ in the environmental studies literature (e.g. Bower and Weerasinghe 2021). Managed retreat is contentious in an Indigenous context: it has been accused of reinforcing settler-colonial hierarchies (Jessee 2022) and disrupting relationships to sacred territory (Walker 2021). At the same time, many Indigenous groups view planned relocation as a necessary evil in response to inexorable sea level rise and associated problems like increased tsunami risk (ibid.). The climatic dimension of managed retreat is morally significant: Native communities have contributed very little to the problem, yet are disproportionately exposed to climate impacts (Pérez and Tomaselli 2021: 353; cf. Caney 2010). Planned relocation, then, invites questions of ethics and justice: the subject of this paper.
I argue that a fair relocation scheme must have three elements. First, the destination site must represent a clear alternative to the status quo that satisfies egalitarian principles of justice. The site must ensure plentiful economic opportunities and a flourishing civic life. Second, the process of relocation must be consensual, with democratic participation. This would minimize epistemic injustice, whereby Native views are not seen as credible and therefore ignored (Byskov and Hyams 2022; cf. Fricker 2007). Third, Indigenous peoples should not be penalized for remaining within vulnerable areas. State agencies should not force them to leave, nor should agencies withdraw emergency assistance for climate-related disasters.
This paper contributes to the conference by considering a major global challenge in the coming decades - sea level rise and increased tsunami risk due to climate change - in the contentious context of Indigenous coastal relocation. It offers theoretical resources for International Studies scholars to engage with the normative stakes of the issue.
Author: Gah-Kai Leung (University of Warwick)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Fiction, Fantasy and PoliticsSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: Lauren Rogers , Andrea Christou (The University of Edinburgh)Chair: Zoë Jay (University of Helsinki)
-
In the summer of 2025, lampposts and motorway bridges across England were festooned with Union Flags and the St. George’s Cross as part of a political movement dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’. Supporters of the campaign claimed the efforts were simple demonstrations of patriotism, though links with the county’s far-right movements were clear, as were connections to mounting racist violence across the country. For readers of JG Ballard, an author celebrated by Will Self as having ‘unerring prescience’, this was a strikingly familiar picture. In the 2006 novel Kingdom Come, the prolific author’s last, Ballard portrayed a similar civic fever taking hold in motorway towns around Surrey. Twenty years on from its publication, Kingdom Come makes for fascinating insight into the political condition of contemporary Britain. For Ballard, the advent of a consumerist age had hollowed people’s lives from greater meaning, letting their politics be dominated by an insidious, powerful political force - boredom. This boredom, then, becomes a foundation of and justification for violence. This paper suggests that this is a rare and perspicacious depiction of a society devoid of political myths, the sacred narratives that justify a political community’s existence, wherein the decline of previously established myths (both national and international) cause populations to turn inwards in a search for significance, leading to undesired political and societal outcomes. This is a trend that is not, of course, unique to England, as the international rise of populist radical right politics well demonstrates. The paper also therefore provides insight into the analytical potential for ‘returning’ to speculative fiction after its original publication to learn about contemporary political phenomena, an undertaking especially useful for analysing the inherently mythic nature of politics, where literature might reflect reality and reality, in turn, might reflect literature.
Author: Jeremy Moulton (University of York) -
Fantasy literature has become a commonplace tool within the study of international relations. The politics of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, for example, are regularly included in teaching modules and are used to make larger claims about the salience of political ideas within pop culture. Yet, there remains a hierarchy within the study of pop culture regarding the types of fantasy literature that are considered valuable for academic inquiry. Fantasy literature written by women and with predominantly female audiences is often dismissed as “Romantasy”, dragon porn, or fairy porn. This dismissal is all the more galling given that these books are often explicitly about IR themes: war, justice, diplomacy, power, just to name a few. Moreover, this genre dominates the publishing industry globally, with over half a billion USD in sales in 2024. In this paper, we engage with one of the most influential series in the genre in 2025: Rebecca Yarros’s The Empyrean. Set in a military college in the empire of Navarre, this series poses questions about immigration, war, torture, censorship, and the security dilemma. It sold 12 million copies over the past two years, and there are rumors of film and TV adaptations. More to the point, Yarros has been explicit in saying that the empire in the series is based loosely around political decay in the United States. In this article, we analyze the way Yarros constructs key political concepts in the three Empyrean books. We argue these constructions can influence how readers interpret and fantasize about war and should thus be considered an important text for understanding the current political moment. In short, fantasizing about alternate political realities shapes what realities seem possible or impossible in the present.
Authors: Andrea Christou (The University of Edinburgh) , Lauren Rogers -
This article offers an original engagement with children’s picturebooks as a neglected, but important, site for exploring and reflecting on the politics of desecuritization. Drawing on examples from The Selfish Crocodile, Thud!, and The Heart and the Bottle, the article makes two arguments. First, the genre offers imaginative resources for understanding the diverse processes through which the politics of security might be transcended or otherwise transformed. Second, the stylised engagement with threat resolution common within the genre provokes opportunity for thinking afresh on potential sites of intervention for desecuritization. In making these arguments, the article offers three contributions. First, it expands the purview of literature on desecuritization through sustained engagement with picturebooks as a hitherto unexplored site. Second, it offers an original empirical reading of desecuritization dynamics within three examples of the genre. And, third, it uses these books to develop an original typology distinguishing between desecuritization initiatives targeted at security’s threats, audiences, and emergency measures.
Authors: Nick Robinson (University of Leeds) , Lee Jarvis (Adelaide University) -
Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel, Intimacies, portrays the life of an interpreter working at a fictional international criminal court based in The Hague. At work, the interpreter translates the words of a former president accused of instigating mass violence and the words of a witness testifying to the deaths of her family and community members. Outside of the courtroom, the interpreter is in a relationship with a man separated, but not yet divorced, from his wife. Over the course of the novel, Kitamura explores themes of belonging, truth, and violence through the interpreter’s private and work lives.
In this paper, I offer a reading of international criminal justice through Kitamura’s imagining of the interpreter’s life. I argue that the liminality and ambiguity depicted in the interpreter’s private life mirrors that of the imagined international court. The interpreter lives and works in the space of the in-between. She is the linguistic intermediary between the accused, the witness, and the court, and she is also in the middle of her lover’s marriage, living in his apartment among the décor chosen by his estranged wife. Not of The Hague, she is between worlds and uncertain of her place. Throughout the novel, the interpreter encounters threats and intimations of violence, but they remain distant and unresolved. There are suggestions of what is past and what is to come, but these are uncertain, passed on as hearsay from person to person. I argue that the private life of the interpreter suggests questions pertinent for international criminal justice, about the promise of what Phil Clark terms “distant justice”, the role of the truth in post-conflict justice processes, and the complexity of reckoning with violence.
Author: Natasha Fricker (University of Edinburgh) -
In February 1999, William MacPherson published his inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder to identify “lessons to be learned for the investigation and prosecution of racially motivated crimes.” MacPherson identified the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, acknowledging how police structures and culture reproduced racial inequalities. Twenty years later, the structure of British policing remains largely unchanged and its public image continues to be challenged by scholars, activists, and cultural producers sharing narratives of racist abuse. The core question driving this paper: under what narrative conditions are anti-racist counter-imaginaries around policing likely to succeed?
This paper explores how the BBC drama Line of Duty constructs and constrains fantasies of racial justice. The series centers on an anti-corruption unit and offered a rare space in mainstream television where institutional racism could be acknowledged and interrogated from within the police apparatus. Its sixth season, with over 13 million viewers, tackled questions of institutional racism explicitly. It was released in 2021, less than a year after the murder of George Floyd and less than a month after the government released its controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, denying the existence of institutional racism. With direct references to Stephen Lawrence’s murder and the subsequent MacPherson Inquiry, the show promoted a lively online conversation about the issues of racism in the police and ultimately divided audiences in a multitude of ways.
This paper deploys a mixed-method analysis of online discourse around Line of Duty’s sixth season. I ask three questions: 1) What do divergent audience responses to the finale reveal about pre-existing fantasies of racial justice? 2) How does the audience's struggle over the show's anti-racist narrative shape their conceptualisation of racial justice? 3) What does the discourse around the finale tell us about the struggles of producing anti-racist narratives in contemporary popular culture?
Author: CJ Simon (University of Sheffield)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Foreign Interference and the Domestic Politics of Foreign PolicySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConveners: Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague)) , Tomas Weiss (Charles University)Chair: Tomas Weiss (Charles University)Discussant: Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague))
-
In Foreign Policy studies, little attention has been paid to this point to the effects of transnational repression (TNR) on bilateral relations between the states hosting exiled opposition ('host states' or 'receiving states'), and the states targeting their dissidents abroad ('home states', 'sending states'). In the young subfield of transnational repression studies as well, research has mostly focused to this point on the motivations for home states to carry out TNR, on the nature and tools of that extraterritorial repression, and on the effect of TNR on exiled activism. The reception and consequences of extraterritorial repression in receiving states are yet to be explored. Starting with the hypothesis that TNR would be perceived by receiving states as 'sending state'-sponsored agressions, I ask in this paper whether TNR does indeed affect negatively the bilateral relations between sending and receiving states. Focusing on the particular case of 'liberal democratic' receiving states, I rely on archival research to explore two case studies involving exiled Iranian opposition residing in France, in the early 80's and in the early 90's. Contrary to my expectations, I find that the occurrence of violent state-sponsored repression operations on a host territory will not automatically cause a political response on the part of the receiving state, or a degradation of bilateral relations: TNR is only identified as state-sponsored and condemned as such if the perpetrating state is already framed as an 'evil' and 'oppressive' state in host state and liberal democratic narratives. In other words, it is not the occurrence of TNR that may cause bilateral tensions, but the occurrence of bilateral tensions that makes TNR identifiable and condemnable to host states.
Author: Chloe Raid (London School of Economics (LSE)) -
In recent years, the term “foreign interference” has been established to describe various types of malign activities conducted by hostile states. However, there are varying opinions about what exactly “foreign interference” is. We argue that the lack of conceptual clarity is caused by the novelty of the term, which became popularised in relation to the US presidential elections of 2016 as “electoral interference”. Our presentation will map out various uses of the term in academic literature, highlight different approaches to its conceptualisation and identify bordering concepts. While in the early 2010s the term was used interchangeably with the term “intervention”, over time it established itself as a distinct concept. Originally, it has been used in relation to “interference” into intrusion into specific and limited systems such as cybernetic systems or electoral processes. Over time, the target of “interference” has been understood more generally in relation to state sovereignty or a democratic system. Therefore, it becomes possible for the term “interference” to serve as a catch phrase for various activities perceived as undesirable. Informed by this mapping, we aim to provide a definition that will be the most useful for further debates and research.
Authors: Jonas Syrovatka (Charles University (Prague)) , Vojtech Bahensky (Charles University (Prague))* -
This paper examines China’s (PRC’s) narratives on the repression of Uyghurs in Taiwan in order to contribute to understanding how authoritarian regimes attempt to protect their external legitimacy. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to justify the repression in Xinjiang can be understood as a form of foreign interference, as they deliberately seek to influence attitudes in Taiwan in line with the interests of the CCP. This research focuses primarily on China’s ability to reinforce conformity among target audiences. Rather than concentrating on the mechanisms of narrative dissemination, which are relatively well studied, the study investigates the extent to which these narratives penetrate the perceptions of Taiwanese audiences. The main method will be quantitative analysis of a survey of a representative sample of Taiwanese society. The questions will focus on media consumption habits, perception of the legitimacy of the Chinese government, perception of the treatment of ethnic minorities in China, and perception of international pressure concerning China. The results will be analysed through multiple linear regression, with the predictor being a pro-CCP media consumption index, and the outcome variables being a pro-CCP narrative index, legitimacy index, and conformity index. This will be supplemented with several expert interviews to understand causal mechanisms.
Author: Jan Svec (Institute of International Relations Prague) -
The process of drafting official strategic documents in democratic states involves numerous consultations, rounds of feedback loops, and input from various actors before the final product is finalized and issued publicly. Among these actors are mostly local stakeholders, academics, and civil society actors, but representatives of allied/partner states can also be involved either in a transparent form or a rather implicit fashion. Since official strategic documents should reflect the national interest of the issuing state, the presence of foreign actors in the drafting process can be questioned. Distinguishing between benign and malign interference, this research project aims to trace the processes of the drafting and formulation of Indo-Pacific strategies in two small Central and Eastern European states – the Czech Republic and Lithuania. The empirics will be collected through interviews with elites, civil society representatives, and other stakeholders involved in the drafting processes. We want to focus on the direct (i.e., being part of consultations, intervening in the drafted language, etc.) and the indirect (i.e., self-censorship, policy adaptation) ways that foreign actors’ positions are taken into consideration by stakeholders of the drafting state.
Authors: Jan Hornat (Charles University (Prague)) , Zuzana Krulichová (Charles University)*
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Global Queer Activism: Challenges and Opportunities for LGBTQIA+ Social Justice in times of Backlash
This roundtable brings together queer scholars from the Global North and South with area expertise in South Africa, Nigeria, East Asia, the Middle East, South America, North America and the UK, to discuss the urgent and emerging challenges and opportunities for queer activists and academics committed to social justice for LGBTQIA+ communities. Queer struggles and communities have long been sidelined by gentrified forms of LGBTQIA+ advocacy, often located and expressed at mainstream, commercialised Pride events, by business advocates and in normative rights terms, such as same sex marriage. The rise of transnational anti-gender and homophobic political forces have led to a significant backlash against LGBTQIA+ rights and a shift in homonationalist discourses returning to forms of homophobic authoritarianism. The reduction of international development spending and the resurgence of traditional security priorities directly threaten queer security. The cancellation of USAID and PEPFAR funding have had exacting and negative impacts on LGBTQIA+ communities in the Global South. Transnational homophobic advocacy, directed by transnational Christian and pro-family groups in the Global North, has encouraged a rollback of LGBTQIA+ rights in a number of Global South locations. Evolving forms of homocapitalism, with a retreat of commercial sponsors at Pride events and the cancellation of EDI programmes by many big businesses, creates dilemmas for LGBTQIA+ organisers and advocates. This roundtable will explore these global dynamics and what they mean for theories of homonationalism, homocapitalism, 'Pink Washing' and diversity politics. Furthermore, the panel will highlight cutting edge queer research and discuss the emerging priorities, needs and responses that we, as socially and politically committed researchers, should chart in the face of these challenging times.
Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupChair: Daniel Conway (University of Westminster)Participants: Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol) , Colin Y. Yang (University of Bristol) , Béatrice Châteauvert-Gagnon (Sciences Po) , Olimpia Burchiellaro (University of Essex) , Andrew Delatolla (University of Leeds) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Governing Agriculture and Agrarian TransformationsSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)Discussant: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)
-
As the world climate dilemma increasingly reshapes agricultural systems, International Studies are being confronted with critical questions like: can governance and development models remain credible without embedding gendered power relations at their core? This research responds to this issues by empirically examining the nexus between gender-inclusive governance, women’s economic empowerment, and climate-resilient agriculture across ten Sub-Saharan African countries (2005–2024). Anchored in Participatory Governance Theory and Feminist Political Ecology, the examination moves beyond traditional state-centric or growth-centred paradigms to foreground the political economy of gendered adaptation. Employing the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) ARDL estimator, the study reveals asymmetric short-run and long-run relationships that exist among governance quality, women’s empowerment indicators (legal rights, school enrolment, and labour participation), and climate-resilient agricultural outcomes. The results reveal that women’s legal rights and economic participation significantly strengthen climate resilience in the short run, while female educational inclusion exerts the better positive influence in the long run. However, the results also reveal structural contradictions food security gains do not automatically translate into resilient systems especially when gendered access to resources remains unequal.
Keywords: Gender-inclusive governance; Women’s empowerment; Climate resilience; feminist political ecology; Sustainable Development Goals.
Authors: Oladimeji Abeeb Olaniyi (Uinversity of Ilesa)* , Adewale Adekanmbi (Dominion University Ibadan) , Joseph Olugbenga Oluwole (Dominion University Ibadan)* -
This paper addresses the contribution of dairy to climate change. Dairy is a complicated and unique agricultural driver of climate change. It combines both biogenic sources of emissions with the carbon intensity of industry. Major dairy producers also vary significantly across the world. They range from extractivist agribusiness producing for the world market, to small-scale farmers supplying vast quantities of local milk. The global diversity of dairy means it defies straightforward climate solutions. The problem, however, is that dominant policy narratives approach dairy’s climate mitigation efforts through the narrow frame of efficiency improvements.
To address this, our paper theorises three distinct ‘dairy-climate regimes’ and the specific climate mitigation and adaptation challenges they face. To do so, we analyse three case studies of Aotearoa New Zealand, California, and Uttar Pradesh. All three cases are major centres of world dairy production and, therefore, sources of emissions. But the profiles of these emissions vary considerably. To explain this, we draw on the tradition of critical agrarian studies to categorise them as distinct ‘climate-dairy regimes’. We analyse the intersecting dimensions of agrarian class structures, global market integration, and governance frameworks to classify these regimes. Ultimately, our paper reveals how just climate transitions in the dairy sector must go beyond the solutionism of efficiency savings and instead address the diverse global complexities of agrarian politics.
Authors: Ian Lovering (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington) , Faisal Al-Asaad (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington)* -
In the face of the current climate crisis, we appear to be neglecting, and even exacerbating, an equally pressing ecological concern: biodiversity loss. In doing so, we increasingly treat the climate crisis as the ecological crisis of our times despite concerns that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. This trend is particularly acute in the agriculture, with the rise of “Climate Smart Agriculture” (CSA) as the globally touted approach to mitigate the sector’s disproportionate contributions to climate change and to build resilience to its acute vulnerabilities within a warming planet. This paper highlights how CSA discursively excludes broader environmental concerns - specifically biodiversity - in the service of its “triple win” approach to address climate change while increasing productivity to feed a growing global population. In doing so, it reviews prominent CSA discursive framings and the practices associated with them, the corporate power that both drives them and benefits from them, and the associated biodiversity implications of these approaches. The paper argues that most of these practices not only fail to mitigate the biodiversity and habitat losses from industrial agriculture, they have the potential to exacerbate them. By contrast, these production approaches privilege large scale corporate interests, including fertilizer, herbicide, seed, and digital technology sectors specific to agriculture, as well as financial interests both within and beyond the agricultural sector. It concludes by demonstrating that an agricultural approach that prioritizes biodiversity restoration in agricultural systems not only benefits biodiversity and habitats, but can mitigate and build resilience to climate change as well.
Author: Kim Burnett (St Francis Xavier University) -
Environmental governance has become a key dimension of global agri-food chains, shaping the expansion of commodity frontiers. In Brazil, soybean production illustrates how farmers operate within a dense web of overlapping rules and sustainability initiatives - from the Forest Code and the Soy Moratorium to corporate protocols and the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). While most analyses focus on downstream actors such as traders and NGOs, this paper shifts attention to farmers, examining how they interpret, negotiate, and sometimes reconfigure environmental norms in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on a mixed-methods approach - including bibliographic and documentary research, secondary data, and 67 interviews in four rapidly expanding soy regions - the study explores the everyday politics of compliance and the territorialised practices through which producers engage with multiple governance frameworks. Findings reveal diverse strategies of adherence, adaptation, and circumvention, reflecting regional contexts, local enforcement capacities, and political-economic alliances. Farmers emerge not as passive rule-takers but as active agents who shape governance from below, generating ambiguities and flexibilities within hybrid regulatory regimes. By foregrounding these practices, the paper contributes to debates on sustainability governance and commodity frontiers, arguing that compliance, contestation, and circumvention are not marginal deviations but constitutive elements of how environmental governance operates in frontier regions.
Authors: Valdemar João Wesz Junior (University of Latin American Integration)* , Tony Heron (University of York)* , Tomaz Mafano Fares (University of York) , Paulina Flores Martinez (University of York)*
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Harm and its hierarchiesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Hannah RichardsChair: Hannah Richards
-
In his 1905 Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, British Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the World Scouting movement, wrote that the form of scouting he envisioned should be understood as separate and distinct from military scouting and he railed at the suggestion by some of his contemporaries that he was, in effect, advocating the martial training of boys. But though he denied he was doing so, he nevertheless made clear he would see no harm in it and, in fact, offered what reads as a spirited defence of a fostered military ethos. Under the heading “Militarism” and with direct reference to what he described as the characteristics of soldiers, he went on to extol the virtues of instilling, among other things, discipline, self-sacrifice, deference to orders, and loyalty to officers. Baden-Powell wove this together with direct appeals to militarist ideation around war preparation as lamentable but necessary to meet the anticipated threats of a presumed dangerous world. This paper traces parallel ideas and commitments through a range of contemporary (para)military organizations for children, developing conceptual distinctions between recruitment, pararecruitment, and perirecruitment (that is, efforts toward recruitment of the eventual adult through the present child).
Author: J. Marshall Beier (McMaster University) -
This paper conceptualizes the contemporary global war on drugs as a sovereign apparatus structured by two interlocking logics: narcopunitiveness and necrostratification. Narocopunitiveness refers to the performative dimension of punitive drug governance, encompassing paramilitary raids, public executions, and capital sentences that dramatize state authority through spectacle. Necrostratification captures the calibrated hierarchies of violence and protection that structure drug control regimes—ranging from death worlds and punitive limbos to hyper-surveilled populations and elite zones of immunity. Together, these logics constitute a dual-face framework of narcotic governance that illuminates how state power is exercised through both spectacular violence and stratified toleration of life and death.
Drawing on illustrative examples from diverse political geographies—including militarized campaigns in Southeast Asia, carceral regimes in Latin America, and surveillance-heavy approaches in North America and Europe—this theoretical reflection maps how narcopunitiveness and necrostratification operate across contexts while adapting to distinct political orders. In so doing, the paper challenges prevailing theories of sovereignty, exception, and social citizenship that tend to analyze punitive power in isolation from global architectures of control. By foregrounding the interdependence of spectacle and stratification in narcotic governance, the analysis demonstrates how drug wars not only discipline populations but also reorder hierarchies of value, rendering some lives disposable while others remain insulated from punitive reach.
The paper concludes by reflecting on the normative and political stakes of this framework. It suggests that recognizing narcopunitiveness and necrostratification as constitutive logics of global drug governance opens new pathways for transnational critique and resistance. These include reasserting due process, advancing human rights-centered harm reduction, and building solidarities across borders to dismantle punitive hierarchies that perpetuate inequality and undermine human dignity.
Author: Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University, The Netherlands) -
On 20 January 2024, a CNN investigation revealed that the Israeli military has desecrated at least 16 cemeteries during its offensive in Gaza, bulldozing gravestones, churning up bodies and damaging memorials. Whilst the IDF claimed that Hamas used cemeteries for military activities and to conceal deceased hostages, critics have claimed that Israeli attacks on graveyards violate basic rules on protected sites and could be considered war crimes. Drawing on Jessica Auchter, Adriana Cavarero and Randa May Wahbe, this paper will examine a specific form of violence is that is no longer concerned with simply extinguishing human life but eradicating the dead. This paper will contend that attacks on cemeteries should not be dismissed as an incidental or collateral damage, but should be understood as a distinct form of genocidal violence that seeks to sever the relationship between the living and the dead. It will show how attacks on necropolises—on both the corpses located inside them and the monuments that commemorate them—seeks to expunge the connection between people and place. At the same time, the paper will examine how Palestinian attempts to mourn the dead—despite these attacks on memorials—can be understood as both a personal intervention to remember those who have died and a political intervention to reaffirm the connection between the living and the dead, and between people and place.
Author: Thomas Gregory (University of Auckland) -
On the 15th of September 2003, in a detention facility in the Iraqi city of Basra, a hotel receptionist named Baha Da’oud Salim Mousa died following 36 hours of abuse and mistreatment meted out by British soldiers. The rippling consequences of this individual human tragedy could not have been foreseen. Mousa’s death and the resulting litigation had wide-reaching effects on Britain and its armed forces. Over the next 20 years, Britain faced hundreds of war crimes allegations emanating from its involvement in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response, a complex web of accountability mechanisms and legal precedents developed, spanning Courts Martials, judicial review cases, three public inquiries, the establishment (and closure) of a series of new investigative bodies, and two preliminary examinations by the International Criminal Court.
This project uses in-depth archival research to establish a contemporary history of these events, plotting the development of accountability processes alongside the responses of the political sphere and wider public. As the first overarching study of these events, it establishes new links and continuities between events across the period, from the early Courts Martial of 2004 to the passage of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act in 2021. More broadly, it speaks to the reality of military justice as a product of the society which undertakes it, the difficulties encountered when international justice becomes the subject of political debate, and brings into sharp focus the challenges faced when an organisation is forced to reckon with its own alleged misdeeds.Author: Elizabeth Brown (King's College London) -
This paper examines the 2023 UK state apology for the LGBT military ban. Public apologies are often regarded as operating to bring matters previously shrouded in secrecy to public visibility through recognition. We suggest, however, that a critical Feminist and Queer approach to secrecy instead highlights how apologies create visibility whilst reproducing states of public secrecy in new ways. Engaging debates in Critical Military Studies, secrecy studies, and symbolic forms of justice, we argue that political apology is a clear site at which we can examine the negotiation of binaries of secrecy/transparency and private/public, which we suggest are inherently gendered and sexualised. In the context of the LGBT military ban, we demonstrate that the UK state apology simultaneously performs a seemingly enlightened politics of renouncing harm to LGBT military subjects whilst obscuring contemporary military cultures of homophobia alongside the especially degrading and violent methods used by the Armed Forces to uphold the ban.
Authors: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire) , Emma Dolan (University of Limerick)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / International Relations as Area Studies: Debating the Provincial Foundations of the Discipline
In his famous 2014 ISA Presidential Address, Amitav Acharya called for International Relations (IR) to transcend the division between western and non-western IR scholarship and embrace ‘global international relations’. Central to ‘global IR’ is the idea that IR discipline is Western-centric and marginalises scholarship from non-Western societies. Ten years later, this provocation has led to significant scholarship that takes Acharya’s call seriously, from dismantling the Western-centric foundations of the discipline to analysing many forms of non-Western scholarship. Taking this call further, this roundtable debates one specific notion in the 'global IR' conversation: that IR as a discipline has been essentially ‘Area Studies’. The way IR scholars understand international politics has been characterised not only by Western-centrism, but also the fact that there are many IR scholars who are European or American specialists with narrow regional expertise but generalising their knowledge as 'international relations'. As such, IR scholars tend to prioritise or privilege one area over another and embrace a provincial viewpoint when discussing regions deemed ‘other’ from the Euro-American vantage point. This roundtable debates whether, how, and to what extent the exisitng international relations discipline is a form of area studies, and discusses the implications for 'global IR'.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Duncan McCargoParticipants: Yi Wang (University of Birmingham) , Karin Narita (University of Sheffield) , Max Warrack (University of Warwick) , Ahmad Umar (Aberystwyth University) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Lived Experience Academics’ and Researchers’ Network (LEARN): Embracing SubjectivitiesSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConveners: Bee Damara (University of Leicester) , Saloni Pradhan (University of Leicester)Chair: Bee Damara (University of Leicester)
-
My research project adopts collaborative autoethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of South African activists who are survivors of human trafficking. Drawing on my own experiences of exploitation, I collaborated with a small group of survivor-activists through debate and creative journaling to examine how we define our experiences and what we believe underlies commercial sexual exploitation. The autoethnographers are Black and mixed race South African women who have lived through both apartheid and post-apartheid socioeconomic conditions.
Political theory surrounding human trafficking and “modern slavery” has long been contested. In the 17th century, it was debated whether African people brought to Europe as sexualised “ethnographic displays” were slaves or willing participants fleeing greater hardship. In the 19th century, women who financed travel across Europe through sex work were controversially labelled victims of “white slavery”. Today, women coerced into sex work are commonly described as victims of “modern slavery”. Critical scholars dispute this terminology, arguing that slavery was systemic and institutionally embedded, and that abuses by individuals outside legal frameworks are not comparable. They also forewarned that “modern slavery” narratives would be used to justify stricter border controls and maintain criminalisation of sex workers.
Debate persists over who bears responsibility for such exploitation. Governments typically focus on criminal justice and border enforcement, while critical scholars highlight structural inequalities that drive people to enter exploitative situations as survival strategies.
Across history, those labelled as slaves or victims have rarely been included in these debates. We know almost nothing of the political views of women displayed in 17th-century “freak shows,” those who travelled Europe funded by sex work, nor women described as “modern slaves” today.
My research brings survivors into this conversation—not as passive victims, but as theorisers and political agents.
Author: Bee Damara (University of Leicester) -
My research examines how Indian youth engage with Hindu nationalism through everyday spaces, i.e., homes, friendships, hostels, classrooms, media and social media. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with university students across regions, genders and castes, I trace how nationalist ideology becomes emotionally embedded not through formal indoctrination, but through intimate, affective processes and spaces.
My lived familiarity with these spaces exposes them as intensely political sites where gender roles, caste hierarchies, and communal boundaries are reproduced through mundane interactions. Growing up within the social worlds I study has attuned me to the political weight of seemingly apolitical interactions, allowing me to recognise ideology operating in spaces and processes that might otherwise be trivialised or rendered invisible. This proximity allows me to access the intimate spaces where nationalism is lived while maintaining the critical distance necessary to analyse how everyday practises create structures of inclusion and exclusion.
This paper argues that lived experience functions as an epistemological advantage, enabling access to varied voices and revealing the emotional infrastructure sustaining nationalism. By centring affect and everyday practice, I illuminate how ideology achieves durability not through top-down propagation but through horizontal circulation within peer networks and familial intimacies. Lived experience produces knowledge by revealing what realist objectivity obscures: that political phenomena are not only rationalised through institutions and policies, but felt, negotiated, and reproduced through emotional architectures. This approach challenges realist objectivity, arguing that understanding contemporary nationalisms requires researchers to engage with the emotional, subjective dimensions of political phenomena, particularly when investigating contexts we ourselves inhabit.Author: Saloni Pradhan (University of Leicester) -
The end-of-life is a significant time which requires difficult decisions to be made. Medicine and technology are more advanced than they were previously and life can be sustained beyond what was ‘naturally’ possible many years ago. For those with religious beliefs and values, it is important for the period surrounding the end-of-life and death to be in accordance with them.
Islam is the second largest religion in the UK, and as a practicing Muslim, it plays an integral part of my daily life. One of the current challenges pertaining to end-of-life considerations is the fact that end-of-life decision-making is restricted by English laws that may or may not align with certain Islamic beliefs and values. When Covid-19 struck, a surge in cases requiring medical treatment and treatment decisions brought to the forefront the fact that there were questions amongst society, and especially within the Muslim community, of what is permitted at the end-of-life. My research investigates the extent to which the Islamic principles and rulings on the definition of death, the refusal of consent to treatment, the withdrawal of treatment, and assisted dying under English law, align with Islam.
My research reveals how there is a lack of clear Islamic rulings concerning particular end-of-life decisions/situations in the UK. Global rulings are drawn upon to fill the gap and recommendations are made in an attempt to reduce conflict in terms of end-of-life decision-making and to ensure that there is more compatibility and respect towards religious beliefs and values. The goal of this research is to demonstrate how similar Islam and English law actually are - something I did not expect or realise until I conducted this research - and steps required to work towards ensuring that the end-of-life is less stressful and more peaceful for Muslims in the UK.
Author: Kulsum Ayub Ali Patel -
My research examines the criminalisation of UK urban music, with a particular focus on drill, and interrogates the ways in which cultural expression has become entangled with narratives of criminality, policing, and moral panic. Over the past decade, UK drill has been positioned by state authorities, mainstream media, and sections of the public as both reflective of, and responsible for, rising levels of youth violence, particularly in London. This research challenges such assumptions by exploring the socio-political context that has produced these discourses, and by critically analysing the implications of policing creative expression for marginalised communities.
Central to this investigation is the rapid increase in the use of UK urban artists’ lyrics, music videos, and online personas as evidence within criminal trials. This practice raises significant concerns regarding artistic freedom, racialised surveillance, and due process, particularly when it contributes to fast-tracked and potentially unjust legal outcomes. The project considers the lived experiences of young people, artists, and families—especially those from international migrant backgrounds—who inhabit and navigate urban street culture in the UK, and who often face heightened forms of scrutiny, cultural stigmatisation, and state intervention.
Methodologically, this study employs ethnographic and autoethnographic research in South London and other key sites associated with the emergence of drill music. Fieldwork includes participant observation, semi-structured interviews with young people, community members, and artists, and an innovative listening-party method designed to elicit reflections on musical meaning, identity, belonging, and social realities. Through this immersive approach, the project aims to foreground the voices of those most affected, disrupt dominant narratives linking drill to violence, and contribute to wider debates on criminalisation, culture, and youth justice in contemporary Britain.
Author: Shabazz Gabriel (University of Leicester)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Meet the editors
n/a
Sponsor: British International Studies AssociationChair: Asaf SiniverParticipants: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham) , Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham) , Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh) , Asaf Siniver -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Mini Zine Making: A Hands-on Approach to Creative Methodologies
In the present moment, when our theorizing and witnessing is situated in a constant stream of crises of rising authoritarianism, climate collapse, and genocide, we invite researchers to question the how and the why of their knowledge production through a non-traditional format. Our workshop asks researchers to question: Who are the stakeholders? Who are we speaking to? How are we shaping our research methods so that knowledges from outside the academy are brought into our conversations?
This workshop offers a hands-on opportunity for researchers to engage with the possibilities of Participatory Action Research in International Studies through creative mediums in including photography, textiles, and zine-making.
Beginning with brief introductions to the practitioners’ own research projects, the bulk of this workshop will be the guided production of mini (8-page) zines through which participants can consider how they would share their own projects through this medium.
Researchers/participants will be provided with art supplies and guided prompts to engage with questions of knowledge production and dissemination. The workshop will close with a short discussion of possible impacts for consideration of ‘the international’ through non-traditional research methods. In this format, participants will learn more about the potential for creative methods in IR, and also consider new avenues for disseminating their research findings.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Chana Rose Rabinovitz (Queen Mary University of London)Participants: Sophie Harman (Queen Mary University of London) , Marcus Nicolson (Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research) , Christine Andrä (University of Groningen) , Helen Gutierrez (Queen Mary University of London) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Nuclear Futures: Norms, Technologies, and GeopoliticsSponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConveners: Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow) , Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) , Woohyeok Seo (LSE)Chair: Woohyeok Seo (LSE)
-
AI decision-support systems are entering nuclear command structures with little understanding of how they will fundamentally alter crisis decision-making and human control over weapons of mass destruction. How will traditionally human dominated nuclear decision-making be affected by AI-DSS integration?
This research establishes a baseline understanding of AI-related escalation risks in this fast-paced, evolving field. Contrary to assumptions that AI improves decision quality, evidence suggests AI-DSS may systematically bias decision-makers toward aggression by accelerating use-of-force decisions and creating illusions of certainty in inherently uncertain crises.
Drawing on behavioral decision-making theory, this paper analyzes how AI integration with nuclear systems could realistically unfold, and builds a framework to assess escalation risks. This theoretical analysis is complemented by comparative examination of alleged real-world AI-DSS deployments in Gaza and Ukraine for target selection and determination.
The research identifies which cognitive risks (e.g., automation bias, complacency, and anthropomorphization) could manifest themselves in the nuclear command structure and pose the greatest danger in engendering aggression and weakening decision-making heuristics. By determining the severity of risks, and which are empirically supported given available data, this paper prioritizes avenues for mitigation efforts and establishes a foundation for future research in this critical domain.
Author: Peter Rautenbach (University of Leicester) -
This article revisits Thomas Schelling’s foundational theories of deterrence and strategic interaction—particularly his emphasis on risk manipulation in brinkmanship—by exploring how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) disrupts these core principles. It introduces “synthetic deterrence”: a new form of coercion in which AI-generated simulations replace traditional demonstrations of capability. Unlike conventional deterrence, which depends on credible threats and costly signaling, synthetic deterrence uses machine-generated content to fabricate signals, simulate adversary behavior, and manipulate perception. GenAI enables strategic ambiguity and weaponized uncertainty, blurring lines between deliberate and accidental escalation. By reshaping how threats are constructed and interpreted, deterrence is redefined as a cognitive contest over belief and perception—focusing less on projecting force and more on influencing how threats are perceived and responded to. This shift challenges assumptions about rationality, signaling, and risk, necessitating a fundamental reevaluation of coercive strategy in an era where machines influence the tempo, credibility, and meaning of strategic communication. This article makes three key contributions. First, it advances deterrence and bargaining theory by framing GenAI not as a passive tool, but as an active strategic agent that shapes perception and behavior. Second, it theorizes synthetic deterrence as a distinct mode of coercion grounded in AI-generated ambiguity and illusion. Third, it shows how GenAI-driven deception undermines crisis stability by eroding signal trust, deepening ambiguity, and accelerating decision cycles. These dynamics demand a fundamental reassessment of coercive strategy in an age of machine-shaped perception.
Author: James Johnson (University of Aberdeen) -
The concept of a “Third Nuclear Age” (3NA) is becoming popular in academic IR and security studies and beginning to infiltrate policy discourse. This paper critically examines the periodization practices of 3NA thinking, in conversation with conceptual critiques of mainstream periodization practices made by historiographers and allied humanities scholars. I argue that the 3NA concept periodizes nuclear history in a politically constitutive manner which forecloses the possibility of alternative nuclear weapons policies from future timelines. This takes place through three principal mechanisms. First, the breaking up of time in a way that emphasizes rupture at the expense of continuity; second; the imposition onto the entire world of a provincial account of history; and third, the invocation of a “race against time” in a “shrinking present”. When applied to nuclear politics, all three generate political conclusions which, taken together, (re)narrate a nuclear future which is still defined by concerns about and action against “proliferation”. This paper does not deny that destabilizing developments in world nuclear politics may be taking place. Rather, it argues that periodizing these developments via the concept of the 3NA does ideological work in service of (re)armament and against disarmament by the nuclear weapons states.
Author: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) -
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, experts and journalists expressed concerns that Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling could weaken the international norm against nuclear weapon use: the “nuclear taboo.” However, we still lack empirical evidence on whether the nuclear non-use norm has, in fact, been eroded during the Russo-Ukrainian war. To address this critical gap in existing scholarship, we reproduced selected pre-invasion survey experiments on the nuclear taboo (N = 13,200). In turn, we conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis to investigate the shifts in attitudes toward the military use of nuclear weapons across various realistic scenarios. Paired experiments fielded in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, and India subsequently allowed us to assess the cross-national generalizability of our results. Our findings contribute to the study of the microfoundations of the nuclear taboo and the broader scholarly debates about the dynamics of international norms in contemporary world politics.
Authors: Michal Smetana (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague) , Marek Vranka (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague)* , Ondrej Rosendorf (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague)* -
The paper examines the new geographical landscape and the great power rivalry within the context of the changing international nuclear order. It then focuses on selected key geopolitical aspects affecting the development and emergence of a new 'authoritarian nuclear market'. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) may need a new approach to frame its win-win-win proposition. The Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE) are working hand-in-hand with the U.S. nuclear industry, and also nuclear proliferation experts need to address the challenges of nonproliferation. The paper suggests investing in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and basing them near or on a trial basis at NATO bases to mitigate safety and security risks. Such an approach could suggest strategies to constrain countries from signing commercial nuclear agreements with Russia.
Author: Aylin Gurzel (Eastern Mediterranean University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Palestine Solidarity in the face of GenocideSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
Both prior to and since the 2023 escalation of Israel’s genocidal violence in Palestine, trade unions around the world have been important drivers of direction action to stop material support for Israel provided by their governments. One — perhaps unexpected — site for this organising has been the UK Civil Service, whose obligation to be politically neutral typically prevents or hinders efforts to frustrate government policies with which civil servants disagree. This paper examines how trade union members in government departments are using collective action to build opposition to British trade with Israel in support of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Based on in-depth interviews with civil servants, it asks whether and how trade union organising can offer possibilities for solidaristic anti-militarist and anti-colonial resistance in institutions otherwise reproductive of hegemonic militaristic and colonial foreign policy practices. I argue that legal protections for trade union activity and the defence of ‘strong beliefs’ create some opportunities for critiques of imperialism to circulate in spaces of power that are otherwise hostile to them, and for using collective labour to organise resistance. However, drawing on Marxist feminist scholarship on institutional ideologies and liberatory praxis, I suggest that the possibilities for ‘change from within’ are limited, and the transformative potential of this work depends on building and cementing links with wider anti-imperialist and labour movements.
Author: Hannah Wright (University of Manchester) -
Drawing on our past two years experiences and involvement with mobilisations in campus, this communication considers the meaning and implications of being university students and workers in this hour of genocide. As university students and workers, we have all participated in the movement, in different ways and with different degrees of involvement. We come from different cultural and class backgrounds, and we are at different stages of our lives and careers, but we all share a commitment to justice for Palestine and against imperialism, colonialism and racism in all its forms. Using the pláticas methodology, this communication has been written as a conversation, a mean to pay tribute to the horizontal and democratic spirit and processes we have witnessed and experienced during student occupations across the globe – in contrast with our institutions’ lack of transparency, censorship and unwillingness to dialogue. As such this contribution hopes to convey a story that highlights the disparity between the silence and repression imposed by academic authorities and the everyday radical praxis of students and university workers.
Authors: Nathan Delbrassine (Université libre de Bruxelles)* , Elsa Roland (Université de Namur)* , Leila Mouhib (ULB) , Jihane Mhand Yamna (Université libre de Bruxelles)* , Omar Jabary Salamanca (Université libre de Bruxelles)* -
This presentation will critically examine practices of witnessing that have developed in relation to the genocide carried out by Israel in Gaza. It will explore the ways in which the world’s first “live-streamed genocide,” as the unrelenting and brutal assault on Gaza has been referred to, calls into question the utility of a politics of solidarity grounded in and focused primarily on witnessing.
This presentation will explore the potentialities and limitations of the politics of witnessing from a number of angles. Firstly, it will critically engage with that which is turned away from, exploring the fixation on women and children as victims imbued with innocence, as juxtaposed with men who are constructed as always suspect, and whose death is therefore framed as unworthy of witnessing.
Secondly, I will explore the debilitating effects of witnessing in a conjuncture where the Israeli state and military has repeatedly called attention to its own atrocities, deploying the politics of witnessing in the service of its genocidal project. This has paradoxically occurred alongside more noticed attempts to deny documented atrocities, or to redirect the witness towards alternative, fabricated readings of what their eyes have shown them. I think through the implications of this for how we understand the politics of narration and truth assertion today.
Thirdly, this paper will explore the deflating affective consequences of bearing witness when one has little power to effect change. What does it mean to bear witness and to descend upon the streets in order to provoke others into witnessing and so protesting, when Western governments refuse to acknowledge – to see – that which is there so clearly before all of our eyes? I will discuss the disconcerting and unsettling effects of bearing witness to an atrocity that is being actively denied despite its glaring presence.
Author: Sophie Chamas -
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 have thus more firmly aligned themselves with the Global North. 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. In the context of global solidarity, the Global East still has a heightened responsibility due to its own peripheral situatedness. 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 peripheral situatedness, allows us to explore these differences and make sense of global solidarity regimes. It invites us to a more granular reading of coloniality and histories of colonialism, making the case that Estonia and the Global East more generally, due to their more privileged peripheral situatedness, have a heightened responsibility to stand with the Global South while this cannot be expected the other way around.
Authors: Benjamin Klasche (Tallinn University) , Birgit Poopuu (Tallinn University) -
This paper emerges and is situated within a moment marked by the increasingly visible neoliberal appropriation of ‘decolonisation’, while the persistence of colonial violence continues to expose the contradictions within institutional claims to decoloniality. Co-written with undergraduate students, the paper reflects on the course ‘Global Palestine and the Politics of Solidarity’, taught within a Politics and International Relations programme, as a pedagogical site through which to navigate and confront these contradictions. It explores how decolonial learning, even within the constraints of the neoliberal university, might be cultivated through moments of affective dissonance that open possibilities for a praxis-oriented pedagogy grounded in affective solidarity. Drawing on Zembylas’s (2023) concept of ‘affective infrastructures’, the discussion situates the pedagogy of affective solidarity within a dynamic constellation of material arrangements, discursive frameworks, and the affective intensities that circulate within the classroom. The paper discusses the curriculum design, delivery, and assessment of the module, envisioned as an attempt to practice a decolonial praxis pedagogy rooted in affective solidarity, and examines students’ reflections on their learning experiences.
Author: Aneta Brockhill (University of Exeter)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Place, performance and power in international political economySponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: Charlie Dannreuther (Leeds University)Chair: Shirin RaiDiscussant: Shirin Rai
-
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are diseases of poverty that affect impoverished, marginalised and neglected populations, who live in impoverished and marginalised regions of NTD-endemic countries. The empowerment of patient populations affected by NTDs can be an effective tool to fight neglect and lobby governments and funding agencies to put these diseases and affected patient populations on political agendas. This paper examines how, over the past fifteen years, neglected patient populations in Latin America have created new national and transnational places to transcend fragmented patient landscapes, connect forces across endemic regions and countries, and unify their voices to put their cause on national and international political agendas in global health.
Author: Markus Fraundorfer (Leeds) -
This paper explores how the concepts of performance and performativity travel across disciplines and how far their meanings are transformed by distinct epistemic and institutional contexts. While both terms have become central to contemporary theory—from linguistic philosophy and cultural studies to law, political economy, and International Relations—the paper asks whether they constitute a shared analytical vocabulary or remain structured by disciplinary boundaries.
Conceptually, performativity refers to the intentional dimension of practice—the way concepts, utterances, or models are made true through reiteration and institutional embedding—whereas performance emphasizes the situated and embodied enactment of such practices through gesture, movement, and material engagement. Through a comparative reading of performativity in legal scholarship (including the Legal Sightseeing collective’s work on the sensory, affective, and spatial dimensions of law) and in political economy (where performativity captures the constitutive power of economic models and financial practices), the paper investigates how each field imagines the relationship between discourse, practice, and materiality. It argues that the interplay between performance and performativity reveals not only disciplinary differences in how knowledge, normativity, and agency are conceptualized, but also shared concerns with how law and economy enact the realities they claim to describe.Author: Oliver Kessler (Erfurt) -
Creating places requires a vision of the future that is valuable enough to build for. While recent literature on assetization focuses on the processes and performances through which value is constituted in contemporary markets, there has been little interrogation of how these performances relate historically, between the public rather than the private, or as reproducing categories value over time.
The infrastructural investments that built Brighton’s sewage system were realised in the interests of local commerce, but wrapped up in the possibility of a better collective future. The vision of late Victorian Britain municipalisation began in earnest through local authority applications to the Public Works and Loans Board for sanitation projects. The PWLB bore the organisational structure of the East India Company and many of initial loans were allocated to “company men” to complement their investments as they repatriated wealth generated overseas. Despite audit reforms and new local government powers the financial processes of this maritime and imperial economy reproduced ownership and class relations through the building, of an paying for, water infrastructure of the town: “modern water” valued scientific invention, private and public ownership linked repayment horizons and terms to rateable value and centralised statecraft centralised powers to Commissioners of the Treasury. These performances of lending, valuation and representation all reflected a hydrosocial order recognisable since Tudor times.
Similar patterns are familiar to any water protestor today and inform not only the kind of political economy that governs water politics today but also the opportunities for structuring opposition and the terms on which these are made. The paper reflects on these transhistorical performances of water power with reference to Brighton.Author: Charlie Dannreuther (Leeds University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Russian Warfare in Ukraine and Beyond: A Global Threat?Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Jakob Hauter (University of Reading)Chair: Ian Garner (Pilecki Institute)
-
Competing imaginaries of peace in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion reflected divergent conceptions of international order. Russia framed its aggression as a contribution to international security that delineated spheres of influence, revived great power management, and pacified allegedly chaotic Ukraine. The Trump administration in the US partially acquiesced to Russia’s great power management proposals and obfuscated Russia’s role in initiating the aggression. Other aspiring mediators, such as China and Brazil, reproduced colonial narratives that legitimised Russia’s demands for domination, requested Ukraine to accept subjugation in the name of global stability, and misrecognised paternalistic hierarchies in the Russo-Ukrainian relations as affinity and shared history. In response, Ukraine articulated a distinct variety of anti-colonialism that foregrounded territorial integrity, boundary enforcement, and European modernity while rejecting self-victimisation. Based on a critical interrogation of different imaginaries of peace in Ukraine, this article conceptualises twenty-first-century imperialism and anti-colonial resistance.
Authors: Kseniya Oksamytna (City St George's, University of London) , Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics) , Yulia Ioffe (UCL)* -
This paper examines how Russia’s experience in Ukraine has exposed the limits of authoritarian learning. While the Kremlin shows remarkable adaptive capacity - mobilising resources, reconfiguring industry, and reframing its war narrative - it has failed to translate adaptation into strategic learning. Drawing on theories of authoritarian learning and cognitive bias, the paper argues that Russia’s highly personalist system encourages “pathological learning.” The selective absorption of lessons that reinforce, rather than challenge, prior assumptions. Using evidence from military reorganisation, wartime economic management, and propaganda evolution, the paper shows how institutional dependence on repression and loyalty prevents feedback from battlefield realities. The result is an autocracy that learns to endure defeat but not to avoid it. By situating Russia’s wartime learning failures in broader debates on authoritarian resilience, the paper contributes to understanding how autocracies respond to crisis, and how the very mechanisms that sustain them politically can undermine their strategic effectiveness.
Author: Stephen Hall (University of Bath) -
How does Russia delegate war? States operating below the threshold of open armed conflict pose a unique challenge to their targets through the employment of proxy actors. The deniability of their actions and their embrace of risk averse strategies creates an uneven playing field which constrains the range of responses for targeted states. In addition, Russian proxies operate on the full the spectrum of war, making Russian proxy warfare expansive, cross-domain, and multi-actor. In this paper, we argue that closer attention needs to be paid to how Russia delegates war to irregular armed actors and to the relationship between such actors and the regular Russian military. We lack a detailed understanding of what conflict delegation entails and under what conditions it takes place, which is particularly puzzling since at the core of the proxy war debate is delegation to proxies by adversary states like Russia. In this paper, we outline the logics underpinning Russian proxy war strategies and illustrate these in a comparative assessment.
Authors: Jakob Hauter (University of Reading) , Vladimir Rauta (University of Reading) -
This paper aims to examine Russia’s hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe, tracing their historical roots and evolution from the 19th century to the present. It outlines that contemporary Russian foreign policy toward Eastern Europe cannot be fully understood without considering the long-standing strategic and ideological imperatives that have shaped its regional approach. The analysis begins in the 19th century, exploring Russia’s drive to consolidate influence over neighbouring territories and secure its position as a dominant power in Eastern and Central Europe. It then examines the Soviet period, highlighting how the Cold War reinforced Russia’s desire for control in the region through ideological expansion, military presence, and political influence over satellite states. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s ambitions transformed in response to the changing geopolitical landscape, balancing efforts to maintain influence over former Warsaw Pact countries with adapting to broader global pressures. The study concludes by linking historical patterns of Russian behaviour to contemporary strategies, illustrating both continuity and adaptation in its hegemonic pursuits. By situating Russia’s ambitions within a long-term historical trajectory, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of how history, geopolitics, and national identity continue to shape Russia’s approach to Eastern and Central Europe.
Author: Bernd Christoph Ströhm (University of Vienna) -
This paper examines Russia’s nuclear signalling in the context of its war against Ukraine, advancing the hypothesis that Russian officials deliberately leverage ambiguity to exploit Western risk aversion. While nuclear threats have become more frequent and explicit, they are increasingly detached from Russia’s formal doctrine. The project identifies patterns in Russian nuclear threats by clarifying conceptual distinctions -- between strategy, doctrine, policy, posture, and types of nuclear signalling -- and by analysing the intellectual and institutional context in which Russia’s nuclear posture has evolved.
Building on the foundational work of Thomas Schelling and Robert Jervis, and incorporating insights from psychology and strategic culture, the paper develops a theoretical framework to explain how ambiguity functions in nuclear brinkmanship. Given the limits of doctrinal analysis alone, it argues for an interdisciplinary approach -- drawing on neuroscience and decision theory -- to better understand how Russia constructs and communicates nuclear risk under conditions of deliberate uncertainty.
Among other things, the paper interrogates whether Russian elites genuinely view limited nuclear escalation as a viable strategy, and whether nuclear posture emerges through centralized presidential control or through interaction among multiple actors -- questions central to assessing the credibility of Russian nuclear threats.Author: Harald Edinger (Vienna School of International Studies)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Scarring the Wound: The Politics of Memory and TraumaSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
Affective Resonance of Hope in Remembering Gendered Bodies of Wartime Sexual Violence in South Korea
This paper explores how representations of gendered bodies subjected to wartime sexual violence generate affective resonance of hope and challenge gender injustice. Building upon feminist and decolonial scholarship on memory and emotions, it seeks to interrogate how we remember and feel embodied experiences of violence, and how certain bodies are mobilised within postcolonial memory spaces. My empirical analysis focuses on the War and Women's Human Rights Museum (WWHRM) in South Korea, remembering Japanese military 'comfort women'/wartime sexual slavery and global gender-based violence to confront the dominant narratives of reconciliation and post-violence. Utilising auto-ethnography and visual analysis of museum artefacts, I examine how representation of victims' bodies deliver the emotion of hope, and how such emotion resonates with visitors and shapes contested subjectivities around victimhood and justice. I argue that the affective resonances are politically generative, producing new configurations of gendered subject positions and critiques of patriarchal, masculine, and nationalist aspects of the South Korean state. By examining how violence against bodies continues to live on, this paper joins ongoing debates on the role of emotions, memory, and embodiment in understanding gendered violence and advances transnational gender justice.
Author: Chaeyoung Yong (University of St Andrews) -
This article examines how, from the early 2000s, the Russian state has constructed a narrative of cultural trauma surrounding the achievement of Ukrainian independence in 1991. We address the following research questions: How has the Russian state constructed and operationalized narratives of cultural trauma in relation to its foreign policy towards Ukraine? And how do these narratives construct childhood(s) as sites where geopolitical imaginaries are shaped by Russia’s expansionist policy toward Ukraine? We begin by applying a theoretical framework based primarily on the works of Alexander, Volkan, and Bliesemann de Guevara to explain how the construction of narratives of trauma may be manipulated to justify and legitimate specific ‘grand projects’ (in this case, the aggressive war of annexation which began in 2014). Through process tracing of state discourse, including educational textbooks and curricula, public speeches, and government documents, we demonstrate how the Kremlin has institutionalized a paternalistic and colonial narrative of Ukraine as both a rightful part of the Russian state and a misguided entity, amputated from the whole by the collective West. We go on to show that the Russian state targets Ukrainian children and youth as key sites for (re)producing this narrative of cultural trauma, through framing them as both the heirs to an aggrieved national history and the instruments of a future restoration of Russia’s ‘glorious’ past.
Authors: Michael Toomey (University of Glasgow) , Iuliia Hoban (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University)* -
How are antagonistic identifications produced in conflict and reproduced in peace? Drawing on over eighty interviews with community leaders, educators, and grassroots peacebuilders in Northern Ireland, this paper interrogates the persistence of antagonism after the cessation of violence. It advances a Lacanian–ontological security framework that accentuates the Hegelian dimension of psychoanalysis: the dialectical constitution of self and other through negation, recognition, and repression. I argue that conflict generates identity through a dialectical relationship with the enemy-other, wherein subjects gain coherence from the antagonism that structures their world. Peace processes, rather than dissolving this structure, often reproduce it through trauma-repressing practices. Such practices foreclose the symbolic working-through of loss and guilt, thereby preserving antagonism as the very condition of ontological security. By contrast, I propose trauma-sublimating practices that enable subjects to recognise the interlocking, multibranching character of conflict identities. These practices do not aim to erase antagonism but to sublimate it, transforming destructive drives into shared narratives of vulnerability and co-dependency. The analysis contributes to debates on post-conflict transformation by reframing trauma not as a residue of conflict but as a constitutive mechanism of identity formation. It invites a reconceptualisation of peace as a dialectical and affective process of sublimation rather than repression—one that requires confronting, rather than resolving, the violence that underwrites belonging.
Author: Albert Cullell Cano (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
The murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich by extremists in 2013 sent shockwaves across Britain, prompting an emotional outpouring unseen since the death of Princess Diana. Over a decade later, and despite numerous terrorist attacks having taken place in the intervening period, Rigby’s death continues to inspire significant public attention each year. Why did Rigby’s murder trigger such an outpouring, and why does it remain politically significant in Britain today? Whereas existing analyses have emphasised the event’s significance as an example of an increasingly unpredictable and fearsome form of terrorism, I argue that the murder’s most significant effect was to generate racialised anxiety around Britishness. Building on recent work in ontological security studies on vicarious identity, icons, and victimhood, I argue that Rigby’s identity as a white, male soldier led to his subsequent social construction by right-wing activists as a martyr object for the experience and expression of more general feelings of ‘vicarious victimhood’ that were initially situated around the juxtaposed figures of the securitized ‘Muslim Other’ and the venerated British soldier. While contested from the beginning, the appropriation of Rigby’s memory has continued since, with his alleged non-memorialisation frequently being juxtaposed with the memorialisation of a range of non-white subjects. Such grievances have prompted annual displays of racialised national defiance designed to reclaim (virtual) spaces. Thus, whereas existing scholarship on icons focuses on identification with living, agentic figures, I argue that dead martyrs vicariously reinforce collective victimhood identities in powerful ways by providing ‘deathly proof’ of victimhood and relatively silent icons that are less able to undermine the ontological security of the collective. Beyond developing our understanding of the case and vicarious identity in (inter)national politics, the paper provides key insights into the evolution of ethnonationalist dynamics that are increasingly at the forefront of British politics.
Author: Joseph Haigh (University of Warwick)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / The Climate Dimensions of the UK’s National Security Strategy 2025
The UK’s 2025 National Security Strategy positions climate and nature as central to national security and economic resilience, pledging to “restore the UK’s position as a climate leader on the world stage.” At the same time, the strategy also foregrounds state-based threats, especially Russia, and announces a significant increase in defence and security spending. This dual positioning raises critical questions about how climate and environmental concerns are (or are not) embedded in Britain’s short and long-term concept of national security.
This panel brings together researchers and civil society experts to examine the climate dimensions of the 2025 Strategy across multiple levels: the strategic (how climate risks are framed in relation to geopolitical and economic priorities), the institutional (how spending and capabilities align, or fail to align, with climate goals), and the societal (how security policies will affect communities and intergenerational fairness).
In keeping with the conference theme, “Is International Studies Ready for What Comes Next?”, we interrogate what kinds of methods and interdisciplinary thinking are needed to understand national security in the Anthropocene. Does the strategy’s framing represent a genuine shift, or a rhetorical adaptation? How can International Studies scholars bring climate science and environmental justice into mainstream debates about UK security? And what new pedagogies or research approaches can move us beyond siloed understandings of ‘security’ and ‘sustainability’? By examining climate security through lenses including gender, conflict impact, civil society accountability, and military emissions, this panel will challenge traditional security orthodoxies and demonstrate the importance of interdisciplinary, justice-centred approaches to governing collective security in a warming world.Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: Hillary Briffa (King's College London)Participants: Jan Selby (University of Leeds) , Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London) , Stuart Parkinson (Scientists for Global Responsibility) , Ellie Kinney (The Conflict and Environment Observatory) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The EU and European Defence: Challenges of a New EraSponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: ESWG Working groupChair: ESWG Working groupDiscussant: ESWG Working group
-
While the EU is re-arming, hybrid forms of warfare are successfully targeting the EU citizens’ mindset and voter preferences in local communities. Given advances in technology and hybrid forms of influence, traditional conceptions of EU security and defense, as well as related institutions, are increasingly less effective. Such institutions often prove slow and less effective in addressing internal vulnerabilities that are weaponized by third parties, especially in local communities and the private sphere. Current hybrid threats are already at play in European societies, in local communities that lack adequate defense capacity. This paper will focus on analyzing how hybrid security vulnerabilities and threats manifest themselves in EU Member States, in order to conceptualize how defense capacity in local communities could be developed.
Author: Stefan Cibian (Făgăraș Research Institute) -
The decision to establish a separate EU defence capacity alongside NATO in the late 1990s remains a perplexing issue, even 25 years later. The inception of the EU Common Security and defence Policy (CSDP) in 1999 raised crucial questions that have gained renewed relevance in the context of the Ukraine war. As scholars discuss new configurations of the NATO/CSDP relationship, it is worth revisiting the period of origin to ask why Europeans first wanted to create an institution that mirrored NATO’s mandate, replicated its institutional structure, and had a very similar membership. This study relies on recently declassified British archival resources and high-level elite interviews to provide a second historical reading. Embracing a historical IR epistemology, it reveals how prevailing role conceptions of British Atlanticism and French Gaullism continue to provide misreadings of this period and the broader CSDP/NATO relationship. Moreover, its goal is to foster an appreciation of how contemporary debates on transatlantic burden-sharing have a peculiar history that should inform discussions on building a new security architecture for European security.
Author: John Helferich (University of Oxford) -
CSDP began with high aspirations for the EU to build defence relevance but instead it settled for a focus on humanitarian crisis intervention. Even this faded, and now CSDP is security-driven. Its military operations, EUFOR Althea in Bosnia excepted, are naval: Atalanta, Irini, Aspides. The Franco-German driver of European Integration is in poor shape, unable to provide leadership. The UK has quit the Union. Into the breach steps the Commission, spurred by considerable worsening of the threat environment and a clear understanding that Europe cannot any longer rely on the US security umbrella. Russia's illegal war on Ukraine and Trump's second Presidency changes everything. But the Commission is not a lawmaker and in security and defence has no executive power. What it does have is (some) money, and the capacity to initiate, to incentivise, and to coerce (gently). Our research highlights some risks in how the Commission seeks to increase defence capability, identifies the key instruments involved, and asks how best this potential capability uplift can be deployed?
The paper is informed by elite interviews with 40+ experts and Brussels-based officials.Authors: Neil Winn (University of Leeds)* , Simon Sweeney (University of York) -
Increasingly it is difficult to deny that Europe is beginning to rearm. A raft of funding and policy initiatives have emerged from the European Union, security and defence cooperation agreements are being made with non-members and while still patchy, defence expenditure is rising steadily (SIPRI, 2025). While much attention has been paid to these developments, work is also ongoing on efforts to make European societies more resilient to hybrid threats. For example, the European Commission has also, in line with the Niinistö Report (2024), developed a European Preparedness Union Strategy (European Commission, 2025), which explicitly adopts a whole-of-society approach and proposes the development of a civil defence mechanism.
The EU approach stresses the role of the individual citizen, proposing for example that citizens should ensure they have resources to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours. In this paper however, we problematise the idea of the prepared neoliberal citizen at the heart of civil defence bringing the role of the state in imagining civil defence back in. While security is often perceived as a threshold condition that can be measured and benchmarked, we understand security as a form of political mobilization. What becomes framed as a security issue and how societies respond are political choices with positive and negative consequences for individuals and communities (Guillaume and Grayson 2023). Thus, paradoxically, in offering protection for some, security may also generate inequalities and oppression for others that reproduce social divisions (Fontana 2020; Hussain and Bagguley 2012). As Cronqvist et al (2022: 3) argue “planning, executing and experiencing institutionalised forms of emergency preparedness did not historically—nor does it today—take place in isolation from societal, cultural and political agendas”.Authors: Kyle Grayson (BISA) , Jocelyn Mawdsley (Newcastle University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / The Once and Future World Order: Book Roundtable
Drawing on his new book covering 5000 years of history, Acharya argues that world order has never been the monopoly of any civilization or nation. Structures of world order: independent states, empires, tributary systems, as well as mechanisms such as diplomacy, inter-state cooperation, freedom of the seas, humanitarian values, religious accommodation and many more, first emerged outside of what we call today as “the West.”
Neither does the West have an exclusive patent over are ideas about human rights, republican government, and democracy. Yet, centuries of dominance have bred both arrogance and ignorance in the West; in which the ideas and contributions of other civilizations through history have been forgotten or dismissed.
Acharya also reminds that all civilizations combine pacific and aggressive tendencies, and civilizations often progress by learning peacefully from each other, rather than purely on their own steam or through conflict.
The future world order, Acharya concludes, will not be shaped by one, two or a handful of great powers, but by a “global multiplex,” with many consequential state and non-state actors and in which diversity and interconnectedness will co-exist. While no world order can be free from conflict, the end of Western dominance need not mean the collapse of world order. On the contrary, it will help mitigate the West-versus-the-Rest divide, and create a more equitable and mutually respectful global arrangement.
This book roundtable brings together a distinguished panel to discuss Acharya's ground-breaking book on the past, present and future of the world order.
Sponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentChair: Indrajit Roy (University of York)Participants: Nora Fisher Onar (University of San Francisco) , Louise Fawcett (University of Oxford) , Indrajit Roy (University of York) , Amitav Acharya -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The Politics of International Human Rights LawSponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupConvener: ILPG Working groupChair: Joanna Wilson (University of the West of Scotland)
-
The weakness of enforcement mechanisms in international human rights law is a persistent issue. Even 76 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, accountability remains elusive in many countries, with perpetrators enjoying impunity and victims denied justice. In recent years, unilateral sanctions have gained prominence as a response to these challenges. Among them, Global Human Rights Sanctions regimes—first established by the United States in 2016 following the death of Sergei Magnitsky—stand out. These regimes, now adopted by 35 countries including the UK, EU, Canada, and Australia, allow governments to impose travel bans, asset freezes, and transaction restrictions on foreign individuals and entities responsible for serious human rights abuses, such as torture, extrajudicial killings, and genocide. This represents the first unilateral, thematic targeted sanctions regime focused on human rights and uniquely enables victims to seek assistance from foreign states.
As a transnational mechanism, Magnitsky sanctions operate without requiring state consent and are backed by physical enforcement, allowing the application of international human rights law across state boundaries. The proposed paper will explore how unilateral sanctions can serve as a mechanism for enforcing international human rights law. It will examine how such measures can act as third-party countermeasures against serious breaches of jus cogens norms, thereby positioning themselves as innovative tools for fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). I will also discuss whether the new sanctions regime creates a new type of jurisdiction which allows third-party states to take the responsibility of protecting human rights in other states. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing discussion about conceptualizing duties and responsibilities toward victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations amid a global human rights backlash.
Author: Yifan Jia (King's College London) -
The article examines the issue of unequal access to human rights justice. Everyone is said to have the right to have their claim heard in court and to receive redress, but the reality at the international level tells a different story. Of all successful claims made before the European Court of Human Rights, for instance, only 15 percent are brought by women. Similarly, individuals who can afford legal representation before UN Treaty Bodies appear more successful in having their claims proceed to the merits stage. This article is the first attempt at a systematic analysis of thousands of human rights cases to determine who gains access to justice, what disparities exist among different groups of claimants, which actors impose barriers on individuals seeking justice, and how these barriers operate. Using quantitative analyses of cases that begin at the national level and reach various international human rights bodies, we examine whether specific types of victims are more successful in advancing through different stages of adjudication. We also assess what role lawyers and judges play in the process of enabling or preventing victims’ access to justice. Our findings contribute to the literature on judicial politics and behaviour by highlighting which types of cases and which groups actually reach the bench, as well as who is left out.
Authors: Umut Yüksel (University College London) , Veronika Fikfak (University College London)*
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Undoing the terra obscura: IPE scholarship, post-Soviet space, and theory without history
This roundtable brings together editors, authors, and critics to explore the subject matter of the homonymous SI published in Globalisations. It addresses the rather non-homogenous "post-Soviet space", its makeup, political, economic, and intellectual object and subject in (G/I)/(C)/PE so violently exposed by the "debates" around Russo-Ukrainian war and of Russia(n) Federation itself as an object and a subject in politico-economic sense. The terra obscura is "produced" through scholar(ship) superiority biases, evidential and analytical gaps, deliberate selective evidence bricolage for the sake of dogmatic pleading, methodological straightjackets that preclude honest and ethical scholarly engagement with the object of study or the carriers of local and indigenous knowledge (research ethics protocols are too a problem), historical ignorance and ignorance of old and new history(-ies) by the producers of knowledge in and outside academia, and more. How spatio-temporally unique intersectional social make-up and division of labour in production and socio-ecological reproduction, racism and othering, (de)coloniality, trade, mobility, migration, and displacement are made and experienced in each case is the question that needs answering if fitting theoretical frames are to be developed off and for them, not imposed on them, if the aim to understand the loci and the agency of concrete persons, groups, institutions, their foreign and (inter)state relations, including trade, security, and military aggression.
Sponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupChair: Yuliya YurchenkoParticipants: Owen Worth (University of Limerick) , Stuart Shields (The University of Manchester) , Yuliya Yurchenko , Lorena Lombardozzi (SOAS) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Unfulfilling the 'China threat' prophecy: complicating and expanding Western knowledge production on ChinaSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Mariana Vieira (International Affairs (Chatham House))Chair: Nicola Nymalm (University of Edinburgh)
-
In the last few years, the European Union has adopted a wide range of measures to protect its industrial base, secure supply chain, and enhance competition against China and the US. These measures include the foreign investment screening mechanism, the Chips Act, foreign subsidiary regulation, and the RepowerEU Plan. This article compares how the EU’s adoption of these ‘geoeconomic measures’ has been received by European and Chinese scholars. It first introduces the context in which the EU adopts the geoeconomic measure in response to the strategic competition between China and the US. It then sets out the methodology used to examine European and Chinese scholarly discourses. It next examines how EU’s geoeconomic turn has been received differently by Chinese and European scholars. It finally concludes that the way in which the EU’s geoeconomic turn is constructed differently in Chinese and European academic discourses matters for China-EU relations.
Author: Biao Zhang (China University of Political Science and Law) -
This paper asks why threat-based identity dichotomies persist even when a state’s behaviour changes. Looking at China’s rise, it shows that efforts to project a peaceful identity often reinforce, rather than challenge, threat perceptions. I call this the self-categorisation recursive loop, a process where peaceful performances stabilise negative external framings. The argument draws on Chinese state-produced documentaries and explains how relations in international politics are maintained through repeated performances of identity.
Author: Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
This paper problematizes the contemporary dominance of the 'China threat' discourse in US foreign policy circles by tracing the emergence and evolution of knowledge production about a 'Chinese threat' within the US national security field. It draws on poststructuralist, sociological and historical IR to develop a genealogy of the 'China threat' debate within the US that goes beyond the top-level policy-makers and that questions the debate's prominence in the Trump administration by going as far back as the late nineteenth century to understand its production. Through archival research and discourse analysis, the paper undertakes a 'history of the present' that investigates the different iterations of a 'China threat' according to three different stages of US imperial development: hegemonic ascendency (1776–1945); hegemonic maturity (1946–1973); and hegemonic decline (1974 to the present). The paper contributes an account of the relational nature of threat perceptions by developing a wider matrix of threats within which the 'China threat' discourse can be examined. In doing so, it questions the wisdom of the mainstream schools of thought (realist and liberal–institutionalist) that deem materially-rising powers as dangerous, without accounting for why alternative non-Western powers are not seen as a ‘threat’ that can overtake the ‘China threat’. It sheds light on the contingencies (and power relations) that have made the 'China threat' discourse possible throughout the decades, moving beyond prevalent understandings of US identity as fixed and exceptional, evaluating the impact of Eurocentric narratives of older East-West encounters and exploring the dynamics between the 'China threat' and US imperial processes of ordering.
Author: Mariana Vieira (International Affairs (Chatham House)) -
Discourse, deliberation, and rhetoric on China from US politics is dominated by frameworks of “New Cold War” (NCW) - discussions are concerned with whether NCW is true, impending, pessimistic, or unrealistic for thinking about China. Irrespective of the conclusions of scholarly and policy debates, the relevance of Cold War (CW) thinking is undeniable for articulating the nature of China and its future: predicting China’s behavior, strategy, and desires are grounded in likeness, denial, or an otherwise comparative backdrop of the historic Cold War. Although the historic US-USSR Cold War dynamic (1945 - 1989) is economically, geopolitically, and militarily distinct from recent relations between the US & China, NCW and other predictive futures referencing the CW appear to be undetachable for framing China-threat discourse. What explains the attachment and reliance on CW discourse for articulating the China threat, despite its imperfect fit? This paper argues that, although comparative CW framing on US-China relations is a flawed analogy, its ahistoricity signifies its utility as a tool of legibility for securing national identity and ontological security in world-order making. Existing attachment to the fealty of US-China relations against the historic Cold War obscures the emergence of a world-ordering Cold War ideology that is utterly abstracted and distinct from its referent event.
Author: April Ma -
This paper offers a postcolonial critique of how American elite foreign policy discourse has represented China’s rise from 2011 to 2024. I argue that United States foreign policy is not simply rationalised responses to China’s ascent but a discursive project of hegemonic identity formation that reaffirms the American Self. By situating the analysis within the so-called new cold war, the study shows how American grand strategies, from President Obama’s competitive engagement, President Trump 1.0’s strategic containment, and President Biden’s strategic coexistence are sustained by racialised and declinist narratives that externalise internal anxieties by constructing a Chinese Other through myths of American exceptionalism and American orientalism. The study advances a historicised analysis of China’s rise by showing how its construction as either a threat or non-threat is not a result of neutral foreign policy decision-making, but discursive strategies driven by neocolonial conquest and desire to sustain the narrative of American benevolent hegemony. Using a Postcolonial Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), I critically examine Foreign Affairs articles and State of the Union Addresses to uncover how language constructs imperial encounters which legitimises shifts in American grand strategies of benevolent assimilation (engagement) or disciplinary exclusion (containment). By showing how these narratives are based on racialised ideologies and colonial hierarchies, the study contributes to the broader project of decolonising International Relations.
Author: Margaret Jane Go (university of westminster)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / What future for peacebuilding?
Amidst increasing fragmentation in many conflict settings, peacemakers are struggling to pursue coherent, effective mediation leading to comprehensive peace agreements. Trends towards repressive governance, inequality and polarisation are exacerbating known causes of violence all over the world. Funding is also collapsing for peacebuilding and multilateral peace and security efforts. In this context we reflect on the context for peacebuilding and what peacebuilders with experience in a range of settings believe the future holds for the sector.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)Participants: Rebecca Ebenezer-Abiola (University of Aberdeen) , Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University) , Larry ATTREE (Rethinking Security) , Lewis Brooks (Saferworld) -
12:15 PM
→
1:15 PM
Lunch Break 1h
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Actors in migration politicsSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton)Discussant: Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton)
-
This paper explores how women’s grassroots organisations engage with subversive humanitarianism to support refugee women’s digital accessibility, inclusion, and activism: an area often overlooked by the public sector, charities, and large humanitarian actors. Drawing on ethnographic methods employed in a two-hour awareness-raising training session co-organised with WAST (Women Asylum Seekers Together) in Manchester, the study investigates the potential benefits and risks of refugee women’s use of digital technologies and social media. It explores how migrant women understand and use social media as a tool for survival, solidarity, and resistance, as well as for maintaining ties with home countries and accessing communities and resources, while also recognising risks such as Home Office’s digital surveillance, privacy violations, and hate speech and discriminatory algorithms on social media in the current context of rising anti-immigration and anti-gender ideologies. The paper highlights how women’s grassroots organisations not only provide immediate practical support but also act as sites of integration and digital citizenship, where migrant women collectively develop strategies to counter isolation, xenophobia and digital exclusion. The findings contribute to broader debates on feminist digital activism, critical approaches to citizenship, and community-led models of integration in the UK, demonstrating how digital spaces can become critical terrains of belonging and resistance for migrant groups.
Author: Zeynep Kilicoglu (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
Although migration is as old as humanity itself, in the 21st century it has taken increasingly systematic, ‘industrialised’ forms. Northeast Asian economies facing labour shortages sign bilateral agreements with poorer nation-states who send tens of thousands of ‘standardised’ labourers, dressed in identical uniforms, to the airport on ‘labour export’ programs. Irregular migrants cross borders stowed away in the back of shipping containers, as if they were commodities – with occasionally deadly consequences, as seen in the ‘Essex 39’ tragedy in 2019 when 39 Vietnamese migrants died in the back of a lorry en route to the UK. Meanwhile, the ‘migration industry’ systematically targets and recruits prospective workers for specific industries based on gendered and racialised attributes. International institutions such as the World Bank use economistic language to describe migration ‘inflows’ and ‘outflows’, using market logics to calculate “trade-offs… between economic gains and migrants’ dignity”. And throughout migration trajectories, noncitizen migrants are subjected to processes of marginalisation, precarity and discipline which can be said to ‘produce’ exploitable subjects.
These examples allude to the ways in which migrants are themselves being ‘commodified’, or at least dehumanised, through contemporary labour mobilities. This paper is interested in applying existing concepts of global value/commodity/care chains to reveal and abstract the mechanisms by which labour migration contributes to new developments in the global capitalist economy. At the same time, people are not commodities and have their own aspirations and desires, with varying degrees of agency to resist, evade or make the best of top-down structures.
Author: Seb Rumsby (University of Birmingham) -
How do Sudanese migrants and refugees in Egypt confront new legal restrictions and seek innovative ways to navigate an increasingly hostile authoritarian environment? To address this question, this paper draws on a year-long ethnographic study undertaken in Cairo with Sudanese humanitarian workers, day-laborers, and artists to see how these individuals negotiate autonomy under heightened state constraint. Through this lens, this paper contributes new empirical analysis of Sudanese migrants in Egypt, as well as a new conceptual contribution towards the debates surrounding autonomy of migration.
Egypt has historically been a prominent destination for (forced) migration, yet it has increasingly positioned itself as a transit country, facilitating the return or resettlement of migrants while dismissing local integration as a viable solution. This framing conflicts with the European Union's extensive efforts to manage migration from North Africa. In response to longstanding EU pressures and recent conflicts in Sudan and Gaza, Egypt ratified a new national asylum law in December 2024 and a new labor law in September 2025.
The new asylum law shifts responsibilities from UNHCR to the Egyptian government, which, while commendable, raises concerns about protection and political repression. Although the law includes provisions for access to healthcare and education for refugees, increasing instances of raids and illegal refoulement of Sudanese asylum seekers in 2024 and 2025 suggest a troubling trend. This is coupled with the new labor law, released in September 2025 which states that all foreigners need to obtain a work permit prior to entering the country, meaning many refugees will still be unable to obtain work permits.
This paper poses critical questions regarding the impact of the new asylum agreements on the treatment of Sudanese in the country and how they negotiate these new barriers in order to keep their own agency and autonomy.
Author: Elena Habersky (University of Glasgow)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Africa and International Studies Working Group and Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Working Group early career paper prizesSponsor: Review of International Studies
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Cooperative Research: Conceptualising, Reflecting and Debating Socially Engaged InquirySponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConveners: Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL) , Kacper Przyborowski (University of Sussex)Chair: Daniela Soto Hernandez (University of Sussex)
-
This paper explores the roles researchers can play in offering support to civil society organisations working with families and communities affected by challenging circumstances. These can include seeing their loved ones joining foreign conflicts and, as a result, losing their lives, being convicted of terrorist offences, or finding themselves stranded abroad. This reflection focuses on a 2017-2020 postdoctoral research project that studied the interplay between the narratives of intervention and statebuilding produced by the West and the Islamic State (IS), as well as the firsthand experiences and life stories of former Western foreign fighters and their families. After authorities denied the planned interviewing of returned foreign fighters, conversations with their families led to an enriching collaboration and several non-academic outputs used by civil society organisations, such as family and individual intervention protocols to support families of convicted terrorists, and mentoring protocols for young people going through challenging periods. The chapter delves into the intricacies of this process and sheds light on the need to critically consider safety implications of publications in collaborative work outside of academia.
Author: Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL) -
This self-reflexive paper attempts to conceptualize whether ethnographic research on everyday co-existence in conflict-affected rural communities has the potential to undermine the dominance of liberal epistemic communities in international peace-building. Truly collaborative action research is not always possible in ethnography with rural communities due to structural constraints, such as lack of resources and, more importantly, systemic prejudices about rural people's agency for social change. Yet, the author argues that there is at least some scope for translating their communal epistemes of peace and co-existence into the actions of peace activists. These actions, informed by the community-centered paradigm, must aim to dismantle “the whole edifice of an epistemic community, founded upon liberal democracy and capitalism” (Richmond 2008) rather than seeking a niche within it, thereby mistakenly believing in the possibility of effecting change from within the system. The critical discussion in this chapter is based on original ethnographic research in Armenian-Azerbaijani rural communities in Georgia, as well as the author’s concurrent personal experience of working with internationally sponsored peace-building in the context of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
Author: Vadim Romashov (University of Eastern Finland) -
This paper explores how feminist ethics of care can reshape research practices in the South Caucasus —a region deeply marked by overlapping histories of empire, socialism, nationalism, and neoliberal transition. Drawing on fieldwork and activist-research experiences across Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, I reflect on how power and care are negotiated within everyday encounters of knowledge production. I argue that care, understood as both affective and epistemic labour, offers a way to resist extractive and hierarchical research traditions, including the contemporary dynamics of data colonialism, where local knowledge and experiences are turned into resources for global academic consumption.
Through a feminist-decolonial lens, the paper examines how researchers from semi-peripheral contexts navigate tensions between institutional demands, ethical commitments, and local responsibilities. It highlights the emotional and relational work of field research where “good intentions” are not enough to confront asymmetries of access and representation. By reimagining the field not as a site of data extraction but as a shared, contingent space of co-labour, the paper invites a broader conversation about what ethical and cooperative research can look like under conditions of geopolitical and epistemic inequality.
Ultimately, it argues that care is not only an ethical stance but a political practice which can unsettle the logics of data extractivism and open possibilities for decolonizing knowledge production in and about the South Caucasus.Author: Sevinj Samadzade (Ghent University) -
Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) is a nonviolent, civilian-led approach to reducing violence in conflict zones. In a time of declining international capacity to protect civilians, the Creating Safer Space research network—comprising 70 organisations in 13 countries, most in the Global South—examined how communities protect themselves and others amid violence through local knowledge, collective action and solidarity. UCP practices often emerge where formal mechanisms fail or are absent, yet remain under-recognized in global protection frameworks and peace research. We discuss how, through decolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, the network sought to co-produce knowledge and collaborate equitably between academic and community partners, modelling participatory, creative and reflexive research practices to challenge extractive norms, centre marginalized voices and reimagine peacebuilding from the ground up. Findings from 26 projects affirm that community-led UCP saves lives, influences armed actors’ behaviour and changes conflict dynamics–rendering it a potentially decolonial alternative to dominant forms of paternalistic protection.
Authors: Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Aberystwyth University) , Nerve Macaspac (City University of New York)* -
An important challenge of academic research is its reliance on relatively fixed analytical and conceptual frameworks. The dissonance between these established frames and the conceptual thinking often taken for granted becomes particularly visible in the researcher’s engagement with local communities. This paper explores how thinking through struggle – an approach grounded in attention to collective experiences and local agency – can address some of these limitations and offer more cooperative ways of organising social inquiry.
Thinking and looking through struggles allows us to remain attentive to how communities’ aspirations and politics are articulated, and through this attentiveness, local agency can be recognised. This, in turn, shifts the analytical focus away from ‘actors with guns’ and towards the complex ways in which political visions are enunciated.
Drawing on doctoral research with Black communities and social organisations in Colombia’s Central Pacific region, the chapter situates thinking through struggle within a broader framework of cooperative research, where inquiry becomes a reflective, collaborative exercise grounded in engagement, relationality, and proximity. Ultimately, thinking through struggle is not only a methodological stance but also an ethical, epistemological, and ontological commitment that must be carefully navigated within the institutional realities of neoliberal academia.Author: Kacper Przyborowski (University of Sussex)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Crisis in the Air: Securitised Feelings and the Geopolitics of Stalled AffectsSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
It has become increasingly commonplace to characterise the present as an ‘age of crisis’. This paper investigates how this ‘age of crisis’ is affectively encountered and processed as a global political condition that simultaneously appears disorienting in its multivalent eventfulness yet stagnant in its irresolution towards alternative futures. We argue that while crises have always been central to the discipline of IR, they have not been significantly treated as felt phenomena that constitutes, and in turn constituted by, a dense political atmosphere which resonates affectively in the lives of political subjects who experience it. To understand crisis, we argue, requires thinking about how the crisis feels in the present, and how it structures and transforms everyday political subjectivity.
In this paper, we attend to the felt dimension of global crisis through conceptualising the term ‘static time’. We use ‘static time’ to denote an ambivalent political atmosphere that is doubly determined by both stasis (by repetitive and horizonless political action) and by a constant deluge of crisis-events that overwhelms subjectivity beyond legible perception, which we metaphorise through the image of ‘radio static’ noise. We argue that the affective co-presence of these ambivalent senses of crisis, as felt in the everyday, increasingly obstructs political agency and creates a suspension of collective-care infrastructures through which political subjects can orient themselves in the present. We navigate the emergence of this felt ‘static time’ of contemporary global politics through the circulation of three popular memes – doomscrolling, ‘I support the current thing’ and ‘I am tired of going through historical events’ – which reflect ordinary affective experiences of the present as articulated through everyday digital media.
Authors: Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk) , Alister Wedderburn (University of Glasgow)* -
There have been two major international energy crises since the end of World War II. The first is the energy crisis of the 1970s that was linked to economic and political turbulence in the Middle East. The second is the energy crisis in the 2020s that was generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Understanding the underlying sources of these exceptional international energy crises is the focus of the article. This involves asking why, in both these crises, energy producers took actions that involved a high risk that they would damage long-term economic interests and undermine the trust of the customers that they had cultivated for a long time. It also raises the question of why these energy crises have been relatively rare, with many geopolitical crises not generating an energy crisis. We argue that a key causal factor in these two cases of energy crisis is the role of emotions and, specifically, that of resentment. The legacies of colonialism also provide a key context for both these energy crises, though in different ways. The article is original in highlighting the role of resentment in energy studies and in comparing the energy crises of the 1970s and those of the 2020s.
Authors: Roland Dannreuther , Wojciech Ostrowski (University of Westminster; School of Social Sciences; Senior Lecturer in International Relations) -
The limited scholarship examining populism through securitisation theory emphasises the discursive power of the securitising speech act and how 'the people' are constructed as the referent object of security. Yet such approaches marginalise securitisation audiences as political actors by treating them as passive recipients of securitising moves and obscure their responsibility in the construction of exclusionary populist narratives. Drawing on affect theory and feminist scholarship on vulnerability as relational and politically generative, this paper recenters the audience by theorising the role of affective vulnerability in populist securitisation discourses. Vulnerability does not diminish agency but rather enables the audience as an affective participant in the securitisation process, whose shared sense of vulnerability is rooted in experiences of marginalisation, constitutive exclusion, and uncertainty. Crucially, centering audience vulnerability is not an exculpatory move. Audiences make substantive political contributions through their affective engagement and circulation of securitisation discourses. These contributions are neither neutral nor inevitable. Vulnerability enables rather than excuses their role in reproducing exclusionary politics. We draw upon the reception of recent securitisation of small boat arrivals in Wales to reveal how audience affect conditions the emergence and resonance of populist securitisation discourses surrounding anti-migration.
Author: Emily Pomeroy (Aberystwyth University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Domestic Ideas, International ConsequencesSponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham)
-
Think tanks have become increasingly central actors in foreign policy, offering expertise that potentially impacts decision-making processes and broader foreign policy discourses. But how exactly does knowledge move between think tanks and politics? The article makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to broader discussions on expert authority and the politics of knowledge in international relations. Conceptually, it advances circulation as a valuable means to grasp knowledge as always already moving (Östling 2018). This opens up a multidirectional perspective that considers not only the ways in which think tanks produce output to be consumed by policymakers, and what enables and hinders this unidirectional movement of knowledge. Circulation also grasps how knowledge moves in multidirectional ways, including from policymakers to think tanks. It also allows to interrogate the (im)material preconditions for knowledge to circulate or, conversely, to be kept from moving. Empirically, the article draws on an ethnographic study of two major German foreign policy think tanks, conducted between 2023-25. It demonstrates that think tanks engage in a mutual learning discourse, situating themselves as both producers and learners of policy knowledge. However, this discourse clashes with (im)material constrains such as funding and office spaces that result in hierarchies of knowledge production, limiting which knowledge can circulate and how. This restricts think tanks impact on foreign policymaking.
Authors: Karoline Färber (University of Erfurt) , Amelie Harbisch (University of Erfurt) , Sophia Hoffmann (University of Erfurt)* -
This paper explores how the public opinion in Turkey perceives the strategic instrumentalization of religion by Saudi Arabia and Iran in their respective foreign policies. While Saudi Arabia promotes Wahhabism, a puritanical sectarian movement, Iran adopts Shiism in its foreign policy, albeit to varying degrees. On the other hand, the dominant approach to Islam among the Turkish population differs significantly from Wahhabism and Shiism. This paper presents an analysis of the critiques in the Turkish public opinion levelled against the ab/use of Wahhabism and Shiism in the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively. Accordingly, for analytical purposes, it categorizes the Turkish public opinion into two main groups, i.e. conservatives and secularists, and focuses on the last two decades under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP in Turkish acronym). First, this paper investigates how and why the conservatives and the secularists in Turkey have criticized the use of Wahhabism in the Saudi foreign policy. Second, it investigates how and why the conservatives and the secularists in Turkey have criticized the use of Shiism in the Iranian foreign policy. Third, it presents a comparative analysis of the critiques in these two cases. To this end, this study draws upon both primary and secondary sources including statements of political figures, coverage of media outlets, and reports and journals issued by both the conservative and the secularist circles.
Authors: Şükrü Çıldır (Kocaeli University)* , Eyüp Ersoy (King's College London) -
This paper examines how Japan—a self-identified liberal democracy—navigates foreign policy decisions in response to international democracy and human rights crises. While liberal values have become more prominent in Japan’s foreign policy discourse, its practical responses remain selective and inconsistent. What explains this variation—and what does it reveal about Japan’s foreign policy roles?
Drawing on elite interviews with Japanese policymakers, official statements, and comparative case analysis, the paper develops a typology of three recurring roles: the cautiously concerned witness, the unyielding victim, and the defensive perpetrator. These roles reflect how Japan balances normative commitments with national interests and identity concerns.
The analysis shows that Japan responds most assertively when democratic values align with core interests—such as protecting its citizens abroad. However, when confronted with human rights criticisms tied to its wartime past, policymakers often perceive these as threats to Japan’s identity as a postwar liberal democracy.
By bridging role theory, norm contestation, and foreign policy analysis, the paper offers insight into how non-Western democracies interpret and perform values-based diplomacy under constraint.
Author: Emily Chen (University of Tokyo) -
This paper examines how religion has been instrumentalized in Turkish foreign policy from the early 2000s to the present, with a focus on the Justice and Development Party (AKP in Turkish acronym) era. While Turkey has historically maintained a secular foreign policy orientation, the AKP rule has increasingly invoked religious narratives and coopted religious actors in the service of foreign policy to bolster Turkey’s soft power, foster transnational networks, and legitimize foreign interventions. This study explores the dual character of religion as both a diplomatic tool and a source of controversy, analysing cases such as Ankara’s outreach to Muslim-majority states, humanitarian diplomacy, and the activities of state-affiliated religious institutions abroad. Drawing on official statements and secondary literature and employing political discourse analysis as the methodological framework, this research argues that while the use of religion has enhanced Turkey’s influence in certain contexts, it has also deepened regional polarization and eroded trust among foreign partners. By conceptualizing the ‘use’ and ‘abuse’ of religion in foreign policy, this study contributes to broader debates on the instrumentalization of religion and religious identity in international relations and the long-term consequences of blending faith with statecraft.
Author: Caglar Ezikoglu (University of Wolverhampton)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Ecological Imperialism and EcocideSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
The Israeli military destruction of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure during a livestreamed genocide, ongoing since 2023, extends a decades-long project of settler-colonial displacement originating in the 1948 Nakba and rooted in the British colonization of Palestine. This paper argues that the systematic targeting of schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, agricultural land, including ancient olive groves, water systems, and energy grids is not collateral damage, but a deliberate necropolitical strategy of erasure. Justified by a doctrine of divine promise and a political claim from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, this strategy aims to dismantle the past, present, and future of Indigenous Palestinian life, envisioning a modern riviera in its place. Through the lens of Gaza’s annihilation, the study interrogates how this ecocide embodies a post-liberal era where Western commitments to human rights and international law are weaponized to enable racial-settler colonial elimination. Drawing on UN documents, international law treaties, historical archives, and globally broadcast Palestinian testimonies, the analysis deconstructs how the dismantling of life is justified through a liberal grammar of "conflict" and "self-defense," semantically evading the reality of a live-streamed genocide. The uprooting of olive trees and bombing of cultural archives constitute an epistemicide, destroying social reproduction and collective memory. Engaging TWAIL criticism, this paper frames Gaza as a historical fulcrum. It examines the Global South’s mobilization, from South Africa’s ICJ case to BDS campaigns, as a nascent counter-order that exposes a fracture between Western publics and their governments, and within Arab and Muslim states normalized through agreements like the Abraham Accords. The paper contests whether the systematic ecocide in Gaza signals liberalism’s terminal crisis or its adaptation to preserve imperial sovereignty. By centering the destruction of the life-sustaining environment, this research contributes to critical debates on the decline of Western moral authority and the link between reparative environmental justice and decolonial liberation.
Author: fatimaezzahra abid (Mohammed V university, Rabat) -
This paper addresses the violence of settler colonialism – including environmental destruction – in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, a historically fertile and abundant territory situated within Area C under the Oslo Accords. I will argue that this Israeli violence – against a people, their livelihoods, their animals, and lands – is made possible not only through rapidly escalating settler attacks (UN, 2025) but also through the frequently Kafkaesque hyper-legal nature of Israeli apartheid itself. To give one of many possible examples, the permit regime—a product of Israeli military law to which all West Bank Palestinians have been subject since 1967—overwhelmingly prevents Palestinians in Area C from legally building structures such as homes, farms and infrastructure, with such structures facing continual threat of demolition for want of a permit. Drawing on theorists including Georgio Agamben (1995; 2003) and Walter Benjamin (1921), I will consider how vigilante settlers and the Israeli military place all Palestinian life in the Jordan Valley within an Agambenian state of exception, and how settlers and army commit forms of mythic law-making and law-preserving environmentally destructive violence in Benjaminian terms. From the poisoning of water and livestock to the burning of acres of ancient olive groves, Palestinians of the Valley face daily attacks on their ability to live, sustain their families, and to remain on their land. Moves towards environmental justice across the territory entail exposing the Kafkaesque hyper-legalism at the heart of the Israeli apartheid regime, calling out violations of international law across Palestine, and supporting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
Author: Lucie Maughan (University of Nottingham) -
This paper analyses the workings of settler logics in non-settler colonies. Few would contest that Tanzania was not a settler colony. However, settlers constituted a powerful sector of European colonizing society both under German and British colonial rule in German East Africa and Tanganyika, respectively. From the very first expeditions of conquest by Carl Peters at the end of the 19th century, until the sizable European planter associations of the mid-20th century, settler desires for land translated into sustained pressures on the colonial government. This entailed formulating and advancing racialized arguments about the need of a settler presence to civilize the Native, and the Native’s propensity to destroy East Africa’s fertile ecologies. As such, settlers profoundly shaped colonialism in Tanzania. Beyond this historical analysis, the paper also examines the extent to which these settler visions continue to structure relations between Tanzanians and ecologies today, and how they are mirrored in contemporary conservationist efforts to grab land for wildlife and biodiversity preservation. In doing so, this paper brings together settler colonial, Indigenous, and decolonial studies to think through what it means for settler colonial projects to coalesce and shape relations of power in a formally independent country subjected to (global) coloniality. Politically, this raises questions about the possibilities for trans-continental struggle for collective, internationalist liberation among differently-colonized peoples.
Author: Felix Mantz (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) -
The Chipko Movement, a grassroots environmental movement, began in the Indian Himalayas in the 1970s, is often seen as the first ecofeminist movement. It left a lasting impact on forest management in India and helped advance global forest conservation. The movement empowered local communities to achieve self-sufficiency and emphasized protecting natural resources for their livelihoods. Chipko challenged traditional development focused on economic growth over environmental health, sparking an ecological awakening that spread throughout India's valleys and forests. Today, its legacy continues to inspire environmental protection efforts, supports marginalized communities, and influences new ecological movements globally. This movement exemplifies ecofeminist environmental justice in resisting financialization and industrialization, especially affecting indigenous and Global South communities. My study explores the intersection of ecofeminist movements and environmental justice to protect nature and livelihoods. By examining how ecofeminism and environmental justice intersect, I aim to assess how this approach might decolonize environmental activism. This research will analyse local cultural values to explore decolonial ecologies and their role in activism. Climate change disproportionately impacts Global South communities, intensifying environmental injustices. However, fostering trans-local solidarities through ecofeminism and climate justice, as demonstrated by the Chipko Movement, can inspire new, decolonial approaches to activism.
Author: Efser Rana Coskun (Social Sciences University of Ankara)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Emerging Frontiers in Religion and International Studies: Ready or Not for What Comes Next?Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Jason Klocek (University of Nottingham)Chair: Jason Klocek (University of Nottingham)
-
Research on the securitization of Islam mostly looks at governments and security agencies; yet, it neglects the role played by Christian religious actors in accepting or rejecting securitization in the name of Christianity, as done by many far-right parties, who translate Christianity as identity rather than faith.
Conversely, prominent representatives of Christian Churches promote an inclusive discourse on Islam, like Pope Francis (2013-2025), who preached fraternity towards Islam, fostering an approach based on integral human development and compassion.
This paper contributes to scholarship on the relations between the Catholic Church and Islam in IR, reflecting on the extent to which Islam is still seen as a civilizational enemy and threat to the survival of European Christianity.
Different stances on Islam exist in the Vatican. Still, I choose Pope Francis as the key (de)securitizing actor and conduct a discourse analysis of his speeches on Islam from 2013 to 2025. I argue that the former Pontiff advanced a de-securitizing agenda centred on two pillars. First, to fight xenophobia in European societies; second, to pursue inter-religious dialogue with Muslim-majority countries. Hence, to use the securitization jargon, I conclude Pope Francis’ de-securitization includes both transformative and managerial dimensions.
Author: Ugo Gaudino (University of Sussex) -
A growing literature explores the role of religion in peace processes. Few studies, though, consider factors that may influence the activities of religious actors beyond their theological tenets. This paper takes the literature in a new direction by exploring how the role of religion during conflict impacts its role after the fighting stops. Applying a relational peace framework, I identify two conflict factors – religion-combatant relations and the salience of religion – that moderate the influence of religious actors in post-conflict settings. When both factors are high, the role of faith-based actors is limited. This is because governments draw lessons about the mobilizing power of religion that limits trust and frames religious and political authority as competitive. When these two factors are low, religious actors have more freedom to influence peace processes. I demonstrate the usefulness of this framework through case studies of civil wars in Algeria (1991 – 2002) and Côte d’Ivoire (2002 – 2007). This paper contributes to peace studies, in general, and the conference theme, in particular, by integrating two phases of conflict typically studied in isolation to show that what happens in the former shapes possibilities for the latter.
Author: Jason Klocek (University of Nottingham) -
Conflict mediation literature emphasizes inclusion in peace processes, recognizing that meaningful civil society engagement is essential to building the social consensus required for lasting agreements. It also outlines the psychological reactions of individuals in a post-conflict environment and how they respond to certain stimulus in negotiation settings. However, academic discourse lacks a comprehensive understanding of the unique role of religious actors in official peace processes. While there is considerable research on religion's impact on peacebuilding, the specific authority and influence of religious actors in formal negotiations remain underexplored, thereby underappreciating a unique point of authority. This paper explores the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, which shows that religion can act as an adaptive mechanism to foster social cohesion, regulate cooperation, and manage conflict
. By embedding moral norms in emotionally powerful rituals and beliefs in supernatural punishment, religion enables large-scale cooperation beyond kin groups and helps maintain group identity. These same mechanisms can be used to both justify violence and facilitate reconciliation. Religious actors, therefore, play a central role in shaping group behavior and moral judgment, making their inclusion in peace processes essential for legitimacy and long-term sustainability. The paper will contribute to ongoing peacebuilding debates by offering a novel perspective and expanding the empirical understanding of religious actors’ impacts in conflict mediation settings.Author: Alexandra Rice (University of Oxford) -
Recent research has considered the way multiple nation-states have embraced forms of religious statecraft, or partnerships with religious actors, as a component of their foreign policy. Typically, such efforts are implicitly framed as either the preserve of states with openly religious foreign policy identities, or the result of lobbying by powerful religious constituencies. Less attention, however, has been paid to how ministries of foreign affairs have rationalised greater attention to religion-related foreign policy in line with secular norms. I explore such dynamics by focussing on British foreign policy. Building on Habermas’s calls for postsecular ‘translations’ of religious intuitions into secular language to enter the public sphere, I argue that British foreign policy elites rely on similar translations to enable religious contributions to foreign policy. Religious organisations become non-state actors; religious worldviews become ethical intuitions. Yet I argue further that many of these translations are already provided by Britain’s existing religious-secular order. I consider three cases – Anglican establishment, cultural Christianity, and the interfaith sector – and demonstrate the different forms of religious engagement they enable within British foreign policy.
Author: Andrew Dickson -
Freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) is widely recognized and protected under international human rights law, primarily under Article 18 of the ICCPR. Although its internal forum is non-derogable even in emergencies under human rights law, the laws of war have long offered protection for faith during times of conflict. Yet wars and long-lasting crises in the SWANA region often turn sacred time and space into targets. This paper explores how international humanitarian law (IHL) can and should be used to defend FoRB during armed conflict. It summarizes IHL's positive obligations regarding detainees’ religious practices (such as access to rites and ministers), the enhanced protection of cultural and religious property (including bans on attacking or using these sites for military purposes), and the protections owed to religious personnel. It then connects these duties to individual criminal accountability (war crimes, persecution as a crime against humanity, and genocide where protected groups are targeted “as such”). Through doctrinal analysis and case studies (e.g., Lebanon 2006; Gaza 2023; ISIS crimes against Yazidis), the paper recommends practical steps: embedding FoRB protections into rules of engagement, facilitating humanitarian access for clergy, and standardizing evidence collection on attacks targeting places of worship. The core argument is that enforcing current IHL tools rather than creating new ones provides the quickest way to narrow the gap between FoRB's promise and its reality in wartime. However, it also underscores ongoing challenges—political selectivity, lack of enforcement mechanisms, and the exploitation of religion in war—that continue to widen the gap between IHL’s normative commitments and the actual experiences of faith during conflict.
Author: Fadi Hachem (University of Amsterdam - Beirut Arab University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Energy and Europe’s North: Multifaceted Security ChallengesSponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: ESWG Working groupChair: ESWG Working groupDiscussant: ESWG Working group
-
This paper develops the concept of entangled threat perception to explain how security meanings in the Arctic are increasingly produced through association rather than aggression. Building on constructivist and post-structuralist scholarship, it argues that in the post-2022 Arctic, threat is no longer anchored in who actors are or where they are located, but in who they are with. The analysis advances a post-identitarian and post-territorial framework in geopolitics, showing how alignments generate audience effects that transform cooperation into perceived threat. Methodologically, the article adopts an interpretive, relational approach combining discourse analysis and comparative case logic. It examines how official statements, media coverage, and policy documents across multiple languages (English, Norwegian, Turkish, and French) narrate and reinterpret alignments. Through triangulated discourse tracing, it maps how the same cooperative acts acquire divergent meanings depending on their spatial context and symbolic constellation. Empirically, the study compares three cases; the proposed BRICS- Russia research station in Svalbard, U.S.–Nordic bilateral defence agreements, and ReArm Europe initiative to illustrate how symbolic visibility and relational positioning drive securitization even in the absence of material escalation. The argument contributes to both Arctic studies and critical security theory by conceptualising relational proximity as the key mechanism through which security meanings are constructed and by positioning the Arctic as a laboratory for post-territorial geopolitics.
Author: Eda Ayaydin (University of London Institute in Paris) -
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: Tim Henrichsen* , Kerem Öge (University of Warwick) -
Small states face increasing security and defense challenges in the High North, as hybrid war with Russia intensifies and the security hegemon, the United States, wavers in its support of European defense. This paper explores how small states in the High North, such as Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, navigate the evolving security environment marked by renewed Russian aggression. Hybrid warfare, such as the drones that shut down the airspace around several Scandinavian airports in September 2025 or potential threats to critical infrastructure, presents new defense challenges. This paper explores the question of how small states in the High North ensure the protection of bigger, more powerful allies? Drawing on the small state security literature and the broader tenets of alliance theory, the paper analyzes how small states in the high north leverage diplomatic agility, multilateral agreements, and niche military capabilities to enhance both regional security and their strategic value to the alliance hegemon. It argues that small states are not passive beneficiaries of security guarantees within security alliances, but actively contribute and engage in alliance operations to maintain their relevance while ensuring continued protection from alliance hegemons. This structured comparative study demonstrates the variation in efforts by small states in the High North to extend their contributions to regional security using a deliberate strategy of realignment and capability investment. Furthermore, this paper contributes to broader debates on the agency of small states in international relations, emphasizing their resilience and adaptability within European collective defense in an era of renewed geopolitical tensions.
Author: Janicke Stramer-smith (Webber State University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Feminist Foreign Policy in an Age of Anti-Feminist Mobilisations
This roundtable explores how Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) can meaningfully operate within international contexts, moving beyond symbolic commitments to enact transformative change in global politics. Drawing on recent thinking and scholarship - including the edited volume Feminist Foreign Policy: Energy and Resistance (2026) published by Bristol University Press and the special section in Politics and Gender (2025) the discussion interrogates the potential of FFP to challenge entrenched power structures and offer alternative visions of security and care. Bringing together scholars across career stages, the roundtable addresses pressing challenges such as the afterlives of empire in global politics, the manifestations of gendered violence within bordering and mobility regimes, and the friction of militarised solutions into violent conflicts. Through a facilitated dialogue with brief opening statements, contributors will reflect on how FFPs or gender-responsive foreign policies manifest across different domains and contexts. Central to the conversation are questions about what FFP praxis is; how it can be reimagined through the lenses of intersectionality, decoloniality, and abolitionism; what recurrent blind spots persist within FFP frameworks; and how these policies can effectively confront the rising tide of anti-gender backlash globally.
Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupChair: Annika Bergman Rosamond (The University of Edinburgh)Participants: Madita Standke-Erdmann (King's College London) , Lara Popovic (Fernuni Hagen) , Christine Agius (Swedish Defence University) , Anna Hauschild (University of Manchester) , Sarah Mortiz (University of Manchester) , Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Financialising developmentSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)Chair: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
Index providers create financial indices that are seen as representations of the underlying ‘market’. Trillions of dollars track indices via passive investment products of index funds and ETFs. Index providers classify markets into three categories: developed, emerging and frontier markets. These classifications are important because significantly more capital tracks developed, and to a lesser degree emerging markets, than frontier markets. I probe the criteria that index providers create for frontier markets, which considers them a threat or danger, rather than accessible, to international investors. Countries have to ensure their financial markets meet the standards of index providers to be included in more prestigious indices and gain access to the capital that tracks those indices. I draw on the case of Vietnam, classified as a frontier market by MSCI but recently reclassified as an emerging market by FTSE Russell. Vietnam has targeted index reclassification to attract more foreign capital, pursuing significant reforms to its’ capital markets to meet the index providers’ standards. I argue that index inclusion is an increasingly important component of state development strategy. States are left with a choice to either adapt their financial markets to meet the standards of index providers or remain on the financial frontier.
Author: Dan Wood
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Gender in Popular Culture and Digital PoliticsSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)Chair: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)
-
Popular culture encompasses the "everyday" and in the everyday, our constant companions are our fears, fantasies and anxieties. Although horror is an important element or guidepost to understanding the gendered nature of the state and society, it is seldom given the attention it deserves in the academic field of International Relations. It often acts as the missing link in understanding the legitimisation and normalisation of the gendered order. Horror is not always natural, as it is constructed and shaped by the state and society. The paper builds on the works of psychoanalysts and feminist scholars, such as Julia Kristeva's (1980) theory of the "abject" and "abjection", and Barbara Creed's (1993; 2023) notion of the "monstrous-feminine", to unpack the gendered nature of horror in everyday life and uncover the latent underpinnings of the state in International Relations. Fears are an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to determining one's choices, responses, who becomes the antagonist or the protagonist, and why.
The socially constructed horror stories around women's bodies and sexuality have repercussions on the state's policies. International Relations, as an academic field with various meta-narratives, risks being cut off from the everyday if it forgoes these linkages. The paper, through a case study of the Indonesian state, analyses various ghost stories, such as Sundel Bolong, Wewe Gombel, and Kuntilanak. These innocuous, everyday horror stories have gendered implications. Further, the paper aims to go beyond the classic definition of the state in International Relations, which limits the state to its territory, population, sovereignty, and autonomy. Through the unpacking of horror in Indonesia, the paper analyses the state in terms of a "discursive construct" that is based on various imaginings encompassing the notion of monsters, witches and mothers.Author: Ira Yadav (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) -
How does one cultivate militarism in a country that legally has no military? For the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), this question lies at the core of their existence as “Uneasy Warriors” (Frühstück, 2007), the quasi-military of an officially demilitarised state. However, analysing JSDF portrayals in the military magazine “Mamor”, my research finds no unease. Instead, a rather traditional warrior masculinity is promoted throughout the magazine. Employing visual discourse analysis, I show how in Mamor, popular culture and gender are leveraged to construct and maintain a military-friendly subculture that promotes traditional military values but strips them of their overt political content. Mamor achieves this by commodifying the JSDF, creating a pleasurable version of militarism which reframes military violence as an exciting game and constructs subcultural fantasies of a heroic and beloved JSDF. Subcultural militarism is constructed around a shared “database” of narrative elements from which individuals construct their own, highly personalised narrative of militarism, translocating political narration to content consumers. Rather than facing and resolving conflicts around militarisation, they are bypassed instead. This process ultimately represents an intriguing pattern of adaptation to the societal pressures faced by postmodern militaries navigating tensions between democratic values and cultures of masculinised military violence.
Author: Miklas Fahrenwaldt (University of Edinburgh) -
In this paper, I am interested in the changing (gendered) imaginations of the Indian nation with the rising salience of Hindu nationalism, as it appears through film. I make a two-fold argument: (a) I suggest that the figure of Mother India, constructed to some extent in relation to colonial discourses, was always an ambivalent figure. (b) I demonstrate that post 2014, with the rising salience of Hindu nationalism, it is undergoing a transition, ‘crossing over’ (Sjoberg, 2012) to a more masculine imagination, while also retaining her femininity. This ambivalence or in-betweenness is now more explicitly embraced in nationalist discourses, used to negotiate India’s location in the international arena. Here, I put extant literature on gender and nation/nationalisms in conversation with both Bhabha (1994)’s understanding of hybridity as well as queer and trans theory to understand the transitionary, ‘in-between,’ ‘in-flux’ periods of national imaginations. Building on the importance of popular visual culture in shaping nationalist imaginations, I trace this shifting imagination through an analysis of 5 Bollywood movies released during 4 different eras of Indian politics. A discourse analytic approach helps me decipher if there is a shift in how the nation is being described and imagined. I therefore bring together and contribute to literature on gender and nationalism, media and nationalism, feminist IR, visual IR, and queer and trans theory.
Author: Shireen Manocha (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)) -
20 years on and the 7/7 London Bombings in 2005 still stands as one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in British history. In addition to creating a new security climate, 7/7 also saw the introduction of unprecedented representations of Muslim terrorist subjects as figures deemed “ordinary”, “normal” and “like us” in British mainstream media. This paper is part of a broader project examining post-7/7 sexualised representations of Muslims as terrorists circulating British mainstream media, showing how sexuality plays an essential role in the Othering of Muslims and its effect on British Muslims and those racialised as such in the everyday. Therefore, through interrogating media discourses on the 7/7 bombers, as well as depictions of terrorists as “enemies within” from TV Dramas such as Sleeper Cell (2005) and Britz (2007) this paper examines the role of sexuality in sustaining representations of terrorists as “unsuspiciously suspicious” Muslims who hide deviance and perversion beneath the veneer of appearing normal and ordinary. It also will discuss how such sexualised representations that entangle perversity and deviance to normality and the ordinary contribute to the targeting of the ordinary in the “everyday”. It will examine how this plays out in both counterterror media campaigns, wherein everyday objects, actions and settings are encouraged to be treated with suspicion, as well as through rise of “false positives” (Heath-Kelly 2012) and the tragic murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005.
Author: Rahima Siddique -
This article examines misogynistic memes as expressions of digital participatory cultures that are increasingly becoming the central sites of virulent and volatile political discourse within the context of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in India. In late 2021 and early 2022, Muslim women particularly journalists, activists, and public intellectuals were targeted through doctored images and dehumanizing memes that placed them up for mock ‘auction’ on open-source platforms such as GitHub, under the banner of Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals. These memes, often circulated via Twitter, are not incidental artefacts of internet trolling but affective and aesthetic imaginaries that help in understanding anti-feminist backlash against the gendered and racialized figure of the Muslim woman from the Hindu- far right perspective. The article offers two core contributions. First, it proposes the idea of ‘mimetic misogyny’ to theorize how gendered violence is not merely reflected but produced through the visual circulation of memes. Unlike conventional hate speech, these memes evade legal scrutiny by cloaking violence in humour, irony and plausible deniability. Second, it rethinks the notion of the ‘other’ in digital politics by showing how Muslim women are constituted not only as political threats but as affective nodes through which majoritarian fantasies of control and humiliation are played out. It argues that the Muslim women, in this context, become affective targets of nationalist panic- figures that are to be simultaneously silenced and spectacularized. The article underscores how the alt-right memetic political discourse in India, is not merely a cultural ephemera, but part of a larger assemblage of online violence that is shaping the contours of contemporary authoritarianism in the Global South.
Author: Ananya Sharma (ASHOKA UNIVERSITY)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Imaginaries of Governance and CitizenshipSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Chenchen Zhang (Durham University)
-
This paper seeks to make an intervention in IR/IS literatures focused on the relationship between the digital and politics, arguing that Eurocentrism is being reproduced in both traditional and new ways in both traditional and critical perspectives. Mainstream IR presents “weaponised interdependence” (Farrel & Newman, 2019) as a model for understanding state relationships with digital communication platforms, but this assumes the complete hegemony of Western and Chinese technological power. Secondly, critical theorists situate the digital as a new tool of colonial and capitalist extraction, with various frameworks of “digital colonialism” (Kwet, 2019), “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), “digital capitalism” (Fuchs & Mosco, 2015), “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019) gaining traction. While we are more sympathetic to these approaches, we argue they too slip into a statist understanding of global digital politics that presents the Global South as simply a site of extraction. In both cases, we identify a discourse of Global South exceptionalism in the study of digital politics that we term the “Digital South” discourse. We describe how this discourse is interlinked with successful attempts by relatively powerful Global South actors (‘regional elites’) and corporations to assert themselves as representatives of Global South agency - at times even ‘anti-colonial’ in nature - while at the same time using digital tools to engage in extractive and coercive projects of governance. This attempt to create a legible ‘Digital South’ is thus produced and reproduced in both the Global North and Global South, but cannot be read as a serious challenge to Eurocentric theories of the digital and digitisation.
Authors: Aasim Khan (King Fahd University Business School (KBS), KFUPM) , Claire Crawford (University of Cambridge) -
This paper examines how “region” emerged as a critical scale for reordering the world since the interwar period. Focusing on the Institute of Pacific Relations (1925–1962), I analyze how the Asia/Pacific region came to be imagined and institutionalized not as a self-evident geographic container, but as a site of epistemic struggle—where imperial, anti-imperial, and nationalist actors articulated divergent claims about international order. I refer to this contested spatial formation as the geography of empire’s afterlives. Grounded in multi-site, multi-lingual archival research, the paper traces how the IPR institutionalized competing regional imaginaries through asymmetrical encounters among colonial and metropolitan actors. These imaginaries fed into—but also exceeded—the frameworks of wartime strategy and postwar settlement that would later shape international governance. By foregrounding region as a site of epistemic and geopolitical contestation, the paper challenges state-centric and universalist accounts of international order. It argues that the Asia/Pacific was not a passive recipient of global designs, but an active field where alternative internationalisms emerged alongside persistent imperial forms—a space where world-making was practiced through the contested grammar of regionalism.
Author: Minah Kang (Johns Hopkins University) -
In 2016, British foreign policy appeared poised for a radical transformation. As Brexiteers remade the Conservative Party and Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, both seized the populist zeitgeist and promised change. The change that ultimately occurred was hardly radical, though. The story of ‘Global Britain’ was less of a rupture and more of (dis)continuity; foreign policy continued to be oriented around the structuring logics of exceptionalism, Atlanticism, and interventionism. To explain why, this paper argues that we should consider a 'three-act play' of national crises: the Manchester Arena bombing, because it provided an opening for dissent; the Salisbury poisoning, as it enabled a defence of the status quo; and the Huawei dilemma, which created conditions for its re-sedimentation. Mobilising A.J.P. Taylor's distinction between criticism and dissent, this paper contends that Jeremy Corbyn’s counter-hegemonic challenge, articulated most successfully in the first act following the Manchester bombing, was defeated by the Establishment in the response to Salisbury. The foreclosing of dissent in the second act was crucial as it allowed the Establishment to resolve its own internal tensions over China in the third. The crisis around Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s 5G network provided the symbolic and affective resources to reassert a shared security-oriented common sense, revealing a hierarchical understanding of the West that centred on the Anglosphere. The paper concludes that Global Britain reproduced many of Britain’s most treasured identifications under the rubric of a familiar, anxiety-infused Cold War logic, rearticulated and ready for a new psychodrama. Demonstrating this, the paper draws on parliamentary debates, mainstream media, and Policy Exchange's output. Policy Exchange is considered in depth because its work had a significant impact on the direction of post-Brexit foreign policy, particularly regarding the ‘tilt’ towards the new geopolitical theatre of the 21st Century, the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific’.
Author: Tom Howe (University of Warwick and Monash University) -
This paper explores how conspiracy theories about foreign military presence undermined state legitimacy in Niger and contributed to the success of the 2023 coup. Between 2022 and 2024, conspiracy theories circulated widely claiming that French forces were covertly supporting jihadist groups and extracting resources through hidden infrastructure. I treat conspiracy theories as articulations of anxieties that many Nigeriens felt about the Nigerien state and its relationship with its former colonial power, France. Drawing on 130 interviews carried out between 2022 and 2024, I identify three themes: the failure of superior Western military technology to protect Nigeriens despite securing Westerners; the paradox of jihadist success against technologically advanced militaries; and fears about clandestine resource extraction. These narratives, while often employing dramatic and sometimes fantastical imagery, gave voice to valid concerns about who the state actually served and protected. By dismissing these theories as ignorance rather than engaging with their underlying grievances about sovereignty and differential protection, President Bazoum's government appeared complicit in neocolonial power arrangements, weakening its legitimacy. This analysis contributes to debates on how foreign military interventions shape state-society relations.
Author: Aoife McCullough (London School of Economics)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Imperial Logics of Genocide and Settler ColonialismSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework to analyse the technologies through which settler colonial projects are upheld and secured by drawing on a comparative analysis of legal, spatial, and biopolitical technologies across Turtle Island/US, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir/India. I argue that settler colonialism operates through adaptable yet structurally consistent technological assemblages that serve three interconnected functions—facilitating Indigenous dispossession, legitimating settler sovereignty, and naturalising the permanence of settlement. Through close examination of different dimensions of technological operation in each of these three sites, this analysis demonstrates the ways in which technology adapts to diverse political conditions, from consolidated liberal democracies to militarised occupation to postcolonial territorial integration. In so doing, this paper theorises settler colonial technologies as a distinct form of colonial governance in its specific orientation toward elimination and investment in constructing settler futurity through concrete mechanisms of specific legal, infrastructural, and technological configurations. Moreover, by developing a comparative framework, this analysis demonstrates settler colonial technologies as operating across and constituting a transnational repertoire rather than as isolated national practices, revealing further patterns of adaptation, circulation, and mutual reinforcement across sites. Importantly, by theorising the distinct relationship between technology and temporality in settler colonialism, I argue that settler technological assemblages fundamentally orient towards securing futures that consistently render Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty illegible within settler governance frameworks. Thus, this analysis highlights the significance of understanding both historical patterns of dispossession and contemporary intensifications of settler technological governance, while emphasising the political work required to interrupt their settler futural orientations.
Author: Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney) -
This paper will analyse the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people within the current conjuncture of polycrisis, understood here as consisting of four overlapping structural crises. A crisis of overaccumulation of global capitalism is internally related with a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology. This polycrisis is nowhere more visible than in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
In this paper, I will unravel the underlying dynamics of genocide by exploring the different and yet related ways in which genocide is driven by these four overlapping crises: 1) I will examine how a bomb-and-build strategy is part and parcel of attempts to overcome economic recession, 2) I will assess the way of how genocide completely undermines the sphere of social reproduction in Gaza including the destruction of Palestinian reproductive capacity, 3) I will explore genocide as a way of dealing with non-white surplus populations, and 4) I will investigate genocide as a form of ecocide reflected in the systematic destruction of farmland.
In a final step, I will look at the increasingly transnational solidarity in support of the Palestinian people, highlighting the ways activists themselves are identifying the internal relations between multiple crises and the need for connecting moments of resistance across the different challenges we face.
In short, this paper will analyse genocide within the wider structural dynamics of polycrisis, allowing us to understand the drivers of genocide as well as the internal relations between multiple crises at the same time.
Author: Andreas Bieler (University of Nottingham)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Tentative title: Is Japan ready to face its harshest post-1945 security environment?
Change was high on the agenda for Japan’s late Prime Minister Abe Shinzo who strongly advocated transforming Japan’s security and defence policies during his long tenure. As Abe’s successors continue to grapple with rapid shifts in the geostrategic environment, Japan’s 2025 Defence White Paper has warned that “International Society Faces Its Greatest Trial of the Postwar Era”. While Abe’s protégé Takaichi Sanae has been elected the first female leader of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the relative domestic political stability of Abe’s tenure has been replaced by tumult and flux. The fraying of the LDP-Komeito coalition that lasted 26 years is accompanied by the rise of right-wing parties. What changes will it take for Japan to attain proverbial “match-fitness” and fundamental reinforcement of its defence capabilities? How can new thinking, methods and practices of security help? This roundtable evaluates key dimensions of Japan’s security and defence policies including deepening partnerships with like-minded states, increasing multilateral military exercises and unprecedented overseas deployments, the societal consensus underpinning policymaking, critical infrastructure protection such as undersea cables, and defence industrial and tech reforms.
Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupChair: Yee-Kuang Heng (University of Tokyo, Japan)Participants: Max Warrack (University of Warwick) , John Nilsson-Wright (The University of Cambridge) , Chris Hughes (University of Warwick) , Wrenn Yennie Lindgren (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs) , Brendon Cannon (Khalifa University) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Knowledge Politics I (Relationality and Coloniality)Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
-
Is this our final century? Scholars and popular writers are increasingly engaged in debates on the potential collapse of human civilisation due to crises such as climate change, advanced artificial intelligence, and nuclear threats. Yet these debates often overlook the tensions between universalist approaches to catastrophic and even existential risk and the diverse lived experiences that shape our understanding of catastrophe. This article brings the concept of Negritude from Black intellectual thought—through a reading of Aimé Césaire's writings—into existentialist literature within International Relations (IR) to critique the intergenerational turn in climate governance by exposing its limits in building genuine global solidarity. I argue that Negritude's emphasis on subjectivity challenges the universalist claims of liberalism that dominate climate politics, particularly given that half of this century's future generations will come from Africa. By foregrounding Negritude, the article underscores the need to broaden perspectives in developing a truly global response to catastrophic risks. Such a shift entails going beyond the limitations of multilateral cooperation anchored in the collapsing liberal international order (LIO), pointing towards more inclusive approaches to global governance grounded in intergenerational solidarity.
Author: Kennedy Mbeva (University of Cambridge) -
The growing popularity of Rights of Nature (RoN) in international legal discourse demonstrates recent attempts to move beyond the anthropocentric understanding of environmental protection. Debates around the recognition of ecocide, UN resolutions under the Harmony with Nature agenda, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ recognition of RoN may suggest a paradigm shift. Yet, the intellectual and ethical origins of RoN lie not in international law but in Indigenous epistemologies, which conceive humans as embedded with Mother Nature and ecosystems.
The RoN framework extends legal rights to non-human beings, recognizing rivers, forests, animals and ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. In contrast, the existing international environmental law remains rooted in anthropocentric ethics, protecting nature from human use, but failing to halt global environmental degradation. Against this backdrop, RoN offers an alternative paradigm that aligns with Indigenous epistemologies emphasizing relationality, reciprocity and collective well-being.
The paper investigates whether the incorporation of Indigenous epistemologies through RoN into the international law represents a genuine structural change and biding obligations or primarily a rhetorical appropriation and symbolic declarations. To ground the analysis in empirical data, the paper will compare Indigenous-led implementations, like those by the White Earth and Rappahannock Nations, with non-Indigenous initiatives like Toledo’s Lake Erie Bill of Rights. While the former integrate RoN within traditional forms of Indigenous governance and cosmologies, the latter often lack cultural grounding.
By comparing these approaches, the paper explores epistemological and institutional differences affecting their effectiveness and legitimacy. It argues that the transformative potential of RoN depends on cultural grounding as well as institutional mechanisms that guarantee justiciability. Meaningful integration of Indigenous ways of knowing may enable international law to evolve toward more eco-centric paradigm capable of securing Mother Earth. In doing so, the paper contributes to the broader debates about the future of international order and ecological security.
Author: Patrycja Badzińska (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) -
The paper seeks to bridge the gap between environmental policy formulation and actual practices through a metatheoretical intervention within a decolonial framework. Ontologically, it seeks to foreground relationality. Since an anthropocentric worldview has been seen as the only way of looking at the world, a relational ontological position is not considered relevant for policy studies. In this direction, the paper begins by examining the implication of relational ontological position and social multiplicity, as opposed to Eurocentric ontological singularity. Epistemologically, the paper advocates standpoint epistemologies rather that the unproblematically accepted meanings rooted in the episteme of modernity. It suggests ways to move beyond instrumental epistemologies that are the major reason for present environmental catastrophe and policy failure. With an effort to decolonize environmental governance, the paper focusses on epistemic erasures of traditional resource users. Methodologically, the paper borrows the framework of Hybrid/Plural Climate Studies and Cosmopraxis in order to arrive at a decolonial perspective to assess the community entanglement with the environment. On one hand, adopting a hybrid methodology allows one to move beyond the analytical boundaries of society and nature. Cosmopraxis, on the other hand, is a result of knowledge of adapting and conversing with the environment that is transmitted intergenerationally. It carries the know-how of the ancestors, but it is also nourished through situated and concrete experiences. Therefore, it has the potential of countering epistemic erasures as a consequence of modernity and colonization of the lifeworld. Empirically, the paper examines the case of select communities in the Sundarbans region where their reciprocal and relational engagement with the nature goes beyond spirituality. It engages with the ways in which specific communities engage with the mangrove forest ecosystem. It shows an implicit presence of cosmopraxis where communities learn to engage with the nature through a combination of practices, experiences and rituals.
Author: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi) -
Rethinking security in the Anthropocene challenges modernist assumptions about securing a modern subject against objective threats and questions the protection of territorial states. It calls for a transformation of security attentive to interconnection, complexity, and relationality, which in turn demands new spatial re-articulations. The limits of existing security logics, discourses, and institutions are more evident when dealing with issues such as climate change. While there is a growing literature on relationality from non-Western perspectives, the debate is marked by an emerging divide that presents Eastern, relational perspectives as an alternative to Western ones, adding epistemological and ontological dimensions to hegemonic struggles. Such a divide can be problematic for developing an approach that is open to a plurality of cosmologies and addresses the Anthropocene's challenges. Engaging with the debates on ontological security and framing it in a relational context, the paper explores how the literature tends to secure a specific understanding of International Relations as a discipline.
Author: Maria Julia Trombetta (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / L & T CaféSponsor: British International Studies Association
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / New Research on the History of International Thought in the 20th CenturySponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: Matti Spåra (King's College London)Chair: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)Discussant: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
-
This article recovers the history of the World Order Models Project (WOMP), active from circa 1965 to 1990. WOMP was a pioneering scholarly movement in the context of the Cold War, convening public intellectuals from the United States, Japan, India, China, Africa, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, South America, and Europe. With contributions from scholars across the globe, WOMP produced proposals towards a just and peaceful world order. In doing so, it developed a new epistemic culture. This article contextualises this epistemic culture – characterised by normative engagement, systemic global thinking, epistemological pluralism, inter-civilizational dialogue and debate, and a future-oriented scholarship – and argues that WOMP’s should be understood as an intellectualisation of the 1960s radical student movement in international studies, marking the creation of a novel intellectual persona: the transdisciplinary dissident. This persona signified a deliberate departure from dominant intellectual norms in the field, particularly the ones informed by realist, positivist, and behavioural thought that defined mainstream international relations scholarship during the Cold War. The article further retrieves WOMP’s attempt to institutionalise this persona through the creation of a new field of inquiry: world order studies. Methodologically, the article draws not only on WOMP’s academic publications but also on original oral history interviews and a wide range of grey literature – including memoirs, blog posts, public talks, and interviews. In tracing WOMP’s legacy, the article highlights the tensions and contradictions inherent in building this new persona. While WOMP ultimately failed to establish a discipline and its world order proposals remain unrealised, it nonetheless laid important groundwork for the emergence of subsequent critical turn in international studies.
Author: Matti Spåra (King's College London) -
Within International Relations, ‘attraction’ is a concept that remains conspicuously undertheorized. This paper argues that IR’s explicit neglect of attraction conceals a deeper, implicit reliance on the concept. Adopting the approach of conceptual history, this paper re-examines the works of the Classical Realists: Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan, tracing the various ways these theorists implicitly conceptualized attraction. It contends that concepts of an attractive pull served to keep these theories manageable, bestowing the image of predictability and consistency onto the political world, and underpinning core categories such as power, security, agency and balancing. In this sense, attraction is a concept Classical Realism could not do without. Building on scholarship that explores the co-constitution of concepts and political reality, the paper examines the relation between these realist concepts of attraction and practices of security, sovereignty and alliance formation. By drawing to the surface this long-neglected concept, this paper improves our understanding of Classical realisms’ conceptual underpinnings, while also bringing attraction within the realm of critique, creating the possibility for new conceptualizations of agency and power.
Author: Michael Anglim (King's College London) -
Georg Schwarzenberger bitterly engaged with Hersch Lauterpacht due to personal reasons and on questions of international law. He saw Lauterpacht as utopian and romantic, and was viewed as engaged in power politics in turn. The disagreements of these two jurists, which affected their professional and personal lives, stand out due to how neither dismissed the political nature of international law. This paper reexamines Georg Schwarzenberger’s and Hersch Lauterpacht’s thought. It contrasts their positions on international law and on the jurisprudence of the law, highlighting their differences. The paper does this through an exploration of Schwarzenberger’s and Lauterpacht’s works and of relevant archival material, which allows it to explore their contentious and strained relationship. Through these materials, the paper analyses these jurist’s differing positions on the politics of international law and its power, reach, and effectiveness. It proposes to rediscover the similarities and differences in the theories of these two jurists. In doing this, it highlights their differing theoretical perspectives on Realism and on the politics of international law, as well as their continued relevance today.
Author: Carmen Chas (Comillas Pontifical University) -
Since its popularisation by Hedley Bull in the 1960s, the concept of the ‘domestic analogy’ has gradually become one familiar to scholars within the discipline of International Relations (IR). It is not only a key concept in the formative output of the so-called English School, but one that scholars of varying theoretical persuasions, alongside historians of international thought, have made recourse to. Despite the concept’s recognisability within the field, there is presently no history detailing its origins and evolution. While Hidemi Suganami’s seminal 1989 study provided an elegant account of how past thinkers applied analogical reasoning from the domestic sphere, his treatment is one that transforms the phrase ‘domestic analogy’ into a timeless concept. One can therefore elucidate how, for example, Kant or Hobbes used domestic analogies, even if neither actually used the phrase ‘domestic analogy’. This paper differs in purpose and approach. Rather than providing a history of a particular form of analogical reasoning in the style of Suganami, we reconstruct an etymology of a specific phrase. To the extent that scholarship addresses the latter, what exists is an incomplete history locating the concept’s origins in the thinking of C.A.W. Manning. We return to fill-in this patchy account, discerning the varied uses of the ‘domestic analogy’ within the history of international political thought during its pre-Bullian phase, before delving into how the phrase gained wider academic currency and cohered around the fixed meaning to which it is associated in contemporary IR
Authors: Shreya Bhattacharya (SOAS) , Kye J. Allen (University of Oxford)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Ontological Security in Global EncountersSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
n this paper, we argue that Ontological Security Studies (OSS) offers a crucial yet underexplored contribution to understanding the role of human nature in International Relations (IR). While human nature and its psychological foundations were central to IR’s emergence and development, these have since been largely assumed rather than explicitly theorised. We suggest that OSS offers a productive space for revisiting this question. We particularly engage with the psychoanalytical strand of OSS, where unconscious drives, emotional life, and relational tensions are central. Drawing on Lacanian and Kleinian approaches, we show how these perspectives offer distinct but complementary ways of thinking about human nature – either as structured by an irreducible lack (Lacan) or as shaped by the dynamic interplay of internal object relations (Klein). While both traditions have influenced OSS, they are rarely examined in dialogue. By doing so, we make three contributions: (1) we reintroduce human nature as a vital but under-theorised question in IR; (2) we demonstrate how OSS, particularly its psychoanalytic strand, offers a compelling lens for conceptualising human nature as contingent, relational, and affective; and (3) we provide a critical synthesis of Freudian, Lacanian and Kleinian approaches within OSS, clarifying their relevance and limitations for IR theory. Ultimately, we argue that reconsidering human nature through OSS.
Author: Bruno Sowden-Carvalho (University of Birmingham) -
What is the role of reincarnations in ontological (in)security of modern societies? How can emic discourse explain Mongolia's resurrecting and legitimizing of the institution of Bogd Jebtsundamba Khutughtu, despite the geopolitical costs imposed by China over its continued ties with the 14th Dalai Lama? By analyzing and tracing the Mongolian concepts for state - Tőru and religion – Şaşin, I will decipher dominant ontological security provision authorities of historical and modern political communities in Mongolia. In doing so, I seek to illustrate how a Buddhist reincarnation can be securitized, and a transnational religious network mobilized for nation-building purposes, and how laicite-related anxieties, as well as human rights concerns over a 10-year-old reincarnate saint, be navigated within a secular state. I do this by modifying the typology of historical primary Ontological Security Provision (OSP) Arrangements to better reflect the Mongolian Buddhist context. Such reformulation allows us to explain the need for Mongolia's spiritual leader - 10th Bogd, while demonstrating how certain types of religious authorities remain the key providers of ontological security in the 21st century. The findings contribute to the methodological potential of ontological (in)security framework and role of religion in it, while explaining a geopolitical dynamic that has caused significant controversy but lacked a coherent explanation until now.
Author: Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva (MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society) -
Global order is structured around an anxious relationship between how ‘the West’ narrates itself in relation to ‘non-Western’ Others – and vice versa. The normalisation of such binaries provides continuity, security and a stable sense of Self vis-à-vis Others. How then do states discursively manage anxiety within this dichotomy? Drawing on ten years of UN General Debate speeches between 2014 and 2024, this paper explores how a contested ‘international order’ is anchored in ontologically (in)secure narratives between the so-called West & non-West, contributing to broader ‘crisis’ narratives that represent international relations today. A Kleinian approach to Ontological Security Studies reveals how select states – France, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and Iran – employ psychoanalytic defence mechanisms against anxiety to stabilise a sense of Self in relation to Others. In doing so, these states (re)produce binaries of ‘the West’ and ‘non-West’ through ontologically (in)secure narratives, showing how anxiety functions as a constitutive condition that both sustains and fragments contemporary conceptions of ‘international order’.
Author: Uma Muthia (Monash University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Pacifism and Nonviolence: New thinking for new directions?Sponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConveners: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University) , Noga Glucksam (Richmond University College London)Chair: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
-
By critically examining the research discourses on militarism in European security studies, we argue that the field risks normalising military development by merely assessing the operational outcomes of defence policies without considering ethical concerns about coercive capabilities and tools of organised violence. This is not only the case for the mainstream scholarship, which often addresses ‘questions of functionality’ such as improving military efficiency, achieving strategic objectives, and coordinating national defence policies. Most critical research also ask how military tools should be used rather than whether they should be used in the first place. However, we also recognise and discuss the recent examples of more direct and fundamental critiques of militarism in the field. To move beyond the normalisation of militarism in the field, we suggest a reflective approach that critically engages with the normative aspects of defence research. This approach also provides a response to recent calls for greater awareness of which research themes are prioritised in the broader field of European (security) studies and which debates are marginalised in this field.
Authors: Baris Celik (University of Sheffield) , Martha Creaser-Ogden (University of Sheffield)* -
This paper proposes a conceptual bridge between pacifism and prefigurative politics through the introduction of the notion of prefigurative pacifism. While pacifism is often viewed as apolitical or utopian, the paper argues for a prefigurative framing of pacifism as an active mode of political resistance. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, the paper suggests that ascetic forms of pacifism embody a distinct mode of political engagement—one that enacts alternative socio-political relations in the present rather than pursuing change through strategic confrontation. This argument is grounded in a historical case study of Bulgaria’s early twentieth-century Tolstoyan and vegetarian–pacifist movement and one of its ideologues, Iliya Enchev, whose doctrine of “scientific vegetarianism” informed the creation of an intentional community committed to pacifist ethics. The paper contributes to renewed efforts to theorize pacifism’s political relevance by reframing it as a practice of world-building, offering new directions for research on nonviolence, ethics, and resistance.
Author: Borislav Tsokov (University of St Andrews) -
Research on long-term campaigns of violence by non-state actors often centres on two primary agents: the militants and the state. This focus tends to overlook the significant yet under-reported role of civil society in shaping the trajectory of such conflicts. This paper addresses this gap by applying Paffenholz’s civil society peacebuilding functions model to the cases of the Basque Country and Northern Ireland. It demonstrates how civil society actors contributed in diverse and multifaceted ways to conflict transformation. These contributions include mass grassroots mobilisation against violence and in support of peace agreements, the socialisation of peace and nonviolence norms, the strengthening of social cohesion, facilitation of dialogue among political actors, conflict parties and communities, monitoring and reporting of human rights violations, and advocacy for victims. In giving prominence to these roles, the paper highlights the transformative potential of civil society in contexts of entrenched political violence.
Author: Javier Argomaniz (University of St Andrews) -
This paper excavates the warist foundations embedded within canonical International Relations (IR) theory, arguing that foundational IR mythology has normalised military violence as inevitable, manageable, and occasionally redemptive. Through a critical reading of twentieth-century IR's constitutive narratives, I demonstrate how the discipline has reproduced an ethos of 'warism' by systematically privileging military solutions and martial logics within international thought and practice, even those meant to diminish the prevalence of international war. Challenging the conventional positioning of warism and pacifism as opposing poles on a single spectrum, I propose instead that contemporary International security architectures function through a 'pacifist-warist' apparatus. This paradoxical formation simultaneously condemns and enables violence, restricting warfare to sovereign states whilst legitimising their monopoly on organised killing. Drawing on critical and post-structuralist approaches, I trace how institutions such as international law and collective security, which were designed to constrain war, have instead codified its acceptability under prescribed conditions. Through the analysis, pacifism emerges not as a simple rejection of war but as a critical stance against the normalisation and neutralisation of international organised violence through norms, discourses and structures that claim to manage violence while fundamentally authorising it.
Author: Noga Glucksam (Richmond University College London) -
The envisioning of ‘collective security’ has periodically informed debates about how to best preserve peace and security since at least the First World War, and still provides the normative justification for the operation of the UN Security Council. Those defending that vision by now, however, are few and far between. This calls for a deep rethink. Rarely have discussions of ‘collective security’ engaged with pacifism and anarchism, yet doing so helps question core assumptions about the efficacy of violence, about Westphalian models of politics, and about the ‘domestic analogy’ upon which mainstream visions of ‘collective security’ have been built. Three criticisms emerge about the conceptualisation and operation of ‘collective security’ to date: the mismatch between ethical pretence and who actually gets what, when and how; the warism and militarism that it institutionalises; and the limitations of the statist imaginaries that underpin it. An anarcho-pacifist counterproposal instead makes two ingredients central for its radically alternative reboot: a preference for nonviolent security methods; and an embrace of political methodologies that look beyond statist models. Radical though such a rethink is, it might provide the revised theoretical compass needed for communities across the world to build a real sense of ‘collective’ ‘security’.
Author: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Pluriversal Politics in Thought and ActionSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConveners: Erzsébet Strausz (Central European University) , Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University)Chair: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow)
-
CAMAMAZON is a collaborative project that follows the hosting of the UN climate change negotiations in the Amazon city of Belém in November 2025. It is motivated by a what if question, what if climate agreement-making reflected a system of many worlds, as exists in the world - in relation with and to one another - the critical difference being that no one system, world or cultural interest dominated collective arrangements? The aim of this paper is to present the collective ethnographic method developed to follow Indigenous peoples, youth, science and government mobilisation during this event. The central purpose of this collective methodology is to capture the rich multi-territorial relations that make up sites of global climate negotiations through the unique vantage points of each researcher within the team. This approach begins with the recognition that each of us as individual researchers has a deep personal relationship with and an emotional connection to the study of climate politics in the world. These personal journeys across territories include coming to terms with the land-people relations that we embody and accepting our own de-territorialised view and situation in and on the world. As such, the collective methodological approach aims to attune us to a collectively shared stake and to our individual understanding and relation to this. It is our unique personal insights and stories that point to the richness and diversity of territories that lie within and in relation to the territories of the world that have the potential to co-exist. Our project seeks to create the collective methodological structures that can seed and grow this uniqueness in each of us to contribute to the writing of a tapestry that offers a possibility of what the world can be, if we can collectively realise the political structures within which many worlds thrive.
Author: Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University) -
Thinking alongside Escobar (2022), we ask if, and how the university can be reimagined through the lens of radical relationality, and how such imaginations may translate into plural ways of knowing and being that are life-affirming and enable more caring presents and futures. Zooming in on the classroom as a “radical space of possibility” (hooks 1994) that continues to provide opportunities for “relational living” in our times, we begin to tease out the ethical and political orientations of an approach that seeks to re-ground international relations in the richness and poetic ambiguity of lived experience in its specific locations and surroundings. In the context of trying to write a Critical Security Studies textbook that seeks to undertake this labour, we ask what avenues may be available for entering and navigating a disciplinary subfield that help us unlearn forms of atomization and separation, and attune to embodied, integrative and reparative modes of perception and interpretation? What pedagogical resources and practices – for both students and educators – might arise from efforts to understand “life in terms of radical interdependence” as well as to restore and uncover connections beyond established categories that are intrinsic to the fluid, contingent, co-created texture of world politics.
Authors: shine choi* , Erzsébet Strausz (Central European University) -
Taking up McKittrick's concept of "unorthodox practices of belonging," this paper explores translation as a way of connecting to and through Black feminist thought from East Asia. Rather than seeking direct parallels or conventional social scientific comparisons, I propose translation itself as a site of connection to compare otherwise. Drawing on Glissant's refusal of "geographic belonging that are tied to racist and colonial knowledge systems," I examine how translation can be a practice of pluriversal politics. By engaging with the praxis/practice of reading-through Black (feminist) thought, translation emerges as an embodied practice that challenges colonial geographies and connects different parts of the globe through coloniality. The paper interweaves memories, narratives, critical engagement with translations of Black feminist texts in South Korea, and literary translations, exploring what it means to translate "black worlds and black ways of being" across different contexts for worlding otherwise. By practicing translation as a practice of unorthodox belonging, this work imagines possibilities for connections against and beyond colonial and racial geographies.
Author: Seoyoung Choi (Kangwon National University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Rebels, Insurgents and Non-State Actor ConflictSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: WSWG Working group
-
The establishment of rebel governance is a common phenomenon in civil wars, present in 64% of cases from 1945 to 2012. The current literature investigated the strategic logic of rebel governance and the type of rebel institutions established by non-state armed actors. To this extent, where rebel governance is established is often neglected, particularly in non-ethnic conflict, where ethnicity is a salient variable in explaining where rebels establish their governing institution. By analysing the cases of the Italian Civil War (1943-1945), the paper aims to understand why rebel groups decided to establish rebel governance institutions in some areas of the country, and why not in others. Preliminary results suggest that military dynamics affect the likelihood of rebel governance emergence, particularly in territories located in rough terrain, while civilian long-standing aversion to the incumbent is not predictive of rebel governance emergence.
Author: Edoardo Corradi (University of Genoa) -
What causes insurgent groups to experience organizational evolution over time? How do these structural changes complicate attempts to disarm these groups by force or diplomacy? Drawing on Neo-Darwinian theory, this article finds that counterinsurgent pressure adheres to the logic of natural selection insofar as it is a major cause for insurgent organizational change during civil wars. When counterinsurgents deploy force against insurgents, the latter’s existing weaknesses are exposed, compelling insurgent commanders to respond and adapt to these selection pressures and address their organizational shortcomings lest they wish to experience defeat. Beyond driving adaptive responses, selection pressures exacerbate pre-existing internal balances of power between those subnational insurgent factions capable of resisting and adapting to counterinsurgent force, and those which struggle to do so. While resilient factions provide successful models of adaptive responses for other less resilient factions to replicate, those factions which do not adopt these effective models of strategic behaviour are more prone to secession and demobilization through force or negotiated settlements. Additionally, this analysis finds that this diffusion of successful practices and ideas between subnational factions also shapes the future trajectory of the larger organization in strategic and military terms, while simultaneously shaping in-group preferences for continued mobilization or demobilization. Finally, it finds that resilient rebel factions are often aided by beneficial mutualistic relationships with vital out-group allies which strengthens their capacity to resist selection pressures. These findings are based on a longitudinal case study analysis of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) insurgency between 1964 and the present that draws on a selection of semi-structured interviews with former ELN members, participants in past peace dialogues, community leaders in ELN controlled regions, Colombian security analysts and journalists.
Author: Charles Larratt Smith (The University of Texas at El Paso) -
Large-scale Western counter-insurgency efforts in the developing world have seen practically no success since the former Western empires surrendered political control.
The most successful repressions of insurgency and restorations of a colony or former colony back solidly into the liberal sphere all occurred before the colonial overlords left. Malaya is t a frequently cited large-scale success story, but since then, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq have all ended in failure. Somalia doesn't look hopeful either. Even in an attenuated form, trying to take control doesn’t really work: Iraq under the Americans or the disputes after the UN left Timor-Leste come to mind.
Even if it were somehow acceptable to reinvade independent states in the wake of Iraq 2003 and Ukraine 2022, as the tide of climate change destruction rises this century, with Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent drying to dust, parched for water, various island groups disappearing below the waves, (not to mention putting cities from Miami to London on the chopping block) and extreme weather events repeatedly making Hurricane Katrina look small, forces will be needed closer to home.
What other options exist? Other alternative approaches to political organisation include the local alternative, seen in Iraq with the Al-Sahwa, the “Sunni Awakening,” from 2006, and the local Hawiye risings in southern Somalia from late 2022; some kind of approach that draws on “hybrid” thinking – the strengths present in “”real everyday human orders” liberal, illiberal, state, and non-state - or maximum possible disengagement and withdrawal. This study will examine the dominant liberal imperial paradigm and why it appears impractical; the local and hybrid approaches; then discuss how counter-insurgency and local approaches have borne little fruit for southern Somalia. Ahead, thus, maximum possible disengagement increasingly appears to be the most feasible course of action. Nothing else really works.
Author: Colin David Robinson (King's College London)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Role of Narratives and Discourses in Attempts to Influence Society and Foreign PolicySponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Jennifer Mathers (Aberystwyth University)Chair: Precious Chatterje-Doody (Open University)
-
Efforts by the state in Putin’s Russia to use historical memory to encourage young people to glorify war and military service have reached a fever pitch since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While many of these efforts aim to permeate everyday life – for example through changes to the school curriculum and textbooks or through popular culture – this paper examines militarising discourses that Russian youth encounter during a day out. Using critical discourse analysis, the paper identifies key messages aimed at young people that have been disseminated through events surrounding the annual Victory Day celebrations on 9 May since 2022. The paper focuses on discourses that construct direct links between the heroism and victory of the Great Patriotic War, the role assigned by the state to youth in protecting the memory of Soviet experiences and achievements in that war, and the expectations instilled in young people that war is a normal part of their lives and one that they should embrace.
Author: Allyson Edwards (Bath Spa University) -
The idea of fighting World War 2 again has been an important feature of Russian state-aligned discourse about the ongoing war in Ukraine. This article examines how state-aligned Russian-language Telegram channels affectively mobilized the wartime past in the present in 2023 through the memory of the Battle of Stalingrad, whose eightieth anniversary took place in that year. We conduct a meso-level network analysis of circulation around “Stalingrad,” treating the battle as the symbolic centre of Russia’s official war narrative, on several hundred state-aligned Telegram channels in 2023—a year that bisects both the ongoing war against Ukraine and the state-led memorization of the 80th anniversary of the battle. We chart how “mnemonic kernels”—short textual strings that mention “Stalingrad”—traverse and bind this network. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals how an apparent heterogeneity amongst clusters of channels within the network produces a simulacrum of spontaneity around “Stalingrad.” Re-worked, re-circulated, and re-contextualized by sub-communities of grassroots news services, military bloggers, and prominent propagandists, “Stalingrad” sheds its historicity to saturate the feed of the present, entangling World War 2 and the war against Ukraine. We term this affective saturation “ambient war,” a networked condition in which repetition, rhythm, and availability make war(s) feel continuous. The saturative and consistent quality of “ambient war” challenges scholarly perspectives on connective memory and war that emphasize fragmentation of narrative in platformed conditions.
Author: Ian Garner (Pilecki Institute) -
This paper explores the ways in which Russian officials and experts have employed strategic narratives about perceived successes, failures and ambiguous results of peace and arms control negotiations in Russia’s past (as these are constructed in Russia’s state-sponsored memories) to interpret and reinterpret the limits of the possible and desirable in ending or continuing Russia’s war against Ukraine. Contributing to the literature on the politics of memory and the debate on how selective and constantly evolving interpretations of the past feed into strategic cultures and underpin strategic communication in war time, the paper focuses on the role of changing memories of Russia’s past negotiations in Russia’s discourses about the Russo-Ukrainian war. It is particularly interested in how strategic narratives of past successes, failures and ambiguous results are linked to changing understandings of Russia’s international status. The paper employs narrative analysis to examine how Russia’s narratives of negotiations and international status have changed since 2014 and reflects on the implications of these changes for Russia’s international behavior.
Author: Valentina Feklyunina (Newcastle University) -
Amidst Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in 2022, coordinated and orchestrated attempts to sow discord and manipulate the public opinion of its adversaries underwent significant strategic growth and adaptation, particularly in the digital information environment, outsourcing its influence work to a diverse and complex array of actors. Combining deception, distortion, and disinformation, Russian Information Operations (IOs) formed a coordinated and persistent campaign advancing the Kremlin’s strategic aims through distinct yet interconnected operators, each with specific identities, targets, and methods.
Drawing on Émile Durkheim’s theory of the division of labour, this paper develops a novel analytical framework for examining Russian influence information operations. To understand the division of labour within one part of this complex, evolving and persistent operation, Durkheim’s concepts can be applied to the case study of the Doppelgänger operation. This study collected the operation’s data over 24 days, from June 18 to July 11, 2024, by monitoring Doppelgänger bots posting URLs on X/Twitter. Through the application of Durkheim’s concepts of specialisation, task differentiation, and coordination, the analysis traces how distinct operational functions, such as content creation, amplification, and the use of proxy media, interact to disseminate messaging on Ukraine at scale while simultaneously obscuring attribution. The findings reveal patterns of linguistic specialisation and coordinated timing around major diplomatic events, including synchronisation with other influence information operations. This demonstrates how Doppelgänger mobilises a division of labour to shape discourse on Ukraine within a wider system of information confrontation.Authors: Helen Innes (Cardiff University)* , David Rogers (Cardiff University)* , Martin Innes (Cardiff University)* , Emma Martin (Cardiff University) , Viorica Budu (Cardiff University) -
This paper examines the influence of Russian governmental narratives about the war against Ukraine on the US New Right and in particular on the Trump administration and adjacent think tank and media discourses. It explores the ways that Russian narratives about the causes and course of the war and about the Ukrainian state, together with Russian historical myths about the origins of Russia and Ukraine and about the Second World War, have been reflected by the New Right, including by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president. It argues that the influence of these Russian narratives extends beyond policy on both the war and Ukraine to shape other areas of US foreign policy, providing discursive legitimation for radical departures from traditional US norms and past practices. The paper suggests that this adoption of both specific narratives and wider narrative practices from the Russian government reflects a rapid change in the direction of influence within the US-Russia relationship and an ideational rupture between the US and Europe, both of which are unprecedented in post-1945 international politics and which signal a fundamental change to the US identity and the character of its engagement with the world beyond its borders.
Author: Ruth Deyermond (King's College London)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / SPERI Presents… The global impact of China’s technological leadership and offshoring: Towards a second China shock?
Scholars in International Political Economy (IPE) have long grappled with the implications of globalisation, but the reconfiguration of production networks led by China poses a fresh set of theoretical and empirical challenges. The shift from China as the ‘world’s factory’ to China as a leader in green and hi-tech supply chains, offshoring production abroad, unsettles existing paradigms of development, dependency, and power in the global economy. As China exports its production models abroad, from electric vehicles and batteries to renewable energy and digital infrastructure, scholars and policymakers alike must rethink the frameworks they use to study global production from the systemic to the everyday levels.
This roundtable asks whether the discipline of IPE is ready for these transformations by focusing on three key questions:
What new directions in theory and method are needed to analyse China’s offshoring and leadership in hi-tech and green industries?
How do host states, firms, and communities negotiate and contest China-led supply chains, and what does this reveal about agency in the Global South?
How do these dynamics challenge established debates on economic statecraft, global value chains, and green capitalism in IPE?
By bringing together scholars of Chinese political economy, global value chains, and critical IPE, the roundtable will situate China’s transformations in production networks as a test for the discipline’s capacity to engage with what comes next.
The panel advances BISA IPEG’s debates by rethinking how China’s evolving role as both a leading and offshoring power challenges Eurocentric accounts of globalisation, while foregrounding agency in the Global Majority and the everyday experiences of workers, migrants, and local communities. In doing so, it follows this year’s conference aims to offer “new thinking” and “new directions” for International Studies to engage with future challenges.
The roundtable will be recorded as a live episode of SPERI Presents…, the podcast of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, which will boost its public engagement, bridging academic debates with broader audiences in policy, media, and civil society.Sponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupChair: Chris Saltmarsh (University of Sheffield)Participants: Shizhi Zhang (University of Sheffield) , James Jackson (University of Manchester) , Yvette To (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) , Frank Maracchione (SOAS University) , Zhengli Huang (University of Sheffield) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Speaking truth to power: Organisational silencing, uncomfortable knowledge and critical friendship in the contemporary Uniformed Public Services.
Our Uniformed Public Services are struggling to bring about the cultural change required to redress crises of legitimacy, recruitment/retention and unacceptable behaviours. Hierarchy, patriarchy and racism perpetuate silencing, secrecy and non-learning, encouraging ignorance to persist. This roundtable brings together academics, from PGRs for Professors, researching across the sector to explore how power manifests in control over knowledge production and the frailties of knowledge mobilisation practices. Speakers will further consider how institutional systems and processes can create inequity of behaviours, experiences, and outcomes; the relationship between organisational culture and psychological/emotional silencing; and the role of leadership and external scrutiny. They will be asked to address the following questions:
• How does power and control over knowledge production manifest in UPS institutions?
• How does academic knowledge go unheard and how can it be harnessed to foster tangible change?
• How can we challenge organisational silencing and foster transparency around uncomfortable knowledge?
• What is hampering collaboration and shared knowledge transfer at the intersection between academia and these institutions?
• Is critical friendship enough?Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupChair: Emma Williams (Anglia Ruskin University)Participants: Jillian Rodgers (Anglia Ruskin University) , Mirna Guha (Dr) , Sian Phillips (Anglia Ruskin University) , Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University) , Ilda Cucko (Anglia Ruskin University) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / The IPE of Welfare and Public ServicesSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
There is a growing and influential literature on the financialisation of the state that foregrounds the state as an object of financialisation, examining how its institutions are restructured in line with financial logics and markets. This article contributes to that body of work by turning the analytical gaze inwards, exploring the state’s changing treatment of its own public institutions as a distinctive mode of governance. I conceptualise this as authoritative financialisation to describe how the state governs public goods through debt – and the implications of this shift. Focusing on the transformation of university funding in England, particularly the 2012 reforms, the article argues that financialisation is not merely a mechanism of privatisation or financial market expansion, but a means through which the state exerts fiscal control and enforces discipline. The use of loans to fund public goods can be understood as a mechanism of governance in which debt operates as a tool that disciplines acceptance of the state’s undeniable power in the subjugation and exploitation of the labour required to repay that debt. Authoritative financialisation describes a new form of control which enables the state to manage economic risk, shift financial burden onto individuals, and consolidate regulatory authority.
Author: Tamar Nir -
All signatories of the Paris Agreement are committed to delivering a ‘Just Transition’. However, past analysis of climate change commitments has revealed relatively little focus on labour market projections or the development of Active Labour Market (ALMP) and Social Protection (SP) policies to facilitate the mobility of labour from polluting to green/sustainable sectors and occupations. Further, scholarly attention to the assessing the way that ALMP/SP design might promote Just Transition is also only yet emergent. This paper will first propose a typology for understanding new social risk in Just Transition efforts (developed in line with materialist feminist Social Reproduction Theory) and ALMP/SP and then include a detailed analysis of the third wave of Nationally Determined Contributions to assess the extent to which they include discussion of ALMP/SPs aligned to delivering a Just Transition.
Author: Alexander Nunn (Uni of Manchester) -
Finance, once trumpeted as enabling social life, over the last two decades, has served as a political haven. Families are confronted with finance through mortgages, loans and debt, making credit and inequality household norms. Instead of financing social needs, it forces families to the periphery of financial capitalism. Despite extensive literature on gendered welfare (Fraser, 1994; Orloff, 1992; Sainsbury, 2008), the financialised household remains understudied, yet it is growing ever more as an active site for economic governance. It is crucial to examine how households interact with the state; how male-designed welfare policies reinforce women’s role in financial reproduction, while sustaining capitalism via unpaid labour and reproducing the nation. To be ready for what comes next, we consider that a forward look requires building new bridges between disciplines and methods of inquiry into social life. Situated in 2010 under Orbán’s premiership, we combine family policy and the political economy of finance to explore family policy changes. By bringing novel insights from radio speeches over time, we examine how discourse mediates the government’s pro-natal economic agenda. We focus on the role and function of Hungary’s family housing subsidy scheme as a tool for social exclusion. Specifically, we explore how the scheme favours married, heteronormative, Christian couples with stable formal employment. The construction of the “ideal” household and native families, we argue, is boosting sectors like construction and facilitates a work-based welfare. Hungary’s state subsidy for a property loan transforms households into financial investment units. In return, an individual’s reproductive choice is politicised and becomes transactional, as wombs turn into assets that drive the market.
Authors: Jorge Quintero-Sanchez , Irene Ktori (University of Edinburgh) -
Research on worker power has highlighted that even well-organised workers cannot come up against political economy constraints such as global economic dependency. This paper investigates the limits that a neoliberalised welfare state imposes on labour power – even where workers have withstood the neoliberal trend toward labour precariousness and de-unionisation. I focus on Colombia’s most powerful trade union – the Colombian Federation of Educators (FECODE) – and their struggle to access good health services in a neoliberalised welfare economy. Despite a high degree of organisation and mobilisation, close ties to the country’s first post-neoliberal government, and a ‘special health care regime’ with exceptional funding, FECODE and its federations have failed to improve healthcare access for an ageing workforce of teachers exposed to enormous physical and mental health risks. An attempt by FECODE and the progressive government elected in 2022 to reform the health regime for teachers failed to secure cooperation from (private) health providers and municipalities. Health access diminished instead of improving. The crisis of the teachers’ health regime is widely mediatised as emblematic of the country’s wider health system crisis. The analysis draws on document analysis and interviews and focus groups conducted in 2024 and 2025. It highlights the dilemmas faced by trade unionists challenging policy failures under ‘their’ first progressivist government and relying on precarious healthcare workers to secure services for teachers. More generally, it underscores the importance of care economies such as health and education for current labour struggles.
Author: Tine Hanrieder (Department of International Development, London School of Economics)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / The Political-Economy and International Law in Outer paceSponsor: Astropolitics Working GroupConvener: Bleddyn Bowen (BISA)Chair: Sarah Leiberman
-
With the growth of the private space sector in the past decade, and its development of more and more advanced capabilities, states have been presented with greater challenges as they try to manage and protect this critical infrastructure. Simultaneously, as the consequences of legislative decisions and the structural realities of private enterprises in such an ungovernable domain become apparent, it generates a degree of relative obscurity that these private space companies operate in.
This paper explores the security challenges that come with this growth and development of the private space sector as states, and particularly western states, lack clarity over key questions regarding what exactly they seek to regulate and protect, as well as how to do so and what to protect these companies from. Moreover, it identifies that as well as these challenges, there is the possibility of grey-zone activity that may offer opportunities to established actors that are not usually benefited by such ambiguities. To do so, this presentation makes usage of both existing issues in space as well as terrestrial comparisons, together with earlier work on the public-private relationship outer space.Author: Jamie Winn (PhD Student at the University of Lancaster) -
Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the advancement of space technology has been exponential. Innovation in the outer space sector was the domain of government-funded space agencies during the late twentieth century, however, in the twenty-first century, government agencies have diversified their approach to outer space. The private sector has emerged as a key player, driving the increase in commercial space activities. Private actors are undertaking innovation activities in space exploration, both independently under contract from government agencies. These contracts include transportation services to the International Space Station, construction of space station modules, and all aspects of technology development for the Artemis missions and the Lunar Gateway programme. This shift poses both opportunities and challenges for international cooperation, governance and security which are crucial for advancing innovation in space exploration, especially in transnational public-private partnerships.
Interdisciplinary in nature, this paper will employ qualitative analysis to analyse case studies. The case studies are transnational public-private partnerships with a significant innovation element that are currently operating or have previously operated as part of a space exploration megaproject. This paper will explore the security and governance challenges within the outer space environment, focussing on those challenges which affect innovation activities undertaken as part of transnational public-private partnerships. It will also investigate the governance and regulation of those public-private partnerships and the impact on their innovation activities. This paper will contribute to the growing discourse on public-private partnerships in the outer space sector.
Author: Sarah-Jane Pritchard (Lancaster University) -
States and space billionaires are rushing to build and settle outer space. Whether it is to build a million-person city on Mars, build a Lunar base with an added theme park, a Lunar research station, or to seed the sky with O’Neel cylinders, there is an increasing push to expand human settlement into outer space. The next 50 years might see the first humans to live, work, and die in space. Humans that will have lost ties with their countries of origin and would have found new communities of belonging.
Unfortunately, international law and the outer space treaty has other ideas. The combination of Articles II (non-appropriation), Article VI (state responsibility), and Article VII (jurisdiction over launched or constructed spacecraft), as well as the general international law prohibition against the recognition of separatist territories, cements the destiny of all future space settlements. Rather than space settlements being the future 13 Colonies of North America, or Bombay, Chennai (Madras), and Kolkata (Calcutta), outpost through which trade and resource extraction flows like in the early days of the East India company, international law relegates them to the status of the Falklands, a far-flung settlement with a strong state presence. The paper will explore this scenario and pose the questions: will international and space law part ways? Is international law doomed to become terrestrial law only governing relations on Earth?Author: Marjan Ajevski (Open University Law School) -
The British political economist Susan Strange through works such as States and Markets (1988), Rival States, Rival Firms (1991) and The Retreat of the State (1996), developed a framework of analysis for the study of International Political Economy (IPE) centred on four Structures of Power namely; Security, Production, Finance and Knowledge. This framework contributed to the study of IPE, and built on work by other American scholars such as Robert Gilpin (The Political Economy of International Relations (1987) and Global Political Economy (2001)) and Robert Keohane (After Hegemony (1984)) which in their own way attempted to construct their own frameworks for understanding the global political economy and the preeminence of the United States in that system. Given the new geopolitical realities of 2025, will the United States maintain its Stuctural Power in the international system, especially in Space? Or will Europe, with its respective space agencies and bodies, be able to break away from American hegemony and strive towards strategic, automous European sovereignty?
Author: Thomas Knight (Canterbury Christ Church University) -
As the private sector gears up for the Return to the Moon and beyond, there is escalating concern over the lack of formal regulation of private space activities and the deprioritisation of scientific objectives. In the absence of a coherent international framework to govern off-earth activities such as space mining, the installation of nuclear fission reactors and the geoengineering of the earth’s atmospheres, this paper analyses international criminal law as a vehicle through which to futureproof outer space against the excesses or abuses of the private space actor. With a focus upon the protection of the space and earth environments, the anticipatory crime of Ecocide is considered as a counter to space-based pollution of the earth’s atmosphere. The War Crime of environmental destruction by a business entity is considered in response to the heightened risk of conflict foreshadowed by the Trump administration’s America First securitization of space with measures such as the Golden Dome, a multi-layered defence system with offensive capabilities comprising thousands of space-based missiles girdling the Earth. In an outer space dominated by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, the remote commission of cybercrimes amounting to Space Piracy in addition to notions of Land Piracy committed on celestial bodies are discussed and developed. The current trend towards permissionless regimes grounded in regulatory light touch is a poor preparation for serious threats posed by an outer space inhabited by a multitude of private actors ranging from the well-heeled transnational corporation to the well-oiled international criminal organisation. Enforcement mechanisms capable of holding private space actors to account are an imperative. As the only binding international mechanism that fulfils this function, this paper develops international criminal law into a bedrock upon which to build a safe and sustainable future in outer space.
Author: Fiona Naysmith (Open University (FBL))
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Care in Global HealthSponsor: Global Health Working GroupConvener: GHWG Working groupChair: Jana Fey (University of Sussex)
-
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 COVID-19 pandemic has made care visible. Images of nurses and doctors in protective clothing caring for seriously ill people, of people keeping their distance from each other and wearing masks to reduce the risk of infection, of parents trying to juggle working from home and homeschooling at the kitchen table, have shaped the media's view of the pandemic.
Not only did care emerge “from the shadows as a previously taken-for-granted afterthought of public life” (Fine & Tronto, 2020); but it was oftentimes emenshed with nostalgic, stereotypical and heavily gendered imaginaries of care.
“Care is never as visible as in situations where a way of life is shaken” (Laugier, 2021, p. 61). But what does this visibility tell us about the role of care in crises? Where is it to be welcomed from a care ethics perspective, and where should it be viewed critically? Assessing different visual material of the COVID-19 pandemic this paper explores the (in)visibility of care from an care-ethics perspective opening up the space for a critical engagement with care in contagious settings exploring the questions of: Who cares, how do we care and, above all, how do we visually relate to these questions?Authors: Katharina Wezel* , Katharina Krause -
The AIDS movement has been central to advancing public health and human rights, particularly in Brazil, where activism reshaped treatment access and state policy. This article examines how actors within Brazil’s AIDS movement responded unevenly to the rise of far-right religious conservatism in the 2010s. While research on repression and social movements often emphasizes external constraints, less attention has been paid to internal differentiation within movements facing authoritarian drift.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice – especially his notions of field (structured arenas of power and struggle), capital (resources such as expertise or moral authority), habitus (dispositions shaped by experience), and hysteresis (the mismatch between dispositions and changing contexts) – I conceptualize the AIDS movement as a subfield within the broader AIDS policy field.
Based on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the article identifies three strategic responses to the conservative turn: silent resistance, persistence, and adaptation. These position-takings reflect distinct activist trajectories and unequal distributions of cultural, social, and militant capital. As the political field shifted, symbolic capital accumulated during earlier progressive cycles lost value, producing crises of meaning for some and new forms of legitimacy for others.
The article offers a Bourdieusian, relational account of how internal dynamics shape movements’ capacity to adapt – or fracture – under political pressure, contributing to comparative and international studies of activism in times of democratic erosion.Author: Helena Moraes Achcar (Fundação Getúlio Vargas)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / What would UK Security policy look like under Reform? The Security Politics of the Right
In recent years, the UK has increased police powers to suppress protest, expanded counter-terror laws, adopted an increasingly hostile stance on immigration and asylum, put itself on a war footing, increased defence spending and cut foreign aid. Yet more change may lie ahead. From Reform garnering significant public support, to well-attended demonstrations for far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson who enjoy the global solidarity of figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, there are signs that the most right-wing government in history may soon come to power in the UK. These UK dynamics echo the rise of the right in many other polities, within and beyond Europe. Drawing on our understanding of right wing security politics both within and beyond the UK, this session discusses the security politics of the right, and specifically how security policy might evolve in the UK if Reform took office at the next election.
Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: Larry ATTREE (Rethinking Security)Participants: Samah Rafiq (King's College London) , Richard McNeil-Willson (University of Edinburgh) , Sophie Stowers (More in Common) , Laila Aitlhadj (PreventWatch) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Where next for peace? A conversation across theory, policy and practice with the British Council.
The British Council brings together experts from research, policy and frontline practice to explore how approaches to peace are changing in today’s more dangerous and divided world, sharing examples from MENA and Eastern Europe and asking how we can develop peace in ways that are more local, culturally nuanced, practical and rooted in trust and relationships.
As the global peace and conflict landscape undergoes profound shifts, the British Council brings together voices from global academia, policy and practice to explore the future of peace and social cohesion in an increasingly fragmented world. The roundtable will examine how communities are adapting in a world where conflicts are deadlier, aid is shrinking, global politics is more multipolar, and disinformation divides societies and undermines trust and cohesion.
The discussion will surface practical innovations in programming from MENA and Eastern Europe, highlighting pragmatic models for supporting peace rooted in belonging, cohesion and locally legitimate social action that address underlying grievances and inequities. This roundtable will consider, from the British Council’s foundation in 1934 during the rise of fascism through to the heavily securitised world of 2025, the enduring power of cultural relations to rebuild trust, sustain dialogue and foster the mutual understanding that anchors lasting and transformative change.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Roddy Brett (University of Bristol)Participants: Christine Wilson (British Council) , Refik Hodžić (European Institute for Peace) , Hoda Khoja (British Council Libya) , Rasha Shukr (British Council Lebanon and Syria) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
TH04 Panel / ‘Woke gone too far’? Emerging research on gender relations in contemporary state militariesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConveners: Bibi Imre-Millei , Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)Chair: Tara Zammit (Kings College London)
-
Yes to Gay Conscripts but No to Gay Officers? Queer Allyship and Militarised Masculinity in Thailand
Thailand’s 2025 legalisation of same-sex marriage marks a pivotal shift in gender and sexual rights. Within this moment, I examine queer identities in the Thai armed forces, a domain shaped by militarised masculinity where male-only cadet academies and conscription serve as key sites for producing hegemonic masculinity and reinforcing binary gender hierarchies. My analysis focuses on openly gay men in two cohorts: compulsory-service conscripts and commissioned officers with cadet backgrounds. While institutional gestures such as endorsing openly gay conscripts and renaming the Military Wives Association to the Spouse Association signal progress, they remain largely performative. I argue that recognition is limited to temporary conscripts and excludes permanent officers embedded in cadet networks. The renaming of the association within a women-led space further reflects uncertainty about where structural change should begin. Consequently, openly gay officers navigate cultural and institutional pressures to embody hegemonic masculine ideals, narrowing accepted forms of gay identity. The absence of explicit support for these officers also underscores how militarised masculinity continues to constrain genuine inclusion, leaving the discursive terrain of gender within the Thai military rigid and resistant to transformative change.
Author: Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat (University of Leeds) -
The UK Armed Services have benefited from a recent rise in applications from ‘diverse’ candidates, achieved through recruitment campaigns and public announcements emphasising organisational commitment to offering equality of respect and opportunity to LGBT and female Service Persons (SP). Within military institutions, context and the situatedness of the protagonist predicate whether the powerful affordances of love are derided or valorised. Influenced by queer theory (Berlant, 2011) and the politics of emotional affect (Ahmed, 2004), this paper analyses how women, LGBT and nonbinary SP are emotionally or affectively conscripted into supporting organisational structures and narratives that reproduce inequality. Through discourse analysis of interview data with 36 heterogenous SP, I suggest that the realisation gap between organisational claims of equality and the daily workplace experience of individuals is bridged by emotional labour and affective defence of the system; often from those SP who are the most marginalised by it. My research argues that the fervent affective commitment evinced by ‘diverse’ SP (in particular) facilitates the UK MoD to silo and abdicate the work of interrogating its own systems and practices whilst maintaining the appearance of being committed to cultural transformation.
Author: Annie Geisow -
This paper examines state-perpetuated violence and oppression against LGBTQI+ subjects within the Azerbaijani military, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Baku. Through a transnational queer-feminist lens, it explores narratives of LGBTQI+ participants who have served, attempted to serve, or worked in the military, revealing how mandatory conscription functions as a mechanism of state control in an authoritarian context. In the context of global gender backlash and intensifying moral conservatism, the Azerbaijani case illustrates how militarized nationalism becomes an arena for disciplining non-normative bodies and identities. Queer recruits are frequently labelled as ‘mentally ill’ and discharged or excluded upon disclosure of their sexual identity, exposing how the military institutionalizes heteronormativity. The analysis highlights how class and rank intersect to intensify marginalization, with lower-ranking and working-class queers facing disproportionate violence and humiliation. Yet, within these structures of repression, the paper uncovers subtle forms of everyday resistance: queer soldiers form covert networks, solidarities, and affective alliances to endure and subvert military hierarchies. Situating these experiences within broader postSoviet authoritarian governance and current transnational anti-gender politics, the study contributes to debates in queer theory, militarism, and state power, showing what the Azerbaijani case reveals about global entanglements of security, masculinity, and sexual citizenship.
Author: Ramil Zamanov (Free University of Berlin) -
Amidst Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has imposed a travel ban on most men aged 18–60, and mobilization practices have gradually intensified. Despite these measures, draft evasion has grown, and over one million fighting-age men have fled abroad. While troop shortages are often discussed from a military perspective, less attention has been given to how men who fled experience and negotiate their position within a wartime gender order marked by the revival of militarized masculinity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 59 Ukrainian men who fled the war, most of them illegally, this article maps complex experiences of agency and vulnerability, exploring how these men navigate societal expectations, civic responsibilities, and the everyday survival of themselves and their families during full-scale war and militarization. Conducting this research during a time of war and heightened gendered polarization also poses important ethnographic challenges, particularly regarding how to study men’s marginalization and agency under conditions where militarization, nationalism, and gender backlash reshape the boundaries of legitimate masculinity. In doing so, this article contributes to broader debates in Critical Military Studies by problematizing what kinds of male subjectivities are recognized as “deserving” of protection, empathy, and citizenship in times of war.
Author: Sofie Rose (University of Southern Denmark) -
Sweden and Canada position themselves as early adopters of ‘feminist’ policy and pioneers of gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights in military contexts. We compare data from our projects on military gender relations in the Swedish and Canadian contexts. Through a feminist narrative analysis, we highlight temporal continuities/ruptures, demonstrating the productive work narratives around being “first” and “early” does for their state brands. We focalize military members' lived experience in backlash times against the same inclusion policies these states have supposedly championed. We argue that in the midst of funding cuts and tangible policy rollbacks, Canada and Sweden maintain a minimalist stance that equality remains important. Positioning ourselves in Critical Military Studies’ debates on militarization as a process and its gendered implications, we offer three frames through which the minimalist gender narrative remains stable across time. First, in backlash times, these militaries focus on ‘hard’ security issues, sidelining ‘gender issues’. Second, this minimization is supported by invoking past tense, claiming that gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights have already been achieved “at home”. Third, to uphold the notion that equality remains important these states show silent disapproval to explicit backlash occurring in states like the US, maintaining a moral high ground.
Authors: Bibi Imre-Millei , Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University)
-
-
2:00 PM
→
3:30 PM
/ Publishing in War and Security Studies: Sponsored by War Studies Hideaway room
-
2:45 PM
→
3:00 PM
Break 15m
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Abortion, MAHA Moms, and the new multilateralism: Global health and the Global Right
Global health is a core battleground in the global politics of the far right. Reproductive justice activists have flagged the right’s attacks on sexual and reproductive rights since the 1970s, and have mapped what these attacks tell us about the international relations of the right, and the anti-gender ideology movement. The right has mobilised vaccine hesitancy and vaccine denialism to tap into concerns about the over-reach of public health and global health institutions within the governance of states and everyday lives. The Geneva Consensus Declaration – a declaration aimed at reducing access to safe abortion and comprehensive contraception – is the backbone of the global right’s movement towards a new form of multilateralism. These trends are heavily gendered with an explicit focus on women’s health, norms of specific types of Motherhood and family exemplified by Trad Wives and MAHA Moms, natalism, and attacks on LGBTQ+ rights framed as defending women. This Roundtable draws on experts on Global Health, EU studies, Reproductive Justice, and the global right to explore how health is central to the international relations of the global right.
Sponsor: Global Health Working GroupChair: Sophie Harman (Queen Mary University of London)Participants: Toni Haastrup (University of Manchester) , Joe Strong (QMUL) , Sara Davis , Rita Abrahamsen , Pia Riggirozzi (University of Southampton) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Affective Archives: Fragments of Contested Histories, Memories, and Aspirations in South East EuropeSponsor: South East Europe Working GroupConvener: Jeta Rexha (University of Munster, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology)Chair: Catherine Baker (Lecturer, University of Hull)
-
This paper reflects on affective encounters with the fragmented archives of Yugoslav social medicine. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed repository of facts, it approaches it as a living, affective terrain where traces of care, hope, and attachments linger. Drawing on my ongoing research into the histories and futures of social medicine in post-Yugoslav contexts, I explore how these archives evoke not only institutional memory but also embodied feelings of hope, loss, and collective aspiration. Thinking with the archive means engaging with its silences, contradictions, and gestures toward unfinished worlds of solidarity. Through reading and feeling these materials, the paper asks how affective arrivals at the archive might open new ways of imagining health, care, and worldmaking in times of transitions.
Author: Jelena Kupsjak (Assistant Professor, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Zadar) -
What kinds of feelings are archived onto the body? This paper explores how beauty practices, including fashion and cosmetic procedures, among young women in post-independence Kosovo function as living, affective archives of aspiration. In a context shaped by profound socio-political transformation and state-driven ambitions for European integration, the body emerges as a central site for worldmaking. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in fashion academies, designer ateliers, and wedding ceremonies, this study argues that these aesthetic practices constitute significant forms of affective labor. Through beauty practices, women actively negotiate competing ideals of modernity, belonging, and citizenship. Women employ their bodies as "pathways of subjectivity" (Berisha, 2023) to navigate structural precarity. These embodied archives of beauty thus document the everyday politics of belonging and the ongoing pursuit of a future that is simultaneously promised and precarious.
Author: Dafina Gashi (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) -
This paper explores how the Croatian confectionery company Kraš has affectively and sensorily shaped imaginaries of childhood and national identity through its products and collectible chocolate stickers. Treating these materials as nostalgic archives, it examines how sweetness, play, and repetition become vehicles for belonging; how consumer acts such as collecting, sticking, and saving transform into affective gestures of memory-making. Through the 1990s albums Cro-Army, Knights’ Tales, Maki, and still popular Animal Kingdom the paper investigates how nostalgia functions as a mode of worldmaking that curates both personal and collective pasts and futures. Drawing on affect theory and ethnographic attention to how these archives persist in memory, homes, and digital spaces, it argues that Kraš operates as a sensory and emotional archive of belonging where sugar, touch, and longing sustain the feeling of nationhood.
Keywords: affect, nostalgia, childhood, Croatia, archive, belonging
Author: Zlatko Bukač (Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Zadar) -
My paper will be focused on activist archives, including organizational documents, public statements, and media clippings based on the interviews with women activists from the Oral History Kosovo platform. The research will use a comparative intergenerational lens to examine how the memory of the 1990s—a period of grassroots resistance against state oppression—acts as a resource for contemporary activists. This will be supplemented with a digital ethnography of online platforms and social media, which are key spaces for contemporary youth activism. I will analyze how activists use these platforms to express frustration, build solidarity, and challenge dominant state narratives. This will provide a crucial layer to understanding how disappointment, frustration and disillusionment circulates in the digital realm and how it is channeled into new forms of protest. Building upon Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism and Ilana Feldman’s untimely optimism, this research will engage with Jessica Greenberg’s critical intervention of disappointment to analyze how these emotional attachments are sustained within a broader “politics of waiting,” a state of constant precarity and aspiration for a future that may never fully materialize.
Author: Jeta Rexha (PhD candidate, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Münster)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Africa: Politics and InterventionSponsor: Africa and International Studies Working GroupConvener: AISWGChair: Lesley Masters (Nottingham Trent University)
-
When discussing international peacekeeping, Africa has long been seen as a ‘beneficiary’ of peace operations led by the Global North institutions. As a result, our understanding of African agency in peacekeeping remains limited. Addressing this gap in knowledge, my paper investigates how agency is practiced in African peacekeeping, focusing on the case of the African Union (AU). Based on a qualitative discourse analysis of AU Peace and Security Council documents and AU Commission staff interviews, I find that the AU, as a regional peacekeeping agent, frames and communicates its ‘African’ identity in a strategic manner. This can be seen especially in the institution’s presentation of its peacemaking doctrine that invokes Pan-African solidarity and the assertion of African ownership against global, often Western-led, peacekeeping actors including the United Nations (UN). At the same time, the AU discourse embodies the identity of an international organisation, appealing to collective security and multilateral peacekeeping. In aligning its practices with ‘global’ norms, the AU also highlights its adherence to the UN standards as well as its global-level contribution beyond the African continent. Building on these findings, the paper argues that African peacekeeping involves a strategic navigation between a dual identity – African and global – the presentation of which allows us to understand the nuanced practices of agency. By doing so, the paper offers much-needed insights into African agency in international peacekeeping and suggests a new agent-focused framework for future studies of African multilateral actors, such as the regional economic communities, in addition to the AU.
Author: Daeun Jung (University of Warwick) -
Unconstitutional changes of government continue to pose a significant threat to democracy and the rule of law in Africa. Yet, notable variation persists in how international actors respond to successful coups d’état on the continent. For example, the 2019 coup in Chad elicited no response from either the African Union or major international actors traditionally associated with the promotion of democracy, whereas coups in West Africa in the early 2020s generated a wide spectrum of reactions, ranging from support by Russia to condemnation and sanctions by the European Union. Although such variation is not unprecedented, the factors underlying these different responses of international actors remain inadequately understood. This study seeks to account for variations in international responses to successful coups in Africa between 1990 and 2023. Drawing on an original dataset, it advances two core arguments. First, it posits that the nature of economic and political relationships between the state experiencing a coup and international actors largely explains the observed variation in responses. These relationships capture the strategic and economic interests that international actors maintain in the affected state and, consequently, influence the scope and intensity of their reactions. Actors with substantial strategic or economic interests are more likely to adopt punitive responses to coups, as such events heighten uncertainty, disrupt political stability, and threaten established partnerships. Second, the study argues that the degree of commitment to democratic norms among international actors also shapes their responses. Because coups inherently undermine democratic governance, actors with a strong normative or institutional commitment to democracy are expected to respond more decisively and critically than those with weaker democratic orientations.
Author: Mwita Chacha (University of Birmingham) -
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 liberalism, 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 interviews, 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. It also hold important insight for the future of international relations and its role in fostering democracy.
Author: Tarela Juliet Ike
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Beyond Editorial Cold Wars: Ideas, institutions and AI in next generation global policy and IR
Around the world, there is a growing debate about the cultural context of knowledge production, with some arguing that the ongoing contentions and transitions must also be evident in the institutions of academic publishing. As the editors of Global Policy: Next Generation, a journal that aims to enhance the profile of early career scholars, especially those from beyond the Global North, we seek to consider and engage with these debates and find answers to the core issue: what is next for scholarship on global policy in times of growing polarization within and across world orders? As editors from different regions of the world, we want to showcase ways in which academic publishing is adjusting to the new world realities, bringing into focus themes and trends, while also comparing and contrasting these with the wider trends in international relations and within the specific field of global policy. We aim to open a dialogue about radical divisions in the global ideological environment, new models for collective action that transcend the state, and both the potential and threats of new technological and AI based infrastructure. This will take place alongside a discussion about the shifting publishing environment for young scholars, on subjects like academic gate-keeping, the ever increasing demand to publish, and the unjust, and even violent, impact the IT revolution has had on knowledge production.
Sponsor: British International Studies AssociationChair: Eva-Maria Nag (Durham University)Participants: Aasim Khan (King Fahd University Business School (KBS), KFUPM) , Jessica Underwood (University of Warwick) , Natalie Braun (York University) , Robert Hanson (Global Policy Journal) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Biography and International RelationsSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: Patricia Owens (University of Oxford)Chair: Alvina HoffmannDiscussant: Kimberly Hutchings (Queen Mary University of London)
-
This paper revisits the longstanding but uneven relationship between life writing and the study of international politics. Biography has never been absent from IR, but its role has often been marginal or implicit. From the foundational figures of the discipline to the recent resurgence of interest in individual agency, IR has drawn on biography more as a resource than a craft. This paper makes the case for a more robust engagement with biography, both as method and as form. It considers how life writing has contributed to IR theory and disciplinary self-understanding. It explores how recent biographical recoveries have unsettled dominant narratives about IR’s history and opened new intellectual terrain.
Author: Patricia Owens (University of Oxford) -
Macro-histories tend to adopt sweeping views of politics that emphasise structures and institutions while downplaying individuals and individual agency. However, a genuine sensitivity to macro-historical change also tells us that the balance between agency and structure is not constant across different time periods. In some eras structures and institutions matter more, and in other periods agents play a greater role. To put it another way, there are periods where structural trends themselves tend to select for hyper-agents whose biographies do matter greatly even for macro-historical narratives. I illustrate this argument with examples from late antiquity, the early modern period and the present.
Author: Ayşe Zarakol (University of Cambridge) -
This paper reads Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s life (1903–1988) as method and archive. A socialist and feminist from modern India, Kamaladevi challenged post-independence orthodoxies that equated modernity with factory industrialism. She reimagined development as humane, decentralised, and culturally grounded. Drawing on practical knowledge of craft economies, cooperatives and guilds, gendered labour, and rural production, she outlined a post-colonial path to equitable progress that offered a global alternative to both capitalist and communist teleologies. Working through a decolonial lens that treats the oral and the lived as knowledge, the paper reads her biography as a text for global, gendered herstories. It highlights her writings, organising, and institution-building for handicrafts that still anchor decentralised development in India and influenced reforms in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Centring women as creative agents, Kamaladevi valued dignity, creativity, and cultural continuity over mechanisation and insisted livelihoods be read within intersecting inequalities.
Author: Priyanka Jha (Banaras Hindu University) -
In 1940, as London sheltered, a handful of left internationalists gathered to form the Fabian Colonial Bureau (FCB), making claims to an uncertain future, where the Labour party would transform world order by reforming the British Empire into socialist commonwealth. And yet, for all sense of momentum, in the early post-war years, while the visions proposed by the Fabian Colonial Bureau attracted enthusiasm, they were soon mired by controversy among its progressive coalition. What did it mean, after all, to render empire into a socialist commonwealth? Beneath shared policy memoranda and pamphlets, divergences brewed. In this paper, we think through the connected biographies of two lesser-known FCB figures - the reformist Rita Hinden and the anti-imperialist Frank Horrabin. Tracing their intellectual biographies within and beyond the FCB, and reflecting on their friendship as well as disagreements, we underline how connecting intellectual biographies can help us make better sense of the history of international thought as built not by great thinkers, but rather by pluralist coalitions, fuelled by ambivalent horizons.
Authors: Johann von Alvensleben (University of Groningen)* , Luke Ashworth (Memorial)* , Antonio Ferraz de Oliveira (Kings College London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Building Resilience through a Whole-of-Society Approach to Security and Defence in EuropeSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConveners: Katharine Wright (Newcastle University) , Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London)Chair: Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London)
-
This paper explores the existing provision for military education in UK universities as constituted by the University Service Units and measures that provision against the stated priorities of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review. It demonstrates that the Higher Education space was a neglected aspect of the SDR with regard to military education and as a result an opportunity has been missed to transform the relationship between the MOD and the university sector and to transform what we mean by military education in general.
It further argues that engaging the entire Higher Education community is essential to the fulfilment of the SDR’s goal of building support for a “whole of society approach to defence” and for the defence needs of the current and future threat environment. For their part, universities need to be encouraged to welcome this enhanced relationship with the Armed Forces and to embrace the opportunities that this presents. Only once both these things happen can the UK move away from educating for the military in a narrow sense and embrace military education for the new strategic environment. To build resilience UK universities need to be embraced and utilised more fully than they currently are.Author: David Dunn (University of Birmingham) -
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought the question of how to resolve interstate disputes back into international headlines. However, for citizens of the occupied territories in the east of Ukraine conflict dates back to 2014. The focus on state level initiatives to end the war has obscured the layered conflict dynamics which exist within the occupied territories. In the decade since its occupation of Crimea, Russian policy in the occupied territories has been marked by Russification and disinformation campaigns that weaponise historical narratives to legitimize its presence. This strategy aims to make de-occupation and the reversal of its influence progressively more difficult. A negotiated settlement to the interstate war will not necessarily resolve these tensions and indeed could exacerbate them – prolonging conflict and regional instability by shifting the war from an interstate to internal violence. It is therefore necessary to understand how any interstate agreement on territory would be implemented within the occupied territories themselves and identify what mechanisms may be needed to manage tension. This paper presents empirical data on the meaning of ‘security’ for people in and from the occupied territories. In so doing the paper considers if and how the tools of mediation and dialogue can be used to foster social resilience at the local level in the face of widespread disinformation, and how this process relates to negotiating positions at the interstate level.
Author: Catherine Turner (Durham University) -
What makes people, societies, organisations or states resilient? Is resilience always beneficial? The proposed paper starts with observations on how we talk about resilience. The British government’s resilience planning and Strategic Defence Review 2025 are aiming to measure societal resilience, but evaluation criteria are ill defined. They seem to assume, like NATO’s resilience policies, that as long as measures which used to be the preserve of so-called ‘prepper’ communities, are in place societal resilience against crises, including military aggression and environmental disasters, would be enhanced. Then unspoken underlying assumption is that resilience is or ought to be fundamentally aimed at preserving the status quo.
The paper calls this assumption into question and seeks to explore the darker sides of the resilience debates. From a biopolitical perspective, resilience can be associated with the exercise of (state or organisational) power over individual lives thereby immediately inviting critical analysis of bout the nature of power, its distribution and its exercise over time and space. The paper also explores where and how we might frame resilience in a much more constructive and democratic manner, if we approach it from the perspective of human capacities (at individual and societal levels) to create conditions of safety, security, dignity and other forms of positive nurture and thus conceptualise resilience as dynamic and empowering from the perspective of an ethic of care and examine what that means in practice through the four pillars of the Women, Peace & Security Agenda.
Author: Andrea Ellner (King's College London) -
How does a feminist critique of resilience enhance our understanding of a whole of society approach to defence? At the 2025 NATO Summit, allies committed to spending 5% of their GDP on defence, with 1.5% of this reserved to spend on ‘resilience’. NATO’s Article 3 also commits member states to ensure their societies are resilient and able to withstand an armed attack. Yet they remain far from it, and despite NATO’s rhetoric it was not a substantive item at the Summit in The Hague. Resilience is undermined across the Euro-Atlantic by a backlash against gender equality; the rise of populism and the far right; the defunding of NGOs; and an increase in the cost-of-living set against on-going geopolitical tensions and grey zone warfare, austerity measures, and the legacy of Covid-19.
The paper draws on and extends feminist critiques of resilience, defence spending, and the ethics of care to bridge the gap between military readiness and societal resilience in the context of NATO. It argues that a whole of society approach to deterrence and defence assumes not only investment in military capabilities but also robust public services, education, and health, all being equally important in withstanding a possible aggression below and above the threshold of conflict. In other words, it is far from a zero-sum game of one over the other as many NATO members and the Secretary General have argued. We contend that addressing gender inequalities is essential to a sustainable, inclusive, whole-of-society approach to defence. It ensures states are equipped to recognise and meet the differing needs of people of all genders before, during, and after conflict, while enhancing societal resilience as a vital component of deterrence in the context of grey-zone threats.
Authors: Katharine Wright (Newcastle University) , Sorana-Cristina Jude (King's College London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / East Asia in world politicsSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: ISMMEA Working groupChair: Ferran Perez Mena (Durham University)
-
This work examines the standardization of terminology in Beijing in relation to Taiwan as a political communication strategy to build international discourse power. Although a lot of scholarly work has been done on the topic of soft and hard power in the context of China, little has been done to examine the linguistic processes involved in the expectation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to impose ideological cohesion and in order to maximize sovereignty using controlled language. Through a qualitative discourse analysis framework with quantitative trend measures of Google trend and Baidu index, the study involves official directives of terminologies (2002, 2016), state media language, and the content of the scholarly publications in CNKI and other types of data to reveal the political and communicative reason of Chinese linguistic governance. The results indicate that the standardization of terms in Beijing has been a powerful mechanism of internal ideology and legitimization of the country and supporting the discourse of One China in the domestic one. Nevertheless, it is not showing much resonance on the international level since the standardized terms forwarded by the PRC are mostly disapproved by the audiences, institutions, and media around the world, and the structural and cultural hindrances that limit the discourse power of China in the global sphere are identified. The paper helps bridge the domain of linguistics, international communication, and political science by demonstrating language policy as a means of confirmation of a hard approach of power, and not as a kind of persuasive soft power, but rather as a continuation of hard power enforcement in China in the domain of hegemony over the discourse.
Author: Yuanyuan Bao -
This paper investigates the Marxist worldview within China’s knowledge production of International Relations (IR) and its implications for Chinese foreign policy. Rather than focusing on disciplinary IR, it examines the ideas and theories constructed by Chinese Marxist scholarship. Drawing on journal articles, textbooks, and official media, this paper explores how the Marxist discourse (re)produces knowledge about the underlying mechanism of international relations and justifies Chinese foreign policy in opposition to the ‘Western/capitalist other’. It addresses key themes such as the causes of international conflicts, globalization and ‘de-globalisation’, ideological struggle and cultural imperialism, and the competition between capitalism and socialism. This paper highlights the continuous influence of Marxism within Chinese intellectual and state-supported discourses on international relations.
Author: Yi Wang (University of Birmingham) -
What drives the formation of sovereign states? Conventional theories of state formation—derived largely from the European experience—identify war-making as the decisive force behind the rise of modern states. This paper offers an alternative explanation rooted in a non-European context, arguing that peace-making, rather than war-making, played a crucial role in the consolidation of state power. Focusing on Tokugawa Japan, it shows that the emergence of a hierarchical but stable international order after a century of warfare provided the necessary conditions for autonomous domains (han) to evolve into coherent domanial states. Contrary to the established thesis that incessant warfare under anarchy drives state-building, this study demonstrates that it was the cessation of war and the establishment of relative peace under the Tokugawa shogunate that accelerated institutional development. Stability allowed local rulers to define territorial boundaries, monopolize resources, and institutionalize mechanisms of governance and social control. Drawing on historical records and administrative documents, the paper traces how daimyo governments engaged in internal consolidation, fiscal reform, and bureaucratic expansion during periods of peace. In doing so, it highlights how hierarchical order and negotiated peace facilitated, rather than hindered, the processes typically associated with state-making. By reinterpreting Japan’s early modern experience, the paper challenges Eurocentric assumptions in International Relations and historical sociology that equate state formation with the dynamics of war. Instead, it proposes a broader theoretical framework that recognizes how peaceful hierarchy and relative stability can equally drive the emergence of sovereign statehood. This perspective contributes to a more global understanding of state formation and invites comparative reflection on the diverse pathways through which political order has historically been constructed.
Author: Naosuke Mukoyama (University of Tokyo) -
Over the past decade, a new historiography has emerged that explores the origins of the Chinese discipline of International Relations (IR) and the evolution of Chinese ideas about world politics. This body of work has largely concentrated on the post-Mao era, a pivotal period that enabled the introduction of Western IR traditions through the efforts of US institutions and Sino–American educational exchanges. Although the role of these institutions was undeniably crucial in promoting Western IR after 1978, existing scholarship tends to overstate the significance of Sino–American connections. This emphasis has, in turn, obscured the contributions of other actors who also profoundly influenced the development of Chinese IR and the socialisation of Chinese IR scholars during the period of China’s opening up. Drawing on original archival research and an analysis of leading Chinese academic journals from the 1980s to the 2000s, this article offers a fresh account of how British IR ideas travelled to China, and how they were produced and reproduced within both the Chinese IR community and the state.
Author: Ferran Perez Mena (Durham University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Coloniality, identity and embodiment in the militarySponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Gabriela Almeida Costa (Anglia Ruskin University)Chair: Margot Tudor (Department of International Politics, City - University of London)
-
In this paper I will discuss my PhD research which investigates belonging in the British Army through the bodily and embodied experiences of service personnel, asking what to belong feels and means for those who serve.
I will discuss my analysis of belonging which examines the embodied corporeality of service personnel to showcase how focusing on the felt, physical, and embodied experiences of personnel can reveal the centrality of the physical body to military service and the tensions and demands service personnel encounter and navigate. My framework of embodied corporeality follows Nirmal Puwar’s (2004) examination of “space invaders” to call exclusionary military discourses into question through an exploration of the military bodies that serve the institution.
Focusing on the lived experiences of LGBTQ+, ethnic minority and female service personnel, this paper will outline my working definition of embodied corporeality to highlight the significance of and relationship between the body and belonging in military service. With the data collection for my research commencing in 2026, this paper will also discuss the challenges researchers encounter with the military institution more broadly to highlight the importance of expanding and developing our analyses of military service to continue to reinforce the prominence and authority of gendered and racialised inequalities and inequities in military institutions.
Author: Ffion Hildred (University College London) -
The United Kingdom has an extensive history of colonial worldwide occupations, settlements, slavery, and the decimation of Indigenous populations. These historical dynamics contribute to establishing structures that persist in contemporary social stratification in the UK and its former dominions. However, the UK’s Armed Forces have relied on foreign labour for centuries, first with Black Caribbean sailors and later with other foreign and Commonwealth (F&C) citizens. Social science researchers have studied the role of military migrants in the UK, however largely focusing on the Gurkhas in the Army and Imperial recruitment for the Navy and Royal Air Force during the First and Second World Wars. Nevertheless, studies still lack a decolonial perspective on military diaspora narratives and policy across the UK. Little is known about how particular colonial links between the UK and its former overseas territories influence the lives of military migrants in the UK. This study proposes to innovate research in the field by developing a decolonial approach, not only focusing on the critical analysis of colonial features but also developing tangible policies to evoke change. By exploring narratives of experience, survival and resistance, together with the policy context in which these stories take shape, it aims to focus on how the notions of identity, race, ethnicity, citizenship and immigration law affects the everyday experiences of military migrants in line with Latin American, African and Asian decolonial thought.
Author: Gabriela Almeida Costa (Anglia Ruskin University) -
This article examines how militarized masculinities in Turkey are enacted at home and register as political masculinities through implicit everyday claims. Based on forty-six interviews with military spouses, I read the household as the hinge where gender is embodied in routine practices that are recognized as small-p political, meaning every day and informal exercises of power, and that can scale into Big-P politics when they become publicly acknowledged and institutionally consequential. This vantage shows how seemingly ordinary domestic routines are not only shaped by militarized norms but also articulated as political claims with effects beyond the household. Three interrelated mechanisms specify this process. Domesticating the chain of command describes how military hierarchies spill over into the home, producing correction-based authority that organizes time, movement, and discipline within family life. Truth-setting captures the assumption that military knowledge is the proper standard and superior to civilian forms, recoding disagreement as instruction and positioning the spouse as a co-performer who must model exemplarity. Spiritual-moral governance highlights how loyalty, piety, and grief are mobilized as public composure, transforming patience and silence into demonstrations of duty and respectability. Together, these mechanisms show how authority, knowledge, and moral warrants are enacted in daily interactions and rendered visible as political claims. These claims travel as spouses are tasked with carrying them from private interiors into compound publics and civilian venues. In doing so, spouses are mobilized as exemplars and mediators who embody militarized values for non-military communities, while also managing the frictions and representational crises that result. By situating militarized masculinities and political masculinities as two vital frameworks in direct conversation, the article clarifies how everyday militarization is claimed and recognized as political masculinities and why the home must be treated as a central site in the political registers of militarized masculinities.
Author: Can Celik (PhD Candidate) -
This article examines how postcolonial armed forces experience and respond to international status anxiety. Building on debates on status dissatisfaction, stigma, and ontological insecurity in International Relations, it conceptualizes postcolonial status anxiety as a condition rooted in the ambiguity of postcolonial subjects who internalize hierarchies forged by colonial domination. Different components of the postcolonial state are affected in distinct ways and respond differently to this condition. The paper focuses on the armed forces, whose institutional identity is uniquely tied to the state’s international standing, while their very nature constrains the range of possible responses. Through an analysis of the Brazilian Army’s intellectual production from the early to late twentieth century, the article shows that postcolonial status anxiety is expressed in tensions between autonomy and imitation, and in competing claims about the military as both instrument and definer of the national community. Furthermore, the military's dominant responses to status dissatisfaction are emulation and transference. The study contributes to the growing literature on international status by showing how global hierarchies shape domestic politics and institutional identities in postcolonial contexts.
Author: David P Succi Junior (European University Institute / São Paulo State University) -
In 1895 to 1898, British Indian forces conducted operations against the Pashtun tribes in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), using tactics like burning villages, stealing cattle, and carrying out punitive collective punishment on tribals for individual attacks on British outposts, or by perceptions of threat. In 2009, Pakistan conducted Operation Rah-e-Nijat in South Waziristan in response to terrorist attacks in Pakistan, and to support the US's 'war on terror'. This has led to the displacement and killings of thousands of tribals in the region. This paper examines both of these operations as the collective punishment of racialised populations in the frontier region, constructed as requiring permanent military management for state consolidation.
Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CPA) of British military reports (India Office Records) and Pakistani military press (ISPR), the paper demonstrates the continuities in how operations are legitimised. The construction of the NWFP region as an "ungovernable" space, comprising "savage" tribes that required punitive military operations to induce what Callwell called the "moral effect," was internalised by the postcolonial Pakistani state, which manifested in Operation Rah-e-Nijat. Both framed the operations in civilising terms, with the British emphasising the benefits of colonial rule and Pakistan highlighting "development and security". Both used violence on the grounds of racialised constructions of Pashtun tribals as inherently violent. The use of tactical phrases like "butcher and bolt" becomes Pakistani "clear, hold, build", and control masquerades as winning "hearts and minds".
The comparison reveals counterinsurgency operations as an inherently colonial practice. By placing colonial and contemporary operations in direct dialogue, the paper demonstrates the persistence of violence in postcolonial statehood. It contributes to postcolonial studies by revealing the counterinsurgency's colonial genealogy, examining how postcolonial states inherit and intensify imperial violence.
Author: Aryan Pratap Singh (South Asian University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence: Norms, Silences and Survival StrategiesSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)Chair: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
-
The prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict and military settings has been widely recognised. The effects of how different military organisations address this issue have been the object of far-reaching scholarly as well as political debate. The engagement of NATO with these topics, however, remains largely unexplored, despite NATO’s resurging role in the international security landscape. This paper aims to fill this gap by asking how NATO understands and addresses the problem and relevance of different forms of SGBV and what this approach means for how NATO perceives the role of its own troops in this context. Building on a feminist theoretical approach and a discourse analysis of relevant policy and doctrinal documents, the paper argues that by creating three categories of different forms of SGBV, NATO fosters an individualised rather than structural response and portrays forms of SGBV punishable under international criminal law as external to NATO. While this approach is congruent with NATO’s self-image of a righteous actor and value-based alliance, it renders SGBV committed by NATO troops outside the scope of international law. Ultimately, this paper advances the scholarly debate on SGBV and has practical implications for addressing it more effectively in military contexts.
Author: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London) -
Kenya’s electoral cycles have been marked by political unrest and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), most notably during the 2007–2008 post-election period and again in 2013 and 2017. Though fewer cases were reported in 2022, fear and structural vulnerability persist. This paper reframes election-related SGBV as part of a continuum of gendered violence shaped by political instability, impunity, and everyday inequalities. It examines how women survivors mobilize networks, reclaim agency, and sustain resilience under these conditions. Drawing on socio-ecological resilience and relational agency, the paper explores how recovery emerges through women’s connections to family, community, and civil society rather than individual endurance alone. Based on fieldwork in Nairobi (August 2024–March 2025), the analysis identifies three phases of resilience: silence as a calculated survival tactic; formation of relational networks such as chamas (self-help groups) and survivor-led initiatives; and collaborative prevention efforts during subsequent elections. Findings reveal that relational resilience is sustained through everyday practices of care and strategic alliances but constrained by enduring political and structural barriers. By theorizing resilience as relational rather than individual, the paper advances feminist international security studies toward a more inclusive and justice-oriented vision of security which transcends the binary between victimhood and empowerment and reimagines the discipline’s capacity to address everyday gendered insecurities.
Authors: Bilge Sahin (Erasmus University Rotterdam) , Phyllis Livaha (Erasmus University College) -
Analyses of the international community’s attempts to address conflict-related sexual violence primarily focus on the discourse in and effectiveness of prominent institutional developments like Security Council resolutions. I argue that in order to understand the international community’s response to conflict-related sexual violence and more broadly, how moral condemnation is translated into tangible action, one needs to analyse the in-between institutional activities of establishing soft law, guidelines, projects, policies, and procedures. Doing so allows us to uncover how and why an international norm prohibiting conflict-related sexual violence has undergone a continuous and evolving process of institutionalisation since its emergence in a 1993 critical juncture. By process tracing expert interviews and state, UN, and regional organisation records, and drawing on feminist constructivism and historical institutionalism, I reconstruct the mechanisms that have (re)produced the institutionalisation of the anti-sexual violence norm. I suggest that this institutionalisation has been characterised by both innovation and appropriation of institutional responses to other types of conflict-related or gender-based violence, and the exceptionalisation of conflict-related sexual violence. I demonstrate that institutionalisation is (re)produced in recurrent opportunities for the norm’s legitimation and by applicatory contestation from a variety of individual and organisational actors, which spur feedback loops. As such, I claim that despite expansions in the actors and behaviours addressed by the norm, the proliferation or programmes and officials who address this issue, and persistent calls for different approaches, the institutionalisation of the norm has become increasingly path-dependent. While this cements the stickiness of the anti-sexual violence norm itself, it shrinks the realm of possibility for future institutionalisation in a time already constrained by gender backlash and dwindling funding.
Author: Taylor Hendrickson (University of Oxford) -
In the decades following Guatemala’s 1996 Peace Accords, gendered violences persist at alarming rates. The postwar years simultaneously ushered in new laws criminalising violence against women (VAW) and femicide. Yet, little research attends to the ways in which queer women and-gender non-conforming people, in particular lesbians, transwomen, femme-presenting and non-binary (NB) people, encounter gendered violences and access legal recourse when they do. With this in mind, this paper offers both a theoretical and empirical contribution to queer feminist political economy, and research on gendered violences in the Latin American context. I ask, how can we make queer feminist political economic sense of violences encountered by lesbians, transwomen, femme-presenting and NB people in postwar Guatemala, and their access and appeals to justice? Informed by qualitative research (2023-2025) and queer feminist political economic critiques highlighting the heteronormativity and cisnormativity of the state (Gore 2022; Lind 2012; Peterson 2020), I will explore how the Guatemalan state regulates gender identity and sexualities in cases of violence against lesbians, transwomen, femme-presenting and NB people. I will also amplify the tensions and possibilities that emerge through activists’ work with, around, against, and through the state and its structures to challenge the violences they encounter.
Author: Julia Hartviksen (University of Sussex)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Creative methods in Critical Military StudiesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University)Chair: Alice Cree (Newcastle University)Discussant: Alice Cree (Newcastle University)
-
Military and carceral institutions are sites where gendered and hypermasculine cultures produce and compound individual and collective trauma. Yet, dominant research on military and carceral trauma often isolates individual experiences from their structural origins, limiting possibilities for transformative change and perpetuating 'damaged-centred' research (Tuck, 2009). This paper argues for a different approach: collective imagination methodologies that, combined with somatic practice, speculative futuring, and participatory design, can both reveal institutional structures and help repair them. Drawing on a research partnership with artist Melanie Crean (New School, New York), I will present findings from participatory workshops with incarcerated military veterans and key decision makers in the UK. These workshops created spaces for veterans to share experiences of harm and collaboratively envision alternative systems of care grounded in mutual accountability and relational healing (Crean and Murray, 2026). The paper positions imagination as a rigorous form of knowledge production that interrupts entrenched cultures and extractivist research logics. The paper concludes by examining the ethical commitments and accountability required in this work, offering both a methodological contribution to critical military studies and a model for catalysing institutional change.
Author: Emma Murray (Anglia Ruskin University) -
The visual and aesthetic turn in International Relations (Bleiker, 2001) has been echoed in military studies where increasingly creative methods examine wicked and intractable problems (Cree, 2023). Participatory filmmaking presents an underexplored methodology that resonates with a critical feminist standpoint (Friedman, 2024, Pruit, 2021), although at present, remains limited in its application to the military community. Building on Caddick et al.’s recent study co-creating films with veterans to disrupt hegemonic narratives about transition (2025), our pilot study formed a small and diverse women-only film crew with women veterans to engage in participatory filmmaking. With participants unaccustomed to research, the complexity and potential inaccessibility of what we were doing became apparent as the formalities of university ethics procedures met with the realities of research literacy. Further, we quickly learnt there was insufficient space to explore our collective understanding of critical military studies research. This required subsequent negotiation to sustain a critical conversation, especially when the camera itself represented an authority that we found influenced the narratives shared. This paper reflects on our initial learning about the application of participatory filmmaking with military communities whilst honestly reflecting on some of the challenges we encountered.
Authors: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University) , Lucy Robinson (Cardiff University) , Ilda Cuko (Anglia Ruskin University) -
Creative methodologies in critical military studies (CMS) can “offer us the tools for rethinking both how we tell and who tells counter-narratives about military life” (Steel, 2023, p. 168). As “knowledge production about war [and the military] is gendered and controlled to deny women a legitimate voice to narrate their…stories” (West, 2023, p. 184), we focus on learning from and about women’s military and veteran voices. Voice work is a well-established technique used with actors and others that offers the opportunity for participants to understand the connection between the voice, the self, and the body, improving confidence and somatic awareness (Steen, 2013; Wells, 2024). We were inspired to explore the practice of voice work in the form of a narrative (Woodiwiss, Smith, & Lockwood, 2017) pilot study with military women veterans (using a pre-chosen poem by Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the wreck,” 1973). During the data collection, our focus group discussions revealed how the voice work became an unexpected catalyst for critical reflection on how military women’s voices are shaped, policed, and weaponised within military environments. Now, we are in the process of developing this practice into an innovative methodology by specifically centering questions about voice in data collection and analysis to explore the counter-narratives of military women veterans. We are building on the voice work by incorporating expressive writing (Taber, 2024) and participatory filmmaking (West, 2025) into this CMS methodology. In this way, participants will voice—write, speak, film, and share—their own stories of the regimented and the playful as relates to their service and veteran lives.
Authors: Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University)* , Nancy Taber (Brock University)* , Ashleigh Percival-Borley (Durham University) , Annie Geisow (Oxford Brookes University) -
As Cree (2023) explains in relation to critical military studies (CMS), “creativity in research is not just about ‘research methods’…but…finding new ways of knowing the world and engaging openly and actively in curiosity” (p. xiii, see also Woodward et al., 2025). This curiosity can be supported, among other ways, through creative forms of writing, such as expressive writing. Expressive writing can assist people in exploring narratives and identities with respect to the “internalized, evolving story of the self that each person crafts to provide his or her life with a sense of purpose and unity” (Adler, 2012, p. 367). When participating in expressive writing, women military veterans are offered the opportunity to reframe, reconsider, and reclaim narratives of their service, demonstrating how individual narratives—each “story of the self”—are interconnected with collective experiences as relates to military culture and structural marginalization (Taber, 2024). CMS scholars such as Caddick (2024) utilize narrative methods to explore cultural narratives of military service while Hast (2023) uses spoken word to problematize cadet training. However, little is known about creative writing as a methodology with military women veterans exploring gendered narratives. Our methodology blends narrative research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) with creative writing research (Zebracki et al., 2025) that is informed by fiction-based research (Leavy, 2023) and applied to expressive writing workshops for military veteran women. This paper discusses the methodological basis for our research as we describe how creative writing can contribute to CMS understandings about women’s military service, to work towards institutional and social reform.
Authors: Ash Grover (Brock University)* , Nancy Taber (Brock University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Critical Border StudiesSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Mabel Meneses (Sheffield Hallam University)Discussant: Mabel Meneses (Sheffield Hallam University)
-
Since the 2015 refugee crisis, annual asylum applications have surged from 28,000 to 80,000 in 2023 (Home Office, 2023), a rise which has been framed as an economic and governance challenge (Walsh and Sumption, 2024). Although this framing process is not new, it has recently resulted in a clear politicisation of asylum, characterised by debates over resource pressures, border control, and integration; exclusionary governmental practices; a reduced asylum infrastructure; rising anti-asylum sentiment; and a hostile environment (Benwell et al., 2023; Goodfellow, 2019). Reforming asylum accommodation has been central to these exclusionary practices, including the shift from hotels to alternative housing (Geiger, 2024). The Bibby Stockholm asylum barge, a repurposed worker barge moored at Portland Port since July 2023, symbolises this shift. The barge’s deployment has drawn criticism and raised important questions about the ethics and implications of asylum accommodation policies (itvNews, 2023).
The proposed article proposes to amplify marginalised voices in the UK asylum landscape, using the Bibby Stockholm asylum barge as a unique case study. While migration studies have produced extensive research, few have critically examined how asylum seekers navigate the complexities of home-making in liminal spaces. This article breaks new ground by exploring everyday practices of belonging aboard the barge, amidst polarised public opinion and media portrayals. By capturing narratives from occupants, employees, local communities, and policymakers, it reshapes ontological discussions on home-making, displacement, and asylum. Positioning the barge as a pivotal moment in asylum practices, this article examines its layered meanings and broader implications. This unexplored case study captures the barge’s experimental and ephemeral nature, exploring its effects on both residents and surrounding communities. By addressing prevailing narratives that dehumanise asylum seekers, it critically analyses what it means to call a floating barge 'Home.'Authors: Sharon Wilson (Northumbria University) , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) -
In his small office in the municipality, Mohammad takes a sip of coffee and sighs deeply, playing with a small tear in the leather of his armchair: ‘Syrian minds are in overdrive about if they should stay or go. And we, Jordanians, have no say. They will go, leaving their home and business, and no new projects or funds will come. We will be forgotten again’.
While literature in critical migration studies has provided rich insight on refugee arrival, host state commitments and the role of refugee-host communities in terms of integration or social cohesion, far less has been written about the socio-political, economic and cultural experiences of host communities who live side-by-side with refugees and the increasing uncertainty surrounding refugee return. Based on long term ethnography in a North Jordan village, this paper explores the emergence of ‘ghost towns’ along the Jordan-Syria border and what is being left behind or forgotten after protracted displacement. Bringing together literature on urban refugees (Sanyal 2017), post-crisis (Jordheim and Wigen 2018) and a ‘more-than-human’ account of the material objects (Squire 2014), the paper investigates the growing insecurity around the housing and labour market, neighbourhood dynamics and a lack of humanitarian investment; pitched by some Jordanians as a ‘re-crisis’. If the refugee uncovers the ‘untenable link between birth and territory…an order incapable of imagining any other form of belonging and legitimate ‘right to a place’’ (Minca et al. 2020: 751), the politics of re-crisis questions traditional notions of international order whereby refugee return becomes a source of unease.
Author: Hannah Owens (University of Hertfordshire) -
Migrant caravans that began in 2018 from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (Northern Triangle) to the United States are a complex and pressing issue. This paper examines the multifaceted factors driving migration flows in the Northern Triangle, including violence, economic hardship, and political instability from 2018 to 2025. It examines the challenges migrants face, including human rights abuses, exploitation, and the risks associated with irregular migration. Additionally, it explores the U.S.’s shifting immigration policies and their broader implications for migrants and regional stability. Mexico has also faced many challenges due to the increased flow of migrants through its territory, where approximately 400,000 to 500,000 migrants traverse yearly. For example, in 2023, Mexico received 140,000 asylum requests. Responding to pressure placed by the U.S., Mexico has implemented measures to stop migrants from crossing the southern border with limited success. Since Mexico does not have the infrastructure required to attend to migrants' needs, many people are left vulnerable to organized crime and human trafficking. International Organizations and Non-governmental organizations have responded to the crisis by assisting migrants with their paperwork, enabling them to stay in Mexico or apply for asylum in the U.S. They have also helped migrants return to their home country if they can determine that their safety is no longer in jeopardy. However, they face significant challenges in attending to the needs of the migrant population in Mexico amid ongoing policy changes. This paper analyzes the challenges faced and successes achieved by International organizations and NGOs during the 2018-2025 time period.
Author: Alina Gamboa Combs (Anahuac University Mexico) -
“A highjack that never happened”: The Nave Andromeda incident and the policing of maritime stowaways
This paper examines the 2020 Nave Andromeda incident, in which the discovery of seven stowaway migrants aboard an oil tanker passing through the English Channel prompted a military intervention by the UK’s Special Boat Service. Although all charges were later dropped, the episode was initially understood and represented as an attempted hijacking prevented by a specialised military response. Situating this incident within the spectacle of maritime border policing and the broader context of the policing of stowaways, I suggest that this is a largely overlooked site for the politics of in/visibility that define maritime bordering. The stowaway is a paradigmatically invisible figure, hidden within the ship’s infrastructure and absent from humanitarian and security discourses, yet here becomes the focus of a performative assertion of the racialised UK sea-border.
Engaging with critical border studies, postcolonial theory and border aesthetics, the paper shows how the stowaway functions as a “body out of place” that unsettles the spatial, legal and racial order of the border. The military spectacle of the Nave Andromeda incident illuminates how the policing of stowaway migrants mobilises colonial imaginaries of maritime disorder and operates through an affective and visual economy of control and exception.Author: Silvester Schlebrügge (University of Warwick)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Cyber Operations and DiplomacySponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University)Chair: Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University)
-
Civil–military relations (CMR) reflect the foundational balance of governance and defense within the state. In post–Cold War Europe, CMR has shifted from concerns over military intervention toward questions of coordination, governance, and operational effectiveness. Classical theories (Huntington, 1957; Janowitz, 1967) emphasized civilian control, while recent scholarship (Franke, 2006; Forster, 2022) highlights the policy dimension—how civil and military actors collaborate to achieve shared security goals. This evolution has profoundly shaped institutions such as NATO and the European Union (EU).
Within the EU, the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has sought to bridge civilian and military efforts through joint planning and crisis management structures. Yet integration remains uneven, hindered by institutional silos, distinct funding mechanisms, and cultural divides. While Europe’s political stability has reduced the salience of CMR as an academic and policy issue, emerging hybrid threats—particularly in the cyber domain—are forcing a reevaluation of this relationship.
Cybersecurity transcends traditional institutional boundaries, intertwining civilian and military responsibilities in unprecedented ways. Cyber operations demand coordinated responses that combine strategic defense, technical expertise, and intelligence sharing across civil, military, and private sectors. As the EU Cybersecurity Strategy (2013) acknowledges, cyber resilience requires “safeguards and actions in both civilian and military fields.”
This article asks: How do cyber dynamics reshape civil–military relations within the EU’s CSDP framework?
It advances two hypotheses:
H1: Civil–military relations in the EU have not evolved into a coherent framework due to limited political and academic attention.
H2: Cybersecurity is fostering new mechanisms of coordination, shared protocols, and communication channels, gradually redefining the EU’s civil–military balance.By triangulating CMR, cybersecurity, and the CSDP, this research illuminates how technological and institutional transformations are reshaping the EU’s role as a security actor and the broader balance between civilian authority and military power in Europe.
Author: ISABELLA NEUMANN (University of Coimbra) -
Cyber offensive operations have increasingly shaped the strategic thinking and practices of nation-states within the international system. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its subsequent cyber offensive targeting of allied nations, cyber resilience have become central to governmental decision-making in critical areas of national defence. In response, the UK has announced a Cyber Growth Action Plan (2025) and committed £1 billion to the development of the Digital Targeting Web (May 2025). While equipping the UK Armed Forces with advanced battlefield technologies is essential, it is equally important for policymakers to ensure that strategic decisions are not solely reliant on algorithmic outputs. Engagement in the cyber battlefield demands a deliberate, rational, and strategically sequenced decision-making process. While technological empowerment is essential, decision-making must not become fully dependent on algorithmic logic. To this end, this paper introduces Algocratic Realpolitik as a critical analytical lens that draws attention to the decisive forces of twenty-first century governance where the algorithmic infrastructures owned and operated by unelected, private actors challenges traditional democratic institutional decision making.
Drawing on academic and practitioner material, the paper starts with an overview of current approaches to offensive cyber operations. In this section it will be argued that separating offensive vs defensive operations in the algorithmic infrastructure will help government decision making. To demonstrate this, the paper will utilise case studies on select cyber events that conditioned military conflict. The paper then presents the algocratic realpolitik framework and its seven mechanisms. Given that the international order is transitioning to a new and yet unknown configuration, it is essential that states and decision makers are critically aware of the power competition and alignment between military, political and technological ecosystems. The paper concludes that the international system is governed less by the traditional power dynamics, than by the balance of power among algorithms.Authors: Aida Abzhaparova (University of the West of England Bristol) , Jonathan Lancelot (University of the West of England Bristol) -
In the early 2010s, cyber diplomacy emerged as a novel diplomatic field, prompting foreign ministries worldwide to establish dedicated departments focused on cybersecurity and internet governance. However, as the international agenda shifts toward newer technological frontiers such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and the systemic competition involving great powers and big tech companies, it is becoming increasingly less clear the place of cyber diplomacy in international relations. This paper explores whether the current maturity of cyber diplomacy coincides with its potential gradual marginalization, driven by evolving institutional, organizational, and multilateral dynamics that reflect the current pivoting towards a broader understanding of technology as a geopolitical priority. Specifically, the paper explores the viability of three key propositions: first, that cyber diplomacy units are increasingly being supplemented—or replaced—by broader technology-focused departments within leading foreign ministries; second, that these ministries are now engaged in a growing number of multilateral forums addressing a wide array of tech-related issues; and third, that even within the primary venue for cyber diplomacy—the UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG)—the scope of discussions has expanded beyond cybersecurity to encompass wider technological challenges.
Author: Andre Barrinha (University of Bath)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Ethics of War and ViolenceSponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working GroupConvener: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)Chair: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
-
The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage by groups such as ISIS, epitomised by the world-broadcasted devastation of Palmyra in Syria, has prompted urgent debates about military intervention to protect humanity's cultural legacy. This paper examines the conditions under which just war theory might legitimise armed intervention specifically to safeguard cultural heritage, asking whether a "cultural humanitarian intervention" is morally and legally conceivable.
While cultural heritage protection features prominently in jus in bello norms, its status as a jus ad bellum concern remains critically underdeveloped (Brunstetter 2019). This paper addresses a series of foundational questions to establish a framework under which military operations to safeguard heritage would be acceptable within just war principles: Can threats to heritage constitute sufficient reason to trigger an armed operation? Is the use of lethal force justifiable against those who deliberately destroy cultural heritage?
After analysing the conditions under just war principles (Foradori et Rosa 2017; Frowe et Matravers 2023), I examine the revived concept of "cultural Responsibility to Protect" (cultural R2P) (Lenzerini 2016).
This study highlights tensions about the scope of security, more precisely between national and human security, sovereignty, human rights and armed violence.Bibliography:
Brunstetter, Daniel R. 2019. « A tale of two cities: the just war tradition and cultural heritage in times of war ». Global Intellectual History 4(4):369‑88.
Foradori, Paolo, et Paolo Rosa. 2017. « Expanding the peacekeeping agenda. The protection of cultural heritage in war-torn societies ». Global Change, Peace & Security 29(2):145‑60.
Frowe, Helen, et Derek Matravers. 2023. « Conflicts in Heritage Protection ». P. 33‑50 in Heritage and War. Ethical Issues, directed by W. Bülow, H. Frowe, D. Matravers, et J. L. Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lenzerini, Federico. 2016. « Terrorism, Conflicts and the Responsibility to Protect Cultural Heritage ». The International Spectator 51(2):70‑85.Author: Eva Portel (Sciences Po Bordeaux) -
A robot now vacuums my floor; I, meanwhile, focus on other things. As such, there is no intentionality to vacuum; vacuuming simply "goes on" (without me). This situation is ethically and ontologically unproblematic. In other activities (i.e., war), however, intentionality is understood (hitherto, at least) as intrinsic to the activity: as Clausewitz observed, the activity of war is essentialized by hostile intentions which result in fighting. What would it mean, therefore, if war simply "goes on" without us; is the telos of autonomous weapons “autonomous war”? The practices and forces of war have, of course, already been mechanized. But would autonomous hostility amount to the mechanization of war itself; is the concept of “autonomous war” (rooted in "autonomous hostility") even conceivable - logically, ontologically, and phenomenologically? My aim in this paper is merely to formulate these questions such that they signify the methodological work that pressingly needs to be done at this critical historical juncture. To this end, I: (1) scrutinize the concept of autonomy vis-à-vis war; (2) problematize the “intentionality gap” brought about by autonomous weapons; and (3) problematize the notion of “hostile intentionality” as essential to our understanding of war. Overall, I argue that we are methodologically ill-equipped to even raise these important questions, let alone answer them. Rapidly evolving technologies in the context of war, as such, must be understood as threatening an ethical, methodological, and even an ontological upheaval.
Author: Mark Gilks (Independent) -
ABSTRACT: The existing literature on jus ad vim is dominated by discussion of the potentially justifiable uses of such measures. However, measures of ‘vis’ are often abused and used unjustly, including Russia’s use of the Wagner Group as a proxy in Africa and its ‘grey zone’ operations in Ukraine. How should liberal actors respond to unjust vis? This paper focuses on this question in relation to the unjust use of proxies. It considers the ethical principles that should govern responses to proxies, such as the Wagner Group, given their use to reduce domestic political costs and maintain plausible deniability globally. It considers two issues: whether sponsors or proxies should be the primary focus of responses and whether ‘tit-for-tat’ proxy warfare is justifiable. The paper then draws on this discussion to highlight general considerations for the ethics of responding to unjust vis.
Author: James Pattison -
We talk about war in terms of neat categories (combatant, non-combatant, civilian, etc), yet targeting decisions in war are inherently imperfect. There is therefore a dissonance between just war theory and the practice of war. This is important because the standard of certainty used by combatants has important moral consequences. Too low a standard would lead to widespread unjustifiable killing, too high a standard would severely inhibit combatants from successfully waging war, which could also have moral consequences if their cause is just. This paper introduces the suspected combatant problem as a means of thinking through and evaluating moral arguments about identification practices and standards of certainty in war. Taking "suspected combatants" as the standard case forces us to reconsider our basic assumptions about ethical standards for the use of force in war. The suspected combatant problem highlights the moral consequences of uncertainty inherent in targeting decisions in war, as well as the considerable variance in uncertainty due to differences between armed groups, objects, and domains of warfare. This paper highlights the importance of this issue by examining critiques of artificial intelligence use in war that rest upon assumptions of perfect identification as a possibility, and baseline standard in war.
Author: Jack McDonald (Department of War Studies, King's College London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Experiencing Un/Belonging in Academia: The Politics of Space and Place as a Traveling Concept
This roundtable engages with the BISA 2026 theme by exploring the politics of space within Higher Education (HE) to consider how these spaces are (re)configured by local power structures and hierarchies (e.g., race, gender, class, caste, religion, etc.) and how they shape experiences of un/belonging in the neoliberal academy. These dynamics influence who enters, thrives in, and remains within International Studies and its institutional spaces. In turn, they affect the discipline’s capacity to meet global challenges through inclusive and transformative pedagogical and institutional practices. As Global South scholars located in Global North and Global South HE institutions, we articulate the politics of space as a ‘traveling concept’ (Bal 2002) and ask: how does the politics of space travel between our HE contexts, and how do local power structures and hierarchies reconfigure their significance? Participants will reflect on how their dis/location(s) within particular academic contexts shape their experiences of un/belonging, how these experiences resonate or differ across individual contexts, and in turn affect participants’ strategies to navigate, contest, and (re)define academic spaces. The roundtable is rooted in an ethics of care, community, and solidarity, and relies on decolonial feminist scholarship on race, gender and representation in academia.
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Monika Barthwal-Datta (UNSW Sydney)Participants: Monika Barthwal-Datta (UNSW Sydney) , Davina Nair (University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies) , Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney) , Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Gender and Russia's War Against UkraineSponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Jennifer Mathers (Aberystwyth University)Chair: Allyson Edwards (Bath Spa University)Discussant: Bohdana Kurylo (London School of Economics)
-
The paper explores Russian women’s solitary pickets against the war in Ukraine between 2022-2025 through the lens of embodied politics. Drawing on Butler’s work on vulnerability, the paper argues that women use their body as a central site for protest and mobilize their corporeal vulnerability for the purpose of asserting their existence in a highly repressive state. The paper explores women’s use of specific colours, symbols, and performative elements and fills the gap in existing research on anti-war protest in Russia that focuses on its discursive elements.
Author: Ina Friesen (Aberystwyth University) -
This paper explores how Ukrainian men who have chosen not to participate in the armed defence of their country negotiate questions of responsibility, subjectivity, and masculinity amid the ongoing war. The study draws on a series of peer-to-peer interviews, designed to create dialogical spaces where participants could articulate experiences and moral reflections in conversation with other Ukrainian men. This approach foregrounds shared vulnerability, relational knowledge production, and the co-construction of meaning under conditions of conflict. Theoretically, the paper situates itself at the intersection of critical masculinity studies, feminist security studies, and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. It understands masculinity as a relational and situational project shaped by entanglements of power, morality, and affect. Refusal to fight is read not as passive withdrawal but as a performative and ethical act that unsettles hegemonic narratives of courage, patriotism, and masculine duty. Participants describe their choices as ongoing ethical struggles marked by guilt, solidarity, and the search for moral coherence, while situating themselves within both national and transnational expectations of loyalty and belonging. Their reflections reveal how war reproduces yet also destabilises gendered subjectivities, opening spaces for alternative articulations of self and community. The paper argues that acts of refusal — as revealed through peer-to-peer dialogues — constitute productive epistemic sites where new forms of responsibility, belonging, and masculinity are negotiated. In doing so, it contributes to conceptual debates on the intersections of gender, ethics, and political subjectivity in wartime.
Author: Dina Bolokan (Coventry University) -
This paper examines an understudied dimension of youth militarisation in Putin’s wartime Russia: the ways that stereotypical ideas about masculinities and femininities are reproduced in practices and discourses. All forms of youth militarisation target boys and girls, young men and young women, and at first glance all youth are given the same opportunities and exposed to the same messages about the glories of war and the importance of the armed forces to defend Russia and Russians. But a close examination of the discourses constructed around the heroic behaviour of war veterans and war survivors that are communicated to youth reveal distinctly gendered features that send very different signals to young men and young women about the kind of war-related activities that they would be expected to participate in.
Author: Jennifer Mathers (Aberystwyth University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Global Politics and British Psychoanalytic TheorySponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConveners: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) , Katherine Pye (LSE) , Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford)Chair: Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
-
Ambivalence is itself ambivalent. It takes two contrary forms and finds resolution in two quite contrary ways. As the pervasiveness of ontological insecurity spreads across the globe, these contrary forms will compete ever more fiercely to determine the mentalities and emotions that dominate social and political relations. The outcome of this conflict will play a central role in determining the future of the world risk society. It already affects how we relate to the future, and how we act in the present, with both future and past in mind. Will norms of recognition that promote the capacity to dwell in ambivalence manage to establish themselves as the proper way to feel, think and relate, or will norms of recognition encoding psychic defences that split ambivalence predominate, thereby promoting defences against ontological insecurity that promote the friend-enemy distinction? That is the issue that confronts our global future. Will ambivalence be split into the idealised and the despised in the false hope of dissolving the ontological anxiety it provokes, or will the capacity to dwell in ambivalence modify and sublimate our emotions without denying them, by accepting and containing the complexity of our emotional responses to challenging situations and challenging relationships?
Author: John Cash (University of Melbourne) -
This article examines the 2024 US presidential election as a pivotal moment for contesting the US autobiographical narrative through what conceptualise as phantasies of masculinity. We argue that, during the campaign, competing phantasies of masculinity were integral to collective narrative and electoral contestation, showing that the Republicans phantasised masculinity in hegemonic and hypermasculine terms, while the Democrats emphasised care but ultimately reproduced traits of hegemonic masculinity. This domestic contestation, ultimately 'won' by the Trump campaign, subsequently shaped US foreign policy actions, now characterised by a display of hypermasculinity. Beyond offering an empirical account of the role of masculinity in the US autobiographical narrative, the article makes two key contributions to International Relations theory by integrating feminist scholarship on masculinities with a Kleinian approach to ontological (in)security. First, it advances ontological security research by theorising the foundational role of masculinity in collective autobiographical narratives, with particular attention to hierarchies of masculinities. Second, it enriches feminist scholarship by examining the translation of masculinity into phantasies that structure the psychological and affective dimensions of narrative contestation. The article calls for deeper engagement between feminist and ontological security approaches to better understand how dynamics of ontological (in)security in global politics are fundamentally gendered.
Authors: Nicolai Gellwitzki (University of York) , Deborah Deborah Faudoa Rodriguez (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico)* , Veronica Barfucci (University of Warwick) -
Why do some political actors experience existential rupture in response to institutional or identity crises, while others remain relatively stable? This paper reframes ontological (in)security as a differentiated, relational condition rather than a holistic state. Drawing on attachment theory and object-relations approaches, it argues that political actors sustain multiple emotionally meaningful attachments – to institutions, alliances, myths, leaders, … –which vary in stability, centrality, and substitutability. Ontological (in)security thus depends less on the mere presence of disruption than on the emotional quality of these attachments: whether they function as secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganised bonds. Building on psychoanalytic scholarship in International Relations, the paper shifts focus from defensive reactions to the sustaining role of attachment and care. It develops a framework of relational dispositions that explains why some ruptures are absorbed with minimal disorientation while others provoke profound insecurity. Various illustrative cases demonstrate the analytical value of this perspective. The framework contributes to ontological security studies by mapping the affective architecture of political life, revealing how security and insecurity emerge through the layered structure of emotional attachments that make the political world feel stable or threatening.
Author: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford) -
The paper explores different meanings of post-colonial independence by looking at two novels, The barracks by John McGahern (1963) and The beautyful ones are not yet born by Ayi Kwei Amah (1965), set in Ireland and Ghana respectively. In both novels, the male protagonist works for the state which he detests, comparing its muddle and murk with the clearer cut purpose of anti-colonial struggle. Both novels play with Plato’s allegory of the cave to explain the frustrations of being denied access to enlightenment and freedom that the men had imagined would come with independence.
The paper argues however, that a more ambiguous picture of independence emerges within the families of the novels. Taking the family as an analogy of the post-colonial state – inherited, orphaned and damaged – it explores feelings of guilt, alienation and impotence, as well as love, as reflections on a more ambiguous independence. It draws on the UK-based psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory of the ‘depressive position’ to make conclusions about the limits and possibilities of independence in two post-colonial states as they seek to establish themselves.
Author: Julia Gallagher (King's College London) -
How do European interveners navigate the gap between their progressive self-image and increasing accusations of neocolonialism and military intervention failure in Africa? Through Kleinian psychoanalysis and Bion’s theory of containment, I examine the relations between European staff and their Malian and Nigerien recipients forged during the EU’s decade-long intervention in the Sahel conflict. Everyday relationships with recipients are crucial sites of meaning-making and recognition for EU staff, yet they are also repositories for unprocessed, evacuated persecutory anxieties about the intervention’s poor outcomes and accusations of neocolonialism. Drawing on 65 interviews with practitioners and ethnographic observation, I argue that European staff are caught in a cycle of failed attempts to process their anxieties about intervention failure. Through projective identification, European staff blame African recipients for not taking responsibility for the poor results of the intervention, and accuse French staff paternalistic and neocolonial behaviour. These projections allow staff to keep investing in their work while preserving their idealised self-representations as ‘good Europeans’ and disavowing colonial guilt and responsibility. As of yet, the EU’s missions and projects do not provide a container in which personnel can process the unbearable thought that their practices perpetuate the colonial histories the EU claims to have transcended.
Author: Katherine Pye (LSE)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Knowledge Politics II (Futures and Limitations)Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
-
In the face of an accelerating planetary crisis, knowing the future holds profound value for practitioners and decision-makers working on the intersection of climate change and security. Private and public actors mobilize advanced computer models, digital twins, or machine learning to turn vast datasets of big Earth data into knowledge of future risks – from large-scale natural disasters to environmental migration, or related political conflicts. However, this growing future expertise rarely seems to translate into political action in the present. The paper argues that the key to explaining this puzzle lies in practices and technologies of de/valuing climate futures. Linking work on anticipatory security in CSS and STS, with the sociology of valuation, I conceptualize climate security as a political economy of futures in which data does not simply inform policy but is translated through three logics of de/valuation.
First, discounting functions as a political technology of devaluing future harm. Through a close reading of the UK Treasury's 2025 “Green Book supplementary guidance: Accounting for the effects of climate change,” I trace how data-driven future scenarios are translated into present-value calculations, rendering long-term risks manageable as part of a broader UK resilience strategy. Second, capitalization enacts climate futures as sites of speculative value. Using the European Earth observation program Copernicus as a paradigmatic case, I study the strategies aimed at turning big Earth data on future risks into (knowledge) products to be further used by economic, administrative, and political actors. Third, I describe the dismantling of knowledge infrastructures and related abilities to monitor and predict climate risks by the current US government as a form of epistemic erasure that seeks to secure the ongoing generation of value by fossil fuel industries.
Author: Delf Rothe -
Title: Imagining Inclusive Climate Futures from the Global South
Abstract:
The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, and environmental degradation are already shaping the futures of communities across the world. Yet, the global debate on climate solutions often excludes voices from the Global South, where the impacts are most severe. This paper argues that building fair and sustainable futures requires a more inclusive political imagination that takes seriously the experiences and knowledge of those living on the frontline of climate change.Drawing from African examples of climate activism, community adaptation, and indigenous knowledge, the paper shows how local practices can inspire global responses. These practices include grassroots reforestation efforts, youth-led climate justice campaigns, and community energy initiatives. They highlight that solutions are not only technical but also social, cultural, and political.
The paper suggests three steps for building inclusive climate futures. First, challenge narrow ideas that place responsibility and decision-making in the hands of only powerful actors. Second, create new narratives of justice and cooperation that reflect the realities of vulnerable communities. Third, turn these narratives into practice through networks, education, and community-driven projects.
By focusing on climate justice, this paper invites International Studies to move beyond abstract debates and engage directly with lived realities. It calls for global conversations where the Global South is not a passive recipient of policies but an active shaper of climate futures. The aim is to imagine and build a shared future that is sustainable, just, and inclusive.
Author: Geoffrey Kimotho (University of Nairobi) -
There is burgeoning environmental politics interest in how ‘storytelling’ opens new modes of being beyond ecocidal, capitalist and colonialist structures. Taking this approach in a new direction, I investigate how businesses apply these tools to serve their interests.
This research is part of a project studying a specific type of non-state actor: ‘corporate environmental pacts’. Pacts are initiatives that encourage business members to ‘take action’ to address environmental crises, certify those actions, market those actions and build virtual communities. Discourse analysis was conducted on interviews with staff from two pacts and a substantial dataset of the pacts’ online content.
Using governmentality theory, I argue that pacts instrumentalise a fundamental impulse of ecotopian environmental politics scholarship: that creative knowledge-sharing through storytelling can shape the ways we conduct ourselves and organise our ecological political economy. Specifically, I examine the discourses used in pact storytelling practices employed in documentaries, social media and blogs. I find that a certain type of human story is told, promoting mentalities of techno-optimism, which shift responsibility onto an abstract ‘humanity’ and recast business as a solutions-finder rather than a climate culprit.
Author: Samuel Toscano (University of Manchester) -
An emergent communication strategy of the oil industry is to claim that continued oil and gas production is essential to finance the energy transition. This stance paradoxically frames the cause of the climate crisis – fossil fuel – as its solution, implicitly suggesting that climate change will fix climate change. Whereas existing scholarship has interrogated the reality of this claim, this article asks what order of reality it produces. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Deleuze’s concept of dividualization, I argue that the idea that exacerbating climate change now will eventually fix it in the future operates as a heterotopia of dividualization. This heterotopia is a representational space where the oil industry becomes ‘other to itself’ by dividualizing its identity – polluter and climate-conscious actor – thus mirroring the subject’s competing dividualities in affluent, carbon-intensive societies. This heterotopic dividualization functions as a governmentality that justifies ongoing extraction and sanitizes fossil fuel consumption.
Author: Luca Mavelli (University of Kent) -
Who has the ability to tell stories via the law? What is the narrative impact of legal storytelling? These questions, and more, prompted the birth of Law and Narrative literature within the American legal academy in the 1980s, making a contribution to the overall 'narrative turn' in research across the humanities (Goodson and Gill 2011). Today, with an increase in attention on legal storytelling, social movement strategic litigators consider storytelling to be a key consideration when bringing a case and maximising effective impact (Fisher 2025).
These questions of narrative impact are only now beginning to be applied to climate change litigation (De Spiegleir 2025; Wewerinke-Singh and Ramsay 2024). Climate change narratives in the law ask us to question who is affected by the climate disaster and who is ‘deserving’ of their day in court. As such, I argue that there is a need to draw upon the insights of worldmaking to examine the construction of these narratives in climate litigation. How do climate stories in the law act as a site of worldmaking for participants, litigators, and courts? Who is involved in the construction of these stories? Through the use of interviews with participants in litigation and text analysis of legal documents, I aim to examine who is empowered to make new worlds in the law and how the language we use creates our climate future(s).
Author: Meredith Warren (Queen Mary, University of London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Legal training for research and training on Palestine with the European Legal Support Centre
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Maritime Issues in Foreign PolicySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Maísa Edwards (Kings College London)
-
Within the context of the ‘new cold war’, resulting in a wedged bi-polar system emerging in the Indo-Pacific, there are growing vulnerabilities associated with independent, stable, and doctrinally entrenched strategic positions. Post-colonial states such as India have looked to escape the pressures of heightened great power competition to assert their interests as they harness institutional mechanisms and benefits extended by both rivals in the great power contest. The existing literature characterises India’s behaviour as either balancing or hedging vis-à-vis the United States and China. The article seeks to provide a new conceptual anchoring of post-colonial state behaviour by introducing ‘strategic liminality’ as an explanation. Strategic liminality reveals the complex, unfixed, and multifaceted nature of discursive repertoire shaping India’s sense of self vis-à-vis its engagement in the Indo-Pacific. The analysis aims at making three substantial interventions. Firstly, it problematises the conventional, Eurocentric balance of power theory in the context of non-Western states. Secondly, it delineates the structural conditions under which India has resorted to being ‘strategically liminal’ since the COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, strategic liminality as a novel conceptualisation provides a model to explain state behaviour in the Indo-Pacific, characterised by skilful bargaining behaviour within the power structure of the region. By dissecting India’s diplomatic behaviour, the article demonstrates how it has creatively utilized strategic liminality to pursue foreign policy goals and economic objectives.
Author: Abhishank Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Since the aftermath of the Cold War Crisis, the notion of the ‘Third World’ has evolved into the concept of ‘Global South’ providing a platform for the developing and least-developed countries to assert their collective interests. Within this framework, the BRICS forum, an intergovernmental grouping formed in 2001, facilitated as the driving thrust for the voice of the Global South Nations. In this context, the Gulf Region marked the critical hub for global trade and goods, where ‘rentier economy’ persisted in shaping its economic structure. Focusing on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this paper explores how its 2024 accession to the BRICS forum, coupled with its ‘String of Ports’ strategy, redefines its leadership role within the Global South. By transforming maritime connectivity into a platform for South–South cooperation, strategic autonomy, and multipolar engagement, the UAE positions itself as a central actor in reshaping regional diplomacy.
Through a qualitative approach, this study analyses a case study from the Gulf and West Asian countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Oman that would test the hypothesis. Such cases would analyze UAE’s role in garnering support and challenges from these nations for its snowballing interests as a powerful bloc. Further, this paper will try to evaluate the ‘Cooperative Diplomacy’ as a conceptual framework.
Thus, this paper seeks to examine the UAE’s evolving maritime diplomacy through the lens of the BRICS forum, drawing attention to its ambition and challenges in the Gulf region.Keywords: Third World, Global South, BRICS, Cooperative Diplomacy
Author: Rajat Biswakarma (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India) -
In global politics, “outsider” is both a descriptive and performative label; it names who does not belong while constituting the very boundaries of belonging. Yet the category remains analytically neglected in International Relations. This paper theorizes “outsiderness” as a relational and performative condition that becomes visible during moments of geopolitical transformation. As global blocs such as the EU, NATO, BRICS, and the Arctic Council expand, fracture, and compete for normative authority, they redraw the symbolic and institutional edges of inclusion, deciding who may enter, observe, or narrate a region. The Arctic provides a revealing case study to explore this dynamic; non-Arctic actors such as EU, China, and Turkey are alternately dismissed as “outsiders,” performing proximity, legitimacy, and expertise to move from the edge toward the center of governance. Methodologically, the paper combines discourse and performance analysis of diplomatic statements, policy imaginaries, and symbolic gestures to trace how outsiderness is enacted and contested. It argues that “outsider geopolitics” reveals not geographical exclusion but the ongoing performative production of regionalism, exposing how global hierarchies are reproduced and occasionally subverted through the language of inclusion, distance, and desire for entry.
Authors: Andreas Raspotnik* , Eda Ayaydin (University of London Institute in Paris) -
This paper argues that the South Atlantic is undergoing an externally driven transformation catalysed by China’s expanding maritime presence and its interdependence with Indo‑Pacific security dynamics. Bringing Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) into dialogue with Maritime Regional Security Orders (MRSOs), it reconceptualises proximity in maritime rather than strictly territorial terms—sea‑lane connectivity, navigational access, and logistical nodes—and introduces the heuristic of a “megaregional security complex” linking multiple supercomplexes without positing their merger.
Empirically, the study traces three mutually reinforcing strands. First, it examines the evolution of the IBSAMAR exercises (2010–2024) as a southern‑led bridge that progressively connects the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic through increasingly sophisticated cooperation, moving from constabulary functions towards multi‑domain interoperability. Second, it analyses the Djibouti precedent and the emerging basing logic centred on Equatorial Guinea, situating these as dual‑use nodes that institutionalise access while normalising forward presence. Third, it surveys People’s Liberation Army Navy operations, port calls, and hydro‑oceanographic activity across the South Atlantic, highlighting patterns of operational persistence and strategic learning. Taken together, these dynamics amount not to a merger of complexes but to sustained external penetration that expands the South Atlantic’s outer boundary, embeds novel dependencies, and reconfigures the region’s strategic geometry.
Theoretically, the paper specifies mechanisms of “external impact” within RSCT and foregrounds maritime infrastructures and practices as vectors of transformation, thereby challenging the framework’s implicit territorialism and state‑centrism. Substantively, it recasts the South Atlantic as a consequential node in a transregional maritime order linking Africa, the Indo‑Pacific, and the wider Atlantic. The findings carry policy implications for South Atlantic states and extra‑regional powers—regarding choices among cooperation, hedging, and capacity‑building—and invite a broader research agenda on how oceanic space mediates security interdependence across mega‑regions.
Author: Mauro Bonavita (King’s College London - Department of War Studies)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / New Visions of JusticeSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
This article uses the Yoorrook Justice Commission as a critical site for understanding how contemporary truth processes engage with ongoing empire. Yoorrook, a Royal Commission on the events and enduring impacts of British colonisation in the Australia state of Victoria, represents the most ambitious attempt to date to reckon with the legacies of colonisation within a settler polity, combining First Peoples leadership, public hearings, thematic inquiries, and an explicit mandate to address structural harm. Yet its design and operation also reveal the limits of truth-telling confined to a single jurisdiction: the state remains both subject and arbiter of truth, material repair is deferred to policy, and imperial structures that extend beyond national borders remain out of reach. Drawing on submissions, hearings, and institutional design documents, complemented by 34 interviews with those involved, the article distils what Yoorrook gets right and identifies where it falters. Mapping these lessons against a broader architecture for reckoning with empire, it proposes key design principles for future processes: transnational jurisdiction and standing; community-governed archives and evidentiary parity; and mechanisms that connect findings to redistributive action. The argument positions Yoorrook not as an endpoint but as a generative experiment in 'learning forward', a model whose tensions illuminate how truth-telling might evolve to meet the global scale of imperial harm.
Author: Asha Herten-Crabb (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
This paper critically engages African decolonial feminist conceptions of justice in Sub-Saharan Africa. While decolonial and Afro-feminist scholars critique the dual influences of coloniality and patriarchy on justice processes, their turn to African philosophies such as Ubuntu and frameworks of legal pluralism often romanticizes justice for African women as performative or abstract. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Lake Chad Basin (October 2022–June 2023), this paper advances a grounded account of decolonial feminist justice through the lived experiences, expectations, and cosmologies of women returnees and survivors of the Boko Haram crisis within transitional justice processes. It examines (1) how colonial legacies embedded in transitional justice frameworks erase women’s experiences and agency; (2) how decolonial interpretations of justice may inadvertently reproduce the epistemic erasures they seek to overcome; and (3) how women’s embodied realities articulate justice as tangible rather than abstract. The findings underscore that for women survivors of armed conflict; justice is not an idealized construct but a lived and material pursuit.
Keywords: justice, women, transitional justice, Boko Haram, Northeast Nigeria, Afrofeminism
Author: Oluwapelumi Obisesan (SOAS University of London) -
This paper asks what limits the search for disappeared gender- and sexually dissident persons encounters today, and how these might be overcome. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with women and LGBT+ searchers in Medellín, Colombia, it examines the reach and limits of human rights and transitional justice frameworks in accounting for lives and deaths targeted by heteronormative and lethal violence. In Colombia’s post-accord context of no-war-no-peace, social families of buscadoras y buscadores, formed by kin, activists, and LGBT+ communities, mobilise gender-diverse solidarities and relational care to recover, remember, and dignify lives erased by historic discrimination and everyday violence in and beyond conflict.
These collectives do more than locate remains or identify names: they produce counter-knowledges and alternative archives of dissident life, expanding what counts as justice, mourning, and memory. Their everyday practices of search confront the necropolitical order that renders sexual and gender-dissident bodies disposable, transforming spaces of grief into acts of body-territorial resistance and relational world-making.
Foregrounding feminist decolonial epistemic-ontological and ethical innovations emerging from Colombia’s search movements, the paper contributes to new directions in International Studies by rethinking how the discipline conceptualises violence, dignity, and justice in contexts where peace accords coexist with ongoing and historic violence. It shows how Southern feminist and gender- and sexually dissident practices of search generate theoretical and methodological insights that make International Studies more responsive to plural experiences of survival and ambiguous loss in and beyond conflict.Author: Sophie Raehme (Central European University) -
According to a now standardized account, what distinguishes the crime of genocide from other atrocity crimes is the perpetrators’ dolus specialis, or ‘specific intent to destroy a group as such.’ Because typical histories have considered case law only from U.N. courts, the literature on responsibility offers only a partial view of how global political institutions have used the 'dolus specialis test’ to hold people responsible. This paper compares prosecutions of genocide and the crime against humanity of extermination between U.N. courts and international people's courts in order to understand the politics of responsbility as it manifests in atrocity trials and how the ongoing practice(s) of legal doctrine impacts the global political projects they sustain or within which they are embedded. It compares how courts across time and space have interpreted the idea of specific intent differently and with what impacts, whether social, legal, or political, such a scheme has on the possibilities of responsibility as politics at the level of international order. It identifies entanglements between the idea of responsibility and imperial logics of liability in the distributional consequences these differing formulations of the idea of dolus specialis, some which far exceed the epistemic boundaries of legal analysis carried out during an atrocity trial.
Author: Megan Manion (University of Minnesota)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Policing realities, abolitionist horizonsSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: Koshka Duff (University of Nottingham)Chair: Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol)
-
This paper stages a creative-destructive encounter between Saidiya Hartman’s vital work of anti-carceral feminism, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. It begins by observing how techniques of shame-production figure in the policing that enforces oppressive forms of social ‘order’, including racial capitalism, ableism, and hetero-patriarchy. Practices of state violence and criminalisation are fundamental to, but not exhaustive of, this policing. Drawing on Hartman’s histories of ‘wayward’ Black women (and refusers of womanhood) and Foucault’s histories of ‘popular illegalities’, I consider the positive role of shameless criminalities in resistance to these hierarchical social orderings.
I argue that pride can be a counter-policing strategy because it takes the weight of expected shame and turns it into a force for bonding, for reimagining sociality as solidarity with and amongst the targets of policing. Simultaneously, I explore some potential pitfalls of a politics of reclaiming – in Foucault’s words – ‘pride in [our] crimes’. The paper is part of a broader project that examines the ideological functions of the concept of ‘the criminal’, demanding a reorientation of political thought to attend to the perspectives of the criminalised.
Author: Koshka Duff (University of Nottingham) -
Police sexual violence (PSV) forms part of the everyday experience of policing for many women, as well as for Black communities in the U.K. Yet, because it is both gendered and racialised, its practice and prevalence are routinely obscured, minimised, or dismissed. For example, Section 60 stop-and-search powers enable forms of PSV and ‘legitimate’ their overtly racialised application. At the same time, PSV is obfuscated through the eroticised culture of hetero-masculinity that underpins the institution of policing.
In this presentation, I analyse instances of PSV through a reformulation of police power as an erotic economy, in which categories of gender and race are continually produced and institutionalised. Here, the sensual is understood as part of the fabric of the police disciplinary apparatus, while the police’s ideological allure is sustained through eroticised fantasies of masculine protection that harbour darker desires of possession and conquest.
I conclude that PSV is not external to the ‘legitimate’ operations of police authority; rather, carnal logics of dehumanisation and abjection animate and license policing’s broader modus operandi. Exposing these constitutive logics is thus crucial for an informed understanding of police power and praxis, as well as for developing effective strategies of resistance.
Author: Freddie Mussard (University of Bristol) -
Resisting policing through divine violence: Walter Benjamin, abolition, and how not to do liberation
Conceiving of policing in its broadest sense as a “strategy of administering structural violence” (Rossdale, 2021), this paper considers the early thought of Walter Benjamin and his relevance for abolitionist thought. It will argue that everyday practices of prefigurative politics in emancipatory social movements – the “implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here and now” (Raekstad and Gradin, 2020) - constitute a form of Benjaminian divine violence and an effective strategy to resist policing.
Using recent examples taken from but not exclusive to the Palestine solidarity movement, I consider practices of prefiguration including direct action and activist mutual aid, contending that such acts work to undermine the mythic violence of the state in Benjaminian terms. Contra Derrida’s Force of Law (1990), in which Benjamin’s anti-state divine violence takes on a deeply sinister character, this paper draws on Frantz Fanon, Slavoj Žižek, and Judith Butler in placing Benjamin firmly at home within abolitionist struggles and movements against liberal order.
By building an epistemology for liberation based on lived experience and intersectionality, by practising horizontal forms of organising or radical forms of care, we can be alive to ways not to do social struggle that risk reproducing the very systems of oppression we oppose. Protecting each other against a pro-genocide and increasingly fascist police state, we can therefore also engage in the potentially divine violence of prefiguration and the permanently freakish practices of abolition.
Author: Lucie Maughan (University of Nottingham) -
Standing Rock, in North Dakota (U.S.A.), has been the site of contested territory and colliding imaginaries as indigenous groups and their allies have come up against the police, the interests of capital and the state – putting their bodies on the line to block the construction of the Dakota Access (Oil) Pipeline across unceded indigenous territory and under the Missouri River, threatening the health of the river and water supply. Struggles involving rights to land, rights of land (and of rivers and their caretakers), and rights to futures (what futures and whose) all came to the fore in this dispute. Of particular interest in this paper is the role that military veterans came to play, placing their bodies between the police and the “water protectors” - as protectors of the protectors. This paper will explore the production of subjectivities and possibilities of belonging and desire that were forged at the intersections of the cross-cutting gendered, racialised and cultural imaginaries at Standing Rock. It will argue that the events at Standing Rock need to be understood as part of a contemporary politics of becoming such that while the battle may have been lost, the seeds of possible futures remain.
Author: Tina Managhan (Oxford Brookes University) -
This chapter builds on the idea that carceral power (the police, the prison, etc.) and economic power (abstract domination stemming from the inner logics of capital) need to be understood in conjunction, rather than in isolation. By thinking with and through the state form, we can see how both forms of power are part and parcel of the everyday manifestation and reproduction of capitalist social relations. One can then see how the perpetuation of the antagonism between capital and labour, and its various articulations with other forms of oppression, such as race and gender, is a lynchpin of this intertwined dynamic.
Zooming in on the violent policing of the Palestine solidarity movement in Berlin and the wider societal impacts of these forms of repression, this chapter aims to make these processes tangible by exploring how the acts of repression and containment can be understood within a wider dynamic of reproducing capitalist social relations within the urban space of Berlin. Understanding the cityscape as a carceral city, the police and adjacent practices, such as surveil-lance, are seen as central in upholding this order, producing subjecthood, and repressing forms of anti-imperialist solidarity.
Author: Niklas Kehrle (Queen Mary University of London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Public discourse, public opinion and national security
Recent British national security policy documents recognise an important role for the public. Both the Strategic Defence Review and the National Security Strategy argue that building resilience at home, and ensuring the public are engaged and supportive of UK approaches to producing security, are crucial. As Sir Keir Starmer’s introduction to the National Security Strategy stresses, ‘nations are strongest when they are bound together by a shared purpose’, demanding ‘nothing less than national unity’ in response to the challenges ahead (HM Government, 2025: 6). To achieve the UK’s national security goals, it is recognised that this requires a ‘whole-of-society’ approach (HM Government, 2025:12). As the foreword to the Strategic Defence Review states, ‘everyone has a role to play and a national conversation on how we do it is required’ (Ministry of Defence, 2025: 9).
Yet, what an inclusive, thoughtful and realistic national conversation on the UK’s defence and national security might look like is not clear. Bringing together cross-disciplinary expertise and research, this roundtable will discuss the relationship between the public and policymaking on topics of national security, asking:
How do diverse UK publics understand and experience ‘security’?
How do these understandings and experiences translate into policy preferences for producing national security for the UK?
What is the basis upon which different policy approaches are preferred and prioritised?
To what extent is there consensus or dissensus on national security policy among key stakeholders (i.e., the public, policymakers, the third sector)?Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: Thomas Martin (Open University)Participants: Francesco Rigoli , Thomas Martin (Open University) , Jim Orford (University of Birmingham) , Evie Aspinall (British Foreign Policy Group) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Re-evaluating the underpinnings of liberal internationalism: International law, international norms, and international orderSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: BISA ConferencesChair: Victoria Basham (Cardiff University)
-
This paper argues that although the liberal rules-based order has not met the moral claims that justified its creation, it endures as a political myth, a continuing process of sense-making, significance-building, and legitimation, that shapes the foreign policies of liberal democracies.
The order’s post-1945 promise to prevent atrocity and protect universal rights sits in persistent tension with institutional incapacity visible in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the scale of civilian harm in Gaza, and repression in Xinjiang. These are not episodic lapses but recurrent failure patterns rooted in structural limits of the UN Security Council and international legal regimes. Yet the order persists because the myth does practical work: it frames what leaders see, filters which responses appear acceptable, and supplies a language of justification to domestic and allied audiences. In this sense, the myth is performative even where institutions are ineffective.
The paper then identifies two risks that follow from treating the rules-based order as mythic practice. First, asymmetric constraint: liberal democracies may bind themselves where rivals do not. An example of this is the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which curtailed the capabilities of liberal democracies, later shown to be operationally significant in conflicts like Ukraine, while non-parties have retained, supplied, and used them, potentially providing a competitive advantage on the battlefield. Second, strategic weaponisation: states that do not subscribe to the order can appropriate its rule-of-law claims to undermine the ontological security of liberal democracies. The Chagos Archipelago dispute illustrates how appeals to international legality and self-determination have been used to undermine the ontological security of a leading liberal state, generating reputational costs and constraining diplomatic flexibility.
Author: Thomas Eason (Aston University) -
This paper reconsiders the dominant representation of international law within the English School account of international society. International law as a primary institution of international society is typically strongly connected to defining, creating, and upholding order. Stronger international law is routinely seen as enhancing order and, consequently, improving the prosects of a more just international society. During a decade or more of debates about the crisis of the ‘rules-based’ or ‘liberal’ international order (LIO), this position has become more deeply entrenched. The paper draws on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and decolonial social theory to argue for international law as an agent of chaos in international society. Starting from a key moment in the crisis of international order, the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, the paper argues the crisis reveals how international law creates and embeds important pathologies in the LIO engendering chaos. From there, the paper argues international law perpetuates instability and resistance to ordering efforts that challenge its pathologies. Finally, the paper explores why international law is alienated from the needs and interests of a diverse humanity. International law as a bedrock primary institution of international society in which law reflects universal imperatives and points towards progressive outcomes, will disappear. The English school’s embrace of international law as an essential and progressive primary institution of international society and essential for order falls away as its character as an agent of chaos comes into focus.
Author: John Williams (Durham University) -
This paper aims to present a theoretical reconfiguration of the three main concepts of the English School of International Relations: international system, international society, and world society. Each of these dimensions is traditionally approached from distinct ontological, epistemological, and methodological elements, which would hinder the analysis of their relationships and generate inconsistencies within the English School itself. The argument presented in these pages is that redefining them based on an ontology of practices grounded in Norbert Elias's processual sociology, rather than in state or transnational ontologies, would make the connection between the elements of the three dimensions possible. It would then be possible to investigate the constitutive rules of each of these environments of interaction instead of phenomena of different natures, such as states and individuals, thus making the criteria for validating knowledge common to all three dimensions.
Author: Fabiana Freitas Sander (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais) -
This paper presents Conceptual Antiquing as a new framework for understanding how historical ideas acquire, retain, and transform symbolic value across academic fields. Using the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as its central case, it explores how “Westphalia” became not only a historical reference point but a tradable conceptual artifact within the discipline’s evolving discourse. Through close readings of seventeenth-century commemorations, nineteenth-century periodization, and post-Cold War critique, the project traces how scholars and political actors have repeatedly reappraised and situated Westphalia to inform particular visions of international order.
By combining conceptual history, discourse analysis, and rhetorical interpretation, the study reveals how Westphalia’s afterlives illuminate broader processes of conceptual inheritance and myth-making in global politics. It argues that conceptual discourse sustains a “heritage economy” of ideas in which canonical events and concepts are continually re-curated to meet contemporary symbolic demand. This approach offers both a methodological tool for diagnosing conceptual change and a reflexive critique of how the discipline narrates its own origins. In doing so, it asks whether International Studies can rethink its inherited conceptual repertoire and what such rethinking might mean for the discipline’s readiness for the next fifty years.
Keywords: Conceptual history; sovereignty; Peace of Westphalia; discourse analysis; disciplinary myth-making
Author: John Parker (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Rethinking Mass Atrocity Prevention and ResponseSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: PKPBG Working group
-
This paper advances a new ethical framework for understanding atrocity prevention through the lens of cosmopolitan harm theory. Existing approaches to the ethics of mass atrocity – from just war reasoning to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – overwhelmingly frame prevention in terms of positive duties: the moral obligation to act. Yet this emphasis obscures how states’ own foreign policy practices may themselves produce or legitimise atrocity harm. Drawing on cosmopolitan harm theory, the paper develops a normative account centred on negative duties – the obligation not to contribute to harm – as a basis for re-evaluating state responsibility. It identifies three mechanisms through which international complicity in atrocity unfolds: diplomatic, economic, and military. The paper considers the implications of these mechanisms for the moral design of preventive policy. In doing so, it shifts attention from intervention to the ethics of everyday foreign policy practice, offering a framework for rethinking global responsibility that is both normatively grounded and policy-relevant.
Author: Richard Illingworth (University of Glasgow) -
This paper examines the 2011 humanitarian intervention in Côte d’Ivoire through a pragmatic analytical framework, arguing that the problem in humanitarian intervention lies not in regime change itself, but in the manner of its execution. The intervention succeeded in halting violence, restoring order, and rebuilding governance under Alassane Ouattara, yet it also revealed how partiality and weak accountability can erode international consensus. Using a triangular framework of humanitarian needs, good governance, and international consensus, the paper evaluates how the operation met the first two goals but failed to secure the third. Through process tracing, it shows that Côte d’Ivoire’s relative stability resulted from a convergence of pragmatic conditions: regional legitimacy, a clear mandate, and domestic governance capacity. However, UNOCI and French involvement blurred the line between protection and regime change, undermining the legitimacy of the outcome. Viewing intervention pragmatically highlights that sustaining international support for humanitarian intervention requires anchoring interventions in regional legitimacy, ensuring mandate precision, maintaining impartiality and accountability, and securing credible prospects for post-conflict governance when regime change delivers humanitarian success.
Author: Yihui Wang -
This paper argues that International Relations scholarship needs to progress the study of mass atrocities beyond the narrow confines of enduring debates around the Responsibility to Protect. The discipline of IR has largely adopted R2P as the primary lens through which to view the prediction, prevention of, and response to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, but without sufficient reflection on the limitations of such an approach. This paper challenges this trend. In doing so, it proceeds in three parts. The first part argues that the problem of mass atrocities has to date been addressed across various academic disciplines through the distinct and relatively unconnected fields of R2P Studies and Genocide Studies. These remain limited fields of inquiry with considerable unfulfilled potential for overlap. The second part evidences the parallel evolution of atrocity prevention as a distinct field of practice over the last two decades, a development that continues to be erroneously conflated with evidence of the influence of R2P. The third part builds on these prevailing scholarly limitations by calling for the establishment of atrocity prevention as a distinct multidisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Borrowing from the work of David Scheffer on the importance of unifying terms, it suggests the alternative umbrella of Atrocity Studies and offers a preliminary sketch of what this new field of inquiry might entail.
Author: Ben Willis (University of Reading)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / Special Issue on The multiplex age: pluralism and connectivity beyond multipolaritySponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Indrajit Roy (University of York)Chair: Nora Fisher Onar (University of San Francisco)Discussant: Amitav Acharya
-
Multiplexity is a promising concept in International Relations (IR) and in this article we interrogate its theoretical foundations, arguing that its claims of foregrounding the significance of the Global South which is, in turn, “democratizing power relations” are problematic. Multiplexity justifies broadening the basis of oligarchy rather than democratising power relations. Our demonstration of this co-optation dynamic first places multiplexity within the developments of Western neo-colonialism. Current notions of ‘poly crisis’ fit well with the demands of multiplexity thereby strengthening the liberal paradigm. In the post-World War II milieu, we use specific empirical examples such as NIEO, Decolonization, BRICS, and G20, where the thundered arrival of a new multiplex world was co-opted. Ultimately, we call for a relational view in IR– synthesised with the insights of Gramscian hegemonic projects and Kautskyian ultraimperialism - of a multiplex world that is attentive to the demands of the people to democratize power, without which multiplexity remains in closer communion with a so-called more ‘diverse’ but still elitist international order.
Author: Sasikumar Sundaram (City, University of London) -
calling out the Eurocentric, racialized, and gendered bias of mainstream approaches to International Relations (IR). As Fisher-Onar and Nicolaidis (2013; 2021) have argued, these blinders are not only normatively problematic but practically counterproductive in an age of “multiplexity” (Acharya 2017). The paper thus begins by parsing the added-value of “multiplexity” as a concept. It helps, I contend, to think critically through—but also beyond—realist and liberal conceptions of “global power shift,” “multipolarity,” and “international order” (all of which favor selfish and/or unidirectional readings of the world). Multiplexity, by way of contrast, impels the analyst to participate in relational learning across plural centers of global gravity or what I have called a “Venn diagram” image of IR as opposed to realism’s “billiard balls” and liberalism’s “concentric circles” (Fisher-Onar 2023). In other words, it fosters an openness to mutually transformative engagement which can help to navigate fraught negotiations of our differentiated to be sure, but also often overlapping interests in a world of many actors.
It follows that our multiplex moment offers opportunities for relational learning within the applied subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Towards this end, the article channels recent efforts to import Saidian “contrapuntal listening” into IR as method for listening simultaneously to multiple voices in foreign policy spaces rather than privileging a single or several registers (e.g. Chowdhry 2007; Bilgin 2016; Wolff et al. 2022). Laying out how to pursue the contrapuntal method within FPA, the article wraps with contrapuntal reading of the alleged “return of great power politics” to the geopolitical theater of Eurasia. Its finding: listening in plural shifts not only what we hear, but how we might practice international relations in and beyond greater Eurasia.
Author: Nora Fisher Onar (University of San Francisco) -
This article investigates the moralistic realism of the emerging multiplex world order. It does so by examining the recent expansion of the BRICS alongside the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Drawing on a critical analysis of official documents complemented by media reportage and secondary assessments by regional experts, synthesised alongside secondary data on key political and economic trends, the article illustrates the ways in which members of the two groupings advance a view of the world that checks efforts at domination of both established and aspiring hegemons.
The paper makes three contributions to the literature. Empirically, it charts recent developments in the BRICS and the IPEF from the perspective of member-countries such as India which participate in both groupings. Methodologically, it introduces the moral economy approach to the study of international affairs. Theoretically, it offers insights into ways in which the agency of the global South contributes to producing a multiplex world order.
The two groupings analysed in this paper help assemble the building blocks of conceptualising southern agency in advancing multiplexity. Underpinning it is a moralistic realism that blends moralpolitik with realpolitik. This moralistic realism in turn draws on a moral economy of international affairs that constrains the concentration of power and resists domination by a single actor. Mobilising insights from Mandala theorising, the article demonstrates the ways in which moral considerations and realist calculations combine to render the two groupings as decentred zones of competition rather than rival blocs that each revolve around a single pole.
Author: Indrajit Roy (University of York)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / The Future of International Military Missions and Peacekeeping in a Post-Unipolar WorldSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Philip CunliffeChair: David Curran (Coventry University)Discussant: Xiaodong Bao
-
At a time of geopolitical shifts, UN Member States’ shifting priorities, and peacekeeping’s entry into a period of ‘marginalization’ as an instrument in global politics (Karlsrud, 2023; also Coleman and Williams, 2021), discussions around the future of peacekeeping orient around finding ways to ‘do less with less’ (Russo, 2025). Heavily driven by considerations that are pragmatic rather than by what scholarly studies have shown ‘works’ in the peacekeeping domain, this paper offers an analysis of the evidentiary basis behind current options on the table, focusing on (a) missions deployed under the guise of non-traditional collective security frameworks and (b) in more fragmented forms in line with a so-called ‘modular approach’. To this end, I consider how these new models of peace operations may fare from the vantage point of existing scholarship. I focus on the Protection of Civilians (POC) agenda as one domain of peacekeeping efforts that has grown in prominence – constituting a yardstick against which at least UN peacekeeping efforts are likely to be judged – and reflect on prospects for POC success for the next stage of peace operations.
Author: Sara Lindberg Bromley (Uppsala University) -
The deployment of peace operations reflects the prevailing global power distribution, shaping their mandates, effectiveness, and challenges. This panel examines how unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity influence peace operations through three case studies: the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia (1992–1995) during bipolarity’s decline, the U.S.-led Multinational Force in Iraq (2003–2009) under unipolarity, and the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID, 2007–2020) in an emerging multipolar era. Each case highlights distinct dynamics in mission design, authority, and outcomes driven by the global power structure.
During bipolarity, UNPROFOR struggled with limited authority and Cold War rivalries, as competing U.S. and Soviet interests constrained effective intervention. In the unipolar era, the U.S.-dominated Iraq operation showcased unilateral power but faced legitimacy deficits and local resistance, undermining stabilization efforts. In the multipolar context, UNAMID’s hybrid model navigated competing influences from Western powers, China, and African states, balancing regional agency with global coordination but grappling with resource and mandate fragmentation.
This paper argues that power distributions shape peace operations’ strategic coherence and operational success. Unipolarity enables decisive action but risks overreach; bipolarity fosters stalemates through ideological divides; and multipolarity complicates coordination amid diverse state interests. By analyzing these cases, the panel elucidates how global power dynamics determine the scope, legitimacy, and impact of peace operations, offering insights for adapting future missions to an increasingly fragmented international system.Author: Philip Cunliffe -
Civilian protection during international military missions has become increasingly structured around practices, tools, and frameworks that seek to manage harm to civilians. A multitude of models have developed under the auspices of organizations such as the European Union (EU), African Union (AU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations (UN), as well as national militaries, to address the conduct of armed forces deployed under international mandates. This article illustrates how transnational expertise shapes these practices, tools, and frameworks of civilian harm mitigation. We trace their emergence and the conditions under which they are sustained, showing how transnational expertise reorients protection toward managing reputational risks for international organizations. We argue that harm to civilians is increasingly framed as a problem of technocratic risk management, with the effect that expertise which addresses strategic and operational concerns becomes more authoritative than that which addresses moral concerns. The paper ends with an assessment of what risk management of harm may mean as state coalitions and ad hoc formats of military interventions become more salient.
Authors: Linnéa Gelot (Swedish Defence University) , Chiara De Franco (Southern Denmark University)* -
While United Nations peacekeeping has been in decline since 2014, ad hoc coalitions have become prominent in international conflict management. We argue that these two trends have changed the field of international conflict management into what we call ‘conflict management à la carte’. Contemporary examples of ad hoc coalitions in international conflict management are the Multinational Joint Task Force, fighting the Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad region, but also maritime missions such as the US-led Coalition Task Force Sentinel in the Gulf region and the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti. After analysing the implications of this turn for international conflict management, we sketch out three types of differentiated ad hoc coalition integration in international conflict management and discuss examples. We then provide recommendations for how to synergize and integrate ad hoc coalitions with UN-led and regional organization-led initiatives, to enhance mission effectiveness and preserve a robust and legitimate toolbox of institutional responses for international conflict management. In conclusion, we argue that as the UN reorients itself towards becoming a service provider through adopting a modular approach, it should continue to invest in interorganizational cooperation on issues of logistics, financial and human rights accountability, including with ad hoc coalitions
Author: John karlsrud (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / The IPE of DigitalSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
India Stack is an ambitious project, described as a unique convergence of government, technology, and regulatory frameworks. Its social and technical achievements are the almost total incorporation of people in the world’s most populous country into formal economic and financial relations built on a basic digital ID system. Research on India Stack has situated these achievements within analysis of broader processes of financialisation, particularly the financialisation of development, and related patterns of contemporary economic restructuring. While digital financialisation and discussions of ‘platform’, ‘surveillance’ and ‘ID capitalism’ are useful for understanding India Stack, the contention of this paper is that more emphasis should be put on the the sociotechnical vision of the project, especially when seeking to understand the specificities of the Indian case. This paper examines the transformations at play by centring analysis of the sociotechnical imaginaries of India Stack as a state-led postcolonial and developmentalist project.
Author: Chris Clarke (University of Warwick) -
This paper examines how trust is built and protected inside Southeast Asia’s scam industry, and why these markets persist despite illegality and churn. Drawing on multi-sited research (2018–2025) across the China–Myanmar borderlands and regional hubs, it traces a three-layer trust architecture: at the micro level, broker–worker ties, kinship/province networks, and informal reputational ledgers; at the meso level, compound “house rules,” internal arbitration, escrow, and calibrated violence; and at the macro level, cross-border payment rails, platform affordances, and selective state enforcement that together provide credible guarantees. The analysis shows how brokers convert social obligation into liquidity and how compounds stage legality to attract labour and investors. Rather than reading persistence as state failure alone, the paper argues it is co-produced by platforms, intermediaries, and fragmented authorities. It closes with practical implications for regulation that target trust-building mechanisms, not just outputs.
Author: Xu Peng (SOAS)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / The Politics of Ecocide after the Rome StatuteSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConveners: Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England) , Alex Hoseason (Aston University)Chair: André Saramago (University of Coimbra)
-
Against the background of a global ecological emergency and demands for climate justice, the formal submission of an amendment criminalising ecocide under the Rome Statute signals a legalisation of the campaign against mass destruction of the natural environment. However, the narrow doctrinal focus of ecocide scholarship has diverted attention from criminalisation as itself a process through which ecocide is constituted as a problem for the international community. Bringing literature on international criminalisation and objectual IR (O-IR) into dialogue, this paper addresses this relationship by theorising criminalisation as an attempt to constitute, and to govern, ecocide through international criminal law (ICL). By situating criminalisation within an international context characterised by fragmentation, hierarchy, and competing sites of international legal authority, our approach permits a more nuanced and relational understanding of the rapidly developing politics of ecocide and the changing role of the ICC within the international system.
The second part of the paper moves to examine the relationship between criminalisation and the growing range of sites and contexts through which ecocide is mobilised and constituted by political actors with different relationships to ecocide and ICL. We provisionally identify and map four areas where criminalisation is having transformative effects: the changing role of Stop Ecocide International as a source of expertise, the role of the ICC in facilitating deliberation over ecocide norms, the pedagogical role of criminalisation in diffusing ecocide norms, and the co-constitution of ecocide with ecological jurisprudence in international law.
Authors: Alex Hoseason (Aston University) , Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England) -
Ecocide, which refers to significant or widespread damage to the environment resulting from human activities, has become a critical global issue in light of accelerating climate change and resource exploitation. Although there is a strong movement to criminalise ecocide internationally and proposals to amend the Rome Statute, it is currently recognised only as a war crime and within fifteen national jurisdictions. Despite adopting the crime in national laws, very few cases have been legally processed. This paper aims to assess national applications of ecocide law to draw lessons for introducing an international ecocide crime. This study will explore two desk-based case studies from Guatemala and Kyrgyzstan, where ecocide legal cases were undertaken. Through discourse analysis, news articles will be examined to highlight key developments, participation, outcomes, ecocide framing and challenges related to the cases. Data collection is ongoing, yet findings are expected to identify the practical implications of national ecocide legislation. Additionally, by the time this paper is presented, the author is expected to have completed part of the second stage of data collection for their PhD. This will include a field trip to Guatemala, where they will interview individuals relevant to the studied cases. Therefore, this paper should be able to draw upon those initial fieldwork experiences, providing novel and valuable insights into national ecocide applications. This contribution is significant for ecocide literature as the field has limited empirical evidence. Therefore, this paper will provide a fresh approach and new insights into criminalising ecocide.
Author: Rose Bevan-Smith (University of Bath) -
Does surviving a climate crisis necessarily mean cooperation? Drawing on Parenti’s concept of the ‘armed lifeboat' (2011), wherein wealthy states use repressive and exclusionary border policies to ‘defend’ against climate displacement, this paper explores the extent to which some ideological entrepreneurs and state actors have proposed strategies that safeguard individual state security at the expense of the broader ecosphere. These as-yet largely unimplemented strategies include solar geoengineering, extractive industry in pursuit of a ‘Green New Deal', and political alliances with far-right groups in the name of 'eco-bordering' (Turner and Bailey, 2022). Such strategies are potentially disastrous for scholars and activists working on ecocide and human security: a set of seductive promises that climate impacts can be deflected, by tolerating (or even worsening) widespread or long-term damage to the environment elsewhere.
By studying national security strategies, think tanks, and individual policy advocates, this paper seeks to investigate whether such strategies have support among Global North states, whether they are politically unworkable (as per Burnett and Mach’s ‘precariously unprepared Pentagon (2021)), or whether a cooperative approach on behalf of the entire biosphere remains paramount.Author: Leah Owen (Swansea University) -
Ecocide represents far more than merely the disruption and annihilation of entire ecosystems, species and key earth system processes (Higgins et al, 2013; Mehta & Merz, 2015). As the late anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (2012) poignantly observed, the present era of ecocide marks a ‘double death’ in the form of the untimely obliteration of the ‘deep biological rivers that constitute entire species’ (Jones et al, 2020, p. 391) as well as the disruption of life’s capacity for regeneration. That is, ecocide effects the incalculable, irrecuperable diminishment not only of our ‘multispecies earthly oikos’ (Jones et al, 2020, p. 392) but, crucially, of entire ways of being as coalescences of terrestrial possibilities (Qureshi, 2025, p. xvi). Yet, as the potentialities of terrestrial vitality can never be wholly extinguished, hope always abounds, for instance as seen in the thousands of alternative ecological worldviews and modes of relationality exhibited by many indigenous peoples the world over, and in the budding ecocide movement. The latter has seen over 400 ‘rights of nature’ initiatives, largely indigenous-led, proliferate across 39 countries (Putzer et al, 2022). However, as crucial as such legal innovations and victories are, they alone cannot uproot centuries of colonial-capitalist imaginaries that frame the earth and its inhabitants as mere commodities to be endlessly consumed and extracted for profit. This intervention critically and imaginatively explores the challenges, possibilities and glimmers of ecocentric values and worldviews as essential foundations of transformations for multispecies conviviality. How do we begin to collectively craft new stories of the earth as agentic kin, rather than dead resource? What happens when a maple tree is not an ‘it’, but a ‘she’ (Kimmerer, 2003)?
Author: Heather Alberro (University of Manchester) -
This presentation explores how the concept of ecocide is reshaping approaches to environmental accountability at the intersection of armed conflict and climate governance. Drawing on Ukraine’s experience of war-related environmental destruction, it examines how legal and institutional innovations emerging from crisis contexts can inform global debates on criminalizing severe environmental harm. By linking ecocide to broader questions of environmental security, human rights, and climate justice, the paper argues for integrating ecocide prevention and accountability mechanisms into international climate and post-conflict recovery frameworks. Through comparative insights from Ukraine and other regions, it highlights practical pathways toward recognizing ecocide as an international crime and strengthening legal responses to large-scale environmental harm in both wartime and peacetime.
Authors: Ievgeniia Kopytsia (University of Oxford) , Rinata Kazak (Linköpings Universitet)*
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
TH04 Panel / The Politics of Finance and Foreign InvestmentSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
As in other fields of multilateral cooperation, India is an important and influential stakeholder in global tax governance. Its combination of economic strength, techno-diplomatic craft and coalition building have made it a crucial participant in negotiations at the OECD and G20, especially those over the taxation of digital services. Yet, for a country whose negotiators are widely respected, its positions are frequently inconsistent and hard to reconcile with its economic interest. We investigate this using interviews with policymakers in India, and those with whom they negotiated. We find that a lack of political engagement in recent years has led to negotiating positions that are closerly associated with individual, entrepreneurial bureaucrats. As individuals are moved in and out of different roles, this produces a volatility and inconsistency in policy priorities. Our focused, longitudinal case study has implications for literature on the regulatory capacity of emerging powers, since it shows how what appears in a snapshot to be an effective negotiating approach may in the long term still result in a country punching below its weight.
Author: Martin Hearson (Institute of Development Studies) -
Financial markets have long been viewed as operating with a binary opposition between public and private financial markets. Increasingly, public financial markets are dominated by asset managers that are tracking (public) market indices like the FTSE 100. At the same time, asset managers are increasingly owning and investing in assets in private markets like housing and infrastructure directly. We argue that the binary between public and private markets is being eroded. The issue is not that BlackRock operates in both public and private markets, but their efforts to remove the distinction between them. To do that, we analyse the case of BlackRock’s takeover of Preqin, a leading provider of data on private markets such as private equity and private credit. We argue this works to unify markets in two directions. The first is the way that markets are thought about with the integration of public and private forms of market data. The second is the unification of how the market is embodied in investment practices and products, such as BlackRock’s Aladdin system. We argue that this is one of the first steps in the integration of public and private financial markets which can shape the distribution of capital in the future.
Authors: Dan Wood (University of Warwick) , Dana Unzicker
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
Artificial intelligence (AI) and Politics and International Relations (IR) pedagogy are deeply intertwined, yet this symbiotic relationship is often missed. AI is a site of political contestation and epistemic disruption but although research on AI governance already examines AI as a political system of power, these insights rarely reach classrooms or shape how we teach about technology . At the same time, IR offers a rich conceptual toolkit for interrogating AI’s societal impacts, from legitimacy and authority to justice and pluralism. AI pedagogy benefits enormously from IR’s critical traditions, while IR education must now grapple with the algorithmic systems reshaping how knowledge is produced, validated, contested, and distributed. This roundtable explores how these two domains can – and must – inform one another.
Participants will explore how IR concepts, including sovereignty, legitimacy, epistemic authority, and global justice, can illuminate the political dimensions of AI in education and society. We will examine how AI challenges traditional knowledge systems, how algorithmic governance reshapes accountability, and how IR’s critical traditions can equip students to interrogate these shifts. Importantly, the roundtable will ask how IR’s commitment to diverse epistemologies and postcolonial theory can counter the epistemic dominance of Western-developed AI systems.Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupChair: Anna Plunkett (King's College London)Participants: Hillary Briffa (King's College London) , Chris Featherstone (University of York) , Sebastian Koehler (Queen Mary University of London) , Ozge Soylemez (King's College London) , Lucas Knotter (University of Bath) -
4:30 PM
→
4:45 PM
Break 15m
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Allies, Partners and the EU in European SecuritySponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: ESWG Working groupChair: ESWG Working groupDiscussant: ESWG Working group
-
States often employ arms transfers as a means of signaling political alignment and assuring allies of their defense commitments. While widely assumed to reinforce alliance ties, the empirical evidence on how arms sale or their denial affect perceptions of assurance remains limited. To address this gap, I will conduct a survey experiment with UK and Polish nationals, varying whether the United States approves or denies an arms transfer request from their governments. This design choice allows me to capture the effect of the arms transfer phenomenon more comprehensively: that of both approval and denial on perceived assurance. I expect that the effect depends on the prior strength and status of the bilateral relationship. When it is relatively higher, the denial of the arms sale request is likely to generate a significant negative effect, whereas the approval will have at most a marginal increase in perceived assurance. Conversely, in relatively weaker bilateral relationships, an approval is likely to have a significant positive influence, while a denial would still produce a negative effect on perceived assurance from allies.
Author: Zakir Rzazade (Charles University) -
Formal alliance and defence cooperation agreements are costly signals of support, but a government cannot always count on its partners: Many alliances are not honoured. Whether a state intervenes militarily in support of a partner during international crises and civil wars depends on the nature of the relationship between the two states. Military interventions by former colonial powers need to be reassessed in light of alliance reliability and post-colonial ties.
This paper systematically investigates the patterns of French military interventions in Africa and asks why it intervened in some former colonies but not in others. In the past, France often responded to requests for military support when asked by a protégé, while at other times, it remained inactive despite an existing defence cooperation agreement. There is variation in French interventions across countries but also for individual countries over time. For example, France intervened frequently in Chad, but not in every critical situations. Relying on data from the Thorette report on French military operations abroad and the International Military Intervention data, we assess the relative importance of distinct defence cooperation agreements. Accounting for various opportunities in the potential target state, such as military coups, rebellions, and international militarized disputes, we investigate under what conditions the French government decided to send military support.
A better understanding of whether France has been a reliable alliance partner or intervened selectively depending on its own geostrategic and economic interests will help explaining why it lost ground in Africa.Authors: Maximilian Krebs (University of Greifswald) , Margit Bussmann (University of Greifswald)* -
The purpose of this study is to contribute to this scarce literature by analysing the extrinsic identities of small EU states through the perception of large states. Based on the main premise of constructivism on the identity concept, states can have multiple identities, and how states interpret others' identities impacts their collective actions in the security field. Therefore, the more we know about identities, the more we
understand the motivations behind the actions/decisions. To this aim, I will apply a comparative case study design with interview method (F2F and CAWI interviews with the member states' representatives).
Thus, I will acquire qualitative and quantitative data.
Specifically, I will focus on the European Peace Facility (EPF) funding to Ukraine within the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Three features of the EPF mechanism crucial to capture the relevancy of the
case for the research question: first, decisions are taken based on a unanimous voting system which provides fair representation among the member states and equal rights on blocking and assisting the
decisions; second it is an off-budget fund, and the contributions are take place based on the gross national income (GNI) of the member states. Therefore, the EPF funding mechanism allows EU small states to
utilise funding for their security strategies on a global scale by assisting strategic partners or third countries. Third, although the direct budget of funding comes through the contributions of member states,
the EU manages the budget. Thus, the role of the EU and member states differ from each other - Member States "assist provider" and the EU "formal sender" (Rutigliano, 2022). Considering the given
information, EPF is an instrument of the CFSP to analyse small states' external identity as the mechanism compensates for the structural differences of the member states.Author: Cagla Nur Cetin (Charles University) -
This paper aims to interrogate the European Union’s pursuit of strategic autonomy as a process of identity construction and discursive ordering in post-Brexit, post-Trump and post-Ukraine European security landscape. While the EU’s efforts to strengthen its defense capabilities and lessen dependence on the United States are often treated in material or institutional terms, this paper will argue that strategic autonomy operates as a discursive project as well, that is, as a way of “speaking Europe into being” as an autonomous and credible security actor.
Drawing on constructivism, the paper conceptualizes security and autonomy as socially constructed practices shaped by collective meaning-making and recognition. Through discourse analysis of EU strategic documents, policy speeches, and official communications (including the Strategic Compass, PESCO framework, and EU–NATO joint statements), it will explore how Turkiye is represented within the EU’s security discourse -as both a necessary partner and a normative outsider and unpack broader struggles over the boundaries of Europe’s geopolitical identity and its normative order. These tensions, it will be argued, reveal how the pursuit of autonomy simultaneously reproduces and contests hierarchies of legitimacy and belonging within the European security community.
By problematizing strategic autonomy as discourse and situating the EU-Turkiye relationship within debates on the future of the post-American European security architecture, the paper aims to offer a nuanced understanding of how Europe’s search for autonomy is intertwined with its efforts to define -and differentiate- itself in relation to its strategic partners.
Authors: Aylin Gurzel (East Mediterranean University) , Muge Kinacioglu (Leiden University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Alternative Worldmaking and Methodologies in International RelationsSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Leah de Haan (University of Amsterdam)
-
This piece is a part of my overall PhD project, in which I interrogate how attending to the practices of La Búsqueda (the search for the disappeared in Mexico) through the lens of cosmopraxis can open paths to reconfigure the very coordinates of knowledge-making and political possibility in International Relations. In this chapter, I argue that La Búsqueda enacts a porous form of worlding: an ontology of interdependence in which humans, spirits, the earth, and artifacts co-constitute political life. This relational world-making unsettles the sovereign/subject binary that organizes much IR theory.
Empirically and methodologically, I combine narrated autoethnography from my own political education with rich fieldwork among women searchers; I animate those encounters through a semi-fictional composite, distilled from many stories, to preserve relational detail while protecting interlocutors. Through narrative threading, I show how tactile techniques, affective labor, and embodied practices are not merely forensic methods but modes of knowing and caring that produce political subjectivities.
A semi-fictional character (Vega) illustrates how the land becomes a language of grief and possibility: digging is simultaneously recovery and maternal offering, each fragment a spoken name. From these practices, I draw theoretical lessons: cosmopraxis surfaces alternative epistemologies and political imaginaries that make space for interdependence, complicate sovereignty, and expand what counts as legitimate political action in IR.Author: Ana Pandal de la Peza (Central European University) -
Trauma sits at the heart of IR theory (Edkins 2003). Yet, as has recently been argued, our understanding of trauma in IR has often been limited to a particular (Freudian) psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and its consequences (Furtado & Auchter 2025). This has both effected how trauma is seen as emerging, its consequences for world politics as well as the appropriate solutions for responding to trauma. Against this constrained vision, other disciplines and practices, such as postcolonial theory and embodied and arts-based therapeutic practices, have developed new, and more holistic, accounts of trauma, its affects and modalities of transformation and recovery. Turning to these theories the paper first builds a bio-psycho-social model of trauma which it argues better encapsulates the full affects of trauma on. The paper then examines the mobilisation of new creative responses to trauma in Ukraine that have centred aesthetic modes of practice as the principal tool for understanding, and responding to, trauma, to empirically test these ideas. Doing so also opens space to think through how trauma can be responded to in more emancipatory ways.
Author: Henry Redwood (King's College London) -
In recent years, the study of knowledge and expertise in international politics has firmly established itself as a burgeoning field of research within (critical) International Relations. Basing itself on concepts such as power/knowledge, epistemic injustice, and epistemic violence, existing IR research has often criticized epistemic actors, forms, institutions, and practices based in or originating from the West/the Global North, as well as their underlying assumptions about who can be considered an epistemically, ethically, and politically capable subject of knowledge. Conversely, IR research dedicated to alternative ways of knowing international politics has been far less extensive. This is where we seek to intervene by theoretically and empirically exploring what conceptual work epistemic disobedience can do for International Relations. Theoretically, we are interested in the tensions that arise when we conceive of international politics not in terms of the oppressor, through which we can expose the Eurocentric biases in global standards of being and knowing, but through alternative logics underpinning disobedient ways of knowing and being. Taking disobedience to be both disruptive and constructive, we pay particular attention to experiential, presentational/artistic, and practical ways of knowing - which oppose the propositional knowledge that is currently dominant in international politics - and the creative/generative elements they entail. How and under what conditions do such ways of knowing amount to epistemic disobedience? With an empirical focus on the fields of conflict, security and the environment, we explore which actors practise epistemic disobedience and how they do so. We also aim to investigate how disobedient ways of knowing can become (politically) effective and (methodologically) seen in international politics. Finally, we are interested in the question of whether, and if so, how epistemic disobedience can constitute a response to the challenges of a political present characterized by "truthiness", revisionism, and fundamental doubt about scientific knowledge.
Authors: Mariam Salehi* , Christine Andrä , Maja Davidović* -
This paper contributes to critical alternatives in world politics by advancing a relational and decolonial approach that, through discourse and visual analysis, and archival methods, reimagines how global relations are produced, lived, and theorized through postcolonial and material sites such as FESTAC Village. Built in the 1970s for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77), the estate emerged from collaborations between Nigerian authorities, Afro-diasporic activists, and Romanian socialist architects. Today, it stands as both a contested urban space and a living archive of decolonization within the Cold War context. The paper conceptualizes the estate as a vessel for conversation. The paper traces how identities, ideologies, and political practices continuously overlap and redefine one another within this physical space. Through this lens, FESTAC becomes a space where global and local forces co-create meaning, blurring the boundaries between structure and agency, design and inhabitation, ideology and everyday life. Methodologically, the paper bridges architecture, cultural history, and International Relations to demonstrate how built environments can ground new thinking in the discipline. FESTAC invites us to rethink world politics as an evolving canvas. By using a transnational lens grounded in the materiality of FESTAC Village, the paper argues that socialist architectural legacies persist through adaptation, resistance, and civic activism.
Author: Miruna Chirila (European University Institute) -
What if IR took the poetic seriously? What would a poetic International Relations look, feel like? What could a poetic IR offer, un/re/make, un/do?
The poetic is often reductively aligned with beauty or goodness, when of course poems unsettle, discomfort, challenge, leave uncertain in their ambiguity and ambivalence, voice – what Sianne Ngai terms – ugly feelings. The poetic can be discomforting; dangerous; disruptive. This manifests also in how we do this work as researchers, as educators: embracing moments of discomfort while engaging in critical-creative-care-full scholarship/pedagogy (Motta). I argue poetry emerges/exists in the research encounter and seminar room. This does not (only) signify in literal poems, but in the being-knowing-doing we create there. That is poetry. Of course, not all teaching or research feels this way: we fail, this sometimes evades us – but there are multiple possibilities always for that to emerge.
Engaging in this work enables us in/through these multiplicities to encourage alternative ways of knowing global politics. This is not to advance this aesthetic approach as somehow an overriding, ‘better’ form of knowledge (production); rather, the ambiguity, discomfort, disorientation provoked by poetic inquiry leave an openness for multiple transgressive reimaginings of the political, the global. Resisting comfortable/comforting conclusions, it unsettles disciplinary, epistemological, methodological frames of ‘normality’. Poetic IR enables us not only to “see ‘the data’ differently, producing new ways of thinking,” but to “become more responsible and accountable for the attempt to rupture and rearrange thought by openly crafting an aesthetics” (Hast 2020:7 via Leavy & Barad). As I have argued elsewhere, “aesthetics is politics but aesthetics is also ethics,” where creative work and the un/re-making of worlds it enables must always be understood as aesthetic-political-ethical process, must always be coupled with responsibility of/as research, to reveal a more textured global politics.
Author: Laura Mills
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Competing Narratives, Competing SelvesSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConveners: Ben Rosher (University of Gothenburg) , Lauren RogersChair: Ben Rosher (University of Gothenburg)
-
As outlined by Browning, Joenniemi, and Steele (2021), since failure in the Vietnam War, the US self-narrative has been based around the principles of commitment to preemptive action over appeasement, the importance of winning and competence, and the association of overwhelming force with victory. Following Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the US self-narrative prompted vicarious identification with Israel to uphold ontological security. Yet today, in the wake of Israel’s rightward political shift—exposed to greater public scrutiny by its 2023 invasion of Gaza—vicarious identification with Israel is waning and vicarious identification with Palestine growing among sections of the US public who adhere to a more critical self-narrative for the US. This paper argues that this split in self-narratives and vicarious identification can help explain Kamala Harris’ loss in the 2024 presidential election and subsequent disarray in the Democratic Party. In addition, challenges to the established US self-narrative have led the US political elite to double down on vicarious identification with Israel, furthering division.
Author: Karl Stuklis (University of Glasgow) -
The paper will unpack the relationship between the issue-specific narratives of ‘foreign interference’ and the broader autobiographical narratives, through which the EU tries to anchor its identity and seek some sense of ontological security. The paper will first engage with the debates about the EU’s identity and role in the world. Since the late 1990s, the EU has been conceptualised as a particular type of actor; a distinctly liberal ‘normative power’, which attempted to influence the world by exporting and institutionalizing normative agendas. However, more recently, both political discourse and academic scholarship shifted towards much more traditional conceptualisations of EU’s identity, speaking about a ‘geopolitical turn’. Increasingly, the EU reconstructed its sense of self in terms of a ‘Fortress Europe’, trying to defend and detach itself from a dangerous world behind its borders. In parallel, the notion that EU was threatened by ‘foreign interference’ became prominent in its discourses. This paper will provide a mixed-methods examination of the narratives of foreign interference, EU identity, and their linkages in official EU texts and European Parliament speeches in 1999-2024. We probe the hypothesis that the rise of foreign interference in the discourse could be seen as a compensatory byproduct of the gradual discursive ‘closing off’ of EUrope. In that sense, the discourse of foreign interference is not only descriptive, but also plays an ontological role.
Authors: Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague)) , Jan Kovář (Institute of International Relations Prague)* -
The social status of the state is a consistent subject of inquiry within international relations, but less so the role loneliness plays as a motivating or debilitating force. Sergei Akopov’s work on discourses of national loneliness provides an entry point to understanding how loneliness anxiety intervenes in Russian foreign policy, but the loneliness of other states, and how the trauma of past loneliness can impact states in the present, is under-researched. In this paper, I elaborate further on the concept of loneliness anxiety by engaging with actors for whom the specter of loneliness remains politically charged. I focus of Estonia and Finland: two states whose memory regimes include significant stories of abandonment. During WWII, Finland famously stood alone against the Soviet invasion when Western states refused to send aid during the Winter War. Estonia, meanwhile, was bartered in the Molotov Ribbentrop pact and left without allies or friends. These stories of abandonment have been activated and deactivated regularly since WWII, but recently a new phrase emerged in both states: “Never Again Alone.” This slogan became salient in both states when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In Finland, it was used as a support for joining NATO. In Estonia, it was a reminder of why joining the EU was the right choice. In both cases, this phrase evokes a key moment in autobiographical time and is a reminder of what it means to be lonely. In this paper analyze how this phrase was used in the context of the war in Ukraine, what memories it evoked, and how the anxiety of loneliness remains pervasive in the narratives of the war. I argue that the trauma of loneliness is a key intervening factor for performing international, European identity in both states, and should be understood alongside other social factors within IR.
Author: Lauren Rogers -
According to Homolar and Turner, “narrative alliances are often comprised of participants with unequal membership cards” (2024: 218). Alliances are hierarchical, with great powers leading not only decision-making but framing the narrative around the alliance, its purpose and identifying threats. This power to construct or convey a specific alliance narrative places small states/middle powers in difficult positions regarding their self-narratives and ideas of ontological security. While the ‘meta-story’ of alliance narratives, such as the defence of the rules-based international order, aligns with ontological security narratives of smaller powers like Australia and Sweden, other aspects of their alliance membership do not rationally cohere and requires narrative management. How states manage narrative alliances is explored in this paper in the case of AUKUS and NATO under the second Trump administration. Trump tells a different story about alliance relationships and the broader security environment, where unity comes at a price and the defence of the post-war rules-based order is not necessarily guaranteed. this paper explores the tensions that emerge in narrative alliances and debates in the context of uncertainty and unpredictability and what it means to be ontologically secure as alliance members.
Author: Christine Agius (Swedish Defence University) -
Much has been written about American exceptionalism–its roots in frontier mythology, its civilising mission, and its Cold War consolidation as the “shining city upon a hill”. Less attention has been paid to the Soviet Union’s own claims to exceptionalism as a vanguard totalitarian state tasked with saving the world from “warmongering” capitalists. While these Cold War narratives were underpinned by radically different ideologies, both superpowers constructed themselves as unique and world-historical actors. This paper revisits these foundational narratives to better understand how American and Russian exceptionalisms have been reactivated, repurposed, and illiberalised under Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Drawing on major speeches, diplomatic and Cold War history, and US-USSR/Russia foreign relations, we argue that both states construct themselves as righteous, besieged civilisational cores, destined to reclaim a lost greatness. But whereas Cold War-era exceptionalism was largely forward-looking–built on ideologies of progress–today’s exceptionalist discourses are defensive and nostalgic, marked by wounded pride and anti-globalist ressentiment. Trump’s rhetoric of American decline and greatness lost mirrors Putin’s emphasis on spiritual renewal and historical grievance, thus producing new logics of illiberal sovereignty. In both cases, exceptionalism legitimates transgressive politics, while presenting each nation as a singular bulwark against internal decadence and external threat. By tracing Russian and American exceptionalist narratives, this paper offers a perspective on how historical self-understandings animate contemporary illiberalism.
Author: Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Competition & Cooperation – Examining Russia’s interactions with other major powersSponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Frank Maracchione (SOAS University)Chair: Frank Maracchione (SOAS University)Discussant: Frank Maracchione (SOAS University)
-
The proposed paper is part of a larger research project dealing with China-Russia rapprochement during the 1990s. This is an important area of enquiry, because the development of China-Russia relations during the first decade of the post-Soviet era remains relatively understudied. Notably, this decade built the foundations of what is today described as the ‘highest level in history’ of relations between the two states. A solid understanding of how relations developed during the 1990s is thus important for an informed assessment of the state and trajectory of contemporary China-Russia relations. This paper takes China-Russia arms trade as one perspective for examining the development of China-Russia relations during the 1990s. How was their arms trade development in the 1990s? Were both sides satisfied with their arms trade at that time? What was the impact of China-Russia arms trade in the 1990s, and is that impact still ongoing? This research would like to bring the latest discoveries from archives and interviews who played the decision-maker or participant roles in the 1990s, with process-tracing methods and document analysis.
Author: Hanjing Wang (University of Nottingham) -
In an age where great power competition is becoming everyday more evident from economic coercion, hard power capacities and open opportunism, middle powers are gradually switching to more assertive strategies. The traditional reliance on multilateralism, niche diplomacy and good regional citizenship has turned into a rising protectionism, assertive entrepreneurialism and immediate gains. This article argues that among the rising strategies, transactionalism has become a pivotal approach adopted by middle powers that seek to enhance status through a riskier foreign policy behaviour. The paper theorises transactionalism as a foreign policy behaviour adopted by middle powers that seek to enhance their foreign policy autonomy by not relying on traditional alliances to pursue: short-term gains, a flexible regionalism, opportunism in security crises, bilateralism and nationalist status-seeking. Among the middle powers that have become ‘niche expert’ of such strategy, Turkey is a significant case study which offers useful insights in the recent management of security issues that affected NATO and Russia ranging from the Black Sea, passing through Southern Caucasus and Middle East. In particular, after the eruption of the Ukraine-Russia war and the instability that followed in the Middle East from February 2022 to October 2025, Turkey has navigated the Russian-NATO returning rivalry in a clear opportunistic way. This article assesses that Turkey’s transactionalism has made Ankara a regional power capable of obtaining security gains in the Black Sea and Middle East thanks to its geostrategic position, but such successes have produced short-lived expectations that question the actual validity of transactionalism.
Author: Edoardo Lavezzo (University of York) -
This paper provides a comparative overview of the European Union's and Russia's entangled 'exceptionalisms' in light of the ongoing crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). It applies Holsti's definition of 'exceptionalism' as comprising responsibility, obligation or mission to liberate others; freedom from external constraints in realising that mission; hostility of the surrounding world; need for external enemies; and a tendency to portray oneself as a victim to both entities. It subsequently places the two exceptionalisms in the broader context of this changing world order. As a Kantian mission to liberate Europe itself from a Westphalian past through economic and political integration, the European Union’s ‘exceptionalism’ – if it can be termed as such - has, since the end of the Cold War, largely conformed to the requirements of that LIO. By contrast, Russia’s ‘hybrid’ form of exceptionalism has long placed itself, and a claimed ‘sphere of special interest’ in an ambiguous relationship with the West, and, more recently evolving from tolerance to pushback of the post-Cold War EU project. With the International Order moving away from its post-Cold War liberal iteration, the paper continues by exploring the ability of either exceptionalism to adapt to and operate within new, illiberal global realities; it concludes by laying out possible future scenarios for EU-Russian relations based on different possible adaptations.
Author: Kevork Oskanian (University of Exeter)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Developments and Insights on UK Foreign PolicySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham)
-
This thesis explores the trajectory of Taiwan in British foreign policy debates and perceptions in the twenty-five years following Taiwan’s first presidential election in 1996, when Taiwan was a relatively obscure concern in Whitehall, through to 2021 when The Economist labelled Taiwan as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’ and the United Kingdom outlined its ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. Focusing on framings within parliamentary debates and the perceptions of elite policymakers this thesis outlines how Taiwan has been perceived, constructed and approached in the foreign policy of one of the United States’, Taiwan’s de-facto security guarantor, closest allies. Through analysing the dominant discourses afforded to Taiwan, this thesis seeks to outline the narrative foundations that will guide a British response to escalation in the Taiwan strait. A focus on parliament acknowledges the increasing importance of parliamentary support in the construction of British foreign policy whilst also centring the emergence of a distinct Taiwanese identity as a fundamental shift in Taiwan’s global importance, recognising the influence of Taiwan’s discursive agency in shaping its future and its potency in the context of the ‘mother of parliaments’. There exists a distinct knowledge gap in current foreign policy scholarship on Britain’s role and approach to East Asia and Taiwan specifically, and as such in concentrating on Taiwan directly, this thesis also seeks to make explicit how perceptions of Taiwan in Britain have changed since its democratisation and the manner in which this shift will shape how Britain will appreciate and approach Taiwan as it faces an increasingly assertive China.
Author: Max Dixon (University of Portsmouth) -
The British Establishment responded to the crisis of Brexit with an Anglospheric foreign policy that explicitly revealed an imaginary that privileges the bonds with other English-speaking countries as the pinnacle of Britain’s hierarchy of international relations. Initially signified by ‘Global Britain’, it sought renewed and intensified connections with like-minded English-speaking partners to preserve and then rejuvenate Britain’s global role. While the Global Britain motif has now faded, the geopolitical imaginary it signified remains. Part of the reason for this is that Global Britain built on developments that were already in train. The burgeoning UK-Australian relationship is a sign of such and a crucial component of Britain’s ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific’. Less studied than their respective relationships with the US, the UK-Australia relationship is characterised by a striking degree of person-to-person contact across state and society. Situated within a broader Anglosphere, this produces a shared cultural repertoire and transnational imaginary that constitutes a predominantly Kantian culture of anarchy. Beyond the boundaries of the community exists the Hobbesian state of nature, orienting the ‘extroverted’ members of the Anglosphere – Australia, Britain, and the US – towards the reactionary defence of the ‘rules-based international order’. Through a Lacanian discourse analysis of official and informal material alongside interviews with foreign policy elites, this paper unpacks Britain’s Anglospheric foreign policy and considers the nature of the UK-Australian relationship. It concludes that the unusual degree of closeness reflects a resonance-laden relationship that has been crucial to the post-Brexit quest for relevance but also exposes both to anxiety-inducing claims of anachronism.
Author: Tom Howe (University of Warwick and Monash University) -
This paper argues that the legitimacy of a state in world politics is not solely the subject of rationality and institutional phenomena. Instead, aesthetic reasoning is a crucial factor in how politics are felt, seen and imagined. Drawing on Roland Bleiker’s call to place a strong emphasis on emotions and aesthetics as forms of political insight, the paper conceptualises aesthetic legitimacy as a mode of political understanding that both complements and challenges traditional rationalist explanations of power.
Moving beyond the individual-level analysis, this paper will examine Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit foreign policy discourse in a performative manner, in which the United Kingdom claims that its global power status remains legitimate and sustained, despite not being part of the EU. A discourse analysis will be used to analyse Johnson’s speeches between 2019 and 2022, tracing how humour, spectacle, optimism, and elements from British literature function as an affective grammar of credibility, reinforcing the perception of the UK as a self-assured global participant despite material and reputational decline. Even though the majority of existing scholarship focuses on Johnson’s rhetoric as evidence of the UK’s decline or imperial nostalgia, this research presents an alternative reading: these aesthetic performances do not necessarily mask a decline but instead actively reconstruct the UK2s sense of power and relevance.
This research is positioning its case within the broader debates on the epistemological futures of International Studies. The study suggests that aesthetic reasoning is not peripheral but fundamental to global politics. The aim will be to highlight the need for an IR that is capable of how power and legitimacy are performed, felt and seen. By doing this, the research will bridge foreign policy analysis with aesthetic turns.
Author: Benan Soydaş (Bilkent University) -
This paper is based on a chapter from a monograph tracing the rise and fall of overseas aid under the UK Conservative Party 2010-20. This presentation examines the period during which the final pillars of Conservative support for UK global leadership in aid policy - a separate Department for International Development (DFID) and the 0.7% of GNI spending target - were dismantled. Based on new analysis of parliamentary debates, it traces narratives and policy actions from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s June 2020 announcement merging DFID with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, through Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s November 2020 decision to reduce aid spending to 0.5%, to the unsuccessful parliamentary rebellion attempting to overturn the cut in July 2021. Against the fiscal pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic, affordability became the dominant justification for reform, reinforced by claims about limited public support for aid spending and the need to align with international peers. With Johnson newly-elected and commanding a large majority, electoral risk played little role in shaping decisions. Analysis of the debates shows a sharp turn towards framing aid in terms of cost, public backing, and national interest. These shifts marked a fundamental reorientation of Conservative aid policy, with lasting consequences even beyond Conservative administration.
Author: Danielle Beswick (University of Birmingham) -
A central theme of both the UK’s 2025 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence Review is that the ‘world has changed’. According to the Prime Minister, ‘it is an era of radical uncertainty’ which necessitates a clear strategic focus on the UK’s national interest (HM Government, 2025, p.4). Whilst this does not represent a significant departure from the discourse of post-Brexit defence and security strategy, there is increasing evidence of the UK’s attempts to adapt to the challenges of a transitional world order in its role orientation, national role conceptions and its role performance. This includes a renewed emphasis on more traditional forms of hard power in foreign policy with increases in defence spending, while further reducing soft power capabilities such as ODA. This article draws on role theory to assess UK foreign policy discourse and practice on defence and security in the context of a transitional world order. It argues that understanding how UK foreign policy actors interpret world order is essential for theorising the UK’s role orientation and subsequent national role conceptions and role performance in security and defence as order changes. It therefore contributes to recent scholarship on role theory and post-Brexit UK foreign policy (Webber, 2023, Hadfield and Whitman, 2023) but through a specific focus on how UK foreign policy actors conceptualise world order, its transition, and the UK’s role within it in terms of both their discourse and practice. This is important for understanding not only the construction of UK discourse on its role orientation in the context of a transitional world order, but also how policymakers navigate the complexity of performing these roles as the world transitions to a multiplex order (Acharya 2017, Acharya et al, 2023).
Author: Blake Lawrinson (University of Leeds)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Disorder and Domination: Rethinking Security, Imperialism, and Global OrderSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: CRIPT Working groupChair: CRIPT Working group
-
Illiberal-Authoritarian Formations in the Americas: Rethinking Norms, Contestation, and Global Order
International Relations scholarship on norms has long assumed a liberal core, treating authoritarian practices as anomalies or as defensive reactions to external pressures. Building on recent work on authoritarian and illiberal practices, this paper advances the concept of the illiberal-authoritarian formation: a dynamic constellation of justifications, discourses, practices, and institutions that simultaneously erode democratic processes and human rights protections while consolidating into prescriptive normative orders. Rather than seeing these developments as isolated or reactive, we conceptualize them as coherent formations with their own internal logics, diffusion pathways, and mechanisms of reproduction. Focusing on the Americas—a region often portrayed as undergoing democratic “backsliding”—we argue instead that it constitutes a crucial laboratory for illiberal-authoritarian norm-making. Our analysis shows how illiberal-authoritarian formations take shape and travel across borders through four key mechanisms: normative reframing, legal-bureaucratic engineering, socialization and diffusion networks, and performance-legitimation feedback. Our analysis advances IR scholarship in three ways. Conceptually, it reframes illiberal and authoritarian practices not as deviations from liberal order but as formations—emergent normative orders with prescriptive force. Empirically, it demonstrates how leaders in the Americas actively generate, diffuse, and legitimate these formations, thereby positioning the region as a central site of global illiberal norm production. Theoretically, it challenges the liberal bias of norm studies by showing that illiberal-authoritarian formations are not marginal or transient but central to the making of contemporary global order. Taken together, these insights compel a fundamental rethinking of how scholars conceptualize norms, contestation, and the contested futures of democracy and human rights.
Authors: Quintijn Kat (Ashoka University) , Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University, The Netherlands)* -
International orders are sets of institutions that define the fundamental guidelines of what states can, must, and must not do, and their nature varies according to their political substance, the scope of their jurisdiction, and the decision-making depth. Orders may range from a minimalist scope where the political substance is normatively thin, most policy areas are covered by states, and where decision-making is intergovernmental, to a maximalist framework where one finds the combination of thick normativity, a wide scope, and supranational depth. The current liberal international order combines a maximalist substance and scope with an intermediate depth, considering the prevalence of intergovernmental procedures, and it is currently being challenged by factors internal and external to the group of liberal states – the West – that have been promoting it since the end of World War II. To understand the nature of international orders is challenging due to the high complexity of the topic, considering the multiplicity of potential actors, interests and causal conditions behind the creation, alteration, and destruction of those orders. The literature in International Relations has either offered monocausal explanations or multi-causal explanations that do fail to pinpoint the fundamental dynamics of causality. This paper seeks to build upon the efforts of the latter type of literature, offering a novel tridimensional realist framework that integrates the complexity of multicausal dynamics, but at the same time remains parsimonious by identifying the factors that fundamentally shape international orders. According to the framework, international politics are shaped by three hierarchically differentiated causal factors. Polarity, material interdependence, and ideational compatibility are the three dimensions that shape, essentially, the behaviour of states in the international system. The framework explains the current decline of the liberal international order, essentially a function of multipolarization combined with weakening material interdependence and ideational incompatibility between major actors.
Author: Nuno Pereira de Magalhães (University Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid) -
This paper investigates the role that discourses of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ play within the legitimacy claims of both hegemonic and counterhegemonic projects. In particular, it considers how accusations of ‘disordering’ are used to stigmatise, and thus delegitimise, rival hegemonic projects. It looks at how China’s rise is represented within Western scholarly and policy discourse as necessarily a risk to international order: China is depicted as antithetical to the fundamental pillars of the ‘liberal’ / rules-based international order, and is thus stigmatised as a disordering influence on the international. A close examination of China’s practices, policy discourses and scholarship relating to international order, however, suggests a different picture: China goes out of its way to represent itself, not just as conforming to the existing norms of international order, but in fact as a leader on these norms, and as a more faithful guardian of the fundamental values of international justice, peace and prosperity which underpin international order. Furthermore, Chinese policy discourse in turn seeks to (counter) stigmatise the US and its allies as themselves the greatest threat to international order, and centres the global South as the crucial ‘audience of normals’ for this stigmatisation. This paper thus seeks to highlight both the importance of 'order' in (hegemonic) authority claims, and the South's role in appraising such claims.
Author: Dani Solomon (SOAS) -
Common historical materialist accounts (Luxemburg 2003; Lenin 1917; Harvey 2017) argue that the origins of imperialism can be explained by capitalism’s need for expansion. Yet, what about empires predating capitalism, such as the Roman Empire? At the same time, realist accounts of imperial expansion typically ignore the specifically capitalist characteristics of modern imperialism and its distinctively economic dimensions (Morgenthau 1960; Cohen 1973; Snyder 1991; Copeland 2024). Therefore, we propose combining both paradigms to derive a comprehensive theory of imperialism that acknowledges the existence of and complex interactions between both 'geopolitical' and 'capitalist logics' (Arrighi 1994, p. 34). We argue that realism and historical materialism are more compatible than assumed by previous authors (Copeland 2024; Harvey 2017; Callinicos 2009; Rosenberg 1994), because both put power – of the owners of the means of production and destruction, respectively – at the centre of analysis, while explaining the systemic constraints arising from anarchy between states and firms, respectively. Understanding capitalism as a global structure existing in parallel to the anarchy of the international system, we deviate from related critiques of realism, such as Rosenberg (1994), who treats the mode of production as a matter of domestic politics. Overall, our two-systems-level theory of imperialism, grounded in a materialist, power-centred analysis, helps overcome weak points of both historical materialist and realist accounts of imperialism while taking both paradigms seriously.
Authors: Pao Engelbrecht (Princeton University)* , Florian Brunner (Nuffield College, University of Oxford) -
Securitisation implies distance: an existential threat (a referent subject) that endangers a group worthy of protection (a referent object). These are separate entities. How does this account change when the threat is already within one’s borders, one’s community, one’s very body? What kinds of new urgency and extraordinary responses become ‘justified’ by this sense of proximity and intimate, immediate, danger? Drawing on examples from a range of fields – including the securitisation of migration, anti-LGBT moral panics, and the ‘security turn’ in genocide studies (Straus, 2015; Moses, 2021) – this paper examines the process by which discursive and strategic framings of ‘dangerous proximity’, ‘infiltration’, and ‘treachery’ are used to enable and direct particularly intense responses. It argues that, in addition to the traditional elements of a securitising speech act (securitising actor, referent object, and so on), critical security scholars should also take engage with the (literal or metaphorical) ‘subject positionings’(Doty, 1993) between the threat and the referent object, which inform and shape securitising moves.
Author: Leah Owen (Swansea University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Europe and GeopoliticsSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
This paper provides a comparative analysis of Sino-Lithuanian and Sino-Czech relations to address the following question: why did Lithuania leave what was originally known as the 16+1 framework of cooperation between China and Central and Eastern Europe, while Czechia did not? Existing literature emphasises the agency of Lithuanian and Czech political elites, but this perspective does not fully explain the divergence in the two states’ foreign policy decisions regarding participation in the 16+1. To fill this gap, the study examines the broader geo-economic structures that both constrain and enable such agency, with a particular focus on the countries’ positions in Germany-CEE-China production networks and automotive value chains. The predominant focus is on structure-related factors that link the study’s independent variable (i.e., a state’s position within the core/semi-periphery/periphery of global value chains) to its dependent variable (i.e., a specific foreign policy decision). At the same time, the study accounts for differences in foreign policy outcomes that cannot be explained solely by structural factors.
A major contribution to the theme of the BISA 2026 conference lies in the paper’s attempt to bridge academic and policy research, with the paper being based on both primary and secondary data collected, analysed and discussed as part of the author’s policy work. The author believes that a greater engagement with major topics, methods and approaches within the policy sphere are needed to keep the IR discipline relevant for current and future global challenges.
Author: Dominika Remžová (ESRC PhD student at the University of Nottingham) -
Why are major European donors increasingly restructuring their foreign aid policies - cutting official development assistance (ODA) budgets or redefining priorities around national interests and military spending? Despite its historical role as a geopolitical instrument, foreign aid has been deprioritized relative to other foreign economic tools. Furthermore, geopolitical imperatives are frequently presented as the main rationale for ODA cuts, but they cannot fully explain the marked divergence in European preferences toward foreign aid policy. I argue that these preferences - though seemingly aligned in their framing - are primarily shaped by divergent domestic interests and societal ideas, with geopolitical rationales often invoked as post hoc justifications. European governments thus selectively emphasize geopolitics rather than responding directly to prevailing economic demands or value-based expectations within their societies. To illustrate this claim, I examine the foreign aid policies of Germany and the United Kingdom, contributing to debates on the geoeconomic turn in European foreign economic policies by unpacking the domestic determinants underlying these shifts.
Author: R. Melis Baydag (University of Freiburg) -
This paper investigates whether the United States or Europe holds greater influence over the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—a longstanding yet underexamined question in the study of global economic governance. While the Fund is widely regarded as dominated by “Western” powers, most existing research either focuses exclusively on American influence or treats the West as a unified bloc, masking important variation between its two key actors. Drawing on panel data from 1980 to 2010, we construct separate measures of US and European influence using principal component analysis of commonly used alignment indicators—UN voting patterns, bilateral trade, and banking exposure—and estimate a series of Tobit and Probit models to assess their impact on four key IMF lending outcomes: loan-to-GDP ratios, participation rates, loan approvals, and conditionality. We find that European influence is strongly associated with higher loan volumes, more frequent participation, and greater likelihood of loan approval, while US influence is not. However, American ties are significantly correlated with fewer conditions attached to loans. Additional analysis shows that European influence is not driven by regional or colonial favouritism: neither European nor African borrowers benefit more from European ties—and may, in fact, fare worse—than other countries with comparable alignment. These findings complicate existing assumptions about IMF decision-making, highlighting the need to distinguish between types of Western influence. They also suggest that Europe wields broader institutional influence over access to IMF resources, while US power manifests more selectively through conditionality. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on hegemony, institutional power, and intra-Western dynamics in global economic governance.
Authors: Zhenyi Chen (Renmin University of China)* , Tong Hu (Beijing Foreign Studies University)* , Dianyi Yang (University of Oxford)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Exploring the relationship between imperialism, coloniality and environmental degradation IISponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)
-
In states that engage in occupation, fossil fuel projects can act as a vector both for the expanding circuit of capital accumulation as well as the state’s consolidation of territorial control over peripheral regions. Multinational petroleum company British Petroleum’s (BP) offshore gas project Tangguh LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) is the single largest resource project in the Indonesian-occupied West Papua province. Despite the Indonesian state’s turbulent and often hostile relationship to foreign petroleum companies, a decades-long alliance has emerged with BP that has facilitated the development of Tangguh LNG. In this paper, I demonstrate that this alliance between the state and the multinational has emerged due to the compatibility of Indonesia’s territorial ambitions in West Papua with BP’s drive to expand its circuit of capital accumulation. Strategically distinguishing these logics allows for a concrete analysis of the ways in which they are imbricated at a particular juncture. Firstly, I trace how West Papua was over decades violently integrated into a world market for oil and gas extraction, production, and export. I then demonstrate how the revenue from Tangguh LNG has played a key role in consolidating the administrative control of various sub-national branches of the Indonesian state over the life, livelihoods, and land of West Papuan people. This analysis of fossil fuel extraction in West Papua, an example of a self-determination struggle against a previously colonised state, provides important nuance to debates concerning the role of state-territorial logics in the capital accumulation process.
Author: Naish Gawen (Australian National University) -
Since the 2010s decade, the notion of sacrifice zones and their association to the country’s history of industrialisation and mining extractive economy, alongside the presence of coal power-plants has taken increased relevance in debates about just transitions and uneven development (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvet, 2020; Espinoza, 2022). This article proposes the concept of necropolitical development to understand the sacrifice zones in Chile and the state's efforts to address them within the context of the national energy transition. By looking at the historical, economic and political dimensions behind the constitution of such zones in Chile, alongside efforts to deal with them that have taken place since the Bachelet second government and the decarbonisation plan, the article proposes a deeper understanding of how these areas are constituted and the role they play in the operational landscapes for national and international urbanisation processes (Arboleda, 2016). Drawing on international relations, critical urban theory and anticolonial literature (Newell, 2024; Danewid, 2023; Arboleda, 2016; Brenner and Katsikis 2014; Escobar, 2012), the paper makes three contributions (i) it offers an interpretation of sacrifice zones amidst broader questions of progress and development that go beyond capitalism by putting the notion of ‘necropolitical development’ forward, (ii) enriches the understanding of the limits of postcolonial states to deal with these territories, and (iii) it delineates the challenges faced to enable something-like just transitions for these areas.
Author: Daniela Soto Hernandez (University of Sussex) -
Over the past two decades, the EU has increasingly positioned itself as a global leader in the energy transition away from fossil fuels, developing an integrated policy framework connecting environmental objectives with economic and geopolitical ambitions. While these policies are framed as EUropean accomplishments, they substantively rely on resource flows from non-EUropean countries. North Africa has been explicitly identified by the EU as a strategic partner due to its geographic proximity and renewable energy potential. Tunisia, in particular, has since the 2010s been increasingly incorporated into EUrope’s green economic sphere. Latest developments, most prominently Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, accelerated this process and increased the attention towards the country’s potential for production of renewable energy, green hydrogen and its derivatives. These initiatives are presented as mutually beneficial, for they would aid Tunisia’s decarbonization, promote economic development, and enable exports to Europe. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with Tunisian civil society actors conducted during a 7-months fieldwork in Tunisia, as well as discourse analysis of key EU and Tunisian policy documents, this paper instead argues that the EU’s green partnership and promises of ‘green growth’ conceal extractive neocolonial dynamics which privilege the metropole’s accumulation at the expense of the periphery’s needs. With a specific focus on the EUropean hydrogen strategy, it in fact shows how this is embedded in a neocolonial structure reproducing EUropean enrichment, international standing and epistemic centrality while externalizing costs to Tunisia and foreclosing local spaces of dissensus and alternative visions regarding ecological transformation.
Author: Debora Del Piano (University of Copenhagen) -
This paper starts from Indigenous people’s charges of genocide against the mining industry for the destruction of their lands and the basis of their existence as peoples. From this standpoint, it asks, if settler colonialism (in so-called Australia) is characterised by the logic of elimination and, arguably, by genocide, and mining is causing genocide (as asserted by Indigenous activists), is there a more substantive relationship between mining and settler colonialism than heretofore acknowledged? (How) does mining work to further the settler colonial project? I address these questions by building on the argument I make elsewhere that mining results in permanent damage to land (obscured and enabled by discourses of mine rehabilitation). I argue that the mining-induced breaking of the land does work for the settler colony: mining furthers the settler colonial elimination of Indigenous socionatures, via cultural genocide, and assists in the reproduction of settler society by materialising colonial environmental imaginaries and creating settler attachments to place. Even if mining companies get up and leave, mines come to stay, in the sense that the damage to land remains. This constitutes, I argue, a settler colonial acquisition of territory. I also reflect of why existing theorisations of settler colonialism have overlooked, or perhaps even hindered recognition of, mining’s contribution to the (Australian) settler colonial project.
Author: Iona Summerson (SOAS, University of London) -
This paper examines how the global green transition reproduces extractive imperialism through new forms of environmental destruction and epistemic violence, exemplified by lithium mining in Argentina’s Salar del Hombre Muerto. Promoted as essential for sustainable development, the expansion of lithium extraction is producing severe ecological degradation, draining scarce water resources and eradicating entire ecosystems that have sustained local livelihoods for centuries. Building on notions of ecological imperialism and ecologically unequal exchange, as well as fieldwork conducted in Argentina, the paper explores how old extractive patterns persist within ostensibly “new” resource frontiers. This continuity demonstrates how environmental sacrifice remains inextricably tied to economic, political, and social control, linking local realities to global power structures
These dynamics are shaped by Argentina’s long-standing denial of Indigenous presence and national narratives of homogeneity, which have been sustained through state policy and development discourse and continue to erase Indigenous identity. This erasure conceals the social and ecological costs of extraction and narrows the horizon of political and economic possibility, presenting extractive-led growth as both natural and necessary. Consequently, state and corporate actors at home and abroad mobilise the language of progress and sustainability to legitimise environmental destruction and the expansion of resource frontiers.
At the same time, Indigenous and local communities in the Puna actively contest these dynamics through anti-extractivist organising and the articulation of alternative relationships to land, water, and livelihood. Linking these struggles to broader histories of coloniality, the paper shows how the green transition renews old imperial logics while generating spaces for decolonial resistance and reimagination of life.Author: Vicki M Reif-Breitwieser (University of Sheffield)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Feminist Practices of ResistanceSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
Situated at the intersection of sociology and politics, my PhD research brings a critical lens to the study of citizenship by investigating and analysing the lives of migrant women in the UK. Drawing on interviews and participant observation conducted over a year, it explores how these women engage in community work and activism amid shifting immigration policies.
This paper asks: what claims to “citizenship” are migrant women making through complaining? Ahmed (2022) defines ‘complaint activism’ as the persistent work of making noise and forcing institutions to expend their resources. My analysis shows how migrant women use complaint as a tool to make sense of their pain while gradually destabilising institutional power.
Building on Isin’s (2009) notion of ‘activist citizenship,’ I argue that by making complaints against state institutions (Ahmed, 2022), migrant women act as activist citizens who disrupt the given order. Through these acts, they blur state borders and demand accountability across scales of struggle, enacting transnational citizenship “from below” (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012).
Foregrounding migrant women as active agents rather than passive victims, this paper challenges dominant narratives that erase their political subjectivity. In a climate of intensifying anti-immigration discourse, this research highlights their agency and contributions to reimagining citizenship in the UK.
Author: Sugandha Agarwal (University of Manchester) -
Political theory surrounding human trafficking and “modern slavery” has long been contested. In the 17th century, it was debated whether African people brought to Europe as sexualised “ethnographic displays” were slaves or willing participants fleeing greater hardship. In the 19th century, women who financed travel across Europe through sex work were controversially labelled victims of “white slavery”. Today, women coerced into sex work are often described as victims of “modern slavery”. Critical scholars dispute this terminology, arguing that slavery was systemic and institutionally embedded, and that abuses by individuals outside legal frameworks are not comparable. They also forewarned that “modern slavery” narratives would be used to justify stricter border controls and maintain criminalisation of sex workers.
Debate persists over who bears responsibility for such exploitation. Governments typically focus on criminal justice and border enforcement, while critical scholars highlight structural inequalities that drive people to enter exploitative situations as survival strategies.
Across history, those labelled as slaves or victims have rarely been included in these debates. We know almost nothing of the political views of women displayed in 17th-century “freak shows,” those who travelled Europe funded by sex work, nor women described as “modern slaves” today.
My research brings survivors into this conversation—not as passive victims, but as theorisers and political agents.
To record in-depth political views of South African survivor activists, I adopted a methodology underutilised in international studies: collaborative autoethnography. These methods place control in the hands of participants, encouraging deep self-exploration, shared reflexivity, and group analysis. It is a storytelling method that enables participants to direct both the narrative and its interpretation.
Author: Bee Damara (University of Leicester) -
Drawing on Sara Ahmed's articulation of feminist hope, this paper illuminates hopeful visions of equity and culturally responsive trauma-informed leadership articulated by Black and other racialised women who have experienced, witnessed and/or work as frontline practitioners within Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (DASV) services in East England, a region adversely affected by the postcode lottery of support (DAC, 2022). These visions emerge from a Medical Research Council UKPRP funded project (led by Dr Guha and Dr Allen) on fostering the leadership of Black and racialised women regionally, and a pilot study on Asian-heritage women’s vulnerabilities around domestic abuse in Cambridgeshire (led by Dr Guha). Together, these decolonial accounts of world-making illuminate the aspirations and resistance (s) of racially marginalised victims-survivors from scattered and under researched diasporic communities as they challenge institutionally imposed ‘solutions’ which epistemically erase their complex experiences. Furthermore, they illuminate the potential of ‘accidental leadership’, emanating from trauma and pain, to intervene against and decolonially transform an exclusionary landscape of public services.
Authors: Mirna Guha (Dr) , Katherine Allen* -
This paper explores refusal as wellbeing as a response to permacrisis. We use permacrisis to mean the compounded impacts of multiple “unprecedented” events, including multiple genocides, climate crises and cost-of-living crises. University departments and academia more broadly are not immune to the impacts of the permacrisis, and have contributed to, and reproduced the conditions that lead to permacrisis. This is done via investment portfolios or working with funding bodies that include fossil fuels and arms manufacturers. It is further demonstrated in the continuing neoliberal agenda in higher education. Throughout the article we discuss the wellbeing of educators and students, and how refusal, slow scholarship and investing in longer term collective wellbeing, act against the forced immediacy of crises. Refusal is a political choice, which means we must consider who gets to refuse, what and how. Refusal can be generative, giving time and space to create new structures and responses to permacrisis. We conclude by offering some recommendations on how to enact refusal.
Authors: Aysha Mazhar (Keele University & Manchester Metropolitan University)* , Sophia Taha (Keele University) -
This paper explores the everyday acts of anti-colonial resistance performed by colonised women in the settler colony German Southwest Africa (1884–1915), present-day Namibia. Drawing on the colonial archives, my paper uncovers everyday gestures of dissent that colonised women performed in the settler’s home. For instance, colonised women fleeing the settler’s farms or colonised women repeatedly refusing to perform menial tasks for their German employers. I argue that these gestures of refusing colonial oppression should be considered as anti-colonial resistance, no matter how uncoordinated and minute they may have been. This paper contributes to research shedding light on how subaltern experiences matter in international relations. Here, I go beyond exploring how the international affects everyday life by illustrating how the everyday lives of non-elites affect the international. The colonial archives leave us with irreversible epistemic violence that erases the voices of colonised women from the writing of empire. My endeavour to recover traces of colonised women’s agency demands reading against the archival grain, which involves stretching the boundaries of the colonial archives. As reading against the grain has only received considerable attention in history and literary studies, this paper also seeks to offer a methodological intervention in social sciences scholarship.
Author: Malin Julie Bornemann (University of Oxford, Nuffield College)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / IPE/GPE and method
IPE/GPE occupies contested disciplinary territory positioned between two other fields: International Relations and Economics while simultaneously founded in the UK on the notion of eclectic method and an intellectual open range. In practice this has meant IPE/GPE ignoring the frontiers of innovative methodologies, remaining firmly wedded to theoretical rigour over exploratory openness and instead all too often devolving into a ‘soft' economic discourse analysis as method.
However, in recent years, several methodological developments have emerged in cognate fields reflecting advances in analytical approach, data availability, computational techniques, and an increasing recognition of the power of meaningful interdisciplinary approaches. These methodological developments elsewhere reflect the interdisciplinary nature of research and the increasing complexity of international and global political and economic systems. This roundtable asks how we might engage with these developments so that IPE/GPE has the potential to further innovate not just these methods but to advance the very study of the global political economy in novel directions.
Sponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupChair: Greig Charnock (University of Manchester)Participants: Johnna Montgomerie (University of British Columbia) , Alex Nunn (University of Manchester) , Stuart Shields (The University of Manchester) , Yuliya Yurchenko , Remi Edwards (Queen Mary University of London) -
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Ideas That Move the Field: Stefan Elbe, Global Health Security, and New Horizons of IR Scholarship on Global Health Politics
This roundtable brings together scholars working at the intersection of global health and International Relations to celebrate the intellectual contributions of Stefan Elbe to this field. Stefan’s work has been foundational in establishing global health—and particularly global health security—as a central concern in IR. Over the past two decades, his work has illuminated how health issues have become deeply entangled with security politics, scientific and technological developments, and global governance. Moreover, Stefan’s scholarship has continuously propelled the field forward by creatively bringing together diverse theoretical traditions, such as pharmaceuticalisation, information theory, postcolonial studies, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies, to shed light on the evolving nexus of health and security. Through this intellectual range, Stefan has opened new conceptual pathways and vocabularies for understanding the political life of biological threats, medical countermeasures, and the infrastructures that sustain global health security practices. The roundtable convenes scholars whose research has been influenced by Stefan’s work to reflect on his intellectual contributions, the new thinking it has generated, and the directions in which it continues to push the study of global health politics. It considers how Stefan’s intellectual curiosity exemplifies the kind of open, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking scholarship needed for the next 50 years of the discipline.
Sponsor: Centre for Global Health Policy, University of Sussex & Global Health Working GroupChair: Anne Roemer-Mahler (University of Sussex)Participants: Christopher Long (Queen's University Belfast) , Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield) , Nadine Voelkner (University of Groningen) , Eva Hilberg (University of Sheffield) -
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Leaders and leadership in world politicsSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Ella Bullard (BISA)Chair: MARIANNA Charountaki (University of Lincoln)
-
Although recent efforts have sought to bridge the gap between Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and the broader discipline of International Relations (IR), scholarship in these two areas still tends to operate independently. This article argues that further integrating constructivism with psychological approaches to FPA can resolve the puzzle of why cultures of anarchy change, despite constructivism’s expectation that existing structures typically constrain and shape agents’ actions in ways that reinforce these structures over time. I demonstrate how individual leaders’ personalities influence their choices to securitize or desecuritize other state actors, which in turn shapes broader shifts in interstate relations. Unlike traditional perspectives that focus on either individual-level behavior or structural norms, this article shows how these elements interact in a dynamic process that leads to shifts in anarchy—from enmity to rivalry to amity, and vice versa. By merging leader profiling approaches, such as operational code analysis and leadership trait analysis, with securitization theory and constructivism, this article offers a novel framework for understanding systemic change. It contributes to both FPA and IR by bridging micro and macro perspectives, filling a significant gap in constructivist theory, and expanding the theoretical scope of personality research in FPA.
Author: Alexander Schotthöfer (University of Edinburgh) -
There is increasing consideration of the role individuals – other than state leaders – can play in diplomacy and negotiations across various contexts. This article argues that the concept of the boundary spanner can be refocused beyond its current narrow use to consider the activities that individuals engage in when operating between conflict parties. Boundary spanners are actors who operate along the boundary between units or a unit and its external environment and engage in four activities –
relational, connectional, informational and entrepreneurial.
Furthermore, I argue this allows for considering the role individuals can play in shaping dialogue and diplomatic relations between conflict parties. Using a range of English-language discursive materials and interviews, I apply this concept to a single case study of Dr. Yair Hirschfeld’s activities in 1989-1993, which were crucial for establishing the Oslo Channel between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.Author: David Wilcox (n/a) -
Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, albeit to different degrees and through distinct strategies, have emerged as two of the most significant challengers to the Western political order and its social imaginary. Since the 2010s, both leaders have increasingly foregrounded civilizational discourses and post-imperial imaginaries that shape domestic politics and legitimise assertive foreign policy. This article takes Putin and Erdoğan as a comparative case study to critically examine the political discourses through which Russkiy mir and neo-Ottomanism function as populist projects that moralise geopolitics and normalise states of exception. Theoretically, it advances a synthetic framework that integrates Laclau’s theory of hegemony, Lacanian notions of affect and jouissance, and Ontological Security Theory to explain how civilizational imaginaries are discursively constructed, affectively invested, and routinised as security practices. Methodologically, the study employs comparative discourse analysis of speeches, strategic doctrines, ministerial statements, and emblematic policy episodes from the 2010s onward, operationalising how both leaders articulate hegemonic discourses and affective post-imperial narratives and tracing their translation into foreign policy practices. Empirically, the paper shows that both regimes converge on anti-Western exceptionalism, charismatic leadership, and moralised geopolitical repertoires, while diverging in their grammars of belonging and in the foreign policy instruments they employ. It argues that costly and escalatory foreign policy routines persist because of their affective returns, particularly the forms of enjoyment derived from attempting to “repair” imperial loss and from promising renewed jouissance. The article contributes both a transferable analytical toolkit for studying post-imperial populist foreign policy and a refined account of how identity work and affect sustain adventurous external behaviour under conditions of ontological insecurity.
Authors: Recep Onursal (University of Kent) , Leonardo Zanatta (Corvinus University of Budapest) -
One way to understand and study populism is to define it as a political style that underscores its performative dimension (Moffitt, 2016). The performance of populist leaders involves not only their discourse but also their delivery, aesthetics, and symbolic acts coming together to address an audience (Moffitt, 2016). Populist rhetoric and leadership styles have received extensive scholarly attention, and these studies predominantly agree that populist rhetoric conveys the notion of a struggle between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004). Benjamin Moffit argues that ‘the people’ cannot be restricted to a group with definite characteristics, boundaries, structure or permanence (Moffit, 2019 p.99). Much of the literature treats ‘the people’ as the sole audience of the populist performance. More often than not this audience is kept equivalent as to domestic constituents. Therefore, the question of who the audience remains underexplored, especially in foreign policy. This paper argues for a conceptual distinction between ‘the people’ as a discursive construct and ‘the audience’ as a more fragmented, heterogeneous formation. Populist performances do not address a singular, monolithic public but rather unfold across layered communicative arenas speaking simultaneously to different audiences that include domestic constituencies, ideological supporters, international institutions, and symbolic ‘others’. These audiences may respond in different ways: through resonance, rejection, or silence. To illustrate this conceptual distinction, the paper will examine Erdoğan as an illustrative case with various symbolic foreign policy performances, ranging from the reconversion of Hagia Sophia to speeches delivered on international platforms, each strategically staged for both mulilayered and multilevel audiences.
Author: Cagla Aydogan Terzioglu (University of Bath)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Making Sense of Misconduct: Gender, Soldiering, and the LawSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConveners: Margot Tudor (Department of International Politics, City - University of London) , Hannah RichardsChair: Margot Tudor (Department of International Politics, City - University of London)
-
In 2014, a whistleblower in the UN leaked a report that detailed incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse committed by French soldiers deployed to Central African Republic as part of Opération Sangaris. The report initiated a series of investigations – both by the French authorities against the soldiers as well as by the UN against its whistleblower – as well as diplomatic efforts to portray any wrongdoing as the actions of a few deviant individuals among an otherwise benign and legitimate intervention. Despite overwhelming evidence that violence and abuse took place, the legal process that followed ultimately failed to hold any individual accountable. This paper asks: how can it be that no justice was enacted even though it was established that crimes were committed? It examines this question through a feminist abolitionist lens, arguing that a carceral approach to sexual exploitation and abuse cannot offer repair for the harms committed. A carceral system protects the privileged, while the marginalised are rendered unable to claim justice by to the same systems of oppression that made them vulnerable to violation in the first place.
Author: Aiko Holvikivi (LSE) -
This paper examines the mission leadership response to troop misconduct, harm, and fatalities during the UN's first armed mission to Egypt and the Gaza Strip, UNEF (1956-1967). I argue that, although the troops conceived of and prepared for external threats (from state soldiers, civilians, the environment, etc), the greatest threat to troop – and civilian – life (on patrol and off-duty) was the troops themselves. I show how paternalist and patriarchal logics of peacekeeping placed the short-term international soldiers in largely unobserved positions of authority over civilian communities, even once the conflict had deescalated. As a novel international military, UNEF staff were anxious to artificially – and swiftly – gel the battalions together so as to cultivate mission identity, enable strategic cooperation, and prevent troop boredom, as well as maintain a steady turnover of volunteers on the ground. This existential anxiety forged a prioritisation of troop morale in quotidian life on patrol, resulting in a generous recreational and welfare programme. Recreational activities relied on the troops’ shared (and presumed) masculinity and heterosexuality as the easiest ways to encourage cosmopolitan friendships. Despite repeated mission investigations, a field-based culture of drinking combined with a lack of regulation and a prioritisation of troop morale continued to cause frequent vehicle incidents, drownings, and ‘accidental’ fatalities or suicides – harming numerous civilians and peacekeepers – far more than those killed on duty. Using Egyptian police reports and UNEF inquiry documents, this paper explores how the UN mission made sense of these injuries and deaths through gendered and individualised approach, preventing any meaningful reflection on harmful mission cultures.
Author: Margot Tudor (Department of International Politics, City - University of London) -
Based on the analysis of observations of 15 hearings at a British military court centre, this paper explores what happens when offences that are not explicitly ‘military’ in nature enter the space of the military courtroom. The military courts are one element of the distinct system of justice that governs the British Armed Forces: The Service Justice System (SJS). The seemingly unique and exceptional nature often ascribed to the military forms the rationale for maintaining this separate justice system. However, the SJS is routinely used to deal with offences that are not unique to the military, for example gendered and racial violence perpetrated by military personnel in non-operational contexts. In this paper, I ask how ideas of institutional exceptionalism are troubled by the presence of such violence in the courtroom. To answer this question, I engage with three embodied exhibits that emerged from my observations: fieldnotes, the privacy screen, and the remnants of a handwritten note. Rather than rely on the textual analysis of judgments, transcripts, or case files, I instead engage with these three exhibits to uncover the bodies which are so often written out of this exceptionalised institution. In this paper, I demonstrate how these exhibits turn attention to the vulnerability of, and connections between, bodies in this space, revealing how the court centre is infused with an intimate, crisis-shaped subjectivity that invites trial participants to respond to violence within the military in particular ways.
Author: Hannah Richards -
This paper utilises cultural camouflage theory and critical feminist epistemology to examine how hypermasculine military institutions shape women veterans' sense-making and narrative construction in the aftermath of gendered violence and institutional betrayal. Drawing from qualitative sociological PhD research with Australian women veterans, the analysis reveals a novel phenomenon of "dual truths" whereby women simultaneously hold contradictory narratives about their service experiences. Intense military socialisation establishes normalisation of male dominance and privileging but also produces camaraderie and deep allegiance to the institution. This allows women to maintain attachment to military identity and community even whilst recognising profound betrayal. The participants defended positive aspects of military service whilst privately acknowledging devastating experiences of violence and institutional abuse. This pattern demonstrates how institutional power operates not merely through concealment of misconduct, but through fundamentally shaping how victims themselves construct and narrate their experiences. These findings expand understandings of how gendered institutional violence operates beyond the violent act itself, revealing how patriarchal military structures infiltrate the very processes through which women construct meaning from traumatic experiences, exposing the gendered politics of knowledge production following military misconduct.
Author: Natalie Merryman (University of Newcastle, Australia)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Narrative futures in International Studies: What stories are we telling?
Narrative approaches to global politics have emerged to complement and rethink the ways in which International Studies produces, legitimates and circulates knowledge. Since the so-called ‘narrative turn’ (Roberts 2006) in International Relations, narratives have been used as sources of data, method of conducting international relations, and a type of scholarly intervention (Freistein, Gadinger and Growth 2024). This roundtable discusses the present role of narratives in research and explores the frames and opportunities enabled by narrative-based methods to reimagine International Studies in the next 50 years. The speakers in this roundtable will address questions such as: How do narrative method and theory currently contribute to International Studies? What opportunities and limitations are associated with these interventions? What stories does International Studies tell of the discipline and its future? How could narrative approaches contribute towards more plural, relational, and situated forms of knowledge? What institutional and methodological innovations are needed to realise the opportunities of these approaches? The roundtable seeks to position narrative inquiry as a critical intervention and a creative horizon for an International Studies discipline that continues to expand and diversify in order to explain, understand and respond to the complex global events in the future.
The speakers’ research focuses on global crises such as climate change, war, and the challenge of establishing peace. They bring forth interdisciplinary perspectives at the intersection of social, political and climate science and policy. The insights in this roundtable connect scholars across career stages and different types of higher education institutions and include:
Professor Miriam Prys-Hansen, GIGA, Hamburg
Professor Nick Caddick, Anglia Ruskin University
Professor Ben O’Loughlin, Royal Holloway University of London
Dr Mirko Palestrino, Queen Mary University of London
Dr Anna Katila, City St George’s, University of London
Chair: Dr Alexandria Innes, City St George’s, University of LondonSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Alexandria Innes (City, University of London)Participants: Anna Katila , Nick Caddick (ARU) , Miriam Prys-Hansen , Mirko Palestrino (Queen Mary University of London) , Ben O'Loughlin -
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / New and emerging security and defence technologies: governance, politics, implicationsSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Thomas Martin (Open University)
-
Why do technologically advanced states diverge in their ability to militarize emerging commercial technologies? From submarines in the late nineteenth century to nuclear weapons in the twentieth and drones in the twenty-first, the pace and direction of military innovation have depended less on technological discovery itself than on how states mobilize and institutionalize civilian expertise. This study examines the early phase of commercial drone militarization across the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, focusing on three explanatory factors: the defense industrial base, organizational flexibility, and key actors. It argues that the United States leads due to its expanded and hybridized defense industrial base, which integrates private technology firms and non-military engineers as central agents of innovation. The United Kingdom, by contrast, remains constrained by bureaucratic inertia within a technocratic defense establishment, slowing the application of AI-enabled drone technologies. South Korea's experience further highlights how stringent defense standards, rooted in persistent security threats from North Korea, limit the transfer of commercial innovation into military use. By comparing these national trajectories, the study elucidates the institutional environments that enable or hinder the translation of commercial technological prowess into military capability, offering broader implications for understanding the evolving dynamics of defense innovation and the future balance of power in AI-driven warfare.
Author: Hyunsu Kim (Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea) -
This paper examines the role of the notion of ‘expertise’ in governing of security through the lens of risk. It engages this question with empirical focus on the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) border security programme and by examining its original contract documents. In 2004, the US-VISIT contract was awarded by the US Department of Homeland Security to the group of private companies who called themselves the Smart Border Alliance. It was a pioneering border security programme that recast border security as inherently a problem of perpetual risk management and hence recalibrated corresponding security practices by institutionalising far greater reliance on digitisation and data. The Smart Border Alliance included technology companies (e.g., Dell), consulting companies (e.g., Accenture that also led the group), as well as security companies (e.g., Titan Corporation). Together, they lay the claim to their collective ‘expertise’ in reformulating the USA’s border security practices and the reframing of border security through the lens of perpetual risk management. Through examination of original contract documents, this paper contributes to critical security studies scholarship by presenting a process-tracing genealogy of the turn to ‘risk’ in border security governance.
Author: Samah Rafiq (King's College London) -
Just as the war in Ukraine has seen exponential growth in the employment of remotely-piloted and (increasingly) autonomous airborne weapons – often shorthanded as ‘drones’ – so too the maritime domain is currently seeing a proliferation of uncrewed systems. In addition to Ukraine’s own successful employment of relatively simple and low-cost naval drones to cripple major Russian warships, most advanced navies are now switching to autonomous models of mine-hunting, China’s PLAN is progressing with the world’s largest and most diverse fleet of uncrewed submarines, and the Royal Navy’s own ‘Atlantic Bastion’ concept relies heavily on autonomous surface and sub-surface vessels to try to control vital UK sea lines of communication while suffering a paucity of crewed ships. Yet do such advances herald a genuine revolution in naval warfare, finally upending an inescapable truth of all previous maritime history: that those who seek to control the sea must be ready to deploy their people on, in, or above it? This paper will argue – via four related lines of reasoning – that the promise of such autonomous naval systems, while real, currently falls far short of such a revolutionary punchline.
Author: David Blagden (University of Exeter) -
Several UK government policy documents published over the past few years attempt to lay out a vision for and estimate of the challenges that policing institutions are likely to face over the coming decades. While generally less in focus of public debate than the Strategic Defense Review, National Security Strategy and Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy, these documents appear to follow in the tradition of recent years to militarise policing or at least adopt similar approaches and language of the military domain. This paper seeks to shed more light onto the ways in which future-of-policing discourses borrow from those in the military domain. By scrutinising the use of concepts and language in framing future operating environments, this research will examine how, if at all, threat framings in the policing and military domain converge or diverge and, in turn, are used to frame discussions over the adoption of AI technologies in policing. By doing so, this paper seeks to understand how the “unknown” (e.g., lone actors, cyber-enabled attacks) is constructed in police and military imaginations of the future, and whether or how these constructions justify the adoption pre-emptive AI-based technologies? Ultimately, this will help to understand if and how the adoption of AI policing tools reinforces, or perhaps challenges, current processes of police militarisation. The findings of this paper will make an important contribution to scholarship on police militarisation by directing scholarly attention from contemporary convergence of knowledge and practice to discussions about the future.
Author: Francisco Mazzola (King's College London)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / New hegemons? India and ChinaSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)Discussant: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
During the 2018-2020 US-China soybean trade dispute, China constructed a narrative strategy centered on “food security,” marking a pivotal moment in transforming external economic shocks into political narratives and reshaping the essence of food security. Based on a post-structuralist perspective and critical discourse analysis, this paper analyzes official policy documents and state media publications during the soybean trade dispute to develop a framework for examining how state-capitalist food security discourse is shaped. It examines the construction of discourse content, legitimization strategies, and identity formation processes within a one-party authoritarian system. By examining the binary oppositions within food security narratives, this study traces the temporal shaping of discourse during the trade dispute and elucidates its diffusion process. We argue that in the soybean dispute with the US, the Chinese government politicized food by exercising state control over knowledge production, capital allocation, and narrative interpretation, thereby aligning food security discourse with the logic of state capitalist governance. By revealing how crisis discourse functions as a governance tool, this study offers new perspectives for critical discussions on sovereignty, development, and political narratives in state capitalist governance.
Authors: Tomaz Mafano Fares (University of York)* , Ziyu Yan (University of York) , Tonghua Li (University of York) -
Since Xi Jinping amended China’s constitution in 2018 and effectively allowed himself to remain President for life, scholarly consensus suggests that the country has shifted from pragmatic authoritarianism towards a more assertive, centralised, and personalised mode of rule. This research examines the Chinese government’s political communication toward domestic audiences during major health crises. We built a database mapping official responses to pandemics from 2001 to 2023, collecting announcements from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission, and reports from both central and local state media. Using a mixed-method content analysis that combines manual coding and cluster analysis, we compare narrative patterns across different leaders and pandemic episodes.
We find that China’s official narratives have evolved from pragmatic reportage focused on crisis management and public health governance to ideologically charged discourse foregrounding national exceptionalism, self-praise, and criticisms of foreign countries’ governing capacity. Methodologically, the study offers a systematic, data-driven approach to tracing shifts in authoritarian communication. Conceptually, it invites new thinking about how authoritarian political communications evolve in response to global challenges and what this means for International Studies as it confronts the politics of crisis, legitimacy, and misinformation in an increasingly authoritarian world.Authors: Hongyi Lai (University of Nottingham)* , Weixiang Wang (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / New thinking, new directions from building educational communities in Politics and International Relations
As higher education faces multiple intersecting global challenges, collective thinking, reflection and action is essential for opening new directions not only for the discipline of Politics and International Relations but for the academy as whole (Stein 2024). Education communities offer a power space for this work, honouring, exploring and fostering pluriversality within and between our institutions. Such communities help to further pedagogical practices, research, and policy, while simultaneously building networks of solidarity.
In this roundtable we bring together educators and pedagogical scholars who have built and sustain educational communities across the academy, from departmental, institutional, national and international levels, to learn how educational communities enable new ways of thinking and doing in political education. We will hear from board members of international networks for global education; founders of the ASPIRE network for teaching-track colleagues in Politics and International Relations as well as directors of institution-based pedagogical research centres. From the importance of informal spaces for connection, to collective power for policy change, the roundtable will both reflect on how education communities have, do and could further create new ways of thinking and new directions for teaching and learning in Politics and International Relations.Sponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupChair: Madeleine Le Bourdon (University of Leeds)Participants: Louise Pears (University of Leeds) , Chris Featherstone (University of York) , Hillary Briffa (King's College London) , Jeremy Moulton (University of York) -
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Peace and Conflict Studies in the PolycrisisSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Sandra Pogodda (University of Manchester)Chair: Sandra Pogodda (University of Manchester)
-
From the contact theory of the 1950s to Western conflict resolution approaches of the 1980s and the power-sharing agreements of the 1990s, the theory and practice of peacemaking have been geared towards mutual understanding, moderation and compromise. Yet, the interventionary tools to create a middle ground between conflict parties have faced a range of critiques, especially regarding their ability to alleviate structural violence and to generate more than fragile stalemates between local conflict parties. In the 21st Century, the international peace architecture is encountering a range of issues and movements that defy consensus-building approaches, from revolutionary movements to demands for global justice, and the multi-directional pressures emerging from the polycrisis. Hence, this paper explores the place of radical thinking and anti-systemic resistance in peacemaking and scholarship. It investigates, how radical ideas have affected thinking about peace, and how radical demands have transformed the international peace architecture. Moreover, this research analyses how the marginalisation of radical approaches has created contradictions and faultlines in scholarship and in practice. Ultimately, it aims to answer the following question: can radical thinking help Peace and Conflict Studies overcome its current impasse in the face of the polycrisis?
Authors: Oliver Richmond (University of Manchester)* , Sandra Pogodda (University of Manchester) -
Building on recent existentialist contributions to IR and ontological security studies, this article contends that anxiety has become a systemic mood in contemporary international affairs, because of the deepening of uncertainty and the ongoing decay of the liberal international order. This systemic anxiety is generating an impasse in peacebuilding by driving stronger attachment to conflicts as means of suppressing existential uncertainty, generating doubt about the value and attainability of peace, and encouraging enactments of radical and heroic agency often manifest in violence. Nevertheless, these adverse effects of systemic anxiety can be mitigated by highlighting the insignificance of conflict in the context of more fundamental uncertainties, enhancing the stability of peace as a system of meaning, and re-associating peacebuilding with the values of autonomy, heroism, and radical agency.
Author: Bahar Rumelili (Koç University) -
The increasing backlash against women's inclusion in peace processes exemplifies a critical dimension of today's polycrisis: the intersection of democratic backsliding, authoritarian resurgence, and erosion of hard-won participatory gains around gender equality. Despite normative advances in women's inclusion in peace processes since UNSC Resolution 1325, a formidable backlash threatens these hard-won gains today. As democratic backsliding accelerates globally and anti-gender movements gain traction from Afghanistan to Western democracies, understanding resistance to inclusive peace processes becomes increasingly urgent. Anti-gender movements increasingly weaponize peace processes as sites of resistance against inclusion. This research, drawing on interviews with 50 women negotiators and mediators across multiple conflict contexts, moves beyond empiricist accounts of "women's participation" to examine the structural dynamics of exclusion. By delving into the root causes of resistance to inclusion, such as competition for power, patriarchal ideology, and social identity threats perceived by dominant groups, this study reveals how resistance to inclusive peace processes reflects and reinforces broader authoritarian trends. The framework proposed here connects micro-level exclusionary behaviors that we observe in negotiation processes to macro-level democratic erosion, demonstrating how gendered resistance in peace negotiations serves as both symptom and mechanism of the polycrisis.
Author: Esra Çuhadar (Bilkent University) -
This paper seeks to determine whether Peace Studies is currently experiencing a paradigmatic crisis and, if so, how such a crisis can be recognized and understood. Rather than assuming its existence, the research interrogates how the epistemological and institutional dynamics of the field reflect, refract, or resist the global polycrisis that characterizes the contemporary world. The central premise is that the state of the “external” world – marked by escalating nuclear threats, renewed geopolitical rivalries, accelerating climate deterioration, rising biological and public health risks, technological disruptions, and economic instability – cannot be separated from the “internal” world of Peace Studies, where its core concepts, methods, and purposes appear increasingly changing. To analyze this relationship, the study draws on Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, particularly his notion of crisis as a moment of paradigmatic instability preceding intellectual transformation. It also reflects on the epistemological implications of identifying a crisis, arguing that such a task requires rethinking the criteria of legitimacy and evaluation within the field, as well as the methodological tools used to study it. In this sense, Peace Studies is approached not merely as an object of analysis but as a living, reflexive discipline that interacts continuously with the historical and global challenges it seeks to address. Ultimately, the research considers whether the field is facing a Kuhnian crisis, not as a symptom of decline, but as an opportunity for paradigmatic renewal and the reaffirmation of its relevance in an increasingly complex and interdependent world.
Author: Theo Valois Souza Ferreira (University of Coimbra)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Processes of PeacemakingSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: PKPBG Working group
-
The concepts of peace and international law are deeply intertwined. This is true for the emerging paradigm of jus post bellum in particular. In this article, I conduct a critical review of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), a core pillar of jus post bellum, as well as the legal scholarship on the relationship between law and peace. I argue that the CCM builds upon and reproduces a limited notion of peace which is compatible with the presence of military violence. The CCM is thus unable to fulfill the requirements of a more demanding or non-violent conceptualization of peace. Critical legal scholars drawing on the political philosophy of Jacques Derrida have argued that pacifism and law are inherently incompatible, implying that the CCM could not play a more pacifying role even if its discursive content was changed. However, this argument relies on a problematic and simplifying reading of the work of Derrida. I argue that there is a need for deeper and more nuanced critical theoretical engagement with the concept of peace. Illustrating this potentiality, I conclude the article by providing a tentative theorization of peace drawing on the work of Butler.
Author: Aksel Bagge Hvid -
With the destruction and decoupling of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority and the settlement and annexation plans and activities of the Israeli government, an increasing number of analysts and activists are speaking about the death of the two-state solution. Voices supporting a one-state solution as the only viable and just solution to the conflict are multiplying. However, public surveys show little support for a one-state solution among both communities, especially Israeli Jews, and such a solution is often discarded by policymakers as a result. We believe that low public support for a one-state solution could be an artefact of (1) a lack of details about possible models of a one-state solution in survey questionnaires and (2) not situating respondents in a context where they directly compare these models with realistic alternatives. In this paper, we analyse the results of the first one-state solution conjoint experiment using representative samples of Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians, including Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, to assess preferences for different configurations of a one-state solution in comparison to the status quo, annexation without civil rights for Palestinians, and the two-state solution. We also include an embedded experiment to test the effect of persuasive framing on support for a one-state solution. Data collection will take place in March/April 2026, with the size of each of the four samples - Israeli Jews, Israeli Palestinians, West Bank Palestinians, and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon - carefully calculated to allow meaningful analysis of the nested framing experiment as well as relevant subgroups (e.g., based on demographics, political ideology, religiosity or victimisation) within each sample.
Authors: Sadi Shanaah (University of Warwick) , Edward Morgan-Jones (University of Kent)* , Neophytos Loizides (University of Warwick) -
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have steadily been on the rise in conflict contexts and consequently in peacebuilding efforts in the recent decades. Although there is a lot of excitement about the use of ICTs, little is understood about how these technologies are utilized by conflict actors in dialogue and peace processes. This research paper will analyze whether there is an effect of Non-State Armed Groups’ (NSAGs) use of ICTs in dialogue or peace processes regarding their agency, inclusion and legitimacy within the process, if so, under which conditions. How do ICTs affect the group’s relationship with communities living in controlled territories or their legitimacy in the process? This paper will explore these questions within a qualitative comparative case study examining peace processes in Colombia and Southern Thailand drawing on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with conflict actors including members of NSAGs, civil society members, government actors, and community members on the effects of how ICTs are utilized within dialogue or peace processes. The research contributes to the empirical question of the role of ICTs in dialogue and peace processes and aims to further contribute to the debate among academics and practitioners on the role of ICTs in peacebuilding interventions.
Author: Rebecca Davis -
Whether in Ankara or Budapest, key historical peace treaties are frequently invoked by politicians, with important implications for long-term stable peace, reconciliation, statehood, and international cooperation. Recent literature attributes such dynamics largely to the rise of populist leaders. While this is partly accurate, it is also important to recognize that major treaties themselves contain features such as power-sharing arrangements or territorial and population exchanges that shape postwar relations among former belligerents and rivals. We argue that transitions to higher levels of peace hinge on whether treaties are predominantly punitive (past-looking, focused on reparations and blame) or constitutive (forward-looking, establishing new, mutually accepted institutional setups). To assess this claim, we draw on an original dataset on peace treaties, complemented by several datasets measuring levels of peace. We analyze the post-treaty environment over time by examining internal debates within the main defeated parties, with particular attention to the major World War I treaties. Our findings contribute to academic and policy discussions on recurrent conflict and the conditions necessary for the achievement of stable peace.
Authors: Batur Ozan Togay (Koç University) , Reşat Bayer (Koç University)* , Clara Imogen Manya Robins (Koç University)* , Mehmed Eryiğit (Koç University)* -
Why do third parties intervene in conflicts under the banner of peace? While prior research emphasizes political or normative motives, growing evidence highlights the role of unilateral agendas and material incentives. This study offers empirical foundations for the concept of the peace–military–mercantile complex, introduced here to theorize how economic interests shape conflict intervention decisions. As climate change strains resources and conflict zones grant access to extractives, resource acquisition becomes a key driver of intervention. We test this claim using a quasi-experimental, staggered-treatment difference-in-differences (DID) framework, leveraging detailed geospatial data on extraction operations in conflict areas. Two DID models assess how the presence of extraction sites influences three forms of third-party intervention: (1) non-coercive mediation, (2) military intervention, and (3) coercive mediation—combined military and diplomatic engagement. Findings will offer empirical insight into how extraction activity affects both the likelihood and type of third-party involvement. We expect that new extraction operations increase third-party mediation and military actions. These results challenge dominant narratives of neutral peace-making and peacekeeping and emphasize the political-economic motivations underpinning contemporary interventions. Ultimately, this research questions the presumed altruism of peace efforts and highlights the convergence of conflict resolution, military action, and global economic competition.
Authors: Elisa D'Amico (University College Dublin)* , Kasia Houghton (University of St Andrews)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Security and desecurity in the postcolonial: borders, nations, entanglementsSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
As international studies confronts calls to decolonize knowledge and reimagine global hierarchies, this paper asks whether military cooperation among democracies can reproduce postcolonial forms of dependency. Focusing on the U.S.–Taiwan relationship, it argues that arms transfers, defense education, and alliance discourse together sustain asymmetrical structures that mirror historical imperial patterns. Drawing on mixed methods—archival research, SIPRI arms transfer data (1990–2023), and elite interviews with policymakers—this study reveals three interlinked dynamics: (1) structural dependency on U.S. defense systems and doctrine; (2) Taiwan’s negotiation of limited agency through indigenous programs; and (3) symbolic narratives that frame Taiwan as a “beacon of democracy” yet perpetually vulnerable.
The paper’s novelty lies in bridging postcolonial theory and empirical security studies, offering a framework for analyzing dependency as simultaneously material and discursive. It invites scholars to view alliance politics not only as strategic bargains but also as sites where global hierarchies are reproduced and contested. By extending postcolonial insights to the Indo-Pacific, the study speaks to broader debates about hierarchy, autonomy, and the future of international studies in an era of shifting power and decolonial critique.Author: Ji-Jen Hwang (Rabdan Academy) -
As seen in the recent wave of anti-immigration protests and governmental discourses across the globe, we are living in a highly securitised environment. While the literature has duly responded by exploring the normative impact of securitising migration, still, less is known about how, if at all, we can desecuritise migrant populations. South America is an ideal testing ground for desecuritisation, given the region’s paradigmatic ‘open doors’ approach to migration during the 2000s post-neoliberal tide. Drawing from the comparative analysis of Ecuadorian and Argentinian migration policy, this paper maps desecuritisation strategies and the racialised, gendered, and colonial factors that shaped their emergence and demise. Turning to Latin American decolonial literature, the paper contributes to critical security scholarship by bringing a South-South perspective to the relatively underexplored desecuritisation of migration.
Author: Gabriela García García (University of Surrey) -
Brazil’s official position on the Falklands War supports Argentina’s claims over the ‘Malvinas’ islands. The conflict has since raised strategic questions explored by the Brazilian Navy regarding the deterrence of the South Atlantic from Global North actors. However, the Navy’s strategic discourse not only reproduces but idealises Margaret Thatcher’s strategic shrewdness, even while referring to the conflict as the ‘Malvinas’. Why does Brazil’s foreign policy look to the South Atlantic, while its strategic posture aligns with the North Atlantic? This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the concept of fantasy. It argues that the Brazilian Navy’s strategic discourse reflects a post-colonial condition in which ritual deterrence articulates a fantasised image of the civilised Western Other. The Navy resists Britain’s perceived imperial presence in its strategic orbit, while simultaneously emulating its strategic discourse. This paper contributes to the growing literature on ritual deterrence by showing how, in Brazil’s post-colonial context, it serves to stabilise an internally coherent self.
Authors: Marco Vieira (University of Birmingham)* , Bruno Sowden-Carvalho (University of Birmingham)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Sovereignty, Status and TechnologySponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)Chair: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)
-
This paper constitutes a presentation of the recently published book 'Geopolitical Union'. From the rise of China as a technological superpower, to wars on its eastern borders, to the belief that the US is no longer a reliable ally, the European Commission sees the world as more unstable than at any other time in recent history. As such, the Commission has become the Geopolitical Commission, working to serve the interests of the Geopolitical Union. Central to many of these conflicts is technology – who produces it, where it is produced, and who controls it. These questions are central to the Commission's pursuit of digital/technological sovereignty, Europe's attempt to regain control of technology regulation.
Focusing on topics such as setting technological standards, ensuring access to microchips, reining in online platforms, and securing rules for industrial data and AI, this book explores the EU's approach to lawmaking in this field; increased regulatory oversight and promotion of industrial policy at home, while exporting its rules abroad. The presentation will summarise the key findings of the book, before expanding upon what contemporary developments mean for the success of the von der Leyen II Commission in achieving its ambitions of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy in technology.
Author: Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University) -
In contemporary International Relations (IR) scholarship, discussions of the European Union’s (EU) digital politics almost inevitably encounter the concept of digital sovereignty. Both in academic debates and political discourse, the term has emerged as a central yet contested notion, prompting scholars to interrogate its origins, meanings, and implications.
This paper contributes to these debates by exploring how digital sovereigntist policies influence structural arrangements in the global economy and the power dynamics they constitute and condition. It develops a theoretical perspective that combines insights from International Political Economy (IPE) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by drawing on Susan Strange’s eclectic structural framework–particularly her multilayered conception of structural power–and integrating an infrastructural perspective within it.
This interdisciplinary lens foregrounds the mundane and often invisible processes of infrastructuring that underpin global economic networks. From this viewpoint, digital sovereigntist policies can be understood as part of ongoing processes of infrastructuring–subtle interventions that steer these processes in particular directions. In doing so, they influence not only the shape of infrastructural arrangements but also the configurations of structural power in the global political economy.
The argument is illustrated through case studies of digital technologies designated by the EU as central to European digital sovereignty. These cases trace how EU policies shape the design of individual technologies, the infrastructures of which they form integral parts, and the broader economic structures in which they are embedded. By doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on European digital sovereignty, to scholarship at the intersection of IR and STS, and to emerging neo-Strangean approaches within IPE.Author: Laura Meyer -
In the post COVID-19 era, digital transformation (DX) has become a global phenomenon, and the world is now entering an era of AI transformation (AX). In this context, data has emerged as the indispensable strategic resource for states. The elevation of data onto the agenda of international politics reflects a growing recognition that data-driven emerging technologies—most notably AI—now shape not only national economies and industries but also core dimensions of national security. A catalytic case was the late-2010s U.S. ban on Huawei under the Trump administration, which effectively securitized data. Washington’s pressure on its allies to participate in the Huawei ban and the Clean Network initiative triggered intensified debates within Europe, Japan, and other allied countries over technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Amid these debates, this study centers on data sovereignty as a critical concept for the AX era. States have increasingly focused on data infrastructure as the foundation for securing data sovereignty: not only the domestic capability to build data infrastructure on the basis of national technological competencies, but also the capacity to protect that infrastructure.
The analysis focuses on Japan’s recent measures. As a relative latecomer in AI, Japan has embarked on extensive investments across multiple sectors—establishing data centers for AI, expanding semiconductor production, and fostering generative AI technologies. While such moves are often interpreted through the lens of economic security, this study advances a distinct argument by reframing Japan’s trajectory through the prism of sovereignty. This article first traces how ‘data sovereignty’ has been employed in prior research and develops an analytical framework. It then examines the proximate causes of Japan’s turn to data sovereignty, highlighting the erosion of sovereignty via alliance pressures. Lastly, it maps Japan’s efforts to secure data sovereignty across multi-domains—terrestrial, undersea, space, and cyber.Authors: Kyungmin Baik , Suyeon Lee (Seoul National University) -
Private companies are now central to cybersecurity management and resilience across Europe. Never has public-private cooperation been so important to national security policy. The success or failure of cybersecurity depends crucially on this relationship and its ability to steer complex technologies. Yet there is a remarkable dearth of knowledge about this process at the national level and how it can be theorised. Whilst the literature on the European Union (EU) as a cybersecurity actor has surged in recent years, in particular following its ‘technologically sovereignty’ turn (Farrand et al 2024; Barrinha and Christou 2022) we know much less about the European nation-state landscape. Here, private companies not only provide key ‘public’ services, including cybersecurity, but also shape policy (Carrapico and Farrand 2016). This interplay between public and private actors creates what has been described as "hybrid sovereignty" (Srivastava 2022), where traditional notions of state sovereignty are redefined through collaborative and interdependent governance frameworks. Our paper aims to expand the concept of hybrid sovereignty by further exploring how it can operationalised to explain the dynamics present in the field of European cybersecurity, in particular comparing ‘idealised sovereignty’ and ‘lived sovereignty’.
Authors: Richard Aldrich (University of Warwick) , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) , George Christou (University of Warwick)*
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The Cause of WarSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: Tara Zammit (Kings College London)
-
Process tracing is well suited to addressing the causes of wars and their outcomes. Wars are relatively rare, always multicausal, and typically characterized by the presence of idiosyncratic context-dependent factors about which it is hard to generalize (see Tannenwald 2015). What, though, can process tracing teach us? This paper follows Suganami (1996) and Mahoney (2015) by focusing on the different kinds of questions we can ask about the causes of wars. It argues that whereas the focus is often on answering synoptic questions about what ‘explains’ wars and their outcomes, process tracing’s real added value lies in its ability to answer narrower questions about whether particular factors of interest did or did not contribute causally in particular contexts. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, answering these narrower questions also turns out to be the key pathway through which process tracing can contribute to the construction of broader theories about the causes of wars and their outcomes. Crucially, however, these theories are not ‘general’ in the way that is sometimes suggested (see e.g. Beach and Pedersen 2013). Rather, these theories describe causal propensities (see Humphreys and Suganami 2024): ideal-typical patterns the unfolding of which is inherently context-dependent.
Author: Adam Humphreys (University of Reading) -
In its essence, war is typically conceived as the reciprocity of hostile intentions between groups which results in fighting/mortal contest (Cf. Clausewitz’ definition). Though concise, this conception is existentially superficial insofar as it presupposes an understanding of the notion of “hostile intentionality” (i.e., “enmity”) at its core. In response, this paper proposes a phenomenological-existentialist conception of the essence of war as Being-against – a term which inverts Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being-with to understand the mutually constitutive nature of enmity/enemies. Through this notion, I contextualize the horror of war in relation to the existential gratification which Being-against potentially—and tragically—facilitates; thereby, I offer a broad explanation for the historical tendency towards war. Moreover, I show that Being-against is an inalienable possibility for a being such as we are; any pacifism, as such, must take this possibility/gratifying tendency seriously if it is to achieve its ends. To conclude, I outline one major contribution of this approach, namely, its ability to contextualize the existential significance of rapidly evolving technologies; specifically, I outline the terms for asking whether robots, guided by artificial intelligence, could ever be-against in our—or some other—fashion.
Author: Mark Gilks (Independent) -
Why do states use flags and national insignia to justify violent territory seizures? Throughout history, states have used flags as a means of asserting their sovereignty over others. Whether the U.S.’s landing on the moon in 1969 or Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the raising of the national flag over these areas was of immediate priority. States constantly use flags to establish legitimacy, relying on the symbolic importance of small pieces of cloth to represent entire nations. While literature on the importance of symbols, sovereignty, and legitimacy remains vast, viewed in the context of territory seizures, it is lacking. In disputes over territory, flags are a cause of great distress and have been used as a justification for deadly violence. Using grounded theory and the constant comparative method, I examine the major geographic disputes of Russia, Argentina, and China in the modern era. In each case, flags and national insignia were used to justify sovereignty claims, often leading to scores of deaths over small, if not insignificant, pieces of land. My analysis shows that states are willing to incur high material costs and that military personnel will engage in deadly conflict despite potential negative outcomes when national symbols are used in territorial seizures. In all, I contribute to research on sovereignty disputes and provide a new perspective on the importance of flags on the battlefield.
Author: Matthew Ellis (Purdue University) -
War has become illegitimate as a way to resolve disputes between states. Victory in battle is no longer a triumph that is respected by the international community and accepted as a way to decide ownership of territory or the distribution of rights. Instead, states deny they are ‘at war’ and try to manipulate the legitimacy of their use of force in various ways. But exactly what difference does this rhetorical shift make to how states make war? In this paper, I demonstrate the various effects of the illegitimacy of war on the diplomacy and conduct of war and peacemaking through a comparison between two uses of force; the Japanese invasions of Manchuria in 1894 and 1931, known as the Sino-Japanese War and the Manchurian Crisis. This paper uses in-depth primary source evidence to show that the two cases differ radically in the justifications for the war and the framing of the use of force, the attitudes of third-parties to the nature and outcome of the use of force and how belligerents tried to make use and manipulate those attitudes.
Author: Joseph O'MAHONEY (University of Reading) -
The paper explores why democratic multi-party coalitions (sometimes) commit to war. It argues that decisions of coalition governments for or against the use of military force in international politics are critically shaped by considerations of political survival. To develop this argument, the paper integrates insights from the study of foreign policy decision-making processes, works on political survival, and scholarship on coalition politics. Specifically, it extends the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision-making (PHT) to the study of coalition foreign policy in parliamentary democracies. PHT is one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive-rationalist divide in Foreign Policy Analysis and suggests that decision-makers rely on a non-compensatory strategy to simplify their decision problem before they switch to a more demanding compensatory mode of information processing. Importantly, the theory conceptualises domestic politics as the critical non-compensatory dimension in foreign policy-making. The paper operationalises PHT’s principle of ‘major domestic political loss aversion’ for the study of coalition governments, theorising that the non-compensatory dimension for coalition foreign policy consists of the expected impact of foreign policy on coalition survival. The paper discusses how this plays out in different types of coalition governments and illustrates its argument with comparative case studies from German and Japanese foreign policy.
Authors: Kai Oppermann (TU Chemnitz) , Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The Contested Politics of ‘The Human’ in Conflict and Security StudiesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Patrick Vernon (University of Wolverhampton)Chair: Vicki Squire (University of Warwick)
-
A key dimension of the War on Gaza has been the extensive use of drone warfare, the scope of which is without precedent in global histories of mass violence. Exploring the queer politics of quadcopter drones, this paper interrogates the various practical and ontological implications of drones being deployed in the War on Gaza. It begins by first exploring the queer relationship between terrorism and drone warfare, as well as the eliminationist epistemologies that drone warfare constructs. It then explores the extent to which drone warfare challenges private/public/international (Enloe, 1990) boundaries by invading and targeting the private sphere at close quarters to an unprecedented extent. Beyond this, it studies the weaponisation and mechanisation of gendercide (Jones, 2000, 2006) through drone warfare, whilst situating the queer politics of quadcopters within the broader context of the War on Gaza and the geopolitics that sustain it. Cumulatively, the paper makes the case that by queering intimate/distant, terrorist/civilian and human/machine binaries, quadcopter drones are being used to extend the genocidal project and the rhetoric that sustains it to the greatest possible extent.
Author: Patrick Vernon (University of Wolverhampton) -
The idea killer robot standing in for a vast complex of human intelligence, producing and analyzing data, machine learning, and targeting and more stands as a kind of well-known figure of imagination standing in for the complex human/technological systems that produce certain humans as ‘targets’ of violence. I examine the ‘thingliness’ or the ‘objectness’ of the AI through the figuration of the robot, especially in its socio-technical imaginaries as an embodied form in order to think through the production of the ‘human’ and its others. I explore the interlinked histories of war, capitalism, imperialism, gender, and race to argue that the AI robot figuration reveals the ongoing gendered racialization of the “human” subject. Engaging with Wynter, Amaro, McKittrick, Warren, and others, I argue that the figuration of ‘the robot’ serves as a map to illuminate how race, embodiment, reproduction, violence, and sovereignty are reproduced in the development of AI technologies, both in general, and specifically for use in war/policing/occupation. As laboring bodies, commodified flesh, fungible property, and reproducers of all of these, the figure of the enslaved and the figure of the robot bear an uneasy and uncanny resemblance and, I would argue, are produced in relation to each other. I argue here that the terror of ‘killer robots’ is in the reproduction of the relation from Fanon, the ‘becoming object’ in relation to a white body.
Author: Lauren Wilcox (University of Cambridge) -
States engage in re/bordering efforts in the name of national security globally. Increasingly, these take the form of migrant detention, extra-judicial deportations, and border militarisation. In this context, the notion of ‘migrant struggles’ constitutes a key conceptual device for understanding subjective responses to many of these pervasive and unequal bordering practices. These struggles may either directly confront dominant systems of migration governance or manifest as everyday acts of refusal/resistance that do not necessarily take the form of overt political contestation. In this paper, I build on new materialist, feminist, and performance studies scholarship to articulate the notion of ‘more-than-human migrant struggles’. In observing states’ instrumentalization of nature to re/border, control and deter unwanted forms of cross-border mobility, I trace how migrant struggles can be shaped by the mediated agencies of non-human lives (such as plants and non-human animals), geomorphic bodies (such as rivers, mountains, drylands, among others), and inanimate things – in short, the more-than-human. In unpacking the complexity of these exchanges, I illustrate my view in the example of contemporary precarious mobilities across the Americas and suggest alternatives for further exploration in other locations worldwide.
Author: Mauricio Palma-Gutierrez (University of Wolverhampton) -
This paper theorises the ways in which superrich techno-capitalists pursue engineered transcendence from both the polis and the flesh, treating the end of the world and the end of the body as mutually reinforcing political projects. Contemporary Silicon Valley technocapitalist imaginaries are increasingly positioning apocalypse as opportunity: a programmable horizon to be optimized through technological infrastructures. Against narratives that frame emerging products such as luxury bunkers, cryogenic longevity ventures, oceanic seasteads, and outer-space colonization as eccentric billionaire hobbies, this analysis instead reads them as co-constitutive expressions of an evolved settler-colonial imperative to exit rather than to repair shared worlds. Drawing on critical security studies, feminist new materialism, and genealogies of neoliberal governance (Brown; Cooper; Slobodian), I argue that these projects enact a political theology of engineered survival in which the body is reconfigured as a technology to optimize, and apocalypse becomes a speculative commodity project.
Foregrounding Thiel’s techno-reactionary body futurism and AI-mediated fantasies of sovereign self-enclosure, the paper traces how transhumanist logics that promise “escape velocity” from biological limits, mortality, and democratic interdependence. In this schema, not all bodies are imagined as deserving of futurity. Instead, technology arbitrates who must inhabit a dying planet and who may transcend it, either through literal escape or new forms of embodiment. Situating these infrastructures of survival within colonial histories of extraction and futurity, I contend that the technocratic management of both apocalypse and the body is central to the technocapitalist reimagining of the ways that “the human” could/should survive doomsday.
Author: Leah Schmidt -
This paper offers a broader analysis of the ways in which racial-colonial ideas and dynamics of property and possession shape international order. Addressing a certain elision in International Relations (IR) theory concerning the role of property in global dynamics of power and security, it contends that looking at the longstanding and pervasive links between property and the body can further IR's understandings of sovereignty, land, and race. The paper's central claim is that our contemporary international order has been foundationally built upon and centred around racialised practices, imaginaries, and regimes of property-making, ownership, and (dis)possession. First, the article argues that racial-colonial ideas and practices of property and (dis)possession against racialised bodies were central to the emergence and maintenance of the sovereign state. In doing so, it reframes sovereignty as the continuous materialisation of a violent and bodily relationship of possession. Second, it argues that property plays a central role in the production, remaking, and policing of global colour lines. Revealing a persistent link between race, property, and subjectivity, it contends that violent regimes of (dis)possession and ownership have been and continue to be central tools in producing and maintaining racial divisions and, thereby, regulating international order. The paper substantiates these arguments through empirical examinations of key contemporary security practices - from border regimes and counterterrorism to dynamics of settler occupation.
Author: Tarsis Brito (SOAS)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The Role of Sex and Gender in Security: Borders, Threats and ProtectionSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
In recent years, IR has increasingly committed to a substantive engagement with the politics of transness. From early theorizations in relation to gendered practices of surveillance to more recent calls for engagement with trans* studies, work on the topic of transness in IR is gathering pace. In this context, I draw on interviews with UK-based trans refugee solidarity organizers and trans people with experience of seeking asylum in the UK to argue that trans anti-border political praxis represents a theoretically significant body of knowledge on borders as a site for the violent reproduction of racialized gender. In doing this, I hope to both further disrupt accounts of transness as an abstracted theoretical category in IR and advocate for an approach to engaging with contemporary trans political practice as an ongoing site of knowledge production with implications for how we understand borders and the state.
Author: Jo Hills (University of Sussex) -
This paper presents a preliminary study of how West Papuan women’s groups frame their activism to navigate the risks and restrictions of operating under Indonesian rule. In a context marked by militarisation, surveillance, and gendered marginalisation, West Papuan women have emerged as vital but overlooked peace actors. Drawing on peace and conflict studies and feminist discursive institutionalism, the paper examines how women construct discourses of peace, care and spirituality to legitimise their activism and negotiate limited political and social spaces. It argues that by framing their advocacy through culturally resonant narratives of motherhood, faith, and community resilience, women are able to advance claims for rights and justice while minimising exposure to state repression. This framing enables them to sustain local networks of support, foster social cohesion, and challenge both militarised and patriarchal structures. Conceptually, the paper introduces the concept of “gendered peace under repression” to describe the strategies through which women mobilise peace and survival within repressive institutional environments. As a preliminary inquiry, the study highlights the need for further empirical research into women’s agency, framing practices, and contributions to peacebuilding in West Papua and other protracted conflict zones.
Authors: Shelliann Israelsen (Radboud University) , Muhammad Ammar Hidayahtulloh (Radboud University)* -
Non-conventional military operations — from peacekeeping to the increasing trend of domestic deployments involving non-combat tasks with limited engagement rules — reveal a security closet: a state of protection that dare not speak its name. In this closet, the non-conventional aspects of operations are treated as if they did not exist, leading soldiers to quietly translate personal and mission uncertainties into a legible, conventional, heteromasculine narrative that disciplines the unusual into what counts as proper protection. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with soldiers deployed in France’s Vigipirate plan and UNIFIL in Lebanon, the paper examines how soldiers describe these operations as ‘travestite’ missions, perverse relative to combat standards and war logics. Puzzlingly, the paper shows how soldiers still carried out those missions by operationalising and weaponising their personal vulnerabilities as fathers/husbands/soldiers. In doing so, they engage in hetero sense-making — equating the mission with familial duties — to render the otherwise deviant, incomplete, and unintelligible mission legible. Hence, back to the security closet, the result is a double denial of anxiety: the state hides its own insecurity through military visibility, while the army conceals its unease at being used in a travestite way with an intimacy that re-settles its hegemonic identity through heteromasculine and familiarist practices of care.
Author: Edgar Paysant (Sciences Po Paris)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The World Politics of Protecting NatureSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)
-
This paper takes up Ursula Biemann’s question of what art is and what artistic action may be for, exploring how art may not only reveal damaged systems in need of repair, but also participate in meaningful and necessary acts of reparation. Drawing on diverse forms of ecological art, creative practice, and collaborative research centered on multi-species encounters, I consider how a reparative intention might be expressed methodologically within social research. I map out modes of everyday attunement, along with ways of knowing, being, and co-creating that affirm interdependence over disconnection. Through this inquiry, I seek imaginative and practical approaches that collapse or otherwise negotiate the distance between representation and life. I reflect, from ethical and political perspectives, on how to hold and mediate across diverse knowledge forms, aspiring towards more plural sensitivities to selfhood, otherness, and our embeddedness in the more-than-human world.
Author: Erzsébet Strausz (Central European University) -
Protecting nature is a pressing global concern, particularly with accelerating climate change and resource exploitation. Despite signs of a shifting landscape, nature protection remains an urgent issue. Ecological jurisprudence refers to the legal recognition of the intrinsic value of the non-human world, challenging traditional anthropocentric frameworks that regard nature as property. Globally, there are various governance approaches to nature protection under ecological jurisprudence. This paper aims to compare how different regions adopt distinct governance models to institutionalise nature protection. It will draw on a global dataset comprising 592 entries of ecological jurisprudence to identify broad regional patterns in governance approaches. The dataset captures the diversity of regulatory, constitutional and community-based frameworks, allowing for a comprehensive assessment of how nature is recognised and governed worldwide. Building on this overview, the paper will focus on Latin America and Oceania, regions that are pioneers in ecological jurisprudence and rich in ecosystems, habitats and biodiversity, to examine their governance approaches. The findings are expected to provide insights and establish generalisations regarding regional governance for nature protection. Specifically, the comparative analysis of Latin America and Oceania will highlight two distinctly different approaches. Latin America stands out with its Rights of Nature frameworks, while Oceania embraces indigenous models. By integrating empirical analysis with theoretical reflection, this paper will contribute to ongoing debates on ecological jurisprudence and governance frameworks. Fundamentally, the paper will emphasise the importance of recognising multiple nature-based solutions and advocating for a diverse governance approach to protect ecosystems, habitats and biodiversity.
Author: Rose Bevan-Smith (University of Bath) -
Amid accelerating global ecological degradation, financial incentive-based conservation has gained prominence in policy and research, mobilising billions in investments annually. One key instrument of global climate finance under the UN Paris Agreement framework are payments for ecosystem services (PES). Promoted as a flagship solution to pay for the provision of ‘nature’s services’, the evidence of its effectiveness remains sparse while social equity and justice concerns persist. Debates on social equity and justice in PES, however, focus on the reproduction and subversion of neoliberal capitalist environmentalism – and neglect the ways in which PES are shaped by Western colonial heteropatriarchal ideas that uphold neoliberal capitalism. If justice is a central concern of critical scholars examining ideologies and power structures underlying as well as micro-practices subverting neoliberal logics within PES, then I contend that these critiques need to consider the conditions of social and environmental reproduction within PES. Drawing on materialist ecofeminist theory and (eco)feminist political economy, I argue that current critical debates on PES overlook three important issues: the issue of Western dualisms, the issue of gendered and racialised labour, and the issue of capitalist crisis as a crisis of social-ecological reproduction. Extending existing critiques of PES, ecofeminisms reveal how incentive-based conservation governance reproduces the conditions of possibility for ecological destruction it aims to solve, since it is based on a contradiction between capitalist environmentalism and the conditions of social and ecological reproduction. A sustained and serious engagement with ecofeminist arguments is needed to envision forms of conservation that are socially and ecologically just.
Author: Magdalena Svetlana Rodekirchen (University of Manchester)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The coloniality of Far-right and Fascist Fantasies and DiscoursesSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
The rise of nationalist, populist, and right-wing movements has reignited discourse around fascism, from the Unite the Kingdom rally in London to the actions of the Trump administration and beyond. However, despite a wealth of scholarship that ties fascism to global systems of neoliberalism and racial capitalism, fascism travelling outside of its domestic context remains a relatively recent intervention. I therefore ask: how and why do fascist politics migrate via the diaspora? Specifically, what does contemporary fascism look like beyond the context of a single state? A notable example of this phenomenon has been the expansion of Hindu nationalist fascism – or Hindutva – past India’s border. Threads of Hindutva have spread across diasporic communities, visible in mob violence in Leicester, England and Brampton, Canada; rallies in the United States supporting Prime Minister Modi; and Hindu nationalist organizations influencing educational curricula. To explain these events, I argue there exists a grammar of a transnational, expansionist fascism, dependent on and shaped by desire and fantasy. This grammar in turn cultivates an attachment to a deterritorialized affective identity. Through examining stories, narratives, and myths, this project contributes to broader redefinitions of fascism and diasporas emerging from the Global South through literature and storytelling.
Author: Nina Kaushikkar (University of Minnesota) -
This intervention examines scapegoating as a crucial shared practice by the European and global far right. Drawing on works in social and political theory, I define scapegoating as a form of Othering by which a figure or group – typically those seen foreign, i.e. in-between a community and its outside – is made to bear the failures and undesirable traits of the whole Self/community using a demonisation-idealisation logic. The far right typically demonise its Others as either too ‘Oriental’ (e.g. backward, overly religious, patriarchal) or too ‘Occidental’ (e.g. woke, globalist, unpatriotic). Using scapegoating as theoretical prism, I show the intrinsic link between these two sets of enemy frames and how they idealise the far right itself as protector of both ‘good Oriental’ values like authenticity, patriotism, loyalty and community, and ‘good Occidental’ values like Christianity, rationality and technological progress. I suggest that the scapegoating of internal ‘Orients’ and ‘Occidents’ is a key discourse-practice shared and networked by far right actors. Not only does scapegoating make up the backbone of reactionary far right identity projects in various localities; these shared scapegoating practices also work to reconfigure the West/Rest binary in international politics in (more) reactionary form – keeping the assumption of Occidental superiority nurtured in the ‘old’ West while privileging new actors and spaces as representing the ‘new’ or ‘true’ West, from MAGA and Silicon Valley to Orban to Putin.
Author: Anni Roth Hjermann (NUPI) -
This article examines how decolonial perspectives are inverted and misappropriated through anti-gender rhetoric by politicians such as Orbán, Putin, and Erdoğan. By analyzing their public speeches from 2010 to the present, specifically those addressing gender, the research explores how these politicians selectively appropriate decolonial discourse by portraying gender as a Western epistemic imposition and framing gender justice initiatives as cultural imperialism. The study argues that anti-gender rhetoric systematically opposes gender justice by invoking narratives around the protection of the nation, family, and traditional gender roles, thus reinforcing sovereignty claims and depicting traditional gender roles as threatened by Western imperialism. They frame Western imperialism as an anti-sovereign and anti-traditional force that enforces epistemic hegemony and promotes moral corruption, positioning themselves as resisting this alleged colonial imposition. They co-opt critiques of epistemic colonialism and sovereignty to frame gender justice as imperialist. Family, masculinity, and femininity are strategically repurposed: decolonial concepts originally intended to challenge hegemonic epistemologies are paradoxically instrumentalized to reinforce traditional gender norms against international norms. Consequently, gender emerges as a battleground where opposition to the West intersects with authoritarian governance, as anti-gender rhetoric reframes epistemic decolonization as a tool for resisting liberal norms while reinforcing nationalist and illiberal structures. Epistemic decolonization is thus paradoxically mobilized as an ideological tool within anti-gender discourse, legitimizing nationalist and illiberal governance strategies in contemporary global politics.
Author: Can Celik (PhD Candidate)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / The elite politics of deterrence: elite practices and the making of deterrence strategy and policySponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConvener: Thomas FraiseChair: Thomas Fraise
-
The Third Nuclear Age is characterised by intensified geopolitical rivalry, the diffusion of advanced technologies, and the intermingling of nuclear and conventional deterrence. This paper examines how public perception management, defined as the strategic construction and manipulation of threat narratives for domestic, international and adversary audiences, shapes the politics and efficacy of strategy of deterrence. In an age of disinformation and cyber warfare, disparate perceptions around a crisis can produce destabilising effects for the force equilibrium, leaving the parties involved, in a perpetual state of insecurity. Incongruent victory narratives that dominate the crisis and post-crisis period, can diminish the lessons ought to be learnt from a crisis and thereby, making ‘deterrence’, a self-defeating goal. I discuss the role of public perception management in deterrence politics by examining the cases of India and Pakistan in light of the 88-hour conflict in May 2025.
Author: Shivani Singh (O.P. Jindal University) -
Extended Nuclear Deterrence (END) has made a comeback in European strategic discourses. Interestingly, we still lack an intellectual history of this category of nuclear discourse. Though it describes a type of deterrence practice which emerged in the mid-1950s, the concept itself did not enter academic and expert discourse until the late 1960s. Deterrence, without adjectives, was the word of choice. The concept assumed the existence of a natural referent object of deterrence, defined as the “homeland”. But the “homeland” is a political, not a geographic concept, without fixed boundaries. The paper makes the hypothesis that the END category emerged as a response to a sense of threat to the Western Hemisphere which led US strategists and policymakers to rethink their relation to their allies. This rethinking involved not simply a re-assessment of interest, but a re-definition of identity so as to construct clients as ontologically different from their patrons. This finding, if confirmed, has implications for the contemporary practice of END: if the homeland is to be protected, then to be protected too, deterrence clients must not simply convince their patron of a shared interests, but of a shared identity.
Author: Thomas Fraise -
This paper investigates the relationship between extended nuclear deterrence (END) and the domestic politics of client democracies. Focusing on the Netherlands, it traces how secrecy was utilized to deflect criticism of END and stabilize Dutch participation in NATO deterrence practices since the end of the Cold War. Throughout this period, the Netherlands has remained a nuclear hosting state with a strong commitment to NATO membership, yet Dutch governments have also faced periodic resistance to both nuclear policy itself and the lack of transparency around it. Such resistance has done little to alter the country’s position in NATO. This paper argues that secrecy has been instrumental in neutralizing domestic political pressures on END. First, and most obviously, secrecy shuts down debate. Dutch parliamentarians are unable to discuss the country’s policy without substantive information, and the invocation of secrecy delegitimises attempts to do so. Second, appeals to secrecy allow for selective representations of facts and rationales. In particular, references to “alliance obligations” facilitate a political useful conflation between END and NATO membership. Finally, secrecy may be used to police a distinction between insiders and outsiders to the nuclear governance system. Political uses of secrecy thus stabilize extended deterrence.
Author: Sterre van Buuren (University of Glasgow) -
How do elites produce threat and reassurance? In US-China relations, interaction ritual chains (IRC) manifest in two ways. The first is the direct interaction of American and Chinese state entities and the mutual surveillance of military forces. These practices bring state-coded bodies together, spark emotional energy and create lasting symbolism. The second is when ritualised practices (e.g. exercises) conducted by one state are re-interpreted by the other. Whereas traditional deterrence theory has concerned itself with the correct production of signals, mobilising IRC adds to our understanding by asking why some practices fail while others succeed. This paper argues that the two states’ elites emphasise different canonical events and practices in their understanding of deterrence effectiveness. PRC deterrentifications of US practices not always intended as deterrence signals contrast with US routinisation, eschewing the spectacular for the ubiquitous. The discordant political contexts ensure that US-China rituals of reassurance only weakly produce shared moods. Conversely, practices that conjure feelings of threat successfully chain together, stoking mutual fear. This finding holds importance for deterrence studies more widely, pointing to a tension between the demand for long-term maintenance of threat and the risk that repetition robs practices of their emotional impact – and thereby undermines deterrence.
Author: Cameron Hunter (University of Copenhagen)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Roundtable / Through the Plate Glass: 65 Years of International Theorising at Sussex and 15 Years of the Centre for Advanced International Theory
It has been 65 years since the University of Sussex was established as the first of the post-Second World War plate glass universities and Martin Wright became its founding Dean of European Studies. 50 years later, the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) was established in 2011 with the aim to reconsider and promote theorizing in International Relations without being directly policy relevant. Until then, the discipline was driven by the desire to influence policy-making but that stood in the way of systematic theoretical analysis. In this roundtable, we invite past recipients of the Sussex International Theory Prize to reflect on the role that the University of Sussex had for International Relations Theories in the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond and what role it still can play. What impact had Sussex play on International Relations Theories? Did CAIT achieve its ambitions from 15 years ago? Are International Relations Theories still important in an anti-intellectual world that and what role can and should Sussex play?
Sponsor: Centre for Advanced International Theory, University of SussexChair: Felix Roesch (University of Sussex)Participants: Jean-Francois Drolet (Queen Mary University of London) , Karin Narita (University of Sheffield) , Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London) , Seán Molloy (University of Kent) -
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Vulnerability, Care, and Control in counterterrorismSponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConvener: CST Working groupChair: CST Working group
-
The global expansion of counterterrorism practices following 9/11 has fundamentally reshaped security governance, with policies increasingly permeating domestic spaces through surveillance programmes and targeted interventions. Contemporary counterterrorism policies instrumentalise care relationships, institutions, and discourses for security purposes, creating fundamental tensions between care ethics and security logics. Investigating the intersection of care and counterterrorism is significant to understand how these ostensibly contradictory domains have become entangled in contemporary security governance, enabling identification of both harms generated and potential alternatives. This scoping review aimed to evaluate social science literature concerning care and counterterrorism intersections. We employed the PRISMA methodology to evaluate literature from databases. A total of 91 articles were identified, with 13 meeting the inclusion criteria. The findings reveal systematic patterns in how care relationships and institutions are appropriated for security purposes and thematic analysis generated seven themes: intersection of security and care, surveillance infrastructure embedded in care systems, racialised targeting and harm in securitised care, professional identity crisis in securitised care, medicalisation and pathologisation of political behaviour, mass responsibilisation for counter-terrorism surveillance, and resistance and agency within securitised care. Based on our findings, the importance of developing care-based alternatives to militarised counterterrorism that maintain clear boundaries from security logics is highlighted.
Authors: Raquel Silva (ISCTE-IUL) , Catarina Mendonça (University of Coimbra)* -
With the release of Netflix’s Adolescence and the growing popularity of misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate, the past year has seen growing concern in UK policymaking and parliamentary circles about the radicalisation of young men and boys online. Such narratives are not new however; fairytales about children venturing into the dark forest and being enticed by adults with malign intentions have been part of the collective cultural imaginary for centuries. Bringing insights from literary studies and narratology into political science, this paper employs Alexander Spencer’s (2016) narrative analysis method to examine narratives of online youth radicalisation in UK counterterrorism policy and parliamentary debates. Focusing on the three elements of setting, characterisation and emplotment, this paper argues that fairytale narratives of the vulnerable child and wicked witch or wolf influence our understanding of modern-day youth radicalisation. This dominant narrative marginalises other stories, in which older males are also radicalised, radicalisation takes place offline as well as offline and young people have agency and digital literacy.
Author: Rohan Kit Bains Stevenson (University of Helsinki) -
Drawing on empirical insights from NGOs working on statelessness affecting ‘ISIS-associated’ British citizens, I examine how legislative changes following the introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 rework terms of knowledge production enabling citizenship deprivation orders to be made without notice. I advance the concept ‘enforced ignorance’ to capture legalised epistemic injustices facing targeted individuals whereby ignorance of deprivation orders prevents them appealing decisions. Enforced ignorance functions through ignorance, secrecy, silencing, and uncertainty, comprising relational racialised epistemic practices that undermine rights and accountability. These dynamic and unstable circuits of non-knowledges involve spatio-temporal-affective control over material-discursive sites of knowledge production. Convergence of racialised citizenship and security measures legitimise deprivation against Muslims as threatening others that can be made stateless without proving citizenship access elsewhere.
Author: Madeline-Sophie Abbas (Lancaster University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
TH04 Panel / Worlds in Motion: On Turning Points, Continuity and Development in International SocietySponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: Alexandros Koutsoukis (Universtiy of Lancashire)Chair: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews)Discussant: Cornelia Navari (University of Buckingham)
-
International politics are increasingly described in terms of great power politics. While the theorization of power has become increasingly sophisticated, the theorization of the ‘politics’ of power politics in this literature is relatively under-theorized. Bridging literatures of International Political Theory, International Political Sociology, and International Relations Theory, this paper explores the terms in which the concept of politics and the political are theorized in great power politics. It then offers a new conceptualization of the role of great power ‘politics’ in the making and unmaking of international (dis)order. Using this framework, it traces the evolution of great power ‘politics’, with in interest in eras of increased 'political' conflict in international society, from the 19th Century to current times.
Author: Aaron McKeil (LSE) -
This paper interrogates whether international revolution might be conceived as an institution of global international society. Rather than treating revolutions as exceptional ruptures or deviations from order, it asks whether recurring moments of radical upheaval perform a recuring role in the reproduction and transformation of international society. From anti-colonial struggles to contemporary ecological and technological movements, revolutions often serve as arenas in which claims to legitimacy, justice, and universal order are contested and redefined. Building on this inquiry, the paper revisits Martin Wight’s revolutionist tradition, suggesting that his reflections on moral universalism, teleology, and the tension between salvation and order offer conceptual resources for understanding revolution as a processual and potentially institutional feature of international life. By situating Wight’s revolutionism within debates on temporality and change, the paper advances a relational view of how upheaval, rather than merely disrupting order, might constitute one of its enduring mechanisms of adaptation in world politics.
Author: Kieran O'Meara (University of St. Andrews) -
The war in Ukraine has brought war back to the forefront of European politics, shattering illusions about the “end of history” and giving renewed meaning to societies forced to confront questions of identity, sacrifice, and restraint. Drawing on Coker’s idea of war’s existential function, this paper complements Bull’s institutionalist view of war and Linklater’s process-sociological account of self-restraints towards violence. The war in Ukraine has strengthened Ukrainian identity and European unity against Russian imperialism, while also galvanising nationalist and illiberal tendencies across the West and exposing ambivalence towards war and sovereignty across non-Western states. By pitting these tendencies of national identification against each other in the crucible of war, the conflict intensifies socio-political struggles in Western states over identity, the future of the collective West, and the restraints on violence it will stand for. At stake are the choices of Western states that have traditionally promoted international humanitarian law and the reactions of non-Western states. These changes will influence the relationship between the primary institutions of international society: war, sovereignty, territoriality, international law, nationalism, and human rights. By reconfiguring established emotional and normative codes, the war in Ukraine may come to be seen as a turning point for international society.
Author: Alexandros Koutsoukis (Universtiy of Lancashire) -
The English School (ES) stands out in International Relations (IR) for its sustained engagement with the importance of ‘standards of civilization’ in the development of international societies. However, its analysis has remained predominantly focused on diplomatic engagements between states. This paper argues that Andrew Linklater’s final work provides the theoretical tools to expand the ES, recasting these standards not merely as products of interstate negotiation, but as outcomes of long-term symbolic struggles that precipitate historical turning points. The conception of international society underpinning this analysis is that of a contested arena, where state and non-state actors negotiate and struggle over collective understandings of political legitimacy through symbols. This argument is developed through the empirical case of China’s promotion of a ‘Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’. We analyse this not as a mere foreign policy concept, but as a profound symbolic challenge to the existing standard of civilisation. It embodies an emerging struggle between Beijing’s pluralist orientation—shaped by a state-capitalist model that emphasises collective rights and non-interference—and a Western-derived, solidarist orientation that prioritises liberal democracy capitalism and individual rights. The paper demonstrates how this symbolic confrontation constitutes a critical inflection point, potentially accelerating global international society's transition to a new, multi-civilizational order with competing organizing standards. Linklater’s work thus proves indispensable for understanding how present-day symbolic struggles shape the future of global international society.
Author: André Saramago (University of Coimbra)
-
-
6:30 PM
→
7:30 PM
/ Testing the Waters: an interactive citizen science workshop about hydro-politics. Open to all conference attendees.
-
7:00 PM
→
8:30 PM
TH04 Conference event / Power and politics in the war machine: global social forces, local resistance. Although this is open to all conference delegates you will need to register in advance to attend at:https://www.tickettailor.com/events/onechurchbrighton/2031246. This roundtable is organised in partnership with the Sussex International Relations Department, Pluto Press, and Lark and Bloom Library
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Afterlives of empire: Migration and Identity in EuropeSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
The article develops a theoretical framework for analysing how mediatised discourses on forced migration in Portugal sustain (or challenge) dominant self-representations of Portugal and the European Union (EU). Rather than focusing on migrants themselves, it examines how representations of migration become a mirror through which Europe constructs and legitimises its own moral and political identity. Taking Portugal as a case study within the EU, the argument holds that these discourses must be grounded in the colonial and racial genealogies that have shaped Europe’s self-identity and its historical processes of othering migrants and formerly colonised peoples. Bringing together postcolonial, decolonial and Gramscian perspectives, the article highlights the interdependence between coloniality, hegemony, and race in the (re)production of European identity. Mediatised discourses function as key instruments through which these imaginaries and hierarchies are reproduced, allowing the persistence of Europe’s humanitarian and normative self-image despite its exclusionary practices. This symbolic reproduction is sustained by a constructed hegemonic consensus, which obscures the material continuities of colonial power and prevents their contestation; media actors play a central role in this process. The article situates this dynamic within the broader history of European modernity, where the construction of moral authority and racial superiority has been central to both imperial expansion and contemporary migration governance. By articulating discourse with historical contextualisation, the framework exposes the racial and colonial foundations of Europe’s social and political imaginaries, revealing how they legitimise hierarchies of belonging and sustain the Union’s global position. Ultimately, the article contributes to International Relations debates by reframing migration analysis around the self-construction of Europe, foregrounding the necessary interconnection between coloniality, hegemony, and race.
Author: Luiza de Almeida Bezerra -
The politics of movement and migration have become significant flashpoints across in a number of countries as we have witnessed renewed investments—both material and affective—in securing the border. A common feature of such reinvestments is the racialisation of both the border and the order that it supposedly secures. That processes of racialisation shape the politics of migration is not new. However, as I argue in this paper, the control of movement is one of the primary means through which White sovereignty—as the domination, rule, and sovereignty of Whiteness over non-Whiteness—is upheld and secured at both the national and the global level. Through an analysis of migration law and the discourses surrounding it, drawing on original archival research in the United Kingdom and Germany, I explore how migration governance functions to re-enact the proprietorial, exploitative, and regulatory claims of Whiteness over non-White bodies, territory, and resources, not only inside individual states but globally as well. I thus suggest that although the governance of migration occurs primarily at the national level, it works in part to shore up and resecure a racialised and hierarchically structured global order.
Author: Owen Brown (University of Arkansas) -
The imperial afterlife is everywhere. Occupying a budding set of temporal connections, geographies of empire live on as malleable manifestations of politics, culture, and materiality as represented by peoples, objects, ideas, images, and events. Never truly ‘dead’, imperial afterlives are part of a diverse spectrum of imperial sustenance, manifesting themselves as rhythms of the past haunting the present in time and space. One such example of where imperial sustenance can be found is in the context of EU migration control, as also seen through the geopolitics of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF for Africa).
This paper traces these imperial afterlives as maintained by the EUTF for Africa. Reading the EUTF as a contemporary expression of historical European attempts at managing African spaces, I demonstrate how the Trust Fund’s cartographical choices exhibit strong echoes of an imperial past. Focusing on the EUTF as a ‘mapping exercise’, I show how each of the three EUTF windows — including the window structure itself —contain important traces of a central but forgotten post-imperial project: Eurafrica. Weaving together Eurafrica as ‘past’ and the EUTF as ‘present’, the EU Trust Fund today is reflective of a tangled set of historical European-African relationships rearticulated through the contemporary context of EU migration control. Both a product of ‘the past’ as well as productive of ‘a past’ reanimated, and complicating our understanding of the relationship between ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’, the EUTF represents a panoply of imperial afterlives, hiding as they are in plain sight.
Author: Floris van Doorn (University of Helsinki) -
This paper examines the evolving political narratives surrounding confinement and internment in Italy’s relationship with Libya, from the early 20th century to the present. It focuses on two key moments: the use of internment camps during Italian colonial rule in Libya (1910s–1930s), and Italy’s more recent economic and political involvement in the infrastructure of migrant detention camps on Libyan territory. The study traces both continuities and ruptures in how political elites justify the control and containment of populations in Libya. It does so through a critical discourse analysis of Italian parliamentary debates from 1930 to1933 (when Italy created sixteen concentration camps in the Cyrenaica region), as well as those from 2003 (when Italy first financed the construction of a camp for undocumented migrants) to 2023 (when the last Memorandum of Understanding to fund detention centres in Libya).
While Fascist-era narratives were explicitly racialised and framed around civilising missions, colonial pacification, and security imperatives against “nomadic disorder,” contemporary political rhetoric often invokes security concerns, migration management, and international cooperation. However, both periods reveal how Libya has been constructed as a frontier of Italian (and later European) security, and how confinement practices have been legitimised through shifting political vocabularies. The research also shows that Italy’s economic participation in the management and funding of migrant detention camps in Libya echoes earlier material and strategic interests tied to governance through internment.
By comparing the political discourse around colonial camps and today’s outsourced detention regime, the paper contributes to scholarship on colonial continuities in the governance of non-white bodies and the racialised geographies of confinement. It highlights the long-standing Italian political investments in mechanisms of extraterritorial control and explores how ideas of discipline, security, and civilisation have been reshaped—but not entirely discarded—across time.Authors: Ugo Gaudino (University of Sussex) , Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Alignment and Hedging StrategiesSponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham)
-
This paper examines the interplay between multi-alignment, trust, and the plausibility of effective international cooperation. Multi-alignment is a foreign-policy strategy that avoids reliance on one major power, instead diversifying strategic partnerships to maximize national interests. While often celebrated as an effective response to 21st-century transnational challenges, this paper argues that multi-alignment's reliance on fluidity, simultaneity, and informality might erode the foundational trust necessary for sustained international cooperation. The paper develops a theoretical framework linking emerging research on multi-alignment and informality to the growing literature on trust in international relations. The core argument suggests that commitment to multi-alignment could potentially impair states' ability to engage in reliable, long-term cooperation due to diminished perceptions of trustworthiness and predictability among partners. When states prioritize flexibility and avoid binding commitments, they may gain short-term strategic advantages but sacrifice the credibility essential for collective action on shared challenges. Empirically, we compare India and Brazil, two prominent proponents of multi-alignment variants. First, we trace whether partnership patterns have shifted since proclaiming multi-alignment, examining whether core features—simultaneity, fluidity, autonomy, and informality—have become more prominent. Second, we assess whether these changes affected perceptions of both states among old and new partners, and whether they influenced these states' capacity for effective international cooperation on global governance challenges. This paper aims to contribute to understanding how contemporary foreign policy strategies shape the conditions for multilateral cooperation in an increasingly multiplex international system.
Author: Miriam Prys-Hansen -
This article refines the concept of hedging in foreign policy and examines whether and how Brazil and Mexico hedge amid China’s rise, shifts in U.S. foreign policy, and evolving U.S.-China relations. We define hedging as a strategy to reduce risks from perceived overdependence on one or more stronger powers. To broaden its application beyond Southeast Asia, we propose a typology of hedging that accounts for regional and thematic variation. We compare the foreign policy approaches of four administrations partly overlapping with Trump’s first term: Bolsonaro (2019–22) and Lula (2023–24) in Brazil; Peña Nieto (2016–18) and AMLO (2018–24) in Mexico. Using original analysis of presidential tweets, we assess attitudes toward China, the United States, and their bilateral relationship. We find that Brazil pursued untethered hedging under both Bolsonaro and Lula—reactively in the former case and proactively in the latter. Mexico’s approach remained North-facing; Peña Nieto attempted limited hedging via Asia-Pacific ties, but without sustained diplomacy. Under AMLO, hedging was largely aspirational. By combining conceptual and empirical insights, the article contributes to understanding hedging in Latin America and highlights how middle powers exercise agency, albeit within significant structural constraints.
Authors: Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes (University of Southampton) , Felipe Krause (University of Oxford)* -
Beyond the chessboard: Brazil’s active non-alignment and the disputed rules of the geopolitical game
The paper problematizes Brazil’s foreign policy of ‘active non-alignment’ in the context of the war in Ukraine, not to assess its strategic adequacy, but as a critical vantage point from which to interrogate a global order whose rules and representations the so-called Global South has been largely prevented from co-authoring. Drawing on critical geopolitics, we interpret Brazil’s stance as part of a broader contest over the very constitution of the geopolitical field and the criteria of legitimate participation within it. Amid renewed discourses of a “new Cold War,” which demand alignment and reproduce binary logics, the paper asks: what can we learn about world politics from a state´s foreign policy that claims to play while refusing to play by the rules? To explore this, the paper interrogates the enduring metaphor of the chessboard, often presented as a neutral image of international politics. We argue that this metaphor operates as a performative and disciplinary device that naturalizes hierarchy and polarization while silencing alternative imaginaries of the political. By situating Brazil’s foreign policy within this contested space, we highlight how the Global South both inhabits and disrupts the epistemic order that defines the “game” of geopolitics itself.
Authors: Francine Rossone (UERJ)* , Marta Fernandez (IRI/PUC-Rio)* , Maíra Siman (IRI/PUC-Rio) -
Turkiye has played a key role in the most recent Gaza deal and has become one of the four mediators as part of this: United States, Qatar, Egypt and Turkiye. The 2011 Syrian civil war, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Gaza deal in 2025 proved us the importance of how Turkiye aims to extend its political, economical and geopolitical powers in the region. Some scholars argue that it is Turkiye’s imperialism in the Middle East (Uysal, 2019) or it is the hegemonic projects in Turkiye’s foreign policy (Yalvac, 2016) that would explain Turkiye’s foreign policy. This paper expands these literatures and investigates the political economy and military industrial complex of Turkiye’s involvement in these three conflicts. This study utilizes a qualitative research and investigates beneficiaries (both state and capital groups) of these conflicts in these countries. The paper is important for two reasons: 1. It sheds light on the relationship between state and capital groups in military operations. 2. It explores the past military involvements of Turkiye to analyze the war and nation building ambitions in Gaza.
Author: Nuray Aridici (The University of York / Lecturer)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Alterity and HumanitySponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Chenchen Zhang (Durham University)Discussant: Chenchen Zhang (Durham University)
-
Over the last decade, ‘stepping into the lives of refugees’ and ‘walking in their shoes’ through refugee simulations have become increasingly popular advocacy tools among humanitarian actors. Driven by highly emotive language of care and compassion, these events invite participants to actively engage with lived experiences of refugees, to feel and to sense what they endure, and to encounter their realities in a deeply embodied and intimate way. In doing so, they aim to raise awareness about refugees, change participants’ attitudes towards them, and mobilise solidarity with them. Despite their popularity, refugee simulations are neglected sites in border studies as well as in International Relations (IR) more broadly. Drawing on Deleuze’s reformulation of the concept of the simulacrum, and mobilizing the concept of minor passages, this paper explores how these simulations might produce, sustain, or destabilise the diagrams of borders while modelling the very borders that they seek to challenge. The paper shows that refugee simulations are performative border sites with a multiplicity of possibilities, some of which may reinforce the violence of borders, while others with their minor politics offer realisable glimpses of hope for solidarity with those on the move.
Author: Umut Ozguc (Macquarie University) -
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry was established to uncover the truth of the fire in which seventy-two people died. This article interrogates the truth-seeking and truth-producing role of the Inquiry. As with any attempt to explain a social event or phenomena, the Inquiry is defined by a series of epistemological and methodological commitments. These shape the contours of the account of the fire that it has produced: predisposing it to particular forms of explanation, whilst excluding others. We describe this as a process of prefiguration in which the scope and form of the Inquiry circumscribes and foreshadows its findings. This encourages us to see the Inquiry as productive of the social reality it seeks to describe. This raises important and under-theorised questions about how public inquiries operate and their role in informing public understanding of consequential events and processes.
Authors: Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester) , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) , Owen Thomas (University of Exeter)* -
This paper builds on the figure of ‘the Stranger’ in IR that has predominantly been understood as a form of otherness capturing ambiguity as a threat to modern conceptions of (collective) identity, that political actors try to discipline and turn into something familiar. Building on scholarship that rejects ontologies based on difference as the drive for equivalence/closure/certainty, we present a different reading of strangeness that shows its creative and, thereby, productive nature. We leave behind the concern with politics of (in)security and, instead, move from the analytical category of the stranger to a concept of ‘strange encounters’ as academic practice.
Looking at the field of IR, we focus on how strangeness does important work in the process of knowledge production, by reading strange encounters in the field in social (strange relationship) and phenomenological (strange experience) terms through three layers: the spatial, the temporal, and the normative. We discuss examples of scholarship crossing boundaries, taking risks, and breaking with established conventions, to advance an ethos that recognises the creative potential found in making the familiar strange. The paper ends with a call to foster and consciously embrace a set of attitudes and practices that enable for strange encounters to happen and to be productive.Authors: Nicola Nymalm (University of Edinburgh) , Felix Berenskötter (King's College London)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Roundtable / Bridging academia and policy in a changing world
There is a little doubt that the global order, as we know it, is changed rapidly and profoundly. Many long-standing pillars of international politics such as international law, multilateral organizations and peace-making, are being questioned and redefined. How can we sense of this changing world together?
This roundtable brings together editors, scholars, policymakers and communications professionals to discuss how links between academic research and policy-making can be fostered in a sustainable way. What does it mean to write and publish effectively for policy audiences? How can academics promote their research to diverse audiences beyond academia? What spaces and opportunities exist for community-building and knowledge exchange between academia and policy-makers? These are some of the many topics we will discuss.
Sponsor: British International Studies AssociationChair: Rheea Saggar (International Affairs journal, Chatham House)Participants: Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham) , Thomas Martin (Open University) , Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth) , Senem Aydin Duzgit (stanbul Policy Center/Sabanci University) , Jonathan Este (The Conversation) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Critical Studies on 'Terrorism' beyond western contextsSponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConvener: CST Working groupChair: CST Working group
-
Nation-state borders are far from fixed demarcations of community. The territory of a state may encompass the historical homelands of those excluded from the ideal imagery of the citizen. Spatial-legal logics in the use of political power differentiate between territorial spaces within the nation-state based on what is ascribed to them (e.g., culture, race, or ethnicity). Spaces with residents that do not align with the nation’s imagined core are consequently subjected to more repressive forms of governance. Kurds in Turkey constitute such a community. The state in Turkey has consistently subjected Kurds to laws and policies of control and discipline. This paper examines the spatial logic of state repression and violence during the Hendek (Trench) Operations in southeastern Turkey between August 2015 and March 2016. By securitising separatism and designating actors and regions as “terrorist,” the state legitimised violence not only against individuals but against entire communities and territories. The Hendek Operations exemplify this logic: lethal operations carried out by military and police forces, the use of heavy weaponry and air bombardments within the state borders, justified on the grounds of constitutional national security provisions. Conducted within the framework of existing law, these measures blurred the boundaries between legality and violence, resulting in widespread human rights violations, civilian deaths, and urban destruction. Beyond counterinsurgency, the operations constituted a spatial project aimed at dismantling Kurdish hometowns, erasing cultural memory, and facilitating neoliberal capital transfer in places such as Diyarbakır’s Suriçi district. Situating these dynamics within Turkey’s long conflict with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the paper demonstrates how repression, violence, and law co-constitute one another in the governance of contested spaces.
Author: Burcu Turkoglu (Bilkent University) -
This study reflects on my PhD fieldwork in Indonesia for seven months across 5 provinces, where one recurring theme is how deeply religion is embedded in the deradicalisation process. The idea of ‘re-correcting’ ideology appears not only through the state apparatus, such as the National Counter-Terrorism Agency (BNPT) and law enforcement (D88) working with former preachers, but also among former detainees themselves, who often believe their previous ideology needs to be corrected.
While deradicalisation is often said to be more difficult to achieve than disengagement (Horgan, 2008, 2009; Koehler, 2016), many have praised the involvement of religion, even framing it as a moral duty to ‘correct’ what is seen as a wrong interpretation of Islam (Aslam & Gunaratna, 2019; Gunaratna & Hussin, 2018). This paper asks how such correction is defined, who defines it, and what assumptions underpin this moral authority.
By exploring how deradicalisation in Indonesia becomes a ‘re-correcting’ moment, an effort to align ‘former terrorists’ with mainstream Islamic thought such as that of Nahdlatul Ulama, this paper examines how religious discourse intersects with state power and counterterrorism narratives. It asks whether such a process truly enables rehabilitation, or rather reproduces certain hierarchies of religious legitimacy and citizenship within Indonesia’s post-conflict landscape.
Author: Unaesah Rahmah (Leiden University) -
This paper analyses the weaponization of the 'terrorist' discourse, known as 'terruqueo' in post-war Peru, as a memory-based form of repression that legitimises state violence and undermines democracy. It argues that this practice is a product of both 'slow memory' (attritional harm) and 'memoria larga' (colonial legacies).
Methodologically, the paper draws on a decade-long collaborative ethnographic study with the sons and daughters of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), an insurgent group during the internal armed conflict (1980-1990s). It analyses their evolving testimonial narratives in the face of an inherited stigma, looking at how their resistance strategies can, at times, reproduce the terrorist discourse. Through a theoretical dialogue between 'Slow Memory' as a politics of pace (Wustenberg 2023; Teichler 2023; Davies 2022) and 'Memoria Larga' as a decolonial politics of time (Cusicanqui 1987, 2010; del Pino 2021), this approach embraces both the slow, reflective process of engaging with the past and the long, interconnected histories of violence and resistance to interrogate the difficulties of working through political violence in Peru outside of this discourse.
The findings underscore the failures of Peru’s democratic transition to question the construction of the ‘terrorist subject’. By critically examining the ongoing violent effects of ‘terruqueo’, the paper claims it: (1) inflicts a ‘slow’ attritional violence on those stigmatised, foreclosing paths to justice; (2) is a product of ‘long’ memory, re-living deep-seated colonial-racial logics to dehumanise those deemed as threats; and (3) is continually redeployed to justify ‘fast’ repressive violence against contemporary dissent, rendering protesters ‘disposable’. The paper concludes this is a memory-based repression that becomes lethal to particular bodies and serves as a warning for societies that mobilise the terrorist discourse, as it perpetuates the State’s right to kill.
Keywords: Memory Politics; State Violence; Terrorism Discourse; Stigma; Peru; Slow Memory; Decolonial Theory
Authors: Jessica Martinez-Cruz (University of Michigan)* , Goya Wilson Vasquez (University of Bristol)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Doing migration research: reflections from the fieldSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Christina Oelgemoller (Loughborough University)Chair: Christina Oelgemoller (Loughborough University)
-
Based on personal ethnographic fieldwork among migrant and refugee groups residing in Poland, I examine the ethical challenges faced by researchers throughout the entire research process—from field entry to the global dissemination of results. The paper argues that ethics in migration studies is not confined to consent or confidentiality but evolves dynamically as the researcher’s role shifts from observer and participant to interpreter, communicator, and advocate.
The analysis suggests to trace the five (and not limit to) interconnected levels of ethnographic practice: (1) fieldwork through observation, participation, and the collection of life stories; (2) interpretation by the researcher; (3) interaction with peers and with research participants as co-interpreters; (4) presentation and negotiation of findings in academic and public fora; and (5) the potential influence of research on decision-making at local, national, and international levels. At each stage, ethical tensions emerge—between representation and agency, authenticity and advocacy, and the narratives constructed.
Drawing on Hastrup’s A Passage to Anthropology (1995), Callaway’s Ethnography and Experience (1992), and Amrit’s Constructing the Field (2000), the paper highlights how researchers’ positionalities and interpretive choices shape both the ethics and outcomes of their work. Insights from Appadurai (1996), Pink (2013; 2016), and Fassin (2011) further situate these dilemmas within globalised fields of mediation, humanitarian reason, and moral responsibility.
Ultimately, the paper questions whether International Studies as a discipline is adequately equipped to interact with migration studies. What transformations in epistemology, methodology, and pedagogy are needed for research to remain ethically grounded while influencing international policy and scholarship?
Key words: migration, ethnography, fieldwork, research ethics, interpretation ethics.Author: Olga Khabibulina (Institute of Slavic Studies Polish Academy of Science) -
Security, as one of the central themes in International Relations (IR), has long been framed by territorial sovereignty, high politics, and state discourses. This study, based on my doctoral dissertation, adopts a radically different perspective by engaging with how (in)security is lived, felt, and negotiated in everyday life. Drawing on fieldwork in Gaziantep, Turkey, this study uses data from semi-structured interviews with displaced Syrians and various stakeholders. It demonstrates how (in)security is produced not only through speeches or legal texts but through mundane practices such as mobile checkpoints, ID controls, and constant threat of deportation. Conceptualizing the border not as a fixed geographical line but as something internalized, mobile, and experienced through bureaucracy and uncertainty, the study argues for a methodological reorientation in IR. It contends that the discipline must more fully embrace fieldwork, non-elite interviews, first-hand experience, and practice-oriented approaches. If IR is to be ready for the future, its analytical lens must better incorporate the realities of lived experience and everyday governance.
Author: Ebru Vural (Gaziantep University) -
In the last decades, critical migration studies within International Relations have mainly focused on bordering mechanisms independently from discursive practices, as securitization has become one of its main research strands. This paper considers that when the security-migration nexus is highlighted, even with the goal to criticize border regimes, migration is treated as a self-referential area of expertise, emphasising the notion of a “migration crisis”. Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, who examine how the focus on the objectification of Black people can inadvertently perpetuate the very system of knowledge that produces such objectification, the paper argues that the method of describing migrants’ dehumanization reinforces it. The text navigates through literary and cinematographic works that reimagine migration instead of treating it as a bounded sociological research area, exploring how storytelling may disrupt the objectification of migrants and stretch our imagination of who they might be. This approach aims to reconnect the symbolic dimension to non-discursive mechanisms of control, while also fostering a closer dialogue between political theory and the humanities.
Author: Suzana Velasco (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Futures of IR pedagogySponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupConvener: Nick Caddick (ARU)Chair: Nick Caddick (ARU)
-
The increasing complexity of International Relations, combined with the accelerating pace of digital transformation, demands a re-evaluation of pedagogical approaches capable of preparing students to act critically, creatively, and interdisciplinarily in a rapidly evolving global environment. Within this context, the Future of Jobs Report, released by World Economic Forum, provides a valuable conceptual framework by identifying “future skills”, including analytical thinking, digital literacy, complex problem-solving, and collaboration, as essential competencies for twenty-first-century professionals. This paper examines how these competencies can be meaningfully integrated into the teaching and learning of International Relations, thereby bridging academic formation with the demands of the global market and the contemporary agendas of sustainability, technology and innovation. It argues that active learning methodologies and interdisciplinary pedagogical designs can enhance critical engagement, promote meaningful learning, and foster globally competent graduates. To illustrate this pedagogical perspective, the paper presents the experience of Future Professionals Project, developed at a Brazilian university, which implements interdisciplinary workshops based on real-world business challenges applied in International Relations. The project demonstrates the potential of aligning educational practices with the World Economic Forum’s framework to cultivate adaptive, innovative, and ethically aware professionals for a complex international system.
Author: Rodrigo Gallo (Instituto Mauá de Tecnologia (IMT)) -
International Relations (IR) finds itself constantly experiencing ‘turns’ within and around its disciplinary boundaries, and it has even been suggested that IR has thus far failed in the fundamental task of defining its own discipline. With such a disciplinary dilemma in mind, it is important to consider where IR fits into the wider research landscape, and how it relates to other disciplines within said landscape. Interdisciplinarity links to potential future directions for IR as a discipline, and it is therefore useful to identify where interdisciplinary work is taking place amongst Post-Graduate Researchers (PGRs), as the next generation of researchers within IR, considering new ways to harness and nurture the interdisciplinary value of their work. This paper reflects on the activities of a ESRC Research Catalyst Fund project exploring PGR perspectives on the future of IR as a discipline, via a variety of PGR-led events.
Through the activities of the project were able to highlight the value of interdisciplinarity within PGR work, with important implications for the structuring of academic life. In addition, we found that PGRs held differing views for the future of the discipline but agreed that IR needed to continue to evolve theoretically and methodologically. Within this paper we will explore these differing views to demonstrate the various directions for IR and how PGRs negotiated these within the academic social space, their own research projects, and prospective careers. Most crucially, we wish to highlight PGRs as the silent inheritor of a discipline experiencing conflicting evolutions.
Authors: Erin McNally (Lancaster University) , David Murphy (Lancaster University) -
International Relations (IR) pedagogies in the Anglo-Saxon academe have experienced massive changes over time, currently imagining themselves as a civilisational project, advancing critical and inclusive agendas, also including so-called Southern voices. Yet how non-Western pedagogies evolve, adapt and transform is a question crucially negotiated at the Frontier – a space at once contested, underexplored and indeterminate.
This paper functions as a Frontier report: reflections of a Central European academic, educated in the UK, and now teaching IR and Security at the American University in the Emirates in Dubai. Here, the classroom operates as a crossroads where academic pasts and futures intersect, and where ideas traverse through a complex assemblage of terrains. Just like Dubai itself, the extremes being held at the same time are promises of futuristic and integrative skyscrapers next to the desert reminding us of the epistemic power of silence, absence and permanence. By reading pedagogy through this tension the paper argues that IR teaching in Dubai offers a glimpse into a post-Western classroom already in motion – a pedagogical frontier that European academia too often theorises but rarely encounters.
Author: Julian Schmid (The American University in the Emirates)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Governing Affective Bonds and Boundaries: Emotional Communities and the Politics of (Un)Belonging in IRSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
Friendship is an important and understudied phenomenon in international politics. Drawing on Aristotle’s conception of character friendship this article argues that friendship is a form of international association that impacts the foreign policy process through making certain courses of action appear self-evidently appropriate and others unthinkable. This limits the options available to policymakers. Friendship emerges when a state comes to see itself in another and this creates obligations to provide supererogatory levels of support and attention to the actor that has been subject positioned as a friend. The imagined similarity that underpins friendship is discursively constructed by the befriending state. In exploring how friendship emerges in international politics, it follows the logic of securitization and argues that a process of amitization occurs through which policy-makers and public negotiate the construction of affective ties, coming to recognize specified states as Other Selves. Theis article centres on how the United States has come to view specified actors as “friends” worthy of supererogatory support. However, theorising friendship through Aristotle’s conception of friends as other selves opens up wider conversations about the geographic boundaries of friendship and the extent to which these ideas and processes travel and are applicable globally or regionally.
Author: Max thompson (RMAS) -
Departing from the literature on emotions in IR (Solomon 2014, 2018; Ross 2014; Koschut 2014, 2020; Koschut et al. 2017; Hutchinson and Bleiker 2014; Pace and Bilgic 2019) and the definition of emotional communities by Rosenwein (2007) and Gürkan and Terzi (2024), this paper focuses on the emotion of friendship in international organizations. Friendship has stirred the hearts and minds of philosophers such as Aristotle or Kant and it immersed in the International Relations discipline with the pioneering studies by Kristin Haugevik (2018) or Felix Berenskoetter (2007). In this paper I seek to theorize the nexus between friendship as an emotion and ontological security theory. I start from the assumption that agents cannot know whether they are ontologically secure or not if they do not ‘feel’ it, so ontological security translates into emotions, symbols, diplomatic narratives and relationships between states.
First, I argue that friendship plays a significant role in ontological security theory. By building safety, trust and emotional stability, friendship enables agents to feel secure in time and space. Second, I argue that in collectives, friendship generates hope, which is a premise for the attainment of the nexus between friendship and ontological security.
I make several contributions. First, I trace theoretical roots of friendship in philosophy, offering, first, a comparative perspective on friendship in the work of Aristotle and Kant, and then discussing contemporary works on friendship in IR. Second, I theorize the nexus between friendship and ontological security theory, framing friendship as both a site of hope and stabilisator in political collectives. Empirically, I provide a case study of friendship in NATO collective actor responses following Russia’s invasion in Ukraine.Author: Cornelia Baciu (Saarland University / University of Copenhagen) -
How do emotions help shape the formation of a nation-state? Nationalist movements tend to draw on a broad conceptual corpus of belonging, articulating who belongs and who does not belong in the nationalist movement. Belonging is an attachment—a feeling of being at home. Since articulations of belonging draw on attachments and feelings, this article suggests that belonging is deeply emotional. To examine how belonging is articulated in nationalist movements, I examine what emotions do the articulation of belonging. Building on and advancing the existing scholarly interventions in social sciences, I analyse how emotions are understood as cognitive, embodied, or social processes. I draw on Bourdieusean logic of practice to conceptualise how emotions could be understood as practices in international politics. That is, emotions exist in the ‘in-between’ as cognitive, embodied, and social practices. Building on this logic, I argue that belonging is an emotional practice that seeks to percolate, perform, and practice nationalism in the making of a nation-state.
Author: Adarsh Badri (University of Queensland, Australia) -
This paper looks at how emotions became a tool of governance in Europe after 9/11, especially in the way Muslim lives were seen, spoken about and managed. It argues that Islamophobia today is not only legal or political but deeply emotional. Fear, humiliation and mistrust have quietly entered the institutions and public spaces that define European liberalism. What began as a security anxiety has turned into a kind of emotional apartheid where whole communities are kept at a distance through suspicion and silence rather than open discrimination.
Drawing on media debates, policy shifts and everyday encounters, the paper shows how the emotional climate of Europe changed over time, producing a sense of belonging for some and rejection for others. It asks what kind of ethics can survive in a society where empathy itself becomes selective. In doing so, it connects the politics of emotion with the moral crisis of freedom and equality in Europe. The paper hopes to bring back the human face to debates on Islamophobia and invites a more honest conversation about how societies feel their politics.
Keywords: Islamophobia, emotions, governance, exclusion, humiliation, Europe, Muslims, ethics
Author: Haris Aziz -
EU defence integration has endured for over two decades despite producing limited strategic returns. Mainstream IR theories – whether emphasising rational adaptation to threats or institutional efficiency – struggle to explain the EU’s recurring pattern of crisis-driven institution-building that repeatedly falls short of its stated ambitions.
This article argues that European defence integration has been driven less by strategic adaptation than by the internal imperative to sustain the European community during ontological crises – periods of profound disruption to collective self-identity. Such crises generate a community dilemma: in order to maintain a sense of progress and safeguard a community integral to their self-conception, leaders are compelled to engage in rapid institution-building. Yet, fearing further division, they pursue this in improvised and deliberately ambiguous institutional forms, producing outcomes that signal unity but lack strategic effectiveness.
The argument is substantiated through process-tracing of three defining episodes of EU defence integration (1999, 2004, 2016), drawing on newly released archival material and 40 elite interviews. By showing how uncertainty compels cooperation to sustain community rather than conflict to preserve autonomy, the article inverts the logic of the Security Dilemma and significantly broadens the range of conceivable state action in international relations.Author: John Helferich (University of Oxford)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Governing the Globe: International Organizations and World OrderSponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupConvener: ILPG Working groupChair: Joanna Wilson (University of the West of Scotland)
-
Why do states deliberately decline great powers’/the invitations to join selective international organizations? Existing literature revolving around institutional withdrawal, member states’ expulsion, or membership suspension cannot explain this phenomenon. This article proposes the concept of status renunciation: states’ voluntary preference for lower social standing in the status quo institutional arrangement. Extrapolating its social psychological motivations, I argue that status renunciation signals states’ limited use of great material capacity and moral authority, thereby serving as a three-front, multivocal legitimation strategy that appeals to international and domestic audiences with diverse interests, identities, and psychological profiles. I build my argument abductively through a novel, multinational archival research on Jawaharlal Nehru’s two refusals to join the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as a permanent member upon the invitations by the US in 1950, and the USSR in 1955. A detailed reconstruction of India’s status-seeking vis-à-vis the Cold War international order refines and nuances the existing theorization on “lying low to climb up,” and provides an important yet under-examined diplomatic history on rising powers’ negotiation of international institutional change.
Author: Zikun Yang (University of Cambridge) -
Under the current polycentric global governance, situations of regime complexity have proliferated, requiring diverse actors to establish coordination among overlapping, and sometimes, conflicting regimes. Conversely, such institutional density could make us find new issue areas that we are not fully aware of by through the linkage and uniting of related regimes. This paper focuses on an emerging approach to recognize a new issue, coordinate related regimes, and guide actors' behavior, that is, to establish "guiding principles" as soft law. Guiding principles are generally defined as an idea-based compilation of several regimes, to recognize an issue area that has been overlooked, to prevent conflicts and create synergies among these regimes, and to "lead" actors to an appropriate behavior under the issue area. Under what conditions do actors create guiding principles, and what characteristics and advantages do guiding principles have? To answer these questions, this study compares two guiding principles by illustrating their creation and implementation processes: Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This comparison reveals that guiding principles can shed light on overlooked or ignored issues, reduce sovereign costs, and be effective for solving issues and producing synergies based on the existing legal order.
Author: Sho Akahoshi (Kobe University) -
Abstract
The 20th century global order – that emerged post-WW-II out of consultation between victor powers and adapted itself to survive into the 21st century – is under duress today. The current debates focus on how to preserve the ‘most valued offerings’ of the order, with great powers most concerned about its future shape or ultimate end. Such concerns result into a ‘prognosis-prescription mix’, while the very problematization of (dis)order suffers a lag. The dominant perspective on (dis)order appears more like a monolithic discourse influenced by dispositional markers of the rule-makers, attributing responsibility to a select few actors. Since an accurate diagnosis is requisite for an apt prescription, a bipartisan view of the factors contributing to our living (dis)order is needed.
This paper aims to delineate on the specific ‘(dis)ordering moments’ that have paved the way to disruptive trends in today’s non-system. It argues that each disordering moment relates to conscious choices, thoughtful complacency or collective inaction of the prime actors– who rationalized the opportunity costs while making trade-offs in their (own) best interests. As time-space transcendence does not allow externalities to be fully reversed in a human world, yet course-correction may help sustaining the order’s most progressive features – the public goods. Acknowledgment of failure(s) in places of irreversible damage, and attributing responsibility instead of blame-shifting, buck-passing and reckless driving is the least to start with – if the rising disorder is to be managed.Authors: Afsah Qazi (National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad) , Syed Sabir Muhammad (Air University Islamabad)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Industrial Policy and IPESponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
From a political economy perspective, upon the rising international efforts for sustainable energy transitions, this paper seeks to assess Brazil’s prospective leadership in SAF production and its structural constraints that may condition its development. These include the country’s commodity dependence, technological gaps, and loose public–private coordination.
Amongst SAF’s technological routes certified by CORSIA, HEFA, AtJ and FT stand out as the most adequate for the Brazilian setting. Given its wide range of suitable raw materials, but incipient technological capacity, routes that demand less high-tech maturity appear as more viable. Nonetheless, Brazil’s potential leadership should not be predicated merely on its natural resource endowments. Rather, it should derive from local knowledge accumulation and technological innovation.
Therefore, three primary conditions are required to upgrade Brazil’s position within the global SAF value chain. First, it is essential to ensure access to high demand markets. A second barrier lies in Brazilian companies’ limited access to knowledge and specific technologies. This limitation connects to our third driver: international firms, as well as institutional and governmental cooperation. Methodology here deals with a case study to measure costs and competitiveness of a sample of our three SAF routes. We also conduct a questionnaire with current or potential actors. The preliminary data analysis is upon a structuralist model linking the global value chain to our three key drivers within the international political economy framework.
We emphasize two main results. First, a diagnostic analysis highlights the significant role of foreign equipment. Interestingly, qualified workers are crucial to integrate the equipment efficiently and manage the challenges posed by locally specific feedstocks. Second, we identify what can be described as an international political economy trap. In this case, international cooperation tends to focus either on Brazil’s exports of primary-based SAF or on the export of intermediate products from capital-intensive SAF routes.
Authors: Eduarda Tedesco (Federal University of Santa Catarina)* , Gabriela Urbanski (Federal University of Santa Catarina)* , Júlia Saint Martin (Federal University of Santa Catarina)* , Marina Jorge (Federal University of Santa Catarina)* , Bruno Duarte (Federal University of Santa Catarina) , Fernando Seabra (Federal University of Santa Catarina)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Innovative Feminist Methods and New Approaches to DataSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)Chair: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
-
This paper rethinks how gender, media, and power intersect in nuclear history, asking how feminist peace journalism can reshape global narratives of security and justice. Drawing from interdisciplinary frameworks across feminist theory, media studies, and peace research, it interrogates how women have been portrayed in nuclear discourse from the patriotic spectacle of the 1950s “Miss Atomic Bomb” pageants to the haunting imagery of the Hiroshima Maidens. Such portrayals not only aestheticised nuclear violence but also silenced women’s agency as scientists, policymakers, and peace advocates.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis and archival media review, this research exposes how gendered symbolism has sustained patriarchal understandings of war and deterrence. It further explores how peace journalism, as a counter-hegemonic practice, can challenge these epistemic injustices by reframing women not as victims but as active narrators and knowledge producers.
In line with BISA’s 2025 theme of “New Thinking, New Directions,” this paper calls for a transformation in how international studies conceptualises security moving from state-centric paradigms to intersectional, human-centred approaches rooted in epistemic justice. By centring women’s experiences from both the Global North and South, the study advances a more inclusive and decolonial understanding of peace communication. Ultimately, it proposes a framework for reimagining nuclear discourse through feminist peace journalism that restores visibility, agency, and historical justice to silenced voices.
Keywords: Feminist Peace Journalism, Nuclear Narratives, Epistemic Justice, Gender and Security, Media Representation, Global South, Cultural Memory, Decolonial International Studies
Author: Qurat ul ain Qurat ul ain (British Academy of Jewellery) -
Mainstream refugee assistance programmes construct women as victims devoid of agency and reinforce dependence on host societies; a narrative that is currently weaponised by the far right. In contrast, this paper recognises refugee women as active political agents who practice creative grassroots activism by engaging with emerging feminist scholarship that highlights how refugehood can foster political empowerment. In light of this, it explores how art-based participatory methods can support the activism and advocacy of refugee women in the UK within a rising anti-immigration and anti-gender context. Drawing on a collaborative project with the London-based NGO Women for Refugee Women, the study worked with twenty-five refugee women in an advocacy-focused collage workshop and a subsequent focus group for collective interpretation of the artworks. Through this process, refugee women produced and analysed artistic pieces that communicated experiences of refugehood, resistance, and belonging. The paper has three objectives: (1) to generate new empirical data by documenting and analysing artworks created by refugee women, thereby advancing the feminist literature on refugehood and empowerment; (2) to explore art as an innovative research methodology; and (3) to co-produce academic knowledge with migrant communities, positioning refugee women not as research subjects, but as active producers of knowledge and creative outputs on their own terms.
Author: Zeynep Kilicoglu (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
Paper is one of the most ubiquitous yet overlooked objects in everyday entanglements of gender and the politics of violence (as sites/practices of (in)security, identity, (il)legitimacy). This research project explores paper through US veteran artist Jenn Hassin’s work which collects personal artifacts with ‘embedded histories of trauma’, (trans)forming this material into paper and then art. Centring two of her works – ‘Molting’ and ‘Absence, Presence, and the Details In Between’ – this project unravels how this material materialises/dematerialises/rematerialises otherwise gender and the politics of violence. In ‘Molting’, Hassin (de)clothes herself in a ‘dress’ of paper pulp handmade from the clothing she was raped in, mixed with her loved-ones’ clothing, matte medium, buttons, and gold thread. Performed in an acrylic box that replicates a single mattress using water poured from a porcelain (pulped) paper cup, ‘Molting’ unravels the body, gender and sexual violence through their de/re/materialisation as embodied, disembodied, reembodied spaces and subjects. Absence, Presence, and the Details In Between displays “remnants” from this “performance”, the traces of the dress hanging, the spectre of the box-bed inverted, a shard-laden typewriter and water-stained porcelain-paper cup mounted atop.
In-betweenness pervades.
O u t l i n e s.
Figments.
Fragments.
D i s comfort.
This piece itself is an unravelling, intersecting fragments of found poetry, visuals, and vignettes of sexual violence and trauma scholarship. It is an unravelling that doesn’t seek to ‘put together’ but to sit in/with that pulp, that fragmentation, that de/re/materialisation, that discomfort, that dis/re/embodiment to unravel other knowings of sexual violence, militarism, and trauma.
Author: Laura Mills -
This paper analyses the growing anti-rights movements and politics of sexual and reproductive health data. It interrogates how these movements exploit and co-opt language and concepts and undermine notions of gender and reproductive justice. Drawing from interviews with global health and data experts (n=54), this paper uncovers the politics behind data structures, making visible how these politics are illustrative of the current tensions and conflicts in sexual and reproductive health. The legacies of population control and gendered biopolitics have remained nested in data collection. This has shaped how silences have been created in data and evidence as well as limited the capacity for data to capture realities of reproductive injustices faced by women. The resulting feminisation of sexual and reproductive health data has exacerbated the burden on women to change their everyday practices in alignment with global narratives of ‘good’ health, whilst simultaneously making patriarchy, power, and men invisible. The problematic, historic politics within data – and their interpretation – have been exploited for mis- and mal-information, in which scientific concepts are repackaged to justify anti-feminist, anti-queer, and anti-sexual and reproductive health and rights movements.
Author: Joe Strong (QMUL) -
Reimagining Conflict Research: Feminist and Creative Methodologies in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland
Traditional conflict research in International Studies has often prioritised state-level and elite perspectives, leaving the everyday experiences of women at the margins. As the discipline looks to its future, there is a need for creative methodologies that centre marginalised voices and reflect diverse, lived realities.
This paper proposes a feminist and creative reimagining of conflict research, drawing on participatory and visual methods that foreground emotion, humour, and memory. Creative approaches, I argue, not only broaden what International Studies can study but also how it studies, challenging hierarchical and exclusionary modes of knowledge production.
Using my photo-elicitation research in Northern Ireland as a case study, I examine how participants’ engagement with stills from the series Derry Girls reveals alternative understandings of memory and conflict. Their reflections show how popular media and comedy can mediate memory, foster intergenerational dialogue, and create space for emotional engagement with difficult pasts.
By integrating feminist, creative, and participatory methods, this paper demonstrates how conflict research can be more collaborative and innovative. It argues that centring gendered experiences and everyday perspectives expands the boundaries of knowledge and redefines what counts as research in International Studies.
Author: Mhairi Claire Lynch (Queen's University Belfast)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Knowledge Politics III (Science, Law and Faith)Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Pauline Heinrichs (King's College London)
-
Planetary protection, concerned with preventing harmful biological contamination during space exploration, increasingly intersects with the frameworks of international environmental law. As spacecraft venture to Mars, Europa, and other celestial bodies, the risk of forward and backward contamination obliges a reconsideration of environmental law principles beyond Earth’s atmosphere. While space law instruments like the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 articulate non-contamination obligations, they lack the procedural depth, technical specificity, and enforcement mechanisms characteristic of terrestrial environmental regimes. In contrast, international environmental law has matured through multilateral treaties, soft-law instruments, and compliance mechanisms that address transboundary harm, environmental impact assessments, and the polluter-pays principle. Focusing on these robust legal traditions, this abstract argues that international environmental law can serve as a primary framework for enhancing planetary protection governance.
To bridge these deficiencies, this paper proposes the elaboration of an international environmental treaty specific to planetary environments. The instrument would embed binding obligations for contamination thresholds, standardised impact assessments, public reporting of mission data, and a polluter-pays liability fund. Technical annexes, developed by an intergovernmental panel on planetary environments, would ensure that evolving scientific discoveries inform regulatory updates. A dispute resolution mechanism, modelled on the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, would adjudicate non-compliance and liability claims. The treaty would mandate capacity-building initiatives and technical assistance to emerging space nations, ensuring equitable access to governance resources and fostering global stewardship of planetary environments. By elevating international environmental law as the primary lens for planetary protection, this approach promises a coherent, equitable, and adaptive governance framework for responsible exploration of outer space.
Author: Scott Steele (Anglia Ruskin University) -
The mid-20th century was a crucial moment for international order that saw both decolonization and the rise of multilateral cooperation to manage interstate relations during the Cold War. In particular, a number of cooperative frameworks – from the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty – relied on science as the legitimating focus. This paper interrogates the relationship between global racialized hierarchies and narratives of scientific progress that enabled the creation of these multilateral agreements at the height of the Cold War. It examines multilateral cooperation in Antarctica and early outer space exploration to trace how science – as both a moral goal of a collective humanity and as a legitimating practice of geopolitical engagement – was celebrated as a unifying force that helped actors overcome fractious international politics and work together towards a common cause. At the same time, scientific narratives of progress depended on the material and ideational infrastructure of imperialism, including racialized civilizational discourses and racialized sites of scientific knowledge production that relied on colonial infrastructure around the globe. In doing so, I show that rather than a clear break with racial hierarchies that informed the imperial global order of the early 20th century, these scientific multilateral frameworks established in parallel with decolonization rearticulated and reinscribed racial hierarchies through the grammar of science.
Author: Joanne Yao (Queen Mary University of London) -
Using the case of Indian leaders and scientists’ reaction to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report’s claims and the heated furore that ensued on cryosphere science in the Himalayan region in 2007, this study explores how nations perceive cryosphere change and choose their responses in the face of global knowledge systems. Existing literature on this episode has mainly focused on the IPCC, its internal dynamics, and its re-legitimation in climate governance. It has overlooked how nations perceive and utilise global expertise on Earth system science, especially in times of surprise or controversy. By looking into the civic epistemology of the Indian state and its interaction with the IPCC between 2007 to 2015, this study offers a fresh perspective on the dynamics between nations and global knowledge institutions such as the IPCC.
Two research questions motivate this research. First, how was environmental change in the frozen terrains of the Himalayan region perceived and discussed by various actors within and outside India post-2007? Second, how did this representation shape political debate and action over time? It examines how actors have represented environmental change within the glaciated spaces of the Himalayan region. Subsequently, it investigates the historical, socio-political, ideological, and institutional factors that drive these actors to perceive ‘degradation’ of the frozen terrains of the Himalayan region, and how national governments have instituted policy responses to managing the cryosphere crises. Sources for the study include legal and policy documents of the Indian government, state departments, scientific reports released by state-affiliated research institutes, consultative bodies, universities, private research institutes, non-university research institutions, and international bodies, writings of non-governmental organisations, forums, journalists and media, academia, and activists. It ultimately theorises "knowing-first" as a legitimate strategy of risk management adopted by national governments as a means to deal with the "uncertainty" accompanying Earth system science.
Author: Aishwarya Sanas (PhD candidate)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Making Gender Visible in Militarization and ViolenceSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)Chair: Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University)
-
Advances in technology have shifted the ideas of masculinity and femininity within the military. In particular, the recent emergence of drone warfare garners attention from scholars of militarism and gender since this new form of war potentially renders the distinction between male and female bodies meaningless.
Analyzing how Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) members explain their occupational fields (especially the signal, which has been a feminized branch, and the infantry and fighter jet pilot domains, which have been perceived as masculinized), this paper clarifies that the triangulation of masculinity, physical strength, and military prowess is being deconstructed within the JSDF.
Whilst some JSDF members consider the signal suitable for female members since physical strength is unnecessary for its task, one male interviewee from the signal, in turn, re-masculinized his expertise. He did so not by referring to physical strength, but by evoking leadership relevant to modern high-tech warfare.
Additionally, some members relativize the militarized masculinity of infantry and fighter jet pilots, given that these fields do not directly engage in drone warfare. These cases indicate that the emergence of drone warfare (namely, technological development) is altering the established idea of militarized masculinity.Author: Remi KODAMAYA (Hitotsubashi University) -
Incel and misogynist ideologies have proliferated across online and popular culture, drawing increasing attention from feminist scholars, sociologists, and security experts. As these ideologies intersect with public acts of violence, efforts to securitise such communities have intensified. Alongside this, there has been a rise in what some commentators call the “womanosphere”, a digital and cultural space where women promote conservative gender roles, anti-feminist ideas, and sometimes misandrist views. This includes tradwives, femcels (female involuntary celibates), red-pill wives, and pink-pill communities that rework incel ideologies. This paper offers a preliminary investigation into the popular culture and social media content emerging from the womanosphere. I argue that to understand securitised incel ideologies, we must situate them within broader patterns of gender-based violence. Drawing on feminist literature and critiques from Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), I highlight how mainstream security approaches often fail to engage with the racialised and gendered foundations of these ideologies. As Gentry (2022) notes, such work frequently overlooks patriarchal cultures and feminist analysis. This paper re-emphasises the need to understand the politics and violence expressed in these spaces within the wider systems of power that enable and sustain them.
Author: Louise Pears (University of Leeds) -
As Europe “rearms” and military budgets bloat across the continent at the expense of public and planetary services – who are we investing in “to preserve peace”? In this paper, I share reflections from an ethnographic deep-dive into seven globally relevant yet NATO-oriented military trade shows (2023-2025). Documenting the material, social and power relations constitutive of the community tasked with delivering Europe’s “defence readiness,” I reveal the settings and logics that underlie the production of military-industrial (man)power. Military trade shows are central nodes in the global circulation of violence and capital and the “military business culture” found therein is telling of the gendered and racialised relations and rationalities through which armed violence – its production, practice and profiteering – is legitimised, normalised and glorified. In this space, money, men and martiality rule; here, the ideal-type warrior mixes and merges with the ideal-type business man, producing a White hypermasculinity at once set on physical, social, sexual, technological and monetary dominance. Writing up the embodied knowledge of both researcher and research subjects, the paper deepens our empirical and conceptual understanding for how wo/men, war, weapons, wealth and Whiteness are made in relation to each other at great costs for human and planetary wellbeing.
Author: Nico Edwards (Newcastle University) -
This paper examines the gendered visual representation of Rio de Janeiro’s state military police operations in the city’s favelas. Drawing on mediatization of war literature (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010; Kaempf, 2013; Maltby, 2012), which explores how war representations normalize conflict, and feminist security and IR studies (Enloe, 2000, 2007; Hooper, 2001; Runyan, 2007; Young, 2003), which investigate militarization and its effects, it argues that the police’s social media imagery of its personnel, weaponry, and policing actions relies on entrenched gender constructs. These serve to legitimize military-style force and dismiss both criticism and non-violent alternatives to the often-lethal policing in Rio’s favelas.
The analysis focuses on images posted by the official Facebook pages of the State of Rio Military Police and the Police Pacifying Unit. Due to the large volume of content and limited scope, the paper adopts an illustrative rather than exhaustive approach. Its main goal is to highlight the value of a gendered perspective when analyzing the mediatization of war and militarized policing, suggesting that even a selective analysis can be insightful. As the analysis of photos produced by Rio’s military police will show, the masculinised visual representations of military police officers as protectors of the (less masculinised) citizen (Young 2003) against the perceived enemies situated within the favelas continue to reinforce gender hierarchies and perpetuate lethal violence within Rio de Janeiro against internal threats, despite the police’s efforts to portray themselves as professional and disciplined crime fighters.
Author: Sergio Catignani (University of Exeter)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Media, Technology, and Visual PoliticsSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk)
-
What insights can consumption and the everyday add to our understanding of US identity and security? This paper argues that consumption plays a crucial role in securing the American way of life during times of insecurity such as the Cold War and 9/11. By exploring everyday sites and spaces, it highlights how consumer goods, choice and freedom act as material evidence of the superiority of American capitalism, with wars against communism and terrorism being fought in and through sites of consumption such as the home and the mall. It highlights key events such as the 1959 Kitchen Debate in which Nixon and Khrushchev faced off in a model home at the American National Exhibition in Moscow- not debating nuclear capabilities and military strength but the merits of American homes, cars and kitchens, reflecting the American belief in democracy and freedom of choice in everything from washing machines to system of government. The paper also explores the proliferation of 9/11-themed commodities and the call to consume in response to the terror attacks- to go shopping, visit Disneyland and buy American cars- highlighting the link between patriotism and consumption that draws on national myths and the belief in American exceptionalism to reaffirm national identity through consumption.
Author: Elicia Coles (University of Warwick) -
The story begins predictably, man meets woman, they fall in love and marry. One shares their veteran status, and the other thanks them for their service. This is an increasingly common script in contemporary dating reality TV. Through a narrative analysis, we explore military member portrayals in Love is Blind (US and UK) and Married at First Sight Sweden to understand what it means for the military to ‘join the cast’. We argue that dating reality TV employs specific gendered grammars to render military institutions intelligible and relatable. Beyond a clear heteronormative script, we argue that these shows constitute important sites to understand contemporary and contextual militarism. Researchers have been attentive to media representations of militarized masculinities and there is an emergent debate on gendered dimensions of military reality TV produced by or in support from militaries on testing, deployment and war-fighting. Military ‘storylines’ in seemingly ‘apolitical’ reality TV, not least dating shows, remain underexplored. Through representations of individuals that served without focusing on active service, the shows render militarism “palatable” (Jester, 2023). Specific heteronormative scripts of love make military stories relatable for audiences, which are not reached through ‘typical’ military reality TV.
Authors: Elin Berg (Swedish Defence University) , Moa Peldan (Swedish Defence University)* -
As secret exposers, women whistleblowers cut through the historically idealized tradition of a woman’s silence and use the disclosure of secrets to resist, undermine, and challenge patriarchal institutions from within. For disclosing institutionalized secrets, they risk having their voices devalued and experiencing severe personal and professional retaliation. Despite a recent imperative in popular culture for women to speak out, a ‘communicative injustice’ persists in which women are compelled to position themselves within a public space which seeks to silence them. Simultaneously, women whistleblowers’ voices and stories are constantly reproduced by the cultural public sphere. This leads to a broader query as to how actors within that sphere identify their roles in the (re)production of these gendered power dynamics. Cultural producers who mediate women whistleblowers’ stories of secret-breaking, must navigate the need to entertain and inform, knowing that they hold responsibility for how they do, or do not, contribute to gendered communicative injustice. We explore how these women’s voices are mediated in the public space through interviews with television producers, and a qualitative content analysis, of documentaries framing the accounts of women who leaked information on powerful state and non-state institutions in the UK.
Authors: Corrin Bramley (University of Bristol) , Sonja Nicholls -
Since the US Army introduced military esports in 2018, participation in gaming competitions has expanded across all service branches of the US Armed Forces. A novel means for the US military to connect with civilians and potential recruits, this phenomenon remains largely underexplored in academic literature. Addressing this gap, this paper explores how military recruitment efforts within esports tournaments, conventions and on gaming(adjacent) platforms fit into the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. By mapping partnerships, sponsorships, and collaborations among the esports sector, the defense industry, the US military and the US Department of Defense, this paper seeks to contribute to broader scholarly debates about the mobilization of popular culture in the organization of armed forces. More specifically, the paper examines how the instrumentalization of competitive gaming in military recruitment form part of a wider network of societal actors in US defense and esport landscapes. While existing scholarship on military recruitment has shown how Western militaries attract enlistees through narratives of employability and skill transferability, this paper highlights how gamers are targeted specifically for their expertise developed through play. The demand for such skills could be understood in relation to the growing value placed on technical proficiency within modern Western militaries, particularly amid the increasing use of autonomous and remotely operated weapons systems and vehicles. This paper tentatively suggests that emerging digital and gaming arenas act as sites where the civilian-military divide is bridged through interactive experiences that lend new forms of authenticity to military engagement with games and gaming.
Author: Jessie Jern (Swedish Defence University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Memory, Migration, and Affective Histories in MotionSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
Among the myriad ethnic identities that present in the multicultural American polity, Irish Americans (Gael-Mheiriceánaigh) often claim the strongest fellow-feeling with their ancestral nation. This includes a profound connection to the island of Ireland, collective memories of the past, and a sense of kinship with other ‘Irish’ regardless of their country of residence. Such group consciousness is not necessarily shared by the Irish of Éire, with social media rife with satirical portrayals of the artificiality of ‘Irishness’ of their American cousins, alongside widespread disavowal of the political leanings of Irish Americans, therein reflecting meaningful temporal, spatial, and societal divergences between the two groups. Recognising this disconnect, the paper interrogates the socio-political narration of national trauma associated with the Great Famine/an Gorta Mór (1845-1852) from the competing perspectives of the Irish and Irish Americans. Focusing on the dark trinity of starvation, dispossession, and emigration through the lenses of the popular arts (music, plays, films/TV, and literature), memorials, and geographies of tourism, we examine how divergent narrations of this shared trauma index and contribute to a stark and growing political and cultural divide between these two communities, and the implications of this rift in shaping ‘Irishness’ in the twenty-first century.
Authors: Robert Saunders (State University of New York) , Michael Toomey (University of Glasgow) -
This study examines the ontological security of young adult minorities in two distinct borderland regions through an analysis of spatial, temporal, and affective dimensions. The study builds on creative arts research workshops and interviews with young adult borderlanders in South Tyrol, Italy and the Zaolzie Region in the Czech-Polish borderland. Addressing gaps in border scholarship, it explores how young borderlanders’ lived experiences and narratives find stability amid crises. Drawing on ontological security theory, we analyse how continuous narratives, national–kinstate ties, and cross-border routines underpin identity. The in-between position of minorities provides opportunities for establishing security and navigate moments of insecurity. We argue that young minorities actively reshape borders and identities, using the advantages of horizontal Europeanisation in borderlands and employing their cross-border experiences to deflect disruptions such as Covid-19. Methodologically, we highlight the value of visual methods for researching regional politics.
Authors: Elżbieta Opiłowska (University of Wroclaw)* , Marcus Nicolson (Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research) -
This article examines affective bonds between British migrants and political values through the lens of migration. Where rising populism foregrounds national politics in the UK, it exists within a global context of outward migration and growing diaspora of British migrants abroad. I argue that political populism, often focused on the domestic sphere, is better understood when expanded to a transnational level. With far-right nationalism embedded with affective messages of ‘home’ and (white) Britishness, I examine what these messages and relationships mean specifically to those who willingly migrate to non-democratic, non-white countries like Singapore. Within which, I explore political identities and affective connections to the nation, home and belonging. Understanding the appeal of non-democratic countries lends insight into how populist ideas are processed, if they recognise them as values and how they impact everyday lives through intersectional experiences. An understudied group, British migrants live within different political and cultural contexts, and are shaped by the politics of home and host nations. How they reproduce or resist populist narratives on local and global levels as a migrant speaks to the affective afterlife of domestic nationalist discourses, their salience abroad and how they feed back into political participation as citizens, and migration trajectories.
Author: Terri-Anne Teo (Newcastle University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Oaths and Confessions: (re)visioning the politics of military/ised violence and voiceSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)Chair: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
-
In Colombia’s post-conflict context, the narratives of ex-combatants frequently circulate within the moral and legal framework of confession, often viewed as acts of truth-telling, repentance, or accountability. However, such frameworks can inadvertently limit the range of meanings that these voices encompass and the roles they occupy in the transitional landscape. This paper advocates for a broader understanding of confession, not as a fixed category, but as a relational and performative practice through which ex-combatants negotiate issues of legitimacy, vulnerability, and belonging.
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with former FARC members, the paper examines the multiple registers in which “confessional” narratives operate: from silence and hesitation to justification and storytelling. These utterances do not simply reveal guilt or remorse; they also reconfigure the boundaries between victims and perpetrators, public and private, individual and collective responsibility. By engaging critical approaches to testimony, affect, and the politics of voice, the paper invites a rethinking of what it means to “listen” to ex-combatants.
Engaging with critical military studies and feminist approaches to voice, the paper proposes a shift from asking what ex-combatants confess to examining what their confessions do: how they rearticulate authority, belonging, and recognition in the aftermath of war. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions about militarised subjectivities, the governance of speech, and the politics of transition in the Global South.
Author: Irene Piedrahita (University of Glasgow) -
Although a considerable part of the literature presents the United States as a reference in building stability in its civil-military relations, the debate on militarization and militarism has called this assessment into question. Recent events in American politics have helped to revive this debate. Besides former President Trump having considered mobilizing the US Armed Forces on national territory to annul the results of the presidential election and repeatedly referred to the military as "my military" and "my generals", he also has left open the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act if he is re-elected. However, the contemporary intensification of militarization in the US does not only come from the strengthening of the extreme right in the country. This research agenda seeks to analyze the relationship between militarization and radicalization, arguing that American interventions in the wake of the Global War on Terror, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, contributed to the radicalization of military personnel, who, recently, have been active in far-right militia groups, such as the Oath Keeper.
Author: Barbara Motta (UFS) -
This chapter presents the theoretical and methodological considerations as developed throughout my PhD research on the emerging German veteran’s movement. Firstly, I summarize the reading I developed of the veteran as a figure that can meaningfully aid in the study of security institutions such as the German military. This conceptualization builds on the analysis of the material collected through ethnographic and qualitative methods which I conducted with a theoretical focus on body, affect and vulnerability. Secondly, and building on other scholars looking into war as experience and embodied/ affective militarisms, I present this conceptualization and methodological approach as a response to the difficulties of studying security institutions, for example in terms of access. Thirdly, I reflect on the blind spots and pitfalls of this approach, especially in terms of taking seriously the interlocutors’ experiences and vulnerabilities while being mindful of reproducing hegemonic narratives around militarisms through a focus on body and vulnerabilities of personnel in Western Liberal Militaries – as well as ways to act within this discomfort.
Author: Nina Reedy (University of Hamburg) -
This paper investigates the discourses and representations constructed within the United States about armed forces veterans involved in far-right movements. Using the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack as a case study, particularly the reactions emerging from the anti-Trumpist political spectrum, the research analyzes multiple, often dissonant and contradictory, voices, including governmental actors (Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary), the media, and civil society organizations such as social movements and think tanks. It examines how the (re)construction of stereotypes of the “ideal veteran”—heroic, apolitical, sacrificial—contrasts with that of the “deviant veteran”—radicalized, pathological, exceptional—within public discourse and collective memory. This process, it is argued, functions as a mechanism of “nostalgic rehabilitation” (Tidy, 2015) of liberal militarism, reaffirming the image of the armed forces as guardians of democratic order and portraying veterans as a vulnerable group to be protected by society. The study also explores potential fractures within the dominant discourse, identifying spaces of anti-militarist resistance. Drawing on insights from Critical Military Studies, it conceptualizes liberal militarism as a set of practices that (re)produce orders and subjectivities, structuring the boundaries of public discourse on violence, legitimacy, and belonging in post-Trump America.
Author: Clarissa Forner (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ))
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Roundtable / Oligarchic Sovereignty: Technology and the Future of Global OrderSponsor: Review of International Studies
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Planetary Politics I: More-than-human and multispecies interventions in IRSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow)Chair: Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University)Discussant: Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University)
-
This paper develops response-able witnessing as a research praxis for more-than-human international relations (IR) scholarship that grapples with the problem of alienation and intangibility of scale of ecological collapse. Humans inability to grasp ecological phenomena and issues sensible at nonhuman scales often leads to alienation. Drawing on Haraway's concept of response-ability and Bird Rose's ecological witnessing, I argue that IR requires narrative methodologies that cultivate responsiveness to more-than-human worlds while bearing witness to multiple forms of existence at different scales. Response-able witnessing counters alienation by moving beyond representational politics based on human-scaled existence to practice thinking-with more-than-human others, generating multiple, even conflicting stories that remake conventional understandings of scales. The paper does so by developing three dimensions of response-able witnessing: First, a methodological practice of attentive presence that registers more-than-human agencies often rendered invisible in anthropocentric frameworks. Second, a writing practice of narrative care that crafts stories attuned to multi-scalar, multispecies entanglements while resisting anthropomorphism, human exceptionalism, and homogenisation of humans. Third, a political practice of transformative accountability that recognises witnessing as an obligation to respond and act, rather than merely describe and critique, and thereby reconfigures political responsibilities across species boundaries. Through a narrative vignette of more-than-human fieldwork encounters in the Brazilian Amazon, I offer an example of narrative care and demonstrate how response-able witnessing reveals international politics as always-already more-than-human assemblages that break down the intangibility of scale and alienation. This praxis challenges IR's epistemological foundations by refusing the nature/culture divide that structures conventional analysis. Instead, it generates what van Dooren calls ‘lively stories’ that thicken our understanding of extinction, climate change, and ecological collapse beyond human-scaled existence. The paper concludes that response-able witnessing offers vital tools for engaging planetary crises by cultivating narratives that make perceptible the more-than-human relations sustaining and devastating earthly flourishing.
Author: Magdalena Svetlana Rodekirchen (University of Manchester) -
The planetary crisis we face is particularly complex and requires a shift in academia and practices from anthropocentric, disciplinary silos to multispecies and transdisciplinary approaches. Further research is essential for effectively supporting the sustainable transition we need to pursue. In response to the planetary crisis, multispecies justice is a new academic field that has emerged in the past decade, extending the concepts of justice beyond human beings. Rights of Nature is a legal embodiment of multispecies justice. The Rights of Nature movement is gaining international recognition, granting legal rights to non-human entities. This paper aims to examine Rights of Nature cases to understand how law, politics and multispecies justice intersect in practice. The paper will examine two cases in Ecuador, including the Vilcabamba River case, where local citizens successfully held a mining company accountable for environmental damage to the river by invoking the river’s rights. The second is the ongoing Rights of Nature case against the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam project that similarly damaged the environment. Through the lens of multispecies justice, the paper will analyse the political strategies, negotiations and power dynamics involved. Further, it will examine the limitations and challenges of implementing Rights of Nature legislation in practice, recognising state interests, judicial interpretations and economic frameworks that apply pressure. Drawing on empirical evidence from Rights of Nature cases and theoretical reflection, this paper will propose how key concepts in International Relations, particularly territory, sovereignty and the state, need to be rethought to incorporate a multispecies justice framing.
Author: Rose Bevan-Smith (University of Bath) -
Posthuman and more-than-human approaches to International Relations (IR) seek to shift away from understandings of agency and power as capacities linked exclusively to humans. Through concepts like ‘thing-power’ and ‘thing-systems’, New Materialist scholars—particularly those who draw inspiration from vital materialism and Actor-Network Theory—attempt to broaden the location of agency beyond humans by distributing its production among human and nonhuman entities. The understanding of nonhuman agency constructed by these frameworks has, however, been critiqued as severely limited: it attributes agency to nonhumans only by reducing it to the ability to act or affect, but not to think, perceive or desire. From a different angle, other scholars contend that a broad-brush conflation of agency as the ability to act—and the flat ontology that enables this perspective—obscures the different types of power that permeate social and political life, and in particular those that speak to power inequalities. In this paper, I seek to address some of these critiques by developing a typology of more-than-human power within the context of anthropogenic climate change. It is hoped that this typology offers a fuller account of the diverse ways that power operates amid human-earth relations. Intended to be non-exhaustive, this typology includes structural power (providing the conditions of possibility for others), material power (producing material impact), and productive power (shaping processes of meaning-making). I suggest that this framework offers a way to navigate the paradox of the Anthropocene discourse, where humans-as-species are posited as simultaneously exceptional in their geological impact and non-exceptional in their dependence on a functioning biosphere. At the same time, it seeks to challenge the homogenisation of the Anthropocene discourse by encapsulating how the structural effects of colonialism and racism shape situated human-earth relations.
Author: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow) -
Planetary politics is today an emerging field of its own - where nascent cleavages are becoming apparent. In a recent major contribution Burke and Fishel theorize "a polity for the Earth" where an "ecology politic" is "accountable to people and Earth at scales from the planetary to the local" (2025: 221-222). They think of this ideal polity as "something like an order" that is nonetheless also decentralized in the sense that it ought to be both "post-sovereign" and "pluriversal." Blake and Gilman, in their recent contribution, argue for a system of "planetary subsidiarity" along similar lines, even more strongly eschewing the idea that state-like centralism might be desirable for future planetary governance (2024). My counter-argument here is that while Burke and Fishel, together with Blake and Gilman, have articulated appealing visions for a future planet polity, their actual realization would require a more balanced mix of planetary subsidiarity and what I conceptualize as "planetary supersidiarity" (cf. Manners 2020). Planetary supersidiarity would be needed to coordinate the new global political economy and the equally novel forms of world politics that a planetary politics in sync with Earth systemic imperatives calls for, at least as a transitional and temporary control measure.
Author: Stefan Pedersen (University of Sussex)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Power and Legitimacy in Trade-Environmental Governance: The Contestation of CBAM and EUDR Within and Beyond EuropeSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: Caroline Bertram (University of Cambridge)Chair: Caroline Bertram (University of Cambridge)Discussant: Patrick Holden (University of Plymouth)
-
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) marks a significant shift toward mandatory sustainability governance by requiring companies to ensure that products placed on the EU market are not linked to deforestation or forest degradation across seven key commodities. While the EUDR aims to transform global supply chains, its effectiveness will depend not only on formal rules and enforcement capacities but also on expectations of key actors about its implementation, as expectations influence cooperation, compliance, and contestation, shaping the trajectories of policy implementation.
This paper investigates how diverse stakeholders envision the implementation and outcomes of the EUDR. Using Q-methodology interviews, it examines how expectations vary among policymakers, industry representatives, civil society organizations, as well as producing-country actors in Colombia and in Côte d’Ivoire, across three commodity sectors – cocoa, coffee and palm oil. The analysis seeks to uncover shared viewpoints and potential (mis-)matches in expectations that may influence the effectiveness and legitimacy of the EUDR. The paper builds on 30 Q-methodology interviews with key stakeholders in Colombia, and upcoming interviews with stakeholders in the EU and in Côte d’Ivoire. Overall, the study underscores the importance of understanding and aligning stakeholder expectations to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of the EUDR’s implementation.
Author: Charline Depoorter (University of Basel) -
The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanim (CBAM) is rather an odd duck. On one hand, it responds to calls for the EU to act with a heavy hand, penalising carbon-intensive imports through a uniform carbon levy to offset internal carbon pricing under the EU Emissions Trading System. On the other hand, it is perforated with exceptions: it applies only to specific raw materials, sectors, and firm sizes, and may even exclude partners such as the United States. CBAM could therefore only emerge as a compromise. In this paper, we attempt to explain the mismatch between the lofty goal of creating an environmental club and the lowlands of achievable politics by analysing how adaptation costs and bargaining power shape member states’ positions. First, adaptation costs, driven by domestic carbon prices and trade exposure, should mitigate support for effective carbon pricing. Policymakers from states with high adaptation costs are expected to acquiesce to domestic opposition by resisting strong pricing measures, while policymakers from states with low adaptation costs are expected to advocate strong prices, reflecting domestic demand from firms already invested in carbon mitigation. Second, we expect that two political factors shape policymakers’ bargaining power. On one hand, industrial concentration within affected sectors amplifies political mobilisation: when adaptation costs or benefits are concentrated among a few firms, these actors have strong incentives to lobby and pressure policymakers. On the other hand, dependence on intra-EU trade weakens bargaining power by exposing policymakers to internal divisions. We test our argument through an automated text analysis of European Parliament debates (2016–2025). Our findings will contribute to the climate policy literature by demonstrating how collective action problems and bargaining considerations shape the arguments of EU policymakers.
Authors: Scott Hamilton (University of Antwerp) , Dirk De Bièvre (University of Antwerp)* -
The European Union (EU) has recently introduced two unilateral trade-climate policies: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products (EUDR). While these instruments are presented as essential to prevent carbon leakage, they have sparked widespread contestation among the EU’s trade partners. In which a key paradox arises: the most vocal critics are not those most directly exposed economically. We argue that unilateral trade-environmental policies must be understood within broader dynamics of international norm contestation, shaped by power asymmetries, justice concerns, and competing visions of global governance. Within the wider field of norm theory in international relations, much attention has recently been given to the contestation of international norms. Norms are rarely accepted linearly; instead, they operate within contested normative environments. To increase our understanding of the contestation of unilateral trade-climate instruments, we draw on the distinction between disagreements over norm frames (the underlying justifications, principles and values) and norm claims (the specific instruments or types of actions prescribed by a given frame). This distinction makes it possible to classify outcomes of contestation: (1) norm clarification (agreement on both frames and claims), (2) norm recognition (agreement on frame, disagreement on claims), (3) norm (agreement on claims, disagreement on frame), and (4) impasse (disagreement on both). Applying this framework, we map the international contestation of the EU’s CBAM and EUDR to assess the implications for their legitimacy and robustness. We rely on a discourse analysis of over 300 meeting minutes from key World Trade Organization bodies between 2019 and 2025. Our coding scheme is grounded in a power/trade/justice typology, which enables us to identify both discursive frames and specific claims raised by WTO members. Overall, our paper suggests that the EU’s external trade-climate policies risk undermining the legitimacy of the trade-climate nexus and cooperation thereof.
Authors: Caroline Bertram (University of Cambridge) , Laurie Durel (University of Bern)* , Hermine Van Coppenolle (University of Ghent)*
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Rethinking peacebuilding: Beyond the crisis of the liberal peaceSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConveners: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent) , Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg)Chair: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
-
This paper revisits the political and normative foundations of peace against the backdrop of the crisis of liberal peacebuilding and polarization within liberal societies. Liberal conflict theory has long assumed that regulated conflict strengthens democracy, yet it has reduced conflict to interest negotiation, thereby stripping it of political substance. The crisis of liberal peace, I argue, stems from this impoverished conception of conflict and liberalism’s failure to prevent factionalism—the fragmentation of the political community into antagonistic groups lacking a shared sense of the common good. The paper reconstructs two waves of republican critique of liberal peace, each arising in periods of political transition - after World War II and following the Cold War - examining how freedom and civic bonds can be maintained amid disagreement. Drawing on this lineage, the paper advances a republican alternative to both liberal and authoritarian approaches. Republican peace, it argues, arises from the tension between hopes for political order and inevitable disappointments. Renewed through Latour’s notion of collective assembly, it envisions peace as a shared search for the common good amid enduring conflict.
Author: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg) -
The migration-security nexus is a well-known and controversial feature of the liberal peacebuilding model, wherein peacebuilders frame and manage migration as a security issue in order to contain conflicts and displaced people. Many critics of the liberal peace have previously called for the desecuritisation of migration as the most normatively desirable outcome for local people in conflict settings and as a necessary prerequisite to build sustaining peace. More recently, theorists have found that desecuritisation is a complex and dynamic process that rarely manifests as the undoing of securitisation. This paper theoretically builds on this literature to consider how the securitisation of migration can be undone in the post-liberal peacebuilding agenda. Focusing on the European Union’s interventions in Mali, the paper employs post-structuralist discourse analysis to identify and critically examine three main logics behind the migration-security nexus: humanitarianism, societal security, and risk management. The analysis shows that effective desecuritisation must go beyond problem-solving approaches to continuously challenge and delegitimise the very epistemological foundations that sustain each of these logics. The paper also finds that non-state actors on the peripheries of peacebuilding circles are particularly well-placed as desecuritising agents due to their liminal position as both institutional insiders and outsiders.
Author: Thom Vigor (University of Kent) -
In conflict-affected and post-conflict societies, youth are at the centre of hopes for a peaceful and prosperous future. Yet, both the liberal internationalism of past decades and domestic politics have frequently portrayed young people, particularly young men, as a source of instability. As the liberal peace paradigm fades and the development economy comes under strain, the question arises: how do international actors, government institutions, and civil society organisations reframe their understandings of youth and peace in policy and practice - if at all? Revisiting the case of Timor-Leste,
this paper examines how the role of youth in societal (in)stability and peace is defined and negotiated across these overlapping spheres in recent years. Analysing policy documents, such as the National Action Plan for Youth 2023–2027, and reports, the paper argues that young people are positioned in a complex and frictional peace order,
situated between international discourses and local expectations, with clear demands of national and community identity. By analysing these dynamics, the paper contributes to broader debates on reimagining peacebuilding beyond its liberal crisis toward more plural and relational understandings of peace.Author: Werner Distler (University of Marburg) -
As the liberal peace framework faces mounting critique for its universalist assumptions and technocratic approaches, forgiveness re-emerges as a deeply political yet underexplored concept in peacebuilding practice and theory. This paper examines forgiveness not as a moral act or emotional state, but as a relational and epistemic process through which societies negotiate multiple truths, repair broken trust, and reconstitute the moral fabric of coexistence. It asks: Can peacebuilding succeed without shared narratives of the past? What happens when forgiveness is sought in contexts where truths remain contested, or where epistemic hierarchies silence different narratives? Drawing on scholarship on epistemic injustice, memory politics, and post-conflict reconciliation, the paper argues that the liberal peace’s reliance on singular truth narratives (e.g. through truth commissions or transitional justice mechanisms) constrains the transformative potential of forgiveness. Instead, a multiple truths framework may better support the resilience of trust and the possibility of coexistence. This framework acknowledges the coexistence of contradictory memories and legitimises marginalised voices. Through this lens, forgiveness becomes an ongoing, plural, and performative act rather than a moment of closure – which might be an essential element in rethinking peacebuilding beyond the crisis of the liberal peace.
Author: Nadine Ansorg (University of Kent)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Russia’s Offensive War Against UkraineSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: James Patton Rogers (Cornell University)
-
The research seeks to answer the main question: How do Russian elites construct justificatory political narratives prior to interventions and wars? It will be addressed through a critical discourse analysis of two case studies: Russia’s intervention in Syria (2015), and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022). The research data will consist of official statements and articles published by Russian elites during the year preceding each act of aggression. The study is situated within the theoretical framework of critical constructivist IR theory, and political mythology, arguing that prior to acts of aggression, states prepare not only their military and economic capabilities but also construct justifying narratives—political myths—to reduce domestic and international opposition. This approach seeks to address a gap left by other IR paradigms, which focus primarily on material factors and often overlook intersubjective meanings (national identity, legitimacy, and perception). The expected outcome is that the discourse is not static but is strategically adapted as the intervention or war approaches. Understanding the mechanisms used by the Russian regime to influence both international and domestic audiences is crucial for responding to the threats posed by such strategies.
Author: Greta Latvenaite (University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations) -
How does the self-perception of conflict actors implicate the peace process? Drawing from the Palestinian Israeli and the Russian-Ukraine War, this paper identifies a major challenge in peace talks arising from actors’ perception of their actions, identity and impact. The paper will underscore how the politics of defining or identifying who the aggressor or victims are in the conflict have stalled peace talks in the selected conflict zones. How a party in conflict identifies itself and the other party in a conflict, shapes how they engage in peace talks. The paper highlights that actor’s perception of themselves, is coloured by three factors their assess and relations to other actors in the international system, their military industrial complex and the media. The paper further explores how peace actors in bringing conflict actors together can go beyond the politics of identity construction during peace talks to engender sustainable agreements.
Author: Chukwuemeka Oko-Otu (Canterbury Christ Church University) -
Ukraine’s history of volunteering and charity work has been a strong source of its resilience to Russian aggression for over a decade. The Donbas War saw society collect to support humanitarian efforts in the East, while an underfunded military also saw crowdfunders support ad-hoc non-lethal aid such as bulletproof vests, reconnaissance drones, and blankets to the armed forces. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, however, participation in these efforts have expedited and adapted to the new wartime environment. Over time, aid has become more militaristic in nature, with greater crowdfunders raising money to supply items to the armed forces that can kill. First-person-view and one-way-attack drones, mortars, grenade launchers, and ammunition are such examples of the instruments that are actively crowdfunded and provided to the armed forces by civil society actors.
This paper traces the evolution in wiliness to donate, arguing that as the war has continued, donors have become more prepared to donate to causes that provide lethal aid to the armed forces of Ukraine. Interacting with discussions on participatory and digital war, it identifies and discusses the factors that impact donations to charitable organisations through two case studies: Come Back Alive Foundation and Dzyga’s Paw. The preliminary findings discover that two particular factors can be attributed to a rise in preparedness to donate to lethal causes: reactions to events of political animosity and a desensitisation to images of war. As the war has continued individuals have become desensitised to elements of the conflict, coming to celebrate graphic imagery of the death of an ‘enemy’ such as FPV drone footage, increasing willingness to donate to non-humanitarian causes. Similarly, donations are vastly impacted by political events, identifying President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s White House meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance in February 2025 as a key flashpoint.Author: Joe Murphy (The University of Edinburgh)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Roundtable / Scholar Activism, Abolitionist Pedagogies, and Institutional Complicity: Developing Creative Tools to Confront Genocide from Inside Academia
This roundtable invites critical researchers and scholar-activists to collectively confront the entanglements of ongoing colonial relations with the severe challenges posed by the current political moment. A moment which is characterised by an intensification of the racial capitalist regime and its acceleration of capital accumulation, dispossession, mass colonisation, violence, and exploitation. Racial capitalism, first and foremost, is a process that makes different grievances and devastating realities of communities seem disconnected from each other.
We acknowledge that for many academics in European institutions, recent events – especially concerning Palestine – have strained our ability to act as critical voices for global decolonial justice, particularly in light of blatant institutional complicity with ongoing colonial violence and genocide.
Grounding our discussion in abolitionist pedagogies and creative methodologies, we will explore the intertwining themes of racial capitalism, settler-colonialism, the arms trade, and the rise of the far right through the lens of colonial violence – military, epistemic, and structural – as manifested in Palestine, SWANA, DRC Congo, at European borders, and within our own cities.
The roundtable moves beyond critique towards practical engagement to counter the coordinated attack on internationalist solidarity. Through collective reflection and creative dialogue, we will examine our positions as educators, researchers, and activists, and explore the complementarity, contradiction, and complicity inherent in our work within and beyond the academy.
Our goal is to develop emancipatory perspectives and tangible teaching tools rooted in a commitment to liberation and social justice. The hope is to take these themes forward to support our students and communities.
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Leila Mouhib (ULB)Participants: Amira Abdelhamid , Leila Mouhib (ULB) , Heba Youssef (University of Brighton) , Marianela Barrios Aquino (University of Porstmouth) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Shaping the international through a lens of accountability to children and young peopleSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Sabrina WhiteChair: Helen Berents (Griffith University)
-
A life with safety, dignity and a clean environment is a precondition for sustainable protection. Yet in the most complex and challenging humanitarian emergencies, the most basic rights of affected populations are barely upheld. Children’s physical wellbeing and development is especially at risk, as humanitarian responses are often adult-focused, and fail to respond to the specific needs of children and the natural environment on which they depend. This paper contends that the uniquely complex nature of dire emergencies favours immediate protection responses at the expense of a longer-term approach needed to build a sustainable, accountable and ecologically sensitive protection of children. This paper analyses the deployment of the language of child protection in policies and practices (operational and programmatic) in complex humanitarian emergencies and mass displacement. What does sustainable and accountable protection look like? Based on discourse analysis of UN emergency response policies and primary research on the mass displacement of the Rohingya people in the mid-late 2010s, this paper illuminates the variable and short-term protection of children. We find that protection and accountability here is also obfuscated by the language of crisis that can dehumanise children and young people on the move.
Author: Charlotte Grech-Madin (Australian National University) -
This paper explores how action research with youth that incorporates capacity building and mentorship can serve as a practice of accountability to youth in ethnically divided post-conflict societies. Focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement entrenched a political system based on ethnic divisions, the project investigates how young people can catalyse political change and reimagine inclusive and peaceful futures. Using a peace process simulation as a pedagogical and research tool, the project engages Bosnian youth (aged 18–29) from different ethnic backgrounds in a collaborative exercise to revise the Dayton framework and reimagine and renegotiate a peace agreement. Pre- and post-simulation surveys and observations assess shifts in participants’ knowledge, attitudes, and capacities for inter-group dialogue and political engagement. This project foregrounds young people’s agency in shaping peace processes and holding power structures accountable. It conceptualises empowerment as participation and as co-production of knowledge and transformation of political imagination. In doing so, the project challenges adultist structures that continue to exclude youth from shaping post-conflict governance and peacebuilding and helps ensure unaccountability to them.
Authors: Asli Ozcelik Olcay (University of Glasgow,)* , Yulia Nesterova (University of Glasgow) -
There is an imbalance in the development and humanitarian sector where accountability is often directed upwards to donors rather than downwards to beneficiaries. Unlike donors, beneficiaries often have little power to hold organisations accountable, and this can often have negative impacts. Production of knowledge on what counts as accountability is also often directed from positions of power and authority. Governance and protection implications of an imbalanced accountability paradigm have made it into some frameworks, such as the Accountability to Affected People (AAP) commitments in the humanitarian sector, but children and young people who are the target of many interventions are especially excluded in accountability reform dynamics. Drawing on participatory research with care-experienced children and young people in Rwanda and South Africa, this paper explores how youth-defined understandings of accountability can shape how we conceptualise and approach accountability to them in development and humanitarian spaces through a lens of the global care reform agenda. Through co-production methodologies, the research offers novel insights into how youth-produced knowledge on accountability can shape approaches to child protection and efficacy of interventions. This is research that is part of a two-year knowledge transfer partnership with global NGO Hope and Homes for Children.
Authors: Sabrina White , Katie Hodgkinson (University of Leeds) -
While governmental action is found to fail to deliver on its climate objectives, climate litigation has emerged as a new strategy used by a diversity of international actors to move climate ambition forward. Climate litigation is expected to produce effects beyond climate protection, to include broader environmental justice stakes, including giving more voice to minorities and rebalancing climate governance. This communication centres on youth as actors of international climate litigation cases and how they shape this environmental justice shift. This research analyses three elements: (i) an inventory of all cases that have included youth as claimants; (ii) assessment of their results or ongoing developments; (iii) comparing these to the characteristics of other international climate litigation cases. To do so, it builds on a broader inter-disciplinary research project, the CLAIM (2025-2030) research project on international climate litigation cases brought by marginalized actors.. By zooming on youth, the paper identifies the specificities of this category of international actors, with regards to their use of legal and communication tools to influence climate policy, and discusses to which extend they are able to address current accountability imbalances in global climate governance for more environmental justice.
Author: Amandine Orsini (UCLouvain Saint-Louis – Bruxelles) -
This paper challenges adultocentrism in International Relations by conceptualising childhood as a formative and diachronic dimension of international practice. Traditionally, the discipline has explained international practice through adult-centred frameworks: its focus was predicated on actors as formed subjects whose political agency starts with institutional or professional socialisation. By contrast, our project makes the case for a more diachronic approach by seeing childhood years as an important site for the production of international practices. Drawing on Bourdieusian sociology and Bernard Lahire’s notion of the “plural habitus”, we theorise how early socialisation produces a “patrimony of dispositions” that later serves as a foundation for agency and change in international fields. We apply this theoretical approach to three figures within global politics: the diplomat, the revolutionary, and the humanitarian. We show that in each case, dispositions cultivated in childhood equip international actors with capital and “practical sense” to embody and rework (or reinforce) the “rules of the game”. In turn, we embrace childhood socialisation as plural, and at times contradictory, rather than a static, unidirectional process. Overall, this paper contributes to micro-sociologically informed research and individual-level analysis in IR, as well as to debates on the agency and subjecthood of children in international politics.
Authors: Alistair Markland (University of Sussex)* , Maya Nguyen (University of London)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Roundtable / Studying Peacekeeping: Unpacking the Methodological Divide
This roundtable launches a newly published forum in International Peacekeeping that revisits the enduring methodological divide in peacekeeping research. While large-N statistical studies and in-depth qualitative analyses often appear to generate contrasting findings, contributors argue that these approaches reflect different research questions and assumptions rather than irreconcilable differences. The forum highlights opportunities for dialogue, collaboration, and methodological pluralism, ranging from joint research agendas to relational approaches that foreground dynamic interactions in peacekeeping practice. In doing so, it asks how peacekeeping research can move beyond a “dialogue of the deaf” to produce cumulative, policy-relevant knowledge. Bringing together contributors of this forum, this roundtable provides a space for reflection on how we study peacekeeping and how peacekeeping scholarship can continue to inform international efforts to manage conflict in an era of shifting global order.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Allard Duursma (ETH Zurich)Participants: Tom Buitelaar (Leiden University) , Vanessa Newby (Monash University) , Chiara Ruffa , Marion Laurence (Canadian Defence Academy) , Sara Lindberg Bromley (Uppsala University) , Georgina Holmes (The Open University) -
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / Technological competition, cooperation, and control in an uncertain global order: Emerging strategic and governance challenges beyond the US-China hyperboleSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Julia Carver (University of Leiden)Chair: Julia Carver (University of Leiden)Discussant: Julia Balm (Kings College London)
-
Strategic competition over cloud computing technologies and sovereignty claims have emerged as key dimensions of global digital politics. While extant literature has tended to overlook the relationship between states' competition over artificial intelligence and their cloud sovereignty ambitions—treating AI competition and cloud sovereignty as siloed issues--they are closely intertwined in reality. Not only are cloud infrastructure and AI technologies key components of Big Tech companies’ ‘technology stacks’, but both technologies have become strategically integrated into contemporary state approaches to ‘digital sovereignty’. Drawing upon the understudied Dutch and British policy contexts as illustrative cases, this paper advances a conceptual framework for understanding how the pursuit of particular ‘sovereign cloud’ solutions by various European states have been shaped by wider techno-geopolitical pressures, including the growing structural entanglement between cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, and states’ foreign policy goals. In so doing, I elaborate an AI-cloud sovereignty paradox in European approaches to digital sovereignty. Accordingly, this paper seeks to offer novel theoretical and empirical contributions to digital IPE scholarship by conceptualizing the ‘integrative’ features of cloud and AI technologies from a geo-economic perspective and by foregrounding the significant tensions they introduce for states’ digital sovereignty goals.
Author: Julia Carver (University of Leiden) -
States face a strategic paradox when considering the public disclosure of intelligence: preserve operational security to protect sources and methods or disclose to gain immediate strategic advantages. This article develops a formal model to explain official public intelligence disclosures (OPID), the deliberate declassification and official release of sensitive intelligence for strategic gain, as a function of states’ shadow of the future. Specifically, the model conceptualizes OPIDs as an expected utility optimization problem within a costly signaling framework. In technological regimes characterized by rapid obsolescence and high technological turnover, states discount the costs of disclosures heavily, as the value of secrecy declines for collection techniques with temporally-limited utility. The model articulates five benefit categories and four cost categories and includes an innovation that captures temporal discounting based on intelligence method obsolescence rates. The model is then evaluated against historical cases spanning 1950-2022 producing the conclusion that disclosure decisions follow predictable patterns, predict an increasing frequency of OPIDs, and sets the foundation for future research in intelligence studies.
Authors: Nechema Huba (Duke University)* , Paul Kearney (Duke University & US Army School of Advanced Military Studies)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / The IPE of TradeSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
Free traders and protectionists alike wield tariffs as their weapon of choice - but toward opposite ends. Richard Cobden and Cordell Hull used tariffs as bargaining chips to achieve multilateral openness, whereas Joseph Chamberlain and Donald Trump deployed them to extract concessions and correct what they framed as structural unfairness in the global trading system. While IPE scholarship has long emphasized the primacy of structural incentives in shaping trade policy outcomes, this paper examines how and why individual agents deploy mercantilist ideas and tools during power transitions, effecting fundamental shifts in international trading regimes.
The paper makes two theoretical contributions, operating at both systemic and sub-systemic levels of analysis. First, it reconceptualises hegemonic stability theory (Krasner 1976) as a dynamic framework wherein agents actively disrupt (or stabilise) structure, revealing a recursive relationship in which crisis-driven agency can transform structural conditions themselves. Second, it demonstrates how pivotal individuals act as "switchmen" (Weber 1946), endogenously manufacturing uncertainty to redirect institutional trajectories (Blyth 2010). It draws on multiple archival sources and applies rigorous process tracing analysis to deepen our understanding of the role of trade policy decisions in power transitions. While direct comparison between the two cases may not be possible due to differences in scope conditions, the British historical case (1) illuminates whether the US protectionist turn under President Trump represents tactical manoeuvring or heralds the collapse of the liberal international order itself and (2) provides analytical tools for studying the role of individual agency in IPE beyond trade policy.
Author: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
The Trump administration’s trade policy was marked by recurrent tariff threats and abrupt policy reversals, alongside publicly articulated justifications that were frequently inconsistent and internally contradictory. These features have often been interpreted as manifestations of chaotic populism, ineffective protectionism, or institutional failure. This paper argues, however, that the political rationale of Trump’s trade policy does not reside primarily in the material outcomes of tariffs, but rather in the shifting and unstable logics through which those tariffs were justified. In this sense, inconsistency and contradiction should be understood not as accidental by-products of the policy process, but as instruments deliberately mobilized to advance particular political objectives. While protectionist and populist elements played an important role in the formulation and circulation of trade discourse, they should not be read as the straightforward expression of either protectionism or populism. Instead, Trump’s trade policy reflects an opportunistic mode of governance mediated through discursive practices, whose central feature lies in the flexible exploitation of conflictual narratives and institutional tensions in order to maximize policy discretion. This mode of governance reveals the dual character of trade discourse as simultaneously performative and structural. At the performative level, trade discourse operated by actively constructing domestic and international antagonisms, thereby mobilizing political audiences and generating a highly emotionalized and confrontational framework of symbolic political action. At the structural level, these discursive practices functioned to legitimize the expansion of executive authority and, to some extent, to circumvent existing institutional constraints, enabling the sustained implementation of unilateral trade measures over time. This paper identifies five categories of tariff justification in Trump’s trade discourse—industrial reshoring, fiscal revenue generation, foreign policy leverage, the punishment of unfair trading partners, and national security—and analyzes how these rationales were constructed, disseminated, strategically substituted, and rendered internally contradictory.
Author: Tonghua Li (University of York) -
Trump’s attacks first on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during his first presidency, and on NAFTA’s successor, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) during his second presidency, dramatically overturned complacent assumptions about the path-dependency of regional agreements. Trump’s initial aspiration was to rip up NAFTA, but he was convinced to renegotiate it (Macdonald 2023). During his second term, however, he doubled down on his weaponization of U.S. trade theory. Since his second election, Trump has employed tariffs and tariff threats within the region to coerce Canada and Mexico to comply with his erratic demands, generate revenues to fund tax cuts, and to encourage uncertainty and incentivize investors to relocate investment to the United States. These efforts conform to a right-wing populist version of neo-mercantilism as well as a neo-imperialist logic. Canada and Mexico have adopted new economic strategies that contain elements of neo-mercantilism but also seek to cling to the old NAFTA/USMCA model, resulting in weak and contradictory policies.
This paper will analyse the economic, political and social assumptions underlying the brand of neo-mercantilism employed by the three North American governments. It will be based on an analysis of government policies as well as statements and social media comments issued by leaders of the three countries and some key economic advisors. Drawing on the classic article by Brenner, Theodore and Peck (2010) on “variegated neoliberalism,” it will argue that neo-mercantilism is similarly variegated, and that different versions of the economic theory are competing and interacting within the North American regional space.
Author: Laura Macdonald (Carleton University)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / The Path Not Taken: Decolonial Perspectives from India and the Future of IRSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)Chair: Abhishek Choudhary (University of Delhi)
-
This study questions the Western-centred roots of soft power ideas in IR. It pushes for a fresh view that puts at the centre the actions, knowledge systems, and past experiences of countries that were once colonies. Joseph Nye's key approach—based on appeal, culture, and democratic ideals—quietly treats Western standards as universal. This overlooks other ways of gaining influence and keeps up an unequal world system, where these countries are seen as followers instead of equal players in shaping global rules. Rethinking soft power means making two big changes in how one understands it. First, one needs to dig into overlooked records of governance, diplomacy, and cultural outreach from the developing world. Second, one should develop new ideas about power that goes beyond just force versus charm. The paper uses examples like India's use of ancient heritage in diplomacy, Brazil's partnerships with southern countries, and Nigeria's film industry spreading culture abroad. It views soft power as a diverse and debated space that is shaped by ongoing fights against the effects of past empires. The goals include tracing the colonial origins in soft power talks and rebuilding non-Western ways of influence through historical records and on-the-ground research. Lastly, it aims to build stronger links between IR, studies of colonialism's aftermath, and regional expertise. Key questions answered are: How do these countries think about and use soft power outside of Western models? How do colonial pasts affect today's cultural diplomacy and efforts to set new standards? Can a reworked soft power idea include clashing ways of knowing without creating fresh inequalities? The paper seeks to shake up the standard views in IR. By bringing forward ignored perspectives, it rethinks global power as a place for freedom and change, not endless control.
Author: Tilak Raj Sharma (Central University of Jammu) -
The discourse of Just War theory is rooted in western epistemological foundation which is ethnocentric and inclined toward Judeo-Christian ethics and moral ground. Moreover, contemporary just war theory and praxis primarily: Deontology, or consequentialism are correspondingly manifested from the same configuration privileging rational individualism and state centric ethics. This paper attempts to decolonise rigid normative foundations of Just War philosophy by questioning their epistemic heritages and exploring marginal moral principle drawn from Indian philosophy as an alternative discourse. It argues that conventional Just War thinking, grounded in Kantian duty (deontology) and utilitarian outcomes (consequentialism) perpetuates colonial hierarchies of universal moral legitimacy and global power. Furthermore, Western “Just War Theory” continues to emphasize principles of just cause, legitimate authority, and proportionality. This excludes expansionist motives only in formal terms, even as strategic interests inform interventionist practice. Non-Western traditions such as Indian philosophical systems rooted in Dharma offer a more holistic ethical approach to war. Ancient text from the Samkhya and Yoga schools emphasizes not only external justice but also the internal moral condition of the warrior, the communal impact of war, and the cosmic balance of duty. These frameworks offer ethical orientations that are neither utilitarian nor imperial. The inclusion of such perspectives does not merely supplement; it represents a fundamental challenge to the moral architecture of contemporary Just War Theory. It invites a pluralistic reconfiguration of ethical discourse that accounts for cultural specificity, epistemic justice, and historical asymmetries. By integrating perspectives from Indian philosophy of Dharma, ethics and relational moralities, just war can be reframed not as a universalized Western inheritance, but as a plural, contested, and evolving dialogue among the world’s diverse moral and philosophical traditions.
Author: Ningthoujam Koiremba Singh (University of Delhi) -
This paper contributes to the emerging field of decolonial International Relations (IR) by foregrounding Indian intellectual resources that unsettle the discipline’s Eurocentric assumptions. Building on postcolonial theory’s critique of epistemic domination—especially its insights on representation, universalism, and power—this study re-reads IR through the categories developed by Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore. From Aurobindo, it draws the ideas of nation-soul, spiritual nationalism, and a federative “ideal of human unity,” articulating a pathway from cultural self-renewal (swaraj in ideas) to a plural world order not reducible to balance-of-power logics. From Tagore, it engages the critique of the modern nation-state as a “machine,” the ethic of world humanism (viśva-mānav), and the pedagogical experiment of Visva-Bharati as an institutional imagination for cosmopolitan belonging. Methodologically, the paper combines conceptual history and hermeneutic reconstruction to extract IR-relevant norms—dharma (ethical restraint), reciprocity (hospitality across borders), and loka-saṅgraha (sustaining the commonweal). It advances three claims: (1) an epistemic move that provincializes Westphalian categories by introducing Indian frames (swaraj, dharma) as first-order analytical tools; (2) a normative move that reorients security toward non-domination and relational dignity; and (3) an institutional move that sketches a pluriversal, layered internationalism reconciling Aurobindo’s civilizational selfhood with Tagore’s cosmopolitan critique. The result is a decolonial grammar for IR that neither romanticizes indigeneity nor subsumes difference into abstract universalism, but proposes a rigorous, dialogical basis for theory and practice from India.
Author: Jai Bhawani Singh (Central University of Jammu) -
While relational concepts carry the potential of taking the discipline beyond Eurocentrism, the way relational concepts are integrated with civilization superiority needs to be problematized. The paper identifies problems/omissions at four levels in the broader project of decoloniality: (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. The problems of Eurocentrism have been debated much in the past few decades and decolonial theories do provide a possible way out. However, 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 International Relations (IR) demands contesting the Eurocentric underpinnings of the domain, and one substantial contribution to this initiative can be found in the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian text on statecraft by Kautilya. The Arthashastra provides a subtle comprehension of power, sovereignty, diplomacy, and governance beyond Western theories' narrow confines. Key concepts such as the use of danda (force) and dama (diplomacy) and the combination of economic and social strategies reflect a comprehensive strategy for statecraft. These ideas provide a clear divergence from Western Realist theories that prioritize military power while ignoring other forms of influence. Moreover, the Arthashastra brings forward the notion of Rajmandala (the circle of states), a model that visualizes international politics as a dynamic, interconnected matrix of states where power, coalitions, and rivalries are incessantly in flux. In contrast to the rigid, hierarchical frameworks in Western IR, Rajmandala stresses the fluidity of state conduct, acknowledging the adaptability of states to evolving geopolitical landscapes. This paper evaluates the propensity to idealize and associate Indian traditions too strongly with Western ideals and instead advocates a decolonial interpretation of the Arthashastra. By positioning its ideas within India’s traditional realities, it provides fresh insights to reconceptualize global politics, challenging the supremacy of Eurocentric IR theories and fostering a more diverse and inclusive comprehension of international relations.
Author: AIMAN UROOJ (Department of Political Science, University of Delhi)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / US power in AsiaSponsor: US Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: USFP Working groupChair: USFP Working group
-
This paper reconceptualizes the trajectory of U.S. power at the nation’s 250th anniversary by advancing the concept of strategic reimperialization. We argue that the Trump administrations’ foreign policy—defined by simultaneous retreat from multilateral institutions and revivalist expansion through tariffs, ad hoc security mini-blocs, and annexationist rhetoric—constitutes a hybrid strategy aimed at staving off imperial decline. Contrary to interpretations of Trumpism as an aberrant populist disruption, we situate it within the enduring logic of American empire and show its affinity with the three founding doctrines of U.S. statecraft: (1) non-alignment and sovereignty through disentanglement from permanent alliances, (2) commerce as prosperity and leverage, and (3) continental expansion and hemispheric hegemony without overseas entanglements.
Our original contribution is threefold. First, we extend Julian Go’s ascent–maturity–decline cycle by demonstrating that decline often produces revivalist strategies of retrenchment and expansion in tandem. Second, we show how Trump’s foreign policy selectively revives Founding Fathers’ doctrines as a repertoire for imperial renewal. Third, we reveal how these external strategies are inseparable from domestic authoritarian restructuring—welfare retrenchment, immigration militarization, and racial hierarchy—which together form the infrastructure of revivalist empire.
By linking early republican statecraft to twenty-first-century decline management, we argue that America at 250 is not in simple decline but in a reimperializing moment, destabilizing both its domestic democracy and the liberal global order it once championed.Authors: Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University, The Netherlands) , Adam Burns (Brighton College) -
-This study examines why Japan and the United States clashed during the 1980s over the establishment of a system to manage dual-use technologies for security purposes, focusing on the domestic political processes within both countries. The disagreement emerged during bilateral negotiations between 1987 and 1988, when Japan and the United States differed over whether to establish a system for controlling technologies with both civilian and military applications. The paper argues that Japan’s gradual understanding of U.S. intentions and its eventual acknowledgment of the need for government oversight in science and technology research and development became the foundation for subsequent bilateral cooperation in security-related science and technology policy.
-In the late 1970s, the United States began emphasizing the strategic importance of managing dual-use technologies as part of its containment policy toward the Soviet Union. It urged Japan to introduce government control mechanisms. Japan, however, regarded such control as incompatible with postwar norms that emphasized scientific freedom and limited state intervention in research and development. These norms, shaped by reflections on wartime experiences, had become deeply institutionalized in Japanese society and policy frameworks by the 1980s.
-When the United States pressed Japan to adopt stricter controls, Japan resisted, citing legal and societal constraints. At the same time, rising economic friction and the Toshiba–COCOM incident intensified U.S. criticism, while Japan faced domestic political instability over tax reforms. Both governments, therefore, operated under significant domestic constraints.
-Despite these challenges, the two nations concluded the U.S.–Japan Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology in Research and Development in 1988. This study contends that a confidential “Side Letter” (a confidential document) negotiated alongside the agreement played a crucial role in overcoming these constraints, enabling a mutual compromise that redefined the bilateral framework for science and technology cooperation.Author: Ryoji Matsushita (Hitotsubashi university) -
While since the 1970s, the US portrays herself as a global champion of human rights, even within the US politics there have been fierce criticisms on the value of a human rights agenda and the role of the US annual human rights country reports. The importance of the ACRs is twofold. On the one hand ACRs are tied to USAID yet on the other hand they are also used by various think tanks and projects in producing quantifiable data and global rankings with global indicators of human rights sourcing these reports. In a sense, US diplomats become producers of knowledge for global human rights standards through the ACRs and play an important role in furthering the US human rights agenda and the distribution of USAID funding. The controversial Project 2025 included a chapter 6 on the Department of State prepared by Kiron K. Skinner. The actual and authentic human rights are Sovereignty. Human Rights documents should not be approached as a “living instrument”. It is clear that Trump like he did in his first term would be keen to use it against China. (Project 2025 p.800 and 810). The Trump administration recently scaled back the 2024 ACRs reports along the lines of the Project 2025 scepticism on the human rights priorities in the US foreign policy agenda. Since the 1980s, China’s ACRs has always been one of the most vetted and politicised report. A prevalent theme in the ACRs for China that anything that could have a detrimental impact on any kind of US foreign policy has been off the table. This paper explores continuity and changes in the Human Rights agenda US Foreign policy towards China through a discourse analysis of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: China.
Author: Ilia Xypolia (University of Aberdeen, UK) -
This paper unpacks the political process of how the U.S. created regional security order in the Asia-Pacific. The literature on international order and hegemony misses a crucial role and responsibility of order-makers: managing social relations between allies and partners, particularly when those states are not allied with each other. This dynamic between a leading state and two allies with a history of shared grievances creates discord within the allied coalition that threatens regional agenda-setting. The origins of the U.S. hub-and-spokes alliance system reveal how managing social relations between client states over war grievances fundamentally shaped the U.S.-led order in the Asia-Pacific and locked in disconnected U.S. alliance dynamics for decades to come. Without the buy-in of key regional clients, the U.S. could not achieve its principal goal: preventing the spread of communism by reinstating Japan as a powerful ally capable of defending itself from communist aggression. But still scarred from war with Japan, these U.S. clients would not agree to a lenient peace treaty. Standing between Japan and its neighbors, U.S. policymakers found themselves fundamentally altering and adjusting preferences to satisfy all parties, moving from a firm stance of no binding alliances to a multilateral security pact to finally bilateral alliances that created lasting U.S. obligations. Using the case of the hub-and-spokes alliance model, this paper seeks to argue three things: 1) that social management is a critical role and responsibility of the leading state in a regional order, 2) that it fundamentally impacts how orders are created and maintained by constraining optionality, and 3) that the leading state has a portfolio of strategies for addressing these prior grievances among supporters when they flare up and impact policy.
Author: Miranda Richman (University of Oxford)
-
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM
FR05 Panel / World politics in MENA region and KurdistanSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: ISMMEA Working groupChair: Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani (Durham University)
-
Syria has witnessed many changes since the collapse of the Baathist regime in late 2024 and the formation of a transitional government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Yet this paper argues that the approach used to manage church-state relations has remained constant even if the state actor has changed. Using a neo-millet framework which implies that the state deals with religious minority groups through representation by church leadership, I show that the three pillars of the historical millet approach – autonomy, recognition and protection - remain relevant in post-Baathist Syria. By analysing speeches of the three patriarchs resident in Damascus – Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Syriac Orthodox - between December 2024 and July 2025, I argue that the neo-millet approach has proven adaptable, flexible and enduring. However, it remains an unequal relationship dependent upon the state to fulfil its obligations and hinders Christian inclusion as individual citizens, instead placing religious leaders as political representatives of their communities.
Author: Fiona McCallum Guiney (University of St Andrews) -
This paper analyzes the triangular relationship between Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Israel during the Gaza war, focusing on how Ankara has maintained its privileged alliance with Baku despite Azerbaijan’s ongoing strategic and military cooperation with Israel. Under President Erdoğan, Turkey has adopted an increasingly confrontational stance toward Israel, culminating in a complete diplomatic rupture during the Gaza conflict. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has continued to strengthen its ties with Tel Aviv, particularly in defense, intelligence, and energy. This study explores how Turkey reconciles this apparent contradiction, upholding the bir millet, iki devlet (“one nation, two states”) narrative with Azerbaijan while intensifying its rhetorical and political opposition to Israel. By framing this paradox within the broader dynamics of Middle Eastern geopolitics and Turkish identity politics, the paper aims to explain the mechanism of strategic “forgettability,” a deliberate form of selective oblivion that enables Turkish foreign policy to maintain coherence by disregarding deep ideological contradictions.
Author: Roberto Belleri (University of Macerata) -
This paper examines the role of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in advancing regional economic integration and contributing to political cooperation and peace in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. While regional trade agreements such as GAFTA, Agadir Agreement, GCC have been central to conventional integration strategies, MENA remains one of the least economically integrated regions in the world. Intra-regional trade constitutes only 2.9% of the region’s GDP, significantly lower than the global average of 7.9% and far behind the EU’s 22%. SEZs represent a largely underexplored mechanism within the literature on international political economy and regionalism. Despite their proliferation across MENA, from 47 in 2009 to over 200 in 2024, empirical and theoretical analyses of their impact on inter-state relations remain limited. The study situates SEZs within the framework of liberal theory, particularly Commercial Institutional Peace theory, which argues that economic interdependence promotes cooperation and reduces conflict. However, drawing on critiques from realist and critical IPE traditions, this research questions the assumption that deeper economic ties produce political stability. This study employs a dyadic mixed-methods design, analysing SEZ-related trade and political data across MENA states from 1995 to 2022.
Author: Mohamed Hafez (Nottingham Trent University) -
Abstract:
International Relations has long treated sovereignty as synonymous with statehood, leaving limited conceptual space for stateless nations and sub-state actors. This paper reimagines Kurdish sovereignty as a practice of autonomy enacted through governance, culture, and diplomacy rather than as a pursuit of full independence. It argues that sovereignty in the Kurdish context is layered and relational, negotiated among domestic, regional, and transnational actors rather than territorially absolute.
Empirically, the study examines how Kurdish actors exercise and contest authority across four regimes: the Kurdistan Regional Government’s institutionalised autonomy within Iraq’s federation; Rojava’s experiment in democratic confederalism amid Syria’s fragmentation; Turkey’s post-Erdogan recalibration and oscillation between repression and pragmatic engagement; and Iran’s ongoing securitisation of Kurdish activism. These cases illustrate how distinct political systems produce a spectrum of sovereignties without states.
Drawing on post-national and decolonial theories of sovereignty (Hardt & Negri, Agnew, Mbembe, Barkawi & Laffey), the paper demonstrates how Kurdish governance practices challenge Eurocentric and state-centric assumptions at the heart of International Studies. It contends that Kurdish political practice offers a model for understanding sovereignty as adaptive, negotiated, and embedded in cultural life.Author: Ahmad Alkuchikmulla (SOAS and University of Bath) -
Does the historical entanglement of nationalism and the nation-state with colonialism perpetuates the coloniality of power? This paper answers this question in the positive through a reflection on the regional “Kurdish question” as a colonial security conundrum. Conceptually, I define “colonial nationalism” as the ideology that naturalises homogenisation, minoritisation, and border-fixing, and I theorise the resulting “permanent limbo of (un)becoming” in which states pursue endless nation-building while Kurds confront cyclical denial, assimilation, and constrained avenues of self-rule. I trace three mechanisms of Kurdish question as a colonial security conundrum: (1) chronic ontological insecurity of states haunted by the permanently possible Kurdistan; (2) recursive Kurdish resistance that reopens the very insecurities states seek to close; and (3) cross-border coordination as well as external attempts at instrumentalisation of the Kurdish resistance that continually reproduce Western domination in the region despite the formal decolonisation. In short, the Kurdish question is not a local anomaly but a constitutive conundrum of the region’s problematic construction: a colonial-national order that organises power through the permanent confrontation of homogeneity-seeking states and minoritised polities resisting for existence. In this way, the article clarifies what prevailing lenses in security studies such as ethno-separatism, proxy warfare, regional security complexes, and ontological security miss due to a combined effect of their state-centrism or colonial blindness. It advances a decolonial security analysis that decouples decolonial possibilities of forming a political community from state-seeking nationalism as a standard path of imagined emancipation.
Author: Jan Yasin Sunca (ULB - Univeristé libre de Bruxelles)
-
-
10:30 AM
→
10:45 AM
Break 15m
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Affective Investments and the Populist Far RightSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
This paper aims to unpack the complex affective politics behind challenges to the liberal international order. IR scholars have made significant strides in understanding the role of emotions, memories, and other affective investments in world politics. While some of this work has moved beyond nations and states to consider affective investments on wider scales—regional organizations, global civil society, and transnational protest movements—IR theory has yet to come to terms with what it means to investigate the affective underpinnings of “international order.” We first trace the complex history of post-WWII institutions—and global resistance to them—to show that the affective investments involved in an order are inherently multi-dimensional, aggregative, and deeply contested. Revisiting this multiplicity then allows us to theorize the micropolitics behind anti-liberal pressures in contemporary global politics. Rather than approach contemporary challenges as an ideologically unified movement of the new right, we regard them as a constellation of intersecting and sometimes resonating affective investments—including performances of masculinity, the enjoyment of co-production in online spaces, and defiance in the face of pandemics and planetary crises. By uncovering these micropolitical underpinnings, our account complements existing work on both neoconservative ideas and authoritarian populist strategies.
Authors: Andrew A.G. Ross (Johns Hopkins University)* , Ty Solomon -
The global rise of radical-right leaders, parties, and movements and events such as the US Capitol riots and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have triggered debates about the reincarnation of fascism. This article adds an International Relations perspective to these debates and explores the nexus between fascism and foreign policy. Bringing together ideational- and practice-oriented approaches to fascism through a poststructuralist theoretical lens, the article conceptualizes fascism as a discourse that produces a distinct national identity through three frames: (1)crisis, decline, and victimhood, (2)Othering and elimination, and (3)rebirth. It argues that foreign policy can become a site for fascist politics, serving not only as a space of dangers, Otherness, and enmity against which an identity of the besieged nation can be constituted but also as a practice through which the nation can be rejuvenated and achieve a mythical wholeness and purity. Using the case of Trumpism in the United States, the article identifies fascist frames and themes in the discourse, such as national decline and rebirth and eliminationist rhetoric, but also shows where it differs from fascism. However, it regards fascism as a useful corrective to the predominant concept of right-wing populism by drawing attention to the fascist potential of Trumpism.
Author: Thorsten Wojczewski (Coventry University) -
This paper examines how right-wing political rhetoric fuses joy and cruelty as mutually constitutive affective forces in the performance of community and power. Contributing to ongoing debates in International Relation on the politics of emotion, affective publics, and the role of language in shaping political behaviour, this paper shows that the emotional life of the contemporary far right cannot be understood solely through negative affects such as anger, resentment, or fear. Instead, moments of shared enjoyment—whether in ironic memes, transgressive humour, or collective rituals of humiliation—form an affective infrastructure that both binds far right communities and legitimates exclusionary politics. Through comparative analysis of far right rhetoric, we show how joy functions not as the antithesis of cruelty, but as its affective companion: a mode of pleasure derived from domination, derision, and the symbolic reassertion of order. This “cruel optimism,” we suggest, underwrites the affective resilience of right-wing political imaginaries and helps sustain the appeal of nationalist and authoritarian projects.
Authors: Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London) , Alexandra Homolar (University of Warwick) -
This paper compares the rise of right-wing populism in the United States and South Korea from 2015 to 2025, focusing on Donald Trump and Yoon Suk-yeol. Both leaders mobilized grievances – economic dislocation and racial anxieties in the U.S.; gendered backlash and anti-communism in Korea – to justify exclusionary populist appeals. Each leader weakened democratic norms through executive aggrandizement, disinformation, and delegitimization of oversight institutions, culminating in violent assaults on democratic institutions: the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the Seoul Seobu Court on January 19, 2025. Yet their trajectories diverged: in the U.S., erosion occurred gradually as norm-breaking and election denialism became embedded in partisan politics, while in South Korea, an abrupt martial law crisis triggered impeachment and removal. The comparison demonstrates that right-wing populism destabilizes both established and newer democracies, albeit through different mechanisms and speeds. The paper concludes with policy implications for protecting democracy through institutional reforms, regulation of disinformation, and the renewal of civic norms.
Author: Jung-Min Hong (State University of New York (SUNY) Korea)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Affective Nationalisms: Emotion, Power and Everyday GovernanceSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working groupDiscussant: EPIR Working group
-
This paper examines how Hindu nationalism operates not primarily through institutional channels or formal political mobilisation, but through the affective microprocesses of everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Indian university students across regions, genders, and castes, I trace how nationalist ideology becomes emotionally embedded through intimate spaces like homes, friendships, hostels, classrooms, and social media interactions.
Rather than studying nationalism as a top-down political phenomenon, I centre the mundane practices through which young people experience, negotiate, and transmit nationalist affects. I argue that understanding contemporary nationalisms requires analytical attention to what is termed 'affective infrastructure' - the emotional sustenance of political ideologies through horizontal circulation within intimate spaces, and processes, including the home, friend group, classrooms, etc. These microprocesses, even a casual joke invoking communal boundaries, gendered expectations naturalised through family and school, caste hierarchies reproduced in friendship formations, reveal how ideology achieves durability through feeling rather than formal indoctrination.
By foregrounding affect and everyday practice, I demonstrate how seemingly ‘apolitical’ interactions function as intensely political sites where power operates through emotional registers. This methodology illuminates what realist objectivity obscures: that political phenomena are not only rationalised through policies and institutions, but felt, embodied, and lived. The paper contributes to emotions scholarship by demonstrating how ethnographic engagement with microprocesses reveals the intimate mechanics through which religious nationalism becomes a durable ‘common sense’.Author: Saloni Pradhan (University of Leicester) -
In the context of the 2026 Senedd elections, this paper argues that Welsh sustainability politics are shaped by a deeply affective and hopeful vision of the future. Central to this analysis is the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015), widely regarded as a “hope-bearing” piece of legislation (Stokes and Smith, 2024). By promoting a vision of a green, sustainable and emotionally resonant Welsh society, the “Future Generations rhetoric” tries to bring Welsh people together, inciting pride for the nation while fostering the hope of a better future. Drawing on publicly available materials and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork within the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, this paper explores how this affective discourse contributes to the construction of a distinct Welsh identity. By remaining intrinsically linked to national identity, the transformative potential of the Act remains constrained by what is deemed ‘politically viable’ within the current Welsh political system. While its affective infrastructure can inspire environmental action, it can also easily be co-opted, and risks obscuring the structural causes of the climate crisis. Ultimately, the paper contributes to broader debates on the affective nature of nationalism and national identity, calling for existing literature on green nationalism to start paying attention to affect and emotions.
Author: Morgane Dirion (Cardiff University) -
Although Thailand and Cambodia share close social and cultural ties, their longstanding border disputes have fostered hostility between the two nations. The ongoing conflict, which began in early 2025, has catalysed waves of nationalist sentiment among Thais, who have perceived the Thai government's ineffectiveness in swiftly implementing responsive countermeasures to the emerging crisis. This erodes public trust and provides other social actors with an opportunity to exploit the heightened tensions to build nationalist political identities and rally Thai civilians to support their actions against Cambodia. However, extensive research has examined how nationalism is expressed and mobilised during political crises to vie for political influence through media outlets, politicians, and activists, it overlooks the activism of political influencers who benefit from the participatory affordances of social media to amplify nationalist ideology, shaping perceptions of the conflict. Therefore, the project aims to investigate how Thai political influencers use social media to shape nationalist narratives and imagination that explain why the Thai people manifest hatred and hostility towards the Cambodian government and its civilians, disregard human rights and peaceful coexistence, and encourage retaliatory actions against Cambodia. The Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is utilised to examine media content produced by political influencers on social media from the start of the conflict in May 2025.
Author: Wisarut Wongnom (School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Alliances and DiplomacySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Maisa Edwards (Kings College London)
-
Examining interpersonal trust between state leaders from different conflict parties is increasingly held to be important when considering foreign policy decision-making around bilateral negotiations. This, however, is not the only context in which interpersonal relations matter. The relationship between key individuals within a conflict party, such as that between a state leader and their foreign minister, can impact foreign policy decision-making around the development of conflict negotiations. These relationships can be marked by trust, but can equally be consumed by distrust. This paper examines how the relationship of managed distrust between a state leader and their foreign minister can impact foreign policy decision-making during conflict negotiations and whether trust can be built from that distrust management. I focus on the relations between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and examine how these political rivals managed to work together during the 1992-1993 Oslo negotiations despite a history of distrust. I find that the relationship between the two men was managed through a combination of three mechanisms: an informal agreement that set out how they would work together; institutionalising one-to-one meetings; and by selecting negotiators who reflected and represented both men’s interests.
Author: David Wilcox (n/a) -
Diplomacy remains one of the least democratized domains of governance. Decisions negotiated in closed rooms often determine the fate of entire societies, yet citizens, civil society, and epistemic communities are rarely included in shaping them. This paper argues that Participatory Action Research (PAR) provides a practical and normative framework for re-imagining foreign policy as an inclusive, reflexive, and co-creative process. Building on the author’s earlier empirical application of PAR in fostering EU–Türkiye collaboration in North Africa*, it extends the discussion beyond the case study to conceptualize “participatory diplomacy”—a model of policymaking that integrates diverse stakeholders into iterative cycles of deliberation, action, and learning.
In contrast to conventional Track I diplomacy, which is hierarchical, state-centric, and reactive, participatory diplomacy fosters collaborative knowledge production and trust-building among governments, experts, and citizens. It operates through mechanisms such as search conferences, stakeholder dialogues, and joint policy design workshops that blur the boundaries between research, consultation, and decision-making. The paper develops a three-pillar framework—inclusivity (multi-stakeholder engagement across levels), reflexivity (institutional learning through feedback), and shared ownership (co-production of outcomes)—to guide the democratization of foreign policy.
Using empirical illustrations from EU, Turkish, and global initiatives, it further identifies institutional, cultural, and political conditions for embedding participation within foreign ministries, regional organizations, and multilateral platforms. Ultimately, the article contends that democratizing diplomacy through participatory methodologies is not merely a procedural innovation but a normative imperative for rebuilding legitimacy and trust in global governance. By linking democratic theory with diplomatic practice, it calls for a paradigmatic shift: from diplomacy about societies to diplomacy with societies.
*https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2025.2556319
Author: Pinar Akpinar (Qatar University) -
Political Time and Leadership Psychology in U.S.–China Normalization and the Taiwan issue, 1969-1979
Scholars have long debated why major foreign policy shifts occur at certain moments rather than others, yet existing explanations often rely on structural conditions or assume a rational, linear conception of time. This paper introduces leadership psychology into temporal analysis, arguing that leaders act through subjectively constructed political time. We conceptualize time as a psychologically mediated factor that interacts with leaders’ temporal orientations and, in triangular contexts, with the competing temporalities of rivals and allies. Drawing on narrative analysis and the Temporal Definition of the Situation (TDoS) framework, the paper traces how U.S., Chinese and Taiwanese leaders—facing broadly similar structural conditions between 1969 and 1979—nonetheless defined political time differently across four dimensions: initiation, pace, duration and order. Archival evidence from the Foreign Relations of the United States series, presidential tapes, and public opinion data reveals how temporal misalignments among Nixon, Carter, Mao, and Chiang generated diplomatic delay, crisis, and eventual re-alignment over the Taiwan issue. This study challenges rationalist models that treat time as an objective backdrop and demonstrates that variation in leaders’ temporal orientations helps explain when and how transformative diplomatic moves become possible—offering fresh insight into the temporal dynamics of contemporary great-power competition.
Authors: Shuang Peng (Peking University) , Yunmeng Zhou (University of St Andrews)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Author Meets Critics: Elif Kalaycioglu's "Politics of World Heritage"
In Politics of World Heritage, Elif Kalaycioglu analyzes UNESCO’s flagship regime, which seeks to curate a cultural-history of humanity, attached to a rarified “universal value” and tethered to goals of peace and solidarity. Kalaycioglu shows that the regime generates and structures desirous pursuits of subjectivity, such as civilizational grandeur, technological acumen, world-historical agency. This raises the question of whether these subjectivities, valorized by the regime’s configuration and coveted by states, are conducive to peace and solidarity. Following that question, Kalaycioglu shows that participants link diverse visions of peace and solidarity to humanity, from nuclear disarmament to cooperation under multipolarity modeled after a stylized Silk Roads history. Three key lessons follow. First, humanity is not a self-evidently normative subject. How humanity is represented matters for resulting social orders and political visions. Second, while cultural and historical resources facilitate political visions, such facilitation can be multiply forged. Finally, a synecdoche for the liberal international, world heritage asks us to contend with difficult questions of the universal and the particular, and the enduring and emergent hierarchies of global politics. To address these claims, the roundtable brings Kalaycioglu into conversation with scholars whose work engage with themes of subjectivity, heritage, and humanity, among others.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Sinja Graf (LSE)Participants: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University) , Marina Duque , Elif Kalaycioglu (The University of Alabama) , Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh) , Alvina Hoffmann -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Author Meets Critics: Reflections on 'The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge' by Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz
'The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge' (University of California Press, 2026) offers a radical rethinking of the fundamentals of refuge, protection, and justice through the lens of queer and trans displacement. Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz interrogate the moral and political foundations of international asylum systems, exposing how existing institutions fail to recognize the lived realities and relational harms experienced by LGBTQ+ individuals in situations of displacement. Against a backdrop of global institutional failure and rising illiberalism, the book challenges us to revisit core assumptions about the “international” and its obligations. This roundtable brings together scholars to reflect on how 'The Way Out' revisits the foundational ideas of international protection: to secure dignity, safety, and justice for the most marginalized. It asks how systems of refuge might be reimagined in light of the structural exclusions they produce, and how queer approaches can recenter global ethics on the needs of those at the edges of visibility and belonging. The authors will respond to the commentaries, opening a conversation about the place of justice for the queer and trans displaced in a world in crisis.
Sponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupChair: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester)Participants: Katherine Mann (University of Cambridge) , Rebecca Buxton (University of Bristol) , Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester) , Samuel Ritholtz (University of Oxford) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order? Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder.
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Michael Cox (LSE)Participants: Chenchen Zhang (Durham University) , Sasikumar Sundaram (City, University of London) , Indrajit Roy (University of York) , Nora Fisher Onar (University of San Francisco) , Andrew Dorman (Chatham House) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Colonial Postcolonial Decolonial output workshop
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Contemporary Challenges in PeacebuildingSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg)
-
With armed conflict escalating along the border, this paper presents new empirical findings on how online antagonism between Cambodian and Thai netizens served as a backdrop to the 2025 violence. Drawing on community-generated testimonies from 2024, it shows that digital nationalism is fuelled by longstanding historical grievances, perceived inequalities and recurrent flashpoints around cultural ownership and heritage. These tensions are reanimated online through claims over temples, martial arts and national symbols that evoke unresolved memories of hierarchy and humiliation. Digital platforms amplify these disputes, transforming them into everyday encounters that normalise antagonism and rehearse asymmetrical power relations. The effects of this online conflict extend beyond the screen, shaping the offline lives of those engaged. Thai users frequently exhibit digital apathy, marked by detachment, mockery and dismissal, while Cambodian users display digital hyper-engagement, marked by defensive participation, humiliation and emotional fatigue. These affective asymmetries spill into communal dynamics, including fears of escalation and long-term intergroup harm. Across testimonies, users describe social media as a virtual battlefield where the legacies of past conflict are continually revived rather than resolved. The findings reveal both the causes and human costs of digital conflict, showing that cross-border peacebuilding requires confronting historical hierarchies as much as repairing the emotional injuries they reproduce.
Authors: Phasiree Thanasin (Chiang Mai University)* , Raymond Hyma (University of Warwick / Monash University) , Suyheang Kry (Women Peace Makers)* -
In Colombia’s ongoing peacebuilding efforts, the notion of responsibility among former combatants remains central yet deeply contested. Over the past two decades, the country has implemented a range of transitional justice and reconciliation mechanisms — from the Justice and Peace Law to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) — to address past violence and promote accountability. However, these frameworks often privilege legal and institutional understandings of responsibility, overlooking the complex ways in which ex-combatants themselves interpret their involvement in the conflict and their moral positioning in its aftermath.
Drawing on qualitative research based on life histories with former members of different armed groups, this paper examines how responsibility is narrated and negotiated in everyday post-conflict settings. The analysis reveals that responsibility is not a fixed moral state but a fluid and relational process, expressed through denial, minimisation, guilt, shame, or reflective reinterpretation. These diverse articulations expose how responsibility operates not only as a juridical category but as an ethical, emotional, and political practice embedded in the lived experience of transition.
By foregrounding the perspectives of those typically framed as perpetrators, the paper contributes to broader debates on peacebuilding and transitional governance. It argues that understanding responsibility beyond institutional frameworks allows for a more nuanced grasp of how peace is constructed, contested, and felt on the ground. In doing so, the paper connects to critical peacebuilding and International Relations debates on everyday peace and vernacular practices, highlighting responsibility as a dynamic and situated process that both reflects and reshapes the moral economies of post-conflict life.
Author: Irene Piedrahita (University of Glasgow) -
Conflict can lead to food insecurity, and food insecurity can lead to more conflict. This makes food insecurity a major catalyst of harm and need among combatants and non-combatants alike. To break this vicious cycle, food aid is often seen as an obvious solution. However, food aid is no panacea and can sometimes even prolong conflict. We argue that the mode and capacity of national-level and local-level governance are key moderators. Local food aid access, coordination with humanitarian organizations, attacks on humanitarian workers, and local food expropriation all hinge on the willingness and ability of government actors at the national and local level to facilitate and to protect relief program s. The resulting conundrum is how external stakeholders can engage effectively to mitigate needs and harms that arise from the twin threats of food insecurity and conflict. Through large-N analysis of micro-level data on food insecurity from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, this paper tests the impact of different constellations of external stakeholder engagement – through international development, humanitarian relief, and peace efforts – on short-term and long-term conflict dynamics and nutrition levels. In doing so, this paper furthers our understanding of parallel strands of academic work spanning development, humanitarian relief, and peace.
Authors: Christoph Dworschak (German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval))* , Hyunjung Park (University of York) , Rob Grace (Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict)* -
Legal empowerment is a rights-based approach to the empowerment of disadvantaged groups that engages legal tools, knowledge and practices to generate legal autonomy and eventually help sustain meaningful social, political or economic improvements. As an alternative to state-centered practices, it promotes pragmatic legal pluralism and a people-focused, empirical and context-cognizant approach to justice. While the concept itself is recent, many NGOs have piloted equivalent programmes in the past decades, with some engaging these techniques in post-conflict settings, such as Burundi. Relying on fieldwork, interviews and field observations, this paper proposes a critical overview of such initiatives in contemporary post-conflict Burundi and argues that legal empowerment activities face intrinsic and extrinsic challenges to their implementation. Torn between the managerial constraints of their organizations and the necessity to sustain the approval of authorities in a judicial arena marked by competitiveness and politicization, legal awareness workshops can serve to entertain and support a fictionalized view of justice which may further ‘disempower’ claimants.
Author: Elizabeth Paradis (University of Cambridge)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Dimensions of Sino-Centric Multilateralism in the Global South. A Book-based Roundtable
China’s rise as a global power has often been assumed to unfold within the international order created and maintained by the West. As a result, much attention has been focused on its challenge to and perceptions of the liberal institutional order established after the Second World War. However, far less attention has been paid to Sino-centric multilateralism — the emergence of multilateral formats initiated by China and operating largely outside the reach of the liberal order.
The Dragon’s Emerging Order (2026) is the first volume to offer a comprehensive, global stocktake of China’s efforts to enhance its centrality in international relations. It provides insights into the struggle for global influence, highlighting the interplay of hard and soft power. The chapters offer balanced and critical views of China’s attempts to establish its own multilateralist presence. There are theoretical and empirical chapters, but all combine theory and empirics. A few of the topics are the Belt and Road Initiative, China-CELAC Forum, FOCAC, China and the BRICS, China and ASEAN, China and the G20, and the agency of regional states.
Sponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentChair: Alan Chong (Rajaratnam School of International Studies)Participants: Miguel Enriquez (Rajaratnam School of International Studies) , Joel Ng (Rajaratnam School of International Studies) , Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes (University of Southampton) , Alan Chong (Rajaratnam School of International Studies) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Directions for UK National Security: navigating alliances with the US, Europe, NATO and beyond
In 2025 the UK National Security Strategy recommitted the UK to ‘collective security, led by NATO’ as the ‘cornerstone of our strategy’. It thus recommitted the UK to deepening its partnerships with both the US and Europe, and made a significant defence investment to this end. At the same time, it signalled an intent to ‘Sharpen our diplomatic focus on countries that… share a similar interest in shaping international norms to mitigate and manage the effects of great power competition’. In this session we explore the UK’s options for shaping its future relationships towards other powers, and the arguments supporting them.
Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: Thomas Martin (Open University)Participants: Danie Reader (University of Manchester) , Christine Cheng (War Studies, King's College London) , Owen Greene (Univeristy of Bradford) , Richard Reeve (Rethinking Security) , Jane Kinninmont (United Nations Association - UK) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Earthpolitik vs Realpolitik: Complements or Contradictions?
We are living in times of existential threat. The worst scenarios for anthropomorphic climate change see humanity experiencing catastrophic casualties – and possibly extinction – as a consequence of its own emissions. It may be that Earth hits an environmental tipping point, beyond which its further deterioration as a life-support system is unavoidable. At the same time, the resurgent spectre of great-power war risks compressing the pace of climate change from decades to mere seconds: if states’ nuclear arsenals are employed in anger for the first time since 1945, especially if such a conflagration escalated to an all-out retaliatory exchange, other concerns about environmental degradation would be rendered moot. This roundtable will therefore consider whether ‘Earthpolitik’ or ‘Realpolitik’ is a more useful lens through which to view contemporary international politics, with a particular – but not exclusive – focus on calls to ‘green the military’. The implications of such a call are radical: that even the state’s shield against the potential predations of an anarchic system should itself be reformed – and potentially weakened – in hope of lessening future planetary danger, thus representing the subordination of realpolitik to a more expansive Earthpolitik.
Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: David Blagden (University of Exeter)Participants: Philip Cunliffe , Patrick Porter (University of Birmingham) , Rita Floyd (University of Birmingham) , David Blagden (University of Exeter) , Jan Selby (University of Leeds) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Gendered Peace, Organizing and Solidarity NetworksSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
This paper explores the experiences and perceptions of women working in cybersecurity with a specific interested in the role that so far underexplored women’s networks play. Situated at the intersection of feminist security studies and feminist technoscience, it conceptualizes cybersecurity culture as structured by gendered power logics embedded in Western technostrategic and masculine norms.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with members of women’s networks across cybersecurity communities, the study examines how women interpret the meanings and functions of their networks. It explores how networks (fail to) facilitate solidarity, professional legitimacy, mediate belonging, negotiate power, and how they constrain or enable resistance to dominant cybersecurity cultures, gendered hierarchies and power relations.
I argue that while women’s networks can challenge those norms and build alternative forms of solidarity, trust and care, they also operate within and might reinforce the masculine and technostrategic norms that shape cybersecurity. By centering the knowledge, experiences and voices of women working across cybersecurity, it highlights the complexity and ambivalences that lie within attempts to make the field more inclusive and gender just and contributes to the growing feminist-informed literature on cybersecurity.Author: Clara Perras (PRIF - Peace Research Institute Frankfurt) -
Quantitative analyses of women’s participation in peace negotiations consistently show that women are often associated with gender equality, and social provisions, while their engagement in militarized or politicized aspects of peace processes remains rare, or at least rarely discussed. This paper focuses on exceptional cases that diverge from this dominant pattern, seeking to understand the conditions under which women negotiators are able to move beyond stereotypically feminized issue areas. Drawing on two outlier cases, Northern Ireland and the Philippines, where women were directly involved in shaping security, power-sharing, and military provisions, the study employs qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and process tracing, to investigate the mechanisms that enable such agency. The analysis is framed by feminist institutionalism and the concept of agency, exploring how institutional contexts, informal norms, and strategic action intersect to create openings for women’s influence in masculinized negotiation spaces. By situating these cases within broader theoretical debates on gender and institutional change, the paper demonstrates how women negotiators navigate, resist, and sometimes transform gendered constraints within peace processes. The findings contribute to feminist peace and conflict research by highlighting the conditions that allow women to engage substantively in “hard security” issues, offering a more nuanced understanding of both gendered agency and institutional flexibility in post-conflict negotiations.
Author: Lena Kempermann -
This paper explores the community mobilisation of Ukrainian women by (inter) national organisations in conflict-affected regions with the aim to “localise” the national action plan on women, peace and security, thereby giving a new significance to the UNSCR 1325.
Drawing from my experiences as a practitioner in the Ukraine response and interactions with several conflict-affected women and civil society activists, this study uses semi-structured interviews to examine how the women, peace and security agenda has been uniquely operationalised in Ukraine amidst ongoing conflict.
It highlights the feminist initiatives of civil society organisations and community mobilisation efforts aimed at incorporating women into local decision-making processes.
This research demonstrates how the understanding and implementation of the WPS agenda can be expanded and redefined, moving beyond traditional focuses on security sector reform and women’s participation in peace negotiations to encompass broader perceptions of security at the local level.Author: Graziella Piga (University of Surrey) -
In this paper, I explore how state-imposed notions of femininity are subverted as tools of anti-war activism. Taking a feminist ontological and constructionist epistemological approach, I suggest the concept of hegemonic femininity as a lens to understand the relationship between gender and state power, particularly in militarised contexts. Drawing on primary research of social media discourse from the Instagram page of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), the most prominent feminist coalition opposing the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, I use reflective thematic analysis to examine the activists’ strategic use of conventional representations and ideals of femininity to convey their anti-war message. The analysis identified four key themes that reveal how emotional expression, care and inner strength are strategically used as political acts; modifying the ‘Mother Russia’ archetype into the antimilitarist solidarity symbol. This research draws attention to an often-overlooked phenomenon of the prominence of women in the Russian anti-war movement and offers a novel theoretical approach of understanding the intersections of gender, militarism, and resistance to it.
Keywords: Femininity; Gender; Militarism; Anti-war activism; Russia
Author: Anna Tolstukhina (University of Bristol)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Global China A Critique of Chinese and Western Narratives
This panel focuses on Tim Summers' newly published Global China: A Critique of Chinese and Western Narratives (British University Press 2025). This insightful book explores evolving perceptions of China, contrasting dominant Western narratives with Chinese perspectives. The book critiques three prevailing views of China’s rise: the return of geopolitics, challenges to liberal order and prospects for collaborative governance.
Sponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupChair: Biao Zhang (China University of Political Science and Law)Participants: Tim Summers (Chinese University of Hong Kong) , Mariana Vieira (International Affairs (Chatham House)) , Rong Wei (University of Birmingham) , Biao Zhang (China University of Political Science and Law) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Historical IPESponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
Bangladesh is widely hailed as a development success story, yet its rapid economic growth has unfolded alongside rising inequality and deepening dependency on global markets. To make sense of this paradox, this paper situates Bangladesh's trajectory within the longer historical evolution of the Bengal region. Through a historical materialist lens, it challenges linear and Eurocentric assumptions that capitalism emerged in the region solely through British colonial intervention. By tracing transformations in land relations, production structures, and class formation from the Mughal period through to early colonial rule, it argues that pre-colonial Bengal exhibited hybrid socio-economic features that cannot be neatly categorized as feudalist or tributary. Drawing on Marx's later writings on non-Western societies and multi-linear theories of development, the paper demonstrates how capitalist relations selectively absorbed and reconstituted existing local structures rather than replacing them.
The British East India Company's corporate mode of extraction, rather than the Raj's civilizing rhetoric, served as the decisive turning point that subordinated indigenous forms of accumulation to global circuits of capital. Through this perspective, the paper situates Bangladesh's later development trajectory within a longer genealogy of uneven and combined development, illuminating how historical continuities in class and land relations underpin contemporary patterns of dependency. The analysis underscores the importance of attending to the regional specificity of developmental paths to identify distinct spaces of resistance and alternative possibilities of transformation.
Author: Tajkiya Ahmad (University of Nottingham) -
Private equity firms own airports, data centres, care homes, sports clubs, and more. They thus can influence geopolitics, futures of AI and climate change, and our everyday lives. Private equity has so far mainly been studied as a narrow set of actors, a number of firms that have emerged in the 1970s in the US that have pioneered the leveraged buyout. This focus couches the study of private equity in terms of the 1980s debate and struggle between shareholders and managers of firms. However, this narrow story does not capture the broad nature of private equity today. Therefore, I argue that the rise of private markets necessitates a reframing of the study of private equity, which can be achieved by reconsidering the history of private equity. This paper zooms in on the earlier roots of private equity in merchant and investment banking, showcasing a lineage from earlier US financiers such as J.P. Morgan. In doing so, it situates private equity as a broader phenomenon that spans across a wider range of actors and acknowledges it as a core segment of financial markets pre-1980s and today. This ‘de-exceptionalisation’ enables future analyses of the broader power relations and infrastructure underpinning private equity today.
Author: Dana Unzicker -
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. Those who have investigated the international dimensions of the Fed’s origins 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 architects of the Fed drew on their studies of imperial finance, as well as their own experience in international financial integration in the US state’s newly established colonial empire, to inform their designs for the American central banking system. Uncovering the imperial origins of the Fed’s institutional design clarifies how a purportedly domestic institution came to exercise structural power in the world economy.
Author: David K Johnson (London School of Economics)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Hydrosphere and Cryosphere GovernanceSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Charlotte Weatherill (The Open University)
-
Does environmental stewardship have an underlying fragility in Arctic international society? This article examines whether the relatively new primary institution of environmental stewardship has entered a state of crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The exclusion of Russia from Arctic cooperation challenged the durability of environmental stewardship, revealing tensions between this institution and more entrenched ones such as sovereignty and territoriality. Drawing on the English School’s institutional evolution debate and constructivist insights on norm reproduction, the article employs process tracing to analyse how discursive and behavioural changes among Arctic states reprioritised the region’s normative order. It identifies two mechanisms, entanglement and institutional decoupling, through which a shock to one primary institution (sovereignty) produced functional fragility in another (stewardship). Despite extensive secondary institutional support, the cessation of cross-border cooperation disrupted the reproducing practices essential to environmental stewardship. The study concludes that environmental stewardship’s fragility is not intrinsic but relational, its resilience depends on its ability to reproduce cooperative practices under shifting normative conditions. It is also highlighted the potential role of world society actors in restoring stewardship’s legitimacy and sustaining Arctic environmental governance amid geopolitical fragmentation.
Author: Brett Lewis (Cardiff University) -
This chapter examines how the weakened performance of the Antarctic Treaty System in the field of environmental protection has encouraged many amongst scholars and policymakers to advocate radical reforms. Most of the reforms proposed aim to include more countries within the ATS and to change decision-making procedures from consensus to majority rule, in an alleged attempt to “democratize” the governance of the Southern Continent. This chapter reflects on how these reform projects emerge from normative standpoints, according to which democracy and inclusivity are considered intrinsically valid principles, which would automatically improve the ATS if implemented. It is afterwards claimed that these normative approaches ignore some fundamental characteristics of the Antarctic regime and are therefore unfit to envision effective solutions to the current challenges faced by the ATS.
Author: Marco Genovesi (Nottingham Trent University) -
Presenting key findings from a forthcoming monograph, entitled The Radial Sea, this paper asks what it would mean to rethink democracy from the ocean.
As the world’s biggest carbon sink, the biggest habitat on this planet and the backbone of our global political economy, the future of the planetary ocean concerns us all. Yet, as Armstrong and I have argued elsewhere (2023, 2025), the political institutions we have today do not allow us to govern the ocean fairly or democratically: we are faced, rather, with an ocean-shaped hole in our democracy.
This paper presents a two-step argument that demonstrates both where the democratic deficit in the ocean is coming from and how it might be addressed. First, I argue that what led to this deficit is what I call the terrestrial world order - a way of governing which centres the land and operates through modes of containment and cultivation. Second, drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with ocean activists (see Scharenberg, 2024, 2025), I present an alternative way of global governance – what I call ocean democracy.
More than making contemporary ocean governance more inclusive or democratic, the paper proposes the term ocean democracy as a way of governing that operates according to a radically different logic and points to a new political vocabulary that derives from the sea itself. As such, ocean democracy offers not only an alternative way of governing the ocean, but a novel approach to planetary politics.Author: Antje Scharenberg (University of Southampton) -
The cryosphere accounts for almost 17-19% of the Indian Himalayan Region area-wise and plays a vital role in facilitating the biophysical components including geology, hydrology, biodiversity, and climatology as well as socio-cultural systems in the region. However, despite its ecological significance, the cryosphere (including the glaciers) has rarely been treated as a distinct subject of analysis in policy studies and social science research. This research is motivated by a significant gap that exists in our understanding of the political, legal, administrative and institutional dimensions of Himalayan cryosphere governance in context of the changing climate. It explores the Himalayan cryosphere—the melting of the glaciers and degradation of the overall landscape—as a policy problem through a single nation case study by delving into Indian environmental landscape. How does the existing and evolving Indian environmental framework regulate glaciers and glacier-related issues at the present and pre-empt future challenges? While it is clear that glaciers have become politically salient ecosystems in environmental politics, we still do not know how and in what ways does the nation-state regulates the landforms that have traditionally been considered ungovernable. While a myopic view would assume that glaciers are not regulated as distinct landforms in India’s environmental framework, this study takes a careful look into India’s environmental governance and shows that glaciers and other aspects of cryosphere are regulated under the country’s environmental framework, albeit under a heterogeneous set of institutions that mainly deal with three policy sub-systems, water, forest and climate. As the world is celebrating the International Year for Glacier’s Preservation (IYGP 2025), one of whose objectives is to strengthen policy frameworks that enable glacier preservation, this study introduces a timely discussion on the legal and institutional basis of glacier preservation.
Author: Aishwarya Sanas (PhD candidate) -
Indonesia, the largest archipelagic country in the world, is actively developing its plans to boost economic growth. The Indonesian government published the national Ocean Policy in 2017 and the country’s Blue Economy Roadmap in 2023. However, development obstacles such as climate change, fragmented ocean management, inadequate infrastructure and technology, and low sustainable investment carry risks in hindering successful outcomes of ocean economies and harming coastal communities (Wuwung et al., 2024). In addition, concerns have been raised regarding the true sustainable dimension of the “blue economy” and the risks of social injustice (Germond-Duret et al., 2023; Bennett et al, 2021; 2023).
This paper will present initial findings from our Leverhulme Trust-funded project, which focuses on the co-production of alternative knowledge of ocean justice with coastal communities. Using innovative and participatory methodologies, including photovoice, we held nine workshops with small-scale fishers, women from small-scale fishing communities, and primary school children, in three cities of Indonesia including Bitung, Jakarta and Kupang. In doing so, we examined how ocean justice was understood by coastal communities. The findings suggest that:
- Injustices felt by coastal communities due to blue economy activities include environmental, economic, social-cultural, educational, and human health dimensions.
- Impacts of competing use for coastal and marine spaces in combination with climate change and biodiversity loss disproportionately harms communities that are most dependent on the ocean, have fewer resources, and are often marginalised in blue economy processes.
- Access to marine resources and market, as well as affordable, timely and effective access to information, and meaningful participation, are key to ensure the protection of needs, interests and rights of coastal communities from adverse impacts of economic activities in ocean and coastal areas.
The findings will be discussed in relation to existing ocean justice frameworks and used to inform Indonesia’s blue economy strategy.Authors: Senia Febrica (Lancaster University) , Celine Germond-Duret (Lancaster University)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Identity, norms, security and status: Eurasian and Asia-Pacific dimensions of regional and international order:Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupConvener: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)Chair: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London)
-
Although Aotearoa New Zealand is a long way from Ukraine, it has been impacted indirectly by the war and has also responded by, for the first time, imposing sanctions on a state outside a UN framework, and by providing military training for Ukrainian soldiers. This paper examines New Zealand’s response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the current state of New Zealand-Russia relations in the context of its wider implications for New Zealand, particularly in its neighbourhood of the South Pacific and Antarctica. It focuses on how the war enters into domestic debates about New Zealand’s interests, identity, and values: for example, the rhetoric about the implications for small states of the breakdown of a ‘rules-based international order’, or the position of New Zealand geographically in the South but not of the Global South. And it shows how discussion over the implications for New Zealand is often filtered through the question of China, where relations are closer and there is far higher economic dependence than with Russia, but there are concerns over China’s great power assertion including in the South Pacific.
Author: James Headley (University of Otago) -
As Russia and China are pursuing a seemingly ever-closer alignment, the increasing disparities in their economic capabilities, China’s growing military capabilities and Russia’s military performance during its war of aggression against Ukraine raise important questions about status anxiety in the Russia-China relationship. While Russia’s official rhetoric has consistently downplayed any signs or expectations of Russia’s diminishing status compared to China’s, Russia’s historical narratives – articulated by Russia’s leadership, various ‘groups’ of intellectual and political ‘elites’ and oppositional voices – have engaged with questions of Russia’s international status in a variety of ways. This paper will employ narrative analysis to explore the multiple ways in which Russia’s state-sponsored and competing memories of Russia’s past engagement with China and the ‘East’ more broadly have been strategically employed by a variety of actors in Russian society to downplay, manage, or exacerbate status anxiety in Russia’s current and future relationship with China. It will then consider the ways in which such memory politics has fed into Moscow’s approach to its ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Author: Valentina Feklyunina (Newcastle University) -
Russia used the 2025 SCO summit in order to showcase its promotion of multipolarity promotion, using a narrower circle of sanctioned states. China emphasised the Shanghai spirit which focuses on fairness and justice for all humanity, as well as inter-civilizational dialogue. This year was also the ‘SCO Year of Sustainable Development’, and China positioned itself at the forefront of sustainability and green energy (differently from Russia which still promotes traditional energy sources), assisting a number of Central Asian states in this area.
However, the dynamics in the SCO regional bloc are increasingly aligned with that of BRICS. They are both expanding and their memberships increasingly overlap or converge. At this year’s SCO summit, the SCO+ outreach exercise featured representatives of the Eurasian Economic Union and ASEAN, so highlighting the continued evolution of the Global South towards building a SCO-EAEU-ASEAN triangle in Eurasia. The SCO is increasingly depicted as part of a new nested global order, with the BRI and the BRICS as the umbrella global framework, within which sits the SCO as a regional organisation with sometimes overlapping memberships.
This paper examines the changing identity of the SCO, as it moves from a focus on regional cooperation issues in Central Asia to a more global focus.Author: Natasha Kuhrt (King's College London) -
This paper explores the genealogy of the contemporary notion of ‘Chinese Central Asia’, central to China’s claim to sovereignty over Xinjiang and provides the first longitudinal analysis linking early Turko-Islamic and modern conceptualisations of China and Central Asia. Specifically, we examine how the region was imagined in both Islamic and Chinese sources from the early Turko-Islamic world, tracing the genealogy of ethno-national classifications in sedentary Central Asia, focusing on the Uyghurs and Uzbeks. Theoretically, we propose a constructivist and postcolonial framework, drawing on the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘othering’. Empirically, we draw on: (1) pre-modern Muslim texts from regions historically described as China in Islamic discourse, (2) historical Chinese materials such as Song-era maps, and two corpora of modern documents analysed through Structural Topic Modelling, including (3) 10,563 contemporary Chinese-language scholarly articles, and (4) 26,391 documents scraped from the website of the Uzbekistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2001–2021). Textual evidence is further complemented by seventy-nine semi-structured interviews conducted in Uzbekistan (2022–2025). We argue that pre-modern texts reveal a fluid imaginary of Sino-Turkic identities and a contested process of boundary-making that informed the hybrid configurations of Sino-Turkic relations under colonial modernity. The subsequent partition of Central Asia between the Chinese and Russian empires operated as a strategy of incorporation, generating identities that were neither fully internal nor fully external to imperial formations. Finally, we maintain that colonial imaginaries underpin the contemporary otherisation of “Chinese” Central Asians, particularly the Uyghurs. In Uzbekistan, this legacy manifests in the construction of Uyghurs as cultural and political outsiders, despite their clear linguistic and cultural proximity.
Authors: Frank Maracchione , Dilnoza Dutureava (University of York)*
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Ideological Competition and International Disorder
The 21st Century world is witnessing escalating international competition and threats to 'liberal international order', as the major powers involved have affirmed. Russia warns of an “intensification of global competition,” the European Union expresses concerns about a “competition of governance systems accompanied by a real battle of narratives,” while NATO asserts that “rising strategic competition and advancing authoritarianism challenge the Alliance’s interests and values.” Such statements allude to the possibility that heightened ideological competition is an important dimension of increasing disorder, yet ideology's precise role and significance is uncertain and contentious. This roundtable will consider this ideological dimension of growing challenges to international order, and how a recent growth of interest in ideology within International Relations scholarship can help theorise it. Contributors to the panel will consider how ideology and international (dis)order should be understood, how ideology relates to bloc politics, and the ideological challenge posed by Xi Jinping's China, Vladimir Putin's Russia, and 'sovereigntist' movements within established liberal democracies.
All members of this roundtable are participants in the 'Contemporary and Historical Ideological Competition in World Politics' research network, created with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Sponsor: European Security Working GroupChair: Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London)Participants: Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) , Olivia Cheung (King's College London) , Aaron McKeil (LSE) , Sandra Pogodda (University of Manchester) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Institutions and Technology RegulationSponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University)Chair: Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University)
-
Spearheaded by the United Nation’s UN 2.0 brief, international organizations and governance actors are revising their structures and approaches to suit a new fluid status quo that is heavily determined by the development of digital technologies. While this turn begins to address long-standing criticisms as to the flexibility as well as digitalization of international organizations, it leaves a question as to what the future of actors like the United Nations will look like following the growing integration of science and technology actors.
Drawing on discussions from a 2025 United Nations conference focused on science policy as well as public statements that include the UN 2.0 brief, this paper applies discourse analysis to the rhetoric used when discussing the modernization (and digitalization) of the United Nations. It explores how actors from the fields of science and technology view their role in the digitalization of the United Nations as well as how the United Nations approaches the integration of emerging technologies in an environment of general funding cuts. The provisional findings identify an undercurrent of technological determinism that emphasizes techno-centric solutions where science is viewed as neutral while also leaving gaps, notably relating to those solutions translate into field contexts like humanitarian missions.
Author: Clara Jammot (King's College London) -
With intensified competition in high technologies, particularly cyber and artificial intelligence, between major powers, an increasing number of states are introducing or tightening export control regulations to restrict the transfer of sensitive goods, software, and technology. Notably, since December 2024, both the US and China have begun enforcing new regulations on the export control of advanced technologies and dual-use items. Export control appears to be emerging as a new international norm, which is defined as understandings of appropriateness. Against this backdrop, this paper conducts a process-tracing analysis of the export control normative frameworks developed by China and the US. Using this case study, it advances a relational perspective on norm emergence and development. This paper argues that norms, can emerge not only through a top-down process driven by the deliberations of norm entrepreneurs (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Rosert, 2019) or a bottom-up process shaped by the practices of a particular group of actors (Bode, 2023), but also within the relational space between different actors. Specifically, in the case study, the shared understanding of export control as an appropriate behaviour is formulated through relational interactions between China and the US, with each defining its normative stance in response to the other. Theoretically, this paper advances a relational approach to understanding norm development and expands the scope of norms examined in norm scholarship beyond its predominant focus on so-called ‘good’ norms. Empirically, it offers a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the emerging export control frameworks and their implications for an increasingly fragmented world order.
Author: Qiaochu Zhang (European University Institute) -
This article examines the European Union's collective securitisation of semiconductors, revealing a fundamental “performance-capacity gap” between discursive success and operational capability. While the EU successfully constructed semiconductors as existential threats – mobilising substantial resources through the European Chips Act and embedding security imperatives within institutional frameworks – it lacks the material capacity to operationalise the security it promises. Europe possesses virtually no advanced fabrication capacity, faces severe workforce shortages, and remains heavily dependent on external actors for critical raw materials – vulnerabilities that cannot be rapidly addressed despite political will. We introduce the concept of material security constraints to explain how infrastructure requirements, technical complexity, supply chain dependencies, and extended temporal horizons systematically limit collective securitisation outcomes in capital-intensive domains. European investments represent a fraction of major competitor commitments, while infrastructure development requires multi-decade timescales that conflict fundamentally with securitisation's urgency logic. This creates a paradox: the very urgency enabling political mobilisation undermines the patient commitment necessary for building semiconductor ecosystems. By distinguishing between securitisation as performative process and operational outcome, this case challenges core assumptions in collective securitisation scholarship. The findings have profound implications for understanding limits of the EU's digital sovereignty agenda and for theorising collective securitisation in infrastructure-dependent technological domains where regulatory and discursive power prove insufficient.
Authors: Konstantin Manakos , Ben Farrand (Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University)* , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) -
A number of core tech developments have shaped the modern IR classroom, from the normalization of a fully digitized work environment to social media and currently, AI. But these changes have not arrived in a neutral context in UK higher education, but rather during a sustained period of austerity, cuts and generational challenges to the role of the University in British society. Technology is routinely showcased as a way of bridging the gap between ever increasing expectations of growth, with increasingly limited resources. Drawing upon the Critical Technology Studies literature, this paper presents a reflection on the experience of using cutting edge technology in the IR classroom (in this case Virtual Reality platforms), and explores why some tech solutions feel like ‘pushing an open door’ in terms of applications for support in adaptation, and what that says about management strategies in negotiating near term challenges to survival of the sector. What is the future of the virtual classroom, and how might these approaches shape the outlook of the next generation of IR scholars?
Author: Ciaran Gillespie (University of Surrey)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Migration Deterrence policies and practicesSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Myriam Fotou (University of Leicester)Chair: Myriam Fotou (University of Leicester)
-
This paper explores how Pakistan’s four-decade relationship with Afghan refugees has turned from hospitality to hostility. Once welcomed in the name of Islamic solidarity and shared history, Afghan migrants are now being repatriated amid fear, exhaustion and political pressure. Using insights from the ethics of hospitality and postcolonial migration theory, the paper argues that Pakistan’s shift reflects a deeper crisis in how moral obligation and national identity are imagined in the Global South.
Methodologically, the study draws on first-hand primary sources collected during field reporting and interviews with Afghan families, local officials and aid workers in border districts. These accounts are supported by analysis of policy documents, government briefings and Urdu-language media debates rarely used in academic literature. This combination allows a grounded understanding of how emotions of threat and fatigue shape both policy and public feeling.
The paper contributes an exclusive perspective from within Pakistan, showing how the moral language of refuge is being replaced by a politics of blame and withdrawal. It invites reflection on what this emotional and ethical reversal means for the future of asylum in South Asia.
Keywords:
migration, refugees, Pakistan, Afghanistan, hospitality, hostility, ethics, emotions, asylum, belonging
Author: Haris Aziz -
This paper situates the 2023 Strage di Cutro, the drowning of 94 forced migrants off the coast of Calabria, Southern Italy, within global racial-colonial histories and geographies of mobility control.
Drawing on what Sharpe calls 'wake work’ (2016), I explore storytelling, practices of mourning, and calls for reparation in the aftermath of the Strage that 'produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing’ (p. 11).
Together with a network of affected forced migrants, local activists, and NGOs who generously shared their stories, alongside my ethnographic practice in Crotone for the second anniversary of the Strage, I narrate from and with the wake, asking how we can mourn, imagine, and exist amidst unfolding and ongoing violence and struggle.
In this paper, I particularly focus on how different people in the Cutro context relate to, narrate, experience, and contest spaces - at sea, on the shore, and on land - that sediment and entangle histories of abandonment and neglect with acts of solidarity and collective care. In doing so, I suggest that ethnographic practice and writing can become part of that wake work, opening towards conceptual, methodological, and ethical reflections on how we research border death, struggle, and survival.
Author: Marianna Patat (King's College London) -
The torture and ill-treatment of migrants and refugees is a global problem. People on the move face beatings, rape, inhumane detention, and torture throughout their migration journey. This torture and ill-treatment has largely been the product of migration deterrence policies, which have aimed to deter people arriving at state borders. These policies restrict safe pathways, make migration journeys more dangerous, and dehumanise and degrade migrants and refugees as a means of deterrence. Although scholars have examined how the securitisation and criminalisation of migrants and refugees have contributed to this harm, what has not been examined are the psychosocial dynamics that enable state actors to implement harmful policies and continue to live with themselves. This paper examines how states morally disengage from their harmful policies by denying responsibility, wrongdoing, and the existence of harm to allow bureaucrats, policy officials, and political leaders to put harm out of sight. This paper draws upon examples from the Global North and Global South and the disciplines of international relations, international law, social psychology, and criminology to shed new light on how migration deterrence policies are legitimised, and how such psychosocial strategies need to be challenged to strengthen international human rights frameworks worldwide.
Author: Jamal Barnes (Edith Cowan University) -
From ancient Athens’ Faleron necropolis of the invisible dead to the unmarked graves in the makeshift cemeteries on the islands of the European periphery, unusual cemeteries appear as the liminal spaces evidencing the long history of “grey areas” where communities showed particular lack of respect and care in handling the bodies of deceased individuals, whom they considered outcast, foreign, undesirable. Archaeological research uses the concept of “deviant deaths” to define these practices, a concept I apply in a European migratory context linking it to the racialisation of current EU border security. Avoiding a linear, Eurocentric reading of death management history and looking beyond the necropolitical theoretical framework, I argue that in the context of migration, deviant burial practices and post-mortem management of migrant bodies are not "exceptional" or "extraordinary", caused by special logistical pressures on states as it is often claimed. Instead, it is part of a long tradition in the west where "deviant burials" and “degraded and insulted dead” constitute a distinct but "synonymous" part of the funerary language of regularity with clear racial and colonial connotations.
Author: Myriam Fotou (University of Leicester)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Militarism (dis)embodied: care, injury, neglectSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Laura MillsChair: Victoria Basham (Cardiff University)
-
Emerging evidence reveals elevated suicide rates amongst women veterans, particularly those involuntarily discharged for medical reasons. This paper examines the institutional structures and processes that produce these devastating wellbeing outcomes, arguing that military organisations systematically create identity injury through institutional betrayal following gendered violence. Drawing from qualitative research with Australian women veterans as an illustrative case with international applicability, this analysis reveals a consistent pattern whereby women who join with high aspirations, serve with distinction, experience institutional abuse, and are subsequently discharged as psychologically unfit—a process that pathologises victims whilst obscuring institutional culpability. Identity injury—profound damage to sense of self through institutional betrayal—differs fundamentally from moral injury's focus on ethical violations. When military institutions fail to protect women from violence, deny appropriate support, and deploy administrative processes as weapons against victims, they inflict wounds that fragment professional and personal identity. Involuntary medical discharge becomes the final corporeal rejection, whereby the institution that created trauma uses resulting psychological distress as evidence of unfitness. This transforms institutional violence into individual pathology, reaffirming gendered narratives positioning women as incompatible with military service. These institutional processes produce cascading harms extending beyond service: isolation from veteran support structures, barriers to healthcare access, loss of social connection, and compromised mental health. This research demonstrates how military institutional structures systematically produce predictable and preventable harm to women service members, with implications for understanding institutional violence, veteran mental health interventions, and the gendered dynamics of organisational betrayal internationally.
Keywords: Identity injury; Women veterans; Institutional betrayal; Veteran suicide; Wellbeing outcomes; Critical military studies
Author: Natalie Merryman (University of Newcastle, Australia) -
In this chapter of my dissertation, my venture point are bodily practices and (care) practices around the body in the emerging veteran’s movement in Germany. These practices not only mobilize a narrative of veteran-as-victim and its political capital, but importantly address veterans in precarious circumstances such as isolation, addiction and poverty. Building on Butler’s thoughts on what we can learn through the embodiment of precarity about the social structures around it, I identify the figure of the veteran body vanished. This figure marks the lens I develop through the analysis of my empirical material (qualitative/ethnographic) and it captures the ambiguous position of veterans: My argument is that ‘the veteran’ thus understood is shaped by and dependent on an interplay between state-practices and practices within the veteran scene. I point out how that interplay carves out and contours certain absences, for example of state provided care structures and symbolic recognition, while simultaneously recovering ideas of a state that actually has the capacity of care and a veteran as its affective center. The veteran body vanished takes part in the consolidation of an understanding of veteran and the state practices which produced them, paradoxically as its most visible form.
Author: Nina Reedy (University of Hamburg) -
The brainchild of Prince Harry, the Invictus Games is an international adaptive sports competition for wounded, injured and sick veterans and serving military personnel. Claiming to harness “the power of sport to inspire recovery and showcase the resilience of the Invictus community’ while leaving all those spectating “inspired long after the Games finish,” Invictus is positioned as a virtuous transformative and restorative process that is enacted on, within and through Invictus participants’ bodies and identities. This paper explores how these identities are mobilised via a troubling logic of disembodiment/embodiment that is traversed with contradictions and perpetuates everyday militarisation through the aesthetic spectacle that is Invictus. Spectacularisation and aestheticisation combine through this (dis)embodiment logic in powerful, affective ways to advance a militarised aesthetics that in turn shores up an aestheticised militarism. Injury and inspiration lie at the heart of this (dis)embodiment logic to ensure an aestheticising of sensing (sense-making, meaning-making) and feeling (spectators’ being moved, ‘awed’) military power and its effects. Relying on yet resisting logics of supercrip and inspiration porn, the aesthetic of the prosthetic undergrids a military-medical complex of technological advancement and superhero/human subjectivity that in turns ‘restores’ our understandings of these controversial post-9/11 wars. While disembodiment is primarily and problematically enacted in the form of physical/mental injury, Invictus serves as a moment of re-embodiment for various bodies (military/familial/national). This paper interrogates the tensions embedded in Invictus’ undoing and remaking of a particular aestheticised military/militarised subject where an affective/aesthetic entanglement of injury/inspiration creates a ‘frontline’ (in sporting spectacle) to sense and feel these wars and the injuries they inflict through sanitised media(tisa)tions.
Author: Laura Mills
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Money, debt and discourseSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) are widely held to be powerful institutions at the heart of contemporary financial markets. Here, I extend understanding of the foundations of CRA power by developing a model of financial market psychology under conditions of policy uncertainty. I posit that when economic policy uncertainty is high, unpredictability generates fear amongst market participants, with fear in turn causing amplified responses to market signals. Under the influence of this psychological nexus, we expect to see stronger market response to CRA bond downgrades when economic policy uncertainty is high. I confirm the existence of this ‘policy uncertainty premium’ on CRA power in the US corporate bond market; when economic policy uncertainty is high, the impact of a rating downgrade on a bond spread rises from around 4 to around 9 basis points. Policy uncertainty, it seems, leads to amplified responses to credit rating downgrades.
Author: Liam Clegg (Department of Politics and International Studies, University of York) -
The phrase ‘sick man of…’ is a prominent framing deployed by Anglo-American media, to portray underperforming countries within a specific region. However, the logic and effects of these framings in political economies remain understudied, despite how they can affect a country’s economic credibility and reputation. In this article, we explore how this and similar framings are deployed by diverse media actors, politicians, and policymakers, as a key part in the (contested) construction of national economic status. We begin with an original, in-depth media and discourse analysis of how key Anglo-American business newspapers use comparative framings to cover countries in Europe and LATAM, disseminating a set of conditions and related metrics that characterise countries' credibility within global financial markets. Afterwards, we analyse how these media framings are deployed within countries in these regions by media and political actors, to contest or support ideas of national economic status. Overall, we argue that the singling out of countries under media coverage of this sort serves a disciplinary logic of comparative economic assessment, which can be used by both reformist or status quo actors. In this way, we identify the mechanisms through which states’ economic credibility is performed, (re)produced and contested.
Author: Guillermo Alonso Simon (University of Warwick) -
Though portrayed as a neutral technocratic institution, the Federal Reserve actively governs the moral and normative foundations of the economy. This paper examines the Fed as an institution of neoliberal governmentality, showing how it constructs economic discipline as a moral duty rather than a political choice. Drawing on Polanyi’s view that the economy is embedded in social relations, the paper argues that the Fed deploys a depoliticising moral discourse to institutionalise market-oriented norms of restraint, responsibility, and self-governance. Using a discursive institutionalist framework, it analyses Congressional testimony by Federal Reserve Chairs from 1979 to 2012 to trace how moral vocabularies, of courage, prudence, and sacrifice, are woven into the technical language of monetary policy. This moralisation of economic governance enables the Fed to produce and legitimate the self-disciplining neoliberal subject, thereby sustaining neoliberal resilience through the politics of moral legitimacy.
Author: Sandra Park (University of St. Andrews) -
This article explores how central bank policy responses have built the foundations of a financialised economic regime in emerging economies in Latin America, with a focus on Chile. While financial stability has been widely embraced as a guiding principle, the instruments used to implement it have favoured the re-capitalisation of commercial banks through disintermediation. Since the late 1990s and 2000s, this narrative focus has persisted, as central bankers have framed monetary policy through a lens of economic exceptionalism that relies on technocratic expertise for its implementation and social acceptance. The analysis shows that gradual capital liberalisation, short-term interest rate adjustments, and regular interventions in the exchange market during periods of economic tension, such as the aftermath of the 1995 Mexican Crisis, were accompanied by socio-technical constructions of debt as a moral cost. These dynamics helped normalise the shift toward financial stability as a central monetary objective. By examining official reports from the Central Bank of Chile, the article uncovers how narratives of macroeconomic welfare have been embedded in the discourse of central bankers. Ultimately, the discussion shows how these underlying conditions laid the groundwork for Chile’s current macroeconomic regime. In parallel, it questions how much the central bankers’ expertise and logic in economic policy responses have truly evolved in practice over the last two decades.
Author: Jorge Quintero-Sanchez
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Norms, Contestation, and the Reshaping of the Global Nuclear OrderSponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConveners: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow) , Woohyeok Seo (LSE)Chair: Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow)
-
This paper examines the Iranian nuclear programme as a case study in the complex interplay between structure and meaning. By tracing the project’s evolution from the Pahlavi period (1921-79) to the Islamic Republic, this article focuses on the Iranian nuclear project as a symbol and tool of ideological contestation. Historian Ali Ansari notes that “one of the key, possibly pivotal contests which has permeated Iranian political discourse in the twentieth century has been an ideological one, in which different factions have fought for the right to define Iranian history.” Part of this semantic struggle to redefine ‘Iran’ according to a particular ideological conception was the dismantlement of the preceding ideological structure. In some cases, however, these processes of dismantlement took the form of appropriation and ‘ontological redefinition’. The most explicit ideological representation of the Pahlavi monarchy, the Shahyad monument in Tehran, was not destroyed by the revolutionaries. Instead it was appropriated, redefined as the Azadi (freedom) monument, and incorporated into the new revolutionary narrative.
A similar pattern is evident in the case of another key initiative emblematic of the Pahlavi era: the Iranian nuclear project. Historically, the latter has undergone a process of ‘ontological redefinition,’ involving its appropriation, reinterpretation, and ‘ideologisation’ to align with the evolving political identity of the state. Originally envisioned as part of the Shah’s project to project Iran as a modern nation on par with Western states, the nuclear programme was suspended following the Islamic Revolution. However, by 1984, the Iranian leadership reversed this policy, redefining the nuclear project as a symbol of pride, sovereignty, and resistance to anti-imperialism. This article argues that the contest over the Iranian nuclear project has been one of meaning rather than structure, intrinsically linked to the leader’s constant semantic struggle for the right to define Iranian history.Author: Ludovica Castelli (Istituto Affari Internazionali) -
Latin America was the first region to establish a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (NWFZ) through the Treaty of Tlatelolco signed in 1967. This regime prohibited the presence of nuclear weapons throughout the delimited perimeter, including the production, transfer, transport, transit, storage, testing, and reception of nuclear devices, as well as the installation of platforms and launch systems for this arsenal. In this way, the Latin American continent contributed to the International System with a peaceful and strategic formula that would be reproduced both during the Cold War and in the post-Cold War period in other regions of the world, establishing other new NWFZs. From this perspective, we highlight the existence of certain weaknesses that affect the effectiveness of the Tlatelolco regime in the 21st century. We have identified at least four issues that challenge the regional regime. First, the gradual increase in nuclear waste and the disposal of such waste by countries possessing nuclear reactors. Secondly, we have the new de facto nuclear powers (India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea), countries that must assume the commitments of the Additional Protocols. Thirdly, there is still no clear reform of Articles 18 and 10 of the Treaty, which allow for "peaceful nuclear explosions." Finally, there is a need to request a review of the Interpretative Declarations made by the de jure nuclear powers regarding their commitments to respect the status of Latin American denuclearization. Therefore, this research analyzes the paradox that Tlatelolco currently faces, being the first established ZLAN (Zone of Nuclear and Nuclear Action), with relative success, but with enormous vulnerabilities that undermine the effectiveness of the regime, precisely in the context of the third decade of the 21st century, in which we observe an ongoing crisis.
Author: Elias David Morales Martinez (Federal University of ABC - UFABC) -
Scholars have often understood non-compliance against established international norms by deviant actors in terms of agentic commitments, contestation practices, and stigmatized identities. However, there have not been adequate studies in characterizing non-compliance as normatively overlooked due to a state’s perceived identity, “low” international status, and unresolved domestic tensions. This form of non-compliance runs rather contrary to great power politics that try to bend international norms as well as rally massive diplomatic support in local, regional, and international institutions. This paper hence asks: How do we understand non-compliance by small states that are often ignored by the prevailing normative consensus in the international system? In answering this question, the paper develops the characterization of “forgotten non-compliance” and argues that this remains key in examining intersections of state agency with existing international and regional structures of governance. To do so, the paper uses the empirical case of South Sudan in studying how Juba has attracted little or no attention by being a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while simultaneously remaining under the ambit of The African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. Through its theoretical and empirical underpinnings, this paper contributes to the scholarship on (nuclear) deviance, stigma, state identities, and small state politics.
Author: Aniruddha Saha (University of Oxford) -
This paper examines North Korea’s initial engagement with the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, highlighted by its accession to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1974 and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1985. Utilizing declassified diplomatic records from South Korea, the United States, and the IAEA archives, along with publicly available North Korean statements, this paper aimes to contextualize North Korea’s membership in the IAEA and the NPT within the shifting dynamics of Cold War geopolitics, inter-Korean relations, and the global nuclear framework. The study argues that North Korea’s decision to join the IAEA and the NPT was not solely based on a commitment to nonproliferation principles. Instead, it was primarily a strategic move aimed at gaining international legitimacy, acquiring civilian nuclear technology, and managing its relationship with the Soviet Union and other countries. However, Pyongyang’s reluctance to accept full safeguards and its contentious interactions with the IAEA revealed persistent mistrust of international oversight over time. This initial engagement did not prevent Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, which became evident with it withdrew from the IAEA in 1994 and from the NPT in 2003. This historical reassessment clarifies North Korea’s dual role as both a participant in and a potential challenger to the global nuclear regime. It also provides insights into the structural and political constraints that influenced the country’s subsequent nuclear trajectory.
Author: Se Young Jang (University of Vienna)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Palestine, Protest, and PretextSponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConvener: CST Working groupChair: CST Working group
-
The relative absence of the spectacular police violence witnessed in other European states (e.g., Germany) has led to a misperception that the repression of Palestine solidarity in Britain is less severe. This paper argues that this reading is a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual workings of repression, which is not a monolithic state project but a function of a distributed network whose very diffuseness and reliance on 'banal' bureaucratic tools renders it largely invisible.
This paper deconstructs the workings of this distributed repression by analysing how two interrelated mechanisms converge at the university level to sustain and reproduce the very international hierarchies and counterterror logics that render genocide not only permissible but necessary. First, we analyse the state-driven securitisation paradigm, which relies on the racialised conflation of Palestine solidarity with inherent ‘terrorism’ or ‘extremism’. This process, leveraging vague legislation like the Terrorism Act 2000 and the diffuse ‘Prevent’ framework, provides the ideological justification for the entire network, enabling pre-criminal surveillance and disciplinary investigations.
Second, the paper demonstrates how this securitisation is operationalised through administrative weaponisation. Here, the university node acts with significant autonomy, translating the state's security logic into a pretext for repression. The ideological framing of pro-Palestinian discourse as a threat is cynically mapped onto health and safety regulations and risk assessments. Charges of creating a ‘security threat’ or an ‘antisemitic environment’ are mobilised, relying on the false conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism and of discomfort with danger.
The paper concludes that the repression in Britain is potent precisely because of its distributed nature, where explicit state-level counterterrorism frameworks provide the overarching threat narrative, while administrative safety bureaucracy within institutions like universities provides the functional, seemingly apolitical tools for enforcement.Authors: Alice Finden , Amira Abdelhamid , Jeroen Gunning (KCL)* , Amna Kaleem (University of Sheffield)* -
This paper has two interconnected but distinct aims. The first is to examine how the lexicon of “essentially contested concepts” has expanded to include until recently uncontroversial “technical terms.” This broadening of discursive contestation, the paper argues, has material impacts on the livelihoods of people living in conflict zones. The paper focuses particularly on the discursive contestation surrounding the terms “ceasefire,” and “child/children” in Israel and Palestine. The paper at the same time engages with the personal journey that brought me to this question. Here, I tell the reader why this matters to me. The aim is to reveal in narrative form the “psychology of discovery” – the reasons that push me to want to investigate the discursive contestation around child/children. It is far from an “academic puzzle” or a “research gap” and indeed, the children I have spent much of my time investigating the fate of – boys held in “rehabilitation centres” in Northeast Syria – are not a “case study” for me. The two narratives try to speak to one another. They are two sides of the same inquiry – an attempt to put the personal and the academic in an open dialogue.
Author: Harmonie Toros (University of Kent) -
Since 2023, the United Nations and the UN Security Council have repeatedly convened to debate ceasefire resolutions and humanitarian pauses in response to Israel’s escalating assault on Gaza. Various drafts and the ultimate failures to negotiate reflect deep fractures in global politics and efforts towards genocide prevention. This research conducts a qualitative content analysis and comparative analysis of the UN ceasefire documents and mediator statements issued between 2023 and 2025. It examines how shifts in political discourse, rhetorical framing, and linguistic patterns have both reflected and reinforced the global power imbalance that allowed the mass violence in Gaza to persist. While extensive scholarship has examined the structural causes and historical grievances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, limited attention has been paid to how the linguistic framing contributes to delays in achieving a sustainable ceasefire. Hence, by tracing how the semantics of “ceasefire,” “pause,” and “self-defence” evolved across diplomatic texts, the research highlights how language has functioned as a tool of obstruction rather than resolution. Ultimately, this research argues that the failure to prevent genocide in Palestine cannot be separated from the politics of language embedded in international diplomacy and the United Nations as a whole.
Author: Nuzhat Tasnim Rahman Raisa (University of Kent) -
This paper analyses international attempts to ‘shame’ Israel for the conduct of its war in Gaza and the Israeli government’s response to such criticism. Many see Israel as shameless, but officials who see nothing wrong with their government’s actions may still be concerned about the negative effect of public shaming on their international reputation. The case of Israel is examined to show how state actors may use what I call ‘inverse shaming’ in an attempt to shun and discredit international organisations or civil society actors who criticise them. Drawing on the literatures on ‘rhetorical coercion’ and ‘shaming’, I show how Israeli officials used a variety of tactics to vigorously counter damaging allegations of genocide and torture. The paper asks: which are the key audiences that Israel is seeking to influence? And what have the consequences of these efforts in enabling the Israeli government to continue its violent campaign in Gaza and the abuse of Palestinians in its prisons. A comparative perspective is also included by comparing Israel to previous cases – chiefly how Spain and UK responded to allegations of torture. Through this analysis, the paper seeks to demonstrate that struggles over shaming, legitimacy and credibility have important consequences for public debate, human rights and security practice.
Author: Frank Foley (King's College London)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Planetary Politics II: Conversation on Planetary Politics
Planetary politics or planet politics is a significant emerging agenda today, not just in International Relations theory and academia more widely but also in concrete activism for new ways of doing politics on a troubled planet. But what is meant by planet/ary politics and what are its implications for redirecting politics and international relations as we know them? What kinds of constellations of actors, agencies and politics arise around planet/ary politics? What are the implications for who speaks, how we relate to others, where we do politics and how? And what kinds of contestations and debates structure the theory and practice of planetary politics?
This roundtable, linked to another proposed panel 'Planetary Politics I More-than-human and multispecies interventions in IR' brings together a range of scholars who have been shaping the agenda of planetary politics, planetary thinking and planetarity in different ways to answer such questions and to unpack the implications for the study of International Relations.
Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University)Participants: Ebony Young (University of Glasgow) , Toni Cerkez (Tallinn University) , Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University) , Stefan Pedersen (University of Sussex) -
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Security and Signalling in Outer SpaceSponsor: Astropolitics Working GroupConvener: Bleddyn Bowen (BISA)Chair: Thomas Knight (Canterbury Christ Church University)
-
In the 21st century, space has transitioned from a domain dominated by exploration and scientific discovery to one increasingly recognized as a strategic warfighting domain. The growing reliance on satellite-based systems for communication, navigation, intelligence, and missile warning has elevated the importance of securing space assets against adversarial threats. This evolution has led to the establishment and expansion of dedicated military space forces, notably the United States Space Force (USSF), reflecting the urgent need to integrate space into national defence doctrines. With rising global competition and technological advancements, space is now viewed as the ultimate high ground in modern warfare. This paper examines the emergence of space as a warfighting domain, the roles and responsibilities of space forces, and the legal, ethical, and strategic implications of military operations in space. It also explores the necessity for new international norms and cooperative security frameworks to mitigate risks of conflict and ensure sustainable use of outer space.
Author: AKANKSHA KALYAN (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Recent events, such as the use of space and counterspace capabilities in the Russo-Ukrainian War and the announced U.S. Golden Dome missile defence system, are a reminder of the varied challenges faced in space. This paper assesses the strategic need, the defence decision-making environment, and the context surrounding the Nudol direct-ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) system to establish the motivations behind its development and testing. This paper reviews the potential offensive and defensive roles of Nudol, its role within Russian military space strategy, and the threat assessments involved. The defence decision-making environment section examines high- and low-level activities, including the political environment, intervention and patronage, and individual and group lobbying. Lastly assessed is the context, both domestic and international, at key points in the system’s life cycle. Nudol’s connection to a range of past and present issues, from the Soviet missile defence program to President Vladimir Putin’s use of his inner circle to establish and maintain power, provides insight not only into continuity and change in political and military thinking on ASAT systems, but also into Russia's arms procurement process, the continued symbolic importance of space for the state, and its military space strategy. As space continues to play a key role in the functioning of the international system and in armed conflict, understanding the motivations behind military space developments is increasingly important.
Author: Sarah Dunn (University of Leicester) -
There is a surprisingly long history of human ideas about war in space, from the earliest science fiction tales to the elaborate space wargames devised today. This paper analyses four generations of ‘space war stories’, drawn from both popular culture and serious strategic planning, in order to demonstrate how these scenarios consistently reflect contemporary anxieties and interests rather than objective predictions of future space conflict. It reviews pre-spaceflight fantasies and the Cold War and American hyperpower eras, before focusing on six key factors driving contemporary visions of space warfare: renewed great power competition; existential threats and space colonization; hypercapitalism; rapidly evolving weapons technologies; critical reappraisals of colonial history; and proliferating conspiracy theories about space. A crucial finding from this analysis is that virtually every space war scenario ever devised has failed to materialise, yet these imaginaries profoundly influence policy, doctrine, technological development, and financial investments. Arguably, they create mythic futures in which space warfare is plausible, likely and winnable, contradicting a number of strategic, normative and technical factors that in reality render space warfare not so plausible, likely or winnable. As the militarisation and weaponisation of orbital space proceeds, understanding how our ideas about space conflict are shaped by mythic rather than inevitable futures is essential for approaching space security with appropriate criticality, and helping to prevent our terrestrial conflicts from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies off-Earth.
Author: Jeni Mitchell (King's College London) -
The space domain now includes a rapidly expanding number of actors, with 73 countries and major private companies like SpaceX operating thousands of objects in orbit. Alongside this, capabilities are advancing as countries seek to diversify their space programmes with new technologies and advanced methods of operating within the domain. It is amidst this changing and evolving climate that questions arise about how such a diverse group of actors operate and communicate in outer space, and how they effectively signal their goals and intentions to other players in this realm.
This paper seeks to expand upon the notion of signalling and perceptions in international relations by applying them to the space domain. It will use case studies to examine how orbital activities can communicate broader postures and consider how they may be received in a community of spacefaring actors that share little consensus on norms and thresholds. The research presented forms part of my ongoing doctoral project, which examines how a spacefaring nation may communicate a desire to establish or maintain a condition of strategic stability in space. In line with this year’s conference theme of “new thinking, new directions,” my research seeks to revisit traditional discussions of signalling and communication in international relations through the lens of the contemporary orbital environment and the changing nature of space activities.
Author: Zoha Naser (Freeman Air and Space Institute, King's College London)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Strategic challenges in Peacekeeping practiceSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: David Curran (Coventry University)
-
How do United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations withstand moments of crisis? UN missions face challenges both at headquarters in New York, where mandates are negotiated, and in the field, where they operate. They experience a triple "legitimacy crisis": at the intergovernmental level (Security Council deadlocks and U.S.-led budget pressures under the Trump administration), at the local level (host governments retracting consent and rising anti-UN sentiment among populations), and within the bureaucracy (notably a persistent liquidity crisis).
Yet despite these tensions, a minimal but durable consensus around peacekeeping persists. This resilience is visible in continued reform efforts, routinised practices (such as annual mandate renewals and Peacekeeping Committee sessions), and the support of key stakeholders, including troop-contributing countries, Security Council penholders, and senior officials in the Department of Peace Operations.
This paper explains the "resilient legitimacy" of peacekeeping by showing how the UN Secretariat sustains PKOs through institutional practices that operate beyond the most contested political arenas. Peacekeeping is legitimated not only through formal political and normative processes, but also through technical, managerial, and symbolic practices that deflect challenges and reinforce continuity. Drawing on a socio-historical study of UN officials, this article argues that missions persist not merely as products of geopolitical bargaining, but thanks to discreet, everyday practices that make them more resistant to crises.Author: Camille Bayet (Centre Thucydide - Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas) -
Operation Safe Corridor (OPSC), Nigeria’s deradicalisation and reintegration programme for former Boko Haram combatants, is officially presented as a moral and patriotic duty aimed at promoting national peace and rehabilitation. Yet, the military and paramilitary personnel responsible for implementing the programme often experience a disconnection between their professional obligations and emotional commitment to its goals. Their continued participation is sustained primarily by discipline and loyalty to the state rather than by belief in the programme’s moral purpose or confidence in its long-term outcomes. This tension, conceptualised as the Noble Cause Paradox, captures the contradiction between a mission framed as morally righteous and the lived reality of those tasked with carrying it out.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with eight security personnel and analysed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the study finds that motivation within OPSC is unstable and context dependent. Participants reported emotional exhaustion, burnout, loss of colleagues, and moral dissonance arising from the expectation to rehabilitate individuals they once viewed as adversaries. Perceived inequities further eroded morale, as soldiers contrasted their own sacrifices and inadequate welfare with the material support provided to ex-combatants. This sense of unfairness reflects an imbalance between effort and reward, consistent with Equity Theory. Consequently, while duty remains intact, emotional commitment is weakened, and engagement with the programme becomes procedural rather than purposeful.
The study contributes to scholarly debates on moral injury, emotional labour, and security sector involvement in Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) processes. It argues that DDR frameworks cannot depend solely on discipline or obligation but must cultivate environments where duty and belief coexist. Achieving this requires ethical clarity, institutional recognition of military sacrifice, and structured psychosocial support. Without aligning obligation with conviction, reintegration initiatives risk eroding legitimacy and deepening disillusionment among those charged with delivering peace.Author: Celestina Atom (Teesside University) -
Legitimacy/legitimation and partnerships are two topics increasingly studied in the contemporary international peacekeeping literature, yet there remains a paucity of a robust framework for investigating their overlap. In addressing this problematic gap, my paper proposes a legitimation framework for peacekeeping partnerships that highlights the following aspects. First, the plurality of agents in peacekeeping partnerships leads to diversified legitimation practices where the agents seek to legitimise themselves (self-legitimation), each other (mutual legitimation), the partnership itself (joint legitimation), while often contesting each other’s legitimacy (de-legitimation). Second, legitimation in a peacekeeping partnership is relational as its agents practice legitimation vis-à-vis each other, often in comparative terms. Third, legitimation practices in partnership contexts are more nuanced than those in a single-agent context, involving a strategic navigation between cooperation and competition. Lastly, legitimation in peacekeeping partnerships involves some additional legitimacy sources (e.g. partnership as a rightful procedure) and audiences (e.g. partnering agents). Overall, my framework sees peacekeeping partnerships as a complex political theatre constitutive of multifaceted and nuanced legitimation practices. In doing so, I emphasise that understanding complex practices is key to expanding our knowledge of how both legitimation and peacekeeping partnerships work. The paper applies the framework to an analysis of the African Union (AU) – United Nations (UN) peacekeeping partnership, demonstrating its contribution and transferability into future research.
Author: Daeun Jung (University of Warwick)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / The World at War: Analysing Contemporary ConflictSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: Debs Alderton (Loughborough University)
-
NATO’s Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concept is operationally ambitious but
its deterrent potential remains unclear. In this article, we explore if and how states may deter
adversarial conventional aggression by adopting an MDO operational posture. By exploring
MDO’s explicit and implicit signals, we demonstrate the concept communicates a dual
willingness to engage in protracted (attritional/exhaustional) and rapid
(annihilational/paralytic) warfare. While great powers may afford and even benefit from such
ambiguity by virtue of being able to engage in both kinds of warfare, small states lack
capabilities to prevail in either kind of warfare, at least without sufficient specialization.Authors: Simon J. Smith (Royal Danish Defence College) , Samuel Zilincik* -
Strategic studies has long assumed that actors in war broadly align with collective objectives, treating deviations from strategic coherence as noise rather than systematic phenomena. Yet historical and contemporary conflicts - from Afghanistan and Iraq to Ukraine and Israel - reveal persistent patterns of self-interested behaviour: leaders prioritising political survival, commanders pursuing personal glory, bureaucratic actors manoeuvring to protect turf. These dynamics are widely acknowledged but remain theoretically marginal within mainstream security studies. This paper develops a conceptual framework to bring such behaviour into the core of strategic analysis. Drawing on the moral economy tradition and interpretive approaches, it conceptualises strategy as socially embedded practice structured by expectations of legitimacy, reciprocity, duty, and shared sacrifice. It constructs two Weberian ideal types - serious strategy oriented towards collective ends, and cynical strategy oriented towards private interests - and theorises the complex middle ground where mixed motives, moral ambiguity, and narrative contestation shape wartime conduct. The argument shows how strategic cohesion depends not only on material capabilities or rational calculation, but on the maintenance of a functioning moral economy and persuasive narrative that binds actors to a collective purpose. In advancing this framework, the paper bridges strategic studies, interpretive IR, and political sociology, offering new analytical tools to explain strategic failure and the erosion of purpose in modern liberal democracies.
Author: Thomas Waldman (Loughborough University) -
This presentation analyses conceptions of future warfare through the prism of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a joint French-German-Spanish air warfare system currently under development (and the subject of considerable disagreements). Centrally, this presentation engages with long-term future armament projects as a central element of discourses and imaginaries about the future of war. The FCAS, meant to enter into service between 2040 and 2045, thus provides an expression of a conception of security futures, one which (as Linda Ruppert and Annika Mattisek demonstrate) is subject to geopolitical shifts and tensions. In the case of the FCAS, the considerable disagreements between national parties and industrial forces further demonstrates the competing temporal horizons shaping conceptions of future war. In this presentation, therefore, I draw on an in-depth case study of the FCAS program to examine future armament projects as political discourses, which are shaped – and shape imaginaries of future war. As such, I situate them within political security projects, and interrogate the role of conceptions of future war in shaping concepts of national defence and military security.
Author: Emil Archambault (School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Violence, Exclusion, DispossessionSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Leah de Haan (University of Amsterdam)
-
This talk is based upon a chapter from a book project, which analyses how torture became “speakable” in the post-9/11 U.S. “war on terror.” The chapter investigates how torture “survived” its “disclosure” both as a set of practices, and as something that could be publicly acknowledged and defended. It analyses three “cases” of attempts to produce accountability for torture through truth-telling in the years following the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal: the (2005) nomination hearings of Alberto Gonzales; the (2007-8) debates over whether waterboarding is torture; and the (2014) publication of the Senate Subcommittee Report on Torture (the “Feinstein report”). Its analysis focuses upon the limits of truth-production as a strategy for the production of accountability, arguing that the “liberal opposition” were operating according to an outdated set of “rules of the game,” which presumed that telling the “truth” about torture would enable them to produce accountability. However, insofar as the Bush administration had already, before the Abu Ghraib scandal, acknowledged and defended many of the key components of the torture program, the power of truth-telling and exposure was undercut by torture’s status as a ‘public secret.’ Liberal torture opponents in the Senate and the media acted as if they were still playing a ritualized game in which state hypocrisy could be countered by valiant exposure of shameful secrets. Yet the Bush administration had moved on to a new game, in which they reshaped the epistemic terrain via strategic acknowledgement of “forbidden” practices. My argument is therefore not just that liberals continued to centre truth-production, but that they centred a particular practice and understanding of truth and how it functions, and thus failed to “reset” the permissibility of torture due to a failure to adapt to shifts in the “epistemic field” and the “rules of the game.”
Author: Lisa Stampnitzky (University of Sheffield) -
What explains the global proliferation of ethnic cleansing from the eighteenth century onwards? Under what conditions are violent forced expulsions perceived as a viable strategy for actors? Scholars of ethnic cleansing have developed theories that examine how modernisation and nation-state development generates the ideological and political conditions for the othering of out-groups and homogenisation of the population. I argue that by situating modernity and the modern state within the historical development of capitalist social-property relations, we may better understand the structural and material conditions of modern ethnic cleansing. Modern ethnic cleansing, I argue, is the culmination of increased market integration, transformations in domestic economic and social relations generated by technological innovation and capital accumulation, and the resistance towards such changes by producers. Rather than being a product of modernity, ethnic cleansing is best understood as a modernising act, utilised by actors seeking to consolidate emerging social systems. I will be inductively probing the theory through three positive cases of modern ethnic cleansing which contain significant spatial, temporal, and historical variation: the Highland Clearances in Scotland (1750-1850), the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia (1945-1950), and the expulsion of Rohingya from Myanmar (2017). This work contributes to the study of ethnic cleansing and organised political violence more broadly by developing a theoretical framework that centres the historical-material conditions of large-scale organised political violence.
Author: Matthew Tentler (University of Glasgow) -
That people exceed the boundaries of their envisaged emplacement in the world of states is typically presented as the ‘migration problem’, a problem that is only set grow due to new and persistent conflicts, the climate emergency and demographic change. While politicians argue about how to solve the asserted problem, people from ‘here’ and from ‘elsewhere’ necessarily live in relation, making (multiple) futures. This paper highlights how the problematisation of migration shapes hierarchies of migrant-citizen relationality. Using the Federal Republic of Germany as an illustration, it traces language requirements as technologies of futurity. Conceptually, the paper thinks through the production, significance and seductiveness of hierarchy in citizen-migrant relationality with a particular focus on how futurities are enabled and foreclosed. It will seek out openings to futures that disrupt dominant understandings of entitlement within and beyond immigration regulations.
Author: Maja Zehfuss (University of Copenhagen) -
Relationality is rightly receiving attention in the study of world politics, in attempts to exceed its historical reduction to anarchy or regulated forms of hierarchy. In privileging relational over conflictual frames, however, current treatments tend to overlook its conditions of emergence within extractive structures of coloniality and capital and its appositionality with violence. Indeed, one might argue that relationality is currently, uncritically, positioned as the very antidote to coloniality and capital or at least as reparative of its worst harms. This paper turns to Sylvia Wynter’s early work to probe the emergence of a ‘disqualified’ relationality emerging on the provision grounds (known as ‘plots’) where slaves grew food for subsistence and developed forms of black ‘underlife’ in the shadow of colonial Atlantic plantations. The paper examines relationality as counter-systemic praxis, yet one that emerges within transatlantic material relations marked by grammars of coloniality and capital and in the midst of palimpsestic -semiotic, physical and affective --violence. The afterlives and futurities of this disqualified relationality, a discussion of present-day state practices that criminalise the institution of ‘family land’ shows, continue to be marked by this ambivalence through the ongoing reproduction of ‘self-sufficient’ Black labour with uncertain access to land.
Author: Louiza Odysseos (University of Sussex) -
Intimate partner and domestic violence is not sufficiently interrogated and, when it is discussed, queer people’s experiences remain sidelined. To address this gap, this article focuses on queer people’s experiences to examine the productive and destructive capacity of intimate partner and domestic violence through the lens of thingification. In particular, the article centres the relationship between violence and thingification in the context of Black studies and queer theory. Drawing on Hortense Spillers (1987), Mel Y. Chen (2012) and José Esteban Muñoz’s (2015) work, I examine the practices and discourses used to dehumanise people through an emphasis and attack on their (body) parts. The article explores how people are made into objects, the implications of this for conceptions of humanity and violence, and, particularly, the place and role of different body parts within thingification. I foreground how body parts – such as orifices and hair – are racialised, sexualised, gendered and queered through racialised heteropatriarchal imaginaries and how this serves to objectify or thingify people. To do so, the article centres racialised and queer people and their experiences of violence. I draw on in-depth interviews and ethnography conducted in 2024 with queer people who were unhoused as a result of experiences of intimate partner and domestic violence in Cape Town, South Africa. The article is grounded in queer people’s retellings of their experiences of intimate partner and domestic violence, its relation to other forms of exclusion and violence, and, crucially, the way in which such violence targeted and emphasised specific body parts. I contribute to the literature on practices of dehumanisation and thingification by foregrounding how people are broken down into pieces, made into (partial) objects through a fixation on certain (body) parts, and crucially, how such objecthood is performed to imagine new conceptions of humanness and objecthood.
Author: Leah de Haan (University of Amsterdam)
-
-
10:45 AM
→
12:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Worldmaking, Memory, and Resistance in South East EuropeSponsor: South East Europe Working GroupConvener: SEEWG Working groupChair: Mate Subašić (Liverpool John Moores University)
-
The Mediterranean as a space of social, economic, cultural and coercive encounter has, over the last few centuries, been made and remade many times as an imagined political space, occupying different roles in various projects of nation-building and “civilisation”. In this paper, we contribute a distinctive perspective on the unfolding story of the Mediterranean taking a particular starting point: the island of Leros in the southern Aegean Sea. Leros, we show, has been witness to some of the most consequential transformations to reshape the modern Mediterranean - from its distinctive position in the Ottoman empire in the 16th to 19th centuries, through the Italian occupation and subsequent colonisation as part of the project of the Fascist Mediterranean, to the incorporation into Greece in 1948 and reinvention as a space dedicated to the “rehabilitation” and containment of those deemed to be at odds with the project of Greek nation-building, and, finally, the contemporary role as an external border of the European Union. In each epoch, it has found itself entangled with and marking the boundaries of different political, cultural and civilisational projects. In the sedimentation of these different historical experiences, we argue, it has also taken on a distinctive role: that of a space defined by its own marginal location, dedicated to the warehousing and containment of undesirable populations - be they political prisoners, orphans and psychiatric patients, or refugees and asylum seekers. In focusing on the spatio-temporal transformations of the island of Leros, we find a novel entry point through which to interrogate the making and remaking of the modern Mediterranean and its shifting role at the core and the periphery of ‘western civilisation’. We thereby contribute to critical scholarship in political geography, on South-East Europe, and border studies.
Authors: Davide Schmid (Manchester Metropolitan University) , Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool) , Giulio D'Errico* -
The History of the Party of Labour of Albania was the key text of the Albanian Communist party-state. Like the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (known as the ‘Short Course’), it sought to orientate cadre and citizens to a virtual world of triumph and threat by relating party origins, achievements, and enemies. Using organisational theory and foreign policy role theory it is possible to elaborate how the ‘self-descriptions’ (to use Niklas Luhmann’s term) of ideologically committed authoritarian states both shape and constrain their international posture. This approach facilitates an understanding of Communist Albania’s conduct of foreign affairs as an outgrowth of its origins in a conspiratorial struggle against foreign domination and elite collaboration within a former imperial periphery. The text provided a schematic rendering of the state’s environment which had to be referenced to communicate in an ideologically correct manner. The roles conferred on itself in the text became ‘self-observation’ mechanisms which created a system specific reality with its own path dependencies. As Communist Albania twice broke alliances with powerful allies for ideological reasons, becoming a last isolated outpost of high Stalinism, it is a fascinating limit case of a state choosing internal coherence and outsider status over engagement. This has wider relevance for the study of states who, unable to act to their own advantage, disengage from international co-operation. In Albania’s case, retreating into a Manichean coding of the self/other distinction and adopting a rhetoric of ideological purity and self-dependency.
Keywords: Dictatorship; Isolationism; Organisation Theory; Role Theory; South Eastern Europe.
Author: Joe Ruffell (Open University) -
After years of stalled integration into Euro-Atlantic structures due to the Greek veto and internal democratic backsliding, the successive SDSM-DUI governments set out to resolve external blockages between 2017 and 2024. Yet, the moves aimed at securing the country’s progress externally – embodied in the 2017 Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighbourliness and Cooperation with Bulgaria, the 2018 Prespa Agreement with Greece, and eventually the accepted 2022 French Proposal – deepened domestic polarisation, provoked conservative mobilisation, and ultimately led to the electoral collapse of the ruling coalition.
The paper examines this paradox in North Macedonia’s recent political trajectory though the vernacular ontological security approach (Croft & Vaughan-Williams) – the vernacular level is placed at the centre of analysis, and elite discourses are examined primarily in terms of how they travel into and are rearticulated through everyday talk. This is done through qualitative textual analysis of elite and religious public discourse (ruling coalition, opposition, the Macedonian Orthodox Church – Archdiocese of Ohrid) and vernacular public discourse (online commentary), all with the aim to demonstrate how international politics seeps into everyday life, shaping how ordinary people understand who they are, what is being threatened, and what feels worth defending.Author: Cvetanka Aleksandroska Miladinova (Södertörn University) -
The presidential and parliamentary elections held in Turkey in May 2023 marked a dramatic moment in the country’s political trajectory. In an unprecedented move, six opposition parties from liberal to social-democratic to nationalist strands co-alesced behind a single presidential candidate in a bid to unseat the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This coalition billed as a resilience strategy against authoritarian consolidation was widely regarded as a high-stakes experiment in alliance-making under conditions of democratic backsliding.
Yet, despite the coalition’s rhetorical strength and structural cooperation, the outcome failed to deliver regime change. Erdoğan secured re-election and the AKP maintained its parliamentary presence, revealing the limitations and paradoxes of electoral alliances in semi-authoritarian contexts. This presentation argues that the 2023 Turkish opposition alliance illustrates three key lessons about the (im)possibility of alliances under authoritarianisms. First, it emphasises the structural disadvantage faced by opposition coalitions operating under a hybrid regime: escalating media constraints, electoral rule-manipulation, and the permeation of state-resources into campaigning. These factors significantly hampered the coalition’s capacity to translate unity into an effective counter-hegemonic force. Second, the presentation explores internal tensions within the alliance: divergent identities, ideological fault-lines, and competing strategic logics (instrumental vs. transformative) which inhibited the forging of a coherent and compelling alternative narrative. Third, the discussion highlights how the alliance’s framing as purely defensive ‘blocking authoritarianism’ rather than positive programme-building, undermined its resonance among key electorates weary of routine politics, thus limiting mobilising capacity.
The Turkish case thus offers a cautionary tale: alliances are neither panacea nor simple strategic fix, under adverse conditions may even reinforce the dominance they seek to dislodge. The experience of the 2023 vote invites us to rethink how resistance is organised, how counter-hegemonic coalitions are built, and when the promise of alliance meets the reality of power.
Author: Caglar Ezikoglu (University of Wolverhampton) -
Ample scholarship has documented the exclusion of women’s activism in the post-war narratives of resistance and local state-building in the case of Kosovo. Almost paradoxically, however, the state has heavily relied on the documentation labour of women during the 1990s in its construction of self through the archives. This paper argues that the “newborn” state of Kosovo has relied on the documentation labour of women in the assemblage of its grant archival infrastructure, and therefore the constitution of its very identity, while simultaneously neglecting the labour of documentation carried by women. This article intends to make a feminist intervention in the state-building literature on Kosovo in a two-fold manner. Firstly, engendering local state-building practices through highlighting the documentation labour carried by women throughout the 1990s. Secondly, through conceptualising how this documentation labour is co-opted by the state for the constitution of its legitimacy, while neglecting the role of women in its state-building processes. The analysis relies on in-depth interviews conducted with prominent activists who documented, recorded and archived human rights violations throughout the 1990s. It is further enriched through discourse analysis of the Oral History Kosovo Initiative archives.
Author: Enduena Klajiqi (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
-
-
12:15 PM
→
1:15 PM
Lunch Break 1h
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / (In)visibility and the visual in militaries and militarismsSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Alice Cree (Newcastle University)Chair: Alice Cree (Newcastle University)
-
How is the relationship between embodied military masculinity, heroism, & vulnerability and State ideology/ontology reflected in film representations of war? Particularly, how is this relationship altered by the post-War on Terror release of films that claim to be apolitical? This paper utilizes the 2025 release of the film Warfare as an entry point to these questions relative to the logics used to give violence higher meaning for citizens of the war-making state. Engaging with Francois Debrix’s 2008 book, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics, I employ an expository film analysis of Warfare to differentiate its “forensic approach”, or dedication to “truth” as opposed to dramatization/political commentary, from what Debrix calls “tabloid culture”. I posit that in traditional representations of the War on Terror, tabloid culture would expose viewers to violent imagery as a means to then enforce dominant ideology - be this nationalism, heroic masculinity, democratic ideals, etc. Warfare, however, offers the viewer no heroism, sacrifice, or bravado to assuage the senselessness of the horrific violence that takes place. I then employ Adriana Cavarero’s theory of horror as de-ontological violence and Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine to interrogate the ontological impact of a war film that does not employ tabloid state ideology. I argue that while Warfare disrupts state-preserving justificatory logics of war, the brutal violence experienced by the viewer is instead employed in the privileging of the soldier as the primary victim of the war machine, rather than the Iraqi civilians, or Others, deeply affected by American occupation. When the ontological connection between state and soldier is severed, who becomes the victim, and to what end? If the visual representation is “too real”, what is the widespread ontological effect of making publicly visible the dissonance between representation and reality - particularly given the current state of U.S. civil-military relations?
Author: Elena Roe (Johns Hopkins University) -
Analysis of videogames as an artefact of culture and conflict is emerging as a useful tool within the International Relations (IR) discipline, and IR scholars are increasingly receptive of the power videogames possess. Though aspects of this literature addresses sci-fi and games set in the future within the broader context of conflict, an interesting question arises when considering how these games specifically affect our imaginings on the future of war: videogames have the capacity to behave not just as sites of knowledge construction, replication, modification, and rejection, but also as sites of interactive speculation, where one can ‘play’ within, and with, futures.
Based on my PhD research utilising surveys and focus groups with videogame players, this presentation develops an analysis of the role videogames play in norm and myth construction in public discourse on the future of war. To understand the importance of videogames in shaping our understanding of the future of war, I observe the relationship players form between videogames and narratives of futures. In addition, I discuss how videogames function within a wider network of popular culture operating within the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, and specifically as a medium for hegemonic futurism.
Author: Erin McNally (Lancaster University) -
This article examines how the visualization and fictional narration of future warfare have been constituted as a legitimate form of security expertise in the United States and Western Europe.
There is a growing tendency among Western military organizations to produce, publish and present visual fictions about the future of war as tools for anticipating and preventing ‘strategic surprise’. Rather than dismissing these materials as propaganda produced by the military-cultural complex, I argue they should be taken seriously as forms of security knowledge that aim both to harmonize the definition of so-called ‘emerging’ threats within Western military discourse and to encourage the appropriation of military priorities by civilian parliamentarians and youth.
Drawing on 18 interviews, discourse and visual analysis of fictions published by American and French military organizations through the Future Conflict Graphic Novels project (2018–2023) and the Red Team Défense initiative (2019–2023), as well as participant observation at several public events organized by the French military, I analyze the history, contributions, and target audiences of what I term the “weak field of imaginary wars” — a transnational space bringing together science fiction authors, comic book illustrators, design fiction consultants, and military professionals to convert imagination and aesthetics into security knowledge.
Showing how this peculiar genre of expertise rests on genealogies of depoliticization of countercultural imaginaries and relies consistently on forms of Orientalism and distrust toward the public and political arena, this article contributes to critical military studies, visual security studies, and critical sociology of expertise.
Author: Elias Brugidou (Sciences Po (Paris))
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Activism! Merging with academia with Queers for Palestine and Palestine Youth Movement
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Alternative Politics of Social Media and Popular CultureSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk)Discussant: Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk)
-
The world of international politics has been variously depicted as militarised, securitised, traumatic, euphoric, magical, practical, gruesome, sublime, and gravely serious. This paper contends that international politics in the digital age is also increasingly mediated and consumed through a more diminutive aesthetics of ‘cuteness’. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s work on cuteness as an aesthetics of hyper-mediated powerlessness (2012), this paper examines what it means to be cute or think about cuteness in the international register. How does cuteness as an aesthetic mode mobilise in international spaces and imaginaries? What work do the emotions and discourses generated through cuteness do in world politics and what relations of power(lessness) emerge through the mediated proliferation of cute subjectivities? Navigating examples from pandemic-era feel-good news accounts on social media offering ‘no politics, just good news’, to photos of diminutive, doe-eyed IDF soldiers accusing critics of ‘being mean’, we demonstrate how cuteness seeps into and mediates everyday political life, and shapes what we see as political. We argue that cuteness functions as a mediated method for smoothing the rough edges of world politics, simultaneously rendering the scary and strange as soft, domestic, and familiar, and exoticising and commoditising the comfortable and well-known. In doing so, we bring International Relations into conversation with the field of cute studies and pay closer attention to an aesthetic mode that has largely gone under IR’s radar, but which nonetheless has increasingly powerful effects on how we make sense of global politics.
Authors: Zoë Jay (University of Helsinki) , Uygar Baspehlivan (uygar.baspehlivan@bristol.ac.uk) -
Focusing on ‘key moments’ of high production (density) where media objects spread across platforms (diffusion) and touch on different affective registers, spatial analyses from digital citizenship scholarship have already studied how the performative principles of online humour and memetic practices (Udupa, 2019) are used to negotiate civic belonging and to enact ‘incongruities as existing in and between states-discourse and practice’ (Guldberg, 2024). By foregrounding ‘diffusion’, however, what is missed is how those objects, and the linked claims to civic belonging, are constantly (re)negotiated already before picking up in use.
Building on this research, following Isin’s theorisation of acts of citizens, I examine the circulation and active remediation of image and text by foregrounding the intensification of communication that precedes those high moments. I claim that intensity of communication is as relevant for understanding how digital aesthetic media contributes to the formation of online communities and for advancing our theorisation of ‘netizenship’. The article takes as its empirical space online uses of Latin on 4Chan and Reddit. Turning to a ‘dead language’ with no clear link to a (national) community, I find attempts to institute such community and the civic obligations that come with it (i.e., ‘four rules for Latin citizen’). Foregrounding these ‘unserious acts’, I argue their enactment instantiates constituents of citizenship: the contestations of the ‘unserious’ material shows how intensification of communication at the point of production is ‘seriously serious’, and that the negotiation of civic belonging behind that work is missed if we only focus the output’s diffusion.
Author: Federico Petris (University of Groningen) -
Political parties, governments, intelligence agencies, military companies, embassies, and intergovernmental institutions are increasingly present on social media. From the CIA posting about its office cat, to NATO channelling a “BRAT summer,” and the UN experimenting with TikTok trends, these actors are adopting informal, humorous, and often playful tones online. While intended to be engaging, these efforts frequently provoke a different reaction: cringe. Defined as “the intense visceral reaction produced by an awkward moment” (Dahl 2018, p. 8), cringe is a form of second-hand embarrassment that arises when institutions attempt to appear relatable but miss the mark (Baspehlivan 2024). In this paper we explore the international political effects of cringe. Building on scholarship that examines humour in IR as a tool for soft power, norm contestation, and identity construction, we argue that cringe represents a communicative failure. These institutions are pursuing a new strategy to cultivate legitimacy and public connection through humour and informality. However, rather than reinforcing authority or trust, their attempts often undermine credibility and provoke discomfort. We examine how this dynamic reshapes perceptions of institutional power, authority, and relevance in the digital age.
Authors: Rhys Crilley (University of Glasgow) , Luise Bendfeldt (Swedish Defense University) , Louise Pears (University of Leeds) -
Politics and International Relations literature has increasingly started to look beyond traditional sites of production to unpack the ways in which our political realities are shaped and influenced. Whilst significant attention has been paid to the interpretation of political representations within artefacts of popular culture (PC) and the possible influence this has on the public, often such research has neglected certain 'everyday' sites where such artefacts are politically contested. Specifically, review platforms like Metacritic and Steam have largely been passed over by the discipline, despite the fundamental position they occupy within the public sphere. As public discourse has increasingly shifted online, the internet has become a key site for political contestation with conflicts like the culture war being waged on its servers. Political vitriol and divisive rhetoric in response to PC artefacts is often launched on these platforms, operating as a proving ground, before being picked up and proliferated by more mainstream outlets and key political figures. Consequently, this paper mobilizes Raffle & O’Connor’s (Forthcoming, 2026) typology of PC artefacts, furthering their argument to move beyond inward readings of PC representations to instead unpack the ways in which PC is a site of political contestation in and of itself as well as a tool for political actors to further their agendas. To do this, the paper looks at reviews of The Last of Us on the platforms Steam and Metacritic, demonstrating that the culture war is being waged within these sites of production and often involves key figures (predominately on the right) mobilizing a ‘metapolitics’ strategy. Emprically, the paper draws upon large corpus of reviews from the aforementioned sites, which were collected and analysed via web scraping in R.
Authors: Euan Raffle (Birmingham City University) , Ryan O'Connor (BCU)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Bureaucracy, Negotiations and Tensions in the rise and fall of European imperial powerSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
The ‘crisis’ of the Liberal International Order (LIO) is widely discussed, yet contributions to the literature frequently decouple the LIO’s vulnerabilities from global capitalism's structural dynamics. Whilst some scholars acknowledge that the LIO sustains capitalism through ideological legitimation, the mechanism linking ideological management to capitalism's structural preconditions remains undertheorised. We argue that the LIO’s primary function is managing the tension between capitalism's reliance on expropriation and liberalism's promise of universal inclusion. The current crisis represents this management strategy’s inevitable failure.
Many existing attempts at explaining the crisis are robust but siloed. The economic transformation thesis emphasises how neoliberal hyper-globalisation undermined domestic social contracts, fuelling populist backlash (Flaherty and Rogowski 2021). The ideological exposure thesis highlights the “hypocrisy charge” between meritocratic promises and hierarchical practices (Lawson and Zarakol 2023). The institutional evolution thesis shows how intrusive post-Cold War governance generates legitimacy problems (Börzel and Zürn 2021). This article extends these perspectives by demonstrating how the crisis is endogenous to the LIO’s operating logic.
Building on Nancy Fraser’s work, we understand capitalism as requiring both exploitation (extracting surplus value from wage labour) and expropriation (confiscating capacities from racialised, gendered, and colonised populations). The LIO managed this contradiction through promising universal inclusion whilst ensuring accumulation-necessary hierarchies. This operated through two phases: embedded liberalism (1945-1970s), securing working-class stability in the core through colonial expropriation (Sabaratnam and Laffey 2023); and progressive neoliberalism (1980s-2010s), legitimising marketisation through an inclusion discourse. The crisis manifests as financialised capitalism's material severity—extreme inequality, ecological degradation, democratic erosion—overwhelming ideological management and exposing the LIO as an imperial project whose contradictions have become unmanageable. As the LIO fragments, we argue, post-liberal attempts at saving capitalism emerge. We illustrate this through examining the contemporary far right in the liberal core and the role of ‘illiberal’ actors beyond the core.
Authors: Saleh Naas (SOAS University of London) , Hengfeng Zhao (University of Leeds) -
This paper examines how epistemic hierarchies and pluralities shape EU–Turkey relations by centering the knowledge practices of Turkey’s EU bureaucracy. Moving beyond political elite-centric analyses, it conceptualizes the bureaucracy as a site of epistemic negotiation, friction, and adaptation. Drawing on the concept of epistemic pluriversality, and and through 84 semi-structured interviews with bureaucratic elites, we examine how diverse—sometimes conflicting—forms of expertise and perspective are mobilized, marginalized, or instrumentalized within Turkey’s EU governance apparatus. Through a multi-level analysis, we identify epistemic enclaves formed through educational and professional trajectories (individual level), tensions between rhetorical collaboration and ministerial dominance (organizational level), and the centralization of decision-making that constrains epistemic diversity (governance level). These dynamics reveal how Turkey’s EU policy-making is shaped not by epistemic harmony, but by discord, asymmetry, and selective inclusions. Our findings show how bureaucratic actors function as both agents and constraints of epistemic plurality. Situating the Turkish case within global concerns about epistemic justice and institutional resilience, we argue that international cooperation relies not only on political alignment but on the contested infrastructures of knowledge itself. This research is supported by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK Project No: 122K720).
Authors: Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm , Selin Turkes-Kilic*
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Coloniality and Imperialism in cultural materialitiesSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
One of the more pernicious ways colonialism was conducted was through food and the changing of peoples’ diets. As states and societies look for ways to move beyond the limitations of colonialism, it is reasonable to ask how this post-colonial drive is manifesting in African kitchens, and in the specific instance of embassy kitchens.
Foods and feasts have been a fundamental component of diplomacy since its inception. In such contexts food is a form of communication about ideals, values, identity, and attitudes manifested in the quantity and varieties, as well as the preparation and serving.Food is an understudied aspect of international relations despite it being central to international trade and culture. We may take our cuisines for granted but they are often a simple dish can tell of an international history of conflict, conquest and compromise.
This research project address the following question: How have African states expressed national cuisines in public diplomacy events abroad?
The research question presupposes that African states are drawing from their national cuisines at diplomatic functions. If, however, there is a lack of deliberate intention on the part of the hosting embassy, this too is of interest as it may be indicative of cogent limitations.Author: Simon Taylor (Durham University) -
Neither representations of racialised women, migrant garment workers, nor neoliberal ideologies that fetishise work and see wages as empowering - especially for racialised and feminised peoples - are new. However, in this paper, I argue that these representations have become entrenched and morphed recently in fast fashion manufacturing in the UK against the backdrop of mass joblessness and the local industry becoming increasingly part of the ‘shadow economy’. I analyse interview data with actors in the industry in Leicester (the hub of UK fast fashion manufacturing) using Bacchi’s (1999) poststructural feminist What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) strategy to reconstruct, analyse and problematise two dominant stories, which I call the culture-specific patriarchy story and the wageless life story. These stories mirror rehearsed global stories about the garment industry and about work as a moral good, while specific localised dynamics within Leicester shape the development of the two stories and why they are so compelling.
I draw upon postcolonial and post-Marxist feminist theorising, including the frameworks of Racial Capitalism and the Coloniality of Gender, to analyse and problematise both global and localised dynamics of the stories (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Lugones, 2010). For instance, the colonial, racialised and gendered harms and pitfalls of portraying structural problems as rooted in a particular cultural setting, and how racialised stereotypes of both South Asian and Eastern European migrants in the UK as ‘hard workers’ actually negatively impact upon their working conditions (e.g. Chakraborty, 2014; Lewicki, 2023). Since stories have power by virtue of being told, local actors make meaning through them (Hall, 1997). This paper contributes empirically, showing the two local stories indeed have material effects, leading to partial solutions and policy and advocacy responses, as well as contributing to homogenising and Othering discourses that invisibilise some while making others hypervisible (Bettcher, 2007; Welland, 2017).
Author: Susannah Williams (University of York) -
This paper explores how the British Empire’s cultural imagination persists through culinary practices, focusing on the phenomenon of fine-dining Indian restaurants in London such as Gymkhana. Historically, Gymkhana clubs were elite spaces in colonial India, reserved for British officers and administrators, symbolizing racial hierarchy and imperial privilege. Today, their namesake restaurants in London actively reshape colonial identity by selectively curating imperial imagination—foregrounding sanitized aesthetics of colonial food while erasing the violence and exploitation that sustained the British Empire. These restaurants do not merely serve food; they curate an experience that reinscribes imperial imaginaries of the previous colonies through décor, menu design, food, and service rituals.
Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, fine-dining Indian restaurants emerge as a site where distinction is performed and racial and class boundaries are reinforced. These fine-dining experience, instead of recalling the colonial history, reinforces power hierarchies rooted in colonial relations, translating them into cultural capital for metropolitan elites. This paper thus asks: What can decolonial/postcolonial studies learn from the politics of taste in metropolitan spaces? Situating decolonisation beyond formal independence, this study argues that cultural practices, like fine dining, reveal the unfinished nature of decolonial projects, which are not only in political institutions but in everyday spaces of consumption. The persistence of colonial aesthetics in London’s culinary scene challenges International Relations scholars to rethink its conceptual boundaries and relate everyday practices with the taming and repackaging of imperial desire and imagination of the former colonial states.
Author: Hongli Liu (KCL)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Critical perspectives in developmentSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)Discussant: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
-
This research explores the systematic subjugation of women’s bodies and labour in the global corporate food and plantation industry. It further reveals how this subjugation occurs through the interconnected categories of emerging ethno-nationalist patriarchal politics aligned with neoliberalism. By examining the narratives of daily minimum-wage, semi- or uncontracted women regarding universal policies on menstrual hygiene management, the study constructs knowledge by redefining labour rights, consciousness, and representation in the corporate world.
This redefinition contributes to understanding and critically engaging with the social reality of providing necessary material support for women during menstruation, which the United Nations acknowledged through Resolution 56/11 in 2014. This resolution affirms member states’ obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM).
The research problem is: Despite the United Nations’ commitment to ensuring menstrual hygiene, why do women working in global food corporations continue to experience menstrual poverty? Two research questions guide this inquiry: (1) How is period poverty defined as a form of structural inequality linked to the body politics of patriarchal culture? and (2) How does the neoliberal market economy in postcolonial countries recognise or fail to recognise the natural bodily process of menstruation among working-class women? This research is grounded in the socialist feminist scholarship of Angela Davis and Nancy Folbre.
This qualitative research draws on the narratives of working-class women employed in the tea and cocoa plantations of Sri Lanka (Hill Country region) and Nigeria (Ondo State). Empirical data were collected from 30 participants, 15 from the tea sector and 15 from the cocoa sector, through semi-structured interviews conducted via online platforms such as WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams.
Author: Aruni Samarakoon (University of Hull) -
Understanding the politics of demographic and health surveys reveals the histories and economies that shape if and how knowledge is produced and the implications of this for global development. This paper interrogates how and why demographic and health surveys originated and their political histories, conceptualising how ‘survey real estate’ commodifies questions and creates silences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with global health data experts (n=54), this paper exposes how iterations of surveys have failed to account for changing political and social realities, entrenching a complicated and problematic entanglement with eugenics and colonialism that centres on control of women’s bodies. Demographic concepts of harmonisation and comparability become political projects that allow only certain realities to exist. Further comparative analysis of surveys in the ‘Global North’ and ‘South’ illustrates these political histories in action, as surveys in the ‘Global South’ continue to focus on comparability to decades-old variables and consistency across time-series at the expensive of expansive, holistic, and necessary updates to how SRHR is understood and for whom it is important. Survey histories and economies combine with the operationalisation of scientific ‘expertise’ to override contextual grounding, and power dynamics between stakeholders involved in the development of survey instruments exemplify the politics of ‘development’.
Author: Joe Strong (QMUL) -
The majority of IR scholarship on global governance and objects of expertise has focused on institutions on global governance as well as elite politics within the states of the Global North. Against this backdrop I highlight an overlooked force in the constitution of objects of governance - subnational projects. Arguing that subnational projects need to be taken seriously in the literature on expertise and global governance, I contest diffusionist assumptions of knowledge (from the core of global institutions to Global South peripheries) within most accounts of global governance. I deploy Bayly’s relational sociology of knowledge to highlight that objects of governance emerged through a wide range of dizzying connections and relations between diverse political and intellectual projects articulated in multiple sites including subnational projects. I demonstrate this empirically by highlighting how the project of the Indian state Kerala’s developmental sub-nationalism was instrumental in the constitution of development as a governance object. I argue that a developmentalist egalitarianism was central to the ethos of Kerala’s subnationalism resulting in a project shaped by tensions associated with the coexistence subnational pride and anxieties of national belonging. These tensions led to multiple articulations of the Kerala model across time, which in turn were instrumental in the shaping of various objects of expertise associated with governance object of development ranging from the basic needs approach (in the 70s) to the capabilities approach (in the 90s) and decentralization (in the late 90s and 2000s) and even recent migration-based human-capital export models couched in neoliberal assumptions. While Kerala’s subnational project certainly was instrumental in propounding an order which contested the hegemonic neoliberal market fundamentalist orders, it also entrenched of a world-order where development was viewed in terms of lacking abilities of actors in developing countries as opposed marginalizing alternate imaginaries which politicised international institutions and interstate relations.
Author: Anand Sreekumar
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Dilemmas and lost spaces in ontological security seekingSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConveners: Lauren Rogers , Ben Rosher (University of Gothenburg)Chair: Bruno Sowden-Carvalho (University of Birmingham)
-
This paper provides a panoramic and pluralist diagnosis of how sleep dynamics, experiences, practices, and meanings interpenetrate political life and its study. We develop these reflections through three main sections. A first section on ‘embodied sleep’ summarizes sleep science and medical accounts of the physiological aspects of sleep as a common, basic need of highly variable quantity and quality. Here we especially highlight the foreign relations impacts of embodied sleep. The section thereafter outlines sleeping spaces and practices as sites of politics, especially governance, discipline, and contestation. A penultimate section links these themes to sleep’s impact on the emergence of the modern Self, initially as a change in consciousness but more recently as an explicit vector of radicalization. We conclude with some suggestions on further research opportunities that arise in light of these reflections.
Authors: Brent Steele (University of Utah)* , Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh) -
Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has developed a sophisticated theorization of identity in International Relations. Foremost among the referents used in OSS are (auto)biographical narratives, in that they keep a ‘story of the Self’ going through time and space. Surprisingly, though, the OSS research community rarely deals with the truth claims of such narratives, let alone how issues of truth shape, impact, disturb and/or follow from narrations of such ‘Selves’. This paper brings OSS work on narratives and mnemonical security, into conversation with Foucault’s late work on parrhesia. I examine the contrasts and overlaps between the (auto)biographical narratives and the ‘account of the Self’ described by Foucault in his lectures. Doing so, I propose, helps specify the moments, and content, that can lead to ontological (in)security for agents and especially within the politics of memory and forgetting. I do through with two case illustrations from the United States: the 1995 ‘Enola Gay’ controversy and the 2025 Smithsonian ‘reforms’.
Author: Brent Steele (University of Utah) -
The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016 generated major shock across both the UK and Europe, being felt particularly acutely in Scotland. Occurring only two years after a failed independence referendum in which European status played a decisive role, and with the Scottish people overwhelmingly voting to Remain, they were forced, alongside the rest of the UK, into Brexit. Existing research demonstrates how Brexit generated intense anxieties amongst Remainers and Leavers, along borders, in Westminster, and amongst the general population. Yet, despite the profundity of the referendum outcome for Scotland, scant attention has been paid to the navigation of this crisis. Empirically, drawing from parliamentary debates, policy documents, and press releases, we demonstrate the way Brexit became deeply entwined with how Scotland, under the secessionist-orientated Scottish National Party, performed its identity in contrast to the UK and, increasingly, in line with Europe. We identify concerted and, crucially, repeated efforts to have Scotland’s referendum vote ‘respected’, to be recognised as distinct political entity whose voice is heard during negotiations, and to permit Scotland a differentiated post-Brexit settlement. Yet, these efforts were consistently met with non-recognition and denial at Westminster, which promoted further, more strident efforts still. Ironically, this cyclical loop exacerbated – more powerfully each time – fundamental anxieties for the ‘Scottish’ self, including the very existence of the Scottish parliament. This, we term, an ‘ontological security paradox’: whereby recurrent ontological security-seeking activities unintentionally expose and sharpen the very anxieties they are intended to address. Unpacking the effect this has for both undermining and sustaining the ontological security of the Scottish self, we explore Scotland’s navigation of a prolonged crises, attending to an under-explored actor in ontological security studies – substates – and contribute to vital debates on the relationship between ontological (in)security, crisis and change
Authors: Lauren Rogers , Ian Paterson (University of Glasgow)* , Ben Rosher (University of Gothenburg) -
Sublimation is the sole psychic defence that does not involve distortion. Instead, it harnesses the full energy of the drive or desire to address complexities in creative ways that can transfigure our subjective and social worlds. It can breathe new life into what may have become moribund, and it can displace the distortions that support dehumanising and de-realising emotions, mentalities and practices. However, in defending against ontological insecurity, sublimation always competes with the many other psychic defences that do involve distortion and that thereby suffer a loss of creative energy. Hence, its political implications are vast, but only if it can flourish. To do so it relies upon a social field in which norms of recognition that support the capacity to dwell in ambivalence gain predominance by displacing norms that encode the friend-enemy distinction. The dilemma for political sublimation is that to transform social and political relations the relevant parties must move in tandem towards realising their capacity for sublimation. If only one party begins to transform its relations with the other(s) through sublimation, while those others maintain their reliance on defences of splitting, projection and abjection, the potential for transformative sublimation collapses. The crucial political issue becomes how to support such mutual processes of sublimation across and between whole societies to avoid a descent into friend-enemy relations.
Author: John Cash (University of Melbourne) -
Silicon Valley technolibertarian billionaire and Trump megadonor, Peter Thiel, recently held off-the-record ‘lectures’ on the advent of the antichrist, harbinger of Armageddon. For Thiel, this figure is incarnated in a person or movement that attempts to curtail technological progress – i.e., subjects like activist Greta Thunberg, who promote stronger regulation on technology, environmental protection, and/or international cooperation. This civilisational othering is embedded in Thiel’s well-documented obsession with fantasy tropes, as exemplified by his involvement in tech firms named after J.R.R. Tolkien’s work (e.g., Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, and Mithril Capital). This discursive assemblage around fantasy tropes responds to a broader political structure linking fantasy, dystopia, grievance, and desire for saviourism and immortality – a structure widely shared by tech oligarchs, reactionaries, and fascists. Whereas erstwhile restricted to niche pop culture ‘nerdom’, this phantasmatic structure is currently shaping high politics, norms, and practices around a religious, oligarchic desire for transcendence or immortality that feeds (off) fascism. Most prominently, this structure is not only about the fear of dystopia, but also about how the anxiety directed at it can transform into socially transgressive enjoyment. This enjoyment is predicated on phantasmatic narratives stitching the ‘good’ techno-supremacist civilisation to the godliness of our righteous tech-bro saviours, thus earmarking the ‘dark-Other’ – e.g., Thiel’s antichrist. In this paper, we use a critical fantasy approach (Glynos, 2021) to examine the anxious fantasies of ontological (in)security that structure this techno-civilisational enjoyment. We specifically analyse the integration of pop culture narratives into techno-fascist discourses of immortality, civilisationism, and godliness as protecting the ‘righteous Whites’ from the ‘taint’ of the dark-Other. We reflect on the consequences of this increasingly streamlined phantasmatic structure on our civilisational negotiation and shift away from liberal modernity, and into the quasi-religious embrace of techno-fascism as a ‘righteous’ horizon of struggle and aspirational cruelty.
Authors: Catarina Kinnvall (Lund University) , Pasko Kisić-Merino (Lund University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / ECSRG CaféSponsor: British International Studies Association
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Health Diplomacy and Governance in Times of Crisis and InsecuritySponsor: Global Health Working GroupConvener: GHWG Working groupChair: Christopher Long (Queen's University Belfast)
-
The 21st century has witnessed a greater number of pandemics and epidemics in just two decades which leads us to give more emphasis on health security. The recent global pandemic has revealed that the current mainstream approaches to health security have failed to secure people from such serious health disasters. Although state and non-state actors have given health priority, the current trends in policy-making within the health sector have failed to enhance the security of people. Moreover, the neoliberal economic policies, which are historically specific to our times and have impacted every aspect of our lives, have also influenced the framing of health security and policies. This paper has tried to look at the influence of neoliberal economic policies on health security and in policy-making regarding the health sector by state and non-state actors in the context of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. India, which is part of the global south, has embraced neoliberal policies in the last decade of the 20th century. This is why the paper has taken the case study of India and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper will look at the influence of neoliberal policies in the health sector and the public sector vaccine institutions of India. Further, the paper looks at how this influence of neoliberal policies has impacted the Indian health sector and vaccine institutions during the pandemic.
Author: Anurag Acharya (South Asian University) -
Since 2012, the Sahelian region of West Africa has been embroiled in a protracted crisis. Aside from the political and economic toll caused by this state of insecurity, this volatile situation has undermined the ability of local communities to access health services. This paper examines the complex ways in which insecurity and local political dynamics intersect with the area of healthcare. More specifically, we explore how conflict dynamics shape local populations’ ability to access healthcare services in areas disproportionately affected by conflict. The analysis reveals how local level identity politics, struggles over authority, and threats to agrarian livelihoods contribute to shaping health outcomes in diverging ways in this conflict-wracked region. While the findings shed light on how recent political developments undermine the ability of local populations to access healthcare, they also fundamentally reveal the novel innovations that various actors have employed to provide ongoing healthcare in these insecure environments. The analysis is informed by the existing literature on the Sahelian crisis and the conflict-health nexus more broadly. However, we also draw upon extensive qualitative research conducted during fieldwork in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in 2024-2025. This includes crucial insights garnered from over 150 interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders such as healthcare workers, traditional authorities, government officials, NGOs, and security experts. The paper provides an important contribution to the literature on conflict and health as there is a limited body of scholarship on the politics around access to healthcare in ongoing zones of conflict.
Authors: Matthew Mitchell (University of Saskatchewan) , Thomas Druetz (University of Montreal)* -
How do crises affect international organisations (IOs)? Drawing on cases of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), this paper develops a framework to explain why some IOs emerge strengthened from major shocks while others lose ground. First, I introduce a tripartite classification of IO focality – de jure, discursive, and de facto – and argue that traditional measures overlook key funding-based indicators. Building on this, I propose a De Facto Focality Index (DFFI), which weights both the quantity and quality (earmarked vs. unearmarked) of an IO’s funding relative to other actors in its policy space. Second, I theorise two causal pathways for IOs responding to crises: early perception and pro-active crisis management can increase an IO’s focality, while downplaying or reacting late often leads donors to choose alternative institutions. Qualitative illustrations of FAO’s role in the 1970s world food crisis and WHO’s responses to HIV/AIDS, the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak and COVID-19 demonstrate how crisis response, donor reactions, and focality are intertwined. Finally, I outline next steps in this research project combining network analysis of IO centrality and computational text analysis of donor communications, aiming to validate the DFFI as a sensitive barometer of IO focality and test whether discursive and de facto focality track together or diverge over time.
Author: Florian Brunner (Nuffield College, University of Oxford) -
Global health diplomacy is an interdisciplinary framework that bridges public health, international relations, and public policy to improve global health outcomes (Kickbusch et al., 2022). Over the last four decades, global health diplomacy has been used as a framework to guide health interventions during conflict to promote political, structural, and social peacebuilding. This abstract examines the role of global health diplomacy in achieving peacebuilding in the context of the war between the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) from 1986 to 2006.
Northern Uganda witnessed civil conflict between 1986 and 2006, which was sparked by an uprising against the National Resistance Movement (NRM), led by Yoweri Museveni, who overthrew the previous Acholi-led central government headed by Tito Okello. Museveni’s government faced opposition from multiple groups, beginning with the Ugandan People’s Democratic Party, except its rebellion was short-lived after signing a peace agreement with Museveni in 1988. Thereafter, the Holy Spirit Movement led by Alice Lakwena and later the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) headed by Joseph Kony gained notoriety for the brutality the LRA unleashed in northern Uganda.
Therefore, this paper will use data from in-depth interviews conducted in northern Uganda to examine whether global health diplomacy was an instrument for peacebuilding in the context of the LRA war. With numerous health initiatives such as those that addressed the increasing incidence of HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and psychosocial challenges during the civil war, there is scope to determine whether these health initiatives contributed to the cessation of violence and ultimately, peacebuilding.Author: Adityavarman Mehta (University of Leeds)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Integrating a youth lens across International Studies
Always present, often overlooked, youth are not just ‘future promise’ but fundamental to the contemporary contours of IR as we face uncertain futures. This roundtable brings together scholars working across multiple sub-disciplines of international studies to reflect on how global challenges might be differently understood and addressed through integrating a youth lens. While much progress has been made in integrating critical intersectional and feminist approaches to international studies, including by drawing more attention to the role of race, class, gender and sexuality in shaping the international, less cross-cutting attention has been granted to age, especially children and young people. This roundtable invites a discussion from scholars across different sub-fields to both explore how youth perspectives shape the landscape of what is known, what a youth lens offers to interrogating and deconstructing knowledge in their field, and how youth-attentive scholarship offers new directions for the discipline in this moment of multiple crises and uncertainty.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Helen Berents (Griffith University)Participants: Katie Hodgkinson (University of Leeds) , Cadhla O’Sullivan (Australian National University) , Gemma Bird (University of Liverpool) , Jana Tabak (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) , Maya Nguyen (University of London) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Local Conflict Dynamics and PeacebuildingSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Nancy Annan (Coventry University)
-
In intergroup conflicts, the line between intention and perception is often blurred, and it is perception that tends to prevail. This paper examines farmer-herder clashes in Benue State, Nigeria, where farm encroachment is frequently cited as the leading trigger of violence. Rethinking how we understand conflict triggers in international studies, this study centers the role of narrative, perception, and subjective experience rather than objective material causes. Farmers often view these incursions as deliberate acts of aggression by herders, while herders describe them as unintentional and caused by cattle straying beyond their control. Yet, regardless of motive, damage to farmland consistently leads to cycles of reprisals, displacement, and destruction. Drawing on 69 in-depth interviews with farmers, herders, and interveners, this study argues that perceptions of threat and malice are more powerful than intent. These perceptions are embedded in historical grievances, ethnic mistrust, and narratives of marginalisation which create fertile ground for conflict escalation. The paper contributes to understanding how perceptions determine violence escalation in multiethnic and plural societies. It advances debates in peace and conflict studies by highlighting the limits of linear conflict resolution approaches in contexts where intent is unclear and contested, and where perception itself becomes a justification for physical, political and psychological attacks.
Author: Rebecca Ebenezer-Abiola (University of Aberdeen) -
Everyday acts performed by ordinary people in their day-to-day lives have the potential to contribute to the de-escalation of conflict and building of peaceful relationships at the community level. Recent scholarship in Peace and Conflict studies has called for the recognition of these everyday acts as a legitimate form of peacebuilding (e.g. Vaittinen et al., 2019; Mac Ginty, 2021). While this research has (re)positioned the community-level as a meaningful site for peacebuilding and encouraged the broadening of formal peace interventions to include seemingly mundane and informal acts, we have yet to fully explore who is performing this everyday peace, why, under what conditions, and the personal, social, and economic impacts this has on those individuals.
Drawing on in-person qualitative fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper conceptualises everyday peace as a form of labour to reveal the relational, emotional, and voluntary work that people undertake to transform conflict in their communities. In doing so, it highlights how women and other marginalised groups are bearing the brunt of this everyday peace labour in the absence of formalised and funded peacebuilding initiatives – including everyday acts of care, community-building, informal safety and development schemes, and ad-hoc conflict mediation initiatives. As a result, this paper calls for greater acknowledgement of everyday peace as a form of labour within peacebuilding theory and practice. This not only helps us to legitimise and appropriately resource this locally embedded peace work, but also highlights what might be missing from our current formal peacebuilding initiatives at the local and national levels.
Author: Bryony Vince-Myers (The University of Sheffield) -
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) -
This paper explores the feminist experience of Polish women activists in 2022 amidst the large-scale invasion of Ukraine and the resulting massive displacement of Ukrainian women and children to Poland. In response, Polish feminists mobilized to provide initial support. One of such initiatives was the "Soup for Ukraine" project launched by local feminist activists in Krakow which has been one of the major support venues in the city providing essential help and home-made meals cooked by local citizens. From this grassroots effort, Polish and Ukrainian women developed various initiatives aimed at community building and social cohesion, effectively integrating Ukrainian refugees. Their approach to refugee support transcended the official government stance, fostering synergies and collaborations that enhanced the overall response to the crisis. This paper, co-authored by one of the founders of the "Soup for Ukraine" initiative, presents an in-depth examination through interview and conversations between the founder and the other activists and the co-author of this paper. By documenting these personal narratives and experiences, the paper highlights the critical role of feminist solidarity and grassroots activism in addressing humanitarian crises, showcasing how community-driven efforts can complement and exceed governmental measures in providing support and fostering integration.
Authors: Anna Chromik (University of the National Education Commission, Krakow)* , Graziella Piga (University of Surrey)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
For decades, scholars of British politics have argued that national security rarely features as a salient topic in electoral politics or public debate, owing to a durable strategic consensus and an assumed public focus on domestic matters. However, the past five years have shattered this assumption. From Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and escalating tensions with China, to the reverberations of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, national security has become a visible and contested arena in the UK political sphere, demanding public scrutiny and intellectual renewal.
This roundtable gathers contributors to the forthcoming edited volume National Security Under Starmer (Palgrave Pivot) to consider what this shift means for International Studies. Centred on the UK Labour government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy, each expert examines a key dimension of Britain’s security orientation: the evolving state identity and public legitimacy of security policy (Martin), the elevation of cyber and digital sovereignty (Devanny), the strategic integration of the space domain (Balm), the long-term evolution of the Strategic Defence Review process (Reynolds), and the embedded role of gender in security statecraft (Kirby).
Together, we offer the first academic forum to examine the Starmer government’s national security policymaking across interconnected domains – from space and cyber to gender and public opinion. By unpacking different forms of evidence (from defence reviews to citizen sentiment) and contrasting state-centric and society-centric perspectives, we explore how to study national security as a whole-of-system enterprise rather than a series of siloed issues.
In doing so, we open a conversation about how to renew security studies for the next 50 years: methodologically (through multi-domain, mixed-method approaches), pedagogically (through teaching security as a public, not just governmental, concern), and conceptually (by breaking down the walls between strategic analysis and democratic accountability). This roundtable reflects BISA’s commitment to critical debate and disciplinary innovation – asking whether Starmer’s government, and those of us studying it, are truly ready for what comes next, and what needs to change if not.Sponsor: Security Policy and PracticeChair: Hillary Briffa (King's College London)Participants: Julia Balm (Kings College London) , William Reynolds (Kings College London) , Paul Kirby (Centre of Women, Peace and Security, London School of Economics) , Thomas Martin (Open University) , Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Norms in Global Politics: Erosion, Decay and ContestationSponsor: International Law and Politics Working GroupConvener: ILPG Working groupChair: Suwita Hani Randhawa (University of the West of England)
-
In this paper, I ask: how do international norms erode? And in particular, how do they get hollowed out whilst remaining in place? I focus on two norms of global politics and trace their different modalities of hollowing out: the norm entailing the duty to search and rescue people at sea and the norm prohibiting the domestic use of the military. Blending discursive institutionalism with meaning-making, I argue that norms become hollowed out through seemingly benign discourses of normalisation pushed forward by antipreneurs- norm entrepreneurs aiming to dismantle these norms. Adopting an abductive approach, I trace the erosion of these norms over time, combining quantitative and ethnographic methods to study norms hollowing out in the central Mediterranean route (for the search and rescue norm) and Western Europe (for the norm prohibiting the domestic use of the military).
Author: Chiara Ruffa -
The function of reservations in international treaty law represents an ongoing theoretical and empirical oversight in International Relations (IR), especially outside the familiar area of human rights treaties. While reservations are officially acknowledged in Articles 19 to 23 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the prevailing perception of them tends to be overly legalistic. This viewpoint obscures their significant political role, particularly for smaller and medium-sized states that operate within international systems influenced by unequal power dynamics. This disconnect is particularly noticeable within the International Drug Control System—an area influenced markedly by the interests of powerful nations, notably the United States, yet seldom examined through the perspectives of strategic opposition or normative debate.
In IR theory, treaties have often been regarded as mechanisms of cooperation or tools for institutionalizing norms. Liberal institutionalist perspectives, in particular, argue that treaties reduce uncertainty, facilitate coordination, and promote compliance among states. Yet these accounts tend to overlook how reservations—particularly those issued by less powerful states—function as vehicles for pushing back against dominant norms. The sparse IR literature that engages with reservations typically does so only in the context of human rights regimes, often framing them as instruments of evasion, obstruction, or normative underperformance. This framing overlooks the possibility that reservations may be rational acts of sovereignty assertion or culturally grounded forms of resistance within normatively coercive systems, specifically in Latin America.
A methodological and geographic bias in existing literature compounds this theoretical neglect. Most studies focus on European or North American treaty behavior, relegating Latin American cases to the margins. As a result, significant episodes of norm contestation—such as Peru’s reservations to drug control treaties concerning the cultural significance of the coca leaf—are treated as exceptions rather than as valuable data points for rethinking global norm dynamics.Author: Walter Abanto (Florida International University) -
In the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Israel-Palestine conflict, the principle of non-conquest (or territorial integrity) has come into question in new ways. Popular political narratives have reasserted this principle as a legacy of WWII and the victory of democracy over totalitarianism. But the historical origins of the territorial integrity principle has been subject to relatively little scholarly analysis. This article, going against the grain of popular narratives, asserts that the US preference for informal imperialism, going back at least to 1900, is one of the major factors in the emergence of territorial integrity. I track the emergence of the prohibition of conquest in three stages. First, the US renounced conquest as a policy, and declared to the world that it had done so, in order to promote friendly relations with others. Second, it inserted territorial integrity into the League of Nations Covenant, at the League’s foundation. Third, the 1932 Stimson Doctrine of non-recognition of conquered territory solidified the importance of territorial integrity. Alongside the second and third stages, I examine two alternative explanations based on European and Latin American activities. Finally, I offer some concluding insights into the relevance of the argument for today, at a time when the role of the USA as a global leader is increasingly in question.
Author: Kerry Goettlich (City St George's, University of London) -
The Antarctic Treaty has effectively maintained peace, scientific cooperation, and environmental protection in the region, yet its domestic implementation shows significant variation among European Parties. Despite collective adoption, Measures 4 (2004) and 1 (2005) on human safety and environmental liability did not enter into force due to missing national implementations. This study investigates which domestic factors explain these differences, focusing on bureaucratic, infrastructural, and coercive capacities as outlined by the Managerial School of International Relations. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) across 12 European Antarctic national programmes, the research examines how internal approval processes, funding structures, institutional arrangements, and legislative requirements influence implementation outcomes. Results indicate that dedicated polar funding and prior ratification of similar conventions are sufficient conditions for implementation when polar management bodies are subordinated to administrations. Conversely, in the absence of dedicated funding, greater autonomy of these bodies can also foster implementation. These findings reveal how domestic institutional and political-legal configurations shape compliance with collectively agreed Antarctic Treaty measures, offering insights into the interplay between international governance and national policymaking capacities in environmental governance.
Author: Daniela Portella Sampaio (Business School, City, University of London)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Operational Challenges in Peacekeeping PracticeSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Daeun Jung (University of Warwick)
-
Peacekeeping stands at a crossroads. Large, resource-intensive missions are being wound down, even as the demand for multilateral conflict management endures. Yet after decades of study, we still lack an adequate language for what peacekeepers and observers intuitively know: that peacekeeping is not simply implemented but enacted—brought into being through the dense, relational fabric of everyday practice. Across diverse literatures, scholars have already been studying this enactment without naming it as such: research on micro-interaction, organisational culture, affect, embodiment, performance, and field-level interpretation has all examined how mandates are lived and negotiated on the ground.
This article introduces Relational Peacekeeping as a framework that synthesises and elevates this dispersed body of work, positioning peace operations as dynamic, socially constituted fields rather than as technical instruments or institutional outputs. In doing so, it shifts the analytical question from whether peacekeeping works to how it comes to work—through the relationships, emotions, and interpretive practices that sustain authority and legitimacy in fluid political environments. Foregrounding a relational ontology illuminates what has remained hidden in plain sight: that peacekeeping endures not through the rigidity of mandates or structures but through the adaptive, negotiated, and affective ties that hold them together. Recognising peacekeeping as relationally enacted offers a theoretical bridge across divided research traditions and a practical lens for understanding how missions might still “keep peace” amid contraction, uncertainty, and change.Authors: Vanessa Newby (Monash University) , Chiara Ruffa (Sciences Po)* -
This paper presents findings from a comparative research project examining the contrasting experiences of military peacekeepers and civilian populations within two major peace operations: the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM, now AUSSOM). One key finding was the lack of trust on both sides. This has prompted an inquiry into the symbolic struggles and relational dynamics that shape the legitimacy and operational logic of these missions.
While the paper addresses the social dynamics within the field of protection, the analysis foregrounds the performative dimensions of protection, focusing on how legitimacy is constructed through visible and symbolic acts by peacekeepers. In so doing, it illustrates what happens when such performances disappoint or encounter resistance, as local actors challenge the meanings, intentions, and effectiveness of Protection of Civilians (PoC) practices. Although the vast majority of civilians expressed support for a more assertive use of force by peacekeeping missions, they ultimately felt let down by the limited outcomes achieved. This disconnect between expectations and results led to growing frustration over their persistent insecurity, regardless of whether the mission was led by the African Union or the United Nations. Thus, the paper offers a critical perspective on how legitimacy is negotiated in peacekeeping contexts, and how symbolic capital is mobilized and contested in the pursuit of protection.Authors: Jutta Bakonyi (Durham University)* , Anne Flaspöler (Durham University) -
This article examines the discourse of protection in UN peacekeeping through a feminist IR lens, interrogating how peacekeeper identity is reshaped when peacekeepers themselves are under protection. While existing literature has extensively analysed the discourse and practice of Protection of Civilians (POC), the gendered and affective dimensions of protection directed toward peacekeepers remain understudied. Drawing on Chinese official media and in-depth life stories from Chinese peacekeepers, this study aims to explore how “reverse protection” discourse (re)produces the subjectivities of peacekeepers. Using China — the state most vocal about improving peacekeeper safety — as a case, the research examines the gap between official framings and lived experiences from individual peacekeepers. The analysis focuses on three contexts where peacekeepers negotiate tensions between being safe and being unsafe: (1) witnessing death and casualties, (2) the dangerous-but-safe narratives; (3) gendered protection discourses towards female peacekeepers. Across these contexts, Chinese peacekeepers articulate contradictory positions between victimhood and agency, between being subjects and objects of protection. This dual positioning challenges their fragile “protector” identity, further complicated by the intersection of domestic gendered expectations, Chinese strategic interests, and UN internationalism discourse. By capturing both institutional and individual responses to peacekeeper safety, this article contributes to scholarly literature on micro-level experiences of peacekeepers and norms contestation around protection, not only in peacekeeping, but also in broader international peacebuilding and security governance. Given declining Troop Contributing Country (TCC) willingness to participate in peacekeeping missions, this study also offers insights for rethinking the structure and reform of contemporary peace operations.
Author: Xiaodong Bao -
A new notable challenge in the practice of international peacekeeping is the rise of violent civilian protests against peacekeeping missions. Since 2010, up to three major United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions have been confronted with the menace of hostile, violent and deadly protests from the host communities. While scholars are increasingly paying attention to this phenomenon, little effort has been made to research why it happens in some contexts but not others. This paper examines the reasons why violent protests against peacekeeping missions occur in certain contexts but not in others. It draws on the sociological literature on emotions to develop a tripartite framework for understanding violent protests during peacekeeping interventions. The framework essentially asserts that whether or not to expect violent protests during a peacekeeping operation is a function of three interrelated factors – (i) whether or not the peacekeeping mission fails to meet the core local expectations, (ii) whether or not this failure to meet the local expectations create a popular local discontent, and (iii) whether or not this discontent stirs up shared local anger. The article further draws on this framework and fieldwork data to analyse why violent anti-peacekeeping protests broke out against MONUSCO but not UNMIL.
Author: Babatunde Obamoye (University of Birmingham) -
Peace enforcement operations authorized under United Nations (UN) Chapter VII mandates are usually executed by multinational military forces under the auspices of international organisations or coalitions. In these robust operations, troop contributing countries (TCCs) are motivated or constrained by a variety of rationales related to various national interests and priorities. The relationship between participation rationales and the willingness of individual national contingents to utilize force and take risks to implement mission mandates has received only scant scholarly attention. To address this gap, this study aims to comparatively assess how different TCC rationales determine variations in national reservations on the use of force – caveats – during operations. Accounting for the factors that determine the adoption of caveats during peace enforcement operations is important because caveats are consequential for a multinational force's ability to efficiently and coherently protect civilians and implement the overall mission mandate. TCCs making non-token, combat-capable contributions to these missions are perceived as best placed to implement mission mandates based on their combat capabilities. However, contingent willingness to utilize combat capability and take risks may hinge on the participation rationales of their political principals. Thus, this study seeks to answer the question: why do non-token combat-capable contingents apply caveats during peace enforcement operations? More so, what explains variation in the adoption of caveats by similarly sized non-token, combat-capable contingents? To bridge participation rationales and caveats, and explain variation in caveats behaviour, I conduct a co-variational analysis of troop contingents in the NATO Implementation/Stabilization Force in Bosnia and the AU Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Data for this study is sourced primarily from institutional archives, organizational documents, and elite interviews.
Author: Lwanga Egbewatt Arrey (Swedish Defence University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Book presentation: Pandemic Politics in Central Asia. Authoritarian Contagion ( Luca Anceschi's)
Book presentation roundtable: Anceschi, Luca. (2026). Pandemic Politics in Central Asia. Authoritarian Contagion. London: Routledge.
Central Asia experienced a pandemic power grab in 2020-2022: the authoritarian leaderships of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan managed the politics of Covid-19 to ultimately strengthen their control over the region’s politics and societies. This book looks at three policy areas wherein this power grab surfaced more noticeably:
• Mobility Control, whereby the regimes, through restrictive legislation enacted in thoroughly repressive fashion, limited the population’s freedom of movement and, indirectly, their capacity to protest;
• Authoritarian Information Flows, whereby Covid-related measures ostensibly meant to align broadcast, print, and digital information flows to the governments’ pandemic message curtailed even further the freedom of expression of everyday citizens across Central Asia;
• The International Politics of the Pandemic, whereby the three regimes studied here capitalised on a rapidly mutating international environment to strengthen their kleptocratic hold over Central Asia’s politics and society, and benefited from the crumbling international order to purse large-scale deception of their Covid response capacity.
This roundtable advances the conference’s call for ‘new thinking, new directions’ by interrogating how the Covid-19 era empowered authoritarian governance in Central Asia and thus challenges prevailing frameworks in International Studies.Sponsor: East Europe and Eurasian Security Working GroupChair: Frank Maracchione (SOAS University)Participants: Giulia Sciorati (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Aijan Sharshenova (Riga Stradins University) , Luca Anceschi (University of Glasgow) , Frank Maracchione (SOAS University) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Peacebuilding and 'post conflict' processesSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: PKPBG Working group
-
Research has commonly acknowledged the importance of trust in political institutions in building towards democratic satisfaction. Two approaches to political trust relationships inform this research. One focusses more on the trust a specific stakeholder invests in a particular trustee, and thus the reasons why the stakeholder chooses to trust. The other emphasises the relationality of the stakeholders. Common to both of the approaches is the notion that political trust is distinct from social trust; that is, the causes for low levels of political trust are different to the causes for social trust.
However, the so-called "boom" of the phenomenon affective polarisation in research has called this distinction into question. By not only linking political identities and social identities but also connecting the polarisation of these interrelated identities to affect, rather than political ideology, the emergence of affective polarisation demands us to at least consider how we account for building trust in political institutions, against the backdrop of decreasing political trust in Europe. This presentation argues that Northern Ireland provides a salient case-study to examine this dynamic. In Northern Ireland, the functioning of the devolved political institutions is primarily investigated through the lens of the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal that established them. The post-conflict conceptualisation of the political institutions reflects an area where political and social identities have been commonly recognised as connected. Just as political innovation was necessary to achieve this post-conflict political arrangement, so too can this innovation extend to inform our understanding of political trust more broadly today.
Author: Saoirse McGilligan (University of St Andrews) -
As a field of scholarship and practice peace and conflict studies is facing difficult times. This paper will present findings from an 8-year study including over 150 interviews with actors in what I will broadly call ‘peace work’ that illustrate the problems the field faces as the compounding pressures of the 21st Century continue to drive increasing disruption, competition, and violence. The overall impression from the data is of a deepening crisis, and of traditional peace work actors, and the kinds of norms they have long advocated, being increasingly underfunded and marginalized from debates. It is important, of course, that peace work actors keep working through this period. That scholars keep theorizing, research, teaching, and publishing, and that practitioners keep advocating for and implementing peace work as the ‘polycrisis’ we face drives new violent conflict. But this paper takes also a longer view of the field and what we must do to avoid being so easily marginalized in the future. Building on insights from the interviews, the paper takes a broader institutional view of the field and asks, what kind of structures and relationships do we need to establish today to ensure we cannot be so easily marginalized in the future? It calls for a renewed focus on the field as a field in development, and provides a framework to guide that development into the future.
Author: Gearoid Millar (University of Aberdeen)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Political transformations in middle powers and small statesSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: ISMMEA Working groupChair: Ferran Perez Mena (Durham University)
-
Amid increasing scepticism towards the functioning of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC), especially given the state of bilateral affairs between India and Pakistan, as well as the domestic situation in Afghanistan. This paper aims to address the debate, concerning the future of regional cooperation in South Asia, through new empirical insights drawn from fieldwork based in Kathmandu, Nepal and beyond including time spent as an intern in the SAARC Secretariat based in Kathmandu. Through data collected from semi-structured interviews, the study looks at the status of SAARC too, and how it continues to operate.
Overall, the study contributes to an understanding of South Asia’s collective agency in a regionally neutral way helping reveal how cooperation, especially through SAARC is in a state of transition owing to a number of factors including political will, administrative mandate, inter-state and domestic issues, role of non-state actors, dissemination of information and many more. Also, revealing how in order to deal with these factors, the SAARC Secretariat is pragmatically moving on with more policy coordination through its regional centres and specialised bodies, as well as through adaptive ways of promoting regional cooperation with the help of its partner inter-governmental organisations.Author: Vishal Sharma (Centre for Peace and Security, Coventry University) -
There has been a rise of interest in the study of non-state diplomacy, which has expanded a realm of study within International Relations that had previously been restricted to sovereign states. On the other hand, discourses have always been at the forefront of diplomacy. This is in particularly true for the diplomacy of actors that do not possess material power, such as non-state actors, who have to rely on non-material power like discourse to display diplomatic agency. Therefore, it would be pertinent to further study how non-state actors utilise discourse in their diplomatic efforts.
To explore this area further, this paper proposes the question of “How do non-state actors display diplomatic agency through discourse?” To answer this question, this paper proposes using discourse theory as a framework to analyse the discourse used by the non-state actors in their attempts in diplomacy. In particular, this paper will use discourse theory to analyse how the non-state actors affix meanings to signs, the discursive devices used, and how these signs overall formed the discourse that the non-state actors used.
This paper will use the pro-democracy movement of Taiwan based overseas from the 1970s and 1990s as a case study, applying discourse theory to explore how these non-state actors used the power of language to advocate for their cause of democracy for Taiwan. In particular, it will explore the discourse of the activists who were based overseas when interacting with states-based actor, and how that played a role in the advocating of democracy for Taiwan.
Author: Zeng Ee Liew (University of Surrey)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Queer Experiences, Perspectives and AnalysesSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
The paper traces the uneasy histories between queer and communism to reconsider what their entanglement might offer for rethinking the international. Queer and communist politics have long occupied uneasy, often antagonistic positions. Communism presents itself as a mass movement oriented toward collective emancipation; queerness, by contrast, is often cast as identitarian and particularistic. One is imagined as plotting the demise of capitalism, the other dismissed as one of its decadent symptoms. Their trajectories reinforce this separation: as communist state projects faltered in the twentieth century, queer rose to prominence with gay liberation and later queer theory. Brief intersections—such as the Bolsheviks’ early decriminalization of homosexuality—quickly dissipated under state repression. Since then, Communism (almost always the authoritarian kind associated with the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba) has been branded an inherently queerphobic project, while the free market is imagined as the guarantor of sexual freedom. One became idiosyncratic, the other quintessentially modern. Communism’s subject of history, often figured as the virile proletarian worker-hero, left little room for gender or sexual difference, a stance condemned by queer revolutionaries alongside the party’s broader moral conservatism. These tensions persist today, as debates over trans liberation within socialist movements echo old suspicions that “identity politics” are 'merely cultural' (Butler, 1997) and fragment class solidarity. The way the history of queer and communism is usually told leaves little room for convergence. Moving beyond these impasses, the paper rethinks both histories in reparative terms. Drawing on examples from the UK, US, and Latin America, it traces moments of queer-communist solidarity and alliance to reconsider their shared horizons of liberation - and what this might mean for the study of the international.
Author: Olimpia Burchiellaro (University of Essex) -
How might we envision a queerer sense of international solidarity? What principles and practices would define it? This paper examines these questions through an application of queer theory to conceptions of solidarity and examines queer histories of solidarity to see how they may inform contemporary internationally focused solidaristic action. The findings in this presentation speak relevant literature, Queer International Relations theory and findings of focus groups conducted with British queer people surrounding international queer solidarity, particularly focused on solidarity between queer population in the UK and Uganda. It is through this analysis that a queerer solidarity will be constructed, and within this presentation I investigate this solidarity, how it may interact with the state, and how it may build solidaristic spaces outside of the state.
Firstly, I examine how a British queer response interacts with the British state, and the state as a general concept, to examine what, if any, role the state may play within international queer solidarity. To do this I will examine histories of queer organising and international political factors that fit the state into systems of heteronormative oppression. Secondly, I will examine other factors, such as the work of NGOs, histories of community organising within queer spaces, and solidarity with LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to build a comprehensive picture of how queer solidarity could occupy the spaces outside of the state. Overall, the goal of this presentation is to explore what a queerer international solidarity may look like, and how this can expand the possibilities for solidaristic action generally.
Author: David Murphy (Lancaster University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Representations of WarSponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: Harry McNamara (University of Loughborough)
-
This paper explores how the convergence between military and cultural actors around the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict is reshaping the strategic field. While existing research has documented the militarisation of heritage protection and the evolution of military doctrines separately, the intersections between these dynamics remain largely unexamined. This project seeks to address this gap by analysing how collaboration between armed forces and cultural institutions contributes to the redefinition of both strategic practice and disciplinary boundaries.
The study investigates two main dimensions: first, how cultural actors influence the conceptual and institutional development of strategic studies through their growing involvement in security discourse; and second, how the integration of heritage protection into military mandates—such as in the cases of MINUSMA and the international coalition against ISIS—transforms the roles, priorities, and self-perception of armed forces. Methodologically, the research combines archival analysis with interviews conducted among military personnel, policymakers, and heritage professionals. By examining these evolving relationships, the project aims to reveal how cultural heritage functions as a catalyst for redefining the aims, ethics, and scope of strategy itself, challenging traditional distinctions between cultural, humanitarian, and military domains.
Author: Eva Portel (Sciences Po Bordeaux) -
The paper introduces a theoretical framework to study which motives are advanced by people for justifying war. The proposal is that war and peace are justified based on three fundamental motives: saving human lives (Human Lives), seeking justice (Justice), and pursuing national interest (National Interest). The framework is tested in eight empirical studies asking people to report why they support war or peace in the context of various armed conflicts (e.g., the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war). The results show that, while Human Lives is typically stressed more by people who endorse peace, Justice typically motivates people to support war. National Interest often plays a role too, but whether this encourages war or peace depends on the specific conflict. The paper examines also the role of political ideology in war endorsement. The data show that ideological differences in opinions about war often occur because of ideological differences in prioritizing Human Lives, Justice, and National Interest. Typically, conservatives stress National Interest more than liberals, with repercussions for whether conservatives endorse war or peace more than liberals. The paper sheds light on public opinion about important conflicts in contemporary geopolitics and offers a novel theoretical and empirical framework to study why people support war.
Author: Francesco Rigoli -
IR as a discipline was established, in the formal sense, to study wars so as to prevent their recurrence. The first Chair in IR was established in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Thereafter, countries at the forefront of international relations and actively caught up in various wars and conflicts, such as the United States, Great Britain, and their allies have made marked contributions to scholarship on wars. A perusal of syllabi on wars in IR reveals the preponderant contribution made by the countries that constitute the ‘Anglosphere.’ However, what has been the contributions to our understanding of wars by regions and countries beyond the Anglosphere? This paper shines light on India, a country with a strong foundation on thinking about wars and conflict by way of Kautilya whose Arthashastra is seen to be at par with The Prince and The Art of War. Over the last eight decades, India has fought wars of various kinds. This has seen India maintain one of the largest armed forces in the world. How have these experiences translated into scholarship on war by Indian scholars? What kind of scholarship on wars are used to make sense of India’s wars? What kind of conceptual and theoretical contributions have been made by scholars in India? At a time when the non-West is seeking to redress the imbalance in knowledge production on various fronts, how has India, one of the prominent figures in the Global South, shaped thinking on one of the prominent and central activities of IR – wars? Based on its experiences, what does it have to offer to one's understanding of wars?
Author: Nabarun Roy (South Asian University) -
Studies of armed conflict in Iraq have been overwhelmingly state-centric, framing Iraq’s conflicts as a product of interactions between states and armed groups. From the Iran-Iraq War to the 1991 Gulf War to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the 2007–08 civil war, and the war against ISIS, civilians’ experiences have rarely come to the fore. This article reverses the lens. Drawing on 60+ life-history interviews (2000–2025) with Iraqis from six cities—Baghdad, Mosul, Erbil, Karbala, Ramadi, and Basra—we make two claims. First, ethnosectarian identity by itself is a weak predictor of an individual’s conflict experiences. There has been no “typical Sunni” or “typical Shia” experience of war. Our findings showed significant within-group variation in experiences of violence, coercion, displacement, revenge, and injustice. Second, geography—especially micro-geographies—does much more work in explaining the variation in conflict experiences. Where a person lived and worked profoundly shaped their risk profile and coping strategies. Ethnosectarian identity mattered insofar as it intersected with place, time, and local configurations of authority (militias, police, tribal actors) but not as a free-standing driver. These findings caution against the everyday use of ethnosectarian labels as shorthand for social relations or political attitudes. Even in settings branded as “ethnic wars”, identity offers at best a partial explanation. Analytic leverage lies in the interaction between identity and geography, and in tracing how local control, mobility constraints, and neighbourhood economies structure civilians’ encounters with violence over time.
Authors: Christine Cheng (War Studies, King's College London) , Isadora Gotts (War Studies, King's College London)*
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Shaping Security: Public Opinion, Media Narratives, and Security PolicySponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Thomas Martin (Open University)
-
As the global order shifts in response to democratic decline, great power competition and a fraught geopolitical landscape, hostile states are pushing their advantage through the increasingly emboldened use of covert and overt information influence operations. In an attempt to gain a competitive advantage, these efforts coalesce around the coordinated and deliberate spreading of false information designed to manipulate public opinion, voting intention or decision-making; increase societal distrust and polarisation; and overwhelm the information environment with dominant narratives or confusion-inducing informational chaos.
As part of an ongoing three year ESRC project exploring how foreign-state information influence operations (IIOs) have an impact on public opinion and policy decisions, this paper examines data derived from in-depth interviews with practitioners working in the field of analysing, countering and defending against foreign-state information influence operations. The paper explores the different proactive and reactive protective measures, disruption and defence options available to the defender community across different government, policy, research, industry and civil society environments. The analysis addresses how defenders see the challenges and successes of countering information influence operations in the current operating environment, and the implications this has collectively for current and future security policy and practice in the face of threat from hostile state information influence.Authors: Jenny Ratcliffe (Coventry University)* , Matthew Francis (Coventry university) -
Studies of vernacular security have shown the potential of everyday articulations to challenge hegemonic understandings of, and approaches, to (in)security. Such work has obvious normative appeal as an alternative to more traditional – state-centric – forms of security research. At the same, it also risks reifying the linkage between vernacular security expressions and a politics of contestation or resistance. In this article, we therefore theorise a more nuanced understanding of the politics of vernacular security by demonstrating how ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ understandings of security can be co-opted by political and security elites. Analysing the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry – and, particularly, the ‘Every Story Matters’ report – we show how heterogenous vernacular securities can be emphasised, sutured, and narrated in order to further the interests of policymakers and practitioners. Through this process, far from a politics of resistance – whereby variegated knowledges act as ‘cutting tools’ to dissect hegemonic projects – vernacular security becomes a ‘stitching tool’ through which politically useful narratives are woven together from the tapestry of public experience. This demotic security politics, we argue, constitutes a specific, significant strand of contemporary populism, whereby vernacular securities are co-opted the heart of state projects, rather than working toward their contestation, curtailment, or reimagining.
Authors: Lee Jarvis (Adelaide University) , Jack Holland (University of Leeds) -
Between 2021-2024 the Centre for Peace and Security undertook a mixed-method research project alongside Rethinking Security, entitled An Alternative Security Review for the United Kingdom. The project sought to understand how security was conceptualised from UK Citizens, providing a unique bottom-up perspective on the security priorities of UK Citizens.
Key to this was a comprehensive nationwide survey of UK Citizens conducted in January-March 2023 across the UK by Savanta. The surveys were designed to elicit the public’s own understanding of ‘security’ through the use open questions; to avoid closed questions that limit the public to selecting threats and responses pre-identified by elites; and to use methodologies that elicit the perspectives of a diverse UK public, including minority and marginalised
groups. One survey used a sample of 1,091 respondents between the ages of 16 and 30; the other used a sample of 2,004 respondents between the ages of 31 and 75.The presentation discusses the full dataset from the survey, which will be released alongside a published paper in 2026. It will speak of the value of such a survey at a time of increased political polarisation, a turn to ‘vernacular’ security studies, and an increased emphasis on societal resilience in the UK’s Strategic Defence Review and National Security. Moreover, it will outline the possibilities of further research that can be generated from what is a comprehensive dataset.
Authors: David Curran (Coventry University) , Anna Gillions (Coventry University)* , Zsofia Hacsek (Coventry University)* , Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor (Coventry University)*
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / Teaching amidst the ruins: IR pedagogy, oppression, and the neoliberal universitySponsor: Learning and Teaching Working GroupConvener: Nick Caddick (ARU)Chair: Nick Caddick (ARU)
-
After the experience with distance learning during the pandemic of COVID19, the pressure for the offer of online courses at the universities has increased exponentially. In the case of International Relations, the coupled push to internationalize programs and to expand online reach presents us with the need to question what it means ‘to internationalize’ and what it means ‘to be present’, both of which are central notions to an ontological and to a pedagogical analysis of the International Relations as a discipline. We propose to follow up on previous research work and think of what it means to be 'present' in the classroom and in research interventions. We question the global economy of the digital architecture in which we operate, how it divides us into pieces of information and what the role is of pedagogical practice in challenging this form of digital existence. The paper also discusses the role of narratives as ways to promote contiguity, calling for qualified presence and conversations as key parts of methodological feminist research interventions. Finally, we look at how teaching can be permeated by constructions of alternative imaginaries in such ways as to guarantee presence in this construction. For all these reflections, we offer teaching and research examples that at once extend this contiguity in terms of a decompression of narrative arcs, that is, in defiance of the sometimes divisive and superficial engagement of digital times, and also question traditional notions of distance and borders by means of a radical openess to relationality.
Authors: Isabel Rocha de Siqueira (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)) , Nycolas Candido Lau (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio))* -
In this communication, I argue that as universities in the Global North remain embedded in structures of racial capitalism, and reproduce colonial hierarchies and whiteness, any attempt to challenge these oppressive structures must be grounded in a decolonial abolitionist praxis. Moving beyond the nonperformative institutional rhetoric of diversity, this praxis is political and radical, anti-racist and decolonial, collective and relational, and directed to transformative practices and abolitionist futurities. It draws on and honors the long history of resistance to the oppressive structures of knowledge, and calls for the dismantling of oppressive academic structures, colonial curriculum and hierarchical pedagogies.
Through a focus on curriculum and pedagogy, I explore how teaching can contribute to the development of pockets of resistance inside the neoliberal university and to the broader reimagining of abolitionist futures in higher education. I reflect on some experiences, including curriculum transformation, student engagement practices, and pedagogical experiments in international relations.
Keywords: abolition, university, pedagogy, resistance, community, curriculum, decolonization, anti-racism.Author: Leila Mouhib (ULB) -
The Trump administration’s extraordinary attack on colleges and universities have led to severe anxiety and insecurity across American campuses. At the same time, it has galvanized academic leaders, faculty and students in defense of institutional autonomy and academic freedom that is unfettered by national and ideological boundaries. Scholars have compared the Trump administration’s actions—arbitrary cuts in federal funding, unprecedented interference in curricular content and governance, and the deliberate targeting of international students and scholars—to those of rightwing nationalist regimes in Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, and India, which have systematically attacked and undermined institutions of higher education, particularly those with a global orientation. This paper compares three examples of autocratic governments targeting globally renowned institutions, namely, the Central European University in Hungary, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ashoka University in India and Harvard and Columbia Universities in the U.S., as part of a populist, anti-intellectual project that is in direct tension with the values of a liberal international education. We examine the motivations and impact of state policies on academic freedom, strategies of resistance, and the implications of these examples for democratic societies and international education and knowledge production, more broadly.
Author: Kavita Khory (Department of Politics, Mount Holyoke College) -
The political economy of banned book circulation raises several opportunities to make an intervention into ongoing debates about media resistance, materiality, and knowledge exchange across regional, national, and international contexts. In this project, we ask questions such as "what constitutes a banned book, what is the relationship between banned books and academic freedom, and how are banned books sustained over time and across different contexts?" We answer this question as a research team situated within the University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights Academic Freedoms Research Network with two interrelated aims. First, we provide map out the localities in which books become banned and preserved over time, demonstrating its relevance towards tracing trajectories of media resistance. Second, we chart a novel conceptual framework on the political economy of banned books to speak to broader discussions on symbolic struggles surrounding different media forms through various political transitions. Taken together, we propose banned books as a case study for understanding how media resistance is inspired, shared, and contested, and as a locus for broader discussions on academic freedoms.
Authors: Anastasia Prussakova (University of Cambridge) , Latina Li (University of Cambridge) , Selena Cai (University of Cambridge) -
As global politics becomes increasingly shaped by digital technologies, students of International Relations (IR) require the skills to critically navigate and interpret a deeply digitalised world. Yet, the discipline has been slow to address how digitalisation transforms not only communication and governance but also power, identity, and the very practice in ‘the international’. This reflective paper draws on our recent experience of co-teaching a course on “Digital International Relations”, designed to bridge this gap by integrating critical theory with digital qualitative methods. We introduce a pedagogical framework that combines constructivist, practice-theoretical, feminist, and postcolonial approaches with digital ethnography. This approach challenges the assumption that digital data must be analysed solely through quantitative, “big data” paradigms. Instead, we encourage students to engage ethnographically with digital practices and emotions – using fine-grained interpretive analysis to interpret tweets, memes, video games, websites, and other digital artefacts as ‘fieldwork’ sites of international meaning-making. Through guided use of software such as MAXQDA, students learn to collect, code, and interpret their own digital datasets, developing both technical and critical competencies. By cultivating methodological reflexivity and digital literacy, our teaching approach prepares students to confront the political and ethical dimensions of digitalisation, including the opportunities and risks posed by artificial intelligence. We argue that embedding qualitative digital methods within IR curricula not only enriches students’ analytical repertoires but also equips them to engage critically and responsibly with the digital infrastructures shaping contemporary global politics.
Author: Jannis Kappelmann
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / The British state as a source of global insecurities: critical scholarship and political accountability in a time of crisis”
Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide is a stark reminder of the enduring significance of the British state as a global actor. Not least since it follows the 2015-22 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, another case of extensive war crimes and a consequent humanitarian catastrophe in which Britain’s complicity was even deeper than in the case of Gaza. For scholars of international relations working in the British context, Britain’s involvement in this extraordinary violence over the past decade presents an urgent challenge: how to contribute to critical knowledge production around the crimes of the British state, and how to place that knowledge at the disposal of wider civil society efforts to ensure accountability for these crimes? Also, if Britain’s role as an accomplice to US imperialism in these and other cases can only be fully understood in the context of Britain’s own colonial history, how might the recent decolonial turn in IR be brought to bear as a theoretical frame to illuminate empirical analysis of British foreign relations?
This roundtable brings together scholars working on British militarism, arms exports and imperialism more broadly, and on the ways in which colonial legacies continue to shape British foreign relations. They will discuss what a new critical research agenda on British foreign relations might look like, in terms of potential topics for research and the theoretical and evidential resources that are available to those interested in pursuing this work.
Sponsor: Centre for Global Insecurities Research, University of Sussex and the Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Lydia Cole (University of Sussex)Participants: Nico Edwards (University of Sussex) , David Wearing (University of Sussex) , Chris Rossdale (University of Bristol) , Jac St John (University of Westminster) , Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex) , Jasmine Gani (LSE) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / The Global Politics of Solar Geoengineering
Global climate change effects are already with us and certain to worsen, pointing to the failure of mitigation strategies to date. In this context researchers, policy-makers and entrepreneurs have begun to discuss the possibility of, even advocate for, technological interventions to moderate the effects of climate change, including geoengineering, While one form of geoengineering- carbon dioxide removal (CDR)- has become relatively accepted and integrated within states’ net zero emissions plans, the other- solar geoengineering/ solar radiation modification (SRM)- remains acutely controversial. Large scale technological interventions to reflect sunlight back into space certainly have the theoretical potential to mask (at least some) climate effects, in the process potentially reducing some harms to humans, plants, animals and ecosystems. Yet they also raise concerns about unanticipated ecological effects, the danger of disincentivising mitigation action and the possibility of causing sudden and significant harms if suddenly curtailed. There are also acute concerns about their governance, with no current global agreement in place to regulate their use and emerging steps towards commercialisation and security sector involvement. This roundtable gathers together leading researchers working on the international politics of solar geoengineering to explore these debates and reflect on the future of solar geoengineering in response to the climate crisis. Participants will be invited to consider a range of questions in this space, including whether (large-scale) solar geoengineering interventions are likely; whether they should be and if so under what circumstances; what the key concerns are about research and their deployment; whether meaningful global regulation is possible; and/or whether the potential implications of their use are adequately considered by key institutions of global politics.
Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: Matt McDonald (University of Queensland)Participants: Matt McDonald (University of Queensland) , Sofia Kabbej (IRIS, France) , Olaf Corry (University of Leeds) , Delf Rothe , Ina Möller (Wageningen University) , Danielle Young (University of Leeds) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / The IPE of Economic NationalismSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
Why do international oil concessions collapse into nationalization? This article advances an enforcement-centered institutional theory that explains nationalization as the outcome of governance failure rather than a simple reaction to prices, ideology, or anti-colonial politics. Drawing on New Institutional Economics, the paper argues that early- to mid-20th-century concessions were structurally fragile because they were self-enforcing: sovereign hosts and international oil companies (IOCs) lacked credible third party formal courts. Over time, incomplete long-term contracts, sunk and immobile assets, and shifting political and fiscal pressures raise “enforcement costs” that must be paid by firms or, crucially, by their home states acting as informal guarantors. When the cumulative enforcement bill exceeds the joint willingness to pay of the company and its home government, concessions unravel, and nationalization follows as institutional change toward more hierarchical governance. Empirically, the argument is traced through a qualitative, archival case study of Aramco and Saudi Arabia (1930s–1980), using U.S. and British documents and published primary sources. The case shows how staged finance, diplomatic recognition, wartime Lend Lease, tax redesign and 50/50 profit sharing, OPEC led pricing and participation, and the 1973–74 shift to state to state energy diplomacy progressively substituted political instruments for missing legal enforcement, culminating in Saudi ownership by 1980. The theory integrates familiar explanations, sovereignty claims, price cycles, obsolescing bargaining, regime politics by specifying how they translate into rising enforcement demands. It predicts both where nationalization is most likely (self enforced concessions with high asset specificity and weak home state backing) and why it often proceeds gradually via participation when home state support is adaptive. Policy-wise, it reframes durable cross border resource governance as a problem of building credible, affordable enforcement often via hybrid joint ventures and downstream co investment rather than merely negotiating “good terms.”
Author: Mohammed Sulaimani (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals) -
Economic sovereignty, while equally critical to political sovereignty as a defining feature of statehood for newly independent nations, is far from guaranteed. In most cases, treaties formalizing independence contain provisions with intricate legal language that impose economic obligations on the new state. These include assurances over the property of foreign private capital held by former colonial nationals or firms. Furthermore, colonial-era contracts with foreign companies often remain in force after independence. Despite these assurances, expropriation and nationalization in the name of economic development were widespread during the 1960s and 70s, a period of rapid decolonization. This raises a fundamental question: Why are some newly independent states more likely to nationalize than others? Existing scholarship in international law and political science has yet to provide a comprehensive explanation for this variation.
Using comparative historical analysis and within-case process tracing of Algeria, Tunisia, Tanzania, Kenya, Indonesia, and Malaysia, this paper argues that nationalization decisions are shaped by elite-level economic ideas, offering a novel framework for understanding the economics, law, and politics of post-colonial states.
Author: Kaiser Kang (University College London) -
This paper investigates state resistance to the ‘chilling effect’ of international investor agreements on mining sector regulation in countries in the Global South. Scholars and activists frequently describe how international investment law disincentivises host states from increasing socio-environmental regulation while incentivising state repression of mining protest to ensure ‘full protection and security’ of mining investments. However, despite the risk of lengthy and costly legal battles, not all states acquiesce directly to the stipulations of international investment agreements. Some seek to renegotiate or intentionally breach investment agreements to enable greater domestic benefits from the sector and/or to implement stronger socio-environmental protection measures.
To understand how and why states resist the ‘chilling effect’, this paper draws on existing studies in institutional politics to compare the experiences of El Salvador, Colombia and Mexico in introducing greater socio-environmental protections in their respective mining sector. Considering the now repealed 2017 Salvadorean mining ban, the 2016 Colombian ban on mining in the páramos and the 2022 and 2023 changes to Mexican mining law, the paper points to the significance of mining to a state’s accumulation strategy, the political sources of power of the ruling elite and the dominant political discourse on foreign investment in enabling state resistance to the incentives created by international investment law.
Author: Clare Cummings -
Amidst the intensifying weaponization of economic interdependence, the global semiconductor industry has become the latest battleground for great power competition that promises the winning party a new and enhanced strategic economic arsenal that it can exploit to achieve absolute power advantage. Drawing and building on the weaponized interdependence (Farrell & Newman 2019) and party-state capitalism (Pearson, Rithmire & Tsai 2022) theories, we develop and apply the ‘weaponized party-state interdependence’ (WPSI) framework to map out the party-state created and controlled panopticon and chokepoint effects that great power rivals, specifically, China and the United States (US), utilise to secure absolute positional advantage over the global semiconductor and, in doing so, enhance their absolute power advantage over the existing international system.
A central underlying assumption of the WPSI framework is that the United States (US), especially under President Donald Trump, is increasingly adopting and resembling a party-state capitalism logic similar to that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China. There are two primary mechanisms through which Trump is able to do this: first, by expanding the ‘Grand Old’ Republican Party’s authority in firms through changes in corporate governance and state-led financial instruments; and second, by enforcing political fealty among various economic actors. These trends have started to blur the distinction between state and private capital in the US, resulting in an ongoing global backlash and a threat to (rather than the protector of) the existing international system and order alongside the CCP’s China Inc.
The paper shows how the pursuit of absolute advantage in the global semiconductor industry creates a paradox where the great power rivals engaging in trade wars are effectively undermining the stability of the global trade system that allows them to weaponize economic interdependence for their own power maximization interests in the first place.
Authors: Tian He , Michael Magcamit (The University of Manchester) -
The ‘Green Transition’ is now central to academic and policy debates, yet its meaning and drivers remain contested. Narrow approaches focusing only on corporate sustainability or state environmental governance overlook the broader political and economic dynamics shaping these transitions. Recent scholarship emphasises the need to situate green transitions within global capitalism and to account for the geopolitical forces influencing them.
While such dynamics are well examined in sectors like defence, critical minerals, and energy—where geopolitics is seen as inherently relevant—other industries are often treated as insulated from these pressures. The garment sector, for instance, is typically analysed through a narrow environmental governance lens, where only state and corporate sustainability actors are considered. This is a serious limitation: these ‘non-strategic’ sectors are equally embedded in global political and economic relations. Analysing them in isolation obscures critical dynamics shaping how they unfold.
This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the geopolitical foundations of the green transition within the global garment industry, focusing on the Moroccan case. It explores how geopolitical and geo-economic developments—particularly the rise of China, supply chain disruptions, and escalating climate breakdown—inform the actions of the European Union, European nation states, multinational garment retailers, and the Moroccan state. It argues that the strategies of each actor towards the green transition are deeply conditioned by these wider forces.
Empirically, the paper draws on five months of PhD fieldwork in Morocco, including 65 interviews with key industry stakeholders, supplemented by document analysis. In doing so, it aims to contribute to a broader theorisation of green transitions that recognises their global and geopolitical foundations, even in ‘non-strategic’ sectors. The paper delivers key insights into the global governance of green transitions, how this intersects with the power relations pervading global supply chains, and the effects of intensifying geo-economic fracturing within global capitalism.
Author: Josh White (University of Sheffield)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / The IPE of the Second Cold WarSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
The aim for supremacy in strategic elements of global value chains, between China and the US reflects the interplay between the foreign affairs and economic statecraft. Despite the increased economic tensions between these superpowers, complete de-coupling seems unrealistic due to deep interdependencies. De-risking, friendshoring, export controls, are some of the emerging concepts. However, little has been said regarding the use of geopolitical alignment to achieve a domination in these critical sectors.
This study aims to empirically investigate how third-country alignment with China and US, reshapes the imports patterns from these two countries, based on the geopolitical distance with them. Using a PPML gravity model, this study explores the trade dynamics on strategic components, and less strategic sectors, over the years 2016 to 2023, examining whether geopolitical alignment matters more in sectors defined as nationally strategic. The findings provide evidence on the reconfiguration of the global value chains and the use of them as a geopolitical tool. Contemporaneous and one-year lagged effects are used to address the endogeneity concerns.
To address causality questions, a Difference in Difference technique is also conducted. The top 40% most aligned countries are considered as treated, while the bottom 40% least aligned countries are considered the control group. Year 2022 is considered the moment of shock.
The research question is as follows: To what extent does geopolitical alignment in the case of US and China, influence sourcing strategies in high-tech components and critical minerals—and how does this differ from import flows in general?Author: Arbnor Bajraliu (Loughborough University London) -
This article addresses the contradictions of US political economy that have shaped its conduct in the Second Cold War. US approaches to international trade and industrial policy have in recent years undergone a series of major shifts and equally significant reversals. Driving this has been a commercial and military arms race with China over Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced manufacturing.
International Political Economy (IPE) has theorised this in two ways. Some scholars have addressed geoeconomics and how the state is weaponising the networks of globalisation. Others have emphasised how the corporate power of Big Tech and asset management have steered national security policies in their interests.
These fresh perspectives are valuable because they identify the growing fusion of commercial and security interests in a changing world order.
But they often problematically treat state and corporate power as symbiotic. The tension of this is that the oscillations of US policy are overlooked in their significance, attributed to the unique chaos of Donald Trump.
In contrast, this paper theorises the Second Cold War through a trilemma of US imperialism. Rather than a policy conundrum of mutually exclusive strategic priorities, this trilemma frames a set of contradictions of political economy through which to interpret the crisis of US hegemony. The trilemma’s vertices are the national security state’s pursuit of an autonomous military advantage, Silicon Valley’s drive for global commercial supremacy, and civilian authorities’ construction of a military-industrial base prepared for a major confrontation.
By empirically unraveling this trilemma, the paper argues that US policy in the Second Cold War is not driven by a coherent grand strategy. It reflects a fractured global political economy adapting to the rising power of China.
Author: Ian Lovering -
Although China is often assumed to be seeking to overturn US hegemony, its approach to existing international institutions varies considerably: Beijing sometimes accommodates itself to them, sometimes seeks reforms, and sometimes – though only rarely – creates new, rival institutions. This paper explains why China creates new international institutions. It deploys an original three-stage theoretical framework, tested via concise plausibility probes of each of the causal pathways and two detailed case studies of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (development finance) and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (security governance), employing process tracing and elite interviews. The paper argues that China initiates new institutions only when: (1) existing arrangements inadequately serve core interests; (2) the dual international political opportunity structure enables institutional creation (reform impossibility + creation feasibility); and (3) China possesses two required capacities (institutional and economic/military). Empirical findings confirm the framework’s explanatory power across issue areas, showing that China’s institutional choices are shaped by a dynamic interplay of structural constraints (Condition 1), strategic calculation (Condition 2), and capacity thresholds (Condition 3). The study advances realist institutionalism and policy-wisely, provides an analytical matrix to predict China’s institutional strategies across issue areas in global governance.
Author: Qi Xu (Queen Mary University of London) -
Turkey’s foreign policy under the AKP has generated debate over whether the country is drifting away from the West or pursuing a pragmatic search for greater autonomy. The early 2000s were marked by close alignment with the Euro-Atlantic community and enthusiasm for EU accession, while the 2010s brought assertive regional interventions, defence-industrial upgrading, and overtures to non-Western platforms such as BRICS and the SCO. This paper situates these developments within broader transformations of the global political economy, from the 2008 financial crisis to the rise of multipolarity and renewed great-power competition. Drawing on a critical IPE/IR framework, it challenges the familiar “benign 2000s / coercive 2010s” framing, instead highlighting continuities of neoliberal expansionism and state restructuring in the 2000s. Shifts in the global order and domestic crises after 2011 accelerated Ankara’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, yet this has unfolded alongside a continued commitment to NATO and the Western security architecture, despite significant tensions. In the last couple of years, it is plausible to argue that this orientation has been re-entrenched against the background of an emerging Second Cold War. In this sense, Turkey differs from other Global South countries in an era of “Active Non-Alignment” and/or “polyalignment,” as it did during the first Cold War. The result is a pragmatic strategy of balancing and leveraging ties across multiple power centres in order to strengthen Turkey’s position in a shifting geopolitical landscape, albeit within certain structural limits.
Author: Mehmet Erol (De Montfort University)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
The roundtable addresses the emergence and development of African security research through interrogating how it emerged, has evolved and where it could be headed. It will involve theoretical, metatheoretical and methodological explorations of the overarching conceptual claims and empirical arguments that have been advanced on Africa interrogating their often unacknowledged ontological, epistemological, methodological and normative commitments. For example, the temporal classification of Africa into the ‘precolonial’, ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’, is often taken for granted which shapes the questions that can be asked as well as claims that can be made about Africa. The roles of gatekeepers and ‘intellectual tourists’ who position themselves as ‘experts on Africa’ thus discrediting legitimate dissenting voices within Africa require further examination. In contrast to the dominant positivist approach to security on Africa, more recent advances within critical security studies have included a growing attention to lived experiences of (in)security, coloniality, race, and reflexivity, among others, where qualitative and ethnographic methods have increasingly been adopted to investigate what locals make of (in)security, thus enriching recent security research. In doing these, the roundtable addresses important questions such as: what dominant themes have emerged historically within African security research? How have these changed? How has theory ‘travelled’ both in and out of Africa? What future directions can security research on Africa take?
Sponsor: Africa and International Studies Working GroupChair: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick)Participants: Akinyemi Oyawale (University of Warwick) , Shirley Achieng , Joshua Akintayo , Emeka Njoku (University of Birmingham) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / The Politics of Global Just Transitions
A decade after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, scholarly and policy discourses are shifting toward the opportunities and challenges posed by its implementation. However, a growing gap between climate action and global goals is becoming increasingly apparent, especially given broader challenges to multilateralism and the ongoing global power shift that is complicating climate politics and governance. Geopolitics is reshaping global governance as multilateralism faces decline. Moreover, the intensifying competition for critical minerals among major powers risks exacerbating the extractivist models that have long impoverished resource-rich but less powerful countries, while some major emitters are simultaneously backsliding on their climate commitments. Against this backdrop, "just transition" has emerged as a powerful metaphor capturing both the normative and strategic dimensions of meeting global climate goals. Yet its connection to ongoing global power shifts remains largely unexplored. This panel examines the prospects of just transition as a framework for understanding the emerging politics of implementing climate commitments. By connecting the concepts of just transition and global order, we illuminate the evolving global politics of just transitions—including both their promise and their contestations. Speakers will draw on their pioneering scholarship on just transitions to reflect on the longer-term challenge of meeting climate goals in a fair and just manner in the coming decades.
Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: Peter Newell (University of Sussex)Participants: Eszter Szedlacsek (VU Amsterdam) , Kennedy Mbeva (Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford) , Chukwumerijer Okereke (University of Bristol) , Alix Dietzel (University of Bristol) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Panel / The Politics of the Migration stateSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Marco Zampieri (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
-
This paper introduces the draft for a book in-progress that is based on my dissertation about the social (re)construction of state immigration control in the international community from historical perspective.
My paper addresses an ontological question of immigration control that has rarely been tackled by conventional studies of global politics/migration, except for normative theorists' works and a few works by scholars of sociology/international relations.
The paper challenges the conventional perspective of taking immigration control as given/rational, and contests prevalent rationales for controlling immigration such as increasing migration-influx or anti-migrant sentiment/parties.
The author focuses on crucial historical changes of modes of state behaviour toward immigration that leads to the (re)building of institutions of immigration control in modern nation-states. Central to these changes is the vicissitude of liberal/nationalist and illiberal/nationalist ideas of migration/migrants shared intersubjectively by significant actors, including norms of state behaviour. My paper contextualises these transformations into structural changes in the international system and into the development of social modernity/late modernity.
My paper is divided into four parts.
Firstly, the author overviews previous studies and introduces theoretical frameworks.
Next part clarifies decisive turning points for state behaviour throughout history and defines state immigration control.
Thirdly, the author elucidates how prototypes of institutions have been intersubjectively (re)constructed in significant destination states. Specifically, this paper sheds light on two processes: how immigration has been politically (re)discovered’ and (re)objectified; how immigration issues have been put into agendas of national policy.
The last part concerns the dissemination of prototypes through the global community and the shift in institutions along developing late modernity, including extraterritoriality principle.
Theoretical frameworks are based on IR-social constructivist/sociological institutionalist studies and sociological theories, including the Foucauldian studies of governmentality.
Document analysis is conducted primarily through discursive/narrative analysis regarding crucial enactments. Documents encompass parliamentary protocols, administrative/legal (archival) documents and secondary literature.
Author: Ryo Kuboyama -
This thesis investigates as to why and how did various Afghan diaspora groups, especially Rome and Peshawar groups, and individuals gain uneven influence during the Bonn process, and how did these disparities shape Afghanistan’s post-2001 state- and peacebuilding efforts. This thesis seeks to delineate the different ways and resources utilised by diaspora groups for gaining influence; how competitions and exclusion shape state- and peacebuilding efforts, the causal pathways through which these asymmetries contribute to state fragility and what does this reveal about conceptual blind spots of the liberal peacebuilding initiatives, especially given it pays little attention to the agentic aspect of the non-state actors as an increasingly significant actors within the world politics (Adamson, 2007; Shain and Barth, 2003; Vanderbush, 2014). As such, the thesis aims at offering a more in-depth understanding of diaspora engagement in liberal peacebuilding, inform a more contextualised peacebuilding approach that account for, rather than exacerbate divisions. This research compares two key diaspora groups: the Rome-based, whose symbolic and political capital was validated during the Bonn Process in 2001, and the Peshawar-based, whose NGO networks, technocratic expertise, jihadi background/affiliations and embedded social capital empowered them to rise to prominence more gradually in post-2001 Afghanistan. Drawing on interviews with former senior Afghan officials, diaspora elites, prominent civil society members, scholars, members of parliament, and experts, as well as document analysis, the thesis employs Bourdieu’s theory of practice and a relational approach, to analyse how various types of capital and habitus contributed to diaspora’s access to power (Adamson, 2013; Bourdieu, 1977; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Josselin and Wallace, 2001) and how did these disparities shape the state- and peacebuilding efforts in Afghanistan. The thesis seeks to contribute to broader debates on diaspora politics and the post-intervention state- and peacebuilding efforts.
Author: Abdul Ghani Amin (University of Exeter) -
Research on authoritarian repression within diasporic populations has mostly focused to this point on the motivations for states to carry out transnational repression (TNR) against their dissidents abroad, on the nature and modalities of these repression operations, and on the effect of TNR on exiled activism. The reception and consequences of extraterritorial repression in dissent-hosting states ('receiving states') are yet to be explored. As one can expect that violent TNR would be perceived by receiving states as 'sending state'-sponsored agression, I ask in this paper whether transnational repression does indeed affect negatively the bilateral relations between sending and receiving states. Focusing on the particular case of 'liberal democratic' receiving states, I rely on archival research to explore two case studies involving exiled Iranian opposition residing in France, in the early 80's and in the early 90's. Contrary to my expectations, I find that the occurrence of violent state-sponsored repression operations on a host territory will not automatically cause a political response on the part of the receiving state, or a degradation of bilateral relations: TNR is only identified as state-sponsored and condemned as such if the perpetrating state is already framed as an 'evil' and 'oppressive' state in host state and liberal democratic narratives. In other words, it is not the occurrence of TNR that may cause bilateral tensions, but the occurrence of bilateral tensions that makes TNR identifiable and condemnable to host states.
Author: Chloe Raid (London School of Economics (LSE)) -
Over the past decade, the discipline of European Studies has increasingly engaged with theorizations that challenge dominant understandings of Europe and foreground perspectives from its margins, particularly Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. This paper contributes to this trend by theorizing the Western Balkans as a crucial site in which competing conceptualizations of Europe are articulated, especially through the European Union’s externalized migration governance. Focusing on the 2023 Italy–Albania Protocol on Migration, which authorizes the establishment of Italian-managed migrant detention centers on Albanian territory, the paper employs Judith Butler’s post-structural feminist framework to argue that Albania, positioned as Europe’s periphery, became a crucial site where Europe is being discursively and materially redefined. Through discourse analysis of Italian and Albanian media narratives and political speech acts, the paper identifies an emerging vision of Europe based on excluding racialized non-European migrants, reproducing colonial heritages, and replicating center-periphery power dynamics. Simultaneously, a counter-narrative emerges from Albanian and transnational civil society actors opposing the agreement, reimagining Europe through plurality, solidarity, and transnational horizontal cooperation. The paper thus reconceptualizes EU migration agreements in the Western Balkans as central, not peripheral, to the ongoing renegotiation of Europe in multiple sites.
Keywords: European Studies, Western Balkans, Migration Governance, Postcolonial Europe, Italy-Albania Protocol, European Identity.
Author: Marco Zampieri (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
-
-
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / The Slavery-War Nexus: New Understandings of the History and Future of Slavery and War
As many as 90% of contemporary conflicts have featured modern slavery practices, yet the profound links between slavery and war remain critically underexplored within International Studies. As BISA looks ahead to the next fifty years, this roundtable addresses a crucial gap in war studies scholarship and practice: understanding slavery not as peripheral to conflict, but as central to its dynamics and impacts.
With more active conflicts globally than at any time since the Second World War, the prevalence of slavery is increasing as well. From forced labour and child soldiers to sexual exploitation and trafficking, slavery is weaponised in war, shaping societies, economies, and legal frameworks across historical and contemporary contexts. Yet governments, international institutions, and humanitarian actors remain ill-prepared to respond effectively.
This panel brings together scholars from the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War – the world's first major initiative dedicated to the slavery-war nexus – to discuss how integrating slavery into war studies not only creates a new sub-discipline, but transforms our analytical frameworks. Panellists will present the innovative interdisciplinary methodologies being developed (spanning historical analysis, survivor narratives, satellite imagery, AI-powered forecasting and peacegaming) that will reveal patterns previously obscured by disciplinary silos and facilitate new strategies for eliminating conflict-related slavery worldwide. By bridging war studies, slavery studies, law, political theory, and data science, this panel exemplifies the disciplinary evolution necessary for International Studies to meet future global challenges – advancing both theoretical innovation and real-world impact.
Sponsor: European Journal of International SecurityChair: Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham)Participants: Maeve Ryan (Kings College London) , Jack McDonald (Department of War Studies, King's College London) , Andrew Mumford (University of Nottingham) , Jeni Mitchell (King's College London) -
1:15 PM
→
2:45 PM
FR05 Roundtable / What's "Left of Queer" in IR? (Re)claiming the radical potential of queer feminist critique
In the 2020 Social Text special issue introduction “Left of queer”, Jasbir Puar and David Eng remind us that “the radical potential of queer critique has often turned on its analyses of gender and sex as ‘racial arrangements’” (2). In agreement, this roundtable calls for a (re)centring of questions of empire, race and (settler)coloniality in our study of gender and sexuality, to appraise how they act as sites where violent racial formations are created, maintained, but also contested. This roundtable asks, how can “what’s left of queer” in IR fundamentally challenge the ongoing violent (racial, colonial) projects of transnational security regimes, nation-state(s), empire, racial capitalism? How can it address the ongoing coloniality of our present, and help us push back against both global fascisms and the murderous inclusions pedalled under “liberal democracy”? How can it ground us in material, lived realities, and defy abstraction and “mystification” (Stoffel & Birkvad 2023)? What new/old/unconsidered objects, subjects and sites of study should our queer feminist critique attend to? These questions will be accompanied by reflections on the production of “queer knowledge” in the academy: What are its material conditions? Who is it for? And how do our different positionalities and personal investments drive our employment of “queer” as an analytic? Attending to these questions, this roundtable seeks to carve out a space for us to take stock of our queer feminist critique and figure out its place and potential in the joint struggle against fascism, genocide, empire, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.
Sponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupChair: Elli Beyer (University of Manchester)Participants: Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London) , Elli Beyer (University of Manchester) , Lizzie Hobbs (London School of Economics) , Abeera Khan (SOAS, University of London) , Sophie Chamas , Senel Wanniarachchi (LSE) -
2:45 PM
→
3:00 PM
Break 15m
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Bordering, Ordering, & Fashioning Militarised SubjectivitiesSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Laura MillsChair: Gabriela Almeida Costa (Anglia Ruskin University)
-
This paper is an examination of how militarization in Edwardian Britain functioned as a form of pedagogy, shaping both moral character and bodily discipline in preparation for war. Drawing on a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908) and the compendium Essays on Duty and Discipline (1910), I analyze how these texts extended military logics of compliance and physical suffering into civilian life starting in childhood, effectively transforming the nation into a site of pre-military training. The disciplining and brutalization of male physicality accompanied its discursive reconstruction as the state’s future war materiel. The analysis draws on Foucault’s concepts of discipline and governmentality, alongside Goffman’s idea of the total institution, to explore how moral instruction and everyday bodily regulation operated together to produce soldier-citizens. By reframing stare control of male physicality and subsequent suffering as moral virtue, Edwardian pedagogies of heroism normalized the militarization and harsh physical disciplining of male youth under the banner of civic duty. The paper contributes to Critical Military Studies and feminist International Relations by revealing how militarization takes root through childhood education, morality, and governance of the male body.
Keywords: Pedagogy; Militarization; Discipline; Masculinity; Heroism; Total Institution; Edwardian Britain; Governmentality
Author: Samuel Rogers (Trinity College Dublin) -
Military culture is a dynamic force of shared beliefs, values, behaviours and norms which shape the professional identity of those who are employed within the institution. In wider research on the development of military identity, it is acknowledged to be formed in part through the learning of this military culture, shaped by the unique cultural context and maintained by social processes. Significantly, a deliberate shift from civilian to military identity is crucial for adapting to and succeeding in military life. Military education and training within the academy are therefore critical for the learning of military culture and where the soldier identity is first adopted.
Women’s participation is crucial for both gender equality and for the benefit of the institution. Despite this, the military is widely acknowledged to be a gendered institution, its culture central to wider constructions of gender and gendered divisions. The ways in which these gendered institutional logics are embedded and most significantly, learned within military culture have substantial implications to the way that women are received and perceived, and how gender is performed within these contexts. How military gender culture is learned in the academy is therefore vital to understand, to enable women’s full and meaningful military participation.
This paper is based on the Norwegian Academy context and seeks to develop new knowledge on how the gendered professional identity is formed through training and education.
Author: Amy Hill (Newcastle university) -
This paper aims to study Pakistan’s use of military force against Afghan migrants and the Taliban-led Afghan state post-2021 as a bordering practice in reinforcing/projecting the ‘border’ along the Af-Pak ‘frontier’. Following Nail (2016), we understand the border as a bifurcating and mobile political form which enacts rather than limits sovereign power of the state. We affirm border as an ontological (Minca & Vaughan-Williams, 2012) generator of political identities. In our framing, militarization is studied as a bordering practice, viewing the border/bordering as active rather than passive. Herein, it is a process aimed at reaffirming state identity and reinforcing national security through violent contestation of spatial ‘transgression’ by ‘enemy’ aliens. Our approach intends to develop an account of bordering practice of violence as tied to stabilisation of national/state identity in a context of rival locus of political obligations. A peculiar situation obtains in the borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan wherein shared local ethnic ties and historical as well as contemporary legacies of imperial violence bind the affective geographies, people and importantly nation-state narratives. Both states especially since the fall of the republican government in Afghanistan, have emphasised their Islamic identity and in the case of Pakistan tried to assert control over its borderland ethnicities and the frontier by escalating bouts of violence and refugee deportations. The martial practices of Pakistani state to project a border on the Af-Pak borderlands are filtered through colonial modes of organising violence and intersect with post-colonial intensification of assertion of nation-state identity especially since the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. Thus, given the power asymmetry between Afghanistan and Pakistan, we assess the implications of how borderlands transformed into ‘frontier’ (Longo, 2017) tend to intensify bordering practices in cases of intersection and contestation over projection of post-colonial subjecthood in the global South.
Authors: Ahmed Sahal k P (South Asian University, New Delhi) , Mujeeb Kanth (South Asian University)*
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Care, Resilience and Social ReproductionSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Aine Bennett (Royal Holloway University of London)
-
Why do armed rebel organisations vary in the extent in which women participate in social reproductive labour, and what does this mean for their viability? Existing scholarship has shown that rebellions require non-militarised support apparatuses to persist, while women are disproportionately responsible for the labour that sustains them. Yet the relationship between these two insights has seldom been theorised systematically. This paper conceptualises social reproduction in armed conflict as the non-combat and non-militarised labour that enables rebellion to exist in the first place, encompassing tasks of both organisational and individual maintenance. Drawing on an original global dataset of 128 armed groups (SRARO), I evaluate how material endowments, rebel governance, and ideological imagination shape variation in women’s social reproduction. Cross-sectional quantitative analysis shows three broad patterns. Materially poorer groups are more likely to rely on women’s unpaid reproductive labour as a substitution for absent financial and resource prosperity. Second, armed groups that establish social rebel governance institutions depend on women’s labour in nurturing and caring roles to sustain service provision and garner popular support in the process. Lastly, rebel organisations that require the consistent propping of ideological imagination - using ideological appeals for continued feasibility - employ women’s reproductive labour to naturalise such social and collective notions of political values. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that women’s reproductive labour is not peripheral but central to rebel organising, providing systematic evidence that labour strategies are structured by the material, institutional, and ideological conditions under which groups operate. This study thus brings feminist theory into conversation with quantitative conflict research and offers a first step toward centring gendered divisions of labour in the study of rebellion.
Author: Carina Uchida (University of Oxford) -
This article examines how Russia’s war in Ukraine has shaped representations, and everyday experiences of Russian and Ukrainian women in China, situating these within entanglements of intimacy, sovereignty, and racial capitalism. Drawing on patchwork ethnography, the study combines interviews with diasporic women in Beijing, analysis of Chinese state media portrayals, and investigation of AI-generated “fake Russian” characters used to sell Russian goods online. I argue that these AI-fabricated identities serve dual purposes: reinforcing China’s conditional geopolitical alignment with Russia, and promoting a biopolitical vision in which white, often Slavic, women are idealised as desirable partners for Chinese men and symbols of modernity. These gendered, racialised, and commodified images circulate in both state-controlled television and e-commerce platforms, blurring the boundaries between intimacy, sovereignty, and racial capitalism. Contrasting media portrayals with ethnographic accounts reveal how the war, on the one hand, valorises Slavic femininity for commercial and militarised interests, and, on the other, has fractured previously close-knit Russian-Ukrainian social networks, exposing the fragility of solidarity and the deep embedding of global geopolitical conflict in everyday, intimate spaces.
Author: Elena Barabantseva (University of Manchester) -
Over the past decade, resilience has become a buzzword in international interventions. Literature has provided an ambiguous assessment of resilience and its gendered implications: some scholars have problematised international resilience-building interventions as a form of governmentality that reproduces existing power structures; others have approached resilience from the bottom-up perspective of communities, highlighting its potential for resistance.
In Armenia, resilience appeared amidst a poly-crisis marked by the covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, which ended with Azerbaijan’s military recapturing of the disputed territory in September 2023. In this context, Armenia’s southernmost province of Syunik became a borderland faced with a vulnerable security position. The 2020 war disrupted Syunik’s geography, economy and everyday livelihoods, with many fearing it would turn into a new hotspot of conflict.
This paper examines how different forms of resilience redefine relations of (in)security in Armenia’s Syunik province and beyond, and their gendered implications. Drawing on feminist interventions across security studies, political geography and IR, the paper delves into the ambiguities that emerge from the encounter between resilience-building interventions and local agency. I examine how ‘resilient subjects’ in Armenian borderlands come to be and for which ends, while also considering bottom-up practices that disrupt the logics of top-down interventions.
Through original fieldwork data, the paper shows how the building of resilience in Syunik constitutes both a discourse of coping with persistent uncertainty, as well as of hoping for a safer future (which may never arrive). It also demonstrates that resilience is invoked to displace international and national actors’ security failure – namely, the failure to prevent ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Lastly, by highlighting the disjuncture between official discourses and everyday practices of communities, the paper reflects on the possibility for bottom-up forms of ‘resilience-in-practice’ that challenge violent systems through care.Author: Laura Luciani (Ghent University) -
This paper examines the compounding and mutually reinforcing crises facing contemporary societies, including climate change, public health emergencies, mental health, systemic inequality, and political instability. We argue that feminist leadership, grounded in values of inclusivity, intersectionality, and care, offers untapped potential for navigating these overlapping challenges.
Despite the prominence that the concept of “polycrisis” has gained recently as a way to describe the escalating complexity and convergence of global challenges, leadership models capable of addressing this complexity have remained underdeveloped. These models are often rooted in hierarchical or technocratic paradigms. Our paper explores the possibilities of innovative and interdisciplinary interventions, positioning feminist leadership as a transformative model for systems thinking and inclusive decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.
The approach is timely in that global events (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, genocide in Gaza, new and protracted conflicts around the world) have highlighted the many limitations of conventional leadership. This leaves, we argue, space for the incorporation of feminist approaches, whose transformative potential have been proven by recent moves to include feminism in global policymaking (e.g. the development of Feminist Foreign Policy).Authors: Toni Haastrup (University of Manchester) , Cristina Stefan (University of Leeds) -
Women remain largely absent from present and historical takes on foreign policy. This applies not only to high-level diplomatic arenas. It also pertains to those everyday spaces which receive less scholarly and public attention, including international schools or cultural institutes and the hierarchies that are inscribed into them as part of exclusive diplomatic communities - especially in postcolonial contexts. As feminist research in International Relations and Political Sociology demonstrates, women’s accounts provide crucial insight into the complex structural and social relations that uphold any kind of institution and their interrelatedness with global politics and histories. Following this premise, this paper argues that women’s memory can bring a unique perspective on the everyday workings of cultural diplomatic institutions. In consequence, this paper poses the following questions: What does women’s memory uncover about everyday expressions of gender, race and coloniality in diplomatic spaces? What can we learn about everyday knowledge practices and systems therein? And how can it challenge or disrupt hegemonic narratives in the foreign policy archive? To answer these questions, this paper centers on Indian and German women’s memory of the German school and cultural institute Max Mueller Bhavan. It juxtaposes archival material with women’s memory to illustrate how these institutions were spaces of social reproduction while being centers of (cultural) power in postcolonial Delhi between 1961 – 1999. This approach highlights not only gendered and racialized absences in the political archive. It also illuminates the interrelatedness of everyday cultural foreign policy with global and regional political developments, including the emergence and collapse of bipolarity and, within it, the formation of post-independence India as an active foreign policy actor.
Author: Madita Standke-Erdmann (King's College London)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Central Banking and Monetary PowerSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEG Working groupChair: IPEG Working group
-
With the U.S. dollar increasingly weaponised as an instrument of statecraft what began as a defensive reaction by third countries to the unprecedented freezing of Russia’s reserves in 2022 has evolved into a wider recalibration of how monetary power operates in an era of contested multipolarity. Under the second Trump administration’s assertive geoeconomic turn, the fusion of fiscal, financial, and foreign policy made explicit what Susan Strange theorised decades ago: that the structure of global finance constitutes a core pillar of power. Yet this pillar, the financial structure in Strange’s fourfold framework, remains under-examined in contemporary debates on multipolarity. This article explores how central banks are reassessing their reserve allocation strategies: not merely out of pecuniary concern, but as a form of geopolitical risk management. Through substantial, and unique, empirical work, it argues that as the dollar’s dominance has become hyper-politicised, central banks are no longer merely managing reserve portfolios; they are navigating hierarchy, loyalty, coercion, and uncertainty within a reordered financial world.
Authors: Tim Aistrope (University of Kent) , Lee Hodgkinson (University of Kent) , Richard Whitman (University of Kent) -
How did the offshore Eurodollar markets affect European integration? Scholars use the framing of a European fortress to reflect upon the degree of autonomy of a sovereign Europe vis-à-vis hegemonic USD flows. From this perspective, European financial integration projects, including the euro, are framed as responses to shield against destabilising USD flows since the fall of Bretton Woods. I challenge these accounts by showing how the European commission pro-actively tried to build a European common financial market in the 1960s. This, however, failed because of the large European universal banks’ interlocking balance sheets on the Eurodollar markets. Tracing the largest banks’ USD practices through the 1960s-1980s, I argue that competitive pressures of the Eurodollar markets critically shaped the European and City banks’ interest in and influence over European financial integration. At first, they rejected the European Commission’s 1960s initiatives for a common financial market because national boundaries protected their own home markets. Simultaneously, the EEC’s anti-competitive regulations threatened to restrict bank operations in Eurodollar markets because banks operated via lending clubs, essentially trans-European cartels. Eurodollar banks’ interest in a European common capital market only arose in the late 1970s after competitive pressures in USD markets necessitated different tactics of credit creation and the EEC’s threat to their strategies abated. But by then, European finance was already deeply dependent on USD markets. As European banks became important architects of USD flows, any monetary project aiming to create an ‘independent’ Europe was doomed from the start.
Author: Mareike Beck (University of Warwick) -
The fact that the increasing scientisation of regulatory agencies such as central banks has shaped the way they operate is well established within the literature. However, so far we know very little about how such scientisation interacts with wider trends of convergence and divergence in regulatory institutions and national varieties of economic organisation. Using financial policy in Germany since the Global Financial Crisis as its case study, this article shows how scientised central banks can become unwitting agents of convergence, because of the way that scientific knowledge accumulation works within the transnational networks of which they are part. While much of the existing work on the role of transnational communities has tended to locate the source of convergence primarily in commitment to a shared policy programme or wider economic ideologies, the article thus highlights a so far underappreciated source of policy change: Convergence in this case is driven by the particular nature of individual epistemic norms that are incompatible with the processes of contextual knowledge construction that used to structure policy in the past.
Author: Nick Kotucha (University of Warwick) -
This article investigates how competing institutional approaches to multilateral payment systems based on CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) may reconfigure global monetary relations. While most analyses of CBDC projects assume that central banks and private financial actors have inherently conflicting interests, this article starts from the premise that central banks have historically built their monetary capacities by cultivating strategic relationships with selected private financial institutions. This is particularly relevant in the domain of global money, where national monetary authorities rely heavily on the relationships established by private global banks within correspondent banking networks to connect their monetary systems to the rest of the world through cross-border payments. Against this backdrop, the article compares two flagship multilateral payment platforms based on CBDC that embody contrasting principles of institutional coordination for processing wholesale cross-border payments: Project mBridge, comprising the People’s Bank of China and other Asian and Middle Eastern central banks, advancing a public–public model based on cooperation among central banks; Project Agorá, featuring the Federal Reserve and other closely aligned central banks, promoting hybrid arrangements between central banks and major private financial institutions. The article argues that these competing institutional models reflect not just alternative preferences for organizing global monetary relations but fundamentally different geopolitical priorities. While mBridge aims to reduce reliance on the private correspondent banking relations that underpin the current USD-centred global monetary system, Agorá seeks to reinforce the institutional foundations of that very system.
Authors: Luca Fantacci (Università degli Studi di Milano)* , Jacopo Maria Magurno (University of Sussex) , Lucio Gobbi (Università di Trento)*
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Climate Policy, National Implementation and International InstitutionsSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds)
-
A tale of institutional fragmentation in the bioeconomy: The establishment of the Biofuture Platform
Global sustainability governance is to a large degree driven by fragmentation, with international energy governance being no exception. There has been considerable debate in the literature as to what motivates actors to establish fragmented governance structures and processes to deal with transboundary global sustainability and other challenges. Dissatisfaction with the status quo has often been put forward as a necessary condition for institutional innovation. However, the pathways that lead from dissatisfaction to institutional reform and innovation require theoretical clarification.
This paper fills this gap by examining the reasons that led Brazil to initiate the Biofuture Platform in 2016, a body aiming to promote international coordination on scaling up production of low carbon advanced fuels and other bioproducts. It argues that dissatisfaction with cooperative outcomes by the current configuration of institutions, as well as perceptions of focal international regulatory institutions as being impermeable to change due to institutional capture by the interests of more powerful state and non-state actors, help explain why Brazil resorted to establishing a new institution in the global bioenergy policy domain.
The contributions of this study to the literature are both theoretical, as well as empirical. First, it tests and extends existing theory on state dissatisfaction with the status quo as a motivating factor for the creation of countervailing and overlapping international institutions by putting forward a model that looks at several explanatory factors such as, among others, capability and pressure to challenge the status quo. Second, it adds to the empirical base by focusing on the specific case of the Biofuture Platform, a body which has so far received limited attention in the academic literature.
Author: Stavros Afionis (Cardiff University) -
Global efforts to accelerate energy transitions often presume that national governments can translate international climate commitments into effective domestic action. Yet in many resource-rich states, transitions are mediated through subnational politics and institutional fragmentation. This paper examines Nigeria’s uneven energy transition through the lens of state capacity and federal governance, asking how federal and state-level institutions shape the politics of reform and renewable energy adoption. Drawing on original data from Nigeria’s 36 states and interviews with policymakers and solar firms, the paper shows that the devolution of electricity regulation following the 2023 Electricity Act has amplified pre-existing disparities in administrative and fiscal capacity. States with diversified revenue bases and stronger institutional linkages to non-state actors are more likely to invest in solar power, while oil-producing states remain structurally locked into fossil-fuel dependence. The analysis advances debates in international political economy by showing how institutional complementarities at the subnational level mediate global climate governance outcomes. It argues that understanding the next phase of global energy governance requires moving beyond national averages and engaging seriously with the politics of institutional capacity in federal and resource-dependent systems.
Author: Fikayo Akeredolu (Oxford University) -
Ad-hoc climate actions rarely contribute to long-term solutions; however, institutionalisation helps to embed these actions in the established policy and governance system, creating long-lasting outcomes. This study employs the theoretical framework of “Institutional thickness” comprising recognition, groundwork and action components to examine the process of institutionalisation at three levels of governance in Nepal. Based on 68 key informant interviews, the study found that the formal institutional setup is strongest within the national government. Most of the evidence was related to the Groundwork component, which involves preparatory activities that establish the conditions for effective institutional action. Fewer instances were found in the Recognition and Action component, which weakens the reinforcing cycle of institutional thickness. Overall, the study's results highlight the difference between having an institution and its functionality, the thicker the institutional process, the greater the institutional sustainability, and vice versa. This paper debates that although systemic institutional frameworks are necessary, the effective institutionalisation of climate actions depends fundamentally on the individual; thus, institutionalisation depends on political will, bureaucratic leadership, and accountability towards vulnerable people. In the case of Nepal, these individual agency factors were found to be lacking, thereby impeding the institutionalisation process.
Author: Sushila pandit (University of Kent) -
Global environmental governance increasingly relies on cooperation between states and non-state actors, particularly multinational corporations. Within this context, the United Nations Global Compact stands out as one of the most significant soft law initiatives promoting corporate sustainability, by advancing universal principles that include environmental protection and green innovation. However, a persistent gap remains between formal commitment and effective practice, the so-called performance gap, which limits the initiative’s actual impact on climate change mitigation. This study investigates this discrepancy through a comparative analysis of the economies with the largest number of Global Compact signatories, emphasising institutional, regulatory, and cultural factors that shape the implementation of corporate environmental policies. The methodology combines documentary analysis, literature review, and semi-structured discursive interviews with representatives of participating organisations. The findings suggest that advancing the climate agenda within the private sector requires not merely symbolic adherence but the establishment of effective monitoring mechanisms, economic incentives, and transnational accountability systems that reinforce coherence between environmental discourse and practice.
Author: Rodrigo Gallo (Instituto Mauá de Tecnologia (IMT))
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Contemporary Challenges and Approaches to Peacebuilding
This roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners to critically examine the evolving landscape of peacebuilding in the face of complex global challenges. From recurrent conflicts and authoritarian resurgence to climate-induced displacement and violations of international humanitarian law, contemporary peacebuilding efforts must navigate increasingly multifaceted environments. Participants will explore how liberal peacebuilding is being re-evaluated and re-interpreted, and discuss emerging approaches that accommodate local agency, adaptive approaches, illiberal practices, and the evolving role of multilateral actors. By fostering dialogue across regions, this session aims to identify the theories and strategies to respond to current realities and advance sustainable peace.
Sponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupChair: Giuditta Fontana (University of Birmingham)Participants: Stefan Wolff (University of Birmingham) , Eugene Chen (King's College London) , Sandra Pogodda (University of Manchester) , Babatunde Obamoye (University of Birmingham) , Giulia Piccolino (Loughborough University) , Claire Smith (University of York) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Contemporary US PoliticsSponsor: US Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: USFP Working groupChair: USFP Working groupDiscussant: USFP Working group
-
State Security and Geopolitical Competition: Understanding Counterterrorism Beyond the War on Terror
This project proceeds from an initial puzzle: why do great powers with differing regime types have varying counterterrorism architectures yet similarly sweeping mandates? Despite a proliferation in research on terrorism in the United States in the last two decades, research on state counterterrorism initiatives has remained comparatively underdeveloped. This paper reviews the present state of counterterrorism studies, and finds five key limitations: (1) a lack of consideration of the role of broader geopolitical strategy in counterterror initiatives and doctrine; (2) a failure to explore non-US initiatives; (3) a failure to explain the gap between a state’s rhetoric and practice of counterterrorism; (4) a failure to examine variation across cases; and (5) the treatment of counterterrorism as ideologically or institutionally neutral.
The paper argues that the wide range of actions being performed in the name of counterterrorism by the United States and its geopolitical rivals should be understood in the context of broader geopolitical strategy. The project concludes by proposing a comparative framework that can better account for variations in counterterror practices between states in an era of great power competition.
Author: William Arnold (American University) -
While American exceptionalism has traditionally framed the United States as a moral, democratic, and providential exemplar for the world, Trump’s nationalist rhetoric and “America First” agenda marked a significant departure from liberal internationalist interpretations. Through an analysis of key speeches, policy documents, and media performances, this paper argues that Trump articulated "MAGA exceptionalism". Rather than a "vindicationalist" or "exemplarist" exceptionalism, Trump's version reasserts U.S. distinctiveness through economic protectionism, border strengthening, and "culture wars" rather than democratic ideals. The paper contends that this recalibration of exceptionalist discourse reflects broader transformations in the global order, where the veneer of American moral superiority has been replaced by a discourse of victimization and decline. By exploring how Trump’s rhetoric mobilized disillusionment with globalization and multilateralism, this research contributes to ongoing debates about American identity, and the future of American leadership in the post-liberal world.
Author: Christopher Featherstone (University of York) -
Since the events of January 6th, there has been a noticeable radicalization in Donald Trump’s political rhetoric. Populist narratives once targeting a misguided ‘globalist’ Washington consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policy now attack the liberal democratic system itself, framed as systematically corrupt and ideologically biased against Trump, the Republican Party and their voters. Political opponents were threatened with the weaponization of law enforcement and public vows of retribution. Since resuming the presidency, there has also been a growing domestic militarization in the United States, with President Trump deploying National Guard troops to Democratically controlled cities like LA and Portland in support of federal anti-immigration measures, and threatening the invasion of Chicago.
This begs the question if populism and Jacksonian nationalism are still accurate analytical avenues to assess contemporary political dynamics in the United States, or if the second Trump administration is not more accurately described as manifestation of a new form of American fascism, or at least proto-fascism. At the core of the research interest here is the level of politically motivated violence against domestic opponents as ‘enemies of the state’ and the concentration of political power and discursive authority in the figure of the supreme leader. Drawing from research in political theory, critical security studies and political communication, this paper puts the issue of American fascism in historical context, while establishing a narrative framework of analysis of political mobilization and policy legitimation, and applying this to the political rhetoric and policy agenda of America First 2.0.
Authors: Jack Holland (University of Leeds) , Jonny Hall (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Georg Löfflmann (Queen Mary University of London) -
This article challenges from a gender perspective the concept of US foreign policy doctrines, a key concept used in US foreign policy and international politics more broadly. Despite a lack of definitional clarity, this article sheds light on two points of convergence in scholarship on US foreign policy doctrines: their gendered style and substance. The article demonstrates that US foreign policy doctrines rely on a masculinised style of communication and on a masculinist military posture. Doctrines may concentrate on different regions, use different methods for projecting American power, advocate different courses of action, or lead to success or failure, yet they share one commonality: doctrines are expressed as short foreign policy ‘post-it’ notes and convey a hawkish and militarist foreign policy stance. This is also true of the Hillary doctrine, one of the early iterations of what is now referred as “feminist foreign policy”. Drawing on a range of feminist scholarship, this intervention contributes to the theorisation of doctrines by making gender visible, so far absent in US doctrines studies. It argues that the way US foreign policy doctrines are conceptualised and recognised maintain the gender order and close alternative constructions of foreign policy that are potentially more complex, conciliatory, and nuanced.
Author: Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU) -
Poll watchers are expected to enhance electoral integrity and transparency by monitoring polling stations and reporting misconduct. In the United States, however, partisan poll watchers have increasingly acted in "bad faith”, leveraging their perceived authority not to strengthen, but to undermine, electoral processes. This paper examines how the practices of partisan poll watchers, together with electoral lawyers, have transformed observation into a tool of lawfare and electoral contestation, producing both legal challenges and public narratives of fraud that destabilize confidence in elections.
Empirically, we draw on original qualitative data, combining semi-structured interviews with electoral lawyers and partisan poll watchers with an analysis of high-profile U.S. court cases rooted in poll-watching claims. This approach allows us to trace how local observation practices are strategically translated into national-level disputes over electoral legitimacy. We show how the partisan observation of electoral ‘truth’ can be weaponized to delegitimize elections.
We find that the massive increase and transformation of partisan poll watching practices - particularly on the Republican side - has amplified electoral litigation, generated hostile dynamics in polling stations, and fostered narratives of systemic fraud. Our analysis demonstrates how poll watching, once a mechanism of democratic accountability, has become central to the politics of electoral contestation.
Authors: Peter Verpoorten (Central European University) , Markus Pollak (Central European University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Contemporary debates in UK Foreign PolicySponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Ella Bullard (BISA)Chair: Andrew Dorman (Chatham House)
-
In this paper, we assess the meaning of the increasing framing of UK foreign policy in terms of geopolitical necessities. This ‘geopoliticization’ of foreign policy draws an explicit linkage between geopolitics and an earlier emphasis on a values-led foreign policy. In this, the UK participates in a broader European trend, showing how much it remains embedded in pan-European dynamics after Brexit. Importantly, it also illustrates the persistence of imperial imaginaries in British and European foreign policy. ‘Geopolitics’ is a naturalizing trope, suggesting natural and unavoidable factors are driving foreign policy. In contemporary European discourse, it is used to claim a reactive turn to geopolitics in the face of Russian aggression. This however erases the way that geopolitical imaginaries are connected to specific ideological choices with particular genealogies. Both in Britain and the EU, geopolitical imaginaries have long-standing connections to imperialism and nationalism. As this paper will argue, the current ‘geopoliticization’ of UK foreign policy needs to be understood in this context and points to continuing imperial legacies now feeding into a current turn to reactionary nationalism. Rather than a natural necessity, the turn to geopolitics shows how the current ideological moment co-produces foreign policy choices.
Authors: Stefanie Ortmann (University of Sussex) , Nicholas Whittaker (University of Sussex)* -
The issue of whether, and how, to regulate arms transfers to the Middle East has been a subject of controversy in recent years, particularly regarding transfers to Saudi Arabia and Israel. This paper examines the operation of the top-secret Near East Arms Coordinating (NEACC) created in the aftermath of the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, in which the US, UK and France declared their “opposition to the development of an arms race between the Arab states and Israel”. The paper begins by situating NEACC in the longer history of efforts to regulate the arms trade to the Middle East. The paper then draws on archival research to examine the background to the creation of NEACC, the debates in NEACC on how to measure whether an arms balance existed, and the strategies of restraint adopted by NEACC members. Overall, the paper will place current debates on controversial arms transfers to the Middle East in the context of the shifting models of arms trade regulation applied to the region. The paper also highlights the strategies of restraint short of prohibition adopted by NEACC members, and the implications such practices have for contemporary research on arms export regulation.
Author: Robert Cooper -
The period just after COVID and following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union left the Scottish government in search of a new strategy that reflected these new circumstances. During this period, some parliamentarians, in line with the Scottish Government, sought to promote Scotland's Feminist Foreign Policy. This vision sought to replicate feminist foreign policies of other countries, including Sweden and New Zealand, and reimagine them in a Scottish context, aligning Scottish external affairs with values similar to those of these model countries. Scotland's feminist foreign policy was greatly influenced by work within the committee system. The committee system sought to engage with outside stakeholders, engaging expert and NGO testimony in its creation. As noted during the committee process, feminist principles were not uniquely focused on external affairs; it also meant changing domestic policy. Scotland’s Feminist Foreign Policy, therefore, became part of an ambitious and broad-ranging realignment of Scottish policy. However, it quickly ran into problems. Domestic contestation over feminist values coincided with increased inter- and intra-party polarisation, upheaval at the executive level and greater intergovernmental tension. I argue that failing to maintain parliamentary legitimacy for this strategy would compound these issues and undermine the feminist approach to Scotland's external affairs. As such, I show that the Scottish Government's external affairs strategy is bounded by parliamentary legitimacy, with a corresponding lack thereof opening up Scottish Government strategy to a greater risk of failure.
Author: Alexander Bendix (University of Edinburgh) -
The 2016 decision to leave the European Union marked a major shift in Britain’s international outlook, reflected in the pursuit of the ‘Global Britain’ agenda. Much analysis has focused on this Conservative project and its links to Brexit and imperial nostalgia. Yet while scholars recognise competing desires for British globality in the Brexit debates, Labour’s own construction of global ambition remains underexamined. This paper explores how post-Brexit reorientation toward the Indo-Pacific became a key site for articulating alternative visions of British globality, tracing Labour politicians’ narratives of regional involvement from opposition to government (2016–2024). Using qualitative narrative analysis of speeches, debates, and policy documents, it reveals a fundamental shift in how Labour framed Indo-Pacific engagement. Under the Conservatives, the region symbolised Britain’s strength beyond Europe; under Labour in opposition, it reflected a Britain adrift from Europe; in government, it signals strength through European partnership. The paper shows how Labour’s re-engagement with Europe re-anchors global ambition within a framework of partnership and responsibility. It argues that post-Brexit desires for global prominence were never confined to the right, but that their meaning and expression diverge across political traditions, as narratives actively constitute the meaning of Britain’s evolving international role following Brexit.
Author: Luke Stephens (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Critical studies on PalestineSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani (Durham University)Chair: Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani (Durham University)
-
Israeli settler violence in the West Bank has become a defining feature of life under occupation, particularly in Hebron, where settlers live inside the urban core under heavy military protection. Palestinians in Hebron face daily intimidation, movement restrictions, and property destruction that gradually force displacement. This study aims to examine how Palestinians experience and interpret this systemic violence and how it functions as a mechanism of ongoing dispossession. Using settler colonial theory, the study conceptualizes settler violence as a structural instrument of domination rooted in a persistent logic of elimination. The research builds on recent scholarship suggesting that everyday harassment, spatial fragmentation, and military–settler coordination accelerate Indigenous removal. The project employs a qualitative, document-based approach, analyzing Palestinian testimonies from human rights organizations and spatial investigations from visual research collectives to identify recurring patterns of coordination, spatial control, and lived resistance. We aim to find that settler violence in Hebron is not an aberration but an infrastructure of elimination, an everyday machinery that rebuilds the city around absence, ensuring Palestinian displacement while normalizing colonial permanence. The study hopes to contribute to a deeper understanding of how spatial domination and daily violence sustain settler colonial control in occupied Palestine.
Author: Hesham Haddad (Tallinn University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Critically examining legalised pathways to international migration
This roundtable brings together scholars working on historical and contemporary border security, migration governance, and visa regimes to critically unpack legalised pathways to human international movement. Through various critical approaches, participants question the ontological assumptions of legalisation of certain pathways to international movement, inviting the audience to reevaluate who gets to cross international borders with safety and dignity. While policy narratives in the Global North and beyond often frame legal migration as accessible and orderly, research and lived experience reveal a deeply stratified system in which legality of who gets to cross international borders safely is constructed by power, leading to uneven access for different groups of people to international spaces. Our panellists unpack the genealogy of legalisation of certain pathways to migration over time and space. The roundtable aims to open a space for dialogue on the epistemic and legal mechanisms through which states and security actors define what counts as legal movement, the role of security infrastructure in legalisation of certain pathways of international movement, the role of visa regimes and bordering practices in relation to international hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and case study and comparative insights across geographies. The roundtable takes a critical approach to the question of legalised migration and provides a platform to reflect on methodological challenges in conducting this research.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Samah Rafiq (King's College London)Participants: Georgia Dimitriou (University of Tuebingen) , Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez (University of Warwick) , Jessi Gilchrist (King's College London) , Sona Singh (Lloyd Law College) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Diaspora PoliticsSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London)
-
This paper examines how Indian international students operate as non-state actors in the transnational diffusion of authoritarian politics. While scholarship on democratic erosion in South Asia has predominantly focused on state-led mechanisms, this study highlights the role of migrants--differentiated from diaspora--in reproducing illiberal repertoires abroad. Drawing on empirical research with Indian international students at a UK university, the paper analyses how Hindu nationalist ideologies are transmitted through political remittances, reshaping host-country civic spaces.
The findings reveal how students enact transnational authoritarian practices such as silencing of dissent and policing of peers through digital surveillance, and normalise vigilante intimidation. These practices replicate homeland authoritarian patterns of Hindutva, thereby extending India’s democratic decline beyond territorial borders. In doing so, students emerge as crucial non-state actors who not only carry but actively embed authoritarian ideologies into host-country institutions, with direct implications for diversity, inclusion and social cohesion.
The paper also considers the broader political implications of Indian international student mobility. As Commonwealth citizens, these students hold voting rights in the UK, and their political remittances can directly influence host-country electoral politics. In addition, their integration into the labour market and their participation in diaspora networks, which can sometimes be linked to organisations such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) that has ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), extend Hindutva’s reach transnationally, aligning with global far-right arguments in support of nativism and Islamophobia.
By discussing students as agents of transnational authoritarianism, this paper expands the geographic and theoretical scope of the argument that non-state actors can shape democratic decline in South Asia.
Author: Dipti Nagpaul (University of Sheffield) -
State-sponsored international education has emerged as a key instrument of soft power, yet its curricula, programs, and target audiences remain underexamined. Drawing on comparative cases from France, India, and Turkey, this research shows how transnational educational policies illuminate shifting national identity narratives. It positions Israel as an outlier, due to its prioritization of relations with the global Jewish ethno-religious diaspora over its own transnational citizens.
Using historical texts, government initiatives and official policies, the research demonstrates how privileging Jewish peoplehood over a civic, citizen-based national identity within transnational spaces reflects domestic ideological shifts and the erosion of Israel's civic-republican conception of nationhood. The findings highlight the value of examining international education, not only as a foreign policy tool but as a diagnostic lens for understanding the evolution of national identity narratives.Author: Marianne Matyash (Israel Democracy Institute)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Disrupting, Disabling, Decolonising the AcademySponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
This article traces the collaborative creation of the Illustrated Dictionary of La Búsqueda, a tool developed through participatory workshops with three Mexican search collectives. Drawing on principles of activist research and radical tenderness, we examine how a metalanguage of disappearance emerges when searchers name their own experiences through writing, collage, and dialogue. The workshops, held in Morelos, Puebla, and Sinaloa, centered the epistemic authority of searchers, transforming private grief into shared vocabulary and vivid visual forms. We analyze how meanings crystallize relationally- through intergenerational exchange, bimodal translation between text and image, and the negotiation of diverse regional and personal truths. Each Dictionary entry functions simultaneously as a counter-archive and a political intervention, challenging state narratives that reduce disappearance to statistics while offering intimate practical and affective guidance to emerging collectives. By foregrounding vernacular knowledge and collaborative meaning-making, the Dictionary demonstrates how communities affected by systemic violence produce alternative epistemologies that refuse erasure, honor memory, and sustain collective struggle. The article reflects on art-based methods' possibilities and limitations in contexts of mass disappearance, emphasizing care infrastructures and solidarity as essential to transformative knowledge production.
Authors: Regresando a Casa Morelos* , Voz de los Desaparecidos en Puebla* , Técnicas Rudas* , Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte Sinaloa* , Ana Pandal de la Peza (Central European University) -
As an early career researcher from the Global South, currently in the Turtle Island (Canada), I experienced friction between the expansiveness of the IR discipline regarding its purpose, audiences, and issue areas and the specificity required in doctoral research. IR addresses a range of audiences: state officials, NGOs, local populations, the IR community, other academics, think tanks, and students. Yet, doctoral work must be positioned within an identified ‘gap’ within a niche in IR literature and its audience (coloniality). Simultaneously, the growing use of AI in research has raised questions about the nature of research, originality, and research integrity.
Given this mismatch between research training, the colonial/decolonial discipline’s breadth, the advent of AI for research, and appreciating its expansiveness and multidisciplinary/supradisciplinary tone, IR should reposition itself as a pluriversal knowledge ecosystem that trains research translators and connectors, rather than portraying itself as a confined discipline. This direction requires rethinking IR research, pedagogy, employment metrics, and discipline’s coloniality.
It’s a considerable undertaking not without obstacles; however, a step would be reimagining doctoral dissertations as not filling a gap, but as expressing an authentic voice on IR, labelling IR scholars not as traditional or critical, but as research translators who speak multiple disciplinary languages.
Keywords: International Relations, Coloniality/Decoloniality, Theory, Research, Pedagogy, AI
Author: Mehak Kapur
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Evolving architectures of security and development governanceSponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Larry ATTREE (Rethinking Security)
-
This paper interrogates the viability and normative legitimacy of non-military applications of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), drawing on comparative case studies of Haiti (2023–present) and Syria (2011–present). While R2P was designed as a multidimensional framework encompassing prevention, diplomacy, and post-conflict rebuilding (ICISS, 2001; UNGA, 2005), its global implementation has disproportionately emphasised coercive military measures (Bellamy, 2015; Hehir, 2013). In response, this study engages decolonial theory (Lugones, 2010; Quijano, 2000), Marxist critiques of humanitarian intervention (Chomsky, 2011; Cox, 1981), and human security perspectives (UNDP, 1994; Acharya, 2007) to assess the potential for non-militarised protection strategies grounded in regionalism and local agency. Through qualitative analysis of official UN reports, regional policy documents, and secondary literature, the paper reveals that while Haiti suffers from the invisibility and fatigue of repeated failed interventions (Schuller, 2016; CARICOM, 2023), Syria illustrates R2P’s paralysis in the face of geopolitical deadlock (Thakur & Orford, 2012; Haddad, 2020). Nevertheless, both cases demonstrate partial successes of non-coercive mechanisms, including regional diplomacy, humanitarian corridors, and transitional justice initiatives.
Author: Stephanie Caroline Bryson Zavaleta (Student) -
This paper presents key findings from my forthcoming monograph Examining the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan: Navigating the Security–Development Nexus between Ottawa and Prague (Routledge, forthcoming). The research offers new insights into the security–development nexus through a comprehensive analysis of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) across Afghanistan between 2002 and 2015. It constitutes the first holistic study of all leading nations that operated PRTs, examining how the nexus was applied across provinces with differing levels of threat and instability.
The findings reveal that a “pure” security–development model—whether security-first, development-first, or mutually reinforcing—rarely emerged in practice. Instead, multiple models often coexisted within and across missions, reflecting the fluid and context-dependent nature of stabilization efforts. Moreover, the study demonstrates that understandings of the security–development nexus varied significantly among international actors, shaped by their distinct strategic cultures and institutional traditions, which had tangible effects on how PRTs functioned in the field.
The paper argues that future stabilization missions must adaptively calibrate the balance between security and development: as security improves, civilian-led initiatives should expand, while in deteriorating environments, protection must take priority. Grounded in extensive empirical evidence, this research advances debates on how integrated approaches can more effectively support peacebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected states.Author: Zdeněk Rod (Prague University of Economics and Business)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Foreign Policy (Analysis) in a World of Personalist Rule
This roundtable explores explore the implications of the rise of personalism for Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). The angles from which this question will be approached include: the relationship between personalist rule and the growing politicization of foreign policy, with the suggestion being that latter is both an instrument and a response to personalist rule; the challenges and opportunities the rise of AI present for foreign policy-leaders in a world of personalist rule; how personalistic rule exemplifies the strong connection between how foreign policy is made and substantive foreign policy outcomes, specifically in the sense that leader personality, and dynamic aspects of personality change in particular, underpin both changes in process and changes in outcomes; the role of personalist leaders in eroding foreign policy bureaucracies; and the role that emotions and gendered approaches to leadership play in foreign policy-making. In so doing, the roundtable seeks to develop and critically assess possible new directions in FPA theorising.
Key words:
Foreign policy
Leaders
Populism
Decision-makingSponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupChair: Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)Participants: Kai Oppermann (TU Chemnitz) , Consuelo Thiers (The University of Edinburgh) , Klaus Brummer (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) , Karen E.Smith (LSE) , Ammnon Aran (City St. George’s, University of London) , Juliet Kaarbo (University of St Andrews) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Histories of sovereignty, solidarity and pan-regionalism in the making of IRSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
International Relations (IR) lacks a consistent theoretical account of ‘solidarity’ as a meaningful international phenomenon. Building on Catherine Lu’s analysis of “Solidarity and Structural Injustice,” this paper offers historical and conceptual clarity on ‘solidarity’ in the international system using the case study of Afro-Asian solidarity during the critical, yet underexplored, period from 1960-1965. I advance two interrelated aims. First, I provide an account of Afro-Asian solidarity as it emerged in two parallel arenas: the United Nations (UN) and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) conferences to trace its meaning and impact in the UN. Second, I draw from historical insights to reconceptualise “solidarity” as an unstable and polymorphic category that, when performed by political elites, is capable of producing radical political imaginaries and shifting diplomatic norms, yet bounded by contradiction, contingency, and institutional constraint. Approaching solidarity historically and sociologically, I put forward a subtype called “bounded solidarity” which argues that political elites navigate diplomatic affairs through a constrained version of justice as they balance their ambitions with the realities of colonial legacies and enduring global hierarchies. Taking a practice-oriented approach, it aims to recover the ambitions and ambivalences of a pivotal yet underexamined moment of anticolonial world-making.
Author: Selena Cai (University of Cambridge) -
In the field of IR, the state and sovereignty claims are frequently regarded as ideal-types, which are central to the myth of political modernity. Dominant and revisionist approaches often ontologise these categories and assume them as fixed and stable entities derived from overarching models, which leads to empirical challenges in capturing historical specificities and concrete political practices. Using the framework of Geopolitical Marxism, this project seeks to move this static ontology of IR by offering a metatheory that reconstructs an account of Mexico’s international historical sociology over the longue durée. Over four substantive chapters, this project demonstrate how this approach allows for a theoretically-rigorous and empirically-grounded socio-political analysis, which situates state formation and renegotiated sources of sovereignty in a class-relational perspective which is, geopolitically mediated, and unevenly projected across territorial space. The research first explores the formation of a colonial polity (1521–1821), shaped by haciendas, merchant networks, and a silver-based economy that enabled imperial sovereignty over vast territories within a broader context of geopolitical rivalry across the Americas, altering spaces and class contradictions. It then examines the complex dynamics of the 19th century, where struggles over sovereignty among México profundo (Indigenous), México imaginario (liberal), and México señorial (colonial-like) shaped a postcolonial state struggling to survive amid the rise of the United States. The thesis concludes with an analysis of the Porfiriato (1870s–1910) as a reassertion of México señorial, still reliant on extra-economic appropriation while integrating foreign capital and expanding institutions of dispossession. The thesis examines the key drivers of predominantly pre-capitalist social property relations and the renegotiated strategies of reproduction, accumulation, and appropriation that were central to the making of pre-revolutionary Mexico. It consistently situates state formation and sovereignty not as fixed entities, but as highly contingent on their geopolitical context.
Author: Armando Van Rankin Anaya (University of Sussex) -
The question of political legitimacy is central to the study of governance, shaping how authority is both enacted and contested. Yet the field of International Studies remains dominated by a state-centric paradigm that positions the nation-state as the sole legitimate authority. This framework marginalises non-state systems of rule—such as rebel governance—as inherently illegitimate and frames areas of limited statehood as fundamentally ungoverned. While recent literature increasingly acknowledges non-state forms of governance, it often fails to interrogate how epistemic authority operates within these contexts. This paper explores how knowledge production and epistemic systems underpin the international recognition regime, sustaining narratives that exclude non-state authorities from legitimacy frameworks and reproducing epistemic injustice. Moving beyond the functionalism and orientalism inherent in much of the Western-centric literature on rebel governance, the paper demonstrates how international expert and academic discourses delineate the boundaries of political legitimacy by depoliticising rebel rule. Rebel authority is often reduced to the management of resources serving insurgent interests, while the symbolic and normative dimensions through which rebel governance can articulate alternative political orders remain overlooked. By foregrounding epistemic struggles over recognition, this study contributes to broader debates on knowledge and power in International Studies, demonstrating how dominant discourses and the politics of knowledge not only reflect but actively shape the contours of political legitimacy.
Author: Alessandro Macculi (Roma Tre University) -
Nationalism, the modern state, and sovereignty are not only foundational to modern world politics but also hegemonic conceptualizations through which it is understood. Yet can these intellectually, historically, and politically European constructs genuinely serve anticolonial projects? In other words, can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? This article argues they cannot. Through a critical reading of the legitimation and normalization of nationalism and the nation-state in postcolonial “cultural authenticity,” decolonial “plurinational state,” and the reification of state borders in internal colonialism debates and strands of Marxist historical sociology, I show how nationalism and the nation-state are presented as remedies to colonial domination. Against this, I conceptualize colonial nationalism as a structuring ideology of colonial modernity. I suggest four mechanisms to understand the entanglement of colonialism with nationalism and nation-state in perpetuating coloniality of power. (M1) Prefiguration: nationalism and the nation-state as ontologically Eurocentric conceptualizations operates as the standardized norms of building political community and organizing political power. (M2) Centralization/Homogenization: the modern nation-state as a colonial conquest, of both territories and imaginations, beginning its outward colonial expansion by first conquering and homogenizing within Europe. (M3) Sovereign Masking: Assumed sovereign equality of states obscures the hierarchies embedded in the coloniality of modern world politics. (M4) Elite Translation: postcolonial elites reproduce colonial domination techniques within “independent states” through internal sovereignty. The article advances decolonizing IR debate by moving beyond generic invocations of coloniality and unsettling residual state-centrism, showing how coloniality is reproduced across scales through the coupling and spatiotemporally specific replications of nationalism and the nation-state.
Author: Jan Yasin Sunca (ULB - Univeristé libre de Bruxelles)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Imaginaries and Stories of PeaceSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)Discussant: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
-
This paper explores how aesthetic methods of practice can act as relational infrastructures within transformative research, mediating conflict and reimagining belonging through the inquiry process itself. Drawing on two arts-based interventions used within participatory action research deploying the Facilitative Listening Design (FLD) method in Cambodia, it examines how the Peace Mask project and Life Afloat photography exhibition opened visual and affective spaces of encounter amid Khmer-Vietnamese tension and the precarity of statelessness. Following weeks of dialogic fieldwork, community participant-researchers entered a silent mask-making process that invited stillness, surrender, and introspection. When the resulting washi replicas of their faces were displayed together as a public-facing artefact, distinctions of ethnicity, gender, and ability dissolved into a shared visual metaphor of collective humanity. In the floating villages of central Cambodia, ethnic Vietnamese community members used photography to capture everyday life at risk of disappearance, later exhibiting the images as Life Afloat—a suspended archive that made the unseen visible without naming a stigmatised community. These multimodal practices did not simply represent data but infrastructured transformation, shaping the sensory, spatial, and symbolic conditions through which participant-researchers related to one another and to the issues at stake. Together, they demonstrate how visually accompanied research can generate counter-imaginaries of peace and presence, extending participatory action research beyond verbal dialogue into the realms of touch, stillness, and shared seeing.
Author: Raymond Hyma (University of Warwick / Monash University) -
What is peace? What is conflict? Drawing on the Lacanian–Althusserian tradition and Alenka Zupančič’s What IS Sex?, this paper argues that neither peace nor conflict exist as stable ontological categories. Instead, they form a single, continuous field—a warpeace continuum—analogous to spacetime: curved, warped, and observer-relative. Just as gravity bends spacetime, ideology bends warpeace, shaping what counts as “peaceful” or “conflictual” in specific historical and symbolic configurations. Yet the ideological curvature at stake here is not driven by positive ideologies such as nationalism or capitalism alone. Rather, it stems from what I call negative ideology: the set of unconscious strategies through which subjects and institutions contain, fantasise about, or disavow the contradictions and failures of symbolic structures that promise order. Negative ideology names the effort to fill the constitutive lack around which both war and peace are organised—an absence that functions as the missing signifier of the international. This paper develops a theory of negative ontology as the repressed condition of conflict and peace processes. By examining how peacebuilding discourses attempt to symbolically seal the void of the Real it shows that such efforts reproduce the very antagonisms they seek to overcome. Recognising the negative ontology of warpeace reveals that peace is not the negation of war but its fantasmatic continuation: the scene where ideology manages the failure to achieve closure. Releasing this repression, I argue, allows us to approach peace not as a goal but as an ongoing confrontation with the Real that sustains the political.
Author: Albert Cullell Cano (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
How can play generate new expressions and practices of peace? Presented with 12,337 personal photos from a Chinese boy’s first Africa-bound trip, the now grown man and two fellow authors decide to ‘play’ around with the archive. Visual methods – autoethnography, reversed elicitation, and appropriation – are combined to tackle the 2015 album and fill Africa-China personhood with new contents and contradictions. We propose alternative modes of international access through physical, virtual, and conceptual travel, asking in what manner ‘play’ produces power relations and makes peace possible. This question is addressed through a close analysis of the visuals and the child producer, considering how the tactician experience might be re-dynamized. The research contribution lies in conceptualizing play in IR through a critical analogy from real-world child’s play. Play is a mode through which peace processes are conducted. It allows for the relative safe exploration of difference, the hosting of contradictory thoughts, and practice of metaphorical peace expressions. We discuss ‘sketching’ as in iteration of peace; ‘folding’ as the disarming past tensions; and ‘creasing’ as in creating new impressions. Play is a challenge to adult authority; a slow process of becoming and representing; and a productive relationship with the unknown. In debates over bilateral relations, the controversy is often as much about establishing reality as it is about shaping perception. By retrieving, reinterpreting, and appropriating a large, ten-year-‘young’ visual database that alludes to Kenya, we throw ourselves into active politics-making. Here is an invitation to trespass into the undefined territories between categories.
Authors: Muan Zhang (University of Macau)* , Keren Zhu (Davidson College)* , Kaian Lam (University of Macau) -
This paper introduces clowning in the landscape of International Relations (IR). In short, clowning can function as an arts-based approach to peacebuilding that transcends traditional state-centric paradigm, as demonstrated via the work of Clowns Without Borders International (CWBI). But it furthermore introduces clowning in its multitude of functions – strategically, theoretically and methodologically. Various approaches on conflict management or resolution have been discussed across disciplines and periods, yet transformational or transitional approaches to conflict remain notoriously understudied. The mission of CWBI is to use art and specifically clowning as a means to spread and promote laughter, hope and joy to children in conflict areas or regions hit by disasters, in order to generate resilience. Resilience, however, not in its neo-liberal or corporate definition but as a way to explore creativity, emotion and empathy as ways to think and build peace. What IR has quite often forgotten or ignored should be at the forefront of the discipline’s thinking: accepting the world as one of creative practice, inverted thinking and play.
Author: Mariana Alves Tavares de Araujo (Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg) -
This paper uses a narrative analysis approach to examine how the role of conflicting narratives can shape the notion of peacebuilding and statebuilding. In the post-conflict context in Colombia that emerged in the aftermath of the signing of the Peace Accords in 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC, this became very prominent. Since narratives are central to the way human beings perceive the world and relate to it, they function as a primary source of meanings and systems of signification that construct social realities and guide collective action. The paper examines specifically how competing narratives of peace, security and statebuilding employed by distinct political elites in Colombia, namely the Santos government and the opposition led by Uribe, hindered reconciliation efforts and the full implementation of the peace agreement. The analysis indicates that peace processes are themselves vulnerable to structural impediments and are also inherently subject to the leverage of competing narratives manufactured by local political elites. Therefore, lasting peace will require the disruption of cycles of conflict by formulating more complex, pluralistic narratives and implementing methods like peace pedagogy to reconcile antagonist positions and build ongoing capacity for sustainable transformation.
Authors: Mariana Alves Tavares de Araujo (Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg) , David Hernando Morales Lozano (Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Imaginaries of World PoliticsSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: CRIPT Working groupChair: CRIPT Working group
-
This paper interrogates the future of liberalism in a post-hegemonic world order. Liberal internationalism, dominant since the Cold War’s end, rested on two interlinked assumptions: the universality of liberal ideals and the disciplining power of Western hegemony. Historically, these cosmopolitan ambitions were inseparable from the hegemonic status of Britain and the United States, whose material and normative power enabled liberalism’s global spread. Today, liberalism's hegemonic pillar has eroded. The liberal West faces internal fragmentation and declining relative power, while non-Western actors—China, Russia, India, and others—advance alternative modernities, challenging liberalism’s monopoly on progress. The paper subsequently argues that liberalism’s inability to adapt to these realities has produced two dangerous delusions: the persistence of a Western “security community” and the feasibility of continued universal proselytism. Both are untenable in a world marked by illiberal resurgence, transnational authoritarianism, and the weaponisation of interdependence. If liberal societies cling to universalist pretensions, they risk accelerating their own decline. As an alternative, the paper proposes a shift from liberal cosmopolitanism to a progressive, communitarian republicanism grounded in non-domination rather than proselytism. This entails four key transformations: (1) abandoning ideological expansionism in favour of a renewed Westphalian restraint; (2) subordinating markets to politics to mitigate external and internal domination; (3) reinforcing boundaries between citizens and internal and external interest groups to protect democratic integrity; and (4) cultivating civic virtue to counter the erosion of public life. Such a framework rejects both liberal hubris and reactionary civilisationism, offering instead a modest, pluralist order of “entangled civilisations” coexisting without hegemonic pretensions.
Author: Kevork Oskanian (University of Exeter) -
The tension between pluralism and solidarism within the English School of International Relations (ES) concerns contrasting perspectives on the structure of international societies. Pluralism emphasizes minimal commitment among states, focusing on international order and coexistence. In contrast, solidarism envisions a society of states bounded by shared moral goals, prioritizing justice over mere order. While this debate touches on key issues like human rights and global justice, it also engages with the relationship between international and world society. Barry Buzan questions whether solidarism can be fully contained within the framework of international society, or if it inevitably spills over into the domain of world society. While some scholars commonly associate pluralism with international society and solidarism with world society, others view solidarism not as a distinctive feature of international societies but rather as integrally connected to the transition from international to world society. This paper argues that these theoretical debates have significant implications for transnational environmental governance. In particular, the paper addresses the extent to which addressing transnational environmental challenges requires a form of solidarism that blurs the distinction between international society and world society. Transnational environmental issues demand cooperative action that transcends state borders, raising the issue of whether international cooperation alone is sufficient or if a deeper, solidarist commitment encompassing world society is required. The argument is structured around the proposed concept of ‘layered solidarism’, suggesting that effective environmental governance may require different degrees of solidarist engagement at varying levels of governance—local, national, regional, and global. It requires a more nuanced shift, at various levels of cooperation, between international and world society, and signals a transformation in global politics within a solidarist framework to govern the shared environment.
Author: Zijian Luo (University of Coimbra) -
The discipline of International Relations (IR) faces a crucial test: its capacity to explain future international praxes — or to understand the past as it is reborn within them — depends on its ability to remain pluriversal without lapsing into relativism that undermines ethical and political judgement. This challenge is especially urgent in an era when much of global politics stems from non-Western resistance to Western imperial dominance, yet such resistances often reproduce their own authoritarian, fascist, colonial, and imperial logics, while US imperialism and inter-imperial rivalries further occlude the agency and responsibility of non-Western actors. What this signals is a plurality of international imaginaries and the ethical and political sensitivity of their interpretation — yet IR, oscillating between ontological reductionism and epistemic relativism, remains ill-equipped to provide responsible interpretation.
This paper argues that a key obstacle lies in IR’s persistent reliance on a “dualist imaginary”, resulting from the projection of the Cartesian subject–object dichotomy onto the world of politics, which produces three interrelated problems: the atomisation of “others” that renders all as others of the West; the mutilation of imagination; and the identitarian categorisation of time. These issues pervade both mainstream and critical theories and methodologies. To address them, the paper proposes a methodological shift in three steps. First, it recovers the neglected potential of Cornelius Castoriadis’s theory of the social imaginary to revive imagination and rethink time in world politics. Second, it integrates Karen Barad’s relational “onto-epistemology” and “entanglement” to address Castoriadis’s neglect of societal multiplicity in shaping the imaginary signification of time and societies’ being-in-the-world. Third, it formulates “self-comparison” — the process through which agents act in the world through relationally formed international imaginaries — the result of this internationalisation of social imaginaries and a key methodological tool to overcome the dualist imaginary in IR and beyond.
Author: Sara Kermanian (University of Sussex) -
Comparative political theory (CPT) is often presented as a remedy for Eurocentrism, promising more capacious engagements with non-Western traditions. Yet the aspiration to compare presupposes that political theory can encounter another ontological world without first determining in advance what counts as intelligible. Existing critiques by Sanjay Seth, Roxanne Euben, and Leigh Jenco have shown how CPT continues to rely on Western epistemic norms. This paper extends these critiques by arguing that the problem is not merely epistemic. Rather, CPT exposes a deeper metaphysical limit within Western political theory itself. Drawing on a Heideggerian account of the closure of Western metaphysics, I suggest that CPT activates a disciplinary “death drive,” since in attempting to reach an outside that might extend its horizon, political theory confronts the impossibility of relation under a singular metaphysical world.
The argument is developed through a reading of Voltaire’s intellectual engagement with the ancient Chinese sage Confucius. Voltaire’s re-articulations of Confucius’ philsophy is not simply an example of Enlightenment misinterpretation, but a demonstration of the structural dynamic at issue. The metaphysical horizon through which Voltaire read rendered Confucian thought commensurable with secular rationalism before it could appear on its own terms. Even had he fully understood Confucian theological commitments that would trouble this commensurability, the encounter could not have appeared as an encounter. This early use of comparison in political philosophy demonstrates the finitude of political theory’s world, a finitude that foregrounds the limitations of CPT.
Author: Marlon Waddell (University of Oxford)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Institutional Challenges and Contemporary SecuritySponsor: War Studies Working GroupConvener: WSWG Working groupChair: Harry McNamara (University of Loughborough)
-
Military Lessons Learned (LL) processes aim to derive insights from experiences to foster organisational learning in both peace and war. Research rooted in rationalist and positivist frameworks often treats LL as knowledge management, emphasising efficiency, optimisation, and technical solutions. However, while identified ‘lessons’ are based on testimonies, memories, and judgments of individuals within military organisations, the human dimension is sometimes overlooked. This paper, therefore, asks whose perspectives shape LL and what forms of knowledge are regarded as authoritative. Drawing on military sociology and military innovation literature, it examines how military and civilian personnel in the Swedish Armed Forces engage with LL processes in practice. By analysing how ‘lessons’ are narrated and justified through the construction of shared meanings around success, failure, and change, the paper offers a reflective account of how such narratives shape learning within military organisations.
Author: Sofia Trygged (Swedish Defence University) -
The October 7 th attacks profoundly reshaped civilian and military life in Israel, bringing renewed attention to questions of moral boundaries and the reasoning behind military violence. By exploring how religious leaders interpret military violence, this dissertation seeks to contribute to broader debates on moral reasoning in prolonged conflict contexts. It asks: How do Jewish religious authorities make sense of Israel’s military measures against Palestinians in the aftermath of October 7th ?
By studying the responses of rabbis from the Israeli and Jewish diaspora to the military measures taken against Palestinians in the aftermath of the October 7 th attacks, this dissertation explores patterns of moral reasoning about violence. The study will adjudicate between Haidt and Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory and Gray and Wegner’s Dyadic Morality Theory to test whether moral reasoning about violence unfolds when individuals rely on specific moral principles, or if they hold clashing perceptions of harm. Contributing to this discussion on moral reasoning in moral psychology, it also contributes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict literature by utilizing frameworks developed in literature on Israeli society such as Bar-Tal’s Social-psychological repertoire.
This research design comprises of three qualitative methods: a vignette exercise, a questionnaire about their moral principles and an interview called a ‘moral history’. To study the moral reasoning behind military measures, the thesis will interview a minimum of 30-40 rabbis from varying denominations across the Jewish diaspora in Europe, the UK, and Israel.
Key words: moral psychology; religious reasoning; military violence; October 7th ; Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Author: Daynn Lissa Morisseau (King's College London) -
Despite decades of gender equity policy, military institutions internationally remain sites of persistent violence against women. This reflects not merely implementation failure but active institutional resistance operating through reform rhetoric to mask continuing male supremacist structures. Drawing from qualitative PhD research with Australian women veterans as an illustrative case with international applicability, this analysis reveals how military institutions function as sites of organised backlash against women's integration; where policy becomes concealment rather than transformation. Institutional resistance operates through the three pillars of militarism: martialism, fraternity, and exceptionalism, which position women as threats to male privilege. Critically, this data indicates violence against women has intensified as participation expanded and combat roles opened, revealing that resistance escalates with women's advancement. Male resentment manifests through gendered violence, harassment, reputational damage, and administrative abuse, demonstrating how martial masculinity sanctions violence as territorial defence. Women who report abuse face institutional betrayal whereby the system protects perpetrators whilst pathologising victims, frequently resulting in involuntary medical discharge that reframes institutional violence as individual failure. This pattern represents institutional gaslighting maintaining male dominance whilst claiming progress. Military institutions serve as concentrated sites for examining how patriarchal structures resist gender equity reforms through strategic concealment and active backlash. Understanding this resistance offers insights into how male dominated institutions across society deploy reform language to neutralise challenges to gendered power whilst maintaining structures of male authority and women's subordination.
Keywords: Gender equality backlash; Military institutions; Male supremacy; Institutional resistance; Women veterans; Critical military studies
Author: Natalie Merryman (University of Newcastle, Australia) -
Since the end of the Pacific War, no organization has been so centered in Japan’s narrative of Self as the military, or the rejection thereof, in pursuit of a state identity – first envisioned as the ideal of a ‘peace state’ and transitioning in more recent decades to that of a ‘normal’ one. Despite this, the modern incarnation of the Japanese military, the Self-Defense Forces, and its shifting relationship with the state and society remain largely uninterrogated from the SDF’s own perspective in political science. While there is persistent scholarly interest in how history and war memory shape the contemporary landscape of Japanese politics and security decisions, especially in the context of ontological security, the military’s own sense of Self has not been seriously considered. This talk will attempt to address the gap that exists between state identity and ontological security research and the more organization-centric sociology and civil-military relations literature. By introducing a theory focusing on the ontological security of institutions, this talk will offer insight into how how the institutional identity needs of the Japanese SDF inform its behavior and interact with a wider narrative of Self of the Japanese state in both in the past and present.
Author: June McCabe (University of Warwick, Department of Politics and International Studies)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Invisibility, Illiberalism, and ResistanceSponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)Chair: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)
-
Policing through Personal Data: Covert Surveillance and the Data Double in Multiagency Interventions
Personal data, like one’s medical diagnoses or apprenticeship placements, has traditionally not been considered relevant for police trying to detect conspiracies or disrupt serious crime. Why would it be? But, unlike the communications intercept data which has traditionally been the object of police surveillance, personal data is readily available – held in great volumes by the health service, social services and schools. In the era of big data analytics, the volume and variety of data (rather than its immediate relevance to crime) make it valuable for pattern and anomaly detection. A ‘data double’ can be created, profiled, and risk assessed by police, just by bringing representatives of health, education and social care around a table in a traditional multiagency format. This, and the fact that personal data does not require a warrant for police to collect, makes our banal records of significant interest to the police.
Data Protection legislation contains ‘exceptions’ to the privacy rights otherwise held by populations. These exceptions (such as the crime prevention exception) constitute a new raison d’etat, in surveillance. If the police want the personal data, they can collect it from other agencies – simply by being police. The paper explores the utilisation of Data Protection exceptions in three covert surveillance/multiagency programs. Given the complicity of Data Protection ‘protections’ in this surveillance regime, the paper wonders whether a ‘right to be forgotten’ could ever re-establish a space beyond state controlAuthor: Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Warwick) -
Social movements depend on social media platforms to raise public awareness, gain wider support and connect the likeminded for solidarity. Activists have found their way to resist the inherent algorithmic violence and the suppression from the platforms over the years. Yet, new challenges appear with the rapid changing AI technologies landscapes. While Generative AI (Gen AI) has caught attentions from scholars across disciplines with the focus on the negative impacts of mis/disinformation associated with it, the algorithmic shift on social media platforms and the ways Gen AI distorted information, experience and knowledge are less explored in the context of social movements. The article draws on Treré and Bonini’s work on algorithmic resistance, I first examine the evolving algorithmic violence with social media platforms and Gen AI. Subsequently, I discuss with case studies to illustrate how these potential challenges may discount the effectiveness of the three dynamics of algorithmic activism typology Treré and Bonini identified. The article concludes with a critical discussion on social media user agency, social movements’ struggle for visibility and information fatigue in the everyday battle against algorithmic violence in our society.
Author: Yee Ting Aires Chung (Tallinn University) -
This paper analyzes how Russia employs artificial intelligence (AI) as an illiberal technology to consolidate political control and sustain regime legitimacy. Building on Laruelle’s (2022) concept of illiberalism as a system that resists liberal universalism while adapting modern tools for state power, the study identifies three key domains of domestic AI use. First, AI underpins information warfare, enabling automated disinformation, propaganda, and deepfake production that amplify state narratives and erode trust in independent media. Second, surveillance and censorship technologies—such as facial recognition and algorithmic monitoring—extend state oversight into digital and physical spaces, reinforcing the regime’s control over potential challenges. Third, the government employs AI to demonstrate control over the digital infrastructure, which in turn project stability and legitimacy. Extending on the work of Mahon and Walker (2025), the paper concludes that the regime is using AI to extend its already widespread use of technology for illiberal purposes to cement its power.
Author: Scott Walker (American University in the Emirates)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Narratives of Greatness in International PoliticsSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University)Chair: Brent Steele (University of Utah)Discussant: Brent Steele (University of Utah)
-
How do great powers respond to their declining status in international relations? Existing studies treat decline as a material phenomenon and focus on conflict as the dominant outcome. Integrating insights from psychology, we reconceptualize decline as a social phenomenon and argue that great powers may respond to decline not only via retaliation but also by reasserting their status. Their responses depend on the level of polarization in domestic politics. While low polarization enables the state to muster resources for reassertion, under high polarization retaliation becomes the only feasible option. We assess our argument by comparing US responses to the “Sputnik moment” in the Cold War, when bipartisan consensus enabled Washington to reassert its status through the space race; and to China’s technological rise today, when record polarization only permits retaliation. Using a survey experiment in the US, we assess more directly whether domestic polarization increases support for reassertion or retaliation.
Authors: Rohan Mukherjee (London School of Economics)* , Marina Duque -
How does thinking about your country's past--the good or the bad--affect how you feel about your country? This paper examines whether nostalgia for a national past influences political opinions and attitudes in the present. In particular, we are interested in whether reflecting on one’s country’s past in a positive or negative light affects the extent to which individuals feel an attachment to the country, as well as whether they support teaching both the positives and negatives of their country’s past to future generations. This paper test these claims in Germany, Britain, and the United States via three survey experiments. Our research offers theoretical and empirical implications for political science and memory studies.
Authors: Robert Ralston (University of Birmingham) , Julian Hoerner (University of Birmingham)* -
Schmitt famously declared that “whoever invokes humanity is cheating.” In contrast, IR scholarship tends to approach humanity as self-evidently normative, and its politics as an antidote to state-centered logics. In contrast to these blunt assertions, this paper attends to the productive politics of humanity. In doing so, it begins at the 19th century, where visions of humanity were, in their hierarchical iteration, part of the logic of civilizing missions. Next, it analyzes the post-WWII liberal-international visions of humanity, which dispensed with these formal hierarchies. And yet, in adopting a universalist vision of humanity, these post-WWII iterations overlooked, and in doing so, reproduced global political hierarchies that course through humanity. Finally, the paper proposes that while these frames afflict the more recent politics of humanity, put forth by China under the rubric “the shared destiny of mankind,” uneven narratives of humanity that emerge from its global political margins and foreground its enduring hierarchies open up the possibility of reparative futures.
Author: Elif Kalaycioglu (The University of Alabama) -
This paper takes a critical look at the narratives the British Museum makes about its position as the depository of universal, world cultural heritage. The paper first provides an international political history of the British Museum, situating it in the imperial cultural order of the early 19th century. I then discuss the role the Museum played in the British imperial project, as well as in the international cultural status competition Britain was engaged in with its rivals, first France, then also Germany. The paper analyzes in depth some of the strongest Museum claims about it being a "museum of the world, for the world" by looking in detail at the cases of the Parthenon Marbles, Benin Bronzes and other artifacts the Museum has been asked to restitute, but has steadfastly refused.
Author: Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / New Directions in Global Ethics ResearchSponsor: Ethics and World Politics Working GroupConvener: EWPG Working groupChair: Seán Molloy (University of Kent)
-
What may broadly be conceived of as ‘the Global South’ appears to be incidental to the most influential work on ethics in International Relations. Until now, it has hardly ever been central to this thinking. Michael Walzer’s (1980) arguments that states could be domestically illegitimate, yet still legitimate members of international society appear to foreshadow some of the challenges that Global South states have faced in international affairs, both as subjects of intervention, and as resisters of intervention, among other ethical dilemmas. This paper seeks to outline the challenges for Global South states as ethical actors in international affairs. It also seeks to put forward a sketch of what a ‘Global South ethics’ may look like. The objectives of this paper are thus: To examine ethical identities of states that have hitherto been overlooked in the study of Global Ethics, namely Global South states. To think further about whether the states of the Global South should be conceptualised as ethical actors within an already-existing ethical universe made up of States and Civil Society (Frost, 2009) or whether they should be conceptualised as originators of a distinctly decolonial global ethics (Dunford, 2017); and, to provide examples of Global Ethics in action.
Author: Candice Moore (University of the Witwatersrand) -
International Relations Theory is in an existential crisis. Modernity and the attempt to construct an international order is coming to an end. Neither constructivism nor geopolitics seem to be able to ‘save’ the situation. Recent catastrophes have demonstrated the ephemerality of things that we used to take for granted in the international order after the Second World War, like security or norms. Blockades in the UN Security Council, most recently in the context of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the Hamas-Israel conflict, denote the empirical contingency of the international system. In this paper, I propose a theory of re-creation in International Relations. I propose a theoretical framing of how things like norms or security can be re-created once they are lost or contingent, along two conceptual dimensions: a mimetic and a metaphysical dimension. Mimesis denotes an aesthetic and simultaneously epistemological category of re-production of a reality (first order), through imitation and performance of simulacra, crafting a second order. Second, a theory of re-creation requires a metaphysical dimension, one that is able to incarnate the state of travelling from one condition to another, while mimicking an order that agents can make sense of. Thus, the re-creation of things, whether security or norms, does not imply an eternal return to the same point, but a transformative process in which agents can ‘travel’ to new conditions, while embracing the same core normative order.
Author: Cornelia Baciu (Saarland University / University of Copenhagen) -
This paper develops the concept of an affective-relational ontology of peace as a new direction for rethinking the future of international studies. In response to BISA’s call to imagine what comes next for the discipline, it argues that the ontological and decolonial turns in peace and conflict studies open space for a fundamental reorientation of how we understand coexistence and ethics in global politics. While relational and hybrid approaches have challenged liberal peace frameworks, they remain limited by epistemological assumptions that treat relations as descriptive rather than constitutive. Building on feminist ethics of care and Southern relational philosophies (Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, Lulik, Talanoa), the paper advances affective relationality as both an ontological condition and an ethical practice of coexistence. Here, affect is not emotion but a generative force that binds beings through responsiveness, reciprocity, and responsibility. This reorientation shifts peace from a universal norm to a pluriversal ethos of becoming-with—an emergent mode of coexistence sustained through care and attunement across human and more-than-human worlds. In doing so, it proposes new thinking and methods for cultivating relational, ethical, and decolonial approaches in international studies.
This paper builds on ideas developed in an unpublished manuscript titled “Towards an Affective-Relational Ontology of Peace.”
Author: Minji Yoo (Ewha Womans University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Nuclear Imaginaries in the Third Nuclear Age
How are ideas about nuclear weapons, their possessors, and possibilities for the future constructed, sustained, and policed in the context of the Third Nuclear Age? This roundtable brings together scholars working on critical nuclear weapons scholarship to interrogate the contemporary dynamics that speak to the legitimacy of nuclear weapons, influence policy choices, and shape nuclear cultures. As the global nuclear landscape becomes increasingly complex via modernisation efforts, technological advancements, and the erosion of arms control agreements, the panel seeks to examine this context through the lens of representation and imagined futures. We aim to explore what particular imaginaries do politically, and how understanding these regimes of thought might open up new avenues for advancing disarmament.
Sponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupChair: Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow)Participants: Rebekah Pullen (McMaster University) , Laura Rose Brown (University of Leeds) , Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) , Sterre van Buuren (University of Glasgow) , Robert Saunders (State University of New York) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Pacifism and Militarism: A conversation at the intersection of critical sub-disciplines
Research on militarism has been thriving over the past two decades, especially with the establishment of critical military studies as a vibrant sub-discipline in IR. Pacifism has been increasingly studied in recent years and is beginning to establish itself as a critical lens for better understanding IR. Both fields intersect with other disciplines, including gender studies, peace studies and political theory. But they have rarely been brought into direct conversation. This roundtable will discuss the main avenues where this dialogue is most likely to be fruitful. Potential topics for discussion might include: framings of peace and security in an increasingly militaristic geopolitics; myths and assumptions about the effectiveness of organised violence; the intersections of popular culture with military institutions and practices; the political economy of war and the arms trade; feminist perspectives on war, militarism and peace; sites of resistance and nonviolent alternatives to militarism; epistemological and ontological challenges and opportunities for critical research agendas; the potential interconnectedness of militarism and pacifism.
Sponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupChair: Louise RiddenParticipants: Kimberly Hutchings (Queen Mary University of London) , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) , Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (Loughborough University) , Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex) , Noga Glucksam (Richmond University College London) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Peacebuilding in International SecuritySponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Charles T. Hunt (RMIT (Melbourne))
-
This paper argues that a cleavage on international cooperation emerged within Kosova’s party system prior to the declaration of independence in 2008 and has influenced the party system. After the 1999 NATO intervention, Kosova became an international protectorate ruled by United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). UNMIK was initially considered as a state-builder, but five years after UNMIK’s rule in Kosova, divisions emerged among domestic political parties over the scope and nature of international involvement in domestic governance. These divisions and the roles different parties took gave rise to a cleavage between parties on how to relate to UNMIK but also role of the international community in Kosova in the final status talks. Drawing on U.S. diplomatic cables, media coverage, and interviews, as well as role theory this article traces the early formation of this cleavage among Kosovar political parties before the declaration of independence in 2008.
Author: Mehdi Sejdiu (Heidelberg University) -
Peace processes are increasingly instrumentalized to serve interveners’ geopolitical agendas, underscoring the need to reassess peace practices in an era of heightened global competition and globalisation. This paper introduces the concept of peacemongering—the use of peacemaking and peacebuilding by third parties as tools of hybrid and grey-zone warfare to control (post-)conflict political economies and gain a strategic advantage over rivals. Drawing on four years of multilingual discourse and content analysis of government documents and news media, it employs process-tracing of Russia’s intervention in Syria. By tracing Russian actors' motives for intervention, strategies and behaviours, and their impact on the trajectory of the Syrian conflict, this case reveals how coercive mediation, manipulation of multilateral mechanisms, and economic capture were used to advance Moscow’s global ambitions. This resulted in the weaponization of peace, and challenged prevailing norms associated with peacemaking and peacebuilding, such as conditional sovereignty and multilateralism.
Author: Kasia Houghton (University of St Andrews) -
International statebuilding interventions have had a checkered history, often marked by failure. Key explanations for these persistent failures blame outsiders for their poor understanding of local contexts, unrealistic time frames, the imposition of ill-suited models, conflicting objectives set by external actors, and the failure to allocate power in a way that reflects the reality on the ground. This article takes a step back to argue that international intervenors and local populations have divergent expectations for how they expect states to function. In transitioning from war to peace, the overarching goal for external intervenors has been to "transform" what is perceived as a "fragile" state into a strong state underpinned by liberal values. This transformation entails a significant shift in governance norms, moving away from a local, clientelist model of the state towards an idealized model of democratic governance. However, this shift rests on the universality of five key statebuilding assumptions: (i) States are inherently good; (ii) More stateness leads to better outcomes; (iii) Rule of law will prevail over social norms; (iv) Peace dividends trickle down; and (v) Stability and good governance are mutually reinforcing. This article argues that, even as these five fallacies underpin the framework for international statebuilding, they do not actually match the lived reality in fragile states. As such, these five fallacies offer an alternative and complementary explanation for the failure of statebuilding. This study underscores how these flawed assumptions, ingrained in the framework of international statebuilding, have consistently contributed to its shortcomings.
Author: Christine Cheng (War Studies, King's College London) -
The 2025 Global Peace Index depicts an era of “Great Fragmentation,” marked by record levels of conflict and a diversification of mediators. Existing scholarship interprets this fragmentation through three main lenses—overlapping, confrontation, and disaggregation—each portraying it as a threat to effective peacemaking. This paper challenges such decline narratives and introduces Modular Mediation as a generative framework for understanding the evolution of mediation in a fragmented order. Drawing from complexity theory and international relations, the paper conceptualizes mediation as a self-organizing modular system composed of distinct actors—great powers, international organizations, and middle or niche powers—each leveraging different sources of influence: power, legitimacy, or expertise. These “mediation modules” interact through dynamics of alternation, complementarity, and sequentiality, forming context-specific modular equilibria that enable adaptive coordination without central control. Empirical illustrations from the Ukraine Grain Deal, the Gaza negotiations, and the DRC show how modular configurations emerge through the combination of muscular, normative, and niche mediation styles. Rather than producing duplication or disorder, such modularity fosters flexibility, specialization, and innovation, allowing diverse actors to contribute according to their strengths. By viewing mediation as a modular and heterarchical system, the study offers both a descriptive and prescriptive contribution: it captures how peacemaking adapts amid fragmentation and outlines a model for designing more resilient, scalable, and effective peace architectures. Ultimately, the paper reframes fragmentation not as a symptom of decline but as a catalyst for systemic adaptation and creative reconfiguration in global peacemaking.
Authors: Giulio Levorato (University of Genoa) , Tom Buitelaar (Leiden University)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Repoliticising Peace and PeacebuildingSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
This study explores the challenges and opportunities of Peace Education in Colombia’s peacebuilding process, emphasizing its marginalisation amid security-focused agendas. Despite formal recognition through the Peace Chair (Cátedra de la Paz), Peace Education remains secondary in national policy and practice, contributing to persistent vulnerabilities—such as the continued recruitment of child soldiers, as noted by the UN Security Council—and underscoring the need for integrated, interdisciplinary approaches. Through a critical microanalysis of discourses from government officials, media actors, and peace educators, the study uncovers divergent understandings of peace—ranging from structural reform and territorial security to emotional and behavioural development—that produce fragmented practices and forms of invisibility, hindering collective transformation. To address these tensions, the article integrates frameworks of agonistic peace and decolonial peace education, challenging liberal, consensus-oriented models and redefining peace as an open, dynamic, and contested process where dissent, affect, and plurality are central to democratic life. By bridging micro-level pedagogical practice with structural change and situating Colombia’s peacebuilding experience within debates on the decolonisation of knowledge in International Studies, the study offers a forward-looking contribution to reimagining global pedagogies and epistemologies within the field.
Author: Anna Di Franco (University of Coimbra, FEUC/CES.) -
This policy paper examines the U.S "Peace Through Strength" approach in Lebanon following the 2024 ceasefire agreement with Israel through a postcolonial lens. While a cornerstone of US foreign policy across the Middle East, history has shown the approach’s consistent failure to deliver peace, fuelling regional instability instead. The paper argues that following October 7th, 2023, a distinct discourse has emerged within both the US and Israel, transforming the approach from a traditional deterrence-based concept into a broader political agenda focused on regional dominance and strategic reshaping. Using postcolonial theory and critical security studies, the paper focuses on Lebanon to reconceptualise "peace" as a contested process rooted in local agency rather than external coercion. The analysis further deconstructs how this approach preserves neocolonial power structures, establishing the US as the ultimate guardian over Lebanese sovereignty while pursuing its own strategic interests. Further, it demonstrates that the rhetoric of "stability" masks underlying ambitions to maintain American dominance and protect Israeli security interests at Lebanon’s expense. This intervention contributes to international studies scholarship by illustrating how postcolonial critique can reveal limitations of Western-centric theorisations and provide alternative frameworks through which we can better understand peace, security, and sovereignty in the Global South.
Author: Zainab Younes (BISA member) -
This paper interrogates the necropolitical dimensions of Britain’s approach to peacebuilding following the conflict in Northern Ireland. Focusing on the UK’s Legacy Act and its juridical management of conflict-related deaths, I demonstrate how provisions for conditional amnesty, limitations on prosecutions, and restrictions on inquests constitute the state’s relationship to violence and accountability, revealing law’s role in obscuring as much as clarifying the past. Situated within the longer genealogy of British counterinsurgency law and the global legacies of empire, the Act exemplifies the interplay between law, governance, and sovereignty in post-conflict justice, raising broader questions about legitimacy and accountability in liberal democracies. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, I analyze how Britain deploys liberal legality and democratic accountability as instruments of sovereign preservation within the reconciliation process. Subordinated to a procedural self-policing that publicly acknowledges potential institutional wrongdoing while at the same time rehabilitating the mechanisms of state power that made such wrongdoing possible, transitional justice is, I argue, configured as a means of reasserting sovereign legitimacy and maintaining hegemony over post-conflict narratives, institutions, and accountability itself.
Author: Thomas Beaumont (Texas A&M University - San Antonio, USA)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Roundtable / States of Transition
What is the role of the state in supporting transitions and deeper transformations towards a more sustainable world? This panel brings together leading scholars from across the discipline to reflect on this question. Prompted in part by engagement with Peter Newell's new book 'States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Social Transformation', it will explore the tensions and contradictions between multiple state roles from the military, democratic and welfare state to the industrial and global state and what this means for the prospects of creating a more sustainable world.
Sponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupChair: Charlotte Weatherill (University of Manchester)Participants: Peter Newell (University of Sussex) , Jan Selby (University of Leeds) , Chukwumerijer Okereke (University of Bristol) , Hannah Hughes (Aberystwyth University) -
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / The Transatlantic Relationship and NATO: From Foundation to TrumpSponsor: European Security Working GroupConvener: ESWG Working groupChair: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)Discussant: Lucia Frigo (Royal Holloway, University of London)
-
Has Trump’s confrontational stance toward European allies undermined NATO’s credibility? In this article, we introduce a theory of retrenchment signaling to explain the double-edged impact of the recent shifts in U.S. foreign policy on the perceptions of the strength of NATO’s collective defense commitments. On the one hand, the theory suggests that highly publicized, credible signals of great power retrenchment significantly decrease the general perceptions of the credibility of commitments made by that power toward its weaker allies (first-order effect). On the other hand, the fears of abandonment and deterrence failures create strong incentives for weaker allies to adopt postures credibly signaling increased resolve. This second-order effect of retrenchment signaling ultimately leads to an increased credibility of mutual commitments among the remaining alliance members. We test this theory through a series of repeated preregistered population surveys in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Canada, and the Russian Federation, and an elite survey conducted in the British parliament. Results of our cross-national study demonstrate a dramatic decline in the credibility of the U.S. commitments to NATO during the first few months of Trump’s second administration. At the same time, we also show a systematic increase in the credibility of collective defense commitments provided by other NATO allies. Importantly, our study in the British parliament provides empirical support for the claim that European political elites are even more skeptical of the U.S. willingness to defend its allies than the general public. Our findings contribute to the current debates about the impact of Trump’s second-term foreign policy and to the existing scholarship about the impact of great power retrenchment on world politics.
Authors: Michal Smetana (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague) , Lauren Sukin (London School of Economics and Political Science)* , Marek Vranka (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague)* , Ondrej Rosendorf (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague)* , Isabelle Haynes (Charles University / Peace Research Center Prague)* -
What was Germany's role in the creation of the Western postwar order, generally referred to as the 'Liberal International Order' (LIO)? Engaging with scholarship on alliance formation and theories on the LIO, this paper argues that the West German state performed an ideological role that was central for the emergence of the emerging European postwar settlement. Germany's Christian Democratic leadership espoused a civilisational worldview that conceptualised the 'West' as a religious community of fate, a position that was shared by US administrations of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Safeguarding and reconstructing Germany was therefore constructed as a civilisational imperative that was akin to saving Western civilisation from the atheist threat of communism as a whole. The paper therefore contributes to recent scholarship that has begun problematising the liberal underpinnings of the LIO at its creation by showing the more complicated origins of the LIO.
Author: Martin Kirsch (University of Cambridge) -
One of the main geopolitical controversies of the post–Cold War period concerns the alleged promises of NATO non-expansion made by Western leaders during the negotiations for German unification (1989–90). A central figure in this debate was West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who stated publicly at the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing in January 1990 that “there will be no expansion of NATO territory to the East, that is, toward the borders of the Soviet Union.” However, as Mark Kramer (2005) notes, this statement never materialized in any binding treaty, and the narrative of such promises was later used as a pretext for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While there is broad historiographical consensus that no formal guarantees were given, Sarotte (2011) and Spohr (2013) argue that Western diplomacy conveyed ambiguous signals that reinforced Soviet expectations that NATO would not expand eastward. To clarify this debate, this study examines the concrete role played by Genscher in generating ambiguity regarding NATO’s postwar role during German unification. Drawing on diplomatic records published in Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit (2011), Michail Gorbatschow und die deutsche Frage (2011), and Die Einheit (2015), it concludes that Genscher was decisive in promoting a CSCE-based European security architecture in which Cold War alliances would dissolve, a vision not shared by other NATO members nor by the German government itself.
Author: Victor Wolfgang Kegel amal -
In his second term in office, US President Donald Trump has introduced revolutionary – if haphazard – changes in US foreign policy, in particular as relates to trade, relations with long-standing allies and relations with perceived ideological opponents and allies. This paper will explore Europe’s response to the Second Trump revolution, placing this analysis in the context of the range of strategic options open to Europe. The paper will examine different policy areas (in particular, trade, defence and political ideology) and assess the response of different European states and NATO and the EU to the Second Trump revolution. The paper will argue that, while existing international relations theories and strategic vocabulary (e.g., balancing, bandwagoning (including appeasement) and hedging) shed light on European response to the Second Trump revolution, they are too reductionist and limit our understanding of the dynamics at play. Although there are important divisions amongst European states, the paper will argue that European states have pursued a relatively coherent strategy towards the second Trump administration, key elements of which including buying time, standing strong on Ukraine, seeking to moderate US behaviour to the extent possible, building collective European strength and building ties with other like-minded partners. The strategy can be summed up as making the best of a bad world – the medium-term success or failure of the strategy remains to be, but it is sensible international politics in difficult circumstances.
Author: Andrew Cottey (University College Cork)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Variegated dynamics of commodification, oppression and contestationSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
The difficulty of deconstructing the War on Drugs: prohibitionist norm decay amid waning US hegemony
Why does a global narcotics governance regime that has failed to achieve its central objective—a ‘drug-free world’—endure, despite ever-louder calls for reform? It is assailed on all sides, yet prohibitionism remains essentially unassailable as the regime’s core organizing principle despite its advanced decay. In the West, liberalizing pressure manifests itself in ‘soft defection’ at the margins: i.e. greater harm reduction policy, reduced criminalization, increased healthcare interventions, and even recreational legalization. In the East, defection occurs in the opposite direction: i.e. harm augmentation, encompassed in increasingly punitive and hardline responses that frequently result in severe human rights abuses. In both cases, there is a degree of normative and substantive divergence from prohibitionism, yet the overarching edifice remains broadly intact.
This paper argues that an under-acknowledged part of the explanation for the puzzling co-existence of norm decay alongside regime ossification lies in waning US hegemony. In the 1960s, Washington was both able and willing to exert genuinely hegemonic influence over the establishment and institutionalization of the regime. However, it no longer has the capacity to recast it in a new image attendant with its own (contradictory) processes of liberalization. Moreover, because the ideology of prohibitionism was embedded so deeply in the institutions and practices that accompanied the expansion of the regime, its normative power as an accepted ‘common sense’ has remained remarkably resilient despite its evident shortcomings, rendering substantive reform exceptionally difficult in a post-hegemonic world. The paper fills a gap in the literature whereby contemporary IR and IPE scholars have rarely applied the analytical tools conventionally used to understand the post-1945 liberal order in general to the global governance of drugs in particular.
Author: Matthew Bishop (University of Sheffield) -
The green transition is increasingly critiqued as a business-as-usual project - one that reproduces extractivist logics under the banner of sustainability, reconfiguring rather than resolving the crises of capitalism and climate. This paper examines how extractivism endures within the green transition through bureaucratic hegemony: the everyday mechanisms that legitimise and govern violent resource frontiers in the name of sustainability. While framed as a global response to climate breakdown, it is local bureaucratic practices that sustain and reproduce familiar dynamics of extractivism and capital accumulation. Environmental impact assessments, corporate transparency regimes, and participatory consultation frameworks signal administrative order while embedding extractive imperatives within mundane governance routines, obscuring the unequal power structures they perpetuate.
Drawing on neo-Gramscian and everyday IPE approaches, and based on fieldwork in Argentina’s lithium sector, the paper conceptualises bureaucracy as a mechanism mediating between the global and the local. By aligning the two, it transforms conflict into procedure and disorder into management, and thus becomes a stabilising function for capital accumulation in times of crisis. As such, the global promise of sustainability as articulated in market-based visions of the green transition becomes materially embedded in everyday life, even though it reproduces ecological and social violence.
By tracing this scalar entanglement, the paper argues that the green transition’s political economy depends not only on markets or technology, but on the mundane infrastructures that make extractivism appear lawful, participatory, and sustainable. Bureaucratic hegemony thus reveals how the global pursuit of a “green future” is sustained through local practices of order, where the administrative everyday becomes a key site of capitalist power.
Author: Vicki M Reif-Breitwieser (Univeristy of sheffield) -
This paper directs attention to contemporary everyday contestations of national growth models, putting into conversation recent developments in everyday political economy and comparative capitalisms research. Further developing existing scholarship, we argue that the everyday is a crucial site for the (de)legitimation of dominant economic structures or sectors, which can be driven by top-down, elite efforts, and/or by bottom-up, citizen- and civil society-led endeavours. To illustrate these mechanisms, the paper utilises a dual case design that zooms in on Trump’s US-China trade war and on the popular discontent against tourism in Spain. The trade war was not designed by everyday agents, but Trump and elite policymakers have managed to present it back to the American people in ways that resonate with their broader everyday experiences. By using narratives such as “China is stealing our jobs”, we argue that Trump is seeking to gain everyday legitimacy by contesting structures of the global and of the US economy. The Spanish case, on the other hand, illustrates how everyday experiences can be what sets dynamics of contestation against a growth model in motion. We argue that while the tourism industry has long been at the core of Spain’s capitalist model, everyday forces are increasingly and publicly contesting its legitimacy, highlighting its perceived negative effects on locals and cities. In this way, we bring attention to how the macrocharacteristics of a national capitalist type interact with the experiences of its everyday agents, showcasing how essential the latter are for the former’s reproduction and/or contestation.
Authors: Guillermo Alonso Simon (University of Warwick) , Kasper Arabi (University of Warwick)* -
Over the past decade, global cannabis regulation has undergone rapid yet uneven transformation, from decriminalisation and medical use to the full legalisation of recreational markets. These processes pose profound questions for the future of governance and global capitalism: how are new markets for a once-prohibited substance being shaped, regulated, and integrated into the global economy? What do these dynamics reveal about the evolving relationship between state, market, and capital?
Uruguay’s state-controlled model, the U.S.’s fragmented commercial systems, and Canada’s hybrid framework illustrate contrasting approaches to market formation and state intervention. While law, public health, and economics have generated substantial analysis (e.g. Crick et al., 2013; Fischer et al., 2020; Goldstein & Sumner, 2021), these literatures rarely address the deeper political-economic logics driving legalisation. Political economists, conversely, have tended to overlook the significance of drug policy and prohibition within broader structures of accumulation and regulation.
In analysing the USA and Canada through a historical materialist framework, this paper argues that cannabis legalisation represents a critical frontier for international political economy (IPE), offering insight into how new commodities emerge through the intersection of global prohibition regimes, national policy reform, and capitalist expansion. The research analyses cannabis legalisation as both a moment of regulatory transformation and an instance of commodification within late capitalism.
By rethinking drug policy through critical political economy, the paper invites International Studies scholars to consider how emerging markets like cannabis challenge conventional understandings of global governance, moral regulation, and capital accumulation—and to ask whether the discipline is prepared to engage with these new frontiers.
Author: Adam Lloyd (University of Sheffield) -
This paper uses the ‘trans culture war’—here understood as a coordinated, multi-scalar attack on trans rights and subjectivities in the UK—as a departure point to make sense of the political economy of the body in the context of capitalist crisis. Despite resurgent interest in the study of crisis since 2007/8, critical IPE scholarship has paid scant attention to trans struggle and to the phenomenon of body politics more generally. Yet understanding the political economy of the (trans) body is, we argue, a pressing task. This is because converging economic, political, social, and ecological crises, often referred to as the ‘polycrisis’, have seen the far right and other reactionary political actors increasingly build their platforms on contestations over body politics—from access to abortion services, gender equality initiatives, and sexuality education in schools to gay marriage and adoption rights—as well as strident forms of anti-trans politics. We consequently seek to advance critical IPE scholarship on crisis, and the gendered dimensions of crisis, by mobilising insights from Black, decolonial, and trans feminist scholars regarding the centrality of gender- and race-making practices to processes of capitalist development and transformation. Rather than viewing the trans culture war as a distraction from other conventionally ‘political’ or ‘economic’ crises—or invoking the (trans) body as a metaphorical or figurative site of power relations abstracted from political economy—we locate the contemporary attack on trans rights within a historical set of state (and extra-state) practices that seek to (i) discipline and govern certain populations regarded as unproductive, unruly and/or otherwise disposable and (ii) instantiate or retrench dominant gender and racial orders that are seen as in flux or under threat.
Authors: Merisa Thompson , Ellie Gore (University of Manchester)
-
-
3:00 PM
→
4:30 PM
FR05 Panel / Why people join: interrogating public participation in protest and combatSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Ella Bullard (BISA)Chair: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester)
-
Studies that seek to explain why people become involved in armed struggle against state forces often focus on specific influential factors – such as identity, ideology, social networks, etc. – or address a variety of influences working at one particular level of analysis – e.g. individual, group, or societal-level factors. In contrast, a social-ecological framework encourages us to consider a broad range of influences across multiple levels of analysis, providing a holistic understanding of an individual’s journey. Drawing on empirical interview data from research on the loyalties of Kurdish fighters (Peshmerga) in Iraq and Iran, this paper adopts a social-ecological approach to analyse why individuals joined and what influenced their loyalties throughout their involvement. In doing so, this paper provides insight into the personal experiences of Peshmerga from three Kurdish parties: Komala (focusing on the period following the 1979 Iranian Revolution), and the KDP and PUK (prior to the 2003 Iraq War).
Author: James Hewitt (University of St Andrews) -
The militia-ization of security through the mass arming of civilians or their recruitment into pro-government militias (PGMs) has become common among governments engaged in counterinsurgency. While much of the literature views these policies as outsourcing violence for functional needs, recent studies suggest that PGM formation often serves as a socio-political tool. Governments may use such policies to fragment populations, manipulate social divides, reward loyalist groups, and isolate disloyal populations or opposition. However, how can we identify the rationale guiding incumbents in militia-izing society? This paper proposes a test based on four criteria: The strength of the regular forces and the need to compensate for manpower shortages; the effectiveness of militia-ization in achieving the policy’s stated goals; the geographic and demographic distribution of recruitment and arming; and the framing of the policy by its architects and leaders.
To illustrate the validity and applicability of this test, the paper employs the case of Israel. In the aftermath of Hamas’s onslaught on the 7th of October 2023, the Ministry of National Security launched a wide-scale militia-izing society, through the formation of hundreds of volunteer-based Rapid Response Squads (Kitot Konenut) in Israeli cities and the widespread distribution of arms to civilians, lowering the basic standards for firearms licensing. As a society and system traditionally averse to the decentralisation of security, Israel is a likely case to support the argument that militia-ization may often be motivated by socio-political considerations, thereby also demonstrating the applicability of the test.Author: Yaniv Voller (University of Kent) -
Radicalisation studies has been a growing branch of International Studies in recent years. Therefore, an important body of work has developed on how to deal with radicalized individuals and groups yet, very little has been done on how academics organize their work and translate their knowledge into political action.
This paper draws on Hass´s concept of “epistemic community” while using expert interviews with academics, policy-makers and practitioners to question the formation of such a community in the French context. This is of high importance as a strong epistemic community would have a higher capacity of translating one´s work into the political sphere.
The key findings of this study are that the French radicalization scene lacks intense collaboration networks, and therefore, a formal epistemic community. This is due to both the important amount of funding that had the effect of atomizing the field, as well as a broader French knowledge culture and political situation.
While this study focuses on a specific national case, the use of the “epistemic community” concept would be of great interest for other works in International Studies and the lessons of this paper can be applied to more general discussions on the reappropriation of academic knowledge by decision-takers.Author: Violette Mens (Marburg Philipps Universität)
-
-
4:30 PM
→
4:45 PM
Break 15m
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / (Gendered) Bodies of / in IRSponsor: Gendering International Relations Working GroupConvener: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)Chair: Karia Hartung (Royal Holloway, University of London)
-
This paper explains how and why the conceptual grammar of IR and security studies are inadequate for understanding international politics and security, and calls for the disciplinary conversation to move beyond the comparatively narrow categories of state and body toward the broader, more heterogeneous lenses of land and flesh. IR has long been underpinned by the body, although this was hidden from view until feminist and critical interventions brought embodiment to the center of the field. Work over the past three decades has excavated how international politics is profoundly embodied: bodies are made and unmade through practices of violence and security, in ways that are biopolitical, necropolitical, gendered, racialized, and species-differentiated. Yet the particular body at the foundation of IR—the masculinized, racialized, heteropatriarchal Leviathan—has been revealed as deeply unhealthy for global politics while the body itself has been found to be profoundly, ontologically insecure and precarious. Building on earlier interventions, including Wilcox’s Bodies of Violence (2015) and Purnell’s Rethinking the Body in Global Politics (2021), this paper consolidates scholarship that has unsettled, denaturalized, and politicized the body as ‘the political object par excellence’ (Epstein, 2021: 1) while highlighting alternative imaginaries that challenge the Eurocentric and exclusionary body politic (Fishel, Krickel-Khoi, Volkner) and have worked to reframe states and international systems as interdependent, multiple, and dialogical rather than sovereign, bounded, and singular. This paper also advances a radical shift from focusing on privileged and ontologically rare embodied subjects to attending to differently/dis embodied subjects-objects, ‘nobodies’, and the more-than-human(ised). Drawing on Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, this paper details the alternate concept of enfleshment and explain how enfleshment exposes the limits of IR’s increasingly corporeal ontology while opening new possibilities for theorizing global politics.
Authors: Kandida Purnell (Richmond, American University London) , Lauren Wilcox (University of Cambridge) -
Building on feminist analyses of militarization (Enloe 2000), femonationalism (Calderaro 2025), and the regulation of racialized women's bodies in France (Vergès 2019), this paper investigates the historical entanglement of natalist, feminist, and militarist discourses in French statecraft. It asks: under what historical and discursive conditions have pronatalist and militarist agendas converged with state feminism to produce a logic of "feminist militarization"?
Grounded in historical feminist perspectives, this paper conceptualizes feminist militarization as the co-optation of gender equality discourses to legitimize security and demographic imperatives. It argues that President Emmanuel Macron's call for a "demographic rearmament" (January 2024) exemplifies a broader reconfiguration of the French state's security reasoning, where feminist language becomes a vehicle for militarization. Central to this recent transformation is the rise of a universalist feminism within French feminist diplomacy - an approach rooted in far-right and femonationalist registers that explicitly marginalizes intersectional perspectives, thereby marking a puzzling shift in the genealogy of feminist state practices.
Methodologically, this paper combines discourse analysis with archival research in diplomatic archives (Paris), colonial archives (Aix-en-Provence), and digital archives documenting the post-Charlie Hebdo securitization moment.
By tracing key critical junctures (from the interwar period and decolonization to Europe's current remilitarization), this paper historicizes how state feminist has rearticulated white women's bodies as both instruments and symbols of the nation's demographic health while simultaneously securitizing racialized women and their children.
Ultimately, this paper contributes to feminist and postcolonial debates on norm co-optation by showing how feminist vocabularies, when entagled with security and demographic logics, reproduce the genderd and racialized foundations of state power.
Authors: Emma Donnaint (Université de Montréal) , Emma Limane (Université de Montréal) -
This paper explores how representations of bodies that experienced sexual violence and remembering gendered bodies in war create affective resonance and dissonance, and how it may contribute to gender justice. Building upon feminist research on the intersection of embodiment, gendered violence and war, and memory, this paper contributes to the scholarship on violence is politically generative by constituting the gendered logic of war and identity. My empirical analysis focuses on the War and Women's Human Rights Museum (WWHRM) in South Korea, remembering Japanese military 'comfort women'/wartime sexual slavery. Utilising auto-ethnography, I examine how the representation of victims of sexual violence at the museum creates affective resonance and dissonance where multi-layered interests and narratives are present. The museum has questioned the male-centric and nationalistic narratives of war and colonialism that forget and silence victims. With an emphasis on gender, the victims/survivors' perspectives, and human rights, the museum has the potential for decolonial remembrance. In a post-conflict society, remembering victims' bodies complicates the ideas of 'post' violence, which are productive within affective and materialist regimes of nationalist and masculine aspects of South Korean state. I argue that affective resonance and dissonance from witnessing violence against bodies open a space for reflecting on violence's consequences and imagining gender justice.
Author: Chaeyoung Yong (University of St Andrews) -
This paper reports on the findings of Future Families, a pilot research project examining how people in the UK are thinking about reproductive futures in the context of intensifying and increasingly visible climate change. Anxieties about low birthrates and population decline are looming large in a number of countries. While these sentiments can shade into the racist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory among the amorphous online far right, the idea that low birth rates represent an endemic societal pessimism is widespread across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, fears are apparently mounting among young people about unlivable, or at least highly uncertain, futures due to accelerating climate change. This paper attempts to provide a rebuttal to both the crude pronatalism of the ‘anti-woke’ right and the misanthropy of populationist environmentalism by reflecting on climate change-related reproductive concerns in their full situatedness and complexity. Drawing on detailed embodied accounts presented by research participants in six in-depth, qualitative interviews, it complicates narratives of ‘climate anxiety’, provides rich insights into how participants envisage (non)reproductive futures and points to possible alternatives to nuclear-family-based kinship relations.
Author: Matilda Fitzmaurice (Lancaster University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / AI Ethics and the MilitarySponsor: International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working GroupConvener: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)Chair: Mike Bourne (Queen's University Belfast)
-
Gatopardismo is a policy of changing everything so that everything stays the same. For Cusicanqui (2012), it is rehearsed by the academics in the Northern Hemisphere whose elaborate networks of lectureships, conferences and funding perpetuate ‘internal colonialism.’ It is an ordering by which the ‘colonized’ remain in their place while the era of purported decolonization acquires a high-profile academic significance. This contribution argues that AI ethics research has become a gatopardist enterprise, where the high-vaunting talk of ‘ethics’ actively depoliticizes AI’s fleshy and filthy existence. The bodies that keep on piling (Zalewski 1996) while we engage in manifold onto-ethical and epistemological sense-making regarding AI are indicative of the increasing detachment of ‘ethical thought’ from its political circumstances.
This contribution presents AI ethics research as a ‘mule.’ The mule is an equine hybrid of a donkey and horse that cannot reproduce. AI ethics has become a hybrid of two broad strands of thinking: a) complex theorizing on agency of technical systems (automated, semi-automated and mechanical) and b) philosophical reflection on the existential character of warfare and its changing matrices (e.g., heroic and post-heroic war, human vs. post-human war). My argument is that in becoming the ‘mule,’ AI ethics research has foresworn a direct engagement with techno-social praxis, which is always political. It has also largely given in to the ‘hype’ surrounding AI, supported by the Northern Hemisphere’s colonialist academic networks. Advancing a call for post-ethical thinking in AI ethics research, I rehearse the injunction by critical scholars of decolonization to pollute ethical thinking by interweaving political praxis into our reflections. This includes but is not limited to weaving into research commitments by the researchers to prohibit AI involvement in warfare.Author: Toni Cerkez (Tallinn University) -
This paper examines the profound ethical challenges of integrating AI-powered decision-support systems (AI-DSS) into high-stakes crisis environments. By accelerating decision-making tempos and influencing life-and-death judgments, these systems raise urgent questions about moral authorship, accountability, and the preservation of meaningful human oversight. While debates over lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) have received significant attention, far less scrutiny has been devoted to the more subtle yet equally consequential ways in which AI-DSS shape human ethical reasoning during crises.
Building on James Moor’s hierarchy of ethical agents and recent scholarship on machine ethics, the paper develops a hybrid exemplar framework that integrates deontological, consequentialist, and virtue ethics. This pluralist model is designed not to replace human ethical deliberation, but to enhance it by embedding structured moral reasoning directly into AI-DSS design and operation. Key features include tiered ethical overrides, dissent logging, trust calibration mechanisms, and transparent audit trails—tools that reinforce human accountability and guard against the uncritical delegation of moral authority to machines.
Moving beyond abstract theory, the paper translates its ethical framework into practical design and governance principles. It proposes concrete metrics for evaluating human–AI interaction, including transparency, override frequency, and the psychological effects of AI use on decision-makers. By embedding ethical safeguards directly into AI-DSS, this approach seeks to mitigate escalation risks, preserve human moral agency, and uphold the legitimacy of crisis management processes.
The paper concludes by offering a roadmap for responsible innovation and oversight, urging institutions to treat AI-DSS not merely as technical tools but as shared cognitive entities that co-shape decisions. In doing so, it reframes the AI ethics debate, shifting focus from autonomous weapons to the deeper systemic transformation of human judgment and accountability in an era of algorithmic warfare.
Author: James Johnson (University of Aberdeen) -
Understanding the Effects of Advanced Military Technology on Pastoral Security: Speed and Complexity
It is commonly understood that as technology advances it becomes faster, more complex and interconnectable. This is likely to persist as new technologies allow us to perform feats of strength and intellect far beyond what we could achieve alone. In the context of the military, these capabilities guide planning and resourcing, to enable forces to operate faster and more precisely against less technologically capable adversaries. Though strategically sound, this push to outpace our enemies creates a context in which the problems of speed and complexity also accelerate, leading to a future operational environment that will be too fast, complex and dangerous for humans to operate within. This presentation will explore what it might be like to take part in military operations in the midst of technologies outpacing of human warfighters.
In particular, I draw out how pastoral security specifically is affected by the deployment of these acceleratingly fast and complex technologies in advanced military technologies. I will highlight how speed and complexity relate to, and threaten, pastoral security. I will then discuss the implications of these relationships and threats to operational effectiveness, morale and security. By doing this, I will explore a hitherto under-researched area of the future battlefield and demonstrate the importance of thinking pastorally about this future.Author: Kenneth Wilkinson-Roberts (Lancaster University) -
Over the past decade, research on the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for the military has expanded tremendously. Early discussions focused primarily on autonomous weapon systems (AWS), but the debate has since broadened to encompass human‑AI interaction across a range of military practices. Although much attention has been devoted to ensuring human control over AI, the notion of agency remains under‑theorised in this context. In particular, the prevalent model of “human‑machine teaming” calls for a reconceptualisation of agency that moves beyond the simplistic dichotomy of human versus machine agency.
This paper investigates how agency can be understood as an analytical concept within military AI. It argues that agency should be viewed as a distributed phenomenon, jointly constituted by humans and AI systems. By reframing agency in this way, the study contributes to ongoing ethical, legal, and political debates surrounding the deployment of AI in the military domain.
Author: Hendrik Huelss (University of Southern Denmark) -
South Asia is a distinctive geostrategic environment characterized by a perilous geography, intractability of the longstanding rivalry, a fraught border, short launch-to-impact times, and three geographically contiguous nuclear weapon states (NWS) persistently engaged in testing each other’s resolve to confirm whether escalation is both ‘controllable and calculable’.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’. With the sharpening of rivalries in the broader pursuit of escalation dominance, both India and Pakistan have continually sought new advantages and technological breakthroughs to improve their position. Fully Autonomous weapon systems (AWS) based on their capability to autonomously track, select, and engage targets at superhuman speed, with an opaque human-machine interface, without taking into account the human fail-safe, at reduced personnel costs in denied environments, will have transformative effects on stability, human decision-making and command and control in the South Asian context. The central research question explored was whether autonomous weapons pose a challenge to Stability in South Asia.
Author: Abhishank Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Actors, Transitions, Global Climate GovernanceSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Jan Selby (University of Leeds)
-
Recent debates in Global Governance (including global environmental governance) underscore the return of Realpolitik and the resulting crisis of multilateralism and global norms. As geopolitical rivalries intensify—particularly between the United States and China—and far-right nationalism surges as a reactionary force against environmental policies worldwide, the resilience of global sustainability norms grows increasingly uncertain. This paper asks whether, and how, environmental norms can continue to shape the evolving world order and global governance architecture under these conditions. It further examines who acts as norm entrepreneurs and defenders, and through what strategies, in sustaining environmental norms within the new environment of Realpolitik. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of norm-ordering, norm-layering, and norm-pairing, the study investigates the distinctive role of advocacy networks in the Global South as pivotal norm entrepreneurs in the governance of critical minerals for just energy transition, situated at the intersection of intensifying geopolitics and environmental justice. Based on semi-structured interviews, online ethnography, and participant observation at official events on global mineral governance, the analysis reveals how these often-overlooked advocacy networks in the Global South function as important “hidden agents” in the defense and re-articulation of environmental norms. Operating across multiple boundaries—public and private, North and South, global and local—they bridge divergent worlds of resource politics and sustainability governance, advancing a pluriversal and decolonial vision of global governance amid shifting geopolitics of critical minerals.
Author: Hyeyoon Park -
Reducing methane emissions provides one of the most obvious routes available to short-term climate mitigation – a fact that has become widely recognised since the launch of the Global Methane Pledge in 2021, when states pledged to reduce global emissions by 30% by 2030. Yet both methane emissions and atmospheric methane levels continue to rise and, crucially from the perspective of this paper, very little research has so far been conducted on methane policy, regulation or politics in practice, and there exists little good understanding of why progress on methane emissions has been so weak. This paper maps out a framework and agenda for understanding these issues. Drawing upon various strands of work in research in political ecology, environmental politics and cognate fields, it argues that methane politics is distinctive and different from ‘carbon dioxide politics’; and argues, more broadly, that the specific challenges associated with methane require us to refine, and perhaps even completely rethink, some core climate policy frameworks. This paper forms an initial output of the Global Methane Politics project, a five year European Research Council advanced grant-funded project that will run from 2026-2030.
Author: Jan Selby (University of Leeds) -
International political economy (IPE) has become increasingly concerned with global energy transition but its focus on states and markets precludes serious consideration of the climate movement as a purposive actor from below. Social movement studies and environmental politics literatures have paid more attention to climate movement organisations but these neglect analysis of the movement as a whole, including its influence in the realm of international climate politics. This paper therefore considers the past, present and future role of the climate movement in the dissemination of global ecological consciousness, construction of international climate governance institutions, and creation of green markets. To do so, it compares organisational cases (Greenpeace, 350.org and Extinction Rebellion), each representative of a period of movement history, between the UK and US, to chart the impact of climate movement through time.
The climate movement’s development interacts with the idiosyncratic characteristics of global climate change as an issue, which produces a series of dilemmas along four dimensions: organisational structure, politics, strategy, and framing. As the contradictions of each dilemma intensify, the climate movement has become less impactful in international climate politics leaving anti-climate forces relatively unencumbered. Prospects for global climate transition now depend on climate movement renewal.
Author: Chris Saltmarsh (University of Sheffield) -
How China and India address the issue of climate change and GHG mitigation will have a significant bearing on the future of the planet, given their economic and demographic weights. However, despite having shared circumstances and interests on climate change, their cooperative endeavours have remained chequered at best, subservient to dominant geopolitical priorities. This is primarily because the China-India climate diplomacy is situated within the traditional international relations paradigm, shaped and constrained by considerations of relative gains and strategic advantages.
Adopting the constructivist approach, this paper contends that an enduring climate cooperation between China and India is possible only through a discursive reconstruction of the climate question as an existential and collective threat that transcends zero-sum geopolitical confines. Through qualitative discourse analysis of policy documents, diplomatic statements, and joint communiqués, the paper explores how such reframing could foster new norms of resilient bilateral climate cooperation.
The paper argues that China and India must draw from their heritage as civilisational states in their neighbourly engagements, shedding the limitations of the Westphalian sensibilities. Climate change must therefore be reframed as a 'civilisational threat' that imperils not only their socio-economic and ecological futures, but their cultural heritage, knowledge and value systems, and worldviews. Such a reconstruction of the climate question will elevate the climate agenda above everyday geopolitics, justifying and necessitating closer cooperation that endures geopolitical whims. Finally, founded on this reconstructed understanding of climate change, the paper formulates a resilient climate cooperation framework designed to institutionalise lasting and effective political, economic, and technological cooperation between China and India.
Author: Robert Mizo (University of Delhi) -
The global energy transition is advancing—technologically, financially, and socially—despite the turbulence of contemporary geopolitics. This paradox defines the post-COP30 moment. Even as populist and nationalist movements weaponise climate policy as an external constraint, decarbonisation proceeds across regions through market forces, innovation, and domestic imperatives of resilience, security and competitiveness. Yet this momentum risks isolating climate politics from wider political agendas, narrowing it to a technocratic process rather than a geopolitical project. I suggest that COP30’s mutirão—the idea of collective mobilisation—offers a means to reconnect the transition to the fractured world it seeks to transform. As a universal metaphor, it captures the cooperative spirit required to align divergent national interests around shared outcomes of justice and stability. The challenge for climate diplomacy after Belém is to embed this ethos within a multipolar order, linking energy transformation to global priorities of development, finance, and security, and turning an inevitable transition into a consciously shared project of international renewal.
Author: Richard Beardsworth (University of Leeds)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Africa and the WorldSponsor: Africa and International Studies Working GroupConvener: AISWGChair: Peter Brett
-
Ever since the coming and going of ‘migrant crises’ at Europe’s borders, the EU and its member states have sought to control international migration flows. Yet whereas initiatives to stymie large inflows of migrants at Europe’s outer borders continue to attract widespread attention, the EU’s own efforts to manage the root causes of ‘irregular migration’ in Europe’s frontiers remain underexplored. One example of how the EU, aiming to tackle ‘the drivers of irregular migration’ from Africa, has tried to contain Europe’s African frontiers can be found in the shape of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF).
This paper examines the EU’s ‘development aid as migration control’ approach by zooming in on one of the EUTF-funded projects in Gambella, a regional state nestled between the borders of Ethiopia and South Sudan. Relying on interviews with 21 stakeholders involved with the project in question, I show that managing Ethiopian frontiers to stem the tide of migration is anything but a straightforward undertaking. Comparing and contrasting the relationship between the European Union as ‘project initiator’ and NGO’s as ‘implementing partners’, it transpires the relationship between the two is complex, messy, and multidimensional. Within this context, I argue that European efforts to control African frontier spaces are not to be viewed as top-down or unidirectional. Rather, managing migratory frontiers is a multidirectional affair, seldom yielding unambiguous or ‘satisfactory’ outcomes.
Author: Floris van Doorn (University of Helsinki) -
Drawing on international legitimacy theory and historical institutionalism, this paper examines how Regional Economic Communities (RECs) navigate tensions between democracy promotion and sovereignty norms in Africa. While ECOWAS and the African Union have developed election observation mechanisms and responses to unconstitutional changes, their effectiveness varies dramatically. Through a comparative analysis of ECOWAS interventions in The Gambia (2017, successful) versus Niger (2023, contested), and a contrast of ECOWAS assertiveness with SADC's reluctance, this paper identifies three constraints: non-interference principles lead to selective enforcement; member states' democratic deficits erode credibility; and resource limitations limit capacity.
Yet RECs have evolved conditional intervention norms when crises threaten regional stability. The paper argues that the effectiveness of RECs depends on the commitment of the hegemon (Nigeria in ECOWAS), the type of crisis (coups versus electoral fraud), and external support structures. This challenges the literature that assumes regional organisations simply aggregate member preferences, demonstrating how institutional design and normative evolution create autonomous agency. By examining how domestic politics within powerful states and external actors (such as EU conditionality and Chinese engagement) shape RECs’ behaviour, the paper contributes to debates on Southern-led governance architectures and post-colonial institutionalism.Author: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja (University of Edinburgh) -
Based on Zimbabwe, but with clear lessons for our current patriarchal and authoritarian moment, this paper explores Zimbabwe as a site of contestation for the politics of religiously mediated femininities. It does so by examining the neglected roles of multi-faith religious women in managing and facilitating political transitions over three generations. The paper explores three critical transitions: the first (1896- 1897), second (1965- 1979), and third (mid-1990s to 2000s) Chimurenga Wars. In examining the critical roles religious women have played throughout these transitions, the paper reveals the multifaceted ways in which religiously mediated femininities have both actively shaped, and in turn been shaped by, the country’s political transitions. To this end, the argument is that religious women have effectively navigated these transitions in drawing inspiration from ‘the warrior-woman’ figure, bringing together masculine and feminine traits, exemplified in the heroic and mythical religio-political figure of Nehanda, a first-generation freedom fighter who waged resistance against colonial rule. Through this, we get to see elements of ‘Nehandaism’ reinvented over time and space across three generations of women. In uncovering these women’s stories, the paper reveals the hidden spaces in which women exercise their agency within authoritarian and patriarchal spaces. The paper draws on research conducted in Zimbabwe including archival and fieldwork research comprising of life histories and in-depth interviews with high and low-profile women from a number of religious faiths in various professions within government, politics, and civil society.
Author: Kuziwakwashe Zigomo (School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS))
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Climate Harms, Violence, ResistanceSponsor: Environment and Climate Politics Working GroupConvener: ecp working group ecp working group (bisa)Chair: Alex Hoseason (Aston University)
-
In recent years, climate activists in the UK have deliberately targeted iconic sites of national memory, including Stonehenge, the Magna Carta at the British Library, and the Royal Courts of Justice, to provoke public attention and demand urgent climate action. These interventions have triggered sharp institutional responses and widespread condemnation, often framed as acts of vandalism or criminal damage. This article examines how both activists and institutional actors construct the significance of these protest actions through competing moral, visual, political, and criminogenic narratives.
Bringing together insights from visual politics and visual criminology, we analyse how these actions generate conflicting discourses about visibility, legitimacy, harm, and historical authority. Through discourse analysis of activist materials and institutional statements, we trace how each group produces a distinct narrative of disruption: activists seek to resignify heritage sites as sites of complicity and urgency, while institutions invoke legal protection, moral outrage, and civilisational values to reassert control. By focusing on this contestation, the article reveals how climate protest at national monuments is not merely a tactic of disruption, but a struggle over the aesthetic, political, and juridical boundaries of dissent in the face of planetary crisis.Authors: João Raphael da Silva (Ulster University) , Marcelle Trote Martins (University of Manchester)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Conceptual History, Culture and World OrderSponsor: Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working GroupConvener: CRIPT Working groupChair: CRIPT Working group
-
This paper places two “inside-outsiders” writing in the immediate aftermath of World War I – W.E.B. Du Bois and Laura Cornelius Kellogg – in conversation to scrutinise the historical relationship between self, state, and democracy during a particular moment of political change: when the concept of self-determination regained-prominence. The first section compares each author’s narratives about the evolution of democracy and their qualification to be viewed in the “demo.” The second part contrasts the aesthetics of their written work as different means of calling for their respective cultures to be considered within understandings of American democracy and citizenship. While Du Bois’ stylistic choices– referencing jazz and gospel – parallel his ideas of Black emancipation and imagination, Kellogg imbues her work with Haudenosaunee cosmology – exemplifying early modes of international advocacy for Indigenous sovereignty. I conclude that disagreements about democracy’s meaning are not a contest over history itself, but a matter of whose experiences are centered in advocating for its theory and praxis.
Author: Selena Cai (University of Cambridge) -
The idea of system, understood as a complex whole formed by the interaction of related parts, is a particular legitimation of modernity. But the character of this idea, the assumptions and attributes that constitute its identity, is obscured by claims about the scientific and secular commitments of modernity. Modernity is neither a fixed time or set of intellectual commitments, but a metanarrative that justifies a particular configuration of reality. This metanarrative conceals the provenance of the idea of system, which is rooted in what modernity is said to have superseded: medieval thought and practice. The aim of this paper is to recover the medieval intellectual culture in which system is intelligible. It begins by problematising the discourse of modernity and what is presented as its uniquely scientific orientation. Then it explores thirteenth and fourteenth century developments in economy and theology which are crucial foundations of modern natural science. System, and its scientific credentials, is neither modern nor disenchanted in the way international relations scholars typically assume. It has a history that imagines the world in a particular way; and comprehending this history allows us to imagine it in different ways.
Author: William Bain (National University of Singapore) -
This paper discusses the final book of Andrew Linklater, soon to be published posthumously, and argues that the book makes a fundamental contribution for a future-fit International Relations (IR), amidst epoch-making civilizational transformations of world order, by providing the foundation for an analysis of the social forces that bind and divide humanity. The book crowns Linklater’s trilogy on harm, violence, and civilization in world politics, with an analysis of how the shifting historical patterns of world orders cannot be understood without analysing the role of collective symbols (e.g. flags, monuments, foundational myths) in forging the emotional bonds that constitute political communities and mediate their relations with those considered outsiders. Linklater's original theoretical synthesis of Norbert Elias's process sociology, Durkheimian social theory, and the English School provides a unique framework to trace how these symbolic codes have evolved over the longue durée, shaping standards of civilization and the tension between symbolic particularism and universalism. By placing symbols at the centre of a grand narrative of the shifting patterns of human interdependence from the Neolithic to the Anthropocene, the book provides the theoretical and conceptual tools for a future-fit IR capable of grappling with the challenges characterising the 21st century, namely the resurgence of identity politics and the challenges in forging civilizational solidarities amidst ecological breakdown.
Author: André Saramago (University of Coimbra) -
There is a growing sense that world politics stands at a crossroads. Temporal metaphors such as the “return of geopolitics” and “Zeitenwende” have become central to how policymakers and scholars alike articulate this moment. Yet despite its ubiquity, the notion of changing time as a constitutive condition of political action is rarely dwelt upon. Dominant understandings of time in IR – from path dependence in Historical Institutionalism to urgency in Securitization Theory – struggle to capture the distinctiveness of our times, in which time itself, and actors’ place within it, are being fundamentally reworked.
This paper develops a conceptual vocabulary for studying changing times, drawing on Reinhard Koselleck’s work in historiography to distinguish acceleration from urgency. It argues that acceleration better captures the present moment of re-ordering, in which signs of the future world order outpace the present.
Empirically, the paper examines the European Union (EU) as a key site where historical time is constructed and contested. It traces how temporal narratives have been mobilized to interpret and re-time crises and geopolitical events from the global financial crisis and the migration crisis to COVID-19, Trump’s (re-)election, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Long seen as the frontrunner of a futuristic, post-national, liberal world, the EU must make these events intelligible through its understanding of time.
The paper argues that the EU’s evolving timing practices are coalescing into a composite temporal prism through which a “new time” in world politics becomes legible. In this new era, the EU risks becoming the emblem and, indeed, the guardian of an old order that is increasingly out of sync with the times. As temporal horizons shift, so too does the directionality of actors, reshaping who is a progressive, conservative, or reactionary force in world politics.
Author: Simon Gaabriel Weisser (University of Cambridge) -
International relations (IR) theory is replete with intellectual traditions, such as the Machiavellian-Realist, Kantian-Liberal, and Grotian traditions. However, adopting “contextualist” perspectives, IR scholars like Beate Jahn and R. B. J. Walker argue that IR “traditions” are fictional “perennial debates” concocted by the false imposition of contemporary assumptions on historical concepts. This article aims to problematize this IR reception of contextualism and revisit the methodological implications of Quentin Skinner’s contextualist method for IR. It examines the potential of Skinner’s mature contextualism to construct intellectual traditions by comparing the methods used to investigate the concept of liberty in Skinner’s Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal and Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society.
This article finds that, when reread as an Anglophone form of conceptual history, Skinnerian contextualism’s focus on temporality does not prevent the construction of intellectual traditions but offers an alternative way to define a tradition. IR contextualists consider traditions lasting for centuries ahistorical because they follow early Skinner in maintaining that concepts can be understood only synchronically within their respective historical contexts. However, like Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, Skinner’s later contextualism views the concept of liberty not only as a register of synchronic historical contexts but also as an instrument that shapes historical transformations. As a form of conceptual history, mature contextualism offers IR scholars the hermeneutic possibility of evaluating concepts diachronically, thereby allowing us to identify the dynamic continuity and change of concepts across historical periods. Instead of nullifying IR traditions, mature contextualism encourages IR to redefine its traditions not as substantial claims about “perennial debates,” but as constructed stories about interconnected concepts travelling from the past to the present that shape our conception of the global challenges in the coming decades.
Author: Mian Xu (University of St. Andrews)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Critical Dialogues on Militarism and Militarization: Non-hegemonic inquiries from the MarginsSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConveners: Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) , Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England) , Jana Tabak (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)Chair: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
-
This paper explores the concepts of militarization and militarism through the everyday experiences of five undergraduate students in International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. By analyzing their daily commute from home to university and back, the co-authors engage with militarism as a discourse that helps to both understand and unsettle the tensions and distinctions between civil/military, public/private, and peace/war. The study foregrounds how militarization is not limited to formal military structures but permeates urban spaces, security practices, and social interactions. Drawing from critical military studies, the article reflects on the embodied and spatialized dimensions of militarism, revealing its impact on the students' perceptions of safety, authority, and resistance. Lastly, we examine the university as a site of resistance, questioning how academic spaces can challenge militaristic and militarized logic and foster alternative imaginaries. Through this discussion, we contribute to broader debates on everyday militarization and the role of universities in shaping other narratives.
Authors: Jana Tabak (Rio de Janeiro State University) , Victoria Basham (Cardiff University) -
The radical right has increasingly assumed leadership positions worldwide, encompassing both the Global North and South. Indicators from organizations such as Freedom House demonstrate mounting pressures on liberal democracy in countries led by radicalized leaders. Similarly, Feldstein’s (2022) Digital Repression Score documents the growing deployment of intrusive surveillance and control technologies by far-right administrations to intensify harassment of political opponents. In these contexts, as noted by Mudde (2019), security agendas have become central and serve as primary instruments for reinforcing mechanisms of social control and subordination. Intersections between militarized and police-oriented discursive practices and logics frequently emerge in the construction of the “order–security” nexus. Nevertheless, the themes advanced, the targets identified, and the sociotechnical apparatuses employed differ across national contexts, shaped by specific social and political contingencies. This paper analyzes how militarist perspectives, actors, and discursive practices are mobilized in the formulation and implementation of security policies, facilitating the expansion of intrusive surveillance systems such as spyware and facial recognition. The analysis focuses on the United States under Donald Trump and Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, as well as selected state and municipal administrations, to examine the intersections of militarism, policing, and vigilantism in contemporary security governance.
Authors: Alcides Peron (Campinas State University) , Clarissa Forner (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ)) -
Military chaplaincies are conventionally analysed through the lens of mental health provision and pastoral care within armed forces. This paper challenges this normative perspective, arguing for the critical importance of understanding the strategic and political dimensions of military chaplaincies, particularly their overlooked role in counter-insurgency and pacification operations and in mitigating soldiers’ moral conflicts during violent engagements. Drawing from critical military studies and the practice approach to security phenomena, the paper first examines why chaplaincies matter in contemporary analysis, highlighting how, despite formal secularism, in liberal countries the separation of church and state remains contested, making chaplaincies sites of political dispute, as illustrated by the Brazilian case involving conservative and authoritarian groups. Second, it delves into military doctrine, primarily focusing on the evolved U.S. model, to analyse how religious assistance is conceptualised and instrumentalised, particularly concerning counter-insurgency and pacification strategies. Finally, the paper presents Brazil as a key case study. It scrutinizes the Brazilian Army's recent manual on religious assistance and its application during military interventions in urban favelas, as well as tracing the expansion of these practices to military police forces nationwide. This analysis, informed by the rapid growth and politicisation of Evangelical chaplaincies in Brazil, underscores how religious actors and ideologies are increasingly integrated into state security apparatuses as instruments of pacification and social control, demanding closer critical scrutiny.
Authors: Mariana Janot (São Paulo State University) , Rodrigo Campos (University of York) -
The paper examines new modes of militarization consolidated through the growing involvement of armed forces in disaster-related crises. Focusing on recent engagements of the Brazilian Navy in disaster prevention, monitoring, and response, it problematizes how claims to military expertise in humanitarian logistics have contributed to the (re)assembly of military authority in Brazil and the reproduction of militarism. By tracing the managerial logic underpinning newly developed doctrines, systems, and routines for military humanitarian operations, the paper shows how logistical discourses of necessity, speed, and efficiency stabilize not only a specific way of knowing crises - as technical and logistical problems - but also who is authorized to govern them as legitimate providers of (logistical) solutions. This reframing of military authority as managerial competence in crisis governance illuminates how militarization operates through languages of logistical coordination, inter-agency cooperation, humanitarian innovation, and technological infrastructure. It also points to a form of militarization that reinforces social reliance on the military for crisis resolution while depicting civilian actors as weak, disorganized, and inefficient. Advancing the notion of managerial militarization, the paper offers both a critical vocabulary for analyzing the subtle reproduction of military authority and a framework for envisioning the epistemic and political conditions of demilitarization.
Authors: Luisa Lobato (IRI/PUC Rio)* , Victoria Santos (IRI/PUC Rio)* , Maíra Siman (IRI/PUC-Rio) -
In October 2025, Operação Contenção, a state-sanctioned massacre that left 130 favela residents dead in Rio de Janeiro, revealed with harrowing clarity the material consequences of the ongoing militarization public security under the far-right government of Cláudio Castro. Against recent currents in Critical Military Studies (CMS) that question the analytic validity of “militarization” or seek to replace it with notions of diffuse martiality, this paper argues that the corpses left behind by Operação Contenção attest to militarization’s enduring importance and deadly reality. Recovering and reworking Vagts’s neglected and often misunderstood conception of militarism, the paper argues that militarization should be taken seriously, not only because of the heuristic value if offers in understanding periods where political violence is intensified, but also and primarily for the concept’s usefulness in pushing back against the normalization of the far right. To this end, the paper advances a radical and anti-foundationalist understanding of militarization beyond the traditional study of arms races and civic/military relations. Instead, it sees militarization as the metaphorical and metonymical extension of relations of warfare to the whole social body, a view capable of explaining the contemporary intersection of “culture wars,” militarism, and extreme episodes of political violence. The Rio massacre thus becomes the empirical evidence of the need to remember militarization as a concept whose usefulness comes from the capacity to evidence and dismantle the infrastructures of power, race, and security in twenty-first-century necropolitical democracies.
Author: Henrique Tavares Furtado (University of the West of England)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Cultural infrastructures of securitySponsor: Security Policy and PracticeConvener: Thomas Martin (Open University)Chair: Samah Rafiq (King's College London)
-
This paper argues information eco-systems in liberal democratic societies are vulnerable to exploitation by internal and external bad actors because technological advances have changed the way we consume information. Smartphones have democratised publishing, social media algorithms influence what we see and mainstream news media audiences are in decline. This combination means we have increased information volume – and decreased verification making it easier than ever before to conduit disordered information into public discourse. This takes the security issue beyond “just” disinformation because it is further argued that the influence of information eco-systems can distort what is seen as true or real – and if anything can be true at all. The undermining of how we can know – epistemic insecurity – promotes disordered discourses which have an epistemic logic which lowers the bar of proof. Crucially, the paper also presents a solution to this threat: for if anyone with a smartphone can publish, they should also be encouraged and enabled to verify for themselves. The University of Nottingham has worked in collaboration with the investigations website Bellingcat to teach open source investigation skills to undergraduates. The paper will present further research on the problem of epistemic insecurity and findings on teaching OSI skills to students in a classroom setting.
Author: Natalie Martin (University of Nottingham) -
A security discourse based on the concepts of the grey zone and hybrid threats is currently emerging among international security actors and policy-makers. The paper analyses this discourse and the policy responses that have been proposed, noting that the key organizing concept in responding to hybrid threats is resilience. This concept is potentially problematic in that resilience has been critically examined as controversial and political in nature insofar as it promotes programmatic preparedness and social control, demanding that civil society, market actors, and individuals “rally ‘round the flag” and contribute to wide-ranging national security management. What is more interesting from a methodological and linguistic point of view is the way in which resilience enables narration about the past, present, and the future. By building or improving resilience we can escape the present chaos and uncertainty and craft a future that is more stable and secure. In that sense, resilience performs a linguistic function that allows the victim to go from inaction and vulnerability to action and readiness and enables a storytelling based on travelling from one stable period to another.
Author: Jonathan Joseph (University of Bristol) -
In recent decades, constructivist theory has been increasingly applied to the discipline of international relations; however, this paper requests particular attention to be paid to the subfield of critical security studies, specifically the study of covert action, which continues to pose intriguing challenges in IR. The subjects of security studies and covert action have long lacked the involvement of social and ideational thought, which this paper argues is crucial in cultivating comprehensive and socially intelligent understandings of security. There indeed exists critical literature which bridges the subjects of covert action and theory, however, like other subfields of IR study, the work surrounding covert action has often been infused with traditional perspectives and analytical approaches: “The impact of covert action, and intelligence more generally, on international relations is under-theorised… Under-theorisation poses a significant intellectual and policy problem” (Cormac, Van Puyvelde, and Walton, 2022: 111-112). In particular, this paper aims to embrace the concepts of dynamic norm, culture, and identity politics when dissecting state secrecy and covert action. Identity and interest, here declared to be non-static systemic elements and drivers of action, play a key and underrated role in the evaluation of covert security matters. These claims challenge classic conceptualizations of the IR subfields, inviting more holistic and sociological approaches via this emphasis on endogenously defined interests and identities. This paper proposes that interest- and identity-formation, producible and reproducible via social processes and interactions, must be considered within theory-based interpretations of security and covert action. Covert action will continue to serve as a consequential tool of foreign policy with the ability to impact global realities. To establish the connection between such a tool and the role of identity in interest-formation is to labor towards an understanding of covert action and theory through an increasingly appropriate analytical lens.
Authors: John Williams (Durham University)* , Marina Pole (Durham University) -
This project is a study of national identity movements (including as relates to colonial histories, immigration, and security), social and political behaviors and public opinion, and inter-disciplinarity. A goal is to illustrate identity, (non)belonging, and boundary drawing in the context of meaning making related to food: Its representation, production, and consumption. Engaging with the politics of food encourages an enlivened International Relations (IR) discipline that approaches global challenges such as political violence and security policy in a way that is attentive to wider audiences and resonance, creativity in methods, and responsibility in scholarship. Food sovereignty, the state, transnational food cultures, and claims of authenticity are interwoven with borders and associated boundary creation, activation, and challenge. Northern Ireland and Scotland encompass multiple co-existing identity claims through which a thoughtful attention to boundaries and borders connected with food, beverage, and consumption may help us to better understand complex security/insecurity dynamics, and why political violence in the name of protecting a particular “us” occurs in some areas but not others. This is particularly important given ongoing polarization within and between societal collectives, and ongoing responsibility to connect better understanding with security policies that mitigate challenges associated with violence and identity.
Author: Kathryn Fisher (King's College London)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Decentering Western Paradigms and anticolonial contestationsSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
Arguments about globalising international relations (IR) seemed to have reached an impasse. Scholars who adhere to the Global IR’s agenda of de-Westernising and pluralising the discipline remain divided on how to define it. One side insists on treating Global IR as a signifier that absorbs various approaches sharing the same goal, whereas the other suggests determining a concrete, non-Western-inspired agenda to anchor it to specific debates. Such preoccupation with defining the terms of Global IR, however useful, not only risks re-treading IR’s familiar themes, such as order, hierarchy, and West/non-West binaries. More problematically, it rehearses criticisms launched by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. Is there, then, really a need for an overarching approach called Global IR? To explore this question, this article argues that Global IR needs to seriously engage with anticolonial thought, not as a mere historical example that bolsters its premises, but as a spectre borne out of colonial experiences and postcolonial exigencies that persistently destabilise the discipline. Often an invisible presence in the Global IR, anticolonialism is paradigmatic of the transboundary thinking associated with pluralising the discipline, including its optimism and pitfalls. Its spectre serves as an injunction on how pluralisation can easily get entangled with the power structures it seeks to dismantle. Yet, it also reminds us of the possibilities of constructing new subjectivities and futures unimaginable in the Eurocentric world. In contemplating the role of the nation-state in this aporia, this paper further suggests that Global IR must go beyond the desire to forge a symmetrical mode of inquiry against mainstream IR. It needs to refashion itself as an ethico-temporal vehicle that welcomes the ghostly returns of past struggles to sustain the productive tension between the need to de-centre the West and the demand to revivify unfinished potentialities of relationality as “being-in-common” in the world.
Author: Carmina Untalan (New university of Lisbon) -
This paper examines the intellectual foundations of Western International Relations (IR) theory, exposing it not as a neutral or universal science of the international but as an edifice constructed through epistemic appropriation and colonial erasure. What is celebrated as the originality of European thought : Realism, Liberalism and Constructivism etc., emerges, upon closer scrutiny, as a systematic rearticulation of non-Western philosophies of order, co-existence, and diplomacy. Realism’s doctrine of power politics was prefigured in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Ibn Khaldun’s sociology of empire; Liberal ideals of cooperation and perpetual peace resonate with Ubuntu ethics, the Confucian tianxia, and indigenous confederacies that long predate Kant; and Constructivism’s claim regarding the social constitution of reality echo Buddhist, African and indigenous ontologies of relationality and interdependence.
Although Western theorist rarely explicitly claimed discovery, IR’s disciplinary architecture, its canon formation, pedagogy, and epistemic hierarchies effectively institutionalized Europe as the sole locus of theoretical innovation. Through colonial education and academic domination, these frameworks were globalised, compelling the rest of the world to interpret its own histories through Western categories while disavowing its intellectual inheritances. What the West universalised as theory, others were taught to regard as myth, tradition, or culture.
Even postcolonial, anti-colonial, and “Global IR” turns, while rhetorically pluralist, remain structurally complicit. They acknowledge difference yet reinscribe hierarchy by reducing Southern though to empirical illustration rather than theoretical co-production. This paper attempts to redefine Western IR as an ideological arm of empire, a disciplinary technology that naturalized domination through knowledge. Debunking it requires not reforms but uninvention: an epistemic disarmament that restores theoretical authorship to the civilizations that first imagined or conceptualise the international.Author: Nagapushpa Devendra (Phd Scholar) -
A focus on the study of concepts, born of the linguistic turn, is increasing across historical IR and international studies more generally. Its benefits are manifold: concepts are useful pedagogical tools (Berenskötter 2016 and 2025) and allow us to interrogate core disciplinary categories (see Bartelson on 'sovereignty' or Wang 2025 on 'the international'). Studying the political nature of concepts, however, is often done by invoking contestation (Berenskötter & Guzzini 2024). Though depicting conceptual meaning as "essentially contested" (Gallie 1956) is not a problem in itself, "contestation" has come to function as a shorthand for actual politics. Assuming continuity between linguistic and political contestation fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between the two. Inspired by Sylvia Federici's understanding of "struggle concepts", I argue that what makes political language 'political' is not contestation in the choice of what concept to use, but the ability of concepts to politicise different surfaces of our lives. Conceptualising 1970's mass incarceration as a 'race war' allowed American activists to connect their individual struggles into an abolitionist movement. More fundamental than linguistic contestation, concepts represent an ability to ontologise an object and de-individualise an experience.
Author: Taylor Borowetz (SOAS University of London) -
Theories enable us to organize and interpret knowledge, offering conceptual architectures through which the world becomes thinkable. Yet, the translocation of theory across geopolitical and epistemic boundaries—particularly from the metropole to the colony—has long posed significant challenges. From a postcolonial perspective, such movements often risk reproducing the very hierarchies they seek to critique. While theories remain indispensable to critical inquiry, their unreflective application may result in the attenuation of their conceptual core or blindness to their contextual limitations.
This paper interrogates the problem of travelling a theory and advances a transformation of biopolitics into a qawmopolitical analytic. Through a deconstructive engagement with the biopolitical paradigm, and by mobilizing qawm a central organizing concept, the paper articulates an alternative framework for analysing mechanisms of life management and the distribution of power.
By provincializing biopolitics and dislodging its conceptual core from its Western epistemic grounding—while sustaining its analytic acuity and critical resonance—this rearticulation as qawmopolitics generates new theoretical and methodological trajectories. It calls on scholars to reconceptualize the politics of life and belonging through plural, embedded epistemologies that exceed and unsettle Eurocentric genealogies.Author: Anil Yildirim (University of Exeter)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Empire and RacialisationSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
In this presentation, I will introduce one of the chapters of my current draft book manuscript that seeks to explain why existing theories of race do not address how a concept like ‘the economy’ is racialised in itself. Most recently critiques of race are focused on race as an ideology or race as a material force. Drawing from the work of Patrick Wolfe (2016), I argue for analysing racialisation—or the practices that build, maintain and reconstitute race in the service of colonial power. Racialisation is the bridge between racial ideology and material racial inequality. Critical race scholarship has left relatively under scrutinised that political ideologies are formed through banal, mundane practices that can be racialised. That is, somewhat unintuitively, the racialisation of economic ideas is a practice that has produced and reproduced to legitimise colonial projects for five hundred years. Such racialisation is by design difficult to perceive, so this chapter lays out four characteristics of whiteness alongside four un-colourblinded harms to differently racialised people: Structure (ignorance); normalisation (obfuscation); privilege (violence); and flexibility (incoherence). ‘The economy’ is considered in the context of these characteristics, which uncovers why this essentially contested idea is so useful in more modern iterations of white supremacy beyond the borders of the USA.
Author: Jessica Eastland-Underwood (Durham) -
In the current crisis of global politics, indigenous people have become increasingly relevant, as theorists search for ways to grapple with the challenges of climate change, environmental destruction and the decline of faith in modernity. Indigenous peoples are frequently referenced in debates on the Anthropocene, as new geological and historical era, which demands that humanity to learn to live in the ruins of modernity. This article proposes the concept of white indigeneity, as a way to understand approaches from the radical right that re-articulate Western identities as indigenous, and position themselves alongside other dispossessed groups after modernity. The argument builds on existing literature on the global politics of the far-right, focusing on English nationalism among the online right through the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, an online platform for political commentary. The article argues that the Lotus Eaters account of identity sets out a critique of modernity, drawn from critical theory, a conception of the English as an indigenous people, rooted in historical revisionism and an aesthetic politics of place, influenced by the medieval Anglo-Saxons. However, it also relies on a disavowal of colonial violence, a melancholic nostalgia for empire and an ambivalence to relationality. White indigeneity approaches stake out a position on the same political terrain as critical theorists of the Anthropocene in IR, challenging the terms of contemporary political debates, and forcing critical theorists to re-frame their discussions of politics after modernity.
Author: Farai Chipato (University of Glasgow)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Everyday Affects in Diplomacy and Global PoliticsSponsor: Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working GroupConvener: EPIR Working groupChair: EPIR Working group
-
This paper theorizes narrated (in)gratitude, understood as public storytelling in which someone is said to have expressed, or failed to express, thanks, as a discursive lever in international politics. Focusing on the Ukraine war, I argue that whether gratitude actually occurs matters less than how it is told and retold. Narratives of gratitude and ingratitude recast roles (aggressor as “civil,” victim as “entitled,” benefactor as moral judge), displace agendas (from accountability and law to tone and manners), discipline allies (by attaching support to demonstrations of deference), and invite resistance (by reframing aid as shared security rather than charity).
Methodologically, the study employs qualitative discourse analysis and within-episode process tracing across “episode packets” that pair principal utterances (speeches, readouts, interviews, leader posts) with elite media framing, official uptake, and counter-frames. Two core cases structure the analysis: (1) flattery narrated as civility in accounts of interactions between Russian and Western leaders, and (2) the “ungrateful ally” trope applied to Ukraine, contrasted with Ukrainian rhetoric of dignity, equality, and common values. Each episode is read for narrative mechanisms such as role recasting, agenda displacement, disciplining, and resistance, and for the ends they prepare or justify, including legitimation, conditionality, reputational punishment, and agenda control.
The paper contributes to affective and postcolonial IR by shifting the unit of analysis from gratitude as private feeling or ritual act to gratitude as a narrative object with political effects. It offers a portable mechanism set and a transparent, fully qualitative template for studying how stories about manners reorder wartime coalitions and the moral economy of legitimacy.
Author: Artur Nadiiev (University of Nottingham) -
The Chinese foreign ministry told the media that ‘we have answered the question (that about not congratulating Sanae Takaichi’s premiership) for many times’ while they had not addressed this question. Taking a disdaining posture towards major global counterparts has been increasingly common in China’s diplomatic exercise in the context of rivalry against the US. Existing literature has approached such a practice in terms of ‘silent treatment’ or ‘strategic ghosting’ as an aggressive move towards predominant powers or international order by China as a revisionist power. While states do strategize the act of disdain as part of a rational calculation of national interests, such an act could be found not only on the official, but also the everyday level as an emotionalised response to changing international circumstances. This paper argues that the act of disdain has constituted a consistent mode of practice by both the Chinese state and society, and it represents a collective aesthetic movement to reflect on China’s political and cultural positioning in the emergent order of multipolarity. For both the authorities and the public, resembling forms of disdaining act has enabled them a vehicle for exchanging views on the officially sanctioned, public-emotionally reproduced discourse of the ‘China model’, which has in turn warrant a restructuring of international hierarchy based upon appreciation of industrially powered developmentalism dismissive of contemporary western public life.
Author: Xin Liu (Liverpool John Moores University) -
Taking its point of departure in the “emotional turn”, this article considers the interactive process of conflict escalation and emotional assertiveness related to the persistent and intractable issue of Taiwan and specifically, when, why and how Beijing’s diplomatic practices directed towards Tokyo and related to Japan’s engagement with Taiwan take an emotionalized form. Emotional assertiveness – where state representatives publicly express moral indignation and urge offenders to apologize in order to stop them, or to deter others, from violating China’s red lines (Forsby 2025) – has become a defining feature of China’s diplomacy. It has also been a feature of Sino-Japanese political relations, albeit to varying degrees and at different junctures over more than 50-years of diplomatic ties. Based on a systematic review of episodes since 2010 and through a discursive analysis of written sources and semi-structured interviews, the article considers the responses of Japan and Taiwan to Beijing’s emotional assertiveness. It asks: what are the effects of China’s emotional assertiveness on Japan-Taiwan relations and on Japan’s own diplomatic practices toward Taiwan? It demonstrates how issues where Japan may have made conciliatory gestures in the past are increasingly becoming issues where Tokyo opts to either wait out the episode or respond defiantly.
Author: Wrenn Yennie Lindgren (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)) -
Trust is a key ingredient of diplomacy in multilateral engagements and environments. Yet whilst the issue of trust at state level is well addressed, diplomatic trust relations at individual and organisational level remain less well understood, and much of the focus to date has concerned formal trust-building mechanisms and activity. However, everyday diplomatic interactions provide vital lubrication to the international and multilateral political and diplomatic machine. The use of informal trust building opportunities becomes especially significant in a multilateral environment like Brussels in which there are insiders and outsiders, major and minor players, veterans and newcomers. This paper looks at the role of informal trust building activity by diplomatic outsiders, newcomers, and those referred to as ‘repeat offenders’ who return to the same posting. The different approaches are considered in respect of the importance of this type of trust-building work in fostering relationships, cutting through diplomatic red lines and moving past political noise going forward.
Drawing upon a data set of 52 interviews with diplomats and EU insiders in the Brussels bubble, this analysis informs the identification of key practice-level opportunities, challenges and implications in relation to the variable diversity, presence and absence of opportunities for informal trust building for different communities of diplomatic actors in Brussels.
Author: Jenny Ratcliffe (Coventry University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Everyday and Ontological (In)Security/iesSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working GroupChair: Natalie Jester (University of Gloucestershire)
-
Vernacular security has expanded our understanding of security, yet empirical studies have mainly focused on citizens. This risks reinforcing state-centric hierarchies over who can legitimately produce security, and it obscures how non-citizens challenge dominant, exclusionary security paradigms and prefigure desirable security futures.
To think vernacular security anew for the future, I propose a theoretical framework that highlights the relationship between knowledge and prefiguration by connecting feminist and performative approaches to citizenship with questions of knowledge and knowability as developed by Mignolo (epistemic disobedience) and Glissant (right to opacity). I illustrate the usefulness of this approach using ethnographic material generated in 2019-2020 with asylum seekers and refugees in Berlin and Vienna, highlighting also non-linguistic and embodied forms of knowledge.
Reflecting on this fieldwork, I then discuss how the sensitivity of security issues, especially for highly securitized people, also raises methodological-ethical questions about how to study alternative security practices under conditions of securitized surveillance. It requires us to reconsider the stakes of (in)visibility involved in security and our own research practices. I discuss participatory research as an approach to mitigate these challenges and to investigate the potential of non-citizen security knowledge as a democratic innovation from below.Author: Amelie Harbisch (University of Erfurt) -
This paper examines how, in context of the Russia-Ukraine war, representations of children become a site of temporalisation of (in)security. While critical literature has already extensively examined the relationship between (imagined) childhood and time, much of it explores (and problematises) instances of children cast as symbols of futurity. By contrast, I examine how in the Russia-Ukraine war, childhood becomes a space through which the Russian state organises the relationship between future as well as past and present. In various official narratives, Russian and Ukrainian children are imagined as future “protectors” or “threats”. However, these future-focused tropes are simultaneously evoked with retrospective genealogies where children are constructed as descendants of World War II “winners” and “losers”. I argue that childhood constitutes a particularly powerful site for temporalising (in)security, as its affective and symbolic appeal enables the collapse of “future” and “past” boundaries to justify violence in the present. The paper thus contributes, first, to ongoing debates on childhood as a technology of governance in international relations. Second, uncovers how metaphors of time can mobilised as instruments of political action, thus contributing to critical discussions of time and temporality.
Author: Maya Nguyen (University of London) -
Astrologers in Turkey regularly appear on prime-time news and social media, offering predictions on elections, economic trends, and global politics and shaping public discourse. Their prominence has grown to such an extent that one astrologer was recently imprisoned for speculating about the health of a key government ally. This paper examines the political and affective resonances of astrology in contemporary Turkey along two strata: First, as an everyday practice of ontological security amid intensifying political and economic uncertainty; and second, as a discourse that supports right-wing politics through the promotion of a victorious national biography and an “ideology of dependence.” Drawing on media analysis along with phenomenological reflections and autoethnographic observations, the paper explores how astrology has become both a politicized and depoliticized mode of finding meaning in a politically restrictive environment and economic precarity. In this context, the paper argues that astrology operates as a diffuse, affective infrastructure through which individuals collectively manage the “mood of anxiety” and assert temporal agency within an increasingly blurry present while also reinforcing ideological dispositions aligned with right-wing politics. Situating the Turkish case within broader theoretical debates in ontological security studies, the paper shows how subjects seek meaning and control in response to structural powerlessness.
Author: Irem Cihan (SOAS) -
This article examines how Pakistani editorial cartoons from 2001–2003 responded to and reinterpreted dominant Western securitising narratives in the aftermath of 9/11. Drawing on metaphor analysis of 809 cartoons from three major newspapers, it argues that Pakistan’s visual discourse on the War on Terror reveals a complex and ambivalent understanding of national security is shaped by postcolonial anxieties, anti-imperial sentiment, and hybrid political identities. Using securitisation theory and postcolonial IR, especially the work of L.H.M. Ling and Achille Mbembe, the paper develops the concept of "speaking back"; a visual, metaphorical mode through which postcolonial states resist, parody, and subvert dominant Western security logics. Further, rather than reproducing a direct securitising chain, Pakistani cartoons reflect crisis as normal politics, with metaphors that blur distinctions between victim and aggressor, and between security and insecurity. In doing so, the article used uses Pakistani images to challenge Eurocentric assumptions in critical security studies and visual IR. It contributes to ongoing debates about the portability of securitisation theory to non-Western contexts and offers a framework for understanding how visual culture in postcolonial settings constitutes a field of everyday security politics.
Author: Saadia Gardezi (University of Warwick) -
This paper uses a relational ethnographic 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 diverse lives of ordinary residents in Narva, the border town between Estonia and Russia, the paper amplifies the need to understand how insecurities are understood and experienced everyday by 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 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 a relational ethnography, 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)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Financialisation of development cooperationSponsor: Global Politics and DevelopmentConvener: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London)Chair: Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth)
-
Philanthrocapitalism is an emerging and market-based form of philanthropy, and it has also been interpreted as a tool to promote accumulation by dispossession and financialisation of margins. This study compares patterns of international development cooperation during the 20th and 21st centuries, both north-south and south-south, with recent patterns of philanthrocapitalism. This is the third part of a PhD thesis and mobilises data from a previous systematic review of cases of philanthrocapitalism in the Global South, and two case studies on the role of philanthropy during the covid-19 emergency in Brazil, to analyse the processes and effects of philanthrocapitalism in the Global South. By analysing the history of both international cooperation and philanthrocapitalism, this study also addresses how philanthrocapitalism relates to previous attempts by different forms of international cooperation to increase equity and sustainability in development.
Author: Luiza Witzel Farias -
This paper examines first the general trends and drivers of financialised development assistance provided by the UK, which has increased in volume over the last decade. This development aid is channeled through the British International Investment. It then presents a case study of Kenya, where we analyse preliminary data gathered during our field work in Nairobi in January 2026.
Authors: Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway University of London) , Melita Lazell (University of Portmsouth) -
Despite considerable attention on the financialization of development aid, its effects on development cooperation and solidarity organizations, including non-governmental organizations and labour unions, have garnered minimal attention. This article examines the effects of Canada's adoption of blended finance in its international assistance programs on civil society organizations operating in Canada involved in international development in aid-recipient countries. The shift towards blended finance is influenced by two trends: the transformation of the role of the state, which today perceives one of its principal functions as 'derisking' the private sector and the emergence of the 'beyond aid' agenda associated with the need to fill the 'funding gap' associated with to the 2030 United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Drawing on interviews with key actors and analyses of documents and official reports, the article concludes that government efforts to recruit development cooperation and solidarity organizations to embark on the blended finance agenda are part of a highly contested effort to promote a market-fundamentalist development model that is inherently exclusionary.
Authors: Karen Spring* , Susan Spronk
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Foreign Interference and European SecuritySponsor: European Security Working GroupConveners: Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague)) , Tomas Weiss (Charles University)Chair: Jakub Eberle (Charles University (Prague))
-
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic states have intensified efforts to counter the threat and impact of Russian foreign interference (FI). Particular attention has been directed toward the region’s so-called “Russian-speaking” populations, who are portrayed as especially vulnerable to Russian influence. Yet, while these communities feature prominently in the security discourses of policymakers, experts, and the public, little is known about how they themselves understand the threat of foreign interference, the measures designed to counter it, and their own role within these processes. This paper addresses this gap through a bottom-up analysis of how FI and counter-FI initiatives are experienced in two predominantly Russian-speaking communities: Daugavpils in Latvia and Narva in Estonia. Grounded in a vernacular security approach, the study explores how state-level security measures intersect with “localized security imaginaries”. It asks: How do residents of Daugavpils and Narva perceive and experience foreign interference campaigns? How do they interpret and respond to state policies aimed at countering them? Do these measures foster a sense of resilience and security, or generate new insecurities? To answer these questions, the paper will draw on qualitative data from interviews and focus groups conducted during fieldwork in November 2025 and spring 2026.
Author: Andrea Peinhopf (Northumbria University) -
The second Trump administration has been vocalizing its critique of the EU’s policies. The administration’s rhetorical incursions have reached such levels that EU leaders have identified US actions as blatant “interference” in their affairs. The label of foreign interference most often refers to the malign actions of adversaries, and it is less common to associate it with allied partners. This paper links the European narratives of US interference with leadership studies, particularly focusing on the concept of idiosyncrasy credit. According to Hollander, leadership status “represents an accumulation of positively disposed impressions residing in the perceptions of relevant others”. The leader has a certain amount of group-awarded credits that permit idiosyncratic behavior. However, a leader may deviate from expected patterns of behavior in order to help the group advance and progress – that is, leaders tend to be innovative at some points, which may cost excessive credit, especially if the “innovations” are not accepted. By exploring current and historical cases of US “interference” in European affairs, the paper identifies its impact on Washington’s idiosyncrasy credit. The study will help ground notion of “foreign interference” among allied partners, but it will also present broader implications for the study of “trust” in Transatlantic relations.
Author: Jan Hornat (Charles University (Prague)) -
European Integration as a Protection and a Threat: EU Small States’ Approach to Foreign Interference
Foreign interference has become a topic of high politics in Europe. Primarily, pundits and politicians have discussed Russian and Chinese interference in domestic politics with the focus on pre-election periods. The European Union has reflected the threat of foreign interference across policy areas, introducing initiatives on media and digital space regulation as well as on market protection. Foreign interference is not a new concept in the European discourse, however. Primarily, small European member states have long struggled with the right balance between integration and autonomy. On the one hand, they need the EU to provide them with shelter. On the other hand, European institutions and policies are often labelled as encroaching on domestic autonomy and exercising, in effect, illegitimate interference into domestic politics. This paper will look at parliamentary debates in three small states, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, to analyse how the concept of foreign interference is used in connection to European integration as a narrative tool to promote or oppose policies. Empirically, the paper will contribute to our knowledge of Central European approach to European integration. Theoretically, it will contribute to our understanding of the concept of foreign interference and its use as a political instrument.
Author: Tomas Weiss (Charles University) -
Czechia – similarly to other EU countries – had to reconsider its security policy vis-á-vis increasingly assertive Russia. Apart from hard security measures, the state also started to develop its ability to react to threats in cyberspace, the information domain, or influence operations targeting political and civil society actors. The increasing resilience against Russian interference was not limited to bureaucratic efforts of state institutions, but has become politicised. The centre-right government ruling between 2021 and 2025 claimed that a competent approach to security policy distinguishes it from alleged irresponsible or outright Russia-sympathetic opposition. However, after these elections, parties previously in the opposition are most likely to form a new government. The contribution aims to analyse how this political change reshapes priorities of Czech security policy, specifically measures related to foreign interference. The analysis will focus on several aspects – political rhetoric, institutional and legislative setting and documents guiding security policy. By reviewing these materials, the contribution will be able to assess the change (or lack of it) in Czech security policy under the new government.
Author: Jonas Syrovatka (Charles University (Prague))
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / From domestic to global contexts of counterterrorismSponsor: Critical Studies on Terrorism Working GroupConvener: CST Working groupChair: CST Working group
-
The Prevent Duty was introduced within the United Kingdom’s education settings in 2015. Since then, post-16 educational settings have had a legal requirement placed upon them to have due regard to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. There is a wealth of existing research regarding educators’ perceptions of the Prevent Duty on education, however, there has been limited focus specifically upon both, further and higher education and how the settings can be considered together. Within this article, I directly address English sixth forms, colleges, and universities together to analyse six educators’ counter stories, in relation to how they perceive their Prevent Duty. The findings demonstrate three key themes: ‘Prevent is counterproductive’, ‘is Prevent safeguarding?’, and ‘Prevent training is inadequate’. It will be concluded that Prevent is perceived as a negative aspect of post-16 educators’ teaching duties, and one that is mundane, yet compulsory.
Author: Lilly Barker (Arden university)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Gendering and everyday militarismSponsor: Critical Military Studies Working GroupConvener: Aiko Holvikivi (LSE)Chair: Aiko Holvikivi (LSE)
-
This paper examines the gendered visual representation of Rio de Janeiro’s state military police operations in the city’s favelas. Drawing on mediatization of war literature (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010; Kaempf, 2013; Maltby, 2012), which explores how war representations normalize conflict, and feminist security and IR studies (Enloe, 2000, 2007; Hooper, 2001; Runyan, 2007; Young, 2003), which investigate militarization and its effects, it argues that the police’s social media imagery of its personnel, weaponry, and policing actions relies on entrenched gender constructs. These serve to legitimize military-style force and dismiss both criticism and non-violent alternatives to the often-lethal policing in Rio’s favelas.
The analysis focuses on images posted by the official Facebook pages of the State of Rio Military Police and the Police Pacifying Unit. Due to the large volume of content and limited scope, the paper adopts an illustrative rather than exhaustive approach. Its main goal is to highlight the value of a gendered perspective when analyzing the mediatization of war and militarized policing, suggesting that even a selective analysis can be insightful. As the analysis of photos produced by Rio’s military police will show, the masculinised visual representations of military police officers as protectors of the (less masculinised) citizen (Young 2003) against the perceived enemies situated within the favelas continue to reinforce gender hierarchies and perpetuate lethal violence within Rio de Janeiro against internal threats, despite the police’s efforts to portray themselves as professional and disciplined crime fighters.
Author: Sergio Catignani (University of Exeter) -
Sun, Sand, Sea: At Ease! Military Beach Clubs as Uncommon Sites of Everyday Militarisation in Turkey
This paper examines how everyday militarisation is lived and reproduced in Turkey’s military beach clubs, military-run social facilities for personnel and families. Ordinary in appearance, these resorts become un-common sites where militarised norms and the politics of violence are sustained. What looks like holiday leisure is regulated in ways that reproduce structural, everyday militarisation: access to amenities is rank-based; conduct mirrors military etiquette; and core services are performed by conscripts whose labour is rendered invisible, redistributing rest upwards. Drawing on interviews with military spouses, the paper centres their perspectives to show how relational care is recruited into militarised order under constraint through mundane, gendered routines. Through address, gesture, and peer-policing of ‘proper’ use of shared spaces, they embody rank codes and adjust demeanour to status cues. Invoking care, many find themselves smoothing interactions and prioritising comfort as a practical accommodation to ranked expectations: lowering voices near senior ranks, instructing children to rise, and adjusting pace to avoid overtaking. The analysis traces how patriarchal-militarised structures script care work and distribute accountability upward, situating spouses’ care and navigations within everyday militarisms and institutional hierarchies, beyond voluntarist framings. In these fleeting acts, authority is reasserted and ease becomes a militarised mode of governance. The beach operates as a common, a shared space maintained through etiquette and rank, yet its exclusions make it un-common. Within this order, brief leniencies, such as sharing amenities across ranks or small gestures by conscripts, mark the edges of hierarchy without displacing it. Taken together, these routine practices are violent unravellings of leisure; ease, rather than resisting, functions within the politics of violence. The analysis foregrounds structural capture of care, while attending to spouses’ ambivalence, negotiation, and limited room for manoeuvre, to show how militarised institutions harness women’s care, appearing as nurturance but operating as discipline, to sustain hierarchy.
Author: Can Celik (PhD Candidate) -
Based on the authors PhD, this paper seeks to explore the meaning of criticality within the Critical Military Studies field. Through her own position as an RAF Veteran and critical military researcher, this paper draws on key philosophical and ontological tensions and trade-offs experienced in conducting primary research on military institutions. The paper challenges militarised gendered standards of knowledge, prioritised in the ‘age of the knowledge economy’ (Catignani and Basham, 2021) by exploring different gendered ways of knowing. In research which attempts to make organisational change by working with the military institution itself rather than against it, the researcher meditates on the political act of knowledge co-production with the military subject and the institution. She asks, is it possible to promote organisational change within the military institution, without a moral trade off? Through a Feminist Ethics of Care lens, which seeks to recognise choice, agency and care of subjects, she attempts to make sense of these ethical dilemmas to challenge academics to rethink and redefine how to enact change and impact.
Author: Amy Hill (Newcastle university) -
This paper asks: how do soldiers deployed in domestic security operations come to understand and justify their professional role, not only through discipline and defence guidelines, but through emotion? To answer this, the paper explores how military professionalism, officially framed as apolitical and detached, is in fact deeply shaped by emotional registers and moral orders. It focuses on French soldiers deployed domestically under the ‘Vigipirate’ plan (approximately 10,000 boots on the ground) and draws on ethnographic interviews with 44 participants. Feminist and critical military studies have shown how militarism is sustained through gendered imaginaries and everyday practices. Yet what remains underexplored is how soldiers’ emotions — shaped here by vulnerability, care, and family relations — legitimise domestic militarisation. Soldiers see themselves as vulnerable soldier-civilians protecting other vulnerable civilians, embedding personal feelings into their professional practice. The paper traces how affect circulates between the military and civilian spheres, revealing a society perceived by soldiers as emotionally invested in militarist logics, which, in turn, fosters a corresponding emotional professionalism that enables militarisation. By showing how affect frames what is possible and acceptable in military work, the paper contributes to debates on security practices, militarisation in Western democracies, and the porous boundaries of civil-military relations.
Author: Edgar Paysant (Sciences Po Paris) -
Women’s military participation and the military’s gendered culture have long been a focus of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship. In their 2016 landmark article, “Regendering the Military,” Claire Duncanson and Rachel Woodward explored the question of how the unequal military gender order can be transformed. Their intervention was significant as it went beyond the earlier juxtaposition between liberal feminist advocacy for women’s equal right to fight and anti-militarist feminist concerns about women’s deepening cooptation into militarism. However, feminist IR research on militaries remains methodologically limited because it tends to treat women as objects of research—with feminist scholars speaking about and on behalf of military and veteran women. Inspired by interventions from Critical Military Studies (Bulmer and Jackson 2016; West and Antrobus 2021) which question the unequal relationship of veterans and researchers, this paper presents an ongoing Canadian research project about and with women veterans. The project “Invisible No More: Canadian Women Veterans Moving the ACVA [Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs] Report Recommendations to Full Implementation” employs a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework that includes women veterans as full-fledged research partners. In this paper, we reflect on the implications, potentials, and limitations of this PAR project for feminist IR research.
Authors: Maya Eichler (Mount Saint Vincent University)* , Caleigh Sze Ting Wong (Mount Saint Vincent University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Global Governance, Democracy and Legitimation StrategiesSponsor: International Political Economy Working GroupConvener: IPEGChair: IPEG
-
The use of bypass aid delivery channels has been popularised recently as a means to alleviating donor concerns over institutional quality in the most in-need recipient developing countries. Bypass aid delivery provides a tool for bilateral donors to disburse aid while circumventing recipient governments, in cases where concerns of recipient government corruption or similar institutional inefficiencies are high. The international aid community has praised this innovation as a solution to the traditional dilemma that the most in-need recipient countries are often the ones where the likelihood of aid capture by political elites or bureaucracies is also the highest. Nevertheless, in this paper I offer an alternative approach to the use of bypass aid delivery channels. Building on the case of AfT, I advance evidence that bypass channels are not primarily used by donors in cases where recipient institutional quality is lower. Instead, donors leverage bypass delivery channels when negotiations with the recipient government in question are less likely to conclude in their favour. This paper questions the use of bypass delivery channels, arguing it represents a new form of donor interventionism in aid-recipient developing countries in contexts where the self-interest of donors is less likely to be realised via traditional government-to-government aid negotiations.
Author: Andrea Gimeno Solaz (University of Edinburgh) -
Controlling corruption is a global concern and oftentimes a crucial aspect of democratisation. This study explores the impact of democratic international organisations (IOs) on states’ control of corruption, focusing on the conditions under which democratic IOs are most effective. The existing theoretical body of work on IO impact has highlighted the importance of enforcement through conditional rewards and changing norms through socialisation. This paper supplements it by exploring a potentially new theoretical condition for impact, extrapolated from sanction-busting literature: the importance of alternative actors, sometimes called black knights. These actors offer an alternative source of rewards and benefits to a state, non-conditional on anti-corruption (conceptualised as state capture and petty corruption). It suggests an avenue to explore: whether a state's efforts to control corruption are hindered if an influential alternative actor, who does not prioritise anti-corruption, has strong economic and cultural ties with that state.
Author: Julie Lespinasse (The London School of Economics) -
Labs of various guises – including ‘policy labs’, ‘innovation labs’, ‘future labs’ and ‘living labs’ – have proliferated in recent years as semi-institutionalised spaces for crafting solutions to contemporary problems across levels of governance. But while scholarship has paid increasing attention to such labs at national and local levels, their existence in global politics has been widely neglected. We address this oversight by conceptualising and mapping global governance labs, which we define as labs hosted within or sponsored by an international institution (even if the lab is located somewhere else). Assuming that the design and work of labs is inherently political because they produce and disseminate usable knowledge at the science–policy interface, we investigate key features of global governance labs: what types of labs exist; what they seek to achieve; in what institutional settings they are embedded; and how, and in whose interest, they operate. In short, we offer a first conceptual cut and empirical overview of the phenomenon of global governance labs. We thus contribute to research in International Relations and cognate fields on the role of expertise, experimental governance, evidence-based policymaking and scientification in global politics.
Authors: Matthias Kranke (University of Duisburg-Essen) , Ali Saqer (ADA University) -
Reparations claims are currently gaining attention through the involvement of intergovernmental organisations such as the Commonwealth, CARICOM, the African Union and the United Nations, sparking controversial debates and aiming to redefine diplomatic relations. At the same time, non-state actors are already establishing projects under the framework of reparations, filling it with meaning and concrete practices. In particular, the British-Caribbean space is defined by actors who work towards reparations and who navigate transnational institutional structures and “dangerous arenas” (Anderl & Salehi 2025), making use of these structures and making them work for it. Bringing together feminist and critical legal approaches to cartography, this paper explores empirically these transnational reparation initiatives for colonial and imperial violence. What are the money and knowledge flows in the reparations struggle that travel in this space? What is the role of charities and philanthropy in the struggle for repair? And when is a reparations project considered legitimate, and by whom? With an approach to follow the money, this paper illustrates a cartography of people, knowledge, and power (cf. Kennedy 2016, Alexander and Mohanty 2010), mapping central figures and organisations, such as professionals and donors, how they are transnationally entangled, and how they produce and transfer knowledge.
Authors: Mariam Salehi* , Laura Kotzur (Freie Universität Berlin) -
While advances in targeted sanctions policy have enabled senders to apply greater and greater levels of targeted economic pressure, sanctions rarely prompt elites to pressure their leader into compliance. Extant literature has argued that by providing compensation for losses caused by sanctions, targeted leaders can retain the loyalty of elites. However, in this paper, I argue that the structure of elite interactions in the target state serves as an additional barrier to sanctions effectiveness. For an elite to pressure the leader into compliance, he must collude with others, however, in the process of finding fellow elites to collude with, he risks propositioning to another who is loyal to the leader and reports the collusion attempt, resulting in severe consequences including imprisonment and death. Thus I develop a typology for understanding the strategies available to targeted elites: resistance, silence, and loyalty. I design a formal model which demonstrates that even when an elite has a strong preference for compliance, the risk of being discovered and punished for disloyalty outweighs the economic harm experienced as a result of sanctions, resulting in silence as the equilibrium strategy. My findings offer a novel explanation for why sanctions on authoritarian regimes are rarely successful.
Author: Jeffrey Love (Oxford University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Interpreting international events and shaping foreign policy responses: how and why civil society mattersSponsor: British International Studies AssociationConvener: Ella Bullard (BISA)Chair: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)
-
What makes citizens perceive the demands of another state as maximalist? How do perceptions of maximalism shape policy responses? I assess these questions using a preregistered survey experiment in Spain, set in the hypothetical context of a maritime boundary dispute. Respondents are presented with a maritime claim by a neighboring country and asked to assess how maximalist it appears and what foreign policy responses their government should take in return. I argue that identical claims can be perceived differently depending on the identity of the claim maker and how much support the claim is said to enjoy under international law. Specifically, claims attributed to autocracies and those described as having weak international legal backing are expected to be seen as more maximalist. I also expect that perceived maximalism increases support for unilateral or coercive policy responses. The results show that both the size of the claim and the regime type of the claimant affect how maximalist the claim is perceived to be, as well as the likelihood of supporting coercive responses. Contrary to expectations, information about international law has no effect on perceptions or foreign policy preferences. These findings contribute to our understanding of how citizens evaluate demands and how such perceptions may influence international dispute processes.
Author: Umut Yüksel (University College London)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Migration and Colonial and racial legaciesSponsor: International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working GroupConvener: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Chair: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)Discussant: Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli (University of Sheffield)
-
The reproduction of the global agri-food system is conditional on the exploitation of migrant labour, prompting the question why have migrants become the stand-in labour force for exploitation in agriculture? This paper disentangles the contingency between exploitation and border technologies through a genealogy of the UK Seasonal Visa Scheme. The paper examines the governmentality of the border by identifying four colonial technologies that enable and sustain this exploitation: containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox that legitimises nominal rights. I argue that while borders are reconfigured to facilitate capital accumulation, the origins of the visa regime are rooted in colonial statecraft designed to control and discipline subjects. Recentering the productive power of exploitative border regimes as artefacts of colonial governance, I show how the racial capitalist system of migrant exploitation is contingent on colonial statecraft, and that it is the state imperative to maintain the social racial order that motivates their reproduction. While racial capitalism explains why migrant workers are exploited, it is the state constructed border regimes —and the colonial rationalities that underpin statecraft—that explains how.
Author: Erica Consterdine (Lancaster University) -
What can the study of past imperial practices of mobility control tell us about the present? In this paper, we engage with the growing literature that examines how past colonial and imperial practices shape present state strategies of population control, by focusing on the spatial politics of imperial transport practices, and the lessons they provide for understanding continuities in contemporary (neo-)imperial forms of population management. Historically, we look at three common imperial practices: convict transport and the use of penal colonies; slavery and indentured labor; and forced exile and banishment. Each of these three practices relied heavily on spatial practices combined with state repression that are replicated in some respects by a range of contemporary state population management practices, including border externalisation and migrant warehousing; facilitated labor emigration; migration diplomacy; and transnational repression. We ask whether existing state-based conceptualisations of migration policy are sufficient for understanding the at-times global scale of states’ mobility control and population management policies and argue for the utility of introducing a neo-imperial framework for understanding contemporary population management practices.
Authors: Fiona Adamson (SOAS, University of London) , Enze Han (The University of Hong Kong)*
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Narratives, Metaphors, and Practices in the Nuclear Age: Rethinking Sovereignty, Security, and CultureSponsor: Global Nuclear Order Working GroupConveners: Tom Vaughan (University of Leeds) , Carolina Pantoliano (University of Glasgow) , Woohyeok Seo (LSE)Chair: Thomas Fraise
-
The process of nuclear acquisition comes with a set of new practices designed to accommodate the exceptional features of nuclear technology. Chief among those is the emergence of information control practices aimed at governing nuclear knowledge – nuclear secrecy. This chapter focuses on this specific category of state secrecy, which occupies a paradoxical position in the literature: though never ignored, nuclear secrecy rarely is the object of a study on its own, resulting in a poor theorization. Nuclear secrecy is generally characterized by a differentiation from other regimes of state secrecy – nuclear armed states often use nuclear-specific forms of classification, as well as practices unique to the nuclear realm. Such differentiation is a historical product more than a technological imperative.
Using the tools of historical sociology, this chapter shows how such category emerged in a specific context – the wartime US state – before becoming normal peacetime practice. Such practice stemmed from a historically contingent interpretation of the unique constraints posed by nuclear technology, which stemmed from their exceptional destructive capacity. International, transnational and purely domestic dynamics combined to solidify such interpretation. The rise of nuclear secrecy transformed the practice of secrecy in nuclear-armed states, ultimately affecting their domestic political economy.Author: Thomas Fraise (University of Copenhagen) -
This paper critically examines the ontological and political function of the “escalation ladder” metaphor. Originally popularized by strategic theorist Herman Kahn, the ladder reframes the unpredictable and catastrophic dynamics of warfare as a structured, stepwise climb - a series of 44 rungs, from "Local Crisis" to "Civilian Doomsday" (Kahn, 1965). The study argues that this dominant strategic conceit - which maps the chaotic and potentially existential risks of conflict onto a rational, spatial, and reversible ascent - performs a critical discursive function by domesticating catastrophe. By transforming a potentially terminal event into a series of incremental choices, it reduces existential dread into a procedural challenge. The vertical, spatial nature of the metaphor is key: it provides the illusion of a clear-cut distance between danger (high rungs) and safety (low rungs). This spatialization allows decision-makers to treat nuclear weapons deployment not as a descent into tragedy, but as a calculated, upward move in a strategic game. Moreover, the ladder fundamentally redefines responsibility. Instead of responsibility for the outcome (global catastrophe), the strategic actor assumes responsibility only for the choice of the next step. Drawing upon metaphor studies and engaging with Palti’s (2011) notion of “explosive metaphors,” the paper demonstrates how the ladder’s framework transforms the "unthinkable and ungraspable" nature of total war into a series of discrete, quantifiable, and conceivable stages. By imposing a false sense of linear progression and controllable thresholds, the metaphor obscures the inherent complexity and material irreversibility of conflict dynamics. The findings suggest that the ladder is not merely a descriptive tool but a performative security technology: its ubiquity in strategic doctrine legitimizes brinkmanship and rationalizes the potential for nuclear exchange by providing a cognitive map that substitutes ethical deliberation for technical management.
Author: Ludovica Castelli (Istituto Affari Internazionali) -
This paper considers the ‘nuclear genius’ as an adjunct to the narrative trope of the ‘genius’ character in western popular culture by incorporating existing literatures that describes the use of high intelligence as a signifier of personal character, including social psychology and popular media studies with scholarly work on nuclear weapons in pop culture and world politics (PCWP) and critical security studies (CSS). Whether an attribute of the archetypal villain or hero, the ‘genius’ trope relies on common sense expectations regarding personality, capacity and temperament, reflecting and reproducing cultural expectations for acceptable human behaviour and acknowledgement of social mores. This paper argues that narratives using high intelligence as a character signifier that also incorporate references to nuclear weapons or knowledge compound the ‘common sense’ understanding around genius as something exceptional. This simultaneously, and paradoxically, acknowledges the exceptionality of nuclear weapons while subsuming them into the acceptable ‘everyday’. This paper analyzes four films with extraordinary and fictional storylines, which centre debates around science, progress, expertise and responsibility (Special Bulletin (1983), Jurassic Park (1993), Independence Day (1996), Iron Man (2008)). Comparing heroes and villains, it problematizes direct and indirect ‘nuclear’ supplements to the genius trope to explore the narrative affect of everyday nuclearism in popular fiction.
Author: Rebekah Pullen (McMaster University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Peace and Peacebuilding TheorySponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: PKPBG Working groupChair: Anne Flaspöler (Durham University)
-
The purpose of this paper is to examine a process of great relevance for peacebuilding theory and practice: (re)humanisation. At its core, (re)humanisation is about respecting the dignity of the Other while acknowledging the structural underpinnings of violence. It entails recognising as human every aspect of someone’s life, acknowledging the individuality of their personhood, and securing their place within the wider human community. I argue that by engaging in this process, conflicting parties may become willing to challenge their groups’ meta-narratives about the ‘enemy’ Other, fostering a disposition to advocate for equal rights and resist discriminatory practices. To facilitate such transformation, ‘safe and brave’ spaces – spaces where conflicting parties engage with each other non-violently, without sidestepping difficult topics or shielding themselves from feeling uncomfortable – must be created. However, such initiatives should always be approached with great care and caution to avoid reproducing harm or reinforcing existing power inequalities. I conclude by considering theatre a ‘safe and brave’ space that can effectively promote (re)humanisation in regions affected by violent conflict.
Author: Ioana Popescu (University of Edinburgh) -
This paper draws on recent scholarship on atmospheres but departs from the common understanding of atmosphere as a register of collective affect or mood. Instead, it approaches atmosphere as a material and elemental environment. Emerging studies have shown that violence is not only exercised through atmospheres—such as in aerial bombardments or drone strikes—but that atmospheres themselves can act violently. This becomes evident in the deliberate weaponization of atmosphere, where air, sound, heat, or other material elements are modulated to injure and control—examples include gas attacks, sonic weapons, or torture through exposure to extreme temperatures.
Adopting this atmospheric understanding of violence opens new perspectives on post-war societies. Violence does not end when the guns fall silent. Rather it continues to manifest—both during and after conflict—within the material surroundings of social life. The paper argues that attending to different atmospheric phenomena—sound, climate, and substances—enables an expanded conception of peace that foregrounds the persistence of violence beyond formal ceasefires. From lingering landmine explosions to air contaminated by the destruction of infrastructure, such atmospheric residues reveal how violence remains active in the very air of post-war life. An atmospheric reading of peace, therefore, exposes how violence continues even after peace has ostensibly been achieved.Author: Thorsten Bonacker (University of Marburg) -
Peace Studies scholars tend to agree that the field has a normative agenda. To work towards or build peace. But how we imagine peace has changed over time, and as our imaginaries of peace have evolved, so have the paradigms, approaches, and practices within the field. Two recent examples of such shifts include the Women, Peace, and Security agenda after the passage of 1325 and the decolonization agenda more broadly attempting to address exclusionary peace theory and practice. Both responded to shifts in how we imagine peace. However, an 8-year project including over 150 interviews with academics, practitioners, and others working across ‘the field’ raises the question of whether we can (or should) have set imaginaries of what peace is at all. While the field has long recognized the dangers of utopian thinking, and the idea of heterotopias was introduced more than a decade ago to introduce the possibility of multiple imaginaries of peace, I argue here that we need also to imagine peace as something constantly changing. As the last few years have evidenced, the challenges to peace are constantly and swiftly evolving. Such a ‘mutopian’ conception of peace can help us guide action, even from within this flux.
Author: Gearoid Millar (University of Aberdeen) -
This paper introduces the neglected level of organizational mandates and commitments to the analysis of peacebuilding practice. It argues that the persistent depoliticization of peacebuilding practices results from the clash between the commitment of most peacebuilding organizations to the twin principles of impartiality and/or neutrality and the political goals of peacebuilding interventions. The paper employs a Bourdieusian framework to reconstruct the emergence of peacebuilding as a field in global governance and scrutinizes the implementation myth of early peacebuilding planning. This myth and the haphazard development of the field facilitated the role of development and humanitarian agencies in peacebuilding and gave rise to the persistent tension at the heart of depoliticized practice. Based on a comprehensive discourse analysis of the practical reasoning of leading peacebuilding actors, the paper identifies the varied mechanisms by which peacebuilding organizations depoliticize their practices in line with their field-specific doxa. Considering the constitutive role that their previous habitus and doxic practices hold for most peacebuilding organizations, the paper suggests that the development of a coherent peacebuilding paradigm and of closely coordinated practice is impossible, given the configuration of the field and its irreconcilable paradoxes. In conclusion, the paper also addresses the implications of these paradoxes for the future of multilateral peacebuilding in an increasingly fragmented international system.
Author: Andrea Warnecke (Leiden University)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Political Ideologies After Unipolarity: Navigating Power and Ideas in a Multipolar WorldSponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsConvener: Philip CunliffeChair: Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh)Discussant: Michael Williams (University of Ottawa)
-
This paper examines the international thought of James Burnham to provide both a genealogy of neoconservatism and a generalizable theory of universalism and pluralism in grand strategy. Burnham, who was a committed Trotskyist before his eventual turn to anticommunism, retained a universalist orientation toward world politics even after his ideological shift. Through his writings in The Partisan Review and later The National Review, he popularized the “rollback” or “liberationist” strategy in the Cold War rather than George Kennan’s more restrained “containment” doctrine. Focusing on Burnham’s influence, this project traces the intellectual migration of Trotskyist universalism into neoconservative international thought. It identifies the persistent elements of internationalism and democracy promotion that underpinned later American strategies, offers a genealogy of international thought within the American conservative movement, and theorizes alternative configurations of universality and pluralism in grand strategy more broadly. By recovering Burnham’s writings and situating them in their historical and strategic contexts, the paper provides a novel interpretation of the history of U.S. foreign policy and intervenes in contemporary debates about the ideological foundations of America’s global strategy. In doing so, it speaks across subfield and disciplinary divides, engaging audiences in international relations and strategic studies, historical political thought, and American political development.
Author: Heather Penatzer (Princeton University) -
The decline of anti-fascism as a prominent ideology in international politics since the end of American unipolarity in the early 21st century reflects shifts in global power dynamics, ideological fragmentation, and evolving threats. During the Cold War and the unipolar era following the Soviet Union's collapse, anti-fascism served as a unifying ideological framework, particularly in Western democracies, rooted in opposition to authoritarianism and ultranationalism. It was bolstered by U.S. hegemony, which promoted liberal democratic values as a counterweight to fascist and totalitarian ideologies. However, the transition to a multipolar world, marked by the rise of China, Russia, and regional powers, has diluted the ideological coherence of anti-fascism.
This abstract argues that anti-fascism has waned due to three factors: the diffusion of global power, which has prioritized geopolitical competition over ideological unity; the rise of populist and nationalist movements, which have co-opted anti-fascist rhetoric for illiberal ends; and the fragmentation of progressive coalitions, which struggle to define fascism in an era of hybrid threats like disinformation and economic coercion. As American influence has receded, anti-fascism lost its universal appeal, becoming a contested and often localized narrative, overshadowed by pragmatic concerns like trade, security, and cultural identity. Drawing on illustrate case studies, this study examines how the absence of a singular hegemonic narrative has relegated anti-fascism to a secondary role, with implications for democratic resilience and global cooperation in addressing authoritarianism.
Author: Philip Cunliffe -
The end of American unipolarity has ushered in a new era of transnational ideological competition, reshaping global order and amplifying disorder. This abstract explores how the decline of a singular hegemonic framework has intensified ideological rivalries, challenging the stability of international systems. As multipolarity emerges, competing ideologies—liberal democracy, authoritarian capitalism, populist nationalism, and religious fundamentalism—vie for influence across borders, fueling both cooperation and conflict.
Drawing on examples such as China’s promotion of state-led development models, Russia’s neo-Eurasianist narratives, and the resurgence of populist movements in Europe and the Americas, this paper analyzes how ideological competition drives global (dis)order. Unlike the unipolar era, where U.S.-led liberal norms dominated, multipolarity enables diverse actors—state and non-state—to project ideological visions through soft power, disinformation, and economic leverage. This fragmentation erodes universal norms, fostering hybrid governance models and localized conflicts while complicating global cooperation on issues like climate change and security.
The paper argues that transnational ideological competition exacerbates disorder by undermining shared values and institutional trust, yet it also creates opportunities for pluralistic dialogue if managed effectively. By examining the interplay of ideology and power in a post-unipolar world, this study highlights the need for adaptive diplomacy and inclusive frameworks to mitigate conflict and rebuild cooperative global structures. The findings underscore the urgency of addressing ideological divides to navigate the complexities of an increasingly contested and disordered international landscape.
Author: Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / Politics and Parties in Foreign PolicySponsor: Foreign Policy Working GroupConvener: FPWG Working groupChair: Danielle Beswick (University of Birmingham)
-
The study of political parties in the foreign policy-making process is often neglected. Recently, scholars such as Chryssogelos (2021) have investigated the relationship between changes in the party system and shifts in foreign policy in Western democracies. Their work builds on ideas drawn from Lipset and Rokkan (1967) and Mair (1997) on the foreign policy implications of changes in party systems. Although research using case studies from the Global North, such as Chryssogelos’s, is expanding, the links between party systems and foreign policy remain poorly understood. Furthermore, studies to date have not included cases from Asia and the Global South.
This paper examines the relationship between Nepal’s party system and its foreign policy, comparing the multi-party system under the constitutional monarchy (1990- 2008) with the post-monarchical era (post-2008). We seek to investigate whether the shift from the Monarchical two-party system to the new Republic’s three-party system after the monarchy collapsed in Nepal in 2008 led to changes in Nepal’s foreign policy, particularly towards China and India. In addition to examining contemporary news reports and elite interviews, the research is based on three case studies of contested mega hydropower projects in Nepal, involving India and China.
The principal finding of this research, which is grounded on a path-dependent approach, is that regardless of the shift in the party system in 2008, it contributed no substantial foreign policy change. Only minor tactical modifications occurred in foreign policy orientation. Moreover, the dynamics of the relationship between the party system and foreign policy change in emerging democracies, as compared to mature democracies, are much more complex and may require additional tools to fully explain them. Results show that the manifestation of the above-mentioned modifications in foreign policy orientation is mainly contributed to by two determinants: parties’ pragmatism (coalition-building politics) and politicians’ individualism (power politics).Author: Sanju Gurung (Birkbeck, University of London) -
Navigating the Maze: Bureaucratic Reconfigurations and the Politics of Repair in EU–Turkey Relations
This paper investigates EU–Turkey bureaucratic relations as a site of institutional resilience and political repair amid escalating global and regional crises of governance. In a period marked by authoritarian drift, democratic backsliding, and declining political commitment to international norms, we foreground the often-overlooked role of bureaucratic labor in sustaining transnational cooperation. Drawing on elite sociology, we trace how Turkey’s EU affairs departments have been established, merged, or dismantled since the 1987 accession application—revealing how administrative restructuring reflects deeper contestations over legitimacy, sovereignty, and global engagement. Focusing on patterns of ministerial circulation and institutional reshuffles, we examine how Turkish bureaucrats navigate shifting political terrain while acting as agents of continuity and adaptation. Despite recurrent disruptions, they have preserved institutional memory, adjusted policy instruments, and maintained channels of dialogue with EU counterparts. Based on 84 in-depth elite interviews with Turkey's EU bureaucrats and 30 published memoirs, the study reveals how everyday bureaucratic practices perform epistemic and symbolic work that helps stabilize cooperation in fractured contexts. This paper repositions bureaucracy as a key site where knowledge, authority, and legitimacy are reconfigured in the face of systemic uncertainty (supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye-TÜBİTAK Project No: 122K720).
Authors: Selin Turkes-Kilic* , Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm -
Key words: Irish foreign policy; Palestine; constructivism; small states
The Republic of Ireland has been depicted as a partial outlier in the European Union in terms of its policy towards Palestine. This perspective highlights developments such as Ireland’s formal recognition of Palestinian statehood in May 2024, its intervention in support of South Africa’s genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January 2025, and the state’s continuing financial backing for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). While recent scholarship has highlighted continued aspects of conservatism in the Irish government’s position, the reasons for this policy and the arguments made in its support warrant closer examination. After reflecting on constructive approaches to IR and theories of small state behaviour, this paper analyses Oireachtas debates and statements to examine the ‘frames’ that Irish politicians have employed in relation to Palestine, and how they have articulated their stance.
Author: Francesca Burke (University of Brighton) -
Effective climate change mitigation will require significant joint action by the US and China. Because such mitigation will be costly, catalytic, and long-term, rising security competition between these states could complicate such efforts. I describe two mechanisms through which great power security competition will affect their climate action. First, great powers facing increased security competition will be less likely to engage in mitigation due to lower trust, heightened focus on relative gains, and heightened focus on short-term security threats. Second, great powers facing increased security competition will have a more difficult time coercing third-party states to mitigate. Greater tensions between great powers increases their dependence on allies, providing third-party states with exit options and bargaining leverage. My argument contradicts prominent theories of international order which depict policy disputes as independent across different issues or questions, including climate change and security. My argument also contradicts theories which acknowledge the connection of climate change and security but which hypothesize positive feedback between these policy spaces, such as if security competition spurred a race to the top in climate investments. I test my predictions for hypothetical US and Chinese climate change action on the historical case of US action on the mitigation of ozone-depletion while locked in security competition with the USSR.
Author: Samuel Houskeeper (University of Oxford)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / The Future of International Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding in an era of global geopolitical tensions: addressing challenges for Peace Studies and for multilateral peacebuilding approachesSponsor: Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working GroupConvener: Owen Greene (Univeristy of Bradford)Chair: Owen Greene (Univeristy of Bradford)
-
The academic field of Peace Studies and peacebuilding practice / policy face significant challenges with respect to how they respond to 21st century war, its causes and consequences. Said challenges go beyond the now well versed critiques of liberal peacebuilding, given that liberal peacebuilding itself now appears, at best, mortally wounded, or, at worst, dead. In such a context, this has precipitated nostalgia for the good old days of liberal peacebuilding, even from those of us who were its strongest critics. Today, while the way we think and practice peacebuilding remains lodged in 20th century ideas and practices, the way war is waged has shifted dramatically over the last three decades. Environmental conflict, the gender impacts of political violence, autonomous weapon systems, the political / criminal violence nexus and piracy, to name a few, have emerged as forms of violence that states and societies are struggling to address in an effective and sustainable manner. Such hybrid warfare and often accompanying polycrises drive forward the nature of war and its consequences,
Author: Roddy Brett (University of Bristol) -
The academic field of Peace Studies is changing rapidly. The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen an expansion of graduate programs in Peace Studies and empirical studies on peacebuilding. As an interdisciplinary field, Peace Studies has grown in the interstices between academic disciplines. However, to date Peace Studies remains under-theorized and the important questions about pedagogical and methodological consequences of the consolidation of the field have not been addressed in a systematic manner. The very question of whether Peace Studies today still is a field of study or is becoming a discipline is looming larger in light of a transforming institutional and political landscape. Debates around decolionality and intersectionality, ownership of research and modes of expression of results are challenging the frequently Cartesian onto-epistemological assumptions of research methodologies. This paper explores the institutional and methodological premises of peace studies in the twenty first century.
Author: Josefina Echavarria Alvarez (University of Notre Dame) -
This paper rethinks contemporary peacebuilding by analyzing counterterrorism (CT) and countering violent extremism (CVE) approaches implemented over the past two decades. Drawing on empirical evidence from field programs on the rehabilitation and reintegration of so-called “foreign terrorist fighters,” it argues that global CT and CVE frameworks have gradually narrowed their scope - from fostering inclusive, post-terrorism societies to merely managing security risks. The research examines cases from Central Asia, the European Union, and Morocco, revealing a paradox in the evolution of peacebuilding. Following the optimistic wave of the 1990s and early 2000s, when transitional justice and reconciliation processes sought truth and healing, truth - once central to post-conflict settings and transitions toward sustainable peace - has become marginal. Meanwhile, multilateral and non-governmental actors have increasingly prioritized the rehabilitation of perpetrators over the restoration of victims, thereby reproducing structural asymmetries in justice and legitimacy. The paper calls for a paradigm shift – from reactive containment to transformative peacebuilding that re-centres victims, reclaims truth as the cornerstone of justice, and envisions peace as a dynamic social process rather than a narrow security objective.
Author: Noufal Abboud (Nordic Center for Conflict Transformation) -
The current crisis in multilateral peacekeeping and peacebuilding raises questions about the extent to which it can be salvaged in its essentials in the context of current global geo-political tensions. This paper argues that there may still be geo-political space for significant multilateral, if not always UN-mandated, peacebuilding missions in some regions. But it is not clear that the international ‘good practice’ guidelines for multilateral peacebuilding that have been developed since 2000 through a series of ‘lessons-learned’ reviews will provide useful guidance for any such future peacebuilding missions. Not only can they be critiqued in their own terms but also the international resources and political space they require are unlikely to be available. The paper proceeds to assess which elements of international peacebuilding efforts are most important to maintain or salvage, and what this implies coalitions of willing ‘progressive’ states and INGOs that remain concerned with supporting peacebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected countries. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for peace studies research.
Author: Owen Greene (Univeristy of Bradford) -
co-author - The academic field of Peace Studies is changing rapidly. The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen an expansion of graduate programs in Peace Studies and empirical studies on peacebuilding. As an interdisciplinary field, Peace Studies has grown in the interstices between academic disciplines. However, to date Peace Studies remains under-theorized and the important questions about pedagogical and methodological consequences of the consolidation of the field have not been addressed in a systematic manner. The very question of whether Peace Studies today still is a field of study or is becoming a discipline is looming larger in light of a transforming institutional and political landscape. Debates around decolionality and intersectionality, ownership of research and modes of expression of results are challenging the frequently Cartesian onto-epistemological assumptions of research methodologies. This paper explores the institutional and methodological premises of peace studies in the twenty first century.
Author: Norbert Koppensteiner (University of Notre Dame)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / The Indo-Pacific in world politicsSponsor: International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working GroupConvener: ISMMEA Working groupChair: Ferran Perez Mena (Durham University)
-
This paper explores how China sustains frequent interaction with Myanmar’s ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) while publicly upholding its principle of non-interference. It argues that this paradox is managed through non-diplomatic and sub-state channels, including local officials, quasi-state entities, business associations, and research institutes, that operate beyond formal diplomatic visibility. Drawing on field interviews and archival materials, the study conceptualizes this pattern as a form of low-profile engagement, in which China maintains practical influence through localized, informal, and semi-official means. Such interactions enable coordination, mediation, and risk management along the border without openly challenging the sovereignty discourse. The paper contributes to understanding how major powers reconcile foreign policy principles with pragmatic adaptation in conflict-affected neighboring regions.
Author: Yaolong Xian (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt) -
‘Who are they building it for - us or them?’ Faizan, a Maldivian marine biologist and activist, asked me as we stood by the Sinamalé Bridge, a Chinese-funded structure connecting Malé to the island where he grew up. His question captured the ambivalence that threads through the politics of development in small South Asian states suspended between India and China. In his words, ‘us’ and ‘them’ collapse into overlapping categories - citizens and elites, hosts and donors, islanders and cosmopolitans - revealing sovereignty not as autonomous but relational, staged, and lived.
This paper situates sovereignty at the intersection of Political Geography, International Relations, and Anthropology, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the Maldives and Sri Lanka. It rethinks sovereignty from geopolitical and sensory margins, challenging the Westphalian model that defines it as exclusive territorial control and full autonomy. By juxtaposing ‘aesthetic sovereignty’ in Sri Lanka, where elites aestheticise dependency through infrastructural grandeur, with ‘terrestrial sovereignty’ in the Maldives, where land reclamation materialises power on sinking ground, I show how elites transform asymmetry into opportunity, turning great power rivalry into a theatre for the spatialisation of sovereignty.
In this paper, bridges, ports, towers, and reclaimed land become performative arenas where sovereignty is produced and felt through materials, bodies, and desires. These spectacles anchor classed and sensory politics of belonging, revealing how elites convert dependence itself into the substance of rule while citizens re-inhabit and sometimes contest these sensory infrastructures. Sovereignty thus emerges not as a fixed legal category but as a discursive, material, and affective practice that links the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean to the everyday textures of life. Ultimately, this paper argues that to study sovereignty from the margins of the Indian Ocean is to trace how power is spatialised and then sensed, moving through infrastructures and bodies.
Author: Sara Frumento (University of Oxford) -
With the onset of the 21st century, the convergence of geopolitical shifts in the Indian Ocean region prompted the New Delhi government to recalibrate its strategic orientation from a primarily continental focus to a maritime one. China’s String of Pearls initiative, the United States’ deepening security presence, and recurring maritime security challenges compelled India to reassess and strengthen its maritime orientation. The adoption of India’s Maritime Doctrine (2007), along with initiatives such as SAGAR, IORA, and IONS, underscores the evolution of India’s maritime diplomacy particularly in the context of the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region.
In this context, the WANA has emerged as a critical hub for global trade and energy flows, characterized by strategic chokepoints such as the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the Suez Canal, and the Strait of Hormuz. Employing a qualitative approach, this study examines case studies from key WANA countries such as Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Djibouti to test the proposed hypothesis. These cases aim to assess India’s evolving maritime engagement, exploring both the opportunities for strategic cooperation and the challenges that arise in pursuing its regional objectives.
Furthermore, the paper draws upon Alfred Thayer Mahan’s concept of Sea Power and Julian Corbett’s maritime strategy framework to provide the conceptual foundation for analysis. Ultimately, this study seeks to evaluate India’s maritime diplomacy within the shifting geopolitical landscape of West Asia and North Africa, emphasizing its ambitions and constraints in this strategically vital region.Keywords: SAGAR, IORA, IONS, Maritime Diplomacy, Sea Power
Author: Rajat Biswakarma (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India) -
Securitization theory has traditionally examined how states construct threats to justify extraordinary measures, yet the securitization of democracy itself remains underexplored. While democracy is conventionally framed as liberation from authoritarian rule, this paper examines how illiberal regimes invert this narrative, portraying democratic reform and liberal values as existential threats that legitimise authoritarian control. Focusing on Singapore under the People’s Action Party (PAP), the paper examines how PAP leaders construct and circulate securitising narratives of democracy through selective references to perceived Western and democratic instability. Using securitization theory and critical discourse analysis of parliamentary debates, state media, and party communications, it shows how PAP officials link political pluralism, social liberalism, and democratic reform to disorder, fragmentation, and decline. Events such as Brexit, Trump’s election, and Western political polarisation are invoked as cautionary tales of democracy’s destabilising potential, reinforcing the legitimacy of Singapore’s model of strong, centralised governance. The paper contributes to securitization scholarship by demonstrating how democracy itself becomes a referent threat rather than an object requiring protection. It shows that authoritarian resilience operates not only through coercive control but through discursive strategies that reframe liberalisation as endangerment, transforming potential reform into existential risk.
Author: Luke Stephens (University of Edinburgh)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Panel / The bodies and scripts of empire: imperial orders and colonial administrationSponsor: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working GroupConvener: CPD Working groupChair: CPD Working group
-
How does the 1953 decolonisation of Greenland continue to play a role in contemporary Arctic orders? Drawing historical parallels to past U.S. interests in Greenland, this paper explores how Danish efforts during the 1950s came to redefine relations of decolonisation amidst the ‘age of decolonisation’ by integrating Greenland into the Danish Commonwealth. Rather than following the conventional decolonisation model marked by anti-colonial independence movements, Denmark pursued a strategy of ‘decolonisation-through-integration’, which preserved Danish sovereignty while incorporating Greenland as an ‘equal’ part of the kingdom. To do this, new and redefined racial structures were imposed. This integration was facilitated by U.S.-Danish imperial entanglements, especially the establishment of U.S. military bases in Greenland during and after World War II. The paper argues that this process of integration, rather than independence, constitutes a unique form of decolonisation, which was crucial for maintaining Denmark’s imperial control over Greenland. This paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates within historical IR by complexifying key core concepts and theories of empire and colonialism by focusing on how Greenland’s integration into Denmark supports a broader theory of imperial sovereignty and world order. This will be put in context with what this paper terms ‘postcolonial hygge’.
Author: Eva Leth Sørensen (Johns Hopkins University) -
Conventional accounts of nationalism and nation-state formation commonly identify the United Kingdom as one of the world’s first nation-states; such a view obscures, however, the principally ‘imperial’ rather than ‘national’ character of the British state until postwar decolonization. I proceed, therefore, from a recognition of the British nation-state as a “post-colonial invention” (Baker 2009) and shed light on the following peculiarity of its ‘postcolonial’ condition: namely how, rather than emerging as the prototypical nation-state that would be replicated outside Europe, Britain has learned the art of national statehood from the colonial world that it forged. I specifically contend that the communities of the former settler empire – in particular Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – have endured as a reservoir of racialized meanings and practices through which Britain has reconstituted itself as a nation-state and navigated successive crises and dilemmas of postcolonial statehood, echoing these communities’ historical envisioning as White utopias and ‘improved’ versions of Britain itself. Drawing on a range of archival and documentary evidence, I trace such circulations from ‘settler colony to metropole’ through an analysis of the various ‘points-based’ immigration and nationality selection systems that successive British governments have adopted from the handover of Hong Kong to the post-Brexit era.
Author: Emerson Murray (Northwestern University) -
It has become increasingly recognised that calling an event ‘complicated’ or ‘nuanced’ can be a device to disarm criticism of a particular atrocity. Focussing on the Culture War over the British Empire, I develop this insight further by analysing three implications of this exculpatory move. First, it is platitudinal and, ironically, functions to shed less analytical intricacy on the event. Second, I suggest that it is a move often deployed to reproduce power relations at the expense of activists, especially women of colour, who are then portrayed as ‘shrill’ or lacking nuance. Third, I argue that complexity being reserved for certain perpetrators but not others speaks to a racialised order where some actors are represented as multifaceted while others are two dimensional villains. I examine this through the prism of Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’ and his idea that such common-sense axioms are both reactionary and contradictory.
Author: Tom Bentley (University of Aberdeen) -
This research examines the embodied memories of the Franco-Algerian War of Decolonization (1954–1962), to explore how this war continues to shape the racial and religious hierarchies in a post-colonial contemporary France. Hegemonic, state-sanctioned narratives privilege Francophone and colonial perspectives, marginalizing Algerian, Harki, and anti-imperial voices. In response, this presentation seeks to decenter official(ized) forms of memory-making (material and spatial commemoration, national days, toponyms, and so on) to include and recognize embodied memories of war. Memories live within and through the body, positioning it as an affective, intergenerational, and active site of knowledge production.
More broadly, the research advances embodied memory as both an epistemological and political intervention. It leans on anti-colonial and Indigenous epistemologies (see cuerpo-territorio by Cabnal, 2010; Guzmán, 2024; Goeman, 2013), which conceive body, mind, and environment as interconnected. By analyzing embodied memories of the Franco-Algerian War, the research contributes to broader debates in decolonial memory studies and reveals how somatic and intergenerational remembrance negotiates colonial hierarchies of race, identity, and belonging in France. The paper argues for an embodied memory as a decolonial practice of reconciliation and re-humanization in postcolonial France.
Author: Julia Spence-Duclos (University of Bristol)
-
-
4:45 PM
→
6:15 PM
FR05 Roundtable / Transnational Harms and Lateral Universal Justice
Impunity is rapidly becoming a (dis)ordering principle of global politics, with accountability mechanisms around problems from arms exports, climate justice, and nuclear rearmament to transnational data sharing becoming increasingly ineffective. How can we think about notions of ‘justice’ and ‘accountability’ for transnational harms? Drawing on the work of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the panel aims to move beyond the universal/particular dichotomy by building on the idea of a ‘lateral universal’ justice. In various situated sites, it will conceive of ‘universalising’ as a dynamic spatio-temporal practice which remains continually open to the future.
Sponsor: Critical Alternatives for World PoliticsChair: Alvina HoffmannParticipants: Liam McVay (SOAS) , Emma Mc Cluskey (University of Westminster) , Kerry Goettlich (City St George’s) , Elspeth Guild (University of liverpool) , Didier Bigo (University of liverpool)
-
9:00 AM
→
10:30 AM